The Six Sacred Stones

Her watch hit 3:49.

“I see Titan…” Alby said.

Through his high-powered telescope, the greatest moon of Saturn appeared as barely a dot behind the large orange orb that was Jupiter. It rose behind it, looking like a very dim star.

A minute passed. The twins hit RECORD on some digital video cameras they’d set up around the henge. They also held still cameras in their hands.

Another minute passed.

“And I see Saturn…wow!”

A larger dot rose behind Jupiter, moving ever so slowly, its rings barely apparent, before it cleared the horizon of Jupiter and a gap appeared between the two planets.

At which point Stonehenge, silent and mysterious for over forty-five centuries, suddenly and spectacularly came to life.

AN INVISIBLElight-force shot over the horizon from the Dark Sun, lanced over the Heel Stone in a dead-straight line, shot through the outer circle of lintels before it slammed into the Firestone sitting atop the central Altar Stone.

The Firestone blazed to life.

Brilliant purple light flared around it, illuminating the ring of trilithons in an unearthly glow.

Then shafts of this purple light—bright, strong shafts of the stuff, six of them—lanced outward from the Firestone like the spokes of a wheel and hit some of the uprights of the trilithons.

Zoe and the others could only stare in stunned awe at the light show, a light show that had not been seen for over 4,500 years.

And then something else happened.

The lichens on the surface of the trilithons—the strange algae-fungus that had no business existing this far inland—began to glow a pale green.

And suddenly, as this faint glowing of the lichens combined with the cracks and indentations of the stone uprights themselves,images began to form on the trilithons, images that hadn’t been discernible before.

Zoe stared in wonder.

The images on the trilithons looked strangely familiar, kind of like the continents of Earth—but not exactly like them. They were somehow different, the familiar coastlines warped. A couple of the trilithons depicted what appeared to be theedges of continents.

“It’s the world,” Lachlan breathed. “They all combine to create a map of the Earth, millions of years ago.”

“What?”Zoe whispered, not realizing that she was whispering.

Lachlan nodded at the glowing images in the stones: “They’re the continents of our planet. They’re in their current positions, but before rising oceans gave them their current coastlines. Whoever built this, built it along time ago.”

Zoe swung back to gaze at the glowing images on the stones, and saw that he was right.

There was Africa…

BEFORE

DURING

And that looked a little like Asia…

The stone depicting Africa was pierced by two of the laserlike purple light shafts: one shaft penetrating it near the northern end, the second shaft hitting it at the very southern tip.

“Are you getting all this?” Zoe called.

The twins were indeed clicking away on their digital cameras, taking photos of the illuminated stones and light shafts. At the same time their video cameras whirred, recording it.

“What about those two?” Zoe asked, indicating the two uprights that appeared to depict the edges of continents.

“Oceans, I guess,” Julius said, “but it’s hard to tell which ones, given the altered coastlines. The world has three main oceans, the Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic Oceans. A third ocean might have been on one of the fallen uprights. Which makes sense. No one has ever figured out why Stonehenge has ten uprights. This would explain it: seven continents and three oceans.”

Zoe blinked.

Holy, holy shit…

Then Alby called, “She’s sinking! Saturn’s sinking!”

A moment later, everything went dark.

The Firestone’s purple light went out and the great stone circle was dark once more.

Zoe gazed at the twins and the kids. “Bet you haven’t seen that before. Come on.” She hurriedly reerected her stepladder, heading for the Firestone. “We’re done. Lachlan, Julius: lower the Altar Stone, put it back exactly where you found it. Then we have to motor. Wizard and Jack are not gonna believe this.”

When the two security guards awoke two hours later, groggy and dazed, they found Stonehenge undamaged, seemingly untouched.

There were several sets of footprints among the central stones, suggesting unusual activity, but nothing was missing. Except for the hole that had once housed the Altar Stone—it had been cleared of dirt—everything, thankfully, was where it should be.

The next day there would be reports from locals of a glowing purple light emanating from the area, but they were quickly dismissed. Every year there were at least a dozen UFO sightings over the Salisbury Plain and numerous other crackpot claims.

And so as dawn came, Stonehenge stood once again, tall and silent, maintaining its centuries-old watch over the ancient landscape.

SICHUAN MOUNTAINS, CHINA

DECEMBER5, 2007, 5:35P.M.

AROUND the same time Zoe and the twins were watching the wondrous lightshow at Stonehenge, Jack and Wizard were soaring over the wild, rugged mountains of central China in the hold of their stolen Hind helicopter, aware that a sizeable portion of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army—some 1.2 million men—were at that very moment mobilizing to hunt them down.

With them were Stretch, Astro, Scimitar, Vulture, and the injured Tank Tanaka.

Sky Monster had taken The Halicarnassus south, just over the Burmese border, where he waited patiently for the extraction call.

“It is absolutely imperative that we get the Philosopher’s Stone,” Wizard said to Jack when they were alone in a corner of the hold. He munched hungrily on some food while he put on clean clothes.

“I got that impression from your notes,” Jack said. “So that’s where we’re going right now. It’s also why we needed to get this helicopter.”

Jack told Wizard about the meeting in Dubai, about the new coalition of nations helping them in this quest—including America and Saudi Arabia—and most importantly, what they had so far deduced from Wizard’s research.

“But I need to know more, Max,” he concluded. “Your notes were good, but we could only piece together so much.”

“Yes, yes…”

“For instance, the part where you said the Sa-Benben and the Philosopher’s Stone were central to everything. Why?”

Wizard’s head snapped up. “Good God, Jack, you didn’t bring the Firestone with you, did you? We can’t allow our enemies to have both it and Laozi’s Stone.”

“No, I didn’t,” Jack said. “Zoe has it. In England. She’s gone to Stonehenge with the Firestone, the twins, and the kids.”

“You got in touch with the twins? Oh,excellent,” Wizard said, sighing deeply. “And Stonehenge. Stonehenge and the Sa-Benben. But, wait, it must be done during the Titanic Ris—”

“Got it covered.”

Wizard stared off into space, smiled. “I only wish I could have been there to see it. I’m glad you figured that out.”

“Wasn’t me. It was Lily’s friend, Alby.”

“Ah, Alby. Smart boy. And such a good friend to Lily. As things get more difficult, she will need companions like him…” Wizard’s voice trailed off, his eyes glazing over into a deep sadness.

As he spoke, Jack scanned the torture scars on the old man’s face, the bruises and gashes, the dried blood on his beard. Wizard had been through the wringer in that prison.

“Oh, Jack,” Wizard said. “The situation is dire. Most dire. It’s like nothing we’ve ever encountered before.”

“Tell me.”

“The world has reached a critical stage in its existence. A turning point has come, a testing point, a time at which the Earth can either renew itself or be destroyed. The Tartarus Rotation was just the beginning, merely the first step in a far larger drama.”

“The coming of this Dark Sun?” Jack prompted.

“The coming of the Dark Sun is only part of it. There are many unexplained things in our world, Jack, and with the coming of the zero-point field, this Dark Sun, many of them will reveal their true purpose. The Great Pyramid and its Capstone are just the start. Stonehenge. Nazca. Easter Island. It all comes together now, with the coming of the Dark Sun. A coalescence of ancient things. But the greatest thing to fear, as always, is man himself.”

“Why?”

Wizard said, “Let me backtrack.”

He grabbed a sheet from his notes, indicated a picture on it that Jack recalled seeing before:

Wizard said, “This is the common symbol for the Great Machine. Now, as you deduced correctly from my notes, the Machine is simply our planet. As the image shows, at six locations around our planet are six underground shrines, pyramidal in shape and inverted, but gigantic, and all pointing down toward the center of the Earth. Note the downward-pointing pyramids in the picture, with the white rectangular pillars sticking out of them.

“While the Machine is depicted in this image as a flat two-dimensional structure, we should picture it three-dimensionally, with the six vertices situated just below the Earth’s surface, arrayed around the spherical planet. Like this.”

Wizard drew a rough sketch:

“Now, at each of these locations, a cleansed pillar must be set in place, the pillars being small oblong-shaped uncut diamonds whose whereabouts are largely unknown.”

“Not totally unknown,” Jack said. “We’re working on that.”

“Oh, good. Now, let me come to the Ramesean Stones, and the most unique part that they play in this challenge. We call them ‘Ramesean’ stones but their true name is actually ‘Guidestones.’ The Six Guidestones of Ra’s Dark Twin. For when each comes into contact with the Sun-charged Sa-Benben, they reveal something about this Machine.

“For instance, at Stonehenge: when the Sa-Benben is placed atop the guidestone there at the rising of Saturn over Jupiter, the locations of the six vertices will be revealed. How this actually occurs at the site of Stonehenge, I don’t know. Hopefully, Zoe now does.”

“And the Philosopher’s Stone?” Jack asked.

Wizard again rifled through his notes, came up with another image:

“This is a carving of Laozi’s Stone,” Wizard said, “otherwise known as the Philosopher’s Stone. Note the pyramidal capstone hovering above it and the rectangular recess in it.

“To cleanse a pillar, one needs three things: the Sa-Benben, the Philosopher’s Stone, and one of the pillars. You place the pillar inside the recess in the Philosopher’s Stone, close the lid, and then place the charged Sa-Benben on the lid. The pillar is thus cleansed and is then ready for placement in one of the six vertices.”

“Which is why the Sa-Benben and the Philosopher’s Stone are central to everything…” Jack said, understanding.

“Correct. The next most important Ramesean stone is the Killing Stone of the Maya: when united with the Sa-Benben, it will specify the astronomical dates by which the pillars must be set in place at the vertices. Now, I already understand that the placing of the six pillars is divided into two distinct time frames—the first two pillars must be set in place within the next week or so; the remaining four must be placed later, about three months from now, just before the equinox on March 20, 2008, when the Dark Sun will make its long-awaited return.”

Jack’s mind spun. This was sounding very big indeed: stars, stones, pillars, vertices, astronomical dates. In a vague corner of his mind he recalled that the Americans had said they possessed the Mayan Killing Stone.

Clearing his head, he brought Wizard back: “So why in all this is Man the greatest thing to fear?”

Wizard sighed.

“Because of the rewards,” he said simply. “The rewards. ‘To he who lays each pillar goes a fabulous reward.’ So it is said on the walls of Abydos. It was there that I found the six rewards listed underneath a carving of Rameses II and his father, Seti I—a carving that scholars have long dismissed as a mere adornment. The six rewards were listed as:knowledge, heat, sight, death, life, and power.”

Wizard’s face went grim. “Jack. What the rewards are exactly, no one knows, but by all accounts, they are of immense value. For instance, I believe heat is a fabulous power source, an unending power source; and knowledge is some great insight that we are yet to discover.”

Jack listened intently to what Wizard was saying. Power sources, great knowledge. Suddenly the US-Saudi interest in the success of his mission made more sense, not to mention China’s grab for the Firestone at his farm.

Wizard said, “Given these stakes, and the arrival of this Dark Sun and the possible end of our world, I can see nations taking great risks to acquire and then place these pillars. And if history teaches us nothing, it teaches us this: where items of great worth are at stake, men will do anything to possess them.”

Just then, the cargo hold was plunged into red emergency lighting, a buzzer sounding repeatedly. The intercom over Jack’s head crackled.

“Huntsman, we’re coming up on the Wu Gorge system,”Astro’s voice said.“ETA is nine minutes, and we’re about to pop up on their radars like a big friggin’ Christmas light. I hope you’re right about this.”

“Come on,” Jack said, standing. “We’d better suit up. The target is guarded and we’re on top of the local Most Wanted List, so we’ll be going in hard and going in fast. Just stay close to me. It’s time for us to finish what you started; it’s time to get the Philosopher’s Stone.”

THE ENTRY CHAMBER

LAOZI’S TRAP SYSTEM,

BENEATH WITCH MOUNTAIN

SICHUAN PROVINCE, CENTRAL CHINA

DECEMBER5, 2007

COLONEL Mao Gongli swore loudly.

In the four days since he’d captured Max Epper and sent him off to Xintan for interrogation, his force of Chinese troops had made little headway through the underground tunnel system that protected Laozi’s legendary stone.

Chiefly, their progress had been hindered by numerous anti-intruder devices: booby traps.

Mao cursed himself. He should have known better.

For over three thousand years, Chinese tombs have been renowned for their ingenious protective mechanisms: for instance, the tomb complex of Emperor Qin in Xi’an—the home of China’s famous terra-cotta warriors—was equipped with automatic crossbows and “murder holes,” out of which oil and liquid tar once poured onto unwary archaeologists.

But the traps protecting this system were of a higher order, beyond anything Mao had seen, as clever as they were vicious.

He’d already lost nine men, all in horrific ways.

The first three to die had not got past the very first threshold of the trap system: the cylindrical doorway set into the wall. The doorway had rotated abruptly, trapping each man inside it…before dropping a foul-smelling, skin-searing yellow liquid from its hollow ceiling onto the trapped man, a liquid Mao now knew to be a primitive form of sulfuric acid.

So his men had blown open that door with C-2 plastic explosive and entered an inner chamber, the only exit from which was a low pipelike tunnel on the far side.

Thus the next man to die had been lying on his stomach, belly-crawling through the pipe, when he had been skewered through the fucking heart by an iron spike that had risen up from an innocuous-looking hole in the floor. It had slowly and painfully penetrated the man’s entire body, punching out through his back.

Two more men had suffered a similar fate—from other holes in the floor of the tunnel—before Mao’s chief lieutenant had hit upon the idea of pouring quick-setting cement into the murderous holes, plugging them up.

And so cement was sent for—it would ultimately come from the Three Gorges Dam a hundred miles away—and after a two-day wait, they passed through the pipe tunnel.

But still they lost men in the next chamber: a long and magnificent downward-sloping hallway that was lined with silent terra-cotta statues on both sides.

Here one of Mao’s troopers had died when a terra-cotta warrior with a wide yawning mouth had suddenly vomited a spray of liquid mercury into the hapless trooper’s face. The trooper had screamed horribly as the mercury stuck to his eyeballs. The thick liquid clogged every pore of his face, slowly poisoning his very blood. He died in agony, hours later.

More quick-setting cement was brought in.

It was poured into the mouth of the offending terra-cotta warrior, stopping it up. Planning to do the same at every other statue in the hall, Mao’s men had moved on.

Only for another trooper to be killed almost immediately when the second terra-cotta warrior statue shot a crossbow bolt out of itseye socket into his eye.

As a third soldier poured cement into the adjoining statue, he managed to dodge that statue’s lethal defense mechanism: a primitive fragmentation charge, set off by a small amount of gunpowder hidden within the statue’s eyes. A volley of tiny lead ball bearings had blasted out from the statue’s eye sockets, narrowly missing the Chinese soldier but causing him to lurch backward—

—and slip on the wet floor of the sloping passageway and slide out of control down its full length before he just fell off the bottom end of the passageway—dropping into darkness, disappearing from his teammates” view. They soon discovered that he had fallen into a deep and dark underground chasm at the end of the passageway, a chasm of unknown depth.

And they hadn’t got beyond that chasm.

Which was why, earlier that morning, word had been sent to Xintan, demanding that Wizard and Tank be brought back to see if they might reveal the secrets of Laozi’s trap system.

THE SUBMERGED VILLAGE

THE FOUR Chinese sentries left up on the surface of the trap system all looked skyward at the sound of an approaching helicopter, their alertness slackening when they saw that it was one of their own: a Hind gunship with PLA markings.

The big chopper landed on a floating helipad nestled among the half-submerged stone huts, blowing debris and spray through the alleyways of the ancient village.

The sentries ambled over to the chopper, their rifles slung lazily over their shoulders—only to see the side door of the gunship whip open and all of a sudden find themselves staring at the wrong ends of some Type-56 assault rifles and MP7 submachine guns.

Dressed in the Chinese Army uniforms of the helicopter’s crew, Jack West Jr. and his team had arrived.

THE ENTRY CHAMBER

THERE WERE two more low-ranking Chinese sentries in the entry chamber—the same chamber that Wizard had marveled at only four days previously, before he had been captured by Mao, before Mao had murdered his gentle assistant, Chow.

Suddenly an odd-looking silver grenade came flying down into the entry chamber from the well shaft.

The grenade bounced on the floor of the chamber, missing the wide hole in its center, but causing the two sentries to turn.

It went off.

A sunlike flash filled the ancient room, astonishingly bright, and both sentries fell to their knees, clutching their eyes, screaming, blinded, their retinas nearly burned clean off. The blindness wouldn’t be permanent, but it would last for two whole days.

Then Jack came swinging out of the entry shaft, swooping down into the chamber, his boots thumping hard against the stone floor, his gun raised.

He keyed his radio. “Guards are down. Chamber is clear. Come on down.”

It was only then that he noticed the body bags.

There were nine of them, containing soldiers the Chinese had lost inside the trap system.

As Wizard and the others joined him in the chamber—Stretch binding and gagging the two whimpering guards, Wizard gasping at the stench of the body bags—Jack examined the entry chamber’s feature wall.

He beheld the magnificent jewel-encrusted carving of the Mystery of the Circles, ten feet wide and stunning.

And directly below it: a narrow recessed doorway with curved walls. Above the doorway was a small inscription of the Philosopher’s Stone just like the one he’d seen earlier, complete with the Sa-Benben hovering over it:

The curved cylindrical doorway was roughly the size of a coffin, and on one side of it there were three cast-iron levers and the Chinese symbol for “dwelling”:

The ceiling of this tiny space was crudely stopped up with concrete—presumably plugging a pipe out of which fell some horrific liquid.

“Not exactly elegant,” Jack said. “But effective.”

Wizard shook his head. “This system was designed by the great Chinese architect, Sun Mai, a contemporary of Confucius and, like him, once a student of Laozi. Sun Mai was a brilliant craftsman, a man of rare flair. He was also a castle-builder, fortifications and the like, so he was well suited to this task. And how does Mao tackle him? With concrete.Concrete. Oh, how China has changed over the centuries.”

“The trap system,” Jack said seriously, gazing at the darkness beyond the open doorway-recess. “Any research? Like the trap order?”

“You cannot study this system’s traps beforehand,” Wizard said. “It possesses multiple thresholds, through which one passes by answering a riddle in situ.”

“Riddles in situ. My favorite…”

“But riddles related to the works of Laozi.”

“Oh, even better.”

Wizard examined the concreted doorway and the chamber beyond it, then he nodded at the body bags. “It seems our Chinese rivals have met with some considerable difficulty. If they’d asked me the right questions during my interrogation, I might have been more helpful.”

“So what’s the trick?” West said.

Wizard smiled. “What is Laozi’s most well-known contribution to philosophy?”

“The Yin-Yang.”

“Yes. The concept of duality. The idea that there are two of everything. Elemental pairs. Good and evil, light and dark, and all that. But there’s more to it: every pair is connected. In the good, there is some evil, and in the evil, some good.”

“Which means…” Jack prompted.

Wizard didn’t answer. Let him figure it out for himself.

“…if there’s two of everything, then there are two entrances to this system,” Jack said.

Wizard nodded. “And?”

Jack frowned. “The second entrance is connected to this entrance?”

“Well done, my friend. Full marks.”

Wizard strode to the wide circular well shaft in the floor, the one that matched the entry shaft in the ceiling, and peered down into it.

“There is indeed a second entrance to this trap system. Down there.”

Wizard said, “The tunnel system branching off this chamber is called the Teacher’s Way. A second tunnel system situated below us is called the Student’s Way.”

“So how are they connected?”

“Simple. They must be tackled simultaneously. Two people, one in each tunnel, moving alternately through their respective traps, each disabling the other’s traps.”

“You have got to be kidding me…” Jack had survived many trap systems over the years, but he had never encountered anything like this.

“It’s the ultimate trust exercise,” Wizard said. “As I set off in the upper tunnel, I trigger a trap. That trap is nullified not by me, but by you in the lower tunnel. My life is in your hands. Then the opposite occurs—you trigger a trap, and I must save you. This is why our Chinese friends are experiencing such difficulty in there. They don’t know of the lower route. So they use concrete and brute force, and in the typical Chinese way”—he nodded at the body bags—’ they just weather the losses and make very inefficient progress. They’ll eventually get through, but it will cost them many lives and much time.”

Jack bit his lip, thinking. “All right then. Stretch. You take Scimitar, and find the lower entrance. I’ll enter through here with Astro and Wizard. Tank, you stay here with Pooh Bear. Keep in radio contact with Vulture up in the chopper, because I suspect we’ll be needing a rapid evac. All right, everyone. Buckle up. We’re going in.”

LAOZI’S TRAP SYSTEM ENTRY TUNNELS

THE CYLINDRICAL DOORWAY (LOWER)

MINUTES LATER, Stretch’s voice came over West’s earpiece:“We’ve found the second entrance. About sixty feet below you. Narrow doorway, cut into the wall of the shaft. Identical to yours. But intact. No concrete clogging its upper recess.”

“Step into it,” West instructed.

Down in the shaft, Stretch and Scimitar were hanging from individual ropes in front of a narrow recessed doorway hewn into the wall of the vertical shaft.

The shaft itself dropped away beneath them into infinite black, depth unknown. Guided by his helmet flashlight, Stretch stepped off the rope and into the doorway…

…only to see the entire doorway suddenly rotate around him on its axis, its curved walls spinning ninety degrees so that the entry gap was sealed, and he found himself trapped in the coffin-sized recess, bounded on every side, with nowhere to go.

Claustrophobia gripped him. His rapid breathing echoed in his ears. His flashlight’s glow was too close against the tight walls.

Then something gurgled in the void above him and Stretch’s blood went cold.

“Er, Jack…”

Up in the doorway of the Teacher’s Way, Jack assessed the three cast-iron levers in the wall, one on top of the other, next to the Chinese symbol for “dwelling”: none of the levers bore any marks or carvings; they were completely plain.

“Er, Jack…”came Stretch’s voice.“Whatever you have to do up there, please do it soon…”

“Pull the bottom lever,” Wizard said. “Now.”

Jack yanked on the bottom lever—

—and at the same moment, down in Stretch’s route, a slab of stone slid across the ceiling and the cylinder rotated another ninety degrees, and suddenly, Stretch saw a new chamber on the other side, a cube-shaped stone room.

He quickly stepped out of the deadly cylinder-doorway and said, “I’m though. Thanks, guys. Scimitar, your turn.”

In the upper tunnel, Jack turned to Wizard: “How did you know?”

Wizard said, “Famous quote from Laozi. ‘In thinking, keep to the simple. In conflict, be fair and generous. In dwelling, live close to the ground.’ Since our clue was ‘Dwelling,’ I picked the lever that was closest to the ground.”

“Nice.”

After getting Scimitar through the same way, Jack, Wizard, and Astro just stepped through their open entry door, its trap disabled by the concrete of Mao’s troops.

THE CRAWLING TUNNEL

Both sets of men were now met by identical cube-shaped rooms.

Four life-sized terra-cotta warriors—all magnificently detailed—stood in the corners of each room. In West’s room, their mouths had been plugged with cement, while in Stretch’s they yawned wide, revealing only darkness within.

“Don’t step near the statues,” Wizard warned.

On the far side of each room was a low tunnel at floor level. Barely two feet square and pipelike, it was the only exit from the stone room.

Jack peered into his: it stretched for about a hundred yards, maybe more. Along its length were numerous tennis-ball-sized holes cut into the floor, all of which had been filled with concrete.

“Spike holes,” Wizard said. “Stretch?”

“We got a tunnel down here, low to the ground, looks long, and it appears we can only get through it by crawling on our stomachs. Lots of holes in its floor.”

Jack said, “Careful with those holes. Iron spikes.”

Wizard found an inscription above his tunnel, this time accompanied by a single lever that could be pushed up or down. The inscription read:

“Genius,” Wizard said. “It’s the Chinese symbol for ‘genius.’”

At either extremity of the lever were two images: above it was a carving of a beautiful tree, below it was a picture of a very plain seed.

“Ah…” Wizard said, nodding. “‘To see things in the seed, that is genius.’ Another maxim of Laozi. Pull the lever down, Jack.”

West did so.

“OK, Stretch, you should be safe,” Wizard said into his radio mike.

“Should be safe?” Scimitar scowled, looking at Stretch. “This whole situation troubles me greatly.”

“It’s a trust exercise. It’s only troubling if you don’t trust your friends.”

Scimitar eyed Stretch for a long moment. “My sources tell me it was the Old Master himself who put that massive price on your head. “

Stretch froze at the name. The “Old Master” was the nickname of a Mossad legend, General Mordechai Muniz, a former head of the Mossad who many said, even in retirement, was still the most influential figure in the organization; the puppet-master who pulled the strings of those ostensibly in charge.

“Sixteen million dollars,” Scimitar mused. “A good price, one of the highest ever. The Old Master wants to make an example of you.”

“I chose loyalty to your brother over loyalty to the Mossad,” Stretch said.

“And perhaps this is why you have become such friends. My brother thinks too often with his heart and not his head. Such thinking is foolish and weak. Look where it has got you.”

Stretch thought about Pooh Bear up in the entry chamber. “I would lay down my life for your brother, because I believe in him. But you do not. Which makes me wonder, first son of the Sheik, what do you believe in?”

Scimitar did not answer that.

Shaking his head, Stretch crouched and entered the low tunnel, belly-crawling through it. It was a tight journey, claustrophobic in the extreme. The tight, wet walls brushed against his shoulders.

Then he slithered over the first hole in the floor, and he held his breath, waiting for—

—but nothing sprang up from it.

Scimitar followed close behind him and the two of them wriggled along the tunnel until they emerged into standing room once more, finding themselves at the top of a steep, downward-sloping hallway.

On the wall behind them, above the exit to the low tunnel, was a lever just like the one West had pulled, with the Chinese symbol for “knowledge” alongside it.

Above this lever was a picture of an ear; below it, a picture of an eye.

Stretch relayed this to Wizard and West.

“The correct answer is the ear,”Wizard replied.“Since you’re in the Student’s Way, your riddles are Confucian, Laozi’s most talented and trusted student. Confucius said, ‘I hear and I know, I see and I remember.’ Knowledge is then hearing. As for us, once again, thanks to Mao’s concreters, we don’t need your help on this one.”

THE GRAND HALL OF THE WARRIORS

It took them a while, but soon West’s team was through their low tunnel. Now, like Stretch and Scimitar, they stood at the top of a magnificent downward-sloping hallway.

It was absolutely beautiful—with soaring corbelled ceilings at least twenty feet high and lined with gigantic warrior statues, each one seven feet tall and bearing a weapon of some kind.

The hallway seemed to stretch for over a hundred yards, sloping sharply downward but with no stairs to get a foothold, delving deep into the bowels of the Earth. The floor was wet and slippery. Battery-powered lamps left by Mao’s men lined the walls like dim runway lights.

Distantly, West heard something coming from the end of his superlong tunnel.

Voices.

Accompanied by the movement of lights and glowsticks.

It was Colonel Mao and his men, held up at a trap at the bottom end of the tunnel.

They’d caught up.

ASTRO CAMEup beside West and they peered together down into the darkness, in the direction of the voices.

Without a word, Astro held up a grenade, this one with a yellow stripe on it.

West turned, saw it. “Do I even want to know what’s in this one?”

“CS-II. Variety of tear/nerve gas, with covering smoke,” Astro said. “It’s a little stronger than the usual kind of CS gas you use in hostage situations. Designed for situations like this, where you need to get past an enemy force holding an entryway but don’t necessarily want to kill them. Although if you want to do that— ”

“Tears and unconsciousness will be fine, Lieutenant,” West said. “I don’t like killing someone if I don’t have to. Max, oxygen kit.”

At this point, Jack grabbed his trademark fireman’s helmet and attached its full face mask and oxygen kit. The others did the same.

Moments later, three of Astro’s yellow-striped grenades came bouncing down the hallway and entered the midst of Mao’s Chinese force gathered at its base, at the edge of the abrupt vertical drop there.

Flash—bang!

Hissing gas and dense smoke engulfed the dozen or so Chinese troops. They instantly began coughing and gagging, their eyes watering uncontrollably.

Through this hazy gas-filled environment, three figures moved like ghosts.

Wearing full-face oxygen masks and moving quickly, Jack, Astro, and Wizard slipped between the screaming Chinese as they fell to the floor, losing consciousness—although Jack did take the opportunity to give Colonel Mao a sharp blow with the butt of his Desert Eagle on the way past, breaking the Chinese commander’s nose and dropping him.

Then he came to the spot where the hallway’s floor just fell away into nothingness.

“Mother of God…” he breathed.

Mao and his men had set up a diesel generator and some arc lights to illuminate the area, and now, in the haze of the gas, the vast space that opened up before Jack took on a mystical, almost otherworldly appearance.

A vast chasm dropped away in front of him—perhaps thirty yards across and of unknown depth. On its far side was a sheer polished stone wall. This wall was literally covered in round holes, hundreds of them laid out in a grid, each about the size of a human hand.

And in the exact center of the wall was a small square tunnel, heading deeper into the mountain.

Standing on the edge of the chasm, Jack kicked a dropped Chinese gun over the edge.

It sailed down into the darkness.

Silence as it fell.

Long silence.

Then, finally, a distant clunk-splonk.

“Whoa…” West whispered.

“Jack!”a voice called both in his earpiece and from somewhere nearby.“Down here!”

West looked down, and saw Stretch and Scimitar poking their heads out from an identical ledge sixty feetbelow his.

The only walkways connecting their tunnels to the magnificent dotted wall were a pair of narrow ledges—one for each hallway: West’s higher one ran along the short left -hand connecting wall; Stretch’s lower one ran along theright -side one.

Along each narrow ledge were more of the hand-sized holes—handholds, Jack guessed, but lethal ones. Each hole, he noticed, every single one, had a small carved Chinese symbol above it.

“Classic Chinese tomb trap,” Wizard said. “The easy way to spot a grave robber in ancient China was to spot the guy with the missing hand. Those are hand-chopping holes. Some have grips inside them, to help you climb. All the others have spring-loaded scissor blades. If you know which ones are safe, you get across. If you don’t, you lose a hand and in all likelihood fall to your death.”

“What’s the clue?” West said.

“It’s here.” Wizard went to a panel on the wall, on which was written:

“‘The greatest treasure,’” Wizard translated. “What, according to Laozi, was the greatest treasure?” he asked aloud. “Ah…”

He recalled the old philosopher’s axiom in his mind:

Health is the greatest possession,

Contentment the greatest treasure,

Confidence the greatest friend,

Nonbeing the greatest joy.

“It’s contentment,” he said to Jack.

Sure enough, one of the handholes on the left-hand ledge bore the symbol for contentment— —above it. So did the third one, and the fifth, and several more.

“Go!” Wizard said. “Go! Go! Go!”

Wasting no time and trusting his friend, Jack plunged his hand into the first hole…

…and found a handgrip.

Then he was off, out along the ledge, above the bottomless black of the subterranean chasm.

Stretch called in: “We got an inscription, too:‘The noblest path to wisdom.’”

Following close behind Jack, Wizard said, “That’s an easy one. Look for the Chinese symbol for ‘reflection.’ It’s a Confucian saying: ‘There are three paths to wisdom: first, by reflection, which is noblest; second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third, by experience, which is the bitterest.’”

After Wizard described it, Stretch said,“Got it. It’s above every second or third handhole.”

“Use only those holes, Stretch,” Jack said. “If you use any of the others, you’ll lose a hand. See you on the other side.”

At length, Jack came to the great pockmarked wall itself, and saw that again every single hole had a symbol carved above it.

It made for a bamboozling sight, and to the uninitiated, it would have seemed totally incomprehensible.

But following the holes that bore the symbol for “contentment,” he found a continuing path that ended at the square hole in the center of the polished wall.

Free-climbing across the sheer slippery wall, high above the deep black chasm below it, he traced a winding path from the left, while Stretch and Scimitar followed a similar trail from their ledge on the lower right:

And all the while, Mao and his crew lay on the floor of the hallway, a few of them groaning weakly on the edge of consciousness.

Jack, Wizard, and Astro came to the square hole, where they were soon joined by Stretch and Scimitar.

“Looks like we go together from here,” Jack said.

He cracked a glowstick and tossed it into the dark hole, revealing another ultralong tunnel, square-shaped this time, big enough to crawl through and stretching away into distant darkness.

“What choice do we have?” he said to no one.

And so he hoisted himself up and climbed into the square hole and guided by his helmet flashlight and another glowstick, disappeared into the passage.

THE CAVERN OF THE TOWER

THE CAVERN OF THE TOWER

AFTER CRAWLING for about 600 feet, Jack emerged in a dark chamber of some kind, where he could stand easily. He removed his breathing mask.

For some reason, however, his flashlight couldn’t penetrate the darkness around him. He could see a lake of some kind immediately in front of him, but no walls. Only black, infinite black. It must have been a large space.

He cracked a glowstick, but it revealed little more.

So he fired his flare gun…

…and beheld the space in which he stood.

“Hoo-ah…” he breathed.

In his time, Jack West Jr. had seen some big caverns, including one in the southeastern mountains of Iraq that had housed the fabled Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

But even that cavern paled in comparison to this one.

It took seven more flares to light it fully.

The cavern that West saw was immense —utterly immense; roughly circular in shape and at least five hundred yards in diameter.

It was also a masterpiece of structural engineering: it was a natural cave, sure, but one that had been shaped by the work of men—tens of thousands of men, Jack guessed—to be even more impressive than Nature had originally made it.

Eight towering pillars of stone held up the cavern’s soaring ceiling. They had clearly once been limestone stalactites that, over thousands of years, had eventually met their matching stalagmites on the floor of the cavern, forming into thick roof-supporting columns. But somewhere in history, a Chinese work-army had shaped them into beautifully decorated columns, complete with faux guard balconies.

But it was the column in the very center of the cavern that dominated the scene.

Thicker than the others and entirely man-made, it looked like a glorious tower, a great twenty-story fortified tower, reaching all the way to the cavern’s superhigh ceiling, where it joined with it.

It was easily the most intricately decorated of all the columns: it bore many balconies, doorways, archer slits, and at its base, four sets of rising stone stairs leading to four separate stone doorways.

Surrounding the tower and each of the other columns was a wide perfectly still lake of a dark oil-like liquid that was certainly not water. It glinted dully in the light of West’s flares. Stretching across it from West’s position all the way to the tower in the middle of the cavern was a long series of seven-foot-high stepping-stones—a bridge of sorts, but one that no doubt possessed its own nasty surprises.

“Liquid mercury,” Astro said, raising his gas mask to briefly sniff the lake’s fumes. “You can tell by the odor. Highly toxic. Clogs your pores, poisons you right through the skin. Don’t fall in.”

As he rejoined West and the others, Wizard recited:

“In the highest room of the highest tower,

In the lowest part of the lowest cave,

There you will find me.

“From Confucius,” he said. “Third book of eternal maxims. I never really understood it till now.”

Near their position, a red-and-black cast-iron archway spanned the first stepping-stone. Carved into it was a message in ancient Chinese script:

A journey of a thousand miles

Begins with a single step.

So too this final challenge

Begins, and ends, with a single step.

Wizard nodded. “Appropriate. ‘Every journey begins with a single step’ is a quote attributed to both Laoziand Confucius. Historians are unsure which of them came up with it. So here, where their two paths join to become one, there is just one quote.”

“So what’s the catch?” Scimitar asked.

West eyed the stepping-stones, the tower, and the great cavern, the intent of it all becoming clear.

“It’s a time-and-speed trap,” he said softly.

“Oh, God, you’re right,” Wizard said.

Astro frowned. “A what? What’s a time-and-speed trap?”

“A big one,” Wizard said.

“That usually begins with a single step,” West added. “Your first step sets off the trap. Then you have to get in and out before the trap completes its sequence. You need accuracy and speed to get through it. I imagine that as soon as one of us steps on the first stepping-stone, the sequence is set off.” He turned to Wizard. “Max?”

Wizard thought for a moment. “‘In the highest room of the highest tower in the lowest part of the lowest cave.’ I imagine it’s up there, in the highest room of that tower. I think we need your skill and speed from here, Jack.”

“That’s what I figured,” West said wryly.

He removed his heavy garments, until all he wore was his T-shirt, cargo pants, boots, and the lower half of his gas mask, leaving his eyes clear. His metal left arm glinted in the dull light. He put his fireman’s helmet back on his head and gripped a climbing rope in one hand. He also kept his gun belt with its twin holsters on.

“He’s going alone?” Scimitar asked, surprised, and perhaps a little suspiciously.

“For this test, the most important thing is speed,” Wizard said, “and in places like this, there’s no man in the world faster than Jack. From here, he must go alone. He’s the only one who can.”

“Yeah, right,” West said. “Stretch, if it looks like I’m in trouble, backup would be appreciated.”

“You got it, Huntsman.”

Then Jack turned to face the long line of stepping-stones stretching out toward the colossal tower.

He took a deep breath.

Then he ran, out onto the first stepping-stone.

THE RUN

NO SOONER had his foot hit the first stepping-stone than things began moving all around the immense cavern.

First, a line of stalactites in the ceiling of the cavern—each the size of a man—began dropping from their places, raining down on the stepping-stones, inches behind the running figure of Jack West.

Jack bolted, arms and legs pumping, moving rapidly across the high stones, seven feet above the mercury lake as boom!-boom!-boom! the pointed missiles rained down behind him, some hitting the raised stepping-stones, others splashing into the lake around him. But he outran the rain of sharpened stones.

The flurry of stalactites was also highly distracting, designed to force an error from the intruder, but Jack kept concentrating as he ran, holding his nerve for the two-hundred-yard dash.

He hit the stairs at the base of the tower at a sprint, clambered up them two at a time, came to a high arched doorway…just as a miniwaterfall of amber-colored acid came splashing down across its threshold.

Jack dived under it, somersaulting into the tower a split second ahead of the skin-searing acid.

He turned to look behind him—and saw the long line of high stepping-stones all slowly begin to lower into the lake!

“Oh that’s just nasty…”

At their rate of descent, he reckoned he had about four minutes till they were completely submerged under the mercury lake, cutting off his only means of escape.

“Jack…!”Wizard called urgently.

“I see them!”

He looked upward and, by the light of his helmet flashlight, saw that the tower was completely hollow: a soaring cylindrical well shaft rising ominously into darkness above him, with ladderlike hand—and footholds cut into one side.

Breathing hard, he climbed the ladder-holds, noticing some small man-sized recesses along the way. Curiously, carved above each recess was the Chinese symbol for “sanctuary.”

A groaning noise made him look up.

The distinctive grinding sound of rolling rock, then a faint whistling…

Jack swung into the nearest recess just as—whoosh—a two-ton boulder came plummeting down the hollow shaft, filling it completely from wall to wall, whipping by Jack in his tiny recess, missing his nose by inches.

Once it was past him, Jack resumed climbing, and on two more occasions he dived into other “sanctuary” recesses just before more boulders rained past him, preceded only by the telltale groaning.

“Why do these guys have to be so protective of their treasures…” he muttered.

But then, after a minute of climbing, he came to the top of the tower, to the point where it merged with the ceiling of the supercavern, and found himself entering a space just above the cavern’s roof.

He rose up into a beautiful square chamber, not unlike the entry chamber back near the surface.

Intricately carved reliefs lined the walls: carvings of the Mystery of the Circles and the symbol that represented the Machine, and against one wall, above a low darkened alcove: an image of the Philosopher’s Stone.

There were other carvings, including one of four throned kings sitting shoulder to shoulder and flanked by five standing warriors, but Jack ignored them.

He crossed to the alcove and beheld within it a small stone altar on which stood one of the most beautiful, most exquisite, most magnificent artifacts he had ever seen in his life.

The Philosopher’s Stone.

It wasn’t very big, but the simple purity of its design commanded respect.

Its sides were perfectly lacquered in the ancient Chinese way—the shiny black flanks were of a deep, deep black and were lined with red. Flecks of gold peppered the red lining.

Made of two pieces, the Stone’s body section was trapezoidal in shape, with a rectangular void cut into the top surface. Its second piece, the lid, was smaller, a perfectly smooth square block, and—Jack noticed—exactly the same size as the base of the Firestone.

Peering into the alcove, Jack saw that its roof was hollow, like a chimney above a fireplace, so with a quick lunge, he reached in and snatched Laozi’s Stone and dived out of the alcove—

—a bare second before the alcove—but not the Stone’s altar—was drenched in a waterfall of pouring sulfuric acid that drained away through a grate in its floor.

Jack hurried away from the alcove, stuffing the venerable Stone into his rucksack, and began his breakneck return journey.

Down the hollow core of the tower, ducking into its recesses as more boulders rained down—more now than before; it was as if the trap system knew the Stone had been taken and was doing everything it could to stop the fleeing thief.

Jack clambered down the handholds in the wall, came to the bottom just as another boulder came shooting down the shaft.

He jumped into the main doorway, whose acid curtain had stopped by now, where he briefly glimpsed the lowering stepping-stones leading back across the lake, when suddenly the boulder came whistling past, clipping his shoulder, causing him to lose his balance and to his horror, he fell, snatching desperately for a handhold but finding none, and so Jack dropped, into the darkness of the well shaft at the base of the tower—

ONLY FOR a hand to snatch his wrist and clamp tightly around it.

Hanging from the hand, West looked up to see Stretch’s sweat-streaked face.

“Your backup has arrived, Captain West,” Stretch said grimly. “Come on. One more sprint to go.”

They emerged from the tower to see the stepping-stones now only one foot above the surface of the mercury lake and lowering fast.

“Go!” Stretch yelled.

They raced out across the mercury lake, moving step for step, almost perfectly in time, springing from stone to stone, all while the stones kept lowering.

With ten yards to go, the stones hit the waterline and Stretch called, “Keep going! Suck it in, Jack! Suck it in!”

Jack was almost out on his feet, exhausted, his heart pounding loudly inside his head, lactic bile rising in his throat, breathing through his half mask in deep rasping heaves.

Then his feet splashed in mercury and, with a terrible sense of helplessness, he felt himself begin to stumble and knew there was nothing he could do about it—he was going to fall face-first into this mercury lake, three steps short of safety!

Staggering and breathless, he toppled forward—only to feel Stretch spring up alongside him, loop an arm under his armpit and drag him over the last three steps until they both went sprawling onto solid ground, sliding to a halt on their bellies right at Wizard’s feet.

“Goodness gracious me!” Wizard blurted, helping Jack to his feet.

Sweating and gasping and held up only by Wizard and Stretch, Jack sucked in air by the gulpful.

When at last he could speak again, he uttered two glorious words: “Got it.”

JACK AND HIS team would be out of China by the end of the day, having left the trap system via the lower route—thus avoiding Mao’s men—and rendezvousing with The Halicarnassus at the Burmese border.

Once they were safely back on board the Hali, Wizard and Tank were sent straight to the infirmary to be treated by Stretch.

Sky Monster said to Jack: “Huntsman. I just got a call from Zoe. She said the mission at Stonehenge was very successful. Says she has a ton of data that Wizard will want to see.”

“Excellent,” Jack said, his clothes still covered in blood, grime, and splashes of mercury. “Set a course for England and call Zoe back. Tell her to send through any images she thinks we need to see beforehand.”

“Assembly point?”

“Tell her we’re coming to her, time and location to be advised. We’re going to have to take the long route.”

“Roger that.”

“Astro, call your American bosses and get them to send the Killing Stone of the Maya to England. And if they know the location of any of the Pillars—which I’m pretty sure they do—tell them to bring those, too.”

“Got it.”

“Oh, and tell our CIA friend, Robertson, that we need him to pull some strings with America’s old friends, the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, and get them to bring their Pillar.”

“The House of Saxe-what?” Astro was confused.

“He’ll understand.”

“OK…” Astro said, heading for a comms console.

Jack turned to Vulture, sitting nearby. “I’m also gonna need the House of Saud’s Pillar, Vulture.”

Vulture stood. “I knew you had a reputation for daring, Captain, but this, this borders on rank impudence. You really are a bold one.”

“Yeah, real bold.” West headed aft in the direction of his quarters. “Now, if nobody minds, I’m going to boldly take a shower and then I’m going to boldly hit the sack. Wake me when we hit eastern Europe.”

A few minutes later, Jack was all cleaned up and lying in his bunk, eyes open in the darkness, when something occurred to him.

He keyed the intercom button above his bunk.

“Yes, Huntsman?”Sky Monster’s voice said from the cockpit.

“Have you spoken to Zoe yet?”

“Just finished talking to her a second ago.”

“Can you call her back for me and tell her to pass on this message to Lily: ‘Daddy says, I love you and I miss you. Good night.’”

“Sure, bro.”

Jack clicked off the intercom and within seconds he was lost in a deep, deep sleep.

He dreamed of many things—memories mostly, some of them happy, others horrific—but most of all, he dreamed of Lily, of her bright smiling face and the home they’d made together in the remote northwest corner of Australia…

GREAT SANDY DESERT

NORTHWESTERN AUSTRALIA

MARCH 2006–DECEMBER 2007

IN THE MONTHS after the Tartarus Rotation of March 2006, Jack West’s team returned to their countries of origin—with the exception of Stretch, since his home nation, Israel, had declared him persona non grata after his actions during that mission. He variously stayed with Jack, Wizard, and Pooh Bear.

Reports had to be filed, careers had to be restarted. After all, it was not exactly common for a professional soldier to disappear on a ten-year mission, and such an absence had to be explained to the various bureaucracies. Backdated promotions, for instance, were given to all of them.

Naturally, this disbanding of the team had an effect on Lily, for that team of soldiers was the closest thing to family she had ever known.

She felt like Frodo at the end of her favorite book,The Lord of the Rings. Having completed a huge Earth-changing mission, now they all had to return to normal life—and how could life ever satisfy someone who had participated in such an adventure. Worse, how did you deal withordinary people who didn’t—couldn’t—know of the great deeds you’d done on their behalf.

Fortunately, the team came to visit her and Jack at the farm often; and once she got her own cell phone—a big day—Lily kept in touch with them by SMS. And of course, whenever it could be arranged, she went to visit them: seeing Pooh Bear in Dubai, Fuzzy in Jamaica, Wizard all over the place, and Zoe in Ireland.

Zoe.

Lily’s favorite times, of course, were Zoe’s visits to Australia. But at first this had been difficult, since an insensitive lieutenant colonel in the Irish Army—ignorant of the heroic role she had played in the Seven Wonders mission—had insisted she retrain and be regraded in the Sciathan Fhianoglach an Airm.

Ordinary people, Lily sighed. Urgh.

Naturally, Jack was aware of this. Indeed, sometimes he felt the same way himself.

The solution was simple.

They had to find new challenges to occupy them.

Which was OK for him, Lily thought, as Wizard would often send him queries and conundrums via e-mail. Things like: “Jack, can you look up the Neetha Tribe for me, from the Congo?” Or: “Can you get an authoritative translation of Aristotle’s Riddles?” Or: “Can you find out the names of all the Bird-Men of Easter Island?”

But then, just when she had been at a loss for interesting challenges, Jack had provided Lily with a startling new one that she had not been prepared for:

School.

Since schools were kind of hard to come by in the northern deserts of Australia, Lily was sent to a prestigious boarding school for gifted children in Perth.

But prestigious or not, kids are kids, and for a little girl who had grown up as an only child among crack troops on an isolated farm in Kenya, school proved to be a confusing and tough experience.

Of course, Jack had known this would be the case—but he also knew that it was necessary.

Just how tough it had been, however, became clear at his first parent-teacher meeting.

Dressed in jeans and a jacket that concealed his muscular physique and work gloves that hid his artificial left hand, Jack West Jr.—commando, adventurer, and owner of two master’s degrees in ancient history—sat in a low plastic chair at a tiny plastic desk in front of Lily’s personal guidance counselor, a bespectacled woman named Brooke. A “guidance counselor,” Jack was told, was simply a teacher assigned to monitor Lily’s overall progress at school.

Brooke’s long list of comments made Jack smile behind his concerned exterior:

“Lily has been embarrassing her Latin teacher in class. Correcting her in front of the other students.”

“She’s scoring excellently in all her subjects, averaging over ninety percent, but I get the feeling that she can do better. She seems only to be doing what is necessary to get a tick, not what she is truly capable of. Our syllabus is the most advanced in the country, yet she seems, well, bored.”

“She’s very choosy when it comes to friends. She hangs out with Alby Calvin, which is great, but from what I’ve seen she appears to have no female friends at all.”

“Oh, and she made young Tyson Bradley cry by bending his wrist backward with a strange grip. The school nurse says she almost broke his arm.”

Jack knew about that one.

Young Tyson Bradley was a little ratbastard and garden-variety bully, and one day he’d tried to bully Alby into giving up his lunch money.

Lily had intervened, and when Tyson had reached out for her throat, she had grabbed his wrist and twisted it inside out, forcing Tyson to his knees, almost breaking his wrist—exactly as West had trained her to do.

Young Tyson had not bothered Alby or Lily again.

It was at that parent-teacher night that West had first met Alby’s mother, Lois Calvin.

A sweet, timid woman from America, she was living in Perth with her mining executive husband. Anxious and nervous, she worried constantly about her gifted son.

“That awful sportsmaster just terrorizes him,” she complained to Jack over coffee. “I honestly don’t see why a gentle boy like Alby should have to play a sport. What if he gets a knock to the head? My son can do amazing things in mathematics—things his teachers couldn’t evendream of doing—and that could all be ruined by a single head injury in a soccer game. But that horrible sportsmaster insists that sport is compulsory and I can’t persuade him to excuse Alby.”

Lois was a lovely woman and she clearly adored Alby, but Jack felt she must be exaggerating things—until later that evening when he himself met the sportsmaster, Mr. Naismith.

Mr. Todd Naismith was a great hulking man who wore too-tight tennis shorts and a polo shirt that accentuated his thick biceps. To a kid, he would have appeared gigantic. To Jack, he was just a bigger version of Tyson Bradley—an adult bully.

The big sportsmaster seemed to assess West’s size and stature as he sat down. He pulled out Lily’s file, absently tossing a softball in his spare hand as he did so.

“Lily West…” he said, perusing the file. “Ah, yes. How could I forget. She refused to participate in a game of dodgeball one day. Said it was a stupid game and that I was a ‘dumb jock-moron who didn’t know anything about the real world,’ if I recall correctly.”

Oh dear,Jack had thought. He hadn’t heard about this.

“Geez,” he said. “I’m really sor—”

“Not much of an athlete, your girl,” Mr. Naismith went on anyway, bringing Jack up short. “But her teachers tell me she’s a bright one. Now booksmarts are one thing, and sure, this school focuses on the academic. But between us, I like sports. You know why I like ’em?”

“I can’t imagine—”

“Because they engender a team mentality.Team. The idea of selflessness. If the chips were down and their backs were to the wall, would Lily stand up and put herself on the line for her friends? I would, and I know I would, from my experiences in sport.”

Jack felt his jaw begin to grind, knowing full well what Lily had done on behalf of dipshits like this guy.

“Is that so?” he said slowly.

“It sure is.” Naismith kept tossing his ball and—

Quick as a whip, Jack snatched the softball in midair and held it in his gloved left hand between their faces, his ice-cold blue eyes levelled at the big sportsmaster’s.

“Mr. Naismith. Todd. My daughter, she’s a good kid. And I have no problem with her conceptions of loyalty and team spirit. I apologize for any offense she might have caused you. She gets her stubbornness from me. But then—”

West squeezed the softball with his mechanical left hand…and with a soft crunch, cracked it to pieces, stringy pieces that fell through his fingers to the floor, the ball’s leather cover sliding limply after it.

Mr. Naismith’s eyes went wide, his previous confidence vanishing in a second.

“—perhaps you should try appealing to her on a more intellectual level. You might get a better response that way. Oh, and, Mr. Naismith—Todd—if her little friend, Alby Calvin, doesn’t want to play soccer, don’t make him. You’re making his mother nervous. That’ll be all.”

With that, Jack left, leaving Todd Naismith sitting there with his mouth open.

AND SO LILY lived for holidays and weekends, when she could return to the farm and meet up with her old friends.

Wizard’s visits were a highlight, although as the months went by, they became less frequent. He was at work, he said, on a very important project, one that he had been working on his whole life.

Lily was thrilled to read his notes, filled as they were with ancient mysteries and symbols, and on a few occasions, she even helped Wizard translate some carvings that were written in the Word of Thoth, an ancient language that only she and one other person in the world could decode.

Twice Wizard brought his research partner Tank Tanaka to the farm.

Lily liked Tank. Clever, cuddly, and fun, on his second visit he brought Lily a toy from his native Japan, a little robot dog built by the Sony Corporation, called Aibo. Lily quickly renamed the dog Sir Barksalot and equally quickly set about using him to terrorize Horus. A quick tweak from Wizard enhanced Sir Barksalot’s infrared motion sensors—making him bark if he detected movement, even in the dark. It made for great games of “spotlight” with Alby, with the goal being to belly-crawl past the hyper-alert robot dog.

Tank also had a tattoo on his right forearm that intrigued Lily: it depicted a Japanese character hidden behind the flag of Japan. Ever curious about languages, she tried to look it up one day on the Net, but she couldn’t find it anywhere.

But there was something else that struck Lily about Tank: there was a tremendous sadness to him, a blankness in his eyes that Lily detected on their very first meeting.

When she asked him what was wrong, he answered by telling her about his childhood:

“I was a small boy, about your age, when my country went to war against America. I lived in Nagasaki, a beautiful city. But when the war turned for my country and the American Air Force started bombing our cities at will, my parents sent me away, to live with my grandparents in the countryside.

“My parents were in Nagasaki the day the Americans dropped their terrible bomb on that city. My parents were never found. They’d been obliterated, reduced to dust.”

Lily knew exactly what it meant to lose your parents—she had never known either of hers—and so a special bond had developed between her and Tank.

“I’m not very old,” she said solemnly, “but one of the biggest things I’ve learned in life is this: while it can never replace the real one, you can make a new family with your friends.”

Tank had looked at her kindly, his eyes moist. “You are most wise for one so young, little Lily. I wish I saw the world as you do.”

Lily didn’t quite understand Tank’s final comment, but she just smiled anyway. He seemed to like that.

AFTER EACHof Wizard’s visits the whiteboard in West’s study would be overflowing with notes.

After one such visit, it had this on it:

THUTHMOSIS V

Renegade priest of Akenaten regime; monotheist;

Rival of Rameses II; exiled by him under threat of execution.

Note Egyptian name-element “mosis” meaning “son of” or “born of”; this element is usually followed by atheorific, or divine, element.

So: “mosis” or “moses” or “meses” = “son of”;

Rameses = Ra-moses = son of Ra.

Thuthmosis = Thoth-moses = son of Thoth!

WHEREABOUTS OF TWIN TABLETS OF THUTHMOSIS

Who knows!! Temple of Solomonarca foederis Menelik Ethiopia

Templar quest to Ethiopia inA.D . 1280 Churches of Lalibela? Templar symbols all over them. Are the Tablets in Ethiopia?

NEETHA TRIBE*

Remote tribe from Democratic Republic of the Congo /Zaire region; warlike; much feared by other tribes; cannibals;

Congenital deformities in all members, variety of Proteus Syndrome (bony growth on skull, similar to Elephant Man);

Found by accident by HENRY MORTON STANLEY in 1876; Neetha warriors killed seventeen of his party; Stanley barely escaped alive; years later, he tried to find them again, but strangely he could not locate them.

Possibly the same tribe encountered by the Greek explorer HIERONYMUS during his expedition into central Africa in 205 B.C . (Hieronymus mentioned a tribe with terrible facial deformities in the jungles south of Nubia. It was from the Neetha that he stole the clear spherical orb that was later used by the Oracle at Delphi.)

BEST KNOWN EXPERT:DR. DIANE CASSIDY, Anthropologist from USC. But her whole 20-man expedition went missing in 2002 while searching for the Neetha in the Congo.

Cassidy found this cave painting in northern Zambia and attributed it to ancestors of the Neetha:

Seems to depict a hollowed-out volcano with the Delphic Orb at the summit but its meaning is unknown.

And finally, the entries that intrigued Lily the most:

EASTER ISLAND

(a.k.a. “RAPA NUI”: “THE NAVEL OF THE WORLD”)

CO-ORDS: 27°09'S, 109°27'W

BIRD-MAN CULT ( “TANGATA MANU”)

Annual competition, held near Rano Kau, the southernmost volcano of Easter Is, whereby a young champion would compete on behalf of his chieftain;

Each champion had to swim to islet of Motu Nui, grab the first tern egg of the season and then return across the shark-infested waters. The winner’s sponsor became Bird-Man, or Chief of Chiefs, for the next year.

ARISTOTLE’S RIDDLES

Series of strange axioms left by Aristotle as “life-guidance” for his students.

Aristotle’s authorship of them is disputed, since they find no correlation elsewhere in his works. They begin with:

What is the best number of lies?

(One, since to support one lie means telling more)

What is the best number of eyes?

(Again, one, after the All-Seeing Eye of Egypt)

What is the best life to live?(The afterlife—key source of Christian theology)

What is the direction of Death?

(West—Egyptian origin)

Lily particularly loved to read through West’s books on Easter Island; she could stare for hours at the great statues, the famous moai, that gazed out over the barren landscape of that distant island, the most remote on Earth.

It was not uncommon for West to find her asleep in the corner of his office, an open book lying across her lap. On those occasions he would gently pick her up, carry her to her room, and put her to bed.

The introduction of Alby to Lily’s life brought not only fun and good times, but also new reading material.

While Lily had been a longtime fan of The Lord of the Rings, it was Alby who introduced her to a boy wizard named Harry Potter.

Lily devoured the Harry Potter series and constantly reread them. In fact, whenever she traveled—either back and forth to school, or overseas to visit her Capstone teammates—the entire Harry Potter series always went with her. Always.

But as ever, the greatest source of mystery to Lily—even now after he had adopted her—was Jack West Jr.

DURING HER adventure with the Seven Wonders, Lily had learned a lot about Jack—except when it came to his family.

She remembered once overhearing Zoe and Wizard talking about his father.

Apparently, Jack West Sr. was American, and he and Jack didn’t get along. To anger his father—who wanted him to join the US military—Jack had become a member of the Australian Army, based on his mother’s nationality.

So one day, over breakfast, Lily asked him straight out, “Daddy? Do you have a family?”

Jack smiled. “Yes. I do.”

“Brothers or sisters?”

“One sister.”

“Older or younger.”

“Older. By two years. Although…”

“Although what?”

“Although, she’s not older than me anymore. Her name was Lauren. She’s no longer older than me because she died when she was thirty.”

“Oh. How did she die?” Lily asked.

“She was killed in a plane crash.” Jack’s eyes became distant. “An airliner accident.”

“Were you close?”

“Sure we were,” Jack said, perking up, returning from his memories. “She even married my best friend, a Navy guy named J. J. Wickham.”

“What about your parents?”

“They divorced when Lauren and I were in our teens. My mother was a high school teacher. History. A smart and quiet woman. And my dad, well—”

Lily waited, holding her breath.

West stared off into space for a moment. “He was with the US Army, met my mum while out here on exercises. He was on the fast track up the promotions ladder and always wanting to go higher. Ambitious. He was also intelligent, really intelligent, but conceited about it—he looked down on anyone who didn’t know as much as he did, talked down to them, including my mother. Which was why they split in the end. She won’t see him now.”

“Do you keep in touch with her?” Lily had never met Jack’s mother.

Jack laughed. “Of course I do! It’s just that…she doesn’t want my father to know where she is, so I only see her rarely. I was actually going to ask you if you wanted to join me the next time I visited her. She’s very keen to meet you.”

“Is she? I’d love to!” Lily exclaimed, but then she frowned: “What about your dad? Do you ever see him?”

“No,” Jack said firmly. “We never really got along. In fact, I can honestly say I don’t ever want to see him again.”

Despite the fact that Jack was no longer on active service, the military never quite went away.

On one occasion in late 2006, an Australian general came to visit Jack at the farm and asked him lots of questions about the Capstone mission.

The general also asked Jack if he knew the whereabouts of someone called the Sea Ranger.

This Sea Ranger, Lily gleaned, was a modern-day pirate of some sort, cruising the east coast of Africa in some kind of boat.

Jack told the general he hadn’t seen the Sea Ranger in years.

But the thing about Jack that was of most interest to Lily was his relationship with Zoe.

When Zoe was finally able to come to Australia more often, Lily was thrilled—especially when she could see how close Zoe and Jack were becoming.

They would smile when they talked on the balcony or went for walks together at sunset.

Lily also enjoyed doing girly stuff with Zoe—painting toenails, doing each other’s hair, dyeing their end tips in matching electric pink—but more than anything else, she loved how Zoe made Jack happy.

She once asked Zoe if she was in love with Jack. Zoe had just smiled. “I’ve loved him from the first moment I met him. But, well—”

“But what?” Lily had asked gently, but Zoe didn’t reply, she just stared off into space, her eyes moist with tears.

Lily let it go, but more than once she imagined Jack and Zoe getting married, and it made her happy because then Zoe would officially be her mom.

Christmas 2006 was an occasion Lily would remember for a long, long time.

She and Jack spent it in Dubai, at the Burj al Arab tower, with all the members of the team that had found the Seven Wonders and the Capstone.

Pooh Bear and Stretch were there, as was Fuzzy, having come all the way from Jamaica. Zoe and Sky Monster, Wizard and Tank.

The whole family, back together again. Lily loved it.

She spent much of the next week with Pooh Bear and Stretch, visiting Pooh’s father’s palace.

There she met Pooh’s older brother, Scimitar, but he talked to her like she was a child, so she didn’t like him too much.

What she did like was Pooh’s demolition shed out beyond the mansion’s stables. An explosives expert, Pooh had all manner of blasting supplies there. He even showed Lily a strange foamlike epoxy that Wizard had given to him: it was called Blast-Foam and it came from the famous Sandia Laboratories in the US. You sprayed foam from a small canister around a live grenade and it could absorb the blast of the grenade.

He also showed Lily how to use C-2 plastic explosive—a small-radius/high-impact explosive used by archaeologists on delicate sites. It could blast away tight sections of rock but not damage nearby relics.

“It can also blow locks,” Pooh Bear whispered to Lily. “Which is why Huntsman always keeps a little wad of it in a compartment in his artificial arm, and why I keep some in this”—he indicated the ornamental bronze ring that kept his massive beard in check. “Don’t leave home without it.”

Lily grinned. Pooh Bear was cool.

AWEEK LATER,the team celebrated the New Year on the rooftop helipad of the Burj al Arab tower, watching a fireworks display in the Arabian sky alongside many of Sheikh Abbas’s powerful friends and associates.

Despite the fact that she should have been in bed, Lily sneaked out in her gown and slippers and watched the gathering from the storage shed on the helipad.

The women wore sparkling dresses—even Zoe, who Lily thought looked just beautiful—and all the men wore smart dinner suits or Arabian-style robes. Even Jack wore a tux, which Lily found very funny. It didn’t suit him at all, and he seemed very uncomfortable in it, but it did make him look very handsome.

Arriving late at the New Year’s celebration, just before midnight, had been Jack’s brother-in-law, J. J. Wickham.

Wickham was a few years older than Jack and seriously good-looking, with short brown hair and a rough unshaven jaw; a sexy guy. All the women on the pad cast sideways glances at him as he walked by.

Accompanying Wickham was an exceedingly tall and skinny black man named Solomon Kol. His skin was a deep, deep black and his eyes were kind. He walked with a long loping stride and stood with a stoop, as if to diminish his considerable height.

Lily stared at the two men, frowning, struck by a strange feeling of recognition. She felt she had seen both of them before but couldn’t remember where.

“Why if it isn’t the Sea Ranger!” Pooh Bear exclaimed, clasping Wickham’s hand warmly.

“Hey, Zahir,” Wickham said quietly. “Sorry, it’s Pooh Bear now, isn’t it?”

“It is indeed and it is a name I wear with pride. ’Tis a great honor to be renamed by young Lily. I hope you have that honor one day.”

Lily smiled inwardly. She just loved Pooh Bear.

“Wick,” Jack said, coming over. “Glad you could make it. And Solomon, my old friend, how are you?”

The giant African smiled broadly. “We miss you in Kenya, Huntsman. You must visit again soon. Magdala misses young Lily terribly. She yearns to see how she has grown.”

“Oh, she’s grown all right,” Jack said. “And she’s hiding right now in the shed over there. Lily! You can come out now.”

Lily emerged, head bowed, in her gown and slippers.

Jack put a hand on her shoulder. “Lily, I’m not sure if you remember Solomon. He used to live next door to our farm in Kenya, and would come over often. He now looks after it for us, just in case we ever return.”

“My, my, you have grown, little one,” Solomon said. “Soon you will be as tall as me!”

Wickham was also gazing down at Lily, but silently, sadly.

Then he turned to Jack: “I can’t stay long. Got the Man on my tail again. But thought I’d swing by and say hi.”

Jack said, “They came asking about you last month. Arms smuggling. Said you grabbed an American weapons shipment by mistake.”

“Oh, it wasn’t a mistake. I knew exactly what it was,” Wickham said. “And I knew exactly where those weapons were heading.”

“Be careful, Wick,” Jack said. “One man’s crusader is another man’s pirate.”

“They’re calling me a pirate now?”

“You keep grabbing CIA weapons shipments to African warlords and soon you’re gonna have the whole Seventh Fleet combing the Indian Ocean for your ass.”

“Bring it on,” Wickham said. “The American military can be beaten. I mean, hell, look at whatyou did, and you’re a chump!”

Jack smiled. “Watch yourself is all I’m saying.”

“I will. Call me if you’re ever in Zanzibar,” Wickham said. “Buy you a beer.”

Then the midnight fireworks started going off. Seen from the helipad of the Burj al Arab, they were simply spectacular. The assembled crowd oohed and aahed as the desert sky lit up in a million colors.

But when Lily turned back from the dazzling fireworks display, J. J. Wickham was gone.

A few days later, when they were alone, Lily asked Jack about him.

“He’s a good man,” Jack said. “A decent man who got court-martialed by the US Navy for doing the right thing.”

“What did he do?”

“It was more what he didn’t do. Wick was the XO on a submarine in the US Navy, a little Sturgeon-class sub operating out of Diego Garcia, the US base in the Indian Ocean, doing patrols off eastern Africa.

“Anyway, a few years after the Black Hawk Down incident in Somalia, his boat intercepted an unregistered Kilo-class submarine en route to the private dock of a Somali warlord: Russian pirates in an old Russian sub, smuggling arms. Wick’s captain ordered him to take a boarding party onto the Kilo and sail it back to Diego Garcia.

“When he got on board the Kilo, however, Wick found a dozen crates of American Stinger missiles and one very pissed off CIA agent. Turned out the CIA was in the process of destabilizing east Africa by arming all the warlords.”

“So what did he do?” Lily asked.

“Wick did what he’d been ordered to do. With a small team, he secured the Russian pirates, took command of the Russian sub, and began sailing it back to Diego Garcia.

“But halfway there, he got a priority signal from Naval HQ, telling him to hand the sub back to the CIA man and forget he’d ever seen it.

“Wick was stunned. The big shots back home were actually supporting this operation. So he made a decision. He figured enough was enough, and since he no longer had a family to worry about, he’d do something. And so he stopped the sub in the middle of the Indian Ocean, threw all its crew—including the enraged CIA man—into a liferaft and set them adrift.

“Knowing a court-martial would follow, he offered all his men on board the sub the opportunity to leave—indeed, he encouraged them to do so, to think of their careers. Most did and he set them adrift as well, in life rafts with homing beacons.

“And so with a skeleton crew Wickkept the Russian submarine and has been using it ever since, conducting his own private patrols off the coast of Africa, using several old World War II submarine refueling stations as his bases. He was court-martialed in absentia for desertion and disobeying a direct order and sentenced to twenty-five years in a military prison. There’s still an outstanding warrant for his arrest.”

“So is he a pirate?”

“To the people of Africa, he’s a hero, the only guy who stands up to the warlords, by intercepting their arms shipments. He also brings the people food, free of charge and obligation. They call him the Sea Ranger. Unfortunately, he steals much of the food from western cargoes, so the US and British navies call him a pirate.”

Lily frowned. “When I saw him on New Year’s Eve, he seemed, I don’t know, familiar. Like I’d seen him before.”

“That’s because you have seen him before.”

“I have? When?”

“When you were very young and we were living in Kenya. You were just a toddler and Wick had only just started sailing his own private submarine. He was on the run, so I let him hide out with us for a while.

“He played hide-and-seek with you, peek-a-boo, that sort of thing. You loved it. Now that you’re officially my daughter, he’s officially your uncle. He lives mostly on the island of Zanzibar, off the Kenyan-Tanzanian coast. But wherever he is and wherever we are, we’ll always be family.”

And so life went on for Lily—at the farm with Jack and at school with Alby, and with Zoe and Wizard when they came to visit—until that fine summer’s day when the sky above the farm filled with parachutes.

K-10 SUBMARINE BASE

MORTIMER ISLAND

BRISTOL CHANNEL, ENGLAND

DECEMBER 9, 2007, 2145 HOURS

“DADDY!”

Lily leaped into West’s arms as he strode into the central lab of the submarine base, K-10, having taken three full days to get to England.

Situated on a windswept island in the mouth of the Bristol Channel, K-10 had been a refueling and repair station for US naval vessels in the Second World War. After the war, as a gesture of thanks to the Americans, the British had allowed them to keep using the island. To this day it has remained a US base on British soil.

In the American classification system, it is a Level Alpha base, the highest security level, and along with Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, is the only base outside of continental America to maintain and store SLBMs—submarine-launched ballistic nuclear missiles.

About a dozen people milled around the high-tech lab: Zoe and the kids; the twins in their “Cow Level” T-shirts; two Saudi commandos, guarding a small velvet case between them—Vulture went directly to them; and Paul Robertson, the American diplomat/spy they’d met in Dubai, who had arrived with a larger Samsonite trunk.

When Lily saw Wizard—his welts and cuts still pink—she released Jack and threw her arms around the old man.

Jack went straight to Zoe. “Hey. So?”

“We’ve been busy while we were waiting for you. The data from Stonehenge is absolutely mind-blowing.”

Jack glanced at Robertson. “He brought the Killing Stone of the Maya?”

“Arrived about an hour ago all by himself. With the Mayan Stone in his big case.”

“He didn’t bring a Pillar, too?”

“No. He said America didn’t possess one.”

“Hmmm. What’d he say about the Saxe-Coburg Pillar?”

“Apparently a member of no less than the British Royal Family is coming here, bringing it. Mr. Robertson certainly has some pull.”

“You bet he does. What about the Saudi goon squad over there?” Jack said.

“They brought the Pillar of the House of Saud, complete with a couple of armed guards.” Zoe shifted hesitantly. “Jack, can we really trust these guys?”

“No,” Jack said. “Not a bit. But right now, they’re being uncommonly helpful and we need that help. The big question will come later—how loyal will they be then? For now, just keep one hand on your gun.”

At that moment, the outer doors to the central laboratory opened and a very attractive young woman strode in, accompanied by two burly bodyguards whom Jack immediately picked as British SAS men.

Paul Robertson exclaimed, “Ah! Iolanthe! I was wondering if they would send you…”

He air-kissed the young woman’s cheeks. Jack noticed that she held in her hands a purple velveteen case the size of a jewelry box—or a Pillar.

Lily gazed at the woman in dumbstruck awe: she was beautiful. Perhaps thirty-five, she had shoulder-length black hair which seemed professionally groomed, perfect makeup with the most exquisitely sharpened eyebrows, and striking green eyes—penetrating eyes that seemed to miss nothing.

Most of all, however, this young woman just had a confidence about her: an easy yet absolute belief in her own right to be here. She dominated the room instantly. Lily had never seen anything like it before.

Paul Robertson performed the introductions. “Ms. Iolanthe Compton-Jones, may I present to you Captain Jack West.”

Jack noted that in his introduction, Robertson had presented Jack to her, a formality of diplomatic etiquette that implied this woman was Jack’s superior.

Iolanthe Compton-Jones shook his hand with a firm grip. As she did so, she appraised him, and smiled at what she saw.

“The Huntsman,” she said, relishing the word. “Your reputation precedes you.”

“Ms. Compton-Jones.”

“Call me Iolanthe. I am the Official Keeper of the Royal Personal Records for the House of Windsor, a position that has existed for nearly seven hundred years and that can only be held by a blood relative of the monarch.”

“And then only by a talented one,” Robertson added. “One in whom the Queen has the utmost confidence.”

Iolanthe ignored the compliment and handed West her velveteen box. “I was instructed to give this to you personally.”

He opened the box to reveal the Pillar inside it.

Jack suppressed a gasp.

It was the first time he had seen one of these fabled Pillars, and its magnificence took him by surprise.

Resting in a fitted velvet hollow inside the box, it was an uncut diamond the size and shape of a house brick. But it wasn’t shiny like any diamond he had seen before. Rather it was cloudy, translucent, more like a piece of ice than a diamond. Nevertheless it was still breathtaking.

Robertson said, “Princess Iolanthe is the emissary of the House of Windsor in this matter.”

“Princess Iolanthe?” Lily blurted. “You’re a real princess?”

Iolanthe turned and saw Lily as if for the first time. She smiled kindly and crouched down in the most ladylike manner Lily had ever witnessed. “Why, hello there. You must be Lily. I’ve heard a lot about you. You’re practically royalty yourself and from a far older line than I. It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

They shook hands. Lily blushed, twirling her pink-tipped hair nervously.

“And yes, I suppose technically I am a princess,” Iolanthe said. “I am a distant member of the Royal Family, second cousin to Princes William and Harry.”

“Noway… ”

Beside Lily, Zoe rolled her eyes, at which point Iolanthe noticed her.

“And who might you be?” she inquired politely.

“Zoe Kissane, Irish commandos. No royal blood, I fear.”

Lily jumped in quickly. “Zoe’s a princess, too, you know. Well, her nickname is Princess.”

“Is that so?” Iolanthe said, glancing at the pink end tips of Zoe’s blond hair, before saying, deadpan, “How positively quaint.”

Jack saw Zoe’s eyes flash and he quickly jumped in.

“As you of all people should know, Iolanthe, names are important,” he said. “One can do many things with a name, including hiding one’s past. Today, you’ve brought us your family’s Pillar, an object it has held far longer than it has held its current name.”

Now Iolanthe’s eyes flashed, seeing where he was going with this.

Jack turned to Lily. “You see, the House of Windsor —the name by which the world knows the British Royal Family—has only existed since 1914. But while the name is young, the House is old, very old. Once known as the House of Tudor, then Stuart, in the 1800s it became known as the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, a very Germanic name that not only betrayed the British Royal Family’s strong links to European royalty but which also became most embarrassing during the First World War. To save face, the British Royal Family changed their moniker, naming themselves after their favorite manor, Windsor.”

“You’re named after a house ?” Lily asked incredulously.

Iolanthe clenched her jaw. “The handsome captain is indeed correct.” Then in a lower voice: “He is also clearly loyal to his people”—a nod at Zoe. “Once again, your reputation precedes you, Captain.”

Jack nodded. The subtle battle for control of this room was over.

And so he turned to the rest of the gathered crowd: “OK people. Let’s do this. Let’s all open our treasure chests.”

The base had several examination labs, two of which—Labs 1 and 2—were sterile rooms, with two-way observation windows in their walls.

In Lab 1, Wizard had set up the Philosopher’s Stone on a workbench.

In Lab 2, the second clean room, the Killing Stone of the Maya was also placed on a bench. Chunky and solid, with a triangular void on its uppermost side—a void that had once perfectly matched a triangular head-chopping blade—and with rather frightening Mayan inscriptions of human sacrifice all over it, it resonated with menace.

Last of all, in Lab 3, the twins had set up several data projectors ready to roll their startling footage from Stonehenge.

Taking the Firestone from Zoe, West said, “Before we cleanse any Pillars, we need to know where and when they have to be placed. We start in Lab 3. Lachlan, Julius. You’re on.”

THE LIGHTS went out in Lab 3, and as the assembled audience watched in silent awe, Julius and Lachlan played back the video footage of their spectacular ritual at Stonehenge.

Purple light played over Jack’s face as he saw the Firestone burst to life in the midst of the dark circle of ancient stones.

Julius commented: “Note the shapes on the stones, formed by the indentations, the lichens, and the Firestone’s light. We’ll look at those shapes in more detail later, but for now—”

At that moment, the Firestone let loose its six shafts of purple light, sending the laserlike beams into some of the uprights of the henge, one after the other.

And then it was over—Stonehenge was plunged back into darkness—and Julius stopped the playback and projected some digital snapshots onto the screen.

“OK,” he began. “Now let’s go through it all a little more methodically. This is how one of the trilithons looked before the light show…”

He flashed up a digital still:

“During the ritual, however, as the light-beams from the Firestone hit it and the lichens came to life, it appeared like this:

“Note the right-hand upright,” Lachlan said. “And see how the outline of the African continent can be clearly discerned. You can even seen the Mediterranean Sea at the top. The Red Sea, which only flooded in recent geological times, is not yet in existence.”

Lachlan quickly outlined the twins’ theory that the shapes on the stones represented the continents and oceans as they existed millions of years ago, before the melting of the ice caps and the worldwide rising of sea levels had produced the present coastlines.

“What about the outline on the left-hand upright?” Paul Robertson asked from the darkness.

Julius said, “That one’s more difficult. As you can see, it only depicts a sliver of land on the right and at the top, so we’re guessing that it depicts a section of ocean, but we haven’t figured which one yet.”

Lachlan went on. “You will further see on the right-hand upright, three luminous little starlike objects. These are the points at which the shafts of light struck the upright. We have numbered them 1, 2, and 4—while No. 6, as you’ll see, is on the left-hand upright. This is the order in which the light shafts hit the stones of the henge.”

“The order in which the Pillars must be placed,” Wizard said.

“Yes,” Julius said. “That’s right. That’s what we think.”

“I’m glad my years of studying this matter meet with your approval, Julius,” Wizard said with a half smile.

“Oh, yeah, sorry,” Julius said. “Here’s the other trilithon that was hit by light shafts 3 and 5:

“Again, we are still working on the exact locations of these points. As you can see, the coastlines are exceedingly old—representing the Earth as it was hundreds of millions of years ago—and so don’t match any existing coastlines. So, like the previous example, we do not yet have a match for these locations.”

Lachlan took over. “In any case, according to Professor Epper’s research, each of these sparkling points represents a vertex, or corner, of a giant six-pointed Machine—”

Julius said: “—Think of two pyramids sitting base to base, forming a diamond within the Earth’s spherical shape.”

Wizard interrupted. “Point of clarification, boys. They represent no less than the locations of six great temple-shrines, underground structures of a magnificence that we cannot even begin to contemplate. It is at each of these temple-shrines that a cleansed Pillar must be placed.”

Julius nodded. “Yes, sorry, good point that.”

“So where are they?” Paul Robertson asked gruffly. “The first one looks like it’s somewhere in Egypt…”

“That’s not a bad guess,” Lachlan said. “The African ones are the easiest to figure out, thanks to the relative stability of the continent’s shape over the millennia. GPS-imaging and satellite photography have proved to be very helpful.”

“Not to mention Google Earth,” Julius added.

“Oh yes, Google Earth, too,” Lachlan said. “In the end, according to the data, the first site lies in southern Egypt, not far from the Sudanese border.But…”

“But what?” Scimitar asked warily.

Julius winced. “But there’s a problem with our analysis. We’ve run the data over and over again, and one issue remains. This first site, it seems, lies underneath a lake.”

“A lake?” Vulture said.

“Yes, Lake Nasser, in the deep south of Egypt,” Lachlan said. “One of the largest lakes in the world.”

Julius said, “And sadly, that’s as precise as we can be from the available data. We’re not sure how you find the exact location of the temple-shrine if it’s underwater, let alone its entrance.”

A general murmur of disappointment went through the room, and the twins—Lily saw—seemed a little embarrassed not to have done better. She felt for them.

But then a voice spoke up from the darkness.

The voice of Jack West Jr.

“Whichend of the lake was it?”

“The southern end,” Lachlan said.

Jack nodded. “Thank you, gentlemen. Well done. I think I know where the first temple-shrine is.”

“WHERE?”Vulture asked quickly.

“Yes, where?” Iolanthe snapped around in her chair.

Jack stood up, examining the image on the screen closely.

“Lake Nasser is a not a natural lake,” he said, gazing at the picture of the first trilithon. “Technically, it’s part of the Nile. It’s an artificial lake that formed behind the Aswan High Dam in 1971; stretches for about two hundred miles to the south. It could easily have covered the entrance to an ancient subterranean structure.

“The dam was also built by the Soviets, after the US pulled out at the last minute.” A glance at Paul Robertson. “Its construction was a Cold War battlefield for Egypt’s allegiance. After much initial excitement and promise-making, during which the Americans did extensive surveying of the area, the US suddenly decided that they didn’t want to go ahead with the project. Maybe their surveyors just didn’t find what they were looking for.”

Paul Robertson was poker-faced.

Jack looked directly at him. “You guys have been at work on this Dark Sun project for a long time.”

Robertson shrugged. “We all have our secrets.”

Jack’s gaze lingered on him before he went on, grabbing a sheet from Wizard’s black folder and placing it on the projector:

“This is a scan from Wizard’s notes. It’s a carving from the sarcophagus of Rameses II, written in the Word of Thoth. Translated by my learned colleague”—a nod to Lily—“it reads:

“With my beloved, Nefertari,

I, Rameses, son of Ra,

Keep watch over the most sacred shrine.

We shall watch over it forever.

Great sentinels,

With our third eyes, we see all.

“‘With our third eyes, we see all.’ That line didn’t make sense to me until now.”

Astro said, “What are you saying?”

“At the extreme southern end of Lake Nasser stands one of Egypt’s greatest monuments, the four colossal seated statues of Rameses II at Abu Simbel. Each one is over sixty feet tall. Gigantic.

“Back in Rameses’ time, they sat on the banks of the Nile at the border of Egypt and Nubia as a warning to any would-be intruders: ‘This is how powerful the King of Egypt is. Think twice before you enter our lands.’

“Abu Simbel, as it’s called, is also the most distant monument in Egypt—its distance from the major Egyptian centers of Thebes and Cairo is astonishing, making it the subject of much speculation. Why build such a dazzling monument so far from the centers of your civilization?

“The thing is,” Jack said, “there’s asecond set of statues at Abu Simbel, about a hundred yards from the four well-known ones of Rameses. It’s a smaller rock-cut temple dedicated to his favorite wife, Nefertari. That second temple features some giant statues of Nefertari, all of whichalso gaze out over the lake.

“These two sets of immense statues are still there today, sitting on the banks of the Nile, now Lake Nasser. But they don’t just keep watch over an old border. According to this carving from Rameses’ own sarcophagus, they keep watch over the most sacred shrine. The temple-shrine.”

A hush fell over the room as the magnitude of what he was saying set in.

“So how do these statues reveal the shrine’s location?” Vulture asked.

“With their third eyes,” Jack said, smiling.

“Oh, Jack…” Wizard said. “You’re a genius.”

“What? What do you mean?” Scimitar said.

Jack’s eyes glowed as he spoke. “I imagine if we go to Abu Simbel and carefully calibrate the eye lines from the third eye of each set of statues—of Rameses and of Nefertari—the meeting point of those eye lines will be the location of the first temple-shrine.”

THE KILLING STONE OF THE MAYA

THE GROUP MOVED on to Lab 2, to where the Killing Stone of the Maya sat on its workbench. They all filed in to the observation room that looked into the lab.

Leading the way, Wizard said, “In addition to the locations of the temple-shrines, we need to know thedates by which the Pillars must be placed in them.

“Now, in Laozi’s entry chamber in China, Tank and I discovered this reference to the laying of the first Pillar:

THE 1ST PILLAR MUST BE INLAID

EXACTLY 100 DAYS BEFORE THE RETURN.

THE PRIZE SHALL BE KNOWLEDGE.

“We had previously calculated the Return—being the full return of the Dark Sun, when its orbit brings it to the outer reaches of our solar system—to be the day of next year’s vernal equinox, March 20, 2008. Working backward then, we deduced that the first Pillar—duly cleansed—must be set in place by December 10, this year, by the light of the Dark Sun, which means during a Titanic Rising.”

“December 10,” Stretch said drily. “Tomorrow.”

“Yes.”

“Cutting it a little close, aren’t we?”

Wizard shrugged as he headed for the door. “When ancient knowledge is lost, sometimes it is never found in time. We’ve been very lucky so far. Tank and I were aware of the 2008 deadline, so we thought we had more time than this. We were surprised that the laying of the first two Pillars was required so soon, and so far in advance of the latter four. Jack? Do you have the Firestone?”

Jack produced the Firestone from its pack, handed it to Wizard.

The old professor then stepped out of the observation room and into an air-lock-type doorway, emerging inside Lab 2, now alone with the Killing Stone.

Everyone watched intently through the two-way mirror as Wizard brought the little golden pyramid over to the Killing Stone. Two HDV video cameras whirred in the silence, recording the scene through the glass. Four more were inside the lab with Wizard, filming the Killing Stone from every angle.

The two stones could not have been more different—the Firestone was ultrasmooth, gold, and glittering; the Killing Stone rough and scratched, with dry maroon stains all over it.

And yet somehow they seemed connected. Fashioned by the same maker.

One of the two flat sections on the upper surface of the Killing Stone bore a shallow square-shaped recess that perfectly matched the base of the Firestone.

“OK,”Wizard’s voice said over the speakers in the observation room,“I am now going to set the Firestone atop the Killing Stone…”

Slowly and with great reverence, he held the Firestone above the recess in the Killing Stone…

…and then he lowered the pyramidion onto it.

As he gazed through the two-way window, Jack found himself holding his breath.

The Firestone slotted into the recess perfectly, now married to the Killing Stone.

Wizard stepped back.

Nothing happened.

And then the crystal on the Firestone’s peak began to glimmer.

An ominous humming began to thrum from the paired stones.

Wizard’s eyes went wide.

Then, abruptly, the humming stopped.

Silence.

No one moved.

But then, in beautiful silence, some symbols on the Killing Stone—individual symbols mixed among the dozens of others carved into it—began to glow dazzling white, one after the other.

One symbol would glow brightly—in total silence—before it went dull again and another shone to life, and another, and another.

A sequence of some kind.

As it played out, the twins jotted down each symbol as it glowed.

“Numbers and Mayan epochs,”Wizard said over the intercom.“Only the numerical symbols for dates are glowing. Crucial dates.”

The sequence went for about forty seconds, before the glowing subsided and both ancient stones resumed their normal appearance once again.

Half an hour later, after Wizard, Tank, and the twins had watched and re-watched the video footage of the event and crunched the numbers, Wizard announced, “The date from Laozi’s chamber is correct. The first Pillar must be set in place during the Titanic Rising just before dawn tomorrow, the 10th of December. The second Pillar must be laid a week from now, on December 17, again during a Titanic Rising.”

“Can you be absolutely sure of your calculations?” Robertson asked.

Tank said, “Yes, the Mayan calendar has long been synchronized with our own. It is one of the easier primitive calendars to calculate.”

“What about the other four dates?” Robertson asked.

“They are all some way off,” Wizard said, “three months from now, clustered around the ten days immediately before the Return itself in late March 2008. It seems we face two separate periods of intense activity, one now, one later. If we survive the placing of the first two Pillars over the coming week, we get a period of relief, a hiatus, before in three months’ time we face another flurry of activity requiring the placing of four Pillars in the space of ten days.”

Jack said, “So unless we get it right this week, we don’t even get to play next year?”

“That is correct,” Wizard said.

There was a silence as everyone present took this in.

“Okay, then…” Jack said. “Our next step is to cleanse the Pillars we have. Which brings us to the last lab.”

THE PHILOSOPHER’S STONE

LAST OF ALL,the group moved into Lab 1, where the Philosopher’s Stone sat proudly and silently on its workbench.

Once again, the larger group remained in an observation room while Wizard, Vulture, and Stretch entered the lab itself: Wizard carrying the Firestone; Vulture bearing the velvet case containing the Saudi Pillar; and Stretch carrying Iolanthe’s velveteen case with the British Pillar.

Again, cameras recorded everything.

And although no one noticed it, a security camera inside the observation room was observing them.

In a darkened room elsewhere on the island base, others were watching.

In the lab, Vulture opened his velvet case and placed his family’s Pillar on the workbench. Stretch did the same with Iolanthe’s, so that the two Pillars stood side by side.

They were almost identical: two brick-sized blocks of uncut diamond, extraordinary in size, hazy and translucent.

As Jack knew, all diamonds looked this way until they were cleaved by an expert and polished to sparkling brilliance.

He also knew that these two raw diamonds far exceeded any diamond previously found on Earth.

The largest diamond ever found was the Cullinan, a huge gem found in South Africa in 1905. Cut into nine smaller gems, labeled Cullinan I to IX, its largest gem—the Cullinan I—was the size of a baseball and now formed part of the British Crown Jewels.

It was only then that Jack noticed something else about these Pillars. Most peculiarly, each of the Pillars possessed an oval-shapedvoid in its core, a little round chamber that appeared to contain a liquid of some sort.

A clear, colorless liquid.

“But how can that be—” he whispered.

“It can’t be explained,” Iolanthe said from beside him. “It defies explanation.”

“What can’t be explained?” Lily asked.

Jack said, “Diamonds are made from carbon that has been crystallized under intense pressure and heat. This makes a diamond one of the hardest and most dense substances known to man.”

Zoe added, “The word ‘diamond’ itself comes from the Greek,‘adamas,’ and its equivalent in Latin,‘diamas,’ meaning—”

“Unconquerable,” Lily said.

Jack said, “Which means that a true diamond, so violently compressed during its formation, should never have any kind of void inside it, let alone one that’s filled with liquid.” He keyed the intercom. “Vulture. Do you have any idea what kind of liquid is inside the diamond?”

From inside the lab, Vulture replied: “An analysis by our scientists suggests that it is a form of liquid helium known as helium-3, He-3.”

Lachlan Adamson whispered, “A substance not found on Earth. Although it was found in solid form on the Moon.Apollo 15 brought some back.”

“Very curious,” Jack said.

There was one other thing about the two Pillars that he noticed. On each one’s uppermost flat end was a marking.

On Vulture’s it was a single horizontal line:–

On Iolanthe’s, there were four.

Even Jack could count in Thoth: these were the First and Fourth Pillars.

Inside the lab, Wizard approached the Philosopher’s Stone, carrying the Firestone. Then, reverently, he slotted the Firestone into the flat square section on top of the Philosopher’s Stone’s lid.

It clicked into place.

“OK.” He nodded to Vulture. “Place your Pillar inside the Philosopher’s Stone.”

Vulture stepped forward and held his oblong diamond block above the rectangular slot in the Philosopher’s Stone. The dimensions of the slot matched those of the Pillar exactly.

With both hands, Vulture lowered the Pillar horizontally into the slot until it rested on its side, its long flat upper surface lying flush with the rim of the slot.

Then he stepped away and, with Wizard, gently picked up the lid and—with the Firestone now incorporated into it—slowly lowered the lid back into position, covering the Pillar.

Jack watched intently.

Beside him, so did Paul Robertson and Iolanthe.

The lid slotted into place, concealing the Pillar.

Now the two pieces of the Philosopher’s Stone were one—with the charged Firestone crowning it and with the Saudi Pillar within it.

All the watchers waited in silence.

No one knew what this so-called cleansing would entail—

A blinding flash of light startled them all.

It flared out from the slit between the lid of the Philosopher’s Stone and its trapezoidal base, and yet it easily illuminated the entire lab.

The watchers stepped back, shielding their eyes.

The dazzling white light continued to blaze out from within the Philosopher’s Stone. Some incredible kind of transformation was taking place inside it.

The crystal at the peak of the Firestone flared like a purple beacon.

From beside West, Tank spoke quietly: “Throughout the ages, the Philosopher’s Stone has always been associated with transformation. Some say that it can perform the act of alchemy, or as scientists would say today, elemental transmutation—Isaac Newton was notoriously obsessed with this property. Others have claimed that it can change water into an elixir that can grant long life. Always the key word has been ‘change.’ Incredible, astonishing change.”

Then as suddenly as it had appeared, the blazing light from the Philosopher’s Stone went out, as did the purple light atop the Firestone.

Silence again. Normal light.

Everyone blinked.

In the lab, the Philosopher’s Stone sat still, lifeless, yet somehow it radiated energy, power.

Wizard and Vulture then used some tongs to gently lift away its lid.

The lid came clear……to reveal the Pillar still nestled within the Stone.

Wizard lifted the Pillar from its slot and gasped.

Whereas before the diamond Pillar was cloudy and translucent, now it was perfectly clear, like polished glass or crystal. And the liquid trapped inside it, which had previously been colorless, was now a vivid shiny silver.

The First Pillar had been transformed.

It had been cleansed.

“WE’VE GOT NO time to waste,” Jack said, striding through the corridors of the base. “We have to get this cleansed Pillar to the temple-shrine at Abu Simbel by dawn.”

Hustling to keep up, Iolanthe said, “Captain! Captain, please! There are other issues about the Pillars that I must discuss with you.”

“You can discuss them on the way to Egypt,” Jack said, heading for the door.

“I’m going with you?”

“She’s going with us?” Zoe asked.

“She is now.”

Things started moving very quickly.

In a hangar near the base’s runway, The Halicarnassus stood in all its glory, black and huge, bathed in arc lights.

The doors to the hangar parted, and a chill Atlantic storm rushed in, rain and wind lashing the nose of the plane.

Jack’s team hotfooted it across the hangar floor to the airstairs leading up to the 747.

The trusted regulars: Wizard, Zoe, Pooh Bear, Stretch.

And the new players: Vulture, Scimitar, Astro, and now Iolanthe.

And the kids: Lily and Alby. This time, Jack decided, they’d come with him. In Egypt, the home of the Word of Thoth, he had a feeling he might need Lily’s linguistic skills.

The only ones not going were Tank and the twins, Lachlan and Julius Adamson. They would stay here on Mortimer Island and continue their studies, searching for the locations of the other temple-shrines.

In an office elsewhere on the island base, the American colonel known as Wolf watched the eleven members of West’s Abu Simbel team arrive at The Halicarnassus on a closed-circuit TV monitor.

Flanking him as always were his two junior men, Rapier and Switchblade.

The door behind them opened, and Paul Robertson entered.

“What do you think, Colonel?” he asked.

At first, Wolf didn’t reply. He just kept watching Jack on the monitor.

“Judah was right,” he said at last. “West is good. He puts together puzzles very well—Abu Simbel was smart. He’s also slippery. He got the better of Judah at Giza and escaped Black Dragon’s attack in Australia.”

“Iolanthe?” Robertson asked.

“She is to be watched like a hawk,” Wolf said. “They might appear helpful now, but the Great Houses of Europe only ever act in their own interests. They have their own agenda here. Make no mistake, the Royals will abandon us the instant it suits them.”

“Do you want me to give Astro or Vulture any special instructions?” Robertson asked.

“As far as Astro is concerned, definitely not. At this stage, his actions must be completely unconnected to us. Astro must be completely ignorant of his role in this; otherwise West will almost certainly find him out. As for the Saudi, he knows we’re watching.”

“What about this mission to Abu Simbel to place the First Pillar?” Robertson said. “Should we step in?”

Wolf thought about that for a moment.

“No. Not yet. It’s not the first reward that interests us. It’s the second. Thus we have an interest in Captain West succeeding in placing this First Pillar. We can also learn from his experience.”

Wolf turned to Robertson, his blue eyes glinting. “Let young West lay this one, and when it is done, grab the little fuck and all his people and bring them to me.”

Lashed by the driving rain, The Halicarnassus lifted off from Mortimer Island in the Bristol Channel.

As it banked round on a heading that would take it to Egypt, another encrypted signal went out from the island base, but not one related to Jack or Wolf or even Iolanthe. To those who could decrypt it, the message read:

FIRST PILLAR SUCCESSFULLY CLEANSED.

WEST GOING TO ABU SIMBEL IN

SOUTHERN EGYPT TO SET IT IN PLACE.

DO WHAT MUST BE DONE.

TEMPLE OF RAMESES II AT ABU SIMBEL

TEMPLE OF NEFERTARI AT ABU SIMBEL

AIRSPACE OVER THE SAHARA DESERT

DECEMBER 10, 2007, 0135 HOURS

The Halicarnassussoared toward southern Egypt, zooming through the night sky, racing the coming dawn.

Despite the late hour, there was activity going on all over the plane: Jack and Iolanthe checking the layout of Abu Simbel and its surrounds; Wizard, Zoe, and Alby doing mathematical and astronomical calculations; while Lily, Stretch, and Pooh Bear studied Lake Nasser.

“So,” Jack said, coming over to Wizard’s desk, “when exactly do we need to have the Pillar in place?”

Wizard tapped some astronomical charts with his pen. “Again, everything depends on Jupiter. According to these charts, the Titanic Rising will occur at 6:12 A.M. local time, just around dawn.

“It’ll be difficult to see Jupiter due to the light of the rising Sun—so we’ll have to use an infrared telescope. The duration of the Rising will also be shorter than the one Zoe saw at Stonehenge because we’re on a different latitude—at the high latitude of Stonehenge, the Firestone received a flat, almost tangential blow from the Dark Sun. But at Abu Simbel we’ll be a lot closer to the Equator and thus more perpendicular to the Dark Sun, so we’ll receive a more direct hit from it. Which means it’ll be shorter, lasting about a minute.”

Jack nodded. “Six twelve it is then.”

Wizard asked, “How are you going with the location of the temple-shrine?”

“I think we have a candidate.”

Jack turned a book around for Wizard and the others to see. It showed the two massive temples dedicated to Rameses II and his wife Nefertari at Abu Simbel.

The larger temple featured four sixty-foot-high figures of Rameses, all seated on thrones, while the façade of the second temple—one hundred yards from the first—featured six thirty-foot-high figures: four of Rameses and two of his favorite wife, Nefertari. Both sets of statues gazed out over Lake Nasser at a curious collection of pyramid-shaped islands that jutted above the flat surface of the lake.

“What we have to remember about Abu Simbel,” Jack said, “is that it does not stand where it originally stood. When the Soviets built the Aswan High Dam in the 1960s, they knew that the lake it created would cover the statues. So UNESCO had the statues of Abu Simbel moved to higher ground, block by block, piece by piece. They erected the statues on higher ground, in almost exactly the same alignment as they originally stood.”

“Almostexactly the same alignment?” Astro said, alarmed. “You mean the statues aren’t correctly aligned anymore? If they’re not—”

“They’re a couple of degrees out,” Jack said calmly. “But the discrepancy is known, so we can account for it. You can see the difference in this picture: the original and present-day positions of the statues.”

“They don’t look so big,” Astro said.

“Trust me. They’re big.”

The plane flew south.

At one point on its journey, Iolanthe disappeared into the aft crew quarters to get changed into something more rugged.

As soon as she was gone, Vulture spun to face West. “Huntsman. A moment with you. Can the British Royal be trusted?”

Jack turned, gazing at the rear section of the plane.

“Not at all,” he said. “She’s here to represent her family, her Royal House, just as you are here representing yours, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia—so I guess I trust her about as much as I trust you. Right now, we’re useful to her and she’s useful to us. But the moment we cease to be useful, she’ll cut us loose.”

“Or cut our throats,” Zoe said.

The American Marine, Astro, frowned, confused. “I’m sorry, but what are you talking about? Great Houses? Royal Houses?”

Stretch said, “When we ventured out to locate the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, we did so in competition with the United States on the one hand and Old Europe on the other—France, Germany, Italy, Austria. The Catholic Church, knowledgeable in ancient matters, also formed part of this Old Europe coalition.”

“Think of it as Old Money versus New Money,” Jack said. “America is New Money, recently attained and acquired. Europe is Old Money, wealth that is acquired through heredity, land ownership, family name. Remember Jane Austen: a gentleman does not work, he receives income from his lands.”

Astro reddened. “I didn’t read Jane Austen in high school…”

Stretch said, “While we like to think of Europe today as a patchwork of modern democracies run by and for the people, this is an illusion. Almost 55 percent of mainland Europe is owned by three families: the Saxe-Coburgs of the United Kingdom—which, through war and marriage, acquired the lands of the old Habsburg family of Austria-Germany—the Romanovs of Russia, and the Oldenburgs of Denmark, the canniest and most cunning royal line in history. Through multiple royal marriages, Danish blood runs thick through nearly all the Houses of Europe, and thus the Danish Royal Family controls a quarter of continental Europe all by itself.”

“The Romanovs of Russia?” Astro said. “I thought the Russian royal family was executed out of existence in 1918 by the Soviets.”

“Not at all,” Stretch said. “Two of the royal children survived, Alexei and one of the girls. And royals do not like to see other royals deposed—they look after their own. The surviving Romanov children of Tsar Nicholas II were sheltered by the Danish Royal Family in Copenhagen and ultimately married off to well-bred families. While they might not use formal royal titles like Tsar anymore, the Romanov line certainly still exists, just out of popular sight.”

Stretch then turned an eye to Vulture, who was sitting a little too silently in the corner. “There is, of course, one other rather old Royal House that holds much sway in the world today: the House of Saud in Arabia. But it is not held in high esteem by the Great Houses of Europe—since its rise from obscurity in the 1700s, it has always been seen by the European Houses as a quaint band of tribesmen merely affecting royal traits. Even the discovery of oil in Arabia during the twentieth century, by which the Saudis gained enormous wealth and power, did not gain for them the respect they so desired.”

“Old Money only respects Old Money,” Jack said.

Vulture said nothing, but the look in his eyes suggested that he agreed.

“So, these Royal Houses, what’s their link to the Machine?” Astro asked.

“Think of royalty throughout history,” Wizard said, “going all the way back to primitive tribes. What made one tribal family worthy of greater respect than all the other families of the tribe?”

“Strength. Their ability to fight on behalf of the tribe.”

“Sometimes, yes,” Jack said. “But not always.”

Astro shrugged. “What else is there then?”

Wizard said, “More often it was the family that held some kind of sacred talisman that was regarded as the head family of the tribe. It might be a mace, or a crown, or a holy stone. The ability to fight was often collateral to the ability to maintain possession of a sacred object.”

Jack said, “Macbeth slays Duncan and takes his mace, thus Macbeth, as holder of the mace, becomes king.”

Wizard said, “And the Three Great Houses of Europe have always held something that has made them greater than other noble households…”

“Pillars,” Astro said, getting it.

“Exactly,” Wizard said, “and the knowledge that goes with them: hereditary knowledge, passed down from generation to generation, about the use and purpose of those Pillars.”

Jack added, “And the fact that our Princess Iolanthe is the current Keeper of the Royal Personal Records means that she is a key holder of that knowledge.”

Astro said, “So if there are only three European Houses, does that mean they only have three Pillars?”

“I believe so,” Wizard said. “But—”

“—but that doesn’t mean we don’t know where the other three are,” Iolanthe said from the doorway at the rear of the main cabin.

Everyone spun.

Iolanthe was the picture of calm and not, it seemed, the least bit offended that they had been talking about her behind her back.

Now dressed in a cream jacket, Oakley boots, and slim cargo pants, she strolled back into the cabin and slid onto a spare couch.

“If I may contribute to the discussion,” she said. “Throughout history commoners have actively sought someone to look up to. Someone of higher birth, of noble blood, of superior sensibility. Royalty. Those who would willingly undertake an obligation to keep safe both the people and certain important objects. And because royalty are known to subscribe to a higher standard of honor, they are trusted to do so.

“The common folk, on the other hand—knowing in their hearts that they themselves are too fickle, too greedy, to stay true to any such notion of honor—seek a family of renown who will. Thus the strong rule and the weak get ruled over, by their own choice. It is the natural order of things. It has been so since humans began to walk upright.”

Lily gazed at Iolanthe closely.

The strong rule, and the weak get ruled over.She had heard those words before: uttered by a deranged Vatican priest named Francisco del Piero, the man who had raised her twin brother, Alexander, to be a despotic and cruel ruler.

Wizard had heard those same words, and he too gazed at Iolanthe with watchful eyes.

Astro said, “If people love royalty so much, why is democracy so embraced then? Look at America.”

Iolanthe snuffed a laugh. “Look at America? Why, Captain, for the last two hundred years, your country has been steadily and unequivocally marching toward monarchy.

“The problem is, your rulers have no talisman, no treasure, to hold on behalf of the people. So you get bold usurpers seeking to create a kingdom: Kennedy’s father, Joseph, wanted to establish a line of Kennedy presidents: John then Robert then Edward. In recent years, the Bush family—aided by its friends in the House of Saud—has succeeded in creating a lineage, and indeed plans to install a third Bush on the throne. But it has no talisman, and thus no kingdom. Although perhaps when this adventure is over, it will, and thus it will take a seat at the table with the Great Houses of Europe.”

Jack said, “So right now in this race we have: us, the good guys, aided by the New Money wannabes from Saudi Arabia and America; you, the royal dynasties of Europe; and China, aided by who-knows-who. So where do, say, the United Arab Emirates fit into this world view?”

“Newer Money, that’s all,” Iolanthe said. “A puny desert tribe that only recently found itself sitting on massive oil reserves.” She shrugged apologetically at Pooh Bear and Scimitar. “No offense.”

Pooh Bear growled, “Ma’am, in the words of my young friend, Lily, get bent.”

Scimitar just bowed. “We take no offense at all, madam.”

Jack said, “So what about other countries? Like Australia, for instance.”

“Still a colony of Britain,” Iolanthe said dismissively.

“China?”

“A nation of corrupt officials and a billion ignorant rural peasants. Fat, slow, and bloated. By the time it advances to the level of the West, we will have reached Mars.”

“Africa?”

“The slavelands of the world. Useless now, as it has already been thoroughly plundered. Nowadays African nations are like whores, willing to sell themselves and their armies to anyone with hard currency.”

“Japan?”

“An interesting case, for the Japanese standsui generis in our world, in a category of their own. Even the most humble commoner there has a deep sense of honor. But their pride is their weakness. Japan is the most racist nation on Earth: the Japanese sincerely believe themselves to be superior to all other races. This got them into trouble in World War II.”

“But Japan has a royal family,” Zoe said. “The oldest continuous royal line in the world.”

“This is true,” Iolanthe said. “It is old and noble and not nearly as weak as it pretends to be. Japan’s capitulation at the end of the Second World War almost saw the first modern destruction of a legitimate royal family. But the royal house survived. The Americans humiliated Hirohito but they did not disempower him. Because they were unable to find his talisman.”

Jack frowned at that. This was something new to him. He leaned forward.

“And that talisman was…?”

“…something that I am not inclined to tell you about just yet, my dashing Huntsman.” Iolanthe gave Jack a michievous sexy grin. “You may have to employ other methods to prise that little secret from me—maybe you could romance it out of me. Alternately, you could just ask your American colleague here.” A nod at Astro.

Jack raised an eyebrow at Astro. “Well?”

“Search me,” Astro said.

Iolanthe said, “In any case, while they might protest otherwise and say that they have moved on, the Japanese have not forgotten the profound slur of World War II. And such a prideful people hold a very long grudge. You turn your back on Japan at your peril.”

For a moment, no one said anything.

“The world is a complex place,” Iolanthe said softly, almost to herself. “Wars are won and lost. Empires rise and fall. But through all of recorded history, power has always been in a state of flux, ever transferred from one empire to the next: from Egypt to Greece and then to Rome; or more recently, from France under Napoleon to the British Empire to the current American dominance. But now—with the igniting of the Machine—it will be different. The transfer of power will cease. For now is the one and only time in history where total and absolute power will come to rest, forever, in the hands of one nation.”

A COUPLE of hours later, the main cabin of the plane was dark and silent.

The only person still at work in it was Jack, poring over a map of Africa by the light of a desk lamp, with Horus perched on his chair back. All the others had gone aft to get some sleep before the big day ahead—except for Lily; she lay fast asleep on the couch beside Jack.

Horus squawked.

Jack looked up to see Iolanthe standing in the doorway to the main cabin, dressed in a loose tracksuit, her hair tousled from sleep.

“Command is lonely,” she said.

“Sometimes.”

“I was told you inspire loyalty in those who follow you.” Iolanthe sat down.

“All I do is let my people think for themselves. Seems to work.”

Iolanthe watched him for a moment, eyeing him closely in the darkness, as if assessing this strange being named Jack West Jr.

“Few people can think for themselves,” she said.

“All people can think for themselves,” Jack said quickly.

“No. Not true. Not all of them can,” she said softly, looking away.

Jack said, “You mentioned before that you might know the whereabouts of the other Pillars…”

Iolanthe was roused from her reverie and she smiled at him, raising an eyebrow. “I might.”

“It’s just that we have this Saudi Pillar, marked with a single dash, and your one, marked with four dashes, indicating that they’re the First and Fourth Pillars. We’ll be needing the second one soon, within the week.”

“If we survive today.”

“Let’s be optimistic and assume we will,” West said. “Where is it?”

Iolanthe stood, touching her upper lip with her tongue. “According to my sources, the second Pillar is to be found in the jungles of central Africa, zealously and jealously guarded by the same tribe that has held it for over three thousand years, the Neetha.”

“I’ve researched the Neetha. Cannibals. Nasty.”

“Captain,nasty does not even begin to describe the Neetha. Nor does cannibal.Carnivore would be better. Ordinary cannibals kill you before they eat you. The Neetha do not give you that dignity.

“It’s believed that a thousand Rwandan refugees fleeing the genocide in 1998 got lost in the jungle and stumbled upon the grounds of the Neetha. Not a single one of them emerged. To enter the Neetha’s territory is to enter a spider’s web.”

“Another question,” Jack said. “What do you know about the last Ramesean Stone, the Basin of Rameses II? Wizard doesn’t know where it is.”

“Nobody knows where it is,” Iolanthe said simply. “The Basin long ago disappeared from history.”

“Do you know what it does?”

“No. Not a clue.” Iolanthe turned to go.

“I don’t trust you, you know,” Jack said after her.

“Nor should you,” she said, not turning around. “Nor should you.”

She left the room. Jack continued with his reading.

Neither he nor Iolanthe had noticed that Lily had awoken during their conversation.

And heard every word.

An hour later, the cabin lights throughout the plane came on, and a tone beeped over the intercom.

“Rise and shine, people!”Sky Monster’s voice called cheerfully.“Jack, I’ve spotted a stretch of highway about forty klicks west of Abu Simbel. Nothing there but desert. Can’t land on the northern highway: there are several convoys of tourist coaches coming down it—they set out early each day from Aswan to get to Abu Simbel just after dawn. The western road should be long enough to act as a runway and far enough out to allow us to get in and out without anyone noticing.”

“Thanks, Monster,” Jack said, standing. “Take us in.”

ABU SIMBEL

SOUTHERN EGYPT

DECEMBER 10, 2007, 0400 HOURS

IN THE PREDAWN light, the enormous statues of Rameses the Great loomed like giants frozen forever in stone.

They towered above West’s team and their vehicles, dwarfing them.

Whereas Zoe had used silent nonlethal force to subdue the guards at Stonehenge, here Jack had not been so subtle. The two Egyptian Department of Antiquities guards who had been on patrol at the popular tourist site had quickly surrendered when they found themselves staring down the barrels of four submachine guns. Now they lay bound and gagged in their guardhouse.

Jack stood before the four statues of Rameses, while Wizard stood a hundred yards away in front of the smaller temple of Nefertari. The whole team was here except for Sky Monster and Stretch—they’d remained on The Halicarnassus and now circled high overhead, keeping watch over the landscape and waiting for the extraction call.

“Range finders,” Jack commanded, and two laser range finders were brought out, one for each set of statues.

“Is that going to be a problem?” Zoe asked, nodding at the second of the four statues of Rameses II. Sometime in the distant past, its head had fallen off.

“No,” West said. “In ancient Egypt, they counted from right to left. The ‘third eye’ will be on that one.” He pointed at the statue second from the right.

Helped by Pooh Bear, Astro abseiled down from the rocky overhang above the statue in question, clutching one of the range finders in his free hand.

Over at the Nefertari temple, Scimitar did the same, aided by Vulture: there the “third eye” was also on the second statue from the right, a statue of Nefertari.

As they roped into position, West turned and gazed out over Lake Nasser.

The great lake stretched away to the horizon, dark and silent, possessed of that unnatural calm found only in man-made lakes. A low fog hovered over it.

The opposite shore swung around in a long curve, and, rising up out of the lake in front of this shoreline, Jack could just make out a series of pyramid-shaped islands.

At the base of many of those islands and all along the old shoreline, Jack knew, were all manner of hieroglyphic carvings that UNESCO had not been able to save from the rising waters. Just like the Three Gorges Dam in China.

Astro and Scimitar were in position.

The great stone head in front of Astro was simply huge, even larger than he was.

“Mount the range finders in the eye sockets,” West instructed. “Make sure they’re precisely aligned with the statues’ sight lines.”

Astro did so—likewise, Scimitar at his statue—using clamps to secure his range finder to the eye socket of his statue.

Once they were done, West got them to adjust the devices slightly, two degrees to southward—to account for the slight repositioning of Abu Simbel by UNESCO.

“OK, turn them on.”

The range finders were switched on—

—and suddenly two dead-straight red laser lines lanced out from the third eye sockets, shooting out over the lake, slicing through the fog, disappearing into the near distance—

—only to converge at a point about one and a quarter miles away, at one of the small pyramidal rock islands jutting up out of the waters of Lake Nasser not far from the opposite shore.

“Oh my goodness,” Wizard breathed. “We found it.”

Two Zodiac speedboats were immediately inflated and launched into the water.

Vulture and Scimitar were left on the shore as a rear guard while Jack and the others shoomed off in the two speedboats.

Within ten minutes, the two Zodiacs arrived at the pyramidal island, shrouded by fog.

The semisubmerged snouts of dozens of Nile crocodiles could be seen nearby, forming a wide circle around the two boats, their eyes glinting in the team’s flashlights, staring at the intruders.

As it drew near, Zoe peered up at the rocky island. At the waterline, its flanks were sheer, almost vertical, while farther up they tapered to a more gentle slope.

“The surface looks almost hand-carved,” she said. “Like someone chiseled the rock island into the shape of a pyramid.”

Wizard said, “Archaeologists have long pondered the shape of these islands, back when they were just hills, before the lake rose. But, no, tests have proved that they were not carved in any way. This is just their natural shape.”

“Weird,” Lily said.

“Hey! I’ve got a sonar reading…” Astro called from his Zodiac, on which was all manner of depth-sounding and ground-penetrating radar devices.

“No, wait,” he sighed. “It’s nothing. Living signature. Something down on the bottom. Probably just a croc—hold on, this is better, GPR has found a void in the base of the island directly beneath us. Sonic resonance confirms it. Looks like a horizontal tunnel of some kind, delving into the island.”

“Bring the boats together,” Jack ordered, “and anchor us to the base of the island. Then bring out the air-chute and the docking door. Astro, Pooh Bear—get your tanks on. You’ve got the job of sealing the entrance.”

Twenty minutes later, a strange contraption sat in between the two anchored Zodiacs: a hollow inflatable rubber tube that dived down into the water like an open-topped vertical pipe.

Astro and Pooh Bear—in full scuba gear and bearing harpoon guns for the crocs—splashed backward into the inky water, flashlights on.

Ninety feet underneath the boats, they arrived at the lake bed, at the point where it met the base of the rock pyramid.

They panned their flashlights over the surface of the island pyramid, to reveal hundreds of images cut into the rocky surface. They were mainly standard Egyptian carvings: hieroglyphics and images of pharaohs shaking hands with gods.

“Jack,” Astro said into his face-mask mike, “we’ve got carvings. Lots of them.”

Pooh Bear waved a portable GPR—ground-penetrating radar—device over the image-riddled wall. Kind of like an X-ray, it could detect hollows and voids behind the surface of the wall. “Here! Got a void behind this carving!”

Astro shone his flashlight onto the suspect section of wall, and found himself illuminating a carving he’d seen before:

The symbol for the Machine. “We should’ve known,” he said. “Found it.”

ASTRO AND POOH BEAR then quickly set about affixing a peculiar tentlike device over the point where the lake floor met the wall of the pyramid island, covering the carving of the Machine.

Shaped like a cube, the tentlike device was a portable variable-aperture United States Navy submarine docking door—a gift to West from the Sea Ranger.

Normally used to join submersibles to submarines, it was a rubber-walled docking unit that operated like an air lock: once you affixed it in place, sealing the edges, you filled it with air—inflating it like a balloon and expelling any water from it—thus providing a dry “docking environment” between two submerged points.

There were removable entry holes in each of the cube’s six sides, and at the moment one of these—on the upper side of the docking unit—was connected to the tube that snaked back up to the Zodiacs.

Once the unit was in place, its corner points bolted to the lake floor and to the pyramid island itself, Jack started an air pump, filling the tube and the docking unit with air.

The docking door inflated quickly and suddenly the way was clear to climb down its tube—perfectly dry—and access the wall of the ancient pyramid island.

Jack climbed down the rubber tube, gripping its inbuilt ladder holds, slowly descending into Lake Nasser.

He carried a full-face scuba mask but did not wear it. It was a precaution, just in case the docking door collapsed or otherwise unexpectedly filled with water. He also held the cleansed First Pillar in a chest pack. On his head he wore his trademark fireman’s helmet.

He came to the bottom of the entry tube and stood—thanks to the air-filled docking unit—on the floor of Lake Nasser. His boots stepped down into an inch of water, water that formed a suction layer against the bottom of the tentlike docking unit.

The exposed flank of the pyramid island stood before him, rocky and uneven and glistening wet.

Carved symbols covered it, a kaleidoscope of images in which the carving of the Machine was easily lost.

But there was no discernible door in the wall. Nothing but carving after carving after carving.

Jack gazed at the symbol for the Machine.

It was a fairly large carving, about the size of a manhole. And the six rectangles in it depicting the six Pillars seemed to be lifesized, the same size as the Pillar in Jack’s chest pack.

Unlike all the others, however, the uppermost rectangle in the carving was indented, recessed into the image.

“A keyhole,” Jack said aloud.

He removed the Pillar from his chest pack, held it against the recessed rectangle.

It was an exact match for size.

“You’ll never know if you don’t try…”

And so he reached forward with the Pillar and pressed it into the rectangle—

—and immediately the entire circular carving turned on its axis, rotating like a wheel, and retreated into the wall, revealing a dark round tunnel beyond it.

Jack stepped back in surprise, still gripping the Pillar.

“Jack? You OK down there?”Zoe’s voice asked in his ear.

“Am I ever,” he said. “Come on down. We’re in.”

THE TUNNEL OF SOBEK

THE TIGHT TUNNEL beyond the round entry hole was slick with wetness. A dripping noise echoed from somewhere within it.

Gripping an amber glowstick in his teeth and guided by the light on his fireman’s helmet, Jack belly-crawled for about five yards down the claustrophobic tunnel before he came to its first obstacle: a huge Nile crocodile, easily an eighteen-footer, blocking the way and grinning at him from a distance of three feet.

Jack froze.

The thing was enormous. A great fat prehistoric beast. Its fearsome teeth protruded from the edges of its snout. It snorted loudly.

Jack shone his helmet flashlight down the tunnel past the big croc, and saw others beyond it, maybe four more lined up in single file down the length of the tight little tunnel.

There must be some other entrance,Jack thought.A crevice somewhere above the waterline that the crocodiles have slithered in through.

“Hey, Jack?” Zoe said, arriving in the tunnel behind him. “What’s the holdup?”

“A large animal with a whole lot of teeth.”

“Oh.”

Jack pursed his lips, thinking.

As he did so, Zoe came up behind him and shone her flashlight past him. “Oh, you have got to be kidding me.”

Then abruptly Jack said, “It’s too cold.”

“What?”

“It’s too early in the day for them, their blood’s still too cold to be a threat.”

“What are you talking about?” Zoe asked.

“Crocodiles are cold-blooded. For a croc, especially a big one, to perform any kind of athletic act, it needs its blood to be warmed up, usually by the Sun. These guys are scary, sure, but it’s too early in the morning for them, too cold, so they’re not gonna be capable of big aggressive movements. We can crawl past them.”

“Now you really are kidding.”

At that moment, Pooh Bear and Wizard arrived behind them.

“What’s the problem?” Pooh Bear asked.

“Them.” Zoe jerked her chin at the line of large crocodiles before them. “But don’t worry, Captain Courageous here thinks we can crawl by them.”

Pooh Bear’s face went instantly white. “Cr-crawl by them…?”

Wizard gazed at the crocs, nodding. “At this time of day, their blood will still be very cold. The only thing they could really do right now is bite.”

“Biting is what worries me,” Zoe said.

Jack checked his watch. It was 5:47 A.M.

“We’ve got no choice,” he said. “We’ve got twenty-five minutes to get to the Vertex, and that means getting past these guys. I’m going in.”

“Er, Huntsman,” Pooh Bear said. “You know…well…you know I’d follow you anywhere. But I’m…not good with crocs at the best of times and this is—”

Jack nodded. “It’s okay, Zahir. No one’s completely fearless, not even you. You sit this one out. I won’t tell anyone.”

“Thank you, Huntsman.”

“Zoe? Wizard?”

He could see that they were thinking similar thoughts.

Zoe eyed the tunnel determinedly. “You can’t do this alone. I’ll be right behind you.”

And Wizard said, “I’ve worked my whole life to see what lies beyond those crocs. I’ll be damned if they’ll stop me.”

“Then let’s do it,” Jack said.

Crawling through the darkness, he came to the first croc.

The great reptile made him look tiny, puny.

As Jack’s face came level with it, the croc opened its massive jaws, revealing every single one of its teeth, and emitted a harsh belching grunt in warning.

Jack paused, drew in a deep breath, and took the plunge, crawling past the thing’s jaws and shimmying around the side of the animal, sliding up against the curved wall of the tunnel.

His eyes came level with the croc’s—and Jack saw that those eyes, cold and hard, were watching him every inch of the way.

But the creature did not attack. It did nothing but shuffle on its claws.

Jack wriggled past it, his cargo pants brushing up against the bulging belly of the beast, and he could feel the flabby give of its abdomen, and then suddenly he was alongside its spiky tail, past it.

Jack let out the breath he’d been holding.

“I’m past the first one,” he said into his headset mike. “Zoe, Wizard. Come on through.”

THE STAIRS OF ATUM

IN THIS MANNER, Jack, Zoe, and Wizard slithered down the long tight tunnel, squeezing on their bellies past the five gigantic Nile crocodiles.

At the end of the tunnel, they emerged at the top of a square stone well equipped with a staircase that delved down into darkness.

The stairs bent back and forth as they dived down the well shaft. On the walls of each landing were thousands of hieroglyphs, including more large carvings of the Machine’s wheel-like symbol.

Jack descended the first flight of steps and came to the first landing……where the Machine symbol in the wall retreated inward by some unseen mechanism and revealed a wide gaping hole behind it, a hole that could contain any kind of deadly liquid…

…but then the Pillar in Jack’s hands glowed slightly and the hole instantly resealed itself.

Jack exchanged a look with Wizard.

“Doesn’t look like you get past these traps without the Pillar in your possession.”

“Not without great difficulty,” Wizard agreed.

Down the stairs they climbed, winding back and forth.

At every landing, the wheel-like symbol for the Machine opened but then closed again when it sensed the Pillar in West’s hand.

Down and down.

Wizard counted the stairs as they went, until at last they came to the bottom, where the stairs stopped at a great stone archway—tall and imposing, twenty feet high. It opened onto dense blackness.

Wizard finished his count—“267.”

Jack stepped into the archway, staring out into the blackness beyond it. A light breeze struck his face, cool and crisp.

He sensed a large space before him, so he pulled out his flare gun and fired it into the black.

Fifteen flares later, he just stood there in the archway, his mouth open in wonderment.

“Now that’s a sight you’ll remember for a long time,” he breathed.

THE HALL OF THE MACHINE

The twenty-foot-high archway in which Jack stood looked microscopic compared to the space that opened up below it.

The archway stood at the summit of an immense mountain of stone steps—five hundred of them, maybe more—steps that descended to a flat-floored hall that was easily four hundred feet tall and five hundred wide. The colossal collection of stairs stretched for the entire width of the hall, from wall to wall, an enormous mountainside of perfectly square-cut steps.

The ceiling of this mighty subterranean hall was upheld by a forest of glorious columns, all of which were carved in the colorful Egyptian fashion, with brilliant red-blue-and-green lotus leaves at their tops. There must have been forty such pillars, all in regular rows.

“Just like the temple of Rameses II at Karnak…” Wizard breathed.

“Maybe the temple of Rameses was a replica built in honor of this,” Zoe said.

Standing at the top of the great flight of stairs, Jack felt like he was standing in the topmost row of a modern football stadium, gazing down upon the field far below.

And there was one other thing.

Down in the hall,there was no fourth wall opposite the stair-mountain.

Indeed directly opposite the huge staircase, past the forest of ornate columns, was nothing at all: the polished floor of the hall simply ended abruptly at a sharp edge, a railless balcony five hundred feet wide, essentially a great viewing platform that looked out over an even larger space of more darkness.

But from their vantage point at the top of the staircase, Jack and the others couldn’t see what lay inside this larger space, so they descended the stairs, looking like ants against the gargantuan hall.

They were halfway down the stairs when Jack saw what lay in the larger space.

He stopped dead.

“We’re gonna need more flares,” he breathed.

THE VERTEX AT ABU SIMBEL

THE FIRST VERTEX OF THE MACHINE

JACK, WIZARD, AND ZOE crossed the vast floor of the Hall, passing through the forest of superhigh columns, before they came to the edge of the hall, the point where it looked out over a larger underground void.

A gargantuan abyss dropped away before them. Deep and black and at least a thousand feet wide, it plummeted to unfathomable depths, into the densest darkness Jack had ever seen.

And mounted over it, suspended from the flat stone ceiling above the abyss, was a colossal pyramid—hanging inverted, upside down—perfectly cut and, by the look of it, of exactly the same dimensions as the Great Pyramid at Giza. It looked beyond ancient, beyond anything mankind could hope to build. Its flanks blazed with a lustrous bronze sheen.

Jack was reminded of the Pyramid Inversé at the Louvre in Paris—the beautiful upside-down glass pyramid that hung over a smaller one. Made famous in the blockbuster novel The Da Vinci Code, its construction was shrouded in both Masonic and neo-pagan myth.

He also thought of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, built as they were into a giant natural stalactite in a great cavern in southern Iraq, and it struck him that perhaps the Gardens were built in homage to this.

Either way, the incredible size of the pyramid dwarfed the hall in which Jack, Wizard, and Zoe stood, the hall that until now had seemed so gigantic.

“Jack. Zoe. Meet the Machine,” Wizard said.

Jack checked his watch.

It was 6:02 A.M. The Jovian equinox would be at 6:12.

They’d made good time.

His radio squawked.

“Huntsman, you still alive down there?”Pooh Bear asked anxiously.

“We’re in. We’ve found the Machine.”

“Sky Monster just called. He’s picked up a large force of land vehicles heading this way from Aswan. Over a hundred vehicles coming in behind the tourist coaches.”

“ETA?” Jack asked.

“An hour, maybe less.”

Jack did some calculations in his head. “We can be gone by then. Just.”

As Jack spoke into the radio, Zoe and Wizard examined the walls of the hall.

They were literally covered in images—thousands and thousands of beautiful and intricate carvings.

Some they recognized, like the Mystery of the Circles, the circular symbol for the Machine, and even the layout of Stonehenge was there. But others were completely new:

Zoe quickly pulled out a high-res Canon digital camera and started clicking away, trying to capture as many of the images as she could.

“That’s Ur,” Wizard exclaimed, pointing at the second to last image.

“It is?” Zoe said.

“It’s the layout of the ancient city of Ur, in Mesopotamia. Ur famously had two walled harbors, one to the west, the other to the north—you can see both of them clearly in the carving. Until the Great Pyramid was built, the Ziggurat at Ur was the tallest building in the world. And do you know what the word ‘Ur’ means?”

“Tell me.”

“Light. The City of Light.”

Taking pride of place in the center of the wall was a huge polished obsidian plaque. Every carving in it was edged with gold and its ornate frame also appeared to be cut from a single square piece of gold:

“Oh my God, the six vertices…” Wizard breathed. “That symbol repeated on the left, an inverted triangle surmounting a rectangle, is Thoth for ‘vertex.’ This carving is a description of all six vertices. I’ll have to get Lily to decipher it.”

Zoe snapped several photos of the plaque, then stared at the incredible hall around them and the gravity-defying pyramid suspended above the abyss.

“Wizard, who could build a place like this?” she asked. “Not ancient man. Not even modern man could do something like this.”

“This is true,” Wizard said. “So who could? Extraterrestrial visitors? Some think so—over 70 percent of people believe that the Earth has been visited by aliens at some point in history. And if they exist, perhaps aliens did visit our planet and build these structures. But I don’t subscribe to that view.”

“What do you think?”

“He thinks men built them,” Jack said, joining them, scanning the walls as he did so. “Hey, it’s Ur.”

“Men?” Zoe frowned. “But I thought you agreed that neither modern nor ancient man could have—”

“I did agree. But I didn’t rule out a race of super ancient men,” Wizard said.

“The past civilization theory,” Jack said.

“Yes,” Wizard said. “The theory that ours is not the first advanced civilization to flourish on this planet. That over the eons, in between asteroid impacts, comet strikes, and deadly Dark Stars, human-type beings have on numerous occasions risen above their animal neighbors, thrived, and then died out, only to rise again millions of years later.”

“You think a previous civilization of people built all this?” Zoe asked.

“Yes. A highly advanced human civilization, far more advanced than we are today. Why, did you notice how all the doors and steps we have passed through to get here have all been suited to our size and stature? This is not coincidence. That an alien culture would build human -sized steps would be an astronomical coincidence. No, this structure—this wonderful structure—was built by human hands a long,long time ago.”

“Humans who despite their advancements couldn’t save themselves from extinction,” Zoe pointed out.

“Maybe something else killed them,” Jack said. “While they were building this, a rogue asteroid might have wiped them out.”

Wizard nodded. “A lot can happen in a hundred million years. Entire species can emerge, evolve, thrive, and become extinct in that time. By contrast, modern Homo sapiens is only a hundred thousand years old. And hey, at least the people who built this Machine were trying to save themselves from the future return of the Dark Star.”

“Wizard, sorry to interrupt, but would you mind taking a look at this.” Jack had moved to the edge of the balcony and was gazing at the colossal inverted pyramid through a pair of binoculars.

The peak of the upside-down pyramid hovered level with their balcony, but it was still three hundred feet—about ninety yards—away.

“The peak isn’t pointed,” he said, handing the binoculars to Wizard. “It’s flat at the summit.”

“Like the Great Pyramid was?” Zoe said.

“Sort of, but smaller. Much smaller,” Wizard said. “About the size of”—he looked at the Pillar in Jack’s hands “—that.”

“So how do we get over there to place it?” Zoe asked.

“I’m guessing the same way we got in here,” Jack said, pointing to the floor at his feet.

Zoe looked down—and saw the symbol for the Machine engraved into the marble floor beneath Jack’s boots. Again, the rectangles in it were life-sized.

Jack placed the cleansed Pillar into the rectangular slot nearest to the abyss.

No sooner had it slotted into place than a deep rumbling could be heard.

Jack snapped left, then right, but couldn’t see any obvious source of the sound. Wizard and Zoe did the same.

And then Jack saw it.

Saw a great narrow bridge emerging from the wall of the abyssdirectly below him. It folded upward as it emerged from the wall, like a drawbridge that folds up into place not down, a long railless stone bridge.

Accompanied by the great rumbling, it rose up and up until with a loud boom it stopped perfectly in front of West, a great leaping tongue of stone that formed a half bridge stretching out over the abyss from his feet all the way to…the inverted summit of the pyramid.

“Nice…” Jack said.

Gripping his cleansed Pillar, Jack West Jr. stepped out onto the bridge, absolutely tiny against the vastness of the hall, the abyss and the colossal pyramid.

The sheer rock-walled abyss below him seemed almost bottomless, disappearing into infinite black.

Jack tried not to think about it and kept his eyes fixed forward as he approached the gigantic bronze pyramid.

Wizard and Zoe watched him every step of the way.

Then Jack came to the end of the bridge, to the summit of the upside-down pyramid…

…just as the clock struck 6:11 A.M.

UP ON THE SURFACE of the lake, the first rays of dawn were creeping over the horizon.

Alby had set up his telescope on the surface of the pyramid-shaped island, just above the two bobbing Zodiacs.

He was bent over the eyepiece when he called, “Saturn has just risen over Jupiter! The gap is coming…now!”

Jack’s watch ticked over to 6:12.

After all the grandeur of the hall and its staircase and the great pyramid and the vast abyss, Jack found it odd that the peak of the massive structure could be so small when seen up close—

Suddenly the pyramid began to hum.

It was a low thrumm —a deep and powerful vibration that resonated throughout the entire cavern.

Jack’s eyes went wide.

“Captain West,”came Alby’s voice on the radio.“The Titanic Rising has just begun. You now have approximately one minute to lay the Pillar.”

“Thanks,” Jack replied. “Somehow I had the feeling it’d begun.”

Standing at the very end of the elongated bridge, high above an abyss of indeterminate depth, he examined the summit of the thrumming bronze pyramid.

As he’d noted from the balcony, the massive pyramid did not end at a sharp triangular point. Rather, it was flat. The great structure ended in a very small square-shaped flat section barely a handspan wide, as if its tiny capstone had once upon a time been sliced off.

Set into this square summit was an equally square hole—one that, Jack saw immediately, matched the size of his Pillar.

“Wizard?” he said into his radio. “Any final thoughts? There’s no ceremonial thing I have to do?”

“Not that I know of,”Wizard replied.“Just insert the Pillar into the pyramid.”

“OK then…”

Jack took a final glance at his watch. It was still 6:12 A.M.

Then, gripping his Pillar with both hands, standing high above a bottomless abyss far beneath the surface of the world, he inserted the cleansed Pillar into the matching hole in the pyramid.

THE PILLAR slotted into the pyramid…

…and instantly lodged inside it, half-in, half-out of the pyramid, firmly locked in place.

The ominous thrumming ceased instantly.

Silence hung in the air.

Jack held his breath.

Then—bam!—the clear diamond Pillar, now lodged in the peak of the pyramid,blazed to life, glowing with intense white light.

Jack reeled away, shielding his eyes.

The blinding white light illuminated the entire cavernous space around him, showing Jack for the first time just how deep the abyss below him was. It was unimaginably huge, its sheer walls plunging down beyond even the reach of the blazing light of the Pillar.

But then, with a great thunderclap, a thick column of laserlike white light blasted downward from the Pillar and shot down the shaftlike abyss, rocketing toward the core of the Earth.

Jack couldn’t watch it properly—it was just too bright.

Then with startling suddenness, the laser retreated back up into the Pillar and the pyramid, and just as quickly as it had sprung to life, the event was over, and the cavern was dark again—save for the pathetic light of Jack’s amber flares.

Uncovering his eyes, Jack peered up at the massive pyramid, staring in awe at the ancient mechanism.

Then he saw the Pillar.

It was pulsing with light, its liquid core throbbing with a soft luminous glow.

And then, slowly, gradually, a strange kind of text began to appear on every surface of the Pillar—white symbols on all of the Pillar’s glasslike surfaces.

Jack recognized the symbols instantly.

The Word of Thoth.

The mysterious language found in Egypt and decipherable only by the Siwan Oracles: Lily and her twin brother, Alexander.

Then he recalled the reward that went with the placing of the first Pillar.

Knowledge.

These symbols conveyed some kind of wisdom, highly advanced wisdom.

Knowledge that nations would kill for.

He reached out to grab the Pillar. No sooner had he touched it than—shnick—there was a soft slicing noise and the pyramid’s clamping mechanism released the Pillar into his hands, now glowing with its pristine white Thoth symbols.

Jack examined it, and immediately noticed that a small pyramidal section of the Pillar had been removed, excised, from its upper end.

Jack looked up in wonder—and saw that the great inverted bronze pyramid was now whole again. Somehow, during the dazzling light show, it had taken a section of the diamond Pillaras its capstone, thus completing its perfect triangular shape.

“Nice…” Jack said, gazing down at the newly formed pyramidal void in his Pillar.

“Wizard,” he said into his mike. “This is serious shit…”

“Don’t I know it.”

Jack tucked the glowing Pillar into his rucksack. “Well,” he said, “all things considered, that was really kinda painless.”

“Yes, which is most unusual for us—”Wizard began, only for his radio signal to cut off abruptly and be replaced by a long droning monotone.

Jack’s blood turned to ice. This wasn’t a simple loss of signal. That would produce static or hash. Tone meant something else.

He turned and saw Wizard at the edge of the balcony, holding his hands out, palms up. Beside him, Zoe was waving Jack over hurriedly.

Jack dashed back across the bridge, holding his rucksack like a football under his arm, keying his radio as he ran. “Astro! Lily! Alby! You guys still on the air?”

No reply.

Only the flat monotone.

He reached Wizard and Zoe. Wizard gazed at the Pillar nestled in the rucksack. Zoe, however, went straight up to him.

“Jack. All our comms have just been jammed. Someone else is here.”

THEY ROSE out of the lake on every side of the two Zodiacs—armed men in black wet suits and scuba gear, brandishing MP-5 submachine guns.

Twelve of them. Frogmen.

“Shit!” Astro cursed. “The moving sonar signal from before. It wasn’t a croc. It was a man.”

“Quiet, you,” the lead frogman said evenly, his accent all Eton. “Guns down and put your hands in the air.”

Astro and Pooh Bear complied.

British troops, Astro thought. Probably SAS or Royal Marines. He spun to glare at Iolanthe, but her face was a mask.

The British frogmen clambered up into the Zodiacs, their black wet suits dripping, their guns glistening.

Pooh Bear instinctively pushed Lily and Alby behind him.

The lead frogman went to Iolanthe, removed his mask and rebreather. He was young, square-jawed, with a pockmarked face. “Lieutenant Colin Ashmont, ma’am. Royal Marines. We’ve been waiting for you. And, as ordered, monitoring Captain West’s radio signals till we heard the Pillar had been placed.”

“Good work, Lieutenant,” Iolanthe said, striding over to stand with the British frogmen. “West is down there with two others. The old man, whom we need, and the woman, whom we don’t.”

She handed Ashmont her headset mike, just as he switched off the jamming device on his hip.

He spoke into the mike. “Captain Jack West. This is the Royal Marines. You have no escape. You know it and we know it. Bring out the Pillar.”

“Go fuck yourself,”came the reply from the radio.

Ashmont smiled. Then he looked at Lily and Alby as he spoke again: “Bring out the Pillar, Captain, or I start killing the children. The boy first.”

“OK. We’re coming.”

Minutes later, Iolanthe, Ashmont, and three of his men stood inside the docking unit suctioned to the base of the rocky island, staring down the pipelike tunnel filled with Nile crocodiles.

At the other end of the tunnel stood Jack, Zoe, and Wizard.

“Send the old man out with the Pillar!” Ashmont called.

“What’s your name, soldier?” Jack said evenly.

“Ashmont. Lieutenant. Fifth Regiment, Her Majesty’s Marines.”

“You threatened my little girl and her friend, Lieutenant Ashmont. I’m gonna make sure you diehard for that.”

“You don’t scare me, Captain West,” Ashmont replied haughtily. “I’ve heard of you, and I know your kind. Some may think you’re good, but to me you’re loose, undisciplined, reckless. Just another wild animal from a colony that should be kept on a tighter leash. I’ve a mind to kill the boy just on principle. Now send the old man through with the Pillar or I give the order.”

Jack handed his rucksack to Wizard, who then proceeded to shimmy down the crocodile-infested tunnel for the second time that morning.

Again, the big crocs grunted in protest, but they did not attack.

As Wizard crawled down the tunnel, Jack called, “Iolanthe. I’m disappointed.”

“Sorry, Huntsman,” she replied. “Blood is thicker than water, especially royal blood.”

“I’ll remember that.”

At length, Wizard emerged from the hole at the end of the tunnel and stepped out in front of the three gun-toting Royal Marines.

Ashmont snatched the rucksack from him, saw the glowing Pillar within it, handed it to Iolanthe.

“Up, old man.” He jerked his chin at the ladder leading back up to the boats.

Wizard protested: “But—”

“Move!”

Reluctantly, Wizard ascended the ladder.

Standing at the tunnel’s entrance, Iolanthe gazed down it, seeing West and Zoe at the far end. She held the Pillar in her hands, brushing the new pyramid-shaped hollow in one end of it with her fingers.

“Enjoy your tomb, Captain,” she said.

Then she pressed the solid end of the glowing Pillar into the rolled-back symbol of the Machine at the entrance and immediately the manhole-sized symbol rolled back into place, sealing the ancient tunnel with a resoundingboom, locking Jack and Zoe inside.

IOLANTHE, Ashmont, and the other Royal Marines climbed back up into the Zodiacs.

Once they were all up, Ashmont broke the seal on the docking unit, and it instantly flooded, covering the entrance to the subterranean system with water again.

Then he pushed Lily and Wizard onto the first Zodiac, leaving Alby, Pooh Bear, and the American, Astro, on the second one.

The British lieutenant deferred to Iolanthe. “What about them?”

“We keep the girl and the old man. The others we don’t need.”

“So be it,” Ashmont growled. Then he promptly cuffed Pooh, Astro,and Alby to their Zodiac, cut the ropes anchoring their boat to his and to the island, and then—blam!-blam!-blam!—fired three shots into its rubber sides.

Lily screamed at the gunshots.

The second Zodiac instantly began to deflate…and sink…with Pooh Bear, Astro, and Alby handcuffed to it!

The many crocodiles that had lurked in wait in a wide circle around the two boats now began to stir. Unlike the ones inside the cool interior of the island, these crocs were alert, awake, and mobile.

“Perhaps you’ll be lucky and drown before the crocs take you,” Ashmont said. “Otherwise, I hope your death is not too frightening.”

“When it comes, I certainly hope yours is,” Pooh Bear retorted. “Bastard.”

“Alby!” Lily screamed, her eyes filling with tears.

Alby himself was petrified, turning this way and that, looking from his sinking boat to the wide circle of crocs.

“Farewell,” Ashmont said.

Then he gunned the engine of his Zodiac and sped off into the dawn across Lake Nasser, heading back for the docks at Abu Simbel, leaving Pooh Bear, Alby, and Astro to their fate.

Water began to dribble in over the sides of the sinking Zodiac.

Standing on the sinking boat, cuffed to it, Alby felt like a passenger on the Titanic : unable to stop his craft’s inexorable sinking and destined to die on it very soon.

“OK,” Pooh Bear said between anxious breaths. “What would Huntsman do? He’d have some kind of extra oxygen tank hidden on his belt, right? Or a blowtorch to cut through these cuffs.”

“We’re out of both,” Astro said drily.

Pooh thought of the small amount of C-2 plastic explosive he kept concealed in his beard ring, but no, it was too powerful for his handcuffs. It’d blow his hand off in the process.

A large croc splashed nearby, whip-cracking its tail.

“How you doing, kid?” Astro said to Alby.

“Scared out of my mind.”

“Yeah, I’m feeling about the same,” Astro replied.

Water began to gush in over the edges of the deflating boat,pouring in, and the whole boat began to sink faster.

The water came up to Alby’s knees, then his thighs.

They would go under any moment now.

A sudden splashing nearby made Alby spin and he turned round in time to see a huge crocodile come launching out of the water at his face, jaws wide, making a lunge for him—only for a booming gunshot to ring out and the croc fell in midlunge, lashing and spasming, shot in the eye by Astro.

“Holy shit …” Alby breathed. “Oh my God, oh my God…”

The water level was at his waist now.

The boat was nearly fully under, tilting dramatically in the water.

Pooh Bear came alongside Alby. He ripped off his face mask and handed it to Alby, despite the fact it had no oxygen tank attached to it. “Here, put this on. It might give you more time. I’m sorry, lad. I’m sorry we couldn’t do more for you.”

Then, with a final inward rush, the crippled Zodiac filled fully with water and went under…

…taking Pooh Bear, Astro, and Alby down with it.

UNDERWATER.

Holding his breath, Alby felt the Zodiac pulling him downward by the wrist. As he fell through the murky haze, he could just make out the wall of the rocky island nearby.

Crocodiles lurked at the perimeter of his vision, hovering in the void, just watching the Zodiac’s slow freefall.

Then in ultraslow motion the Zodiac hit the bottom, kicking up silt, and one of the crocs moved in.

It glided through the water, propelled by its thick tail, zeroing in on Alby, jaws opening as it approached, and Alby screamed a soundless underwater scream as it rushed at him and—

—stopped.

Stopped dead, three inches from Alby’s face.

Its snarling teeth were halted right in front of Alby’s bulging eyes, and it was only then that Alby saw the great big Ka-Bar knife—Pooh Bear’s knife—that had been lodged up into the soft underside of the crocodile’s lower jaw.

Pooh Bear had reached over with his free hand and stabbed it up through the creature’s jaw, just in time.

But then Alby saw the big man’s eyes—they were wide open and bloodshot, running out of air. That lunge, it appeared, had been Pooh Bear’s last act on this Earth. He visibly sagged.

Then a second croc advanced from the other side, again coming for Alby, the smallest prey, and this time Alby knew there was no escape. Pooh was done. Astro was too far away.

The crocodile zoomed in toward him, jaws opening, charging.

Running out of air and now totally out of heroes, Alby shut his eyes and waited for the end.

BUT THE END didn’t come.

There was no explosion of pain or slashing of teeth.

Alby opened his eyes—to see Jack West, wearing scuba gear, wrestling with the gigantic crocodile, rolling and struggling; the croc bucking and snapping.

And then suddenly someone jammed a scuba regulator to his mouth and Alby sucked in glorious air. Zoe hovered beside him in the water, also scuba-equipped.

Then she dashed to the limp Pooh Bear’s side and inserted the regulator into his mouth. He came to life instantly. She moved on to Astro.

As for the fight between Jack and the crocodile, it was now a rolling struggle, hidden amid a cloud of roiling bubbles.

Then all of a sudden, Alby saw the croc bite down hard on Jack’s left hand—only to see, two seconds later, Jackextract his hand from the great beast’s jaws!

And just as Alby recalled that Jack’s left hand was made of metal, he saw the crocodile’s head explode underwater and spontaneously become a cloud of red. As it bit him, Jack must have left a grenade in its mouth.

At that moment, Zoe fired a shot through Alby’s handcuff and did likewise with Pooh’s and Astro’s bonds and then Jack was right beside him, sharing his regulator, and Alby found himself being guided to the surface, somehow alive.

They broke the surface together and swam for the rocky island, where Jack pushed Alby up the slope, clear of the waterline, until he could lie safely on the less-steep upper surface.

Pooh and Astro were pushed up next, then Zoe and last of all, Jack, keeping a watchful eye on the crocs—but thankfully, most of them were preoccupied with eating the corpse of their now-headless comrade.

Jack lay on the island, sucking in great heaving breaths.

“How did—how did you get out?” Alby gasped.

“There were crocs in the entry tunnel,” Jack said. “They’d got in by another entrance on the other side, a small cleft in the rock that was probably created by a tremor sometime. We came out through there.”

Then Jack propped himself up on his elbow and looked back out over the lake. “Did they head back for Abu Simbel?”

“Yeah,” Alby said.

“They took Lily?”

“And Wizard. Are you angry, Mr. West?”

West clenched his teeth. “Alby, angry doesn’t even begin to describe how I’m feeling right now.” He keyed his radio. “Vulture! Scimitar! You copy?”

His radio remained silent. No reply.

“I say again! Vulture, Scimitar! You guys still at the dock?”

Again there was no reply. Just silence on the airwaves.

Jack swore. “Where the hell have they got to?”

AT THE SAME TIME this was happening, Lieutenant Colin Ashmont’s stolen Zodiac was arriving back at the docks not far from the great statues of Abu Simbel, flanked by two smaller inflatable speedboats—which had been inflated out on the lake and were now filled with the other eleven members of his squad of Royal Marines.

The first convoy of tourist coaches was just now arriving in a parking lot not far from the docks.

Tourists of all nationalities piled out of the buses—German, American, Chinese, Japanese—and they variously stretched their legs and yawned.

Ashmont shoved Lily and Wizard out of the Zodiac, pushing them toward a couple of white Suburbans with tinted windows parked nearby. Iolanthe led the way, striding quickly, all business, carrying West’s rucksack with the Pillar inside it.

As Lily and Wizard were guided toward the two British Suburbans, some of the tourists from the nearest bus came closer.

They were classic Japanese tourists—four older men with Nikon cameras slung from their necks and wearing bulky camera vests and sandals with white socks.

One of the Japanese called to Ashmont: “Halloo, sir! Excuse me! Where statues?”

Ashmont, now wearing a T-shirt over his wet suit, ignored the man and walked right past him.

Lily wanted to shout to the Japanese men, to scream—

—but then she saw the first Japanese man’s eyes follow Ashmont, glinting with purpose, and she suddenly realized that something was very, very wrong here.

The four old Japanese tourists were arrayed around Ashmont’s cars and team in a perfect semicircle.

Heart thumping, Lily scanned their faces, and saw only steely eyes and grim expressions.

And then, fleetingly, she saw the forearm of one of the Japanese men…and beheld a tattoo on it, a tattoo she had seen before, a tattoo of the Japanese flag with a symbol behind it.

“Tank…” she said aloud. “Oh, no. Oh,no …Wizard! Get down!”

She threw herself into the bewildered old professor, tackling him around the legs, felling him just as the Japanese “tourist” nearest to Ashmont opened his photographer’s vest to reveal six wads of C-4 strapped to his chest. Then the kindly-looking little old man thumbed a switch in his palm and he exploded.

FOUR SHOCKINGLY violent blasts ripped through the air as all four of the Japanese suicide bombers just disappeared in identical outward sprays of smoke, fire, and body parts.

The windows of every car in a sixty-foot radius blew out simultaneously, showering the area with glass.

Ashmont was hit hardest by the blast. He was flung into the side of his Suburban with terrible force and dropped to the ground like a rag doll.

Three of his men, those closest to the Japanese suicide bombers, were killed instantly. All the others were hurled every which way.

Iolanthe was farther away and thus more sheltered from the blast—she was only thrown back fifteen feet by the concussion wave, where she hit the ground hard, banging her head, knocked out cold.

Tumbling to the ground on top of Wizard, Lily felt a wave of searing heat hit the back of her body—like a slap to her bare skin—then she smelled something burning, but the sensation didn’t last long, because an instant later, she blacked out.

In fact, the only person to survive the attack completely unscathed had been Wizard—thanks to Lily’s last-second tackle—which put him below the blast zone.

His ears ringing, he raised his head, to see Lily lying on top of him, her shirt on fire!