He turned in a full circle, making eye contact with his audience, daring them to object. “They are the team of scientists to send. And, it makes sense for the U.S. Special Forces team which has already become embroiled in this problem to be the ones to accompany them. They’ve already been briefed on the dangers of tachyon emissions, and the potential threat of a tachyon bomb. They’ve already had contact with the Moon Mask, they know what it looks like, the type of environment it might be kept in. And, they’re here. It will take days to assemble a multi-national team of trusted Special Forces operatives from the various countries represented here, in this council. It will take more time for them to butt heads, for the egos of men and women from different nations to decide who is the boss, who is in charge. Believe me, I know. I was one of those men once.”
No one could offer a strong argument to his reasoning and he knew it. Nevertheless, he concluded; “The United Nations will be in charge of this mission. The Special Forces team will report to me, direct, not the White House, not the Pentagon. And, I welcome any oversight from any of my esteemed colleagues here,” he encompassed the entire chamber. “Breathe down my neck, read every report, shadow my every move. So long as you don’t stop me from doing my job, in the best interests of the U.N. and all of our nations, then I and this mission will be an open book to you.”
No one said anything. He could see the entire assembly contemplating his words, mulling them over, seeking any way to pick apart the logic of what he was saying.
But, he knew, there was no way. His logic was sound.
Eventually, the president rose to his feet. “We shall take a vote,” he said.
22:
Reunion
“So, this meteorite crashes into the rainforest near to Sarisariñama,” Sid repeated her boyfriend’s hypothesis, mulling the information over in her head. “The residents of the city of Xibalba — a bright, prospering subterranean city — fashion it into a mask and it becomes a central idol in their faith.”
“That’s right,” King said excitedly.
They stood inside one of two suites in the Secretariat Building which had been morphed into impromptu science labs. While the adjoining room had become a sterile-as-possible environment in which Nadia was studying the human remains of Kha’um and Edward Pryce, this one was a disorganised shambles. Open books littered the sofas and beds, crinkled maps were pinned to the walls, computer screens were open on dozens of different web pages.
It was the result of their manic twelve hour hunt for the remains of the Moon Mask.
After Langley had left King, he had been reunited with Sid and Nadia. He had embraced his girlfriend tightly but, even as her emotions, pent up for the last few days, spilled out, his mind had been focussing on the puzzle of the mask.
He had forced the two women to get to work immediately. While both the Moon Mask and the Fake Mask were stored in a lead-lined concrete bunker beneath U.N. Headquarters, Langley had provided them with all the material they needed. For the first few hours they had scoured through the NASA report, Nadia’s knowledge filling in any blanks and irritably giving King and Sid a crash course in quantum physics.
Then they had split up. Their goal was to locate the missing pieces of the mask which King was convinced Kha’um had already found and assembled for them. Despite having a starting place in mind, to do that, they needed to look at the giant puzzle from every angle.
Nadia got to work on the human remains. Although she had already studied what King suspected to be Pryce’s body, she wanted to conduct a more thorough investigation, particularly on the skull deformity which she had suggested may have been the result of a tumour or some other growth. King remembered her saying as much during their discussions in her lab several nights ago before Professor McKinney had cut her off.
Sid, meanwhile, focussed her attention on the ‘map’ which he and Raine had found with Kha’um. She had scanned a high resolution image of the piece of bone into the computer and was running a program, searching for any correlation between it and any coastline. Without knowing where to start, however, it was like looking for a needle in a haystack.
An awkward distance had settled between the two lovers as they’d worked. Very little had been said, and all that was communicated between them related to the mission. As the hours had passed, that expanse, an expanse that had opened the moment King had stumbled into the chamber and found the Xibalban mask, had only grown.
King himself had devoted his time to reviewing all his and his father’s work on everything to do with the Moon Mask, the Bouda and the Progenitors. The awkwardness between him and his girlfriend drifted from his mind. He could barely contain his excitement as another piece of the thousand year-old puzzle fell into place.
“Then,” Sid continued, “a piece of another, broken mask is brought to the city by one of your… Progenitors. But, instead of the harmless lump of space metal they used to make the first mask, this one emits tachyon radiation. The inhabitants of Xibalba quickly succumb to the deadly effects of it. Most of them perish, their flesh seemingly devoured, giving rise to the local legend of the flesh devouring Evil Spirit that lives on the mountain.”
“But, just as some of our expedition demonstrated a greater resistance to the radiation than others, some of the Xibalbans hung on to life.”
“But their society was changed drastically by the events,” Sid concluded.
“All social order collapsed,” King said, his mind drifting. He could picture the great subterranean city in his mind, a wondrous place where possibly one of the world’s very first civilisations had arisen. But a dark shadow had fallen upon the city.
“The citizens saw the terrible affliction, a plague it must have seemed to them, as the wrath of the gods. There was rioting in the streets, chaos everywhere as the monarchy lost control of its populace. Agriculture on the terraces grew to a halt, starvation set in. Dead bodies littered the streets, poisoning the water supply. Total anarchy reigned.”
Sid studied her boyfriend as his eyes grew distant, staring off into the space behind her, as if he was reliving a memory.
A nightmare.
“It became a hellish place,” he continued. “In an attempt to appease the gods, they fashioned the shard of the mask into a new, complete construction, but the curse continued. For years, the survivors struggled to survive, the radiation, now locked in the temple we found the mask in, slowly killing them. To try and maintain some sense of order, the Lords of Xibalba became a brutal entity, a state controlled by fear and brutality. They came to worship the mask, and even the death it brought them, sacrificing their own survivors. Sometime before the end, a few of them escaped, fleeing west towards the Andes, and north into Central America where their tales of their cursed city became ingrained in the local mythology.”
He looked at the battered photograph of the Gambian cave paintings he had taken many years ago which was now pinned to a cork-board.
“Just as the Bouda were the first great civilisation of Africa,” he realised, “the Xibalbans were the first of the Americas. The Progenitors spread to them both, teaching them agriculture, metal and stone-work. Civilisation. When the Xibalbans fled their doomed city, they took with them not just legends of the Underworld, but knowledge of how to build vast pyramids, temples and cities out of stone; how to terrace mountainsides to be used for farming; how to construct networks of sophisticated irrigation canals.”
He thought again about the Progenitors. They still drifted at the back of King’s mind as little more than a ghost, merely a theory that his father had developed to explain the similarities in world mythology. Hinted at in cultures both modern and extinct from countries across the globe, a unified image of a vast civilising race had begun to identify itself in Reginald King’s research.