Mason sighed. “I’m starting to get the picture.”
“In a word, they are unknowable. Their acolytes are in every government in the world and yet the infiltrations are anonymous. It’s Titanfort’s speculation that every institution on earth probably has at least one Hidden Hand acolyte inside it, usually at the top somewhere and protected by what they call drones.”
“Drones?” Milo asked.
“People who do their bidding without knowing it.”
“A touching description,” Ella said.
“Quite,” Ezra continued. “Once on the inside they shape things for the advantage not of the institution but for their own mysterious cult. They direct whole governments for the benefit of themselves and have zero regard for the average man or woman in the street.”
“Are you sure you’re not just talking about regular politicians?” Zara said.
It raised a low laugh, but everyone was starting to feel more than a little freaked out by what they were hearing.
“As I say,” Ezra pressed on. “The long-term stated goal of Occulta Manu is to destroy the existing power structure and create the world in its own image.”
“They want to control the world, then,” Caleb said.
“Yes,” Ezra said bluntly. “To do this they need to control the future, and to do that they must control the past. Along with their work infiltrating governments and institutions around the world, they are obsessed with the control of history, particularly the history of the ancient world. From what we can work out, they figure that if they control the flow of information and knowledge relating to our most distant past, they can shape future minds any way they want.”
“Stop the plane… I want to get off,” Ella said.
Ezra sympathized. “I’m sorry, but OM is the big boy holding all the strings, Miss Makepeace. There’s no getting away from them, on or off this aircraft.”
Zara sighed. “Still don’t get why most of us has never heard of them.”
“Like I already explained, if you’ve heard of them, they’re not secret societies. The ones you’ve heard of or read about on the internet are publicly recognised institutions that give to charity. Occulta Manu does not give to charity.”
Ella shivered. “This is all starting to sound kinda creepy.”
“You can say that again,” Milo said. “Remember the good old days when we thought Kyle Cage sounded scary?”
Virgil crossed his hands behind his head. “Ah, the good old days…”
Ezra frowned. “And he still is scary, Mr Risk. If you underestimate a man like Cage you’ll live to regret it, but not for long, I assure you.”
Another grim rattle of laughter rippled around the small room but everyone knew it was just nerves.
“Jesus, talk about getting red pilled,” Zara said. “When I woke up this morning I thought the worst thing that could happen was another Ed Sheeran song at Number 1. How fucking wrong was I?”
“Very wrong,” Ezra said. “And it gets a lot worse.”
“We can take it,” Mason said.
Caleb brushed his jaw and gave a confident nod. “Yeah, let us have it, Ez.”
“Okay — but don’t say you didn’t ask for it.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Far across the city, Mason watched a large jet plane push up into the sky and disappear in a bank of low, gray clouds. “Gets a lot worse, you say?” he asked.
Ezra gave a resigned nod. “As I have indicated, after the Athanatoi, the Hidden Hand is the highest of all secret societies.”
“The Athanatoi?” Virgil asked. “Now they really are just a myth, right?”
“Wrong,” Ezra said bluntly.
“Who are they?” Ella asked.
“They’re someone else’s problem. Our problem is the Hidden Hand, and they sit at the top of an unimaginably vast network of less powerful societies. These lesser societies operate all over the world, but it’s from the Hidden Hand that these societies get their orders.”
“You mean secret societies we’ve actually heard of?” Zara asked.
Ezra’s tone grew weary. “If you’ve heard of a secret society then they’re not a secret society any more. That’s not the way these guys roll — they demand total secrecy, loyalty and anonymity and traitors are extinguished without mercy. When the world hears about a society that’s because they’re done with it and they’ve moved on. Skull and Bones, Priory of Sion, Carbonari, Bloodline of the Snake — all of them now just mere shells compared with what they once were as the power goes elsewhere.”
“Like the Illuminati?” Ella asked.
Ezra laughed. “The Hidden Hand is the ultimate Mystery Cult. The Illuminati was created by men who were ordered to do so by the Hidden Hand. They come from Masons and Masons come from ancient Mystery Cults. This is very well-documented. Like the Skull and Bones and the Priory of Sion, they’re just another creation of the Hidden Hand; just one of many cogs in Occulta Manu’s vast, hungry machine. It’s there to deflect from the real deal, like a simple façade in front of a house of horrors.”
Milo was frantically scrolling through pages on the internet. “Shit, he’s right — but there are so few references to the Hidden Hand it’s almost impossible to know anything about them.”
“As I said,” Ezra said, “OM are not in Show Business. These are the big boys, pulling the strings of organizations like Skull and Bones, Rosicrucians, Illuminati, Bilderberg, Carbonari…”
Zara leaned forward in her seat. “Wait, that’s the second time you said that, but isn’t that a pasta dish?”
“That’s carbonara,” Ezra said with a weary sigh. “The Carbonari were a group of revolutionaries operating in Italy during the early part of the nineteenth century during Napoleon’s rule.”
“I’m just yankin’ your chain, Ez.”
“Sure you were. And it’s Ezra.”
Before Zara responded, Mason said, “What was that about Napoleon?”
“History records the Carbonari’s original purpose as resisting the French occupation under Napoleon, but the truth is somewhat darker. The truth is that they were ordered by their masters in the Hidden Hand to resist Napoleon as a punishment for his Egyptian expedition.”
Virgil shook his head. “So they really have been controlling history since way back then.”
“To the members of the Hidden Hand, the time of Napoleon was five minutes ago. They go back way further than that. Anyway, all of these organizations that I’ve mentioned were all created by the Hidden Hand at various times in its long history, and each time there was a specific reason for doing so — a specific place or institution that had to be infiltrated or controlled. Occulta Manu is the dark secret that no government wants you to know about — believe me.”
“Sure sounds like it.”
“When an initiate in other lower societies gets an order from OM they will usually have no idea why they have been ordered to do it or even where the order originates from. The only people in the know are those at the heart of the movement — those men and women who have vowed to follow the ancient mystery religions.”
“Which is where all this Raven crap comes from, right?” Zara said.
“Correct. That is why they hold the ancient symbols in such high regard — with reverence, actually. These guys are the real deal. They carry ideas and beliefs older than Egypt itself — maybe even Sumer. Stuff so ancient we couldn’t begin to rationalize it but to them it’s a code to live by. If you screw with these people you will die. The only way to handle them is with the utmost respect.”
“Has anyone ever gotten close to them?” Caleb asked.
Ezra looked doubtful. “Not really, but last year a man named Morton Wade was killed by the ECHO team. We were monitoring Wade for a number of reasons, not least his connections to the Hidden Hand. He had been part of them once. That may or may not have been where he’d gotten his bloodlust for human sacrifice.”