The Sword of the Templars (8 page)

“Only in the Ozarks,” said Peggy. She scooped up some home fries.

“I once had an insurance actuary tell me that there’s a freight train and a level crossing out there for all of us. One way or the other, it’s just a matter of time,” said Holliday. “Maybe you’d better ease off on the cholesterol.”

“I can’t,” said Peggy. “I’m foolish youth, remember? I have a reputation to protect.”

“You have whipped cream on your upper lip.”

She wiped it off with her napkin.

“What do we do about Broadbent?”

“Right now?” Holliday said. “Nothing. He’s right. We don’t have any proof that he was involved with the fire.”

“What about the guy you chased?”

“Fredonia’s police force has one investigative sergeant. I’m not holding out a lot of hope.”

“So we let it drop?”

“No, we do what I said. We find out why Broadbent wants a thousand-year-old sword so badly.”

After breakfast they went up to Holliday’s room and retrieved the sword, which he’d hidden under the mattress of his bed. He laid it out on the table beneath the window.

“Okay,” said Peggy. “It’s an old sword wrapped up in an old flag. Other than the fact that Grandpa found it in Adolf’s living room, what significance could it have?”

“Let’s begin at the beginning,” said Holliday, staring down at the sword. “Uncle Henry’s had the sword for more than half a century—why all the sudden interest now?”

“Something he found out?”

“Like what?” Holliday said. “It’s an old sword, just like you said. It was clearly owned by a wealthy man, probably a knight or even a lord.”

“What’s the country of origin?” Peggy asked.

“There’s no way to tell. It’s not like a painting, it has no provenance, and I doubt if there’s anything in the record to tell us how it got into Hitler’s hands. It’s undoubtedly some kind of plunder, looted by the
Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg
, the Reichsleiter Rosenberg Institute for the Occupied Territories. Either that or Hermann Göring’s people. They had a thing for going after Masonic relics; it played into the whole Aryan thing.”

“The Masons had swords?” Peggy asked.

“No, but the Templars did; the Templar mythology and the Masons’ started getting mixed up in the early 1800s.”

“So it could be a Templar sword then.”

“Sure.”

“How can you tell?”

“You can’t.”

“I thought you said the really good swordsmiths left their signatures on their swords.”

“That’s right. Their chop. They engraved it or embossed it.”

“But this sword doesn’t have one.”

“You’d have to take off the wire wrapped around the tang to find out.”

“So?”

Holliday looked at the sword. The leather wrapping that had once covered the wire was virtually nonexistent, and it looked as though the wire was already loose.

“Any good archaeologist would scream blue murder,” he muttered.

“Indiana Jones has left the building,” urged Peggy. “Do it.”

“Foolish youth is right,” he said, but he began to carefully unwrap the wire. By the time he reached the second level down he knew that the wire was gold; the top layer had been stained by the disintegration of the leather covering.

It was a single length made up of at least a dozen shorter pieces welded together. He also realized that someone had done this before now—the wire was too loosely wound to have maintained its integrity for a millennium. It took him the better part of half an hour, but he finally removed the last of it.

“What is that?” Peggy said as the tang was revealed.

“A chop,” said Holliday. “Two of them, as a matter of fact.” One was in the shape of a bee, stamped into the steel. The second was delicately engraved: two knights in armor riding a single horse, the official symbol of the Knights Templar. Below the symbol were the letters D.L.N.M.

“The two knights on the horse is the symbol of the Templar Order. I don’t know about the bee.”

“The initials there,” said Peggy, pointing to the four letters. “The initials of the guy who made it?”

“I doubt it.”

Holliday flipped the blade over.

“Amazing.”

Stamped into the steel were the words: ALBERIC IN PELERIN FECIT.

“You’re the scholar, Doc. What does it mean?”

“ ‘Alberic made this in Pelerin.’ ”

“What’s a Pelerin and who is Alberic?”

“Pelerin was a crusader castle in the Holy Land, what we know as Israel now. It was the only castle that was never taken by the Mameluk sultans. Alberic was a dwarf, supposedly a creature who made magical swords. The Hitler connection is a little clearer now.”

“You really do know everything, don’t you?”

“I told you, I read a lot.”

“A mythical dwarf who made magical swords. This isn’t
The Lord of the Rings
, Doc, this is real.”

“Tell that to Adolf. Alberic was the mythical dwarf who guarded the treasure of the Nibelungen in Wag ner’s opera, Hitler’s favorite.”

“Okay. It’s a Templar sword made by a mythical dwarf that wound up being owned by an opera-loving German megalomaniac dictator mass murderer. Where does that get us?”

“He wasn’t German actually,” corrected Holliday. “Hitler was Austrian.”

“I repeat, where does that get us?”

Holliday didn’t answer. He picked up the spiraled length of wire and examined it closely, running the edge of his thumb along its length. He smiled.

“Canada,” he said. “That’s where it gets us.”

8

Driving Peggy’s rental, they crossed the border at Niagara Falls and turned northeast, roughly following the shore of Lake Ontario under cloudless summer skies, reaching the city of Toronto ninety minutes later. Neither Peggy nor Holliday had ever been there, and both were surprised at the city’s size. In fact Toronto was the fifth-largest metropolitan area in North America, with a population of something over six million, spread out along twenty-nine miles of Lake Ontario and occupying 229 square miles of territory that had once belonged to the Algonquin Indians.

To Peggy Blackstock and Doc Holliday it looked like a cleaner version of Chicago, with a modern subway system rather than the antiquated El train. There was an enormous, soaring concrete structure on the waterfront that reminded Holliday of the Seattle Space Needle on steroids and a domed stadium that Peggy thought looked like a gigantic vanilla cupcake. They booked into the Park Hyatt two blocks from the center of the city, the intersection of Bloor and Yonge where east became west and uptown became down.

The hotel was directly across Bloor Street from the pseudo-Norman pile of the Royal Ontario Museum, complete with turrets and a grand columned entrance that made it look more like a courthouse than a place of learning. Recently some museum committee in its infinite wisdom had decided that the building needed to be modernized, and an architect had been hired. The result was a giant glass and steel, sharply pointed crystalline extension that looked like some science-fiction starship that had fallen to earth and fused itself to the old building.

Kitty-corner to the hotel was another large building of the same vintage but with more columns. Like a lot of the property in the city center the building was part of the University of Toronto. The top floor was home to the university’s Centre for Medieval Studies, a rabbit warren of offices that might have come out of a novel by Charles Dickens, all dust and echoing corridors and creaking wooden floors.

Steven Braintree’s office fit the profile of a Medieval History professor: stacks of books, files, and papers on every flat surface, sagging bookcases, overflowing files, cabinets, and cardboard boxes on the floor, and a dying aspidistra plant on the radiator with a single wilting purple flower straining toward the narrow grimy window. Braintree himself was something else again. He looked to be in his mid-thirties with shoulder-length dark hair, dark intelligent eyes behind a pair of fashionable Prada glasses. He was dressed in jeans and a white T covered by an expensive-looking short sleeve, green silk shirt.

Braintree had only known Uncle Henry by reputation and a few telephone calls before their meeting in March, but he was shocked by the news of his death. According to Braintree, Henry had never discussed an actual sword on his visit in the spring, but he had seemed quite intrigued when Braintree told him of some recent discoveries in the Vatican Archives that suggested there was a complex encoding system that had first been used during the early Crusades that involved “common decryptors.” The decryptors were usually well-known passages of scripture that were common to both the sender and the receiver of the coded message. The encryptors were usually variations on the Ancient Greek “
skytale
” system.

The
skytale
was a baton or wand of a particular length and diameter on which a strip of parchment would be wound, like paper on a roll. The message, sometimes in plaintext and sometimes numerically or alphabetically shifted, would be written out along the length of the baton. When it was unwound it would be incomprehensible gibberish and would only make sense again if it was wrapped around another, identical
skytale
. What the documents in the Vatican had described was a combination of this method, the Caesar Shift. Thriller fans might recognize it as the same “book” code in Ken Follett’s spy novel
The Key to Rebecca
.

“The gold wire wrapping on the hilt of a sword,” Holliday said with a nod.

Braintree smiled broadly, then clapped his hands together.

“Exactly!” the young man said. “That was your uncle’s hypothesis. If you somehow marked the length of wire at the appropriate points to coincide with the text on a common document, the wire would take the place of the parchment wrapped around the
skytale
. Even if the sword fell into the wrong hands it would be useless unless you knew the key! How did you figure it out?”

Holliday reached into the pocket of his jacket and took out the coil of gold wire that had been wrapped around the steel tang. He handed it to Braintree. The young man tipped his glasses up onto his forehead and examined the wire closely, running his thumb and forefinger down its length.

“Bumps,” he murmured. “Like little beads.”

“Gold solder,” agreed Holliday. “Unevenly spaced, but repeating. A total of seventy-eight beads as you call them.”

“Not a very complex message,” said Peggy.

“The beads aren’t the message.” Braintree smiled. “They’re like the rotors on the German Enigma machine from the Second World War. If you lay the beads on the wire along the key text it will give you the appropriate transpositions to use.”

“I’m lost,” said Peggy, frowning.

“I think I see it,” said Holliday. “If you repeat the spaces between the beads throughout the text, that will give you the message.”

“That’s it,” nodded Braintree.

“I’m still lost,” muttered Peggy.

The professor shrugged.

“It doesn’t really matter unless you’ve got the key.” He paused. “Where’s the sword now?” he asked. “You didn’t bring it with you by any chance, did you?”

“Not the kind of thing you want to carry across borders these days,” said Holliday. “It’s safely tucked away.” In fact they’d taken the sword to Miss Branch, who’d tucked the weapon away in the university’s security vault.

“Too bad,” said Braintree, “I would have loved to have seen it.”

Peggy reached into her bag and took out a handful of digital prints she’d made of the sword. Braintree looked at each of them carefully.

“An arming sword,” the professor said, nodding. “Early thirteenth century if the Templar seal is any indication.” He looked up at Holliday. “You’re sure it’s authentic?”

“I might be fooled by a good reproduction,” he said, “but not Uncle Henry. Besides, who would go to all the trouble?”

“If it’s real it would be worth an enormous amount of money. I’ve got a few rivals across the road at the Royal Ontario Museum who’d probably sell their own mothers to get a sword like that in their collection. It would be worth faking just for the financial reward let alone anything else.”

“Grandpa wouldn’t have gone to so much trouble over a fake,” said Peggy.

“The inscription is a little bit over the top though, don’t you think? Alberic in Pelerin? Do you know the provenance? Whose collection was it in?”

“Adolf Hitler’s,” said Holliday flatly, enjoying the startled expression on the Canadian professor’s face.

“You’re sure?”

“Positive.”

Braintree looked through the pictures again, then nodded slowly.

“It makes sense, historically. Hitler was intrigued by all that pseudo-scientific garbage Nietzschean stuff about the Aryan race. Blood and Soil, the Ring of the Nibelungen. Valkyries. Dwarf swordsmiths, Templars, Masonic rituals. He would have loved it.” Braintree gave a short, sour laugh. “Who knows, maybe he thought it was
Tirfing
.”

“What’s that?” Peggy asked.

“The sword of Odin,” said Braintree. “If you like Wagnerian opera.”

Peggy snorted. “Only what I heard on the soundtrack of
Apocalypse Now
,” she answered.

“Then again . . .” mused the professor. “Maybe it’s not that Alberic at all.”

“There’s more than one?” Peggy said.

“Yes, actually,” said Braintree. He got up from behind his desk and began going through piles of books stacked up on the floor. Not finding what he wanted, he moved to the bookcases that lined one wall, humming to himself and occasionally pulling a book halfway out to examine it.

“Aha!” he said at last. “Got you.”

“Who?” Holliday asked.

“Him,” said Braintree, handing him the thick hardcover book. Holliday read the title:
The Templar Saint, Alberic of Cîteaux and the Rise of the Cistercian Order.
He looked below the title. The author was somebody named Sir Derek Carr-Harris with a lot of letters after his name, including “D. Litt. Oxon” and “KCBE.” A knight commander of the British Empire, one better than Paul McCartney, and a doctorate from Oxford, to boot. Impressive. And the name was vaguely familiar, as well.

“You think this is the Alberic inscribed on the sword?”