by James Becker
When they walked back into the bookshop, Betty was already busy with the coffee machine, and when they sat down she placed a slice of Victoria sponge on a side plate in front of each of them, and followed that with a mug of coffee.
“We’ll take the chest upstairs later,” Robin said. She pointed at the slice of cake on the plate in front of Mallory. “Now you can throw that down your throat, wash it down with the coffee, and then put on your Latin decryption hat, because that’s probably what we’re going to be doing for the rest of the day.”
2
Dartmouth, Devon
Gary Marsh selected a radio station that was playing middle-of-the-road music, turned the volume down until the sound was barely audible, and then reclined the driver’s seat of his car a couple of notches to give himself a bit more comfort for what might turn out to be a very long day indeed. The car was unremarkable, a characteristic that was also embodied by the driver. Middle-aged, appearing to be somewhere between about thirty and fifty, but with one of those faces that’s hard to age, short grayish hair, and no features that made him stand out in the memory of most people who saw him. Which of course was the point. A surveillance specialist who people would remember for some reason was unlikely to ever prove good at his job. And Marsh was very good at what he did. Even his long-suffering wife, Ginny, who frequently wished he’d take up some other, more conventional employment because of the time he inevitably spent out on the road and often incommunicado, had to admit that.
His mobile phone—a somewhat larger unit than most people carried, with an extended-life battery fitted as well as a number of unusual and in some cases technically illegal apps—was clipped to a holder on the dashboard, the charging lead snaking down to a power socket on the center console. A copy of the Daily Mail newspaper was propped on the steering wheel, and he gave every impression of a man waiting for his wife or somebody, and reading the paper just to pass the time.
In fact, Marsh never read newspapers of any type, simply choosing one by size for whatever job he was contracted to perform. In this case, he’d wanted a paper he could hide behind whilst in the car, but not one so large that it would be cumbersome to carry when he left the vehicle.
He had found a parking place in Dartmouth—no mean achievement on its own—but also one that gave him a distant but uninterrupted view of Robin Jessop’s antiquarian bookshop, which he frankly hadn’t expected. He’d anticipated that he would have to park the car somewhere and then walk the streets of the town until he found a suitable vantage point from which he could watch the target premises. The space he had found was in one of those free-parking-for-two-hours-but-no-return-within-one-hour zones, but that didn’t bother him.
He owned two virtually identical vehicles, the same make, model, and color, and tucked away in the trunk of each of them was a spare set of number plates applicable to the other vehicle. They were fitted with slim but powerful magnets, and it would be the work of only a few seconds for him to replace the existing number plates with the spare set. If a traffic warden or police officer walked past, a check on the vehicle details, whichever plates were visible, would confirm that it was properly licensed and insured. The practical upshot of this technique was that he could change the identity of the car at a moment’s notice and so remain in the same parking place all day if he wished, and if it proved necessary to do so.
As he stared down the road toward the bookshop, he reflected again at his surprise at being where he was and doing the surveillance that he was being paid to perform. About two weeks earlier, he had been contracted to mount a surveillance operation against Robin Jessop by a man that he remained convinced was a senior police officer, and probably up to no good. But surveillance, while not the kind of activity that most men would boast about in their local bar, was at least fundamentally harmless, and he had been paid a substantial sum of money for his time and expertise.
The operation had proceeded smoothly enough until he had witnessed another two-man team also targeting Robin Jessop, and he had seen that at least one of these men had been carrying a pistol. That changed the entire thrust of his tasking, at least in his own mind, and after a certain amount of soul-searching he had breached the unwritten terms of his contract and told Jessop what he had been hired to do, and had at the same time also told her about the armed man who was on her trail. Surveillance was one thing, but the only reason anyone carried a gun was to use it, and Marsh had no intention of getting involved in anything like that.
Within a remarkably short period of time his principal—the anonymous police officer who had hired him—had ended the contract and paid him the balance of the agreed fee. But the previous day he had been contacted once again by the same man and told to resume his surveillance. Same target, same briefing. The payment he had been offered was again substantially more than he would normally expect from a job of that type, but he had accepted it immediately, canceling another less interesting and much less lucrative assignment in order to do so.
He told himself that his decision was entirely financial, but in reality it was much more complex than that. Although he had never met Robin Jessop or David Mallory, the man who seemed to be almost permanently by her side, they seemed to be a fairly decent couple, and Marsh rationalized his assignment as being as much about keeping them safe as about watching what they did. For some reason, he felt somewhat protective toward them, a feeling that would certainly not be shared by whatever new surveillance operative would be hired if he declined the job.
That day, almost exactly nothing had happened. There had been two deliveries of reasonably large cardboard boxes by a couple of different courier companies early that afternoon—presumably boxes of books, bearing in mind the profession Robin Jessop had chosen—and Mallory and Jessop had arrived at the shop separately a short time later. They had left the shop only once since then, when the two of them had walked down the street, Mallory carrying a cardboard box that didn’t appear to be particularly heavy.
Marsh had followed at a discreet distance, using his digital camera at intervals, and watched as they entered a nearby bank. A couple of minutes later, he’d walked into the building himself and perused a handful of the brochures extolling in the most favorable terms possible the niggardly interest rates that were on offer. He’d seen Jessop talking to a bank official in a quiet area away from the main counter, watched her complete a number of forms, and then all three of them—the official, Jessop, and Mallory—had disappeared through a door controlled by a keypad and a swipe-card reader, Mallory still carrying the cardboard box. His tiny digital camera, a piece of equipment that fitted comfortably into the palm of his hand, had recorded the various steps in the transaction. They’d reappeared about five minutes later, just as Marsh was fending off the attention of a junior employee apparently eager to make some kind of a sale, and the cardboard box was no longer in evidence. The conclusion was simple enough: Jessop had obviously been depositing something of value in one of the bank’s safe-deposit boxes.
He’d followed the two targets at a distance back to the shop and continued up the street to where his car was parked. And since then, there’d been no movement whatsoever from either of them.
He decided that he would watch for another hour, and if neither of them had emerged from the building in that time, he would walk the fifty or so yards down the street toward the bookshop and visit the convenience store he had spotted earlier and buy himself a handful of packets—sandwiches, if they had any, and if not cookies and chocolate bars—plus a couple of small bottles of water. They would keep him going until Mallory and Jessop settled down somewhere for the night, when he would be able to make his own arrangements and find a place offering suitable—meaning cheap and convenient—accommodation in the town.
And at that point, he would also contact his principal and provide him with a short verbal report on the activities, or more accurately the lack of activities, he had witnessed during the day, and that
would include the transfer of the cardboard box to the vault of the local bank. His brief had been to watch Robin Jessop as the main target, and although the fact that she had deposited something at the bank didn’t seem directly relevant to his instructions, he knew his principal would wish to know about it, if only for the sake of completeness.
3
Via di Sant’Alessio, Aventine Hill, Rome, Italy
Livio Fabrini looked up in some surprise as the door of his office swung open and Silvio Vitale stepped inside.
To say the man was an autocratic boss was to severely understate the case. Within the confines of the electronically shielded and highly secure belowground basement area of the building on the Aventine Hill, Vitale ruled with what amounted to a mailed fist. He almost never visited any of his subordinates. He issued orders, and the men—no women were employed by that section of the order—under his command obeyed them. Immediately and without question. If he wanted to talk to any of them, he would make a call and that person would report to him in his office.
“Silvio?” Fabrini said, a question in his voice. “Can I help you?”
“I certainly hope so,” Vitale snapped. He was not an imposing figure, with a slim build, unremarkable features distinguished only by a thin mustache that covered the length of his upper lip. He had a generally friendly appearance that was, as Fabrini and everyone else in the building knew only too well, extremely deceptive. He was capable of switching in an instant from apparent bonhomie to incandescent rage, episodes of seething anger that were usually characterized by both calculated brutality and extreme violence directed against anyone who offended him.
“Is it these documents?” Fabrini asked, gesturing toward a pile of ancient parchments, some still folded neatly, others opened up, that virtually covered his wide oak desk. Stacked against the wall of his office in two stacks were six large metal-bound and obviously ancient wooden chests.
“Of course it’s those documents. Why else would I bother coming all the way over here to talk to you?”
Fabrini nodded. Like Vitale, he was a long-term employee of the order and, also like the man in charge, he invariably wore a black suit that had become a kind of unofficial uniform for those individuals who worked in the basement of the building. In fact, he was one of the longest-serving members of the order, now in his seventies, with an encyclopedic knowledge of almost everything to do with the Ordo Praedicatorum, and especially of the quest on which the order had embarked the better part of one millennium earlier, and which even today was its single most important and overriding priority. Like Vitale, he was slim—perhaps thin would be a more accurate description—with dark hair, a hunched posture, and somewhat gaunt features dominated by a large and bladelike nose that from certain angles gave him an uncanny resemblance to a resting bird of prey.
Vitale picked up a couple of the pieces of parchment and scanned the handwritten words and sentences with a somewhat distracted gaze, but nodded when he noted on each document the unmistakable symbol of the Knights Templar at both the top and bottom of the text.
“So, are these what we thought they were?” Vitale demanded.
“I can tell you that they are a part of the lost Archive of the Knights Templar,” Fabrini replied, “though as you can see I have barely begun to scratch the surface of the total number of documents that Toscanelli and his men recovered from Switzerland. In my estimation, to properly study this huge collection of parchments could take years and would require the services of quite a large number of our members to process, collate, and assess the information.”
Vitale shook his head, as always somewhat frustrated by Fabrini’s apparent inability to give a short and straight answer to a short and straight question. He respected the old man’s depth of knowledge, dedication, and commitment to the order, but just wished he would get to the point a hell of a lot quicker than he usually did.
“So are you telling me that we have recovered the documents relating to the assets of the order of the heretics? Because that’s not what Toscanelli told me he’d found.”
Fabrini nodded.
“I don’t believe that Marco Toscanelli is necessarily the best person to offer an expert opinion on documents such as these,” he said. “His abilities seem to lie more obviously in the physical plane, as an enforcer or perhaps as an assassin. Cerebral activities, such as thinking about anything more complex than interesting methods of killing people, do not seem to me to be his strong suit.”
“Forget about Toscanelli,” Vitale snapped. “Just tell me what we have here.”
“As I said when I looked at the very first parchment to be taken out of these chests,” Fabrini said, “these are vitally important documents, and they are undoubtedly genuine. Every one that I have studied so far has been related to a kind of a financial transaction, sometimes involving portable assets such as bullion or jewelry, but an almost equal number of them have involved real estate, property holdings of one sort or another. So without a doubt, what Toscanelli managed to recover, in his unique blundering fashion, is the Templar Archive. But what these documents don’t refer to are the deeds of gift and assignment that we were expecting to find.”
“So, the short version of what you’re trying to say is?”
“Unless one of these boxes contains something very different to the documents I have already examined, what we have recovered is the less important part of the Templar Archive. These pieces of parchment refer to short-term financial transactions, normally involving the deposit of a physical asset, or the assignment of a piece of real property, in exchange for which a person would be extended a line of credit or a cash sum so that he could complete a matter of business. But what these documents do not refer to are the vast real estate holdings that the heretics accumulated over the centuries. I would expect that those documents would be far fewer in number than those I am examining, and might well have been kept for safekeeping in a different location to these chests.”
It wasn’t exactly a short answer, and it certainly wasn’t the answer that Vitale had been hoping to hear.
“Right,” he said. “You’d better keep on checking what’s here. Let me know immediately if you find any documents that could relate to the Templar real estate holdings.”
Without waiting for Fabrini to respond, Vitale turned on his heel and stalked out of the office. It looked to him as if Toscanelli’s assessment of the situation had—perhaps surprisingly—been correct. And that meant that there was one important question that needed answering, as a matter of some urgency.
Vitale strode back to his own office and pushed his way in through the open door. Marco Toscanelli was sitting in the chair in front of Vitale’s desk, exactly where he had been when the other man walked out of the office.
“Fabrini thinks the same as you do,” Vitale said, sitting down and facing Toscanelli. “What you brought back from Switzerland was the working part of the Archive, the records of the financial transactions that took place on a daily basis in the Templar preceptories and commanderies throughout Europe. He thinks that the other part of the Archive, the one containing details of the order’s real estate holdings, might even have been stored in an entirely different location to the one where you recovered the chests.”
Vitale stared at his subordinate for a few moments before he said anything else.
Toscanelli remained silent. He knew far better than to ever try to interrupt Vitale, especially when he was obviously annoyed, as he was at that moment.
“So we need answers to a few questions,” Vitale said. “First, is Fabrini right? Did the Templars separate the records of their day-to-day transactions from the documents that we are interested in, the deeds relating to their real estate holdings?”
That, at least, was a question that Toscanelli felt qualified to answer.
“I think they would have kept them in the same place,” he said, “but obviously I can’t prove it. That
cave system under the mountainside in Switzerland was so well hidden, and so well protected by those booby traps, that I would have thought they would have felt entirely safe in keeping all their records in that one place. And I suppose the other side of the coin is that if they did have a second hiding place, we have absolutely no idea where to even start looking for it.”
Vitale nodded noncommittally, but didn’t reply immediately, just stared across his desk at Toscanelli. Even looked at through the eyes of a normal heterosexual adult male, the man was obviously attractive. He was tall, well-built, and with movie-star good looks, deep brown eyes, his features tanned and regular under a thick mop of curly black hair. But he was a long way from being the sharpest tool in the shed, and Vitale suddenly remembered an irreverent remark somebody had passed about Toscanelli years earlier. “He has the body of a Greek god, and the brain of a Greek goat.” It was perhaps a little harsh, but Vitale knew there was more than a grain of truth in it.
What Toscanelli was good at—usually—was taking care of problems where the answer to the difficulty lay primarily in the application of violence, and particularly the application of terminal violence. Though when it came to taking care of the English couple—Robin Jessop and David Mallory—in this way, he had proved to be singularly inept. Maybe, Vitale wondered for a moment, Toscanelli was past his sell-by date and would need to be retired, most probably on a permanent basis, when it was clear that his usefulness was entirely at an end.
On the other hand, his assessment of the events in Switzerland seemed particularly astute, and what they had found under the mountain might prove to be valuable. So maybe he wasn’t quite over-the-hill yet.