The Templar Brotherhood

by James Becker

  The things they needed were fairly obvious, the two biggest and heaviest items being a pickax and a shovel, but when they left the shop the heavy-duty canvas bag Mallory had bought was bulging at the seams with the weight and bulk of the club hammer, selection of masonry chisels, two jimmies, heavy-duty gloves, climbing rope, earth anchors, powerful torches with spare batteries, and all the other equipment. In fact, the bag was so heavy that after he’d paid the bill, Mallory spent even more money purchasing a collapsible trolley that was sturdy enough to carry everything, including the pickax.

  They took the metro back to the hotel and transferred everything from the trolley and the bag into the luggage compartments in the Porsche. Most of the smaller items fitted in the front compartment, and Mallory squeezed the shovel, pickax, and folded trolley into the space behind the seats.

  Their preparations completed for the physical work to come, they returned to their hotel room to resume their study of the maps.

  • • •

  From his seat in the back of the hired Audi sedan, Toscanelli muttered to himself as he watched the English couple tucking a selection of tools into the luggage compartment of the Cayman. They were so close that he could be on them, and killing them, in less than ten seconds. But he knew perfectly well that if he did that Vitale would order his own execution the moment he heard about it, and his own death would likely be both protracted and a virtual symphony of agony. When it came to inflicting astonishingly painful revenge on anyone, Silvio Vitale really was in a class of his own.

  “What are they doing now?” Vitale asked, his voice emanating from the small speaker on Toscanelli’s mobile.

  “Putting away all the tools they bought in Edinburgh,” Toscanelli replied. “In the car, I mean.”

  He hadn’t risked being a part of the surveillance team himself, in case Mallory or Jessop recognized him, but two of his men had followed them into Edinburgh and from shop to shop until they had made their purchases, and had then dogged their footsteps all the way back to the hotel.

  “Are they going anywhere in the car?”

  “Just a moment. They’ve opened one of the car doors, and they’re putting the last couple of large tools into the vehicle through the rear hatch. Now they’ve closed the door and Mallory’s just locked the car. And they’re heading back into the hotel.”

  “It might be a bit late for them to go off and start digging somewhere this afternoon,” Vitale said, “but we can’t take a chance. All of you stay on watch until it gets dark. Then both vehicles are to return to the hotel. If nothing else happens today, I will want surveillance to be mounted against them tomorrow morning from six, so ensure you all get a good sleep tonight.”

  • • •

  “I think this is probably our best bet,” Mallory said, drawing a rough circle around one particular part of the topographical map. “As far as I can see from this, the land isn’t used or developed. There are no buildings anywhere within about a quarter of a mile, and no footpaths, either. But the road runs past it on the other side of this stand of trees, and that’s only about a hundred yards away, so we won’t have too far to lug everything.”

  “I’m really more interested in the tunnel,” Robin said. “I’m definitely following your lead on this, but are you sure that we’re not going to have to dig about a dozen feet or more straight down and then find we’re looking at solid sandstone, with no way of getting through it unless we bring in a pneumatic drill?”

  Mallory shook his head.

  “It’s very difficult to be certain,” he said, “but I’ve been studying the blasted contour lines on these maps until I’ve virtually gone cross-eyed. That place is in a kind of dip near the base of a small hill, and all three topographical maps quite clearly show a subterranean void right below the spot I’ve marked. As far as I can tell without actually going out there and digging a hole, that’s where the tunnel roof has to be closest to the surface. What I can’t tell, for obvious reasons, is whether or not that’s a section of man-made tunnel, rather than being a natural cave in the bedrock. But what I do know is that if the markings on these topographical maps are accurate—and they should be—that particular void seems to have quite straight sides, which does suggest it’s not a natural feature.”

  He indicated another area on the same map, but some distance away from the point he’d marked.

  “If you look here, about a mile or so north, the void is shown as having different widths and the path it follows is a long way from being straight. So that looks to me far more like a cavern or a long fissure in the rock. I’m hoping that what we’ve deduced is correct, and that when we dig down to the tunnel roof we’ll be confronted by worked stones and not a mass of solid bedrock. But realistically, there’s no way of telling. I’ve looked at the whole length of the tunnel on the maps, and I’ve located two other places that seem to be possible access points, just in case the first spot doesn’t work.”

  “All we can do is hope,” Robin said. “Hope that you’re right about where we should start digging. And more importantly hope that if—or when—we get into the tunnel, we don’t find that it’s full of spiderwebs and dead rats and nothing else, and that everything we’ve been through has been for nothing. That would really piss me off.”

  “Me, too. Anyway, we’ll know soon enough. Let’s try and get out there early tomorrow morning. The sooner we do this, the sooner we’ll know if we’ve just been wasting our time.”

  50

  Midlothian, Scotland

  Mallory braked the Porsche to a stop a few minutes after nine the following morning and switched off the engine. He’d seen a convenient pull-off, just about big enough for a single car, only about fifty yards from the place he’d wanted to park. For a minute or so, they sat there, listening to the ticking sounds of the cooling engine and the almost complete silence of the woodland outside the car through the open windows.

  “Time’s a-passing,” Robin said. “Let’s do this.”

  Mallory nodded, raised the windows, and stepped out of the car. In a few minutes he’d opened up the rear hatch, replaced the tools in the canvas bag, and strapped it to the trolley, the pickax and shovel lashed on top. There was no traffic on the road, and not even the distant sound of a car engine. The silence was almost complete.

  He locked the Cayman and they walked across the fairly narrow road, Mallory pulling the trolley, and stepped into the field on the other side, the land sloping down and away from the road. The ground was slightly damp underfoot, the result of a couple of hours of light drizzling rain the previous afternoon, but that morning the sun was already shining, still low on the eastern horizon behind them.

  Robin was carrying the maps, two folded up in one of the pockets of her waterproof jacket—they’d come dressed for the conditions they expected to encounter during the day, both above- and belowground—and the other in her hand, opened to the area Mallory had decided to explore.

  Once they’d cleared the narrow strip of woodland they stopped so they could orient themselves. Mallory had spent quite a long time identifying landmarks that should be visible from the target location, and marking the appropriate bearings of them on the map, so that they would be able to confirm precisely where they should start digging.

  He took out a pocket compass that he’d bought in Edinburgh the previous afternoon at a camping and outdoor store and flipped up the cover as he looked around them.

  “Okay,” he said, “we’re still at least fifty yards from where we need to be, I reckon, but I’ll just check we’re basically in the right place.”

  He aimed the compass toward a road junction over to the west and noted the bearing, then did the same thing with a distinctive house about half a mile to the north. Then he closed the compass and took hold of the handle of the trolley again and walked forward about twenty yards.

  Then he took out his mobile phone and opened the mapping application. The other
thing he’d done, as a final check, was to note the latitude and longitude coordinates of the spot he wanted to find from the map. The application—as usual—took several seconds to respond, and longer still before it locked onto enough GPS satellites to confirm his location on the ground. When it finally did so, he was able to pinpoint his position.

  “We keep going straight ahead,” he said, pointing. “When we reach that clump of bushes I’ll check again, but the spot I chose is right in front of us.”

  The next time he stopped, one of the bearings was spot-on, but they had to move a few yards farther north until the second one lined up exactly. There was a third landmark he’d identified on the map, but it was invisible behind a distant wood, and a fourth that for some reason he couldn’t identify against the backdrop of the urban development to the north, so he had to rely on just the two that he could see, but they should be enough. He made a last check of the GPS system on his phone, then nodded.

  “This is it,” he said, lowering the trolley to the ground so that he could remove the tools from the bag.

  He released the top of it, reached inside, and took out the gloves. Then he removed his waterproof jacket, picked up the shovel and pickax, walked a couple of paces farther down the gentle slope, and stopped. He checked that Robin was well out of the way, then swung the pickax in a short arc, driving the point deep into the soil. Perhaps because of the rain, the soil was comparatively soft, and he was able to make quite quick progress. The pickax broke up the soil, and after every half dozen or so swings he dropped the tool on the ground, picked up the shovel, and lifted the loose earth out of the hole he’d created, tossing it to one side.

  To begin with, he tried to dig straight down, but he quickly realized that wasn’t going to work. The hole needed to be fairly wide, because ultimately he was hoping that both he and Robin would be able to climb down into it in order to lower themselves into the tunnel. So he began widening the hole at the same time as he dug downward, aiming to end up with a roughly square vertical shaft, each side about three feet long.

  “I don’t know if this is good news or not,” he said, after a few minutes, “but what I’ve been shifting here is just earth. There are almost no stones or rocks in it. And it’s quite easy work.”

  “Good,” Robin replied, “because I’m going to take my turn when you get tired. I’m just as strong as you are.”

  Mallory didn’t doubt that, but he really didn’t want Robin to have to get involved in the strictly physical stuff. He was enough of a gentleman that he didn’t like the idea of a woman working at anything like digging a hole in a Scottish hillside.

  • • •

  Just under a quarter of a mile away, at the edge of a small copse of trees, Silvio Vitale and Marco Toscanelli lay on the ground side by side and watched the operation, using powerful binoculars.

  Following the Porsche through the early-morning traffic had been perfectly straightforward, thanks to the two trackers, which meant that neither of the pursuing vehicles had needed to get within sight of the Cayman at any point. They had been able to rely on the electronic link between the trackers and their mobile phones to follow the vehicle accurately but at a safe distance. Once the trackers confirmed that the Porsche had stopped, the Dominicans had been able to park their own vehicles reasonably close to the location but out of sight and then find a vantage point to observe their quarry.

  “They’ve obviously found something,” Toscanelli said. “I can order my men to kill them right now.”

  The other Dominicans had already moved up to within about a hundred yards of where Mallory and Jessop were excavating the hole, and were waiting for instructions, their mobile phones set for silent operation and to vibrate only when a call was received.

  “As far as I can see, Toscanelli, they haven’t found anything yet. They’re just digging a hole. It will be time to move when they lift something out of it. Unless you want to go over there and dig the hole yourself, of course? As I told you before,” Vitale added, his voice cold and hard, “I will decide what we do and when we do it. So, if you have nothing meaningful to contribute, just shut up and watch. This could be a very long day, and we’ll be doing nothing until I’m absolutely certain what the situation is.”

  • • •

  Although the day was still cool, the digging was hot and sweaty work, and within about twenty minutes Mallory had stripped off his shirt and handed it to Robin.

  “That’s better,” he said.

  “Better for you, maybe,” she replied, “but less so for me, because I’ve got to watch your half-naked body grunting and sweating, and one of the Chippendales you’re not. Mind you,” she added, “I’ve never found the male body desperately attractive, with all sorts of bits and pieces dangling and swaying in the wind, but yours isn’t that bad. Just make sure you keep your trousers on. Otherwise, I might die laughing.”

  “Thanks for that, I think,” Mallory said, swinging the pickax again.

  Just over a quarter of an hour later, by which time he was standing in the hole as he dug farther down into the earth, the tip of the blade of the pickax hit stone, jarring Mallory’s arms, and the impact making a very distinct noise.

  “That sounds hopeful,” Robin exclaimed, stepping over to the side of the hole Mallory had excavated and staring down into it. “That wasn’t just a loose stone, I take it?”

  Mallory shook his head.

  “Definitely not. Whatever it is, it’s pretty solid. Of course, it could just be bedrock, but I’ll see in a few moments.”

  He put the pickax to one side and picked up the shovel, using it to lift the earth away from that part of the hole and then scraping the blade across the hard surface he had encountered. Then he leaned the shovel against the side of the hole and looked up at Robin.

  “Strike one,” he said, sounding irritated. “What I think I’ve found is one of the Pentland Hills or whatever this collection of uplands is called. This is definitely bedrock, not man-made.”

  “Bugger,” Robin said, with feeling.

  Mallory passed her the pickax and the shovel and climbed out of the hole he’d dug, then shoveled most of the soil back inside it.

  “Do you need to do that?” Robin asked.

  “Probably not, but I don’t like leaving a mess.”

  Inevitably he ended up with a small mound of earth rather than a flat surface. Robin pointed at it.

  “I suppose that proves the old saying that you can never put back into a hole everything you’ve dug out of it,” she remarked. “So, where to now?”

  “There are two other spots that we identified as possible sites from the map, so we’ll try both of those.”

  “And if you hit rock on both of those, we just call it a day?”

  “Unless you’ve got any bright ideas,” Mallory replied, “we’ll have to.”

  • • •

  Vitale gestured at the distant scene as he and Toscanelli watched Mallory and Jessop walk away from the patch of grass on the hillside back toward the spot where their car was parked.

  “That is precisely why we are only watching them,” he said. “Neither you nor I have any idea exactly what clue or clues they are following, and if I’d adopted your suggestion and had them killed half an hour ago, we would have lost the only lead we have to the location of the treasure. Trying to persuade them to tell us what they know would be prolonged, messy, and with no guarantee of success. This way, we just let them run. They will do all the work for us, and we will simply step in at the last moment, relieve them of whatever they find, and then eliminate them. Contact the others and tell them to head back to the cars. We’ll follow them to wherever they’re going next.”

  51

  Midlothian, Scotland

  The second location was about a quarter of a mile from the first, and Mallory was back in the saddle, so to speak, pickax in his hand, in well under ten minutes. He again use
d the map, his compass, and the mapping application on his mobile phone to confirm that he was in exactly the right spot, and then he started digging.

  His interpretation of the contour lines on the topographical maps had suggested that the underground void marked in that location was probably deeper underground than he had expected at the first place, but in fact the point of his pick hit stone only about four feet down. And this time, when he used the shovel to clear away the soil, it was immediately obvious that he had not struck bedrock.

  “I can see oblong blocks of stone,” he said, the excitement in his voice obvious, “so unless this is some other kind of underground structure, I think I’m standing on the roof of the tunnel built by the Templars.”

  “Do not,” Robin instructed, “fanny about. Get some of those blocks shifted so we can see what we’re looking at.”

  Mallory nodded, but before he did anything else he levered himself up and out of the hole and opened up the canvas bag of tools and equipment.

  “I think the important thing to remember,” he said, “is the expression ‘the roof of the tunnel,’ so the first thing I’m going to do is attach a rope to the trunk of that tree over there and then wrap the other end around me, so that if the roof gives way when I start removing stones, it won’t take me with it.”

  “Good thinking. Do you want me to tie it for you?”

  “You’re probably better at it than I am,” Mallory said, “but as it’s my neck that’ll be broken if I fall, I’d rather do it myself. Then if the bottom does fall out of my world, I’ll only have myself to blame.”