The Lost Treasure of the Templars

by James Becker

  Robin slid the end of the screwdriver through the hole cut in the false pages of the book safe, doing her best to keep it straight so that it would make contact with the catch on the inside. She heard the very faint sound of metal touching metal, and then the screwdriver blade would go no farther.

  “Here goes nothing,” she muttered, changed her grip so that the heel of her hand was on the end of the screwdriver, and pushed firmly.

  The screwdriver slid perhaps another half inch inside the book safe. There was a faint click and then a sudden loud thud.

  Robin Jessop was so shocked she released the screwdriver and flung herself backward away from the desk, the back of her wheeled chair slamming into the wall behind her.

  “Jesus Christ,” she said, getting to her feet, her eyes still fixed on the book safe.

  4

  Helston, Cornwall

  As well as establishing the identity of his forebears and completing the various parts of his family tree, Mallory was also creating a map that showed the location where each person he’d been able to identify had been born, lived, and then died, marking each spot with, respectively, a green, blue, and red label bearing the name of the man or woman and the appropriate date or dates for each of those events or periods. He’d bought a large-scale map of the United Kingdom especially for this purpose and mounted it on one wall of the bedroom he used as an office. What he was finding particularly interesting, and obviously predictable, was that, although for the last few generations his family had lived in and around Cornwall and the western parts of Devon, the earlier he trod back in time, the more dispersed his ancestors seemed to become.

  There appeared, in fact, to be a steady movement eastward the further back he went, toward London and the southeast of England, which really wasn’t what he had expected. He had always understood from what his mother had told him that his family had lived in the far southwest of the country for generations, but this was only partially correct. They had lived in that area, but only since about 1875. He had always mentally assumed that his roots lay in the mysterious country of King Arthur and the land of Tintagel, the rugged promontory that jutted out into the Atlantic, the most southwesterly point of England aimed like the tip of a spear toward the far distant shores of America, the rocks endlessly defying the pounding waves.

  As a child he had been fascinated not just by tales of Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table and Avalon, but also by the stories he had heard of the legendary land of Lyonesse, which centuries, countless ages, ago had supposedly sunk forever beneath the waves somewhere off the Cornish coast, and he’d even briefly wondered if his ancestors might have been descended from the remnants of the noble families who had apparently perished in that long-forgotten tragedy.

  Later in his childhood, he’d been equally enthralled by the tales of the wreckers and smugglers who, only two or three hundred years earlier, had haunted the rocky coves of the Lizard Peninsula—that name alone evocative and intriguing—using lights to lure ships onto the saw-toothed rocks and the unfortunate sailors to their deaths.

  And it wasn’t as if the stories were all wild flights of fantasy. The sheer number of known wrecks around the coast of Cornwall was a persuasive argument that suggested that at least some of the tales of the wreckers had to be based in fact. There was one cove on the west side of the Lizard where gold coins from some wreck had been found so often that it was known locally as “Dollar Cove” in preference to its real name. And there were other echoes as well, somewhat less substantial than the discovery of an occasional gold coin, locations where shadowy figures had allegedly been seen in the night, apparently reliving some traumatic event from hundreds of years earlier, and still other places, lonely beaches, where the ghosts of long-dead sailors were said to walk the sands when the cold sea mist rolled in from the Atlantic.

  These romantic, if somewhat gory, notions had colored his childhood dreams and his outlook, and he’d been secretly proud of the imagined feats of his ancestors, but now it looked as if at least some of his forebears had far more likely been soft city folk, probably scratching out a living as tradesmen somewhere near London, or possibly farmers, rather than the tough and ruthless land-based Cornish pirates he’d conjured up in his imagination. And that was actually rather disappointing.

  But the information he’d just read related to another branch of his family, and their origins seemed to lie a long way from London. The genealogical search results he’d just been sent showed a steady migration toward London from some way north of the Scottish border and, even further back than that in the early fifteenth century, the earliest dates Mallory had yet seen, from northern France.

  And not only that, but even his family name had been altered and amended along the way, the double L appearing as a permanent feature only in the late eighteenth century. Before that, there were numerous variants, the O and A changing places to give “Molary” and “Malory,” and occasionally one letter vanishing altogether, so there were several “Molorys” and “Malarys” among his forebears.

  But it was the French arm of his family that he was beginning to find the most interesting, and what was driving his interest there was less the location than the spelling of the surname, and the possible implications if his parallel research into another, and totally unconnected, subject produced the results he was hoping to see.

  5

  Dartmouth, Devon

  Before she did anything else, Robin Jessop picked up her car keys and walked out of the apartment and down the spiral staircase to the parking area at the back of the building. Halfway down, she used the remote control to unlock her car, and when she reached ground level, she opened the vehicle’s trunk and took out a pair of heavy gloves that she kept there in case of having to change a tire. Then she locked the car again and climbed back up to her apartment, pulling on the gloves as she did so.

  In the study, she sat down and slid the chair close to the desk and looked closely once again at the book safe. Gingerly she stretched out her gloved right hand, picked up the screwdriver she had been using, and, at arm’s length, carefully eased the tip of the tool under the lid of the object, trying to lift it. But it remained firmly closed, which was actually what she had expected, bearing in mind what had just happened. She would have to probe the lock again and try to free the mechanism a second time.

  She mentally reconstructed the sequence of events, remembering the way the screwdriver had reached a dead end as it touched the latch mechanism, and the faint click she had heard when it freed some part of the catch. That was what she had been expecting.

  But what had taken her completely by surprise was the loud thud that had followed as an appallingly effective medieval antitheft device had been activated. In that split second after the catch had been released, powerful springs had obviously been triggered by a mechanism within the book safe and had forced two rows of needle-pointed spikes out of opposite sides of the relic, one set driving through the spine of the “book” and the other set through the false pages on the opposite side.

  If she had grasped it by the spine, which she had very nearly done and which would have been the obvious way to hold the object while opening it, when the catch was released, three or four of those spikes would have been driven into, and very possibly even through, her left hand. And if she had used a screwdriver with a shorter blade to free the catch, her right hand could have been punctured as well.

  She thanked her lucky stars that she’d used the pen holder instead to brace the object, and doubly so when she bent forward and looked even more closely at the rows of spikes. Despite the fact that the metal had probably been forged well over half a millennium earlier, not only were the points clearly still very sharp, but each also carried a faint discoloration. Robin knew quite a lot about medieval tactics, and guessed that as well as the agonizing pain that the spikes would cause when driven into a person’s hand, there was a very good chance that they had also
originally been painted with some kind of poison or toxin. Whether or not it would still be viable after such a passage of time was another matter altogether, but she definitely had no wish to find out.

  Wearing the heavy gloves as protection for her hands, she pressed down hard on the leather cover, holding the object firmly in place against the pen holder, then slid the point of the slim screwdriver back into the slot, taking care to avoid touching the protruding spikes even with her gloved hand. This time, the end of the tool entered slightly farther than it had done previously before striking metal.

  Robin took a deep breath—not that doing so helped in any way, of course—and then pushed the screwdriver gently. Nothing happened, so she increased the pressure steadily, concentrating on keeping the tool straight. For a few seconds she thought the blade must be resting on the wrong piece of the internal mechanism, because nothing seemed to be budging. But then there was a very faint click and the screwdriver slid perhaps a quarter of an inch farther inside the book safe.

  Nothing else seemed to happen. No other spikes emerged, and the relic appeared unaltered. But when she removed the tool and carefully slid the point under the front “cover” of the old object, she found that it lifted up quite freely.

  She used the screwdriver to open the lid of the book safe all the way so that the interior was completely exposed, but she didn’t touch any part of it. She guessed that the spikes were the only protection the object had, because it wasn’t very big and there was no sign of any other mechanism inside it still waiting to be triggered, but she wasn’t prepared to take any chances. Instead, for several minutes, she just sat at the desk and studied the book safe.

  Now that the lid was open, it was quite easy to see the mechanism. Carried on a metal frame that was secured to the bottom of the book safe with a single pillar was the central catch. In fact, there were two separate catches. Releasing the larger of these, the one closer to the opening and which any metal object slid into the hole would touch first, freed two other catches. These held the mechanism controlling the two rows of spikes in place. They looked something like the head of a garden rake, a pair of slim metal base plates on which the sharpened spikes had been positioned. When the catches were released, these two plates had been forced apart by a pair of powerful springs, with the result she had witnessed just a few minutes earlier.

  Then there was a second and smaller catch, located perhaps half an inch behind the first one and that controlled the second and fortunately harmless mechanism she’d triggered. Pressure on it did nothing more than release small spring-loaded bolts on the three sides of the “book,” at the top, bottom, and side. Once they had been tripped, the cover could be opened.

  She studied the interior carefully, but could see no indication of any other devices. As a check, she tapped and prodded all around both the inside and the outside of the book safe using the long screwdriver from her tool kit before she touched any part of it with her gloved hands. Nothing happened. No other mechanisms were triggered, and after a few minutes she was satisfied that the object was safe to handle.

  She’d been wrong about one thing in her e-mail to William Stevens. The book safe wasn’t empty. Not quite. Underneath the latch mechanism was a length of parchment rolled into the shape of a scroll and lying beside it was a short length of frayed leather, which had presumably originally been tied around it.

  She didn’t immediately pick it up. Instead she slid the point of the screwdriver into the end of the roll and lifted it an inch or two, just in case it was somehow connected to any other kind of antitheft mechanism built into the book safe. Then she lowered it again and repeated the operation at the other end of the scroll. Finally she took a second screwdriver and used both tools to lift the scroll completely out of the box and deposit it on her desk.

  Still wearing the heavy leather gloves she had taken from the trunk of her car, she picked up the book safe, carried it across to the metal filing cabinet that stood against one wall of the room, and placed it carefully on top. Then she took off the gloves, because they were too cumbersome and clumsy to allow her to examine the parchment, and instead opened one of the drawers on her desk, removed a pair of white cotton gloves, and pulled them on. Old books were often delicate and needed special handling, and she almost always wore gloves when she was examining books and manuscripts more than about one hundred years old.

  And there was another reason as well. The spikes fitted into the book safe had been a nasty surprise, and it was not beyond the bounds of possibility that the medieval mind that had conjured up that device could also have decided to protect the parchment itself, perhaps by coating it with poison, or mixing a toxin into the ink. The one thing she certainly wasn’t going to do was touch any part of it with her bare hands or even with her gloves.

  She used the screwdrivers to maneuver the parchment, took a pair of pliers from her toolbox, opened the roll a couple of inches, placed them at the top to hold it in place, and again used the screwdrivers to carefully and gently unroll the remainder of the document, placing a second pair of pliers at the bottom of it. Then Robin put down the tools, picked up her low-power magnifying glass, and bent forward over the parchment scroll.

  She read the first few lines carefully. Or, to be absolutely accurate, she looked at the first few lines and tried to make sense of them, without any success. She’d expected whatever was written on the scroll to be in Latin, a language with which she was quite familiar, but although the writing obviously used the Roman alphabet, she didn’t recognize any of the words. They certainly weren’t Latin, nor did they belong to any other language that she could identify.

  Of course, there were any number of ancient languages that the author could have used, including ones like Catalan and Occitan, which were still spoken by communities in Europe—by millions of people, in fact, in the case of Catalan—or a language that had died out since the Middle Ages. But she had seen enough ancient texts to be able to at the very least recognize the probable language employed. She would normally be able to identify the odd word, or even the root of a word, but that wasn’t the case with the text in front of her. The more she looked at it, the more convinced she became that it wasn’t written in any known language, but was actually enciphered.

  If she was right, then this opened up a host of new possibilities and questions, beginning with the obvious one: what kind of cipher had been employed? Cryptology was a subject about which she knew very little, and one obvious problem, even if she had been an expert on the subject, was that ciphers had developed over the centuries, and without knowing exactly when the text on the parchment had been prepared, she had no way of knowing what types of encryption methods would have been employed at that time.

  But there was one thing she could try. She removed her cotton gloves, took a sheet of paper from her desk drawer, wrote out the alphabet across the top of it from left to right, and then wrote out the alphabet again directly below it but this time backward, so that the letter Z appeared directly under A, Y under B, and so on. That was a decryption code for one of the oldest—and the simplest—ciphers known to exist, the Atbash.

  Originally intended for use with the Hebrew language, Atbash was the most basic possible substitution cipher, encryption being carried out by simply replacing the plaintext letter selected from the conventional alphabet with the cipher letter that corresponded to it. So the plaintext English word FOREST would appear as ULIVHG in Atbash. Although the encrypted text would appear indecipherable, the standard cipher had only one possible key—the reversed alphabet—and was hence extremely weak and easy to crack. Technically, it was a monoalphabetic substitution cipher, and was known to have been used as far back as the time of Julius Caesar, and there were even a couple of examples in the Book of Jeremiah.

  Robin wrote down on the paper the first half dozen words of the first line of text written on the scroll, using capital letters. Then, using the alphabet and its mirror image, she r
eplaced the letters in each of those six words with their Atbash equivalents. Then she tossed her pencil down on the desk in frustration. The six words she had copied had appeared to her to be simple gibberish, but the Atbash-deciphered equivalent words that she had just created were equally incomprehensible, words that she was quite certain were not a part of any known language that she had ever encountered. If the text was enciphered, and she was virtually certain that it was, then whatever encryption method had been used was clearly far more complex than conventional Atbash, and that could mean that the document was much more recent than she had first supposed, cryptology getting more and more sophisticated with the passing centuries.

  What she needed to do now were two things. First, she should definitely try to find out if the book safe was of any value in itself, though she had her doubts about that. Not everything dating from the medieval period—and that was her best guess as to its likely date—was worth much, and the fact that the object contained the spring-actuated spikes added a further level of complication. What she had was essentially a book-sized antipersonnel device, a sort of clever medieval switchblade, and it was quite possible that selling it could actually be illegal. She might end up having to give it to a museum somewhere, just to get rid of it.

  That was the first thing, and she guessed that she could get some results immediately thanks to Google and the Internet. She woke up her laptop again and entered the search term “ipse dixit book safe” and pressed the ENTER key. As usual, the search generated a number of replies—she couldn’t ever remember entering any search term that didn’t produce at least some results from Google, but none of them on the first two screens she scanned looked hopeful. She tried other variants, adding the words key, medieval, text, parchment, cipher, and encrypted in various combinations as well. But she found nothing, no sites or references that seemed to describe anything like the object she had acquired. She widened the search, just looking for “book safes,” but even that didn’t produce any useful information.