The Templar Cross Read Online Free PDF Page A

d’Isoard de Vauvenargues, a count from Aix-en-Provence. As it turns out the Count de Vauvenargues family on his mother’s side goes back to Robert de Everingham, one of the early Norman Templars in England. It’s like a huge, endless jigsaw puzzle.”
    Rafi shrugged. A blond flight attendant in a natty suit and kerchief asked him if he wanted a drink. He shook his head and she shimmered off. “Okay,” he said. “So all these companies, or at least their financing, all have their origins with the Templars. That was then. This is now. What does it mean in the present? I mean, so what ?”
    “I ran through a hundred of the interconnecting companies for the first five names on that list. The majority share holdings of all one hundred companies are held by Pelerin and Cie, Banquiers Privés. Does that name ring a bell?”
    “Castle Pelerin in Israel. Where we found the Silver Scroll.”
    “The very one,” said Holliday grimly. “It is, or was, a private bank. Private banks are owned by individuals and they don’t have to declare their assets. Pretty good cover if you’re trying to hide old Templar money. There are only three people on the board of directors of Pelerin and Cie, none of whom I had ever heard of: Sebastien Armand, Pierre Pouget and George Lorelot. Between them it looked as though they controlled about a hundred billion euros in assets. That’s a whole hell of a lot of euros, pal. And that’s enough to kill for.”
    “You used the past tense—‘it looked as though’ they controlled a hundred billion euros.”
    “That’s because all three people on the board of Pelerin and Cie are dead. Armand in 1926, Pouget in 1867, and Lorelot in 1962. The only thing they have in common is that they’re in the same row in a cemetery in the village of Domme in the Aquitaine district of France.”
    “So Pelerin and Cie is a front?” Rafi asked.
    “I don’t know yet. The estates of all three men are handled by an avocat —a lawyer in the village named Pierre Ducos. It took almost eight months to track Ducos down after I started trying to decipher the notebook. He’s the person we’re going to see in France.”
    “You think he’ll be any help?”
    “I think he’s the only lead we’ve got.”

4
    Driving a rental Peugeot 407, Holliday and Rafi rolled across the Dordogne River on the centuries-old stone bridge at Cenac-et-St.-Julien and found themselves in a landscape that had changed very little since the time it had been the realm of Richard the Lionheart’s mother, Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, eight hundred years before. It was early afternoon, a day after their arrival in Paris, and the sun shone down from a perfect blue sky. Summertime in the south of France was a story-book come to life.
    With the exception of the odd highway here and there the valley of the Dordogne was the same patchwork of fields that had existed since the Middle Ages, dotted about with walled villages, hillsides dark with forest, the earth itself as black as pitch and capable of growing almost anything.
    Ahead of them the steep cliff rose from the banks of the winding river, cloaked in a protective skirt of evergreens. At the top of the cliff on a long angular plateau they could see the walls and the castle keep where more than seventy Knights Templar were imprisoned after the sudden dissolution of the Order in 1307.
    Just before the little village on the far side of the bridge they turned sharply to the right. The fields and the river were lost to view as the car plunged into the forest and began the long switchback climb up the escarpment. Craning his neck and looking up through the windshield, Rafi could barely see the base of the old city walls. In the twelfth century any attack on the fortified village would have been next to impossible without a long siege and the complete deforestation of the hillside.
    “Strange to think what the world was like when this place was built,” Rafi said as they continued upward.
    “Full