The Swagger Sword
Templars, Columbus and the Vatican Cover-up
Copyright © 2018 by David S. Brody
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, scanning or by any other information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author: [email protected]
Eyes That See Publishing
Westford, Massachusetts ISBN 978-0-9907413-4-3
1st edition
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Except as otherwise noted in the Author’s Note, any resemblance to actual events or people, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Cover by Kimberly Scott and Renee Brody
Book Interior and E-book design by Soumi Goswami
Printed in USA
“Brody does a terrific job of wrapping his research in a fast-paced thrill ride.”
—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
“Rich in scope and vividly engrossing.”
—MIDWEST BOOK REVIEW
“A comparison to The Da Vinci Code and National Treasure is inevitable….The story rips the reader into a fast-paced adventure.”
—FRESH FICTION
“A treat to read….If you are a fan of Templar history you will find this book very pleasing.”
—KNIGHT TEMPLAR MAGAZINE
“An excellent historical conspiracy thriller. It builds on its most famous predecessor, The Da Vinci Code, and takes it one step farther—and across the Atlantic.”
—MYSTERY BOOK NEWS
“A rousing adventure. Highly recommended to all Dan Brown and Michael Crichton fans.”
—READERS’ FAVORITE BOOK REVIEW
“The year is early, but this book will be hard to beat; it’s already on my ‘Best of’ list.”
—BARYON REVIEW
You paved the way for a
whole generation of researchers.
Best of all, at the age of 88,
you were still looking under rocks,
trying to find the truth.
Rest in peace, dear friend.
David S. Brody is a Boston Globe bestselling fiction writer named Boston’s Best Local Author by the Boston Phoenix newspaper. His children call him a “rock nerd” because of the time he spends studying ancient stone structures which he believes evidence exploration of America prior to Columbus. A graduate of Tufts University and Georgetown Law School, he has appeared as a guest expert on documentaries on History Channel, Travel Channel, PBS and Discovery Channel, as well as the Coast to Coast AM radio program. He lives in Westford, MA with his wife, sculptor Kimberly Scott.
The seven prior books in his Templars in America Series have been Amazon Kindle Top 10 Bestsellers in their category, with three titles reaching #1.
The Swagger Sword is his eleventh novel.
For more information,
please visit DavidBrodyBooks.com
Unlawful Deeds
Blood of the Tribe
The Wrong Abraham
The “Templars in America” Series
Cabal of the Westford Knight: Templars at the Newport Tower (Book 1)
Thief on the Cross: Templar Secrets in America (Book 2)
Powdered Gold: Templars and the American Ark of the Covenant (Book 3)
The Oath of Nimrod: Giants, MK-Ultra and the Smithsonian Coverup (Book 4)
The Isaac Question: Templars and the Secret of the Old Testament (Book 5)
Echoes of Atlantis: Crones, Templars and the Lost Continent (Book 6)
The Cult of Venus: Templars and the Ancient Goddess (Book 7)
1. Though this story is fiction, the artifacts, sites and works of art pictured are real. See Author’s Note at end of book for more detailed information.
2. This is a stand-alone story. Readers who have not read the first seven books in the series should feel free to jump right in. The summary below provides some basic background for new readers:
Cameron Thorne, age 43, is an attorney/historian whose passion is researching sites and artifacts that indicate the presence in America of European explorers prior to Columbus. His wife, Amanda Spencer-Gunn, is a former museum curator who moved to the U.S. from England while in her mid-twenties; she has a particular expertise in the history of the medieval Knights Templar. They reside in Westford, Massachusetts, a suburb northwest of Boston. Newly married, they have recently adopted a thirteen-year-old girl named Astarte, who is of Native American descent.
Newport, Rhode Island
December, Present Day
Cameron Thorne squinted into the morning sun, relieved that the thin clouds on the horizon had dissipated. He exhaled, his breath rising in the still winter air, and strode across the snow-covered park. “Hello, beautiful,” he said, looking up at the round stone tower standing imperially in front of him. “Looks like you’re going to have quite a few admirers today.”
Once a virtually unknown phenomenon, the winter solstice illumination at the Newport Tower had in recent years attracted an increasingly large crowd. And an eclectic one. As Cam approached the Tower along a shoveled pathway, he noticed Freemasons sporting aprons and sashes, white-robed Wiccans carrying wooden staffs in the fashion of the ancient Druids, Native Americans attired in fringed buckskin vests … and a hulking man wearing bright green pants carrying a short-bladed sword.
Cam blinked. The man, who stood alone off to the side of the arched tower, seemed to spot Cam just as Cam eyed the weapon in his hand. Nodding curtly, the sun at his back, the burly man slashed the sword once through the air and marched to intercept Cam. Cam angled his head. There was something familiar about the way he moved, but Cam was more focused on his stern expression than on his gait. And of course on the sword itself, which the man held out in front like a knight wielding his lance.
Cam hesitated. His controversial research on the medieval Knights Templar sometimes angered those with traditional religious beliefs. He had no interest in settling the debate with a joust.
The man continued his march, chin up and sword raised, now only twenty feet away. Cam took a deep breath. If it came to fight or flight, there really was no choice. He cleared his throat and half-turned, ready to run. “Please stop right there.”
The man paused for half a stride before guffawing and lowering the blade a few inches. “Really?” He raised his voice into a whine, mimicking Cam. “Please stop right there.” He grinned and resumed his march. “What a fucking wimp you’ve turned into.”
Cam shielded his eyes with his hand. Something about the voice. “Do I know you?” Ten feet now, not much time.
“Know me?” He stopped suddenly. “Christ, Cameron.” Holding the sword in his right hand, he grasped the blade with his left and squeezed. Releasing the blade, he held a bloody palm out to Cam. “When we were kids, we were blood brothers.” A pair of hard grey eyes held Cam’s. “And as far as I’m concerned, we still are.”
It took Cam a few seconds to wrench his eyes away from the man’s bloody hand and focus on his jowly face. “Brian,” he said as he took a step back. “Brian Heenan.”
Brian nodded. “What it’s been? Twenty-five years?”
Cam looked away. Not long enough. They had been neighbors and best friends from kindergarten through middle school in Westford, Massachusetts, drawn together by their passion for sports and treasure-hunting. At one point, Cam now recalled, they had pricked each other’s fingers, pushed them together, and sworn a blood allegiance. But when they reached high school Brian discovered pot and later cocaine, and the two drifted apart. Their lives intersected again during Cam’s freshman year of college
, when a drug-addled Brian robbed Cam’s parents’ house, using the spare key he had known about since grade school. Scumbag. Stealing from a family that fed him when his own mother was too busy playing pool and keno at the local dive bar to give a damn. From the capillaries visible on Brian’s nose and cheeks, the absence of most of his bottom teeth, and the gray pallor of his skin, it looked like Brian still didn’t have his shit together. “So what do you want?”
Brian swallowed. “I’m dying.” He blinked but otherwise held Cam’s eyes. “Doc says I have a few months, at best. Pancreatic cancer.”
“Oh. Um, sorry to hear that.” Cam looked down at his feet. Hopefully there were no children being left fatherless. He motioned with his chin toward the Tower. “But why come here? And what’s with the sword?” Not to mention the melodrama with the blood.
“Monsignor Marcotte told me I could find you here.” He had balled up his hand, but blood continued to drip down his wrist.
Cam nodded again. Marcotte, a priest in Westford, sometimes helped Cam with his research. Cam was not Catholic, which had allowed them to build a friendship outside the religious tent—Cam didn’t need his soul saved, and Marcotte appreciated being off-duty once in a while. Which is not to say the cleric had not provided valuable spiritual advice. A particular insight resonated when Cam first heard it, and it popped into his head again today: You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body. The soulless person standing in front of him, Cam sensed, might test that model.
“That’s right, your aunt is a nun at Saint Catherine’s,” Cam said. That explained how Brian knew Marcotte. “And the sword?”
“A peace offering.”
“Peace offering?”
“Or maybe a bribe.”
Cam studied the sword for the first time. A steel blade with a dark wooden handle. No cross-guard or fancy pommel. Just a broomstick-shaped handle with a two-foot blade, probably designed to slide into a narrow swagger stick case. Cam had seen them before, used as hidden weapons by military officers in old war movies. “What’s so special about it?”
Brian flicked his wrist and turned the sword, revealing a series of engravings on the blade. Wavy parallel lines that looked like a river with markings inside it, a rock with a table atop it, a letter that looked like a ‘P’ superimposed over the number 9…
“Wait a second.” Cam’s eyes widened as his heart thumped. He leaned closer, the blade reflecting the sun into his eyes. It couldn’t be. “Where’d you get this?”
Brian grinned. “I thought you might recognize it.”
Cam reached for the swagger stick blade to study it more closely, surprised that Brian would release it to him.
“Where’d you get this?” he repeated. The markings were identical to those Cam had seen on a 12th century Templar map showing the location of buried artifacts in New York’s Catskill Mountains. And he had read about the existence of swagger stick blades, also called swagger swords, with mysterious ties to the Vatican. But he had never seen a sword himself. Until now.
Brian took the sword back. “Like I said, it’s a bribe. You can have it, but only if you give me what I want.” He flicked his wrist, turning the sword over, teasing Cam by momentarily revealing another set of markings—Cam saw a cross and an X with a dotted line joining them—on the back side of the blade.
Cam blinked. There was always an angle with Brian. “And what is it that you want?” Brian still hadn’t told him where he got the sword.
“I’m going to Ireland. I’ve never been, and it’s really the only thing on my bucket list.” He lifted a leg, as if his Irish heritage explained both the green pants and his desire to visit his ancestral homeland.
“But I don’t want to travel alone. I want you to come with me.”
Cam hadn’t seen that one coming. “Me? Why?”
Brian opened his hand to show again his bloody palm. “Because we’re blood brothers.” He lowered his voice and let out a long sigh. “Or at least we used to be. And because, well, I really don’t have anyone else I can ask.”
Amanda Spencer-Gunn circled the block, slowing as she approached the cluster of young children waiting for the neighborhood school bus at the end of a cul-de-sac. This had become her daily routine: Drop Astarte off at the high school, grab a cup of coffee, and wallow among the grade-schoolers. Watch them run, laugh, hug their parents. A little boy with a low-hanging backpack built a snowman and rushed to push a stick in its face to make a nose as the bus approached. A girl bent to kiss her dog goodbye. Another tiny girl, probably a kindergartner, bravely pulled herself up the steep stairs of the yellow bus. And Amanda’s tears came, mingling with her coffee, as she imagined what might have been. Imagined a life with the child, a life for the child, who had not lived.
She rubbed her nose as the bus pulled away. She almost wished someone would report her to the police just to break the routine.
Her therapist told her it was normal, part of the grieving process. Step four, depression. After this would come acceptance and hope. But step four had lasted almost three months now. She might someday get to acceptance. But never hope: Her doctor had put an end to that when she explained that the miscarriage was not just bad fortune but rather as a result of Amanda’s overactive immune system, which perceived the fetus as some kind of invader. Amanda’s body rejected pregnancy the same way some people rejected organ transplants.
She loved Astarte with all her heart, but she and Cam had not adopted the girl until she was eight years old. They had skipped her first word and learning to walk and Goodnight Moon and gone straight to soccer and Girl Scouts. Amanda sniffled. All the bus stop parents had departed and she was still idling at the stop sign.
From deep inside her cocoon of misery a smile somehow bubbled to the surface as she recalled reading about the ‘Wandering Uterus.’ During the Classical era, it was believed that a woman’s uterus, when not weighed down with a fetus, floated around the body like an untethered balloon. This wandering organ was blamed for all sorts of female ailments, both physical (such as shortness of breath) and emotional. In fact, the word hysteria derived from the word uterus, doctors believing that the floating uterus caused a woman’s emotional outbursts and instability. Had she lived in Greek or Roman times, her post-pregnancy depression would have been treated by eating garlic and perfuming her vagina, the belief being that the uterus could be repelled from the head and lured back toward the pelvis by appealing to its olfactory sense.
She took a deep breath. She should have perfumed her vagina and gone with Cam to the Tower. But she had been such a drag the past few months that Cam was probably happy to be free of her and her wandering uterus. She checked her watch. Only six hours until it was time to pick up Astarte from school. Plenty of time to go home and chew on some garlic.
Cam’s legal training had taught him to compartmentalize his thoughts and emotions. But even he was having trouble focusing on the Tower illumination unfolding in front of him. Was this really one of the Vatican swagger swords? And if so, where had Brian obtained it? More to the point, why had a dying Brian dropped into Cam’s life after a quarter-century of no contact?
He shook his head clear. The solstice illumination only occurred once a year, and even that was dependent on weather conditions. He’d worry about Brian later. And there were more than fifty people standing around, including a lifestyle reporter from the Providence Journal, waiting for him to explain the phenomenon.
He led the group down a path to the western side of the park, the morning sun temporarily blocked by the Tower. Together they waited, watching as the sun slowly bore its way through one of the structure’s windows, emerging on the dark side of the Tower in a sudden starburst pattern of sunlight.
Cam cleared his throat, turning so the reporter—bundled against the cold with a pair of thick earmuffs—would not miss his words. They had spoken on the phone yesterday for an hour; she had impressed him with her preparation, though he sensed she was skeptical the Tower was anything other than a Col
onial gristmill. “This only happens on the winter solstice.” He shrugged. “But it could just be a coincidence.” He began to walk back toward the structure. He understood the importance of not overstating his case; sometimes a starburst was just a starburst.
They returned to the sunny side of the Tower. “But what happens in about a half-hour is definitely not a coincidence.” He pointed up. “Take a look at that window on the south side.”
He explained that the Tower featured a handful of seemingly randomly-placed and oddly-shaped windows which had long mystified historians. Why would a gristmill need windows? “The first time I saw this window, I was instantly struck by the sloppiness of the masonry work. Just look at the shape of the blue sky framed by the window. I mean, what kind of self-respecting stonemason would craft such a poorly-shaped window?”
“A drunk one?” a man wearing a Masonic apron offered with a grin.
Cam laughed. A Mason answering a question about masonry. “I think even a drunk mason could do better work than that. I think something else is going on.” He paused. “Back in the 1990s an astronomy professor named William Penhallow concluded the windows were built to mark celestial and astronomical events.” He smiled. “Which is why we’re here today. The most dazzling alignment is the winter solstice illumination.”
He turned and squinted into the sun. As he did so he spotted Brian, hanging toward the back but listening intently. At least he was no longer waving the sword. Brian had always been fascinated with buried treasure, mostly because he was allergic to hard work. Was his newfound interest in the Tower related to the Templar treasure? Pushing thoughts of his childhood friend aside, Cam checked his watch. “In fact, we can see the alignment beginning now. The sun passes through that window—we’ll call it the ‘drunk mason window’—and forms a light box on the interior wall of the Tower. As the sun ascends and moves southward, that light box creeps along, descending and changing shape as it moves.”
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