The Lost Treasure of the Templars (22 page)

“You're right,” she agreed. “The Latin noun is singular, not plural, but I still don't see what difference that makes.”

“I think I do. If you remember, the number nine seemed significant when I was decoding the text, because almost every ninth word marked a shift in the Atbash cipher. So we have the year 1307, the number nine, and a reference to a ‘strict rule.' Does any of that ring a bell with you?”

“Not really, no.”

“Well, I've got a pretty loud ringing in my ears at the moment, and I'm surprised it didn't occur to me earlier. A really significant event happened in October 1307, an event that still has some repercussions even today. That's the date encoded in that numerical notation that was almost certainly developed by the Cistercians, and that religious order is important. Plus, there was one medieval society for which the number nine was important in at least two different ways. And, finally, that same society was famed for its adherence to a particularly strict code of conduct, a ‘strict rule,' if you like.”

Mallory paused and glanced across the table at Robin, who still looked baffled.

“Put all that lot together,” he continued, “and you have three indirect references to perhaps the most mysterious, notorious, and powerful of all the medieval organizations. I think this text has got something to do with the Knights Templar.”

Exeter, Devon

Half of the secret of success in life lies in looking the part, and this is especially true when it's a case of gaining unauthorized access. Toscanelli knew that wearing the right clothes and carrying the correct accessories enormously reduced the chances of anyone stopping him and asking any questions.

Not that he was trying to get anywhere to which access was restricted. He was simply checking hotels, but as far as possible he wanted to be effectively invisible while he did so. Wearing his dark suit and carrying his briefcase, he looked exactly like every other businessman walking the streets of Exeter, and he simply strode into each hotel they'd identified as if he had reserved a room there, hurrying past the reception desk with a quick glance at his watch and then making his way to the parking area using the lifts or the stairs. And nobody at all had taken the slightest notice of him, as far as he could tell.

Exeter was big, but it wasn't a huge city, and they'd only identified about a dozen hotels that had off-street
parking that couldn't be seen from the road. And, in the event, they hadn't had to check every one of them.

When Toscanelli had stepped out of the lift on the first level of the underground parking lot at the eighth hotel, almost the first vehicle he'd seen was the black Porsche Cayman, parked in a bay near the sidewall. He'd walked over to it and checked the registration number, just to confirm it, but he'd known it was the right car the moment he saw it.

There was a grim smile on his face when he emerged from the front door of the hotel and walked a few yards down the street to where Dante and Mario were waiting in the Ford Focus.

“Drive away,” he instructed, leaning in through the open window, “but circle round and find a parking space somewhere on the opposite side of the street. Pick a spot where you can see both the garage door and the main entrance of that hotel. I'll wait here until you've done that.”

“The car's there, then?” Mario asked.

“Yes, it's in the garage,” Toscanelli confirmed. “Now get going.”

Less than five minutes later, he resumed his place in the front passenger seat of the Ford, and all three men settled down to watch the hotel where they now knew that their quarry had gone to ground.

Exeter, Devon

“Of course, 1307,” Robin said. “Friday the thirteenth of October, to be exact, when all the Templar commanderies and preceptories throughout France were raided and their assets seized on the orders of King Philip the Fourth of France, Philip the Fair—who was anything but fair in his dealings with the order.”

“Unlucky for some,” Mallory said, with a smile.

“If you were a Templar in 1307, definitely. Now, I see the importance of 1307, and I did know that the Templars operated by a very strict rule for all their members, but what was so important about the number nine?”

“A couple of things, really. Do you know much about the Templars?”

“Not a lot, if I'm honest, and probably most of what I know is wrong, because of the way old stories and legends get distorted.”

“True enough. Well, I've read quite a lot about them, because they've always fascinated me for one very unusual reason, which I'll tell you about some other time, because
it's not relevant right now. Most people know about the way the order was destroyed after 1307, but not many have much idea how it started, and even now there's quite a lot we don't know about that period. But we do know that in about 1119 a French noble named Hugues de Payens, who lived in the Champagne region of the country, decided to create a small military group—I suppose today we'd probably call it a task force—and persuaded eight of his noble relatives to join him in the venture.

“They based the rule and conduct of the order on the Cistercians, and that's why that symbol containing the number 1307 is important, because it reminds us of the year the Templar order effectively ceased to exist. But it also provides an incontrovertible link between the Cistercians—nobody outside that order of monks would probably have known how to use that kind of numerical notation—and the Templars. This was just after the First Crusade, and the idea behind the group was simple enough. What they wanted to do was provide a form of protection for pilgrims from Europe who were on their way to worship at the various holy sites in and around Jerusalem.”

“So that's why the number nine is important?” Robin said. “Because there were nine of them?”

“That's one reason, yes. One obvious question that nobody's ever been able to answer is how anybody could reasonably expect a force of only nine knights to protect the hundreds, probably thousands or even tens of thousands of pilgrims who were traveling to the Holy Land. Even if they concentrated their efforts on the area immediately around Jerusalem, there were still too many roads and far too many people to make the idea viable. But obviously Hugues de Payens and his companions were very persuasive, because when they arrived in the city in
1120 they approached King Baldwin the Second and explained their mission, and he allocated them one of the two buildings standing on the Temple Mount to use as their headquarters.

“The area was under Christian control at that time, of course, but the two buildings were Muslim in origin. The Dome of the Rock, which is located more or less at the center of the Mount, was believed to have been built on the site of the Jewish Temple, and was commonly referred to as the Holy of Holies. That was turned into a Christian church known as the
Templum Domini
, or the Temple of the Lord.

“The other building that, like the Dome of the Rock, is still standing, was the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and it was that structure which Baldwin allocated to the new military group, and which then gave them their name. Traditionally, the mosque was understood to have been erected on the site of Solomon's Temple, and it was then known as the Temple of Solomon, the
Templum Solomonis
. Because they were using that building as their headquarters, the fledgling order adopted the name
Pauperes Commilitones Christi Templique Solomonici
, which translated as the Poor Fellow Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon. That was a bit of a mouthful, and fairly soon, because they were all of noble birth and based in the temple, they simply became known as the Knights Templar.”

“So did they manage to protect the pilgrims in the Holy Land?”

Mallory shook his head. “The short and snappy answer is no, and again the number nine is significant. There were nine knights in this original group, all of whom were related by marriage or by blood ties, and the identities of most of them are known. However, two of
the men were known only by their names—Rossal and Gondamer—and the final member of the order is completely unknown to history. There's been speculation about him for centuries, but no believable candidate has ever been suggested. And there's no evidence that any member of this original group of knights did anything to protect pilgrims on the roads around Jerusalem or anywhere else.

“Instead, for nine years—that number again—they stayed on the Temple Mount and inside the building, and the best evidence we have suggests that they spent almost this entire period digging down below the Al-Aqsa Mosque and deep into the caves and tunnels that are known to lie beneath the Temple Mount. It's popularly been supposed that they were looking for something, and it's difficult to think of another cogent reason why they should have done all this excavating. Speculation about the object of their quest has ranged from the Ark of the Covenant all the way to the decapitated head of Jesus Christ. The bottom line is that nobody actually knows what they were looking for, but there is some circumstantial evidence that they did finally find it, because in 1129 they suddenly stopped digging and turned their attention to other matters.

“At the Council of Troyes in that year they were recognized and then sanctioned by the Church, and the order then embarked on a major campaign, but not to fight infidels, which is what they soon became known for, but to raise money. They asked for donations, which could be cash, obviously, but they were also happy to accept land and property, and a major thrust of their effort was directed at the noble families of Western Europe. They were very keen to recruit other nobles to join the order, all of whom brought donations with them, normally
handing over their entire property when they swore their oaths of allegiance and were accepted as members of the Knights Templar. The thrust of the recruitment drive was that donations would be used to help the order in its fight against the infidels in the Holy Land, the various Crusades, and it was certainly implied that each donor would also earn himself or herself a favored place in the kingdom of heaven.

“There was quite a lot of resistance at the time to the idea of an order of warrior monks, the obvious argument being that a man of God should not take up arms and engage in battle with anyone. But this belief was quickly turned around by a treatise written by the very influential Bernard of Clairvaux, in which he stated categorically that the religious order could, and in fact should, fight a just war to defend both the Church and the innocent from attack. He also established the belief that a Knight Templar who fell in battle against the infidels would go immediately to heaven, any and all sins being forgiven. At a time when heaven and hell were believed to be absolutely real, and when people were genuinely worried about the fate of their immortal souls, this was a remarkably persuasive argument, and dozens of important nobles flocked to join the order.

“Then the Vatican joined the campaign, and in 1139 Pope Innocent the Second issued a papal bull known as
Omne Datum Optimum
, which basically exempted the Templars from paying any taxes or duties, allowed them the unquestioned right to cross any border, and stated that the order was subject to no authority apart from that of the pope himself. It was, if you like, the ultimate ‘get out of jail free' card, because it allowed the Templars to do whatever they liked, and within a very short time the order had expanded enormously, with chapters being
created across most of mainland Europe, as well as in England and Scotland.”

“But they were a fighting force?” Robin asked. “I thought they were involved in most of the Crusades.”

“You're quite right. The Knights Templar became the most feared shock troops of the time, something like the Special Air Service is today. They were well equipped and well trained, but above all they were incredibly highly motivated, largely because of this belief that if they died in battle they were assured of a place in heaven. And their orders in combat reinforced this. They were forbidden from retreating in any conflict unless they were outnumbered at least three to one, and only then if they were ordered to do so by the commanding officer, or if the Templar flag, the
Beauseant
, fell. As a result, in combat they were utterly fearless. It was popularly believed that when battle was imminent the only question the Templars ever asked was where the enemy was, never how strong the enemy forces were, because they simply didn't care. They believed that dying in battle was the ideal way for their lives to end.”

“Pretty much the same attitude as radical Islam today,” Robin commented.

“There's not much that's new in this world, but I suppose it's interesting how that belief has now come full circle, from being a tenet of radical Christianity to now being held with equal fervor by radical Islam. There's probably a message or a moral in there somewhere. Anyway, all that stuff about the origins of the Knights Templar might be useful background, but it's not actually getting us anywhere. What we need to do is try to decipher the rest of the text on the parchment, and now I think we've got a good shot at doing that.”

Devon

The police investigation into the triple homicide in Dartmouth hadn't actually stalled, but it seemed clear to everybody involved that it was going nowhere, and not particularly quickly. About the only thing they knew for certain was the identity of the victims and where they had come from.

The names of the three dead men had been established as soon as the bodies were transferred to the mortuary in Exeter, simply by a comparison of the faces of the corpses with the small pictures in the diplomatic passports that had been recovered from the hired Range Rover. By checking the number plate of the car, the police had also established where and when the vehicle had been collected. The SUV had been impounded to allow forensic checks to be carried out on it, although as the murders had been committed elsewhere, nobody was quite certain what results this was expected to yield. It was already clear to everybody involved that the three dead men had traveled from Exeter Airport to Dartmouth in the vehicle, and that had been their only contact with the car.

Almost as an afterthought, one of the staff at the airport had mentioned that two almost identical SUVs had been hired at the same time, and by the same person using a single credit card, and the police seized upon this as another possibly fertile avenue of investigation.

Suddenly, as well as three dead men, they also had another vehicle to trace and three further Italians who were presumably still alive and somewhere in Devon, and who were also clearly a part of the same group as the men who had been killed. A watch order had been issued for the second vehicle, images from speed and traffic cameras being closely scrutinized, and a search mounted for these men, whose names had been extracted from the arrivals details at Exeter Airport. But so far no trace of them had been found. They appeared to have vanished just as suddenly and effectively as Robin Jessop, who was still at the very top of the list of the people whom the police wished to question.

Aircraft of any sort, but especially passenger jets and expensive private aircraft, earn no money while they are parked on a hardstanding somewhere, and the Cessna Citation had been refueled within an hour of landing and then taken off about an hour after that. According to the aircraft's flight plan, it had returned to the Rome airport from which it had departed, and inquiries made by the Devon police through the British embassy in the Italian capital had provided almost no useful information.

The aircraft, the embassy stated, had been hired by a businessman in Rome to convey six of his employees to Exeter, and that was about the total extent of the data that had been forthcoming. Apparently the same or another aircraft would be chartered at a later date to collect the men, although it was also possible that they might be flying back to Italy on a normal commercial flight once
their stay in Britain had been concluded. The businessman had not yet made up his mind, according to the embassy staff officer who had talked to him. The Italian had been conspicuously reluctant to convey any information whatsoever about his business interests or the reason for sending six people to England, or what they were supposed to be doing there. In fact, he had basically provided almost no information at all to the embassy apart from his name.

The passports were another problem. The businessman had also failed to explain why the six passengers on the Cessna Citation were all carrying diplomatic passports. He had refused to make any comment at all about the origin of those passports, which was a matter of considerable interest because they had not been issued by the Italian authorities. In fact, when the British police examined the passports, they assumed at first that they were forgeries because they had never heard of the organization that had allegedly produced them.

Generally speaking, diplomatic passports are issued by governments to senior diplomats, hence the name, but the three documents that had been recovered in Dartmouth had not been issued by the government of any nation, but by the Sovereign Military Order of Malta.

A check with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London had confirmed that both the order and the documents were entirely legitimate, but that hadn't helped much. The SMOM, as it was usually referred to, was an ancient Roman Catholic religious order, originally based on the island that gave it its name, but at present with its headquarters in Rome. All communications between the British embassy in the capital and SMOM officials, based in the Magistral Palace on the fashionable Via Condotti near the Spanish Steps in central Rome, on the
subject of the passports and the men who had been carrying them had been ignored.

So the police had three dead Italian diplomats, killed execution-style for an unknown reason, a missing antiquarian bookseller, and no obvious link between them apart from the flat above the shop in Dartmouth, the site of the killings. In short, it was something of a stalemate. Until officers from the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary could lay their hands on either Robin Jessop or the missing three Italians, nobody really believed that the investigation was going to do anything other than stagnate.