palaces, and sublime buildings. Buildings like the new Imperial Library, where a small army of calligraphers and librarians would toil at transcribing ancient texts from the fragile papyrus they’d been written on onto more durable parchment and keep the flame of knowledge alive.
The library would also keep something else alive.
Something Hosius felt a need to conserve.
He watched his acolytes put the third of the chests onto the wagon bed and cover it with a tight canvas cover. He tensed up with anticipation. They would soon set off, protected by a small detail of guards, under cover of the night.
He hoped his betrayal would never be uncovered. Even if it were, he was prepared to die to protect it.
He couldn’t burn them.
Even if they threatened the orthodoxy. Even if they threw up dangerous questions.
They had to be kept. They had to be protected.
They were sacred.
And if not now, if not during his lifetime or the lifetimes of many of his descendants, there would come a time when they would be read and studied openly. A time when they would enrich man’s understanding of his past.
He would see to that.
Chapter 51
So Hosius decides these writings shouldn’t be destroyed and stashes them away somewhere safe. How did they end up in the Templars’ hands?”
“I don’t know,” Tess replied, her mind hurtling down many avenues at the same time. “But somehow, the first Templars to show up at the monastery, the ones led by Everard—”
“The ones the monks poisoned,” Reilly interjected.
“Yes, somehow, they got hold of them.” A beacon lit up somewhere in the maze and drew her toward it. “That was in 1203. Just before the sack of Constantinople,” she told Reilly, her eyes flaring with the thrill of a newly established connection. “What if that’s where they’d been kept all along, in Constantinople? What if whoever Hosius had entrusted to look after them figured they had to get them out of there and moved to somewhere safe before the city was overrun by the crusaders?”
“The crusaders—in other words, the pope’s army.”
Tess felt her skin light up. “The pope’s army had the city under siege. They’d just pillaged Zara, a Catholic city. The people of Constantinople could expect even worse, given that it was the capital of Orthodox Christianity. The Orthodox patriarchs and the popes had spent the last couple of hundred years trading insults and excommunicating each other. It didn’t take a soothsayer to know what the crusaders would do to them once they got inside the city walls. Whether the pope knew the documents were there or not, they were still at risk.”
“So they ask the Templars to take them somewhere safe? Why the Templars?”
Tess processed the timeline. Another beacon flared up, dazzlingly bright and irresistible. “What if the Templars were in on it from the beginning?”
“What do you mean?”
“Three years ago, at the Vatican, the first time you met Brugnone, he told you the Templars had found Jesus’s journal in Jerusalem. He confirmed what Vance had suspected—that they’d used it to blackmail the pope and that that was how they got so rich and powerful so quickly. Well … where did that journal really come from?”
“Didn’t they find it buried somewhere in the remains of the old Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem? I thought the story was that they spent their first few years out there digging around, and then when they found it, it allowed them to blackmail the Vatican into backing them and that’s when all the donations of money and land started pouring in.”
“That’s what we’ve always assumed. But what if we were wrong?” She thought back to the origin of the Templars that was common lore—nine knights from across Europe who all showed up in Jerusalem one day back in 1118, out of the blue, and told the king they wanted to protect the Christian pilgrims who were streaming in to see the newly conquered holy city. The king gave them huge premises to use as their base, the site of the old Temple of Solomon—hence, Knights of the Temple, or Templars—premises they didn’t apparently leave for nine years, years that they supposedly spent digging around, looking for something that, when they found it, gave them great wealth and power. Something that Tess believed she and Reilly had uncovered three years earlier.
“Did the first Templars really find it after digging around those ruins?” she asked. “Or was that just their cover story? What if it had been part of the trove of Nicaea from day one?”
“So they lied to the pope to sex it up? To make it sound more mysterious, more mythical?”
“Partly,” Tess speculated. “It would also keep the rest of the trove safe. There was no reason for them to alert the pope and his cronies to the fact that there were all these other gospels and writings out there. Why put it all at risk?”
“But that would mean the founding Templars knew about the trove from day one,” Reilly observed.
“Which begs the question,” Tess jumped in, “who were they really, and why did they choose to make their move and blackmail the pope when they did?” She was having trouble keeping up with the implications of every new realization. Everything she’d thought she knew about the origins of the Templars—who they really were, where they came from, why they appeared when they did, what they were really trying to achieve—it was all suddenly thrown into question.
“When did they first show up on the map?”
“In 1118. A pretty revolutionary time,” she thought aloud, her mind on fire now. “It was the first time that any pope, the leader of the Catholic Church and Jesus’s representative on earth, wasn’t spreading His message of love and peace. Instead, he was telling his flock to go out and kill in the name of Christ, telling them all their sins would be forgiven and Heaven would be theirs if they went out and butchered the heathen in the name of the Cross. And at that point, his holy army was winning. They had taken over Jerusalem, the Muslims were on the ropes. The pope was the leader of the only superpower around, and the world was his for the taking.”
Reilly processed her words. “Maybe someone, somewhere decided to create a counterpoint?” he put in. “A force that could check Rome’s supremacy and maybe put the brakes on before it all got out of hand?”
Tess nodded, her eyes distant. “Maybe everything we thought we knew about the Templars is wrong.”
A silence fell over them, allowing their ideas to find some purchase. Then Tess’s expression lost its inspired lightness and sank, heavy with trepidation. “I can see why our Iranian friend wanted to get his hands on Hosius’s stash. We’ve got to find it, Sean. If it’s out there, we’ve got to find it first. We can’t let some bastards in Tehran dump it on an unprepared world.”
“You really think it can still cause trouble?” he questioned. “Even in today’s world? People out there are pretty cynical.”
“Not about this. Not about the Bible. There are two billion Christians out there, Sean, and a lot of them think of the Bible as God’s words.
