Moon Mask (42 page)

“No! You bastard! I’ll kill you if you hurt her! I’ll-”

“Enough of the threats, Ben,” Bill scolded. Throughout the entire exchange, the calm tone of his voice had never wavered. He wiped the blood off the metal blade and left Sid shivering in her seat, unable to even probe the wound on her cheek. Then Bill picked King up and threw him back against his own seat, re-sheathing his knife.

“If you lie to me again, Ben,” he promised, “I will cover your girlfriend’s lovely, lovely body with hundreds of little cuts, just like that one. It will be agonising and, even if I then decided, merciful as I am, to let her live, she would be so disfigured, so heinous and abhorrent, that even Quasi-goddamn-modo wouldn’t want to screw her. Got it?”

King studied the other man’s emotionless grey eyes, sickened to the core by what he saw there. It wasn’t just evil. No, evil was something he could understand, something he could quantify and hate. But Bill’s eyes were simply cold, as lifeless and as dead as a corpse.

He nodded weakly and got to work.

The
V-22 Osprey thundered south over the Andes, its powerful turboprops chewing into the mountainous air and propelling it at almost three hundred miles per hour. Unlike most planes, however, the V-22’s rotors were able to be tilted up and down, giving it the ability to take off and land vertically or to hover just like a helicopter. This tilt-rotor design had made it the ideal choice for Gibbs’ team upon learning of the likely terrain of their destination. Much of the Patagonian region of Argentina and Chile was occupied by mountains, glaciers and tiny archipelago islands, making it almost impossible to land an ordinary airplane should their destination be as remote as they feared. Yet, worrying that they were already lagging behind their prey, the speed of a fixed-wing aircraft was essential.

Using their borrowed Bell 407 Jamaican coastguard helicopter, the team had flown to a rendezvous point in Belize where a hastily assembled Sea King, on loan from Britain’s Royal Navy, had been waiting. They had used the Sea King to head south to a Peruvian airbase where they were supposed to meet up with the tilt-rotor which had been sent from a U.S. Aircraft Carrier in the Pacific. The well organised logistical operation had fallen apart due to confusion between the Peruvian authorities and the U.N. and had delayed the mission by over an hour.

Fearing they had fallen behind the mercenary plane, they now pushed the Osprey to its limits even as, inside its hold, Raine and Nadia tried to pinpoint their ultimate destination.

“We need to track down the descendants of Abubakar,” he told the Russian woman. Despite the events of the last hours, Nadia still managed to look remarkably sexy, her black clothing clinging to the curved contours of her body. Her eyes were as intense and focussed as ever, though, as she studied the laptop computer perched on her legs.

“What makes you think he has any?” she asked.

“Because if he doesn’t, we’re screwed. And so are Benny and Sid.”

She fixed him with a hard stare but he could see the genuine concern in her eyes. She wanted to find her missing friends as much as he did.

With startling proficiency, she linked the laptop via satellite signal onto the World Wide Web. The system wasn’t dissimilar to the link-up the computers had used back at Sarisariñama, allowing a fast, flaw-free flow of information from just about anywhere in the world, even high above the Andes.

“Where do you even start?” West asked, his Brooklyn accent strong. He sat between Gibbs and O’Rourke who both dozed on the opposite side of the cabin. Garcia sat beside Raine while Murray occupied the co-pilot seat in the cockpit along with Lake.

“At the beginning,” Nadia replied automatically, not really listening to anyone else as she navigated into a powerful search engine which had been developed by DARPA. In a matter of seconds she had a list of websites which claimed to hold census data for Argentina dating back to the mid sixteenth century. She quickly weeded out the obvious commercial sites that had sprouted up in recent years since the boom in interest in plotting out family trees. She clicked on a link that ended in ‘.gov.ar’ which opened onto the homepage of the
Archivo General de la Nación
, Argentina’s General Archive of the Nation. Raine, fluent in Spanish, took the computer off her lap and scanned through the text.

Established in 1821,
Archivo General de la Nación
absorbed dozens of historical archives, libraries, church and provincial records, amassing them all into one place. Raine quickly navigated through the website.

“I presume we do not have a second name for this ‘Abubakar?’” Nadia asked.

“Afraid not,” Raine replied. “But I’m guessing that the child of an Egyptian and a Selk’nam Indian wouldn’t go unnoticed.”

Across the hold, Gibbs stirred and opened his eyes. Bleary for a second, they suddenly snapped onto the laptop on Raine’s knees.

“What the hell!” he snapped. “I told you, no com equipment! West, you’re supposed to be watching him!”

“Sorry boss,” West grumbled.

Raine held up his hands in surrender. “Whoa, keep your panty-hoes on Gibbsy,” he said. “I wasn’t looking at Playboy or-”

“Give the computer back to the Rusky,” Gibbs said firmly. Raine saw his hand drift to his sidearm and a flare of rebellion made him want to hold on to the machine just to piss the man off. But causing trouble wasn’t going to help King and Sid so he slowly placed it back on Nadia’s lap.

“Sorry,” he said insincerely. “I just figured that doing something more than taking a cat-nap might be useful.” The dig at Gibbs was
obvious and his face twisted in fury but Nadia cut him off.

Her hands had been running across the keypad at incredible speed, almost a blur, ignoring the exchange and finishing Raine’s search, but in a flourish, she jabbed the return key and announced: “Shakir Adjo.”

“Shakir
Adjo,” King read the name off the computer embedded into the bulkhead opposite him. Bill operated it under the archaeologist’s direction to prevent him from trying to use the internet to call for help.

King’s hunch had paid off. Accessing Argentina’s
Archivo General de la Nación,
he had pulled up the files for settlements in the Patagonian region from the year that, according to the Kernewek Diary, Abubakar had returned to the area. From Emily Hamilton’s descriptions, Abubakar and his wife, Kénos, sounded as if they were head-over-heals in love with one another. Even though their wedding, he could only assume, had been a bizarre conglomeration of Muslim and local customs and therefore most likely not recorded, the strong presence of Christian missionaries in the area would have seen to it that even pagan and heathen births were recorded.

He had then scanned through a list of recorded births from the period he had surmised the Egyptian had returned to Patagonia, from around 1713 onwards. Most of the names were heavily influenced by the predominant Spanish settlers. Except for one. Shakir Adjo.

“It doesn’t list the name of the parents,” Bill said accusingly. “And you said the diary doesn’t mention Abubakar’s second name. How can you be so sure that this is his child?”

Sid now sat beside her boyfriend, allowed to join in with the investigation. Bill’s lackey had cleaned the cut on her cheek and applied a couple of paper stitches. Now, her dark eyes shone with intelligence as she scanned the digitalised version of the archaic birth record. “We may not know his second name,” she replied, “but Shakir Adjo is a popular Arabic name. If you look at the names on the other records, they’re mostly things like José or Hernando, influenced strongly by the Spanish explorers and missionaries to the area which interbred with the natives. There wouldn’t have been very many people of Arabic descent in Patagonia back then. Or now, I imagine.”

“Plus,” King added, “Abubakar hid a clue in his own son’s name.” Bill frowned but Sid’s face lit up with understanding.

“Adjo,” she realised.

“It’s Egyptian,” King told Bill. “It means ‘treasure’.”

“He gave his son a surname which he himself never had,” Sid said. “A map of names-”

“Which leads to the map itself,” King concluded. Despite himself, he felt a twinge of enjoyment, even excitement. “All we have to do is follow that map.”

“Now
we have a name, it should be a relatively simple process to chart the family’s movements,” Nadia said in her usual calculating manner. Her eyes never left the screen as she spoke and her delicate fingers ran over the keyboard with robotic precision, never a key out of place.

She quickly set up a flowchart template on a basic office document, a series of boxes linked with arrows. In the two at the top she typed
‘Abubakar and Kénos’
, linking it to a box below it in which she typed
‘Shakir Adjo, Son, Born 1715.’
From there sprouted off two more branches and she input the name of Shakir’s son and daughter, and then his wife, before branching again to
their
children and so on. A complex diagram literally grew from the tiny acorn of an obscure Egyptian name into the mighty oak of a family tree. The closer to the present the tree came, the more complex the information that was held about Abubakar’s descendants: birth, marriage and death certificates, places of residence, military service records, even digitalised copies of last wills and testaments.

After sometime, Raine peeled his gaze away from the screen and glanced across the hold at Gibbs. His puckered face stared back at him with a menacing glower and, in response, Raine couldn’t help but fire him one of his winning grins. Then he shifted his gaze to the other members of the team. They all looked battered and bruised following the explosive events in Jamaica and the hollowness in their eyes revealed the pain of losing team mates. But these were the best of the best. They had lost comrades before and they would do so again. They betrayed no sense of grief or anger but Raine knew the turmoil of emotions that were churning around inside each of them.

“Hey,” Garcia said from beside him, his accent betraying his Latino roots. “That thing you did with the bike. It was pretty damn cool.”

Raine nodded his appreciation. Such simple praise from men such as these was an honour. It meant that despite whatever rumours
they had heard about the convicted traitor, they had seen him in action now and judged him a worthy warrior. He felt a sudden longing for that sense of camaraderie and shifted his gaze to O’Rourke. The big man remained silent, his eyes meeting his for only a second before flicking away under the bitter scrutiny of Gibbs who then refocused all of his attention on him. Raine could practically feel the malice rolling off of him in waves.

There were only three of them alive now, him, Gibbs and O’Rourke. And despite whatever ruling a military court had made on him, whatever sentence he had received and now the pardon he had been granted, he knew that only those two other men had any right to judge him. And their verdicts scared him. They had been there. They had seen what he had done.

The icy moment was broken when Nadia announced: “I know where the map is.”

“Hernando
Gruber Adjo,” Sid read off the sheet of paper on which King had spent the better half of two hours scribbling down Abubakar’s family tree on. She glanced at the proceeding boxes. “What a mix,” she commented.

Over the subsequent years since Abubakar settled in Patagonia and married an Indian woman, his bloodline had blended into the Hispanic settlers and, shortly after the end of World War Two, even German.

“So this guy,” Bill said, pointing to the computer screen which displayed a forty three year old birth certificate, “is a mixture of Egyptian, Selk’nam Indian, Spanish and German bloodlines?”

“That’s right,” King nodded.

“And you’re sure this is the right guy?”

It was a best guess really. There were, he had worked out, currently six living descendants of Abubakar scattered around Argentina, Chile and Brazil. One had even immigrated to New Zealand.

“As is the custom in most societies, important family heirlooms usually get passed down through generations via the first born son. I’m also figuring that the name ‘Adjo’ corresponds with this. It hasn’t been filtered out through marriage like you might expect can happen when we’re looking so far back in time. So,” he traced his index finger along the line on the family tree which he had highlighted. “I followed the map’s passage from Abubakar down the line of first born sons. Luckily for us, each generation had a male born into it, carrying on the family name. Follow the path and we come to this man. Hernandez Gruber Adjo; the forty three year old owner of a youth hostel in the town of El Chalten, Patagonia, Argentina.”

He looked Bill straight in the face and didn’t dare show any of his misgivings. He and Sid were only alive right now because they were useful. If he let on to the fact that he was making some pretty massive leaps here and it turned out that he was wrong, that the map was passed into another branch of the family generations ago, both he and Sid would be dead.

“That’s where we’ll find Abubakar’s part of the map,” he said firmly.

Bill stared back at him, his gaze calculating. Eventually, he turned away and headed up into the cockpit. Already en route to the Patagonian region, King nevertheless felt a shift in the pit of his stomach as the plane banked towards its new destination.

They were running out of time.

33:

World’s End

Laguna Viedma,

Argentina

The
Black Cat dropped down through the crystal clear Andean air, banking towards the long line of mountains that stretched down the backbone of the South American continent. Running through rainforests and deserts, the incredible line of mountains approached their final destination in the ice fields of Patagonia. Their jagged peaks towered around the black plane as it dropped into them, surrounded on all sides. Winter in the southern hemisphere dropped sheets of pure white snow upon them, broken only by grey outcrops of rock.