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She looked past him to the stairwell. “Can snakes climb steps?”

Pierce chuckled. “Maybe, but I think we’re safe for a little while.” He gave her a squeeze, then released her and moved into the chapel, scrutinizing the frescos.

Now that there was time for her to look at them, Fiona realized that she was looking at a visual record of the chamber’s discovery. The paintings on the right side showed an artist’s rendering of a man in a rough-looking garment with his eyes raised heavenward as if in prayer. Then the same man journeying into the desert at the head of a procession of men carrying large bundles. In the final scene, they were setting up what looked like a circus tent in a cave. The panels on the left side showed the story of how the Templars found the secret chamber.

Pierce stared at the last panel on the left, which depicted the same scene as on the opposite side, but with the addition of Templars kneeling before their swords, which were held in front of them like crosses. “This is where they found the Holy Tabernacle of Meeting.”

“It doesn’t show what happened next,” Fiona said. “Where did they take it?”

Pierce moved back to the first panel, which showed priests and Templar scholars perusing scrolls. “They found something that told them where to look. Maybe the same scrolls we read.” He moved to the next panel, which showed Templars, some on horseback, others on foot, carrying what looked like short walking sticks. One of the men was kneeling, with his cane lying on the ground before him, pointing toward the rising sun.

Pierce tapped the picture. “That rod, it’s too short to be a walking staff. I think it’s a measuring stick. Exactly one Sacred cubit. They calculated the correct length six hundred years before Isaac Newton.”

“How?”

Pierce shook his head. “There are several references to measuring the Temple in the Bible — the Revelation, the prophecies of Ezekiel and Zechariah. Maybe there was something left of the old Temple in Jerusalem that they were able to use as a baseline.”

He moved to the last panel, which showed the warrior-monks ringing the Tabernacle, praying before their upraised swords. “If they’d had the Tabernacle, they would have been able to measure it and work it out backward…” His voice trailed off, and then he turned to Fiona, his eyes dancing with excitement. “I know where the Ark is.”

FORTY-FIVE

Chartres, France

Ask the Templars.

Augustina Gallo had wrestled with Pierce’s parting admonition for hours. She had pondered the message as Fallon’s men drove them to the airport in Amman, then dissected and parsed the words as Fallon’s private jet soared toward France, the only destination she could think to give him. Now, standing here at the north entrance to the Cathedral of Our Lady of Chartres, she hoped she had interpreted the message correctly.

Gallo had convinced Fallon to allow her Internet access aboard his plane, albeit with him looking over her shoulder. She was not an expert on the Templars by any means, which meant that before she could even begin to solve the mystery of what they had done with the Ark, she would first have to figure out who they really were.

There were two Templar histories. The generally accepted version began in 1119, when Hugues de Payens founded the order, and ended in 1307 with the arrest of the last grandmaster Jacques de Molay, the official dissolution of the order, and the seizure of all Templar assets. Despite being set against the backdrop of the Crusades, it was more a tale of shrewd business and political scheming than a war story. The Templars fought valiantly, sometimes brutally, but could not hold the Holy Lands against the forces of Saladin, the Sultan of the Levant. Their success derived, not from prowess in battle, but from an astute manipulation of both economic and religious power. That success attracted enemies far more destructive than Muslim armies.

Then there was the other history of the Templars. Pseudo-history to the doubters, true history to the believers. Some, though not all, held that the story began a century earlier than the official version, with the discovery of holy relics in Scotland. All agreed that it continued right up to the present, with Templar influence transforming secret societies like the Bavarian Illuminati and the Freemasons into powerful political and economic entities, all in pursuit of a New World Order. In this history, the Templars were both heroes and villains, guardians of secret scientific or occult knowledge, and diabolical puppet masters.

Gallo, a professional historian, knew all too well that the official version of history was rarely honest or completely accurate, but she lived by the same principles as a scientist — extraordinary claims required extraordinary proofs. And while she had seen some extraordinary claims proved true, she always started from a foundation of solid, reliable information. Pierce, knowing both her background and her temperament, would have expected her to start with research, but the more she read, the harder she found it to separate fact from fancy, real history from conspiracy theory.

Then it occurred to her what Pierce was trying to tell her.

“Chartres Cathedral,” she had announced. “That’s where we need to go.”

One of Fallon’s hired men, a brutish thug named Williams, made a rude joke about the name, but Gallo ignored him. “The Templars were involved in financing its construction. Its location has long possessed spiritual significance going back to pre-Christian times. If the Templars brought the Ark back to Europe, that’s the most logical place for them to put it.”

“And it’s still there?” Fallon asked, barely able to contain his eagerness.

“There’s only one way to know for sure.”

That had been enough to get them to the idyllic French town of Chartres, sixty miles from Paris. The church for which the town was world famous, was considered the best preserved Gothic cathedral in the world, having survived World War II almost completely intact. It had also survived the previous day’s earthquakes mostly intact, though a few areas of the exterior were cordoned off with yellow caution tape.

Gallo stared up at the ornately carved pillars of the north façade. Like all Gothic cathedrals and most Catholic churches worldwide, Chartres utilized a long cruciform design, with a nave divided into several bays, separated by pillars, and a transept crossing the nave, separating it from the apse. All of the facades were elaborately decorated, but the north entrance featured the element that had commanded the attention of Templar historians and Ark hunters for several decades.

“There,” she said, pointing to a pillar that showed what appeared to be a wheeled cart being pulled by robed figures. “That’s a representation of the Ark of the Covenant being brought from the Holy Land by the Templars. The inscription beneath it is Latin. HIC AMITITUR ARCHA CEDERIS. ‘Here things take their course. You are to work through the Ark.’”

Fallon nodded and rubbed his hands together. “Work through the Ark? How do we do that?”

“We have to go inside.” She started walking along the exterior, passing the impressive flying buttresses that extended out from the main structure like the skeletal ribs of an enormous leviathan. “There’s a labyrinth set into the floor of the nave. That’s sort of like a spiritual maze.”

“I know what a labyrinth is,” Fallon said.

“Well, it’s been proposed by some Ark hunters that the Ark is hidden on another dimensional plane, and if you walk the labyrinth through to the end, you will be able to step through into that other dimension.”

“Seriously?”