Free The Sword of the Templars by Paul Christopher

said. “That’s where it gets us.”

8
    Driving Peggy’s rental, they crossed the border at Niagara Falls and turned northeast, roughly following the shore of Lake Ontario under cloudless summer skies, reaching the city of Toronto ninety minutes later. Neither Peggy nor Holliday had ever been there, and both were surprised at the city’s size. In fact Toronto was the fifth-largest metropolitan area in North America, with a population of something over six million, spread out along twenty-nine miles of Lake Ontario and occupying 229 square miles of territory that had once belonged to the Algonquin Indians.
    To Peggy Blackstock and Doc Holliday it looked like a cleaner version of Chicago, with a modern subway system rather than the antiquated El train. There was an enormous, soaring concrete structure on the waterfront that reminded Holliday of the Seattle Space Needle on steroids and a domed stadium that Peggy thought looked like a gigantic vanilla cupcake. They booked into the Park Hyatt two blocks from the center of the city, the intersection of Bloor and Yonge where east became west and uptown became down.
    The hotel was directly across Bloor Street from the pseudo-Norman pile of the Royal Ontario Museum, complete with turrets and a grand columned entrance that made it look more like a courthouse than a place of learning. Recently some museum committee in its infinite wisdom had decided that the building needed to be modernized, and an architect had been hired. The result was a giant glass and steel, sharply pointed crystalline extension that looked like some science-fiction starship that had fallen to earth and fused itself to the old building.
    Kitty-corner to the hotel was another large building of the same vintage but with more columns. Like a lot of the property in the city center the building was part of the University of Toronto. The top floor was home to the university’s Centre for Medieval Studies, a rabbit warren of offices that might have come out of a novel by Charles Dickens, all dust and echoing corridors and creaking wooden floors.
    Steven Braintree’s office fit the profile of a Medieval History professor: stacks of books, files, and papers on every flat surface, sagging bookcases, overflowing files, cabinets, and cardboard boxes on the floor, and a dying aspidistra plant on the radiator with a single wilting purple flower straining toward the narrow grimy window. Braintree himself was something else again. He looked to be in his mid-thirties with shoulder-length dark hair, dark intelligent eyes behind a pair of fashionable Prada glasses. He was dressed in jeans and a white T covered by an expensive-looking short sleeve, green silk shirt.
    Braintree had only known Uncle Henry by reputation and a few telephone calls before their meeting in March, but he was shocked by the news of his death. According to Braintree, Henry had never discussed an actual sword on his visit in the spring, but he had seemed quite intrigued when Braintree told him of some recent discoveries in the Vatican Archives that suggested there was a complex encoding system that had first been used during the early Crusades that involved “common decryptors.” The decryptors were usually well-known passages of scripture that were common to both the sender and the receiver of the coded message. The encryptors were usually variations on the Ancient Greek “ skytale ” system.
    The skytale was a baton or wand of a particular length and diameter on which a strip of parchment would be wound, like paper on a roll. The message, sometimes in plaintext and sometimes numerically or alphabetically shifted, would be written out along the length of the baton. When it was unwound it would be incomprehensible gibberish and would only make sense again if it was wrapped around another, identical skytale . What the documents in the Vatican had described was a combination of this method, the Caesar Shift. Thriller fans might recognize it as the same