The Two Lost Mountains Read online

  ‘O-kay . . .’

  Hades said, ‘The man you call Ezekiel was born Nicolai Niculescu. That was his name before he took on his holy name, Ezekiel. For the Omega monks, that holy name always starts with an e.

  ‘Like many of his Omega brothers, Ezekiel is Romanian by birth. Some while ago, the Order became a haven for ultra-conservative Romanian priests and monks, men who found the regular Church too permissive. To this day, the Order of the Omega maintains links to hardline Catholic soldiers within the Romanian armed forces.’

  Zoe went to check the living quarters while Jack explored the innermost sanctum of the monks’ realm: the main underground vault of the museum.

  Police tape was stretched across its door, but he just tore it away and stepped inside.

  The Omega monks had indeed taken pretty much everything they could carry.

  That hadn’t included the striking life-sized stone statue that stood in the centre of the vault.

  It still stood here, the pained image of a man with his hands bound behind his back, his face pointed skyward, mouth open in an agonised scream.

  Jack said to Hades, ‘Ezekiel told me this statue is actually a man encased in liquid stone: an intruder who had been discovered inside the museum. Can that be true?’

  ‘Entombment alive in greystone has long been a punishment in religious circles,’ Hades said. ‘That pained scream looks real enough to me.’

  ‘I do not like these guys,’ Jack said.

  He crossed to several steel cabinets he had seen last time; they contained wide pull-out drawers that had been filled with parchments and sketches.

  This was where he and Lily had found the tracing of the entire triangular stone tablet that had been the key to fulfilling the Trial of the Cities.

  Jack recalled seeing among the other parchments here a star map on a papyrus sheet labelled in Latin, magnum viam portae qvinqve: The Five Gates to the Great Labyrinth.

  Now, however, most of the shallow drawers were empty, cleared of their contents. But some still contained random documents and scraps of paper.

  On one such scrap, Jack saw some scribbled words: inca incercand sa determine locatia celui de-al doilea.

  ‘What language is that?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s Romanian,’ Hades said. ‘It translates as: “Still trying to determine the location of the second mountain.”’

  ‘They’re already in this race,’ Jack said. ‘That’s what I was worried about.’

  He found another note near the first one that read: inca incercand sa gaseasca statuia sarelui.

  ‘What’s this one say?’

  ‘“Still trying to find the statue of the serpent,”’ Hades said.

  ‘Any idea what the statue of the serpent is?’

  ‘No . . .’ Hades said thoughtfully.

  On another loose sheet of paper, Jack found a list of numbers: coordinates of some kind expressed in degrees of latitude and longitude:

  # Original Davies et al, 1987

  Latitude

  Deg N

  Longitude

  Deg E

  Latitude

  Deg N

  Longitude

  Deg E

  11

  LRRR

  0.6875

  23.4333

  0.67337

  0.67409

  23.47293

  23.47298

  12

  ALSEP

  -3.1975

  23.3856

  -3.01084

  -3.01381

  -23.42456

  -23.41930

  14

  LRRR

  ALSEP

  -3.6733

  -17.4653

  -3.64422

  -3.64450

  -3.64544

  -17.47880

  -17.47753

  -17.47139

  15

  LRRR

  ALSEP

  26.1008

  3.6527

  26.13333

  26.13407

  26.13224

  3.62837

  3.62981

  3.63400

  16

  ALSEP

  -8.9913

  15.5144

  -8.97577

  -8.97341

  15.49649

  15.49859

  17

  ALSEP

  20.1653

  30.7658

  20.18935

  20.18809

  30.76796

  30.77475

  He took it. He’d crosscheck the coordinates on a map later.

  ‘Hey, Jack,’ Zoe said, returning from the living quarters. ‘Apart from a few Bibles left on bedside tables, this is all I found. Spotted it in a closet, in the pocket of an old jacket.’

  She held in her hand a curious little hourglass hanging from a slim chain. Inside the hourglass was a fine-grained black-grey powder that Jack knew well.

  Greystone.

  Gorgon Stone.

  The deadly powder that turned water to stone.

  Jack took the little hourglass from Zoe and gazed at it. ‘The Omega monks wear these around their necks.’

  He looked about himself and shook his head. ‘Come on. Let’s get out of here. These assholes are long gone.’

  After dropping Zoe and Hades back at Hades’s estate, Jack had then dashed to his second destination, his secret farm back in Australia.

  He took Alby and Aloysius Knight with him and they flew in Knight’s plane.

  Jack wanted to retrieve some ancient texts and files he kept in a bio-secure vault there. In particular, he was after a collection of documents related to his very first mission with Lily, the one involving the Great Pyramid at Giza and the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

  He recalled that a couple of those documents—in the course of describing some of the booby-trapped places Jack had encountered during that mission—had mentioned ancient Egyptian labyrinths. Since the vault was biometrically sealed, only Jack could open it, so he had to go himself.

  In addition to this, he had hoped to find an old Warbler of Wizard’s that he had kept for many years. With its ability to deviate a bullet’s flight, he figured the Warbler might come in handy in the coming days but he couldn’t find it anywhere at the farm.

  He also wanted to pick up one other thing . . . for Alby.

  One of his old artificial hands.

  During the mission to find the three cities, Alby had been captured by Dion DeSaxe and the Knights of the Golden Eight. Using a supersharp ancient filament weapon, Dion had cruelly severed Alby’s left hand. Over the years, Jack had upgraded his own prosthetic titanium left forearm a few times, so he figured he could retrofit one of the old ones for Alby.

  Having collected everything they needed at the farm, Jack, Alby and Aloysius had started their return flight to France and were in the air over the Persian Gulf when word came in.

  Lily had been found . . .

  . . . spotted by a security camera . . .

  . . . in Red Square, Moscow.

  Airspace
over Moscow

  23 December, 0910 hours

  Stretch shot down through the sky at astronomical speed, buffeted by the freezing wind, his head pointed downward, his body shaped like a spear, his face covered in a high-altitude facemask.

  The mask was actually Jack’s. So was the high-altitude dropsuit Stretch wore and the carbon-fibre wings on his back known as gull-wings.

  Stretch didn’t care whose gear he wore. He wanted to rescue Lily.

  Three miles below him was Moscow.

  The city looked like a freezing mix of mottled white and grey, the combination of snow, slush, and grim Russian architecture.

  With one shining exception.

  In the heart of this monochromatic metropolis lay a precinct that was painted in the most vivid and striking colours.

  The Kremlin district.

  The famous fortress is painted in a deep shade of red: rich blood-red. It is this colour that inspired the name of the square beside it. Some think Red Square was a Soviet name, but this isn’t true. The name preceded the Soviets.

  And in that square, next to the Kremlin, also exploding with colour, is St Basil’s, with its colourful onion domes and red and green walls.

  The city’s three concentric ring roads gave Moscow a roughly circular shape, with Red Square nestled in the innermost ring.

  Cutting across the three concentric rings was the thick white line that was the frozen Moskva River.

  While Stretch zoomed downward, soaring high in the sky above him in a holding pattern were Pooh Bear and Sky Monster in the Sky Warrior, ready to dive in fast and low with a retrieval hook-and-cable when Stretch found Lily.

  As Stretch fell further, the details of Moscow became clearer: in the innermost circle, he could make out the blood-red Kremlin and the domes of St Basil’s Cathedral.

  As he came in low, Stretch hit a switch and his gull-wings sprang out from their swept-back position into gliding mode and suddenly he banked in a controlled swoop, shooting in fast over the Moskva River, following its twisting curves, heading toward St Basil’s.

  Then he saw the bodies.

  And the side-turned cars and buses.

  And the crashed garbage trucks.

  The people lay on riverside walks, face-down, arms wide, as if they had crawled in their final moments. One man’s dog was still tethered by its leash to his wrist. It barked forlornly.

  ‘Pooh, Sky Monster, are you seeing this?’ Stretch said into his throat mike. A camera on his facemask was recording everything.

  ‘Good Lord,’ Pooh Bear’s gruff voice said in his ear. ‘We’re seeing it.’

  ‘Are they dead?’ Sky Monster’s voice said.

  ‘Don’t know,’ Stretch said. ‘But the whole city looks like a ghost town.’

  ‘Be careful, old friend,’ Pooh Bear said.

  Stretch flew over the white-frozen river until he came to the Kremlin and Red Square.

  Still no movement.

  And then he saw St Basil’s Cathedral . . .

  . . . and three tiny figures seated on its front steps.

  Stretch’s heart leapt.

  The middle one was Lily.

  Lily watched from her bound and gagged position on the west portico of St Basil’s as the winged figure swooped in to a perfect landing on the cobblestones of Red Square twenty metres in front of her.

  At first she thought it was Jack: the outfit, the gull-wings and the opaque black visor of the high-altitude facemask.

  She strained against her bonds, her eyes bulging, yelling uselessly through the gag in her mouth.

  Then the man flipped up his visor and she saw that it was not Jack but Stretch.

  ‘Lily! Oh, thank God,’ he said, clambering up the steps. He spoke into his mike as he ran: ‘Guys, confirmed. It’s her, and she’s alive.’

  Stretch raced to Lily’s side and yanked the gag off her mouth.

  ‘It’s okay, Lily. I’m here now. I’m here to get you out.’

  Her body quivering from the cold, Lily sobbed, ‘Oh, Stretch! No! You shouldn’t have come . . .’

  ‘A lot of people care about you, kid,’ Stretch said kindly. ‘Everyone you know has been trying to find you. I got Pooh circling above us with Sky Monster, and Jack is en route—’

  Lily shook her head. ‘No, Stretch, I didn’t mean it that way. I meant you shouldn’t have come because this is a trap!’

  At the exact moment that Lily said those words to Stretch, they were being watched.

  By four individuals.

  Two of these watchers stood about half a kilometre away, over by the river, atop the high corner watchtower of the Kremlin.

  They were both Knights of the Golden Eight and they observed Lily and Stretch through high-powered digital binoculars.

  They were Jaeger Zwei—translation: Hunter Two; the second most senior member of the Knights—and Jaeger Acht, Hunter Eight, the most junior of the ruthless knights-for-hire.

  The other pair of people watching Stretch and Lily did so from a different vantage point, the opposite side of Red Square.

  They hid behind the snow-flecked trees of Zaryadye Park. They wore bulky white parkas, white reflective goggles and state-of-the-art headphones. White woollen scarves masked their faces and they made sure not to be seen.

  Standing on their watchtower, Jaeger Zwei and Jaeger Acht gazed down at Stretch. They had tracked him on their scanners all the way into Moscow.

  Jaeger Zwei keyed his radio-mike: ‘Sir, this is Zwei. West just arrived here. He came in on those gull-wings that he used against us at Aragon Castle.’

  ‘Put him to sleep,’ Jaeger Eins’s voice said through Zwei’s headphones. ‘I would very much like to remove some of Captain West’s body parts when he wakes.’

  ‘Copy that, sir,’ Jaeger Zwei said. ‘It will be our pleasure.’

  Then he picked up a remote-control unit beside him and hit a switch on it.

  It rose quickly from behind a building near St Basil’s Cathedral, shooting vertically into the sky.

  Catching the movement out of the corner of his eye, Stretch spun.

  Lily gazed up at it in horror. ‘Oh, shit.’

  It was the drone Chinook helicopter that she had seen used earlier. Still suspended from its underbelly was the ancient spherical bell.

  The Chinook rose in the way of robotic drones: up, up, up, fast, fast, fast.

  Stretch frowned. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘We’re in trouble,’ Lily said as he cut her hands free. ‘Big trouble.’

  She snatched the sheet of paper pinned to the chest of one of the headless nuns beside her, the sheet with the grim handwritten warning:

  YOU

  WILL

  WAKE

  AS

  SLAVES

  ‘Sphinx left this for whoever came to rescue me. I think he figured Jack would be the one who found me first.’

  ‘What does it mean? You will wake as slaves . . .’ Stretch said.

  In answer, Lily just craned her neck to look up at the drone chopper now hovering high above the coloured domes of St Basil’s.

  ‘We’re about to go to sleep. You got a pen?’

  Stretch was now really confused, but he did have a Sharpie in his suit’s breast pocket. He handed it to Lily.

  She started writing hurriedly on the sheet. ‘You say Pooh Bear and Sky Monster are circling above us in the Sky Warrior?’

  ‘Yes. Why?’

  ‘Shit, they’ll be within thirty miles. The soundwave will knock them out. Call Sky Monster right now and tell him to put the plane on autopilot and, if he has them, to put on full noise-cancelling headphones. Pooh as well.’

  Stretch knew better than to argue so while Lily kept writing, he did just that.

  Then, high above them, the drone helicopter rocked . . .
>
  . . . causing the spherical bell hanging from it to ring out.

  The eerie sound rippled across Moscow again, fanning out in an invisible wave.

  Stretch looked up at the noise: it was so beautiful, so true, so perfectly—

  ‘We don’t have long,’ Lily said, scribbling fast.

  A second later, she and Stretch collapsed together to the ground.

  They were still awake, for now.

  Stretch’s eyes boggled in confusion. ‘What the—?’

  Lily had never felt anything like it.

  It was as if her legs had been kicked out from under her.

  ‘I just have to . . .’ she gasped as she crawled on her belly, her legs useless, dragging herself on her elbows to the pen and paper she had dropped as she’d collapsed.

  She wrote on it some more, but her pen strokes were getting slower as her mind and body faded.

  ‘. . . have to . . .’

  Sleep overtook her.

  And as Lily slumped to the ground on the front steps of the famed Russian cathedral, she realised that Sphinx had been well informed about the effect of the spheres.

  An almost electric charge of something that could only be described as pure bliss—joy, ecstasy—ran through her, tapping the pleasure centres of her brain in an almost chemical way, and suddenly falling asleep seemed like the most wonderful and desirable thing in the world.

  Lily and Stretch’s heads dropped to the ground as they fell into matching comas.

  From their position atop the corner watchtower of the Kremlin, Jaegers Zwei and Acht saw them go down.

  Jaeger Zwei smiled thinly.

  ‘Jaeger Acht,’ he said, ‘if you would be so kind, please go down there and secure the bodies of the girl and Captain West. It will be our honour to present them to our lord emperor, Sphinx, later.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Jaeger Acht hurried for the stairs behind them.

  A short while later, Jaeger Acht stepped out of Spasskaya Gate and crossed the deserted expanse of Red Square, gripping his gun as he approached St Basil’s.

  He came to the southern end of the west portico and beheld the slumped bodies of Lily and—

  It wasn’t West.

  It was one of his companions.

  The Israeli, wearing West’s gull-wings and drop gear.