by James Becker
Then he counted the letters in the grid—thirty-nine—and eliminated all of the duplicates from the total.
“I think you’re definitely onto something,” he said. “That gives us eighteen unique letters, the same number that the frequency-analysis program came up with. And I’ve just tried it the other way round, as it were, only using the letters that corresponded to the white squares on the checkerboard. But that only gives us a total of sixteen, so you were right the first time. Brilliant stuff.”
“Let’s hope it works,” Robin said.
It wasn’t easy, because of the number of duplicate letters that were still present, even in the reduced number of code words they were using, but eventually the text they had transcribed from the vellum began to yield its secrets. Robin produced a final copy of the Latin text and then spent another hour translating it into fairly readable English.
“So, what have we got?” Mallory asked when she finally put down her pencil and eraser and scanned what she’d written.
“This isn’t exactly what I’d been expecting,” Robin replied. “It starts off with a kind of summary or justification of the events before and after October 1307.”
And at that moment, her phone started to ring.
20
Heathrow Airport, London
Marco Toscanelli, uncomfortably conscious of the weight of the Beretta pistol in his carry-on bag, suffered a brief moment of panic as he approached the immigration official at Heathrow. But after the briefest of glances at the document that he had proffered, the uniformed man, who appeared to be an Indian, simply nodded and waved him on his way.
Getting the diplomatic passport, which now bore a bad photograph of his unshaven face and the name Marco—because sticking to the same first name was always a good idea—Mancini, the alias that Vitale had given him, had been something of a rush.
The first version that the officials at the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, the SMOM, had provided had been rejected by Vitale because its validity date had been that very day, and he was concerned that questions might be asked of an alleged diplomat traveling internationally with a brand-new passport. Instead, he had returned it to the Palazzo Malta, the SMOM’s Rome headquarters, with a request that they backdate it at least a year and include a scattering of immigration stamps within its pages.
All that had taken time, but the SMOM had never had any trouble in taking orders from, or fulfilling tasks for, the Dominicans, with whom they were inextricably linked. The Supremus Ordo Militaris Hospitalis Sancti Ioannis Hierosolymitani Rhodius et Melitensis, the Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of Saint John of Jerusalem of Rhodes and of Malta, commonly known as the Sovereign Military Order of Malta or just the Order of Malta, is the oldest surviving chivalric order in the world, having been founded in Jerusalem in about 1099.
It had then been known as the Knights Hospitaller, and had been chosen as the official beneficiary order to receive all of the confiscated assets of the Knights Templar, a transfer that had been widely expected to be of immense value, and that was to have been supervised by the Dominicans, the militant order that had functioned since the Middle Ages as the pope’s personal torturers and enforcers. The transfer had indeed taken place, but because the Templars had clearly anticipated the actions orchestrated by King Philip the Fair of France, virtually all of the movable assets of the Templars had been spirited away before the mass arrests in 1307 that had signaled the end of the order.
But the Dominicans had always taken their instructions seriously, and for the previous seven hundred years they had been actively trying to track down and recover every Templar asset they could lay their hands on. They hadn’t achieved very much, but what they had found in the early years had been passed on to the Hospitallers, and in more recent times to the renamed Sovereign Military Order of Malta.
And that was why the two very different organizations enjoyed such a close and mutually beneficial relationship. The issue of diplomatic passports to members of the Dominican order involved in sensitive operations was just one of the many services that the SMOM very willingly provided.
The two men who had been traveling with Toscanelli also walked through passport control and immigration without any problems, and within minutes they had all linked up with their colleague who had flown there from Milan, and who had already hired the vehicle they would be using.
Less than twenty minutes after the aircraft from Rome had landed, the four-man team was in the Audi, checking and loading their weapons and heading toward the town of Dartmouth in Devon.
21
Dartmouth, Devon
“It’s a private number,” Robin said, swiping her finger across the screen of the mobile to answer the call. “Hullo?”
“Hi, Robin,” a male voice replied. “Actually, I was hoping to talk to David as well. Is he there?”
“Yes. Who is this?”
The voice was faintly familiar to her, but she didn’t recognize the caller. “It’s John.”
That was definitive information, but not helpful, because she still didn’t know who he was. “John who?”
“Just John.”
Then she remembered, and the expression on her face changed. She glanced at Mallory and put the phone on speaker.
“I think it’s that spy bloke who bugged us before,” she said. “The one who called himself John because he was too ashamed to tell us his real name.”
“Well remembered,” the voice from the speaker replied. “And it’s less about shame than security. A real name isn’t that much to go on, but it would be an obvious chink in my armor, so I’m quite happy to stick with something nicely anonymous. Something like ‘John,’ in fact.”
“Hi, John,” Mallory said.
“Hang on a minute,” Robin interjected. “How did you get this number? I bought a new phone and had a new mobile number issued after that last fiasco.”
“Ways and means, my dear, ways and means,” Gary Marsh responded. “Nothing very clever about it. You left your mobile phone bill on the desk. It was there in plain sight when I popped in the other evening to see what the two of you were up to.”
“I’m glad you find it funny,” Robin snapped. “I’d have thought that spying on people was actually a bit sick.”
“Actually, I don’t find it funny at all. It’s just a job, and it pays pretty well, but you are kind of right. There are times when I wish I did something else for a living. This is one of them.”
“Go on,” Mallory said. “By the way, thanks for leaving those clues to show you’d been in the apartment, that little patch of talcum powder and the briefcase turned around the wrong way.”
“I thought you might notice those, and I’m glad you did,” Marsh said. “I know we’ve never met, but I quite like you two and I have the definite feeling that you’ve got yourselves involved in something much bigger than you think, and that’s why I’m being somewhat economical with the truth as far as my employer is concerned, whenever I can. And that’s also why I’ve been giving you the occasional hint. And well-done finding the mains-powered bug, though I’m not sure that the performance the two of you gave before you unplugged it was entirely convincing.”
“I suppose you recorded that and sent it to whoever is paying your fee,” Mallory suggested. “And would that be an Italian gentleman?”
“I don’t actually know. The man I’m dealing with is certainly English—an English policeman, in fact—but I’m equally certain that he’s taking his orders from somebody else. And that, really, is why I’m talking to you now, because I don’t like the way this seems to be panning out.”
Mallory was all attention.
“What do you mean by that, exactly?”
“I mean the last set of instructions I was given about you two bothers me. Listen, usually I just do routine, noninvasive surveillance. I’m given details of the target and an overview of my tasking, which is usually w
hat the man who’s paying my bill is expecting the target to do. I don’t do matrimonial, because I think that’s a bit sleazy—”
“That’s something we agree on,” Robin interrupted, “and I’m pleased you have some standards and scruples.”
“Quite,” Gary Marsh said. “I’ve done a bit of industrial counterespionage, where a company is afraid that its trade secrets or details of its marketing processes or whatever is being leaked to a rival, usually by one of the company’s own employees. But as I said, most of the time I end up doing this kind of thing: nonspecific short-term surveillance. Right from the start, with you two, a few things have bothered me.”
“So what are you, then?” Robin asked waspishly. “A spook with a conscience? Is that it?”
“If you want to put it that way, then I suppose I am, yes.”
“Carry on, John,” Mallory said placatingly, holding up a calming hand toward Robin. “What was it that bothered you?”
“First of all, it was the money. The fee I was offered was far too much, given the obvious simplicity of the job. I won’t tell you what I was paid per day, but it was quite a bit more than I normally charge per week. Then the tasking didn’t really make sense, either. Initially all I was supposed to do was follow you, Robin, and keep my employer informed about your movements. Usually, I’m told to monitor and ideally record conversations and identify anyone the target has any meaningful contact with, but in your case he only seemed interested in knowing where you were at all times. But that changed very recently, when I was told to get inside your apartment. My employer, or perhaps more likely the principal, the man who’s been pulling his strings, suddenly became very interested in deliveries to your shop. He wanted to know the size of any packages that you received, and if there was any indication that you were taking those deliveries anywhere else. To a vault in your bank in Dartmouth, for example.”
“John” paused briefly, and Mallory responded.
“I suppose you were dogging our footsteps, then, weren’t you?”
“All part of the job, yes. And of course I had to tell my employer what I had seen, and that seemed to get him very excited. That was when he told me to get inside Robin’s apartment and try to locate a medieval wooden chest. If I found it, I was to photograph it, concentrating on anything that looked like a pattern in the metalwork or a carving in the woodwork. I was also told to photograph or copy any paperwork or documents that could in any way relate to a medieval manuscript. Anything in Latin, for example. He also instructed me to position a bug in the apartment and to record and then upload your conversations to the cloud.”
“Let me guess,” Mallory said. “After you recorded those two conversations I had with Robin—when I thought I’d spotted something that would let us decode a particular encrypted manuscript, and the second one, where I suggested we should head for Tomar in Portugal—your orders changed again.”
“They did. I was told to keep my distance, but at the same time to maintain my surveillance. Specifically, I was told to contact my employer immediately if the two of you left the apartment, either to go somewhere else in the town or if you went further afield by car. He was most insistent that he should know exactly where both of you were at all times. In my opinion, the implication of that was fairly obvious, but the other thing that concerned me was that he also told me not to react to any incidents that involved either or both of you, and very specifically told me that I was under no circumstances to contact the police, no matter what happened. I’ve been in this business a long time, and to me that’s a clear warning that somebody, maybe more than one person, is going to come looking for you. And reading between the lines, I think they probably aren’t going to be the kind of people that you would actually want to meet.”
“We’ve met them already,” Mallory said flatly, “or some of their colleagues, and you’re right about that. Getting involved with these people is potentially extremely bad for our health. So thanks for the warning. Is there anything else?”
“I do have a sense of the timing involved. In his last call, a few minutes ago, my employer let slip that it was particularly important to know your whereabouts from five o’clock this evening, and that’s less than an hour from now. So, in my opinion, you need to move pretty soon, and to be long gone from Dartmouth by five, before your unwelcome visitors turn up.”
“Thanks,” Mallory said again. “I presume you’ll be telling your employer the moment we get on the road?”
“Well, that’s the thing. One of the advantages of being down here on the coast is that the seafood is usually excellent.”
Robin looked at Mallory and shrugged. Neither of them had any idea where this particular conversational thread was heading.
“And?” Robin prompted.
“And I have a sneaking suspicion that the prawns I had for lunch weren’t quite as fresh as I had expected.”
“Did you have prawns for lunch?” Mallory asked.
“Is that strictly relevant?”
“Probably not.”
“Anyway,” “John” continued, “I think it’s almost certain that sometime within the next five minutes or so those prawns are going to come back to bite me, and I’m going to be confined to a white porcelain throne for quite some time. And the trouble with being a one-man band is that I’m a one-man band. There’s nobody I can get to take over my duties if I can’t perform. So, unfortunately, when you do decide to leave I don’t think I’m going to be in a fit state to see you go, and so I obviously won’t be able to tell my employer that you’re on the move.”
“Thanks, John. That’s a big help.”
“The other odd thing about these prawns, though, is that I’ll probably recover fairly quickly, and so I should be back in position when whoever is being sent here to find you eventually turns up. If Robin can overcome her natural revulsion to actually speaking to someone like me, I can give you a bell and let you know what the opposition consists of. Numbers of people, brief descriptions, the cars they’re driving, all that kind of thing. After all, surveillance is what I do for a living.”
“Thank you, John,” Robin said. “And I mean that. No bullshit. Thanks very much. We really do appreciate it.”
“I’ll call you later.”
For a couple of seconds both Mallory and Robin stared at the now-silent mobile phone on the desk in front of them.
“Do you think he’s on the level?” Robin asked.
“I hope so. But if he isn’t, I don’t know what he’s trying to achieve by warning us. We know that the Dominicans are probably still on our trail, so all he’s doing is giving us the specifics of the situation from his perspective, from the point of view of the opposition. And that can only help us.”
“So we get back on the road?” Robin asked.
“We get back on the road,” Mallory confirmed, “though right now I have no idea where we should be heading, or where this quest is taking us.”
“I might be able to help you with that,” Robin said.
22
Dartmouth, Devon
The man driving the BMW 5 Series had made much better time than either he or the woman who lived in the satnav had expected. For some reason, most of the roads were virtually empty of traffic, and he’d held the Beamer at well above the limit for most of the way, at least until he reached the narrow and twisting lanes of Devon and had to haul the speed right down. So the estimate of five o’clock that the front-seat passenger had telephoned to Silvio Vitale, which Vitale had in turn relayed to the tertiary, and which he had then passed on to Gary Marsh, turned out to be somewhat pessimistic.
And that meant that when the driver steered the BMW sedan into the street that ran behind Robin’s bookshop and stopped in the road right beside the metal spiral staircase that led to her apartment, Mallory and Robin hadn’t actually left. Robin was in the bookshop chatting to Betty, the woman who actually ran the place on her b
ehalf, and Mallory had just loaded his computer bag into the trunk in the front of his Porsche Cayman, parked about seventy yards up the road, the closest to the apartment he’d been able to park. The apartment itself was still unlocked, and Robin’s overnight bag was sitting on the desk, the top open and waiting for her to add whatever final items she decided she needed.
As Mallory pushed down on the front trunk lid to close it, he looked straight back down the street and immediately noticed the BMW. It wasn’t the car that attracted his attention but the sight of the three heavily built men, each with black hair and wearing a black suit, who were climbing out of it. He didn’t react for a few seconds, just watched where they were going and what they were doing. But when the leader of the trio reached inside his jacket and extracted what looked to Mallory remarkably like a pistol as he stepped over to the spiral staircase, he knew he had to do something, and quickly.
He had Robin’s mobile number on speed dial, and he called it as he dropped into the driving seat of the Porsche. She answered almost immediately.
“We’ve got company,” Mallory said urgently. “If you’re still in the shop, leave right now. Turn left and walk toward the river. I’m in the car and I’ll pick you up at the end of the street.”
“Got it,” Robin said.
As he started the engine of the Cayman, Mallory thanked his lucky stars that Robin was not a typical woman. When things got sticky, she didn’t hesitate, she didn’t ask stupid questions, and she didn’t dither. She just acted, and right then, that was more important than anything else.
There was only one problem with the Porsche: when the key was turned in the ignition switch and the engine started, the sound was difficult to ignore. The roar of the 3.4-liter flat-six echoed off the surrounding buildings before settling down to a dull rumble. For a couple of seconds, Mallory took his eyes off the instrument panel to check the rearview mirrors. One of the men who had climbed out of the BMW was standing in the middle of the street, staring toward the Cayman. But there was nothing he could do about that.
