by James Becker
Not for the first time, the Italian wondered if their masters in Rome had got it all very badly wrong. Perhaps Jessop and her male companion were simply taking a holiday. But the more he thought about that, as he pretended to be engrossed in the newspaper open on the table in front of him, the less likely it seemed, simply because of the places they had visited since they slipped away from Britain. Tourists would be unlikely to visit the Sidon Sea Castle, a fortification constructed by the Knights Templar, and then the castle of Saint Hilarion, known to have been used by the order, unless they were looking for something, and obviously something to do with the Templars.
But at that moment something changed. Jessop, who had until then appeared somewhat morose, suddenly smiled, wrapped her arm around her male companion’s shoulders, and kissed him on the cheek. Both of them were visibly more animated for a few seconds. Clearly they had made some kind of discovery, because the man moved the computer to one side and began studying the map in much more detail.
Jessop murmured something to him and he nodded. She got up, walked over to the counter, and ordered two more cups of coffee, which at least made Salvatore’s immediate decision slightly easier. As soon as she had sat down again, he left his seat to collect another drink for himself. Clearly the two targets wouldn’t be leaving the café for at least a few more minutes.
He watched them as closely as he could without making his surveillance obvious. They seemed to be alternating their attention between whatever was displayed on the computer—and because of the angle of the screen Salvatore couldn’t see what that was and he wasn’t prepared to risk walking close to their table—and the unfolded map.
For almost a quarter of an hour, the targets appeared to be engrossed in their task, and then it looked as if they had found what they were looking for, or at the very least had reached a decision, because the man closed the lid of his laptop and slid the computer into the bag he had with him while Jessop folded the map. Moments later, they both stood up and walked out of the café.
As they passed his table, Salvatore took his mobile from his pocket and pressed the speed-dial key for Toscanelli’s phone. His call was answered almost immediately.
“Sì?”
“They’re on the move,” Salvatore said in Italian. “They’ve been looking at something on the man’s computer and studying a map.”
“Something on the Internet?” Toscanelli asked.
“I don’t know, because I couldn’t get close enough to see,” Salvatore replied, standing up and following the two targets out of the building. “Wait.”
He had expected them to purchase tickets and then enter the grounds of the old castle, but instead they did the opposite, heading away from the buildings and walking down the road toward their hire car.
“It looks like they’re leaving the place,” Salvatore reported. “They’re either going back to their car or heading somewhere else on foot.”
“I didn’t expect that,” Toscanelli said. “Nico’s already inside the castle, waiting for them. I’ll get him back straightaway and into the car. You follow on foot until we know what they’re doing.”
“Where are Emilio and Flavio?”
“In the other car, waiting down the road, just in case the targets leave the area. I’ll alert them as well.”
Salvatore pressed the button on his Bluetooth earpiece to end the call and turned in the same direction as the targets, following them down the road fifty or sixty meters behind. As they approached their vehicle, the man took a set of keys from his pocket and seconds later the hazard warning lights flashed to indicate that he had unlocked the car. The moment he saw that, Salvatore crossed to the other side of the road, took out his mobile phone, and speed-dialed Toscanelli’s number while he pretended to use the device to take photographs of the castle wall that towered above the road.
“They’re definitely on the move,” he reported. “I’ll head back and collect the motorcycle. Make sure that Emilio knows they could be heading his way.”
Salvatore ended the call, then turned away and walked up the road up to where he had left his motorbike. Behind him, he heard the sound of a car engine starting, and the crunch of tires on gravel or stone as the vehicle began moving.
Just before he pulled on his helmet, a few minutes later, his phone rang.
“They haven’t gone that far,” Toscanelli told him, now obviously making a conference call. “There’s a parking area for coaches just down the road, where it forks right to lead up to the castle. Emilio was parked just beyond that. The two targets have turned in there, and now they’re following a rough track that runs around the side of the mountain. They’re driving slowly, and I think they’re looking for something.”
He paused for a few moments, apparently making a decision.
“Salvatore, don’t go down the road for the moment. Stay near the castle and find somewhere that will give you a good view of the track. I want to know the moment they stop and what they do then. Nico and I will follow them. Emilio and Flavio, you cover the end of the track, because it doesn’t go anywhere and they’ll have to come back the same way. This could be the endgame,” he finished. “I don’t know how they’ve done it, but somehow they must have discovered where the hoard was hidden. So all we have to do is wait until they recover it and then take it off them.
“Remember,” Toscanelli finished, “the orders from Rome are quite clear. The targets are not to leave the island. When they find what we’re looking for, they can take its place. It’s been undiscovered for over seven hundred years. With any luck, their bodies will remain hidden for centuries. As a bonus, you can all take a turn with the woman before you kill her. Or even afterward, if that’s your thing.”
60
Cyprus
“Are you sure about this?” Robin asked as the rental car bounced along the rough track, throwing up a cloud of brownish dust behind them.
“Frankly, no. But as far as I can tell from the topographical chart, this track will take us into the area directly below the castle, and that’s about as close as we can get to the caves that are marked on the map.”
“I don’t want to rain on your parade, but surely if the caves are marked on the map, people will have explored them already. The people who did the survey for the topographical chart, for example.”
“Not necessarily. Mapmakers make maps: they don’t normally also explore the landscape. It’s quite possible that they will simply have noted the entrance to a cave and its approximate internal dimensions, and left it at that. I doubt very much if they would also have explored or surveyed the caves, because that really isn’t their job.”
Mallory grunted as the front wheels of the car dropped down into a deep rut and the whole vehicle bounced and shuddered. “But you’re right about other people wandering around the hillside and having a poke about inside any caves they noticed. If we’re reading the clues correctly and Tibauld did store the treasure here, that does make sense because he would have needed to choose somewhere with fairly easy access, but at the same time it would have to be a place that offered some kind of security, so that no opportunist just wandering into a cave would be able to find the chests or whatever the treasure was stored in.”
Mallory glanced through the windshield at the shape of the castle on the mountaintop above and to their left, then turned his attention back to the track in front of them. “According to the map, there’s a turning area at the end of this path. We’ll park the car there and then start walking.”
“And you still think that’s the right place to search?”
“I hope so. But now that we know the shape of the castle, it does make sense of that strange mark, the kind of stylized double capital letter L, the small L on top of a large L, that was scratched underneath the carving of the Beauseant we discovered at the Sidon Sea Castle. The layout of the main walls of the castle is exactly that shape, the lower walls forming
the larger letter and the upper ward the smaller. And the mark that was carved on the right-hand end of the larger letter L could easily be interpreted as an arrow, pointing us in more or less the direction we’re going now. In fact, the turning area or whatever it is at the end of this track is more or less directly in line with the lower wall of the castle, so I think that’s probably a pretty good place to start looking.”
A minute or so later he pulled the car to a stop in a roughly circular area of rough ground. Then he started moving forward again and turned the car around so that it was facing back in the direction from which they had come. He parked it on one side, so that any other vehicle following them would also be able to turn around easily.
Before he did anything else, Mallory stared back along the track they’d just driven along, then looked back up the slope towards the old castle.
“What is it?” Robin asked.
“Just checking that nobody’s followed us,” he said. “I haven’t seen anyone taking any interest in what we’re doing, but by now those Italians probably know we’re on the island, even if they don’t know exactly where we are.”
But he saw nobody. No car had followed them down the track, and he couldn’t see anyone near the castle looking in their direction.
“I think we’re okay,” he said.
“I hope so,” Robin replied. “I’d hate to have the bad guys turn up now, not when I think we’re so close to the end of the trail.”
They got out of the car, and while Mallory opened the trunk to remove a rucksack containing a couple of large bottles of water, a heavy flashlight, and a packet of spare batteries, plus a few tools that he had thought might be helpful, Robin looked up toward the peak of the mountain.
“I see what you mean,” she said. “This spot is almost directly in line with that lower wall. But where do we go now?”
Mallory looked back the way they’d come, then stared at the steep slope that lay beyond them, in the opposite direction.
“If that symbol was an arrow,” he replied, “then what we’re looking for must be somewhere over there. And if the inverted V shapes on the carving represented caves, which seems to me to be the obvious explanation, then we’re looking for three of them, probably situated fairly close together, and almost certainly the important one is in the middle.”
Because they had expected to do a fair amount of walking, both were wearing stout lace-up leather shoes with heavy-duty soles and trousers and had lightweight anoraks, because they knew the temperature would fall the higher they climbed. In fact, it was quite a bit warmer than either of them had expected, and so the anoraks stayed in the trunk of the car, along with Mallory’s computer bag.
“Are you sure about that?” Robin asked. “I thought you normally slept with it.”
Mallory smiled at her.
“I do, almost,” he said. “But I think in the circumstances, bearing in mind that we’re going to be scrambling around inside caves—or at least I hope we are—it’s probably actually safer left locked up in the car. The last thing I want to do is drop it.” He tapped one of the zipped pockets on his trousers. “And I’ve downloaded everything that’s really vital onto this external hard drive, so I do have a backup as a last resort.”
Mallory picked up the rucksack and hoisted it onto his shoulder, and after a final check to make sure that the car was locked, they set off, picking their way horizontally across the slope in front of them, trying to maintain a more or less straight path. The air was warm, thick, and muggy, and within just a few paces both of them had started to perspire.
“I know we’ve only just started,” Robin said, “but how far do you think we’ll have to go? I mean, are we there yet?”
“Probably not all that far,” Mallory replied with a chuckle. “If we get a long way from the peak, then I think we can be fairly certain that we’ve missed it, because then it wouldn’t be ‘under the castle,’ which I still think is what Tibauld meant. My guess is that the hiding place was probably within visual range of the castle, simply so that the garrison, or perhaps a few trusted and selected members of it, could see if anybody approached it. And practically speaking he wouldn’t have wanted the treasure to be too far away in case he needed to access it. So the short answer is that we shouldn’t have that far to go.”
Within about eighty yards, the slope they were walking across terminated in a rock face that barred any further progress. A short distance over to their left was a cleft in the rock that presumably was one end of what looked like a fairly narrow and constricted ravine. Mallory ignored that, and instead turned to his right and began making his way along the cliff face, looking for any indication of a cave or an opening.
And almost immediately they found one.
The cliff face was rugged and uneven, and had a considerable amount of vegetation growing along its base. Behind two large bushes growing quite close together, Mallory spotted an opening. It was roughly square in shape, perhaps six feet wide and five feet high, but even without entering the space he could tell that it was small.
“It’s a cave,” he said, “but not a big one, and unless the others are really well hidden, it seems to be the only one along this stretch of cliff.”
“But we are going to check it out,” Robin insisted.
“Definitely,” Mallory agreed, reaching into his rucksack and taking out the flashlight.
They stepped forward, moving through the entrance to the cave and into the gloom that lay beyond. The contrast between the brilliant sunshine outside and the darkness within was startling, and for a few seconds they just stood there side by side as they waited for their eyes to become accustomed to the lower levels of light inside. Then Mallory switched on the flashlight and moved the beam slowly around the interior of the cave.
Like the entrance, the interior of the cave was roughly square, but it was small, perhaps only eight or ten feet in length and about the same in width, while the roof height varied between about five and seven feet. Close to the entrance, one of the walls was somewhat blackened, presumably evidence of fires that had been lit there in the past, a deduction that was supported by a rough circle of stones that had clearly been used as a rudimentary hearth.
“Somebody’s obviously been in here,” Mallory said. “Maybe a shepherd or a goatherd has used this cave as a temporary shelter in the winter, if they bring their animals this high up. Otherwise I suppose a wandering hiker or two might have used it. But I don’t see any evidence of a medieval presence here. Do you?”
“None at all,” Robin agreed. “But at least this proves that you were right and that there are caves in this area. It just means we haven’t found the right one yet.”
They stepped out again into the bright sunlight and made their way slowly along the cliff face, looking out for any other openings in the rock. But the outcropping was not particularly big, and in a few minutes they had reached the end without finding any other caves or openings apart from a couple of narrow cracks barely wide enough to accommodate a human hand.
“The carving back at the Sidon Sea Castle indicated that there should be three caves here—assuming that our interpretation of those inverted V shapes is correct, of course—and so far we’ve only found one,” Robin said. “There was nothing over to the right of it, so maybe the other two are over there, on the far side of the entrance to that ravine.”
They walked back the way they’d come, retracing their steps along the base of the cliff. But although they followed the cliff face as it curved around to the west, beyond the entrance to the ravine, and looked carefully behind every single patch of vegetation, they saw no sign of any openings or gaps in the rock that would accommodate anything much bigger than a rabbit.
“I suppose that kind of proves a negative,” Mallory said. “We now know that wherever the three caves are, they aren’t anywhere along this cliff face.”
“I have a feeling that we m
ight have more luck in that ravine,” Robin replied. “Just thinking back to that carving at Sidon, the representations of the caves were lined up horizontally on the stone. If the purpose of that stylized letter L was for us to walk away from the castle, then the implication is that we would pass the caves as we did so, while we were heading more or less northeast. But if the caves had been located along this rock face, then I think the carver—Tibauld de Gaudin or whoever was acting on his instructions—would have placed the symbols one above the other, in a vertical line, because that would have been a more accurate representation of the geography.”
A few moments later, they turned left and stepped into the entrance to the narrow ravine. The shape struck them immediately. It was as if some mythical giant in the days of the ancients had swung a massive ax, smashing the head down and driving a narrow gully through the stone. And that wasn’t the only impression that they both immediately had.
“Sidon again,” Robin said, and Mallory could hear the excitement in her voice. “That other shape carved into the stone, the letter V lying on its side and pointing back toward the carving of the Beauseant. That’s exactly the shape of this ravine. This could be it. It really could.”
“Right. Let’s hope so,” Mallory agreed, realizing immediately that she was right. The ravine was shaped like an elongated V, the apex pointing back toward the old castle, and it was aligned roughly southwest to northeast, more or less along the extended line of the lower wall of the castle of Saint Hilarion. It did all seem to fit with the image they had found carved on the old stone back in the Sidon Sea Castle.
“This ravine is pretty narrow,” he said, “so why don’t we split up? You cover the left side and I’ll take the right.”
The left-hand wall of the ravine was almost sheer and largely featureless, just a few small shrubs and bushes hanging on to life and clinging to what soil there was in the few cracks and ledges on the stone. The vegetation growing at the base of the cliff was comparatively sparse, and Robin was quickly able to confirm that there were no obvious caves or openings visible.