‘And that,’ he added, ‘brings an entirely new possibility into the mix.’
33
Pretty much the first thing that Farooq did after he and his companions had landed and made their way into the city from the airport was assemble his men in a café a couple of blocks outside the Old City, and make a telephone call to a local number. It was answered almost immediately, and the conversation that followed was short and largely monosyllabic, at least at Farooq’s end. Less than a minute later, he ended the call and gestured to two of the men to accompany him.
‘We should be about half an hour, maybe a little longer,’ he told the four others still sitting in the café. ‘The meeting place is on the outskirts of the city. Wait here until we get back.’
Then Farooq turned away and raised his arm to hail a cab that had just turned into the street.
In fact, it was just over an hour before the three men returned to the café. Farooq glanced around, but as far as he could tell they were unobserved. People were passing in the street, talking together, looking at maps, wielding cameras and all the other tourist-oriented activities that are an enduring and inevitable part of daily life in a city like Jerusalem. More to the point, nobody appeared to be paying them the slightest attention.
He nodded to his two companions, each of whom took two obviously heavy packets from their pockets and passed them over, one to each of the other four men.
‘Don’t open them now,’ Farooq instructed. ‘Wait until you’re alone. They’re a mix of different makes, a couple of Brownings, a Sig and a Walther, but all nine millimetre and each with twenty rounds of ammunition.’
‘Only twenty rounds?’ one of the men asked.
‘That’s nearly one hundred and fifty between the seven of us,’ Farooq replied. ‘And you all know that we’re not here to get involved in a firefight. The weapons are for your personal protection and for use against the infidels if the need arises, though in this environment a quieter assassination method would obviously be more appropriate. That is why you also each have a knife and a garrotte.’
He looked around the group.
‘When you open the packets, you’ll see that the magazines aren’t loaded and the shells are loose, so you may wish to do something about that sooner rather than later. The three of us have already prepared and loaded our weapons.’
‘What use is a pistol wrapped up in a bit of paper with an empty magazine?’ another of the men said. ‘I’m going to the restroom to load mine right now.’
Without waiting for a response, he pushed back his chair and strode into the café, heading towards the lavatories at the back of the building.
Over the next twenty minutes the other three men followed their colleague’s example, visiting the stall in the male lavatory, to unwrap, check and then load the pistols Farooq had purchased. Finally they reassembled at the café table.
‘So what do we do now?’ one of the men asked.
‘We do nothing,’ Farooq said. ‘Khaled has not told me yet when he will be arriving, but it will probably be sometime today, or tomorrow at the latest. Once he gets here we can do whatever it is that he wants and then return to Iraq. Or that’s what I hope, anyway.’
‘You still haven’t told us why we’re here.’
‘I haven’t told you because I don’t know,’ Farooq replied. ‘But he’s paying us, and paying well, so we’ll just have to wait and see what he intends to do.’
‘How long do we wait, then?’
Farooq shrugged. ‘As long as it takes.’
34
‘No matter what you may have heard or read about the Knights Templar,’ Bronson began, ‘and there’s a hell of a lot of stuff out there that is complete fantasy, there is one indisputable fact about the end of the order, when the Templars were purged. At the time the order was arguably the richest single entity in the whole of Europe, possessing and controlling more wealth than many nations. Most history books will tell you that the operation to seize the assets of the order was kept entirely secret, and was a total surprise to the Templars. But in fact it seems much more likely that they knew about it well in advance and hid the treasure somewhere.
‘Nobody’s ever been able to prove it, but if you look at the circumstantial evidence there doesn’t seem to be much doubt about what happened. In 1307, the order was a vast multinational corporation. I can’t remember the numbers involved because it was some time ago that I read about it, but in all there were tens of thousands of Templars, knights, sergeants and all the other people involved, but only a few hundred were actually arrested throughout the whole of France when the French troops arrived to carry out the king’s orders. Either his troops were incredibly stupid and incapable of finding all of the Templars, which seems extremely unlikely, or they simply weren’t there to be arrested.
‘And it is a documented fact that Philip the Fair — Philip IV of France — was virtually bankrupt before he ordered the arrest of the Templars, and he was still virtually bankrupt after the order had been purged. The cupboard was bare. And it’s been established that he knew the kind of assets the order possessed because a few months before he came up with his devious master plan, he’d had to take refuge in the Paris preceptory of the Templars to avoid an angry mob. So the assets that formed the backbone of the Templar order had almost certainly somehow been spirited away.’
‘You seem to know a lot about it,’ Angela said.
‘I’ve always been interested in the subject,’ Bronson said. ‘I’m a detective, I’m supposed to solve crimes, and what happened to the Knights Templar was undeniably a criminal act. Philip claimed that he suspected the order of indulging in heretical practices, but that simply doesn’t hold water. In those days, in the mediaeval period, heaven and hell were real and virtually tangible, and the word of God — or more accurately the word of the incumbent sitting on the throne of St Peter in the Vatican — was the ultimate truth on almost any subject. Heresy, meaning anything the Church of Rome disagreed with, was a mortal sin, and anyone who engaged in heretical practices was likely to end up being excommunicated, which — according to the belief system of the time — meant that they would be denied a place in heaven for all eternity.
‘In extreme cases, once the various inquisitions got involved, being excommunicated meant they got off lightly, because all the inquisitions basically functioned in exactly the same way. They started from the assumption that the individual being investigated was guilty and all his or her protestations of innocence were simply attempts to mislead and hoodwink the church. There was no possibility, in their eyes, of any innocent person being accused, so really all they were doing was establishing the degree of guilt. And in order to obtain the confession that they needed — the confession that would save the soul of the heretic — they indulged in the most horrendous and inventive tortures that the mind of man could devise. They were forbidden to spill blood, so they dislocated joints using things like the strappado, broke bones, burned off the feet by roasting them in a fire, pulled teeth and probed the sockets with red-hot spikes and, ultimately, tied people to stakes and set fire to the wood that surrounded them, burning them alive. All this, of course, in the name of a gentle and merciful God, who was extremely conspicuous by his absence from the torture chambers of the Inquisition.’
‘You feel really strongly about this, don’t you?’
Bronson shook his head and smiled somewhat ruefully at her.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I’ll climb off my high horse right now. I suppose it all comes down to my personal dislike and distrust of religion. Of all religions, in fact.’