The Babylon Rite. Tom Knox
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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 blindness. ‘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