The Three Secret Cities

by Matthew Reilly

  ‘There’s no time! Stay alive and fight another day.’

  Jack leapt down into the secret compartment. Hades climbed down into it last of all, closing the hatch above them and using a hidden cable to pull the carpet back into place above it.

  A black-and-white monitor in the panic room showed footage from various closed-circuit cameras in Hades’s penthouse:

  In the atrium, the dead bodies of Hades’s staff lay strewn near the elevators in pools of blood.

  On another monitor, five men wearing dark outfits and carrying machine guns ran into Hades’s private office and straight into the open vault . . .

  . . . where the first two men immediately opened fire, spraying the entire vault with gunfire.

  The wave of bullets strafed every surface of the vault, pinging off the bulletproof-glass casings protecting the artefacts.

  Jack’s eyes went wide. Hades had been right to drag them into the panic room.

  Everyone in the underfloor compartment held their breath.

  Then the gunfire stopped and the leader of the group of intruders strode into the vault.

  ‘There’s nobody in here,’ he said.

  Jack didn’t need to look at the monitor to know who it was.

  He knew that voice. It was the voice of a man who hated Jack more than any other person in the world.

  It was Orlando Compton-Jones, the King of Land.

  Jack froze as he stared at the black-and-white monitor showing the vault room right above his head.

  On it was the cruel king for whom he had competed in the Great Games.

  Four men stood with Orlando. Two were obviously bodyguards: military men gripping Steyr machine guns.

  Of the other two, Jack knew one: Cardinal Ricardo Mendoza. Compact, narrow-eyed and with a thin pencil moustache, Mendoza was a member of the Catholic Church’s Omega Group. He was also Orlando’s chief advisor. Jack had encountered him in the Underworld.

  The last man in Orlando’s entourage was everything Mendoza was not. He appeared to be of Indian or Pakistani extraction and was enormously fat, with a bushy grey moustache and many chins. His chubby neck was adorned with many garish gold chains.

  ‘That’s Sunny Malik,’ Mae whispered to Jack. ‘The black market antiquities expert from Karachi.’

  Jack nodded silently. Mae had told him about her deadly run-in with Malik in Karachi with Stretch and Pooh Bear.

  Jack gazed at Orlando on the monitor.

  He hadn’t seen the King of Land since the bedlam he, Jack, had created during the Supreme Ceremony atop Hades’s palace at the Underworld five days previously. He’d heard that Orlando and Mendoza had got away from India but he didn’t know where they had gone.

  On the monitor, Orlando turned to his two advisors. ‘Well?’

  ‘The Helmet of Hades.’ Mendoza pointed at the glorious bronze headpiece. ‘Now you have the Sword and the Helmet. When you get the Trident, you will have all three of the weapons.’

  Orlando casually upturned the glass dome covering the Helmet and took it. ‘So where’s the Trident?’

  Mendoza turned to Sunny Malik.

  Sunny said, ‘According to several ancient Cretan texts, as the prized weapon of the Sea King, the Trident-Mace was buried with him. It resides in Poseidon’s tomb.’

  ‘And where is that?’

  ‘The exact location is unknown, but by all accounts, it is somewhere near the City of Atlas.’

  Orlando turned to Mendoza, who nodded.

  ‘I concur,’ the cardinal said. ‘This matches our records in the Vatican libraries. It makes sense, too, since Atlas was the historic capital of the Sea Kingdom.’

  ‘Atlas,’ Orlando said sourly. ‘That means consulting Sphinx. Fuck.’

  Mendoza said, ‘I have always found Lord Lancaster to be very pleasant company. He is well read and most refined: a man who honours the old ways. It is to your advantage that he is the watcher of Atlas. I imagine, as your blood relative, he would be thrilled to assist you in your noble quest.’

  ‘Sphinx may be my cousin,’ Orlando spat. ‘But he is also a snake who knows every secret of every royal family in the world. How else do you think he got his nickname? He is also keenly aware when he has leverage. Mr Malik: while we speak to Sphinx, begin your own inquiries into the location of Poseidon’s tomb and the Trident.’

  ‘As you command,’ Sunny Malik said.

  While Orlando and Malik spoke, Mendoza stepped up to the triangular sandstone tablet and aimed a peculiar-looking device at it.

  The device quickly scanned the tablet with a pair of green lasers.

  Orlando said, ‘My father told me about this tablet. He said Hades’s father claimed it was part of the Altar of the Cosmos.’

  Mendoza’s device beeped . . .

  . . . and the cardinal’s face lit up as he read from its screen.

  ‘The Mystery of the Weapons: The first kills. The second blinds. The third rules.

  ‘And The Mystery of the Cities: First is Thule, plunging to fathomless depths. Second comes Ra, the great golden city.’

  Mendoza looked like he’d seen God. He was ecstatic.

  ‘This is incredible,’ he said. ‘These are two of the Mysteries: the nature of the Weapons and the order of the Cities. This is vital: without it we would not know where to start. We begin at Thule. We must also take this tablet to my lab at the Vatican to analyse it fully.’

  In the darkened panic room below them, Hades turned to Jack and whispered, ‘Like I said: translation programs.’

  As the two thugs took the heavy stone tablet off its podium, Mendoza gazed at it in wonder. ‘Lord in Heaven, it’s magnificent.’

  Orlando snorted. ‘Whatever. Lord Hades has no claim to it any more. And no use for it, not where he’s going. We, however, shall head for Thule right away—’

  Suddenly, on the monitor, Orlando paused, listening intently to his earpiece.

  ‘Copy that,’ he said into his radio-mike. ‘Gentlemen, we have to move. Others are on their way here and we do not want to be here when they arrive.’

  Then as quickly as they had arrived, Orlando and his men were out of there, leaving the vault with the Helmet and the tablet in their possession, and rushing back to the elevators.

  As soon as the elevator’s door had closed, Hades pushed open the hatch.

  ‘They took the Helmet and the tablet,’ he said. ‘Damn. At least we got a look at the inscriptions.’

  ‘Who is that Sphinx guy they mentioned?’ Mae asked as they all climbed out of the secret compartment.

  ‘Have you heard about the Trismagi in your research?’ Hades asked, reaching down to help her.

  ‘Yes,’ Mae said. ‘They’re the keepers of the three secret cities.’

  Hades said, ‘Sphinx—or more precisely, Lord Hardin Lancaster XII—is one of the Trismagi. He is the keeper of the greatest of the three cities, the City of Atlas.’

  ‘Come on, folks, let’s hustle,’ Jack said urgently. ‘We gotta get out of here, too.’

  They hurried out of Hades’s office, down the hallway and around the sweeping staircase, arriving at the elevators.

  Hades stared sadly at the crumpled and bloody bodies of his staff. Geoffrey knelt down beside one of the corpses as—

  Ping!

  The arrival light on the right-hand elevator sprang to life.

  Jack spun, exposed.

  The elevator’s doors opened . . .

  . . . to reveal a huge, hulking man flanked by six heavily armed NYPD SWAT cops. But Jack could tell from their dead eyes that these were not real SWAT cops.

  The hulking man saw the group before him—Jack, Hades, Lily, Mae and Geoffrey—and he smiled meanly.

  ‘Why, hello there.’ He stepped out of the elevator. ‘Seems like I’ve caught you all in something of a hurry.’
>
  He was taller than Hades, a solid six-three, and fit as hell. The likeness was unmistakable. His face looked just like Hades’s—piercing maroon-tinged eyes, severe features and dark arched eyebrows—only younger.

  ‘Brother,’ he said, nodding with mock deference to Hades, ‘so nice to see you. And this’—he turned to Jack—‘I can only assume is the famous Captain West. I’m so very pleased to meet you. My name is Prince Yago DeSaxe, Governor of the Royal Prison, and I am here to arrest you both.’

  They all stood there in a tense face-off.

  ‘Yago,’ Hades said carefully. ‘Please. Let’s talk.’

  ‘There is nothing to say, brother. You committed treason against the four thrones and have thus been sentenced to life imprisonment at Erebus. You have been cast out.’

  Jack heard his tone instantly.

  Barely concealed contempt.

  Yago, a proud prince consigned to the lesser rank of policeman and jailer, didn’t care for Hades at all.

  Hades wasn’t giving up. ‘Yago, please, we must find the Mysteries in order to stop the Omega Ev—’

  ‘I must do nothing,’ Yago spat. ‘You have no power over me anymore, Anthony. Your role in worldly affairs is at an end. There is nothing left for you but pain and suffering at my hands and I will gladly carry out the sentence. As for Captain West here, he laid hands on a king—’

  Abruptly, the building’s emergency sirens rang out, shrill and piercing.

  Yago whirled.

  Jack did, too.

  Then a deep throbbing sound could be heard . . .

  . . . and a fearsome image rose into view outside the panoramic windows on the northern side of Hades’s penthouse.

  A gigantic hover-capable V-22 Osprey attack plane loomed outside the windows, its two upturned rotors blurring, its nose lowered menacingly, its cannons and missile pods levelled.

  A second identical plane raced around behind the first one, banking fast, rotors thumping, moving in a wide circle around the high-rise tower.

  Jack didn’t know what was happening. From the surprised look on his face, neither did Yago.

  A two-way stand-off had just become a three-way one.

  Then the sirens fell silent and a man’s voice came over the building’s emergency public address system:

  ‘We bid you greetings, Prince Yago and King Hades—well, former King Hades. Such a pity to hear of your fall from grace.’

  The accent was European: part French, part German.

  ‘This is Jaeger Eins, and we are the Knights of the Golden Eight. We have been lawfully engaged to kill Captain West and capture his daughter and, if he is also there, her friend, young Mr Calvin. The price has been paid and so the mark has been made. They are our property now. Yago, I assume you are here for Hades and West. We will allow you to take Hades, but not West. He and the two youngsters are ours.’

  Jack’s mind tried to keep up with everything he was hearing.

  Were there actually two groups pursuing him?

  Yago and these assholes—who it seemed were also after Lily and Alby.

  And now these new arrivals were telling Yago—the official royal jailer—to essentially get out of their way.

  The response from Yago surprised Jack.

  Yago grabbed Hades roughly by the arm and hurled him to his SWAT guards, who cuffed Hades and shoved him into the elevator.

  ‘Sir!’ Geoffrey lunged after them, only to receive a sharp rifle-butt to the face from one of Yago’s thugs.

  He fell to the floor, bleeding.

  Yago drew a pistol and calmly levelled it at Geoffrey’s head.

  ‘No!’ Hades protested. ‘Leave him be! He has done nothing but serve me well.’

  ‘If he stays here, he is as good as dead, brother,’ Yago said. ‘You know how the Knights operate.’

  ‘Please . . .’ Hades said.

  Yago holstered his pistol. ‘So be it,’ he said as he joined Hades and the SWAT team in the elevator.

  As the doors began to slide shut, Hades’s eyes found Lily’s and he mouthed, Run.

  For his part, Yago locked eyes with Jack.

  ‘I leave you to the mercy of the Knights,’ he said. ‘You have my sympathies.’

  The doors to the elevator closed over Yago’s face and suddenly Jack, Lily, Mae and Geoffrey were left standing there in the magnificent penthouse, staring at the two military aircraft hovering outside its windows sixty storeys above downtown New York.

  And then, spectacularly, the Knights launched their assault on Saxony Tower.

  The rotary cannons on the first hovering Osprey blazed to life and an unimaginable torrent of fifty-calibre tracer rounds assailed Hades’s penthouse.

  Windows shattered.

  Glass flew everywhere.

  Bullet holes the size of softballs punctured the walls.

  Priceless vases exploded.

  Statues blew apart.

  Books on shelves were eviscerated, their pages becoming confetti.

  Couches were shredded, showering the apartment in a snow of goose down and feathers.

  Jack reacted instantly. He crash-tackled Lily and Mae out of the line of fire and they went tumbling together down the curving marble staircase. Jack curled his body around Lily’s as they rolled, protecting her from the bumps of the descent.

  Geoffrey the butler wasn’t so lucky.

  He was hammered by the incoming gunfire.

  The entire front of his body was turned to a bloody pulp as the wave of anti-aircraft fire hit him. He convulsed horribly as the fusillade of heavy-bore ammunition shot right through his body and ripped into the wall behind him, before, at last, the gunfire stopped and he collapsed to the floor, deader than dead.

  At the base of the curving stairs, Jack scooped up Lily and Mae.

  ‘Keep moving!’ he urged.

  Through the now-shattered panoramic windows, he could see the first hovering attack plane but not the other one—

  —then, suddenly, black-clad commandos came swinging in through the shattered windows of the penthouse on ropes from the roof. The other V-22 must have landed up there.

  There were six commandos and they all wore black goggles, black ceramic half-masks, and striking black body armour. As they fanned out into the penthouse with clinical precision, they all looked down the barrels of MP-9 machine pistols, military-style.

  No wonder Yago got out of here, Jack thought.

  ‘This way.’ He hauled Lily and Mae through the hallways of the penthouse’s lower level.

  Outside, the hovering Osprey swooped swiftly and began firing at that level.

  More windows shattered.

  More walls blew apart.

  ‘Zoe!’ Jack yelled into his radio as they ran. ‘We need you!’

  ‘I saw,’ Zoe’s voice replied in his ear.

  ‘Southwest corner!’ Jack called.

  ‘On it.’

  They came to a bedroom in the southwestern quarter of the lower level: it was a corner room with windows on two sides and a breathtaking view of the Statue of Liberty and the distant Atlantic Ocean.

  The Osprey appeared outside it like an angry hawk-god, its cannons levelled.

  Jack drew his pistol and fired first, shattering the windows of the bedroom and hitting the cockpit of the Osprey, cracking its dome and striking one of its pilots in the chest.

  The plane banked wildly.

  Wind rushed into the corner bedroom.

  Jack spun: and saw fast-moving shadows entering the hallway behind him.

  They were close.

  Then the European-accented voice came over the building’s PA system again.

  ‘Captain West,’ it said. ‘It is useless to run. No matter where you go, we will find you. It is what we do. It is what we have done without peer for two millennia. Trust
me when I say it is better for you to surrender now. Our methods are as effective as they are notorious. You do not want to experience them. We need the girl and her friend alive; you, less so. That said, while we have been tasked with returning your daughter to our employer alive, we have not promised that she will be delivered in one piece.’

  Lily swapped a horrified look with Jack.

  ‘Who are these guys?’ she whispered.

  The first two pursuers appeared in the hallway behind them, machine guns raised. Jack fired twice at them, forcing them back behind the corner.

  The voice said, ‘Captain. There is nowhere for you to run. We promise, if you surrender now, we will kill you quickly.’

  ‘Zoe?’ Jack said urgently into his throat-mike.

  ‘Go! West-side window. Now!’ Zoe shouted.

  Jack grabbed both Lily and Mae by the hand.

  ‘Take a leap of faith with me?’ he asked.

  ‘Okay . . .’ Mae said hesitantly.

  ‘You bet,’ Lily replied instantly.

  And together they ran toward the wide-open western windows of the bedroom just as the Osprey that Jack had shot swooped back into position right outside it and as their pursuers launched their final assault on the room and charged in, guns up.

  Jack, his mother and his daughter leapt clear out of the smashed window, sixty storeys above the world, right in front of the hovering V-22, out into the morning sky . . .

  . . . Jack, Mae and Lily plummeted down the side of the tower—for exactly seven feet—before they landed with abrupt thumps in the steel basket of a crane: the crane they had seen mounted atop One Tribeca, the building under construction across the street from Saxony Tower.

  Whereas before the crane had been resting horizontally across the roof of One Tribeca, now it was raised at a steep upward angle toward the upper floors of Saxony Tower, its basket perfectly placed just below the southwestern corner of Hades’s penthouse.

  In the cab of the crane sat Zoe, sent there earlier in the event a hasty escape was required.

  Zoe swivelled the crane on its base, causing the basket hanging off its high arm to swing wildly around.