The Templar Heresy

30

‘And Plan B is what, exactly?’ Angela asked.

‘Basically,’ Bronson replied, ‘it’s not so much a plan, more like an anti-plan. Instead of doing what they might expect, we do the opposite, and stay unpredictable. I’ve no doubt that Stephen was forced to tell his killers that we planned to drive to England, and if we do that there’s a good chance there’ll be a man with a long rifle waiting for us somewhere near the Channel port or outside your apartment building.’

Angela stared at his profile for a few moments before she spoke.

‘You’re serious? You really think they won’t give up until they’ve killed me?’

Her voice was calm and level, but there was no mistaking the fear that lay behind her simple questions.

‘They massacred a whole camp of people and then had Stephen murdered,’ Bronson said in reply. ‘Italy’s a long way from Iraq, but they had no trouble reaching out and killing him in Milan within just a few hours. So, yes, I’m serious. Mind you,’ he added, ‘we’ve been here before, facing the same kind of threat.’

‘I know,’ Angela said, ‘but when it happened before, at least we had a good idea what the motive was. This time, it just doesn’t make sense. How can the knowledge contained in an inscription carved over half a millennium earlier be so important — or so dangerous — that everybody who sees it ends up dead?’

‘The only way to find out is for you to decipher it,’ Bronson said simply. ‘Do you think your photographs are good enough to let you transcribe the letters and work out what the plaintext says?’

Angela nodded.

‘That wasn’t why I took the pictures,’ she said. ‘At the time, the inscription was just a curiosity, and the photographs were intended to show the entire layout of the underground temple, but they’re certainly clear enough to let me transcribe every character.’

‘I think we should go to ground, lose ourselves completely for a while. Once you’ve worked out the meaning of the inscription, we can decide what to do next.’

‘That won’t get them off our backs, though.’

Bronson nodded. ‘I know. The trouble is that at the moment we have no idea why they want us dead, so what we need more than anything else is information. And pretty much the only source is that inscription. Once we know what it says, we’ll have a better idea why it’s worth killing for and hopefully what we should do about it.’

‘So we just drop off the radar?’

‘Exactly. For the time being, I think that’s our safest course of action. And the first thing we need to do is get rid of this car. If they traced Stephen to his hotel room, there’s no doubt at all that they’ll know about this vehicle.’

A few minutes later they reached the Auxerre-Sud junction of the Autoroute du Soleil, and Bronson steered the car down the off ramp. Auxerre wasn’t a huge town, but it was big enough to have a number of vehicle hire agencies and, luckily, one of them was the same company that they had approached in Milan. He handed over the vehicle, explaining to the counter clerk that they had changed their plans and were now going to take a train to Paris and then fly to London from there. That, he hoped, would help muddy the waters if their anonymous pursuers managed to track them to that agency.

About a quarter of an hour later they sat down at an outside table at a pavement café, their bags tucked against the wall behind them, and ordered the menu of the day, plus a coffee for Bronson because he was going to be driving, and a large gin and tonic for Angela because she looked like she needed it.

‘So we’ve got rid of the car,’ Angela said, taking a long swallow. ‘What next?’

‘We max out our credit cards, draw as much cash as we can. With the resources these people seem to have, I’ve no doubt they’ll be able to pinpoint our location if we pay hotel bills with cards, so we need the cash if we’re going to stay out of sight. Out of electronic sight, I mean. Then we find ourselves another car, hopefully from a small agency.’

‘We’ll have to use a card for that,’ Angela pointed out, ‘unless the rules have changed.’

‘I know, but there’s nothing we can do about it. But it will take them time to find out what we did after we handed back the first car, and even if they get the details of our new vehicle, France is a really big country and finding us won’t be easy. We’ll make sure of that. And then we disappear. Just take a look at the map and pick somewhere at random. Find a hotel and get started deciphering the inscription as soon as we can.’

‘Okay. A hotel would be helpful because I’m going to need the Internet. My Latin isn’t too bad, but I’ll need some pointers about deciphering the text. I’m not an expert in cryptography.’

They left Auxerre in a small and anonymous three-year-old Citroën a little over two hours later, having raided the ATMs and drawn out a couple of thousand euros between them. Their natural inclination was to head towards Paris and the Channel ports, but that was probably what anybody trying to follow them would assume they’d do, so instead Bronson steered the dark blue C3 south-east, following a road that more or less paralleled the autoroute, and taking turnings as and when he felt like it.

‘Do you know where we’re going?’ Angela asked.

Bronson shook his head.

‘No, and that’s the point. If I don’t know where we’re going, nor will anybody else. What I want to do is put about thirty miles between us and Auxerre, because that will create a huge search area for someone trying to find us.’

Around three-quarters of an hour later, he steered the Citroën into the car park of a hotel lying just off the Route de Paris on the outskirts of Avallon and not too far from the local airport. The parking was behind the building, which meant that the car would be out of sight of the road, and a large sign beside the main entrance extolled the virtues and facilities of the premises. These included the obvious essentials like en suite bathrooms and central heating, but also advertised coffee-making facilities in each room and, in quite large letters, free Wi-Fi.

The proprietors only spoke basic English, but Bronson’s French was more than up to the task, and they chose a double room on the first floor overlooking the road.

‘Are you sure about the double?’ Bronson had asked, somewhat surprised at Angela’s insistence. Their relationship was still somewhat fragile and sharing a room was unusual rather than normal.

‘Just book it before I change my mind,’ Angela had replied. ‘It’s going to attract a lot less attention. And after what we’ve been through in the last day or so, I don’t think I want to be on my own.’

In the hotel room, Angela immediately opened up her computer and navigated to the folder containing the photographs of the inscription.

Bronson sat beside her as she studied the pictures she’d taken.

‘It really isn’t what I expected,’ Bronson said, staring at the image on the screen. It was many times larger than the small image he’d previously looked at on her camera, and he could see the inscription clearly for the first time. ‘I’d envisaged a neat carving, maybe inside a shield or escutcheon, something like that. But that just looks so crude.’

The image showed a flat area of rock, brilliantly illuminated by the flash from the camera and on which every detail stood out clearly. There was a roughly carved border around the outside of the text, and the incised letters were carved in a simple and basic fashion with no attempt at ornamentation of any sort. It looked as if the carving had been done in a hurry by somebody whose only aim had been to ensure that the individual letters were perfectly readable.

‘That’s one of the things that struck us about it as well,’ Angela said. ‘We came to the conclusion, maybe wrongly, that the inscription was a copy of something else. Maybe a piece of text written on a parchment or something of that sort, and the inscription was just intended to be a permanent record.’

‘In other words, it’s not the inscription that’s important, it’s the message. It’s the information, rather than the form in which that information is conveyed.’

Angela nodded. ‘Exactly. Now, I think the easiest way to tackle this is for you to take a pencil and paper and copy down the inscription as I read it out, letter by letter. Once we’ve done that, I can try to work out how the encryption was done.’

Bronson opened his own computer bag and took out what he needed, then sat at the other end of the small desk in the room and wrote down each letter as Angela read it out from the image on the screen. It wasn’t a large piece of text, and it didn’t take long for Angela to finish. There were a few instances where extra clarity was needed, and on these she looked at different pictures of the inscription until she was satisfied that she had correctly read every single letter.

‘And I suppose that,’ Bronson said, putting down the pencil he’d been using, ‘was the easy bit.’

‘Correct.’

An hour or so later, Angela had followed the same logical process as Khaled had done hours before and had in front of her a new version of the inscription, produced not by any form of Atbash but simply by frequency analysis.

She was staring at it, her head in her hands.

‘I must be missing something,’ she said. ‘This looks almost right, but it just doesn’t make sense.’ She pointed at one section of the text. ‘It still looks like gobble-degook, but less obscure, somehow.’

Bronson walked over to the side of the room and made a couple of cups of coffee, then returned to the desk and put one of the cups in front of her.

‘It’ll come to you,’ he said confidently. ‘I know you. You’ll keep going backwards and forwards over this until you finally crack it.’

Angela suddenly stiffened.

‘Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings,’ she murmured, grabbing another piece of paper.