The Templar Salvation

Chapter 13

VATICAN CITY

PRESENT DAY

A heavy silence smothered the room. Tess glanced around, her eyes surveying the faces about her as she tried to gauge whether or not to keep going. Cardinal Brugnone and the prefect of the archives, Monsignor Bescondi, seemed particularly disturbed by what she’d related. Which was understandable. For men of the cloth, the idea of monks—not warrior monks like the Templars, but gentle, highly pious men who’d retreated from society to devote their lives to prayer and study—the idea of such monks resorting to murder, no matter the reason, was unfathomable.

Reilly also looked puzzled by what was in the monk’s confession. “So the first group of Templars had something that the monks were prepared to kill them for? And then, a hundred years later, three Templars pick up the trail of their missing buddies, show up at the monastery, and take back what was theirs, leaving that group of monks so freaked out about it that they kill themselves?”

“That’s what the abbot’s letter says,” Tess confirmed.

“The impostor who came here with Agent Reilly,” Tilden asked. “Who was he?”

“I don’t know,” she replied. “Sharafi didn’t know who he was either. You see, after Sharafi found the confession, he felt he’d stumbled onto something big. He couldn’t help but want to look into it some more, but at the same time, it disturbed him. Deeply. I mean, remember what the monk wrote. ‘The devil’s handiwork, written in his hand using poison drawn from the pits of hell, its accursed existence a devastating threat to the rock upon which our world is founded.’ Maybe this was something that shouldn’t be found. Still, Sharafi couldn’t resist it—but he knew he had to be careful. He knew that something like this could be dangerous. Even more so, perhaps, if it fell into the wrong hands. So he sneaked the letter out of the archives—he stole it, basically—and he just worked on it quietly in his spare time, hoping to figure out what happened to those Templars and what they took with them. He spent a lot of time in the library, looking for more clues. The Sufi traveler hadn’t written about the confession he’d hidden in his journal; he hadn’t left anything behind that said where he’d found it or what he’d done after he’d found it. Sharafi thought he must have been as spooked by it as he was. Still, the Sufi’s journal described his travels in the area, which was a starting point, although Sharafi knew that a lot of the names of places and natural landmarks the traveler used had changed many times over the centuries. So Sharafi had a look in the area the Sufi had roamed, the area around Mount Argaeus, which is now called something else, asking around, trying to find the remains of the monastery. He also looked into any material on the Templars that he could find. But he kept hitting walls. The area he was looking in is sparsely populated, and he couldn’t find the monastery—not that he really expected to find anything there, not after all this time. He couldn’t find any mention of Conrad either, not in any of the Templar records he had access to. He was ready to give up when a couple of months ago, this guy came up to him outside the university, in Istanbul. He knew all about Sharafi’s find. He told Sharafi he wanted him to find the writings that the monk had talked about. And he threatened him and his family.”

Tess glanced at Reilly. He nodded his support. She swallowed and felt her body stiffen up. “Sharafi was … terrified. The man showed Sharafi a severed head. The head of a woman he’d killed, a schoolteacher who was Sharafi’s daughter’s favorite. He’d cut her head off … just to make his point.” The air in the room bristled with unease at her words.

“How did this guy know what Sharafi was working on?” Reilly asked. “I asked our impostor that question in the taxi on the way in from the airport, thinking I was asking the real Sharafi, and he said he hadn’t told anyone about it.”

“We asked him too,” Tess replied. “He said it was his research assistant at the university. He was the only person who knew about it apart from his own wife. And when he confronted him about it, the guy didn’t deny it. He berated Sharafi for not having reported it himself and said it had been his duty to do that.”

“His ‘duty’? Who was he?”

“A graduate student. From Iran.”

“What about the killer himself ? Did Sharafi say anything about where he was from?”

“He said he was also from Iran.”

“How sure was he?” Reilly felt a blip in his pulse.

Tess thought about it for a beat. “He just said he was from Iran. He didn’t seem to have any doubt about that.”

Reilly frowned. It was clearly not the answer he’d been hoping for—but after all that had happened, he’d come to expect it. This was starting to sound suspiciously like the dirty work of an intelligence agency. The intelligence agency of a country that wasn’t known to pull its punches. Which didn’t bode well at all.

“Anyway, Sharafi got the message,” she continued. “He had to get results. And when he couldn’t go any further on his own, he decided he needed the help of a Templar expert.”

“So he went to Jordan,” Tilden added. “To consult your friend Simmons.”

Tess nodded. “He was in bad shape. At first, he tried to hide it. He didn’t tell us the whole story. He just said he’d been working on something for a paper he was writing, he was trying to track down a Templar knight called Conrad who’d ended up in Constantinople in 1310.”

“But I thought all the Templars were arrested in 1307?” Reilly asked.

“The arrest warrants were served in October of 1307, yes. But some Templars managed to hit the road before King Philip’s seneschals swooped in. Many French Templars, for instance, ended up in Spain and Portugal, where the local orders were more or less protected by the local kings. They changed their names to escape detection when the pope’s inquisitors turned up looking for them. And in the East, the Templars had lost all their bases in the Holy Land long before that. Acre fell in 1291, right? Their last bastion there was on a small island off the Syrian coast, Arwad. They were kicked out of there in 1303 and the surviving Templars ended up in Cyprus, where they got into trouble for helping the king’s brother overthrow him. When the king took back the throne, he had the four Templar ringleaders executed by drowning and exiled the rest, who couldn’t really go back to their homelands in Europe, where they faced arrest. We know very little about what happened to them.”

“So this Conrad is, presumably, one of those escapees,” Reilly speculated.

“That’s what Jed thought,” Tess said. “He checked his records. He found mention of a knight called Conrad right up to the arrests in Cyprus. After that, the trail went cold. He couldn’t find anything beyond that—which isn’t surprising. Once they were exiled by the King of Cyprus, Conrad and his buddies weren’t about to head back to Europe, not with all the inquisitors there waiting to pounce. Jed thought they’d most likely be living incognito in big cities like Antioch and Constantinople. So that was it. And then Sharafi broke down. He told us what was really going on. And Jed, well, he decided he had to do everything he could to help him. We both did. This wasn’t just a trivial academic inquiry. It was clear that Sharafi’s guy wouldn’t accept failure. Sharafi was freaking out with worry that he might do something to his wife or his daughter to push him harder. We had to find something. And when Jed hit a wall with his own records, he told us about the Registry. He knew about it, he knew it existed, he knew it was kept in the bowels of the Vatican—but he also knew no one was allowed to see it.”

Tess paused, hoping someone would pick up that ball.

Reilly did. He turned to Brugnone. “Is that true?”

Brugnone shrugged, his expression still locked in its frown, then nodded. “Yes.”

“Why is that?” Reilly pressed.

Brugnone slid a guarded glance at Tess, then directed his attention back at Reilly. “Our archives are full of sensitive documents. A lot of what we have can be easily misinterpreted and twisted around by scandalmongers with less-than-honorable agendas. We try to limit that.”

“And this Registry?”

Brugnone nodded to Bescondi, who stepped in. “It’s a complete record of the arrest of the Templars and the dissolution of their Order. Everything the inquisitors found, everyone they spoke to, it was all logged into it. The names of the members of the Order from the grand master right down to the lowliest of squires, what happened to them, where they ended up, who said what, who lived, who died … The Order’s properties, its holdings across Europe and in the Levant, their livestock, the contents of their libraries … Everything.”

Reilly processed it. “So Simmons was right. He knew that if there was any trace of what happened to Conrad, it would be in there.”

“Yes,” Bescondi agreed.

Reilly noticed Bescondi glance pointedly across at the cardinal. A silent exchange seemed to have passed between them as the cardinal answered the archivist with an almost imperceptible nod. The archivist did the same to acknowledge it.

Reilly turned his attention back to Tess. “And … that’s when you called me.”

Tess shook her head ruefully. “I’m sorry. It’s just—I thought, you were the one person I knew could get Sharafi in to have a look at it. Nothing more. Still, I agonized over whether or not I should ask you to do this. Especially given what we were …” Her gaze lingered on Reilly for a long second as she let the words trail off. There was no need for the others to hear about their problems. “I talked it over with Jed first. I wasn’t sure, I was still debating it … and the next thing I know, this guy shows up outside Jed’s office with a gun in his hand, herds us into the back of his van and drives us to some grotty place, I don’t know where it was. He throws me and Jed into this room, it must have been a cellar of some kind, he puts these plastic cuffs on our wrists and ankles. Sharafi was already there, tied up like us. And all these horrible images of the teacher’s head and the hostages in Beirut and in Iraq started flashing through my mind.” Tess was feeling colder now. Talking about it was making her relive the whole nightmare. She looked at Reilly. “He made me call you.”

“How did he know about all that?” Reilly asked. “Did you discuss it with anyone else?”

“No, of course not. Maybe he was listening in on what me and Jed were talking about, maybe he had a mike planted in Jed’s office or something.”

Reilly processed it for a few seconds. “This guy, whoever he is, whoever he’s working for—and I think we’ve got some ideas to think about on that front—he’s got some serious resources at his disposal. He shows up in Istanbul and thinks nothing of murdering a woman to motivate Sharafi. He shadows him to Jordan and somehow gets wind of what you and Simmons were talking about privately. He grabs the three of you out in Jordan and manages to whisk at least two of you, if not all three, all the way to Rome, undetected. He has the balls to meet me at the airport and sell me on his story and has me bring him in here to recover this Registry, but not before setting up a couple of rigged cars to use as diversions in case he needs them.” He shook his head and exhaled heavily. “This guy’s got access to the right intel, he’s got resources that allow him to travel around as he likes, he’s got access to explosives and detonators and cars and God knows what else. He’s as cool under pressure as anyone I’ve come across.” He looked around the room to press his point. “This guy is no lightweight. He’s the real deal. And we’re going to need some serious resources ourselves if we’re going to stand half a chance of taking him down.”

Delpiero bristled, his expression indignant. “Oh, we intend to do everything we can to bring this man to justice,” the Vatican cop confirmed, his tone laced with mockery. “But equally, I think you have a lot to answer for in this matter. You seem to have forgotten that you were his accomplice in this crime.”

“I haven’t forgotten that at all,” Reilly snapped. “I want this guy more than anyone in this room.”

“Perhaps I’m not making myself clear,” the inspector said. “We’re filing charges against you. You brought this man into the Vatican. If you hadn’t done that, he wouldn’t have gotten into the archives, he wouldn’t have needed to detonate any bombs, and—”

“You think that would have been it?” Reilly fired back. “You think he’d have called it a day and scooted home? Are you kidding me? You saw how he operates. If I hadn’t brought him in here, he would have found another way in. He might have, I don’t know, found a way to get to Monsignor Bescondi. Maybe with another severed head, to make sure he was taken seriously.”

“You drugged the monsignor,” Delpiero growled. “You helped the bomber escape.”

“That was before I knew he was the damn bomber or that he even had a bomb,” Reilly raged. “I did what I had to do to get him his damn book and save the hostages. You tell me this, all right? What would you have said if I’d told you this guy needed to check out the Templar Registry? Would you have just let him waltz in there and given him access to it? Or would you have needed to know exactly who he was and why he needed to see it?”

Delpiero stumbled for a reply, then looked over at Bescondi and Brugnone. The archivist and the cardinal seemed equally flustered by the question.

“Well?” Reilly insisted, his tone fierce.

Their shrugs answered him.

He mopped his face with his hands and tried to throttle back his anger. “Look,” he offered, his voice calmer now, but still resolute. “Maybe you think I was wrong, maybe you think I should have done things differently. Maybe you’re right. But in the heat of the moment, I just didn’t see any other option. I’m willing to face the consequences of what I did. Absolutely. You can do anything you want to me—once this is over. After he’s in custody or in the morgue. But until that happens, I need to be part of this. I need to help bring him in.”

Delpiero met his gaze straight on. “That’s very admirable of you, Agent Reilly. But we’ve discussed this with your superiors, and they agree with us.”

Reilly followed the inspector’s glance across to Tilden, who gave him a “what the hell did you expect?” shrug. “You weren’t here on Bureau business—worse, you withheld informing us about what you were really here for. That hasn’t gone down too well with the powers that be back home. Unless I’m missing something, my bet is you should consider yourself suspended,” the attache told him, “pending the Vatican and Italian authorities’ investigation.”

“You can’t sideline me on this,” Reilly protested. “This guy suckered me into it. I need to do this.” He looked around the room and noticed Brugnone studying him.

Tilden spread his hands open in a resigned, helpless gesture. “I’m sorry, but that’s how it has to play out for now.”

Reilly shot up to his feet. “This is insane,” he railed, his hands cutting the air emphatically. “We have to move fast. We’ve got a crime scene to process. We’ve got an unexploded bomb to analyze. We may have prints in the cars and in the archives and vidcaps on CCTV footage. We need to get a BOLO out to all ports of entry, we need to liaise with Interpol.” He focused on Delpiero. “Don’t cut off your nose to spite your face. I know you’re pissed off. So am I. But I can help, and I’m here now. You can use FBI resources on this and you can’t afford to wait until they figure out who to send and fly them over. He could be long gone by then.”

Delpiero seemed unmoved by Reilly’s plea. Three chairs away, however, Brugnone cleared his throat conspicuously, drawing everyone’s attention as he rose out of his seat.

“Let’s not rush into anything.” He slid a glance at Reilly and said, “Agent Reilly. Walk with me to my chambers, won’t you?”

Delpiero shot to his feet. “Eminenza Vostra,”—Your Eminence—”begging your forgiveness, but … what are you doing? This man should be under arrest.”

Brugnone stilled him with a languid flick of his hand that, however understated, carried great authority. “Predersela con calma.” Calm down.

It was enough to stop Delpiero in his tracks.

Reilly got up, glanced uncertainly at Tilden and at Delpiero, and followed the cardinal out.