The Templar Brotherhood

by James Becker

  • • •

  Outside the building that housed Robin’s small apartment, the leader of the group noticed that one of his men had stopped and was staring down the street.

  “What is it?” he demanded in his native Italian.

  The third man pointed urgently down the road.

  “We were told that the man Mallory owns a Porsche Cayman. I’ve just seen a car that matches that description pulling out from the side of the street.”

  The leader hesitated for just a few seconds, considering his options. Then he made his decision.

  “Both of you, get back in the car. Follow him and stop him in the town if you can and bring him to me. If you can’t, and if it looks as if he’s getting away, shoot him or shoot out the tires on the car. Now go.”

  The two men ran back across the street, climbed into the BMW, and with a brisk squeal of tires drove off in the same direction the Porsche was heading.

  • • •

  Mallory pulled out of the parking space and accelerated briskly along the street, turning right at the end, and then eased the car over to the pavement on the left-hand side and stopped as Robin walked quickly over toward him. Mallory left the engine running but opened the driver’s door and climbed out as she approached.

  “You drive,” he said, walking around to the passenger door and opening it. “One of them spotted the car as I drove away, so they might come after us, and you’ll get much more out of this car than I ever will.”

  The Cayman was Mallory’s pride and joy, a treat that he had bought for himself a year or so earlier, but Robin held a competition racing license, and he knew perfectly well that with her at the wheel they could leave the BMW in the dust. He’d seen her in action once before, when she’d been at the wheel of a standard Ford saloon and outdriven a very determined bad guy trying to catch them in that same car, Mallory’s Porsche.

  “What am I looking for?” Robin asked as she pulled her seat belt tight. “In the rearview mirror, I mean. What are they driving?”

  “A silver BMW 5 Series. Probably a hire car, so you shouldn’t have any trouble losing it. It might even be a diesel.”

  “On these roads, that depends on the traffic as much as anything else.” She checked her mirrors briefly, then pulled away. “So, what did you see?”

  “Three men wearing black suits who climbed out of the Beamer and headed straight toward the staircase to your apartment. I’m pretty sure that at least one of them was armed, maybe all three.”

  “So it looks as if John’s estimate was a bit out. And we’ve got another problem as well.”

  “Don’t worry about your bag. We can buy the clothes and stuff you need once we get clear. You’ve got your handbag and your phone, and that’s all that matters.”

  “I wasn’t thinking about my bag,” Robin replied, dropping down into second gear to overtake three cars moving very slowly and apparently in convoy in the one-way system along the Quay. “I was going to put that piece of wood from the medieval chest in my safe, if it fitted, or somewhere else where it would be out of sight of prying eyes. But I didn’t get around to it, so it’s still on the desk in the study. And so is that piece of vellum, because I hadn’t put that back in the safe, either.”

  Mallory nodded.

  “I’d forgotten about that,” he admitted. “So the bloody Dominicans will now know exactly what we know, so they’ll be able to follow the same trail. This is about to turn into a real race.”

  “And that’s not the only race we’re in,” Robin said crisply. “A silver BMW, two up, is now about half a dozen cars behind us, and there’s not much I can do about that until we get clear of the town.”

  Mallory turned around in his seat and looked behind the Porsche. They’d just swung right onto Mayor’s Avenue, and the German sedan was only visible intermittently in the stream of traffic driving through Dartmouth, but he could see enough to confirm Robin’s suspicion.

  “That’s the car I saw,” he said after about half a minute. “You will be able to lose them,” he added, more of a statement than a question.

  “On the open road, no problem. Once we get to Coronation Park I can turn onto College Way, and I’ll lose them going up the hill. The real trick is going to be figuring out where we go from there.”

  Robin’s mobile rang, and the Bluetooth system in the Porsche automatically answered it and fed the call through the speakers.

  “It’s John again,” the voice said. “You might know this already, but a silver BMW stopped outside your apartment a few minutes ago. One man went into the building and the other two got back in the car and left in a hurry, so they might well be following you.”

  “Thanks, John,” Mallory said. “We know that, and they’re about fifty yards behind us right now.”

  “Good luck, then. You might need it.”

  “And thanks for that, as well.”

  As the call ended, Robin steered the Porsche around the virtually right-angle bend beside Coronation Park, essentially a large roundabout, turning the car away from the waterfront and toward the looming bulk of HMS Britannia, the Royal Navy training college that dominated that part of the town. Because they were now heading away from the center of Dartmouth, the traffic began to thin out, which allowed the driver of the BMW to get significantly closer, moving into position only two cars behind.

  Robin was boxed in behind a white Transit van that was moving uncharacteristically slowly, White Van Man in Britain usually driving with excessive speed and a total disregard for all other road users.

  And then everything changed.

  Two round holes suddenly appeared, just a couple of seconds apart, in the left-hand rear door of the Transit van at about head height, paint flaking off around the points of impact.

  23

  Dartmouth, Devon

  The van driver immediately indicated and began pulling over to the left-hand side of the road. Obviously he had heard or felt the impact of the bullets, and probably assumed that another vehicle had hit him.

  “They’re shooting at us,” Mallory said, unnecessarily.

  “Shit hot, Sherlock. I’d never have guessed.”

  The driver of the car directly behind the Porsche had clearly seen what had happened and for some reason decided to brake, rather than accelerate out of danger. That meant the BMW driver also had to brake, and then swerve around the sudden obstruction, and that upset the passenger’s aim. He was firing his silenced automatic pistol through the open side window, and the violent maneuvering of the car meant that his next shot hit the side of the Transit van, but his fourth shot missed completely.

  The moment she’d seen the first two shots hit the van, Robin had been jinking the car left and right, but the van driver’s action cleared the way, opening up a space on the right of the vehicle, and Robin instantly took advantage of it, again dropping down into second gear and employing the full power of the Porsche.

  The noise of the flat-six engine rose to a roar, and both Mallory and Robin were forced back in their seats by the brutal acceleration. The Cayman screamed up the hill that led out of Dartmouth, the sight of the BMW shrinking almost comically in the rearview mirrors. In seconds, the Porsche was doing over eighty miles an hour, ludicrously fast for that part of the town, but essential to get out of danger.

  “The Beamer can’t match our acceleration,” Robin commented, her voice absolutely calm and relaxed, “but it’s still a fast car, and losing it isn’t going to be easy. It’s already doing maybe sixty miles an hour coming up that hill, so we’re drawing away from it but not that quickly.”

  “At least we’re well out of pistol range now,” Mallory said, again turning to look behind the accelerating Cayman. “Where are you going to go?”

  Robin paused for a moment or two before replying, obviously weighing up her options.

  “I don’t want to take the obvious route out of
Dartmouth, because that’s probably where they’d guess we were heading, and the danger in doing that is that we could get held up by traffic or roadworks or something, they could get right up behind us again, and then it would pretty much be game over. I think we should do exactly the same thing as we did last time.”

  “You mean cross to the other side of the river?”

  “Exactly. We can double back into Dartmouth and use the Floating Bridge ferry to get over to the Kingswear side of the estuary. That’s the best way to put some distance between them and us.”

  Just beyond the Church Road junction on the left, the main road bent around to the south. The Porsche was doing well over ninety when Robin straightened it out again, but then she immediately hit the brakes and started slowing down for the Y junction ahead of them.

  “The main road goes right,” she said, “past Norton and over to Halwell, and if I was planning on getting out of Dartmouth in a hurry, and didn’t want to take the ferry, that’s the route I would pick.”

  “You know the area, and I don’t,” Mallory replied, “but I guess we’re not going that way.”

  “Nope.”

  At the mini roundabout by the Y junction, she dropped down two gears, flicked the steering wheel to the left, and accelerated hard down Yorke Road, cutting directly in front of a gray-haired lady driving a conspicuously battered white Nissan Micra. The angry bleat of the Nissan’s horn followed them distantly as they headed south.

  “There are several roads we can take to get back to Dartmouth,” Robin said, “but I think this is one of those occasions when time really is of the essence, and we need to get back to the town and get across the river as quickly as possible. I would hate to be waiting in the queue for the Floating Bridge if those two comedians in the Beamer spotted us, then drove up and blasted the hell out of us and this car.”

  “Amen to that.”

  Robin continued accelerating for a few seconds, then hit the brakes, hauling the speed right down to make the turn onto Waterpool Road, a narrow, twisting country lane that ran almost due east from their present position and that would get them back into Dartmouth as quickly as possible.

  The Porsche slid a few feet sideways as she turned off Yorke Road, but she corrected it effortlessly and continued accelerating, moving the steering wheel left and right as the car reached each bend in the road.

  “I’m glad you opted for a Cayman rather than a 911,” she said, as she corrected another power slide on a sharpish left-hand bend.

  “Why?” Mallory responded, his eyes fixed on the blur of scenery in front of them as hard and rocky pieces of the Devon landscape raced toward the car at ridiculous speed.

  “This is midengined, and that means the center of gravity is pretty much in the center of the car. And because of that you can really throw it around.”

  “I can see that,” Mallory said briefly.

  “In the dry, a well-driven 911 could lose us, because it has got more power. But the problem with the Cayman’s big brother is that it’s a triumph of engineering over design, and no matter what the engineers at Stuttgart do, the 911 has a massive and heavy lump of metal hanging right out at the back, behind the rear wheels, and that means it’s inherently unstable. In the wet, or on a bad road surface, if you give it the smaller quarter of rather less than half a chance, a 911 will do its best to kill you. Unless you really like living dangerously, and are happy being overtaken by old ladies on bicycles during a rainstorm, the Cayman is a much better choice.”

  “Right,” Mallory muttered, as another bend appeared in front of them, the distance to go before the inevitable impact diminishing with suicidal speed.

  And then, almost as a kind of anticlimax, on a gentle right-hand bend, the Porsche reentered the built-up area, and Robin quickly brought the speed down to just over thirty miles an hour, because of the obvious danger of hitting a wandering pedestrian or somebody incautiously stepping off the pavement somewhere. She drove down Crowther’s Hill, and after a few more bends and junctions she turned left onto the Embankment, the road that followed the west bank of the river Dart, and which she then followed all the way to Coronation Park. She joined the one-way system, turning into Coombe Road, and then pulled off at the northern end into the waiting area for the Floating Bridge ferry across to Kingswear.

  And all the way through the town, both Robin and Mallory had watched everything and everyone, just in case the two men in the BMW had somehow guessed their intentions and had doubled back to lie in wait for them. But they saw nothing to arouse their suspicions.

  24

  Dartmouth, Devon

  Although Marco Toscanelli wasn’t yet in Dartmouth—he was still traveling as quickly as the road and traffic conditions permitted in the hired Audi toward the West Country—he was making his presence, and his displeasure, known to the three Dominicans who were already on the scene. Specifically, he was profoundly irritated that the English couple had managed to slip away from the town, and even more annoyed that a large number of British police officers had now been deployed there because of the unsuccessful attempt to stop them by using their pistols, a very public event that had been witnessed by dozens of passersby and possibly even filmed by some of them using the cameras in their mobile phones.

  The only good thing about that incident was that the BMW had followed the Porsche out of Dartmouth, away from the scene. When the front-seat passenger had called Toscanelli on his mobile, as soon as it was obvious that the Porsche had managed to evade pursuit, he had ordered the driver not to return to the seaside town. Instead, he had told him to drive up to Exeter, dump the BMW in some side street, telephone the hire company and report it stolen, then hire another vehicle and drive back to Dartmouth. Although their diplomatic passports would ensure their freedom if they were stopped by the police, Toscanelli and his men needed to do their work unmolested, and the risk of driving back to the town in the BMW was too great.

  But there had been some good news. The third man of the trio that had been the first to arrive had walked into Robin Jessop’s apartment, because the door had been left unlocked, and on her desk he had found a piece of obviously ancient vellum bearing a chunk of encrypted text. That had fairly clearly been concealed in the false bottom of the medieval wooden chest that he had also found in the office. And the bonus was that sitting on the desk beside the vellum was the piece of wood that had formed the false bottom of the chest, and on it, in an area that looked newer and fresher than the rest of the timber, and that had presumably been covered by something, was a grid of letters. That, very obviously, was the key that they would need to decipher the text.

  When the Dominican had telephoned Toscanelli with this news, the Italian enforcer had been delighted. Although Mallory and Jessop had escaped the net—at least for the moment—he knew that the order now had in its possession all the information necessary to continue with the quest.

  As soon as he reached Dartmouth, Toscanelli would photograph everything, check everywhere in Robin Jessop’s apartment and not just in the office, then relay the information to Silvio Vitale back in Rome and send him copies of all the images by encrypted e-mail.

  The race to follow the third trail of clues that the Templars had left seven centuries earlier was now on. And Toscanelli had no doubt whatsoever about who would be the victor.

  25

  Devon

  The queue for the ferry was fairly short, and just under twenty minutes later the vessel moved away from the jetty and began the short crossing over to the other side of the river.

  “It’ll be too little, too late, of course,” Robin said, fishing in her handbag and taking out her mobile phone, “but I suppose I should tell our wonderful police force that somebody might well be burgling my apartment even as we speak. And if there isn’t anything more interesting happening somewhere else, they might send a uniformed constable around sometime this week. Or maybe next week.”

&n
bsp; “That’s very cynical,” Mallory replied, “but probably more accurate than you realize. My guess is that the shooting we were involved in will attract quite a large contingent of the Thin Blue Line, and I very much doubt if they’ll want to do anything as mundane as investigating a possible break-in. But you should probably do it, and tell Betty to lock up the apartment for you, because I left the door open while I ferried stuff to the car.”

  But before she could dial the number, the phone rang and the Bluetooth system in the Porsche automatically answered the call.

  “Hello?” Robin said.

  “Are you okay? It’s John.”

  “We’re fine,” Mallory replied. “We managed to get away just as the bad guys arrived. Your heads-up was a good call, but the timing sucked. They got here a hell of a lot quicker than we expected.”

  “They were quicker than I’d been told as well, so we were all caught out. Don’t tell me where you are, just in case anyone is listening in, but did you get away from Dartmouth?”

  “We’re doing that right now, and as far as Robin and I can tell, we’ve lost our pursuers. In fact, as we’re safe where we are at the moment, we were just about to call the local police to tell them that her apartment has been burgled.”

  “I wouldn’t bother, if I were you,” John said. “I called them about two minutes after you sped off in that rather nice Porsche to tell them I’d just seen a man force the apartment door. In fact, he just walked in, because it was unlocked, but never mind. I still have eyes on the place, and so far nobody resembling a policeman has appeared. But the burglar—he was the third man who’d arrived in that BMW—left the building about ten minutes after he walked up the staircase. He was carrying the old wooden box that you had in your study, which I presume was what he was looking for.”