The older man sighed deeply. "Again, Mr. Reilly, had we wanted you dead, you would not be here. Can we dispense with the threats and get down to whatever business you have in mind? I gather there is something you want from us or you would not have been the one to initiate contact."
His eyes met Lang's as he made a show of slowly reaching into his coat pocket, producing the silver case and taking out a cigarette. He broke the gaze only long enough to light it.
"You're right;" Lang said. "You've been blackmailing the church for over seven hundred years. Now it's your turn to pay a little hush money.»
The Templar showed no surprise. In fact, Lang was certain he had been expecting it. "How much?»
Lang had given this a lot of thought. The sum should be big enough to be punitive but not enough to make it tempting to kill him and take their chances with the letter. Lang was prepared to negotiate, something he had learned well from horse-trading with the prosecution for lower sentences for his clients. But never anything this big. It was going to be like trying to get a charge of sodomy reduced to following too close.
"Half billion a year, payable to the Janet and Jeffrey Holt Foundation."
Silver Hair lifted a gray eyebrow, either surprised or doing a good job of pretending to be. "I don't think I've ever heard of it."
Lang sneezed. The cold of the stone on which they were sitting was beginning to permeate his body. Standing, he kept an eye on the entrance. "It doesn't exist yet. Janet Holt was my sister, the one you people incinerated along with her son when you firebombed that home in Paris."
The Templar nodded slowly. "You'll use a foundation to channel money…»
"No! The foundation will be real enough.»
Lang had given this subject a lot of thought, too, ever since Jacob had convinced him that exposure of the Templar secret would do a great deal more harm than good. First he had thought of the money he could demand. the vacation homes, yachts and jets that could be his. The truth, plain and ugly, was that the idea of going, the same places for every vacation was only slightly more appealing than getting seasick..His terror of flying increased in inverse proportion to the size of the aircraft involved. The Porsche was his choice of car, he lived exactly where he wanted and already made an obscenely large income doing what he enjoyed, trying cases. The only thing missing from his life was Dawn and even the Templars couldn't give her back.
Besides, there was no way the sort of money Lang had in mind would stay a secret. It took little imagination to conjure up the hordes of solicitors lining up to inundate him with timeshares, questionable securities, even more doubtful charities and the rest of the telemarketing inventory. He could also see the IRS salivating at the prospect of taking a large part of the money to staunch the eternal government hemorrhage. A charitable foundation both memorialized Janet and Jeff and let Lang spend a huge amount wherever he thought Janet and Jeff might have wanted, perhaps for children like Jeff in poverty-ridden countries.
Silver Hair smiled coolly. "A true philanthropist, just like your fellow Atlantan Ted Turner."
"Better. I didn't marry Jane Fonda."
It was not lost on Lang that the other man hadn't squawked about the price, a sure indication he should have asked for more. Instead, Lang said, "One more thing…"
"There always is," the Templar said, his tone bristling with sarcasm.
"You got me blamed for a murder in Atlanta and another in London. I want to read in the London Times and the Atlanta Journal that those murders have been solved, the culprit arrested."
Silver Hair was looking around for a· place to drop his cigarette. He finally ground it out on the stone floor. "That might be difficult."
"I'm not stipulating that it has to be easy. You've got people who're willing jump out of windows, you can sure as hell find somebody to take those raps."
He gave Lang a nod, an acknowledgement this request, too, would be met. "And for this, we get to know who has the letter?"
Lang shook his head. "I might have been born at night, pal, but not last night. The letter's location stays with me. I've got too much to live for. Besides, you know I won't go public with your secret; it would end the funding for the foundation."
"We all die, Mr. Reilly. What happens then?"
"If the foundation is to survive me, so will your secret, a risk you'll have to take, that I'll make provisions not to endanger the annual funding of the charity."
The Templar looked at Lang for a moment as if trying to make up his mind about something. "For a half billion dollars a year, Mr. Reilly, I'd think I'd be entitled to hear exactly how you found the tomb. Most of it we know. But the rest… I'd hate to have to be paying more money if someone else…"
"Fair enough," Lang said. "You know about the Templin diary. That indicated whatever the secret was, it Was located in the southwest of France. It was through the painting, or rather the picture of it, that I finally figured it out. The inscription made no sense, ETINARCADIAEGOSUM. One too many words. I guessed it might be a word puzzle, anagram, so I rearranged the letters." Pulling a city map out of a pocket, Lang wrote on the margin. "I rearranged the letters like this:
Et in Arcadia Ego (Sum)
Arcam Dei Iesu Tango.
Arcam, tomb, objective case.
Dei, God, dative case.
Iesu, Jesus, possessive.
Tango, I touch.
" 'I touch the tomb of God, Jesus: is what I made of it. As long as the Poussin is around, somebody else is just as likely as I was to figure that out."
"Since you, er, found our secret, all copies of the painting have been destroyed. The original is in the Louvre."
"Okay," Lang said, "since this is question-and-answer time, I've got one for you. How did you, the Templars, find out about the tomb in the first place?"
Silver Hair took out another cigarette. "Very well, then. When we held Jerusalem, one of our number came across documents, ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, it's called today, scratched on parchment, much like the Dead Sea Scrolls. A petition in which Joseph of Arimathea and Mary Magdalene asked Pilate for leave to depart for another part of the Roman Empire, taking the corpse of Jesus with them for reburial. Written across that parchment was approval in Latin.
"Our long-ago brethren recognized the places and rivers in that document and found the tomb, something that would have been an embarrassment to the Church, as Christ's corporeal body supposedly ascended into heaven. The Vatican saw the wisdom of-ah-paying us to guard this secret."
"Why didn't the Vatican simply destroy the tomb and its contents?" Lang thought he had given Gurt the correct reason but he wanted to know for sure.
The man regarded the end of his cigarette. Thinner and longer than any brand Lang had seen, he would have bet it was made to order. The Templar took a long drag before answering. "And commit the ultimate sacrilege, defiling the tomb of Christ? Better the pontiff should have exhumed Saint Peter and thrown him into the Tiber. Bad enough the body of Our Savior had not ascended, that the Gnostics had been right all along. Besides, the pope only saw part, of the documents we found. Where Joseph and Mary actually went, we kept to ourselves."
This was the weirdest conversation Lang had ever experienced. He was sitting in the ruins of an ancient temple, conversing like two baseball fans discussing batting averages with the man who had been at least indirectly responsible for the deaths of what family he had-the first person he had truly wanted to kill. And the one person he knew he would not.
"For such a valuable secret, you left a lot of clues lying around. You explained Poussin's painting, but the cross by the side of the road that lines up with the statue?"
"A relatively modern addition, but a clue for those who know what they are searching for-only Templars until you. We may need to remove one or both markers."