The Lost Crown of the Knights Templar (Order of the Black Sun Book 19)

by Preston William Child

  “Dr. Gould,” Ayer called from his room, beckoning her back. “What is it?”

  “Well, I just wanted to ask you the things you would expect to be asked by someone you are holding,” she started.

  “Like, are we going to kill you?” he asked quickly, polishing his Doc Martins.

  “Um, aye. I suppose that is important to know,” she shrugged, her arms folded over her chest as she leaned in the doorway. “But I wonder also, why you are so lenient on me?”

  “Would you prefer we lock you up like a prisoner? Because we would have no problem doing that,” he replied nonchalantly.

  “No, I just don’t understand. If you’re going to let me walk around here, eat with you, and join in your conversations, why am I even here at all? Can’t you just let me go home?” she asked evenly.

  “You’re joking, right?” Gille said behind her, lurching over her small frame like a shadow. Frightened at his sudden, hard voice, Nina winced and drew away from him. “You know who we are. You know what we are and…and, ultimately, you know what happened at the morgue – you know that we exist, Dr. Gould. You can rain a world of hell on our little sect, smaller now, because of that journalist and his friend running down our brothers like stray dogs in the street to save that bitch Toshana!”

  Nina’s heart pounded. “Sam,” she whimpered.

  “Sam Cleave, the hero. You must be really special, Dr. Gould,” Ayer smiled as the strokes of the shoe brush coughed rhythmically under his motions. “That very woman he saved from us? He is going to betray her trust in cold blood to trade her for you.”

  “Aw, that’s sweet, isn’t it? How long have you been banging him, luv?” Gille teased, but Nina did not appreciate his humor. She summarily backhanded him across the face. He did not even budge, but his face instantly wore proof of her rage. Red welts formed where the back of her right hand had connected, and a trickle of blood appeared under his nose, decorating his pursing mouth. Gille’s eyes were wide with anger, but Ayer’s words dissuaded him from doing anything about it.

  “You did ask for it, brother,” the leader chuckled as Gille wiped his face, painting his fat cheek with scarlet. “Go get cleaned up.” Ayer looked at Nina. Her face was distorted in defeat, her whole body quivering in anger and her dark eyes were shimmering with tears. “I cannot tell you why yet, Dr. Gould, but you are very fortunate that we are not allowed to leave even a bruise on you. It would compromise our deal. And that is why you are being treated so well, unharmed, and fed.”

  “I see,” she said softly. “May I ask one more thing?”

  “Of course, Dr. Gould. Anything,” he replied. He set his shoes neatly together on a toolbox and waited for her to speak.

  “That awful smell,” she sniffed, wiping roughly at her teary eyes. “What is it?”

  He looked up, sighing. “Why do you insist on knowing about the bad things, Nina? Can’t you just wait and keep busy until you’re delivered?”

  “It’s a bit hard to ignore,” she said, frowning. “Doesn’t it make you lads sick to the stomach to breathe in that stench?”

  “You get used to it, I suppose,” he admitted. “Not something to be proud of, certainly. We all have homes all over Europe, North Africa, and Scandinavia, but when things go wrong within our sect, like the loss of the crown from its monstrance, then we come down here and congregate so that the problem can be solved, you see? We don’t always live on take away fish & chips, Dr. Gould, nor shower in cement bathrooms with no hot water.”

  He walked towards her, ushering her with his arm. Ayer led Nina by his hand on her back, softly steering her down the main hallway of the colossal dystopian bunker that reminded her of an abandoned Russian reactor. Their conversation echoed like hymns as they strolled. “Normally we live in lavishness and comfort, so please do not think this is who we are.”

  “Do you have normal occupations when you are – home?” she asked.

  “Heavens, no,” he laughed. “Occasionally we take jobs consulting.”

  “Consulting on?” she pried relentlessly, secretly amazed that Ayer allowed her to badger him with questions.

  “Tactics, weapons training, and so on,” he answered. “Sometimes we act as…” he hesitated, looking almost ashamed, “assassins, you know, mercenaries for hire. But that is rare. Why would we need to? We are independently rich, each one of us.”

  “So you just do other jobs because you’re bored?” she asked, raising her eyebrow in surprise. “Is that why you came out for the crown you lost?”

  “It was taken from a safe place where Chaplain Hermanus’ daughter hid it in the 1980s. Her father shared the location of the Templar Crown with her on his death bed, but the whole family heard the confession,” he recounted. He led Nina into another maze-like tunnel that was a precise duplicate of the first. Here the walls reeked of death more strongly than before.

  “So she stole it?” Nina asked.

  He nodded affirmatively. “Her family tried to reason with her, tried to convince her to leave the thing in the column of the mosque on the Temple Mount. But she had to know the secrets. She just had to,” he hissed through clenched teeth, frustrated at the turn of events, “had to know. Just like you, she just had to know everything.”

  Nina felt the coldness like a breath of emotion, his resentment clear enough to scare her. Don’t worry, they’re not allowed to hurt you, she reminded herself as Ayer’s words provoked her concern. They can’t touch you until they’ve delivered you to Sam. Nina wanted to smile. Sam.

  “Did she find out what she wanted to know?” Nina asked.

  “She found death. We are the guardians of the Crown of the Templars and we do not negotiate. You goddamn women. Always women!” Nina refrained from engaging in a gender debate this time. “Hermanus’ daughter took the relic down into the vaults under the Al-Aqsa Mosque at night, where we killed her.”

  “How?” Nina’s question came without passing her brain first and she blurted it out from sheer curiosity. She felt that her prying was a mistake when Ayer stopped in his tracks to regard her face to face, but his answer was unashamed and honest.

  “We stoned her to death with stones from Solomon’s Temple – the Temple Mount,” he said without any hesitation. “She was a member of the Nazi order that had been challenging us for decades, Dr. Gould, and we could not let her have the crown, the knowledge, or the power. Hell no.”

  “Wait, she was a Nazi?” she frowned. “Black Sun?”

  “Now you’re catching on,” he smiled. “You see, we are monsters, but we stop bigger monsters from taking over the world. Anyone who has ownership of the Templar Crown –

  the Head made by Pope Sylvester – has access to Baphomet, has access to all knowledge and enlightenment.”

  “Illumination,” she said to herself.

  “Yes, Dr. Gould,” he affirmed. “Imagine the wisdom of Baphomet, the duality of all existence, in the hands of the Order of the Black Sun. This is why I did not have Sam Cleave killed for murdering my brothers. He belongs to allies of ours.”

  “The Brigade Apostate,” she whispered.

  “Right,” Ayer nodded. “But he rescued another snake of the Black Sun in the process, while we were executing her for stealing the Templar Crown.

  “Toshana belongs to the Order of the Black Sun,” Nina said. “She had the crown, then.”

  “But she refused to tell us where she had hidden it,” he lamented. “Now that Sam is working with us to surrender her to us, we will be able to find it again.”

  They entered a pitch-dark hall. Nina could tell the size of the place by the change in acoustics. Ayer’s voice sounded like a battle horn when they entered the hot, dark place that smelled like burning flesh. “Oh my God. This is how I’ve always imagined Hell,” Nina remarked, listening to her own voice get lost in the space hidden by darkness.

  “You’re not wrong,” Ayer chuckled, trying to sound reassuring. “This is what you wanted to know. You women and your inexhaustible need to know the secret
s of men.”

  Nina’s heart raced. She tried not to throw up from the sweet stench that wafted over her like the foul breath of the devil. Holding her hand over her mouth and nose, she coughed at the overwhelming heat.

  “This is where we held the funeral for our brothers,” Ayer told Nina as he reached for what she thought was a light switch, but it was the switch to a gas line. His finger flicked it upward, releasing gas through the wall-mounted pipes of the massive hall.

  What Nina saw frightened her to death, but she knew she had to keep calm. Her legs numbed, her knees buckled, as she realized that she was, in reality, in the belly of the beast. The four walls, each measuring approximately ninety feet in height, appeared out of the darkness bearing the thin gas pipes. All the piping ran to the main wall in front of Nina and Ayer, where they culminated in an enormous shape, a symbol well known to be wary of.

  Fire ignited the symbol, and a terrified Nina Gould played witness to a burning inverted pentagram, enclosed in a double border circle. Inside the circle she recognized the arcane Hebrew characters.

  “Baphomet,” she whispered through a dry mouth and burning throat.

  “That’s right,” Ayer said proudly. Nina wanted to keep asking questions to still the screams in her head. As long as she sympathized, or played along, Ayer’s mind would hopefully remain occupied.

  “Um, what are the characters inside the border for? It is Hebrew, correct?” she remarked, as the horrific image inside the pipelines became a visible, painting on the wall. A goat’s head, fitted snugly inside the inverted star, grinned at her.

  “Oui, Dr. Gould,” he smiled, impressed. He pointed them each out as he revealed them one by one. “It spells, counterclockwise, ‘LVTHN’,” he informed her in the heat of the fire. “Leviathan.”

  “The Devil,” she murmured.

  Ayer gave her a long hard look while Nina regarded the atrocious sight of eight charred bodies, hung upside down. “You wanted to know, Nina.”

  “Like Saint Peter,” she said, as the flame reflections tinted her dark eyes with blazing orange and yellow. “Like the Hanged Man of the Tarot.”

  At once Nina realized that the monstrous roar of blowing wind she had heard that first night was the spewing pipes inducing a hellish fire. She swallowed saliva that was not there and whispered, “Like dragon’s breath.”

  29

  Evil Deeds with Good Intentions

  Purdue followed last, keeping an eye on the military guards he’d bribed to allow them into the Al-Aqsa mosque. Father Harper led the way, with Sam close at his side to help muscle in should they need to fight their way through anyone who tried to tell on them. Both Sam and Father Harper, being dark of eye and crown, passed seamlessly through the groups of Muslim men, but Purdue’s neatly trimmed white hair and pale blue eyes drew unwanted attention.

  “Hurry, please,” he whispered at Father Harper.

  “If we hurry more, we’ll be running, Purdue,” Sam answered, amused. “You don’t want to be running through a forbidden place with your Scandinavian features, do you?”

  Father Harper chuckled, unable to keep a straight face at the image painted by Sam. “I would have passed better as a woman, had I the right attire,” Purdue mumbled, trying to lessen his panic with silliness. “I should have escorted the ladies, rather.”

  With subdued smiles on their faces, the three men gradually made their way toward a semicircular niche in the wall of the mosque, walking with heads slightly bowed. Father Harper stopped to survey their surroundings. “This is the mihrab we have to enter by,” he said in a low voice. “This is the mihrab of Zecheria, and here,” he pointed to the mosaic wall that bore the beautiful shrine-like feature, “are the Templar symbols, disguised as tiled art. See that?”

  “Whoa,” Sam gasped. “Very shrewd, sir.”

  Purdue was fascinated, as always, by the beauty of the structure and its gilded arches and marble columns standing stately in perfect symmetry. Where Father Harper placed his hand upon an artwork of a Templar cross with its rose, the wall dented away. The red, even-armed cross on the white flower was ingeniously laid in between the laurel-shaped images of the wall.

  Purdue and Sam stared as they watched the big priest casually split two identical panels, allowing them to pass into the small entrance while the second panel maintained the artwork for bystanders not to discover the ruse. It was dark on the other side of the panel, and had been left mostly abandoned over the past few years.

  “Fucking hell! What is that smell?” Sam coughed as Father Harper slid the first panel shut behind them.

  “Sulfur,” he answered in the darkness.

  Purdue’s tablet suddenly lit up the place, startling his friends. In the sharp illumination they could see his grin of achievement and proceeded to mutter about how they appreciate his genius at times like these.

  “Oh, come now, lads, enough,” he smiled to dismiss their teasing.

  “No, really, Purdue. Well done. Who needs to sneak around with petty flashlights to avoid detection when you can clone the light of the sun and harness it in here, hey?” Sam persisted in his boyish jesting.

  “That odor of sulfur,” Father Harper said quietly without whispering. “The Militum, as well as older orders from the Templar sect, used these troughs of sulfur to light up the chambers down here.”

  The masonry was built along the entire length of the old, gray stone walls to hold the brimstone compound. It was a bit unnerving for Purdue to see all the arcane things his new friend and former rescuer knew about, but he was invaluable to Purdue’s small excursion.

  “Oh my God, the crown!” Purdue blurted out suddenly. His companions stopped in their tracks to see what he was talking about, but Purdue only shrugged. With a sincere look of confusion he admitted, “I don’t know why, but only just then did I remember that I was actually down here to look for a crown. Sounds daft, I know.”

  Father Harper and Sam exchanged looks. Father Harper gave Sam a nod. It was time to inform Purdue of Nina’s plight. While the big priest waited for the women to show up from the side tunnel that met this one in a T-junction, Sam told Purdue everything.

  “Do you remember the awkward meeting between your Countess and I?” he asked.

  Purdue gave a scoff. “It was hardly easy to miss, old boy.”

  “That’s because we’d already met, her and I, when I saved her from attackers in England about two weeks back. Purdue, she is bad news, and she has you…” Don’t say it! Sam’s common sense begged, but as usual, he ignored good advice. “…under a spell.”

  “A spell?” Purdue replied at the absurdity.

  “Tell me, where is Nina?” Sam asked his friend. Purdue shrugged, “You said she could not make it.”

  “And when I spoke to you on Skype?” Sam pressed, peering into the genuinely bewildered eyes of his friend. “Did you hear what I said about Nina?”

  Purdue ran his elegant, long fingers through his soft hair, trying to remember.

  “I do remember. Sam, I do, I just…Jesus, I remember you talking about her and…I really do, but I swear to God I cannot tell you what you said about her,” he stammered, his voice cracking at the realization that his mind has been clouded all this time, thinking it was clear. Only his distance from Toshana aided in the clearing of his thoughts and he could not deny it. Sam knew it. So did the priest.

  That was Sam’s cue to fill Purdue in on the rest of the events that had since transpired, before their meeting in Jerusalem. In a brief discussion, Sam told him about the attempted hit on his life, the message from the Militum, which brought on the tiff with Nina and why she left that day. Then came the discovery of the bodies’ strange tattoos and why Nina got involved in what was coincidentally to become both her and Sam’s joint predicament, only from two different angles.

  “She was kidnapped by these brutes, Purdue. And they want Toshana, if we don’t give her to them we’ll never see Nina again. Do you understand? And that is where Father Harper got involved,” Sam
said.

  “Only for the abduction, Father?” Purdue asked the priest.

  “No, David. I used to belong to this sect, branched off from the Templars by blood or honor. We’re not on good terms since I left them – rather hurriedly and blood-drenched – many years ago,” Father Harper recounted as he sat down on the edge of the rocky trough. “All I could do as a Templar was to remain in the service of the church. It was both my sanctuary from the Militum and my prison for religion – both of which I’ve now been sprung from by revealing my identity.”

  “No wonder you know all these hallways and beacons so well,” Purdue mused in admiration. “The Temple Mount, where the great King Solomon’s temple ruins sleep. The former headquarters of the Templar Knights! My God, what a phenomenal revelation!”

  “It’s not as romantic as the books relay, David. Templar Knights were as brutal as they were pious, and they served whatever master benefitted them best, clutching their crosses,” Father Harper sighed. Failing him, his words came weakly. “They still do. They still do.”

  “The Militum, however, do not serve the church, right?” Sam asked the priest.

  He looked at Sam with a face that told him that there was simply too much to explain. “They do not,” he said. “Nor do they serve Christ. But nothing is that simple, my friend. We had reason to protect the crown, and we had good reason to kill to uphold its secret location. Lieutenant Hermanus had no good intentions when she took it from the hiding place her father secured it in, and we had to stop her at all costs, you see. That doesn’t make the Militum evil. No man is pure, Sam. Not one!” His face was wet with perspiration as he stared into the darkness ahead. “She was a modest Scottish pilot in Her Majesty’s Air Force, but she was greedy for power. And the power she sought was too big for this world. We stopped her,” he whispered, pointing into the dusky part of the hallway where Purdue’s light started to fade, “right about there.”

  “That is where you left the relic?” Purdue asked.