Templar's Code

CHAPTER 20

“You must follow them to Arcadia.”

Heavyhearted, Mercurius hung up the phone. While not dire, the situation was troubling. Earlier today, one problem had been resolved only to have another emerge in its place. Jason Lovett had taken the historian Caedmon Aisquith into his confidence. Not only did the Brit know about the Templar colony, he was determined to find the sacred relic.

Mercifully, the Brit had no idea what he sought.

Worried what danger the new day would bring, Mercurius trudged down the hall toward his study to keep vigil. As was his custom, he stopped in front of the framed photographs that hung on the wall. His gaze slowly went from one heart-wrenching image to the next. The massacre of Armenian Christians. The extermination of European Jews. The slaughter of Bosnian Muslims.

Bodies . . . blood . . . bones.

“‘And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of a sword,’” Mercurius softly whispered, the verse from Joshua ironically apropos. Ironic because three millennia ago, a terrible evil was spawned, an abomination that fostered hatred, promoted bigotry, and incited intolerance. Darkness followed in its wake. The evil manifested into the cult of monotheism. Judaism, Christianity, Islam—within the bosom of each cult beat the heart of darkness.

Crusades . . . holy wars . . . jihads.

Could anything be more reprehensible?

So much hatred and violence. Century after bloody century. One could sweetly dream of a peaceful planet, but with the dawning of each new day, the nightmare returned. Indeed, mankind can be forgiven for viewing the world with suspicion. A suspicion germinated from the niggling fear that perhaps our gods had played us false. That we’d been duped into believing this world was created by a benevolent and merciful God.

What if it was all a hoax?

For there, in each haunting picture, was the uncontestable proof. A thousand words not nearly enough to convey the unrelenting anguish.

. . . and darkness was over the face of the deep.

Confronted with this pervasive darkness, what man didn’t yearn to be free of the torment? Drugs, sex, food, shopping, gambling—just a few of the sedatives that mankind used to anesthetize the pain.

As always, his gaze returned to the framed black-and-white image of emaciated corpses haphazardly tossed into an earthen pit. He reverently touched the glass that covered the sixty-six-year-old photograph. Auschwitz.

“Lest we forget . . .”

While that atrocity still haunted, who would mourn the slain Templars tossed into a mass grave at Arcadia? Mercurius didn’t need a photograph to envision that brutal episode. The Templars’ descendants had been hunted for their heretical beliefs. But massacred on account of the sacred relic that they’d safeguarded. For all their vaunted courage, in the end, the Knights Templar could not bring themselves to use the relic to eradicate the evil in their midst. Perhaps they’d harbored an ill-fated hope that the world could be redeemed.

A hope shared by so many.

Save the world. Save the earth. Save the planet.

The desperate cry of the anguished souls who refused to acknowledge that the Creation was flawed. Had always been flawed. Defective. One had only to turn on the cable news channel to ascertain that the hate mongers, the dictators, and the vicious thugs dominated global politics. Always threatening to pull the trigger. Start a war. Drop the bomb. It was now as it was in the beginning.

Mercurius tore his gaze away from the framed photographs. He refused to countenance such a world. A pragmatic man, he could reach but one conclusion: This world was not worth saving.