The Templar Heresy

by James Becker

  ‘So actually,’ Angela said, ‘although the chambers in the centre of the Mount were sealed, there were plenty of passageways where our unknown author could have inscribed the key.’

  ‘Exactly. And that’s why we need to take another look – a careful look – at the Latin translation.’

  44

  Jerusalem

  Salim’s death had been something of a shock to the other members of the group. But they were freedom fighters, battling for Islam and any paymaster who saw fit to use their services, and in that line of work deaths were inevitable. In fact, they all believed – and hoped – that they would die with a weapon in their hands.

  Even so, none of them had ever expected to meet their fate in a dark tunnel deep underground, a tunnel under the control of the Jews, and especially not at the hands of an infidel who was actually unarmed. That seemed to all of them to be a shameful death, dishonourable in almost every way, and the best way to avenge their companion was to find the man who had killed him as quickly as possible, and then ensure that his death would take a long time to come.

  So when Farooq issued his new orders, there had been no dissenting voices, and a few minutes after dawn the group split up to begin surveillance on the hotels near the Temple Mount. Khaled had been unable to find a decent photograph of Bronson, but he had obtained several good-quality pictures of his former wife. And in a country where almost every woman had brown skin and black hair, Angela Lewis, blonde and with a fair complexion, unmistakably Western European, should stand out.

  ‘If you see her, either by herself or with the man Bronson,’ Farooq instructed, ‘do not attempt to kill them immediately. Even after we have disposed of these two we will still have things to do here in Jerusalem, and we must not get involved in a firefight on the streets of the Old City. So if you spot them, do two things. First, follow them and do not lose sight of them, otherwise you will answer to me. Second, call me with the exact location, so that I can begin directing your comrades into appropriate positions. There will be a small bonus for the man who locates them.’ Farooq paused and smiled at the group. ‘This will not necessarily be in the form of money. The woman has to die as well as the man, but her death need not be immediate.’

  A couple of minutes later, the five-man group, plus Farooq, slipped out of the café they had selected for their early-morning meeting, each man clutching a street map of the city, a colour photograph of Angela Lewis and a sheet of paper on which Farooq had written the names and addresses of the hotels that they were to check individually, and the streets they were to patrol.

  As he stepped out of the building, Farooq glanced up at the sky. It was a powdery blue, and the first rays of the morning sun were spearing over the buildings and craggy terrain that lay over to the east. It was going to be hot, there was no doubt about that, and already he could smell the streets, that strange mixture of ancient dust and humanity crowded together in one spot, a scent that seemed unique to Jerusalem.

  If Khaled solved the problem of the key, and he and his men were able to find and take care of Bronson and Lewis, then they could be heading out of Jerusalem that very same day.

  45

  Jerusalem

  Farooq’s plan was a good one, but it did rather rely on their quarry making themselves visible, which is what both he and Khaled had expected. Because the spaces under the Temple Mount had not yielded the results they had anticipated, they had assumed that Bronson and Lewis would be back out on the streets, still searching for the key, perhaps at the Wailing Wall or somewhere nearby. Khaled assumed that the English couple must have broken the code and read the first part of the inscription, just as he had done, otherwise they would not be in Jerusalem at all.

  What he hadn’t anticipated, though, was that Bronson and Angela were one step ahead of him in terms of the trail they were following.

  After their breakfast, Angela and Bronson had returned to their room just minutes before Mahmoud, smartly dressed in a dark suit, had walked into the hotel as if he was just another guest, or perhaps a businessman meeting a guest, and had looked at the handful of occupants of all the public rooms. Just as in the previous establishments he’d visited, he had hoped to find a fellow Muslim with whom he could have struck up a conversation and discreetly enquired about the whereabouts of his ‘young female English friend’. Farooq had suggested this approach as being less likely to arouse suspicion than a direct approach to a concierge or receptionist. After all, it was just a short step between simple suspicion and contacting the police, especially in a city as laced and riven with racial tension as Jerusalem. And they definitely needed to keep the police out of their business.

  But in that hotel dining room, Mahmoud could see that that gambit wasn’t going to work. The clientele appeared to be almost exclusively tourists, and European tourists at that.

  Mahmoud walked out of the hotel entrance about five minutes after he’d walked in, took a pen from his pocket and made a neat tick beside the hotel name and followed it with a question mark. He glanced back at the building, then made a note on his sheet of paper to ensure that he would visit it again later that morning. So far, he had three hotels in total marked down as possibilities for similar reasons.

  Then he opened the tourist map he’d been given by Farooq and on which all of ‘his’ hotels and streets had been marked, and strode briskly along the pavement towards the next one.

  46

  Jerusalem

  ‘So what bit of the Latin do you think we got wrong, bearing in mind that these other people have obviously done exactly the same decryption and translation, and you met them right under the Temple Mount, precisely where you were going to search? We all came to the same conclusion, so is it really very likely that we all got it wrong?’

  Angela didn’t sound at all convinced that Bronson was on the right track.

  ‘It’s not so much that we got it wrong,’ he replied, ‘more that we didn’t look at the complete sentence and fully understand what it’s actually saying.’

  He took the piece of paper that Angela had used to translate the decrypted Latin, and pointed at one particular section of it.

  ‘Here,’ he said, ‘we decided this meant something like “in the hall under the lost temple where the treasure was concealed the key shall remain for ever”. In other words, we assumed that the key was actually in the same place that the hoard or the treasure or whatever it is had been hidden, but when you translated the full sentence, the first few words give it a slightly different slant. Now it reads more like “within the walls around the hall”, and that means—’

  ‘I see what you’re driving at,’ Angela interrupted. ‘It doesn’t say that the key is in the hall itself but on the walls outside it. But I’m still not sure how that helps us. Surely the walls that it’s referring to must be the supporting walls built by Herod around Mount Moriah, the supporting walls for the Temple Mount? And, more significantly, the walls that you looked at for about half a minute or maybe just a little longer and decided were unmarked.’

  Bronson nodded.

  ‘You could be right,’ he agreed equably, ‘and if you are, that’s pretty much the end of this search. But usually, where you get one piece of graffiti, even mediaeval graffiti, you get lots, and I saw nothing at all on those stones. But there are lots of marks inside the Western Wall Tunnel, and that would also very obviously be one of the walls that surrounded the inner hall, which means it could fit the description. So maybe that’s where the key is actually carved, and we simply missed it when we did the tour. Because of what happened last night, the facility is obviously going to remain closed for a day or two at least so we can’t look there again. But I’m hoping that shouldn’t matter, because both of us took dozens of photographs of anything that looked even vaguely hopeful. What I mean is that we might already have an image of the clue we’re looking for.’

  Angela groaned.

  ‘I’ve only looked at those pictures once but I’m fed up to the back teeth with them alr
eady.’

  ‘I know,’ Bronson said, with a slight smile, ‘but just look on the bright side.’

  ‘There’s a bright side?’

  ‘Kind of. This really has to be it. If we don’t find anything in those photographs then we give up, get out of here, go home and hope we can keep one step ahead of the bad guys.’

  ‘That doesn’t really sound like too much of an option. Or much of a bright side.’

  ‘I’m sorry, but it’s the only one I’ve got,’ Bronson said, opening his own netbook and navigating to the pictures folder that he’d used to store the digital photographs that he’d taken.

  Angela somewhat reluctantly opened up her laptop to do the same.

  ‘Bearing in mind we’ve gone through all these once already, what are we looking for this time that’s different?’ she asked.

  ‘There were certain characteristics in the original inscription,’ Bronson replied, ‘like the font, if you like, the way the letters themselves were shaped and carved. And that horizontal line of crosses that divided the bit that we could decipher at the top from the bit we couldn’t at the bottom. Whoever carved that first inscription must have known about the key, obviously, and there would have been no point in carving the first inscription unless it was intended that the second one, the key, could be found. My guess is he might have included some kind of recognition symbol, maybe like those crosses, or perhaps just the shape and character of the letters themselves, so look at anything that seems even vaguely familiar.’

  It took them most of the rest of the morning, but eventually Angela thought she’d found what they were looking for. It wasn’t a line of crosses, or even a marked similarity in the style of carving, but it was something she thought she recognized.

  ‘This must be it,’ she said, and Bronson immediately stood up and walked over to look at the screen.

  ‘What?’ he asked. ‘What can you see?’

  She traced a more or less vertical oval outline with her finger in the centre of the screen, and suddenly Bronson saw it too.

  ‘The bearded man,’ he said. ‘Just like the image carved above the altar in your underground temple.’

  Angela smiled at him.

  ‘The flash caught it just right,’ she said. ‘And this shot shows what’s been carved below it. The trouble is, I don’t really see how it helps us.’

  She clicked the left-hand button below the mouse-pad and a different picture replaced it on the screen.

  They both stared at it in silence. The carved image of the bearded man had been reproduced almost exactly, although obviously on a much smaller scale. In a horizontal line underneath the image were eight letters, carved into two groups of three and five and separated by a distinct space:

  F E I Y B Y B Y

  ‘Well, that’s made everything as clear as mud,’ Bronson said. ‘What the hell does that mean?’

  ‘What we need,’ Angela murmured reflectively, ‘assuming that the second part of the inscription was also enciphered using Atbash with the addition of extra words, like the first part, is those words. Tacking these collections of letters on to the beginning and end of the alphabet simply wouldn’t be enough, not least because it’s actually only five new letters. If that were the case, we’d have cracked the decryption using frequency analysis. The only way this could possibly be the key is if both those collections of letters are abbreviations for much longer expressions that would add the right level of complication. And that does kind of make me wonder,’ she added.

  ‘Wonder what?’ Bronson asked.

  ‘Just give me a minute.’ Angela began rooting around among the sheets of paper they’d used when deciphering the first part of the inscription. ‘I think it might be instructive to do some reverse engineering.’

  ‘And that means what?’

  ‘If we can find out what words must have been added to the standard alphabet to add the level of complication that we encountered on that first cipher, then maybe that will give us a clue to identify the expressions these letters are meant to represent.’

  It didn’t take all that long, despite the amount of trial and error involved, and within fifteen minutes Angela wrote two words down on a fresh piece of paper and handed it to Bronson. He looked at it blankly.

  YOHANAN MAMDANA

  ‘Now I think we really are getting somewhere,’ Angela said, a smile of anticipation on her face.

  ‘You may be getting somewhere, Angela,’ Bronson said, ‘but you’ve left me behind choking in the dust. This means nothing to me at all.’

  She stood up and stretched, turning her back to the window, the sun pouring through it turning her hair into a halo of gold.

  ‘Then it’s just as well that it does to me,’ she said.

  47

  Jerusalem

  Mahmoud was taking a break, sipping a coffee at a café a few yards down the street from one of the hotels he had put on to his ‘possibles’ list, and wondering if he should risk walking through the public rooms in the building again. He had already done it twice before that morning, once during breakfast service and the second time in the middle of the morning when he’d expected coffee to be served. On both occasions he’d seen nobody who resembled his quarry, but the receptionist had stared at him rather longer than made him feel comfortable as he left the second time.

  The good news was that he probably didn’t need to go in again, because it looked as if many, perhaps even most, of the guests, were heading out, presumably to explore the Old City. But although he never took his eyes off the hotel entrance, he saw nobody who resembled either Bronson or Lewis in the chattering throng.

  He was about to try his luck somewhere else when a sudden movement caught his eye. A female figure moved across one of the windows on the upper floor, stood for a few seconds with her back to the glass, and then turned. And in that instant Mahmoud realized that he had found them. He was too far away for her to be aware of his surveillance, and he continued watching her through the glass for a few more seconds, until she moved out of view.

  He exhaled deeply, unaware that he’d been holding his breath, then reached inside his jacket pocket and took out his mobile phone.

  48

  Jerusalem

  ‘So what is “Yohanan Mamdana”?’ Bronson asked. ‘Some lost city out here in the Holy Land?’ he suggested. ‘If it is, I’ve never heard of it.’

  Angela shook her head. ‘No, it’s not a place. It’s a person.’

  ‘Well, I’ve never heard of him. Or her.’

  ‘Actually,’ Angela said, ‘I can guarantee that you not only have heard of him – because Yohanan Mamdana was a man – but you also know a little bit about his life, and exactly how he died. The manner of his death, in fact, is perhaps better known than much about his life. Any ideas?’ she asked.

  ‘Not a glimmer so far.’

  ‘Right. Of course, like all the names from this period that have survived in stories and legends, the spellings have changed, often quite significantly. In this case, “Yohanan” has come down to us as “John”, and he was beheaded by—’

  ‘The Baptist,’ Bronson interrupted. ‘You mean John the Baptist. Herod and Salome and the silver platter.’

  ‘Spot on. Yohanan Mamdana was the original name, or at least the Syriac name, of the man we know as John the Baptist.’

  ‘Syriac? You mean from the Syrian language?’

  ‘No. It was an Aramaic dialect spoken across much of the Middle East.’

  ‘Fine. But what I have no clue about,’ Bronson said, ‘is why his name should form part of an Atbash cipher used to encrypt an inscription in a temple buried in the deserts of southern Iraq. And, come to that, I’ve no idea why any of that should have anything to do with the Temple Mount and the Knights Templar.’

  ‘Yes,’ Angela replied, ‘that bit is pretty obscure, I’ll grant you that. But as for the buried temple and the inscription, that does make a kind of sense. You remember when we were talking about it on the way from Kuwait City to the di
g, and then when you saw it for yourself. My view was that it was almost certainly a Mandaean temple, because of where it was, that shallow indentation in the floor that could have been intended for baptisms, and even the image of the bearded man. The point that we probably didn’t make all that clear to you at the time was that both the ancient Mandaeans and the followers of that religion today all worshipped exactly the same person. And that person wasn’t – and isn’t – Jesus Christ, but John the Baptist.’

  Bronson looked puzzled.

  ‘So was John the Baptist supposed to be another son of God, or someone equally important and unlikely?’ he asked.

  ‘Not as far as I know,’ Angela replied. ‘I think it’s generally accepted that he was a prophet of a sort, but in the Christian Bible and the Catholic Church he was seen as very much a bit-part player, somebody who was important for what he did, rather than for who he was. And that, for the Mandaeans, was the problem and the conundrum, because of the obvious logical inconsistency of the biblical tale. If Jesus Christ genuinely was the son of God, then obviously He had to be the most significant and important figure in religious history. But in the view of the Mandaeans, that simply could not be the case, because He was baptized by John the Baptist. No mere mortal could possibly be allowed to anoint the son of God, so very obviously the man who baptized Jesus had to be even more important than Him to be able to carry out that act.