Paul Christopher: Red Templar

“ Mi mas sentido pesame, compadre , but that is a long time, no?”

“Yes.”

“You loved her very much, yes?”

“Yes, very much.”

“Did you have children?”

“No, unfortunately. We both wanted them, but. .”

“ Se agote el tiempo- time ran out, yes?”

“Yes.”

“I have many, little Eddie. . Eduardo, not Edimburgo. ?Alabado sea Dios! , I would not do that to a child. . Cleopatra, Estrella, Domingo, Miroslava. .”

“Miroslava? Funny name for a Cuban.”

“My mother, she had admiration for a famous Mexican actress, Miroslava Stern.”

“There was such a person?”

“Of course, she is starred with Mel Ferrer in The Brave Bulls . It was the story of Luis Bello; ‘the Swordsman of Guerreras,’ they call him. The greatest matador in all of Mexico. Very, how you say, classico with the ladies as well. He would say to one, ‘Cada dia te quiero mas que ayer, y menos que manana.’ ‘I love you today, but not as much as I will tomorrow.’ And they would fall into his arms. Ay, what a man was this!”

“Where are these children?”

“In Habana.”

“And their mother?”

“Many mothers. One for each child, which is what I am saying to you. You need. . la variedad,?comprende? ”

“Variety?”

“ Si , variety, la variedad .”

“So you’re telling me I should get out more-is that it?”

“?Que?” Eddie responded, then smiled, nodding. “Yes, this is what I am saying.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“That would be a start.”

Holliday decided that it was time to change the subject. “Genrikhovich’s asleep,” he said, glancing in the rearview mirror. The Russian was snoring loudly.

“At least he is not making peos anymore.” Eddie grinned, pinching his nostrils.

“Good point,” said Holliday. “Maybe things are looking up.”

Ahead of them Ahtopol appeared, a 1950s pastel vision of a Black Sea resort for high-ranking apparatchiks, government employees with enough money to rent an umbrella on the beach and a pink or yellow or blue little villa by the sea. A Marxist-Leninist paradise. The place was a ghost town, and from the highway they could see that all the beaches were empty. It was October and winter was in the wind.

The monastery of Saint Simeon the Plowman lay nestled in the hills above Ahtopol, surrounded by stands of birch and alder. Farther up the slopes spread the cool green of a pine forest that had once provided the lumber for the fishing fleets and trading ships that set out from Peronticus, as the Romans had once called the seaside town.

The monastery had the typical look of most Templar sites Holliday had seen, as much fortress as a place of religious enlightenment. A high stone wall surrounded a round church, its windows doubling as slits for archers. There was a refectory behind the church, presumably with the kitchens below, and a bleak-looking windowless chamber that was probably a charnel house for depositing the bones of monks who’d died here over the past eight hundred years.

Ranged around two sides of the fortress walls was a cloister with cells for the monks, and in the center of the cloister a courtyard with a well and a statue. For a monastery dedicated to Saint Simeon Stylites, the hermetic who set himself upon a stone column to deny himself temptation. Simeon himself would have been an appropriate subject for a sculpture, but instead there was a life-size figure of a horse and two riders, one of the most enduring symbols of the Templar Knights. The statue was in bronze green with age, the walls and church were local pale stone and the roofs were iron gray slate.

Holliday parked the rental car on the gravel beside the death house and woke up Genrikhovich, who still looked a little queasy. Leaving the doors and windows of the Moskvich open to give the vehicle a much-needed airing out, the three men entered the church. It was a simple room, with a single aisle lined with perhaps twenty benchlike pews on each side, the aisle leading to a plain stone altar with a rose window behind it with a rendition of the face of Christ. Each of the four petals of the rose contained the figure of a knight, the familiar Croix Rouge of the Templars on their body-length “kite” shields. Each knight wore a helm and hauberk of chain mail and carried a sword in his right hand. At the feet of each knight was a single word on a ribbon: Aos, Hesperios, Polaris, Octanis. The stars of east, west, north and south. It was certainly no coincidence. The four words were the names given to the four swords that carried the hidden and coded message out of Castle Pelerin and the Holy Land: We are betrayed. The king and the Holy Father conspire against us. Let Sagittarius be the guardian’s inspiration and pray that he be guided by the loins of the bear.

Although the last part of the message remained obscure, its meaning lost in time, the first part was prophetic enough. King Philip IV of France, in the midst of a financially draining war with England, had already expelled the Jews from his country, seizing their assets, and by 1293 was conspiring with his chief political adviser, the Bishop of Bordeaux, Raymond Bertrand de Got, to assassinate the pope, then replace him with the bishop.

As pope, on Philip’s order, de Got would dissolve the Templars and seize their enormous assets in France, thus simultaneously absolving Philip of responsibility for his equally enormous debts to the order. A simple enough plan on the face of it, but it took time to put all the pieces in place, giving the Templars an opportunity to discreetly move the greater part of their wealth out of France and Philip’s clutches, as well as to infiltrate the royal court with well-placed spies. On Thursday, October 12, 1307, there were fifteen heavily loaded Templar ships in the harbor at La Rochelle, the last of the Templar fleet in France. The next day, when Philip’s order to arrest the senior members of the order took effect, the ships had vanished. Their secrets vanished with them.

A monk in the plain working robes of a Russian Orthodox monk was on his knees in front of the altar with a bucket and a scrub brush, cleaning the stone floor as Holliday, Eddie and Genrikhovich entered the monastery chapel. Genrikhovich muttered something to Eddie, and the Cuban turned to Holliday, nodding toward the monk.

“That is the man, Theodore Dimitrov.”

The monk stood as they approached, drying his hands unceremoniously on his water-stained robes. He was much younger than Holliday had expected, no more than thirty or so, slim, dark haired, with a long, narrow face and deep-set eyes as black as Eddie’s skin. He nodded perfunctorily to Genrikhovich, then concentrated on Holliday.

“You are Holliday, the one who knew Brother Rodrigues?” His English had a faint British cast to it.

“Briefly,” Holliday answered, surprised at the monk’s abrupt question.

“You keep the book?”

The bloodstained notebook of names, contacts and coded account numbers given to him by the dying Rodrigues, the codex mystericum to nine hundred years of the ancient order’s history.

“Yes.”

“You keep it safely?”

“In a bank vault.”

“You saw the rose window. You know its significance?”

“It marks the four swords that went out from Pelerin.”

“Who made them?”

“Alberic Fecere,” Holliday responded.

“What is the true meaning of the cross?”

“The four sides of the pyramid, the secret revealed.”

“Which sword was yours?”

“Hesperios,” said Holliday. “The Sword of the West.”

“Which sword did Rodrigues have?”