by James Becker
He had allocated additional resources in the shape of three other men to assist in the process of frequency analysis, but he was under no illusions about how successful that part of the process might be, in view of what Benelli had already discovered. But if the text prepared by the Knights Templar—the text written on vellum or parchment and then concealed by them in the wooden chest that had served as a repository for the most valuable documents that composed the Templar Archive—could not be deciphered, then the quest that the Dominicans had been tasked with completing over seven hundred years earlier would finally fail. And Vitale was not prepared to let that happen. Not, as the saying goes, on his watch.
He sat at his desk, considering his options. The one thing he dared not do was seek outside assistance with the decryption. He was well aware that he could call on the services of experts in cipher technology, but the risk of one of those experts realizing the true nature of the search, and of the prize that might still lie at the end of the trail, was too great to be contemplated. In fact, it wasn’t the prize itself that was so dangerous, but the implications—the appalling worldwide implications—if knowledge of its true nature were ever to be made public.
For a few minutes he thought about the possibility of dividing up the encrypted text, of separating it into a number of much smaller documents that could perhaps be handled by outside experts without compromising the full meaning of the text and hence the quest. But even doing that would still pose a risk, because it was more than possible that almost any part of the ancient text might provide some specific information about the prize, as well as its location. And unless Benelli’s assessment of the text was completely wrong, it was entirely probable that even an expert would be unable to resolve the cipher unless he had access to the whole document, so it would be a fruitless attempt. And Vitale had already decided that he could never allow that.
So, apart from waiting for any results that Benelli might obtain from the transcription, the only other way forward that Vitale could see working was to dog the footsteps of the English couple. After all, they clearly had possession of whatever the transcription had been written on, and if some hint relating to the decoding method was present on the parchment or inside the box, then presumably they would be able to use it, produce the plaintext version of the message, and then follow whatever clues it provided.
At present, through the tertiary working in the British police force, he had ordered only discreet surveillance, but it was clear that he would have to change this, to increase the intensity and the number of watchers, and have a team of men in Britain ready to move at a moment’s notice to follow the English couple wherever they went. Or possibly to do what he’d ordered when the whole thing had started: send a team into Jessop’s apartment with instructions to recover the ancient box, and the parchment, and kill them both.
But before he could even start to formulate his new orders, two things happened virtually simultaneously. His e-mail client was set up to check for messages every fifteen minutes, and at that moment the speakers attached to his desktop computer emitted a musical double tone to indicate that new mail had arrived. It was only one message, and as he glanced at the address of the sender, he realized it had been sent by the tertiary in Devon he had been thinking about only seconds before.
He clicked on the message to open it, but as he did so, his mobile phone rang. He checked the number before he swiped his finger across the screen of his phone to answer the call.
“Yes?” he said briefly and in English, recognizing the 44 country code.
“Do you know who I am?” the caller asked.
“Yes. I’ve just received your e-mail, though I haven’t read it yet.”
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. This morning I heard from the surveillance specialist I hired. As you ordered, he concealed a microphone in the target premises, and earlier today he listened to a very interesting conversation between the two subjects.”
“When was this?” Vitale demanded. “When did this conversation take place?”
“A little over an hour ago.”
“Then why did you not call me immediately?”
“I wanted to be sure of my facts before I spoke to you. The recording he made was uploaded to the cloud, so I had to download it before I could play it back. I think you’ll find it interesting, and I’ve attached it to the e-mail you now have. It’s the very last section that’s important.”
Vitale nodded, though this obviously conveyed nothing to the caller.
“Very well,” he said. “I’ll listen to the recording immediately. Kindly call me back in exactly fifteen minutes, when I’ll probably have some further orders for you.”
He opened the message, looked quickly at the text, and then double-clicked on the attachment, a single audio file. Because of what the tertiary had just told him, he ignored the first part of it and skipped through until he reached about the eighty percent mark. Then he pulled on a set of headphones and started listening.
After a few seconds, he pressed the fast-forward control to move more quickly through the recording, pausing to listen to the odd sentence every few moments. And then he reached one section of the audio file that he listened to in its entirety. And when he’d done so, he moved the cursor back and listened to it again. And then played it once more, just in case he’d missed anything.
When his mobile phone rang for the second time that morning, he took off the headphones to answer it.
“Have you heard anything further?” he demanded.
“Nothing yet,” the tertiary replied. “The operative conducting the surveillance is waiting for them to return to the apartment, so we shouldn’t have too long to wait.”
“Call me the moment you hear anything,” Vitale instructed, and then ended the call.
15
Dartmouth, Devon
“You said it would be easier to show me than tell me,” Robin said, walking into her office and flicking on the light. “So show me.”
“I will,” Mallory replied, picking up his computer bag and opening one of the side pockets. “Just give me a couple of minutes to sort myself out first.”
“I’ll give you more than that. I’ll go and make us some sandwiches. Ham and pickle okay for you?”
“Perfect,” Mallory said, producing what looked something like a chunky and old-fashioned mobile phone and a pair of lightweight headphones, which he put on, plugging the minijack into the device.
Across the room, Robin gave him a quick thumbs-up, then turned and left.
Mallory switched on the multifunction detector, chose silent operation so that he could find any bug in the room without anyone listening in through it being any the wiser, and made a quick circuit.
Immediately, the screen on the device illuminated, confirming his suspicion. Narrowing down the location took only a matter of seconds in the small room. He crouched down beside Robin’s printer and identified the location of the bug in the mains adapter plugged into the wall socket.
Then he stood up again, leaving the adapter in place. Before he did anything to it, he needed to confirm that it was the only bug in the property. Without saying a word, he walked around every room in the small apartment, then returned to the office.
To maintain the pretense that neither he nor Robin had any idea the conversation was being monitored, he moved about the room, probably generating enough noise to trigger the device, assuming that it was a voice-activated bug, then stepped over to the doorway.
“How are you doing out there?” he asked.
“Nearly ready.”
“We can eat in there. That’ll save getting bread crumbs all over the office.”
Mallory walked into the small kitchenette, where Robin was leaning against the counter and waiting for him, and closed the door softly behind him.
“One bug,” he said quietly. “There’s a suspiciously clean and
new-looking mains adapter plugged into one of your wall sockets, the one that feeds your printer.”
“You have no idea how irritating I find that,” Robin said. “The thought of some sleazy little git listening in to everything I say—that we say—in the office is terminally annoying. So, now you’ve found it, what are you going to do about it?”
“What we discussed, I think. That still seems to me to be the best option.” Mallory glanced around the kitchenette. “Did you make any sandwiches?”
“Of course not,” Robin snapped. “You’ve spent the morning filling your fat face with pastries and cakes and coffee, so the last thing I’m going to do is make you any more food, because you don’t need it. That conversation we had was just to let you check the office while I was out of the way.”
“Right. Okay, so we’ll give it a few minutes and then go back in and try to sow a few seeds of disinformation that will hopefully get the opposition chasing their tails somewhere that we aren’t.”
Five minutes later, they returned to the office.
“I’ve been really patient up to now,” Robin said, “so this had better be good. What have you found?”
“What I haven’t found,” Mallory replied, “is any way of deciphering the stuff that was written on that piece of vellum. There are just too many possible permutations and options. In fact,” he added, “I’m even wondering if that text is a complete red herring, just a piece of gibberish that doesn’t actually mean anything at all.”
“That makes no sense to me,” Robin said, ad-libbing her way through the basic script that Mallory had asked her to follow. “Why would they go to all the trouble of preparing a piece of text like that, hiding it in a wooden chest with the rest of the Templar Archive, and then burying it underneath a mountain in Switzerland?”
“Well, I suppose it may mean something, but there’s not much chance of our being able to decrypt it. But I think the important thing isn’t the vellum, but the wooden chest. And, in fact, not even the wooden chest itself but just the false bottom, because what I found on the underside of that looks to me remarkably like a map.”
“Are you serious? A map of what? Of where?”
“Right now, I’m not sure. It’s only a very basic illustration, just a series of lines cut into the wood of the false bottom of the chest. But I’m actually wondering if it might be Rome, because right in the center of the carving are what look like seven hills, with a castle or a tower drawn on top of them.”
“I didn’t think that the Templars had anything much to do with Rome,” Robin objected. “Apart from their connection to the pope and the Vatican, of course.”
“That’s true, but it still— Hang on a minute.” Mallory let his voice rise in obvious excitement. “I’ve been stupid. Of course it’s not Rome. But there’s another city that was really important to the Templars, especially after 1307, and that was also supposed to have been built on seven hills.”
“Where?”
“Tomar, in Portugal. I’m amazed I didn’t make the connection straightaway. It’s pretty much in the middle of the country, and was originally a Roman city called Sellium. The Templars were granted the land in the middle of the twelfth century and built a castle there that became their headquarters for the entire country. When the order was purged, Portugal was one of the nations that didn’t join in the campaign against the Templars and offered the remaining knights a safe haven. Then, in 1317 the Portuguese king created the Order of Christ, which was basically exactly the same as the Knights Templar but with a new name, a new uniform, a new flag, and immunity from persecution. The new order had a different symbol as well, but it was actually just the old Templar croix pattée with a plain white cross set into it as a kind of insert. And from what I’ve read, the repackaged Templars hadn’t lost their magic financial touch. The new order was later heavily involved with Henry the Navigator, and became immensely wealthy during the Portuguese age of exploration.”
“So, what you’re saying is that it would make very good sense for the Templars to have smuggled the contents of their various treasuries down to Portugal. I assume they would have known they would be safe in Portugal even before Philip’s men began their campaign of mass arrests throughout France?” Robin asked.
“I think the evidence is overwhelming,” Mallory said, nodding, “that the Templars knew about his plan well in advance. If they didn’t, it was a hell of a coincidence that most of the members of the order were nowhere to be found on that day in October 1307, and also that the majority of the treasuries were virtually bare. Don’t forget that the Templar strongholds were literally surrounded by potential enemies in every country in Western Europe, and I’m quite certain that they would have been well aware of what was going on all around them. And you’re right. The order would also have been making covert inquiries with any country that could have provided it with a safe haven, and that would certainly have included Portugal and probably England and Scotland as well.”
“So, do you think we’re now on the right track, that the Templar treasure is lying hidden somewhere near Tomar?” Robin asked, really getting into the spirit of the deception.
“This isn’t much of a map,” Mallory replied, “but that is what I think it means. The trouble is that there’s almost no detail, so I have no idea where we should start looking. But I think a good first step would certainly be to get out to Tomar and see what we can find there. And we’ll still keep trying to decipher the encrypted text on the parchment because, if it isn’t a red herring, it will hopefully provide more information about exactly where we should start looking.”
“Good idea. I really think we might be on the last lap of this quest now. So, what are you doing now?”
“My phone’s battery is starting to give me trouble, so I’ve got this external power pack thing that I carry around with me, but that’s flat as well, so I need to charge it up. Is it okay if I plug it in here?”
“Yes. Just pull the adapter out of the socket.”
“What about these two leads that are plugged into it?” Mallory asked.
“Don’t worry about them. One’s for the printer, and the other’s for the fan next to the desk, and I’m not using either at the moment.”
And with that, Mallory pulled the bugged adapter out of the socket. He was still holding his detector, and turned it on, pointing the aerial at the adapter in his hand. The screen of the detector remained completely blank, and he altered the way he was holding it so that Robin could see it well.
“Is that it?” she asked.
“That’s it. It’s obviously only mains powered—no backup battery—so we’re no longer broadcasting. I just hope we sounded natural, and that they take the bait.”
“I don’t know about the Dominicans, but all that stuff you said about the Templars setting up a new base in Portugal after 1307 and probably taking their treasure with them was really convincing. I almost believed it myself.”
Mallory grinned at her.
“It sounded believable because it’s true,” he said. “Obviously I have no idea whether or not that’s where the Templar treasure ended up, but it’s certainly one very real possibility. And it would be a bit ironic if it turned out we were right and the trail actually did lead us to Tomar. That would probably count as shooting ourselves in the foot, sending the Dominicans to a place that we have to go ourselves, and before we get there. But it was the best idea I could come up with at short notice.”
Mallory walked over to the desk, put the mains adapter on it, and began examining it.
“This is quite a sophisticated piece of kit,” he said after a couple minutes, “but I was wrong about it sending the output to a recording device somewhere nearby. There’s no radio transmitter built into the circuitry.”
He extracted a small piece of plastic from within the adapter and showed it to Robin.
“Do you recognize this?” he asked.
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“It looks like a SIM card from a phone.”
“That’s exactly what it is. This bug includes a cut-down circuit board from a mobile, allowing it to dial a specific number, most likely a mobile phone, obviously, the moment the microphone detects any sound. So as soon as we walked into the apartment, the bug would have called whoever had positioned it in here, and he would then have been able to listen to everything we said inside this room.”
“So you mean he could listen to our conversation, but not record it?”
Mallory shook his head.
“I’d be very surprised if he didn’t do both. It’s not that difficult to set up a mobile phone to record every conversation on it, and that would include an incoming call from a device like this. My guess is that the man doing the surveillance listened to what we said, recording it on his mobile at the same time, and then probably immediately uploaded it to a secure cloud storage somewhere so that whoever he’s working for could download it and listen to it themselves. And because we’re talking mobile phone technology, the man who planted this bug could be anywhere in the world, as long as he had a signal on his mobile phone and this SIM card had sufficient credit to make the call. It’s a clever device.”
“So, what are you going to do with it? Smash it up?”
“Certainly not. Because of the way we disabled this, there’s a good chance that the listeners will assume we did it entirely accidentally, literally unplugging their device to plug something else in. That means that if we want to pass them another message, to try a bit more misdirection, we can simply plug it back in and have another artificial conversation. So for the moment we should definitely keep it.”