The Three Secret Cities Read online

  ‘Correct. And if we fail to complete the trial,’ Jack said, ‘the world becomes “a wasteland of misery and pain”.’

  The cabin fell silent.

  Jack looked at his watch. Today was 24 November. Crunch time was the twelve minutes beginning at 8:05 p.m. GMT on 1 December.

  ‘So we have seven days to find the Mysteries and fulfil the first trial, the Trial of the Cities,’ he said.

  No-one spoke as the scope of their task set in: three fabled weapons, three lost cities and a sacred altar that all had to be found in one week.

  ‘Fuck me . . .’ said Mae.

  ‘You can say that again,’ Hades said.

  ‘Fuck me . . .’ Mae said.

  ‘Okay,’ Jack said. ‘We know what we have to do. Everybody gear up and make sure you know your places when we get to Hades’s apartment. Make no mistake, when we hit New York, we’re going to hit the ground running.’

  As Jack’s jet shot up the eastern seaboard of the United States toward New York City, three other private planes were also heading there.

  The first was coming from the south, from somewhere in Central America.

  It was a privately-owned grey C-17 Globemaster III military transport plane, one that had been heavily modified.

  On its outside, carefully blended into its flanks, was some state-of-the-art weaponry including AIM-120 AMRAAM missiles, M61 Vulcan rotary cannons and an AN/AAQ-24 directional infrared countermeasure system designed to protect it from heat-seeking missiles; on the inside, in its massive hold (which could store, among other things, an Abrams tank or a CH-53E Super Stallion helicopter) was its main feature and reason for being: a row of six reinforced steel cells.

  The huge grey plane bore a special serial number on its tail that allowed it immediate and unquestioned landing privileges in any civilised country in the world. Indeed, it had just been granted priority landing status at Newark Airport, west of Manhattan, forcing every other aircraft on approach to hold back and wait.

  This was because it was the personal aircraft—and flying jail—of the Governor of the Royal Prison at Erebus, Mr Yago DeSaxe.

  The second aircraft speeding toward New York came from England. It also bore a special tail number—ostensibly registered to the British royal family but in reality owned by the Land Kingdom—which also guaranteed it unfettered entry into any nation.

  This plane was headed for JFK Airport, east of the city, and inside it was a very royal passenger.

  The third and final plane racing Jack’s to New York that day was the smallest but fastest of the three: a sleek Bombardier Global 8000, the most expensive private jet in the world.

  In it were eight stony-faced men.

  With them inside their luxurious jet was a small arsenal of machine guns, pistols, grenades—both incendiary and smoke—tactical helmets and Kevlar body armour.

  Their plane had a cage in it as well, just a single one.

  The Bombardier also possessed a special registration number that allowed it to bypass the usual entry requirements of the United States, no questions asked.

  This plane had been cleared for landing at McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey, to the south of New York City. It was coming from Aragon Castle in Italy and it carried inside it the Knights of the Golden Eight.

  NEW YORK & NEW JERSEY

  SAXONY TOWER & SURROUNDS

  New York City

  24 November, 0600 hours U.S. Eastern time

  In the pre-dawn light, the Sky Warrior touched down at Teterboro Airport, a small private airport on the Jersey side of the Hudson, fifteen miles from New York City.

  It taxied to a halt in front of Hades’s personal hangar.

  Two helicopters were waiting for it, their rotors already turning.

  The bigger one was a huge AgustaWestland AW101, the same VIP model of chopper that, painted green and christened Marine One, flew the President of the United States.

  The second chopper was smaller, a luxurious Eurocopter EC155, which in any other environment would have been a showstopper all by itself, but beside the AW101, it looked positively modest.

  Jack, Lily, Mae and Hades strode straight off the Sky Warrior and into the big AW101. The helicopter’s airstairs folded up behind them and it took off immediately.

  Zoe and Alby boarded the smaller Eurocopter, heading for their positions.

  No sooner were the two choppers in the air than Sky Monster taxied away in the Sky Warrior, soaring off into the sky to wait at Republic Airport, a little regional airstrip on Long Island.

  The mighty AgustaWestland AW101 helicopter thundered through the sky, making a beeline for the southern end of Manhattan.

  Speeding low and fast over the streets of Jersey City and then the broad expanse of the Hudson River, its journey—which in a car would’ve taken an hour—took exactly eleven minutes.

  As they soared alongside the skyline of New York City, Jack gazed out at its many skyscrapers, including, right ahead of him, the enormous Freedom Tower at the World Trade Center.

  As the chopper came to the Tribeca area, just north of Pier 26, Hades pointed at a glittering modern skyscraper featuring many balconies and reflective blue glass in its windows. It was at least sixty storeys tall.

  ‘That’s my building: Saxony Tower,’ he said. ‘My apartment occupies the top two floors.’

  ‘Saxony Tower?’ Jack asked. ‘Is that connected to your surname in some way?’

  Hades nodded. ‘Saxony, Saxon, DeSaxe, Saxe-Coburg, they all derive from the same familial line. You’re starting to understand the royal world.’

  The tower, Jack noted, stood almost right on the bank of the Hudson, separated from it by a slightly smaller building that was under construction. Forty storeys tall, this second building had bare concrete levels, a gantry elevator running up its side and a crane mounted precariously on its roof. Jack had encountered the structure in his research on the way here.

  Hades saw Jack looking at it.

  ‘That tower under construction is called One Tribeca. Very trendy. They pre-sold every apartment off the plan. When completed it’ll be filled with lots of nouveau-riche celebrities and rappers.’

  As Jack had noted in his research, One Tribeca stood on the very edge of the Hudson River. It achieved this by incorporating an innovative tunnel at its base that spanned the riverside expressway.

  Hades said, ‘Its original plans had it slightly taller than Saxony Tower—seventy storeys—but strangely, despite the very wealthy and successful developers backing the project, the city planners killed those designs and the building was approved at forty storeys.’

  ‘You intervened?’ Jack asked flatly.

  Hades shrugged. ‘At the original height, it would have impeded the view from my apartment. So I made a call and their plans were amended.’

  ‘Right . . .’ Jack said. That hadn’t been in his research. ‘You live in quite a world, Tony. You just say the word and things happen.’

  Hades bowed his head.

  ‘I used to,’ he said.

  The big chopper landed on the roof of Saxony Tower, where a lone man in blue jeans, hiking boots and a tan ‘Pine Valley’ sweater was waiting for it.

  He stood with perfect poise, despite the tornado of wind that the helicopter whipped up all around him.

  Hades dashed out of the helicopter and clasped the man’s hand with genuine affection.

  ‘Geoffrey!’ Hades yelled over the roar of the rotors. ‘Meet Captain Jack West Jr, his daughter, Lily, and his mother, Mae. Everyone, meet Geoffrey Moles, my butler, executive manager and bodyguard.’

  Jack assessed the man as they shook hands: he was in his early fifties, lean, bald and fit, with sharp, squinting eyes that assessed Jack from top to bottom in an instant. His grip was like iron.

  ‘Captain West. The fifth of the warriors,’ he said. ‘And v
ictor of the Great Games.’

  ‘That’s me,’ Jack said.

  Hades said, ‘Geoffrey is a graduate of the Wharton School of Business and the South Philly school of street fighting, two vital prerequisites for his job as my adjutant. He’s been my butler and friend for the last twenty-five years.’

  Geoffrey ushered them quickly inside.

  ‘Sir, if I may. The Slave King’s forces just landed at Newark and are on their way by car with a police escort. We have maybe twenty minutes at best.’

  They took a private elevator down to Hades’s penthouse.

  As they stepped out into it, Lily gasped. ‘Whoa.’

  To call Hades’s double-levelled pied-à-terre opulent would have been the understatement of the century.

  It featured floor-to-ceiling windows on every side, a sweeping marble staircase, two private elevators (one going up to the roof, the other down to the street), priceless paintings—including two Picassos and a Goya—sculptures, a Stradivarius violin and a Bösendorfer grand piano.

  It had panoramic views of the city to the north and Upper New York Bay to the south, including an uninterrupted view of the Statue of Liberty.

  A small six-person team of chefs, maids and a driver all stood to attention at the top of the curving staircase: Hades’s New York staff.

  Hades nodded to them all before pledging his apologies and hurrying down an inner hallway.

  ‘The Slave King has a police escort?’ Jack asked as he followed Hades.

  ‘Remember, Captain, you have to view the world differently now,’ Hades said as he walked. ‘All the major nations of the world—countries like America, Russia, the U.K., France—all exist to serve the four kingdoms in some way or another. If someone with royal authority wants to, they can co-opt any agency of a country to use as they wish: the police, the army, the navy, tracking satellites, even nuclear weapons. All it takes is a phone call.’

  ‘That’s incredible . . .’ Mae said.

  ‘No, just real power,’ Hades said. ‘In this period of royal instability, the Slave King acts with the authority of three of the four kings. If he finds us, it will be very hard to escape his clutches.’

  With Jack and the others racing to keep up with him, Hades turned abruptly into an office area, a vast corner suite the size of a suburban house.

  It was the kind of private office Jack expected of one of the four wealthiest men in the world.

  While the decorations in the larger apartment were more well known—Picasso, Goya, Stradivarius—in here they were more esoteric and ancient.

  Partial stone tablets bearing strange carvings stood on pedestals.

  Statues—some missing arms, some missing heads—stood on plinths.

  An old wooden tree trunk depicted the Hydra Galaxy.

  Hades marched right past them, hit a switch under his desk and a whole bookcase in the wall suddenly swung open on a hinge, revealing a massive silver vault door with a high-tech digital keypad and scanner on it.

  Hades pressed his thumb to the keypad and his eyes to the scanner. A laser played over them and the screen beeped:

  ‘A pulse scan?’ Jack said.

  Hades said, ‘So someone can’t cut my eyeballs out of their sockets and sever my thumb and get in. If there’s no pulse behind my eyes, this vault doesn’t open.’

  From deep within the thick steel door, unseen bolts unlocked and valves hissed, and then the vault door popped open an inch.

  Hades pulled it wide. ‘Come on in. This is where I keep the important stuff.’

  Inside the vault, the windowless inner sanctum of Hades’s sumptuous home, Jack beheld a shelf on which stood a handful of truly ancient wonders.

  A small round shield made of shiny black metal.

  A gold statue of a tall thin man with the head of a long-beaked bird.

  Taking pride of place in the vault, however, were two items mounted on their own pedestals:

  First, an ornate bronze helmet, encased in a clear glass dome.

  It was a variant of the well-known Corinthian-style helmet: it had the distinctive noseguard and elongated cheekplates common to that design, but the brows above the Y-shaped aperture for the wearer to peer out through had been accentuated so it seemed harsher, angrier, more fearsome. The helmet’s horsehair plume was long gone: its holder was just a curving metal spine.

  And second, a triangular stone tablet.

  Pale yellow in colour, it appeared to be made of weathered sandstone and it was absolutely striking. Covered in glyphs and symbols, it stood upright on its pedestal and was roughly the size of a TV, if TVs came in triangular shapes.

  Jack noted the three weapons prominently displayed on it: a helmet, a sword and a triple-bladed mace or trident.

  The Three Immortal Weapons.

  He quickly snapped off some photos of it with his phone’s camera.

  As he did, he noticed that a section at the tablet’s bottom-right corner had been broken off at some point in the past, disrupting its symmetry:

  Lily went straight to it.

  ‘That’s the Word of Thoth,’ she said, eyeing the many glyphs carved into its perimeter.

  ‘Indeed it is,’ Hades said. ‘That tablet is over five thousand years old. It is one of my family’s most prized secret possessions: my father, the previous Lord Hades, only told me about it as he lay on his deathbed and I was about to take his throne. He said it was a key piece of the Altar of the Cosmos.’

  He turned to Lily: ‘I tried to get your father—your birth father, the previous Oracle—to translate it, but he was an elusive and problematic man and he died before I was able to find him.’

  Elusive and problematic, Jack thought. That was a nice way of putting it. The former Oracle of Siwa had been a spoilt and obnoxious drunk.

  Hades said, ‘Over the centuries, many of the four kings have employed linguists, codebreakers, geniuses and, in recent times, computer programs, to try to translate the Word of Thoth. The Catholic Church—the Cult of Amon-Ra with its obsession with ancient Egypt—has been at it for over four thousand years. I myself had a supercomputer purpose-built for the task of decoding the text on this tablet and after a week of rendering, it came up with nothing.’

  Lily peered at the worn triangular stone . . .

  . . . for all of ten seconds.

  ‘I can read it,’ she said. ‘It looks like there were originally six messages on this tablet—two on each side—but because of the missing chunk at the bottom, there are now only five. Three of the messages refer to the weapons and two refer to the cities.

  ‘The first set is about the Weapons. It says:

  The first kills

  The second blinds

  The third rules.’

  She squinted. ‘The second set is about the Cities:

  First is Thule, plunging to fathomless depths.

  Second comes Ra, the great golden city.

  ‘I’m guessing there should be a line about the third city, but that part of the tablet has broken off.’

  Hades just stared at Lily, slack-jawed.

  ‘You just did in half a minute what I spent many years and millions of dollars unsuccessfully trying to do. Your ability is extraordinary.’

  Lily, in her jeans and Han Solo t-shirt, just shrugged. ‘Born with it.’

  Jack was on edge. He didn’t want to linger here, especially in a dead-end corner of the apartment.

  ‘The missing chunk,’ he said quickly to Hades. ‘Do you know where it is?’

  ‘No,’ Hades said. ‘No-one does. I was once told that an ancient tracing, or rubbing, of the entire tablet exists. It is supposedly held by a little-known order of Catholic monks in Venice known as the Fraternal Order of St Paul. They are a very peculiar brotherhood, ultra-conservative. They have something of a strained relationship with the Church in Rome, as they find i
t too liberal for their liking. It’s entirely possible they have not even told the Church they have the full tracing. For a long time they have been avid collectors of relics and artefacts. Their monastery is part of the Gallerie dell’Accademia, the famous museum in Venice.’

  ‘Who else knows about this tablet?’ Jack asked.

  ‘The other kings,’ Hades said. ‘Back in quieter times, it was common for us to have meetings at each other’s homes. We would put our prized antiquities on display.’

  Jack looked behind them, as if searching for a pursuer. ‘Yeah, well, times have changed—’

  Then suddenly, standing beside Hades, Geoffrey touched his radio-earpiece.

  ‘Say again?’ he said into his wrist-mike.

  ‘What is it?’ Hades asked, concerned.

  ‘Someone just boarded your private elevator down in the lobby and overrode the scanners. Five men. They’re coming up now—’

  A burst of machine-gun fire echoed out from the atrium of the apartment, harsh and loud, followed by screams.

  The screams of Hades’s staff being gunned down.

  Three more gunshots silenced them.

  ‘Shit . . .’ Jack whirled, looking for an escape.

  But the vault was a dead-end. There was no way out of there except the way they had come.

  They were trapped.

  Hades, however, was already moving, back toward the entry to the vault where he crouched on his knees and peeled back a strip of carpet to reveal a handle embedded in the floor beneath it.

  He turned the handle and a segment of the floor lifted on a hinge.

  A secret compartment under the floor opened up before them. It was a panic room of some sort; about the size of a small closet.

  ‘Everybody in! Now!’ Hades whispered.

  They all dived into the underfloor compartment.

  Jack threw a glance at the helmet under its glass dome at the other end of the vault—weighing up whether he could get to it and back to the panic room before their enemies arrived—but Hades grabbed him by the arm.