The Lost Treasure of the Templars

by James Becker

  His orders from Vitale were clear and unambiguous: no information about their mission was to be revealed to anyone, so the last thing he was going to do was leave any of these men alive to be questioned by the British police. He pulled the trigger of his Beretta a second time.

  Still holding the weapon, he picked up the laptop, stepped outside the apartment to where the third man lay incapacitated and moaning, his wrist lashed to the balcony railing, and fired another single bullet through his head as well.

  He took a final glance round, satisfied that he had sanitized the scene as well as he could in the circumstances, then ran swiftly down the spiral staircase to ground level and walked through the alleyway to the main street, where he turned left to rendezvous with the Range Rover, which was already illegally parked perhaps two hundred yards away, engine idling, the driver waiting for him.

  * * *

  “Where are we going?” Robin asked as they strode quickly along the street. As she spoke, she took a step closer to him.

  “Away from here,” Mallory replied. “Apart from that, I really don’t—”

  He broke off as the shop window they were just passing suddenly shattered, shards of glass tumbling onto the pavement beside them.

  Mallory looked behind them. He’d been checking the street at intervals, but he hadn’t spotted anyone following them, a mistake that could have been fatal.

  About forty yards back, a dark figure in a black suit was taking aim for a second shot at them with a silenced automatic.

  “Run,” Mallory shouted.

  As Robin dodged behind him and began sprinting along the pavement, Mallory pulled the Beretta pistol from his pocket, aimed the weapon vaguely in the direction of their pursuer, clicked off the safety catch, and pulled the trigger.

  The report was deafening in the near silence of the narrow street, and he had no idea where the bullet went: forty yards was a long distance for accurate shooting with a pistol, especially one he’d never used before.

  But the shot had precisely the effect he wanted. The man who’d fired at them clearly hadn’t expected them to be armed, and had ducked down low the moment Mallory fired.

  Mallory aimed toward the pavement in front of the crouching figure, and pulled the trigger a second time. He hoped the bullet would perhaps shatter on contact with the stone, and that maybe one of the fragments would hit the man, slow him down a bit.

  That might even have worked, because as he turned away he heard a strangled yelp from behind him.

  And then Mallory was running, Robin about ten yards in front of him, both moving as fast as they could. Mallory glanced over his shoulder. Their pursuer was also up and running, so clearly if any part of the bullet he’d fired had hit him, it certainly wasn’t slowing him down.

  Mallory heard another dull thud from behind, and a bullet slammed into the wall of a property just to his right. But he kept on running, knowing that it would need to be a really lucky shot if either of them was hit while their pursuer kept moving.

  He was gaining slightly on Robin, and when he looked back, the gunman had dropped back slightly and was now perhaps fifty yards behind him.

  “Next right,” Mallory yelled as Robin approached a side street.

  She gave no sign of having heard him, but when she reached the corner she dodged to the right and vanished from sight.

  Mallory followed her around the corner of the building, but when he’d covered about thirty yards up the street, he turned and waited for a moment, aiming the Beretta back toward the street they’d just left.

  But within a few seconds he saw that the gunman was too experienced to just blindly run around the corner in pursuit of his quarry. Instead he came to a dead stop, his body shielded by the building, and just looked up the side street, his head the only part visible.

  But that was enough for Mallory to shoot at, and he pulled the trigger twice, the noise of the shots again echoing from the surrounding buildings. Even as he fired, he saw the man pull his head back, ducking into safety behind the solid brickwork of the building on the corner.

  Then Mallory turned and ran on, hoping he’d gained perhaps another ten yards, and that the gunman might wait for just a few more precious seconds before continuing the pursuit.

  Robin was almost at the end of the side street, and at that moment she glanced back to see where he was.

  “Go left,” he called, and watched her angle across the street and over to the opposite pavement.

  Mallory stayed on the same side of the street, reached the end, and then turned to face back the way he’d come.

  The gunman was still not in sight, but as Mallory looked, he stepped around the corner. Once more Mallory lifted the pistol and fired, and again their pursuer vanished from sight.

  Immediately Mallory crossed the street to follow Robin. His hope was that the gunman would remain behind the building until he himself had disappeared, so that he wouldn’t know which way they’d run. That, too, might gain them more precious seconds. And he knew his car was now only a few dozen yards away. If they could reach that, they’d be safe.

  As he ran after Robin, Mallory switched the pistol to his left hand and fumbled in the pocket of his jacket for his car keys. He pulled them out and pressed a button. Immediately the hazard lights on a black Porsche Cayman parked on the opposite side of the street ahead flashed obediently.

  Robin obviously saw the car’s lights flashing and immediately raced across the street toward it, running around behind the Porsche and wrenching open the passenger door as soon as she reached the vehicle, Mallory only yards behind her.

  As she did up her seat belt, he pulled open the door and dropped into the driver’s seat, sliding the key into the ignition and turning it as he pushed his computer bag into the space behind the passenger seat and dropped the pistol onto his lap. The engine started with a roar, and Mallory engaged first gear, hit the lights, turned the steering wheel, and powered the car out of the parking space.

  As he did so, Robin reached over and behind him, pulling out his seat belt and clicking the buckle into place as quickly as she could. Like Mallory, she was panting from the unexpected exertion.

  Mallory grabbed second gear, powered down his window, and picked up the pistol again. Seconds later, the car reached the end of the side street they’d run along, and they both saw the dark figure just reaching the junction.

  The gunman saw the Porsche at the same instant, and immediately raised his pistol, taking aim at the car.

  Mallory stuck his right arm out of the window, aimed the Beretta, and pulled the trigger. He had no real hope of hitting the man, not from a moving car, but he hoped firing at him would spoil his aim.

  The gunman fired at the same moment, the sound of Mallory’s unsilenced weapon drowning out the dull thud of the suppressed pistol. Mallory clearly saw the man’s arm move to absorb the recoil, but the bullet apparently missed, because he felt no impact anywhere on his car.

  The gunman ducked and crouched down as Mallory fired at him a second time, and then the Porsche was past him, accelerating hard down the street.

  Mallory was switching his attention between the street in front of him and his mirrors, and as he watched he saw the man step out into the street, aiming his pistol. There wasn’t room in the fairly narrow street for him to swerve or try to dodge, so he just had to rely on speed. And Porsches were good at speed. That was what they were built for.

  He left the gear lever in second, the speedometer needle hovering at around sixty miles an hour, the engine screaming its banshee wail.

  Robin flinched slightly as the rear window of a parked car they were driving past exploded with the impact of a bullet, but then they were out of pistol range. But not, Mallory guessed, out of trouble.

  “Thank God for that,” Robin said.

  “We’ve still got problems,” Mallory said, slowing down slightly. “T
hat man wasn’t just shooting at us,” he added. “I was watching in the mirror. When he fired that last shot, he was also talking into a mobile phone.”

  “Which means?”

  “Which means there must be other people out looking for us. We’re not out of the woods yet. Where the hell are we? And how do I get out of this town?”

  Robin looked through the windshield.

  “I know exactly where we are,” she said. “Take the next right. We need to get onto College Way because that’s the main road out of the town.”

  She gave him further directions, which Mallory followed, now making sure he stayed at or below the speed limit. With a loaded pistol in the car, the last thing he wanted to do was get pulled over by a policeman.

  “Right,” Robin said as they made another turn. “This is Newcomen Road. Keep going straight through the one-way system, and then we’ll end up down by the river, on the North Embankment. You have to turn left at the end of that to go past Coronation Park. Then you go left again, and that’s College Way, the A379. No problem.”

  Despite the running gun battle they’d been involved in, the town of Dartmouth seemed quiet and normal, with no signs of any unusual activity, though Mallory assumed that the area around Robin’s shop and apartment would be knee-deep in rozzers by then. The traffic was light, and they encountered no holdups.

  “That’s Coronation Park, right in front,” Robin said, “so we’re nearly there.”

  Mallory nodded, swung the Cayman around to the left to follow the street, and then left again to start climbing the hill, the looming bulk of the Royal Naval College clearly visible over on their right.

  And then, when they’d almost reached the top of the hill, seemingly out of nowhere, a black Range Rover materialized from a side turning directly in front of them, perhaps sixty yards away, stopping broadside on to block the left side of the street.

  Both the windows on the right-hand side of the car were lowered, and in the light from the Porsche’s headlamps Mallory could see two bulky figures, arms extended, both holding pistols that were pointed straight at them.

  It wasn’t over yet.

  19

  Dartmouth, Devon

  The control room operator who had picked up Mallory’s triple-nine call had had very little information to go on. But she had heard, and heard very clearly, the shouted statement that some kind of firearm was involved in the incident, as well as the agonized scream of a woman. Those two factors had immediately increased the importance of the call, and her response to it, with the approval of the duty inspector in the control room.

  As well as ordering the nearest regular patrol car to head for the address in Dartmouth that the automated location system had provided, she also ordered the crew of an ARV, an Armed Response Vehicle, from the Tactical Aid Group of the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary, to attend.

  The ARV was a BMW estate car, painted with the usual distinctive pattern of blue-and-yellow high-visibility squares, but with two small yellow squares on each end of the front bumper just below the headlights to indicate that the occupants were armed, the only external indication of the vehicle’s special status.

  The car was on the road between Plympton and Ivybridge when the call came through. The driver immediately flicked on the roof bar lights and siren and headed east as fast as the traffic would permit along the A38 dual carriageway, while the codriver talked with the control room operator to try to get as much information as he could about the incident.

  “Could be a hoax, from the sound of it,” Eddie Fulton said as he concentrated on covering the ground as quickly as he could.

  The BMW had just passed the outskirts of South Brent, the speedometer needle holding steady at a hundred and ten miles an hour as the car headed northeast. One problem both the officers were well aware of was that they weren’t then actually heading toward Dartmouth, there being no fast roads that offered a direct track to the address they had been given.

  “Which route are you going?” the codriver, Dave Chambers, asked.

  “Not a lot of choice, really. I’ll stay on this as far as the interchange, then go east to Totnes and south and east to Dartmouth from there. You’d better tell the operator we’re going to be at least another twenty minutes on the road.”

  Chambers made the call, adding that unarmed officers should not approach the scene until they arrived, just in case there really was a man there waving a gun, unlikely though he thought that would be in sleepy Dartmouth, and it wasn’t the far more probable scenario of a couple of drunken locals having a laugh.

  In the end, they made better time than Fulton had expected, and he pulled the BMW to a halt a little under seventeen minutes after Chambers had passed his original estimate. Two other patrol cars were already on the scene at the back of the building from which the call had been made, and an ambulance was parked a few yards away, the crew waiting inside the vehicle in case they were needed. Another patrol car had been parked at the end of the alleyway that terminated on the main road to cover that exit, its flashing blue lights reflecting eerily from the windows of the antiquarian bookshop that the police had already established was owned by a Robin Jessop, the same person who owned the apartment from which the emergency call had been made.

  Inevitably the relatively heavy police presence had attracted a crowd of interested observers, most of them eagerly recording the scene with the cameras in their mobile phones. Uniformed officers were doing their best to keep them away from both the front and the back of the building.

  Moments after Fulton stopped the BMW, he and Chambers climbed out and opened the trunk to unlock the firearms safe. Two minutes after that, both men were fully equipped, Glock semiautomatic pistols in holsters at their sides, and each carrying a Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun, all weapons primed and ready to fire.

  The on-scene commander was a uniformed inspector—his name tag read WILSON—and before doing anything else, Fulton and Chambers reported to him.

  “Evening, sir. What’s the situation?”

  “What have you been told?”

  “Very little. The control room operator who took the triple-nine call heard a scream, possibly from a woman, and then a man’s voice, slightly muffled, shouting that somebody had a gun. That’s it.”

  The inspector nodded.

  “There’s not a great deal that I can add,” he said. “We’ve secured the perimeter, and since the first car arrived on-site, nobody has entered or left any part of the building.”

  Wilson paused for a moment and pointed up toward the second floor level. “There’s at least one light switched on in the apartment, and the entrance door is standing ajar, but we’ve seen no sign of any movement. One of the constables thinks he heard a couple of thumping sounds when he arrived and got out of his car, but that’s it, and we’ve no idea what could have caused them. And of course they might have nothing at all to do with this incident.”

  He turned back and smiled somewhat bleakly at the two armed officers. “Anyway, you’re the cavalry, so over to you. The only access we can see to the apartment is up that metal spiral staircase, though there might be some internal stairs as well leading down into the bookshop. Both parts of the property are owned by somebody called Robin Jessop. We’ve been trying his mobile phone, but it’s switched off and we have no idea where he is at the moment. Obviously our major concern is that he’s up there in the apartment, perhaps injured or worse, but we’ve been ordered to wait for you before investigating further. I’ve got floodlights positioned already, but I assumed you’d rather make a covert approach to start with.”

  “Yes, thank you, sir,” Chambers said. “In this case, I think quiet is much better than noisy. Now, could you please pull your men back to a safe distance, and we’ll take a look. If you monitor our transmissions, we’ll give you a shout if we need the lights.”

  Both men checked their weapons and equipment,
each running his eyes over his companion’s gear as well as a final check on their mutual readiness, and then they began moving forward slowly until they had a better view of the apartment and the external staircase leading up to it.

  They stopped about ten meters from the base of the staircase and for a few moments just studied the scene.

  “I think I can see a shape up there on the balcony. Could be a person, or maybe just a pile of something, clothing maybe,” Chambers whispered. “I don’t see anything else.”

  “Nor do I. Let’s go. I’ll lead. We’re going in now.”

  “Understood,” Wilson’s voice came through loud and clear in their earpieces. Both armed officers were equipped with specially designed radios that allowed them to transmit without removing their hands from their weapons.

  Fulton stepped forward, his submachine gun aimed and ready, covering an arc in front of him as he approached the base of the staircase.

  When he was a few feet away he stopped and looked down for a few moments.

  “This is Fulton,” he said quietly into his microphone. “There’s a pistol lying on the ground here near the base of the staircase. It looks like a Beretta, and the magazine is in place. Suggest you upgrade the status of this incident accordingly.”

  “Copied,” Wilson responded.

  “I’m starting to climb the staircase now.”

  Slowly and really carefully the armed police officer began ascending the metal spiral staircase, his weapon pointing upward to where any threat would materialize. Chambers stood a few feet away from the base of the staircase, also aiming his Heckler & Koch upward but ensuring that his colleague was never in the line of fire, scanning the entire balcony and looking out for any signs of danger.

  Moments later, Fulton had climbed high enough so that he could see along the length of the balcony at the top of the staircase. The vague shape that he and Chambers had spotted from the ground was now only a few feet from him, and it was immediately clear that he was looking at a man.