The Lost Treasure of the Templars

by James Becker

  Mallory was still looking at the photocopy of the parchment, and at the letters. Then he held it a little farther away, and after a few more seconds he nodded.

  “I think I might have worked it out,” he said, “and actually it’s really simple, not much of a code at all. It looks to me like a combination of the letters themselves and where they’re positioned on the sheet of parchment, which letters they’ve chosen, I mean. So it’s not actually a string of ten letters, but five separate groups of two letters arranged in a very specific shape, like this.”

  He took a clean sheet of paper and quickly jotted down the letters in the format he had just suggested, one group on the first line, three on the second, and the last one on the third line, so forming a rough diamond shape:

  PS

  CS CI TE

  SI

  “I’m none the wiser,” Robin said. “You’re obviously seeing something I’m not.”

  “I’ve put the letters together in pairs, but their positions are pretty accurate. The shape of the letters forms a cross, that’s the first thing, a cross with equal-length arms, which is very much like the croix pattée used by the Knights Templar. And I think the letters are nothing more than the first and last letters of each word in the official name of the order: Pauperes commilitones Christi Templique Solomonici, so that gives us PS CS CI TE SI. It’s just another hint to get us thinking the right way, to confirm that the parchment contains information about the Templars. And I’ll bet that when we finally crack the code that will let us decipher the rest of the text, the code word will be something specific to the order.”

  Mallory paused for a moment, then pulled out another of the pieces of paper they’d been working on earlier and scanned what they’d written on it. “I thought so. This is yet another pointer toward the Templars. You remember that the first section of the document used the Atbash cipher with different shifts. If you take the first letter generated by each new shift, you get P C C T S in sequence, the five initial letters of the full name of the Templar order. Whoever wrote this was making sure there were plenty of clues incorporated in the first part of the text to help steer anyone trying to decode it in the right direction. So now all we have to do is work out what word or words they used as the cipher text in the Atbash cipher so that we can decode the rest of the encrypted text.”

  “Are you sure that’s the answer?”

  “No,” Mallory replied, “but at the moment that’s the only thing that makes sense to me. Why would the author of this text leave so many clues pointing to the Knights Templar unless the key to the cipher text was something to do with the order? We already know that the bulk of the message can’t be decoded using the normal Atbash cipher, because we’ve tried every possible variant, so the word or words used have to be something other than just the alphabet, written in either direction.”

  “So what words do you think we should try?” Robin asked.

  “Well, the most obvious ones to start with are the names of things and people that were definitively associated with the Knights Templar. Things like the Beauseant—that’s the name of the Templar battle flag—and the important individuals associated with it, people like Hugues de Payens and Jacques de Molay, the two men who were respectively the originator of the order and its last grand master, and Bernard of Clairvaux, whose treatise about fighting a just war was so important to the growth of the order. That document was called De Laude Novae Militiae.”

  “That translates as ‘In praise of the new knighthood,’” Robin interrupted.

  “Exactly, and that’s another possible set of words we could try. Doing a bit of lateral thinking, we could also try things like the names of the reigning pope when the order was established—he was Innocent the Second—perhaps along with the Latin Omne Datum Optimum, the name of the papal bull he issued that exempted the Templars from paying taxes and essentially allowed the order to grow as quickly as it did. We can implement all those suggestions by themselves or in combination with each other, but probably the first, the simplest, and certainly the most obvious group of words we should try is the Latin name of the order itself: Pauperes commilitones Christi Templique Solomonici.”

  Robin nodded.

  “That makes sense,” she said. “Let’s give it a try.”

  47

  Devon

  Inspector Paul Wilson walked from the metaled surface of the lane into the small clearing a few miles to the west of Exeter. He stopped just outside the blue-and-white police tape that had already been positioned around the unmoving figure on the ground. He scratched his head, not easy to do when wearing both latex gloves and a Tyvek oversuit that included a hood, and turned to look at the man beside him.

  “Tell me what happened,” he said.

  “This lane’s popular with dog walkers, sir,” the uniformed sergeant replied, and pointed to one side of the open area where an elderly man wearing a pair of brown corduroy trousers and a Barbour jacket was sitting in the rear seat of a police patrol car, the door open. On the ground beside him, and securely linked to the man’s left hand by a long leather lead, sat a male black Labrador, waiting with the gentle and unmoving patience that only dogs ever seem able to display.

  “That’s Jeremy Young. He’d let his dog—its name is Sebastian, and I’ve no idea why—off the lead at the far end of this copse, and it ran ahead of him and into this clearing. According to Mr. Young, Sebastian just stopped dead and started barking. Wouldn’t stop, and so he came in after him and found the body. He had his mobile with him, so he dialed triple nine and then just waited for us to arrive.”

  Wilson glanced across at the man, who was leaning back in the seat and chatting to a uniformed constable.

  “He seems quite relaxed, bearing in mind he’s just stumbled over a corpse.”

  “He’s retired now, but he was a doctor, sir, so this obviously isn’t the first dead body he’s ever seen. Probably buried a few of his patients over the years.”

  Wilson nodded. “Right, make sure we get all his contact details and a full statement, and then he and Sebastian can carry on with their walk.”

  Wilson ducked under the tape and took a few steps forward to where another man, also wearing a full body suit, was kneeling beside the body, an open black case beside him. The man glanced back over his shoulder as the inspector approached.

  “Good evening, Paul,” he said. “Quite clear-cut, at least as far as the cause of death is concerned. He was shot at virtually point-blank range with a pistol. Even with the naked eye I can see some evidence of powder burns on his chest, and at that range the bullet went right through him.”

  “I don’t know why,” Wilson said, “but I have a feeling there’s a ‘but’ heading my way.”

  Reginald Barnes—he’d known Wilson for a couple of years—nodded and grinned.

  “Just a tiny peculiarity I need to explain to you,” he replied. “When somebody is shot in the chest, death is almost instantaneous, for obvious reasons, and in almost every case the body will fall backwards. But in this case I think the victim was killed while he was lying on the ground, first because of the contained area of bleeding, and also because of the bullet.”

  “The bullet?”

  “In a moment. When I arrived, the body was lying on its front. Once I’d confirmed death, I took a good look around the corpse, and there are definite signs of bloodstains on the ground right beside it.”

  Barnes pointed to a discolored reddish patch a short distance away from the body.

  “I rolled him the other way,” Barnes pointed out, “when I put him on his back to continue my examination. So the obvious conclusion is—”

  “That the murderer probably moved him after the killing took place,” Wilson interrupted. “Or at least rolled him over onto his chest. But why would he have done that?”

  “You’re the detective, not me, but I can make an educated guess. I said the
bullet passed right through his body, and you can clearly see an exit wound in the middle of his back. But I haven’t found any rips or tears in the fabric of his jacket, and my guess is that the killer saw that as well when he turned him over. The bullet probably only just made it through the chest of the corpse—he was a very heavily built man with good musculature, and that would have slowed the passage of the projectile—but because he was lying on the ground it ended up trapped between the exit wound and his clothing. It’s not there now, so my guess it’s either in the killer’s pocket or maybe at the bottom of a river somewhere.”

  “If you’re right, that’s totally buggered up any chance we have of solving this,” Wilson said sourly.

  “There’s something else as well,” Barnes said. “You know I did the posts on the three corpses found in Dartmouth? It may just be nothing more than a coincidence, but I did happen to notice that this man is wearing an Italian-made suit, just like those three were, and there’s nothing at all in his pockets apart from a packet of tissues. No wallet, no passport, nothing at all. He’s also physically similar to those three, the same kind of tanned complexion and black hair. Obviously none of that’s conclusive, but I was wondering if perhaps this man was a part of the same group. You did tell me, if you remember, that the first three were part of a group of six Italians who flew into Exeter in a private jet the other day.”

  Wilson shook his head.

  “Bugger me,” he muttered. “If you’re right, that means four of them are now dead. That’s not going to do much for British-Italian relations, is it? And why the hell are they flying over to Devon to be killed? Why couldn’t they shoot each other back in Tuscany or wherever they’ve come from?”

  “As I said, Paul, you’re the detective.”

  “Thanks, Reg. It looks like this is going to be another very long day.”

  48

  Newbury, Berkshire

  Over two hours after they’d started trying to decipher the encrypted text, and having tried a number of different code words and combinations, Mallory took yet another sheet of paper and wrote out the alphabet in a horizontal line across the top, placing each letter in a box with another box directly underneath each one. Then he checked the spelling and copied the first twenty-six letters of the expression Pauperes commilitones Christi Templique Solomonici directly below it, finishing with the letter t in Christi.

  “I don’t think that’s going to work,” Robin said. “You’ve got the letters e, i, and s occurring three times in the code word, as well as several other duplicates. That’s bound to cause confusion, isn’t it?”

  Mallory nodded. “Yes, but it shouldn’t make much difference because the worst-case scenario is that we’ll have to try two or three different letters when we’re decoding a particular word. Just as an example, in English the word sword would come out as erinp, which is fine. But I agree there are a lot of duplicates if these are the right code words. For example, the letter E in the encrypted text can stand for E in the plaintext, which is unusual in itself, or G or S. But I would have thought that when you’re looking at a decrypted word, it would be fairly obvious which of the three possible options will be the correct letter. Of course, if we don’t get anywhere we’ll have to think again and try some more different code words. In fact, there’s an argument that having multiple possible solutions for an encrypted letter adds a further layer of security to the cipher text, because somebody decoding it might find that a particular word comes out as gibberish, and decide that he’s got the wrong code words. Anyway, let’s see what we’ve got here.”

  They worked as a team, Robin reading out the Latin words of the encrypted message letter by letter and pausing when it looked as if she had reached the end of a sentence. Mallory copied down each letter, then used the table he’d prepared to try to decode the original for Robin to translate. It didn’t prove to be as difficult as they had expected, and within half an hour they’d managed to decipher the next section of the encrypted text. As Mallory had predicted, although some letters in the cipher text did have two or even three possible solutions, in almost every case it was very quickly obvious which was the right letter to use. Where there was any ambiguity, he simply placed all the possible letters in a vertical line in the correct place in the word.

  Then Robin translated the Latin into English, and read out what it said.

  The first section of the encrypted text trod ground that was already quite familiar to Mallory. It was essentially a summary that explained what had happened to the members of the order in the winter of 1307, beginning with the incredible duplicity of Philip the Fair of France, who had actually invited Jacques de Molay to be a pallbearer at the funeral of his sister on the twelfth of October, the day before the mass arrests of the Knights Templar took place.

  The orders for the arrests had been sent out weeks or months earlier, and the author of the text was incredulous that the king of France could be so calculatingly evil as to extend the hand of friendship to Jacques de Molay—in those days to be a pallbearer was not only a great honor, but also a duty that would normally only be performed by a family member or by an extremely close friend of that family—when he absolutely knew that within less than twenty-four hours that same man would be incarcerated in his own dungeon and facing an agonizing and painful death.

  It was absolutely clear, the writer went on, that King Philip was motivated by nothing more than greed, and had conceived of the plan to destroy the Knights Templar order simply as a way of resolving his own crippling financial problems. And that, the author added, was the firm opinion of most of Philip’s court, as well as almost everybody associated with the Templars.

  “That’s interesting,” Mallory said, after Robin had read out the last part of that particular passage. “There’s been something of a debate over the last hundred years or so about what was driving Philip to take the action he did. Opinion is pretty much split between two conflicting suggestions. Some people believe that because Philip himself was extremely religious, and he had heard from witnesses who had attended Templar ceremonies that they practiced heresy as a matter of course, he decided with the typical arrogance of people committed to a particular religious outlook that he was right and they, obviously, were wrong. And when anyone subscribes to that view, it’s only a fairly small step to take to have the people you believe to be heretics put to death for the good of their immortal souls.

  “In medieval times, that was a valid argument, but what it really doesn’t explain is why the arrests of the members of the Knights Templar order were so impressively coordinated and conducted in a single swoop. If Philip really believed the Templars were worshipping false gods and as a good Christian he wanted to help them, then surely he should have begun arresting them immediately, again for the good of their souls, and he certainly shouldn’t have allowed the leader of such a bunch of heretics—Jacques de Molay, the chief heretic, if you like—to even attend his sister’s funeral, far less be a pallbearer at it.”

  Robin nodded. “You’re right. That argument really doesn’t make sense. But if he was actually after the Templar treasury, trying to keep Jacques de Molay in particular in the dark about his plans would have been a good move tactically. He would have kept the element of surprise and allowed his men to seize the wealth of the order, which would probably have been more than enough to bail him out of a financial mess he had got himself into. And I suppose that’s more or less the opposing argument that’s been suggested?”

  “Absolutely right, and these days I don’t think that most people who’ve done any research on the subject have much doubt that his motive was purely financial. And I do find it interesting that this piece of text, which from what we’ve already translated looks as if it’s more or less contemporary with the end of the Templars, supports that view.”

  Then they started decoding the next section, and that produced more of a surprise. Robin was still reading out the encoded words, lette
r by letter, which Mallory was then transcribing onto paper before referring to the Atbash cipher text to pick out the appropriate plaintext letters. That produced the Latin plaintext, very little of which he could understand, and he then passed the paper to Robin to translate the Latin into English.

  “I hadn’t expected this,” Robin said, when she’d finished that section. “Just listen to what it says.”

  In a very matter-of-fact way, the next section of the text revealed that the sudden and unexpected attack on the Templar strongholds throughout France had certainly been sudden, but it had definitely not been unexpected. The order, the writer claimed, had agents everywhere, including somebody inside the court of Philip the Fair, and the Templar hierarchy had actually known about the impending arrests and seizures almost as soon as the king had formulated his plans.

  “That does make sense,” Mallory said. “The Templars essentially formed an independent state with its headquarters in France, and like every state it would have needed to know what was going on in the neighboring countries. For the Templars, because they were mainly based in France, they were quite literally surrounded by potential enemies, so good and accurate information would have been even more important to them. Intelligence has always been the lifeblood of diplomacy: before any government is able to react to a particular situation, it needs to know as much as possible about the intentions of the other party. It would have been really surprising if the Templars hadn’t had spies, or at the very least a number of powerful and influential sympathizers, in the French court.”

  “So that does rather make you wonder why the Templars didn’t do more to resist when French troops came knocking on the doors of their commanderies.”