The Lost Crown of the Knights Templar

30 The Knight’s Valor

Sam and Father Harper stared down the maniacal Purdue, suddenly beside himself.

“What are you doing, Purdue?” Sam asked plainly, trying not to rile up his friend even more with insinuations of misplaced loyalty. Father Harper, he noticed, inched gradually towards the white haired puppet of Toshana Baldwin. That is how he saw Purdue right now. A puppet controlled by a vice few men could resist.

“You’re not taking her,” he hissed at Sam.

“And Nina? Are you going to leave her to die when your beloved Toshana does not show up?” Sam asked, occupying Purdue’s attention as the priest stalked nearer.

“But I always show up, Sam,” Toshana said from the darkness of the side tunnel. “I might take some time, but I never let a good deal get away from me.”

The men swung around as her pretty face appeared from the pitch darkness of the tunnel she was traversing. Purdue’s heart fluttered, but not for long. With his eye keenly on the dangerous Father Harper, he did not notice Sam hurtling toward him. Unexpectedly, the journalist flung his body at Purdue, spearing him off his feet. The two men landed hard on the cold rock of the tunnel floor, now completely robbed of light. Purdue’s tablet and his laser-based weapon clattered somewhere in the darkness.

Father Harper allowed Sam to take care of Purdue, but having seen Sam’s viciousness before, he did feel the need to cry out some advice. “Just don’t kill him. Sam! This isn’t his fault!”

A stinging sensation burned in the priest’s side. He was familiar with the feeling, the blunt pain of a blade sinking into his flesh. Vacuuming into his tissue, the blade retracted as Sam and Purdue’s altercation echoed through the blackness. Another bite of the blade sank into his chest, the steel scratching the bone of his chest plate as it rested short of his lung.

Toshana’s breath raced as the kill excited her, but she neglected to remember that she was not dealing with an opponent who died easily. Father Harper tried to ignore the pain that flowered through his torso, numbing his muscles. Using his massive hands to grab at where the knife was lodged before she could pull it out again. His actions were so rapid that Toshana had no chance. He found her hand and promptly snapped it at the wrist before seizing her by the throat.

Her scream reverberated in the underground sanctuary of the Templars of bygone centuries, giving it a superb voice that thundered back at the party before it dwindled into a guttural rattle.

“He’s strangling her, Sam!” Purdue shrieked under Sam’s blows.

“Good! I hope he fucking kills her!” Sam spat furiously as he brought down his knee in Purdue’s gut, rendering him breathless. “You are so goddamn pussy-whipped you can’t see straight!” Sam was wheezing madly, his arms exhausted and his knuckles burning.

Purdue had gotten in a few good ones, though. Sam’s brow smiled wide open and crimson over his eye, the blood blinding him while he wiped profusely at it. His chest ached from the side kick Purdue had connected expertly a few moments before. “Father Harper!” Sam cried, trying not to raise his voice too much, should anyone above hear the ruckus.

“I’m here,” the weak voice of the priest answered. His hand was still firmly on Toshana’s throat, but she was still writhing. Both her delicate hands were clasped around his wrist, but she was too weak to pry his hand from her neck.

“Are you hurt?” Sam asked. “Father?”

“Bit busy, Sam,” Father Harper said, hardly releasing the words from his mouth. He could hear Sam’s footsteps approach, following the sound of his voice. “Toshana, if you tell me where the crown is, I will let you live,” Sam heard the priest say.

Purdue switched on the bright light on his tablet. He could barely stand upright now, propping his arm on his knee. His face was bruised and swollen and his shirt ripped, straining over his heaving body. He could see Sam support the priest’s large frame as he sank to his knees, still holding the treacherous woman firm.

“Please, Father, don’t kill her,” Purdue begged from a distance as he watched his lover chocking under the fading power of the priest. Father Harper was weakening rapidly, but he insisted on knowing where the crown was.

“Toshana, please, tell him,” Purdue implored. “Don’t let me watch you die.”

“Let go, Father. I’ll restrain her. She’ll get no mercy from me.” Sam grimaced as he took hold of Toshana’s hair in his fist and pulled her free of Father Harper’s grip. “Now, where is the crown?”

“Do you think I will tell you?” she coughed.

Sam looked at Purdue and shrugged, ignoring his friend’s pleas for mercy as Sam landed a hefty boot in her back, ripping the breath from her. Toshana gasped for air, screaming in pain when air was permitted.

“They’re going to kill me if I don’t give them the crown!” she shrieked angrily as the pain overwhelmed her.

“They are going to kill you anyway, bitch,” Sam growled in her ear, away from Purdue’s perception. “No matter how you play this, if you don’t tell me where that fucking relic is, I am going to end you right here, where the Militum ended the last bitch who stole the crown. It would be rather… poetic, I think.” He jerked her head back so hard that her neck crunched softly inside. “Don’t you think that would be poetic, Toshana? So… ironic.”

“Not the Militum, the Bilderberg representatives of the Order of the Black Sun,” she whimpered, “are going to kill me.”

“Sam,” Purdue tried, but Sam roared, “Shut up! You! You just stay over there and be a good boy, Purdue, because I like Nina way more than I like you right now!”

Father Harper whispered, “I suppose Miss Harris got the wrong end of your knife as well. You brought us all down here to make away with us, didn’t you? This whole excursion was staged to facilitate our murders.”

Toshana said nothing, but her face affirmed the priest’s suspicion. “All of you, but especially you, Purdue. My God, they hate you,” she said, relishing the heartbreak in Purdue’s eyes.

“And Harris,” Sam added.

Toshana silently nodded at the assassination of the annoying journalist. Sam almost felt sorry about the loss. He probably would mourn his old foe even for just a minute, had he not been livid and sore beyond sympathy.

“If this priest dies, Toshana, I am smashing your skull against this wall. I swear to Christ! You had better spill it, or you die right now,” Sam reiterated. “Purdue, I am really reaching the end of my tether right now.”

“Alright, alright,” she finally cracked, “but I’ll take you to the citadel myself. That way you will have to let me live. Otherwise you get nothing!”

“The citadel?” Sam asked. “Here in Jerusalem?”

“Not in Jerusalem,” she stammered though bloody teeth. “That is where Lieutenant Hermanus was on her way to when she was…” she looked at Father Harper, “…intercepted.”

“We knew Hermanus was Vril Society. We found her fleeing to Medina. She had their mark branded on her chest, between her breasts,” Father Harper mumbled. “A warped lightning bolt springing from a Black Sun emblem. But you, Toshana…”

“What?” she gasped. Sam’s grip seemed to tear her scalp from her skull.

“You serve something much older, don’t you?” the priest grunted. His voice shivered over its last two words and his body went limp on the floor. Sam and Purdue both felt their impatience escalate at Toshana’s delays.

“Finally, a Templar dies in the Templars’ ill-begotten palace,” Toshana remarked. Her impudence earned her another kick and she cried out in a hoarse voice, refusing to weep.

“Where is the citadel?” Purdue asked, sounding harsh and tired.

“I will take you if you let me live,” she insisted.

“Do we still have to give her to the Militum, Sam? Isn’t there a way out of that?” Purdue asked.

“Aye, there are two ways. Toshana dies now or Nina dies later. Either way, one of them will die, Purdue,” Sam said. He turned and gave Purdue a sharp look. “Choose very carefully which one you would prefer to keep breathing. I know I’ve made my choice.”

From a distance, they could hear a rumbling ensue. It was way past closing hour and the mosque had to be empty by now. Above them there was no trembling of ground, so Sam and Purdue realized that the sound came from both sides of the tunnel. “The light!” Sam whispered loudly. “Kill the light before they find us.”

Purdue promptly switched off the light. Men shouted from the sudden darkness, confirming that they had been discovered under the mosque.

“Shit, shit, shit,” Sam whispered. “How do we get out?”

“They sound very angry, Sam. Have any ideas?” Purdue asked.

“Your pen laser,” Sam suggested. “Why don’t you use that hostile fucking stationary on someone besides your friends?”

“I have no idea where it is. You knocked it out of my goddamn hand, genius,” Purdue retorted.

Suddenly, Sam felt a terrible pain in the arm he was holding Toshana with. A heavy, sharp stone came down on his elbow joint, spraining the joint and forcing Sam’s hand open on impact.

“Jesus Christ!” Sam bellowed. He lost all feeling in his arm for a while, but his legs were still strong. “You bitch!” He jumped up and pursued her clapping footsteps in the dark.

“Sam! Wait for me!” Purdue cried, bolting forward as much as his beaten body would allow. It sounded as if the soldiers were lost down there, their voices floating in argument and suggestions. Their flashlights could not penetrate far enough into the tunnels to locate the intruders. With the speed that Sam and Purdue moved after the fleeing Countess, they quickly left the soldiers behind.

But by the time they found the exit of the tunnel, they had been walking for over an hour. Toshana’s footsteps were silent now. Either she had escaped through the women’s mosque or she was hiding somewhere in the dark. The two men had no time to waste trying to find her in the perpetual dark of an endless maze.

“What do you wager she is on her way to the citadel?” Sam finally asked.

“She paid me in gold bars, stamped ‘RB,’ you know?” Purdue confessed. “I should have known.”

“What is ‘RB’?” Sam asked, wedging out through a crevice in the tunnel that led out from the Temple Mount.

“It is how the SS marked their gold, the abbreviation for Reichsbank. Now, how many normal financial institutions have those?” Purdue asked, shaking his head at his own foolishness.

“Don’t worry. We might not know where to find the citadel exactly, but we know someone who would know,” Sam said. “Doubt he will be very helpful, though, once he knows that we lost Toshana again.”

“Poor Father Harper,” Purdue lamented the fate of the priest. “That man saved me from a terrible fate under Mother’s house when nobody else knew where I was or cared to rescue me.” They stumbled out over the loose rocks, their tired eyes blessed by the beauty of the lights everywhere around the site. Jerusalem by night looked like a galaxy of floating stars shimmering over highways that held their orbit.

“He died because of my mistakes, you know,” Purdue persisted.

“He died because he came to Nina’s rescue,” Sam corrected Purdue. “Something I would do in a heartbeat.