The Templar Inheritance by Mario Reading Read Free Book Online

held the barrel down and fired again. He was still reeling from the unexpected recoil from the abbreviated stock. Part of his mind was idly wondering whether, if he hit the man, he wouldn’t simply explode. And was the belt packed with plastic explosive or with ‘Mother of Satan’ TATP? If the latter was the case, they would be dead in less than a millisecond. With plastic explosive they might have an outside chance of survival. And would the bomber have a dead man’s switch?
    Something tapped Hart on the shoulder and he lurched backwards. It was Nalan.
    ‘Where is he?’ said Hart, his face numb with shock.
    ‘Don’t worry. He is dead.’
    Hart stumbled forwards. He looked down at the man in his suicide vest.
    The vest was hanging open. Some of its explosive sleeves were still empty.
    Hart realized that by a miracle he had somehow managedto shoot the man through the heart. His white kurta was saturated with blood.
    ‘I killed him.’
    ‘Yes. He would have killed you. Me. Others maybe.’
    ‘Yes. I understand that.’
    Hart stood for a long time looking down at the body.
    He hardly noticed when Nalan put the ringing telephone back into his hand.

NINE
    Schloss Hartelius Lake Tegernsee, Bavaria
    15 MAY 1198
    When Johannes von Hartelius had been released from his Templar vows after saving the Holy Lance from the Saleph River, the Holy Roman Emperor’s youngest son, Frederick VI of Swabia, had decided, in his capacity as commander-in-chief of the German crusaders, that Hartelius must immediately marry. How, otherwise, could a man formerly committed to poverty and chastity start a dynasty? A dynasty that would undertake to be Guardians of the Holy Lance of Longinus in perpetuity?
    The bride chosen for the twenty-one-year-old Hartelius had been Adelaïde von Kronach, a fifteen-year-old fellow Bavarian from Upper Franconia, of impeccable pedigree and even more impeccable dowry, who had been destined for the court of the Queen of Jerusalem. Eight years into their Muntehe marriage Adelaïde had already given Hartelius four children – Grimwald, who would inherit the title Baron St Quirinus – Paulina, Agathe and Ingrid. Their fifth child was a breech birth.
    As the result of a freakishly late snowstorm, the physician called upon to oversee Adelaïde’s lying-in from outside the actual confines of her bedroom, as was the custom amongst aristocratic families, found himself and his retinue stranded across the lake from Schloss Hartelius, in Tegernsee Abbey. An inexperienced midwife and a wet nurse he had sent on ahead of him were the only people on hand to help with the birth. The midwife had never dealt with a breech birth before, and when the jet bowl and the birth girdle and the amber and coral amulets and the parchment lozenges all failed to alleviate the mother’s agony, she panicked. The child suffocated. Adelaïde needed the body to be cut out of her, but no one present was capable of doing it.
    The news of Adelaïde von Hartelius’s death in childbirth travelled swiftly around Bavaria, where anyone with an aristocratic title, or who pertained to aristocratic privilege, was related to everyone else. Outside Bavaria the news travelled a little more slowly.
    It was more than three months after Adelaïde’s death, therefore, that a messenger arrived at Schloss Hartelius with orders that the newly bereaved Baron Sanct Quirinus must present himself at Mainz, in his capacity as Hereditary Guardian of the Holy Lance, in good time for Philip of Swabia’s coronation.
    Hartelius, who had been expecting neither the call to duty nor the royal messenger, said the first thing that came into his mind. ‘Philip of Swabia? But he is the brother of the dead king. I thought the new king would be Frederick’s son,little Frederick? Has something happened to him?’
    The messenger responded more sharply than his nominal role might at first have suggested. ‘A three-year-old king of the Germans would be an impossibility, sir, as you