He explained to Robin how the device worked, and emphasized that it meant they were completely safe from any normal level of electronic interception. Then he started investigating all things runic, which turned out to be a far bigger subject than either he or Robin had expected.

The earliest runes had been used in the second century AD, and were almost certainly derived from the ancient Old Italic alphabets that were used on the Italian peninsula and that were employed to provide written versions of a number of different languages. These alphabets themselves had in turn originated from the Euboean alphabet, which had been used in Greek colonies in the southern parts of Italy. These archaic alphabets were first written from right to left, because that was the natural way that a right-handed mason carving an inscription would work, but when the use of ink became common, the direction shifted to left to right, again because most people were right-handed, and writing in that direction did not smudge the ink.

By the time the first runic alphabets emerged, left to right was the accepted direction for most writing, though some of the very earliest examples ran in the opposite direction, possibly owing to the influence of other alphabets that were written that way, such as the Northern Etruscan. The first runic alphabet was commonly known as Elder Futhark, the latter name representing the phonemes of the names of the first six runes, and as soon as Mallory looked at it he knew that the symbol he was investigating bore no resemblance whatsoever to most of the letters.

"These runes are all quite simple shapes," he said to Robin, who was sitting beside and slightly behind him. He pointed at the images on the screen. "None of these are anything like as complex as this symbol."

"More to the point," Robin replied, "not one of those runes contains any additional strokes like those on the symbol. I mean, none of them have a horizontal line at either the top or bottom of the vertical stroke, and the only one with a prominent diagonal line is the L rune, normally spoken as laguz, and which means water or a lake. The diagonal is on the correct side, but it's at the top, not the bottom, of the vertical line. What I was wondering was whether we were looking at a kind of complex or combined rune, where several letters were displayed together, on the same vertical line, but that isn't the case with this version of the alphabet."

"Yes," Mallory said, "but this Elder Futhark was only in use until about the eighth century, according to this article, so let's take a look at the alphabets that followed it. The next in terms of timescale was the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc."

He clicked on a link and brought up a diagram showing all the letters of the revised runic alphabet.

"This looks pretty much the same to me," Robin said, "though there are a few more letters employed. The Elder Futhark had twenty-four runes, but the Anglo-Saxon version expanded over the years until it contained thirty-three different runes. But none of the new ones had the characteristics we're looking for. Try the Younger Futhark."

Mallory obediently selected another link, and they both stared intently at the screen, studying the new information.

"Several of these are more complex shapes," Mallory said, "especially the medieval versions of the runes-you can see that they've added dots to some of the letters-but I still don't see any shapes that resemble this symbol. I think we're probably on the wrong track."

"That's what I thought right from the start," Robin said, "but it was a useful exercise to do, if only because we've now eliminated the various runic alphabets as a possible source for the symbol. The question now is where we look next."

Mallory shook his head. "I'll just do a few general searches on the Web and see if I can find any references to runelike symbology. That might work, if anything like this has appeared before."

A little over an hour later, Mallory sat back and stretched his arms out above his head, looking across at Robin, who was lying sprawled across the bed.

"Nothing?" she asked.

"Nothing," Mallory confirmed. "Either that symbol is so unusual that nobody has ever seen it before, or perhaps we were wrong and it really is just a kind of doodle, a drawing that we can't decipher simply because it doesn't actually have any meaning. But to me it still looks too deliberate, too positive in the way it's been created, for that to make sense."

He glanced at his watch. "Look, let's order a pot of tea or coffee or something, and see if we can think of somewhere else we can search. Not everything's on the Internet, you know: it just seems as if it is. Maybe we should be looking in libraries, places like that."

Robin smiled at him, picked up the phone, and placed the order with room service.

"You must be getting desperate if you're thinking about actually reading a book," she said. "I'd more or less got the impression that you lived your life online."

"I have been known to read the odd book," Mallory replied, slightly defensively, "but you're right. I do sometimes feel a bit like that guy in The Matrix, living inside a computer program and not having much contact with reality."

When the coffee arrived, he turned his attention back to his Web browser. "I think I covered pretty much all the possible search options relating to runic inscriptions and symbols of that type. Any ideas where we could start looking next?"

Robin thought for a few moments, then nodded.

"Maybe you could try a bit of lateral thinking," she suggested. "Instead of trying to find some way of deciphering that symbol, how about approaching the problem from the other end, as it were?"

"And by that you mean?"

"Try searching for subjects that are a bit less specific. Use terms like 'medieval cryptology' or 'early cipher systems,' that kind of thing, and see if that produces any useful information. I just think that because we don't actually know what encryption system-that's assuming that there was an encryption system, of course-was used to create the object, trying to decode it is probably going to be impossible. But if you just look at old cipher systems in general, that might give you a clue as to where you should be looking."

Mallory shrugged.

"You might be right," he said, "and it's certainly worth a try."

To his surprise, although the majority of the sites he looked at dealt with what might be termed conventional cryptography-principally various kinds of letter substitution codes and innovative types of steganography-he actually found the result he was looking for almost immediately.

"I've got it," he said, sounding astonished.

"You have?" Robin was almost equally surprised.

"It's an obscure medieval number code that was apparently developed by Cistercian monks in the late thirteenth century. It used a single vertical stem, just like a rune, and nine different types of line or shape that could be attached to that stem. Depending on which side of the vertical they were positioned, they had different meanings, and any combination of these shapes could be used to represent numbers from one up to nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine. It's a simple and really clever system, and according to this Web site, it was used by the monks for a couple of hundred years after it was developed, as an alternative to both the old Roman numerals and the new Hindu-Arabic numbers, which were just starting to be introduced."

Robin shook his head. "I've never heard of it. In fact, I've never heard of anything like that."

"I'm not surprised. Again, if the information on this Web site is to be believed, and I've got no reason to doubt it, the system started as a development of a kind of ancient Greek shorthand that only really became generally known about in the nineteenth century when a carving on a stone was discovered at the Acropolis, a carving that described that shorthand. But the number notation system remained obscure right up to the twentieth century, and it was only investigated then because of a fourteenth-century astrolabe that was auctioned at Christie's in London in 1991. The astrolabe was marked with symbols derived from this numbering system, and that prompted research into their origin and meaning."

"So the symbol is a number? I'm not sure that helps us very much, but now you've got the table of meanings in front of you, you can decode it."

Mallory nodded and pointed at the symbol. "I already have," he said. "The horizontal line at the base of the vertical means one thousand; the diagonal pointing up and to the right decodes as three hundred, while the kind of reversed capital letter L on its side at the top of the upright means seven. So the entire number represented by the symbol is 1307, and I really don't see how that helps us very much. My best guess is that it refers to the year the document was prepared. And I suppose it could also mean that the person or people who authored it were quite possibly Cistercian monks. Other than that, I don't think we're that much further forward."

Robin nodded, appearing deep in thought. "I'm not sure you're right about it referring to the year the document was written, because my impression was that the date was much later than that, maybe even a century or two later. But that is certainly one possible interpretation."

Mallory pushed the computer to one side on the table and took another drink of coffee. "Any other ideas, or have we just wasted about half a day working out that the symbol is just an unusual way of writing a date?"

"I don't know. I mean, the number pretty much has to be referring to a year-you've proved that-but I still don't think it means the year the text was prepared. If the author wanted the date to be included, or if the date itself was important to the message in some way, then I would have expected him to have made a reference to it in the text itself. A kind of 'In the year of our Lord' statement, that sort of thing. So in my opinion, for what it's worth, it looks to me as if that encrypted date is another clue of some sort, and perhaps what we should be looking for is something that happened in 1307, an event that might have meant something to the authors of the text. But I've got no idea what that might be, so maybe what we'll need to do is carry out a kind of quick survey of all significant events that took place that year, and try and relate one of them to the encrypted text."

Mallory shook his head, light dawning.

"We might not have to do that," he said.

He reached into his computer case to extract the decryptions they had already done of the first part of the encrypted message. He scanned quickly over the printed plaintext that between them they had decoded and then translated from the Latin, until he found the passage that he had remembered. Mallory turned the paper around on the table so that Robin could see the text, and then pointed at a particular section of it.

"We talked about this before," he said, "but the significance of it escaped me at the time."

"It's still escaping me," Robin said. "This passage is just a kind of general statement about the importance of worshipping God and leading a life according to strict rules. I don't see how any of this helps, so what are you talking about?"

Mallory jabbed his finger at the text again.

"Just read that passage aloud, could you?" he asked. "Only that one short section."

"It says 'only through the observance of strict rules can the penitent sinner expect to enter the kingdom of heaven.' It sounds to me like a typical medieval admonition trying to persuade people to follow a particular path."

Mallory shook his head. "Agatha Christie once wrote a novel where the crux of the plot hinged upon a character not repeating word for word what a dying man had said to her, but upon her interpretation of what he had said. I heard what you said when you read out that passage, but what you read was not exactly what we had translated and what's written on this piece of paper. Look at it again."

Robin glanced down at the sheet and shook her head.

"You're wrong," she said. "I did read out what it says."

"No. You said 'of strict rules,'" Mallory insisted, "but the translation actually reads 'of strict rule.' Singular, not plural."

"Rule, rules. What's the difference? And you might have written it down wrong."

"I don't think I did, so why don't you take a look at the sheet with the decrypted Latin text on it and just check it?"

Robin pulled the paper toward her and looked at it. Then she nodded.

"You're right," she agreed. "The Latin noun is singular, not plural, but I still don't see what difference that makes."

"I think I do. If you remember, the number nine seemed significant when I was decoding the text, because almost every ninth word marked a shift in the Atbash cipher. So we have the year 1307, the number nine, and a reference to a 'strict rule.' Does any of that ring a bell with you?"

"Not really, no."

"Well, I've got a pretty loud ringing in my ears at the moment, and I'm surprised it didn't occur to me earlier. A really significant event happened in October 1307, an event that still has some repercussions even today. That's the date encoded in that numerical notation that was almost certainly developed by the Cistercians, and that religious order is important. Plus, there was one medieval society for which the number nine was important in at least two different ways. And, finally, that same society was famed for its adherence to a particularly strict code of conduct, a 'strict rule,' if you like."

Mallory paused and glanced across the table at Robin, who still looked baffled.

"Put all that lot together," he continued, "and you have three indirect references to perhaps the most mysterious, notorious, and powerful of all the medieval organizations. I think this text has got something to do with the Knights Templar."

32.

Exeter, Devon Half of the secret of success in life lies in looking the part, and this is especially true when it's a case of gaining unauthorized access. Toscanelli knew that wearing the right clothes and carrying the correct accessories enormously reduced the chances of anyone stopping him and asking any questions.

Not that he was trying to get anywhere to which access was restricted. He was simply checking hotels, but as far as possible he wanted to be effectively invisible while he did so. Wearing his dark suit and carrying his briefcase, he looked exactly like every other businessman walking the streets of Exeter, and he simply strode into each hotel they'd identified as if he had reserved a room there, hurrying past the reception desk with a quick glance at his watch and then making his way to the parking area using the lifts or the stairs. And nobody at all had taken the slightest notice of him, as far as he could tell.

Exeter was big, but it wasn't a huge city, and they'd only identified about a dozen hotels that had off-street parking that couldn't be seen from the road. And, in the event, they hadn't had to check every one of them.

When Toscanelli had stepped out of the lift on the first level of the underground parking lot at the eighth hotel, almost the first vehicle he'd seen was the black Porsche Cayman, parked in a bay near the sidewall. He'd walked over to it and checked the registration number, just to confirm it, but he'd known it was the right car the moment he saw it.

There was a grim smile on his face when he emerged from the front door of the hotel and walked a few yards down the street to where Dante and Mario were waiting in the Ford Focus.

"Drive away," he instructed, leaning in through the open window, "but circle round and find a parking space somewhere on the opposite side of the street. Pick a spot where you can see both the garage door and the main entrance of that hotel. I'll wait here until you've done that."

"The car's there, then?" Mario asked.

"Yes, it's in the garage," Toscanelli confirmed. "Now get going."

Less than five minutes later, he resumed his place in the front passenger seat of the Ford, and all three men settled down to watch the hotel where they now knew that their quarry had gone to ground.

33.

Exeter, Devon "Of course, 1307," Robin said. "Friday the thirteenth of October, to be exact, when all the Templar commanderies and preceptories throughout France were raided and their assets seized on the orders of King Philip the Fourth of France, Philip the Fair-who was anything but fair in his dealings with the order."

"Unlucky for some," Mallory said, with a smile.

"If you were a Templar in 1307, definitely. Now, I see the importance of 1307, and I did know that the Templars operated by a very strict rule for all their members, but what was so important about the number nine?"

"A couple of things, really. Do you know much about the Templars?"

"Not a lot, if I'm honest, and probably most of what I know is wrong, because of the way old stories and legends get distorted."

"True enough. Well, I've read quite a lot about them, because they've always fascinated me for one very unusual reason, which I'll tell you about some other time, because it's not relevant right now. Most people know about the way the order was destroyed after 1307, but not many have much idea how it started, and even now there's quite a lot we don't know about that period. But we do know that in about 1119 a French noble named Hugues de Payens, who lived in the Champagne region of the country, decided to create a small military group-I suppose today we'd probably call it a task force-and persuaded eight of his noble relatives to join him in the venture.

"They based the rule and conduct of the order on the Cistercians, and that's why that symbol containing the number 1307 is important, because it reminds us of the year the Templar order effectively ceased to exist. But it also provides an incontrovertible link between the Cistercians-nobody outside that order of monks would probably have known how to use that kind of numerical notation-and the Templars. This was just after the First Crusade, and the idea behind the group was simple enough. What they wanted to do was provide a form of protection for pilgrims from Europe who were on their way to worship at the various holy sites in and around Jerusalem."

"So that's why the number nine is important?" Robin said. "Because there were nine of them?"

"That's one reason, yes. One obvious question that nobody's ever been able to answer is how anybody could reasonably expect a force of only nine knights to protect the hundreds, probably thousands or even tens of thousands of pilgrims who were traveling to the Holy Land. Even if they concentrated their efforts on the area immediately around Jerusalem, there were still too many roads and far too many people to make the idea viable. But obviously Hugues de Payens and his companions were very persuasive, because when they arrived in the city in 1120 they approached King Baldwin the Second and explained their mission, and he allocated them one of the two buildings standing on the Temple Mount to use as their headquarters.

"The area was under Christian control at that time, of course, but the two buildings were Muslim in origin. The Dome of the Rock, which is located more or less at the center of the Mount, was believed to have been built on the site of the Jewish Temple, and was commonly referred to as the Holy of Holies. That was turned into a Christian church known as the Templum Domini, or the Temple of the Lord.

"The other building that, like the Dome of the Rock, is still standing, was the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and it was that structure which Baldwin allocated to the new military group, and which then gave them their name. Traditionally, the mosque was understood to have been erected on the site of Solomon's Temple, and it was then known as the Temple of Solomon, the Templum Solomonis. Because they were using that building as their headquarters, the fledgling order adopted the name Pauperes Commilitones Christi Templique Solomonici, which translated as the Poor Fellow Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon. That was a bit of a mouthful, and fairly soon, because they were all of noble birth and based in the temple, they simply became known as the Knights Templar."

"So did they manage to protect the pilgrims in the Holy Land?"

Mallory shook his head. "The short and snappy answer is no, and again the number nine is significant. There were nine knights in this original group, all of whom were related by marriage or by blood ties, and the identities of most of them are known. However, two of the men were known only by their names-Rossal and Gondamer-and the final member of the order is completely unknown to history. There's been speculation about him for centuries, but no believable candidate has ever been suggested. And there's no evidence that any member of this original group of knights did anything to protect pilgrims on the roads around Jerusalem or anywhere else.

"Instead, for nine years-that number again-they stayed on the Temple Mount and inside the building, and the best evidence we have suggests that they spent almost this entire period digging down below the Al-Aqsa Mosque and deep into the caves and tunnels that are known to lie beneath the Temple Mount. It's popularly been supposed that they were looking for something, and it's difficult to think of another cogent reason why they should have done all this excavating. Speculation about the object of their quest has ranged from the Ark of the Covenant all the way to the decapitated head of Jesus Christ. The bottom line is that nobody actually knows what they were looking for, but there is some circumstantial evidence that they did finally find it, because in 1129 they suddenly stopped digging and turned their attention to other matters.

"At the Council of Troyes in that year they were recognized and then sanctioned by the Church, and the order then embarked on a major campaign, but not to fight infidels, which is what they soon became known for, but to raise money. They asked for donations, which could be cash, obviously, but they were also happy to accept land and property, and a major thrust of their effort was directed at the noble families of Western Europe. They were very keen to recruit other nobles to join the order, all of whom brought donations with them, normally handing over their entire property when they swore their oaths of allegiance and were accepted as members of the Knights Templar. The thrust of the recruitment drive was that donations would be used to help the order in its fight against the infidels in the Holy Land, the various Crusades, and it was certainly implied that each donor would also earn himself or herself a favored place in the kingdom of heaven.

"There was quite a lot of resistance at the time to the idea of an order of warrior monks, the obvious argument being that a man of God should not take up arms and engage in battle with anyone. But this belief was quickly turned around by a treatise written by the very influential Bernard of Clairvaux, in which he stated categorically that the religious order could, and in fact should, fight a just war to defend both the Church and the innocent from attack. He also established the belief that a Knight Templar who fell in battle against the infidels would go immediately to heaven, any and all sins being forgiven. At a time when heaven and hell were believed to be absolutely real, and when people were genuinely worried about the fate of their immortal souls, this was a remarkably persuasive argument, and dozens of important nobles flocked to join the order.

"Then the Vatican joined the campaign, and in 1139 Pope Innocent the Second issued a papal bull known as Omne Datum Optimum, which basically exempted the Templars from paying any taxes or duties, allowed them the unquestioned right to cross any border, and stated that the order was subject to no authority apart from that of the pope himself. It was, if you like, the ultimate 'get out of jail free' card, because it allowed the Templars to do whatever they liked, and within a very short time the order had expanded enormously, with chapters being created across most of mainland Europe, as well as in England and Scotland."

"But they were a fighting force?" Robin asked. "I thought they were involved in most of the Crusades."

"You're quite right. The Knights Templar became the most feared shock troops of the time, something like the Special Air Service is today. They were well equipped and well trained, but above all they were incredibly highly motivated, largely because of this belief that if they died in battle they were assured of a place in heaven. And their orders in combat reinforced this. They were forbidden from retreating in any conflict unless they were outnumbered at least three to one, and only then if they were ordered to do so by the commanding officer, or if the Templar flag, the Beauseant, fell. As a result, in combat they were utterly fearless. It was popularly believed that when battle was imminent the only question the Templars ever asked was where the enemy was, never how strong the enemy forces were, because they simply didn't care. They believed that dying in battle was the ideal way for their lives to end."

"Pretty much the same attitude as radical Islam today," Robin commented.

"There's not much that's new in this world, but I suppose it's interesting how that belief has now come full circle, from being a tenet of radical Christianity to now being held with equal fervor by radical Islam. There's probably a message or a moral in there somewhere. Anyway, all that stuff about the origins of the Knights Templar might be useful background, but it's not actually getting us anywhere. What we need to do is try to decipher the rest of the text on the parchment, and now I think we've got a good shot at doing that."