Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg (50 page)

“So you’re saying Steve Jobs is an alien?” Gordon scoffs, edging away from Lloyd again.

“No, not exactly... but keep an eye on Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft.”

“What–is he a Mason, too?”

“No, but he intuits the designs of the First Builder, who works in algorithms, as well as stone. We recognize him as a brother.”

There are other photographs on Lloyd’s wall that Gordon pretends to take an interest in: Lloyd in a tweed suit with Margaret Thatcher, Lloyd wearing Mickey Mouse ears with Roy Disney, Lloyd playing golf with Henry Kissinger and Gerald Ford.

“Y’know, it’s weird…” says Gordon, “but my grandmother was talking to me tonight about a Dark Brotherhood. She thinks they’re involved in political assassinations somehow. Would you know anything about that?”

“I’d say your grandmother must be a very wise old woman.”

“Yeah, well, I wouldn’t be too sure about that. She also thinks Frank Sinatra is a shape-shifting reptileman.”

“She’s right,” says Lloyd.

“What?” Gordon turns around. Lloyd is looking at him with a jaded emptiness, dead serious.

“Look–do you want the truth, or do you want to keep your so-called sanity?”

Gordon suddenly feels overheated. The werewolf fur on his neck is starting to itch. “Can’t I do both?” he asks.

“You can try.” Lloyd doesn’t sound optimistic. “Only a few have developed eyes that permit them to gaze into the face of truth and live. Perhaps you’re one of them.”

“Truth, then,” says Gordon. “What the hell.”

Lloyd settles his hoggish frame into the leather chair behind his desk and taps at his computer keyboard. A document appears on the screen. “We don’t have time tonight to take you through a complete history of Freemasonry and its alliances with other secret societies such as the Jacobins and Adam Weishaupt’s Illuminati,” he says. “You can find a wealth of that material on your own, if you’re so inclined. Since it’s assassinations and shape-shifting reptilians you’re interested in, we need to go back to the Knights Templar and their discoveries in the Middle East. Specifically–what they found in the tunnels beneath the ruins of King Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem, and what they learned from their encounters with Hasan bin Sabbah’s fanatical Islamic sect, the Assassins.”

“You’re not shy about any of this lunatic fringe stuff, are you?”

Leaning back in his chair, Lloyd obscures his face in shadow again. “So much sheer crap has been written about the Templars,” he says. “They’ve been turned into the ultimate woo-woo mystery cult. Do you know much about them?”

“Not really…” Gordon admits, “just that they were Catholic warrior-monks with a lot of strange rumors flying around them. But I read somewhere that they left the Cathars alone during the Albigensian Crusade while the other Crusaders went after them. I’ve always sort of liked them for that.”

“Ah, yes, the good men and good women of Languedoc…. Such gentle people, the Cathars. Gnostic vegetarians, if I’m not mistaken.”

“I’m pretty sure they also ate fish.”

“And if you believe the legends, they marched straight into the bonfires singing at the top of their lungs when the Crusaders burned them as heretics.” Lloyd marches his fat fingers across the scattered papers on his desk.

“Yeah, they weren’t afraid of dying,” says Gordon. “They believed Jesus was a spiritual prophet of the True God and they practiced what he preached way better than the Crusaders ever did. I don’t know why the Pope had such a problem with them.”

“As I understand it, they were getting too popular. And the Church absolutely
abhorred
the Cathar’s assertion that they didn’t need a middleman between themselves and God. Direct access to God is always discouraged by religious institutions, because such access renders those institutions irrelevant. Hence, the Inquisition. I take it you’re sympathetic to the Cathars’ beliefs?”

“I’ve read a few books on Gnosticism since my dad died,” Gordon admits. “Their whole idea that the world is too evil to have been created by a perfect, loving god–it just rings true for me. What if we’re really angels who got suckered into incarnating in these human bodies by a half-mad Demiurge, like the Cathars believed? It makes you look at life in a whole new way.”

“You should count yourself lucky you were born in this century. A few hundred years ago the Inquisition would have had you on their To Do list.”

“Like I was saying….”

“Yes, well, getting back to the Templars… they were also misunderstood in their day, as I was telling you. I fancy myself sort of an amateur medieval historian. I have a timeline here–” Lloyd points to his computer–“of significant Templar-related events. Would you care to look at it?”

“Um, sure,” Gordon says, curious. He leans over Lloyd’s desk. On the computer screen, he sees a long list of dates accompanied by brief descriptions. He takes a few minutes to scroll through it:

1095
: First Crusade launched by Pope Urban II (“God wills it!”) to wrest control of the Christian Holy Land and the sacred city of Jerusalem from the hands of Muslims. Remission of sins offered to anyone who dies in the undertaking.

1099
: Heavily outnumbered, but inspired by Peter Desiderius’ divine vision of the sacred city falling to the Crusaders after a siege of nine days (as in Joshua’s siege on Jericho), the First Crusade captures Jerusalem. Almost every inhabitant of the city massacred, some 70,000 in all, including women and children (see Muslim historian Ibn al-Athîr). Many sought shelter in the mosques at the Temple Mount where, in the words of one purported eyewitness: “the slaughter was so great that our men waded in blood up to their ankles.”

1119
: Nine knights led by Hugh de Payens present themselves to King Baldwin II in Jerusalem for the purpose of protecting pilgrims traveling to the Holy Land. After taking vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, they’re installed in the Al-Aqsa Mosque at the southern end of the Temple Mount platform, former site of King Solomon’s Temple. Hence their name: Order of the Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon – or the Knights Templar.

1127
: First Templar Grand Master Payens and other early Templars, including André de Montbard, return to Europe seeking recruits and funds. What the original nine Templars actually did during their first nine years remains a mystery. A growing consensus believes they were excavating under the Temple Mount, looking for treasure. Later archeological expeditions by Warren (1867), Parker (1911), and Ben-Dov (1968) tended to confirm this.

1128
: The Council of Troyes recognizes the Knights Templar as an official military and religious order. A Papal Rule for the order is prepared by Bernard of Clairvaux (canonized as St. Bernard in 1174), founder of the Cistercian Order, nephew of André de Montbard, and enthusiastic cheerleader for the Templars during their first few decades of existence. Running to seventy-two articles, the Rule defines the Templars’ dual roles as knights and monks. The Pope gives the Templars his blessing and sanctions contributions to the order. Thus begins their unprecedented rise to wealth and prominence.

1129
: Grand Master Payens returns to the Holy Land with 300 new knights, guarding a large contingent of pilgrims along the way. The Templars then join in an ill-fated attack on Damascus led by King Baldwin II. Their allies in this attack are Nizari Ismailis – also known at that time as the Assassins.

1139
: By now the Templars own land in France, Germany, England, Scotland, Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Austria. Pope Innocent II, a protégé of Saint Bernard, decrees that wherever the Templars own property, they are answerable to no one but the papacy. He exempts them from all taxes, tithes, and tolls and allows them to levy taxes and accept tithing on their own land. He also grants them the unusual right to build their own churches.

1145
: Pope Eugenius III issues the bull Quantum praedecessores, calling for the Second Crusade. Saint Bernard preaches the Second Crusade in France and Germany. The pope also sends him to Languedoc to preach against Catharism, but Saint Bernard reports back: “No sermons are more Christian than theirs, and their morals are pure.” This later leads to speculation that Saint Bernard and the Templars secretly shared Cathar beliefs.

That’s just the first fifty years…. There’s more, but Gordon has seen enough. What little he’s read about the Templars is coming back to him and Lloyd is only too happy to fill in the rest:

“By the end of the twelfth-century, the Templars had become the world’s first multinational corporation. They’d built out an enormous financial support network with headquarters in London and Paris–and they were only getting bigger. They were well on the way to becoming the first modern bankers, predating the Medicis and the Rothschilds. Before they were betrayed in 1307 by King Philip the Fair–whom they easily could have bankrupted–they controlled one of the most powerful financial institutions the Western world has ever seen.”

“No wonder you’re so into these guys.”

“They were brilliant!” Lloyd enthuses. “People donated land and funds to the Templars because they wanted to secure their immortal souls–a rube’s game if there ever was one. The Templars organized those holdings into productive communities called preceptories. They also built commanderies along all the major trade routes. Then they invented what we now think of as traveler’s checks–letters of credit, written in cipher, that could be redeemed for local currency at any Templar outpost.”

“
Templar Express
. Don’t leave home without it,” says Gordon, thinking of the American Express commercials featuring Karl Malden–the big-nosed actor who played a cop on the hit TV series, “The Streets of San Francisco.”

“Joke all you want, but it solved a huge problem. Travel was extremely risky at the time. There were bandits everywhere. But the Templars were trusted. No individual knight could grow rich–they’d all taken the vow of poverty, remember? But that didn’t mean the Order itself couldn’t prosper…. The Templars had gotten used to handling large sums of money for their war effort. Now, for a small service fee, someone could deposit enough money to cover their travel expenses at a Templar establishment in Paris, say, and then pick it up again, with a letter of credit, in Jerusalem–or just about anywhere.

“Those service fees, along with income from their preceptories, started piling up. The Templars put their money to work, making loans to kings and the Holy See. The Church had a ban against usury at the time, but the Templars somehow got around that. They were innovators in every field they got into: banking, farming, shipping, building, trade fairs–you name it. Almost entirely by their efforts alone, they were pulling the European economy out of the Dark Ages.”

“I thought this was supposed to be about a treasure hunt and secret meetings with the Assassins,” Gordon says.

“I’m getting to that. Don’t worry…” says Lloyd. “But the question you should be asking yourself right now is: ‘Where did all that specialized knowledge come from?’”

“Okay… so where did all that specialized knowledge come from?” Gordon asks, playing along.

“Some people think the Order of Assassins had something to do with it,” Lloyd says, “and I tend to agree with them. It’s a matter of historical record that numerous pacts, tributes, and treaties existed between the Templars and the Assassins. Both were at war against Saladin and the Seljuk Turks, and you know the old saying: ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend.’ The Templars are thought of as the first modern militia, while the Assassins are considered the world’s first terrorists, using stealth and cunning to kill their richer and more powerful adversaries–often from within their own strongholds. The two orders had a mutual respect for each other. They might have freely exchanged knowledge during the many years when they weren’t in direct conflict with each other.”

“They could’ve written a great self-help book together:
How to Win Friends Like the Pope and Assassinate Your Political Enemies
. Or:
Nurturing the Murderous Religious Fanatic Within
.”

“Funny,” Lloyd grumbles, flicking a bead of sweat off his brow. “However, there was much more to the Assassins than just targeted killings. The sect’s original leader, Hasan bin Sabbah, was a renowned Persian mystic and scholar. He’d been inducted into the Brotherhood of the Grand Lodge of Cairo–a repository for esoteric knowledge in mathematics, astronomy, and theology passed down from the days of Adam and Noah. In 1090, by some clever ploy, Hasan took possession of the mountain fortress at Alamut, 6,000 feet above the Caspian Sea near modern-day Tehran. There, he and his followers lived by the motto: ‘Nothing is true, everything is permitted.’”

“Sounds like the set-up for a non-stop orgy,” says Gordon.

“That came later, in 1164, when one of Hasan’s successors, Hasan II, proclaimed the
Qiyama
, or Great Resurrection–an invitation to experience paradise on Earth, free from the strictures of morality or legalism. The original Hasan was actually quite a strict disciplinarian. He had his own son executed for drinking wine, to cite just one example.”

“I guess everything wasn’t permitted after all….”

“I suppose not,” Lloyd says. “However, Hasan wasn’t above using drugs and sex as recruitment techniques. According to legends propagated by Marco Polo–and here I quote–” Lloyd squints at his computer and reads aloud as a new document appears on the screen:

“–‘Whenever the Grand Master of the Assassins discovered a young man resolute enough to belong to his murderous legions, he invited the youth to his table and served him a potion of hashish. Under the spell of deep sleep induced by the drug, the young man was secretly transported to the Master’s pleasure gardens where, upon waking, he imagined he had entered the Paradise of Mahomet. Trellises of roses and fragrant vines covered pavilions of jade and porcelain furnished with Persian carpets, soft divans, and Grecian embroideries. Delicious drinks in vessels of gold and crystal were served by young girls whose dark-daubed, unfathomable eyes caused them to resemble those virginal divinities known as the Houris. After the young man had enjoyed to satiety all the joys promised by the Prophet to his elect, he was drugged once more and returned to the presence of the Grand Master. There he was informed that he could perpetually enjoy the delights he had just tasted if he would take part in the war on the infidel as commanded by the Prophet. “Go thou and do this thing,” said the Grand Master, presenting the youth with a golden dagger, “and when it is done my angels shall bear thee to paradise.” And the assassin would go and perform the deed willingly.’”