The Templar Salvation (2010)

here.”

Mehmet took a quick glance at the gold pieces inside the pouch, then pulled its ties tight and tucked it under his belt. “It’s a long way back to Constantinople. These are dangerous lands. Plenty of Ghazis out there.”

“We’ll be fine,” he repeated. “We’re not going back there.”

“Oh?”

Conrad just nodded and struck out his hand, his expression clearly signaling that he wouldn’t be saying much more about that. The portly trader frowned, then took his hand and shook it grudgingly.

“Safe travels then,” the trader told him.

“And to you.”

He stood with Hector and Miguel and watched as the Turks rode off. Conrad had no illusions about what was probably going on in the trader’s mind. They had paid him a small fortune to guide them to this place, and they had brought a wagon with them. A wagon to carry something. Something that had to have great value if it was worth the risk and the cost.

Something the trader would instinctively covet.

“I’m guessing you found something,” Hector told him.

“That I did,” Conrad said, keeping watch as the six riders disappeared down the mountain. His mouth broadened with the hint of a cheeky grin. “That I did.”

FATHER NICODEMUS SAT at the chronicler’s worktable and felt increasingly nauseous with every line he wrote. The weight of his burden was clouding his mind, turning the selection of each word into a herculean effort. Still, he had to do it. There was no road back. Not from this.

We should have burnt it, he thought. We should have burnt it all, long ago. He’d thought about it many times over the years, wondered about doing it, even coming close on a couple of occasions. But like his predecessors, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Like all his predecessors, he didn’t dare do it for fear of transgressing and bringing upon himself a wrath not of this Earth.

He felt the heavy gaze of his gathered acolytes upon him, but he couldn’t look up and face them. He just concentrated on the sheets of vellum under his eyes and tried to keep his hand steady as it moved the quill across it.

I have failed my Church, he wrote. I have failed our Church and our Lord and from that failure, there is no possible redemption. I fear that the knight Conrad and his fellow Templars have sealed our fate. They now roam the land, headed to Corycus and from there to shores unknown, laden with the devil’s handiwork, written in his hand using poison drawn from the pits of hell, its accursed existence a devastating threat to the rock upon which our world is founded. I would not presume to seek forgiveness or mercy for our failure. All I can offer is this simple act to save our heavenly father from the burden of tending to our miserable souls.

He gave the sheets another read, his eyes tired and watery. When he was finished, he set the quill down beside them and only then did he dare look up at the monks before him. They were all staring at him in silence, their faces more gaunt and pale than ever, their lips and fingers quavering.

In front of each of them was a simple terracotta cup.

The abbot cast his eyes across them, meeting each of their gazes with his own forlorn stare. Then he gave them a collective nod and raised his cup to his lips.

Each of them raised his own.

He nodded again.

Chapter 13

VATICAN CITY

PRESENT DAY

A heavy silence smothered the room. Tess glanced around, her eyes surveying the faces about her as she tried to gauge whether or not to keep going. Cardinal Brugnone and the prefect of the archives, Monsignor Bescondi, seemed particularly disturbed by what she’d related. Which was understandable. For men of the cloth, the idea of monks—not warrior monks like the Templars, but gentle, highly pious men who’d retreated from society to devote their lives to prayer and study—the idea of such monks resorting to murder, no matter the reason, was unfathomable.

Reilly also looked puzzled by what was in the monk’s confession. “So the first group of Templars had something that the monks were prepared to kill them for? And then, a hundred years later, three Templars pick up the trail of their missing buddies, show up at the monastery, and take back what was theirs, leaving that group of monks so freaked out about it that they kill themselves?”

“That’s what the abbot’s letter says,” Tess confirmed.

“The impostor who came here with Agent Reilly,” Tilden asked. “Who was he?”

“I don’t know,” she replied. “Sharafi didn’t know who he was either. You see, after Sharafi found the confession, he felt he’d stumbled onto something big. He couldn’t help but want to look into it some more, but at the same time, it disturbed him. Deeply. I mean, remember what the monk wrote. ‘The devil’s handiwork, written in his hand using poison drawn from the pits of hell, its accursed existence a devastating threat to the rock upon which our world is founded.’ Maybe this was something that shouldn’t be found. Still, Sharafi couldn’t resist it—but he knew he had to be careful. He knew that something like this could be dangerous. Even more so, perhaps, if it fell into the wrong hands. So he sneaked the letter out of the archives—he stole it, basically—and he just worked on it quietly in his spare time, hoping to figure out what happened to those Templars and what they took with them. He spent a lot of time in the library, looking for more clues. The Sufi traveler hadn’t written about the confession he’d hidden in his journal; he hadn’t left anything behind that said where he’d found it or what he’d done after he’d found it. Sharafi thought he must have been as spooked by it as he was. Still, the Sufi’s journal described his travels in the area, which was a starting point, although Sharafi knew that a lot of the names of places and natural landmarks the traveler used had changed many times over the centuries. So Sharafi had a look in the area the Sufi had roamed, the area around Mount Argaeus, which is now called something else, asking around, trying to find the remains of the monastery. He also looked into any material on the Templars that he could find. But he kept hitting walls. The area he was looking in is sparsely populated, and he couldn’t find the monastery—not that he really expected to find anything there, not after all this time. He couldn’t find any mention of Conrad either, not in any of the Templar records he had access to. He was ready to give up when a couple of months ago, this guy came up to him outside the university, in Istanbul. He knew all about Sharafi’s find. He told Sharafi he wanted him to find the writings that the monk had talked about. And he threatened him and his family.”

Tess glanced at Reilly. He nodded his support. She swallowed and felt her body stiffen up. “Sharafi was … terrified. The man showed Sharafi a severed head. The head of a woman he’d killed, a schoolteacher who was Sharafi’s daughter’s favorite. He’d cut her head off … just to make his point.” The air in the room bristled with unease at her words.

“How did this guy know what Sharafi was working on?” Reilly asked. “I asked our impostor that question in the taxi on the way in from the airport, thinking I was asking the real Sharafi, and he said he hadn’t told anyone about it.”

“We asked him too,” Tess replied. “He said it was his research assistant at the university. He was the only person who knew about it apart from his own wife. And when he confronted him about it, the guy didn’t deny it. He berated Sharafi for not having reported it himself and said it had been his duty to do that.”

“His ‘duty’? Who was he?”

“A graduate student. From Iran.”

“What about the killer himself ? Did Sharafi say anything about where he was from?”

“He said he was also from Iran.”