Moon Mask (65 page)

Instantly, he felt a wave of nausea sweep through him and he staggered, reaching out with a hand to steady himself against the worktop. But the worktop was not there! Instead, there was the wooden wheel of a ship, then the stone altar of a temple, a metal bulkhead, a brick wall, and then nothing, and he fell forwards, tumbling into an abyss of emptiness. He felt his eyes searing as though they were on fire. He felt his brain swell within his skull and throb like a pulsating star. Images flashed before his eyes, a thousand faces, a thousand landscapes, some he knew, others which were as alien to him as another world.

Then, unable to control the searing agony, Benjamin King dropped to the ground and screamed.

The screaming didn’t stop for hours.

47:

The Philadelphia Experiment

New York City,

USA

“Okay
, okay, I’m coming already!” Rasta-Man-872 shouted to whoever it was that was incessantly pounding his door bell.

Of course, any preconceptions of Rasta-Man-872 being of African origins went out the window the moment one took a look at the ultra-skinny five-foot-one mousy-looking man whose skin was as pale as a polar-bear’s hide. The ambiguous dreadlocks which went down to the middle of his back and the brightly coloured clothes he wore looked ridiculous on him but Rasta Man didn’t care. He often said that he was a black man trapped inside a white man’s body. His walls were adorned with posters of Bob Marley, ultraviolet lights cultivated his crop of marihuana and when he talked he tried to put a Jamaican inflection into his boyish voice.

He peered through the peek hole and was surprised by who he saw on the other side. He quickly opened the door. “Alex Langley, how’s it going,
mon
?”

“Not great, Rasta. I need your help.”

“Shit, what happened to you?” As Langley stepped hurriedly into the light of Rasta Man’s basement apartment, his bedraggled state became apparent. His normally immaculate clothes were torn and smeared with dirt and soot, his face was covered with flecks of ash that had landed on him and a number of cuts and bruises were evident on his features. The hair on the right side of his head had been singed and now felt like a matted mass of hard nylon and his face still stung from the blistering heat, but he’d been lucky. Far luckier than Mrs Braun.

Following the explosion at her house, he’d spent several minutes clambering through the wreckage, shouting her name, but as there was little left of the house, he quickly forced himself to acknowledge that there would be even less left of her.

He’d quickly scrambled into his SUV, struggling to control the shock and the adrenaline, and then raced away from the burning wreckage. The sounds of emergency sirens had howled through the air but he knew he couldn’t remain on the scene. Someone was trying to keep Phoenix a secret; they’d silenced the Brauns and, having escaped, he’d be next on their list.

He’d driven fast back towards New York City, taking a circuitous route, always looking in his rear view mirror expecting to see someone come back to finish the job. Once in the city he’d dumped the vehicle, taking his laptop, phone and gun with him, then descended into the subway system, doubling back on himself numerous times. Twice he’d surfaced, hailed a cab, driven to a different location, switched to a different cab and then a bus before descending back to the subway.

He hadn’t become as stale in the years since he left the CIA as he’d thought, he’d realised. All his training, all his experience had kicked back in.

Confident that he had lost any tail he might have had, he finally made his way to the home of the only man who could help him, hidden in a dingy, windowless basement flat in Queens.

“I don’t have time to explain,” he said, pushing his way into Rasta Man’s main room, ignoring the crop of marihuana.

“It’s for medicinal purposes,” Rasta Man defended himself. “My back’s been giving me-”

“I need you to access an encrypted file for me.”

Rasta Man was the best at what he did, and what he did was hack.

Nathan Raine had been the first to ‘recruit’ the gangly boy years ago on a previous mission. Back then, Rasta Man had gone by his real name of Elliot Basingstoke, the son of a Queens Café owner. Bullied at school for his nerdish tendencies, he had come to the attention of MIT who had offered him a scholarship. But, always weary of authority, following the daylight robbing of his parents’ café and their murders, he’d retreated underground- literally. He lived now on that narrow line between villainy and normality, surviving by hacking rich peoples’ bank accounts and sieving off small amounts of money- enough to buy the high grade computer equipment he needed but not enough to get noticed. And he hacked. He hacked into banks and private corporations. He hacked into politicians’ files and government databases. And he even hacked into the military database. But he knew the limits. He knew that the government allowed him and the other world class hackers of modern society to get away with minor infringements which were posted online in conspiracy theorist websites. All they did was deny the theories, label Rasta Man and his ilk as ‘whackos’ and ‘nutters’. But if he ever tried to break through the military’s inner firewall, they would be down on him in no time and he’d never see the light of day again.

Langley was about to ask him to do just that.

He opened his laptop, already powered up, and spun it around on Rasta Man’s desk which was cluttered with computer towers, monitors, hard-drives and card readers. Rasta Man crashed into his plush swivel-chair-on-wheels as though it was the command chair of the Starship Enterprise and began tapping at Langley’s keyboard.

“Phoenix,” he read, his hands flying over the machine in a blur. Screen after screen appeared until all of a sudden a loud tone erupted from the speakers and a warning screen shot up. Rasta Man jumped back as though he’d just been bitten by a Rattle Snake.

“No way,
mon
,” he said in a panic.

“Rasta, it’s important,” Langley said. “Can you do it?”

The young man looked even paler than usual. “Sure I
can
do it, but there is no way I’m gonna. That file is protected by half a dozen firewalls, it’s encrypted up to its teeth. I’m guessing there are only a handful of people in the world that can access it.”

“Which is why I need your help,” Langley said smoothly. “Think about it, what this file contains could be the scoop of the century- it’s a conspiracy theorist’s wet-dream.”

“And worst nightmare,” Rasta added. “Al, listen to me,
mon
. I can hack it, but Uncle Sam’ll know what I’m doing the
instant
I start. They’ll be here in less than ten minutes- NYPD to begin with, just following orders, locking me down. Then the Fed’s will show up in their suits, then I’ll find myself in a torture chamber under the Pentagon somewhere while they water-board-out-of-me what I saw. Then, if I’m lucky, I get to spend the rest of my life in a high security military prison, probably shacked up in a cell with some six-foot-seven beast who takes a liking to my tooshy.”

“Elliot,” Langley said, his tone serious, no-nonsense. “If you don’t do this, thousands, even millions of people could die.” The young hacker looked as though he was about to be sick. “I’ll protect you. You’ve hacked my record, I’m sure.” He didn’t deny it. “You know my history- I was the commander of the most elite Special Forces team in the
world
. I can make you vanish, like a ghost.”

Rasta Man gestured at his array of computers. “I don’t want to vanish. This is my world-”

Langley fished into his pocket and pulled out his wallet. He threw it at Rasta who instinctively caught it. “It’s yours,” he said. On the hacker’s puzzled expression, he explained. “All the money I have in the world, which is a lot, Elliot,
a lot-
it’s yours. I’m not going to need it where this path is going to take me.” He looked the young man in the eyes, catching his gaze and not letting it go. “From the moment you start hacking the file, we’ll have, I estimate, about seven minutes before NYPD arrive, directed by the DOD’s cyber-terrorist unit. How long will it take you to download the file onto a disk drive?”

Rasta’s mind was racing as he calculated the time he’d need. “If I have all the programs I need open and ready before I start the hack, I can get into the file in under a minute.” He glanced uncertainly at the screen. “But it’s a big file. Even with the speed of my computers it’ll take about four minutes to save onto a portable disk.”

“Then you make the hack,” Langley explained, “you download the file. That still leaves us two minutes to get as far away from here as possible before-”

“Two minutes isn’t enough-”

“Two minutes is an eternity,” Langley snapped, “if you know what you’re doing. And trust me, I know what I’m doing. We can be out of the city in under an hour, then you can go buy yourself a penthouse suite in Miami full of computers and a harem of whores to cater to your every geeky desire. What do you say . . .
mon?
” he added with a smile.

Rasta Man took a deep breath and then slowly let it out. “Okay.” Then, with renewed energy he swung back to his desk and plugged Langley’s laptop into one of his many computer towers and began pressing buttons. “It’ll take a few minutes to get ready to make the hack.”

“Take your time,” Langley replied. “Do you have another machine I can use? I want to follow up on another lead.”

“Sure.” With a tap of another keyboard, another of Rasta’s many plasma screens lit up.

“All I need is an internet connection.”

“There,” he said, with one hand opening a basic internet connection on Langley’s allocated machine while continuing his own efforts. Langley sat down and typed USS ELDRIDGE into the search bar. It was the name of the ship Mrs Braun had said her husband had served on which she believed had triggered his emotional problems and his interest in radioactive related illnesses.

“Whoa, you’re really getting into this conspiracy theory stuff,
mon
,” Rasta said, peering momentarily at the results screen.

“What do you mean?”

“First hacking into Phoenix, then researching the Philly Experiment.”

“The what?”

Rasta paused what he was doing and looked at him. He nodded at the screen. “The Philadelphia Experiment,” he explained. “Don’t you know what you’re looking at?”

“Enlighten me.”

“Okay,” he returned to what he was doing on his own computer but spoke as if he were making a cup of tea rather than preparing to hack the Department of Defense’s firewall. “You really should read my blog, you know.”

“Rasta,” he urged.

Rasta Man seemed excited now as he recited what he knew. “The Philadelphia Experiment is one of the holy grails of conspiracy theorists,” he explained. “Of course, the government’s covered it all up, just like they did with Roswell and JFK, but I got evidence that it really happened.”

“What happened?”

“In the latter half of 1943, while in the Philadelphia Harbour Naval Yard, the
USS Eldridge
, a newly commissioned destroyer, took part in an experimental procedure. Some people reckon it was to test a new faster-than-light engine, others say it was to make it impervious to mines and torpedoes, others say it was to render it totally invisible. The other theory is that the U.S. Government was experimenting with time-travel.”

“Time travel?” Langley gasped. Somehow, he had expected to hear that, yet it still came as a shock. Nevertheless, he knew to take Rasta’s claims with a pinch of salt.

“The ship was fitted with two massive 75 KVA generators, connected to magnetic Tesla coils on the main deck where the weapons turrets should have been.”

Tesla coils, Langley repeated in his mind, linking back to the evidence King had presented him about Tesla’s involvement with the Moon Mask.

“There were three 2 megawatt RF transmitters, three thousand power amplifier tubes, special synchronizing and modulation circuits, and a whole shit-load of other stuff. All the most state-of-the-art technology of the time.”

Langley felt like asking how the hell he knew all this but he knew now wasn’t the time to question his theory, only to listen.

“All the equipment was designed to generate massive electromagnetic fields to bend light and radio waves around the ship,” he explained. “On July 22
they powered the generators up, a green mist enveloped the ship and then both the mist and the ship vanished- totally. It wasn’t visible on radar or to the naked eye. Fifteen minutes later they shut the generators down and the ship reappeared. But,” he added ominously, “there was a problem. When the ship was boarded, its entire crew was suffering from severe vomiting and disorientation. I reckon it was the effects of radiation poisoning.”

Langley kept his poker face in place while secretly he was reeling. Time travel. Radiation poisoning. Could this experiment have been responsible for the course that Emmett Braun’s life had taken?

“Nevertheless,” Rasta continued, still tapping away at his keyboard, “a few months later, on October 28, they performed the experiment again. Only this time, instead of fading into a green mist, there was an explosion of blue light and
bam!
” he slapped his hands together, startling Langley. “The ship was gone.” He paused dramatically. “At exactly the same time, the crew of the S.S. Andrew Furuseth, hundreds of miles away, in Norfolk, Virginia, reported seeing a similar flash of blue light, preceded by the appearance of a United States destroyer. Several minutes later, another flash of light, and the ship vanished from Norfolk and reappeared in Philadelphia.”

It was a sensational story but, despite what he had learned so far, Langley was having a hard time swallowing it. “Did the crew suffer from radiation sickness again?”

Rasta stopped what he was doing altogether and stared long and hard at Langley. “It was much worse the second time around. The crew was violently sick, puking up blood and their own liquefied organs. Some were covered in horrific burns, others had gone nuts, wandering around like madmen. Others had vanished altogether and have never been seen since. But worse,” he concluded ominously, “some of the crew had become
fused
to the ship’s bulkheads, their bodies literally welded into the metal.”