The Lost Treasure of the Templars

by James Becker

  “And you still think it’s worth carrying on?” she asked. “In view of its history, are you sure that we’re not just wasting our time?”

  “I can’t be certain of that, no, but I still think that if the treasure had been found, there would be some report about it, somewhere. And I also think that Tibauld de Gaudin wasn’t a stupid man. He would have known that the castle of Saint Hilarion, just like any other castle, would very probably be besieged at some point, and might even be taken by enemy forces, and so the last thing he would have done would be to secrete the treasure anywhere that it was likely to be found. I think he probably concealed it near enough to Hilarion so that the castle became a kind of marker, but far enough away that you would have to know exactly where to look to discover it.”

  “So, how do we find out where to look?”

  Mallory shrugged and grinned at her.

  “I’ve said that I don’t know so often since we began this that it’s almost become my motto,” he replied. “I’m hoping that once we’ve had a look at the castle itself and the surrounding area, we might have an idea where to start. When we’ve done that, we’ll take another look at the pictures I took of that piece of graffiti in Sidon and see if it makes any more sense. I suppose the one advantage we do have is that, assuming what’s written on that old piece of parchment is correct, at least we know there is something here to find, even if we don’t know exactly where to look for it. Without that single piece of information, I suppose it’s at least possible that nobody has ever come up here looking for the Templar treasure. That’s not much of a plan, I know, but right now it’s all I’ve got.”

  At the fork in the road, Mallory swung the car right, following the signs for the castle, though he hardly needed them: the battlements and crenelated walls that adorned the top of the mountain were clearly visible. It looked like something out of a fairy tale, a pointed peak surmounted by an ancient Disneyesque castle.

  There weren’t many parking spaces at the end of the road below the sprawling outline of the castle, and although they were early Mallory didn’t want to get boxed in by other visitors, so he turned the rental car around and stopped it about fifty yards down the road, pulling off onto the stony verge on the left-hand side.

  Then he turned off the engine and for a few moments they both sat there staring through the side windows at the ancient ruin that stretched up to the peak above them.

  “It’s much bigger than I thought it was going to be,” Mallory said. “I’d kind of envisaged something a bit like the Sidon Sea Castle, a fairly compact fortification.”

  “You can probably describe this place in lots of different ways,” Robin replied, “but ‘compact’ certainly isn’t one of the words that immediately springs to mind.”

  Mallory glanced back, toward the end of the road. Drivers of other cars were maneuvering their vehicles into the marked parking places or choosing spots beside the road, as he had just done. There were a couple of buildings there, one of which obviously contained a café, and presumably a section where admission tickets could be purchased, and probably a gift shop as well, the Turks not missing an opportunity to capitalize upon a captive audience.

  “According to this book,” Robin said, “the climb up to the top of the castle takes about an hour, and it’s pretty steep, but apparently the views are really spectacular.”

  Mallory nodded.

  “If we were here on holiday,” he said, “I’d suggest we should do just that, climb all over the place taking pictures that we’d probably never look at again, exactly like tourists everywhere. But I think the one thing we can be certain about is that the treasure isn’t anywhere that a person buying a ticket is going to be able to visit. So actually visiting the castle is going to be a complete waste of time and effort, not to mention bloody hard work, from the sound of it.”

  Robin smiled at him. “You’re just a cheapskate, too mean to buy a ticket.”

  “Not really. Just to prove it, I’ll buy you a coffee and a cake or something in that café back there, and I’ll find the best book about this place that the gift shop has to offer. Wandering about here is going to be pointless until we’ve got some idea of the layout.”

  He took his computer bag out of the trunk and locked the car, and then they walked back along the road until they came to the entrance to the gift shop. There were numerous guides to the castle on the shelves, written in about a dozen different languages. Mallory flicked through them and selected a volume containing two different maps, one showing the layout and structure of the castle itself, while the other was a detailed topographical chart of that section of the mountain range. He bought the book and they walked into the café.

  The temperature was already starting to climb up outside, and instead of coffee they both decided that a couple of glasses of cold fresh lemonade would hit the spot rather better, accompanied by two generous slices of baklava. Once they’d finished eating, he moved the plates to one side and opened the first of the maps, the one showing details of the castle. The extensive structure seemed to be divided into three main areas. At the very top, nestling between the twin peaks that formed the summit of the mountain, was the upper ward. This contained the remains of the royal apartments and King John’s tower, and was the ultimate destination of most visitors because of the spectacular views it offered over the north coast of Cyprus.

  Below that was the middle ward, where there were further royal apartments and a number of other structures including Saint Hilarion’s Chapel, the gatehouse, and the Belvedere, the name deriving from Italian and simply meaning a structure designed to take advantage of a particularly fine view. The lowest section of all, predictably enough called the lower ward, was delineated by the impressive wall that dominated the landscape close to the approach road, and which also contained one of the entrance gates and the barbican.

  “And a barbican is what, exactly?” Mallory asked, pointing at the label on the map.

  “It just means a fortified gate or entrance,” Robin replied. “They were a common feature of castles and fortified towns in the Middle Ages, and they were usually positioned just outside the main wall to act as a first line of defense for the gateway, the weakest point in the defensive wall. The barbican was normally linked to the main wall by a short corridor protected by thick walls, usually referred to as the ‘neck,’ so that if the enemy forces seemed to be gaining the upper hand, the defenders could leave the barbican and get back inside the city or castle and continue the fight from there. They fell out of use during the fifteenth century because of changes in siege tactics and the kind of heavy weapons that had started to become available then.”

  They continued studying the map for several more minutes, but nothing struck them as being particularly significant. The whole structure had clearly been built, rebuilt, demolished, and built up again over roughly half a millennium beginning in the tenth century, and as Mallory had believed all along, if the Templar treasure had been hidden away anywhere within the grounds of the castle, somebody would certainly have found it during that period.

  “Interesting, but not helpful,” he said, folding the map and tucking it into the sleeve inside the back cover of the book. “Let’s take a look at the general area, and see if inspiration strikes us then.”

  He took out the second map and spread it out on the table where they were sitting. It was much more comprehensive and detailed than the topographical chart of the island that they had bought back in Larnaca, and just showed that section of the Kyrenia range where the castle was located. Again they studied the markings and details, but without seeing anything that seemed important.

  “It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack, to use a cliché,” Robin said, “when you’re not actually sure you’re looking in the right haystack.”

  Mallory stood up and felt in his pocket for some coins. “Would a coffee help?” he asked.

  “It certainly would
n’t hurt. White, no sugar, and not too strong, if that’s possible, bearing in mind we’re in Turkey.”

  A few minutes later Mallory carried the drinks over to the table and sat down again.

  “Let’s have another look at the pictures you took at the Sidon Sea Castle,” Robin suggested. “Maybe that will generate some kind of spark.”

  Mallory quickly had the laptop running and they studied each of the images that he had taken of the symbol scratched on the wall of the old Templar fortification, displaying them on the screen one after the other.

  “There are a few other marks on the stone,” Mallory commented. “I can see those inverted V shapes underneath it, and the V lying on its side, but I have no idea what their significance is, or even if they’re just a few random shapes scratched on it by somebody centuries later.”

  “I don’t know,” Robin said thoughtfully, studying the new picture on the screen. “Hang on a minute,” she continued as Mallory pressed the key to display the next image. “Go back one.”

  She stared at the picture again, then nodded.

  “You’ve seen something?” Mallory asked.

  “I don’t know, but I was just wondering if there might be some significance in the positioning of the letters.”

  “Which letters? Oh, you mean the SOIM and TBLD?”

  “Yes.” Robin pointed at the picture on the screen. “If we’re right—and after all this I hope to God we are—I still think it’s a bit peculiar that the abbreviated form of Tibauld should be positioned in the lower half of what you think is the Beauseant. After all, he had been a senior member of the Knights Templar for several years, and by the time this inscription was carved, he was the grand master, the leader of the order. So if his name was going to be put on the Beauseant, I would have expected it to be at the top of the flag.”

  “Maybe.” Mallory didn’t sound completely convinced. “Don’t forget that the order made a big thing of poverty and humility, and perhaps Tibauld didn’t think himself worthy of having his name at the top of anything, grand master or not.”

  “But this is just a piece of well-carved graffiti, something that was never really intended for public consumption, not like an actual flag to be hoisted above a group of Templar knights or flown from the battlements of a castle. We’re assuming that this carving was made for one purpose only: to indicate to members of the order arriving at the Sidon Sea Castle at some future date, long after the original garrison had either left or been slaughtered, that the treasure of the order had been taken to Cyprus and to show its location. Or at least to provide a clue, a starting point, if you like, to allow these later Templars to recover it.”

  “Okay,” Mallory replied, “I can’t argue with any of that, but I don’t really see where you’re going with it.”

  Robin pointed at the screen again.

  “I think it’s significant,” she went on, “that the SOIM, which we’re fairly sure is HLRN, the abbreviated form of Hilarion encrypted in Atbash, is placed above the TBLD. Tibauld was the treasurer of the order. The treasure was placed in his care and after that he became the grand master, so maybe he was using his own name as a synonym for the treasure itself. After all, he couldn’t really spell out exactly what he was hiding, because if he did, then anybody—Templar, infidel, or just somebody looking for booty—would be able to follow the trail and recover it. But only a Templar would know that Tibauld was the treasurer, and that he had taken the wealth of the order to Cyprus.”

  “I think I see what you mean. You reckon that the TBLD refers to the treasure. And because the letters SOIM are placed above the TBLD, that means the hiding place is underneath the castle.”

  “Exactly,” Robin said. “Tibauld was too intelligent a man to hide the treasure within the castle, or even in an existing cellar or dungeon or anything like that, because he would have known that it would almost certainly be discovered in the future. So I think that he may well have ordered an underground cavity to be excavated somewhere in the lower area, the lower ward, of the castle and buried the treasure in it. That would, if you like, be a literal—in the proper sense of the word—interpretation of the carving. The treasure would be under the castle. So that would be TBLD under SOIM, or rather HLRN, just like the carved inscription.”

  Mallory nodded slowly. What Robin had said certainly made sense, though there was an obvious problem.

  “If you are right,” he said, “that does present us with a certain amount of difficulty. You can see the size of the castle, and especially the lower ward. If that was where Tibauld hid the treasure of the order, any markers or indicators he might have left to show where it was will almost certainly have been obliterated during the last seven hundred years. And there’s also an obvious practical problem. Even if we could somehow manage to find the location of the hoard, digging it up would probably prove to be impossible. I somehow can’t see the Turkish authorities letting us chew up the interior of one of their principal tourist attractions with a JCB digger, and we’d probably need to use something like that to have any hope of finding it.”

  “So that’s it, then? We just pack up and go home?”

  “Maybe. In fact, yes, if you’re right. This really is the end of the trail.”

  For a few seconds the two of them just sat there, staring blankly at the computer screen. Then Mallory shook his head.

  “That really is a bit of a bummer,” he muttered. “I really didn’t expect that we would manage to get so far, to follow the trail for as long as we have, and then meet something like this. We can’t go to the Turkish authorities and tell them what we’ve discovered, because we haven’t really found anything, just an old bit of parchment and some scratches on a stone in the wall of a long-abandoned castle. None of that is what you might call solid evidence, is it?”

  “No,” Robin agreed, glancing at Mallory.

  She looked back at the screen, and then her expression changed.

  “Hang on a minute,” she said. “There’s something about this that doesn’t make sense. About the timing, I mean.”

  “Timing?”

  “Yes. Think it through. Tibauld de Gaudin traveled from Acre to Sidon with the treasure, and when he got there he was elected grand master of the order. But he left almost immediately to carry the treasure to Cyprus, and according to the historic record he never went back to Sidon because he died on the island quite soon after his arrival. So that carving at the Sidon Sea Castle must have been done on his orders after he arrived from Acre but before he left for Cyprus.”

  “Obviously,” Mallory interjected.

  “Sorry. Just getting my facts in a straight line. So if that timeline is correct, Tibauld must have known before he left Sidon exactly where he was going to store the treasure on Cyprus. That must mean he knew the layout of this castle and local area in enough detail to have selected a suitable spot in advance. If that was the case, then I don’t think his solution to the problem was to dig a hole somewhere and bury it. He must have had somewhere more permanent in mind, but somewhere that still fitted the general description of being under the castle of Saint Hilarion. Maybe some building or structure lower down the mountain.”

  Mallory thought for a few seconds, then reached out and picked up the topographical map. Down one side of it was the usual legend, explaining the meaning of the various symbols used on the map and other relevant information. When he read one particular sentence, his face brightened immediately, and he pointed at it.

  “I think you could be right,” he said. “Just read that.”

  Robin looked down at the tiny writing. “I don’t understand. ‘The Kyrenia range is sedimentary in origin and principally formed of limestone with some marble deposits,’” she read out. “I thought marble was limestone,” she added.

  “It is, I think. Or a kind of limestone, anyway. The point is that there’s something interesting about limestone and the way it reacts to
acidic water. When rain falls, it will absorb a certain amount of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and it picks up more from decaying plant material once it hits the ground.”

  He paused and glanced back at the topographical chart before turning again to Robin.

  She looked puzzled and faintly irritated.

  “So?” she demanded. “I really don’t want a lesson on meteorology, if you don’t mind.”

  “It’s not meteorology,” Mallory pointed out, “just some basic chemistry that I can barely remember now. The point is that the addition of carbon dioxide to water produces a form of carbonic acid. Limestone is actually calcium carbonate, and that reacts chemically with carbonic acid, causing a slow but consistent erosion of the rock. And that produces cavities that grow larger with the passing millennia.”

  “So?” Robin demanded again.

  “So one of the principal characteristics of limestone is the ease with which caves are formed in it by this chemical process. I don’t think Tibauld de Gaudin had any intention of just digging a hole and burying the treasure of the Knights Templar or sticking it in a building near here. I think he knew that the mountain underneath the castle of Saint Hilarion was riddled with caves, and he picked one of those to be the final resting place of the wealth of the order. So what we have to do now is find which one he chose.”

  * * *

  On the other side of the café, Salvatore was becoming restless, and debating the advisability of buying another cup of coffee, just in case he had to go to the lavatory and the targets chose that moment to leave. To add to his discomfort, the seats were hard, and he was slowly growing numb.

  He was also puzzled because he had no idea what the targets were planning on doing next. Like Toscanelli, he had expected that once they arrived at the castle they would head to wherever they believed the treasure was hidden, but unless they thought it was somewhere in the café—which seemed unlikely at best—it didn’t look as if they were doing anything other than a bit of research, studying images on a computer and a map taken from a book the man had purchased in the gift shop.