The Lost Treasure of the Templars (17 page)

Devon

“We've lost them,” the driver—he was using the work name Dante—muttered as the Range Rover plowed on through the night, its powerful headlamps illuminating the entirely empty road in front of them. They were just passing to the west of Paignton, traveling close to the maximum speed limit.

“We lost them back in Dartmouth,” Toscanelli snapped. “I don't expect to see them again tonight. But don't worry about it.”

“What? I don't understand.”

“There's a lot you don't understand, Dante. Just keep driving. Keep heading toward Exeter. That's got the best motorway access, and we'll need to move quickly once I get the call.”

“What call? You spoke in English to the man you rang, so we don't know what you said. What can he do to help us?”

“Don't ask questions. Just drive. I'll tell you what you need to know, when you need to know it.”

*   *   *

As they entered the outskirts of Exeter, Mallory crossed the river Exe and then took turnings entirely at random, just heading in the general direction of the city center, but with no specific aim in view. All he was looking for was a hotel with off-street parking, ideally underground or otherwise secluded and secure, because he absolutely needed to get the Porsche off the road. It was too easily recognizable a vehicle to risk leaving it on the street. He wouldn't put it past the thugs in the Range Rover to spend all night driving around the streets of Paignton, Exeter, and all the other large conurbations in the area looking for the Cayman.

And if he did park it in the open somewhere, he had no doubt that the inexorable workings of Sod's Law would ensure that it would be spotted by the bad guys or, almost as bad, it would be either stolen or vandalized.

About ten minutes later Mallory pulled the Cayman to a stop by the side of the road and pointed across to the other side.

“That looks as if it would do,” he said.

It wasn't a chain hotel or, if it was, it was such an obscure chain that Mallory had never even heard of it, but what had attracted his interest was the large closed garage door to the right of the main entrance, and the sign above it that proclaimed
SECURE PRIVATE PARKING
.

“Works for me,” Robin said. “Do you want me to go in and book a couple of rooms?”

“I'd better do it,” he replied. “Nobody's looking for me, but I bet by this time the plods are looking for you. Stay in the car, and we should be able to get up to the rooms from the garage so you won't have to pass the reception desk.”

He looked at the expression on her face. “Don't worry
about it. They'll want to question you about what happened in Dartmouth, obviously, but I think it's better if we can try to sort out this mess without the cops getting involved at all, at least at the moment. The keys are in the ignition, just in case,” he added, then stepped out of the car and crossed the road to the hotel.

About five minutes later he walked back across to her and sat down in the driver's seat again. “No problem. We've got adjoining rooms on the third floor, and you're my sister if anybody asks.”

The garage door opened automatically on the approach of a vehicle, but a ticket was required to leave the underground car park, which suited Mallory. He parked the Porsche in a space over to one side of the garage, and then they went up together in the lift. The rooms each had a double bed and an en suite bathroom, but for a few minutes Mallory stayed in Robin's room while they discussed what they had to do.

“I've never been on the run before,” she said, “and I'm not absolutely sure I like it. There is a kind of buzz about it, though.”

Mallory just looked at her. “You're actually enjoying this? Getting shot at and chased by a bunch of Italian thugs intent on murdering you?”

“Kind of, yes,” Robin replied. “In the excitement stakes it certainly beats trying to make a living flogging a bunch of old books. Now, tomorrow,” she went on briskly, “we'll have to go shopping, because the only clothes I've got are what I'm standing up in. I can wash my underwear tonight and it'll be dry by the morning, but I'll definitely need to buy a few bits and pieces.”

“That shouldn't be a problem,” Mallory said, standing up. “Exeter's a busy place, and I'm sure we can blend right in. Right, I'm going next door. Try and get a good
sleep, because we have no idea what tomorrow is likely to bring, but I very much doubt if it'll be good news.”

“I'm going to have a bath,” Robin said, walking over to slip the security catch on the door behind Mallory, “because I feel grubby after everything that's happened this evening. We'll talk at breakfast, or do you want to get food sent up from room service?”

“I'll think about it. Sleep well, and don't open the door to anybody but me.”

In the side compartment of his computer bag, he had a change of underwear, a small washing kit including a razor, a spare summer shirt, and one of the T-shirts he normally used instead of pajamas. He had been half expecting to spend the night somewhere in Dartmouth, and had brought the bare minimum of stuff with him. So it looked as if both of them would need to hit the shops the following day, which, he realized with a jolt of surprise, was only Saturday. So much seemed to have happened in the last twenty-four hours that it felt as if several days had passed since he left home.

He'd already noted that free Wi-Fi was available in the room, and he was still wide-awake, so he took out his computer and plugged the power cord into the wall socket behind the desk on one side of the bedroom. Then he connected his laptop and switched it on, before rummaging in his bag for a gadget that he guessed might greatly increase their degree of invisibility.

Every time a computer connected to the Internet, a thing called an IP—Internet Protocol—address was created. For a fixed network, this might be a permanent address, but any PC logging on through a wireless network in particular would be allocated a temporary IP address. Just like a regular street address, the IP address contained location information for the computer, and it was
possible to fix its geographical position precisely, if certain monitoring and tracking tools were available.

With their having just managed to slip away from Dartmouth, absolutely the last thing Mallory wanted was to connect his laptop to the Internet and check his e-mail. Bearing in mind the electronic competence already shown by the Italians, that would be rather like springing up and shouting “I'm over here!” which would be a terminally stupid idea.

But there was something Mallory could do about that. He fished a small white object out of his bag and slid it into one of the USB ports on his laptop. Immediately a green light illuminated on the dongle to show that it was connecting and had been recognized by the operating system. He opened Windows Explorer, navigated to the appropriate USB port, and clicked the icon for the hardware application.

A few seconds later, a somewhat unusual Internet window opened, which confirmed that he was connected and a part of a VPN, a Virtual Private Network, and one of the top-line options enabled him to choose the country where he wanted to appear to be. It wasn't a device Mallory used often: he most frequently employed it when he was on holiday abroad to allow him to watch stuff on BBC iPlayer and other systems, a facility denied to him if the server he was connected to realized he was located in France or Spain or elsewhere. It was an undeniably useful piece of kit.

He decided he would be in America for the duration of this particular Internet session, and selected the appropriate option. As usual, his e-mail contained half a dozen offers of enormous sums of money if only he'd send some “attorney at law” or similar all his contact details, and a few genuine messages from friends and colleagues at the company, none of them important or requiring an immediate reply.

His e-mail dealt with, Mallory checked on the Web to see if any news about the situation in Dartmouth had so far been released, but he could find nothing. It was early days, and he made a mental note to check again the following morning. Apart from anything else, he hoped that when the news of what had happened in Robin's apartment did break, even if it was only reported in a local Dartmouth newspaper, he might learn something useful about the three Italians they'd left immobilized there.

Then he sat back in the chair, wondering what to do next. The encrypted script on the parchment still needed to be deciphered, but he decided he would rather wait for Robin before he started looking at that again. Two heads were often much better than one in trying to work out that kind of puzzle, and she knew Latin and he didn't.

But there was something that rather bothered him about the text on the parchment, and he took out the photocopies Robin had made to look at them again. As well as the encrypted text, there was a symbol on the first page that he hadn't recognized when he first looked at it. It was on the top right-hand corner of the first page, a shape that meant absolutely nothing to him, but which looked important. He didn't really think it was a doodle, because paper and parchment were expensive commodities in medieval times, and people who could write then didn't have the time to indulge in such frivolous pursuits. Everything they put down in ink was important. Unfortunately, although the symbol was clear enough, Mallory had not the slightest idea what it was or why it had been included on the parchment. It looked almost like a kind of stick figure, though it quite obviously wasn't:

He spent a few minutes looking around the Internet in the hope of deciphering it, but without success. For the moment, it remained just another question without an answer.

He would shower in the morning, he decided, and got undressed. Before he climbed into bed, he walked over to the window and peered out into the darkened street below. As he did so, he saw a dark-colored, possibly black, Range Rover drive slowly past the hotel, heading toward the center of the city.

It had to be a coincidence, because he was certain they hadn't been followed, and that make and model of SUV was common enough on the roads in Devon, but it still sent a shiver of foreboding through him. He pulled the curtains firmly closed, walked back across the room, and climbed into bed.

But sleep eluded him for quite some time.

Devon

It had been, by any standards, a frustrating night.

Toscanelli was certain that the call he'd made would produce results, but he was also well aware that it would take time for the necessary procedures to be put in place and for the results to be collated and analyzed. And then there would inevitably be a further delay before the man he had contacted would be able to provide him with the information they needed.

Although Toscanelli was certain it would be a waste of time and effort, they'd driven all the way up to the outskirts of Exeter, fairly quickly, then reversed direction and driven back the way they had come, but on the slower coast road, through Dawlish and Teignmouth. The chances of spotting the Porsche were slim in the extreme, and all three of the men in the car knew it, but they did it anyway.

They'd looked in the car park of every hotel they'd seen, without result. And, realistically, they all knew that they couldn't even be sure that they were looking
anywhere near the right place, because if Jessop and his girlfriend hadn't stopped somewhere but had driven on into the night on the motorway system, they could by then be halfway to London or Birmingham. Great Britain was not a big country, but it was heavily populated and had an extensive road network and literally tens of millions of cars. Finding any one vehicle—even one as distinctive as that black Porsche Cayman—would be virtually impossible, at least without help. He had a gut feeling that their quarry was still somewhere nearby, but continuing their random search would achieve nothing.

They were driving around the northern outskirts of Paignton when he finally decided to call a halt to their efforts.

“That's it,” he said, glancing at his watch. “This is not getting us anywhere. Head back toward Exeter on the main road, and we'll find somewhere to stop there.”

“A hotel?” Dante asked hopefully, but Toscanelli shook his head.

“It's gone midnight,” he said. “This is a covert operation and three Italian men checking into a hotel at this time of the morning would be bound to attract attention we don't want. No, we'll find a quiet spot somewhere and sleep in the car. And, in any case, there's something else I need to do.”

As the Range Rover headed north, back toward Exeter, he opened the laptop computer he had taken from the office in the apartment in Dartmouth and waited for the desktop to appear. It didn't, but instead a password prompt was generated, which caused him to grunt in irritation.

But not only had he been well briefed before he left the building on the Aventine Hill in Rome, but he had also been provided with a number of specialist pieces of
equipment in a small custom-built leather case. He shut the lid of the computer again and turned to glance at Mario, the man in the backseat.

“Open up that case,” he ordered. “You'll find a couple of discs in there. Give me the one with the word
Boot
printed on it.”

Mario did as he was instructed, passing the CD in its case to Toscanelli, who took out the disc, inserted it in the DVD drive of the laptop, and then opened the lid once again. As soon as the screen came alive, he looked at the default message displayed and then pressed the F2 key repeatedly to enter the boot options menu. When he was able to access it, he changed the boot sequence, altering the first boot device from the computer's hard disk to the DVD drive. He saved the change and exited the menu, and then watched the screen as the custom hacking software loaded a cut-down version of the operating system that would allow him to bypass the normal start-up sequence and the password request, and then access all the files and folders that were stored on the hard disk.

As the Range Rover continued north, Toscanelli scanned the directory structure, looking at the names of the folders. It didn't take long to find exactly what he was looking for: Robin Jessop had helpfully labeled one of them “Ipse Dixit,” and when he checked the contents he found five files there, one entitled “Original text” and four scanned images. When he checked the dates, he discovered that both the files and the folder had been created within the last two days, which confirmed what he had been hoping. Toscanelli used a universal file viewer program to examine both the scanned images and the text file, and nodded in satisfaction when he did so. There was a lot of data in the text file, none of which he could read, but that didn't matter.

His expertise did not extend to translating Latin—which was what his masters had told him was almost certainly the language used to create the document—but obviously there would be no problem in doing so for some of the experts in the organization back in Rome. What he had to do, very obviously, was get the contents of the “Ipse Dixit” folder sent over to Italy as quickly as he could.

He looked up from the computer screen to the built-in GPS to check exactly where the car was, then expanded the map slightly to see the route ahead.

“We're just coming up to a town called Newton Abbot,” he said. “Head toward the center, and then take it slow.”

Then Toscanelli took out his mobile phone. Unlike all the other men in the group, he had been provided with a state-of-the-art smartphone equipped with a huge array of apps. He navigated through one of the screens until he found what he was looking for: a detection program that would identify wireless networks. He could have used the wireless facility built in to the laptop, but the phone was less obtrusive—just in case they were seen by a policeman who wondered what they were doing—and the app would probably be a bit faster to react.

“What are you doing?” Mario asked from the backseat.

“It's what the Americans call ‘wardriving,'” Toscanelli replied. “I'm looking for an unsecured wireless network that I can tap in to, because I need to send the information on this laptop to Rome.”

The equipment he'd been supplied with hadn't included a mobile broadband dongle, probably because his masters hadn't seen the need for one.

“Couldn't it wait until tomorrow, when we could find a cybercafe somewhere?” Dante asked.

“No. It looks to me as if this man Robin Jessop helpfully transcribed all the encrypted text from the original parchment onto this computer. If I'm right, the sooner the people in Rome get it the better, so that they can start decoding it. And if that is what he did, we probably won't have to bother recovering the relic, though that would be a bonus. We'll probably be retasked.”

“To do what?” Dante asked.

“Most likely just to kill Jessop and the woman. They know too much about this to be allowed to live. And we owe them for Giacomo and the other two.”

Within ten minutes the app Toscanelli was using had identified three unsecured networks. One was no good because it would be impossible to park the car anywhere within range, and he couldn't really stand in the street holding the computer while he sent the data. But the two other wireless networks—both were from closed cafés—had parking spaces conveniently located on the street outside.

Dante stopped the car outside the one that had the strongest signal and Toscanelli picked up the laptop again.

“Keep the engine running and leave the parking lights on,” he instructed, “and switch on the interior light as well.” He took the map book that he'd been looking at earlier and handed it to Dante. “Hold this up in front of you,” he said, “in case some passing busybody or a police officer happens to spot us. You're just a lost motorist studying a map. This shouldn't take long.”

He opened the wireless network connection utility, selected the network that had the most powerful signal strength, which was obviously the closest one to the car, and clicked the option to connect to it. But when he tried to do so, a dialogue box popped up asking for the
password, and he muttered under his breath in irritation. Sometimes networks that were apparently unsecured asked for a password before access was granted, and obviously that was the case in this instance. Trying to crack it was something he really didn't have the time or the inclination—not to mention the skill—to attempt.

“Mario,” he instructed the man in the backseat. “Get out and look in through the windows of that café. There might be a notice on the wall or somewhere that gives the password. If there isn't, we'll have to try the other place.”

The bulky Italian opened the rear door of the Range Rover and crossed to the closed and locked door of the café. There was a single low-wattage light burning at the back of the café, positioned almost directly above the till, obviously intended as a rudimentary security feature, but the rest of the area was in semidarkness. Mario peered in through the glass door, shading his eyes so that he could see better, then stepped back and returned to the car.

“There are a couple of signs on the walls,” he said. “Something in big letters, but I can't quite make out what it says. I need a flashlight.”

“You'll find one in that leather case,” Toscanelli said. “Just get a move on, before somebody comes along the road.”

Mario walked back to the closed café and shone the thin but powerful beam of the flashlight into the gloom of the building. After a few seconds, he switched direction and aimed the light at the opposite wall. Then he walked back to the Range Rover and resumed his seat.

“It is a password,” he announced. “They've got the same notice on both walls. In fact, we could probably have guessed it, because it really isn't all that secure. It's ‘DEVON001,' all the letters in uppercase.”

“Very amateurish,” Toscanelli commented, quickly typed
the password into the appropriate field on the screen in front of him, and then clicked C
ONNECT
.

Within a few seconds he was able to open a Web browser, and he swiftly opened an Italian Web site, one that had deliberately never been listed on any of the major search engines, and which had a lengthy and obscure name that nobody was ever likely to type into a browser by accident. It was also protected by a military-grade log-in system. Once he had signed in, he opened a sophisticated FTP—File Transfer Protocol—utility, navigated to the documents section of the hard disk, selected the “Ipse Dixit” folder, and uploaded the entire contents to the Web site. Then he returned to the home page of the site and set an alarm specifying the folder name for the uploaded files.

Then he shut the lid on the computer and passed it over his shoulder back to Mario, took out his phone again, and dialed a number in Italy that was monitored twenty-four hours a day. When it was answered, he passed a brief message to the man in Rome, explaining to him what had happened, beginning with the unavoidable deaths of half the team members in Dartmouth, but finishing with the news—which he hoped would serve to counterbalance the disastrous beginning of the operation—that he had recovered a computer and uploaded what he believed to be the full text of the long-lost parchment to the Web site. Then he ended the call.

The man he had called was, Toscanelli knew, merely a low-level operative, and it would not be until the following morning—or rather a few hours later that same morning, he realized, glancing at his watch—that anyone in authority in the order would be able to check the contents of the folder. And that same person would be able to issue whatever new or revised orders seemed appropriate in the light of what had happened so far.

As Toscanelli replaced the phone in his pocket, Dante glanced at him.

“So now what do we do?” he asked.

“We find somewhere to spend the rest of the night. No hotel, no guesthouse. We're going to sleep in the car because we really don't have any other options. Turn round and head back along the main road, and then drive north toward Exeter. Then we'll find somewhere quiet out in the country somewhere.”

Dante nodded, switched on the headlamps, made a U-turn, and drove away from the café, then swung north back toward Exeter, through the area that they had been searching earlier that evening. They kept their eyes open just in case the Porsche suddenly appeared, though that would have been an extraordinarily unlikely occurrence.

About ten minutes after leaving Newton Abbot, Dante picked a side road that looked quiet and little used, and pulled the car off the road into a small copse that offered some kind of cover from prying eyes. The three men made sure that their weapons were well out of sight, just in case anybody—–most especially a policeman—spotted the vehicle and looked through the windows, checked that all the doors were locked, opened a couple of windows a bare inch or two to let in some fresh air, and then settled down to try to get some sleep during what remained of the night.