The Templar Brotherhood

by James Becker

  “What’s that?” Mallory asked.

  “What every girl has in her bedroom or bathroom, dumbo. A hair dryer, obviously. Concentrated heat, focused on one spot, with no danger of a naked flame damaging the wood or even setting fire to it.”

  “Excellent. I should have thought of that,” Mallory admitted.

  A couple minutes later, with the top of Robin’s desk cleared and covered in sheets of newspaper, Mallory held the piece of wood steady while she moved the nozzle of the hair dryer over one small area of the wax, heating it gently. A faintly sweet and not-unpleasant odor filled the room as the wax started to warm up. They watched as the surface changed color, the dark brown, almost black, of the solid wax turning to a reddish brown shade as it heated up and began to melt.

  “That seems to be doing it,” Mallory said as the first drops of wax ran down the wood, Robin chasing them with the nozzle of the hair dryer to reveal wood of a much lighter color underneath.

  It wasn’t a quick process, because the moment Robin moved the hair dryer, the wax that was no longer directly receiving the heat from the device began to harden. After a few trial runs, they decided that the best way to do it was for Mallory to hold the wood horizontal while Robin eased the dryer’s nozzle vertically downward, moving slowly over the wax. That melted the top layer reasonably quickly, and by repeating the operation she ended up clearing a vertical strip about an inch wide every four or five minutes. Even so, it took well over half an hour before the vast majority of the wax was cleared from the ancient wooden board. But still, on the matrix of carved letters that slowly emerged as the wax was removed, a few final traces remained, requiring further gentle heating before every tiny patch of wax was melted off and the individual characters could be clearly seen.

  Then Robin unplugged the hair dryer and put it on the floor to cool, and they both looked carefully at what had been hidden beneath the layer of ancient wax.

  “That’s interesting,” Mallory said, “but I’m not entirely sure that it’s much help.”

  “Well, it must be. If it doesn’t provide some kind of a key to decode the encrypted text, what was the point of carving it into the wood and then hiding it in the chest?” Robin sounded quite indignant. “That doesn’t make any sense at all.”

  What they were looking at was a virtual block of letters, thirteen characters wide and six deep. The list began with S, E, U at the left-hand side of the top line and ended with N, I, S on the right of the bottom line. No sequence of letters seemed to form a word, apart from a handful that coincidentally formed short English words such as FOE and MET and RAN, and the one thing they were both certain about was that if any words were included in the sequence, they would be in Latin. And there appeared to be no indication as to how these letters could help decode the information written on the sheet of vellum.

  But Robin had to be right. That really didn’t make sense, not least because the wood had actually formed one part of the hiding place for the vellum, and it was simply inconceivable that what they had just found and the encrypted text weren’t linked in some way. They would just have to work out what that way was.

  “You’re right,” Mallory said, “so let’s look at what we’ve got. I’ll do a quick analysis of the letters and see if that helps.”

  He took a pencil and a fresh piece of paper and copied the block of letters onto it. Then he counted all the occurrences of each letter—a basic frequency analysis—and showed Robin the result.

  “There are twenty different letters in that block of text, and the commonest is E, which occurs nine times. And that is right in accordance with that frequency table I downloaded from the Internet, and the one you’ve been using as well. The letter most frequently found in Latin is E. Then it all starts going a bit odd, because the next commonest letters are R and A, both appearing eight times, and they’re followed by O, with seven. All the other letters in the list occur five times or less.”

  “Interesting, I suppose,” Robin said. “Of course, that’s a really small sample, and the one thing it obviously isn’t is plaintext, so frequency analysis is most unlikely to work anyway. Though it might be indicative that the commonest letter turned out to be E.”

  “I wonder if the layout is in some way important. There are thirteen columns of letters, and the purging of the Templar order began on the thirteenth of October 1307.”

  “I think that’s a bit of a stretch,” Robin said dismissively. “Let me have a look at that.”

  She took the paper Mallory had been working on and studied it for a few moments. Then she passed it back to him and drew an oval ring around the last nine letters.

  “Two things,” she said. “First, that is a plaintext Latin word, but spelled backward. SINOMOLOS is SOLOMONIS backward, and that translates as ‘of Solomon.’ Of course, that could just be a coincidence, like these apparent short English words that we saw in the block of letters when we first looked at it, but as it’s nine letters long that’s a lot less likely. Second, I know about the number thirteen and the Templars, but I think there’s a more practical reason for the layout of these letters. Thirteen is half of twenty-six, and there are twenty-six letters in the alphabet, so I think that what we’re looking at is a series of code words that we can use to decipher the encrypted text. It’s just a really rather complicated Atbash cipher. What we need to do is write out the alphabet as usual and then copy these letters underneath it, in three lines of twenty-six letters each rather than six lines of thirteen letters. Why don’t you try it?”

  “SOLOMONIS,” Mallory repeated, looking at the word Robin had found. “That’s a really obvious link to the Templars, because when they were based in Jerusalem they were given quarters in what is now the Al-Aqsa Mosque. And that building had been erected on what everyone then believed—and in fact many still do believe—to be the site of the ancient Temple of Solomon, the Templum Solomonis in Latin. And that was not only their physical base in Jerusalem but also the building that gave its name to the order: officially the Pauperes commilitones Christi Templique Salomonici, or the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon. The order’s full proper name also included the Latin word Hierosolymitanis at the end, which translates as ‘of Jerusalem,’ but that’s normally ignored. And I’ve just noticed that to the left of the word SINOMOLOS or SOLOMONIS is PMET. Those are the first four letters of the word Templum, but spelled backward.”

  He looked at Robin and smiled.

  “I think you may have cracked this,” he said.

  18

  Heathrow Airport, London

  The orders Vitale had issued had been clear and simple. When the first two of his men arrived at London’s Heathrow Airport after the flight from Milan had landed, they walked through customs and immigration with barely even a pause, thanks to their diplomatic passports, and went immediately, and separately, to two of the car hire desks in the terminal. Each man hired a fast and expensive sedan, one a BMW and the other an Audi, and then they bought a drink each and sat together at a table in one of the cafés to wait for the arrival of the next scheduled flight from Naples.

  A few minutes after that aircraft touched down, the man who had hired the BMW shook hands with his colleague and then went down to the arrivals hall to wait. Just like the other two, the pair of Dominicans on that flight cleared the formalities very rapidly and were the first passengers from it to emerge into the hall, each with only a carry-on bag. The two new arrivals were met by their colleague, paused only to buy takeaway coffees in Styrofoam mugs, and then all three of them made their way to the car park and the vehicle they had hired.

  Fifteen minutes later, they were heading west away from Heathrow in the BMW 5 Series toward the M25 orbital motorway. That would take them south to the M3, the road they would use to reach the West Country. The driver was following the map display on the satnav and the verbal instructions delivered—in Italian, thanks to the front-seat passenger sp
ending a few minutes fiddling about with the settings on the device as they found their way out of the airport—by the young woman who apparently lived inside it.

  While they headed toward their destination, the two passengers removed shoulder holsters from their carry-on bags and put them on under their jackets, took out their pistols, loaded them, and fitted the weapons in the holsters. The men also had suppressors for their Berettas, but those were too big to fit on the pistol whilst it was in the holster, so they put them in their pockets. There would be plenty of time to attach them to the weapons when they reached their destination.

  Back at Heathrow, sitting in the café in the terminal building, the other Dominican enforcer placed his carry-on bag on the table, where he could keep an eye on it, and walked over to the counter to order a meal and another drink. He was waiting for a call or message from Rome to tell him when Marco Toscanelli and the other two men would be boarding their aircraft to London Heathrow at Leonardo da Vinci–Fiumicino Airport, but so far he’d heard nothing.

  It looked as if it could be a very long day.

  19

  Dartmouth, Devon

  Mallory took a clean sheet of paper and quickly wrote out the full twenty-six-letter alphabet in a horizontal line across the top, putting in horizontal and vertical grid lines to keep each letter separate. Then he copied out the thirteen letters of the first line of the text block underneath it, ending at the letter M, and then added the thirteen letters from the second line, placing them below the letters from N to Z. He repeated the process with the remaining four lines, to produce an alphabet with a vertical line of three letters underneath each plaintext letter.

  “That’s good,” Robin said, looking over his shoulder, “and it definitely works, because of what you spotted. Just to the left of the reversed SOLOMONIS is MULPMET, which is obviously TEMPLUM spelled backward.”

  “I’ll do the same thing with the rest of it,” Mallory said. “See if anything else makes sense if I reverse the order of the letters.”

  It didn’t take long, and the result was impressive, at least to Mallory.

  “These are all names written backward,” he said triumphantly, “and all the names are directly related to the Templars. The founders of the order were Hugues de Payens and another eight French noblemen. Knights, in fact. Two of them were brothers and all nine were related to one another either by blood or by marriage. The first six letters of this block of text spell HUGUES backward. The other founding members were Godfrey de Saint-Omer, Archambaud de Saint Agnan, Geoffrey Bison, a knight called Rossal, Payne de Monteverdi, André de Montbard, and another knight, named Gondamer. And the other names written backward in this piece of text are GODFREY, ARCHAMBAUD, GEOFFREY, ROSSAL, PAYNE, ANDRE, and GONDAMER.”

  Mallory paused and tapped the piece of paper with his finger.

  “Nobody knows the identity of the ninth founding knight,” he continued, “or at least, they didn’t until now. Some writers have pushed the idea that it might have been Count Hugh of Champagne, though the historical record shows that he didn’t join the order until his third visit to the Holy Land, in 1125, six years after it was formed. But this last word spelled backward is BERNARD, so either that was the name of the ninth knight or, just possibly, it’s a reference to Bernard of Clairvaux, who was the nephew of André de Montbard and the most important clergyman of the time to the Templars, because he was orchestrating a campaign to allow for the acceptance of the order by the Catholic Church.”

  “That seems pretty conclusive,” Robin agreed, “and I think it’s interesting that the alphabet the writer of this was using contained all twenty-six letters, rather than the twenty-three that were in use until the Middle Ages. Nobody actually knows when the number of letters in the alphabet was fixed, but certainly it had happened by the end of the fifteenth century. Later on, it might be worth getting a piece of the vellum radiocarbon-dated, because that would help clarify when the change took place.”

  Mallory was still studying the grid of letters that they had uncovered and he had written out. After a few seconds, he tossed the paper back onto the desk and looked at Robin.

  “Believe it or not,” he said, “I’m not sure how this helps us. We could probably have deduced most of this just by applying frequency analysis to the encrypted text, and we still have the problem of working out which plaintext letter is represented by which letter or letters in the ciphertext. Take the plaintext E, for example. According to this table, that could be represented by the letters U, G, or R. The problem is that those three letters also represent a lot of other plaintext letters because of all the duplications in the code words, in the proper names, that they chose. So as well as decoding as E, the ciphertext letter U can mean C, L, or O. G can also mean C, D, or M, and R is potentially the most confusing, because that can stand for a total of seven different letters. As well as E, it can mean H, I, K, R itself, V, or Z. We can still do this, but it’s going to take us a hell of a long time.”

  He took another piece of paper and wrote out the word MESSAGE.

  “Let me show you what I mean. If I encrypt that using this ciphertext, and just taking the first option from the code words each time, I end up with GUAASYU. But because of all the duplicates in the ciphertext, when I try to decode it, that produces C, D, E, and M for the letter G, and C, E, L, and O for the U. Assuming that we’re looking for an English word, we might guess that it begins with CL, like CLOUD, or maybe EL, like ELF or ELEPHANT. Alternatively we could deduce that the second letter is a vowel, the E or the O, so the decode could be CE, DE, ME, CO, DO, or MO, giving us eight different possibilities in just those two letters. Factoring in the additional complications, such as the fact that the encryptor had at least two and usually three different ciphertext choices for each letter of every word, and that the plaintext was written in archaic Latin, not English, I think it could easily take months to make any kind of sense of this.”

  “So, what you’re saying is that we’ve achieved nothing,” Robin said.

  “Not exactly. We have achieved something, just not very much, and certainly not as much as I’d hoped. I can’t help feeling that we’re missing something fairly obvious.”

  “Like what?”

  “If I knew that,” Mallory replied, “we wouldn’t be missing it.”

  For two or three minutes, neither of them spoke, Mallory again examining the grid of letters carved into the ancient wooden plank, while Robin studied the alphabet and code words he had transcribed on the paper, and the results of the frequency analysis that the computer program had produced.

  “I don’t know if this is significant,” she began hesitantly, “but there is a kind of mismatch between the frequency analysis and this grid of code words.”

  “There is? What?”

  “It’s in the number of letters. The frequency-analysis program produced results for only eighteen letters, but there’s a total of twenty different letters in this grid.”

  Mallory looked at the sheets of paper she was studying and nodded agreement.

  “You’re right,” he said, “but that really doesn’t make sense. I mean, it would be reasonable to assume that there would be very few occurrences of the letter Z in the plaintext Latin document, but the ciphertext equivalents are D, R, and S, and they’re duplicated several times.” He thought for a moment, then nodded again. “There’s only one way that that can work. Whoever did the encryption must only have used eighteen of the letters in the code words, not the full twenty, but I have no idea how or why they did that.”

  “I agree with you about the ‘how,’ but the ‘why’ seems fairly obvious. As you’ve just shown, there are so many duplicates that deciphering any word is going to be very difficult. Whoever encrypted this must have done it with the intention that a Templar or some member of the order could later decipher it, so they must have done something to simplify the encryption, though right now we can’t see what it w
as.”

  Together, they looked carefully at the wooden plank, but apart from the grid of letters it was devoid of any kind of marking. Then Robin retrieved the vellum from her safe and put that on the desk. Mallory reached out to unfold it so that they could look at the original text, but Robin stopped him with a gesture.

  “Hang on a minute,” she said. “What’s that symbol on the front of it? It looks like a checkerboard design.”

  Mallory looked at the faint and faded image she was indicating and shook his head.

  “I think it’s just a form of decoration,” he said. “I’ve seen it before in Templar buildings, and it’s a repeating pattern of black and white squares. The most likely explanation is that it’s a representation of the beauséant, the Templar vexillum belli, their battle flag, which in its simplest form was just a black square above a white square.”

  “You could be right, but don’t you notice anything else about that pattern?”

  “It’s like a small checkerboard, that’s all.”

  “It is,” Robin agreed, “but can you see that it’s got three horizontal lines containing the black and white squares, but also a top line that has no black squares at all?”

  “It’s faint, but I can see that, yes. So what?”

  “Just a wild idea, but suppose that’s a kind of aide-mémoire to show which letters should be used in the ciphertext. Imagine that you write the alphabet along the top line, and then only use those letters that correspond to the black squares. Or just the white squares. I don’t know.”

  “I see what you mean,” Mallory said. “So, the letter A would be encoded by S or N, B only by F, and so on. Let’s try that.”

  He drew another alphabet, and this time he only put the checkerboard pattern of letters into the squares below it.