by James Becker
“This may not be correct, but I was thinking about the ‘sacred mound.’ This does all seem to have something to do with Rosslyn Chapel, and the author of the parchment text obviously knew that at some point in the future a building was going to be constructed to both honor the Templars and remind people about them. The chapel is built on a hill—part of the ridge, in fact, overlooking Roslin Glen and the Esk River valley—and like a lot of high ground, there’s at least a possibility that the site was considered sacred or to have some religious importance. I can’t find any proof of that, but it’s certainly possible. What I’m wondering, really, is whether the site of Rosslyn Chapel could be the ‘sacred mound’ that’s referred to. What do you think?”
Robin looked at the location on the maps.
“It might be, I suppose,” she said, “but of course the only thing marked on these maps is the chapel itself. There’s no indication whether or not there was an earlier religious building or anything else at that location. But even if we assume it was the ‘sacred mound,’ I don’t see how that actually helps us.”
“Well, it might.” Mallory sounded tentative as he explained what he was thinking. “I was just looking at a website that deals with the history of the area, and it turns out that in February 1303 there was a battle—the Battle of Roslin, the name spelled differently—that took place only about half a mile up to the north of the present site of Rosslyn Chapel. So, if that interpretation is correct, and the high ground that the chapel is standing on is the ‘sacred mound,’ and that’s the right battlefield, then we are supposed to be looking for a door that’s both open and closed somewhere beyond it, and presumably in the same direction.”
“Fine,” Robin said. “And now I suppose you’re going to amaze me with your explanation of exactly what the text means by a door that can be open and closed at the same time.”
She looked at him expectantly, and Mallory smiled at her.
“I don’t think that since we met I’ve amazed you about anything,” he said, “and I’m not entirely sure that I’m going to start now. But I did have a thought about it. We know how fond the Templars were of using caverns and underground passages. Let’s face it: we’ve seen enough of them in the last few weeks, and the treasure that we’re looking for was almost certainly buried underground. Or, rather, stored in a cave or tunnel. At first glance, there’s no way that any door could be both open and closed, but we know that many of the phrases we’ve deciphered are obscure until you grasp their true meaning, and perhaps this is another one. So I don’t think we’re looking for a door in the conventional sense, not a door as a lump of wood or metal and fitted with hinges and a lock inside a frame. I’m wondering if the open door is the entrance to a cave, the doorway to get inside, if you see what I mean, and it’s closed because the entrance is blocked with rocks or something. That could more or less explain the expression. It’s an opening that’s also closed.”
“Sort of, I suppose. But that only helps if you know of a cave entrance somewhere up to the north of Rosslyn Chapel that’s been blocked by stones.”
Mallory nodded.
“I know, and there actually is one,” he said. “There are a couple of problems with it, but it does seem to me to be a contender.”
“Where is it?”
“About four or five miles to the northeast of the chapel. It’s a place you can visit, and it’s become something of a tourist attraction, because it’s another one of those locations that has a somewhat peculiar and definitely mysterious history. It’s called Gilmerton Cove,” he finished.
47
Midlothian, Scotland
“They’re definitely in Edinburgh,” Vitale announced, ending the call he’d just taken on his mobile phone. “There were two traffic camera sightings as their vehicle approached the city and another one on the bypass, all three of them yesterday. And now we even know where they’re staying.”
The Dominicans had booked rooms in a hotel near Penicuik, to the south of Edinburgh, quite close to the city and with easy access to the network of fast roads in the area.
He opened a typical tourist map—long on colors and adverts and short on detail—on the table and pointed.
“Mallory used his credit card here, in this hotel, yesterday afternoon. That wasn’t a good idea, but he may have had no choice. Some of the larger hotels insist on authorizing a card even if the final bill will be settled in cash, just in case the guest absconds or something. Whatever the reason, that’s what he did, and the chances are that they’re still there, so that’s where you’ll go now. I want all of you out there, in two cars. I will remain here and await your reports.”
Toscanelli nodded.
“And your orders?”
“Follow them when they leave, obviously. Mallory’s car is very distinctive, so find it in the hotel car park and then put a tracker on it.”
Vitale opened his briefcase and took out two black boxes, each smaller than a matchbox.
“You’ve used these before,” he said. “Link their output to the tracking software on your mobile phones—I mean all of you, so that there is plenty of redundancy—and make sure that all of you keep your phones switched on and fully charged. If you haven’t got chargers that work off the car systems, make sure you buy some before you reach the hotel. Most garages sell them. One phone in each car is to be on charge all the time. The trackers use mobile phone technology, so as long as Mallory’s car is within range of a cellular tower you will be able to keep out of sight but still track it accurately.”
He handed one tracker to Toscanelli, and the other to Mario.
“You are to call me when you reach the hotel and have located Mallory’s car. Once you have done that, at least one car is to remain close enough to the target vehicle to allow continuous observation of it. You are to call me again when you have placed both trackers on the target car, and again the moment you see either Mallory or Jessop, with a report on what they’re doing.”
“You’re sure you want both trackers on the same car?” Toscanelli asked.
“Yes,” Vitale replied shortly. “It is essential that we find out where they are going, and I’m not prepared to risk a single tracker falling off the car or starting to malfunction or being spotted by Mallory. That’s why you’ll be positioning both of them, obviously choosing different places on the vehicle and placing them out of sight.”
“And then what do we do?” Toscanelli asked.
“You keep following them, and then call me again the moment they stop, even if they are apparently just going into a café or restaurant. You are not under any circumstances to approach them. I will decide what action we are to take, and when we are to take it. Now get going.”
48
Midlothian, Scotland
“What, exactly, is Gilmerton Cove? It sounds like a tiny little village on some rocky coast, all whitewashed houses and steep streets, a few yachts bobbing at anchor in the bay, seagulls wheeling overhead, a fishing boat in the distance, all that kind of thing.”
“Very poetic,” Mallory said. “Unfortunately it’s absolutely nothing like that. First of all, it’s inland, some distance from the sea in a suburb of Edinburgh about four miles from the city center, and it’s under, rather than in, a small mining town named Watson. As in Sherlock Holmes. More importantly, it’s the entrance to an extensive cave system, though there’s almost nothing known about its origins. There’s a vague official version of its history, which is that in 1719 a blacksmith named George Patterson excavated it from the local sandstone bedrock, and it took him five years to create the whole complex. The problem with this tale is that the cave system is big, really big, and it’s really unlikely to have just been the work of one man, even if he did nothing but tunnel his way through the rock every day. And presumably he would have had to do a bit of blacksmithing as well, just to earn a living.”
“So, who did build it?”
Mallory shrugged his shoulders.
“The short answer is that nobody knows,” he replied. “It’s certainly been there for hundreds of years, and quite probably some bits of it may have started out as natural caverns and tunnels that were then enlarged and reshaped for different purposes, and not just by George Patterson. What it consists of is a series of hand-carved chambers, rooms, and passageways. In plan, it’s built around a main corridor about forty feet long, with six main rooms and two entrances. The rooms themselves are somewhat bizarre, because all the furniture is built in and carved from the natural rock. In all, the cave system extends to over a thousand square feet, and it’s located about ten feet below the present street level.
“What records there are suggest that the main rooms were in use up to about two hundred and fifty years ago, which was when George Patterson lived there, but after he died the place was apparently abandoned, at least as a full-time residence. It might have had some quasireligious functions, because one of the slabs in there has had a circular hole cut into it. The slab is called the ‘punch bowl,’ but what it resembles more than anything else is a baptismal font. It is known that the cave also functioned as a convenient and secret location for different types of illegal activities, including whiskey distilling and smuggling. For part of the time it was even used as a brothel, and presumably they took beds and bedding down there for that, because it wouldn’t have been a lot of fun doing that sort of stuff on cold, bare rock, especially on the sharp, pointy bits.”
“You old romantic, you,” Robin said.
“Not really. There was an investigation there in 1897 in an attempt to uncover its history, but this didn’t actually discover very much at all. There was a lot of graffiti carved into the walls, but about all this confirmed was a connection to the Masons, because the only shape that appeared with any degree of frequency was the classic Masonic symbol of the square and compasses. According to legend, in past centuries it had been used as a meeting place for members of the Knights Templar order and the Freemasons, which I suppose was borne out by the graffiti, and more recently it was a meeting place and no doubt a secret location for all sorts of interesting activities by members of the Hellfire Club.
“There was a modern investigation as well, carried out in 2002, with the same intention, and that did produce a bit more historical data, though the actual origins and purpose of Gilmerton Cove are still a mystery. The most obvious fact that this survey did manage to establish was that George Patterson did not build the place—though he almost certainly modified and changed bits of it—because it appears that the cave system had been used as a refuge by the Covenanters at least a century earlier.”
“The Covenanters? I’ve heard of them, I think. Just remind me.”
“This is from one particular website, because I didn’t know anything much about them, either. According to this, they were a group that opposed the way that the Stuart kings were trying to interfere in the Scottish church in the mid-seventeenth century, opposition that resulted in a national covenant. The Scottish royal household couldn’t tolerate what they saw as this seditious rebellion, and so the Covenanters were hunted down like animals by the royal armies. This was a grim time in Scottish history, with thousands of them being killed and far more than that made homeless. This period became known as the Killing Times, and in their attempts to avoid being slaughtered, many of the Covenanters hid out in the countryside or in the various cave systems dotted around Scotland, including places like Gilmerton Cove. There’s a monument to them near Oxgangs, to the southwest of the city center and just north of the Edinburgh Bypass. Not too far from here, actually.”
“Okay,” Robin said, somewhat impatiently. “All jolly interesting stuff, but what’s the relevance to Rosslyn and the lost treasure of the Templars?”
“I was coming to that. The other thing that the 2002 investigation found was a doorway in one of the rooms, a doorway that was special for two reasons. First, it was completely blocked by stones, masonry, and rubble, and there’s no easy way of shifting any of it because it goes under a roadway and if it’s moved there’s a real chance the road could collapse. That was what I was thinking could possibly be the door that’s both open and closed. But the most interesting thing about it is that the blocked doorway and the tunnel that is believed to lie behind it appear to point directly toward Rosslyn Chapel, which is less than five miles away.”
“Does it, now? And has anyone suggested that whatever lies beyond the blockage could be the Templar treasure?”
Mallory nodded, then shook his head.
“Not exactly that, or not specifically, no, but a few people have come out of the woodwork to claim that the Holy Grail is hidden in the tunnel, apparently brought to Scotland by the Knights Templar, and that the Grail was the relic they recovered from the hidden chambers under the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. So, yes, there’s supposed to be a form of treasure there but not the one that we’re looking for. That idea has been raised a few times, but nothing has been done about it for several reasons. First, nobody’s come up with any compelling evidence that there’s anything at all beyond the pile of masonry apart from another empty room, not even necessarily a tunnel at all. And, even if there was, shoring up the roadway to allow the stones and rocks to be removed and the tunnel to be opened up would be a really expensive and quite difficult civil engineering project for all sorts of reasons. To do it at all would also require official permission, and there’s no real likelihood of such permission ever being granted, at least not without cast-iron proof that the Grail—or something else of equal historical or commercial value—is actually hidden somewhere in the tunnel. And that isn’t ever going to happen, for obvious reasons.”
“So, we have a possible tunnel leading from this Gilmerton Cove place toward Rosslyn Chapel. We don’t know if it goes all the way from one to the other, and it might only be ten feet long. It’s also a tunnel we can’t get into at either end. And, even if we could get into it, we have no idea if there’s anything inside it or not. Is that a fair summary of the situation?”
“Yes. And no,” Mallory said with a grin. “Because as far as I can see, there is a tunnel there and it’s certainly not just ten feet long,” he added.
He picked up one of the topographical maps, folded it so that they were only looking at the area between Gilmerton Cove and Rosslyn Chapel, and then pointed.
“See these faint lines?” he asked.
“I see a lot of lines. Which ones do you mean?”
“These dotted ones. They all show the location of underground voids. I presume that at some time there was a seismic survey done because of the caves that formed naturally in this area, and, more importantly, all the mining operations that took place here in the past, which would have resulted in abandoned tunnels and workings. Voids can be a problem, obviously, because you can get sinkholes appearing suddenly, and if one of those developed under a house, the whole thing could vanish into it. It wasn’t a complete survey, but there are enough marks to show that there is a tunnel that runs from Gilmerton Cove out into the countryside toward Rosslyn Chapel. There are breaks in the marks, but it makes sense that it’s actually a continuous underground space rather than a whole series of separate underground voids, because it does seem to follow a fairly straight line.”
Robin studied the marks he was indicating.
“I see what you mean,” she said, “but there’s one obvious problem. Even if there is a tunnel running between Gilmerton Cove and Rosslyn Chapel, we still can’t get into it at either end, unless I’ve missed something, so we’re no further forward.”
“That’s because you’re not thinking laterally,” Mallory said. “To get into a tunnel you don’t necessarily have to use either end. If you know the route the tunnel takes—which thanks to these maps I think we do—you can cut your way into it almost anywhere, because according to this topo chart, it’s not a tunnel through rock, or not for the wh
ole length, anyway. We identify a place where it’s definitely man-made rather than natural, and then all we have to do is to dig down until we reach the roof, and hack our way inside.”
“That sounds easy if you say it quickly,” Robin said. “I have a feeling the reality might be a whole lot different.”
49
Midlothian, Scotland
What they couldn’t do, quite obviously, was just pick a spot at random and start digging. They needed to be absolutely sure that they were in the right place, and to do that Mallory knew they’d have to spend quite some time with the topographical maps, studying the entire length of the tunnel, or those sections where it was marked, to try to find the right place to break into it. They would need the smallest possible depth of earth above the tunnel roof, and that was something they would have to deduce by looking at the contour lines on the map. They would also have to find a place out in the countryside, somewhere quiet where they wouldn’t be disturbed, because they clearly couldn’t start excavating in someone’s back garden or a farmer’s field.
“We’re going to have to check this, recheck it, and then check it again,” Mallory said, “and that’s going to take us all afternoon and probably most of the evening as well.”
“I know. That’s obvious. So what?”
“All I was going to suggest was that it might be worth going into Edinburgh now and buying the stuff we need—all the equipment, I mean—so that when we do locate the best spot we’ll be able to get in the car and drive out there right away.”
“That’s not a bad idea,” Robin said. “And I could certainly do with a break.”
Mallory jotted down a rough list of what he thought they would need; then they left the hotel and walked the short distance to the metro station for the ride into the center of Edinburgh. It took them a little while, but eventually they found an old-fashioned hardware shop, one of those places that seemed to sell everything from screws and nails up to concrete mixers and industrial space heaters.