Toad smiled without humor, and Ari left the subject.
“So…you’ve been quiet.”
Toad gazed at nothing for a few moments, and then asked, “Why would a Catholic priest want to know if he’s a cohen? What difference would it make to him?”
“I don’t know. All I know is that somebody carried out a Jewish ritual in that chapel—which, by the way, is called the Holy of Holies. Blood was strewn on the altar. The scapegoat was marked.”
“It could be. It is intriguing.” Toad’s bland face hid the workings inside. He was neither surprised nor disappointed that the answer was not simple. In his experience, crime involved the most complicated of motives. No crime was simple.
“Think about whoever did this. Everyone is guilty but you. You’re the real victim. The world is a standing violation of everything you cherish. You’re a soldier.”
Toad hesitated. Ari was surprised to hear Toad expound like this, but any entrance into his mind was worth taking. He leaned forward to listen.
“Think about how you carried out the shootings: all of them commando-style. To you, these were not murders—they were acts of war.” He paused. “What we have to figure out is, what is the nature of the war?”
Miner came back in the room. “They’ve just got the results on the Monsignor. Hold on—you won’t believe it. The profile of Peter Chandos shows 95 percent on the Cohanic scale.”
“The Monsignor was a Jew?” Ari cried.
“Not only a Jew, but what a Jew. An almost pure match to the cohen gadol haplotype, whatever that is.”
“A haplotype is like a fingerprint,” said Toad. “The man who died in that chapel was one of the priesthood of Israel…”
They looked at each other, wondering.
“So?” Miner asked, “What difference does it make? There are tens of thousands of Cohanic men in the world. Why should it matter that much to him? Could it have been some kind of…hobby?”
“Shor removed the sample without going through procedures. And on a high holy day.” Toad pointed out. “Why would he go to all that trouble for a trifle? Why the secrecy?”
“He’s protecting somebody. A client.”
“A very important client. So important that Shor is willing to do aven and break the law.”
Miner spoke up. “Maybe Shor knew Chandos. Maybe he was doing him a favor by profiling his DNA for him against the Cohanic type, then saw the news and decided he wanted nothing further to do with him. So, he grabbed the sample and erased all references. Simple.”
“And then casually went out to be murdered?” Ari asked sarcastically.
“Why should Shor’s murder have anything to do with Chandos? It happened elsewhere. Different building, different crime. We should be looking at the robbery instead of this religious mumbo-jumbo. Isn’t 99 percent of police work about following the money?”
All three were quiet for a moment. A draft of air from the building’s useless cooling system ruffled the piles of evidence on the table. The laboratory clock hummed overhead.
Ari wondered for a moment if chasing these ancient ghosts could end up as a fatal detour. Maybe he and Toad were overcomplicating things. Maybe the nature of this war was totally clear, and the oblique connections they had made were simply fog. Maybe it was the same old story—not a new one after all.
“Well, if Miner’s right, we’ve been going down a cul-de-sac. For argument’s sake, let’s leave off Chandos for a minute.”
“Wait.” All at once Miner was looking puzzled at the GeMscreen in his hand. “There’s another message from Sara. It looks like Chandos also had MAO-A mutation.” He spelled it out carefully and looked up at Ari, who shrugged.
“Let me see that,” Toad asked for the GeM and examined it carefully. “MAO-A mutation pre-disposes a person to aggression and violence. The head of the institute told me that. It’s their main research project right now.”
“You’re saying that killing might have come naturally to Chandos?” Ari was surprised. “I thought the man was a saint.”
“And there is still the eyelash. And the inscription on the rings,” Toad reminded them.
Miner sighed and took back the GeM. “I guess we won’t be leaving off Chandos.”
Magisterial Library of the Order of Malta, Via Condotti, Rome, 1000h
The sealed letter from Jean-Baptiste Mortimer was more than Maryse needed. The Director knew what was wanted before she asked for it and had prepared a small, elegant study for her use. A man known to her by reputation as a retired historian—and an eminent one—he closed the door silently behind him, seated her at the table, and opened a cabinet in the wall with an old-fashioned iron key. From this cabinet he drew a book, one of the most ornate she had ever seen, and carefully laid it on the table in front of her. The leather cover featured scrollwork illuminated with four figures—a lion, an ox, an eagle, and a winged angel.
The administrator smiled tensely and locked the door as he left. Maryse took out her magnifying glass and went directly to work. The book was old and broken-backed. She learned it had never been digitized and existed only in this form. Most of the writing had faded long ago. The further back in time, the more fluid it was, until it became nearly unreadable, but there were some fresher entries dating from the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth.
“Chandos…Chandos,” she murmured, her nose and eyes itching at the veil of dust that hung over the book. She was grateful for the cotton gloves that protected her fingers from the old binding. The light was dim and the script too small to read easily, so after an hour or so of examining the book she leaned her head back against the chair and rubbed her head, eyes closed, thinking through the willowy descent charts she had been studying. There was no coherent story, but the fragments of Latin next to the illuminated names were beginning to come together for her.
HIC RICARDUS CORDIS LEONIS REX ANGLORUM…
King Richard the Lion Heart of England, who in 1193 quit the siege of the Temple of Solomon. …Robert de Sablé, Grand Master of the Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, his knight companion…
HIC DOM. GULIELMUS CARNUTENSIS…
Monseigneur William of Chartres, Grand Master of the Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, knight companion, 1210…
So, this Lord of Chartres was Grand Master while the Cathedral was under construction.
HIC DOM. IACOBIMUS MOL…
Monseigneur Jacques de Molay, Grand Master of the Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, who in 1293 paid homage in secret to King Edward as companion-in-arms as his predecessors had done. The last of the Grand Masters to do so. In 1314, burned at the stake at Paris falsely convicted of heresy…
Of course, the story of de Molay was well known. The execution of the last Grand Master of the Templars was a medieval scandal.
