Moon Mask (66 page)

Get them out!
Langley remembered Mrs Braun’s dramatic retelling of her husband’s night terrors. Could it be? Was he screaming to get people melded into the bulkheads of a naval ship out? He could certainly appreciate how such horrors could guide a man’s life; some descended into madness, others, like Braun, grew from their experiences and tried to put right the wrongs they had seen.

“The government covered it all up of course; a falsified report to make out the
Eldridge
was nowhere near Philadelphia; that the crew members who’d died or vanished had been killed while fighting the Japanese; but they never gave up with their studies. The experiments continue to this day. Theories abound. Most people think that Einstein’s Unified Field Theory- which, coincidentally, was classified top secret at the same time that he was working for the DOD on ‘unrelated issues’, is the key to the whole process. I think Project Rainbow, which is the project that ran the Philadelphia Experiment, was also part and parcel of the Manhattan Project.”

Langley hadn’t seen that one coming. He knew that the Manhattan Project was the name of the secret work that had been carried out in the forties on the development of the A-bomb, culminating in the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “How so?” he asked.

“You want to know what I think went wrong on the
Eldridge
? I think the U.S. Government affectively developed the technology to travel back in time, using the theories of the great thinkers of the time, Tesla and Einstein. They were also developing a power source big enough to power the enormous energy needed to create a stable wormhole through space-time- the power of the atom. After the failure of Philadelphia, they focused on turning that power source into a bomb, which they dropped on Japan. But that wasn’t their plan originally. Blowing Japan off the face of the planet wasn’t enough. Nuclear power isn’t powerful enough to generate the energy needed to stabilise what happened to the
Eldridge
. But if it had been, they would have used it to wage
temporal war
against Japan, and Germany and all their enemies of the day.”

“Temporal war?”

“Think about it,” the hacker was enraptured in his own narrative now. He didn’t get out much. “Why settle for blowing the crap out of an enemy with nuclear bombs, if you can travel back in time and manipulate events in your favour before they become an enemy? The technology is out there . . . all they need is the power source.”

Langley felt bile rise in his throat.
All they need is the power source,
the young hacker’s words echoed in his mind again and again. Cracking the atom wasn’t enough. They needed to harness something even more powerful.

The tachyon.

“Okay, I’m ready,” Rasta Man suddenly cut into his thoughts.

Despite the turmoil as his mind tried to make sense of everything, his training cut through the haze and got straight to the point. “Do it.”

Rasta Man took a deep breath and closed his eyes for a second. Then, summoning his resolve, he opened them and hit EXECUTE.

Instantly, the firewall surrounding the Phoenix file collapsed and Langley knew that a hundred alerts were going crazy on computer screens throughout America’s intelligence network. Phones call would be being made, emergency calls through to the police department. Men in suits would be running to their cars. Computer analysts would be homing in on the geographical source of the hack.

“This is so cool,” Rasta Man muttered. “I can’t believe you brought me Phoenix, Al.”

Langley, never taking his eyes from the screen as a status bar showed the progress of the download onto a memory stick Rasta Man had slotted into the machine, frowned.

“What do you mean? Are you saying you’ve heard about Phoenix?”

“Of course I have.” Then it was Rasta’s turn to look confused. “You mean, you haven’t? I assumed, ‘cause you were researching
Eldridge
that you knew about the connection.” The status bar was half full now.

“What connection?”

“The Phoenix Project is the continuation of the Rainbow Project.”

“What?”

Just then, in the distance, the screeching howl of emergency sirens rang out. It could have been a coincidence but Langley knew otherwise.

“That wasn’t seven minutes,” Rasta Man said, panicked.

“We’ve got to go.”

Rasta Man grabbed a rucksack and swept as much of the loose pen-drives, hard drives and CDs into it as he could. The status bar pinged to 100%. The police might have arrived earlier than anticipated, but Rasta’s computer had worked faster too.

“Let’s go.” Langley ripped the pen-drive out of the machine and dragged Rasta to the door. They moved fast, flying through the door and out into the night. Langley used the butt of his gun to smash the security light on the side of the two story building that Rasta’s apartment was beneath and then dragged him out of the back gate. The sirens grew louder and more of them seemed to echo out in every direction. In the air the distant thrum of propellers beat through the night sky but Langley ignored it and kept on moving.

Across the street a narrow alleyway tucked down between two buildings and Langley darted down it, rounded a corner and then broke into a full sprint. Rasta Man struggled to keep up. They had to put as much distance between them and the basement apartment as possible, Langley knew.

The secret of Phoenix was out, and somebody wanted to lock it away again. Langley wasn’t going to let that happen. He knew what it had cost him. His life was over. He could never return to the United Nations, nor probably set foot on American soil again. But his fate had finally been revealed.

He remembered the words he had spoken to Sergei Dityatev, thinking about what Nathan Raine had done three years ago.
A man’s most important oath is not to his country. It is to his conscience.

And with that thought, Alexander Langley vanished into the night.

48:

To Kill a Sheep

NATO Air Base Geilenkirchen,

Germany

“We
had to induce a coma to halt the neurological trauma,” Doctor Henry Heinrich explained in heavily accented English. Short and wiry, with unkempt hair that made him look as though he’d been playing with live electrical sockets and a pair of thin-framed, rounded spectacles that constantly slid down his nose, he reminded Raine of some comedy sketch of Sigmund Freud. He had already picked up on a number of phrases which he repeated constantly, such as adding a high pitched ‘
ja?
’ after almost every sentence and using ‘
etcetera
’ to fill in gaps. Nevertheless, as a doctor in the German army and a specialist in neurological trauma, the NATO base commander had assured Gibbs that Heinrich was the best medical help Benjamin King could wish for.

“For now, he is stable,” the German concluded.

“What do you mean, ‘for now’?” Sid demanded. She stood next to King’s head, softly stroking his smooth scalp where the doctors had shaved his short hair. Muddy rivers had dried on her cheeks following the passage of tears.

Also gathered in the hospital room were Raine, Nadia and Gibbs, all standing at the foot of the hospital bed where King lay motionless, hooked up to IV lines and EEG monitors. Numerous sensor pads were adhered to his scalp and hooked up an array of plasma screens which the base hospital staff had hastily erected. The doctor had, by necessity to save King’s life, been brought up to speed on the physiological effects of tachyon radiation, such as they were known.

Raine’s eyes had been fixed on those screens but, upon Sid’s question, they wandered back to the German doctor. “The truth is, Doctor Siddiqa,” he admitted, “we don’t understand enough about what were are dealing with. Your fiancée is suffering from a form of radiation sickness. This we know, and this we had treated,
ja
, using the precedent set in the treatment of the Sarisariñama Expedition members. His own ‘immunity’ if you want to call it that, protected him from the severity I would have expected to be associated with such close, intimate contact with the radioactive material. If it wasn’t for such a bizarre immunity, he would most certainly be dead.”

Raine thought about Edward Pryce and the description King had read from Emily Hamilton’s journal- deformed and monstrous, his hair gone, his skin blistered, his bones twisted and deformed. All from wearing the Moon Mask. King had very nearly met a similar fate, only with a larger piece of the mask.

“It is the neurological damage which we cannot even begin to fathom,” the doctor continued. He gestured towards the three screens which displayed the MRI and EEG scans taken of King’s brain.

“A short lesson in neurology,” he said quickly. “The brain is made up of billions of neurons which communicate to their neighbours via millions of billions of synapses, which in turn make up vast neural circuits in the brain.”

“Think of it as a computer network,” Nadia explained. “Put fifty computers in a room, link them together on a wireless network which sends enormous amounts of information from one machine to another, and you’ve got yourself a network.”

“Only this network,” Heinrich continued, “has been overloaded. The tachyons have triggered some kind of electronic impulse which is redirecting these synapses and focussing them on one specific area of Doctor King’s brain, thus shutting down all his other functions. Scientists have observed similar effects using
transcranial magnetic stimulators
on rats, thus developing accelerated growth of specific areas of the brain. The conclusion was that they had made the rats smarter.”

“He’s already smart enough for my liking, Doc,” Raine half-joked.

“What is happening to Doctor King is not the same as what happened to the rats. The stimulating device- in this case the radiological material placed directly against his skull- is different and the way the tachyons have ‘excited’ his synapses again is like nothing that has been documented before.”

“You said his synapses had all been redirected to a specific part of his brain. Is it a part that . . . I don’t know, controls his vision . . . or his motor skills . . ?”

“We are talking about the most sophisticated computer ever created here, Mister Raine. The human brain isn’t conveniently compartmentalised and labelled with ‘eyes’ ‘ears’ ‘mouth’ and ‘nose’. The whole thing works together,
ja?
However, it can be loosely separated into several parts: the cerebellum which controls things like balance, reflexes,
etcetera, etcetera, etcetera
.” There was something almost flippant about the neurologist, Raine decided. It was as though he knew his subject matter inside out and didn’t like wasting his time having to explain it to the less scientifically minded.

“The Primary Motor Cortex controls movement,” he continued. “The Temporal Lobe is responsible for hearing, memory formation, recognition, that sort of thing. The Occipital Lobe contains the visual cortex and essentially controls the information gathered from the eyes. The Frontal Lobe governs things like consciousness, habits, motor skills, personality,
etcetera
. My personal favourite is the Limbic System. This is the primal part of the brain responsible for emotions . . . and sexual arousal.”

Raine noted the doctor’s eyes flick over to take in Nadia’s lithe form before concluding. “Last but not least is the Parietal Lobe.” He tapped one of the monitors which displayed the electroencephalogram, or EEG scan, which monitored the electrical activity of King’s brain. “It is the Parietal Lobe, or more precisely, the right-hand hemisphere of the Parietal Lobe, that all the electrical synapses in Doctor King’s brain are being diverted to.”

Nadia studied the scan closely, her attractive face grim. “That is also the general area of the skull where I detected the anomalies in Kha’um and Pryce’s remains, most likely caused by a tumour.” She heard Sid catch her breath and turned to her friend. “Both Kha’um and Pryce were exposed to the tachyon radiation over an extended period,” she tried to reassure her but Raine read the unspoken truth. King’s exposure may have been brief, but with three pieces of the mask, it was intense.

He tried to shift the conversation away from that delicacy and asked the doctor, “What does the Parental Lobe control?”

“
Parietal
,” Heinrich corrected gruffly. “Put simply, it controls the sensory information.” At Raine’s blank stare, he continued with a huff. “Basically, it ‘sifts’ through all the information which your sensors - your eyes, ears, mouth, nose and skin – have already fed to other parts of your brain and forms a single concept. A piece of art, for instance. It is here, in the Parietal Lobe, that your appreciation for a painting will be determined, or a member of the opposite sex for that matter.” Again his eyes drifted to Nadia.

“Why would his brain be rewiring itself to give him a greater appreciation of art?” Gibbs demanded.

“Maybe our next destination is the Louvre,” Raine replied lightly. No one seemed to appreciate his attempt at levity.

“It is not just art,” the doctor glowered. “It is any sensory input,
ja?
Or many. What is interesting is that the increased neural activity is only being focussed on the right-hand hemisphere of the lobe.”

“Why’s that interesting?” Raine asked. He had slipped into command of the discussion easily, taking over from Gibbs without either man realising it.

“A few years ago, a group of American scientists conducted a study on both male and female volunteers, subjecting them to a variety of different stimuli. On the public face of it, their premise was to either prove or disprove the old ‘battle of the sexes’ when,
one
: a man accuses a woman of being a poor map reader, bad with directions and navigation, and,
two
: a woman accusing a man of not being able to see something right under his nose,
ja?
The car keys, for instance.”

He paused and looked at each person gathered in the room before continuing. “What they discovered was that both statements were entirely justified. The study found that both hemispheres of the Parietal Lobe became active in women, creating a tighter, closer spatial awareness. So, for instance, while searching for those lost keys, while the man would take in the entire room, the woman’s attention would be focussed bit at a time on far smaller areas- the coffee table, beneath the sofa,
etcetera
, often finding them where the man had already looked. The team linked this back to woman-kind’s prehistoric ancestors who spent their days close to their caves or camps foraging for fruits, roots, berries,
etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.