Besides, there was no way the sort of money Lang had in mind would stay a secret. It took little imagination to conjure up the hordes of solicitors lining up to inundate him with timeshares, questionable securities, even more doubtful charities and the rest of the telemarketing inventory. He could also see the IRS salivating at the prospect of taking a large part of the money to staunch the eternal government hemorrhage. A charitable foundation both memorialized Janet and Jeff and let Lang spend a huge amount wherever he thought Janet and Jeff might have wanted, perhaps for children like Jeff in poverty-ridden countries.

Silver Hair smiled coolly. "A true philanthropist, just like your fellow Atlantan Ted Turner."

"Better. I didn't marry Jane Fonda."

It was not lost on Lang that the other man hadn't squawked about the price, a sure indication he should have asked for more. Instead, Lang said, "One more thing…"

"There always is," the Templar said, his tone bristling with sarcasm.

"You got me blamed for a murder in Atlanta and another in London. I want to read in the London Times and the Atlanta Journal that those murders have been solved, the culprit arrested."

Silver Hair was looking around for a· place to drop his cigarette. He finally ground it out on the stone floor. "That might be difficult."

"I'm not stipulating that it has to be easy. You've got people who're willing jump out of windows, you can sure as hell find somebody to take those raps."

He gave Lang a nod, an acknowledgement this request, too, would be met. "And for this, we get to know who has the letter?"

Lang shook his head. "I might have been born at night, pal, but not last night. The letter's location stays with me. I've got too much to live for. Besides, you know I won't go public with your secret; it would end the funding for the foundation."

"We all die, Mr. Reilly. What happens then?"

"If the foundation is to survive me, so will your secret, a risk you'll have to take, that I'll make provisions not to endanger the annual funding of the charity."

The Templar looked at Lang for a moment as if trying to make up his mind about something. "For a half billion dollars a year, Mr. Reilly, I'd think I'd be entitled to hear exactly how you found the tomb. Most of it we know. But the rest… I'd hate to have to be paying more money if someone else…"

"Fair enough," Lang said. "You know about the Templin diary. That indicated whatever the secret was, it Was located in the southwest of France. It was through the painting, or rather the picture of it, that I finally figured it out. The inscription made no sense, ETINARCADIAEGOSUM. One too many words. I guessed it might be a word puzzle, anagram, so I rearranged the letters." Pulling a city map out of a pocket, Lang wrote on the margin. "I rearranged the letters like this:

Et in Arcadia Ego (Sum)

Arcam Dei Iesu Tango.

Arcam, tomb, objective case.

Dei, God, dative case.

Iesu, Jesus, possessive.

Tango, I touch.

" 'I touch the tomb of God, Jesus: is what I made of it. As long as the Poussin is around, somebody else is just as likely as I was to figure that out."

"Since you, er, found our secret, all copies of the painting have been destroyed. The original is in the Louvre."

"Okay," Lang said, "since this is question-and-answer time, I've got one for you. How did you, the Templars, find out about the tomb in the first place?"

Silver Hair took out another cigarette. "Very well, then. When we held Jerusalem, one of our number came across documents, ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, it's called today, scratched on parchment, much like the Dead Sea Scrolls. A petition in which Joseph of Arimathea and Mary Magdalene asked Pilate for leave to depart for another part of the Roman Empire, taking the corpse of Jesus with them for reburial. Written across that parchment was approval in Latin.

"Our long-ago brethren recognized the places and rivers in that document and found the tomb, something that would have been an embarrassment to the Church, as Christ's corporeal body supposedly ascended into heaven. The Vatican saw the wisdom of-ah-paying us to guard this secret."

"Why didn't the Vatican simply destroy the tomb and its contents?" Lang thought he had given Gurt the correct reason but he wanted to know for sure.

The man regarded the end of his cigarette. Thinner and longer than any brand Lang had seen, he would have bet it was made to order. The Templar took a long drag before answering. "And commit the ultimate sacrilege, defiling the tomb of Christ? Better the pontiff should have exhumed Saint Peter and thrown him into the Tiber. Bad enough the body of Our Savior had not ascended, that the Gnostics had been right all along. Besides, the pope only saw part, of the documents we found. Where Joseph and Mary actually went, we kept to ourselves."

This was the weirdest conversation Lang had ever experienced. He was sitting in the ruins of an ancient temple, conversing like two baseball fans discussing batting averages with the man who had been at least indirectly responsible for the deaths of what family he had-the first person he had truly wanted to kill. And the one person he knew he would not.

"For such a valuable secret, you left a lot of clues lying around. You explained Poussin's painting, but the cross by the side of the road that lines up with the statue?"

"A relatively modern addition, but a clue for those who know what they are searching for-only Templars until you. We may need to remove one or both markers."

The man shifted his seat on the rock, grasped his knees and seemed to be waiting for Lang's next question. The son of a bitch was enjoying this, bragging on the cleverness of the order. Lang not only wanted to kill him, but he would have enjoyed doing it with his hands around the bastard's throat, watching-the life leach out of that arrogant face.

Lang's rational self told him that he would be better off to learn what he could. "You must have a pretty large organization to have tracked the painting from London to Paris to Atlanta."

The other man exhaled smoke tinged with red from the lights. The illusion looked as though he were breathing blood. Stephen King would have loved it here. "Not large but very, very efficient. You don't keep an international organization secret for seven centuries without being efficient."

These people, or at least this one, weren't overcome with humility, just as Pietro had observed seven hundred years before.

"Like the Mafia," Lang said.

The corners of the Templar's mouth turned down in disdain and he sniffed at the comparison, totally missing Lang's sarcasm. "Come now, Mr. Reilly. The Mafia is hardly secret, hasn't been for forty years. And most of its members are in prison-or about to be. No, Mr. Reilly, we are much more efficient. We have brothers in every western country, influential members of their societies. Two heads of state, leading politicians. Education, commerce, science. Any field you choose, we have members not only in it but dominant. And sufficient wealth to buy half the world's nations, General Motors, any other large corporations you care to name. Or politician. There has been no single foreign policy in the Western world we have not orchestrated. We cause conflicts including war when it benefits us and peace when it does not."

Now there was a comforting thought.

Or the man was crazy, megalomania on steroids. Worse, he might not be crazy. But if half of what he was saying was true, every conspiracy nut in the world was, in fact, an optimist.

Lang had forgotten how cold he was. He stood, stretching joints that were beginning to ache with the damp chill. "As soon as I see the articles in the papers, I'll e-mail instructions about the money, where to send it. Oh yeah, if you've got someone on the papers, thinking about fabricating a story, don't. I get arrested, the Templars'll be the biggest story of the century, maybe the millennium."