The Lost Treasure of the Templars

by James Becker

  The programmed route took them out of Taunton, and over the M5 Motorway, which surprised Mallory.

  “I think we’re heading more or less south,” he said. “Is that right?”

  “Yes.” Robin nodded. “We’re going to a place called Dunkeswell.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  Within quite a short time the roads grew narrower and the going slower, and occasionally Mallory had to stop the car and pull to the side to allow a larger vehicle to pass in the opposite direction.

  “It is a bit inaccessible,” Robin admitted as they waited for a cement truck to edge past. “There is another, very easy way to get there, but I’m afraid we can’t use it.”

  Mallory suspected she was deliberately teasing him, playing on the fact that he genuinely had no idea where they were going or what she’d got planned, but he responded anyway. “I’m sure you’re dying to tell me, so I’ll ask the question. Why can’t we go that way?”

  She smiled mischievously.

  “Because we haven’t got the right equipment,” she said.

  About ten minutes after that, Mallory suddenly realized what she was hinting at as he saw a light aircraft turning to the left a mile or so in front of the car.

  “Ah, now I get it,” he said. “Dunkeswell is an airfield, isn’t it? And the easiest way to get there is to fly?”

  “Exactly.”

  “And is this Justin guy going to meet us there?”

  “Not exactly,” Robin replied, and refused to elaborate.

  Mallory followed the signs to the large free car park located near the entrance to the airfield, found a vacant space, and slotted the DS3 into it.

  “Now what?” he asked.

  “Now we take to the air.”

  They grabbed their bags from the trunk, and Robin led the way over to the aircraft park, where a number of small, mainly single-engine, aircraft were clustered on the hard standing. She stopped at the edge of the parking area and lowered her weekend bag to the ground.

  “Just hang on here,” she said, and vanished in the direction of what looked like an office. A few minutes later she walked back, a key in her hand, picked up her bag, and led the way over to a high-winged single-engine monoplane wearing blue-and-white livery, which also had a small armorial symbol painted on the door.

  “That’s Justin’s coat of arms,” she said, noticing Mallory glancing at it. “He’s got some kind of title, but I can’t remember what it is.”

  “So this is his aircraft?” Mallory asked as Robin unlocked the cabin door and lifted her bag up to lodge it inside.

  “Yes.”

  “So who’s going to fly it?”

  “Me,” Robin said simply.

  “But I thought you told me you didn’t have a license?”

  “No. I told you my PPL had lapsed because I hadn’t flown enough hours recently. It’s only a bit of paper,” she went on, “and by the time I land this thing I’ll probably have done enough hours to renew it for this year.”

  “Does Justin know your license has expired?” Mallory persisted. “Are you qualified to fly it?”

  “No, of course he doesn’t know, but he probably wouldn’t care if he did. Look, flying’s like driving or riding a bike. Just because my license is out of date doesn’t mean I’ve lost the skills. And you’d be amazed at what I’ve got licenses for. Now shut up, get the rest of the bags stowed in the cabin behind the front seats, and then strap yourself in.”

  “Which one?”

  “Unless you’re planning on driving it yourself, the right-hand seat.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “The external preflight checks, of course. Tires, control surfaces, checking for leaks, all that kind of thing.”

  By the time Mallory had tucked everything away and done up his straps, Robin was already climbing inside the aircraft. She sat down in the left-hand seat and put the key in what looked remarkably like an ignition switch.

  Mallory watched in silence as she then continued what was obviously a very familiar sequence of internal preflight checks, moving the rudder pedals and the control column—he had read just enough about flying to know that it wasn’t called a joystick—for full and free movement and checking all the gauges and instruments before she started the engine.

  The propeller spun somewhat jerkily for a couple of revolutions before the engine caught, sending a sudden puff of blue smoke into the air, then settling down to a steady roar. She again checked that all instrument indications were normal, then pulled on a headset and gestured for Mallory to do the same.

  As soon as he did so, the noise from the engine was enormously reduced, and he could also hear Robin talking on the radio, the selector display of which showed a frequency of 123.475.

  “Dunkeswell, this is Golf Sierra Tango in the park requesting taxi instructions for a cross-country navex.”

  “Good morning, Sierra Tango. Taxi for runway two two on QFE 1008. Call at the holding point for two two left.”

  “Two two left on QFE 1008. Thank you, Dunkeswell.”

  “To save you asking a whole lot of irritating questions,” Robin said, altering the setting on the altimeter subscale before releasing the parking brake and goosing the throttle to start the aircraft moving, “a navex is a navigational exercise, a normal training evolution, which usually means flying a triangular pattern around three airfields. Two two zero degrees is the magnetic heading of the runway, and you have to fly a left-hand circuit from it. The QFE is the local pressure setting that means the altimeter will read zero feet on the ground here, which helps when you’re landing but isn’t so important when you’re taking off, obviously. And we’ve got clearance to taxi to the runway, but not to enter it.”

  Mallory looked at her.

  “And Golf Sierra Tango?” he asked.

  “The aircraft’s registration number, which is also its call sign. Nothing clever there. I didn’t memorize it or anything. It’s printed right here.” She pointed at the control panel in front of her, on which the full registration number was displayed.

  “Too much information,” he said. “This is all new to me, and I’m not taking it all in. What type of aircraft is this, by the way? I mean, is it reliable and all that?”

  Robin nodded but didn’t take her eyes off the view through the windshield as she taxied toward the runway.

  “It’s a Cessna 172 Skyhawk,” she replied, “and it’s the most successful aircraft ever in terms of the total number built. Cessna has knocked out over sixty thousand of these babies, and it’s been around since the mid–nineteen fifties, though this one’s only eight or nine years old. So, yes, it is reliable, very.”

  A few minutes later she braked the Cessna to a stop on the taxiway a few yards short of the entrance to the runway and carried out further checks there.

  “Pretakeoff checks,” she said to Mallory, then depressed the transmit button again. “Dunkeswell, Golf Sierra Tango, holding short of two two left.”

  “Sierra Tango. Take off. Wind light and variable, regional pressure setting 1014.”

  “Roger, Dunkeswell. Sierra Tango.”

  Robin opened the throttle again, and the Cessna eased forward. She turned it left onto the center of the runway, and opened the throttle all the way. The tarmac rushed past with increasing speed, the aircraft bouncing slightly over uneven sections of the runway, and then the plane gave a small lurch and was airborne.

  Robin continued climbing straight ahead to eight hundred feet, the circuit height, then turned left to head away from the airfield.

  “Dunkeswell, Golf Sierra Tango is continuing VFR en route. Good day, sir.”

  “Clear to continue VFR. Squawk 4321.”

  “Four-three-two-one, Sierra Tango.”

  Robin did something to a box just to the left of her.

  “That’s a setting o
n the secondary surveillance radar transponder,” she said. “It just means that any radar unit that detects us will read a 4321 squawk and know that we’re a real aircraft, not an angel or anything, and that we’re not in receipt of a radar service from anyone.”

  “I’m not even going to ask what an angel is,” Mallory said, “but what’s VFR?”

  “Visual flight rules. It means we do our own navigation, take our own separation from other aircraft, basically just do our own thing. And an angel is a slang term for anomalous propagation, usually an atmospheric effect that can produce returns on a radar screen that look just like aircraft but aren’t.”

  Mallory nodded slowly as the Cessna continued climbing and opened out to the east. It was a clear and bright day, the few clouds high and well dispersed, and visibility was excellent. He’d never been in a light aircraft before, and the appeal of it was immediately obvious, the experience exhilarating.

  “Well, it’s good of this Justin guy to let you borrow his aircraft,” he said.

  Robin was silent for just a second or two too long.

  “What?” Mallory asked.

  “He didn’t actually say I could borrow it, not in so many words. I rang him up to see where he was and what he was doing over the next week or two. When I found out he was going to be stuck in Cornwall for a while doing bits of estate business, I knew he wouldn’t miss his Cessna.”

  “You mean you nicked it?” Mallory asked. “We’re flying around in a stolen aircraft?”

  “I think calling it ‘stolen’ is a bit strong. He’ll be getting it back, after all. It’s more kind of temporarily TWOC’d.”

  “Twocked?”

  “Taken without owner’s consent, that sort of thing. A common expression in the police force, I understand.”

  Mallory stared at her for a moment, then looked out through the windshield again, a slow smile spreading across his face. “In view of everything else that’s happened over the last couple of days, I suppose flying about the countryside in a hot aircraft is the least of our worries. So, what the hell? Fly me to France, Robin.”

  50

  Southern England and France

  They landed at Biggin Hill in Kent, the old Second World War fighter base, affectionately known as “Biggin on the Bump,” to refuel.

  Once they’d touched down, Robin steered the Cessna over to what looked a bit like a regular petrol station, albeit with very wide spaces in front of the two pumps, and switched off the aircraft’s engine.

  “Use my card,” Mallory said, “just in case there’s a watch order out on yours.”

  Twenty minutes later, having also used Mallory’s Visa card to pay the landing fees, Robin taxied the Cessna back toward the active runway, and minutes after that they were airborne again.

  “What about French customs and immigration?” Mallory asked as they climbed through five thousand feet and Robin turned the plane onto a southeasterly heading. “Won’t we have to clear them in France?”

  “That really depends on how good a lunch the men in peaked caps have had, in my experience. I filed a flight plan when we paid the landing fees at Biggin Hill, stating that we were flying to Le Touquet, which is the closest French airport to Kent. I’ve flown in there a few times, and usually there’s been nobody about apart from a man demanding a fistful of folding money for landing fees. I know Justin quite often nips over there for lunch as well, which means this aircraft is something of a regular visitor, so hopefully we won’t attract too much attention.”

  “So we are going to Le Touquet?”

  “Oh yes. Not complying with a filed flight plan is a very good way of attracting official attention really quickly. And we have to land somewhere, obviously. I guess we can just hire a car there and then disappear into the French countryside while we work out what to do next.”

  Two hours later, with the Cessna fully fueled, chocked, and locked in the aircraft park at Le Touquet, they were sitting in a hired Renault Mégane and had just turned south onto the nontoll coastal autoroute at Abbeville. Robin had the map book open on her lap and was looking at the area down to the southeast of Rouen.

  “We can start looking for a hotel somewhere quiet once we get past Rouen. According to the map, it’s about a hundred kilometers—roughly sixty miles—away, so it’s only about an hour’s drive. We’ll come off the autoroute once we leave Rouen, and there’s bound to be a halfway decent hotel somewhere between Louviers and Évreux.”

  “Sounds good. We just have to remember that this is France, and the French have pretty rigid ideas about timing. A lot of hotels won’t accept new arrivals after about eight in the evening, and that’s also usually the last possible time you can sit down to dinner, so ideally we need to find a place by seven.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I’m not. I’ve been caught out before, driving through France. Some hotels actually lock their doors in the evening to dissuade unexpected paying guests, though I think they’ve lightened up a bit since the economic crisis started. But there are always places we can stay at any hour. There’s a chain called Formula One, for example, and you can get in to those at any hour of the day or night using a credit card, but by all accounts they’re pretty basic but very cheap. None of the comforts of home, I mean, but at least you get a bedroom, and they’re usually clean. My favorites are the Logis de France. They’re usually small places, family-run, and often quite quirky. But in my experience you get a decent meal, and the owners are very friendly, at least by French standards.”

  Robin was silent for a few moments, and when she spoke again her voice was tinged with concern.

  “I’ve been thinking,” she said, “and I hate to remind you about this, but back in the wood you killed that Italian, or at least helped him shoot himself. I know he absolutely deserved it because of what we’re pretty sure the two of them planned to do to us, and I don’t really have any problems with that. But even if it wasn’t your finger on the trigger, if you hadn’t been there, he would still be alive. Are you sure the police can’t pin that on you?”

  Mallory shook his head.

  “That’s why I took the extra few seconds to recover the bullet and the cartridge case,” he replied. “If I’d left them there and they’d found me with the pistol in my possession, I’d be in real trouble because they could fairly easily have matched the bullet to the weapon, and that would be extremely difficult evidence to refute. But as it is, all they have is the corpse of a man who’s been killed by a shot from a pistol, and about the best they’ll be able to do is have a guess at the approximate caliber of the weapon that discharged the bullet, and estimate how close the weapon was to the man when it was fired. Even if I was arrested and they found the pistol in my bag, I would obviously be in trouble for the illegal possession of a firearm, and that would be bad enough, but there’s no way they could pin a murder on me.”

  “But supposing they find the bullet or the case?”

  “They won’t,” Mallory said firmly.

  “How can you be certain of that?”

  “Because I dropped them out of the side window of the Cessna when we were halfway across the English Channel, and the handkerchief I’d wrapped them up in followed a minute or so later, knotted around about a pound’s worth of my loose change.”

  “I wondered what you were up to when you opened the window,” Robin said. “Anyway, thanks for explaining.”

  Traffic was fairly light, and so it was quite a bit less than one hour later when they drove through the tunnel and joined the traffic jostling for position on the network of roads to the northeast of Rouen city center.

  Robin was still navigating, and doing a pretty good job of it.

  “If you see a sign for Pont de l’Arche, follow that road,” she instructed. “It looks as if that will take us out to the east and avoid the worst of the traffic.”

  Mallory saw the sign at the la
st moment, and dived over to the right, earning himself a couple of horn blasts from angry French drivers, then drove under a bridge and followed the road around to the left. Once across the next junction, the road followed the course of the wide river on which a couple of large motorized barges were heading steadily south.

  About twenty minutes later, and well clear of Rouen, he turned onto another nontoll autoroute, following the signs for Chartres and Orléans, but, conscious that it was already nearly seven in the evening, they turned off shortly afterward and headed for Amfreville-sur-Iton to find a hotel.

  “Watch out for a small greenish sign saying ‘Logis,’” Mallory said.

  They didn’t see a suitable hotel in Amfreville, but about a dozen miles farther on they saw exactly what Mallory had been hoping to find: a large square hotel on the right-hand side of the road, the green Logis sign swinging in the wind and with most of the lights burning. Luckily there was a choice of rooms, and after a quick freshen-up they went down to the dining room and enjoyed a simple but satisfying meal.

  “I think this is ideal,” Mallory said as they waited for the coffee to arrive after the dishes containing the last scrapings of their desserts had been removed. “I’ve checked with the owner and both rooms are available all week, so I’ve booked for tonight and tomorrow. It’s got Wi-Fi, not free but we can afford to pay for it, obviously, and I’ve bought a coupon that will cover us for a couple of days. With a bit of luck, that’ll give us the time—and the peace and quiet—we need to decipher the rest of the text.”

  “And then what?” Robin asked.

  “I’ve no idea. It all depends on what we find out when we can finally read what’s written on the parchment. If it’s just a lot of rambling religious nonsense, we’ll have to go back to Devon and face the music, I suppose, but I think it’ll be a lot more than that. Otherwise why would these Italians be so desperate to get their hands on it, and quite prepared to kill both of us in order to do so?”