The Lost Crown of the Knights Templar

9 The Meeting

Two days after the renowned investigative journalist, Sam Cleave, collected his car from the Barking street, the man who sent him a video message was sitting in a bunker nearby. Surrounded by the rest of his local chapter, he called the informal meeting to order.

“He has not delivered Toshana, neither has he notified us of his intentions,” he declared to the few men. “I really, really hoped he would not call my bluff on this. I admire the man.”

“How could you?” his friend Gille asked, vexed at the leniency shown by their leader. “He killed our friends, our brothers! With his typically annoying heroic bullshit, he disrespected our ways! How could you admire him at all?”

“Listen, not all wars have only two sides, Gille! Sometimes you make alliances with enemies so that you can defeat the forces that wedged us apart in the first place,” he explained to a very angry Gille. “Yes, he and the man in the car killed our brethren. For that, I am deeply regretful and angry, but we cannot have a man like him killed without drawing international attention. Do you understand?”

Another of the men scoffed from the other side of the room, “It’s not like we can stone him in public, you know, Gille.”

To the mocker’s amusement, Gille flipped him the bird. He turned to look at his leader with a serious face. “What are you going to do, then? We have to find him before he gets Toshana out of the country, out of our reach.”

“Bitch,” one of the men groaned as he ate his sandwich. A hum of agreement filled the room from the other men. They were only six in total, what was left of the initial group before Sam and his unknown friend had reduced their numbers.

“For Christ’s sake, man. Why don’t we just kill him and be done with it!” Gille hissed.

The leader promptly slapped him across the face. “Do not blaspheme, Gille. I will not tell you again.” Gille recoiled, holding his face, but he nodded obediently. “I think you all ought to know that Sam Cleave is not a full-blown enemy of ours just because he killed our brothers to save Toshana,” he continued to explain the predicament to his men. “He is a member of the Brigade Apostate.”

“What?” an older man next to the scoffer gasped.

“What the hell is the Brigade Apostate?” Gille asked, his hand still firmly on his cheek.

The old man took the liberty to explain, since it looked like their leader was conceding him the chance. Blinking profusely as he recounted, the old man tried his best to give an accurate description. “They are a clandestine organization, one of many in the world, and they are based in the wild mountain ranges of Mongolia and Russia, mostly. In the time of the Second World War, Hitler, Himmler, and the other members of the SS High Command founded a small group…”

“The Thule Society, we know all that, Ben,” Gille sighed.

“Listen to him,” was all the leader told Gille, gesturing for the old man to carry on.

“Not the Thule Society this time, Gille. From the Thule and Vril Societies, along with remnants of others like the Brüder des Lichts.”

“Brothers of the Light,” the leader elucidated to accommodate those of them suffering from rusty German.

“Within the Thule Society, some the SS elite formed another secret society they called The Order of the Black Sun. Heard of them?” the old man asked his associates. Some nodded, others looked lost. “Well, the Black Sun was in pursuit of holy relics to facilitate the inter-dimensional arrival of the old gods who would obliterate the world’s nations and elevate the Aryan race to rule the world. I know it sounds preposterous, like something from a bad novel, but they truly believed that artefacts like the Spear of Destiny and the Ark of the Covenant could amass the ethereal thrust they needed to connect with the original master race they believe begot all pure Aryan races.”

He looked at his associates, all of whom were listening intently. “The Black Sun is reputed to have disbanded after the death of Adolf Hitler, somewhere in the late 1940s. But many people know that the Order of the Black Sun is still in existence, still pursuing world domination. They have boundless resources, including members of high society belonging to the order and funding their agenda. Now, the Brigade Apostate is a secret organization too, but what makes them a special threat to the Order of the Black Sun is that most of them once belonged to it!”

The men sat, spellbound at the revelation. In silence they took it all in, and the old man gave them time to learn what he was teaching. With a gruff voice, low in tone and drenched in mystery, he said, “The Brigade Apostate is the anti-Black Sun, so to speak, making it their sole objective to locate and quietly incapacitate and destroy all Black Sun endeavors. Using financial institutions, computer hackers, social media, and a plethora of other crippling modern methods to disable the foundations of what the Black Sun tries to accomplish, the Brigade Apostate is an enigma. In fact, they are untraceable except to those who know where to find them.”

The leader combed the congregation of loyal friends before adding the point he wished to make to Gille. “And Sam Cleave, my friends, is an esteemed member.”

With astonished expressions, the group of men in the bunker under Trinity Square Gardens realized why they could not act with haste concerning Sam Cleave. Gille dropped his face, feeling rather out of place after vehemently rallying for the ousting and execution of the journalist.

“You know how they always say in those gangster movies,” the leader smiled, “about not killing someone you don’t know? This is such a case. We have to move wisely, my brothers. We cannot just kill who we don’t know, you see?”

“So now what?” Gille asked. “What are you going to do, then, to get Toshana back?”

The leader shrugged. “Honestly, I don’t know yet. I would hate to resort to using people close to him. Getting Toshana, though, is worth the risk of kicking the hornet’s nest.”

“The enemy of my enemy, and all that, seems to come into play here,” the old man reckoned. “That makes it hard for us to trust. But on the other hand our leader is right, brothers. We have to tolerate Sam Cleave and maybe use him to find Toshana, before we make him disappear without the Brigade Apostate learning of his sudden demise.”

“Wise words, Papa, wise words,” the leader acknowledged.

“So I shall track him and see if I can reason her away from him. If he resists, I will shoot him in the face and stone the bitch without much effort in some abandoned building,” the leader shared. “But either way I will remove her from this earth, with or without Sam Cleave’s help.”

The men all sat in silent contemplation of the new plan. They were used to sitting in wait while developments dictated their next move. From where they bided their time, their leader usually paved the way for their next endeavor and they had learned by now to trust him with all decisions.

“Just sound the charge when you need us, son,” the old man said.

“I will. I will leave in two hours for Edinburgh. The tracker I put in Cleave’s equipment points to a stack of mass cage-living Scots in some prime part of the city — just the place you would expect a cheap superstar to live,” the leader said. “No matter how this turns out, we will know which path to take within the next twenty-four hours.”