Raiders

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Mason stood with his hands in his pockets and studied the Frankfurt skyline. He was standing in a room on the top floor of another safe house across the city and this time, it was their safe house, arranged by Ezra Haven. The man himself was in the next room talking with Eva who was undergoing a full examination by the medic, an American named Mat Wills. Wills believed she was showing symptoms of PTSD after the kidnap and assault and had whisked her away the moment he saw her almost as fast as Ezra had taken the strange jewel-encrusted object away.

Caleb and Zara walked over with coffees and sat down opposite him at the little table.

“I told you we could trust him,” Caleb said.

“What?” Mason said, knocked from his daydream.

“I said I told you we could trust Ezra. We go way back.”

Mason gave another weary sigh. “The mission’s not over yet.”

“I think he’s kinda cute,” Zara said. “That whole Special Agent Dale Cooper thing going on and all.”

Mason rolled his eyes. “Since when do we judge if we trust someone based on what they look like?”

She shrugged. “Just sayin’.”

When Ezra entered the room, Mason’s mind was still buzzing, but he worked hard to look cool and collected. Turning to the American, he said, “On the jet from Turkey, you told us that these Spiders were working for someone else. I want to know who, and now.”

Ezra gave a brief nod. “All right everyone, gather around.

“How’s Dr Starling?” Virgil asked.

“Dr Starling is still with Mat Wills next door. He thinks maybe she’s been drugged.”

“Drugged?” said Ella.

“I asked about who controls the Spiders,” Mason said, louder this time and the frustration rising in his voice.

“And I’m going to answer you right now, just take it easy. As you know, SPIDER is a tight operation and they can be anywhere with very little notice. They’re usually independent, but they’re also for hire. Following the successful extraction and rescue of Dr Starling, my organization has now cleared you to know that we believe the Spider crew were hired by a kind of cult.”

Everyone in the room stopped talking and all eyes fell on the man in the black suit.

Mason spoke for the whole team. “A cult?”

Another brief nod. “A secret order we know very little about. We think they hired the Spiders to snatch Eva Starling.”

Mason’s eyes widened. “That’s who Eva described as weirdos! At some point, they must have been at the safehouse where the Spiders were keeping her.”

Ezra nodded. “Looks that way. The plan must have been to meet there — Spiders bringing Starling and the cult bringing the item they wanted her to translate.”

“That thing we found on the basement floor?” Caleb said.

“We’ll get to that.”

“Are these guys a bigger threat than the Spiders?” Milo said, shifting uneasily his seat.

“Without a doubt.”

Caleb cleared his throat. “And what do we call this threat?”

Ezra sighed deeply and rubbed his tired eyes. “What I’m about to tell you might sound like the plot to a Mission Impossible movie, but it’s true — every damned word of it. Their name is Occulta Manu. It means Hidden Hand in Latin.”

“The Hidden Hand?” Zara said. “I don’t like the sound of that.”

“Me neither,” said Milo. “I was freaked out enough by the Spider guys, and now this.”

Virgil furrowed his brow. “You can’t be talking about the Hidden Hand?”

“I’m afraid so, Mr Lehman. You’re aware of them?”

“My PhD is in the classics. I speak Latin and Ancient Greek. If we’re talking about anything from the ancient world, or any sort of esoteria, then I’m aware of it… but I thought they faded away centuries ago.”

“They did, but now they’re coming back to life. Someone, or something, woke them up.”

“I’ve heard of them,” Ella said. “But I thought they were only a legend, not some kind of dormant monster.”

“I only wish they were a legend.”

“What do we know about them?” Mason said.

“As I say, very little. I know a great many NSA researchers, and those guys have access to the best military intelligence on the planet and a free pass to go pretty much anywhere they want with their research. However, all they have — and all we have — is that OM have been around longer than any of the other organizations you’ve ever heard of, and even though they usually stay in the shadows, when they strike they strike hard. They have a strong interest in controlling the flow and direction of history and they kill easily and without conscience.”

“Especially their own, yes?” Mason said.

“Yes,” Ezra said, raising an eyebrow. “How did you know?”

The Londoner shrugged his shoulders. “Same as any other fraternity, gang, brotherhood — loyalty is powerful but if you betray your brothers they see it as the greatest crime of all. You see it with all the street gangs, Russian Mafia, you name it.”

The American man gave a pensive nod. “It’s interesting you mention gangs, because gangs usually have a pecking order. One of the few things we know for sure about the Hidden Hand is that they have a strict hierarchy. A newly initiated member becomes a Corax, or Raven, then a Nymphus or Bride — male or female, then a Soldier, or Miles and then a Leo, or Lion. These are the rank and file members of OM. After these levels is what you might call the officer class when a member becomes a Perses, or a Persian, and then finally a Heliodromus, or Sun-runner. These ranks each have their own special symbols based on the old Cult of Mithras — raven, diadem, lance, lion, crescent moon, and the sun-god.”

“And the Sun-runner’s the boss?” Zara asked.

“No. The top man is called the Pater, or the Father. His symbol is the patera, what the experts call a shallow libation bowl but you or I would call a kind of cup without handles. We estimate there are thousands of Ravens, Brides and Soldiers and probably hundreds of Lions. We really have no solid idea but our best guess is that there are probably only a few dozen Persians and around twelve Sun-runners.” He looked at them and offered an apologetic shrug. “For certain, there is only one Occulta Manu Father.”

Zara gave a grim laugh. “So in other words we know there’s a weird bunch of men running around in robes calling each other Ravens and Brides and they have lots of money and power?”

Ezra frowned. “The idea of these guys going around in robes is ridiculous. The Hidden Hand might be some kind of secret cult following ancient pagan rites, but they exist in the modern world. And it’s men and women,” he said. “As I just mentioned, OM uses the rank system of an ancient Mystery Cult called the Cult of Mithras, but there’s a big difference — the Mithrians were strictly men only — we know for a fact that the Hidden Hand actively recruit women from all over the world.”

“An equal opportunities secret society,” Zara said. “They don’t sound so bad.”

“They are seriously bad, Miss Dietrich,” Ezra said, a note of fear in his voice. “Occulta Manu are something no one in the NSA, or any other branch of US government intel for that matter, know very much about. Most of our enemies are easy to understand and monitor — other states, foreign spy agencies, international terrorist cells, and so on. But OM is different. Very different. Frankly, there are many in the intelligence community who are just plain old-fashioned scared of them. Not even Titanfort has a handle on this organization yet.”

Mason gave him a sharp look. “Titanfort? I’ve heard of Titanpointe — that’s the NSA’s spy hub, but what’s Titanfort?”

Ezra paused a beat while he scanned their faces. Again, the man in the black suit was processing countless thoughts and calculations. “Titanfort is the spy hub owned by the private agency that employs me, and maybe you, too. Don’t confuse it with Titanpointe.”

“What’s the difference?” Mason asked flatly.

“Titanpointe is government. They’re south of us in Lower Manhattan. Titanfort is ours, and it’s private. It’s different.”

“You already said that, but what makes it so different?”

“The world knows about Titanpointe. No one knows about Titanfort.” He lowered his head and stared at them, unblinking. A look of menace crossed his face. “And that’s the way it’s staying.”

Jed Mason frowned. The last thing he wanted to hear was that one of the world’s best funded intelligence agencies was scared of something, and now he had to process the Titanfort revelation on top of everything else.

“Who controls Titanfort?”

“Classified.”

Mason sighed, but managed a grin. “All right, fine. Let me try this instead: you said this secret order vanished for a few centuries, but now they’ve woken up — what did you mean by that?”

“For a long time they went silent, and for centuries we thought they were gone, but a few years ago the NSA and other agencies started picking up chatter. Both they and Titanfort began to have concerns they were coming back, getting stronger, adapting to the new world — undermining civilization and reshaping it in their own image. They’re like a pathogen.”

Ezra let the words sink in before continuing the briefing. “Reges Chao — Latin for the Kings of Chaos. This is another name they go by, and it’s an accurate description because of their habit of infiltrating institutions and creating mayhem inside them.”

Mason sighed. “I’m starting to get the picture.”

“In a word, they are unknowable. Their acolytes are in every government in the world and yet the infiltrations are anonymous. It’s Titanfort’s speculation that every institution on earth probably has at least one Hidden Hand acolyte inside it, usually at the top somewhere and protected by what they call drones.”

“Drones?” Milo asked.

“People who do their bidding without knowing it.”

“A touching description,” Ella said.

“Quite,” Ezra continued. “Once on the inside they shape things for the advantage not of the institution but for their own mysterious cult. They direct whole governments for the benefit of themselves and have zero regard for the average man or woman in the street.”

“Are you sure you’re not just talking about regular politicians?” Zara said.

It raised a low laugh, but everyone was starting to feel more than a little freaked out by what they were hearing.

“As I say,” Ezra pressed on. “The long-term stated goal of Occulta Manu is to destroy the existing power structure and create the world in its own image.”

“They want to control the world, then,” Caleb said.

“Yes,” Ezra said bluntly. “To do this they need to control the future, and to do that they must control the past. Along with their work infiltrating governments and institutions around the world, they are obsessed with the control of history, particularly the history of the ancient world. From what we can work out, they figure that if they control the flow of information and knowledge relating to our most distant past, they can shape future minds any way they want.”

“Stop the plane… I want to get off,” Ella said.

Ezra sympathized. “I’m sorry, but OM is the big boy holding all the strings, Miss Makepeace. There’s no getting away from them, on or off this aircraft.”

Zara sighed. “Still don’t get why most of us has never heard of them.”

“Like I already explained, if you’ve heard of them, they’re not secret societies. The ones you’ve heard of or read about on the internet are publicly recognised institutions that give to charity. Occulta Manu does not give to charity.”

Ella shivered. “This is all starting to sound kinda creepy.”

“You can say that again,” Milo said. “Remember the good old days when we thought Kyle Cage sounded scary?”

Virgil crossed his hands behind his head. “Ah, the good old days…”

Ezra frowned. “And he still is scary, Mr Risk. If you underestimate a man like Cage you’ll live to regret it, but not for long, I assure you.”

Another grim rattle of laughter rippled around the small room but everyone knew it was just nerves.

“Jesus, talk about getting red pilled,” Zara said. “When I woke up this morning I thought the worst thing that could happen was another Ed Sheeran song at Number 1. How fucking wrong was I?”

“Very wrong,” Ezra said. “And it gets a lot worse.”

“We can take it,” Mason said.

Caleb brushed his jaw and gave a confident nod. “Yeah, let us have it, Ez.”

“Okay — but don’t say you didn’t ask for it.”