by Tom Knox
41
Rua Pablo Dias, Tomar, Portugal
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.’
‘We’ll do exactly what he did, today. That church, then Sagres; then we get out of Portugal. We have to hide somewhere else, anywhere else. And we need to solve this puzzle fast.’
‘One last chance then.’ Her voice was melancholy.
The moonlit Atlantic silvered in the distance. A glow of towns and cities, and nocturnal sea. They had reached the southwest extremity of Europe, where the continent ended, where the Templars lived out their final years, and became the Order of Christ, the sect of journeyers – medieval knights becoming Renaissance explorers, like dinosaurs evolving into birds. And then those knights lit out for the oceans, carrying the Templarite cross on their white-sailed caravels, heading west, always west, to the distant empty shores of a bold New World.
There was a beauty to it.
It was Christmas Day and they were on the Algarve. The church was just twelve kilometres short of Sagres, the most southwesterly point of all.
Empty roads led to the darkness of the ocean. Behind them the rosy-green caress of dawn was now visible, above the orange lights of distant Faro. The first light of Christmas Day.
He parked. The little church was tucked down a lane off a side-road. The church was so humble it had no gate, no car park, no nothing: just a tiny chapel in the middle of a field, off a farm lane.
She flicked the light again and read the book.
‘“The secret chapel of Henry the Navigat
or, and built to his precise instructions, the chapel of Senhora de Guadalupe is drenched with Templar associations. Local legends attest that French knights, fleeing the suppression of the Order in France, took to their boats at La Rochelle, then sailed south, bringing their notorious secret treasure with them. Supposedly they landed here, on this safely remote part of the Algarve coast, and built the first church on this site.”’
‘Go on,’ said Adam.
‘“These fanciful speculations aside, it remains an object of puzzlement as to why Henry the Navigator, a leading figure of the Order of Christ, the direct descendants of the Templars in Portugal, ordered this tiny chapel to be built, in secret, in this immensely lonely part of his vast estates. It is said he came here to worship in private, whenever he was able.”’
She closed the book and they stepped out of the car into the hushed pink light of Christmas dawn. It was cold but the sky was clear. The endless west wind was slicing along the coast.
The church was disappointingly small and empty. A timorous light shone through the unstained windows on to empty pews and bare walls. The only point of interest was a curious gargoyle, or boss, in the ceiling: it showed a human face licking a leaf. Another Green Man image, yet different, less stylized, more direct. A man licking a leaf, or a plant.
Licking?
Nina stared for a long time at the gargoyle, her face drawn into a deep frown.
Back in the car, Adam rubbed his tired eyes, then looked at his hands. Now the sun was coming up he could see the torn knuckles, and he still had a peppering of dried red blood on his shirt. He felt properly sickened now at what he had done. Where had the violence come from? All that terrible aggression. Locked inside him. Was he as bad as Ritter, in his own way? It was a close call between righteous anger and pure sadistic pleasure. He shuddered at the memory of his own glee, swinging a boot, aiming for the face.
In the silence of the car, Nina said, ‘Vikings.’
‘What?’
‘You fought like a Viking. Mad. Crazy.’
He shook his head. Embarrassed. ‘Did I?’
‘Don’t you remember, when we were talking about America, you said the Vikings were famous – for fighting like madmen?’
‘Guess I did …’
‘Adam.’ Her voice had taken on a strange, portentous quality. ‘Tell me. Wasn’t there a particular kind of Viking who fought with special ferocity?’
He mused. ‘You mean – the berserkers?’
‘Yes. Them. I remember studying Vikings in school, Eric the Red and all that. The berserkers would get so crazy before battle that they would bite their own shields in bloodlust. Waiting to kill. Yearning to kill.’
She toyed with the glove box, opening and closing it. Carefully yet pointlessly. The movement of the world seemed to slow to a stop, here in the car, in the rose-amber dawn, on the most southwesterly point of Europe – till she spoke again.
‘And they took drugs, didn’t they? The berserkers, they were rumoured to take drugs. I remember that too. They took drugs, but no one knows what drug it was …’ Slowly she turned and gave him the brightness of her eyes, fierce and gazing. ‘Adam it’s a fucking drug. It’s drugs. It’s always been a drug.’
He didn’t understand. But she looked triumphant. ‘The Babylon rite wasn’t ritual hypnosis, it wasn’t a sexual trance: they took a drug. Yes? The Templars had a drug, some secret drug. That was their secret treasure! That’s why people thought they buried it: they planted it. A seed, that made a golden flower. A flower that made a drug. A drug that made them stronger, more violent. Increased aggression, increased testosterone. Hence the gay sex. It’s a drug! Hence the gargoyle in the church, the man licking a leaf.’
His pulse raced at the idea; yet he calmed himself. Slowly, quickly, slowly, Adam ran the numbers. Did the maths. She was possibly right. She was probably right. ‘That explains the Grail!’ he said at last. ‘They must have taken it as a liquid, in a ritual, like holy sacrament, late at night.’
‘Yep. Drinking the Babylon drug.’
‘From a Grail, in liquid form: hence the Templar worship of the Grail; hence the woman with the alembic, in Domme. That’s a vessel used in medieval alchemy, or chemistry, as we discussed, and that was for preparing the drink … But what about the pentagram?’
She shook her head. ‘Dunno! But this is why we keep seeing the Green Men. Eating foliage, with vines in their mouths, Adam. Likewise the vines in Tomar, and that gargoyle in the church. That’s exactly what they did: prepared a drug from a plant and ate it. Drank its liquor. Secretly at night, in the Babylon rite. The Templars weren’t pagan, Ad: they were just addicted to the high of this substance, which made them brave but also violent, sexually violent to the point of self-destruction. Adam it’s the case. We found it—’
He was shivering. The idea was deliciously good. But there was a problem. A deep flaw. Adam voiced it.
‘DCI Ibsen told us he’d tested everyone for drugs. That’s one of the first things he did, and he got no results.’
‘But what if it was a new drug? Or at least one not seen in a thousand years? What if it produced a … an alkaloid, that no one had seen since medieval times? Then you couldn’t test for it, could you? They’d have no idea what to test for!’
She was right. She was so right it was rhapsodic.
He started the car and began the last drive. They talked urgently as he motored the last few kilometres to Sagres. Thoroughly and diligently they worked through the scenarios. Someone had elucidated the existence of the drug and its links to Templar history. Someone, the Camorra maybe, had paid her father to trace or rediscover the drug, using his Templar knowledge.
Nina was so excited she rushed her words. ‘Dad must have found the drug in Peru. Then he brought it back.’
‘However, most of the drug he sold to the Mafia gangs, who paid for it handsomely—’
‘My dad? Gangsters?’ She shook her head. ‘But it’s gotta be true. Though he kept some of the drug for himself. It probably helped with his cancer: made him happier? Able to face death. Like a berserker. Like a Templar knight. Facing death. That’s why his moods were so weird.’
Adam added, ‘But the drug he kept – a small amount no doubt – was wanted by a rival gang, and they came looking for it, stole the remaining drug, or most of it, and asked him where they could get more. That must’ve been the argument Sophie Walker heard. But he refused to hand his theories over. So they stole his notebooks and attempted to find out where he’d got the drug for themselves.’
‘But why the kids?’ Nina interrupted. ‘Why did they have to die, Nikolai Kerensky and Klemmer?’
Adam already had the answer. ‘Don’t you see, Nina? The drug that the second gang obtained, they needed to test it, so it was tried on willing victims. They tested the drug. We know that Ritter got an in with the rich kids, the experimental set, the swingers. These people were into new thrills, new drugs, so he must have said: here try this, it’s great, a real turn-on.’ He swerved the car, then continued, the story playing out in his mind. ‘The rich young Londoners loved the drug. But the drug worked too well, if anything. They killed themselves, they became too aroused, too fatally sexualized. And then Ritter gave some to …’
‘Hannah.’
‘I’m sorry, but yes. He must have. Ritter was also on the drug himself, of course. Hence his sexualized sadism.’
Nina sighed, bitterly. ‘So it wasn’t rape.’
‘It was rape: she was drugged, Nina. It wasn’t her fault. No more than if she’d been unconscious. He raped her.’
‘Then it must work incredibly fast, Adam. He must have given it to her there and then. In the bedroom: is that even possible?’
‘DMT.’
‘What?’
‘Businessman’s acid, I used to do it in Oz, with Alicia, we tried everything. DMT. Dimethyltryptamine. It’s a kind of short-acting, very strong hallucinogen. It’s found naturally in plants in the Amazon jungle, ironically enough.’ He searched the wi
de coastal horizon: nearly there. ‘Anyway, you inhale it, and it works in microseconds. They call it businessman’s acid ’cause you get extremely high instantly, then hallucinate wildly for ten minutes, then you come down at once. You can do it in a lunch break if you like: you can go to the moon and back, instead of having a sandwich. There’s no reason our drug couldn’t do the same. Act instantaneously.’
At last, he pulled up at the cliff edge of Sagres. They climbed out of the car and stood, and stared, momentarily rapt by the view. The sun was shining on the vast, cold Atlantic. They were parked at the ends of the earth, on the flatness of Cabo de São Vincente, jutting out into the churning seas. This was the great embarkation point for the Portuguese explorers, who lifted anchor in the coves below, and set white sail for the treasures of the Unknown.
‘That’s it,’ said Adam. ‘That also explains why there are so many conquistadors from here, from Portugal and Extremadura.’
Nina frowned.
‘The Templars’ last redoubt in Spain was Extremadura, right?’ Adam went on. ‘Their last redoubt in all Europe was Portugal. And this is the same place, Extremadura, that bred the Spanish explorers. It was from towns like Trujillo and Cáceres and Badajoz and Jerez de los Caballeros, that Balboa and Cortés and Pizarro and the rest of them emerged, determined to go west, to find a city of gold, buried treasure; their El Dorado.’
Her thoughts followed his. ‘They were looking for the Templar drug? So … maybe it was lost over time, that’s why the Templars declined. But the legends remained. Of a great golden drug. From a land far away. That made men superbly warlike, yes, peerlessly brave. These men were warriors. They wanted it again – the golden drug—’
The seagulls wheeled, white and crying in the Christmas light.
‘It must have motivated them, motivated them all, including Henry the Navigator, to find it again. Because the drug must have disappeared: maybe they couldn’t grow it any more, maybe medieval climate change affected them? It was lost but the legends lived on, the myth of Templar treasure.’
