The Isaac Question: Templars and the Secret of the Old Testament (Templars in America Series Book 5)

by David S. Brody

  In a perverse sort of way, she hoped Cam was correct. If Randall really was murdered, and the crime was related to the events Cam just listed, that swung the needle even further toward the photographs being fake. It didn’t prove anything for certain—Cam’s enemies could have caught him in a compromising situation and used the photos to humiliate him or for some reason derail their pending marriage—but it at least made Cam’s claim plausible. After all, what are a few doctored photos compared to murder? She voiced her thoughts aloud.

  Cam nodded. “Your logic is sound, but you’re forgetting one thing: Whoever murdered Randall could do the same to us.”

  “Theoretically, yes. But it seems to me that someone is trying to use you, manipulate you. Not murder you.”

  “For now, yes. But once they get what they want?”

  They turned the corner. She felt the urge to go for an ice cream, to sit on a bench and count stars and tell each other stories about their childhood. But that’s not who or where they were right now. “You know, we’ve been assuming there’s only one person trying to pull your strings. But maybe we’re wrong to look at it that way.” She glanced at him. “Who wants what? Let’s start with Zuberi.”

  “Short answer is he wanted me to take the Brandeis job.”

  “But why?”

  “I think there are two things going on. Carrington wants to promote the story of her ancestors discovering the New World, and Zuberi wants me to find more evidence Scotland was first settled by Egyptians.”

  “Has he asked you to look into the Scota stuff?”

  “Not directly, but it’s understood. He’s always sending me articles and stuff.”

  “Okay, who else? What did Randall want?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know if I’ll ever know. The Masons have definitely been feeding me information about the Druids and ancient Egyptians.” He shrugged. “But who knows why?”

  “Well, okay, we have an intersection point here with the ancient Egyptians. Zuberi and Randall were both directing you toward them.”

  He nodded. “And my research on the ancient Egyptians led me to the Isaac Question revelations.”

  “Which is pretty toxic stuff. So maybe that’s what this is all about.”

  He popped the lock and they climbed into the SUV. She continued the conversation. “What about the lottery ticket? Does that guy tie in at all?”

  Cam shook his head. “If he does, I don’t see how. That whole thing makes no sense. The fake baby, the lottery ticket, throwing me into the harbor. Just weird.”

  “How about the email, the guardian angel guy?”

  “From what he said, he wants to help me. And I haven’t heard boo from him since his first email.”

  “Anyone else?”

  “Well, don’t forget your original theory that whoever sent me the deed to the Groton property was trying to stop our research. It seems like Zuberi, Randall, even the guardian angel guy are all supporters of it.”

  “So maybe there’s another player in all this, someone trying to stop you? Someone who might want to stop Randall from helping you? The guy who attacked you on your run mentioned someone had been following us in Connecticut? Who’s that?”

  Cam turned onto the highway. “Well, there’s actually two mysteries here: Who was the guy in Connecticut, and who was the guy on my run trying to figure out who the guy in Connecticut was?”

  “And then who was the guy following him? The guy who saved you? So there’s actually three guys. I wonder if that third guy was the guardian angel?”

  “Could be. Or I wandered onto a Three Stooges movie set.”

  She smiled. “Okay, so we have Zuberi, Randall Sid and the Freemasons, lottery ticket guy, guardian angel guy, our tail in Connecticut, and the guy who attacked you on your run.”

  “Plus whoever deeded me the property and sent the pictures, assuming it’s not someone you already mentioned.” He turned and smiled. “I’m glad you’ve straightened this all out for me.”

  “It is a bit bollixed up, I admit.”

  Cam stared ahead, chewing his lip. “You told me a few weeks ago the best thing to do was just keep doing our research. Someone is trying to stop us, and we can’t give in.” He glanced at her quickly. “But I’m worried about you and Astarte. Maybe you guys should get out of town for awhile.”

  Amanda shook her head. “And go where? If you’re right, and someone did kill Randall, that means that Samantha woman was a paid assassin. I don’t think people like that would have any trouble finding Astarte and me no matter where we hid.”

  “Fair point.”

  A ping from Cam’s phone interrupted their conversation. Cam glanced down. “An email from one of the Masons who was there tonight. Randall’s lieutenant. Can you read it?”

  “Dear Cameron,” she read. “Randall gave me strict instructions to email the attached note to you if anything should happen to him. Obviously contact me with any questions.”

  Amanda opened the attachment from Randall and continued reading. “Not to be melodramatic, but if you are reading this it means I am dead. Perhaps from natural causes, perhaps not. It does not matter. But there are things I still have not shared with you, things that will help you better understand the connections between the Masons and the Druids. The Templars had knowledge, which they passed down to us, that the Druids came to America early in the Dark Ages to hide the head of a very important man.” Amanda looked up at Cam, sensing the importance of the revelation. “Again with the head.”

  Nodding, he breathed a singled word. “Baphomet.”

  “Yes.” In her mind, she pictured a stone chamber with a niche recessed deep inside. Inside the niche rested a treasured ancient skull, illuminated once a year—on the winter or summer solstice—by the rays of the life-giving sun. Her body reacted to the image with an involuntary shudder.

  She read on. “The Christians were taking over the British Isles at that time and the Druids did not want the Christians to have the head. The Druids believed the head possessed great power—visionary power—and that whoever possessed it would see the future and rule the land. No hiding place in Europe was safe, but the head needed to be preserved, so the Druids brought it to America. This was in the early 6th Century. Later, in the late 1100s, the Templars came back to retrieve it. This head, I’m sure you’ve already deduced, later became known as Baphomet. Everyone thinks the Templars came to America to hide something. And later that’s what they did—they hid things from the Church. But the first time they came over, they came to retrieve the Baphomet head.”

  Cam let out a whistle. “Wow. That’s good stuff.”

  “Wisdom from the grave. I wonder why he didn’t tell you before.”

  “He liked to feed this stuff to me in tiny morsels, like to a dog.” Cam smiled. “It kept me coming back.” He shifted lanes. “How far are the Catskills from the Putnam County stone chambers Shannon was telling us about?”

  “I’m with you,” Amanda said. They both were thinking about a twelfth-century travel log they possessed which described a Templar journey to New York’s Catskill Mountains. In fact, the log—which they called a codex—along with maps and carved stones had been given to them by Astarte’s uncle just before his death. If the Templars had been searching for the head in the beehive chambers of New England and New York as Randall was suggesting, that could explain why they were in the Catskills in the late 1100s.

  Amanda and Cam belonged to an organization called New England Antiquities Research Association, which studied and catalogued the mysterious stone structures in and around New England. On the group’s website Amanda found a list of chambers in New York’s Putnam County. She pulled up a map on her phone. “It looks like the chambers are mostly located along the Hudson River, maybe fifty miles south of the Catskills. A pretty straight shot.”

  “Okay,” Cam said, switching lanes, “so the Templars were going up and down the Hudson looking for the head. But here’s the obvious question: Whose head is it?”

&n
bsp; “It has to be John the Baptist, doesn’t it?” she replied.

  “You said he was beheaded by some Druid visiting Jerusalem—”

  “Mug Ruith was the executioner. He left the body out to be eaten by vultures, but the head was never found.”

  “So maybe this Mug Ruith took the trophy home with him to Ireland, where the Druids kept it and venerated it as the grand prize in the Cult of the Head worship.” He paused. “But why would the Druids venerate a Christian prophet?” Cam asked.

  “At the time he was beheaded, there was no such thing as Christianity, at least not as we know it. John the Baptist was just a prophet who people believed had amazing visionary powers. And remember, that’s the reason the Druids preserved these skulls—they believed the skulls could look into the future and serve as shepherds to the living. So a few centuries later, when the Christians started squeezing the Druids out, the Druids needed to hide the head, as Randall suggests.”

  “So off to America.” Cam nodded. “It works.” He paused, drumming the steering wheel with his finger. “The one thing that doesn’t make sense is why would Brendan the Navigator, a Christian, hide the skull from other Christians?”

  Amanda turned in her seat. “Don’t forget, the legends say there were three Druids on the voyage with Brendan. Maybe Brendan had no idea.”

  Cam nodded. “The pieces fit together. Later the Templars learned of the head across the Atlantic. And they had long venerated John the Baptist.”

  “Would the Templars have risked crossing the pond to get his skull? At the time, it would have been considered incredibly dangerous.” Amanda had a strong opinion on this question, but she wanted to hear Cam’s thoughts first.

  “Would they?” Cam sniffed. “They would have swum across if they had to.”

  During the rest of the car ride home from Charlestown they discussed whether it made sense for Amanda and Astarte to go into hiding. In the end Amanda carried the argument. “Honestly, Cam, I don’t think Astarte and I have anything to do with this. If they want to stop your research, they’ll come after you, not us. But even so, I think we’re safest here. We have the alarm system now, the police are watching the house, and we know all the neighbors so any strangers lurking around would stick out like an Adam’s apple on a beauty queen.”

  Cam smiled. “I’ve never heard that one before.”

  “I thought about using turd in a punch bowl, but it seemed vulgar even for me.”

  He smiled again. He actually liked her vulgarity.

  “Anyhow,” she continued, “like I said earlier, if some professional assassin is after us, I doubt we’d be able to hide for long anyway.”

  He nodded. “Okay. But no more school bus. And no more babysitters—one of us always needs to be with her.”

  Ten minutes later they pulled into Astarte’s friend’s driveway. “Let’s go for an ice cream,” Cam said as they left the house with Astarte. It was important to keep up some sense of normalcy, even as the world swirled around them.

  “I thought you liked mayonnaise for dessert,” Astarte teased.

  He hoisted her over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. “You better watch out or you’ll find mayo in your toothpaste.”

  At the ice cream stand Astarte joined some friends on a swing set. “Sorry to talk shop again,” Amanda said, “but I’ve been thinking about something you told me when you got back from Washington, about how Rosslyn Chapel was meant to tell the history of Scotland with its carvings and symbolism.”

  Cam kept one eye on Astarte. “You don’t agree?”

  “No, I think you’re spot on.” She spooned some black raspberry frozen yogurt into her mouth. “But I don’t think you took it far enough. In addition to the Green Men and the sun worship and the ties to the Druids and the Egyptians and Freemasons there’s one other thing—carvings that depict North American plants.”

  Cam knew about these. The theory was that Prince Henry Sinclair brought back drawings or even samples from his 1398 journey and the Earl of Rosslyn, Prince Henry’s grandson, carved them into the chapel as a nod to the journey.

  Amanda continued. “Everything else carved into the chapel describes early Scottish history, things that tell the story of early Scotland. These plants are out of place. They tell the story of America, and even of the Sinclair family, but not of Scotland.” She paused. “Unless there was something in America that relates back to the early days of Scotland.”

  “Ah,” Cam smiled. “You’re talking about the head.”

  “Yes. The Sinclairs were prominent members of both the Knights Templar and the Freemasons. If anyone knew about the head, it would be them.” She lifted her chin. “And I’ll take it one step further: I bet the head is now hidden someplace at Rosslyn Chapel. There have long been rumors of a skull hidden in or under the Apprentice Pillar,” she said, referring to the ornately-carved pillar in the center of the Chapel. “In fact...,” Amanda said, pausing as she tapped at her phone. “Yes, here it is.”

  “What?”

  “A letter from Mary of Guise in 1546 to William Sinclair. Mary of Guise was Queen of Scotland and later served as regent for her daughter, Mary Queen of Scots. During the gap between these two reigns she visited Rosslyn Chapel. Apparently William Sinclair showed her some important secret, because afterward she wrote to Sinclair and said to him: ‘We shall be loyal and a true Mistress to Sinclair, his Council and the Secret shown to us, which we shall keep secret.’”

  “That’s fairly … subservient language for a queen to use toward a lord, isn’t it?”

  “Very much so. Rather than Sinclair pledging his loyalty to the queen, it is the queen promising to be loyal to the Sinclairs and not betray their secret.”

  “So that must have been some secret Sinclair showed her.”

  Amanda smiled. “That’s why I read it to you.”

  As Cam scooped up the remains of his ice cream, he considered the possibility of the venerated head originally hidden in America being later secreted within Rosslyn Chapel, and eventually shown to the queen under an oath of secrecy. “So how would the head make it to Rosslyn? We know that when the Templars fled France in 1307, lots of them ended up in Scotland.”

  Amanda nodded. The Templars, commanded by another William Sinclair, fought on the side of Robert the Bruce in 1314 at the Battle of Bannockburn. The famous battle for Scottish independence took place—perhaps not coincidentally—on June 24, John the Baptist’s birthday. “The Templars turned the battle for the Scots after all was thought lost at Bannockburn,” she said. “After that, Robert the Bruce welcomed the Templars with open arms.”

  “Along with their treasures,” Cam said. Including, quite possibly, the priceless head they retrieved from America more than a hundred years earlier. Cam smiled. “Think about it: What better place to hide a Druidic skull than inside a chapel filled with dozens of little pagan Green Men to stand guard?”

  Cam tossed and turned on the pull-out couch. It was Saturday night and he was sleeping alone. Or not sleeping. What had happened to his idyllic world?

  Venus, hearing his movements, trotted down the basement stairs to keep him company. She rolled onto her back and he rubbed her stomach. “Your only worry in life is who’s going to give you your next belly rub.” She cocked her head in an apparent effort to remind him she also chased squirrels from the yard. “Well, if I’m not going to sleep, I might as well do some research.” He opened his laptop and sat on an old recliner in the darkened basement

  One of the loose ends he needed to chase down was the Scottish Stone of Destiny. The stone, also known as the Stone of Scone, was an oblong block of red-gray sandstone used for centuries in the coronation of Scottish and English monarchs. Cam found a picture of the stone, with a couple of metal rings at either end to aid in transportation, in its location at Edinburgh Castle.

  Stone of Destiny, Edinburgh, Scotland

  The stone was believed to have originated in the Middle-East and was also called Jacob’s Pillow—it was upon this st
one that the Biblical Jacob supposedly rested his head while he dreamt of God promising him the land of Canaan. Was this dream inserted into the Old Testament by early writers, Cam wondered, as another attempt to buttress Jacob’s claim to the Holy Land in light of his father Isaac’s questionable parentage?

  In any event, tonight Cam’s research focused on how the stone found its way to Scotland. But what he uncovered as he dug made him want to shake Amanda awake and share the revelation.

  Using as his source a 14th century book called the Scotchichronicon, or Chronicle of the Scots, Cam learned that the original Stone of Destiny—rather than being a block of red-gray sandstone—was actually an ornately carved marble throne of Egyptian origin. In a spine-tingling case of dots connecting perfectly, this marble throne had been brought out of Egypt by none other than Princess Scota at the behest of her father, the Pharaoh Akhenaton. Akhenaton had abdicated his throne, but apparently only in the figurative sense—he took steps to make sure the actual seat of power remained in his family.

  Cam stared blankly at the wall. The moon had broken through the clouds, bathing the room in a soft yellow glow. Here was another tie-in to the Scota legend, another piece of tangible evidence tying the Scots to the ancient Egyptians. Akhenaton surely kept for himself other symbols of his kingly authority—his scepter, for example. But his daughter Scota would need authentication of her claim to the royal throne as well. What better validation could there be than the throne itself?

  So what happened to this throne? How had it morphed from an ornately carved seat of marble to a hunk of sandstone? The answer, as was often the case, was convoluted.

  Best Cam could tell, in 1296 the Scots—knowing that Edward I of England intended to invade Scotland and take the Stone of Destiny as plunder and as validation of his rule over Scotland—substituted the throne with another famous stone known as the Bethel Stone. It was the Bethel Stone, not the Stone of Destiny, which the Biblical Jacob had used as his pillow and which now was on display in Edinburgh Castle. The Scots allowed Edward to plunder this ancient Biblical relic, saving for themselves the even more valuable marble throne of Akhenaton.