by James Becker
‘And the implication, at least as far as the Mandaeans were concerned, was that the Bible and the Church and Christianity as a whole had got everything backwards. Jesus Christ had only been a prophet, one of a long line of such men in those days, and John the Baptist was the individual who deserved to be worshipped. Christ, in fact, was seen as a liar and usurper, a man who had donned the mantle of the son of God without being in any way deserving of the title. As far as the early Church was concerned, of course, this was the wildest and most unforgivable heresy of the lot, because the Mandaeans weren’t just guilty of worshipping in the wrong way, like a lot of heretics, but they were worshipping the wrong person and refusing to accept the divinity of Jesus.’
‘It’s no wonder that temple was buried,’ Bronson pointed out. ‘The Church had long arms in that period, and could probably have reached out all the way to Iraq – or mediaeval Babylon at that time – to try to stamp out that heresy. Worshipping in secret in a temple that could be completely hidden from view might have been the safest option they had.’
‘We thought it might just have been a case of excavating it from the rock underground because it would be permanent and, more importantly, relatively cool, but you could well be right. Anyway, the important thing is that I think we now know how to decipher the rest of the inscription.’
‘We do?’ Bronson sounded surprised. ‘Show me.’
Angela took a fresh sheet of paper and wrote down the two sequences of letters that had been carved into one of the stones in the Western Wall Tunnel.
F E I Y B Y B Y
‘If this is meant to be a decode for a kind of extended Atbash,’ she said, ‘then logically one word group should be written out before the alphabet and the second word group after it.’
‘But we still don’t know what those word groups are,’ Bronson objected.
‘Oh, I think we do, now that we’ve made the connection with John the Baptist. As I said to you before, the names of the characters involved in these events at the start of the first millennium have changed over the centuries, been altered with different spellings and in some cases been changed beyond all recognition. And that applies in particular to the person that we now refer to as Jesus Christ. He was never known as Jesus. In fact, that name is essentially a British invention. His original Hebrew name was believed to be “Yehoshua”, which later became “Yeshua” or “Joshua”. Later, the name “Yehoshua” was translated from the Hebrew into Greek and then into Latin, where it was rendered as “Iesvs” or “Iesous”, and that variant was then changed to “Jesus” in English.
‘And the “Christ” is another later addition. According to the Bible, Jesus was believed by some of the people he encountered to have been the Messiah, and that word in Hebrew means “the anointed one”. That fact was recognized by the early translators who were rendering the Bible in Greek, and the oil used for that kind of anointing was called khrisma in Greek and a person who had been anointed was known as a khristos. When the text was then translated from Greek into Latin, the khristos was changed into christus and, predictably enough, during the translation into English that became “Christ”, but it was never a part of Jesus’s name when he was alive.’
‘Assuming that such a person lived at all,’ Bronson interjected.
Angela shook her head.
‘Another time, another story,’ she said shortly. ‘In those very early days, people didn’t actually have a second or family name. Instead, Jesus would have been known as “Yeshua bar Yahosef bar Yaqub”, or “Joshua, son of Joseph, son of Jacob”.’ She paused for a moment and pointed at the paper, and at the second group of letters. ‘“Y B Y B Y”,’ she said. ‘There doesn’t seem to me to be any doubt that that refers to “Yeshua bar Yahosef bar Yaqub”, the man the Mandaeans saw as the usurper, and if we were in any doubt at all, then the letters “F E I” would seem to confirm it.’
‘Furis et interceptoris,’ Bronson said, remembering their earlier conversation and nodding. ‘“Thief and usurper”. Let’s hope that really is it.’
He took another piece of paper, wrote out the three Latin words, then the reversed alphabet, and then Yeshua bar Yahosef bar Yaqub, all without spaces. Then he wrote out the plaintext alphabet below it, repeating it until he had matched each ciphertext letter with its plaintext equivalent. The entire ciphertext string amounted almost to three complete alphabets.
‘I’ve reversed the alphabet this time,’ he said, ‘but we can always try it the other way round, and I suppose reverse the added bits as well. Ring the changes, as it were. Let’s see how it goes.’
As Angela read out the encrypted letters from the temple inscription, Bronson carefully checked the possible plaintext equivalents and wrote each of them down, bracketing each group as he did so.
And slowly, with much trial and frequent error, a kind of message began to emerge from the jumble of letters.
49
Jerusalem
‘Where are they?’ Farooq demanded, sitting down at the café table next to Mahmoud, who now had a fresh cup of coffee in front of him, a necessary purchase to allow him to retain his seat. ‘Don’t point,’ he added. ‘Just tell me.’
‘The hotel on the corner to our left. First floor, second window from the right. I saw her for maybe ten seconds.’
‘And you’re certain it’s her?’
Mahmoud nodded. ‘I’m quite sure. The photograph you supplied was very clear. It’s definitely her.’
‘What about the man? Have you seen him?’
‘No. I’ve only seen her, and only for that short period.’
‘No other shadows or shapes on the window?’ Farooq persisted. ‘Nothing that could mean the man Bronson, or anyone else, was in there with her?’
Mahmoud was silent, mentally reliving that brief few seconds when he’d seen their quarry. Then he smiled as realization dawned, and he nodded again.
‘I’ve just thought …’ he said. ‘I was concentrating on making sure it really was her, but there must have been someone else in the room because she was talking. Or at least, her mouth was opening and closing.’
‘You’ve done well, my friend,’ Farooq said, and reached across to squeeze Mahmoud’s shoulder. Then he took his own mobile from his pocket, dialled a number and held a very brief conversation with Khaled. That completed, he switched to messaging, composed a short text and sent it simultaneously to the mobiles held by the remainder of his men. Then he leaned back in his seat, ordered a coffee from a waiter who’d been waiting expectantly a few feet away and glanced across at Mahmoud.
‘The others are on their way,’ he said, ‘and Khaled will be coming as well. He wants to be here.’
‘So now we just wait?’
‘We wait,’ Farooq confirmed. ‘And we watch. If they leave the hotel, we’ll follow them to make absolutely sure that they don’t manage to slip away.’
‘Where are we going to do it? We could take them in the hotel easily enough.’
‘We could, and then we’d be shot down like dogs in the street by the Israeli police or the soldiers who would be here within minutes. Like you, my friend, I have no fear of death, but I do want my dying to mean something, something a lot more than that. And don’t forget that the man Bronson almost certainly has Salim’s pistol. Trying to kill them in the hotel would be too noisy and uncertain. We must wait until they leave and then pick our moment. We’ll find somewhere much quieter, a place where they would least expect it.’
Mahmoud nodded, clearly seeing the logic of what his leader was telling him. But then another thought struck him.
‘What about Khaled?’ he asked. ‘He will probably want the job done as quickly as possible. Do you think he will be prepared to wait, as you suggest?’
‘Khaled is an administrator, not a man of action. In military matters, or tasks of this sort, I have no doubt he will defer to me.’
50
Jerusalem
Almost two hours after they’d started, Angela finally put down th
e piece of paper she’d been working on. The writing on it followed a series of wandering lines, the text marked by numerous crossings-out but it did, finally, make some kind of sense.
‘Is that it?’ Bronson asked.
‘Pretty much, yes,’ Angela replied. ‘There are still one or two words that are a bit ambiguous in translation, but I think it’s more or less right. There’s no point in reading out the first section of the text, because it’s nothing more than a condemnation of the actions of Yeshua bar Yahosef bar Yaqub, Jesus Christ, the usurper. There was obviously no love lost there. It’s the next bit that’s interesting. Confusing, but interesting.’
‘So confuse and interest me at the same time,’ Bronson said. ‘I’m all ears.’
‘Right. The next section makes a reference to the “brotherhood”. That’s not an exact translation, but it’s as close as I can get. I have the feeling that the Latin word probably had a slightly different meaning at that time, and might well have been rather more specific. But in my opinion the precise meaning is made clear in the very next section, because it states that the members of the brotherhood wear the “splayed cross”, and you know as well as I do what that’s likely to refer to.’
‘The best-known symbol of the Knights Templar,’ Bronson replied. ‘The croix pattée. They wore it from 1147 right up until the day that the order was purged and dissolved.’
‘Exactly. So what we have here is an explicit reference to the Knights Templar, and he then goes on to describe the movement of an object, or perhaps more likely a number of objects. I’ll come back to that later, because there’s another reference that I don’t quite understand. But the route or path that these objects followed is perfectly clear, as long as we can identify the various waypoints. The places where the hoard spent various periods of time.’
She glanced at Bronson to make sure that he was still following, which he was.
‘There’s no information about where the hoard originated, only its movement once it began its travels, I suppose you could say. And that trail leads from “the castle that fell” to “the fortress above the waves”. Hopefully, with your knowledge of Templar activities in the Holy Land, you’ll be able to identify those two locations, though I’m not sure that it matters too much even if you can’t, because I already know where the third place was on the route.’
‘Those two are pretty easy,’ Bronson replied. ‘There were a number of castles and fortifications that were captured by the enemy at various times during the Crusades and the period when the Knights Templar were operating in this area. But putting those two references together almost certainly means that the first castle referred to was the one at Acre. And we know that because pretty much the night before that castle fell to the Mamluks, the treasurer of the order was instructed by the Marshall, a man named Pierre de Sevry, to take the Templar treasure and as many non-combatants as he could fit into his ship, and make his escape north up the coast to Sidon.
‘And the point about that, I suppose, is that the fortification at Sidon was known as the “Sea Castle”, because it occupied almost the entire land area of a small island just off the mainland and was linked to it by a narrow causeway. If you were going to describe that castle in just a few words, calling it the “fortress above the waves” would be about as accurate a description as you could hope for. So the hoard – and from what I know of Templar history that almost certainly means the order’s treasure in Outremer, the land beyond the sea – went from Acre to Sidon. And we even know where it went next, because the Templar Treasurer, a man named Tibauld de Gaudin, got back on his ship a short time after he’d arrived at Sidon, and set sail for Cyprus, intending to raise reinforcements.
‘Acre was already lost. De Gaudin would have known that because the Mamluk army that was encircling the city was so huge that even if he had managed to summon ten thousand knights, not even that number would have been enough to make a difference. The next logical target for the Mamluks would probably have been Sidon. Because it was essentially an island fortress approachable only along a narrow causeway, and which might have been able to withstand a prolonged siege, perhaps it was de Gaudin’s intention to make a stand there. Maybe he thought that if he could reinforce the garrison at Sidon, the Templars could keep a toehold in the Holy Land and eventually regroup and retake Jerusalem. But that never happened and he was never able to produce any reinforcements at all. Not that long afterwards the Sidon Sea Castle was attacked by the Mamluk army and fell quite quickly because the defenders were hopelessly outnumbered, and that pretty much marked the end of the crusades and the Templar presence there. There were some abortive attempts to re-establish the order at a place called Ruad, but they never came to anything much.’
Angela nodded and traced the remainder of the line on the piece of paper with the tip of her finger.
‘This doesn’t use the proper name Cyprus, or any proper name, in fact, but it does refer to the hoard being transferred to “the island of copper”, and in antiquity Cyprus was famous as a good source of copper, so that seems fairly clear. The historical record that you know about and this translation are in accord with each other, at least so far. What are you smiling about?’ she added.
‘I was just thinking that on this occasion we might be on the trail of something big, something worthwhile. The Templar treasure of Outremer was never found, was it? Certainly there was no suggestion that it was left in the cellars of the castle at Acre, and de Gaudin’s voyage to the Sidon Sea Castle and on to Cyprus is well documented. He was the Treasurer of the order and the obvious man to be entrusted with the wealth of the Templars, and although most experts believe the treasure was carried off to Cyprus, it then simply vanishes from the historical record. This translation of that obscure inscription, as far as I know, is the only documented reference that might possibly show where it ended up.’
‘So what was this hoard?’ Angela asked. ‘Gold bullion or something?’
‘It would have been a mixture of a lot of different stuff – most likely gold and silver as bullion or coinage, as well as jewellery of various types. Most of it would have been owned by the Templars, but there would also have been valuables deposited by other people, either for safe keeping or as collateral. The order basically conceived the banking system that we still use today, so a businessman could deposit funds in, say, the Paris Preceptory, receive a coded letter of credit in exchange and take that to the Templar castle at Acre or wherever and withdraw the same funds less a handling charge, so he could travel perfectly safely on his journey, knowing that he could never be robbed. In fact, really, the Templar assets were less a treasure in the conventional sense than simply their working capital. And the other things they would have held were lots of land deeds, because many of their assets were immovable property – castles, houses, farms and estates scattered throughout Europe.’
Angela nodded and turned her attention back to the sheet of paper in front of her.
‘Right,’ she said, ‘the next bit is slightly ambiguous. In fact, I can read what it says but I’m not sure that I know what it means. This next phrase translates as “there was safety in separation”, which perhaps suggests that the treasure was divided into two or more smaller units. But I’m not actually sure that that’s what it means, because there’s another reference here to the “truth”, just like there was in the first part of the inscription, and the way it’s written could mean that the treasure went one way and this “truth”, whatever it is, went somewhere different.’
She paused for a moment and reread the translation of the decrypted text.
‘I don’t know if I’m reading more into this than is actually there, but the emphasis seems to be that the hoard – presumably the assets of the Knights Templar order in the Holy Land, as you said – is of less importance to the writer, and to the Templars, than the “truth”. The text is describing the route the two separate things took from the castle at Acre, but the object the Templars really wanted to save was this “truth”, an
d the treasure was almost of secondary importance, just along for the ride, as it were.’
‘So does it say where either object ended up?’
‘Yes, but only in the vaguest terms. In fact, although that earlier section describes the separation, the following sentence states that they both ended up in the same place, in “the land from whence came the nine”, which I presume means France, as that’s where the first Knights Templar originated from. But the text doesn’t say where the objects finished up in France, and that’s a very big country. It also doesn’t state that both the treasure and the truth ended up in the same place in France, and because of that phrase about “separation” I suppose you could reasonably assume that they were taken to different destinations.’
‘So that’s it,’ Bronson said, sounding bitter. ‘After all this, all that inscription is actually saying is what we could have probably guessed anyway, that the Templar treasure was sent from Acre to Sidon and then on to Cyprus, and from there it was taken to France when the position of the order in the Holy Land finally became completely untenable. Jacques de Molay, the last Grand Master of the Templars, had accompanied Tibauld de Gaudin in his flight from Acre, and took over from him when the Treasurer died on the island. Most investigators have always assumed that, when de Molay returned to France with the remnants of the order, the treasure went with him, probably to the Paris Preceptory.’
Angela nodded, and Bronson noticed a slight smile playing over her lips.
‘What?’ he demanded. ‘There’s something else?’
‘I said the text doesn’t tell us where in France either object ended up, but there is one other phrase that I do not understand but which seems to be suggested as able to supply the answer to at least a part of the puzzle.’
She picked up her pencil, turned over the sheet of paper and wrote out a new phrase on it, and then drew a circle around it.