The Last Templar

by Raymond Khoury

  Three cars behind the Volvo and keeping a discreet distance was a gunmetal gray Ford sedan, driven by a man who had the nasty habit of flicking cigarette butts out the car window while they were still lit.

  To his left and across the river, the spires of the Lower East Side beckoned.

  As he had guessed, the Volvo was soon on the bridge and heading into Manhattan.

  Chapter 34

  Even before she opened her eyes, Tess was aware of the smell of incense. When she did open them, she saw what appeared to be hundreds of candles, their yellow flames throwing a soft, glowing light around the room she was in.

  She was lying on a carpet of some kind, an old kilim. It felt rough and worn to her fingers. Suddenly, her encounter with Bill Vance flooded back and she felt a chill of fear. But he wasn’t there. She was alone.

  Sitting up, she felt dizzy, but forced herself to rise unsteadily to her feet. She felt a sharp pain in her chest and another in her left side. She glanced down, feeling around, trying to remember what had happened.

  He shot me. I can’t believe he actually shot me.

  But I’m not dead…?

  She examined her clothes, actually looking for telltale entry points, wondering why she was still breathing. Then she noticed the two spots where she’d been hit, the two places where her clothes were punctured, the edges of the holes slightly frayed and burned. And then it slowly came back to her, the image of Vance and the gun he’d been holding. She realized he hadn’t meant to kill her, only to incapacitate her, and that the gun he’d shot her with must have been some kind of stun gun.

  Not that that was a particularly comforting thought either.

  Looking around through eyes that were still hazy, she guessed that she was in a cellar. Bare walls, paved floor, low-vaulted ceiling carried on elaborate pillars. No windows. No doors. In one corner was a wooden staircase leading upward into a darkness that wasn’t reached by the light from the candles, most of which stood on shapeless masses of melted wax.

  She slowly realized that the place was more than a cellar. Someone lived here. Against one wall was a cot, with an old wooden box for a bedside table. It was crammed with books and papers. At the opposite end of the space stood a long table. Before it, tilted slightly as though it had seen many years of service, stood a large swivel office chair. The table was piled with more books and papers at each end and there, centrally placed and surrounded by yet more candles, sat the encoder from the Met.

  Even in the darkness of the candlelit chamber, it shone with an otherworldly presence. It seemed to be in better condition than she remembered it.

  Tess spotted her bag on the table, her wallet lying open beside it, and she suddenly remembered her cell phone. Vaguely, she recalled hearing its ringtone before blacking out. She remembered feeling her way around the phone while it was still ringing and was sure she’d managed to hit a button, establishing the connection. She took a step to grab her bag but before she could get to it, a sudden noise spun her around. She realized that it came from the top of the stairs: a door opening, then closing with a metallic clunk. Then footsteps were coming down the steps and a pair of legs appeared, a man’s. He was wearing a long overcoat.

  Hastily, she stepped back as he came into view. Vance was looking her way and smiled warmly and, for an instant, she wondered if she were imagining what he had done to knock her out.

  He moved toward her, carrying a large, plastic bottle of water.

  “I’m really sorry, Tess,” he said apologetically. “But I didn’t have much choice.”

  Taking a glass from among the books on the table, he poured some water and handed it to her. Then he searched his pockets until he found a foil strip of tablets. “Here. These are strong painkillers. Take one and drink as much water as you can. It’ll help with the headache.”

  She glanced at the foil and recognized the brand. The strip looked untouched.

  “It’s just Voltarol. Go on, take it. You’ll feel better.”

  She hesitated for a moment, then snapped a tablet out of the foil wrap and swallowed it with a gulp of water. He refilled her glass and she greedily drank that down, too. Still stunned by what had happened to her, she stared at Vance, her eyes striving to focus in the light of the candles. “Where are we? What is this place?”

  His face took on a saddened, almost confused look. “I guess you could say it’s home.”

  “Home? You don’t actually live here, do you?”

  He didn’t answer.

  Tess was having trouble making sense of what was going on. “What do you want from me?”

  Vance was scrutinizing her. “You came looking for me.”

  “I came looking for you to help me figure something out,” she snapped angrily. “I didn’t expect you to shoot me and kidnap me like this.”

  “Calm down, Tess. No one’s been kidnapped.”

  “Oh? So I suppose I’m free to leave.”

  Vance looked away, thinking. Then he turned to face her. “You may not want to leave. Once you’ve heard my side of the story.”

  “Believe me, I’d just as soon get the hell out of here.”

  “Well…maybe you’re right.” He seemed lost, even ashamed. “Maybe it is a little more complicated than that.”

  Tess felt the anger in her giving way to caution. What are you doing? Don’t antagonize him. Can’t you see he’s lost it? He’s unstable. He’s into beheading people. Just stay calm. She didn’t know where to look or what to say. Glancing again toward the encoder, Tess spotted an opening in the wall against which the table stood. It was small, square, and shuttered. She felt a surge of hope, which just as quickly faded as she realized he wouldn’t have left an escape route uncovered. He might be unhinged, but he isn’t stupid.

  Her eyes were drawn to the encoder again. That’s what it was all about. She felt she needed to know more. She willed herself to calm down, then asked, “It’s Templar, isn’t it?”

  “Yes…And to think I’d been to the Vatican library several times, and all the time it must have been sitting there in some vault, gathering dust. I don’t think they even realized what they had.”

  “And after all these years, it still works?”

  “It needed some cleaning up and some oiling, but yes, it still works. Perfectly. The Templars were meticulous craftsmen.”

  Tess studied the device. She noticed that on the table beside it were numerous sheets of paper. Old documents, like sheets from a manuscript. She looked at Vance, who was watching her. It seemed to her like he was almost enjoying her confusion.

  “Why are you doing this?” she finally asked. “Why did you need it so badly?”

  “It all started in France, quite a few years ago.” He cast a wistful glance at the old documents sitting by the encoder, his mind drifting. “In fact, it was shortly after Martha and Annie died,” he said somberly. “I’d left the university, I was…confused, and angry. I had to get away from it all. I ended up in the south of France, in the Languedoc. I’d been there before, on walking trips with Martha. It’s beautiful down there. You can easily imagine what it must have been like back then. They have a very rich history, though a lot of it is rather bloody…Anyway, while I was there, I came across a story that just stayed with me. A story that had taken place several hundred years ago. It was about a young priest who was called in to a dying old man’s deathbed to give him the last rites and hear his confession. The old man was believed to have been one of the last surviving Templars. The priest went in, even though the man wasn’t part of his congregation and hadn’t asked, in fact had even refused, at first, to see him. Finally, he relented, and, legend has it that when the priest came out, he was white with shock. Not just his face, but even his hair had turned white. They say he never smiled again after that day. And years later, just before he eventually died, he let the truth slip. It turned out that the Templar had told him his story and had shown him some papers. Something that literally shocked the life out of him. And that was it. I couldn’t sh
ake that story, I couldn’t get away from the image of this priest’s hair turning white, just from spending a few minutes with a dying old man. From that point onward, finding out what this manuscript was, or where it might be, became—”

  An obsession, Tess thought.

  “—a mission, of sorts.” Vance smiled lightly, his mind clearly conjuring up images of distant, cloistered libraries. “I don’t know how many dusty archives I’ve rooted through, in museums, churches, and monasteries all across France, even across the Pyrenees in the north of Spain.” He paused, then reached out a hand and rested it on the papers that sat beside the encoder. “And then one day, I found something. In a Templar castle.”

  A castle with an inscription on its portal. Tess felt light-headed. She thought of the Latin words she had heard him say, about the Latin saying Clive had told her was carved into the lintel at the Château de Blanchefort, and took another look at the papers. She could see that they were ancient, handwritten documents. “You found the actual manuscript?” she asked, surprised at feeling some of the thrill she knew Vance must have experienced. Then a flash of enlightenment struck her. “But they were coded. That’s why you needed the encoder.”

  He nodded slowly, affirming her guess. “Yes. It was so frustrating. For years, I knew I was sitting on something important, I knew I had the right papers, but I couldn’t read them. Simple substitution or skipping codes didn’t work, but then I knew they were more clever than that. I uncovered arcane references to Templar coding devices, but couldn’t find any of the machines anywhere. It really seemed hopeless. All of their possessions had been destroyed when they were rounded up in 1307. And then, fate intervened and brought up this little jewel from the bowels of the Vatican where it had been sitting all those years, hidden away long ago and all but forgotten.”

  “And now you can read them.”

  He patted the sheets. “Like the morning paper.”

  Tess looked at the documents. She chided herself for the feeling of wild excitement that was coursing through her and had to remind herself that lives had been lost and that this man was quite possibly deranged and, given recent events, undoubtedly dangerous. The discovery he was working on was potentially a big one, bigger than anything she’d ever had the chance to uncover, but it was drenched in innocent blood, and she couldn’t allow herself to forget that. It also had a darkness to it, something deeply unsettling about its history that she couldn’t dismiss.

  She studied Vance, who again seemed lost in his own thoughts. “What are you hoping to find?”

  “Something that’s been lost for too long.” His eyes were narrow and intense. “Something that’ll make things right.”

  Something worth killing for, she wanted to add, but decided against it. Instead, she remembered what she had read, about Vance’s suggestion that the founder of the Templars was a Cathar. Vance had just told her that he’d found the letter in the Languedoc—where he had suggested, much to the affront of the French historian whose article she’d read, that Hughes de Payens’s family came from. She wanted to know more about that, but before she could speak up, she heard a jarring noise from above, like a brick scraping against a stone floor.

  Abruptly, Vance jumped to his feet. “Stay here,” he ordered.

  Her eyes darted up to the ceiling, looking for its source. “What is it?”

  “Just stay here,” he insisted as he moved urgently. He went behind the table and pulled out the Taser he had used on her, then decided against it and discarded it. He then rummaged through a pouch and pulled out another gun, this one a more traditional handgun, and awkwardly chambered a round as he hurried to the steps.

  He climbed them briskly and, when his legs were out of view, she heard the metallic thud as he closed and locked the door behind him.

  Chapter 35

  De Angelis cursed to himself the instant his foot nudged the charred piece of timber off its setting and disturbed the settlement of debris around him. Moving stealthily through the burned-out church wasn’t easy; scorched rafters and chunks of broken stone from the collapsed roof littered the dark, damp space around him.

  He’d been initially surprised to find that this wreck was where Plunkett had trailed Tess and her silver-haired abductor. Skulking through the silent, ghostly remains of the Church of the Ascension, he now realized it was a perfect spot for someone who wanted to work undisturbed; someone whose dedication went beyond simple matters of personal comfort. One more confirmation, not that he needed it, that the man he was after knew exactly what it was he had taken from the Met that night.

  De Angelis had entered the church from a side entrance; less than forty minutes earlier, Plunkett had observed a blindfolded Tess Chaykin being helped out of the back of the gray Volvo and led through the same entrance by her abductor. She had seemed barely conscious and needed the man’s assistance to take the few steps into the doorway, her arm looped over his shoulder.

  The small church was on West 114th Street, tucked in between two rows of brownstones with a narrow alleyway running alongside its east facade, which was where the Volvo and the sedan were now parked. The church had suffered a major fire in the recent past, and its reconstruction was evidently not in the cards yet. A large panel out front displayed the progress of the fund-raising efforts for the rebuilding in the form of a six-foot-high thermometer, which was graduated in the hundreds of thousands of dollars needed to bring the church back to its former glory. The thermometer currently stood at only one-third full.

  The monsignor had made his way through a narrow passage and into the nave. Rows of columns divided it into two side aisles and a center section, which was strewn with mounds of half-burned pews. All around him, the stucco had been burned off the walls, exposing the brick masonry, which was blackened and occasionally holed. Below the ceiling, the few remaining plaster arches that spanned from the exterior walls to the columns were unrecognizable, charred and deformed by the flames. Only a hollow ring remained where the stained-glass window had proudly stood over the church’s entrance, its wide opening now boarded up.

  He had crept along the edge of the nave, past the melted brass gates of the altar, and had climbed carefully up the steps and onto the sanctuary. The scorched remains of a large canopied pulpit loomed to his right. All around him, the church was silent with only the occasional noise from the street wafting in through one of the many cavities in its exposed shell. He had surmised that whoever had taken the girl must be using the back rooms. With Plunkett outside keeping watch, he now slipped quietly past the remnants of the altar and into the passage behind the sanctuary, slowly twirling a silencer onto the nozzle of his Sig Sauer handgun.

  And that was when his foot nudged the debris.

  The noise echoed around him in the darkened hallway. He froze, listening carefully, alert to any disturbance he may have triggered. Squinting, he could barely make out a door at the far end of the passage, when suddenly, from beyond the door, he heard a muffled thud, then faint footsteps coming closer. Swiftly, De Angelis stepped aside, hugging the wall, raising his handgun. Footsteps approached the hall, the door handle rattled, but instead of the door opening outward, toward him, it opened inward and all that he saw was a dark space. He was the one in the light.

  Too late and too dangerous to retreat, which was not, anyway, in his nature, he hurled himself forward into the darkness.

  GRIPPING HIS GUN WITH tight fingers, Vance stared through the doorway at the man who had trespassed into his sanctuary. He didn’t recognize him. He glimpsed what he thought was a clerical collar. It made him hesitate.

  Then the man was leaping forward and Vance tried hastily to use his gun, but before he could pull its trigger the stranger was on him, knocking him to the floor, the handgun slipping from his hand. The passageway was narrow and low and Vance used the wall to thrust himself upward but the man was much stronger and down he went again. This time, he brought his knee up sharply, heard a satisfactory grunt of pain. Another gun, his attacker’s, clattere
d noisily across the floor. But once again his attacker recovered quickly, swinging a fist hard against his head.

  The blow hurt Vance but didn’t daze him. More important, it jarred him into a fury. Twice in one day, first by Tess Chaykin, now by this stranger, his endeavor was being jeopardized. He used his knee again, then his fist, then a barrage of punches. His blows were unschooled, but they were fired by his anger. Nothing and no one had the right to come between him and his goal.

  The intruder blocked his blows expertly and backed off, but as he did so he stumbled over some planks of wood. Vance, seeing his opportunity, kicked out, connecting savagely with the man’s knee. Snatching up his gun, he leveled it and squeezed the trigger. The stranger was fast, though, throwing himself sideways as the bullets flew out. By the strained cry that followed, Vance thought one of them may have struck its intended target, but he couldn’t be sure. The man was still moving, staggering backward into the sanctuary.

  Vance hesitated for just a moment.

  Should he follow, find out who the man was, and finish him off? Then he heard some noise coming from the far corner of the church. The man wasn’t alone.

  He decided it was best to escape. Turning, he hurried back to the trapdoor that shielded his cellar.

  Chapter 36

  Tess heard a loud gunshot, which was followed by what sounded like an angry cry. Someone was hurt. Then footsteps were rushing back toward the trapdoor. She wasn’t sure if it was Vance or someone else, but she wasn’t about to just stand there and wait to find out.

  She dived across the chamber, grabbed her bag off the table, and pulled out her cell phone. In the faint glimmer of the candles, the LED screen lit up like a flashlight, only to inform her there was no signal in the cellar. It didn’t really matter; she didn’t know the FBI’s number by heart and, while dialing 911 was an option, she knew it would take too long to explain what was happening. Besides, she didn’t have a clue where she was.