The Templar Prophecy Read online

  THE

  TEMPLAR

  PROPHECY

  Mario Reading is a multi-talented writer of both fiction and non-fiction. His varied life has included selling rare books, teaching riding in Africa, studying dressage in Vienna, running a polo stable in Gloucestershire and maintaining a coffee plantation in Mexico. An acknowledged expert on the prophecies of Nostradamus, Reading is the author of eight non-fiction titles and five novels published in the UK and around the world.

  Also by Mario Reading and available from Corvus

  The Nostradamus Prophecies

  The Mayan Codex

  The Third Antichrist

  Published in paperback in Great Britain in 2014 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

  Copyright © Mario Reading, 2014

  The moral right of Mario Reading to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Paperback ISBN: 978 1 78239 317 7

  OME ISBN: 978 1 78239 385 6

  E-book ISBN: 978 1 78239 319 1

  Printed in Great Britain.

  Corvus

  An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

  Ormond House

  26–27 Boswell Street

  London

  WC1N 3JZ

  www.corvus-books.co.uk

  For my beloved granddaughter Éloise – Baba’s

  best little girl in the whole world.

  Contents

  One: Homs, Syria

  Two: The Saleph River, Cilician Armenia, Southern Turkey

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six: Syrian Air Flight 106 from Damascus

  Seven: The Hitlerbunker, Reich Chancellery, Berlin

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen: Calle de Chipilapa, Antigua, Guatemala

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen: Haus Walküre, Bad Wiessee, Bavaria

  Eighteen: Rancho La Virgencita, Antigua, Guatemala

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One: Richmond, England

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Forty-Five

  Forty-Six

  Forty-Seven

  Forty-Eight

  Forty-Nine

  Fifty

  Fifty-One

  Fifty-Two

  Fifty-Three

  Fifty-Four

  Fifty-Five

  Fifty-Six

  Fifty-Seven

  Fifty-Eight

  Fifty-Nine

  Sixty

  Sixty-One

  Sixty-Two

  Sixty-Three

  I would like to thank Michael Mann for his seemingly innate capacity to steer me towards interesting and esoteric ideas without appearing to do so. Nick Robinson, for advising me to ‘keep it simple’ when my fervid brain would have had it otherwise. My agent, Oli Munson of A. M. Heath, for relentlessly guiding me in the direction of my readers rather than towards the rocks. My secret reader, Michèle O’Connell, for her unerring insights into my elusive psyche and her ability to remind me to play to my strengths rather than to my weaknesses. And finally my beloved wife, Claudia, without whose presence in my life this would all be mush anyway.

  ‘We are awake. Let others sleep. What today is known as history, we will abolish altogether.’

  Adolf Hitler

  ‘Nor can we ever know what visions sweeten the dreams of the crocodile.’

  John D. MacDonald, One Monday We Killed Them All

  ‘So I ask myself the question: could the religions I study teach us the art of killing the dragons in our flesh? This diabolical presence, buried within us yet constantly surfacing: is this the original sin I was taught as a child?’

  François Bizot, The Gate

  ONE

  Homs, Syria

  16 JULY 2012

  The peace demonstration was spiralling out of control. John Hart had been a photojournalist for fifteen years, and he was attuned to outbreaks of negative energy. He could sense when things were about to turn bad. It was why he was still alive.

  Hart elbowed his way to the front of the crowd and began taking pictures, switching focus and emphasis as instinctively as he switched cameras. There was a time limit to this one, and he needed to get his material in the can before the mob began to search for scapegoats. He had hidden his Kevlar vest and flak helmet behind a wall, but he still stood out from the pack. He had three different cameras slung around his neck and a separate rucksack for his iPad and lenses. If even one man singled him out for special notice he would need to run. Hart was nearing forty, and he couldn’t run as fast as he used to.

  Shots rang out. They were single spaced and ordered, as if whoever was firing had a specific agenda – a sniper, or someone firing a sequence of warning shots. The crowd surged in their direction.

  Hart had seen such a thing before. It was a bad sign. It meant that people no longer cared what happened to them. That they were relying on the sheer force of their numbers to protect them.

  Hart allowed himself to be swept towards the side of the avenue. He smelt tear gas. He veered down a side street that ran parallel to the main avenue. Almost immediately he found himself running alongside a gang of about thirty young men, their faces covered. Some were talking into mobile phones. There was organization of a sort here, he decided. And intent. He would shadow them and wait to see what happened.

  Hart and his companions emerged onto a semi-derelict square. The area had recently been subjected to either a bombardment or a concerted tank attack. Sheet metal and crumbling concrete amplified the moonscape effect. The sun glistened off a field of broken glass.

  Hart sidestepped alongside the young men, taking pictures all the time.

  A yellow Peugeot 205 breasted the far corner of the square at breakneck speed, struck a lump of concrete and flipped over.

  The group changed direction like an animal scenting prey.

  A man climbed out of the shattered front door of the Peugeot. Blood masked his features. When he saw the crowd surging towards him he made the most disastrous decision of his life. He took out his pistol.

  There was a collective roar. The group turned into a mob. Their focus, once random, became explicit.

  The man fired three shots into the air. The mob stuttered a little and then regrouped. It began hurling bricks, stones and lumps of concrete as it ran. Hart realized th
at no one was in the mood to pay any attention at all to the word PRESS stencilled onto the Peugeot’s roof in both English and Arabic.

  He positioned himself on a pyramid of shattered concrete and began taking photos. He knew better than to involve himself in what was happening. He was a veteran of the siege of Sarajevo. Of the troubles in Sierra Leone and Chechnya. Of the war in Afghanistan. Photographers didn’t make history – they recorded it. That was set in stone. You kept your nose the hell out.

  It was then that the woman stumbled into view and overturned all his certainties. She had been sitting in the back seat of the Peugeot typing copy onto her iPad, which she was clutching to her chest like a talisman. Hart recognized her despite the Kevlar vest and the padded helmet with her blood group stencilled onto the front in indelible white ink. It was journalist Amira Eisenberger.

  Hart had known Amira for ten years. They had slept together in Abidjan, in Cairo and in Baghdad. Once they had even shared a fortnight’s leave on the Kenyan island of Lamu, following which Amira had briefly fallen pregnant. The on/off nature of the affair had suited them both. No ties. No commitments. Falling in love in wartime is painless. The hard part was to pull it off when peace broke out again.

  Hart shifted his cameras onto his back and sprinted towards the mob, shouting. The driver was dead. The mob was focusing all its attention on the woman.

  One youth made a grab for Amira’s iPad. She tried to hold onto it, but the boy cuffed her across the face with the back of his hand and sprinted off with his prize. He loosed a kick at the battered body of the driver as he ran past.

  Another man, slightly older than the others, picked up the driver’s pistol. He forced Amira onto her knees, threw off her helmet and put the pistol to her temple.

  ‘No!’ shouted Hart. ‘She is a journalist. She is on your side.’

  The mob turned towards him as one.

  Hart waved his Press Pass above his head. He spoke in halting Arabic. ‘She is not responsible for what her driver did. She supports your revolution. I know this woman.’ He was counting on the fact that some of the men would have seen him shadowing them and taking pictures. That they might be used to him by now. Might sense that he didn’t work for Assad or the CIA. ‘I know her.’

  They made Hart kneel beside Amira. Then they took his cameras and equipment bag.

  Hart knew better than to argue. Three cameras and an iPad weren’t worth a life. He would buy them back on the black market when things quieted down again. That was the way these things were managed.

  ‘You are spies dressed as journalists. We shoot you.’

  ‘We are not spies,’ said Amira, also in Arabic. ‘What this man says is true. We support your revolution.’

  Amira’s use of their language wrong-footed the men.

  ‘Show us your Press Card.’

  Amira felt in her breast pocket and took out her pass.

  The older man raised his glasses and held the pass so close to his eyes that it was clear that he suffered from extreme myopia. ‘It says here your name is Eisenberger. This is a Jewish name. You are a Jew.’

  ‘My first name is Amira. My father is Arab.’

  ‘But your mother is a Jew. You have chosen to carry her name. You are a Zionist. You are an Israeli spy.’

  Hart knew that he and Amira were doomed. Nothing could save them. The man holding the pistol had a thin mullah’s beard and was an acknowledged leader. As Hart watched, he cocked the pistol.

  The snap and fizz of incoming machine-gun fire echoed around the square. The crowd unfolded in all directions like a flower in the wind.

  Hart threw himself onto Amira just as the man with the pistol took aim. Why did he do it? Instinct? Knight errantry? Because Amira had briefly – ever so briefly – carried his child? The bullet would probably pass through his unprotected body and kill Amira anyway. What a stupid way for both of them to die.

  The pistol clicked on an empty chamber. The man with the beard called on Allah to witness the uselessness of the dead driver’s gun.

  Hart turned round and looked at him.

  The two men locked gazes.

  Hart stood up and approached the man.

  The man put the pistol to Hart’s forehead and pulled the trigger a second time.

  Nothing happened. The magazine had contained only three bullets, and the dead driver had exhausted them with his warning shots.

  Hart put his hands round the man’s neck and began to squeeze. Amira told him later that he had been shouting, but he had no memory of this. He only knew that a red mist descended on him and that his gaze turned inwards, like a man on the verge of death. Like a dead man living.

  Syrian government soldiers dragged the two men apart a few moments later. At this point the man who had tried to kill both him and Amira was still very much alive.

  Afterwards, when he and Amira passed through the square again on their way to the airport following their formal ejection by the Syrian authorities, they saw the man’s body crumpled against a wall as if he had been washed there in the aftermath of a tsunami. When they asked the military driver what had happened, he told them that the man had tried to escape and had been inadvertently crushed to death by a lorry.

  Hart sat back against the side of the van and closed his eyes. What is this madness? he asked himself. Why am I here? Why am I still alive?

  When Amira reached across to touch his arm, Hart shook his head.

  TWO

  The Saleph River, Cilician Armenia, Southern Turkey

  10 JUNE 1190

  Johannes von Hartelius had never seen a man in full armour fall into a raging river before. Much less the Holy Roman Emperor.

  Dressed only in a linen undershirt and a pair of sheepskin breeches, Hartelius sprinted to the riverbank and plunged into the icy water. He was instantly swept towards the central current, fifty feet above the spot where Frederick Barbarossa and his wounded horse were still struggling to stay afloat. The king’s charger was no match for the combination of man and armour that was clinging in deadweight to the pommel of his saddle. Added to which the crossbow bolt in the stallion’s neck, from which blood now jetted, was weakening him by the minute.

  Hartelius, a poor swimmer at the best of times, spooned the water towards his chest, alternately lunging forwards and then throwing out his arms like a man welcoming a loved one back to his bosom. Both the king’s squires, swiftly separated from their own mounts, had already succumbed to the river. Hartelius was alone with the sixty-seven-year-old monarch, but still more than twenty feet to his rear. Behind him, he could sense the clamour of the ambush diminishing, to be replaced by the greedy roar of the river.

  Riding parallel to him, and on opposite sides of the bank, were the two Turkish crossbowmen who had targeted the king. Hartelius swung onto his side as first one and then the other crossbowman let fly. The first quarrel ricocheted off the surface of the water a few feet from Hartelius’s head, whilst the second quarrel sliced through the gathering twilight in a looping downward arc. Hartelius threw himself backwards in an effort to avoid the missile, but the bolt split the skin on his right cheek as cleanly as a hatchet splits wood.

  Hartelius sank beneath the surface of the river. He could feel the water’s icy grip numbing his wound; see the crimson spread of his blood being snatched away by the current against the sky’s fading light. When he resurfaced, the king’s horse was swimming alone – the king was nowhere to be seen. Hartelius arrowed downwards, but the cold and the shock from his wound were beginning to tell on him. He tried three more times to force himself towards the river bottom, but at each attempt his dive was shallower and less effective than before. He now knew himself to be well beyond the place where the king had become separated from his horse. And there was no possible way back against the current.

  Hartelius let his head fall forward between his arms and allowed the river to take him. Thirty feet away he could see the bracketing crossbowmen hesitate and look backwards. Their main target was dead – no ma
n could withstand the actions of such a current whilst dressed in full armour. With darkness falling, was an injured and half-naked knight with no accoutrements worth their further efforts, when the real plunder lay back at the camp? The Turks reined in their horses and retraced their path along the opposing banks of the river, first at an amble, then at a canter.

  Had the crossbowmen really not recognized that their victim had been the Holy Roman Emperor himself? Hartelius concluded probably not. The ambush had commenced just a little before dusk. And for a good three days now the king had no longer been accompanied by the telltale flock of ravens whose sudden absence, for many, had portended his coming death.

  The ravens and the Holy Lance of Longinus had between them constituted unimpeachable proof to the faithful that the king’s authority was directly vested in him by God. The sacred Lance was the very one used by the half-blind Roman centurion, Longinus, to spear Christ’s side on the Cross. History had construed this as a final act of pity to prevent the symbolical breaking of Christ’s bones by the followers of the Israelite High Priests, Annas and Caiaphas. Since then, the Holy Lance had served as emblem to all the great leaders of Germany and the Western Kingdoms. Now the ravens were gone and so was the king. And the Holy Lance had doubtless sunk to the bottom of the Saleph River, never to be recovered.

  Hartelius had little choice but to submit to the current and allow it to carry him along. Far ahead he saw the king’s stallion struggle towards the far bank and collapse onto a sand spur. The horse’s body spasmed once, its legs sweeping the air like those of a newborn foal, and then it died. He struck out towards the spur. He was beginning to die of cold himself. There was only one possible solution to his condition.

  Hartelius crawled onto the spur and dragged himself towards the horse. The king’s sword was still attached by its scabbard to the saddle. He levered it out and used its blade to disembowel the stallion. The hot blood and stomach contents of the horse gushed over his feet. He tore out the Turcoman’s gut sack and intestines, and then, still gagging, he eased himself inside the animal’s vacated belly. He could feel the heat from the Turcoman’s body enveloping and cradling him as if he were a child.