Solomon's Throne by Jennings Wright Read Free Book Online Page B

Africa, silks from Asia, ivory, gemstones…Whatever he could sell.”
    “Slaves?” Gideon asked.
    “No, it doesn’t appear he ever sold slaves. I’m sure Mr. Xavier is glad about that, anyway.” Rei reworked her unruly hair into a messy bun. “So the bottom line is, he had enough money to get started, but he did pretty well for himself after that. And had smart kids, apparently. So the question is, what did he find, and did he leave a way for anyone else to find it?”
    “That’s definitely the question… I think we have to assume that Brother Petros’ order, or at least his abbot, is aware that there is more to this than the letter. I guess I can understand single minded obsession, but it’s hard to believe that a secret order has been hunting for this letter, which, for all intents and purposes, had disappeared and posed no threat. Not for eight hundred years… That just doesn’t make sense to me. These guys are like a cult, separated from their families and friends, single mindedly focused on this quest of theirs. The letter… it just doesn’t feel like enough to motivate the people paying the bills.” Gideon had a headache from all the possible permutations.
    “Yeah, I agree. Someone knows there’s a treasure. Someone has known all these years, since the Templars stole the letter. One of them must have said something to someone, or maybe bragged about it. Or maybe they just knew enough about the Templars to know there was probably treasure hidden somewhere. Who knows—people are always looking for the Templars’ hidden treasure. But if we’ve managed to figured it out, they certainly have by no… We just have to beat them to it.” Rei grinned.
    Gideon smiled back at her. “They don’t have you, the puzzle solver extraordinaire. And even better, they don’t know we have a copy of everything.”
    “I think the latter is better for us than my puzzle solving prowess… So I’d better get on it!” She went back to the laptop, scrolling through the pages of the journal once again.

    “Gid! I’ve got something!” Rei was yelling from the suite’s living room to the bedroom. It was 2:00 am.
    Gideon came out of the dark room in his boxers, hair spiked and eyes screwed up against the light. He staggered to the sofa. “What?”
    Rei was hyper, a combination of copious amounts of coffee and the thrill of discovery. “OK, so I realized I had to start backwards. Father Eduardo found the treasure in Goa somewhere, but then he left Goa and came back to Lisbon. It looks like his route was exactly the same on the return as it had been going, only in reverse. The only place he writes about extensively is Cape Town, and he says he stopped there on both trips. See here?” She pointed to the journal page on the screen, “He says, ‘The Cape of Good Hope has, indeed, given me hope that, beginning, our sons shall be blessed.’ The beginning… It must be where the first clue is.”
    Still looking sleepy, Gideon nodded. “I’m with you so far.”
    “Right. Now, the Templars would have traveled an overland route to India—no one sailed around the tip until Vasco da Gama in the fifteen hundreds. But Father Eduardo was going by sea, and he knew his sons would go by sea because of the business he’d started. So we can assume that he left clues along the spice route, in the places he stopped on the ships. He wanted someone to find the treasure—he’d had to leave it in Goa for whatever reason, but he wouldn’t have wanted it lost. Especially if it had some kind of religious significance. And I think he was still being watched, if not chased.”
    “Why? Wouldn’t he have lost them with all that travel and changing his name and all?”
    “Well, there are numerous mentions in the second half of the journal about seeing strange men, men who reminded him of the first one that had chased him from Portugal. He seems to elude them at times, but they always seem to be able to find him again, so they had some