Moon Mask (2 page)

But he had been determined that enough was enough. He was retired. He was old. He was finally happy.

“The Phoenix has arisen,”
one of the CIA agents had told him over the radio. The agent didn’t have a clue what his cryptic message had meant, he was merely a messenger.

But Emmett knew. The words had sent a cold chill down his spine.

Only hours later, he had been on a private jet alongside the two agents who identified themselves as Jones and Tomskin. Touching down in Baltimore, he had been whisked to John Hopkins Hospital. The staff there had been confused by his presence alongside a female patient, labelled simply 'Jane Doe'. One of the world’s leading hospitals for infectious and tropical diseases, the doctors had been forbidden to talk to Emmett. He didn’t find this unusual. As soon as the government got involved, a veil of secrecy fell upon even the most innocuous of situations.

Anyone who had any contact with, or knowledge of Jane Doe would be debriefed by government cronies, he knew, and forced to sign confidentiality agreements. If they ever spoke of what they had seen, they would be prosecuted. But Emmett knew such prosecution would never come. They would simply vanish.

The moment he laid eyes on the Jane Doe, Emmett knew that she was not suffering from any tropical disease. Her skin was red and blotchy and in a few places the redness had swelled into ulcers which the medical staff had dressed. On first sight, it did indeed look like some tropical disease.

He read the notes which had been carefully edited to remove any mention of the girl’s real name and any background information about her.

He understood how the doctors at John Hopkins hadn’t immediately recognised radiation poisoning. Her initial symptoms, reported by the medical team first to treat her on site - wherever ‘on site’ was – were nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea and high fever. The skin irritation had then developed, followed by unconsciousness. All signs pointed towards a biological agent but the doctor in charge, upon discovering hair-loss, checked her blood work for signs of radiological material and brought in a Geiger counter.

Despite it looking more and more like radiation sickness, all tests proved negative for exposure to any source of radiation.

At least, any known type of radiation.

Emmett snapped himself out of his lapse in concentration to narrowly avoid slamming his rented sedan into a speeding truck. The large vehicle’s lights flashed crazily and its horn echoed as he shot through an underpass and then circled around, speeding up as he tore onto the interstate. In his rear-view mirror he saw the flash of the black SUV but then snatched his attention back to whip around a bus.

Interstate 83 was busy, the rush hour traffic whirring all around him and he felt in a daze, trying to control the surge of adrenalin pumping its way through his body. His hands trembled as they clutched the steering wheel, while his mind hastily sought through his memories, desperately trying to think of someone, anyone, who could help him.

After he had run his tests on the Jane Doe and confirmed his findings to Jones and Tomskin, Jones had stepped out to make a call. On his return, he’d thanked Emmett for his help and told him a rental car was waiting outside and a reservation had been made in a nearby hotel.

Emmett had been shaky as he wandered through the hospital parking lot and identified his car, his mind working in overtime, absorbing what he had just discovered. Perhaps he should have known that now his task was complete, he wouldn’t be allowed to live. He had seen the two men approach, heads down, hoods up. He remembered an odd thought as he noted their shoes- black, polished, matching.

He’d quickly got in the car, started the ignition but, glancing in the mirror, he’d seen one of the hooded men look up. Recognised Jones’ face.

Without thinking, he’d slammed the car into drive and stamped on the gas, squealing away even as two shots rang out and glass shattered.

Now, he raced for his life, dodging and weaving amongst the heavy traffic. The black SUV was there again, closing fast, flicking in and out of view as its driver fought his way through the mêlée.

Emmett slammed his palm down on his horn as he braked hard to avoid smashing into the back of a slow vehicle in the fast lane. The offending car drifted out of his way and Emmett floored the gas again, squeezing through the narrow gap between the car and the centre of the road. The SUV pushed in front of the bus Emmett had already passed, and hauled between two other angry drivers to plant itself in the fast lane directly behind Emmett.

He watched through his mirror as the assassins closed the gap, their more powerful vehicle easily-

The slow moving car slammed into Emmett’s hind quarters. Panicked by the sedan’s angry order to move out of his way, the incompetent driver had swerved into the middle lane just as a large truck was pushing out of the slow lane to overtake. He panicked and swung back into the fast lane but too quickly.

It was only a glancing blow but, pushing one hundred miles an hour, Emmett instantly lost control. The steering wheel spun on its own accord and he felt the vehicle slew out, its front end intersecting the middle lane only to have the incompetent and now petrified driver scream as he rammed into Emmett’s broadside. The sedan rolled and Emmett heard the crunch of metal and the screech of rubber above his own scream as the car rolled over once, twice, three times. Each time, Emmett’s world got a little smaller as the metal of the car compressed on him. His head smashed the windscreen, the steering wheel, the roof, the chair, and the erupting airbags. He realised that he hadn’t fastened his safety belt in his haste to escape the gunmen and now rolled inside the crushed wreck.

But no safety belt or airbag could have saved him.

Even as its driver fought with the brakes, its twenty-foot-long trailer swinging out from side to side and taking out half a dozen other vehicles, the large truck which had indirectly caused the pile-up hammered into the crumbled sedan. It exploded into two separate pieces which spun away, rolling and twisting until at last they came to a stop.

Behind
the carnage, Agent Jones skidded the black SUV to a halt while beside him, and for miles behind, hundreds of other vehicles did the same. Within moments, Interstate 83 was gridlocked. Car horns echoed and angry voices shouted out, indignant about the sudden halt to their journeys home.

“Did you see that?” Tomskin asked beside him. Glancing at his subordinate, Jones noted the younger man’s face had lost its colour as he stared ahead. All in all, there were about a dozen vehicles that had been caught up with Emmett Braun’s death, the wrecked hulks of cars, trucks and buses belching smoke into the sunset.

“Of course I bloody saw it,” Jones snapped without sympathy. He clambered out of the SUV and headed towards the remains of Braun’s rental car. Tomskin had the good sense to follow.

Emergency sirens wailed as the first responders battled through the gridlock to the site of the crash while people from the first rows of cars to escape the carnage rushed to help the survivors.

“Well, I don’t think we’re gonna get our rental deposit back on that,” Tomskin tried to joke. Jones, ever the professional, ignored him and focussed on the charred and bloodied figure crushed within the folds of metal that had once been the sedan. Then he pulled his cell phone out and called the pre-programmed number.

“It’s done,” he said simply.

On
the other end of the line, the man who had answered did not smile. He simply replied, “Good,” and then hung up and began dialling another number.

As he waited for the encrypted connection to be answered, the man glanced at the information on his computer. It displayed a medical report for Doctor Karen Weingarten, signed off by one Emmett Braun who had known the sick girl only as Jane Doe. It confirmed everything he wanted to know.

Weingarten had been an archaeologist working on the UNESCO funded Sarisariñama Expedition in Venezuela, one of the last places on earth he had expected someone with her ‘condition’ to be discovered.

Of course, he knew all about the expedition. It had been on the news for over a year now, ever since a billionaire playboy with nothing better to do had illegally base-jumped into an enormous sinkhole on one of the country’s famous table-mountains. His chute had been caught on the holes’ thick foliage, swinging him into the vegetation encrusted wall. But there, totally unexpected, hidden for hundreds of years by the thick vines and lush tropical vegetation, was a doorway, hewn into the rock. That doorway had led to a series of passageways tunnelling into the three-hundred square mile summit, sparking enormous academic debate over its origins.

Over eight thousand feet above sea level and defended by almost vertical cliffs on all sides, the summit of Sarisariñama had a uniquely isolated ecosystem with numerous endemic species of fauna and flora. Its four giant sinkholes burrowed over a thousand feet into the mountain and one of them, Sima Humboldt, was over a thousand feet wide. No thorough scientific study had been conducted on the summit since 1976, and no archaeological expedition had ever had cause to set foot there.

Hundreds of miles from the nearest road and accessible only by helicopter, Sarisariñama was one of the most isolated places on the planet. And it hid a secret far more powerful than a simple doorway.

A voice on the other end of the phone answered. “Yes?”

The man was quick to the point. “Braun confirmed it.” He eyed the computer screen again, looking at Weingarten’s plump but pretty face and wondered, not for the first time, how she had managed to get herself caught up in all this. Then he thought about the rest of the U.N. expedition- a multi-disciplined team of archaeologists and anthropologists, along with a host of biologists, botanists, zoologists and entomologists. The scientists were supported by a team of local workers, cooks and porters and an international film crew documenting the adventure.

But now, the entire expedition was in his way.

They had to be removed.

His next words, his orders, were cold and hard. “You have a go.”

2:

Black Death

The Labyrinth,

Sarisariñama Tepui,

Venezuela,

With
a final shove,
Benjamin King burst through the prison of thick vines and fell unceremoniously onto the ground.

“Ben!” he heard Sid cry out in shock as her boyfriend suddenly vanished in a cascade of rotting greenery and crumbling stone. She wafted away the plume of dust from King’s passage and pushed into the hole in the wall, shining her torch through the gloom.

It took a few seconds for Sid’s eyes to discern King’s dark skin, betraying his African descent, amidst the gloom. “Ben?”

“I’m okay,” he coughed.

The passageway they had been exploring had led to a dead-end but King had realised that the blocking wall was different to the surrounding walls. Whereas the rest of the underground labyrinth of tunnels running through the mountain had been constructed with painstaking precision, every block cut perfectly to fit on top of the last, this wall was imprecise, sloppy even. The blocks were a haphazard jumble of irregular shapes, loosely piled up and then cemented together with a thick grey mortar. Unlike the smooth, almost marble-like finish to the rest of the passageway, these rocks were jagged and rough, allowing the jungle’s hardy vines to find purchase and spread across it like a spider web, concealing the narrow gap where some of the wall had fallen away.

It was through that gap that King, while slashing away at the vines with a machete, had fallen, part of the structure giving way beneath him.

He scrambled up onto his feet, chunks of ancient masonry and decapitated vegetation tumbling to the ground, and picked up his own torch, scanning it across the walls.

“Wow,” he mumbled under his breath. “This is amazing.”

“Uh . . . a little help here?” Sid called. King ignored her as he ran his light over the walls, his eyes picking out the intricate detail.

“Ben!” she snapped.

King whirled around, shaking off his astonishment, and hurried to assist her. She was part way through the newly excavated opening and had become intertwined in the crusted vegetation.

“Here,” he said, helping her to untangle herself and jump into the passageway. Another shape appeared behind her, a form even more lithe and athletic than Sid. Ben offered her a hand.

“I do not need any help,” a clipped Russian accent replied. Sure enough, moments later Nadia Yashina slipped into the hidden passageway unaided. Her sharp eyes surveyed her new surroundings and astonishment flashed across her normally stoic face.

“What is this place?” Sid asked, awed.

“I’m not sure,” King replied excitedly, scooping up his satchel and notes from where they had fallen on his less than elegant entry. He hurried up beside Sid to study the wall. “It’s absolutely amazing though.”

From top to bottom and stretching all the way into the gloom beyond where their flash-lights could penetrate, every single block in the wall had been carved into the near perfect shape of a human skull.

“They’re all like it,” Sid said enthusiastically, moving from block to block, running her hands over the polished craniums. “I’ve never seen anything like it. I mean, most of the ancient South American cultures had their fascination with sacrifice and death and decorated their temples with images of skulls and skeletons, but I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

“They’re all so lifelike,” King said. “I wonder what sort of stone they’re-”

“Bone.”

King and Sid both looked, mouths agape, at Nadia, but no elaboration was forthcoming.

“Bone?” Sid repeated. “You mean . . .” her voice trailed off as she realised what her friend was saying. Reverently, she removed her hand from a shiny plate and her face twisted into a slight grimace. “Oh.”

Each and every one of the skull-shaped blocks was in fact an actual skull.