know it sounds ludicrous, but it's a popular story, a lot of people have worked on researching it, and we're not just talking about fiction bestsellers either, we're talking serious scholars and academics as well.'
She studied Reilly, wondering what he must be thinking. If I had him with the treasure bit, I've definitely blown it now. Leaning back, she had to admit it sounded more and more preposterous now, hearing herself verbalize it out loud.
Reilly seemed to think about it for a moment, then a faint smile crossed his lips. 'Jesus's bloodline, huh? If He did have a kid or two, and assuming they then had children of their own, and so on . . .
after two thousand years—which is, what, something like seventy or eighty generations later—it's exponential, there'd be thousands of them, the planet would be crawling with His descendants, wouldn't it?' He chuckled. 'People really take this stuff seriously?'
'Absolutely. The Templars' missing treasure is one of the great unsolved mysteries of all time. It's 51
easy to see why people are drawn to it. The premise itself has a great hook: nine knights show up in Jerusalem, claiming to want to defend thousands of pilgrims. Just nine of them. Seems pretty ambitious by any standard outside of The Magnificent Seven, don't you think? On hearing this, King Baldwin gives them a prime slice of Jerusalem real estate, the Temple Mount, the site of the second Temple of Solomon that was destroyed by Titus's legions in 70 AD, its treasure plundered and brought back to Rome. So here's the big what if: what if the Temple's priests hid something there when they knew the Romans were about to pounce, something the Romans didn't find?'
'But the Templars did.'
She nodded. 'Perfect fodder for myths. It stays buried there for a thousand years, and then they dig it up. Then there's the so-called Copper Scroll they found in Qumran.'
'The Dead Sea Scrolls are part of this too?'
Slow down, Tess. But she couldn't help herself, and kept plowing on.
'One of the scrolls specifically mentions huge quantities of gold and other valuables buried under the Temple itself, supposedly in twenty-four hoards. But it also mentions a treasure of an unspecified kind. What was it? We don't know. It could be anything.'
'Okay, so where does the Turin Shroud figure into all this?' Reilly mused.
For a fleeting moment, an irritated look crossed her fine features before she composed her face into a gracious smile. 'You're not buying into any of this, are you?'
Reilly raised his hands, looking slightly contrite. 'No, look, I'm sorry. Please, keep going.'
Tess collected her thoughts. 'These nine ordinary knights are given part of a royal palace with stables, which were apparently big enough to accommodate two thousand horses. Why was Baldwin so generous toward them?'
'I don't know, maybe he was a forward thinker. Maybe he was blown away by their dedication.'
'But that's the thing,' she argued, undeterred. 'They hadn't done anything yet. They get given this huge base to work from, and what do our magnificent nine do? Do they go out and perform all sorts of heroic deeds and make sure the pilgrims get to their destinations, like they're supposed to? No.
They spend their first nine years in the Temple. They don't leave it. They don't go out, they don't take on any new recruits. They just stay locked up there. For nine years.'
'They either turned agoraphobic, or . . .'
'Or it was one big scam. The most widely accepted theory—and personally, I think it makes sense
—is they were digging. Looking for something buried there.'
'Something the priests hid from Titus's legionnaires a thousand years earlier.'
She sensed that she was finally getting through to him, and her eyes were ablaze with conviction.
'Exactly. The fact is that they lie low for nine years, then all of a sudden they burst onto the scene and start growing in stature and wealth at a dizzying rate, with the Vatican backing them wholeheartedly. Maybe they found something there, something buried under the Temple that made it all possible. Something that made the Vatican bend over backward to keep them happy—and evidence of Jesus having fathered a child or two would certainly fit the bill.'
Reilly's face clouded over. 'Hold on, you think they were blackmailing the Vatican? I thought they were soldiers of Christ? Doesn't it make more sense that they found something that really pleased the Vatican, and the pope decided to reward them for their discovery?'
Her face scrunched inward. 'If that was the case, wouldn't they have announced it to the world?'
She eased back, seeming a bit lost as well. 'I know, I'm still missing a piece to this puzzle. They did go on to fight for Christianity for two hundred years. But you've got to admit, it's pretty intriguing.'
She paused, studying him. 'So do you think there's anything in it?'
Reilly weighed the information she'd so eagerly laid out for him. Regardless of how ridiculous it all sounded, he couldn't simply dismiss it entirely. The attack at the Met was clearly symptomatic of something frighteningly warped; there was more behind its extreme staging than a simple heist, that much everyone agreed on. He knew how radical extremists latched onto some mythology, some core belief, and how they made it theirs; how gradually that mythology got twisted and distorted until its devotees completely lost touch with reality and went off the deep end. Could this be the link he was looking for? The Templar legends certainly seemed rife with distortion. Was someone out there so infatuated with the terrible fate of the Templars that they identified with them to the point of dressing up like them, taking revenge on the Vatican on their behalf, and perhaps even trying to recover their legendary treasure?
Reilly's eyes settled on her. 'Do I think the Templars were the keepers of some big secret—good or bad— relating to the early days of the Church? I have no idea.'
Tess glanced away, trying to smother any visible signs of her dismay, when Reilly leaned in and continued. 'Do I think there's a possible link between the Templars and what happened at the Met?'
He let it hang for a moment, nodding almost imperceptibly, before a faint smile crossed his lips. 'I definitely think it's worth looking into.'
Chapter 22
Gus Waldron was definitely not having one of his best days. He remembered waking up a while ago. How long, he couldn't tell. Hours, minutes—and then he'd drifted off again. Now he was back, a little more alert.
He knew he was in bad shape. He winced as he remembered the crash. His body felt like it had taken more pounding than a veal chop at Cipriani's. And the irritating, incessant beeps from the monitors around him weren't helping either.
He knew he was in a hospital—the beeping and the ambient noise were clear indications of that. He had to rely on his hearing, as he couldn't see a goddamn thing. His eyes stung like hell. When he tried to move, he couldn't. There was something around his chest. They've got me strapped to the bed. Not real tight, though. So the strap was there for hospital reasons, not cop reasons. Good. His hands moved over his face, feeling bandages and finding other things. They had him stuck full of tubes.
There was no point in fighting it, not right now. He had to know how bad he was hurt, and he would definitely need his eyes back if he was to get out of there. So until he knew the score, he would try to cut a deal with the cops. But what did he have to offer? He needed something big, because
they wouldn't like the fact that he'd chopped the head off that fucking guard. He really shouldn't have done that. It was just that, riding up there, dressed like Prince-fucking-Valiant, he had gotten to wondering what it would be like to take a swing at some guy. And it had felt real good; there was no denying it.
What he could do was rat out Branko Petrovic. He was already pissed off at that dick for not telling him the name of the guy who had hired him, rambling on about how cool it was, this idea of blind cells. Now he saw why. He'd been hired by Petrovic, who'd been hired by someone else, who'd been hired by some other asshole. Who could tell how many blind fucking cells there were before you reached the guy the cops were out to nail?
The hospital sounds rose slightly for a moment, then fell again. The door must have opened and closed. He heard footsteps, squeaky on the floor, as someone approached his bed. Then whoever it was lifted Gus's hand, fingertips resting on the inside of his wrist. Some doctor or nurse taking his pulse. No, a doctor. The fingers felt rougher, stronger than a nurse's would. At least the kind of nurse he would fantasize about.
He needed to know how badly hurt he was. 'Who's that? Doc?'
