Steve Berry - The Templar legacy

"I don't give a damn whether you believe me or not. I knew nothing of this till a moment ago."

"How do you explain it then?" Malone asked.

"I can't. I can only say that Lars borrowed a hundred and forty thousand dollars from me three months before he died. He never said what the money was for and I didn't ask."

"You just gave him that much money with no questions?" Stephanie asked.

"He needed it, so I gave it to him. I trusted him."

"The abbe in town said the buyer bought the property from the regional government. They were divesting themselves of the ruins and had few takers, as it's up in the mountains and in poor condition. It was sold at auction here in St. Augulous." Mark faced Thorvaldsen. "Yours was the high bid. The priest knew Dad and said he wasn't the one who actually bid."

"Then Lars engaged someone to do it on his behalf, because it was not me. He then placed the title in my name to give him cover. Lars was quite paranoid. If I owned that property and knew it, I would have said something last night."

"Not necessarily," Stephanie murmured.

"Look, Stephanie. I'm not afraid of you or any one of you. I don't have to explain myself. But I consider you all my friends, and if I owned the property and knew it, I'd tell you."

"Why don't we assume Henrik is telling the truth," Cassiopeia said. She'd stayed uncharacteristically quiet during the debate. "And get on up there. Darkness comes quick in the mountains. I for one want to see what's there."

Malone agreed. "She's right. Let's go. We can fight about this later."

The drive up into the higher elevations took fifteen minutes and required strong nerves and good brakes. They followed the abbe's directions and eventually caught sight of the crumbling priory, resting on an eagle's aerie, its shattered square tower flanked by a merciless precipice. The road ended about half a mile from the ruins and the hike up, along a trail of emaciated rock flowered with thyme, beneath a canopy of great pines, took another ten minutes.

They entered the site.

Signs of neglect lay everywhere. The thick walls were bare and Malone allowed his fingers to slip along the gray-green granite schist, each stone surely quarried from the mountains and worked with faithful patience by ancient hands. A once grand gallery opened to the sky with columns and capitals that centuries of weather and light had tarnished beyond recognition. Moss, orange lichens, and gray wiry grass littered the ground, the stone floor long ago returned to sand. Grasshoppers sang a loud castanet.

The rooms were hard to delineate, as the roof and most of the walls lay collapsed, but the monk cells were evident, as was a large hall and another spacious room that might have been a library or scriptorium. Malone knew that life here would have been frugal, thrifty, and austere.

"Quite a place you own," he said to Henrik.

"I was just admiring what a hundred and forty thousand dollars could buy twelve years ago."

Cassiopeia seemed enthralled. "You can imagine the monks harvesting a meager crop from the little bit of fertile soil. Summers here were brief, the days short. You can almost hear them chanting."

"This place would have been sufficiently forlorn," Thorvaldsen said. "An oblivion only for themselves."

"Lars titled this property in your name," Stephanie said, "for a reason. He came here for a reason. Something has to be here."

"Perhaps," Cassiopeia noted. "But the abbe in town told Mark that Lars found nothing. This could be more of the perpetual chases he engaged in."

Mark shook his head. "The cryptogram led us here. Dad was here. He didn't find anything, but he thought it important enough to buy. This has to be the place."

Malone sat atop one of the chunks of stone and stared up at the sky. "We have maybe five or six hours of daylight left. I suggest we make the most if it. I'm sure it gets pretty cold up here at night, and these fleece-lined jackets aren't going to be enough."

"I brought some equipment and gear in the Rover," Cassiopeia said. "I assumed we could be underground, so I have light bars, flashlights, and a small generator."

"Well, aren't you Johnny-on-the-spot," Malone said.

"Here," Geoffrey called out.

Malone glanced farther into the decayed priory. He'd not noticed that Geoffrey had wandered off.

They all hustled deeper into the ruin and found Geoffrey standing outside what was once a Romanesque doorway. Little remained of its craftsmanship beyond a faint image of human-headed bulls, winged lions, and a palm-leaf motif.

"The church," Geoffrey said. "They carved it from rock."

Malone could see that indeed the walls beyond were not human-made, but were part of the precipice that towered above the former abbey. "We'll need those flashlights," he said to Cassiopeia.

"No, you won't," Geoffrey said. "There's light inside."

Malone led the way in. Bees hummed in the shadows. Dusty shafts of light poured through slits cut through the rock at varying angles, apparently designed to take advantage of the drifting sun. Something caught his eye. He stepped close to one of the rock walls, hewn smooth but now bare of any decoration except a carving about ten feet above him. The crest consisted of a helmet with a swathe of linen dropping on each side of a male face. The features were gone, the nose worn smooth, the eyes blank and lifeless. On top was a sphinx. Below was a stone shield with three hammers.

"That's Templar," Mark said. "I've seen another like it at our abbey."

"What's it doing here?" Malone asked.

"The Catalans who lived in this region during the fourteenth century had no love for the French king. Templars were treated with kindness here, even after the Purge. That's one reason the area was chosen as a refuge."

The ponderous walls rose high to a rounded ceiling. Frescoes surely once adorned everything, but not a remnant remained. Water leaking in through the porous rock had long ago erased all artistic vestiges.

"It's like a cave," Stephanie said.

"More a fortress," Cassiopeia noted. "This could well have been the abbey's last line of defense."

Malone had been thinking the same thing. "But there's a problem." He motioned to the dim surroundings. "No other way out."

Something else caught his attention. He stepped close and focused on the wall, most of which rose in shadow. He strained hard. "I wish we had one of those flashlights."

The others approached.

Ten feet up he saw the faint remnants of letters roughly hewn on the gray stone.

"P, R, N, V, I, R," he asked.

"No," Cassiopeia said. "There's more. Another I, maybe an E and another R. "

He strained in the dimness to interpret the writing.

Malone's mind came alive. He recalled the words at the center of Marie d'Hautpoul's gravestone. REDDIS REGIS CELLIS ARCIS. And what Claridon said about them in Avignon.

Reddis means "to give back, to restore something previously taken." Regis derives from rex, which is king. Cella refers to a storeroom. Arcis stems from arx – a stronghold, fortress, citadel.

The words had seemed meaningless at the time. But perhaps they simply needed rearranging.

Storeroom, fortress, restore something previously taken, king.

By adding a few prepositions, the message might be, In a storeroom, at a stronghold fortress, restore something previously taken from the king.

And the arrow that stretched down the center of the gravestone, between the words, starting at the top with the letters P-S and ending at PR?-CUM.

Pr?-cum. Latin for "pray to come."

He stared again at the letters scratched into the rock.

French for "pray to come."

He smiled and told them what he thought. "The abbe Bigou was a clever one, I'll give him that."