Templar 09 - Secret of the Templars

by Christopher, Paul

  “Bull. The truth is the Knights Templar, this self-described Army of God, was nothing more than a gang of extortionists and thugs. As a group they were certainly the world’s first example of organized crime, complete with secret rituals and a code not unlike that of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra—the Mafia.”

  Lieutenant Colonel John “Doc” Holliday, a dark-haired, middle-aged man in an Army Ranger uniform wearing a black patch over his left eye, looked out over the classroom, checking for some sort of response from his students, or failing that at least an indication of interest. What he saw were eighteen “firsties,” fourth-year students, all male, all wearing the same “as-to-class” short-sleeved blue uniform blouses with a neat triangle of snow-white T-shirt showing at the neck, all wearing the same gray trousers with a single stripe, all with the same high-and-tight haircut, all with the same sleepy, glassy-eyed expression of young men attending the last class of an academic day that had started almost ten hours before. Incredibly, this was the cream of the West Point graduating class, most of them single-minded ring thumpers who’d already branched Artillery, Infantry, or Armor, and none of whom had the slightest interest in medieval history in general or the Knights Templar in particular. Future Warriors of America. Huah!

  Holliday continued.

  “The big problem with the First Crusade of 1095 was the fact that the crusaders won it. By 1099 they’d captured Jerusalem and they were an army without an enemy. No more godless Saracens to slaughter. Knights of the time were professional soldiers, swords for hire bought and paid for by wealthy noblemen, most of them French, Italian, or German. They were chevaliers, literally men who could afford to ride a horse; chivalry and fair damsels in distress didn’t factor in the equation. They were killers, plain and simple.”

  “Warriors, sir.” The observation came from Whitey Tarvanin, a tough-looking Finn from Nebraska whose pale skin and even paler hair had given him his nickname. He was obviously Infantry, the crossed idiot sticks on his uniform blouse proud proof of that. When he’d posted a few weeks ago he’d actually chosen Fort Polk, Alabama, the least attractive choice on the roster, just to prove how down and dirty he was.

  “No, not warriors, Cadet, mercenaries. These guys were in it for the money, nothing more. No Honor, Duty, Country. Maybe a little raping and pillaging on the side; after all, according to the rules of engagement in the eleventh century non-Christians were going to Hell anyway, so they didn’t count. The nobles had promised them all sorts of plunder in the Holy Land, but as it turned out there wasn’t enough to go around and thousands of these chevaliers came back penniless and a lot of the nobles were close to bankruptcy, as well. Many of them returned home to find that their lands, castles, and everything else had been stolen by scheming relatives or simply forfeited by one king or another for taxes.”

  Holliday paused.

  “So what does an unemployed soldier whose only real skills involve hacking, butchering, and otherwise committing acts of extreme violence on the godless enemy do with himself once that enemy has been vanquished?”

  Holliday shrugged.

  “He does what men in that situation have done since the days of Alexander the Great. He turns to crime.”

  “Like Robin Hood?” This was from “Zits” Mitchell, skinny, pimples, wire-rimmed glasses, and a hairline already edging backward into baldness. After watching Mitchell go through four years at the Point, Holliday was still amazed by his stamina. He’d expected the beanpole cadet to wash out after Beast Barracks, if not before. But he’d stuck it out. Holliday smiled. Mitchell’s pimples would go away eventually.

  “Robin Hood was a romantic fantasy invented by songwriters who came along a few hundred years after the fact. The people I’m talking about, the routiers, as these vagabond highwaymen were called, were more like Tony Montana in Scarface—products of their environment; an unskilled ex-con Marielito washed up on the shores of Key West doesn’t have much choice if he wants to get ahead in his new home: he deals cocaine. A routier in medieval France joins a gang of like-minded ex-soldiers and starts plundering the countryside or offering villages and towns ‘protection’ for a price.

  “One of these men was Hugues de Payens, a French knight in the service of the Duke of Champagne. The duke ran short of money and Sir Hugues switched allegiance, fighting with the army of Godfrey of Bouillon until Jerusalem was overthrown.

  “Godfrey was installed as king of Jerusalem, and using his prior connection Sir Hugues along with half a dozen other routiers petitioned King Godfrey for the job of guarding the new pilgrim routes through the recently captured Holy Land, along with the right to establish their headquarters in the ruins of the old Temple of Solomon.

  “Pilgrims were big business back then, and tolls from the pilgrims formed the basis for economy of the newly ‘liberated’ Holy Land. Godfrey agreed, and Sir Hugues took things one step further, ratifying his position by having Pope Urban II grant him the status of a holy order, thus freeing the newly formed Knights Templar from the obligations of any sort of taxation, not to mention making them answerable only to the Pope.”

  “He made them an offer they couldn’t refuse.” Zits Mitchell grinned. “Godfather style.”

  “Something like that.” Holliday nodded. “Sir Hugues and his fellow routiers controlled a lot of military might. Godfrey had upset a bunch of his colleagues by accepting the title of king. At the very least Godfrey was buying protection for himself in the fragile little kingdom.”

  “So what happened?” Whitey Tarvanin asked, suddenly getting interested.

  “There had always been rumors about some sort of treasure hidden in the Temple of Solomon, maybe even the Ark of the Covenant, the box that supposedly held the second set of the Ten Commandments brought down from Mount Sinai by Moses.”

  “Second set?” Tarvanin asked.

  “Moses broke the first tablets,” said Granger, a football jock with the nickname Bullet, which probably had something to do with the shape of his head. He was also the class’s biggest über-Christian. The hefty point guard had been scowling at Holliday since he’d mentioned Dan Brown and The Da Vinci Code. A sensitive topic for a lot of people, although Holliday wasn’t quite sure why; after all, it was a novel, a work of fiction, not a campaign platform or a sermon. Granger cleared his throat as though he was embarrassed about displaying too much knowledge in front of a teacher. “God wrote them down a second time and Moses put them in the Ark. It’s in the Bible.”

  “It’s also in the Koran,” said Holliday mildly. “It has a deep significance for Muslims as well as Christians.”

  Granger’s scowl darkened and his big head turtle-tucked down into his beef-slab shoulders.

  “Did these guys find it?” Tarvanin asked.

  “Nobody’s quite sure. They found something, we know that much. Some say it was gold from King Solomon’s Mines; others say it was the Ark of the Covenant; others say it was the secret wisdom of Atlantis. Whatever they found, within a year the Knights Templar were loaded. They financed their pilgrim escort service, built castles up and down the pilgrim routes to Jerusalem and sold their muscle to anyone who could pay.

  “Because of the distances involved between Europe and the Holy Land, they borrowed an idea from their Saracen enemies and introduced an encrypted note of transfer—a deposit of money in one place could be transferred on paper for thousands of miles. Wire transfers before they had wires.

  “The Templars also began making loans at interest, although this was specifically forbidden in the Bible. As time went on the Templars even began financing entire wars. Land and other assets were regularly used as collateral and often wound up being forfeited, expanding the Templars’ power and wealth even more.

  “Within a hundred years the Templars were into everything: loan-sharking, real estate, the protection rackets, shipping, smuggling, bribery, you name it. By the end of the next century they were the next best thing to a
multinational conglomerate, and there’s no doubt that much of it came from illicit sources.

  “In most major cities of the time, from Rome to Jerusalem, Paris and London to Frankfurt and Prague, you didn’t make a major move without consulting the local Templar authority. They controlled politics and banks, and owned entire fleets of ships. They were their own army, and by the beginning of the fourteenth century they had an unsurpassed intelligence network that spanned the known world. By then, of course, Jerusalem was back in the hands of the infidel, and the Holy Land was a battleground once again, but by then it didn’t matter anymore.”

  “So what happened then, sir?” Zits Mitchell asked.

  “They got a little too big for their britches,” explained Holliday. “King Philip of France had just fought a long war with England. He was broke and he owed the Templar banks a lot of money. They were on the verge of taking over the entire country. The Pope was getting a little nervous, too; the Templars had far too much power within the church and were easily capable of putting their own man on the papal throne if they chose to.

  “Something had to be done. Pope Clement and King Philip concocted a plan, laid charges against the Order for various crimes, some real and some false, and on Friday the thirteenth, 1307, most of the Templar leaders in France were arrested. They were tried for heresy, convicted, tortured, and burned at the stake. Eventually the Pope ordered every Catholic king in Europe to seize Templar assets under threat of excommunication, and by 1312 the Knights Templar had ceased to exist. Some say that the Templar fleet took the Order’s treasure to Scotland for safekeeping, and other people think that they managed to flee to America, although there’s no proof of that.”

  “I don’t see the point,” said Whitey Tarvanin. “It’s like most of this historic stuff. What’s it got to do with right now? With us?”

  “Quite a bit actually,” replied Holliday. It was an argument he’d heard a thousand times, usually from the mouths of gung ho kids exactly like Whitey Tarvanin. “Have you ever heard the expression ‘Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it’?” There were a lot of blank looks. Holliday nodded. He wasn’t surprised.

  “The quote is generally attributed to a man named George Santayana, a Spanish-born American philosopher of the early twentieth century. In the way that Adolf Hitler forgot the lessons of history and tried to invade Russia in the winter. If he’d remembered Napoleon’s disastrous attempt he might have consolidated the Western Front instead and won the war in Europe. If we’d paid attention to history and remembered the decades-long failure of the French in Vietnam, maybe we wouldn’t have tried to prosecute that war in the same way they did and maybe we wouldn’t have lost it.”

  “So what does that have to do with these Templar guys?” Zits Mitchell asked.

  “They got too powerful and they forgot who their friends were,” said Holliday. “Just like we did. The United States came out of the Second World War with a per capita casualty rate that was lower than Canada’s, and we suffered none of the catastrophic damage done to Europe and Great Britain. We also had made enormous industrial wartime loans that put us into the world’s economic forefront. We dominated the world, just like the Templars. People got jealous. People got pissed off.”

  “9/11,” said Tarvanin.

  “Among other things,” said Holliday. “And to make things worse we started mixing religion with politics. An old argument just like the Crusades. Our God is better than your god. ‘God Is with Us’ on the Nazi belt buckles. Holy Wars against women and children, Catholics killing Protestants in Belfast. We went into Iraq for the wrong reasons and we left our friends behind. More people have been killed in the name of God and so-called ‘faith-based values’ than for any other reason.

  “You can bully people into being your allies, but when things get bad don’t expect them to stand beside you, especially when you put God into the mix. The separation of Church and State. That’s what the Constitution is for, although we seem to have forgotten that, as well. And as for the relevance of history you can probably trace the troubles in the Middle East directly back to Moses.”

  “Don’t you believe in God?” Bullet Granger asked.

  “My personal beliefs have nothing to do with it,” said Holliday quietly. He’d been here before, as well—shaky ground, the kind of thing that could get you into trouble.

  “You’re always knocking Christians and the Bible. Moses, and like that,” Granger argued.

  “Moses was a Jew,” said Holliday, sighing. “So was Christ as a matter of fact.”

  “Yeah, well,” grumbled the big football player, brooding. The bell rang.

  Saved.

  2

  Lieutenant Colonel John Holliday stepped out of Bartlett Hall and paused for a moment, enjoying the early-evening sunlight that bathed the gray stones of the United States Military Academy at West Point. Directly in front of him was the broad expanse of the Plain, the celebrated parade ground that had felt the heels of ranks of marching cadets for more than two hundred years. All the greats had been here, ghosts in cadence from George Armstrong Custer to Dwight D. Eisenhower. To Holliday’s left were a score of other stone buildings rising like the protective bastions of some crusader’s castle. To the right, beyond the baseball diamond on Doubleday Field, were the bluffs that stood above the wide silver brushstroke of the Hudson River as it flowed the last fifty miles down to New York City and the sea.

  There were monuments scattered everywhere on the grounds, commemorating battles, brave deeds, brave men, and most of all the dead, graduates of this place who’d given their best, their all and their lives for one cause or another, the causes now long forgotten, found only between the dusty pages of the history books that Holliday loved so well. That was the problem of course; all wars became meaningless in time. The Battle of Antietam was the bloodiest single conflict in American history with 23,000 dead in a single September day, and now it was a plaque on the side of an old building and a picnic ground for tourists toting cameras.

  Holliday had fought his own war, of course, more than one in fact, from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, with half a dozen others in between. Had his fighting made any difference, or the lives of the men who died beside him in those terrible, lonely places? He knew that the simple answer was no. They kept on growing poppies in Afghanistan, oil still flowed in Iraq, rice still grew in the paddies around Da Nang, babies still starved to death in Mogadishu.

  That wasn’t the point, of course. Soldiers didn’t think that way—they were trained not to. That’s what places like West Point were for: to ensure that the next generation of officers in the United States Army would follow the orders of their superiors without question, because if you stopped or even hesitated long enough to ask that question the other guy would probably put a bullet in your head.

  Holliday smiled to himself and went down the steps. All those wars, all those battles and the only injury he’d ever sustained was a blind eye caused by a sharp stone thrown up from the wheel of his Humvee on a back road outside Kabul. The eye had cost him his combat posting and had eventually led him here. The fortunes of war.

  He crossed Thayer Road and started down the footpath that cut across the Plain at an angle. A pair of cadets rushed by, pausing just long enough to throw Holliday a rigid salute as they passed. Cows, by the look of the stripes on their tunics—third-year cadets. Firstie year to get through and then they’d be off to their own far-flung outposts of democracy. A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. Holliday shook his head. Did George Lucas ever wonder just how many West Point Luke Skywalkers he had inspired? A cool gust of wind spun across the parade ground like a shiver. It wasn’t even summer yet, but the breeze felt like fall. The leaves rattled in the trees that stood along the path for a few seconds, and then the strange feeling was gone. Goose just walked across his grave. One of his mother’s favorite spooky sayings from long, long ago.

  Hollid
ay reached the far side of the Plain and the Thayer Statue, then crossed Jefferson Road and walked past Quarters 100, the superintendent’s white-brick house, with its twin cannon guarding the front walk. He continued on to Professors Row with its neat cluster of late-Victorian houses and finally reached his own quarters at the end of the block, a little two-bedroom Craftsman bungalow built in the 1920s and the smallest accommodations on the Row.

  Stepping into the cozy house was like going back in time. Warm oak, stained glass, and built-in cabinets were everywhere. There was even an original slatted Morris chair and matching ottoman in the living room beside the tiled fireplace, as well as plain painted cabinets and a huge porcelain sink in the simple kitchen at the back. He’d turned the larger of the two bedrooms into a study, the walls lined with his books. The smaller bedroom held nothing but a bed, a chest of drawers, and a bedside table. There was a single photograph on the table: Amy on their wedding day, with flowers in her hair, standing on a beach in Hawaii. Amy when she was young, eyes bright and flashing, before the cancer that swept through her like the cold wind that had rushed across the Plain a few minutes ago. It took her in the springtime, killing her before summer’s end. It had been ten years ago now, but he still remembered her as she was in the fading picture on the bedside table, and mourned her and her vanished smile. Mourned their decision to put off having children for a little while longer, because a little while never came and there was nothing left of her in the world.

  Holliday went into the bedroom, stripped off his uniform and changed into jeans and an old USMA sweatshirt. He went to the built-in bar in the living room, poured himself a good belt of Grant’s Ale Cask, and headed into his study, bringing the drink along with him. He put a Ben Harper and the Blind Boys of Alabama CD into the stereo and sat down at his old, scarred partners desk. He booted up his PC, did a quick check of his e-mail, then opened up the file for his work in progress, a half-serious, relatively scholarly work he had tentatively titled The Well Dressed Knight, a history of arms and armor from the time of the Greeks and Romans to the present day.