Tom Knox - The Babylon rite

And tiny little Jerez de los Cabelleros also produced two great conquistadors all by itself: Hernando de Soto, who travelled with Pizarro to Peru, and who became governor of Cuba, and who died near the Mississippi searching for some legendary gold in Florida; and Vasco Nunez de Balboa, the first European to cross the Americas, the first European to see the Pacific from the American coast, another man obsessed with gold.

Two great conquistadors, from just one tiny Templar town?

Was that really mere coincidence?

‘There it is, the castle,’ said Nina.

The ruined Templar castle of Trevejo was perched on the loftiest outcrop high above the village, which itself stared down from the Sierra de Gata on the roads into Portugal. It was a good site to build a castle if you wanted to watch the passes, or check any Muslim attacks.

For a few moments they stood on the silent precipice, just outside the castle, gazing down at the roads which snaked through the green, hilly pinewoods. There was a Templar flag flying from the keep of the castle: the red cross pattee on a field of white. The silence all around was imperious. Just the wistful flicking of the flag in the wind, and an eagle mewing in the distance, as it circled above the wintered emptiness.

Then they descended, picking their way through the perilous rocks, until they reached the Templar church, a few hundred metres beneath the castle on a ledge.

‘My God.’

Adam didn’t have to ask what had surprised her. Graves. Tiny little slots of graves, human-shaped slots in hard stone. Just like the graves at Penhill.

Adam took some brisk and anxious photos. Then they retreated quickly down the stone road, past the raddled houses, to the stoneflagged plaza of Trevejo, and they climbed in the car and Nina drove down the winding road, as Adam furiously searched the net on his phone.

At last he sat back and said, ‘This is it. The connection. With America. This is how it all links. ’

The Museo Larco, Lima, Peru

Hairless dogs.

That was one thing that united ancient Mexican culture with ancient Peruvian culture. What else?

Jess was sitting in the sunlit courtyards of the Museo Larco, enjoying some rare Limeno sunshine, taking a few minutes to relax herself, as best she could, after all the violence and grotesqueries of the last week. She’d been in Lima for three days, and this was the first day she had summoned the courage to leave her hotel room.

So here she was. The Museo Larco, the greatest collection of ancient north Peruvian art in the world; if she hadn’t been terrified for her life this might have been a nice afternoon jaunt, a chance to chill out in this pretty colonial palazzo, with its orange trees and fountains, and the gardens haunted by the strange, black, friendly, stray dogs, descendants of the hairless dogs once eaten by Aztecs and Inca and Moche alike.

A thought nagged at her. But what was it? Not the possibility of her illness; something different, very different. But the thought eluded her. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, trying to meditate away the stress and tension.

When she opened her eyes again the little dog was just a few metres distant, gazing right at her, his sad head cocked imploringly, his hairless tail whipping. A Museo Larco security guard lazily clapped his hand, chasing the dog out of the courtyard, and into the street.

Jess rose and walked into the dark twinkling rooms of the museum. Her stride was purposive: she ignored the magnificent imperial Chimu goldwork, the warrior priest’s diadems from the Apogee Epoch, the sacred spondylus shell bottles, and went straight to the Moche collection.

Her eyes ran along the shelves, assessing the pottery of screaming bats, hunched demons, Moche with their limbs removed, Moche women having sex with the dead, or sex with animals. Nina moved down the aisle, examining the pottery of Moche people who deliberately skeletonized their faces.

The questions thronged. How did these last pots relate to the pottery showing sex with corpses and skeletons? More importantly: how did these pots relate to the death of her boss from Toronto, of her lover? How and why was the horror of Moche culture being re-enacted in the grubby streets of modern Peru? And maybe even in Scotland?

Jess sat down on a bench in the darkened chambers of the Moche rooms of the Museo Larco and went over what she knew.

She didn’t doubt that necrophilia actually took place in Moche society, there was too much ceramic and textile evidence for this. People had sex with the dead, and probably quite frequently, judging by the abundance of art dedicated to the theme. But equally some of the pots that showed people with skull-like faces raping women were probably representations of men who had slashed their own faces to look like skulls, cutting off their own lips and noses and slicing off the flesh from the cheeks, men who were maybe allowed to take women at will.

Imagine a society like that. People with no lips and noses and faces, wandering around, like living screaming skulls. Smiling, eating, having brutal and coercive sex. How did these skull-men avoid infection? How long did they live with these terrible wounds exposed? Weeks, months, years?

A tourist was gazing at one of the sex pots. A backpacker. Twenty-one or twenty-two. American maybe. And giggling. The backpacker turned to his friend. ‘Jesus, sweetheart, look at this — the guy is getting an enema. Gross!’

The girlfriend was apparently around the corner, behind a glass pottery cabinet. Jess heard her young voice. ‘Can we go, Todd? This stuff is just… ewww.’

They drifted away. Jess felt the helplessness weighing her down. She walked out into the patio once more. What a waste it all was, what a terrible waste. All that digging, all that thinking, all those horrific yet exciting discoveries, all those moments of terror or exultation: it had all been for nothing. The TUMP site was closed. Dan was dead. The police were scared, and shutting all the doors. And still the killers were out there. Were they coming after Jess?

She sighed and looked at the dog. The hairless dog with the sad, sad eyes, so similar to Aztec dogs. As she gazed, she remembered the men in the pyramid. Their accents.

The way they said the word ulluchu.

Accent. Aztecs. The Aztecs. Ulluchu. Accent.

Ulluchu was a pretty strange word. Oo-ll-oo-choo.

And yet there was one other word which was just like it, from a different culture a thousand years later, four thousand miles away. In Pre-Columbian Mexico.

The Aztec word.

Ololiuqiu. And ulluchu.

They were one and the same.

Tomar, Portugal

The grandiose castle and church of medieval Tomar loomed above the small, surrounding town, like the great wooden effigy of a saint held aloft by humble peasant hands.

Nina and Adam sat sipping bad Portuguese coffee in an inconspicuous corner of the cobbled main square. The palm trees rustled in the December wind, a few shops were already selling lurid, clownish costumes for Carnival alongside Christmas treats: festive pumpkin fritters, broas de mel. Adam startled himself with the realization: it was Christmas Eve. He had lost track of time, like a lonely child at a fairground, bewildered by the fleeing colours. Was he going to ring his dad for Christmas? No, he hadn’t spoken to him in three years, not since they had last come to blows, when Adam was defending his mother.

He wondered how his mother put up with it all, now he wasn’t there to protect her. His father had never actually hit his mother; but he certainly bullied her, and in the end Adam had found it too much. The urge to protect had made him eventually intervene in one of his parents’ rows, and so he and his father had fought. And yet, now he considered it, maybe his mother was at fault as well: she tolerated it, passive-aggressively. Maybe they both liked it.