The Lost Treasure of the Templars

by James Becker

He continued looking at the hotel, but there was no sign at all of the two people he had been following, and he guessed that they were in their room, maybe unpacking or just freshening up. He didn’t want to leave it any longer, in case they decided to return to the vehicle and drive off somewhere for a meal. The window of opportunity was quite small.

  Salvatore nodded to himself, checked his watch, and then spoke into his headset.

  “I’m going in now,” he said.

  He restarted the engine of the motorcycle and drove up the road before swinging right into the parking area of the hotel, stopping his machine right beside the white Renault. He glanced round to make sure that he was unobserved, then reached into the pocket of his jeans, took out a small black plastic object about half the size of a box of matches, and flicked a tiny switch on the side. He checked that the small green light at one end was flickering faintly, then bent down and in one fluid and practiced movement he positioned the box against the metal on the inside of the car’s rear wheel arch, the powerful magnet the device incorporated almost snatching it out of his hand.

  Then he simply turned his bike around and rode unhurriedly away from the hotel, as if he’d just changed his mind about going into the building.

  “The tracker’s in position,” he said into his headset as he changed up into third gear and accelerated gently down the road that led out of Larnaca. “Confirm that you have a good signal?”

  “Confirmed,” the voice in his ear stated. “Remain within sight of the hotel, just in case they decide to move later this evening. Ensure that you have a full tank of fuel and a spare battery for your mobile.”

  Even as Toscanelli issued his instructions, Salvatore was turning left into a street that would virtually complete the circle and bring him back to a position from which he would be able to observe the hotel again. Until he was completely certain that the two targets had retired for the night, he had no intention at all of leaving the area.

  He didn’t even bother to reply to Toscanelli. He was a professional, and knew exactly what was expected of him. Being given pointless orders by the man who had presided over one of the most spectacular failures in the order’s recent history was not something that sat well with him.

  * * *

  “I’ve been in worse places than this,” Robin said, placing her bag on the end of the double bed in her room and looking around.

  The walls were a kind of faded grayish green, not an unpleasant shade but one that was beginning to look distinctly tired, while the shutters on the windows were newly painted in white. The en suite bathroom was small but possessed all the necessary equipment, and it looked fairly clean. Like the bathroom, the floor of the bedroom was tiled, which probably helped combat the heat, at least to a certain extent, but as far as she was concerned the single most important object in the room was the rounded white oblong shape fitted above the window that bore the name Mitsubishi in red: the air-conditioning unit. Mallory’s room next door was virtually identical.

  On one of the two small bedside tables were two remote controls, one for the small flat-screen television mounted on a bracket and attached to the wall opposite the bed, and the other for the air conditioner. Mallory seized the latter, aimed it at the window, and pressed the appropriate button. Almost immediately the vents on the front of the unit opened and a faint hum indicated that it was working. A welcome breeze of chilled air wafted across the room toward them.

  “It works,” Mallory muttered.

  “Excellent,” Robin replied. “Now I’m starving, and I could also do with an infusion of alcohol of the gin-and-tonic variety, so let’s take a walk.”

  They stepped out of the front door of the hotel and strolled down the street that paralleled the seafront, Mallory again checking for any indication that they were being watched. They picked a bar that overlooked the beach, found a table with a good view of the dark sea, and enjoyed a long cool gin and tonic each. The sun was about to dip behind the mountains to the west of the town, and Mallory knew that quite soon darkness would fall. In the Mediterranean, the transition between day and night is sudden, and the lingering dusks familiar to residents of the British Isles simply don’t happen. They finished their drinks and then stepped back out into the street in search of food.

  Almost all the local restaurants seemed to be open and they had plenty of choice, eventually settling on a fish restaurant that looked clean and welcoming, reasoning that if you couldn’t get decent fresh fish in a restaurant within spitting distance of a fishing harbor in the Mediterranean, where could you?

  The food was as good as they’d been hoping, well cooked and presented, and they washed it down with a decent bottle of white. Mallory paid the bill in cash, as usual, and then they strolled slowly back to the hotel. They enjoyed a final cup of coffee out on the terrace, looking at the lights of Larnaca and listening to the nighttime sounds of the town, then went up to their rooms.

  * * *

  Salvatore had eaten a much simpler meal.

  He’d consumed two cups of coffee while ostensibly reading a newspaper in a café a short distance down the street from the hotel where the two targets had taken a room, and it was with a certain sense of relief that he finally watched them step out of the building and stroll down the street. Once they’d passed him and had walked about fifty meters down the street, he folded his paper, stood up, and began to follow them on the opposite side.

  When they walked into the bar, he sat on a low wall on the opposite side of the street close to a lone streetlight and again appeared to immerse himself in his newspaper, despite the gathering gloom. But within just a few minutes, he could no longer even pretend to be able to see the print, so he folded the paper and stuck it in his pocket and then just sat there, watching the street.

  Once the two targets had entered the bar, Salvatore contacted Toscanelli to explain where he was and what was happening, a call he ended when the two people emerged. He stayed behind them, merging with the early-evening crowds and easily keeping them in view, as they continued walking down the street. When they eventually chose a restaurant and disappeared inside, he strolled on farther and picked up a snack from a street vendor. He daren’t take the risk of sitting down in a restaurant, because if he did that he wouldn’t be able to leave quickly if the targets suddenly emerged, and he had no intention of ending his surveillance until he was certain that the targets had returned to their hotel for the night.

  Just over an hour later, they did just that, walking out of the restaurant, apparently entirely unaware that anybody was paying them the slightest attention, and retraced their steps down the street to the hotel.

  As soon as the main door of the building had closed behind them, Salvatore continued walking along the street, past the building, to the side street where he’d left the motorcycle. At the corner, he paused for a couple of minutes, staring back down and across the street toward the hotel.

  Then he shrugged, pulled on his helmet, started the bike, and rode away.

  57

  Cyprus

  Robin and Mallory walked down to the hotel dining room for a somewhat belated breakfast a little after nine the following morning, sitting in a coffee shop–cum-bar at the back of the hotel on the ground floor. It opened onto a small terrace with three tables each surrounded by four metal and plastic chairs, from which they had quite a decent view across the rooftops of Larnaca to the eastern Mediterranean beyond, a solid band of bright blue flecked with the occasional whitecap.

  The terrace was deserted, and they decided to have coffee out there once they’d eaten. Robin sat down at the table on the right-hand side in the shade of the umbrella and placed the road map of Cyprus on the table in front of her, weighing it down with a glass ashtray. Then she removed a pair of large sunglasses from her bag and put them on, shielding her eyes against the glare.

  A minute or so later, Mallory walked out onto the terrace, the strap of his comp
uter bag over his shoulder and a cup of coffee in each hand, and sat down beside her.

  They lingered over their coffee, trying to decide whether or not to stay in that hotel for a further night, or to move somewhere farther inland on the grounds that it might be a bit closer to the area they were going to have to search. Assuming, of course, that they did actually manage to interpret the clue they believed Tibauld de Gaudin had left at the Sidon Sea Castle over seven hundred years earlier.

  “I like it here,” Robin said. “Larnaca seems like a pleasant town, and this hotel isn’t bad. And to me, it doesn’t seem to make very much sense to drive somewhere else on the island until we’ve got some idea where we should be looking. Why don’t we take the easy option, at least just for one more night, and stay here?”

  “That’s fine with me,” Mallory replied. “Now, if we’re going to crack this we need to get moving.”

  Together they scanned the map, looking at the terrain and place-names that were displayed, hoping for inspiration.

  “This isn’t going to be easy,” Robin pointed out, “and I know I’m stating the obvious, but what we have to look for is somewhere that satisfies two separate criteria. First, it has to be somewhere that actually existed at the beginning of the fourteenth century, and I don’t know enough about the history of Cyprus to know which of the towns and settlements shown on that map today were around in Tibauld’s time. Do you?”

  Mallory shook his head.

  “No, not really,” he admitted. “This hotel has Wi-Fi, so I can do a bit of research on the Internet, but a good first step might be to try and buy a tourist guide to the island, which will hopefully tell us a lot more about the history of the place. You said two criteria,” he added. “What was the second one?”

  “Oh, just the names,” Robin explained. “This place is called Larnaca today, but I have no idea what it might have been called back in the medieval period. Or if it even existed in those days. So we need to find somewhere that had already been built in medieval times and find out what name it had in that period. And, of course, it has to be somewhere that will make sense of the SOIM clue.”

  Mallory sat in thought for a couple of minutes, staring down at the map and digesting what Robin had said. He knew she was right, and at that moment he couldn’t think of any easy way of narrowing down the search. He had no doubt that if he went to the Internet and researched, say, Larnaca or Limassol or Nicosia, he would quite quickly be able to find out what those places were originally called and when the first settlements had been established, but he couldn’t do that for every village and town and city on the island because it would take far too long.

  Driving around Cyprus and hoping for inspiration was never going to work, either, because according to the abbreviated table of facts and figures on the road map, the island boasted over eight thousand miles of roads, roughly two-thirds of which had paved surfaces, while the other third were unmade. The island was both much bigger and much more developed than he had ever anticipated. Finding any object here that had been hidden, and hidden competently by people who knew what they were doing, over seven hundred years earlier was going to make finding a needle in a haystack look like an absolute doddle by comparison.

  Random searching was never going to work. They definitely had to work out what Tibauld de Gaudin had been thinking when he landed there and what he could possibly have done with the Templar treasure of Outremer.

  “I think,” Mallory said slowly, after a few moments, “that we can probably ignore the towns and other built-up areas.”

  “That’s a big jump,” Robin replied. “How can you justify it?”

  “I’m trying to imagine what might have been going through Tibauld’s mind when he arrived here on Cyprus. He had been present in the city of Acre, in the Templar fortress that had been one of the principal fortifications of the order for something like a century. Although he had left a matter of hours before the final attack by the Mamluks, he would obviously have known almost as soon as he got to Sidon that Acre had fallen, and probably guessed that the entire Templar garrison there would have been slaughtered. He would also have looked at the fortifications and defensive strength of the Sea Castle when he reached it and realized that neither the strength of the fort nor the size of the garrison would be anything like enough to withstand a determined attack by the Mamluk army. Don’t forget, he’d already seen the Mamluks in action, right up close and personal.

  “So by the time he landed in Cyprus, Acre would already have been lost and Tibauld would most probably have been expecting to hear quite soon that Sidon and, very probably, Tortosa and Athlit as well, would be either destroyed or abandoned in the face of the Mamluk hordes. In short, he would have known that the Knights Templar had effectively been expelled from the Holy Land and, unless a miracle happened, they were extremely unlikely to be able to return in the foreseeable future.”

  Mallory took a sip of his coffee and glanced at Robin, who nodded encouragement.

  “I can’t fault your logic so far,” she said. “Carry on.”

  “Right, so the Templars have basically been defeated, and Tibauld is sitting around on the island of Cyprus with a bunch of treasure chests full of bullion and coins and stuff. I’m sure he probably did do his best to try to raise a reinforcing army, but my guess is that he already thought it was a lost cause. So I think that when he chose a hiding place for the Templar assets that had been placed in his care and control, he would almost certainly have assumed that it might be years, possibly even decades, before the Knights Templar presence could be reestablished in the region and the treasure recovered.”

  “You’re obviously presuming,” Robin said, “that transporting the treasure back to France or one of the other Templar strongholds in mainland Europe wouldn’t be another option for him?”

  “I am,” Mallory agreed, “but that isn’t necessarily the case. Don’t forget that the Knights Templar divided their assets between their various headquarters. Traveling in those days was an extremely dangerous operation, and although the ostensible reason for the founding of the Templar order was the protection of pilgrims on the roads to Jerusalem, in later years the order developed an incredibly safe and very secure means of facilitating trade, which works very much like modern banking.

  “A trader in Paris who wanted to go to Rome, say, to purchase goods, would take sufficient funds—and these could be coin, bullion, jewelry, or anything else negotiable—to the Templar preceptory in Paris and deposit it there. In return, he would be given a document, issued by the Templars and with the appropriate seals and signatures or whatever to establish its authenticity. He could then travel with that document, which would be of no use to anybody but him, all the way down through Europe as far as Rome. When he got there, he would take the document to the Templar stronghold closest to the city, hand it over, and receive the equivalent value in coin or whatever he wanted, less a commission that would be retained by the Templars. Their banking charge, if you like.

  “Now,” Mallory went on, “the only way this system could possibly work in medieval times was if every Templar stronghold held substantial assets. A trader had to be absolutely certain that if he deposited money in one Templar preceptory, he could then go to the corresponding stronghold of the order in another country and be able to draw the money he required immediately. So unless Tibauld de Gaudin was convinced the order was finished in Outremer, he would have wanted the assets stored somewhere safe to allow the order’s banking system in the eastern Mediterranean to keep functioning.”

  Robin nodded. “I remember you saying earlier that the Templars actually owned the island of Cyprus for a while, and it was obviously an important strategic refuge for them for some time because of the attempt to take Tortosa from the island of Ruad, so all that makes sense. Of course, once the order was disbanded in 1307, everything would have changed. But that’s another story. But I still don’t know why he wouldn’t h
ave hidden treasure in a town.”

  “Just because of the time factor,” Mallory explained. “If Tibauld guessed that the future of the order in that part of the world was uncertain, and he must have been an intelligent man to have become the order’s treasurer and later the grand master, then he would have known that hiding it in a town would simply be too risky. The thing about towns, about a settlement of any size, is that they are in a constant state of flux, of change. A building is demolished to make way for a larger structure; cellars are removed to allow stronger foundations to be built; the paths of streets and roads are altered. Over time, everything changes. The one thing he would definitely not have wanted to happen was for the treasure to be tucked away in a cellar somewhere and then to be found fifty or a hundred years later or whenever by somebody simply enlarging their property. I think he would very deliberately have chosen somewhere where he felt the treasure could lie safely hidden for as long as it took for the Knights Templar to rise again and reclaim the Holy Land once more for Christendom.”

  “Very messianic,” Robin commented.

  Mallory smiled somewhat sheepishly. “Sorry about that. I do get a bit carried away sometimes over the Templars.”

  “So, where did he put it?”

  “I still don’t know,” he admitted. “But I think it would have to be somewhere well away from the centers of population, perhaps in a cave or another kind of natural hiding place, or just possibly in a building that already existed, maybe a castle or a monastery or something like that. The trick, of course, is going to be finding it.”

  For the next two hours or so they pored over the map, looking for anything, any structure or geographical feature whose name could possibly be rendered in a shorthand form that might read SOIM. But nothing they looked at seemed even remotely likely. They saw no names that shared more than one or two of the letters of the abbreviation.

  Finally Mallory leaned back in his chair with an expression of frustration on his face.