The Lost Treasure of the Templars (32 page)

“That's just a theory, mind you, and I could be completely wrong, but the way the text talks about a trail suggests that there might be clues left on the ground, as it were, that we can follow.”

“So now we have to go to Lebanon?” Robin asked.

“I think we should, yes, and just hope if Tibauld
did
leave any kind of clue in the Sea Castle that it's still there, because the place was pretty badly knocked about after he left Sidon.”

Mallory used the touch pad to move the cursor to open a new browser window and entered another term in the search box. “Anyway, I think the first thing we have
to do is work out how to get to Lebanon. We want a route that's quick and easy, and that probably means hopping on a plane, so I'll just do a quick search and see what's available.”

While Mallory checked flights from various French airports to the eastern Mediterranean, Robin looked again at the text they had finally translated.

“I think you're right about following a trail,” she said, “because that
is
the way this passage reads. But I just wonder how easy it will be to spot any clues Tibauld left behind him over seven hundred years ago, far less work out what they mean.”

“That will be the real trick,” Mallory replied, “and all we can do is hope that we're smart enough to see a hidden meaning in what other people have dismissed as unimportant over the centuries.”

Sidon, Lebanon

Traveling to Sidon didn't prove to be as difficult as Mallory had been expecting. They drove to Paris Orly and took a flight direct to Beirut, landing at the airport that lay just to the south of the city. Once there, they hired a car and drove the relatively short distance—about twenty miles—down the Mediterranean coast of Lebanon to Sidon.

“I'm actually rather enjoying this,” Robin said, leaning back in her seat and looking through the side window of the car at the sparkling blue waters of the Mediterranean as Mallory steered the hired Renault south. “I just wish we had the time to stop and lie on the beach for a week or so, and let all our troubles just waft away. But I can't stop thinking about the problems still waiting for us back in Devon, festering away quietly in the background.”

“And they're probably getting worse as well,” Mallory said. “I'm quite sure that the pointed hat brigade will be getting more and more irritated with every day that passes when they can't haul you into the nearest police
station and give you the third degree about what happened in your apartment. When you do eventually go back and face them—because obviously we can't keep doing this forever, running around looking for lost treasures—I still think your best plan is to simply deny all knowledge of what happened. Tell them you walked out of your apartment to meet your new boyfriend and, quite unexpectedly for you, he turned out to be a kind of white knight who whisked you off for a prolonged dirty weekend that turned into a week spent bouncing around the eastern Mediterranean.”

Robin smiled at him.

“I don't really see you as a white knight,” she said, “and we haven't had any kind of dirty weekend. But you're probably right. The obvious objection to that scenario is my failure to go and talk to the police once I knew that those three men had been killed in my apartment. I suppose I could say that I thought it was Betty having a joke with me, trying to spoil my fun, but I really don't know if they would believe that.”

“I don't think that it really matters whether they believe it or not. What they can't prove is that you were there when the murders took place, because you weren't. The old triumvirate in law enforcement, and especially for murder, is means, motive, and opportunity, and of those the only one that really fits you is opportunity, simply because you own the property. Means is a bit of a gray area because it will be clear to the police that the men—or at least two of them—were armed when they arrived, and so they could argue that you seized one of their pistols and shot the three of them. But that still leaves motive. You didn't know those three men, and you certainly didn't have any valid reason for wanting them dead, so it's difficult to see how they could mount a successful
prosecution against you for their murders. Apart from anything else, I don't think any reasonably fair-minded jury would believe that tiny little you would be able to overpower three hefty men armed with pistols and then shoot them, with or without your martial arts skills.

“In fact,” Mallory continued, “if my reading of what happened after we made our getaway is correct, I'm the one who needs to be worried. That last Italian could dump the murder weapon in my car so that the police will find it when they recover the vehicle. I suppose with hindsight it probably was a good idea to report the car stolen, because at least that will muddy the waters. If the vehicle wasn't in my possession, then I couldn't have placed the murder weapon in it. But I still think I'm going to need a flock of high-priced lawyers back in Britain if I'm going to be able to talk my way out of this.”

“Then let's hope there really is some kind of treasure at the end of this, because then you'll be able to afford the best legal brains money can buy,” Robin said.

They drove on in silence for a few more minutes, and then Mallory pointed ahead.

“There it is,” he said, gesturing toward an old gray stone fortification, much of it in ruins, located just off the coast on their right-hand side, on the northern edge of Sidon. It was approached by a stone causeway that linked the small island to the mainland.

“It looks as if it's suffered a bit over the years,” Robin remarked.

“It has,” Mallory confirmed. “After Tibauld left to sail to Cyprus, the remaining Templars here prepared to defend the castle against the Mamluks, but they almost certainly knew from the start that they were doomed. And they were right. The enormous Mamluk army, fresh from their overwhelming victory at the siege of Acre, arrived
at Sidon and quickly overwhelmed the defenders of the castle. The few members of the order who managed to survive the battle escaped by sea and made their way to Tortosa, but it quickly became apparent that there were simply too few of them there to make the slightest difference, and that for the garrison to remain would simply be suicidal.

“The Knights Templar weren't scared of dying in battle—in fact, they welcomed it—but they were also very aware of military tactics, and they would have known that if they stayed in Tortosa to face the oncoming Mamluk army, they would all die. If that happened, there would be even fewer Christian knights in the Holy Land able to combat the menace of the infidels, and throwing away their lives to no purpose would only serve to weaken their cause.”

“So they left, presumably,” Robin said.

“They left. Both Tortosa and the one other remaining mainland Templar castle in the Holy Land, Athlit, were abandoned that same year, before the Mamluks were able to lay siege to either of them. But the Templars did make a kind of last stand on the fortress island of Ruad. That's located a couple of miles off the coast of Tortosa, today's Tartus in Syria, a few miles north of Tripoli. In fact, in 1300 Jacques de Molay, who was by then the Templar grand master, took part in a complicated and ultimately unsuccessful plan involving not only his own order but also the Knights Hospitaller and the Teutonic Knights, supposed to be supported by a large force of Mongol warriors that conspicuously failed to materialize. The idea was to use Ruad as a bridgehead to attack and recover Tortosa, but all they actually managed to achieve was to launch a few raids on the mainland, seize a handful of prisoners, and engage in a bit of plunder. Because the
Mongol army was delayed by bad weather, they didn't have a sufficiently large force to even attempt to engage the Mamluks. And after a certain amount of deliberation, most of the combined forces withdrew and returned to Cyprus, leaving behind a small garrison on Ruad.

“The pope then got in on the act, and with typical papal generosity and arrogance, and ignoring the territorial claims of any other nation, he gave Ruad to the Templars. Jacques de Molay organized the reinforcement of the fortress island, and stationed a large force of knights there, some hundred and twenty, who were supported by five hundred archers and four hundred servants. He was obviously hoping that the island could eventually be used to stage an invasion of Tortosa, but it all came to nothing.

“In either 1302 or 1303 the Mamluks sent an invasion fleet of sixteen ships to Tripoli, and from there they besieged Ruad, setting up their own encampments on the island and finally starving out the defenders. After the final surrender, the Mamluks behaved with their normal duplicity and disregarded the terms they had just agreed to. All the archers were executed and the majority of the Knights Templar were taken in chains to Cairo and imprisoned under appalling conditions, most of them dying through ill treatment and starvation. And the surrender of Ruad,” Mallory finished, “marked both the end of the Crusades and of the presence of Christian knights—whether Knights Templar or from one of the other two military orders—in the Holy Land. There were plans and schemes after the event, mainly orchestrated by the pope, but none of them ever came to anything.”

Mallory braked the car to a stop conveniently close to the end of the causeway linking the Sea Castle to the mainland, and for a couple of minutes the two of them
just sat in silence, staring out at the ruined fortress in front of them.

“So, what happened here?” Robin finally asked.

“When the castle fell to the Mamluks, they did their best to demolish it. That seems to have been almost a kind of policy with them: whenever they took a Templar stronghold, like Acre, the order's main power base in the Holy Land, or the castle of Athlit, they systematically dismantled the fortress, presumably in an attempt to make sure it couldn't be reused, or not without a lot of rebuilding work. Here at the Sea Castle, they apparently changed their minds a bit later on, because they then came back and rebuilt it themselves, and also constructed the stone causeway that you're looking at right now. That wasn't the end of the story, because the castle was later abandoned, but it was rebuilt yet again by a local emir in the seventeenth century. It was extensively damaged in later conflicts, so it's had a long and somewhat traumatic life.”

Mallory pointed at the old fortifications. “Pretty much all that's left now are the two towers you can see and a wall that connects them. The rectangular tower is the better preserved of the two, but in some ways the east tower, the other one, is the more interesting. That was built by two different groups of people at different times. The lower levels date back to the days of the Crusaders, the Templars, while the upper part was constructed by the Mamluks. The wall that links them is interesting, too, according to what I've read. That includes Roman columns, built into it as horizontal strengtheners, and that was quite a common technique in areas where Roman remains were found, because the stones they used were strong and regularly shaped and offered an easy way to increase the speed of construction.”

Robin looked at him.

“Well,” she said, “we certainly aren't going to find any kind of clues or information Tibauld might conveniently have left for us sitting here in this car staring at it. Let's get over there and take a look.”

The rectangular western tower was, as Mallory had explained, in quite good condition, given its turbulent history. It was over to the left of the entrance of the site as they left the causeway, and when they walked in they entered a very large room with a vaulted ceiling. There were a number of carved capitals in the room as well as several rusting iron cannonballs, presumably a legacy of the later conflicts that had raged around the building.

A staircase wound its way up the internal walls and gave access to the roof of the building, on which a small mosque had been constructed during the reign of the Ottoman Turks. More impressive was the view of the harbor and the old city from the roof, a wide and unobstructed vista. But they weren't there to sightsee. They spent a few minutes on the roof, then walked back down the staircase into the large room, waited for their eyes to become accustomed to the much lower level of lighting inside the building, and then began their search, working their way around the groups of tourists wandering in and out of the building.

They took their time, first looking around the interior but without seeing anything that immediately struck them as being interesting, and then began a much slower and more careful inspection of the lower levels of masonry, the parts of the building that would most likely have been standing when the Knights Templar were in occupation.

“It would be a help,” Robin said, more than a trace of irritation in her voice, “if we had the slightest idea what we were actually looking for.”

Mallory grinned at her.

“That's the problem,” he said. “What we're doing could be a complete waste of time. We still don't know if Tibauld left any kind of clue here, and if he did there's really no way that we could guess what it might be. Obviously I'm assuming that it wouldn't be anything very obvious—not, for example, an outline map of Cyprus with a large cross in one location and a note in Latin beside it saying ‘the treasure is buried here'—but I'm hopeful that he might have left something. He would also have known there was a good chance that the castle would fall to the Mamluks within a matter of weeks or months, and that it would then be badly damaged and possibly even demolished by them, so if he
did
leave any kind of indication, it would almost certainly be carved into a single stone, not inscribed on a number of them, in case the wall or whatever was demolished.”

“That's slightly interesting,” Robin said, “but not actually helpful. You know more about this sort of stuff than I do, so let's look at it from the other side, as it were. I agree that marking a single stone would make good sense, and he would most probably have picked a stone that forms a part of the foundations or the very lowest levels of the fortress, because those would be the parts of the structure most likely to be left standing after the Mamluks had done their worst. So I suppose we're looking in more or less the right place. But what form could any clue possibly take? And there are a lot of symbols and letters and even whole words carved on these stones, many of them medieval graffiti and in everything from Latin to Arabic, so picking out the right inscription or carving isn't going to be easy.”

Mallory considered for a moment.

“Okay,” he said. “Let's think it through logically. He
obviously knew that he was going to take the treasure to Cyprus, because the island was not only under the control of the Knights Templar, but for a while they'd actually owned it and had set up their headquarters in Limassol. They bought it from Richard the First, Richard the Lionhearted, back in 1192, and he'd captured the island a year earlier during the Third Crusade. The Knights Templar later sold it to Guy of Lusignan. The island has a long history of conflict that's still the case even today with the Greeks and Turks arguing over it. With their toehold in the Holy Land becoming ever more tenuous, Cyprus was really his only possible destination. So there'd be no point in writing the name of the island or drawing a map of it, because any member of the order would already know that was where he would have to be going. But what he might have done was draw a map of a particular section of the island, or possibly write the name of the place he had chosen to secrete the wealth of the order. And I suppose that he might also have included some kind of Templar symbol, something unmistakable, so that anyone following the trail would be able to recognize the significance of the inscription. Maybe a drawing of the
croix pattée
, something like that.”