Reilly watched Tess as she ate. Despite the insanity of the last twenty-four hours, it felt so natural to be with her. Again. Being with her brought it all bursting back to life, everything that he missed about her. The peridot green eyes that glinted with intellect as well as with mischief. The exquisitely shaped lips and perfect teeth, co-conspirators behind her luminous smile. The wild, blond curls that framed it all and added to the untamed vibe she radiated. The laugh. The humor. The drive and the energy. The magic that entranced any room she walked into. Watching her now, as she wolfed down her food with the wholehearted delight of someone who ate life up in big, greedy mouthfuls, he couldn’t believe he’d actually let her walk out of his life. And yet he had, although the reasons for their split now seemed, well, if not trivial, then certainly mishandled. Which was something that was always easily said in hindsight.
He should have said something back then, he thought. Put a stop to the slow erosion, to the frustrations and the feelings of inadequacy, to the hurt. But there had been no easy solution. They’d leapt into starting a life together. She already had a kid, Kim, a daughter from her ex-husband, a sexual-harassment-lawsuit-in-waiting of a news anchor who’d moved to the West Coast. Reilly, on the other hand, had never been married or fathered a child. Which became a problem when the capriciousness of human reproduction came into play. Reilly wanted to be not just a step-father to Kim, but also a dad himself, and, as it was with more and more women in their thirties, it hadn’t proven to be that simple. The gift of life was proving to be frustratingly elusive. Tests had shown that his body wasn’t the one at fault. Years of Tess taking the pill were a probable culprit. And so an undercurrent of melancholy took root as Reilly’s primal longing became hers too. The IVF treatments added to the malaise, chipping away at the bond between them. Each failed attempt felt like going through a divorce. By the end of it, Tess needed to get away. The heartache and the feeling of failing him were too profound to face. And he didn’t try hard enough to stop her, although at the time, he’d felt as drained and hollow as she had.
Yeah, he should have said something, he thought, as he held her firmly in his sights. He told himself he’d never let her walk out of his life again—but in the same breath, he reminded himself that it wasn’t just up to him.
She must have sensed his stare, as she slid a sideways glance at him. “You gonna finish that?” she mumbled between chews, pointing her knife at his plate.
He chuckled and passed her his plate. She scooped up the last piece of veal and gobbled it down. After a pause, he asked, “What just happened here?”
“What?”
He tried to order his thoughts. “This. Us. Here. Dealing with whackjobs and Templars again.”
“Maybe it’s our lot in life,” Tess grinned between mouthfuls.
“I’m serious.”
Tess shrugged, then gave him a slightly pointed look. “There’s still a lot we don’t know about them. Why do you think I went out to see Jed? It’s what I tried to explain to you … before I left. They deserve to be taken seriously. For decades, they’ve been this academic no-go zone, just fodder for fantasists and conspiracy theorists. But we know better, don’t we? Everything we thought was just myth and nonsense … it all turned out to be true.”
“Maybe,” Reilly argued. “We never got a chance to see if the documents from the Falcon Temple were real, or just forgeries.”
“Still … they were there, weren’t they?”
That part was true, he had to agree—and it supported her view of the Order. “So now that your work and your books are all about them,” he asked, “does that mean you’re going to be in the line of fire every time some crackpot thinks he’s got a lead on one of their secrets?”
“This guy didn’t come after me,” Tess reminded him. “He came after Jed. I just happened to be there.”
“This time,” he pointed out.
“Well,” she crept closer to him and gave him a wet, messy kiss, “if it happens again, just promise you’ll be there to rescue me?”
He drank it in quietly, then pulled away, a pensive look on his face. “Just so I understand things correctly—if you’re grabbed by some murderous psychopath, and only then, your request that I give you some ‘space’ “—he did some air quotes—”and keep away from you to give you some time to ‘figure things out’”—more air quotes—”no longer applies.” He paused, mock-thinking it over, then nodded sardonically. “Okay. Works for me.”
Her expression clouded at his words, as if an uncomfortable reality were coming back into focus. “Can we … can we just enjoy this moment and not talk about us for now?”
“Is there an ‘us’?” He kept his tone light and playful, even though deep down, the question was anything but that.
“We’ve just spent a couple of hours putting practically every pose in the Kama Sutra to the test. I think that kind of has an effect on our status, doesn’t it? But can we please just … not now, okay?”
“Sure thing.” He flashed her a slight grin to defuse the moment and decided to drop the subject for now. What they’d been through wasn’t the ideal grounding for a serious chat about where they stood with regard to each other. He didn’t think it was fair to Tess, not after her ordeal.
He changed tack. “Tell me something … these trunks, the writings the monk’s confession refers to. The cardinal didn’t seem too keen on giving me a straight answer about what they could be. You must have discussed it with Simmons. Any ideas?”
“Some, but … we’re just guessing.”
“So guess.”
She frowned. ” ‘The devil’s handiwork, written in his hand using poison drawn from the pits of hell,’ and the rest of it. It’s got a very creepy ring to it, doesn’t it? And it’s not something that’s commonly associated with the Templars.”
“But you know different?”
Tess shrugged. “Sort of. The thing is, you have to understand the context of it, the setting. The events in the diary, Conrad and the monks … that all happened in 1310. That’s three years
after
the Templars were all arrested. And how that happened, why it happened when it happened, could help explain what it’s all about.”
“Keep going.”
Tess straightened, and her face lit up as it always did when she got excited about something. “Okay. Here’s the backstory. Late 1200s, early 1300s. Western Europe’s going through tough times. After several centuries of warm weather, the weather’s now getting freaky and unpredictable—a lot colder and wetter. Crops are failing. Disease is spreading. This was the start of what’s called the ‘Little Ice Age’ that—weirdly enough—lasted until a hundred and fifty years ago. By the time you hit 1315, it rains almost nonstop for three years and triggers the Great Famine. So the common folk—they’re having a really miserable time. Now, on top of that, they’ve just lost their Holy Land. The pope had told them that the Crusades were willed and blessed by God—and they failed. The crusaders lost Jerusalem and were finally kicked out of the last Christian stronghold, at Acre, in 1291. Now keep in mind, the church had spent decades building up the arrival of the new millennium as this thousand-year milestone and was talking it up as the date of the
parousia
, the Second Coming. They were warning people that they had to embrace Christianity and submit to the Church’s authority before that date or miss out on their eternal reward. So there was a great resurgence of religious fervor at the time, and when nothing happened, when the new millennium came and went without the Big Event taking place, the Church needed to find something else to distract its people, an excuse almost. And they turned to liberating the Holy Land from the Muslims who had taken it over. The pope dreamt up the Crusades as something that God was waiting for, the crowning achievement of that whole movement, the start of a new triumphant age for Christianity. And the Church had even gone as far as to change its position radically, from preaching about peace and harmony and loving your fellow man, to doing the total opposite—the pope was now actively promoting war and telling his followers ‘God will absolve you of all your previous crimes if you go out and slaughter the heathen in the Holy Land.’ So there was a lot riding on getting the Holy Land back. And when that failed, it was a huge blow. Huge. And people were feeling scared. They were wondering if God was angry with them. Or if something powerful and evil was at work, undermining God’s efforts. And if that was the case, who were his agents, and what powers did they have?
“Now while this is all happening, something else is brewing at the same time,” Tess continued. “People in Western Europe, and I’m talking about the people in power, the priests and the monarchs—the few who could actually read and write—they’ve recently started taking the dangers of magic and witchcraft seriously again. They hadn’t, not for centuries. Those concerns had died out with paganism. Magic and witchcraft were ridiculed as nothing more than the superstitions of delusional old women. But when the Spanish took back the south of Spain from the Moors towards the end of the eleventh century, they discovered a whole new world of writings in places like the library of Toledo, ancient and classical scientific texts that the Arabs had brought with them and had translated from the original Greek into Arabic and then into Latin. So the West rediscovered all these lost writings, the works of great thinkers and scientists that they’d completely forgotten about, like Plato and Hermes and Ptolemy and a whole bunch of others they’d never heard of. Books like the
Picatrix
and the
Cyranides
and the
Secreta Secretorum
that explored philosophy and astronomy as well as magico-religious ideas and potions and spells and necromancy and astromagic and all kinds of ideas these people had never seen before. And what they read scared the hell out of them. Because these texts, regardless of how primitive or misguided we might now consider them, talked about science and understanding how the universe worked and how the stars moved and how our bodies could be healed, and basically, how man could gain power over the elements around him. And that was scary to them. It was early science, and early science was considered magic. And since it undermined the concept of ‘God’s will,’ the priests painted it as ‘black magic,’ and anything it achieved had to be due to demon worship.”
Reilly remembered something from his previous exposure to the warrior-monks and asked, “Weren’t the Templars accused of worshipping some demonic head?”
“Of course. The Baphomet. Now there are conflicting theories on that, we still don’t know for a fact what it was all about. But that’s what I’m talking about. To understand why the Templars were rounded up and accused of all these mostly ridiculous things, you have to understand the mind-set in which that happened.”
“So we’ve got people thinking God is angry with them and that the devil’s agents are out to destroy them, and priests and kings believing black magic might actually exist.”
“Exactly. And against that charged backdrop, you’ve got these arrogant, wealthy warrior-monks who lost the Holy Land and are now back in Europe, and they don’t seem to be too embarrassed by their defeat. They’ve still got all these vast holdings and they’re living it up on the fat of the land while everyone else is starving. And people start asking questions. They start wondering about them, asking themselves how these guys are getting away with it—and pretty soon, they’re asking themselves if these guys don’t have some kind of evil power, if they’re not in league with the devil, if they’re not debauched demon-worshipping wizards. This fear of black magic—it was at the root of the Templar trials. Of course, their accuser, the King of France, had plenty of reasons to want to take them down. Greed and envy played a huge role. He owed them a lot of money and he was broke, and he was also incensed by their arrogance and their flagrant disrespect towards him. But beyond that, he genuinely saw himself as the most Christian of kings, the defender of the faith, even more so after the death of his wife in 1307—the same year he ordered the arrests, a time when he’d withdrawn into religious self-absorption, something he never came out of. He saw himself as a man chosen by God to do His divine work here on Earth and protect his people from heresy. He was hoping to set up another crusade. And he and his advisors just couldn’t understand how these Templars could possibly be as arrogant and as dismissive of God’s chosen one if they weren’t getting the help of some kind of demonic power.”
Reilly chortled. “They really believed that?”
“Absolutely. If the Templars had made a pact with the devil, if they had knowledge that could transform the world—and take away power from those who held it—they had to be defeated. And it’s not as outlandish as it sounds. Knowledge is power, in all kinds of ways, and occult weapons are a common thread in history. Megalomaniacs looking for that extra edge, that divine power, that arcane knowledge that would let them conquer the world. Hitler was obsessed with occultism. The Nazis were totally enthralled by black magic and runes, and not just in
Raiders of the Lost Ark
. Mussolini had a pretty nutty personal occultist called Julius Evola. You’d be amazed by the superstitions and the wacky belief systems that a lot of world leaders take seriously, even today.”
Reilly felt heavy-headed. “So these trunks … ?”
“‘The devil’s handiwork, written in his hand using poison drawn from the pits of hell, its accursed existence a devastating threat to the rock upon which our world is founded,’ ” Tess reminded him. “What’s in these books that frightened the monks so much? Could there be any truth to the accusations against the Templars? Were they really occultists that practiced black magic?”
Reilly looked doubtful. “Come on. It could all be just metaphorical.” His previous meeting with Brugnone, three years earlier, flashed across his mind. “I can think of other writings that would shake up a monk’s world, right?”
“Of course,” Tess nodded. “But keep an open mind. I’ll give you one example that Jed brought up. You know there were a lot of Templars in Spain and Portugal. Big presence there. Well, at some point in the thirteenth century, they got into trouble and they had to pawn off most of their holdings in Castile. Of all the enclaves they had out there, the only one they kept was an insignificant little church in the middle of nowhere. It didn’t make sense. It wasn’t in a strategic location. Its land didn’t even produce enough revenue to allow its friars to send funds to their brothers in the Holy Land. But it was the one
encomienda
, the one enclave, they decided to keep. What wasn’t immediately obvious was that this small church actually did have an interesting feature: its location. They had built it right in the center of Spain, equidistant from its farthest capes. And I mean perfectly equidistant, down to the meter.”