by James Becker
But perhaps there was an alternative, a way of persuading them to give up the information without running the risk of permanently damaging them. They were, after all, four comparatively elderly men who would never be able to withstand the kind of tortures that a man in his twenties could tolerate.
Guillaume of Paris made his decision.
“Bring in Jacques de Molay,” he ordered.
Minutes later, the two torturers reappeared, half carrying and half dragging a bearded man with long white hair, barefoot and wearing a stained and filthy gray robe, who had clearly already suffered from the attentions of the inquisitors.
Against one wall of the chamber was a metal chair that was used to support a victim while his feet were being crushed in the iron boot, and Guillaume of Paris pointed at it.
“Tie him to the chair,” he ordered.
As soon as de Molay had been immobilized, one of the torturers seized the metal boot and placed it in front of the chair, and started to make it ready for use, but the inquisitor stopped him with a single command.
“No,” he said, “go back and bring another one of the prisoners. One who has not yet been questioned, and who is young and strong and able to last the rest of the day.”
The torturers nodded almost simultaneously, turned, and left the chamber. They were paid to use their strength and ability to inflict the maximum possible level of pain on their victims, and to work under the specific instructions of the inquisitors. In short, they were paid to listen and to obey, and not to talk.
“Until today we have only questioned one man at a time,” the second inquisitor said. “Why are you involving a second heretic?”
“I have received the most detailed orders from my master, the king,” Guillaume of Paris said. “There is one matter which concerns him deeply and which I have been instructed to resolve if I am able. I believe that the information the king seeks is known to de Molay, but I also believe that he will not divulge it without extreme persuasion. I therefore intend to make him watch as the torturers practice their dark arts on a younger member of his order. Perhaps he may be induced to give the answers that I need, knowing that if he does not, the young man will suffer unbearable agonies in front of his eyes, agonies that I will make clear de Molay can end with a single word.”
The second inquisitor nodded, clearly recognizing the logic of the older man’s argument.
“If the matter is confidential,” he said, “perhaps I should leave you.”
Guillaume looked up as the door opened and the two burly torturers reappeared, dragging a third man, struggling ineffectually in their grip, between them.
“Yes,” Guillaume said. “Perhaps you should.”
He waited until the other friar had left the chamber, then stepped down from his seat and walked across to where Jacques de Molay was secured to the metal chair, looking at him with hostile, frightened eyes.
“You know the information that I want from you, old man,” Guillaume said, his voice soft but laced with menace. “But it will not be you who suffers if you fail to give it to me. Now, will you answer the question I asked you before?”
De Molay shook his head, and then very deliberately spat, his spittle landing squarely on Guillaume of Paris’s cloak and sliding slowly down the material.
The inquisitor looked down at the spittle for a moment, then back at the man in front of him.
“Very well,” he said. “When you are ready to talk, nod your head. I will be watching both you and the suffering of this young knight, who I believe is a recent recruit to your godless order.”
Then he turned and walked back to his chair, seated himself comfortably, and looked across at the two torturers, the young Templar knight still writhing in their grasp.
“Prepare him,” he instructed. “We will begin with the strappado.”
1
Dartmouth, Devon
Present day
“What we have here,” David Mallory said, looking carefully at the ancient piece of vellum and running his fingers through his slightly untidy blond hair, “is yet another puzzle. And I don’t mind telling you that this is getting a bit tiresome.”
Robin Jessop looked from the vellum—a piece of fine calfskin used in the medieval period for only the most important of documents—to the three sheets of paper upon which, a few minutes earlier, Betty Howarth had transcribed the ancient text, letter by letter, under Robin’s direction. She glanced at Mallory and then again at the vellum. It had been folded about the midline, the outer surface darkened with age, while the other, inner surface was much lighter in color, having been protected by the fold and the narrow confines of its hiding place under the false bottom of the wooden chest. The writing on this inner surface was clearly legible, the ink still a solid black. Not that they could read it, of course, because the author of the text had done his best to make sure that that would not be possible. Or at least, not possible without a lot of effort and, more importantly, knowledge.
The three of them were sitting at two of the small circular tables Robin had positioned at the rear of her small antiquarian bookshop in the old coastal harbor town of Dartmouth in Devon. Behind the tables was a long counter on which stood a cutlery tray and a pile of assorted side plates, plus two covered glass cake stands, one bearing the remaining third of a Victoria sponge and on the other a couple of slices of walnut cake. At one end stood a till, and beside that a basic Windows laptop connected to a laser printer. Behind the counter was another long shelf on which stood a professional coffeemaker, cups and mugs and bags of beans on the shelves above it, and a large kettle next to half a dozen boxes of tea bags of different types.
The idea of the tables and the catering equipment was simple enough: the lady who actually ran the bookshop, Betty Howarth, was a very accomplished cook, with a particular talent that leaned toward the production of delicious cakes. Antiquarian books were not popular purchases with casual browsers, much of Robin’s business being conducted through her specialist website and by e-mail, but the allure of coffee or tea and carrot cake or whatever sweet delicacy Betty had prepared the previous evening was more than many of the people who stepped through the door could resist. It was slightly galling to Robin that on some days her bookshop made far more money from providing refreshments to the passing trade, many of whom had no discernible interest in any kind of printed publication, ancient or modern, than from any books that Betty managed to sell.
But there were no customers in the shop that afternoon. The sign on the door had been turned around so that the word CLOSED was prominently displayed, and underneath that Robin had taped a single sheet of paper on which the slightly more informative message CLOSED FOR STOCKTAKING. OPEN TOMORROW AS USUAL had been printed using the laser printer at the end of the counter.
In reality, they weren’t stocktaking. For an antiquarian bookshop, where the goods on offer are obtained as job lots from private buyers or purchased, often in bulk, at auction, the very idea of stocktaking is not simply redundant but largely meaningless. The products that the establishment sold were the books displayed on the shelves, and that really was the end of it. The only items individually recorded by Robin were those few books that each had a significant value—her threshold figure was one hundred pounds—and those she kept in a couple of locked glass-fronted bookcases near the back of the shop. They were on display, but not accessible to casual browsers, just in case.
No, the reason the shop was closed was because Robin had received a delivery of books and a number of ancient pieces of parchment and vellum. These much older documents had not been specified on the bill of lading produced by the bookseller in Switzerland who had sold her the bound volumes, simply because Robin and Mallory had added the undeclared ancient deeds and other records to the shipment before dispatch, and nobody had known about it apart from the two of them. Those documents comprised the long-lost and much sought-after Templar Archive, the deta
iled records of properties and other assets owned by the order as a part of their estate holdings. Houses, castles, manors, extensive tracts of land, and in some cases entire villages, all of which had been bequeathed or handed over to the order in the centuries before the Knights Templar were purged by King Philip the Fair of France in October 1307.
They had managed to locate the Archive among several chests of documents hidden away for over half a millennium in a complex cave system they’d found at the end of a valley in Switzerland, caves that extended in a network below the nearby hills. In some ways, that had been the easy bit, but they had also managed to convince both the Swiss authorities and a group of armed Italian thugs that the Archive had been destroyed. These men were enforcers employed by a militant arm of the Ordo Praedicatorum, the Dominican order whose members had emerged to become the pope’s personal torturers and assassins in the medieval period.
And that wasn’t all. They had also been able to get a courier company to send the medieval box that had originally contained the Archive, complete with a sophisticated antitheft device built into the lid, from Switzerland to Dartmouth, where it had arrived at more or less the same time as the books and parchments.
Robin still had to make a decision about what to do with the documents they had recovered, because in many cases the medieval records showed clearly that hundreds of acres of real estate in many European countries didn’t actually belong to the people and organizations that claimed ownership of them. In fact, the documents unambiguously stated that these now extremely valuable properties had been given to the Order of the Knights Templar in perpetuity, often with a caveat that should the order be disbanded for any reason, the ownership should pass to the then Grand Master of the Templars, and from him to his heirs and assignees. It was entirely likely that there were hundreds or even thousands of ordinary citizens living in Europe and descended from high-ranking Templars who were the proper legal owners of these pieces of land and, more importantly, the documents Mallory and Robin had found in the Archive could prove this beyond the slightest doubt.
To say that the deeds and records were dangerous was a huge understatement; explosive was much closer to the mark. Certain important families and organizations throughout Europe could end up with many of their assets seized from them if these documents were made public, and would no doubt take any measures they could to ensure that the deeds never saw the light of day. Exactly what they were going to do with the Archive was a question that Robin and Mallory still had to address.
“It’s not just a puzzle,” Robin said, pointing at the piece of medieval vellum. “If what we transcribed on that first piece of parchment is correct—and you know as well as I do that it almost certainly is—then what we have here is most probably a solid clue. Something that could lead us to the third trial or trail that Jacques de Molay put in place over seven hundred years ago. What we’re looking at could be the first tangible evidence to show what really happened to the Templar treasure before the order was purged.”
Mallory nodded, his gaze still fixed on the vellum in front of him, a relic that neither he nor Robin had any idea existed until the faintest of anomalies had struck him about the medieval chest that they had recovered from the cave system. There was a tiny, but noticeable, mismatch in its dimensions: the interior depth was slightly less than the outside measurement suggested, a discrepancy that he had verified using a ruler. From that point, finding the hidden compartment in the base of the chest had taken just a few minutes. He’d used a knife to lever out the false bottom of the chest and, inside the space that this action had revealed, they’d found the vellum.
“So you think we should go for it?” Mallory asked, looking up at Robin, his blue eyes searching her face.
She nodded.
“We’ve come a long way already,” she said, “but those bloody Dominicans grabbed the chests we found in Cyprus and pretty nearly killed us—”
She broke off for a moment as she saw the expression on Betty’s face.
“I didn’t tell you that bit, Betty,” she said, “but you know that we came out of it completely unscathed.”
“Despite the grenades,” Mallory added mischievously, the fingertips of his left hand unconsciously running down the faint white mark of a jagged scar on his left cheek, an old healed injury that had become more visible as his face had acquired a tan.
“Grenades?” Betty said, her voice carrying the barest twinge of incipient hysteria.
“Actually,” Robin chimed in, giving Mallory a hostile glance, “it was only one grenade, and when it went off it wasn’t anywhere near us, so stop trying to frighten Betty. I grant you that this time we definitely came out on top, because we’ve still got the chest and the most important single bit of the Templar Archive, but realistically that’s not a huge amount to show for all our efforts. The Archive has the potential to make a lot of people a lot of money, especially the lawyers, but that doesn’t really include us, unless we’re going to sell the individual property deeds either to the people who presently think they own particular bits of real estate, or to the people who actually own those same bits. And I think either option would be difficult to achieve successfully, and might be extremely dangerous. And we can’t even really sell the medieval chest, because of the booby trap built into the lid. I’ve no doubt the local woodentops would class it as a lethal weapon and confiscate it, because those two sword blades are like a kind of giant flick-knife. So our total financial benefit from everything we’ve done so far amounts to precisely zero. And a lot less than zero if we add up what it’s cost us in airline tickets, hotels, and hire cars to get to where we are right now.”
Mallory pointed at the piece of vellum.
“But there’s no guarantee,” he said, “that this piece of encrypted Latin text is actually going to take us any closer to the lost treasure of the Templars. And even if we can work out how to decipher it and follow whatever clues are hidden within the text, realistically it’s quite possible that the contents of the treasure chambers of the order were broken up and dispersed hundreds of years ago by the surviving knights. There may quite literally be no treasure left to find.”
“I fully accept that,” Robin said, “but I absolutely feel that it’s worth a try. We might just as well decode this—if we can—and then follow the trail to see where it leads us. At the very least, then we’ll have explored every possibility. And don’t forget the Dominicans. They aren’t going to give up the quest they’ve been committed to for the last seven hundred years, and we’re still right in their sights. That bastard Toscanelli, in particular, is almost certain to come after us at some time, just looking for revenge, so getting to the end of the trail first could be extremely beneficial to our health.”
“I thought you might say that. I was really just checking to make sure that you know what we’re letting ourselves in for—again. But before we make a start doing that, there are another couple of decisions we need to make.”
Robin nodded, her serious expression a contrast to her normally cheerful disposition. She had quite short black hair, large dark brown eyes that Mallory always felt he could lose himself in, and a slightly bent nose above full lips. Not a classically beautiful face, perhaps, but enormously and compellingly attractive, certainly as far as Mallory was concerned.
“I know,” she replied. “The chest and the Archive. What do we do with them?”
“I think the Archive is probably the easier of the two to sort out. At least for the moment, we can’t let anybody know that it didn’t go up in flames on that hillside in Switzerland, because if word of that gets out I can pretty much guarantee that all sorts of extremely unpleasant people will come out of the woodwork and do their level best to inflict severe harm on us and either recover or destroy all the documents. So the easiest thing to do, in my opinion, is to put it all in a cardboard box, walk it round to your bank, or preferably to an entirely different bank where you’re n
ot a customer, and stick it in a safe-deposit box. And then more or less forget about it.”
Robin considered what he’d said for a few moments, then nodded agreement.
“That makes sense,” she said. “And the chest? I presume you think that putting it on display in the window of the bookshop would be a pretty bad idea.”
“It would. I’m quite certain that we’ve not seen the last of those murderous Dominicans and I wouldn’t be surprised if they mounted a surveillance operation against you and against this shop. I know they probably think at the moment that the Archive and the box it was hidden in have both been destroyed, but putting that medieval chest on display anywhere would certainly give them second thoughts. So I think you need to hide that away as well. But in that case, I think you could just leave it upstairs in your apartment, tucked away somewhere in your office.”
“Right,” Robin said briskly, “then that’s exactly what we’ll do.”
Packing the Archive away took about twenty minutes, because Robin was determined that the fragile old documents should not deteriorate any further while they were in her possession. So she used a number of sheets of special packing paper designed to be used to wrap ancient books and parchments, paper that was mechanically and chemically stable, and packed the entire collection into a cardboard box that met the same specifications. The last thing she wanted was for the parchments in particular to be damaged by chemicals leaching out of the packing material. Once she was happy, she sealed the box, made a brief phone call to the bank that was the actual owner of both her bookshop and the apartment she lived in above it, and arranged for a safe-deposit box to be leased to her. Then she and Mallory walked around to the bank, Mallory carrying the box, and saw it locked safely away in part of the vault after completing the required paperwork.
