The Lost Treasure of the Templars (33 page)

“That's still really vague,” Robin said, “but I'll let you know if I see anything that might fit the bill.”

They worked their way diligently around the walls, moving in opposite directions until they finally met up again near the entrance door.

“I didn't see anything that looked helpful,” Robin said, “though some of the Latin graffiti was interesting, not to say inventive. How about you?”

Mallory shook his head. “Nothing at all. Maybe we'll have better luck in the other part of the castle.”

The other principal section of the castle, the eastern
tower, was in a much more dilapidated state, lacking a roof and with large sections of the walls damaged or missing completely. The only good thing about the tower's poor state of preservation was that the missing roof meant it was much easier to see and interpret the marks on the stones. And there were a lot of those, spanning the ages.

There were fewer visitors in this part of the fortification, probably because there was less to see in the ruined tower, and just as they had done in the western tower, they circled the interior of the building looking for anything that stood out and could possibly be a clue.

“Keep your eyes open for initials as well,” Mallory called out to Robin.

“I am,” she replied shortly.

But again, their search appeared to be entirely fruitless and, somewhat despondently, they met in a spot near the center of the ruined tower to compare notes and share the lukewarm contents of a bottle of water. It was a hot day, and they both knew the dangers of dehydration, of forgetting to drink when you were busy doing something else.

“I didn't see anything,” Mallory said. “I've looked at dozens of crosses scratched into the stones. I've seen Christian, Coptic, and Greek Orthodox symbols, crosses in squares, and crosses in circles, but what I haven't seen anything like a
croix pattée
. No sign of the splayed ends that are so characteristic of that Templar symbol.”

“What about initials?” Robin asked. “Nothing useful there, either, I suppose?”

Mallory shook his head. “No. I've had my eyes peeled for
TDG
—Tibauld de Gaudin—all the time we've been here, and I've looked at dozens, maybe hundreds, of letters and initials on those stones, and that's one combination I've yet to see.”

Robin took the bottle from him and had another long
swallow. But as she handed him back the plastic water bottle, a sudden thought struck her.

“Hang on a minute,” she said. “If Tibauld
did
write his initials, he probably wouldn't use those three letters. The name Tibauld de Gaudin is what we know him as, the way that history records his name, but the ‘de Gaudin' bit isn't actually a part of his name, is it? That simply tells us where he came from. He was a man named Tibauld who came from a place called Gaudin, and if he walked up to us right now and introduced himself, he would just call himself Tibauld.”

“I hadn't thought of that,” Mallory admitted. “So if he was going to write his name in shorthand, as it were, what would he do? What letters would he use?”

“That I don't know for sure, but if you look at the way shorthand forms have developed over the years, one very common characteristic is that you lose the vowels, because it's really the consonants that give the word its shape. So
thanks
becomes
thnx
, though that's probably not a very good example. But if Tibauld was going to use an abbreviated form of his name, it would probably be something like
TBLD
or perhaps just
TBD
.”

“Now, that,” Mallory said, “does ring a bit of a bell with me. I'm sure I've seen the letters
TBLD
somewhere in this place.”

“What, where we are now?”

Mallory shook his head. “No. I think it was in the other tower.”

Without saying another word, the two of them abandoned the eastern tower and quickly walked back into the other structure.

“Where did you see it?” Robin asked.

“That's the tricky bit,” Mallory replied, “because I can't remember exactly. I think it was over on that wall
there”—he pointed to the opposite side of the large room—“but I can't be absolutely certain. We'll just have to search until we find it. What I do remember is that the letters were quite large and whoever had inscribed them had enclosed them in a kind of square box. And don't forget,” he added, “that even if I've remembered the initials correctly, there's no guarantee those letters are anything to do with Tibauld de Gaudin.”

“I know,” Robin said briskly, “but that's absolutely all we have found, so let's take a look at it and try to work that out.”

In the event, finding the four initials—and Mallory had been right about them—didn't take very long. Only a couple of minutes after they'd walked over to the opposite wall, Robin lifted her arm and beckoned him over.

“Is this what you saw?” she asked.

On the old gray stone directly in front of her was a rough square, itself divided into two equal parts by a horizontal line. Below the line and centered in the lower half of the square were the letters
TBLD
, clearly and accurately carved, in contrast to some of the other marks they had found, which were little more than surface scratches. These letters, and the line that formed the bisected square, had apparently been incised with a metal chisel, and had been done with considerable care. Above the dividing line and also centered were four other letters—
SOIM
—which made no sense to either of them.

“It doesn't look to me as if whoever carved this was simply some mindless little git who wanted to make his pathetic mark here for posterity,” Robin said, tracing the outline of the letters with the tip of her forefinger. “This was obviously done using proper tools and looks to me like a deliberate and thoughtful carving, intended to last for eternity. The only problem is that there's no sign of a
Templar symbol anywhere near it, so I really don't think that we're any further forward. This could have been carved by Tibauld de Gaudin, or probably more likely by someone acting on his orders, or it could equally well have been put here by some unknown bloke called ‘Thomas Brian Liam Doyle' or another equally forgettable name. Though if it was, I don't know why he would have taken so much trouble over it.”

Mallory nodded, and gave her a brief smile.

“You're absolutely right,” he said, “except for one thing. When we started looking here, I suggested you keep your eyes open for any depiction of the
croix pattée
, but I think now that I was wrong. The Templar cross was so well-known as the symbol of the order that it would simply be too obvious a shape to carve. Anybody seeing it, and especially somebody on the track of the Templar treasure and looking here, would immediately be alerted. The fact is that there's a Templar symbol right in front of us, but it's much more subtle than the
croix pattée
. What we're looking at is actually an accurate representation of the
Beauseant
, the battle flag of the Knights Templar.”

“It is?” Robin sounded something other than totally convinced.

“It is.”

Mallory pointed at the square carefully incised into the gray surface of the old stone and traced the outline.

“The
Beauseant
was one of the simplest flags that has ever been created,” he said. “All it consisted of was a roughly square piece of material dyed black at the top and white at the bottom, the dividing line occurring at the halfway point. Some later versions also contained the
croix pattée
, but in these circumstances that would have been too much of a giveaway. But I think what we're looking at here is the simplest possible design of the Templar
battle flag, with a shortened form of the name of the newly elected grand master carved into the lower half. I'm certain this is the clue that Tibauld de Gaudin left here before he sailed to Cyprus.”

Robin still looked doubtful.

“Don't you see?” Mallory said urgently. “Tibauld would have known the likely fate of the Sea Castle, so he couldn't have left an overt message or other indication, for fear of it being too obvious. But this”—he pointed again at the carving—“this is just a bunch of letters in a square. It only makes sense if you already know that Tibauld de Gaudin was here, and that he was the former treasurer and then the grand master of the Knights Templar, and that he had been entrusted with the treasure of the order and was leaving imminently for the safe haven of Cyprus.”

Robin looked at him, and then back at the carved letters and lines on the stone. Then she pointed at the part of the stone directly below the carved inscription. There were a number of other marks inscribed, with equal care but nothing like as deeply carved, in that area.

“Are those a part of it, do you think?” she asked.

Mallory took a small black aluminum flashlight out of his pocket and shone it where Robin was indicating. He could see an unusual shape, somewhat like large and small capital letters
L
, the small one directly above and to the left of the larger one, and joined to it.

“It could be,” Mallory agreed. “It looks as if it's been incised with the same care as the main carving, but I haven't the slightest idea what it means.”

 

 

A couple of inches over to the right was what looked like a letter
V
, but lying on its side with the apex pointing to the left. And to its right were three other, smaller, shapes, each of which also looked like the letter
V
but inverted, the middle one slightly smaller than the other two but more deeply incised and with a short horizontal line directly below it.

“I also have not the slightest idea what these might mean, if anything,” he added. “But I'll take a bunch of pictures of them, just in case.”

While Robin stared at the shapes, Mallory fished around in his computer bag, which—inevitably—he had brought with him from the car, and took out a small digital camera. He checked that the flash option was set to “Auto” and then took half a dozen pictures of the inscription and the marks underneath it in quick succession, altering the angle of the camera each time to ensure that he was capturing the entire image, and hoping that by doing so any other marks or incisions that they hadn't spotted in the fairly poor light would be recorded by the camera.

“Why did Tibauld inscribe the shorthand version of his name in the lower half of the flag?” Robin asked. “He was the newly appointed grand master of the Templars by this time. Surely his name should go at the top of the flag, as the leader of the order, instead of these other four letters?”

“I don't have an answer for that. The Templars were always modest in their outlook. They took vows of chastity, poverty, and humility, so perhaps Tibauld thought it more appropriate that his name should appear lower down. It does seem odd, though, because it implies that the
SOIM
was more important than he was. The short answer is that I don't know.”

“So, if this is the clue,” Robin persisted, “what does
SOIM
stand for?”

“That's the rub, I'm afraid,” Mallory replied, replacing the camera in his bag, “because I have absolutely no idea. But what I do know is that those four letters have to mean something. They could be the shortened name of a person, but I think it's much more likely that they indicate a place-name or something of that sort on Cyprus, and the only way we're going to be able to work out their meaning is to get ourselves over to the island. I'm sure that's where the answer lies.”

Rome

Silvio Vitale had carefully considered everything that Toscanelli had told him. Some of what he said Vitale had discounted as little more than excuses for the embarrassing failure of his men, but much of it clearly had a basis in fact: the deaths of four people and the maiming of a fifth allowed for no other interpretation.

Obviously there was much more to the female bookseller Robin Jessop and her unidentified male companion than met the eye. Vitale was not a man known for making assumptions, and he had immediately instructed members of his staff to gather all the data that was available on Robin Jessop. This turned out to be precious little, almost no more information than he already knew about her ownership of the bookshop. The only significant piece of extra data his staff had managed to collect was that she was an occasional amateur racing driver, holding a competition license and generally doing well in the handful of events that she bothered to enter each year.

But even the most diligent of inquiries had failed to
reveal much about the man who was accompanying her. Toscanelli had noted the registration number of the Porsche Cayman that he had been driving, and that information, channeled through the senior police officer who was a tertiary, a kind of unofficial lay member of the Dominican Order, had generated the name David Mallory and an address in Cornwall, but almost nothing else.

However, there were a number of official channels open to Vitale, and he had instituted a number of checks through these. And almost immediately he had begun to gather results.

Within the Schengen area, routine passport checks were almost nonexistent, but travelers were still required to produce their documentation whenever they did certain things, the most obvious of which was flying as a fare-paying passenger in an aircraft, and passenger records were held for some time. They were also confidential, but there were numerous ways in which they could be accessed by law enforcement agencies and other bodies.

Within six hours of Robin Jessop and David Mallory flying to Beirut, Silvio Vitale was looking at a printout of the passenger list for that flight, and that told him precisely where in the world she and Mallory were heading.

Vitale knew that Toscanelli would still be in transit to Cyprus, but he sent him a long encrypted e-mail anyway, telling him what he had discovered. Beirut, he was absolutely certain, was not Jessop's final destination. He knew the history of the Knights Templar better than almost anybody, and from the deciphered parchment text he knew that there was a strong probability Tibauld de Gaudin might have left clues, clues that could conceivably have survived to the present day, and that the first of these was most likely to be found at Sidon, at the Sea Castle.

In fact, he hoped that this was the case, and that Jessop and the man with her would find it and then travel on to Cyprus, which was where both logic and history suggested that the lost treasure of the Knights Templar was to be found, or at least the treasure de Gaudin had taken from Acre, the treasure of Outremer.

But Vitale was still frustrated by one thing: despite a brute-force attack mounted by three of the most powerful computers the order possessed, the final section of the encrypted parchment had still not been deciphered. He had been assured by Fabrini that it would eventually yield, but he had no idea when they might achieve a breakthrough. It could take hours or months, and nobody had any idea which.

But perhaps whatever information remained to be discovered at the Sidon Sea Castle would be enough for Jessop to discover the hiding place. And for that reason, Vitale had had a change of mind with regard to the orders he had given Toscanelli. Instead of acting alone, he was to link up with the advance party that had already reached the island of Cyprus, and they were then to identify Jessop the moment she arrived and follow her and her companion until they discovered where the treasure was hidden.

Once that had been done, the encrypted e-mail concluded, Toscanelli's original orders were to be followed: the woman and her male friend were to die, and Vitale frankly didn't care how, so Toscanelli and the other men could enjoy themselves with her if they wished.

Vitale read through the text of the message one last time, making sure that everything he had said was perfectly clear and unambiguous, and then he sent it. And after that, there was nothing he could do but sit back and wait.