Here's where Lincoln and company shifted into conspiratorial overdrive. Borrowing the thesis of Hugh J. Schonfield's book, The Passover Plot, and grafting it onto the enigmatic Plantard clues, Lincoln and his co-authors fashioned a, well, daring theory. Stripped of syllogistic elegance, it goes something like this: Christ survived the crucifixion by "faking" his death or otherwise being "fruitful" before Good Friday, either way leaving behind the wife and kids. The "Christs" subsequently legged it to the south of France where they intermarried with the royal Franks to found what eventually became the mystical Merovingian Dynasty. Ergo, the real mission of the Templars and Priory of Zion: to safeguard not just the treasure of the Crusades, but to preserve the Grail, which appeared in medieval texts as "Sangraal" or "Sangreal," and which Lincoln et al. translated to mean sang real, or "royal blood." In other words: the dynastic legacy of Christ, literally.

This, then, might be the stunning secret--and the secret society that evolved through the ages to protect it--that Abbe Sauniere stumbled upon in Rennes-le-Chateau: TO DAGOBERT II KING AND TO SION BELONGS THIS TREASURE AND HE IS THERE DEAD. Who He? J.C.

Suddenly, the meandering history of Europe develops a dramatic, cohesive plot line: The persecution of the Cathars by the church, the collusion of Rome in the assassination of King Dagobert, the successful conspiracy of the Pope Clement V and Phillipe IV of France to suppress the powerful Templars--all were efforts to "eradicate it, Jesus' bloodline." For "it" constituted nothing less than a rival church with a more direct link to J.C.'s legacy than the Vatican could ever claim.