The Cotton Malone Series 7-Book Bundle

by Steve Berry

  “And not on mine?”

  “You must tread carefully.”

  They were sitting behind the closed door of his chamber, the window open, the distant waterfall a gentle roar. “That approach has taken us nowhere.”

  “Whether you realize it or not, those men dying has shaken your authority. There’s talk already, and you’ve only been master a few days.”

  “I will not tolerate dissension.”

  A sad but tranquil smile came to the chaplain’s lips. “You sound just like the man you so opposed. What’s changed? Has the seneschal so affected you?”

  “He’s not seneschal any longer.”

  “Unfortunately, that’s the only name I know him by. You apparently know far more.”

  But he wondered if the cagey Venetian sitting across from him was being truthful. He’d heard talk, too, his spies reporting that the chaplain was quite interested in what the master was doing. Far more than any spiritual adviser needed to be. He wondered if this man, who professed to be his friend, was positioning himself for more. After all, he’d done the same thing years ago himself.

  He actually wanted to talk about his dilemma, explain what happened, what he knew, seek some guidance, but sharing that with anyone would be foolhardy. Claridon was bad enough, but at least he was not of the Order. This man was altogether different. He had the potential to become an enemy. So he voiced the obvious. “I’m searching for our Great Devise, and I’m close to locating it.”

  “But at the price of two dead.”

  “Many have died for what we believe,” he said, voice rising. In the first two centuries of our existence, twenty thousand brothers gave their lives. Two more dying now is insignificant.”

  “Human life has a much greater value now than then.” He noticed the chaplain’s voice had lowered into a whisper.

  “No, the value is the same. What’s changed is our lack of dedication.”

  “This not a war. There are no infidels holding the Holy Land. We’re talking about finding something that most likely doesn’t exist.”

  “You speak blasphemy.”

  “I speak the truth. And you know it. You think finding our Great Devise will change everything. It will change nothing. You must still garner the respect of all who serve you.”

  “Doing what I promised will generate that respect.”

  “Have you thought this quest through? It’s not as simple as you think. The issues here are far greater than they were in the Beginning. The world is no longer illiterate and ignorant. You have much more to contend with than the brothers did then. Unfortunately for you, there exists not one mention of Jesus Christ in any secular Greek, Roman, or Jewish historical account. Not one reference in any piece of surviving literature. Just the New Testament. That’s the whole sum of His existence. And why is that? You know the answer. If Jesus lived at all, He preached His message in the obscurity of Judea. No one paid Him any mind. The Romans couldn’t have cared less, provided He wasn’t inciting rebellion. And the Jews did little more than argue among themselves, which suited the Romans. Jesus came and went. He was inconsequential. Yet He now commands the attention of billions. Christianity is the world’s largest religion. And He is, in every sense, their Messiah. The risen Lord. And nothing you find will change that.”

  “What if His bones are there?”

  “How would you know they’re His bones?”

  “How did those nine original knights know? And look at what they accomplished. Kings and queens bowed to their will. How else can that be explained except through what they knew.”

  “And you think they shared that knowledge? What did they do—show the bones of Christ to each king, each monetary donor, each one of the faithful?”

  “I have no idea what they did. But whatever their method it proved effective. Men flocked to the Order, wanting to be a part of it. Secular authorities courted its favor. Why can’t that be again?”

  “It can. Only not in the manner you think.”

  “It galls me. For all we did for the Church. Twenty thousand brothers, six masters, all died defending Jesus Christ. The Knights Hospitallers’ sacrifice cannot compare. Yet there is not one Templar saint, and there are many canonized Hospitallers. I want to right that injustice.”

  “How is that possible?” The chaplain did not wait for him to answer. “What is will not change.”

  He thought again of the note. THE ANSWER HAS BEEN FOUND. And the phone resting in his pocket. I WILL CALL BEFORE THE SUN SETS WITH INFORMATION. His fingers lightly caressed the bulge of the cell phone in his trouser pocket. The chaplain was still talking, murmuring more about “the quest for nothing.” Royce Claridon was still in the archives, searching.

  But only one thought raced through his mind.

  Why won’t the phone ring?

  “Henrik,” Malone screamed. “I can’t take much more of this.”

  He’d just listened to Mark’s explanation that the ruins of the nearby abbey belonged to Thorvaldsen. They stood in the trees, half a mile from St. Agulous, where they’d parked and waited.

  “Cotton, I had no idea that I own that property.”

  “We’re supposed to believe that?” Stephanie said.

  “I don’t give a damn whether you believe me or not. I knew nothing of this till a moment ago.”

  “How do you explain it then?” Malone asked.

  “I can’t. I can only say that Lars borrowed a hundred and forty thousand dollars from me three months before he died. He never said what the money was for and I didn’t ask.”

  “You just gave him that much money with no questions?” Stephanie asked.

  “He needed it, so I gave it to him. I trusted him.”

  “The abbé in town said the buyer bought the property from the regional government. They were divesting themselves of the ruins and had few takers, as it’s up in the mountains and in poor condition. It was sold at auction here in St. Augulous.” Mark faced Thorvaldsen. “Yours was the high bid. The priest knew Dad and said he wasn’t the one who actually bid.”

  “Then Lars engaged someone to do it on his behalf, because it was not me. He then placed the title in my name to give him cover. Lars was quite paranoid. If I owned that property and knew it, I would have said something last night.”

  “Not necessarily,” Stephanie murmured.

  “Look, Stephanie. I’m not afraid of you or any one of you. I don’t have to explain myself. But I consider you all my friends, and if I owned the property and knew it, I’d tell you.”

  “Why don’t we assume Henrik is telling the truth,” Cassiopeia said. She’d stayed uncharacteristically quiet during the debate. “And get on up there. Darkness comes quick in the mountains. I for one want to see what’s there.”

  Malone agreed. “She’s right. Let’s go. We can fight about this later.”

  The drive up into the higher elevations took fifteen minutes and required strong nerves and good brakes. They followed the abbé’s directions and eventually caught sight of the crumbling priory, resting on an eagle’s aerie, its shattered square tower flanked by a merciless precipice. The road ended about half a mile from the ruins and the hike up, along a trail of emaciated rock flowered with thyme, beneath a canopy of great pines, took another ten minutes.

  They entered the site.

  Signs of neglect lay everywhere. The thick walls were bare and Malone allowed his fingers to slip along the gray-green granite schist, each stone surely quarried from the mountains and worked with faithful patience by ancient hands. A once grand gallery opened to the sky with columns and capitals that centuries of weather and light had tarnished beyond recognition. Moss, orange lichens, and gray wiry grass littered the ground, the stone floor long ago returned to sand. Grasshoppers sang a loud castanet.

  The rooms were hard to delineate, as the roof and most of the walls lay collapsed, but the monk cells were evident, as was a large hall and another spacious room that might have been a library or scriptorium. Malone knew that life here would h
ave been frugal, thrifty, and austere.

  “Quite a place you own,” he said to Henrik.

  “I was just admiring what a hundred and forty thousand dollars could buy twelve years ago.”

  Cassiopeia seemed enthralled. “You can imagine the monks harvesting a meager crop from the little bit of fertile soil. Summers here were brief, the days short. You can almost hear them chanting.”

  “This place would have been sufficiently forlorn,” Thorvaldsen said. “An oblivion only for themselves.”

  “Lars titled this property in your name,” Stephanie said, “for a reason. He came here for a reason. Something has to be here.”

  “Perhaps,” Cassiopeia noted. “But the abbé in town told Mark that Lars found nothing. This could be more of the perpetual chases he engaged in.”

  Mark shook his head. “The cryptogram led us here. Dad was here. He didn’t find anything, but he thought it important enough to buy. This has to be the place.”

  Malone sat atop one of the chunks of stone and stared up at the sky. “We have maybe five or six hours of daylight left. I suggest we make the most if it. I’m sure it gets pretty cold up here at night, and these fleece-lined jackets aren’t going to be enough.”

  “I brought some equipment and gear in the Rover,” Cassiopeia said. “I assumed we could be underground, so I have light bars, flashlights, and a small generator.”

  “Well, aren’t you Johnny-on-the-spot,” Malone said.

  “Here,” Geoffrey called out.

  Malone glanced farther into the decayed priory. He’d not noticed that Geoffrey had wandered off.

  They all hustled deeper into the ruin and found Geoffrey standing outside what was once a Romanesque doorway. Little remained of its craftsmanship beyond a faint image of human-headed bulls, winged lions, and a palm-leaf motif.

  “The church,” Geoffrey said. “They carved it from rock.”

  Malone could see that indeed the walls beyond were not human-made, but were part of the precipice that towered above the former abbey. “We’ll need those flashlights,” he said to Cassiopeia.

  “No, you won’t,” Geoffrey said. “There’s light inside.”

  Malone led the way in. Bees hummed in the shadows. Dusty shafts of light poured through slits cut through the rock at varying angles, apparently designed to take advantage of the drifting sun. Something caught his eye. He stepped close to one of the rock walls, hewn smooth but now bare of any decoration except a carving about ten feet above him. The crest consisted of a helmet with a swathe of linen dropping on each side of a male face. The features were gone, the nose worn smooth, the eyes blank and lifeless. On top was a sphinx. Below was a stone shield with three hammers.

  “That’s Templar,” Mark said. “I’ve seen another like it at our abbey.”

  “What’s it doing here?” Malone asked.

  “The Catalans who lived in this region during the fourteenth century had no love for the French king. Templars were treated with kindness here, even after the Purge. That’s one reason the area was chosen as a refuge.”

  The ponderous walls rose high to a rounded ceiling. Frescoes surely once adorned everything, but not a remnant remained. Water leaking in through the porous rock had long ago erased all artistic vestiges.

  “It’s like a cave,” Stephanie said.

  “More a fortress,” Cassiopeia noted. “This could well have been the abbey’s last line of defense.”

  Malone had been thinking the same thing. “But there’s a problem.” He motioned to the dim surroundings. “No other way out.”

  Something else caught his attention. He stepped close and focused on the wall, most of which rose in shadow. He strained hard. “I wish we had one of those flashlights.”

  The others approached.

  Ten feet up he saw the faint remnants of letters roughly hewn on the gray stone.

  “P, R, N, V, I, R,” he asked.

  “No,” Cassiopeia said. “There’s more. Another I, maybe an E and another R.”

  He strained in the dimness to interpret the writing.

  PRIER EN VENIR.

  Malone’s mind came alive. He recalled the words at the center of Marie d’Hautpoul’s gravestone. REDDIS RÉGIS CÉLLIS ARCIS. And what Claridon said about them in Avignon.

  Reddis means “to give back, to restore something previously taken.” Regis derives from rex, which is king. Cella refers to a storeroom. Arcis stems from arx—a stronghold, fortress, citadel.

  The words had seemed meaningless at the time. But perhaps they simply needed rearranging.

  Storeroom, fortress, restore something previously taken, king.

  By adding a few prepositions, the message might be, In a storeroom, at a stronghold fortress, restore something previously taken from the king.

  And the arrow that stretched down the center of the gravestone, between the words, starting at the top with the letters P-S and ending at PRÆ-CUM.

  Præ-cum. Latin for “pray to come.”

  He stared again at the letters scratched into the rock.

  PRIER EN VENIR

  French for “pray to come.”

  He smiled and told them what he thought. “The abbé Bigou was a clever one, I’ll give him that.”

  “That arrow on the gravestone,” Mark said, “had to be significant. It’s dead in the center, in a place of prominence.”

  Malone’s senses were now alert, his mind surging through the information, and he started to take notice of the floor. Many of the flagstones were gone, the remaining cracked and misshapen, but he noticed a pattern. A series of squares, framed by a narrow stone line, ran from front to back and left to right.

  He counted.

  In one of the framed rectangles he tallied seven stones across, nine down. He counted another section. The same. Then another.

  “The floor is arranged seven, nine,” he told them.

  Mark and Henrik moved toward the altar, themselves counting. “And there are nine sections from the rear door to the altar,” Mark said.

  “And seven go across,” Stephanie said, as she finished finding a final floor section near an outer wall.

  “Okay, we seem to be in the right place,” Malone said. He thought again about the headstone. Pray to come. He gazed up at the French words scratched into the stone, then down at the floor. Bees continued to buzz near the altar. “Let’s get those light bars and that generator in here. We need to see what we’re doing.”

  “I think we also need to stay tonight,” Cassiopeia said. “The nearest inn is in Elne, thirty miles away. We should camp here.”

  “We have supplies?” Malone asked.

  “We can get them,” she said. “Elne is a fairly good-sized town. We can buy what we need there without drawing any attention. But I don’t want to leave.”

  He could see that none of the others wanted to go, either. An excitement was stirring. He could feel it, too. The riddle was no longer some abstract concept, impossible to understand. Instead, the answer lay somewhere around them. And contrary to what he’d told Cassiopeia yesterday, he wanted to find it.

  “I’ll go,” Geoffrey said. “Each of you needs to stay and decide what we do next. It’s for you, not me.”

  “We appreciate that,” Thorvaldsen said.

  Cassiopeia reached into her pocket and produced a wad of euros. “You’ll need money.”

  Geoffrey took the funds and smiled. “Just give me a list and I’ll be back by nightfall.”

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  Malone raked the flashlight’s beam across the inside of the church, searching the rock walls for more clues. They’d off-loaded all of the equipment Cassiopeia had brought and hauled it into the abbey. Stephanie and Cassiopeia were outside, fashioning a camp. Henrik had volunteered to locate firewood. He and Mark had come back inside to see if there was anything they’d missed.

  “This church has been empty a long time,” Mark said. “Three hundred years, the priest in town said.”

  “Must have been remarkable
in its day.”

  “This type of construction isn’t unusual. There are subterranean churches all over the Languedoc. At Vals, up near Carcassonne, is one of the most famous. It’s in good shape. Still has frescoes. All the churches in this region were painted. That was the style. Unfortunately, little of that art has survived anywhere thanks to the Revolution.”

  “Must have been a tough life up here.”

  “Monastics were a rare breed. They had no newspapers, radio, television, music, theater. Only a few books and the frescoes in church as intoxicants.”

  Malone continued to survey the almost theatrical darkness that surrounded him, broken only by a chalky fading light that colored the few details as though snow lay heavy inside.

  “We have to assume the cryptogram in the marshal’s report is authentic,” Mark said. “There’s no reason to think it’s not.”

  “Except the marshal disappeared shortly after he filed the report.”

  “I always believed that particular marshal was driven like de Roquefort. I think he went after the treasure. He must have known the story of the de Blanchefort family secret. That information, and the fact that Abbé Bigou may have known the secret, has been a part of our Chronicles for centuries. He could have assumed that Bigou left both cryptograms and that they led to the Great Devise. Being an ambitious man, he went to get it himself.”

  “Then why record the cryptogram?”

  “What did it matter? He had the solution, which the Abbé Gélis gave him. No one else even had a clue as to what it meant. So why not file the report and show your master that you’ve been working?”

  “Using that line of thinking, the marshal could have killed Gélis and simply gone back and recorded what happened afterward as a way to cover his tracks.”

  “That’s entirely possible.”

  Malone stepped close to the letters—PRIER EN VENIR—scratched in the wall. “Nothing else survived in here,” he muttered.

  “That’s true. Which is a shame. There are lots of niches, and those would have all contained statues. Combined with the frescoes, this would have once been a decorated place.”