The Templar's Quest

by C. M. Palov

  For several long seconds he stared, his old self tempted.

  ‘ “And every spirit upon earth seemed fervourless as I,” ’ he muttered, well aware that he’d become a predictable bore.

  Tuning out the Siren, he purposefully hitched the satchel a bit higher on his shoulder and strode out of the room.

  A few moments later, alarm set and shop door locked, he departed L’Equinoxe bookstore. The gaily painted shop sign swayed ever so slightly in the breeze, rusty hinges jangling. He’d designed the signage, which depicted the Fool, the first card in the Tarot deck, as a satirical self-portrait. The innocent young man blithely setting forth on an adventure. So consumed in his joie de vivre, it rendered him oblivious to the fact that he was about to step off a cliff and break his bloody neck.

  Although, strangely enough, today the image bespoke a deeper meaning. In truth, he felt uplifted. Invigorated, even. Certainly a departure from the self-loathing he’d experienced upon rising. For what began as a day like any other had unexpectedly turned into an odyssey. A mental challenge had presented itself, wrapped in the tantalizing ribbons of a centuries-old mystery.

  However, unlike the Fool, he wasn’t naive. The Seven Research Foundation sought the Grail so they could put a dark plan into play. The progeny of monsters, God only knew what they intended. The Cathars would claim, and rightly so, that the Seven owed allegiance to none save Rex Mundi, Lucifer, the god of the material realm. The evil one who lured young fools from the straight and narrow path.

  As he hurriedly made his way down Rue de la Bûcherie – feeling very much like a newly released penitentiary inmate – it dawned on Cædmon that all of the cock-ups in his life had transpired after he’d veered from the straight and narrow. His father, were he still alive, would maintain that he’d taken his first misstep when he’d journeyed down the birth canal. Indeed, he held Cædmon personally liable for the fact that Helena Aisquith died while she laboured to bring their first child, a squalling baby boy, into the world.

  Because of that tragic misfortune, he’d been raised in a cheerless household. When he turned thirteen, his father shunted him off to Eton College. A malicious contrivance, Cædmon was forced to bear a whole new torment, pecking order at the hallowed public school determined by one’s lineage. Lacking the ancestral prestige of his classmates, he had to best them with the only tools in his arsenal: a sharp mind and a well-honed body. By the time he left Eton, he boasted membership in the elite Sixth Form Select and had captained the cricket team that victoriously took the field against Harrow. For five arduous years he had stayed true to the straight path until, finally liberated, he set forth for Oxford.

  In no time at all, he veered on to a crooked lane.

  For the first two years he ran with a fast crowd who fancied themselves latter-day libertines, ‘Mad, bad and dangerous to know.’ When the late-night revels became old hat, his scholastic passions revived. However, craving academic excitement, he did the unthinkable and changed from Egyptology to medieval history, the Knights Templar far more thrilling than mummified pharaohs. Earning a reputation as a rogue scholar, the impulsive move eventually resulted in his ousting from Queen’s College. ‘The Manifesto’, as he jokingly referred to his dissertation, was summarily dismissed as a ‘harebrained hypothesis that could only have been opium-induced’. When, a few months later, MI5 came knocking at his door, it seemed a blessing in disguise.

  Little did I know …

  But the overlords at Thames House had not deadened his spirit. Nor had the dons at Queen’s College blunted his academic passion. The fact that he was setting off for Montségur proved that he was still curious. Still intrigued by those questions that had no answers.

  In a hurry to get to the Metro, Cædmon sidestepped a group of tourists who, maps and cameras in hand, huddled on the pavement. He glanced at his wristwatch. The high-speed TGV train for Marseille was scheduled to depart Gare de Lyon in forty-five minutes. Giving him just enough time to arrive at the train station and purchase a ticket. According to the schedule, they would arrive in Marseille by mid-evening. He intended to use the three-hour train ride to devise a plan of action. Wi-Fi Internet access would enable him to begin his preliminary research.

  He knew that the trip might prove a fool’s errand. Many men had sought the Grail. Many had met their death in the ill-fated quest. Be that as it may, he felt compelled to join the hunt.

  Making his way across the Square René Viviani, the small park adjacent to St Julien-le-Pauvre Church, Cædmon sensed an unseen presence following in his wake. The nape of his neck prickled as he ducked into a church doorway.

  Hidden in a dark alcove, cheek pressed to the fluted limestone, he surreptitiously peered around the corner. This time of day the tree-lined park brimmed with harried mothers chasing tots and pushing prams. From where he stood, he had an unobstructed view across the Seine to the much larger, and more magnificent, Notre-Dame.

  Eyes narrowed, Cædmon searched for the telltale person who did not belong. The anomaly in the endless stream.

  Nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

  As a precaution, he waited a few seconds more. Because all train passengers had to pass through a metal detector, he’d been forced to leave his Ruger pistol back at the flat.

  He released a pent-up breath. ‘I’m seeing fiends where none exist.’

  Stepping away from the portal, he continued on his way. He quickened his pace as he glanced at the western horizon and noticed a strange chartreuse cast to the sky.

  A warning that a violent storm was brewing.

  PART III

  ‘The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes, but in having new eyes’ – Marcel Proust

  47

  Montségur Castle, The Languedoc

  0914 hours

  Could anything be more ridiculous than a middle-aged man on a Grail quest?

  ‘Only the Fool about to blithely step off a steep cliff,’ Cædmon muttered under his breath.

  To prevent a fatal mishap, he braced both hands on the ruined battlement as he set his gaze on the Pyrenees. Perched atop a limestone and granite outcrop that rose an impressive three thousand feet into the air, Montségur commanded a panoramic view that left one awestruck. Ragged peaks. Colossal mountains. Sheer precipices. Set against a cerulean blue sky, the ancient mountains seemed impregnable.

  Although appearances could be deceiving as the doomed Cathars discovered when their ‘impregnable’ citadel was besieged by the Pope’s army.

  According to legend, just before the fortress capitulated, on a frigid and moonless night, four brave Cathars scaled Montségur’s western cliff. Managing to sneak past the enemy line, they travelled under cover of night to the Templar preceptory located twelve kilometres away. To persuade the warrior monks to fight on their behalf, the four Cathars bore a gold medallion with an encrypted map that revealed the secret location of the greatest treasure of the Middle Ages, the Holy Grail. Having presented the medallion to the Knights Templar, the Cathar emissaries promised that the encryption key would be turned over as soon as the Templars took up arms. The prize too tempting to resist, the Templars saddled their war horses and set off for Montségur.

  By the time they arrived, the citadel had already fallen, the last two hundred and fifty Cathars forcibly marched through the barbican gates. They were put to the torch by order of the Pope’s envoy, a white-robed Dominican priest, thus bringing to a fiery close the thirty-year-long Albigensian Crusade.

  As had happened on all of his previous visits to Montségur, Cædmon found himself contemplating the tragedy with renewed vigour. Everywhere he looked the ghost of those humble heretics hovered amidst the ruined ramparts and shattered curtain walls, all that remained of the Cathars’ mountaintop eyrie. A limestone monument to the dead, it invoked the memory of that other doomed mountaintop fortress, the Jewish bastion at Masada. Which no doubt explained the heart-rending aura that clung to the citadel like a finely spun burial shroud.

&nb
sp; Opening the flap on his field jacket, Cædmon removed his BlackBerry. Because of the precipitous hike up the winding mountain trail from the village below, he’d dressed in khaki cargo pants, a practical long-sleeved shirt and rugged boots. Accessing the photo log on the BlackBerry, he stared at the symbols incised on the medallion: star, sun, moon and four strangely-shaped ‘A’s arranged in a cruciform.

  His gaze zeroed in on the four ‘A’s.

  Yesterday, on the train ride from Paris, he’d carefully examined a map of the Languedoc. With numerous place names in the region beginning with the letter ‘A’, it would take a lifetime to search each and every one. Moreover, the Languedoc encompassed an area that measured nearly sixteen thousand square miles. Most of it, mountainous terrain. The disheartening reality was that the Grail could have been hidden anywhere within those sixteen thousand square miles.

  He skipped to the next photograph, a close-up of the engraved text on the medallion’s flipside. The first two lines, written in the Occitan language, read: ‘In the glare of the twelfth hour, the moon shines true.’ A curious turn of phrase since the moon was most often associated with the night sky. The last line of text had been scribed in Latin. Reddis lapis exillis cellis. ‘The Stone of Exile has been returned to the niche.’ While the meaning was obvious, it was also frustratingly vague, no mention made of where ‘the niche’ was located.

  The mystery compounding, Cædmon took a deep breath, filling his lungs with the pine-scented air as he stared at the craggy mountains in the near distance. Terra incognita.

  Worried that he’d journeyed to Montségur in vain, he gazed at the barren courtyard beneath the ramparts. Two blokes who’d hauled surveying equipment to the citadel were toying with a transit-level. Another pair, who were filming a documentary, had just set a very professional-looking video camera on to a tripod. A tour group on the far-side of the courtyard was taking turns reading aloud from Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival.

  Cædmon suspected that, like him, they were all attempting to solve the mystery of the Cathars’ mountaintop –

  Mountain!

  ‘Bloody hell,’ he whispered, hit with a sudden burst of inspiration.

  Sliding his rucksack off his shoulder, he hurriedly loosened the drawstrings, retrieving a small leather-bound journal and a sharpened pencil. His hand visibly shaking, he opened the journal to the first blank page and drew one of the ‘A’s from the medallion cruciform.

  His breath caught in his throat.

  It’s not an ‘A’ … it’s a mountain peak!

  Taken aback by the revelation, Cædmon hitched his hip on to the battlement as he examined the digital photos on the BlackBerry with fresh eyes. If he was right, it meant that, rather than four ‘A’s, there were four mountain peaks depicted on the medallion. A pictogram of the landscape visible from Montségur. Hope renewed, he stared intently at the other engraved symbols.

  Certain that the star and the sun represented the heliacal rising of Sirius, that left the moon in the top quadrant to decipher. An age-old symbol found in almost every culture, its meaning and significance was myriad. Birth. Death. Resurrection. Cyclical time. Spiritual light in the dead of night.

  But how did any of that relate to the four mountain peaks?

  ‘ “In the glare of the twelfth hour, the moon shines true,” ’ he quietly recited, the moon not only depicted on the medallion, but specifically mentioned on the reverse inscription.

  Could the ‘moon’ be the key to unlocking the riddle of the Montségur Medallion?

  Again, he was struck by the strange reference to time. Noon, the twelfth hour of the day, was the apogee of light, when the sun, not the moon, shone at its brightest. Traditionally, ‘noon’ also correlated to the cardinal direction of ‘south’. To this day, the French word ‘midi’ meant ‘noon’ and ‘southern’. As in the Midi-Pyrénées, or southern Pyrenees, where Montségur was located.

  What if the ‘moon’ referred to a specific mountain located south of Montségur?

  Anxious to test the hypothesis, Cædmon quickly checked the online map feature on his BlackBerry.

  ‘Damn,’ he muttered a few moments later, not getting a single hit.

  On a twenty-first-century map.

  Undaunted, he next pulled up an Oxford University search engine for the map collection at the Bodleian Library. Just as he’d hoped, the Bod had a thirteenth-century map of the Languedoc archived online. Heart beating at a brisk tattoo, he clicked on it.

  ‘Christ.’

  Shaking his head in disbelief, Cædmon double-checked the crudely rendered chart. He then lurched to his feet and turned about face, towards the granite peak that loomed on the southern horizon. Mont de la Lune.

  ‘Moon Mountain’ as it had been called eight hundred years ago.

  He barely suppressed the urge to rear his head and shout a joyful hosanna. While the clue might not lead to the Grail, it was a signpost. A new direction in which to venture forth.

  On a wing, and even a prayer, so goeth the intrepid Fool.

  Anxious to be on his way, Cædmon hurriedly shoved the BlackBerry into his jacket pocket and returned the journal to his rucksack. He then rushed towards the stone steps that led from the ramparts to the courtyard below, an unshaven, khaki-clad wayfarer ready to embark on la quête du Graal.

  God help him.

  48

  Grande Arche Belvedere, Paris

  1059 hours

  ‘Hey, Katie. What’s the matter?’ Finn slid his Oakley sunglasses on to the top of his head. ‘And please don’t tell me that you’re scared of heights.’ Standing on the rooftop of the Grande Arche building, at the eastern side of the belvedere, they had a bird’s-eye-view of the Axe Historique, a.k.a. the Champs-Élysées, thirty-five storeys below. With all of the ultra-modern architecture in the near vicinity, the area resembled a cityscape from a sci-fi movie.

  Although Finn didn’t consider it much of a tourist attraction, a crowd nonetheless shuffled along the barricaded perimeter of the rooftop. Bright-blue telescopes were set up every ten feet or so, tourists plopping coins into the slots so they could ooh and ahh over the wonders of Paris magnified umpteen times.

  Kate seated herself on a nearby bench. ‘I’m concerned about this so-called “mission op”,’ she told him in a subdued tone of voice. ‘After everything that happened yesterday, is it prudent to go on the offensive?’

  ‘Grabbing the bull by the balls is the only way that I can get justice for Corporals Dixon and Kelleher. The Dark Angel will pay in a court of law for what she did to my two buddies.’ Homily delivered, Finn figured a little bolstering was in order as Kate was obviously suffering from a bad case of battlefield jitters. ‘Do you have any idea how much it costs to train a special ops soldier? I’ll tell ya – it costs three quarters of a million dollars.’ He paused, letting the fact soak in. ‘In other words, I know what I’m doing. Besides, they have no idea that we’re even here.’ ‘They’ being the Seven, who had their headquarters on the thirty-fifth floor of the Grande Arche. The penthouse suite directly below them.

  According to Fabius Jutier’s calendar, an eleven o’clock board meeting of the Seven Research Foundation had been scheduled. With all of the principal players in attendance, it was Finn’s chance to storm the castle gate.

  ‘You’re right.’ Kate smiled sheepishly. ‘Sorry for being such a nervous Nellie.’

  ‘Hey, it’s understandable.’ Glad they’d got over the hump without incident, Finn sat down beside her.

  Granted, it wasn’t the most comfortable seat in the house, but he’d seen one too many uniformed police prowling around below deck. Just as worrisome, with the exception of the rooftop, there were video cameras mounted everywhere. If his image was captured and matched to his military photo – enabling the authorities to close in on him – he’d have no choice but to abort the mission. And leave Dixie and Johnny K hanging in limbo. No way in hell was he going to let that happen.

  In this man’s army, you don’t leave your
comrades behind.

  Leaning against the metal bench, Finn put an arm around Kate’s shoulders while he took in the view. While the Grande Arche came in at a respectable height, the marble-clad structure was dwarfed by the towering steel and mirrored glass buildings that surrounded it. The reflected light near blinding, Finn slipped his shades back on.

  ‘I’m curious, Finn … why did you join the army?’

  An innocent enough question but, unbeknownst to Kate, it struck a deep chord.

  Seventeen years may have come and gone, but Finn could still vividly recall his treeless South Boston neighbourhood with the ramshackle three-storey terraced houses and chain-link fences, the streets lined with dented aluminium trash cans. Oppressive as hell. It became even more oppressive after his brother Mickey joined the McMullen Gang. On more than one occasion, Finn was picked up by Boston’s finest, the bad-ass badges mistaking him for his twin brother. That’s when Finn decided to get out of South Boston before some rival gang member mistook him for Mickey and pulled the trigger. The US Army offered the perfect means of escape.

  ‘Since I’ve always been something of an adrenaline junkie, the military was a natural choice,’ he told Kate, that as good an answer as any. ‘In addition to all of the action, along the way I’ve picked up an interesting skills set.’

  Kate folded her arms over her chest. A challenging tilt to her chin, she said, ‘Let me guess? All of these skills have to do with guns, ammo and chasing enemy combatants.’

  ‘Not true. Back in ’92 when I first got out of basic training, I was stationed at a refugee camp along the Iraq–Turkey border. That’s where I learned how to deliver a baby.’

  Almost comically, Kate’s mouth fell open. ‘Are you kidding me? You, the rough, tough, macho commando, delivered a baby?’