Moon Mask (10 page)

There was an unspoken question which lingered in her dark eyes. King read it.
But will you sacrifice anything - Kha’um, the Moon Mask, the Bouda - for me?

It was something he had thought a lot about, especially since his father’s death. That loss had made him open his eyes to what he had. A career, prospects – however few – and a beautiful, intelligent woman who he couldn’t stand being without.

He kept telling himself that the moment just hadn’t presented itself to reach into his satchel and pull out the ring-box concealed within. Yet, somewhere deep inside, he feared the answer to his girlfriend’s question. And it was that fear that had stayed his hand and kept the engagement ring hidden in his bag for over six months.

It wasn’t that he didn’t love Sid. He did, deeply and truly. Since the day she had walked into the library at Oxford University all those years ago. It hadn’t been some fairy-tale romance. There had been plenty of ups-and-downs, trials and tribulations. Like any relationship.

Yet, for all the love he felt for her, he knew that a husband needed to be committed, one hundred per cent. He needed to be ready to sacrifice anything,
anything,
for her. But there was one thing he feared he couldn’t sacrifice.

The Moon Mask.

He had thought he could. Following his father’s death, he had sworn to forget all of his ‘crazy’ ideas. Sid had convinced him not to follow his father’s path. He thought he had put the world of the ‘maverick archaeologist’ behind him. Yet his mind always searched for clues to the Moon Mask’s location. His nightmares always replayed that terrible afternoon in Lagos.

His quest for the Moon Mask was far more than mere scholarly one-upmanship. It was more than fame-seeking, it was more than proving that his father wasn’t a nut-job.

It was about proving to himself that his mother and sister hadn’t died for nothing all those years ago.

Could he sacrifice that?

He knew he needed to tell Sid something. Saw the desire in her eyes. Felt the longing in his heart.

He reached for his bag. “Sid, I’ve been meaning to ask you something-”

“Don’t.” She caught his hand and pulled it back. It was as though she had read his mind, his thoughts. She knew his fear.

Tears flowed down her cheeks. “Don’t say what you don’t mean,” she pleaded.

“But I-”

“Just kiss me,” she demanded, cupping his chin in her hands and bringing their lips together.

In that brief meeting of flesh, all of King’s worries evaporated. The passion grew, the heat intensified.

Piece by piece their clothing was removed. Inch by inch her hands explored the hard ridges of his muscular body. Kiss by kiss, his lips caressed her silk-smooth cocoa skin.

For tonight, at least, Benjamin King knew, he could sacrifice himself, if nothing else, to her.

The
dream was the same as the previous night, and the night before that, and every night for as far back as he could remember.

Nathan Raine ran through the dense underbrush, his athletic legs pumping hard, branches tearing his clothes, whipping his face. The sound of automatic gunfire drilled into the dark sky, accompanied by the screams of the dying and the wails of the mourning-

“It is not healthy to sleep in such a position.”

The words jolted him awake and he sat bolt upright in the canvass chair.

He was in the mess tent, tendrils of sunlight creeping under the canvass as it flapped in the strong morning wind. Stood three feet away, a severe expression blanketing the natural beauty of her face, was Nadia Yashina.

A mischievous grin split through his sleepy daze. “I can think of a few better positions to sleep in, if you’d care for a demonstration.” He scanned the Russian woman’s body, clad in tight fitting black trousers and a form-hugging khaki vest-top which revealed the merest
glimpse of the top of her full, rounded breasts.

“No doubt you could conjure up numerous experimental bedtime positions more comfortable than that, but I believe you have a number of other candidates who are first in line to be your . . . guinea pig.”

Her scathing remark and nonchalant attitude, in fact her complete lack of interest in him whatsoever, only made Raine’s blood boil hotter.

“Why, you sound almost jealous, Nadia,” he accused.

The Russian scientist turned away and headed to the small kitchenette area. “I am merely stating an observation, Mister Raine. I would have thought by now you’d have realised I have no interest in becoming another one of your . . . how you Americans say? Conquests!”

“It hadn’t escaped my attention,” he grumbled under his breath.

“What are you doing here anyway?” Nadia demanded. “You have your own tent, no?” She began pouring herself a bowl of high-fibre Venezuelan cereal which Raine had delivered the previous day.

His mouth dry and his head feeling groggy, Raine glanced at the empty bourbon bottle on the floor next to his chair before achingly climbing to his feet. He rubbed his sore neck from where his head had lolled at a curious angle during sleep.

Nadia’s eyes snapped from her breakfast, to Raine and then to the whiskey bottle. “Ah,” she said in understanding.

“‘
Ah
,’ what?” Raine asked innocently but the Russian said no more.

Raine stood on the opposite side of the self-service counter and switched on a half-full kettle. “Coffee?” he asked.

Nadia glanced at him. “My cereal is fine, thank you,” she replied curtly but her voice was drowned out by a sudden, high pitched scream. It echoed across the mountain top, piercing the shrill howl of the wind and scattering frightened, roosting birds into flight.

Acting on pure instinct, Raine launched into action, bursting from the tent and running in the direction of the cacophony, Nadia on his heels. They darted between the ranks of sleeping tents, bolting guy-ropes and dodging the occasional occupant who had been woken by the noise and sleepily come to investigate.

Within seconds they had both arrived at the tent that was the source of the disturbance, squatted on the edge of the camp near to the science labs. From within came the screaming: high pitched, panicked, out of control. A figure within lunged and thrust at the canvass, as if desperate to escape but having forgotten how to use the door!

Without hesitation, Raine ripped open the zip and flung up the flap. Instantly, a middle-eastern looking woman in her early twenties, wearing only thermal sleeping garments, burst out and fell into his arms. She panicked and struggled but Raine held her close.

“Hey,” he said, trying to steady her. “Hey!” he snapped, more harshly this time. It did the trick. The girl stopped struggling and stared, wide eyed, up at him. “What’s the matter-?”

He cut himself off and brushed the woman’s black hair away from her face. Hidden beneath was a large, oozing welt of broken flesh. It was all he could do not to pull away from her, aghast.

“Nate,” Nadia called. Her tone seemed flat, somehow. Detached. And her use of his first name was also surprising.

She was halfway inside the tent but backed out to allow Raine access. He relinquished the frightened girl to Nadia’s embrace and peered inside the canvas.

It was all he could do to swallow the bile that rushed up his throat.

Lying on the second of two roll mats was an oriental man, lifeless eyes staring. His naked body was covered in dozens of boils and welts which had burst and sprayed sickly smelling, oozing puss over the tent’s interior.

“Oh my god,” Raine gasped and quickly retracted from the tent.

Another scream suddenly tore into the early morning sky, this one deeper, more masculine. Raine spun and stared across the camp as a man burst out of his tent in a panic. Even from this distance, he could see boils on his flesh. Then, awoken by the disturbances to discover the same debilitation, one scream of terror after another rose up. Men and women erupted from their tents, some waking up next to dead loved ones, others blistered and bleeding. Some ran around in a panic, others stumbled, dazed and shocked.

“What the hell is happening?” Nadia whispered.

In only moments, the sunbathed summit of Sarisariñama had been transformed into a living, bleeding hell.

Raphael del Vega’s words suddenly came to Raine’s mind.

It is an Evil Spirit which will devour us all
.

It seemed the spirit had awoken.

And it was hungry.

6:

Secondary Concerns

The White House,

Washington D.C., U.S.A.,

United
Nations Ambassador Alexander Langley hurried into the Oval Office, surprised to see the two men seated on the president’s blue sofa.

Michael ‘Mick’ Kane was into his fifties, a streak of grey running through the once thick black hair on either temple. Most of that grey had developed since he had taken up the mantle of Secretary of Defense. He was a good man, Langley knew, honest and decent. Unfortunately, those traits occasionally clashed with his responsibilities. A veteran of the first Gulf War, he tended to think too much about the lives of individual soldiers and less about the overall importance of a situation.

Jason Briggs, on the other hand, was cold and analytical. As Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, he had learned to treat everything as commodities- from field reports to company vehicles to soldiers’ lives.

He was a short man with a wiry frame and a head of silver hair. But despite his petit stature, only a brave, or foolish, man crossed him. Urban legend that circulated through the intelligence community even suggested that he could kill you with a stare from his intense dark brown eyes, a skill he had learned from the notorious mind-manipulating ‘Stargate’ Project.

Langley masked his surprise and glanced at President John Harper.

At forty three, Harper was only two months into his second term, narrowly scraping through the polls to retain his seat. Langley had known from the moment he had stepped into the Oval Office just over four years ago that he was never going to be one of America’s great presidents. He was no Washington or Roosevelt or Kennedy, but he had made his mark on the country, more so than most of the population knew. But now, his once jet black hair and narrow, youthful face was showing the signs of presidential stress. His hair was run though with streaks of grey and worry lines danced across his once handsome features like a child’s doodle pad.

“Thank you for meeting with me at such short notice, Mister President,” Langley said.

“Please, Alex, take a seat,” Harper replied, rising from where he had perched casually against the Resolute Desk. Crafted from the timbers of the British ship, HMS
Resolute
and presented to President Rutherford B. Hayes by Queen Victoria, the desk had been present in the Oval Office through numerous administrations.

Langley took a place on the sofa, crossing one leg over the other in a casual pose. He nodded and smiled a greeting at Kane and Briggs before refocusing on the president who took a seat opposite him.

“I’ll get straight to the point, Mister President,” he began. “At approximately seven hundred hours this morning, our time, UNESCO headquarters in Paris received a distress call from Professor Juliet McKinney. She’s heading up a scientific expedition on one of Venezuela’s table mountains.”

“I know all about the Sarisariñama Expedition, Alex,” Harper cut him off with a smile.

“Well, sir, it seems the expedition has been struck by some sort of contagion. The Director-General of UNESCO has been desperately trying to organise a rescue operation but she’s meeting opposition from the Venezuelan authorities. They themselves are proving reluctant to commit resources to the site until the exact nature of the contagion has been determined.” He shrugged. “So she called me.”

The situation, in fact, fell somewhat out of Langley’s purview as the United States’ Permanent Representative to the United Nations Security Council. But the Director-General had called in a personal favour and, when he had begun following the unfolding drama, he had felt compelled to assist. He knew coming to the president was a long shot, and frankly had been surprised by his agreeing to a meeting.

So far, there had been three fatalities on the summit: a male Japanese botanist, a female Scandinavian zoologist and a female American intern. But the illness had spread quickly through the camp’s population.

The first symptoms were stomach cramps, headaches, vomiting and diarrhoea, followed by severe skin irritations which on many of those infected had quickly developed into painful ulcerations. Several reports also mentioned hair loss as a symptom which had raised concerns in Langley about some sort of radiological exposure. The impromptu medical team on the summit, however, had used Geiger-counters and radiation detectors to ensure this was not the case. Also, he had since read the medical report on the German woman who had been evacuated several days earlier.

John Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore had diagnosed Karen Weingarten as suffering from a rare and extremely aggressive strain of
leptospirosis
or Weil’s Disease
. Apparently, the condition was caused by coming into contact with water contaminated by animal urine and caused fever and severe flu-like symptoms along with skin irritation. The strain the expedition was suffering from was far more aggressive, exaggerating all of those symptoms, to the point of death. While minor cases could be treated with strong antibiotics, severe cases, like most of those on Sarisariñama, required dialysis. It was therefore imperative that the sick scientists received medical help as soon as possible and, to do that, Langley would have to pull in a few personal favours of his own.

He finished explaining the situation to the president and sat back, trying to look relaxed.

Before a bullet to the knee cap had brought a sudden end to his military career four years earlier, Langley had been the rising star of D.C. But the scandal that had surrounded his injury had almost crushed him. Nevertheless, for a man who had fought enemies with guns, the slimy agents of Capitol Hill weren’t going to keep him down. He had manipulated his way into the U.S. seat on the Security Council and since then had fought enemies far more cunning than Taliban fighters.