The Lost Treasure of the Templars (13 page)

Dartmouth, Devon

“Those are two good questions,” Mallory replied, sitting opposite her and glancing down at the two unconscious men lying on the floor of the small office. Then he looked back at Robin and noticed that, although her voice was steady, her hands were shaking slightly, obviously a physical reaction to what had just taken place.

“And have you got any good answers?” she asked, her glance straying toward Giacomo and the blood still pumping, albeit now more slowly, out of the wounds in his hands.

“Not right now, no,” Mallory said.

He paused for a couple of beats.

“Look,” he went on, “don't feel bad about letting that man trigger the antitheft device. If we hadn't, and the mechanism hadn't worked, we might both be dead by now.”

“I know. It's just that I've never had to react like that before. Up till now, I've only ever used martial arts in training, never for real.”

That was shading the truth more than a little, but at that moment Robin didn't feel like explaining herself in any detail. “It's good to know I've got the skills,” she added, “but it's still a bit of a shock to see what happens to somebody when I do it in a live situation.”

“Karate?”

Robin nodded. “I do Shotokan karate and aikido, mainly, and that was a
mae geri
followed by a
mawashi geri
, to be exact. A front kick and then a roundhouse kick.” She shook her head in frustration. “So, what are we going to do now? Call the police? Get that one to a hospital? He's bleeding all over my carpet, quite apart from anything else. It's not a very good carpet, but bloodstains certainly aren't going to improve it.”

“I think,” Mallory said after a moment, “that the best thing we can do is leave, if we can.”

“What do you mean?”

“There's at least one other man waiting outside,” Mallory replied. “You were already climbing the staircase when one of these two signaled to somebody in an SUV parked about fifty yards down the road. The man in the driving seat must have a clear view of the back of this place and the staircase as well. What I'm not sure about is what he's likely to do if we leave, what his orders are. These two were carrying pistols, so it's quite possible that he is as well. And I'm not even sure it's just one man. There could be two or three more of them in that vehicle, just waiting for us.”

“Oh God. I didn't realize that.” She paused for a second or two, then continued. “Look, is there any good reason why we can't just lock the door, call the police, and then wait for them to show up?”

“I think calling the cops is a really good idea,” Mallory
replied, “but what I'm not so certain about is whether or not we should still be here when they arrive.”

“Why?”

“You might not know how the institutional police mind works, but I do. I've had dealings with them before, close up and personal. If a couple of your local rozzers walked in here now and saw these two men lying on the floor, they would be whisked straight off to a hospital and we would be arrested for possession of firearms and assault. Probably,” Mallory went on, pointing at Giacomo, “for causing actual or grievous bodily harm in his case. The fact that he actually triggered the antitheft device on the book safe himself would be deemed to be irrelevant. We both knew what would happen when he stuck the letter opener into the slot, and in the mind of a policeman that would be just the same as if we'd sat on him and then hammered nails into his hands.”

“But they were going to kill us,” Robin protested.

“That's true, but also irrelevant. The law these days invariably favors the perpetrator, not the victim.”

“What about the guns?”

“That was why I stopped you touching the second pistol with your bare hands. If you had handled it, which a fingerprint comparison would show, how could you then prove that one of these two Italians brought it here? Even if you did your best to wipe it clean, there could still be partial prints on it that would incriminate you. And possession of a pistol in this allegedly free country, I should remind you, invariably results in a mandatory prison sentence.”

Robin nodded slowly.

“I see what you mean,” she said. “So, what do we do?”

Mallory stood up.

“We leave,” he replied, “but we have to time this right, and we will definitely be calling the cops.”

He stepped out of the office and checked that the door of the apartment, which had been closed when the four of them entered, was locked. It was, the catch on the Yale lock having clicked into place. Then he walked back to the desk, pulled on the second pair of cotton gloves he'd been wearing earlier, picked up the pistol that Robin had removed from underneath the desk, and ejected the magazine. Using his thumb, he stripped all the nine-millimeter cartridges out of it, the gleaming brass ammunition forming a small pile on the desk, and replaced the magazine in the butt of the weapon. Then he pulled back the slide and an additional cartridge, which had been in the chamber of the pistol and ready to fire, spun out of the breech.

“It's not a very big pistol,” Robin said, “but that's a lot of bullets.”

Mallory glanced at the model number etched into the slide of the weapon.

“I've never seen one of these before,” he said, “but I have fired the odd automatic before, thanks to a friend of mine down at the Royal Navy Base at Culdrose. This is a Beretta, an Italian weapon, and according to this the model is a PX4 Storm in nine millimeter. The magazine holds fifteen rounds and there was another one in the chamber, so that's sixteen in total. The fact that the weapon was ready to fire is another reason why I think these two men probably intended to kill both of us, and quite apart from being a really uncomfortable thought, that does raise a bunch of other questions.”

Mallory slid the second pistol, the one he had already handled, into his jacket pocket, together with one of the
suppressors, the two fully loaded spare magazines, and all but three of the ejected cartridges.

“You're taking that with you?” Robin said, more as a statement than a question.

Mallory nodded.

“There's a lot about this situation that really worries me,” he replied, “and I think that having a weapon we can use is a really good idea, just in case anybody decides to start shooting at us.”

“So, what about the other pistol?” Robin asked. “What are you going to do with that?”

“I'm going to put it back in his pocket along with the suppressor,” Mallory said, pointing at the second unconscious Italian, “and the magazine and these three cartridges in Giacomo's jacket. When the cops arrive, that will more or less guarantee that both these men end up in the slammer. There'll probably be a bit of head scratching over why one man has the weapon and the other one has the magazine and ammunition, but I don't think either of them will be back out on the streets for quite a while.”

“But who are they?” Robin asked again, watching closely as Mallory did exactly what he'd described.

“I don't know.” Mallory sat down again, reached across the desk, and picked up one of the two wallets they'd taken from the pockets of the unconscious men. “Perhaps there's something in here that might give us a clue,” he added.

His touch was clumsy inside the cotton gloves, and he fumbled as he extracted the contents, which proved to be somewhat sparse and largely unhelpful. There were two currency sections at the back of the wallet, one containing exactly one thousand euros, and the other precisely two thousand pounds sterling, both consisting of crisp new high-value notes. There were no credit cards, driving
licenses, business cards, passports, or anything that conveyed the slightest indication of the actual identity of the man lying on the floor.

“I'll make you a prediction,” Mallory said. “I'll bet that the second wallet contains exactly the same amount of cash, even the same denomination of notes, as this one.”

“And that means what, exactly?”

Mallory didn't reply for a moment but stretched out his hand again and opened the second wallet, to reveal the same amount of cash, exactly as he had expected.

“It means,” he said then, “that these two men have been given the same weapons, money, and equipment, and no identification documents.” He pointed at the two mobile phones sitting on the desk, took a handkerchief out of his pocket, and carefully wiped the one that he had touched with his bare hands. “They've even got identical phones. Whoever they are, it was obviously intended to be a deniable operation, with no link between these men and the organization or government that's employing them.”

“Government?” Robin asked, the pitch of her voice rising sharply in alarm. “You think some government sent them?”

“Probably not, but I do know it's standard practice to make sure agents sent on sensitive operations carry nothing to identify them, just in case they get caught. If nothing else, that muddies the waters so that there can never be actual proof that they are employed by any particular country or government. It's called a deniable operation.”

Mallory took out his own wallet and slid all the cash into it, then carefully wiped both of the wallets he'd emptied to remove any trace of his fingerprints and tossed them back onto the desk.

“You're stealing that cash?”

“Damn right I am. They won't be needing it where they're going, and we can certainly use it.”

Robin nodded.

“Fair point,” she said, “as long as you split it fifty-fifty with me. Now, how do we get out of here without whoever it is in the SUV seeing us? Bearing in mind that the only way down to street level is to use the spiral staircase, where we'll be clearly in view.”

“Timing is everything,” Mallory said, standing up, “and we need to go now, before the bad guy in the Range Rover starts to wonder why his friends are taking so long to retrieve what they came to collect and to dispose of us.”

He picked up the book safe, taking care not to touch any of the coagulating blood on the leather cover, cleaned the blade of the letter opener, and then slid the steel point into the slot. He waited for the click that would show the lid was unlatched, opened the book safe to remove the parchment, and then quickly reset the mechanism. He cleaned the cover, shifting as much of the blood as he could, using most of a packet of tissues that Robin produced from her handbag.

“The safest place for the parchment is back in this, I think,” he said, “and then you should probably put it in your safe. I don't think we want to be carrying it round with us.”

He picked up the parchment and replaced it in the medieval book safe, then pressed the lid closed. Robin carried it over to her safe, placed it inside at the back of one of the shelves, and then locked the door.

Mallory looked at the two Italians again, but both men were still unconscious. He had no idea how long that happy state of affairs was likely to last, but he knew the clock was ticking. He took a last glance around at the
office, making sure that neither of them had missed anything, then nodded to Robin.

“Now we can call the cops,” he said. “But we don't have to tell them anything. Well, only one thing, just in case the man or men in the SUV are also carrying weapons. I'll handle that. As soon as I've got through, you scream. Then I'll leave the phone off the hook for a few seconds so they'll know exactly where to come. Okay?”

Robin nodded.

“I'll do my best,” she said, “but I'm not really much of a screamer.”

“Oddly enough, I didn't think you were,” Mallory replied.

He lifted the receiver from the phone on the desk and laid it down. Then he dialed triple nine, and as soon as he heard the call connecting he pointed his finger at Robin, who obliged with a piercing screech. Then Mallory took over, muffling and changing his voice by the simple expedient of partially covering his mouth with his left hand.

“Oh my God,” he yelled. “He's got a gun! He's holding a pistol!”

He thumped and banged the desk quite violently, and slammed one of the chairs into it. They could both hear the tinny sound of the emergency operator's responses from the earpiece of the telephone handset, but then Mallory ended the call.

“Are you sure that was long enough?” Robin asked. “For them to locate where the call was coming from, I mean?”

“It should be, yes. Establishing the location is the first thing they do, and if they think there's a woman in danger—and that was a pretty convincing scream, thank
you—and especially if there's a chance of firearms being involved, they'll be here in minutes.”

“So your plan is?”

“We wait until we hear the sounds of the sirens, because they're bound to have their blues and twos working. We'll hear them coming at the same time as the guys in the SUV, and as soon as we do we leg it out of here and down the staircase. Then along the alleyway to the main street, and then we just walk away. The opposition will probably see us, especially if they switch on their headlights, but unless they get out of the car and follow us on foot, we'll be long gone before they can drive around to the main street and intercept us. And they might not be so keen to leave their vehicle if they know a police car is going to be arriving within a matter of seconds.”

“And if they do decide to risk it and chase after us down the alleyway?” Robin asked. “What then?”

“We can probably outrun them, but even if we can't I've got a whole pocketful of nine-millimeter reasons why they should keep their distance.”

And then there was no more time for talking, because both of them simultaneously heard the distant but quite unmistakable sound of a siren, the atonic wailing noise almost immediately getting louder.

“Quicker than I thought,” Mallory said. “That sounds like our cue to get out of here.”