by James Becker
“You could be right,” Mario said, somewhat testily, because it wasn’t the first time his companion had explored that subject since they arrived in Chartres. “You could also be completely wrong, and sitting here speculating isn’t going to answer the question one way or the other. So why don’t you just shut up and keep your eyes on the hotel? If they’ve not appeared by the time it gets dark, we’ll have to think again. Then we’ll need to ring Vitale or the duty officer and tell him the situation. But right now I don’t want to talk to him and I doubt very much if you do, either. He’s got a nasty temper at the best of times, and telling him we haven’t even seen these people despite sitting out here for most of the afternoon would be a really good way of annoying him.”
“We’ll have to check in with him sometime today.”
Something across the street attracted Mario’s attention, and he didn’t respond, just picked up his smartphone and swiped the screen to wake it up, then stared intently at the display, where a picture of a male face was visible.
“That looks like him,” he said quietly, inclining his head slightly in the direction of the hotel. “I’m pretty sure that’s Mallory.”
A few yards down the street, a well-built man with an obvious healed scar on one side of his face had walked out of the hotel entrance and was heading down the street. Seconds later, he entered a boulangerie. By the time he emerged, a paper bag in his hand, Mario was already talking to Silvio Vitale.
“He’s just bought a couple of sandwiches, by the looks of it,” he reported in Italian, “but there’s no sign of the woman, so she’s probably in their room at the hotel. This is a confirmed sighting,” he added, as Paolo—who had been closely studying both the target and the two full-face photographs the order had uncovered of David Mallory—nodded to him.
“Good,” Vitale said. “Now we know where they are. They’ll have to come out sooner or later, and when they do you have to get close enough to them to see what they’re doing and where they’re going. Plant a bug on them if you can. If you can’t, try to overhear what they’re saying. You all speak good enough English to do that.”
“Understood.”
Mario ended the call, and the two of them watched as Mallory reentered the hotel and disappeared from view.
As soon as he was out of sight, Mario waved to the other two men and they crossed the street to join them. Now that they’d established a definite location for the targets, they needed to prepare for whatever came next. They didn’t know if Mallory and Jessop had traveled down to Chartres on a train or by car, and that was something they needed to find out.
“Let’s make this easy,” Paolo suggested. “We know he’s in that hotel, and it looks like he’s just bought a late lunch for him and Jessop, so presumably they’ll be in there for at least another hour or so. We’re going to need somewhere to stay tonight, so why don’t I go and book a couple of rooms in the same place? That’ll give two of us access to the building, and we might be able to find out their room number.”
“And us?”
Mario glanced at the speaker. “There’s another hotel just across the road. You both take rooms there, and make sure one of the rooms faces the street, because that will give you eyes on the target hotel, just in case they slip out without us noticing.”
That seemed to work as a tactical plan, and there was an unexpected bonus: when he and Paolo had checked in and put their overnight bags in their rooms, Mario took the lift down to the underground parking garage. There were hire cars in three of the spaces, and he noted their makes, models, and registration numbers before returning to his room to call Vitale.
That meant a trace could be run by tertiaries of the order in France to identify which vehicle—if any of them—had been rented by the targets and that, in turn, would allow the surveillance team to attach a tracker to the vehicle. Vitale promised that he would get the information within a couple of hours, and until then there was nothing the four men could do apart from make sure that if one or both of the targets left the hotel, at least two of the team would be right behind them.
24
Chartres, France
“Like what?” Mallory asked, then took a bite from the end of his torpedo-shaped ham and salad baguette.
“Ah, well, right now I don’t exactly know,” Robin replied. “If this encrypted text had referred to an ark or a box or a chest, anything like that, then it would certainly be a lot more exciting. As it is, there are very few direct references to whatever the trail is leading toward. In fact, there are only three nouns used that give any indication of what has been hidden. And those three words translate as ‘deeds,’ ‘titles,’ and ‘archive.’ In fact, the last noun—it’s tablinum in Latin—has three possible meanings, including a terrace or a gallery, but in the context ‘archive’ seems to be the most accurate translation.”
Mallory nodded as he took in the implications of what Robin just said.
“I think I know what that means,” he said. “More important, does the translated text indicate where this archive or repository can be found?”
“Not directly, no. There’s a reference to a valley that includes some detail that might be a help if you knew exactly where the valley was, and the next sentence of the text refers to some kind of local organization, a cofraternitas, which translates as brotherhood. I think it probably means a union of villages or towns. Something like a league, perhaps.”
“Could it possibly translate as ‘confederation’?” Mallory asked.
Robin glanced back at the online dictionary that was still open on the screen of her laptop, typed in the Latin word, and then pressed the ENTER key to see the translation.
“That’s not one of the options that’s coming up in this dictionary,” she said, “but the meaning is pretty much the same as most of the nouns listed here. Hang on a moment.”
She selected a different dictionary and input the word cofraternitas again.
“Yes,” she said, “or at least this dictionary suggests that ‘confederation’ is a possible alternative meaning.” She looked at him keenly for a few seconds, then glanced back at the transcribed Latin text. “This means something to you, doesn’t it?” she asked.
Mallory nodded. “Yes, it does. It most probably means that we’re on the trail of a rather different kind of Templar treasure. We’re not talking about gold or silver bullion, jewelry or precious stones, nothing like that. I think what this is referring to is probably the most valuable part of the entire Templar treasury, the Archive. Remember that one of the ways in which the order became so wealthy so quickly was that the Knights Templar essentially invented modern banking and, just like today, many of the assets that they held on behalf of third parties didn’t consist of portable goods. In probably thousands of cases, the Templars provided loans or capital advances secured against real properties of various sorts, including houses, farms, estates, and even castles. But before they would advance any money to an applicant, they would as a matter of routine take his title deeds or other proof of ownership of the asset from him as a form of security.”
“Exactly like banks do today, only they call it a mortgage,” Robin said. “I didn’t realize it had been going on for so long.”
“And there were a couple of other things that the Templars did that also resulted in them holding title deeds or other documents relating to property ownership. When a knight applied to join the order, he was supposed to join for life, and so the usual routine was for him to hand over all the assets in his possession, and these were often lands or houses that generated rent, as well as having an obvious capital value. So the bigger the order grew, the more properties it had control of. And the second thing was that, just like the Church today, the Templars also relied on donations, on people handing over assets in return for spiritual favors.”
“That was also true in the Crusades,” Robin said, “if I remember rightly. Going on a crusade was a moral duty in th
e eyes of the Christian Church, and anyone who embarked on such a campaign automatically had all their sins annulled and were guaranteed a place in heaven when they died.”
“Precisely. And the other refinement that the Templars took advantage of—they may even have introduced it for all I know—was that by handing over significant assets to the order, a donor would be guaranteed a place in heaven because of his support of the Warriors of God. In the medieval period, you have to remember that heaven and hell were both thought to be absolutely real, and when anyone died his soul would be carried off in one of two different directions, either up to heaven or down to hell. A soul condemned to an eternity in purgatory or in the depths of hell was truly damned. It was a terrifying prospect that people would do almost anything to avoid.”
Robin nodded. “So you think that we could be on the hunt for the Templar Archive, do you? If so, isn’t that just a waste of time? I mean, even if we managed to follow the trail wherever it happens to lead and open up a chest or whatever containing the archives, all we’re going to find is presumably a bunch of medieval property deeds written in Latin. That will be a find of enormous importance for historians, but unless I’m missing the point, I don’t see that it will have any value today.”
“Not necessarily,” Mallory said. “It’s quite possible that the archive—assuming it still exists, of course, and that the documents are still readable—could be both valuable and dangerous. Valuable because it could show that some very expensive real estate in Europe isn’t actually owned by the people who are living on it, and dangerous for precisely the same reason. I’m not quite sure how the law would view a document that, for example, proved conclusively that a few thousand acres of prime French real estate had actually been given in perpetuity to the Knights Templar in the middle of the thirteenth century. That would mean that anyone who occupied it after that date would be a squatter, with no legal right whatsoever to the land. It would be a very interesting legal squabble to see how that would be resolved.”
Robin laughed shortly.
“Perhaps it would,” she said, “but it probably wouldn’t come to that, possession being nine-tenths of the law, and with the Templars having been permanently disestablished in the early part of the fourteenth century. I mean, these days would anybody care?”
“They might,” Mallory said. “I saw a very interesting television program a few years ago. It proved conclusively that the British royal family, the House of Windsor, are usurpers to the throne, because of a break in succession that took place two or three hundred years ago. The researchers for that program did the genealogical research needed to prove their case, but, more important, at the same time they tracked down the genuine heir to the British Crown. If my memory serves me correctly, he was something like a sheep farmer working in the Australian Outback. They interviewed him, and asked him if he’d be prepared to mount a claim for the throne, but he wasn’t interested. But in law, he would have had an extremely good case, because the genealogical records proved his succession absolutely. There was no gray area. The present members of the British royal family have no legal right to occupy the throne, and he absolutely possessed that same right. Now, if the Templar Archive contained information anything like that, recovering it could be explosive.”
“Maybe,” Robin said, sounding anything but convinced, “but I have my doubts. I mean, would we just be wasting our time trying to track down a bunch of medieval land deeds?”
“Until we find it,” Mallory replied, “we have no idea what it contains. But there’s another factor we need to remember. We’re following a trail here. The first leg of the search took us from Dartmouth, strangely enough, though it should probably have started in Scotland, from what you told me about the origin of the parchment and the book safe, and then all the way to Cyprus. The second leg seems to be taking us in search of the Templar Archive, but if we don’t find it, then we obviously also won’t find the information we need to follow the third leg. If you remember from the text on the parchment we translated earlier, the author referred to three trials, or three trails, that had to be followed, and by implication followed in the correct sequence. If we want to reach the end of this search, then we have to follow it through.”
“Right,” Robin said. “I don’t disagree with any of that, because it makes obvious sense. When I said that the Latin word I was looking at could translate as something like ‘league,’ you asked if it could possibly mean a confederation. So does that mean that you know where we should be looking next?”
“Maybe, yes. There’s an interesting story about the high mountain regions of Switzerland that dates right back to the same decade in which the Templars were purged. At the end of 1315, a motley band of poorly armed and hopelessly outnumbered peasants took on the might of the Austrian Habsburg army not far from the present Saint Gotthard Pass and completely defeated it. That in itself would be unusual enough, because in that battle uneducated and untrained farmers were facing a huge army of well-equipped and properly trained soldiers led by a large cadre of knights, and the result should never have been in the slightest doubt. To put it into modern terms, that’s rather like a guerrilla army equipped only with rifles and pistols taking on a proper national war machine with aircraft, tanks, and artillery, and then coming out on top. It shouldn’t happen, and it almost never does happen, but just occasionally you find something like the Vietnam War that breaks all the rules.”
“So how did they manage to do it?” Robin asked.
“Well, that’s the point, isn’t it? Military tactics in those days were firmly established, and in general worked quite well. The heavy armor of the medieval army was of course the mounted knight, a highly trained warrior clad in steel plate armor and sitting astride a massive horse, also clad in protective steel armor and trained to be almost as aggressive as the man sitting on its back. The bulk of the army was made up of rank-and-file soldiers armed with swords, daggers, and spears or other thrusting weapons, while arguably the most lethal members of the force were the bowmen, the archers, typically using longbows or the equivalent, though some armies preferred the more powerful and more accurate crossbow, although these had a much slower rate of fire than a longbow.
“You could argue that battle in those days was formalized. The tendency was for the opposing forces to face each other across open ground, where the battle would finally take place. The opposing forces would typically remain in that position for some days, preparing to fight, while at the same time negotiations might be carried out between the two leaders to see if some kind of agreement could be reached without the necessity of doing battle. When all those possible avenues had been exhausted, then battle would commence. The outcome tended to be predictable, the larger and better-equipped force normally prevailing over the opposition. And in Switzerland, if the peasant farmers from the fledgling confederation had faced the Habsburg army in straight combat, there’s no doubt at all that they would have been annihilated. So they didn’t. They resorted to guerrilla tactics, blocking the path the Habsburgs had to take and then taking advantage of the hilly terrain to rain down boulders and tree trunks on the enemy forces essentially trapped below them.
“Militarily speaking, it was both brilliant in terms of tactics and completely successful, the Austrian army being routed and with enormous loss of life. But the point really is that it is extremely unlikely that any group of people with no established background in combat or battlefield tactics could have come up with such an unusual and effective strategy. Unless, of course, they had help. And that’s what most of the stories about that conflict imply. There’s a persistent legend that a small group of White Knights—meaning knights who were their own men, who owed no allegiance to any lord or master—were in the area before the battle and devised the tactics that were used to overcome the Habsburgs.
“Of course,” Mallory went on, “that doesn’t mean that those knights, assuming that the legend is true, were Templars, but i
t’s difficult to suggest who else they might have been. By 1315, the Templar order had been purged and the last grand master had died in the flames of his execution pyre in Paris. But only a mere handful of Templars had actually been arrested, and remarkably few of them were the highly trained knights who formed the core of the order’s military machine. Those knights who escaped the cull would almost certainly still have been in Europe, and most probably would have been looking for some safe haven where they could live without fear of persecution by the French king. The lawless mountains and high passes of Switzerland would have been a fairly obvious choice, and it’s more than possible that some Templars did end up there, exchanging their extensive knowledge and experience of combat for the right to stay. They could easily have devised the plan that more than leveled the battlefield in favor of the peasant farmers when the Austrian army approached, and that would certainly explain the overwhelming defeat that the Habsburgs suffered.”
“I hear what you say,” Robin said, “but there could be other explanations. The Swiss peasants must have known the terrain where the conflict was going to take place really well. So maybe they could have come up with a suitable battle plan all on their own. Or perhaps there were just a few unattached knights, White Knights, as you call them, and they were persuaded to lend a hand in preparing the ambush. What I mean is, the ambush didn’t have to involve the Templars at all.”
Mallory nodded.
“You’re absolutely right, of course,” he said. “And after this passage of time, there’s no proof, or even a lack of proof, one way or the other. But there are another couple of pieces of what you could call circumstantial evidence that are worth considering. We’ve already talked about the way the Knights Templar basically introduced the modern concept of banking into medieval Europe. In almost all important respects, the systems invented by the Templars are exactly the same as the systems we use today. You can trace the origin of the bank account, the check, charging interest, bank fees, security charges, cash advances, conversion of assets, and even bearer bonds all the way back to the financial acumen of the Templars. And what is perfectly obvious is that if you ask anyone today what Switzerland is famous for, a very high proportion of people you question are probably going to mention banking. The gnomes of Zürich and all that. The point is that a very short time after the serfs and peasant farmers of the high cantons defeated the Austrians, a banking system that was virtually identical to that used by the Templars began to be operated in that same area, apparently by those same peasant farmers and serfs.