"That's the tricky bit," Mallory replied, "because I can't remember exactly. I think it was over on that wall there"-he pointed to the opposite side of the large room-"but I can't be absolutely certain. We'll just have to search until we find it. What I do remember is that the letters were quite large and whoever had inscribed them had enclosed them in a kind of square box. And don't forget," he added, "that even if I've remembered the initials correctly, there's no guarantee those letters are anything to do with Tibauld de Gaudin."

"I know," Robin said briskly, "but that's absolutely all we have found, so let's take a look at it and try to work that out."

In the event, finding the four initials-and Mallory had been right about them-didn't take very long. Only a couple of minutes after they'd walked over to the opposite wall, Robin lifted her arm and beckoned him over.

"Is this what you saw?" she asked.

On the old gray stone directly in front of her was a rough square, itself divided into two equal parts by a horizontal line. Below the line and centered in the lower half of the square were the letters TBLD, clearly and accurately carved, in contrast to some of the other marks they had found, which were little more than surface scratches. These letters, and the line that formed the bisected square, had apparently been incised with a metal chisel, and had been done with considerable care. Above the dividing line and also centered were four other letters-SOIM-which made no sense to either of them.

"It doesn't look to me as if whoever carved this was simply some mindless little git who wanted to make his pathetic mark here for posterity," Robin said, tracing the outline of the letters with the tip of her forefinger. "This was obviously done using proper tools and looks to me like a deliberate and thoughtful carving, intended to last for eternity. The only problem is that there's no sign of a Templar symbol anywhere near it, so I really don't think that we're any further forward. This could have been carved by Tibauld de Gaudin, or probably more likely by someone acting on his orders, or it could equally well have been put here by some unknown bloke called 'Thomas Brian Liam Doyle' or another equally forgettable name. Though if it was, I don't know why he would have taken so much trouble over it."

Mallory nodded, and gave her a brief smile.

"You're absolutely right," he said, "except for one thing. When we started looking here, I suggested you keep your eyes open for any depiction of the croix pattee, but I think now that I was wrong. The Templar cross was so well-known as the symbol of the order that it would simply be too obvious a shape to carve. Anybody seeing it, and especially somebody on the track of the Templar treasure and looking here, would immediately be alerted. The fact is that there's a Templar symbol right in front of us, but it's much more subtle than the croix pattee. What we're looking at is actually an accurate representation of the Beauseant, the battle flag of the Knights Templar."

"It is?" Robin sounded something other than totally convinced.

"It is."

Mallory pointed at the square carefully incised into the gray surface of the old stone and traced the outline.

"The Beauseant was one of the simplest flags that has ever been created," he said. "All it consisted of was a roughly square piece of material dyed black at the top and white at the bottom, the dividing line occurring at the halfway point. Some later versions also contained the croix pattee, but in these circumstances that would have been too much of a giveaway. But I think what we're looking at here is the simplest possible design of the Templar battle flag, with a shortened form of the name of the newly elected grand master carved into the lower half. I'm certain this is the clue that Tibauld de Gaudin left here before he sailed to Cyprus."

Robin still looked doubtful.

"Don't you see?" Mallory said urgently. "Tibauld would have known the likely fate of the Sea Castle, so he couldn't have left an overt message or other indication, for fear of it being too obvious. But this"-he pointed again at the carving-"this is just a bunch of letters in a square. It only makes sense if you already know that Tibauld de Gaudin was here, and that he was the former treasurer and then the grand master of the Knights Templar, and that he had been entrusted with the treasure of the order and was leaving imminently for the safe haven of Cyprus."

Robin looked at him, and then back at the carved letters and lines on the stone. Then she pointed at the part of the stone directly below the carved inscription. There were a number of other marks inscribed, with equal care but nothing like as deeply carved, in that area.

"Are those a part of it, do you think?" she asked.

Mallory took a small black aluminum flashlight out of his pocket and shone it where Robin was indicating. He could see an unusual shape, somewhat like large and small capital letters L, the small one directly above and to the left of the larger one, and joined to it.

"It could be," Mallory agreed. "It looks as if it's been incised with the same care as the main carving, but I haven't the slightest idea what it means."

A couple of inches over to the right was what looked like a letter V, but lying on its side with the apex pointing to the left. And to its right were three other, smaller, shapes, each of which also looked like the letter V but inverted, the middle one slightly smaller than the other two but more deeply incised and with a short horizontal line directly below it.

"I also have not the slightest idea what these might mean, if anything," he added. "But I'll take a bunch of pictures of them, just in case."

While Robin stared at the shapes, Mallory fished around in his computer bag, which-inevitably-he had brought with him from the car, and took out a small digital camera. He checked that the flash option was set to "Auto" and then took half a dozen pictures of the inscription and the marks underneath it in quick succession, altering the angle of the camera each time to ensure that he was capturing the entire image, and hoping that by doing so any other marks or incisions that they hadn't spotted in the fairly poor light would be recorded by the camera.

"Why did Tibauld inscribe the shorthand version of his name in the lower half of the flag?" Robin asked. "He was the newly appointed grand master of the Templars by this time. Surely his name should go at the top of the flag, as the leader of the order, instead of these other four letters?"

"I don't have an answer for that. The Templars were always modest in their outlook. They took vows of chastity, poverty, and humility, so perhaps Tibauld thought it more appropriate that his name should appear lower down. It does seem odd, though, because it implies that the SOIM was more important than he was. The short answer is that I don't know."

"So, if this is the clue," Robin persisted, "what does SOIM stand for?"

"That's the rub, I'm afraid," Mallory replied, replacing the camera in his bag, "because I have absolutely no idea. But what I do know is that those four letters have to mean something. They could be the shortened name of a person, but I think it's much more likely that they indicate a place-name or something of that sort on Cyprus, and the only way we're going to be able to work out their meaning is to get ourselves over to the island. I'm sure that's where the answer lies."

55.

Rome Silvio Vitale had carefully considered everything that Toscanelli had told him. Some of what he said Vitale had discounted as little more than excuses for the embarrassing failure of his men, but much of it clearly had a basis in fact: the deaths of four people and the maiming of a fifth allowed for no other interpretation.

Obviously there was much more to the female bookseller Robin Jessop and her unidentified male companion than met the eye. Vitale was not a man known for making assumptions, and he had immediately instructed members of his staff to gather all the data that was available on Robin Jessop. This turned out to be precious little, almost no more information than he already knew about her ownership of the bookshop. The only significant piece of extra data his staff had managed to collect was that she was an occasional amateur racing driver, holding a competition license and generally doing well in the handful of events that she bothered to enter each year.

But even the most diligent of inquiries had failed to reveal much about the man who was accompanying her. Toscanelli had noted the registration number of the Porsche Cayman that he had been driving, and that information, channeled through the senior police officer who was a tertiary, a kind of unofficial lay member of the Dominican Order, had generated the name David Mallory and an address in Cornwall, but almost nothing else.

However, there were a number of official channels open to Vitale, and he had instituted a number of checks through these. And almost immediately he had begun to gather results.

Within the Schengen area, routine passport checks were almost nonexistent, but travelers were still required to produce their documentation whenever they did certain things, the most obvious of which was flying as a fare-paying passenger in an aircraft, and passenger records were held for some time. They were also confidential, but there were numerous ways in which they could be accessed by law enforcement agencies and other bodies.

Within six hours of Robin Jessop and David Mallory flying to Beirut, Silvio Vitale was looking at a printout of the passenger list for that flight, and that told him precisely where in the world she and Mallory were heading.

Vitale knew that Toscanelli would still be in transit to Cyprus, but he sent him a long encrypted e-mail anyway, telling him what he had discovered. Beirut, he was absolutely certain, was not Jessop's final destination. He knew the history of the Knights Templar better than almost anybody, and from the deciphered parchment text he knew that there was a strong probability Tibauld de Gaudin might have left clues, clues that could conceivably have survived to the present day, and that the first of these was most likely to be found at Sidon, at the Sea Castle.

In fact, he hoped that this was the case, and that Jessop and the man with her would find it and then travel on to Cyprus, which was where both logic and history suggested that the lost treasure of the Knights Templar was to be found, or at least the treasure de Gaudin had taken from Acre, the treasure of Outremer.

But Vitale was still frustrated by one thing: despite a brute-force attack mounted by three of the most powerful computers the order possessed, the final section of the encrypted parchment had still not been deciphered. He had been assured by Fabrini that it would eventually yield, but he had no idea when they might achieve a breakthrough. It could take hours or months, and nobody had any idea which.

But perhaps whatever information remained to be discovered at the Sidon Sea Castle would be enough for Jessop to discover the hiding place. And for that reason, Vitale had had a change of mind with regard to the orders he had given Toscanelli. Instead of acting alone, he was to link up with the advance party that had already reached the island of Cyprus, and they were then to identify Jessop the moment she arrived and follow her and her companion until they discovered where the treasure was hidden.

Once that had been done, the encrypted e-mail concluded, Toscanelli's original orders were to be followed: the woman and her male friend were to die, and Vitale frankly didn't care how, so Toscanelli and the other men could enjoy themselves with her if they wished.

Vitale read through the text of the message one last time, making sure that everything he had said was perfectly clear and unambiguous, and then he sent it. And after that, there was nothing he could do but sit back and wait.

56.

Cyprus Getting from Lebanon to Cyprus hadn't proved to be anything like as difficult as Mallory had expected. There were no ferries, apart from one that plied the route between Mersin in Turkey and Girne on the north coast of the island. But flying was easy, and even the timing had worked. They got back to the airport in Beirut just after five that afternoon, and once Mallory had returned the rental car, almost as a formality he and Robin wandered over to check the departure boards before attempting to find a hotel for the night.

But what they saw changed their minds immediately: Cyprus Airways had a flight leaving for the island at seven fifteen that evening, and they were in good time to catch it. Mallory bought two tickets with cash, choosing a return flight in three days' time. Hopefully by then they would either have located what they were seeking or have to acknowledge that they were wasting their time.

The flight landed precisely on time at Larnaca at seven fifty-five, and they were among the first of the passengers to walk out after passing through customs and immigration. The sun was a glowing yellow ball in a solid blue sky, dipping slowly toward the horizon, and they knew that the heat would hit them like a hot and muggy blanket when they started their search the following day.

"We need two things," Mallory said, looking around the interior of the airport building. "A car-obviously air-conditioned-and somewhere to stay, and that had better have either really thick walls or air-conditioning as well. In that order," he added.

"Well, don't just talk about it," Robin said, pointing at a sign for a hire car agency. "Get over there and sort something out."

"And the other thing we need to do is keep our eyes open. I paid for our air tickets with cash, but we had to show our passports, and that could mean the bad guys know where we're heading. In fact, they might even be here already."

Half an hour later they were sitting in a white right-hand drive Renault Clio, Cyprus being one of only two islands in the Mediterranean-the other being Malta-where traffic drives on the left-hand side of the road, a hangover from the colonization and occupation of the island by the British at the end of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. Although the light was already beginning to fade, he had the air-conditioning running at full blast to try to bring the temperature down to a manageable level because the car had been standing in the full sun all day. Inside the vehicle, Robin and Mallory were looking at a road map of Cyprus that had been supplied by the rental agency.

"I don't know why," Mallory said, "but I always thought Cyprus was quite a small island. In fact, it's big. Really big. According to this, it's the third biggest island in the Mediterranean after Sicily and Sardinia. More important for us, it's about a hundred and fifty miles long and over sixty miles wide at its widest point, and that means it's a hell of a big area to search."

Robin nodded. "So we absolutely have to decipher what Tibauld de Gaudin meant by those four letters. Otherwise this is going to be a complete waste of time."

Mallory pointed at the map.

"Right now," he said, "we have no idea where our search is going to take us, so I suppose it doesn't really matter where we decide to stay, at least for tonight. According to this map, the airport is just to the south of Larnaca itself, so why don't we just head north into the town and drive around until we find a small hotel that looks halfway decent? Then we can take a couple of rooms for a night or so while we sort ourselves out."

"Go for it," Robin instructed.

Mallory slipped the car into gear and moved away from the curb where the vehicle had been parked. He drove slowly down the road, alternating his attention between his mirrors and the buildings lining the road as they entered the town from the south. He saw no sign of anyone following them, but the traffic was so heavy that spotting any surveillance was extremely difficult.

Neither he nor Robin had ever been to Cyprus before, so it was all new to both of them. It looked typically Mediterranean, the seafront road dominated by a mixture of newish high-rise hotels and apartment buildings and a handful of much smaller and older individual houses, almost all of them painted white, presumably to reflect the ever-present sunlight, and with red-tiled roofs. There were cars everywhere, and motorcycles and scooters whizzed through the traffic with a cavalier disregard for any rules of the road.

"There've been a lot of problems here in the past, haven't there?" Robin asked. "Between the Turks and the Greeks, I mean."

"There still are problems," Mallory confirmed. "The island's basically divided into two separate parts. Down here in Larnaca, we're more or less in the heart of the Greek sector, which occupies about two-thirds of Cyprus. Then up to the north of us there's a dividing line running roughly east to west, and above that is the smaller Turkish area. I don't think today that there's too much open hostility between the two parts, but it's certainly true that they don't get on with each other very well."

"I saw something on television a while ago about property problems, people buying land in some areas of Cyprus, building houses, and then being told that the ground actually belonged to a Greek citizen, and that the Turkish vendor didn't actually have any legal right to sell it in the first place. I think some houses had actually been demolished as a result."

"I saw the same program," Mallory confirmed. "The start of the troubles was when Cyprus became independent in 1960 after the British occupation."

Robin nodded.

"Remind me not to buy anything except food and drink while I'm on the island," she said. "Definitely no real estate."

Mallory drove the Renault farther through Larnaca and away from the center of the town, where he guessed that hotel prices would be fairly high, and headed north toward the outskirts, looking out for somewhere that appeared both welcoming and inexpensive. He still had a substantial amount of cash in his wallet, the money he had taken from the Italians they'd clashed with back in Devon, but those funds were not inexhaustible. He had avoided using any of his credit cards since they left Britain, so that the British authorities wouldn't be able to trace them through credit card transactions. In their position, cash really was king, and using it essential if they were going to stay below the radar.

About twenty minutes later he braked the car to a stop on the side of the road and pointed through the windshield, again checking the mirrors and again seeing no sign of any vehicle or person who could be following them.

"How does that look at you?" he asked, indicating a white-painted hotel on the opposite side of the road and a short distance ahead.

"Pretty much the same as about a dozen or so that we've already passed," Robin replied. "Why have you picked that one?"

"Two reasons," Mallory said. "The signs beside the entrance."

Robin shifted her glance slightly, and then nodded. "I see what you mean. That should do us nicely."

On one side of the entrance a cheaply painted board announced GOOD ENGLISH SHE IS SPOKE HERE, while on the opposite side another sign proudly proclaimed AC ON ALL ROOME.

Mallory drove the short distance down the road, swung the car over to the right, and stopped it in one of the half dozen or so parking bays that fronted the small hotel. He left the engine running to drive the air conditioner and opened his door.

"You stay here for a minute or so," he said. "I'll see if they've got any vacancies and check just how good the English is they spoke, because my Greek is nonexistent."

He came back out about ten minutes later, two room keys attached to large brass fobs in his left hand.

"They had two rooms left," he announced, opening the driver's door and reaching inside to turn off the engine. "They're next to each other at the back of the building with quite decent views of the sea."

They removed their bags from the trunk of the car. Mallory locked it and then they walked inside the hotel.

A little over eighty yards away, in a narrow side street, a tall and well-built man kept his compact binoculars focused on the two figures as they walked away from the car. He was wearing a pair of cutoff jeans and a T-shirt, and he was sitting astride a middle-sized Honda motorcycle, powerful enough to keep up with almost any car on the twisting roads that characterized some areas of Cyprus, but small enough to be maneuverable in the crowded streets of Larnaca or any other town. In a leather pouch on his belt was a smartphone, and a Bluetooth headset was positioned over his right ear.

"They've just walked into the hotel," he reported in Italian. "They're carrying their bags, so I'm sure they've taken a room there. Just confirm that you've made a note of the address. You already have the registration number of their rental car."

He listened to the reply, his gaze never leaving the entrance to the building.

"I'll give it five minutes," he said, when the man at the other end of the call stopped talking, "just in case they've forgotten anything, and then I'll do it."

The man calling himself Salvatore-a randomly selected work name-had been waiting inside the airport building, sitting at a table in one of the cafes that offered an unobstructed view of the arriving passengers, and had identified the two targets almost immediately. The description that Marco Toscanelli had supplied was both accurate and detailed. They hadn't known which flight the targets would be likely to arrive on, and so Salvatore had been visiting the airport to meet every aircraft that had come from Lebanon. Toscanelli had explained that eventually the order would be told which flight they'd taken from the passenger list, but getting access to the list would take time, and the flight duration was very short, only about forty minutes, so physical surveillance had been the only option.

As soon as Salvatore was certain of his identification, he had called Toscanelli's mobile phone to confirm that the two people had been on that flight, and had kept the line open until Jessop and Mallory walked over to the rental car desk. Then he'd ended the call temporarily, folded up the newspaper he'd been pretending to read, and slipped it into his pocket. He waited until the targets had completed the formalities and were walking toward the exit doors, then followed them out of the building, keeping a few yards back.

Outside, he had walked over to the edge of the parking area where he had left his motorcycle, pulled on his helmet, and again opened the line to Toscanelli to update him on the situation.

As soon as the targets had been positively identified, Toscanelli had suggested sending another member of the group to join the surveillance operation in a car. Salvatore had agreed to this, but recommended holding the second vehicle out of sight and in reserve, because he really didn't believe that any car could elude his motorcycle on the streets of Larnaca. And he'd been right.

When the two targets had put their bags in the trunk of the rental car, Salvatore started the engine on the Honda and waited for the Renault to move away. Then he followed the car, never getting closer to it than about fifty meters and often dropping back to over two hundred meters, and using the heavy traffic on the streets to shield him from the view of the driver as much as he could. Through the Bluetooth headset he kept up a running commentary so that Toscanelli knew exactly which route the two targets were following, just in case something unexpected happened and he lost contact with them.

But it had been almost too easy, the driver of the Renault apparently having not the slightest idea that he was being followed, and Salvatore was completely certain that he had been unobserved. Now he only had one final task to perform, which would take him under a minute.

He continued looking at the hotel, but there was no sign at all of the two people he had been following, and he guessed that they were in their room, maybe unpacking or just freshening up. He didn't want to leave it any longer, in case they decided to return to the vehicle and drive off somewhere for a meal. The window of opportunity was quite small.

Salvatore nodded to himself, checked his watch, and then spoke into his headset.

"I'm going in now," he said.

He restarted the engine of the motorcycle and drove up the road before swinging right into the parking area of the hotel, stopping his machine right beside the white Renault. He glanced round to make sure that he was unobserved, then reached into the pocket of his jeans, took out a small black plastic object about half the size of a box of matches, and flicked a tiny switch on the side. He checked that the small green light at one end was flickering faintly, then bent down and in one fluid and practiced movement he positioned the box against the metal on the inside of the car's rear wheel arch, the powerful magnet the device incorporated almost snatching it out of his hand.

Then he simply turned his bike around and rode unhurriedly away from the hotel, as if he'd just changed his mind about going into the building.

"The tracker's in position," he said into his headset as he changed up into third gear and accelerated gently down the road that led out of Larnaca. "Confirm that you have a good signal?"

"Confirmed," the voice in his ear stated. "Remain within sight of the hotel, just in case they decide to move later this evening. Ensure that you have a full tank of fuel and a spare battery for your mobile."

Even as Toscanelli issued his instructions, Salvatore was turning left into a street that would virtually complete the circle and bring him back to a position from which he would be able to observe the hotel again. Until he was completely certain that the two targets had retired for the night, he had no intention at all of leaving the area.

He didn't even bother to reply to Toscanelli. He was a professional, and knew exactly what was expected of him. Being given pointless orders by the man who had presided over one of the most spectacular failures in the order's recent history was not something that sat well with him.