by James Becker
“You win your bet,” he said. “I don’t know what’s in them, but they’re definitely not empty.”
He bent down again, grasped the handles once more, and with a sudden expulsion of breath lifted the chest to waist height. “Christ, this is heavy.”
Grunting with the effort, he lifted it higher still and maneuvered it sideways onto the floor of the cave, to where Robin was standing waiting. Then he bent down and repeated the operation on the second chest, which was at least as heavy as the first. Mallory pulled himself out of the cavity, and together they crouched down to examine what they’d found.
The wood seemed to be in quite good condition, bearing in mind its likely age, which was presumably due to the extremely dry conditions in the cavity under the floor of the cave. The ironwork was covered in a thin patina of rust, but seemed to have retained its strength, again almost certainly because of the lack of moisture in the air.
“They don’t look to me as if they’re seven hundred years old,” Mallory said. “Those handles I was using are still really strong.”
“They might not look it, but the evidence we have suggests that they really are as ancient as that.”
“But the problem is they’re too small. They simply can’t hold the treasure of the order. I think these are something else.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. I just think we need to be really careful with them.”
Mallory looked closely at the first chest. The wood on both the lid and the sides was covered in an intricate pattern of ironwork, complex and convoluted, which would probably also have helped give the chest even more structural strength. The sides were straight, while the lid was semicircular in cross section, supported by a hinge at the back that ran the full length of the chest, and secured at the front by a lock and a type of over-center catch.
“I don’t suppose there’s the slightest chance that it’s unlocked,” Robin murmured.
“I doubt it,” Mallory replied, sticking the point of the crowbar under the catch and levering it open.
Then he tried the lid of the chest, but it remained firmly closed.
“I’ll just try the other one,” he said, “but I think it’ll be the same result.”
Again he used the crowbar, but his prediction was correct: although he had no trouble freeing the external catch, there was no movement whatsoever when he tried to lift the lid.
“I don’t suppose that the key’s down there?” Robin asked hopefully. “Tucked away in a corner somewhere?”
“Fat chance.”
But he lowered himself back down into the cavity anyway and shone the flashlight carefully all around, searching for any kind of metallic glint or a box or anything that might contain the key. Unsurprisingly, when he stuck his head up again, he had found nothing.
“Nada,” he said, climbing out of the hole. “No sign of it. But it wouldn’t have been the brightest of ideas to lock the chests and then hide them with the key in the same place, and we’re pretty certain Tibauld de Gaudin wasn’t stupid.”
Robin stared down at the two ironbound chests. “I don’t want to damage these, because they’re probably quite valuable in their own right, so how are we going to get them open?”
At that moment a shadow moved across the entrance to the cave and an unwelcome voice called out:
“I think we can help you with that.”
62
Cyprus
Robin spun round immediately, but Mallory was looking in that direction already.
Two men stood silhouetted in the entrance to the cave, their faces and bodies in shadow and unrecognizable. But Mallory didn’t need to see the face of the man who’d spoken to know who he was. His voice was an extremely unpleasant reminder of the last contact they’d had with him, back in Devon. Even more unpleasant was the realization that both men were carrying pistols while he and Robin were completely unarmed.
The pistol and ammunition that Mallory had acquired were tucked under the seat of the Renault Mégane rental car, and that was sitting in the long-term car park at Paris Orly. He’d known there was no possibility of getting the weapon onto the flight and, in any case, he had hoped he wouldn’t need it anymore.
“What did you do with my car?” Mallory asked.
“I dumped it, but that should be the least of your worries right now,” Toscanelli responded.
“How did you find us?” Robin sounded almost more curious than afraid. “You can’t have followed us all the way from Devon.”
Toscanelli shook his head as he and the other man each moved slightly sideways, away from the entrance, still aiming their pistols directly at Robin and Mallory.
“No. The trail went cold as soon as you managed to shake us off in Exeter. I had no idea where you’d gone, but fortunately my masters possess the ability to track almost anybody, almost anywhere, these days. Once you used your passport to take that flight to Beirut, we knew exactly where you were going, and we were able to anticipate your actions. We were too late to follow you on the ground at Sidon, so we didn’t know what you might have found there, but as soon as you booked a flight to Larnaca, whatever you had discovered became irrelevant.
“We had expected that the trail would end here on the island, simply because this was where Tibauld de Gaudin died. One of my men picked you up at the airport, and my people have been following you ever since. Right now I have two men guarding the end of the track you drove along to get here, and another watching the cave entrance from the top of the cliff on the opposite side of the ravine. It was all really quite simple.”
“Obviously,” Robin said bitterly.
“And your men arrived on the island by boat, I suppose, which is why you have weapons?” Mallory asked.
“No, by air. Our diplomatic passports make sure we aren’t ever stopped or searched.” Toscanelli gestured with his pistol. “You make me nervous, standing there,” he said to Mallory. “Get back down into that hole.”
“One thing I don’t understand,” Robin interrupted as Mallory climbed back into the cavity in the floor. “When David and I left my apartment in Dartmouth, your three men—I’m assuming that you were in charge of them—were alive. A bit battered, certainly, but they were all still breathing. Somebody then visited the place and killed all three men, shooting them through the head, as if they were executions. Did you order that to be done, or did you do it yourself? And why?”
Toscanelli inclined his head.
“That was my work,” he replied, “because my orders were absolutely specific. All three of those men knew exactly why we were in England, and my masters had told me it was imperative that the purpose of our mission should remain secret. There wasn’t enough time to get them out of the apartment, and I knew that the police would arrive at any moment. I couldn’t take the risk that they’d talk, so killing them was the only option I had left.”
“You shot three of your own men in cold blood just to preserve a secret? What kind of monster are you?”
In the gloom of the cave, Toscanelli smiled, a thin and humorless expression.
“Not a monster,” he replied. “Just a man acting in the best interests of his masters.”
“And who are your masters, exactly?” Mallory asked.
Toscanelli inclined his head slightly, almost a bow. “Like my colleagues, I have the honor to serve as a member of the Ordo Praedicatorum.”
“I should have guessed,” Mallory replied. “The Dominicans, Domini Canes, the Hounds of the Lord. The Black Friars and the pope’s personal torturers. The parchment even warned us against you. Your order carried out the interrogations of the members of the Knights Templar, interrogations that remarkably few people survived, and most of those who did perished in the execution fires afterward. I’m frankly surprised that you’re still around.”
“The eradication of heresy is just as important now as it wa
s in the Middle Ages. The Templars may have suffered pain during their earthly trials, but we know we saved their immortal souls when we put them to the cleansing flame.”
“And you believe that crap, do you?”
Toscanelli shook his head.
“My beliefs are no concern of yours,” he said. “We are part of a small group, a special section of the Dominican order, if you like, and our function today is unchanged. We act to protect the pontiff and the Holy Mother Church by whatever means are deemed necessary.”
“So why are you searching for this buried treasure?” Robin asked. “It’s got nothing to do with the Catholic Church.”
Toscanelli shook his head. “That’s where you’re wrong. Members of our order were charged by the pope with recovering the assets of the Knights Templar so that their wealth could be redistributed to other medieval orders that were untainted by heresy. This is simply unfinished business that my masters wish to bring to a close.”
“I don’t understand,” Robin said.
“I think I do,” Mallory said, filling the pause that followed her remark. “Philip the Fair of France purged the Templar order because he was bankrupt. The entire purpose of his actions was to seize the Templar treasury, and he coerced the pope into supporting him. Once Philip had taken what he could, because most of the treasure disappeared before the raids in October 1307, the pope ordered the remaining assets held by the Poor Knights of Christ to be handed over to the Knights Hospitaller. The Dominican inquisitors were instructed to find the hidden Templar assets, and that was why the most brutal tortures were applied so enthusiastically. But the Templars never told you, did they? The treasure was never found.”
“That is exactly the point. We were given our orders over seven hundred years ago, but the passage of time is irrelevant in our eyes. We have been searching for both the Templar assets and the lost treasure for almost a millennium, and we will continue to do so until both are recovered.”
Mallory glanced at Robin.
“What do you mean about the assets and the treasure?” he asked. “Surely they’re one and the same thing?”
Toscanelli smiled suddenly.
“You really don’t know?” he asked, his tone disbelieving. “The assets were what you’d expect—bullion, coin, and the rest—but the treasure is a single object the Templars revered beyond all price.”
“What object?” Robin demanded.
“You’ll never know,” the Italian replied, “not now.”
Robin pointed at the two wooden chests standing on the floor of the cave by her feet.
“And now you think you’ve found it?” she asked.
Toscanelli shook his head.
“Probably not,” he replied. “We believe that those chests contain one part of the Templar treasure of Outremer, but that is simply a tiny fraction of the total wealth that the order was known to possess. Our present search for the hidden assets of the Templars has only just begun, but the real treasure probably lies elsewhere, a long way from this place.”
“How did you find out that we were involved?” Robin asked.
“We embrace and employ the latest technology. Our technical staff monitors Web sites, blogs, and the search strings used on the major search engines. The moment you searched the Web for information about the Ipse Dixit relic, we knew that you must have found something significant. In fact, we already knew of the existence of the parchment you found, but it had vanished from sight sometime in the fifteenth century, and no copies of the text were known to exist. Once we had established where you were from your IP—Internet Protocol—address, I was sent to England with a team of men to recover it.”
“But you didn’t do a very good job of it, did you?” Robin asked. “You had the relic, and the two of us, in your possession for only a few minutes before we got away, and the body count on your side was quite impressive. You shot three of your own men, David killed another in self-defense, and the fifth member of your little group ended up slightly broken as well.”
Toscanelli shrugged. “Shit happens, as you English sometimes say. But no matter. We have these chests now, thanks to your efforts, and we have no further use for either of you. You can both go back into the hole that the treasure chests came out of. That’ll give the archeologists of the future something interesting to investigate.”
The sentence of violent and painful death, so casually pronounced, sent a chill through Robin.
“So what now?” Mallory asked.
“This is the end of the trail, and the end of your lives,” Toscanelli replied. “We’ll kill you both, break open the chests, and recover the treasure. We’ll take it back to Rome with us. Our diplomatic status will ensure that we won’t have any problems doing that.”
He turned to the other man and issued a string of instructions in Italian. His companion nodded, tucked his pistol into the waistband of his trousers, and walked back toward the cave entrance, pulling a mobile out of his pocket as he did so.
“My other three men will be here in a few minutes,” he said, “and then we can get started. This is the endgame, and so it’s only fair that we wait until they arrive. So you have just a few minutes longer to make your peace with whatever god you worship. I will offer a prayer for your souls before we kill you both.”
“I’m an atheist,” Robin snapped.
“Then you are truly damned.”
The second man returned, and again Toscanelli issued instructions to him in Italian.
“There’s no reason why we can’t open the chests while we’re waiting,” Toscanelli said, and gestured toward Robin with his pistol, as he’d done with Mallory. “You’re too dangerous to stand there while we do that, Jessop, so climb down into that cavity and stay there while Nico works his magic on these old locks.”
Robin had absolutely no option. She knew beyond any doubt that if she didn’t do as the Italian had told her, he would probably shoot her down where she stood, and she was determined to make use of every extra minute of life she had left. Maybe there was still something that she and Mallory could do, though right then she had not the slightest idea what that might be.
As soon as Robin was standing beside Mallory in the cavity in the floor of the cave, only their shoulders and heads visible, the man Toscanelli had called Nico walked over to the two chests and bent down in front of them. He took a small leather pouch from his pocket and opened it on the ground beside him. He extracted a couple of precision tools from it, inserted both into the lock on the first chest, and began probing the mechanism, closing his eyes as he concentrated on what his fingers and his ears were telling him.
After only a couple of minutes there was a click from the lock and Nico seized the catch and lifted the lid a bare fraction of an inch. Then he lowered it again and turned his attention to the second chest, the lock on which offered little more resistance than the first. After he checked that the lid would open, he replaced the tools in the leather pouch, stood up, and walked away. He returned to his place on the opposite side of the cave to Toscanelli, took out his pistol again, and aimed it at Mallory.
“This is a great moment for us,” Toscanelli said. “The culmination of a search that has lasted for centuries, or at least the end of the first part of that search. We will wait until all my men are here before we open the chests.”
An uncomfortable silence descended on the cave while all four people waited, anticipating very different events.
“If you want to say good-bye to each other,” Toscanelli said, after a few minutes, “now would be a good time to do so. You will both be dead in about ten minutes.”
Standing beside him in the hole in the floor of the cave, Robin wrapped her arms around Mallory, who bent his head forward until their lips were almost touching.
“Is there anything we can do?” she asked.
“I’m not dead yet,” Mallory replied, “and neither are you.�
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“You’ve got a plan?”
“Not exactly, but there might just be a way out of here.”
He bent closer toward her and lowered his voice to a barely audible whisper.
“Remember the book safe,” he finished, and they both turned and looked toward the cave entrance, where three other men had just appeared.
Like Toscanelli and Nico, the three new arrivals were heavily built with black hair and swarthy complexions, all typically Mediterranean in appearance. They stepped inside the cave and looked with interest at the two iron-bound chests, and at Robin and Mallory, still standing together in the cavity.
Toscanelli greeted the three men briefly, then switched his attention back to Mallory and Robin.
“I’ve decided that killing you both is going to be quite messy and take some time,” he said, “so I think it would probably be better if we removed the treasure first. Then my men can take their time with both of you. And I’m sure you’ll also be interested in seeing one small part of the wealth of the Templar order, and you can die knowing how close you came to getting it for yourselves.”
Toscanelli waved two of the new arrivals forward, and each one knelt down before one of the chests.
As the two men stretched out their hands to the lids, Mallory again bent forward and whispered something to Robin.
On a single word of command from Toscanelli, the two Italians flung back the lids of the chests, a brilliant flash lit up the cave, and for the briefest of instants time seemed to stop.
Then the screaming started.
63
Cyprus
“Now,” Mallory said, ducked down, and began half crawling, half running, down the passageway he had spotted when he first jumped down into the cavity, Robin following a couple of feet behind him. The light from the flashlight bounced and shimmered on the walls of the passage as they concentrated on putting as much distance as they could between themselves and the cave. There were other openings off the passage, but Mallory ignored them, keeping to the main tunnel. But then he spotted a narrow cleft that ran upward and made an instant decision.
