The Templar Brotherhood

by James Becker

  “Yes. I just thought moving would be marginally safer than staying still,” Mallory replied. “So, what happened?”

  “Let’s find out.”

  They walked around to the end of the crypt and looked down. The carved-stone skull was lying on its side about eighteen inches away from the hole where it had been placed some seven hundred years earlier, but that wasn’t what attracted their immediate attention.

  Projecting over three feet out of the circular hole in the end of the crypt was a lance. Usually such weapons consisted of an iron or steel head with a double-edged blade attached to a wooden shaft. This one was different. The head, the business end, of the weapon was metal, but so was the rest of it, making it unusually heavy and almost indestructible in the largely airless interior of the crypt. The only sign of its age was a light sprinkling of rust on the surface of the iron. Obviously removing the carved skull had triggered an ancient mechanism that included a powerful spring that had driven the metal lance out of the hole in the end wall of the crypt.

  “If I’d still been sitting there,” Mallory said, and shook his head, “I’d have ended up as a kebab.”

  “I know,” Robin said quietly. “Is it safe now, do you think?”

  “Probably.”

  But just as a precaution, he picked up the jimmy, climbed back onto the stone top of the crypt, looped the end of the tool around the shaft of the spear, and tugged it a few times. Nothing happened. The metal spear was locked rigidly into the fired position, as far as he could tell.

  “I think that’s it,” he said. “Somebody who didn’t know about the possibility of a booby trap would be dead, which was the intention. Let’s see what we have here.”

  The base of the carved skull was circular, as they had expected, but had a couple of broad grooves cut around its circumference. A glance into the hole in the crypt showed that these had mated with corresponding lands carved into the stone interior: a simple but effective locking system.

  Robin turned the skull upside down and looked at it.

  “It’s not solid stone,” she said, her voice rising with excitement. “There’s a cavity inside the skull and there’s something hidden in it.”

  Her slim hand reached down toward the hollow interior, but almost immediately she stopped.

  “Bad idea,” she said. “There could be some sort of nasty lurking in there as well.”

  Mallory passed her the pliers, and she used them to probe inside and grip whatever had been concealed within the hollow skull. But as she glanced at the small leather-covered package she had retrieved, before she slipped it into her bag to examine later, she noticed something else.

  Both the base of the skull and the stone around the circular hole in the end of the crypt bore lines of tiny neatly chiseled letters.

  “That has to be the next clue,” Robin said, pulling out her mobile phone and taking a series of pictures of what she had spotted, ensuring she got at least three photographs of each section of the text.

  Mallory did the same, with both his digital camera and his mobile, because the more records they had of it, the better. Then he put his hands around the shaft of the spear and tried to push it back inside the crypt, but it simply wouldn’t budge. Whatever mechanism had been tripped to release the weapon had obviously also locked it in place.

  “We’re going to have to leave it like this,” Mallory said. “I can’t shift it.”

  “That’s irritating,” Robin replied, “because that means those bloody Dominicans will be able to read the text the same as us, so the race is still on.”

  And as she spoke, a shot rang out, the sound of the gun firing occurring at the same instant that the bullet plowed into the top of the crypt, sending stone chips flying in all directions.

  • • •

  Thirty seconds earlier Mario Donatu had ended a call to Toscanelli, explaining exactly what he had just seen taking place in the churchyard, everything from Mallory’s initial removal of the section of turf to the triggering of the hidden booby trap and the way the targets had taken pictures of the stone skull and the end of the crypt. That, Toscanelli had agreed, almost certainly meant that the English couple had located the next clue. And that, inevitably, meant that their lives were expendable from that moment onward.

  Mario’s only mistake had been to fire his first shot at them from over forty yards away, much too far for accurate pistol shooting.

  Realistically the maximum accurate range of most semiautomatic pistols, including Mario’s Beretta, is about thirty yards. Beyond that, the short barrels of these weapons, barrels to which the sights aren’t attached, mean that accurate shot placement is difficult even for an expert. Revolvers are much more accurate because of their design, but aren’t as common in military or law enforcement roles because of their slow firing and reload rate and the limited number of rounds they hold. In most firefights, the more rounds, the better, and the high-capacity magazine and the instant reload facility of an automatic pistol usually outweigh all other considerations.

  His second shot was closer, but not much, and by then his targets were no longer in sight.

  • • •

  Mallory reacted instantly, diving behind the solid and demonstrably bulletproof stone of the crypt, but Robin actually got there first. Not only that, but she’d also somehow managed to grab Mallory’s rucksack on her way down.

  “I don’t like being shot at,” she said, reaching into the side pocket of the rucksack and pulling out the Browning Hi-Power.

  She racked the slide back to chamber a round, clicked off the safety catch, and crawled to the end of the crypt. She risked a quick glance, looking for a target, and snapped off a single shot toward a black-haired figure wearing a dark suit and standing behind the boundary wall of the churchyard. He ducked out of sight, and she didn’t even bother to see where her shot had landed.

  “I can only see one man,” she said, “but my guess is that there are at least two of them, because I don’t believe they’d send only one man here. So we need to get out of this place before we’re caught in the cross fire with nowhere to go but into a couple of body bags.”

  “Can’t argue with that,” Mallory said. “If we can get across to the wall of the church, we’ll be out of sight from where he’s standing. Give me the pistol and I’ll make sure he keeps his head down while you run for it.”

  “I’m a better shot than you are,” Robin said. “You go.”

  “No chance. And at this range, accuracy really doesn’t matter.”

  Robin didn’t respond for a moment. Then she looked at Mallory.

  “Let’s confuse him with a moving target. In fact, with two moving targets. We’ll go together. Duck and dive while you’re running, obviously.”

  Mallory nodded, then grabbed the rucksack. All that was left in it was a handful of tools.

  “I’ll throw this, just as a distraction. Then we go,” he said.

  Robin nodded, then eased herself up until she could shoot over the top of the crypt. Immediately she glimpsed a dark shape just coming into view above the stone boundary wall—the head and right arm of the gunman—and pulled the trigger.

  At the same instant, Mallory heaved the rucksack toward the churchyard wall as hard as he could, hoping to make the gunman’s attention waver for the brief few seconds they’d need to reach safety behind the solid walls of the old Templar church.

  Then they were both up and running, running for their lives.

  It was a distance of only about twenty yards between the crypt and the end wall of the church, but to Mallory, jinking from side to side as he ran and keeping well clear of Robin to give the gunman two widely separated targets to engage, it felt like a mile.

  Robin was doing the same, following an erratic path and switching her attention from the ground in front of her to the lurking danger behind the churchyard wall. She saw the figure stand up and
take aim at them as they ran, and immediately fired two quick shots toward him, barely even taking the time to point the pistol accurately, just trying to make the Dominican keep his head down.

  The man fired one shot in answer, and neither of them had any idea where the bullet went, but it didn’t hit them, and that was all that mattered.

  “We’re not out of the woods yet,” Mallory said. “You’re probably right. There’ll be at least two of them here, so we need to get to the car and get out of here as quickly as we can.”

  The gunman was out of sight, completely hidden by the bulk of the church, but they had no doubt that he was already on the move, probably running around the outside of the building to try to cut them off.

  They paused for a matter of seconds, deciding which way they needed to go to avoid the gunman behind them and trying to second-guess where the other Dominican was likely to be waiting in ambush for them.

  “Not the gate,” Mallory said urgently, pointing across the churchyard. “The wall over there only looks about four feet high. We can easily get over that. And that’ll protect our backs.”

  They ran again, both taking frequent glances over their shoulders as they checked for danger from behind, as well as looking ahead to try to spot any sign of a second gunman. They reached the wall, both slightly out of breath, and Robin immediately handed Mallory the Browning, butt first.

  “Cocked, safety catch off,” she snapped.

  A range officer would have had a field day at such an unsafe practice, but right then neither of them cared, and the reliable Browning mechanism meant that an accidental discharge was highly unlikely. It would take a deliberate pull on the trigger to fire the Hi-Power.

  Mallory spun round to place his back against the wall and took the pistol in both hands to cover the area behind them, his finger on the trigger as he scanned the normally peaceful grassy churchyard.

  Beside him, Robin scrambled lithely over the wall and dropped down onto the other side, where the ground level was slightly lower.

  “Give me the pistol,” she said.

  Mallory repeated her action, but clicked on the safety catch as a precaution.

  “Safety on,” he said.

  While Robin looked warily back toward the church, the direction from which they had come, Mallory climbed over the wall and stepped down beside her.

  “Which way now?” Robin asked.

  “Down that lane,” Mallory said, pointing over to his left. “I think that’ll take us in the right direction.”

  They both took a final glance into the churchyard, but saw no sign of the man who’d fired at them.

  “Maybe one of your shots hit him,” Mallory suggested.

  “No bloody chance,” Robin replied. “I was just trying to keep his head down. I doubt if any of my bullets got within ten feet of him.”

  But whether or not that particular Dominican was still in the land of the living became a purely academic question a few seconds later.

  41

  Templecombe, Somerset

  When they turned into the lane, Mallory slightly in front of Robin, they came face-to-face with another of the enforcers from Rome, who was jogging straight toward them, his pistol in his right hand. Presumably he had heard the sound of the gunshots from around the church and had decided to investigate.

  He immediately swung his weapon to point at Mallory, clearly believing that of the two people he was the more dangerous, as a man.

  Mallory thought he could actually see the whitening as the man’s finger tightened on the trigger of his Beretta, but the shot that rang out came from beside him, not in front, as Robin pulled the Browning from behind her handbag, which had completely hidden it from view, and neatly put a round from the pistol through the Dominican’s right shoulder. He staggered backward with a yell of pain, dropping his own pistol and clutching at his wounded shoulder.

  “Wrong guess,” she said to him with a smile as Mallory bent down to pick up the man’s weapon. “The female is always deadlier than the male. You’ll probably remember that from now on.”

  “That’s if Marco Toscanelli doesn’t decide to blow your head off because you’re wounded,” Mallory added, as he and Robin left him lying on the ground and ran quickly down the narrow lane that they were hoping would take them back to the part of the village where they’d parked the car that morning.

  When they reached the first bend in the lane, they heard an angry shout from behind them, and then another gunshot. But this bullet missed them by an even larger margin than before, at least thirty feet, slamming harmlessly into the wall of an adjacent building.

  “We’re pretty much out of range now,” Mallory said as they rounded the bend, “and now that we outnumber them two to one and have got twice as many weapons as them, I don’t think they’ll try and follow us.”

  Once they’d covered another hundred yards or so, they slowed to a walk, and both Mallory and Robin tucked the pistols away out of sight. Robin put the Beretta into her purse, because it was the smaller of the two, while Mallory tucked the Browning into the rear waistband of his trousers, under his jacket.

  They saw no one else as they made their way back to the Porsche. Or, to be absolutely accurate, they saw quite a lot of people wandering around different parts of the village, just as you would expect to see in any village in Britain on most days of the week, but they saw no one whom they considered to be a threat. Many of the pedestrians, as on the previous day, seemed to be heading in the general direction of the church, no doubt attracted by, and curious about, the repeated gunshots.

  Robin and Mallory almost reached the car when they heard the first sirens, heading straight toward them. Standing on the street didn’t seem the brightest of ideas, just in case the dash cam in the police car recorded decent images of their faces, so they took a side road that ran almost parallel to the street they wanted, and stayed on that, out of sight of the traffic, until the noise diminished behind them.

  Robin said she’d drive, just in case they needed to put some distance between themselves and the Dominicans, assuming that the Italian enforcers spotted their car as they left Templecombe. She sat in the driver’s seat and turned the key in the ignition, and the engine started with a dull rumble.

  But before she moved off, she reached into her handbag and removed the small leather-bound packet she had pulled out of the hollow stone skull.

  “Just take a look at that, will you?” she said. “The leather felt to me as if it was in pretty good condition, so hopefully whatever’s inside it will be as well.”

  Mallory nodded, but didn’t do more than glance at the object before slipping it into his jacket pocket.

  “I’ll wait until we get well clear of this place,” he said. “I don’t want to be sitting here with my head down, looking at it, if some Dominican steps out of the hedgerow and aims his pistol at us.”

  He took out the Browning, checked that it was cocked and ready to fire but with the safety catch on, then placed the weapon on his lap, where it would be immediately available if he needed to use it.

  Robin kept the speed right down to well below the legal limit until she reached the derestriction sign at the village boundary, and then gave the car its head.

  Six minutes, and five miles, later she nodded to Mallory.

  “There hasn’t been another car behind us for the last three miles,” she said, “so I think we’re well clear of them. If they didn’t make themselves scarce when the police cars arrived, they’re probably arguing with our guardians of law and order right now. But either way, I don’t think we need worry about them for the moment.”

  “That was a good shot,” Mallory said. “I presume you were aiming to wound him, not kill him.”

  “I’ve taken the lives of remarkably few creatures since I arrived on this planet,” she replied, “and I’d quite like to keep it that way. I don’t hunt and I don
’t shoot animals or birds, and I never have. I grant you that these Dominicans are among the least attractive specimens of the human race that I’ve ever encountered, but I would still rather they walked, or least staggered, away from any encounter with us. So, the short answer is, yes, I was aiming to wound him. His right shoulder was the obvious target, because he was clearly right-handed and that pistol was aimed straight at you. Hitting him there pretty much guaranteed that he wouldn’t be able to pull the trigger.”

  Mallory nodded.

  “Well, thanks,” he said. “Rather than look at this thing on the move,” he added, taking the leather-covered object out of his pocket, “why don’t we find a parking spot, or even a café or pub with a car park, where we can look at it together?”

  Just under ten minutes later, Robin steered the Porsche onto the forecourt of a roadside café, and parked the vehicle out of sight behind a large white Transit van emblazoned with the name of a firm of jobbing builders. Inside the building, Mallory organized drinks and a small plate of sandwiches, then sat down opposite Robin at the corner table she had selected.

  “I could really do with something like a stiff gin and tonic,” Robin said, looking with uninterest at the alleged cappuccino Mallory placed in front of her, “but I suppose this will have to do for the moment.”

  There were only half a dozen other customers in the café, and they could talk relatively freely. Once they’d demolished the sandwiches—neither of them had eaten anything, apart from a muffin each in the Templecombe pub, since breakfast at the hotel that morning, and everything that had gone on had given them both an appetite—Mallory took the leather packet out of his pocket and put it on the table between them.

  It was about six inches long, a couple of inches wide, and roughly circular in cross section, the leather sewn together at both ends and along the length of the object, to form a kind of purse or case. Mallory hefted it in his hand, feeling its weight.

  “It almost feels empty,” he said. “If it isn’t, then whatever is inside it doesn’t weigh much at all. My guess is that we might be looking at yet another piece of parchment that we’ll have to decipher and then translate.”