by James Becker
“So?”
“So what?”
“So, what did you find? Obviously it wasn’t a carving on the inside of that box, so what was it? What have you really got?”
“Something very different,” Mallory said, “and after all this, I just hope I’m right.”
He walked around the desk and picked up the ironbound chest that they had recovered from inside the Swiss mountain. He put it on the desk and opened the lid.
“We’ve looked inside and outside this box several times,” he said, “and unless we’ve missed it there’s not a single deliberate mark anywhere on it. There’s nothing on the wood that I can see, and the metalwork is simply functional, not ornamental, and there’s no sign of anything that could be construed as a clue or message. But there is one thing about this chest that did strike me as being unusual. And it was this.”
He reached inside the box and took out the piece of ancient wood that had concealed the compartment at the bottom of the chest. It was blackened with age, but as he turned it in his hand, Robin could see that one side of it had been painted a dark brown color.
“You told me that it’s been painted,” she said. “So what? We thought that might have been done just to protect the piece of vellum.”
“That’s what I thought when I saw it,” Mallory replied, “until I realized that it didn’t make sense. As I said before, if it was genuinely intended to provide protection, then why wasn’t the same paint used on the rest of the hidden compartment? If you look in the chest you’ll see that all the other wood is unmarked and in its natural state. And I don’t know all that much about parchment or vellum, but I would assume that maintaining the ambient temperature and relative humidity of the place where it was stored would be far more important than painting the inside of the box they put it in. And one thing I do know about caves and caverns is that both the temperature and the humidity are usually stable.”
“You’re right about that. Vellum needs to be stored at a reasonably constant temperature and humidity. If the humidity is too low, it will get brittle and fragile, and if it’s too high then it may well develop mold or fungus. But painting one part of the storage compartment would have no effect at all on either factor. So the obvious question is, why did they do it?”
Mallory turned over the piece of wood in his hands, and then ran his fingernail along the edge of the painted area. Then he looked up at Robin and smiled.
“I was wrong about the paint,” he said, “because this isn’t paint at all.”
“Then what is it?”
“I think it’s a kind of wax, and to me that makes far more sense. Have you ever heard of a technique called steganography?”
16
Via di Sant’Alessio, Aventine Hill, Rome, Italy
“Sit down, Toscanelli,” Vitale instructed as his subordinate entered his office. “Then listen to this.”
Moments later, the sound of Robin Jessop and David Mallory talking together filled the room. The moment Toscanelli recognized their voices, his face clouded with anger and he visibly tensed, wondering what was coming next.
“I want to—” he began.
Vitale stopped the playback and glared across the desk at him.
“You’ve had more contact with these two than anyone else in the organization. I know all you want to do is kill them, but for the moment just sit there, shut up, and pay attention to their conversation. I want your opinion about something.”
Toscanelli relaxed slightly, and as the playback of the recording resumed he gave it his full attention.
Vitale played it all the way through to the end, the volume level of Mallory’s voice increasing markedly in the last few seconds before the recording abruptly ended.
“The tertiary who is coordinating the surveillance of the English couple sent that a few minutes ago. What do you think about it?”
Toscanelli wasn’t quite sure what Vitale was driving at.
“Tomar is an obvious possibility,” he ventured. “It’s well established that the order of heretics did seek shelter in Portugal.”
The exasperation in Vitale’s voice was unmistakable.
“I know that. We all know that. I didn’t ask you here for your opinion on the established and confirmed history of the Knights Templar. What I want is your opinion of the conversation between Mallory and Jessop. Do you think that it was genuine, or was it in some way scripted and intended to throw us off the scent? Listen to the important section one more time.”
Vitale used the controls on his computer to rewind the playback, cued it, and then started it again. Both men listened intently as the sounds of the English voices filled the room once more.
“So, what do you think?” Vitale asked.
“I really don’t know.”
“Now, why does that not surprise me? Do you think it’s possible that Mallory somehow or other found out the apartment was bugged and then he and Jessop performed that little scene so that we would send a team racing off to Tomar to start looking for the Templar treasure? Or was that a genuine conversation that accidentally ended up with Mallory disabling the bug? Because the bug has been off-line since he apparently pulled the mains adapter out of the socket. According to the tertiary, the surveillance operative tried to remotely reactivate the device a few minutes after that recording ended, but was unable to do so. He has been told to keep checking it, and if it comes back online we will be informed immediately. So let me ask you again. Do you think that was a genuine conversation or a setup?”
Toscanelli spread his hands in a gesture that clearly conveyed both his frustration and indecision. But before he could reply, there was a brisk double tap on the door, and moments later another member of the organization—short and stocky with black hair and a tanned complexion dominated by a nose that appeared to be badly broken and equally badly reset—walked into the office, carrying a laptop.
Vitale gestured to the other chair in front of his desk, and the man sat down, lifting the lid of his laptop as he did so and glancing at the display that sprang to life on the screen.
“So, Alessandro, what is your opinion, as Toscanelli here seems to have no idea at all?”
“It will be better and easier if I can show you.”
The new arrival stood up and placed the laptop on the end of Vitale’s desk, angling the screen so that it could be easily seen.
“You can look at this as well, Toscanelli,” Vitale instructed. “Get up and come round to this side of the desk.”
“As you instructed when you sent me the recording,” Alessandro said, “I’ve analyzed it using two different specialist software packages, both intended to be used to assess the results of polygraphs. Both gave broadly the same result, but it is perhaps easier to see on this one.”
The screen of the laptop showed a horizontal voiceprint-analysis display, and below that three further horizontal bands labeled—in English—“Stress,” “Hesitation,” and “Excitement” and at the bottom of the display a smaller box labeled “Analysis.”
“This is an audio-spectrum analyzer that uses a technique known as Layered Voice Analysis and samples over one hundred different parameters present in speech. It displays the three most important types of analysis as percentages in these three bands and then produces a single result, which is displayed in the box at the bottom of the screen. Basically the analysis program is designed to detect deception of any sort, and the result will be color-coded, green meaning no deception, amber possible deception, and red definite deception.”
He pressed one of the laptop keys and the display sprang to life, the sounds of the voices coming out of the speakers while the constantly moving audio spectrograph visually showed the sounds as a series of peaks and troughs. At the same time, the readings in the three horizontal bars flickered from left to right and back again as the software attempted to analyze the different parameters.
&
nbsp; “This is the part of the conversation where the Englishman is talking about Tomar and its importance to the Knights Templar. Note that the analysis box is displaying a solid green color, which means that no deception has been detected. This, of course, is exactly what we would expect, because what he is saying is established fact. I used this part of the conversation to provide a baseline for the analysis, a section where I could be sure he was telling the truth.
“A polygraph examiner,” Alessandro explained, “will begin a session by asking the subject a number of simple questions where there is no doubt about the answers to establish the range of responses. Things like the subject’s name, birthday, and job, which will all produce truthful responses, and then he or she will be told to tell lies in reply to a number of other questions. I didn’t have that luxury, obviously, so this was the best I could do.”
He stopped the playback and cued another section of the recording.
“When Mallory deduces that the carving he is describing is most probably a reference to Tomar, I would expect the level of excitement in his voice to increase, which it does, but notice that the level of stress has also risen, which indicates possible deception.”
Alessandro played that part of the recording and Vitale and Toscanelli watched as the analysis box on-screen flickered and then turned amber.
“But this is the most significant section,” Alessandro said, cuing another part of the recording. “This is right at the start of the conversation, where Mallory tells the woman that he has found a carving inside the wooden chest. You will see that the levels of stress and hesitation in his voice have both increased, and look at the analysis box.”
He played back the relevant part of the audio file, and immediately after Mallory described the carving of the map, the analysis box turned solid red and stayed that way for the next few seconds, until Alessandro stopped the playback.
“That shows definite deception,” he said.
“So, your conclusion is?” Vitale asked.
“It’s only a fairly short conversation, but to me the results are clear. Mallory probably did find something inside that chest, but whatever it was, it was not a carved map, and it almost certainly had nothing whatsoever to do with Tomar. In my opinion, this was a partially scripted conversation deliberately intended to throw us off the scent, and if that is correct, then the other conclusion is obvious.”
Vitale nodded.
“Exactly. Mallory must have known about the bug,” he said. “Thank you, Alessandro. We’ll take it from here.”
Vitale waited until the technician had left the room before he continued.
“Right, the first thing we’ll do is continue trying to decrypt the text Mallory and Jessop helpfully transcribed from the vellum, but we obviously do not have the clue that Mallory referred to in his previous conversation.”
“Are you sure that wasn’t just another piece of misdirection?”
“Yes. Alessandro checked that recording as well, and it showed no deception. We have no idea what Mallory found, but it is clear that he found something, and logically that something has to be related to the vellum. Presumably a way of decrypting the text, or at least some kind of hint that would allow him to start doing so.”
“So, what do you want me to do?” Toscanelli asked.
“At this precise moment, nothing,” Vitale said, “but you will be on a plane to London today, or tomorrow at the latest. The delay is because I don’t know how long it will take to get a diplomatic passport issued to you in a new name. Obviously you can’t use the name on your previous passport, because that will certainly be on the British government’s watch list.”
“We used a private jet before.”
“I know. I authorized it. But because of the shambles that that mission turned into, I’m not prepared to do that again. You’ll have a team of six men under you, but to keep a low profile two of them will fly out of Milan and two more out of Naples. Those four are already on the way to those two airports. You and the final pair will fly from Rome. All of you will have diplomatic passports, and each of you will have a loaded automatic pistol and two spare magazines, both fully loaded, in your carry-on bags. I do not expect these weapons to be used except as a last resort.”
Toscanelli looked markedly more cheerful at the prospect of getting up close and personal with Mallory and Jessop again. “And what are your orders?” he asked.
“I would have thought that was quite obvious,” Vitale said. “The two audio recordings obtained for us by the tertiary clearly show that the English couple has discovered something. They also show that Mallory was aware that he was under surveillance. I have no doubt that he and Jessop will move somewhere out of the town of Dartmouth very soon to start following whatever clue they have uncovered. We cannot afford to lose them. So you and your team are to get to Dartmouth as quickly as possible, get inside Jessop’s apartment, and recover whatever it is that Mallory has found, using whatever force you think is necessary.”
“And Mallory and Jessop themselves?” Toscanelli asked. “What about them?”
“As I believe the English sometimes say,” Vitale replied, “they are surplus to requirements once you have recovered the object or clue that they have found. So you can dispose of them—permanently—however you wish. The only criterion is that both you and whatever method or weapon you decide to use must under no circumstances be traceable back to us.
“Apart from that,” he added with a bleak smile, “you are free to enjoy yourself for as long as you like with either or both of them. Just remember that this time we must not fail. And they both must die.”
17
Dartmouth, Devon
“Steganography today is amazingly complex. The technique involves concealing a piece of classified information within something else that is clearly not in any way sensitive and normally appears to be quite innocent. One typical method is to take a classified document and reduce it enormously in size until it can be fitted within a single pixel in a photograph, an image that can then be sent or displayed quite openly. That’s just a development of a slightly older technique, pretty much Cold War stuff, that allowed a document to be concealed within a full stop at the end of a sentence. That was known as a microdot.”
“Yes,” Robin said, somewhat impatiently, “and I do know a bit about steganography. But whatever the Templars did, it was clearly nothing like that.”
“No,” Mallory agreed, “but the principle—the idea of basically hiding something in plain sight—goes way back into antiquity. Probably the most famous example involved a slave who was used to carry a crucial message from one place to another. He couldn’t be given a written message, because there was too much danger of him being intercepted, and the information was too important for him to try to memorize it. So his master ordered his head shaved, had the message tattooed on his scalp, and then sent the slave off to his destination once his hair had grown again. When he got there, he told the person he had been instructed to contact to shave his head so the message could be read. That’s pretty much classic steganography, the secret—the message—hidden in plain sight on the innocent carrier, the slave.”
“So, what steganographic technique do you think was used here? I presume it’s something to do with the paint—or the wax, I should say—on that piece of wood?”
“That’s what I’m hoping. Like you, I assumed that brown stain was paint until I ran my fingernail over it. Paint would have provided a hard and solid surface, but that was soft and my nail just dug into it. As soon as I did that, I remembered another ancient steganography technique.”
“And now I know where you’re going with that,” Robin said, interrupting him.
“You do?”
“Yes. Stop me when I go wrong. In the days before paper—or even papyrus—and ink, it was common for temporary messages, stuff that was important but only in the short term, to be written on w
ax tablets. They were flat pieces of wood with a shallow depression cut out and filled with wax. A stylus was used to write down the information, and when they’d finished, when the message was no longer important or they’d done whatever they were supposed to do, they could simply wipe a flat blade across the wax to erase the old message. The steganography bit was when an important message needed to be sent, and somebody realized they could use a wax tablet to do it, not on the wax but under it. They carved the message into the wood in the depression, then filled it with wax and wrote something innocuous on it that would arouse nobody’s suspicion. When the courier reached the person he was supposed to give the message to, he simply melted the wax off the tablet, allowing the concealed message to be read.”
Robin paused for breath and pointed at the length of wood that Mallory was still holding.
“So, is that what you think you’ve got there?” she asked. “Not a message hidden under another message written on wax, but just something carved into the wood and then hidden by a layer of wax?”
“Spot-on,” Mallory said. “Let’s see if I’m right.”
The ancient wood had darkened with age and felt immensely strong and solid, but even so they proceeded with caution. Mallory tried using a round-ended kitchen knife to lift off the layer of wax but quickly decided that this was not the best way to do it, because the blade could scratch the wood, and perhaps even damage whatever was concealed beneath the wax, possibly making the message indecipherable.
“I can’t think of anything that dissolves wax,” he said after a few minutes, “but if we can heat it, that will probably work. I don’t suppose you’ve got one of those blowtorch jobs in your kitchen cupboards, the ones chefs use to caramelize their creations?”
Robin shook her head.
“I’m certainly not a chef, and not even much of a cook, and I definitely don’t own anything like that. But I have got something that would be even better.”