The Templar Heresy

4

‘Is this what you expected, Khaled?’ Farooq asked.

He and the man in the white suit were standing side by side in the underground chamber, the powerful arc lights switched on and casting a pitiless white light that illuminated every corner of the space. Faintly, in the background, they could hear the throb of the petrol generator that was supplying the power.

Khaled stared at the carved inscription, nodding slowly. ‘We will need to decipher this, but I have no doubt at all it will provide the information we need to track down the relic.’

‘But you can’t know that for certain,’ Farooq pointed out reasonably, ‘until you have decoded the inscription.’

In Farooq’s case, appearances were more than slightly deceptive. He looked and dressed like the leader of a gang of terrorists, which to all intents and purposes he was, but he was also a highly educated man, possessing two separate degrees from a Middle Eastern university. And he was, just like Osama bin Laden — the man who had first inspired him to take up arms in the service of radical Islam — the product of a wealthy and respected Saudi Arabian family. Khaled, who also had two degrees — and a doctorate — was by no stretch of the imagination a man of violence, though he was more than capable of ordering it when necessary. As such he treated Farooq as an equal.

‘This is my business, Farooq, and I have been waiting for something like this to be discovered somewhere in this area for the last two decades. I know that we can’t read the inscription — yet — but the fact that the inscription exists at all, and in such close proximity to that face’ — he pointed at the carving above the altar at the other end of the room — ‘tells me that I’m right.’

He reached into his pocket and took out a compact but high-resolution camera. He aimed it at the carved inscription and snapped about a dozen photographs, checking each image in the camera’s viewing screen after he had taken it.

Then he and Farooq climbed up the aluminium ladder back to the surface. Khaled strode over to the jeep in which he’d arrived, opened the rear door and sat down on the seat. Positioned right in the middle of the rear bench seat was a leather computer case, which he unzipped. He took out a slim laptop computer, opened it and pressed the power button. While he was waiting for the operating system to load, he slid open the memory card slot on the camera and pulled out the data card. He slid the card into the card reader on the laptop and examined the photographs that he had taken. He was only interested in the clarity of the images, and checked each one carefully to make sure that every piece, every single letter, of the inscription was clearly visible.

He copied the images on to the laptop’s hard disk, but didn’t delete them from the camera’s data card, and then made a further backup copy on to a separate memory stick that he put in one of the pockets of his jacket. That gave him three separate and identical copies of the images, so even if some catastrophe resulted in both the computer and the camera being lost or destroyed, he would still have one copy left.

He shut the lid of the laptop and slid it back into the case, then climbed back out of the jeep and rejoined Farooq by the ladder.

‘The pictures are good enough?’ the younger man asked.

‘They’re very clear. So now we just need to get rid of it. This is our information, and I’m not willing to risk sharing it.’

Farooq nodded, and waved to one of his men, who immediately jogged over. Farooq murmured his instructions, and the man pulled a broad-bladed cold steel chisel and a hammer from a fabric bag he had slung over his shoulder.

The man glanced at Khaled, apparently seeking final confirmation for what he was going to do and then, as Khaled nodded, he strode over to the aluminium ladder and descended into the underground temple.

Farooq issued another instruction, and the generator sprang back into life, illuminating the lights inside the chamber.

Within seconds, the sound of steel on stone became clearly audible as Farooq’s man began carefully chipping every last vestige of the inscription off the wall. It wasn’t a particularly long inscription, and within about a quarter of an hour he had completed the task and emerged from the temple.

Both Khaled and Farooq climbed down again to inspect what he had done. The section of the wall where the letters had been carved was now completely blank and featureless, with no indication at all — apart from a few barely visible chisel marks — that there had ever been anything displayed there.

Khaled glanced down at the small pile of stone chippings that lay on the floor of the temple underneath that section of the wall.

‘One last thing,’ he said. ‘Get somebody to sweep up all those and then dump them.’

‘You really think that’s necessary?’ Farooq asked. ‘I doubt anybody could reconstruct the carving from those few bits of stone.’

‘It’s not worth taking the chance. I want the evidence gone. And have your men go through every tent in this camp to collect all the computers, cameras, disks and memory sticks, just in case any of the archaeologists took photographs in the underground chamber. Tell them to put them all in the back of my jeep.’

Ten minutes later, the stone chippings had been collected and then scattered at random around the site, joining a myriad other small pieces of stone, and every piece of electronic equipment in the place had been collected. Now they were all ready to leave. Farooq ordered his men to climb up into their trucks, and then those two vehicles started up and drove slowly away from the encampment.

Khaled waited until his driver started the engine — and hence the air-conditioning — of his 4x4 vehicle before he climbed into the back. Once seated, and with the temperature inside the vehicle dropping steadily, he opened the computer bag, took out the laptop and began studying the pictures that he had taken.

The driver turned the jeep around and drove back out of the encampment the same way they had arrived. He looked incuriously at the bullet-ridden corpses, their clothes blotched with starlet stains, that lay scattered about the area.

But Khaled, sitting in the back seat, didn’t so much as glance at the bodies. He was entirely focused on the images on his computer screen.