Sword of the Templars Read online

  The Sword of the Templars

  Paul Christopher

  Penguin Group USA

  Table of Contents

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  THE SWORD OF THE TEMPLARS

  Ducking under the swing, Holliday lunged forward, shoulder dropping, and caught the thief in the chest, knocking him backward, half up the embankment. The thief swung the sword again, the blade slashing toward his head in a whistling arc. Holliday threw himself to one side as the sword came close to decapitating him.

  The man turned, tossing the sword away, and scrambled up the bank, using both hands to haul himself upward. Holliday lunged again, managing to grip his attacker’s ankle. The man kicked back furiously, this time connecting, catching Holliday in the chin. Holliday fell away, stunned, then tumbled back down the embankment. By the time he got to his feet again the man who’d burned down Uncle Henry’s house and tried to steal the mysterious sword had vanished into the night.

  ALSO BY PAUL CHRISTOPHER

  Michelangelo’s Notebook

  The Lucifer Gospel

  Rembrandt’s Ghost

  The Aztec Heresy

  SIGNET

  Published by New American Library, a division of

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  First published by Signet, an imprint of New American Library,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, July 2009

  Copyright Š Paul Christopher, 2009

  All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  eISBN : 978-1-101-05926-5

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  To Mariea, Noah, Chelsea & Gabe with all my love.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank Brent Howard and Claire Zion at NAL for giving me the idea, the entrancing and spiffy looking Leora, the best nurse in the world, and her fiancé, the real Raffi Wanounou, for letting me steal his wonderful name. Mazel tov to both of you.

  Where is the grave of Sir Arthur O’Kellyn?

  Where may the grave of that good man be?—

  By the side of a spring, on the breast of Helvellyn,

  Under the twigs of a young birch tree!

  The oak that in summer was sweet to hear,

  And rustled its leaves in the fall of the year,

  And whistled and roared in the winter alone,

  Is gone,—and the birch in its stead is grown.—

  The Knight’s bones are dust,

  And his good sword rust;—

  His soul is with the saints, I trust.

  —Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Knight’s Tomb”

  Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.

  Here lies Arthur, the Once and Future King.

  —Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte d’Arthur

  Glory to God Who did take His servant for a Journey by night from the Sacred Mosque to the farthest Mosque, whose precincts We did bless, in order that We might show him some of Our Signs: for He is the One Who heareth and seeth all things.

  —The Koran, The Night Journey, Chapter 17, Verse 1, in which the Prophet is shown the great wonders in the ruins of Solomon’s Temple

  And he will stretch out his hand against the north, and destroy Assyria; and will make Nineveh a desolation, and dry like a wilderness.

  —Zephaniah 2:13 The Holy Bible, King James Version

  1

  “In The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown depicted the Knights Templar as being the sacred keepers of the secret of Christ’s bloodline. In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade they were portrayed as immortal guardians of the Holy Grail. In the movie National Treasure, Nicolas Cage described them as being the caretakers of a vast fortune buried under Trinity Church in downtown Manhattan. According to various religious scholars they were gatekeepers of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem after the successful conclusion of the First Crusade as well as protectors of pilgrims on their way to the Holy Land.

  “Bull. The truth is the Knights Templar, this self-described Army of God, was nothing more than a gang of extortionists and thugs. As a group they were certainly the world’s first example of organized crime, complete with secret rituals and a code not unlike that of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra—the Mafia.”

  Lieutenant Colonel John “Doc” Holliday, a dark-haired, middle-aged man in an Army Ranger uniform wearing a black patch over his left eye, looked out over the classroom, checking for some sort of response from his students, or failing that at least an indication of interest. What he saw were eighteen “firsties,” fourth-year students, all male, all wearing the same “as-to-class” short-sleeved blue uniform blouses with a neat tria
ngle of snow-white T-shirt showing at the neck, all wearing the same gray trousers with a single stripe, all with the same high-and-tight haircut, all with the same sleepy, glassy-eyed expression of young men attending the last class of an academic day that had started almost ten hours before. Incredibly, this was the cream of the West Point graduating class, most of them single-minded ring thumpers who’d already branched Artillery, Infantry, or Armor, and none of whom had the slightest interest in medieval history in general or the Knights Templar in particular. Future Warriors of America. Huah!

  Holliday continued.

  “The big problem with the First Crusade of 1095 was the fact that the crusaders won it. By 1099 they’d captured Jerusalem and they were an army without an enemy. No more godless Saracens to slaughter. Knights of the time were professional soldiers, swords for hire bought and paid for by wealthy noblemen, most of them French, Italian, or German. They were chevaliers, literally men who could afford to ride a horse; chivalry and fair damsels in distress didn’t factor in the equation. They were killers, plain and simple.”

  “Warriors, sir.” The observation came from Whitey Tarvanin, a tough-looking Finn from Nebraska whose pale skin and even paler hair had given him his nickname. He was obviously Infantry, the crossed idiot sticks on his uniform blouse proud proof of that. When he’d posted a few weeks ago he’d actually chosen Fort Polk, Alabama, the least attractive choice on the roster, just to prove how down and dirty he was.

  “No, not warriors, Cadet, mercenaries. These guys were in it for the money, nothing more. No Honor, Duty, Country. Maybe a little raping and pillaging on the side; after all, according to the rules of engagement in the eleventh century non-Christians were going to Hell anyway, so they didn’t count. The nobles had promised them all sorts of plunder in the Holy Land, but as it turned out there wasn’t enough to go around and thousands of these chevaliers came back penniless and a lot of the nobles were close to bankruptcy, as well. Many of them returned home to find that their lands, castles, and everything else had been stolen by scheming relatives or simply forfeited by one king or another for taxes.”

  Holliday paused.

  “So what does an unemployed soldier whose only real skills involve hacking, butchering, and otherwise committing acts of extreme violence on the godless enemy do with himself once that enemy has been vanquished?”

  Holliday shrugged.

  “He does what men in that situation have done since the days of Alexander the Great. He turns to crime.”

  “Like Robin Hood?” This was from “Zitz” Mitchell, skinny, pimples, wire-rimmed glasses, and a hairline already edging backwards into baldness. After watching Mitchell go through four years at the Point, Holliday was still amazed by his stamina. He’d expected the beanpole cadet to wash out after Beast Barracks, if not before. But he’d stuck it out. Holliday smiled. Mitchell’s pimples would go away eventually.

  “Robin Hood was a romantic fantasy invented by songwriters who came along a few hundred years after the fact. The people I’m talking about, the routiers, as these vagabond highwaymen were called, were more like Tony Montana in Scarface—products of their environment; an unskilled ex-con Marielito washed up on the shores of Key West doesn’t have much choice if he wants to get ahead in his new home: he deals cocaine. A routier in medieval France joins a gang of like-minded ex-soldiers and starts plundering the countryside or offering villages and towns ‘protec tion’ for a price.

  “One of these men was Hugues de Payens, a French knight in the service of the Duke of Champagne. The duke ran short of money and Sir Hugues switched allegiance, fighting with the army of Godfrey of Bouillon until Jerusalem was overthrown.

  “Godfrey was installed as king of Jerusalem, and using his prior connection Sir Hugues along with half a dozen other routiers petitioned King Godfrey for the job of guarding the new pilgrim routes through the recently captured Holy Land, along with the right to establish their headquarters in the ruins of the old Temple of Solomon.

  “Pilgrims were big business back then, and tolls from the pilgrims formed the basis for economy of the newly ‘liberated’ Holy Land. Godfrey agreed, and Sir Hugues took things one step further, ratifying his position by having Pope Urban II grant him the status of a holy order, thus freeing the newly formed Knights Templar from the obligations of any sort of taxation, not to mention making them answerable only to the Pope.”

  “He made them an offer they couldn’t refuse.” Zitz Mitchell grinned. “Godfather style.”

  “Something like that.” Holliday nodded. “Sir Hugues and his fellow routiers controlled a lot of military might. Godfrey had upset a bunch of his colleagues by accepting the title of king. At the very least Godfrey was buying protection for himself in the fragile little kingdom.”

  “So what happened?” Whitey Tarvanin asked, suddenly getting interested.

  “There had always been rumors about some sort of treasure hidden in the Temple of Solomon, maybe even the Ark of the Covenant, the box that supposedly held the second set of the Ten Commandments brought down from Mount Sinai by Moses.”

  “Second set?” Tarvanin asked.

  “Moses broke the first tablets,” said Granger, a football jock with the nickname Bullet, which probably had something to do with the shape of his head. He was also the class’s biggest über-Christian. The hefty point guard had been scowling at Holliday since he’d mentioned Dan Brown and The Da Vinci Code. A sensitive topic for a lot of people, although Holliday wasn’t quite sure why; after all, it was a novel, a work of fiction, not a campaign platform or a sermon. Granger cleared his throat as though he was embarrassed about displaying too much knowledge in front of a teacher. “God wrote them down a second time and Moses put them in the Ark. It’s in the Bible.”

  “It’s also in the Koran,” said Holliday mildly. “It has a deep significance for Muslims as well as Christians.”

  Granger’s scowl darkened and his big head turtle-tucked down into his beef-slab shoulders.

  “Did these guys find it?” Tarvanin asked.

  “Nobody’s quite sure. They found something, we know that much. Some say it was gold from King Solomon’s Mines; others say it was the Ark of the Covenant; others say it was the secret wisdom of At lantis. Whatever they found, within a year the Knights Templar were loaded. They financed their pilgrim escort service, built castles up and down the pilgrim routes to Jerusalem, and sold their muscle to anyone who could pay.

  “Because of the distances involved between Europe and the Holy Land, they borrowed an idea from their Saracen enemies and introduced an encrypted note of transfer—a deposit of money in one place could be transferred on paper for thousands of miles. Wire transfers before they had wires.

  “The Templars also began making loans at interest, although this was specifically forbidden in the Bible. As time went on the Templars even began financing entire wars. Land and other assets were regularly used as collateral and often wound up being forfeited, expanding the Templars’ power and wealth even more.

  “Within a hundred years the Templars were into everything: loan-sharking, real estate, the protection rackets, shipping, smuggling, bribery, you name it. By the end of the next century they were the next best thing to a multinational conglomerate, and there’s no doubt that much of it came from illicit sources.