Moon Mask (28 page)

Sid’s pretty face screwed up, unconvinced. “I don’t know, Ben. Something just doesn’t fit. I mean, I’m not disputing the Moon Mask theory, nor the idea of the survivors transplanting the myth or Xibalba, or even their technology and knowledge. But I think pursuing the Progenitor connection between the Bouda and Xibalba is barking up the wrong tree.”

King frowned at her, a jolting sense of betrayal rushing through him. “No,” he argued. “The mask’s presence in the New World proves it was transplanted from the old by a race of advanced seafarers in prehistory.”

“But that conflicts with the legends of the Moon Mask,” Sid protested. She knew she was treading on thin ice. Her boyfriend was sensitive about his theory, even more so since his father’s death. Nevertheless, Ambassador Langley had wanted her involved in the mission as a ‘level head’, to keep King on track. The priority wasn’t proving the existence of the Progenitors; it was finding the rest of the mask.

“Remember what Raphael del Vega told us about the Sanumá legend,” she said to him. “He said that the Evil Spirit on Sarisariñama manifested itself into the form of a face so that its mouth could devour the humans who lived on the mountain. And nowhere in the Bouda legends does it mention that they were actually
given
their shard of the mask by any particular person.”

King grew agitated. He turned from the picture board they had assembled and glowered at Sid. “They believed that the gods divided it up and entrusted one piece to them.
Any significantly advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic
,” he quoted. “To the primitive tribe that they were before being given the Moon Mask, the Progenitor’s level of technology would have seemed advanced. Magical. Godly.”

“Ben,” she replied, her own frustration starting to boil over. “We’ve been tasked by the United Nations with finding the rest of the Moon Mask. Yes, it was broken and scattered across the earth. Yes, somehow one piece made it to the New World, but that doesn’t prove the existence of the Progenitors.” King tried to cut in but she continued to speak over him, determined to get her point across. “For all we know, Christopher Columbus himself might have taken it there! Or Hernan Cortes or Francisco Pizarro-”

“I thought you were supposed to be supportive?” King snarled angrily.

“No!” Sid snapped. Her lower jaw trembled as her emotions, pent-up for days, erupted. “I’m a scientist, Ben. I’m not just going to blindly go along with your theory if I don’t think it’s right.”

“How can you doubt-”

“Under ordinary circumstances,” she cut him off, “if we were just debating the existence of the Progenitors for a heated scholarly debate then fine, I’d be willing to open my mind a little. But we are not! I want to find the rest of this mask because it poses a danger to thousands, even millions of people’s lives. But you,” she heard the bitterness crack into her voice. A lump formed in her throat. “You don’t care about that, do you? All you care about is proving that your father wasn’t crazy! All you care about is showing off to the world, saying ‘hey, look at me! I’m Benjamin King and I was right all along!’”

“How dare you-”

“You’re
obsessed
, Ben!” Her eyes were angry now and hot tears began to swell. “You’re obsessed with the mask. Just like Kha’um was. Just like your father was. You don’t care about anything else,” her body trembled as the words spilled out of her mouth. “Not the tachyon radiation or this super-duper bomb. Not the millions of lives that are at risk, and most certainly not about me!”

The words smacked King in the face like a physical blow. “What do you mean? Of course I care about you.”

“Do you?” A single tear finally squeezed out of her left eye. “When we were on the mountain-top, where was your priority? With me or the mask?”

“We had to keep it safe.”

“I was dying, Ben!” She broke down. The awkwardness that had consumed them since being reunited finally manifested itself. “By the time you got back to me, I might have died, just like Professor McKinney!”

“You just said yourself, millions of lives-”

“It was
my
life Ben! Am I proud that what you and Nate did kept a potentially terrible weapon away from the Chinese? Yes! I am so proud of you.” She touched his check, feeling the firm set of his jaw as it clenched. “But you weren’t thinking about millions of lives. You weren’t even thinking about my life. All you were thinking about was the mask. About keeping it away from the Chinese, about keeping it away from Nate-”

“That’s not fair!”

“Isn’t it? Tell me I’m wrong! Tell me you thought of me, of my safety and nothing else as you ran around those ancient ruins! Tell me you didn’t care if the mask was destroyed or lost so long as I was okay! Tell me I mattered more than some lump of space rock! Tell me-”

“Sid,” he grasped her arms. She tried to pull away but he overpowered her, pulling her to him. She resisted a moment longer before breaking down against his powerful chest. He wrapped his muscular arms around her lithe body, holding her close as the stress and tension of the past days racked through her.

“You know, you haven’t once asked me if I am okay,” she mumbled against his chest.

“Langley told me you had taken well to treatment. That you were fine.”

She pushed back and looked up into his dark eyes. Her own glistened with moisture and her cheeks were run through with teary streams. She looked so vulnerable and so hurt that King felt his heart skip a beat. An angry jolt of self-loathing shot through him.

“That’s not what I meant, Ben.”

She was right. Although Alex Langley had confirmed that both she and Nadia had been treated for the radiation sickness they had suffered and were both fit and well, he hadn’t asked her personally how she was. There was more than just the physical aspect to what they had all lived through. There was the emotional. The man she loved had left her on the summit of a mountain at the hands of Chinese soldiers suffering from an illness that had already killed several of her friends and peers. Then, except for a brief reunion before she was shipped off to a state-side hospital and he had elected to remain behind to look after the mask, they had been separated for days. She had been kept in an isolation ward, fed drugs and undergone tests while he had been interrogated by American, British and U.N. officials.

And, after all of that, he couldn’t remember what the first words he had spoken to her had been but, sure enough, he had not once asked her directly how she felt.

In fact, he couldn’t remember thinking about anything except the Moon Mask since the moment he had laid eyes on it.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, cupping her chin in one hand.

“I don’t want to lose you, Ben,” she whimpered.

“You’re not going to. Not ever,” he promised but the sadness in her eyes only seemed to intensify.

“I already am,” she whispered.

He couldn’t think of what else he could say to her. Instead, his hand drifted to his pocket, his fingers gripped the ring that he still had not been brave enough to produce.

“Sid, I-”

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” Alex Langley said uncomfortably as he pushed into the room. He halted in the doorway, his eyes scanning the unkempt state of the room and the two lovers embracing in the middle of the chaos.

Sid held his gaze for a second longer and then turned towards the ambassador. King released the breath he didn’t know he had been holding and let the ring drop back into his pocket.

Alexander Langley looked almost dead on his feet as he made his way further into the room. His tired eyes were bloodshot and large bags hung under them.

“Any luck?” he asked the two scientists.

King glanced at the strewn books and the computer monitors. “We’re still running a comparative mapping program to see if the map we recovered can be matched to any particular piece of coastline but, with no rough location, no scale and, bearing in mind coastal erosion patterns over the last three hundred years, it’s a long shot.”

“Ben did find something out about Edward Pryce,” Sid said, wiping her eyes uncomfortably and leading Langley to one of the monitors. On it was displayed a digitized copy of a very old, dog-eared, yellow stained document.

“What’s this?” the ambassador asked.

“These are Edward Pryce’s release papers,” King explained. He glanced at Sid and their eyes locked for several long moments before he focussed on his work.

“After he was found aboard the
Raptor,
” he explained, “he was admitted to an asylum on Jamaica. But, three years later, he was released into the custody of this man.” He tapped the screen and it zoomed in on a scrawled name. “Jonathon Hawk.”

“Who was he?”

“The son of a wealthy British businessman,” Sid told him. “There’s not a lot of information on him.”

“Then how does this help us?”

“I think it offers further support to my theory that Pryce chased Kha’um around the world, both of them,” he glanced significantly at Sid, “obsessed with finding the Moon Mask. Also, now knowing the name of Kha’um’s ship, I searched for any references to the
Hand of Freedom.
I found one, in June 1708, which mentions a ship, bearing that name, passing a watch-post on Malta.”

“In the Mediterranean,” Langley said needlessly. “So how does
that
help us?” he asked again.

“The sighting comes only days after the report I found of ‘The Black Death’ off the coast of Tunisia. It proves we’re on the right track. That the remains we found in the
Freedom
are those of The Black Death, aka, Kha’um, and that he sailed into the Mediterranean. I think, in search of another piece of the mask.”

“The Med is a big place, Doctor, surrounded by a lot of countries.”

“That’s right, and he could have found the mask in any of them. The point is,” he said, glancing at the interconnecting door as Nadia came in from her own ad-hoc science lab, “that Kha’um searched for and I think found the other pieces of the mask. He hid them in one hoard, probably along with other treasure, to keep them safe before embarking on his final voyage into the Amazon. So, all we have to do is find that hoard of pirates treasure. We’ve got a map, or part of one anyway, and I know where to get the rest.”

“All we need,” Sid said to Langley, “is ‘a go.’”

Langley mused through all the information he had just been given and then nodded. “The majority of the council voted in favour of sending the three of you, under the protection of American soldiers, to retrieve the rest of the mask.”

A look of relief crossed King’s face and he felt Sid’s eyes watching him. But he couldn’t help it. He’d been given an opportunity to find the rest of the mask.

“That’s great,” he said. “When do we go?”

“You’ll be shipping out in the morning.”

“I’m afraid not, Mister Ambassador,” Nadia’s voice suddenly cut in. Everyone turned to look at her serious expression.

“We have a problem.”

23:

The Castle

United States Disciplinary Barracks,

Fort Leavenworth, Kansas,

U.S.A.,

The
helicopter raced through the dead of night, its rotor blades whirring as its pilot altered its pitch, coming in low over the brightly lit Fort Leavenworth Army Base. Bright halogen spotlights moved with menacing grace, bringing sections of the establishment into glaringly brilliant focus, outlining the stark silhouettes of walls and fences topped by razor wire, the encircling trench and the guard towers beyond.

Built by prisoners between 1875 and 1921, the largest barracks, dubbed, due to its domineering presence and fortified persona, The Castle, had been torn down in 2004. Nevertheless, the new facility, despite being portrayed as ‘brighter and airier’ was no less of a fortification than its predecessor. Situated in the middle of the one hundred and eighty year old army base and surrounded by fourteen foot high fences and a multitude of high-tech surveillance and security equipment, the new, state-of-the-art Castle was home to the American military’s most dangerous men.

The Department of Defense’s only maximum security prison, USDB housed five hundred court-martialled male inmates. Most of the prisoners were enlisted men or officers who had been convicted of rape or murder, but a small handful were held there convicted of offences related to National Security.

Alexander Langley stared through the forward windshield of the helicopter as the pilot radioed in his clearance and began his descent.

Beyond mere exhaustion now, Langley’s eyes were bleary; his head pounded and his body craved sleep. For a moment, he mused upon how fragile he had become since retiring from the forces. But, he supposed, twisting the arm of the most powerful man on earth could be draining.

“Absolutely no way!” the President of the United States of America had practically shouted at him. “Totally out of the question! I can’t believe you’re even bringing this to me! You of all people, Alex!”

For his part, Langley hadn’t let John Harper’s outburst faze him. He had held his ground, staring through the teleconference suite at U.N. Headquarters, his image and voice being transmitted into the identical suite in the White House.

Leering back at him, each of their faces displayed on six-foot tall, high definition screens to either side of the president was Sec Def Mick Kane and CIA Director Jason Briggs.

“I wouldn’t, Mister President,” he had replied with all the diplomacy he now wielded instead of an assault rifle. “If I thought there was any other way. But the fact of the matter is, sir; we need him.”

Harper’s face had darkened. “The man is a traitor,” he snarled. “A traitor to his country, to his people, to his uniform. To me,” he added. “He took an oath to protect the citizens of this country, the office of the president and, having abandoned that oath, he committed perhaps the vilest betrayal of all. He betrayed the men and women under his command. He has the blood of U.S. citizens and U.S. soldiers on his hands. He escaped justice once, Alex, but fate has given us, and the families of the dead, a second chance to see that justice enacted.”