The Templar Throne

by Paul Christopher

  “What have you done?” Sister Meg groaned, stooping down over the wounded man. Holliday pushed her aside and removed the sling and the submachine gun. He laid the MAC 11 on the sand and rolled the man over, none too gently. The man screamed.

  “You’re hurting him!” Meg said furiously.

  “Good,” said Holliday blandly. The man was carrying a Beretta identical to the one Holliday had shot him with. “Push the boat into the water. I’m going to drag this one up beyond the tide line.” Holliday grabbed the man by his collar and started hauling him up the beach.

  “We can’t just leave him here!”

  “We’re sure as hell not taking him with us,” said Holliday. He reached the tide line, marked by a line of drying kelp and driftwood, and let the man drop. He walked back to the boat, ignoring Meg, and heaved on the transom. As the boat slipped into the water Holliday levered himself over the gunwale and dropped down onto the flat wooden bench. He eased the outboard over the transom and started looking for the starter.

  “What are you doing?” Meg asked, staring at him, a little wild-eyed.

  “Leaving before your friend Sean figures out what’s going on and calls in the cavalry,” said Holliday. “If you’re coming, you’d better get in.”

  Holliday found the electric starter and punched it, one hand on the throttle arm. Small waves were already moving the old clinker-built fishing boat into deeper water. Meg hesitated for a second longer, then waded out into the water and threw her backpack into the boat. She grabbed the gunwale and boosted herself up and in. The engine caught with a coughing roar. Holliday twisted the tiller arm and pointed the dory out to sea.

  Katherine Franklin Sinclair, widow of the late Angus Pierce Sinclair, the onetime ambassador to the Court of St. James in London, and mother to Senator Richard Pierce Sinclair, sat at a corner table in the Senate Dining Room having lunch with her son. Katherine was enjoying the bacon-wrapped scallops and her son was having a tuna sandwich, toasted on white with a side of fries.

  The Senate majority leader was at a table behind them and the head of the Armed Services Committee was eating a cheeseburger one table over. Heady stuff, but if Kate Sinclair had her way it was going to get a lot better on November 8 next year, the date of the next federal election.

  Katherine was adorned in a red Nancy Reagan dress, her white hair done in a sprayed and brittle- looking perm. She looked like a once-beautiful, dried-up Palm Beach matriarch, which was exactly what she was. Her son was dressed like a senator: dark chalk-stripe suit, dark Florsheims, white shirt with gold and cobalt blue presidential cuff links given to him by G.W. himself to commemorate his Senate appointment, and a burgundy and silver Phillips Exeter Academy Alumni tie.

  “There’s nothing to discuss, Richard. The immigration bill is key to your election.”

  “The Latino vote in California was one of the keys to Obama being elected; I’ll lose it if I vote for a bill that requires all Mexicans to register with Homeland Security and carry a special photo ID card. It’s like putting yellow stars on Jews.”

  “It will play in every state in the union except California. It will win you back all the Bush states that Mc-Cain lost. It will also show that you can stand firm for the principles that made this country what it is.”

  “Your principles, Mother.”

  “Who cares whose principles they are? They’ve worked in the past and they’ll work now. The country’s a mess; you can clean it up and the first step is to throw out the trash.”

  “It won’t do too much for my status in the party,” said the handsome forty-something senator. He took a bite out of the oozing sandwich and put it down on his plate again. He chewed and sighed simultaneously. Kate Sinclair looked at her son and wished he had a little more spine. On the other hand, she knew where the soft side of his nature came from; growing up as Angus Sinclair’s only son and in the ambassador’s long shadow hadn’t been easy. Most of Richard Sinclair’s life had been ordained without him having any choice in the matter. Schools: Exeter and Yale. Discipline: law. Career: public service, followed by a strategic and well-thought-out jump to the Senate. Next logical step: a run at the White House. It had been Angus Sinclair’s plan even before his son’s birth, the banner eagerly taken up by Katherine upon her husband’s death.

  “To hell with the party,” the aging woman said at last. “You have real power on your side.”

  “You mean your so-called friends in high places?” Senator Sinclair said, his lip curling. He knew exactly what his mother was talking about.

  “Your friends, too,” answered Katherine. “They’ve helped you along the way, helped pave the road to your success.”

  “You mean they paid for it,” said the senator. “Which makes me beholden to them, right?”

  “They only want what’s best for the country,” said Katherine. She sliced a scallop in half with her knife, added a daub of creamed spinach and popped the morsel neatly between her thin lips. She chewed without appearing to move her jaw, a trick she’d learned at Miss Porter’s School in Framingham many years before.

  “That’s what Hitler told the Poles just before he invaded,” her son answered sourly. He took another bite of his toasted tuna.

  “Don’t be irritating,” snapped his mother. “You know exactly what I’m talking about and who. There’s no choice in the matter. You are the next in line; simple history makes you heir if nothing else. You’ll be the de facto head of the order and all its resources. Electing you president will be easy after that.”

  “You really believe Rex Deus still has that kind of power?” Senator Sinclair scoffed, popping a French fry into his mouth. He chewed.

  “I know they do,” his mother answered. “And you know it, too.”

  She was right, of course. The senator let out a long breath. Rex Deus and his place in it had been part of his life for as long as he could remember. Rex Deus, once also known as the Desposyni, supposedly the bloodline of Jesus Christ through Mary, his mother, leading all the way to the Merovingian royal families of Europe, was historical fact, at least insofar as its historical existence was concerned.

  At one time the Desposyni had been regarded as the aristocracy of the early Church, but over the centuries Rex Deus had become an underground secret society with money and power at its core. Like the Masons, Rex Deus was attractive to the early colonizers of America, especially during the prerevolutionary 1700s, and there were as many Rex Deus signers of the Declaration of Independence as there were Freemasons, including, among others, Benjamin Franklin, of whom Katherine Sinclair was a direct descendant, and Robert Payne, an ancestor of Angus Sinclair.

  By 1776 the battle lines had been clearly drawn; American diplomacy with their colonial masters was at an impasse. It was clear that the British would eventually ban slavery, if for no other reason than stopping the growth of the American cotton industry. Added to this was the tax imposed on the colonists by the crown to pay for the French and Indian War, plus the increased prices for manufactured goods imported into the colonies.

  The Masons and the members of Rex Deus were either wealthy landowners or equally wealthy merchants, and it was no coincidence that a third of the signers of the Declaration were slave owners. The Continental Congress and the Declaration of Independence were established to fuel an American financial revolution just as much as a political one. Then, as now, it had been all about wealth and power.

  “There are other people who want to be elected head of the order,” said Senator Sinclair. “It’s not as though I’m the only one.”

  “The Magdalene Conclave is in less than two weeks,” insisted Katherine, her voice low as she leaned across the table. “We will win the election and you will become the new head of the order.”

  Senator Sinclair sighed; he’d seen his mother in this mood before. He remembered an embarrassing incident at basketball tryouts that had made him the punch line of a hundred jokes at Exeter. He sighed again and fingered his alumni tie. It was remarkable how easy it w
as for his mother to get under his skin.

  “Why in God’s name is this so important to you, Mother? Don’t you think I can become president on my own?”

  “Not without the help of the order, dear. With the order at our backs we can get the best of everything; we can bring the whole world over to our way of thinking. The order has unlimited resources; with you at the head we would be unbeatable.”

  “I’m not even sure I want to run, let alone win,” said the senator, feeling the tuna sandwich making its mayonnaise-heavy way through his digestive system.

  “Of course you want to be president, Richard,” said his mother, looking up and staring around the lavishly decorated dining room. “Everyone wants to become president of the United States. It’s the fulfillment of a lifetime dream. It was your father’s dream. And mine.”

  Not my dream, thought Richard Sinclair.

  “Yes, Mother,” he said.

  “Good,” said Katherine. “That’s settled then. Let’s have dessert, shall we? Perhaps the peach cobbler with a little ice cream?”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  21

  They reached Mull shortly after one thirty in the afternoon, ditched the boat and managed to find a taxi in Fionnphort to take them to Tobermory and the little seaplane port on the bay. From there they took a Cessna Caravan to Glasgow and managed to catch a direct flight via Air Transat to Pearson International in Toronto.

  By that evening, hungry and a little tired, they were half a world away from the sacred Isle of Iona and booking themselves into the Royal York, a twenty-eight-story chateau-style edifice from the twenties with more than a thousand rooms and its own apiary capable of producing seven hundred pounds of honey a year, or so said the brochure.

  Once upon a time it had been the largest hotel in the British Empire and came by its “royal” name honestly, having hosted three generations of the Royal Family on a number of occasions, from the Duke of Windsor to Princess Diana, with a few proper kings and queens in between.

  The hotel also had the advantage of being directly across the street from Toronto’s old Union Station, a monstrous granite leftover from the Grand Central era that looked more like the British Museum than the British Museum did. There were trains departing for Montreal throughout the day and an evening overnight train to Halifax.

  Despite the paranoid “ultra-surveillance” movies loved by Hollywood, Holliday knew that in reality you didn’t retask satellites to look for people like them in places like Toronto, and tracking credit cards wasn’t as simple as it looked for Jason Bourne and his ilk. Holliday gave them at least a couple of days’ grace before whoever was tracking them got their bureaucratic ducks in a row. Taking the train would confuse things even more, especially if they paid for their tickets in cash. Before that, however, Holliday had an old friend to see.

  Steven Braintree, a professor of medieval history at the University of Toronto, had an office on the top floor of a neo- Corinthian building at the corner of Bloor Street and Avenue Road that looked more like an old-fashioned bank or insurance company than a university faculty building. Appropriately enough, the Royal Ontario Museum was located directly across the street. The Center for Medieval Studies building was one block west of the exact center of the city at Yonge and Bloor, the division of east and west, uptown and down.

  Braintree’s office was a free- form collection of stacks of books, scatterings of files and snowstorms of paper littered over every flat surface in the twelve-by-twelve room, filling sagging bookcases, overflowing from filing cabinets and seeping out of cardboard boxes on the floor. There was a plastic model of a knight in armor on the windowsill beside a dying aspidistra on the radiator with a single drooping purple flower. The flower still had its tag from the nursery and the knight’s shield had been replaced by a Quidi Vidi beer bottle cap from the Newfoundland microbrewery of the same name.

  The office was under the eaves of the old stone building and without air- conditioning. At this time of the year Toronto was usually as hot as New York. The grimy windows were glued shut with a hundred-odd years’ worth of paint and a solid Scots-Presbyterian regard for keeping heat in over the winter.

  Braintree was just about as wilted as the aspidistra on his radiator. He was wearing jeans and a Chaucer is my Homeboy T-shirt. His long dark hair was lank and stringy from the heat, with a few more streaks of gray since Holliday had last seen the man. Sitting at his desk, the professor stared owlishly at Holliday from behind a fashionable pair of dark plastic- framed glasses, his hands tented under his frowning mouth as he listened to the tale of Jean de Saint-Clair and the Blessed Juliana.

  “The poem is certainly interesting,” he murmured. “As you know, medieval codes and cryptography are something of a specialty with me.”

  “You think it’s a code?” Meg asked.

  “It’s awkward enough to be one,” said Braintree, glancing at the red-haired nun. “One of the ways you can tell an old- fashioned code is through the awkwardness of its construction. The key words have to be there even though they don’t really fit.”

  “Such as?” Holliday asked.

  “It’s mostly in the second verse,” replied the young professor. He repeated the second stanza of the prayer aloud, emphasizing what he felt were the key words:

  “Save us from Satan’s royal vengeance once more / And give us Mary’s holy wings to fly / Us to the farther sable shore / Then we shall keep thy treasures safe / In Arcadia’s pale enclosing arms once more.” He shook his head. “It’s just not right.” He turned away and started rummaging through a toppling pile of books on the floor behind him.

  “What do you mean?” Meg urged. “It’s just not right?”

  “According to you this was written in the early thirteen hundreds. About the time of the Lay of Havelock the Dane.”

  “Who?” Meg asked.

  “What,” corrected Braintree. He pounced on a thin book bound in pale brown buckram. “Aha!” he said. “The Clarendon Press edition, 1910. Quite valuable. Thought I’d misplaced it.”

  “What?” Holliday said.

  “Exactly,” said Braintree. “I thought I said that already. The Lay is a what not a who.”

  “What does it have to do with our prayer?” Meg asked, frustrated.

  “As I said, it’s awkwardly constructed. Poetry, songs, prayers, verse of any kind was almost always written in eight-syllable rhymed couplets, like the Lay of Havelock the Dane, or Chaucer.” He grinned, sticking out his chest, and recited, “Bot I haf grete ferly that I fynd no man / Dat has written in story how Havelock his lond wan.”

  “Easy for you to say,” Holliday said and laughed. Middle English had never really been his thing.

  “It’s about a Danish prince who settles in the town of Grimsby in England—his lond wan, so to speak. Shakespeare’s source for Hamlet.” Braintree cleared his throat. “The point is your Jean de Saint-Clair and this Blessed Juliana either didn’t write your prayer at all or wrote it for purposes other than prayer.”

  “The original was in French,” said Holliday.

  “Doesn’t matter,” said Braintree. “Conventions in French poetry at the time were identical—rhymed couplets were the only way to go. If they actually meant it to be a proper prayer, that’s the way it would have been written.

  “And as I said before, some of the word associations are strained—‘Satan’ and ‘royal’ would never be used together unless there was some second meaning, as you suggested. Same with the farther sable shore. Sable is redundant; in French it means sand, all shores are sandy, at least in poetic terms.

  “There had to be a reason for its use. The same goes for Arcadia’s pale enclosing arms. Arcadia was a paradise, a place where anything grew. It was early propaganda to get people to uproot themselves and travel to the so-called farther shore to colonize the New World. Pale enclosing arms doesn’t sound particularly inviting.”

  “So what does the prayer refer to?” Meg asked.

  “Nova Scotia,” said Ho
lliday. “Arcadia.”

  “Check out a map. Nova Scotia looks like a lobster that’s missing a claw. No pale enclosing arms.” Braintree paused, suddenly struck by a thought. “But there is a place that fulfills all the criteria. In fact, it’s perfect. If Jean de Saint- Clair and this Venetian ship of his were crossing the Atlantic to the farther shore, they’d be almost certain to at least go by it, if not actually run into it. It’s got pale enclosing arms, that’s for sure.”

  “Where is it?” Meg asked.

  Braintree pushed away a pile of papers on his desk, revealing a black-cased Hewlett-Packard laptop. He hit a few keys then peered myopically at the screen, pushing his glasses down low onto his nose and looking over them.

  “Forty-three degrees ninety-five minutes north by fifty-nine degrees ninety-one minutes west,” he said. “Often referred to as the Graveyard of the Atlantic. At least three hundred and fifty shipwrecks since 1583. That’s a lot of firewood, kids. A thirty-mile-long sandbar shaped like a sickle moon right in the middle of nowhere. Sable Island.”

  Located approximately a hundred miles off the coast of Nova Scotia, Sable Island was a long, curving, low-lying arc of sand shaped very much like a compound bow, its center thicker than the two flared ends. The enormous spit was perched within a mile or two of the edge of the continental shelf and was right in the middle of the whirling vortex of currents, tides and winds where the Labrador Current met the Gulf Stream head-on.