The Templar Archive (Lost Treasure of the Templars) - Softcover

Buch 2 von 3: The Lost Treasure of the Templars

Becker, James

 
9780451473967: The Templar Archive (Lost Treasure of the Templars)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0451473965 ISBN 13: 9780451473967
Verlag: PUT, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

James Becker, New York Times bestselling author of The Lost Treasure of the Templars and The Lost Testament, delivers a breakneck thriller continuing the adventures of antiquarian bookseller Robin Jessop and encryption expert David Mallory.

While trying to decipher what few clues they have managed to recover about the Templar’s secrets, Jessop and Mallory discover that the legendary “treasure” they have been searching for may not be what they thought. Rather than gold or precious jewels, their long-sought prize may, in fact, be something far more valuable...

Information.

For the Templar Knights were the original inventors of international trade. And not all of it was in money. Lands, titles, the fates of entire noble houses were placed in their keeping. The records of such transactions, though centuries old, may possibly yield the greatest wealth in the world. But hunting for such an archive places Jessop and Mallory in the cross hairs of Europe's most powerful families...

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

James Becker spent over twenty years in the Royal Navy's Fleet Air Arm. Throughout his career he has been involved in covert operations in many of the world's hotspots, including Yemen, Russia, and Northern Ireland. He is the author of The Lost Treasure of the Templars, as well as the Chris Bronson novels, including The Lost Testament and Echo of the Reich. He also writes action-adventure novels under the name James Barrington and military history under the name Peter Smith in the UK.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1

Present day

Via di Sant'Alessio, Aventine Hill, Rome, Italy

Privacy costs money, and was a benefit that few could afford in Rome. The Via di Sant'Alessio was one of the most exclusive areas of the city, and in that quiet road privacy was both expensively purchased and expected. Very few of the properties located there displayed the slightest outward indication of what activity or activities were carried out inside them. One of these, a substantial detached building encircled by well-tended gardens behind high walls, offered nothing more than a house number to anyone who looked at it.

Inside this building it was always busy, because it contained some of the more private administrative facilities of a much more public organization that was located in a building facing the Lungotevere Aventino, not too far from the minor basilica of Santa Sabina.

One of the departments working within the building was a specialist intelligence and operational unit, a group of people who had virtually no contact with any of the other staff in the building because they had no need to do so. Their place of work was a small suite of air-conditioned rooms in the lowest level of the basement, accessed only through a steel-lined door that was permanently locked and only ever opened to allow the unit's staff to come and go. None of the other people working in the building, not even the most senior administrators, had any right of access to the basement at any time or for any reason. It formed the most private and deniable part of the Ordo Praedicatorum, was answerable to nobody, and had essentially unlimited funding. Provided, of course, that the long-term goals of the organization-goals that might appear senseless to an outsider-were met.

In his private office within that suite, Silvio Vitale leaned back in his chair and stared with barely disguised hostility at the man standing in front of him. It was an obvious measure of the tone of the interview so far that his subordinate, Marco Toscanelli, was still standing rather than sitting in one of the comfortable leather chairs in front of the desk.

"How sure are you that they're both dead?" Vitale demanded.

He was a slim man who had a pencil-thin mustache and a deceptively friendly appearance. Deceptive because, as Toscanelli knew only too well, he could erupt without warning into violent rages that were characterized by calculated brutality and extreme violence directed against anyone who had offended him. As always, Vitale was wearing a black suit, the unofficial uniform of the organization of which he was the head.

Toscanelli shook his head. "I can't be certain of that, no. After we opened the chests in the cave, they both ducked down into the tunnel system that ran under the cave. We didn't even know that the tunnel existed, because the entrance that had been exposed once they'd shifted the rocks and timbers just looked like a hole in the ground. We tossed a grenade after them, but I don't know if they were caught in the blast or not. I had other things to deal with at the time."

Vitale nodded.

"Yes," he said frostily. "You had to take care of things like shooting two of your own men because they were too badly injured to be moved out of the cave. That brought your tally of men from this organization that you have personally executed out in the field to an impressive total of five. Not to mention the other man who you claim was killed by Mallory. And all of them, I would remind you, died on one single operation."

"I had no choice," Toscanelli protested, shaking his head. He had Italian movie-star good looks, tanned and regular features under curly black hair, but the anguish in his brown eyes was obvious and his unusually pale complexion was a sign of the strain he was feeling. He knew there was a better than even chance that Vitale would end the interview by ordering his execution, because failure was something the order never tolerated willingly. He shook his head and explained again what had happened.

"Their injuries were so severe that even if we could have somehow got them to a hospital, they would certainly have died from shock and blood loss. We had no clue that those two medieval chests contained booby traps. Lethally effective booby traps."

"Obviously," Vitale replied dryly. "But what I find interesting is that from what you've told me both Mallory and Jessop apparently guessed that some kind of device might have been built into the chests, because of the way they made their escape at the very instant that your two men opened the lids. I've seen the chests, obviously, but not the booby trap. How exactly did the mechanism work, the device that did the damage?"

"I can do better than explain it to you," Toscanelli replied, encouraged by what he thought was a subtle change in Vitale's tone. "I have one of the chests outside and I can show you precisely how it worked. With your permission, of course."

Vitale nodded assent.

Toscanelli turned, walked back to the office door, opened it, and issued a short command. A few moments later, a man walked into the office carrying a fairly small and obviously old wooden chest, the curved lid inlaid with an intricate pattern of wrought-iron decoration. He stepped forward, lowered the chest to the carpet where Toscanelli indicated, bowed respectfully to Vitale, and left the room.

"It's smaller than I had expected," Vitale said, "and it doesn't look like much."

"It's not what it is so much as what it does. And that's really impressive, in a brutal sort of way."

Toscanelli stepped behind the chest, leaned forward over it, grasped the front of the lid, and lifted it. With a faint creak from the pair of ornate hinges that were mounted on the back edge of the chest, the lid swung open, revealing an entirely empty interior.

"That," Toscanelli said, "was what we expected to happen when my men unlocked and opened the two chests. What we hadn't anticipated was this." He pointed inside the curved lid, where an intricate construction of metal had been concealed by whichever medieval craftsman had fabricated it. "And because of the weight of the chests we were certain they were full, and of course they were, but filled only with rocks, which we definitely hadn't expected."

He closed the chest again and pointed to a pair of small metal objects in the form of rings or circles, one on either side of the lid and each rising about an inch above the complex decoration.

"Obviously these aren't the original locking pins," he said. "I had these made up in the workshop here, once we worked out how the mechanism had been set and triggered."

He slid his right forefinger through one of the circular objects and pulled firmly. As the length of steel emerged, Vitale heard a very faint metallic click from somewhere within the chest, a sound that was repeated a couple of seconds later when Toscanelli removed the second pin. Each piece of steel was about four inches long and roughly a quarter of an inch in diameter.

"With the pins removed, the holes are virtually invisible and appear to be just a part of the complex decoration on the lid. Which was obviously the idea, so that there would be no external indication of the mechanism inside."

"So removing the pins was like priming a hand grenade?" Vitale suggested. "A hand grenade with a fuse set for half a millennium?"

"Yes, though it was set, in fact, for eternity, because they'd only be triggered when somebody came along and opened the chests. Both mechanisms had obviously been very well lubricated to ensure that they stayed in good condition. And they were also protected by the chests being closed and locked and then buried underground, because both booby traps worked faultlessly. This is what happened when my men opened them."

Toscanelli again reached forward and...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
PUT
Erscheinungsdatum
2016
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0451473965
ISBN 13 
9780451473967
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
480
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

Weitere beliebte Ausgaben desselben Titels

9781800328655: The Templar Archive (Hounds of God, 2, Band 2)

Vorgestellte Ausgabe

ISBN 10:  1800328656 ISBN 13:  9781800328655
Verlag: Canelo, 2022
Softcover