The Templar Thief: Peter Sparke book 4

by Scott Chapman

  "You have a crack legal team?"

  "Yup, her name is Morag. She'll turn this round by tomorrow. Meantime, let's do a preliminary site reconnaissance."

  "You mean wander round for a bit and find a place for lunch?"

  "Isn't that what I just said?"

  Lunch in Radda is not a fast affair and it was almost two o'clock by the time Sparke and Tilly managed to find the energy to pull themselves out of their seats and continue exploring the town. It was not a lengthy expedition.

  Facing a small square was a church reached by a flight of stone steps. Chiesa di San Pietro had been the center of the town for almost a thousand years. Its unadorned stone facade had been built to keep the heat out and showed its position as a humble local church, rather than an elaborate gift from some local noble or Cardinal.

  The dark, cool air inside made the building feel almost air conditioned. The rows of heavy wooden pews sat empty, but the altar was dressed for mass, showing that it still served as the spiritual refuge for at least some of the people of the town.

  It took Sparke and Tilly a few minutes for their eyes to adjust to the gloom. Inside the building it was clear that it had gone through several stages of construction over the centuries. Around the walls were a number of small alcoves.

  "If your Fra Muratore was a Radda man then I guess his local church will have a plaque or a statue or something," said Sparke. “Or even have him buried in the under the floor?”

  "Totally," said Tilly. "All I need is a few snaps of his tomb, maybe a shrine, and the trip is in the bag."

  They walked over to the first of the alcoves, but there was no image or writing that gave any indication of a link to Muratore. Tilly lifted her gaze and looked around the top of the walls, searching for a carved frieze, but again there was nothing.

  An elderly lady stood near the altar. She wore a plastic name badge on her cardigan and Tilly walked towards her with her best smile on.

  "Excuse me, do you speak English?"

  "Little," said the lady. Tilly reached into her bag, pulled out her phone and flicked the screen until an image of Fra Muratore appeared.

  "Is this the church of Fra Muratore?" she said. The lady smiled back, but shook her head slightly as though she had not understood. Tilly held out the phone for the lady to see. The lady reached into the pocket of her cardigan and pulled out a pair of spectacles and peered closely at the image and the caption underneath.

  "Fra Muratore," she said, shrugging. "No, sorry. No Fra Muratore."

  "Bugger," said Tilly.

  The Plan

  “It was a time of great confusion,” said the Mason, “panic almost. Even amongst our own Order there was a lack of leadership and the Brothers who escaped with this object had no guidance and made their decisions based on the limited options they could see before them.”

  “I feel that you are leading up to something,” said Salvatore. The room was bare of furniture except for a number of iron-bound chests and the rough wooden bench the two men sat on. The Mason shifted his weight and thought for a moment.

  “In Tripoli, there were no Templar posts that could offer enough protection for something so valuable. Also, the Brothers who had it in their care knew that it had to remain in the greatest secrecy.”

  “They hid it?”

  “Of course,” said the Mason. “They hid it somewhere they could be sure certain it would not be discovered by accident, but they knew they needed to be able to watch over it easily without raising any suspicions.”

  “Somewhere that was public, but completely secure? A problem.”

  “A problem they managed to deal with very effectively, given the pressure of time and events. They left a document describing their actions. Only one copy was ever created and it has been in the possession of the Grand Masters ever since. He has entrusted it to me, and only he and I know the contents. Now you will learn it too.”

  For a moment Salvatore tried to imagine the fate of a small group of his fellow knights, fleeing a victorious Saracen army, in possession of one of the Order’s greatest treasures in the midst of a strange city where they had few friends and no allies.

  “Where is it hidden?” asked Salvatore.

  “You ask where, but not what it is?”

  “Is there value in me knowing what it is?”

  “None,” said the Mason.

  “Then tell me where. And if you believe I ever need to know what it is, you will tell me, I am sure.”

  The Mason nodded. “A wise decision on your part,” he said. “The less you know the better for you. You have heard of Jean d’Anton?”

  “He was the man who led the armies that first took Tripoli."

  “The same. When he died, his body was placed within a tomb, made of marble from his homeland in Burgundy, in the Cathedral of Tripoli. He wanted to be both in the Holy Land and at home for all eternity. The tomb was carved from a single piece of stone. Inside are his remains. The tomb took ten men to lift it.”

  “They lifted it by hand?”

  “The Brothers were fighters. They had no understanding of the arts of building or working with heavy stone. They lacked your fine education, so they simply used their own strength to lift the whole covering. They placed the object on top of the remains of d’Anton and replaced the marble outer shell.”

  “And the object? How heavy is that?”

  “It takes four men to carry it any distance, although two can lift it.”

  “And its shape?”

  “Imagine a deep coffin, but only a yard in length,” said the Mason.

  Salvatore closed his eyes and tried to visualize the object.

  “Obviously there is a reason why we cannot just send a group of our men to recover it.”

  “You know that Tripoli is under grave threat,” said the Mason. “If we are seen removing items from the city it will be construed as an act of cowardice and that we have no confidence in the ability of the County to survive. This can only be done in absolute secrecy. Also, if Tripoli’s leaders knew what the object was they would never let it leave.”

  “An interesting conundrum,” said Salvatore.

  “You have a good choice of words. You must go to Tripoli, lift the tomb of d’Anton and recover the item with no one learning that anything has taken place."

  “The tomb must be replaced?”

  “Exactly as you found it.”

  “How long do I have to prepare?”

  “We have a ship sailing north in two weeks. Will that suffice?”

  Salvatore nodded, already deep in thought. “I will need space to try out some ideas.”

  “The old bastion of St Christina has been long abandoned. It’s never visited since the wells there dried out. You can use that. I will prepare a few things for you before you leave.”

  It took Salvatore only an hour to collect and pack his equipment. As dusk fell he led his train of three horses out of the castle at Acre and headed along the coast and up to the hills where the old bastion stood. A decade of Templar training was impossible to break and he still rode with the horse carrying his arms and armor in front of him. Unlike the rest of his Brothers in the Order, he was used to travelling alone.

  The time passed quickly and a fortnight after taking up residence in the abandoned fort, Salvatore saw the Mason approaching through the narrow pass the bastion had been built to protect.

  Dismounting, the Mason looked around the inner courtyard. A stone horse-trough lay shattered and upended on the ground and several large stones had been taken from the front gates. They too lay scattered, many of them broken.

  Salvatore sat on one of these stones, chipping at the surface with an iron chisel and a round-topped mason’s mallet.

  “Your carving is improving,” said the Mason, looking at Salvatore’s handiwork.

  “It helps me think,” said Salvatore. It had been the habit of Salvatore to teach himself new skills whenever time allowed. Now he was perfecting his ability to carve into stone. It was always the
same image, a praying figure with his hand pointing upwards encircled with a line of letters in Latin spelling out the name “Far Muratore”.

  “You have managed to break a few stones, I see,” said the Mason, glancing around the courtyard.

  “Not all of my ideas worked.”

  Stacked in a corner were a number of timber spars, all snapped, and coils of rope, much of it reduced to torn shreds.

  “Stone and timber are cheap,” said the Mason. “You have a plan?”

  “No, no plan, but some ideas.”

  The Mason lifted a leather satchel from his shoulder and passed it to Salvatore. “Some things you will need.”

  Salvatore reached into the bag and pulled out several pages of parchment. “Bills of Exchequer,” he said, then looked more closely at the writing and the seals at the bottom of each. “I have never seen a blank Bill of Exchequer before.”

  “Few men have,” answered the Mason. “Use these to draw funds from our Treasurer in Tripoli.” He threw a heavy purse to Salvatore. “This is travelling money.”

  Salvatore hefted the purse in his hand. “Things must be bad to entrust such a mission and so much money to one knight.”

  “Things are worse than you can know, and will get worse still.” The Mason paused for a moment, then continued. “Our Order has many enemies. People who will be happy to see us fail, happy even to see us destroyed. If you find a way to succeed, you will have done more than any Templar in history to help us secure our future.”

  “And if I fail?”

  “Then nobody will ever know."

  No Saints

  “Isn’t that a bit unusual?” said Sparke. “I mean, towns don’t run around changing their patron saints on a whim do they?”

  Tilly thought for a moment, her face taking on the blank expression that Sparke now recognized as a sign that she was lost in thought.

  “As far as we know Fra Muratore wasn’t exactly the patron saint of the town,” she said. “In fact the whole idea of a patron saint is not the most precise term. There’s not exactly an official register of every city with all their saints and whatever. Muratore might not even have been a proper saint. His name appears only once or twice on lists of holy festivals and he is not mentioned in the main codex.”

  “I thought there was a big process for becoming a saint?”

  “There is,” said Tilly. “A formal case is made that takes years and then, basically, it ends in a big trial at the Vatican. Somebody is the Advocate of the person they want to sanctify and somebody else makes the opposition case and tries to prove that the candidate never actually performed any miracles.”

  “Like a Devil’s Advocate sort of thing?”

  “Not like a Devil’s Advocate, it really is the Devil’s Advocate. That’s his official title. His job is to challenge the application by attacking the whole case.”

  “When you say it ‘is’ his official job,” said Sparke, “you mean that this still goes on?”

  “Absolutely. Whenever they want to make a saint they still nominate a Devil’s Advocate.”

  “Must be a great job title to put on a passport application.”

  Tilly was hardly listening, distracted by her own thoughts. “Might have changed his name,” she said.

  “Seriously?”

  “Sure. Look, you’re from Glasgow, their patron saint is St Mungo, but he used to be called St Kentigern so perhaps Fra Muratore was an alternative name, some sort of local version maybe? I can ask the research people in Edinburgh to look into it. The Vatican has an awesome archive team. They can sometimes help.”

  “Sounds like the sort of research we can do next to the pool,” said Sparke.

  “Next to the pool with a big cold beer,” said Tilly, nodding.

  The hotel’s poolside was large and well shaded and had friendly staff on hand to provide a constant flow of cold beer to any guest who preferred to cool off, rather than fight the fierce Tuscan heat. Lacking proper swimming trunks, Sparke wore a pair of baggy cycling shorts. Tilly wore a swim suit that would have looked at home on a triathlon competitor.

  Despite having spent his career in heavy engineering and crisis management, Sparke had worked closely with many women and he had established clear lines for himself as to how to deal with them purely as colleagues.

  “What is the next step?” he said, keeping his eyes firmly on her face. “We struck out at the church. Is there some sort of Royal archive or suchlike for the period that we can look at?”

  “Nope. No Royal archives. There was no king here in the Middle Ages and no emperor. The land was directly owned by the Church. The Pope was the Lord Spiritual and Temporal.”

  Her phone pinged softly.

  “Email from our crack legal team,” she said. “Morag will have that Italian form translated and back to us tomorrow.” She scrolled down the page. “She says that one of the Medieval History gang over at St Andrew’s University, a chap called Navid Singh, has something that might be worth following up on. Seems there is a reference in the financial accounts of the Templar Commandery in Genoa, of all places, allocating funds to an outpost here. Listen, it says, ‘Funds released to the Commander of the Tower near Radda. This is required as the House has neither lands nor farms to provide for its own sustenance.’ Unusual.”

  “Why’s that unusual?”

  “Outside of war zones, and even in them quite often, Templar Houses were supposed to be more than self-sufficient. They were meant to provide a surplus back to the Order. Looks like they had some sort of position near Radda which was on its lonesome without any land around it to keep it fed and supplied.”

  Sparke reached over and picked up his own computer.

  “New computer, I see. Neat,” said Tilly.

  “Yeah, well, when I was kicked out of the company I had to give back all my smart toys and buy new ones for myself.”

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to be clumsy.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Sparke. “Like you say, I have fourteen million pounds in the bank, so what do I have to worry about?” He peered at the screen for a moment. “Any idea exactly where this thing might be?”

  “Nope, just a general comment that it was somewhere near Radda.”

  “Sounds to me like we have a clear objective,” said Sparke.

  “Yup, one for tomorrow, I think. No point in rushing around when there is so much important thinking to be done here,” said Tilly, lifting herself from her lounger and heading to the pool’s edge.

  The quiet Tuscan evening brought a change to Radda. The groups of tourists thinned out and the restaurants opened their terraces. Sitting across from Tilly, Sparke felt a sort of calmness that he had rarely experienced before. It occurred to him that he had never realized how much stress he was often under until it was no longer there. Losing his job had been the greatest shock of his life, even worse than his divorce several years ago. He had to work out how to spend the rest of his life. But right now, all he needed to focus on was deciding on dessert.

  “Cake or no cake?” he said to Tilly.

  “Cake. There’s a huge trolley of goodies just inside the restaurant. Needs some careful reconnaissance I think.”

  “Let me check it out,” said Sparke, getting out of his chair.

  Food was never much of a priority for Sparke, but he was trying to get used to having a lot of free time and a whole new range of choices, so he spent a long time gazing at the array of desserts laid out inside the restaurant.

  Eventually, he made up his mind, ordered the traditional Italian version of lemon tart, Torta della Nonna, and went back to his seat. He had the feeling that the other dinners were staring at him as he joined Tilly and as he sat down she gave him a strange look.

  “Your phone went off,” she said. “I didn’t want to rummage in your jacket pocket.”

  “Bugger, sorry about that,” said Sparke, trying to offer the room an apologetic smile.

  “Nice choice of ring tone,” said Tilly. “Ride of the Valkyries?”
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  “Really?” Sparke looked at the screen. “That’s not my normal ring tone.”

  “Somebody you know gets Wagner as their own ringtone?”

  “Yes, it’s the one I use for Karin at the office. At the old office,” he said, quickly correcting himself.

  “Your ex-girlfriend is calling you in the middle of the evening when you’re on holiday, huh?”

  “She’s not my ex-girlfriend.”

  “OK, your ex-boss.”

  “She wasn’t really my boss to be honest.”

  “Right, so the woman who was not your girlfriend and not your boss is calling you at nine p.m. Must be important.”

  Sparke looked at the phone for a second. “I’m on holiday, I’m having dinner with you and I can’t think of a single reason why I would want to talk to her.”

  He switched his phone off, something he could never remember having done before.

  To Tripoli

  The wind caught the single square sail, making the ropes and timbers of the ship creak as it began to pull itself through the Mediterranean, north, into the trade route to Tripoli. The ten rowers shipped their oars as the breakwater, which protected Acre harbor from winter storms, passed on their port side.

  "Our Brother the Mason told me it would be best to ignore you while you are here and forget you as soon as you leave," said the Commander of the small detachment of Templar knights who made up the only passengers on the ship.

  "He has an admirable brevity in his commands," replied Salvatore. "I will not trouble you or your men. I know they will not trouble me. Once we arrive at Tripoli, we will part. Until then, treat me as one of your own, but one to whom you do not give any orders."

  The Commander, who had no experience of any Templar activities outside of the strict, military norm, knew enough of the Mason’s reputation not to question his orders.

  "We pray together and eat together at the normal times,” he said. “Apart from that we will respond to any request you make, but not trouble you otherwise."

  Salvatore nodded and found a place near the flat stern of the ship that would be his position for the three-day voyage. Here, no one spoke to him as he pored over the sheaves of parchment that he carried in his small satchel. Whenever he tired of reading, he could be seen by his brother Templars talking quietly with the helmsmen. He asked them about currents and winds, reading the stars and the sun, endlessly curious about how sailors found their way from port to port.