De Champagne's face reddened at the insult to his monarch. Yet he pressed on. Surely this rough knight could be made to see reason.

"De Molay, the king would show you his magnanimity. Think! You wish to die for something that in fact belongs to the Crown, to France and all of Christendom."

"Belongs? Explain to me why it belongs to Philippe."

The count could hardly contain his rage. He would relish the day when this so-called "master" and his fellows pleaded for the mercy they now spurned so arrogantly.

"You know as well as I how much gold Louis, good King Louis, sent to Byzantium in exchange for holy relics. And you know that the emperor himself agreed that Louis should have the shroud of Christ-until it was stolen away!"

The Templar waved him away.

"I have nothing to do with the trade between kings. My life belongs to God; the king may take it from me, but it belongs to God. Go and tell Philippe that I do not have this object he seeks, but that if I did I would never put it in hands such as his for any price whatsoever, including my life. I am a man of honor."

Scant hours later, Jacques de Molay, Geoffroy de Charney, and the rest of the Templars who remained in Villeneuve du Temple were arrested and taken to the dungeons of the king.

Philippe of France ordered the jailers to torture the Templar knights without mercy. They were to pay special attention to Jacques de Molay, until they secured the answers Philippe sought-namely, where the Grand Master was hiding the holy relic that bore the image of Christ.

The screams of the tortured men echoed within the thick walls of the dungeons. How many days had passed since they were arrested? The Templars had lost count. Broken on the wheel, burned with red-hot iron, their bodies flayed of skin and bathed in vinegar, some confessed crimes they had not committed, praying their agony would end. But their confessions were for naught, for their torturers continued to torment them implacably.

On occasion a man, his face concealed by a hood, watched from the shadows the suffering of the knights, these knights who had once wielded their swords and risked their very lives to defend the cross. Reveling in their torment, sick with avarice and cruelty, Philippe would signal the torturers to go on…

One evening he asked to be taken into the presence of Jacques de Molay. Broken and bloodied, the Grand Master could hardly see, but he sensed who it was beneath the hood. A smile came to his lips when the king demanded that he confess where he had hidden the Holy Shroud of Jesus.

At last, Philippe saw that it was futile to continue. De Molay would not yield. All that was left was public execution, so that the world might know that the Temple had been exterminated for all eternity.

It was the eighteenth of March in the year of Our Lord 1314 when the sentence of death was signed for the Grand Master of the Temple and those knights who had survived the interminable tortures that the king had ordered.

On the nineteenth, the city of Paris took on the aspect of a fair, for the king had ordered that before the majestic spires of Notre Dame a pyre be erected, upon which the proud Jacques de Molay would be publicly burned. Nobles and commoners alike congregated for the event, and there were rumors that the king himself would attend.

By the first light of day, the square was filled with the curious, who shoved and brawled to secure the ideal spot from which to watch the final suffering of the once mighty knights. The people always enjoyed the spectacle of the powerful of the earth humiliated- and the Temple had been powerful, though more good had come of its power than evil.

Jacques de Molay and Geofrroy de Charney were mounted on the same wagon and drawn into the square. They knew that soon their pain would end forever in the flames.

The court had put on its finest clothes, and the king laughed and joked with the ladies. He, Philippe, king of France, had done what no man had ever done before- he had brought the Temple low.

His deed would pass into the history of iniquity.

Fire began to burn the Templars' ravaged flesh. Jacques de Molay's eyes remained fixed on Philippe, and before him and the people of Paris the Grand Master proclaimed his innocence and called down divine justice on the king of France and Pope Clement, summoning them to stand with him before the judgment of God within the year.

A shiver ran down Philippe's spine as de Molay's words rang out. He trembled in fear and had to remind himself that he was king and nothing could harm him, for he had secured the consent of the pope and the highest authorities of the Church before he acted.

No, God could not be on the side of these Templars, these heretics who worshipped a secret idol, who had committed the sin of sodomy, and who were known to be friends of the Saracens. He, Philippe, king of France, was obeying the laws of the Church.

But was he obeying the laws of God?

"HAVE YOU FINISHED?"

Ana jumped. "Professor! You scared me! I was in the middle of reading about the execution of Jacques de Molay. It makes your hair stand on end. What is the judgment of God, anyway?"

Professor McFadden sighed heavily and gave her a bored look. She had been at the institute for two days, poking about in the archives and asking questions that sometimes sounded like pure nonsense.

She was bright but rather ignorant, and he'd had to give her several elementary lessons in history. Her knowledge of the Crusades and the chaotic world of the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries was rudimentary at best. But she was no fool-her academic ignorance seemed to be inversely proportional to her instincts for the pearl within a sea of information, for going straight to the heart of a story. She searched and searched and searched, and she knew where and how to find things. She grasped at a phrase, a single word, an event as she went about her anarchic research. Anything might be a clue.

He had been careful; he'd taken pains to divert her attention from those events that he knew might be dangerous in the hands of a reporter.

He pushed up his glasses and began explaining what the judgment of God was. Ana couldn't contain a shiver when the professor's dramatic rendition repeated the words of Jacques de Molay. Then he came to the payoff.

"Pope Clement died forty days later, and Philip the Fair eight months after that. Their deaths were terrible, as I've told you before. God exacted His justice.". "I'm glad for Jacques de Molay," Ana told him.

"I beg your pardon?"

"I like him. He seems to have been a good man, and fair, and Philip the Fair, as you Brits call him, anything but. You have to admit how satisfying it is that, in this case at least, God decided to exact justice, as you put it. It's a shame He doesn't do it more often. But don't you think that the Templars were behind those unpleasant deaths?"

"No, not at all."

"Why? How can you be so sure?"

"There is detailed documentation on the circumstances of the king's and the pope's deaths, and I assure you that you will find no source that suggests, even as speculation, the possibility that the Templars avenged themselves. Besides, it's not the way the Templars lived or acted. With all you've read, you should realize that."

"I'd have done it."

"It?"

"Organize a group of knights to assassinate the pope and Philippe."

"Perhaps so. But the Knights Templar would never have allowed themselves such behavior. They killed in pursuit of their duty, as they saw it. But never for revenge."

"Tell me what this treasure was that the king was after. According to the archives, he'd already taken virtually everything. Yet Philippe insisted that Jacques de Molay hand over a 'treasure.' What treasure was he talking about? It must have been something concrete, something of great value, right?"