David Gibbins - The Crusader's gold

She blinked hard, trying to register what she was seeing. She took a few faltering steps back, the candle wavering in her hands. To the right she could see the victims assembled, like prisoners after a battle. The wall-painting was clearly a narrative, a progression of scenes in a story, going from right to left. She looked at the ceiling again. She tried to marshal her thoughts, to think like someone whose mind was highly trained. As if in another lifetime, she remembered her tutorials years before when she and Jack were undergraduates together, on the history of architecture. Corbel vaulting. One major civilisation had built all their vaults this way, had never learned to make an arch. One civilisation, famous for its architecture, infamous for its cruelty.

She looked back at the wall. Corbelled vaulting. Narrative scenes from right to left. Fearsome warriors with flat foreheads. The symbols, glyphs. Human sacrifice on a temple altar, sacrifice on a prodigious scale. She began to think the unthinkable.

The Maya.

She staggered back, hit by a wave of dizziness, then rallied her strength and took a few steps to the right, until she was standing beside the wooden lid. She held the candle up against the wall. She was midway between two scenes, the first of the paintings. The scene at the outset showed a naval engagement, long canoes full of warriors, one with a square sail. The next scene showed a bloody battle, this time on land. Warriors dressed identically to the executioner were battling other warriors, those who would soon become prisoners. All had sloping foreheads, but the vanquished were even bigger, giants. All were stripped to the waist. In the foreground were the dead of both sides, some dismembered, some in a river, seemingly underground. The victors were wielding clubs and maces, the vanquished swords and axes.

Maria stopped herself. Swords and axes.

She looked more closely. She began to tremble, and made herself steady the candle. The sloping heads of the vanquished were not foreheads, but the nose-guards of helmets. They were stripped to the waist but wore leggings, not the kilts and loincloths of the victors. They were bearded. They were blond. They had broadswords and huge, single-bitted axes.

Varangian battle-axes.

Maria reeled. It seemed as if she were dreaming the final chapter of the story that had possessed her for days now, a chapter so extraordinary it could only be fantasy. She wished Jack were here next to her, his calm, reassuring voice telling her this was all the stuff of fiction. She looked back at the scene of sacrifice, to the altar and the executioner where the wall seemed to be oozing blood. She staggered back and sank against the other wall, shutting her eyes tight, desperately trying to wake up back in the monk’s cell at Iona, to feel the warmth and steady breathing of another beside her.

“Dr. de Montijo. So good of you to come. The effects of the drug will wear off shortly.” A voice was addressing her, a real voice. “You are in Mexico.”

Maria jolted blearily awake. “Yes,” she said, the word coming out even before she had registered what was happening. “I know.”

“How?” The voice sounded shrill, testy.

Maria tried to stand, but slipped down the wall again to where she had been lying. She could see nothing, her vision blinded by a torch shining directly into her face. Her mouth was bone-dry, and her voice was a croak. “I worked it out.”

The torch snapped down and she saw a short, wiry man standing in front of her, his black hair slicked back from his forehead. She guessed he was about seventy, his hair obviously dyed, though he had the physique of a man thirty years younger. He had washed-out grey eyes.

The truth dawned on Maria. She looked at him with sickening certainty, scarcely believing she was finally in his presence. Everything else, her appalling state, even O’Connor’s death, was eclipsed from her mind. He was the one. She fought to control her emotions, to keep her cool. She was suddenly wide awake. “Pieter Reksnys. I see your father taught you well. Lithuanian, I believe? The master race.”

A hand shot out and gripped Maria’s neck like a vise, displaying lightning agility for a man of his age. He jerked her towards him and raised her up, holding her almost off the ground. Through the suffocating pain Maria sensed something familiar, a nasty tang to his breath, a familiar odour. “Never speak of my father again, Jew,” he hissed. “And don’t think he was the only one who pulled the trigger back then. I had plenty of diverting entertainment with the children.” He dropped Maria and stood over her while she coughed and retched. “I only wish my own son had been alive then. He would have done his grandfather proud.”

He kicked Maria over on to her back, ostentatiously wiping his shoe on the ground afterwards. Maria saw another figure advancing on her. His head was held low, his hands clenching and unclenching, his movements sickeningly familiar. He grabbed her by the hair and dragged her over to the wooden lid, kicking it roughly aside and shoving her over the hole underneath. She could see nothing but blackness, a yawning depth that brought with it a waft of cooler air, as if there were water somewhere far below.

“Don’t worry.” She was yanked up against him, and she saw the ugly scar. “I reserved the blood-eagle for your boyfriend. When I throw you down into the underworld you won’t even die. At least that’s what the Toltecs told their victims.” The voice was hoarse, ugly, less refined than his father’s. He made as if to push her in, then pulled her back roughly. “My kind of people.” He laughed, an insane, high-pitched cackle, then hurled her down on the ground. “Now the felag has some use for you. Enjoy our little vacation hideaway while you can.”

“The true felag died out seven hundred years ago.” Maria raised her head and tried to stare at Loki. “Harald Hardrada’s men would never have admitted scum like you. They wouldn’t even have considered you worthy of a blood feud.”

Loki lunged at Maria, but Reksnys held him in check. “Not yet,” he muttered. He turned to Maria, speaking with mock apology. “My son still has these romantic notions. He thinks he’s in the SS.”

“Too weak for that.”

Loki lunged again and once more Reksnys held him back, then his voice hardened. “Our felag was a means to an end. No more, no less. And it looks like we will have the last laugh on Harald Hardrada.”

Loki snarled and turned abruptly away, heading quickly out of the entranceway at the side of the chamber. Maria crawled back against the wall. Reksnys tossed her a small water bottle. “So now we have become acquainted. I need some expert assistance. You are going to help me.”

He took out a digital camera and pointed it at her. Maria began to lose all feeling, sinking to the floor, then looked up at Reksnys and remembered what he and his son had done. O’Connor had ensured that justice was carried out against Reksnys’ father, had staked his life on it and had paid the ultimate price. She owed it to him to do everything in her power to see that the job was finished. And she owed it to herself.

She would be strong.

Jack stood pensively in the control room on Seaquest II, cradling a coffee and watching a cloudburst release a shimmer of rain far out to sea. The sky had an ominous grey overcast, the high clouds they had seen on the beach that morning having been replaced by a dark mass rolling in from the Caribbean. Where the sun shone through, curtains of light hung and twisted and mingled in the sky, like the northern lights they had seen in Greenland but heavy with the portent of weather to come.

“It looks like we’re in for some rain.” The Canadian captain of Seaquest II came up beside Jack, peering out to sea through his binoculars. “We’re almost into hurricane season. As a precaution I’m closing down shop. We’re moving farther offshore and I’m battening down the helicopter in the hangar.”