Free The Templar's Code by C. M. Palov Page A

birdies will have to come to the kitchen. All he had to do was lie in wait.
    About to slip his shoes back on, Saviour saw something out of the corner of his eye—a small metal door in the middle of the kitchen wall. The panel box for the electric circuit breakers. Even more perfect.
    He softly padded across the kitchen and opened the gray metal door.
    The last piece of the plan just fell into place.

CHAPTER 17
    “I’m casting my vote for bonkers,” Edie stated for the record, suspecting that Jason Lovett was spinning an imaginary web. “The hunt for the fabled Templar treasure makes for a great Hollywood movie, but it’s just an urban legend.”
    “Many legends have a basis in fact,” Caedmon was quick to inform her just before he pressed the Start button on the digital voice recorder.
    Now this is where serendipity and Sarah Sanderson come in. Within days of meeting Tonto Sinclair, I got a text message from a woman I used to date at Brown. Sarah suggested that I check out a centuries-old circular stone tower that’s located on a knoll overlooking the bay in Newport, Rhode Island. A local oddity, nobody’s ever been able to figure out who built the damned thing. Although—and this is where the story gets interesting—the Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazano made mention of the circular tower when he explored Rhode Island in 1524. Verrazano is credited with being the first European dude to come ashore in New England. Curious as hell, I drove to Newport to check out the stone tower for myself. A careful examination of the site convinced me the tower had been built in the fourteenth century by the Knights Templar.
    Certain there was a connection between Yawgoog, the Newport Tower, and the Templars, I asked Tonto Sinclair if he knew where exactly Yawgoog and his extended family had lived. While he didn’t know the location of Yawgoog’s cave, he was able to show me where the family maintained an aboveground settlement. As with the carved boulder, the settlement was located in the Arcadia Wilderness Area. Anxious to conduct a field search, I rented a cottage that was conveniently situated at the crossroads just outside the park entrance. Since it’s off-season, I pretty much have the place all to myself. That enabled me to set up a large site perimeter without having to worry about nosey rangers and curious hikers.
    On my preliminary field walk of the site, I discovered slightly raised patterns on the ground surface. A little digging revealed that a substantial rubble-work structure, probably a fortification wall, had been erected at the northwest corner of the site. I’m guessing that in its heyday a settlement complex, covering a ten-acre swath, had been built at Arcadia. Although for some unknown reason, all visible traces of the settlement have been obliterated.
    Needing to prove that this was a Templar settlement and not an Indian village, I used a metal detector to scan the area. It didn’t take long before I hit gold—literally—nearly shitting on the spot when I excavated a half dozen gold coins minted in the late thirteenth century. I also uncovered bits and pieces of early sixteenth-century weaponry, a sword hilt engraved with a Maltese cross, part of a rosary with a Sacred Heart of Jesus medallion, and a silver ring. The year 1523 was engraved on the rosary medallion. I then checked the historic record and learned that there were Maltese knights aboard Verrazano’s ship the Dauphine.
    Since six gold coins and one tarnished ring does not a treasure make, I decided to bring in the heavy artillery and use ground-penetrating radar to scan below the surface. Imagine my surprise when I discovered a mass grave containing at least two hundred bodies on the outskirts of the settlement.
    Edie switched off the device. “Whoa! I didn’t see that coming,” she exclaimed, the tale having taken a dark turn.
    Caedmon’s brow furrowed. “A mass grave can mean only one thing: After more than two hundred years,