The Templar Salvation (2010)

He chuckled and passed her his plate. She scooped up the last piece of veal and gobbled it down. After a pause, he asked, “What just happened here?”

“What?”

He tried to order his thoughts. “This. Us. Here. Dealing with whackjobs and Templars again.”

“Maybe it’s our lot in life,” Tess grinned between mouthfuls.

“I’m serious.”

Tess shrugged, then gave him a slightly pointed look. “There’s still a lot we don’t know about them. Why do you think I went out to see Jed? It’s what I tried to explain to you … before I left. They deserve to be taken seriously. For decades, they’ve been this academic no-go zone, just fodder for fantasists and conspiracy theorists. But we know better, don’t we? Everything we thought was just myth and nonsense … it all turned out to be true.”

“Maybe,” Reilly argued. “We never got a chance to see if the documents from the Falcon Temple were real, or just forgeries.”

“Still … they were there, weren’t they?”

That part was true, he had to agree—and it supported her view of the Order. “So now that your work and your books are all about them,” he asked, “does that mean you’re going to be in the line of fire every time some crackpot thinks he’s got a lead on one of their secrets?”

“This guy didn’t come after me,” Tess reminded him. “He came after Jed. I just happened to be there.”

“This time,” he pointed out.

“Well,” she crept closer to him and gave him a wet, messy kiss, “if it happens again, just promise you’ll be there to rescue me?”

He drank it in quietly, then pulled away, a pensive look on his face. “Just so I understand things correctly—if you’re grabbed by some murderous psychopath, and only then, your request that I give you some ‘space’ “—he did some air quotes—”and keep away from you to give you some time to ‘figure things out’”—more air quotes—”no longer applies.” He paused, mock-thinking it over, then nodded sardonically. “Okay. Works for me.”

Her expression clouded at his words, as if an uncomfortable reality were coming back into focus. “Can we … can we just enjoy this moment and not talk about us for now?”

“Is there an ‘us’?” He kept his tone light and playful, even though deep down, the question was anything but that.

“We’ve just spent a couple of hours putting practically every pose in the Kama Sutra to the test. I think that kind of has an effect on our status, doesn’t it? But can we please just … not now, okay?”

“Sure thing.” He flashed her a slight grin to defuse the moment and decided to drop the subject for now. What they’d been through wasn’t the ideal grounding for a serious chat about where they stood with regard to each other. He didn’t think it was fair to Tess, not after her ordeal.

He changed tack. “Tell me something … these trunks, the writings the monk’s confession refers to. The cardinal didn’t seem too keen on giving me a straight answer about what they could be. You must have discussed it with Simmons. Any ideas?”

“Some, but … we’re just guessing.”

“So guess.”

She frowned. ” ‘The devil’s handiwork, written in his hand using poison drawn from the pits of hell,’ and the rest of it. It’s got a very creepy ring to it, doesn’t it? And it’s not something that’s commonly associated with the Templars.”

“But you know different?”

Tess shrugged. “Sort of. The thing is, you have to understand the context of it, the setting. The events in the diary, Conrad and the monks … that all happened in 1310. That’s three years after the Templars were all arrested. And how that happened, why it happened when it happened, could help explain what it’s all about.”

“Keep going.”

Tess straightened, and her face lit up as it always did when she got excited about something. “Okay. Here’s the backstory. Late 1200s, early 1300s. Western Europe’s going through tough times. After several centuries of warm weather, the weather’s now getting freaky and unpredictable—a lot colder and wetter. Crops are failing. Disease is spreading. This was the start of what’s called the ‘Little Ice Age’ that—weirdly enough—lasted until a hundred and fifty years ago. By the time you hit 1315, it rains almost nonstop for three years and triggers the Great Famine. So the common folk—they’re having a really miserable time. Now, on top of that, they’ve just lost their Holy Land. The pope had told them that the Crusades were willed and blessed by God—and they failed. The crusaders lost Jerusalem and were finally kicked out of the last Christian stronghold, at Acre, in 1291. Now keep in mind, the church had spent decades building up the arrival of the new millennium as this thousand-year milestone and was talking it up as the date of the parousia, the Second Coming. They were warning people that they had to embrace Christianity and submit to the Church’s authority before that date or miss out on their eternal reward. So there was a great resurgence of religious fervor at the time, and when nothing happened, when the new millennium came and went without the Big Event taking place, the Church needed to find something else to distract its people, an excuse almost. And they turned to liberating the Holy Land from the Muslims who had taken it over. The pope dreamt up the Crusades as something that God was waiting for, the crowning achievement of that whole movement, the start of a new triumphant age for Christianity. And the Church had even gone as far as to change its position radically, from preaching about peace and harmony and loving your fellow man, to doing the total opposite—the pope was now actively promoting war and telling his followers ‘God will absolve you of all your previous crimes if you go out and slaughter the heathen in the Holy Land.’ So there was a lot riding on getting the Holy Land back. And when that failed, it was a huge blow. Huge. And people were feeling scared. They were wondering if God was angry with them. Or if something powerful and evil was at work, undermining God’s efforts. And if that was the case, who were his agents, and what powers did they have?

“Now while this is all happening, something else is brewing at the same time,” Tess continued. “People in Western Europe, and I’m talking about the people in power, the priests and the monarchs—the few who could actually read and write—they’ve recently started taking the dangers of magic and witchcraft seriously again. They hadn’t, not for centuries. Those concerns had died out with paganism. Magic and witchcraft were ridiculed as nothing more than the superstitions of delusional old women. But when the Spanish took back the south of Spain from the Moors towards the end of the eleventh century, they discovered a whole new world of writings in places like the library of Toledo, ancient and classical scientific texts that the Arabs had brought with them and had translated from the original Greek into Arabic and then into Latin. So the West rediscovered all these lost writings, the works of great thinkers and scientists that they’d completely forgotten about, like Plato and Hermes and Ptolemy and a whole bunch of others they’d never heard of. Books like the Picatrix and the Cyranides and the Secreta Secretorum that explored philosophy and astronomy as well as magico-religious ideas and potions and spells and necromancy and astromagic and all kinds of ideas these people had never seen before. And what they read scared the hell out of them. Because these texts, regardless of how primitive or misguided we might now consider them, talked about science and understanding how the universe worked and how the stars moved and how our bodies could be healed, and basically, how man could gain power over the elements around him. And that was scary to them. It was early science, and early science was considered magic. And since it undermined the concept of ‘God’s will,’ the priests painted it as ‘black magic,’ and anything it achieved had to be due to demon worship.”

Reilly remembered something from his previous exposure to the warrior-monks and asked, “Weren’t the Templars accused of worshipping some demonic head?”

“Of course. The Baphomet. Now there are conflicting theories on that, we still don’t know for a fact what it was all about. But that’s what I’m talking about. To understand why the Templars were rounded up and accused of all these mostly ridiculous things, you have to understand the mind-set in which that happened.”

“So we’ve got people thinking God is angry with them and that the devil’s agents are out to destroy them, and priests and kings believing black magic might actually exist.”

“Exactly. And against that charged backdrop, you’ve got these arrogant, wealthy warrior-monks who lost the Holy Land and are now back in Europe, and they don’t seem to be too embarrassed by their defeat. They’ve still got all these vast holdings and they’re living it up on the fat of the land while everyone else is starving. And people start asking questions. They start wondering about them, asking themselves how these guys are getting away with it—