The Three Secret Cities Read online

  About The Three Secret Cities

  HELL HATH NO FURY LIKE FOUR KINGDOMS SCORNED. THE HUNT FOR JACK WEST JR HAS BEGUN.

  A SHADOW WORLD BEHIND THE REAL WORLD

  When Jack West Jr won the Great Games, he threw the four legendary kingdoms into turmoil.

  A WORLD WITH ITS OWN HISTORY, RULES AND PRISONS

  Now these dark forces are coming after Jack . . . in ruthless fashion.

  THAT IS REACHING INTO OUR WORLD . . . EXPLOSIVELY

  With the end of all things rapidly approaching, Jack must find the Three Secret Cities, three incredible lost cities of legend.

  It’s an impossible task by any reckoning, but Jack must do it while he is being hunted . . .

  Contents

  Cover

  About The Three Secret Cities

  Dedication

  Endpapers & Epigraph

  The Aftermath of the Games

  First Pursuit: The Decapitation of Hades

  Second Pursuit: The New York Takedown

  A Royal History of the World: The Three Secret Cities

  Third Pursuit: The Water City and the Hall of Records

  A Girl Named Lily: Part VI

  Fourth Pursuit: The London Showdown

  The Secret Royal World: The Prison of Erebus

  The Secret Royal World II: The Castle of the Knights

  Fifth Pursuit: Francis Drake’s Coffin and the Tomb of Poseidon

  Sixth Pursuit: The Three Secret Cities

  An Interview with Matthew Reilly

  About Matthew Reilly

  Also by Matthew Reilly

  Copyright page

  For Kate

  Geopolitics, like nature, abhors a vacuum . . . Whenever a power vacuum emerges, someone will fill it.

  The Financial Times

  THE MYSTERY OF THE WEAPONS

  The first kills

  The second blinds

  The third rules

  INSCRIPTION ON a tablet believed to be in excess of 5,000 years old,

  Private collection, New York City

  THE TRIAL OF THE CITIES

  No oceans.

  No clouds.

  No rivers.

  No rain.

  The world a wasteland

  of misery and pain.

  From The Zeus Papyrus,

  Private collection, London

  PROLOGUE I

  The Great Bend

  The Underworld, India

  For three whole days after the Great Games, the Underworld lay silent.

  The captive participant, Captain Jack West Jr—competing on behalf of Orlando, the King of Land—had prevailed.

  Having overcome the same deadly challenges that the three previous champions of the Games—no lesser figures than Osiris, Gilgamesh and Hercules—had faced, to the surprise of many in the royal gallery, he had won.

  But during the final ceremony to crown the winning king and impart to him the Mysteries that would see the Earth safely through the coming crisis, pandemonium had broken out.

  Helicopters had assailed the mountaintop temple on which the ancient ceremony had been taking place. Lord Hades’s own sons had tried to assassinate their father. And Hades’s minotaur army—all four thousand of them, a lost population of Neanderthals who wore bull-shaped helmets—having discovered the plan of their master’s sons to kill him, had risen up in revolt and stormed the mountain-palace. When the bodyguards of two of the fleeing kings had foolishly opened fire on the minotaurs, death and destruction had ensued.

  Two of the four kings were torn limb from limb. All but a few of the royal elite who had gathered to watch the Games were also killed.

  Only two kings had survived.

  Hades, the King of the Underworld, who had fled with West and his loyal band of friends.

  And Orlando, who had scurried away from the scene with his advisor, the Catholic cardinal and member of the Church’s shadowy Omega Group, Cardinal Ricardo Mendoza, leaving the rest of his entourage and his fellow royals to die.

  Never in all of history had the four legendary kingdoms been thrown into such disarray. For thousands of years, they had ruled the world from the shadows, installing governments as they saw fit and toppling them when they deemed it necessary, instigating wars and destroying empires.

  Word travelled fast.

  Elsewhere in the world, individuals with connections to the four kingdoms quickly learned what had happened.

  Royalty demands certain things, the foremost of which is continuity. Heirs had to be found and crowned, but in the immediate aftermath of the Games, it was uncertain just which heirs had survived and which had not.

  Another demand of royalty is penalty, retribution, blame.

  Someone had to be held responsible for the outrageous end to the Games. And punished for it.

  Most worrying of all, the Mysteries—the very reason for holding the Great Games in the first place—were not revealed, and the fate of the world depended on them.

  All of these matters, however, would be dealt with by others, the King of the Minotaurs thought as he surveyed the now-empty Underworld, battered and broken after the chaos.

  The Grand Staircase was horribly blasted-open in its middle. That had been West’s doing.

  The elevator giving access to the holy temple at the summit of the mountain-palace had been rent from its mountings.

  Bodies lay everywhere. Many had fallen from the temple all the way down the mountain. It wasn’t pretty.

  As Lord Hades had fled from the Underworld, he had bequeathed his kingdom to the Minotaur King, Minotus, and his Neanderthals, so that they could live out their days in peace and obscurity here in the remote northwestern desert of India.

  Minotus had given his army of minotaurs a few days to rest after the whole affair and now it was time to commence the clean-up.

  Bodies were gathered up and burned.

  The smashed stone blocks of the Grand Staircase were taken away in preparation for rebuilding.

  And thirty minotaurs were sent to the Great Bend, the farthest corner of the Underworld and the scene of the Fifth Challenge, a wild car race that had taken place on an edgeless roadway around the rim of a dark fathomless abyss out on the Bend.

  These thirty minotaurs were tasked with hauling away the crashed vehicles and dead bodies that littered the precarious road.

  A key part of their task was cleaning up the area around the two mysterious structures that stood at the farthest end of this farthest corner of the Underworld: an enormous pyramid positioned in a box-shaped shelf and a many-levelled building that hung off the edge of the great abyss.

  Cut into the flanks of this building in regular rows were hundreds of rectangular recesses, each containing a glistening silver coffin.

  Every single one of these hundreds of coffins was etched with a carving of a man with the head of a long-beaked bird.

  No-one had been in here when, shortly after the Games, one of those coffins had slowly begun to open.

  Now, as the minotaur cleaning crew arrived, they saw the open coffin.

  It caused quite a stir.

  The hanging tower, ancient and still for so many years, had loomed in mysterious silence for as long as any of them could remember.

  The leader of the cleaning crew radioed the Minotaur King and informed him of the development. Minotus said he would come with a team of lieutenants at once.

  The cleaning crew, unable to restrain their curiosity, edged toward the open silver coffin and peered inside it.

 
A six-foot-tall man-shaped figure lay in it.

  The figure lay in perfect repose, on its back, as if sleeping.

  It looked like a statue made entirely of bronze, with mostly human features: head, shoulders, arms, legs.

  Except for one key feature.

  The figure had no face.

  It had no eyes or mouth and instead of a nose it just had a sinister-looking downturned beak.

  Its hands were folded across its chest. They were crafted from the same dull bronze alloy that the rest of the statue appeared to be made of. It was a peculiar bronze: lustrous yet dull. The minotaurs’ flashlight-beams reflected off it in a muted, hazy way. There were no seams on the statue’s body. It was as if it had been moulded out of a single perfect pouring of the bronze alloy.

  The members of the minotaur cleaning crew gazed at each other in wonder as they contemplated the hundreds of other coffins embedded in the flanks of the hanging tower.

  None of those coffins was open. Just this one.

  And then suddenly the bronze statue sat up, and with its eerie faceless head, stared right at them.

  A toneless voice came from deep within it:

  ‘Kushma alla?’

  Minotus and a cadre of his best lieutenants arrived on the scene twenty minutes later . . .

  . . . to find the entire cleaning crew, all thirty of them, dead, cut to pieces and lying in grisly pools of blood.

  The open coffin was empty.

  Then the bronze figure emerged from behind Minotus and his entourage.

  ‘Kushma alla?’ the faceless thing said.

  Minotus frowned. The language was unfamiliar to him.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ he replied.

  And then the bronzeman raised its metallic claws and attacked them without fear, hesitation or mercy.

  PROLOGUE II

  Aragon Castle

  Ischia Island, Amalfi Coast, Italy

  Four days after the Great Games

  In a soaring cavern inside a towering island-castle off the west coast of Italy, there was an octagonal chamber.

  Within that octagonal chamber was an octagonal table made of worn timber that had once been the Porta Scelerata, the cursed gate, one of the gates of ancient Rome.

  Occasionally over the centuries the table had been described as round, but this was not technically true. It was eight-sided, with a place for each of the eight men who for the last 1,600 years had resided here and claimed ownership of the table, the castle and the entire island of Ischia.

  To those who knew of their existence, they were known as the Knights of the Golden Eight.

  Their octagonal chamber was decorated with trophies from previous missions, items they had taken from their victims: swords, shields, crowns.

  Today, a lone man stood before the Eight, on a precarious ledge situated across a chasm from their table. The platform was known as the Petitioner’s Ledge and it had been designed so that the petitioner was forced to look up at the Knights.

  The man standing on the ledge wore a translucent plastic medical mask over the lower right quarter of his face.

  His eyes blazed with fury. He was in excruciating pain but he did not give voice to it. His doctor had prescribed potent painkillers, but the man wouldn’t take them.

  Right now, his pain fuelled him, drove him, reminded him of the vengeance he sought.

  Vengeance that the Golden Eight would provide.

  After the man in the half-mask had presented his case and provided the required gargantuan down payment, the leader of the Golden Eight stood and in a solemn voice addressed his seven brothers-in-arms.

  ‘The price has been paid, so the mark has been made. In accordance with our long and sacred custom, the Knights of the Golden Eight accept this assignment.’

  The leader picked up the three photos that the man in the mask had provided in his brief.

  ‘The task is straightforward,’ he said. ‘One assassination, two kidnappings: this man is to be liquidated while the younger man and the woman are to be captured alive and brought before our noble employer here, for him to deal with as he sees fit.’

  The leader of the Golden Eight nodded deferentially to the man in the mask. ‘Our price is high, but then, in over two thousand years, we have never failed on a mission.’

  He held up the three photos. They were shots of:

  Jack West Jr.

  His daughter, Lily.

  And her friend, Alby Calvin.

  Sky above the U.S. Atlantic Coast

  24 November, 0530 hours U.S.

  Eastern time

  Jack West’s plane shot across the sky faster than the speed of sound, rushing toward New York City.

  Known as the Sky Warrior, the plane was a Tupolev Tu-144, a Russian-made clone of the Concorde. It was sleek in the extreme, clad in black radar-absorbent material, and like the famous Concorde before it, it was fast: really, really fast.

  Jack had acquired the Sky Warrior from an old enemy after his previous plane, his beloved 747, the Halicarnassus, had been destroyed during a desperate mission at Easter Island.

  Right now, flown by Jack’s loyal pilot, Sky Monster, the dart-shaped plane was slicing through the air at Mach 1.5 at an altitude of 50,000 feet, far above commercial airliner routes.

  As a man who often ventured to some of the more remote corners of the globe, the bustling metropolis of New York City was not one of Jack’s regular destinations, but right now he was in a hurry to get there.

  His haste was not just for his own reasons. It was also for the gentleman travelling with him: Mr Anthony Michael Dominic DeSaxe, known to the regular world as one of the richest men on Earth, a billionaire shipping and mining magnate, and the fourth member of his extremely old and aristocratic family to be appointed Marshal of France.

  But that was the regular world.

  In more shadowy circles, he was known as one of the four eternal kings who ruled the planet: Lord Hades, King of the Underworld.

  Or at least he used to be.

  Things had moved quickly for Jack and Hades after they had returned to Jack’s home in the hours following the disastrous ending to the Great Games.

  That Jack had won the Games was nothing short of historic, an achievement that would place him in an elite pantheon of heroes that included the mythic Greek warrior, Hercules.

  Indeed, as Jack had discovered halfway through them, the Games and their many diabolical challenges and prizes were the source of the myth of the Twelve Labours of Hercules. It was that very discovery that had proved crucial to his ultimate victory.

  Arriving back at his home in the vast Australian outback, all Jack had wanted to do was rest. He’d never chosen to go to the Games; he’d been drugged and kidnapped, then forced to fight non-stop for his life for two days and nights, all the while wearing a Homer Simpson t-shirt and jeans.

  Honestly, now he just wanted to tend to his many wounds and sleep in his own bed for about a year.

  But that was not to be.

  First, his wife, Zoe—with her short blonde hair and bright blue eyes—had been waiting for him, freshly returned from her own investigative trip to the Mariana Trench, the deepest ocean trench on the planet.

  Seeing the Sky Warrior making its final approach to the farm’s landing strip, Zoe had hurried out onto the tarmac to meet it.

  She couldn’t wait to tell Jack of her experiences and she smiled broadly when she saw him, Lily and Alby emerge from the plane, followed by Pooh Bear and Stretch.

  ‘Wait’ll you hear what I saw—’ she began.

  Then she saw his shaved head.

  And the many cuts and bruises on his face.

  And the way he limped slightly and nursed his right arm. His left arm—made of titanium from the elbow down—was covered in dirt and scratches.

  What had happened
?

  Then she noticed Lily: she wore a floral day dress that Zoe had never seen and she carried in her hands a pair of high heels. That was odd. Lily wasn’t a high heels kind of girl.

  Pooh Bear and Stretch looked okay, but Alby wore a bandage on his face covering a large cut of some kind.

  Then Zoe saw Jack’s mother, Mae, step out of the sleek black Tupolev.

  Now Zoe felt completely on edge. If Jack’s wounds weren’t enough to whip up her anxiety, seeing Mae seized her full attention.

  Dr Mabel ‘Mae’ Merriweather—all five foot two of her, with her short bob of hair and pixie face—was a formidable individual at the best of times. She didn’t suffer fools and she guarded her seclusion fiercely. She lived in the distant coastal town of Broome and didn’t emerge from her splendid isolation for anything but the most serious of reasons. (Birthdays and deaths were not serious enough, although thankfully Jack’s wedding to Zoe had been.) Why Mae would be here with Jack now was a clear and present cause for concern.

  And then the others had emerged from the plane.

  First, Iolanthe.

  Zoe did not like the British princess at all.

  Aristocratic, poised, refined—and totally self-interested—Iolanthe was everything Zoe was not. The sister of Orlando Compton-Jones, the King of Land, officially her title was the Keeper of the Royal Records for that kingdom. On several occasions, their paths had crossed: Iolanthe had once tried to kill Zoe and Jack at Abu Simbel in Egypt; she had repeatedly tried to seduce Jack; but then, surprisingly, at an ancient underground site at Diego Garcia, she had saved Jack’s life when she didn’t have to. Zoe didn’t know whether to trust Iolanthe or shoot her on sight.

  And then came the two people Zoe didn’t know: Hades—he was about sixty, tall and powerfully built—and a smaller, stocky fellow with unruly black hair, a fat nose, a thick monobrow and deep-set brown eyes. Jack later introduced him as E-147.

  ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph!’ Zoe exclaimed. ‘I go away for a week and look at you. What happened? You look like you’ve been to Hell and back.’

  ‘That’s a very interesting choice of words, honey. Let’s go inside and sit down. I’ve got a lot to tell you.’