by James Becker
“Drive away,” he instructed, leaning in through the open window, “but circle round and find a parking space somewhere on the opposite side of the street. Pick a spot where you can see both the garage door and the main entrance of that hotel. I’ll wait here until you’ve done that.”
“The car’s there, then?” Mario asked.
“Yes, it’s in the garage,” Toscanelli confirmed. “Now get going.”
Less than five minutes later, he resumed his place in the front passenger seat of the Ford, and all three men settled down to watch the hotel where they now knew that their quarry had gone to ground.
33
Exeter, Devon
“Of course, 1307,” Robin said. “Friday the thirteenth of October, to be exact, when all the Templar commanderies and preceptories throughout France were raided and their assets seized on the orders of King Philip the Fourth of France, Philip the Fair—who was anything but fair in his dealings with the order.”
“Unlucky for some,” Mallory said, with a smile.
“If you were a Templar in 1307, definitely. Now, I see the importance of 1307, and I did know that the Templars operated by a very strict rule for all their members, but what was so important about the number nine?”
“A couple of things, really. Do you know much about the Templars?”
“Not a lot, if I’m honest, and probably most of what I know is wrong, because of the way old stories and legends get distorted.”
“True enough. Well, I’ve read quite a lot about them, because they’ve always fascinated me for one very unusual reason, which I’ll tell you about some other time, because it’s not relevant right now. Most people know about the way the order was destroyed after 1307, but not many have much idea how it started, and even now there’s quite a lot we don’t know about that period. But we do know that in about 1119 a French noble named Hugues de Payens, who lived in the Champagne region of the country, decided to create a small military group—I suppose today we’d probably call it a task force—and persuaded eight of his noble relatives to join him in the venture.
“They based the rule and conduct of the order on the Cistercians, and that’s why that symbol containing the number 1307 is important, because it reminds us of the year the Templar order effectively ceased to exist. But it also provides an incontrovertible link between the Cistercians—nobody outside that order of monks would probably have known how to use that kind of numerical notation—and the Templars. This was just after the First Crusade, and the idea behind the group was simple enough. What they wanted to do was provide a form of protection for pilgrims from Europe who were on their way to worship at the various holy sites in and around Jerusalem.”
“So that’s why the number nine is important?” Robin said. “Because there were nine of them?”
“That’s one reason, yes. One obvious question that nobody’s ever been able to answer is how anybody could reasonably expect a force of only nine knights to protect the hundreds, probably thousands or even tens of thousands of pilgrims who were traveling to the Holy Land. Even if they concentrated their efforts on the area immediately around Jerusalem, there were still too many roads and far too many people to make the idea viable. But obviously Hugues de Payens and his companions were very persuasive, because when they arrived in the city in 1120 they approached King Baldwin the Second and explained their mission, and he allocated them one of the two buildings standing on the Temple Mount to use as their headquarters.
“The area was under Christian control at that time, of course, but the two buildings were Muslim in origin. The Dome of the Rock, which is located more or less at the center of the Mount, was believed to have been built on the site of the Jewish Temple, and was commonly referred to as the Holy of Holies. That was turned into a Christian church known as the Templum Domini, or the Temple of the Lord.
“The other building that, like the Dome of the Rock, is still standing, was the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and it was that structure which Baldwin allocated to the new military group, and which then gave them their name. Traditionally, the mosque was understood to have been erected on the site of Solomon’s Temple, and it was then known as the Temple of Solomon, the Templum Solomonis. Because they were using that building as their headquarters, the fledgling order adopted the name Pauperes Commilitones Christi Templique Solomonici, which translated as the Poor Fellow Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon. That was a bit of a mouthful, and fairly soon, because they were all of noble birth and based in the temple, they simply became known as the Knights Templar.”
“So did they manage to protect the pilgrims in the Holy Land?”
Mallory shook his head. “The short and snappy answer is no, and again the number nine is significant. There were nine knights in this original group, all of whom were related by marriage or by blood ties, and the identities of most of them are known. However, two of the men were known only by their names—Rossal and Gondamer—and the final member of the order is completely unknown to history. There’s been speculation about him for centuries, but no believable candidate has ever been suggested. And there’s no evidence that any member of this original group of knights did anything to protect pilgrims on the roads around Jerusalem or anywhere else.
“Instead, for nine years—that number again—they stayed on the Temple Mount and inside the building, and the best evidence we have suggests that they spent almost this entire period digging down below the Al-Aqsa Mosque and deep into the caves and tunnels that are known to lie beneath the Temple Mount. It’s popularly been supposed that they were looking for something, and it’s difficult to think of another cogent reason why they should have done all this excavating. Speculation about the object of their quest has ranged from the Ark of the Covenant all the way to the decapitated head of Jesus Christ. The bottom line is that nobody actually knows what they were looking for, but there is some circumstantial evidence that they did finally find it, because in 1129 they suddenly stopped digging and turned their attention to other matters.
“At the Council of Troyes in that year they were recognized and then sanctioned by the Church, and the order then embarked on a major campaign, but not to fight infidels, which is what they soon became known for, but to raise money. They asked for donations, which could be cash, obviously, but they were also happy to accept land and property, and a major thrust of their effort was directed at the noble families of Western Europe. They were very keen to recruit other nobles to join the order, all of whom brought donations with them, normally handing over their entire property when they swore their oaths of allegiance and were accepted as members of the Knights Templar. The thrust of the recruitment drive was that donations would be used to help the order in its fight against the infidels in the Holy Land, the various Crusades, and it was certainly implied that each donor would also earn himself or herself a favored place in the kingdom of heaven.
“There was quite a lot of resistance at the time to the idea of an order of warrior monks, the obvious argument being that a man of God should not take up arms and engage in battle with anyone. But this belief was quickly turned around by a treatise written by the very influential Bernard of Clairvaux, in which he stated categorically that the religious order could, and in fact should, fight a just war to defend both the Church and the innocent from attack. He also established the belief that a Knight Templar who fell in battle against the infidels would go immediately to heaven, any and all sins being forgiven. At a time when heaven and hell were believed to be absolutely real, and when people were genuinely worried about the fate of their immortal souls, this was a remarkably persuasive argument, and dozens of important nobles flocked to join the order.
“Then the Vatican joined the campaign, and in 1139 Pope Innocent the Second issued a papal bull known as Omne Datum Optimum, which basically exempted the Templars from paying any taxes or duties, allowed them the unquestioned right to cross any border, and stated that the order
was subject to no authority apart from that of the pope himself. It was, if you like, the ultimate ‘get out of jail free’ card, because it allowed the Templars to do whatever they liked, and within a very short time the order had expanded enormously, with chapters being created across most of mainland Europe, as well as in England and Scotland.”
“But they were a fighting force?” Robin asked. “I thought they were involved in most of the Crusades.”
“You’re quite right. The Knights Templar became the most feared shock troops of the time, something like the Special Air Service is today. They were well equipped and well trained, but above all they were incredibly highly motivated, largely because of this belief that if they died in battle they were assured of a place in heaven. And their orders in combat reinforced this. They were forbidden from retreating in any conflict unless they were outnumbered at least three to one, and only then if they were ordered to do so by the commanding officer, or if the Templar flag, the Beauseant, fell. As a result, in combat they were utterly fearless. It was popularly believed that when battle was imminent the only question the Templars ever asked was where the enemy was, never how strong the enemy forces were, because they simply didn’t care. They believed that dying in battle was the ideal way for their lives to end.”
“Pretty much the same attitude as radical Islam today,” Robin commented.
“There’s not much that’s new in this world, but I suppose it’s interesting how that belief has now come full circle, from being a tenet of radical Christianity to now being held with equal fervor by radical Islam. There’s probably a message or a moral in there somewhere. Anyway, all that stuff about the origins of the Knights Templar might be useful background, but it’s not actually getting us anywhere. What we need to do is try to decipher the rest of the text on the parchment, and now I think we’ve got a good shot at doing that.”
34
Devon
The police investigation into the triple homicide in Dartmouth hadn’t actually stalled, but it seemed clear to everybody involved that it was going nowhere, and not particularly quickly. About the only thing they knew for certain was the identity of the victims and where they had come from.
The names of the three dead men had been established as soon as the bodies were transferred to the mortuary in Exeter, simply by a comparison of the faces of the corpses with the small pictures in the diplomatic passports that had been recovered from the hired Range Rover. By checking the number plate of the car, the police had also established where and when the vehicle had been collected. The SUV had been impounded to allow forensic checks to be carried out on it, although as the murders had been committed elsewhere, nobody was quite certain what results this was expected to yield. It was already clear to everybody involved that the three dead men had traveled from Exeter Airport to Dartmouth in the vehicle, and that had been their only contact with the car.
Almost as an afterthought, one of the staff at the airport had mentioned that two almost identical SUVs had been hired at the same time, and by the same person using a single credit card, and the police seized upon this as another possibly fertile avenue of investigation.
Suddenly, as well as three dead men, they also had another vehicle to trace and three further Italians who were presumably still alive and somewhere in Devon, and who were also clearly a part of the same group as the men who had been killed. A watch order had been issued for the second vehicle, images from speed and traffic cameras being closely scrutinized, and a search mounted for these men, whose names had been extracted from the arrivals details at Exeter Airport. But so far no trace of them had been found. They appeared to have vanished just as suddenly and effectively as Robin Jessop, who was still at the very top of the list of the people whom the police wished to question.
Aircraft of any sort, but especially passenger jets and expensive private aircraft, earn no money while they are parked on a hardstanding somewhere, and the Cessna Citation had been refueled within an hour of landing and then taken off about an hour after that. According to the aircraft’s flight plan, it had returned to the Rome airport from which it had departed, and inquiries made by the Devon police through the British embassy in the Italian capital had provided almost no useful information.
The aircraft, the embassy stated, had been hired by a businessman in Rome to convey six of his employees to Exeter, and that was about the total extent of the data that had been forthcoming. Apparently the same or another aircraft would be chartered at a later date to collect the men, although it was also possible that they might be flying back to Italy on a normal commercial flight once their stay in Britain had been concluded. The businessman had not yet made up his mind, according to the embassy staff officer who had talked to him. The Italian had been conspicuously reluctant to convey any information whatsoever about his business interests or the reason for sending six people to England, or what they were supposed to be doing there. In fact, he had basically provided almost no information at all to the embassy apart from his name.
The passports were another problem. The businessman had also failed to explain why the six passengers on the Cessna Citation were all carrying diplomatic passports. He had refused to make any comment at all about the origin of those passports, which was a matter of considerable interest because they had not been issued by the Italian authorities. In fact, when the British police examined the passports, they assumed at first that they were forgeries because they had never heard of the organization that had allegedly produced them.
Generally speaking, diplomatic passports are issued by governments to senior diplomats, hence the name, but the three documents that had been recovered in Dartmouth had not been issued by the government of any nation, but by the Sovereign Military Order of Malta.
A check with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London had confirmed that both the order and the documents were entirely legitimate, but that hadn’t helped much. The SMOM, as it was usually referred to, was an ancient Roman Catholic religious order, originally based on the island that gave it its name, but at present with its headquarters in Rome. All communications between the British embassy in the capital and SMOM officials, based in the Magistral Palace on the fashionable Via Condotti near the Spanish Steps in central Rome, on the subject of the passports and the men who had been carrying them had been ignored.
So the police had three dead Italian diplomats, killed execution-style for an unknown reason, a missing antiquarian bookseller, and no obvious link between them apart from the flat above the shop in Dartmouth, the site of the killings. In short, it was something of a stalemate. Until officers from the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary could lay their hands on either Robin Jessop or the missing three Italians, nobody really believed that the investigation was going to do anything other than stagnate.
35
Exeter, Devon
“But before we get stuck into trying to decipher that,” Mallory said, “I think I just need to go and sort out the cars, find a local hire company, and tuck the Porsche away somewhere nearby. There are plenty of car parks around here.”
“I’ll come with you,” Robin said.
“You don’t need to.”
“Look, I feel safe when I’m around you, and I know it makes no logical sense, but I’m not going to sit here waiting for a knock on the door that might be these Italians, who’ve somehow managed to track us down. No, if you go, I’m going with you.”
“Okay. Whatever you want.”
Robin again pulled on the long blond wig and adjusted her makeup, then announced that she was ready. This time, Mallory made no move to pick up his computer, and she looked at him quizzically.
“You sure about that?” she asked.
“No, but just in case we run into any trouble I want both hands free,” he said, tucking the Beretta into the rear waistband of his trousers. It would be uncomfortable driving like that, but he would feel a whole lot happier having the pi
stol about his person, just in case.
Ten minutes later Mallory inserted the authorized parking ticket in the machine in the parking lot and waited until the electric motor had lifted the metal door clear of the concrete ramp. Then he gave the Cayman a little throttle and drove the Porsche up the slope and out onto the street.
“I’m sure we’re safe enough,” Mallory said, “but just keep your eyes open for any black Range Rovers, just in case.”
He swung the car around to the left to head toward the car park he’d selected, watching the traffic around him closely, but saw nothing to raise his suspicions. In fact, it wasn’t until he pulled the Cayman to a stop on the fourth level of the multistory car park that he really registered the presence of the small Ford sedan that had driven into the car park behind him.
And by then it was too late.
36
Exeter, Devon
The Ford had pulled to a stop directly behind the Porsche, blocking it in completely, and before Mallory or Robin could move, a black-suited man was standing on either side of the Cayman, each aiming an automatic pistol directly at them.
“Oh God,” Robin muttered.
“Unless you want this girl’s brains splattered all over you,” the man standing beside Mallory’s door said in completely fluent and almost unaccented English, pulling it open, “you’ll do exactly what I tell you.”
Mallory glanced to his left. Robin was just getting out of the car, the man beside her pressing the end of his pistol firmly into her neck. Her face gazed at Mallory in mute appeal, but there was nothing he could do to help her. At least, not at that moment.
“As my colleagues must have told you back in Dartmouth, you have something that we want, Jessop, but we’ll get to that. First of all, the Ford isn’t a very big car for all five of us, so you’ll be lending me your Porsche.”
