Paul Christopher: The Templar throne

Colonel John "Doc" Holliday, U.S. Army Rangers (retired), most recently a professor of medieval military history at the United States Military Academy at West Point (retired from that, too), sat on the glassed- in terrace of La Brasserie Malakoff, an upscale cafe in the prestigious sixteenth arrondissement of Paris. His companion was Maurice Bernheim, director of the Musee National de la Marine, the National Maritime Museum of France.

Both men were eating a lunch of salad and croque monsieur, the Parisian version of a Reuben sandwich that might as well have come from an entirely different universe. The Parisians looked down their noses at everyone else on the planet, but when it came to food they were right. Even a Royale avec Fromage at a Paris McDonald's was vastly superior to a Big Mac sold anywhere else in the world. Bernheim had been lecturing him on the subject for the better part of an hour, but a good lunch on a spring day in Paris made up for a lot of things.

Holliday had crossed paths with Bernheim previously when he was in the midst of tracking down the secret of the Templar sword. The chubby little historian who smoked the foul-smelling cigarettes called Boyards had helped him then and Holliday was hoping he'd help him again.

"I must say it is too bad that your charming niece could not be with you today," said Bernheim. He finished the sandwich and hailed a waiter, ordering creme caramel and coffee for both of them.

"Cousin," corrected Holliday. "She's too busy being pregnant in Jerusalem." Peggy and the Israeli archaeologist Rafi Wanounou had married last year shortly after their adventures in the Libyan desert, the same adventures that had eventually led Holliday to his high-cholesterol lunch with Maurice Bernheim.

"Such a pretty young woman," sighed the middle-aged man.

"Her new husband thinks so." Holliday smiled. "Speaking of which, how's your wife and kids?"

"Pauline is well, thank you. Fortunately for me her dental practice keeps me in the style to which my little hellions and I have grown accustomed. The twins of course must also have the latest running shoes. La vie est tres cher, mon ami. Life is very expensive, yes? Soon it will be makeup and matching Mercedeses." Bernheim flicked an invisible bit of fluff off the lapel of his very expensive Brioni suit.

The creme caramel arrived and the museum director stared at it reverently for a moment, as though it was a great work of art, which, to Bernheim, it probably was. Holliday ignored the dessert and tried the coffee. As with everything else at Malakoff's, it was excellent. At least with the ban on smoking in Paris restaurants he didn't have to endure Bernheim's Boyards.

"So," said the nautical expert. "What brings you to Paris and my humble little museum?" He took another bite of the creme caramel and briefly closed his eyes to savor the flavor.

"Have you ever heard of a place called La Couvertoirade?" Holliday asked.

Bernheim nodded. "A fortified town in the Dordogne. Built by the Templars, I believe."

"That's right," Holliday said and nodded. "A while back an archaeologist, a monk named Brother CharlesEtienne Brasseur, discovered a cache of documents from there relating to the Templar expedition to Egypt." Holliday paused, trying to remember it all. "The texts were written by a Cistercian monk named Roland de Hainaut. Hainaut was secretary to Guillaume de Sonnac, the grand master who led the Templars at the Siege of Damietta in 1249."

"Of course. The Seventh Crusade," said Bernheim. "They couldn't get upriver because of the Nile flooding so they sat around for six months and had their way with the Egyptian women."

"They also played at being tourists," added Holliday. "Guillaume de Sonnac's personal ship as grand master was a caravel called the Sanctus Johannes chartered out of Genoa from a ship owner named Peter Rubeus. De Sonnac provided his own captain, a fellow Frenchman named Jean de Saint-Clair."

"A common enough name in France, I'm afraid," said Bernheim. "Rather like John Smith in America." He smiled. "A name used to sign hotel registers with."

"Well, while this particular Saint-Clair was in Damietta he traveled a little way to Rosetta, where the famous stone was found a few hundred years later by Napoleon's archaeologists."

"And stolen by the British, I might add," snorted Bernheim.

"Take it up with the queen," said Holliday. "Anyway, while Saint-Clair was on his little visit to Rosetta along with de Sonnac's secretary, they stumbled on some old Coptic documents in a monastery there. The documents described something they referred to as an Organum Sanctum."

"An Instrument of God," translated Bernheim. "It generally refers to a person. Moses was an instrument of God, for instance."

"Not this time," said Holliday. He opened the floppy old-fashioned briefcase on his lap and took out two ten-inch-long strips of wood. One of the strips was slightly thicker than the other and had a square hole halfway down its length. The narrower of the two pieces was clearly meant to fit into the hole, forming a cross. Both strips were notched at regular intervals.

"A Jacob's Staff," Bernheim said and nodded. "A sixteenth-century navigational instrument."

"Except the documents were discovered by Saint-Clair and de Sonnac's secretary two hundred years before that," said Holliday. "Stranger still, the documents described the device from which that model was made as being even older-from the time of the pharaohs, in fact."

"Ridiculous," scoffed Bernheim.

"I found the original of the device you hold in your hand in the mummified hand of the pharaoh Djoser's vizier. The mummy was entombed at least twenty-five hundred years before the birth of Christ and four thousand years before Jean de Saint-Clair was in Rosetta. The original is now in the safekeeping of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The copy you're holding is an exact duplicate made by their model department."

"There can be no mistake about the age?"

"Spectroscopic analysis is accurate within a margin of error less than ten percent for African juniper. There's no doubt about it, Maurice: the instrument is forty-five hundred years old."

"Merde," breathed the man, his creme caramel forgotten. "You know what this does to the basic paradigm of modern nautical history?"

"Destroys it," answered Holliday flatly.

"This device would be as much a secret weapon as the atomic bomb," said Bernheim. "A seafaring nation that had it would have an incredible advantage over a nation that lacked it."

"At least for the two hundred years or so between Saint-Clair's discovery and the Jacob's Quadrant being invented in the fifteen hundreds," said Holliday.

"Columbus goes out the window."

"And it almost certainly means that those fairy tales about the Templars going to America are true. Or could be," said Holliday.

"Saint-Clair, Sinclair," mused Bernheim. He ran his thumb along the notches along the sides of the two strips of wood, then fitted the two pieces together. He held up the cruciform instrument. "Have you ever seen the ancient coat of arms of the Saint-Clairs?" Bernheim asked. "The original, as it was used in France?"

"Sure," answered Holliday. "A scalloped cross."

"Pas escallope, mon ami. In France it is called La Croix Engraal," said Bernheim. "An 'engrailed' cross."

"Which means?" Holliday asked.

"In heraldic terms engraal means 'protected by the Holy Grail,' the Grail being indicated by what, in that silly Da Vinci book, was referred to as the V of the sacred feminine, not sangraal, the blood of Christ. But what if, on the Saint-Clair crest, the engraal notches on the cross referred to something else? Something much more practical." Bernheim ran his thumbnail along the notches in the wood. Holliday suddenly understood.