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 Navigator, 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
