The Babylon Rite

by Tom Knox

  But against this was set another, opposing desire: to learn more, to get the truth, to be a journalist. Everything in his training was telling him: This is it: this is a Real Story. Adam was jobless and directionless, and if he wanted to make a living he could not afford to turn down a cracking story when it was given to him like this.

  He sipped the last of his beer. ‘Where did your father live?’

  7

  The Huacas, Zana, north Peru

  ‘Are you ready?’

  Jess felt a trace of annoyance amidst her professional excitement. ‘Of course!’

  They were standing at the entrance of Huaca D, the latest adobe pyramid of the Moche era to be opened by the TUMP team. She had a notebook in her hand. ‘So. Tell me again. How do we know this is an important tomb?’

  Dan shrugged. ‘Various indications, such as grave goods in the outlying chamber. And the disarticulated skeletons.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  He explained briskly. ‘The skeletons are slaves, or maybe concubines who were forced, during the funeral rituals, to have their limbs amputated, in a gesture of servility to the noble. Remember, we discussed the funeral sacrifices. They indicate the prominence of the inhabitant of the tomb.’

  Jess remembered as she scribbled, the ghastliness of the notion making her sway a little in the burning Sechura sun.

  For once the clouds had parted and it was fiercely hot: out there beyond the huacas the villagers of Zana were tilling their fields, bending to cut the reeds of sugar cane, white towels of turbans on their heads to ward off the sun. Otherwise the landscape was empty. Drifting, and empty, and dying.

  ‘OK?’

  She nodded. Dan smiled, and there was a definite but discreet warmth to his smile. The smile of a boyfriend. Jessica welcomed his discretion, and reticence: no one else in TUMP knew she and Dan were having a relationship – not yet. And Jessica wanted to keep it that way. Because she wasn’t sure what she felt yet. Dan very definitely wasn’t her normal type: she usually went for young bohemian guys, unshaven and unreliable, casual and sexy. Musicians and artists. She’d been quite promiscuous at university. But now suddenly she’d gone for the older man. Why? Maybe she was emotionally a late developer, even as she was professionally precocious: maybe she was finally filling the father-shaped hole in her heart. Wasn’t that what daughters who lost a dad at an early age were meant to do? Seek out the missing male security figure?

  The wind was stifling, the sun relentless. Dan was sweating in the heat, showing damp sweat patches under the arms of his grubby T-shirt. Yet she still felt a stir of attraction: he was quite rugged in an older and scholarly way. And his expertise itself was attractive: a man doing something well. He was a very gifted archaeologist – quite famous in his field.

  As if aware of her scrutiny, he looked up: ‘Do you not have a flashlight? You’ll need it in the tomb, Jess. If you want to see to take notes.’

  ‘I’ve got it. Don’t worry. I’ve got everything.’ She glanced behind her at the waiting huaca, the ancient pyramid of crumbling dust, and lifted her notebook. ‘Tell me again what we know for sure about the age. When does the tomb date from?’

  ‘From the very last gasp of Moche civilization. Eighth or ninth century, when they evolved into the Muchika. Essentially they’re the same people, same culture, same bizarre civilization, but with dwindling resources.’

  Jess nodded and wrote in her notebook, then said, ‘How do we know there haven’t been any haqueros? Any graverobbers? How do we know the tomb is sealed?’

  Dan didn’t answer, he was distractedly patting his pockets, apparently making sure he had some kit on his person. This was typical for Dan – the classic intellectual scientist, always elsewhere.

  Jess took the time to gaze around at the strange town that had been her home for six months. In a part of the world singularly blessed with hideous towns, Zana, an hour’s drive south of Chiclayo, and even deeper into the Sechura Desert, was still a shocker.

  The streets were mostly paved with mud, or mud and sewage. The houses were concrete or adobe hovels, painted dirty white or a hopelessly sour pastel. Most of the buildings were one storey, but they didn’t have proper roofs, just ugly amputated concrete pillars bristling with steel cables that pointed at the empty air, waiting for the day when the family got rich enough to afford a second storey. These amputated houses gave the city an odd appearance, as if some dreadful god of pre-Columbian Peru – the mysterious Decapitating Demon of the Moche – had come along and swept a chainsaw across the town, levelling the buildings, chopping off anything too ambitious.

  Turning back to the huacas, the prospect hardly improved: it seemed impossible that such ugly, if sizeable, heaps of mud, stretching almost to the horizon, could be so archaeologically important. Yet they were. These were the Moche pyramids, great sacred sites brutally eroded by fifteen hundred years of desert wind and El Niño rain. Once they would have been lofty, painted ziggurats dominating the flats and cornfields, full of warriors, priests and bloodthirsty nobles. Now they were muddy lumps, fabulously unexcavated muddy lumps, the precious knolls that had persuaded Toronto University Archaeology to locate its Moche Project in Zana.

  In just two seasons of digging, Dan and the guys had opened only three of the many huacas, and already they’d found two senior Moche tombs, both undisturbed, one of which had provided the damaged neck vertebrae which had afforded Jessica her insight.

  So it was exciting to wonder what else lay out here in the endless heaps of dry soil and potsherds.

  At last, Dan lifted his eyes from his kit. ‘Sorry, Jess? Did you say something?’

  Jessica smiled. ‘I said: how we do know the haqueros haven’t been here? The graverobbers.’

  ‘Well, we don’t, not absolutely,’ he confessed, his long grey hair falling over his dark brown eyes, ‘But we’re extremely optimistic. We’re guessing the reputation of Zana, as a bruja town, a town of sorcerers, has protected these huacas. Most of the people here are emancipated African slaves, thought to possess magical powers – that’s probably why the other tombs were untouched, in which case, why not this one also? And the doors are also intact. Anyway, we can talk later. Shall we do it?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘Turn on your headtorch.’

  Dan was already buckling the chins strap of his helmet, with its halogen headtorch. Jess followed him.

  The path around the southwest incline of Huaca D led to a low, excavated entrance. The smell emanating from the dark mudbrick tunnel beyond was earthy, and homely, and yet tanged with something else: something warm and maybe fetid. Something alien.

  Stooping, they entered. Nina felt the brush of the mud roof on her helmet, and it was a distinctly satisfying sensation. At last she was inside a huaca: a real-life Moche adobe pyramid! Fifteen hundred years old!

  Their uncomfortable crawl through the narrow adobe passage took several minutes: this was one of the biggest huacas in Zana. As they inched their way along, the mudbrick walls narrowed, tapering on either side, and above. A few minutes later, she and Dan were virtually crawling, abject and animal-like, on hands and feet. The darkness was intense.

  Jessica hated the dark. It always reminded her of her father, and his last days. Specifically it reminded her of being in his hospital room at night, with the lights low, near to his death, as his cancer conquered him. She had been just seven years old and hadn’t understood what was happening. But she had nonetheless imbibed some emotional association: darkness equals death, equals a terrible nothingness, an inexplicable nullity. Yes, she hated the dark.

  The darkness in the huaca was made worse by the claustrophobic conditions. The air was clammy and over-warm, lacking oxygen. Jess sweated. How could Dan be sure the pyramid wouldn’t simply collapse on top of them, smothering them in ancient mud, their mouths filling with suffocating soil, an avalanche of crumbling adobe? And then more darkness.

  They moved on. Two more minutes of crawling became three. The passageway zigzagged, perhap
s as a deterrent to graverobbers. The darkness was now pure and solid, cut through only by the beam of her headtorch: it illuminated Dan’s white T-shirt, as he led the way, crawling and crouching. The white of the T-shirt was turned a dirty orange: grimed with fifteen-hundred-year-old mud.

  ‘Here.’

  Panting with relief, Jess saw they were entering a taller antechamber. She could stand; though Dan, with his lanky six feet four, still needed to hunch over.

  Two other team members were waiting for them, kneeling in the dust. Jay Brennan and Larry Fielding. They said hello, and made poor jokes about the loveliness of their surroundings. Jess smiled as best she could, but she was too distracted by the floor of the antechamber.

  ‘My God.’

  Here were the disarticulated skeletons, half-excavated. These were the sacrificed concubines or servants of the lords buried further within. From her research, she knew what these signified. The Moche believed their aristocrats required servants in the afterlife just as they did in the present life: so when the slaves were sacrificed to accompany their master their feet were chopped off. So that they couldn’t run away in the hereafter.

  The idea was absurd, yet also appalling. Jess stared at one long skeleton, probably male, judging by the narrowness of the pelvis. It certainly had no feet. It looked like a pretty tall skeleton for a slave.

  Recalling her thorough lessons in forensic anthropology from Steve Venturi at UCLA, she knelt and examined the ankle bone where it had been severed. Something was not quite right about it. Jess steadied her torchlight over the bone, examining the angle of the blow, as a voice echoed above her.

  ‘Right. This way.’

  It seemed she didn’t have time to linger. She was a guest on this trip, conspicuously the anthropologist amongst proper archaeologists, so she was lucky to be here at all, and in no position to ask for a delay.

  They moved down the last length of darkened passage to the sealed tomb. The air grew hotter, the coarse mud walls even rougher: they had only recently been excavated. The weight of the great adobe pyramid above them was palpable, and oppressive.

  ‘There.’

  Dan pointed. A slab of rock blocked the passage, illuminated by their collective headtorches; the slab was the height of the passage itself – maybe one and a half metres wide and tall.

  Jess asked the obvious and probably stupid question. ‘How do we move that?’

  ‘Brute force,’ said Dan. ‘The mud is ancient, it gives way. It’s surprisingly simple, you can dislodge the portals by hand. The rocks aren’t thick, they’re more like large slates.’

  ‘But – the roof?’

  ‘These adobe pyramids are secure, they won’t collapse. They erode in the sun and rain, but they’ve lasted fifteen hundred years: they don’t collapse from the inside.’

  Jess felt her excitement surging. What was beyond this ancient portal? Already they had found a trove of mutilated skeletons. This was an important tomb, from the mysterious end of the Moche Empire, the desperate time of the Muchika. They were headed for the dark heart, the airless core of the pyramid.

  Jay was muttering behind, in the depths of the gloom. His colleague joined in, giving voice to his concerns. ‘You know. The air is, ah, pretty bad down here, Dan.’

  ‘But what can we do? We haven’t got any oxygen tanks at the lab, have we?’

  ‘Nope. We finished the last on Monday.’

  The frustrating debate continued, then Dan lifted a hand. ‘So, either we call a halt and wait a week for a new delivery, or we advance. Guys?’ His headtorch illuminated their white faces one by one.

  In turn, everyone nodded. The decision was made.

  ‘Then let’s do it!’

  Reaching up, Dan began tugging at the door. There was just room for his fingers to grasp an edge, and pull. He pulled once. Nothing. He pulled again. No movement.

  Jess came up beside him, kneeling in the dust, to help. Still nothing.

  ‘Another go, come on.’

  As one they tugged, and then the door seemed to shift, a few millimetres; then decisively, with a cloud of soil and choking dust. But something was wrong. This dust was red—

  It was pouring from somewhere, from some hidden channel, some broken vessel above; draining like a tipped-up load of vermillion sand over Jessica’s face and hair and mouth. She was being smothered in thick red dust with a weird smell. She screamed out loud, in terror.

  It was a ghastly childhood dream – of being stifled at night, feeling cold hands that throttled; it was a dream of being her father in his last moments, in hospital, misting the oxygen mask, drowning in pain, staring hapless and terrified at the nurse and the kids and the oncoming darkness – until his own seven-year-old daughter had wanted to thrust a pillow right over his face and end it for him—

  And then the scarlet dust filled her mouth, and she could scream no more.

  8

  The Bishops Avenue, London

  There were murders and there were … murders. That was the unspoken agreement between Detective Chief Inspector Ibsen and his detective sergeant, Larkham. A plain old murder was just that: a murder. A robbery gone nasty, or a domestic gone awry.

  But a … murder was different. It required a microsecond of hesitation before the word was enunciated, or a subtle drop in voice tone, barely half a note, a third of a note. ‘Sir, we have a … murder.’

  This one was, by all accounts, very much a … murder. Ibsen could tell from his DS’s demeanour. DS Larkham had already seen the corpse, which had been discovered six hours previously: his already-pale English face was paler than ever, his voice subdued, his normal cheeriness quite dispelled.

  Their large police car was slowly rolling down The Bishops Avenue, one of the richest streets in London. Ibsen gazed out at the enormous houses, the fake Grecian villas looking faintly surreal in the drizzle. One resembled a vast temple from Luxor, inexplicably transported to the wintry north of the capital and fitted with six burglar alarms. The next house appeared to have sentries.

  ‘Who the fuck lives in houses like this?’ said the driver, giving voice to all their thoughts.

  ‘Kuwaiti emirs,’ said Ibsen. ‘Billionaire Thai politicians. Nobody in winter.’

  ‘Sorry, sir?’

  ‘Look – hardly any cars. A lot of these people have houses all over the world. They come here in summer, it’s dead in December. Makes it a good place to commit a crime. In winter.’

  ‘Well, our murder victim lived here.’ Larkham grimaced. ‘Even in winter.’

  ‘What do we know about him?’

  ‘Nephew of the Russian ambassador.’

  ‘Ouch.’ Ibsen winced at the complications. ‘This is an official residence?’

  ‘No, sir. Just a rich family. Father’s into oil and diamonds. Oligarch.’

  ‘Has someone told the Foreign Office?’

  ‘Already did it, sir.’

  DCI Ibsen gazed, with a brief sense of pleasure, at Larkham’s keen face. Here was an ambitious policeman, a bright young man who had skipped university to go straight into the force, already a DS in his mid-twenties, with a very young family. He’d been Ibsen’s junior for just six months, and he was obviously itching for Ibsen’s job, but in a good way, just so he could move on up. Ibsen preferred to have someone nakedly and brazenly ambitious than a schemer who subtly politicked.

  Larkham yawned; Ibsen grinned. ‘Nappies at dawn?’

  ‘And feeding at four a.m. Feel like I’ve done a shift already.’ He stifled his sleepiness and asked, ‘Does it get better?’

  ‘It gets better. When they reach the age of reason. About five or so.’

  Larkham groaned; Ibsen chuckled. ‘OK. Tell me again. We’ve got statements?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Larkham repeated what information they had gathered so far. The first statement came from a passer-by, who had heard two raised male voices as he walked past the house at eleven p.m., though they didn’t sound violent …’

  ‘And the ot
her statement?’

  ‘From a neighbour, an au pair in the house next door, at one a.m., approximately the time of death, according to Pathology’s very rough initial guess, sir. She also heard the raised voices of two men. She says these voices were shouting, aggressive, possibly violent, possibly drunk.’

  ‘But she did nothing?’

  ‘Very young lady, sir, Just nineteen. Croatian.’

  ‘Ah.’ Ibsen understood this. Bishops Avenue was the kind of place where rich important people went to be seriously undisturbed in big houses. A teenage au pair living in a strange big house in a strange new country would be reluctant to cause any bother.

  ‘Here we go, sir.’

  The car parked outside a large building fronted by two-storey-high white Doric pillars. A big car in the driveway was covered with some kind of tailored sheet. Ibsen stared: he had never had a car expensive enough to require special protection from the English winter.

  ‘The body?’

  ‘This way.’

  They were greeted at the door by the Scene of Crime Officer, wearing a paper suit which zipped up at the front. Other forensic and attending officers came out of the building, carrying evidence bags, and walked to a large steel van, parked behind the sheet-covered car.

  ‘There’s a lot of blood,’ said the SOCO through his paper mask, with the air of a host at a house party greeting his latest guests.

  ‘Can we see?’

  ‘You need to nonce up first, sir.’

  Stalling at the doorway, Ibsen and Larkham slipped on their plastic gloves and paper masks and translucent overshoes, like politicians visiting a fish factory. Then they stepped through the enormous pillared hall into an enormous pillared sitting room. Ibsen resisted the urge to swear, as he surveyed the crime scene. Then his resistance crumbled.

  ‘Fucking hell.’