The Templar Heresy

7

Angela tucked the car out of sight among the uneven dunes and dips that surrounded the camp, and turned it around to face away from the tents, as Bronson had suggested.

‘Until we know what’s going on here we should try to stay out of sight. We need to know we can get in that vehicle and then get out of here really fast if needs be,’ he’d explained.

Only then had the three of them approached the silent encampment. Both Angela and Stephen had wanted to rush in there straight away, but Bronson had urged caution, suggesting that they should conceal themselves in a patch of sparse vegetation about a hundred yards from the tents and try to work out what, if any, danger lay ahead.

They had no idea what had happened in the camp, but the unmoving shapes they could now see on the ground — many of them surrounded by groups of squabbling black birds — indicated that something catastrophic had taken place.

So for several minutes they just watched and waited.

‘We have to get in there right now and find out what’s happened,’ Stephen said, his voice cracking with emotion. ‘We can’t just wait out here. We have to go and help them.’

He made as if to rise, but Bronson placed a firm hand on his shoulder and forced him to remain still.

‘Not yet. Can you both take a look at the camp and tell me what, if anything, looks out of place there. Have any of the tents been moved? Are any missing?’

‘It looks just the same to me,’ Angela stammered.

‘What about the vehicles?’ Bronson asked. ‘Is there an extra truck or anything parked next to your 4x4s? Or anywhere else.’

But neither Angela nor Stephen could see any vehicles they didn’t recognize, and after another couple of minutes of seemingly interminable waiting, Bronson finally stood up and led the way towards the camp to investigate what had happened.

Even so, they still approached very cautiously, and from slightly different directions so that they wouldn’t form such an obvious target as a group. But they saw nothing, and heard nothing, no indication at all of any movement in the camp. And then the reality became obvious, and the thing they had all dreaded revealed itself, as they stopped right beside one of the unmoving shapes.

‘Dear God,’ Angela gasped and clapped her hand to her face. She looked down at the body lying face down on the rocky ground, the man’s back marked by at least four bullet wounds, the corpse surrounded by a pool of dried blood. ‘Mohammed. I can’t believe it. Oh my God.’

Bronson shook his head and took her arm, trying to turn her away from the corpse.

‘You can’t do anything for him now,’ he said. ‘Or for any of them, I’m afraid.’

She bent down and stretched out her shaking hand, but Bronson stopped her with a command.

‘Don’t touch him. He’s dead, Angela. Don’t touch anything. Either of you. I know it’s hard to think like this right now, but this is a crime scene. What communication equipment do you have here?’

Angela just stared blankly ahead, clearly in shock as her mind struggled to process what her eyes were seeing.

Stephen’s face was white and his breathing shallow. He, too, seemed unable to speak, but after a moment he turned to Bronson.

‘There’s a satellite phone,’ he said, a tremor audible in his flat, expressionless voice.

‘Right,’ Bronson said. ‘You two wait over there — stay away from this body. I have no idea how thoroughly or efficiently the Baghdad police will investigate this, but we must avoid doing anything to contaminate the scene. And we must let the authorities know what’s happened out here. I’m going to check the rest of the camp to see if anyone has survived. Look after each other for a moment.’

It took him less than five minutes to confirm that every single member of the expedition was dead, and had been for at least a couple of hours, judging by the dried blood that surrounded the corpses. Each body displayed multiple bullet wounds, and some of them had clearly been shot by more than one weapon.

Bronson stopped by one body and looked down at it with a mixture of disgust and horror; even with his police background this was a sight that turned his stomach.

The wounds on this man, and the method of his death, were very different, as the sightless eyes in his severed head stared unblinkingly across the blood-soaked sands.

Bronson counted the bodies as he made his way around the encampment, trying to use his training as a police officer to think logically and work out what must have happened. Most of the corpses were lying close together in one particular area, while the body of the man Angela had identified as Mohammed and that of one of the younger Iraqi archaeologists were lying some distance away. After circling the camp, Bronson walked back over to where Angela and Stephen were waiting, the heaviness in his step making it clear that he had no good news for them. Stephen had his arm wrapped around Angela, trying to comfort her as they both struggled to deal with the shock of it. As Bronson approached, she looked up at him, an unspoken question in her eyes.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It was a massacre. The whole camp. And it wasn’t random — this looks like a targeted terrorist attack.’

‘Terrorists?’ Stephen Taverner asked. ‘You think terrorists did this? Why? This was an archaeological dig.’

Previously, his voice had been quiet and subdued, but the initial horror of their discovery had been replaced by a surge of anger. Anger tinged with the inescapable knowledge that he himself would certainly have been killed if he’d been in the camp when the attack took place — knowledge that would weigh heavily upon anyone’s mind.

‘I think Mohammed and one of the other men probably tried to make a run for it, and were shot down while they were trying to get away,’ Bronson said sadly. ‘Whoever did this really didn’t care about leaving evidence behind them. Every fired cartridge case and every bullet that the authorities manage to recover from the bodies can be positively linked to a particular weapon. So that means that either these killers think they’re above the law or, more likely, they’re a bunch of terrorists and they know that they’ll never be brought to justice because they expect to die fighting, so they don’t care. The vast majority of the shots seem to have been fired from Kalashnikov AK-47s, judging by the spent cartridge cases I’ve seen. And that assault rifle is the weapon of choice for most terrorists around the world, because it’s cheap, readily available and keeps on working pretty much no matter what you do to it.

‘From what I’ve seen so far,’ he continued, his voice laced with anger, ‘I think that’s the most likely scenario. There are four virtually brand-new Toyota Land Cruisers parked over there. If this had been a robbery of some sort, why wouldn’t the thieves have taken them? I’m prepared to bet that when we check the tents we’ll find that all the valuable stuff is still there. To come here, kill everybody and then just vanish back into the desert only really makes sense in two contexts. One possibility is that this was a straightforward terrorist atrocity, a group of Westerners and locals being identified and then targeted by a death squad to make a point to the world, just another unprovoked act of senseless violence and terror. The kind of action that’s intended to make headlines around the world. But as this place is in the middle of nowhere it seems unlikely.’

‘And what’s the other option?’ Stephen asked.

Bronson shrugged.

‘The only other idea I’ve got is that the archaeologists were targeted by some group because of something specific at this dig. Something you’ve discovered.’

‘But… we hadn’t really found…’ Angela trailed off.

‘I know. That’s what I mean. If that temple had been stuffed to the rafters with solid-gold relics studded with precious stones worth countless millions, then wiping out the people who discovered it and making off with the booty would make a certain amount of twisted sense. But I can’t see anybody murdering every man in this group of archaeologists because they’d stumbled across an empty underground chamber. That’s simply ridiculous. We’re missing something here. Let’s check the tents.’

Angela led the way to Mohammed’s tent. All of the archaeologists had been accommodated two to a tent apart from Angela, as the only female, and Mohammed, the most senior.

In the space that in the other tents would have been occupied by a single campbed, Mohammed had a slim desk, the top covered in a layer of folders, paper and pens, held down by the chunky shape of a satellite phone, and with a stainless-steel Rolex watch sitting at one end of it. That, as much as anything else, was confirmation that robbery had not been the motive of the unknown attackers.

‘Is anything missing?’ Bronson asked.

‘His computer and camera aren’t here,’ Angela said.

‘Would he have worked on his laptop somewhere else?’ Bronson asked.

‘I doubt it. That’s why he had this two-man tent all to himself, so that he could work in here. I never saw him take the computer anywhere else. Apart from anything else, it’s virtually impossible to see anything on a laptop screen in sunlight. We did all the work on our laptops in our tents.’

‘Okay. At least the phone is here, though.’ Bronson turned to Stephen. ‘While Angela makes the call, could you just check the other tents and see if all the other archaeologists have still got their laptops, cameras, watches and stuff?’

Stephen nodded agreement and walked away.

Angela glanced across at Bronson before she picked up the satellite phone, but he nodded for her to do so.

‘Go ahead,’ he said. ‘This isn’t a part of the crime scene, not really, and whatever else we do, we have to call this in. Do you know what the number is?’

Angela pointed at a printed list suspended by a length of string from part of the framework of the tent.

‘Mohammed prepared this before we even set out to drive here. It’s got every number that he thought we might need, including most of the British Embassy and consular officials based in this region.’

‘It might be worth talking to them later, but for the moment just tell the police in Baghdad. I know Kuwait City is a lot closer, but jurisdictions will be important in this, and I’m quite sure that the Baghdad authorities will want to take the lead.’

Angela dialled the number from the list and, after speaking slowly and clearly to a succession of people who obviously understood little or no English, she was finally put through to somebody who could speak her language. She was good in a crisis, and explained succinctly what had happened, and then listened to the instructions given by the Iraqi officer. Then she ended the call.

‘I presume he told us to wait here for them to arrive?’ Bronson asked.

‘Exactly, yes. And not to disturb the scene, just as you said. I suppose we really ought to tell the people at the Baghdad and Kuwait City Museums as soon as we can.’

‘I don’t think that’s a good idea at the moment. Our only link to the outside world is that sat phone, and we really shouldn’t use it in case the police want to contact us for any reason. Anyway, the Baghdad authorities will want to decide who needs to be told about this and when.’

‘So what should we do now?’

‘There’s not a lot we can do, but if we can find some blankets or something I’ll cover the corpses, if only to try to give these people a bit of dignity.’

Stephen reappeared while they were sorting out sheets and other coverings to use.

‘There’s not a single laptop, memory stick, tablet, mobile phone or camera anywhere here, as far as I can see,’ he said. ‘But they seem to be the only things missing. That doesn’t really make sense.’

‘You’re right,’ Bronson agreed. ‘It doesn’t.’