Tom Knox - The Babylon rite

‘So he had a theory, so what, why did you lie?’

‘Because he paid me money.’ Dan’s eyes were shining with guilt. ‘At first I said to him I was busy and didn’t have time to talk, which was true, but then he offered me money, and TUMP needed money, and the money was… eh… very good, ten thousand US, enough for a few months’ digging, but I knew it was probably illegal, not going through the proper channels, and anyway McLintock swore me to secrecy, so that was the deal. So I took the cash, and said nothing. And I gave McLintock a secret tour of the site, and told him everything, even the stuff we haven’t published. And then he disappeared, went to Lima, I think. I don’t know.’

‘And you never told anyone?’

An agonized shrug. ‘I never told a soul, Jess. But now you know. You. The person who means more to me than anything. But it’s over now. There’s too much violence. Even this McLintock guy is dead. I have no idea what is happening but I’m gonna hand in my notice, if TUMP want to continue — and they probably will, now we’ve found all these poor kids — then they can appoint someone else. That’s if the police don’t close us down, which they might, because we are disturbing the locals.’ He spat out the words. ‘Damn it all, Jess. Just damn it to hell. I’ll be glad to get out of here, out of this disgusting place.’

Jessica couldn’t find the words. What to say?

‘The irony is,’ Dan went on, ‘I believe McLintock may have been on to something. A proto-god. A uniting mythology, underneath it all. It makes a kind of sense. There are too many sinister similarities between all these American cultures. Something unites them. A god, a hidden god, a terrible god, the god of death and of blood.’ He laid a gentle hand on her arm, lifted her wrist, and kissed her chastely on the hand. ‘There. Jessica Silverton, sweetheart. If you want to be famous, pursue that, make that your thesis. You are young and bold. I am not. I am done. But be careful. Beware the demons of the Moche.’

He didn’t even say goodbye. He just switched off the tomb lights, turned and crouched, and began the long crawl back to the huaca entrance, through the dark adobe tunnels.

Jessica followed him, churning with emotion. Suddenly, and to her own surprise, she wanted to tell Dan about her father, and about the doctor: she had to tell someone, she had to share and divide her anxieties, and he was the only man she could really trust. Maybe she even loved him back; her sudden feelings were stronger than she had suspected. She didn’t want to lose him.

Strapping her hard hat on her head, and turning on her headtorch, Jess crawled urgently through the narrow, claustrophobic, zigzagging tunnels. Dan was so eager to get out he was twenty metres ahead, a barely glimpsed glow of receding light.

The final corner turned: and now Dan was gone, he’d stepped out into the fresh air.

Jessica urged herself on, to confess and to share, but then she halted, her heart straining with fear, in the last yards of darkness, looking towards the grey light outside.

She could hear voices. Curt, laconic, contemptuous voices. And it wasn’t Larry or Jay. It sounded like the intruder in the lab, the same man, the same accent. The same violent sneering voice.

This time there was no argument, no preamble, no chance for Dan to escape his fate. The sullen gunshot echoed down the adobe passageway. Another shot confirmed the horror: they had shot Dan! Jess could actually see his body, fallen at the entrance, blood trickling into the dust.

She gazed, paralysed by terror.

Then a torchbeam pierced the dark of the passage. Jessica pressed herself flat against the mud walls, trying to hide. A figure was kneeling at the adobe entrance, peering in, pointing the torch up the tunnel.

‘Marco! Creo que hay alguien aqui.’ I think someone is in there.

They were going to search the huaca.

Jessica began to back up the passage. Crawling with infinite and painful slowness, away from the light.

But the torchbeam followed her.

Clapham, south London

DCI Mark Ibsen gazed around the clean white flat. It was decorated with framed photographs. Some foreign locations, some sombre, monochrome photo portraits.

‘It’s been a week now. How is she? Where is she?’

The young journalist, Adam Blackwood, nodded at a closed door to the left. ‘Sleeping, she sleeps in the day and she doesn’t sleep at night. She cries at night.’

‘You?’

Blackwood waved a hand across a weary face. ‘I’m OK. I sleep on the sofa.’

‘Ah.’

‘It’s not like that, Detective. Not me and Nina. Not that this really bloody matters.’

‘I understand. And please, call me Mark.’

Blackwood stood and walked to a bookshelf that was dedicated mainly to bottles of whisky rather than books. He took a bottle of Macallan, unscrewed the top, poured a good measure into a tumbler and glugged down the amber-dark Scotch.

‘You?’

‘I’m on duty. Your friend is generous.’

‘You mean lending me the flat? Or letting me drink his good Scotch?’

‘Both.’

Adam Blackwood shrugged. He poured himself another, and drank some more of that with a faintly trembling hand. ‘Jason’s a photographer, he works with me a lot, very good mate. Ironically, he was working with me the day this all started, in Rosslyn, when all this lunacy began. Now he’s on assignment in Spain at the moment, some story. He said we could stay here as long as we wanted. Obviously we can’t stay at my place in case they… whoever they are… are still looking for us.’

‘I’m glad you took my advice. We’ll have cars outside, twenty-four/seven. There’s one on the corner by the Common, another at the junction with Nansen Road.’

‘You got the guy, didn’t you? You shot him…’

‘We cornered him in Barnsbury Square. An hour later. He went down fighting, refused to surrender. A marksman took him down.’

‘But who was he? Why did he want to kill us all?’

Ibsen looked at Adam’s brave but frightened face. ‘Cammorista.’

‘Italian gangs? But he was American, he had an American accent.’

‘He’s half-Puerto Rican, brought up in California. But he’s been in Europe a long time, and he had strong links with southern Italian gangs, especially the Camorra, in Calabria, in Italy.’

‘And-’

‘They are known for people-trafficking: Moldovan girls, Romanian girls, sex slaves, high-class hookers.’

‘He was a pimp?’

‘Sometimes, yes. Sometimes drugs. High-level crime. He was a definite pro, with psychopathic tendencies. As we have seen.’

Adam whirled the whisky, his journalistic mind churning through the facts. Computing the puzzle. ‘So that explains the sex. The girls, I mean. Ritter imported whores, poor girls… so that’s how he hooked up with the sex party crowd, the rich kids?’

Ibsen nodded. ‘Yes. We believe so. Probably he supplied girls for the sex parties, for the millionaire swingers, or what you might call them. That’s how he got an in. To those elite circles.’

‘You know, if I wasn’t the bloody target of mad Puerto Rican sex-murderers this would be a bloody great story. Christ, why are they trying to kill us, Mark? Why did he kill Hannah McLintock? Like that?’

‘You stumbled on a trail first trodden by Archibald McLintock. He must have discovered something that the gangsters really want. Someone suspects you and Hannah and… sorry, you and Nina. They suspect that you know something. But you don’t. But they don’t know that. It is confusing, taken at face value.’

‘Confusing, and terrifying.’ Adam closed his eyes. ‘It was truly terrifying. I pissed myself. I did. I was sitting by that radiator chained to that radiator and I actually wet myself. Isn’t that pathetic?’ He opened his blue eyes and stared, intently, at the wall. ‘He was going to rape and kill Nina, after he raped and killed Hannah. And then he was going to kill me. And there was nothing I could do about it and so I wet myself like a baby. Jesus.’