Moon Mask

by James Richardson

  Raine had an urge to tell her all that he knew, to complete the unfinished story for her. He knew how the story of Kha’um and the Hand of Freedom had ended, at least to a point. He had seen ‘Davy Jones Locker’. He had seen the mortal remains of Edward Pryce and the Black Death himself.

  Mrs Marley drew in a deep breath. She was not melancholy, like he might have expected. Instead, it seemed that she was relishing the opportunity to pass the burden of her family secret onto someone else.

  “Emily took her fortune– some of the wealth they hadn’t buried on their Treasure Island– and changed her identity, founding this museum and starting a campaign for the freedom of slaves. She took a Negro husband- causing quite a stir- and died happy, asking her children only one thing. That they protect the location of the two pieces of the Moon Mask she had helped to find. For they hid a menace, she believed, a terror waiting to be unleashed upon the world. And, as I say, I have honestly never found her piece of the treasure map. But,” she added, “she does say that Abubakar returned to that land of frozen sand which he loved so much. And that’s probably where his map is. Somewhere in Patagonia.”

  Raine grimaced. “Bit of a wide area to search,” he said.

  Mrs Marley shrugged. “It’s the best I can do. If you want the map, you’ll have to find a way to narrow it down.”

  Raine considered that for a moment. Patagonia was an immense area, covering over six hundred thousand miles of the southern-most region of South America. To narrow down Abubakar’s destination would be like searching for a needle in a haystack. Not to mention that there were no guarantees that the region was his final destination. For all he knew, the Egyptian might have diverted his travels, or perished, along with the map, en route.

  Nevertheless, he knew that King would be reading the diary right now. He would find a way to narrow down the search and, with Sid used as leverage, he’d have little choice but to reveal that information to his captors.

  If King worked it out, then he’d have to as well.

  He heard the distant whump of helicopter blades growing louder and turned to look across at the activity by the harbour front. One of the Jamaican Coastguard choppers had landed briefly but had now taken to the air again and turned towards the ruined museum. No doubt, by order of the U.N. Security Council, it had been lent to Gibbs and the survivors of his team.

  It would take only seconds to travel the short distance.

  “Mrs Marley,” Raine said urgently, shifting his intense eyes back to her. “We’re out of time. Is there anything else you can tell me? Anything at all?”

  The old woman laughed. It wasn’t the same bitter cackle of before but carried with it a certain weariness. “You’re out of time?” she repeated as the chopper, a Bell 407, swung into a hover over the rooftop. A spear of light shot down and the aircraft’s side door slid open. Raine didn’t have to look to know that at least a couple of assault rifles were trained on his back.

  “Stay where you are,” Gibbs’ voice boomed, amplified by the chopper’s speakers. “Do not move or we will shoot you!”

  Raine had no intention of moving. He kept his eyes fixed on the Jamaican, straining to hear above the din as the helicopter lowered to the rooftop. His hair and clothes whipped wildly around him in the chopper’s backwash.

  “There’s never enough time, is there, Mister Raine,” Mrs Marley said to him, seemingly oblivious to the chopper. “It’s a predator. It stalks us, hunts us our entire lives. And yet, complain as we do about there not being enough hours in the day, we do nothing but waste it! Until we run out of it. Until we hold a dying lover in our arms, wishing forever that we could turn back the clock, say what we didn’t say, do what we didn’t do.” Raine felt a pang of pain shoot through him as the old woman’s words dredged up bitter memories of a life wasted.

  “But the Moon Mask can change all that,” she continued, both of them oblivious to the soldiers pouring out of the chopper and running towards them. The wind whirled like a hurricane, the noise thundered through his skull, but all Raine could focus on was the old woman’s words.

  “Kha’um believed that the Moon Mask could control time,” she told him. “If he could harness its power, he could go back and save his wife and his son. But that would have given him the power over life and death and who was he to say who lived and who died, or even who does or does not exist! To control the Moon Mask is to control the power of god, and no man should have that power. You hear me, mon?” she reached up and grasped a chubby hand onto his shoulder.

  “Hell, Raine!” Gibbs gasped as he halted beside him. Garcia and West stopped behind him, guns pointed at his head. “What the hell did you do to her?”

  But Mrs Marley ignored the blood on her brightly coloured dress and even the gun totting soldiers around her. She stared fiercely at Raine, the very man who had tortured her only moments ago.

  “That is why my family was entrusted to protect the mask,” she concluded. “And now, I pass that burden to you. Promise me, Mister Raine. Promise me that you’ll let no man take the power of god.”

  He nodded weakly, stunned by her words. In some ways it seemed preposterous. Did she truly believe the legend about the mask’s abilities? Either way, her words were true. The power of the Moon Mask, the power of a tachyon bomb, was comparable to the power of god and she was right. No one man, nor nation, should control it.

  “Promise me!” she demanded.

  “I promise,” he said, and then she released him and lay back, gazing towards the east where the sun began to rise. She chuckled softly to herself.

  “A new day,” she whispered.

  Raine stood and turned towards the waiting chopper. Garcia and West kept their weapons on him but held their fire.

  “This woman needs medical attention,” he told Gibbs.

  “I’ll have an ambulance pick her up,” he replied tersely as they clambered into the belly of the waiting helicopter, hovering a meter above the weakened rooftop. “We’re heading to a U.S. Navy vessel to-”

  “Negative,” Raine cut him off. “We need to get to Patagonia. Now.”

  Gibbs snarled at him. “Why the hell-”

  “Because that’s where Benny and Sid are heading . . . to find a piece of the map.” He turned and faced Gibbs and he could see the soldier rustling for a fight.

  “I want to know everything that woman told you,” he demanded.

  “No problem,” Raine replied, buckling into a seat next to Nadia. “But we can waste time talking about it now, or I can explain it to you en route.” He shot Gibbs a winning grin, knowing it would annoy the hell out of him. “Trust me, Gibbsy.”

  Gibbs snorted derisively and turned to issue the orders to Lake in the cockpit. Seconds later, the chopper lifted off and shuddered higher. Raine turned to peer down at the receding form of Mrs Marley. Strangely, he felt a connection to the obese Jamaican woman. It was as though she had looked into the darkest depths of his troubled soul and still found something in there worthy of her charge.

  The rising sun finally broke the horizon and streamers of golden light rushed across the Caribbean, hitting the white sandy beaches, gliding through the palm trees and bouncing off the half-demolished walls of the Hand of Freedom building.

  “Wait!” he shouted suddenly, urgently. When the chopper continued to climb, he hastily unbuckled his seat and banged on Lake’s shoulder. “Wait a second!” he ordered.

  The woman threw the chopper into a hover, high enough above the Hand of Freedom building to see it’s strangely designed ‘hand-shape’ in its entirety. The birds-eye-view allowed something which had been nagging him to click into place. A sly smile creased his face.

  He knew where Emily Hamilton’s piece of the map was.

  32:

  Map of Names

  Airborne above South America

  King was enthralled.

  Lost within the pages of the Kernewek Diary he had almost forgotten the situation that he and Sid wer
e in. It read almost like a novel, the scrawling handwriting difficult to read, yet King had long ago mastered the swirls, loops and whoops of the intricate script. The handwriting, as he had always expected, was identical to that within the pages of Emily Hamilton’s diary which he had read dozens of times, searching for clues as to her, and Kha’um’s fate.

  Now, he had in his hand the greatest sequel of all time. This was no dreary monologue about a young woman’s worldly desires, dreams and fears like the Hamilton diary. This was a rip roaring adventure, picking up almost instantly from the moment that its predecessor stopped. It told of Edward Pryce’s terrifying attack on her family home and Kha’um’s dramatic rescue of the slaves, leading them to freedom aboard their commandeered ship. It narrated the events of the subsequent months, of Kha’um’s heroic struggle to free others who had fallen into the world of slavery. It was all just as he had imagined. The Kernewek Diary would rewrite the history of slavery, introducing a new historical hero, an outlaw to rival Zorro or Robin Hood, into the tapestry of Caribbean folklore.

  He had been right all along. If only that stupid fat Jamaican woman had let him have access to this small leather bound book years ago. He could have proven his and his father’s theory. He could have proven to the world the existence of the Moon Mask.

  A flash of General Abuku’s face shot him back down to earth. Such vindication of the mask’s existence was exactly what he had wanted. It was what his mother and sister had died for. In that despot’s hands, the mere existence of the Moon Mask would have costs tens of thousands of lives. For so many years, King’s father had forced them to work in near secrecy for fear of the Himmler of Africa. It wasn’t until his assassination almost four years ago that the King’s felt they could publish their research. King remembered the feeling of triumph upon hearing about the death of his mother and sister’s murderer. Yet a strange emptiness had also taken hold. It was over. His family’s memory could be laid to rest, their murderer brought to justice at the hands of some unknown assassin. The Moon Mask no longer needed to be protected.

  He had been grossly mistaken.

  He glanced up at Bill, realising that the veteran soldier’s eyes had barely left him in the hours that they had been flying.

  They were heading south, based on his initial skim reading of the diary. In a profession which involved trudging through giant volumes of ancient text, often in search of only the most insignificant fragment, he had become adept at skim reading and had quickly identified Patagonia as their general destination. Now he scoured the diary in more detail, searching for clues to pinpoint the location of Abubakar’s map.

  And once he found it, he knew, Bill would need only Emily Hamilton’s piece to find the mask. But for what purpose? To sell to Islamic terrorists? The Russians? The Chinese?

  Either way, he had opened Pandora’s Box. The secret that Mrs Marley’s ancestors had kept for so long was about to consume the world.

  While Emily Hamilton, or Mrs Marley for that matter, knew nothing of tachyon bombs, they had both clearly realised the danger the Moon Mask presented. Even early on in the diary King picked up an air of menace in the tone of the writer whenever the Moon Mask was mentioned. An obsession, Emily had called it: ‘One which has already dragged Edward Pryce into the darkest pits of hell and back again. An obsession which has taken hold of Kha’um also.’

  Pryce. Kha’um. Abuku. His mother, his sister and eventually his father. The Moon Mask had, one way or another, claimed them all.

  He glanced at Sid. She still sat, her head lolled at an awkward angle as she dozed fitfully, tied to her seat. She looked so beautiful, her mocha skin smooth and creamy, her black hair falling in ringlets around her face, hiding the welt that had formed from where she had been struck by one of Bill’s men.

  He wouldn’t let the mask claim her as a victim too. One way or another, he would get her out of this calamity he had dragged her into. Then he would pull the ring from his pocket, get down on one knee and-

  “Tick-tock, Ben.”

  Bill’s voice suddenly shocked him back into the moment. The rugged mercenary grinned nastily at him, following his gaze across to Sid.

  “She’s quite lovely, isn’t she,” he said. The sudden voices made Sid stir and she looked around at her surroundings, confused for a moment before remembering where she was. The other mercenary sat opposite her, eyeing her body lecherously.

  King felt a surge of anger pass through him. For an insane second he considered tackling both the soldiers. There were only these two and the pilot now. As his hands had been freed so that he could read the diary, maybe he could overpower them, take control of the plane.

  “So, what have you got?” Bill asked. The interior of the old flying boat had been soundproofed so that the noise of the propellers was little more than a muted rumble. Outside the windows he could see nothing but clouds but he knew that they were cutting south-west across the immense bulk of South America.

  Forgetting all his ideas of heroism, he closed the diary and sighed. “There’s nothing more in here,” he admitted truthfully. “Nothing else that indicates where the two pieces of the map are.”

  “Well, that is a shame, Ben,” Bill said, rising to his feet. Very slowly, he drew a fierce looking knife out of its sheath. One edge glistened in the cabin’s lights, razor sharp. The other edge was jagged like a shark’s jaw.

  “If there’s nothing more you can offer me to help, then I guess I won’t be needing any leverage against you anymore.”

  He stepped up to Sid who tried to squirm away but he grabbed her face roughly between his calloused palms and laid the edge of the blade against her left cheek.

  “No!” King shouted at him. He pushed out of his seat but, with his feet still tied, all he succeeded in doing was falling forward, reaching desperately towards his girlfriend.

  “I can find the map! I can find it! I know how to find it!” he roared at the mercenary. His heart thundered inside his rib cage as he watched the knife lightly slice across Sid’s cheek, drawing a slither of blood. She squealed at the pain but could not move away.

  “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 poin
t 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.