“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.
“We were doing what was right,” Raine replied sharply. “We were delivering it to the United Nations, for its fate to be decided by the people in place to make those sorts of decisions! Not some shadowy splinter group!”
“Now, I know you’re not that gullible, Nate. You knew all along that at some point America, just like Russia and China, would show its hand. No one in the pact was prepared to share the power of the tachyon. What I failed to realise, however,” he added ominously. “was the true, and far more insidious, application that the United States had planned for the Moon Mask.”
Raine and King both frowned.
“Which is what?”
“Nathan, Ben,” he paused for emphasis, glancing from one to the other. “The Moon Mask doesn’t just threaten the future of humanity. It threatens its past.”
56:
Phoenix Rising
King’s breath caught in his throat. “What?” he gasped.
“The Moon Mask threatens humanity’s past,” Langley repeated. “The whole tapestry of time.”
“What are you talking about?” Raine demanded.
“Time travel, Nate,” the older man replied.
Raine stared at him with his intense blue eyes for several long seconds. Then he burst out laughing. “You’ve got to be kidding me!”
King leaned forward on his chair, suddenly more interested. Whilst he had participated in the conversation to this point, his gaze had been distant, his thoughts trapped beneath the waves with the spirit of the woman he loved. But now, all such distance evaporated in an instant. He thought about Kha’um, about his own epic quest across the globe to reunite the pieces of the Moon Mask. All to save his people. All to save the woman he loved.
To save her from ever dying in the first place.
“He’s not kidding, Nate,” he told his friend, his eyes focussed on Langley. The man seemed older now than he had back in New York. He had made a decision to leave behind the life he had known, rightly or wrongly, for a cause that he believed in.
Langley spun on his chair and began tapping the touch-screen computer affixed to the bulkhead of the plane. After a few clicks, he brought up a file. The very first page displayed the emblazoned logo of a bird bursting out of searing flames.
“Project Phoenix,” he announced, “began life in the early forties as a last ditch effort to combat the overwhelming forces of imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. It was, quite literally, to be the re-birth of America. But, in reality, it began far earlier, drawing on the research of some of the world’s greatest scientific minds. Much of it was based on research which the CIA confiscated from Nikola Tesla’s estate after his death. Research he conducted on the fragment of the Moon Mask which had made its way from Africa, into the hands of the early Freemasons — a totally different organisation to the group I represent, I might add — before being… procured by the ‘mad scientist.’ Only that mad scientist was not as mad as history has made him out to be. He drew up the blueprints for the first scientifically plausible time machine; blueprints which the next generation of scientists, headed by one Albert Einstein, elaborated on, culminating in the construction of the USS Eldridge.”
He proceeded to tell Raine and King about the Philadelphia Experiment and its failed attempts to transport the USS Eldridge back in time so that it could eliminate America’s enemies before they ever became a threat.
“It failed,” he finally concluded. “And eventually the D-Day landings saw the beginning of the end of Hitler’s regime, and the A-bomb subdued Japan. The war was over. But the U.S. government still wanted to control the power of time. And so Phoenix thrived. It moved from one establishment to the next, one generation to the next; from Philadelphia to Area 51 in the late forties, early fifties; Long Island in New York to Montauk Air Force Station in the eighties and nineties. And, most recently, Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado — right underneath NORAD.”
“That’s incredible,” King whispered.
“At the heart of the experiment has always been that single shard of the Moon Mask,” Langley continued, tapping on the touch-screen computer to bring up the schematic of a ship. The Eldridge. Even to King’s untrained eye he knew there was something wrong with the image. There were no giant guns mounted to the deck, none of the fixtures and fittings he would have expected from a WWII-era warship. Instead, pipes, wires and conduits snaked around the central superstructure, down through the decks to a long chamber running through the very centre of the ship.
“This is the Eldridge as she looked in the early forties.” Langley pointed to a room at the aft of the ship, four decks down. “This was her generator room.” He tapped on it and that section of the screen enlarged. Again, there were more pipes and wires trailing from two enormous-looking computers and hooked up to a frame built directly in front of the opening to the ‘tube’ he’d noticed running the length of the ship. A few more taps of the screen and Langley over-laid black and white photographs of the room.