The Templar Brotherhood

by James Becker

  They batted the subject back and forth between them for the next few minutes, but reached no useful conclusion.

  “Okay,” Mallory said. “This isn’t exactly a plan, but it’s an idea. I still think the encrypted text was quite clear about Templecombe and the Head. That is where we were supposed to go. So why don’t we find another hotel in this general area and stay there tonight? We can go over the stuff we decrypted again and look at it really closely. And if anything jumps out at us, we can go back there tomorrow or the next day, once the police presence has ended or at least diminished, and have another look around.”

  “I can pretty much guarantee that we won’t be the only ones at the church if we do that,” Robin said. “The shooting in the building will attract all the local ghouls and the sensation seekers. It’ll probably be standing room only.”

  Mallory grinned at her.

  “You’re probably right,” he agreed. “But that might actually help us. We could lose ourselves in the crowd and have a good snoop around without looking any different to everybody else there.”

  “We still need to lose ourselves,” Robin said. “The biggest place around here is Warminster, so let’s head over there and find somewhere to stay.”

  Mallory fell silent as Robin drove past Mere and headed toward the A360, the road that would take them north to Warminster. In his mind, he replayed, again and again, the violent events of the day, wondering if he should have acted differently, and decided eventually that he had done the right thing. The shooting of the rector was a despicable act by any standard, and he could think of no good reason why he shouldn’t have visited the same level of injury in retribution. An eye for an eye, an appropriately biblical sense of justice.

  Then he mentally switched his attention to the—as it turned out—abortive investigation. And a sudden realization dawned on him. Something that made such obvious sense that he was simply amazed that it hadn’t occurred to either of them before. Something that he absolutely knew would have been blindingly obvious to the Templars as well.

  And then he started to laugh.

  36

  Somerset

  “Over there. That’ll do,” Toscanelli instructed from the passenger seat of the leading car, pointing ahead, and the driver immediately touched the brake pedal and moved the indicator stalk, giving an obvious warning to the driver of the car behind of his intentions.

  The two cars containing the Dominicans, their number now reduced by one because of what had happened in Templecombe, pulled to a halt in a lay-by—in reality nothing more than the wide triangular-shaped end of a little-used farm track—and all the men climbed out.

  Toscanelli issued a brief instruction, and a few moments later they were standing around in a rough semicircle looking at the glass-fronted wooden display case that held the enigmatic Templecombe Head.

  “It’s ugly,” one of the men said. “The face, I mean.”

  “It may be,” Toscanelli agreed, “but if our experts in Rome are right, this painting holds the key to the lost treasure and the vast wealth of the cursed Templars. And we managed to snatch it away before Jessop and Mallory could get their hands on it.”

  “It’s a shame about Salvatori,” another of the men said, slowly and deliberately.

  “He did the right thing,” Toscanelli said, staring at him. “He did just as Vitale ordered. As soon as he recognized Mallory he opened fire at him. But neither he nor I expected the Englishman to be armed. He shot Salvatori and then bolted the church door. Once he did that, there was no way I could get inside and finish them off. That door was massive and it would have withstood almost any assault—that was what it was designed to do by the medieval carpenters who built it. So I had no choice. This is supposed to be a covert operation, and I was certain the British police were already on their way. Salvatori was badly wounded, and would probably have died even if we could have got him to a hospital. But we couldn’t do that, for obvious reasons. Our instructions were quite clear about contact with the British authorities. We couldn’t move Salvatori, so I did the only thing I could to ensure that he wouldn’t talk. If it had been me who’d been shot by Mallory, I would have expected one of you to do the same to me.”

  The Dominican who’d made the comment didn’t appear entirely convinced by Toscanelli’s obvious justification for his actions, but looked away. Men who accompanied Toscanelli on missions tended to have a really short shelf life, as had been demonstrated on several occasions in the past.

  “Right. Get it open. The information we need is on the back.”

  Two of the Italians produced screwdrivers and pliers and set to work opening up the wooden case. It didn’t take long. The box had been designed to support and display an interesting curio on a church wall, not protect the contents from a determined attempt to open it. Within a few minutes, the case was open, and they could extract the ancient wooden panel bearing the image of the unidentified man’s face.

  “Turn it over,” Toscanelli said, taking a compact digital camera from his pocket to record whatever information the reverse of the panel contained.

  The two men who’d pulled the panel out of the box obeyed him, and rested the panel against the side of the car.

  For a few moments there was complete silence. Then one of the Dominicans laughed briefly before lapsing into silence again.

  The reverse of the panel was devoid of any markings whatsoever, exactly as George Unwin had told Robin and Mallory. In fact, there were a few marks and blemishes, just as there always were on any piece of wood, but nothing that in any way resembled letters, numbers, or recognizable shapes.

  Toscanelli stared fixedly at it, almost as if he was daring some hidden message to somehow manifest itself, then shook his head and tucked the camera away again.

  “And Salvatori died for this?”

  He turned to look at the man who’d spoken.

  “Be quiet,” he snapped. “Let me look at it closely.”

  He stepped forward and bent to look at the panel, running the tips of his fingers over the wood, just in case there were any indentations that could form a part of a clue or message that was invisible to the naked eye. But he found nothing.

  “This doesn’t make sense,” he muttered. “Everything pointed to this as the location of the next clue we needed to follow. I must talk to Vitale, and find out what he wants us to do now.”

  He produced his mobile and took three pictures of the blank reverse of the panel, and one of the painted face, and then used the phone’s Internet connection to send them to the duty officer in Rome. He knew that Vitale was expecting to see the images as soon as possible, and guessed that he would have them displayed on his computer monitor within a matter of minutes.

  Less than two minutes later, Toscanelli’s mobile rang.

  “I’m not impressed with this, Toscanelli,” Vitale said, the tension in his voice obvious. “And I’m a lot less impressed that you left a dead man behind you at Templecombe.”

  “How did you know?”

  “We have tertiaries everywhere,” Vitale snapped. “Who was it?”

  “Salvatori. He had no identification on his body and I removed his weapon. We had no option but to leave him. Mallory was carrying a pistol, which we hadn’t expected, and shot him in the stomach. All I could do was finish him off.”

  “Just as you’ve done in the past. Several times,” Vitale reminded him. “Who shot the rector? I know about that as well, and the only good news is that he will probably recover, so at least there isn’t a murder hunt in progress for him as well as for Salvatori’s killer.”

  “That was Salvatori.”

  “Poetic justice, I suppose. And now the panel turns out to be blank, unless you know something I don’t.”

  “I don’t,” Toscanelli admitted. “We can see no signs of any writing or carvings or anything else on it. But we can ship it out to Rome today and
let our experts examine it.”

  “Don’t bother,” Vitale instructed. “If you can see nothing on the panel, there’s probably nothing there to see. The Templars were sophisticated for their time, but the chances of their being able to use invisible ink or something to inscribe a clue on the panel, a clue that would endure for over seven hundred years, are nil. If they put something on it, you’d be able to see it. That means we must have interpreted the clue wrongly, so we’ll have to look at the decryption and translation again.”

  “So, what do you want us to do now?”

  “Until we can work out what went wrong, nothing. Change your hire cars, just in case anyone saw you in them, and find somewhere to stay within about fifty kilometers of Templecombe. That part of the clue seemed clear enough, so the information we need has to be hidden there somewhere. It’s now just a matter of working out where you should be looking next. Do not execute Mallory or Jessop, just in case they eventually lead us to the clue we need to follow.”

  “And the painted wooden panel?” Toscanelli asked.

  “It’s an important religious artwork and a small part of the history of Christianity, so treat it with the proper amount of care and respect. I gather it was displayed in a case, so put it back inside it, and then leave it somewhere near the village, so that it will look as if the thieves changed their minds about stealing it. But do not go back into Templecombe itself until I give you your new orders. The place will be full of British police for the next day or two at least while they clean up the mess you left there.”

  37

  Warminster, Wiltshire

  “I’m glad you think something is funny about all this,” Robin said, as they entered the southern outskirts of Warminster.

  “It’s not funny, exactly,” Mallory replied, “more a bit surprising that there’s something that now seems so obvious to me that we both missed.”

  “Okay, I’ll buy it. What, exactly, is obvious and what did we miss?”

  “Just look back at the clues we’ve found so far. In fact, not the clues themselves but the mediums used to carry them. The parchment hidden away in that book safe. The images concealed in the metal scrollwork of those wooden chests. And then the sheet of vellum hidden in the false bottom of another medieval wooden chest.”

  “So what?”

  “They were all chosen to last the centuries either by virtue of their own strength or by being hidden inside secure containers. And neither of those criteria apply to the Templecombe Head. That was just a face painted on a piece of wood that was apparently kept somewhere in the village, but with no obvious effort made to protect it. At any time over the centuries somebody might have decided to break it up and use the wood for something else, or even chop it up for firewood. Knowing what we do about the Templars, I don’t believe they would have entrusted a vital piece of information to something so potentially fragile and ephemeral, not to mention unprotected.”

  Robin nodded.

  “That does make sense,” she conceded. “So, do you mean we misread the clue completely, and we’re actually in the wrong place?”

  “No,” Mallory said. “I think we were in exactly the right place when we went to Templecombe, but we were looking at the wrong thing when we got there. I think what we’re trying to interpret is almost like a double clue. We worked out that the location had to include the word Temple or Templar in its name, because of the phrase ‘the settlement named for us,’ but that would still have left a lot of potential candidates. When we added in the other phrase, ‘behind the eyes,’ that pointed us straight to Templecombe, because as far as I know that’s the only Templar establishment that still survives where there’s a face, or a head. To me, nothing else makes sense.”

  “You mean, that’s the double clue or whatever you called it?” Robin asked.

  Mallory shook his head.

  “No. I think the double clue is ‘behind the eyes.’ The first interpretation just confirmed that we should be looking at Templecombe, but the second meaning is actually telling us where to look. And it isn’t at the Templecombe Head.”

  “It isn’t? Then where should we be looking?”

  “We’ve been thinking laterally, assuming that the phrase meant to look behind the Head, on the reverse of the painted face, but what I think we should be doing is taking the meaning of the expression quite literally. We need to look ‘behind the eyes.’ Not behind the face painted on the wooden panel, but somewhere much more substantial. What do you find ‘behind the eyes’?”

  “You’ve lost me,” Robin said.

  “No, I haven’t. Just think literally. Behind your eyes and behind my eyes is exactly the same thing—the skull. Somewhere in or near the church at Templecombe there must be a carving of a skull or perhaps even a full skeleton, and when we find it I think we’ll also find what we’re looking for.”

  Robin said nothing for a few seconds, then nodded.

  “That does make sense,” she said, “in a strange kind of way. And you’re right. A stone carving—I assume that’s what you’re talking about—would last a whole lot longer than a painting on a piece of wood. But do you actually know if there is anything like that back in Templecombe?”

  “No, but skulls and skeletons have always been quite common motifs on gravestones and in churches, so I’d be quite surprised if we didn’t find one, maybe even a few of them, at the church. But if we go back there and find nothing, then obviously this is something else that I’ve guessed wrong.”

  On the southern outskirts of Warminster, they picked a small hotel with a car park that was behind the main building and screened from passing traffic by thick hedges. Robin parked the car in the farthest corner, out of sight from the road; then they carried their bags into the building and booked a double room on the first floor.

  Mallory put their bags on the bed and then washed his hands and forearms thoroughly in the bathroom sink to try to remove all traces of cordite from his skin, to get rid of the indisputable evidence that would prove he had fired a pistol. Then he cleaned and reloaded the weapon itself before tucking it away in his computer bag. Because of what had happened that day, he was determined that the Browning had to remain out of sight but close at hand.

  38

  Templecombe, Somerset

  The following morning they drove back to Templecombe and again parked in a quiet lane on the outskirts of the village, where the Porsche Cayman would, they hoped, be less likely to attract attention and be remembered by anyone.

  They strolled hand in hand through the village, making toward the church, trying to look like any other young couple out to enjoy the fine weather. Over one shoulder Mallory had slung a rucksack, newly purchased at a camping store in Warminster, inside which was what he hoped was a useful selection of tools—a hammer, a folding metal shovel that apparently had military aspirations because it had been sold as a “trenching tool,” a short jimmy, a large screwdriver, and the like—also bought that morning. They hadn’t known what to expect, so Mallory had suggested they come prepared. In one of the side pockets of the rucksack, hidden underneath a pair of heavy-duty gloves, was the Browning, invisible on a casual inspection but still accessible in a few moments if the need arose. They both hoped it wouldn’t.

  “Nearly there,” Robin said, as the gray tower came into view around a corner. “What do we do if the place is stuffed to the rafters with police and forensics teams?”

  “We do just what the song says—we walk on by. Then we find a café or somewhere we can get a drink or even a late breakfast, and come back later when hopefully they’ll have gone. But let’s wait and see. They might already have finished.”

  They hadn’t.

  When Robin and Mallory reached the end of the churchyard, they saw a uniformed constable standing just inside the gate behind a couple of strands of blue-and-white police tape that barred the entrance. Beyond the constable, a line of hunched figures w
as visible, moving slowly across the short-cropped grass of the churchyard. The dead body of the Dominican enforcer had obviously already been removed, probably the previous day.

  “They’re doing a fingertip search,” Mallory murmured as they approached, “and it looks like they’ve nearly finished, because they’re getting close to the wall around the churchyard. They’re probably looking for cartridge cases or bullets, any bits of evidence they might be missing from the shooting.”

  It was obvious that they wouldn’t be able to get into the churchyard, far less the church, until the search was complete, so they just walked past the uniformed sentinel and continued down the road. They didn’t find a café, but the local pub already had its doors open and a sign outside promised coffee, so they walked in and sat down. When the barman appeared from whatever back room he’d been in, Mallory ordered two coffees and a couple of wrapped muffins. They weren’t the best they’d ever tasted, but the coffee was hot, and that was more important.

  About an hour later, they walked out of the building and back toward the church, and this time the searchers were nowhere in sight. The police constable was just removing the lengths of tape, scrunching them up and putting them into a black garbage sack. As he strode away, the sack in his hand, Mallory led the way into the churchyard.

  They walked across to the door set into the base of the tower, but as they’d both expected it was locked.

  “I wonder how Unwin is,” Robin said, as they turned away.

  “With a bit of luck he’ll make it. He was probably on the operating table within about two hours of being shot, so that would give him a good chance of survival. With wounds like that, time really is of the essence.”

  “I’m slightly surprised there aren’t any ghouls snapping pictures and rubbernecking about the place. At least we’ll be able to have a good look around without being interrupted. What about getting inside the church, though? Isn’t that a more likely location for this skull thing you think we need to find?”