Alex tried to process this. “Why would that matter? Whatever he knew died with him when that ship sank?”
Hancock started to say something, but closed his mouth and simply stared hard at her for several seconds. “Were you followed here? Did you leave any kind of trail that might lead them here?”
“I don’t think so.”
“And these papers; are there other copies?”
“The originals are in the National Archives. Anyone can request them, but unless they know what to ask for…” She shrugged.
“I see. Well, perhaps the men pursuing you have already done so, and consider you merely a loose end.” He lapsed into silence again, chewing his lip as if to gather his courage, and then got to his feet. “I may be able to answer your question after all, Alex. Come with me. There’s something I want to show you.”
Alex felt a rush of excitement, but it quickly turned to confusion when her host led her, not to the house, but deeper into the tangled maze that had once been the garden. Through a clearing in the brambles, she spied a small cemetery with a single ornate crypt and several more less impressive headstones. Like the garden, the burial grounds had been badly neglected. For a moment, she wondered if Hancock was leading her to his brother’s cenotaph, but their path skirted past the cemetery and continued toward a wooded hillside beyond.
Hancock seemed to grow spryer with each step, and when they reached the tree line, it was all Alex could do to keep up. At one point, she lost sight of him when he rounded a thick oak, and when she passed the same tree, she found him standing beside a knee-high boulder. As she approached, he bent over the rock and attempted to roll it aside.
“If it’s no bother,” he said expectantly.
“What? Oh, sorry.” She joined him, and their combined strength was sufficient to shift the rock a couple feet away, to reveal a dark cleft in the hillside. Hancock gestured to it expectantly and Alex’s earlier anticipation turned to horror. He wanted her to go underground.
She wasn’t claustrophobic, not like people in movies were sometimes. She could get into elevators and ride subway trains without the slightest hesitation. But that comfort did not extend to crawling around in a dugout tunnel barely wide enough to let her through.
“Than answers you seek are in there,” said Hancock. “It’s perfectly safe. I’ve even brought a torch.” He took a small flashlight from his jacket pocket and played its bright beam into the opening as if that would somehow reassure her.
“Well aren’t you the Boy Scout,” she muttered. But the light did help a little, and Hancock’s confidence was infectious. He promptly lowered himself into the opening and was swallowed up by the darkness. “Oh, fine.”
She extended a cautious foot into the darkness, felt solid ground sloping away, and then advanced further. Those first tentative steps were the hardest. Once her head and shoulders cleared the opening, she found that there was actually quite a lot of room to move. She could even make out Hancock’s silhouette, a dark outline in a corona of diffuse golden illumination, just a few paces ahead. She soon caught up to him and in the beam of his flashlight, saw that they were not in a natural cave formation, but rather a manmade passage, reinforced with brick walls and an arched ceiling. The passage was wide enough for her to walk alongside him.
The passage was short and ended in a large circular room, which immediately reminded Alex of a chapel. There were about a dozen wooden benches, arranged in two rows like pews. Sculpted figures of metal and stained glass were mounted on the walls at regular intervals like decorative lighting fixtures. At the far end stood a large table or altar, and three more passages branched off like the apse and transepts of a cruciform chapel. The place felt old but not unused or forgotten.
“What is this place?” Alex noted that the cloth covering the altar was adorned with a red cross with arms that were equal in length and tipped with serifs. “That’s a Templar Cross.”
Hancock continued forward to the altar, dipping his head slightly as if to pray then turned to her. “You are correct. I am a sworn brother of the Poor-Fellow Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon — a Templar Knight, in the common parlance — as was my dear older brother, Trevor.”
“The Templars are extinct.”
Even as she said it, Alex knew that wasn’t quite the whole truth. Of course the Templars were gone, the real Templars, but that didn’t mean there was anything preventing modern pretenders from assuming their mantle or co-opting the mystique associated with the crusading holy knights.
“You know something of the order then? Ah, well of course you would. You are an historian after all.”
He carefully balanced the flashlight on the altar so that its light shone up to illuminate the ceiling, revealing a random assortment of intricately carved symbols — crosses, stars, moons, and other glyphs that looked like occult runes. Alex wondered if they were a coded message, instructions to unlocking some mysterious source of Templar power. She understood why people were so fascinated with the Templars — people like Hancock who evidently believed himself an inheritor of their cause.
“I don’t understand how this has anything to do with what happened to your brother.”
“Trevor was the keeper of our greatest secret. That of course did not exempt him from his duty to the Crown, nor would he have wanted it to. He was a true knight, worthy of our heritage. None of us could have imagined that he would not return.”
“Allied Command knew about Trevor’s secret and didn’t want to let the Japanese get their hands on him. But that secret died with him.” Alex knew she was missing something important. “It was war. You had to know that there was a chance he might die and that there would be no way to get your secret back.”
Hancock smiled patiently. “You misunderstand. I did not speak of his survival, but rather his return.”
“It was an object,” she deduced aloud. “Something he was carrying.”
Hancock laid his hands flat on the altar and stared at a fixed point between his outstretched fingers. “For nearly two hundred years — almost as long as your country has been in existence — the knights of the Temple ruled an empire that stretched from the British Isles to Jerusalem. Six hundred years ago, when our enemies conspired to destroy the order, our predecessors took immediate action to preserve the source of our power. A select group of knights were chosen to be the keepers of this secret. Many more, including our revered Grand Master, sacrificed themselves to protect that knowledge.”
“I’m familiar with the stories.”
“Are you indeed? Well, there are stories and then there’s the truth.”
“Where does Trevor come in?”
“Have you ever heard the saying, ‘Two can keep a secret if one of them is dead’?”
Alex smiled. “I think the original quote was: ‘Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead.’ Benjamin Franklin.”
“The surviving knights knew that their enemies would stop at nothing to hunt them down, torture them until they revealed the secret. The location of the vault, where the secret was kept, was marked on a map.” Hancock waved a hand over the light. “A map in this very room.”
Alex’s gaze was drawn to the domed ceiling, which she now realized contained more than just elaborate symbols. The entire dome was a single enormous relief map. As she found a few familiar shapes — the British Isles, the Iberian Peninsula, the Strait of Gibraltar — the entire picture emerged in a cascade of recognition. The symbols she now saw, marked specific locations, cities perhaps, or Templar outposts, scattered across Europe, ringing the coast of the Mediterranean Sea and even dotting some of the islands within. The symbols were grouped in sets of two or three at each location, though never in the same order, to form a unique sigil for each. A closer look revealed that no two shapes or symbols were exactly identical.