One of the knights is mortally wounded in the event; he dies on land after hiding a small leather pouch under a gravestone.

The last surviving knight reaches Paris in 1314, just in time to see the order's last Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, being burned at the stake after refusing to reveal the location of the Templars' treasure.

In the present, four people on horseback dressed as Templars storm New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art during its exhibition of The Treasures of the Vatican.

Tess Chaykin, an archaeologist, survives the raid, but is bothered by something mouthed by the leader of the Templars as he stole the encoder: "Veritas vos liberabit."

He kills the driver and flees, with the FBI, including the agent in charge of the case, Sean Reilly, in pursuit.

He is interrupted by Monsignor de Angelis, Vatican special envoy, helping the FBI investigate the Met incident.

Upon discovering that everything entering the United States was X-rayed, Reilly finds an image of the encoder at JFK Airport, its port of entry for the ill-fated Met exhibit.

This information is sufficient to build a working replica of the encoder, which decrypts a letter from one of the Knights Templar about the fall of Acre which the FBI photographed.

Reilly, who is on the Vatican's boat, shoots De Angelis and then jumps overboard and uses a life raft to find Tess.

Tess wakes in a hospital room on a small Greek island, to find Reilly badly hurt and in a coma.

She walks around the island and, improbably, finds the figurehead with the chest inside containing the diary of Jesus, but is unable to read its Aramaic script.

Tess realizes that the scroll is meaningless, without verifying its authenticity;, however, after her stay on the island and time to think she has a change of heart about releasing the diary.

After his mentor Aimard dies, he is to take a message to the Grand Master, but after many perils, he is captured in Tuscany and forced into slavery for years before returning to France.

[4] NBC made a two-part television miniseries starring Mira Sorvino, Scott Foley, Victor Garber, and Omar Sharif.

Gus Waldron is depicted as a crook who was trying to solicit an antiquarian's help to sell the relic he stole at the Met; in the movie, this line is omitted.

The role of Tess's daughter, Kim, is left to a minimum in the book, while in the movie, she is helping her mom to solve a clue on old Arab town's location.

The name of the "Turkish" town recorded by Al-Idrisi is different, and in the book it is underwater (as a result of a nearby dam's work).

Above comment is incorrect in the book the FBI agent Reilly is taken to the Vatican and compelled to assist in finding Tess and Vance, they all appear in the same boat later in the story.