The Babylonian Mask (Order of the Black Sun Book 14) Read online

  THE

  BABYLONIAN MASK

  Order of the Black Sun Series - Book 14

  Preston W. Child

  Copyright © 2016 by Preston William Child

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication might be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  Publisher's Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author's imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

  Edited (USA) by Usnea Lebendig

  Where is the sense in the senses when there is no face?

  Where walks the Blind when there is but dark and holes, empty?

  Where speaks the Heart without the release by tongue the lips to fare?

  Where tracks the sweet scent of roses and lover’s breath when absent lies smell?

  How will I tell?

  How will I tell?

  What hide they behind their masks

  When their faces are secret and their voices compel?

  Do they hold Heaven?

  Or do they wield Hell?

  ~ Masque de Babel (circa 1682 - Versailles)

  Chap ter 1 – The Burning Man

  Nina blinked profusely.

  Her eyes listened to her synapses as her slumber fell into REM, abandoning her to the cruel talons of her subconscious mind. In the private ward of the University Hospital of Heidelberg, the lights buzzed through the dead of night where Dr. Nina Gould had been admitted to reverse, if possible, the dreaded effects of radiation sickness. So far, it had been difficult to diagnose how critical her case really was, as the man who’d accompanied her had inaccurately relayed her level of exposure. The best he could say was that he’d found her wandering the underground tunnels of Chernobyl a few hours too long for any living creature to recover.

  “He did not tell us everything,” affirmed Sister Barken to her small group of subordinates, “but I had a distinct inkling it was not half of what Dr. Gould had endured down there before he claimed to have found her.” She shrugged and sighed. “Unfortunately, short of arresting him for a crime we do not have any proof of, we had to let him go and deal with the little information we had.”

  Obligatory sympathy played on the faces of the trainees, but they were only masking the boredom of the night behind professional guises. Their young blood sang for the freedom of the pub, where the group usually met after their shifts together or for the embraces of their lovers at this time of night. Sister Barken did not tolerate their double entendres and missed the company of her peers, where she could exchange actual cogent verdicts with those equally qualified and passionate about medicine.

  Her protruding eyeballs combed them, one by one, as she imparted Dr. Gould’s condition. Slanting at the corners, her thin lips fell downward in an implication of discontent that she often mirrored in her harsh, low tone when she spoke. Apart from being a stern veteran of the German medical practice adhered to at the Heidelberg Uni, she was also known to be quite the brilliant diagnostician. It was a surprise to her colleagues that she never bothered to further her career by becoming a physician, or even a resident consultant.

  “What is the nature of her circumstances, Sister Barken?” asked a young nurse, shocking the Sister with a show of actual interest. The fifty-year-old buxom superior took a moment to answer, looking almost happy to have been asked the question instead of having to stare into the comatose gaze of entitled runts all night.

  “Well, that was all we could find out from the German gentleman who brought her in, Nurse Marx. We could find no corroboration as to the cause of her illness, save that which the man told us.” She sighed, frustrated by the lack of background pertaining to Dr. Gould’s state. “All I can say is that she seems to have been rescued in time to be treated. Although she exhibits all the signs of acute poisoning, her system seems to be able to combat it satisfactorily…for now.”

  Nurse Marx nodded, ignoring the scoffing reaction of her colleagues. It intrigued her. After all, she had heard much of this Nina Gould from her mother. At first, by the way she babbled on about her, she had thought her mother actually knew the petite Scottish historian. It didn’t take long, however, for medical student Marlene Marx to find out that her mother was simply an avid reader of the journals and two books published by Gould. Thus, Nina Gould was a bit of a celebrity in her house.

  Was this another of the clandestine excursions the historian had undertaken, like those she had lightly touched on in her books? Marlene often wondered why Dr. Gould did not write more about her adventures with the well-known explorer and inventor from Edinburgh, David Purdue, but rather hinted upon the many journeys. Then there was the well-accounted association with the world-renowned investigative journalist, Sam Cleave, that Dr. Gould had written about. Not only did Marlene’s mom speak of Nina as if she were a friend of the family, but speculated about her life as if the feisty historian were a walking soap opera.

  It was only a matter of time before Marlene’s mother would start reading books about or published by Sam Cleave himself, if only to find out more about the other rooms in the great Gould mansion. All this mania was precisely why the nurse had been keeping Gould’s stay at Heidelberg a secret, fearing her mother would stage a one-woman march into the west wing of the 14th Century medical facility in protest to her captivity or something. It made Marlene smile to herself, but at the risk of provoking the carefully avoided anger of Sister Barken, she hid her amusement.

  The group of medical students did not know about the creeping convoy of injury approaching the emergency room a floor below. Under their feet a team of orderlies and night staff nurses were surrounding a screaming young man who was refusing to be strapped to a gurney.

  “Please, sir, you have to stop screaming!” the head nurse on duty begged the man as she cordoned off his furious path of destruction with her rather large frame. Her eyes flashed toward one of the male nurses armed with a shot of succinylcholine surreptitiously approaching the burn victim. The horrible sight of the wailing man had two of the newer staff members gagging, barely composing themselves as they waited for the head nurse to shout her next order. For most of them, however, this was a typical panic scenario, although every circumstance was different. They had, for instance, never had a burn victim running into the ER before, let alone one that was still exuding smoke as he skidded, losing clumps of flesh from his chest and abdomen along the way.

  Thirty five seconds felt like two hours for the stumped German medical professionals. Soon after the big woman cornered the victim with the blackened head and chest, the screams halted abruptly, changing into rasps of choking.

  “Airway edema!” she roared in a powerful voice that could be heard throughout the emergency ward. “Intubation, now!”

  The stalking male nurse lunged forward, planting a needle in the asphyxiating man’s crisp skin and pushing the plunger without reservation. He winced as the syringe crackled through the epidermis of the poor patient, but it had to be done.

  “Christ! That smell is sickening!” one of the nurses huffed under her breath to her colleague, who nodded in agreement. They covered their faces momentarily to catch their breath as the stench of cooked flesh assaulted their senses. It was not very professional
, but they were only people after all.

  “Get him to O.R. ‘B’!” the robust lady thundered to her staff. “Schnell! He is in cardiac arrest, people! Move!” They fitted an oxygen mask on the convulsing patient as his coherence waned. Nobody noticed the tall, old man in the black coat on his trail. His long, stretching shadow darkened the pristine door glass where he stood watching the smoking carcass being wheeled away. Under the brim of his fedora his green eyes glinted and his wasted lips sneered in defeat.

  With all of the chaos in the emergency room, he knew he would not be noticed and slipped through the doors to haunt the ground floor locker room a few feet past the reception area. Once inside the locker room he escaped detection by eluding the bright luminescence of the small ceiling lights above the benches. As it was the middle of night shift, there would not likely be any medical staff in the changing room, so he procured a pair of scrubs and made for the showers. In one of the obscured cubicles the old man shed his clothing.

  Under the tiny, circular lights above him, his skeletal, powdery form revealed itself in the reflection in the Plexiglas. Grotesque and gaunt, his elongated limbs shook off his suit and sheathed themselves in the cotton scrubs. His laden breath wheezed as he moved, mimicking a robotic, skin-wearing android pumping hydraulic fluid through its joints during every shift. When he removed his fedora to replace it with the scrub cap, his deformed skull mocked him in the mirror image of the Plexiglas. Each dent and protrusion of his skull was accentuated by the angle of the light, but he kept his head bowed as much as he could during the fitting of the cap. He did not want to be confronted by his biggest handicap, his mightiest deformity – his facelessness.

  Only his eyes were evident of his human countenance, perfectly shaped, but lonely in their normality. The old man did not suffer himself the indignity of his own reflection’s mockery, where his cheekbones flanked a featureless face. Hardly any hole formed between his nearly absent lips and above his meager mouth, and only two tiny fissures served as nostrils. The last piece of his clever disguise would be the surgical mask, elegantly finishing off his ruse.

  Shoving his suit into the farthest cabinet on the east wall and just pushing the narrow door shut, he corrected his posture.

  “Abend,” he muttered.

  He shook his head. No, his dialect was wrong. He cleared his throat and took a moment to collect his thoughts. “Abend.” No. Again. “Ah-bent,” he enunciated more clearly and listened to his hoarse voice. The accent was almost there; only one or two more tries.

  “Abend,” he spoke clearly and loudly as the door to the locker room swung open. Too late. He held his breath to break the word.

  “Abend, Herr Doctor,” the entering male nurse smiled as he proceeded to the adjacent room to hit the urinals. “Wie geht’s?”

  “Gut, gut,” the old man replied hastily, relieved at the nurse’s oblivion. He cleared his throat and headed for the door. It was growing late in the hour and he still had unfinished business to attend to regarding the smoking hot new arrival.

  Feeling almost ashamed of the animal method he used to track down the young man he had followed to the emergency room, he tilted his head back and sniffed the air. That familiar odor compelled him to trail it like a shark would relentlessly follow blood through miles of water. He paid little attention to the courteous greetings of staff, janitors and night doctors. Without a sound, his covered feet trod step after step as he obeyed the acute scent of burning flesh and disinfectant where it was strongest in his nostrils.

  “Zimmer 4,” he mumbled as his nose led him left at a t-junction of hallways. He would have smiled – if he could. His thin body crept down the burn unit hallway to where the young man was being treated. From the inside of the room he could hear the voices of the doctor and nurses declare the patient’s chances of survival.

  “He will live, although,” the male doctor sighed sympathetically, “I don’t think he will be able to retain his facial functions – features, yes, but his sense of smell and taste will be permanently severely impaired.”

  “He still has a face under all that, doctor?” a nurse asked softly.

  “Yes, but barely, as the skin damage will cause his features to…well…dissolve into the face a bit more. His nose will not be prominent and his lips,” he hesitated, feeling truly sorry for the attractive young man on the barely intact driver’s license in the charred wallet, “are gone. Poor child. Barely twenty-seven and this happens to him.”

  The doctor shook his head almost imperceptibly. “Administer some IV analgesics and start urgent fluid replacement please, Sabine.”

  “Yes, doctor.” She sighed and helped her colleague collect the dressing. “He will have to wear a mask for the rest of his life,” she said to no one in particular. She pulled the trolley closer, carrying the sterile bandages and saline solution. They did not see the alien presence of the intruder peering in from the hallway, finding his target through the slowly closing slit in the door. Only one word escaped him silently.

  “Mask.”

  Chap ter 2 – Stealing Purdue

  Feeling somewhat concerned, Sam strolled casually through the vast garden of the private institution just outside Dundee under a roaring Scottish sky. After all, was there any other kind? He felt good, though, inside himself. Empty. So much had befallen him and his friends of late that it felt amazing to think of nothing, for a change. Sam had returned from Kazakhstan a week before and had not laid eyes on either Nina or Purdue since he had returned to Edinburgh.

  He had been informed that Nina had suffered serious injuries due to radiation exposure and had been admitted to a hospital in Germany. After he had sent new acquaintance Detlef Holtzer to find her, he had remained in Kazakhstan for a few days and had not been able to obtain any updates on Nina’s condition. Apparently Dave Purdue had also been discovered at the same site as Nina, only to be subdued by Detlef for his strangely aggressive behavior. But that also was speculative at best, thus far.

  Purdue had contacted Sam himself the day before to notify him of his own confinement in the Sinclair Medical Research Facility. Funded and managed by the Brigade Apostate, the Sinclair Medical Research Facility was a clandestine ally of Purdue’s in a past battle against the Order of the Black Sun. The association happened to be ex-members of the Black Sun; apostates of the faith, so to speak, that Sam had also become a member of a few years earlier. His operations for them were few and far between, as their need for intelligence would surface only every now and then. Being a sharp and efficient investigative journalist, Sam Cleave was invaluable to the Brigade in this regard.

  Other than the latter, he was free to operate in his own capacity and do his own freelance work whenever he felt like it. Weary of doing anything as intense as his last mission any time soon, Sam had elected to take the time to visit Purdue in whatever madhouse the eccentric explorer had checked into this time.

  There was very little information on the Sinclair Facility, but Sam had a nose for smelling the meat under the lid. As he approached the place, he noticed that there were bars on the windows all across the third floor of the four stories the building boasted.

  “I bet you are in one of those rooms, hey, Purdue?” Sam chuckled to himself as he proceeded toward the grand entrance to the creepy building with its overly white walls. A chill ran through Sam as he entered the lobby. “Geez, Hotel California posing as the Stanley much?”

  “Good morning,” the petite, blond receptionist greeted Sam. Her smile was genuine. His rugged, dark looks instantly intrigued her, even if he were old enough to be her much older brother or almost too old uncle.

  “Aye, that it is, young lady,” Sam agreed flamboyantly. “I am here to see David Purdue.”

  She frowned, “Then who is the bouquet for, sir?”

  Sam just winked and tilted his right hand downward to hide the flower arrangement under the counter. “Shh, don’t tell him. He hates carnations.”

  “Um,” she stuttered in abject uncertainty, “he is i
n Ward 3, up two floors, Room 309.”

  “Ta,” Sam grinned and whistled as he walked toward the staircase that was marked in white and green – ‘Ward 2, Ward 3, Ward 4,’ swinging his bouquet lazily as he ascended. In the mirror he was greatly amused by the trailing stare of the bewildered young woman who was still trying to figure out what the flowers were for.

  “Aye, just as I thought,” Sam mumbled as he found the hallway to the right of the landing where ‘Ward 3’ was marked on a similarly uniform green and white sign. “The loony floor with the bars and Purdue is the mayor.”

  In no way did the place resemble a hospital, really. It looked more like a conglomerate of medical offices and practices in a large mall, but Sam had to admit that he found the lack of expected lunacy just a tad unsettling. Nowhere did he see people in white hospital gowns, or wheelchairs transporting the half-dead and dangerous. Even the medical staff, which he could only tell apart by the white coats, looked remarkably serene and casual.

  They would nod and greet him cordially as he passed them, not making a single inquiry into the flowers he had in his hand. Such acceptance just took the fun out of Sam’s intended humor and he dumped the bouquet into a nearby trash bin just before he reached the allocated room. The door was closed, of course, being on the barred floor, yet Sam was dumbstruck when he found that it was unlocked. Even more astonishing was the interior of the room.

  Apart from one well-draped window and two posh luxury seats, there was little else but a carpet. His dark eyes scrutinized the strange room. It was missing a bed and the privacy of an en suite bathroom. Staring out the window, Purdue sat with his back to Sam.

  “So glad you came, old boy,” he said in the same cheerful, richer-than-God tone he usually used to address his guests at his mansion.