The Sword of the Templars

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“In The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown depicted the Knights Templar as being the sacred keepers of the secret of Christ’s bloodline. In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade they were portrayed as immortal guardians of the Holy Grail. In the movie National Treasure, Nicolas Cage described them as being the caretakers of a vast fortune buried under Trinity Church in downtown Manhattan. According to various religious scholars they were gatekeepers of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem after the successful conclusion of the First Crusade as well as protectors of pilgrims on their way to the Holy Land.

“Bull. The truth is the Knights Templar, this self-described Army of God, was nothing more than a gang of extortionists and thugs. As a group they were certainly the world’s first example of organized crime, complete with secret rituals and a code not unlike that of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra-the Mafia.”

Lieutenant Colonel John “Doc” Holliday, a dark-haired, middle-aged man in an Army Ranger uniform wearing a black patch over his left eye, looked out over the classroom, checking for some sort of response from his students, or failing that at least an indication of interest. What he saw were eighteen “firsties,” fourth-year students, all male, all wearing the same “as-to-class” short-sleeved blue uniform blouses with a neat triangle of snow-white T-shirt showing at the neck, all wearing the same gray trousers with a single stripe, all with the same high-and-tight haircut, all with the same sleepy, glassy-eyed expression of young men attending the last class of an academic day that had started almost ten hours before.

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