"Too much information," he said. "This is all new to me, and I'm not taking it all in. What type of aircraft is this, by the way? I mean, is it reliable and all that?"

Robin nodded but didn't take her eyes off the view through the windshield as she taxied toward the runway.

"It's a Cessna 172 Skyhawk," she replied, "and it's the most successful aircraft ever in terms of the total number built. Cessna has knocked out over sixty thousand of these babies, and it's been around since the midnineteen fifties, though this one's only eight or nine years old. So, yes, it is reliable, very."

A few minutes later she braked the Cessna to a stop on the taxiway a few yards short of the entrance to the runway and carried out further checks there.

"Pretakeoff checks," she said to Mallory, then depressed the transmit button again. "Dunkeswell, Golf Sierra Tango, holding short of two two left."

"Sierra Tango. Take off. Wind light and variable, regional pressure setting 1014."

"Roger, Dunkeswell. Sierra Tango."

Robin opened the throttle again, and the Cessna eased forward. She turned it left onto the center of the runway, and opened the throttle all the way. The tarmac rushed past with increasing speed, the aircraft bouncing slightly over uneven sections of the runway, and then the plane gave a small lurch and was airborne.

Robin continued climbing straight ahead to eight hundred feet, the circuit height, then turned left to head away from the airfield.

"Dunkeswell, Golf Sierra Tango is continuing VFR en route. Good day, sir."

"Clear to continue VFR. Squawk 4321."

"Four-three-two-one, Sierra Tango."

Robin did something to a box just to the left of her.

"That's a setting on the secondary surveillance radar transponder," she said. "It just means that any radar unit that detects us will read a 4321 squawk and know that we're a real aircraft, not an angel or anything, and that we're not in receipt of a radar service from anyone."

"I'm not even going to ask what an angel is," Mallory said, "but what's VFR?"

"Visual flight rules. It means we do our own navigation, take our own separation from other aircraft, basically just do our own thing. And an angel is a slang term for anomalous propagation, usually an atmospheric effect that can produce returns on a radar screen that look just like aircraft but aren't."

Mallory nodded slowly as the Cessna continued climbing and opened out to the east. It was a clear and bright day, the few clouds high and well dispersed, and visibility was excellent. He'd never been in a light aircraft before, and the appeal of it was immediately obvious, the experience exhilarating.

"Well, it's good of this Justin guy to let you borrow his aircraft," he said.

Robin was silent for just a second or two too long.

"What?" Mallory asked.

"He didn't actually say I could borrow it, not in so many words. I rang him up to see where he was and what he was doing over the next week or two. When I found out he was going to be stuck in Cornwall for a while doing bits of estate business, I knew he wouldn't miss his Cessna."

"You mean you nicked it?" Mallory asked. "We're flying around in a stolen aircraft?"

"I think calling it 'stolen' is a bit strong. He'll be getting it back, after all. It's more kind of temporarily TWOC'd."

"Twocked?"

"Taken without owner's consent, that sort of thing. A common expression in the police force, I understand."

Mallory stared at her for a moment, then looked out through the windshield again, a slow smile spreading across his face. "In view of everything else that's happened over the last couple of days, I suppose flying about the countryside in a hot aircraft is the least of our worries. So, what the hell? Fly me to France, Robin."

50.

Southern England and France They landed at Biggin Hill in Kent, the old Second World War fighter base, affectionately known as "Biggin on the Bump," to refuel.

Once they'd touched down, Robin steered the Cessna over to what looked a bit like a regular petrol station, albeit with very wide spaces in front of the two pumps, and switched off the aircraft's engine.

"Use my card," Mallory said, "just in case there's a watch order out on yours."

Twenty minutes later, having also used Mallory's Visa card to pay the landing fees, Robin taxied the Cessna back toward the active runway, and minutes after that they were airborne again.

"What about French customs and immigration?" Mallory asked as they climbed through five thousand feet and Robin turned the plane onto a southeasterly heading. "Won't we have to clear them in France?"

"That really depends on how good a lunch the men in peaked caps have had, in my experience. I filed a flight plan when we paid the landing fees at Biggin Hill, stating that we were flying to Le Touquet, which is the closest French airport to Kent. I've flown in there a few times, and usually there's been nobody about apart from a man demanding a fistful of folding money for landing fees. I know Justin quite often nips over there for lunch as well, which means this aircraft is something of a regular visitor, so hopefully we won't attract too much attention."

"So we are going to Le Touquet?"

"Oh yes. Not complying with a filed flight plan is a very good way of attracting official attention really quickly. And we have to land somewhere, obviously. I guess we can just hire a car there and then disappear into the French countryside while we work out what to do next."

Two hours later, with the Cessna fully fueled, chocked, and locked in the aircraft park at Le Touquet, they were sitting in a hired Renault Megane and had just turned south onto the nontoll coastal autoroute at Abbeville. Robin had the map book open on her lap and was looking at the area down to the southeast of Rouen.

"We can start looking for a hotel somewhere quiet once we get past Rouen. According to the map, it's about a hundred kilometers-roughly sixty miles-away, so it's only about an hour's drive. We'll come off the autoroute once we leave Rouen, and there's bound to be a halfway decent hotel somewhere between Louviers and evreux."

"Sounds good. We just have to remember that this is France, and the French have pretty rigid ideas about timing. A lot of hotels won't accept new arrivals after about eight in the evening, and that's also usually the last possible time you can sit down to dinner, so ideally we need to find a place by seven."

"You're kidding."

"I'm not. I've been caught out before, driving through France. Some hotels actually lock their doors in the evening to dissuade unexpected paying guests, though I think they've lightened up a bit since the economic crisis started. But there are always places we can stay at any hour. There's a chain called Formula One, for example, and you can get in to those at any hour of the day or night using a credit card, but by all accounts they're pretty basic but very cheap. None of the comforts of home, I mean, but at least you get a bedroom, and they're usually clean. My favorites are the Logis de France. They're usually small places, family-run, and often quite quirky. But in my experience you get a decent meal, and the owners are very friendly, at least by French standards."

Robin was silent for a few moments, and when she spoke again her voice was tinged with concern.

"I've been thinking," she said, "and I hate to remind you about this, but back in the wood you killed that Italian, or at least helped him shoot himself. I know he absolutely deserved it because of what we're pretty sure the two of them planned to do to us, and I don't really have any problems with that. But even if it wasn't your finger on the trigger, if you hadn't been there, he would still be alive. Are you sure the police can't pin that on you?"

Mallory shook his head.

"That's why I took the extra few seconds to recover the bullet and the cartridge case," he replied. "If I'd left them there and they'd found me with the pistol in my possession, I'd be in real trouble because they could fairly easily have matched the bullet to the weapon, and that would be extremely difficult evidence to refute. But as it is, all they have is the corpse of a man who's been killed by a shot from a pistol, and about the best they'll be able to do is have a guess at the approximate caliber of the weapon that discharged the bullet, and estimate how close the weapon was to the man when it was fired. Even if I was arrested and they found the pistol in my bag, I would obviously be in trouble for the illegal possession of a firearm, and that would be bad enough, but there's no way they could pin a murder on me."

"But supposing they find the bullet or the case?"

"They won't," Mallory said firmly.

"How can you be certain of that?"

"Because I dropped them out of the side window of the Cessna when we were halfway across the English Channel, and the handkerchief I'd wrapped them up in followed a minute or so later, knotted around about a pound's worth of my loose change."

"I wondered what you were up to when you opened the window," Robin said. "Anyway, thanks for explaining."

Traffic was fairly light, and so it was quite a bit less than one hour later when they drove through the tunnel and joined the traffic jostling for position on the network of roads to the northeast of Rouen city center.

Robin was still navigating, and doing a pretty good job of it.

"If you see a sign for Pont de l'Arche, follow that road," she instructed. "It looks as if that will take us out to the east and avoid the worst of the traffic."

Mallory saw the sign at the last moment, and dived over to the right, earning himself a couple of horn blasts from angry French drivers, then drove under a bridge and followed the road around to the left. Once across the next junction, the road followed the course of the wide river on which a couple of large motorized barges were heading steadily south.

About twenty minutes later, and well clear of Rouen, he turned onto another nontoll autoroute, following the signs for Chartres and Orleans, but, conscious that it was already nearly seven in the evening, they turned off shortly afterward and headed for Amfreville-sur-Iton to find a hotel.

"Watch out for a small greenish sign saying 'Logis,'" Mallory said.

They didn't see a suitable hotel in Amfreville, but about a dozen miles farther on they saw exactly what Mallory had been hoping to find: a large square hotel on the right-hand side of the road, the green Logis sign swinging in the wind and with most of the lights burning. Luckily there was a choice of rooms, and after a quick freshen-up they went down to the dining room and enjoyed a simple but satisfying meal.

"I think this is ideal," Mallory said as they waited for the coffee to arrive after the dishes containing the last scrapings of their desserts had been removed. "I've checked with the owner and both rooms are available all week, so I've booked for tonight and tomorrow. It's got Wi-Fi, not free but we can afford to pay for it, obviously, and I've bought a coupon that will cover us for a couple of days. With a bit of luck, that'll give us the time-and the peace and quiet-we need to decipher the rest of the text."

"And then what?" Robin asked.

"I've no idea. It all depends on what we find out when we can finally read what's written on the parchment. If it's just a lot of rambling religious nonsense, we'll have to go back to Devon and face the music, I suppose, but I think it'll be a lot more than that. Otherwise why would these Italians be so desperate to get their hands on it, and quite prepared to kill both of us in order to do so?"

"Do you want to start work on it tonight?"

"I think we should," he replied. "We're probably safe here, lost in a randomly chosen bit of the French countryside, but I have no idea how long that state of affairs will last. Sooner or later the British authorities will extend their search for you outside the borders of the United Kingdom, and eventually those Italians might pick up our trail as well. We've got a bit of breathing space at the moment, so I think we should crack on and solve as much as we can of this riddle as soon as possible."

51.

France The following morning they walked down to the dining room and ate their way through a typical Continental breakfast consisting of bread, croissants, and pastries, washed down with glasses of fresh orange juice and coffee served in huge cups, each probably holding about half a pint.

Sated, at least until lunchtime, they walked back up the stairs to Robin's room. Mallory booted his laptop and within a few minutes they were once again using the Atbash cipher text to convert the next part of the writing into Latin plaintext. As he started working on it, Robin pointed out something else that had only just occurred to her.

"At last I think I know why that book safe had such a strange title," she remarked. "Ipse Dixit translates as something like 'the master has spoken,' and I think that should be 'Master' with a capital M, because quite a lot of what we've read so far has been referring to Jacques de Molay, the last grand master, directly or indirectly."

"That makes sense," Mallory said, carefully transposing letters from one line to another as he did so. "It does rather read a bit like de Molay's memoirs, explaining what happened in the last days of the Templar order. I'm just hoping that whatever comes next in this translation will provide a bit more information, because although there've been a few revelations, most of what we've read so far was already known or at the very least suspected by many historians."

The last two sentences on the first side of the sheet of parchment were perhaps the most enigmatic of all, and when she read them out Mallory could easily detect the uncertainty in Robin's voice.

"I hope that you can make a bit more sense of this than I can at the moment. This is the best translation I can come up with from the Latin: 'Three trials will reveal the heritage and the rebirth, but beware the hounds. Rely two times on him who came before and carried the burden and the rank.' It's almost as if this was written by a different person to the rest of the text, somebody who was trying to be deliberately obtuse."

"It looks to me like the same hand wrote this part of the text as the rest of it, but I quite agree with you. The section we've already decoded and translated was quite easy to understand and factual in nature. This isn't. It looks to me like a deliberate clue, or rather a number of deliberate clues, and my guess is that we'll have to solve them before we find out exactly what the text is referring to. Anyway, let's leave those two sentences to one side for the moment and carry on with the other side of the parchment. There may be something in the next piece of writing that will help clarify exactly what these sentences mean."

But as it turned out, they couldn't do that, because when Mallory applied the Atbash cipher text to the first line written on the reverse of the parchment, even he could see that the result was pure gibberish. He passed the text over to Robin, but really just so that she could confirm his diagnosis.

"This isn't Latin," she confirmed, "and that almost certainly means that the decryption is wrong."

"I agree. The author has obviously used a different cipher text to encrypt this piece of the writing. I'm afraid we'll have to start all over again, trying different words associated with the Knights Templar until we finally work out what he's saying."

Two hours later, Mallory stood up from the desk where he'd been working and stretched, trying to work the kinks out of his back.

"We need to take a break," he said. "I've tried every word I can think of that might be associated with the Templars, and none of them have worked on the next piece of text. The trouble is, even if I've somehow managed to pick the right two or three words, if I haven't got them in the correct order, the decryption still won't work. This could take us a hell of a long time to decode."

"Right," Robin agreed, glancing at her watch. "Let's go and grab a bite to eat in the dining room-they'll be serving lunch by now, I expect-and then take another look at it when we come back."

They tossed the problem back and forth between them during the meal, but didn't seem to be getting anywhere with it. Then Robin suddenly fell silent and fixed her eyes on Mallory, the beginning of a smile playing around her lips.

"We're going about this the wrong way," she said. "We were so focused on using words associated with the Templars that we haven't tried the clue that's already contained within the parchment itself, in the text on the first side."

"What clue?" Mallory looked puzzled for a moment, but before Robin could reply he smacked his forehead in frustration as he realized what she was driving at. "You're right. All that stuff about trials and heritage and dogs, or hounds, or whatever it was. Those two sentences were so obscure and obtuse that the clue to the cipher text more or less has to be in them somewhere."

Neither of them bothered with a dessert, and they were back in Robin's bedroom, sitting at the desk in front of Mallory's laptop computer, a few minutes later.

"Right," Robin said. "You know far more about the Templars than I ever will, so where do we go from here? It looks to me as if there are four possibly important words in the first sentence-trials, heritage, rebirth, and hounds-but I frankly have no idea what any of those mean, apart from the literal translation, obviously."

"The bad news," Mallory replied, "is that I don't know, either, which obviously isn't exactly what you wanted to hear. I don't know what is meant by trials, but I suppose if we apply a bit of logic to the problem, we could reasonably assume that heritage probably just means the legacy of the Templars, if you like, and rebirth might be a suggestion that although the order was purged in 1307 and ended in 1314, it somehow endured and rose again."

"I didn't realize it took five years for the Templar order to be dissolved," Robin said. "I thought all that happened in 1307."

"No, it was quite a long process. It was officially disbanded by Pope Clement the Fifth in 1312, and the last grand master was executed in 1314. You have to remember that the Templars weren't subject to secular authority: they answered only to the pope. When King Philip began his program of seizures and arrests, the Templars appealed directly to the Vatican for help, on the reasonable grounds that they owed neither allegiance nor obedience to the king of France, or indeed to any monarch. The problem they had was that Pope Clement the Fifth not only was a very weak pontiff, but was also intimidated by Philip, who bullied him into supporting his actions.

"Even then, the pope refused at first to believe the accusations made against the Templars, and in fact in recent years a document known as the Chinon Parchment was discovered tucked away in the Vatican's Secret Archives. That document proved conclusively that in 1308 the pope actually absolved the leaders of the Knights Templar of the charges made against them, and in the same year Clement sent another document to King Philip of France telling him that all members of the order who had confessed to heresy had been absolved and welcomed back into the bosom of the Church. Philip, of course, ignored this information and simply increased the pace of his persecutions.

"But eventually the king's bullying tactics worked, and in 1312 the pope promulgated the papal bull Vox in Excelsis, which formally dissolved the order. What's quite interesting is that Clement actually expressed his own unhappiness at the action he was taking in that bull, and admitted that there was insufficient evidence to condemn the order, and that he was taking that step only for the common good, because of the events that had occurred in France. Anyway, because of the differences of opinion between Philip and Clement, for several years the status of the order remained in something of a limbo, hence the delay in its formal dissolution."

Robin nodded. "None of that really helps us understand what's meant by rebirth, though, unless I'm missing something. What about hounds?"

"That's about the only word that does mean something to me, and especially in the context of that statement. 'Beware the hounds' I think is a direct reference to the Dominicans and also, as a matter of interest, helps us to date this parchment. The order was formed in the early twelve hundreds in France by the Spanish priest Saint Dominic de Guzman, and was approved by the pope shortly afterward. The order was established to do two things, both dear to the heart of the Catholic Church at that time. The monks were supposed to preach the gospel, which sounds innocent enough, but also to combat heresy, and that was a much darker side of their activities. Over the years they essentially became the pope's personal torturers, working in the darkness of castle dungeons and employing ever more sophisticated methods designed to cause the maximum possible amount of pain to the people-both men and women-who fell into their clutches."

"But how does that help date the parchment?"

"When the order was formed, it was known simply as the Order of Preachers, the Ordo Praedicatorum, and it wasn't until the fifteenth century that they became commonly known as the Dominicans, after their founder. But when that name became commonly used, somebody realized that it was a sort of pun, and that the word Dominican sounded somewhat similar to Domini canes, which would translate as the 'Hounds of the Lord.' And that's why I think that because the author of this text is telling us to 'beware of the hounds,' he has to have been writing no earlier than the fifteenth century."

"That makes sense, and I suppose the most obvious explanation for the information that the writer has already conveyed in this parchment is that he was drawing on a number of contemporary sources that described what had happened to the Templar order. So at least we know what one of the words in that sentence refers to, assuming you're right, of course. But I don't think we're any further forward in working out what cipher text we should be using to decode the next section."

Mallory nodded and turned his attention back to the translated text.

"The way I read it," he said, "I don't think that first sentence contains the clue that we're looking for. It looks to me as if that's just a general statement, maybe outlining a course of action that we need to follow-that could be the meaning of the expression 'three trials,' for example-but the second sentence seems to me to be far more specific. 'Rely two times on him who came before and carried the burden and the rank.' That's almost a definitive instruction. So all we need to do now is work out exactly what the writer means by "him who came before.'"