by James Becker
“Well, we’ll see in a minute. Have you got something to cut the binding?”
Mallory pulled out a small multitool from his pocket and opened up the knife blade. It was sharp—he’d never seen the point of having a knife with a blunt blade—and in a matter of seconds he had sliced through the thin leather strips that held the object closed along its long side. With Robin watching closely, he then repeated the operation at each end, removing all of the lengths of leather from the holes and putting them to one side.
“You don’t think there’s likely to be anything dangerous inside it, do you?” Robin asked.
“If you mean something mechanical,” Mallory replied, “then the answer is definitely no. It’s far too light for anything like that. That doesn’t mean it’s completely harmless, though. Toxins and poisons were big business in the Middle Ages, and I’m quite sure that the Templars would have had access to all the most sophisticated and dangerous substances available at that time. But I very much doubt if there’s anything to worry us in this. This object was protected by that spear device in the crypt, just as the original piece of parchment was concealed inside that book safe with the antitheft device built in, but once we’d circumvented that, the parchment was harmless. And in any case, I very much doubt if any poison would still be viable after seven-hundred-odd years.”
“Okay, then. Why don’t you go for it?”
On the table there was a stainless steel pot containing a selection of cutlery, and before Mallory did anything else, he removed half a dozen knives, the heaviest objects in the pot. He placed the steel pot on the end of the leather to hold it down, then used the blades of the knives to maneuver the package open, slowly unrolling it to reveal the contents.
It was exactly as he had expected. The only thing inside the leather pouch was a small piece of parchment that had been rolled into a cylinder and around which the protective leather had been sewn.
“I told you,” Mallory said. “We’re obviously back on the decryption-and-translation trail yet again.”
“Actually,” Robin said, “I’m not absolutely sure that we are.” She picked up one of the knives and aimed the point at a part of the parchment where the writing was clearly legible. “I don’t know what this is yet,” she added, “but what it isn’t is scriptio continua, which is what we’ve seen on all the other bits of parchment we’ve recovered. In fact, there are a lot of words on this that I can see and translate immediately. This isn’t a ciphertext. This is a piece of plaintext Latin, and that does seem rather odd.”
That stumped them both for a few moments, and then Mallory remembered the word that had bothered Robin when they’d been doing the previous decryption.
“If it’s in plaintext,” he suggested tentatively, “do you think this could be that license or permission which the other text mentioned?”
“That’s not a bad thought. The Latin word was licentiam, if I remember rightly, and it really didn’t make sense in the context we were looking at.”
“But if it was some kind of permission, then you would expect it to be written in plain language—Latin, in this case—because presumably the document would have to be offered or shown to officials or somebody, and they wouldn’t be able to accept an encrypted document. So, what does it say?”
“I can’t translate it now,” Robin replied. “I’ll need access to an online dictionary, so we’ll have to wait until we’re back at the hotel.”
“Then let’s head over there right now.”
42
Somerset
“Tell me again exactly what you saw,” Toscanelli ordered.
He had arrived at the outskirts of the village about twenty minutes after the shooting had started, and had met Mario and Lucca on a quiet road with a couple of convenient parking areas beside it.
“They must have guessed there was a booby trap in the crypt,” Mario said for the third time, “because Mallory climbed onto the top of it before he loosened the stone skull. When it came free, that iron spear was forced out of the structure and locked in place. I tried moving it afterward, before the police arrived, but I couldn’t shift it.”
“I know what you did,” Toscanelli snapped, “but I only want to know what they did.”
“Once they’d triggered the booby trap, they examined the skull.”
“You told me the skull was hollow. Did you see them take anything out of it?”
“No. It was the woman who checked the skull, presumably just to see how it had been fitted into the hole, but then they both took a series of photographs of the base of the skull and around the hole in the crypt. It was obvious to me that they’d found an inscription of some sort, as I told you on the phone. You gave me permission to shoot them, but unfortunately I missed.”
“You missed,” Toscanelli repeated. “I’m surrounded by idiots. You had two sitting targets, neither of them aware that you were watching, and you still managed to miss both of them.”
“I didn’t miss by much,” Mario protested.
That wasn’t the right thing to say, obviously.
“You still missed.” Toscanelli raised his voice almost to a shout. “Then Michele meets them on the other side of the church, and gets shot himself for his trouble. And you failed to finish him off when you found him, so he’s now talking to the British police, or he will be as soon as they’ve managed to dig the bullet out of his shoulder. It’s a complete shambles, and Vitale will not be impressed with your performance.”
Or, Toscanelli knew, with his own conduct, but he certainly wasn’t going to say that. With a bit of luck, he’d be able to spin the story so that it would appear Lucca, Mario, and Michele had acted on their own initiative in going back to the village, against Vitale’s and Toscanelli’s direct orders, and had screwed up.
“Absolutely the only thing you did right was duplicate the photographs you saw Mallory and Jessop taking, so at least we can send copies of those back to Rome. We passed a café offering free Wi-Fi a few miles back, so we’ll get those images on their way within a few minutes. Then we’ll just have to wait until our people have decoded the inscriptions before we know where Mallory and Jessop are heading. And once we do, we’ll bring this whole sorry matter to a permanent end.”
43
Somerset
“We were right,” Robin said a couple of hours later. “This is plaintext Latin and it is a kind of license. Well, maybe not exactly a license but more a sort of Templar passport.”
They’d returned to the hotel without incident, gone immediately to the bar to allow Robin to down a couple of long gin and tonics, Mallory sticking to coffee just in case they had to drive anywhere, and then climbed up the staircase to their room. Ever since, Robin had been working on the new piece of parchment, putting together the most accurate translation she could manage.
“I’ve never heard of a Templar passport,” Mallory said.
“Well, that is what this looks like. There are a couple of telling phrases. One requests that all authorities, secular and religious—this is my translation of it, but it is what the Latin means—should allow the bearer to travel with ‘such goods and valuables as he may possess,’ and another one says he should be permitted to pass ‘without let or hindrance upon his way.’ That’s pretty similar to a phrase you’ll find in a modern British passport. It also specifically identifies the bearer as a member of the Knights Templar and states that he is engaged upon the official business of the order, is acting on behalf of the Grand Master, and answers to no authority save the pope himself. The document was issued over the signature of Jacques de Molay as the Grand Master, and ‘whosoever may succeed him in that post,’ and in the name of Pope Clement V. It’s dated 10 August 1307. The final sentence states that the document and all its permissions and conditions will remain valid in perpetuity, and the authority to use the passport—for want of a better word—and to hold and dispose of the goods entrusted to t
he bearer is to pass from him to his firstborn heir ‘until the ultimate generation.’”
“Primogeniture,” Mallory said, nodding. “The right of the firstborn male child to inherit the wealth of the family, just twisted slightly because in this case it didn’t relate to familial wealth, but to the assets of the Templar order. At the time, that would have been an incredibly powerful piece of parchment. Basically the holder could go anywhere and do anything, without reference to anybody else. And the date is obviously significant. By August 1307 the Templars would have known their order was doomed and facing ruin at the hands of Philip the Fair of France. So, although it doesn’t explicitly say so, that document obviously must have been given to the member of the order who organized the transfer of the treasure of the Templars out of France. He would have been in charge of the small fleet of ships that sailed from Honfleur, and a whole train of wagons, accompanied by a bodyguard of armed and armored knights in France and in whatever country the Templar fleet made landfall. He would definitely have needed that document to allow him to cross borders and avoid being detained by local troops or even questioned by officials. And nobody wanted to annoy the Knights Templar, or go against the wishes of the pope, so it would probably have worked very well.”
Robin nodded. Mallory’s interpretation exactly matched what she thought.
“And of course this does tie up with the reference we found earlier, about de Molay entrusting this man with a specific document that he was to keep safe, to conservare et salvare in perpetuum, meaning to ‘protect and save for all eternity.’ The other odd thing about it,” she went on, “is that the word puer is used again to refer to the possessor of this document. If you recall, we found that on the sheet of vellum you pulled out of the secret compartment in the wooden chest we recovered from that cave in Switzerland.”
“I remember,” Mallory said. “He was the fourth member of the order summoned by de Molay to that meeting in August 1307, when the writing was already on the wall as far as the Templars were concerned.”
“Exactly. The text on the vellum describes de Molay as spending some hours with that person after the meeting had concluded. When you consider that, along with this passport thing we’ve found, it does suggest that our interpretation of who that fourth person was is probably wrong. We thought that puer could mean a servant or retainer or maybe a lay member of the Templar order, but this passport or whatever you want to call it was just too powerful to have ever been entrusted to anyone who wasn’t a full member, a genuine Templar knight.”
“But I thought the vellum text stated that three knights were summoned to the meeting by de Molay, along with this other person. Surely, if he’d also been a knight, the text would have described four knights being summoned.”
“Precisely. So, that almost certainly means that our first translation and interpretation of this man’s status was wrong, because puer does have another, rather different meaning that seems to me to be more likely to be correct.”
“And what’s that?” Mallory asked.
“Son,” Robin replied. “The Latin word puer could also translate as a young man or a son. I think in August 1307 Jacques de Molay was organizing the removal of the treasure and assets of the Knights Templar order and entrusting the entire operation to the one person he was completely certain he could rely on absolutely—his son.”
Mallory looked as startled as he felt. Then he nodded slowly.
“That does make sense,” he said after a few moments. “The rules were quite simple. The Templar order didn’t grant knighthoods, so you had to be a knight in your own right before you could join. You were also required to be single, either unmarried or a widower, but of course that did allow people who had been married, and who had had children, to join. So it’s quite possible that de Molay had a son. There was nothing in the rules of the order that would have forbidden it.”
“And that does rather enhance the significance of these two parchments, especially the second one.”
When they’d unrolled the document in the hotel bedroom, they’d found that it wasn’t one piece of parchment, as they’d thought, but two, one wrapped around the other.
“What was on the second one?” Mallory asked. “You haven’t told me yet.”
“Two things,” Robin replied crisply. “First of all there’s an inventory, a list of chests and their contents, which doesn’t mean a lot to me because although it’s another piece of plaintext, they’ve used a kind of shorthand to describe the assets and their values. But there are direct mentions of both gold and silver, so I think it’s clear it’s referring to the real, tangible wealth of the Templars.”
“We’ve thought we’ve been here before,” Mallory said. “Are you sure?”
Robin nodded.
“Pretty sure, yes. There is one oddity, though. As well as listing the contents of these various chests and boxes, the document also refers to the ‘treasure’ of the order as if it’s something different to their material wealth, something separate. It’s also referred to as the ‘proof,’ which I don’t understand at all, unless the Latin word had a different meaning back then. And this parchment does state specifically that this proof, whatever it is, was hidden under the ‘stone that is not as it seems,’ virtually the same phrase as the one we deciphered before.”
“Working that out is probably a bit academic unless we can locate the treasure,” Mallory pointed out. “Hopefully, if we do locate it, it’ll probably be quite obvious what the document refers to.”
Robin nodded.
“Of course, knowing what the treasure consists of is one thing. It’s interesting, but not helpful, as you might say. But the second piece of information on the parchment seems to be the route the treasure was supposed to take. Or a partial route, at least. There’s a list of the most important Templar establishments in France, starting with Paris, as you would expect, and a couple of sentences explaining how their assets were to be collected and then transported to Honfleur and embarked on the ships of the Templar fleet. Again, that’s just a confirmation of the text we decrypted earlier.”
“So, does it say where the ships were to take the assets? That’s the really big question.”
“And the really big answer is no,” Robin replied. “The other text we deciphered talked about the insulae ad aquilonem, the islands of the north, and this mentions the order’s ‘friends in the north,’ but again it’s not specific. Oddly enough, bearing in mind the codes and ciphers we’ve been faced with, I don’t think the writer was being deliberately obtuse or trying to be misleading. It’s more as if he expected that the reader would know exactly whom he was referring to by that phrase, so he didn’t need to be explicit about it. Or that’s my impression, anyway.”
“So, the bottom line, unless I’ve missed something,” Mallory said, “is that neither of the documents we found at Templecombe really tells us anything useful. We don’t even know what country we should be looking in. Was there anything definitive in the text carved into the wall of the crypt itself? I saw you looking at the pictures earlier.”
“I’d almost forgotten about that,” she admitted. “I really just checked that the images were clear enough to let us read the letters. Let’s take a look at it right now.”
Working together, they carefully transcribed the carved letters from the images on Robin’s camera—checking them against the pictures Mallory had taken—onto a couple of sheets of paper. When they’d finished, they checked it again, just to make absolutely sure that every letter was right, and then started working out the encryption system.
That didn’t take anything like as long as they’d been expecting. In fact, after only about ten minutes Robin put down her pencil and looked at Mallory.
“I’m not sure I believe this,” she said, “but unless I’ve got it completely wrong, this is a really simple Atbash cipher, just using the reversed alphabet but with a five-letter shift to the right.�
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“You’re not wrong, obviously,” Mallory replied, pointing at the sheets she’d been writing on, “because it’s working. Even I can tell that the decryption is producing Latin words.”
“But why, after all the complex decryptions we’ve had to sort out to get this far, is this one so simple?”
“Maybe because we’re at the end—or at least we think we’re near the end—of the trail. Or maybe it’s got something to do with those two plaintext parchments. Perhaps the earlier stuff was deliberately made difficult to ensure that only a Templar knight or someone who knew a lot about the order would be able to decrypt it. But because we’ve got this far we’ve passed the test or something. The reason doesn’t really matter. All we actually need to do is read the plaintext and see where that leads us.”
Robin nodded and looked back at the translation she’d done. She checked a few of the words against the online Latin-to-English dictionary she was using, and made a couple of minor corrections as a result, then wrote out a fair copy—it wasn’t a long piece of text—and slid it over so Mallory could read it.
He eagerly scanned the few lines that Robin had produced, then looked across at her.
“Is this it?” he asked. “It’s not what you might call comprehensive, is it?”
He looked again at the text, running the tip of his forefinger along each line, making sure that he didn’t miss anything.
“About the only concrete piece of information I can see here is that the final resting place of the stuff taken from the Templar properties in France and elsewhere was near a temple in the north, which is extremely nonspecific. It doesn’t even say which country it’s in.”
“Hang on a minute,” Robin said. “I just thought of something.”
She took the sheet of paper back from Mallory, put a line through the word a, and replaced it with the word the.