The Templar Archive Page 7

  “They are sort of similar,” she admitted, “but different enough that you would never mistake one for the other, if you see what I mean. I can see shapes in one that aren’t there in the pattern of the second chest, and vice versa. But what I don’t see are any shapes that could be letters or anything of that sort, and unless we’ve got it completely wrong, we need another piece of plaintext or a code word that we can use to translate that final section of encrypted text on the parchment. Is that what you think as well?”

  “Pretty much, yes,” Mallory said, nodding and glancing over at Robin. “That really is the obvious way forward.”

  A few minutes later, he turned the Golf right at the Halwell T-junction to head north up the A381 toward Totnes.

  “Where are we going?” Robin asked, a few minutes later. “Not Exeter again, I hope. I had about enough of that particular city the last time we were there. No good memories, except that we did manage to walk away.”

  “No, not Exeter,” Mallory agreed. “I still haven’t got anywhere definite in mind, so I was generally heading up toward Okehampton. We should be able to find a quiet hotel somewhere up there on the edge of Bodmin Moor.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  Robin closed the lid of her laptop with a decisive click and slid it back into her leather computer case.

  “If I look at those pictures any more, I will definitely go boss-eyed,” she said. “We’ll have a proper look—both of us—once we get to the hotel, where it’s quiet and we can concentrate.”

  * * *

  A little over an hour after they’d driven away from Robin’s bookshop in Dartmouth, a nondescript Ford saloon drew to a halt a few yards down the road and an entirely unmemorable man stared across at the parked Porsche. He didn’t need to check the registration number because he had already memorized it. In his business, a good memory for numbers, information, and especially faces was a definite asset.

  He made sure his car was legally parked, because coming to the attention of any of the British authorities for any reason was something he always tried to avoid, then walked away from the vehicle and approached the antiquarian bookshop’s street door. Inside, he held a very brief conversation with the slightly plump lady behind the counter, then stepped out again and returned to his vehicle.

  Marsh took out his mobile phone and dialed the number of his temporary and still-unidentified employer.

  “The good news,” he began, “is that I’ve found the address in Dartmouth and I’ve also found the Porsche. The bad news is that neither of the targets is here. According to the woman in the shop, they drove down from Exeter about an hour and a half ago, parked the car, and then left almost immediately in Jessop’s vehicle. And for that I don’t have a make or model, though the woman I talked to thinks it might be silver or gray, and fairly small, maybe a hatchback.”

  “That’s not a problem. I can get those details to you in a few minutes. Did this woman have any idea where they were going?”

  “No. All that Jessop apparently told her was that she and Mallory were involved in some kind of project, and they were going off to do some research. I did manage to get Jessop’s mobile number, so you should be able to triangulate their location fairly easily, as long as she leaves the phone on, of course. That bit wasn’t difficult. She has it printed on her business card.”

  What Marsh was not prepared to do was admit that he could also triangulate the location of Jessop’s mobile phone. That particular ability and that software were both entirely illegal under British law for anyone outside the police force or the security services.

  “Good. I’ll set the wheels in motion. There’s no point in you staying in Dartmouth, because the one place they’re not going to be is back down there, so I suggest you return to Exeter and wait for me to contact you again.”

  Marsh told him Robin Jessop’s mobile number and then ended the call. But for a few minutes he did nothing else except use his eyes and the rearview mirrors on his car.

  One of the obvious characteristics of people involved in his profession was the ability to be constantly alert, to observe rather than simply to see. And what he was observing was giving him pause for thought.

  A dark blue Ford sedan with two men inside it, one driving and the other in the front passenger seat, had just made two circuits of the small block of buildings that included Robin Jessop’s antiquarian bookshop. Of course, the driver might just have been looking for somewhere to park, a task that was notoriously difficult anywhere in Dartmouth, but Marsh didn’t think he was. Apart from anything else, it was the fact that on each occasion as the Ford had driven past the rear of the shop, the vehicle had slowed down considerably, and both men had very obviously been staring up at the second-floor apartment, rather than at the Porsche, which was a more unusual sight in the town.

  And on their third circuit, their intentions became clear. The car stopped at the side of the street on a single yellow line, where parking was not permitted, and the passenger stepped out of the vehicle, the driver remaining where he was, the engine of the car still running.

  The passenger looked both ways up and down the street, but in a manner that seemed to suggest he was possibly looking for any potential witnesses rather than checking for oncoming cars, then crossed over to the rear of the shop and swiftly ascended the spiral staircase that gave access to Robin Jessop’s apartment. When he reached the metal landing, he walked over to the apartment door and rapped on it sharply.

  There was no response that Gary Marsh could see, which was entirely unsurprising, as he knew for a fact that both Jessop and Mallory had left Dartmouth together some time earlier. As he watched the unknown stranger standing by the apartment door, Marsh sank a little lower in the seat of his car and at the same time took a powerful compact digital camera from his jacket pocket. He aimed at the man, used the telephoto lens to zoom in on his face, and took about a dozen images. For good measure, he also took a handful of pictures of the illegally parked car, making sure that the registration plate was clearly visible.

  The man on the landing turned and looked around him, then reached inside his loose jacket and took out an object that glinted metallically in the early-afternoon sun. As Marsh switched his camera to video mode and started filming, the man extended the object, which Marsh could then identify as a collapsible jemmy, stuck the point into the space between the door and the jamb, and gave a sharp push.

  The crack as the door gave way was clearly audible even from where Marsh was sitting inside his car. Immediately the intruder vanished from sight into the apartment.

  “Interesting,” Marsh murmured to himself, and continued both watching and recording.

  It was perfectly obvious to him that the apartment had to be fairly small, simply because of the dimensions of the building, and so he wasn’t surprised when the unidentified man stepped back out of the door less than two minutes later, again glanced around him, and then descended the spiral staircase. At the bottom, he glanced over toward his companion in the parked Ford, shook his head, and headed through the alleyway that led to the main street and the front of Jessop’s shop.

  Marsh briefly contemplated following him, but just as quickly rejected the idea. The most obvious reason for the man walking down the alley was for him to go into the bookshop, exactly as Marsh himself had done only a few minutes earlier, to try to find out where Robin Jessop had gone.

  This time, the man was out of sight for rather longer, but not by much. About three minutes after he had disappeared into the alley, he stepped out again and strode briskly across to the parked car. Again Marsh filmed him, the telephoto lens on his camera bringing his face and figure sharply into focus.

  Almost as soon as the man sat down in the passenger seat, the driver of the Ford indicated and the vehicle drove swiftly away down the street.

  Marsh watched it depart, but his attention was concentrated not on the car, but on the vi
deo images he had just recorded. Something had struck him about the man as he had walked back to the car, and he scanned through the digital images, looking for the relevant frames.

  Then he saw it. The unexpected bulge in the fabric of the stranger’s jacket and then the briefest of glimpses of the object that was causing it as he walked across the street.

  For a few moments, Marsh studied the images, making sure that he wasn’t mistaken. Then he took his mobile and dialed his contact, the man who was his temporary employer.

  “I’ve got a question for you,” he said, when his call was answered.

  “What?”

  “Am I working this gig solo or have you got another team in play?”

  His question produced a brief silence at the other end. When his contact finally replied, his voice was hesitant, almost uncertain.

  “No, it’s just you. Nobody else. Why?”

  “I’m still in Dartmouth, and I’ve just watched a two-man team break into Jessop’s flat and, probably, check out her shop as well.”

  “That’s nothing to do with me. Did you get pictures?”

  “Obviously,” Marsh replied. “I always record everything. That’s what I do. I’ll send a copy of the stills and video to your e-mail as soon as I get back. But there’s something else you need to know. One guy stayed in the car while his partner did the breaking and entering, and unless I’m seeing things that aren’t there, the B and E player was tooled up. A shoulder holster and what looked to me like an automatic pistol rather than a revolver. And that does kind of add an extra dimension to this surveillance operation.”

  There was another brief silence before the other man replied, “Are you sure? That he was armed, I mean.”

  “Pretty certain, yes. When you see the footage, you’ll know what I mean.”

  “Are you still in?”

  This time Marsh didn’t reply immediately, choosing his words carefully. “For the moment, yes. But if and when the shooting starts, you won’t see me for dust.”

  8

  Via di Sant’Alessio, Aventine Hill, Rome, Italy

  Vitale was a long way from being pleased. The order employed experts in a number of different disciplines, but primarily archaeologists—or, to be exact, people who specialized in the interpretation of archaeological information, which wasn’t quite the same thing—and linguists who had impressive skills in understanding and translating texts written in the numerous dead languages of the world, particularly Latin, ancient Greek, and Aramaic. But they could not call on experts in code breaking, because only very rarely did they encounter ciphers of any sort, and when they did, these were usually fairly simple letter substitution codes, such as Atbash, which were generally quite straightforward to unscramble. Roman Benelli, the man in the organization who knew most about encryption systems, actually specialized in the translation of Aramaic and related languages into Italian. For him, codes and ciphers were definitely of secondary importance.

  The problem the order was currently facing was trying to work out whatever message or other piece of information had been incorporated within the ornate metalwork adorning the lids of the two medieval chests they had recovered from the cave in Cyprus. And the main difficulty didn’t stem from any kind of decryption that might be necessary, but from a far more basic and fundamental question.

  “So, are you telling me that there is a code or something built into that scrollwork or not?” Vitale demanded. “Are we looking at just a pretty piece of metalwork or is it something else?”

  The man standing in front of his desk—late-middle-aged, short, plump, wearing a suit so tight that it looked as if it had been painted on him, and with an impressive five o’clock shadow, given that it was still early afternoon—shook his head. “At this stage we still don’t know. We’ve been over the chests with magnifying glasses, several times, and as far as we can tell none of the marks on the metalwork represent letters in any known language. They appear to be nothing more than decorative. Having said that, I’ll add that there are a number of markings that could perhaps be interpreted as letters in the Roman alphabet, but these are always isolated and it is difficult to see how they could possibly form part of a code word or key. By definition, any code word has to possess a reasonable number of letters. Otherwise it simply will not work.”

  “What about the insides of the chests? Did you find anything there?”

  Benelli shook his head.

  “Again,” he said, “we examined them with the most powerful magnifying glasses we possess, and the insides of both chests are completely unmarked. We have even removed that hideously effective antitheft device from the inside of the lid of each box, just in case anything had been painted or carved onto the wood before it was assembled. But there is nothing. There are no marks of any sort inside the chests. If there is a clue to be found—and I’m by no means certain that that is the case—then whatever it is has to have been incorporated within that exterior scrollwork.”

  Vitale glared at his subordinate for a few seconds, and then dismissed him. The man was, he knew, doing his best, but it was beginning to look as if the man who had ordered the chests to be constructed—definitely either Jacques de Molay, the last grand master of the Knights Templar order, or his immediate predecessor, Tibauld de Gaudin—had somehow managed to encode the vital information needed to decipher the last clue to the puzzle in a way that would defeat any later analysis.

  Or perhaps, he thought as another possibility struck him, there was no clue built into the chests. Maybe the chests were just a kind of lethal farewell gesture left on Cyprus by the last of the Knights Templar before they returned to France.

  But that really didn’t make sense. Vitale knew as well as anyone that the enormous treasure of the Knights Templar had never been found. When the mass arrests were performed by the soldiers of Philip the Fair, the treasure vaults in the commanderies and preceptories throughout France were largely empty. The vast wealth of the Templars had somehow been spirited away and vanished from the historical record, and the only possible clue that could give even a hint as to the whereabouts of this hoard was in the form of the elaborate metalwork pattern incorporated in the lids of the two wooden chests now under the control of the order.

  Even more pertinently, the Ipse Dixit parchment, the translation of which had led Toscanelli and his men to the cave near the castle of Saint Hilarion in Cyprus, a place they had become aware of only because they had been following Jessop and Mallory, was the only clue to the possible location of the treasure that had surfaced in well over half a millennium. And the clues in that parchment had resulted in the discovery of the chests. So, logically, and despite the lack of any hint as to what clue the chests might contain, the information they needed to obtain had to be encoded in them somehow. The chests simply had to be the next step in the path, because there was nothing else.

  And the sheer fact that they had been so well concealed, buried under layers of heavy wooden planking in the floor of that remote cave on Cyprus and then covered with tons of stone, simply confirmed that. Nobody would have gone to that much trouble to hide the chests unless they either contained something of immense value—which they hadn’t, simply being full of rocks—or were vitally important in some other way. Although they couldn’t see it right then, the metalwork had to be hiding the clue that the order was so desperately seeking.

  That set him thinking about the English couple who had so effectively outwitted Toscanelli, both in England and on Cyprus. The interview he’d just conducted had reinforced his own doubts, and the mission on which the order was engaged was too important, far too important, to be allowed to fail.

  He had considered ordering the elimination of Jessop and Mallory in Britain as soon as he’d found out that they had survived and returned to their homeland. That was why he had ordered the tertiary, the senior British police officer who acted for the order, to organize a surveillance operation a
gainst them. At the very least, he needed to know where they were and what they were doing.

  But perhaps, as he’d suggested to Toscanelli earlier, just perhaps the English couple could still be useful. They had photographs of the metalwork on the chests, he was sure about that, and they had already proven to be both knowledgeable and resourceful. That was why they had beaten Toscanelli to Cyprus, obviously. Maybe his best tactic would be to give them a bit more rope. Let them work on decoding whatever clue was built in to the decoration on the chests.

  Yes, the two of them could become a second string to his bow. He would delay ordering their execution for a little while longer.

  Decision made, Vitale reached for the phone and dialed a U.K. mobile to issue his new instructions.

  9

  Outskirts of Okehampton, Devon

  It was almost two hours after they had settled themselves down in the large double room on the fourth floor of the hotel, a room from which they had distant views of the bleak heathland of Bodmin Moor, before either Jessop or Mallory saw anything useful in the photographs they were studying. And even then, it seemed more accidental or coincidental than deliberate. It also didn’t seem, at least at first glance, to be particularly helpful.

  Robin was sitting in front of her laptop, using the scroll button to zoom in and out on various parts of the photograph on the screen. Mallory had just made two more cups of instant coffee—he claimed the caffeine helped his concentration—at the small table behind her, and was walking back carrying the drinks. He glanced at the screen as he did so, and saw something that both of them had missed.

  “Hang on,” he said. “Don’t alter the picture for a moment.”

  He put the cups down and leaned closer to the screen, but almost immediately muttered a curse. “It’s gone. I can’t see it now.”

  Robin looked at him in irritation.