Free The Templar Archive by James Becker Page A

want.”
    As Mallory approached her, Robin walked around the car to the passenger door and opened it.
    “You drive,” she said. “I’m going to look at the pictures on my laptop again, just in case anything leaps out at me.”
    “That’s fine with me,” Mallory said, buckling his seat belt and starting the Golf. “Any preference where you’d like to stay?”
    “No, not really, but I think I’d prefer country rather than town. Just surprise me. You’ve done that once today already.”
    Mallory smiled at the memory but didn’t respond.
    Beside him, Robin opened her laptop and pressed the space bar to wake it up. She had a copy of the photographs they’d taken in the cave on Cyprus on the computer as well as her tablet, and hoped that the laptop, with its larger screen, would make it easier to identify the code or pattern that they believed had to be concealed within theornate metalwork that covered the lids of the two medieval chests. Assuming it was there, of course.
    They had both taken a number of pictures of the chests with their mobile phones in the indifferent lighting of the cave, some using the flash and some without, and despite these unfavorable conditions the quality of the pictures was actually quite good. Certainly she could see a considerable amount of detail, even down to the tiny patterns, little more than groups of etched lines, that decorated almost all of the complex pattern of metal that encased the old wood.
    She began by looking at the overall pattern on the photograph of one of the chests, tracing the intricately curved lines of metal with her eyes as she tried to identify any kind of symbol or shape that might be significant. Then she switched her attention to a photograph of the second chest and did the same thing before reducing the size of the two images, loading them onto the screen at the same time, and studying them as a pair rather than as individual objects.
    “Any luck?” Mallory asked as he steered the car out of Dartmouth and pointed them in a generally westerly direction, mainly because there weren’t any roads going north, which was the direction he actually wanted to go.
    “Not really,” Robin replied. “All I can tell you is pretty much the same as we already knew. Which is, basically, that the lids of these two chests are covered in a pattern of metalwork that is almost certainly too elaborate to simply be decoration, especially bearing in mind the circumstances in which they were buried. And, as we saw when we uncovered them in the first place, the patternsare different, which again suggests that there’s some kind of hidden message in the scrollwork.”
    “What about the etchings and marks on the metal itself? Could there be a clue hidden in those tiny marks?”
    “I’d feel a whole lot better if we had the actual chests in front of us and could examine them properly,” Robin replied, “because it’s always possible that there’s something the cameras didn’t pick up. But, as far as I can tell from studying the pictures, those small marks are really just decorative. There are a few places where some of the marks do seem to form letters, but I really can’t be sure that I’m not seeing something that actually isn’t there. I mean, I’m looking at three straight lines, say, and if I apply a bit of poetic license I can almost make them form the shape of a letter
N
, and I can turn two lines into a
V
or four lines into a
W
. But if you looked you probably wouldn’t see the same association at all. I think I’m just seeing letters because that’s what I’m hoping to see, and the bottom line is that even if I am right and on one of the curved bits of metal there is a letter
N
, for example, that doesn’t really help us because it’s just one letter by itself. We’re looking for a phrase or at least two or three words, not individual letters.”
    Mallory was silent for a few moments, mulling over what Robin just told him. What she said hadn’t come as a