by James Becker
“You told us to find a medieval chest, any ancient documents, and anything that might be a transcription or a decryption of a piece of encrypted text. In the chest there’s a piece of parchment or vellum that’s in good condition, with a very clear text written on it, and a piece of wood that appears to have formed a false bottom in the chest, and which also has a block of letters carved into it. I also picked up a handful of papers covered in handwritten letters and words, which I think are part of the transcription they did. I couldn’t see anything else that seemed useful in the room, and I did check every other room in the apartment. It didn’t take long, because it’s not very big.”
Toscanelli nodded.
“That’s good, because I think you found everything we need, everything that our experts back in Rome will require.”
“So, where to now?” the driver asked.
“We need to send everything to Rome as quickly as possible, so find somewhere quiet where we can park the car and take the photographs we need.”
“According to the satnav, there’s a castle down at the southern end of the town. Will that do?”
“Listen to me,” Toscanelli snapped. “I don’t care where we go. Just find somewhere quiet.”
Without another word, the driver moved the car away from the curb, navigated his way around the complex one-way system of narrow streets that get jammed with visitors to the town every summer, and then headed south, following the road beside the river. A quarter of an hour later, he stopped the car in the parking area close to the castle itself. There was only a handful of other vehicles there, all empty, and he chose a spot at one end, where they could open the trunk of the Audi and not be overlooked by anybody.
The area was dominated not by the castle, but by the impressive bulk of the Saint Petrox Church, which loomed up above and behind the fortification. Dating from about the twelfth century, when it possibly began life as a monastery dedicated to Saint Peter, the huge gray stone tower of the church, topped by crenellated battlements, was an imposing sight. The castle itself was a comparatively small structure, but in a good state of repair, perched on the rocks that marked the end of the headland and, strategically, on one of the narrowest points of the river. Control of that location would dominate the river and would imply control of all the traffic on that waterway. Built at the end of the fourteenth century to defend against a possible attack by the French, the fortress had been equipped with muzzle-loading cannon, including one heavy cannon capable of sinking a ship, possibly the first time this particular kind of weapon had been installed in a British castle. As a further refinement, the entrance to the river could be blocked in time of war by a heavy chain that ran between the castle and the opposite side of the river, an indication of the importance of the town and harbor.
Not that Marco Toscanelli had the slightest interest in his surroundings, except as a private place where he could take the photographs he needed. Within a few seconds of the vehicle stopping, his men had lifted the medieval chest out of the trunk and placed it on the ground, where Toscanelli snapped half a dozen pictures with a small but high-specification digital camera. Then he opened the chest up, took out the papers, the sheet of vellum, and the piece of wood, and photographed all of them several times from multiple angles to ensure that all the text on the vellum and the block of letters—which he presumed were code words of some sort—had been clearly recorded.
Then he opened his computer bag, took out a laptop and pressed the START button, removed the data card from the camera, and placed it in the slot on the computer to transfer all the images to the laptop. Once he’d done that, he checked each image to ensure that the transfer had been flawless and the images themselves were perfectly clear.
Once he was satisfied with the photographs, he selected the best and clearest images from the fifty or so pictures he had taken, attached the first of them to an e-mail, and then wrote a short message to Silvio Vitale explaining briefly what had happened. Then, aware of the limitations of all e-mail systems in terms of message size, he prepared half a dozen additional e-mails that each contained only some of the photographs. He encrypted all the messages using one of the standard ciphers employed by the Dominicans, then glanced around the car park.
“You, Cesare,” he said. “There’s a café just over there near the castle. Go and see if they have Wi-Fi.”
The heavily built Italian strode quickly across the car park, looked at the handful of signs on the windows and doors of the establishment, then turned round and walked back.
“They have,” he said. “For customer use only.”
“Then we’ll be customers,” Toscanelli decided. “There are five of us,” he added, “so I’ll go in there with Cesare, and you three can follow in a couple of minutes.”
Toscanelli picked a table well away from the other clients of the establishment, took a seat, and opened up his laptop while Cesare stood at the counter, ordering drinks and something to eat. The Wi-Fi was fast, and although the size of all the messages was large because of the photographs attached to them, they were all transmitted pretty quickly.
“They’ve gone,” Toscanelli said, and closed the lid of the computer before reaching across to pick up the coffee that Cesare had bought.
“So, now what do we do?” the other man asked.
“We’ve no idea where Mallory and Jessop are right now, so there’s nothing we can do about finding them for the moment. Vitale will have to get one of our tertiaries to track them, using the traffic cameras that seem to infest Britain. That will tell us where they’ve been, but not necessarily where they are, and obviously they don’t need to produce identification to stay in a hotel in this country. Our best bet is to trace them through credit card transactions, but even that will be slow and unreliable. Until we get some kind of a positive lead, we’ll have to forget about them.”
“You mean, we’ll just have to sit around and wait?”
“Yes, but hopefully our experts will work out what that encrypted message on the vellum means very quickly, and once they do, then we should be ahead of the game and be able to get to wherever the first clue is located quicker than Mallory and Jessop. And if we can do that, then all we have to do is wait for them to walk into whatever building or site the clues lead them to. Once we’ve disposed of them, we can take our time in following the rest of the trail.”
“You’ve had dealings with them before, haven’t you?” Cesare said.
Toscanelli’s expression changed markedly.
“I have,” he said, “and up to now they’ve been lucky. But this time luck won’t come into it. We have all the information that they have, and far more expertise back in Rome than the two of them have between them. This time we will beat them to the prize, and they will die. And that is a promise.”
27
Bristol, Somerset
Putting some distance between themselves and any possible pursuit seemed like a really good idea, so as the daylight faded with the approach of evening, Robin switched on the headlights and drove on, keeping her speed just a fraction below the legal limit, and with both her and Mallory watching with total concentration for any indication that the Dominicans might have picked up their trail again.
They turned onto the M5 motorway just outside Exeter and drove north until they reached Portishead, just outside Bristol. That looked like a good enough location to go to ground, close to a city with a population of around half a million people, and with fast and easy access to the motorway network. From there, motorways ran west into South Wales, east to London, and north up to the Midlands, and the normal trunk roads provided a huge number of other routes they could take. Finding them in that area would have been next to impossible, or so they hoped.
Robin picked a hotel that offered secure underground parking, and half an hour after they’d left the motorway they were sitting side by side on a large double bed in the hotel room, both of them studyin
g the translation that Robin had produced.
“I see what you mean,” Mallory said. “Plenty of information, and that stuff about de Molay and what he did when he learned about Philip the Fair’s plot is fascinating from a historical perspective, because it proves beyond any doubt that the Templars did know about the mass arrests in advance. As I said, there’s plenty of information, but not much in the way of specifics that would be of any use to us.”
“Well, we can’t just fly up to Bergen or Copenhagen or somewhere and start wandering about, looking for buried treasure, with a couple of shovels and a pickax. That obviously isn’t going to work. So what are we going to do?”
“I don’t believe that the author of this text would be so vague that there would be no indication where we should be looking. There must be some kind of clue embedded in it, and it’s just something we haven’t seen yet. Or perhaps it’s something we haven’t understood properly. And I was just wondering about that ‘islands of the north’ reference. There is one enduring mystery that’s been linked with the Templars by some researchers, but I really hope that it’s nothing to do with our quest, because if it is, then we’ve already failed. Have you ever heard of Oak Island?”
“I don’t think so,” Robin replied. “Where is it? And what is it? Apart from being an island, I mean.”
“Obviously it’s an island—the clue is in the name. It’s located off the shore of Nova Scotia in Mahone Bay in Canada, and ever since the end of the eighteenth century people have been digging there, looking for buried treasure. That’s not unusual, of course. There are reputed sites of buried treasure all over the world, but what makes Oak Island different are the defenses that some unidentified group of people put in place there to make sure that whatever they’d buried stayed safe and undisturbed. You’ll find sites all over the Internet devoted to the island and the so-called Money Pit, and there are all sorts of theories about who constructed it and what may be hidden there, but the reality is that nobody actually knows.
“Briefly, in the summer of 1795 a teenager named Daniel McGinnis landed on Oak Island and found a shallow circular depression in the ground and a tree right next to it with a branch on it that either had a pulley attached—according to some stories—or looked as if it could have been used to mount a pulley, because of the way the other branches had been cut back. There were rumors of pirate treasure being buried in the area, and so McGinnis returned home and then went back to the island with some friends to excavate the depression. The truly bizarre aspects of this story concern what they found when they started digging.
“Without going into too much detail, they found a layer of flagstones about two feet down and immediately assumed that they were on the verge of making a fabulous discovery. They kept on digging, and about ten feet below the surface they hit a layer of oak logs. They dug further still, but didn’t find any treasure. What they did find was another oak platform at about twenty feet down and another one at thirty feet down. At that stage they abandoned the excavation, but they came back nearly a decade later with more men and better equipment to continue the dig. And they found the same thing. Oak platforms every ten feet all the way down to ninety feet, plus three other anomalous layers: charcoal at forty feet, putty at fifty feet, and coconut fiber at sixty feet.”
“Hang on a minute,” Robin interrupted. “That doesn’t make sense. You don’t get coconut trees in Nova Scotia. They only grow in the tropics, so where did the coconut fiber come from?”
“Nobody knows. And that’s not the only thing about the Money Pit that doesn’t make sense. Also at the ninety-foot mark, or maybe at eighty feet down because accounts vary, the searchers recovered a stone bearing strange inscriptions. There are drawings and replicas of the inscriptions on various websites, but as far as I’m aware there’s no way of telling whether or not these images are accurate. If they are, they really don’t make any sense. They’re mainly what look like mathematical symbols, drawings of geometric shapes—most of them triangles—and about half a dozen shapes that could be letters. There have been some attempts to translate the inscription, including one that read, ‘Forty feet below, two million pounds lie buried.’ But the results aren’t checkable because nothing has actually been found there, so nobody has any idea whether or not this decrypted message is accurate. There’s also some doubt as to whether the message that was apparently decrypted was the one carved on the stone. And there’s another problem with it as well.”
“This is beginning to sound ridiculously similar to what we’ve been involved in, although we have had some tangible successes,” Robin said. “So, what was the other problem with the stone?”
“One reason for the confusion over the translation is that the first mention of the stone is in a newspaper article from 1862—that’s over half a century after the date it was supposed to have been discovered—but in another article published the following year the reporter stated that the stone had been built into the chimney of an old house located near the site of the pit. Sometime later in the nineteenth century, the stone was apparently removed and taken to Halifax, where another expert deciphered the inscription as reading, ‘Ten feet below are two million pounds buried.’ Exactly who these two unnamed men were or what fields they were supposed to be experts in has never been established.
“At the beginning of the twentieth century, what was claimed to be the same stone was in the possession of a bookbinding company in Halifax, and it was described as being a type of very hard basalt. One complication was that by this time there were apparently no characters visible on the stone, and the unlikely explanation given was that the bookbinder had used the stone for many years as a firm base on which to beat leather. Most people are very doubtful that this process would be sufficiently damaging to the stone to eliminate all the characters. When the bookbinder’s business closed, this stone apparently vanished. So the actual whereabouts of this stone can’t be established, nobody knows if it was actually the original stone, and there is no proof that the inscription displayed on replicas and in drawings is what was on the original piece of rock.”
“It sounds to me as if the stone might have been a bit of a red herring—if any stone can acquire such fishy characteristics. So, what happened to the excavation? The people doing the excavation had got down to ninety feet, but what happened then?”
“Basically, they triggered a booby trap. They carried on digging below ninety feet, but water started to enter the pit, and when the diggers returned the following day the water level in the excavation was only thirty-three feet below the top. They tried pumping, but that didn’t work. In fact, it had no effect at all on the level of water in the pit, and that turned out to be a very big clue. They tried digging a parallel tunnel a short distance away from the original. They excavated down to about one hundred feet, and then decided to dig a horizontal tunnel to link up with the original, apparently not realizing what was likely to happen. The moment they broke through, the new tunnel flooded to the same level as the original excavation. With no obvious way of getting rid of the water, they abandoned the digging for some forty-five years.”
“Interesting stuff,” Robin commented, “but I don’t really see how it relates to the Knights Templar. Unless I’m missing something.”
“It doesn’t, or not directly, anyway. I mentioned a booby trap. Later investigation revealed that there were hidden tunnels linking the Money Pit with a bay known as Smith’s Cove, and that was why pumping had no effect, because the water filling the pit came directly from the sea. But that wasn’t all. Whoever constructed the Money Pit had built an artificial beach at the cove and constructed a drainage system that covered almost fifty yards of that beach with a series of channels dug into the clay subsoil. These channels had been filled with rocks and covered in eel grass and coconut fiber, all of which acted as a filtration system that allowed the channels to remain clear of debris and silt and so allowed water to flow freely. These channels met inla
nd from the beach and all of them fed into a sloping stone-lined channel that led from that point to the Money Pit, which was about five hundred feet away, and joined it at about one hundred feet below ground level.
“It was an extremely impressive feat of engineering, way beyond anything that any pirate could have achieved, and it would have taken weeks, perhaps even months, to construct. And that’s one reason why some people have suggested that the site might be where the last remnants of the Knights Templar order buried their huge treasure. Either that, or it must have been designed and constructed by a whole team of engineers and workmen, and that in turn suggests the probable involvement of a government. But that doesn’t really make sense. Why would any government decide to bury something hundreds of feet down underneath an uninhabited island, when they could more easily construct a vault on some piece of land they owned and lock away whatever they were trying to hide in that? At least the Templar theory makes sense if it was their vast reserves of assets, their treasure, that they were concealing.”
“Well, we do know that the Templars had impressive engineering skills. That’s quite true, and we’ve had personal experience of some of those. But is there any evidence that they knew the North America continent even existed? After all, we’re talking about a period well over a century before Columbus set out to find his route to the East Indies, and kind of stumbled across America on the way.”
“To be pedantic about it,” Mallory pointed out, “Columbus never saw any part of North America. On all three voyages he bounced around various Caribbean islands, and remained convinced until the day he died that he was actually sailing around previously undiscovered islands of the East Indies. But even if he had stepped ashore in what is now North America, he was a long way from being the first European to set foot there. The Vikings reached the area in the tenth century, and established a colony in Greenland that lasted for almost half a millennium, and another one at a place called L’Anse aux Meadows at the northern end of Newfoundland. That was discovered in 1960, and it’s the most important Viking settlement so far discovered in North America. But there is some evidence that the Vikings weren’t the first, either, and that it was actually the Irish who discovered America, but until now that’s not been proven beyond any doubt.”