The Templar Archive (19 page)

“What’s that?” Robin asked.

“You’ll see,” Mallory said, and started walking toward the waterfall, stopping to pick up a golf-ball-sized rock as he did so.

He stopped right at the edge of the pool of water that had formed at the base of the waterfall, and which was itself drained into a fast-flowing river that ran down the center of the valley.

He braced himself, then took careful aim and threw one of the rocks he’d picked up as hard as he could at the waterfall. They heard no sound above the roar of the tumbling water, but the result was obvious. The rock disappeared into the foaming water about six feet above the base of the waterfall and vanished.

Mallory gestured to Robin and they walked far enough away from the waterfall so that they could hear each other.

“You saw what happened?” Mallory asked.

“Yes. There has to be a cavity of some sort behind the waterfall, which is pretty much what we expected. So that’s where we should be looking, but right now we really aren’t dressed for it.”

Canton of Schwyz, Switzerland

The following day, they both had a large breakfast in the hotel’s dining room because they weren’t certain when they’d next be able to eat, and then set off to do some essential shopping.

“I really don’t think an umbrella is likely to be much use to us,” Robin said as they walked down the street looking for a shop that might sell what they wanted. “That water is coming down the mountainside at a hell of a rate. I think if you put an umbrella up and stood underneath it, it would last about three seconds. What we need are proper waterproof capes with attached hoods. That way we can walk through the waterfall and at least our clothes should hopefully still be almost dry when we step into the cave or whatever it is behind the water.”

That made sense, and about a quarter of an hour later they walked out the door of an outdoor and camping shop
where they’d found exactly what they wanted. They’d bought a pair of heavy-duty capes large enough to provide almost complete protection. In Mallory’s case the garment covered him from the top of his head to just below his knees, while for Robin it almost reached the ground. They also bought flashlights and a decent supply of spare batteries and, from the tools section of the shop, a crowbar, two large heavy-duty screwdrivers, and a couple of collapsible trenching tools that combined the functions of a pickax and a shovel. And a pair of sturdy rucksacks to put everything in.

“If we’re right and we are on the correct trail,” Mallory said, “we’ll probably need a lot more than this stuff. But hopefully these tools will let us get inside the cave and have a proper look around. Then we can decide what else, what other equipment, we’re going to need to buy to complete the job.”

They walked back to the hotel, put all the bits and pieces they’d bought in the car, and then set off for the valley, pausing only at a small general store on the way out of the town to buy a couple of large bottles of water and half a dozen alleged energy bars that they hoped would keep them going throughout most of the day.

Less than an hour after they’d driven away from the hotel, they were standing at the end of the valley and looking again at the roaring waterfall in front of them. This time, they’d seen no cars in the car park, and there was no sign of anyone else in the valley around them.

“Let me go first,” Mallory suggested. “I’ll do a quick check and just see if there’s anything there. If I don’t come
back, it means I’ve found something, or at least that I think the place is worth exploring.”

Robin nodded her agreement and watched as Mallory took the cape out of his rucksack, then slung the pack back over his shoulder before pulling the cape on over his head. The bulk of the rucksack made it look as if he had an impressive hunchback, and the cape rode much higher on his body than before, but it would still offer adequate protection for his clothes.

Mallory gave Robin a quick peck on the lips, then turned away toward the waterfall. He stopped when he heard the unmistakable sound of suppressed laughter from behind him, and turned back to look at his companion.

Robin was giggling almost uncontrollably.

“What?” Mallory asked.

“Forget the Hunchback of Notre Dame,” Robin said. “What you remind me of is a kind of giant snail, with that thing on your back. Anyway, don’t just stand there. Get on with it.”

Mallory walked the last few feet to the waterfall around the edge of the pond, and when he reached the rock face he just stood there for a few moments, trying to see if there was anything visible behind the tumbling water.

There wasn’t. There also wasn’t any easy or obvious way of stepping behind the waterfall. The rock beside him was a sheer cliff, with no visible hand- or toeholds, and was in any case soaking wet with the spray from the waterfall and appeared treacherously slippery. It looked as if the only way to achieve his objective was to literally go against the flow: to go from the pond to the waterfall and climb
up into the falling water. That wasn’t going to be easy, and he knew immediately he was going to get very wet, but as far as he could see there was no other way.

He was wearing jeans and a pair of trainers with socks underneath the cape, and for a moment he contemplated taking them all off and stowing them in the rucksack, in the hope that they would end the journey through the waterfall in a relatively dry state. That did make sense, and so he lifted off the cape, lowered the rucksack to the ground, and unlaced his trainers.

“Probably a good idea,” Robin said, watching him then take off his socks, “but my advice is you wear your trainers when you walk into that pool, because we’ve got no idea what’s on the bottom, and the last thing you want is to tear your foot open on a piece of broken glass or a sharp rock.”

“I was going to,” Mallory said, undoing the belt on his jeans and slipping them off. “I feel like a bit of a lemon, dressed like this,” he admitted, glancing down at his underpants, “but it’s probably the best option. What we should have done, with hindsight, was to have scoped out the access on this side yesterday, and maybe picked up a couple of wet suits or something.”

With his jeans and socks in the rucksack, and the trainers back on his feet, he again pulled on the cape and then stepped into the water at the edge of the pond.

“Jesus Christ, that’s cold,” he said.

He started wading the short distance toward the waterfall, the water getting deeper all the time, albeit very gradually. When he stepped close enough to the falling
torrent to reach out and touch it, the water was only just over his knees.

Mallory had no idea what to expect, so he glanced back over at where Robin was standing watching him, gave her a thumbs-up, then took a deep breath and stepped forward.

It felt as if he had stepped into the worst rainstorm in the history of the world. The water crashed down on his head and his shoulders in a never-ending torrent, the flow given impetus by the hundreds of feet it had fallen from the spring or lake high up on the mountainside that provided its source. That was one thing. The other was that he could see nothing in front of him, nothing apart from the falling curtains of blue-black water. He took another cautious half step forward, which changed nothing. He did it again, and this time he clearly felt the force of the water lessen significantly, and he knew he was almost clear of the waterfall.

Another half step, and the pressure on his head and shoulders ceased completely, though his rucksack was still dragging on its straps as the rear of it remained inside the waterfall itself.

The other thing that struck him immediately was that it was very dark. For a moment, he wondered if he was actually looking at a stone wall, just inches in front of him, but when he stretched out his hands he felt nothing at all. Just empty space. He realized that the wall of water behind him was simply filtering out virtually all the light, and that the only way to see where he was and where he should go was to use one of his flashlights.

He had taken the precaution of putting one in the
pocket of his jacket, though the other flashlight and spare batteries were all in his rucksack. He reached under the cape, took out the flashlight, and switched it on.

*   *   *

Paolo pulled the hire car to a halt in the car park, stopping only a few feet away from the target car.

Sitting in the passenger seat, Mario stared intently toward the path that wound away from the car park and deeper into the valley but saw no sign of the two people he was following.

“Change the tracker,” he instructed, “while I check the valley.”

The tracker had long-life rechargeable batteries, but these only gave it a total useful life of three or four days, so replacing the unit while they could was a sensible precaution.

Both men were wearing casual hiking clothes to blend in with the people they might expect to meet in the mountains, clothing that was nothing like their normal dark suits, and Mario was carrying a pair of compact binoculars to complete the outfit.

He walked quickly along the narrow path that led into the valley, keenly aware that the targets had stopped their car over fifteen minutes earlier, and that they could have covered a considerable distance in that time. Vitale would be unimpressed—at best—if he failed to find out where they’d gone.

Once he cleared the edge of the vegetation, he could see the whole of the valley in front of him. More important, he could see a single figure in the distance, standing
beside a pool that had formed at the base of an impressive waterfall. He stopped, lifted the binoculars up to his eyes, and focused on the distant image.

It wasn’t Mallory, as he had expected, but the woman Jessop, and she appeared to be getting undressed, which was not at all what he had expected. As he watched, she slid out of her jeans or trousers, then sat down on a rock and pulled on a pair of shoes—they looked like trainers or hiking boots—before placing her discarded clothing in a rucksack. She hoisted the rucksack onto her shoulders, pulled a cape on over that, and then walked toward the end of the pool nearest the waterfall and stepped into the water.

As Mario watched, she actually walked into the waterfall itself, and then seemed to step right through it. In an instant, she completely vanished from sight, as if she had never been there.

Mario waited for a few seconds, staring through the binoculars at the waterfall in case she suddenly reappeared, but he saw nothing. Still keeping his attention directed toward the far end of the valley, he lowered the binoculars, took out his mobile phone, and used the speed dial to ring Silvio Vitale in Rome.

He explained exactly where he was and what he had just seen.

“I assume that Mallory went through the waterfall first,” he said, still watching the end of the valley, “and that the woman then followed him.”

“Interesting,” Vitale said. “At least we now know what they’re looking for. Or where they’re looking for it, at any rate, which is almost as important. Stay where you are and
watch what happens when they come out again, and especially check to see if they’re carrying anything. And make a note of the time that they’re in there.”

*   *   *

The blackness vanished instantly, and Mallory found himself looking at a wide cleft in the rock, rather than into the cave that he had been expecting. The top of the opening appeared to be about fifteen feet above his head, and the opening gradually widened until the floor of the cleft was perhaps eight or nine feet in width, the floor rocky and uneven.

Mallory reached out and rested the flashlight on the rocks, leaving it switched on, and then used his arms and legs to lever himself up out of the icy water and into the opening. Then he removed the cape yet again, swung the rucksack off his shoulders, and lowered it to the ground.

He picked up the flashlight and shone the beam all around him to see if anything looked unnatural—man-made rather than created by the geology of the mountains—but saw nothing. However, it was immediately apparent that the cleft ran deep into the rock, and that was obviously the place where he would now have to explore.

“Have you found anything?”

The voice was loud in his ear, clearly audible over the noise of the waterfall. He jumped involuntarily and then span round.

Robin stood in front of him, her cape and rucksack on the ground beside her, and her bare legs wet from wading through the pond outside.

“I decide to follow you straightaway,” she said, pressing
her mouth close to his ear so that he could hear her. “I was only about thirty seconds behind you. Bloody noisy in here, isn’t it?”

“You got that right,” Mallory said. He had heard nothing over the thunderous roar of the waterfall until Robin had spoken. “And no, I haven’t seen anything yet, because I haven’t even started looking.”

Mallory bent down, opened the top of his rucksack, and took out a towel, which he handed to Robin. She quickly dried her legs with it, then passed it back to Mallory, who copied her action.

“We don’t know how long this is going to take,” Robin said, pulling her crumpled jeans out of her rucksack, “and I don’t know about you, but I’m quite cold, so I’m getting dressed again.”

“That’s probably sensible,” Mallory said. “Exploring a dark cave full of sharp rocks and slippery boulders when you’re half-naked doesn’t seem to me like a good idea.”

They left their capes near the waterfall, but hoisted the rucksacks onto their backs. Then they both shone their flashlights around the walls of the cavity they had discovered, checking for anything that seemed out of place. Something gleamed whitely on one side of the cavern, and Mallory strode over the tumbled rocks to look at it.

“It’s a skull,” he said, shining the beam of his flashlight directly at the object.

“You don’t mean human, I hope?” Robin asked.

“Definitely not. It looks like a big rat. The rest of the body is here as well, just fur and bones, really.”

Satisfied that there was nothing in the cavern entrance
that could be what they were looking for, they made their way deeper into the cave, Mallory leading with Robin a few feet behind him.

“It’s bigger than it looks,” Robin said as the cleft narrowed significantly and then opened up almost immediately into a much wider cave.

They both shone their flashlights around the walls, the bright white beams dispelling the blackness. The floor of the wider part of the cavern was more or less level, but virtually covered in boulders and lumps of rock, which had presumably fallen from the roof of the cave as a result of geological movements, or possibly caused by nothing more than the action of water. Certainly, in about half a dozen places within the cave, trickles of water ran down the walls, and in one location a fairly steady stream, somewhat reminiscent of a weak shower, emerged from the roof and splashed into a shallow depression on the floor. It was a remarkably bare and depressing cave, the stone a dull and dark uniform color, and with none of the different shades caused by minerals and ore in the rocks, or any sign of the stalactites and stalagmites that characterized other caves they had both visited in the past.