Hell Ship (20 page)

“I understand.
I’ll make my way back by the best route possible. Maddock, out.” He hung up without letting Maxie ask him to explain what he meant by “best route.” Dane’s best route would neither be the quickest, nor the most direct.

England

Although Hancock Manor
had most certainly entered the twilight of its prosperity, it was currently in the midst of a modest surge in activity. Outwardly, it did not look much different than when Alex had first walked up the drive almost a week earlier, but there were three cars parked near the main entrance and lights were burning in several of the rooms on both the ground and upper stories.

“I think we’re expected,”
Alex remarked, staring out from the cover of the tree line, more than half a kilometer away.

“They’re expecting somebody,”
agreed Dane, as he swept the grounds with a pair of binoculars. “They know that people are actively looking for their treasure, and they control access to the map.”

“Do you think Ray has been here already?”

That was the question that preoccupied Dane’s thoughts during their journey from Hong Kong to London.

It had been a long
, expensive and time consuming journey. Dane had almost completely exhausted his supply of cash. He didn’t even bother with the money belt; the remaining bills fit easily into the wallet he’d bought to hold his newly acquired driver’s license and credit cards—the license was an expert forgery and the credit cards issued to his alias had only a token amount of available credit, just enough to pass the registration process at a hotel or car rental agency. Their false identities had been easily enough procured in Hong Kong, where the business of creating such documents for Chinese nationals hoping to escape the island colony before the British government returned it to China before the end of the century, was booming. Just like with Chinese food, you could get it fast, cheap, or good, but not all three. They needed documents that would stand up to close scrutiny and they needed them in a hurry, so…they paid. Their standby plane tickets had been less expensive, and perhaps more discreet than rushing out on the first available plane, but the trade-off had been another full day lost.

Ray was now at least three days ahead of them.
If he had visited the chapel, perhaps without attracting the attention of the Gatekeepers, then he might already have found the treasure vault. Dane left Alex’s question unanswered.

With dusk deepening around them, they crept through the woods toward the hill which concealed the entrance to the Templar chapel.
Bones had scouted ahead, channeling the woodcraft of his Cherokee ancestors, and moving with complete stealth despite his size. Dane and Bones each carried a small walkie-talkie, with an ear bud and lip mic to minimize noise, and Bones had reported seeing a foot patrol, in the form of a game-keeper walking an old hound, but there was no sign of permanent surveillance in the area. That left Dane with an uneasy feeling, however there was no putting off what had to be done.

He keyed the mic.
“We’re moving. If anyone comes along, make a ruckus.” He knew from experience that a radio signal probably wouldn’t work once they were underground.

There was a scritch of static and Bones soft answer.
“Roger.”

Dane took
Alex’s hand and led her out of the woods. The covering rock had been rolled back into place and he took a moment to inspect it, ensuring that no booby traps or motion sensors had been placed beneath, before rolling it out of the way.

So far, so good.

He lowered himself inside and lit their way with a red-hooded Mini MagLite. Alex was similarly equipped and they moved through the passage much more quickly than they had during their earlier escape.

The red lights added to the surreal atmosphere of the chapel, giving the decorations an almost hellish cast.
Dane took out two metal triangles, identical to each other and hopefully to the medallion he’d found with Trevor Hancock’s remains, except for the fact that these facsimiles were made of copper instead of alloyed gold. Dane had even used an iron stylus to inscribe approximations of the Templar cross on the original, and drilled through each to simulate the nail hole that had been used to affix the medallion to Trevor Hancock’s skull.

He passed one to
Alex and they both commenced slotting their respective triangles into the sigils adorning the chapel ceiling. There were over a hundred of the symbol groupings, and an unusually high proportion included triangles, so Dane was a little surprised when, after only five minutes of searching, Alex let out a cry of triumph.

“Got it!”

He hurried over to inspect her discovery. She held her triangle in place at a point on the map that corresponded to a location in the middle of Western Europe, northwest of the distinctive boot-shape of Italy. “Where is that?”

“Do I look like a Jeopardy champion?” she retorted, playfully.
“My focus is Twentieth Century American history, not geography. I found it, you figure it out.”

He grinned, consulting his woefully incomplete mental atlas of the world as he studied the surrounding areas on the map.
There were no political boundaries, not even those that would have been in use at the time the map was created, nor were there any marking to indicate city names. Some of the sigils however did mark places that were instantly recognizable.

“Okay, we’ve got Italy here.”
He pointed to a sigil near the midpoint of the peninsula. “That’s Rome, so we have a point of reference. Over here…” He touched another point that was almost the same distance from their target along a not-quite straight line to the northwest. “I think this is Paris. So our treasure lies roughly at the midpoint between Rome and Paris. Northern Italy or Southern France?” He snapped his fingers. “It’s in the Alps.”

“Don’t forget Switzerland, Germany, Austria—”

“Oh, so now you’re a geography whiz?” Dane shook his head. “Well, we’re not going to be able to pin it down without a current map. We can measure the distances on this map and then triangulate.”

“I forgot to pack my ruler.”

“Me too.” Dane quickly inventoried what they did have that he might be able to use to mark the distances. “Maybe I can cut some strips of fabric off my shirt, tie them together into a field expedient tape measure.”

“Save your shirt.”
Alex pointed to the cloth covering the altar. “Use that.”

“Nice.”
Dane flicked open the blade of his folding knife and commenced sawing at the flowing white shroud, cutting two long strips. He had Alex hold the end of one at the spot where Rome was situated, and then cut the other end so that it perfectly spanned the distance between the two cities. He then used the second strip to measure the distance from the target to each of the other cities.

As she watched him perform the latter operation,
Alex said, “How is this supposed to work?”

“The distance between Rome and
Paris is a constant. Sort of. There will be some wiggle room, but if we get the actual distance between the two cities, then we’ll be able to establish the scale of the map. That line forms the base of a triangle, and our treasure vault is at the top. We’ll know the distance of the sides of the triangle, and since it is a triangle, there’s only one spot where those lines will intersect.”

“Maybe you should go on Jeopardy.”

“Nice.” He stuffed the strips in his pocket. “We’re done here. Next stop...” He pointed to the sigil. “There.”

“There” turned out
to be somewhere in the vicinity of Bern, Switzerland. Based on uncertainties about the specific locations shown on the chapel ceiling, inaccuracies in the map itself, and of course, minor errors in his measurements, Dane figured a margin of error of about twenty miles, which meant that identifying the correct sigil on the map had not narrowed the search down nearly as much as they had hoped. This fact did not become apparent until after their undetected second escape from the Gatekeepers’ chapel, as they gathered in their shared London hotel room to pore over a stack of tourist guides to the famously neutral Alpine country along with a few Templar histories which ranged from dryly accurate to ridiculously sensational.

“
Where’s Professor when we need him?” said Bones, looking up from a Lonely Planet guide. “Remind me. When were the Templars…umm…around?”

“They wer
e active from about 1120 to 1312,” said Alex. “Why?”

“Because acc
ording to this, the city of Bern didn’t even exist until the year 1191.”

“Let me see that
.” Alex slid next to him and read the paragraph from which Bones had taken his information. When she was done, she offered her unenthusiastic conclusion. “The city did exist in the Templar period, but you’re right that it would have been a very small spot on the map of the Templars’ world.”

“
Did you know,” intoned Dane, reading from a different guide, “that Switzerland didn’t really even exist until the end of the Thirteenth Century…just a few years before the Templars were destroyed. Before that, it was a bunch of isolated independent city states. But in 1291, those independent states formed the confederacy that eventually became the nation of Switzerland. Here’s the interesting part. During the Fourteenth Century, this confederation successfully fought to become independent of the Habsburg Empire. They won several major battles, and according to some accounts, they were assisted by an army of foreign knights who wore white coats.”

“
White coats,” muttered Bones. “Somebody has a hero complex.”

Alex
shook her head. “Coats refers to their coat-of-arms. A white coat would indicate that they were landless knights, with no property or allegiance.”

“Mercenaries?”

“Or Templars on the run,” said Dane. “Think about it. The Templars must have known that their days were numbered. You can’t get that powerful and wealthy and not have enemies. So in 1291, the Templars establish a secret headquarters in Switzerland—near the city of Bern—and began transferring some of their wealth there. When the Church moves against the Templars, they flee France and head into Switzerland where they begin slowly establishing a new country, a country that even today is famous for three things.”

Bones began ticking items off on his fingers.
“Hot cocoa, army knives…and um, oh, I know this one… cheese!”

Dane grinned.
“Close. I was thinking banking, engineering, and secrecy. Things that the Templars were also famous for. It makes perfect sense. The proof is right there on the Swiss flag.” He picked up a guide book and pointed to the distinctive white cross on a background of red. “It’s the reverse of the Templar Cross.”

“I’d hardly call that proof,” countered
Alex. “Crosses are everywhere. Next you’re going to tell me that the International Red Cross is a Templar front.”

“Well, they are headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland.”

Alex covered her ears. “Not listening.”

Dane grinned.
“Look, I don’t know whether any of this is true, but you and I both saw that mark on the chapel map, corresponding to Bern, Switzerland. That’s where we have to go next. The only question is, what do we do once we get there? There aren’t any sites that are known to have a connection to the Templars, but there are plenty of old castles and other buildings that date back to the period. How do we tighten our focus?”

“Another needle in a haystack,” grumbled
Bones. But then he abruptly looked up from his guide book. “Speaking of haystacks… give me one of those triangles.”

Dane tossed the copper reproduction to Bones and then crossed the room to peer over his shoulder as Bones held the medallion out in front him, moving it back and forth as if trying to bring something into focus.
Dane realized that what he was actually doing was using the triangle to eclipse part of a photograph on the page before him.

The photograph showed a lake at sunset, and in the background, a mountain peak that rose to an almost unnaturally well-defined triangle
point; a perfectly match with the shape of the medallion.

Inspired, Dane took out his Mini MagLite, flipped off the red lens filter, and held it above the triangle.
A tiny spot of light shone through the hole at the center of the cross and illuminated a point on the photograph.

“X marks the spot,” he announced.
“Haystack, meet needle.”

Switzerland

John Lee Ray
had long wondered at the inclusion of Bern on the chapel map. His extensive research into actual and suspected Templar refuge sites had uncovered a great deal of circumstantial evidence to support the idea that the Swiss Confederation had been a bold move on the part of the Templars to establish their own independent state in Europe. The timing was too perfect to be coincidence.

The decline of the order had begun in 1291, with the fall of the Templar stronghold of Acre in Palestine
. The campaign to take back the Holy Lands was the very essence of the Templar mission, and despite their many successes, the ultimate defeat of Christian forces under Templar leadership had left them vulnerable. That was very year that the cantons and city-states of the remote mountain region east of France had united to fight for an existence independent of the European monarchies.