Moon Mask

by James Richardson

  Eventually, he had been briefly reunited with Sid and the two lovers had fallen into each other as though they were both parts of the same whole. Again, he’d fingered the engagement ring hidden in his satchel which had been left safely in his tent. But, yet again, the correct moment had just never presented itself to bring it out into the open.

  Both the Moon Mask and the fake mask which he had found on Kha’um’s remains had been secured inside lead-lined containers, blocking out the harmful tachyon radiation of the former.

  An hour later, four more helicopters had arrived, ferrying in a full medical team. Shortly thereafter, the evacuation had begun in earnest. Despite their objections, Sid and Nadia had been shipped out with the rest of the sick scientists while King had remained on the mountain with the soldiers to ensure that the two masks, as well as anything relating to them, such as the remains of Pryce and Kha’um, were carefully stored for transport.

  “I’ll be with you soon,” he had promised Sid. But he saw the hurt in her eyes. Once again, his obsession with the Moon Mask took precedence over her. To make matters worse, that had been over two days ago, and he still had no idea where his girlfriend, or any of his colleagues, were.

  He had felt an odd sensation as he stepped off the summit of Sarisariñama, the last of the doomed expedition to leave the site where so much had happened.

  For him, it was more than the tragedy of the deaths of so many people; it was more than the horrors and the exhilaration of what he had lived through.

  Sarisariñama now represented the culmination of his life’s work, of his father’s work. Of his obsession. It had brought to life the Moon Mask, Kha’um and so much more. Xibalba. Surely the biggest archaeological discovery since Hiram Bingham had unveiled Machu Picchu or Howard Carter had opened King Tut’s tomb.

  King’s family name would no longer be remembered as a laughing stock, but as the discoverers of the wonders of history.

  The Black Hawk had taken off from the summit in the dead of night, leaving the burned and bullet-riddled remains of the expedition’s base camp to the lonesome Evil Spirit of local folklore once more.

  In Caracas they had transferred to a U.S. Army Gulfstream C-20G jet which shot north over the continental United States. He had tried to sleep, but the weariness of his body could still not give in to the adrenaline rush that had overcome him.

  Six hours later, they had landed at an unspecified military base. There, he had been ‘debriefed’ by the leader of the Special Forces team, a man named Gibbs. The debriefing, however, had felt more like an interrogation.

  At first open and cooperative, as Gibbs had pushed him for all he knew about the Moon Mask, tachyon radiation, the Chinese and the unknown hostiles, King had closed up. His previous suspicions about the motives of the Americans came back to the forefront of his mind. He had demanded to speak to a representative of the British Embassy and to be reunited with Sid. Seven hours later, without either of his demands being met, he’d been shipped by helicopter to the United Nations Headquarters in New York City. There, he’d been met by a representative from Great Britain’s mission to the United Nations Security Council.

  Due to the serious nature of the events that had occurred in Venezuela, normal British counsel couldn’t be supplied, he had been told. Very few people in the world knew the truth about what had happened. Even the scientists themselves had been fed a cover story about Weil’s Disease and mercenary tomb raiders who had detected the expedition’s mayday and taken advantage of the situation.

  The Official Secrets Act had popped up a number of times during his new debriefing with the British Security Council Representative. Sid and Nadia, he had been told, were both responding well to the treatment they had received at John Hopkins hospital and were being shipped to New York. As another two people who could not be spoon-fed the lie, they would undergo a similar debriefing.

  Until the Security Council had convened and decided on a course of action, however, none of them would be allowed to talk to each other or to anyone outside of the small circle of knowledge.

  And so, as Langley stepped into what amounted to little more than a cell – a basic, windowless room with a single bed, a chair and desk, a television and a small shower/toilet room – King couldn’t keep the anger out of his voice.

  “I’ve already told you everything I know,” he snapped at the ambassador’s extended hand.

  “I know, Ben,” Langley replied. He picked up the metal-framed chair, turned it around and straddled it casually. “May I call you Ben?” he double checked, eyeing the archaeologist perched on the edge of the bed, muscles tense, eyes tired. He didn’t reply to his question so Langley continued smoothly. “I’m sorry if your stay here has been less than friendly so far. You know what these military types are like,” he shrugged. “They had to be certain you didn’t pose a threat to national security.”

  “I’m an archaeologist,” King answered, losing some of the bluster in his voice. It was more resignation now. Exhaustion.

  “Of course,” Langley smiled. “But I’m afraid that since 9/11 everyone looks like a terrorist to this country’s security forces. I make no excuses for that. These are dangerous times. And quite frankly, Ben, you are at this moment one of the most dangerous men in the world.”

  King’s expression of surprise quickly descended into one of humour. He laughed bitterly. “I heard that you yanks had a habit of coming up with a load of cock-n-bull to justify throwing people into Guantanamo without trial, but I think you’re going to have a hard time pegging that title on me.”

  “I’m afraid it is the truth, Ben.” Langley’s face softened. “But don’t worry. No one is throwing you into Guantanamo Bay or any other prison.”

  King studied the man in front of him. Despite the relaxed demeanour and the casual nature, he could see an analytical mind at work behind his grey eyes. Yet, strangely, he sensed that it wasn’t the behind-the-scenes manipulative analysis of an ordinary politician. There was something open and honest about the man. Refreshing, following his days spent being interrogated by harsh soldiers and slimy bureaucrats.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  “As I said, my name is Alexander Langley,” he repeated. “I am the United States Permanent Representative to the United Nations Security Council.”

  “And what do you want with me? Shouldn’t I be speaking to the British ambassador?”

  “I am a United States national,” Langley explained, “but in my position, I do not represent the interests of the U.S. but of the United Nations. And, right now, the U.N. needs your help.”

  “My help?” He had been expecting a battle to remain in any way involved with the study of the Moon Mask, given what it’s physical composition represented in terms of world power. All he cared about was understanding the cultural and historic link between Xibalba and the Bouda that the mask represented.

  Langley threw his thoughts off track. “Would you like a coffee?”

  Catching him by surprise, all King could think to do was shrug, non-committal.

  “Follow me,” Langley said. He knocked on the door which was opened by the guard. Obviously, King’s jail-break had been prearranged as the guard didn’t question him. After a moment’s hesitation, King followed him out into the corridor, to an elevator which ferried them up through the heights of the Secretariat Building. On the twenty-second floor, the doors opened and he was led down another corridor to the ambassador’s office.

  A long mahogany desk sat to one side of the room, its polished surface clear of clutter, a state-of-the-art touch-screen computer occupying most of the space. A large, abstract painting hanging on the wall in front of the desk looked vaguely African in origin, its bright colours a nod to the ambassador’s ancestral roots. Unexpectedly, a large, bright green cheese-plant loped against the side of the desk, effectively dividing the room in two.

  Langley led him around the giant vegetation to an L-shaped couch which had been set up in fro
nt two floor-to-ceiling corner windows. One looked down on the hub-bub of the United Nations Headquarters complex, tiny dots of people going about their business, moving purposefully from the famous thirty-nine story tall Secretariat tower to the domed General Assembly building and the unimaginatively named ‘Conference’ Building which housed the Security Council Chamber.

  King took the pro-offered seat in front of the other window, however, which offered a spectacular view of New York City, the varying heights of the high-rise buildings reflecting in the sunlit waters of the East River.

  With one side pushed up against the wall, the L-shaped sofa and the corner windows created a square shape, in the middle of which sat a glass coffee table. A pre-arranged silver tray held a coffee pot, a small jug of cream, a pot of brown sugar, two cups and saucers and a plate of biscuits. Langley poured them both a cup of coffee, added cream and sugar to their liking then settled back into his own couch, casually placing one leg over the other and resting his cup and saucer on his knee.

  “Help yourself to the cookies.” Bored of the dreary meals he had been fed since arriving in the U.S., he tucked into the assortment of biscuits with vigour.

  Langley laughed lightly before settling down to business. “I mentioned earlier that you are currently one of the most dangerous men in the world.”

  Suddenly, King’s appetite abandoned him. He swallowed the lump of food in his mouth and gazed up at the ambassador. “What did you mean by that? I’m not going to hurt anyone.”

  “Not knowingly.” He took a sip of his coffee. “Over the last twenty four hours, I’ve given myself a crash-course in everything ‘Benjamin King’. I know about your father’s theories, about the Bouda, the Progenitors. I know about the death of your mother and sister at the hands of General Abuku.”

  King felt a flash of anger stab at his heart. Who the hell was this man to invade his privacy like this, to dredge up the dark and painful memories of a childhood lost?

  “I’ve read every article you’ve ever written about this Kha’um character and his quest for the Moon Mask.” He took another sip of his coffee, but King’s own went untouched. He focussed on the man in front of him, realising that despite the hospitality, he was still in the midst of an interrogation.

  “The Moon Mask,” Langley said again, his own voice holding a degree of reverence. “It has shaped your life, hasn’t it, Ben?” King said nothing. He felt the other man’s eyes bore into him, the cold grey seeming to cut through his outer façade and see into his very soul.

  Suddenly, he stood up, balancing his coffee cup as he turned to peer out the window at the sunbathed city. Evening was approaching, a dusky haze settling into the azure sky.

  “Tell me, Ben, do you believe in destiny?”

  “I’m a scientist. I believe in facts, figures, evidence.”

  “Kha’um believed in destiny. You said so yourself, in the paper you wrote three years ago.”

  King’s eyes narrowed. “No. Kha’um believed that he could rewrite his destiny. He believed in the Bouda myth about being able to use the mask to travel through time.”

  “You don’t believe that?”

  King laughed. “Of course I don’t.”

  “And you don’t think it was your destiny to find Kha’um’s body inside a rotted ship in the Venezuelan rainforest?” He turned and looked at him, a quizzical expression on his face. “After all, you weren’t looking for him anymore. Quite the opposite, as I’m led to believe by Doctor Siddiqa's debriefing.”

  “You’ve spoken to Sid? Where is she-?”

  “She says that you went to Venezuela for precisely the opposite reason. To escape your family’s doomed obsession with the Moon Mask, with the Bouda, with the Progenitors.”

  “What’s any of this got to do with-?”

  “I do believe in destiny, Ben.” Langley returned to his seat, perching on the edge. “Not in any clairvoyant, star-reading nut-job kind of way. I believe that everything happens for a reason. Does that mean there’s some greater force out there pulling our strings?” He shrugged. “Beats me,” he admitted. “But you . . . your family has sacrificed so much to find the Moon Mask, to prove that the Bouda were real, to prove that an ancient civilisation once sailed this earth long before we ever thought possible. And right when your quest was over, your father dead, your hunt ended, only then did you, quite by chance, quite unexpectedly, find the evidence you and your father were seeking.”

  This guy’s got a screw loose. “I’m not sure what you’re saying,” he admitted carefully.

  Langley sighed and relaxed back into his seat. He took another sip of coffee, savoured it then swallowed. “I’m saying, Ben, that it is your destiny to find the Moon Mask. All of it. I’m saying that you’re the only man in the world that can do that. And that makes you dangerous. Very dangerous.”

  Langley placed his coffee on the table and walked over to his desk. He retrieved a tablet computer which was synced to his P.C. and returned to the couch.

  “A science team from NASA, under the jurisdiction of the U.N., was tasked with studying the two masks you retrieved from Xibalba,” he explained, handing King the tablet. On it was displayed a scientific report which, despite the photographs of the Moon Mask and Kha’um’s fake mask, meant very little to him.

  “To tell you the truth, I’m no scientist and all their report did was bamboozle me with information. But the general gist of that report is that Doctor Yashina’s original analysis of the mask was slightly in error.”

  Dare you to tell her that. “How so?”

  “The mask you found in the Labyrinth was composed mostly out of iron. This piece,” he indicated the roughly triangular section encompassing the left-hand jaw, tapering to a point in the nose, “she surmised as being composed out of pure iridium. She was almost right and, given the instruments she had to work with compared to NASA, she really had no way of knowing otherwise.”

  “Knowing what?”

  “Iridium is a superconductor, which means that its electrical resistance decreases as its temperature decreases,” he regurgitated, in layman’s terms, what the NASA boffins had told him. “Below 0.14 kelvins, iridium has absolutely no resistance. Zero. In a normal conductor, every time an electron collides with an ion, some of the energy carried by the current is converted into heat, which is carried off so that the energy is constantly dissipating. Superconductors work differently, however, in that when the metal is cooled, the current loses no energy as heat, and therefore flows without any energy dissipation.”

  King listened intently, recognising some of what the ambassador was saying from Nadia’s own description of Iridium back at the base camp.

  “0.14 kelvins, that’s iridium’s ‘critical temperature’, works out at something like minus four hundred and sixty degrees Celsius. Pretty damn cold. It has to be cooled to that level with liquid helium. Once there, a current can theoretically be maintained for over one hundred thousand years with very little degradation and with no further voltage applied. In recent years, so I’m told, scientists have begun trying to understand High Temperature Superconductors. It’s the same idea, only instead of being cooled by liquid helium, they use liquid nitrogen, which I’m told is a lot warmer- about 30 kelvins, or minus two hundred and forty three Celsius.”

  “Balmy.”

  “The Holy Grail of superconductivity, though, Ben, is a metal that demonstrates absolutely zero electrical resistance at room temperature. Such a marvel would revolutionise the world- power distribution, electronics, transportation. You name it.”

  King peered at the image displayed on the tablet’s screen. The Xibalban mask stared back at him.

  “The mask, in fact, both the masks - the iridium-like section of the one you found inside Xibalba, and the entire thing that you found with the remains of Kha’um – both demonstrate that attribute. Whatever the metal is, it’s not iridium, and it’s not of this world.”

  “A meteorite?” King asked, although he
had always suspected the answer. The original Bouda legend told of a king who had fashioned the original mask out of a piece of the moon which had fallen to earth, only to have it confiscated by the gods and scattered around the globe.

  But what about the second mask? he wondered. His first thought upon finding Kha’um cradling a second mask in the remains of his ship was that he had stolen a decoy, a fake mask used to dupe thieves. But if what Langley was saying was true, then both the ‘fake’ mask and the piece of the original, were fashioned out of the same miraculous lump of metal that had fallen from space hundreds, even thousands of years ago.

  “That’s right, though not the same one. The so-called ‘fake’ mask, while demonstrating the same super-conductivity as the piece of the original, is not emitting any tachyons.”

  So they had finally arrived at the real heart of the matter.

  Tachyons.

  That was what everyone was really after; the Chinese, the soldiers in black, the Americans, the U.N. None of them cared about the impact these space rocks had had on ancient cultures, how the tachyon radiation had destroyed an entire ancient civilisation and manifested itself in other cultures’ mythology. None of them cared about Kha’um, the Bouda, the Xibalbans or the Progenitors.

  It was all about the tachyons. Because, it seemed, tachyons were power in more ways than one.

  He placed the tablet computer on the coffee table, drained his cup and looked Alex Langley squarely in the face. “What do you want from me?”

  Now

  “A tachyon bomb has the potential to wipe humanity off the face of the earth.”

  Alexander Langley’s profound statement echoed across the United Nations Security Council chamber, twelve hours after his conversation with Benjamin King had finished.

  “NASA is not too sure how the tachyon particles are being generated in the piece of the original mask,” he explained. “One theory is that they are in fact a bleed-off of the superconducting metal’s current. At its critical temperature – in this case, room temperature, 300 kelvins – zero electrical resistance is found in the metal. However,” he continued, “the physical mass of the material, the mask itself, could have a limiting effect to the amount of energy it can store. Effectively, the mask is at full capacity and is bleeding off some of the excess energy in the form of tachyon particles. These in turn, as they decay, emit harmful radiation.”