Paul Christopher: Red Templar

The music stopped, the sound of the bells fading slowly away to faint echoes. There was the grinding of more hidden gears within the walls. Directly in front of them a section of wall five feet wide began to rumble slowly into the floor until it disappeared. Genrikhovich picked up the lantern and shone it through the newly created gap in the wall.

“Gentlemen,” said the Russian ponderously, “I give you the lost treasures of Ivan the Terrible!”

One after another the three men stepped across the threshold and entered the room beyond.

Genrikhovich stepped into the treasure house, set the big lantern down and turned it up to its fullest light, revealing a room born from the sweat and blood and hearts and hands of ten thousand toiling artisans from the mountains of the Himalayas to the great Horn of Africa. It was large and domed, and surrounded with Palladian columns, steps of granite leading down to a floor that Plato might have debated on, or where the great Sophocles might have set his Oedipus Rex, or his Antigone .

But the floor was covered knee-deep in treasures, goblets, coins, bars and bolts of cloth so old they had rotted away to rich dust, and the steps had been turned into shelves full of coins and bullion, silver and gold jewelry crusted with gems of all kinds, from ropes of huge pearls to diamonds the size of ice cubes and emeralds the size of green apples.

There were carved ivory elephant tusks, a life-size pair of black onyx leopards being held in check by golden chains grasped in the fist of a carved Nubian slave that might have come from some ancient Egyptian tomb. On one side a stuffed crocodile with amethyst eyes was in full-scale combat with a full-size Russian bear. On the other side turquoise hummingbirds hung from the silver branches of a plum tree blossoming with pale Ceylonese sapphires.

On the cases set along the walls between the high pillars were scrolls wrapped in gold and capped with chased silver. There were manuscripts bound in inlaid horn and every form of precious metal. There were enormous tomes, their leather spines as worked and carved as the backs of ancient dinosaurs, and some volumes slim enough to be held in a child’s hand and bound in the thin, translucent mottled shells of unborn tortoises. This was Ivan the Terrible’s great library, saved from the vandal pillaging of Constantinople almost six hundred years ago, marking the end of an empire that had lasted since the time of Christ.

Holliday shivered, hearing the last words of the big, sad-eyed monk Helder Rodrigues as he lay dying in the rain under a dark, troubled sky: Too many secrets. Too many secrets.

“Poryodok zhar-ptitsa,” whispered Genrikhovich, staring across the high-domed room. He began to walk like a man hypnotized, humming softly under his breath.

“What’s he saying?” Holliday whispered.

“The Order of the Firebird. The Phoenix,” answered Eddie, keeping his voice low. “?Querido Dios!?Esta cantando el saga Krasny!” said the Cuban, tears suddenly welling from his big brown eyes and running down his cheeks.

“The what?” Holliday said, stunned at the reaction it was having on his friend.

“My mother sang it to me when I was a little boy,” said Eddie. “When my father was dying in the hospital of cancer I held him in my arms and he asked me to sing it to him, and I did, but I could not remember the words and he died.” The Cuban was openly sobbing now, as though some long-forgotten dam of emotion had burst.

“I’m sorry, friend, so very sorry,” Holliday said. It was as though the man were being ripped apart by the memory of his dying father. His eyes on Genrikhovich, Holliday could now see where he was going: a granite podium like the one outside, this one with a sword sheathed in silver hanging over the stone edge of the plinth from a fine gold mesh belt.

Holliday immediately recognized the sword by the simple, wire-wrapped hilt identical to the sword his uncle Henry had kept hidden in his house in Fredonia, New York, for more than half a century. That sword had previously been owned by Adolf Hitler and kept at his mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden in Bavaria. Now, Holliday could see, this was the last of the four swords sent out from Castle Pelerin by the dwarf swordsmith Alberic in the Holy Land, warning the Templars of their grisly destiny. This was Octanis, Sword of the South.

The front of the plinth the sword hung on was carved with a great fiery bird rising up out of a bed of flames-the phoenix. On the top of the podium and looking remarkably familiar was a large, ornate box. The box looked familiar because it was identical to every illustration or copy of it Holliday had seen since he was a child in Sunday school, right up to the one hidden away in a Pentagon warehouse in Steven Spielberg’s famous film.

It was four feet long and two and a half feet wide, the entire box covered in sheet gold and topped by two angels, wings stretched toward each other, wing tips touching, also in gold. The sides of the box were covered in ornate designs, and two poles were permanently fixed to its base for transport. By most accounts it held the shattered stone tablets Moses had smashed at the foot of Mount Sinai, but occasionally was thought to include Aaron’s rod and a jar of manna from heaven, depending on which book and which translation of the Old Testament you were reading. It was, beyond a shadow of a doubt, none other than the Ark of the Covenant.

The original Ark was thought to have been hidden in a variety of places, from a Templar Knight’s ancestral home in Warwickshire, England, to a lake in Ethiopia, returned to Mount Sinai, now known as Mount Horeb, hidden inside a hill in Ireland, the Languedoc region of France and even hidden away in a museum in Harare, the capital city of the Republic of Zimbabwe. To Holliday’s knowledge no one had even once suggested that it had rested under the Kremlin for the last few hundred years, although it made a certain amount of sense when you considered the origin of most of Czar Ivan’s riches.

Genrikhovich reached the podium, grasped the wings of the angels on the peaked cover of the ark and pulled upward with a jerk. The top of the box came up and off without any problem. For a single second some idiot part of Holliday’s brain expected a ray-gun beam of brilliant light to zap out of the box and melt Genrikhovich’s face like a wax candle, but nothing happened. The Russian simply set the top aside and reached inside.

A moment later he removed a large jeweled slipcase made out of beaten gold. From inside he withdrew a simple leather-bound volume about eighteen inches high, a foot and a half wide and three or four inches thick. He laid it carefully on the surface of the podium, sweeping the top of the box to the floor, where it split into several pieces. He turned back the cover and stared. An instant later he crowed like a rooster at dawn.

“I have it!” he screeched. “I have it now!” The Russian did a gruesome little jig, his lank hair plastered to his temples as trickles of sweat coursed down his face. He took off his spectacles, peering closely at the text, then put them on again, fumbling as he hooked the arms of the glasses over his ears.

“It is in Aramaic, Holliday. Can you read Aramaic? No, of course you can’t, but it doesn’t matter. I don’t need you anymore-or them, for that matter. Or your silly notebook; they can have it all!” He crowed again, a terrible shriek that dissolved into convulsive giggles.

“You know what it says, you poor fool of an American? You know what the title of this book is? No? Well, I’ll tell you. It says, ‘The Gospel of Yeshua ben Yusef.’ You know who he was, at least, surely.”

Holliday knew. He stood stunned beside his weeping friend. Yeshua ben Yusef had been Christ’s name as a man. If the book Genrikhovich held in his hands was literally Christ’s own words as written by himself in the years before his death-or, Holliday thought, after his supposed crucifixion-if they were the words of a man and not a god, then those words would have more real power than anything dreamed up for a Hollywood movie or in the beakers of horrors at the Almaty Biological Weapons Facility in Kazakhstan, so short of money now that they kept their supplies of anthrax in old coffee cans.