"But it isn't," Ana replied, playing the devil's advocate. 'And they would have known it wasn't. The Holy Shroud dates to the thirteenth or fourteenth century, so…"

"Yes, you're right, but it may have been represented to the Templars as authentic in the Holy Land. Back then it was hard to determine whether a relic was authentic or a fake. What seems clear is that they believed it to be real when they sent it off to be safeguarded. You're right about this, Ana, I'm sure of it. But you have to be careful; you don't get near the Templars without risk. We have a good genealogist, one of the best, and he'll help you find out if there are other leads out there. As for your current friend in the family, give me an hour or two and I should be able to tell you a bit more about him."

As Ana left Elisabeth's office with Paul, she told him she'd be back that afternoon to meet with the genealogist. She'd see then what Elisabeth had found on the man she was sure had visited his family estates in Lirey not so very long ago-Padre Yves de Charny, the secretary to the cardinal of Turin.

She wandered around Paris aimlessly, turning over in her mind everything she knew and had guessed. Around noon she sat in the window alcove of a bistro and had lunch, reading the Spanish newspapers she'd found at a kiosk on the street. It had been days since she'd had any news of what was happening in Spain or Italy. She hadn't even called her newspaper, or Santiago, although she sensed that the Art Crimes investigation must be coming to its end. She was convinced that the Templars had had something to do with the shroud, that as popular suspicions through the centuries suggested, it had been they who had brought it back from Constantinople. She remembered the night in the Dorchester in London, when it had hit her as she looked through her appointment book that the handsome French priest in Turin, the cardinal's secretary, was named de Charny. Until now she'd had no solid lead, just that it appeared that Padre Yves had visited Lirey several years ago-if there was one thing she was sure of, it was that it had been he. There just weren't that many priests so strikingly handsome that everyone who mentioned them said how good-looking they were.

It was possible that Padre Yves was related to the Templars, but was it a relation to the distant past, to long-dead knights, or to something happening now? To people-Templars-living now?

But that would mean nothing, she told herself. She could just picture the handsome priest with his innocent smile telling her that, yes, his ancestors fought in the Crusades, and that indeed his family came from the region of Troyes. And what of it? What could that possibly prove? Nothing, it proved nothing. She certainly couldn't picture him lighting fires in the cathedral. But her instinct told her that there was a thread that led somewhere-a thread leading from Geoffroy de Charney to Geoffroy de Charny that then wound in twists and circles for generations until it came to Padre Yves.

She hardly ate. She phoned Jean and felt better the minute she heard his voice reassuring her that, even if Paul Bisol was a litde strange, he was a good man, and she could trust him.

At three she went back to the Enigmas offices. When she arrived, Paul was waiting for her in Elisabeth's office.

"Well, we did turn up something," Elisabeth said. "This priest of yours belongs to a very well-connected family. His older brother was a representative to the French National Assembly and is now in the cabinet, and his sister is a justice of the Supreme Court. They come from the lesser ranks of the nobility, although since the French Revolution the de Charnys, no e, live like perfect bourgeois. Yves has protectors high up in the Vatican-Cardinal Visier-in charge of church finances, no less-is a friend of his older brother. But the bombshell is that Edouard, our genealogist, who's been working for three hours on the family tree, is almost certain that this Yves de Charny is indeed a descendant of the de Charneys, with an e, who fought in the Crusades and, even more important, is a very close descendant of the Geoffroy de Charney who was precept of the Temple in Normandy and died at the stake alongside Jacques de Molay."

'Are you sure?" Ana asked, uncertain whether to believe her or not.

'Absolutely," replied Elisabeth without the slightest hesitation.

Paul Bisol saw the doubt reflected in Ana's eyes.

'Ana, Edouard is a historian, a professor at the university. I know Jean is a litde doubtful about our magazine, but I assure you, we've never published anything we can't prove. This is a magazine that investigates enigmas of history and tries to find answers. The answers are always developed and provided by historians, sometimes aided by an investigative team made up of reporters. We have never had to print a retraction or a correction. And we never print anything we aren't absolutely sure of. If somebody has a hypothesis, we print it as a hypothesis, never as a fact.

"You maintain that some of the mishaps in the cathedral of Turin have something to do with events in the past. I don't know-we've never looked into it. You think that the Templars were the owners of the shroud, and there you may be right, just as you're apparently right that this Padre Yves comes from a very ancient family of aristocrats and Templars. You wonder whether the Templars have any relation to the accidents in the cathedral. I can't answer that question-I don't know, but I very much doubt it. I honestly don't think that the Templars have any interest in damaging the shroud, and one thing I can assure you is that if they wanted it for themselves, they'd already have it. They are a very powerful organization, more powerful than you can imagine-right, Elisabeth?"

Paul looked at Elisabeth, who nodded. Ana froze when the chair Elisabeth was sitting in moved from behind her desk and began to advance. She hadn't noticed-it looked like an office chair, but it had been fitted out to serve as a wheelchair as well.

Elisabeth stopped in front of Ana and pulled aside the shawl over her obviously useless legs.

'Ana, I don't think we-or you-have a lot of time. I'm going to give you our part of the story whole, right now. I'm Scottish-I don't know whether Jean told you. My father is Lord McKenny, and he knew Lord McCall. You've probably never heard of him. He's one of the richest men in the world, but you'll never see him in the newspapers or on TV He lives in a world that allows entry only to the fantastically rich and powerful. Although he spends most of his time in London, he has a castle, an ancient Templar fortress, located on the west coast of Scotland, near the Small Isles. But no one from the general public is ever invited there, and it's staffed by tight-lipped professionals from other places. We Scots are given to legends, and there are quite a few about Lord McCall. Some of the villagers who live near the castle call it Castle Templar, and they say that from time to time men arrive in helicopters to visit, among them members of the English royal family and other noble and well-connected families from around the world.

"One day I was telling Paul about Lord McCall, and it occurred to us that we ought to do a story on the Templar estates and fortresses all across Europe. A kind of inventory, you know: find out which ones are still standing, who owns them, which ones have been destroyed over the course of the centuries. We thought it would be great if Lord McCall would let us visit his castle. We started working and at first we didn't have many problems. There are literally hundreds of Templar fortresses, most of them in ruins. I asked my father to talk to McCall to see if he'd let me visit his cas-de and photograph it. But my father got nowhere- McCall was always very polite, but he always had some excuse. I was determined not to take no for an answer, so I decided to try to persuade him myself. I called him, but he wouldn't even come to the phone-a very polite secretary informed me that Lord McCall was away, in the United States, so he couldn't receive me, and of course the secretary had no authority to allow me to photograph the fortress. I insisted that he let me at least come to the castle, but the secretary wouldn't budge- without Lord McCall's permission, no one would set foot on the estate.