The Templar Concordat

by Terrence O'Brien

  “Just thought I’d call to let you know everything is going well. This is an amazing facility,” Marie gushed.

  “Does all that mean you have Jean in sight inside the laser lab?”

  “Oh, yes. We just shot our first sample. Can you believe it? Yes, within twenty years.”

  “Have you made contact with her?”

  “Yes. You wouldn’t believe who I ran into here. Jean Randolph. Yes, right. From Oxford. We’re having a late lunch after she shoots her sample.”

  “You and Jean are having lunch? Good work. Go shopping when you’re done. Buy a dog. Do anything. I don’t care. Just give me as much time as you can.”

  “Ok. Good luck. Bye-bye.”

  * * *

  Callahan’s van said, “Zodiac Fine Woodworking Installation and Restoration.” He parked in front of Jean’s flat, opened the back doors of the van, and took out a toolbox. He stood on the sidewalk a few minutes appraising the house, faked a cell phone call, then walked up the front stairs, through the outer door, and measured her front door, jotting numbers down on a small pad.

  She had a new Schlage deadbolt lock with five pins that opened to his hook pick after a few minutes. He was careful not to let the cylinder turn all the way around so he didn’t have to pick it closed when he left. Then he held the door open with his foot and carefully measured the doorjamb before going into the flat and closing the door. That’s what fine woodworkers did, and that’s what he was supposed to be.

  He called out when he entered, heard nothing, and took a fast walk through the flat. Living room, dining room, small kitchen, full bath, study, small bedroom, and a workroom. The furnishings were comfortable and practical, but nothing fancy. But it was the workroom that caught his attention. The walls and two tables were covered with taped up pictures of old manuscripts, some normal-sized, others were enlargements notated with a red marker pen. He could see all the pictures were from an excellent photo quality inkjet printer.

  The treaty? He could hardly read the cramped, ornate letters on the pictures, and even where he could, didn’t even know the language. How did those people do it? Marie and the people in Zurich had given him a crash course, but he was way, way out of his depth. He pulled out a fifteen mega-pixel digital camera, set it on the highest resolution, and panned the room clicking pictures of everything he saw. Let them figure it out. He snapped more than two hundred pictures on a single memory chip.

  He checked the other rooms, but found little of interest. The telephone message machine was clean, a little jewelry, clothes, lots of shoes, another closet with shoes, exercise bicycle, iPod speakers, metal framed landscapes on the wall. The file cabinet held too many papers and receipts to go through, and far too many books lined the shelves. Desk drawers held desk drawer clutter, and even the ice cube tray held ice. The desk had a real inkwell with an elaborate set of calligraphy pens on a stand next to it. Nothing stood out except the workroom.

  Finished, he parked the van where the Watcher had told him, changed clothes in the back, and found a pub with a lunch buffet. He called Marie and told her he was out.

  * * *

  “It looks like there are forty-two pictures on the wall,” Marie told Callahan back in her hotel room at the Dorchester. “Thirty-seven appear to have nothing to do with the treaty, but I’d bet my life these other five are pictures of that treaty. Also, two on the desk are the treaty.”

  They had downloaded Callahan’s pictures to her laptop, and the Dorchester had provided a 26-inch LCD monitor for better resolution.

  Callahan peered over her shoulder. “Can you read it?”

  “Yeah. It’s scary. I can read most of it. Jean took the pictures under different light filters so the dark areas in the center of the page show up. But it’s essentially what the Chief Archivist said. A treaty to wipe the Muslims off the Earth. Accept Jesus or die. Convert him, and that’s one less Muslim. Kill him, and that’s one less Muslim. Either way is fine. That’s what the Popes, two of them, say God wants.”

  She shivered. “Different times, different attitudes. But to be fair, I’m guessing at a few words here and couldn’t swear to them. About how God wants all this. Your pictures of her pictures lose detail. Look.” She pointed at a red question mark and a few words Jean had written on the page. “See how she’s having trouble, too? If she really had the treaty, she could zero in on that section and tease out the script with filters. That’s even more evidence she doesn’t have the original.”

  Callahan leaned over her shoulder and squinted at the screen. “Can you imagine what a mess that treaty would be today if it got out? The Marshall’s right. The Muslim countries would go nuts. Can’t say I’d blame them. Was everyone crazy in the Twelfth Century? And think of the field day the Christian nuts would have.”

  Marie ignored him and chewed on the earpiece of her glasses. “But what puzzles me… it looks like there are two treaties. I didn’t see anything in the library computer or drawers about that.”

  “Two? What do you mean? All you found was one entry and that deleted image scan.”

  She scanned a page of thumbnails and displayed two on the big screen, setting them next to each other.

  “Look at these. Here’s this long page, and it’s the treaty. Then look at this shorter page. That’s another treaty. Looks like they say the same thing. Wish we had better pictures.”

  “Hey, we do what we can with what we have.”

  “I don’t know.” Now she tapped the eyeglasses against the monitor screen. “It almost looks like someone tore the bottom off… Oh, my God! That’s what she did.”

  Now she totally ignored Callahan as she moved pictures around the screen, zoomed in and out, changed contrast and brightness. “You thieving bitch,” she mumbled. “You miserable, thieving bitch!”

  “Shall I turn the TV on and watch an exciting game of darts, or are you going to let me in on your cat fight here?”

  “Remember, I told you about her pen and ink art work? And engravings? That’s what she’s up to here. She cut off the unused bottom half of the page… tore it, actually.” She used both hands and pointed at two pictures on the screen. “And she’s going to fill it with whatever she wants. She can make whatever document she wants on the blank page. I bet she gave the Arab the top of the page with the treaty, and she kept the bottom that was blank.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Look. It’s right here in front of you. These two pictures. One shows the treaty on a long page. The other shows it on a shorter page, with just enough room to fit the seals in on the bottom.” She tapped on the screen. “The first picture shows the treaty as it was written, the way it’s been for eight hundred years. That’s the long page with the bottom part blank. But the second picture just shows the treaty after that bitch tore off the unused bottom half of the page. Damn her to hell.”

  Callahan shrugged. “Yeah, so what? She has a blank piece of paper. Who cares?”

  “Who cares? You idiot!” She jumped up and stomped around the room. “You don’t get it. With the new laser analysis, she can get rock-solid verification of the age… Twelfth Century… so there’s no question of forgery. She can write anything she wants on her piece of parchment… then discover it. Nobody would bother with further analysis since the laser said Twelfth Century. It’s the gold standard. There isn’t any blank parchment from the Twelfth Century, so there’s no reason to do anything more. She has the only piece. You can’t order it up on the Internet. There isn’t any. And since there isn’t any, the only way to get script on a Twelfth Century piece of parchment is to do it in the Twelfth Century.”

  Marie stood up and clenched her fists. “Oh, I’d like to strangle her. Someone should have choked her in the cradle.”

  Callahan watched in amazement, but thought it best to keep quiet. This woman was as cool and professional as they come. She did have ice water in her veins. She had hunted down world-class terrorists, picked them up in clubs and dropped them off dead in the morning. She
kept it together in Costa Rica when that nut case started slicing her up. Cool under pressure? He’d be happy to be half as cool. And now she was having a fit over a piece of paper?

  “Um… well… help me out here,” he said. “She stole a treaty from the Vatican Library while the Pope and about a thousand other folks were being blown to bits. Right? And she’s a great pen and ink artist, and does engravings, too?”

  “Yes, yes. I know.”

  “But now you find out she has a blank piece of paper… parchment… whatever it is. One piece of old brown paper, and will probably forge something on it. And well… now that almost seems to be a bigger deal?”

  “You’re an ass. Of course it’s not a bigger deal than the bombing. You know that. But I really didn’t have a personal connection to anyone in the bombing. But now she’s in my century, she’s in the Twelfth Century, and that’s personal. That’s mine. Not at all like the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. I take care of my centuries.”

  He laughed and grinned at her.

  She stopped pacing and smiled for the first time. “You really are a first-class ass, Callahan. We spend our lives documenting and researching the past, and manuscripts like this are a big part of it. That’s our connection. And along comes some quick buck artist, passes off a forgery, and throws God knows how many dedicated researchers onto the wrong path. It can take hundreds of years to recover from one of these things. We have things from the Middle Ages we’re still not sure about. Probably some we accept that really are forged.”

  “I see.” He really didn’t, but decided to keep that to himself.

  “But what really gets me is she isn’t just some gifted artist or engraver. No. She’s a member of our own community. She’s a scholar we all accept, respect, and admire. Top of her field. And what does she do? She stabs us all in the back. She’s one of us.” She looked back at the monitor. “You miserable, disgusting bitch!”

  “Alright, let me ask a dumb computer guy question. Why was half the page blank? Was that common? Wasn’t paper… parchment… or whatever… valuable back then? I mean, wasn’t there some little, old paper maker who labored over every sheet?”

  “Look.” She pointed at the long page on the screen. “Pope Gregory puts his seal here. He started this thing. If the other kings had put theirs below his, like the Pope thought they should, and spaced them out, the full page would have been filled and balanced. But that’s not what the kings did. They pulled a fast one and stuck their seals above the Pope’s. Sticking a thumb in the Pope’s eye. Probably thought it was funny. They made him look like the junior guy on the bottom. See,” she pointed at the seal of Henry II. “This one was so squeezed in there, it even ran into the script above it. When the thing came back to Rome, Pope Gregory was dead, and Pope Clement didn’t have anywhere to put his seal except next to Gregory’s on the second line. Second line is second class.”

  She stood up again and squared on Callahan. “I need better pictures.”

  “I can’t go back there again.”

  “Why not? We need good pictures of every word. We can’t guess at this. We have to have it perfect. You went once. Didn’t seem too hard.”

  “Don’t play the absent-minded professor with me. You know this business as well as I do. Sure I went once, and what if her neighbor saw me and asks about the woodworking she’s having done? Maybe she called the cops, installed an alarm, hired a guard, bought a Rottweiler, smeared garlic on the door. I can’t go back.”

  She bounced onto the bed and sat cross-legged. “We have to get those pictures she has. Originals. These aren’t good enough.” She waved at the computer screen. “I can read most of it, but I’m guessing at some, too. And that’s not good enough for Zurich to make a decision. You think the Templar Marshall gives a damn if you’re afraid of a Rottweiler? Would you rather face him or the dog?”

  Now it was Callahan’s turn to pace. “Yeah, yeah, I know. Ok. Let’s not mess around. Those pictures are from her printer and the printer is hooked up to her laptop. Cable connection, so the picture files are on the laptop. How about we just copy the whole damn hard drive on the laptop, ship it to Zurich, let the computer weenies loose on it, and you and your Kruger folks can all party with the pictures? You’ll have everything she has.”

  He turned to the door. “I have some shopping to do. I’m not sure how late the computer stores stay open here.”

  “Computer geeks are useful sometimes, Callahan.”

  London - Thursday, April 2

  Zodiac Fine Woodworking returned to Jean’s flat the next day while she was at the laser lab. Callahan went through the same routine of measuring, and picking the lock. However, this time, his tool box held a powerful laptop computer and three external hard drives, each with terabyte capacity. Strange, he thought, each of those little machines could hold millions of books. He could carry most of the world’s knowledge all in a tool box. He didn’t know what he’d need, so he came prepared.

  He had been up half the night, on the phone with the computer people in Zurich, downloading software from them, installing it on his computer, and testing the system. When he was finished, they did a dry run attacking Marie’s computer to make sure it would work.

  When he went in, there were no alarms, and no Rottweilers. So far, so good. Jean’s laptop was in the same position in the workroom. He flipped it over and unscrewed the panel over the hard drive, disconnected its ribbon cable, and laid the drive on the table.

  Then he connected Jean’s hard drive to his own computer, and also connected two of the stand-alone hard drives, and started a program on his own machine that would copy an image of Jean’s hard drive to his two external drives. Now all he could do was wait for it to finish.

  He wandered around the flat while the machine whirred, and paid more attention to the calligraphy pens she had on display in the office. Several half-completed ink drawings of animals and cityscapes sat on a small drafting table with a tilting top. One page contained the same French paragraph written in several styles of writing. A shelf by the table held a polished hardwood box with about thirty bottles of ink, each labeled with a single number and date.

  Had she been doing more than pen and ink cityscapes? Perhaps some enterprising forgery? He took pictures of everything, then daubed samples of the ink onto blank pages in a small notebook he carried. Couldn’t hurt.

  Marie had called at eleven and told him Jean had just come into the lab and was beginning the third laser shot on her sample. At a minimum he had at least an hour and a half to copy the drive. Jean’s laser procedure would take over an hour, and even if she left the museum immediately, it would take another half hour to get to the flat. He still had at least thirty minutes to spare.

  * * *

  Each time Hosni Zahid clicked the RECALC button, the same number flickered up on the screen. The treaty sample Hammid had given him really was from the Twelfth century. The analysis said 1180 AD, plus or minus twenty years. It was dated 1189. Perfect.

  As a scholar, he felt satisfaction, but as a human being, he felt disgust at the lengths people went to exterminate each other. And as a Muslim, he felt real anger. He knew the treaty was an aberration, and doubted the Church even knew it existed, but those words on the page and the seals below them sent a chill through him.

  Was it preposterous to think the West could do something like this? Was the modern mind any more immune to stupidity and hatred than the medieval mind?

  On the one hand, he valued and appreciated the progress of civilization. On the other, the carnage, slaughter, and exterminations of Europe in World War II had been exclusively at the hands of Europeans. And that wasn’t eight hundred years ago. Neither Muslims nor Arabs had ever done anything even approaching that horror.

  Hitler had ordered the same treatment for the Jews. Was it fair to say he was a product of the same Christian culture and beliefs that spewed out this disgusting treaty? After twelve hundred years of Christian culture, they had produced this treaty, and after nine
teen hundred years that same Christian culture had produced Hitler? Was that fair?

  But what about his own people? Were they any better than the Europeans? Or were they simply lacking in the technical means to join in the grand slaughter? But they had never expressed the intention, and they had never codified it in a treaty like this. At least that was comforting.

  Nothing good could come to anyone from this treaty. Suppose he told Hammid the parchment was produced in 1900? He knew what Hammid would do. He’d send someone else to check the results. In fact, maybe he had already done that. Maybe he had someone at the laser lab in Geneva. And that would be the end for him, his wife, and his daughters.

  When the lab director bustled over to his workstation, the scholar in him was delighted. Another laser analysis in the lab had matched to his own. That could only mean both manuscripts had come from the same batch of handmade Twelfth Century parchment. He dropped the philosophical brooding in a heartbeat and hurried off with the director chasing down history. That’s what he did.

  * * *

  “Professor Randolph, Professor Randolph, you won’t believe this. This is amazing.” The portly lab director came chugging up to Jean’s workstation waving a wad of papers. He half-dragged a Middle Eastern man with him. Marie had seen him in the lab, but didn’t know what he was doing.

  Callahan had called Marie telling her he was out of Jean’s flat, so when Jean told Marie she was leaving for the day, they chatted briefly and made plans for dinner that night.

  The lab director looked around for Jean. When he asked Marie if she had seen Jean, she told him Jean had just left for the day.

  “Oh, no. I have such great news. This is just… just so exciting.”

  Marie stood up and came over and laughed. “Dr. Samuals, you’re fairly walking on air. What do you have there?”

  “The chemical profiles. They’re the same and we…” Then he stopped himself.