The Templar Thief: Peter Sparke book 4

by Scott Chapman

  Again the Bishop fell into silence. Salvatore had thought through the path the Bishop's mind would take. The man who opened the door to his carriage was clearly a Templar. He had ridden with the troop and spoken to the Commander, a man the Bishop knew well. But Salvatore was now wearing common clothes, he was beardless and he was openly blackmailing him. Of all the options open to the Bishop, compliance was the easiest.

  "I will wait at the Priests Door after evening service," said Salvatore. "You will let me in, and in the morning I will go. If any of your men are waiting with you, I will kill them."

  The Bishop stared at him. There was no need to expand the threat any further.

  "This is the only thing?" said the Bishop. "I will never see you again if I do this?"

  "This is the only thing for now. But be assured, nothing I do will harm the Cathedral."

  "And if I refuse?"

  "Don't," said Salvatore, disappearing back into the shadows.

  The next night, Salvatore watched as the Bishop walked alone into the Cathedral. He had checked the obvious places for an ambush party to wait and all were empty. He walked to the open door where the Bishop stood. Wordlessly, Salvatore pushed past him and into the corridors that lay behind the public part of the building, hearing the door lock behind him.

  Making his way through into the main hall, Salvatore had the feeling of being alone on a great ship, ready for sea, but asleep and calm. The high windows let in enough moonlight to see by once his eyes adjusted to the gloom. For a moment, he stood motionless, listening for the slightest sound of movement, but apart from the constant murmur of the city outside, he was alone.

  He walked over to the tomb of the crusader knight who had led the capture of Tripoli and observed it from a distance, looking at the walls and roof again for any point where he could fix a rope and pulley, but found none. Walking over to it, he placed his finger tips on the base of the monument, looking for any line that suggested a join. Transporting such a huge piece of marble would have been difficult and it was easy to imagine that it might have been made in several pieces, and then assembled on site. To the group of frantic Templars who lifted it so many years ago, it could have felt like a solid piece, but they had lacked all knowledge of stonework, knowledge that Salvatore had gained through his years of working under the Mason.

  He traced every edge, paying particular attention to the point where the carved effigy of the knight rested on the top, but there was nothing. It was one of those rare items that was what it appeared to be, a solid marble tomb.

  Salvatore found a wooden stool near the altar and placed it in front of the knight's last resting place. He looked again at the walls, the ceiling, the floor space and the tomb. Then he did it again and again, working with painful dedication towards a solution to an impossible problem. One man, acting alone, lifting a stone several times his own weight, then reaching inside to remove some heavy object, one too heavy probably for him to move alone, then replace the tomb, leaving no trace.

  "Thank you, Brother Mason," he said in a soft whisper, his voice flitting through the dark cathedral like a bat in the night.

  Cloverleaf

  Sparke had been flying constantly for most of his adult life, but rarely with any degree of comfort. He passed some of the time on this flight rating his all-time worst journeys. First was easy; he had had the misfortune to be the center of what later turned out to have been the longest single helicopter flight in history, a flight so tough that he had been appalled to see the crew congratulating each other when they finally landed.

  He had sat strapped into plastic mesh seats, enduring the endless racket of engines on board comfortless military transports and had held onto the instrument boards of numerous bush aircraft as they hopped between dirt landing strips in a dozen nations.

  Today, he was experiencing the polar opposite of those flights. The aircraft, sent by the Taiwanese, was an executive jet built to carry up to ten people with high expectations of comfort, in the lap of luxury. His leather seat swiveled and reclined until it was almost flat. Should he feel the need to sleep, there were two soundproofed cabins in the rear.

  Due to the length of flight, there was a team of four cabin crew with nothing to do but find new ways to make Sparke comfortable.

  Immediately after boarding, he had been handed a tablet computer in a Prada leather case bearing the logo of the Taiwanese firm. Loaded onto the machine was the most up-to-date information on the crisis. The onboard Wi-Fi system automatically updated it with the latest weather and situation reports.

  Before he lost his job, he had been aware of various risk situations around the world and had developed a complex alerting system which combined various indicators showing where potential risks might develop in the regions where his company worked.

  Losing that job meant becoming unplugged from that network and he realized how small his view of the world had now become.

  The Taiwanese firm had expanded greatly since Sparke had last worked with them, acquiring several commercial maritime companies. With the slowdown in international bulk cargo transport, they had shifted their focus to the booming world of oil exploration and production, particularly in the China Sea and North Pacific.

  They operated a fleet of oil rig support vessels, crew platforms and, most recently, production rigs. At any one time the company could have up to three thousand staff offshore and be responsible for the comfort and safety of many thousands more.

  Before moving into crisis management, Sparke had cut his teeth on the North Sea oil business in his native Scotland and knew the reality of risk management in the offshore world as well as anyone alive.

  At first glance, the threat appeared to be one-dimensional, a threat from a single source, but Sparke soon realized that the situation was considerably more complex. What they faced now was known as a 'Cloverleaf Incident'. Each leaf represented a source of risk in its own right, but the focus for Sparke was the point where three leafs intersected.

  The first leaf, and the trigger point to this alert, was the long-predicted eruption of a volcano called Ashoka east of the oil exploration field. Bad as this was, it was compounded by the fact that tropical storm Epsilon was hammering its way towards the zone and was due to hit within twenty-four hours. Sparke's plane was already encountering the leading edge of this storm and the small aircraft was bucking through the darkening clouds. The third leaf, and the wildcard in the pack, was that three nations who all claimed access to, or ownership of, a stretch of ocean bordering the South China Sea were facing off against each other. The result of this was that each of the powers had sent their most effective coastal protection vessels into the disputed waters and these vessels were part of the emergency response network that commercial operators in the area could normally count on as a support of final resort.

  Sparke's phone rang with the ring tone he had assumed he would never hear again, the one used purely when he was engaged in a major incident. He accepted the call, which had been patched through by the aircraft's onboard systems.

  "Peter Sparke."

  "Peter, it is Markus, great to hear your voice again."

  "Great to hear yours too," said Sparke. He had trained Markus over the past dozen years to the point where he was one of the most effective incident management experts in his field. "What do you see?"

  "Have you got the sitrep?" said Markus.

  "No, I have the background and the general overview, but I don't have access to the system."

  "I 'm sending you the access codes now."

  Sparke saw an email arrive carrying a decoding package, and then a few seconds later a link arrived to the cloud-based incident management system, which Sparke had largely created. He initiated the passwords and his computer flipped into the system that had been the focal point of much of his working life for so long. Sparke was not much for naming things, so he had called it, 'the Screen'.

  "Good morning, Peter," said the Screen.

  "Screen, show risk assessment
for Tropical Storm Epsilon."

  The Screen flashed up a dashboard showing a chart with a sharply climbing line. The end of this line was now deep within a colored area marked 'High Likelihood of Potential Risk to Life.'

  "Screen, show risk assessment for volcanic eruption."

  The screen changed again, and this time the line was significantly higher.

  "Screen, show compound risk for both situations." A new chart appeared. This was one of those situations where two plus two equaled seven; the risks were not added, but multiplied.

  "Factor in loss of deep-sea support vessels."

  "The new risk point cannot be quantified, Peter," the Screen said. "Risk is too close to a hundred percent to evaluate."

  Sparke clicked on the icon showing Markus's face.

  "Markus, what's the human count?"

  "There were a total of three thousand personnel at sea when the first alert was triggered. Evacuation has been slow due to the storm warning keeping non-essential ships in harbor. There are still four hundred at sea, but they are due to dock within three hours. Emergency and environmental crews are still on board three rigs, but they will be choppered out by the last alert."

  "I will be landing at Shenduh in two hours. Unless anything else happens I would say that you might want to keep them there until the situation stabilizes."

  "My thinking exactly. We have the choppers on standby."

  "Markus, where are we with..." Sparke was interrupted by a flashing alert on the screen.

  "You see this?" said Markus, looking at the same alert.

  Sparke looked at the Screen and felt a familiar wave of cold calm wash over him. The noise of the aircraft disappeared and the growing ferocity of the storm faded as he saw the single line of text which had flashed onto his computer.

  "Ashoka Volcano erupted at 04.27 local time."

  Puzzle

  Salvatore bent down and blew the dust from the block of stone he was working on between his feet.

  "You have a good hand,” said the voice of Dimitrios from the shadows of his workshop. He had been watching his strange new client for hours, a man who had hired a boatyard, disappeared for several days, and returned to spend a morning carving on a piece of sandstone that had been used as ballast on an old fishing boat.

  "And you have a sharp eye," said Salvatore, not looking up. He brushed the surface of the rock and looked at the image. It was a man, tonsured, wearing the robes of a priest, his right hand pointing upwards. Around him, in a circle, were the letters spelling out the words, "Fra Muratore".

  Salvatore bent again, working on the lines, smoothing and defining the image, lost in thought.

  Hours passed and, as the light of the day faded, Salvatore saw movement in the shadows where Dimitrios had his dwelling.

  "Do you ever eat?" said Dimitrios, holding a loaf of bread up in one hand. "Food is included in your rent."

  Salvatore dusted off his clothing and walked into the cool shade of the wooden shelter behind the house.

  The two men ate in silence, drinking wine mixed with water and flavored with cloves. The water softened the bitterness of the wine, the wine killed the brackish taste of the water and the cloves masked the taste of both.

  "You can find men skilled in working with timber?" said Salvatore eventually.

  "This is a boatyard, I have many skilled men I can call on."

  "An ironworker?"

  "My cousin's wife is the sister of a master blacksmith. Weapons, armor, gateworks, very good and the best prices."

  "A wheelwright?"

  "Halber the Catalonian is the man who works for all the rich in the city. He has a yard near the East Gate."

  Salvatore rose and went to the small shed he used as his cell. He had returned to it after his mission to save the Bishop to find that the thread he had stretched across the doorway was untouched. So far, Dimitrios had been as good as his word and had not pried into the business of his client.

  He returned a few moments later with a scrap of parchment, a block of ink and a quill. He sharpened his quill, spat on the ink block and wordlessly began creating a list, which he handed to Dimitrios.

  "I will need four men, for a week I think," said Salvatore.

  Dimitrios read the list, struggling with the words, then nodded.

  "All can be done, but it will not be cheap."

  "You surprise me. Whatever price you are thinking of, cut it in half. How long for the materials?"

  "The timber, the day after tomorrow. Nails, ropes and spar bolts I have here, but the iron work I cannot say until you talk to the ironworker. As for these things," he pointed to the bottom of the list, "I have no idea, but I am sure I can find them for you."

  Salvatore stood. "You had better get to bed early, you have a busy day tomorrow." Then, without a further word, he walked out of the yard and into the busy streets outside.

  The guard at the Templar Commandery recognized the man in the yellow hooded cloak as soon as he opened the small hatch in the door.

  "Fetch the Commander," said Salvatore, turning back to his place in the shadows. This time, the Commander appeared within minutes and walked immediately over to where Salvatore stood.

  "How can we serve?" he asked.

  Salvatore held out a slip of parchment which the Commander read briefly, before tucking it into his belt.

  "Will you wait?" he said. Salvatore nodded.

  Within an hour the side door to the Commandery opened and the Commander stepped out. This time the Guard followed, scanning the quiet street carefully.

  Salvatore stayed hidden as the Commander approached and handed him a heavy leather bag. As Salvatore took it, he felt its weight and heard the clink of coins.

  Like all major Templar posts, the Tripoli Commandery acted as a bank for rich pilgrims and merchants who had no desire to carry large sums of money. The parchment Salvatore had given the Commander was a bill to withdraw funds, one of five given to him by the Mason, all fully signed and sealed, all blank where the sum was normally stated.

  Salvatore nodded his thanks to the Commander and turned away into the growing darkness, carrying enough money to keep a man in comfort for as long as he lived.

  The next day the boatyard teemed with life. Men arrived with the morning sun and began sweeping, cleaning and preparing tools. The yard itself was cleared, creating a flat, empty space. The first of the timber arrived that afternoon and was sorted and inspected by Dimitrios and his men.

  Satisfied that things were in hand, Salvatore left and followed the directions Dimitrios had given him to the ironworker's forge. It took many hours of discussion and a dozen sketches in the sand before Salvatore was confident that he had communicated his requirements. It would take three days’ work according to the blacksmith, a rush job.

  Salvatore paid the man half the money agreed and told him he would be back at the end of each day to check his progress.

  His visit to the wheelwright was shorter. The man could read well, and was familiar with the practice of measurements.

  Shortly after dawn the next day, the main gate of the boatyard was hauled open and the timbers were delivered. Then, in another delivery, several small barrels and a half-dozen uncured ox-hides were brought in and stored in a secure hut at the far end of the yard.

  Salvatore had the timbers laid out across the yard, and with a piece of charcoal, a length of twine and a small triangle of metal which he took from his pack, he began drawing the outlines of the cuts he required. The workmen, used to working only by eye, watched intently. They had seen a dozen types of ship, western and Arab, some had experience in erecting buildings and constructing wagons, but none had ever seen the shapes being outlined by Salvatore.

  "What are we building?" asked the oldest of the workers.

  "I need these holes to be true and matching the ones on the other piece," said Salvatore. "Tell me before you drill them so that I can be here to guide you."

  The workman shrugged, took one side of a double saw, and beck
oned his apprentice to take the other and, with his other comrades, began the laborious process of shaping the timbers to match the strange lines Salvatore had drawn.

  It took five days of work. Apart from short absences, Salvatore spent every minute with the boat workers, frequently asking them questions about how they worked, often taking their tools into his own hands and copying their actions.

  On the sixth day, the wheelwright and the iron worker delivered their parts to the yard. The men looked at iron chains, and wheels, and then fell into conversation about the other items, including something that appeared to be a half basket made entirely of metal. Later, a cart arrived carrying two dozen wooden buckets, small ones of the type used by those who collected night soil from the better houses in the city.

  Salvatore ordered all of the items laid out across the yard.

  "It's a machine for digging wells," said one of the workers.

  "No, it is device to pull out the trunks of trees," said another.

  Dimitrios, better travelled than the others, stood looking for a long time.

  "No," he said, "it's none of those things."

  The Bad and the Worse

  "Volcanoes are bad, but not as difficult as earthquakes, "said Sparke.

  "Volcanoes stay in one place," agreed Markus, "nice shirt by the way."

  Both Sparke and Markus had been involved in managing the response to the Chilean earthquake several years ago that had struck twice, with eruptions four days apart in locations separated by over a hundred miles. The centers set up to assist in the response to the first shock had been obliterated in the second, multiplying the impact on the rescue mission.

  "Tropical storm Epsilon is bad, but not bad enough to take out the rigs that are still manned," said Markus. “The ash plume from the volcano is grounding everything downwind but there won't be any major particle clouds in the rig area for forty hours according to the system. With the rigs almost clear of people there is not much chance that we would need to call on the coastal protection vessels."