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green of England.
    Dumbfounded, she scanned the horizon, unable to see a house or building. Or any structure that suggested human habitation.
    The warm sunshine heated her face, inciting a second wave of nausea. She waited a few seconds for the queasy roiling to abate before she began to hurriedly extract jagged pieces of glass out of the frame. She needed to remove all of the remaining pieces before she shimmied through the window. Otherwise, she’d cut herself to ribbons.
    ‘Sod it!’ she muttered under her breath, pricking her thumb.
    About to wipe away the crimson blob, she instead kept plucking shards and flinging them on to the plush carpet of grass on the other side of the window frame.
    Stay focused and finish the job!
    Tossing aside the last piece of glass, she put her hands on the frame. Ready to hoist herself through the cleared opening, she suddenly heard the door open.
    ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ a deep voice snarled in English.
    Before Anala could react, she was grasped by the waist and yanked backward, the irate captor flinging her on to the mattress. She caught only a blurred glimpse of a dark-skinned, dark-eyed man before she saw the balled fist that, in the next instant, painfully connected with her jaw.
    The assault happened so quickly, there was no time to scream, let alone fend off her attacker. In the span of a brief instant, Anala was hurled into an enveloping darkness.

8
     
    ‘If you must know, I had a very good reason for contacting the Vatican Secret Archives,’ Gita Patel retorted in a defensive tone of voice. ‘The only information that I could find on the Internet pertaining to Fortes de Pinós was an official prisoner list of Templar knights held at Chinon Castle in France. And that list merely indicated his name and the date that he was arrested.’
    Hearing that, Caedmon asked the obvious, ‘Which was?’
    ‘ March the eighth, 1308.’
    ‘Mmmm . . . interesting. Given that t he Knights Templar were arrested en masse on October thirteenth, 1307, Brother Fortes obviously wasn’t caught in Philippe le Bel’s original dragnet.’
    ‘Perhaps he was still in India on that particular date,’ Gita conjectured. Reaching for the stainless-steel pot, she poured the remains into her tea cup, Caedmon relieved to see that the trembling in her hands had steadied considerably. ‘According to the Maharaja plate, Fortes de Pinós was in Muziris during the latter part of 1307.’
    Having yet to touch his own drink, Caedmon stared morosely at the yellow bit of lemon peel that jockeyed for position with the melting nuggets of ice.
    Those damned Templars.
    There had been a time, many years ago while he was at Oxford, when he’d been thoroughly enamored with the white-robed warrior monks. In his dissertation he’d asserted that the Knights Templar had been exposed to ancient esoteric rites; an exposure that colored their Christian beliefs. To his horror, the head of the history department at Queen’s College denounced his hypothesis as little more than an unfounded fairy tale. Realizing that his advanced degree would not be conferred, he left Oxford, mortified by the very public put-down.
    Whereupon he’d promptly been recruited by MI5, Britain’s Security Service.
    As fate would have it, Five actively sought men like him, defrocked academics keen to prove their worth. Grateful to have a job, he’d spent eleven years in Her Majesty’s Service before returning to his first love, history. No longer concerned with how his peers might react to his controversial theories, he’d written Isis Revealed. And though many critics disagreed with the book’s premise – that the medieval Cathars of the Languedoc had been an Isis Mystery cult – Caedmon had seen the proof of it with his own eyes.
    ‘Assuming that Fortes de Pinós returned to France some time in early 1308, he would have learned that his brother knights had been arrested soon after he docked at the Templar naval harbor at New