Moon Mask (75 page)

It wasn’t Bill who had spoken.

A second figure came into view behind him.

Alexander Langley.

55:

The Watchers

Airborne over the Pacific

“Who
the hell are you?” Raine’s demand hung in the cabin of the Black Cat as it powered through the night sky, almost invisible.

Having dried off and changed into clean, dry clothes, he and King sat opposite Langley and Bill, nursing warm cups of coffee and waiting for some answers.

A seething anger simmered in his veins, a sense of betrayal which far surpassed that of Gibbs and even Nadia. He had been betrayed before, but never three times in one afternoon! Gibbs’ betrayal was neither here nor there. He’d known the man’s hatred for him, understood it even. Nadia’s betrayal stung like an open wound. He had been foolish enough to drop his guard, to let her get close to him in a way that went beyond the physicality of mere sex. For a moment, just a moment, he had begun to harbour feelings towards her.

Idiot!
He cursed himself.

But Langley? Never in a million years would he have predicted his former mentor’s treachery. The man had helped him to escape from ‘The Castle’ three years ago. He had voluntarily taken an agonising bullet to the knee, almost crippling him. His loyalty to him had certainly crippled his career in the CIA. So how did a man like that end up being involved with a bunch of mercenaries who had left a trail of death and destruction in their wake?

“Years ago, when I was still in the SOG, still your C.O. in fact,” Langley began, fixing Raine with his dark eyes, “I was approached by a group of men and women who claimed to represent the ‘
interests of humanity
’.”

“Oh please,” Raine snarled, earning an angry look from Bill. King for his part kept quiet, his face twitching with barely suppressed emotion, his mind reeling from all that had happened. Yet Raine knew he was focussed on the conversation, hanging on Langley’s every word.

“The group assigns themselves no specific
name
or
title
,” Langley continued over the drone of the plane’s engines, “however, society itself has assigned it with numerous ones over the years. Probably the most famous is the Knights Templar.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

Langley continued, unperturbed by his scepticism. “In fact, the origins of the group stem back much further, back to the earliest origins of Ancient Egypt. I’m sure you’ve heard of the
Urshu
, Ben?”

King glanced up, eyes sharp yet distant at the same time; red raw, watery with tears yet burning with anger. “The ‘Watchers’,” he said easily, without showing any strain of plucking the obscure information from his memory. “In Egyptian mythology, they were a group of . . . ‘
demigods
’, I guess you could say. They were intermediaries between the first of the Egyptian gods, the
Neteru
, and humankind. After what the Egyptians called
Zep Tepi,
the First Time, the
Neteru
ascended from earth to heaven but the
Urshu
remained on the corporeal plane as guardians of the knowledge of the gods. The idea was most likely worked into the ethos of the priesthood and even the king, who took up the
Urshu’s
job as an intermediary between the gods and mankind. It’s pretty much the origins of ‘divine right’.”

“They were so much more than just the guardians of knowledge, Ben,” Langley explained. “They were the guardians of
mankind
, the protectors of civilisation. Long before the first king of Egypt was even born, the
Urshu
took a vow to protect the world from evil, a vow and a role which has been carried forward from one incarnation to the next. The
Urshu
of Egypt, Eleusians of Greece, the Knights Templar, the Freemasons, the Illuminati. Many groups, like the masons, have branched off from the original core group, forgotten about its existence. Others faded in the sands of time. Others exist now only in popular culture, Lara Croft video games and Dan Brown novels. Some, like the Illuminati, have been demonised and villainised. But that has all been a carefully executed plan. To give the world a snippet of truth so that they blind themselves to the reality.”

“And what is the truth? What is the reality?” King asked angrily.

“The truth is that we’ve always been there, behind the scenes,” Langley replied casually, either not noticing the archaeologist’s growing resentment towards him, or not caring. “Many people think of the Illuminati or the Freemasons as shadowy groups behind the scenes of world governments, pulling the strings of presidents and prime ministers, working towards their goal of creating a new world order. But the truth, Ben, is that we are not trying to
create
anything, merely
preserve
it. Civilisation has always balanced on the edge of a knife. The
Urshu
, the Templars or whatever you want to call them, have always been there to bring us back from the brink of annihilation.”

“And you do that by abducting innocent people?” King snapped, glowering at Bill. “By shooting an unarmed woman in the knee and terrorising her children?” He glanced at his bandaged hand, considering the irony of sitting in front of the man who only days ago had run the appendage through with a nail. Those days seemed like a lifetime ago now.

“We do it,” Langley cut in before Bill shot back a heated retort, “by any means necessary. The world has changed in the last five thousand years, and so the group has needed to change too. Our ideal method is to work peacefully behind the scenes. That was my job at the U.N., to sway the thoughts of the Security Council so that the next time a Saddam Hussein, or an Adolph Hitler, arose, they would not sit idly by and wait for millions to die before acting.” He continued. “Sometimes our methods are to manipulate information, to make governments do our work, to make those in power make decisions that will help humanity, not just America, or Britain, or Russia. We fed the White House faked information about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq so that they would take down Hussein, for example.”

“Langley,” Bill warned, uncomfortable with letting him reveal their secrets.

“Relax,” Langley said smoothly. “They’re not going to tell anyone.” He glanced at Raine and King in turn, and then smiled slyly. “Besides, who would believe them?”

“But what you did in Jamaica and Chile wasn’t covert,” King pointed out.

“No,” Langley admitted. “It wasn’t. Sometimes it has been necessary to take a more active role in the course of human events, and that is where people like Bill, here, come in. The ‘Field Unit’ of the group, if you will; ex-Special Forces soldiers, posing as mere mercenaries, who will do
whatever
it takes to protect the world from its enemies.”

So Bill’s team had nothing to do with the Russians after all, Raine realised. It wasn’t West or Nadia that had been feeding the mercs information, enabling them to hound their every step. It was Langley. Venezuela, Jamaica, Patagonia. He had orchestrated it all, even pulling in a favour with the Peruvians to delay the team on their pursuit of King and Sid to Argentina.

“What enemies does the entire world have in common?” Raine asked, re-entering the conversation after absorbing all that his former C.O. had said. “One nation’s enemy is another’s ally.”

“And yet not all men think in terms of
nations,
Nate, do they? Some have much larger visions . . . global conquest: Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan . . . Adolph Hitler. Their downfalls and deaths were all orchestrated by
us
.” He paused for a second, as though deciding whether to reveal more. “Lincoln. JFK.” Raine glanced up, shocked by the mention of such prominent names from his own nation. “Powerful men control the fates of millions. But some men, even the ‘good’ ones, can be too powerful.” His eyes caught Raine’s and then King’s in turn. “Too dangerous,” he added ominously.

King looked incredulous. “But what did you achieve by killing Hitler, or any of the others? They still killed millions of people.”

“We’re not fortune-tellers, Ben. To begin with, Hitler was nothing more than an outspoken politician. A petty thug. By the time anyone realised the danger he posed, it was too late. He’d surrounded himself with only his most trusted circle which even we couldn’t infiltrate. We tried. We made several attempts on his life. But we failed. Right until his regime began crumbling around him and we were able to get a man into his bunker. The same with all the others. We had to wait until they were at their most vulnerable.”

“And is that what you’ve done here?” Raine snarled. “Waited until we’re at our most vulnerable?”

Langley laughed. It was a genuine sound which seemed out of place given the circumstances. “You’re good Nate, but I’m not ready to put you in the same league as Alexander the Great just yet,” he joked. No one laughed.

Langley composed himself and then continued, as smoothly as if he were addressing the UN. “It is not just people that are dangerous, is it?” It was a rhetorical question. “There are . . .
things
in this world, objects which hold such powers or such secrets that they could wrench a chasm through civilisation.” He smiled his usual grandfatherly smile but Raine knew it hid more danger than he had ever imagined. “I don’t know all the details. Even to members of the group we know only of rumours, myths and legends; The Tower of Babel, the Ark of the Covenant, the Holy Grail. The lost prophesies of Nostradamus. The original Codexes of the Maya. Members of the group have spread from Egypt throughout the world, sometimes as soldiers, sometimes as politicians, sometimes as missionaries. The conquest of the Americas was a particularly active time for them, a terrifying era when unknown beliefs and unknown ‘technologies’ for want of a better term, threatened the established civilisations of the Old World.”

“The Franciscan priests and missionaries,” King realised, appalled. “They destroyed most of the indigenous knowledge of the ancient people of Mesoamerica and the Andes. They were members of your group.”

“No,” Langley corrected him. “They merely did our bidding, without even knowing it. We are simply the cogs, within the wheels, within the machines of governments and religions. A gentle suggestion to a monarch or to a religious leader; nowadays to a politician, a president or prime minister; normally that’s all it takes. Rarely do we have to get our hands so dirty to preserve the fragile status quo of this world.”

Raine’s face twisted in indignation. “You say you ‘preserve’ the status quo, but, in reality, you are the embodiment of the urban-legends about the Illuminati and the Masons: a secret cabal, working behind the scenes, employing whatever means necessary to manipulate the course of human history!” He shook his head in disgust.

“Don’t pass judgement on us, Nathan,” Langley snapped with an angry twist to his voice. “You of all people know what it takes to maintain some semblance of peace in this world. In order for the many to live, a few, even the
innocent
few, must die.”

“But there is a line!” Raine was angry now and he knew that it was more than just shock at learning of a secret society which had manipulated the course of history. It was personal. Alex Langley, his former C.O., his mentor, his friend, his surrogate father, had lied to him. Betrayed him. “And you crossed it!”

“Don’t lecture me about lines!” Langley took Raine’s assault just as it was intended. Personally. “Tell Mrs Marley about that ‘line’ Nathan. You were happy to cross it when your friends’ lives were in danger.”

“What did you do to Mrs Marley?” King asked but Langley continued talking over him.

“Tell that to the men and women you have tortured for information. Tell that to the men and women you have
killed
.”

“Men and women killed in war, in the defence of my country,” Raine shot back. “Men and women who were soldiers just like me. Men and women I tortured to get information which I needed to save many more lives!”

“Just like me! Just like
us
!” Langley said triumphantly. Raine had been trapped into endorsing his group’s actions. “This is a
war
that we are fighting, but not just a war for the supremacy of one country over another, for the subjugation of a people. This is a war we are fighting for the very survival of the human race!” He was impassioned now, preaching as he would to the Security Council. “We have fought it for five thousand years, and we will fight it for another five thousand, for another
ten
thousand! For as long as it takes for humanity to finally stop threatening itself with self-annihilation! If it wasn’t for us, the world as you know it would have self-destructed long ago.” He took a deep breath, settling himself. He didn’t remember standing but now found himself on his feet. He returned to his seat.

“We now face the greatest danger mankind has ever faced,” he announced solemnly.

Raine had not cooled his temper and remained on his feet. “The tachyon bomb-”

“No,” Langley laughed. “No.” He rubbed his greying temples. “Originally, that’s what we thought. That’s what I told the Security Council. That’s what I told the ‘Group’. I knew that every country involved would betray every other country involved, hence my insisting on a joint UN-led mission. It was a fail-safe option. Better than nothing. Better to have the Moon Mask under the joint protection of the
United
Nations than in the hands of just one.”

“But your primary mission was for Bill to get to the mask first. Keep it out of everyone else’s hands,” King realised, glancing at his opponent.

“I didn’t lie to you Ben,” Bill spoke up. “I would have let you and Siddiqa go once I had all the pieces. Then we would have destroyed it.”

“Just as we have destroyed dangerous objects throughout history,” Langley added.

“But you two fucked that all up!” Bill accused Raine and King. Raine tensed, muscles bunching.

“They were only doing what they thought was right,” Langley defended them.