The Templar Brotherhood

by James Becker

  “Talking of clues,” Vitale said, deciding to explore another avenue first, “how, exactly, did Jessop and Mallory manage to locate the entrance to the cave behind the waterfall, bearing in mind that the only possible lead they could have had was the photographs they’d taken of the outsides of those two chests you recovered from Cyprus?”

  Toscanelli spread his hands in the universal gesture that translated as a total lack of knowledge.

  “I know our experts checked every inch of those chests,” he said, “and to the best of my knowledge they found nothing. But somehow Jessop—because she seems to be the brains of the outfit—must have found something. Some pattern or some clue that sent her and Mallory to Chartres Cathedral. But we don’t know what it was that she saw, or even what other information the two of them found during their visit to France. I’ve talked to Roman Benelli, who seems to know more about encryption systems than anyone else here, and his best guess is that there might have been an inscription on an old tombstone, thirteenth century or earlier, that might have been the code word they needed to decipher the last part of that original manuscript that Jessop found.”

  Toscanelli again spread his hands.

  “But what tombstone they looked at, and what inscription they recorded, we have absolutely no idea. And now, because we picked up their trail and followed them into the cave in Switzerland, the exact clue they found doesn’t really matter. That particular lead is now a dead end.”

  “And you are quite sure,” Vitale asked, “that there was no sign in that cave system of the Templar assets or their sacred treasure?”

  Toscanelli shook his head.

  “We covered every inch of that network of caves, and I’m quite certain that there’s nothing else there. That complex was intended to keep the Templar Archive safe until the order could regroup and emerge again to spread their heresy throughout Europe. No, in my opinion, and for what it’s worth, the Templars hid their assets and the treasure somewhere else. Possibly, even probably, in another country.”

  Vitale nodded. On this particular occasion, Toscanelli’s take on the situation exactly matched his own.

  “That’s something else we have to think about. Right now I’m more interested in the other bit of the Archive. Tell me again exactly what happened when you confronted Mallory and Jessop in that dead-end cavern.”

  Toscanelli nodded and once more explained to Vitale what had taken place and what they had seen: the English couple they had been pursuing trapped in the cave with no way out, the possibility that they had a small box or chest with them, and then the echoing thunder as Mallory and Jessop used a length of rope to trigger the final Templar booby trap, dropping hundreds of tons of stone from the roof of the cave to form an impenetrable barrier between themselves and their pursuers.

  “And you believed that they had trapped themselves by doing that?”

  “As far as we could tell at the time,” Toscanelli said, “that was the obvious conclusion. What we hadn’t anticipated was that the Templars had managed to design the booby trap so that as well as blocking the way through the cave, it opened up an escape route through a hole in the roof or maybe in a side passage. But as soon as we saw that their car had gone, I knew that they had somehow managed to get out of the cavern.”

  “With the rest of the Archive?” Vitale asked.

  “We didn’t know that at the time, but when we finally caught up with them, they certainly had an old wooden box with them. A box full of documents of some sort, but we never got close enough to see the documents or examine the box. And then of course Mallory poured petrol over it and set it on fire.”

  “So do you think that what you saw him destroying was the Templar Archive?”

  Again Toscanelli spread his hands wide and shrugged.

  “As I said, we couldn’t get close enough to see properly. All I do know is that he poured petrol over what looked like a small medieval wooden chest that contained documents of some sort. So either that was the Archive, and they decided that the only way they were going to get out of Switzerland was by destroying it in front of that senior government official, or they somehow or other managed to find a duplicate chest, and the whole thing was just a trick.”

  “You told me you went back to the hillside after everyone else had gone. What did you find?”

  “We went back, yes, because I wanted to examine what was left, which wasn’t much. The chest had been completely destroyed by fire, and all that remained were the metal fittings, a few slivers of wood, and some fragments of parchment. I picked up the biggest pieces I could find, and I sent them all for radiocarbon dating the moment we got back to Rome.”

  “And the result was?”

  “The laboratory complained about having to do a rush job and then added all sorts of caveats about inaccuracies caused by the fire that had destroyed the chest, and a number of other factors, but the consensus date for the wood was 1327, with a margin of error of fifty years either way, and the piece of parchment I supplied dated from forty years earlier.”

  “So the dates fit pretty well,” Vitale said. “Obviously we have no idea when the Archive was placed in the chest, but sometime in the early part of the fourteenth century has to be about right. And you also found several pieces of parchment?”

  Toscanelli nodded.

  “Yes, about a couple dozen bits, the biggest roughly half the size of the palm of my hand. There are fragments of text written on most of them, letters and a few words. As far as Fabrini was able to determine from his analysis, the wording is consistent with medieval Latin and most probably refers to transactions of various kinds. He told me that the fragments I found were not dissimilar to the other documents we recovered in the six big chests.”

  “You would expect it to be similar,” Vitale pointed out, “because it would be the same age, written on the same kind of material and referring to the same kind of transactions. On the other hand,” he went on, “if Mallory somehow managed to find a medieval chest somewhere, stuffed a few dozen of the records of normal Templar transactions inside it, and then set fire to it, what you found would be a perfect match for that as well.”

  Vitale paused for a moment and stared at Toscanelli.

  “You’ve had more contact with these people than anyone else. What do you think happened on that hillside in Switzerland?”

  Toscanelli didn’t reply immediately but paused for a few seconds, mentally analyzing what he had seen and what he knew about Jessop and Mallory.

  “Despite what I saw,” he said eventually, “my instinct tells me that it was a trick. A good trick, certainly good enough to fool that Swiss government official.”

  “Explain.”

  “It’s Jessop more than Mallory, in my opinion. She’s an antiquarian bookseller, and that must mean she has a huge interest in ancient documents of all kinds. That’s her business. We know they managed to get out of that cave, and were almost certainly carrying the lost Templar Archive with them when they left. What I can’t believe is that Jessop would then allow Mallory to set fire to documents of such tremendous historical importance, especially because of the implications of the information that is contained within those documents. I think they somehow managed to smuggle the Archive out of the country, and probably just burned up a handful of unimportant parchments, very likely inside the chest in which the Archive had been stored.”

  “So you think her personality and profession were the determining features?” Vitale asked.

  “If you put it like that, yes.”

  Vitale was silent for a few moments; then he nodded briskly.

  “We don’t always see eye to eye, Toscanelli,” he said, “but in this case we do. I have already ordered inquiries to be initiated in Switzerland to see if any shipments were made from antique shops and book dealers to Jessop’s store, and through one of our tertiaries I have ordered surveillance to be resumed on her in Engl
and. If they did manage to get away with the Archive, I promise you that we’ll find out about it.”

  Toscanelli nodded.

  “If you want, I can go—”

  “You’re not going anywhere, Toscanelli. Because of what happened on Cyprus, when you let Mallory and Jessop slip through your fingers, and your incompetent bungling later in Britain, you’re now compromised in England, so that’s one place that you can’t go to in the immediate future, unless we decide to give you a different identity and another diplomatic passport.”

  Vitale paused for a few moments, considering.

  “In fact,” he went on, “it might be worth altering your appearance, just in case we do decide you need to travel to Britain.”

  “You mean plastic surgery?” Toscanelli sounded quite alarmed at the prospect of going under the knife.

  Vitale shook his head.

  “You’re not valuable enough to the order to justify spending that kind of money on changing your face. No, from now on you just don’t shave. A full beard is by far the easiest way of giving you an entirely different look.”

  “I understand.” Toscanelli sounded relieved. “Is that everything?”

  “Of course not. The original parchment, the Ipse Dixit text that started this hare running, stated clearly that there were three trails that would have to be followed in sequence. The first part of the quest took you to Cyprus and to that cave below the old castle, and the second part ended in that complex of caves under the Swiss mountain. We still don’t know how, but something Mallory and Jessop saw in the metallic decoration on the two chests buried in Cyprus led them to Switzerland. The problem we now have is that presumably they know what the final clue is, and have some idea about where to start following the trail that will take them to the last remaining part of the Templar treasury.”

  “You mean the treasure itself? All the assets that vanished from Templar strongholds in the last days before the order was purged?”

  “That’s exactly what I mean. The vast quantities of gold and silver, jewelry and precious stones, and all the rest of it. Everything of value that the order possessed at the end of its existence. That treasure is the only thing left, the only thing that we have not so far been able to find or account for. We now know—or at least I believe—that the Archive has finally been recovered, and we will be taking steps to get our hands on the documents that compose it.

  “But far more important than that is the contents of the Templar treasury, and of course the sacred relic worshipped by them. The probability is that the chest that Mallory and Jessop recovered from the Swiss cave system didn’t just hold the lost Archive, but also a document or an inscription or something that will allow them to continue with the third and final part of the quest. And that means that the end of our task is in sight. We watch them, we follow them, and when the trail comes to an end, we’ll take the treasure and the relic from them.”

  “And what about Mallory and Jessop?” Toscanelli asked. “What happens to them?”

  “Then you can kill them, of course. In fact, if the circumstances permit, I’ll even let you take your time. You can have a little fun with them before they die. I’m sure you’ll enjoy that, almost as much as they won’t.”

  4

  Dartmouth, Devon

  “Are you getting anywhere?” Betty asked.

  She was slightly overweight, dark haired, middle-aged, and perpetually cheerful. And, at least in Mallory’s supremely unqualified opinion, she probably looked on Robin as the daughter she’d never had.

  Her short marriage had ended very abruptly when her husband, a professional fisherman, had set out on his boat with two other local men for a five-day fishing voyage, and had simply vanished. No sign of him, his two companions, or his fishing boat had been seen since, though a section of the hull of what was clearly a very similar vessel had washed up a couple months later dozens of miles farther down the coast in Cornwall. It was never confirmed that this wreckage had come from his boat, because of the absence of any positive identifying marks, but the paintwork was approximately the right color.

  The shipping lanes off the southern coast of England are among the busiest in the world, and it was conjectured that the fishing boat might have been run down in the dark by a much larger vessel, perhaps one on which a proper radar watch was not being kept. Or perhaps the fishing boat’s radar reflector had been lost overboard and nobody on the ship had noted the faint return on the radar or seen the boat’s lights.

  As was always the case with any kind of a maritime disaster, there were a number of possible explanations, any one of which could have been correct, but none offered more than a few crumbs of comfort to Betty, who had instantly lost her soul mate and the man she had hoped to grow old with. But at least she had been left financially secure, the insurance policy clearing the mortgage on her cottage, and her husband’s life insurance had been enough to provide her with an adequate, if not comfortable, income for the rest of her life.

  But she would have gladly swapped all that just to have him back.

  “I think the expression ‘not really’ more or less covers it,” Robin said, gesturing with her pencil toward a haphazard collection of sheets of paper, each covered with successive and unsuccessful attempts at working out what the text on the piece of vellum meant.

  Sitting at the table beside her, Mallory nodded agreement.

  “About the only thing we know for sure,” he said, “is that the text is encrypted. And we knew that before we even started. But everything we’ve tried up to now to decipher it has just turned one piece of gibberish into another, slightly different piece of gibberish.”

  “I’ll make some more coffee,” Betty said, standing up and walking around the counter toward the coffee machine, “and perhaps another slice of cake might help stimulate your thought processes.”

  “Thanks,” Robin said, tossing down her pencil in irritation. “I’m not quite sure how much improvement an injection of caffeine is likely to make to our performance, but it will certainly be very welcome.”

  The very first clue that Robin had encountered in what had become an all-consuming quest, what seemed like a lifetime earlier but had in fact been only a few weeks, was a piece of ancient parchment rolled up and secreted away inside a book safe, a leather-bound box that looked exactly like a book until you tried to open it. More by luck than by judgment, she had used a long-bladed screwdriver to release the catch holding the box closed, and in doing so had triggered a functional antitheft device that comprised two rows of needle-sharp spikes that were forced out of the box by powerful springs. Luckily, none of the spikes had been driven through her hands, but the brutal efficiency of the device had set the tone for almost everything that she and Mallory had subsequently experienced.

  Opening the book safe incautiously would inevitably have resulted in serious damage to a person’s hands, but opening the two chests they had found under the floor of the cave on Cyprus would have been lethal. Lifting the lid released a pair of razor-sharp blades, easily capable of disemboweling anyone standing in front of the chest, and even the small wooden chest they had recovered from Switzerland contained a simpler, but still very effective antitheft device: two spring-loaded blades that were released the moment the lid was lifted. And the cave system itself, a warren of tunnels and caverns that ran below a mountain in the canton of Schwyz, had contained at least three separate booby traps, one of which had resulted in the death of one of the pursuing Dominican enforcers. The other two had been potentially even more dangerous, consisting of carefully planned and prepared rockfalls that had been triggered by simple release mechanisms that were still fully operational some seven hundred years after they had been constructed.

  That first piece of parchment had been covered with an encrypted text, and in trying to decipher it, Robin had enlisted the aid of David Mallory, an IT specialist who was the only man she had ever encountered wi
th an interest in codes and ciphers. Working together, they had cracked the code on the first part of the text written on the parchment, and later further sections of text had yielded their secrets when the two of them had solved additional clues.

  But the text written on the piece of vellum had, so far, not succumbed to any of their attempts at analysis. Mallory had been hoping—and expecting—that the anonymous compiler of the text had used some kind of a substitution code in its preparation, and most probably Atbash or a variant of it. Plain vanilla Atbash was the simplest possible letter-substitution code, created simply by writing out the alphabet in a horizontal line with the reversed alphabet written underneath it. Simple enough to do, and simple enough to decode, a fact that had clearly been well understood by people in medieval times. Variants had been introduced, typically involving displacing the reversed alphabet so that, for example, instead of the letter Z occurring underneath A, it would be under an entirely different letter of the alphabet, with all the other letters shifted accordingly.

  A further refinement was the replacement of the reversed alphabet with one or more code words or, in some cases, the addition of code words to the beginning and end of the alphabet, which greatly increased the security of the encrypted text and hence the degree of difficulty in trying to decipher it.

  “About the only thing I am completely sure of,” Mallory said, his frustration evidenced in his voice and on his face, “is that we’re definitely not looking at basic Atbash. Whoever encrypted this used something much more complex than that, and almost certainly replaced the alphabet with code words.”

  “And if you don’t know what those code words are,” Betty suggested, “then you may not be able to decipher the text.”

  “Exactly,” Robin said. “We’ve tried all the obvious words that we can think of. Things like the names of the Templar grand masters, the places where they had their most imposing and important fortifications, and even things like the names of the symbols that were most commonly associated with the order. Things like the Templar battle flag, the beauséant, and the red cross, the croix pattée, that they wore on their surcoats and was emblazoned on their shields. But as David said, nothing we’ve tried produces anything like the plaintext we’re hoping for.”