The Templar Heresy

46

‘So what bit of the Latin do you think we got wrong, bearing in mind that these other people have obviously done exactly the same decryption and translation, and you met them right under the Temple Mount, precisely where you were going to search? We all came to the same conclusion, so is it really very likely that we all got it wrong?’

Angela didn’t sound at all convinced that Bronson was on the right track.

‘It’s not so much that we got it wrong,’ he replied, ‘more that we didn’t look at the complete sentence and fully understand what it’s actually saying.’

He took the piece of paper that Angela had used to translate the decrypted Latin, and pointed at one particular section of it.

‘Here,’ he said, ‘we decided this meant something like “in the hall under the lost temple where the treasure was concealed the key shall remain for ever”. In other words, we assumed that the key was actually in the same place that the hoard or the treasure or whatever it is had been hidden, but when you translated the full sentence, the first few words give it a slightly different slant. Now it reads more like “within the walls around the hall”, and that means—’

‘I see what you’re driving at,’ Angela interrupted. ‘It doesn’t say that the key is in the hall itself but on the walls outside it. But I’m still not sure how that helps us. Surely the walls that it’s referring to must be the supporting walls built by Herod around Mount Moriah, the supporting walls for the Temple Mount? And, more significantly, the walls that you looked at for about half a minute or maybe just a little longer and decided were unmarked.’

Bronson nodded.

‘You could be right,’ he agreed equably, ‘and if you are, that’s pretty much the end of this search. But usually, where you get one piece of graffiti, even mediaeval graffiti, you get lots, and I saw nothing at all on those stones. But there are lots of marks inside the Western Wall Tunnel, and that would also very obviously be one of the walls that surrounded the inner hall, which means it could fit the description. So maybe that’s where the key is actually carved, and we simply missed it when we did the tour. Because of what happened last night, the facility is obviously going to remain closed for a day or two at least so we can’t look there again. But I’m hoping that shouldn’t matter, because both of us took dozens of photographs of anything that looked even vaguely hopeful. What I mean is that we might already have an image of the clue we’re looking for.’

Angela groaned.

‘I’ve only looked at those pictures once but I’m fed up to the back teeth with them already.’

‘I know,’ Bronson said, with a slight smile, ‘but just look on the bright side.’

‘There’s a bright side?’

‘Kind of. This really has to be it. If we don’t find anything in those photographs then we give up, get out of here, go home and hope we can keep one step ahead of the bad guys.’

‘That doesn’t really sound like too much of an option. Or much of a bright side.’

‘I’m sorry, but it’s the only one I’ve got,’ Bronson said, opening his own netbook and navigating to the pictures folder that he’d used to store the digital photographs that he’d taken.

Angela somewhat reluctantly opened up her laptop to do the same.

‘Bearing in mind we’ve gone through all these once already, what are we looking for this time that’s different?’ she asked.

‘There were certain characteristics in the original inscription,’ Bronson replied, ‘like the font, if you like, the way the letters themselves were shaped and carved. And that horizontal line of crosses that divided the bit that we could decipher at the top from the bit we couldn’t at the bottom. Whoever carved that first inscription must have known about the key, obviously, and there would have been no point in carving the first inscription unless it was intended that the second one, the key, could be found. My guess is he might have included some kind of recognition symbol, maybe like those crosses, or perhaps just the shape and character of the letters themselves, so look at anything that seems even vaguely familiar.’

It took them most of the rest of the morning, but eventually Angela thought she’d found what they were looking for. It wasn’t a line of crosses, or even a marked similarity in the style of carving, but it was something she thought she recognized.

‘This must be it,’ she said, and Bronson immediately stood up and walked over to look at the screen.

‘What?’ he asked. ‘What can you see?’

She traced a more or less vertical oval outline with her finger in the centre of the screen, and suddenly Bronson saw it too.

‘The bearded man,’ he said. ‘Just like the image carved above the altar in your underground temple.’

Angela smiled at him.

‘The flash caught it just right,’ she said. ‘And this shot shows what’s been carved below it. The trouble is, I don’t really see how it helps us.’

She clicked the left-hand button below the mouse-pad and a different picture replaced it on the screen.

They both stared at it in silence. The carved image of the bearded man had been reproduced almost exactly, although obviously on a much smaller scale. In a horizontal line underneath the image were eight letters, carved into two groups of three and five and separated by a distinct space:

‘Well, that’s made everything as clear as mud,’ Bronson said. ‘What the hell does that mean?’

‘What we need,’ Angela murmured reflectively, ‘assuming that the second part of the inscription was also enciphered using Atbash with the addition of extra words, like the first part, is those words. Tacking these collections of letters on to the beginning and end of the alphabet simply wouldn’t be enough, not least because it’s actually only five new letters. If that were the case, we’d have cracked the decryption using frequency analysis. The only way this could possibly be the key is if both those collections of letters are abbreviations for much longer expressions that would add the right level of complication. And that does kind of make me wonder,’ she added.

‘Wonder what?’ Bronson asked.

‘Just give me a minute.’ Angela began rooting around among the sheets of paper they’d used when deciphering the first part of the inscription. ‘I think it might be instructive to do some reverse engineering.’

‘And that means what?’

‘If we can find out what words must have been added to the standard alphabet to add the level of complication that we encountered on that first cipher, then maybe that will give us a clue to identify the expressions these letters are meant to represent.’

It didn’t take all that long, despite the amount of trial and error involved, and within fifteen minutes Angela wrote two words down on a fresh piece of paper and handed it to Bronson. He looked at it blankly.

‘Now I think we really are getting somewhere,’ Angela said, a smile of anticipation on her face.

‘You may be getting somewhere, Angela,’ Bronson said, ‘but you’ve left me behind choking in the dust. This means nothing to me at all.’

She stood up and stretched, turning her back to the window, the sun pouring through it turning her hair into a halo of gold.

‘Then it’s just as well that it does to me,’ she said.