“We’ve just spent a couple of hours putting practically every pose in the Kama Sutra to the test. I think that kind of has an effect on our status, doesn’t it? But can we please just … not now, okay?”
“Sure thing.” He flashed her a slight grin to defuse the moment and decided to drop the subject for now. What they’d been through wasn’t the ideal grounding for a serious chat about where they stood with regard to each other. He didn’t think it was fair to Tess, not after her ordeal.
He changed tack. “Tell me something … these trunks, the writings the monk’s confession refers to. The cardinal didn’t seem too keen on giving me a straight answer about what they could be. You must have discussed it with Simmons. Any ideas?”
“Some, but … we’re just guessing.”
“So guess.”
She frowned. ” ‘The devil’s handiwork, written in his hand using poison drawn from the pits of hell,’ and the rest of it. It’s got a very creepy ring to it, doesn’t it? And it’s not something that’s commonly associated with the Templars.”
“But you know different?”
Tess shrugged. “Sort of. The thing is, you have to understand the context of it, the setting. The events in the diary, Conrad and the monks … that all happened in 1310. That’s three years after the Templars were all arrested. And how that happened, why it happened when it happened, could help explain what it’s all about.”
“Keep going.”
Tess straightened, and her face lit up as it always did when she got excited about something. “Okay. Here’s the backstory. Late 1200s, early 1300s. Western Europe’s going through tough times. After several centuries of warm weather, the weather’s now getting freaky and unpredictable—a lot colder and wetter. Crops are failing. Disease is spreading. This was the start of what’s called the ‘Little Ice Age’ that—weirdly enough—lasted until a hundred and fifty years ago. By the time you hit 1315, it rains almost nonstop for three years and triggers the Great Famine. So the common folk—they’re having a really miserable time. Now, on top of that, they’ve just lost their Holy Land. The pope had told them that the Crusades were willed and blessed by God—and they failed. The crusaders lost Jerusalem and were finally kicked out of the last Christian stronghold, at Acre, in 1291. Now keep in mind, the church had spent decades building up the arrival of the new millennium as this thousand-year milestone and was talking it up as the date of the parousia, the Second Coming. They were warning people that they had to embrace Christianity and submit to the Church’s authority before that date or miss out on their eternal reward. So there was a great resurgence of religious fervor at the time, and when nothing happened, when the new millennium came and went without the Big Event taking place, the Church needed to find something else to distract its people, an excuse almost. And they turned to liberating the Holy Land from the Muslims who had taken it over. The pope dreamt up the Crusades as something that God was waiting for, the crowning achievement of that whole movement, the start of a new triumphant age for Christianity. And the Church had even gone as far as to change its position radically, from preaching about peace and harmony and loving your fellow man, to doing the total opposite—the pope was now actively promoting war and telling his followers ‘God will absolve you of all your previous crimes if you go out and slaughter the heathen in the Holy Land.’ So there was a lot riding on getting the Holy Land back. And when that failed, it was a huge blow. Huge. And people were feeling scared. They were wondering if God was angry with them. Or if something powerful and evil was at work, undermining God’s efforts. And if that was the case, who were his agents, and what powers did they have?
“Now while this is all happening, something else is brewing at the same time,” Tess continued. “People in Western Europe, and I’m talking about the people in power, the priests and the monarchs—the few who could actually read and write—they’ve recently started taking the dangers of magic and witchcraft seriously again. They hadn’t, not for centuries. Those concerns had died out with paganism. Magic and witchcraft were ridiculed as nothing more than the superstitions of delusional old women. But when the Spanish took back the south of Spain from the Moors towards the end of the eleventh century, they discovered a whole new world of writings in places like the library of Toledo, ancient and classical scientific texts that the Arabs had brought with them and had translated from the original Greek into Arabic and then into Latin. So the West rediscovered all these lost writings, the works of great thinkers and scientists that they’d completely forgotten about, like Plato and Hermes and Ptolemy and a whole bunch of others they’d never heard of. Books like the Picatrix and the Cyranides and the Secreta Secretorum that explored philosophy and astronomy as well as magico-religious ideas and potions and spells and necromancy and astromagic and all kinds of ideas these people had never seen before. And what they read scared the hell out of them. Because these texts, regardless of how primitive or misguided we might now consider them, talked about science and understanding how the universe worked and how the stars moved and how our bodies could be healed, and basically, how man could gain power over the elements around him. And that was scary to them. It was early science, and early science was considered magic. And since it undermined the concept of ‘God’s will,’ the priests painted it as ‘black magic,’ and anything it achieved had to be due to demon worship.”
Reilly remembered something from his previous exposure to the warrior-monks and asked, “Weren’t the Templars accused of worshipping some demonic head?”
“Of course. The Baphomet. Now there are conflicting theories on that, we still don’t know for a fact what it was all about. But that’s what I’m talking about. To understand why the Templars were rounded up and accused of all these mostly ridiculous things, you have to understand the mind-set in which that happened.”
“So we’ve got people thinking God is angry with them and that the devil’s agents are out to destroy them, and priests and kings believing black magic might actually exist.”
“Exactly. And against that charged backdrop, you’ve got these arrogant, wealthy warrior-monks who lost the Holy Land and are now back in Europe, and they don’t seem to be too embarrassed by their defeat. They’ve still got all these vast holdings and they’re living it up on the fat of the land while everyone else is starving. And people start asking questions. They start wondering about them, asking themselves how these guys are getting away with it—and pretty soon, they’re asking themselves if these guys don’t have some kind of evil power, if they’re not in league with the devil, if they’re not debauched demon-worshipping wizards. This fear of black magic—it was at the root of the Templar trials. Of course, their accuser, the King of France, had plenty of reasons to want to take them down. Greed and envy played a huge role. He owed them a lot of money and he was broke, and he was also incensed by their arrogance and their flagrant disrespect towards him. But beyond that, he genuinely saw himself as the most Christian of kings, the defender of the faith, even more so after the death of his wife in 1307—the same year he ordered the arrests, a time when he’d withdrawn into religious self-absorption, something he never came out of. He saw himself as a man chosen by God to do His divine work here on Earth and protect his people from heresy. He was hoping to set up another crusade. And he and his advisors just couldn’t understand how these Templars could possibly be as arrogant and as dismissive of God’s chosen one if they weren’t getting the help of some kind of demonic power.”
Reilly chortled. “They really believed that?”
“Absolutely. If the Templars had made a pact with the devil, if they had knowledge that could transform the world—and take away power from those who held it—they had to be defeated. And it’s not as outlandish as it sounds. Knowledge is power, in all kinds of ways, and occult weapons are a common thread in history. Megalomaniacs looking for that extra edge, that divine power, that arcane knowledge that would let them conquer the world. Hitler was obsessed with occultism. The Nazis were tot
ally enthralled by black magic and runes, and not just in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Mussolini had a pretty nutty personal occultist called Julius Evola. You’d be amazed by the superstitions and the wacky belief systems that a lot of world leaders take seriously, even today.”
Reilly felt heavy-headed. “So these trunks … ?”
“‘The devil’s handiwork, written in his hand using poison drawn from the pits of hell, its accursed existence a devastating threat to the rock upon which our world is founded,’ ” Tess reminded him. “What’s in these books that frightened the monks so much? Could there be any truth to the accusations against the Templars? Were they really occultists that practiced black magic?”
Reilly looked doubtful. “Come on. It could all be just metaphorical.” His previous meeting with Brugnone, three years earlier, flashed across his mind. “I can think of other writings that would shake up a monk’s world, right?”
“Of course,” Tess nodded. “But keep an open mind. I’ll give you one example that Jed brought up. You know there were a lot of Templars in Spain and Portugal. Big presence there. Well, at some point in the thirteenth century, they got into trouble and they had to pawn off most of their holdings in Castile. Of all the enclaves they had out there, the only one they kept was an insignificant little church in the middle of nowhere. It didn’t make sense. It wasn’t in a strategic location. Its land didn’t even produce enough revenue to allow its friars to send funds to their brothers in the Holy Land. But it was the one encomienda, the one enclave, they decided to keep. What wasn’t immediately obvious was that this small church actually did have an interesting feature: its location. They had built it right in the center of Spain, equidistant from its farthest capes. And I mean perfectly equidistant, down to the meter.”
“Come on,” Reilly questioned, “what do you mean, ‘perfectly equidistant’? How could they figure that out, what, seven hundred years ago? Even today, with GPS mapping and—”
“It’s bang in the center, Sean,” Tess insisted. “North-south, east-west, draw those lines, and where they cross, that’s where it is. Jed checked it using GPS coordinates. It’s really there. And that location has a major occult significance: controlling the epicenter of a territory was meant to give you magical dominance over it. And there are other geographic peculiarities to that location that have to do with the pilgrims’ road to Santiago and other Templar holdings. Now, is it all just a coincidence? Maybe. Or maybe the Templars really believed in that mumbo jumbo. And maybe it’s more than mumbo jumbo.”
Reilly exhaled heavily. Whatever it was, it was something the man he was after was prepared to kill for. And maybe that really was all he needed to know.
“Bottom line … it could be anything,” Reilly concluded.
“Yup,” Tess nodded as she finished off the last piece of escalope.
Reilly studied her curiously, then shook his head slowly and blew out a small chortle.
Tess eyed him curiously. “What?”
“I know you. You’re just thinking about how this is all going to be great fodder for your next book, aren’t you?”
She set down her fork and stretched lazily, then sank back into the pillows. She turned on her side to face him. “Can we talk about something else?” She grinned, her expression dreamy. “Or even better, how about we don’t talk at all for a while?”
He smiled at her, cleared the plates off the bed and onto the room service table cart in one fell swoop, and sank into her.
THE BUZZ OF A TELEOHONE jolted his senses with the velvet touch of a taser and yanked him out of a dreamless sleep that had eluded him for hours.
He’d tossed and turned forever. It had been an emotionally devastating day, with highs and lows coming at him fast and furious. The night was harder. Images of the devastation and the carnage at the Vatican were suffocating any elation he felt at being with Tess again. He found himself replaying the events over and over in his mind, trying to rationalize what he had done, but he couldn’t escape the haunting feeling that he was responsible for it all and wondered how he was going to live with the burden of guilt that was growing inside him.
He pushed himself to his elbows, feeling dazed. Fine strands of sunlight were streaming in through small openings in the shutters. It took him a couple of seconds to register where he was. He glanced at the clock radio on the bedside table. It showed that it was just after seven o’clock in the morning.
Tess stirred next to him as he answered the phone.
He listened, then said, “Put him through.”
As he grunted one-syllable replies, Tess sat up, all groggy and tousled, and looked him a question.
He cupped the phone’s handset. “It’s Bescondi,” he mouthed. “They’ve got a hit. In the Registry.”
“Already?” Then her eyes lit up. “Conrad?”
“Conrad.”
Chapter 17
PARQUI DI PRETURO AIRFIELD, L’AQUILA, ITALY
As he steered the car down the last of the switchbacks and drove up to the gate that stood at the end of the scenic country lane, Mansoor Zahed once again felt pleased with his choice of pilot. The airfield seemed as somnolent as it had been when they’d landed there two days earlier. The pilot he’d hired, a South African by the name of Bennie Steyl, clearly knew what he was doing.
Huddled in a quiet valley in the Abruzzo region of Italy, the small facility was only an hour and a half’s drive from Rome. As Zahed approached it, he could see that, as before, there was little discernible activity. Recreational flying was far more expensive in Italy than it was in the rest of Europe due to highly taxed aviation fuel and steep charges for everything from the use of airspace to snow removal and de-icing services—a compulsory fee, even in Sicily at the height of summer—and the quiet airfield had gradually fallen into disrepair until an earthquake of 6.3 magnitude struck the region in the spring of 2009. The narrow, winding roads in and out of the area were clogged by fleeing locals, but the fact that the remote, run-down facility was within a stone’s throw from the devastated towns and villages made a massive rescue and humanitarian effort possible, which in turn inspired the Italian prime minister to relocate that summer’s G8 Summit from Sardinia to the small medieval town of L’Aquila to show solidarity with the earthquake’s victims. The airfield had been hastily spruced up in order to receive the leaders of the developed world, before it reverted to its natural, sleepy state.
A state that suited Zahed perfectly.
He pulled up to the small gatehouse. In the distance, he could already see Steyl’s plane waiting idly on the tarmac, its white fuselage glinting in the morning sun. The twin-engined Cessna Conquest was parked off to one side, away from the dozen or so smaller, single-engined aircraft of the L’Aquila Aero Club that were lined up alongside the short asphalt runway. The beefy gateman set down his pink-paged Gazetta Dello Sport newspaper and greeted him with a lethargic wave. Zahed waited as the unkempt, potbellied man pushed himself out of his cratered woven-cane chair and lumbered over to the car. Zahed explained that he needed to drive in to drop off some luggage and other supplies to the plane. The gateman nodded slowly, padded over to the barrier, and settled his meaty arm on its counterweight. The barrier tilted up just enough for Zahed to be able to drive through, which he did, with a courteous wave of gratitude to the perspicacious guard.
The gateman didn’t ask him about the drowsy man with the dark sunglasses who was half-asleep on the passenger seat. Zahed hadn’t expected him to. In a quiet, out-of-the-way airfield like this—kudos to Steyl, again—security wasn’t anywhere near as important as the latest football scores.
Zahed drove up to the plane and pulled up alongside it. Steyl had cleverly positioned it so that its cabin door faced away from the other planes, the flying club’s hangar, and, farther afield, the simple yellow-and-blue structure that housed the facility’s offices and its modest control tower. The precaution was probably unnecessary. There was no one else around.
The pilot, a tall, sinewy, bearded ma
n with slicked-back ginger hair and deep-set gray eyes, emerged from the cabin door and helped Zahed with Simmons, who was sedated to the edge of uncousciousness. They guided the archaeologist up the steps and settled him into one of the wide leather seats. Zahed checked him out. Behind the dark shades, Simmons’s eyes were staring blankly ahead, and his mouth was slightly open, a small gob of drool pooled at the edge of his lower lip. The American would probably need a top-up before they landed in Turkey.
“Let’s get out of here,” Zahed told Steyl.
“We’re ready to rumble,” the South African replied. His tone was gruff, but Zahed knew that was just the man’s way. “Leave the car by the edge of the taxiway so as not to draw attention to it. I’ll start the engines.”
Zahed did as the pilot suggested and abandoned the rental car by the side of the hangar. The Cessna’s turboprops were whining to life as he headed back to the plane, and just as he reached it, he spotted a man in a white T-shirt, a wide pair of black trousers held up by braces, and big, heavy boots emerge from the tower structure. The trousers seemed to have a reflective stripe going down the side of each leg. He had some papers in his hand and looked like he was in a rush. More than that, his body language was giving off a hint of fluster as he climbed onto an old bicycle and started pedaling, heading their way.
Zahed reached the plane before him and climbed in. He found Steyl in the cockpit, flicking switches as he ran through his preflight checklist. He pointed the man out through the pilot’s side window. “Who’s this guy?”
The pilot glanced out. “He’s a fireman. They have to have them around at all times to justify charging us for them. And since the odds of them actually having to deal with a fire are virtually zero, they usually double as paper pushers and help out the guy in the tower with the paperwork. This guy’s a bit of a fusspot, but not too much of a pain as long as you flash the cash.”
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