The Babylon Rite (30 page)

The views of the town below were contemptuously lofty. Another Templar flag rippled, arrogant and proud, in the stiff, chilly breeze. Nina said, ‘It’s so bloody big.’

‘This is where the Templars survived longest in Europe; in fact they never went away,’ Adam said, quoting his own research. ‘They survived because the Portuguese king protected them, and refused to reduce them. Eventually the Portuguese Templars evolved into the Order of Christ. So this Templar citadel became the global headquarters – of the Order of Christ.’

‘But what was my
dad
looking for here? He spent a day here, or at least an afternoon.’

‘Pretty sure he didn’t come for the view. Quick. Let’s go down.’

A claustrophobic stone staircase led them down to the third cloister. The cloister of the washing. The
claustro de lavagem
. Again they were the only people here. A few Templar gravestones were propped against the delicate marble pillars; in the central patio a crudely carved fountain fluted water into the Christmas air.

The old knightly graves had pentagrams on them.

Nina said, very quietly. ‘
The Order of Christ
, I did them in history, at S Level. The Age of the Explorers. The Order bred all the great Portuguese explorers, right? Like Henry the Navigator. The guys who went to Africa and South America. It’s another link with the Americas. But the wrong way round. I don’t … Wait.’ The whisper was loud. ‘Someone’s following us.’

Adam looked behind. It was a man in a blue uniform. Emerging from behind a door, and staring in their direction. He relaxed, slightly. ‘Nina, they are about to close early, it’s Christmas Eve. That’s just a
guard
, waiting for us to go.’

She shrugged, impatient and frustrated, and walked into the next cloister, the
claustro de cimeterio
. There were more odd, propped gravestones here, with more silent yet eloquent pentagrams carved on them.

Pentagrams, thought Adam, buttoning his coat tighter against the cold. How did pentagrams fit in? And the Grail? Those mysteries were still unsolved. And did he really believe his own Viking theory? It was possible, but it was also very tenuous, and it needed more evidence. There was still so much missing.

They had one more place to visit. Nina rejoined him and they paced to a stone staircase, and quickly climbed the helix of weathered cream marble into a spectacularly vivid and perfectly circular chapel, with a gilded ceiling raised on delicate pillars – a ceiling almost impossibly high above their heads.

‘Why’s it so tall?’

Adam consulted the little guidebook. ‘The Templars used to take communion here on horseback.’

‘What?’

‘Yes. Apparently. The knights would ride straight in and take mass on their stallions. And it’s round because it is modelled on the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and maybe Solomon’s temple.’

Nina gazed up at the smoky distant colours of the ceiling. The whole chapel was ornately painted and silvered. Gold and sombre scarlets framed her black, black hair. ‘They really were nuts, weren’t they? Militant ravers. Murderous hippies. Taking communion on horseback. No wonder people suspected they were odd. This and the Babylon rite. Jesus.’ She paused. Then said, quite calmly, ‘Adam, I don’t buy our own theory. I don’t.’

‘Why?’

‘Because. Look at this. Look at
this place
.’ She gestured at the spectacular ceiling of the circular chapel. ‘This is stunning: this isn’t fake.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I don’t believe the Templars were pagan. There is no real evidence for it, yet there is enormous evidence that they were sincerely, even militantly
Christian
. They built churches everywhere. They were famously
devout
. They kissed the cross before going into battle. Yet we’re trying to claim they were secret Satanists with a sexy cat fetish? Pfft. It doesn’t pan out. It doesn’t make sense. Just disnae make any sense
at all.
’

Her words died away with a faint echo. Adam sighed, deeply. If she was right, they were nowhere closer to solving the problem.

A secret that gets you killed
. The Babylon rite. They’d come halfway across Europe and they were still lost in the ominous dark.

Nina was sitting on a bench, disconsolate. Adam turned and looked at the exquisite decoration of the pilasters, feeling as if he had nothing else to do. Vegetal motifs adorned every square centimetre: stone vines and painted garlands wove around stone men, snaking into their mouths, and out of their eyes. Just as with the Green Men in the Temple in London. Here were figures and faces intoxicated with the vines of life, spewing the tendrils, eating the greenery.

A memory returned, unwarranted.
You’ve got to eat your greens
. A man raping Hannah. Or, even worse, not raping her.

‘
Bom dia
.’

Adam jumped, the adrenalin thumped. But it was just the guard, again; the official was keen to usher them out and go home for a Portuguese Christmas, for the
consoada
, the reunion of the family.

Hastily, they retreated to a bar in the old town by the ancient Tomar synagogue, a bar of drunks, of people on their own, people with no
consoada
, people like Nina and Adam.

Nina drank too much and talked about memories of her family. Playing chess with her dad when she was a little girl, playing footie with Hannah by the river in the little Borders town where they grew up. And as she drank more of the cheap
vinho tinto
, the night got darker and the bar noisier, and the lonely men stared at Nina, and ogled her white skin and her low top and short denim skirt with black tights, and her lips and teeth got more and more stained from the dark Douro wine, and her words became more and more slurred and Scottish.
Brae. Birl. Skitie. Drookit
.

And Adam sat there thinking how much she reminded him of Alicia, beautiful and drinking and funny and risky, and how much he couldn’t go there, not again, not ever again.

She stopped talking and gazed distantly at Adam in the blur of the fuzzy night and the tawdry skirl of Brazilian pop music. ‘Aren’t you
ever
going to try and fuck me?’

He stared her way. Embarrassed. And aroused. She was drunk and he could understand why she was drunk: the total horror of her recent experiences, the loss of her father and sister. He would be drunk every day in that situation. But this, here and now, was wrong.

‘I mean. Am I doing something wrong? Giving out the wrong signals? Don’t ya even want to kiss me
at all
?’

He said nothing because he was at a total loss. What should he say?

‘Fuck this, then, I’ll find someone else.’

She stood, quite swayingly drunk. Then she went to the door of the bar and pushed it. And she was gone.

For a few minutes he remained, riven by indecision. He should go after her. But he didn’t trust himself not to take advantage. He
did
want her. He’d been captured by her beauty that first time he saw her: the ravenly hair, the slender elusiveness. He wanted her more than he had wanted any woman since Alicia, maybe even more than Alicia. But if he touched her once he would never stop touching her. And if she tried to kiss him he would be unable to resist her red lips and her white skin, the colours of Christmas itself, of berries in the snow—

But what if she was in trouble? She was drunk, and he had to look after her. They had to look out for each other, they were still being hunted. She could be in trouble
now
.

As soon as he stepped outside the bar into the freezing old alley, by the ancient old synagogue, he saw her in the shadows. And the man holding her against a wall.

Whether it was attempted rape or just a fumbled kiss Adam had no idea: in the dim lamplight, which he ran towards, he just saw a very big man, one of the thugs from the bar, in a dirty leather jacket. With his left hand the man was wrenching up Nina’s skirt.

She yelled, ‘Let go,
leave me alone
!’ Adam’s shout froze the chilly air. ‘
Leave her alone
!’

The Portuguese man, tall, and thickset, turned and gazed at Adam. ‘You talking big?’ The man grinned. ‘Stupid English fuck, I open you up. Stick you in the ribs.’

He flourished something: Adam saw it was a knife, flashed from his inside pocket.
That
was why he was so confident, so brazen.

‘Adam, let’s go! Let’s just go!’ Nina cried.

But something in Adam said
No
. He’d been running away for weeks; maybe he’d been running away for years, ever since Alicia. Running from feelings, running from situations. And this nasty bastard, this boozed-up pig, reminded Adam of Ritter. Leather jacket, leather coat, creepy smile. Another arrogant bully. He gazed from the knife to the man; from the man to the knife. ‘Come on, then. Try me.’

The man waited half a second, then lunged.

The blow was wayward: Adam swerved the blade easily, then brought a forearm smashing down on the guy’s wrist. The knife twirled into the gutter. Then Adam leaned back a fraction and
punched
.

His fist connected so hard with the side of the man’s head it felt as if he was thumping steel, a literally stunning blow: his knuckles rang with the pain.

The reaction was instant: the man wheeled away, spinning on the spot, like an enormous toy. Eyes rolling.

Adam remembered his dad’s instructions.
Never let them recover.
His next punch was immediate, to the stomach, hard and perfect and kidney-level, making the guy double up and groan. In the dark Adam grabbed the man’s hair, and pulled his head down on to his upthrust knee, crunching his nose in a disturbing explosion of blood and of cartilage. The man reeled back, and fell to the pavement.

‘Adam—’

All he could hear was his own anger.
You think you’re so tough, menacing a girl half your size? How about THIS?

Adam drew back a boot and then laid into the man’s stomach, and a groaning bellow of pain made it all better; a third violent kick produced a whimper. He knew he was going too far now, but all the horrors and frustrations of the last weeks were concentrated in the shining toecap of his boot as he kicked this man twice more. This was for Antonio Ritter; and this kick was for everyone: for the truck driver who hit Alicia, for the man his father became, for the guy who killed the cop. All Adam’s challenged masculinity was disappearing with each richly satisfying thump of his boot into dull human flesh—

‘Adam!’

Nina had him by the shoulders, pulling him away. His face stung – suddenly. She had slapped him, hard.

‘Stop! You’re going to kill him.
Stop
.’

She was crying.

It was a bucketful of cold common sense, poured over his head. It made him shiver. What the fuck was he doing? She was right. The man was utterly beaten, lying on the floor clutching his balls, and groaning. He was a boozed-up fool who thought he could grope some drunken girl in an alley; but then he had drawn a knife on the wrong guy at the wrong moment.

‘Let’s get out of here.’ Nina grabbed his hand and pulled him. ‘The police will be after us. Come on, now – come on!’

Detaching himself from her grasp, Adam stooped, and lifted the guy’s copiously bleeding head. Yes, he’d live. He’d surely suffer some cracked ribs. Maybe a ruptured organ. But he’d live.

Glancing up, he realized that a CCTV camera was patiently observing him.
Fuck.

The man moaned in his pain. Adam’s conscience roiled.

‘Call an ambulance,’ he told Nina as they fled down the road to their hotel. As they made it to the river he heard her fumbling through the Portuguese,
emergencia, sinagoga, obrigado
. She was swiftly sobering up.

At a fountain he stopped and washed the blood from his hands. In the moonlight the blood looked black. His knuckles were scraped raw from the initial enormous blow to the man’s skull.

Despite the guilt and revulsion at his own violence, a tiny ripple of prideful pleasure ran through him. The victim was a big ugly yob, a stupid bully with a knife, so he got what he deserved: a thoroughgoing beating. And Adam had delivered it.
Righteous justice.

‘Get your bags,’ he told Nina. ‘We should check out right now.’

For all the lateness of the hour, the hotel was humming with old people eating, and drinking. Christmas Eve. Some elderly ladies were in the bar, drunk, carolling songs. The barmen looked bored yet busy. It was perfect cover.

Seven and a half minutes later they were in the car, speeding away from Tomar. The streets were utterly deserted: only the churches were doing business, as people trooped out of the rooster’s mass, excited children in anoraks laughing and holding balloons.

The auto-estrada was like a racetrack out of season. Not a car in sight. Adam realized he was drunk-driving, and he didn’t care. The police would be after him now, anyway, as soon as they saw the CCTV footage.

Nina was silent. Finally she spoke, and her words were unslurred. ‘He came out and followed me, wanted to kiss me, I just shrugged I didn’t care, God knows why—’

‘You were drunk.’

‘But then the kiss got nasty. Ach. I tried to push him off. If you hadn’t got there he’d—’

‘He’d have raped you.’

‘Maybe … He was drunk.’

‘But he had a knife.’

‘Yes. He did. And it’s my stupid fault.’

‘No, it wasn’t your fault, he was just a thug. Anyway, he won’t be troubling anyone now.’ Adam steered them off the motorway.
The Algarve 15km.
‘My temper overtakes me, sometimes, I get it from my dad …’

Reaching across the gear well, she went to touch him, then seemed to think better of it. She pulled back her hand, and asked, ‘D’you think there were any witnesses?’

‘I’ve no idea. But the ambulance will find him, the police will ask questions – and I saw a CCTV camera in that alley. We’re in trouble.’

‘So what do we—’

‘Let’s just finish this: there are just two more places to go, right?’

Nina turned on the car lights and scrutinized the final European receipts. ‘Nosse Senhora de Guadalupe, in the Algarve. He went there on August nineteenth. The morning. Then that afternoon he went to Sagres, had a beer. And that’s it. After that, Peru.’