by James Becker
And in the event, it had been a wise precaution.
Then they turned to look at the slim figure standing beside them, clad all in black with a holstered sidearm and carrying his sub-machine gun.
The man smiled again.
‘Was that how you wanted it done, Monsieur Bronson?’ he asked.
‘Merci, Capitaine,’ Bronson replied, shaking the gunman’s hand, and now speaking almost normally. ‘That was exactly how I wanted it done. We – and you, I suppose – really needed to hear those two Iraqis incriminate themselves.’
‘Your chest?’ the Frenchman asked. ‘The vest worked, obviously, but are you okay?’
‘It hurts like hell,’ Bronson said, ‘and I’ll be bruised for a month. But that doesn’t matter.’
He turned and introduced Angela. ‘My former wife, Angela Lewis,’ he said. ‘Angela, this is Captain Bouvier of the GIGN, the Groupe d’Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale. The GIGN is a specialist anti-terrorist intervention unit based at Maisons-Alfort, just to the south-east of Paris. He and his men have been in position, hidden here in this chapel and waiting patiently, since before five o’clock this morning.’
Angela shook Bouvier’s hand too, trembling a little as she did so, the shock of her own vulnerability and the sudden death of the two Iraqis hitting her.
‘Thank you so much, Captain. I only agreed to this madcap scheme because Chris assured me that we would have proper professional help.’
‘In my opinion, madame, you have had the best professional help available anywhere.’ Bouvier was clearly nothing if not proud of his unit’s performance. ‘And thanks to the questions you asked this man’ – he dismissively kicked Khaled’s inert body with his left foot – ‘we’ve recorded what amounts to a full admission of what happened at the camp in Iraq and in Milan.’
‘Are they all dead?’ Bronson asked.
As if in answer to his question, they heard a single thud from the chapel above, the unmistakable sound of a silenced weapon being fired in single-shot mode.
‘It would seem so,’ Bouvier replied, ‘and it’s much better that way. No loose ends, no awkward questions, no arguments, and no need for a messy and expensive trial. They were armed and resisted arrest, with this unfortunate but inevitable result. And I’d like to think that the French archaeologists that these animals slaughtered at the dig in Iraq would approve of that decision.’
Bouvier glanced round in satisfaction, and then issued crisp orders to the man standing behind him.
‘And now, Monsieur Bronson, it’s time for you to leave, so that we can get this mess cleaned up. I don’t think you’ll want to hang around. Oh, please take off the vests before you go.’
‘Could you just give us five minutes, please?’ Bronson asked, as he and Angela started to remove the ballistic vests. ‘We’ve followed the trail to this place all the way from the Middle East, and we’d very much like to see exactly what was concealed in that chamber.’
‘Take ten minutes,’ Bouvier said, ‘but then you really will need to leave. And please be careful. Whatever is in that hidden room belongs to France.’
‘Of course.’
Bronson and Angela walked forward almost reverently into the chamber – the hidden chapel that had obviously been the Knights Templars’ most important place of worship in the long-vanished commandery. As they’d glimpsed earlier, standing in pride of place on the stone altar was a wooden box, perhaps eighteen inches tall, twelve inches wide and about the same deep. It was a very plain and simple design, in keeping with the strict rule by which the Templars had lived, and their vows of poverty and obedience.
The wood was hard and brittle, blackened by the ages. On the front were two small square handles made of gold, and embossed on each was an outline of the Templars’ croix pattée.
Angela glanced at Bronson, but he gestured for her to go ahead and do the honours. They’d risked their lives for this moment. She grasped each handle and pulled open the door, the unlubricated hinges protesting audibly. And then for a few moments they just looked.
Behind the twin doors was a painting that looked remarkably familiar. A noble, patrician face, marked by a heavy beard and with long hair, stared back at them.
‘It’s pretty much a dead ringer for the carving in the temple in Iraq,’ Angela said quietly.
Bronson pointed at the top of the box, at another small gold handle, and she carefully lifted that as well, the lid of the box creaking open.
Inside was a complete skull, as far as they could tell without removing it from its resting place, which Angela wasn’t prepared to do.
‘My God,’ she whispered. ‘I can’t believe it. We shouldn’t even be touching this – it will need specialist conservation.’
‘So what do you think?’ Bronson asked her. ‘Is that really the head of John the Baptist?’
‘It looks old enough,’ she replied, ‘and a forensic anthropologist could confirm whether or not the body was decapitated, assuming enough of the neck vertebrae are present, but the reality is that we have no way of knowing if this skull truly belonged to the man known as John the Baptist. But what I can tell you is that the box seems to have been designed so that originally the face of the skull would have been visible behind those two doors. I think the painting was a later addition, added once the flesh on the skull started to really decay, and all that at least implies that the object could have been worshipped. So the short answer is that we’re probably looking at the notorious idol, at Baphomet itself, the disembodied head or painted face that was so much venerated and revered by the Templars.’
She looked down at the top of the skull once again.
‘But if you want my guess, my gut feeling, then I think the answer’s “yes”. I think we’re looking at the skull of John the Baptist. And there’s this as well,’ she added, pointing at the wooden face of the box directly below the two doors.
Written in a horizontal line in small but carefully carved letters were two words that they could just barely read.
‘Yohanan Mamdana,’ Bronson said. ‘John the Baptist.’
‘That’s not proof, of course, but it’s indicative. At least the person who carved that had no doubts about the contents of the box. Now let’s get out of here.’ She closed the wooden doors on the box carefully, leaving it looking exactly the same as when they’d first seen it.
‘I’d forgotten about that phrase you quoted at Khaled,’ Bronson said as they walked out, ‘but it does make sense now. Tibauld de Gaudin, or more likely Jacques de Molay himself, the nobleman who succeeded de Gaudin as the last Grand Master of the Knights Templar, must have decided to send the assets of the order in Outremer somewhere completely different. In fact, bearing in mind that pretty soon after de Molay returned to France he probably found out about the plot Philip the Fair was hatching against the order, he would almost certainly have had the wealth concealed in another country altogether.’
‘And you think it’s still there, somewhere, just waiting for somebody to stumble across it?’
‘Knowing the Templars, I doubt very much if anyone will ever stumble across it, as you put it. Wherever it is, I’m certain it’ll be extremely well concealed in a secure location, and it’ll only be found by someone who finds a clue somewhere and follows whatever trail has been left. But, yes, I do think it’s still out there, the massive hoard that represents a significant part of the riches of the order, because there’s never been any suggestion that it’s been found, at any time in history. Maybe we should carry on looking.’
Angela shook her head and gave a small smile.
‘Not me, or not right now, anyway. What I want is something to eat and drink, followed by a good long sleep without worrying if some man with a gun is going to try to kill me while I’m in bed. And then I’ll be quite happy to go back to my office at the British Museum and get stuck into some really dull and boring, but really, really safe work.’
She paused for a moment as a thought struck her.
&nb
sp; ‘But if you do ever happen to stumble across any kind of clue that might lead you to the treasure of the Templars, just make sure that I’m the first and only person you tell about it. Okay?’
Bronson smiled back at her and nodded.
The café-restaurant a few yards up the road, by the traffic-light controlled junction, was just opening its doors and Angela pointed at it.
‘Coffee and a croissant?’ she asked. ‘It’s probably all they’ll have available at this time of the morning.’
‘Sounds good to me. In fact, that’s the best offer I’ve had in a long time,’ Bronson said. He took her firmly by the hand, and led the way across the street and into the early-morning sunshine.
Author’s note
I’m a novelist by profession, which means I’m a professional liar – my short job description is that I’m paid to make up stuff – but I have always believed that the best fiction has a grounding in fact. It’s far easier to construct a story around real events, though sometimes the truth and the fiction inevitably become somewhat blurred. This short author’s note should help separate the one from the other.
Mandaean heresy
In global religious terms, the Mandaean faith is insignificant, with only perhaps 70,000 followers still remaining worldwide, and until the Iraq war of 2003, the vast majority of them lived in southern Iraq. Today this number has dropped to an estimated 5000 in this region of the country, and it is believed that most of the remainder are now living in Iran and northern Iraq.
The Mandaeans followed a Gnostic religion – just like the Greek word gnosis, the Aramaic word manda translates as ‘knowledge’ – that would undeniably have been regarded as the wildest heresy by the early Christian church. They believed in the reality of many of the Old Testament figures, people like Adam and Noah, and especially revered John the Baptist, while at the same time utterly rejecting Moses, Abraham and particularly Jesus Christ. They spoke a dialect of Eastern Aramaic known as Mandaic, and were probably of Semitic origin.
Bearing in mind that in mediaeval times a person could be labelled a heretic simply for worshipping God and Jesus in a way that was not approved of by the Church, anyone following the Mandaean religion would have been seen to be completely beyond the pale, and it is therefore unsurprising that they have remained one of the most private and secretive of all religious sects. Virtually all the information about them has been obtained by outsiders.
The concept of baptism was, and is, central to their faith and followers of this belief system are more commonly known in the Middle East as the Subba, a name that derives from another Aramaic word that refers to baptism. The place where the Mandaeans worship is known as a mandī, and would normally be built beside a river to facilitate baptism (maṣbattah), though where this was impossible a ritual bath would be constructed inside the mandī.
Knights Templar formation
The description of the formation of the order of the Knights Templar, the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon (the Pauperes Commilitones Christi Templique Salomonici) is as accurate as the historical record will permit, bearing in mind that the events described took place almost one millennium ago. As far as can be established, the original nine knights were linked by either blood or marriage, and their ostensible purpose in travelling to Jerusalem was to protect the pilgrims on the roads of the Holy Land, a task that would have been manifestly impossible for such a small number of warrior monks, no matter how well trained, fearless and dedicated they might have been.
And, as far as can be gleaned from the historical record, for the first nine years of the existence of the Order, none of the members made the slightest attempt to do anything of the sort. Instead, having somehow managed to persuade King Baldwin II of Jerusalem to grant them accommodation in the lavish quarters of the Al Aqsa mosque on the Temple Mount in 1120, they apparently rarely ventured outside. This notable absence from their alleged primary purpose led to any number of subsequent conspiracy theories, and it seems to have been generally accepted that they spent most of their time excavating the ground that lay beneath their feet. A number of Templar relics were later found in the hidden rooms below the Temple Mount, and we know for a fact that they made use of some of the chambers that lay within it, most particularly the large space that became known as Solomon’s Stables, which they used to accommodate their horses.
In those first years, the Order was notably impoverished – indeed, one of the symbols used to represent the poverty of the Knights Templar was the image of two men riding one horse, the implication being that they could not afford a horse each – and relied upon donations to survive.
However, that changed very quickly once the Order was officially recognized and endorsed by the Roman Catholic Church in about 1129, an endorsement that was gained suspiciously rapidly bearing in mind the tiny size of the Templar organization at that time. This endorsement was followed only ten years later by the proclamation of the Omne Datum Optimum papal bull. It exempted the Templars from obeying any local laws, meaning that members of the Order could cross any border into any country, were not required to pay any taxes to anybody, and were subjected only to the authority of the Pope himself.
By any standards, this was an extraordinary piece of legislation, and there appears to have been no particularly obvious reason why it should have been granted by the pontiff. It is therefore not beyond the bounds of possibility that the first members of the Knights Templar did spend years excavating the Temple Mount and in doing so found something, the mere existence of which was sufficient to terrify the Pope into granting whatever the Templars wanted.
Unfortunately, the chances are that we’ll never know the truth of this suggestion, or what this powerful object – assuming that they did find something – might have been.
Forewarned is forearmed
The arrests of the Knights Templar in France and other countries, on the instructions of Philip the Fair, took place on 13 October 1307. The claim often made is that these arrests came as a complete surprise to the Order, and that the operation was entirely successful. However even the most cursory examination of the surviving evidence suggests that this was not the case.
The Knights Templar organization was one of the richest and most powerful entities then in existence, far more wealthy than many countries and a majority of European monarchs. But it had a problem – it did not have a secure base, a big enough piece of territory that it could occupy and control and which it could defend against its enemies. Instead, it had a number of small strongholds, like the Paris Preceptory, but every one of these was entirely surrounded by the territory of another nation. The Order was literally surrounded by potential or actual enemies on all sides.
The Templars would have tried to remain as well informed as possible about the intentions of the rulers of these territories. They would have employed spies at court or paid informers. And an operation as big as the arrest of the Templars could never have been kept completely secret. Too many people, in too many different countries, were involved. So almost certainly the arrests did not come as a surprise to the Order, but because of the circumstances, even knowing – perhaps in considerable detail – what was about to happen, there wouldn’t been very much that they could have done about it.
In fact, the indications are that they did a fair amount, because the number of Templars arrested in France was only a tiny fraction of the total known complement of the Order in that country. It is also known that when Philip’s soldiers opened up the Templars’ strong rooms in the Paris Preceptory, the vast quantity of treasure that the king had seen there just a few months earlier had somehow vanished. Some assets were left, obviously, but nothing like the amount of bullion and coin that Philip had counted on finding to clear his own enormous debts.
Exactly where that treasure went, and how it was removed, has never been explained convincingly, and it is quite possible that somewhere in France, or indeed in another country entirely, there may well be a sealed and long-
forgotten vault within which the priceless Templar treasure still lies hidden. This is one of the central mysteries about the Knights Templar, which has kept people intrigued about them for centuries.
Baphomet
When the Templar Order was purged and the Knights and Sergeants arrested in 1307, one of the charges brought against them was that of heresy, specifically that they worshipped an idol, apparently a disembodied head, which they referred to as Baphomet.
The name Baphomet predates the Templars by over twenty years. It was referred to in a letter written in 1098 by a Crusader named Anselm of Ribemont, and was used to apparently describe an idol or deity venerated by the Muslim opponents of the Crusaders. The derivation of the name does imply that it was probably both Arabic and Muslim: a chronicler of the First Crusade described the mosques as Bafumarias, and there is a suggestion that the word ‘Baphomet’ was the term used by the often illiterate Crusaders to mean ‘Mahomet’, more properly known as ‘Muhammad’. There are no references to either the word or to any kind of an idol in the Templars’ own Rule, the very specific and rigorous code of ethics and behaviour that governed their lives, or in any surviving contemporary documents, and most of the information about the object has been derived from the records of the Inquisition.
These are frequently contradictory and incomplete. The information was obtained from men under the most brutal torture, where they would simply tell their inquisitors what they thought they wanted to hear, irrespective of the veracity or otherwise of what they were saying.
Some accounts described Baphomet as a severed head, others as a cat, and still others as a head with three faces. It has been reasonably well established that the Templars did own a number of relics, and that these included heads of various sorts, some actual skulls apparently having been removed from the bodies of dead saints, one for example was claimed to be that of St Euphemia, and another being the skull of Hugues de Payens, one of the founders of the Templar order. Other heads had apparently been carved out of wood and presumably had a purely symbolic significance.