The Templar Archive (18 page)

“Do you mean this book?” Mallory asked, reaching into his bag and pulling out the slim volume he had just purchased. “By Herr Gruber?”

The librarian looked slightly surprised. “So you have it already?”

“Yes, but I haven’t had a chance to read it yet. But you’re saying that this is quite authoritative?”

“In my opinion, yes. It was the product of three years of hard work by Herr Gruber. It will give you a good overview of the event.”

When Mallory and Robin had left the building, the librarian checked a record on her desk, then unlocked the top drawer and took out a folded sheet of paper. She read
the text, noted the telephone number printed underneath the block of writing, took out her mobile, and dialed it.

When her call was answered, she passed a brief message and then hung up, replaced the paper, and relocked the drawer. It would probably come to nothing, but the request made so many years earlier still carried weight, simply because of the identity of the people who had made it.

*   *   *

“As well as buying something in that last bookshop,” the watcher reported, “they’ve also just come out of the library. It looks to me as if they’re still doing research, so we’ve probably got enough time to assemble a full team here.”

“Copied,” Mario said. “Keep your eyes on the targets and make sure Paolo and Nico know where they go next, so one of us always has them in view. I’ll be off-line, bringing Vitale up-to-date.”

The watcher, the fourth member of the team Vitale had sent to follow Mallory and Robin, was apparently studying the menu posted outside a restaurant on the opposite side of the road from the library. The other three men were loitering in nearby streets, linked together in a conference call, and listening to his commentary on their mobiles, each using a Bluetooth hands-free earpiece.

All four of them had been on the flight out of Orly the previous evening, and in the crowds at Geneva Airport it had been a fairly simple matter to keep their targets in view as they cleared passport control and immigration. And when Mallory had been given the keys to a Renault hire car, Mario was at the head of the queue of
the adjacent booth, completing the rental documentation for an Opel sedan.

When the targets drove away from the airport, Mario and Paolo had easily been able to follow them to Versoix, the headlights of their car just another set of lights in the darkness. Once they’d stopped, Paolo had put another tracker on the Renault and then they, too, had found a local hotel for the night. The last two members of the team, using the work names Nico and Carlo, had waited at the airport until Mallory started the hire car to ensure that they had confirmed the vehicle make, model, and registration number. Then they had also hired a car and driven to Versoix.

The tracker had worked precisely as the Italians had hoped, and the two surveillance vehicles had been able to follow the Renault from Versoix, on to Lucerne, and then farther east to Schwyz without ever having sighted the car once it had left the motel. And following the targets on foot around the town was proving to be just as easy. Obviously the English couple had no idea that they were being observed.

*   *   *

“Three years’ hard work it might have been,” Mallory said, nearly four hours later, “but as far as I can see there’s nothing in this book that’s of any use to us.”

They’d returned to the hotel, and while Robin had spent her time studying the topographical map and identifying places that looked interesting and that she thought they ought to search, Mallory very quickly read the English version of the book he had purchased.

“All he does is explain what happened immediately before and just after the battle, and covers the fighting itself in some detail. But there’s almost nothing about the aftermath, about what, if anything, the White Knights did once the surviving Habsburgs ran away from the battlefield.”

“I did say that to you at the time,” Robin said, “so far be it from me to say I told you so. But, actually, I did tell you so. Is there nothing at all that’s relevant?”

“Not really, apart from a couple of maps, one showing the site of the battle, up by Lake Ägeri, which is almost certainly not what we want, and another one that just indicates where the local settlements were located at the time of the conflict. But neither of them is particularly detailed, mainly because they’re hand-drawn, so I don’t think they’re going to be any help.”

He closed the book and tossed it on the bed. “How about you? Any luck?”

Robin shook her head.

“Not really,” she replied. “I’ve basically been looking for valleys that could contain caves, but the terrain around here means that there are probably dozens of them, maybe hundreds, that might fit the bill. I think what we have to do is get out there and start looking, and I’ve picked out half a dozen places where we could start. Once we’ve had a good look at the countryside, maybe that will give us a kind of feel for the sort of terrain we need to study.”

“That works for me,” Mallory said. “How about we go down and get dinner now? Then we’ll come back and both look at the map. If we make an early start tomorrow
morning, we can cover a good deal of the canton pretty quickly, with any luck.”

*   *   *

The short telephone message left by the librarian had produced immediate results. The number she had called was constantly monitored, though never answered, every message being listened to within a few minutes of its receipt. The librarian had provided two names—David Mallory and Robin Jessop—because the English couple had completed visitor forms when they visited the building.

Those names provided a starting point, and a comprehensive Internet search generated a surprising amount of information about them. In particular, a couple of local British newspaper reports linked the name of the woman to the alleged discovery of an ancient parchment and, more significantly, with the murders of a number of unidentified Italians in the small town of Dartmouth in Devon. That raised red flags for two different reasons.

The man tasked with monitoring the telephone number considered the appropriate response for a few more minutes, as he again studied the newspaper reports he had unearthed. Then he nodded, reached for his mobile phone, and dialed one of the six numbers recorded on it.

“We might have a problem,” he said in German when his call was answered.

Canton of Schwyz, Switzerland

A little after two o’clock the following afternoon, Mallory pulled the Renault hire car to a halt in the parking area of a roadside restaurant not far from the base station of a ski lift. For a minute or so, neither of them moved, just sat there hearing the faint noises as the car’s engine started to cool down, staring through the windshield. They had left the hotel almost seven hours earlier, and since then had hardly stopped, driving from one location to another, hoping to find some landmark or geographical feature that might in some way tie up with the cryptic clues they had decoded from the text on the parchment. And until that point, they had seen absolutely nothing useful.

“Well, that was a bit of a busted flush,” Mallory said.

“Yes,” Robin replied shortly. “We can’t keep doing
this, this kind of scattergun approach, driving into a valley and just looking out of the car windows and hoping to see something that might fit the bill.”

“So what can we do?”

“What we should probably have done in the first place,” she replied. “We take a bit of a time-out and go back to the clues on the parchment. We need to work out what at least one of them actually means, and then try to find a location that fits the clue, rather than trying to do it the other way round and just hoping for inspiration to strike when we see a bit of countryside.”

“We’ll give it a go,” Mallory said. “Anything’s better than this pretty much aimless driving around. Let’s grab a bite of lunch here, and see if we can work out exactly what we should be looking for.”

Strangely enough, cracking one of the clues didn’t take anything like as long as either of them had feared. Inspiration struck Robin almost as soon as she reread the transcription from the Latin as they lingered over coffee in the restaurant.

“I can’t believe I missed this,” she said.

“What did you miss?” Mallory asked.

Robin shook her head. “Just hang on a minute. First, I need to look at the map again.”

She stared at one particular section of the map for a few minutes, tracing lines on it with the end of an elegant red-painted fingernail. Then she tapped one part of the map and nodded to herself.

“As I see it,” she said, “there are three possibilities here. Three locations, I mean, that might be right.”

“What have you found?” Mallory asked, sounding impatient.

“I’m not going to tell you, because if I’m wrong I’ll look like a complete idiot,” she replied.

“I’m getting to know you quite well now, and I doubt very much if you could ever look like an idiot, complete or otherwise. Right, if you won’t tell me what you think you’ve spotted, at least give me a clue.”

Robin thought for a moment, then nodded. “Here’s a clue. When is a snake not a snake?”

Mallory looked blank. “I have no idea, but I’ll bet you’re just aching to tell me.”

“I’m not aching to tell you, but I am quite keen to show you,” she said. “Let’s go. You drive. I’ll navigate.”

She directed him away from the area where they had searched before, giving him terse directions as she related the markings on the map to the display on the sat nav and the countryside around them. The roads they were traveling along became progressively narrower and obviously less used, though the surfaces remained good. The Swiss were nothing if not organized.

“I said there were three possible locations,” Robin said, “but I’ve actually found four. We just have to try them all until we find what we’re looking for.”

“I don’t know if this is good news or bad news,” Mallory said, “but this road stops a couple of hundred yards ahead of us in a car park. Can I assume that that is not what you’re looking for?”

“Not a car park, no. But what I am interested in is the valley that you should see just to the east of us right now.”

Mallory locked the car and they strode off together, in the direction that Robin was indicating.

At first glance, the valley didn’t look significantly different from the others that they had explored during the morning. It had steep grassy sides dotted with stunted bushes and a handful of trees—Mallory thought they were pines or firs, but as he was no authority on any aspect of botany, he had no idea which, or even if either guess was correct—while at the end of the valley, perhaps a quarter of a mile in front of them, he could see the flashing silver of a mountain stream tumbling down from some unseen spring or hidden lake.

Robin strode ahead of him and stopped when she reached a clear area where the entire valley was visible in front of her. Then she lifted a pair of compact binoculars to her eyes—she had removed them from the depths of her handbag before they had left the car—and for about half a minute she just stared through the instrument at the far end of the valley.

Then she turned to Mallory and shook her head briskly.

“It’s not this one,” she said. “The shape is wrong.”

“The shape of what?” Mallory asked, sounding more irritated than curious. “The valley itself?”

“No. Keep guessing.”

*   *   *

“What are they doing now?” Vitale asked.

“The same as they’ve been doing all morning, ever since they left the hotel,” Mario replied, looking at the tracking application on his smartphone and talking
through the Bluetooth earpiece. “They’re just driving around the mountains and valleys.”

“Have they been stopping?”

“Yes, but usually only for a few seconds or a few minutes—no more than a quarter of an hour—at the most. Apart from lunch, of course. That took them almost an hour, but they’re now back on the road.”

“They’re obviously looking for something,” Vitale said, “and it’s equally obvious that they haven’t found it yet. Keep watching, and close in on them the moment it looks as if they are staying in one place for a significant amount of time. Don’t interfere with them, and don’t let them see you, but find out exactly where they go. I’m sending out another two men, and they’ll be bringing weapons for you all, because I think we’re probably getting close to the endgame.”

*   *   *

Mallory asked her again as they walked back to the car, but she refused to elaborate. Sitting in the passenger seat, she gave him directions to the next blind-ended valley that she wanted to investigate. It wasn’t far away. In fact, Mallory guessed it was probably the next valley to the east of the one they had just looked at. This time there was no convenient car park, and the road simply petered out at the edge of a patch of woodland. Tire tracks on the ground suggested that vehicles did either park there, or at the very least turn around, and there was room for him to park the car without blocking either the road or the turning area.

They repeated the investigation process, Robin leading the way, her binoculars at the ready, while Mallory stumbled along behind, still trying to work out exactly what she was looking for. Just as in the previous location, as soon as they reached an area from which they could see most of the valley in front of her, Robin stopped and studied the far end with her binoculars. And, again as before, she then shook her head and led the way back to where they parked the car.

“A clue might be helpful here,” Mallory said. “I still have no idea what you’re looking for, but if you told me that I might spot something that you miss, it would make sense.”

“It might make sense,” she replied, “but I’ve already given you a clue, and you’ve seen all the same information that I have. So I’m just wondering how long it’ll take you to catch up.”

“You said something about a snake, and one of the clues mentions a serpent, but I still don’t see the connection. Are you trying to tell me you’re looking for a snake?”

“In a manner of speaking, yes,” Robin replied. “Or, to be absolutely accurate, I’m looking for something that looks like a snake, but which isn’t actually a serpent.”

“Oh, right,” Mallory muttered, “that makes everything really clear.”

Robin took pity on him as he unlocked the car using the remote control.

“If the next place we look at doesn’t fit the bill,” she said, “then I promise I’ll tell you what that first clue refers to. Or rather, what I
think
it refers to. Anyway, let’s get back on the road. Maybe it’ll be third time lucky.”

Mallory was entirely unsurprised when she directed him to drive into another narrow blind-ended valley. It was slightly wider than both of the places they had visited so far, and like the first, there was a small car park at the end of the road, already occupied by about half a dozen vehicles, parked in the neat and orderly fashion that they had come to expect, even after such a short time in Switzerland. Mallory slid the hire car into a space between a German-registered BMW saloon and a Mercedes SUV with Geneva plates.

“Maybe this is a popular walking or hiking area,” Mallory suggested as they made their way along a narrow track that wound its way through a stand of trees that grew in the space between the car park and the start of the valley.

“Perhaps,” Robin agreed. “It is spectacular countryside; you have to admit that.”

This time, they didn’t have as far to walk to get a good view of the entire expanse of the valley. Almost as soon as they’d cleared the last of the trees, they were rewarded with the sight of the valley opening up in front of them. Robin stopped and took in the sight. What she didn’t do, Mallory noticed, was use the binoculars. Instead she glanced at him and then pointed in front of her toward the mountain that blocked off the end of the valley.

“Now do you see it?” she asked.

Mallory looked where she was pointing, but as far as he could tell the valley they were then standing in was virtually identical to every single one of those that they had already looked at.

“I don’t—” he began, but Robin interrupted him.

“Snake,” she said. “Think snake and then look again.”

Mallory did so, uncomprehendingly.

“I see trees and grass and a stream,” he said, shaking his head.

And then suddenly he saw exactly what she meant. There had been a stream at the end of the previous two valleys. In fact, Mallory guessed that there was probably a stream in almost every valley in Switzerland, and that most likely the majority of them had been formed by the action of water over the millennia. But whereas the previous two streams had bounced and danced their way almost straight down the rocky bed they had carved out, the stream he was then looking at had followed a rather different course.

Instead of tracking straight down toward the lowest level, water always taking the easiest possible path when it flowed, for some reason possibly associated with the geology of that particular part of the mountain, the stream they were looking at flowed in a fairly regular pattern from side to side, taking a curved path that was actually very reminiscent of the shape, the classic sinuous shape, of a snake on the ground.

“I see what you mean,” Mallory said. “Was that what you were looking for?”

Robin nodded.

“It suddenly came to me,” she said. “I kept puzzling over the expression about a snake that roared. That didn’t seem to me to make any sense at all, because the most that the average snake can manage is a hiss. I was actually
thinking about what could make a roaring noise and could be found in the mountains of Switzerland when I guessed the author of that clue might have meant the noise of a waterfall. That almost always sounds like a roar, and once I made that connection I also realized that if you had a stream that kind of meandered its way down the side of a hill making lots of curves and ended in a waterfall, that could very well be considered to be a snake that roared.”

“Simple enough when you explain it,” Mallory said. “Let’s check it out.”

They set off at a brisk walk, and within only a few minutes they could both clearly hear the sound of the water tumbling down the rocks at the far end of the valley, first as a muted growl, but becoming louder with almost every step that they took. And when they finally came to a stop, perhaps seventy yards from the base of the falls, the only possible word they could use to describe the sound was a roar. Standing so close, they couldn’t appreciate the full shape of the stream as it made its way down the mountainside, but they had seen it very clearly as they’d approached that spot. In fact, Robin had taken several pictures of the stream with her digital camera already.

“I think that’s pretty clearly the answer to that first cryptic clue,” Robin said, “so the obvious question now is, what do we do next? Where do we have to go to find the answers to the second and third clues?”

“You said you thought that the third clue, the one that mentions the guardian, might be intended to point us in the right direction, to lead us to the right bit of some
valley,” Mallory said. “But if we’ve actually come straight to the right place, maybe you were wrong. Maybe that clue is only relevant when we find ourselves inside the cave or wherever this trail leads us.”

“And the other problem, as I see it,” Robin said, “is that we seem to be looking at three separate clues, with no obvious link or progression between them. We’re standing here right now beside what seems to me to be almost certainly the landmark that the author of that text meant us to find.”

“I’m quite certain you’re right about that. And if we take that as a given, then we must also logically be in the vicinity of what we’re looking for. In fact,” he added with a grin, “I’m slightly surprised you haven’t made the connection yet.”

Then it was Robin’s term to look irritated. She reached into the hip pocket of her jeans and took out the sheet of paper on which they’d written the transcribed clues, and read them again. Then she looked at Mallory.

“If you’re right in what you’re thinking,” she said, “then we’re going to need umbrellas at the very least. That is what you meant, isn’t it?” she added.

“Exactly. About the only thing that could possibly be interpreted as a moving wall is the wall of water, in my opinion, at least. I think we have to walk up to the waterfall and see what’s behind the water coming down the mountain. But there is something I want to do first, just as the kind of basic check that we’re not barking up completely the wrong tree, or try to walk through the wrong waterfall.”