The Templar Archive Read Free Page B

time.”
    Vitale nodded.
    “Yes,” he said frostily. “You had to take care of things like shooting two of your own men because they were too badly injured to be moved out of the cave. That brought your tally of men from this organization that you have personally executed out in the field to an impressive total of five. Not to mention the other man who you claim was killed by Mallory. And all of them, I would remind you, died on one single operation.”
    “I had no choice,” Toscanelli protested, shaking his head. He had Italian movie-star good looks, tanned and regular features under curly black hair, but the anguish in his brown eyes was obvious and his unusually pale complexion was a sign of the strain he was feeling. He knew there was a better than even chance that Vitale would end the interview by ordering his execution,because failure was something the order never tolerated willingly. He shook his head and explained again what had happened.
    “Their injuries were so severe that even if we could have somehow got them to a hospital, they would certainly have died from shock and blood loss. We had no clue that those two medieval chests contained booby traps. Lethally effective booby traps.”
    “Obviously,” Vitale replied dryly. “But what I find interesting is that from what you’ve told me both Mallory and Jessop apparently guessed that some kind of device might have been built into the chests, because of the way they made their escape at the very instant that your two men opened the lids. I’ve seen the chests, obviously, but not the booby trap. How exactly did the mechanism work, the device that did the damage?”
    “I can do better than explain it to you,” Toscanelli replied, encouraged by what he thought was a subtle change in Vitale’s tone. “I have one of the chests outside and I can show you precisely how it worked. With your permission, of course.”
    Vitale nodded assent.
    Toscanelli turned, walked back to the office door, opened it, and issued a short command. A few moments later, a man walked into the office carrying a fairly small and obviously old wooden chest, the curved lid inlaid with an intricate pattern of wrought-iron decoration. He stepped forward, lowered the chest to the carpet where Toscanelli indicated, bowed respectfully to Vitale, and left the room.
    “It’s smaller than I had expected,” Vitale said, “and it doesn’t look like much.”
    “It’s not what it is so much as what it does. And that’s really impressive, in a brutal sort of way.”
    Toscanelli stepped behind the chest, leaned forward over it, grasped the front of the lid, and lifted it. With a faint creak from the pair of ornate hinges that were mounted on the back edge of the chest, the lid swung open, revealing an entirely empty interior.
    “That,” Toscanelli said, “was what we expected to happen when my men unlocked and opened the two chests. What we hadn’t anticipated was this.” He pointed inside the curved lid, where an intricate construction of metal had been concealed by whichever medieval craftsman had fabricated it. “And because of the weight of the chests we were certain they were full, and of course they were, but filled only with rocks, which we definitely hadn’t expected.”
    He closed the chest again and pointed to a pair of small metal objects in the form of rings or circles, one on either side of the lid and each rising about an inch above the complex decoration.
    “Obviously these aren’t the original locking pins,” he said. “I had these made up in the workshop here, once we worked out how the mechanism had been set and triggered.”
    He slid his right forefinger through one of the circular objects and pulled firmly. As the length of steel emerged, Vitale heard a very faint metallic click from somewhere within the chest, a sound that was repeated a couple of seconds later when Toscanelli removed the second pin.Each piece of steel was about four inches long and roughly a