The Templar Archive (The Lost Treasure of the Templars)

by James Becker

  Marcel nodded.

  “A remarkably accurate analysis, if I may say so,” he said. “So what are you suggesting?”

  “I’m not suggesting anything,” Robin replied. “We’ve already decided, my partner and I, that the only safe thing to do with the archive is to utterly destroy it.”

  She turned back toward Mallory and gave a brief nod. “We’re not prepared to hand it over to anybody, here or in any other country, simply because we can’t trust anyone else’s motives. So we’re going to destroy it ourselves right now to make sure.”

  Behind her, Mallory opened the lid of the chest and then upended the red can of petrol that they’d bought in the garage, splashing the highly volatile liquid over both the ancient wood and the paper and parchment documents that were inside it. Once the can was empty, he replaced the cap, took a step back, fished in his pocket for a box of matches, struck one, and dropped it straight into the chest.

  There was an audible whump as the fuel ignited, and a sheet of flame leaped some three or four feet into the air as the fire immediately took hold.

  For a moment, Robin wondered if Marcel—or whatever his real name was—was going to try to intervene. The police car would almost certainly carry a fire extinguisher as part of its standard equipment. But he just stood there, apparently quite relaxed, watching the conflagration as both the ancient documents and the wooden chest were steadily consumed by the flames.

  “I think,” Marcel murmured, as the flames began to die away, “that that is what you English call a fait accompli. I don’t disagree with your motives, but I would have very much liked to get the documents studied before they were destroyed. But rest assured, if we had taken possession of them, ultimately we, too, would have consigned them to the flames. They were just too dangerous, and potentially too destabilizing, to be allowed to exist.”

  “So what now?” Robin asked. “We saw the television news report that said we were wanted for murder.”

  Marcel nodded. “Once we realized that you had found a way out of the cave system, most probably with the Templar Archive, we initiated an immediate search for both of you. But somehow you managed to evade all of our normal surveillance procedures, and so the only recourse we had left was to get your faces out there so that the ordinary citizens of Switzerland could help us find you. And there was, after all, a dead man lying somewhere in the cave. Somebody was responsible for that, and it was a convenient hook to use in the police report.”

  “But you do know, I hope, that we had nothing to do with it. We have no idea how he died, but we assume that he was probably caught by one of the Templar booby traps hidden in the cavern.”

  “I do know that. The police report was my idea, and I will ensure that the appropriate steps are taken to sanitize the record and eliminate your details from it.”

  “Thank you. I’ve recorded what you just said on my phone, just in case there’s a problem in the future. And so I ask you again, what now?”

  Marcel looked behind her, up the slope to where the last few bits of the wooden chest were still burning fitfully.

  “I think we’re done here,” he said, “and as far as I’m concerned you’re free to go. I’ll ensure that you experience no problems at any of our airports if you fly home or at our border crossings if you decide to drive out of the country. Thank you for locating the archive, and thank you again for doing the right thing with it.”

  As Marcel turned away, the red laser designator on Robin’s back snapped off. Mallory walked down the hill to join her, and together they made their way back to their hire car.

  “You haven’t heard the last of this, Mallory,” Toscanelli spat as they walked past him. “If it’s the last thing I do I’m going to kill you. Both of you.”

  “Are you?” Mallory said. “You’ve tried before a few times, as I recall, but you really don’t seem very good at it.”

  “I don’t know if it’s of any interest to you, Marcel,” Robin said, “but this man is wanted for murder in England.”

  Toscanelli’s face paled as he realized the implications of what she had just said.

  “Is he, now?” The Swiss government official sounded interested. “In that case,” he said, “it might be as well if I made a couple of phone calls as soon as I get back to the office.”

  The Italian glared at Mallory and Robin, then turned tail and strode back to his car with his two companions. Seconds later, it drove off down the road at speed.

  “You’ve obviously met him before.”

  “Yes. He nearly killed us in Britain and later on tried again in Cyprus,” Robin said.

  “It might help you to know his name. His passport was copied when he entered the country. A routine precaution. He’s Marco Toscanelli, or at least that’s the name in his passport. Perhaps the British police could create an international arrest warrant for him. Obviously we can’t hold him here in Switzerland, because he’s committed no crime here that we’re aware of, and we have received no request from any other country to arrest or extradite him.”

  Marcel nodded to Robin, briefly shook hands with Mallory, then climbed back into his helicopter with his companions. The jet engines on the aircraft started up with a whine that grew into a roar. The rotors began turning and it lifted up into the air. The pilot flew just a short distance to pick up the sniper from the hillside, and then it climbed into the air and quickly vanished out of sight behind the mountain.

  Without a word, two police officers climbed back into their vehicle, reversed it onto the road, and drove away.

  Robin stepped over to Mallory, wrapped her arms around him, and squeezed him tight.

  “For a moment,” she said, “I thought we weren’t going to get away with it.”

  “O ye of little faith,” Mallory replied. “Let’s get out of here.”

  42

  Dartmouth, Devon

  Three days later, Mallory walked into Robin’s antiquarian bookshop in Dartmouth and nodded to Betty, who was making coffee behind the counter. He sat down at one of the small round tables Robin had positioned in the shop, and accepted both a cup of coffee and a slice of Betty’s excellent homemade carrot cake.

  The bell on the door rang and a few moments later Robin sat down in the seat opposite him.

  “Feeding your face already, I see,” she said.

  “It’s only one slice,” Mallory said.

  “It’s very difficult to have only one slice of any of Betty’s cakes, and I’d like you to remember that. Did you contact that irritating man Wilson?”

  Mallory nodded. “I even spoke to him in person. I gave him Toscanelli’s full name, but he said there wasn’t much the police could do unless he came back to Britain. I told him that Marcel had suggested issuing an international arrest warrant, and he just muttered something about there being better uses for a few sheets of paper. Anyway, at least he knows, so now it’s up to him.”

  “Let’s just hope we don’t see those Italians again,” Robin said. “By the way, I’ve had a delivery. While you’re here, you can give me a hand unpacking it. Once you’ve finished your coffee, I mean.”

  Ten minutes later, Robin released the two fabric bands securing the lid on a heavy-duty black plastic box, the outside covered in canceled shipping labels, courier information, and details of the sending company. Inside the box, underneath the packing material, were several obviously old books, the musty smell of old leather quite unmistakable.

  “You found a couple in English,” Mallory said, picking out two of the books and looking at the titles. “The rest are all in German.”

  Robin nodded.

  “I had to take what they had in the shop in Zürich,” she said. “I was lucky that I could talk them into letting me take the box to the post office, because that gave us time to put the other things inside it.”

  She lifted off the last few of the old books. Below them, arrang
ed in neat layers, were all the deeds of gift and irrevocable transfers that had composed the most secret and most important part of the Templar Archive. She lifted out the pieces of parchment and vellum almost reverently and placed them on an empty shelf in the bookcase beside her.

  “What will you do with them?” Mallory asked.

  “Right now I don’t know. They need to be properly studied and analyzed, so I’m thinking maybe I’ll hand over one or two to the British Museum, but I really haven’t decided yet. It was a shame that we had to burn the other documents you took from the larger chests in the cave. But they really were of no particular value compared to these, so I guess it was a good trade-off. And you were lucky finding that late medieval chest in the Zürich antique shop.”

  Mallory nodded. “I was gambling on the fact that none of them, not even the Italians, had actually seen the small chest, so as long as I’ve found something that was more or less the same size as they were expecting, I guessed that we could fool them. Which we did. And has the real one arrived yet?”

  “Yesterday,” Robin said, pointing at a heavy-duty cardboard box tucked in one corner of the shop.

  Mallory picked it up and walked over to where Robin was sitting. Taking a knife from his pocket, he sliced through the fabric tapes holding it together, noting as he did so the prominent label affixed to the top of the box, which described the contents, in German, as “reproduction medieval chest, quantity one,” accompanied by details of the shop where he’d apparently bought the item and labels affixed by the Zürich branch of an international courier company.

  He reached inside the box and lifted out the ancient chest, the lid closed and locked and the lethal blades secured by the nails he’d inserted to lock the mechanism.

  “It’s still bloody impressive,” he said, “bearing in mind how old it is. Another genuine medieval antitheft device in perfect working order.”

  He checked that all three of his locking nails were in position, then took a double-ended Allen key from his pocket and unlocked the chest. He lifted the lid and looked inside.

  “We’d never have got it through customs with all the documents inside it,” Robin said. “Splitting them was the only way it was ever going to work, just in case any customs officer along the route insisted on opening the box and looking inside.”

  “True enough. So, what are you going to do with it? You can’t really flog it on eBay, can you?”

  “Definitely not. Either it’ll have to go to a proper auction house in London, which might be awkward if they ask any questions about provenance, or it’ll end up as a gift to a decent museum. Or maybe I’ll just keep it around as a kind of unusual souvenir from Switzerland.”

  “Personally I think I’d keep it.”

  He sounded a little preoccupied, and Robin looked closely at him.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “I’ve just seen something that’s a bit odd,” he said. “Have you got a ruler?”

  “A ruler?”

  “Yes. Measuring stick, that kind of thing.”

  “I do know what a ruler is, thank you.”

  She walked over to the counter. Betty saw her coming, opened one of the drawers, and gave her a plastic ruler about eighteen inches long.

  Mallory took it and placed it vertically against the outside of the chest.

  “Seventeen and a half inches, near enough,” he said.

  “So?”

  Then he put the ruler inside the chest and measured the internal depth.

  “Fifteen inches,” he announced. “But the wood on the sides of the chest is only about an inch thick. So why is the base about two and a half inches thick?”

  “Good question. Does it feel like it’s solid wood?”

  Mallory picked up the chest again and hefted it in his hands.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t think so. It’s not heavy enough. There must be a hidden compartment that we never spotted earlier.”

  “The circumstances weren’t ideal, if you remember. So stop messing around and get it open.”

  There were no obvious catches or ways to release a secret door, and in the end Mallory realized there wasn’t anything like that built into it: it was just a false bottom. He used a thin knife blade to slide down the inside of the chest, eased the tip between the side and the wood on the bottom, and levered it up. The panel that emerged was about half an inch thick, quite heavy, made of old wood, and so precisely cut that it was invisible to a visual inspection.

  “What’s in there?” Robin demanded, leaning over to peer inside. “No, wait,” she added. “Use gloves. It might be fragile.”

  She stepped behind the counter again and returned with a pack of thin latex gloves. She handed a pair to Mallory, who pulled them on and then reached down into the chest. He lifted out a folded sheet of vellum, brown with age, but apparently unmarked and still supple.

  Robin and Betty cleared away the plates and cups from the table they’d used and spread a cloth over it. Mallory placed the vellum on it and slowly and with infinite care unfolded it.

  The inner surfaces of the vellum were much lighter in color, presumably because they’d been protected both by being internally folded and placed in a closed space.

  The letters on the inner surface were solid black and clearly legible, and both Robin and Mallory bent over the vellum eagerly, trying to read the text.

  “Do you need me to transcribe it?” Betty asked.

  Mallory looked at her in surprise.

  “I’ve told Betty what we’ve been up to,” Robin said in explanation. “Or most of it, anyway.”

  “So, do you?” Betty asked again. “Want me to transcribe it?”

  Robin stared at the handwritten text on the vellum, her gloved finger tracing the course of the top line.

  “It looks like Latin,” she said, “but I can’t read it, so I’m pretty sure it’s another piece of encrypted text. Honestly this is like one of those nests of bloody Russian dolls. What do they call them? Matryoshka or something like that. Every time you get to a point where you think you’ve reached the last one, you find that it opens as well to reveal yet another doll inside it.”

  She shook her head in irritation, but Mallory could tell she was excited about what they’d just found.

  “I suppose we could run Atbash on it,” he suggested. “See if that makes any sense of it.”

  Robin nodded.

  “Yes. I won’t be able to sleep until we’ve found out what this is all about,” she said, “so yes, please, Betty. Start on a clean sheet of paper, please. I’ll call out the letters to you one at a time. If the letter isn’t clear, I’ll give you whatever the possible alternatives are, and you should write those in a vertical line below my first guess at the letter. I’ll tell you when I see a break in the text, and you should start a new line each time I do that. Okay?”

  “I’m ready when you are,” Betty said, picking up a pencil and checking the point.

  Mallory looked at Robin, at the fierce concentration on her face as she stared down at the lines of text on the vellum, and smiled as she read out the first letter of the text.

  “Here we go again,” he said.

  Author’s Note

  Total Surveillance

  Mention has been made in this novel and in the first book of this trilogy—The Lost Treasure of the Templars—of various surveillance systems, and the truth of the matter is that Big Brother really is watching you, using a myriad of devices and systems.

  Echelon is by far the oldest global surveillance system, and that was started back in the 1960s by the Americans during the Cold War, but today it’s operated by what are known as the Five Eyes: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The system can monitor and intercept all telephone calls, faxes, and e-mails sent by landline, broadband, or satellite that originate or terminate in or a
re routed through any of the five member nations, as well as other friendly territories like Germany and the Netherlands. In practice, that means Echelon sees just about everything, because most of the Internet servers are based in America and Western Europe. It’s about as near to a global surveillance network as it’s possible to get, and “Echelon” is just one of several names for the system, and that’s the name which is most commonly used by the American National Security Agency, who kind of run it. But Lockheed calls it “P415,” and a couple of the software programs that run on it are called Silkworth and Sire.

  Carnivore is different. That was run by the FBI and started in the late 1990s, but was a lot more specific, intended to be aimed at an individual target, one particular suspect or group. It was later called DCS1000, and was replaced in about 2005 by more sophisticated commercial programs like NarusInsight, but although the software and the name are now different, the system is still out there and still listening.

  PRISM is an official code name for a data-mining and collection program called US-984XN that began in 2007 and ran in the States with the legal backing of the American Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. It was designed to tap in to data from the principal network companies, like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Apple, as well as social networking sites including Facebook and YouTube. There was a leak in mid-2013 by a man named Edward Snowden, who was a contractor for the NSA, and then the protests started, because American citizens were being illegally spied upon by their own government, and because of the information he made public, they knew it. He also leaked that GCHQ at Cheltenham in Britain was a part of the system, and that meant that the same thing was happening in the U.K. The reality is that we were and we still are—all of us—being watched.

  PROMIS was by far the most shameful. That program—its full name was the Prosecutor’s Management Information System, hence PROMIS—was developed in the mid-1970s for the United States Department of Justice by a small American company called Inslaw. It was a very effective piece of software, designed to track individuals and identify links between them and other people, and the American government basically stole it.