by James Becker
“But that’s only a legend,” Mallory said. “It’s the kind of story that could have been made up at any time in the past. Is there any historical basis for it?”
“According to some sources, the legend only dates from the eighteenth century, but actually a number of things do support the idea that the murder actually happened. Far from being an eighteenth-century legend, there’s a written version of the same story recorded by a man named Thomas Kirk in 1677. But more significantly there are a number of references to the need to ‘reconcile Rosslyn,’ which is kind of church-speak and means that the building had to be cleansed because of some act of violence that had taken place within it. There’s also evidence that the chapel was reconsecrated sometime after it had been built. And that is something that wouldn’t normally be done unless something extremely unpleasant had happened in the building.”
“Right, so maybe the story is true and the murder did take place. But I still don’t see why you think that’s what we should be looking at.”
“Well, it’s just my own interpretation,” Robin said, “but the object we’re trying to find is ‘the stone which is not as it seems,’ and this pillar was built by an apprentice because his master didn’t think he could do it without extra help, without viewing the original. And what that obviously means is that the apprentice was by far a better mason than the man he was serving, so you could argue that the Apprentice Pillar should really be called the Master Pillar. So this particular piece of stone has arguably been misnamed, and so it could be described as a stone that is not as it seems. But if you’ve got any better ideas, I’d be really happy to listen to them.”
Mallory shook his head.
“No,” he said. “What you said does make perfect sense, so let’s take a look at it.”
The pillar was very obviously a structure of solid stone, the top helping to support the roof and the base resting on the stone-flagged floor. There was clearly no way of moving it, or of getting into whatever crypt or chamber might lie below the floor of the chapel, the space where they’d deduced that the supposed “treasure” was meant to be hidden.
They both examined the pillar very closely, looking for any kind of catch or lever that might allow it to be moved, but there was nothing visible. Absolutely the only mark of any kind on it, apart from the rows of complex carvings, was on the base, a thin line of slightly discolored stone about an inch or so long.
Mallory crouched down and looked at it, scratching at the stone with his thumbnail.
“This mark seems to be much softer than the stone surrounding it,” he said. “I wonder if that could be it.” He glanced up at Robin. “It’s all old and worn, obviously, but that mark does look a bit like the strange V-shaped cross section at the end of the blade of the sword.”
“Well, don’t just sit there thinking and talking about it. You’re carrying the sword, so why don’t you try it?”
Mallory stood up and glanced around the chapel, but it seemed to be deserted for the moment, the visitors they’d seen when they arrived having left the building.
He grasped the handle of the Templar sword and pulled the weapon out of its scabbard. Then he rested the point of the blade on the discolored line on the stone and pushed down and inward. With remarkably little resistance, the blade of the heavy sword slid three or four inches into the stone.
“I thought that shape looked like the cross section of this blade,” he muttered.
He pushed it just a little farther. Then they both heard a faint click, and the lowest section of the Apprentice Pillar moved very slightly.
They crouched down side by side, seized the edges of the stone, and swung it sideways. The stone opened on some kind of hidden hinge, and directly below the base of the pillar was a wooden box, about a foot square.
Eagerly, Mallory reached into the cavity, grasped it with both hands, and lifted it out to place it on the floor of the chapel. He gently brushed the dust of the ages from it, and then they both stared at what they’d found. On the ornate wooden lid was a small carved panel, something like an escutcheon, and on that was an inscription in a language they hadn’t expected to see.
“That looks a bit like Hebrew,” Mallory said. “I had a holiday in Jerusalem once,” he added.
“Funnily enough, this isn’t really a total surprise to me,” Jessop replied, “because this is now making sense. In fact, it started to make sense to me back in that blasted tunnel when the Dominicans walked away from the Templars’ chests and all that bullion and other stuff. And as a bit of a confirmation, I can read a little Hebrew.”
“What does it say?”
“This inscription is a name, Yeshuah ben Yusef ben Heli, or ‘Joshua, son of Joseph, son of Heli,’” Jessop said.
Then she took hold of the edge of the lid of the wooden box, turned it away from both Mallory and herself, just in case there was an antitheft device built into the lid, and slowly opened it. Nothing happened, except that the lid lifted jerkily, the old hinges obviously in need of some lubrication.
Inside, nestling on what was originally a bed of fabric but was now rotted and virtually disintegrated, was a human head, wisps of hair and patches of flesh still clinging to it.
She closed the lid again and looked at Mallory.
“That must be Baphomet,” he said in answer to her unspoken question. “The disembodied head that was supposed to be worshipped by the Templars. But what does the inscription mean? I know it’s a name, a person’s name, but that’s all.”
“This is the real treasure of the Knights Templar,” she said. “When the Dominican inquisitors were torturing the information they wanted out of the knights of the order, they were asking the wrong questions, or maybe listening to the wrong answers. One of the accusations leveled at the Templars was that they denied Christ, but that’s not the whole story. At that time, a lot of societies in Europe practiced a kind of cult of the head, worshipping the head or the skull of an important man who’d died maybe centuries earlier. I think you’re right: what we have in this box is Baphomet, the most sacred of all the Templar possessions. In fact, this really is the treasure of the order. The Hebrew inscription tells you exactly who this head once belonged to. At the time he was alive, people knew him as ‘Joshua, son of Joseph, son of Heli,’ but today the whole world knows him just as Jesus Christ.
“In this wooden box is the head of Jesus, and because the Templars knew that they owned the actual head of Jesus Christ, they also knew absolutely that he was not divine, and that there could have been no Resurrection. So they weren’t denying Christ—they were just denying his supposed divinity, and they worshipped him in their own way as one of the most important religious leaders in history. They knew that he was only a prophet, not the son of God.”
“Bravo, Jessop,” a coldly harsh voice said.
Mallory and Jessop looked up to see two heavily built men dressed entirely in black standing just inside the door of the chapel, only a few feet away from them. They immediately recognized the man who hadn’t spoken as the Dominican Marco Toscanelli, the man who’d confronted them before, in Devon, Cyprus, and later in Switzerland, but they’d never seen the other man before.
Two other Dominicans of similar build and dressed all in black were advancing toward them.
“You’ve done our work for us,” Toscanelli said, a cruel smile on his face.
Mallory took a half pace backward and drew the Templar battle sword from the slot in the base of the Apprentice Pillar and brandished it in front of him. One of the men grabbed at him and he swung the sword in a vicious arc. The sharpened tip of the weapon cut across the man’s stomach, slicing open his shirt and carving a furrow across his flesh as, for the first time in over seven hundred years, a Templar sword drew blood in combat.
The man gasped with the pain and shrank back, clutching at his abdomen, as Mallory swung the weapon again, threatening both him and the man clo
se beside him.
Toscanelli took out a pistol and aimed it at Mallory, but the man who’d spoken, presumably the leader, raised his hand to restrain him.
“Wait,” he said. “We should be grateful to these two for what they’ve done. They found the treasure for us.”
“The Hounds of the Lord again,” Robin Jessop said. “Dominican Black Friars, still pursuing the Templars after the better part of a millennium? Still acting as inquisitors, are you?”
The leader inclined his head in agreement.
“Not so much pursuing the Templars as making sure that their heresy doesn’t damage the Mother Church. And of course collecting all their assets to hand over to the rightful owners, the Knights Hospitaller. Once we’ve removed all those chests from the tunnel, our work here will be done.”
Robin pointed down at the wooden box.
“But that’s not a heresy, is it? What’s in that box is a truth that you daren’t risk ever becoming known, because it proves conclusively that the Resurrection never happened, and that fact alone could be enough to destroy Christianity completely.”
Again the leader nodded.
“What’s considered a heresy depends entirely on where and when you’re standing,” he said. “The church has got very used to bending and shading the truth over the centuries, but the fear that the Templar treasure, the real treasure, would surface one day has always been there. Now we can walk out of here with that box and that will be the end of it. We’ll ensure it isn’t destroyed, of course. The relic is far too important for that. We’ll just find a home for it in the darkest recesses of the Vatican Secret Archives, where nobody will ever find it. Now, step back and do not interfere.”
With Toscanelli’s pistol pointing at them, there was nothing Mallory or Jessop could do except obey his order.
The uninjured Dominican bent down in front of them, picked up the wooden box, and rejoined his companions by the door, the injured man stumbling along behind him. The leader of the Dominicans gestured for the two of them to leave the chapel with the relic, and for a minute or so nobody else moved.
“Now it’s time for you to die,” the black-clad figure stated.
“Why? You’ve got what you came for,” Mallory said.
The Dominican looked slightly surprised at this remark.
“Don’t be so stupid. You both know far too much to be allowed to live,” he said. “You know the truth of what we’ve been searching for, and for that reason alone you obviously have to die. And, of course, you’ve both been a thorn in the side of my organization ever since this quest began. Toscanelli here has been looking forward to this moment for weeks. It’s just a shame that we don’t have time to allow him to execute you both in a leisurely fashion—I know he’d prefer that, to take his time over your deaths—so it will at least be quick. Good-bye.”
55
Midlothian, Scotland
But before Toscanelli had even brought his pistol up to aim, Robin reached into her pocket and in one fluid movement took out the Beretta they’d liberated from the wounded Dominican at Templecombe and fired two quick shots across the chapel and straight at Toscanelli.
The first bullet missed, slamming into the stone wall directly behind him, but the second caught him in either the shoulder or the upper part of his right arm. He dropped his own pistol, clutching at his wound, and as Robin took a couple of steps closer to them, shortening the distance, both Toscanelli and the other man turned and ran out of the building, the pistol lying forgotten on the floor.
“I didn’t know you had a pistol with you,” Mallory said, “but I’m glad you had.”
“It was under the passenger seat in the Porsche. I picked it up and put it in my pocket on the way over to the chapel, just in case we hadn’t seen the last of the Dominicans.”
Mallory walked across the chapel, picked up the discarded Beretta pistol, and put it in his own pocket.
“We seem to be collecting quite an armory on this job,” he said. “Just as well you didn’t kill him. Otherwise, I suppose they’d have had to cleanse and reconsecrate the chapel again.”
At that moment the door of the chapel swung open and a large group of tourists entered, accompanied by a guide, all of them looking slightly perplexed.
“We heard two explosions,” the guide said to Mallory, walking over to him, “and they sounded as if they came from inside here. What happened?”
Mallory looked at him blankly.
“Explosions? In here? We didn’t hear anything. Are you sure it wasn’t just thunder or something outside the building?”
The guide shook his head, clearly still puzzled, then turned back to the group he was shepherding. The new arrivals started to spread out, looking in every part of the building.
Mallory walked back over to the Apprentice Pillar, swung the stone panel back into position, and picked up the Templar battle sword.
“We need to get back to the tunnel,” he said, “before those bloody Dominicans take everything.”
They left the building cautiously, checking that the Dominicans weren’t lying in wait for them outside, then retraced their steps to the car. Mallory powered up the narrow road to the place he’d parked before and plucked the Browning pistol from under the driver’s seat before he got out of the car, grabbing the Templar sword as he did so. Then they headed back across the field to the hole he had dug through the roof of the tunnel.
“Are you sure this makes sense?” Robin asked. “There are two of us, and we’ve each got a pistol. In fact, you’ve got two of them plus a medieval sword, for some reason. I don’t know how many Dominicans are down there, but I’d guess there are at least half a dozen of them, and they’ll all be armed. We’re outnumbered and outgunned, so what exactly are we going to be able to do to stop them?”
“I’ve got an idea about that,” Mallory said, “because I saw something down in the tunnel that should help us.”
They climbed down the aluminum ladder into the darkness, and within a few minutes they could hear activity ahead of them, and the unmistakable sound of voices speaking Italian. It was obviously the Dominicans, and they had no doubt that the Italians were closing up the opened boxes of bullion and preparing to take away the lost wealth of the Knights Templar.
• • •
Sitting in the Audi sedan about fifty yards beyond where Mallory had stopped the Porsche, the injured Dominican nursed the horizontal slash across his stomach caused by the Templar sword. His companion had applied rudimentary first aid—basically a thick pad held in place by a bandage wrapped around him to compress the wound, slow the bleeding, and prevent his intestines from falling out—before he’d left him to return to the tunnel. Another of the Dominicans had been sent off in the other car to hire a large van to transport the wooden chests. The injured man didn’t know that Toscanelli had also been wounded. But in his case, the bullet had only ripped through the skin of his biceps muscle, and once he had had it roughly bandaged he had gone back down into the tunnel with the other men.
And at that moment, as the Dominican hugged his stomach and moaned in pain, he saw the man who had caused his injury walking quickly across the field toward the tunnel, the Englishwoman beside him. Unbelievably they were both quite obviously unhurt. He watched them descend the ladder into the tunnel.
For a few seconds, after they’d both vanished from sight, he tried to make sense of what he’d seen. He’d assumed that Mallory and Jessop would have been dealt with at the chapel. When he’d left the building, Toscanelli had been about to execute them both. What had gone wrong?
In a few moments, his indecision passed. Something clearly wasn’t right, and it was just possible that the English couple could interfere with the removal of the Templar assets from the tunnel. But there was something he could do about that. He hoped.
Grunting with pain, the Dominican eased himself across the seat and pushed open the car
door. For some reason, he didn’t find standing up quite as difficult or as painful as he had expected. He checked that his pistol was in his pocket and fully loaded; then he pushed the car door closed and began walking unsteadily across the field to where he could see the top of the ladder sticking out of the hole in the roof of the tunnel.
• • •
“So, what do we do now?” Robin Jessop asked, in a soft voice. “We can’t stop them.”
They had reached a point in the tunnel system from which they could just see the ghostly figure of the long-dead Templar knight sitting in his wooden chair. Mallory was certain that the attention of the Dominicans would be firmly focused on the task at hand, and he quietly led Robin a few yards farther down the tunnel.
Shading the lens of his torch with his hand again, he aimed the beam toward the roof.
“What do you see?” he whispered.
“A lot of heavy round boulders and metal bars,” Robin replied, equally quietly. “So what?”
“So, we can’t stop the Dominicans,” Mallory agreed, “but I think the Templars probably can. This is one last trap right here that we can trigger.”
There was a sudden shout, a cry of alarm, from the far end of the tunnel, and in an instant the beams from three torches swung away from the pile of wooden chests and speared down the tunnel in the direction of Mallory and Robin.
“Run!” Mallory instructed, as two shots rang out from the Dominicans, the bullets singing and ricocheting off the old stone walls that surrounded them.
