“Maybe the chicken came before the egg,” Fiona suggested. “Maybe they got interested in this stuff because Isaac Newton asked them to protect the Ark.”
“It’s not that crazy,” Pierce admitted. “And a lot of Masons consider Newton to be an influence, if not a member. What we do know for certain is that Newton was an early member and president of the Royal Society.”
“More secret brotherhoods,” Fiona said, rolling her eyes.
“The Royal Society isn’t a secret,” Pierce said. “It’s the world’s oldest and most esteemed scientific organization.”
“The Royal Society was founded in 1660,” Dourado said, summarizing the result of another Internet search. “But it traces back to an earlier group of scientists who called themselves ‘the Invisible College.’ The idea for the Invisible College came from a reference to ‘Salomon’s House’ in the book New Atlantis, by Sir Francis Bacon. It was an early blueprint for a research institute.”
“Once again, life imitates art,” Gallo said. “And who better to take as a namesake than King Solomon, the wisest man ever to have lived?”
“Solomon’s House might also refer to the Temple,” Pierce added.
“You might be right about that,” Dourado said. “Bacon was known to be a student of Templar lore. He was also involved in creating the King James Version of the Bible, and he consulted with Dr. John Dee on the creation of the statute measurement system.”
“Isn’t he also the guy that wrote the Voynich Manuscript?” Fiona asked.
“You’re thinking of Roger Bacon,” Pierce said. “No relation.”
She grinned. “Other than crispy deliciousness.”
Pierce shook his head in a display of dismay, and then turned to Gallo. “There’s your connection. The Templars relocated the Ark to London. France wasn’t safe for them anymore. The Templars already had a strong presence in England, and King Edward sheltered them from the worst of the persecution. England and France were constantly at war, and Edward wasn’t about to do Philip any favors. What better place to hide a secret Templar revival?
“Eventually, Edward was forced to comply with the wishes of the Church, and all Templar holdings were given to the Hospitallers, but they had plenty of time to cover their tracks. And when Henry VIII broke with Rome, he kicked the Hospitallers out as well. Which brings us to Sir Francis Bacon, the Royal Society, and to Isaac Newton.
“Newton was as much a man of faith as he was a man of science, but his discoveries were part of the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the beginning of the end for universal acceptance of a divine origin for the Universe. I would guess that, as intellectual philosophies gained greater acceptance, the idea of holding onto religious relics like the Ark would have seemed a bit quaint. That probably contributed to the creation of the Masonic brotherhood, a way for men of faith and science to square the circle. Some of the Founding Fathers were both Masons and Deists — hybrid theistic rationalists. Just having the Ark would be an anchor for their spiritual beliefs.”
“Dots connected,” Gallo said. “Which just leaves one question. Where’s the Ark today? You said you knew where it was.”
“What’s the first rule of real estate?” Pierce asked. “Location, location, location. The Temple Mount was chosen for a specific reason, an alignment of geomagnetic forces that even Solomon probably didn’t understand, but was somehow connected to the Originator power grid. The cave where Jeremiah hid the Ark was calculated using the Sacred cubit and the location of the Temple. I would be willing to bet that the Templars used a similar calculation when deciding where to hide the Ark in London. A sacred place they would have identified right from the beginning: Temple Church.”
“Of course,” Dourado exclaimed. “It was in The DaVinci Code! I can’t believe I forgot that.”
Pierce winced at the reference but refrained from commenting.
Temple Church was, as its name indicated, a Church built by the Templars. The site, chosen by the first Templar Grandmaster, Hugues de Payens, was already sacred ground, albeit in a pagan tradition, having once been the location of a Roman temple in the ancient city of Londinium. The church itself was round, rather than cruciform, an architectural signature of Templar churches, just like the chapel Pierce and Fiona had discovered beneath Mount Nebo. The Templars had outgrown Temple Church, and built a city in Hertfordshire to the north of London, but Temple Church continued to serve an important role in Templar operations as the English royal treasury.
Even on a good day, getting to Temple Church was a bit of a challenge, requiring a local’s knowledge of the narrow pedestrian throughways and back streets. At midnight on the day following the biggest disaster to hit the city since the Ragnarok Event, it was an ordeal comparable to escaping the subterranean world beneath Arkaim. Although London had suffered only minor earthquake damage, the subsequent nine-foot-high tsunami wave had flooded low-lying areas near the river as far inland as Battersea Bridge. The affected area included the Temple district, where Temple Church was located. The church itself was high and dry, but everything south of the Strand was barricaded off to vehicle traffic, and despite Dourado’s best efforts to find them a route, it took forty minutes of wandering to find an approach.
“Reminds me of Castel Sant’Angelo,” Fiona remarked, as they crouched in the shadows, checking to make sure the coast was clear.
“You’re not the first to notice that,” Pierce said. Indeed, the rugged church bore more than a passing resemblance to the papal fortress and one-time prison structure that concealed the entrance to the Cerberus Group’s underground headquarters. “It’s the round design. Most churches are cross-shaped, but Templar churches were always round, like the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.”
They remained in hiding for a few more minutes before making the final push to the entrance on the south side of the church. The locked door posed no great challenge to Fiona, who was almost as adept at picking locks as she was at creating golems, and they slipped into the deserted nave.
Pierce swept the surrounding area with his light. The round nave to their left contained the stone burial effigies for which the church had become famous. To the right was the more traditionally Gothic choir and chancel.
“Now what?” Fiona whispered.
Pierce had hoped that the proximity of the Ark would trigger some kind of reaction to which Fiona would be attuned, but that wasn’t happening. He felt guilty asking her, yet again, if she sensed anything. Scanning with ground penetrating radar was also out of the question. He had no intention of going back to the snake pit underneath Mount Nebo to retrieve the lost Groundshark unit.
“We’re going to have to do this the old-fashioned way,” Pierce said. “Look everywhere.”
“For what?” said Gallo.
“A secret door. The entrance to an underground crypt.”
“There isn’t a crypt,” Dourado said, her voice audible only through the synced Bluetooth devices they were all using.
“This church used to be the Royal Treasury. There has to be more than meets the eye here.”
Gallo cast a dubious eye into the nave. “I’m sure we’re not the first visitors to come in here rapping on the walls hoping to find some hidden Templar secret.”
“Well, we’re just going to have to look in the one place they didn’t. Cintia, try to dig up whatever information you can on this place. Maybe there’s some old blueprints or something in the historical record that might steer us in the right direction. The older, the better.”
“On it.”
As the three of them fanned out, moving to different corners of the church looking for some irregularity that might hint at the location of a hidden passage, Dourado began recounting details from the historical record. Most of the early information focused more on the Templars and the disposition of the property once they were gone, but after the Great Fire of 1666, history began paying attention to the building itself.