Saint and the Templar Treasure (22 page)

Judging his moment with the timing of an actor, Simon tapped him on the shoulder.

“Priez Dieu que tous nous vueille absouldre,” he said sepul-chrally.

It is physically impossible to jump out of one’s skin, but Louis Norbert made the best attempt that the Saint had ever seen. His whole body jerked so violently that the flashlight flew from his hand. He whirled around but the Saint was no longer there. Simon side-stepped, picked up the torch, and shone it straight into the professor’s ashen face.

“Bon soir, maitre. How nice of you to drop in.”

“Templar!” Norbert gasped the name.

“Who were you expecting? Turn around slowly and raise your hands.”

“Why?” Norbert sounded genuinely puzzled.

“Because I’m getting cautious in my old age,” the Saint explained patiently, but with an edge to his voice that told the professor it would be wise to obey.

Norbert did as he was told and the Saint ran an expert hand over him.

“Excuse my suspicions, but one can’t be too careful,” he remarked when he was satisfied that the most dangerous weapon the professor possessed was a fountain pen. “Now let’s have more light on the subject.”

He moved across the crypt and switched on the lamps. He leant against one of the columns and eyed the professor thoughtfully. Norbert was staring at the casket.

“You have been reading the scroll?” he asked.

“I was trying to, but it’s all Greek to me.”

Norbert appeared too relieved to enjoy the joke and was in a hurry to change the subject.

“How did you get in here?”

Simon indicated the locked door.

“Through there. Hecate let me in, and I just followed my nose.”

“You found the tunnel yourself?”

“Purely by luck—but whether it was good or bad remains to be seen,” replied the Saint. He pointed towards the parchment. “What do you know about that piece of antique toilet paper?”

Norbert hesitated as he sought the right reply.

“Nothing much. Why should I?”

It was such an obvious lie that the Saint felt like laughing.

“Couldn’t you understand it?”

Norbert shook his head, and even managed a half-hearted shrug.

“It is too fragile to unroll, without special treatment. And unhappily I am not very versed in ancient Greek. But from the few lines I have seen, it would appear to be a history of Ingare. Interesting in its own way, but no, not important.”

The Saint picked up the parchment. His eyes narrowed.

“A history of Ingare in ancient Greek,” he repeated. “Obviously, not very interesting. So we needn’t bother with it.”

With deliberate slowness he broke off a small corner and let it fall to the floor.

Norbert watched horrified as he prepared to repeat the operation. Suddenly he threw himself forward, clawing for the scroll, but the Saint was waiting for just such a move. He raised the parchment out of Norbert’s reach as he pushed the little man away with the palm of his free hand.

“Well?”

Norbert glared at him in an impotent frenzy.

“I told you, it …”

“Try again.”

The professor looked from the scroll to the Saint and realised that the time for bluff was past. He spoke slowly and distinctly.

“It is the treasure of the Templars.”

Simon laid the parchment back on the marble slab beside the casket, his expression a mixture of perplexity and disbelief.

“This?”

Tenderly Norbert rolled it up, retied the thongs, and put it back in the casket and closed the lid. He turned to face the Saint.

“Yes, that is the treasure. No gold or jewels, but something more priceless than any amount of them,” he announced calmly.

“But what is it?” Simon persisted impatiently.

“I believe …” the professor began and then stopped abruptly. He looked directly at the Saint, and his voice was almost defiant as if he anticipated the response his words would receive. “No, I am sure. It is the Testament of Judas Iscariot.”

The idea seemed so absurd that the Saint could hardly keep a straight face.

“The Gospel according to Judas? You’ll have to do better than that.”

Norbert spread his hands in a gesture of resignation.

“I did not believe it either at first, but I have studied it as best I can. The writing, the parchment, everything can be scientifically dated and verified.”

“But surely Judas gave back the blood money and hanged himself. He didn’t have time to write anything,” Simon protested.

Norbert’s lips curled in a patronising smile.

“You were there? St. Matthew says he hanged himself. In the Acts of the Apostles, it is written that after using the money to buy a field, later given the cursed name of Accidama, he fell down and ‘burst asunder.’ Who knows? When the Gospels were written, and remember that was more than thirty years after the Crucifixion, it would be important to show that the man responsible for Christ’s death had come to a bad end. How could the converts believe in a God that allowed such a man to live? It would have been an impossible question for them to answer.”

The professor was no longer looking at the Saint but at the casket. His hands were clasped at his waist and the original excitement in his voice when he had revealed his discovery had given way to the dry monotone of a don addressing his students on an academic puzzle.

“There is no reason why he should not have escaped the wrath of the other disciples and later told his story to someone who wrote it down. Judas has always been an enigma, yet in many ways he is the second most important person in the Gospels. Without Judas there might have been no Crucifixion, without a Crucifixion no Resurrection, and without a Resurrection no Christian religion. In his own way, he has a greater claim to sanctity than any of the other disciples.”

Simon was fascinated by the idea. “St. Judas and All Traitors? That sounds like a fun parish. How did you find it—from the map or the stone?”

Norbert visibly stiffened.

“So you know about the map, too,” he said slowly. “Well, I suppose it does not matter now … No, not from the map or from the stone, but from my own observations. I, Louis Norbert, discovered it. I did it all on my own. While he was chasing gold, I pursued truth. I solved the riddle the Templars left behind them. They were clever, clever enough to keep their secret for six hundred years, but not clever enough to fool me.”

The professor’s voice had tightened until it almost choked him. His hands clenched and unclenched spasmodically as he spoke, and his staring eyes seemed to look straight through the Saint. For the first time Simon felt the real force of an obsession.

“The stone and the map were deliberately left to mislead. Why do you think they left them where they might be found? They were useless. Anyone who found them would search for a hoard of loot but find nothing, while the real prize was under their noses all the time. In there!”

Norbert pointed to the sarcophagus and then stepped towards it. His shaking hands caressed the recumbent figure sculpted on it.

“It was mere accident that neither the map nor the stone were found when the Templars left, but those who followed knew all about the tomb and they ignored it. Just a tomb in a crypt, and then they blocked up the crypt and even forgot about that. It was left to me, me, to open the crypt again and ask the questions no one else had asked. Why was such a magnificent tomb hidden in a crypt? Why was it not in the chapel where all could see it? An important person’s tomb, but whose? There is no name on it. And why an altar at the foot of a tomb? To put something on. But what?”

Norbert grasped the corner of the sarcophagus beside the Crusader’s left foot and pushed hard. The whole top slid halfway back on invisible rollers to reveal the hollow interior of the base, big enough to have held a giant’s coffin, but now empty.

The professor chuckled.

“So simple, but so effective. And so safe. The Templars brought back many trophies from the Crusades, but this scroll was unique, and they kept it a secret. It was their treasure. They were accused of Devil worship, in the main it was a libel, but here at Ingare a cult must have developed around this unholy relic. And what greater prize for a Satanist than the words of the man who betrayed God?”

The Saint heard Norbert’s words and their meaning registered, but he was no longer consciously listening to the little man’s lecture. For a moment he was hardly aware of the present at all as his mind flooded with the images of the past.

He thought of the Knights whose name he carried going out to do battle, their ideals as bright as their armour, their standards billowing in the wind of the charge. Fighting and dying and winning respect and renown. But when the campaigns were over, when there were no more pilgrims to protect or battles to win or walls to storm, growing rich and complacent and eventually corrupt. Accepting a life of luxury and indulgence, playing politics, storing wealth, and then at last dabbling in strange heresies against the faith that had first inspired them.

Instantaneously he remembered his own beginnings—the ideals that had sent him and his own small band of crusaders out into a world grown stale and lifeless from what was called progress. Ideals they had fought for and one had died for. To deliver justice in a world that no longer understood the word. To wage their own private war against the men who grew bloated on the life-blood of the weak. Could it happen to him— a twentieth-century privateer akin to every soldier of fortune who had ever nailed his colours to the mast and set out to seek his destiny?

But that depressing prospect survived only a microsecond against the utterly gorgeous grandeur of the historic reality that had just exploded before his comprehension: a Templar treasure that could be truly priceless—and in ordinary terms completely unsaleable.

For a moment as his gaze swept over the lines of coffins he could wonder if one day he too would settle for a fading glory and the pleasures of the idle and the unconcerned. But only for that moment; and then he laughed. A deep, rich “to hell with it all” laugh. The sword was still bright, and ideal was still a spur, and the jest was magnificent. So there was no treasure, just the words of a traitor. Something for the academics and theologians to argue over while the rest of the world carried on—business as usual. And a Nobel Prize or something of that sort for somebody, perhaps Louis Norbert.

“Of course, Henri knows about this,” said the Saint.

“He refuses to believe it,” Norbert said. “He is still convinced of a treasure that can be counted or weighed and banked-“

At that same instant the key grated in the lock of the tunnel door. Before the startled professor realised what was happening he was engulfed in a whirlwind of action. The Saint killed the lamps, clamped a silencing hand over Norbert’s mouth, and in a continuation of the same hold threw them both down behind the tomb.

The door swung open and the beam of a powerful flashlight carved the darkness. The Saint peered cautiously around the farthest side of the tomb. Standing in the splash of light just inside the doorway was Mimette, and from the awkward way she stood with her hands behind her he could tell without seeing them that they must be tied together there. At her side, a gun pressing into her ribs, was Henri Pichot.

3

There were fifteen feet of darkness between the sarcophagus and the probing light source of Henri’s torch. Had the Saint been alone, he would have asked for nothing more and cheerfully pitted his speed and stealth against the quickness of the lawyer’s reactions. But even to attempt such a tactic now would have placed the girl in unacceptable danger, besides leaving Norbert free on his flank. Shielded by Mimette, within a pace of the open door and controlling the only light in the room, Henri’s position was impregnable.

Stalemate. Henri, with no way of knowing whether the Saint was armed, could not approach further without putting himself at risk. The Saint, restricted by his hold on the professor, could not make any move that would take Henri by surprise. There was only one way the impasse could be broken, and Simon waited calmly for the inevitable, only slightly reassured by the conviction that his nerves were the stronger, and therefore every second that limped past, every fractional increase in the tension, must be to his advantage.

Henri swept the beam of his torch wildly around the crypt; but, hidden by the tomb on one side and the thickness of a column on the other, Simon stayed safely hidden. Only when the light told him that the beam was pointed another way would he steal a quick peep around the sarcophagus to keep track of captor and captive.

He weighed with icy detachment the significance of what he saw. Pichot’s drawn features glimpsed in the dim illumination reflected by his flashlight from the walls, his too rigid stance offset by a slight trembling of the hand that gripped the automatic, revealed his inner desperation, and the Saint had found that there are few men more dangerous than a frightened amateur. By contrast, Mimette appeared almost relaxed. She stared straight ahead, her face calm and composed but her eyes wide and frozen. Grimly he recognized that shock would shield her for a short while, but if hysteria took over it would be a dangerous complication.

Still he waited.

Norbert began to wriggle, and the Saint was forced to shift his position slightly to straddle the professor’s body, pinning his arms and legs against the floor. It made only the thinnest scuff of cloth against stone, but it was enough. The light beam swung towards the tomb, and when Pichot spoke his voice faltered and he could not quite control a rising pitch.

“Templar. I am going to count to three. Come out into the light with your hands up or I shall shoot Mimette.”

He spotlighted the floor a dozen feet away and jabbed the muzzle of his gun into the girl’s side.

“One.”

Simon rolled off the professor and glided towards the other end of the tomb. Behind him he heard Norbert clambering to his feet. Henri started and swung his flashlight towards the noise.

“No, don’t shoot, it’s me!” Norbert shouted frantically, and superfluously, as the light pinned him.

For a second, Pichot lost his place in the countdown.