“Philip the Fair needed money. It was as simple as that. His kingdom depended on it. The Templar fortress was seized and, on that same night, every one of the Templars in France, all two thousand of them, were arrested. Nearly all of them were executed. That was in 1307. Four years later, in 1311, Philip reached an agreement with the Church. At the Council of Vienne, the Templar’s Order was abolished and its property transferred to the Knights Hospitallers of St. John, an order originally created to provide care and sustenance to those injured in the Crusades but that now took on the same militant function as the Templars. They in turn paid over to Philip the debt he claimed he was owed from the Templars.
“Two hundred fifty years pass, an enormous period of time from our perspective, but only a brief interval in the chronology of a family that traces its origins back to the beginning of France: the Knights of St. John defeat the Muslim leader, Suleiman II, at the siege of Malta. The leader, the Grand Master of the Knights of St. John that day in 1565, was named Jean de la Valette. Now imagine that instead of an American who-and I think this is true of most of us-can’t name all his great-grandparents, you were the direct descendant of a family like that, raised in a country whose history is measured in thousands of years. What do you look up to, what are you taught to remember? What is it you use to measure success? A better job, a better house, a more distinguished career than that of your father and his father before him? Or something that will once again change history and the world?”
By nature shy and retiring, Austin Pearce spent his days poring over statistical charts and graphs, tracking the movements of the world’s markets, and his evenings reading the histories that fewer and fewer people seemed to care about. He could act with speed and decision when the occasion required it, and he could deliver a speech that was sharp and incisive, but in private conversation, when he wanted to speak nothing but the truth, he sometimes, like most of us, found it difficult to give adequate expression to what seemed so clear in his mind. He had been trying to explain to Bobby Hart, one of the few men he knew who could look past the usual time-worn categories and grasp the essence of things, why he believed Jean de la Valette was potentially a very dangerous man and all he had managed to do was describe a rich eccentric.
“He’s a dangerous man!” he blurted out in frustration, slamming his hands on the arms of his chair, and then laughing in bewilderment at what he had done.
“More dangerous than you know.” Hart said this with such a serious expression that Pearce’s laughter died in the air.
“What do you mean-more dangerous than I know?”
“You know about Frank Morris? You know what happened?”
“Yes, of course. He was killed yesterday in prison. Terrible thing. But what does that have to do with…?”
“Morris knew about The Four Sisters. He was taking money from them, but he didn’t know until much later what they were doing. The strange thing is that it wasn’t what you just told me. According to Burdick-”
“Quentin Burdick, the reporter? What did he know about this?”
“Damn near everything, as it turns out. He started working on a story about The Four Sisters months ago.”
Astonished, Pearce gave Hart a puzzled look.
“Burdick has a nose for things like this,” explained Hart. “He has a sense when something isn’t right. There were always rumors about Constable and money, where it came from, what Constable might have done to get it. That was the story, or the start of it, but Burdick didn’t have anything, nothing he could use. Then he stumbled on the name The Four Sisters, and as soon as he had that, Constable, who had been dodging him, suddenly wanted to talk. The night before they were supposed to meet was the night the president died. That’s why Burdick went to see Frank Morris, on the chance that Morris might know something and, because he had nothing left to lose, might be willing to talk. Morris was willing to talk, all right, but it wasn’t quite for the reason Burdick thought.”
Hart was still troubled by what he had learned from Burdick just hours earlier; troubled, also, by the new dimension that had now been added by Austin Pearce. The fading sun behind him cast the remnant of his own shadow across the glistening hard surface of the desk that had stories of its own to tell. Hart had the feeling as of time running out, of things happening beyond his grasp, of a danger he could not quite define. He had to tell Pearce about the president.
“Constable did not die of a heart attack, Austin. He was murdered.”
Pearce’s face turned ash gray.
“Murdered? How? By whom?”
Hart quickly shook his head. His eyes were immediate, determined.
“I need to tell you about Morris first. Burdick went to see him out in California, in prison, and Morris told him everything. He did not know about Constable, he didn’t know how he had died, but he was almost certain that he had been killed and that it was because of The Four Sisters. Morris had taken money, not the bribery that got him convicted-that was a set-up, a frame. No, the money Morris took involved a lot more than anything they said he had done. Then Morris found out that The Four Sisters was not just interested in getting rid of obstacles to foreign investment; it was a conduit by which foreign governments could acquire a controlling interest in certain American companies, governments that wanted to influence what, as Morris put it, what we read and what we watch-books, newspapers, television, movies, everything. Morris never said anything about what you just told me: that The Four Sisters was using money from our government to finance a private war.”
Pearce grasped immediately what had happened.
“We caught it at different ends, the thread that runs through everything. It makes perfect sense. The Four Sisters uses money from a foreign source, or a set of sources, to do certain things here-buy into a company, get a controlling interest. Then it uses money it gets here-from the government, but also, perhaps, sometimes from those same companies-to do something in the Middle East someone doesn’t want the world to know about.”
Pearce narrowed his eyes into a look of concentration that with each passing moment became more intense, until his expression had changed entirely, become bitter, bleak, the look of someone close to losing faith in everything.
“He was murdered? The president of the United States? Robert Constable managed to put himself-managed to put the country-into a position where a thing like this could happen? But how did Frank Morris know, how did he find out it was murder?”
“He didn’t,” replied Hart. “He guessed. It was the only thing that made sense. When Morris found out what The Four Sisters was doing, he went to the president. Constable was the one who had first suggested that he talk to some of their people. He told him that even if it meant the end of his career, he was going to stop it, go public with the story if he had to, but stop it any way he could. Constable told him not to worry, that everything was going to be all right, that-and this drove poor Morris crazy-they hadn’t done anything wrong.
“Why Morris trusted Constable, even Morris did not know. Maybe he just wanted to believe-maybe it was the only thing he had left to hang onto-that the president of the United States, even if it was Robert Constable, would not let anyone put the country at risk. But the next thing Morris knows, he’s under indictment and on his way to prison. He knew then that if he talked, the chances were that no one would believe him and that he might get killed. He talked to Burdick because he knew it was his last chance to set things straight, and because he knew he was dying of cancer and had only a few months left to live. They killed him just hours after Quentin Burdick’s second visit. That’s what convinced Burdick that Morris was correct in his suspicion that Constable did not die of a heart attack, that he was murdered instead. I told Burdick he was right.”