by James Becker
“I think we’re wasting our time,” he said. “Unless we’ve missed it, that abbreviation doesn’t refer to any of the geographical features shown on this map, and certainly not to the castles and other buildings that could have been around when Tibauld was here. I was really hoping that he might have picked one of the old castles on the island, because they were definitely here in that period, and they would almost certainly have been occupied by the Templars and would have been fairly safe and obvious places to secrete any valuables. But the names are completely wrong: by no stretch of the imagination can I get SOIM out of Buffavento, Kantara, or Hilarion, so obviously Tibauld didn’t do what I would more or less have expected him to do.
“Part of the problem is that this is a new road atlas. I’m quite sure it doesn’t label all the geographical features, and obviously any names that it does include are going to be the current spellings of names that might originally have been written in Greek or Latin. As I said before, we need a decent guidebook to Cyprus that will include a really comprehensive history of the island and whatever the local equivalent is of a British Ordnance Survey map, a map that will chart and name every significant geographical feature on the island.”
He stretched his arms above his head and took a deep breath. The sun was rising steadily higher into the sky, and the day was already hot. It was also, Mallory noted with sudden surprise, almost time for lunch, and despite his recent breakfast he was already feeling hungry.
“There’s really nothing else we can do at the moment,” Mallory said, “though I suppose I could go on the Web and just do a bit of background research on Cyprus, see if I can find any of the old names of various places, that kind of thing, but I can do that later just as well. Why don’t we take a wander down the street and see if we can find a bookshop and then grab an early lunch so we’ve got the afternoon free?”
“Good idea,” Robin replied. “I don’t know about proper bookshops that will sell you the kind of map you want, but I can pretty much guarantee that we’ll find a souvenir shop down the street where you can pick up a guidebook.”
Proper bookshops, as Robin had described, seemed few and far between. One was closed, and had clearly been so for some considerable time. The other they located obviously relied upon the sale of paperback novels in multiple languages for much of its income, but they found a small map section tucked away in a corner of the very back. The proprietor spoke reasonable English, so Mallory was able to explain exactly what he was looking for.
There wasn’t really an Ordnance Survey type of map available, but he was able to purchase a modern copy of a seventeenth-century map of the entire island, as well as a current and fairly detailed topographical map. Between the two of them, they hoped that those would reveal the information they were looking for.
Finding a guidebook was a lot easier, and they emerged from one of the souvenir shops along the street with three volumes, two of them illustrated current guides to the island, and both lavishly illustrated with color photographs. The other was a much more serious tome detailing the history of Cyprus from the earliest days, but noticeably lacking any kind of illustration apart from a handful of maps and a few line drawings.
Everything went into Mallory’s computer case, and they continued along the street.
“We’ll just grab a quick lunch,” Mallory said when they’d selected a restaurant. “I want to get back to the hotel and start studying those two new maps. The name we’re looking for has to be out there somewhere.”
* * *
Salvatore, their faithful but invisible shadow, had appeared outside their hotel at just after six that morning, just in case the targets suddenly decided to leave the building. The tracker on the car would allow the vehicle to be followed, but Toscanelli was insistent that he wanted them tailed if they left the hotel on foot as well. Apart from Toscanelli himself, who needed to keep out of sight of the two targets, the only member of the team who had actually seen them, and so could be relied upon to definitely recognize them immediately when they emerged, was Salvatore. He was the only choice in a field of one.
He’d wandered up and down the street, merging as best he could with the few pedestrians who were already out and about, and then took a seat at an outside table as soon as the first café opened its doors for business. Ordering himself coffee and breakfast, he paid as soon as the waiter brought his meal so that he could leave immediately. The café was on the opposite side of the street, which gave him an excellent view of the hotel, and his motorcycle, with a full tank of fuel, was parked a few yards down the street.
The two people he was watching out for finally appeared late in the morning, by which time he’d read the entire contents of his newspaper twice and listened to two somewhat acrimonious telephone calls from Toscanelli, who appeared to be convinced that Salvatore must have missed them. The fact that Toscanelli seemed to doubt his competence was another black mark against the man, in Salvatore’s opinion.
When the targets finally stepped out of the building, he heaved a sigh of relief. He had been beginning to wonder if Jessop or the man had somehow detected their surveillance and had slipped away during the night.
They seemed to be in no particular hurry, just ambled down the street like a couple of holiday-makers, intent on nothing more than lunch and sightseeing, although Mallory seemed to be frequently searching their surroundings, probably checking for surveillance.
But Salvatore realized they had some vague plan in mind after he’d made a brief call to Toscanelli to tell him they were on the move. Their visits to the bookshop and the souvenir store confirmed that. In each case he managed to get close enough to glance through the window while they were inside, and although he couldn’t see exactly what the man was purchasing, he could at least tell that it was a couple of maps and a few books.
After they’d left the second shop, he called Toscanelli again, briefing him on what he’d seen. The update pleased the disgraced operative.
“They know something,” Toscanelli said confidently. “They must have some kind of lead. That’s the only reason they’d be buying maps. Make sure they don’t see you.”
Salvatore watched as the targets walked slowly past the handful of restaurants lining the street, pausing to look at the menus posted outside each one. He took the opportunity to move some distance ahead of them: people who think they’re being followed tend to only look behind them, but he could observe them just as well from in front.
Eventually they selected a restaurant and disappeared inside, then reappeared a few seconds later to sit at a table outside. Salvatore mirrored their actions, glancing at a number of menus before sitting down at a table just inside a different establishment that lay between the hotel and where the two targets were sitting. He ordered a small beer and a main course, and paid the bill as soon as his food arrived. From his position, he would easily be able to see Jessop and the man as they returned to their hotel.
They didn’t take as long over their meal as Salvatore had expected, and strode past the front of the restaurant after about an hour. And, exactly as he’d done before, the Italian stood up and dogged their footsteps all the way back.
* * *
“Do you want to work out there on the terrace again, like we did this morning, or upstairs?” Robin asked, as they walked into the reception hall. They could see the terrace through the rear doorway of the hotel. The brilliant Mediterranean sunshine was bathing it in light, the only shadows the small circles of darkness cast by the umbrellas above the tables.
“I think we’d be better up in your room. The Wi-Fi signal will probably be stronger up there, inside the building, and the computer screen is really difficult to see in sunlight.”
Robin nodded, looked through the windows at the bright blue strip of the Mediterranean beyond the town, and suddenly shivered.
“Cold?” Mallory asked.
“No. Somebody just walked over my gra
ve. Which I hope is only an old saying. I’ve got a lot of life I want to live yet.”
Mallory switched on his computer and placed it on the dressing table while Robin sat on the newly made bed and spread out the maps they’d bought that morning.
They started with the current topographical map, sitting side by side on the bed and each looking at roughly one half of the representation of the island on the unfolded sheet. Examining every geographical feature and place-name took a considerable length of time. It was over an hour before Mallory finally shook his head and stood up to stretch his aching back.
“I haven’t seen anything, any name at all, that could realistically be abbreviated to SOIM,” he said. “Have you spotted anything?”
“Not to put too fine a point on it,” Robin replied, “sod all. I’m beginning to think we’re barking up the wrong tree here.”
Mallory picked up the topographical map and folded it.
“We’re not done yet,” he said. “Don’t forget that some of the names will have been changed, perhaps as recently as the nineteen seventies, just because of the conflicts between the Greeks and Turks. Let’s take a really good look at that copy of the old map.”
The seventeenth-century map was quite different from the current version. In contrast to the sharp modern lettering that had identified geographical features on the topographical chart, the older map’s annotations were written in a stylish cursive script, like italics. The labels were also much more difficult to read, the letters tiny and indistinct, and frequently confusing, not least because the labeling was in French.
After another hour, neither of them had seen anything that was even faintly possible as the location to which Tibauld de Gaudin had been referring. Either they were on the wrong track altogether, or the clue that they believed they’d found at Sidon was actually completely irrelevant, just a piece of unusually well constructed graffiti.
Mallory picked up the map and tossed it onto the chair in front of the dressing table; then he and Robin lay down side by side on the bed, staring at the ceiling and alone with their thoughts.
“Maybe we’re wrong,” Mallory said finally. “Maybe when we saw that shape at the Sea Castle I was just clutching at straws. I mean, it does look remarkably like the Beauseant, but you could also argue that it was just a square with a line across it. And perhaps because I assumed it was a representation of the Templar battle flag, I kind of talked you into believing that TBLD was a shorthand form of Tibauld.”
Robin shook her head. “I don’t think you talked me into anything. In fact, I’m not that easy a person to persuade. I still think that you were right, that the mark on the stone had been carved on Tibauld’s specific orders. I don’t believe that it was just a piece of graffiti. It was too carefully and accurately carved for that to be the case, so I still think we’re on the right trail. We just need some final piece of evidence or a different way of interpreting the information.”
“I’m glad you think so,” Mallory said. “I was beginning to wonder if it was all in my mind, if I was seeing far more in the codes and clues than was really there. I know that you can always interpret—”
“Wait,” Robin interrupted urgently, sitting up and looking at Mallory. “I just thought of something, right then when you mentioned codes and clues. I’ve just realized something that doesn’t make sense.”
Mallory was caught up in her excitement, and stood up from the bed.
“What?” he demanded.
Robin stood up as well, crossed to the desk, and grabbed a piece of paper and a pencil.
“Look,” she instructed.
She wrote the name Tibauld on the sheet, and then the abbreviated form TBLD right beside it. On the line below she wrote the other clue they’d found at Sidon: SOIM. Then she pointed at the piece of paper.
“What do you see?” she demanded.
Mallory shook his head.
“Only what’s there,” he said, unsure where she was going. “The full name Tibauld, the abbreviation of it, and the other abbreviation that we still can’t make any sense of. What are you seeing that I’m not?”
“Look at the two abbreviations,” Robin said. “What’s different about them?”
Mallory looked back at the page.
“The letters, obviously,” he replied. “All the letters are different, and the only similarity is that each abbreviation has four letters, but I guess that it could just be coincidence.”
Robin smiled at him mischievously. “There’s something else you’re missing. Remember when we were back in Sidon and I told you that one of the commonest ways of abbreviating any word or name is simply to take out the vowels, because it’s the consonants that shape a word? That’s how you get TBLD from Tibauld. But SOIM is different, because it hasn’t been formed by stripping out the vowels. It can’t have been, because two of the letters actually are vowels. Now do you see?”
“I hear what you’re saying, and I see what you mean. What I’m not sure of is how this helps us.”
“Right from the start of this adventure, or whatever you like to call it, almost everything we’ve touched has had something to do with codes and ciphers. I think that Tibauld de Gaudin decided to apply a final further level of secrecy to the location of the Templar treasure of Outremer. For the abbreviation of his name to be recognized, he would have had to leave it simply as TBLD, but I think he basically tried to encrypt the abbreviation he’d used for the location. My guess is that he chose his hiding place, abbreviated the name by stripping out the vowels, and then encrypted it, probably by using plain vanilla Atbash. That’s how we’ve ended up with two vowels in an abbreviation where there really shouldn’t be any.”
Mallory didn’t reply, but scrabbled among the papers he’d removed from his computer bag when they returned to the bedroom, and plucked out the one on which he had written the first, simple, and uncomplicated Atbash cipher. It took him less than ten seconds to decode the four letters SOIM.
When he’d done so, he picked up the discarded map of Cyprus and looked at one particular area on the north coast of the island. Then he opened one of the guidebooks, checked an entry in the index, and swiftly found the corresponding page and read the first part of the article that was printed on it.
He put down the book, turned back to Robin, and impulsively kissed her full on the lips. She looked somewhat startled but made no move to resist.
“Sorry,” he said, the excitement palpable in his voice. “I just felt I needed to do that, because you’re absolutely right. That’s the only thing that makes sense. The straight Atbash decode of SOIM is HLRN, and the most obvious interpretation of that is the castle of Saint Hilarion, up on the north coast of the island, a castle that was originally built in the eleventh century and that the Templars definitely occupied. That must be where Tibauld de Gaudin stashed the treasure of the order, and so that’s where we’re going right now.”
Fifteen minutes later they had packed their bags, paid the bill, and checked out of the hotel. Mallory opened the trunk of the little Renault and put everything inside it, then sat down in the driver’s seat and started the engine while Robin looked at the map, working out the best route to take to the north coast of the island.
“I think we’ll take the long way round,” she said. “The problem is that we’re down here on the south coast at Limassol, and the castle of Saint Hilarion is on the other side of Cyprus on the north coast, and between the two places are the Troodos Mountains. There are roads that go over the mountains, but it’s quite a long way and they’ll be twisty and steep, so I think the fastest route will actually be to head east along the coast and then follow the main road north to Nicosia. Then that will carry us pretty much straight on to Girne or Kyrenia, and that’s more or less the location of the castle.”
“Suits me,” Mallory said, reversing the Renault out of the parking space. “I’m just the driver. All you have to do
is tell me where to go.”
* * *
“They’re on the move,” Salvatore announced when his call was answered, speaking softly into his Bluetooth headset, “and my guess is they’ve checked out of the hotel because the man has just put all their bags in the car.”
He was again sitting at a café on the opposite side of the street—a different one this time—a coffee cup and a newspaper on the table. He watched as the Renault stopped just short of the main street, the driver checking the traffic in both directions before pulling out.
“They’re heading east,” Salvatore continued. “I’ll give them a couple of minutes, then catch up with them on the bike. Confirm you still have a good signal from the tracker?”
“Confirmed,” Toscanelli said. “Nico is in his car about half a kilometer from you, and he’ll become the primary unit once they leave the built-up area. I’m in the secondary unit, and we’ve just got mobile from the hotel. Make sure they don’t see you. If you think the driver has any suspicions at all, turn off as soon as you can and then hang well back for the rest of the journey. Whatever happens, they mustn’t know that they’re being followed.”
“Copied,” Salvatore said, ending the call. He tucked his newspaper into the pocket of his jeans and walked away from the café toward his parked motorcycle.
58
Cyprus
Following Robin’s directions, Mallory steered the car through the center of Larnaca, heading northwest toward the interior of the island. The afternoon traffic was heavy, and they made fairly slow progress.
“We’re on the B2 at the moment,” Robin said, looking up from the road map that she had open on her lap, “but if you see a sign for Nicosia, or for the A2, follow it. It looks to me as if the B2 was the old main road, and the A2 is a newish motorway that follows the same route.”
“So we could stay on the B2.”
“Yes. But it’s already late afternoon and we need to find somewhere to stay tonight, so the sooner we get across to the other side of the island, the better.”