The United Nations had always shone as mankind’s brightest beacon of international hope, a place where all nations could come together for the betterment, and the protection, of humankind. But now both China and Russia had shown their hands. They had no interest in international security, only in their own goals.
Sergei’s accusation still echoed in his mind. “Think about it, Alex. How do you think your government even knew about the tachyon radiation? They sent a team to Venezuela to retrieve the mask long before it even came to our attention.”
How had the Pentagon known about tachyon radiation? How had U.S. doctors diagnosed the German archaeologist, Karen Weingarten, as suffering from tachyon radiation poisoning if it was only theoretical? The Russians had experimented on it, and he presumed so had the Chinese for them to have known to send a team to the Amazon. But following that train of thought likewise led him onto the only logical conclusion: the United States had also been experimenting with tachyons. And if that was true, were their motives equally as selfish as Russia and China’s?
The shrill ring of the phone on his desk startled him from his dark thoughts. He grasped the receiver. “Yes?”
The voice of his aide replied. “Mister Ambassador, we just got word that the package has been recovered.” She said the words in such a simple, casual manner, totally oblivious to the danger that the ancient mask posed to the modern world.
He didn’t know whether he was relieved or not. “Thank you, Kelly,” he said half-heartedly. He went to reset the receiver in its cradle then snatched it back to his ear. “Kelly.” She was still there. “Will you get me the name and contact details of the doctor at John Hopkins who diagnosed Karen Weingarten from the UNESCO Sarisariñama Expedition? Thank you.” Then he hung up the receiver and returned to his dark and troublesome thoughts.
The low afternoon sun glared through the window in the office space Benjamin King had been allocated upon arriving at the NATO base two hours earlier, but he ignored it and his own fatigue as he scrolled through page after page of digitalised documents on the internet. Spread across the desk around him were numerous books which he had managed to commandeer from the base’s library but so far they had revealed nothing about the two missing pieces of the Moon Mask.
He had been expecting one to be missing. Throughout the Kernewek Diary, there had been no mention about Kha’um recovering the mask originally stolen from the Bouda by Edward Pryce. On his adventures through Chile and then Cornwall, he had been positive that the Bouda mask wouldn’t be with the pieces Kha’um had gathered from his own adventures three hundred years ago. But he had been certain that all the other pieces would be there — the Egyptian mask, the Easter Island mask, and ultimately the final missing piece which King himself had found — the Xibalba mask.
Tracking down the Bouda mask, he knew, was only a matter of time. Sid and Nadia were currently in an adjoining office trying to piece together the life of Edward Pryce. In all of her writings, Emily Hamilton had described Kha’um’s nemesis as little more than ‘a devil which dogged our trail every step of the way’. But there was more to Pryce than some faceless villain, King knew. He was a man obsessed with reuniting all the pieces of the Moon Mask in the misguided belief that he could use it to travel back in time and right the wrong he felt had been done to him. King already knew that he had been declared insane and locked away in an asylum. Yet all of a sudden he reappeared in Kha’um’s life, not only released from his asylum but suddenly in command of a ship and a crew. And then, after losing his ship to Kha’um, he had miraculously found another. Yet, the records indicated that all his assets had been frozen when he had been declared insane, his family’s wealth, built on the trading of African slaves, absorbed by the government of the time.
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.