Tom Knox - The Babylon rite

Which left one choice.

They entered the church, through the low side door. The building was empty and hushed. Slender candles twinkled; the blonde wooden pews were empty; winter daylight striated the floor. The old church was beautiful and sad, and vacuous. There was no sense of mystery here, no sepulchral clue, no air of intrigue that might imply what Professor McLintock had found. It was an echoey cenotaph, laid with effigies.

Frustrated, he strode around the circular nave with its grotesque gargoyles. Here was a man screaming, with his ear being bitten by a creature. Why?

Nina was crouching beside a gravestone, reading quietly from her father’s book. Adam took some photos: of the delicate black marble pillars, then the elegant circular colonnading, then the effigy of William Marshall, Earl of Pembroke, laid out in full battle-kit, chainmailed, a sword in his hand. Ready to fight violently for Christ, even now.

‘This bit dates right back to 1200,’ said Nina, standing and gesturing at the clean golden arches, the chevrons of wood in the ceiling.

‘Still looks new,’ said Adam.

It did look new. Too new. As if it had been recently restored. Adam thought about the evil ambience of Temple Bruer. What linked these two places? Somewhere very old and dirty and pungent with atmosphere, and somewhere cleaned and spruce and empty.

Adam stepped to the side where there was a table stacked with helpful pamphlets, advertising opportunities for charity work in West Africa, and schedules of festive carols in the Wren Churches. He heard voices. Nina was talking to someone a gowned man, the verger, or the vicar maybe. Adam knew nothing about church hierarchies. The man had a fusty, middle-aged, churchly air and a black gown over his shoulders. Walking across, Adam extended a hand, just as Nina’s conversation with the man dwindled to silence.

‘Adam Blackwood. The Guardian.’ It was a lie, he’d been sacked; but he didn’t care. He wanted information, and saying you were a professional seeker of information just sped things up.

The man had strange eyes, as if he was wearing tinted contact lenses. A hint of livid blue. The word restored was a continuous bass organ note in Adam’s mind, waiting for the treble, the tune, the harmony, as the man swivelled.

‘Name’s Baldwin. I’m the churchwarden. I was explaining to your friend that I never met her father. The name doesn’t even ring a bell. Sorry.’ His accent was northern. Perhaps Yorkshire.

Restored?

‘She tells me he were a great expert on the Templars! But that he recently… passed beyond?’

Nina was trying again. ‘You’re sure you never met him ever? He came here last year, two days in a row.’ They knew this because of receipts from Caffe Nero, on Holborn.

The churchwarden gazed at Nina as if she was mad.

‘Miss McLintock, I don’t meet every tourist, even famous ones! We have so many visitors. Anyhow, I wasn’t here last summer: no one was. We were restoring.’

The lock yielded at last; Adam turned the mental key. ‘Do you mean the whole church was closed?’

‘Yes. Exactly.’ The man’s smile was sincere and bored. ‘The whole church were locked for, ooh, eighteen months. We allowed no visitors. Not a soul. It were the biggest restoration we’d had since the Blitz. Cost millions, but the Corporation were very generous, the large legal companies, and so forth…’

‘All visitors?’

‘Yes! We had an iron rule. Anyway, I must be getting on… Tempus bloody fugit. If you want to make donation, the offertory box is near t’exit.’

The gown swished and the churchwarden departed through an interior door. Nina looked with mystification at Adam.

‘I don’t understand. So Dad didn’t come here. Why come here, twice, if you can’t get inside? Did he go somewhere else?’

‘The exterior!’ Adam grabbed her hand. ‘It must be. We know he came to the Temple, but if he couldn’t get in — that means he must have been looking at the exterior. And there is only one bit of the exterior left-’

The excitement was mutual. Not pausing, they rushed outside to the West Porch: a large, dark door, filigreed with ironwork and iron studs; and surrounding it an intricate stone jamb, with a semicircular arch, semicircles within semicircles, like ripples of stone. Decorated with peculiar and significant sculptures.

The sculptures were all of Green Men. Dozens and dozens of Green Men, faces of the pagan past, wreathed in stone ivy and tendrils, grinning at him. Adam yelled with excitement. ‘This is it. Must be it. This is it! This is what he came to see. This. It’s our first real clue, Nina, this is it: Green Men, just like those at Rosslyn. So we know he was on to something, and we know it definitely is linked to Rosslyn. He wasn’t mad, he wasn’t joking; he really was unlocking a puzzle.’

She smiled — anxiously and worriedly — but she smiled. ‘Well done. Come on, let’s go see my sister. She’s been doing her own research; we need to compare.’

They ran through the alleys out on to High Holborn and Nina hailed a taxi. ‘Thank you,’ she nodded at the taxi driver, as they climbed in. ‘Thornhill Crescent. In Islington.’

Mercado de las Brujas, Chiclayo, north Peru

The condor stared at her. It was dead, and hanging upside down. Next to it was the dried foetus of a llama, its eyeball poached and screaming in the skinless carcase.

Jess spat the taste of the rough nylon hood from her mouth. The hood now lay crumpled on the dirty floor; it had been whipped away by a lustrously dark, luridly tattooed man, with a necklace of shark’s teeth and an Abercrombie amp; Fitch sweatshirt. The man was barefoot and muttering and smoking a spliff of dark jungle tobacco, and tightening the bonds that strapped Jess to the chair on which she had been forced to sit.

She knew immediately where she had been taken: because they hadn’t gone far, and the environs were distinctive. Evidently, she had been dragged into the witches’ market, a corner of the town market where shamans and curanderos and brujas came from many miles around, to trade potions and spells and malevolent juju. Ironically, the Mercado de las Brujas was where she had been headed. But now she was here as a hostage.

Jess struggled. ‘? Que estoy haciendo aqui? ’ What am I doing here?

The man ignored her, and just kept muttering. ‘ Nqupaykunaq yuyay champi… ’

These words were Quechua. The man in the little stall, shielded from the rest of the market by plastic sheets and curtains, was speaking Quechua. Probably he didn’t even understand Spanish. Nonetheless she tried again. ‘?Por que??Por que me has secuestrado?’ Why have you kidnapped me?

It was pointless. She heard a small voice behind her, in the gloom. Jess caught a glimpse of other dark faces in the background; staring at her and whispering.

The man in the sweatshirt smelled of condor. And dung. And rainforest. And sex. As if he hadn’t washed in several weeks. It was a primal smell of jungle and mountain, Quechua and Inca. He was obviously a curandero, one of the mountain shamans, down from his Andean village to do his weekend business, hawking talismans and voodoo dolls to the local wizards.

Jess tried to pacify her terrors, to rationalize them. She knew these people: the real Peruvians, the country-folk and mountain-dwellers, the descendants of the Moche and the Chavin and the Cham Cham who believed and practised the ancient magic. They were not usually killers. If anything, they were all too inert and passive, ruefully resigned to the terrible forces of nature — drought and El Nino, white men and dictatorships.

But her rationalizations only got her so far. And then they gave out entirely. Jess was terrified.