Langley led him around the giant vegetation to an L-shaped couch which had been set up in front two floor-to-ceiling corner windows. One looked down on the hub-bub of the United Nations Headquarters complex, tiny dots of people going about their business, moving purposefully from the famous thirty-nine story tall Secretariat tower to the domed General Assembly building and the unimaginatively named ‘Conference’ Building which housed the Security Council Chamber.
King took the pro-offered seat in front of the other window, however, which offered a spectacular view of New York City, the varying heights of the high-rise buildings reflecting in the sunlit waters of the East River.
With one side pushed up against the wall, the L-shaped sofa and the corner windows created a square shape, in the middle of which sat a glass coffee table. A pre-arranged silver tray held a coffee pot, a small jug of cream, a pot of brown sugar, two cups and saucers and a plate of biscuits. Langley poured them both a cup of coffee, added cream and sugar to their liking then settled back into his own couch, casually placing one leg over the other and resting his cup and saucer on his knee.
“Help yourself to the cookies.” Bored of the dreary meals he had been fed since arriving in the U.S., he tucked into the assortment of biscuits with vigour.
Langley laughed lightly before settling down to business. “I mentioned earlier that you are currently one of the most dangerous men in the world.”
Suddenly, King’s appetite abandoned him. He swallowed the lump of food in his mouth and gazed up at the ambassador. “What did you mean by that? I’m not going to hurt anyone.”
“Not knowingly.” He took a sip of his coffee. “Over the last twenty four hours, I’ve given myself a crash-course in everything ‘Benjamin King’. I know about your father’s theories, about the Bouda, the Progenitors. I know about the death of your mother and sister at the hands of General Abuku.”
King felt a flash of anger stab at his heart. Who the hell was this man to invade his privacy like this, to dredge up the dark and painful memories of a childhood lost?
“I’ve read every article you’ve ever written about this Kha’um character and his quest for the Moon Mask.” He took another sip of his coffee, but King’s own went untouched. He focussed on the man in front of him, realising that despite the hospitality, he was still in the midst of an interrogation.
“The Moon Mask,” Langley said again, his own voice holding a degree of reverence. “It has shaped your life, hasn’t it, Ben?” King said nothing. He felt the other man’s eyes bore into him, the cold grey seeming to cut through his outer façade and see into his very soul.
Suddenly, he stood up, balancing his coffee cup as he turned to peer out the window at the sunbathed city. Evening was approaching, a dusky haze settling into the azure sky.
“Tell me, Ben, do you believe in destiny?”
“I’m a scientist. I believe in facts, figures, evidence.”
“Kha’um believed in destiny. You said so yourself, in the paper you wrote three years ago.”
King’s eyes narrowed. “No. Kha’um believed that he could rewrite his destiny. He believed in the Bouda myth about being able to use the mask to travel through time.”
“You don’t believe that?”
King laughed. “Of course I don’t.”
“And you don’t think it was your destiny to find Kha’um’s body inside a rotted ship in the Venezuelan rainforest?” He turned and looked at him, a quizzical expression on his face. “After all, you weren’t looking for him anymore. Quite the opposite, as I’m led to believe by Doctor Siddiqa's debriefing.”
“You’ve spoken to Sid? Where is she-?”
“She says that you went to Venezuela for precisely the opposite reason. To escape your family’s doomed obsession with the Moon Mask, with the Bouda, with the Progenitors.”
“What’s any of this got to do with-?”
“I do believe in destiny, Ben.” Langley returned to his seat, perching on the edge. “Not in any clairvoyant, star-reading nut-job kind of way. I believe that everything happens for a reason. Does that mean there’s some greater force out there pulling our strings?” He shrugged. “Beats me,” he admitted. “But you… your family has sacrificed so much to find the Moon Mask, to prove that the Bouda were real, to prove that an ancient civilisation once sailed this earth long before we ever thought possible. And right when your quest was over, your father dead, your hunt ended, only then did you, quite by chance, quite unexpectedly, find the evidence you and your father were seeking.”
This guy’s got a screw loose. “I’m not sure what you’re saying,” he admitted carefully.
Langley sighed and relaxed back into his seat. He took another sip of coffee, savoured it then swallowed. “I’m saying, Ben, that it is your destiny to find the Moon Mask. All of it. I’m saying that you’re the only man in the world that can do that. And that makes you dangerous. Very dangerous.”
Langley placed his coffee on the table and walked over to his desk. He retrieved a tablet computer which was synced to his P.C. and returned to the couch.
“A science team from NASA, under the jurisdiction of the U.N., was tasked with studying the two masks you retrieved from Xibalba,” he explained, handing King the tablet. On it was displayed a scientific report which, despite the photographs of the Moon Mask and Kha’um’s fake mask, meant very little to him.
“To tell you the truth, I’m no scientist and all their report did was bamboozle me with information. But the general gist of that report is that Doctor Yashina’s original analysis of the mask was slightly in error.”
Dare you to tell her that. “How so?”
“The mask you found in the Labyrinth was composed mostly out of iron. This piece,” he indicated the roughly triangular section encompassing the left-hand jaw, tapering to a point in the nose, “she surmised as being composed out of pure iridium. She was almost right and, given the instruments she had to work with compared to NASA, she really had no way of knowing otherwise.”
“Knowing what?”
“Iridium is a superconductor, which means that its electrical resistance decreases as its temperature decreases,” he regurgitated, in layman’s terms, what the NASA boffins had told him. “Below 0.14 kelvins, iridium has absolutely no resistance. Zero. In a normal conductor, every time an electron collides with an ion, some of the energy carried by the current is converted into heat, which is carried off so that the energy is constantly dissipating. Superconductors work differently, however, in that when the metal is cooled, the current loses no energy as heat, and therefore flows without any energy dissipation.”
King listened intently, recognising some of what the ambassador was saying from Nadia’s own description of Iridium back at the base camp.
“0.14 kelvins, that’s iridium’s ‘critical temperature’, works out at something like minus four hundred and sixty degrees Celsius. Pretty damn cold. It has to be cooled to that level with liquid helium. Once there, a current can theoretically be maintained for over one hundred thousand years with very little degradation and with no further voltage applied. In recent years, so I’m told, scientists have begun trying to understand High Temperature Superconductors. It’s the same idea, only instead of being cooled by liquid helium, they use liquid nitrogen, which I’m told is a lot warmer — about 30 kelvins, or minus two hundred and forty three Celsius.”