The path climbed steeply, curving its way up the slope through the woods. “They brought the granite down on carts and sleds. That’s why the path’s so wide,” he said. The trail ended at a round clearing about the size of a baseball infield. The entire ground was flat, smooth granite, almost as if the infield had been flooded and then frozen in a cement-colored ice. “Looks like they quarried the rock ledge right off the top.”
“It’s a beautiful spot, almost looks like an ancient amphitheater.” Perhaps soon they could return and picnic. If they lived long enough.
They walked across the smooth granite, picked up the path on the far side of the quarried area and climbed another hundred feet. He checked his GPS device. “We’re pretty much at the top. Let’s look around.”
She stepped off the path, wandered deeper into the woods and spotted a gray, car-size boulder split neatly down the middle. The two halves were almost equal in size, separated by a V-shaped gap. She beckoned Cam. “That’s the largest rock in the area. And that split is remarkable. What could be stronger evidence of an energy line than a giant boulder split in half, seemingly for no reason?”
He nodded. “During medieval times, how else would you explain it?”
“If I were looking for a place to drill a hole for my mates to find later, I’d select this boulder.”
Climbing on top, he began to examine the boulder. She squeezed into the gap and studied the surface for inscriptions or other signs of alteration, brushing away moss with a stick. Cam used his pocket knife to do the same. They worked for about ten minutes, slowly circling the boulder, brushing leaves and pine needles off the surface and crevices. Nothing.
She sighed. She had been certain they would find something.
“I’m going to look around,” he said and began to walk away.
She took a few steps back and studied the boulder. They had cleared the entire surface and the stone was bare other than a small weed that had taken root in the rock’s crevices like a lone acacia tree in the desert. Taken root. Of course. “May I use your knife?” He flipped it to her. She dug around the weed and loosened the soil. Yanking on the plant, she pulled it free, tossed it aside and probed into the root’s crevice, extracting dirt. “Cam, look!” She triumphantly pointed to a silver dollar-size, triangular-shaped hole. “There it is. Just as we suspected.”
Grinning, he squeezed her arm. “Good job. I totally missed it.” He inserted his finger into the hole, rubbed the edge. “It’s uneven, definitely not machine-made.”
She inserted a stick into the hole. “Approximately three inches deep.” Same size, same shape, same depth as the holes on the Tyngsboro Map Stone and the Spirit Pond outcropping. It was time to play Connect the Dots.
* * *
“How are you on a bike?” Cam asked.
He and Amanda sat on the warm granite outcrop of the round amphitheater-like quarry clearing, sharing a bag of trail mix and a bottle of water. The sun had melted away the morning chill, promising another temperate day. The weather—tranquil and clear and comfortable—continued to stand in stark contrast to the storm swirling around them.
“As long as we stay off your mountain trails, I’ll be fine. What’s your plan?”
“I think we need to get to someplace with a lot of maps, where we can spread out and plot these points and try to figure out how everything fits together.”
“Perhaps a library.”
“Yes, but it’s too risky to stay local. Someone might see us. And I really don’t want to use the Subaru on the main roads.”
“Well then, let’s go buy me a bike.” She smiled. “Something to match my new hair.”
They followed the trail back down the hill, Cam mapping the path they would take through the woods to a nearby Wal-Mart. As they prepared to cross the main road, the sound of a siren broke the morning calm. He pulled Amanda behind a tree; a police car sped in the direction of Monsignor Marcotte’s church just up the street. An ambulance followed quickly in its wake, its siren also blaring.
Cam resumed his mental mapping. “Do you hear that?”
“What?” She looked at him quizzically. “I don’t hear anything.”
“Exactly. The sirens didn’t just fade away. They stopped. Which means the ambulance stopped.”
Her chin dropped. “The Monsignor. You don’t think….”
“I don’t know what to think anymore.” He phoned Brandon. “Can you find Poulos, ask him if knows anything?”
They walked in silence, hand in hand, waiting for Brandon to call back. “Really, it may be nothing,” she said.
He frowned. “What’s your gut tell you?”
“Unfortunately, the same thing yours tells you,” she said, leaning against him.
Brandon called ten minutes later. “What?” Cam answered.
“It’s bad. Monsignor Marcotte is dead.”
“Damn it.” A wave of thick, acrid bile rose in Cam’s throat; he swallowed it down and spat to clear his mouth.
“Poulos is all over it. He’s at the church right now. They think the Monsignor died of a drug overdose. Probably some kind of truth serum, sodium pentothal maybe. Poulos told me to tell you you should come in.”
Cam steadied himself against a tree. “Listen. Tell Poulos to worry about catching the killers. Tell him that the Monsignor thinks it’s some kind of extremist Catholic group called the Legions of Jesus doing all this. He’s going to need some help—FBI, whatever.”
He hung up. “The Monsignor was a good man. Just like Forsberg.”
Her eyes wet with tears, Amanda slipped her arm over his shoulder. “I know.”
“They must have figured out he was helping us.” He retched again; again he swallowed his bile. The Vatican crazies had taken this to a whole new level. If they would kill a respected Monsignor, they wouldn’t hesitate to knock off a few more civilians. He pulled her deeper into the woods. “Brandon’s not safe.”
“Didn’t Poulos post a cop at his door?”
“Yeah, but I don’t think one cop has much of a chance against a paramilitary hit squad. And it’s not like Brandon can just hit the road like we did.” His mind raced. “It’s only a matter of time before they get to him. We need to have a plan in place before they do. Something that Brandon can tell them that will buy him his life.”
* * *
There was no time for caution, no time for buying bicycles and sticking to back roads. Forsberg was dead. Marcotte was dead. Brandon would be next. Cam swiped the branches off the Subaru, threw his pack in the back. “I have an idea but I need maps.”
“Outside of Westford,” Amanda said, “Groton’s library is the closest.”
“Anybody know you there?”
“No.”
“Me neither.”
Less than ten minutes later he pulled into the lot behind a yellow brick building near the town center. They found an oversized map of New England and eastern Canada at the reference desk. As Amanda spread it out on a heavy mahogany table, Cam found a stack of yellow Post-its at the reference desk and ripped a few of the sticky ends of the sheets into a dozen dice-size squares.
“Okay. Let’s start marking important spots. If Forsberg was right, these artifacts and stone holes and carvings are part of some kind of elaborate mapping system.”
“You do that,” Amanda said. “There’s a book I want to locate.”
He worked quickly, sticking Post-it scraps to mark the Newport Tower, the Westford Knight, the original Boat Stone location, the Tyngsboro Map Stone, Spirit Pond, the Narragansett Rune Stone site, America’s Stonehenge, Lake Memphremagog in Quebec (where Templar artifacts were found and where Prince Henry may have sailed via the Merrimack River), Oak Island in Nova Scotia, and the stone hole they found on Cowdry Hill in Westford.
She returned, looked over his shoulder and studied the map. “Probably dozens of other artifacts and stone holes and petroglyphs were either destroyed or haven’t been uncovered yet. When you think about it, it really is amazing that so much ev
idence still survives.”
He only half heard her. He was looking for a pattern in the yellow scraps of paper. “Let’s go back to this chess thing. And let’s imagine that the Newport Tower really is a rook. It would move either vertically or horizontally.” He traced the latitudinal line due east toward Europe: The line passed directly through Rome. Not a bad reference point for a prime meridian.
Focusing now on the north-south orientation, he dropped one end of his ruler on Newport. “Check this out, Amanda.” He stood. “The Tower and America’s Stonehenge are on the same longitudinal line. Maybe Forsberg was right—maybe the Tower is the key to some whole mapping system.”
“And I wager that’s what the lantern clue is trying to tell us also—the Tower is the key.”
As they studied the map, a middle-aged man with thick glasses tapped Amanda on the shoulder and handed her an oversized, fabric-bound book entitled, The History of Chess. She waved it at Cam. “You continue working on the map. I’ll work on the chess pieces.”
“Okay.” What about the Westford Knight itself? Did it fit into the mapping in any way? Brandon had said the Masons laid out Washington using a series of L-shaped patterns, similar to a chess knight’s movement, with the two stems of the L in the golden ratio of 1:62 to 1. Cam marked the Knight on the map and maneuvered his ruler in different L-shaped combinations for a few minutes. He dropped his ruler as one of the L-shaped patterns in the 1:62 to 1 ratio landed his knight exactly on the America’s Stonehenge site.
“What is it?” she asked.
He didn’t want to overstate his case. Lives were at risk, including his and Amanda’s. But this was a remarkable coincidence. Or it was more than that. “The knight passes through the America’s Stonehenge site just like the rook—the Tower—does.”
She set her book down and peered over his shoulder. “I suspected that might be the case.”
“You did?”
She held up her book, waving it at him again. “A few interesting chess facts. First, as we knew already, the Templars played a large role in introducing chess to Europe from the Middle East.”
“Make sense. They were traveling back and forth a lot.”
“But fancy this: The chess queen was originally a minor piece, only able to move one square at a time, similar to the king. The Templars were behind the change to make her the most powerful piece on the board.”
“Venus worship strikes again.”
“Precisely. And it gets better.” Her eyes gleamed. “In medieval times there was no bishop on the board. They played with a ship piece instead. The Church was bothered because the game was becoming popular yet there was no Church player on the board. So the Church decreed that the ship piece—which moved diagonally, as would a boat tacking back and forth into the wind—be changed to a bishop.”
Not only were the hairs on his neck standing, they were swaying in the wind. “Wait. So the bishop used to be a boat?”
“Yes. A medieval knorr. The same type of ship as is carved on the Boat Stone.”
“Bloody amazing,” he grinned. Turning back to his map, he drew a diagonal line through the Boat Stone, just as a bishop would move. The line passed through the Cowdry Hill stone hole to the southwest and the Tyngsboro Map Stone, which also had a stone hole, to the northeast. Extending it a bit further, his hands shaking as he moved the ruler, the line passed directly through the America’s Stonehenge site, intersecting the L-shaped Knight and vertical Tower lines. Further north, the line bending to account for the curvature of the earth, the line would pass over the Spirit Pond stone hole as well.
“This is fascinating, Cam. You’ve got the knight, the rook and the bishop—or the ship—all intersecting in the same spot. America’s Stonehenge.”
IMAGE SHOWING INTERSECTION OF ROOK, BISHOP AND KNIGHT CHESS PIECE MOVEMENTS AT AMERICA’S STONEHENGE SITE (NEWPORT TOWER NOT SHOWN).
“It’s like Eric Forsberg said. Everything the Templars did existed on multiple levels. So these artifacts were not only markers and signposts and memorials but also pieces to a whole secret map.”
“Directing us to Mystery Hill, America’s Stonehenge.”
“But why? Why did Prince Henry devise a coded map using chess pieces to point to a bunch of ancient rock formations?”
She touched his shoulder, her face flushed in excitement. “You’re not thinking like a medievalist, Cam. Don’t you see? Finding America’s Stonehenge would have been crucial to their survival in the New World. It was their calendar and their compass. In many ways it was just as important to them as Stonehenge in Britain was to the Grooved Ware culture. As the Monsignor said, it told them how to farm and manage their livestock and when to travel. Basically how to survive in the wilderness—you know American history, you know the Pilgrims almost perished that first year because they did not understand the climate here.” She paused. “And it would also have told them when to celebrate religious holidays. Recall that, though they did not follow the dogma of the Church, they remained devout Christians.”
She shifted in her seat, folding a leg beneath her. “And fancy this: It goes even further. It ties back all the way to Venus worship, to worship of Mother Earth. That’s what the America’s Stonehenge site is: It’s the manifestation of man’s understanding of Mother Earth. America’s Stonehenge must certainly have been a sacred site; Prince Henry convinced the natives to share it with him, probably because they understood he worshiped nature just as they did.”
She had made a compelling argument. And she wasn’t done yet. “An ancient megalithic site called Maes Howe remains standing today in northern Scotland. Like Stonehenge, it was built by the Grooved Ware people and records the Venus cycles.” She paused, made sure he was with her. “Cam, Maes Howe is in Orkney, where Prince Henry resided and ruled. He certainly knew about it, probably observed the Venus cycle himself. He would have immediately appreciated the importance of the America’s Stonehenge site.”
The more he thought about it from a medieval point of view, the more Amanda’s conclusion seemed correct. Prince Henry traveled halfway around the world and what did he find? A series of stone structures—whether built by ancient Europeans or by Native Americans themselves—used by the natives to mark and measure celestial events in the same way his ancestors did in Orkney. It would be like going to another planet today and stumbling upon a Swiss watch. The discovery must have blown Prince Henry away. Could he have really hoped to find like-minded peoples amongst the ‘savages’ of the New World?
So it made sense he would consider the America’s Stonehenge site a treasure of the New World. Just as his ancestors worshipped Sophia, the goddess of wisdom, so too would Prince Henry, in Templar fashion, understand that knowledge was the true Holy Grail. Knowledge of the seasons, knowledge of nature, knowledge of the stars, knowledge of the earth. Knowledge was the most valuable of all treasures. No wonder Prince Henry’s coded maps led directly to the ancient stone structures that embodied this knowledge.
It was all perfectly consistent with Templar and Kabbalistic values and traditions. Yet he had the feeling that there was more to it, another layer to the onion they hadn’t peeled away yet. As the Monsignor said, the Templars always operated on multiple levels….
But the onion-peeling would have to wait. For now they needed to save Brandon. He dialed his cousin’s TracFone.
“Hey,” Brandon said. “I just spoke to Poulos. They think they got one of the guys who killed the Monsignor.”
Some good news, finally. “Is he talking?”
“No. He’s got a bunch of high-priced lawyers, flown in from Miami.”
Maybe not such good news. Probably just a low-level operative. No doubt there were dozens more Legions of Jesus soldiers waiting in the shadows to replace him. In some way they were like modern Templar Knights, willing to die for their religion. Looking back at the Templars and their fanaticism, perhaps the modern al-Qaeda movement and its seemingly endless supply of suicide bombers shouldn’t surprise Western observers after a
ll.
“Listen. I think we figured everything out.” He recounted the chess movements, the intersection of all the pieces, the significance of the America’s Stonehenge site as both a calendar and a link to ancient Templar spiritual beliefs.
“So that’s it? No treasure?”
“Not a treasure in the traditional sense, no.”
“Not even a genealogy or anything like that?”
“Nope. Like I said, nothing sexy. Just a coded map that points to America’s Stonehenge.”
“So the Vatican has nothing to worry about?”
He pictured the black sedans speeding toward Massachusetts General Hospital, the muscular goons, the long needle with truth serum dripping from its tip. He hated lying to his cousin. But he had no choice. “No, nothing. Prince Henry and his gang were just trying to stay alive. Just trying to figure out when to plant their crops and when to celebrate their holidays.”
* * *
They only had a few hours, at most, before the Legions of Jesus operatives closed in on Brandon. But something Amanda had said resonated in Cam’s mind, causing a bunch of otherwise irrelevant scraps of information to suddenly become not only relevant but potentially vital: Somehow Prince Henry convinced the Indians to share the America’s Stonehenge secret with him. This was the key to peeling away the next layer of the onion.
Unfortunately, they didn’t have time to pursue his theory now. In fact, he didn’t even have time to share his ideas with Amanda. “We need to move quickly. I have a feeling this all is going to come to a head today. My guess is they’re going to abduct Brandon, use him to get us to come in and meet with them. I don’t really see how we can stop them. Poulos has already posted a guard—we don’t have enough evidence against the Legions of Jesus to convince him to put a whole SWAT team up there. And it’s not like they can move him someplace safe; he needs to be in an ICU ward in a major hospital. These guys are trained paramilitary forces. Whether it’s today or tomorrow or the next day, they’re going to find him no matter what we do.”
Cabal of The Westford Knight: Templars at the Newport Tower (Book #1 in the Templars in America Series) Page 27