The Lost Treasure of the Templars

by James Becker

  “Of a sort, yes. As soon as you’ve made that turn, take the first on the right and then go right again.”

  When they reached Friars’ Green, the Porsche was just coming into view, but some distance behind.

  “He can’t travel much quicker than us on these roads,” Robin pointed out, turning the Ford left into Southernhay.

  Thirty seconds later, she made the second turn Mallory had told her to take, and as she did so he pointed in front of the car.

  “There,” he said. “Drive in there.”

  “A car park?”

  “Exactly. That Italian’s following the car, so it’s time we dumped it.”

  Robin drove into the parking lot and stopped the car at the end of a row, where it would hopefully be invisible from the road. Immediately they both got out and Mallory opened the trunk to retrieve Robin’s laptop, left there by the Italians. Then they walked briskly away, heading between the Cathedral Court buildings and back toward the Friars’ Green interchange. They stopped when they reached the road and looked along Southernhay to the northeast.

  In the distance they saw a black car disappearing around a gentle bend in the road. It could have been the Cayman, but neither of them could be sure.

  “And now?”

  “We walk over there,” Mallory said, pointing to the other side of the road. “We go into that hotel, have a drink or two, then go to the reception desk and ask them to call us a cab.”

  “And the blood on your shirt?” Robin pointed out.

  “A bad nosebleed,” Mallory replied, glancing down. “I’ll need to buy a new shirt, obviously.”

  * * *

  “We’ve lost them,” Dante said as Toscanelli steered the Porsche along Southernhay East. “They must have turned off somewhere, because if they were still ahead of us we’d be able to see them by now.”

  “You’re right,” Toscanelli agreed, “but we’re not finished yet. My bet is that they’ll be going back to that hotel they were staying at, so we can pick them up there.”

  He stopped the Cayman by the curb, reprogrammed the GPS, and moments later set off again.

  * * *

  Half an hour later Mallory paid off the taxi outside a car rental company, and they walked into the office. Twenty minutes later he started the engine of a Citroën DS3—he’d picked it mainly because the windows were tinted, especially the rear side windows—and drove away, back toward their hotel. He stopped the car about a quarter of a mile from the building, and for a couple of minutes he and Robin scanned the street ahead of them. They couldn’t see the Porsche, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t there somewhere, tucked into a side street or parked beyond the hotel.

  “So do we go in, or forget it?” Robin asked.

  “We go in,” Mallory said. “I want my computer, and I don’t think there’s that much risk, if we do this the right way.”

  Five minutes later, Robin—now without both the blond wig the blue contact lenses, because she’d been wearing both when the Italian had seen her face-to-face—steered the DS3 across the street and stopped in front of the hotel garage door, which opened slowly in front of her.

  Mallory was behind her, virtually invisible thanks to the heavily tinted rear windows of the car, the Beretta pistol clutched in his right hand, just in case.

  “I don’t see the car,” Robin said, barely moving her lips, as the door finally opened all the way.

  “Let’s hope they’ve given up,” Mallory said.

  But when he looked out of the window of Robin’s room, the Cayman was clearly visible, parked in a side street on the opposite side of the main street, two shadowy figures barely visible inside it. There was nothing they could do about that, so they quickly packed their few belongings and prepared to leave. But before they did so, Mallory reached into his jacket pocket and took out the cheap disposable mobile phone he’d bought what seemed like several days ago, and dialed the nonemergency number for the police.

  “What are you doing?” Robin asked.

  But before he could explain, the operator answered and he quickly explained to her that he’d just been robbed at gunpoint in the center of Exeter, and that the thief had got away with the keys to his Porsche Cayman. He added that minutes later he had actually seen it being driven away, through the town. He had no option but to give his correct name and address, and the vehicle details, as well as an accurate description of the man he claimed had robbed him, but apologized that he was having to leave the country immediately to attend a business conference in America, and would be out of contact for at least a week.

  “Was that a good idea? Giving all your personal information to the cops?”

  “I really don’t know,” Mallory replied, “but I like that car and I want it back, and now that Italian will have something else to worry about with all the local police keeping their eyes open for both him and the car. With a bit of luck, they’ll find it when the Italian finally decides to dump it, and hopefully the police will impound it and keep it safe. And at least they’ll now be alerted to the fact that the driver of the vehicle is armed, so they’ll know what to expect if they try and stop it on the road.”

  Robin nodded. “That makes sense, I suppose, but my guess is that the Italian will abandon the car pretty soon, because it’s just too distinctive.”

  Then they picked up their bags, and while Robin took the lift down to the garage level, Mallory paid the bill in cash and picked up another ticket for the garage door.

  Two minutes after that, Robin drove the Citroën out of the underground garage and didn’t so much as glance at the Porsche in the side street opposite the hotel. When she looked in the mirror a minute later, there was no sign of the car following her, so she presumed that her disguise—or to be more accurate, her complete lack of a disguise—had worked, and the Italians simply hadn’t recognized her.

  On the eastern outskirts of the city, before they joined the M5 Motorway, Robin stopped the car. Mallory climbed out of the backseat and sat in the front passenger seat alongside her.

  “So we’re pretty much clear of Exeter,” she said. “What next? Where do we go now?”

  “One question,” Mallory said, not replying to her directly. “Have you got your passport with you?”

  “Yes.” She nodded. “I always keep it in my handbag. Why?”

  “I think it’s time we took a holiday together. How does France sound?”

  Robin glanced at him.

  “French, mainly,” she said. “But why France, and won’t getting out of England be a problem, with the cops all looking for me?”

  “It doesn’t have to be France, but that’s probably the easiest. I’ve gone over there by car on the Eurotunnel train a few times, and what always struck me was how lax the border checks were. Quite often there’s nobody at all in the British passport control booth, and usually the French just wave you through. It’s different coming back, but we’ll have to cross that bridge when we come to it. And I know the police are looking for you, but they’ll be searching for a woman with short dark hair, probably traveling alone.”

  “And why France?” she asked again. “You didn’t seem to answer that.”

  “Safety in distance,” Mallory replied. “Those Italians tracked us down—or rather tracked you down—to Dartmouth, just because of the search terms you used on the Web. We’ve been off the grid ever since, but at this moment that last Italian knows we’re somewhere in Devon, and if he calls for reinforcements, that’s where they’ll start looking for us. Plus, the local police still want to shove you into an interview room and try to persuade you to admit to something that you didn’t do. So the short version is that Britain, and especially Devon, is probably going to be too dangerous for you quite soon. France just seems like a good bet.”

  Robin thought for a moment. “Okay, you might be right. We could well be safer in France than this side of the Channel,
but I don’t fancy just chancing our arm at Dover or Folkestone and hoping nobody spots us, or rather me.”

  “You’ve got a better idea?”

  “Definitely,” Robin said. “I’ll tell you later. But where are we going right now?”

  Mallory fiddled with the GPS for a few moments, then sat back.

  “We’ll aim for Taunton,” he said. “I’ve just chosen that place at random, so nobody will ever be able to find us there. I hope.”

  45

  Exeter, Devon

  Toscanelli and Dante sat in the Porsche in the side street opposite the hotel for almost two hours without seeing any sign of the Ford Focus. Other cars arrived and departed, and people walked in and out through the main doors, but none of them looked even remotely like their quarry. Toscanelli finally admitted to himself that he had no idea where Jessop and the woman were, or how he could possibly pick up their trail again. They might have driven away from the city, or gone to ground in some other hotel. Or done almost anything else, in fact. But the reality was that he had no clue about their location, and spending any longer in that town was, as far as he could see, just a complete waste of time.

  He had taken a short telephone call from the senior police officer who’d told him that the Porsche had been reported stolen, and that meant he would have to lose the car fairly quickly.

  The other thing he had to lose was Dante. The man was now barely conscious because of the pain from his broken and grossly swollen arm, and would clearly be of absolutely no use to Toscanelli for the foreseeable future. But he certainly wasn’t going to take the time to drive him to a hospital. As far as Toscanelli was concerned, Dante and Mario had screwed up big-time in letting Jessop and the woman get away. Mario had paid the ultimate price for his incompetence, and Toscanelli saw no particular reason why he should do Dante any favors. After all, as a result of what the two men had failed to do, he had now lost track of Jessop. He also lost the laptop computer that he had taken from the apartment, and probably the relic itself as well, because he was pretty sure that Jessop or the woman would have been carrying it. So he wasn’t feeling particularly well disposed toward his injured colleague.

  He drove away from the hotel toward the city center, then turned the Porsche down a side street and pulled up to the curb.

  “Empty your pockets,” he ordered.

  “What?” Dante stared at him.

  “Empty your pockets,” Toscanelli repeated. “Take out everything you have.”

  Using his good hand and moving with difficulty, Dante produced his mobile phone, the spare pistol magazine, and the screw-on suppressor for the Beretta.

  “That’s the lot,” he said.

  “Now get out. Walk back to the main street, pick a place where there are a fair number of people around, and collapse. That’ll be the fastest way of getting you to a hospital. But let me remind you of one thing,” Toscanelli added, an arctic chill creeping into his voice. “The British police might interview you. I don’t know. If they do, you will say nothing about what we have been doing over here. You simply tell them you are an Italian businessman who has been mugged and has had everything stolen, and your arm was broken by your attacker. Once you have been treated, contact the Order and we will make arrangements to get you back to Rome. But tell anybody anything at all about this operation, and I will make it my personal business to find you and silence your tongue for good. Are you completely clear on that?”

  Dante nodded, his left hand already reaching for the door handle. “I know the rules. I guarantee my silence.”

  The moment the injured Italian closed the door, Toscanelli engaged the clutch and drove away, watching Dante walking slowly back along the pavement in his rearview mirror before taking another turning and increasing speed.

  Ten minutes later, he abandoned the Porsche in another side street and walked away from the vehicle. He walked on until he found a café, because after the events of today so far, he felt he needed both a drink—strong coffee, nothing alcoholic—and something to eat. The establishment he chose was quiet and situated on a corner not far from the main shopping area. Toscanelli ordered a coffee and a tortellini carbonara.

  Once his food and drink had arrived, he checked that nobody else was within earshot, then took out his mobile phone and called the number in Rome. As he had expected, he was answered by the duty agent, but what he hadn’t anticipated was that his call was transferred almost immediately to Silvio Vitale.

  “Do you have the relic?” Vitale asked immediately in Italian.

  “No,” Toscanelli replied in the same language. He knew there was no point in sugarcoating the truth, and he quickly sketched out everything that had happened since the last time he and Vitale talked.

  “So this team of six men has now been reduced to just you, Toscanelli?” Vitale asked, the scorn evident in his voice. “Four of the other men are dead and the fifth is probably on his way to a hospital to have the bones of his arm screwed back together again. And all this damage and mayhem has been inflicted on you by an English bookseller and his girlfriend. If I said I wasn’t very impressed, would you understand exactly what I meant?”

  Toscanelli suppressed a slight shiver as he heard the Italian almost whisper the last sentence. Silvio Vitale’s rages were legendary, and retribution and punishment swift and without mercy, as he knew only too well. On the other hand, Toscanelli himself had achieved something of a reputation within the order, and he was certainly too important to be metaphorically cast aside, even by Vitale. And there was something that he wanted to flag up immediately.

  “I’m not so convinced that this man Jessop is simply a bookseller,” he replied. “I’ve met him, and there was an air of competence about him that for me was completely unexpected. He may be just a bookseller now, but I believe there is probably something else in his background that we know nothing about. And if we had known more about him, then my approach might well have been very different.”

  There was a brief silence between the two men as Vitale digested the clearly implied criticism of the intelligence the order had managed to obtain about the target. But before Vitale could reply, Toscanelli spoke again.

  “But according to Dante, Jessop may not be the more dangerous of the two people. He said that when they confronted them in the clearing, it was Jessop’s girlfriend who attacked him. Dante said he and Mario went to pull the couple apart, but when he grabbed the girl she simply spun out of his grip and kicked him once in the arm. That was enough to break both the bones in his lower arm, and she followed it up by kicking his legs out from under him. She’s clearly an expert in some kind of martial art, and is quite prepared to use her skills.”

  “I’m not in the least bit surprised that she used whatever abilities she had to protect herself. Any woman finding herself in that position would have done the same. Now, unless we get extremely lucky, I very much doubt if we’ll ever see those two again. There’s no point in you remaining in England now. Do your best not to come to the attention of the British authorities, and get yourself on a flight out of London and back to Rome as soon as you can. Since we last spoke, we have made some progress with the decryption and translation, and we expect that you will be retasked very soon.” Vitale paused for a moment, apparently gathering his thoughts. “The clues seem to be leading us in an unexpected direction.”

  “Where?” Toscanelli asked.

  “The eastern Mediterranean,” Vitale replied. “I’ll brief you more fully when you get back.”

  46

  Newbury, Berkshire

  Robin pulled off the M5 Motorway at the Taunton turning, and they drove around the built-up area for a few minutes before selecting a small three-star hotel virtually at random. The only thing Mallory was really concerned about was getting the car out of sight of the road, just in case the Italians had somehow discovered he’d hired it, and that particular establishment had parking behind the bu
ilding, which made it completely invisible to anybody driving past.

  They took two double rooms, paying with cash—they obviously had substantial funds, unwillingly provided by members of the Italian group that had appeared so determined to end their lives—and had an early dinner in the dining room before retiring to Robin’s room. There was still a lot of information on the parchment that they didn’t understand, and the bulk of it still needed to be decrypted and translated.

  Mallory connected his computer to the power supply and opened the lid of his laptop to wake it up again. But before he did anything else, he took out the photocopies of the parchment and looked carefully at them. Quite apart from the symbol derived from the Cistercian monks’ number notation system, which they had now managed to decipher, there was something about the encrypted text itself that had been niggling away at his subconscious. Not the text itself, with which they were both now quite familiar, at least in its enciphered format, but something else.

  Then he spotted it. For no very obvious reason, some of the letters on the same side of the parchment as the Cistercian symbol had dots underneath them. Not big marks, but large and firm enough to suggest that they were deliberate, and not just the result of a lack of care in the writing.

  “Look,” Mallory said, gesturing to what he’d found. “These letters have dots below them, maybe to emphasize the words, or perhaps just to draw attention to the letters themselves.”

  “I hadn’t seen that,” Robin said. “How many dots have you found?”

  “About half a dozen so far. If I call out the words to you, can you write them down?”

  That didn’t take long, but didn’t produce any useful results, so then Mallory just called out the individual letters that had dots underneath them. But, again, that looked like a blind alley. The letters were P, S, C, S, C, I, T, E, S, I.

  “Means nothing to me,” Robin said. “Usually when you get a group of letters like that, they refer to an expression that would have been in common use at the time the document was prepared. Something like FID DEF or just F D, which you still find on all British coins. That stands for Fidei Defensor or ‘Defender of the Faith,’ and it’s actually a part of the title of the reigning monarch. Mind you, there are also a few that have never been cracked.”