The Three Secret Cities

by Matthew Reilly

  The two V-22s saw it and sprang instantly into action.

  The nearer of the two Ospreys pivoted in mid-air, aiming its guns not at the basket but at Zoe in the crane’s cab.

  The Osprey opened fire, its fifty-calibre rotary guns making loud puncture-like whumps with every shot.

  Zoe ducked.

  The cab’s steel flanks erupted in sparking bullet-impacts. All its windows shattered.

  The wave of gunfire pummelled the crane, causing it to shudder and shake violently.

  Jack, Mae and Lily were still in the basket, swinging around in a wide lateral arc, high above the streets. Their basket just managed to swoop in low over the roof of the construction tower at the exact moment that the Osprey’s withering stream of tracer fire wrenched the crane’s cabin from its mount and the whole crane came loose and—bam!—slammed down on top of the building.

  Zoe dived out of the cabin, somersaulting onto the dusty concrete roof of One Tribeca as the crane’s long metal arm bounced against the rooftop and the entire spindly thing tipped over the edge and dropped out of sight.

  A short distance away from Zoe, Jack, Mae and Lily leapt clear of their basket and went sprawling onto the concrete . . .

  . . . just as the basket was suddenly sucked off the roof.

  Like some kind of giant long-armed insect, the crane sailed down the side of One Tribeca for a full forty storeys before it slammed in a tangled heap into the empty side street that lay between One Tribeca and Saxony Tower.

  Up on the roof, Jack was already on his feet, scooping up Lily and Mae and joining Zoe in bolting for the nearest stairwell—while the two Ospreys banked around in the sky above them.

  ‘Jesus, Jack,’ Zoe yelled above the din, ‘who are these guys?’

  ‘Another part of the shadow world that wants to kill us,’ Jack said grimly. ‘Knights of some kind. They said they want Lily alive and me dead, and they’ve been paid to do it.’

  The four of them raced down the dusty stairs.

  As they did, through the open-air concrete levels of the construction tower, they saw the Ospreys circling the building, stalking them.

  Jack keyed his throat-mike. ‘Alby! Come in!’

  ‘I’m here, Jack,’ Alby replied immediately in his earpiece.

  ‘Get into position! I was hoping we wouldn’t have to use you, but I think we’re gonna have to!’

  ‘I’ll be there,’ Alby said.

  Jack, Zoe, Mae and Lily were still quite high up on One Tribeca. They hurried over to the river-facing edge of the open-sided building.

  The glittering waters of the Hudson River stretched out beneath them, running up against the base of the building. On the opposite shore of the wide river, the skyline of Jersey City glimmered in the morning light.

  Jack eyed the waves thirty storeys below them.

  ‘Three hundred feet, give or take,’ he said. ‘It’s survivable. Just.’

  And then their pursuers made their decision for them.

  One of the Ospreys swung into a hover above the river about ten levels below them . . .

  . . . and launched two missiles at the construction tower!

  The two missiles streaked out of their pods, issuing dead-straight smoke trails behind them before they hit One Tribeca and detonated.

  Two colossal explosions shook the building.

  Jack and the three women struggled to hang on as the whole thing shuddered and swayed.

  Girders squealed.

  Concrete groaned.

  And then the tower buckled—right in its middle—and folded, and like a slow-falling tree, the top half of One Tribeca began falling toward the Hudson River with Jack, Zoe, Mae and Lily in it.

  It was an unbelievable sight.

  It was as if a god-sized axeman had hacked at the midpoint of the forty-storey construction tower, causing it to fold and fall.

  With a tremendous roar of cracking concrete and rending steel, the upper half of the building broke free of its lower half and fell toward the Hudson . . .

  . . . where it crashed into the river with an absolutely gargantuan splash.

  The great concrete structure—all 900,000 tons of it—slammed into the water, creating a massive wave.

  The wave expanded in every direction, a surging wall of water. Most of it spread out harmlessly into the river, but the part of it that rushed back toward the island pounded against the seawall, hurling a mighty shower of water onto the riverside expressway.

  For a brief moment, the enormous tower with its open-air concrete levels bobbed in the water—then those levels filled with water and the massive thing began to sink.

  If one had been looking closely at the building as it fell toward the water—at its northwestern corner, to be precise—one would have seen four infinitesimally small figures leap off it at the very last moment, jumping clear of the structure and spearing feet-first into the river themselves.

  As the colossal concrete structure disappeared below the surface in a roiling mass of whitewater, the two V-22 Ospreys prowled the air above it, searching for them.

  In the first Osprey, the leader of the Knights of the Golden Eight, Jaeger Eins, stared at the sinking building in the river, searching for West and his daughter amid the wreckage and the waves.

  But they didn’t surface.

  He waited a full ten minutes.

  Nothing.

  Then ambulances and police cars began to arrive at the shore. They weren’t necessary; not a single bystander had been hurt by the building’s spectacular collapse, but they could be inconvenient later. Likewise, early-morning joggers stopped and pulled out their earbuds to gawk at the sight and record it on their cell phones.

  Jaeger Eins peered at the splash site closely.

  Was it possible West and his daughter had drowned?

  Yes.

  But he didn’t believe it.

  West was too shrewd for that. He’d have had an escape plan.

  ‘Let’s pull out,’ he said into his helmet microphone.

  The two Ospreys boomed away to the south, away from New York City.

  ‘Never mind, gentlemen,’ Jaeger Eins added. ‘We will simply have to bring them out into the open another way.’

  As the two Ospreys peeled away to the south, a hundred metres to the north of the massive splash site, under the surface of the river, a pressure hatch was being opened in the roof of the Holland Tunnel.

  When it opened in 1927, the Holland Tunnel was the world’s first underwater road tunnel. Now it is one of two car tunnels that snake across the bed of the Hudson connecting Manhattan with New Jersey.

  While most of the tunnel is cut out of the bedrock below the riverbed, at each end of it, where the road rises, short sections are exposed to the river proper.

  In these sections are hatches—with internal pressure chambers—that allow divers to access the tunnel in the event of an emergency.

  Those hatches were Jack’s escape plan. He’d figured, if the need arose, his team could leap into the river via the construction tower and, using small scuba breathers, make for the hatches in the tunnel.

  Granted, he hadn’t expected to plunge into the river on top of the falling construction tower, but the plan was essentially the same.

  After Zoe, Mae, Lily and he had leapt clear of the falling building and speared into the water, they had bit into their breathers and swum for the tunnel.

  Into one of the hatches, depressurising, and then emerging through an emergency door into the tunnel itself . . . where Alby pulled up in a little Toyota hatchback, collected them and sped off down the tunnel.

  Jack sat in the back seat, sopping wet and thinking hard.

  Hades had been taken by Yago to the royal prison, wherever that was.

  The assassins in those Ospreys—the Knights of the Golden Eight, they c
alled themselves; ruthless, well armed and not afraid to destroy entire buildings—were hunting Lily, Alby and him.

  And Orlando now had a head start in the race to find the cities and avert the Omega Event.

  Alby turned around in the driver’s seat as they sped down the Holland Tunnel.

  ‘Where to, Jack?’

  ‘Republic Airport on Long Island. We gotta regroup with Sky Monster.’

  The Underworld

  Northwestern India

  24 November, 1700 hours local time

  While Jack was falling into the Hudson River inside a building, Pooh Bear and Stretch were arriving at the Underworld on the remote northwestern coast of India, where the Thar Desert meets the Arabian Sea.

  The two of them landed in an amphibious plane on the placid waters of the Arabian Sea to the west of the Underworld and taxied to the shore.

  The towering skeletons of derelict supertankers and container ships still loomed on the broad flat beach. A couple of them lay on their sides, thanks to an explosive chase involving Jack West Jr.

  Looking past the ship graveyard, they saw a high concrete structure embedded in the sand-cliff: the western supply dock of the Underworld.

  There were two minotaurs standing there waiting for them and they were waving frantically.

  Within minutes, they were zooming in a jeep through the long tunnel that led to the Underworld.

  After a few kilometres, they emerged from the tunnel in the high cavernous space of the minotaur city. Like a freeway flyover, their elevated concrete road passed over hundreds of rickety tenement-style structures on its way to the mountain-palace of Hades.

  Stretch saw the palace looming in the distance . . .

  . . . but they were not going to get to it.

  ‘What on Earth is going on?’ he said.

  A gigantic crowd of minotaurs was gathered on the road in front of them—a couple of thousand of them—completely blocking the way.

  Only they weren’t trying to block the roadway.

  Pooh Bear leaned forward. ‘They’re looking at something. Something down below.’

  Their jeep pulled up to the edge of the crowd, where it was met by Minotus, the King of the Minotaurs.

  ‘Mr Pooh, Mr Stretch, I’m so pleased you came,’ he said breathlessly. ‘It has been a terrible time here. It has killed over one hundred and fifty of my people already.’

  Stretch blanched. ‘One hundred and fifty of your—what has?’

  Minotus guided them to the guardrail of the overpass and pointed downward.

  ‘It was the only way we could contain it,’ he said. ‘We lured it into the alley and then brought down the building behind it. Four of my bravest minotaurs died in the act.’

  Pooh Bear looked out over the rail and gasped.

  ‘Oh my Lord,’ he said.

  Down among the tenements below them was a dead-end alley. Through the deft use of explosives, the minotaurs had indeed brought down a building at the open end of the alley, blocking it.

  The result was a deep, sheer-walled chasm from which there was no escape.

  And standing in that alley, pacing rapidly back and forth, looking this way and that, left and right, up and down, occasionally punching the thick stone walls of its prison, was a six-foot-tall man-shaped figure made entirely of bronze.

  Stretch stared in shock at the thing. ‘What . . . in the world . . . is that?’

  Minotus said, ‘It came out of one of the silver coffins at the end of the Great Bend. It killed a cleaning crew of thirty minotaurs before it made its way here and carved a bloody swathe through my people.

  ‘To every individual it meets, it says the same thing: “Kushma alla?” If you do not answer it, it kills you and asks the next person. If you do answer, but answer incorrectly, it kills you and asks the next person. Since none of us knows the correct answer, all we could do was flee.’

  Pooh Bear peered down into the makeshift pit.

  The figure looked like a robot but somehow not: its movements were at the same time stilted yet smooth, awkward yet purposeful, robotic yet alive. It looked like a walking statue—a tall bronze-coloured automaton—but one that, caught in the dead-end created by the desperate minotaurs, could not carry out its simple programming.

  The creepiest part about it, Pooh thought—apart from the murderous rampage it had gone on—was its face, or rather its absence of a face.

  It had no discernible eyes or mouth.

  It made it seem inhuman.

  Emotionless. Pitiless.

  Its only feature was a long bird-like snout or beak that seemed soldered to its face.

  Minotus said, ‘It is strong: it can hurl an entire car out of its way, punch through walls, and tear a man’s head off with its bare hands. It is clever, too: it can open doors, climb ladders, solve problems.

  ‘And its skin. Our bullets bounced off it. It was the same with our swords. Grenades did not leave a scratch. Flamethrowers did not slow it down. Its claws are like razors and it uses them to stab anyone who dares stand in its way. It is a walking metal demon. And it keeps asking that infernal question: Kushma alla?’

  Stretch looked at Pooh. ‘I don’t know what it’s saying, but I have an idea what language it’s speaking.’

  ‘You think it’s speaking the Word of Thoth?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Stretch pulled out his iPhone, opened the video-calling app and pressed Lily’s number.

  She answered on the first ring, her face appearing on the screen.

  She appeared to be in a moving car—a fast-moving car—and it looked like she was soaking wet.

  ‘Hey, Stretch,’ Lily said. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘You okay?’ Stretch said, noting her appearance.

  Jack’s face appeared next to Lily’s. ‘Let’s just say New York was rough. We lost Hades and the building we were in fell into the Hudson. What have you got?’

  Stretch said, ‘We’ve got a serious situation here. One hundred and fifty dead minotaurs thanks to this . . . thing . . . that emerged from one of those coffins you talked about.’

  He reversed the phone’s camera so that it showed the bronzeman trapped down in the alleyway.

  ‘Hey!’ Stretch called to the figure.

  It looked up and saw him with its eyeless metal face and from deep within its body came an unearthly voice:

  ‘Kushma alla?’

  The deep voice reverberated around the cavern. At the sound of it, the assembled minotaurs fell completely, fearfully silent.

  Pooh Bear said, ‘We thought it might be the Word of Thoth, but in spoken form. What do you think, Lily?’

  Lily was silent for a long moment.

  ‘It’s the Word of Thoth all right,’ she said.

  ‘What does it mean?’ Pooh asked.

  Lily said, ‘It means: “Are you my master?”’

  ‘It wants its master,’ Pooh Bear said, gazing down at the bronzeman. ‘But who is its master?’

  ‘The King of Kings,’ Jack said from the phone. ‘One of the rewards for winning the Games was an army of men of bronze. Jesus Christ, what have I done?’

  ‘Why do you say that?’ Stretch said.

  It was Minotus who answered him.

  ‘Out on the hanging tower by the Great Bend, there are hundreds of coffins containing more of these things. This single bronzeman has killed a hundred and fifty of my minotaurs. Imagine what an army of them could do? If the others awake, there will be nothing we can do to stop them.’

  ‘Stretch, Pooh,’ Jack said. ‘Events are starting to pick up speed. Kings are on the move, some bad dudes are hunting us, and we only have seven days to save the world.

  ‘It’s a good bet all those other coffins are going to open soon. Do whatever you can to help Minotus seal up the tunnels leading out of that Bend. If you
have to block them up with fifty feet of concrete, do that. It’ll slow them down when they wake up. Call me when you’re done, because I need you out here in the field.’

  Airspace above the Atlantic Ocean

  New York to Venice

  24–25 November

  The Sky Warrior sped across the Atlantic, heading for Europe. After their spectacular fall into the Hudson, Jack, Mae, Alby and Lily had met Sky Monster out on Long Island and taken to the air immediately.

  Jack gathered the group in the main cabin. Behind him, a small bank of TV sets played the four major news stations: CNN, MSNBC, BBC World and Al Jazeera. Right now, with the sound muted, all four showed different camera angles of the same thing: a crumpled New York City skyscraper lying toppled in the Hudson.

  ‘All right, people,’ Jack said, ‘we’ve got our backs to the wall. We need to find the three weapons and the three cities. Our rivals have a big head start and we just lost our greatest expert on the royal world, Hades.’

  Lily clapped Mae on the shoulder. ‘We have our own expert.’

  ‘Thanks for the vote of confidence,’ Mae said. ‘But Hades lived and breathed that world. I’ve only studied it in books and scrolls.’

  ‘Where do we even start, Jack?’ Alby asked.

  Jack went over to his electronic whiteboard.

  ‘I think Zeus told us. Remember what he wrote on that papyrus: The journey to the Three Secret Cities begins at the end. The end of this journey is the Altar of the Cosmos—that’s where you have to go when you’re done at the three cities—and we have a photo of a piece of that altar.’

  Jack transferred a photo from his phone to the electronic whiteboard. It appeared on it in much larger size: the shot he had taken in Hades’s vault of the triangular tablet.

  ‘This tablet is our starting point,’ he said. ‘But it’s incomplete. Part of it has broken off. Hades said there’s a rubbing of the full tablet at the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice. In my experience, it’s best to know everything you can about a task before you start out on it. Saves you from nasty surprises later. I want to see the full tablet, which is why we’re going to Venice now, to the Gallerie dell’Accademia.