by James Becker
He pulled out the Browning, but even as he turned to fire, Robin stepped beside him and loosed off four rapid shots.
“I’ll keep them back,” she snapped. “You just trip the booby trap. You’d better hope that it still works. Otherwise, we’re in trouble.”
They both turned and ran back down the tunnel, the way they had come, random shots and ricochets pursuing them as the Dominicans tried to gun them down.
Mallory flicked on his torch, running the beam down the side of the tunnel, looking for the object he had seen when they had first walked that way: the thing that looked like a sconce on the wall but actually wasn’t.
As another volley of shots rang out, the Dominicans probably now aiming toward the loom of his torchlight, Mallory suddenly saw the heavy metal bar he was looking for, sticking out of the wall at an angle, the dark steel discolored by a pattern of rusty patches. It was probably about eight feet off the ground.
He didn’t just pull the bar downward; as he ran he handed the torch to Robin, then jumped up and grabbed it with both hands, letting his body weight pull the lever down. For one sickening instant, nothing seemed to happen. Then the lever jerked in his hands and traveled downward until it was at a right angle to the vertical wall.
For perhaps two seconds after Mallory released the bar, the only sounds in the tunnel were the shouts of the Dominicans and the volley of shots coming from behind him. But then he and Robin heard a deeper and much louder bang as something heavy moved against some other massive object.
Mallory grabbed Robin by the hand and they both started running, as hard as they could, back toward the opening in the tunnel.
And then the last Templar booby trap, cunningly designed and constructed by a group of men who had known exactly what they were doing, was activated after lying dormant and waiting for some seven hundred years. Metal catches linked to heavy chains were snapped open, hinged steel bars swung downward, and hundreds of tons of boulders, their edges painstakingly rounded to ensure that they would not jam the mechanism, rumbled down from the hollow chambers built into the roof of the tunnel.
In just seconds, with a noise like a thousand simultaneous thunderstorms, the banging and crashing echoing from the walls, the boulders smashed to the floor, one upon another, until the entire tunnel was completely sealed by the huge rockfall.
As the noise finally ceased, Mallory and Robin slowed their headlong flight and then turned to look back down the tunnel.
Of the Dominicans, there was no sign. They had probably been too far back to be crushed by the falling rocks, but they were now, without any doubt, imprisoned at the end of the tunnel along with the enormous wealth of the Knights Templar.
“The Templars seem to have been quite good at this kind of thing,” Mallory said. “That’s three birds with one stone,” he added, coughing in the cloud of dust thrown up by the rockfall. “It keeps the Dominicans away from us. It also keeps them here on the site where they can be arrested, and makes sure that they can’t steal anything. Now we can call the police and organize a rescue party. An armed rescue party, obviously.”
They both took a last look down the tunnel, then continued walking.
“Well, at least we’ll show a profit on this little adventure,” Robin said, as they walked back down the tunnel toward open air and the ladder thoughtfully provided by the Dominicans. “The gold in the tunnel must be worth tens of millions of pounds at least, just as bullion, and probably a lot more because of its historical importance. It’s a bit of a shame that we’ll have to declare it a treasure trove, and that means we’ll probably never see any of it again, except as an exhibit in some museum.”
They reached the ladder and Robin started to climb up it.
But as her head emerged above ground level, a shot rang out and she tumbled back down the ladder to land in a crumpled heap beside Mallory on the tunnel floor.
56
Midlothian, Scotland
The Dominican had waited only to positively identify the person climbing up the ladder as the woman Jessop before he had fired. He’d heard both the sound of gunshots and then the thunderous rumble a few minutes earlier, and had guessed that the English couple had probably had something to do with what was quite obviously a rockfall. There might have been nothing he could do now to help his companions, but at least he could take his revenge on the English couple in the name of the Dominican order.
He wasn’t entirely sure that he’d hit Jessop, though the complete absence of sound from the tunnel suggested that he probably had. In fact, it suggested he’d probably killed her, because if she’d just been wounded, he would have expected to hear—and he would have enjoyed listening to—her cries of pain.
And he still didn’t know where Mallory was.
He waited a few more seconds, then began walking slowly and carefully toward the aluminum ladder, his pistol held ready in one hand in front of him, while his other hand pressed gently on the dressing over his stomach.
• • •
When Robin had fallen limply and clearly out of control down the ladder, Mallory had rushed forward, fearing the worst because of the shot he’d heard. But when he reached her, she rolled over, stood up, and pulled him away from the opening and deeper into the tunnel.
“Are you okay?” Mallory demanded.
“Yes. That bloody Dominican you slashed with the sword is up there waving a pistol about. When he shot at me it was a hell of a shock because I didn’t expect to see anybody at all, and I missed my footing on the ladder. That’s why I fell. I’ll be a bit bruised for a while, but that’s all.”
“Right. I’ll take care of him.”
“No, you won’t,” Robin said firmly. “He shot at me, so he’s mine.”
“Okay, if that’s what you want, but could I just suggest something?”
• • •
The wounded Dominican was about ten feet from the ladder when he saw something that made no immediate sense. From the dark opening in the tunnel a Templar battle sword suddenly appeared in the air, turning end over end as it rose high into the sky. The sight was so unexpected that he simply couldn’t take his eyes off it, and it was only as he turned away from the tunnel entrance to see the sword slam, point down, into the grassy surface of the field about twenty feet away that he realized he had been duped.
He turned back to the aluminum ladder, raising his pistol to aim as he did so, but the woman Jessop was already there, standing on the ladder with the upper part of her torso out of the tunnel and her own pistol pointing steadily at him.
He muttered a curse as he squeezed the trigger, but he knew it was already too late.
As two bullets slammed into his body, knocking him backward, his last conscious thought was about the word that the woman had said in the instant before she pulled the trigger. His command of the English language was reasonably good, and he found the word almost as insulting as the bullets that tore the life from his body.
The word was amateur.
• • •
There was nothing they could do for the Dominican who had tried to kill Robin, so they left his body where it was and headed back to the car. Mallory would make all the calls and be on-site when the police and the rescue teams arrived. But because Robin had fired her pistol four times in total, and because there was a dead man, shot by her, lying in the field, it was vitally important that she get out of the way and leave the scene as soon as possible.
They decided to drive back to the hotel, where Robin could shower and give her hands a good scrub to try to remove the cordite, and where they would also pack the three pistols away in one of their bags.
They also decided that once she’d done all that, Robin would check out of the hotel, hire a car, and then take a room in an entirely different hotel some distance away, just to ensure that there was no easy way for the police to question her for at least a couple of days, by which time any test ad
ministered to her hands would reveal no traces of cordite.
“Are you okay?” Mallory asked, as he drove away from the site and back toward the hotel. “About killing that Dominican, I mean.”
“Yes. That was completely justified, in my opinion. I’m sure I’ll suffer the odd nightmare over it for the next few weeks, but really, I’m fine. I’m quite tough, you know.”
“I do know that,” Mallory replied, resting his hand on her thigh. “You’ve proved it often enough.”
After a few minutes, Robin returned to the topic she’d started talking about earlier.
“So, I’m sure we should get something out of this,” she said, “some reward for what we’ve found—all the incredible wealth of the Knights Templar—but I suppose we probably won’t be able to keep any of it.”
“We might,” Mallory replied, “because of the unusual circumstances. The rules of treasure troves basically depend on two things: whether the object was lost or hidden deliberately, and whether or not there was an intention to return to recover it. In this case, we know who hid it—the Knights Templar, led by Jacques de Molay—and we also know that they meant to retrieve it one day. And that means you can argue that it’s still owned by the Templar order.”
“But the Templars don’t exist any longer,” Jessop objected.
“True, but not necessarily relevant. One of the rules of the order was celibacy,” Mallory replied, in an apparent non sequitur, “but as we talked about before, many of the knights joined the Templars not as young men but later in life, when they might have already been married and fathered children. One of them was Jacques de Molay himself. There are probably hints in the historical record that he had a male child, and we know from what we’ve discovered—that word puer, for starters—that he had a son, a man he was almost certainly grooming to enter the order as a knight and who perhaps would even end up following in his father’s footsteps, to become the next Grand Master. Philip the Fair put a stop to that, of course. But we’ve recovered a crucially important document during this quest.”
Jessop nodded. “You mean the parchment we found in the Templar church at Templecombe?”
“Exactly. As we discovered, that was a kind of Templar passport,” Mallory went on, “that would allow the bearer to pass freely with his goods. I looked carefully at it, and the bearer was very clearly the son of Jacques de Molay. He was the man entrusted by his father to spirit the treasure, the gold as well as Baphomet, out of the clutches of the French king. And obviously Jacques de Molay guessed that it would be a long time before the order rose again, if it ever did, and so there was one additional paragraph on that parchment. In it, in his role as the Grand Master and as a way of trying to safeguard everything that the order owned, de Molay passed on the ownership of all the Templar wealth to his son and, more importantly, to his son’s offspring, down through the generations in perpetuity, obviously to try to achieve some kind of continuity.”
“So what?”
“So, you remember I told you I was researching my family history? I was surprised when the main branch of my family tree shifted north to Scotland, and even more surprised when it jumped over to France a few centuries earlier, but I’ve checked it several times now, and the results are always the same. De Molay’s son brought the treasure out of France, and transported it on to Scotland using the Templar fleet that sailed out of Honfleur. But to foil any attempts by the Dominicans or anyone else to seize it, when he arrived in Scotland he and his companions, the Templar knights charged with accompanying him and guarding the treasure, made sure that it was really well hidden. Then he must have built on the preparations that Jacques de Molay had already put in place in Cyprus at the castle of Saint Hilarion, and also worked with the Templars who’d escaped from France into Switzerland with the Templar Archive. They must have prepared and encrypted the clues that would lead to the final hiding place of the treasure, and he must have done his best to ensure that the trail and the meaning of the messages would be intelligible only to a fellow Templar. That was his intention, anyway.
“But the son of Jacques de Molay did something else as well. He changed his surname from de Molay to Mallay, and that, over the years, morphed into Mallory. Having done everything that he could to ensure that the Knights Templar order would have access to the assets if the order ever rose again, he also settled down in Scotland, got married, and had children in his new country. Jacques de Molay had stated and arranged that the succession would be through primogeniture, through the firstborn and through the male line, and the whole point about this is that that is what I am. I’m a direct lineal male descendant of the last Grand Master of the Knights Templar, firstborn all the way, and I can prove it.
“It’ll be an epic legal struggle, I’ve no doubt,” Mallory finished, “but I think I’ve got enough evidence to prove that everything that we found in that tunnel actually belongs to me.”
“You mean you think you’re the last of the Knights Templar?” Robin asked, a broad smile on her face.
“That’s a bit of a stretch,” Mallory admitted, “though I suppose I’ve got more right to call myself that than any of these idiots who prance around wearing funny clothes and pretending that they’re modern-day Templars. And I’m certainly unique because I used a genuine Templar battle sword today in personal combat with an enemy. And kind of won the fight, I suppose. But I definitely wouldn’t call myself a Templar, and certainly not a Templar knight. What I am really is just the beneficiary of the Knights Templar order.
“But however you look at it, that’s one hell of an inheritance.”
Author’s Note
The Knights Templar
From its earliest days, the order of the Knights Templar didn’t really make sense. Ostensibly, it was a group of nine warrior monks, all related by either blood or marriage, or both, to the founder, Hugues de Payens, and it had been formed in 1119 with the stated objective of protecting pilgrims on their journey to Jerusalem. Quite how a force so small could possibly guard the thousands of miles of pilgrim routes that ran across Europe, or even the dozens of miles within the Holy Land, was never explained.
They received permission from King Baldwin II of Jerusalem to establish their headquarters on the Temple Mount, and they were accommodated in the Al-Aqsa Mosque, then known in Latin as the Templum Solomonis, because it was believed to have been erected on the original site of Solomon’s Temple. Indeed, their lodging was largely responsible for the official name the order adopted: the Pauperes commilitones Christi Templique Solomonici or the “Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon.”
The very first thing the order of the Knights Templar did after its formation was spend an inordinate amount of time—nine years, in fact—digging into and under the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, apparently searching for something quite specific and obviously of great importance to them. Exactly what they were looking for has never been definitively established. Some researchers have suggested it was either a kind of monetary treasure—though this seems unlikely in view of the determined efforts made by the order to accumulate funds soon afterward—or more possibly a religious artifact, perhaps even the fabled “Baphomet,” the sacred head or skull the members of the order were believed to venerate.
That these excavations took place is beyond doubt, as Templar relics were found in the hidden chambers under the Mount by Charles Warren during his sponsored dig there between 1867 and 1870. He later became Sir Charles Warren, the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis, the head of the Metropolitan Police in London, and the man who famously failed to capture Jack the Ripper.
In 1129, the Templar order was officially sanctioned by the Catholic Church at the Council of Troyes and immediately began asking for donations of land or money, or both, and also for the sons of noble families to join the cause to fight the good fight. It was stated that the funds and assets would help provide protection for pilgrims and for the defense of J
erusalem, and by implication also assist the donor in securing a place in heaven.
Only a decade later, in 1139, Pope Innocent II issued the papal bull Omne Datum Optimum, which was by any standards an astonishing document. It exempted the Templars from having to obey any local laws and from the payment of any taxes. It was the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card that allowed the Templars to go where they liked, to cross any border and to do whatever they wanted, subject only to the authority of the pope.
No other military or religious order, before or since, has received anything like this blanket freedom and privilege from the Vatican, and nobody has ever managed to explain how the Knights Templar, formed only twenty years earlier, achieved this. There is a strong argument to suggest that the pope was so terrified of some object the order possessed—and by implication something they found in Jerusalem in the hidden chambers under the Temple Mount—that he gave the Templars whatever they wanted. If that were the case, then what the order owned had to have been of enormous religious significance. The two obvious contenders are the Ark of the Covenant—which quite probably at one time was hidden at Chartres Cathedral in France, as is discussed in the second book of this trilogy, The Templar Archive—or something that had the potential to destroy the Catholic Church, like the severed head of Jesus Christ.
A papal bull, by the way, was a specific charter or letter issued by the pope, and the unusual name is derived from the lead seal known as a bulla that was attached to the document as a form of authentication.
From the outset, the concept of armed monks was criticized—how could a man of peace carry a sword?—but the order was legitimized by the influential Bernard of Clairvaux, a nephew of one of the original knights who wrote a long treatise called De Laude Novae Militae or “In Praise of the New Knighthood,” which not only supported the Templars as a group, but also defended the idea of a military religious order by appealing to the long-held Christian beliefs of fighting a just war and the taking up of arms to protect both the innocent and the Church against attack. By his actions, Bernard endorsed the mission of the Templars, who thus became the first “warrior monks” of the Western world.