The Last Templar

Chapter 28

W hen the printouts from Columbia came through to Tess's office that afternoon, they appeared to be disappointingly thin. A quick skim confirmed the disappointment. Tess couldn't find anything that was of use. From what Clive Edmondson had told her, she was not expecting anything on the Knights Templar. It wasn't William Vance's official area of expertise. Mostly, he had concentrated on Phoenician history up to the third century before Christ. The link, though, was a natural one and seemed promising: the great Phoenician ports of Sidon and Tyre became, a thousand years later, formidable Templar strongholds. It was as if one had to peel through layers of Crusader and Templar history to get a peek at Phoenician life.

Furthermore, nowhere in his published papers that were sent to her was there any mention of the subjects of cryptography and cryptology.

She felt deflated. All the reading and research she'd done at the library, and now Vance's papers—none of it had helped her get any closer to figuring this out.

She decided to do one last trawl online, and the same several hundred hits came up again when she entered Vance's name into the search engine. This time, though, she decided to take her time and study them more carefully.

She had run through a couple of dozen sites when she came across a site that only mentioned Vance in passing and in an unashamedly mocking tone. The article, a transcript of a speech given by a French historian at the Universite de Nantes almost ten years ago, was a scathing review of what its author considered less than worthy ideas that were, in his view, muddying the waters for more serious academics.

The mention of Vance came two-thirds of the way into his presentation. In it, the historian mentioned in passing how he had even heard the ridiculous notion, from Vance, that Hughes de Payens may have been a Cathar, simply because the man's family tree indicated that he was originally from the Languedoc.

Tess reread the passage. The founder of the Templars, a Cathar? It was an absurd suggestion.

Templarism and Catharism were as contradictory as could be. For two hundred years, the Templars had been the unflinching defenders of the Church. Catharism, on the other hand, was a Gnostic movement.

Still, there was something intriguing about the suggestion.

Catharism had originated in the middle of the tenth century, taking its name from the Greek katharos, meaning "the pure ones." It was based on the notion that the world was evil and that souls would be continually reborn—and could even pass through animals, which was why the Cathars were vegetarians—until they escaped the material world and reached a spiritual heaven.

Everything the Cathars believed in was anathema to the Church. They were dualists who believed that, in addition to a merciful and good God, there had to be an equally powerful but evil God to explain the horrors that plagued the world. The benevolent God created the heavens and the human soul; the evil God entrapped that soul in the human body. In the Vatican's eyes, the Cathars had sacrilegiously elevated Satan to God's equal. Following this belief, the Cathars considered all material goods evil, which led them to reject the trappings of wealth and of power that had undeniably corrupted the medieval Roman Catholic Church.

More worryingly for the Church, they were also Gnostics. Gnosticism— which, like Cathar, is derived from a Greek word, gnosis, meaning higher knowledge or insight—is the belief that man can come into direct and intimate contact with God without the need for a priest or a church.

Believing in direct personal contact with God freed the Cathars of all moral prohibition or religious obligations. Besides having no use for lavish churches and oppressive ceremonies, they had no use for priests either. Religious ceremonies were simply performed in homes or in fields.

And if that wasn't enough, women were treated as equals and were allowed to become "parfaits," the closest thing the Cathari faith had to a priest; since physical form was irrelevant to them, the soul residing within a human body could just as easily be male or female, regardless of outward appearance.

As the belief caught on and spread across the south of France and northern Italy, the Vatican got increasingly worried and ultimately decided that this heresy could no longer be tolerated. It didn't only threaten the Catholic Church, it also threatened the basis of the feudal system in Europe, as the Cathars believed oaths were a sin, given that they attached one to the material—hence, evil—world.

This gravely undermined the concept of pledges of allegiance between serfs and their lords. The pope had no trouble enlisting the support of the French nobility to put down this threat. In 1209, an army of Crusaders descended on the Languedoc, and, over the next thirty-five years, proceeded to massacre over thirty thousand men, women, and children. It was said that blood flowed ankle deep in the churches where some of the fleeing villagers had taken refuge, and that when one of the pope's soldiers complained about not knowing whether he was killing heretics or Christian believers, he was simply told to "Kill them all; God will know his own."

It simply doesn't make sense. The Templars went to the Holy Land to escort the pilgrims—the Christian pilgrims. They were the Vatican's storm troopers, its staunchest supporters. The Cathars, on the other hand, were the Church's enemies.

Tess was surprised that someone as learned as Vance would advance such a wild proposition, especially when it was based on the flimsy premise of one man's provenance. She wondered if she was barking up the wrong tree, but what she really needed, Tess knew, was to talk to him in person.

Regardless of such an academic faux pas, if there were a connection between the Templars and the robbery, he would probably nail it in a flash.

She dialed Columbia University again and soon got through to the History Department. After reminding the secretary of their previous conversation, she asked her if she'd had any luck in finding anyone at the department who knew how to reach William Vance. The woman said she'd asked a couple of professors who taught there at the same time as Vance, but they'd lost touch with him after he'd left.

"I see," Tess said wistfully. She didn't know where else to turn.

The woman picked up on her dismay. "I know you need to reach him, but maybe he doesn't want to be reached. Sometimes, people prefer not to be reminded of, you know . . . painful times."

Tess snapped to attention. " 'Painful times'?"

"Of course. And after what he went through ... it was all so sad. He loved her very much, you know."

Tess's mind was racing, trying to think of whether or not she had missed something. "I'm sorry, I'm not sure I know what you're referring to. Did Professor Vance lose someone?"

"Oh, I thought you knew. It was his wife. She fell ill and passed away."

This was all news to her. None of the sites she'd looked at mentioned it, but then, they were purely academic and didn't delve into personal matters. "When did this happen?"

"It's been a few years now, five or six years ago? Let's see ... I remember it was in the spring. The professor took a sabbatical that summer and never came back."

Tess thanked the woman and hung up. She wondered if she should forget about Vance and concentrate on getting in touch with Simmons. Still, she was intrigued. She went online again and clicked onto the New York Times's Web site. She selected the advanced search function and was relieved to find that the archive went back to 1996. She entered "William Vance," ticked the obituary section, and got a hit.

The brief article announced the death of his wife, Martha. It only mentioned complications after a brief illness, but gave no more details. Casually, Tess noticed where interment had been scheduled to take place: the Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. She wondered if Vance was paying for the upkeep of the grave. If he was, it was likely that the cemetery would have a record of his current address.

She thought about calling the cemetery herself, then decided against it. They probably wouldn't release such information to her anyway. Reluctantly, she found the card Reilly had given her and called his office. Told that Reilly was in a meeting, Tess hesitated about telling the agent on the line anything and decided she'd wait to speak to Reilly in person.

Glancing back at her screen, her eyes fell on the obituary, and suddenly a flash of excitement struck her.

The secretary was right about Martha Vance's death having occurred in the spring.

It had happened exactly five years ago tomorrow.