“Standby,” he muttered under his breath. He watched the Jamaican woman turn her back on them and stalk up the steps to the platform at the rear of the building and then pushed up to his feet. He crouched beside King whose head was being held in Sid’s hand. His eyes fluttered open and levelled angrily on him.
“You never said that was part of the plan,” he growled.
“Well you never told me that you tried to rob her,” he shot back.
“I didn’t try—”
“Um, Nate,” Nadia cut in. Raine glanced at her. She nodded towards the platform and he turned to see Mrs Marley’s enormous form turn back to them. She stalked back, feet thumping loudly on the floorboards, expertly loading what looked very much like an antique musket.
“I think we might have outstayed our welcome.”
“You think?” King groaned.
“This woman is insane,” Nadia commented.
“Get out!” Mrs Marley bellowed at them, pulling out a small bag of gunpowder from between her considerable bosom and stuffing it into the barrel.
“Who the hell keeps bags of gun power down there?” Raine said.
“I told you she’s eccentric,” King reminded them as they helped him clamber to his feet. They all backed away towards the door as the mad woman screamed at them again. She levelled the musket.
“You’re in a lot of trouble, Mrs Marley,” Raine called angrily as they filed, one-by-one, out of the door. This was the endgame. “You better take one last read of that journal, because we’ll be back here to get it real soon. As well as this dump you call a museum!”
“Get out!” Mrs Marley screamed and fired the 18th century musket. It smashed through the window of the inner door just as Raine ducked through and rolled outside. They all scrambled back into the Humvee and moments later Raine sent them bounding down the dirt road, a plume of dust blooming up behind them.
No one said a word until they clawed back onto the tarmac of the highway and headed back towards the township of Port Royal. Nadia broke the silence.
“I feel terrible,” she said from beside him in the passenger seat.
“You feel terrible?” King grumbled. Raine glanced in the rear view mirror. The archaeologist nursed a purple eye but he’d live.
“We practically terrorised that poor old lady with nothing but lies,” the Russian continued. Raine glanced at her, eyes flicking momentarily to the exposed flesh between the V of her blouse. Then he settled on her ordinarily severe face, her blue eyes, set off by locks of brown hair which now hung loose around her neck and shoulders. The more casual look had been agreed upon for their little melodrama in the museum. It was a good look.
Nadia met his gaze. Her concern for the old woman revealed a far greater glimmer of humanity than he gave her credit for.
“She’ll live,” he replied casually, slipping his sunglasses back on and turning back to the windshield. He felt Nadia’s eyes linger on him a moment more. Analysing. Contemplative. Was she searching for his humanity too?
“Besides,” he added. “It was better than Gibbs’ alternative.”
He pushed the Humvee back through the escalating ‘pirate party’ and continued down the highway back toward the mainland and the rendezvous point.
Nadia’s gaze finally peeled away from him. “I just hope that we got what we went for.”
Mrs Marley sat shaking on the floor of her museum where she had collapsed after her confrontation with the attorney. Shards of shattered glass were scattered around the smashed window and the sulphurous, rotten egg smell of gunpowder permeated the air.
Could the attorney be right? she wondered for the thousandth time. Could Doctor King be telling the truth? Was she days, perhaps hours away from losing her home, her business, the legacy of the great people that had come before her?
Eyes gushing tears, all she could do was chuckle at the irony of her thoughts. To lose this place, this ball and chain that had dragged her down because of loyalty which her father had taught her. Loyalty to an oath once taken by a man or a woman who had lived hundreds of years before she had been born.
“Protect our family legacy,” her father had told her every day of her life. “Protect the memory of those that fought for our freedom,” he had said on his death bed. “But most importantly, protect the mask.”
The mask. The goddamn mask.
Her entire life she had been told the story of the Moon Mask. She had been told how she would be the next guardian of the Kernewek Diary. She knew the diary page for page, word for word. She alone in the world knew the secret of the Moon Mask and to honour a vow made centuries ago, she had forgone her own life, her own dreams, to protect it.
And now an end was in sight. If the lawyer told the truth then the responsibility, according to that very same oath, would at last fall to another.
Yet now she found, after a lifetime of resentment, allowing the memories of the past to become tarnished and forgotten, this building, a symbol of freedom, to fall into ruin, she did not wish to give up her charge.
Her ancestors had been strong. Now so would she.
The sun was beginning to set by the time she heaved her considerable bulk up off the floor and lumbered over to the stairs. Slowly she climbed them to the top floor where her tiny bedroom, as cluttered as the rest of the building, lay. She walked up to the filthy double bed upon which she spent most of her days staring at the ceiling contemplating a life that could have been. She heaved and slid it to one side.
In one of the floor boards there was a finger hole and, slotting her index into it, she lifted one board, then two others.
In the compartment within, she lifted out a large chest and, retrieving a heavy metal key from a chain between her drooping breasts, she unlocked it.
“That’s it,” King breathed.
Along with Raine, Sid, Nadia and Gibbs, he huddled around West, the SOG operative assigned to communications. On a XGA Rugged laptop, encased in a chassis made of ballistic armour, designed to survive the extremities of military field work, they watched a live-streaming video being transmitted from the microscopic video camera which Raine had attached to Mrs Marley’s dress when he had pushed her away.
On the screen, Mrs Marley plucked a battered, leather bound book from within the chest and almost reverently opened the cover to the first page.
“There,” King snapped. “Pause it there.” West did so, freezing the image on the elegant scrawl of the first page.
He retrieved another book from his own satchel. The same one he had shown Raine five nights ago on the summit of Sarisariñama.
Emily Hamilton’s diary.
He opened it to the last page, mysteriously cut off three quarters of the way through the book, and held it up against the laptop screen.
The writing was an exact match.
Emily Hamilton and Amelia Kernewek were one and the same.
Just as Raine had planned, frightening the old woman had forced her to take them straight to the Kernewek diary.
And the diary would take them to the Moon Mask.
27:
Ambush
High above the tiny Caribbean island of Jamaica, a full blanket of stars spread as far as the eye could see, reflecting in the mirror — like surface of the waters which sloshed gently against the island’s shores.
But despite the hundreds of people who still partied around the north western beaches, no one noticed the black plane that passed in front of the stars, its light absorbent paint making it all but invisible to the naked eye at night, its stealth technology hiding it from any obtrusive radar scans.