The Lost Treasure of the Templars

Genres: Mystery; Thrillers; Historical Thrillers

Synopsis

An absolutely gripping Templar conspiracy thriller, perfect for fans of Mario Reading, Dan Brown and Scott Mariani.
An ancient sect. A modern mystery. The most dangerous secret ever unearthed. Antiquarian bookseller Robin Jessop has acquired a strange medieval volume. What appears to be a book is a cleverly disguised safe, in which she finds a single rolled parchment, written in code. For encryption expert David Mallory, the text is impenetrable. Until an invaluable clue opens the door to a conspiracy, stretching back seven centuries. Now Jessop and Mallory find themselves on a desperate hunt that could change history, topple an empire and bury them both alive. Because soon they're not only the hunters. They're also the hunted.
“A thrilling historical mystery full of ingenious clues and unexpected twists” -GOOD BOOK GUIDE

Release date: July 7, 2015

Publisher: Berkley

Print pages: 512

Sample

PRAISE FOR JAMES BECKER’S NOVELS

ALSO BY JAMES BECKER

SIGNET

Prologue

Acre, Palestine

May 1291

“We have no choice. We agree or we die. All of us. It’s that simple.”

Pierre de Sevry, the marshal of the Knights Templar in the Holy Land, rested his left hand on the pommel of his sheathed battle sword and looked around at the assembled company. His white tunic, bearing the unmistakable symbol of the order, the bloodred croix pattée, which had been used in various forms since 1147 to signify membership of this illustrious company of warrior monks, was ripped and torn and heavily stained with blood, some of it his own. His plate armor was dented, holed, and scratched from the almost continuous close combat that had been a daily feature of the siege of Acre since the first Mamluk attack on the city.

The Mamluks—an elite caste of warrior slaves who had fought for the Egyptian rulers for over a century—had assumed power in Egypt a short time earlier, ending the reign of the descendants of the great Muslim leader Saladin. Thirty years earlier they had utterly destroyed a Mongol army at Ain Jalut, south of Nazareth, and had been undefeated ever since. By any standards, they were formidable opponents.

A deep voice cut across the suddenly silent chamber.

“For myself, I would be happy to give my life in this glorious mission.”

De Sevry looked at the knight who had spoken, a man he knew had acquitted himself with conspicuous valor over the last few days, and nodded.

“None of us doubt either your courage or your resolve, my brother, and all of us have been prepared to give our lives for the honor of God every day since we arrived in this place. But I have no wish to sacrifice myself or any of this company to no purpose. We are a mere handful of men, less than two hundred strong, and by our latest count the sultan Khalil has mustered an army of over one hundred and fifty thousand soldiers, not to mention his siege engines and catapults, and his miners who are probably even now tunneling somewhere in the ground under our feet. Even if each of us in the coming battle managed to slay five hundred of the enemy, there would still be well over fifty thousand of them left. This is a fight that we simply cannot win, no matter what we do or how courageously we conduct ourselves. If we decide to fight, then it is inevitable that we are also deciding to die. And if we die, then the only chance the forces of Christendom have of regaining the Holy City will die with us.”

De Sevry paused in his grim recitation and again looked around at the company of his most senior knights, a bare dozen men whom he considered his brothers in Christ as well as his most trusted comrades in arms. All of them looked haggard and wearied by over six weeks of unrelenting and utterly brutal hand-to-hand combat, facing the teeming hordes of Mamluk attackers who had thrown themselves, wave after wave, against them.

From the very beginning, the sultan’s siege engines and catapults had been raining missiles down on the city, their target the massive outer wall surrounding Acre. The wall was studded with ten separate and formidable towers, the principal entrance tower possessing walls almost thirty feet thick, a huge structure that had looked utterly impregnable to some of the inhabitants. But that hadn’t proved to be the case.

As well as the knights of the Templar order, the beleaguered garrison included Hospitallers and Teutonic Knights, and a joint force of Templars and Hospitallers had barely repelled a determined attack by the Mamluk soldiers on Saint Anthony’s Gate on May fifteenth. But already the writing had been on the wall: the siege was only ever going to end one way, and all of them inside the fortress knew it.

Three days later, a sound like distant swelling thunder had echoed off the old stones of the city walls as all the war drums of the Mamluk attackers had been sounded simultaneously, the noise growing rapidly until people within the city were almost deafened. And then with a suddenness that was almost shocking, the drumming stopped and there was the briefest of instants of total silence.

And then the screaming had started, the awe-inspiring sound of tens of thousands of voices bellowing their battle cries to the heavens. Then line upon line, wave upon wave, of Mamluk soldiers had begun running headlong over the rough ground toward the fortifications, converging on the battered structure from all sides simultaneously, their unsheathed swords glinting like a sea of silver in the rays of the morning sun. Above them, the sky had darkened as tens of thousands of arrows had flown overhead, the archers targeting the soldiers waiting on the walls. It had been the beginning of an unrelenting and all-out assault on the city.

And of course it wasn’t just the Mamluk soldiers that the defendants faced. The sultan had assembled an array of siege engines, massive catapults, and trebuchets that could hurl rocks ranging from the size of a man’s head up to massive boulders three or four feet in diameter that might require a dozen or more men to lift into position on the weapons.

The moment the war drums had fallen silent, the siege engines had fired, the rocks arcing up into the sky before plummeting to earth with devastating force, obliterating anything they hit. For a whole number of reasons, the weapons were inaccurate, but there were so many of them that accuracy was not really an issue. Even the handful of boulders that had smashed into the inner wall of Acre’s defenses had been enough to cause significant damage, and most of the rocks that missed this target had slammed into the area beyond the defenses, causing utter carnage among the soldiers and civilians who were unfortunate enough to find themselves in the impact area.

The first breach on one of the towers—the so-called Accursed Tower—had occurred that day, and immediately the attackers had swarmed through the opening driven into the wall, forcing the beleaguered Christian defenders to retreat to the next line of defense, the inner wall, fighting all the way.

And it had been on that very same day that the tragic event occurred, which had unexpectedly thrust Pierre de Sevry into the position of commanding the few remaining Knights Templar.

Guillaume de Beaujeu, the grand master of the order, had been taking a brief rest from the fighting when he was told that the Mamluk attackers had actually forced their way inside the city. Without pausing to don all his plate armor, Guillaume had immediately rushed out and taken his place at the forefront of the defenders, as was the norm for Templar grand masters, wielding his double-edged battle sword to lethal effect against the swarm of Mamluk besiegers.

In the heat of the battle he had raised his weapon to strike down another attacker when an arrow slammed into his body underneath his upraised arm. His full armor would probably have stopped the missile, but the mail he was wearing was insufficiently strong to deflect it. The arrow had delivered a fatal wound, and he had died within the day.

The next most senior officer was de Sevry, and when Guillaume de Beaujeu had drawn his last breath, the marshal of the Knights Templar reluctantly assumed the mantle of leadership. But it was clear to all the knights that there was very little chance de Sevry would retain the title he had inherited for very long. Or, at least, that had been what everybody believed until a few days later, on May twenty-fifth, when an unarmed emissary sent personally by the sultan al-Ashraf Khalil had arrived at the gates of the Templar castle with an unexpected offer.

Unexpected, because the Mamluk forces had very quickly gained the upper hand after the outer wall had been breached. The less substantial defenses of the inner wall fared little better, the first crack occurring in the area controlled by the Hospitallers, a battle during which their grand master—like Guillaume de Beaujeu, a man who had commanded his troops from the front—was seriously wounded. Mamluk forces had poured into the gap created in that wall, and then the besiegers had managed to open the Saint Anthony Gate, allowing them unfettered access to the interior of the fortification. At a stroke, hordes of the attackers had swarmed inside, indiscriminately slaughtering soldiers and civilians as they did so.

The battle had raged on the open ground inside the wall, but the outcome was never in any doubt: the city was going to fall. Fighting every step of the way, the defenders were forced back before the waves of determined Mamluks, retreating to the safety of the sea and the handful of boats that still remained, or taking refuge in the Templar castle, the last unbreached redoubt.

The Mamluks had quickly gained the upper hand, and the streets and buildings had echoed with the howls of agony of the wounded and dying. For those who were unable to hide or make their escape, no quarter was given. As soon as the city had been secured and the fighting largely over, the Mamluk soldiers had worked their way steadily down the ranks of prisoners, dragging out all the men and the elderly of both sexes, as well as the infants, and summarily executing them. Young boys and women of childbearing age were spared, only to be clapped in irons to be later sold as slaves, or worse.

But despite the overwhelming superiority of numbers and the resources of the besieging army, one single building, the Templar fort at the southern extremity of the city, still stood, massive and solid, somehow having managed to resist and repel every attack the Mamluks had launched against it.

Most of the Templar knights, the pitiful few still left, could have escaped by sea—the fortress possessed its own guarded access to a small loading dock where a handful of boats were still moored—but that option had never even been considered by de Sevry and his colleagues for one very simple reason: the other people in the fort. Even before the outer wall had been breached, a ragged and desperate clutch of women, many with their infants and older children in tow, had taken refuge in the fortress. The creed of the Templars was simple and inviolate: one of their duties was to protect the innocent, and there was insufficient space in the boats for everyone to escape, and so they had vowed to fight on to the end.

The fortress had held out for five days, the final obstacle standing in the path of the sultan, and still the massive outer walls showed no signs of crumbling under the almost continuous assault by the siege engines. And this failure by his troops to eliminate the last remaining group of enemy soldiers had clearly rankled with the Mamluk leader, for on the sixth day the assaults had suddenly ceased, and a single unarmed figure, carrying a white flag of truce, had walked up to the immense wooden doors that guarded access to the castle.

It was the offer that man had conveyed that the Templar leaders were now discussing. If the sultan was to be believed, and not all of the Templars assumed that suggestion was a given, then in return for handing over the fortress, the Mamluk sultan was prepared to allow all the women and children sheltering inside the fortress to leave the building unharmed. Not only that, but he had also stated that the Templars themselves could walk out, with their weapons and anything else they could carry. It was a remarkably generous offer, and that was why the Templars were immediately so suspicious of it.

They all knew, as, presumably, the sultan also knew, that eventually the fortress would fall. No building or garrison could hold out forever, and especially not against such overwhelming odds. The Mamluk leader was perhaps getting impatient or maybe, as one knight suggested, he wanted to avoid any further deaths among his own men, though the way he had conducted his campaign suggested that this was extremely unlikely to be a consideration on his part.

“I do not trust this infidel,” another of the knights stated flatly. “What is to stop him cutting us all down the moment we leave the safety of the castle?”

“Nothing,” de Sevry immediately admitted. “They could slaughter us all within seconds. But that might almost be preferable, a quick death in the open, fighting man to man, rather than being crushed beneath the stones of the walls of this castle when the siege engines finally finish their work.”

Again he looked around at the other knights. Every one of them met his gaze unflinchingly, their expressions hard and determined.

“If we accept this offer,” he continued, “there is at least a chance that we can leave this place with the women and children who have entrusted their lives and their souls to our care and protection. If we reject it, then both we and the innocents will surely die and, as I said before, the one true religion that we serve will lose the last hope of ever regaining the Holy Land.”

He paused for a moment. “I know this is a heavy burden to bear, as you will be speaking on behalf of your fellow knights who do not have a voice in this matter, and a difficult decision to make, but the envoy requests and requires an answer, one way or the other. So what do I tell him?”

For a few seconds, none of the armored knights responded. Then one man took a half step forward.

“I am unconcerned for my own life,” he growled, “but our master is right. We have accepted into our charge and care the innocents, the women and children who have taken refuge within our fortification. If we do not accept this offer, then they will surely die or end their lives as slaves. If we agree to leave this castle as the Mamluk has requested, then there is at least a chance that we can continue to offer our protection to these people. I vote that we accept.”

De Sevry noticed that several of the other knights had nodded agreement at the man’s suggestion.

“Very well,” he said, his gaze resting briefly on each member of the company in turn. “Am I to assume that that suggestion is acceptable to you all? If not, speak now.”

No dissenting voice was heard, and the newly elected grand master himself nodded.

“Very well. Resume your posts, my brothers, and have the sultan’s envoy brought before me. I will address him myself.”

*   *   *

Within the hour, a group of roughly one hundred Mamluks, a significant force and each armed with both a scimitar and a curved dagger mounted on a belt worn outside his robe, strode boldly toward the closed doors of the Temple castle. But before they reached it, de Sevry, who had been watching their approach from the crenelated wall above the gate, ordered it to be opened, as soon as he was satisfied that only this group of men was close enough to enter the building.

The Mamluks swaggered inside the fortification, looking around them with interest at the battered and bone-weary defenders who had held out against their attacks for so long. Like the Crusader knights, many members of the Templar order spoke at least some Arabic, but when the leader of the Mamluk group made his first demand, none of the knights present would allow it. But during his earlier conversation with the envoy, de Sevry had been told precisely what the enemy soldiers would wish to do, and had reluctantly agreed to it. In a tired and resigned voice he instructed one of his knights to lead them to the highest point of the castle, where the flagpole stood.

It was the work of only a few seconds to haul down the distinctive battle flag of the Knights Templar, the black-and-white Beauseant, and replace it with the sultan’s own personal standard. As the new flag reached the top of the pole, a light breeze briefly fluttered it, revealing its colors and design to the watching men. The Mamluk group immediately responded to the sight with a ragged cheer, the sound instantly echoed by a thunderous roar of approval from members of the encircling army. Sultan al-Ashraf Khalil now had nominal possession of the castle, and the inhabitants, under the terms of the accommodation de Sevry had agreed to with the envoy, would vacate the building within twenty-four hours.

In the courtyard below, several knights had already begun packing their few possessions, ready to leave, and in other places groups of the women and children who had sought refuge in the building were also beginning to assemble. Through this scene of hurried preparations the Mamluk soldiers strode, confident of their own superiority and invulnerability, there in the very heart of the enemy camp.

De Sevry and a handful of the senior members of the order stood together on one side of the courtyard, watching the activity with jaundiced eyes.

“When we leave this place,” the grand master said quietly, “ensure that your sword arms are unencumbered. We may walk out of here freely, but that does not mean that we will easily be able to pass through the enemy lines.”

“You do not trust the infidels?”

“I do not,” de Sevry replied flatly. “They may still plan to fall upon us the moment we step beyond the gate. As I said before, we may simply be exchanging a quick and honorable death in battle to a more prolonged process of dying if we allow the siege to continue. But we will know soon enough.”

A shrill scream, suddenly silenced, echoed from somewhere within the gray stone walls of the fortress, and instantly each knight reacted. With a metallic slithering sound, battle swords were drawn from their scabbards as they attempted to identify the unseen threat.

“Spread out,” the grand master ordered. “Find out what’s happening.”

The knights dispersed in different directions, each trying to identify the source of the sound. It didn’t take long to find it.

One of the senior knights rounded a corner in one of the passageways and was confronted by an appalling scene. Two of the Mamluk soldiers had apparently happened upon a woman and her young son and had set upon them. The woman lay, clearly unconscious, on her back, her face bloodied and bruised, while the Mamluk heaved his body on top of her. The boy was still conscious, but the second Mamluk had effectively silenced him by twisting a length of cloth around his neck. The boy had been bent forward over a barrel, his clothes ripped asunder, to allow the Mamluk to enter him from behind.

The knight didn’t hesitate. The scene before him was an affront to every tenet of the order and to simple human decency. His sword was already in his hand, and in two swift strides he reached the infidel who was sodomizing the boy. He seized him by the shoulder, dragged him backward, and swung his sword around in a lethal arc, the broad double-edged blade cutting deeply into the man’s body.

The other Mamluk scrambled to his feet and reached for his curved scimitar, but he never had time to draw his weapon. As the first man tumbled backward to the ground, already dead, the knight withdrew his blade and swung it toward the second Mamluk. The end of the sword cut through the enemy soldier’s right arm just above the elbow, and the man screamed in agony. An instant later the knight reversed the direction of his blade and swung the tip through the Mamluk’s neck, instantly decapitating him. His body collapsed to the ground as his head bounced to one side.

The knight stood for a moment, sword still in his hand and ready for immediate use should any other danger present itself. After a moment, he heard the sound of running footsteps approaching him and turned to face this potential new threat, raising his sword with a two-handed grip.

But the man who appeared was not a Mamluk, but another member of the Templar hierarchy, and immediately the knight lowered his weapon.

The newcomer sheathed his own sword as he stared at the two dead men.

“We should never have trusted these infidels,” he said bitterly.

He strode across to where the boy still lay spread-eagled over the barrel, removed the length of cloth from around his neck, and helped him stand up.

The first knight bent down beside his decapitated victim and cleaned the blood from the blade of his sword with the Mamluk’s robe. Then he sheathed the weapon and knelt beside the woman who’d been raped. She was still unconscious, but at least she was breathing. The knight rearranged her clothing to cover her thighs and groin, affording her a slim measure of decency, and then stood up.

Moments later, Pierre de Sevry himself appeared on the scene with two other senior knights, his face reflecting the fury he felt at what had taken place.

“I was perhaps too hasty, Master,” the first knight said, somewhat hesitantly, “but when I saw what was happening I reacted instinctively.”

De Sevry shook his head. “No, my brother. You did what any of us, what any decent man, would and should have done.”

He paused for a moment, and then nodded, his decision made. He turned to the knights standing beside him and issued three simple orders.

“Find them,” he said. “Find them all, and kill them all. When you’ve done that, tear down that rag and hoist the Beauseant in its place. And then summon Tibauld de Gaudin to my presence.”

*   *   *

“I am unhappy about this,” de Gaudin said, sitting on the opposite side of the table to the grand master. “I feel that my place is here, with you and the other members of our order, until the end comes.”

De Sevry nodded.

“I know that,” he replied, “but we have to look at the whole situation. Because of what happened here today, and no matter what transpires tomorrow, this fortress is going to fall. Perhaps not this week, perhaps not even next week, but within a month the siege engines and the miners will have done their work and the walls will give way. I know that you are unconcerned for your own life, but we have charge of these women and children and the only hope they have is you, my brother. I have already ordered my men to load the chests onto the ship. As soon as they have completed that work, I want you to take on board the vessel as many of the women and children as the ship will physically hold, and then sail as quickly as you can to Sidon and to our castle there. That would at least ensure that we salvage something from the disaster of Acre, even if it is only the lives of the innocents.”

“Very well,” de Gaudin said, “if that is your order, then I will of course obey. When I reach Sidon I will organize a force to sail here as quickly as possible to assist you.”

“Do not bother, my friend. I have a feeling that this will all be over long before any reinforcements could possibly arrive.”

That evening, while it was still light enough to see, the galley that had been allocated to Tibauld de Gaudin, the treasurer of the Pauperes commilitones Christi Templique Solomonici in Outremer, the land beyond the sea, moved slowly and silently away from the dock that was protected by the Templar castle. Positioned in a line above the keel were half a dozen ironbound and locked chests, and sitting or standing on every available few square inches of space on the deck were the women and children fortunate enough to have been selected to accompany him.

The galley headed directly away from the shore, opening out to the west, so as to put some distance between the vessel and the archers of the besieging Mamluk army as quickly as possible. Only when the crew was certain they were out of range did the heavily laden vessel begin a slow and somewhat cumbersome turn to starboard, around to the north, for the fifty-odd-mile journey up the coast to Sidon.

In those days, vessels rarely sailed at night, for a number of reasons, but on this occasion they had had no option, and they did have one device that helped them in their mission. Next to the helmsman, illuminated by a shielded oil lamp, was a small container of water in which floated a piece of wood carrying a slim length of steel, one end bearing a daub of red paint. The Templars were one of the first groups ever to use a basic compass, and there were still discussions about exactly how and why it worked, but the pragmatic view was that it did and so they employed it. For whatever reason, the red end of the metal always pointed in the same direction, and that was all the sailors of the order needed to know.

Tibauld de Gaudin stood in the stern of the craft, behind the helmsman, and stared back toward Acre. A few lights flickered in the Templar castle, the torches placed in sconces on the battlement walls, and beyond them he could see the much brighter and more obvious illumination from the blazing fires that delineated the front line of the besieging army. De Gaudin stared behind the slow-moving galley until he could no longer see anything save for a dull yellowish glow in the sky, and then he left his post to stare with equal intensity into the blackness of the night ahead of the ship.

He knew with absolute certainty that he would never see any of his Templar brothers from Acre again.

And in this belief he was perfectly correct.

*   *   *

The morning after de Gaudin had made his somewhat reluctant escape from the doomed city of Acre, another envoy arrived at the Templar stronghold bearing a further message from the sultan, in response to the brief explanation de Sevry had already provided for the continued presence of the Templars. According to the envoy, the group of Mamluks who had entered the fortress the previous day had clearly been guilty men who had acted in an unacceptable manner, and the sultan was so embarrassed by their conduct that he wished to apologize in person to the commander of the Templar forces and give his personal guarantee that the terms agreed for the surrender of the fortress would be respected.

In hindsight, the Templars should have known better than to have even listened to the man. But in accordance with the expressed wishes of the sultan, de Sevry and a handful of his senior knights left the fortress and strode toward the center of the encircling army. The moment they were outside bow shot range of the fortress walls, they were surrounded, swiftly disarmed and forced down to their knees, and then one by one beheaded to the accompaniment of the spaced beats from a single Mamluk war drum. The defenders of the castle looked on in horror, but were powerless to do anything to intervene.

One of the great strengths of the Templar order was that if a leader fell in battle or was otherwise unable to continue in his post, the members of the order simply elected a new leader and carried on fighting. As was the custom, a senior knight was duly elected to command the force inside the castle, but it was already obvious that his tenure in the post was likely to be even shorter than that of his predecessor.

Three days after de Gaudin had left, the Mamluk miners set fire to the stacks of timber that they had placed in the tunnels they’d dug under the outer wall of the castle, and within a matter of hours the first crack appeared in the outermost wall of the structure. And as soon as that happened, an attack was launched against the building by over two thousand Mamluk soldiers, the attackers outnumbering the remaining defenders by more than ten to one.

But even as the final battle for the Templar castle began, other sections of the wall that had been seriously undermined by the tunneling operations simply collapsed, crushing most of the attackers as well as virtually all of the defenders. Once the dust had quite literally settled, hundreds of other Mamluk troops swarmed into the ruins, slaughtering every Christian they found.

*   *   *

At Sidon, when news of the fall of Acre reached the Sea Castle, de Gaudin was elected grand master of the order of the Knights Templar in Outremer, though his command now only comprised a bare few dozen knights. About a week after he had safely landed his human cargo at Sidon, he returned to his galley and ordered the crew to sail back out into the eastern Mediterranean to the island of Cyprus, then owned by the Templars, in order to raise reinforcements to protect and defend the last remaining Templar mainland strongholds in the Holy Land.

But in this quest de Gaudin was unsuccessful, and the relieving force he had hoped to create never materialized. After he left, Sidon itself was attacked and quickly fell to the massive army of the marauding Mamluks. The few surviving knights, squires, and sergeants of the order made their way to Tortosa, but that stronghold, like the other remaining mainland Templar castle in the Holy Land, Athlit, was abandoned in August that year, even before the Mamluks had launched an attack on either.

The last redoubt for the Templars proved to be the tiny fortress island of Ruad, located about two miles off the coast of the mainland, where the few surviving members of the order gather