The Templar Inheritance (13 page)

TWENTY-EIGHT

Shepherd’s Bush, London

FRIDAY 3 MAY 2013

Amira Eisenberger looked across the kitchen table at her ex-boyfriend, John Hart. This was the first time she’d had the opportunity to study him at close quarters since picking him up at Heathrow Airport an hour earlier. For immediately on his emergence through the Arrivals Gate he had been surrounded by a maelstrom of reporters, most of whom she knew, if not by name, at least by phizog, fighting to interview him.

‘Oh come on, Amira. Give us a frigging break,’ Martin Halsom of Sky News had called out to her from behind his sound man. ‘You can’t keep him all to yourself. He’s one of us.’

Amira had paid no attention to his plea. Nor to that of any of the others, however friendly she might be with them outside business hours. She had shuttled Hart in front of her and out of the airport as if he were a film star on a lightning visit to promote his new movie.

Once he was in the clear, Hart had shaken his head as if he were recovering from a sucker punch to the jaw. ‘I didn’t
think anybody was picking me up. I was going to take a taxi.’ He had snatched another look back over his shoulder at the sad gaggle of newspaper people and TV reporters gathering up their flotsam and jetsam behind him. They all knew better than to argue with Amira. ‘Were those people really there for me?’

‘No. They were waiting for Justin Bieber. They just thought you were him.’

‘Very funny.’ Hart had looked across the car roof at Amira as she fumbled for her keys. ‘I feel I should tell you that I’ve booked a room at the Frontline Club. I thought I’d stay there and not at my flat until I found my feet again. At least that way I’d be certain of getting fed.’

‘Well, cancel it. You were working for me in Iraq. I’ve been writing your story while you were banged up. So you are staying with me. Don’t worry. I will feed you.’

‘In exchange for an exclusive, you mean?’

‘Yes. For your exclusive story. What do you think? That I want you back in my life again after your affair with that little fascist in Germany?’

‘No. I didn’t think that.’

‘Thank God for small mercies.’

Hart leaned back in his chair and looked round the room that he had once known so well. The place stank of cigarettes. There were unwashed dishes in the sink. Papers and books strewn across all the visible surfaces. Used coffee cups weighing down the papers. The prospect of eating anything in such an environment appalled him. The place had gone
catastrophically downhill since he’d last visited, ten months before, and Amira with it. It could have doubled as one of the Camberwell sets from the film
Withnail & I
.

‘You’ve lost weight.’ Amira was watching him as you would a prize steer. ‘And you’ve got a new scar on your forehead.’

‘I jumped off a roof and someone’s AK47 belted me on the head.’

‘I suspected as much.’

They both laughed.

‘You’re a celebrity now,’ she said. ‘You do realize that? A star photojournalist. A made man. You’ll forever be the guy who shot dead the suicide bomber. It’ll be like a travelling footnote. You’ll be able to write your own ticket from here on in.’ Amira didn’t seem particularly happy at the prospect. ‘Well. You probably guessed as much when you saw your reception committee at the airport. Those pieces I wrote about you triggered it. There wasn’t much other news. So you found the front pages and stayed there. Heroic reporter saves Kurdish girl at the risk of his own life. Takes down human bomb with single shot. “The Templar” strikes again.’

Hart pushed an overflowing ashtray out of the way with the back of his hand. ‘That wasn’t how it was and you know it. I mostly sprayed the wall above his head because I forgot, in the heat of the moment, that assault rifles throw their barrels upwards when you have them on full auto, and not where you aim. I just got lucky, if you can call it that. And I acted from naked fear, Amira, not heroism. Single shot my arse.’

‘But single shot is how it read. And that’s what people want in the news. They are sick of downbeat stories. They want triumphs. Good over evil. That sort of crap.’

‘I thought you were wedded to the truth?’

‘I am. But truth depends on a variety of factors. It’s not just someone’s opinion. You did do those things I wrote about. And people need heroes from time to time. It amused me to make you one. You can call it subjective truth if you want.’

‘But “the Templar”? Couldn’t you have thought of a better hashtag?’

‘No. You’ll thank me one day. People remember nicknames.’

Hart cocked his head to one side and stared at her. ‘Amira. . .’

‘No. Don’t say it.’

‘Say what?’

‘Whatever you were going to say. How dreadful I look. What a mess this flat is. Why I’m talking to you like this when I should be throwing you out on your ear.’

Hart stayed silent for a long time. ‘Why don’t I take you out to dinner? The Ivy or Le Caprice. Your choice.’

‘Aren’t you afraid of being mobbed again, Mr Hero?’

‘No. They’ll be bored with me already and searching for new victims. Newspaper people need feeding, like guppies. And you just cut them off at the tit. For which I’m sincerely grateful, by the way.’

‘You don’t like being a celebrity, you mean?’

‘No.’

‘And you’re hungry?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why don’t we eat here then? I’ve got a freezer. And a microwave.’

‘I’d probably get food poisoning.’ Hart stood up. ‘Jesus, Amira. You can afford a cleaner. Why don’t you get one?’

‘I like it like this.’

‘No, you don’t. This is how Wesker used to live. But you’re not Wesker. I know he was your mentor, but why emulate his incapacity for housekeeping? He was a disaster in everything bar journalism.’

Amira tapped at her mobile phone. ‘Sometimes I wish I was more like him. At least he was able to drown his sorrows in whisky until that fascist thug threw him off the balcony in Germany. But I hate the bloody stuff. And I value my brain too much to fill it full of drugs.’

‘I value your brain too. But you don’t need to keep it in a skip. Or smoke it to death.’

Amira put the phone to one ear and her finger to another, like a child refusing to listen to its mother’s chiding. ‘Takeaway Chinese suit you?’

Hart closed his eyes. ‘As long as they provide chopsticks. No power on earth will persuade me to eat off your cutlery.’

Amira flicked him a V sign. ‘Chinese it is then.’

TWENTY-NINE

‘I want you to look at this for me.’ Hart held out the same sheet of vellum parchment he had shown to Nalan Abuna – the one containing Johannes von Hartelius’s last words.

Amira spooned some more Dim Sum into her mouth, disdaining the throwaway chopsticks the caterer had provided, and which Hart was manipulating with what she felt was a certain louche dexterity. ‘I’ve already seen it. You showed it to me last summer, remember? Just after your late girlfriend and her tame SS storm trooper had tried to kill me. I don’t understand why you’re still so fascinated by it.’

‘Look again. Hold it up against the light. Better still, play your lighter backwards and forwards behind it. Just try not to burn it, please.’

Amira made a face. She flicked on her lighter and held the parchment against it. She drew in her breath at the mass of additional material revealed by the flame – the dozens of words snaking between the conventionally written lines
and up the margins of the vellum. ‘I can tell you this much. Your ancestor had verbal diarrhoea. Either that or extreme Asperger’s. They say it’s genetic, you know?’

Hart pretended he hadn’t heard. ‘Nalan discovered the hidden writing by torchlight when we were hiding in the cellar in As Sulaymaniyah. She says Hartelius must have done it with urine, or sperm, or some other colourless liquid available to him in his cell. Something that wouldn’t show up on a cursory reading, but only when held up against a concentrated light source. Like a candle with a reflector, say.’

Amira shoved the manuscript back across the table to Hart in feigned distaste. ‘Nalan?’

‘Oh come on, Amira. Nalan Abuna. My guide and translator in Kurdistan. You’ve already written about her, remember? Not only that, but it was your own bloody newspaper who paid her to assist me in the first place.’

‘What? You don’t mean that stunningly photogenic twenty-seven-year-old Kurdish woman whose life you so heroically saved and whose photos you’ve been bombarding my editor with?’ Amira raised her eyebrows dramatically. ‘The one who was no doubt oozing with gratitude towards you once she’d managed to pull herself together after you shot the bomber. New girlfriend, John?’

‘She’s engaged to be married. So no. She’s not my girlfriend. Nor is she ever likely to be.’

‘Not for want of trying, I’m sure.’

Hart slid the parchment back inside its protective cover. ‘Not even that. If you knew more about her life, you’d
understand. She’s got no reason to be grateful to men for anything. And certainly not to me. In fact, to all intents and purposes, it was she who saved my life, and not the other way round. If she hadn’t known about the Red Interrogation House, we’d both have been mown down in the street during the first ten minutes of the attack.’

‘So why are you showing me this gobbledegook now?’

‘Because it’s not gobbledegook. Because in it my ancestor talks about a thing called the Copper Scroll. Something historians know for a fact existed, and which was believed by the Templars to hold the key to the secrets of the Temple of Solomon. Also of where to find Solomon’s hidden treasure, with which the Temple was to be funded.’ Hart jabbed his finger at the parchment in frustrated emphasis. He understood exactly who he was dealing with. Amira put work first and relationships second. In that way she was entirely predictable. And doggedly consistent. ‘Johannes von Hartelius knew he was going to die when he wrote this. He had nothing left to lose. So he left this parchment to posterity, knowing it would be sealed inside the Holy Spear by his executioners as a warning to others. In it he tells how he succeeded, where no one else had, in getting the scroll translated by the Yazidis in Lalish. It also tells us how and where he managed to hide it before the Hashshashin got their hands on him.’

‘The Hashshashin? Copper Scrolls? The Yazidis in Lalish? You can’t be fucking serious?’

‘I’m perfectly serious. The scroll, which was considered the greatest treasure of the Templars, went missing in 1198.
Which coincides exactly with the dating of Johannes von Hartelius’s deathbed confession. Boreas 1198.’

‘Boreas? What’s that?’

‘It means winter. Boreas was one of the Anemoi. He was the Greek God of the freezing north wind that heralds winter. His other name was the Devouring One. He had snakes instead of feet, and he conjured up the wind by blowing through a conch shell. They say he could turn himself into a stallion and father colts simply by getting his mares to turn their hindquarters into the wind. Without the actual need for coition, in other words.’

‘Sounds ideal. I wish there were more men like him.’

Hart refused to be derailed. ‘He lived in somewhere called Hyperborea. Which is the place beyond the north wind. A place of exile. A place beyond the pale. Which also happens to be where Hartelius hid the Copper Scroll.’

‘You don’t say.’ Amira rolled her eyes. ‘He hid the Copper Scroll in a place beyond the pale? And it says all that here? On this itsy-bitsy scrap of parchment? Extraordinary.’

Hart threw himself back in his chair. Amira wasn’t the easiest person to convince of anything. Her first instinct, when offered unsolicited information, was to doubt it. It was what made her a first-class journalist. ‘Not the Boreas bit, no. Frau Erlichmann found all that out for me last year. But listen to this. I emailed a photograph of the new text you’ve got in your hands to Frau Erlichmann’s grandson, Thilo, and he took it straight over to his grandmother’s house.’

‘Frau Erlichmann?’

‘Oh come on, Amira. You remember Frau Erlichmann. The old lady who took me under her wing in Germany last year? The one who gave me her father’s malfunctioning First World War pistol? Well, she translated the manuscript for me from the Old German. I received Thilo’s reply containing her translation on the plane coming home. If the scroll is still where Hartelius says he left it, its discovery will be the biggest story since the Dead Sea Scrolls were stumbled upon by three Bedouin shepherds back in 1947.’

‘And where did Hartelius leave it? I assume he went into a little more detail than simply “beyond the pale”?’

Hart laughed. ‘Ah. That’s the tricky bit. He left it in a place called Solomon’s Prison. The Zendan-e Soleyman.’

‘And where’s that? No. Don’t tell me. You haven’t got the faintest idea.’

‘Wrong, Amira. I’ve got a very good idea. It’s a hollow mountain in a precise geographical location. Legend has it that Solomon used it to incarcerate his prisoners – one myth has it that he even imprisoned monsters in there. There’s no way in but over the lip. And then there’s an immediate drop of nearly eight hundred feet to the bottom, which is entirely sealed off by sheer walls. No other way to enter or exit but down the vent. I suppose the prisoners were fed – if they were fed, that is – via a basket let down over the side. I’ve confirmed from the Internet that the mountain really exists. And hardly anyone ever visits it. And no one, as far as I can tell, has ever been allowed to climb down the funnel.’

‘You’re joking. A place like that will be oozing with climbers and risk-takers and pot-holers, or whatever they’re called.’

‘No, it won’t.’

‘So where is it then? Don’t keep me in suspense. North fucking Korea?’

‘No. But you’re closer than you think. It’s on pretty much the same latitude, both politically and geographically. It’s in Iran.’

THIRTY

Amira gave a vehement shake of the head. ‘They don’t let foreign journalists into Iran any more, or hadn’t you heard?’ She stared down at her iPad. ‘Yes. Here it is. Just as I thought. We kicked the Iranians out of their London embassy in November 2011, after the riots in Tehran in which the British Embassy was ransacked. Now any non-journalistic UK citizen who wants to visit Iran has to apply through their Dublin embassy, where they charge Britons a penalty fee of 180 euros apiece just for being British, and go through every application with a fine toothcomb. And if they can find any possible excuse to do so – like an ‘I’m off to your country to plunder the Copper Scrolls from Solomon’s Prison’ declaration – they refuse you an entry visa. According to
gov.uk
, individual travel is discouraged anyway – too difficult for the Iranians to police. And I can’t see you travelling over there with a tourist party, somehow, and breaking away from your group for the afternoon to go clambering down an eight-hundred-foot-deep pothole.’

‘I’m sure I can get around all that.’

‘I’m sure you can, Superman. But you’re forgetting one other thing.’

‘And what’s that?’

‘You’re a celebrity now.’

‘You have to be joking.’

Amira struck her forehead with the heel of her hand. ‘You know, I always forget that you’re not a real journalist, John, but just some snapper who happens to have the word “journalist” tacked onto the end of his job description.’

‘Nicely put.’

‘Your name and face have just been splashed across half the world’s newspapers, or don’t you remember? You killed a suicide bomber, John. It’s something of a one-off. MI6 will probably be waiting at your flat to interview you. In fact I’m stunned they weren’t at the airport to greet you.’

‘You probably scared them off.’

‘Don’t joke about it. It’s something people tend to remember. You’ve no idea of the fuss you caused.’

‘But that was in Iraq, not Iran. Why should the Iranians give a shit about what I did in another country?’

Amira rolled her eyes. ‘Because it is the Iranians who were almost certainly behind the bombing in As Sulaymaniyah.’

Hart blew out his cheeks. In moments like this he wished he had done his homework a little better in terms of filtering through the news – but his profession consisted in supplying images to other people’s content, not in supplying that content himself. That was Amira’s job. ‘How can you be so sure?’

‘Who else wants to undermine the creation of an independent Iraqi Kurdistan?’

‘The Iraqi state?’

‘Hole in one. And the Iraqi state is predominantly made up of Shia Muslims. Same as the Iranian state. And Shia Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia are fighting it out to the death on Iraqi soil for influence and control of the Iraqi oil fields. And where are most of the richest Iraqi oil fields located? In Sunni Kurdistan. And what region, beyond Turkey, has the longest natural border with Iraqi Kurdistan? Iran. So it’s a welcome player in the anti-independent-Kurdistan league.’ Amira drew herself up. She stared across the table at Hart as if she were addressing a madman. ‘If the Iranians so much as sniff the fact that you might be entering their airspace, John, they will unleash their dogs of war. You won’t even make it past the airport transit bus. In my opinion they’ll put you directly on trial as a Western spy. A good show trial always cheers people up. If you’re lucky you’ll get life imprisonment. But I suspect they’ll want to dispose of you quicker than that. Their favourite method these days, as you no doubt know, is hanging enemies of state by crane in a public square.’ She moved behind Hart and yanked at his shirt collar. ‘Go look on Facebook. Or YouTube. You can see lots of clips of recent hangings. It’s not particularly edifying, I can assure you. Wait. Here. I’ll even summon one up for you on my iPad. There’s nothing like a good execution for livening up one’s day.’