The Templar's Secret (The Templar Series) (10 page)

Suffering a faint dyspeptic twinge,
he suspected that whoever abducted Anala had assigned a ‘watcher’ to keep tabs on Gita and report on her movements. To ensure that she didn’t go to the authorities.

He stared at the dodgy-looking fellow for a few seconds
longer. Then, glancing down, he noticed a milky palm print on the glass pane. Curious, he went down on bent knee.

‘
Were you aware of the fact that there’s a print on this pane of glass?’ he asked Gita, certain that the window had been the abductor’s point of entry into the house.

‘
I had no idea,’ Gita said, her brows drawn worriedly together.

Caedmon
scrutinized the distinctive print – ‘distinctive’ because it clearly indicated that Anala’s abductor had a Chi-Rho cross branded on his right palm, the tell-tale image now stamped on to the glass.

A symbol dating to Constantine the Great, it was actually a monogram composed of two superimposed Greek letters. More importantly, it was a symbol long associated with the Roman Catholic Church. A damning signpost.

‘Bloody hell,’ he muttered under his breath.

It was what
he’d feared all along.

Bored out of her wits, Anala Patel wondered if was possible to die from unrelenting ennui, her brain withering on the vine.

Sitting cross-legged on the narrow cot, she closed her eyes, the harsh glare of the bare light bulb that dangled from the ceiling inducing a headache. By her reckoning, she’d spent three days in her wood-paneled dungeon, her life reduced to the most banal of bodily functions: eating, sleeping and using the loo.

Sighing, she opened her eyes and glanced at the dour-faced guard who sat on the wooden chair a few feet away playing a video game. There were three different guards who rotated shifts, taking turns watching her. Because of the constant surveillance, her only privacy was the few minutes each day that she was escorted to a grungy toilet. Oddly enough, while all three men spoke Spanish amongst themselves – which Anala didn’t speak
– they addressed her in accented English.

She still had no idea in which country she was being held, the guards refusing to divulge any details. None the less, she’d been able to glean a few dribs and drabs, fairly certain that the men holding her captive weren’t sex traffickers. Much to her relief. For the time being, at least, her captors didn’t want her dead. Merely docile.

Despite the fact that meek had never been her MO, Anala had quickly assumed the role of mild-mannered captive. The last thing she wanted to do was antagonize her jailers who, after the failed escape attempt, had manacled her wrists with plastic Flexicuffs rather than duct tape. The upgrade meant that she didn’t have a prayer of breaking free of the restraints. However, on the plus side, they’d cuffed her hands in front of her waist, enabling her to feed herself and tend to more personal matters. Albeit it rather awkwardly.

Suffering a twinge of pain in her hip, Anala shifted her weight, the metal bed frame creaking loudly.

The guard immediately glanced up from his video game, brows drawn in a fierce frown.

‘No need for alarm,’ she hastened to assure him. ‘I’m just trying to find a more comfortable position.’ Two days ago she’d asked permission to pace the room, explaining that she desperately needed some exercise. The request had been denied.

Frown dissipating, the guard held up a water bottle, silently offering her a drink. Very tempted to tell him to ‘piss off’ – he’d been the bastard who’d stopped her from pacing – Anala, instead, nodded her head, refusing to let her pride dictate her actions.

Taking the bottle from him, she murmured her thanks.

This is what my life has come to. Not quite the end of the world. But I can definitely see it from here
.

As a despondent wave washed over her, she rested her head on her bent knees and stared at the dingy linoleum.

Which is when she caught sight of a piece of glass glittering on the floor about eight feet from the cot. Obviously someone had missed it when they’d swept the floor after her failed escape, the window having been boarded over with planks of wood.

I can use that piece of glass to cut through the plastic cuffs!

No sooner did the thought take root than Anala turned her head in the other direction, keeping her expression as neutral as possible. Seeing that jagged piece of glass, a small flame of hope had flickered. Not a bright flame. But enough of a glow for her to immediately think about how she might go about retrieving the piece of glass.

She didn’t need to hang around until the closing credits to know how the movie was going to end. It was going to end badly.
Very badly.
Unless she did something to rewrite the script.

La Torre dei Venti, The Vatican

The Prefect of the Secret Archives peered over his shoulder, verifying that no
one lurked in the vicinity.

Stuffing a hand
into his cassock pocket, he removed a silver key on a nondescript ring and quickly inserted it into the door lock. La Torre dei Venti
– the Tower of the Winds – was closed to the public. The reason why it was his favorite retreat. Reclusive by nature, he adjourned to the tower whenever he needed a bit of privacy. Or to escape from prying Vatican eyes.

In a hurry, Franco made his way down a passageway that led to a small elevator.

A few moments later, the old-fashioned lift shuddered to a stop. Exiting, he strode down a dimly lit corridor that dead-ended at the Tower of the Winds.

As he rushed down the corridor, Franco barely gave the flaking frescoes that covered the wall
s a passing glance, whimsical personifications of the seasons and vividly imagined Biblical scenes streaming past his peripheral sight line in a colorful blur.

Piled against
those forgotten masterpieces were bins full of bound indexes, the tower used as an overflow storage area for the Archives. Here, some of the greatest secrets of papal history were safeguarded, with much of the diplomatic correspondence scribed in secret code due to the sensitive nature of the communiqués. Often confused with the Vatican Library, which was the repository for books, texts, codices and manuscripts, the Archives contained all of the papers pertaining to the internal workings of the Church, much of it political in nature.

On the far side of the storage room there was a spiral staircase. Lifting his cassock with his left hand, Franco ascended. Halfway up, huffing, his chest burning from the exertion, he came to a gasping halt.

Bracing a hand on the stucco wall, Franco continued up the corkscrewed stairs.
Well worth the effort,
he thought as he reached the top and entered the beautifully decorated Meridian Room, the only area in the tower that contained no book bins.

Still trying to catch his breath, Franco
set his gaze upon the anemoscope at the top of the ceiling, an instrument that never ceased to fascinate. Designed by the same Dominican friar responsible for the topographical maps in the
Galleri delle carte geografiche
,
the anemoscope had a pointer attached to an outdoor weather vane that indicated the movement of the wind.

Oddly enough, it was the anemoscope that
had inspired Franco to use the alias ‘Irenaeus’ when he’d contacted the Patel woman. One of the early Church Fathers, Irenaeus was instrumental in creating the Gospel canon, weeding out the heretical gospels that had proliferated in the ancient world.

‘
Because there are four corners of the universe and there are four principal winds, therefore there can only be four gospels that are authentic.
’

No surprise that liberal
-leaning biblical scholars refused to countenance Irenaeus’s assertion and actively sought heretical gospels, wasting an inordinate amount of time traipsing around the Middle East peering into bat-infested caves. When the Nag Hammadi Library of ancient Gnostic texts was unearthed in the mid-twentieth century, rogue scholars were downright orgiastic about the discovery.

Standing in the white marble meridian circle that was imbedded in
the middle of the floor – part of a zodiacal diagram orientated to the movement of the sun – Franco opened the manila envelope that he’d received from the Vatican secret service. Although the airy enclave lacked electrical lighting, there was a small hole near the ceiling through which streamed a beam of natural light. It provided enough illumination for him to read the two typed sheets of paper; the dossier he’d requested on one Caedmon St. John Aisquith.

He gave the photograph of a middle-aged auburn-haired man a
cursory glance. According to the dossier, Aisquith had attended Oxford University and had an advanced degree in medieval history. Which he had clearly put to deviant use, having authored a work of conspiracy history entitled
Isis Revealed.
The sort of tripe that would have garnered a visit by the Grand Inquisitor several hundred years ago.

Franco re-read the particulars, disturbed by the fact that there were nearly twelve years, from 1995 to 2006, missing from Aisquith’s biographical data. As though the man had
temporarily disappeared off the face of the planet. He was also uncertain what to make of the fact that Gita Patel had contacted the Englishman.

Perhaps they
had known one another at Oxford.

‘
Yes, no doubt that’s it,’ he murmured. Given that Aisquith and the Patel woman were the same age, the explanation was entirely plausible. Since Aisquith was a medieval scholar, Franco assumed that she’d consulted him to assist in deciphering Fortes de Pinós’s cryptic riddle.

Stuffing the two sheets of paper back into the envelope, Franco strode towards a closed door that led to an outdoor terrace. Like his lavishly designed tower
,
the little patio was another perk that came with the job.

After his humiliating ouster from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Franco
had made the best of the situation, undertaking his new duties overseeing the Secret Archives with due diligence and devotion. His humility was soon rewarded when he began to peruse long-forgotten files pertaining to the Knights Templar that had been stashed in a locked
armadi
, the closet tucked away in the section of the Archives that was often referred to as
terra incognito.

Like Minerva’s owl spreading ‘its wings only with the falling of dusk,’ the Knights Templars’ dark secrets had been unfathomable during their 200-year history. The Church only knew that they
had
secrets. Even the inquisitors could only wring from them hints and vague allusions. ‘
The knights at Château Pèlerin discovered something in the caves of Mount Carmel.
’
‘
The Grand Master was hiding a relic at the commandery on Cyprus.
’
‘
There was a secret ritual performed beneath the preceptory in Paris.
’
Never anything
specific.
Just enough information to induce the inquisitor to loosen the screws and lessen the pain.

Although he had no proof, Franco believed that the Templars’ demise had nothing to do with their insufferable arrogance or blind ambition, as was so often claimed, but rather their fall from grace had to do with a great secret. One that harkened to the very dawn of Christianity. A secret that was contained in the
Evangelium Gaspar.

Fascinated by this bit of unknown Templar history
, Franco had began to comb through the archive indexes in search of all the files pertaining to the Templar Order. No easy task given that the archival records weren’t maintained in alphabetical or even date order. Instead, the voluminous records were indexed by narrow topics.

It
had taken three years of committed research to finally locate Fortes de Pinós’s inquisition transcript.

Having had no luck deciphering de Pinós’s riddle, Franco had nearly given up all hope of ever finding the ancient gospel when, quite unexpectedly, a
historian from India contacted the Vatican Secret Archives requesting information regarding a Knights Templar named Fortes de Pinós
.
The politely worded missive was a godsend, Franco nearly swooning on the spot when he’d first read it, certain that Dr. Patel knew far more about the
Evangelium Gaspar
than she revealed in her email.