Paul Christopher: Red Templar

“Aos, Sword of the East.”

The monk nodded as though Holliday had passed a test of some kind.

“Come with me,” said Dimitrov.

The monk led them to a narrow door to the left of the altar, which he opened with an iron key hanging from his belted cassock. Stone stairs led downward. The monk headed down and the others followed. The stairs led to the chapel crypt. It was a single, barrel-vaulted room lit by a lone clerestory window, which allowed in a bar of sunlight that fell upon the stone effigy of a knight set on a high granite plinth. Instead of a shield across his breast there was a sword. A motto was carved into the plinth, the letters worn with age and time: Non nobis, non nobis, Domine Sed nomini tuo da gloriam.Not to us, not to us, O Lord, but to your name give glory. Beneath the inscription was a circular seal-a double-headed eagle gripping a sword in its talons circumscribed by the inscription: Magister Templaris in Rostov .

The double-headed eagle, a heraldic device used by half the countries in Europe, including Bulgaria, and the central part of the Romanov crest.

“Who was he?” Holliday asked.

“Mikail Alexandreivich Nevsky, the last master of the ‘Rus’ Templars, an illegitimate child and grandson of Alexander Nevsky. He had no place in the hierarchy of his family even though he was a prince, so he joined the order.”

“He carried one of the swords from Pelerin?”

Dimitrov nodded. “Polaris.”

Sword of the North.

The monk brought them out of the crypt and led them to a small office in what had probably once been the sacristy of the little church. There was still a large vestment cupboard with beautifully carved and decorated doors against one wall and a table on which stood various gold chalices, patens, ciboria, aspergilla and other liturgical vessels.

There was a plain wooden desk and several chairs set around it. The monk sat behind the desk and gestured to his guests to seat themselves. The only artwork on the wall was a wood-and-gold-leaf-framed icon of Saint Simeon seated on his column. The walls, like the rest of the church, were bare stone.

Tired and more than a little annoyed at the game of hares and hounds he’d been lured into playing for the last ten hours or so, Holliday spoke first. “All right then, Brother Theodore, if that’s what you call yourself, I’ve come a long way on the strength of a name and a Latin phrase. I’d much rather be sitting down to a nice rib-eye dinner at the Plaza right now, which was my previous intention, so let’s see if my side trip to sunny Bulgaria was worth it or not.”

The monk said nothing. He opened the drawer in the desk and withdrew a large manila envelope, pale with age. He slid it across the desk to Holliday, who opened it and removed a single photograph. It showed six men standing in the courtyard of the monastery, identifiable because of the statue. The six men stood in a semicircle examining a plain medieval short sword.

“Do you recognize any of the men in that photograph?” Dimitrov said. “My grandfather was prior then. He took the photograph from the shadows of the cloister. Had they seen him he would have undoubtedly been killed on the spot.”

“I recognize three of them,” said Holliday, his heart pounding. A photograph such as this one simply should not exist. “Averell Harriman, the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, Lavrenti Beria, the head of what was then the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, and Molotov, Stalin’s foreign minister. I don’t know who the others are. The man in the business suit on the left looks vaguely familiar.”

The monk spoke again. “That’s because he’s George Herbert Walker, grandfather to President George Herbert Walker Bush, and great-grandfather to President George W. Bush. He was vice president of Harriman’s Wall Street company.”

“The other two?”

“The man with the long beard is Sergey Vladimirovich Simansky, better known as Alexis I, Russian Orthodox patriarch of Moscow and all the Russias. The slim man in the plain brown NKVD uniform with the sidearm is Molotov’s aide, Vladimir Spiridonovich Putin.”

“Putin’s father?”

“Yes. The photograph was taken during the Yalta Conference in 1945. Harriman borrowed Roosevelt’s C-54 Sacred Cow and they flew into Burgas Airport. It was less than a two-hour flight across the Black Sea. They weren’t even missed at the conference.”

“They came for the sword? Polaris?”

“Yes. The abbot, a corrupt man who it later turned out was a Nazi collaborator, gave it to them.”

“But why on earth would they want it? How did they know it was here?”

“Putin’s father had been with an NKVD sabotage squad during the war. He heard about the sword and the story behind it. He in turn told his father, and his father told Stalin.”

“Putin’s grandfather knew Stalin?” Holliday said, not quite believing it.

“Spiridon Putin was Stalin’s cook,” said Dimitrov. “The only man Stalin trusted to prepare his meals. Stalin even brought him to Yalta. Before that he cooked for Lenin, and before that he was a cook for the czar’s family.”

“That’s all very interesting, but it still doesn’t explain why they wanted the sword, and it sure as hell doesn’t explain why the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union and a Wall Street financier were interested, not to mention the Russian version of the pope at the time.”

“My grandfather heard Molotov mention the Order of the Sirin ,” said the monk. “The zhar-ptitsa .”

“The pajaro de fuego . . the fenix ,” explained Eddie.

“The Order of the Phoenix?” Holliday asked.

“It dates back to the time of Yaroslav the Wise and the establishment of the Saint Sophia Cathedral in Kiev. To most Ukrainians, Yaroslav was a hero for making the Orthodox Church truly Russian with the appointment of a Russian metropolitan. To others and to history he was clearly a white supremacist. The charge of the Order of the Phoenix was to bring an all-white Russia and specifically the Ukraine to world domination.”

“A Russian Ku Klux Klan,” said Holliday.

“Far more meaningful than that,” said the monk. “Imagine your Ku Klux Klan with the power of both the state and Church behind it. There are two hundred and twenty-eight million members of the Orthodox Church around the world, the large majority of them Russian-one hundred and twenty-five million, to be precise. It is a number to be reckoned with, Colonel Holliday, especially when it is effectively under the control of the Sirin , the upper-echelon members of the Phoenix order.”

“How many?” Holliday asked, startled.

“Two hundred and twenty-eight million, of which three-quarters of a million are American.”

“That’s a little hard to believe,” said Holliday, his tone skeptical. “But even if it’s true, it still doesn’t explain why Harriman and Walker were there, especially with a monster like Beria.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

Holliday thought for a moment. “Was Beria one of these Sirin ?”

“Almost certainly.” The monk nodded. “In fact, it hardly could have been otherwise. Beria joined the NKVD, or Cheka, as it was known then in 1921. The NKVD in its various incarnations virtually ran the order dating all the way back to the 1917 revolution. Perhaps even before.”

“Before?”

“Before the NKVD there was the Okhrana, the czar’s secret police, and secretly members of the order as well.”

“It still doesn’t make any sense. Why would they have been interested in the sword?”

Throughout Holliday’s conversation with the monk, Eddie Cabrera had been keeping up a whispered running translation for Genrikhovich. At the mention of the sword, a word he clearly recognized in English, the Hermitage curator began a frenzied stream of Russian. The man was clearly extremely upset. Finally he stopped and turned to Holliday, his eyes wide and his expression one that Holliday could only conclude was abject fear.