The Sword of the Templars t-1

by Paul Christopher

  “I don’t think Henry Granger ever chased a firefly in his life,” answered Holliday. “It simply wasn’t in his nature. He was a historian; he gathered facts, checked sources, did his research, developed hypotheses, and constructed theories.”

  “In other words he did it by the book.”

  “That’s right,” nodded Holliday.

  “But it doesn’t make sense,” argued Peggy. “He had the sword for decades, and he kept it hidden. Then all of a sudden he gets in touch with Carr-Harris and goes running off to England.”

  “And then Germany,” added Holliday.

  “Assume that means Kellerman,” said Peggy. “So what got him going after all those years?”

  “Maybe it wasn’t his interest,” said Holliday. “Maybe it was someone else’s interest in him.”

  “Like Broadbent?”

  “The lawyer?” Holliday said. He shrugged. “I think Broadbent’s a latecomer, nothing more than a hired gun. I think Kellerman’s people used him. That story about his father and the sword was completely bogus. He was fishing for information.”

  “So you think Kellerman is behind this?” Peggy asked.

  “It’s either him or this Sodalitium Pianum or whatever Duroc called her Vatican assassins.”

  “You believe her?” Peggy said a little skeptically. “We’re getting into grassy-knoll-people-going-around-with-aluminum-foil-on-their-heads-to-keep-out-the- cosmic-rays territory here, don’t you think?”

  The stewardess came around with a cart loaded down with cheese sandwiches wrapped up in plastic and cans of Fanta Orange. They took one of each. The cheese tasted like something you’d use for an insole. They were a long way from La Tourelle, the little cafй in Paris.

  “Did you know that Fanta was invented in Nazi Germany by a chemist from Atlanta to replace Coca-Cola?” Holliday said. “They made it from saccharin, scrapings from apple cider presses, and cheese curds.”

  “And that is relevant how?” Peggy asked, frowning at the familiar can in her hand.

  “It just shows how truth really can be stranger than fiction,” he explained. “The Borgias did exist, and some of them really were assassins just like she said.”

  “But really, secret societies, Doc? Come on.”

  “Why not?” Holliday said. “A secret society is really nothing more than a network, like the Mafia is a network, or the Bush family and Skull and Bones at Yale. Put it in the right context, and you’ve got something that Oprah would approve of.”

  “Dead priests in the streets of Jerusalem would never wind up being on her approved list of things to see on your next summer vacation,” said Peggy with a snort.

  “The point is, things like Duroc’s Sodalitium Pianum or La Sapiniиre really exist. That priest was sent to kill us, there’s no disputing that. He was an assassin. Even the Portuguese have secret societies-the Carbonбria was a military group of Freemasons who were responsible for killing King Carlos I back in the early nineteen hundreds.”

  “Another history lesson, Doc?” Peggy warned.

  “Sorry.” He took a sip of the Fanta, thought about cheese curds and Nazis and put the can down on his seat table.

  “The Azores is a long way to go on the basis of a name you saw on the back of a boat,” said Peggy, staring out the window at a fleet of fluffy white clouds sailing by, all sails set.

  “It’s more than that,” responded Holliday. “I’m doing this the way Uncle Henry would. Make the hypothesis fit the facts, not the other way around. When you get enough facts together to make an overwhelming case then you go from hypothesis to theory, and the only way to prove the theory is by-”

  “Finding the treasure that Roger de Flor took away from Castle Pelerin,” completed Peggy.

  “Which is why we’re going to the Azores,” said Holliday.

  “You have enough facts to prove the hypothesis?” Peggy asked.

  “A lot of suppositions at least.”

  “So suppose away.” Peggy grinned.

  “Suppose you’re a pirate. Where do you bury your treasure?”

  “A desert island.”

  “Not a hermit’s cave in France or a busy port like La Rochelle.”

  “Why not leave it at Castle Pelerin?” Peggy argued.

  “Because like Jerusalem itself, you have no idea of how long it’s going to be before the place is overrun by the godless infidels. Pirates bury treasure to keep it away from prying eyes and sticky fingers.”

  “But maybe it’s all smoke and mirrors,” argued Peggy. “Like I said before, what if the whole idea of a Templar treasure is a myth?”

  “They dug up the Temple Mount for nine years; they were looking for something. The stories say it was the Ark of the Covenant, but who knows?”

  “People dig for treasure all the time,” said Peggy. “I used to do it in Grandpa’s backyard, looking for artifacts from the Cattaraugus Indians. I never found so much as an arrowhead.”

  “Templar treasure is one thing. Templar wealth is another. They were unbelievably rich; that’s established fact. It’s also fact that they liquidated their assets shortly before they were disbanded. Those assets went somewhere. The money is out there.”

  “And you think it’s in the Azores?”

  “It fits. For one thing, they’re the nearest thing to desert islands close enough to La Rochelle to be useful. The Catalan Atlas shows a few of the islands in 1375, but colonization didn’t really begin for another hundred years or so. According to the guide I just read, Corvo, the smallest of the islands, wasn’t discovered until the middle of the fifteenth century. Even now only about three hundred people live there.”

  “Okay,” nodded Peggy. “I’ll give you the desert island.”

  “What?” Holliday laughed. “Now we’re doing Deal or No Deal?”

  “Something like that,” said Peggy. “I need more proof.”

  “Kellerman,” responded Holliday.

  “What’s Kellerman’s connection with the Azores?”

  “A ship called the MS Schwabenland. It operated under Himmler’s orders for the Ahnenerbe, looking for evidence of their so-called Aryan ancestors in South America and Antarctica in particular. The ship operated out of the Azores before the war and even during, even though Portugal was supposedly neutral. Maybe one of the people on the Schwabenland got a whiff of a Templar treasure somewhere on the Azores, and the mythology grew from there.”

  “Thin, but barely possible, I suppose,” she said. “What about Duroc’s Vatican assassins?”

  “Settling old scores?”

  “Really thin,” said Peggy. “Can’t you do any better than that?”

  “At a guess I’d say it probably had something to do with keeping secrets. The Vatican has been getting a lot of bad press recently, and with a German Pope on the papal throne they’d be particularly vulnerable to bringing up old ghosts connected with Nazi Germany.”

  “So that’s it?”

  “Pretty much, except for the most important thing.”

  “Which is?”

  “Uncle Henry again.”

  “What about him?”

  “He never started anything without finishing it, not in his whole life,” said Holliday emphatically. “Everything we’ve done so far has been at his direction. He didn’t put that sword where he knew we’d find it for no reason. He wanted us to do this. He planned on it. He knew we’d follow in his footsteps no matter where the trail led.” Holliday held up his hand and counted off the fingers one by one: “England, Germany, Italy, Jerusalem, France, and now the Azores. It’s the last link in the chain.”

  “I still don’t get why he waited more than half a century to start this wild-goose chase,” said Peggy. “If he’d known all this for all that time you’d think he would have found the treasure a long time ago.”

  “I know,” said Holliday. “I can’t figure that out either.”

  Two hours later the big, wide-body jet landed at Ponta Delgada Airport on the island of Sгo Miguel. It was small, fe
wer than fifty thousand people, a city of churches and fine seventeenth- and eighteenth-century buildings reflecting the island chain’s rich past as the staging base for virtually anyone hoping to reach the riches of the New World. For the most part it was now a city of tourists.

  They booked in to the Hotel do Colйgio in the town center, ate a tasty bouillabaisse of various unidentified bits of seafood to counteract the cheese sandwich and the Fanta, and then went to bed, reconvening at the breakfast buffet the following morning. Once again the weather outside was perfect: clear skies, bright sunshine, and a cool onshore breeze coming in off the bay.

  “So what’s the plan?” Peggy asked, starting on her second cinnamon roll. “Get some spades and start digging up the beach?”

  “Caves,” said Holliday. He sipped his chбvena quente-black coffee, very strong. “It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

  “Are there any caves in the Azores?”

  “Lots of them,” said Holliday. “The islands are all volcanic; there are lava tubes everywhere.”

  “So how do we figure out where to look?”

  “Logic,” Holliday answered. “Most of the caves here are famous; they even had a convention of cave explorers here once or so the guide book says.”

  “Ergo?”

  “Ergo we find the caves that no one’s ever explored before, which means going to Corvo, the smallest of the islands and the most remote.” Holliday smiled. “Not to mention the fact that Corvo is also known as ‘Pequeno Rocha,’ the ‘Little Rock.’ ”

  “So how do we get to this little rock of yours?”

  “There’s a plane you can take, but I’d rather see it from the sea the way Roger de Flor must have. We need a boat.”

  29

  The Azores are a volcanic archipelago of nine major islands in the North Atlantic a thousand miles from Lisbon and twelve hundred miles from St. John’s, Newfoundland. During the age of New World exploration between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, the string of islands provided a perfect way station for ships heading west or returning to Europe on the easterly trade winds. There are three major population centers on the islands: Ponta Delgada on the island of Sгo Miguel, Angra do Heroнsmo on the island of Terceira, and Horta on the island of Faial. There has been volcanic activity in the Azores as recently as a hundred years ago.

  The westernmost island in the group is Corvo, barely six and a half square miles in size. There is one small village on the island, Vila Nova do Campo, with a population of approximately three hundred people. Corvo, the Little Rock, is essentially nothing more than a collapsed volcanic cone or “caldera.” The island’s only occupation is farming. Half of the time the island is shrouded in fog, the caldera hidden by low-lying clouds. The northernmost end of the island, hammered by an unrelenting Atlantic, is a ring of surf-shattered cliffs rising up the steep slopes of the old volcano.

  There is one guesthouse with seven rooms, one restaurant, one bar, and an open-air barbecue which shares a small walled-in pasture with a motley, ill-tempered herd of goats. Corvo is fifteen nautical miles from Flores, its immediate neighbor, and a hundred and thirty-five miles from Horta, the nearest town of any size.

  On the afternoon of their first full day in the Azores Holliday and Peggy took the short-hop commuter flight from Ponta Delgada to Faial and went searching for a boat to take them to Corvo the following morning.

  Horta turned out to be a hilly little town of fifteen thousand built around two small bays that make up the port and divided by yet another volcanic crater. There is a sports bar, some appropriately charming restaurants and craft shops, and the occasional second-level cruise ship snuggled up to the fairly modern concrete pier and breakwater.

  The most notable visitor to Horta was Mark Twain, who stayed there briefly in the early stages of his long journey to Jerusalem in 1867. Setting foot in the town he was immediately assaulted by a throng of barefoot beggar children who haunted his every step for the next two days. He never came back.

  The boat, when they found it, was an old Chris-Craft 38’ Commander from the sixties, and looked eerily like the raggedy vessel piloted by Humphrey Bogart in the movie version of Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not. It smelled of fish and beer, needed a paint job and was named the San Pedro.

  Her owner and captain was a man named Manuel Rivero Tavares. Tavares smelled like the boat and looked like a bowling ball with a two-day growth of stubble, but by all reports he was the best and most knowledgeable charter-boat captain in Horta.

  “Why you want to go to Corvo?” Tavares asked. “No food there, no hootchie-hootchie nightclub with Michael Jackson. No nothing. Not even no fish.” According to the men drinking in Peter’s Sports Bar in town, Capitano Tavares was the finest white marlin fisherman in all of the Azores.

  “We don’t want food or hootchie-hootchie night-clubs, and we don’t want Michael Jackson,” said Holliday. “We want to see it from the ocean the way the old explorers did.”

  “Old explorers are dead,” replied Capitano Tavares. “All of them.”

  “I know that,” said Holliday. “How much to take us to Corvo?”

  “If you are not liking hootchie-hootchie and not liking fishing what will we talk about? A long way to Corvo. One hundred thirty-five nautical miles. Seven, eight hours to get there, seven, eight hours to get back. Long time.” The captain didn’t look happy.

  “We don’t have to talk about anything,” sighed Holliday. “How much?”

  “Manuel Tavares likes to talk,” said the captain, frowning.

  “How much?”

  “A thousand euro.”

  “Five hundred.”

  “Seven hundred and fifty.”

  “Seven hundred.”

  “You will pay the gasoline?”

  “Yes.”

  “Beer?”

  “Yes.”

  “Seven hundred twenty-five. I cook you an’ your little sister-girlie nice fish stew.”

  “Deal.”

  Two hours later, stocked with food and a case of the captain’s favorite Sagres Branca beer, they motored slowly out of the port, turning around the long breakwater then swinging sharply around the remains of the old volcano before heading west along the rugged coastline of the island, bearing a little north into the open sea, heading toward Corvo.

  Peggy had taken Holliday’s Bradt guide and was sunning herself on the forward deck while Holliday sat beside Capitano Tavares in the companion chair on the flybridge high above the main deck of the boat. The San Pedro was doing a steady eighteen knots, muscling easily through the gentle swell. The sea was dark blue, almost a steely black. A few petrels whirled and dipped in their wake, but except for the birds they were alone on the ocean.

  Far ahead on the distant horizon Holliday could see a broadening line of dark clouds gathering. They were heading into a storm. It occurred to him that the weather had been absolutely perfect ever since he’d left West Point. The closest thing to a problem had been the fog approaching Friedrichshafen. From the looks of the sky ahead, that was about to change.

  “Storm coming,” commented Holliday.

  Tavares took the bottle of beer out of its polystyrene holder in front of him and sucked on the neck for a few seconds. He gave a little belch and put the bottle back in its holder.

  “Long time yet,” he said. “Manuel Tavares knows these things.” He turned and smiled. He poked himself in the eye. “Captain Jack Sparrow has no need to worry, yes?” He laughed at his own joke. “That Johnny Depp, he’s a funny guy, no?” He laughed again. “What kind of name is that-Depp? Something you put in the hair to make it shiny, yes? Depp! Ha!”

  “You know Corvo?” Holliday asked.

  “Do I know Corvo! Of course! I was born there! Corvo is one cattle, a big fat brown one with udders like Scotland bag flutes. Lying down in the grass. Looking out at the ocean, chewing grass. Waiting for the milk. That is Corvo. Maybe one goat, as well.”

  “Are there any stories of treasure?” Holliday
asked.

  “Sure! Sure!” nodded Tavares. “Moby Dick!”

  “The whale?”

  “Yes, of course. It was written in the book about Corvo. The courage of her men. ‘Call me Ishmael,’ yes? There was a statue. A man with a finger pointing west to Boston, the Holy Virgin. A whaler. Who knows? A statue and a pot of gold coins. Very old. Phoenicia, yes? You know it?”

  “You’re kidding, right?” Holliday said.

  Phoenicia was the ancient name for Canaan. Phoenician coins had been found in the old foundations of Castle Pelerin. It was too much of a coincidence. Myths turned to reality, legend to fact, like Schliemann discovering Troy.

  “No! No! True, swear to God! Coins. Found in fifteenth century by a priest named Gao, I think. Ponta do Marco, the very edge of the world! I will take you there!”

  Bless you, Uncle Henry, Holliday thought. Somehow he’d managed to make the right choice; the odyssey continued.

  The weather worsened with each passing hour. The dark smudge of clouds staining the western horizon became a black, roiled wall of thunderclouds, their flattened undersides stretched out like hammered anvils blocking out the sun and the blue sky. Peggy came in from her sunbathing, then Holliday and finally the captain climbed down from the flybridge. All three of them huddled in the protection of the lower helm overhang as the blustering wind blew up the waves into a frothing mass of spume-tossed peaks and valleys. The San Pedro continued to hammer forward, the old fiberglass hull crashing through the heaving swell, forcing itself along the line Manuel Rivero Tavares had decreed.

  It began to rain. The drops fell in sheets as one gale after another roared over them. Peggy finally disappeared into the forward cabin while Holliday remained with Tavares at the helm.

  “How long will it last?” Holliday yelled into the Portuguese captain’s ear.

  “At least through the night, perhaps longer,” he answered. “There is no point in making for Corvo; the harbor at Flores is a better choice.”

  “You’re the captain,” said Holliday. “Whatever you say.”

  Tavares nodded and spun the wheel. They turned a little further west, away from their goal. An hour later Flores came in sight, and an hour after that the San Pedro reached the tiny harbor of Santa Cruz das Flores, a single concrete pier in the lee of a tiny village huddled at the base of a battery of rugged hills.