Paul Christopher - The Templar throne

Meg followed his glance.

"What exactly are you looking at?"

"There, just to the left of where the middle window starts."

"A knight in armor being attacked by another knight. A man being burned at the stake. Two men on a single horse. A battle?"

"It's a date. Friday, October 13, 1307. The Templars are being attacked, their leaders burned at the stake. The two knights on a single horse is the symbol of the Templars. The whole embroidery's been done that way. Not only was Brother Morgan a historian, he was also a canter."

"A singer?" Meg asked.

"Canter with an e," said Holliday. "It's a term in heraldry where the designer of a coat of arms makes visual puns from a person's name. Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, the old Queen Mother and the wife of George VI. The family crest is bows and arrows and lions, Bowes, Lyons. Princess Beatrice of York has three bees-bees thrice, over the royal arms of York. A canter invents the crests. Morgan was doing the same thing here. It's a rebus, an old-fashioned word puzzle."

"You lost me back at bees thrice," said Meg.

"It's simple. Look at the embroidery. Two knights on a horse. The Latin word Iulia and a woman wearing black robes, followed by a two-masted, lateen-sailed ship with a sail flying an engrailed cross, followed by an island with a castle on it, and the Greek word ichthys enclosed with the symbol of the fish."

"The old symbol for the Christian Church," said Meg. "I get it now. Sort of."

"The two knights on a horse means a Templar, Iulia and the woman in the robes is your Blessed Juliana, a boat with a lateen sail like that was a classic Venetian design, and an engrailed cross was the arms of the Saint-Clairs. Ichthys was an ancient puzzle on its own: iota, chi, theta, upsilon, sigma were all letters referring to Christ. Arranged in a five-character square it could be read in any direction. It's called a palindromic acrostic, or a magic square. On top of all that, Ichthys was also the original name for St. Michael's Mount. Put it all together and you get: A Templar knight and the Blessed Juliana came to St. Michael's Mount in a Venetian 'nau' sometime after the fall of the Templars in 1307."

Meg looked at the next set of symbols and letters.

"Some barrels, something that looks like meat being butchered, the ship with the cross on the sails again and then the word 'Iona' with a ball and cross after it."

Holliday translated the stitched, doodle-like images.

"The ship took on water and food then left for the island of Iona. I wrote a paper about Iona when I was at Georgetown. It's an ancient sacred island in the Scottish Inner Hebrides. Norwegian, Saxon and Scottish kings are buried there. There was an abbey on Iona a lot like this one. It's also just about the end of the world, or it was at the time. Go north and you might hit Iceland if you were lucky. Go west and there was nothing between you and North America."

"That was remarkably simple," said Meg.

"Sometimes things are exactly what they seem," said Holliday with a grin. "Like Freud said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." He shrugged. "You don't have to look for clues and secret symbols everywhere in history; Hitler wasn't in league with the Devil or the Illuminati, he was just your average everyday maniac. Stalin was another one."

"And sometimes life is more complex than it looks," warned Meg. "Sometimes symbols are everything."

They started out of the library, heading into a long passageway that the brochure indicated was the way to the exit.

"Are you talking about the Dan Brown character's idea of symbolism or the Catholic Church?" Holliday asked.

"I'm talking about the fact that symbols often mean a great deal to people. Christian relics are like that. The Shroud of Turin doesn't have to be genuine for people to take great peace and solace from it. If it leads them to prayer or contemplation that's enough sometimes. A relic doesn't have to perform miracles. The discovery of the True Ark would bring many doubters back to the faith. That's why it's so important to find it."

"Like seeing the Virgin Mary cooked into a taco shell?" Holliday said.

"Whatever toots your horn," said Meg as they headed down a narrow flight of stairs. Coming from a nun the line was so unexpected that Holliday burst out laughing.

He glanced out the streaming arched window on his right, the laughter fading. The view through the old leaded glass panes was of the forest pathway up to the castle and the harbor beyond. At the foot of the harbor Holliday could make out the fat, insectlike shape of a black Westland Sea King helicopter, its eight-bladed rotor still spinning lazily. The big side door of the sinister-looking machine was open and men in black riot gear were pouring out, one after the other. Not a rescue mission after all.

"Jesus," whispered Holliday.

"Pardon?" Meg asked, startled.

"Trouble," said Holliday. "SO19. The Brit equivalent of a SWAT team."

"Swat?" Meg said. Holliday's eyebrow rose.

"Special Weapons and Tactics," Holliday explained.

He stared out the window and down to the base of the wooded hill. Twenty men had formed up in two lines in front of the big black chopper.

"We've got to find another way out of here," said Holliday. "And we've got to find it fast."

"Maybe they're here for something else," suggested Meg, staring out the window now. Holliday let out a short barking laugh. Could she really be that naive?

"They're here for us, believe me."

He tried to remember what he knew of the elite armed response police. He vaguely recalled that they carried Glock 17 automatic pistols, Heckler amp; Koch MP5 machine guns, HK G3 assault rifles and Benelli riot shotguns. They also carried stun grenades, Tasers, tear gas and pepper spray. Twenty of them were enough to start a small war. It was unbelievable overkill to capture two unarmed civilians. Someone had called in a fat favor, that was for sure. But who?

There was no time to think about that. Holliday tore the brochure out of Sister Meg's hand and scanned it, his brain working furiously. The SO19 team would have been briefed and prepared, most likely using aerial photographs. It wasn't hard these days; you could plan an operation like this using Google Earth.

The twenty men would have been divided into squads, two to flank and one up the center through the woods. There were three paths: the middle one through the woods, one to the left following the sloping terrain, and one to the right going down the steeper western side of the island stronghold, beginning at the old abbey ruins and the ornamental gardens. Ten men up the middle, through the woods, five each on the flanking paths. There was no way to escape.

"What do we do?" Meg asked.

Holliday's first commanding officer had a primary rule in critical situations-make a decision as fast as you can. It may be the wrong one, but even a wrong decision is better than no decision at all.

"What they don't expect," said Holliday. He grabbed Meg by the hand and headed back the way they'd come, going back down the hallway, through the library and back into the chapel. They cut across the nave of the church, ran up the steps and out onto the south terrace, looking out to sea. It was still pouring rain and they were soaked in seconds.

There was a single stone staircase in the old battlement tower. It had to lead somewhere. Holliday stepped up, looking out and down, trying to orient himself, praying that there was a pathway down the southern cliff that could take them down to sea level. The tide was just beginning to turn; maybe a strip of beach would be exposed, allowing them to circle around.

He peered through the curtain of rain, holding his hand above his eyes. There was no obvious path, but maybe they could pick their way down over the tumbled litter of boulders and through the briars and gorse clinging to the precipitous, slightly sloping wall of stone. The clifflike wall of the castle had been well placed, facing out to sea, huge thirty- two-pounder cannon mounted in every second slot of the crenellation. If the castle was true to type there would be a secondary "postern gate" at the bottom of the battlement tower stairway. A postern gate that wasn't shown in the brochure and wouldn't be visible on any diagram or photograph used by the SO19 squad.