The Sword of the Templars (29 page)

“Only in part,” answered Duroc. “The Inquisition was much more than that. In effect it was the CIA of the Catholic Church, seeking out not just heretics among the general public but dissenters within the Church itself.” She shook her head. “If there is one thing the Catholic Church abhors it is change.”

“CIA?” Holliday said. “Isn’t that a bit extreme?”

“Not at all,” said Duroc. “The Dominicans, the so-called Hounds of God, actually sent spies to infiltrate other orders. Groups of papal assassins have been known since the time of the Borgias; during the Renaissance religious murder became a fine art. In more modern times there was the institution known as
Sodalitium Pianum
, the Fellowship of Pius, an organization within the Vatican that sought out officials within the Church teaching the so-called condemned doctrines.

“In France the group was obscurely called
La Sapiničre
, the Tree Farm—much like the CIA’s training school in Maryland called ‘The Farm.’ It was such an organization that masterminded the flight of SS officers through the ratlines of Rome and funneled black operation funds out of the Vatican Bank during the 1970s.” Duroc paused. “Oh, no, Monsieur Holliday, the intelligence networks of the Holy See are very much alive.”

Which explained the murderous priest in Jerusalem, but not why he was there in the first place. What possible secret could the Templar sword contain that would interest the Vatican a thousand years later? Axel Kellerma might be searching for war booty and his father’s legacy, but the Roman Catholic Church had more money than it knew what to do with.

Not money—power.

“What about Professor Bernheim’s idea about Saint-Emilion and the cave?” Peggy asked. “Is it worth a look?”

“Rubbish,” said Valerie Duroc, stubbing out her cigarette. “Saint-Emilion is almost two hundred kilometers from here—a hundred and twenty-five miles. During the Middle Ages that would represent at least a week’s travel. The caves of the hermit St. Emilion have been receiving pilgrims since the eighth century, and the underground galleries have been used to store wine for at least as long. It’s hard to imagine a worse place to hide a treasure.” She laughed.

“Maurice has a fanciful imagination; he would have made a wonderful lawyer but a very bad scientist. He tends to bend facts to his hypothesis rather than the other way around.” She shook her head again. “No, Monsieur Holliday, I am afraid your search for the mythical treasure of Roger de Flor ends here in La Rochelle.”

Holliday looked out over the marina and sipped his beer. Valerie Duroc lit another cigarette and leaned back in her chair. Peggy looked depressed. A huge yacht lumbered past them, big diesels throbbing. Two unbelievably beautiful women lounged on the after-deck in their bikinis. The name on the ship’s transom was picked out in black and gold:

LA ROCHA
PONTA DELGADA

“La Rocha,” he murmured to himself.

“Pardon?” Duroc said.

“The name La Rocha.”

“Portuguese,” replied the French professor. “The same as mine actually. It means ‘The Rock.’ ”

“Where’s Ponta Delgada?” Holliday asked, watching as the yacht motored out through the breakwater entrance.

“The island of Săo Miguel in the Azores,” said Duroc. “It’s the main way station for sailboats crossing the Atlantic.”

“Didn’t the Templars settle in the Azores after they were disbanded?” Holliday asked, vaguely recalling something about it from his reading on the subject.

“They exiled themselves to Portugal and called themselves the Knights of Christ. The ships Columbus used to cross the Atlantic carried the Catalan Cross on their sails.”

“Could de Flor have reached the Azores with his fleet, or at least a single ship?”

“Certainly,” said Duroc. “With ease.”

28

They drove the big Mercedes south, following the long azure curve of the Bay of Biscay. They flinched a little every time they saw one of the Gendarmerie Nationale’s blue Subaru chase cars speeding by but traveled without incident into the Basque Country and the rugged coastal mountains of the Pyrénées Atlantiques, crossing the border at Hendaye with barely a ripple. The only visible sign that they had left one country for another was the change in highway signs from blue to black on white.

Gone were the days of barbed wire and Franco’s bully boys armed with machine guns poking through your luggage; now there were only blue and gold Eurostar welcome signs and the occasional multilingual tourist information kiosk.

They drove through the wine country of Navarre and west across the plains of old Castile and finally to Salamanca and the old battlefields Holliday had only read about in Bernard Cornwell’s almost addictive Sharpe novels. They crossed the border into Portugal with even less fanfare than there had been crossing into Spain and continued south through the old capital of Coimbra then took the toll route down to Lisbon. The entire trip took two full days, and during that time there wasn’t the slightest indication that they were being pursued by the police or anyone else.

In Lisbon they booked a flight to the Azores on SATA and flew out of Portela Airport the following day. Holliday had picked up a Bradt guide to the Azores at their hotel the previous afternoon and had been reading it ever since.

“Of course this whole thing could be a wild-goose chase you know,” said Peggy. The Airbus A310 had reached cruising altitude, and they were heading out over the Atlantic, the European Continent falling away behind them. “Grandpa could have been chasing fireflies.” She shrugged her shoulders. “Maybe the Duroc woman is right; the search ended in La Rochelle.”

“I don’t think Henry Granger ever chased a firefly in his life,” answered Holliday. “It simply wasn’t in his nature. He was a historian; he gathered facts, checked sources, did his research, developed hypotheses, and constructed theories.”

“In other words he did it by the book.”

“That’s right,” nodded Holliday.

“But it doesn’t make sense,” argued Peggy. “He had the sword for decades, and he kept it hidden. Then all of a sudden he gets in touch with Carr-Harris and goes running off to England.”

“And then Germany,” added Holliday.

“Assume that means Kellerman,” said Peggy. “So what got him going after all those years?”

“Maybe it wasn’t his interest,” said Holliday. “Maybe it was someone else’s interest in him.”

“Like Broadbent?”

“The lawyer?” Holliday said. He shrugged. “I think Broadbent’s a latecomer, nothing more than a hired gun. I think Kellerman’s people used him. That story about his father and the sword was completely bogus. He was fishing for information.”

“So you think Kellerman is behind this?” Peggy asked.

“It’s either him or this
Sodalitium Pianum
or whatever Duroc called her Vatican assassins.”

“You believe her?” Peggy said a little skeptically. “We’re getting into grassy-knoll-people-going-around-with-aluminum-foil-on-their-heads-to-keep-out-the- cosmic-rays territory here, don’t you think?”

The stewardess came around with a cart loaded down with cheese sandwiches wrapped up in plastic and cans of Fanta Orange. They took one of each. The cheese tasted like something you’d use for an insole. They were a long way from La Tourelle, the little café in Paris.

“Did you know that Fanta was invented in Nazi Germany by a chemist from Atlanta to replace Coca-Cola?” Holliday said. “They made it from saccharin, scrapings from apple cider presses, and cheese curds.”

“And that is relevant how?” Peggy asked, frowning at the familiar can in her hand.

“It just shows how truth really can be stranger than fiction,” he explained. “The Borgias did exist, and some of them really were assassins just like she said.”

“But really, secret societies, Doc? Come on.”

“Why not?” Holliday said. “A secret society is really nothing more than a network, like the Mafia is a network, or the Bush family and Skull and Bones at Yale. Put it in the right context, and you’ve got something that Oprah would approve of.”

“Dead priests in the streets of Jerusalem would never wind up being on her approved list of things to see on your next summer vacation,” said Peggy with a snort.

“The point is, things like Duroc’s
Sodalitium Pianum
or
La Sapiničre
really exist. That priest was sent to kill us, there’s no disputing that. He was an assassin. Even the Portuguese have secret societies—the
Carbonária
was a military group of Freemasons who were responsible for killing King Carlos I back in the early nineteen hundreds.”

“Another history lesson, Doc?” Peggy warned.

“Sorry.” He took a sip of the Fanta, thought about cheese curds and Nazis and put the can down on his seat table.

“The Azores is a long way to go on the basis of a name you saw on the back of a boat,” said Peggy, staring out the window at a fleet of fluffy white clouds sailing by, all sails set.

“It’s more than that,” responded Holliday. “I’m doing this the way Uncle Henry would. Make the hypothesis fit the facts, not the other way around. When you get enough facts together to make an overwhelming case then you go from hypothesis to theory, and the only way to prove the theory is by—”

“Finding the treasure that Roger de Flor took away from Castle Pelerin,” completed Peggy.

“Which is why we’re going to the Azores,” said Holliday.

“You have enough facts to prove the hypothesis?” Peggy asked.

“A lot of suppositions at least.”

“So suppose away.” Peggy grinned.

“Suppose you’re a pirate. Where do you bury your treasure?”

“A desert island.”

“Not a hermit’s cave in France or a busy port like La Rochelle.”

“Why not leave it at Castle Pelerin?” Peggy argued.

“Because like Jerusalem itself, you have no idea of how long it’s going to be before the place is overrun by the godless infidels. Pirates bury treasure to keep it away from prying eyes and sticky fingers.”

“But maybe it’s all smoke and mirrors,” argued Peggy. “Like I said before, what if the whole idea of a Templar treasure is a myth?”

“They dug up the Temple Mount for nine years; they were looking for something. The stories say it was the Ark of the Covenant, but who knows?”

“People dig for treasure all the time,” said Peggy. “I used to do it in Grandpa’s backyard, looking for artifacts from the Cattaraugus Indians. I never found so much as an arrowhead.”

“Templar
treasure
is one thing. Templar
wealth
is another. They were unbelievably rich; that’s established fact. It’s also fact that they liquidated their assets shortly before they were disbanded. Those assets went somewhere. The money is out there.”

“And you think it’s in the Azores?”

“It fits. For one thing, they’re the nearest thing to desert islands close enough to La Rochelle to be useful. The Catalan Atlas shows a few of the islands in 1375, but colonization didn’t really begin for another hundred years or so. According to the guide I just read, Corvo, the smallest of the islands, wasn’t discovered until the middle of the fifteenth century. Even now only about three hundred people live there.”

“Okay,” nodded Peggy. “I’ll give you the desert island.”

“What?” Holliday laughed. “Now we’re doing
Deal or No Deal
?”

“Something like that,” said Peggy. “I need more proof.”

“Kellerman,” responded Holliday.

“What’s Kellerman’s connection with the Azores?”

“A ship called the MS
Schwabenland
. It operated under Himmler’s orders for the
Ahnenerbe
, looking for evidence of their so-called Aryan ancestors in South America and Antarctica in particular. The ship operated out of the Azores before the war and even during, even though Portugal was supposedly neutral. Maybe one of the people on the
Schwabenland
got a whiff of a Templar treasure somewhere on the Azores, and the mythology grew from there.”

“Thin, but barely possible, I suppose,” she said. “What about Duroc’s Vatican assassins?”

“Settling old scores?”

“Really thin,” said Peggy. “Can’t you do any better than that?”

“At a guess I’d say it probably had something to do with keeping secrets. The Vatican has been getting a lot of bad press recently, and with a German Pope on the papal throne they’d be particularly vulnerable to bringing up old ghosts connected with Nazi Germany.”

“So that’s it?”

“Pretty much, except for the most important thing.”

“Which is?”

“Uncle Henry again.”

“What about him?”

“He never started anything without finishing it, not in his whole life,” said Holliday emphatically. “Everything we’ve done so far has been at his direction. He didn’t put that sword where he knew we’d find it for no reason. He
wanted
us to do this. He planned on it. He knew we’d follow in his footsteps no matter where the trail led.” Holliday held up his hand and counted off the fingers one by one: “England, Germany, Italy, Jerusalem, France, and now the Azores. It’s the last link in the chain.”

“I still don’t get why he waited more than half a century to start this wild-goose chase,” said Peggy. “If he’d known all this for all that time you’d think he would have found the treasure a long time ago.”

“I know,” said Holliday. “I can’t figure that out either.”

Two hours later the big, wide-body jet landed at Ponta Delgada Airport on the island of Săo Miguel. It was small, fewer than fifty thousand people, a city of churches and fine seventeenth- and eighteenth-century buildings reflecting the island chain’s rich past as the staging base for virtually anyone hoping to reach the riches of the New World. For the most part it was now a city of tourists.

They booked in to the Hotel do Colégio in the town center, ate a tasty bouillabaisse of various unidentified bits of seafood to counteract the cheese sandwich and the Fanta, and then went to bed, reconvening at the breakfast buffet the following morning. Once again the weather outside was perfect: clear skies, bright sunshine, and a cool onshore breeze coming in off the bay.