The Lost Treasure of the Templars (7 page)

Via di Sant' Alessio, Aventine Hill, Rome, Italy

The Pontifical University of Saint Anselm was sandwiched between the Magistral Villa and the minor Basilica of Santa Sabina on the Lungotevere Aventino, which ran along the south bank of the Fiume Tevere, a location that offered excellent views across much of Rome and Vatican City from the Aventine Hill.

The Via di Santa Sabina ran behind all three buildings, and directly opposite the university, which was built in the form of a square and enclosed an open courtyard flanked by arches and a covered walkway, the Via di Sant' Alessio extended, arrow straight, for a little under a quarter of a mile down to the southeast. The road was flanked by a number of substantial detached buildings surrounded by gardens and in many cases protected by high walls. Few of these properties displayed any outward indications of what activity or activities were carried out inside, privacy being a jealously guarded benefit in this exclusive and expensive area of the city.

One of these buildings, its external identity being
restricted to nothing more than a house number, contained what amounted to the back office facilities of one of the buildings that fronted the Lungotevere Aventino. Different parts of the structure served different purposes for different groups of people within the organization. One of these, one of the smallest, in fact, was essentially a dedicated intelligence unit. It occupied an air-conditioned suite of rooms in the basement, protected by a steel-lined door that was kept locked at all times whether or not anyone was in the suite. The unit had been established almost a century earlier to carry out a very specific type of monitoring activity for a purpose that at first sight appeared to make no sense whatsoever.

In the earliest days of the unit's existence, the small staff had spent their working days reading the occasional novel, but mainly commercially published nonfiction books and especially reports that had been obtained from a number of different sources, some in the public domain but many that had originated within the walls of national intelligence units around the world. Throughout the twentieth century, advances in technology had dramatically increased both the scope and the ability of the unit, beginning with the introduction of telephones and telex machines, and then fax equipment, until finally the staff had started taking advantage of the most flexible, the most comprehensive, and by far the most effective intelligence collecting tool so far developed on the planet: the Internet.

What most users of the Web didn't realize was that every time they went online, they were leaving behind them a trail of electronic footprints that anybody with the appropriate equipment and skills was able to follow. Internet monitoring programs could be set up to record every action that a particular person took, every search
term he entered, every Web site and every page on every Web site that he visited, every e-mail he sent and received, and even—if it was considered necessary—every single keystroke that he made.

This kind of comprehensive blanket surveillance was, paradoxically, most often used inside the home, allowing parents to monitor what their children were up to on the Internet in an attempt to keep them safe and out of the hands of the pedophiles who, if the popular press was to be believed, were to be found lurking on every virtual street corner. Husbands and wives also took advantage of this kind of technology when one of them suspected that the other might be playing away from home, and some businesses had been known to covertly monitor the actions of their employees in the same way. This kind of almost total surveillance was specifically and precisely targeted and could reveal a hell of a lot about the chosen subject, but it was usually of little or no relevance to anybody outside the immediate family, group, or company.

Of far more interest to the intelligence unit based in the center of Rome was blanket general surveillance, and in particular surveillance in two apparently dissimilar fields: Internet searches and special interest blogs. One characteristic that almost everybody who used a computer would immediately recognize was that whenever any new piece of information or an unusual word was encountered, almost the first thing most people did was to type the word or phrase into a search engine to find out more about it. Everybody did it because it was quick and easy and in most cases it provided the required information with a fair degree of accuracy.

The analysis of search terms on the Internet was a serious matter because of its importance to companies that primarily traded online, who absolutely needed to know
what their potential customers were typing into their search engines so they could tailor their Web sites to respond accordingly. And, just as important, they also needed to know the keywords their competitors were monitoring—the “pay-per-click” system used to drive clients to a particular Web site—on specific search engines. Search engine optimization was a vitally important weapon in the armory of every company trading online.

The remit of the small intelligence unit based in Rome was both broader and in many ways more specific than this. Their task was to identify particular words or phrases that they had been told were significant by their employers, though they hadn't been told why. The main problem they had faced was that nobody knew for certain exactly which words might be significant, because the information on which they were basing their searches was the better part of one millennium old. So the dictionary—for want of a better expression—that they were using contained a huge number of possible search terms, both individual words and combinations of words, and false alarms were very common as a result.

Some of the commercial search engines provided lists of the most popular search terms to anybody who was interested, but these almost invariably just listed the words used by browsers, and that was really only half the story. For the intelligence unit, not only was the search term important, but just as vital was the geographical location and especially the identity of the person who had typed it into his or her computer.

Programmers working for the intelligence unit had developed a number of monitoring tools that would allow the unit to identify search terms of interest that had been entered into the principal search engines, together with the IP—Internet Protocol—address from which the
search was generated, and that would allow the location to be established with a fair degree of accuracy.

Multiple copies of the programs ran on different servers, each monitoring a particular search engine, and they had also installed other versions of the programs that used the same look-up word tables in the other main European languages, as well as both Arabic and Hebrew. But the language that the unit had been told was the most important to monitor was, oddly enough, Latin, and all the computers were programmed to monitor a large number of Latin words and phrases as their highest priority.

The blog sites in many ways offered less fertile ground, not least because there were far fewer blogs that needed to be monitored, as there weren't that many that dealt in any way—no matter how obscure—with the subject matter.

So it was perhaps not entirely surprising that when the intelligence unit received the first confirmed hit—confirmed because the two words typed precisely matched one of the Latin phrases in the oldest and most reliable of all the word lists they used—it came from a Web search engine, not a blog.

Once the validity of the match had been confirmed and all the information possible obtained about the person responsible for the Web search, the substance of the hit was reported to the man in charge of the unit.

After that, things happened very quickly.

Dartmouth, Devon

Robin Jessop had been sitting at a corner table in the café she'd selected for about fifteen minutes, nursing a rather flat cappuccino and watching the sunlit street outside through the slightly grubby window. She had asked Mallory to get there by one o'clock, and at a couple of minutes past the hour the door of the café swung open and a large, heavily built man with a pronounced beer belly swaggered in and glanced around.

Robin's heart sank. Not only was he twenty years older than she had expected, fat and unattractive, but he was also wearing a wedding ring on the third finger of his left hand. If that was Mallory, the sooner he finished the decrypting and left, the better, she decided. But then the man gave a broad smile and strode past her to another table at the back of the room, where a rather plain and solid woman was sitting, wearing a floral dress that didn't suit her.

She turned around slightly in her seat as he passed her to see where he was going, and when she turned back
another man was standing right in the doorway, scanning the patrons, apparently searching for somebody. He was about her age, tall, well built, and with neat blond hair parted on one side, wearing blue jeans and a leather jacket, a computer bag slung over his shoulder. He looked remarkably average apart from the faint white line of a jagged scar running down his left cheek, an obviously old healed injury that immediately drew her eyes toward it. He glanced at her, but then his gaze passed over her.

It was the computer bag that suggested his identity, and Robin half rose in her chair and waved her hand to attract his attention.

“Are you David?” she asked diffidently.

He immediately looked down at her. “Yes. You're Robin?”

She nodded and gave him a quick smile as she gestured toward the seat on the other side of the table.

“Are you okay?” she asked. “You look a little surprised to see me.”

Mallory smiled and nodded.

“I'm fine,” he said, “but I am surprised. My mental picture of you was as a kind of blue-rinsed academic, all pearls and twinset, and maybe twenty years older.”

“Are you disappointed?”

He shook his head. Even with her sitting there and wearing a padded jacket, he could see that she had a proper female figure, the swell of her bosom unmistakable beneath the material. Mallory had never understood the “can't be too rich or too thin” near-anorexic fashion that some women embraced, turning themselves into walking bags of bones.

Her large dark brown, almost black eyes peered at him through the lenses of her spectacles with cool appraisal beneath the dark fringe of her quite short black hair. Her
face was slightly rounded, her nose very slightly bent, almost as if at some time it had been broken, unlikely though that scenario had to be, and her full lips were parted to reveal small white teeth. And, although it was an obvious cliché, there was a definite look of determination about her chin. Overall, it was the face of a girl who knew exactly where she was going and precisely how she intended to get there.

But it was her smile that struck him most forcibly. He'd occasionally read in bad novels how the heroine's smile was supposed to brighten up a room, and he'd always dismissed it as simple hyperbole and cheap exaggeration, but in Robin Jessop's case it was absolutely true. It really did, and Mallory found it difficult not to smile back at her. So he didn't resist, and matched her expression with his own.

“You're less geeky than I was expecting,” she said, “which is good news. And for a few seconds I thought that you might be the man who's now sitting right behind me.”

Mallory glanced over her shoulder as he sat down on the opposite side of the table, then flicked his glance back to her.

“You mean the one with the stomach and the jowls?” he asked.

“Exactly.”

“You may be doing him a disservice,” Mallory said mildly. “He may well be a teetotal nonsmoker, the perfect family man, completely faithful to his wife, wonderful with children, kind to animals, and all the rest of it.”

Robin nodded. “You're right, of course. You should never judge by appearances.” She hesitated for a moment, then leaned forward slightly. “I'm sorry, but I just have to ask. Where did that scar come from?”

Mallory didn't respond for a moment, then shook his head.

“You are direct, aren't you?” he replied. “It's from a part of my life I'd rather forget. An incident that ended a career I was enjoying. When—if—we get to know each other better, then I'll tell you.”

“I
can
keep a secret,” Robin said.

“Luckily, so can I,” Mallory replied, then immediately changed the subject. “Look, I'm sorry I'm a few minutes late, but trying to find somewhere to park in this town is well-nigh impossible, and I'm gasping for a coffee and something to eat. Is the food here any good?”

“The coffee is a bit suspect,” Robin said, her voice revealing a trace of the irritation she felt over what Mallory had said, or rather failed to say, “but the sandwiches aren't bad.”

“Right,” Mallory said, grabbing the plastic-coated menu from the holder on the table. “I'm buying. What would you like?”

Five minutes later, they were both tucking in to paninis, and fifteen minutes after that they stepped out of the café, heading toward Robin's shop.

“It had spikes on it?” Mallory asked as she described what had happened when she used a screwdriver to release the catch on the book safe. “I've never heard of anything like that before.”

“Nor have I. But quite a number of interesting and unusual devices came out of the medieval period. Some of their chests are absolute works of art with the most massive and complex locking systems built into the lids. One key could control as many as a dozen different bolts spaced around the edge of the chest, a bit like the doors you get on some big safes today. And all the bolts and levers would be curved and carved, sometimes embossed
with gold or silver decoration. Really wonderful designs and elegant workmanship. The book safe is frankly quite crude by comparison, but as an antitheft device, it would certainly have been brilliantly effective. If those spikes—and I think it's at least possible that they would originally have been tipped with poison—had slammed through your hand, the last thing you'd be thinking about was what was inside the object. And of course even after you'd prized the spikes out of your flesh, the box was still locked.”

Mallory was silent for a few seconds, then glanced sideways at Robin.

“But that means there's a bit of a problem with it, don't you think?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“It would work as an antitheft device, obviously, but whoever owned it wouldn't want to trigger the mechanism every time he needed to put anything in the box or take something out. That would just be pointless and dangerous. So there must be some way of freeing the catch to open the lid that won't fire the spikes through your hand.”

“Oddly enough,” Robin said, “that never occurred to me. But you're quite right. I released the catch just by using the point of a long-bladed electrical screwdriver, but obviously when it was made, there must have been a proper key for it. The hole it goes into is shaped like a wide flattened oval, so presumably that's what a cross section of the key would look like. But just wait until you see this thing. It scared the life out of me when it went off.”

“I'm not surprised. You were really lucky in the way you decided to open it.”

They turned in to the street where Robin's bookshop was located, but she didn't go in through the front door
because she could see a couple of customers in the shop and the last thing she wanted to do was disturb them when they might possibly be in a buying mood. Instead she led Mallory down the adjacent alleyway and around to the rear door of her premises.

“Come upstairs,” she said, suddenly aware when she spoke that it was a slight double entendre.

“That's an offer I've not had in a while,” Mallory replied, quietly enough not to be heard.