The Last Templar - Страница 18

Tess nodded. "Look, on its own, I agree, it's not conclusive. But then there's the encoder."

"This is the object the fourth horseman took. The one you were next to."

Tess moved in a bit closer, seeming more driven now. "Yes. I looked it up. It's far more advanced than anything that appeared for hundreds of years. I mean this thing is revolutionary. And the Templars were known to be masters of encryption. Codes were the backbone of their whole banking system. When the pilgrims traveling to the Holy Land deposited money with them, the receipts they were given were written in code, which could only be deciphered by Templars. That way, no one could forge a deposit note and cheat them. They were pioneers in this field and somehow, this encoder fits their sophisticated, secretive methods."

"But why would a Templar encoder be part of the Vatican's treasures?"

"Because the Vatican and the king of France both conspired to bring down the Order. They were both after its wealth. It's easy to imagine that whatever the Templars had in their preceptories ended up either at the Louvre or in the Vatican."

Reilly looked uncertain. "You mentioned something about a Latin saying?"

Tess visibly rallied herself. "That's what got me started. The fourth horseman, the one who took the encoder. When he had it in his hands, it was like this big religious moment for him. Like he was in a trance. And as he held it, he said something in Latin. I think he said "Veritas vos liberabit?"

She waited to see if Reilly knew what it meant. His quizzical look indicated he didn't. "It means 'the truth will set you free.' I looked into it, and, although it's a very widely used saying, it also happens to be a marking on a Templar castle in the south of France."

Tess could see that he was pondering what she'd just told him, but wasn't sure how to read him. She fidgeted with her cup, downing the last of her coffee, which had by now gone cold, then decided to keep going.

"I know it probably doesn't sound like much, but that's only until you start to understand the level of interest that the Templars inspire in people. Their origins, their activities and beliefs, and their violent demise are all shrouded in mystery. They have a huge following. You wouldn't believe the amount of books and material I found about them, and I've only scratched the surface. It's just phenomenal. And here's the thing. What usually triggers off the conjecture is that their fabulous wealth was never recovered."

"I thought that was why the king of France rounded them up," Reilly observed.

"It's what he was after. But he never found it. No one ever did. No gold, no jewels. Nothing.

And yet the Templars were known to have a phenomenal treasure trove. One historian claims the Templars discovered one hundred forty-eight tons of gold and silver in and around Jerusalem when they first got there, even before the donations from across Europe started pouring in."

"And no one knows what happened to it?"

"There are widely accepted claims that the night before die Templars were all arrested, twenty-four knights rode out of die Paris preceptory with several wagonloads of crates and escaped to the Adantic port of La Rochelle. They're supposed to have sailed away on board eighteen galleys, never to be seen again."

Reilly pondered the information. "So you're saying the museum's raiders were really after the encoder, in order to use it to somehow help them find the Templars' treasure?"

"Maybe. The question is, what was that treasure? Was it gold coins and jewelry, or something else, something more esoteric, something that," she hesitated, "requires a slightly bigger leap of faith."

She waited to see how that sat with him.

Reilly flashed her a comforting grin. "I'm still here, aren't I?"

She leaned forward and lowered her voice unconsciously. "A lot of these theories claim that the Templars were part of an age-old conspiracy to discover and guard some arcane knowledge. It could be a lot of things. They were said to be the custodians of many holy relics—there's a French historian who even tiiinks they had the embalmed head of Jesus—but one theory I kept coming across and that seemed to hold more water than the others was that it has to do with the Holy Grail

—which as you probably know isn't necessarily an actual cup or some kind of physical 'chalice' that Jesus supposedly drank from at the Last Supper, but could well be a metaphorical reference to a secret concerning the real events surrounding His death and the survival of His bloodline into medieval times."

"Jesus's bloodline?'

"Heretical as it may seem, this line of thought—and it's a very popular one, believe me—claims Jesus and Mary Magdalene had a child— maybe, probably more than one—that was raised in secret and hidden from the Romans, and that Jesus's bloodline has been a closely guarded secret for the last two thousand years, with all kinds of shadowy societies protecting His descendants and passing on their secret to a select group of 'illuminati.' Da Vinci, Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo, pretty much any illustrious name over the centuries—they're all supposed to have been part of this secret cabal of the holy bloodline's protectors." Tess paused and watched for Reilly's reaction. "I know it sounds ludicrous, but it's a popular story, a lot of people have worked on researching it, and we're not just talking about fiction bestsellers either, we're talking serious scholars and academics as well."

She studied Reilly, wondering what he must be thinking. If I had him with the treasure bit, I've definitely blown it now. Leaning back, she had to admit it sounded more and more preposterous now, hearing herself verbalize it out loud.

Reilly seemed to think about it for a moment, then a faint smile crossed his lips. "Jesus's bloodline, huh? If He did have a kid or two, and assuming they then had children of their own, and so on . . .

after two thousand years—which is, what, something like seventy or eighty generations later—it's exponential, there'd be thousands of them, the planet would be crawling with His descendants, wouldn't it?" He chuckled. "People really take this stuff seriously?"

"Absolutely. The Templars' missing treasure is one of the great unsolved mysteries of all time. It's 51

easy to see why people are drawn to it. The premise itself has a great hook: nine knights show up in Jerusalem, claiming to want to defend thousands of pilgrims. Just nine of them. Seems pretty ambitious by any standard outside of The Magnificent Seven, don't you think? On hearing this, King Baldwin gives them a prime slice of Jerusalem real estate, the Temple Mount, the site of the second Temple of Solomon that was destroyed by Titus's legions in 70 AD, its treasure plundered and brought back to Rome. So here's the big what if: what if the Temple's priests hid something there when they knew the Romans were about to pounce, something the Romans didn't find?"

"But the Templars did."

She nodded. "Perfect fodder for myths. It stays buried there for a thousand years, and then they dig it up. Then there's the so-called Copper Scroll they found in Qumran."

"The Dead Sea Scrolls are part of this too?"

Slow down, Tess. But she couldn't help herself, and kept plowing on.

"One of the scrolls specifically mentions huge quantities of gold and other valuables buried under the Temple itself, supposedly in twenty-four hoards. But it also mentions a treasure of an unspecified kind. What was it? We don't know. It could be anything."

"Okay, so where does the Turin Shroud figure into all this?" Reilly mused.

For a fleeting moment, an irritated look crossed her fine features before she composed her face into a gracious smile. "You're not buying into any of this, are you?"

Reilly raised his hands, looking slightly contrite. "No, look, I'm sorry. Please, keep going."

Tess collected her thoughts. "These nine ordinary knights are given part of a royal palace with stables, which were apparently big enough to accommodate two thousand horses. Why was Baldwin so generous toward them?"

"I don't know, maybe he was a forward thinker. Maybe he was blown away by their dedication."

"But that's the thing," she argued, undeterred. "They hadn't done anything yet. They get given this huge base to work from, and what do our magnificent nine do? Do they go out and perform all sorts of heroic deeds and make sure the pilgrims get to their destinations, like they're supposed to? No.

They spend their first nine years in the Temple. They don't leave it. They don't go out, they don't take on any new recruits. They just stay locked up there. For nine years."

"They either turned agoraphobic, or . . ."

"Or it was one big scam. The most widely accepted theory—and personally, I think it makes sense

—is they were digging. Looking for something buried there."

"Something the priests hid from Titus's legionnaires a thousand years earlier."

She sensed that she was finally getting through to him, and her eyes were ablaze with conviction.

"Exactly. The fact is that they lie low for nine years, then all of a sudden they burst onto the scene and start growing in stature and wealth at a dizzying rate, with the Vatican backing them wholeheartedly. Maybe they found something there, something buried under the Temple that made it all possible. Something that made the Vatican bend over backward to keep them happy—and evidence of Jesus having fathered a child or two would certainly fit the bill."