Free The Lost Treasure of the Templars by James Becker

of interest to at least a handful of her regular customers, and as soon as she had taken pictures of the new volumes and prepared accurate descriptions, she would send personal e-mails to all those she thought might be interested in buying them.
    With any luck, she might be able to recoup at least half of the money she had spent in buying the collection of books within a couple of weeks, and that would obviously be good news for her cash flow. In the meantime, she put the book safe, its brutal antitheft device, and its curious contents out of her mind.

6
    Helston, Cornwall
    Because David Mallory was on a number of mailing lists, he picked up between fifty and sixty new e-mail messages every day. The vast majority of these, including the inevitable invitations from people in Nigeria desperate to share a multimillion-dollar fortune they had just stumbled across, and blatantly obvious phishing e-mails urging him to supply his bank account details as quickly as possible to some hopeful cybercriminal who was pretending to work in the security department of a High Street bank he’d never had an account with, he discarded without even opening. Messages sent by members of the various genealogy sites he always looked at, just in case there was anything of interest, and obviously he read anything sent by friends or members of his family, and most of these he replied to.
    He’d got into the habit of processing his messages in the evening, when he’d driven home from wherever he had been working—assuming he’d been on-site somewhere that day—or when he logged off from somecompany intranet if he’d been working on from home. And the other thing he did at about the same time was take a cruise around the genealogy sites and look at some of the latest posts on the various blogs, just in case anybody had come up with some useful information or found any new sources of data.
    That evening, when he’d put down his briefcase in the hall, made himself a cup of coffee—he invariably drank instant because he wasn’t interested in fannying about with percolators and the like—he walked into the bedroom at the back of his house that he used as a study, put down his laptop, and switched it on. He’d only made the jump from a personal desktop machine to a high-specification laptop when he started his genealogy research, because the advantages of being able to carry not just a few notes but the entire corpus of his work around with him on a single machine were overwhelming. So he’d splashed out and bought the best he could find. The machine had a big screen, two hard drives of one terabyte each, an additional solid-state drive for his operating system and application software, a quad-core processor, and sixteen gigabytes of RAM. It was, in computing terms at that time, about as state-of-the-art as you could get.
    He started downloading his e-mails but didn’t look at them, and instead went straight to one of the blogs that was on his list of favorites. He scanned quickly through the list of posts, glancing at the subject matter of each one, then clicked on the link to the next blog and repeated the process. Several posts were interesting, but none of them provided any information he didn’t already know, just really serving as confirmation of data he’d already established.
    His messages had finished downloading a few minutes earlier, so he shifted his attention from his browser to hise-mail client and began weeding out those which were of no interest to him, filing those that he thought he would need to keep and replying to all those that warranted it. About halfway down the list, he came across one that stood out. It wasn’t the first time he’d heard from that particular man, and he’d established a cordial business relationship with him, albeit completely one-sided. Mallory was a customer; the man was a supplier.
    He read the message with interest, looking at the