The Cathar Secret: A Lang Reilly Thriller Read online

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  THE CATHAR SECRET

  OTHER LANG REILLY THRILLERS BY GREGG LOOMIS

  The Pegasus Secret

  The Julian Secret

  The Sinai Secret

  The Coptic Secret

  The Bonaparte Secret

  The Poison Secret (January 2015)

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  THE CATHAR SECRET

  Copyright © 2014 Gregg Loomis. All rights reserved.

  This book or any part thereof may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  The Cathar Secret is a work of historical fiction. Although some events and people in this book are based on historical fact, others are the products of the author's imagination.

  Cover design: Nellys Liang

  Interior design: Kym Whitley

  Cover images: iStock

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Loomis, Gregg.

  The Cathar Secret: a Lang Reilly thriller / Gregg Loomis.

  pages cm.

  ISBN 978-1-63026-005-7

  1. Suspense fiction. 2. Historical fiction. I. Title.

  PS3612.O563C38 2014

  813'.6--dc23

  2014019220

  Printed in the United States of America

  14 15 16 17 18 19 20—0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  This book is for Suzanne

  THE CATHAR SECRET

  PROLOGUE

  Montségur

  Languedoc (Now Southwestern France)

  March 16, 1244

  GUILLAUME OF ANJOU KNEW IT WAS over. Thirty years of one-sided combat. They had butchered women and children at Carcassonne, marched them into waiting fires at St. Nazaire and Toulouse. At Béziers, the soldiers had asked Arnaud Almaric, the papal emissary, how to distinguish between good Catholics and Cathars. His reply had been, "Kill them all. God will know his own."

  And they had, down to the newest born baby.

  Cathars. Les Parfaits or Perfects, they called themselves. They had refused the tithes levied by the pope, laughed at the excommunication that followed. Honest and so peaceful, they would not fight.

  What sort of man would not fight to prevent his woman from being raped and his son from being impaled?

  Pope Innocent III had decreed a crusade against these people who despised the priesthood, ate no meat, and refused the sacraments of infant baptism and marriage. And they insisted the souls of man, and some animals, found homes in other people.

  Guillaume smiled, thinking of Apollo, his huge black Ariegeois stallion, returning from death, perhaps as a chainmail priest.

  His helmet permitted but a narrow view of the scene, particularly since he had only the one eye remaining after an encounter with a Saracen arrow. But soldiering was all he knew. As the third son of minor nobility, he had inherited no estates and he had no real desire to become a priest. The spoils of conquest gave him the only living he knew how to make. He lifted the bucketlike helmet from his head and put it on the pommel of his saddle where his buckler already hung. There would be no need of shield or sword this day. He wished he could shed his chainmail armor as easily. It was becoming uncomfortably warm.

  This was the last Cathar stronghold, and today its inhabitants had surrendered after six months of siege of the castle perched on a mountain so steep neither man nor horse could climb it without using the narrow path the enemy had so perfectly blocked. Six months of camping in rain and snow and mud so deep the horses sank into it almost to the shoulder and tents simply disappeared.

  But now the campaign and the crusade were over. Hand in hand the last two hundred or so Cathars were making their way down that accursed path, singing in their peculiar language, Occitan, in which the word for "yes" had given the region its name, Langue d'oc, language of the yes.

  Guillaume wondered idly if they would continue to sing as they were marched into the bonfires that awaited them. One thing was certain: they had no fear of death. He also wondered, somewhat more sourly, what booty would await the victors in that castle. He had heard these people despised material possessions. It was certain he had never seen one who seemed to own more than the rough jerkins and leggings they wore.

  And after today? Who knew? The only thing certain was that a fighting man with his own horse and weapons would always be in demand.

  His attention went back to the procession winding down the mountainside. He had fought the infidel in the Holy Land; he had slain the innocents in a dozen rebellious regions here in France. But he had never seen the priests so vehement as they had been toward these seemingly peaceful people.

  Was it because of the heresies the Church had described?

  Or was it something else?

  CHAPTER 1

  Campo de' Fiori

  Rome

  February 17, 1600

  IT WAS UNUSUALLY MILD FOR A winter day but still too early in the year for the flower sellers to arrive. They had given the once-open field its name, long before it had been populated by the other merchants and innkeepers. Visitors to the city had left their rooms early to assure themselves a place near the center of the square. They competed for the best views with the growing crowd of the curious, as well as the shopkeepers, butchers, and fishmongers who sold their goods here along the papal route.

  But it was not the pope who was the center of attention today. Indeed, he was not even present. Instead, the mob's attention was riveted to a fifty-two-year-old former Dominican monk. Barefoot, chained by the neck and muzzled with a wooden mask, he had been led the half mile from his prison cell in the Tower of Nona to an iron pole in the center of a pile of kindling wood. Walking beside him, monks of the Order of St. John the Beheaded had offered crucifixes for him to kiss, thereby signaling repentance and a renunciation of his fearful blasphemies.

  At each, he had shaken his head.

  The audience grew restive with anticipation as the man came closer to the stake. Burning heretics had become infrequent, only twenty-five or so in the last hundred years. They were about to witness a rare spectacle indeed.

  A glass merchant from The Most Serene Republic of Venice turned to a man in the robes of the Society of Jesus. "Is this not Giordano Bruno, the man who was examined by the Venetian Inquisition and found innocent, if misguided?"

/>   The Jesuit did not take his eyes from the unfolding events. "It is. He came to the attention of Cardinal Bellarmine here in Rome seven years ago. The man has spread his vile doctrine across Europe, giving much comfort to those who deny the authority of the Holy Father. He was even briefly in the court of that devil-spawned bastard who sits on the throne of England, Elizabeth Tudor."

  The Jesuit's tone of voice almost silenced the glass merchant, but his curiosity overcame his reluctance. "Pray tell, good father, did he not agree with Copernicus that the earth is not the center of the universe, an argument he put forth as a philosopher, not a monk? Was that not why the inquisitors in Venice found him not willfully evil?"

  The Jesuit gave the man a glare that said the morals of Venetians clearly did not meet his Roman standards. "Evil enough to relegate this world, where God sent His only son, to some celestial backwater. Today he will commence suffering the agony of hellfire for far worse. He has widely proclaimed souls are of God, that they do not journey to heaven, hell, or purgatory but pass from person to person as though some garment to be worn and worn again."

  The glass merchant watched straw being piled up to Bruno's chin and a crucifix being offered a last time. Despite the unseasonable warmth of the day, he pulled his cloak tighter about him.

  CHAPTER 2

  Hemis Monastery

  Ladakh, India

  January 1877

  HE HAD FALLEN FROM HIS HORSE and the resulting broken leg was ever more painful. He should have been more careful. After traveling through the Himalayas' narrow, icy passes, he could have anticipated his mount might slip.

  Nicolas Notovitch, journalist, political writer of international note, traveler, stuck in a Buddhist monastery hundreds of wintry miles from the nearest telegraph, unable to wire his progress to thousands of eager readers.

  At least the monks seemed to know what they were doing in treating his leg.

  The time would not be wasted.

  One of the monks spoke French, a language in which Notovitch was fluent. The Lama had produced a series of ancient scrolls in Tibetan from which the polylinguistic monk read to him each day while Notovitch took the words down in his native Russian.

  At first, he had listened and transcribed as a diversion from the pain and the boredom. Although he had converted from Judaism to the Orthodox Church years before, it had been a political move only. Jews had limited futures under the czar. He had had no passion for religion. The history and teachings of a holy man, Issa, from about AD 14 until AD 30, held little interest.

  Until the third day.

  Then Notovitch began to pay attention, very close attention. What he was hearing had worldwide implications.

  CHAPTER 3

  Monowitz-Auschwitz III

  Near Cracow, Poland

  December 30, 1944

  SOLOMON MUSTAWITZ HAD A LOT TO be thankful for. He was reminded of that every time he looked out of the window of the Arbeitseinsatz offices of the IG Farben plant at the snow-covered ground below. Groups of prisoners, wearing nothing more than the same tattered striped cotton uniforms they had been issued upon arrival, were herded from one labor detail to another, frequently leaving bloody footprints from their lack of shoes. Many, perhaps most, would not survive the winter.

  Solomon was lucky. Before the Germans had invaded Poland, he had been a mere office clerk, but he had taken a course to master the American-made IBM card-punch machines.

  Auschwitz consisted of a sprawling series of three major concentration camps, surrounded by some forty minor camps, farms, and factories. Some sort of automation of data was imperative. The need was filled by a dozen IBM punch-card machines supplied by the American company's Polish subsidiary. Four sorters and two high-speed tabulators ran twenty-four hours a day. Each prisoner had a card bearing the number tattooed on his left forearm, a card with neat, square holes that would respond to the tabulator's coded search for, say, a stonemason or carpenter.

  Happily, both the machines and their German supervisors required comfortable temperatures to operate, far warmer than the unheated barracks where Solomon returned at night. Those clapboard walls did little to stop the wind. Prisoners had only a thin, lice-infested blanket for cover. But at least Solomon was warm fourteen hours a day here in the office. And he had ample opportunity to gather up lunch scraps left by the German workers: sausage made with real meat and bread made of flour rather than sawdust. The typical prisoner ration of watery soup with a rare potato slice once a day was hardly enough to sustain life. Nor was it intended to.

  That was the cruelest part: sustaining life. Solomon's job provided just enough heat and food to allow him to think beyond the camp, to remember his wife, Rebecca, whom he had not seen in two years. Was she still alive in the women's camp or dead, her memorial being a greasy black column of smoke emitted from the ovens? The cold, the hunger, the pain inflicted by beatings for little or no reason had reduced most prisoners to an atavistic state where survival, not lost love ones, occupied every waking minute.

  Survival or willing surrender.

  Mornings began with each barracks stacking up those who had succumbed to the cold, malnutrition, or disease during the night. That, of course, was another reason Solomon's skills with the machines were sorely needed: as soon as a prisoner died, perhaps even before, a scramble ensued between his bunkmates for his clothes and blanket, ensuring the corpses piled up outside were identifiable only by the tattooed number. Removing the deceased's card from the machine was as close to a funeral as the dead got.

  Solomon knew his turn would come, but he was not yet past caring. The beatings, the unprovoked cruelty, even the dehumanizing tattoo, had failed to diminish his desire to live. Joining the stacks of dead frozen bodies one morning would be surrender, abandoning the frail spark of life to the Germans. It was the only thing he had left, and he intended to keep it.

  This morning had started like any other: shouts from the guards and kicks and blows for any prisoner who did not move fast enough to suit them. Bring out the dead, roll call while breath froze on the cheeks, and work for assignments. Solomon had duly reported to the IG Farben building as he had every morning for . . . how long? He was unsure. The days, months, and years had a way of slipping by in anonymous similarity. Was this his second winter here or his third?

  No matter. He knew today was going to be different when he entered the room where the card machines were housed. At the front was a desk usually occupied by Herr Steck, a pudgy, greasy-haired little Hessian who peered at his charges through glasses that magnified his eyes so much they appeared to make up over half of his face. Though small, Steck was given to fits of violent temper that frequently ended in a caning, some of which resulted in disability that inevitably meant a trip to the gas chambers and ovens.

  That temper had cost Solomon two teeth, but he bore no particular ill will. The incisors were already loosened by the poor diet and would have fallen out anyway, as a molar had the month before. Having them knocked out among blood and spit had saved a worse beating. Steck became nauseated at the sight of blood.

  This morning there was no sign of Steck nor his steel-tipped cane.

  Instead, a black-uniformed Sturmbannführer sat on Steck's desk, a riding crop slapping rhythmically against leather boots shiny enough to reflect the room's overhead lights. Solomon could not help but gape enviously at the fur-trimmed great coat thrown across a chair. With a coat like that, a man would never be cold.

  "You are the Jew Solomon Mustawitz?" he asked in German.

  The yellow Star of David sewn onto Solomon's blouse answered at least part of the question, but he nodded.

  "Ja, Herr Sturmbannführer."

  The German wrinkled his nose as though smelling something unpleasant. And, indeed, he might. Prisoners' personal hygiene was not a camp priority.

  "You will come with me," the officer said, turning and walking out of the card machine room. Not once did he so much as look over a shoulder to make sure Solomon was following.
r />   At first, Solomon had to force himself to walk despite legs and feet that did not want to cooperate. When a prisoner was removed from his work post, he was taken directly to the gas chambers or a firing squad. He had worried that he might become indifferent to death like so many here. Now, faced with it, he was surprised to find he cared very much. But the others, the men hauled away to their deaths, had been taken by low-level guards, or by the kapos, other inmates who cooperated with the their captors for a few stale crusts of bread and perhaps an extra bowl of that watery soup.

  But a full SS Sturmbannführer?

  His curiosity grew even more when the German crossed the barracks yard and passed the warning wire just inside the main fence. Any prisoner who even touched the inner wire was summarily shot, the only real escape from Auschwitz and one occasionally voluntarily chosen by its inmates over the stark existence in the camp.

  The winter wind cut through Solomon's tattered cotton uniform like a knife. His joints ached. The snow seeped through the soles of his paper slippers, numbing his feet to a dull, pulsing pain. He thought of the prisoners he had seen with toes black as coal dust from frostbite. The brave cut off those toes with whatever sharp edge they could find, even their own teeth. The timid ones watched the blackness spread until their entire leg became gangrenous and they found final relief in the gas chambers.

  For a moment, his discomfort was replaced by recurring curiosity. If he was not being taken to his death, then where? And for what purpose?

  At the main gate, the guard, an elderly Volkssturm replacement for the younger men who had been siphoned off to staunch the hemorrhaging Eastern Front, drew himself up in an approximation of attention. Whatever was said was lost in the wind, but Solomon and the officer passed through onto ground Solomon never expected to feel under his feet again.