The Templar Concordat

by Terrence O'Brien

  “Oh, pardon my rudeness.” The director looked at Marie. “Dr. Marie Curtis of the Kruger Institute, may I introduce Professor Hosni Zahid of Cairo University.” Zahid was a middle-aged man of average height, just beginning to widen out. Typical academic, thought Marie. They shook hands and exchanged meaningless formalities. She could see Zahid had a wondering eye.

  Since Jean was gone, the director zeroed in on Marie, and waved his papers. “This is most amazing. The samples submitted by Professor Zahid and Professor Randolph show an identical chemical profile. Identical.” He slapped the papers into his other hand.

  “Do you realize what that means?” He looked back and forth between Marie and Zahid.

  Marie knew exactly what it meant, and an alarm ran through her whole body. But she maintained a confused expression and looked at Zahid. “I’m sorry, but I’m not sure. When did they date?

  “Oh, they both dated the same, too. 1180. So that’s plus or minus twenty years, so the range is 1160 to 1200. And that’s to be expected, of course, because they have the same chemical profile. Identical. We speculated about this, but… can you imagine?” He didn’t wait for an answer, just spun on a heel and rushed off the way he had come.

  Zahid seized the opportunity. “As I’m sure you know, Doctor, the procedure used here at the lab delivers far more than age. It also develops a chemical profile, a very, very accurate and detailed profile. So accurate, in fact that it can tell us the exact parchment maker’s batch that a given page came from.”

  Didn’t this Zahid moron realize what was happening, Marie wondered.

  “Consider,” he continued lecturing, while Marie delivered the most admiring and awe-struck gaze she could muster. “A typical parchment maker of antiquity used a wooden trough and a paddle to mix his ingredients.” He mimed mixing with a large paddle. “Then he might get one hundred pages from that batch.”

  He stopped long enough for Marie to play with the ends of her hair, tilt her head to the side, and slide a step closer. “Yes, yes…” Too much, too soon? Hard to tell.

  “Now, our parchment maker didn’t have the kind of quality controls we have today, so each batch contained a slightly different mix of ingredients. Not a big difference.” He held his hands apart to illustrate big. “And not a medium difference.” He brought them together to instruct her about medium. “But a very small difference.” He held his index fingers very close together to let her know what small meant. Marie resisted the urge to say, “Fascinating.”

  “And the analyses show that both samples, both mine and Professor Randolph’s, come from the same parchment batch. And pages in those days were used locally, very close to where they were made.”

  Marie played with the top button of her blouse and looked up at Zahid. “That means each of you can cross-corroborate the provenance of your manuscripts.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Zahid. “I do wish Professor Randolph was here.”

  It’s now or never, thought Marie. “Well,” she moved closer to Zahid and lowered her voice. “I probably shouldn’t say anything, but…” He was slightly taller than she was and she tried to give him a good look down her blouse. She looked around conspiratorially, moved closer, and took his arm. First contact. “Jean… Professor Randolph… has done quite a bit of work in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries. It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if she had something from…” she looked both ways, tilted her head down a bit, and raised her eyes to him. “Well… how should I say this? Let’s just say she has done a lot of work on papal manuscripts.” She shrugged. “But, of course, it’s not for me to say.”

  He brightened when he heard that, then she saw his eyes shoot down her blouse and instantly recover. He drew himself up to his full height and tried to absorb his belly. Progress.

  He looked at Marie, lowered his voice, and joined the conspiracy. His eyes darted around and he said, “This is really very good news. Would you believe I am dealing with a manuscript we think was sent from the Pope to the Ayyubid Sultan in Egypt? That’s the same time frame you say Professor Randolph is investigating.”

  “Well, I didn’t exactly say…”

  “Yes, yes, yes. No, no, of course you didn’t.”

  Marie moved closer so they were locked in a whispered conversation. First intimacy. More progress. At least he had the brains not to say he was dating the Treaty of Tuscany for his terrorist masters. Time to stop reeling him in and give him a bit of line.

  She glanced at her watch. “I suppose you have more work to do, Professor Zahid?”

  “Oh, no, and please call me Hosni. I’m finished for the day.”

  “And I’m Marie.” She looked down, off to the side, then back at him. “I’d love to continue our discussion some time.”

  “I have an idea,” he said with the surprise of a man smacked by a jolt of inspiration. “Perhaps we can continue our discussion over lunch?”

  She beamed her most radiant smile. “Excellent idea, Prof… Hosni.” Then she caught herself. They needed more time. She frowned. “Oh, no. I have a conference call with the Kruger in an hour.” She lifted an eyebrow. “But I am free for dinner.”

  “Excellent. That would be great.”

  “Wonderful,” said Marie. “How about I meet you at your hotel? Is 7:30 Ok?”

  “Yes. Yes. That would be fine. I’m at the Edwardian Mayfair.”

  * * *

  When Zahid left his room at the Mayfair to meet Marie that evening, a short, round man left another room on the same floor, watched Zahid put his keycard in his pocket, and hurried after him to the elevator. In the elevator, the man stood on Zahid’s right side, with his briefcase between them. The man felt a small vibration in the handle of the briefcase when the scanner inside told him it had successfully read the code on the keycard in Zahid’s pocket.

  * * *

  When Marie returned to her room in the Dorchester at 11:30 pm that night, Callahan and two electronic surveillance engineers were hunched over a computer screen mumbling to each other. Nobody even looked up.

  “What’s going on, guys?”

  “Look,” said Callahan. “Zahid is on his laptop checking email. We can see everything he sees right here.” He proudly pointed to the screen. “Deiter and Erik got into his room while you dined and installed a new whizbang in his laptop.”

  “Now you all get to share his porn?”

  “No,” said Callahan, pointing to a string of digits at the bottom of the screen. “We get his GPS position, get to see everything he does, get to explore his computer while he does it, and the whizbang even makes a cell phone call every hour and tells us exactly where it is.”

  “And you follow him right to the treaty?”

  “Yep. Not only that, the microphone in the computer lets us hear what’s going on, and we can even look through the computer’s camera.”

  “Well,” she said, “if you guys can do all that, then my hat’s off to all of you.”

  Chapter Eight

  Dhahran - Thursday, April 2

  Professor Zahid had told Hammid that he would have the final result of the laser spectrographic analysis today, but it was now 7:00 pm, 4:00 pm in London, and he had heard nothing yet. Everything hinged on that result. If it showed the treaty was indeed from the Twelfth Century, then he could call the Old Man and let him know they could proceed to the next stage of their plan. No. He caught himself. He would call the Old Man with the news, then let the Old Man tell him the next step. If Hammid wanted to remain alive, he could never forget who was in charge.

  He couldn’t call Zahid and reveal how anxious he was. That would show weakness, and Zahid needed a strong hand guiding him. So he waited.

  At 9:00 pm Zahid finally called. “Hammid, the result is the year 1180. That means the parchment was manufactured sometime between 1160 and 1200. A forty-year period. That’s right on target.”

  Hammid wanted to leap up on the railing of the balcony overlooking the gulf and shout for joy. Hundreds of years of patient waiting, and now they ha
d it. They had it. And he did it. He, Hammid Al Dossary did it. Hammid Al Dossary, whose name would be remembered for a thousand generations. But instead he replied in a calm and flat voice. “Excellent, Hosni. That’s very good news. Very good, indeed. Our people are indebted to you. When are you coming back?”

  “There’s one more thing I’d like to pursue. It would actually augment the case for authenticity. Another researcher was running a sample at the same time I was. Nothing to do with the treaty. She’s a professor here in London. Her sample showed a chemical profile that exactly matched mine, and the only explanation for that is both parchments were manufactured in the same batch. If I can get with her, I can learn the particulars of her manuscript, and it might shed some more light on our own.”

  Damn, thought Hammid, think. Jean Randolph? Who else? Think before you talk. Don’t show ignorance, and don’t give away what you want to keep hidden. You are the leader, and you are always in control. Zahid doesn’t know where the treaty came from, and he doesn’t know how it was obtained. He has no reason to suspect someone else might be running a sample of the same treaty. It is logical for him to accept the explanation of a common manufacturing batch. He has no other.

  “That’s very interesting, Hosni. Who is this other researcher?”

  “Her name is Jean Randolph. She’s a professor of medieval history, specializes in rare manuscripts. Quite well-known.”

  It was her. Jean Randolph. What on Earth could she be up to? Parchment from the same batch eight hundred years ago? Nonsense. She had a sample of the treaty and she was putting it through the same laser analysis.

  But why? From her perspective, why care if it was from 1189 or 1889? So what? What was her interest? Had she gone to the authorities? If she had, they would have buried her so deep under the British Official Secrets Act that she’d never see daylight again. If she had gone to MI6, and had a sample, they could easily have the British Museum run the sample day or night. What is wrong with her?

  This didn’t feel right, and Zahid was no field operative. He wasn’t cut out for it. Hammid’s recent elation deflated a bit. He still had problems. Something was very wrong here.

  “Listen, Zahid, I’d like to have you back here as soon as possible. We can always get with that professor. What’s her name? Randolph? But it sounds like you got what we needed. We have a lot of work to do, so I think it’s best if you get back here with the results as soon as you can.”

  Politics always trumping scholarship, thought Zahid. It was pointless to argue. He’d be back in Dhahran as soon as he could.

  * * *

  So, what do we do with Professor Jean Randolph, Hammid asked himself. She obviously had a piece of the treaty, but how much? Did she take any of the text? It seemed unlikely since the treaty in his possession showed all the seals old Hashashin records indicated, two Popes and three kings. And the text matched their records word for word. Did they put footnotes on these things? Or did she just take a corner of the treaty for her own amusement? But to what end? Or did she just grab something else from the library for herself, something from the same collection that came from the same parchment batch? Nonsense again. That same batch idea was silly.

  Kill her? He could kill her, but the Old Man had specifically forbidden that. If he went back to the Old Man for permission, he would have to admit there was a problem, and how long would he live after that? The Old Man would take the treaty and plant him in the desert.

  Accidents? People died every day from unexpected accidents. Traffic? Falls? Mountain-climbing? Ski? Sky-dive? Scuba? He had no idea, and didn’t have to time to find out. A million euros wasn’t enough for the greedy bitch. The greedy Western mind again.

  The more he considered the alternatives, the less he liked them. Every option was bad, with no clean way out of this, not with the Old Man’s peculiar habit of getting rid of people when the people or circumstances displeased him.

  An accident was risky, but offered him the best chance of surviving the Old Man’s suspicions and succeeding in his mission. And there would have to be a clean-up so no trace of the treaty was found by family or authorities. He pulled a novel off the shelf, flipped through it until he found the number in the margin, and called Beirut.

  “Marhaba, Jamilah, I have something that needs special attention.” Maybe she could solve his problems.

  Dhahran – Thursday, April 2

  Even telling the Old Man about a great success was something Hammid dreaded, but it had to be done.

  “Sheik, the tests of parchment of the Treaty of Tuscany we have in our possession show it was manufactured between 1160 and 1200. The treaty is dated 1189.”

  “Is there any further test the West could demand?”

  “No, Sheik. The laser spectrographic analysis is the best that has been developed.”

  “In that case, wait until the new Pope is elected and has been in office a bit longer. Wait until the news surrounding the bombing, his election, and the novelty of the new Pope falls off the news cycle. I want this to hit when there is no other news coming from the Vatican. The media hates the Church, and will be drooling at the chance to slam it after all the sympathy from the bombing and the interest in the papal election. Never forget, the news people are our strongest allies. They are so stupid they don’t even know it, but we aren’t that stupid.” He broke the connection.

  Hammid’s hand shook with excitement and fear as he clicked his phone off. The exciting thing was the world would soon know the treacherous roots of the West’s core religion. It would learn who was the aggressor in the struggle between the East and West, and the West would see itself reflected back in that dark, oily mirror of the treaty. TV news and newspapers would do most of the work, but they had to be guided. Just give them some excuse to hate themselves and they would jump at the chance.

  The fear was for his own life since he had just turned Jamilah loose on Jean Randolph. That was a risk, but what choice did he have? If he lost, it would be a sudden shot in the back of the head or a dagger to the brain stem. In either case, he’d never even know it. But, the Old Man wouldn’t be certain either, and would he upset an operation on the way to success? How did he know how the Old Man thought?

  But now he had the order to proceed. He almost ran to Zahid’s workroom. But Zahid wasn’t back from London yet.

  London - Saturday, April 4

  London was a great big belly-laugh of a city, a round-the-clock whirlwind of life, love and good cheer. Jamilah had been to most of the world’s great cities, but none could match London. It wasn’t the biggest, tallest, richest, or most beautiful, and its weather was terrible, but it had a strength and vitality she found nowhere else. The grin spread across her face as soon as she glimpsed the shores of Britain and felt the Airbus bank for its gradual descent into Heathrow.

  She had boarded at King Fahd near Dhahran after meeting with Hammid at his estate. His plan was unbelievable. Hammid was the new Saladin, riding a big white horse and uniting all the Arabs behind his banner? Stranger things had happened. But she had never seen him so nervous. It was nothing she could put her finger on, but he was always tightly controlled and operated behind a mask that hid the true man. But she sensed something was wrong, that he was worried.

  He explained what she had to do, the information she had to get out of Jean, and even showed her the treaty. She didn’t think anyone would care much about what some old fools had written hundreds of years ago, but that was Hammid’s problem, not hers. What she did know was he was paying her very well.

  When she boarded the British Airways plane in Dhahran, she was dressed just like the other forty Arab women traveling to London, wrapped in a head-to-toe black abaya with a headscarf concealing her long black hair and everything but her face.

  When the seatbelt sign went off minutes out of Dhahran, she joined the line of stoop shouldered women trudging to the back of the plane to remove their abayas and revel in the freedom the rest of the race enjoyed every day. They returned to their seats
in Western clothes, strutting, smiling, and holding their heads high. Jamilah had seen it every time she had flown out of the Kingdom, and she still felt satisfaction each time she joined in defying the silly custom.

  * * *

  She slept on the plane and had a quick breakfast at her hotel, the Dorchester, since the credit card she used went to Hammid’s account, then geared up for a day of power shopping. Harrods? Carnaby Street? God, she loved this. She wore tight jeans over black boots, a blue oxford shirt, and a black leather jacket. With her thick black hair held loosely by a red band, she returned pleasant smiles to both the admiring looks from the men and the daggers from the women.

  Her light step, innocent smile, and quick giggle put her at about twenty-one, far younger than her real age. She attributed it to good genes, skin care, and exercise, and her targets never suspected her long record of successful kills. How could they? She looked like somebody’s daughter, not an assassin.

  When she had two full shopping bags it was time for the boring shopping. She took a taxi to a pharmacy in Knightsbridge, and asked the Lebanese pharmacist about mint-flavored Egyptian cough medicine. He said nothing, just reached under the counter and gave her a package with two syringes, two bottles, and a small box of latex gloves.

  She walked to a sporting goods shop in the same neighborhood and bought a coil of light-weight climbing rope and two knives, one four-inch folding knife with a thumb open, and one sheath knife with a double-edged three-inch blade.

  Her last stop was an art supply house in Soho, where she purchased paints, canvases, turpentine, several bottles of solvent, silver wire, a small melting pot, jewelers’ tools, and an artist’s propane torch.

  Now she was loaded down, but she did have a job to do, and the sooner she finished it, the sooner she could get back to shopping and London nightlife. She had a strict rule. No partying until the job was done. No exceptions. That kept her focused. She had to have a clear head for her work since her life really did depend on it.