Moon Mask (44 page)

“I won’t hurt anyone, Mister Adjo, as long as you-”

“I don’t have a map. I’ve never seen any treasure map-”

Bill shrugged. Pulled the trigger-

“Wait!” King’s voice exploded out with more authority than expected, halting Bill’s trigger finger. The girl squirmed away from him.

“Something to add, Ben?”

King took a moment to collect himself, fighting back an explosion of painful memories from that afternoon in Lagos.

He didn’t doubt that Bill would have pulled the trigger and so had shouted out on reflex to stop him, but without something to show for his outburst the girl’s life would be only seconds longer. Her life, the lives of Adjo’s entire family was in his hands.

“He doesn’t know where it is,” he argued meekly.

“I’m simply jogging his memory.”

“Look at him,” King demanded, pointing a finger at the man crumpled to his knees. Tears streamed down his face, mucus drooled from his nose, his breath came out in ragged breaths and his body visibly trembled. “Look at him,” he said again. “That’s not a man who is lying to you for the sake of a map. That’s a man who would do anything,
anything,
to protect his family.”

Bill regarded the man and King noted that there was no distain in his expression, no pity or contempt. It was as though Bill was a blank slate, totally devoid of all feeling. He had a mission, a purpose, and it didn’t matter who lived or died so long as he saw it through to its fruition.

“What are you saying, Ben?” he asked. “That you’ve brought us to the wrong goddamned place? That you’ve led us on some wild goose chase to the cesspit of the earth? Because if that’s the case then it’s someone else who will be suffering the punishment.” He went to tap his radio earpiece.

Sid.

“No,” King cut him off. “The map’s here. But we’re talking about nearly three hundred years of history, Abubakar’s descendants moving around all over Patagonia.”

“Abubakar?” Adjo repeated the word, grabbing Bill’s attention.

“That’s right,” King said, cutting in before Bill threw a new tirade of threats at him. He came around from the sofa and crouched down to the other man’s level. “Abubakar was your ancestor. From Egypt.”

The man’s eyes went wide. “Egypt?” His brow creased. “But how? That is not possible.”

“It is possible, Mister Adjo. Abubakar settled in Patagonia in 1713, fell in love, married and had a child. But before he settled in these parts, your ancestor was . . .” he feared saying it, feeling the inklings of a bond forming between him and Adjo which threatened to collapse at the incredulity of his next word. “A pirate.”

“A pirate?”

“That’s right,” he replied before the other man had time to fully process what he had just been told. “And he had a map - well, part of a map really - which I’m guessing he handed down to his son, who passed it onto
his
son, and so on, and so on, right up until you.”

Adjo shook his head. “I have never seen this map which you speak of.”

“But you did recognise the name Abubakar, didn’t you Mister Adjo?” King felt Bill’s impatience mounting as Adjo nodded.

“It is a word, scratched into the chest.”

“Chest?” That got Bill’s attention.
Nothing like a good old pirate cliché to enrapture the uneducated morons of the military world,
King thought.

Adjo nodded again, more vigorously. “There is a chest. A very old chest, made out of wood. It was my father’s, and his father’s before him. It has been in the family for many years, many generations. And, scratched into the inside lid of it there is a word- Abubakar. My father said he never knew what it meant.”

“Where is it?” Bill demanded.

Adjo glanced nervously at him. “It is in the attic,” he explained, then shrugged. “We use it to store blankets.”

“Show me,” King said.

“There is nothing in it. There never has been. It was empty when my father gave it to me. There certainly is no map.”

King’s heart sank. If he didn’t find the map then Adjo’s family would be butchered, and so would Sid. Maybe there would be something, some clue as to the map’s fate. “Show me anyway,” he said, glancing at Bill for permission. He nodded to his guard.

“Go with them. And Ben-”

“I know,” he said, rising to his full height, “
Don’t try anything
.”

With a significant glance at his family, worriedly taking in the crimson pool of blood from his wife’s gunshot wound, Adjo led the way through the apartment to where he retrieved a wooden ladder. He leaned it against one wall in the corridor leading to the bedrooms then climbed up to remove the hatch in the ceiling. Bill’s guard ordered him back down and then proceeded up first while Bill covered them, then Adjo and King ascended after him.

The attic space was surprisingly large but low and the frigid Patagonia air had crept in so that King could see his own breath escape his mouth in clouds of vapour. Keeping low to avoid the diagonal beams of the building’s roof, Adjo led the way through mounds of discarded items- rolls of carpets, rarely used suitcases, bags of clothes and boxes of toys. In one corner there sat a bulky television set, the faux-wood sticker peeling off.

“Here,” Adjo said. He cleared some of the junk out of the way to reveal an old wooden chest. It was almost stereotypically pirate-esque, about a meter long, half a meter wide and the same again as deep. Its lid rose into an elongated dome and metal strips strengthened the corners. The wood was dark and laced with scratches and gouges, making it look worn and most certainly well travelled.

King crouched down beside Adjo while he opened the lid and threw out the blankets and clothes within in a hurry. Their guard kept his silenced pistol aimed at them.

“There,” Adjo said and he pointed at the inside of the lid, low down near to the rusted hinge. King studied the marking. It was faint and looked like it had been purposely gouged into the wood with a knife.

“Abubakar.” As he read the name he felt a momentary sense of awe come over him. This was the private treasure chest of someone who had become one of Kha’um’s closest allies. It was yet another physical connection to that fantastical world of buried treasure and epic adventures he had read about in Emily’s diary.

He shrugged it off. This wasn’t the time. Even as one part of his mind instantly got to work trying to work out the chest’s connection to the map, the other part was trying to figure someway out of this mess. He knew that once the map had been discovered Bill would kill Adjo and his family. He couldn’t let them talk to the authorities until they were out of harm’s way. Yet if King acted against them then he would order Sid’s execution.

But even if he somehow found Abubakar’s part of the map, he doubted he and Sid would live much longer. He had read the Kernewek Diary cover to cover and, while it had led him to Patagonia in pursuit of Abubakar, he had no idea how to find Emily’s part of the map. His and Sid’s lives were worth only the value of the information King provided their kidnappers.

“So where’s the map?” their guard demanded, surprising King. Not only was it the first thing he had heard the man speak
, but it had been said in a strong Welsh accent.

“I told you,” Adjo said innocently. “There is no map.”

The mercenary’s face twisted angrily but King cut in before he could speak. “When your father gave you the chest, was there anything else with it?”

Adjo was exasperated. “No. Nothing. No map, no-”

“It’s okay,” King placed a calming hand on the man’s shoulder. Adjo sighed, rolling back on his haunches. “It’s got to be here somewhere,” he mumbled under his breath. In fact, the rational part of his mind knew it could be anywhere in the world right now, separated from the chest years, even centuries ago. In fact, there was no proof that it had ever been contained within the chest. After all, what self-respecting pirate would keep a map to buried treasure inside his own treasure chest? Yet something told King he was close.

He checked all the surfaces of the chest, running his finger along all the scratches and the gouges, searching for any pattern, any sense of logic that might reveal directions scrawled into the wood. Turning it on its side he checked the bottom, and then the domed lid before finally slamming it closed in frustration.

Something clanked inside it.

King’s brow furrowed in confusion. “I thought you emptied it.”

“I did,” Adjo replied, opening the chest again to reveal its empty interior. King took the lid from him and slammed it closed again. Once more, something shifted inside. It was subtle, barely noticeable in fact. Was he clutching at straws?

“
Is everything alright up there?”
Bill’s voice crackled through the Welshman’s radio.

“Fine, boss. Just the Doc making a hullabaloo,” he replied. “Looks like another dead-end to me.”

“Well tell King that he has three minutes until my next check in. I’d better see some progress by then or else his girlfriend’s gonna start losing fingers.”

King ignored the man’s threats. He opened the lid again and then shook it on its hinges. The rattle was definitely coming from inside the dome of the lid. The underside of it was nailed shut. “I need something to prise this open with,” he told Adjo.

“I have a toolbox,” Adjo said, rising to his feet. The merc whipped his pistol up and Adjo held up his hands, startled by the aggression. “I have screwdriver,” he explained.

The guard considered this before nodding. “Slowly,” he warned, trailing him with his gun as he scrambled to a metal box lodged against the old TV. Adjo returned a moment later with a flat headed screwdriver and handed it to King.

King instantly pictured himself driving the screwdriver savagely at their guard but the mercenary had obviously considered that too.

“My gun is aimed squarely at your head,” he told him. “Get any ideas and you’ll have a bullet pass straight through that genius brain of yours. Just do what you’ve got to do then put the screwdriver on the floor and slide it back to me.”

King glanced at the brute’s reflection in the TV screen. Sure enough, the pistol was right where he’d said it would be. Even Raine wouldn’t be able to move fast enough to attack the man with the screwdriver before getting up close and personal with a bullet. Instead, he used the flat head for its original purpose, sliding it between the inside of the lid and its frame. The wood splintered as he levered it along its length until finally it wrenched free, falling into his hands. Within the cavity of the domed lid he saw something glisten.

“Alright, Doc. Do like I said,” Bill’s lackey reminded him.

And like that, the next few seconds all clicked together for Benjamin King.

He cautiously placed the screwdriver on the floor and slowly slid it back, subtly keeping his eyes on the TV in the corner. In the reflection, he saw the guard, gun still aimed at his head, crouch down to the retrieve the potential weapon. He kept his back straight, his weapon poised, but the immediate threat of using the screwdriver to attack him had passed.

He flicked his eyes down to the screwdriver.

King made his move!

34:

Overland Runaway

El Chaltén,

Argentina

Wrenching
it from its cocoon within the lid of the chest, Benjamin King spun around and with savage ferocity, an act of desperation, he sliced the golden blade, once the weapon of an Ancient Egyptian, across the guard’s throat, gouging deep. Even after so many years, the knife slid through flesh and cartilage as though it was butter, crunching against the bone of his guard’s spine. He was dead pretty much instantly and, in horror, King watched as the body slumped to the floor. The impact would alert Bill in the living room below. He’d kill Adjo’s family, then order Sid’s death-

Adjo moved as fast as lightning and caught the soldier’s body, lowering it softly and silently to the floor.

King stared at the bloodied dagger in his trembling hand, his mind numb.

During his dash through Xibalba he knew he was responsible for the deaths of some of his attackers, but he had never in a million years contemplated the brutal murder of a man, staring into his horror struck eyes as the knife plunged deep, as-

“It is okay,” Adjo whispered. His words seemed harsh on his ears, loud, shocking him from the nightmare of the Welshman’s face as it flashed again and again through his mind.

Gently, Adjo placed a hand on King’s trembling wrist and lowered the knife. It was solid gold, its handle once wrapped in leather that had long since worn away, its hilt decorated with tiny hieroglyphs and precious gems. King remembered Emily Hamilton’s description of a golden dagger which Abubakar had kept and knew this was the same one, but how could it be the map he sought?

“We must do something or that man will kill my family,” Adjo refocused his thoughts on their present plight.

His family? King shook himself back into reality. Adjo’s family. Sid. He didn’t have the time to feel guilt or self-loathing over what he had done. He had to take charge of the situation. He nodded once, firmly, to Adjo then knelt quietly on the floorboards, taking a moment to wrap the dagger in an old shirt which had been tossed from the chest. He then slipped the weapon into the inside pocket of his jacket and reached over to pluck the dead man’s gun from his fingers.

“We need to get the timing just right,” he said in hushed tones to Adjo.

“Is everything all right up there?”
Bill’s voice crackled loudly through the guard’s radio.

“Shit,” King cursed. He knew that any delay in a response would rouse the other man’s suspicions. He plucked the dead man’s radio to his lips. “Sure boss,” he said in what he hoped was something akin to a Welsh accent.

He checked his watch. It had been almost fifteen minutes since Bill’s last check in with his pilot. It was almost time to act. “We’ve got the map. Coming down,” he added briefly.

“Copy that.”

“What do we do?” Adjo asked, a stir of panic in his voice.

King had already worked out a plan of attack. “You go first,” he told the hostel owner. “When I say, I need you to create some sort of distraction, get Bill looking away from me.” He was an amateur with a gun. Bill was an expert. He knew that in a direct shootout with his captor he’d end up looking like Billy Clanton at the O.K. Corral. Dead. “Go,” he ordered.