He'd also taught his cadet students that all of that had come crashing down in a single day, Friday, October 13, 1307, as Philip of France and Pope Clement's order for the arrest of all Templars in France and the confiscation of their property and wealth was carried out.
Every other country in Europe soon followed suit, seeing an easy way to rid themselves of crippling royal debt to Templar banks. According to accepted history the Templars had simply disappeared, erased from history, a brief phenomenon that had come and gone. Holliday had taught all that as fact. And he'd been totally wrong.
On that particular day in 1307 King Philip's bailiffs cut off a thousand Templar heads, but Philip forgot that there were also a thousand Templar tails. The knights, or at least most of them, were gone, but the accountants, many of them Cistercian monks, survived. By the end of World War II Germany was a rubble-strewn wasteland, but when the smoke cleared it was the same men running the trains, policing the streets and teaching the children. In the United States, presidents came and went every few years like a revolving door, but the bureaucrats remained. So it was with the Templars.
Long before King Philip sent out his edict, the lower echelons of the Templar Order saw the potential for disaster and took steps to avoid it. Deeds and testaments were quietly rewritten, titles to properties changed and notes in hand for enormous sums were transferred to supposedly innocent hands in distant places, far from the clutches of Philip and his English cousins. It was no accident that the man who invented double-entry bookkeeping was a monk. The concept of keeping two sets of books wasn't far behind.
When Philip arrested the Templars he confiscated their visible wealth but their invisible wealth had long since been spirited away. As Jacques de Molai, the last official Grand Master of the Templars, said shortly before he was burned at the stake in 1314: "The best way to keep a secret is to forget that it exists." And that was precisely what the Templars did.
For the better part of seven hundred years, under scores of different names and identities, the Templars' hidden assets had grown to almost unbelievable proportions, doubling and redoubling over time, diversifying into every walk and facet of everyday life in virtually all the nations of the earth.
Consolidated into a single force, the power of that much wealth would be almost overwhelming, capable of toppling governments with ease. Forged into a mighty hammer the influence of the Templar fortune was capable of doing enormous good or unspeakable evil. It was the key to the kingdom of heaven or to the burning gates of hell.
And the key lay in the small, blood- spattered notebook now locked in a desk drawer in Lieutenant Colonel John Holliday's study. The notebook was the gift of an ex-priest named Helder Rodrigues, dying in Holliday's arms on the island of Corvo in the distant Azores.
The gift came with a codicil, however: use it wisely, use it well or use it not at all. The Templar treasure Rodrigues had revealed to Holliday and Peggy that day in the furious rain had been great enough; the secret revealed within the bloody notebook was a million times greater. The neo-Nazi Axel Kellerman had forfeited his life for it, run through by Aos, Sword of the East. The anonymous assassin from the Vatican's Sodalitium Pianum had died for it on the narrow midnight streets of Jerusalem.
All of which lay behind Holliday's decision to leave West Point. He knew the menace inherent in the notebook from Rodrigues wasn't over and there was no way he was going to imperil the cadets or anyone else at the Point; if there was danger ahead, it would be his alone.
Holliday dozed, warmed by the fire, then fell into a dreamless sleep. When he awoke it was almost dawn, the first pink light creeping up over the trees along Gee's Point and the Hudson River. The fire had burned to cold ashes in the grate and Holliday's joints ached after a night of sitting up in the chair. Something had awakened him. A sound. He blinked and raised his wrist, checking the old Royal Air Force Rolex he'd inherited from his uncle Henry. Ten to six. Too early for reveille by forty minutes.
He levered himself out of the armchair and crossed the room to his front window. There was a blue Academy Taxi from Highland Falls idling on the street in front of the house. A figure climbed out of the taxi and started up the walk. He carried only a flight bag for luggage.
Holliday recognized the handsome dark- haired man immediately. It was Rafi Wanounou, the Israeli archaeologist he and Peggy had befriended in Jerusalem. From this distance he looked fit and well, and the only evidence of the savage beating he'd taken on their behalf in Jerusalem was a slight limp. The expression on his face, however, was grim. He climbed the steps, favoring his right leg. Holliday went to the front door and threw it open.
"Rafi," he said. "This is a surprise. What on earth are you doing here?"
"She's gone," the archaeologist said. "They've taken Peggy."
2
"Talk," said Holliday, busying himself by making a fresh pot of coffee. Rafi sat slumped at the kitchen table. His face looked pale and exhausted. He made a little groaning sound and sat a little straighter in his chair.
"You knew how it was between us," Rafi started tentatively. It was almost a question.
Holliday shrugged. "You were a couple," he said. "She went back to Jerusalem after we were in the Azores and she stayed there."
"That's right," Rafi said and nodded. "At first it was so she could take care of me after I got out of the hospital, but later…" He let it dangle.
"Later it turned into something else," said Holliday.
"Something like that," said Rafi.
Holliday found two mugs in the cupboard above the counter, then went to the refrigerator and brought out a container of cream. He kept his hands working, fetching spoons. He'd never felt comfortable talking about his own relationships, let alone anyone else's, particularly Peggy's. With Uncle Henry gone, he and his much younger cousin were orphans together. It was a special bond. Now this young archaeologist was in the mix.
"Did you have a fight or something?" Holliday asked, taking a stab in the dark. He took a handful of coffee beans and poured them into the little grinder on the counter. The machine whirred for a few seconds and the dark, rich aroma of the freshly ground beans filled the air.
"No," said Rafi, shaking his head. "No fight. Nothing like that. In fact we were talking about making things a little more… permanent."
"Marriage?" Holliday asked, surprised. Peggy was a self-described serial monogamist, a committed bachelorette, or spinster, or whatever the hell the politically correct term for it was these days. It seemed out of character.
"We were getting there," said Rafi bleakly.
"So what happened?"
"She got a call. Smithsonian magazine. They had an assignment for her. They knew she was in Jerusalem, so she seemed like the obvious choice."
"They wanted a photo story?" Holliday asked. He dumped the coarse ground coffee into the Bodum French press on the counter and poured in boiling water from the kettle. The cowboy coffee on the stove was for himself; the Bodum was for guests.
"A photo story and a written one as well. A journal of the dig. She liked the idea of writing; she'd been thinking about it for a while. This was a break for her, or that's what she thought," added Rafi bitterly.
"What dig?" Holliday asked.
"The Biblical Archaeology School of France in Jerusalem had underwritten an expedition into Egypt and Libya. One of their senior people, a man named Brother Charles-Etienne Brasseur, had stumbled onto a cache of old Templar texts while he was doing research in the Vatican Archives."
"The Vatican? The Roman Catholics had the order disbanded and the last grand master burned at the stake," said Holliday.
"The texts Brasseur discovered had been confiscated by King Philip's marshals during the dissolution," replied Rafi. "They came from an obscure abbey called La Couvertoirade in the Dordogne region of France."