The Templar legacy

1:30 AM

MALONE STOOD IN THE SALON, THE SPACIOUS ROOM LIT BY LAMPS, the others crowded around the table. He'd awakened them all a few minutes ago.

"I know the answer," he told them.

"For the cryptogram?" Stephanie asked.

He nodded. "Mark told me about Sauniere's personality. Bold and brash. And I agree with what you said the other day, Stephanie. The church in Rennes is not a signpost to a treasure. Sauniere would never have telegraphed that information, but he just couldn't resist a little pointing. Trouble is, you need a lot of pieces to assemble this puzzle. Luckily, we have most of them."

He reached for the book Pierres Gravees du Languedoc, still open to Marie d'Hautpoul's gravestones. "Bigou is the fellow who left the real clues. He was fleeing France, never to return, so he hid cryptograms in both churches and left two carved stones over an empty grave. There's the wrong date of death, 1681, the wrong age, sixty-seven, and look at these Roman numerals at the bottom – LIXLIXL – fifty, nine, fifty, nine, fifty. If you add those together you get one hundred sixty-eight. He also made reference to the painting Reading the Rules of the Caridad in the parish register. Remember, in Bigou's time the date was not obscured. So he would have seen 1681, not 1687. There's a pattern here."

He pointed to the drawing of the gravestone.

"Look at the spider carved into the bottom. Seven dots were intentionally placed between the legs, with two spaces left blank. Why not just include a dot between them all? Then look what Sauniere did in the garden outside the church. He takes the Visigoth pillar, turns it upside down, and carves Mission 1891 and Penitence, Penitence into its face. I know this is going to sound crazy, but I just dreamed the connection among all these."

Everyone smiled, but no one interrupted him.

"Last year, Henrik, when Cai and all the others were killed in Mexico City-I dream about it from time to time. Tough to get those images out of your brain. There were a lot of dead and wounded that day-"

"Seven dead. Nine wounded," Stephanie muttered.

The same thought seemed to rush unbidden into each of their minds and he saw understanding, especially on Mark's face.

"Cotton, you might just be right." Mark sat down at the table. "1681. Add the first two and last two digits. Seven, nine. The carving on the pillar. Sauniere turned it upside down to send a message. He erected it in 1891, but invert that date and you have 1681. The pillar is upside down to lead us in the right direction. Seven, nine again."

"Then count the letters," Malone said. "Seven in Mission. Nine in Penitence. That's more than a coincidence. And the one hundred sixty-eight from the Roman numerals on the gravestone. That total is there for a reason. Add the one to the six and eight and you get seven and nine. The pattern's everywhere." He reached for a color image of station 10 from inside the Church of Mary Magdalene. "Look here. Where the Roman soldier is throwing the dice for Christ's cloak. On the dice face. A three, four, and five. When Mark and I were in the church I wondered why these particular numbers were chosen. Mark, you said Sauniere personally oversaw every detail that went into that church. So he selected these numbers for a reason. I think the sequence is what's important. The three is first, then the four, then five. Three plus four is seven, four plus five is nine."

"So seven, nine solves the cryptogram?" Cassiopeia said.

"One way to find out." Mark motioned and Geoffrey handed him the rucksack. Mark carefully opened the marshal's report and found the drawing.

He then started applying the seven, nine sequence, moving through the thirteen lines of letters and symbols. As he did, he wrote each selected character down.