by James Becker
“I didn’t know that,” Robin said. “But we seem to have rather drifted away from the Money Pit. What happened next?”
“Oh, yes. After that, the story turns into a bit of a bugger’s muddle. Numerous groups, each convinced that they knew exactly what they were doing and how to do it, got involved in the act. The whole area filled up with half-dug tunnels and new pits, to the extent that it became almost impossible to pinpoint where the original Money Pit was located. Then a second flood tunnel, taking water from the South Shore Cove, was discovered in 1899, and that new discovery lent obvious weight to the belief that something of huge value or crucial importance simply had to be buried somewhere underneath Oak Island. Whoever had constructed the pit and its defenses wouldn’t have gone to all that trouble unless the value of the buried object justified it.
“The excavations have continued, right up to the present day, but the people who are there now are employing modern machinery of various sorts and, because of the problems of actually digging down into the pit, several boreholes have also been drilled. One of them, drilled at the end of the nineteenth century, went down quite deep. At a depth of about two hundred feet, it apparently penetrated the roof of a concrete vault made from walls over six inches thick and with a height of about seven feet. Analysis of the substances the drill bit cut through included wood, soft metal of various sorts, and what was rather coyly referred to as an unknown substance, whatever that means. Allegedly, the drill bit also brought up a tiny piece of parchment, possibly sheepskin, on which two letters were written, the first one being a V, U, or W, and the second one the letter I.
“It’s often difficult to separate fact from fiction in this kind of case, but far more recently a company called the Triton Alliance drilled a borehole known as 10-X in 1976. This went down over two hundred feet and entered some kind of a cavity. A camera was lowered down into the borehole, and according to some reports, images of a severed human hand, a human body—number of hands unknown—some discarded tools, and three alleged treasure chests were seen. Divers were sent down, but saw nothing because of poor visibility, and later the roof of the cavern or whatever they were exploring collapsed. But as far as I know, at least one team of treasure hunters is still out there, still digging away hopefully.”
“So, what do you think? Is Oak Island genuinely the last resting place of the Templar treasure? And does that mean we’re just wasting our time here?”
“As I said, I really hope not, because even if we could get to the island, there’d be no chance that the two of us would somehow magically be able to get down to the bottom of the flooded Money Pit and find what’s down there. Not if all these other teams, with all their equipment, have so far failed. And although they’ve not found anything in terms of treasure—apart from three links of a gold chain that were supposed to have been recovered back in 1849 and that subsequently vanished—they have recovered a few artifacts that could help date the construction. Some of the worked wood found on the island and presumably used by the original builders was carbon-dated and returned an age of about two hundred and fifty years; a few handwrought nails have been found, and also a pair of wrought iron scissors. These were identified as being Spanish American, and had most likely been made in Mexico about three hundred years ago.
“None of that’s conclusive, obviously, because they could be contaminants, objects left at the site at a much later date, but the commonality in the ages of the finds that could be dated does at least suggest that the Money Pit was most probably built about three hundred years ago, roughly at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and only about one hundred years before McGinnis stumbled across the shallow depression in the ground that started this treasure hunt.”
“And that’s realistically about four hundred years too late for it to be the Knights Templar who constructed it,” Robin said. “Right. So it’s an intriguing mystery that might never be solved, if what you’re telling me is correct, simply because there’s a good chance that whatever was buried there will never be recovered. So, with that out of the way, let’s try and work out where we need to go and what we need to do.”
Mallory looked at her in some surprise.
“I thought you said—or at least you implied—that there was nothing in the text on the vellum that told us where to go. Or did I miss something?”
“Yes and no, really. There is what I think is a kind of clue. In fact, there are three phrases that might well be clues, but none of them really makes sense to me.”
She took a pencil and drew a kind of circle around each of the phrases she had identified in her translation of the decrypted Latin as potential clues and pointed the three of them out to him.
Mallory stared at the few words in each part of the translation and then shook his head.
“I absolutely agree with you there,” he said. “Not one of them makes any sense to me, either.”
28
Exeter, Devon
When his mobile phone rang, Toscanelli answered it immediately.
“Toscanelli.”
“Just for a change, Toscanelli, you and your team seem to have done a reasonably competent job.” Silvio Vitale’s tone was unusually warm.
“Thank you.”
“I’m not, of course, referring to the gunplay in Dartmouth. That was utterly stupid and achieved absolutely nothing, and I can assure you that as soon as Pietro gets back to Rome he will be sorry that he gave the order to open fire. Do not, by the way, tell him that. I am keen to interview him personally.”
Toscanelli shivered slightly, because he knew precisely what Vitale meant by that.
“Where are you now? And what are you doing?” Vitale asked.
“We had no idea where the next phase of this quest would take us, so we’ve checked into a hotel in Exeter, in Devon, where we have good access to the British motorway system. We’ve been here about two hours, and Pietro and his colleague arrived thirty minutes ago after getting rid of the hire car—which the British police are probably already looking for—and obtaining another vehicle. We are now awaiting your further orders, and we can move out at a moment’s notice.”
“Good. Remain where you are tonight, unless I call you again. I have a team working on the information you sent back to me, and according to Benelli the decryption has already begun. It will probably take longer than you would expect, because there are a large number of duplicates and so even with knowledge of the block of code words the process involves a fair degree of trial and error. But we are getting there, and he is confident that we will be able to read the entire decrypted text tonight, or tomorrow at the latest. Keep your mobile phone with you at all times, switched on and fully charged, because you may well have to act extremely quickly once we know what the text says. Don’t forget that Mallory and Jessop”—Vitale almost spat the names—“have had access to this information for significantly longer than we have, so they may already be well ahead of you.”
Toscanelli opened his mouth to reply, but immediately realized that Vitale had ended the call. He shrugged, put the phone on the bedside table, and plugged in the charging lead.
Then he turned his attention back to the packet of largely flavorless sandwiches and alarmingly colored crisps that composed his evening meal, along with a mug of instant coffee he’d made at the so-called hospitality station on the other side of the hotel bedroom.
It was an almost entirely inadequate meal, but it had the undeniable advantage that if Vitale called again to tell them to get on the road, he could either shove it in the nearest waste bin—which was realistically the best place for it—or take it with him, as could the other members of his team who were eating their way through largely identical combinations of snack foods in their own rooms.
Toscanelli had vetoed the idea of sitting down to a restaurant meal precisely for this reason, though as he cautiously lifted off the bread from one half of the next sandwich to inspect t
he contents, he wondered if that had actually been the right decision.
29
Bristol, Somerset
“I can read what the words say,” Mallory elaborated, “but I really don’t know what they mean. And we’re not going to be able to work that out without some context, without first deciding exactly where we should be looking.”
He pointed at the first of the decrypted and translated phrases.
“That just seems obvious and completely unhelpful,” he said. “Wherever the treasure is hidden, it’s bound to be ‘where no eyes may regard it’. Otherwise, somebody would almost certainly have already found it. What that probably means is that it’s buried, or in a cave or an underground vault or something like that. That second phrase, which states that the prize—not the treasure, I notice—is ‘beneath the stone which is not as it seems,’ is just a fraction more useful, but it won’t help us until we know that we’re standing in the right place. Hopefully we’ll then be able to see some kind of stone or rock and recognize that it’s in the wrong place or whatever that phrase means. Is there any chance that either the decryption or your translation could be wrong, or could some of the words have a different meaning? Anything like that?”
Robin appeared to bristle slightly at Mallory’s implication.
“Of course that’s possible,” she said somewhat snappily, “not least because like any other language, Latin evolved through the centuries, and so the meaning of a word in the colloquial Latin of the early to mid-fourteenth century—which is probably when this was written—might be somewhat different to the entry in a twenty-first-century Latin-English dictionary pulled off the Web. But as far as I can see, the translation we’ve ended up with should be reasonably accurate, because at least the sentences do make sense. They may not be very helpful, but that’s a different problem.”
“Even that third phrase, which seems really obscure?”
“Even the third phrase,” Robin agreed. “And you’re quite right. It does appear to be completely unhelpful, but I played around with every possible alternative meaning, or shade of meaning, that I could find, and that is the most accurate translation I managed to come up with.”
Mallory nodded, and then read the translation aloud.
“‘In the settlement named for itself, seek behind the eyes,’” he read. “That really and truly means absolutely nothing to me, and if you’re right about the rest of the sentence, it doesn’t even refer to the actual location of the treasure but to something completely different.”
“Exactly. And the word in the phrase that follows that one, the word which definitely doesn’t make sense to me, is this one: licentiam. Even without a dictionary, it wouldn’t be too big a jump to guess that the closest equivalent in English is a ‘license’ or a ‘permit’ or possibly even ‘permission.’ But just like you, I have no idea what the relevance of that is. If we do ever manage to end up locating this treasure, we might well have to organize picks and shovels and buckets, or even a backhoe, to get it out of the ground, but absolutely the last thing we’re going to need is a seven-hundred-year-old permit written in Latin.”
Mallory nodded slowly, then again read that particular section of the text. Then he grinned and tapped the piece of paper he was holding.
“What?” Robin asked. “Don’t tell me you found something I missed. That would be almost terminally irritating.”
“No, not really. It’s not so much something you missed as applying a bit of a different interpretation to that word licentiam.”
“What different interpretation?” Her voice was low and almost dangerous.
“We—or at least I—have been assuming that the word license or whatever translation you prefer means some kind of permission, but maybe that’s not quite right. Perhaps it’s not so much an authorization to recover the treasure as an explanation of where it is. It could even be the information we need to locate it.”
“You mean like a modern license to excavate gives the appropriate permission to break ground, but also specifies the area as well as the terms and conditions and any limitations? Yes, that’s not a bad thought. So all we have to do now is find out exactly where ‘the settlement named for itself’ is. And I don’t think that’s going to be exactly a walk in the park.”
They both stared at the translation for a few seconds; then Robin uttered a short and not particularly ladylike expression, and picked up the other pages containing the transcription of the encrypted text and the notes she’d made while she’d been working on them.
“You’ve thought of something?” Mallory asked.
“Yes,” she replied, staring at what she’d written. “At least I think I have. That phrase we’ve been looking at really doesn’t make sense, because if that was an accurate translation it should read something like ‘the settlement that takes its name from the king or the lord or the river,’ not ‘for itself.’ As it stands, it’s senseless, unless for some bizarre reason somebody created a settlement and then named it ‘settlement,’ which seems really unlikely. But if we make just one tiny change to it, that part of the phrase makes perfect sense.”
“It does? What change?”
“This one,” Robin said briskly, taking up her pencil, drawing a line through itself, and substituting us in its place. “One of the possible alternative translations for the word we took to mean ‘itself’ was ‘ourselves,’ or just ‘us.’ Now it reads ‘the settlement named for us.’ I think we’re looking for somewhere that was named after the Templars, and which had had that name bestowed on it well before the middle of the fourteenth century.”
“That should help narrow the search,” Mallory agreed, “but there are a lot of place-names in England—probably at least a dozen—that include the word Templar or Temple and have some connection to the order, and far more than that in other countries. If we have to visit all of them, we’re going to be racking up a lot of frequent-flier points and spending days or weeks on the road.”
Robin shook her head.
“Not necessarily,” she said, “because I think our search is going to keep us much closer to home. Not just keep us in England, but take us to a part of the country not far from where we are right now.”
“Where?”
“I’ll get to that. It’s all to do with that strange phrase about looking ‘behind the eyes.’ I think that’s just a slightly convoluted way of referring to a face, or a head, and if I’m right, then that narrows our search down immediately to just one place. A place that was definitely Templar in origin, that includes the word Temple in its name, and which possesses a face.”
She stopped talking and looked inquiringly at Mallory.
“This is supposed to be more your field than mine,” she said. “Any idea where I’m talking about?”
“Oh yes,” Mallory replied with a grin. “I know exactly where you mean now you’ve laid it out like that. You’re talking about Templecombe and the Templecombe Head.”
30
Exeter, Devon
The information Toscanelli needed—or at least a part of it—had been sent to his mobile as a message rather than as a call, and the alert tone when it arrived had awoken him at a little after three thirty in the morning.
It wasn’t the decryption he’d been expecting, but it was something almost as useful, and had been sent by the duty officer at the Rome headquarters of the order. The ciphertext, according to the first sentence of the text message, was still being worked on, and he—Toscanelli—could expect to receive an abstract of the data soon, whatever that last word actually meant.
But what information the text contained was helpful. Silvio Vitale had again requested assistance from the tertiary who was a senior officer in the local police force, and the man had delivered. He was obviously of a sufficiently high rank that he could request data from the all-pervasive network of roadside traffic and ANPR—Automatic Number Plate Recognition—cameras that
covered Britain’s motorways and major trunk roads, and his request had borne fruit. The Porsche had been caught on several such cameras, not exceeding the speed limit or doing anything illegal, but just driving away from Dartmouth and north toward Exeter.
When he saw that, Toscanelli smiled grimly to himself, his decision to move his men up to Exeter immediately being vindicated. Unfortunately, the picture produced by the traffic cameras was far from complete. The distinctive Porsche Cayman had driven past Exeter and continued north on the motorway, but it had later vanished. The last sighting of the vehicle had been on the motorway a few miles south of Bristol, when it had still been heading north, but since that moment there had been no sign of it.
The obvious conclusion, the duty officer had suggested, was that their quarry had probably left the motorway near that city and found somewhere to stay out of sight. That, Toscanelli mentally agreed, was the most likely scenario, but it was nothing like specific enough for him to do anything about it. He quickly opened up a Web browser to check the basic data for Bristol, and immediately realized that it would be pointless going there. The place was just too big and he would need something else—another traffic camera sighting or a definite lead based on a transcription of the text—before he could initiate any kind of a search.
Or, at least, it would be pointless and completely counterproductive to head up there that night. He and the rest of his men needed their sleep, and checking out of the hotel at that hour would be so unusual that the night staff would remember it happening, and the whole point of their mission was that it be covert. So they would move closer to Bristol, but only at a sensible hour later that morning, after breakfast.