The Last Templar - Страница 27

Tess spotted her bag on the table, her wallet lying open beside it, and she suddenly remembered her cell phone. Vaguely, she recalled hearing its ringtone before blacking out. She remembered feeling her way around the phone while it was still ringing and was sure she'd managed to hit a button, establishing the connection. She took a step to grab her bag but before she could get to it, a sudden noise spun her around. She realized that it came from the top of the stairs: a door opening, then closing with a metallic clunk. Then footsteps were coming down the steps and a pair of legs appeared, a man's. He was wearing a long overcoat.

Hastily, she stepped back as he came into view. Vance was looking her way and smiled warmly and, for an instant, she wondered if she were imagining what he had done to knock her out.

He moved toward her, carrying a large, plastic bottle of water.

"I'm really sorry, Tess," he said apologetically. "But I didn't have much choice."

Taking a glass from among the books on the table, he poured some water and handed it to her. Then he searched his pockets until he found a foil strip of tablets. "Here. These are strong painkillers.

Take one and drink as much water as you can. It'll help with the headache."

She glanced at the foil and recognized the brand. The strip looked untouched.

"It's just Voltarol. Go on, take it. You'll feel better."

She hesitated for a moment, then snapped a tablet out of the foil wrap and swallowed it with a gulp of water. He refilled her glass and she greedily drank that down, too. Still stunned by what had happened to her, she stared at Vance, her eyes striving to focus in the light of the candles. "Where are we? What is this place?"

His face took on a saddened, almost confused look. "I guess you could say it's home."

"Home? You don't actually live here, do you?"

He didn't answer.

Tess was having trouble making sense of what was going on. "What do you want from me?"

Vance was scrutinizing her. "You came looking for me."

"I came looking for you to help me figure something out," she snapped angrily. "I didn't expect you to shoot me and kidnap me like this."

"Calm down, Tess. No one's been kidnapped."

"Oh? So I suppose I'm free to leave."

Vance looked away, thinking. Then he turned to face her. "You may not want to leave. Once you've heard my side of the story."

"Believe me, I'd just as soon get the hell out of here."

"Well . . . maybe you're right." He seemed lost, even ashamed. "Maybe it is a little more complicated than that."

Tess felt the anger in her giving way to caution. What are you doing? Don't antagonize him. Can't you see he's lost it? He's unstable. He's into beheading people. Just stay ealm. She didn't know where to look or what to say. Glancing again toward the encoder, Tess spotted an opening in the wall against which the table stood. It was small, square, and shuttered. She felt a surge of hope, which just as quickly faded as she realized he wouldn't have left an escape route uncovered. He might be unhinged, but he isn't stupid.

Her eyes were drawn to the encoder again. That's what it was all about. She felt she needed to know more. She willed herself to calm down, then asked, "It's Templar, isn't it?"

"Yes . . . And to think I'd been to the Vatican library several times, and all the time it must have been sitting there in some vault, gathering dust. I don't think they even realized what they had."

"And after all these years, it still works?"

"It needed some cleaning up and some oiling, but yes, it still works. Perfectly. The Templars were meticulous craftsmen."

Tess studied the device. She noticed that on the table beside it were numerous sheets of paper. Old documents, like sheets from a manuscript. She looked at Vance, who was watching her. It seemed to her like he was almost enjoying her confusion.

"Why are you doing this?" she finally asked. "Why did you need it so badly?"

"It all started in France, quite a few years ago." He cast a wistful glance at the old documents sitting by the encoder, his mind drifting. "In fact, it was shortly after Martha and Annie died," he said somberly. "I'd left the university, I was . . . confused, and angry. I had to get away from it all. I ended up in the south of France, in the Languedoc. I'd been there before, on walking trips with Martha. It's beautiful down there. You can easily imagine what it must have been like back then.

They have a very rich history, though a lot of it is rather bloody . . . Anyway, while I was there, I came across a story that just stayed with me. A story that had taken place several hundred years ago.

It was about a young priest who was called in to a dying old man's deathbed to give him the last rites and hear his confession. The old man was believed to have been one of the last surviving Templars. The priest went in, even though the man wasn't part of his congregation and hadn't asked, in fact had even refused, at first, to see him. Finally, he relented, and, legend has it that when the priest came out, he was white with shock. Not just his face, but even his hair had turned white. They say he never smiled again after that day. And years later, just before he eventually died, he let the truth slip. It turned out that the Templar had told him his story and had shown him some papers.

Something that literally shocked the life out of him. And that was it. I couldn't shake that story, I couldn't get away from the image of this priest's hair turning white, just from spending a few minutes with a dying old man. From that point onward, finding out what this manuscript was, or where it might be, became—"

An obsession, Tess thought.

"—a mission, of sorts." Vance smiled lighdy, his mind clearly conjuring up images of distant, cloistered libraries. "I don't know how many dusty archives I've rooted through, in museums, churches, and monasteries all across France, even across the Pyrenees in the north of Spain." He paused, then reached out a hand and rested it on the papers that sat beside the encoder. "And then one day, I found something. In a Templar castle."

A castle with an inscription on its portal. Tess felt light-headed. She thought of the Latin words she had heard him say, about the Latin saying Clive had told her was carved into the lintel at the Chateau de Blanchefort, and took another look at the papers. She could see that they were ancient, handwritten documents. "You found the actual manuscript?" she asked, surprised at feeling some of the thrill she knew Vance must have experienced. Then a flash of enlightenment struck her. "But they were coded. That's why you needed the encoder."

He nodded slowly, affirming her guess. "Yes. It was so frustrating. For years, I knew I was sitting on something important, I knew I had the right papers, but I couldn't read them. Simple substitution or skipping codes didn't work, but then I knew they were more clever than that. I uncovered arcane references to Templar coding devices, but couldn't find any of the machines anywhere. It really seemed hopeless. All of their possessions had been destroyed when they were rounded up in 1307.

And then, fate intervened and brought up this little jewel from the bowels of the Vatican where it had been sitting all those years, hidden away long ago and all but forgotten."

"And now you can read them."

He patted the sheets. "Like the morning paper."

Tess looked at the documents. She chided herself for the feeling of wild excitement that was coursing through her and had to remind herself that lives had been lost and that this man was quite possibly deranged and, given recent events, undoubtedly dangerous. The discovery he was working on was potentially a big one, bigger than anything she'd ever had the chance to uncover, but it was drenched in innocent blood, and she couldn't allow herself to forget that. It also had a darkness to it, something deeply unsettling about its history that she couldn't dismiss.

She studied Vance, who again seemed lost in his own thoughts. "What are you hoping to find?"

"Something that's been lost for too long." His eyes were narrow and intense. "Something that'll make things right."

Something worth killing for, she wanted to add, but decided against it.

Instead, she remembered what she had read, about Vance's suggestion that the founder of the Templars was a Cathar. Vance had just told her that he'd found the letter in the Languedoc—where he had suggested, much to the affront of the French historian whose article she'd read, that Hughes de Payens's family came from. She wanted to know more about that, but before she could speak up, she heard a jarring noise from above, like a brick scraping against a stone floor.

Abruptly, Vance jumped to his feet. "Stay here," he ordered.

Her eyes darted up to the ceiling, looking for its source. "What is it?"

"Just stay here," he insisted as he moved urgently. He went behind the table and pulled out the Taser he had used on her, then decided against it and discarded it. He then rummaged through a pouch and pulled out another gun, this one a more traditional handgun, and awkwardly chambered a round as he hurried to the steps.

He climbed them briskly and, when his legs were out of view, she heard the metallic thud as he closed and locked the door behind him.

Chapter 35

De Angelis cursed to himself the instant his foot nudged the charred piece of timber off its sitting and disturbed the settlement of debris around him. Moving stealthily through the burned-out church wasn't easy; scorched rafters and chunks of broken stone from the collapsed roof littered the dark, damp space around him.