The Templar Brotherhood

by James Becker

  Moments later, they both saw the unmistakable loom of light through the dense black material as at least two torch beams were shone into the opening. Then a third torchlight appeared and they heard heavy footsteps on the rocky floor as one of the Dominicans stepped into the side passage.

  The cloth was too thick for them to see what was happening outside their hiding place, but the changing intensity of the light told the tale anyway: a man was obviously shining his torch around the space, looking for any sign of them.

  The beam passed over the draped cloth three or four times, but never stayed focused on that spot, presumably because Mallory had been right: the black cloth looked remarkably similar to the black rock that surrounded it.

  They heard snatches of conversation that meant nothing to either of them, as they spoke no Italian, and then, to their unspoken relief, the lights disappeared and the sounds of voices and footsteps receded down the tunnel.

  • • •

  “I presume you didn’t find them,” Vitale said, when Toscanelli and the other men stopped beside him.

  “No,” Toscanelli replied. “The tunnel is blocked by a rockfall a few dozen meters farther on, so they didn’t get out that way, and we’ve checked all the side passages and cracks in the rock, and there’s no sign of them. They probably went the other way down the tunnel once they got inside it.”

  In the torchlight, Vitale looked and sounded profoundly unconvinced, but there was nothing else he could say. He had expected Mallory and Jessop to head toward the southwestern end of the tunnel, but if they hadn’t, then that certainly gave his men time to check the wooden chests piled against the tunnel wall.

  “You might have missed them and they could still be hiding somewhere here,” he said, “so keep your eyes open. Now check those boxes. You all know what we’re looking for.”

  Toscanelli moved over to the side of the tunnel opposite the pile of wooden chests, a position from which he could see in both directions up and down the tunnel as well as watch his men investigate the boxes.

  “Be careful when you open each one,” Vitale warned them. “Remember that we’ve already encountered a number of Templar booby traps. Some of those chests might incorporate defensive mechanisms, so when you open the lids, make sure you’re standing behind or beside the boxes, not in front of them.”

  • • •

  In the crevice at the end of the short side passage, Mallory and Robin stood still and silent, worried that their hiding place had been spotted, and that if they emerged from behind the sheet of cloth, they might find themselves looking down the barrels of a couple of pistols held by two Dominicans. From the tunnel, they could hear the sounds of heavy objects being moved—presumably the Dominicans were removing some of the chests from the pile and then opening them up—accompanied by the almost constant chatter of Italian male voices.

  But that wasn’t all. Occasionally they both heard a metallic clatter, followed in each case by raised and obviously excited voices. And despite not understanding the language, it also became obvious to them both that one man was very much in charge. A cold and commanding voice, quite different to Toscanelli’s, belonged to the man who was clearly directing operations.

  It was also apparent that something had happened that their pursuers hadn’t expected. The raised voice of an angry man sounds very much the same no matter what language he’s speaking, and several of the Dominicans were obviously getting annoyed. For what reason, Mallory couldn’t guess, but the tones of the voices he could hear left him in no doubt that something had gone wrong.

  Maybe the chests were empty and they hadn’t found the bullion and jewels that they had been expecting to recover. Perhaps it was yet another deception by the Templars, and the boxes were full of rocks or something else of no value whatsoever. Whatever the cause, the raised voices were not what Mallory had expected to hear.

  And then, in a long sentence obviously spoken by the leader of the group, he picked out one single word in Italian that he did know. He couldn’t remember where he’d learned it, but he was quite certain of its meaning. And that made no sense, either, in the context of where they were and what was happening.

  He heard another brief sentence, uttered by the same voice, then the sound of footsteps receding down the tunnel and back toward the hole he had cut through the roof of it.

  Mallory waited until the silence around them was complete, and then slowly and with infinite care he pulled back the edge of the black cloth just far enough to allow him to look across the stone chamber.

  His eyes were well-adjusted to the darkness because of the length of time they had been down there, but he could see absolutely nothing. The blackness was total.

  For a few seconds he did nothing, just concentrated all his attention on trying to discover if there was anyone else in the chamber with him and Robin. He heard nothing. No sound of movement or breathing.

  He took his torch, extended his arm to one side of his body as far as he could, then flicked on the light and immediately turned it off again. That brief flash, almost like from the flashgun on a camera, allowed him to confirm what he had hoped: the chamber was empty. And, he believed, the torch had been illuminated for such a short time that the Italians farther down the tunnel would not have seen it.

  “They’ve gone,” he said quietly. “I think we can move.”

  “Thank God for that. All my joints feel as if they’ve locked solid.”

  Mallory wrapped his fingers around the glass at the end of the torch to reduce the amount of light it would emit to little more than a glow, then switched it on and cautiously led the way out of the rocky chamber. At the entrance, he paused and listened, the torch switched off again, in case his deduction was wrong and the Dominicans had left an ambush behind them. But he saw and heard nothing.

  He stepped out into the tunnel and, still using the minimum amount of light he could, he looked at the pile of chests.

  And what he saw made even less sense of the word he had not only clearly heard but also clearly understood.

  About a dozen of the medieval wooden chests stood open on the floor of the tunnel. Seven of them had incorporated defense mechanisms within their lids, because each of those open chests exhibited some kind of an extended steel blade, some individual but most double, that had obviously been triggered when the lid was lifted. But the absence of any blood or bodies showed that the Dominicans had learned from the hard lessons of the past, and had opened each of the chests by either standing behind it or making sure they were out of range of the defense mechanism when the lid was raised.

  “I don’t understand this,” Robin said, looking at the chests.

  Within each of the open boxes, below the triggered antitheft devices, the dull yellow of incorruptible, eternal gold shone in the light of the torch. Each chest was full almost to the brim with a literal fortune: chalices, cups, goblets, plates, knives, coins, and bars of gold, interspersed with the occasional object fashioned from silver. Without the slightest shadow of a doubt, they were looking at part of the lost treasure of the Knights Templar order.

  “They’ve just opened roughly a dozen chests and then walked away,” Robin went on. “You’d expect them to take some of the boxes or the contents with them, but as far as I can see they haven’t. And even if they’ve just gone off to organize a van or a lorry to haul this away, I would have thought they’d have left an armed guard here, just to protect what they’ve found.”

  “You’re absolutely right,” Mallory said, “but I have a theory about that, based on one single word that I heard and understood.”

  “I didn’t think you spoke Italian.”

  “I don’t, but I do recognize the odd word or two. You heard their raised voices just before they left this end of the tunnel? One man was doing all the shouting, and he was obviously the one in charge. One of the last sentences he uttered contained the Italian word chincaglieria, and
that was the word I recognized.”

  “Which means what?” Robin demanded.

  “It translates as ‘trinkets,’ meaning ornamental objects of no particular value.”

  She didn’t respond for a moment; then she shook her head.

  “That makes no sense, either. I’m no expert on gold and silver objects, but I don’t doubt for even a second that what we’re looking at here is the real thing. This isn’t some kind of Templar trick. Those boxes genuinely are full of gold and silver objects, worth a king’s ransom, so why would that Dominican refer to the contents as trinkets? Are you sure that you heard the word correctly?”

  “As sure as I can be, yes. But actually, this does make a kind of sense. If you remember, some of the text we decrypted referred to the treasure of the order, but also to the assets, as if these were two different things, not just two different ways of referring to the same thing. I think what we’ve found here are the assets, the working capital and financial wealth of the order.”

  “Then what the hell is the treasure?”

  “I do have one idea about that. More to the point, I think the Dominicans opened up these boxes hoping to find one very specific object, and when they didn’t the man in charge of them dismissed all of this vast wealth as a collection of mere trinkets, because in his eyes that’s exactly what it is. I think the Dominicans are after something very different, and they’ve probably all gone off to try to find it.”

  “And I suppose you know what it is, and where it’s hidden?”

  Mallory smiled at Robin in the darkness.

  “Actually, I have got a good idea about the answers to both those questions. And if I’m right we’ll definitely need this sword.”

  54

  Midlothian, Scotland

  “When all this is over,” Robin said, as they made their way quickly and quietly back along the tunnel, “you can spend an evening explaining to me exactly what you meant when you said you thought you loved me, preferably over a candlelit gourmet dinner in a Michelin-starred restaurant attached to a decent hotel with the biggest and most comfortable beds available. I’m not the kind of girl likely to be satisfied by a muttered expression of devotion while she’s hiding under a bit of dirty old cloth in a cave and expecting to be shot at any moment.”

  “When all this is over,” Mallory replied, “not only will I be glad to do that, but hopefully I’ll be able to afford to do that.”

  “I think you’ll find a way to pay for it. But in the meantime, what’s the thing with this sword?”

  Mallory was clutching the second Templar battle sword, the one that had been hanging on the wall near the end of the tunnel.

  “I think the sword means something, because of the strange shape of the end of the blade. More accurately, I think the end of the blade might function as a key to something. Remember the book safe that started all this?”

  The trail they had been following for what seemed so long had begun when Robin had found an old piece of parchment in a medieval book safe that had arrived in her shop as a part of a job lot of old books she’d purchased. When she opened it, she triggered an ancient antitheft device that had forced two rows of sharpened spikes out of the safe, obviously intended to seriously injure anyone who forced it open. Fortunately she’d been using a long-handled screwdriver at the time, and although it was a shock when the booby trap was actuated, none of the spikes had even touched her.

  “I’m not likely to forget it,” she replied. “And you worked out that the ‘key’ that would open the safe without driving spikes through your hands was the blade of a particular dagger. So do you think we’re looking for something similar? Some chest or box that needs the blade of that sword to be inserted to open it?”

  “More or less, yes, but probably not a box, because that would have been forced open by somebody centuries ago. I think we’re looking for something much more subtle and less obvious than that.”

  “And where is it?”

  “The sword was mounted on the wall with the blade pointing toward the blocked-off end of the tunnel. That was quite deliberate, and I think that’s a fairly clear indication that whatever the sword blade is designed to open lies in that direction, on the other side of the rockfall.”

  “Does that mean you’ve got to go and dig another hole so we can get into the tunnel on the other side of the blockage?”

  “I hope not,” Mallory said. “I think it’s simpler than that. As far as we could tell from the topographical maps, this tunnel seems to run all the way from Gilmerton Cove to Rosslyn Chapel. We cut into the tunnel roof just over a mile from the chapel, by my rough calculations, and we walked about a mile underground. So I think the Templar treasure and the end of the tunnel are really close to the chapel, perhaps even underneath it. So I don’t think the sword was necessarily pointing toward the last few yards of the tunnel, the bit we couldn’t get into, but more likely toward Rosslyn Chapel itself.”

  “So is that where we’re going?”

  “That’s where we’re going,” Mallory confirmed.

  He turned off the torch when he saw a dim glow ahead of them in the tunnel.

  “I hope that’s light coming into the tunnel through the hole and not the torchlight from a Dominican reception committee.”

  It wasn’t a reception committee, but when they reached the opening in the roof, they both saw at once that the rope they’d used to climb down had disappeared. The Dominicans had obviously removed it.

  “That’s a bit of a bugger,” Mallory said, “but it’s not a problem. The roof of the tunnel is only about nine feet high at this side. There’s another rope in the car, and I can boost you up so you can get out and go and fetch it.”

  He put the sword safely to one side, handed her the car keys, then leaned back against the wall of the tunnel, bent his knees, and laced his hands together. Robin put her left foot into his cupped hands. As soon as she did so, Mallory straightened up and then lifted his hands as high as he could, up to chest level, boosting Robin high enough that she could easily scramble out of the hole.

  “Okay?” he asked.

  “We won’t need the rope,” Robin said in reply. “Keep out of the way,” she added.

  Moments later, Mallory saw why as the end of a rigid aluminum ladder appeared. Robin lowered it down into the tunnel.

  “It was just lying here on the grass a few feet away,” Robin explained as Mallory quickly climbed up it to join her. “Presumably the Dominicans brought it with them.”

  “I’m glad they did,” he replied. “I’ve never been very good at rope climbing. Right, let’s go.”

  They jogged up the slope to where Mallory had parked the Porsche. He opened the car, slid the sword into the space behind the seats, then sat down and started the engine. It was only about a mile and a half to Rosslyn Chapel on the twisty country road, and he stopped the car in the largely empty parking lot reserved for visitors.

  “I’ll take the sword with us,” he said. “There don’t seem to be that many people here today, and hopefully we can find what we’re looking for quickly and without attracting too much attention.”

  There were a few visitors inside the chapel, standing in small groups or as individuals, looking at the bizarre decorations, but it was largely empty. The word chapel usually conjures up images of a fairly small place of worship, but Rosslyn was big. They both stopped after they’d taken a few paces inside and just looked around them.

  “I have no idea where we should even start,” Mallory said.

  “Hang on a minute. I’ve just remembered something. The translation we did of that text on the parchment said that the wealth of the order was in one place, but that the ‘treasure’ was ‘beneath the stone which is not as it seems’ or something like that.”

  Mallory shrugged.

  “As far as I can see, apart from the pews and one or two other bits in here, everythin
g is made of stone,” he pointed out. “So which particular one do you think we should be looking at?”

  “Now, that is a bloody good question. I have no idea.”

  “Nor me,” Mallory said. “Let’s split up and just walk around the place to see if anything strikes us.”

  They each did a complete circuit of the chapel in opposite directions, looking carefully at every single piece of stonework that could possibly suggest some kind of double meaning, which obviously excluded the walls of the building because a wall was, ultimately, just a wall. They met each other again near the entrance, neither of them having spotted anything that seemed vaguely hopeful.

  But Robin had found something, though it was nothing directly to do with their search. On a pew near the back of the chapel she’d picked up a discarded guide to Rosslyn, and when Mallory walked up to her, she was flicking through the pages, hoping for inspiration.

  And then, strangely enough, she found it. Or, at least, she found a photograph and a half page of text that identified something that just possibly might have been what they were searching for.

  “This could be it,” she said. “That pillar over there. If this guidebook is right, that does seem to fit the bill, more or less.”

  “What is it?”

  “That’s the Prince’s Pillar, better known as the Apprentice Pillar,” she said.

  “I’ve heard of that,” Mallory said. “Something to do with a murder, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. Now, if this is right, then it means that at least one of the documents we translated had to have been written after Rosslyn was built, because the story of the killing goes right back to the time when the chapel was being constructed. According to the legend, one of the master masons employed in building the chapel was given a model of a pillar of extremely complex and sophisticated design, and was told to reproduce it in the chapel itself.

  “The mason decided that it would be so difficult to manufacture it that he first needed to go and see and measure the original, which was in some building in Europe, possibly in Rome. So he went off to look at the original pillar. But while he was away his apprentice took the model and constructed the pillar that we see in front of us today. When his master returned from his travels, he was both stunned and furious when he saw the finished work, and when he was told that it was his own apprentice who’d fabricated it, he picked up his mallet and killed the apprentice on the spot. That’s why it’s now known as the Apprentice Pillar, though until roughly the end of the seventeenth century it was known as the Prince’s Pillar.”