The Lost Treasure of the Templars by James Becker Read Free Book Online Page B

to her, and one of the others was simply far too big, the blade too thick to enter the slot. But the last screwdriver had a narrow but quite long blade—she thought it was the kind used by electricians—and she guessed that would probably be long enough, because as far as she could tell from her examination of the book safe, the catch was only four or five inches inside.
    Robin slid the end of the screwdriver through the hole cut in the false pages of the book safe, doing her best to keep it straight so that it would make contact with the catch on the inside. She heard the very faint sound of metal touching metal, and then the screwdriver blade would go no farther.
    â€œHere goes nothing,” she muttered, changed her grip so that the heel of her hand was on the end of the screwdriver, and pushed firmly.
    The screwdriver slid perhaps another half inch inside the book safe. There was a faint click and then a sudden loud thud.
    Robin Jessop was so shocked she released thescrewdriver and flung herself backward away from the desk, the back of her wheeled chair slamming into the wall behind her.
    â€œJesus Christ,” she said, getting to her feet, her eyes still fixed on the book safe.

4
    Helston, Cornwall
    As well as establishing the identity of his forebears and completing the various parts of his family tree, Mallory was also creating a map that showed the location where each person he’d been able to identify had been born, lived, and then died, marking each spot with, respectively, a green, blue, and red label bearing the name of the man or woman and the appropriate date or dates for each of those events or periods. He’d bought a large-scale map of the United Kingdom especially for this purpose and mounted it on one wall of the bedroom he used as an office. What he was finding particularly interesting, and obviously predictable, was that, although for the last few generations his family had lived in and around Cornwall and the western parts of Devon, the earlier he trod back in time, the more dispersed his ancestors seemed to become.
    There appeared, in fact, to be a steady movement eastward the further back he went, toward London and the southeast of England, which really wasn’t what he hadexpected. He had always understood from what his mother had told him that his family had lived in the far southwest of the country for generations, but this was only partially correct. They
had
lived in that area, but only since about 1875. He had always mentally assumed that his roots lay in the mysterious country of King Arthur and the land of Tintagel, the rugged promontory that jutted out into the Atlantic, the most southwesterly point of England aimed like the tip of a spear toward the far distant shores of America, the rocks endlessly defying the pounding waves.
    As a child he had been fascinated not just by tales of Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table and Avalon, but also by the stories he had heard of the legendary land of Lyonesse, which centuries, countless ages, ago had supposedly sunk forever beneath the waves somewhere off the Cornish coast, and he’d even briefly wondered if his ancestors might have been descended from the remnants of the noble families who had apparently perished in that long-forgotten tragedy.
    Later in his childhood, he’d been equally enthralled by the tales of the wreckers and smugglers who, only two or three hundred years earlier, had haunted the rocky coves of the Lizard Peninsula—that name alone evocative and intriguing—using lights to lure ships onto the saw-toothed rocks and the unfortunate sailors to their deaths.
    And it wasn’t as if the stories were all wild flights of fantasy. The sheer number of known wrecks around the coast of Cornwall was a persuasive argument that suggested that at least some of the tales of the wreckers had to be based in fact. There was one cove on the west side of the Lizard where gold coins from some wreck had