The Lost Treasure of the Templars (28 page)

But on the day both de Molay and de Charney refused to obey their captors. On a scaffold that had been erected in front of Notre Dame, they instead proclaimed to the assembled multitude that both they personally and the
order of the Knights Templar wholly and collectively were entirely innocent of any and all of the charges that had been leveled against them and to which they had confessed simply to relieve their agony in the torture chambers of the French king.

“They obviously both knew what was going to happen to them,” Robin said, after she'd read out the last translated sentence of the decrypted text. The calm and almost matter-of-fact way in which the events of 1314 had been described had sobered them both.

“Renouncing a confession meant that the two men were considered, in the eyes of both the Church and the law, to be relapsed heretics,” Mallory said quietly, “and they were immediately handed over by their Dominican jailers to the secular authorities for punishment. According to what I've read elsewhere, when the news was delivered to Philip the Fair he was incandescent with rage, and ordered the matter to be resolved without delay. For any relapsed heretic, there was only one suitable punishment, and no further trials or hearings were required.

“On the evening of that same day they were taken out to a small island in the river Seine, where a pile of wood had been hastily prepared and laid around a substantial wooden post. The two men were chained to this post and the fire lit beneath them. As a final sick refinement, the executioners had been ordered to use the driest wood they could find.”

Mallory paused for a moment and glanced across at Robin. She nodded for him to continue.

“In those days, death by burning included a number of refinements, some designed to be merciful and others the complete opposite. The bodies of some victims were burned, certainly, but they were actually dead before the fire was even started, because they were strangled,
garroted, or stabbed by the executioner after a payment was made to him by either the victim or the condemned person's family or friends.

“You have to remember that in most cases the executioner was not paid by the state or by whoever had authorized the death of the man or woman. Instead the victim was expected to pay the executioner's charges. I know that sounds a bit sick, and in fact it is, but at least if the victim did hand over a bag of money, he or she could reasonably expect that death would be quick, even if it wasn't painless. No payment, or not enough money offered, could mean that the executioner would take three or four blows to behead his victim, instead of one clean stroke with his ax or sword.”

Robin shuddered.

“I am thankful that I'm living in the present century,” she said. “This is fascinating, even if it is morbidly appalling. So some people were killed beforehand, that's what you're saying?”

“Yes. In other cases, a friend of the victim would stand somewhere near the fire and attempt to shoot him with a bow and arrow as soon as the fire had been started. That was dangerous for the person attempting it, because it was illegal: the victim was expected to suffer. There were also cases where a bag of gunpowder was hung around the neck of the condemned person, the idea being that it would explode when the flames reached it, but apparently this was only rarely successful. By the time the flames reached the powder, the victim would already be in agony, and there was a good chance that the gunpowder would simply flare up, possibly killing him quicker but making him suffer even more in the process. Tying the victim to the stake with ropes was also a kind of mercy,
because when they burned through, he would probably collapse into the flames and die a little bit quicker.”

“You said for these two men that they were held in place with chains.”

“Yes. That would ensure that they would remain upright until the flames had consumed them, keeping them alive and in agony for the longest possible time. The use of dry wood was also calculated to prolong their suffering. If wet wood was used, it would produce clouds of smoke that would choke the victims possibly even before their flesh began to burn. But choosing dry wood ensured that they would literally be roasted alive, and that they would remain burning in the flames for perhaps as long as an hour.

“There was a case I read about in England during the Marian Persecutions—when Protestants were persecuted for their religious beliefs—where the condemned man suffered in the flames for some three-quarters of an hour, the gunpowder trick having failed to work, and for much of that time he was pleading with the onlookers to fan the flames of the fire so that his suffering would end all the quicker.”

When Mallory finished speaking, Robin was silent for a few moments, her eyes misty with unshed tears.

“You know,” she said finally, “I really believe that more atrocities have been perpetrated in the name of some organized religion than by every atheist and nonbeliever who has ever lived. I think you could argue that every religion is inherently evil, simply because of the way that committed believers absolutely know that they and they alone are right and therefore everybody else is wrong. It's even happening today with militant Islam condemning everything that Christianity stands for, while
equally militant Christians do precisely the same thing, condemning all Muslims.”

Mallory nodded.

“I have to confess,” he said, “that I can't think of any recent atrocity perpetrated in the name of militant atheism. But you're right. I can name dozens of horrendous acts of violence carried out by one group of believers against another group of people just because they didn't happen to share those same beliefs. And that's all they are: beliefs, not facts. It's never about facts where religion is concerned. Anyway,” he added, “that was pretty much the end of the Knights Templar, at least as far as we know. Unless this parchment is going to tell us that somehow the order managed to survive, of course.”

“We'll find out in a few minutes, I hope,” Robin said. “Wasn't there some kind of curse made by Jacques de Molay on the day he died? Something about King Philip and the pope dying as well?”

Mallory shook his head. “There was a legend to that effect, yes, and it's certainly true that Pope Clement died in April of the following year, 1315, after a long illness, and Philip the Fair died in November after falling from a horse, and those two unrelated events were probably the origin of the story. It looks as if the myth of the curse began in 1330 with an Italian writer named Feretto de Ferretis, but he stated that the curse was issued by an unidentified Knight Templar, not by de Molay. But in the mid–sixteenth century the French historian Paul Émile claimed that the words had been spoken by the last grand master himself.”

Robin was looking at Mallory with a puzzled expression on her face.

“What?” he asked.

“I asked you before,” she said, “but you never gave
me an answer. How come you're so knowledgeable about the Knights Templar? Most people probably know a bit about the order, but every time we talk about it you come up with chapter and verse. That's more than just a casual interest.”

Mallory nodded and smiled at her, looking almost embarrassed.

“Two reasons,” he said. “In my spare time I'm writing—or I'm trying to write—a book about them, so I've got reams of information about the Templars on my computer that I'm trying to knock into some sort of order. And I've got a pretty good memory for facts.”

“That's one reason,” Robin said. “What's the other?”

Mallory looked uncomfortable.

“I'm going to keep that to myself for the moment,” he said. “It's personal, and it's something I'm still working on. Once I've resolved it, I promise I'll tell you.”

Robin nodded. “Okay. I'll hold you to that.”

“Anyway,” Mallory went on, “the other thing that does support what's claimed in this parchment, about the order having been forewarned about the French plan, is that when Philip the Fair's troops and officials gained access to the Paris preceptory of the Knights Templar to seize the treasure, they found that the cupboard was very largely bare. The same story was repeated at most of the other Templar establishments throughout France. The treasure Philip was hoping to grab simply wasn't there, and the obvious implication is that the order knew about the impending raids and had already moved it to a place of safety.

“That's one thing, and there's also a problem with the numbers. In 1307, the Templars probably numbered well over fifteen thousand—some estimates have put the figure as high as fifty thousand—but only a few hundred
Templars were actually arrested. The reality is that most of the order and the vast majority of its treasure and assets simply weren't there when the seizures took place. I've always believed they had foreknowledge of what was going to happen, and it's great that the text on this parchment confirms that. Of course, what we still don't know is where the knights went, or what happened to their treasure.”

“Well, maybe that is the actual purpose of this piece of text, to explain that,” Robin suggested. “After all, what we've seen so far in this translation has been interesting but certainly not earth-shattering, and certainly not important enough information to have required the protection offered by that book safe. Perhaps this really is a written treasure map, and at the end of it we'll find out exactly where to look.”

She said it with a smile, but there was just enough of a serious tone in her voice for Mallory to realize that she wasn't joking. Or not entirely, anyway.

“Then we'd better get on with it and decode the rest,” he replied, “but I really don't think we can do any more tonight. It's nearly midnight, my brain hurts, and I can feel my eyes closing. And we need to decide about France. Are we going to cross the Channel and, if so, how?”

“Yes, I think we should visit the land of the cheese-eating surrender monkeys. And tomorrow morning I'll tell you how we're going to get there.”

Southern England

They were up and having breakfast in the hotel's dining room just after eight thirty the next morning, and were ready to leave by nine.

“You still think France is the best option?” Robin asked as they placed their bags in the trunk of the car a few minutes later. “I mean, if we just want to go to ground somewhere, what's wrong with Wales, or Scotland, or even London? Sometimes the best place to hide is in a crowd.”

“Nothing,” Mallory admitted, “and we could still do that. But we now know for certain that that parchment is something to do with the Knights Templar, and that order began its life in France and was ultimately destroyed in France. We still have no idea what other secrets the text will reveal, but it wouldn't surprise me if it involved some part of that country, and if we have to go further afield than that, it's a whole lot easier to travel in Europe because of Schengen. There simply are no border controls anymore.”

Robin nodded.

“Right. In that case I need to make a phone call,” she said, and pulled out the cheap mobile she'd bought in the phone shop in Exeter. She checked a page in a small diary with a silver cover, tapped out the number on the keypad, and pressed the button to make the call.

She exchanged greetings with the man she'd called—Mallory gathered his name was Justin—and the conversation that followed seemed both inconsequential and pointless.

When she ended the call, she smiled at Mallory.

“Who was that?” he asked.

“That was the man who's going to help us get to France.”

“Your boyfriend?” Mallory felt a pang of jealousy as he asked the question.

“No. He'd like to be, but he's a bit too much of a hooray Henry for my liking. Too much breeding, too much money, and too many teeth, but not enough brains or guts. He's got a Porsche as well, as a matter of fact. Two of them, at the last count, plus an Aston and a selection of other high-priced automobiles. He owns most of the bits of Cornwall that Prince Charles doesn't.”

Mallory felt unaccountably irritated that she'd called him, which didn't make sense because he had no relationship with Robin Jessop other than having been unavoidably thrown together with her because of the book safe and the ancient manuscript.

“So, what's he going to do?” he asked, somewhat sulkily.

“Not a lot, to be ruthlessly honest, but he will be lending us one of his assets.”

“What?”

“I'll do better than tell you: I'll show you. Let's get on the road.”

Knowing how competent Robin was behind the wheel, Mallory would have been quite happy sitting in the passenger seat, but she simply shook her head when he offered her the keys.

“You drive,” she said. “I get bored if I have to stick to the speed limit.”

“Yes. I've noticed that,” he said. “Where to?”

Robin leaned forward and spent a minute or so programming the Citroën's GPS.

“There you are,” she said, leaning back. “Now just do exactly what the nice lady in that box of electronic tricks tells you to do.”

“I don't know if ‘nice lady' is an accurate description,” Mallory replied. “All the women who live in GPSs sound horribly like one of my old schoolteachers, except that they don't rap me over the knuckles with a ruler every time I take a wrong turn. They just tell me they're recalculating the route, with a kind of weary resignation in their voices.”

The programmed route took them out of Taunton, and over the M5 Motorway, which surprised Mallory.

“I think we're heading more or less south,” he said. “Is that right?”

“Yes.” Robin nodded. “We're going to a place called Dunkeswell.”

“Never heard of it.”

Within quite a short time the roads grew narrower and the going slower, and occasionally Mallory had to stop the car and pull to the side to allow a larger vehicle to pass in the opposite direction.

“It is a bit inaccessible,” Robin admitted as they waited for a cement truck to edge past. “There is another, very easy way to get there, but I'm afraid we can't use it.”

Mallory suspected she was deliberately teasing him,
playing on the fact that he genuinely had no idea where they were going or what she'd got planned, but he responded anyway. “I'm sure you're dying to tell me, so I'll ask the question. Why can't we go that way?”

She smiled mischievously.

“Because we haven't got the right equipment,” she said.

About ten minutes after that, Mallory suddenly realized what she was hinting at as he saw a light aircraft turning to the left a mile or so in front of the car.

“Ah, now I get it,” he said. “Dunkeswell is an airfield, isn't it? And the easiest way to get there is to fly?”

“Exactly.”

“And is this Justin guy going to meet us there?”

“Not exactly,” Robin replied, and refused to elaborate.

Mallory followed the signs to the large free car park located near the entrance to the airfield, found a vacant space, and slotted the DS3 into it.

“Now what?” he asked.

“Now we take to the air.”

They grabbed their bags from the trunk, and Robin led the way over to the aircraft park, where a number of small, mainly single-engine, aircraft were clustered on the hard standing. She stopped at the edge of the parking area and lowered her weekend bag to the ground.

“Just hang on here,” she said, and vanished in the direction of what looked like an office. A few minutes later she walked back, a key in her hand, picked up her bag, and led the way over to a high-winged single-engine monoplane wearing blue-and-white livery, which also had a small armorial symbol painted on the door.

“That's Justin's coat of arms,” she said, noticing Mallory glancing at it. “He's got some kind of title, but I can't remember what it is.”

“So this is his aircraft?” Mallory asked as Robin unlocked the cabin door and lifted her bag up to lodge it inside.

“Yes.”

“So who's going to fly it?”

“Me,” Robin said simply.

“But I thought you told me you didn't have a license?”

“No. I told you my PPL had lapsed because I hadn't flown enough hours recently. It's only a bit of paper,” she went on, “and by the time I land this thing I'll probably have done enough hours to renew it for this year.”

“Does Justin know your license has expired?” Mallory persisted. “Are you qualified to fly it?”

“No, of course he doesn't know, but he probably wouldn't care if he did. Look, flying's like driving or riding a bike. Just because my license is out of date doesn't mean I've lost the skills. And you'd be amazed at what I've got licenses for. Now shut up, get the rest of the bags stowed in the cabin behind the front seats, and then strap yourself in.”

“Which one?”

“Unless you're planning on driving it yourself, the right-hand seat.”

“What are you going to do?”

“The external preflight checks, of course. Tires, control surfaces, checking for leaks, all that kind of thing.”

By the time Mallory had tucked everything away and done up his straps, Robin was already climbing inside the aircraft. She sat down in the left-hand seat and put the key in what looked remarkably like an ignition switch.

Mallory watched in silence as she then continued what was obviously a very familiar sequence of internal preflight checks, moving the rudder pedals and the control column—he had read just enough about flying to know
that it wasn't called a joystick—for full and free movement and checking all the gauges and instruments before she started the engine.

The propeller spun somewhat jerkily for a couple of revolutions before the engine caught, sending a sudden puff of blue smoke into the air, then settling down to a steady roar. She again checked that all instrument indications were normal, then pulled on a headset and gestured for Mallory to do the same.

As soon as he did so, the noise from the engine was enormously reduced, and he could also hear Robin talking on the radio, the selector display of which showed a frequency of 123.475.

“Dunkeswell, this is Golf Sierra Tango in the park requesting taxi instructions for a cross-country navex.”

“Good morning, Sierra Tango. Taxi for runway two two on QFE 1008. Call at the holding point for two two left.”

“Two two left on QFE 1008. Thank you, Dunkeswell.”

“To save you asking a whole lot of irritating questions,” Robin said, altering the setting on the altimeter subscale before releasing the parking brake and goosing the throttle to start the aircraft moving, “a navex is a navigational exercise, a normal training evolution, which usually means flying a triangular pattern around three airfields. Two two zero degrees is the magnetic heading of the runway, and you have to fly a left-hand circuit from it. The QFE is the local pressure setting that means the altimeter will read zero feet on the ground here, which helps when you're landing but isn't so important when you're taking off, obviously. And we've got clearance to taxi to the runway, but not to enter it.”

Mallory looked at her.

“And Golf Sierra Tango?” he asked.

“The aircraft's registration number, which is also its call sign. Nothing clever there. I didn't memorize it or anything. It's printed right here.” She pointed at the control panel in front of her, on which the full registration number was displayed.

“Too much information,” he said. “This is all new to me, and I'm not taking it all in. What type of aircraft is this, by the way? I mean, is it reliable and all that?”

Robin nodded but didn't take her eyes off the view through the windshield as she taxied toward the runway.

“It's a Cessna 172 Skyhawk,” she replied, “and it's the most successful aircraft ever in terms of the total number built. Cessna has knocked out over sixty thousand of these babies, and it's been around since the mid–nineteen fifties, though this one's only eight or nine years old. So, yes, it is reliable, very.”

A few minutes later she braked the Cessna to a stop on the taxiway a few yards short of the entrance to the runway and carried out further checks there.

“Pretakeoff checks,” she said to Mallory, then depressed the transmit button again. “Dunkeswell, Golf Sierra Tango, holding short of two two left.”

“Sierra Tango. Take off. Wind light and variable, regional pressure setting 1014.”

“Roger, Dunkeswell. Sierra Tango.”

Robin opened the throttle again, and the Cessna eased forward. She turned it left onto the center of the runway, and opened the throttle all the way. The tarmac rushed past with increasing speed, the aircraft bouncing slightly over uneven sections of the runway, and then the plane gave a small lurch and was airborne.

Robin continued climbing straight ahead to eight hundred feet, the circuit height, then turned left to head away from the airfield.

“Dunkeswell, Golf Sierra Tango is continuing VFR en route. Good day, sir.”

“Clear to continue VFR. Squawk 4321.”

“Four-three-two-one, Sierra Tango.”

Robin did something to a box just to the left of her.

“That's a setting on the secondary surveillance radar transponder,” she said. “It just means that any radar unit that detects us will read a 4321 squawk and know that we're a real aircraft, not an angel or anything, and that we're not in receipt of a radar service from anyone.”

“I'm not even going to ask what an angel is,” Mallory said, “but what's VFR?”

“Visual flight rules. It means we do our own navigation, take our own separation from other aircraft, basically just do our own thing. And an angel is a slang term for anomalous propagation, usually an atmospheric effect that can produce returns on a radar screen that look just like aircraft but aren't.”

Mallory nodded slowly as the Cessna continued climbing and opened out to the east. It was a clear and bright day, the few clouds high and well dispersed, and visibility was excellent. He'd never been in a light aircraft before, and the appeal of it was immediately obvious, the experience exhilarating.

“Well, it's good of this Justin guy to let you borrow his aircraft,” he said.

Robin was silent for just a second or two too long.

“What?” Mallory asked.

“He didn't actually say I could borrow it, not in so many words. I rang him up to see where he was and what he was doing over the next week or two. When I found out he was going to be stuck in Cornwall for a while doing bits of estate business, I knew he wouldn't miss his Cessna.”

“You mean you nicked it?” Mallory asked. “We're flying around in a stolen aircraft?”

“I think calling it ‘stolen' is a bit strong. He'll be getting it back, after all. It's more kind of temporarily TWOC'd.”

“Twocked?”

“Taken without owner's consent, that sort of thing. A common expression in the police force, I understand.”

Mallory stared at her for a moment, then looked out through the windshield again, a slow smile spreading across his face. “In view of everything else that's happened over the last couple of days, I suppose flying about the countryside in a hot aircraft is the least of our worries. So, what the hell? Fly me to France, Robin.”