The Templar's Code (6 page)

I’ve seen his face before
, he realized with no small measure of surprise. At London’s National Gallery there was a painting by Botticelli,
Portrait of a Young Man
. Jason Lovett’s assassin could have stepped right out of the fifteenth-century canvas, the resemblance uncanny.

Smiling slightly, the assassin raised his right hand to his lips, blowing Caedmon a kiss.

“Cheeky bastard,” he disgustedly muttered, the killer’s smugness the last insult. The “Young Man” well aware that he had just gotten away with murder.

The thought popped into Caedmon’s head as he reentered the Masonic reading room, D. H. Lawrence’s assessment strangely apropos.

Although he wasn’t altogether certain that Jason Lovett’s assassin
was
an American. The audacious young man had the air of a fashionable boulevardier combined with the physical beauty of a Mediterranean gigolo. Not exactly the image that came to mind when envisioning a cold-blooded American hit man.

Edie, her face streaked with tears, rushed toward him. The crimson-red shawl that was tied at her waist flared behind her like an unfurled sail.

“Thank God, you’re all right!” she exclaimed, flinging herself at his chest. “Lovett didn’t . . . he didn’t make it.”

Caedmon wrapped his arms around her quivering backside, belatedly realizing that he was shaking as well. For several moments they held each other, both of them murmuring words of comfort.

Hearing the shrill blare of sirens outside the building, he pulled away and awkwardly patted her shoulder. Four months ago, fate had literally thrown them together when they were both marked for execution by a religious zealot intent on finding the Ark of the Covenant. Had it not been for that dangerous episode, their paths would never have crossed. Given that he maintained a flat in Paris and Edie lived in Washington, their paths didn’t cross on a regular basis. In fact, he’d just flown in to Dulles last evening—the first time in nearly four weeks that they’d seen one another. He supposed that a bit of bumbling was to be expected.

“Yes, right.” He cleared his throat, directing his attention to Jason Lovett’s sprawled body. “Where is everyone? A brutal murder usually brings out the morbidly curious.”

“The security guard has the lecture-goers cordoned in the banquet hall.” Edie scowled at him. “I know that you got your book smarts from Oxford and your street smarts from MI5, but seeing you chase after the killer scared the bejesus out of me. Who do you think you are—Superman?”

“My apologies for scaring the lady. Unfortunately, my superpowers left something to be desired,” he confessed. Like any male of middling years, it pricked his ego that he’d been bested by a younger man. Stronger of both wind and limb. “The bastard made a clean go of it. Like chasing the Artful Dodger.”

Gnawing on her lower lips, Edie glanced over her shoulder at the dead archaeologist. “Before he died, I thought Lovett was about to pull a gun on me.” Slipping a hand into her dress pocket, she removed a small chrome-colored device, which she wielded like a hand-gun. “Bang-bang!
This
is what I mistook for a loaded weapon,” she said, handing him a digital voice recorder.

“How curious. Given the tragedy that just transpired, I suspect Jason Lovett wasn’t the only person actively searching for the Templar treasure. Although his unfortunate death makes me think that—” Suddenly noticing the jeweled knife hilt protruding from Lovett’s back, he stopped in midsentence.

Good God. Surely, he was seeing things.

Well aware that the authorities would arrive at any moment, Caedmon walked over to the corpse. Going down on bent knee, he examined what appeared to be a finely crafted centuries-old dagger.

“I don’t believe it.”

Clearly perplexed by his reaction, Edie stared at the jeweled hilt. “What is it?”

Taking care not to touch the murder weapon, he indicated the small inset rubies that formed a distinctive eight-pointed star.

“It’s an octogram star, the age-old symbol of creation.” Perplexed at seeing the symbol on a murder weapon, he stood upright. “In ancient Egypt, the octogram star was known as the
ogdoad
and was used by the creation cult that sprang up at Hermopolis. The number eight is highly significant in many esoteric traditions—the Gnostics, the Kabbalists—and, of course, there are eight points—”

“On the famous Templar cross,” Edie said, beating him to the punch. A split second later, her brow furrowed. “Do you think this star has something to do with the Knights Templar?”

“I think that Dr. Lovett’s murder has something to do with the Knights Templar. As for the star . . . I don’t know.” Caedmon shrugged, wishing he had a better answer. The eight-pointed star was one of the most complicated symbols in history.
Two interlaced squares. The seven days of Creation followed by the eighth day of regeneration.
Paradise regained.

Lost in thought, he glanced upward, his gaze alighting on the Egyptian hieroglyphics that adorned the ceiling. The unusual motif reiterated the premise of his Oxford dissertation—that the Knights Templars’ exposure to the Egyptian mysteries was at the heart of their brutal demise. And though he’d been derided for a lack of corroborating evidence, he still held firm to the belief.

The Templar treasure. The Octogram star. The Egyptian
ogdoad.
A dead archaeologist.

Was there a connection between the seemingly separate sine qua non?

“The Knights Templar are at the heart of this mystery. I can feel it in my blood.”

Edie waved a hand in front of his face. “
Hel-lo.
Jason Lovett was murdered before our very eyes. I suppose you’re going to tell me
that’s
an occupational hazard of being an archaeologist.” She shook her head, putting Caedmon in mind of a harried mother chiding her ill-behaved child. “Until now, I thought your obsession with the Knights Templar was relatively harmless.”

“I am not obsessed,” he replied, taking issue with her word choice.

“Well, if you aren’t obsessed, why did you chase Lovett’s killer?”

“Strangely enough, I had a great many questions to put to the brute. First and foremost, I wanted to know why he executed Jason Lovett.”

Edie’s brown eyes opened wide, as though he’d just made the most outlandish of statements. “Man’s greed knows no bounds. Money is the root of all evil. Yo-ho, yo-ho, a pirate’s life for me. Take your pick.”

Before he could reply, a bevy of uniformed police officers and a medical emergency team, stretcher in tow, rushed into the reading room.

“What about the digital voice recorder? Should we turn it over to the police?” Edie worriedly inquired.

Caedmon glanced at the uniformed policemen shoving their way through the crowd. Then he glanced at the small digital voice recorder that he still held in his right hand. Finally his gaze landed on the open book that was on the floor beside the dead archaeologist.

“Mention the digital recorder to no one. Our slain acquaintance bequeathed it to us for a reason.” With the tip of his shoe, he closed the book.

Hopefully, no one would think to open it.

Saviour exited the city bus.

At a glance he could see that he was in a Latino neighborhood, the shop signs all in Spanish, the pedestrians darkly hued.

Still in a heightened state of exultation, he strode toward a cantina a half block away. Admittedly, he enjoyed being pursued, finding it highly erotic. Although in the early years he’d done his share of chasing. Begging. Pleading.

In need of an espresso, he entered the run-down cantina. Almost immediately, he was assaulted with the combined scents of cinnamon, jalapeño peppers, and heated lard. Confidently striding to the back of the establishment, he seated himself at a table covered with a stained white cloth. In the center of the table, there was a vase of plastic flowers, a pitiful attempt to beautify what was essentially a very ugly café.

A squat woman with dark eyes and even darker hair approached the table.

Assuming she spoke no English, he initiated the exchange.
“Un café exprés, por favor,”
he told her. Having spent a summer on the Costa del Sol, he knew enough Spanish to satisfy most of his physical needs.

Stone-faced, the waitress returned a few moments later, placing a demitasse and chipped saucer in front of him. Raising the cup to his lips, Saviour immediately felt a stab of pain in his right hand. His pursuer had scored a direct hit with the brass lamp, the surge of adrenaline having masked the injury.

Grimacing, he took a sip of the bitter brew, the pain causing his thoughts to turn to the red-haired man who’d given chase. Did Lovett tell him about the excavation? If he did, it meant that Caedmon Aisquith knew about the massacre and the treasure that initiated the bloodbath. As God was his witness, he wouldn’t have shared that information with his own mother. The bitch.

An unmarried woman, Iphigenia Argyros earned the condemnation of her family and neighbors when she was raped by a Libyan refugee. Like hundreds of his countrymen seeking asylum, Saviour’s father arrived on the island of Chios in a rickety fishing boat, having braved the treacherous seas to get there. Apprehended by the Greek coast guard, he was transferred to a detention center in Thessaloniki, managing to escape in short order. First he satisfied his hunger. Then he slaked his lust.

Saddled with an unwelcome bastard, whom she named Saviour out of spite, Iphigenia blamed her miserable lot in life on the child born of that violent union. The fact that his father was a “filthy, dirty Muslim” made Saviour subhuman in his mother’s eyes.

On his thirteenth birthday, enraged that his mother had refused to mark the occasion, Saviour stormed out of the two-bedroom flat in Vardalis Square. It had been the only home he’d ever known.

The first night of his newfound freedom had been terrifying. Curled in a fetal position, he’d slept in a doorway. The second night, he sneaked into the Agía Sophía. The Church of Holy Wisdom. Lulled to sleep by the soft glow of devotional candles and the strangely erotic scent of incense, he’d been rudely awakened the next morning by a bearded priest who dragged him across the tiled floor, bodily tossing him through the ornately carved church doors. Holy wisdom obviously did not include Christian charity.

His belly aching from hunger, he’d had no choice but to steal food from the Modiano market. A fiasco, as it turned out, a furious fruit vendor beating him with a rose switch. Sobbing, his backside a mass of raised welts, he feared what would happen to him come nightfall. As fate would have it, that’s when he met Ari, a street-smart fourteen-year-old who’d been homeless for nearly five years.