by James Becker
“Yes. Once I’ve done that, what do you want me to do next?”
There was a brief pause while the man at the other end of the line apparently considered his response. Then he obviously came to a decision.
“We may want you to take further action over this, but I’ll need to see the photographs and discuss what you’ve found with my colleagues, so stay in Dartmouth or somewhere nearby tonight and expect a call from me in the morning.”
• • •
Robin and Mallory finished their meal some fifteen minutes later, but didn’t linger over coffee in the restaurant. Instead, they decided to return to Robin’s apartment and perhaps do a little more work on trying to decipher the encrypted Latin text. They walked back, following the same route that they had taken earlier, while Gary Marsh dogged their footsteps about one hundred yards back and on the opposite side of the road, effectively invisible on the streets of the town, which were now getting busy as people emerged from their houses and apartments in search of food and drink and evening entertainment.
When Robin and Mallory turned into the alley that gave access to the rear of the building, Marsh abandoned his covert surveillance of the two targets and continued along the road toward his car. In the trunk of the vehicle he had, as he always had when on a job, an overnight bag containing a light sweater, two clean shirts, four changes of underwear and socks, pajamas, a washing kit, an alarm clock, a couple of paperback novels, and a handful of other bits and pieces that in his experience would make his night in a strange bed in a strange hotel in a strange town as comfortable as possible.
When he reached the vehicle, he glanced at his watch. With a bit of luck, as long as the hotel he chose wasn’t too far away, he might even be in time for dinner, which was a far more attractive prospect than the snack meal he had expected to have to eat, probably sitting in his car with only some fatuous DJ on a radio station for company.
Before he decided where to go, he checked his satnav, which showed that what was probably the main hotel in Dartmouth was a fairly short walk away, and it was the work of only a few seconds to dial the number and book a room.
Twenty minutes later, having unpacked and hung up his meager possessions in the small double overlooking the river, Marsh walked down the staircase to the dining room and sat down at a table for one with a satisfied sigh.
8
Dartmouth, Devon
Robin opened the door of her apartment and stepped inside, Mallory right behind her. She headed for the kitchenette to turn on the kettle, while he slipped off his jacket and hung it on one of the hooks in the hallway. Then he stopped and just stared at the carpet right in front of him.
“What is it?” Robin asked, peering around the corner from the kitchenette and looking right at him.
“It might be nothing,” he said, “but there’s a kind of a whitish discoloration on this carpet, just inside the door, and I don’t remember seeing it when we went out.”
“I don’t really do housewife stuff,” Robin said. “So if you’re having a pop at me for not wielding the Hoover properly, then you’re wasting your time.”
Mallory shook his head.
“I wasn’t, I promise you.” He dropped down to his knees and bent forward to examine the faint mark more carefully. He extended his hand to the whitish discoloration, touched it, and then rubbed his thumb and forefinger together. “It’s like a very fine white powder,” he said. “In fact, I think it’s talcum powder.”
Robin walked out of the kitchenette and squatted beside him. She repeated his action, examining the slight trace of powder on her fingertips, and then smelling it.
“There’s a small tin of talcum powder in the bathroom,” she said, “but that’s where it lives. I’ll only bring the tin out of there when it’s empty and I need to throw it away. And that powder has very faint perfume. This stuff, whatever it is, doesn’t smell of anything.”
Mallory looked at her, his expression serious.
“I think we might have had a visitor,” he said. “A visitor who’s either not very competent as a burglar, or who’s trying to send us a message.”
“Message? What message?”
“This looks to me like the powder you get in a packet of latex gloves, but if he had stood outside your front door and put the gloves on there, the wind would have dispersed the powder in a matter of minutes, and we’d have been none the wiser. But by waiting until he stepped inside, he left a fairly obvious trace. That’s what I mean by saying he’s either not very good or very good indeed, and he wants us to know that he’s been here.”
Robin nodded, the puzzled expression on her face giving way to irritation.
“I’ll check the place out,” she said.
Mallory walked into the study and looked round. Everything appeared to be as he had left it, until he looked at his computer bag. He had left it with the back of the bag leaning against the wall, the natural thing to do so that the front pockets were easily accessible. But now it had been turned around so that the back of the bag faced the room. He didn’t touch it, but just called out to Robin.
“I didn’t leave this bag in that position,” he said, “so somebody has definitely been in while we were out at the restaurant.”
“Did they take anything?” she asked.
“I don’t know yet. I’ll just check.”
He opened the computer bag and took out his laptop. He placed it on the desk, opened the lid, and watched as the opening routine ran. It went as far as his password prompt and then came to a stop, waiting for his input.
“That seems to be okay,” he said. “Cracking my password would almost certainly have taken a lot longer than the length of time that we were away, and even if the burglar had his own boot disk and tried to get in along that route, I don’t think he could have accessed my system that quickly.”
He opened up the document pockets in the computer case and pulled out the papers that the two of them had been working on down in the shop. He scanned them quickly, making sure that none was missing.
“These all seem to be here,” he said. “As far as I can tell, anyway.”
“But someone has definitely looked in your bag?”
Mallory nodded.
“Yes. And what that means, I think, is that this wasn’t some opportunistic burglary by a lowlife looking for something to steal so that he could sell it to buy drugs, because if it was, then for sure my computer wouldn’t still be here.”
“So you mean it might have been the Dominicans again, still dogging our footsteps?”
“I think this is perhaps a bit too subtle for them,” Mallory said, “bearing in mind that the last time we entertained them—using that word in its loosest possible sense—here in Dartmouth, they more or less came in with all guns blazing. My guess is that the Dominicans are behind it, yes, but I think that they’ve probably recruited some expert local help, and what we’re seeing is his footprints, if you like.”
“So you mean that we probably didn’t throw them off the trail in Switzerland when we burned up that other chest and the documents?”
“Perhaps not. Or maybe this is just a kind of belt-and-braces thing. We know for a fact that they translated most of that first piece of parchment that you found in the book safe, and that specifically said that there were three trails that had to be followed. And they’ve been behind us all the way, first on Cyprus, and then in Switzerland. Maybe what they’re doing is trying to find out if we have any idea where the third trail is going to take us, and that’s why this was a low-key nonburglary burglary: they just wanted to see what we’ve got. And if that is the case, whoever came in here will certainly have seen that medieval chest.”
“But that doesn’t prove anything,” Robin objected.
“No, but if I was running their operation, I’d be very suspicious if I found that the people I was following had a medieval chest complete with a b
ooby trap in the lid, a chest that was virtually identical in appearance to another chest that I had just seen burned and reduced to dust in the middle of Switzerland. Even if I was particularly stupid and obtuse, I think I would definitely suspect that a switch had been pulled. And I don’t think those Dominicans are either stupid or obtuse.”
“So, if you’re right,” Robin said, “the Dominicans or whoever these people are will have copies of our transcriptions of the encrypted Latin text.”
Mallory nodded.
“We have to assume that, yes. Whoever broke in here will either have photographed the sheets of paper we were working on, or might even have had the cheek to duplicate them using your photocopier. My guess is that he’d have used the camera on his phone, if it had a high enough resolution, or maybe a small high-spec pocket camera, because then he could transfer the pictures onto a computer or, more likely, send them electronically to somebody with an e-mail address in Rome. Whoever did this,” he finished, “almost certainly wasn’t the principal. He was probably somebody recruited locally who was just following orders.”
“You mean it wasn’t one of those Dominican thugs?”
“It might have been, but I doubt it. This was a very clean and unobtrusive entry to the property, and that probably means whoever did it was a specialist, somebody with the right tools to get in and out undetected. If it had been one of the Dominicans, I would have expected the door to be broken down, or at least forced open, and both the wooden chest and my computer would probably be missing.”
Robin looked puzzled.
“So, why the clues, I suppose you could call them? The talcum powder and your computer case turned the wrong way round? Are you sure they weren’t just accidental? The result of clumsy searching, maybe?”
“They could be, but in my opinion they weren’t. I think we’re probably again under surveillance by that guy who called himself John, the one who rang your mobile in the hotel in Okehampton and basically told us to get out of Dodge. I know he’s working for the other side, but for some reason he also seems to have our best interests at heart. At the very least, if it is him, he has told us exactly what the situation is.”
• • •
At his corner table in the dining room at the hotel a few hundred yards away from where Robin Jessop and David Mallory were analyzing the situation, Gary Marsh ended the call he had received, a call that had been initiated by the bug in the adapter a few seconds after the targets had entered the apartment, and allowed himself a brief smile before turning his attention again to his meal.
“Message delivered,” he murmured to himself, picking up his knife and fork.
9
Via di Sant’Alessio, Aventine Hill, Rome, Italy
The communication system in the secure basement of the anonymous property on the Via di Sant’Alessio possessed a number of unusual features, including an online spam checker that analyzed the contents of any e-mail from an unknown address before downloading the message, and automatically bounced any confirmed spam message straight back to the sender. In fact, this rarely happened, because the e-mail addresses used by the organization were far from being either obvious or intuitive. But occasionally some Internet marketing company managed to harvest one of the e-mail addresses and for about a week or so a few entirely unwanted messages were handled in this way.
Most of the traffic comprised routine reports from the organization’s agents, and these were usually machine-encrypted and automatically decrypted on arrival, the embedded routing indicators ensuring that the correct officer in the building received the messages. Each e-mail also included an embedded priority code, and whenever the building fielded only a skeleton staff—which was mainly overnight and on Sundays—the on-watch communications officer was alerted every time a message with a priority of “Urgent” or higher was received. He was tasked with inspecting the contents of each such message and deciding whether or not the designated recipient should be called in to deal with it.
By far the smallest number of messages were those sent by the tertiaries, the lay brothers who unofficially and covertly assisted the organization for short periods of time and for very specific matters. For security reasons, these men—and they were invariably male—were never privy to any of the encryption systems in use, and accordingly all their messages arrived as plaintext e-mails. But precisely because these messages involved matters of considerable importance to the organization—otherwise there would have been no need to request the services of a tertiary in the first place—they were always automatically accorded the highest possible priority.
So when a plaintext e-mail arrived in the early hours of the morning from a Web-based e-mail address that had been allocated to a tertiary based in Devon, in the United Kingdom, the communications officer didn’t even bother glancing at the text or the attachments. He simply made a note of the routing and then dialed the mobile telephone number of the officer who had been nominated to deal with this particular matter.
His conversation with the man was short and to the point, and less than twenty minutes later Roman Benelli used the external keypad to unlock the steel door giving access to the basement, and walked into the communication suite.
“Where is it?” he asked.
The communications officer looked up and nodded at the new arrival. The man was wearing a black suit that appeared to be at least two sizes too small for his somewhat chunky frame, and his round face displayed what looked far more substantial than designer stubble. It was common knowledge that Benelli had to shave at least twice a day, and it was popularly believed that his entire body under his clothing was covered by a thick pelt of black hair. Not that anybody in the organization had ever seen him naked, of course. Or wanted to.
“I’ve routed it to your computer and I’ve printed one copy of the message and two copies of each of the attachments. They’re on your desk.”
“Thanks,” Benelli said, and walked down the corridor to his office.
While he waited for his computer to load the operating system, he read the hard copy of the message. Before he even looked at the attachments, he guessed he was probably already out of his depth. His specialty was the translation of dead or obscure languages, particularly Coptic and Aramaic and of course Latin, into modern Italian, but he was also the only person in the building who had any knowledge at all of codes and ciphers, and inevitably anything involving encrypted text from any period and in any language landed on his desk.
The attachments were obviously photographs, possibly taken by a high-resolution camera in a mobile phone, and the images displayed excellent clarity, every letter on the handwritten sheets being sharply in focus. That was the good news. The bad news was that the context was somewhat uncertain.
He read the text of the e-mail again—his spoken English was far from fluent, but he had no trouble in reading and understanding the language—but that didn’t particularly help. According to the tertiary, the photographs had been taken of a number of sheets of paper removed from a briefcase believed to belong to David Mallory, one half of the English couple who had proved to be such a thorn in the side of the organization so far.
Benelli was well aware of the shambolic events in Switzerland, when Marco Toscanelli had apparently been outwitted by them for a second time, and had let the long-lost and immensely valuable Templar Archive slip through his fingers. He also knew, because Silvio Vitale had told him, that the organization had again mounted surveillance against them in England. This was both in an attempt to confirm that they had somehow managed to get out of Switzerland with the Templar Archive intact and, much more important, to find out if they had also discovered any clues as to the whereabouts of the Templars’ sacred relic and their lost assets, the vast hoard of bullion, jewels, and other enduring and enormously valuable treasure that had simply vanished from the pages of history at almost the same moment that the Templar order had been purged.
Bene
lli looked again at the printed copies of the photographs, trying to make sense of them. Most of them seemed to be pictures of sheets of paper covered in capital letters, clearly handwritten. On a couple of pages it looked as if the writer had been performing frequency analysis on a piece of text, with individual letters being written on the left side of the page and each occurrence then being recorded. All of which was interesting, if not immediately helpful.
Then he looked at the e-mail sent by the tertiary working for them in the United Kingdom, and realized that all the pieces of the puzzle were actually in front of him, though the communications officer hadn’t bothered printing all of the photographs that had accompanied the e-mail. In particular, he had failed to print the images of the ironbound medieval box that had been spotted in the woman’s flat by the surveillance specialist tasked with entering the premises. And when Benelli looked closely at the interior shots of the box, he could clearly see that the false bottom of the chest had been removed, and could even make an estimate as to the likely size of the revealed hidden cavity.
“Perhaps two centimeters in depth,” he murmured to himself, then glanced back at the printouts showing the handwritten letters. “Deep enough for several pieces of parchment or vellum.”
There was a knock on his office door, and a moment later the communications officer walked in, carrying a small cup of espresso.
“I hope it was worth your while coming in for that,” the communications specialist said, gesturing at the printed sheets on the desk in front of Benelli. “But you looked as if you needed something to keep you awake.”
“Thanks for the coffee. I’ll probably need several cups, from the looks of this.”
“Are you getting anywhere?”
Benelli looked again at each of the images, then compared them to the e-mail attachments, making sure that he had hard copies of everything, and at the same time hoping to find a photograph of whatever the original document or documents had been. But in that, he was disappointed, though unsurprised.