The Templar Archive (The Lost Treasure of the Templars)

by James Becker

  Those names provided a starting point, and a comprehensive Internet search generated a surprising amount of information about them. In particular, a couple of local British newspaper reports linked the name of the woman to the alleged discovery of an ancient parchment and, more significantly, with the murders of a number of unidentified Italians in the small town of Dartmouth in Devon. That raised red flags for two different reasons.

  The man tasked with monitoring the telephone number considered the appropriate response for a few more minutes, as he again studied the newspaper reports he had unearthed. Then he nodded, reached for his mobile phone, and dialed one of the six numbers recorded on it.

  “We might have a problem,” he said in German when his call was answered.

  27

  Canton of Schwyz, Switzerland

  A little after two o’clock the following afternoon, Mallory pulled the Renault hire car to a halt in the parking area of a roadside restaurant not far from the base station of a ski lift. For a minute or so, neither of them moved, just sat there hearing the faint noises as the car’s engine started to cool down, staring through the windshield. They had left the hotel almost seven hours earlier, and since then had hardly stopped, driving from one location to another, hoping to find some landmark or geographical feature that might in some way tie up with the cryptic clues they had decoded from the text on the parchment. And until that point, they had seen absolutely nothing useful.

  “Well, that was a bit of a busted flush,” Mallory said.

  “Yes,” Robin replied shortly. “We can’t keep doing this, this kind of scattergun approach, driving into a valley and just looking out of the car windows and hoping to see something that might fit the bill.”

  “So what can we do?”

  “What we should probably have done in the first place,” she replied. “We take a bit of a time-out and go back to the clues on the parchment. We need to work out what at least one of them actually means, and then try to find a location that fits the clue, rather than trying to do it the other way round and just hoping for inspiration to strike when we see a bit of countryside.”

  “We’ll give it a go,” Mallory said. “Anything’s better than this pretty much aimless driving around. Let’s grab a bite of lunch here, and see if we can work out exactly what we should be looking for.”

  Strangely enough, cracking one of the clues didn’t take anything like as long as either of them had feared. Inspiration struck Robin almost as soon as she reread the transcription from the Latin as they lingered over coffee in the restaurant.

  “I can’t believe I missed this,” she said.

  “What did you miss?” Mallory asked.

  Robin shook her head. “Just hang on a minute. First, I need to look at the map again.”

  She stared at one particular section of the map for a few minutes, tracing lines on it with the end of an elegant red-painted fingernail. Then she tapped one part of the map and nodded to herself.

  “As I see it,” she said, “there are three possibilities here. Three locations, I mean, that might be right.”

  “What have you found?” Mallory asked, sounding impatient.

  “I’m not going to tell you, because if I’m wrong I’ll look like a complete idiot,” she replied.

  “I’m getting to know you quite well now, and I doubt very much if you could ever look like an idiot, complete or otherwise. Right, if you won’t tell me what you think you’ve spotted, at least give me a clue.”

  Robin thought for a moment, then nodded. “Here’s a clue. When is a snake not a snake?”

  Mallory looked blank. “I have no idea, but I’ll bet you’re just aching to tell me.”

  “I’m not aching to tell you, but I am quite keen to show you,” she said. “Let’s go. You drive. I’ll navigate.”

  She directed him away from the area where they had searched before, giving him terse directions as she related the markings on the map to the display on the sat nav and the countryside around them. The roads they were traveling along became progressively narrower and obviously less used, though the surfaces remained good. The Swiss were nothing if not organized.

  “I said there were three possible locations,” Robin said, “but I’ve actually found four. We just have to try them all until we find what we’re looking for.”

  “I don’t know if this is good news or bad news,” Mallory said, “but this road stops a couple of hundred yards ahead of us in a car park. Can I assume that that is not what you’re looking for?”

  “Not a car park, no. But what I am interested in is the valley that you should see just to the east of us right now.”

  Mallory locked the car and they strode off together, in the direction that Robin was indicating.

  At first glance, the valley didn’t look significantly different from the others that they had explored during the morning. It had steep grassy sides dotted with stunted bushes and a handful of trees—Mallory thought they were pines or firs, but as he was no authority on any aspect of botany, he had no idea which, or even if either guess was correct—while at the end of the valley, perhaps a quarter of a mile in front of them, he could see the flashing silver of a mountain stream tumbling down from some unseen spring or hidden lake.

  Robin strode ahead of him and stopped when she reached a clear area where the entire valley was visible in front of her. Then she lifted a pair of compact binoculars to her eyes—she had removed them from the depths of her handbag before they had left the car—and for about half a minute she just stared through the instrument at the far end of the valley.

  Then she turned to Mallory and shook her head briskly.

  “It’s not this one,” she said. “The shape is wrong.”

  “The shape of what?” Mallory asked, sounding more irritated than curious. “The valley itself?”

  “No. Keep guessing.”

  * * *

  “What are they doing now?” Vitale asked.

  “The same as they’ve been doing all morning, ever since they left the hotel,” Mario replied, looking at the tracking application on his smartphone and talking through the Bluetooth earpiece. “They’re just driving around the mountains and valleys.”

  “Have they been stopping?”

  “Yes, but usually only for a few seconds or a few minutes—no more than a quarter of an hour—at the most. Apart from lunch, of course. That took them almost an hour, but they’re now back on the road.”

  “They’re obviously looking for something,” Vitale said, “and it’s equally obvious that they haven’t found it yet. Keep watching, and close in on them the moment it looks as if they are staying in one place for a significant amount of time. Don’t interfere with them, and don’t let them see you, but find out exactly where they go. I’m sending out another two men, and they’ll be bringing weapons for you all, because I think we’re probably getting close to the endgame.”

  * * *

  Mallory asked her again as they walked back to the car, but she refused to elaborate. Sitting in the passenger seat, she gave him directions to the next blind-ended valley that she wanted to investigate. It wasn’t far away. In fact, Mallory guessed it was probably the next valley to the east of the one they had just looked at. This time there was no convenient car park, and the road simply petered out at the edge of a patch of woodland. Tire tracks on the ground suggested that vehicles did either park there, or at the very least turn around, and there was room for him to park the car without blocking either the road or the turning area.

  They repeated the investigation process, Robin leading the way, her binoculars at the ready, while Mallory stumbled along behind, still trying to work out exactly what she was looking for. Just as in the previous location, as soon as they reached an area from which they could see most of the valley in front of her, Robin stopped and studied the far end with her binoculars. And, again as before, she then sho
ok her head and led the way back to where they parked the car.

  “A clue might be helpful here,” Mallory said. “I still have no idea what you’re looking for, but if you told me that I might spot something that you miss, it would make sense.”

  “It might make sense,” she replied, “but I’ve already given you a clue, and you’ve seen all the same information that I have. So I’m just wondering how long it’ll take you to catch up.”

  “You said something about a snake, and one of the clues mentions a serpent, but I still don’t see the connection. Are you trying to tell me you’re looking for a snake?”

  “In a manner of speaking, yes,” Robin replied. “Or, to be absolutely accurate, I’m looking for something that looks like a snake, but which isn’t actually a serpent.”

  “Oh, right,” Mallory muttered, “that makes everything really clear.”

  Robin took pity on him as he unlocked the car using the remote control.

  “If the next place we look at doesn’t fit the bill,” she said, “then I promise I’ll tell you what that first clue refers to. Or rather, what I think it refers to. Anyway, let’s get back on the road. Maybe it’ll be third time lucky.”

  Mallory was entirely unsurprised when she directed him to drive into another narrow blind-ended valley. It was slightly wider than both of the places they had visited so far, and like the first, there was a small car park at the end of the road, already occupied by about half a dozen vehicles, parked in the neat and orderly fashion that they had come to expect, even after such a short time in Switzerland. Mallory slid the hire car into a space between a German-registered BMW saloon and a Mercedes SUV with Geneva plates.

  “Maybe this is a popular walking or hiking area,” Mallory suggested as they made their way along a narrow track that wound its way through a stand of trees that grew in the space between the car park and the start of the valley.

  “Perhaps,” Robin agreed. “It is spectacular countryside; you have to admit that.”

  This time, they didn’t have as far to walk to get a good view of the entire expanse of the valley. Almost as soon as they’d cleared the last of the trees, they were rewarded with the sight of the valley opening up in front of them. Robin stopped and took in the sight. What she didn’t do, Mallory noticed, was use the binoculars. Instead she glanced at him and then pointed in front of her toward the mountain that blocked off the end of the valley.

  “Now do you see it?” she asked.

  Mallory looked where she was pointing, but as far as he could tell the valley they were then standing in was virtually identical to every single one of those that they had already looked at.

  “I don’t—” he began, but Robin interrupted him.

  “Snake,” she said. “Think snake and then look again.”

  Mallory did so, uncomprehendingly.

  “I see trees and grass and a stream,” he said, shaking his head.

  And then suddenly he saw exactly what she meant. There had been a stream at the end of the previous two valleys. In fact, Mallory guessed that there was probably a stream in almost every valley in Switzerland, and that most likely the majority of them had been formed by the action of water over the millennia. But whereas the previous two streams had bounced and danced their way almost straight down the rocky bed they had carved out, the stream he was then looking at had followed a rather different course.

  Instead of tracking straight down toward the lowest level, water always taking the easiest possible path when it flowed, for some reason possibly associated with the geology of that particular part of the mountain, the stream they were looking at flowed in a fairly regular pattern from side to side, taking a curved path that was actually very reminiscent of the shape, the classic sinuous shape, of a snake on the ground.

  “I see what you mean,” Mallory said. “Was that what you were looking for?”

  Robin nodded.

  “It suddenly came to me,” she said. “I kept puzzling over the expression about a snake that roared. That didn’t seem to me to make any sense at all, because the most that the average snake can manage is a hiss. I was actually thinking about what could make a roaring noise and could be found in the mountains of Switzerland when I guessed the author of that clue might have meant the noise of a waterfall. That almost always sounds like a roar, and once I made that connection I also realized that if you had a stream that kind of meandered its way down the side of a hill making lots of curves and ended in a waterfall, that could very well be considered to be a snake that roared.”

  “Simple enough when you explain it,” Mallory said. “Let’s check it out.”

  They set off at a brisk walk, and within only a few minutes they could both clearly hear the sound of the water tumbling down the rocks at the far end of the valley, first as a muted growl, but becoming louder with almost every step that they took. And when they finally came to a stop, perhaps seventy yards from the base of the falls, the only possible word they could use to describe the sound was a roar. Standing so close, they couldn’t appreciate the full shape of the stream as it made its way down the mountainside, but they had seen it very clearly as they’d approached that spot. In fact, Robin had taken several pictures of the stream with her digital camera already.

  “I think that’s pretty clearly the answer to that first cryptic clue,” Robin said, “so the obvious question now is, what do we do next? Where do we have to go to find the answers to the second and third clues?”

  “You said you thought that the third clue, the one that mentions the guardian, might be intended to point us in the right direction, to lead us to the right bit of some valley,” Mallory said. “But if we’ve actually come straight to the right place, maybe you were wrong. Maybe that clue is only relevant when we find ourselves inside the cave or wherever this trail leads us.”

  “And the other problem, as I see it,” Robin said, “is that we seem to be looking at three separate clues, with no obvious link or progression between them. We’re standing here right now beside what seems to me to be almost certainly the landmark that the author of that text meant us to find.”

  “I’m quite certain you’re right about that. And if we take that as a given, then we must also logically be in the vicinity of what we’re looking for. In fact,” he added with a grin, “I’m slightly surprised you haven’t made the connection yet.”

  Then it was Robin’s term to look irritated. She reached into the hip pocket of her jeans and took out the sheet of paper on which they’d written the transcribed clues, and read them again. Then she looked at Mallory.

  “If you’re right in what you’re thinking,” she said, “then we’re going to need umbrellas at the very least. That is what you meant, isn’t it?” she added.

  “Exactly. About the only thing that could possibly be interpreted as a moving wall is the wall of water, in my opinion, at least. I think we have to walk up to the waterfall and see what’s behind the water coming down the mountain. But there is something I want to do first, just as the kind of basic check that we’re not barking up completely the wrong tree, or try to walk through the wrong waterfall.”

  “What’s that?” Robin asked.

  “You’ll see,” Mallory said, and started walking toward the waterfall, stopping to pick up a golf-ball-sized rock as he did so.

  He stopped right at the edge of the pool of water that had formed at the base of the waterfall, and which was itself drained into a fast-flowing river that ran down the center of the valley.

  He braced himself, then took careful aim and threw one of the rocks he’d picked up as hard as he could at the waterfall. They heard no sound above the roar of the tumbling water, but the result was obvious. The rock disappeared into the foaming water about six feet above the base of the waterfall and vanished.

  Mallory gestured to Robin and they walked far enough away from the waterfall so that they could hear each
other.

  “You saw what happened?” Mallory asked.

  “Yes. There has to be a cavity of some sort behind the waterfall, which is pretty much what we expected. So that’s where we should be looking, but right now we really aren’t dressed for it.”

  28

  Canton of Schwyz, Switzerland

  The following day, they both had a large breakfast in the hotel’s dining room because they weren’t certain when they’d next be able to eat, and then set off to do some essential shopping.

  “I really don’t think an umbrella is likely to be much use to us,” Robin said as they walked down the street looking for a shop that might sell what they wanted. “That water is coming down the mountainside at a hell of a rate. I think if you put an umbrella up and stood underneath it, it would last about three seconds. What we need are proper waterproof capes with attached hoods. That way we can walk through the waterfall and at least our clothes should hopefully still be almost dry when we step into the cave or whatever it is behind the water.”

  That made sense, and about a quarter of an hour later they walked out the door of an outdoor and camping shop where they’d found exactly what they wanted. They’d bought a pair of heavy-duty capes large enough to provide almost complete protection. In Mallory’s case the garment covered him from the top of his head to just below his knees, while for Robin it almost reached the ground. They also bought flashlights and a decent supply of spare batteries and, from the tools section of the shop, a crowbar, two large heavy-duty screwdrivers, and a couple of collapsible trenching tools that combined the functions of a pickax and a shovel. And a pair of sturdy rucksacks to put everything in.

  “If we’re right and we are on the correct trail,” Mallory said, “we’ll probably need a lot more than this stuff. But hopefully these tools will let us get inside the cave and have a proper look around. Then we can decide what else, what other equipment, we’re going to need to buy to complete the job.”