The Sword of the Templars (2 page)

“There had always been rumors about some sort of treasure hidden in the Temple of Solomon, maybe even the Ark of the Covenant, the box that supposedly held the second set of the Ten Commandments brought down from Mount Sinai by Moses.”

“Second set?” Tarvanin asked.

“Moses broke the first tablets,” said Granger, a football jock with the nickname Bullet, which probably had something to do with the shape of his head. He was also the class’s biggest über-Christian. The hefty point guard had been scowling at Holliday since he’d mentioned Dan Brown and
The Da Vinci Code
. A sensitive topic for a lot of people, although Holliday wasn’t quite sure why; after all, it was a novel, a work of fiction, not a campaign platform or a sermon. Granger cleared his throat as though he was embarrassed about displaying too much knowledge in front of a teacher. “God wrote them down a second time and Moses put them in the Ark. It’s in the Bible.”

“It’s also in the Koran,” said Holliday mildly. “It has a deep significance for Muslims as well as Christians.”

Granger’s scowl darkened and his big head turtle-tucked down into his beef-slab shoulders.

“Did these guys find it?” Tarvanin asked.

“Nobody’s quite sure. They found something, we know that much. Some say it was gold from King Solomon’s Mines; others say it was the Ark of the Covenant; others say it was the secret wisdom of At lantis. Whatever they found, within a year the Knights Templar were loaded. They financed their pilgrim escort service, built castles up and down the pilgrim routes to Jerusalem, and sold their muscle to anyone who could pay.

“Because of the distances involved between Europe and the Holy Land, they borrowed an idea from their Saracen enemies and introduced an encrypted note of transfer—a deposit of money in one place could be transferred on paper for thousands of miles. Wire transfers before they had wires.

“The Templars also began making loans at interest, although this was specifically forbidden in the Bible. As time went on the Templars even began financing entire wars. Land and other assets were regularly used as collateral and often wound up being forfeited, expanding the Templars’ power and wealth even more.

“Within a hundred years the Templars were into everything: loan-sharking, real estate, the protection rackets, shipping, smuggling, bribery, you name it. By the end of the next century they were the next best thing to a multinational conglomerate, and there’s no doubt that much of it came from illicit sources.

“In most major cities of the time, from Rome to Jerusalem, Paris and London to Frankfurt and Prague, you didn’t make a major move without consulting the local Templar authority. They controlled politics and banks, and owned entire fleets of ships. They were their own army, and by the beginning of the fourteenth century they had an unsurpassed intelligence network that spanned the known world. By then, of course, Jerusalem was back in the hands of the infidel, and the Holy Land was a battleground once again, but by then it didn’t matter anymore.”

“So what happened then, sir?” Zitz Mitchell asked.

“They got a little too big for their britches,” explained Holliday. “King Philip of France had just fought a long war with England. He was broke and he owed the Templar banks a lot of money. They were on the verge of taking over the entire country. The Pope was getting a little nervous, too; the Templars had far too much power within the church and were easily capable of putting their own man on the papal throne if they chose to.

“Something had to be done. Pope Clement and King Philip concocted a plan, laid charges against the Order for various crimes, some real and some false, and on Friday the thirteenth, 1307, most of the Templar leaders in France were arrested. They were tried for heresy, convicted, tortured, and burned at the stake. Eventually the Pope ordered every Catholic king in Europe to seize Templar assets under threat of excommunication, and by 1312 the Knights Templar had ceased to exist. Some say that the Templar fleet took the Order’s treasure to Scotland for safekeeping, and other people think that they managed to flee to America, although there’s no proof of that.”

“I don’t see the point,” said Whitey Tarvanin. “It’s like most of this historic stuff. What’s it got to do with right now? With us?”

“Quite a bit actually,” replied Holliday. It was an argument he’d heard a thousand times, usually from the mouths of gung-ho kids exactly like Whitey Tarvanin. “Have you ever heard the expression ‘Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it’?” There were a lot of blank looks. Holliday nodded. He wasn’t surprised.

“The quote is generally attributed to a man named George Santayana, a Spanish-born American philosopher of the early twentieth century. In the way that Adolf Hitler forgot the lessons of history and tried to invade Russia in the winter. If he’d remembered Napoleon’s disastrous attempt he might have consolidated the Western Front instead and won the war in Europe. If we’d paid attention to history and remembered the decades-long failure of the French in Vietnam, maybe we wouldn’t have tried to prosecute that war in the same way they did and maybe we wouldn’t have lost it.”

“So what does that have to do with these Templar guys?” Zitz Mitchell asked.

“They got too powerful and they forgot who their friends were,” said Holliday. “Just like we did. The United States came out of the Second World War with a per capita casualty rate that was lower than Canada’s, and we suffered none of the catastrophic damage done to Europe and Great Britain. We also had made enormous industrial wartime loans that put us into the world’s economic forefront. We dominated the world, just like the Templars. People got jealous. People got pissed off.”

“9/11,” said Tarvanin.

“Among other things,” said Holliday. “And to make things worse we started mixing religion with politics. An old argument just like the Crusades. Our God is better than your god. ‘
God Is with Us
’ on the Nazi belt buckles. Holy Wars against women and children, Catholics killing Protestants in Belfast. We went into Iraq for the wrong reasons and we left our friends behind. More people have been killed in the name of God and so-called ‘faith-based values’ than for any other reason.

“You can bully people into being your allies, but when things get bad don’t expect them to stand beside you, especially when you put God into the mix. The separation of Church and State. That’s what the Constitution is for, although we seem to have forgotten that, as well. And as for the relevance of history you can probably trace the troubles in the Middle East directly back to Moses.”

“Don’t you believe in God?” Bullet Granger asked.

“My personal beliefs have nothing to do with it,” said Holliday quietly. He’d been here before, as well—shaky ground, the kind of thing that could get you into trouble.

“You’re always knocking Christians and the Bible. Moses, and like that,” Granger argued.

“Moses was a Jew,” said Holliday, sighing. “So was Christ as a matter of fact.”

“Yeah, well,” grumbled the big football player, brooding. The bell rang.

Saved.

2

Lieutenant Colonel John Holliday stepped out of Bartlett Hall and paused for a moment, enjoying the early-evening sunlight that bathed the gray stones of the United States Military Academy at West Point. Directly in front of him was the broad expanse of the Plain, the celebrated parade ground that had felt the heels of ranks of marching cadets for more than two hundred years. All the greats had been here, ghosts in cadence from George Armstrong Custer to Dwight D. Eisenhower. To Holliday’s left were a score of other stone buildings rising like the protective bastions of some crusader’s castle. To the right, beyond the baseball diamond on Doubleday Field, were the bluffs that stood above the wide silver brushstroke of the Hudson River as it flowed the last fifty miles down to New York City and the sea.

There were monuments scattered everywhere on the grounds, commemorating battles, brave deeds, brave men, and most of all the dead, graduates of this place who’d given their best, their all and their lives for one cause or another, the causes now long forgotten, found only between the dusty pages of the history books that Holliday loved so well. That was the problem of course; all wars became meaningless in time. The Battle of Antietam was the bloodiest single conflict in American history with 23,000 dead in a single September day, and now it was a plaque on the side of an old building and a picnic ground for tourists toting cameras.

Holliday had fought his own war, of course, more than one in fact, from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, with half a dozen others in between. Had his fighting made any difference, or the lives of the men who died beside him in those terrible, lonely places? He knew that the simple answer was no. They kept on growing poppies in Afghanistan, oil still flowed in Iraq, rice still grew in the paddies around Da Nang, babies still starved to death in Mogadishu.

That wasn’t the point, of course. Soldiers didn’t think that way—they were trained not to. That’s what places like West Point were for: to ensure that the next generation of officers in the United States Army would follow the orders of their superiors without question, because if you stopped or even hesitated long enough to ask that question the other guy would probably put a bullet in your head.

Holliday smiled to himself and went down the steps. All those wars, all those battles and the only injury he’d ever sustained was a blind eye caused by a sharp stone thrown up from the wheel of his Humvee on a back road outside Kabul. The eye had cost him his combat posting and had eventually led him here. The fortunes of war.

He crossed Thayer Road and started down the footpath that cut across the Plain at an angle. A pair of cadets rushed by, pausing just long enough to throw Holliday a rigid salute as they passed. Cows, by the look of the stripes on their tunics—third-year cadets. Firstie year to get through and then they’d be off to their own far-flung outposts of democracy. A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. Holliday shook his head. Did George Lucas ever wonder just how many West Point Luke Skywalkers he had inspired? A cool gust of wind spun across the parade ground like a shiver. It wasn’t even summer yet, but the breeze felt like fall. The leaves rattled in the trees that stood along the path for a few seconds, and then the strange feeling was gone. Goose just walked across his grave. One of his mother’s favorite spooky sayings from long, long ago.

Holliday reached the far side of the Plain and the Thayer Statue, then crossed Jefferson Road and walked past Quarters 100, the superintendent’s white-brick house, with its twin cannon guarding the front walk. He continued on to Professors Row with its neat cluster of late-Victorian houses and finally reached his own quarters at the end of the block, a little two-bedroom Craftsman bungalow built in the 1920s and the smallest accommodations on the Row.

Stepping into the cozy house was like going back in time. Warm oak, stained glass, and built-in cabinets were everywhere. There was even an original slatted Morris chair and matching ottoman in the living room beside the tiled fireplace, as well as plain painted cabinets and a huge porcelain sink in the simple kitchen at the back. He’d turned the larger of the two bedrooms into a study, the walls lined with his books. The smaller bedroom held nothing but a bed, a chest of drawers, and a bedside table. There was a single photograph on the table: Amy on their wedding day, with flowers in her hair, standing on a beach in Hawaii. Amy when she was young, eyes bright and flashing, before the cancer that swept through her like the cold wind that had rushed across the Plain a few minutes ago. It took her in the springtime, killing her before summer’s end. It had been ten years ago now, but he still remembered her as she was in the fading picture on the bedside table, and mourned her and her vanished smile. Mourned their decision to put off having children for a little while longer, because a little while never came and there was nothing left of her in the world.

Holliday went into the bedroom, stripped off his uniform and changed into jeans and an old USMA sweatshirt. He went to the built-in bar in the living room, poured himself a good belt of Grant’s Ale Cask, and headed into his study, bringing the drink along with him. He put a Ben Harper and the Blind Boys of Alabama CD into the stereo and sat down at his old, scarred partners desk. He booted up his PC, did a quick check of his e-mail, then opened up the file for his work in progress, a half-serious, relatively scholarly work he had tentatively titled
The Well Dressed Knight
, a history of arms and armor from the time of the Greeks and Romans to the present day.

The book had originally been the subject of his doctoral thesis at Georgetown University back when he’d been at the Pentagon more than a decade ago, but with the passage of time it had turned into the massive, doorstopper epic that he used as both a hobby and a way to occupy his mind when it started to turn into the dark corners of memory that sometimes haunted him. At nine hundred pages he’d just finished with John Ericsson and the construction of the Union Navy vessel
Monitor
, the first American ironclad, and he still had a long way to go.

He’d been interested in the subject of armor since he was a kid playing with his uncle Henry’s antique lead soldiers in the big Victorian house up in Fredonia where the old man still lived. Henry had been a teacher at the State University of New York in Fredonia for years and before that something vaguely sinister and hush-hush during the Cold War. It had been Uncle Henry who’d interested him in history in the first place, and it was Uncle Henry who’d managed to wangle him the congressional recommendation that got him into West Point and out of the intellectual desert of Os wego, New York. Not to mention freeing him from a life of stormy alcoholic desperation with his widower father, a railroad engineer on the old Erie Lackawanna Line until he was laid off in the early seventies.

By then Holliday was already off to West Point, and a few years later, gone to war in Indochina. When his father died of liver failure in the spring of 1975, a twenty-four-year-old Holliday, now a field-promoted captain in the 75th Ranger Regiment, was helping the last evacuees board helicopters during the fall of Saigon.