The Templar Concordat (25 page)

On the one hand, he valued and appreciated the progress of civilization. On the other, the carnage, slaughter, and exterminations of Europe in World War II had been exclusively at the hands of Europeans. And that wasn’t eight hundred years ago. Neither Muslims nor Arabs had ever done anything even approaching that horror.

Hitler had ordered the same treatment for the Jews. Was it fair to say he was a product of the same Christian culture and beliefs that spewed out this disgusting treaty? After twelve hundred years of Christian culture, they had produced this treaty, and after nineteen hundred years that same Christian culture had produced Hitler? Was that fair?

But what about his own people? Were they any better than the Europeans? Or were they simply lacking in the technical means to join in the grand slaughter? But they had never expressed the intention, and they had never codified it in a treaty like this. At least that was comforting.

Nothing good could come to anyone from this treaty. Suppose he told Hammid the parchment was produced in 1900? He knew what Hammid would do. He’d send someone else to check the results. In fact, maybe he had already done that. Maybe he had someone at the laser lab in Geneva. And that would be the end for him, his wife, and his daughters.

When the lab director bustled over to his workstation, the scholar in him was delighted. Another laser analysis in the lab had matched to his own. That could only mean both manuscripts had come from the same batch of handmade Twelfth Century parchment. He dropped the philosophical brooding in a heartbeat and hurried off with the director chasing down history. That’s what he did.

*     *     *

“Professor Randolph, Professor Randolph, you won’t believe this. This is amazing.” The portly lab director came chugging up to Jean’s workstation waving a wad of papers. He half-dragged a Middle Eastern man with him. Marie had seen him in the lab, but didn’t know what he was doing.

Callahan had called Marie telling her he was out of Jean’s flat, so when Jean told Marie she was leaving for the day, they chatted briefly and made plans for dinner that night.

The lab director looked around for Jean. When he asked Marie if she had seen Jean, she told him Jean had just left for the day.

“Oh, no. I have such great news. This is just… just so exciting.”

Marie stood up and came over and laughed. “Dr. Samuals, you’re fairly walking on air. What do you have there?”

“The chemical profiles. They’re the same and we…” Then he stopped himself.

“Oh, pardon my rudeness.” The director looked at Marie. “Dr. Marie Curtis of the Kruger Institute, may I introduce Professor Hosni Zahid of Cairo University.”  Zahid was a middle-aged man of average height, just beginning to widen out. Typical academic, thought Marie. They shook hands and exchanged meaningless formalities. She could see Zahid had a wondering eye.

Since Jean was gone, the director zeroed in on Marie, and waved his papers. “This is most amazing. The samples submitted by Professor Zahid and Professor Randolph show an identical chemical profile. Identical.” He slapped the papers into his other hand.

“Do you realize what that means?” He looked back and forth between Marie and Zahid.

Marie knew exactly what it meant, and an alarm ran through her whole body. But she maintained a confused expression and looked at Zahid. “I’m sorry, but I’m not sure. When did they date?

“Oh, they both dated the same, too. 1180. So that’s plus or minus twenty years, so the range is 1160 to 1200. And that’s to be expected, of course, because they have the same chemical profile. Identical. We speculated about this, but… can you imagine?” He didn’t wait for an answer, just spun on a heel and rushed off the way he had come.

Zahid seized the opportunity. “As I’m sure you know, Doctor, the procedure used here at the lab delivers far more than age. It also develops a chemical profile, a very, very accurate and detailed profile. So accurate, in fact that it can tell us the exact parchment maker’s batch that a given page came from.”

Didn’t this Zahid moron realize what was happening, Marie wondered.

“Consider,” he continued lecturing, while Marie delivered the most admiring and awe-struck gaze she could muster. “A typical parchment maker of antiquity used a wooden trough and a paddle to mix his ingredients.” He mimed mixing with a large paddle. “Then he might get one hundred pages from that batch.”

He stopped long enough for Marie to play with the ends of her hair, tilt her head to the side, and slide a step closer. “Yes, yes…” Too much, too soon? Hard to tell.

“Now, our parchment maker didn’t have the kind of quality controls we have today, so each batch contained a slightly different mix of ingredients. Not a big difference.” He held his hands apart to illustrate big. “And not a medium difference.” He brought them together to instruct her about medium. “But a very small difference.” He held his index fingers very close together to let her know what small meant. Marie resisted the urge to say, “Fascinating.”

“And the analyses show that both samples, both mine and Professor Randolph’s, come from the same parchment batch. And pages in those days were used locally, very close to where they were made.”

Marie played with the top button of her blouse and looked up at Zahid. “That means each of you can cross-corroborate the provenance of your manuscripts.”

“Yes, yes,” said Zahid. “I do wish Professor Randolph was here.”

It’s now or never, thought Marie. “Well,” she moved closer to Zahid and lowered her voice. “I probably shouldn’t say anything, but…” He was slightly taller than she was and she tried to give him a good look down her blouse. She looked around conspiratorially, moved closer, and took his arm. First contact. “Jean… Professor Randolph… has done quite a bit of work in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries. It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if she had something from…” she looked both ways, tilted her head down a bit, and raised her eyes to him. “Well… how should I say this? Let’s just say she has done a lot of work on papal manuscripts.” She shrugged. “But, of course, it’s not for me to say.”

He brightened when he heard that, then she saw his eyes shoot down her blouse and instantly recover.  He drew himself up to his full height and tried to absorb his belly. Progress.

He looked at Marie, lowered his voice, and joined the conspiracy. His eyes darted around and he said, “This is really very good news. Would you believe I am dealing with a manuscript we think was sent from the Pope to the Ayyubid Sultan in Egypt? That’s the same time frame you say Professor Randolph is investigating.”

“Well, I didn’t exactly say…”

“Yes, yes, yes. No, no, of course you didn’t.”

Marie moved closer so they were locked in a whispered conversation. First intimacy. More progress. At least he had the brains not to say he was dating the Treaty of Tuscany for his terrorist masters. Time to stop reeling him in and give him a bit of line.

She glanced at her watch. “I suppose you have more work to do, Professor Zahid?”

“Oh, no, and please call me Hosni. I’m finished for the day.”

“And I’m Marie.” She looked down, off to the side, then back at him. “I’d love to continue our discussion some time.”

“I have an idea,” he said with the surprise of a man smacked by a jolt of inspiration. “Perhaps we can continue our discussion over lunch?”

She beamed her most radiant smile. “Excellent idea, Prof… Hosni.” Then she caught herself. They needed more time. She frowned. “Oh, no. I have a conference call with the Kruger in an hour.” She lifted an eyebrow. “But I am free for dinner.”

“Excellent. That would be great.”

“Wonderful,” said Marie. “How about I meet you at your hotel? Is 7:30 Ok?”

“Yes. Yes. That would be fine. I’m at the Edwardian Mayfair.”

*     *     *

When Zahid left his room at the Mayfair to meet Marie that evening, a short, round man left another room on the same floor, watched Zahid put his keycard in his pocket, and hurried after him to the elevator. In the elevator, the man stood on Zahid’s right side, with his briefcase between them. The man felt a small vibration in the handle of the briefcase when the scanner inside told him it had successfully read the code on the keycard in Zahid’s pocket.

*     *     *

When Marie returned to her room in the Dorchester at 11:30 pm that night, Callahan and two electronic surveillance engineers were hunched over a computer screen mumbling to each other. Nobody even looked up.

“What’s going on, guys?”

“Look,” said Callahan. “Zahid is on his laptop checking email. We can see everything he sees right here.” He proudly pointed to the screen. “Deiter and Erik got into his room while you dined and installed a new whizbang in his laptop.”

“Now you all get to share his porn?”

“No,” said Callahan, pointing to a string of digits at the bottom of the screen. “We get his GPS position, get to see everything he does, get to explore his computer while he does it, and the whizbang even makes a cell phone call every hour and tells us exactly where it is.”

“And you follow him right to the treaty?”

“Yep. Not only that, the microphone in the computer lets us hear what’s going on, and we can even look through the computer’s camera.”

“Well,” she said, “if you guys can do all that, then my hat’s off to all of you.”

Dhahran - Thursday, April 2

Professor Zahid had told Hammid that he would have the final result of the laser spectrographic analysis today, but it was now 7:00 pm, 4:00 pm in London, and he had heard nothing yet. Everything hinged on that result. If it showed the treaty was indeed from the Twelfth Century, then he could call the Old Man and let him know they could proceed to the next stage of their plan. No. He caught himself. He would call the Old Man with the news, then let the Old Man tell him the next step. If Hammid wanted to remain alive, he could never forget who was in charge.

He couldn’t call Zahid and reveal how anxious he was. That would show weakness, and Zahid needed a strong hand guiding him. So he waited.

At 9:00 pm Zahid finally called. “Hammid, the result is the year 1180. That means the parchment was manufactured sometime between 1160 and 1200. A forty-year period. That’s right on target.”

Hammid wanted to leap up on the railing of the balcony overlooking the gulf and shout for joy. Hundreds of years of patient waiting, and now they had it. They had it. And he did it. He, Hammid Al Dossary did it. Hammid Al Dossary, whose name would be remembered for a thousand generations. But instead he replied in a calm and flat voice. “Excellent, Hosni. That’s very good news. Very good, indeed. Our people are indebted to you. When are you coming back?”

“There’s one more thing I’d like to pursue. It would actually augment the case for authenticity. Another researcher was running a sample at the same time I was. Nothing to do with the treaty. She’s a professor here in London. Her sample showed a chemical profile that exactly matched mine, and the only explanation for that is both parchments were manufactured in the same batch. If I can get with her, I can learn the particulars of her manuscript, and it might shed some more light on our own.”

Damn, thought Hammid, think. Jean Randolph? Who else? Think before you talk. Don’t show ignorance, and don’t give away what you want to keep hidden. You are the leader, and you are always in control. Zahid doesn’t know where the treaty came from, and he doesn’t know how it was obtained. He has no reason to suspect someone else might be running a sample of the same treaty. It is logical for him to accept the explanation of a common manufacturing batch. He has no other.

“That’s very interesting, Hosni. Who is this other researcher?”

“Her name is Jean Randolph. She’s a professor of medieval history, specializes in rare manuscripts. Quite well-known.”

It was her. Jean Randolph.  What on Earth could she be up to? Parchment from the same batch eight hundred years ago? Nonsense. She had a sample of the treaty and she was putting it through the same laser analysis.

But why? From her perspective, why care if it was from 1189 or 1889? So what? What was her interest? Had she gone to the authorities? If she had, they would have buried her so deep under the British Official Secrets Act that she’d never see daylight again. If she had gone to MI6, and had a sample, they could easily have the British Museum run the sample day or night. What is wrong with her?

This didn’t feel right, and Zahid was no field operative. He wasn’t cut out for it. Hammid’s recent elation deflated a bit. He still had problems. Something was very wrong here.

“Listen, Zahid, I’d like to have you back here as soon as possible. We can always get with that professor. What’s her name? Randolph? But it sounds like you got what we needed. We have a lot of work to do, so I think it’s best if you get back here with the results as soon as you can.”

Politics always trumping scholarship, thought Zahid. It was pointless to argue. He’d be back in Dhahran as soon as he could.

*     *     *

So, what do we do with Professor Jean Randolph, Hammid asked himself. She obviously had a piece of the treaty, but how much? Did she take any of the text? It seemed unlikely since the treaty in his possession showed all the seals old Hashashin records indicated, two Popes and three kings. And the text matched their records word for word. Did they put footnotes on these things? Or did she just take a corner of the treaty for her own amusement? But to what end? Or did she just grab something else from the library for herself, something from the same collection that came from the same parchment batch? Nonsense again. That same batch idea was silly.