The Babylon rite

44

Radisson Hotel, Lima

They talked in her room for two hours: Jessica, Nina and Adam. Though they had only spoken twice on the phone, and sent a few urgent emails, though they had been brought together by a the most circuitous of routes — a call from Ibsen to Nina’s secret cellphone, the number only DCI Ibsen knew — by the end of these two hours, Jess felt as if she had been reunited with lost siblings. As if they were united by some high and benign agency because they shared the extraordinary DNA of this story.

It took an hour for Adam and Nina to share all their crucial information. As Nina passionately explained the role of her father, and the police, and the terrible scenes in London, and the way they had followed the trail of the receipts — from Temple Bruer to Tomar, from Rosslyn to Sagres and finally to Peru — Jessica sensed the dynamic between this fiercely determined girl and the tall, brooding Australian. The tragedies that bonded them.

Once more, Jessica felt the pang of her own loneliness. Her dyingness? No. That was stupid. She chided herself for her self-pity, and urged Nina to continue.

Finishing her third black room-service coffee, Nina mentioned their discovery in Portugal, the sculptures in the church, the pentagram in old Tomar Jessica leaned close. ‘Pentagram?’

‘Yes.’ Nina looked at Adam, who shrugged. She turned back. ‘That’s the only bit we couldn’t work out.’

‘But I can — I know how it fits!’ Jessica pulled her little laptop from her bag, opened it, and tapped a few words. ‘See. The pentagram is not a symbol of the devil or Christ’s wounds — at least, not in this case. It is also symbol of a flower. The five-pointed flower of the morning glory. That’s the final proof: with the seeds, and the uncanny similarity to ololiuqui, and now this, that’s enough proof. We now know ulluchu is definitely a morning glory, we just don’t know which one.’

Adam was gazing at the laptop screen and its row of pentagrams, juxtaposed with morning glories. He nodded. ‘So, please. Now tell us what else you know.’

This took less time: Jessica skipped the more gruesome episodes; she couldn’t bear to reveal them. At the end Adam nonetheless looked shocked; she waved away his sympathies and said, ‘Show me the last receipts again.’

Pulling out an envelope saying Peru September 2nd — 13th, Nina handed them over.

Jessica opened the envelope. ‘So your father went to Iquitos? For a week — that makes sense.’

‘Why?’

‘Because Iquitos is the capital of the Amazon rainforests and the Amazon is where everyone goes to look for new drugs. Amazonia is just seething with undiscovered plants and trees and fungi, with all kinds of medicinal and psychotropic potential, a five-thousand-mile-wide pharmacopoeia. I have an ethnobotanist friend researching there now who is willing to help you, if you want. He is good. Very good. And this is the kind of stuff he loves.’

Adam gave her a sardonic expression. ‘We’ve made it all the way here. Another thousand miles: so what?’

‘Of course.’ Jessica was focused on the receipts; she had picked out the final chit, a small piece of paper bearing the handwritten word Toloriu and the figure 5; and the date: September 18th.

‘It’s a taxi receipt, we think.’ Nina said. ‘Ach. His last movements are opaque: his plane tickets are missing. But we found this, five days after all the others: it’s a town in the northern Andes?’

‘Yes, I know it. Near Huancabamba. Quite famous for its curanderos. So maybe he got the ulluchu in Iquitos, then had it prepared by a healer. It’s possible.’

Jessica stared once more at the chit, then returned it to the envelope.

‘OK. We need to be straight. You know the danger. The Mexican drug cartels are the most powerful criminal syndicates in the history of-’

Nina smiled bleakly. ‘The visible universe. Aye. We know. We’ve been through a few wee scrapes ourselves.’

‘Sorry. Sorry, yes, of course.’ Jess handed back he envelope of receipts. ‘So we go to Iquitos tomorrow?’

‘We go to Iquitos tomorrow.’

For a moment they sat in silence. Nina and Adam seemed pensive; but Jessica was more animated, she was positively distracted. She had just this moment grasped another shining fragment of the puzzle.

The Aztec legend. The great Aztec legend.