Lost City of the Templars (15 page)

“What exactly did we just see?” Sir Alistair asked.

Thornhill explained, “An aircraft, probably an old DC3, belly-landed at a small airfield near Bayou La Batre, Alabama—Bayou La Batre is where they shot the shrimp boat scenes in
Forrest Gump
, by the way. At any rate, as it landed one wing of the downed aircraft swung around and slammed into a waiting vehicle, either a Cadillac Escalade or a limousine, from the size of the heat signature.

“In the process the two passengers inside the vehicle were killed by the resulting explosion. The plane comes to rest and a few moments later four people exit the DC3 and run to a waiting panel van, something the size of a Renault Kangoo or a Ford Transit. Once in the van, they start it up and drive off.”

“And what on earth does this have to do with our Colonel Holliday?” Givens, the man from the Home Office, asked.

“Do shut up, won’t you?” Sir Alistair said. He turned to Thornhill. “Go on, then, Roger.”

“This might explain things a little better,” said the analyst. He tapped a few keys on his computer, and a still image appeared on the big screen. “We know Holliday and his people have crossed swords with Kate Sinclair in all her incarnations, and we also know that Holliday has been seen in northern Brazil—Amazonia to be precise, an area with direct ties to our own Lord Grayle and the Pallas Group. This shot was taken fifteen minutes before the tropical storm now known as Mellissa struck Bayou La Batre.” The image now on the screen showed a limousine with a well-dressed man standing beside it smoking a cigarette or a cigar.

“Can we come in a little closer on that?” Sir Alistair said.

Roger Thornhill tapped another key.

The photograph zoomed in.

“Oh dear,” Sir Alistair sighed. “Charles Peace.”

It took them slightly more than twelve hours to make the trip to Miami, stopping only six times, three at public rest stops and twice for food at a Denny’s and once at a Harvey’s BBQ for a rib-tip sandwich.

The address they were looking for was farther down Old Cutler Road in Coral Gables and through the fairy-tale arch of giant banyan trees that turned the street into a dappled tunnel, brightening as the sun rose.

It was seven thirty in the morning when they found the address Rafi was looking for. It was an old rancher from the ’sixties fronted by a forest of untended trees and foliage, the house barely visible from the street.

They turned down the driveway and climbed out of the van into the misty air. They walked up to the front door and Rafi knocked. A few moments later there was the sound of feet shuffling in slippers. The door opened.

“A change of name or place may sometimes save a person,” Rafi said, then repeated the phrase in Hebrew.

“Eyn ashan bli esh,”
said the man.

“There is no smoke without fire.”

The man sighed and ushered them into the house. “Feh,” the man said. “Just what I need, guests at this hour of the day, countersigns so old they have dust on them. You’ll be hungry. I’ll give you breakfast.”

He turned away, then led them across an old man’s living room of comfortable furniture, walls of books and framed photographs and newspapers strewn across a floor covered by an old braided rug.

“My name is Avrom Lazar, by the way. I teach Judaic studies at the University of Miami. I am only a spy in my spare time. A
sayani
, as we are called.”

The kitchen could have been teleported from the ’fifties, complete with pale yellow cupboards and appliances, cottage curtains with cornflower blue patterns and a yellow Formica table, six matching vinyl chairs and a checkerboard black-and-white linoleum floor.

Avrom Lazar busied himself around the kitchen making breakfast, humming quietly. Even at this early hour, he was wearing a yarmulke pinned to unruly silver hair. He was in his eighties with drooping bags beneath twinkling eyes and rosy cheeks forced down by time and gravity on either side of an almost feminine mouth that looked as though it rarely frowned.

The man had bright red reading glasses perched on his forehead and wore a brown corduroy suit much too warm for the summer, complete with vest, white shirt and tie, the vest decorated with a fob and chain that spanned a moderate belly. He wore purple velvet bedroom slippers.

Breakfast turned out to be toasted bagels with deli cream cheese, a lox and green onion omelet and an endless supply of excellent coffee. They told their story as they ate. Lazar said nothing, merely nodding from time to time.

Using a laptop she’d purchased at a Walmart Supercenter in Panama City, Peggy showed him the photographs she’d transferred from her camera onto a memory stick showing the inside of Hiram’s ossuary and he just nodded again.

When they’d finished their story, Lazar took an old briar pipe from the pocket of his jacket, put in a large pinch of some aromatic blend he kept in a leather pouch and lit up with a kitchen match he fired on a thick yellowed thumbnail.

“What a wonderful tale,” he said, puffing on the pipe. “Rather reminiscent of Steven Spielberg at his best. I would have loved to be with you on such an adventure. I haven’t done something as exciting as that since the war.”

“You fought in World War Two?” Holliday asked.

“Fought is hardly the word. I was initially part of the Jewish Brigade Group and then I was sent over to British Intelligence because of my knowledge of European art.”

“Art?” Peggy said.

“I was studying at the Slade when the war broke out. My intention was to write the definitive biography of Constable since I had no artistic talent myself, but SIS was already interested in Adolf’s looting even early in the war and they recruited me. Following the end of the conflict, I was the handler for several field groups, one of whom had the mandate of discovering the source, if any, of Hitler’s acquisition of religious relics—the Ark of the Covenant in particular.”

“Uncle Henry,” said Holliday.

“Quite so,” said Lazar. “Henry Granger and Derek Carr-Harris.” He turned to Rafi. “Do you know what your father did just after the war, Dr. Wanounou?”

“He was an archaeologist. He died when I was sixteen.”

“Were you aware that his first dig was at Khirbet Qumran in 1947 under the direction of a Dominican priest named Roland de Vaux?”

“Is this going where I think it’s going?” Holliday asked.

“I don’t get it,” said Peggy.

“There was a man, a Cistercian monk named Bernard de Clairvaux, who wrote the Templar creed. He was really the first Templar. You’re trying to say there’s a connection between the two men?” Holliday explained.

“A direct descendant. Roland de Vaux spent his first years at the
École biblique et archéologique française de Jérusalem
studying the old documents relating to the Templars,” said Lazar.

“It sparked his interest in two things—the ruins on top of the cliffs at Qumran and an obscure Templar knight named Sir William Fitzmartin. Fitzmartin was a monk of the Abbey of St. Andrew. All we know of him is that he vanished sometime shortly after the taking of Jerusalem in 1099. He is notable for refusing to take part in the massacre that followed the siege and was last seen to be headed into the Eastern Desert, alone. According to Roland de Vaux, his family sigil, a single lion rampant below a Templar cross, was found scratched onto a staircase in the ruins of the Scriptorium at Khirbet Qumran.”

“What does any of this have to do with my father?” Rafi asked.

“He was the one who found Fitzmartin’s mark.”

“So when you cut to the chase, you’re saying you believe the Ark exists,” Holliday said.

“Of course it exists,” replied Lazar. “We’ve known about it for years. That’s one of the major reasons we’ve been excavating around the Dome of the Rock for the past ten years. If you asked the average American who should own the Ark, he’d tell you it’s a Christian relic when of course it’s not. Moses led the Jews out of Egypt, not the Christians. Christ was a Jew, after all. The Ark belongs in Israel, not to the Vatican, and certainly not to Kate Sinclair. It’s ours. We’d like you to get it back.”

“You knew we’d come here?” Rafi asked.

“I was advised that it was a probability.”

“Mossad has been watching us?”

“Since the monk Rodrigues gave you the notebook on the island of Corvo.”

“So what do we do now?” Holliday said.

“First we must get you out of the United States and into Israel. We can’t fly you out of any of the major airports. Security is too tough. I suggest Canada.”

“We’ll need documents.”

“Easy enough. You’ll each cross separately from Detroit to Windsor by car. I have access to a private jet from one of our other ‘friends’ here in Miami. It’s all been arranged. I just have to say the word.”

“Then say it.” Holliday nodded.

“I have never been to Israel,” said Eddie.

“You’ll love it,” said Holliday. “Just like Cuba—hot weather and white sand beaches.”

•   •   •

Antonio Ruffino sat in Lord Adrian Grayle’s library, a snifter of very expensive Rémy Martin in one hand and a Cuban Bolívar in the other. He was staring at the immense three-by-five painting of a battle. It was incredibly detailed, horses rearing, men dying, cannons blasting.

“William Sadler,
The Battle of Waterloo
,” said Grayle, spritzing a little soda into his glass of scotch. “We won, if you’ll recall.”

“I have never been in your home without the others. I am wondering why I have been singled out for brandy and cigars. It is a great honor, Lord Grayle.”

Grayle was perfectly aware of the slightly acidic tone in the Italian’s voice. “I want you to deliver a message to your brother, the cardinal secretary of state,” Grayle said bluntly.

“You know I am not on good terms with my brother, for obvious reasons.”

“Your brother has assets available to him that I do not and vice versa. We must use those assets to defeat a common enemy.”

“What enemy?”

“Holliday and his people. Everyone is after them now. They’re on their way to Israel as we speak. They’re too close. We have to stop them from reaching their objective. Stop them dead.”

The plateau of Khirbet Qumran lies less than fifteen miles from the high hills of Jerusalem and less than two miles from the shores of the Dead Sea. The entire area is a national park, complete with an interpretive visitors’ center and an oversized tour bus parking lot.

There were no tour buses today and very few tourists. The sun was a white-hot furnace in a sky leached of any color. It was over a hundred and ten in the shade of the few palms that grew on the fringes of the parking lot, and a steady wind from the south was blowing up clouds of dust. Holliday and the others had come prepared, and as they climbed out of the rental van they were wearing kaffiyehs and Ryder sand goggles they’d purchased at a Jerusalem motorcycle store.

“I feel like one of the sand people in
Star Wars
,” said Peggy.

“You look like a teeny, tiny Anwar Sadat,” joked Rafi.

“I’m still not talking to you, Mr. Mossad agent,” Peggy snorted back. She was hauling a small plastic cooler out of the back of the van. It was stuffed with water bottles and protein bars for all of them. There were even a few oranges.

Rafi sighed. “I’m not a Mossad agent, Peg. I’m a
sayan
, just like Avrom Lazar. A helper when I’m needed, no more than that.”

“Whatever,” said Peggy. “The point is, you should have told me.”

“They told me not to.”

“They?”

“Mossad,” he answered, sighing again.

“Then you really are a Mossad agent.”

Holliday broke in. “This is going nowhere. Enough domestic disputes. Which way are the ruins?”

“This way,” said Rafi. “I’ll lead the way.” He picked up the gym bag carrying his basic “dig” tools and they head toward the ruins.

•   •   •

Khirbet Qumran was occupied during the first century B.C. as a place of refuge by the Essenes, a group of Jewish holy men who decided that Jerusalem and the Temple had become a place of sin and corruption, much as Christ did a hundred and thirty years later. The occupants of the community, all men, numbered a thousand at the high point of the settlement, and these men spent much of their time transcribing the early Scriptures onto parchment and keeping the settlement self-sustaining by the use of an aqueduct to capture water from the regular flash floods that struck the area as well as raising sheep for both sustenance and for the parchment made from the animal skins. They were also well-known potters and provided water jars for the other communities along the coast.

With the arrival of the Romans in 68 B.C., things became much more tenuous for the Essene community, and to prevent the destruction of the Scriptures and other documents relating to their creed, they began a steady program of putting these documents in sealed pottery jars and hiding them in the caves of the surrounding hills. The Essenes faded into history, but miraculously the documents remained hidden until they were accidentally discovered in 1946 by Muhammad Ahmed al-Hamed, better known by his nickname Muhammed edh-Dhib (“Muhammad the Wolf”), a Bedouin shepherd boy from the Ta’amireh clan residing in Bethlehem. These were the famous Dead Sea Scrolls, which in many ways rewrote what was known about the Old Testament as well as the history of Judaism at the time they were written.

They reached the ruins, an unprepossessing scattering of piled rocks and stones, whatever mortar had held them together as walls long eaten away by the sand, wind and the passage of time. An unlikely place to find the most valuable relic in both the Christian and Hebrew worlds.

The group stood there, muffled against the grating of the blowing sand, staring at the ruins through the eerily tinted lenses of their goggles.

“Beautiful,” said Rafi. Holliday knew he wasn’t seeing ruins but the buildings as they had been all those centuries ago. He saw it peopled with men as they went about the business of the settlement, heard the sound of potters’ wheels and the chants of holy men at prayer. Holliday had felt something like it in his time: the stamping of Nazi jackboots on the Champs-Élysées, the clatter of arrows raining down from a castle parapet in Spain, the thunder of horses crossing the blood-soaked fields of Waterloo. Sometimes the power of history could reach out from the distant past and touch you, if only for a moment. To Rafi this moment was magical.

“Where did they find this sign of the knight?” Eddie asked.

Rafi pointed through the swirling cloud of sand to the rear of the settlement. “There,” he said, his voice muffled by the kaffiyeh. “The smallest of the cisterns, close to the aqueduct. At the foot of the staircase leading down to the water.”

They plodded through the ruins, skirting walls, cutting through the remains of roofless, doorless buildings.

“This is what we call in Spanish
fantasmal
.”

“Spooky,” said Holliday.

“
Sí, mi coronel, muy
spooky. Bad spirits are here. There were hard deaths in this place.”

“He’s right,” said Rafi as they made their way through the ruins. “In the first century A.D. the Romans destroyed this place and slaughtered every Jew they could find. Same old, same old.”

They finally reached their destination at the far end of the settlement. It was a series of three small cisterns, the main one in the middle being fed by the aqueduct overhead, the main pool feeding the two others, one left and one right.

The pools were clearly man-made, roughly circular pits about eight feet deep and lined with bricks. A stairway led down to the bottom of the pool, and two more stairways, no more than three or four steps, led down to the deeper pools on either side.

“The knight’s scratches are at the foot of the stairs leading to the left pool,” said Rafi, pointing.

They climbed slowly down the crumbling steps, then went down the four steps leading down to the smaller pool. It was roughly circular, carved out of the sandstone and lined with bricks. Rafi knelt down at the base of the short flight of steps, opened his gym bag and took out a broad hard-bristle paintbrush. He gently teased the buildup of sand away from the bottom step until a faint image appeared.

“Hand me a bottle of water please,” he said to Peggy. She opened the cooler and cracked open a small bottle of Mey Eden mineral water. He sprinkled it over the deeply etched stone, and the image became clear—a childlike figure of a lion with a larger and very distinct Templar Cross above it.

Rafi sat back on his haunches as the others stooped to see the marking. Below the level of the plateau, the sand blew more softly and the wind was lesser, so Rafi pulled his goggles down to see better. The others followed suit.

“There have always been different interpretations other than the fact that a Knight Templar was here. Was it Sir William Fitzmartin himself, or simply one of the other knights he recruited to come with him on the Crusade? Was it no more than a piece of errant and idle graffiti by a man in Fitzmartin’s band who simply paused here for a cup of water? The arguments have been going back and forth since De Vaux found the sign on his early excavations here. There are even some of his enemies who whispered that he had scratched the marks there himself to bolster his reputation.”

“Could it have been?”

“According to his journals of the dig, my father thought so. Initially De Vaux had given him the job of digging at the pool site, which was hardly the jewel of the operation. De Vaux was a vain and egotistical man, but he was also a shrewd man. To have found the sigil himself would have been suspicious; having a young student like my father find it made the discovery much more feasible as the real thing.”

“Your father was a suspicious man,” said Eddie, smiling.

“A suspicious mind in an archaeologist is a good thing.”

“And in a Mossad agent,” grumbled Peggy.

“I have not been, am not now and will never be a Mossad agent,” said Rafi.

“Can it,” said Holliday. “We have to stay focused. Why this place? Is there anything special about it?”

“There are arguments about that, as well.”

“What arguments?”

“Why three pools, why so close to the aqueduct—it runs right above us—and why are they so small in relation to the half dozen other cisterns scattered throughout the community?”

“You have a theory?”

“Yes, but it’s not readily accepted.”

“Why?”

“I think it’s a
mikvah
, a ritual cleansing pool. The three pools together, their lack of depth in relation to the other cisterns and the fact that these were very holy men. The
mikvah
would be a necessary ritual every day, and this is the most likely spot.”

The wind began picking up again, roaring over the plateau and driving what few tourists had come for a visit back to their cars. Holliday felt the hairs on the back of his neck rising, and all his senses were suddenly on high alert. He felt terribly exposed. Maybe it was just Eddie’s
fantasmal
, and maybe not.

He felt the Cuban’s big black hand grip his shoulder. “I feel it, too, amigo,” he said quietly.

Holliday dragged himself back to the matter at hand. “What are the arguments against its being a
mikvah
?”

“Theoretically a
mikvah
must have running water; a man cannot cleanse himself in the taint of the previous user. None of the three pools has running water available; like all the other cisterns, they are merely vessels for storing water.”

“What would it take to make this running water?” Holliday asked.

Eddie shrugged. “Every bathtub must have a plug, yes?”

“A drain,” said Peggy.

“There is no drain,” Rafi said.

“To prove your theory is correct, there has to be a drain, right?”

“But there isn’t one. They’ve gone over this settlement a thousand times in the past eighty years. They would have found a drain if there was one.”

“Just like they didn’t find the Dead Sea Scrolls for two millennia,” said Holliday.

“So, what’s the answer?” Peggy asked.

“I know what he is going to say,” said Eddie, rolling his eyes and grinning.

“So what am I going to say, you Cuban
sabelotodo
?” asked Holliday.

“Your Cuban is getting real good,
mi
coronel
.”

“Answer the question, smart-ass.”

“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth,” quoted Eddie. “Your favorite saying of the great detective Mr. Sherlock Holmes.”

“Okay, then, where is the drain?” Rafi demanded, sweeping his arm around the twelve-foot-diameter pool.

Holliday thought for a moment, letting his mind wander over the whole problem and its possible answer. He had a glimmering of something, but he couldn’t quite see it. “It can’t be a drain,” he said finally.

“Really helpful,” said Rafi.

“Think about it. How were these baths used? What did they do?”

“They stripped off their clothes, then immersed themselves.”

“How much of themselves?”

“Total immersion was the prescribed way if it was possible, like the original baptisms. Total immersion and then a rebirth without your sins.”

“So they’d come down the steps until they were completely underwater.”

“Presumably.” Rafi nodded.

“But how?”

“I don’t understand.”

“They must have had a way of filling the pool, using the aqueduct, or drawing it from the other cisterns, right?” Holliday paused. “They had to fill it up, probably almost up to the top step.” He indicated the top of the pool a few feet above their heads.

“Obviously,” said Rafi. “We’ve been over this.”

“Would they use the same water over and over again to bathe themselves?”

“That makes no sense,” said Eddie.

“So that means they had to empty it,” said Holliday.

“Through a nonexistent drain,” said Rafi.

“Which would be like emptying a bathtub; it hardly rates as running water,” Holliday said.

“So?” Peggy asked.

“Richard Nixon,” said Holliday.

“
Qué?
”
Eddie said.

“A water gate. The Egyptians had them for irrigation. Like the floodgates on a dam. They’d have a series of pulleys to raise and lower it; as the holy men came into the water, the gate would be slowly opened, letting the water rush out in a controlled way. Running water.”

“I don’t see anything,” Peggy said, staring.

“I do,” said Rafi. He had his paintbrush and water bottle out and began brushing dust and old mortar away from the side of the stairwell. It didn’t take very much time at all. Within fifteen minutes he’d discovered a section on the side of the stairway seven feet high and three feet wide.

“Bricks, not stones,” he said. “Put in a long time after the pool was built. He stared at what he had discovered, shaking his head. “It was probably sealed up by Fitzmartin or whoever left that sign. A thousand years and nobody noticed.”

“Nobody was looking for it,” said Holliday.

Rafi stood back and examined the section of brick wall revealed by his water and his paintbrush. “This hardly rates as accepted archaeological practice, but what the hell?” He raised his leg and slammed at the brickwork with the sole of his heavy hiking boot. The brickwork, its mortar decayed or nonexistent, crumbled under the attack. A hole appeared with nothing but darkness behind. The others joined in and soon the opening was big enough to step through. Rafi fished a large Maglite out of his bag and switched it on.

“Come on,” he said, “let’s see what’s on the other side.”