The Babylon Rite Read online

  He could start it with that GK Chesterton quote: ‘when people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing – they believe in anything’.

  Adam turned as a baritone voice resonated down the nave: one of the more pompous guides, holding a fake plastic sword, was pointing at the ceiling, and reciting some history. Adam listened in to the guide’s well-practised spiel.

  ‘So who exactly were the Knights Templar? Their origins are simple enough.’ The guide levelled his plastic sword at a small stone carving, apparently of two men on a horse. ‘Sometime around 1119, two French knights, Hugues de Payens and Godfrey de Saint-Omer, veterans of the First Crusade, got together to discuss over a beaker of wine the safety of the many Christian pilgrims flocking to Jerusalem, since its brutal reconquest by the Crusaders of Pope Urban II.’ The guide’s sword wobbled as he continued. ‘The French knights proposed a new monastic order, a sect of chaste but muscular warrior monks, who would defend the pilgrims with their very lives against the depredations of bandits, and robbers, and hostile Muslims. This audacious idea was instantly popular: the new King Baldwin II of Jerusalem agreed to the knights’ request, and gifted them a headquarters on the Temple Mount, in the recently captured Al-Aqsa Mosque. Hence the full name of the Order: the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, or, in Latin, Pauperes Commilitones Christi Templique Solomonici. Ever since then, the question has been asked: was there also an esoteric reason for this significant choice of headquarters?’ He hesitated, with the air of a well-trained actor. ‘Naturally, we can never know. But the Temple Mount very definitely had a mystique: as it was located above what was believed to be the ruins of the first Temple of Solomon. Which,’ the guide smiled at his attentive audience, ‘is thought, in turn, to be a model for the church in which you stand today!’

  He let the notion hang in the air like the fading vibrations of a tolling bell, then trotted through the rest of the story: the Templars’ rise and supremacy; the twenty thousand knightly members at the very peak of the Order’s strength; the great, Europe-wide power and wealth of the ‘world’s first multinational’. And then, of course, the dramatic downfall, after two proud centuries, when the French king, coveting the Templars’ money, and envying their lands and status, crushed them with a wave of violent arrests and ferocious torture, beginning on one fateful night.

  The guide flashed a florid smile: ‘What was the date of that medieval Götterdämmerung, that Kristallnacht of kingly revenge? Friday the 13th, 1307. Yes, Friday the 13th!’

  Adam repressed a laugh. The guide was a walking store of clichés. But entertaining, nonetheless. If he’d been here for the fun of it, he’d have been happy to sit here and listen some more. But he had just seen something pretty interesting.

  ‘Jason …’ He nudged his friend, who was trying to get a decent shot of the Prentice Pillar.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Isn’t that Archibald McLintock?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The old guy, sitting in the pew by the Master Pillar. It’s Archibald McLintock.’

  ‘And he is?’

  ‘Maybe the most famous writer on the Knights Templar alive. Wrote a good book about Rosslyn too. Proper sceptic. You never heard of him?’

  ‘Dude, you do the research, you’re the hack. I have to worry about lenses.’

  ‘Very true. You lazy bastard. OK, I suggest we go and interview him. He might give me some good quotes, we could get a picture too.’

  Advancing on the older man, Adam extended a hand. ‘Adam Blackwood. The Guardian? We’ve actually met before.’

  Archibald McLintock had sandy-grey hair and a demeanour of quiet, satisfied knowledge. Remaining seated, he accepted Adam’s handshake with a vague, distracted grasp.

  An odd silence intervened. Adam wondered how to begin; but at last the Scotsman said, ‘Afraid I don’t recall our meeting. So sorry.’ His expression melted into a distant smile. ‘Ah. Wait. Yes, yes. You interviewed me, about the Crusades? The Spear of Destiny?’

  ‘Yes. That’s right, a few years back. It was just a light-hearted article.’

  ‘Good good. And now you are writing about the Chapel of Rosslyn?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ Adam shrugged, mildly embarrassed. ‘We’re kind of doing another fun piece about all the … y’know … all the Dan Brown and Freemasons stuff. Templars hiding in the crypt. How Rosslyn has become so famous for its myths.’

  ‘And you want another quote from me?’

  ‘Do you mind?’ Adam flushed, painfully aware he was disturbing a serious academic with all this fatuous, astrological absurdity. ‘It’s just that you famously debunked all this rubbish. Didn’t you? What was that thing you said? “The Chapel of Rosslyn bears no more resemblance to the Temple of Solomon than my local farmer’s cowshed is modelled on the stately pleasure dome of Xanadu.”’

  Another long silence. The tourists whispered and bustled. Adam waited for McLintock to answer. But he just smiled. And then he said, very quietly. ‘Did I write that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Hm! A little piquant. But why not? Yes, I’ll give you a quote.’ Abruptly, Archibald McLintock stood up and Adam recalled with a start that the old man might be ageing but he was notably tall. Fully an inch taller than Adam, who was six foot two.

  ‘Here’s your quote, young man. I was wrong.’

  ‘Sorry?’ Adam was distracted: making sure his digicorder was switched on. ‘Wrong about … what?’

  The historian smiled. ‘Remember what Umberto Eco said about the Templars?’

  Adam struggled to recall. ‘Ah yes! “When a man talks about the Templars you know he is going mad,” You mean that one?’

  ‘No. Mr Blackwood. The other quote. “The Templars are connected to everything.”’

  A pause. ‘You’re saying … you mean …?’

  ‘I was wrong. Wrong about the whole thing. There really is a connection. The pentagrams. The pillars. The Templar initiations. It’s all here, Mr Blackwood, it’s all true, it’s more strange than you could ever realize. Rosslyn Chapel really is the key.’ McLintock was laughing so loudly now that some tourists were nervously looking over. ‘Can you believe it? The stature of this irony? The key to everything was here all along!’

  Adam was perplexed. Was McLintock drunk? ‘But you debunked all this – you said it was crap, you’re famous for it!’

  McLintock waved a dismissive hand and began to make his way down the medieval aisle. ‘Just look around and you will see what I didn’t see. Goodbye.’

  Adam watched as the historian walked to the door and disappeared into the drizzly light beyond. The journalist gazed for a full minute as the door shut, and the tourists thronged the nave and the aisles. And then he looked up, to the ancient roof of the Collegiate Chapel of St Michael in Roslin, where a hundred Green Men stared back at him, their faces carved by medieval stonemasons, into perpetual and sarcastic grins.

  3

  Rosslyn Chapel, Midlothian

  ‘OK, I’m done. Got it all.’ Jason stood and stretched. ‘The upside-down angel thingy, Mary Magdalene by the fire extinguisher. And a cute Swedish girl bending over the tomb of the Earl of Orkney. Short skirt. Plaid. You all right?’

  ‘Yes …’

  Jason theatrically slapped his own head. ‘Sorry. Ah. I didn’t get a shot of your old guy – what was his name?’

  ‘Archie McLintock. Professor McLintock.’

  ‘So,’ Jason capped his lens. ‘He give you any good quotes?’

  Adam said nothing. He was wrapped in confusion.

  The silence between the two men was a stark contrast to the hubbub of tourists coming into the building: yet another tour guide was escorting a dozen Japanese sightseers into the nave and pointing out the Templar sword on the grave of William Sinclair, ‘identical, they say, to the Templar swords inscribed on Templar tombs in the great Templar citadel of Tomar!’

  ‘Hey?’ said Jason, waving a hand in front of Adam as if testing his friend’s blindnes
s. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Like I said. Just something … a remark of his.’

  ‘Okayyy. Tell me in monosyllables?’

  Adam stared hard at the carving of the Norse serpents at the foot of the Prentice Pillar, and there, on the architrave joining the pillar the famous inscribed sentence. Forte est vinum fortior est rex fortiores sunt mulieres super omnia vincit veritas: ‘Wine is strong, a king is stronger, women are stronger still, but truth conquers all.’

  Truth conquers all.

  It was all true?

  ‘Well …’ Adam exhaled. ‘He admitted, or rather confessed, that he had been wrong all along. That it was all true. The Templar connections. Rosslyn really is the key, the key to everything. The key to history. That’s what he said.’

  Zipping up his light meter in one of the many pockets of his jacket, Jason gazed laconically at Adam. ‘Finally gone gaga then. Doollally tap. Too much tainted porridge.’

  ‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you? Yet he sounded sane I … I just don’t know.’

  ‘Mate. Let’s get a beer. What’s that shit they drink up here? Heavy. A pint of heavy.’

  ‘Just a half for me.’

  Jason smiled. ‘Naturally.’

  They walked with a mutual sense of relief out of the overcrowded, overwarmed confines of Rosslyn Chapel into the honestly dreary Scottish weather. For one last second Adam turned and looked at the church, landed in its green lawn, a greystone time machine. The gargoyles and the pinnacles disturbingly leered at him. A chime, an echoic buzz, a painful memory resonating.

  Alicia. Of course. Alicia Hagen. His girlfriend. Buried in a Sydney suburb with the kookaburras in the trees and the sun burning down on the fake English Gothic church.

  Anxiety pierced him. Now he had lost his job, would he go back to brooding? He needed to work, to take his mind off the past; he had emigrated from Australia to put distance between himself and the tragedy, and that had succeeded – to an extent – but he also needed to occupy himself. Or he would recall the girl he had truly loved, who died so pointlessly, so casually. And then he would feel the sadness, like a g-force, as if he was in a plummeting plane.

  Adam paced quickly into the car park. The local pub was just there, on the corner, looking welcoming in the mizzle and cold.

  ‘Maybe I’ll have an entire pint. And a few chasers.’

  ‘Good man,’ said Jason. ‘We could—’

  ‘Watch out!’

  Adam grabbed at Jason, and pulled him back. Jason spun, alarmed.

  ‘Whuh – Jesus!’

  A car shot past, inches from them, doing seventy or eighty miles an hour: an insane speed on this suburban road, skidding left and right, but the driver’s intention was disturbingly obvious.

  ‘Christ—’

  They ran after the vehicle, now heading straight for a high brick wall flanking the curve of the road.

  ‘Fuck—’

  ‘Jesus—’

  ‘No!’

  The impact was enormous. The car smashed straight into the wall with a rending sound of sheared metal and shattered glass. Even at this distance Adam could tell that the driver must be dead. A head-on crash with a wall, at eighty miles an hour? It was suicidal.

  They slowed as they approached the car. The crash was enveloped by an eerie silence. Shocked onlookers stood, seemingly paralysed, hands to their mouths. As he dialled his phone urgently for an ambulance, Adam leaned to see: the windscreen was entirely smashed on the driver side, the glass bent outwards like a massive and obscene exit wound: the driver had indeed gone straight through.

  Chunky nuggets of glass lay scattered bloodily on the pavement. Shards of metal littered the kerbstones. The driver was clearly dead, his bloodied body half-in, half-out of the car.

  Jason already had his camera out.

  Adam didn’t need a camera to record his memories; he would not forget what he had seen. The driver had been smiling as he raced past them: smiling as he drove straight into the wall.

  And the dead driver was Archibald McLintock.

  4

  Pan-American Highway, north Peru

  Every second or third time Jess closed her eyes, she experienced it again: the truck slamming into the garage, the dirty black pornographic fireball, the terrible aching crash of glass and silence and screams. She opened her eyes. Enough of this: she had to stay alert: because she was driving, taking the road north out of Trujillo, the Pan-American Highway.

  Pan-American Highway was a very grandiose name for what was, in reality, just a dirty, narrow, trash-littered blacktop, slicing through the wastes of the Sechura Desert. The route was long and monotonous, punctuated only by the odd strip of green as a river descended from the Andes, and the odd desultory greasy township, where drivers paused at gas stations to refuel their huge trucks, full of Chinese toys and pungent fishmeal, being ferried south to the factories of Trujillo and Chimbote and Lima.

  One such truck was headed her way now: arrogantly dominating the road. She swerved to give it room, catching the ammoniac scent of the fishmeal as it swept past, shaking her pick-up.

  Who the hell would drive a truck into a gas station in Trujillo? She winced, once again, at the images: like grainy internet videos projected on a wall. She didn’t want to watch but she had to watch.

  Jessica lifted the truck a gear, and replayed in her mind the terrible moment, and her questionable reactions. Should she have done something else? Anything else? What exactly? After the fireball had subsided, she had wrenched herself free from the man holding her down, the man who had saved her life, and sprinted over the road, shouting Pablo’s name.

  But the smoke had been so thick, and so hot, and so burning. Unable to get near, she’d choked and stumbled in the violent blackness. Then the police had swept in, sirens shrieking, nightsticks waving. Fearful of further explosions, they had angrily pushed people from the scene, down the road, away from the burning carcass of the building and the truck. So there was nothing she could have done for Pablo, and she had done nothing. But the guilt abided.

  And then she’d seen it. Tossed a hundred metres by the wild explosions was an entire Moche pot, miraculously unharmed, lying on a greasy verge next to a burned plastic oil canister from the Texaco garage.

  The pot was unusual: a spouted jug in the form of two toads copulating. This was maybe all that was left of the Casinelli collection, yet she couldn’t bear to pick it up.

  After that, she’d done her duty: weeping, occasionally, in her hotel room at night; giving her evidence to the police by day. Dan had called many times, very attentively, and she had been grateful to hear a consoling voice. Now, a week later, she was heading back to work. Determined but rattled.

  Her hands trembled for a moment on the steering wheel of her long-term rented Hilux. She needed a break, and she definitely needed a cooling drink, a Coke, some water, even an Inca Kola, even if it did taste like bubblegum drool. Anything would do. Slowing down, she drove past a row of shanty slums, houses of reed and plastic, people living in the middle of nowhere.

  It was barely more than a hamlet, and a pretty impoverished one at that. Adobe bricks lay drying on the roadside, like hairy ingots of mud. The settlement was surrounded by a cemetery so poor it had hub caps for gravestones, the names daubed thereon in red paint. She knew what to expect in a desert village like this: restaurants where the chicken soup cost twice as much if the chicken was plucked; dire and rancid tamales served on plastic plates.

  But she had no choice. This was north Peru. It was always like this, everywhere, a satanic part of the world: no wonder the civilizations that emerged here had been so insane. The landscape was evil, even the sea could not be trusted: one day serving up endless riches of anchovy and sea bass and shark, the next offering El Niño or La Niña, and wiping out entire civilizations with drought or flood, leaving rotten corpses of penguins strewn across the beach.

  The image of the burning garage filled her mind once more: she thought of her dead father and she didn’t wa
nt to know why.

  ‘Señorita?’ a dirty barefoot kid looked hopefully at her gringa blonde hair as she climbed out of the Hilux. ‘Una cosita? Señorita?’

  ‘Ah. Buenas …’ Jessica deliberated whether to give the kid a few soles. You were not meant to. But the poverty gouged at her conscience. She handed over a few pennies and the lad grinned a broken-toothed grin and did a sad barefoot dance and gabbled in Quechua, the ancient language of the Inca: Anchantan ananchayki! Usplay manay yuraq …

  Jess had no idea what he was saying. Thank you kindly? Give me more, Yankee dogwoman?

  It could be anything. She barely understood Peruvian Spanish, let alone this Stone Age tongue. Braving the boy with a half-hearted smile, she headed for the nearest cantina advertising the inevitable pollos.

  Inside it was, of course, dingy: a few plastic tables, the whiff of old cooking oil. Three men in cowboy hats were sharing one dirty glass of maize beer served from an enormous litre bottle. The men glanced at her from under their hats, and turned back to the shared liquor. The first man poured a slug, and guzzled, and tipped a little on the dirt floor, making an offering to Pachamama, the mother bitch of the earth, with her dust that ate cities.

  ‘Agua, sin gas, por favor?’ Jess said to the tired woman who approached, her hand was scarred with an old burn. The woman nodded, loped off behind a counter, and returned with a bottle of mineral water. And a chipped glass. A chalkboard on the wall advertised ceviche, the national dish: raw fish. Jess shuddered. What might that be like out here in the desert? Rancid, rotten, decomposing: six days of dysentery …

  Her cellphone rang. Daniel, again. Click. ‘Jess, you’re OK?’