The Templar Vault *** NUMBER ONE BOOK ***: A Peter Sparke Book Read online

  The Templar Vault

  By Scott Chapman

  KINDLE edition

  Copyright © 2014 Scott Chapman

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof in any form. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored, in any form or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical without the express written permission of the author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  PublishNation London

  www.publishnation.co.uk

  Dedication

  This book is dedicated to David who inspired it and Karen and who endured it.

  Also by Scott Chapman:

  The Kaiser's Navigator

  Click here for more details, or:

  Click here for The Kaiser's Navigator on amazon.com

  Click here for The Kaiser's Navigator on amazon.co.uk

  Introduction

  Six more bodies lay on the floor of the chamber. Like the others in the passageway, they appeared so relaxed, almost alive, that it was hard to believe they had been lying here under a mountain for eight hundred years. He stepped over the outstretched arm of the nearest corpse as he made his way towards the back of the chamber, his arms slightly raised as though that would give him better balance.

  The room had the same dry flat smell as the passage outside and, despite the winter wind that swept the hillside beyond, it was silent and still in here. Air that had not moved for centuries now filled Sparke's lungs and the thin light from his head torch threw harsh shadows everywhere. It was hard for him to judge distances, and everything seemed to have the same flat blue-grey colour. He felt as though he was underwater, peering into the murk.

  Blood from his torn head ran down the side of his face. The cold made him shiver and a fat drop of blood fell from his left ear. It splashed into the palm of the curled hand of the body on the floor beneath him. He froze. The small puddle of blood glistened, red-black against the desiccated skin of the long-dead guardian. He had nothing more he could use to stem the blood and he knew that any attempt to adjust the rough dressing he had already applied would only make things worse. He moved on.

  The shape he had seen at the far end of the vault was not, as he had first thought, a table, but solid like a short flat-top plinth. As far as Sparke could tell, it was carved out of the surrounding stone, rising directly from the floor.

  Four bodies were seated or stretched out on the floor with their feet pointing towards the plinth, two others with their feet pointing away as though their position in death had been determined by the stone, or more likely by the thing that sat on top of it. None of the bodies showed any sign of distress or gave an indication as to what had killed them. Like the first bodies he had found, there were no obvious wounds, all looked to have weapons near them but they were either stowed on their belts or lying carefully placed near the walls. Whatever caused these men to die, it had not been a desperate swordfight.

  Sparke crouched down to look at the corpse right at his feet. The skin on the face was like old, dark leather, heavily creased but not dry or withered. It reminded him of the corpse he had seen in a museum, of a man who had died in a marsh and whose flesh had been preserved by the peat in the water. Sparke looked carefully at the face and fingertips of the corpse. No rats had been in this vault since these men had died.

  He straightened up and moved further into the dark of the room, still treading with exaggerated care, making sure that he disturbed nothing, stopping at every footstep to look around him before shifting his weight again. Six more steps brought him almost to the end of the chamber.

  Slowly, he turned and retraced his steps, trying to follow his actual footprints until he reached the collapsed inner door. He picked his way carefully over the debris of the door on all fours. Once clear, he picked up his heavy outdoor jacket that he had abandoned when he first entered the chamber. He was cold now and the adrenaline that had been rushing through him had passed.

  As he walked slowly along the passage towards the outside he stopped and looked again at the first two corpses he had found. Like the six bodies inside, both of these wore dull chainmail armour covered over with a simple white sheet. Emblazoned on the front of each sheet near the shoulder was a large cross. Even in this light, it was clear that the cross had once been red.

  He reached his rucksack and boots which he had left at the entrance, next to the pile of rubble that had been the outer doorway, and rummaged inside the bag until he found the waterproof pouch that he used to store his mobile phone. Despite the wildness of the surroundings the signal was good. He half-clambered through the hole he had made and dialled.

  In an office just over a hundred miles away someone answered Sparke's call.

  "I have just found something I think you need to know about," he said.

  Chapter 1

  Sparke stared out the massive windows of Amsterdam's Schipol Airport with the look of bored surrender that only air passengers possess. He had been waiting for almost seven hours for his flight, but he was good at waiting. There were many things that could annoy Sparke, mainly things concerned with the frequency with which people tend to act irrationally, but he did not get annoyed about weather.

  His table was covered with empty coffee cups and crumpled paper napkins. The waiter smiled as he cleared everything onto a tray.

  "Another coffee?" he said, wiping the table-top clean.

  Sparke smiled a thank you, and watched as the waiter scrunched together the used napkins and dropped them into a trash bag. Every napkin had the same doodle scribbled on it; a long thin blob with an irregular, unfinished shape off to the left-hand side of the top end. Both shapes were crosshatched. It looked a little like two islands that nearly touched, sitting at right angles to each other, or two stretches of water separated by a thick neck of land. To everyone in the world except Sparke it looked like nothing at all.

  The waiter brought fresh coffee and, even before he walked away, Sparke had picked up the napkin that came with it and started idly scrawling the same doodle once again.

  For the third time in less than an hour Sparke considered opening his laptop and doing some work and for the third time he decided not to. There was little in this project to really interest him. In fact there was little in his work that interested him very much now.

  How he had ended up doing this job was still a mystery to him. He certainly had not sought it out. In fact he had never really planned his career. Engineering became his life because at school he had been good with numbers and bad at almost everything else. Success in technical subjects sent him to engineering school and success there led him to being snapped up by an oil company.

  For the first years of his working life, he had found himself helping to move oil rigs out of the yards where they had been built, and towing them across the North Sea and into production. Because he managed to see the immensely complex nature of such a project as a simple series of small logical steps, he had never been daunted by the fact that his decisions could have major impacts on multi-million dollar projects.

  One of his colleagues had made the slightest of miscalculations in a project that showed the importance of what Sparke and his like did. Sparke's colleague had to get a new rig towed down a river from a shipyard, under a high bridge and out to sea. That river had seen scores of rigs pass under the bridge without incident. This time, Sparke's colleague had checked the height of the rig, the clearance of the bridge and worked out precisely the time when the tide would be best suited to float the thing out to sea. Every measurement was checked thoroughly, and repeatedly. The bridge was checked again to make sure there was no construction work planned on it that might snag the rig, the rig was checked again to make sure that no alterations had been made that might impact on its height and the tides checked many times.

  Unfortunately no one checked the fact that the rig was actually sitting on a barge rather than floating. The barge added just enough height to the rig to cause it to crash into the bridge, the busiest road crossing in the region.

  The bridge did not fall down, but it was closed to heavy traffic for months creating millions in additional costs to the companies who used the bridge for haulage. All of that came directly to the door of Sparke's company.

  Sparke had been the only qualified person available in his firm when the collision took place and had been rushed to the site by helicopter. Standing in the howling wind and rain by the side of a river blocked by a multi-million dollar oil rig jammed under a road bridge, Sparke's colleagues heard him say, "Oh, what a mess", which was strong language from him.

  His success in unsticking the rig, without causing the collapse of the bridge, had made him into one of the firm's troubleshooters and now he found himself frequently involved in helping clear up problems which other people had made.

  During one particularly messy situation to do with an oil-pipe leak and a few thousand acres of Alaskan wilderness, he met his CEO, who was on-site to fend off attacks on their company by media and furious nature lovers.

  "You must be Sparke," said his CEO quietly, in her soft south-German accent. Karin was the only woman in
the industry who ran a company of this size. Only forty years old, she had performed to a shockingly high degree of competence since she joined the company directly from school as a technical trainee.

  Recognising raw talent when they saw it, the company leadership had groomed her for great things almost from the outset. Pushed hard as technical trainee, her hard work and photogenic good looks had seen her thrust into being the face of a PR campaign by her company, anxious to show its positive approach to gender balance. A grateful management was happy to put her through university and by the age of thirty she had managed to build an unblemished work record coupled with a PhD.

  She had not reached this level by being either shy or overly sensitive to others. When introduced to Sparke she said cheerfully, "I hear you're the man who clears up all the mistakes we make."

  Sparke smiled, extended his hand to Karin and said, "Nice to meet you."

  Karin was only a few years older than Sparke but was already a legend within the company and the industry. She continued to look closely and directly into his eyes.

  "How exactly do you go about clearing things up for us, Mr Sparke?"

  A lot rested on how well Sparke could manage this situation and Karin had no reservations about testing him. Sparke took a moment to think about the question, then another long moment to consider an answer.

  "It is a case of not thinking in too straight a line, I suppose," he said. "A bit of looking at everything at the same time and seeing where the lines all cross."

  "You think perhaps that we take too narrow a focus in our company?" continued Karin, still pushing.

  Again she watched Sparke closely as he considered his answer.

  "Our company is made of people. People who are trying to do their jobs. Things can still go wrong when everybody does their job because, I think, it is not often anyone's job to think about how things can go wrong."

  "So we could be better at managing risk, perhaps?" Karin asked.

  "Oh, I think we are good at risk, but possibly not so good at imagining catastrophe. Risk is a matter of probabilities, catastrophe is far more creative."

  Karin thought for a moment, assessing both Sparke's words and his failure to be fazed by her questions. Finding herself happy with both she nodded gently. "So let us try to turn this little catastrophe back into manageable risks again."

  Sparke and his CEO talked together frequently during the clean-up operation. Every conversation left Karin feeling more comfortable that Sparke was the right person to be running things.

  Following a successful resolution of the oil-pipe issue, Sparke found himself removed totally from day-to-day work and dedicated wholly to the subject of dealing with things that had gone wrong. During those periods between things going wrong, he spent his time looking for things that might go wrong and finding ways to stop that happening.

  Occasionally Karin would wander into his office for what seemed to be an aimless conversation. He would find himself talking for hours about how reliable robot technology was, and then learn with interest a few weeks later that his firm had spent millions buying a new robotics company. A lengthy and apparently pointless discussion about his experiences in the oil rig construction division of his company was followed a few months later by an announcement that his company had sold its construction subsidiaries.

  It was not Sparke's job to concern himself with the agenda of his CEO. She was paid to worry about the future of the company and he was happy to help out when asked. He never offered unprompted advice or sought personal advantage from his growing relationship with her. And he was rarely surprised at the jobs she asked him to take on.

  Alone in his office early one morning, Sparke heard the computer screen on his wall make a soft pinging sound as an incoming video call arrived. It was his CEO.

  "Can you go to Paris for us?" she asked. "There is a thing we need to have a look at."

  Sparke was more than happy to go to Paris. Few cities in the world live up to their reputation, but Paris is one. The thing he had to deal with was actually quite dull. A straight-line problem he resolved quickly. In fact it was tidied up so quickly that he found himself alone, at liberty and on full expenses in Paris for several days. Since much of Sparke's life consisted of standing on oil rigs in the North Sea with storm force winds hurtling passed him, or wading through oil-soaked swamps or, occasionally, looking at incinerated corpses, Paris was a nice place to be stranded.

  He spent his time doing what people should do in Paris: wandering without aim or direction and trying to avoid crowds. On a cold, bright morning he found himself standing in a small garden at the end of a tiny island in the middle of the Seine.

  It was strange to find somewhere so quiet and calm in the middle of the city that almost invented modern urban chaos. Very strange. He stood at the end of the garden where it formed a point, like the prow of ship, looking downstream. He watched the river flood past, wondering why this little patch of peace existed here, not often visited as far as he could tell, and not the home to some statue of a King or Emperor. The quiet ordinariness made him look around at the walls carefully. It was here, at the base of the triangle that formed the garden that he saw a small, discoloured plaque which commemorated the death of someone called, "Jacques de Molay, Grand Master of the Order of the Knights Templar."

  Strange, thought Sparke, in the city which set the tone for flamboyant architectural statements, here in the heart of the country that knew itself to be the true centre of the world, to find something so small and subtle that commemorated something without actually explaining why. What an interesting thing, thought Sparke, who saw a lot of things but found few of them interesting.

  His Paris trip ended abruptly with another phone call from his CEO and he found himself back on the treadmill of dealing with chaos past, present and future.

  It was a small disaster from the distant past that brought him back to reality. Years had passed since Sparke's first brush with chaos, when the oil rig had jammed under the bridge on the river, and during that time the government had been doing what governments do best; it had been discussing things. Now the discussions were finally over and the committee responsible for investigating the events around the day the oil rig jammed under the bridge was issuing its report.

  Not to be too hard on governments, but there really is not much that a report like this can possibly say except, "Make sure you measure things better from now on." This is what the report said, only in two thousand pages of documentation. Publishing this report required a meeting, of course.

  Sparke was required by his company to attend so he booked his flights and made his plans. Although he travelled on business frequently, this trip was a little different - it was a trip back to his hometown.

  The bridge that the oil rig had jammed under was on the river Clyde on the west coast of Scotland. Once the location of the world's largest concentration of ship building, a virtual hellhole of noise, dirt and smoke, it was now gently returning to a natural state of clean water and green fields.

  Though he had been born and bred within a few miles of the infamous bridge, the place had little pull on Sparke's emotions. He had no family there now, and he had never kept in touch with friends from school. Still, it was home, so he made sure that he built in a few days of free time to find out if there was any nostalgic tug. There was no way to know if he would ever be back there and this could be his last chance to visit.

  Sparke's father had arrived in Scotland as a child, at the outbreak of World War Two, when his grandfather, Piotr Skranislav, had, almost miraculously, found a place for his young wife and infant child on one of the last ships to escape Poland when the Germans and Russians invaded. The family had stepped off the overcrowded ship with one suitcase and the clothes they wore into a country that seemed to be barely surviving itself.