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

by David S. Brody

  “You guess?”

  He shifted. “All right, you put a dick in.”

  “Brilliant. You combine the male and the female. Just as with the Hooked X. And just as with the Jewish star, which happens to be a Masonic symbol—you combine the male triangle with the female triangle. So,” she said, holding up the Tower replica, “do you know of any 30-foot phalluses?”

  * * *

  Amanda was playing a dicey game here. Salazar was intrigued by her 30-foot phallus theory. But she was making it up as she went along.

  “So you think this Tower model is the key to accessing the Money Pit?”

  “Of course. Just as it was the key to locating the ninth arch.”

  “How?”

  She glanced at Cam. His face was covered in sweat and he was shivering in the damp crypt. “If I tell you, you’ll simply leave us here to die.”

  “Maybe. But if you don’t, I definitely will.” He pushed himself to his feet slowly, aiming the gun at Cam while eying her. He was wobbly from the blow to his head but still functional. Little chance of her overpowering him. “Give me the model. I’ll figure it out myself.”

  She laughed. “Really, are you certain of that?” She needed a plan. One that satisfied Salazar but also ensured their escape from the cave. “I have an idea. We shall all leave the cave together. When we arrive at the synagogue, I’ll give you the model and explain the clue.”

  He waved away her proposal, as she feared he would. “No deal. I’ve got the gun, I call the shots. But you’re right—I’m not sure I can figure it out myself. Lucky for me I don’t have to. We stay here until you tell me how the model gets me into the Money Pit.”

  Her mind raced. She needed a convincing story, plus a new plan. “The key to it all is the extra window. It got us through the rotunda and it will get you into the Pit.”

  “I’m listening.”

  She glanced at Cam, still shivering and moaning. He was running out of time. She ripped another strip from his shirt, this one about ten feet long. “First I need to change his dressing.” Shielding him from Salazar with her body, she handed one end of the dressing to Cam. “Hold that tight,” she whispered. “And sit up tall.” Instead of tending to his wound, she passed the other end of the bandage through one of the windows in the Tower replica and wrapped it around her own wrist. Standing slowly so as not to alarm Salazar, she backed away from Cam and released the Tower model, allowing it to slide along the cloth strip like a dog on a leash run. The model hung between Cam and her, dangling a few feet off the ground, suspended by the thin ribbon of fabric. She turned to Salazar. “If either of us releases the fabric, the model will crash to the floor. And Cameron is beginning to lose consciousness.”

  Salazar smiled. “Nice try.” He took a step toward the model.

  She lowered her hand a few inches, sending the replica diving toward the stone floor. “Stop where you are. We have nothing to lose. And we have no need for the model anymore.”

  He stepped back. “Okay. Looks like we have a stalemate.” He stared up at the Delta of Enoch. “How about this? You finish telling me about how to get into the Pit and I’ll let you two walk out of here with that thing hanging between you. I only get it when we all get out. Okay?”

  It gave them a chance, at least. “Very well. But we begin now. I see no reason for Cam to lie here bleeding in this crypt any longer.”

  * * *

  Cam staggered through the tunnel, head bowed, fighting to keep his feet. If he stumbled, the model—their ticket out of here—would fall and crash. He felt feeble, empty, out of fuel, similar to the way his body reacted when his sugar levels got too low. Who knew how a loss of a couple pints of blood affected blood sugar? And his arm seared. At least Salazar had cut his cuffs so he could brace himself against the walls with his right arm.

  “Shall we rest?” Amanda walked behind him in the dark, the eight foot ribbon an invisible moat between them. Even if she wanted to help him, the tunnel was too narrow to walk side-by-side. He was on his own. Salazar brought up the rear.

  “Doing okay. The rotunda is just ahead.”

  Amanda was still stalling, knowing the drop into the rotunda would be Salazar’s best chance to grab the model. “So, as I said, the extra window is the key. You’ll need to orient the model on the horizon, of course….”

  Cam reached the rotunda opening, lowered his body into a sitting position. The model slid along the ribbon to him. Quickly, before Salazar could intervene, he dropped through the hole, hugging the model to his chest like a running back securing a football. His knees buckled as he landed but he somehow kept his balance. He raised his arm high in the air and the model slid back toward Amanda crouched in the passageway.

  “Well done, Cam.” She jumped through as well, landing soundlessly on the stone floor.

  They moved away from the opening to allow Salazar room to climb through. The cat leapt down beside him. He turned and, using a couple of handholds expertly hidden in the panel’s face, pulled the passageway door closed. “I haven’t given up on that triangle of gold yet.” He turned back to Cam and Amanda. “Because of that, you know I’m not going to kill you—at some point someone would track you to this rotunda and find your bodies. Then I’d never be able to get back to the crypt. But I still expect you to keep your end of the bargain. Keep talking.”

  Cam nodded. Whatever they could do to get rid of Salazar was worth it. And it wasn’t like they had many bargaining chips—Salazar had the gun and time was running out on Cam. Amanda moved toward Cam, shortening the ribbon as she did so, and palmed the Tower replica. Pulling her end of the ribbon through, she handed the model to Salazar. “From what I’ve read, the Money Pit flood tunnels are designed like the ones in the pyramids in Egypt. Which makes sense, since the Middle East is where the Templars learned most of their engineering tricks. There should be an alcove or niche in the Pit that matches up with the extra window on the model; I’m guessing it’s about twenty feet beneath the surface, just like in the rotunda. That’s your key. In the niche there should be a lever like the one that opened the ninth arch. Pull the lever and some kind of mechanism will release rocks and stones and debris that will seal the flood tunnel. That’s how it works in the pyramids. Then you should be able to get to the treasure.”

  Cam steadied himself against the spiral staircase. True or not, it was a hell of a story. Better yet, Salazar bought it.

  Salazar tucked the model into his bag and began to jog down the tunnel toward the synagogue. After a few strides, he stopped and turned. “I’m sorry about your dog, Thorne, I really am. And about your friends also.” He ran his fingers through his hair as his eyes rested on Amanda. “I have a little girl, almost seven years old. I hope she turns out like you.”

  CHAPTER 19

  [Late September]

  Amanda, blond again and clear-skinned, lounged in a chenille bathrobe at a bed and breakfast in Newport, picking at a corn muffin as she scanned the Sunday paper. She laughed quietly as she showed Cam a story headlined, Da Vinci Code Comes to America. “The irony is that this story wouldn’t have been nearly so large if the Vatican fanatics hadn’t gone around killing people willy-nilly to keep it quiet.”

  Cam had just returned from a long run along Newport’s Cliff Walk. After a couple of days in the hospital and a few days rest, he was regaining strength. “It’s almost always the cover-up, not the crime, that gets people in trouble.”

  A couple of weeks had passed since their jump from the Longfellow Bridge, which Amanda, in an accent he continued to find endearing, had renamed ‘The Long Fall Bridge.’ The press accounts, fueled by the arrests on the bridge, focused initially on the seedy activities of the Vatican extremists. But as the days passed a few outlets had begun to dig deeper into the story, to explore what it was that the Vatican was so intent on keeping secret. The Consortium, to its credit, did not attempt to finesse the story by downplaying either Prince Henry’s opposition to the Church or the reality that the Narragansett Indians had
as much claim to the title of heir to the Jesus bloodline as did the Consortium families. As Babinaux explained to Amanda, “Sometimes we forget the old Yiddish proverb, that a half truth is a whole lie. It is time to tell Prince Henry’s entire story and allow the world to form its own opinions. If the Vatican is unhappy with us, so be it.” Cam and Amanda were happy to stay out of the spotlight and allow the Consortium to speak for Prince Henry—it gave them time to recover, unwind and get to know each other in a less frenzied setting.

  Despite the wisdom of Babinaux’s Yiddish proverb, they had decided to keep their crypt discoveries—both the Delta of Enoch and the Prince Henry tomb and genealogy—secret for now. In a month or two, after the dust settled, they would contact the synagogue and cemetery trustees. Even without the crypt, the Prince Henry story was a monumental one: the account of the heir to the Jesus bloodline journeying to America 100 years before Columbus to establish a new Christianity based on ancient pagan ideology both altered American history and undermined many of the core teachings of the Catholic Church. But the millennia-old evidence in the crypt, showing that the earliest practitioners of the religion that spawned Judaism, Christianity and Islam believed God existed in a feminine form, would shake the world. The Christian fundamentalists and Orthodox Jews would go crazy; the hard-line Islamic clerics might go ballistic. “I have no interest in being the next Salman Rushdie,” Amanda had noted. On a more practical level, they wanted to move carefully to avoid a Dead Sea Scrolls-like scenario—the Vatican somehow gained control of the scrolls in the 1960s and delayed release of any information for decades.

  They did, however, phone Scott Wolter in Minnesota to share their crypt discovery and their conclusion about the femininity of God. Without his research they wouldn’t have come close to solving the mystery. “Well, I guess now we know why Mona Lisa was smiling,” he had chuckled.

  Even without the crypt contents the Prince Henry saga filled newspapers, magazines and airwaves. Public opinion essentially fell into three different camps—some bought the story of Prince Henry, heir to the Jesus bloodline, coming to America to form a New Jerusalem in opposition to the Church; some believed he came but rejected the Jesus bloodline and any religious rationale for his journey; and a minority dismissed the evidence as circumstantial and questioned the events completely. Within this latter group, no doubt, existed racists who could not accept the notion that the blood of Jesus ran through a race of North American savages.

  Amanda continued reading from the newspaper. “Even now, the Blinky Blanks of the world insist our entire version of events is hogwash. She’s quoted in this story, still claiming the Newport Tower is a Colonial windmill.” But she was in the minority. Even without the crypt, there was simply too much evidence, coupled with the Vatican fanatics’ desperate desire to suppress it, for the public to dismiss the Prince Henry story.

  “The press is clueless sometimes,” Cam said. “Why are they interviewing professors and governmental officials? These are the people who couldn’t figure it out in the first place.”

  “Yes. They should be interviewing the NEARA folks.”

  “In the end, it won’t matter. I just ran by the Tower. There were about 50 people there, plus another tour bus arriving. Blinky Blank can say whatever she wants but people will make up their own minds.”

  Based on the talk shows and press accounts, most Americans, after the initial shock of having the name Jesus Christ linked with words like ‘paganism’ and ‘Kabbalism’ and even ‘witchcraft,’ seemed to be okay with Prince Henry’s reported goal of reuniting the male and the female in the Godhead, of tempering Mars with some Venus, of respecting Mother Nature rather than merely conquering and exploiting her earth. Of course, most Americans didn’t know that Prince Henry and his followers took it one step further and believed God existed in a female rather than male form.

  The Masons, apparently, were in on the secret. Or at least a few of them were. Peter had done more research on the Delta of Enoch symbol. When portrayed in a Masonic lodge or on artwork, the triangle usually pointed up. But there was one special degree of Masonry called ‘The Thirteenth Grade of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, the Royal Arch of Enoch.’ During this ceremony a feminine, downward-pointing triangle was deployed. Apparently this degree, named after Enoch, signified that the Mason brother had reached an advanced level of understanding and enlightenment. “Once you reach it you’re allowed to see the truth,” Peter had said.

  Cam gulped some water. “In retrospect, the idea of God being a woman isn’t so outlandish. Like you said to Salazar, isn’t life the most precious gift? I just had to get past my cultural bias.”

  “And swallow your male ego.”

  “That too.”

  “To be fair, I didn’t see it either,” she conceded. “Nobody saw it, other than perhaps a handful of high-level Masons. Not that the clues weren’t there. The Cistercians were practically screaming it out to the world: They took the beehive as their symbol and they worshiped the Virgin Mary—they viewed themselves as a cluster of worker bees serving the queen. And the Templars dedicated everything to the Virgin Mary and made the queen the most powerful piece on the chess board. Why, if not to venerate the Sacred Feminine? It’s not like medieval woman possessed any power.”

  Over the centuries, Judeo-Christian culture had flooded human consciousness with so many images of a male God that no other possibility seemed conceivable. It wasn’t always so; Isis reigned supreme in ancient Egypt. But eventually the branches of the Isis tree—embodied in Templar, Cistercian, Masonic, Gnostic and Kabbalistic beliefs—became concealed beneath the smothering forest of patriarchal Christianity, Judaism and Islam. “It’s just hard to believe nobody figured this out before. The clues are so obvious.”

  “More so than you know. Look what I stumbled upon.” She handed him a printout from a webpage. “I was surfing the Web while you were on your run. How’s your Hebrew?”

  “I can do the blessing over the wine. That’s about it.” He glanced down at the paper. Some kind of Hebrew grammar lesson.

  “A shame. It would have saved us a lot of time and work.” She sat forward in her chair and explained. “In Hebrew, like Spanish and French, all words are either masculine or feminine, depending on their final letter. In Hebrew, words that end in the letter ‘hey’ are almost always feminine.”

  Blood rushed to his face as he grasped the importance of this information. “No way.” The tetragrammaton, the ancient Hebrew name for God, was spelled Yud, Hey, Vov, Hey. Yahweh was a feminine word.

  “Way. In fact, it should actually be pronounced ‘Yahwah’ instead of ‘Yahweh,’ which makes it even more clearly feminine. In some texts it’s still written with the ‘a.’ Centuries ago somebody changed it to make it sound more masculine.”

  He smiled. “A man, no doubt.”

  “No doubt. The mainstream Jewish scholars perform all sorts of grammatical acrobatics to come to the conclusion that the word Yahweh is actually masculine or even gender-neutral, but I think that’s more a reflection of cultural bias than anything else.”

  “What about other names for God?”

  “Funny you should ask. Are you familiar with the word ‘Elohim’?”

  “Sure. It’s the name for God in the Hebrew Bible.”

  “Correct. In fact it’s the third word in the Book of Genesis. Well, the root word of ‘Elohim’ is ‘Elowah.’ And ‘Elowah’ is also a feminine word.”

  She leaned back. “So it seems that the ancient Israelites, both the ones who first named God and also the ones who wrote the Bible, may have believed God was a woman.”

  * * *

  Cam stepped out of the shower, his body still tingling over the revelation that Yahweh and Elohim, the ancient Israeli names for God, were feminine words. He had never been all that religious but felt strangely drawn to the spiritual side of Prince Henry and his worship of the Sacred Feminine. Or maybe they should rename her the Supreme Feminine.

  Of course, that may have
been because he himself was under the spell of Venus for the first time in his life. And happily so.

  Amanda smiled at him, aware he was staring at her. She folded her newspaper as he dried himself and dressed. “Some of the newspapers are declaring Prince Henry rejected Christianity.”

  “Why would he do that? He was a descendant of Jesus. Of course he didn’t reject him. He just wanted to bring Christianity back to its roots.” The way it was before the orthodox Church fathers hijacked it. In many ways Prince Henry was the true Christian, the true messenger of Jesus Christ.

  “I agree. I think that’s what Roslyn Chapel is, an attempt to marry the Sacred Feminine with Christianity—Christ and Mother Nature, combined under one roof.” She reopened the newspaper. “Fancy this quote from Niven Sinclair; remember, he’s the current patriarch of the Sinclair clan: ‘Roslyn Chapel is a story in stone—a story which tells us that God and Nature are One.’”

  He smiled. “That’s pretty good.”

  “Which is probably why Prince Henry got on so well with the North American natives. They shared a reverence of nature.”

  “Apparently that’s not all they shared.” Prince Henry’s tomb made it clear he had merged his bloodline, and that of Jesus, with the Narragansetts.

  “Good point. Speaking of which, did you see anyone at the Jewish Cemetery?”

  “I ran right by but nobody was poking around.” They had returned a few times to the cemetery, not surprised that no trees or plants, other than the rose bushes, grew in Frazon’s corner of the cemetery—the roof of the crypt probably rose to just below the surface of the ground. Which was also probably why nobody was buried in this section of the cemetery other than Frazon.

  “Do you really believe none of the synagogue officials know about the crypt?”

  “I do.” They had debated this question a few times already. “I think at one time people like the Touros knew. But when the Jews fled Newport after the Revolutionary War, the secret died. As far as they knew, the tunnel ended at the rotunda.”