The Babylon Rite (26 page)

Spitting the vileness from her mouth, Jessica moved on, slithering through the crackling insect shells, and then at last she half-stood, and ran and threw herself blindly at the wall.

A light.

The torch beam of her pursuers was now visible in the antechamber beyond: a dim and troglodytic light, sinister and subterranean. And coming her way. Fevered with desperation and terror, Jessica groped her way to the corner of the room where the secret entrance to the second antechamber was concealed.

The passage was virtually a hole in the ground, hidden behind a mud wall. Would the killers see it? This was her only chance. Jessica squeezed herself into the tight and grimy final passage. It was so narrow it seemed to her that she was now being
swallowed
by the mud, swallowed by the Moche pyramid, eaten up by their unknown gods.

A minute later she was in the antechamber. She could sense the higher space around her, even if she could not see it. And she could stand up. She could also sense the little skeletons of the children, sleeping in their kindergarten, their hearts removed.

There was nothing Jess could do now but wait. She squatted in the far darkness of the chamber, her eyes closed to the terror; but the terror was the same with her eyes open or shut. She wiped the mud from her blinded eyes and just stared into the blackness.

Subdued murmurs, echoing down the long huaca passages. The word
ulluchu
… they were talking about ulluchu, and the way they said it was strange, not quite right, spoken in a different accent. Not Peruvian? The pronunciation chimed in Jessica’s mind. But she didn’t know why, and she didn’t care, because now the voices were dwindling, they weren’t getting any nearer, they seemed to be moving away.

Time passed. With no sign of the killers. Maybe she was going to make it?

But then despair grasped at her, in the darkness. Even if she did survive, what was the point? If she lived longer, that maybe just meant she would die soon, but more slowly. From Huntington’s. And that would be worse. Much, much worse.

Maybe it would be better if she was shot now: simple and painless.

Yet even as she thought this, her soul stirred with rebellion. Clinging to life.

Jessica stared into the blackness, where the Muchika children lay sleeping. Devoid of visual stimuli, her mind conjured up pictures of its own: she was seeing her father again. Thrashing in his bed, angry, then crying, then angry, then very silent again: the longest silence of all. And now Jessica could see herself in the hospice: she was a child, looking at the body on the bed, looking at the body where her father had been, and she was wondering where he had gone.

Jessica remembered her own reactions. Staring at the dead body, outraged, tearful, and wondering where the life had gone. Her mother’s soothing stories of Jesus and angels and heaven had not consoled her. With a seven-year-old’s basic sense of morality, she felt she’d been
robbed
. Someone or something had stolen her father away, and he would surely be returned.

But he never returned.

There. Now.

A voice. In the tomb.

She returned to alertness with a startle and suppressed a cry of fear.

The voices were getting louder. They were coming down the passageway into the hidden antechamber.

So this was it. They’d found the concealed passage. Death had not relinquished her, after all.

The killers emerged into the chamber; they had dazzling headtorches. They were tall silhouettes flashing beams of light right into her eyes. She held up her hands in supplication, visoring her eyes in the glare. But she could see one thing well enough: the men had raised their guns, and they were pointed her way.

The carol singers were gathered under the bare-boned plane trees, by Holy Trinity Church, warbling of merriment and figgy pudding. The hardiest joggers sprinted past, white earphones in place, oblivious and sweating despite the chill.

Nina sat between Adam and Jason, on the cold park bench. She pulled the sleeves of her blue jumper over her small white hands. ‘Poor bastard.’ She shook her head. ‘And he had kids, didn’t he? A baby?’

Adam nodded. Fighting off the fear and despair. This was the first time he and Nina had really discussed what the detective had told him: that Ibsen had returned to his car to find DS Larkham dead. Garrotted, while he sat in his car; his face contorted into a smile.

‘And there was a note, right?’ Jason said.

‘Yes. “
One of ours, one of yours
.” That’s what it said, that’s
all
it said.’

Nina interrupted, ‘So they must have been looking for us, failed, but found the poor cop. But we’re next.’

Adam quickly replied. ‘We don’t know that.’ Though he knew it to be true. Ibsen had said as much to him, sounding shaken.

Jason sighed. Adam’s best friend had been back from a hard assignment in Spain for just a few hours, and the tiredness showed in his face. Now Adam felt a deep shiver of guilt, dragging his old friend into all this terror.

‘So what the hell do we do now?’ Nina asked.

Adam looked into her eyes, seeking her real feelings. Ever since the discovery of Larkham’s death, she had appeared to strengthen, paradoxically. The sobbing had stopped, the rheumed eyes had disappeared. She had slept. Probably, Adam guessed, she was faking the strength, but the fakery was good, and necessary. He answered as best he could. ‘Ibsen suggested we could go into protective custody.’

‘You mean put us under bloody house arrest? Yeah, great.’

Jason gestured at the police car parked at the edge of the Common. Two officers sat patiently inside: their protection. A pair of officers didn’t seem quite so impressive, not any more.

‘You’re already pretty restricted. But living with the cops in some dismal safe house, that could be even worse.’

‘Exactly. It’s pish. I’m not doing it!’ Her voice was decisive. ‘Who knows when we’d ever emerge? These guys, the Camorra, are famously patient: they will wait years if necessary, didn’t you say that, Jason?’

Jason agreed. ‘I did a story once on them once, they will cross the world to take out enemies and rivals.’

‘Well they’re not doing it to me.’ Nina swore. ‘My sister is already dead. My dad is dead. They’ve killed two-thirds of my family. I don’t care any fucking more. I’m not hiding in some stupid hole.’ Her voice was impassioned, maybe a little broken, but it was undefeated. ‘I’m not going to hide for the rest of my life.’

Adam stared at her: she was like Alicia, yet she was also much, much stronger. ‘What do you suggest we do, then?’

‘We get moving. We find the answer.’

‘We continue searching? The trail your father laid?’

‘Of course.’

‘But they will just hunt us across Europe.’ Adam gazed at the police car, dwarfed by daunting London traffic.

Jason interrupted. ‘You could set a decoy? Pretend that you’re still in Britain, get a mate in the press to leak a story saying you’ve been taken into protective custody. That would buy you some time.’

‘Yes,’ Nina said. Her eyes were fiercely bright. ‘Yes. Adam? Yes? Would Ibsen buy that?’

‘I don’t know. I guess. Quite possibly. Yes …’ The idea began to quicken in Adam’s mind. Fight back: do something. Stop the terrible waiting. It was tempting, but there was a problem. ‘But what about you, Jason, what would you do? They might—’

Jason shook his head. ‘I’m flying to the States Tuesday. A three-month assignment on the West Coast, Canada, Oregon. I’ll be just fine, dude. Will that cop agree to this?’

‘Yes, I think so. In the end it’s up to us. Of course we’d have to come back as witnesses at some point. But that could be months.’

‘So,’ said Nina, ‘that’s what we do. We do it fast, and we keep moving. We don’t give them a chance to catch us. Here.’ She reached for her jeans pocket, and brought out an envelope.

Adam recognized her writing.
France, August 4th-9th
. ‘Your father’s receipts. You brought them?’

‘I had the feeling we would make this decision.’ Her smile was fixed. ‘This is where he went next.’ She opened the envelope. ‘Southwest France. Near Bergerac.’

‘Where?’

‘It’s a castle. The Templars were imprisoned there. It’s called Domme. He spent three days there. It must be crucial.’ She murmured the words like a prayer for the dead. ‘Domme Castle, Sarlat-le-Canéda. In the Dordogne.’

‘Mio Dios.’
The torchbeams played across the little skeletons, illuminating one tiny skull, then another. ‘
Esto es terrible.
’

The voice was unexpected: not the same as before. Jessica squinted to see who was in the tomb, then she glimpsed the shine of a cap badge. Police. It was the police.

The Peruvian officers lifted her to her feet. The police? She felt a sudden urge to fight back, to protest: they had frightened her so much, sent her into the darkest terror. Vainly she slapped a hand away, pushed at one of the officers. Almost flailing.

They looked at her in the semi-dark, perplexing, questioning, bewildered. ‘Señorita …’

This was foolish, and Jessica knew it. She was chiding them for what? Saving her life? They were doing their job and they had done it well.

‘Señorita?’

She calmed, a little. ‘I …
soy … Lo Siento
. I am sorry – I was scared …’

They dismissed her words with a wave: they wanted her out of the huaca straightaway.

Stumbling over the bones, she obeyed: following them slowly out of the antechamber, and down the passageways, making the long retreat out of the huaca. No one spoke: the only sound was the scrape of boots in mud, the whisper of dust disturbed.

She steeled herself for what she was about to see as she approached the quadrangle of light that was the pyramidal exit: Dan’s body, prone in the Zana dust. But as she reached the fresher air, her apprehension was replaced by confusion. The body was already gone: only the bloodstains remained.

The tallest policemen, a handsome English-speaking man with a gentle smile, touched her mud-dusted shoulder. ‘Your friend is already in an ambulance.’

‘He is alive?’

‘No. I am sorry, no. He was killed, but we must examine the body.’

Jessica resisted the surging sadness, the tears she hadn’t cried. ‘What about the killers?’

‘They escaped. Someone from the village, from Zana, called us, they heard the shooting. Please—’ He gestured at one of three police cars, their red lights flashing absurdly, in the desert air. ‘We would like you to come to Chiclayo, and make a full statement. Is that permissible?’

‘Yes.’ Jessica shrugged. She was exhausted to the point of indifference; numbed by it all. ‘Of course.’

The questioning, in Chiclayo police headquarters, lasted four hours. It was polite, efficient, depressing, and repetitive. Towards the end Jessica found her mind wandering, gazing at the maps and mug-shots on the wall of the grubby office. What was she going to do now? TUMP was obviously finished. Her life was probably in danger. She didn’t especially care. Her lover, Dan, was dead: at the moment when he’d told her he loved her, almost exactly as she’d realized she probably reciprocated his feelings, he had been taken from her.

Death had a cruel sense of humour.

The police drove her back to Zana to collect her stuff. They expected her to move out of town for her own safety, she had to pack at once.

The police car stopped near the town plaza. Jessica alighted, reassuring the police that she could drive back to Chiclayo on her own. But they insisted on escorting her. She yielded to their protection, and agreed she would meet them at the lab in three hours. Then they could follow her Hilux to Chiclayo.

Jessica began her walk to the lab, and her little apartment next door. But as she walked, another enormous wave of melancholia almost knocked her legs away. The sadness was like a sack of rocks, as if she was hauling eighty kilos of grief on her back.

She needed to pause and think. Finding a broken bench in the town square, Jessica sat down, under fraying palm trees with gangrenous trunks.

Taking a can of cherry cola from her bag, she cracked it open, and drank. She was also hungry, but she had no food. Drinking the cola, she stared up the road. It terminated after two blocks with a rubbish-filled maize field, and then came the huacas. With the little children. And the bloodstains. The sadness was unbearable.

She stood and tossed the can in a bin, and began her walk to the lab. But a small black child was in the way, kicking a football against a wall of the grimy Panateria Tu Casa. A peeling wall poster for Inca Kola,
El Sabor de Peru!,
flaked a little more paper onto the dirty street each time the ball thumped.

‘
Ola
, Eduardo.’

The kid stopped, and turned, and grinned at Jessica. He was the son of the cleaner at the archaeology lab, at the other end of town. Jess often saw him running late to school, in shoes so battered he might as well have gone barefoot. She would never see him again. Eduardo answered, eagerly,
‘Buenas dias
, Senorita Silverton!’ Another kick of the ball,
‘¿Quieras jugar?’

Do you want to play?

Jess smiled, sadly, and turned down the offer. ‘
No, gracias. Los estadounidenses somos muy malos jugando al fútbol.
’

I am an American, we are useless at soccer.

The boy grinned, and Jessica said goodbye, feeling herself stumble on the finality of the word –
adios
,
adios
– then she walked quickly to the lab.

She found Larry inside hastily packing away equipment.

They looked at each other. And Jessica knew that anything they said would feel pointless and wrong.

‘What are you going to do, Jess? Go home to California?’

Jessica sat on a stool. ‘Christmas in Redondo, with my mom?’ She sighed. ‘Maybe. You? What about you? And Jay?’

‘Still thinking. Jay’s already bought his ticket to Chicago. But I’m not sure.’ He picked up a Moche pot, then set it down. ‘The police say they might want us as witnesses pretty soon. So we’d just have to come back.’