The Templars' Last Secret

by Martin Walker

  By the time Bruno and Amélie returned to his office in St. Denis, Leah’s arrival at the Paris station had been spotted on the tapes as she came up the stairs from the Métro. She had then spent an hour alone with a book at a café in the station until she was joined by the older man from the Laundromat tapes, who arrived on a train from Cologne. Her greeting was affectionate, and they held hands as they went to a different café in the big square outside the station, where they were later joined by the second man from the Laundromat. He was much younger and had arrived on another German train, this time from Frankfurt. Two more young men in hoodies then joined them.

  Unknown to Bruno, a vast machine of international cooperation was then triggered into action as the images and travel dates of the targeted individuals were launched into a system of global databases that contained in total close to a million names. Many of them had no more connection to terrorism than a link through family, through school or places of study or through travel records that had been deemed interesting by the algorithms that had been programmed to track specific routes and patterns. The databases included Palestinians, Syrians, Iraqis, Kurds, Turks, Uighurs, Moroccans, Algerians, Colombians, Chechens, Afghans, Pakistanis, Irishmen, Sikhs, Bangladeshis, Indonesians and now elderly Japanese, Germans and Italians from the various Red Army groups of the 1970s. The most recent additions to these expanding lists were an ever-increasing proportion of British, French, German and American citizens of Islamic origin.

  The brigadier first made contact with his counterparts in Germany’s BND, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, and asked them to track the movements of the men Leah Wolinsky had met and any associates they may have encountered. As a routine, the photos were then forwarded by the brigadier’s staff to a series of organizations, beginning with the French joint antiterrorism center, and then to Europol, to the European Union’s Intelligence Analysis Centre and to the office of the EU antiterrorism coordinator in Brussels. They went also to the British National Counter Terrorism Security Office, with whom the French worked closely, to the Global Counterterrorism Forum and to the National Counterterrorism Center in the United States. They also went to the Shin Bet liaison officer at the Israeli embassy in Paris.

  There was too much data for any individual service to handle. The three thousand officers of Britain’s MI5 and the thirty-five thousand staff of the FBI, let alone the handful of officials at the EU’s various coordination centers, could not begin to trawl through the hundreds of thousands of data points that the computers logged each hour. Instead, the task was left to the algorithms to narrow down the mass to the significant, and from the significant to the seriously interesting. And at that point, a handful of extraordinary individuals took over.

  One was a legendary woman in Paris, a veteran of the old Renseignements Généraux police intelligence service, who had a unique knack of recognizing a face from the shape of an ear and a hint of jawline. In Tel Aviv, an elderly Jewish man, who had been born in Poland and taken to Israel from a Cyprus refugee camp while a babe in arms, had a photographic memory for Arabs with terrorist connections. In London, a Chinese woman, formerly in the criminal intelligence section of the Hong Kong police, could even identify people from gestures and the way they walked. There were two brothers in Pullach, Germany, former members of the East German Stasi, who had an uncanny ability in facial and pattern recognition that allowed them to make connections between suspects. After years of coordination and meetings at conferences on counterterrorism, experts like these had developed their own informal networks to communicate with one another.

  It was the elderly Israeli who identified the older man who had met Leah at the Gare de l’Est station as Saïd al-Husayni, a member of an influential and well-established Jerusalem family who had studied in Spain and was part of the Islamic history faculty at Birzeit University just outside Ramallah on the West Bank. The university, which had been closed by the Israeli occupying authorities for four years before the signing of the Oslo Accords, was closely watched by the Israelis. They had no record of Husayni having any political or radical links, though for the previous year he and Leah had been living together in Ramallah. Leah was on their watch list as a militant member of the Peace Now movement.

  Yet for all the computer algorithms and surveillance powers of modern states, the most significant breakthrough came from Bruno’s office in the St. Denis mairie. Working on her own smartphone, Amélie explained that she couldn’t find anything in the usual databases about Marie Dubois using the date of birth on her ID card.

  “What about health records, pharmacies?” Bruno asked when he returned from delivering the surveillance tape. “If she’s French, she should at least have a carte vitale.” Like every French citizen, he carried the small green card in his pocket that took care of most medical bills.

  “I’ll try it, but if she doesn’t have an ID card…” Amélie sighed but began working her phone. After a few minutes she looked up.

  “There’s something interesting about this Marie Dubois woman. She’s supposed to be in a psychiatric hospital in Paris, the Pitié-Salpêtrière.”

  She had tried the health ministry database, which was still under construction. But since Marie had been included in a ministry survey looking into the costs and causes of long-term residential care, her name and details were on file. She had been a patient at the hospital, one of the largest in Europe, for the previous six years.

  “And two years ago our Leah Wolinsky was briefly a patient in the same hospital, under the same specialist, diagnosed with severe depression when she was finishing her doctorate,” Amélie added. “Do you think she could somehow have stolen Marie’s ID card? Maybe she claimed it had been lost and applied for a new one in Marie’s name?”

  Bruno called the brigadier at once to pass on the information and then sat back to read the printouts Amélie had collated from her research into Leah’s academic work. Her thesis was on the Arab occupation of southern France in the eighth century, after the Muslim invasion of Spain in A.D. 711. Within five years, the Visigoth kingdom of Spain had been pushed back to the Pyrenees, and the Arab armies had then poured through the mountains to conquer the province of southern Gaul known as Septimania. Bruno sat up in surprise when he learned that for the next forty years they retained control of much of southern France from their base at the old Roman city of Narbonne.

  “I had no idea they were in France for so long,” Bruno murmured, almost to himself.

  “Nor did I,” said Amélie. “Did you get to the bit about the Arabic words that stayed in the language? I never knew that our chemise came from their qamisa. Nor that the town of Le Bugue, just up the river, came from the Arabic al-buca. Apparently it means ‘station’ or ‘military post.’ ”

  Bruno was skimming through the index and then recalled that someone had once told him that in any academic publication it was important to read the acknowledgments. Leah Wolinsky had mentioned “two scholars to whom I am indebted for their support and their comments on an early draft of this thesis, the historian of al-Andaluz, Saïd al-Husayni, and the French medievalist Auguste Dumesnil.”

  Horst had introduced Dumesnil, the man who followed the Benedictine rule who lived in nearby Sarlat. Bruno tried the number for him he found in the phone directory. When Dumesnil answered, he reminded him of their acquaintance and said he was trying to confirm the identity of a woman recently found dead who was thought to be a former pupil of his, Leah Wolinsky.

  “Leah, dead?” came the startled reply. “But I saw her just last week and she looked in excellent health. And she wasn’t my pupil, not in any formal sense.”

  “What day was that?” Bruno asked.

  “Let me see, Friday afternoon, at a time when I had no classes. She came with Saïd Husayni, whom I was delighted to meet. I knew his work on the Moorish period in Spain, and of course his brilliant treatise on Avicenna. He speaks excellent French. But what happened to Leah? Was it some kind of accident?”

  “She fell to her
death from the wall of Commarque.”

  “What? But when she came we talked of Commarque and of my hopes from the new excavations. And of course about this latest nonsense about Iftikhar’s famous testament. Leah was very worked up about that, and I must say I find it very hard to believe that it really exists. But are you sure this woman is Leah? You said the body was thought to be hers. Mon Dieu, Commarque—I was just there, when I met you.”

  “I know, I should have shown you the photo of the body then,” said Bruno. “It was my mistake, I’m sorry. I should also have taken you beyond the château so you could see the letters we think Leah was painting on the wall when she fell. They were I-F-T-I, which could be the beginning of ‘Iftikhar.’ I need to pick your brains about that. At the time I had no idea you knew her, not until I read the reference to you in her thesis. Since you are the only person in this area who knew her, perhaps I could come and show you the photo and then take you to the morgue in Bergerac. We need someone who knew her formally to identify the body.”

  After a long moment of silence, Dumesnil agreed to see him that evening at seven, when his choir practice should have finished. He was teaching the cathedral choir to sing Gregorian chants. Bruno ended the call and immediately phoned J-J to say that he should be able to provide a definitive identification of Leah from someone who had known her. Then Bruno turned to Amélie.

  “It will be after the workday, but if you’re interested in meeting a medieval scholar who knew Leah, I’m going to see him in Sarlat at seven,” he said. “You remember, we met him at Commarque. It seems that his expertise does not stop at the Templars. He also teaches Gregorian chant.”

  Amélie stared at him with an odd expression. He couldn’t tell whether it was confusion or surprise.

  “Gregorian chant? In Sarlat?” She paused, looking at him solemnly. “Yes, I’ll certainly come. Meanwhile, I have a phone number for Leah’s American friend. It turns out that she’s another historian and she’s currently in Paris, doing some research at the national archives. She’s writing a book about Paris during the war.”

  Bruno dialed the number, and Jenny Shindler answered as she ate a sandwich lunch in a park just off the rue des Francs Bourgeois. Her initial surprise at his call was complicated by the need to finish chewing. He explained in English that he was following up on the death of her friend Leah.

  “I saw it on social media,” she replied in good French. “Some kind of climbing accident at a medieval château, which doesn’t sound like Leah. Why call me? We weren’t that close and we parted on bad terms.”

  “Her death looks suspicious. She was climbing with somebody who left her dead and took away the paint can and climbing rope she had with her,” he replied. “I was hoping you might know something about her traveling companions.”

  “I didn’t even know she was in France. She’d been living in Ramallah for some time with an Arab professor, Saïd Husayni, and I know they were hoping to have kids. I can’t think who else she might have been with. Maybe someone from his family. Where was the château where she died?”

  Bruno explained the location of Commarque and its Crusades and Templar connections, and the letters she had apparently been daubing.

  “Oh, no,” Shindler exclaimed. “Don’t tell me she was still on that crazy trail. That’s what we argued about just a few weeks ago. She wanted me to translate an article she’d written and get it into the American press, or at least circulated on social media, about the Testament of Iftikhar and Jerusalem. I told her it was just a distraction from the real issues of today. She sent me a very angry reply.”

  “Do you still have the article she sent you?” Bruno asked, trying to keep the excitement out of his voice.

  “I never got it. She sent me an e-mail and I skimmed it and told her to forget it. I wasn’t interested and no one else in the peace movement would give a damn. We’re focused on what’s going down today, not what happened a thousand years ago. I should still have her e-mail.”

  “Could you possibly forward it to me?” He gave her his e-mail address at the mairie.

  “The least I can do, I guess. We got on pretty well until this Jerusalem business blew up. I’m looking for the e-mail now.”

  Bruno heard the sound of laptop keys being tapped and then her voice, “Coming through now.”

  “Would you have any photos of Leah you could send, or of her friend al-Husayni?”

  “Leah and me, yes, from when she visited me in the States, but not of him. I’ll send them. You might find more on her Facebook page; she used that a lot. Do you really think her fall was no accident?”

  “You might help us establish what really happened,” he said as his computer beeped with an incoming e-mail. He looked to be sure it was the right one and sent it to his printer. “I have the e-mail, thank you. I’ll let you know what we conclude and thanks again for your help, mademoiselle.”

  “ ‘Dear Jenny,’ ” he read, the words written in French.

  I’m really depressed and worried about the way things are going here. The Peace Now movement is on the ropes, so many of the old stalwarts seem to have given up or been intimidated and now the academic row over Jerusalem has entered a new phase. I told you about the way that Israeli and Arab scholars have been arguing like a bunch of schoolkids about who first built Jerusalem and whether it was really significant to the early Islamic faith. I can’t prove it yet but I’m pretty sure that there’s some dirty work around a long-lost document that we only know of at second and third hand. Some people tried to sound a warning by painting this graffiti, photo attached, on the walls of a castle here that was linked to the Crusaders and to the Templars, thinking with all the interest in the Templars it would be sure to make a stir. Photos have been sent to newspapers and history magazines around the world but so far it has been virtually ignored. Perhaps you could help get the word out in the U.S. I’m going to try again in France.

  First, some background you’ll need. Pro-Israeli scholars (and see the link I attach to the article in Middle East Quarterly) suggest that Jerusalem only became an issue for Arabs when it had some special political status. After all, Jerusalem is never mentioned in the Koran, but there are some seven hundred references to the city in the Jewish Bible, the one Christians call the Old Testament. The Dome of the Rock mosque on the Temple Mount was built by the Damascus-based Umayyad dynasty in the decade after A.D. 690 when they were faced with Zubayr’s revolt in Mecca, the holiest center of Islam. The Umayyads deliberately built up Jerusalem as a rival, pouring in money for new buildings in an attempt to give it equal standing with Mecca. In the Koran 17:1 you will find the phrase referring to Muhammad’s famous night journey, or dream:

  “Glory to He who took His servant by night from the Sacred Mosque to the furthest mosque.”

  There is really no proof that this “al-Aqsa Mosque” (the furthest mosque) refers to Jerusalem, where there was no mosque in Muhammad’s lifetime. But the Umayyads built a mosque in Jerusalem and called it the al-Aqsa Mosque, in a transparent attempt to make the direct connection with the Prophet Muhammad. Once the Umayyad dynasty fell in A.D. 750 and the center of the caliphate moved to Baghdad under the Abassid dynasty, Jerusalem sank once more into obscurity—until it was brought back into prominence in 1099 when the city was first captured by the Crusaders.

  Iftikhar ad-Daula was the governor of Jerusalem when the Crusaders took the city. Iftikhar retreated to the citadel and negotiated freedom for himself, his family and his personal guard—while the rest of the inhabitants were slaughtered, Jews, Muslims and local Christians alike. The brutality of the Crusaders was extraordinary; one of their monks reported that their horses were up to their fetlocks in blood. So it is all the more surprising that they agreed to let the enemy commander and his family and his picked troops all go free. Bribery alone can hardly explain it since the Crusaders could have taken whatever gold or jewels he had. He must have offered them something very special in return for his life.

  The agreement If
tikhar reached with the Crusaders was written down, the celebrated Testament of Iftikhar, and entrusted by Baldwin, the first Christian king of Jerusalem, to the Templars. Iftikhar allegedly affirmed that the city was of no religious significance to Islam, and that its reputation had been an invention of the Umayyads to shore up their religious and political credentials. The testament then disappeared, if it ever existed.

  You can imagine the political impact today if this long-lost testament were to surface, which I believe is about to happen. But I suspect it would be a very careful and professional forgery. That is why the graffiti was painted onto the castle and why honest historians have to do something similar in Europe and the U.S., where such a warning would not be ignored. Please feel free to show this to any medieval scholars you know.

  You know my own views. I seek a two-state solution, for Israel and for Palestine, with a shared capital of Jerusalem, and the old city itself under international control, open to all and shared between all faiths, Jews, Muslims and Christians—and Buddhists and Confucians as well, come to that. I know some Jewish extremists accuse the Peace Now movement of being traitors to Israel. This is untrue. I love Israel, and love it so much that I think the only way to ensure its future is to share it with our Palestinian neighbors. Otherwise I fear that we will disappear, just like the old Crusader kingdom. I’ll do anything to prevent that from happening. Yours in peace and love, Leah.

  Bruno reread the final paragraph and then looked across at Amélie, who was reading the printout. “Leah strikes me as an impressive woman and she could be right about the political impact of this Testament of Iftikhar emerging now.”