by James Becker
Mallory looked at Robin, before turning his attention back to the space in front of them. “There are a lot of assumptions in that, I know, but to me it does make sense, because I’m certain we are in the right place. Those two clues that we followed up were too specific to be accidental or for there to be another cave like this one. So I think this almost certainly was the Templar storehouse, though obviously that certainly doesn’t mean the archive is still here.”
While Mallory had been talking, both he and Robin had been sweeping the beams of their flashlight around the chamber, looking for any sign of the objects they were seeking. But as far as they could tell on this first inspection, the cupboard was bare. It was also conspicuously damp, trickles of water running down a number of sections of the walls, and in a couple of places actually dribbling out of cracks in the ceiling.
“I don’t know about you,” Mallory said, “but this isn’t the kind of place I would choose as a long-term repository for important documents. I reckon that any kind of paper or parchment that was left in here would rot away within a few years at most. It certainly wouldn’t have lasted for centuries.”
“What about the third clue?” Robin said suddenly. “There were three clues that we deciphered in that piece of parchment, and so far we’ve only been able to find locations that correspond to two of them. What about that phrase ‘the guardian beckons’? How does that fit in here?”
“I have no idea.” Mallory sounded quite dispirited. “Anyway, let’s take a look around and just see if there is anything here to find.”
As they had done before, in the outer cave, they walked around the irregular perimeter of the cavern, checking the floor and the ceiling and the walls constantly as they did so. For some reason, there were more loose boulders and large stones in this cave than in the smaller one, and in a couple of places these heavy stones were piled up almost from the floor to the roof of the cavern.
“There could be something behind one of these heaps of stones,” Robin suggested. “I know they look natural, as if they had just been formed from a landslide or by a part of the roof collapsing, but they could also have been put there deliberately to conceal an entrance to another chamber.”
Mallory played his flashlight beam over the groups of stones that she was indicating.
“That’s possible,” he conceded, “but we could spend a couple of days shifting one of those piles, by the looks of it, and there’s no guarantee that we’d find anything at all behind it, apart from another solid rock wall.”
They completed their inspection of the chamber, and for a few seconds just stood side by side, looking for any kind of clue to tell them where—or even if—the archive was, or had ever been, hidden in there.
“I hate to say it,” Mallory said flatly, “but I don’t think there’s anything here to find. Maybe this cave was used as a temporary hiding place for the Templar Archive, but it was later removed, because I don’t see any sign here that there’s anything left. The ground is solid rock, so there’s not even the chance of seeing the outline where a bunch of cases might have been stacked.”
Robin nodded slowly.
“I don’t see anything, either,” she admitted, “but this really doesn’t make sense. We already know that the encrypted text on the parchment I found wasn’t written at the same time as the Templars were purged but some years afterward. We also know that the first set of clues we deciphered led us to that cave on Cyprus and the two chests. Granted, they didn’t contain treasure, but we think we worked out why. So the author of the text obviously knew what he was talking about, and I can’t believe that he would have planted the clues that led us here, only to find an entirely empty chamber. We must be missing something.”
“You’re probably right,” Mallory said, “but as far as I can see, there’s not much more we can do here, though it’s probably worth taking a bunch of photographs of this place so that we can look at them later. You never know; something might show up on a digital image that we simply can’t see with the naked eye.”
Suiting his action to his words, Mallory removed his digital camera from the rucksack and set about systematically photographing every single section of the cavern, the light from the automatic flash bouncing off the dark walls.
“That’ll do,” he said, a few minutes later. “Let’s go.”
* * *
“They’re coming out,” the sniper murmured, staring at the waterfall at the end of the valley, where a dark figure had suddenly come into view. “Keep watching the man below. See what he does.”
The man watching from the cover of the patch of woodland below stiffened as the two distant figures reappeared, and he immediately lifted his binoculars again to study them. Clearly all his attention was directed toward them, as the spotter could tell from the man’s body language: if any confirmation had been needed of the man’s purpose in being there, that provided it.
“Now he’s moving,” the spotter said. “He’s making his way back toward where the car is parked.”
“As we expected,” the sniper said. “He’s moving away because the two targets are heading back down the valley. You’d better call it in.”
Again the spotter dialed the contact number they had been instructed to use and explained what was happening.
“Do you have any further orders?” he asked. “The targets are well within range right now, but they’ll be back at their car in a few minutes.”
“No further order at this time. Do not, I repeat, do not engage the targets. Remain in position until they have left the area. Then exfil yourselves and await further instructions. Ensure that your mobile is kept fully charged and is switched on.”
* * *
Back at the hotel, Robin took a long shower while Mallory transferred the photographs they had taken onto his laptop, where they would be able to examine the images more easily. He replaced the computer in his bag, and then they both went down to the coffee shop. With the drinks on the table in front of them, Mallory made room to open up his laptop, and together they began studying the pictures that he had taken with his digital camera. They were, at a first glance, and in fact even at a second glance, uniformly disappointing. All they seemed to show was the featureless and slightly damp walls of the cavern, but they didn’t appear to reveal anything that they hadn’t already seen for themselves with their own eyes.
Until, that was, they looked at one single photograph, a picture taken by Mallory of one of the piles of stones stacked up against the side wall of the cave.
“Is that a mark on the rock, just there?” Robin asked, pointing at the wall to one side of the pile.
Mallory looked to the area she was indicating, shrugged, and then centered and enlarged that part of the image. The flash from the camera had caused some flares of light on the rock, but above and below these areas of brightness they could both see what looked like very faint lines.
“That’s barely visible,” Mallory said, “but that does look to me like a straight line, maybe carved there by someone using a hammer and chisel.”
“And there, below it,” Robin said, “that looks like another horizontal line, but quite a lot longer than the other one. Have you got any other pictures of that part of the cave?”
When Mallory took the series of photographs, he had deliberately allowed a considerable amount of overlap between them, and in response to Robin’s question, he pulled up another half dozen images, one after another. Fortunately that precise area of rock was visible on three of them. Even more fortunately, because of the changing angle of each photograph, the flare from the flash was different in each picture.
“There’s definitely something there,” Robin said, looking at the pictures in sequence, “but all I can make out is those two lines. Even if they are man-made, I’m not sure how that could possibly help us.”
“Let me just try something,” Mallory suggested.
He load
ed the best of the pictures into a piece of photo-manipulation software, enlarged the relevant area until it occupied most of the screen display on his laptop, then began tweaking it.
“The original image is a color photograph, obviously,” he said, “though pretty much everything in that cave was black. Let’s see what it’s like if we view the image in different ways, like black-and-white, sepia, and all the rest of it. Then we can try fiddling about with the brightness and contrast, just see what comes out of that.”
The successive manipulations he did only seemed to make the horizontal lines either more or less pronounced, but didn’t apparently reveal any further details. Then he had another thought. He converted the image to black-and-white, and then inverted it, so that it was like looking at a photographic negative.
And that was when the image suddenly came to life. Directly below the longer of the two horizontal lines, they could see, very faintly, another line running almost parallel. Almost, but not quite, because on the right-hand side of the image the two lines met at what appeared to be a blunted point, while an equally faint vertical line was visible on the left-hand side, making the shape look like an extraordinarily elongated letter T, lying on its side.
“That’s a bit like the Shroud of Turin,” Robin said, staring at the image. “You can only really see the image on that if you view it as a negative, rather than a positive. But what is it? What is that shape?”
“I have an idea,” Mallory replied, “but I’m more interested in these lines here,” he added, pointing close to the top of the image.
On the artificially produced negative image, the shorter horizontal line was clearly visible, as were two vertical lines descending from either end of it, and between them, virtually framed by those three lines, was the faint outline of what looked like another horizontal line, shorter and thicker.
“I can see more of it now, thanks to your manipulation,” Robin said, “but I still don’t really see what that is supposed to represent.”
“We really need to get back into that cave and take another look at it,” Mallory said, “but I already think I know what that is. When the Templars rode into battle, they invariably wore helmets, and probably the classic shape for the helmet of a Templar knight was one with a flattened top, vertical sides, and with a horizontal slot cut out of the metal to allow the wearer to see out of it. I think those few lines are just a simple representation of the helmeted head of a Templar knight.”
“It is a definite shape,” Robin conceded, staring intently at the image on the screen of the laptop. “But I hope we’re not just seeing what we want to see. If you are right, then the shape below it has pretty much got to be a Templar battle sword, and the tip of the blade is fairly clearly pointing toward that corner of the cave. So what we could be looking at here is the ‘guardian’ from the third clue.”
“I hope so, but the bad news is that if that shape is the guardian, and he is beckoning, he’s very clearly indicating that massive pile of stones and rocks. That probably means there’s another chamber off the one we explored, and the only way we can get inside it is if we move every one of those boulders. That’s going to be bloody hard work, and it could easily take us one or two days just to shift them.”
Robin smiled at him.
“We never thought this was going to be easy,” she said, “but the other piece of good news is that the rocks are still in place. If somebody else had come along centuries ago and beaten us to it, those boulders would have been scattered all around the floor of the cave, and the opening into whatever other chamber is there would have been clearly visible. So we can at least be reasonably sure that the Templar Archive is still hidden in there, and waiting for us.”
Mallory nodded. “Well, it’s going have to wait at least another twelve hours. It’s too late to go back there today, and in any case we’re going to need leather gloves, probably another crowbar or two, and a heavy hammer at the very least, plus a couple of decent battery-powered lanterns because we’ll need good light in that cave to see what we’re doing. So tomorrow morning we’ll go shopping, and when we’ve done that we’ll see what lies on the other side of that rock pile.”
31
Canton of Schwyz, Switzerland
“They’re still in the hardware store,” Paolo reported, “and I can’t see what they’re doing. Do you want me to go inside after them?”
“No,” Mario said decisively. “Don’t take the risk of them noticing you. Pick them up again when they come out and keep following them. But if you can, try to see what they bought in the shop.”
“Understood.”
“Carlo, Nico. Make sure you stay off the street where that store is located and out of sight. Wait for Paolo to tell you which way the targets are headed. Then the one of you who’s closest to them will take over the surveillance. And keep the commentary going. We need to know everything they do and everywhere they go.”
Once again the Italian enforcers were using the conference call facilities on their mobile phones to remain in touch. It was a simple but extremely effective tool for the task at hand, allowing all four of them to keep in constant contact with one another.
“They’ve just walked out of the shop,” Paolo reported. “The man Mallory is carrying a canvas work bag that looks quite heavy. I presume he’s bought tools of some sort, but I can’t tell what. They’ve turned left and are heading down the street toward Nico.”
“I’ve got them,” Nico said.
And as Mallory and Robin made their way back through the streets, the loose group of four Italians moved and shifted around them, one of them always keeping the English couple in view. When they reached the hotel and went inside, the group assembled outside the building, out of view from the windows at the front, but in a location from which they could see the main entrance, and waited.
* * *
“I’m beginning to think,” Mallory said as he lowered the canvas bag of assorted tools to the carpeted floor of the bedroom, “that we’ve got company—again.”
“Not those bloody Dominicans?” Robin demanded.
“I really don’t know. I’m reasonably observant, and I seem to have noticed either the same man, or two men who look and dress remarkably alike, in the streets of this town. In fact, it’s not just one man, but two or three different men who seem to be taking something of an interest in what we’re doing.”
“You mean they’re people you’ve seen before?”
“Not as far as I know. And it might well be a coincidence, and we’ve just run into a few locals who happen to have been in the same area as us at the same time, but with what’s happened to us in the past I’m inclined to be cautious.”
“Definitely. Do you want to just walk away? To get out while we can?”
Mallory shook his head. “I don’t want to quit any more than you do, and I may well be jumping at shadows. But I do have the distinct feeling that we’re being watched, that kind of prickling sensation. And even if we have picked up a tail, I still think our best option is to keep going, to try to follow the clues and get to the archive before anybody else can.”
“I feel it,” Robin said. “I feel we’re now so close. We’ll carry on, just keep our eyes open, make sure we’re not being followed, and try to make sure nobody knows where we’re going. With a bit of luck, we could get inside that hidden chamber today or tomorrow, and that could be the end of the quest.”
* * *
As Mallory and Robin talked together, their words were relayed from a voice-activated audio bug concealed inside a power socket in their hotel room to a digital recorder mounted in the glove box of a black Mercedes sedan parked in the adjacent street.
The bug had been installed that morning, shortly after they had left their room, by a technician who had presented unarguable credentials to the hotel manager, credentials that had been provided by the same people who were employing the sniper team. The h
otel manager had supplied him with a master key for the room the targets were occupying, and the insertion of the device had taken him less than ten minutes, including testing the chosen location for sensitivity and clarity of reception.
As well as the recording equipment, their conversation was also being monitored in real time by the two men sitting in the parked car.
When Robin mentioned the Dominicans, they glanced at each other and one gave a barely perceptible nod.
“As we guessed,” one of the men murmured.
“It really had to be them,” the other responded. “After all these years, who else would have the slightest interest in chasing down a couple of treasure hunters on the trail of the Templars?”
“So what do we do about them? The Dominicans, I mean.”
“They are not our concern. If they get in the way, we’ll take them out, but our only real problem is this English couple. Judging by what the woman said, it is just possible that they really have found the lost Templar Archive, or at least they think they have. We’ll have to make a judgment about what to do with them once they’ve explored whatever chamber they think they’ve found.”
“It’s a shame we can’t bug them as well, but at least we’ll know where they go, thanks to the tracker the technician fitted to their car. You know he found another device already installed on it?”
“Yes. I saw his report. At least that explained how the Dominicans—or whoever those people are—were able to track the English couple without driving along right behind them. And I think we did the right thing in leaving their tracker in place. Removing it would have tipped our hand. This way, if we follow the English pair, we’ll know more or less where the Dominicans are as well.”