The Templar Thief: Peter Sparke book 4

by Scott Chapman

  To provide the extra lift required, he now began carrying rocks from the crate of missiles and placing them into the counterweight basket. The new weight strained against the holding pin at the pivot point.

  The crate, which had looked to be completely full of stones, was, in fact, only two layers deep. A false bottom created a large empty space within it. He took the wooden slats that had formed the now visible base of the crate and stacked them next to the tomb.

  Salvatore leaned his weight on the counterbalance arm. "Luck, skill and optimism," whispered Salvatore as he pulled out the restraining pin.

  The counterweight immediately dropped downwards, pulling the lifting head upwards with a low groan. The chains snapped taught under the new tension and the leather harness squealed under the pressure, water streaming out of it as it was squeezed tight against the stone. He leaned his body on the counterweight, and then lifted his feet of the ground. Nothing happened. The machine vibrated under the strain, but the tomb did not move.

  He took his weight off the arm and let it drop, replacing the iron pin in the frame. He had used all of the stone missiles already and now had nothing more to add to the counterweight. He already knew that there was nothing in the church building which he could use as extra weight.

  Taking his last length of rope, he now tied one end to the counterweight and threaded it through the small windlass winch which was designed to pull the throwing arm down into firing position, and began winding. Once it was tense, he clambered back up and released the long arm. Again the counterweight dropped towards the ground, lifting the arm. This time he began pulling on the rope, heaving the counterweight down.

  Sweat poured from his body as he used every ounce of his strength to bring more pressure on the tomb. Still nothing happened.

  Was it possible that the tomb was fixed to the cathedral floor? Salvatore wondered. He tied off the rope and fixed the windlass with the ratchet, then stepped back from the machine to look again at the tomb.

  There was no cellar to the building so no one could have reached inside it from below. He knew from the document given to him by the Mason that ten men had once lifted it.

  He walked around the tomb, inspecting it for the hundredth time, knowing there was nothing to find.

  It was still pitch dark outside, but this had already taken longer than he had expected and dawn was not far away.

  He knew his machine was stronger than ten men, even ten men made desperate with fear. There was nothing that could be causing it not to move. He placed his hand against the cold stone and he was sure that he could feel tremors run through it with the weight pulling it upwards.

  He looked at the water, still trickling down from the leather harness and noticed that it did not pour down as water normally did over stone, but quickly formed droplets on its surface. Was the stone coated in resin?

  He reached into his belt and drew out his old dagger, and started scoring the join where the stone touched the floor. In the dim light he could see tiny flakes of something being dislodged as he cut.

  Halfway round the monument Salvatore heard a sharp crack. A heartbeat later there was a snap and the stone edge he was working on suddenly leapt upwards, inches from his face. He fell backwards and saw the entire monument race up into the darkness of the cathedral.

  He tensed, waiting at any moment for the huge mass of polished stone to crash down on him. The ropes creaked, and there was the sound of chain links grinding against each other, but the weight held.

  Going back to the machine, he took a small covered lamp and, using his slow-burning charcoal, brought it to light. After the near pitch darkness he had been working in, the small flame seemed like a dazzling light.

  Slowly, he approached the space where the tomb had stood. On a low stone plinth he saw the withered remnants of the knight, entombed here for almost two hundred years. The dry air had desiccated his body, pulling the skin into a tight leathery mask over his skull. The long dead eyes stared blankly upwards.

  The rest of his body had been twisted and roughly folded upwards, his knees now resting on his chest.

  At the bottom of the plinth, where his feet had been, was a large wooden box.

  Date

  The US Navy has several capabilities that are not widely known. One of them is their ability to move people at high speed around the world. Twenty-four hours after being picked up by the USS Lexington, Sparke was in the care of US Commander Fleet Activities Chanhae, in the American base in the Republic of South Korea.

  It was here that he found out that the story of his escape had become one of those short-term marvels that feed the global media. Sparke looked in horror at the coverage by CNN that referred to the events as the "Elkhorn Tsunami Incident".

  They had somehow got access to a recording of his final radio conversation with the chopper sent to pick him up, and the text of the discussion was being shown on a scrolling page on the screen. The US Office of Naval Research had provided a detailed description of how his tiny free-fall lifeboat had survived, and the medic from the USS Lexington was interviewed. The caption on the screen changed as she spoke to show her being quoted saying, "The first thing he asked for was a cup of tea."

  Amongst this bad news there was one bright light: his luggage had arrived in Korea before him, sent on by Markus and courtesy of FedEx.

  Wincing at the pain from his ribs, he struggled out of the clothes which had been given to him by the crew of the USS Lexington.

  He had almost forgotten his extravagant shopping experience in Siena. He laid the clothes out on the bed in front of him and looked at his new way of dressing. So far in his life, clothes had been a mundane necessity; these clothes were simple, but they were made for people who took themselves, and their appearance, seriously.

  Dressed, he picked up his phone and took a deep breath. Tilly's phone rang hollowly across the thousands of miles. It rang out and clicked over to voicemail.

  "Hi, this is Tilly Pink, sorry I'm away from the phone. Just leave a message and I'll call you right back."

  Sparke had been away from Scotland so long that the sound of her Scottish accent still caught him off guard: it was a sound from a home long ago.

  "Hello, Tilly, it's Peter here, Peter Sparke. Sorry I didn't respond to your text messages. I was out of cell coverage. Ah, well, I was wondering if it might make sense... I was thinking that perhaps, if you're free at the weekend... Are you back in Edinburgh yet? Well, anyway, even if you're still in Italy... either is just as good for me. Would you like to come to dinner with me? Look, you might see something on the telly. It’s nothing. Everything is fine and I'll be heading back to Europe so if you don't have any other plans..." The phone made a distant pinging noise and he realized that he had run over time on Tilly's message service. He looked down at the phone and then looked at his own reflection in the mirror. From the neck down he looked great. The bandage on his broken nose was not too bad and it had the advantage of distracting him from looking at the stupid expression on his own face. The phone rang.

  "Peter Sp..."

  "You idiot, you absolute idiot. Of course I saw you on television. You're all over the BBC. They say you had almost no chance to escape that bloody oil rig. You're such a total idiot. You should be dead, but you leave me a message asking if I am free for dinner?"

  "Ah, yes, I really wasn't sure... last time we spoke I was a bit of a duffus, so, you know, I wasn't sure..."

  "Sure? Well, I'm sure you absolutely are a duffus. I have been kicking myself. I was sick with worry."

  The phone fell into silence.

  "So, what about dinner then?" said Sparke eventually. For a long second, Tilly didn't speak.

  "Peter, I'm sorry. I shouldn't be angry. You've just been through some hellish experience and now you have to me ranting down the phone like a harridan."

  "Talking about phones, this call is costing you a fortune. I'm in Korea so..."

  "Korea? Look, can you get onto Skype?"

  "Nope, I
lost my computer and my face is a bit of a mess anyway, so best not to appear on a screen just right now. Can we meet? Are you back in Edinburgh?"

  "Yes, I'm home. Send me your flight details."

  "Soon as I get organized I will send them over. Probably Saturday. OK with you?"

  "Saturday," said Tilly. "Of course, Saturday is fine. Peter, I was so worried."

  "Saturday," said Sparke. "See you then."

  He stood for a moment, wondering exactly what he wanted to say to Tilly when he met her. His reverie was broken when he heard a knock at the door.

  "Mr. Sparke, I'm Lieutenant Marshall, press relations. Would you be willing to make a brief statement for the press?"

  "Press? Sorry..." Sparke had spent his life avoiding journalists and was well practiced at dodging their questions. For the first time in his life he paused before giving his normal refusal. "What press is it?"

  "We have a lady here from the Chosun Iibo, that's a Korean daily paper and one of our own Navy Mil people. Navy Mil is the news service for our own people, like a Navy newspaper."

  "Sure," said Sparke, nodding. "Where's the harm?"

  The two journalists were waiting in a bare office room.

  "Would it be all right if I just gave you a little statement? I'm a bit tired and I have to leave soon?"

  Happy for the chance to be the first journalists to talk to the man who sailed through a tsunami on purpose, they agreed. Sparke thought for a moment, and then leaned forward towards their microphones.

  "I am extremely happy that eight men from the Elkhorn were rescued and I send my condolences to the families of the men who did not make it." He paused. "After the wave passed I was unconscious and in danger. I would not have been able to save myself. The people on board the USS Lexington heard my distress signals. They sent the crew of one of their rescue helicopters into an oncoming storm to come and save me. When they found me, one of their divers jumped into the sea to reach my lifeboat." Sparke stopped and took a sip from a bottle of water that Lt. Marshall passed him. "The helicopter crew lifted my lifeboat to the deck of the USS Lexington. I understand the diver stayed with me the entire time. They were very brave men and women and I owe my life and eternal gratitude to them. Thank you. I need to go now."

  Sparke stood up and left the room, partly to avoid their questions, but, to a large extent, to hide the fact that, for the first time in his adult life, he had a tear running down his face.

  The flights from Seoul back to Europe passed in a blur. Several people stared at his bandaged face but he was upgraded on every flight. The staff of the British Airways flight from Seoul to London was impeccably discrete, but made sure that his journey was painless. He transferred to the connection to Scotland and before he knew it, he was walking through immigration control at Edinburgh airport.

  Tilly was standing amongst the crowd of waiting drivers and friends that populate the arrivals gate of any airport.

  "You look good in bandages," she said, smiling hugely. "Nice threads by the way."

  Box

  Someone had taken a great deal of care over this box: it was not something recently made. The edges were smoothly finished and the joins were impeccably smooth. On each of its longer sides, the box had brackets, probably designed to take lifting poles so that it could be carried by two or four men.

  Salvatore placed the palm of his hand against the timber: this was the thing he had been sent to retrieve. He had no idea what it contained and had no desire to know its contents.

  Taking some of the loose slats from the false bottom of the crate, he laid out a low platform next to the plinth the box sat on. Then, after wiping the soles of his shoes on the end of his discarded cape, he braced himself and began to push the side of the box with both feet.

  The box moved easily, the smooth base of the wood sliding over the stone with a quiet grinding noise. It took three pushes to shift the box onto the slats and free of the area around the plinth.

  Above him, the heavy marble tomb spun slowly in the dark, creaking like a ship at anchor.

  Despite the fact that dawn would soon be upon him, Salvatore took a few moments to lift the corpse of the ancient knight back into its original position. The dry, withered limbs weighed nothing and his clothing fell to pieces, but at least he was now stretched out in some dignity for the first time in almost two hundred years.

  Moving back to the machine, Salvatore put his full strength against the rope, placed his feet against the frame and released the restraining pin. Even with all of the counterweights, it was still a shock and the tension of the weight pulled his body close to the machine as he lowered it.

  Laying the small lamp on the ground next to the body, he climbed back onto the machine and took the strain of the rope, his eyes fixed on the descent of the tomb. Inch by inch the stone shroud returned to earth and the knight was returned to his solitary rest. He inspected the edges to make sure that it was fully rested on the floor, and that there were no telltale marks showing that it had been moved.

  It took only a few minutes to strip the rope and leather harness from the stone and throw them onto the machine. Next he pulled the empty ammunition crate over to the tomb and carefully roped the wooden box from the tomb to the arm of the machine.

  After the effort of moving the tomb, it was an easy task to hoist the box and drop it gently into the crate. He had not known the exact size of the box, so he had made the crate over-large. To stop the cargo moving around and being damaged, he stuffed loose sacking and ropes around it as padding.

  He looked up through the high dark windows, straining to see any trace of the coming dawn, but darkness was still with him.

  Within thirty minutes, he had the crate positioned back on the machine and the false bottom back in place. Then he removed the missiles from the counterweight and replaced them. Any observer would see nothing more than a rough crate full of stone missiles.

  His muscles ached as he set himself to moving the machine back to its original position, heaving down on the iron spar to lever the drive wheel round. With the box recovered, and the tomb replaced, Salvatore now felt exhaustion creeping over him, even the effort of slotting the spar into the machine and letting his own weight drive the machine forward was almost overwhelming and he moved ever more slowly, almost as though he was in a dream.

  With a start, Salvatore realized that he could now see the pale outline of the buildings that surrounded the cathedral. He frantically cleaned the floor round the tomb and the machine, now back in its original position in the transept.

  The clicking of the lock sounded as loud as thunder to Salvatore. Scuffing steps of feet approached from the small rear door as Salvatore turned for one last look at the area where he had been working.

  With horror, he saw that one of the wheels had left a long, dark mark on the floor, despite its covering of leather. It looked like a three yard long arrow pointing from the machine directly to the tomb.

  There were voices now in the corridor leading to the main chamber. They were the low, sleepy, early morning voices of people newly awake. Salvatore snatched a length of sacking from the machine and rushed towards the mark on the floor. He bent down and began to rub, it seemed to be the dust of crumbling leather that had fallen from one wheel coverings, and it came up easily.

  "What's this?"

  The words sent a freezing chill through his body. Salvatore was kneeling on the floor, halfway between the tomb and his machine, as visible as a spider on a bed sheet. He reached for the dagger in his belt.

  "What's this monstrosity in the church?" said the voice. "Althus, come here immediately and explain this!"

  The voice receded into the back of the cathedral and its owner sought out whoever Althus was. Salvatore pushed the bundle of sacking onto the floor and pushed it along the floor towards the tomb, wiping up the trail of dust as he went. As he reached the tomb, he heard the voice again, "Who permitted this nonsense? Is this a siege machine?"

  "I'm sorry, Father, you should
have been told. It is the express wish of the Bishop that this machine is blessed this morning. We will have an army of such machines and they will safeguard the city against all enemies."

  "The Bishop might do well to remember that he is not a warlord. Why was I not consulted? Use of the cathedral is not only in the gift of the Bishop. I am Deacon here, does that mean nothing?"

  Crouched behind the tomb, Salvatore gently slid the dagger back into his belt and the two men, who had come within a hairsbreadth of death, continued bickering over the protocol of cathedral affairs.

  Doreen

  "I know it is a cliché, but I was too busy running around the rig to think about anything at all."

  "So you weren't frightened?" Tilly said.

  "When I saw the wave, I was. I was bloody terrified," said Sparke. "It was like a bit of the earth reaching out to slap me down. Imagine being chased by a mountain, or having that street outside suddenly lift itself up and roll over you. Mainly though, I was trying not to do anything stupid."

  "I can't imagine you doing very many stupid things."

  "I do stupid things all the time. I was a total dummy when I went off to Siena and left you in Radda."

  Tilly looked down at her food. "I was just a wee bit angry when you went off on your own, but I was bloody furious when I heard that you were thousands of miles away being hit with a tidal wave."

  Now it was Sparke's turn to be silent.

  "Great curry," he said, after a long pause.

  "As good as it gets," she said. "I've been coming to The Raj since I moved to Edinburgh."

  "That's the one thing that all expats dream about, you know," said Sparke. "You just cannot get decent Indian food outside the UK."

  "And now what?" said Tilly. “Are you back in the world of crisis and disaster?"