Moon Mask Read Online Free

ever be that passionate about me?” Then she headed off after him. A heartbeat later, Nadia fell into step too, without saying a word.
    Despite the Russian’s desire to follow procedure, King could tell that somewhere under her cold exterior she was as excited as he was. And it was true. Doctor Juliet McKinney, the strong-minded, blusterous, hot-tempered Scottish bitch in charge of the expedition would swoop in and steel the glory of the moment. She was a fame seeker, spending every possible moment in front of the documentary crew’s cameras. She would relish this find. So far, after almost six months camped on Sarisariñama’s jungle-clad summit, all the archaeological team had found was meter after meter of empty tunnels. Thus, they had dubbed it, The Labyrinth.
    The construction of the tunnels themselves was fascinating to any scholar and had already sparked fierce debate in the circles of academia.
    Firstly, the presence of sophisticated tunnels boring into the rock of a table-mountain had reopened the age old question about whether or not a more sophisticated and established society than isolated Indian communities could exist in the inhospitable rainforest. For decades the general consensus had been that the jungle was too imposing an environment for civilisations like those found in the distant Andes to evolve.
    But it was the design of the walls inside the tunnels that had stirred up the real hornets’ nest in halls of learning across the globe.
    Constructed out of hundreds of oddly shaped blocks of varying sizes, carved to fit snugly against one another, the walls bore an uncanny resemblance to the Inca structures scattered around the Sacred Valley of Peru.
    That the Incas could have established an outpost so far into the immense rainforest, so far from the safety of the Andes, had sparked a renewed interest in the legends of El Dorado and the Lost City of Z. The general public’s interest in the dig had been enormous and, with the power of modern technology, the expedition had been a true multi-media event. Blogs were posted on the dig’s official website, live videos were streamed whenever satellite coverage permitted, and hundreds of thousands of people followed the events on Twitter and Facebook.
    Despite being in one of the most remote places on earth, the expedition was an open book for the whole world to see.
    The biological division of the expedition had been hugely successful, the team of UNESCO scientists identifying a number of brand new endemic species of flora and fauna. But the real public interest lay in the archaeological mission and that, sadly, had been far from the roller-coaster, Indiana Jones-like adventure which many had expected.
    Seeking fame, all McKinney had been able to report on in six months was the numerous, almost identical tunnels and a few shards of broken pottery which had yet to yield the secrets of Sarisariñama.
    The discovery of a hidden passage lined with human skulls would send McKinney into fame-fuelled overdrive and King had no doubt that she would shut him, the ‘radical son of a radical archaeologist’ , as she had already referred to him, out.
    Before she did that, however, he wanted to find out anything he could about his exciting discovery.
    They continued down the tunnel slowly, stopping occasionally to examine the walls and jot down notes.
    “Poor Karen,” King said. “Can you believe she missed out on this find?”
    He did feel genuine regret that Karen Weingarten, the German archaeologist who had been assigned the exploration of this section of the tunnel system, had missed out. By all rights, it should have been her team’s find, but she had been taken ill, contracting some sort of tropical disease. UNESCO had organised her emergency medical evac. The expedition’s supply chopper, a private contractor based in Caracas, had brought a medical team to the summit. Once they had confirmed that no other expedition members were showing signs of the illness,