by James Becker
Angela shook her head. ‘Not exactly, no. The first part of the inscription refers to this thief or usurper, but unless I’m reading it wrongly the cluster or treasure is something different, something that justified the claims being made. A kind of positive proof that the unnamed man was a thief. Some object that would prove the case against him, if you see what I mean.’
‘But it doesn’t say what it was? Or who he was?’
‘No. Though it does give a hint that this cluster of objects had been secreted somewhere. As I said, each word has more than one possible meaning and interpretation but the relevant section reads something like “within the chamber under the lost temple where the objects were deeply hidden there the key will endure for eternity”. The phrase that’s least subject to different interpretations is “deeply hidden”, but the basic meaning seems clear enough. Something – something of considerable importance to the author of this text – was buried in some kind of underground chamber.’
‘But what about this key that’s being referred to? What do you think that is? A key for a chest or something like that?’
Again, Angela shook her head.
‘I think it’s simpler than that,’ she said. ‘An iron or bronze key intended to open a lock couldn’t really be described as something that would endure for eternity, because eventually it would rust or corrode. I think this piece of text is telling us that we need to find this chamber and that when we do there’ll be some kind of a carving or inscription that will act as a key to decipher the rest of the inscription, the bit that we haven’t cracked so far. That could easily be described as a key that would last for ever.’
‘So what you’re saying is that this somewhat bizarre inscription that was hidden in a temple buried under the sands of Iraq is actually trying to send us off on some kind of a treasure hunt? I’m assuming, obviously, that these objects, this anonymous cluster of things, will have some kind of a value even today, that it is treasure of a sort.’
‘You might be right,’ Angela said, ‘but equally these hidden objects could simply have been valuable documents of some sort, priceless half a millennium ago but essentially worthless now. On the other hand, I suppose it is just about possible that when – or rather if – we manage to follow this trail to the end we might find ourselves looking at something with very real value. The question, really, is whether or not the trail is worth following. Are we going to find ourselves in more danger if we do embark on this hunt than if we just walk away and try to hide?’
Bronson didn’t respond for a couple seconds, then he nodded.
‘Two things,’ he said. ‘First, I don’t think any document or something of that sort would be sufficiently valuable for the clues to its location to be carved on to the wall of an underground temple. To me, that just doesn’t make sense. I think whatever the inscription refers to has to be something of real tangible value.’
‘And the second thing?’
‘It’s pretty obvious that those men are on the hunt as well, and after what happened in Iraq and Milan I have no doubt at all that they will never give up. For whatever reason, the knowledge contained in that inscription is so important to them that they’ve decided that anyone who finds out about it has to die, and what they know has to die with them. I think that even if we walk away from all this, we’ll be in exactly the same danger as we would be if we carried on looking. In fact, it might even be more dangerous, because we’ll be more static targets if we go back to Britain. My vote is that we carry on, keep following the trail and try to stay one step ahead.’
‘Very inspiring,’ Angela said with a slight smile. ‘But the obvious problem is that right now I have no idea at all where we should start our search. Have you?’
‘No,’ Bronson admitted, and looked down again at the sheet of paper on which Angela had written the deciphered and translated text. ‘This chamber,’ he said after a few moments. ‘You’re sure it must be somewhere underground?’
Angela pointed at another part of the translated text.
‘As certain as I can be, yes. The Latin word used is hypogeum, and the Latin adjective hypogeus specifically means “underground”, so I think we’re looking for some sort of room that lies underneath a temple.’
When she said those last few words, a distant memory stirred somewhere in Bronson’s brain, and he leaned across to the keyboard of Angela’s laptop.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked.
‘I just had an idea.’
He input a four-word search string into the browser and pressed the enter key as they both stared at the screen. He clicked on the top entry.
‘There you are,’ he said when the page had loaded. ‘I think that’s probably somewhere near the place that the line in the inscription is talking about, the Minheret Hakotel, if that’s how you pronounce the Hebrew: the Western Wall Tunnel in Jerusalem that leads to the Hall of the Hasmoneans. That’s probably the most obvious location that could be referred to as the hall under the lost temple. It’s arguably the most famous temple that doesn’t actually exist any more anywhere in the world, and has been since about the start of the second millennium. If we’re going to keep following this trail, our next stop has to be Israel. And there’s something else,’ he added, scrolling down to look at the rest of the information.
‘What?’ Angela asked.
‘The other thing that might be relevant is that the most famous – or notorious – residents of that vanished temple weren’t the Jews who built it or the Muslims who’ve occupied the site for the last fifteen hundred years, but the Knights Templar. They took their name from the alleged location of the Temple of Solomon on the Temple Mount, and according to legend they spent the first few years they were in Jerusalem excavating the chambers and passageways that lay within the Mount. And of course the Templars were more or less contemporary with the inscription, if your dating of it is anything like accurate. So maybe what we’re looking for has got less to do with the Marsh Arabs of Iraq than with the best-known of all the Western Christian mediaeval military orders.
‘And that,’ he added, ‘brings an entirely new possibility into the mix.’
33
Jerusalem
Pretty much the first thing that Farooq did after he and his companions had landed and made their way into the city from the airport was assemble his men in a café a couple of blocks outside the Old City, and make a telephone call to a local number. It was answered almost immediately, and the conversation that followed was short and largely monosyllabic, at least at Farooq’s end. Less than a minute later, he ended the call and gestured to two of the men to accompany him.
‘We should be about half an hour, maybe a little longer,’ he told the four others still sitting in the café. ‘The meeting place is on the outskirts of the city. Wait here until we get back.’
Then Farooq turned away and raised his arm to hail a cab that had just turned into the street.
In fact, it was just over an hour before the three men returned to the café. Farooq glanced around, but as far as he could tell they were unobserved. People were passing in the street, talking together, looking at maps, wielding cameras and all the other tourist-oriented activities that are an enduring and inevitable part of daily life in a city like Jerusalem. More to the point, nobody appeared to be paying them the slightest attention.
He nodded to his two companions, each of whom took two obviously heavy packets from their pockets and passed them over, one to each of the other four men.
‘Don’t open them now,’ Farooq instructed. ‘Wait until you’re alone. They’re a mix of different makes, a couple of Brownings, a Sig and a Walther, but all nine millimetre and each with twenty rounds of ammunition.’
‘Only twenty rounds?’ one of the men asked.
‘That’s nearly one hundred and fifty between the seven of us,’ Farooq replied. ‘And you all know that we’re not here to get involved in a firefight. The weapons are for your personal protection and for use against the infidels i
f the need arises, though in this environment a quieter assassination method would obviously be more appropriate. That is why you also each have a knife and a garrotte.’
He looked around the group.
‘When you open the packets, you’ll see that the magazines aren’t loaded and the shells are loose, so you may wish to do something about that sooner rather than later. The three of us have already prepared and loaded our weapons.’
‘What use is a pistol wrapped up in a bit of paper with an empty magazine?’ another of the men said. ‘I’m going to the restroom to load mine right now.’
Without waiting for a response, he pushed back his chair and strode into the café, heading towards the lavatories at the back of the building.
Over the next twenty minutes the other three men followed their colleague’s example, visiting the stall in the male lavatory, to unwrap, check and then load the pistols Farooq had purchased. Finally they reassembled at the café table.
‘So what do we do now?’ one of the men asked.
‘We do nothing,’ Farooq said. ‘Khaled has not told me yet when he will be arriving, but it will probably be sometime today, or tomorrow at the latest. Once he gets here we can do whatever it is that he wants and then return to Iraq. Or that’s what I hope, anyway.’
‘You still haven’t told us why we’re here.’
‘I haven’t told you because I don’t know,’ Farooq replied. ‘But he’s paying us, and paying well, so we’ll just have to wait and see what he intends to do.’
‘How long do we wait, then?’
Farooq shrugged. ‘As long as it takes.’
34
France
‘No matter what you may have heard or read about the Knights Templar,’ Bronson began, ‘and there’s a hell of a lot of stuff out there that is complete fantasy, there is one indisputable fact about the end of the order, when the Templars were purged. At the time the order was arguably the richest single entity in the whole of Europe, possessing and controlling more wealth than many nations. Most history books will tell you that the operation to seize the assets of the order was kept entirely secret, and was a total surprise to the Templars. But in fact it seems much more likely that they knew about it well in advance and hid the treasure somewhere.
‘Nobody’s ever been able to prove it, but if you look at the circumstantial evidence there doesn’t seem to be much doubt about what happened. In 1307, the order was a vast multinational corporation. I can’t remember the numbers involved because it was some time ago that I read about it, but in all there were tens of thousands of Templars, knights, sergeants and all the other people involved, but only a few hundred were actually arrested throughout the whole of France when the French troops arrived to carry out the king’s orders. Either his troops were incredibly stupid and incapable of finding all of the Templars, which seems extremely unlikely, or they simply weren’t there to be arrested.
‘And it is a documented fact that Philip the Fair – Philip IV of France – was virtually bankrupt before he ordered the arrest of the Templars, and he was still virtually bankrupt after the order had been purged. The cupboard was bare. And it’s been established that he knew the kind of assets the order possessed because a few months before he came up with his devious master plan, he’d had to take refuge in the Paris preceptory of the Templars to avoid an angry mob. So the assets that formed the backbone of the Templar order had almost certainly somehow been spirited away.’
‘You seem to know a lot about it,’ Angela said.
‘I’ve always been interested in the subject,’ Bronson said. ‘I’m a detective, I’m supposed to solve crimes, and what happened to the Knights Templar was undeniably a criminal act. Philip claimed that he suspected the order of indulging in heretical practices, but that simply doesn’t hold water. In those days, in the mediaeval period, heaven and hell were real and virtually tangible, and the word of God – or more accurately the word of the incumbent sitting on the throne of St Peter in the Vatican – was the ultimate truth on almost any subject. Heresy, meaning anything the Church of Rome disagreed with, was a mortal sin, and anyone who engaged in heretical practices was likely to end up being excommunicated, which – according to the belief system of the time – meant that they would be denied a place in heaven for all eternity.
‘In extreme cases, once the various inquisitions got involved, being excommunicated meant they got off lightly, because all the inquisitions basically functioned in exactly the same way. They started from the assumption that the individual being investigated was guilty and all his or her protestations of innocence were simply attempts to mislead and hoodwink the church. There was no possibility, in their eyes, of any innocent person being accused, so really all they were doing was establishing the degree of guilt. And in order to obtain the confession that they needed – the confession that would save the soul of the heretic – they indulged in the most horrendous and inventive tortures that the mind of man could devise. They were forbidden to spill blood, so they dislocated joints using things like the strappado, broke bones, burned off the feet by roasting them in a fire, pulled teeth and probed the sockets with red-hot spikes and, ultimately, tied people to stakes and set fire to the wood that surrounded them, burning them alive. All this, of course, in the name of a gentle and merciful God, who was extremely conspicuous by his absence from the torture chambers of the Inquisition.’
‘You feel really strongly about this, don’t you?’
Bronson shook his head and smiled somewhat ruefully at her.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I’ll climb off my high horse right now. I suppose it all comes down to my personal dislike and distrust of religion. Of all religions, in fact.’
‘Enough of that,’ Angela said, squeezing his arm. ‘I think you rather lost the thread of where you were going. You were telling me why you believed that the purging of the Templars was a crime.’
‘Oh yes. That’s right. All I was going to say was that if Philip the Fair genuinely believed that the Templars were guilty of heresy and engaged in heretical practices, then for the sake of the souls of the Templars themselves he should have acted immediately, and sent in the inquisitors. No, he was a deceitful and duplicitous, not to mention treacherous, man. He’d actually allowed Jacques de Molay, the Grand Master of the Order, to act as a pallbearer at the funeral of one of Philip’s own relatives just a week or so before the arrests took place. In those days such a job was an honour and would only be performed by a member of the immediate family of the deceased or somebody who was an important and valued family friend. If Philip had genuinely believed that the Templars were guilty of heresy, there is no way that he would have allowed the leader of the order, by implication the biggest heretic of the lot, to take part in such a ceremony.’
‘And by that time Philip must already have made his plans to swoop on the Templars?’
‘Weeks earlier at least,’ Bronson agreed. ‘Getting his sealed orders to his various military commanders and assembling troops in the right positions throughout France would have been a long process in those days. Messages could be sent as fast as a man on a horse could gallop, but the soldiers would have had to march to their destination, and that would have been the slowest part of the entire process. No, the whole thing – the arrests, the trials and everything else – was a set-up, an operation set in action simply to allow Philip the Fair to get his hands on the assets of the order. Only, as I said before, he didn’t, because they’d disappeared.’
Angela was silent for a few moments, then she glanced at the computer screen, at the pages scattered across the desk, and finally at Bronson.
‘Are you saying what I think you’re saying?’ she asked. ‘Do you really think that the inscription we found has got something to do with the lost treasure of the Knights Templar?’
Bronson shrugged and spread his hands wide.
‘I genuinely have no idea,’ he said. ‘If it has, I think it’s the first tangible clue ever found that might give some ind
ication of what happened to the Templar assets, which would explain the lengths these terrorists have gone to in order to cover it up. What I do find interesting is that the text you’ve deciphered seems to point us towards the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, which is where the history of the order really began, and it is definitely telling us about a hoard, a collection of objects or possibly even a treasure, depending on how you translate the Latin word, that’s been hidden. That just seems to be too intriguing a possibility to ignore.’
Angela nodded briskly.
‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘I agree with you. The Temple Mount could well be the location referred to in the inscription, though adding the Templars into the mix is a bit unexpected. I also think the idea that we could be on the trail of the Templar treasure is something of a stretch, but I’ll keep an open mind on that. So, yes, we are going to keep following this trail, and the sooner we can get ourselves out to Jerusalem the better.’
35
Jerusalem
The two biggest problems Bronson had encountered in booking a flight were that the majority seemed to arrive in Israel in the very early hours of the morning, and most also involved an intermediate stop at Brussels, Amsterdam or Rome. He was keenly aware from what they knew had happened to Stephen that it would be fairly easy for someone to track down their whereabouts once there was a record of them booking a flight.
It cost more – a lot more, in fact, almost double – but eventually he’d found a direct Air France Airbus out of Charles de Gaulle to Tel Aviv, and they’d bought the tickets when they’d arrived at the airport the following morning, at the very last minute.
As they had expected, security on arrival at Ben Gurion Airport was both obvious and comprehensive, and it took some time to get through the system and into the arrivals hall.