by James Becker
They swung their flashlights to both sides, checking the walls and the rock ceiling above them, but saw nothing. Nothing except ancient stone, anyway.
Then Mallory spotted something. Or he thought he did. He shone the flashlight beam into one corner of the cave and held it steady.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know. There’s movement there, I think.”
“You mean an animal?” Robin asked, putting her hand on his arm.
“No, not something alive. I didn’t mean that. I think it’s water flowing.”
“There’s water flowing everywhere in this place,” she pointed out, then fell silent as she looked more closely at the area that Mallory was indicating. “I see what you mean.”
Together, they walked over to the spot where he had focused the beam of light. From a height of about seven feet, a virtual curtain of water, a kind of mini waterfall, emerged from a virtually straight horizontal crack in the rock and fell smoothly to the floor of the cavern, where it vanished into a deep gully.
“The second clue,” Robin said, her voice barely audible over the sound of the torrent behind them. “It said ‘beyond the moving wall, the door awaits.’ Even without poetic license, this looks to me pretty much like a moving wall. A wall of water.” She fell silent and glanced at Mallory. “So, what do we do now?” she asked. “Just step through it?”
Mallory shook his head in the darkness.
“I think that would be a really bad idea,” he said. “The one thing we do know about this Templar treasure trail, or whatever you like to call it, is that not taking the proper precautions can be extremely hazardous to your health. Remember the booby trap concealed inside that book safe, the object that kick-started this little adventure, and those lethal blades hidden in the chests we found under the floor of the cave in Cyprus. Opening the book safe in the obvious way would have crippled you, but the mechanism hidden in the chests would have cut you in half. So what we definitely don’t do is just walk straight through that opening.”
He looked carefully at the moving curtain of water in front of him, from where it emerged from the rock above their heads down to the gully where it vanished.
“In fact,” he added, “at the moment, we don’t even know if there is an opening on the other side of this kind of elongated shower. So that has to be the first thing we should check out.”
He shone his flashlight directly at the falling water, trying to see through it at whatever structure was on the other side.
“I don’t know if your eyes are any better than mine,” he said, after a few seconds, “but all I can see is blackness. That could be a solid wall of rock, or the entrance to another cave.”
“That’s what I see, too,” Robin agreed. “I think it’s time to try something physical.”
There were hundreds of rocks of different sizes lying on the floor of the cavern, and Mallory bent down and picked up a handful of them. Then he motioned Robin to stand back, and lobbed the first stone toward the moving water.
It passed through, but immediately there was a faint but clearly audible click, the sound of stone hitting stone, and the rock bounced back toward them.
“I didn’t expect that,” Mallory said. “Maybe we’ve got it wrong, and what we’re looking at is just an unusual waterfall.”
He threw another stone toward the water, with the same result, and then a third, which also bounced back. Then he changed his aim slightly and tossed the next rock toward the right-hand side of the curtain of water. That one simply disappeared from view.
“That’s different,” he said. “Maybe we’re looking at only a really narrow opening.”
He gathered a few more stones and threw them, one after another, toward the right-hand side, aiming the first one near the ceiling of the cave and working his way down to floor level. Some bounced back, but most of the rocks simply disappeared from sight into some cavity. By the time he’d finished, Mallory reckoned he had a reasonable idea of what lay beyond.
“It looks to me like there’s a tall but fairly narrow opening on the right-hand side,” he said. “It’s probably wide enough for one person to step through, but whether it would have been wide enough to allow a couple of Templars to carry a chest through it is another matter entirely.”
“So we put on those blasted capes again,” Robin suggested, “and carry on?”
“Not quite yet,” Mallory cautioned. “We now know that there is an opening behind the water, but we still don’t know if it’s protected by some kind of medieval mantrap. Before we step through it, I want to try something else.”
He shone the flashlight around the floor of the cave, looking for some object that he could use as a probe. Over to one side, he spotted a darkly sinuous shape, apparently the root of a long-dead tree that had somehow penetrated into the cave from above. The root wasn’t as long as he would have liked, nor as thick as he wanted, but it was all he could see, so it would have to do.
Mallory picked up the end of the root and twisted it to free the upper end, then carried it over to where Robin was standing, framed against the wall of water.
“We have got the crowbar, don’t forget,” she said.
“I think this length of root will be safer, just in case there is some mechanism guarding the entrance that could knock it out of my hands. A length of root flying around could give you a bruise if it hit you, but a flying crowbar could take your eye out or even kill you.”
He stepped up beside the falling water and thrust the end of the root into it at a little over head height. Nothing happened, as far as either of them could tell, except that the end of the root had clearly entered some kind of opening in the rock. Mallory pushed it as far as he could, without actually letting his hands enter the water.
“There’s definitely a cavity there,” he said. “Let’s see if we can work out the rough shape before we go any farther.”
He moved the length of root downward, keeping it over to the right-hand side as he tried to trace the outline of the opening. It appeared to be almost a vertical line, though with a number of protuberances that suggested it was probably a natural formation in the rock, rather than something cut out with hammers and chisels.
Mallory pulled out the root and then thrust it again into the water near the top. He repeated the process by pressing it against the left-hand side of the opening. Again, the line he traced was almost vertical, and this time it appeared to be much straighter.
“That could be manufactured, rather than natural,” he suggested.
“Only one way to find out,” Robin said.
“A couple more things I want to try first.”
He ran the length of root all the way to the bottom of the hidden opening, then rammed it down hard against the rock, repeating his action half a dozen times.
“You’re worried about a trip wire or something like that,” Robin said. “This would make a pretty hostile environment for a mechanism like that. With all this water around, iron or even steel would rust quite quickly, I would have thought.”
“You’re absolutely right,” Mallory agreed, “but there could be other kinds of traps, maybe using falling rocks or possibly excavating a cavity in the floor of the cave and covering it with something that would break under the weight of a man. And that sort of thing could still be able to function even after all this time, because the only mechanism needed would be gravity, and that’s a pretty reliable force.”
Having achieved nothing, Mallory tossed the length of root to one side and looked at Robin.
“I’ll go first,” he said, “and I’ll talk to you all the time, to tell you what I’m seeing. What we don’t want to do is just blunder in, in case we have missed something that could kill us.”
He walked across the cave, picked up his cape, and put it on. Then he opened his rucksack and took out the crowbar, which he tucked under the belt of his
jeans. He took out a spare set of batteries for his flashlight, then stepped back to the wall of water.
“If I don’t see anything dangerous,” he said, “I’ll tell you, but for the moment I’d rather you stay out here, just in case I get trapped or injured by something on the other side of this. At least then you’d be able to call for help.”
He gave her a quick grin, checked he had everything that he thought he would need, pulled the cape over his head, and then cautiously thrust his face into the wall of falling water so that he could see what lay beyond.
“Most of it, most of the rock behind the waterfall,” Mallory said, raising his voice so that Robin could hear him, “is completely solid. Over on the right-hand side, as we worked out, there’s an opening that’s wide enough—easily wide enough—for a person to step through. The right side of the opening looks completely natural, but the wall on the left is suspiciously straight, so that could well have been hacked about in the distant past to widen the access, though I can’t see any chisel marks or anything like that on it. The floor of the opening looks to me like solid rock, with no sign of any booby traps, or the like. And I’m not sure how long a medieval booby trap could keep operational if it was constantly being drenched in fast-flowing water.”
“All understood,” Robin said, from behind him.
Mallory took a cautious step forward to move completely behind the curtain of falling water and into the opening. Before he committed himself, he stamped his foot hard against the rock over which he was going to have to advance, just in case there was some trap there that he couldn’t see. But the stone appeared and felt completely solid.
“I can’t see any sign of a problem,” he said, “so I’m going to walk through the opening. I can’t see anything significant at the moment using my flashlight,” he added. “All the beam seems to show is more rock in front of me. I’m just doing a final check.”
He removed the crowbar from his belt and slammed the curved end into the rock floor in front of him, putting most of his strength behind it, but was rewarded only by the unmistakable sound of steel hitting rock. He did that half a dozen times, with exactly the same result—or perhaps lack of result—on each occasion.
He used his flashlight to examine the sides of the opening before he moved forward, but again saw nothing that gave him cause for concern. It looked like a cleft in the rock. Nothing more, nothing less.
“I’m walking through now,” Mallory announced.
“Just be careful,” Robin said, her voice sounding much closer behind Mallory than before. He turned to glance behind him, and saw that she was now standing on the inner side of the waterfall, only about three feet behind him.
He nodded, then turned his attention back to the narrow cleft in the rock in front of him. He shone the flashlight down at the floor, making sure that there were no natural hazards waiting to trip him up, as well as no obvious traps left by the Templars nearly one millennium earlier.
Then he stepped forward.
30
Canton of Schwyz, Switzerland
On the hillside, the spotter had slid backward from his observation position and made his way slowly and carefully along the top of the hill, ensuring that he remained beneath the skyline and so invisible to anyone on the ground below, until he reached a position from which he could see the end of the road below him. From his vantage point he could see three vehicles.
One—a somewhat old and battered but well-equipped four-by-four that was tucked almost out of sight behind what looked like a wall of shrubs and young trees—was the farthest away, about a hundred meters down the valley, and he could ignore it completely, because that was the vehicle in which he and his companion had arrived about half an hour earlier. Of the other two vehicles, one was tucked into a secluded parking space as far away from the hill as possible, barely visible behind the vegetation. It was very obviously empty, and was by inference the hire car being used by the two primary targets.
The other car was much closer to the spotter, and much less carefully parked. The driver’s window was wound down and the arm of the man in the driving seat dangled outside, a thin gray plume of smoke from a cigarette held in his hand rising almost straight up into the air.
That was obviously the car in which the unidentified watcher had arrived, and was still in the same position that it had been when he and the sniper had parked some distance down the road and then made their way up through the bushes and undergrowth, keeping out of sight the whole distance. Reading the number plate of the car through the powerful zoom lens on his camera was the work of a few seconds, and he took three pictures to ensure that he had recorded it clearly. Once he’d done that he waited for a few moments, deciding what to do next.
Their employer had requested a photograph of the two men as well, and that wouldn’t be as easy. The face of the man in the car—indeed, all of his upper body apart from his left arm and hand, still holding the cigarette—was invisible, and there was no obvious way for the observer to get himself into a position from which he would be able to photograph him in his present position. The only option, realistically, was to get him to move, to have him step out of the car.
Sometimes, it’s the simplest and most obvious things that work best. The observer placed his camera on the ground behind a tussock of grass. Then he stood up, picked up a couple of stones from the ground, each of them about half the size of a golf ball, and flung them with all his strength toward the parked car. Then he dropped flat and took hold of his camera.
The distance was perhaps fifty yards. A long throw, but achievable in part because the observer was higher up on the hill, which gave him a bit more distance, and he was fit and strong. One of the stones missed the car entirely, but the other one bounced off the roof, the metallic clunk of its impact clearly audible.
Immediately the man in the car dropped his cigarette and stepped out of the vehicle, peering all around him for whatever had caused the sound that had roused him. He obviously saw nothing, because there was nothing to see, but while he was outside the vehicle and looking around, the spotter took almost a dozen pictures of him, the high-specification digital camera entirely silent in operation.
After a minute or so, the man in the car shrugged and got back into the vehicle. The spotter waited until he was certain the man wasn’t going to get out again, then eased back out of sight, slowly and cautiously. He climbed the hill and vanished from the skyline, then made his way back to where his partner was silently watching and waiting.
“Okay?” the sniper asked quietly.
“Yes. No problem.”
The spotter lay down to the left of his companion. Getting pictures of the second man was easier because he was already in the open, but complicated by the vegetation that surrounded him. Nevertheless, over a period of about five minutes the spotter got three or four reasonably clear pictures of his head and face. Hopefully they would be good enough to compare with the images obtained from the surveillance cameras at the airports, assuming that the man had arrived in the country by air. If he’d driven to Switzerland by car, that obviously wouldn’t work, but the Swiss registration plate on the parked vehicle suggested it was probably a rental, which in turn implied that he’d most likely flown in.
* * *
Mallory began making his way forward, moving cautiously and testing the ground every step of the way, and at the same time checking the stone walls on either side for anything that looked out of place.
The passageway curved to the left, the width of the opening and the rocks that formed it appearing essentially unchanged. Now that he was fairly confident that at least the entrance to the hidden cavern in front of him had not been booby-trapped, Mallory was able to examine the walls more carefully, and with a frisson of excitement he realized that he could see the unmistakable marks of chisels on both sides. More than anything else, that convinced him that they really were in the right place.
“Both sides of this opening are either completely man-made,” Mallory said, “or at least modified by men with hammers and chisels.”
Then he took another step forward, out of the curved confines of the entrance passage, and into what immediately felt like a large chamber, much bigger than the one behind the waterfall. He shone his flashlight all around him, checking for any obvious sign of danger, then turned his head and called out, “It seems to be okay. You can come through.”
Just seconds later, Robin stood beside him, shining her flashlight around the chamber as her eyes started to explore the space she had just entered.
“This is quite a bit bigger than the outer cave,” she said, “though that entrance is fairly narrow.”
“It’s probably about three feet wide at its narrowest point,” Mallory said, “and that would be wide enough for quite a big wooden chest to be carried through it.”
Robin nodded.
“True enough,” she said, “and I suppose tactically having a narrow entrance would have provided them with an extra measure of security. If they were attacked, one or two knights could hold that entrance against an unlimited number of attackers, simply because it is so constricted.”
“There might be something else,” Mallory said. “I’ve been thinking about it ever since I saw that narrow entrance. The Templars were consummate military strategists, the best-trained fighting men of their period, and I don’t believe that they would have chosen a location for one of their most precious assets that didn’t have at least two entrances. I think we might’ve kind of come in through the back door, and there’s another entrance, probably a whole lot wider, somewhere else.”
“In that case,” Robin asked, “why didn’t the clues take us to the other entrance?”
“Assuming for the moment that I’m right,” Mallory said, “which is by no means certain, I wonder if this supposed other entrance might be really well hidden, with no distinctive landscape features anywhere near it that could be used to show its location to somebody following the trail. Maybe they found this cave by accident or while they were looking for a secure location, and then discovered this inner chamber, which they then used as a storeroom. But they also realized that the only way it could ever be found again, except by the wildest of accidents, was if they left a clue or clues pointing to the entrance we came through.”
