Steve Berry - The Templar legacy

MALONE STOOD UNDER THE SHADE OF TALL POPLARS THAT DOTTED the promontory. A cool breeze eased past and dulled the sun's rays, reminding him of a fall afternoon at the beach. He was waiting for Cassiopeia to tell him what nobody else knew. "Why did you allow de Roquefort to have Lars Nelle's notebook?"

"Because it's useless." A crinkle of amusement slipped into her dark eyes.

"I thought it contained Lars's private thoughts. Information he never published. The key to everything."

"Some of that is true, but it's not the key to anything. Lars created it just for the Templars."

"Would Claridon have known that?"

"Probably not. Lars was a secretive man. He told no one everything. He said once that only the paranoid survived in his line of work."

"How do you know this?"

"Henrik was aware. Lars never spoke of the details, but he told Henrik of his encounters with the Templars. On occasion, he actually believed he was speaking to the Order's master. They talked several times, but eventually de Roquefort entered the picture. And he was altogether different. More aggressive, less tolerant. So Lars created the notebook for de Roquefort to focus on-not unlike the misdirection Sauniere himself used."

"Would the Templar master have known this? When Mark was taken to the abbey, he had the notebook with him. The master kept it hidden until a month ago, when he sent it to Stephanie."

"Hard to say. But if he sent the notebook to Stephanie, it's possible the master calculated that de Roquefort would again chase after it. He apparently wanted Stephanie involved, so what better way than to bait her with something irresistible?"

Smart, he had to admit. And it worked.

"The master surely felt Stephanie would use the considerable resources at her disposal to aid the quest," she said.

"He didn't know Stephanie. Too stubborn. She'd try it on her own first."

"But you were there to help."

"Lucky me."

"Oh, it's not that bad. We never would have met otherwise."

"Like I said, lucky me."

"I'll take that as a compliment. Otherwise my feelings might be hurt."

"I doubt you bruise so easily."

"You handled yourself well in Copenhagen," she said. "Then again in Roskilde."

"You were in the cathedral?"

"For a while, but I left when the shooting started. It would have been impossible for me to help without revealing my presence, and Henrik wanted that kept secret."

"And what if I had been unable to stop those men inside?"

"Oh, come now. You?" She threw him a smile. "Tell me something. How shocked were you when the brother leaped from the Round Tower?"

"Not something you see every day."

"He fulfilled his oath. Trapped, he chose death rather than risk the Order's exposure."

"I assume you were there because of my mention to Henrik that Stephanie was coming for a visit."

"Partly. When I heard of Ernst Scoville's sudden demise, I learned from some of the older men in Rennes that he'd spoken with Stephanie and that she was coming to France. They're all Rennes enthusiasts, spending their days playing chess and fantasizing about Sauniere. Each one of them lives in a conspiratorialist dream. Scoville bragged that he meant to get Lars's notebook. He didn't care for Stephanie, though he'd led her to believe otherwise. Obviously he, too, was unaware that the journal was by and large meaningless. His death aroused my suspicions, so I contacted Henrik and learned of Stephanie's impending Danish visit. We decided that I should go to Denmark."

"And Avignon?"

"I had a source at the asylum. No one believed Claridon was crazy. Deceitful, untrustworthy, an opportunist-certainly. But not insane. So I watched until you returned to claim Claridon. Henrik and I knew there was something in the palace archives, just not what. As Henrik said at lunch, Mark never met Henrik. Mark was much tougher to deal with than his father. He only occasionally searched. Something, perhaps, to keep his father's memory alive. Whatever he may have found, he kept totally to himself. He and Claridon connected for a while, but it was a loose association. Then, when Mark disappeared in the avalanche and Claridon retreated to the asylum, Henrik and I gave up."

"Until now."

"The quest is back on, and this time there may well be somewhere to go."

He waited for her to explain.

"We have the book with the gravestone and we also have Reading the Rules of the Caridad. Together, we might actually be able to determine what Sauniere found, since we're the first to have so many pieces of the puzzle."

"And what do we do if we find anything?"

"As a Muslim? I'd like to tell the world. As a realist? I don't know. The historical arrogance of Christianity is nauseating. To it, every other religion is an imitation. Amazing, really. All of Western history is shaped by its narrow precepts. Art, architecture, music, writing-even society itself became Christianity's servants. That simple movement ultimately formed the mold from which Western civilization was crafted, and it could all be predicated on a lie. Wouldn't you like to know?"

"I'm not a religious person."

Her thin lips creased into another smile. "But you're a curious man. Henrik speaks of your courage and intellect in reverent terms. A bibliophile, with an eidetic memory. Quite a combination."

"And I can cook, too."

She chuckled. "You don't fool me. Finding the Great Devise would mean something to you."

"Let's just say that it would be a most unusual find."

"Fair enough. We'll leave it at that. But if we're successful, I look forward to seeing your reaction."

"You're that confident there's something to find?"

She swept her arms toward the distant outline of the Pyrenees. "It's out there, no question. Sauniere found it. We can, too."

STEPHANIE AGAIN CONSIDERED WHAT THORVALDSEN HAD SAID about the New Testament, and made clear, "The Bible is not a literal document."

Thorvaldsen shook his head. "A great many Christian faiths would take issue with that statement. For them, the Bible is the Word of God."

She looked at Mark. "Did your father believe the Bible was not the Word of God?"

"We debated the point many times. I was, at first, a believer, and I'd argue with him. But I came to think like he did. It's a book of stories. Glorious stories, designed to point people toward a good life. There's even greatness in those stories-if one practices their moral. I don't think it's necessary that it's the Word of God. It's enough that the words are a timeless truth."

"Elevating Christ to deity status was simply a way of elevating the importance of the message," Thorvaldsen said. "After organized religion took over in the third and fourth centuries, so much was added to the tale that it's impossible any longer to know its core. Lars wanted to change all that. He wanted to find what the Templars once possessed. When he first learned of Rennes-le-Chateau years ago, he immediately believed the Templar's Great Devise was what Sauniere had located. So he devoted his life to solving the Rennes puzzle."

Stephanie was still not convinced. "What makes you think the Templars secreted anything away? Weren't they arrested quickly? How was there time to hide anything?"

"They were prepared," Mark said. "The Chronicles make that clear. What Philip IV did wasn't without precedent. A hundred years earlier there was an incident with Frederick II, the king of Germany and Sicily. In 1228 he arrived in the Holy Land as an excommunicate, which meant he could not command a crusade. The Templars and Hospitallers stayed loyal to the pope and refused to follow him. Only his German Teutonic knights stood by his side. Ultimately, he negotiated a peace treaty with the Saracens that created a divided Jerusalem. The Temple Mount, which was where the Templars were headquartered, was given by that treaty to the Muslims. So you can imagine what the Templars thought of him. He was as amoral as Nero and universally hated. He even tried to kidnap the Order's master. Finally he left the Holy Land in 1229, and as he made his way to the port at Acre, the locals threw excrement on him. He hated the Templars for their disloyalty, and when he returned to Sicily, he seized Templar property and made arrests. All of which was recorded in the Chronicles."