Moon Mask (59 page)

So how was Edward Pryce able to purchase two ships and two crews? How was he able to provide the supplies and provisions for numerous trans-Atlantic hunts in pursuit of Kha’um? Or, more importantly, who was funding him from behind the scenes? And why?

King knew that if they could answer these questions they would lead to Pryce’s puppet-handlers. And whoever was pulling his strings, he knew, was also the person who possessed the Bouda’s mask.

But while Sid and Nadia pursued that line of investigation, King had set himself a far more daunting challenge.

Taking into account the missing piece which they could account for, there was still another ‘gap’ in the completed Moon Mask, a slot for the final piece of the ancient jigsaw to fit into.

Only this time, King had no idea where to begin.

There were no clues, no open lines of enquiry. He’d re-read the Kernewek Diary and all the other source material he had accumulated over the years but everything he had so far suggested that the puzzle was complete, that the mask was composed of four parts: the Bouda piece, the Xibalban piece, the Easter Island piece and the Egyptian piece.

So he had started from scratch, searching the internet for any hits that might reveal the final piece’s location. He searched for any references to magical masks, which came back with so many possibilities that he’d never have enough years of his life left to read them all. He’d scoured the UNESCO database and Nadia had set up a ‘spider’ search program which spread throughout the web, searching museum inventories, private collectors and auction houses. So far, he’d read about masks from Egypt to Mexico, Ancient Babylon to Aboriginal Australia. He’d read myths and legends, folktales and purely farcical stories about the magical masks of Solomon, Rameses and Augustus to Genghis Khan, Henry VIII and George Washington, but none of them fit, either physically or metaphorically, with the Moon Mask.

After clicking onto yet another whacko website about a magical mask worn by George Washington, King dropped his head down onto the desk and thumped it three times. It did nothing to help the headache which he hadn’t shaken since crashing off the balcony in the Hand of Freedom building and then being knocked out by West in the mine. His eyes felt like they were going to pop, just about every muscle in his body ached from the exertions of the last week and the nail wound in his forearm and hand still hurt like hell despite the pain killers he’d been prescribed by Culdrose’s medic.

“Ben?” Sid’s voice suddenly startled him. He looked up at her groggily. The brief excitement of their engagement seemed years ago now. He was running on empty. Sid had tried to get him to catch some shut-eye on the two hour flight from Culdrose but he’d spent the whole time re-reading Emily Hamilton’s narrative about Kha’um’s adventures, hoping for some clue. How had Kha’um found the other pieces of the mask in the first place? If
he
couldn’t track them down using the universal network that was the internet, how did an illiterate escaped slave find two pieces and almost a third, three hundred years ago? But all that Emily said about the matter was that Kha’um ‘
placed the mask upon his head and entered a trance-like state
’. When he removed it, severely weakened and disorientated, he claimed to know where the next piece was. But how was that even possible?

“Hi,” he greeted Sid and Nadia. Officially released from custody, Nadia had been reinstated back onto the team. But despite her cooperation, King could see a distance in her that hadn’t been there before. She was angry. She was hurt. Luckily for the rest of them, most of that anger seemed to be directed at her original accuser: Nathan Raine.

They’d been told that Raine had been recovered safely and, after a quick once over in the infirmary, he was now being debriefed somewhere on the base. The British were pretty angry about him destroying a Red Arrow, but King suspected he’d rather be facing a pissed off RAF Air Marshall than Nadia Yashina at this precise moment.

“We think we’ve got something,” Nadia stated crisply.

Sid continued. “What do you know about George Washington?”

King glanced from the image on his computer screen back to the two women. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

United Nations Head Quarters,

New York City, USA

“As
you may or may not know, Mister Ambassador,”
King’s voice came through Langley’s computer speakers,
“national archives from around the world have started digitalising ancient documents- UNESCO, the Smithsonian, the British Museum. Pretty much any official document kept in some dusty warehouse somewhere either is, or will be within the next ten or twenty years, available online. We got lucky on this one though.”

Langley studied the images of the three scientists on his computer screen, the sophisticated video-conferencing technology of the U.N. Headquarters and the NATO base allowing a seamless transmission.

“As you know, back at the U.N. we managed to find the original discharge papers for Edward Pryce-”

“The man who was following Kha’um,” Langley said.

“
Hunting
would be a more apt word, but yeah, that’s him.”

“So how does that help us?”

King explained his logic to Langley, how if they could find Pryce’s handlers, maybe they’d find the Bouda’s mask.
“The discharge papers placed Pryce into the custody of a man named Jonathon Hawk. This man Hawk also made a hefty donation to the asylum at the same time.”

“So he’s the man pulling his strings.”

“Initially, yes,”
Nadia added.

“Initially?”

“Well, we pretty much know Pryce’s story- he chased Kha’um around the world trying to find the Moon Mask and met his end in a dead-end chamber in Sarisariñama,”
Sid added.
“So we did some snooping into the life and times of Jonathon Hawk.”

“And what did you find?”

“Additionally to signing Pryce’s discharge papers, Hawk’s signature also appears in a number of different places. Notably, on the billing information we found for two decommissioned ships purchased from the Spanish navy.”

“So he supplied the ships to Pryce,” Langley said. “But who is this ‘Hawk’ character?”

“Jonathon Hawk, among other things,”
Sid explained,
“was one of the first Freemasons in the New World.”

Langley hadn’t seen that coming. “Freemasons?”

“That’s right.”

“Freemasonry wasn’t firmly established in the Americas until around the 1730’s,”
Nadia said, her usual scathing tone in her voice,
“but as the migration to your ‘land of the free’ spread out of Europe, so too did the various lodges of England, Scotland and Ireland.”

“What do you know about the Freemasons, sir?”
King asked.

“Only what I’ve read in Dan Brown novels,” he joked.

“Well, without boring you too much with the history of Freemasonry, we all know that it is a secret society, or rather, a
‘society with secrets’
as they term it, composed entirely of men.”

“Rich, fat, old men,”
Nadia added testily.

“Not necessarily,”
King interjected.
“In fact, some of the most powerful men in history have been Freemasons.”

“What does any of this have to do with the Moon Mask?” Langley cut in, seeing another scathing response bubbling up from Nadia.

“Well, the trail of the Bouda Mask goes cold once it reaches Jamaica,”
Sid continued.
“Pryce’s ship is boarded by the British, he is sent to an asylum, and Kha’um is sold to Lord Hamilton’s sugar plantation. But, except for the log of a Lieutenant Percival Lowe of the
H.M.S. Swallow
which mentions finding Pryce with the mask, there is no further mention of it.”

“I still don’t see how this all fits together.”

“No one really knows all that much about the origins of the Freemasons,”
King confessed,
“or what goes on in their lodges. Mostly, it is just a bunch of rich, fat old men,”
he glanced at Nadia,
“playing dress up, acting out ancient rites which most people think stem from Egypt. Powerful people belong to their lodges, to be sure, but they are very much a peaceful organisation. It is not a religion ‘
per se
’ but it is a ‘brotherhood’ which uses allegorical symbols and codes in what you could call a ‘
quest for enlightenment
’. But,”
he added quickly, seeing Langley’s mounting irritation,
“there are also lots and lots of myths surrounding them. Most of them are poppycock, but when Sid and Nadia discovered Pryce’s benefactor’s links to the masons, they delved a bit more deeply into some of these myths.”

“One of the main themes that kept popping up was ‘time travel’,”
Sid said.

Langley shifted forward on his chair. In the 1700s, well before they understood anything about tachyons, the main belief surrounding the mask was that, if assembled, it gave its wearer the ability to travel through time.

“They are all crazy conspiracy theories, of course,”
Nadia said,
“posted on the internet by the same people who claim to have seen UFOs and Bigfoot-”

“But all of them surround the mythical ‘33
^rd
Degree’,”
King added;
“The great secret that is revealed only to the highest order of the lodges.”

“Lots of the stories we found claim that the secret of the 33
^rd
Degree is the knowledge of how to see the future, look into the past, or even to travel to them and manipulate events,”
Sid explained.
“One theory even suggested that the origins of the Freemasons stem from time travel. That originally the masons were slaves forced to build the Great Pyramid at Giza but discovered the ability to travel through time and thus escape their masters.”

Langley couldn’t help but smile at the whimsical nature of the stories he was being told. “Surely you’re not suggesting any of this is true?”

“Of course not,”
Nadia said.
“They are nothing more than modern day myths.”

“But, I think we have proven over the last few days that mere myths deserve more than just a cursory glance,”
King argued.
“We’ve proven the existence of the Moon Mask and explained, with science, the myth behind its ‘time travelling’ properties. And I think the same goes here. Myths don’t have to be thousands of years old, Mister Ambassador. And this one is only as old as the Freemasons. But who is to say that it doesn’t stem from the same source? Nadia, back at the U.N., you yourself explained to us that the tachyons emitted from the Moon Mask stimulate a specific part of the brain: the Parietal Lobe. Well, it may shock you to discover that I’ve come across this before while researching the legends of the Moon Mask. Extra Sensory Perception, or ESP-”

Nadia tried to cut him off with a scoff but Langley watched as King barrelled straight through her objections.

“Scientists have been studying ESP for years, looking into how some people claim to perceive future events, predict the card you’re holding in your hand, or even commune with the dead-”

“ESP has not been scientifically proven to exist,”
Nadia argued.
“The legends surrounding the Moon Mask’s fortune-telling properties were the results of the hallucinogenic compounds which you yourself said Kha’um used to enter a trans-like state.”

“But suppose for the moment that the tachyon stimulation of the Parietal Lobe, causing the brain tumours you discovered in both Kha’um and Pryce’s remains, did give them some degree of extra sensory perception,”
King argued.
“It would explain Kha’um’s visions, how by simply wearing part of the mask he found the other pieces. Imhotep, who one way or another came into the possession of another piece of the mask, was considered a visionary. He designed the forerunner to probably the most iconic shaped building in the world, the pyramid. He was a master of science and medicine, far beyond anyone else of his day. He knew to seal the mask inside lead. He even carried out successful brain surgery!”

“You’re kidding,” Langley couldn’t help but say, shocked.

“No, it’s a well document fact,”
King confirmed.
“Having developed a form of ESP from his exposure to tachyons explains how he came about such knowledge.”

“You’re saying that he took this knowledge from his visions of the future?”
Nadia didn’t bother trying to hide the disdain in her voice.

“That’ right. And if the Freemasons had access to the Bouda’s mask then it would explain the time-travelling legends behind the 33
^rd
Degree.”

Langley felt this video conference spiralling into a fierce academic debate and so pulled it back on track. “So you’re saying that this man, Jonathon Hawk,” he concluded, “a prominent member of an early sect of the Freemasons in America, took Pryce’s piece of the mask and then . . . what? Employed Pryce to find the other pieces?”

“Basically, yes,”
King confessed.
“Pryce most likely was himself being used by Hawk and Hawk’s own superiors. I’d guess that they promised him that he could use it to undo the ‘curse’ he’d been inflicted with.”

“Suppose any of this is true,” Langley said. “How does it help us?”

“It opens up a new avenue of enquiry to pursue,”
King replied.
“About eighteen months after Kha’um and Pryce left England for the last time and set sail for ‘Davy Jones Locker,’ Hawk left the Caribbean and never returned. He moved to the Colony of New York where, in later years, he became an outspoken opponent of British rule. He was also instrumental in the formative years of the Grand Lodge of New York, the oldest officially independent Freemason Lodge in America. Hawk died about twenty five years before it was officially founded but we discovered evidence of his interactions with a man named Daniel Coxe, the first of the Provisional Grand Masters during the 1730’s.”

“Where’s this going, Doctor?” Langley was getting agitated again.

King felt the pressure mounting. Langley, an American patriot through-and-through, wasn’t going to like the next part.
“He also had dealings with a tobacco planter from Virginia- a man named Augustine Washington. Whether or not Hawk had any influence over Augustine’s son, George, is unclear, but what is known is that on November 4
^th
, 1752, in his early twenties, George Washington was initiated into Freemasonry. In 1789, following Washington’s victory over Britain in the War of Independence, Robert R. Livingston, the Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of New York, administered America’s first president’s oath of office.”