The Brotherhood Of The Holy Shroud (46 page)

As Ana left Elisabeth's office with Paul, she told him she'd be back that afternoon to meet with the genealogist. She'd see then what Elisabeth had found on the man she was sure had visited his family estates in Lirey not so very long ago-Padre Yves de Charny, the secretary to the cardinal of Turin.

She wandered around Paris aimlessly, turning over in her mind everything she knew and had guessed. Around noon she sat in the window alcove of a bistro and had lunch, reading the Spanish newspapers she'd found at a kiosk on the street. It had been days since she'd had any news of what was happening in Spain or Italy. She hadn't even called her newspaper, or Santiago, although she sensed that the Art Crimes investigation must be coming to its end. She was convinced that the Templars had had something to do with the shroud, that as popular suspicions through the centuries suggested, it had been they who had brought it back from Constantinople. She remembered the night in the Dorchester in London, when it had hit her as she looked through her appointment book that the handsome French priest in Turin, the cardinal's secretary, was named de Charny. Until now she'd had no solid lead, just that it appeared that Padre Yves had visited Lirey several years ago-if there was one thing she was sure of, it was that it had been he. There just weren't that many priests so strikingly handsome that everyone who mentioned them said how good-looking they were.

It was possible that Padre Yves was related to the Templars, but was it a relation to the distant past, to long-dead knights, or to something happening now? To people-
Templars
-living now?

But that would mean nothing, she told herself. She could just picture the handsome priest with his innocent smile telling her that, yes, his ancestors fought in the Crusades, and that indeed his family came from the region of Troyes. And what of it? What could that possibly prove? Nothing, it proved
nothing.
She certainly couldn't picture him lighting fires in the cathedral. But her instinct told her that there was a thread that led somewhere-a thread leading from Geoffroy de Charney to Geoffroy de Charny that then wound in twists and circles for generations until it came to Padre Yves.

She hardly ate. She phoned Jean and felt better the minute she heard his voice reassuring her that, even if Paul Bisol was a litde strange, he was a good man, and she could trust him.

At three she went back to the
Enigmas
offices. When she arrived, Paul was waiting for her in Elisabeth's office.

"Well, we did turn up something," Elisabeth said. "This priest of yours belongs to a very well-connected family. His older brother was a representative to the French National Assembly and is now in the cabinet, and his sister is a justice of the Supreme Court. They come from the lesser ranks of the nobility, although since the French Revolution the de Charnys, no
e,
live like perfect bourgeois. Yves has protectors high up in the Vatican-Cardinal Visier-in charge of church finances, no less-is a friend of his older brother. But the bombshell is that Edouard, our genealogist, who's been working for three hours on the family tree, is almost certain that this Yves de Charny is indeed a descendant of the de Charneys, with an
e,
who fought in the Crusades and, even more important, is a very close descendant of the Geoffroy de Charney who was precept of the Temple in Normandy and died at the stake alongside Jacques de Molay."

'Are you sure?" Ana asked, uncertain whether to believe her or not.

'Absolutely," replied Elisabeth without the slightest hesitation.

Paul Bisol saw the doubt reflected in Ana's eyes.

'Ana, Edouard is a historian, a professor at the university. I know Jean is a litde doubtful about our magazine, but I assure you, we've never published anything we can't prove. This is a magazine that investigates enigmas of history and tries to find answers. The answers are always developed and provided by historians, sometimes aided by an investigative team made up of reporters. We have never had to print a retraction or a correction. And we never print anything we aren't absolutely sure of. If somebody has a hypothesis, we print it as a hypothesis, never as a fact.

"You maintain that some of the mishaps in the cathedral of Turin have something to do with events in the past. I don't know-we've never looked into it. You think that the Templars were the owners of the shroud, and there you may be right, just as you're apparently right that this Padre Yves comes from a very ancient family of aristocrats and Templars. You wonder whether the Templars have any relation to the accidents in the cathedral. I can't answer that question-I don't know, but I very much doubt it. I honestly don't think that the Templars have any interest in damaging the shroud, and one thing I can assure you is that if they wanted it for themselves, they'd already have it. They are a very powerful organization, more powerful than you can imagine-right, Elisabeth?"

Paul looked at Elisabeth, who nodded. Ana froze when the chair Elisabeth was sitting in moved from behind her desk and began to advance. She hadn't noticed-it looked like an office chair, but it had been fitted out to serve as a wheelchair as well.

Elisabeth stopped in front of Ana and pulled aside the shawl over her obviously useless legs.

'Ana, I don't think we-or you-have a lot of time. I'm going to give you our part of the story whole, right now. I'm Scottish-I don't know whether Jean told you. My father is Lord McKenny, and he knew Lord McCall. You've probably never heard of him. He's one of the richest men in the world, but you'll never see him in the newspapers or on TV He lives in a world that allows entry only to the fantastically rich and powerful. Although he spends most of his time in London, he has a castle, an ancient Templar fortress, located on the west coast of Scotland, near the Small Isles. But no one from the general public is ever invited there, and it's staffed by tight-lipped professionals from other places. We Scots are given to legends, and there are quite a few about Lord McCall. Some of the villagers who live near the castle call it Castle Templar, and they say that from time to time men arrive in helicopters to visit, among them members of the English royal family and other noble and well-connected families from around the world.

"One day I was telling Paul about Lord McCall, and it occurred to us that we ought to do a story on the Templar estates and fortresses all across Europe. A kind of inventory, you know: find out which ones are still standing, who owns them, which ones have been destroyed over the course of the centuries. We thought it would be great if Lord McCall would let us visit his castle. We started working and at first we didn't have many problems. There are literally hundreds of Templar fortresses, most of them in ruins. I asked my father to talk to McCall to see if he'd let me visit his cas-de and photograph it. But my father got nowhere- McCall was always very polite, but he always had some excuse. I was determined not to take no for an answer, so I decided to try to persuade him myself. I called him, but he wouldn't even come to the phone-a very polite secretary informed me that Lord McCall was away, in the United States, so he couldn't receive me, and of course the secretary had no authority to allow me to photograph the fortress. I insisted that he let me at least come to the castle, but the secretary wouldn't budge- without Lord McCall's permission, no one would set foot on the estate.

"But I still wasn't giving up, so I went to the castle, anyway. I was sure that once I was actually there, they'd have to let me at least look around. I don't usually trade on my own family connections, but in this case I thought, stupidly, that they'd provide entree.

"Before I got to the castle I talked to some of the villagers. All of them have enormous respect for Lord McCall, and they say he's a kind and generous man who makes sure their needs are all seen to. You might say that they more than respect him-they worship him. None of them would ever move a finger to harm him or compromise him in any way. One of them told me that his son was alive thanks to McCall, who had paid all the expenses for open-heart surgery in Houston.

"When I came to the iron gate at the entrance to the estate, I couldn't find any way to get in, and no one responded to the bell. I started walking along the wall, just to see what I might find. Finally I came to a place where the stone had crumbled a bit, just enough to suggest a tenuous handhold or two. You should know that my favorite pastime was rock climbing. I started climbing at ten, and I've climbed a lot of pretty good cliffs. So climbing over that wall didn't look particularly hard to me, despite the fact that I didn't have a rope or anything. Well, I couldn't resist.

"Don't ask me how I did it, but I managed to climb up on the wall and jump inside, onto the grounds of the estate. Off in the distance, in the middle of the woods, I saw an ivy-covered stone chapel and started toward it. I heard a sound, then felt a terrible pain and fell. I don't remember much else. I was crying and writhing in pain. A man was standing there with a rifle, aiming it at me. He called somebody on a walkie-talkie, a four-by-four drove up, they put me in it and drove me to the hospital.

"I was paralyzed. They didn't shoot to kill, but they did aim carefully enough to leave me like this.

"Naturally, everyone said the guards on the estate had been doing their duty. I was a trespasser who'd jumped the wall. And believe me, none of the authorities was interested in pursuing it further."

Ana had listened to Elisabeth's story in silence. Now, looking at the vibrant young woman, her heart swelled in sympathy and outrage.

"I'm sorry," she said. Anything else seemed superfluous.

"Yeah, me too. But the point is, it seems pretty certain that the kindly Lord McCall is anything but. I asked my father to give me a detailed list of everyone he knew of who had any relationship with McCall. He didn't want to do it, but he finally gave in. He hasn't been the same since my accident. He never wanted me to be a reporter, much less devote my career to these things on the fringes. So we kept digging, Paul and I, with more reluctant help from my father, and we did manage to put together a basic picture.

"Lord McCall is a strange person. Never married, a connoisseur of religious art, incredibly wealthy. Every hundred days a group of men arrive at the castle by car or helicopter and stay for three or four days. None of the locals knows who they are, but the sense of the villagers is that they're as important as McCall himself. We've managed to identify some of them, though, and have followed the trail of their businesses, and I can tell you that there is no significant financial event in the world that can't be traced in one way or another to him and his friends."

"What does that mean?"

"It means they're a group of men who pull the strings, whose financial power is almost as big as governments', which means they influence governments around the world."

'And what does that have to do with the Templars?"

'Ana, for years now, I've been studying everything written on the order. I have a lot of time, and I've come to some conclusions. In addition to all the organizations that claim to be the heirs of the Temple, there is another, secret organization, made up of men who stay in the shadows, all very important, and who inhabit the very heart of the heart of society. I don't know how many there are or who they all are-or at least I'm not sure that all the ones I suspect of belonging to this group actually do. But I think that the true Templars, the heirs of Jacques de Molay are
there
and that McCall is one of them. I've learned a lot about his Scottish estate, and it's interesting. Down through the centuries it has passed from hand to hand, always to men who are single-solitary, even-and rich and well connected, and every one of them obsessed with keeping out strangers. I think there's a Templar army, if you will, a silent, well-structured army whose members hold high positions in virtually every country."

"You seem to be talking about a Masonic organization."

"No, what I'm referring to is the authentic, core organization, the one nothing is known about, not even that it exists at all. With the list my father gave me and the help of an excellent investigative reporter, I've managed to make a partial organizational chart of this new Temple. But it hasn't been easy, I'll tell you. Michael, the reporter, is dead-a year ago he had a fatal car accident. I suspect they killed him. Nasty things seem to happen to those who get too close. I know-I've followed what has happened to curious people like us."

'A pretty paranoid vision of things, this worldwide conspiracy, murders, cover-ups."

"Yes, but still, I think there are two worlds: the one we see, in which the vast majority of us live, and then another, underground world that we know nothing about. That's the place from which these various organizations-financial, Masonic, whatever-pull the strings. And that's where this new Temple can be found, in that underground world."

"Granting that you're right, which I'm not so sure of, it doesn't explain what relationship the Templars of today have to the shroud."

"I don't know. I'm sorry. I've told you all this because your Padre Yves could be…"

"Say it."

"He could be one of them."

"A
Templar in this secret society that you think-
think,
mind you-exists?"

"You think I'm seeing things, that this accident, this wheelchair, has made me paranoid, but I'm a reporter just like you are, Ana, and I can still tell reality from fiction. I've told you what I think. Now you can act as you see fit. If the shroud belonged to the Templars, and Padre Yves comes from the family of Geoffroy de Charney-"

"Even then," Ana interrupted her. "Even given all that, the shroud is not the cloth that Christ was buried in. We know it dates from de Charney's time, basically, and I think the Templars would have had to know it was a recent creation, or at least that its provenance was dubious-and I just don't see them staking everything on another half-baked relic, as they seem to have done…"