Raine’s voice was quiet, gentle. More sincere than King had ever heard it. “I do know what you’re going through,” he said again. “I know what it’s like to…” His voice cracked. Raw with emotion. “To lose the woman you love… to be betrayed by those closest to you.” Tears finally swelled in his eyes, memories he had long fought to suppress resurfacing. Haunting him again. As they had done for three and a half years.
“And I also know that the pain and the anger that you’re feeling right now, it isn’t going to go away like some people will tell you. But I also know that Sid—” his voice broke again. He felt her loss too. He had forced King beneath an overhang in the underwater monument when he saw Sid’s body roll into the water. The image of her beautiful form, her beautiful soul, being torn apart piece by piece, was one more demon he would carry until his death.
“Sid wouldn’t want you to give up,” he said firmly, forcing control of his emotions. “She’d want you to live Ben. Live!” He looked the other man in the eyes. There was a bond there now. A bond of camaraderie. Of friendship. Of brotherhood. “I’m not leaving you,” he said again. “So if you want to just float here until we can’t take it anymore and we sink below the waves and drown, then fine.” He pulled the dump on his vest and the air rushed out, dropping him lower in the water. He kicked but he too felt exhausted and he began to sink.
“Do you know how many times I’ve held a gun against my head?” he asked, surprising even himself with his honesty. “In my mouth? You’re doing me a favour actually. Helping me to do what I’m too big a coward to do by myself.”
“What are you doing, Nate?” King asked weakly.
“I’m not leaving you,” Raine answered. He stopped kicking. Stopped struggling. He leaned his head back. Closed his eyes. Felt the whimpering heat of the setting sun lick his face. The sky was as red as the bloodied water had been thirty minutes before.
He let his natural buoyancy keep him a float for a few moments. There was something soothing, peaceful even about the feeling of his body sinking beneath the waves. Maybe his demons wouldn’t find him there, lost in the blue abyss for the rest of eternity. It was more than he deserved after all.
Just as the water began to slide up over his mouth and then his nose, he felt King grasp him and hold him afloat. Slightly disappointed, he slowly opened his eyes and studied his friend. No more words were needed. Instead, they both nodded their agreement, their silent pact to continue to struggle, to live. Then he re-inflated his vest, took hold of King again and began to kick towards the shore.
The sun had almost completely set now, casting the sky a twilight purple, turning the water to silky velvet. But then, silhouetted against the dying, blood-red rays, a plane came into view. It sank through the sky towards them, the buzz of its propellers growing louder, until its jet-black prow struck the waves and sent up a plume of froth. The swell from the touch-down tossed Raine and King about like flotsam and jetsam but despite their distress they both recognised the vessel instantly.
The black Catalina Flying Boat.
For an instant they began paddling faster through the water towards shore but the black prow came towards them, slicing cleanly through the waves. Knowing escape was futile, Raine and King stopped swimming and bobbed on the swell, looking up as the Black Cat came alongside them and its side door opened.
Former Sergeant Bill Willis crouched in the opening, dressed in black. He leaned forward and extended a hand. “Here,” he called to them. “Take my hand.”
“No chance!” Raine shot back. “We’re not going anywhere with you!”
“Nathan, stop being a child and get out of the shark infested waters.”
It wasn’t Bill who had spoken.
A second figure came into view behind him.
Alexander Langley.
55:
The Watchers
“Who the hell are you?” Raine’s demand hung in the cabin of the Black Cat as it powered through the night sky, almost invisible.
Having dried off and changed into clean, dry clothes, he and King sat opposite Langley and Bill, nursing warm cups of coffee and waiting for some answers.
A seething anger simmered in his veins, a sense of betrayal which far surpassed that of Gibbs and even Nadia. He had been betrayed before, but never three times in one afternoon! Gibbs’ betrayal was neither here nor there. He’d known the man’s hatred for him, understood it even. Nadia’s betrayal stung like an open wound. He had been foolish enough to drop his guard, to let her get close to him in a way that went beyond the physicality of mere sex. For a moment, just a moment, he had begun to harbour feelings towards her.
Idiot! He cursed himself.
But Langley? Never in a million years would he have predicted his former mentor’s treachery. The man had helped him to escape from ‘The Castle’ three years ago. He had voluntarily taken an agonising bullet to the knee, almost crippling him. His loyalty to him had certainly crippled his career in the CIA. So how did a man like that end up being involved with a bunch of mercenaries who had left a trail of death and destruction in their wake?
“Years ago, when I was still in the SOG, still your C.O. in fact,” Langley began, fixing Raine with his dark eyes, “I was approached by a group of men and women who claimed to represent the ‘interests of humanity’.”
“Oh please,” Raine snarled, earning an angry look from Bill. King for his part kept quiet, his face twitching with barely suppressed emotion, his mind reeling from all that had happened. Yet Raine knew he was focussed on the conversation, hanging on Langley’s every word.
“The group assigns themselves no specific name or title,” Langley continued over the drone of the plane’s engines, “however, society itself has assigned it with numerous ones over the years. Probably the most famous is the Knights Templar.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Langley continued, unperturbed by his scepticism. “In fact, the origins of the group stem back much further, back to the earliest origins of Ancient Egypt. I’m sure you’ve heard of the Urshu, Ben?”
King glanced up, eyes sharp yet distant at the same time; red raw, watery with tears yet burning with anger. “The ‘Watchers’,” he said easily, without showing any strain of plucking the obscure information from his memory. “In Egyptian mythology, they were a group of… ‘demigods’, I guess you could say. They were intermediaries between the first of the Egyptian gods, the Neteru, and humankind. After what the Egyptians called Zep Tepi, the First Time, the Neteru ascended from earth to heaven but the Urshu remained on the corporeal plane as guardians of the knowledge of the gods. The idea was most likely worked into the ethos of the priesthood and even the king, who took up the Urshu’s job as an intermediary between the gods and mankind. It’s pretty much the origins of ‘divine right’.”
“They were so much more than just the guardians of knowledge, Ben,” Langley explained. “They were the guardians of mankind, the protectors of civilisation. Long before the first king of Egypt was even born, the Urshu took a vow to protect the world from evil, a vow and a role which has been carried forward from one incarnation to the next. The Urshu of Egypt, Eleusians of Greece, the Knights Templar, the Freemasons, the Illuminati. Many groups, like the masons, have branched off from the original core group, forgotten about its existence. Others faded in the sands of time. Others exist now only in popular culture, Lara Croft video games and Dan Brown novels. Some, like the Illuminati, have been demonised and villainised. But that has all been a carefully executed plan. To give the world a snippet of truth so that they blind themselves to the reality.”