Julia Navarro - The Brotherhood Of The Holy Shroud

Paul looked at Elisabeth, who nodded. Ana froze when the chair Elisabeth was sitting in moved from behind her desk and began to advance. She hadn't noticed-it looked like an office chair, but it had been fitted out to serve as a wheelchair as well.

Elisabeth stopped in front of Ana and pulled aside the shawl over her obviously useless legs.

'Ana, I don't think we-or you-have a lot of time. I'm going to give you our part of the story whole, right now. I'm Scottish-I don't know whether Jean told you. My father is Lord McKenny, and he knew Lord McCall. You've probably never heard of him. He's one of the richest men in the world, but you'll never see him in the newspapers or on TV He lives in a world that allows entry only to the fantastically rich and powerful. Although he spends most of his time in London, he has a castle, an ancient Templar fortress, located on the west coast of Scotland, near the Small Isles. But no one from the general public is ever invited there, and it's staffed by tight-lipped professionals from other places. We Scots are given to legends, and there are quite a few about Lord McCall. Some of the villagers who live near the castle call it Castle Templar, and they say that from time to time men arrive in helicopters to visit, among them members of the English royal family and other noble and well-connected families from around the world.

"One day I was telling Paul about Lord McCall, and it occurred to us that we ought to do a story on the Templar estates and fortresses all across Europe. A kind of inventory, you know: find out which ones are still standing, who owns them, which ones have been destroyed over the course of the centuries. We thought it would be great if Lord McCall would let us visit his castle. We started working and at first we didn't have many problems. There are literally hundreds of Templar fortresses, most of them in ruins. I asked my father to talk to McCall to see if he'd let me visit his cas-de and photograph it. But my father got nowhere- McCall was always very polite, but he always had some excuse. I was determined not to take no for an answer, so I decided to try to persuade him myself. I called him, but he wouldn't even come to the phone-a very polite secretary informed me that Lord McCall was away, in the United States, so he couldn't receive me, and of course the secretary had no authority to allow me to photograph the fortress. I insisted that he let me at least come to the castle, but the secretary wouldn't budge- without Lord McCall's permission, no one would set foot on the estate.

"But I still wasn't giving up, so I went to the castle, anyway. I was sure that once I was actually there, they'd have to let me at least look around. I don't usually trade on my own family connections, but in this case I thought, stupidly, that they'd provide entree.

"Before I got to the castle I talked to some of the villagers. All of them have enormous respect for Lord McCall, and they say he's a kind and generous man who makes sure their needs are all seen to. You might say that they more than respect him-they worship him. None of them would ever move a finger to harm him or compromise him in any way. One of them told me that his son was alive thanks to McCall, who had paid all the expenses for open-heart surgery in Houston.

"When I came to the iron gate at the entrance to the estate, I couldn't find any way to get in, and no one responded to the bell. I started walking along the wall, just to see what I might find. Finally I came to a place where the stone had crumbled a bit, just enough to suggest a tenuous handhold or two. You should know that my favorite pastime was rock climbing. I started climbing at ten, and I've climbed a lot of pretty good cliffs. So climbing over that wall didn't look particularly hard to me, despite the fact that I didn't have a rope or anything. Well, I couldn't resist.

"Don't ask me how I did it, but I managed to climb up on the wall and jump inside, onto the grounds of the estate. Off in the distance, in the middle of the woods, I saw an ivy-covered stone chapel and started toward it. I heard a sound, then felt a terrible pain and fell. I don't remember much else. I was crying and writhing in pain. A man was standing there with a rifle, aiming it at me. He called somebody on a walkie-talkie, a four-by-four drove up, they put me in it and drove me to the hospital.

"I was paralyzed. They didn't shoot to kill, but they did aim carefully enough to leave me like this.

"Naturally, everyone said the guards on the estate had been doing their duty. I was a trespasser who'd jumped the wall. And believe me, none of the authorities was interested in pursuing it further."

Ana had listened to Elisabeth's story in silence. Now, looking at the vibrant young woman, her heart swelled in sympathy and outrage.

"I'm sorry," she said. Anything else seemed superfluous.

"Yeah, me too. But the point is, it seems pretty certain that the kindly Lord McCall is anything but. I asked my father to give me a detailed list of everyone he knew of who had any relationship with McCall. He didn't want to do it, but he finally gave in. He hasn't been the same since my accident. He never wanted me to be a reporter, much less devote my career to these things on the fringes. So we kept digging, Paul and I, with more reluctant help from my father, and we did manage to put together a basic picture.

"Lord McCall is a strange person. Never married, a connoisseur of religious art, incredibly wealthy. Every hundred days a group of men arrive at the castle by car or helicopter and stay for three or four days. None of the locals knows who they are, but the sense of the villagers is that they're as important as McCall himself. We've managed to identify some of them, though, and have followed the trail of their businesses, and I can tell you that there is no significant financial event in the world that can't be traced in one way or another to him and his friends."

"What does that mean?"

"It means they're a group of men who pull the strings, whose financial power is almost as big as governments', which means they influence governments around the world."

'And what does that have to do with the Templars?"

'Ana, for years now, I've been studying everything written on the order. I have a lot of time, and I've come to some conclusions. In addition to all the organizations that claim to be the heirs of the Temple, there is another, secret organization, made up of men who stay in the shadows, all very important, and who inhabit the very heart of the heart of society. I don't know how many there are or who they all are-or at least I'm not sure that all the ones I suspect of belonging to this group actually do. But I think that the true Templars, the heirs of Jacques de Molay are there and that McCall is one of them. I've learned a lot about his Scottish estate, and it's interesting. Down through the centuries it has passed from hand to hand, always to men who are single-solitary, even-and rich and well connected, and every one of them obsessed with keeping out strangers. I think there's a Templar army, if you will, a silent, well-structured army whose members hold high positions in virtually every country."

"You seem to be talking about a Masonic organization."

"No, what I'm referring to is the authentic, core organization, the one nothing is known about, not even that it exists at all. With the list my father gave me and the help of an excellent investigative reporter, I've managed to make a partial organizational chart of this new Temple. But it hasn't been easy, I'll tell you. Michael, the reporter, is dead-a year ago he had a fatal car accident. I suspect they killed him. Nasty things seem to happen to those who get too close. I know-I've followed what has happened to curious people like us."

'A pretty paranoid vision of things, this worldwide conspiracy, murders, cover-ups."