by David Wood
“The final test,” breathed Dane.
One of the symbols was an obtuse triangle, exactly like the key, though larger. Clearly, the key was not meant to fit here.
“Maybe it’s like a key pad,” suggested Bones.
The shots had momentarily stopped, but the sounds of shouts and footsteps were getting louder.
“Here goes nothing.” Dane pushed the block with the triangle. It slid back an inch or so, but that was all that happened.
“Nothing is right,” muttered Bones.
“It’s a combination lock,” suggested Alex. “Try the cross.”
Dane found the distinctive Greek-cross with its equal arms flaring slightly at the end, and pressed that block.
Still nothing.
“The circle.” Alex, frantic, didn’t wait for Dane to press the block, but instead pushed it herself. There was thud from behind the slab and then it abruptly moved out of the way.
They bustled through, heedless of any further traps. Once through the arch, they saw that the slab was actually a circle, like an ancient tombstone. There were square holes cut in it, corresponding to several of the blocks on the doorpost. The correct blocks had evidently nudged the stone just enough to cause it to roll down a very slight decline. Pushing the wrong blocks would have locked the slab in a closed position.
“Get the door!” shouted Dane
Bones seemed to comprehend the message. While Dane pushed the three combination blocks back out of their recessed position, Bones braced himself against the stone circle and started pushing. It took Dane only a moment to complete his task and then he added his strength to Bones’ endeavor.
Through the arch, Dane saw the glow of lights growing brighter as Ray and his men bounded up the stairs, closing the gap. The circle began to move, slowly at first, but once its inertia was overcome, it picked up speed. Dane caught just a glimpse of a human outline, blazing flashlight in hand, before the great round slab rolled back into place, sealing out the pursuers.
Dane and Bones both slumped with their backs against the closed portal, panting to catch their breath after the exertion.
After a few moments, Bones said, “Tell me again how that improves our situation.”
“They’re out there. We’re in here.”
“I’m still not clear on exactly how that works in our favor.”
“Me either,” confessed Dane. “It was the best I could come up with on short notice.”
He got to his feet and shone his light at the door slab. Because of the decline, it would take only a little effort to roll the door out of the way again. Dane didn’t think he could rely upon Ray mistakenly pushing one of the locking blocks into place.
“We need to wedge this thing shut.” He searched the area with his light, looking for something—a loose rock or piece of debris—and finding nothing, checked his pockets. His fingers closed on the copper facsimile of the medallion. It seemed somehow appropriate to use the Templar’s key to lock the door. He slipped it into the rolling track and wedged it under the round slab.
“Look!” whispered Alex, directing her own flashlight into the far reaches of the chamber in which they now found themselves.
It wasn’t nearly as big as Dane had expected. The ceiling was perhaps twelve feet high, the room appeared to be a square at least fifty feet on each side. There were shelves along the side walls and a few tables arranged haphazardly about the center, but no other furnishings.
And no treasure.
The shelves and tables were bare. If this was a treasure vault, it had been picked clean.
The room however, was not empty.
Alex’s light fell up nine figures standing motionless in the center of the room. They might have been mannequins, posed suits-of-armor, but for two important distinctions.
Instead of armor, their attire was modern; a grayscale urban camouflage pattern uniform. They wore black tactical vests, with pouches for spare magazines and a brace of hand grenades, and a black beret with the seal of the Templars on the decorative flash. Instead of swords, they had machine pistols.
They were also alive.
Alex’s light fell up on a familiar figure in the center. He stood taller and straighter than Dane remembered, but maybe that was the effect of the uniform. He also wore a holstered pistol though his right arm was in a cast and slung across his chest.
“I was beginning to think you weren’t going to show,” said Edward Lord Hancock.
CHAPTER 23
Alex was dumbfounded. “You…how?”
Dane was having trouble grasping this development as well, but the posture of Hancock’s men—presumably sergeants in the Gatekeepers organization—told him that figuring out the mystery of the missing treasure was not the most urgent priority.
Still, it couldn’t hurt to try. He remembered that Hancock had a weakness for grandiose expostulation; maybe the old man would let something slip.
In his initial survey of the vault, he had also noticed another arched opening at the back, and chose to address this detail first. “I see you used the back door. You didn’t mention that when we visited you.”
“No I did not,” said Hancock. “You seemed like the sort of man who would eventually find his way here, so I felt it best not to let you in on that little secret.”
Alex was still lost. “I don’t get it. If you already knew where the treasure was, why…? Why any of it? Why have your brother carrying the key? Why go to the trouble of making him disappear?”
“Tradition?” ventured Bones. “You guys are all about that stuff, right? Even though the reason for it doesn’t matter anymore, you like your rituals and traditions. It’s like a connection to the old Templars.”
Hancock inclined his head as if to agree, but Dane wasn’t sure that was the whole story. “There’s more to it than that, isn’t there. It’s not the treasure you Gatekeepers are protecting at all, is it? It’s this place.”
Alex shook her head. “Why? It’s empty.”
“It’s proof. Proof that the Templars survived, proof that they had a treasure back in the Fourteenth Century.” Dane turned to her and continued. “Remember what Professor said about what the Templars would have done if they really had a treasure? They would have used it; spent it trying to rebuild the order.” He faced Hancock again. “That’s what you actually did, isn’t it? You built your little Templar state in Switzerland, turned that treasure into investment capital and…”
He balked a moment at the next logical conclusion, but then continued in a lower voice meant for Bones and Alex. “Everything Ray said about these guys is true. If word of this vault gets out, it pulls the curtain back on their conspiracy. That’s what they’re really protecting.”
“You are correct in most respects,” replied Hancock. “I was not deceiving you when I spoke of the Gatekeepers. That has ever been our assigned duty; to guard the gates to this vault, and to keep the tradition of protecting the key, just as your large friend there suggests.”
“But if you had a back door,” said Alex, “and you knew there wasn’t any treasure here anyway, why go to the trouble?”
“The treasure was kept here for many years. It was not quite so vast as has sometimes been reported, but those exaggerations served the order well. The belief that our letters of credit were guaranteed by a trove of incalculable value certainly facilitated our recovery after the Church betrayed us. Maintaining that fiction was also an important part of the Gatekeepers’ mission. However, as the years passed and the nature of the European economy began to change, it no longer seemed prudent to leave the treasure here to gather dust, so over the course of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, the treasures were liquidated.”
“And that infusion of cash helped you gain a foothold in international politics.”
Hancock shrugged. “Such matters are not in my purview. “
“I thought you guys had all kinds of treasures, like stuff from the Holy Lands, and secret knowledge,” Bones said.
Hancock gave a small nod. “There are legends of such things, and some are likely based in fact. Our forbearers were widespread and, in some respects, fragmented. I can speak only to this vault and the treasure that was kept here and the responsibilities of my particular sect. I am a Knight Gatekeeper. My duty is to protect the key and the vault, and I might add, the knowledge of the disposition of its original contents.”
“Which is why you’re going to make us disappear, right?” Dane asked.
“You do make it all sound so melodramatic.” Hancock gave an avuncular chuckle. “Why don’t we start with something simple? The key. Give it to me.”
“The key?” Dane laughed. “We don’t have it.”
Hancock’s unflappable lordly demeanor cracked a little. “Of course you do. You couldn’t have come this far without it.”
“We’re just that good.”
“But you found the ship. You said you were going to find Trevor.”
“Oh, we did. And we found your key, but then somebody took it.”
“We got a copy made at Home Depot,” added Bones.
Hancock’s self-control slipped another notch, and in a voice like wire stretched to the breaking point, said, “Who took it?”
Before Dane could even think about how to answer, a sound like the inside of a thunderclap boomed through the vault. The detonation was followed by the equally loud noise of the door slab breaking free of its guide track and slamming mostly intact onto the floor right behind where Dane and the others were standing. The combination of the blast wave and the resulting tremor threw everyone to the floor where a cloud of high explosives residue and dust rolled over them.
Dane’s ears were ringing and he figured that anything he said would be wasted, so he reached out to snare Alex’s hand and pulled her away from the doorway, just as the first of Ray’s men came through, his pistol leveled.
The Gatekeeper sergeants, further from the blast center, responded quickly, turning their machine pistols on the target in the doorway and firing without hesitation. The mercenary pitched backward under the withering torrent of lead, but no sooner had he gone down than return fire erupted from the breached opening.
Dane stayed low, half-crawling to the perimeter of the room, where he paused just long enough to make sure that Alex was still with him and not too badly injured. He could barely see her in the gloom, but when he clapped a hand to her shoulder, she nodded reassuringly.
The firefight intensified, and in the muzzle flashes, Dane spied Bones crawling along the opposite edge. Two of the sergeants were down and Hancock was nowhere to be seen, having evidently fled the battle in a very un-Templar-like display of cowardice. For the moment at least, no one was interested in the unarmed trio, but Dane knew that window of opportunity wouldn’t stay open long. He pointed toward the back of the room, and at a nod from Alex, started moving.
The gunfire slackened a little, and Dane saw that the surviving Gatekeepers were now hunkering down behind overturned tables and taking shots only when they detected movement beyond the entrance. Ray’s men were similarly cautious, but Dane knew that the standoff wouldn’t last; eventually one side or the other would make a bold move.
The back entrance was just twenty feet away and evidently unguarded. He checked to make sure that Alex was ready, and then bolted for the opening. A bullet sparked off the wall above their heads but they didn’t slow. Dane ducked around the edge of the doorway and found himself at the foot of another ascending stairwell.
He risked a quick sweep with his flashlight, and seeing no indication of traps, started up. Within a few steps, the noise of the battle was muffled by the surrounding stone and with his ears still ringing from the explosion, he couldn’t even hear the sound of his own footfalls. He turned his light on again, shining up, but the beam showed only endless steps, far more than any of the other stairs they had previously encountered.
Fueled by adrenaline and a fierce desire to survive, they raced onward, until at last, there was an end to it; a door, not of stone but of battleship gray metal with a very modern-looking institutional panic bar latch. Dane hit it at full speed, slamming his full body against the door. The hydraulic closer resisted the assault, but his momentum carried him through, stumbling into an empty room with cinderblock walls and no other immediately visible exits.
“There!” shouted Alex, pointing her light at the wall to the right.
The mortar around a large section of the blocks was missing, leaving a half inch gap that outlined an area big enough for a person to pass through. There was also a small hole in one of the concrete bricks, and inside it, a metal handle. Dane gave it a push, then a pull, and the section of wall swung toward them on concealed hinges.
Another concrete room, but this time the space was filled with equipment and sundry maintenance items. In the middle of the room was an enormous machine that Dane recognized as the drive pulley for the funicular railroad.
“We’re at the top of the mountain,” he realized aloud.
A cool breeze was drifting in through the dark cable way. He checked his watch and saw that it was after seven o’clock; the funicular should have been shut down for the night, but as they stood there, the machinery whirred to life and the cable started moving. Someone was using the rail line.
Hancock!
“Come on.” He shouted to Alex, but didn’t wait for her. He charged through another metal door to emerge into the brisk mountain evening on a walkway that ran parallel to the track. A hundred feet down the line, a rail car pulling away from the station.
Dane leapt onto the tracks and started sprinting after it. The funicular moved at about six miles per hour, faster than a walking pace, but not faster than he could run—at least not on a level surface. The funicular however was on a sharp angle to match the slope of the mountain, and to make matters worse, the evenly spaced wooden rail ties were a treacherous surface on which to move. He hadn’t worked out exactly what he was going to do when he caught up to the car, but he knew that he had to stop Hancock from summoning reinforcements.
Once he found a stride that matched the spaces between the ties, he picked up his pace and started closing the gap. There was a platform at the rear of the car and just above it, through the large viewing window in the operator’s station, he saw Edward Hancock staring back at him coldly. Dane poured on a burst of speed and got close enough to throw himself onto the platform. The car jolted to a stop.
There was a rasping sound as the side door slid open and he caught a glimpse of Hancock reaching around with his left hand, taking aim with a pistol. Dane lashed out with his foot, slamming Hancock’s hand against the corner of the car. The gun fell from his grasp, clattering onto rails and disappearing, and Hancock pulled back.
Dane immediately scrambled up, swung around the corner and through the opening, driving Hancock back with a body blow that sent him careening down the stair-stepped center aisle. Dane got his feet under him and moved down to stand over the old man.
Hancock stared back at him, unbowed. “This isn’t over.”
“It is for you.”
“Templars never surrender.”
Before Dane could reply, a faint tremor shook the car. He looked back and saw Alex climbing inside through the open door.
She wasn’t alone. Behind her, his pistol pressed against the small of her back, was John Lee Ray.
Ray shoved Alex away, sending her stumbling down the aisle. Dane caught her and pulled her to the side, covering her with his body just in case Ray decided to shoot. There wasn’t much else he could do. Ray’s attention however was fixed on the old man.
“Where is it?” he raged, all trace of his Southern gentility gone. “What did you do with the treasure?”
“There is no treasure,” said Dane. “They sold it off ages ago. This is all just a sham.”
This revelation unexpectedly seemed to please Ray. “I knew it. It’s all true, isn’t it? The grand Templar conspiracy, controlling the world, building a New World Order. And no
w, at last, the truth will be revealed. The world will know.”
“What difference will it make if they do?” Dane challenged. “Half of the world already believes that everything is controlled by some Big Money conspiracy, and the rest don’t care. Don’t you get it? You’re killing people for something that doesn’t even matter anymore.”
“It matters to him,” snarled Ray. “And it matters to me.”
“You won’t live long enough to tell anyone,” said Hancock, still defiant.
“I’ll live longer than you.” Ray leveled his gun at the old man, and without any hesitation, pulled the trigger.
Hancock flinched as the bullet struck his chest. He coughed once, a stream of blood trickling from his mouth, but strangely he was still smiling. “Not much longer, I’ll wager.”
The old man raised his left hand and Dane saw that he had found another weapon, not a gun, but a small green spherical object about the size of a tennis ball. He opened his fingers slightly and a small spring-loaded metal lever handle flew away.
Ray let out a curse and fired again, but in the time it took for him to do so, Hancock hurled the object up the length of the car to where his murderer was standing. Even as Ray’s bullet plowed into the old man’s forehead, the grenade landed on the top step and rolled behind the mercenary.
Dane had just enough time to push Alex down again before the world exploded.
CHAPTER 24
The firefight in the empty treasure vault had been a war of attrition. Cowboy, the first man through the door had been the first to fall. Viper, who had been right behind him, just as quickly followed him into the hereafter.
The attack was completely unexpected, and for a moment, Scalpel wondered how Maddock had managed to procure weapons. It quickly became apparent however that the foe they faced was not Maddock, or at least not just Maddock and his two companions. For a few seconds, Ray, Scalpel and Paycheck had returned fire, taking down several of the gunmen, but each time they did so, they exposed themselves to the enemy guns. When Paycheck caught a round, Ray had signaled for Scalpel to stop firing.
