“But what could it be?”
“Impossible to say for sure, but we can infer certain things about it from what we do know. If the sources I’ve looked at have got it right, sometime during that last night at Montse’gur, as the flames of the huge pyre at the foot of the mountain died away to a dull red glow, the last four parfaits escaped. They’d been hidden in the fortress by the garrison, and chose an extremely hazardous, but almost undetectable, route, using ropes to descend the sheer west face of the mountain.
“They took this risk because they were carrying the treasure of the Cathars. They reached the foot of the mountain and then vanished both into the night and from the pages of history. No one knows what they were carrying, where they went or what happened to them.
“If there’s any truth in that story, then there are at least two points worth making. First, whatever the ‘treasure’ comprised, it had to be fairly small and not too heavy, because otherwise the four men couldn’t have carried it during their perilous descent. Second, it had to be a physical object, not simply knowledge, or the four parfaits could have disguised themselves as soldiers or servants and left the fortress with the men-at-arms the following day.
“Now, this is all guesswork, unsupported by a single shred of verifiable evidence, but it does provide a plausible explanation for what happened when the siege of Montse’gur ended. But what happened next on the mountain is in the historical record.
“Once the fortress was deserted, the crusaders, acting on the specific instructions of the Pope, tore it apart in a desperate search for some object, some ‘treasure.’ But whatever it was they were looking for, they clearly didn’t find it, because they dismantled the castle, quite literally stone by stone. It’s not generally known, but the citadel that now stands at Montse’gur was actually erected early in the seventeenth century, and no part of the original Cathar castle now remains at the site.
“For the next half-century, Rome ordered all traces of the Cathar heresy to be expunged from the landscape. As well as executing every parfait they could lay their hands on, the crusaders also continued their search for whatever had been secreted at Montségur, but without result. Eventually, memory of the ‘treasure of the Cathars’ passed into the mists of legend. And that’s the story of Montse’gur as we know it today: a mix of historical fact, rumor and conjecture.”
“But what the hell has that got to do with a six-hundred-year-old farmhouse on the side of a hill in Italy?” Bronson asked, waving his arm in frustration.
“It’s all in the inscription,” Angela explained. “The first verse of the Occitan poem can be interpreted as a specific reference to the end of the siege.”
She read Goldman’s translation of the verse from her notebook: “ ‘From the safe mountain truth did descend
Abandoned by all save the good
The cleansing flames quell only flesh
And pure spirits soar above the pyre
For truth like stone forever will endure.’
“The second line could describe the surrender of the garrison of Montse’gur, and the third and fourth the mass execution when the Cathars were burned alive. But I think the expressions ‘truth did descend’ and ‘truth like stone forever will endure’ refer to the escape of the four remaining parfaits, carrying with them some document or relic upon which the core of their faith—their unarguable ‘truth’—relied. Whatever the object, it was so compelling in its implications that Cathars would rather die at the stake than renounce their beliefs.”
“And the second verse?” Bronson asked.
“That’s just as interesting, and again some lines seem to refer to the Cathars.”
Again, she read the verse aloud: “ ‘Here oak and elm descry the mark
As is above so is below
The word becomes the perfect
Within the chalice all is naught
And terrible to behold.’
“The expression in the second line was commonly used by the Cathars, and the ‘word’ referred to in the third line could be the ‘truth’ that guided the beliefs of the parfaits. The first line’s nothing to do with the Cathars, but I think it’s possible that the reference to the two species of tree indicates a hiding place.”
“And the last couple of lines? About the chalice?”
“I’m guessing—I’ve been guessing all along, but now I’m really guessing—that they mean the object was secreted in some kind of a vessel—a chalice—and that it’s dangerous.”
Bronson began to reduce speed. He was approaching Vierzon, where the autoroute divided, and turned southeast for Clermont-Ferrand.
“So what you’re suggesting,” Bronson said, “is that the Cathars had some kind of relic, something that confirmed their beliefs, and that quite probably would have been seen as dangerous by other religions? And the Pope started the crusade to recover or destroy it?”
“Exactly. The Albigensian Crusade was instigated by Pope Innocent III—and rarely was any pope so misnamed—in 1209.”
“Right. So you think the Pope knew about this relic and believed it was secreted somewhere at Montse’gur? And that was why he ordered the different treatment of the Cathars and garrison there, and why, after the massacre, his crusaders demolished the fortress?”
“Yes. And if my reading of these verses is right, I think we may well find that the Cathar treasure was hidden somewhere in Mark’s house in Italy!”
II
Back at their hotel near Gatwick, Mandino and Rogan had spent hours using their laptops to study the search strings the intercept system had recovered from the Cambridge cybercafe’s.
They seemed to have exhausted all their other options. They’d waited outside Angela Lewis’s building, but her apartment lights had remained switched off, and neither her phone nor her doorbell was answered. Bronson’s house was just as obviously deserted, and Mandino had now realized that both of them had disappeared. The intercept system was all they had left.
The biggest problem they’d faced was the sheer volume of information they had to work with. Carlotti, Mandino’s deputy who’d remained in Italy, had sent them three Excel files. Two contained the searches input at the cybercafe’s he believed Bronson had visited, while the third and much larger file listed the search strings from the other half dozen Internet cafés within the five-mile radius which Mandino had requested.
He and Rogan ran internal searches for words they knew their quarry had been looking for, including “LDA,” “consul,” “senator” and so on. Each time either of them got a hit, they copied the following fifty search strings and saved them in separate files.
Just doing that took a long time, and at the end of it they were really no further forward.
“We’re not getting anywhere with this,” Mandino said in irritation. “We already knew that Bronson had probably worked out what the additional letters meant on the Latin inscription. What I haven’t found yet is anything that looks like it might refer to the second inscription.”
Rogan leaned back from his laptop. “Same here,” he said.
“I think what we need to do is try to second-guess Bronson,” Mandino mused. “I wonder . . .”
He did have one powerful weapon in his armory. The book he held in his safe in Rome contained the first few lines of the Latin text of the lost relic. More important, it had a potentially useful couple of pages that detailed the Vatican’s attempts to trace the document’s location through the ages.
“The house in Italy,” he asked, turning to face Rogan. “Did you find the exact date it was built?”