Washington, thought Holliday. So the priest had also been a spy, but for who?
“But why did you expect us in particular?” he asked.
“Because I heard that Henry had died,” answered Rodrigues. “I knew that you would come eventually.”
“How does that follow?” Peggy asked.
“I knew the sword would bring you,” said Rodrigues simply. He sipped his coffee, looking at them over the rim of his cup, dark eyes twinkling.
“You knew about the sword?” Holliday said, stunned.
“Four of them actually,” offered Rodrigues. “Aos, Hesperios, Boreas, and Anatos. The so-called Xiphкphoros Peritios Anemos.”
“East, West, North, and South, the Swords of the Four Winds in ancient Greek,” translated Holliday.
“Quite so,” said Rodrigues. “The benefits of a classical education, I see,” he smiled. “The Swords of the Four Winds. The sword your uncle had was named Hesperios, the Sword of the West. It was carried by a man named the Chevalier Guillaume de Gisors, not to be confused with the man of the same name who is sometimes reputedly referred to as a Prior of Sion. This Gisors was a simple knight in the service of Henry II of Jerusalem. The city of course had fallen long before, but by then Saladin’s treasure had been removed, first to Castle Pelerin and then to Cyprus.”
“Saladin’s treasure?” Holliday asked. “Richard the Lionheart’s Saladin?”
“His full name was Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, a warrior born in what is now known as Iraq. Tikrit to be precise.”
“But how is it his treasure?” Holliday said. “Didn’t the Knights Templar excavate the treasure from the Temple of Solomon?”
“The Templars never excavated anything from Jerusalem,” said Rodrigues. “Saladin was no fool. He knew that he couldn’t hold on to Jerusalem forever. Eventually it would fall again, and given the emotions involved it would probably be pillaged and sacked by whoever held it next.
“Saladin knew bloodshed was almost inevitable, but he knew that the treasure had to be saved above all else. At that point the Knights Templar were the greatest united force Saladin had to negotiate with; on the promise that they would neither reveal the origins of the treasure nor disperse it he secretly let the Templars remove it from the city. Had the negotiations ever come to light it is probable that both Saladin and the Templar leaders would have been executed for treason.”
“This makes no sense at all,” said Holliday. “You’re saying that Saladin, the crusaders’ nemesis, the arch-enemy of Christianity, gave away the treasure to the Templar Knights?”
“He saved the treasure,” said Rodrigues. “Had he not, it would almost certainly have been destroyed. It was the act of a noble and honorable man.” Rodrigues smiled sadly. “Unfortunately it was not an act that ingratiated him to Pope Clement or to Philip of France, both of whom wanted the treasure for themselves.”
“There’s no documentation of this in the historical record,” said Holliday. “Nothing at all.”
“The historical record, as you well know, Doctor, is written much later than the history itself. All history is hindsight. It is well-known that the Templars did business with their enemies; trading with the enemy is a fact of life, even now. Standard Oil filled the tanks of submarines sinking British ships during World War Two. IBM facilitated the record keeping of Adolf Eich mann at Dachau and Auschwitz-Birkenau. American-owned hotels line the beaches of Veradero in Cuba. It was the same during the Crusades. After all, Richard the Lionheart used a sword forged in Damascus.”
“So what happened to the four swords?” Peggy asked.
“The four swords, each with the same message to the Templar hierarchy at Clairvaux, were sent off with four separate messengers, each blade backing up the others in case one or more was lost. None ever reached their destination. Roger de Flor sailed off with Saladin’s treasure and vanished into history, its location a secret.”
“First to La Rochelle, and then here,” said Holliday.
“So some people say,” murmured Rodrigues.
“How does Uncle Henry figure into all of this?”
“There had always been rumors that Boreas, the Sword of the North, had reached Scotland with some of Roger de Flor’s ships. Sir Henry St. Clair was thought to be the Boreas messenger, which is probably how the rumors started. Your uncle became interested in the sword mythology during his time at Oxford, which is of course where our paths begin to cross. It was Henry who discovered the connection to Mussolini and the Hesperios sword, which he eventually traced to Berchtesgaden and Hitler’s lair.”
“The existence of which he kept a secret for the rest of his life,” said Holliday flatly, still finding it difficult to believe that he was having this conversation in the belly of an extinct volcano in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
“Of course he kept it a secret,” said Rodrigues. “To reveal it would have had disastrous consequences. It was the end of the war; the Middle East was in ferment; Israel was barely a dream, and a fragile one at that. The Catholic Church wasn’t in much better shape. Over the years the situation has gone from bad to worse.”
“How does La Sapiniиre fit into all of this, the Sodalitium Pianum or whatever it was called?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Because one of their people tried to kill us in Jerusalem,” said Holliday. “A priest, like you.”
“I told you,” said Rodrigues, “I am no longer a priest.”
“That doesn’t matter. What interest does the Vatican have in all of this?”
“The same as it did eight hundred years ago,” answered Rodrigues. “Power. Or the lack of it. The Saladin treasure would make the Roman Catholic Church an irrelevancy in one blow if it was revealed. The political machinery that has evolved in the Holy See over a thousand years would come down like Humpty Dumpty off his wall. There would be no way to put it back together again.”
“I don’t get it,” said Peggy. “The Vatican has more money than it knows what to do with. You’re trying to tell me they’d hire killers just to get more?”
“You’d be surprised at what the Church is capable of,” said Rodrigues. “But this is not about money. It never was.”
“What else is treasure about?” Peggy said.
“When is a treasure not a treasure?” Rodrigues responded.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Peggy asked, exasperated by the tall man’s roundabout answers.
“I think I see,” said Holliday slowly.
“Well, I sure don’t,” said Peggy.
There was a sound from the road outside the cottage: tires on gravel, and more than one vehicle from the sounds of it. Doors slammed, and they heard the low sound of voices speaking quietly.
Rodrigues stood and went to the window. He looked for a few seconds, then turned away and went to the fireplace. He took down the shotgun, carried it to the desk, and rummaged in one of the desk drawers. He took out a handful of shells, broke the barrels of the shotgun, and loaded it. He snapped the barrels closed and turned to Holliday and Peggy.
“We have visitors,” Rodrigues said. “Unwelcome ones by my estimation.”
32
Through the window, Holliday saw two cars, an old Citroлn 2CV and an even older Mercedes sedan, standing on the gravel in front of the cottage. There were six men, all big, blond, and hard-faced. One of them stood at the trunk of the Mercedes handing out weapons to the others. Shotguns and small, brutal-looking machine pistols, Uzis and MAC-10s. Holliday caught the flash of a tattoo on the wrist of one of the men.
“Kellerman’s people,” said Holliday.
“Ordo Novi Templi,” nodded Rodrigues. “The Order of the New Templars.”
“You know about Kellerman?” Peggy asked, startled.
“There have been White Templars and Black since the beginning,” answered the ex-priest. “Ordo Novi Templi is simply one of the Black Templars’ more recent incarnations.” The tall man shook his head. “There is no time to explain further. We mus
t leave this place immediately.”
“And how are we supposed to do that?” Holliday asked. “Those men outside aren’t about to give us a free pass.”
“Vis consili expers mole ruit sua,” said Rodrigues, stuffing the pockets of his trousers with more shotgun shells.
“Horace,” answered Holliday. “ ‘Discretion is the better part of valor.’ You don’t happen to have another weapon by any chance, do you?”
Rodrigues reached under the desk. There was a faint tearing sound: Velcro. He handed Holliday a well-oiled Czech CZ 75 automatic pistol in a belt-clip holster.
“It’s loaded with Smith and Wesson.40-caliber copkillers-Teflon coated.”
“Strange priest,” said Holliday, stuffing the holster into the waistband of his jeans.
“Strange times,” responded Rodrigues. “Follow me.”
Rodrigues stepped quickly to the center of the room and threw back the braided rug. Beneath it was the obvious square and iron ring of a trapdoor set into the floor.
Peggy groaned. “Not this again!”
Rodrigues grabbed the ring and pulled up the trapdoor. Beneath it was a narrow set of stone steps leading downward. The ex-priest motioned them toward the opening.
“Go down. I’ll come after you.”
“It’s dark,” objected Peggy.
“The fifth step down on the right,” instructed Rodrigues. “There’s a switch on the wall.”
“Go,” said Holliday to Peggy.
She eased herself onto the stairs and went downward, feeling her way with one hand against the stone. A few seconds later there was a wash of light, and Holliday heard the distant grumbling of a generator coming from far below.
“Your turn,” said Rodrigues.
“They’re going to follow us, you know,” cautioned Holliday.
“I think I can cool their ardor somewhat.” The ex-priest smiled. “Go.”
Holliday went down the steps, following Peggy. He could see her below him on the stairs carved into the ancient, porous, pumice-like stone at a steep angle. A thick old-fashioned strip of flat cable was threaded through rusty old staples in the roof of the stairway, and bare bulbs hung every ten feet or so, the light pulsing with each cycle of the generator.
The stairway turned sharply at almost right angles and suddenly ended in a low, wide tunnel that looked man-made but wasn’t. Peggy was waiting for him. The tunnel went left and right; the left-hand path was dark while the right-hand path was lit by the same bulbs as the stairway. Holliday stretched out his hand and ran his fingers along the rows of parallel ridges in the frozen stone.
“A lava tube,” he said. Once upon a time molten stone had flowed in a white-hot liquid river down this subterranean path, eventually ending in the sea. Ahead of them Holliday could hear the echoing, out-of-place sound of the generator powering the lights in the ceiling overhead.
“What do we do now?” Peggy asked, staring down the tunnel.
“Wait for Rodrigues,” answered Holliday. He drew the pistol, racked the slide, and waited at the foot of the steps. The ex-priest appeared a few moments later, his expression tense.
“I’ve been expecting something like this for many years,” said Rodrigues as he stepped into the tunnel, the shotgun cradled in his arms. “Secrets never remain secrets forever. As Shakespeare said-‘the truth will out.’ ”
From above them there was the sudden sound of an explosion. Rodrigues smiled grimly.
“That should even the odds a little,” he said. “This way.” He headed off down the tunnel. The lava tube went noticeably downward for two or three hundred yards, meandering around extruded rock formations as it found its petrified path, narrowing until it was barely wide enough to navigate. Finally it was no more than a crack in the seamed, black stone.
Peggy felt her chest constricting. Without the naked lightbulbs in the roof of the now two-foot-wide passageway, she knew she’d be having a severe case of the screaming meemies. Tight spots and stalled elevators had never been her favorites. The fact that there was probably a squad of armed goons behind them wasn’t making her feel any better.
“Getting a little claustrophobic here,” she muttered warningly to Holliday, who had taken up a position right behind her.
They were shuffling sideways now, faces inches from the rock walls.
“It’ll be over in a few seconds,” soothed Rodrigues ahead of her in the impossibly narrow corridor.
Peggy wasn’t quite sure she liked his choice of words.
Suddenly Rodrigues vanished. She heard his voice.
“Mind the step,” he said. Peggy squeezed out through the crack and stopped dead in her tracks. She felt Holliday slip out behind her onto the small stone platform.
“Holy crap,” she whispered.
“My God,” breathed Holliday, stunned by the vision that rose before him.
The scale was almost beyond belief.
They stood at the foot of a cavern almost as large as the main concourse of Grand Central Terminal in New York City. It was as wide as a football field and twice as long. The ceiling, towering more than a hundred feet overhead, seemed to pulse with life. Color, form, and texture danced up from the mists of time long past as giraffes and wildebeests wandered across endless plains; ibex, scores of them, raced in bent-legged flight, horns swept back as black stick figures pursued them over the great veldts.
Bears, not seen in the Azores since the dawn of the last ice age, roamed through ancient forests. Life-sized Phoenician triremes, sails bent above twin hulls, drove across restless seas through the Pillars of Hercules and beyond into the great unknown sea. Crusader ships followed them, white Templar crosses proud on red sails. Soldiers in armor and chain mail, thousands of them, marched forever out through Jerusalem’s gates. Red, green, black, yellow, and ochre, blues azure and aquamarine, blacks and browns and silver, flowing muscle, finely wrought bone, men, animals, creatures that were both and neither, hundreds of them, herds of them, armies and oceans of them, all danced, sailed, rode, and ran across time and the arching ceiling overhead in a strange fantastic vision on the stone.
It was the most awe-inspiring work of art either Holliday or Peggy had ever seen, the great ceiling of the Sistine Chapel paling in comparison. Even illuminated by the electric bulbs set along the walls, Holliday knew that he was only seeing half of what was there, the rest lost in permanent shadow. Heaven only knew how the artists had created such an enormous spectacle; it defied the imagination. It was magnificent.
Steps had been cut into the stone down into the great bowl of the chamber floor, and terraces of frozen lava rode up against the curving walls in lapping waves. Here and there around the base of the cavern Holliday could see the shadows that marked other lava tubes running through the caldera’s foundation.
On one of the shelf-like terraces closest to them there were a number of iron chests that looked hundreds of years old, and stacked beside them, almost incredibly, were piles of what could only be iron spears, their flanged points still visible. In the middle of all this was a long, zinc-topped table and an assortment of power tools. It was like a rough version of Raffi Wanounou’s lab in Jerusalem.
Sitting under a magnifying lamp on a pair of padded pedestals in the middle of the table was a sword, the perfect mate to the one Holliday had discovered in Henry’s secret drawer. On a second table, set at right angles to the first, was another table, this one holding a large, plain terra-cotta amphora, a delicately shaped clay container about five feet long and used until the late Middle Ages for transporting wine.
On the far left in the darkest corner of the cathedral-like cavern was something that looked like the blackened skeleton of some enormous sea monster, claw upheld, dark spine broken, and huge bony rib cage revealed. It lay partially on its side along a sloping ledge of flowstone that oozed into the shadows. It took Holliday a second, but he managed to decipher the image: it was a shipwreck, perhaps a hundred feet long and thirty wide, the planking long since rotted away, leaving onl
y the stark outline of the hull.
Rodrigues gestured toward the wreck. “All that is left of the Wanderfalke, the Peregrine Falcon, Roger de Flor’s flagship, loaded with the great treasure from the Temple of Solomon, Saladin’s gift to the Templar Order and to the world, brought here by a Castilian knight named Fernan Ruiz de Castro. The sword on the table belonged to him. It is Aos, the Sword of the East.”
“De Flor knew about this place?” Holliday asked. He stepped over to the table and bent down, examining the ancient weapon.
“By my estimation this cavern has known human occupation for at least ten thousand years,” said Rodrigues. “There are paintings in the back of the chamber clearly showing the European cave lion, which lived during the Upper Pleistocene Era, probably contemporary with the last ice age. The illustrations of some of the Phoenician ships predate Christ by at least a thousand years. The Phoenicians certainly knew of this place, perhaps the Vikings, as well. One of de Flor’s captains discovered the island when his ship was blown off course. The sea entrance to the cave was much larger then, and there was a much easier landfall. From the evidence I have seen there was some sort of seismic activity in the sixteen hundreds, and a large section of the entrance collapsed, making it almost invisible. There could have been no better place to hide the treasure.”
“You keep on talking about treasure,” said Peggy. “But I don’t see any.”
Rodrigues went to the second table and put his hand on the terra-cotta wine jar under examination. It was sealed around its upper end with some dark, resinous substance.
“This is the treasure,” said the ex-priest softly.
“Wine?” Peggy laughed. “We’ve traveled halfway round the world and back, putting our lives in jeopardy for a big bottle of wine?”
“No,” said Rodrigues gently. “You’ve traveled halfway around the world and back putting your lives in jeopardy for this.”
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