by David Wood
He passed one to Alex and they both commenced slotting their respective triangles into the sigils adorning the chapel ceiling. There were over a hundred of the symbol groupings, and an unusually high proportion included triangles, so Dane was a little surprised when, after only five minutes of searching, Alex let out a cry of triumph.
“Got it!”
He hurried over to inspect her discovery. She held her triangle in place at a point on the map that corresponded to a location in the middle of Western Europe, northwest of the distinctive boot-shape of Italy. “Where is that?”
“Do I look like a Jeopardy champion?” she retorted, playfully. “My focus is Twentieth Century American history, not geography. I found it, you figure it out.”
He grinned, consulting his woefully incomplete mental atlas of the world as he studied the surrounding areas on the map. There were no political boundaries, not even those that would have been in use at the time the map was created, nor were there any marking to indicate city names. Some of the sigils however did mark places that were instantly recognizable.
“Okay, we’ve got Italy here.” He pointed to a sigil near the midpoint of the peninsula. “That’s Rome, so we have a point of reference. Over here…” He touched another point that was almost the same distance from their target along a not-quite straight line to the northwest. “I think this is Paris. So our treasure lies roughly at the midpoint between Rome and Paris. Northern Italy or Southern France?” He snapped his fingers. “It’s in the Alps.”
“Don’t forget Switzerland, Germany, Austria—”
“Oh, so now you’re a geography whiz?” Dane shook his head. “Well, we’re not going to be able to pin it down without a current map. We can measure the distances on this map and then triangulate.”
“I forgot to pack my ruler.”
“Me too.” Dane quickly inventoried what they did have that he might be able to use to mark the distances. “Maybe I can cut some strips of fabric off my shirt, tie them together into a field expedient tape measure.”
“Save your shirt.” Alex pointed to the cloth covering the altar. “Use that.”
“Nice.” Dane flicked open the blade of his folding knife and commenced sawing at the flowing white shroud, cutting two long strips. He had Alex hold the end of one at the spot where Rome was situated, and then cut the other end so that it perfectly spanned the distance between the two cities. He then used the second strip to measure the distance from the target to each of the other cities.
As she watched him perform the latter operation, Alex said, “How is this supposed to work?”
“The distance between Rome and Paris is a constant. Sort of. There will be some wiggle room, but if we get the actual distance between the two cities, then we’ll be able to establish the scale of the map. That line forms the base of a triangle, and our treasure vault is at the top. We’ll know the distance of the sides of the triangle, and since it is a triangle, there’s only one spot where those lines will intersect.”
“Maybe you should go on Jeopardy.”
“Nice.” He stuffed the strips in his pocket. “We’re done here. Next stop...” He pointed to the sigil. “There.”
“There” turned out to be somewhere in the vicinity of Bern, Switzerland. Based on uncertainties about the specific locations shown on the chapel ceiling, inaccuracies in the map itself, and of course, minor errors in his measurements, Dane figured a margin of error of about twenty miles, which meant that identifying the correct sigil on the map had not narrowed the search down nearly as much as they had hoped. This fact did not become apparent until after their undetected second escape from the Gatekeepers’ chapel, as they gathered in their shared London hotel room to pore over a stack of tourist guides to the famously neutral Alpine country along with a few Templar histories which ranged from dryly accurate to ridiculously sensational.
“Where’s Professor when we need him?” said Bones, looking up from a Lonely Planet guide. “Remind me. When were the Templars…umm…around?”
“They were active from about 1120 to 1312,” said Alex. “Why?”
“Because according to this, the city of Bern didn’t even exist until the year 1191.”
“Let me see that.” Alex slid next to him and read the paragraph from which Bones had taken his information. When she was done, she offered her unenthusiastic conclusion. “The city did exist in the Templar period, but you’re right that it would have been a very small spot on the map of the Templars’ world.”
“Did you know,” intoned Dane, reading from a different guide, “that Switzerland didn’t really even exist until the end of the Thirteenth Century…just a few years before the Templars were destroyed. Before that, it was a bunch of isolated independent city states. But in 1291, those independent states formed the confederacy that eventually became the nation of Switzerland. Here’s the interesting part. During the Fourteenth Century, this confederation successfully fought to become independent of the Habsburg Empire. They won several major battles, and according to some accounts, they were assisted by an army of foreign knights who wore white coats.”
“White coats,” muttered Bones. “Somebody has a hero complex.”
Alex shook her head. “Coats refers to their coat-of-arms. A white coat would indicate that they were landless knights, with no property or allegiance.”
“Mercenaries?”
“Or Templars on the run,” said Dane. “Think about it. The Templars must have known that their days were numbered. You can’t get that powerful and wealthy and not have enemies. So in 1291, the Templars establish a secret headquarters in Switzerland—near the city of Bern—and began transferring some of their wealth there. When the Church moves against the Templars, they flee France and head into Switzerland where they begin slowly establishing a new country, a country that even today is famous for three things.”
Bones began ticking items off on his fingers. “Hot cocoa, army knives…and um, oh, I know this one… cheese!”
Dane grinned. “Close. I was thinking banking, engineering, and secrecy. Things that the Templars were also famous for. It makes perfect sense. The proof is right there on the Swiss flag.” He picked up a guide book and pointed to the distinctive white cross on a background of red. “It’s the reverse of the Templar Cross.”
“I’d hardly call that proof,” countered Alex. “Crosses are everywhere. Next you’re going to tell me that the International Red Cross is a Templar front.”
“Well, they are headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland.”
Alex covered her ears. “Not listening.”
Dane grinned. “Look, I don’t know whether any of this is true, but you and I both saw that mark on the chapel map, corresponding to Bern, Switzerland. That’s where we have to go next. The only question is, what do we do once we get there? There aren’t any sites that are known to have a connection to the Templars, but there are plenty of old castles and other buildings that date back to the period. How do we tighten our focus?”
“Another needle in a haystack,” grumbled Bones. But then he abruptly looked up from his guide book. “Speaking of haystacks… give me one of those triangles.”
Dane tossed the copper reproduction to Bones and then crossed the room to peer over his shoulder as Bones held the medallion out in front him, moving it back and forth as if trying to bring something into focus. Dane realized that what he was actually doing was using the triangle to eclipse part of a photograph on the page before him.
The photograph showed a lake at sunset, and in the background, a mountain peak that rose to an almost unnaturally well-defined triangle point; a perfectly match with the shape of the medallion.
Inspired, Dane took out his Mini MagLite, flipped off the red lens filter, and held it above the triangle. A tiny spot of light shone through the hole at the center of the cross and illuminated a point on the photograph.
“X marks the spot,” he announced. “Haystack, meet needle.”
CHAPTER 20
Swi
tzerland
John Lee Ray had long wondered at the inclusion of Bern on the chapel map. His extensive research into actual and suspected Templar refuge sites had uncovered a great deal of circumstantial evidence to support the idea that the Swiss Confederation had been a bold move on the part of the Templars to establish their own independent state in Europe. The timing was too perfect to be coincidence.
The decline of the order had begun in 1291, with the fall of the Templar stronghold of Acre in Palestine. The campaign to take back the Holy Lands was the very essence of the Templar mission, and despite their many successes, the ultimate defeat of Christian forces under Templar leadership had left them vulnerable. That was very year that the cantons and city-states of the remote mountain region east of France had united to fight for an existence independent of the European monarchies.
It was in the subsequent history of Europe however that Ray saw the tentacles of Templar influence. Just as the warrior-monks had created a sophisticated system of banking, the Swiss had, over the centuries, established a banking empire that guaranteed anonymity and political neutrality. Swiss banks had become synonymous with investor security, to the extent that a fortune in Nazi gold bullion, treasure looted from Holocaust victims and laundered through a series of foreign banks, was still sequestered away in Swiss vaults fifty years after the end of Hitler’s regime. Moreover, many of those victims—successful Jewish businessmen—had Swiss accounts of their own, which were now inaccessible to their surviving offspring since the Swiss banking system was built on a foundation of anonymity; names did not matter, only account numbers, and if those numbers were lost, the accounts entered a state of perpetual limbo. Swiss neutrality guaranteed that, even though the Third Reich was gone, no one—neither the victorious Allied powers nor the heirs to Nazi brutality—could get their hands on those assets.
To Ray, this was further evidence of Templar influence. The Swiss could remain neutral in every conflict, secretly bankroll both sides, and were assured that regardless of who was the victor and who was defeated, they would always win.
That knowledge however did not shed light on the location of the Templars’ own treasure vault.
Three days after arriving in Bern, the very place indicated by his photographs of the chapel map, he was no closer to finding it than he had been before traveling to Manila. He had the medallion, which proved that the vault was real, but where was it?
He had begun his search in the oldest part of the city, on the peninsula surrounded by the River Aare. He sent his men out to scout various location in the medieval heart of old Bern, while he and Scalpel visited some of the city’s oldest and most prominent landmarks, searching for Templar symbols or anything that might hint at a secret room or tunnel passage. He fancied the notion that the Zytglogge clock tower, with its elaborate mechanical bell striker, might somehow unlock the vault; turn the clock hands this way or that and a hidden door would pop open. The structure was certainly old enough; it was one of the original gate towers, dating back to the mid-1200s. Unfortunately, it was also, even after seven hundred years, still a work in progress. The Zytglogge tower had been almost completely destroyed in the great fire of 1405, along with most of the rest of the city, and been in a near constant state of renovation ever since. Many of its more famous features, including the clock itself, had been added in the centuries following the fire. If a vault had existed there, it almost certainly would have been discovered during one of the ongoing construction projects.
If not the Zytglogge, then where?
He spent the better part of a day roaming the Nydegg neighborhood and the Nydeggkirche, a historic church built in the mid-1300s on the site of the original Bernese fortress. Here too he found a structure that had been restored, renovated, and repurposed countless times throughout the centuries, but nowhere were there Templar “fingerprints” to be found.
He was pondering his next destination when his cell phone trilled. He answered it with his customary greeting: “John Lee Ray speaking.”
“Rooster here. You’ll never guess who I saw getting off a Eurail train.”
“I believe you’ve been in my employ long enough to know that I detest guessing games,” he answered frostily. “I suggest that you come hastily to the point, after which we may need to review procedures for reporting in.”
“Dane Maddock.” Rooster did not sound the least bit chastened. “Along with the woman and the Indian.”
All thoughts of further berating his subordinate evaporated. “Maddock is here?”
Scalpel immediately took an interest, mouthing the same words.
“Affirmative. I spotted them waiting for a train.” Rooster paused a beat, and then casually added. “I followed them to a place called Mulenen. They’re asking around about something called the ‘Niesen.’”
Niesen. It was the German word for sneeze, but it was also the name of nearby mountain peak, which when viewed from a certain perspective, formed a slightly off-center triangle. So perfect was the outline that Niesen Mountain, just a few miles from Bern, was widely known as “the Swiss Pyramid.”
Not only had Maddock escaped his exile in the Spratly Islands, he had also found the location of the Templar treasure, right where the riddle promised it would be.
Under a triangle so big only God could see.
Dane held the copper triangle at arm’s length so that it completely blocked out the outline of the Niesen, just as Bones had done with the photograph in the travel guide. Despite its nickname, the mountain only looked like a pyramid when viewed from the east; the most dramatic pictures, including the one that had led to Bones’ discovery, were taken from the far shore of nearby Lake Thun. Through some trial and error, Dane had worked out the approximate location on the slope that would correspond to the pin-hole in the center of the triangle. If all his assumptions were correct—a big if—the door to the Templar treasure vault would be found there.
Peering through the triangle one last time verified the spot at least, which perhaps not coincidentally, fell almost exactly at the location of the Schwandegg station for the Niesenbahn funicular railway—a cable driven single-track conveyance that shuttled hundreds of tourists daily from the village of Mulenen, at the base of the mountain, to its summit, nearly 7,800 feet above sea level. The Niesenbahn had been built in 1910 and was the longest continuous funicular railway in the world. Because it ran at an almost forty-five degree angle for its entire length, the interior of the cars were built on stair-step platforms so that passengers could stand on a level surface during travel. Running alongside it, at 11,674 steps, was the Guinness World Record longest stairway in the world, though the steps were only open to the public once a year for an organized stair-climbing race. Although neither the funicular nor the stairway had been built until many centuries after the destruction of the Templars, the route chosen for both doubtless traced back to an earlier, historical trail. The only question was whether the construction had inadvertently covered up any signs that had been left to indicate the precise location of the vault.
Dane could not help thinking about Bones’ haystack comparison. It felt like every time they made a deductive leap forward, they were confronted with a smaller, but still seemingly insurmountable area in which to search for their goal.
They bought tickets for the funicular and spent the fifteen minute ride halfway up the mountain trying to see the slope as the exiled Templars might have seen it nearly seven hundred years earlier—raw, untrammeled, undeveloped. The shape of the Niesen might have seemed like the perfect signpost, but what would have been involved in transforming the mountain into a place to store treasure?
His research had enlightened him on one point. Although often romanticized—sometimes demonized—the Templar organization was far more complex than most people realized. To begin with, only about ten percent of those who joined the Poor-Fellow Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon could be called Templar Knights. The Templar order did not elevate members to the knighthood; onl
y those of noble birth who took monastic vows to join the order—including a pledge to surrender all their wealth and property—were actually considered Knights of the Temple. The rest of the order, which numbered more than 20,000 at its peak, was mostly made up of two classes—sergeants and chaplains. The sergeants were both fighters and tradesmen—blacksmiths, carpenters, stone masons, and so forth. With an army of thousands of skilled tradesman, it would certainly have been feasible for the fugitive Templars to carve out a vault beneath this mountain peak.
They disembarked at Schwandegg but instead of joining the throng that moved to board the rail car for the second leg of the ascent, they meandered around the station and eventually descended the steps to continue their search on the mountain slope itself. Their first bit of luck came when they learned that the station was built on the foundation of an earlier watchtower dating back to the time of the original Swiss confederation.
“We need to focus our search on this building,” declared Dane. “Our Templars might have used that original tower to hide their excavation.”
They waited for the train cars to depart, one returning to the base of the mountain, the other moving on to the top, to begin looking in earnest. It was already early evening and there would only be a few more runs before the train shut down for the day. If they didn’t find what they were looking for, they would have to stay the night at the summit lodge or hike out on foot.
At one corner of the station well concealed by the overhanging viewing terrace, they found a large weathered cornerstone, and on it, more proof: a triangular depression that might easily have been mistaken for a Masonic seal, except that unlike the universal builder’s square and compass symbol, the triangle was not quite symmetrical. They had seen this shape elsewhere; it was on the official logo of the Niesen Park. But it was also a perfect match to the medallion.