Chapter 07
Corcoran Gallery of Art
East St. Entrance
Washington DC
June 2012
Morgan couldn't help it, he nearly fell over laughing. "Yes you do!" Okay, now it all made perfect sense.
"Morgan?" Spencer stopped in his tracks and stared at his friend. "What are you doing here?"
"We recruited him." Benson said, lifting his glass in a toast to Morgan. "We finally found a Nouoroa you will not lose, ignore, run off or terrify."
"I do not need a Nouoroa!"
"Yes you do!" Morgan finally managed to stop laughing long enough to catch his breath. "Yes you do. Man you have been shot, set on fire, held hostage, blown up..."
"I was not!"
"You were! I was blown up with you! Twice!"
"Blown...?" Benson put a hand up. "No no. Do not tell me. I don't want to know. See my hair? This is all because of him over the past nine years. Every other Knight of the Blue leads a quiet life, academia, maybe they practice law or they join the church. But this one..." He took a long pull on his drink.
"I can take care of myself!" Spencer insisted. He switched languages and said something else.
While Morgan tried to stop laughing the two men had a heated discussion in whatever language that was, clearly over the topic of minders and the need for such. But Benson finally ended it. "Enough!" He said. "This came from the GM herself! This is a direct order Knight! Live with it!" He turned to Morgan. "Your assignment, Knight, is simple. Keep his central nervous system functioning. Period."
"Just that?" Morgan asked. "Not the rest of it?"
"We don't need the rest of it." Benson said, "Welcome aboard Agent Morgan, and good luck." He gave Spencer one last glare. "Now get out of my office!"
They got out of his office. Morgan stopped all questions until they were in the car. Then, "How much of that was an act?"
"Define act. I've tried not to have a Nouoroa since Gideon left. If I did they would want to keep track of my movements and what we do is hard on civilians. Unfortunately histrionics have proven to be the only way to get John to listen." Spencer replied. "Not that he has given that you're here."
"Gideon?" Okay, this conversation was going to blow his mind.
"Yeah, he was a Knight of the White. That's how we met. What is going on?"
"A case. I'm undercover."
"For the FBI?"
"Interpol." He smiled at Spencer's frown. He didn't get to confuse the genius that easily. "Emily. I'm heading back to the office."
"Emily?"
"Start here. Since when are you a part of this?"
"All my life. My Dad was a Knight of the White. Mom tried for Knight of the Blue but washed out when her symptoms started showing. Granted they only have a sanctuary in Vegas, not a full Priory, but we used to go there for church. They asked me to join up when I turned eighteen."
"So this is a church thing?"
Spencer considered this. "If you mean is this where I attend church services, yes. If you're asking if that's why I signed up, no. Knights of the Blue are paid for their services."
"How much?"
"Bennington." Spencer said. "Back when I was eighteen and working as an adjutant professor I was barely clearing two thousand a month. Bennington costs eight thousand a month. SSDI only covers three. Even now that would take half my monthly salary."
Morgan nodded, now things were making sense. "Okay, I'm tracking. So what do they pay you to do for them? And do not tell me you can't tell me, this is us here."
Spencer smiled. "I read."
Not what he was expecting. "Huh?"
"Ever hear of the Library at Alexandria?"
"Yeah, um, ancient library, destroyed by fire..." Okay, he didn't remember much about the Library at Alexandria.
The Royal Library of Alexandria was one of the largest and most significant libraries of the ancient world. It flourished under the patronage of the Ptolemaic dynasty and functioned as a major center of scholarship from its construction in the 3rd century BC until the Roman conquest of Egypt in 30 BC. The library was part of a larger research institution called the Museum of Alexandria, where many of the most famous thinkers of the ancient world studied."
"Short version of the lecture," Morgan asked.
"According to general knowledge it was destroyed by fire at the time of the Roman invasion. According to historical record it was supposed to have been destroyed by a fire set by Julius Caesar in 48 BC, in an attack by Aurelian in the AD 270s, by the decree of Coptic Pope Theophilus in AD 391 and finally by the order of Caliph Omar I in 620. The only record of that is a quote of him ordering, 'If those books are in agreement with the Quran, we have no need of them; and if these are opposed to the Quran, destroy them.'"
Morgan considered this a long moment. "They weren't destroyed."
"No, the cache was discovered by the Templars during the Crusades. They recognized the value of what they had found and took them back to Europe. They spread the scrolls out in caches at their strongholds all across the Western world and have been guarding that knowledge ever since." Spencer smiled. "It's actually only been in the past twenty years that the world is catching up to some of what's in there."
"Damn." Okay, now Morgan was impressed. "So they've just been sitting on it all this time?'
"Part of the charge of the Knights of the Blue, specifically the elder knights, is to decide when the world is ready for some of that information to be released. The younger knights guard the caches so they cannot be destroyed."
"How do you do that? It's not like you're standing there all day."
Spencer smiled. "Every Knight of the Blue has a tested eidetic memory."
And that was the bit they needed. "You're memorizing it?"
"At the moment I've memorized the LA cache and about a third of the DC cache. This is one of their major priories, so it has a much bigger cache. They like you to try to get through at least one container a week, which takes me a couple of hours. I try to get in on Sundays before services."
"And they are paying you five grand a month for that?"
"You have to remember these rules were set up long before documents could be scanned and sent into the cloud for retrieval later. As recently as World War II the Knights of the Blue got the Berlin cache to safety after the Nazi's destroyed the scrolls. They escaped to London where they recited them back for transcription." Spencer looked over at his friend. "In case of all out war or something your job is to get me safely to the nearest sanctuary or priory, and then to the Chapterhouse in London so I can recreate those caches. New York, Charleston, Boston or Toronto are our best bets."
"Mental note." Morgan was not worried about war breaking out. "Now I see why that guy has white hair. You have not been making it easy on them."
"They get three hours a week on average and a promise that I'll be there in case of emergency. The rest of my life is my own. They have to accept that. Now what about the case?"