“I thought you were dead,” King and Sid said to one another before kissing. But King pulled away from the kiss.
“Before anything else happens,” he said hurriedly, pulling something desperately from his pocket as though his life depended on it. He flipped open the ring box that had travelled with him through Venezuela, New York, Jamaica and Argentina. In all those places he had been shot at, kidnapped, almost blown up, attacked by crocodiles and anacondas, leapt from waterfalls and plummeted into bottomless pits, yet only now did he find the courage to utter four simple words.
“Will you marry me?”
Sid’s face lit up and, despite the tenseness of the situation and the usual harshness of Gibbs, the coldness of Nadia and the coolness of Raine, all three spectators broke into wide grins as she replied: “Of course I will!” They kissed again, hungrily and passionately.
Raine felt a tremendous swell of joy for his two friends. He tried to shrug off the memories of his own lost love and found his eyes drifting towards Nadia. Whether she had meant to or not, her eyes had also drifted towards him. An almost guilty expression crossed her face, self-recrimination at being caught, but instead of flicking her eyes away, her full lips curved into slight smile.
“Alright people, this isn’t the love boat,” Gibbs snapped, all business again, his broad Texan accent tearing the warmth of the moment apart. “Those maniacs are still out there and they’re still after the mask. We need to find it. Your doe-eyed canoodling can wait til later. O’Rourke, report,” he snapped into his radio.
“Come on, lover boy,” Raine said, scrambling past Gibbs to take King’s arm and guide him to a bench where Nadia was busy opening a first aid kit. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”
King reluctantly released his new fiancée yet despite all he had just been through, he couldn’t wipe the world’s biggest grin off his face. He allowed Raine and Nadia to gently get to work on his injuries.
“There’s no sign of any mercs, Boss,” O’Rourke replied.
Gibbs moved into the cockpit but his voice could still be heard. “Lake, anything on infrared?”
“No sir,” she replied. “And there’s no sign of the stealth plane either.”
“Damn,” King muttered, trying his best to ignore the fact that he still had two nails protruding from his body. With the adrenaline wearing off, they were starting to hurt like hell. “He got away with the map.”
“No,” Sid corrected. Raine noticed a certain degree of reluctance in her face, as though revealing what she was about to could ruin the happiness she had just found. The quest for the mask was far from over, but had King overcome his obsession?
Before taking a seat next to her fiancée, she pulled a golden dagger out of her waistband and presented it like a prize to King. “These guys chased him off before he could retrieve it,” she explained.
King took the dagger in his left hand and turned it over, studying it fully for the first time. He noticed again the worn leather of the handle, the hieroglyphs and the precious stones, most striking of which was a large red gem in the centre of the hilt, but he still wasn’t sure how it could be a map.
Then he noticed something which seemed out of place. Twisting in a seemingly random pattern down the length of the golden blade was a crude engraving, a single line which stretched in what he could only describe as a ‘squiggle’ down the metal. Unlike the fine craftsmanship of the rest of the knife, the line was ugly and rough. Certainly like nothing he had seen on a ceremonial Egyptian weapon before.
A vibration in the deck indicated that the Osprey was moving, its tilt-rotors shifting position to pull the plane out of the hover it had maintained to proceed to the rendezvous with O’Rourke.
“I don’t see what good it’s going to do us though,” Sid frowned, looking at the ornate knife, wondering who it had once belonged to. Nadia paused in her administrations to glance at it also.
“Kha’um’s map will lead us around the coastline of an unknown island,” King told them what he had learned from the Kernewek Diary, unaware that Mrs Marley had already told Raine. “This,” he held up the dagger, “must lead us through the system of caves to where they stashed the treasure. But we still need to figure out where Emily’s piece of the map is. And I have no idea where to start looking,” he admitted.
Raine grinned triumphantly at him. “Well, smarty-pants,” he said, “look no further. Miss Yashina,” he said to Nadia as she finished wrapping King’s hand, the nail now removed and the wound coated in antiseptic ointment. “If you please.”
Not playing up to Raine’s theatrics, Nadia nevertheless flipped open the laptop screen to display an image of an area of land easily identifiable to an Englishman.
“Cornwall?” King asked. Then it all clicked into place and he slapped his forehead, instantly regretting the action as it sent new bolts of pain through his hand, his arm and his head. “Of course!”
“Of course… what?” Sid asked, not understanding.
The Osprey settled into another hover low to the glacier, scarcely three feet above a flat section of ice and one by one O’Rourke, Garcia and West clambered on board. Seconds later, Lake piloted the tilt-rotor up and away from the glacier and headed east over the mountains.
“Forever more, the bearer of my name shall hold my piece of the map in their hand,” King repeated the final passage of Emily Hamilton’s diary. “I took that to imply that the bearer of her name, her descendants, would look after her piece of the map. That it was kept somewhere safe in the Hand of Freedom building. But she wasn’t talking about her great, great, great grandchildren or whatever,” he said excitedly. “She literally meant the bearer of her name, which she changed to Kernewek.” To Sid’s blank expression, he added: “Kernewek is the traditional language of Kernow… Cornwall, the southern peninsula of Great Britain, and home to a long legacy of piracy and smuggling. The coastline is riddled with caves, many of which were expanded on by smugglers to gorge their way through the county and avoid the authorities.”
“So, the bearer of her name was another entity entirely,” Sid confirmed. “Not a person but the actual landmass where the treasure was buried. Not an island, but a peninsula.” She frowned. “But what about the hand? Her clue suggests that the map was somewhere in the Hand of Freedom building.”
Raine answered that. “May I?” he asked, plucking the laptop from Nadia. Gibbs was too busy working out the logistics of getting them to England to notice his indiscretion and Raine took that as a mini triumph.
“This is a map of Cornwall,” he showed them the image on the screen:
Then he brought up a satellite image of the Hand of Freedom building which they had previously used to plan their infiltration and juxtaposed the image on top of the map:
“Forgive the pun,” he said with a grin, “but it fits like a glove.”
Indeed, the Hand of Freedom building hadn’t been designed in the shape of a hand at all, but rather as a copy of the iconic shape of the southern tip of England.
“So now we just need to work out what part of the coastline Kha’um’s tactile map represents and—”
“We’ve been busy,” Nadia cut King off, taking the laptop back off of Raine and tapping at the keyboard. King recognised the computer program Sid had been using back at the U.N. to fit the contours of the tactile map into the coastline of a landmass. But without any idea of where to start, it had been like looking for a needle in a haystack.