The Babylon Rite

by Tom Knox

Ritter produced three sets of handcuffs from a pocket of his capacious leather coat. Hannah, Adam and Nina backed into the corner. Adam edged further, as discreetly as he could, to the window.

  ‘Don’t scream out of the window. Or I will hurt your friends. Very, very badly.’

  Hannah was close to crying, her face a crumpling mask of failing courage. Folding on itself, into tears. Nina was impressively blank. Adam admired her display of courage, even as he realized what appalling danger they were in: this man wouldn’t have let his name slip unless he aimed to kill them all, tonight. Indeed, Ritter was taunting them: evidently enjoying the horror.

  Ritter spat: ‘Right. All of you, sit there. In front of the radiator. Now. In a nice row like dogs at a show.’

  They did as they were told. Adam squirmed, and furiously calculated the chances. A desperate rugby tackle might just unbalance the man. Ritter was big, at least six foot, but not as big as Adam. He looked fit, but not real Aussie Rules fit, like Adam. It could be done. Adam could take him, if only he could get near. One more time. He’d got that first punch in, he could do it again. Better this time.

  But Ritter was blithe and clever in his long leather coat, he kept his distance, and his gun cocked, and his eyes on his captives, as he went from window to window, locking them and closing the curtains.

  Ritter kicked out the landline phone sockets and stamped on them, trashing the phonelines. With the mobiles drowned, they were now entirely incommunicado.

  Now he turned to them. ‘I need to keep you safe. And quiet. So we can talk.’ He tossed the handcuffs in Adam’s direction. ‘Put these on the girls. Chain them to the heater. Now.’

  Adam did as he was instructed. The radiator was uncomfortably hot: he was already sweating. His moist hands slipped as he snapped the cuffs first over Nina, on one side, and then over Hannah, on the other side. Perhaps he would get a chance – one last opportunity to tackle this guy – before he himself was secured.

  He got no chance. Ritter came over fast and locked Adam, likewise, to the firm ironwork of the radiator pipes. Now they were all shackled. Ritter extracted a cylindrical black silencer from an inside pocket and screwed it on to the muzzle of his pistol. ‘The Tundra Gemtech Suppressor,’ he said, almost murmuring. ‘As they say, it does not render the shooter inaudible, so much as invisible.’ A flash of a grin. ‘Reckon we’re ready.’

  Traffic passed outside, oblivious to the hideous drama herein.

  ‘Did you kill my father?’ Nina asked.

  Ritter laughed. Tall in his long leather jacket. Looking like a renegade Nazi, a Spanish Nazi with a Texan accent. ‘You still think that shit? Your dad killed himself. He was dying.’ Another laugh. ‘Or do you really think he had found something amazing?’ Ritter stopped closer to Nina. ‘Mmm? Would he do all that and then just top himself? Without even a note to say thanks for the motherfucking haggis?’

  He slapped her gently across the face, twice, like a cat cuffing a ball of wool. ‘Tell me, Nina McLintock. I researched you. You’re the fucked-up little sister, right? You tried to kill yourself didn’t you? Last year? So why are you so fucking surprised that your dear old dad had the same gene?’ The gun stroked Nina’s white cheek. Then the muzzle edged to her neck, her pale sweating neck. Pointing down to the incipient curve of her white breasts under her sweat-dampened shirt.

  ‘I’ve got a knife. Cut you up a bit. Shall we have some fun? Think Adam likes you.’

  ‘Leave her alone,’ said Adam, involuntarily. ‘I’ll fucking … I’ll fucking …’

  Ritter scoffed. ‘What? Pull the radiator outta the wall, Aussie hero? If you raise your voice I will chop off Nina’s ear. And feed it to the roaches under the fridge.’

  He stood, looking at Nina, then at Hannah. ‘Need to put the damn heat on. In the meantime I will gag you.’

  Three gags were swiftly produced. Ball gags with steel links.

  ‘Sex toys. From Soho. Amazing what you hoity-toity English like to use in bed.’ The chains were tight around the neck. The fat plastic balls, rammed in their mouths, stifled any words. They could only mumble, softly, desperately. Ritter chuckled. ‘Interesting, though. And relevant, no? Amazing how close sex is to violence. Orgasm to murder. Talking of which …’

  Ritter disappeared to the corner of the room and adjusted something on a wall. With a shudder of apprehension Adam realized it was the thermostat. He was turning up the thermostat. They were chained to a large new radiator and he had evidently put the heat on full.

  Within moments Adam felt the boiling water percolate into the metal radiator. It was burning the sweat from his shirt, burning his back, burning burning burning. The oversized plastic ball filled his mouth so he could barely swallow.

  The gunman returned. ‘Now, to work. I want to know what you know. Before you die. What have you been looking for and what have you found?’

  First he unchained Nina’s gag. She spat out the plastic ball and then spat in his face, ‘Nothing!’

  Ritter sleeved the spittle from his cheek.

  The radiator was scorching into Adam’s back. His heartbeat was erratic. Could you burn to death from a radiator? He had to Do Something.

  Ritter tried again. ‘You’ve been following your stupid fucking dead dad around Britain. Have you found what he found? You may as well tell me because I’m going to cut out your clitoris with a razor if you don’t. And even if I don’t, someone else will. You are very, very … hot properties. Hot hot hot. All three of you. You don’t know how many people want to torture you and kill you. You have no idea. I think I can smell burning.’

  He took Nina’s head and pressed it back hard, with a clanging thud, pushing it against the almost red-hot radiator.

  ‘Is that too fucking hot? Pretty bitch? Is it too hot? Tell me what you found!’

  He unchained her gag and she spoke.

  ‘Nothing. We found nothing. Nothing! We’ve been searching but we found nothing. A few sculptures. Green Men. Nothing else.’

  There was an obvious truth in her desperate response. The leather coat creaked as Ritter sighed, dropped Nina’s head, and regagged her, shoving the vile plastic ball in her mouth, chaining it round her neck. Her defiant shouts became moans of pain.

  He moved on to Hannah, repeating the process, asking her the same questions. ‘We don’t know anything. We think he may have found some truth about the Templars. The initiation rites.’ Half-crying.

  ‘The Babylon rite?’

  ‘What is that? Yes. No. Yes, that. And and and …’

  ‘And what else?’

  ‘Nothing! That’s as far as we got.’

  Like a disappointed university tutor, Ritter dropped his head and sighed. And then he moved and knelt – and licked Nina’s face. Licked her from chin to eye.

  ‘Sweet. Very sweet.’

  Next to her sister, Hannah gave a muffled scream.

  Ritter licked again. ‘Mmm. Cherry Garcia.’

  Ritter moved along, to Adam. He had produced a knife from somewhere. He angled it towards Adam’s groin, as he unloosed the gag with his other hand. Grotesquely nauseated, Adam spat out the plastic.

  ‘Tell me, you Aussie cocksucker. What were you after? You’re a journalist, aren’t you? You must have been following a story.’

  Adam shook his head. ‘There is no story. I think he committed suicide. Maybe he found something about the Templars but we’ve got nowhere.’

  For once Ritter’s mildly handsome, faintly unshaven face flashed a look of disappointed belief. Angry acceptance. ‘You know what, I believe you.’ He stared at Adam, then at the girls, and smiled. ‘But the night is young, and you are still alive, so I think it’s time for fun. I think I’ll leave the pretty one for pudding. A nice sugary dessert. Yes. You first, plain Jane. Gotta eat your greens.’

  With the gun at Hannah’s head, he unchained her from the radiator, cuffed her hands behind her back, and lifted her to her unsteady feet.

  ‘Let’s leave these people to cook. Leave them on the b
ackburner.’

  He dragged her through the door to the bedroom. Adam strained to see, and watched as Hannah was pushed on to the bed. Then Adam could see very little but, grotesquely, he could hear. Struggling. Writhing. Bed slats. He stretched as far as he could against the chains and glimpsed bare legs, Hannah’s bare feet. Desperately fending him off. Ritter kept his boots on. All he could see was his boots. Ritter was on top of her.

  Nina sobbed. Ritter was evidently raping her sister.

  ‘Quit your sobbing, bitch.’

  The sound of a hard slap echoed. Then Hannah’s muffled sobs. Then there was just silence apart from the rhythmic creaking of the bed. He was raping her again. All Adam could see were bare ankles, kicking, listlessly, at Ritter’s leather boots. Then the kicking stopped. Hannah’s feet were stroking the boots.

  Stroking?

  ‘Rapingggg her.’ Nina somehow choked the words around her gag. ‘Hhheehmm.’

  Adam’s anger and confusion boiled with the blood in his back. It was self-evidently true: Ritter was raping her. Now he heard a stifled scream. Then a coarse laugh; and the muzzled groan of someone, doing something. Was he cutting her as well?

  The bed slats creaked obscenely, again and again and again. Through the crack in the door Adam saw that Ritter apparently had her upside-down. Taking her from behind. The radiator burned. The creaking went on and on and on and still the rapist blurted his disgusting hoarse grunts. Hannah moaned as if she was dying.

  The moans were followed by ardent breathing, and then whispered noises and sighing; and then quietness. Liquid noises. Gurgling. Then again nothing.

  Gurgling?

  Adam yearned and burned against the scorching radiator. Hannah’s legs were no longer visible. What had Ritter done to her? Killed her? Suddenly he was sure Ritter had killed her. Raped her, then killed her.

  Nina was crying again; Adam felt like crying himself. But he didn’t. He found he was just waiting for the next scene in this grotesque yet inexorable melodrama. When Ritter would come out and unchain Nina, and take her into the bedroom. And do the same to her: rape her and kill her so Adam could hear. So he could imagine.

  A brutal noise shattered his terminal reverie.

  The door had crashed open. The noise was … downstairs.

  Brutal shouts and noises.

  Two seconds later police in blue steel helmets and flak jackets were swarming into the sitting room. Half a dozen of them, staring at Nina and Adam. Adam struggled in his shackles and motioned at the door – the bedroom – but even as he did so Ritter emerged, half naked, gun in hand. A dazzling and deafening helicopter light pierced the window shutters; and then the room filled with gas, or smoke – a smoke grenade – then there was a massive crash of glass; Adam strained to see – it was Ritter – he had run into the bedroom and hurled himself, bodily, through the window, which was just visible. The window was shattered; he’d jumped from the first floor.

  The police ran into the bedroom. Adam heard shouts outside, and more gunshots: they must be pursuing Ritter, through the back gardens. Two other cops snapped the shackles that chained Nina and Adam to the burning radiator, then the metal links of their vile gags.

  Nina hurled the plastic from her mouth, shoved herself to her feet and ran to the bedroom door.

  But a large policeman stopped her. Stout and strong in his blue flak jacket.

  ‘But it’s my sister. My sister!’

  The cop held her by her trembling shoulders. ‘You don’t want to see what’s in there.’

  32

  Witches’ Market, Chiclayo

  ‘Qasiy chay ruwasqaykita osqhayman!’

  This wasn’t the curandero. Jessica opened her eyes. She looked up and left. It was Larry Fielding. And he was shouting at the wizard.

  ‘Mana ruwanki chayqa qanmantacha yachakunki!’

  Behind him was a policeman. A policeman? The Peruvian officer had a gleaming peaked cap, and a hand poised on the butt of a gun, ready to draw.

  The wizard shrivelled away: cowering and protesting. Larry reached and pulled the rank cloth from Jessica’s mouth; she phlegmed the horrible taste into the dust and coughed up her questions.

  ‘What the – what the? Jesus – Larry – how did you find me?’

  He shrugged: a bashful saviour. ‘I was watching you, and you seemed evasive. We gotta watch out for each other! Didn’t quite believe your supermarket shtick.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘The market traders told me someone had grabbed you so I went to get the cops to help.’

  As the boy unfastened Jessica’s bonds, Larry snapped questions at the shaman, who grovelled his replies.

  ‘Kay warmika milloymi apamun nunakunata.’

  Larry nodded, grimly and disdainfully.

  Jess stood up. There was still lizard blood on her stomach. The policeman handed her a handkerchief; she did her best to rub the gore from her skin. The Quechua conversation rattled around the shack, coarse and staccato, like dried beans in a gourd. Larry was the only one in the TUMP team who could speak the ancient Incan tongue.

  ‘What?’ she said. ‘What were they doing?’

  He put a firm hand on her shoulder. ‘It was just an exorcism. They weren’t going to kill you, or even harm you. They just think you need exorcising.’ He glanced around the sun-lanced shack, at the witchy little dolls, the sprigs of dried monkey paws.

  ‘Exorcising! Why?’

  Larry shook his head. ‘You know why. They think TUMP is hexed! They reckon we have cursed the area, stirring all these ancient Moche demons – like the pishtacas.’ He gestured at her rolled-up jeans. ‘They weren’t actually going to cut off your feet, it was just symbolic. They were trying to placate the Moche god by performing, I guess, a phoney Moche ceremony.’

  The policeman spoke, impatiently, and in very fast Spanish. But Jess could clearly discern the meaning: he wanted them to leave the market.

  ‘We’d better go,’ said Larry. ‘This is their world. The Quechua speakers. We’d better go now.’

  Jess was unlikely to disagree. Unsteadily she walked out of the shack. In the darkened aisles of traders she breathed the reeking air of the main market with abject relief; it was just as it always was. People were sitting at dirty counters drinking from steel mugs of coca tea, eating rancid plates of brown octopus, and buying eels in bottles. And monkey paws.

  Behind them, in the shack, Jess could hear the policeman yapping angrily at the bruja. ‘What will happen to them?’

  ‘Slap on the wrist, maybe. The police sympathize with the locals. They don’t want us here either, Jess.’ He grabbed her by the elbow and they stepped into the grubby sunshine of Chiclayo. Black turkey vultures circled, inevitably, in the dusty blue sky over the dusty orange cathedral. As if the whole city was carrion.

  ‘The cop told me something.’ He gazed at her. ‘That gunman who came for Dan has been here too, with friends, asking questions, terrorizing people, asking about us in Zana. And asking about McLintock.’

  ‘Here?’ Jess shook her head. ‘They came here?’ She was still trying to shake off the memory of the little boy with his dirty, wet finger circling her ankle with warm blood. ‘And this guy, McLintock. How does he fit into this?’

  Larry ignored her question. ‘There’s something else you need to know.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They’ve made a discovery. At Huaca D.’

  ‘I know, I was there. I—’

  ‘No. A new discovery. This morning. A major, major discovery. Dan phoned me an hour back. And it changes everything. Apparently.’ Larry sighed. ‘That’s all I damn well know! That’s all Dan said. It changes everything.’

  They sprinted to the car.

  Two hours later she was back in Huaca D. The same dust, the same sleeping bones; yet this time it was all different.

  ‘All children?’

  Dan nodded, making the beam from his headtorch jiggle forlornly. ‘All of them children.’ He stepped into the antechamber. ‘We broke in by
accident, this morning. One of the villagers put a shovel through the wall; we found a little passageway, and then this. We hadn’t geosurveyed this section, we had no idea; this is so unusual.’

  Jess stared. Her hands were shaking with the tension. This discovery was a revelation: it altered everything – as Larry had said. The large, low antechamber, concealed beyond the main tombs of Huaca D, contained more skeletons than any other Moche tomb to date. Here they were, laid out in little sleeping rows.

  All of them children.

  Dan stooped to the nearest line of small and silent bones. ‘We’re guessing they were first sedated, at least I hope they were sedated, maybe with nectandra, then their throats were slit and their chests cut open. Here, look, you can see the breastbone. This one here.’

  Jessica leaned. The breastbone was crudely severed. ‘A heart extrusion?’

  Dan sighed and nodded and rubbed a dusty hand over his dusty face. He looked wearied: even in the quarter-light of this dismal adobe hall she could see he was beyond tired. He was vanquished. But his voice retained some professional lucidity.

  ‘Probably they used a tumi blade. To hack the children open. Alive. Some of these fibrous remains imply … look—’ He pointed. ‘The children were tied by the hands and feet before the ritual began.’

  Jess felt sick. First the horrors of the witches’ market, now this. She gazed at her shaking hand, and wrestled away the terror.

  Dan was intoning now, like a priest who had lost his faith, who nonetheless had to deliver a sermon for Easter, ‘The remains are, we think, the earliest evidence of ritualized blood sacrifice and of the severe mutilation of children, the earliest evidence that has so far been seen in South America. It may even be the biggest mass sacrifice of children … anywhere in the ancient world.’

  Picking up a flashlight, Jess played it along the dormitory of bones. The quiet little children were all present and correct, all tied and hacked and dismembered, and left here. In neat little rows. She remembered her own nursery school, in sunny LA, when they would sleep in the afternoon. This was like that, but satanically upended. Here was a kindergarten of evil. Like the children of the Goebbels family, in the Berlin bunker, schlaft gut, schlaft gut, meine kindern.