The Templar Heresy

59

Getting out of Jordan and into France proved both easier and faster than Bronson had expected — the flight was on schedule and uneventful — but even so it was still well after ten that evening before he pulled his new hire car, rented at Toulouse’s Blagnac Airport, to a stop on the west side of the D117, the Route de Saint-Girons, and stared across the road at the ancient Templar chapel.

‘It looks pretty much like any other church,’ Angela said.

‘I agree,’ Bronson replied. ‘As you found out from the Internet, it’s only the interior that’s exceptional. But at least we know we’re in the right place,’ he added, pointing in the opposite direction.

Screwed to the white stone wall a few feet from where he’d stopped the car was a maroon metal sign with white lettering, the words easily visible in the moonlight.

‘“Place des Templiers”,’ Angela read, and nodded. ‘Yes, that seems clear enough.’

Bronson looked around, and up and down the road, but apart from a solitary car heading north, possibly intending to join the autoroute just outside the village, the place appeared to be deserted.

He reached up, altered the interior light switch so that the lamp wouldn’t come on when he opened the door, then reached for the handle.

‘As they say, there’s no time like the present. The keys are in the ignition. As soon as I’m outside, get in the driving seat and then just keep your eyes open. I think we’re ahead of the game, at least at the moment, but if you see anything you don’t like the look of, just start the car and get the hell out of here.’

Angela put her hand on his arm.

‘For God’s sake be careful, Chris,’ she said.

‘I will. I’m just going to try the door. If it’s locked then we’ll have to think of something else.’

Bronson opened the door of the car and stepped out. In seconds, he was invisible, his dark clothes blending seamlessly into the solid black shadow that cloaked the front of the chapel.

The door was set into a fairly ornate arched entrance, flanked by four stone pillars, the whole surmounted by a kind of frieze of carvings that formed a semicircle around the top of the arch. Bronson flicked on his torch and examined the stonework. It was a line of human faces, each different from its neighbour and some apparently in agony, judging by the expressions they were displaying.

He moved the thin beam of the torch around the semicircle, then stopped when he reached the apex to examine another carved image set into the ancient stone directly above the arch. It looked somehow familiar to him. He reached into his pocket, took out his mobile phone, made sure the street was still deserted and then snapped a picture of the carved stone, the explosion of light from the built-in flash bouncing off the old stones.

Then he turned his attention to the door itself. This wasn’t, as he had been expecting, a single door, but rather two separate doors hinged at either side of the archway. A printed notice on the left-hand door advised anybody interested that the key was available from the village Mairie on four days of the week — including Sunday, predictably enough — but only between the hours of three and five in the afternoon.

He tried the handle anyway, and it was of course locked. He bent to examine the lock, but realized immediately that it was the kind of ancient mechanism that would require a heavy and complex key some six or seven inches long. Bronson’s expertise in lock picking was confined to the more modern kinds of devices, and he certainly didn’t have the heavy-duty picks and torsion wrenches he would need to try to open it.

And he wasn’t even sure that opening it would be a good idea. In order to do any meaningful exploration inside the building, they would need to use torches, and although, like most French villages late in the evening, all the houses in Montsaunès appeared to be shuttered and completely silent, the occupants apparently having retired for the night, he had no doubt that somebody would notice intermittent torchlight inside the old chapel.

Before he returned to the car, Bronson checked both sides of the church. Access to the sides and rear of the building was prevented by a substantial steel fence supported by stone pillars and pierced by locked gates. There were, he noted, at least two other doors into the building, one on each side, and at the right-hand rear of the chapel was what appeared to be a later addition, a single-storey stone structure attached to the church and accessed by a narrow doorway. Bronson guessed it might function as a storeroom or even as a robing room for the local priest. Because the main door of the church was locked, he had no doubt that all the other doors would also be secured.

Even the lowest windows were mounted so high in the walls that a ladder would be needed to reach them, and as far as he could tell by the light of his torch they were all closed. For a few moments he toyed with the idea of clambering over the metal fence and examining the back of the building, but knew he’d be unlikely to achieve anything if he did. And, in fact, he also knew he didn’t need to.

By the time he walked back across the street, Angela had already moved over to the front passenger seat of the car.

‘It was locked, I presume?’ she asked.

‘Locked securely,’ Bronson replied, ‘which at least means that if we can’t get in, no one else can either. All we can do now is wait until tomorrow morning.’

‘You took a photograph,’ Angela stated.

‘Oh, yes.’

He fished his mobile out of his pocket, tapped the screen to open the gallery, then handed it to her.

The picture showed two angelic figures — each had a halo — that appeared to be supporting an ornamented stone circle within which was an unusual symbol, at least to Bronson’s eyes. It looked like an enlarged letter X with the elongated shaft of a letter P driven down through the centre point of the X.

‘What is it?’ Bronson asked.

‘It’s a Chi Rho,’ Angela replied. ‘Of a sort, anyway. It’s one of the oldest Christian motifs, a monogram that contains the first two letters of the word “Christ” in Greek, the letters chi and rho.’ She pointed at two other symbols, either side of the central motif. ‘That’s the Greek letter alpha on the left and what’s left of omega on the right, the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet. The beginning and the end, if you like.’

‘So it’s a common symbol?’ Bronson asked.

‘Yes. Some Christians still use it, but this particular Chi Rho is a bit different. I’m not sure what this symbol at the top means. It looks like a kind of flattened and elongated letter omega, but it’s not something I’ve seen on a Chi Rho before. But perhaps the oddest feature is the snake.’

‘Snake? What snake?’

‘Here. Entwined around the upright of the letter rho.’

‘I thought that was the letter “S”.’

‘That’s what it looks like, but it’s almost certainly a serpent. There’s evidence that the Chi Rho symbol actually existed perhaps half a millennium before the time of Christ, in the writings of Herodotus and Plato, for example. It was known as the Chrestos, and it was kind of backwards, if you like. The Chi Rho was accepted as a religious symbol that was created by combining two Greek letters, but the Chrestos was a symbol from the first. The “X” on the Chrestos is almost certainly a representation of the solar ecliptic path and the celestial equator, not the letter Chi, which is why the two straight lines don’t cross at right angles.’

Even in the darkness of the hire car Angela could see Bronson’s expression starting to glaze.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ she said. ‘All it means is that the symbol is a lot older than most people think and originally had nothing to do with Christianity. It probably meant good fortune, and was hijacked by the early Church because the shape of the cross was a visual reminder of the crucifixion.’

‘And the snake?’ Bronson asked.

‘Oh, yes. The snake’s been an important symbol for religions and societies for millennia, and most likely that’s astrological in origin. It’s the sign of serpens, the serpent, and referred to the serpent healers of antiquity. So although most people think of the Chi Rho as a Christian symbol of the crucifixion, it actually isn’t. It’s much older and had a completely different meaning.’

They hadn’t seen a hotel in the village, but even if there had been, Bronson wouldn’t have wanted to stay that close to their objective. Thinking ahead earlier in the evening, on their way to the village of Montsaunès, they’d pulled off the autoroute at Boussens and picked a hotel at random close to the banks of the River Garonne, checked in, locked their bags in their room and then driven on.

Back in the hotel, they sat side by side on the double bed consuming the sandwiches and soft drinks they’d bought earlier at the airport, while Bronson talked through his plan.

‘This really has to be the end of the trail,’ he said. ‘I can’t believe we’ll get inside the church and find some other clue intended to send us scampering off to yet another ruin in yet another country. And I’ve had an idea about where we’ll find the relic.’

‘Oh, yes?’

Bronson picked up the camera that he’d used in the tunnel under Shobak Castle. He flicked through the pictures he had taken, and selected the one that seemed to him to be the clearest and held the camera in front of Angela.

‘Some of the information we’ve been using has relied upon placement,’ he began. ‘Things like the positioning of the code words on either side of the alphabet to allow us to decipher the Atbash. I think that the positioning of the symbols on this last clue is just as important. The name is the simple bit, really, because that’s brought us to where we are now, or where we will be at dawn tomorrow morning, this tiny village in France. The Christian cross above the name of the village seems to me to be telling us that the place we have to look is the chapel, because that’s how you would normally indicate a chapel or a church on a map, and I’m sure the same sort of symbology has probably been used for centuries.

‘But note that the Templar cross, the croix pattée, is placed under the name. To me, that suggests that the treasure or the relic, whatever it may turn out to be, is somewhere underneath the chapel, in a crypt or cellar or somewhere of that sort.’

‘I suppose we’ll find out tomorrow,’ Angela said, ‘but if there’s an iron-bound box sitting in a crypt underneath the chapel, why has nobody thought to open it before?’

Bronson shook his head. ‘I don’t think it’ll be anything like as simple as that. The amount of secrecy involved in this and the number of layers of codes and ciphers that we’ve had to peel away and decrypt suggest that the relic will be extremely well hidden. It won’t be a matter of just pushing open the door to a crypt and saying, “Oh yes, there it is.” I think there’s a good chance that the entrance to the crypt itself will be concealed, and possibly even the existence of the crypt will be unknown to the priest or whoever is in charge of the building. Finding it is not going to be easy, but I suppose the difference is that because of the trail we’ve been following, at least we know that there is something there to be found. Or at least that something was hidden, and hopefully it’s still there.’

‘So what do we do? Just march into the building tomorrow morning and tell the priest that we want to explore his crypt and would he kindly show us the way? Then find the relic and push off with it before the bad guys turn up, guns blazing?’

‘Not exactly,’ Bronson replied. ‘I had to leave the pistol in Jordan, obviously, because there was no way I could get on to the aircraft with it, so we’re completely unarmed. The opposition would also have had to fly from Iraq or wherever they’re based to Israel, and they would have had the same problem. But within a very short time of them getting there, they were touting pistols, so clearly they have good international connections that allow them access to weapons quickly and easily. It wouldn’t surprise me if they’d made arrangements to collect weapons soon after they’d arrived in France. In fact,’ he added, ‘that’s more or less what I’m hoping they’ve done.’

Angela looked at him quizzically.

‘You hope they armed themselves? Why?’

‘Because we can’t handle them by ourselves, and that means we need professional assistance. And the kind of professional assistance I have in mind will only be available if there’s a credible opposition force. And,’ he added, taking a last swig from his soft drink, ‘that means it’s time for me to start making a few phone calls.’

Thirty minutes later, Bronson ended his final call, put the mobile on the bedside cabinet and connected the charger.

Angela looked at him and nodded.

‘I think I followed most of your French,’ she said, ‘and I can see exactly what you’ve got planned. But it all sounds pretty risky to me. Are you sure this is the only way we can do it?’

‘I think so, yes. But if you’re not happy to go ahead, you can stay here and I can go it alone.’

Angela shook her head. ‘No. I told you before. Where you go, I go,’ she said, ‘and obviously it’ll be more believable if I’m there as well, because they must know who I am. If you’re right, I’ve been their main target ever since the attack in Iraq.’

‘Good. Right, now we really do need to get to sleep. I’ll set the alarm for five thirty, and we need to be on the road by six at the latest.’

But despite all that had happened, sleep didn’t come easily to Bronson. At two o’clock, with Angela’s head resting on the crook of his left arm, he was still awake, eyes wide open and staring at the ceiling, wondering if there was anything else he could or should do, or anything he’d forgotten.

And above all, he was supremely conscious of the number of things that could go spectacularly and terminally wrong.