The Templar Legacy - Steve Berry

New York Times BESTSELLER -- "Exciting... hard to put down without reading one more page." - The Florida Times-Union

The ancient order of the Knights Templar possessed untold wealth and absolute power
over kings and popes . . . until the Inquisition, when they were wiped from the face
of the earth, their hidden riches lost. But now two forces vying for the treasure
have learned that it is not at all what they thought it was-and its true nature could
change the modern world.

Cotton Malone, one-time top operative for the U.S. Justice
Department, is enjoying his quiet new life as an antiquarian book dealer in Copenhagen
when an unexpected call to action reawakens his hair-trigger instincts-and plunges
him back into the cloak-and-dagger world he thought he'd left behind.

It begins
with a violent robbery attempt on Cotton's former supervisor, Stephanie Nelle, who' s far from home on a mission that has nothing to do with national security. Armed
with vital clues to a series of centuries-old puzzles scattered across Europe, she
means to crack a mystery that has tantalized scholars and fortune-hunters through
the ages by finding the legendary cache of wealth and forbidden knowledge thought
to have been lost forever when the order of the Knights Templar was exterminated
in the fourteenth century. But she's not alone. Competing for the historic prize- and desperate for the crucial information Stephanie possesses-is Raymond de Roquefort,
a shadowy zealot with an army of assassins at his command.

Welcome or not, Cotton
seeks to even the odds in the perilous race. But the more he learns about the ancient
conspiracy surrounding the Knights Templar, the more he realizes that even more than
lives are at stake. At the end of a lethal game of conquest, rife with intrigue,
treachery, and craven lust for power, lies a shattering discovery that could rock
the civilized world-and, in the wrong hands, bring it to its knees.