“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.”
CHAPTER 20
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.
It was in the subsequent history of Europe however that Ray saw the tentacles of Templar influence. Just as the warrior-monks had created a sophisticated system of banking, the Swiss had, over the centuries, established a banking empire that guaranteed anonymity and political neutrality. Swiss banks had become synonymous with investor security, to the extent that a fortune in Nazi gold bullion, treasure looted from Holocaust victims and laundered through a series of foreign banks, was still sequestered away in Swiss vaults fifty years after the end of Hitler’s regime. Moreover, many of those victims — successful Jewish businessmen — had Swiss accounts of their own, which were now inaccessible to their surviving offspring since the Swiss banking system was built on a foundation of anonymity; names did not matter, only account numbers, and if those numbers were lost, the accounts entered a state of perpetual limbo. Swiss neutrality guaranteed that, even though the Third Reich was gone, no one — neither the victorious Allied powers nor the heirs to Nazi brutality — could get their hands on those assets.
To Ray, this was further evidence of Templar influence. The Swiss could remain neutral in every conflict, secretly bankroll both sides, and were assured that regardless of who was the victor and who was defeated, they would always win.
That knowledge however did not shed light on the location of the Templars’ own treasure vault.
Three days after arriving in Bern, the very place indicated by his photographs of the chapel map, he was no closer to finding it than he had been before traveling to Manila. He had the medallion, which proved that the vault was real, but where was it?
He had begun his search in the oldest part of the city, on the peninsula surrounded by the River Aare. He sent his men out to scout various location in the medieval heart of old Bern, while he and Scalpel visited some of the city’s oldest and most prominent landmarks, searching for Templar symbols or anything that might hint at a secret room or tunnel passage. He fancied the notion that the Zytglogge clock tower, with its elaborate mechanical bell striker, might somehow unlock the vault; turn the clock hands this way or that and a hidden door would pop open. The structure was certainly old enough; it was one of the original gate towers, dating back to the mid-1200s. Unfortunately, it was also, even after seven hundred years, still a work in progress. The Zytglogge tower had been almost completely destroyed in the great fire of 1405, along with most of the rest of the city, and been in a near constant state of renovation ever since. Many of its more famous features, including the clock itself, had been added in the centuries following the fire. If a vault had existed there, it almost certainly would have been discovered during one of the ongoing construction projects.
If not the Zytglogge, then where?
He spent the better part of a day roaming the Nydegg neighborhood and the Nydeggkirche, a historic church built in the mid-1300s on the site of the original Bernese fortress. Here too he found a structure that had been restored, renovated, and repurposed countless times throughout the centuries, but nowhere were there Templar “fingerprints” to be found.
He was pondering his next destination when his cell phone trilled. He answered it with his customary greeting: “John Lee Ray speaking.”
“Rooster here. You’ll never guess who I saw getting off a Eurail train.”
“I believe you’ve been in my employ long enough to know that I detest guessing games,” he answered frostily. “I suggest that you come hastily to the point, after which we may need to review procedures for reporting in.”
“Dane Maddock.” Rooster did not sound the least bit chastened. “Along with the woman and the Indian.”
All thoughts of further berating his subordinate evaporated. “Maddock is here?”
Scalpel immediately took an interest, mouthing the same words.
“Affirmative. I spotted them waiting for a train.” Rooster paused a beat, and then casually added. “I followed them to a place called Mulenen. They’re asking around about something called the ‘Niesen.’”
Niesen. It was the German word for sneeze, but it was also the name of nearby mountain peak, which when viewed from a certain perspective, formed a slightly off-center triangle. So perfect was the outline that Niesen Mountain, just a few miles from Bern, was widely known as “the Swiss Pyramid.”
Not only had Maddock escaped his exile in the Spratly Islands, he had also found the location of the Templar treasure, right where the riddle promised it would be.
Under a triangle so big only God could see.
Dane held the copper triangle at arm’s length so that it completely blocked out the outline of the Niesen, just as Bones had done with the photograph in the travel guide. Despite its nickname, the mountain only looked like a pyramid when viewed from the east; the most dramatic pictures, including the one that had led to Bones’ discovery, were taken from the far shore of nearby Lake Thun. Through some trial and error, Dane had worked out the approximate location on the slope that would correspond to the pin-hole in the center of the triangle. If all his assumptions were correct — a big if—the door to the Templar treasure vault would be found there.
Peering through the triangle one last time verified the spot at least, which perhaps not coincidentally, fell almost exactly at the location of the Schwandegg station for the Niesenbahn funicular railway — a cable driven single-track conveyance that shuttled hundreds of tourists daily from the village of Mulenen, at the base of the mountain, to its summit, nearly 7,800 feet above sea level. The Niesenbahn had been built in 1910 and was the longest continuous funicular railway in the world. Because it ran at an almost forty-five degree angle for its entire length, the interior of the cars were built on stair-step platforms so that passengers could stand on a level surface during travel. Running alongside it, at 11,674 steps, was the Guinness World Record longest stairway in the world, though the steps were only open to the public once a year for an organized stair-climbing race. Although neither the funicular nor the stairway had been built until many centuries after the destruction of the Templars, the route chosen for both doubtless traced back to an earlier, historical trail. The only question was whether the construction had inadvertently covered up any signs that had been left to indicate the precise location of the vault.