“Negative,” Raine cut him off. “We need to get to Patagonia. Now.”
Gibbs snarled at him. “Why the hell—”
“Because that’s where Benny and Sid are heading… to find a piece of the map.” He turned and faced Gibbs and he could see the soldier rustling for a fight.
“I want to know everything that woman told you,” he demanded.
“No problem,” Raine replied, buckling into a seat next to Nadia. “But we can waste time talking about it now, or I can explain it to you en route.” He shot Gibbs a winning grin, knowing it would annoy the hell out of him. “Trust me, Gibbsy.”
Gibbs snorted derisively and turned to issue the orders to Lake in the cockpit. Seconds later, the chopper lifted off and shuddered higher. Raine turned to peer down at the receding form of Mrs Marley. Strangely, he felt a connection to the obese Jamaican woman. It was as though she had looked into the darkest depths of his troubled soul and still found something in there worthy of her charge.
The rising sun finally broke the horizon and streamers of golden light rushed across the Caribbean, hitting the white sandy beaches, gliding through the palm trees and bouncing off the half-demolished walls of the Hand of Freedom building.
“Wait!” he shouted suddenly, urgently. When the chopper continued to climb, he hastily unbuckled his seat and banged on Lake’s shoulder. “Wait a second!” he ordered.
The woman threw the chopper into a hover, high enough above the Hand of Freedom building to see it’s strangely designed ‘hand-shape’ in its entirety. The birds-eye-view allowed something which had been nagging him to click into place. A sly smile creased his face.
He knew where Emily Hamilton’s piece of the map was.
32:
Map of Names
King was enthralled.
Lost within the pages of the Kernewek Diary he had almost forgotten the situation that he and Sid were in. It read almost like a novel, the scrawling handwriting difficult to read, yet King had long ago mastered the swirls, loops and whoops of the intricate script. The handwriting, as he had always expected, was identical to that within the pages of Emily Hamilton’s diary which he had read dozens of times, searching for clues as to her, and Kha’um’s fate.
Now, he had in his hand the greatest sequel of all time. This was no dreary monologue about a young woman’s worldly desires, dreams and fears like the Hamilton diary. This was a rip roaring adventure, picking up almost instantly from the moment that its predecessor stopped. It told of Edward Pryce’s terrifying attack on her family home and Kha’um’s dramatic rescue of the slaves, leading them to freedom aboard their commandeered ship. It narrated the events of the subsequent months, of Kha’um’s heroic struggle to free others who had fallen into the world of slavery. It was all just as he had imagined. The Kernewek Diary would rewrite the history of slavery, introducing a new historical hero, an outlaw to rival Zorro or Robin Hood, into the tapestry of Caribbean folklore.
He had been right all along. If only that stupid fat Jamaican woman had let him have access to this small leather bound book years ago. He could have proven his and his father’s theory. He could have proven to the world the existence of the Moon Mask.
A flash of General Abuku’s face shot him back down to earth. Such vindication of the mask’s existence was exactly what he had wanted. It was what his mother and sister had died for. In that despot’s hands, the mere existence of the Moon Mask would have costs tens of thousands of lives. For so many years, King’s father had forced them to work in near secrecy for fear of the Himmler of Africa. It wasn’t until his assassination almost four years ago that the King’s felt they could publish their research. King remembered the feeling of triumph upon hearing about the death of his mother and sister’s murderer. Yet a strange emptiness had also taken hold. It was over. His family’s memory could be laid to rest, their murderer brought to justice at the hands of some unknown assassin. The Moon Mask no longer needed to be protected.
He had been grossly mistaken.
He glanced up at Bill, realising that the veteran soldier’s eyes had barely left him in the hours that they had been flying.
They were heading south, based on his initial skim reading of the diary. In a profession which involved trudging through giant volumes of ancient text, often in search of only the most insignificant fragment, he had become adept at skim reading and had quickly identified Patagonia as their general destination. Now he scoured the diary in more detail, searching for clues to pinpoint the location of Abubakar’s map.
And once he found it, he knew, Bill would need only Emily Hamilton’s piece to find the mask. But for what purpose? To sell to Islamic terrorists? The Russians? The Chinese?
Either way, he had opened Pandora’s Box. The secret that Mrs Marley’s ancestors had kept for so long was about to consume the world.
While Emily Hamilton, or Mrs Marley for that matter, knew nothing of tachyon bombs, they had both clearly realised the danger the Moon Mask presented. Even early on in the diary King picked up an air of menace in the tone of the writer whenever the Moon Mask was mentioned. An obsession, Emily had called it: ‘One which has already dragged Edward Pryce into the darkest pits of hell and back again. An obsession which has taken hold of Kha’um also.’
Pryce. Kha’um. Abuku. His mother, his sister and eventually his father. The Moon Mask had, one way or another, claimed them all.
He glanced at Sid. She still sat, her head lolled at an awkward angle as she dozed fitfully, tied to her seat. She looked so beautiful, her mocha skin smooth and creamy, her black hair falling in ringlets around her face, hiding the welt that had formed from where she had been struck by one of Bill’s men.
He wouldn’t let the mask claim her as a victim too. One way or another, he would get her out of this calamity he had dragged her into. Then he would pull the ring from his pocket, get down on one knee and—
“Tick-tock, Ben.”
Bill’s voice suddenly shocked him back into the moment. The rugged mercenary grinned nastily at him, following his gaze across to Sid.
“She’s quite lovely, isn’t she,” he said. The sudden voices made Sid stir and she looked around at her surroundings, confused for a moment before remembering where she was. The other mercenary sat opposite her, eyeing her body lecherously.
King felt a surge of anger pass through him. For an insane second he considered tackling both the soldiers. There were only these two and the pilot now. As his hands had been freed so that he could read the diary, maybe he could overpower them, take control of the plane.
“So, what have you got?” Bill asked. The interior of the old flying boat had been soundproofed so that the noise of the propellers was little more than a muted rumble. Outside the windows he could see nothing but clouds but he knew that they were cutting south-west across the immense bulk of South America.
Forgetting all his ideas of heroism, he closed the diary and sighed. “There’s nothing more in here,” he admitted truthfully. “Nothing else that indicates where the two pieces of the map are.”
“Well, that is a shame, Ben,” Bill said, rising to his feet. Very slowly, he drew a fierce looking knife out of its sheath. One edge glistened in the cabin’s lights, razor sharp. The other edge was jagged like a shark’s jaw.
“If there’s nothing more you can offer me to help, then I guess I won’t be needing any leverage against you anymore.”
He stepped up to Sid who tried to squirm away but he grabbed her face roughly between his calloused palms and laid the edge of the blade against her left cheek.