The Templar's Code (38 page)

“ ‘Morning has broken,’ ” Mercurius murmured, luxuriating in the sun’s rays shining through the bedroom window.

As he stretched the kinks out of his seventy-two-year-old back, he slid his bare feet into a pair of ornately beaded Moroccan slippers. The Ali Baba slippers, his
amoretto
liked to tease. The frivolous footwear was a colorful reminder of the deprivations suffered during the war years. Those years when he had no shoes, climbed garden walls to pilfer oranges, and wore mended clothing.

He snatched his silk robe from the hook on the back of the door and slipped his bare arms into the sleeves, tying the garment at his waist.

Before retiring last evening, he’d listened to the recordings that his
amoretto
had made, distressed to learn how much Aisquith and his two cohorts had pieced together. Not only did they know about the three streams of hidden knowledge—alchemy, Kabbalah, and magic—they knew the Emerald Tablet contained a pictograph in which the secret of creation had been encoded.

He took a small measure of comfort in the fact that even if they uncovered the relic, without the encryption key they could not access the sacred power. Not even the brilliant Sir Francis Bacon had been able to decipher the encryption. Long millennia ago, Thoth had devised an ingeniously complex code.

Entering his study, Mercurius walked over to the built-in bookcase and rolled the floor-to-ceiling ladder several feet to one side. Hit with a twinge of arthritis in his right hip, he gingerly climbed the rungs. It took a moment to locate a slender volume:
New Atlantis.

One could not help but admire the utopian thinkers who attempted to fashion a better world. One without war. Without hunger. Without misery. But every utopian colony ever founded had collapsed, besieged, the dark energy from the outside world too great a force to withstand. The inhabitants beaten down and demoralized because they dared to remake the world anew. While their aspirations were commendable, there was a flaw in the very concept of an earthly utopia. Simply put, it was
impossible
to remake or rehabilitate this dark planet.

For ours was a cursed world.

Which is not to say that a better world doesn’t exist. It did, on a plane of existence where the Light permeates every thought and every action of every man. Contained within each living creature, there was a divine spark.
The soul.
Our individual piece of eternity. Imprisoned within a physical body, from the very moment of conception, our souls long to be reunited with the Light. To return to the Lost Heaven.

Mercurius glanced down at his own withered body. How could anyone possibly accept the ridiculous notion that this belching, farting, perspiring vessel was made in God’s image? Physical existence was proof positive that this dark world was a failed experiment created by a malevolent demiurge.

To be free of this dark world, a soul must wrench itself from the physical prison of the body. Once liberated, the soul could return to the Lost Heaven and dwell in a state of luminous grace. That being the only
true
utopia.

He idly flipped through the pages of the slender volume that he held in his hands, the
New Atlantis
less than fifty pages in length. He stopped on page thirteen, a sentence in the text capturing his attention: “Thou hast vouchsafed of thy grace, to those of our order to know thy works of creation, and true secrets of them.”

In the
New Atlantis
, the scholars of Solomon’s House posses the secret of creation. Moreover, the esteemed scholars know that there’s a link between creation and the hidden stream of knowledge. While the brilliant Sir Francis was correct in postulating that the hidden stream of knowledge was the key, he was unaware that there were
four
streams of hidden knowledge. Not three. And that the fourth stream was the key to unlock the mystery of the Emerald Tablet.

As fate would have it, Mercurius had the key.

Finished reading
The Book of Moses
, Edie released a gusty breath. “Whew! Those monks of Medmenham were
very
bad boys.”

“A nom de plume for London’s notorious Hell-Fire Club,” Caedmon informed her. “Rakes, lechers, and pornographers, the lot of them.”

“Talk about the secret life of Benjamin Franklin. Although we’re still very much in the dark as to the relic’s whereabouts.”

“According to his confession, Franklin whisked the Emerald Tablet off to the colonies.” He banged the table with a balled fist. “Damn the man!”

“Being a Freemason, Benjamin Franklin knew all about Francis Bacon’s scheme to use the Emerald Tablet to create a utopian society. A hundred and fifty years after Bacon’s death, the plot was still very much on the front burner.” Edie lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. As though suddenly aware that they were discussing a centuries-old mystery in the middle of an Internet café. “Franklin knew that the English aristocracy had plans to create a benevolent tyranny run by intellectual elites. Moreover, they intended to use the Emerald Tablet to achieve their despotic ends. Deny it all you want, but that
is
the beating heart of Bacon’s
New Atlantis
.”

Caedmon placed his right hand over his heart and gazed heavenward. “Thank God for Dr. Franklin! The great American hero who fought the evil English elites with a kite in one hand and the Emerald Tablet in the other.”

“Make mock if you will, but Benjamin Franklin believed that ‘rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.’ ”

Well aware that Americans tended to be a tetchy lot when it came to their civil liberties,
Sic Semper Tyrannis
and all that, he altered course. “Given that Franklin was an avowed Deist, I’m not the least bit surprised that he’s so disdainful of the occult rituals observed at Medmenham Abbey.”

Edie snapped two sugar packets to and fro before tearing them open and pouring the contents into a cup of coffee, her third of the day. “I seem to recall that quite a few of the American Founding Fathers were Deists. Wasn’t it a religious movement that came about in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries?”

“The Deists were spawned during the Enlightenment,” he verified with a nod. “Nominally Christian, the Deists were convinced that God not only created the universe, but at the same time he devised the laws of nature. Indeed, one can
only
know God through reason and observation of the natural world. Not through miracles or prophecy or otherworldly voices emanating from the Ark of the Covenant.”

About to raise her coffee cup to her lips, Edie lowered it to the table instead. “Makes perfect sense that a dyed-in-the-wool Deist like Benjamin Franklin would be horrified by the notion of using the Emerald Tablet to tap into the mind of God in order to create the perfect society. Given everything he’d heard and witnessed, he suspected the relic contained the so-called Genesis code. And it scared the hell out of him.”

“Franklin came of age during the Enlightenment, and like his Deist brethren, he was convinced that God graced mankind with intellect,” Caedmon said, giving voice to a deep-held belief of his as well. “By employing our God-given intellect, we can create and fashion a world based upon the tenants of reason and natural law. A whole different type of creation altogether.”

“Yeah, the safe kind. As in no Big Bang.” Edie pointedly glanced at the yellow sheets of paper. “Last night, Rubin mentioned that Thoth brought the Emerald Tablet to Egypt from Atlantis. Do you think the Emerald Tablet had something to do with the destruction of Atlantis?”

“Mmmm . . . an interesting question. The few references to Atlantis in the ancient records claim that the entire continent was obliterated from the earth. That said, it is possible that the Genesis code contained within the Emerald Tablet triggered the catastrophe.”

“It would only take one exploding atom to do the trick.” Edie shuddered. “Franklin was afraid of what would happen if the Freemasons found the encryption key and decoded the pictograph.”

“Indeed.” He drummed his fingers on the tabletop. “Your Benjamin Franklin is proving a difficult circle to square.”

“Might have been nice if he had left a clue as to where he intended to take the Emerald Tablet once he left London.”

“I believe that he did.” With his index finger, Caedmon drew Edie’s attention to several lines of text. “Franklin writes, ‘I propose to take Thoth’s stone to the City nearest the Centre to that place where men strive to improve the common stock of Knowledge so that all may prosper in mind as well as spirit.’ Without question, it’s a clue as to where Dr. Franklin intended to take the Emerald Tablet.”

Edie rolled her eyes. “Good luck finding
that
location on a Rand McNally map.”

He studied the last page of Franklin’s missive. Selection made, he said, “These two phrases look promising: ‘the City nearest the Centre’ and ‘the common stock of Knowledge.’ ” He quickly typed both phrases into an Internet search engine.

“In one way or another, it always comes back to ‘knowledge,’ doesn’t it?”

“The glue that binds one century to the next. Well, well. We have a hit,” he announced. At seeing the two phrases pop up in the same online document, he experienced a surge of optimism. “It seems that the wise sage used those same phrases in a written proposal dating to 1743.” He quickly skimmed the text that had come up on the screen. “In this document Franklin states his intention to found an organization in Philadelphia, that ‘being the City nearest the Centre of the Continent-Colonies, ’ to be known as the American Philosophical Society.”

Edie picked up where he left off. “The aim of which was to ‘cultivate the finer Arts, and improve the common stock of Knowledge.’ ” She glanced at him. “Sounds like the American Philosophical Society was supposed to be the colonial counterpart of the Royal Society.”

He quickly typed “American Philosophical Society” into the search engine. “And still is,” he informed her, grinning.
One step closer
.