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

by Preston William Child

  “Oh Jesus!” Sam shrieked out loud, throwing himself backward onto the floor.

  “What?” Purdue asked.

  “I just touched something fucking disgusting,” he gulped, looking spooked. Ayer smiled as he bent to see under the shelf where Sam had reached. “Congratulations, Sam,” he said, drawing out the hideous and hairy severed goat’s head, “you found the lost Crown of the Knights Templar!”

  “Christ, what an ugly fucking thing! It looks like a spider,” Sam yelped as quietly as he could, while Purdue stood fascinated.

  “This is the mechanical Head the Pope made?” Purdue asked Ayer.

  “Oui. Look,” he answered, pulling aside the hard, brown hairs to reveal the robotic skull and horns. “The Head of Baphomet. Finally we have it back. God, I wish I could destroy it once and for all so that we could rest assured this shit doesn’t happen again.”

  A ruckus ensued behind them. The bedroom door slammed and swung open violently. Toshana came darting out with only a towel wrapped around her, screaming at the top of her lungs as she hung over the balustrade to alert her friends two floors down.

  “We have to go!” Ayer said, grabbing the revolting Head and bunching it up in his rucksack. Toshana was dive-tackled by Gille and thrown to the floor, and then pinned down with his humongous weight. A clamor of footsteps and voices came rushing up the first and second flights. “Come, let’s go out the window!” Ayer commanded. “Bring the bitch!”

  Gille slammed her hard onto the floor, rendering her unconscious before flinging her naked body over his shoulder. “You had better get going,” the old Templar instructed. “There’s a battalion of angry Nazi’s coming up the stairs.”

  But Purdue and Sam could not leave without Nina. They watched the Militum take off with Toshana and the Crown, finally claiming back what was theirs along with the thief that had taken it from them. Purdue suddenly raced towards her bedroom.

  “Purdue! Purdue, are you daft?” Sam shouted, trailing after his friend.

  “I have to find the leather folder with my contract. I cannot allow it to bind us,” Purdue raved, his white hair wild and sweaty. Sam saw the officers appear on the stairs, pistols drawn.

  “Listen, listen,” he panted, grabbing Purdue by the shoulders. “I have a better idea, okay? Just go with it.”

  Sam smashed all the bottles of spirits lining Toshana’s personal bar tray, sending shards of crystal everywhere and reeking up the room with strong alcohol. He flicked his Zippo and dropped it on the lavish wet carpet. Then Sam dragged Purdue out the bedroom door by his white cotton shirt, just ahead of the crowd of shouting, gun-toting soldiers. He had Purdue by the collar, sprinting the length of the corridor to reach the left-hand stairs on the other side.

  The few men and women who came up their way were promptly kicked back down and trampled by the two fleeing Scotsmen. Holding his tablet up to navigate their way to the garage, Purdue fell about by Sam’s steering. Smoke filled the upper floor as Sam glanced upward. It moved just the way it had when Nina had been suffering the fire treatment and he had rescued her.

  Like rats on a sinking ship, Sam and Purdue scrambled into the basement. An engine was already revving as they shut the door behind them and padlocked it.

  “Move your fucking asses!” she shouted. Ahead of them, she was mounted on an old BMW R75 with a sidecar, waiting for Sam and Purdue to get on. The door behind them broke down like plywood and they careened in front of the pistol fire. Sam jumped into the sidecar, allowing Purdue to drive, with Nina holding on behind him. The World War II motorcycle bolted up the ramp into the moonlit night, barely making it out before the top floor started to rain debris. Even as they crossed the perimeter, shots rang and whistled past from the officers in the archway.

  “That is why the Militum was late coming into the citadel!” Sam shouted after he had emptied a magazine on the Nazis.

  “Why?” Purdue asked over the whoosh of the wind.

  “Look, they sabotaged all the cars first!” Sam laughed. Nina looked back at the burning vehicles, thankful that this time she was far from the flames. It was a pleasure for Purdue to watch the emblem of Mammon plummet from the gate arch and crash to the ground in flames.

  He did not miss Toshana, nor did he dread her fate at the hands of the cruel Templars who needed a new female body for their idol. Purdue began to smile as he felt Nina’s hands hold on to him in the cool Arabian night air. Although he had broken into the citadel, he was the one who had been liberated.

  36

  Residue

  One Week Later – Edinburgh, Scotland

  At Wrichtishousis, Sam and Nina waited for their host to arrive. Purdue had invited them over to unveil a new artifact he had procured recently, and to celebrate Sam’s latest nomination for the World Media Awards’ Best Investigative Journalism award. After Jan Harris’ body had been retrieved from the Templar tunnels, her footage had been delivered over to Sam Cleave, whom she had named as collaborator on the exposé she was covering.

  Between his careful editing and both their respective footage reels, he was able to compile an exclusive on the involvement of the Bilderberg Conference in a worldwide monopoly that manipulates the markets and political leaders to submit to a sinister, clandestine organization. A covert mass blackmailing of government systems to adhere to one master – finance.

  “Looks like Mammon is alive and well,” Nina sighed.

  “Look around you, love,” he told Nina. “We are right in the middle of it all.”

  “Aye. Aren’t we lucky we have a High Priest as a friend?” she laughed, amusing Sam.

  “Aye. And speaking of priests,” he said, lowering his voice. “They still have not been able to recover Father Harper’s body from the tunnels under Al-Aqsa.”

  “You’re shitting me!” she gasped. “Sam, what if he is like…like Jesus or something?”

  Sam chuckled. “Who knows?” He shrugged. “He wasn’t always a priest, you know.”

  “Ha!” she giggled.

  Purdue burst through the doors. “It is ready, friends!” he grinned shrewdly.

  “Oh God, what is it this time?” she mumbled.

  He led the two of them through the manor, out the backdoor, and into a newly constructed summerhouse of sorts, holding various relics of grandeur and age incalculable. The building boasted scorched stone to turn the rock masonry as dark as possible, and it was crowned with a dome-shaped roof of black slate. The rosewood doors sported old, crude, iron carvings of demon heads that unsettled Nina somewhat – her horrible experience had not yet faded to memory.

  “Um, Purdue, if you don’t mind,” she said, “I don’t really want to see anything evil right now.”

  “I do understand,” he replied quickly, “but please humor me. Trust me.” He posed at the front plaque. “This will be my collection of Occult relics from all countries and eras,” Purdue bragged, “but it is what is inside I wish to show off. Got it from some friends. They asked that I promise to show it to Dr. Gould. Apparently it was a promise to her that she would see it.”

  Sam gently steered her forward to enter the spacious interior. Nina’s eyes immediately caught the biggest relic of all, positioned at the far end of the place, aptly named ‘The Throne Room.’ Her mouth fell open as she slowly approached the huge statue, glancing back at Sam and Purdue who stayed behind to relish her amazement.

  Before her, cast in bronze, sat a topless woman. She was positioned precisely on a throne of crude metals, bolted in to hold her body fixed. “The same throne,” Nina marveled as she inspected every detail. “I wanted to see Toshana sitting on the throne.”

  “Quite macabre,” Sam told Purdue. “Having your murdered girlfriend cast in bronze.”

  “Not me. I know nothing, old boy. To me it is just a statue of an idol,” Purdue answered, shrugging. “I received the piece as a gift. Besides, they wanted the Crown of the Knights Templar to be kept from the world. What better way than to fashion it on a body and trap it inside a cocoo
n of bronze?”

  “It’s in there?” Nina asked. “The actual Head?”

  Purdue smiled and nodded, holding up his tablet’s infrared to prove it. Sam and Nina gasped as the x-rays revealed the mechanical cranium and its deformities under the metal.

  “The Militum send their regards,” Purdue told Nina.

  “They have assimilated into the Brigade Apostate, I hear,” Sam said. “They will fit in well.”

  “God, I never want to see another goat’s head in my life,” Nina said. They laughed together, still limping and stitched, leaving the newly acquired idol in peace and quiet behind locked doors.

  Nina sighed and asked, “Will I never be rid of the nightmares that goddamn thing gives me?”

  Purdue slipped his tablet into his pocket without noticing the static interference that came from the crown of the statue. On the screen of the device, coming from the active head, appeared one word.

  No.

  END