The Brotherhood of the Holy Shroud

  She hardly ate. She phoned Jean and felt better the minute she heard his voice reassuring her that, even if Paul Bisol was a little strange, he was a good man, and she could trust him.

  At three she went back to the Enigmas offices. When she arrived, Paul was waiting for her in Elisabeth’s office.

  “Well, we did turn up something,” Elisabeth said. “This priest of yours belongs to a very well-connected family. His older brother was a representative to the French National Assembly and is now in the cabinet, and his sister is a justice of the Supreme Court. They come from the lesser ranks of the nobility, although since the French Revolution the de Charnys, no e, live like perfect bourgeois. Yves has protectors high up in the Vatican—Cardinal Visier—in charge of church finances, no less—is a friend of his older brother. But the bombshell is that Edouard, our genealogist, who’s been working for three hours on the family tree, is almost certain that this Yves de Charny is indeed a descendant of the de Charneys, with an e, who fought in the Crusades and, even more important, is a very close descendant of the Geoffroy de Charney who was precept of the Temple in Normandy and died at the stake alongside Jacques de Molay.”

  “Are you sure?” Ana asked, uncertain whether to believe her or not.

  “Absolutely,” replied Elisabeth without the slightest hesitation.

  Paul Bisol saw the doubt reflected in Ana’s eyes.

  “Ana, Edouard is a historian, a professor at the university. I know Jean is a little doubtful about our magazine, but I assure you, we’ve never published anything we can’t prove. This is a magazine that investigates enigmas of history and tries to find answers. The answers are always developed and provided by historians, sometimes aided by an investigative team made up of reporters. We have never had to print a retraction or a correction. And we never print anything we aren’t absolutely sure of. If somebody has a hypothesis, we print it as a hypothesis, never as a fact.

  “You maintain that some of the mishaps in the cathedral of Turin have something to do with events in the past. I don’t know—we’ve never looked into it. You think that the Templars were the owners of the shroud, and there you may be right, just as you’re apparently right that this Padre Yves comes from a very ancient family of aristocrats and Templars. You wonder whether the Templars have any relation to the accidents in the cathedral. I can’t answer that question—I don’t know, but I very much doubt it. I honestly don’t think that the Templars have any interest in damaging the shroud, and one thing I can assure you is that if they wanted it for themselves, they’d already have it. They are a very powerful organization, more powerful than you can imagine—right, Elisabeth?”

  Paul looked at Elisabeth, who nodded. Ana froze when the chair Elisabeth was sitting in moved from behind her desk and began to advance. She hadn’t noticed—it looked like an office chair, but it had been fitted out to serve as a wheelchair as well.

  Elisabeth stopped in front of Ana and pulled aside the shawl over her obviously useless legs.

  “Ana, I don’t think we—or you—have a lot of time. I’m going to give you our part of the story whole, right now. I’m Scottish—I don’t know whether Jean told you. My father is Lord McKenny, and he knew Lord McCall. You’ve probably never heard of him. He’s one of the richest men in the world, but you’ll never see him in the newspapers or on TV. He lives in a world that allows entry only to the fantastically rich and powerful. Although he spends most of his time in London, he has a castle, an ancient Templar fortress, located on the west coast of Scotland, near the Small Isles. But no one from the general public is ever invited there, and it’s staffed by tight-lipped professionals from other places. We Scots are given to legends, and there are quite a few about Lord McCall. Some of the villagers who live near the castle call it Castle Templar, and they say that from time to time men arrive in helicopters to visit, among them members of the English royal family and other noble and well-connected families from around the world.

  “One day I was telling Paul about Lord McCall, and it occurred to us that we ought to do a story on the Templar estates and fortresses all across Europe. A kind of inventory, you know: find out which ones are still standing, who owns them, which ones have been destroyed over the course of the centuries. We thought it would be great if Lord McCall would let us visit his castle. We started working and at first we didn’t have many problems. There are literally hundreds of Templar fortresses, most of them in ruins. I asked my father to talk to McCall to see if he’d let me visit his castle and photograph it. But my father got nowhere—McCall was always very polite, but he always had some excuse. I was determined not to take no for an answer, so I decided to try to persuade him myself. I called him, but he wouldn’t even come to the phone—a very polite secretary informed me that Lord McCall was away, in the United States, so he couldn’t receive me, and of course the secretary had no authority to allow me to photograph the fortress. I insisted that he let me at least come to the castle, but the secretary wouldn’t budge—without Lord McCall’s permission, no one would set foot on the estate.

  “But I still wasn’t giving up, so I went to the castle, anyway. I was sure that once I was actually there, they’d have to let me at least look around. I don’t usually trade on my own family connections, but in this case I thought, stupidly, that they’d provide entrée.

  “Before I got to the castle I talked to some of the villagers. All of them have enormous respect for Lord McCall, and they say he’s a kind and generous man who makes sure their needs are all seen to. You might say that they more than respect him—they worship him. None of them would ever move a finger to harm him or compromise him in any way. One of them told me that his son was alive thanks to McCall, who had paid all the expenses for open-heart surgery in Houston.

  “When I came to the iron gate at the entrance to the estate, I couldn’t find any way to get in, and no one responded to the bell. I started walking along the wall, just to see what I might find. Finally I came to a place where the stone had crumbled a bit, just enough to suggest a tenuous handhold or two. You should know that my favorite pastime was rock climbing. I started climbing at ten, and I’ve climbed a lot of pretty good cliffs. So climbing over that wall didn’t look particularly hard to me, despite the fact that I didn’t have a rope or anything. Well, I couldn’t resist.

  “Don’t ask me how I did it, but I managed to climb up on the wall and jump inside, onto the grounds of the estate. Off in the distance, in the middle of the woods, I saw an ivy-covered stone chapel and started toward it. I heard a sound, then felt a terrible pain and fell. I don’t remember much else. I was crying and writhing in pain. A man was standing there with a rifle, aiming it at me. He called somebody on a walkie-talkie, a four-by-four drove up, they put me in it and drove me to the hospital.

  “I was paralyzed. They didn’t shoot to kill, but they did aim carefully enough to leave me like this.

  “Naturally, everyone said the guards on the estate had been doing their duty. I was a trespasser who’d jumped the wall. And believe me, none of the authorities was interested in pursuing it further.”

  Ana had listened to Elisabeth’s story in silence. Now, looking at the vibrant young woman, her heart swelled in sympathy and outrage.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. Anything else seemed superfluous.

  “Yeah, me too. But the point is, it seems pretty certain that the kindly Lord McCall is anything but. I asked my father to give me a detailed list of everyone he knew of who had any relationship with McCall. He didn’t want to do it, but he finally gave in. He hasn’t been the same since my accident. He never wanted me to be a reporter, much less devote my career to these things on the fringes. So we kept digging, Paul and I, with more reluctant help from my father, and we did manage to put together a basic picture.

  “Lord McCall is a strange person. Never married, a connoisseur of religious art, incredibly wealthy. Every hundred days a group of men arrive at the castle by car or helicopter and stay for three or four days. None of
the locals knows who they are, but the sense of the villagers is that they’re as important as McCall himself. We’ve managed to identify some of them, though, and have followed the trail of their businesses, and I can tell you that there is no significant financial event in the world that can’t be traced in one way or another to him and his friends.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means they’re a group of men who pull the strings, whose financial power is almost as big as governments’, which means they influence governments around the world.”

  “And what does that have to do with the Templars?”

  “Ana, for years now, I’ve been studying everything written on the order. I have a lot of time, and I’ve come to some conclusions. In addition to all the organizations that claim to be the heirs of the Temple, there is another, secret organization, made up of men who stay in the shadows, all very important, and who inhabit the very heart of the heart of society. I don’t know how many there are or who they all are—or at least I’m not sure that all the ones I suspect of belonging to this group actually do. But I think that the true Templars, the heirs of Jacques de Molay, are there and that McCall is one of them. I’ve learned a lot about his Scottish estate, and it’s interesting. Down through the centuries it has passed from hand to hand, always to men who are single—solitary, even—and rich and well connected, and every one of them obsessed with keeping out strangers. I think there’s a Templar army, if you will, a silent, well-structured army whose members hold high positions in virtually every country.”

  “You seem to be talking about a Masonic organization.”

  “No, what I’m referring to is the authentic, core organization, the one nothing is known about, not even that it exists at all. With the list my father gave me and the help of an excellent investigative reporter, I’ve managed to make a partial organizational chart of this new Temple. But it hasn’t been easy, I’ll tell you. Michael, the reporter, is dead—a year ago he had a fatal car accident. I suspect they killed him. Nasty things seem to happen to those who get too close. I know—I’ve followed what has happened to curious people like us.”

  “A pretty paranoid vision of things, this worldwide conspiracy, murders, cover-ups.”

  “Yes, but still, I think there are two worlds: the one we see, in which the vast majority of us live, and then another, underground world that we know nothing about. That’s the place from which these various organizations—financial, Masonic, whatever—pull the strings. And that’s where this new Temple can be found, in that underground world.”

  “Granting that you’re right, which I’m not so sure of, it doesn’t explain what relationship the Templars of today have to the shroud.”

  “I don’t know. I’m sorry. I’ve told you all this because your Padre Yves could be…”

  “Say it.”

  “He could be one of them.”

  “A Templar in this secret society that you think—think, mind you—exists?”

  “You think I’m seeing things, that this accident, this wheelchair, has made me paranoid, but I’m a reporter just like you are, Ana, and I can still tell reality from fiction. I’ve told you what I think. Now you can act as you see fit. If the shroud belonged to the Templars, and Padre Yves comes from the family of Geoffroy de Charney—”

  “Even then,” Ana interrupted her. “Even given all that, the shroud is not the cloth that Christ was buried in. We know it dates from de Charney’s time, basically, and I think the Templars would have had to know it was a recent creation, or at least that its provenance was dubious—and I just don’t see them staking everything on another half-baked relic, as they seem to have done….”

  Listening to Elisabeth, Ana realized how ridiculous she herself must have looked, taking the time of serious scholars to expound on her own theories.

  At that moment she didn’t like herself much. She felt like a fool that she’d lost her head over a far-fetched story, trying to out-investigate the pros in the Art Crimes Department. It was over, she told herself; she was going back to Barcelona on the next plane. She’d call Santiago. She knew he’d be delighted when she told him she was moving on, that she’d had enough of the shroud to last a lifetime.

  Elisabeth and Paul left her to her thoughts. They could see the skepticism—incredulity, really—reflected on her face. They had spoken to only a handful of people about their investigations into the new Temple, because they feared for their lives and the life of anyone who helped them. But this reporter had gotten herself in pretty deep, and they thought she had a right to know what she was up against.

  “Elisabeth, are you going to give it to her?”

  Paul’s words brought Ana out of her reverie.

  “Give me what?” asked Ana.

  “This file, Ana. It’s a summary of my work over the last five years. Michael’s and my work, rather. It lists the names and biographies of the men we think are the new masters of the Temple. In my opinion, Lord McCall is the Grand Master. But read it and see what you think. And however ridiculous we seem to you, be careful, for your sake and ours. Only a few people know about this. We’re trusting you because we think you’re on the verge of an important discovery—we aren’t sure exactly what it is, or what direction it’ll take you, but you seem to be zeroing in on something, something big, that we’ve been missing. There are notes and historical details in the file you may want to think about, too, which may be relevant to your shroud, things we’ve discovered about the fall of the order, where they fled, speculations about what happened to their records and their riches, how they reconstituted themselves….

  “If these papers fall into the wrong hands, we’ll all die—don’t doubt that. So I ask that you confide in no one, absolutely no one. They have ears everywhere—in the judiciary, in the police, in parliaments, in the stock markets—everywhere. I’m sure you’re already on their radar. They know you’ve been with us; what they don’t know is what we’ve told you. We’ve invested a great deal in security, and we have electronic scanners to find bugs. Even so, it’s possible that we haven’t found them all.”

  “Elisabeth, I’m sorry. This is too far into John le Carré territory, even for me.”

  “Think whatever you want, Ana, but you’ve put yourself into this. Will you do what we ask?”

  “Look—you’ve taken me into your confidence, and I’m grateful. Your secrets are safe with me. Not a word to anyone, I promise. Shall I return this file when I’ve finished reading it?”

  “Destroy it. It’s just a summary, but I promise—you’ll find it useful, very useful, especially if you decide to go on.”

  “What makes you think I’m turning back?”

  Elisabeth took a deep breath before replying, then smiled ever so slightly.

  “That’s what you should do, Ana, believe me. Stop now. But somehow I don’t think you will.”

  IT WAS SEVEN A.M., AND THE CORE MEMBERS OF THE ART Crimes Department looked like they’d just gotten out of bed after a sleepless night. Now they were waiting for their breakfast orders to be brought in. The hotel dining room had just opened and they’d been the first guests to enter.

  At nine the mute was to be released from the Turin jail.

  Marco had planned for the operation to tail him meticulously. They would be backed up by a group of carabinieri and by Interpol.

  Sofia was nervous, and she thought Minerva looked uneasy too. Even Antonino showed the tension in the way he tightened his lips. Marco, Pietro, and Giuseppe, however, seemed fine—loose and easy. All three were cops, and for them a tail was routine. They had reviewed their respective roles and responsibilities until they could practically recite them in their sleep. There was nothing to do now but wait.

  To fill the time, Sofia began to update Marco and the team about some of the more intriguing leads—or hints, really—that she’d come across on her most recent forays into the shadowy history of the shroud, paging through biblical Apocrypha and books on Edessa and its role as an ancient center of
trade. The more she delved into the connection they’d unearthed to Urfa, Edessa’s modern incarnation, the more convinced she became that there was indeed a thread stretching from there through the centuries—cryptic allusions to inquiries emanating from powerful forces within the city seeking the whereabouts of a mysterious lost treasure. The probes seemed to reach into every kingdom on the continent and beyond, even as far as England, Scotland, and Ireland. She was certain that the treasure was Edessa’s stolen shroud—and that perhaps the effort to recover it hadn’t stopped when the historical accounts broke off.

  “Jesus, I never heard anything so stupid!” Pietro interrupted her. “It’s too early in the morning for this bullshit, Sofia.”

  “This is not bullshit! I mean, it’s speculation, I know that, and it’s a little ‘out there,’ and I’m not saying that it’s true, but you can’t call everything that doesn’t agree with what you think ‘bullshit.’”

  “Cool it!” Marco barked. “Sofia, I don’t know…it seems a bit fantastic that this could have been going on all these years. But with a little luck, and close attention to the job at hand,” he looked pointedly around the table at them all, “we’ll have some hard answers soon. Now let’s run through everything one more time.”

  Far from Turin, the animated atmosphere within the opulent penthouse of one of the world’s most powerful shipping magnates was in stark contrast to the storm outside now lashing New York City. Guests milled about, chatting happily, laughing, and although it was after midnight, the party seemed to be just beginning. The group of men ensconced comfortably in a discreet corner with champagne and Havana cigars seemed to perfectly reflect the festive mood of the night.

  Their conversation, however, belied their relaxed postures.

  “Mendib will be leaving the prison about now,” the oldest murmured discreetly to the others. “Everything is ready.”