by James Becker
“Let’s get out of here,” he said, walking back to where Robin was standing.
The Golf was a mess. The rear window had been blown out by the second shot fired by the dead driver, and two other bullets had hit the rear of the car, leaving ugly holes with jagged edges in the metal.
“We’re lucky neither hit the fuel tank,” Mallory said, peering under the vehicle to check for dripping petrol. “At least it should still be drivable.”
Robin got back in the driver’s seat and started the engine, which sounded entirely normal.
“I’ll tell you one thing,” she said, releasing the clutch pedal as Mallory sat down beside her. “This has comprehensively buggered up my no-claim bonus.”
He grinned at her for a moment, then shook his head.
“I didn’t think we’d be in this state quite so quickly,” he said. “Obviously the bloody Italians are still after us, even if they are outsourcing the work.”
“That’s a nice way of putting it. I presume you know more about this kind of thing than I do, but even I can guess that the ‘principal’ is the person who ordered us to be killed, but what did that man mean by a ‘cutout’?”
“Ordering somebody to be killed is a big deal, and nobody who wants a murder committed is ever going to openly make a contract with a couple of assassins for hire. If at all possible, he’ll use a third party, maybe more than one in a chain, to hide his identity. That’s a cutout. I suppose,” he added thoughtfully, “it might have been a good idea to take the mobile, just in case we could have tracked and identified the cutout at least.” Then he shook his head. “Too late, anyway, and I suppose whoever it was will have screened his number so it would be difficult or impossible to identify him, at least with the resources we have.”
Robin had brought the Golf up to speed on the now virtually empty road, and was trying to use as little throttle as possible to avoid exhaust fumes being sucked into the car through the destroyed rear window.
Mallory glanced back and looked at the rear tailgate. Bits of safety glass were still clinging to the window seal around the edges of the hatchback, but virtually all the glass had been blown into the vehicle.
“We’ve got to decide what to do about this,” he said.
“What, the car or the Italians?”
“Both, though I was really thinking short-term, about the car. Getting the rear window replaced will be easy enough, but those two bullet holes are going to be a bit more difficult to hide. We can’t take the car to a garage in this state, because absolutely the first thing they’d do would be to call the rozzers. And we can’t really claim the car was stolen, because that would raise an immediate red flag in front of Inspector bloody Wilson. He’s just itching to find something—anything—that he can pin on us.”
“So what do we do?”
“I think we need to do a bit of modification to the back of it, to hide the bullet holes. If you can find a quiet parking area somewhere well off the road, I’ll see what I can do.”
Fifteen minutes later Robin steered the car off the road and onto a disused track, not a paved turnout, that offered some cover from the road, and she and Mallory hopped out to inspect the damage.
The two holes were fairly close together, one in the tailgate itself and the other one a short distance below it, and it was perfectly obvious what had caused them. Bullet holes in thin metal left unmistakable damage.
“I think,” Mallory said, “that we need a slight rear-end shunt to conceal these.”
He looked around, then pointed a short distance farther down the track at a rocky outcrop. “That might do it. Let me just do a bit of creative panel beating first.”
He picked up a heavy stone about the size of a grapefruit, one side of it a jagged point, and rammed the sharp edge hard against the lower hole. The fairly thin metal bent and tore, and after repeating the treatment five times, the telltale hole was so torn and distorted that it was impossible to tell what had caused the damage.
Then Mallory lay flat on his back and looked under the vehicle, checking to see if the bullet had lodged somewhere in the chassis.
“There’s a dent and a scar on a part of the rear subframe,” he said, “but the bullet is nowhere in sight.”
“The tailgate is going to be more difficult,” Robin said, “because it’s double-skinned.”
While Mallory scrambled to his feet, she opened the tailgate and peered into the open trunk of the vehicle.
“You’re not going to like this,” she said.
“What?”
“The bullet stayed inside the trunk. What stopped it plowing through and into the car—and potentially into my back—was your computer bag. And, unless I’m mistaken, your computer.”
Mallory’s expression darkened. His computer was his life, and his main source of income.
“There’s a hole on this side, but no hole on the other,” Robin continued, lifting out the leather bag.
Mallory almost snatched it from her and opened it to pull out his laptop. He looked at both sides of the computer but could see no immediate sign of damage
“It looks untouched,” he said, his tone puzzled. “So what . . .”
“I think this is what you’re looking for,” Robin said, reaching into the bag herself and pulling out a distorted and bent oblong black metal object, from the side of which about half of a copper-jacketed nine-millimeter bullet protruded. “It’s one of your backup hard disks. Hard, in this case, being the most important part of the description.”
Mallory took it from her, an expression of profound relief on his face. “I always said backups were vital, but until this moment I didn’t know just how important they could be.”
“Look at the angle,” Robin said. “I think that probably saved my life. If that bag had been lying flat instead of standing upright, the bullet would have gone right through the back of the driver’s seat.”
Mallory took the ruined disk from her and looked at it. Then he wrapped his arms around Robin.
“Thank God for that,” he murmured, kissing the top of her head.
“Enough of that. Later,” Robin said, disengaging herself. “We’ve got stuff to do.”
Mallory picked up the hard drive and seized the end of the bullet, but it was stuck fast in the metal of the hard disk. He took out a folding multitool from his bag, opened it to expose the jaws of the pliers, and prepared to grasp the missile once again, but Robin stopped him with a gesture.
“I’d like that as a souvenir,” she said. “With the bullet in place, obviously. It’ll be the first time a computer’s ever saved my life, rather than tried to drive me to suicide. I think I’ll get it mounted.”
“You’re welcome to it. It’s all yours,” Mallory said, handing it over. “Now let’s see what we can do with this bullet hole.”
He used the rock again to distort the point of impact and conceal the cause of the damage. When he was satisfied that nobody would be able to prove that a bullet had hit the vehicle, he started the car, drove it a few yards along the track to the rocky outcrop, turned the vehicle, and then backed it hard into the rock. Then he got out again and checked the damage.
“That should do it,” he said. “It just looks like a bit of really clumsy reversing, which I know you wouldn’t do, not with your driving skills. But that’s the best we can do. Now we can book it into a garage somewhere and get the damage fixed without some eagle-eyed mechanic calling the cops.”
They checked that all the rear lights still worked, then got back on the road.
“Exeter, I suppose?” Robin asked.
“That’s as good as anywhere. All we need is a garage where we can leave the car to be fixed. Then we’ll hire something else so we can stay mobile.”
Robin was silent for a few moments, then glanced across at Mallory.
“And do what?” she asked softly. “I don’t
know about you, but this really isn’t what I signed up for. Facing those armed Italians here in Devon and then in the cave on Cyprus was one thing. We were both hunting for the relic, obviously, and I suppose you could say it was inevitable that we’d end up in some kind of fight with them because of that. But unless I’ve completely misunderstood, those two men had just been ordered to kill us. Not find out what we knew or what we were going to do, or anything like that, but just to shoot us down in cold blood. And that’s a whole different ball game.”
Mallory nodded. “You’re absolutely right, but I do think it was a predictable reaction, just because of what happened. Think about it. We managed to escape those Italians in Cyprus, and once we came back to the U.K. we passed over what we’d discovered about their identities to the police, including that video of the leader of the group telling us how clever they’d been, and admitting that he’d killed the three men in your apartment in Dartmouth. He only told us that because he knew we were about to die. But because we escaped, he’s now a wanted man here in the U.K., and that’s entirely down to us. So trying to kill us does make sense from his point of view. It’s simple revenge. Nothing more, nothing less. And he would have had to outsource the job because his face will now be on a watch list at all British airports and other points of entry to the country. Or it should be, if Wilson has any brains at all.”
“So are you saying that he’ll try again once he’s found out that his first attempt didn’t work?”
Mallory spread out his hands. “I have no idea. Possibly. Maybe even probably. And that really leaves us with two choices. We can hide, go to ground, and hope that whoever he sends after us next time can’t track us down. Or we do the other thing.”
“Which is?”
“We carry on with the quest. We try to identify the next clue and see where that takes us.”
Robin nodded. “That’s what I guessed you’d say. But are you sure we’d be safer if we carry on?”
Mallory shook his head. “I really don’t know. I suppose my logic is that if we do follow the trail and find whatever the Templars hid all those centuries ago, then the quest will be over. We’ll have won, and that would finally knock the Italians out of the race.”
“But they might still come after us,” Robin pointed out.
“They might,” Mallory admitted, “but there’s not a lot we can do about that, apart from trying not to get killed when they show up.”
“That’s not a hell of an attractive plan, if you don’t mind me saying so: try not to get killed. Is that the best you can do?”
“It’s worked for us so far,” Mallory said, a smile briefly appearing on his face. “But,” he added, “I still think that going on, following the trail and trying to identify and decipher the next clue, is potentially the safer option of the two. Being active, I mean, rather than passive, just hanging about and waiting for something to happen.”
“Okay. Actually I think you’re right. Finding whatever the Templars hid might not just be the best way of getting these Italian comedians off our backs—it might be the only way to get rid of them. So we’ll crack on, agreed?”
“Agreed.”
Mallory used his mobile to locate a Volkswagen dealer on an industrial estate on the outskirts of Exeter. He was very keen not to drive through the city, because he was certain the damage to the car would be visible on traffic cameras, and that could provide a tenuous link between them and the shooting, a link that he knew Wilson would definitely exploit if he got to hear about it. But the garage he’d picked was far enough out for that not to be a problem. He hoped.
Robin followed his directions to the dealership and handed over the Golf for repair. The workshop was pretty well backed up with cars awaiting servicing or repair, and the best estimate the workshop reception could provide was about two weeks before the car would be ready for collection. They would have preferred a rather shorter timescale, but right then they were out of other options.
They took a taxi to a car hire company and rented a rather dull and ordinary Renault, which Mallory hoped would be relatively anonymous.
“Do we find a hotel here, or do you want to go somewhere else?” Robin asked.
“We’ll head toward London and find somewhere en route,” Mallory said. “I’d like to put a bit of distance between us and Okehampton, because of what happened there. By now there’ll be a heavy police presence in the area, and being somewhere else seems like a pretty good plan to me, even though there’ll be nothing to connect us directly to the shooting.”
“The passenger might spill the beans about what happened.”
“I doubt it, actually. If he is stupid enough to tell the rozzers that he had a contract to kill us, what they’ll do is add a charge of attempted murder to the murder rap he’ll already be facing, because bullets from that Beretta pistol killed the driver. So telling them what really happened will make his own situation worse, not better.”
“But he didn’t fire the weapon,” Robin pointed out.
“No, but he did fire the Browning, so a routine paraffin test on his hands will show that he’d used a firearm. The lack of his fingerprints on the murder weapon is bound to be an oddity that will puzzle the cops, but I doubt if that would stop a prosecution. They’ll just assume he wiped the pistol before he dropped it. The bigger anomaly will be the bullet that hit him in the stomach, which was the first one I fired from the Beretta. I don’t know how they’ll explain that one away, but knowing the British police they’ll think of something. Maybe they’ll decide he had an argument and shot the driver, then stumbled and accidentally pulled the trigger while the muzzle of the weapon was pointing at his stomach. Something like that.”
15
Yeovil, Somerset
They didn’t drive that far, turning off the A303 near the Royal Naval Air Station at Yeovilton in Somerset and heading south to the market town of Yeovil and picking a small hotel on the northern outskirts. Once they were settled in their room, they started work again.
Working on the photographs, Mallory spent almost an hour trying to identify every mark on the metalwork that could possibly be a part of the shadowy female figure. It wasn’t easy, but knowing where her face was, and a part of one of her feet, meant that at least he knew where he should be looking. When he’d finished, he sat back, scrutinized what he had done, made a handful of tiny changes, and then showed the result to Robin.
“That’s as good as I can get it,” he said, “and at least I think I found enough marks on the metal to confirm that it’s not just a figment of my imagination. There really is a drawing of a female figure concealed within that pattern.”
Robin took the page from him and looked at it intently.
“I believe you,” she said. “I really thought you were wrong on this, but I can see enough of a correlation between what you’ve drawn and the marks on the metalwork to confirm it. And that means that we know what we have to do next.”
“Yes. Go through the same process on the metalwork from the second chest. Maybe the second symbol or shape—and I’m sure there is one—will give us a pointer as to where we should be looking.”
It didn’t seem that difficult a job. After all, they had managed to identify and then re-create the image hidden in one part of the ornamental scrollwork, but trying to identify anything at all in the photograph of the top of the other chest proved to be much more difficult.
“I don’t know if it’s just me,” Mallory said, nearly two hours later, “but I’m not seeing anything in these pictures.”
“Nor me,” Robin agreed. “The only possible mark I have found is near the top of the pattern, and I think it might show a circle, something like that.”
“Let me see,” Mallory said, leaning over to look at the page Robin was holding.
“There are two marks, here and here,” Robin said, pointing near the top of the picture, “and another one much lower down, jus
t here. If you connected those lines together, they would form a circle or a sphere, something like that.”
Mallory nodded.
“I missed that,” he admitted. “I’ve been trying to find anything that looked like a human figure, but actually I was probably wasting my time. There’s no reason why the other symbol would have to be another figure. In fact, that’s probably quite unlikely.”
“Why?” Robin asked.
“Because the only purpose of these hidden images has to be to provide a clue to a name that we can use as a code word to decipher the last piece of that text, or to send us somewhere where we’ll find the code word. To me, nothing else really makes sense.”
“And as all we have so far is the outline of an anonymous woman, with no idea what historical figure the image is meant to represent, I suppose you think we will have to visit some significant location? Mind you, I still don’t think that’s necessarily right. I mean, why couldn’t they simply have incorporated the code word directly into the metalwork pattern?”
Mallory shrugged. “I don’t know. Don’t forget that we’re dealing with a cunning medieval mind, and what might seem sensible and logical to you and me might not have even occurred to whoever ordered that scrollwork to be fabricated. Or perhaps this kind of round-the-houses approach was intended to provide an extra layer of security.”
“Well, it’s certainly done that,” Robin said, “because we’re no further forward now than we were when we started.”
“That’s not quite true. We’ve managed to identify the outline of a female figure built into the metalwork, so that at least means that we’re not looking for the name of a man. So whatever code word or other information is encoded into a decoration on those chests, we can be certain that it’s not the name of Jacques de Molay or any other Templar knight. Women were not part of the order, don’t forget. When knights joined the Templars, they were required to be single, and they were also forbidden from any and all contact with females while they wore the croix pattée. So while I don’t know who this woman is supposed to be, realistically there can’t be that many contenders.”