The Templars' Last Secret

by Martin Walker

  “I’m not supposed to tell you so keep it to yourself. There’s an alert for a bunch of jihadist terrorists. Can Pierre borrow your shotgun?”

  “Certainly. Jihadists, you say? I haven’t hunted them since the Algerian War.”

  At this point, Bruno heard a siren and turned to see the gendarmerie van coming from St. Denis, Sergeant Jules at the wheel and Yveline in the passenger seat. Jules parked, leaving the siren blaring and his blue light flashing, and four more gendarmes piled out from the rear, each with a flak vest and a handgun at his belt.

  “My general called,” said Yveline. She was carrying an MPF submachine gun, the only one stored at the St. Denis gendarmerie. “He says I’m under your orders until further notice.” She looked at the rifle at his side and gestured behind her to where Sergeant Jules was pulling something from the back of the van. “Jules brought his hunting rifle.”

  “Good, I was feeling outgunned until the baron arrived. Another rifle could be just what we need. Other hunting friends should be arriving with more, but we probably won’t need them. If the white van hasn’t shown by now, they’re probably taking another route.”

  His phone rang. It was J-J to say that the official registry recorded that white van’s license plate should have been attached to a black Renault on a parking lot for used cars in Bergerac. Local police were checking.

  Five minutes later, J-J called again. The urgences at St. Cyprien had been called to an incident. A motorcycle gendarme had been shot by the side of the road at Siorac, a crossroads about five kilometers beyond Le Buisson.

  “The bastards could be anywhere,” he said.

  Chapter 19

  Bruno drove over the bridge into the main square of St. Denis. Amélie was standing on the balcony outside his office, anticipating his return. He waved once he’d parked, slung the baron’s rifle over his shoulder and broke open the shotgun he had borrowed. Entering the mairie, he heard the sound of her high heels clattering down the stairs to meet him.

  Her eyes widened at the sight of the guns. “Did you catch them? Was there a fight?”

  “They took another route, shot a gendarme who tried to flag them down and disappeared.”

  “Is he dead?”

  “I don’t know.”

  They mounted the stairs together, and the mayor was waiting for him along with Xavier, the maire-adjoint, some of the senior members of the town council and Fabiola. The mayor led the way into the council chamber and asked Bruno to brief them all on the potential danger to the town.

  “We have four armed terrorists on the loose,” he began, leaving the guns by the door. “Two of them were stocking up on supplies at the supermarket in Le Buisson and we had little time to organize roadblocks. They shot a gendarme at Siorac and disappeared. He’s been taken to the hospital, but I don’t know his condition. This is now a major antiterrorist operation being run by the Ministry of the Interior. We’ll be getting serious firepower. Three special forces teams, including one from the elite GIGN group of the gendarmerie, are being deployed with helicopters.”

  One of the councillors tried to interrupt with a question, but Bruno waved him aside.

  “Sorry, Michel, I don’t have time for discussion,” he said. “We know the identities of two of the group and have photos of the remaining two. Their leader appears to be an important man from ISIS. We know they assaulted and tortured a man in Sarlat, but we don’t know their mission. It could involve Lascaux, since they like destroying monuments. It could be the planned opening of the new scout camp here, but that’s being postponed. It could be something or somewhere else altogether. We’ll be coordinating a search from the gendarmerie here in town because it has good and secure communications.”

  He was interrupted by a flurry of questions but held up a hand until they were silent.

  “That’s all I know and probably more than I should tell you. Please don’t speak of this outside this room, and above all do not mention ISIS. We don’t want people to panic. I know the mayor and I can count on you. And now, excuse me, I have to get to the gendarmerie.”

  He went to his office to say hello to Balzac and check his e-mails. Amélie followed him, and he said she should stay; she would not be allowed into the command post being set up at the gendarmerie.

  “I understand. I’ll stay with Balzac,” she said. “While you were away I was working on a couple of things. First, remember I used my phone to photograph that letter on Dumesnil’s desk? Here’s the number of the historian at the Sorbonne he was writing to.”

  She handed him a piece of notepaper. “And I was looking again at Leah’s false ID. It was set up over a year ago, so how long had she been planning this? Was the bank account opened at the same time? I put the details on the paper with the name and phone number. And here’s a copy of the printout from the till at Casino of the supplies they bought. The manager e-mailed it to you.”

  He began to thank her, but she interrupted.

  “I’ll stay here and answer your phone. This evening I’m having dinner with your friend Florence to talk about computer clubs. If you need me, just call my mobile. Take care.” She gave him a quick hug as he thanked her and left.

  The parking lot on the old parade ground in front of the gendarmerie had been closed to the public and was now occupied by three gendarme vans and a mobile communications unit. Bruno recognized J-J’s car parked beside it. Three gendarmes with flak vests and submachine guns were standing by the roadblock formed by another van. Inside the building, J-J and the gendarme general were already installed in Yveline’s office, each of them talking on his phone, and Yveline was talking to a video link on her laptop. She was the first to finish.

  “We’re rebasing the helicopters at the Belvès airfield because it’s closest,” she said. “The brigadier is on his way down here with some antiterrorist staff, and we’ve taken over the Royal Hotel to house people. They should arrive late tonight, and we all meet here tomorrow morning at eight.”

  “Talking of housing people, the bad guys are equipped to feed themselves for a week,” Bruno said, giving her the copy of the Casino bill. “Rice, eggs, bread, milk, noodles, olive oil, cheese, tomato paste, vegetables, fruit and fruit juice, a lot of coffee, sugar and jam, chocolate and nothing frozen. And no meat, presumably because they couldn’t be sure it would be halal.”

  “That sounds as though they have access to a kitchen with saucepans and crockery, which suggests to me that they’ve found a vacant house.”

  “You know how many thousands of vacation homes we have around here, all closed up and waiting for the tourist season. It would take months to search them all.”

  J-J finished his call and broke in. “Isabelle sent me the breakdown from the cell-phone tower near Vaugier’s place. We’ve got two numbers that we think must be theirs, with very heavy Internet use. So France-Télécom is now watching for those numbers on every cell tower in the département. But they seem to know what they’re doing, using a VPN and proxy servers along with Tor encryption.”

  “What does that mean?” Bruno asked.

  “A virtual private network using proxy servers is a way to hide your identity and location,” said Yveline. “ ‘Tor’ stands for ‘the Onion Router,’ a way of encrypting data that’s done in layers, like an onion. So while we might be able to track where they are, we can’t read what they’re up to.”

  “And if they’re that sophisticated, they won’t be using their phones anywhere near where they’re staying now that they know we’re hunting them,” said J-J. “They’ll probably want new throwaway phones, so we’re checking on all smartphone thefts and all new sales. But maybe they brought extra phones with them.”

  “It’s possible one of them just panicked when he saw a cop waving them down and shot him,” Bruno replied. “So now they’re panicking even more. They’ll want to get new wheels, unless they already have them. Maybe they could do an amateur paint job on the van.”

  “The problem is we can’t block all the roads.” Y
veline turned to the large map of the département on the wall by the door. “So we’re doing the usual blocks, all autoroute access points and all national road intersections. Even with the extra manpower, we can’t do much more than that.”

  “We know when they were at Siorac, and presumably heading back to their base. We also know that at that time we had motorbike cops at the obvious choke points—on the main road below Belvès, at Beynac, outside Sarlat, at Les Eyzies and your own block at the Limeuil turnoff. I think we have to work on the assumption that they’re in this area—they’d have to know the back roads to get out of that net.”

  “It’s still four or five hundred square kilometers, and full of vacant gîtes,” J-J said.

  “Yes, but with all the major roads blocked and helicopters cruising the minor ones, we’ll at least have them pinned down,” Yveline replied.

  Behind them, the general slammed the phone down. “They say it can’t be done, not with their current technology. Still, it was a good thought. Well done, Lieutenant.” He gave Yveline a quick smile and explained to Bruno that Yveline had wondered if the electricity network could pinpoint houses that had suddenly started using power after a week without.

  Bruno excused himself to find a quiet space to make some calls, but the squad room was full of gendarmes being briefed and issued local maps. He told Sergeant Jules that he’d be in the bar across the road. Once there, he ordered a coffee and called the number of Professor Philippeau in Paris. He explained himself, said that Dumesnil was in the hospital without explaining why, but that he had been writing to the professor about the Testament of Iftikhar. What could the professor tell him about it?

  “This is very odd. I hadn’t heard of that supposed document for twenty years, but this is the fifth or sixth time it has come up in the last couple of months.”

  He explained that it started at the recent annual meeting of the American Historical Association in January. He had given a paper on Outremer, the Christian kingdom that was established around Jerusalem after the First Crusade. Afterward, one of the American scholars came up to ask whether he thought Iftikhar’s testament was genuine.

  “A lot of historians are very dubious about it, me included. And then another scholar, who had been at some conference in Israel, said he’d heard a rumor there that it had been tracked down, and some intensive tests were under way to establish whether it was genuine, the parchment and ink and so on. Of course, I questioned him, but it all seemed very vague, told to him by someone he didn’t know talking about it in a group at a bar after a dinner, but then shutting up when he realized he might have said too much. It’s very political, you understand, this document. If it’s genuine.”

  “How did Dumesnil come into it?” Bruno asked.

  “He was my pupil, and I’m fond of him, a brilliant man. So what’s this about being in the hospital? Nothing serious, I trust.”

  “They say his condition is stable. When I spoke to him about it, he sounded very skeptical about this document, like you.”

  “Yes, I called him and we discussed the rumor, of which he had heard nothing. But it’s possible, because with all the chaos in the Arab world in recent years museums and archives have been looted and destroyed.”

  “Would that include documents?”

  “Oh, certainly. There’s a flood of Middle Eastern antiques and ancient books and documents on the world market, some priceless old Arabic calligraphy from the Baghdad museum. More has been reaching the market from Aleppo and more recently items from Nineveh and Mosul and Palmyra that Daesh looted and sold. It’s tragic that these collections have been broken up, but I’m on a committee at the Institut du Monde Arabe here in Paris that advises on acquisitions. We’re deluged with offers of material that a few years ago we’d have paid a fortune to have, but now they’re being offered for a pittance.”

  “So it’s entirely possible that this long-lost testament could suddenly have surfaced. But wouldn’t the Arab museums have known what it was?”

  “You wouldn’t believe the state of some of these national museums, even before the Iraq War and the Arab Spring. They were underfunded, understaffed, too many jobs given as political patronage rather than to real scholars. The Arab curators were just as distressed, but even when the region was stable they had little influence.”

  “So they might not have known what they had, what was there?”

  “That’s right. And we don’t know what happened to the archives of King Baldwin other than that they were entrusted to the Templars. When Jerusalem fell to the Arabs in October 1187, Saladin was merciful. He allowed all the Christians to leave if they paid a ransom, and there was a lot of haggling over the terms. Finally the Templars and the Hospitallers agreed to pay the ransom of those without money, in return for being allowed to take with them their holy relics and ornaments. Heraclius, the Roman Christian patriarch of Jerusalem, left with wagons containing treasure and the relics from the Holy Sepulchre. The Templars led one of the refugee columns to Tyre, which was still in Christian hands, and they took their own treasure with them.”

  “And that could have included the testament?”

  “Yes, it was supposedly shown to Richard Lionheart in Acre, when the Templars established themselves there. But after the rest of the Holy Land fell in 1291, except for a tiny offshore island that later fell to the Mamluks, the Templars fled to Limassol in Cyprus, and the trail goes cold. Whether it was lost in Acre, in Limassol or at the base they established on the island of Arwad, we don’t know. We do know that at this time the Templars had negotiated an alliance with the Mongols, who were ravaging Muslim lands from the east. And of course it could have been lost when Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in 1453.”

  “So you think it’s possible that the testament was captured from the Templars, stored in some Muslim or Mamluk archive and has now reappeared in the chaos of the Arab world?”

  “Yes, but it may be a fake. I joined one group in Baghdad a few years ago, with funds raised from charity to buy precious relics and bring them back to France for safekeeping. I was offered two holy shrouds, several pieces of the true cross, nails from the Crucifixion and several swords of Saladin.”

  “But you are hearing of the Testament of Iftikhar only now?”

  “Yes, and as I said I keep hearing about it, most recently from a British colleague, who said that somebody from the British Museum had been invited to Israel to help verify the document. And then two days ago I had a call about it from a reporter at the New York Times, so word seems to be spreading. But until I see it and can examine the original myself, I’m reserving judgment.”

  “Do you have the name of this reporter and this British colleague?”

  “The colleague is named Keenan, a medievalist at Merton College, Oxford, and the reporter is—let me check—yes, Jackson, Bill Jackson.”

  Bruno thanked him, adding that he’d keep him informed about Dumesnil. Bruno then called Amélie to relate what he’d learned and to say he needed her excellent research skills. He gave the names of the professor’s two contacts and asked if she could track down their phone numbers.

  “No problem,” she said. “I think my English is better than yours, so do you want me to talk to them? I assume you’re trying to find the origin of these rumors about the testament. And there are no new e-mails from your network—you left your e-mail up on your screen. Do you want me to close it?”

  “No, keep monitoring it. We’re trying to organize a proper roadblock and search system. Thanks, Amélie.”

  He sat back, reflecting on this remarkable young woman who’d entered his life. No, he wouldn’t put it that way. Amélie was striking in her way, but not in any sense that stirred him. He respected her intelligence, her judgment and her readiness to help, and he admired her ambition. If he cultivated the relationship, they could become good friends, and he resolved to try to do so. As he was paying for his coffee, his phone rang. It was Philippe Delaron, asking about the shooting of a gendarme at Siorac and Bruno�
��s sudden roadblock earlier that day.

  “Call the police spokesman in Périgueux, Philippe. I’m not saying a word.”

  “Nor is she, that’s why I’m calling you. A cop shot, a teacher in Sarlat hospital who’s been tortured, gendarme helicopters and reinforcements, and then you set up an impromptu roadblock outside Le Buisson. It’s a manhunt for those guys whose photos you gave us. We can help, Bruno, if you could tell us a little more. I can put word out on the radio and in the paper.”

  “I can put word out myself, Philippe, and when I can say more, I will.”

  “Is it terrorists? Arabs? ISIS?”

  “Sorry, Philippe.” He closed his phone and instantly it rang again.

  “I just called the news desk at the New York Times,” said Amélie. “They have no reporter by the name of Bill Jackson, and there is no freelancer of that name on their books. But they told me that it wouldn’t be the first time someone tried to impersonate one of their reporters. It may be significant that your professor got a fake media call, almost as if somebody is trying to spread the news. Now I’ll start looking for the guy at Oxford.”

  “Wait, don’t hang up. You mean that there could be a deliberate attempt to spread a rumor about this testament?”

  “Absolutely. Something about this has triggered my suspicious little mind. After all, this all started with Leah’s fall at Commarque, and she was trying to paint something about it, and then that e-mail of hers warning that somebody was trying to make a forgery. Why bother to make a forgery that could be disproved when you can make this document into a virtual reality by rumors?”

  Bruno frowned, not sure he was following her meaning. “Why would anyone want to do that?”

  “There’s one obvious suspect, and the strategy is smart: first the historians, some anonymous guy in a bar at a conference, then the newspapers start asking questions. Pretty soon I’ll bet it’s going to be on Twitter and then there’ll be an Internet meme. It doesn’t have to exist in reality as long as people give it a kind of reality by talking and writing and arguing about it.”