Cabal of The Westford Knight: Templars at the Newport Tower (Book #1 in the Templars in America Series)

by David S. Brody

  “And now, a year later?”

  “I work every weekend and I’m the lone voice in New England complaining about the sun. And I’m bored out of my bloody mind.” She smiled. “At least I was until a few days ago.”

  * * *

  The Spirit Pond Rune Stones were housed in the town of Hallowell, about a mile from the Maine State Museum in Augusta. Amanda directed Cam to a brick warehouse building in an industrial park on the side of a commercial highway that also housed the state lottery and alcoholic beverages commission. He parked next to a tractor trailer and scrunched his face. “Why are they kept here? Shouldn’t they be on display someplace?”

  “Good question. Some bloat in an office made the decision that they’re a hoax. So now they’re hidden away.”

  She led him across a cement-floored loading dock, pushed open a door marked ‘Archeology’ and entered a large room lined with file cabinets and old display cases. She gave her name to a middle-age man with thick glasses and white hair growing from his nose who guided them to a table tucked amid the clutter in the back of the room.

  He pointed to three shoebox-size plastic tubs stacked on the table. “There they are. Take as much time as you need.”

  THE SPIRIT POND MAP STONE

  THE SPIRIT POND INSCRIPTION STONE

  THE SPIRIT POND DRAWING STONE

  [All photos courtesy of Scott Wolter]

  Cam opened the cover of the first tub. “They’re smaller than I thought.” He pulled out a sandstone-colored, triangular-shaped flat slab with foreign lettering—runes—across the top and a map carved into the main body of the stone. On the reverse side, a series of pictures had been carved—a canoe, a bow and arrow, a fish, a bird, a flower, all apparently depicting objects local to the area. “This is amazing. Why don’t more people know about these?”

  Amanda opened the other two plastic cases. From one she removed a pentagonal slab with 10 rows of runes on the front and six more on the back. The other contained a slab with yet more runic lettering. Shaking her head, she responded to his question. “It’s sad, actually. There’s a bunch of these artifacts all across New England. Every time someone finds one, the experts dismiss it as a fake. They say things like, ‘If it was authentic, don’t you reckon we’d find other evidence?’ Well, the fact is that there’s plenty of other evidence.” She shook her head. “But it’s all stashed away in plastic tubs like this. God forbid we should let the public decide for themselves.”

  * * *

  Salazar pulled the rim of a brown UPS cap low over his forehead and adjusted the fake mustache and beard. Pushing a two-wheeled trolley through the door marked ‘Archeology,’ he called out, “I got a bunch of boxes for some guy named Gilbert.”

  An middle-age man in a wheeled office chair turned toward him. “Just leave ’em there.”

  Salazar nodded, careful not to turn his face directly toward Thorne and the girl, who was no longer blond. She also had some rash on her face. Thorne didn’t seem to care, didn’t turn away from her. Salazar touched his own cheeks, still pockmarked from a bad case of acne as a youth. Christina used to make jokes at his expense, especially when she’d been drinking. He wore a beard for a while but shaved it when she left him.

  He motioned toward where Thorne was examining three sand-colored, book-size slabs. “I got more of ’em back in the truck and they’re heavy. Sure you don’t want me to pile them over against that wall?”

  “That’d be great, thanks.”

  His orders were to use whatever means necessary to prevent them from continuing their research. Not much ambiguity—no more warnings, no more second chances. Too bad; it would have been better if they had simply gone away. They seemed like a nice couple, smiling and laughing together. And they were obviously bright and resourceful—they evaded two of Reichmann’s men at a rest area yesterday, which made his own Newport debacle look not so bad by comparison.

  An old special ops buddy had once argued that it was immoral to kill outside the battlefield. It was a distinction without a difference—other than in cases of self-defense, all killing was the same, whether on the battlefield or not. War was an attempt by a nation or a tribe or a religious faction to elevate itself at the expense of another. It was about power and wealth; morality rarely played a part. His Narragansett cousins who protested the Thanksgiving holiday were being silly. Christopher Columbus and the Europeans did not slaughter natives because Europeans were evil—they did so because they were mighty, just as Native Americans had attacked and conquered one another for centuries. Salazar had been ordered to kill McLovick for the same reason he killed an opposing combatant on the battle field—because McLovick threatened his employer’s wealth and power. McLovick had been warned to abandon his search for the treasure and ignored the warning, just as Thorne and the girl had ignored their warning. They were like villagers who chose not to flee as enemy soldiers approached; they could hardly be surprised to find themselves in the crossfire. As the African proverb stated, when elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.

  Of course, this analysis begged the more fundamental question of the morality of killing itself. As a soldier, he had long struggled with the issue, in the end concluding that humans were no different than animals—some would eat while others starved; some would rule while others perished. The taking of life was no more evil than an eagle making a meal of a field mouse; the evil derived from the infliction of suffering. When a body died, its soul moved on to the next corporeal being. So long as the body did not suffer, the soul remained healthy. A soul that suffered, however, returned in a wicked form to inflict more suffering. When animals killed, they did so quickly, efficiently. The gratuitous infliction of suffering—not the act of killing—was the true sin. A uniquely human one at that.

  Thorne and the girl continued to study the artifacts. Just as Salazar had no problem killing to promote his employer’s interests, he had no problem disobeying his employer’s orders to promote his own. Like Thorne and the girl, he was mere grass under the elephants’ feet. Perhaps his little Rosalita could someday be the elephant.

  Fumbling with some paperwork as he slowly stacked the boxes, he leaned closer and listened as they discussed the mysterious rune stones.

  * * *

  Cam studied the runic letters inscribed neatly on the stone. “If this is a prank, it’s pretty elaborate. It’s tough to carve stone by hand. Plus, how many people even know what the runic alphabet is?”

  “The so-called experts always say that it just takes one prankster.” Amanda examined the carvings with a magnifying glass. “But, again, they’re ignoring all the other artifacts around New England. It would actually take a dozen pranksters working over a dozen decades in a dozen different places.”

  “The map and the pictures are self-explanatory. But what does the runic inscription say?”

  “Nobody is certain. There are no word separators so the letters all run together. Most folks reckon it’s a ship’s log describing their journey.”

  “How do these relate to the Prince Henry voyage?”

  “The dates 1401 and 1402 are encoded on the map stone using something called the Easter Table, which is the same way the Kensington Rune Stone was dated. Sinclair left the Orkneys in 1398 and traveled to New England in 1399. So the dates make sense.” She pointed to a line on the map stone. “This shows the Maine coast, specifically the Popham Beach area, and the arrow points to Vinland as two days sail to the south.”

  “Vinland’s earlier than Prince Henry, right?”

  “Right, that’s the Viking settlement from around the year 1000. But it does tie in. Although Prince Henry lived in Scotland, his mother was a Norsewoman, a Viking. He may have possessed some of the old Viking maps of Vinland.”

  “So is Vinland actually two days’ sail to the south?”

  “Nobody knows for certain. But there’s a small island off of Martha’s Vineyard called Noman’s Land. It’s restricted now—your military used it for years as a bombing range and it’s
full of unexploded ordnance. There’s a stone there with a runic carving on it that reads, ‘Leif Eriksson, 1001.’ And another line that some experts translate as ‘Vinland.’ Makes you wonder whether the island’s name derives from ‘Norman’s Land’ or ‘Norseman’s Land.’

  It did.

  “In any event,” she continued, “the stone was originally placed high on a bluff but it slid down to the water’s edge in the late 1800s. Some folks are trying to relocate it into a museum but Rhonda Blank wrote a letter on behalf of the state historical commission opposing it. She claimed moving it might ‘disturb other cultural resources.’” Amanda rolled her eyes. “The stone is offshore and under water. It’s on an island used for decades as target practice for your navy bombers. What other ‘cultural resources’ could she possibly be bothered about? Missile casings?”

  “This goes back to what you said before. She’s staked her professional reputation on the absence of pre-Columbus contact. So the last thing she wants is people preserving or studying artifacts that might prove her wrong.”

  “Right. And there are other rune stones near Cape Cod. The Bourne Stone is of interest because we can trace it back to the 1600s. It sports a carving of a medieval ship similar to the one on the Boat Stone.” She dug around inside her leather carrying bag and pulled out a photo. “This is a rubbing.”

  [Photo courtesy of Scott Wolter]

  A RUBBING OF THE BOURNE STONE, BOURNE, MASSACHUSETTS, USA

  The image next to the footprint on the lower left did look like the Boat Stone ship. “What do the experts say about this one?”

  “Since it was originally found in a Native American church they say it was carved by your Indians.”

  He studied it. In the 1600s the Colonists set up Praying Towns and built churches for Native Americans who had converted to Christianity. “Even if they did have the tools to do it, the ship is medieval. They had to see the ship before they could carve it.”

  “This is what the Consortium has been up against for years.” She shook her head. “There’s another rune stone in Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island. And of course we have the Newport Tower. As you Americans say, a lot of smoke for there not to be any fire.”

  And a lot or runes for there not to be any Europeans. He shifted his eyes back to the Spirit Pond stones. “Getting back to this map stone, I thought they found archeological evidence that Vinland was up in Newfoundland, not near Cape Cod.” In the 1970s amateur archeologists, ignoring the skepticism of the professionals, uncovered a Viking settlement in L’Anse aux Meadows.

  “There’s just one problem with that site—there are no grapes growing that far north.”

  “No grapes, no Vinland. I get it.”

  “Sort of a fundamental problem seeing as they named the settlement after the grape vines, if you ask me. It may be that L’Anse aux Meadows was only a stopover on the way south to the actual Vinland.”

  “Getting back to the so-called experts: What do they think of this map?”

  “As I said, they ignore it because they assume it must be a hoax. The Blinky Blank syndrom.”

  “Do they have any evidence it’s not legit?”

  “Nothing specific, no. But it doesn’t fit their theory so they simply dismiss it.”

  “Hey, this is interesting.” He pointed to the map stone with the arrow indicating Vinland was located two days sail away. “If you were drawing a map, today, which way would south be?”

  “Along the bottom, of course.”

  “But this map, based on the contours of the coastline, has south orienting to the right, where you’d expect east to be. Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  They pondered the question for a few seconds. “Really,” Amanda said, “in some ways this helps prove the authenticity of the rune stones. If they were a forgery or a hoax, the prankster would still have used modern mapmaking conventions.”

  “Right. South would be at the bottom. Even for a hoaxster, it would have been second nature.” He continued to study the map. “If it’s authentic, Vinland would actually be near Martha’s Vineyard. Vinland and Vineyard. Just like any 4th-grader would guess.”

  “The Vinland-Vineyard connection is actually not that surprising. It’s similar to Noman’s Land and Norseman’s Land. I’ve learned that these types of coincidences occur so often that they’re not really coincidences. The same sites, and the same names, and the same symbols all keep turning up again and again. It can’t be just random.” She smiled. “In fact, I have a theory about all this if you fancy to hear it.”

  “Of course. But let’s talk in the car. We should get going.” He snapped a few pictures with his digital camera, stepped around a UPS delivery man and reluctantly left the warehouse.

  * * *

  Salazar didn’t bother following Thorne and the girl. The tracking device he had attached to the underside of the Subaru’s bumper would do the job for him.

  First he phoned Rosalita, left another message. “Hey big girl, I just wanted to wish you luck in your game today. Try your hardest and I’m sure you’ll do great. And don’t forget to use your left foot.” Her coach had told the girls that when they went home and kicked the dog to use their left foot because it was good practice. Rosalita didn’t get the humor but Salazar, even as an animal lover, appreciated it. “When I come home, we can practice and you can show me all of your new moves. Oh, and remember to be a good teammate—tell the other girls they played good even if they weren’t so great, you know? Okay, bye honey.”

  Next he phoned Reichmann in Buenos Aires. “I spent the night questioning desk clerks at hotels along the Maine Turnpike. They stayed at a Motel 6 in Bangor, paid cash, checked out this morning.”

  “You mean you lost them again?” Reichmann spoke English with a thick Spanish accent.

  “No. Your guys at the rest area lost them. I just found them for you.”

  Reichmann sighed. “Yes, you are correct.” He pronounced the ‘s’ in ‘yes’ as a ‘z’. “Good work tracking them to the motel. They cannot have gone far.”

  The display on Salazar’s tracking device showed the Subaru heading south on the Maine Turnpike, back toward the Boston area. “The clerk said they were asking for directions to Montreal. My guess is they’re heading north.”

  * * *

  Back in the Subaru, Amanda took a deep breath. “Seeing that you’re such an expert on American History, what was the first English colony in America?”

  Cam clutched and shifted. “Why do I think this is going to be a trick question?”

  “Your answer, please.”

  “I thought you were going to tell me about names and sites and symbols repeating themselves.”

  “Answer the question, solicitor.”

  “Okay. Jamestown.”

  “Incorrect.” Smiling, she made the sound of a buzzer.

  “That was harsh.”

  “Actually, you are partly correct. Jamestown is tied with another colony in Maine called the Popham Colony, founded by one George Popham in 1607. It lasted only one year before it was abandoned. For perspective, your Pilgrims didn’t arrive in Plymouth until 1620, 13 years later.”

  He turned to her. “Wait. Popham. Didn’t you mention something about Popham Beach earlier?”

  “Ah, so you were listening. And you are correct. Popham Beach is the area depicted on the map we just viewed. And, yes, they are one and the same.”

  “So the English settlers just happened to stumble upon Popham Beach, out of the thousands of miles of American coastline?”

  “Now we’ve come upon my theory about too much coincidence. I think a far more likely scenario is that our friend Mr. Popham possessed an old map, one that directed him toward a safe harbor with fresh water and perhaps even friendly natives.”

  “A map from the Prince Henry voyage.” It seemed possible. “Okay, where next?”

  “I’ve been pondering that. Drive back toward Westford. There’s something I want you to view in Tyngsboro.”

  �
��Works for me. Monsignor Marcotte wants to talk to me and I’d rather do it in person than over the phone. It’s not that I don’t trust him but--”

  “The whole Church thing?”

  “I guess maybe it is that I don’t totally trust him.”

  “Really, there’s a religious aspect to all of this that I’ve never looked at very closely. Perhaps he has some insights that’d be helpful. I’ve never met the man but we’ve chatted on the phone a few times. He seems to have a keen interest in the Knight, which I’ve never quite understood.”

  They drove southwest down the Maine Turnpike, crossed into New Hampshire for a few miles, then entered Massachusetts. “Do we have time for a bit of a detour?” she asked.

  The digital clock on the Subaru’s dash read 11:17 AM. “A short one, I guess. If you think it’d be worthwhile.”

  They ate energy bars and dried fruit for lunch as Cam drove, crossing back into New Hampshire. “This site is called America’s Stonehenge,” Amanda said between bites. “It used to be called Mystery Hill but as a tourist site the new name sounds more … ancient. It’s comprised of a series of stone chambers and markers and cairns, dating back a few thousand years. Your Native Americans lived on the site but many experts believe it was built either by ancient Europeans or the Phoenicians.”