Lost City of the Templars (16 page)

Stepping through the ragged hole in the brickwork, they suddenly found themselves in a cool, slightly damp environment filled with the faintly comforting scent of a basement that was something just short of paradise after the savage heat and the blowing sandstorm they’d left behind them.

As they walked through the darkness, guided by the cold circle of light produced by Rafi’s flashlight, a few details came to light. The tunnel or watercourse or whatever it was had a hewn stone floor and was built as a single arch with quarried stone of some kind other than the local material of the plateau. The stones were fitted together perfectly without a crack between them, perhaps a faint reminder of an earlier period of history when Hebrew hands had built the pyramids of Egypt. Was this the work of the descendants of Moses’ people, led out of the Pharaoh’s land and into the desert?

“Real masons,” said Peggy. “This wasn’t done by men in funny hats and barbecue aprons.”

“Put this on the History Channel and they’d build a whole story around alien plumbers. Fit you in right between
American Pickers
and
Cajun Pawn Stars
,” grunted Holliday.

The passage branched several times, but inevitably the roving circle of light would find the Templar cross and the lion rampant guiding the way.

“He’s leaving us a trail of bread crumbs,” said Rafi.

“The question is, where is he leading us?”

“Maybe he’s leading us to Harrison Ford.”

“Peggy?” Holliday said.

“Yes?”

“Shut up.”

“You know how I get when I’m in little dark spaces.”

“Shut up anyway.”

“Okay, Doc.”

The passage seemed to both narrow and become less high. Both Eddie and Holliday were forced to stoop, and all of them could feel their shoulders brushing the side walls.

“I don’t like this,” said Peggy, her voice beginning to quaver. The jokes were gone.

“Relax,” said Rafi. “It’s just the Bernoulli effect. They turned this part of the aqueduct into a venturi tube.”

“Liquids forced through a narrower channel increase in speed,” said Holliday.

“I knew that,” said Peggy

“They knew about this so long ago?” Eddie asked.

“They didn’t know the theory. It was all observation. I’ll bet you we’re going up an incline. To give the water the velocity necessary to overcome gravity, they narrowed the conduit.”

A hundred feet farther on, the tunnel opened up and they could walk freely. Holliday could actually feel a slight incline, and then the tunnel branched again. Fitzmartin’s sign was there to guide them again, so they turned to the right. Another hundred feet and they were suddenly faced with an obstacle that appeared impossible to overcome.

“The ceiling collapsed,” said Rafi, pointing the Maglite at an enormous pile of rock and stone barring their way.

“The collapse could be yards thick; there’s no way we can clear it,” Holliday said.

“Any sign of the knight’s mark?” Peggy asked.

Rafi swung the flashlight beam around.

“There!” Eddie said, pointing. On the right side of the collapse, barely visible, was the top half of the Templar cross. Eddie scrambled up the pile of fallen rock. He began to hand the fallen stones down to Rafi and Holliday, who piled them off to one side. Eventually the Cuban had revealed the top of a narrow arch.

“Give me the flashlight please,” said Eddie. Rafi handed it up and Eddie poked the beam into the opening.

“What can you see?” Holliday called up the pile.

“A ladder,” he said. “A ladder of iron rungs set into the stone. Very old and very rusty.”

“How high?”

“Twenty meters, maybe a little more,” said Eddie. “The light does not reach the top.”

“What’s that in American?” Peggy asked.

“Sixty-five feet, give or take a few inches,” answered Rafi.

“No way, José. This place is bad enough. You won’t get Maggie Blackstock’s baby girl climbing any two-thousand-year-old rusty ladder.”

“Harrison Ford would do it,” teased Holliday. “He does all his own stunts.”

“Yeah, and he’s getting thirty million a pop for each movie he’s in. No chance I’m going up that ladder.”

Eddie had already enlarged the aperture. Within five minutes there was a hole they could squeeze through.

“Coming?” Holliday asked as Rafi scrambled up the tumble of stone and vanished into the hole.

“Oh, crap,” said Peggy. “Of course I am.”

She followed Holliday up the rocks and slipped in through the hole.

•   •   •

The chimney up through the stone of the Khirbet Qumran plateau was a rough oval eight feet across, and natural rather than hewn by man’s hand. On the right a strange climbing apparatus had been bolted to the stone. A ladder had been created by bolting a series of long lengths of iron together, bolting those lengths into the rock, then driving iron bars through the lengths at right angles to form a long procession of T rungs that disappeared up into the darkness.

“It’s a ‘compline ladder,’” said Rafi, shining his light on the ancient ironwork. The hammer marks of the long-dead blacksmith were still visible.

“A what?”

“The old Hermetics used them to climb down into their holes or up into their caves. They were usually made of wood because that’s all they had at hand. Some sects even think it is a symbolic image of the Crucifixion. In monastic terms it represents Jacob’s ladder, the story told within the call to evening prayer.”

“So, who goes first?” Peggy asked.

“You do,” said Rafi.

“You’re kidding.”

“You’re the lightest, then me, then Doc and then Eddie. Relax, kiddo. We’ll be right behind you. I won’t let you fall.”

“Just don’t look down, right?”

“I wouldn’t recommend it.”

They began to climb, Peggy’s breathing becoming more ragged with each rung. Behind her Rafi’s wobbling light guided the way upward. Several times Peggy froze, the creaking of the bolts holding the rusted contrivance to the rock wall grinding and half pulling out of their settings in the stone. Rafi calmly urged her on and one by one they reached the summit.

Rafi switched off the light as he came up through the narrow orifice. “It’s a cave,” he said, calling down to Holliday and Eddie. It was small, barely high enough for Holliday and Eddie to stand upright, the walls and ceiling covered with some sort of gray-brown stuccolike substance that had cracked and broken off with time. Enough light came in through the cave entrance to light the full interior. From the sight lines of the opening, which extended to the steep side of the plateau as well as the hills far beyond, Holliday could see that the entrance would be almost always in shadow, invisible except for brief moments during the day. The wind howled around the entrance like a living thing, fighting to get inside.

“It’s empty,” Peggy said, looking around. “We went through all that to find an empty cave? Was this Fitzmartin guy playing a joke, or what?”

“I don’t think so,” said Rafi. “Look at the wall.”

“I see it,” said Holliday.

Rafi slipped the pack off his back and dug around, coming up with a small rock hammer. Here and there deep scratches on the stone were revealed by the flaking off of the stucco.

Rafi went to work, using the hammer to gently break away the fragile stucco, revealing several lines of strange-looking characters that had been etched into the wall of the cave two thousand years before.

“What is it?” Holliday asked.

“Nabatean Aramaic,” said Rafi.

“The language used by the people of Jerusalem and the Essenes at the time of Christ,” said Holliday.

“Can you read it?” asked Holliday.

“It’s not the whole message. There’s more beneath it.”

Rafi spent another few minutes chipping off the last of the stucco, revealing the entire message. The final blow of the hammer was enough to break off a large section of the stucco, exposing some kind of niche cut into the wall below it.

“Chicken tracks,” said Peggy, staring at the squiggly series of lines on the wall.

“What does it say?” Holliday asked.

Rafi studied the message again, his lips moving slightly as he formed and translated the ancient message.

“It says, ‘The King of the Jews is dead. The Messiah is reborn in the East.’”

“There is a box in the opening beneath the message,” said Eddie, pointing.

Between them the three men managed to pull the stone box out of the niche and place it carefully on the floor. The box was a little more than two feet long and about eighteen inches high. The top was a loosely fitted slab of the same kind of stone. Inside was a collection of old bones without a skull and a few scraps of fabric or what might have been skin or parchment.

“It’s an ossuary,” said Rafi. “Bodies would be entombed until decomposition was complete and a year or so later the bones would be placed in a box like this and taken to a crypt of some kind.”

“Any idea who the bones belong to?”

“Given the message on the wall, I can hazard a guess,” Rafi said. He went back to his pack and brought out his bristle paintbrush. He turned the ossuary on its side and gently eased away the dust of centuries. A simple line of lettering appeared, this time in what Holliday thought looked like some form of ancient Hebrew.

yeshua ben yosef

“Yeshua Ben Yosef, Joshua, son of Joseph, Christ’s name before the world and the Greek translators got to it,” Rafi said. “The relic, the Ark of the Covenant, vanished with Christ into the East, and somehow Fitzmartin knew where.”

Suddenly the wind dropped and the cave was flooded with light. Peggy went to the mouth of the cave and stared out, shading her eyes. “Would you look at that?” she said, smiling and turning back to look at Rafi and the others. “All of a sudden it’s a beautiful day out there.”

Without a sound the large-caliber sniper’s bullet struck at the base of Peggy’s cervical spine before exploding out through her neck in a haze of blood. She never heard the sound of the echoing shot that killed her so quickly it was as though her soul leaped out of her body so fiercely she simply dropped in place, the smile still on her ruined face.

“Peggy!” Rafi screamed, standing and hurling himself toward her curled-up figure on the floor of the cave.

“Rafi! No!” Holliday yelled.

Rafi reached Peggy’s body, a wailing scream rising from deep within him. He leaned forward, pressing his hand over the ragged hole in her throat, trying to stop blood that had already ceased to flow. Holliday crawled toward them on his elbows and knees. “Get down!”

The second shot was a little off center, catching Rafi under his left lung, splintering ribs and tearing down through his kidney and spleen, the rest of his vital organs struck by sharp shards of his splintered ribs. He gave a single heaving breath of surprise, slumping down beside Peggy, what was left of his lungs heaving, forcing blood up his gullet and into his mouth.

The sound of the shot echoed, and then there was a screaming cluster of shots that struck the interior of the small space like a swarm of angry hornets. Then there was silence.

Holliday’s brain worked without conscious thought.
Twelve hundred yards, he’s firing at shadows.
A pro special forces from some army. Super sniper; a few of those in Vietnam, more now after Iraq and Afghanistan. He won’t hang around
. Still, Holliday kept low, finally reaching Rafi and Peggy. Rafi was still breathing, but barely. There was no hope for him; he was going to die and he knew it. He reached up and grabbed Holliday’s hand.

“Don’t . . . don’t let them get away with this. Don’t let them find the Ark. Nobody should have that kind of power.” He coughed out a gout of blood that painted his chest glistening red. “Promise me.”

“I promise,” said Holliday, gripping Rafi’s hand. He watched the light fade in the archaeologist’s eyes, but he held his hand for a few moments longer, making sure Rafi felt a friend’s touch as he died. He turned then and, weeping, stared down at Peggy. He reached out and softly touched her hair. “I promise,” he said.

Holliday felt Eddie’s gentle hand on his shoulder.

“I am so sorry, my friend.”

“So am I,” said Holliday, roughly wiping away his tears.

“So what now,
mi
coronel?
”

Holliday’s eyes were hard. “I keep my promise. We find the Ark and then we kill them all.”

The Templar Conspiracy

In Rome, the murder of the Pope by a sniper on Christmas Day sets off a massive investigation that stretches across the globe. But behind the veil of Rex Deus—the Templar cabal that silently wields power in the twenty-first century—the plot has only just begun.

Read on for the first chapter of this exciting installment of Paul Christopher’s Templar series.

Now available in mass market and ebook.

It was Christmas Day in Rome and it was snowing. Snow was a rare occurrence here but he was ready for it. He had kept his eyes on the weather reports for the past ten days. It was always best to be prepared.

The name on his American passport was Hannu Hancock, born of a Finnish mother and an American father in Madison, Wisconsin, where his father taught at the university and his mother ran a Finnish craft store. Hancock was forty-six, had attended East High School, followed by a bachelor’s and then a master’s in agronomy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His present job was as a soil-conservation biologist and traveling soil-conservation consultant with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Hancock had been married for three years to a young woman named Janit Ferguson, who died of lung cancer. He was childless and had not remarried.

Not a word of this was true. Not even the people who hired him knew who he really was. He traveled under a number of passports, each with a different name and fully detailed biography to go along with it. The passports, along with a great deal of money, were kept in a safe-deposit box at Banque Bauer in Geneva. As alternates he kept several more passports and a secondary nest egg tucked away in a bank in Nassau, Bahamas, where he also owned a relatively small house in Lyford Cay—Sir Sean Connery was his closest neighbor—as well as a self-storage locker on Carmichael Road on the way to the airport. The Bahamas house was his usual destination after doing a job. It would be his eventual destination again, but he’d been told to remain available for another assignment in Rome sometime within the next six days.

Not for a minute did he consider failing, nor did he think about the enormity of the initial act he’d been hired to complete. He never failed; he never made mistakes. Remorse was an emotion unknown to him. Some people would have called him a sociopath, but they would be wrong. He was simply a man with a singular talent and he practiced it with enormous efficiency. He left the motive and morality of his task entirely in the hands of his employers. In his own mind he was nothing more than a technician, a facilitator for the needs of the people who hired him.

Hancock made his way down the Corso Vittorio Emanuele II in the lightly falling snow. He glanced at his watch. It was six thirty in the morning and it was still dark. Sunrise would be in an hour and four minutes. He still had plenty of time. He was wearing a white ski jacket purchased in Geneva, blue jeans from a vintage clothing store in New York and high-top running shoes from a store in Paddington, London. He had a pale gray backpack slung over his shoulder and tucked under his arm was a long, Christmas-wrapped box of the kind usually used for long-stemmed roses. On his head, covering his dark hair, he wore a white balaclava ski hat rolled up into a watch cap.

He’d seen virtually no one on his walk except for a few taxi drivers, and the steel shutters were pulled down over the entrances to the cafés, bars and small pizzerias along the way. Partly it was the unfamiliar snow on the ground and part of it was the day. Most people would be at home with loved ones, and the more pious would be preparing breakfast before heading out to Saint Peter’s Square for the apostolic blessing by the Pope, scheduled for noon.

Hancock reached the Via dei Filippini and turned into the narrow alley. Cars were angle-parked along the right-hand side, and the only spaces available were for the large nineteenth-century apartment block on the left. Hancock’s own little DR5 rental was where he’d left it the night before. He continued down the alley until he reached an anonymous black door on the right. Using the old-fashioned key he’d been provided, he unlocked the door and stepped inside.

He found himself in a small, dark foyer with a winding iron staircase directly in front of him. He began to climb, ignoring several landings, and finally reached the top. A stone corridor led to the right and Hancock followed it. The passage took several turns and ended at one of the choir lofts.

He looked down into the central part of the church eighty or ninety feet below. As expected, it was empty. Most churches in Rome, big and small, would be vacant this morning. Every worshipper in the city was hurrying to Saint Peter’s in time to get one of the good spots close to the main loggia of the church, where the Pope made his most important proclamations.

There was a narrow door at the left side of the choir loft. Opening it, Hancock was faced with a steep wooden staircase with a scrolled banister. He climbed the steps steadily until he reached the head of the stairs and the small chamber at the top. The floor of the chamber was made of thick Sardinian oak planks, black with age, and the walls were a complex mass of curving struts and beams of the same wood, much like the skeletal framework of a ship from the Spanish Armada; not surprising, since the framework was built by the best Italian shipwrights from Liguria in the late sixteenth century.

The framework supported the heavy outer masonry dome and allowed the much lighter inner dome to be significantly taller than what was built on churches at that time. A simple wooden staircase with banisters on both sides soared upward, following the dome’s curve and ending at the foot of a small round tower steeple that capped the dome.

Hancock climbed again, reaching the top of the dome, and then went up a narrow spiral staircase into the tower. He checked his watch. Still forty minutes until the sun began to rise. He dropped the heavy parcel and shrugged off the backpack. The trip from the outer door on Via dei Filippini to the tower had taken him eleven minutes. By his calculations the return journey would take no more than seven minutes, since he would be going down rather than up and he’d no longer be carrying the extra weight.

Before doing anything else Hancock took out a pair of surgical gloves and snapped them on. He opened the flap on the backpack and took out a wax paper–wrapped fried egg sandwich and ate quickly, methodically making sure that no crumbs fell onto the stone floor at his feet. As he ate he looked out over the city. The snow was coming down heavier now, easily enough to cover his tracks down the alley to the access door but not so heavily as to obscure vision. He finished the sandwich, carefully folded the wax paper and slipped it into the pocket of his ski jacket.

He set the alarm on his watch for eleven thirty, pulled the masklike balaclava over his face to conserve heat and slid down to the floor. Within three minutes he fell into a light, dreamless sleep.

The alarm beeped him awake at exactly eleven thirty. Before standing up he opened the backpack again and took out a loose-fitting white Tyvek suit that covered him from chin to ankles. It took him only a few moments to slip it on. The snow was still falling lightly, and in the suit and the white balaclava he would be invisible against the dull blur of the Christmas sky.

Hancock crouched over the backpack and removed a device that looked very much like a digital video camera. He stood up and with the viewfinder to his eye he scanned the northwestern skyline on the far side of the Tiber River. The range was still exactly 1,311.64 yards, but he’d wanted to check the windage. He’d guessed from the straight fall of the snow that there was virtually no breeze, but the Leupold rangefinder was sophisticated enough to account for hidden air currents as well as plot a ballistic line that computed the differential in height between him and the target. This was important, since the Chiesa Nuova and its tower steeple were more than three hundred feet higher than the target, which lay across the river from the Plain of Mars.

Hancock bent down and returned the rangefinder to the backpack. He then began to undo the Christmas wrapping, carefully folding the red-and-gold paper and sliding it into the backpack. He lifted the top of the box, revealing the basic components of an American CheyTac Intervention .408-caliber sniper rifle—to Hancock’s mind the greatest weapon of its kind ever made. He screwed on the stainless steel muzzle brake and suppressor, slipped the U.S. Optics telescopic sight onto its rails and slid the integral shoulder rest out of the stock. Finally he fitted the seven-round box magazine into its slot in the forestock.

The rifle was immense by most standards—fifty-four inches when assembled, or almost five feet long. The weapon had a built-in bipod toward the front of the rifle and a telescopic monopod at the rifle’s point of balance. Hancock chose neither. Instead he took a custom-made, sand-filled rest from the backpack and placed it on the capstones of the chest-high wall of the tower.

By kneeling on one leg he could bring the target to bear almost exactly. He looked at his watch. Five minutes to twelve. It would be soon now. He took his handheld Pioneer Inno satellite radio out of the backpack and plugged in the earbuds. The radio was tuned to CNN, which was carrying the apostolic blessing live, something the network did every year on Christmas Day.

According to the commentator more than sixty thousand people were gathered in Saint Peter’s Square to hear their sins forgiven. Based on the last four
urbi et orbi
blessings, Hancock knew that he had no more than a minute and ten seconds to find the target and take the shot. At two minutes to twelve a huge cheer went up in the square. Hancock tossed the radio into the backpack and rose to his firing position, placing the barrel just behind the suppressor on the sand pillow. He turned the knob on the telescopic sight two clicks and the target area jumped into view: the central loggia, or balcony, of St. Peter’s Basilica.

There were eight other people on the long balcony with His Holiness: two bishops in white vestments and miters; two priests in white cassocks with red collars; a sound man with a boom microphone; a cameraman; the official Vatican photographer, Dario Biondi; and a senior cardinal who held the large white-and-gold folder containing the blessing.

In the middle of it all was the Pope himself. He sat on a red-and-gold throne with a golden crosier, or shepherd’s crook, held in his left hand. He was dressed in white and gold vestments and a matching white-and-gold silk miter. Behind the throne, barely visible in the shadows of the doorway, Hancock could see several dark-suited members of the Vigilanza, the Vatican City security force.

At last, through the sight he saw the Pontiff’s lips begin to move as he started the short blessing:
“Sancti Apostoli Petrus et Paulus: de quorum potestate et auctoritate confidimus ipsi intercedant pro nobis ad Dominum.”

A papal banner draped over the balcony lifted slightly in a light wind and Hancock adjusted the sight minutely. Below the balcony, unseen and unheard, the enormous crowd gave the obligatory response in unison: “Amen.”

Fifteen seconds gone.

Hancock wrapped his latex-gloved finger around the trigger as the Pope began the second line:
“Precibus et meritis beatæ Mariæ semper Virginis, beati Michaelis Archangeli, beati Ioannis Baptistæ, et sanctorum Apostolorum Petri et Pauli et omnium Sanctorum misereatur vestri omnipotens Deus; et dimissis omnibus peccatis vestris, perducat vos Iesus Christus ad vitam æternam.”

Twenty-five seconds gone.

The field of vision clear, a three-quarters profile; not the best angle for the job but good enough.

The crowd responded once again: “Amen.”

Thirty seconds gone. Through the telescopic sight Hancock saw the Pope visibly take a breath before beginning the third line of the blessing. His last breath.

Hancock fired.

The two-and-three-quarter-inch, missile-shaped, sharp-nose round traveled the distance between Hancock and the target at a muzzle velocity of 3,350 feet per second, reaching the Pope in just a fraction more than one and a half seconds.

Hancock waited until he saw the impact, striking the Pontiff in center mass, ripping through the chest wall and tipping the throne backward into the doorway of the balcony. Sure of his primary kill, Hancock then emptied the six-round magazine in an arc across the balcony, his object to create mayhem and as much confusion as possible. He succeeded.

With the task completed, he took down the rifle and laid it on the stone floor of the tower. He took a few moments to collect each brass casing and strip off the Tyvek suit. He put the shell casings into the pocket of his ski jacket, stuffed the Tyvek suit into his backpack and then took a small, clear plastic bag from his pants pocket.

The plastic bag and its contents had been sent to him by his employer, along with instructions regarding their use. He pulled open the zipper-top bag and tipped the contents onto the stone floor. The solid gold coin gleamed in the bitter winter light.

After he received it, Hancock had copied the image of the coin and taken it to a specialist in ancient coins. It was authentic, dated 1191. The name of the seated figure in the center of the piece was scrolled around it:
al-Malik an-Nasir Yusuf Ayyub,
a Kurdish soldier born in what was now Tikrit, Iraq, and known to the Western world as Saladin, the man who took back Jerusalem from the Crusaders and defeated Richard the Lionheart. With the coin in place he shrugged the backpack over his shoulders and headed downward from the tower, leaving the rifle behind.

He had overestimated the time it would take for the return journey. Five minutes after beginning the downward trip he reached the alley, locking the anonymous black door behind him. At six minutes, ahead of schedule, he climbed into his rental car and headed for the Roma Termini, the main railway station.

As he drove he heard siren after siren heading for the Vatican, but no one paid him the slightest attention. He arrived at the train station eleven minutes after the assassination, caught one of the frequent Leonardo Express trains to Fiumicino Airport, where he caught a prebooked flight to Geneva on the oddly named Baboo, a short-haul company that used Bombardier Dash 8 turboprops.

The elapsed time from kill to takeoff was fifty-four minutes. By that time neither the Vatican police nor the State Police had even established the direction the onslaught had come from, let alone any clue as to the identity of the assassin.

The job was done. The Pope was dead.

Crusader had begun.