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.’
‘You think somebody knew about this that long ago?’
‘It stands to reason,’ Bronson said quietly. ‘I don’t believe that the entrance to the tunnel wouldn’t have been discovered soon after New Ross was settled. And I’ll bet you that whoever found it built a barn or something to hide it, and that the building there now is one of a long line of replacement structures. And you obviously know what that means.’
‘Yes. Somebody has been keeping this place a secret since the late-medieval period, because it’s not recorded in any of the archaeological records of Nova Scotia. And that does make me wonder about who they are and what their purpose is.’
‘Well, we may be about to find out.’ Bronson gestured in front of them, where the last half-dozen fluorescent lights illuminated the end of the tunnel and revealed a dark opening over to their right.
‘Keep going,’ the tall man ordered from behind them.
As Bronson led the way towards the opening, another lighting circuit clicked into life. Not fluorescent tube lights this time, but wall lights mounted in sconces that appeared identical to those in the tunnel.
‘They must’ve been triggered by a PIR sensor,’ he said. ‘And that’s definitely twenty-first-century technology.’
The space they entered was another tunnel, slightly wider and taller than the one they’d just walked down but only about twenty yards long, with a pool of darkness ahead of them. As they approached, another set of lights slowly started brightening to reveal a circular chamber, a dark shape to one side of it. And then a spotlight, obviously mounted somewhere on the roof of the chamber, snapped on, the beam bathing the shape in brilliant light.
Bronson and Angela stopped at the entrance, transfixed.
There, directly in front of them, gleaming golden as if newly polished, was the fabulous Ark of the Covenant, resting on a shallow plinth. It seemed almost to glow in the spotlight, and Bronson thought he could detect a faint humming sound coming from it.
The tall Israeli emitted a sound somewhere between a moan and a yell and rushed forward, brushing Angela aside as he did so. He stopped about a yard from the Ark, put his pistol on the ground and knelt before the relic, lowering his head in prayer.
Then he stood up, took a couple of paces forward and tentatively reached out to touch the lid of the Ark. The instant he did so, there was a sharp crack and he tumbled backwards and fell to the ground. But he was up and on his feet in a moment.
He picked up his pistol and turned back to face the other two Israelis, who had also entered the chamber, moving in front of Bronson and Angela.
‘This is the true Ark, the casket of God,’ he said. ‘And I have felt its power.’
The walls of the chamber were covered with hanging drapes, and as the Israeli spoke, one of them fluttered and drew back to reveal the classic figure of a medieval Knight Templar in full armour with a battle sword in his hand.
To Bronson, it was surreal, bizarre and unbelievable: three armed Israelis facing a medieval knight standing on one side of a subterranean chamber lit by electricity, with the Ark of the Covenant on the other side.
‘Who dares enter this sacred place?’ the knight demanded, his voice seeming to be magnified by the chamber. As he spoke, he lifted his sword in a threatening manner.
The tall Israeli didn’t hesitate, just raised his pistol and squeezed the trigger. The chamber rang with the sound of the shot. At that range there was no possibility he could miss, but the medieval figure didn’t even flinch, just swung the battle sword in a lethal arc towards the intruder.
Bronson could hear the hissing sound as the blade cut through the air.
The Israeli stumbled backwards, pulling the trigger twice more at point-blank range.
And as quickly and as inexplicably as the knight had appeared, the figure simply vanished.
Bronson took a couple of steps forward, intending to grab one of the pistols held by the other two Israelis, whose attention was entirely on the Ark and the events unfolding in front of them.
But before he got close enough to seize a weapon, a heavily built black-clad figure materialised behind him and pushed him and Angela through the drapes on the left-hand side of the chamber and into a small room illuminated by a dim bulb in the centre of the ceiling. Almost before they could react, the figure closed a steel door and turned the key on the inside. Then he – it was obviously a man – turned to them, pointed at a flat-screen television mounted on the wall and said, ‘Keep quiet and watch.’
The screen was divided into quadrants, each displaying the feed from a surveillance camera positioned inside the chamber of the Ark. And what it showed was the three Israelis in a state of confusion.
As soon as the apparition had vanished, Gellerman strode across to the hanging drape from behind which the knight had appeared. He pulled back the curtain and found himself facing a featureless steel panel, with no sign of the body of the man he had just shot. He grabbed at the other drapes to reveal similar steel plates.
He whirled around, scanning the chamber, then looked back at the panel and rapped on it with the butt of his pistol. It sounded completely solid.
‘I don’t know what’s going on here,’ he said, ‘but it doesn’t matter. We came for the Ark and we’ve found it, so let’s get out of here. Get Bronson and Lewis to carry it.’
Dayan turned round to carry out Gellerman’s order.
‘They’ve gone,’ he said.
‘They must have run down the corridor. Get after them. There’s nowhere out there they can hide.’
Dayan rushed out of the chamber but returned in a matter of seconds.
‘They aren’t there,’ he said. ‘I can see all the way to the far end of the corridor. They didn’t go that way.’
The three Israelis stared around them. Very obviously something was going on that they didn’t understand.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Gellerman said. ‘You two, grab those.’ He pointed behind the plinth on which the Ark sat to where two stout wooden poles leaned against the wall. ‘We’ll take it right now.’
Dayan and Chason strode across to the relic, threaded the poles through the rings on either side of it and picked it up – not without difficulty, as it was clearly heavy.
As they lifted it, the spotlight illuminating the Ark snapped off and the lamps in the sconces began to dim. From somewhere in the chamber a noise that sounded like a distant multitude of people shouting and screaming became audible, its volume rapidly increasing until it was a deafening roar. At almost the same instant the shadowy figures of another half a dozen fully armed Templar knights suddenly appeared around the perimeter of the space, each chanting the medieval Latin battle cry of the order – In hoc signo vinces – and raising his battle sword. They closed in on the three men, whose wide eyes and horrified expressions clearly showed their abject terror.
‘Get going!’ Gellerman shouted, spinning round and snapping off a fast volley of shots at the threatening figures as the other two men stumbled out of the chamber carrying the Ark between them. None of his bullets had any obvious effect, and the muzzle flashes and echoing bangs simply added to the surreal and bizarre scene that was unfolding.
As the three Israelis ran from the chamber, the figures of the knights followed, but only as far as the entrance. There, unseen by the three fleeing men, who were running as if their very lives depended on it, the six knights flickered out of existence and the lamps in the wall-mounted sconces slowly began to brighten.
Inside the hidden room, the man in black picked up a remote control, aimed it at the television screen and pressed a button. The view changed to cameras located at intervals along the long corridor, and in silence the three of them watched the Israelis carrying their prize towards the open door at the end. Once they had disappeared through it, the unidentified man pressed a button on a small control panel beside the television, and the door closed. He pressed another button, and the camera feed showed two large electrically controlled bolts snapping into place.
‘We’re now secure,’ he said. ‘I think that went quite well, don’t you?’
Angela stared at him. ‘Would you please tell me what the hell is going on here?’ she said. ‘Starting with who you are and then moving on to what just happened.’
‘Gladly. My name is Michael Rogers, and I’m a Templar knight.’
That didn’t help very much, and Angela’s expression suggested that she was, if anything, even more confused than she’d been a few minutes earlier.
‘Let me introduce you to the others,’ Rogers said, ‘and then we’ll explain what’s going on.’
He unlocked the steel door and stepped outside, Bronson and Angela following closely behind him.
In the Ark chamber, where the now-empty low plinth sat like an accusing witness, the first person they saw was the Templar knight in full regalia, who was clearly unharmed despite what they’d seen happen just a few minutes earlier.
‘That went well, Brother Michael,’ the Knight said. ‘A very successful operation.’ He switched his glance to Bronson and Angela. ‘I imagine you have a few questions.’
‘You have no idea,’ Angela said. ‘Let’s start with why, who, what, when, where and a side order of how. First of all, who are you and why aren’t you dead? I saw that Israeli shoot you at point-blank range.’
‘My name’s Roger Pemberton, and like Brother Michael, I’m also a Templar knight. As for why I’m alive, the Templars in the medieval period had armour made of steel. Ours is made of layers of Kevlar, and there’s lots of padding under this tunic. But I was in no danger at all, because that wasn’t me in the chamber. Or to be exact, what you saw out there was me, but at the same time it wasn’t.’
‘What?’ Angela demanded, her voice clouded with frustrated confusion. Or perhaps confused frustration.
‘I think he means we’ve been watching a performance,’ Bronson suggested. ‘A projection, or maybe using mirrors, something like that.’
Pemberton nodded. ‘Actually, we’re a little more sophisticated than that. My part in that scene was played out a lot earlier and recorded. What you saw was a hologram. Just like the six knights who appeared when the Ark was lifted.’
‘What did you mean when you said it was a very successful operation?’ Bronson asked. ‘As far as I can see, you’ve been doing some kind of play-acting, and as a result of that, those three Israelis have got away with the Ark of the Covenant.’
‘Well, yes and no, really. Let me begin at the beginning. I find that’s usually quite a convenient place to start.’