by James Becker
Chapter 63
‘Where do you want me to go?’ Bronson asked after a few minutes, as they neared New Ross.
‘Just park anywhere that looks convenient, preferably somewhere near the church. We’ll need to have a bit of a hike around the place to get our bearings. But I have found out something about a well, and that something does fit the clue in the parchment.’
‘Oh yes?’
‘The source is a little flaky. It’s a website that makes all kinds of extravagant claims about what people have found in and near New Ross, but it’s short on actual evidence. Or even photographs of what it believes is there. Anyway, what it claims to have discovered about one particular well does make sense, or at least it’s a possible explanation of the text on the parchment. It says that this well technically isn’t a well at all, but a cistern. It says the water supply for it comes from some unspecified mountain via an underground tunnel because the groundwater in the New Ross area is contaminated by uranium. What it doesn’t explain is how the Templars could have known that if they built the well, which is what the site seems to be implying.’
‘And is it contaminated? Does a glass of water here glow in the dark?’
‘There is uranium in Nova Scotia, yes, just like there is in most of the rest of the world, and the area around New Ross does have slightly higher concentrations of the element than some other parts of the province. But as far as I know, the water doesn’t glow.’
‘So where’s the well?’
‘Ah. That’s something else this website isn’t very good at: producing facts. Things like the location of these various hidden rooms and possible tunnels and probable Templar treasure vaults – those are just some of the claims – and of course the mysterious well. It claims to have used ground-penetrating radar to locate some of these structures. If I was being charitable, I’d assume this vagueness was to keep the important discoveries secret to avoid looters, but I have a feeling that the more likely reason is because whoever is behind the website doesn’t want people looking around and finding absolutely nothing to support their claims.’
‘Are these the same people who think a pile of rocks mean a castle was built here?’
‘I can’t remember, but it wouldn’t surprise me.’
‘So what are we going to be looking for? A six-hundred-year-old well, presumably?’
Angela shook her head. ‘Even if we could locate it, I don’t think looking at it would help us very much. I have the feeling it’s somewhere near the centre of the present village, but that’s about the only indication I picked up. If I’m interpreting the clues on that parchment correctly, the well is nothing more than a marker. The vault or whatever you want to call it is deep underground, just like the Money Pit on Oak Island, and was probably built the same way. They dug the hole, built the vault and an access tunnel to it, then filled in the hole and created the well on top of it as a marker and a defence mechanism. Finally they filled the well with water, so that if anyone dug down near it, the shaft would flood. That’s the way I read it, anyway.’
‘So?’ Bronson asked, parking the hire car well off the road about fifty yards from the church.
‘So what we need to find is the entrance to the tunnel that the Templars dug.’
‘That’s something else that sounds easy if you say it quickly. How do we find it? In fact, where do we even start looking?’
‘First we look around. Get the hiking poles out of the boot and follow me.’
Bronson had hidden the Winchester rifle under everything else so it was invisible when he opened the boot. He reached in, grabbed the two poles and the binoculars and locked the car.
They walked away from the church and down the road towards the cafe they’d stopped at earlier that day.
‘If we assume the well is somewhere near the village centre, then the first thing we need to look at is the terrain, the way the land slopes away.’
‘Why?’ Bronson asked.
‘Basic geometry. The Templars would have wanted the tunnel to be level, obviously, so that would be the base of a triangle. The depth of the vault below the ground would form the short side and the hypotenuse would be the slope of the ground between the entrance to the tunnel and the top of the well. The well would have to be at least fifty feet deep, probably double that, so that means we can forget about anywhere on higher ground than the village centre and on all the surrounding land that’s less than fifty feet below the centre. I know that all sounds a bit arbitrary, because it is, but we have to start somewhere.’
They walked down the road until they found a rough path, more like a game trail than something used by people, which took them away from the road and into the undeveloped area around the village.
For a little over two hours they wandered around the edges of the settlement, trying to find any sign of a tunnel entrance or anything similar, then Angela grumpily told Bronson that she needed a drink and food and a dose of inspiration. They climbed back up to the road to the cafe and found a vacant table.
‘I think we’re looking in the wrong place,’ she said, stirring a cup of coffee far more vigorously than necessary. ‘Most of the land around here is farmed, as far as I can see, and that means it’s been occupied for the better part of half a millennium. If there ever had been a tunnel entrance, somebody would have found it centuries ago. I was hoping to find a few cliff faces where the Templars could have piled up rocks to conceal an opening, something like that, but this area is all fields and grassy slopes.’
‘On the other hand, it would have been easy ground for them to construct a tunnel,’ Bronson pointed out. ‘Not like hacking their way through rock.’
Angela nodded. ‘Yes, but that also means the entrance would have been obvious and visible. They could have planted trees and bushes around it, I suppose, but trees die and fall down, and sooner or later somebody would have seen the opening.’
‘So what do you want to do?’
‘I don’t know. The reality is that the clues from the parchment fit this place better than anywhere else in Nova Scotia, as far as I can tell, so although we haven’t found it, I still think it must be here, just a hell of a lot better hidden than I expected.’
‘That,’ Bronson sad after a moment, ‘might be the operative word.’
‘What?’
‘Hidden. I’ve just remembered something I saw but didn’t notice, if you see what I mean.’
‘What?’ Angela repeated.
‘Finish your coffee and I’ll show you.’
Chapter 64
‘Tell me what you see,’ Bronson said, handing Angela the binoculars and pointing across an open field.
She brought the binoculars up to her eyes and scanned the ground in front of them.
‘A field,’ she said, stating the obvious, ‘a hillside opposite, and an old barn backing onto the hill. Is that it?’
‘Not quite. Now tell me what you don’t see.’
‘No idea.’
‘You see the barn, right? What does a farmer use a barn for?’
‘I don’t know,’ Angela said grumpily. ‘Somewhere to store hay or keep his tractors or ploughs or something.’
‘Exactly. So what’s missing? What should be there but isn’t? In front of the barn?’
‘I don’t… Oh. I see what you mean. The ground’s quite soft, but the area in front of the barn looks more like a lawn than a field. No tyre tracks. And if the barn was in use – as a barn, I mean – the ground should be churned up.’
‘Exactly. I think we should take a look over there.’
‘Hang on. If you’re right and that isn’t a barn but a building concealing the entrance to the tunnel and made to look like a barn, that must mean that somebody already knows about the Ark. You wouldn’t find a tunnel entrance and not explore it, would you? So why don’t we already know that the relic has been found?’
‘That’s a very good question.’
They both turned at the sound of the unfamiliar voice.
Fac
ing them in a loose semicircle were three men, the one who had spoken tall and almost Scandinavian-looking, while the other two were shorter and much darker in complexion. But their appearance wasn’t what grabbed and held Bronson’s attention: it was the automatic pistol that each man was holding and pointing at him.
‘Who are you?’ he asked.
The tall man shook his head. ‘I’m holding the weapon,’ he said. ‘That means I ask the questions and you answer them, Bronson. And that goes for you too, Lewis.’
Bronson had been surprised by the appearance of the three men, but the fact that they knew their names was a much bigger shock.
‘Who—’ he began again.
‘You don’t need to know who we are,’ the man said. ‘What you need to do is shut up, listen to me and do what you’re told. If you don’t, the woman standing next to you will suffer. Please believe me when I say that I don’t make idle threats.’
There was something about the man’s voice, a kind of cold and detached determination, that told Bronson he was entirely serious. He glanced around the field and the surrounding area, but there was no sign of anybody else within view, or even within shouting distance. Against one man armed with a pistol he might have a chance. Against three men carrying weapons it would just be an unusual way of committing suicide. Or, worse, getting Angela shot. He had no option but to do exactly what he was told and wait for an opportunity to try to turn the tables.
‘Let me give you a reality check,’ the man said. ‘We know who you are because we’ve been following your trail all the way from the south of France. We know what you’re looking for, and we know that it’s probably only a few dozen yards away from where we’re standing right now. We also know that we’re going to take it away from here and back to where it should be.’
‘Let me guess,’ Angela said, sounding more irritated than frightened, and having obviously made a deduction about the nationality of the men and their probable motive. ‘You’ve got some crackpot scheme to use the Ark to justify the building of the Third Temple in Jerusalem.’
Bronson noticed that the aim of all three pistols held by the men had shifted to Angela.
‘There’s nothing crackpot about fulfilling our destiny,’ the tall man said sharply, a statement that confirmed Angela’s suspicions.
‘Even though that would probably spark a conflict between Christianity and Islam that could engulf the entire world? It would be like the Crusades all over again, but with jet fighters and tactical nukes instead of horses and battle swords.’
‘If that’s what it takes, yes. We’re prepared to die for our beliefs and for Israel.’
‘Spoken like a true fanatic,’ Bronson said, ‘and if you want to die, I’d be very happy to give you a hand.’
The three pistols, moving as if coordinated, shifted back to point at him.
‘Enough,’ the man snapped. ‘You think the Ark is somewhere inside the building in front of us, and so do we, so let’s go and find out. You two lead the way, just in case there are any nasty surprises waiting for us. And you can lose the poles as well.’
They had no choice and they knew it. Bronson and Angela laid their hiking poles on the ground and walked off across the field towards the barn that probably wasn’t a barn at all.
Although the building had looked somewhat ramshackle from a distance, when they got close to it they could see that it had a strong steel frame and that the boards secured to it were about an inch thick and held in place by multiple bolts. The front was dominated by two wide doors, again with steel frames, and the lock that secured them in the centre was clearly a high-quality product.
Bronson tried turning the handle, but it didn’t budge even a fraction of an inch.
‘I think we’re all going to be disappointed,’ he said, ‘unless you brought a tame locksmith along with you.’
‘As a matter of fact,’ the tall man said, ‘we did. You two, move over there. Aaron, do your stuff.’
One of the other men tucked his pistol into the waistband of his trousers and stepped forward, taking a soft leather tool roll from one of his jacket pockets. He released the drawstring to open it up and stared at the lock for a few seconds. Then he nodded, selected a torsion wrench and what Bronson recognised immediately as a set of skeleton keys for a warded lock and set to work, applying pressure with the wrench while he probed the interior of the keyway with the skeleton keys.
It took him a little over five minutes before they all heard a distinct click. He turned the substantial steel handle of the door and pushed it open about six inches before packing away his tools and taking a few steps backwards.
‘Inside,’ the first man said, gesturing with the muzzle of his pistol towards Bronson. ‘You stay here,’ he told Angela, ‘just in case your boyfriend decides to do something stupid. Aaron, watch her.’
Bronson pushed the door open a couple of feet so that he could step inside, and immediately looked round, searching for anything that he could use as a weapon. But he found himself standing in a largely empty space. From the inside, it looked just as much like a barn as it had from the outside, though bereft of the type of machinery and vehicles that most people would expect to find on a farm. There were no windows, but he could see perfectly clearly thanks to a row of fluorescent lights mounted above the centre of the space, which he assumed had switched on when the door had been opened. Along the right-hand wall was a workbench with a selection of tools clipped to a pegboard above it, but the presence of the tall man right behind him told him that he would never make it if he tried to grab a hammer or something.
At the rear of the building, where he knew the hillside began to slope upwards, was what looked like a solid wooden wall. If they were in the right place and their deductions had been correct, he knew that the entrance to the tunnel must be somewhere behind it.
He looked behind him just as the man who’d picked the lock prodded Angela into the open space.
‘Don’t just stand there,’ the tall man snapped. ‘Find the tunnel entrance.’
Bronson and Angela both walked over to the rear wall.
‘Are you okay?’ Bronson asked quietly.
‘I’d feel a hell of a lot better if I was sitting in a car or an aircraft and heading away from this place,’ she said, ‘but they haven’t hurt me yet and I would quite like it if that situation continued. So is there a bloody door here or not?’ she added, looking at the wooden boards in front of them.
‘There’s nothing obvious. Because of the framing and the way the boards have been bolted to it, we can’t be looking at a door that slides or opens conventionally inwards or outwards, which covers most possibilities.’
‘Maybe we’ve got it wrong. But if we have, then those Israeli bastards might decide to shoot us and start looking somewhere else, and I’d rather they didn’t do that.’
Bronson was still looking at the boards, staring at one particular place on the wall.
‘This could be it,’ he said. ‘See that horizontal gap between those two boards? If you look closely, you can see something silvery glinting in there. I think that’s a hinge for a horizontal cantilever door, which means that somewhere here there must be a switch for a motor, because I don’t see any way of opening it manually.’
He walked the length of the wall, checking every board but saw no sign of a switch. Then he retraced his steps and stopped just to one side of where he thought he had seen the hinge.
‘I need a long screwdriver,’ he told the tall man.
‘What for?’
He pointed at a hole in one of the planks. ‘I think there’s a switch on the other side of this.’
‘A lot of the planks have got holes in them,’ the man pointed out. ‘What’s special about that one?’
‘The other holes that I’ve looked at are natural, where knots have fallen out of the wood. This one has been made with a drill.’
‘Aaron, get him a screwdriver with a long blade and take it to him.’
A few moments late
r, Bronson slid the end of the screwdriver blade into the hole he had detected and applied gentle pressure. Nothing happened, so he pressed a little more firmly and detected a faint click from behind the wooden board.
Immediately he heard the sound of an electric motor, and with a creak the central section of the rear wall began moving, the lower section tilting upwards and outwards into the open space while a part of the upper section also moved outwards, the two parts connected by the long horizontal hinge he had seen.
A waft of cold and slightly musty air made its presence felt as all five of them stared at the entrance to the tunnel that had just been revealed.
Chapter 65
There was a distinct click from somewhere in the tunnel and a sudden flare of light as the first of a line of fluorescent tube lights flickered into life, quickly followed by the others, until they were looking down an arrow-straight illuminated tunnel, roughly eight feet high and eight feet wide and perhaps seventy or eighty yards long, carved out of the earth.
The tunnel was supported about every ten or twelve feet by an inverted U-shaped timber frame, the wood at least six inches square. Solid wooden planks linked the frames to form a roof and two walls. Each frame had an obviously old metal sconce bolted to it, probably to take an oil lamp, the timber above the sconces blackened with soot.
Angela shivered slightly. ‘God, this looks old,’ she said.
‘Of course it’s old, you stupid woman,’ the tall man said. ‘It’s been here for over six hundred years. You two, walk in front of us, just in case the Templars included any nasty surprises for unexpected visitors.’
With a brief glance behind him, Bronson started walking slowly along the beaten-earth floor of the tunnel, Angela at his side and the three Israelis about ten feet behind them.
‘Do you think there are any booby-traps?’ Angela asked, her voice little more than a whisper.
‘Definitely not. This tunnel may be six hundred years old, but the door we’ve come through and the wiring and lighting are twenty-first-century. If there were any booby-traps, whoever found this tunnel would have shifted them, probably centuries ago.’