Angela nodded, and Bronson noticed a slight smile playing over her lips.
‘What?’ he demanded. ‘There’s something else?’
‘I said the text doesn’t tell us where in France either object ended up, but there is one other phrase that I do not understand but which seems to be suggested as able to supply the answer to at least a part of the puzzle.’
She picked up her pencil, turned over the sheet of paper and wrote out a new phrase on it, and then drew a circle around it.
Bronson stared at it for a moment.
Angela had written:
THE TRUTH OF THE TRUTH LIES
IN KRAK DE MONT REAL LXII DOWN
‘I don’t know about you,’ Bronson said, irritation evident in his voice, ‘but I’m getting a bit fed up with this. Every time we seem to get close to the answer, we get handed another riddle that doesn’t make sense. Is that accurate? And what the hell does it mean?’
‘It’s as accurate as I can get it, and I have no idea. But I’m going to find out.’
‘I presume that’s the number sixty-two,’ Bronson said, pointing at the ‘LXII’ notation.
‘Yes. But I don’t know its significance.’
Angela woke up her laptop, opened the web browser and began typing while Bronson continued staring at the cryptic clue.
‘“Mont Real” is French, of course,’ he said, after a few moments, ‘or probably, anyway, but “Krak” isn’t. I think it usually means a castle, like “Krak de Chevaliers”.’
‘You’re right,’ Angela replied. ‘I don’t know the root of the word, but it does mean a castle. And now I do know where the writer was talking about.’
She turned the computer round so that Bronson could see the screen.
On it was the image of a more or less conical hilltop, similar terrain distantly visible behind it. But the hilltop was far from barren, being dominated by the impressive ruins of a castle, the grey-brown stone walls seeming almost to grow straight out of the bedrock.
‘That,’ Angela said, ‘is Shobak Castle, and it’s nowhere near France. It’s in Jordan, not far from the old Nabatean city of Petra.’
‘I’ve never heard of it,’ Bronson said. ‘And we were looking for a place called Krak de Mont Real.’
‘That was its old name,’ Angela replied. ‘Krak de Mont Real or Krak de Montreal. It was never a Templar stronghold, according to this, but it was a Crusader castle. It was built in 1115 by King Baldwin I of Jerusalem, and it was the first of a whole bunch of fortifications he put up to guard the road between Damascus and Egypt. It withstood several sieges, but was finally conquered in 1189 and largely dismantled. When the Mamluks had finished driving the Templars out of the Holy Land in the fourteenth century, this was one of the places that they occupied and restored.’
Bronson nodded.
‘That must raise a bit of a question mark,’ he said. ‘If what you’ve just found out is correct, then during the time of the Templars the castle must only have been a ruin. So if that were the case, why would whoever authored that inscription have left anything in the building? And if they did, surely the Mamluks would have found whatever it was when they took over the place a century or so later?’
‘Good points, but I have a feeling that neither the Mamluks nor anybody else would necessarily recognize the importance or even the meaning of what was in the castle. Let’s face it, without having foreknowledge of the inscription from the temple in Iraq, neither of us would have even given that carving of the letters and the face of the bearded man that we found in the Western Wall Tunnel so much as a second glance. We would just have assumed it was a piece of well-carved graffiti. My guess is that whatever was left at Shobak Castle is the same kind of thing. A carving or something of the sort that would be completely meaningless to anyone who hadn’t already deciphered the other clues. And at least this time the author of the inscription is pretty much telling us where to look. I’m sure that the number sixty-two will mean something when we get to the castle.’
‘So you’ve made up your mind already?’ Bronson asked.
‘Not necessarily, but having come this far it seems to me to be stupid not to take that one last step. What do you think? What do you want to do?’
‘I’ll follow you, Angela, as I always do. Don’t worry about that. But if we get absolutely nowhere at this castle, then maybe we should rethink what we do next, because I get the feeling we’re being played with, sent from one place to another while we decipher and follow some pretty obscure clues. Really, this is worth doing only because we might have a one per cent chance of tracking down the lost treasure of the Templars, but the last bit that you deciphered suggests to me that maybe we’re not following the trail of the treasure but the trail of the “truth”, and I have a shrewd suspicion that that might not be an iron-bound box full of bullion but something completely different.’
‘So do you want carry on? Yes?’
‘Yes, at least for the moment.’
Bronson took his mobile phone out of his pocket.
‘Tell me again where this Shobak Castle is,’ he said.
Angela referred back to the webpage.
‘It’s in Jordan,’ she confirmed, ‘and it’s roughly one hundred miles north-east of Aqaba, which is down on the coast, next to Eilat in Israel.’
Bronson found it on the mapping app and zoomed in so that he could see the individual roads.
‘Is it way out in the bundu, or is there a town close by?’
‘There’s a reasonable-sized town called Wadi Musa, which is also on the way to Petra, and there’s what looks like a village with the same name — Shobak — fairly close to the castle.’
‘Got it,’ Bronson said. ‘In fact, in a straight line, it’s only about a hundred miles from where we’re sitting right now. We could drive it in two or three hours.’
Angela looked suddenly doubtful.
‘I wonder how easy it is to get across the border into Jordan?’ she mused.
‘We’ll tackle that when we have to,’ Bronson said confidently. ‘In the meantime, let’s get everything packed and then we can see about hiring a car.’
‘And you want to do this today?’
‘The longer we spend in one place, the more chance there is of being tracked down, so I’m very happy to keep on the move. We probably won’t get to Shobak today, but I’m sure we can find somewhere to stay in Jordan, maybe in Wadi Musa, and if we stick to doing everything with cash, we’ll be a lot more difficult for anyone to find.’
Fifteen minutes later, they were ready to go. Bronson settled the bill in cash, and obtained the name and address of a car hire company that allowed its vehicles to be taken out of Israel.
Then they stepped out into the street and started walking.
51
‘They’ve just left the hotel on foot,’ Farooq said quietly into his mobile phone.
Just over a hundred yards away, Khaled grunted an acknowledgement, and then stood up to stare down the street.
‘Are they leaving? Have they checked out, I mean?’ he asked.
‘I think so,’ Farooq replied. ‘They’ve got bags with them.’
‘Good. Tell your men to follow them until you can isolate them somewhere and finish the job.’
Khaled ended the call, tossed a few coins on to the café table to cover the cost of his drink, and then began heading down the street, towards the hotel Farooq and his men had had under surveillance. He didn’t want to be seen, but at the same time he definitely wanted to be close enough to make sure the job was done properly.