by James Becker
While Robin stared at the shapes, Mallory fished around in his computer bag, which—inevitably—he had brought with him from the car, and took out a small digital camera. He checked that the flash option was set to “Auto” and then took half a dozen pictures of the inscription and the marks underneath it in quick succession, altering the angle of the camera each time to ensure that he was capturing the entire image, and hoping that by doing so any other marks or incisions that they hadn’t spotted in the fairly poor light would be recorded by the camera.
“Why did Tibauld inscribe the shorthand version of his name in the lower half of the flag?” Robin asked. “He was the newly appointed grand master of the Templars by this time. Surely his name should go at the top of the flag, as the leader of the order, instead of these other four letters?”
“I don’t have an answer for that. The Templars were always modest in their outlook. They took vows of chastity, poverty, and humility, so perhaps Tibauld thought it more appropriate that his name should appear lower down. It does seem odd, though, because it implies that the SOIM was more important than he was. The short answer is that I don’t know.”
“So, if this is the clue,” Robin persisted, “what does SOIM stand for?”
“That’s the rub, I’m afraid,” Mallory replied, replacing the camera in his bag, “because I have absolutely no idea. But what I do know is that those four letters have to mean something. They could be the shortened name of a person, but I think it’s much more likely that they indicate a place-name or something of that sort on Cyprus, and the only way we’re going to be able to work out their meaning is to get ourselves over to the island. I’m sure that’s where the answer lies.”
55
Rome
Silvio Vitale had carefully considered everything that Toscanelli had told him. Some of what he said Vitale had discounted as little more than excuses for the embarrassing failure of his men, but much of it clearly had a basis in fact: the deaths of four people and the maiming of a fifth allowed for no other interpretation.
Obviously there was much more to the female bookseller Robin Jessop and her unidentified male companion than met the eye. Vitale was not a man known for making assumptions, and he had immediately instructed members of his staff to gather all the data that was available on Robin Jessop. This turned out to be precious little, almost no more information than he already knew about her ownership of the bookshop. The only significant piece of extra data his staff had managed to collect was that she was an occasional amateur racing driver, holding a competition license and generally doing well in the handful of events that she bothered to enter each year.
But even the most diligent of inquiries had failed to reveal much about the man who was accompanying her. Toscanelli had noted the registration number of the Porsche Cayman that he had been driving, and that information, channeled through the senior police officer who was a tertiary, a kind of unofficial lay member of the Dominican Order, had generated the name David Mallory and an address in Cornwall, but almost nothing else.
However, there were a number of official channels open to Vitale, and he had instituted a number of checks through these. And almost immediately he had begun to gather results.
Within the Schengen area, routine passport checks were almost nonexistent, but travelers were still required to produce their documentation whenever they did certain things, the most obvious of which was flying as a fare-paying passenger in an aircraft, and passenger records were held for some time. They were also confidential, but there were numerous ways in which they could be accessed by law enforcement agencies and other bodies.
Within six hours of Robin Jessop and David Mallory flying to Beirut, Silvio Vitale was looking at a printout of the passenger list for that flight, and that told him precisely where in the world she and Mallory were heading.
Vitale knew that Toscanelli would still be in transit to Cyprus, but he sent him a long encrypted e-mail anyway, telling him what he had discovered. Beirut, he was absolutely certain, was not Jessop’s final destination. He knew the history of the Knights Templar better than almost anybody, and from the deciphered parchment text he knew that there was a strong probability Tibauld de Gaudin might have left clues, clues that could conceivably have survived to the present day, and that the first of these was most likely to be found at Sidon, at the Sea Castle.
In fact, he hoped that this was the case, and that Jessop and the man with her would find it and then travel on to Cyprus, which was where both logic and history suggested that the lost treasure of the Knights Templar was to be found, or at least the treasure de Gaudin had taken from Acre, the treasure of Outremer.
But Vitale was still frustrated by one thing: despite a brute-force attack mounted by three of the most powerful computers the order possessed, the final section of the encrypted parchment had still not been deciphered. He had been assured by Fabrini that it would eventually yield, but he had no idea when they might achieve a breakthrough. It could take hours or months, and nobody had any idea which.
But perhaps whatever information remained to be discovered at the Sidon Sea Castle would be enough for Jessop to discover the hiding place. And for that reason, Vitale had had a change of mind with regard to the orders he had given Toscanelli. Instead of acting alone, he was to link up with the advance party that had already reached the island of Cyprus, and they were then to identify Jessop the moment she arrived and follow her and her companion until they discovered where the treasure was hidden.
Once that had been done, the encrypted e-mail concluded, Toscanelli’s original orders were to be followed: the woman and her male friend were to die, and Vitale frankly didn’t care how, so Toscanelli and the other men could enjoy themselves with her if they wished.
Vitale read through the text of the message one last time, making sure that everything he had said was perfectly clear and unambiguous, and then he sent it. And after that, there was nothing he could do but sit back and wait.
56
Cyprus
Getting from Lebanon to Cyprus hadn’t proved to be anything like as difficult as Mallory had expected. There were no ferries, apart from one that plied the route between Mersin in Turkey and Girne on the north coast of the island. But flying was easy, and even the timing had worked. They got back to the airport in Beirut just after five that afternoon, and once Mallory had returned the rental car, almost as a formality he and Robin wandered over to check the departure boards before attempting to find a hotel for the night.
But what they saw changed their minds immediately: Cyprus Airways had a flight leaving for the island at seven fifteen that evening, and they were in good time to catch it. Mallory bought two tickets with cash, choosing a return flight in three days’ time. Hopefully by then they would either have located what they were seeking or have to acknowledge that they were wasting their time.
The flight landed precisely on time at Larnaca at seven fifty-five, and they were among the first of the passengers to walk out after passing through customs and immigration. The sun was a glowing yellow ball in a solid blue sky, dipping slowly toward the horizon, and they knew that the heat would hit them like a hot and muggy blanket when they started their search the following day.
“We need two things,” Mallory said, looking around the interior of the airport building. “A car—obviously air-conditioned—and somewhere to stay, and that had better have either really thick walls or air-conditioning as well. In that order,” he added.
“Well, don’t just talk about it,” Robin said, pointing at a sign for a hire car agency. “Get over there and sort something out.”
“And the other thing we need to do is keep our eyes open. I paid for our air tickets with cash, but we had to show our passports, and that could mean the bad guys know where we’re heading. In fact, they might even be here already.”
Half an hour later they were sitting in a white right-hand drive Renault Cli
o, Cyprus being one of only two islands in the Mediterranean—the other being Malta—where traffic drives on the left-hand side of the road, a hangover from the colonization and occupation of the island by the British at the end of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. Although the light was already beginning to fade, he had the air-conditioning running at full blast to try to bring the temperature down to a manageable level because the car had been standing in the full sun all day. Inside the vehicle, Robin and Mallory were looking at a road map of Cyprus that had been supplied by the rental agency.
“I don’t know why,” Mallory said, “but I always thought Cyprus was quite a small island. In fact, it’s big. Really big. According to this, it’s the third biggest island in the Mediterranean after Sicily and Sardinia. More important for us, it’s about a hundred and fifty miles long and over sixty miles wide at its widest point, and that means it’s a hell of a big area to search.”
Robin nodded. “So we absolutely have to decipher what Tibauld de Gaudin meant by those four letters. Otherwise this is going to be a complete waste of time.”
Mallory pointed at the map.
“Right now,” he said, “we have no idea where our search is going to take us, so I suppose it doesn’t really matter where we decide to stay, at least for tonight. According to this map, the airport is just to the south of Larnaca itself, so why don’t we just head north into the town and drive around until we find a small hotel that looks halfway decent? Then we can take a couple of rooms for a night or so while we sort ourselves out.”
“Go for it,” Robin instructed.
Mallory slipped the car into gear and moved away from the curb where the vehicle had been parked. He drove slowly down the road, alternating his attention between his mirrors and the buildings lining the road as they entered the town from the south. He saw no sign of anyone following them, but the traffic was so heavy that spotting any surveillance was extremely difficult.
Neither he nor Robin had ever been to Cyprus before, so it was all new to both of them. It looked typically Mediterranean, the seafront road dominated by a mixture of newish high-rise hotels and apartment buildings and a handful of much smaller and older individual houses, almost all of them painted white, presumably to reflect the ever-present sunlight, and with red-tiled roofs. There were cars everywhere, and motorcycles and scooters whizzed through the traffic with a cavalier disregard for any rules of the road.
“There’ve been a lot of problems here in the past, haven’t there?” Robin asked. “Between the Turks and the Greeks, I mean.”
“There still are problems,” Mallory confirmed. “The island’s basically divided into two separate parts. Down here in Larnaca, we’re more or less in the heart of the Greek sector, which occupies about two-thirds of Cyprus. Then up to the north of us there’s a dividing line running roughly east to west, and above that is the smaller Turkish area. I don’t think today that there’s too much open hostility between the two parts, but it’s certainly true that they don’t get on with each other very well.”
“I saw something on television a while ago about property problems, people buying land in some areas of Cyprus, building houses, and then being told that the ground actually belonged to a Greek citizen, and that the Turkish vendor didn’t actually have any legal right to sell it in the first place. I think some houses had actually been demolished as a result.”
“I saw the same program,” Mallory confirmed. “The start of the troubles was when Cyprus became independent in 1960 after the British occupation.”
Robin nodded.
“Remind me not to buy anything except food and drink while I’m on the island,” she said. “Definitely no real estate.”
Mallory drove the Renault farther through Larnaca and away from the center of the town, where he guessed that hotel prices would be fairly high, and headed north toward the outskirts, looking out for somewhere that appeared both welcoming and inexpensive. He still had a substantial amount of cash in his wallet, the money he had taken from the Italians they’d clashed with back in Devon, but those funds were not inexhaustible. He had avoided using any of his credit cards since they left Britain, so that the British authorities wouldn’t be able to trace them through credit card transactions. In their position, cash really was king, and using it essential if they were going to stay below the radar.
About twenty minutes later he braked the car to a stop on the side of the road and pointed through the windshield, again checking the mirrors and again seeing no sign of any vehicle or person who could be following them.
“How does that look at you?” he asked, indicating a white-painted hotel on the opposite side of the road and a short distance ahead.
“Pretty much the same as about a dozen or so that we’ve already passed,” Robin replied. “Why have you picked that one?”
“Two reasons,” Mallory said. “The signs beside the entrance.”
Robin shifted her glance slightly, and then nodded. “I see what you mean. That should do us nicely.”
On one side of the entrance a cheaply painted board announced GOOD ENGLISH SHE IS SPOKE HERE, while on the opposite side another sign proudly proclaimed AC ON ALL ROOME.
Mallory drove the short distance down the road, swung the car over to the right, and stopped it in one of the half dozen or so parking bays that fronted the small hotel. He left the engine running to drive the air conditioner and opened his door.
“You stay here for a minute or so,” he said. “I’ll see if they’ve got any vacancies and check just how good the English is they spoke, because my Greek is nonexistent.”
He came back out about ten minutes later, two room keys attached to large brass fobs in his left hand.
“They had two rooms left,” he announced, opening the driver’s door and reaching inside to turn off the engine. “They’re next to each other at the back of the building with quite decent views of the sea.”
They removed their bags from the trunk of the car. Mallory locked it and then they walked inside the hotel.
* * *
A little over eighty yards away, in a narrow side street, a tall and well-built man kept his compact binoculars focused on the two figures as they walked away from the car. He was wearing a pair of cutoff jeans and a T-shirt, and he was sitting astride a middle-sized Honda motorcycle, powerful enough to keep up with almost any car on the twisting roads that characterized some areas of Cyprus, but small enough to be maneuverable in the crowded streets of Larnaca or any other town. In a leather pouch on his belt was a smartphone, and a Bluetooth headset was positioned over his right ear.
“They’ve just walked into the hotel,” he reported in Italian. “They’re carrying their bags, so I’m sure they’ve taken a room there. Just confirm that you’ve made a note of the address. You already have the registration number of their rental car.”
He listened to the reply, his gaze never leaving the entrance to the building.
“I’ll give it five minutes,” he said, when the man at the other end of the call stopped talking, “just in case they’ve forgotten anything, and then I’ll do it.”
The man calling himself Salvatore—a randomly selected work name—had been waiting inside the airport building, sitting at a table in one of the cafés that offered an unobstructed view of the arriving passengers, and had identified the two targets almost immediately. The description that Marco Toscanelli had supplied was both accurate and detailed. They hadn’t known which flight the targets would be likely to arrive on, and so Salvatore had been visiting the airport to meet every aircraft that had come from Lebanon. Toscanelli had explained that eventually the order would be told which flight they’d taken from the passenger list, but getting access to the list would take time, and the flight duration was very short, only about forty minutes, so physical surveillance had been the only option.
As soon as Salvatore was certain of his identifi
cation, he had called Toscanelli’s mobile phone to confirm that the two people had been on that flight, and had kept the line open until Jessop and Mallory walked over to the rental car desk. Then he’d ended the call temporarily, folded up the newspaper he’d been pretending to read, and slipped it into his pocket. He waited until the targets had completed the formalities and were walking toward the exit doors, then followed them out of the building, keeping a few yards back.
Outside, he had walked over to the edge of the parking area where he had left his motorcycle, pulled on his helmet, and again opened the line to Toscanelli to update him on the situation.
As soon as the targets had been positively identified, Toscanelli had suggested sending another member of the group to join the surveillance operation in a car. Salvatore had agreed to this, but recommended holding the second vehicle out of sight and in reserve, because he really didn’t believe that any car could elude his motorcycle on the streets of Larnaca. And he’d been right.
When the two targets had put their bags in the trunk of the rental car, Salvatore started the engine on the Honda and waited for the Renault to move away. Then he followed the car, never getting closer to it than about fifty meters and often dropping back to over two hundred meters, and using the heavy traffic on the streets to shield him from the view of the driver as much as he could. Through the Bluetooth headset he kept up a running commentary so that Toscanelli knew exactly which route the two targets were following, just in case something unexpected happened and he lost contact with them.
But it had been almost too easy, the driver of the Renault apparently having not the slightest idea that he was being followed, and Salvatore was completely certain that he had been unobserved. Now he only had one final task to perform, which would take him under a minute.