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     Charlemagne Griffin Chronicles   The Knights Templar         This is a work of Fiction. All characters and stories are fictional although based in historical settings. If you see your name appear in the story, it is a coincidence, or maybe I asked first.      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except brief extracts for the purpose of review, without the permission of the copyright owner         Acknowledgements      Thanks to Dawn Spears the brilliant artist who created the cover artwork and my editor Debz Hobbs-Wyatt.      My wife who is so supportive and believes in me. Last my dogs Blaez and Zeeva and cats Vaskr and Rosa who watch me act out the fight scenes and must wonder what the hell has gotten into their boss. And a special thank you to Troy who was the grandfather of Blaez in real life. He was a magnificent beast just like his grandson!            Copyright © 2022 Christopher C Tubbs     THANK YOU FOR READING!      I hope you enjoy reading this book as much as I enjoyed writing it. Reviews are so helpful to authors. I really appreciate all reviews, both positive and negative. If you want to leave one, you can do so on Amazon, through the website, or also on Twitter.            About the Author      Christopher C Tubbs is a dog-loving descendent of a long line of Dorset clay miners and has chased his family tree back to the 16 th century in the Isle of Purbeck. He left school at sixteen to train as an Avionics Craftsman, has been a public speaker at conferences for most of his career and was one of the founders of a successful games company back in the 1990s. Now in his sixties, he finally writes the stories he had been dreaming about for years. Thanks to inspiration from great authors like Alexander Kent, Dewey Lambdin, Patrick O’Brian, Raymond E Feist, and Dudley Pope, he was finally able to put digit to keyboard. He lives in the Netherlands Antilles with his wife, two Dutch Shepherds, and two Norwegian Forest cats.      You can visit him on his website   www.thedorsetboy.com   The Dorset Boy, Facebook page.      Or tweet him @ChristopherCTu3         Contents       Chapter 1: A Strange Encounter     Chapter 2: Preparation     Chapter 3: Paris to Rome     Chapter 4: The Vatican     Chapter 5: Commandery of Jales     Chapter 6: Cambridgeshire     Chapter 7: Enforcement     Chapter 8: Probabilities and Possibilities     Chapter 9: Deception     Chapter 10: Syria     Chapter 11: Cyprus     Chapter 12: Escape to captivity     Chapter 13: Kidnapped     Chapter 14: The Sword in the Bei     Chapter 15: Seek and Thou Shalt Find     Chapter 16: There’s Gold in Them There Hills     Chapter 17: The Lake     Chapter 18: The Fleur     Chapter 19: End Game.        Chapter 1: A Strange Encounter       Etherton stood thigh deep in the river Shin a mile downstream of the falls, rod in hand. It was October and a perfect morning to be fishing. He cast with an expert flick of the wrist, the line snaking back and forth like the tail of some unearthly serpent. The fly landed precisely where he aimed it and drifted towards the object of his desire.. His quarry, a large Atlantic jack salmon, was moving up the river to its spawning grounds. The difficulty was the fish didn’t eat when they ran, so to get one to take a fly was more a question of annoying it into biting rather than tempting it with a tasty morsel.   His concentration was totally on the fly as it passed over the fish’s head. It ignored it. He whipped his rod up snaking the line into the air, flicking it back and forth as he gathered the line in his left hand. A final flick and the fly landed ahead of the salmon, he expertly guided it, right over its nose. There was a flash of scales and a scintillating spray of water.   He struck.   The hook bit.   The fish ran.   His split cane rod bowed with the pressure, the line bit into his hand. He played him, trying to tire him out, the fish was fit and now angry at being hooked. It tried every trick in the book to get free. But Etherton was a master of his craft and inevitably the salmon tired after being fought for an hour.   Etherton reached behind him for his landing net.   “Can I help, old boy?” a distinctly Scottish voice said from the shore. A glance showed a fellow fisherman holding a larger landing net than he had.   “If you would, this one is a bit big for my net.”   The man waded in and slid his net down into the water, gently easing it under the fish. It gave a token