The Three Secret Cities

by Matthew Reilly

  Lily said, ‘We were searching for—’

  ‘Do not speak!’ Ezekiel barked, almost squealing in his explosive anger.

  Lily took a guarded step backwards.

  Ezekiel regathered himself and whispered, ‘“Do not permit a woman to speak or to have authority over a man; she must be silent.”’

  Jack recognised the quote instantly.

  It was from the Bible, from the writings of St Paul, the notorious woman-hater, and suddenly the ‘doctrine’ of the Fraternal Order of St Paul became clear to him.

  Ezekiel looked up again. ‘The female voice is a foul and disgusting thing. It is offensive to our ears. Profane. God himself did not wish for women to speak, so why should we hear it?’

  He looked hard at Lily. ‘Woman was put on this Earth to bear children for Man or, if not, then to serve him with total and silent obedience. That is how the nuns function here. I was not addressing you, young lady. Further to that, if I am speaking, you can presume that I am not speaking to you.’

  Lily’s eyes went wide.

  ‘I think someone’s been living away from the world a little too long,’ Jack muttered.

  Brother Ezekiel glared at him. ‘I said, can you explain yourself?’

  Jack took a deep breath. ‘We are trying to overcome the Trials and thus avert the Omega Event. To that end, we are searching for anything that mentions the Mysteries and thus informs us about what must be done at the three secret cities. We became aware of this rubbing and so we came to see it.’

  ‘Why didn’t you just ask us if you could examine it?’

  ‘We were told that you were—’ Jack hesitated. ‘That you were . . . extremely possessive of your treasures.’

  Ezekiel smiled thinly again.

  ‘You were well advised,’ he said. ‘We have killed intruders for less.’

  He nodded at the life-sized stone statue next to Jack: the one of a man with his hands behind his back and his face pointed skyward in a silent scream.

  At first Jack didn’t get it.

  Then, looking more closely at the statue, he saw that the man-shaped statue hadn’t been carved into that shape.

  No, the black-grey stone looked like cement, cement that had been poured—poured over a man while his hands had been bound behind his back. Then the liquid stone had set and dried in that shape.

  There was a man inside that stone statue.

  The monks had entombed him in the stone. If he hadn’t died during the pouring, he would have died an agonising death inside it, slowly suffocating or, worse, starving.

  And suddenly Jack recognised the black-grey stone.

  He had seen this material before: in the Underworld, during the Games. This same ‘liquid stone’ had been used to execute the hostages of the champions.

  ‘Are you going to kill us?’ he asked, swallowing.

  ‘Normally, we would, and we would take great pleasure in it,’ Ezekiel said. ‘But not today. There are considerable prices on both of your heads. When they realised you were coming here, the Knights of the Golden Eight called us . . .’

  Jack felt his blood run cold.

  ‘. . . and asked that we hold you till they arrived.’

  At that moment, Lily and Jack heard a monstrous roar from somewhere overhead and looked up.

  It was the sound of an aeroplane—a large aeroplane—coming in low over the Gallerie dell’Accademia.

  ‘That sounds like them now,’ Brother Ezekiel said.

  It was still before dawn in Venice, so only a handful of early risers saw it.

  And, boy, was it a sight.

  A big CL-130 Hercules military plane came thundering in low over Venice from the north, before sweeping around into a banking turn directly above the lower end of the Grand Canal . . .

  . . . where it suddenly released three parachuted men from its open rear ramp.

  A trio of directional parachutes blossomed above the canal and proceeded to speed down toward the city in fast diagonal flightpaths, heading right for the Gallerie dell’Accademia.

  The Hercules itself kept going for a short distance before it banked again, this time performing a wide U-turn and beginning a descent designed for a water landing right in the mouth of the Grand Canal.

  For this was no ordinary Hercules. The letters ‘CL’ designated it as the fabled amphibious version of the classic military plane: this Hercules had a curved underbelly and pontoons hanging from its wings, making it capable of water landings and take-offs.

  One of the handful of people who witnessed the Hercules’s extraordinary descent toward Venice was Alby, standing on the bridge of the now-speeding Belarus.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ he breathed as he watched the three paratroopers glide swiftly in the direction of the Accademia.

  As the paratroopers descended on the museum in front of him, and the Hercules swooped down toward the water’s surface behind him, Alby’s Russian-owned superyacht raced into the Grand Canal.

  The Belarus’s powerful twin engines created a gigantic wash behind it as the enormous powerboat shot past the Basilica di Santa Maria della Salute at the mouth of the Grand Canal and raced toward the Accademia three hundred metres away.

  ‘Jack!’ Alby called into his radio-mike, ‘you got three paratroopers inbound to your location. ETA: maybe three minutes.’

  As Sky Monster drove the boat hard, Alby kept watch on the sky.

  Ahead of them, the three paratroopers landed on the square in front of the Gallerie dell’Accademia.

  Behind him, the dawning sky was filled by the shadow of the incoming amphibious Hercules.

  ‘Drive faster, Sky Monster!’ Alby yelled above the howling wind. ‘Get there!’

  The Hercules touched down on the Grand Canal right between St Mark’s Tower and the Basilica di Santa Maria—and only a hundred metres behind the speeding superyacht driven by Sky Monster and Alby.

  It then proceeded to roar right up the Grand Canal itself, its wingtips almost touching the multicoloured buildings on either side of the broad waterway.

  Both vessels—the megayacht and the seaplane—produced surging bow waves that sloshed wildly against the foundations of the buildings flanking the canal. Such bow waves, had they been made by any other kind of boat, would have incurred hefty fines for the vessels’ owners.

  The Belarus sped up the Grand Canal, chased by the Hercules, perhaps the only seagoing vessel that could make the Belarus seem small.

  The superyacht arrived at a small dock in front of the Accademia—metres short of the wooden footbridge that spanned the Grand Canal right in front of the museum. It practically skidded to a halt, kicking up a fierce side wave.

  Alby and Sky Monster leapt out of it, not even bothering to tie it up or drop the anchor.

  The front doors of the Accademia museum lay open.

  Three empty parachutes lay on the small piazza in front of them.

  Alby dashed for the museum. ‘Figure out a way to get us out of here, Sky Monster! I’m going after Jack and Lily!’

  Seconds later, the giant Hercules seaplane, its engines roaring, its colossal bulk almost filling the Grand Canal, just crunched right over the megayacht, hitting it perfectly amidships, the plane’s reinforced nose smashing right through the yacht’s flank like it was made of tissue paper.

  As if cruising down the Grand Canal weren’t brazen enough, now it had just bulldozed right over a $200-million superyacht.

  The Belarus crumpled under the weight of the massive seaplane.

  It folded in its middle, causing its bow and stern to be hoisted high into the air. Then, parked alongside the Venetian dock, right up against the wooden footbridge, with a Hercules seaplane sitting across its crushed waist, the luxury motor yacht began to sink.

  THE MUSEUM, THE GRAND CANAL

  AND THE HERCULES

  Insi
de the vault room deep within the bowels of the Gallerie dell’Accademia, Jack and Lily were still surrounded by the five monks of the Order of the Omega.

  Jack had heard Alby’s warnings through his earpiece: three paratroopers, most likely members of the Golden Eight, were close. And he and Lily were stuck here.

  He looked around himself for something, anything, he could use.

  And he saw it.

  Maybe . . .

  ‘Lily,’ he whispered. ‘When I do what I’m gonna do, get behind me, okay.’

  ‘Do what?’ she hissed.

  ‘This.’

  Then, like a Wild West gunslinger, Jack drew his pistol from his thigh-holster and fired it into the chest of one of the two monks armed with the 33-round automatic Glocks.

  That monk dropped like a sack of shit.

  Shocked by Jack’s lightning-fast move, the second one turned and opened fire with his modified Glock, right at Jack.

  The pistol unleashed a withering burst of automatic gunfire, echoing loudly in the tight space of the vault room, expelling its thirty-three rounds in a brutal second-and-a-half.

  There was no way Jack could get out of the way.

  But then that hadn’t been his plan.

  As soon as he’d killed the first monk, Jack had reached out to his right and snatched up the most valuable masterpiece in the room—

  —Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man—

  —and held it up in front of himself like a shield!

  Lily, as instructed, dived behind him.

  The second monk’s spray of gunfire slammed into the sketch’s bulletproof-glass frame and bounced off it in what seemed like a million sparks. Two of the shots hit Jack’s gloved hand gripping the glass shield: but it was his left hand, which like the forearm above it, was made of titanium.

  And then the monk’s clip was empty and Jack levelled his pistol over the top of Vitruvian Man, and with two booming shots, dropped him.

  The three other monks, including the leader Ezekiel, scattered, and suddenly Jack and Lily were racing out of the vault room.

  ‘Shut the door!’ Jack called as they hurried out.

  Lily hit a switch and the heavy vault door whooshed shut behind them, locking the remaining monks inside.

  Through the museum they ran.

  Sirens began to blare.

  Yellow emergency lights spun.

  Up a stairwell, then down two hallways lined with priceless works of art. Around another corner and—

  —the three-hundred-year-old painting on the wall beside them was shredded with machine-gun fire.

  Two black-clad, ceramic-masked paratroopers were charging down the corridor toward them: it was definitely the Knights of the Golden Eight again.

  ‘Jack! Lily!’ someone called from their right and they saw Alby down another corridor, standing at an open window, waving at them. ‘This way!’

  Jack pushed Lily toward Alby—

  —just as a thick-barred security grille came rushing down from the ceiling, landing with a clang against the floor right between Jack and Lily.

  They were separated.

  ‘No,’ Lily gasped from the outer side of the grille, Alby’s side.

  ‘Go,’ Jack said. ‘Please. I’ll catch up.’

  The look in Lily’s eyes showed that she didn’t like this at all, but she knew she had no choice.

  ‘I love you, Dad,’ she said as she took off down the corridor.

  With the two paratroopers advancing, Jack slipped into a nearby stairwell.

  Alby and Lily leapt down from the open window, landing in a narrow cobblestoned alleyway that ran down the side of the Gallerie dell’Accademia. Dim streetlights lit the alley in a sickly yellow glow.

  At one end of the alley lay the Grand Canal, at the other, a maze of smaller alleyways.

  ‘Their plane is on the Grand Canal,’ Alby said. ‘We have to go into the alleys and disappear—’

  ‘Hold it right there,’ a dark figure said, emerging from a side alley filled with dumpsters, leading with his MP-9 submachine gun.

  The third Golden Eight paratrooper.

  ‘You two shits are lucky the price on your heads demands you be brought in alive,’ the paratrooper said, his accent French. ‘Hands where I can see them.’

  Defeated, Alby and Lily placed their hands on their heads.

  ‘Who are you working for?’ Lily demanded.

  ‘We work for a royal gentleman. One who harbours a burning rage against you and your father; although we can bring your father in dead.’ The paratrooper jerked his gun in the direction of the Grand Canal. ‘Move. This way—’

  Whack. The paratrooper was struck from behind—with a pipe—by someone else in the dark side alley.

  Sky Monster stepped out of the shadows.

  ‘This is why I hate being on the ground,’ he said. He keyed his radio. ‘Jack, I have the kids. We’re on the south side of the Accademia. How the hell do we get out of here?’

  Jack’s voice came over his earpiece. ‘On the Russian dude’s floatplane.’

  ‘The one on the stern of the Belarus? Last I saw, it was on the boat when the bad guys rammed right over it.’

  ‘I’m on the roof of the museum and I have a visual on it. It’s still in the game, which means so are we.’

  Huddled behind the front corner of the museum, Sky Monster, Alby and Lily peered across the small piazza in front of the Gallerie dell’Accademia.

  In the dim early-morning light, they saw the Hercules seaplane parked near the dock there, on top of the wreck of the Russian superyacht, the Belarus.

  The superyacht had been cut cleanly in half by the colossal weight of the Hercules, broken into two pieces.

  Those two pieces had now settled on the bottom of the Grand Canal, but given that the canal was only six metres deep here and the Belarus’s main deck usually rose about six metres above the waterline, its floatplane now sat perfectly level with the surface, still tied down to the stern of the yacht.

  Despite the horrible wreckage all around it, the plane was entirely undamaged, fresh as a daisy, its maroon-and-gold flanks still as shiny as the day they had been painted.

  ‘Huh,’ Sky Monster said, seeing it. ‘How about that?’

  Police sirens cut through the silence.

  Four blue patrol boats with ‘polizia’ on their hulls and flashing lights on their roofs were rushing down the canal—two from each end—converging on the bizarre sight of the Hercules on top of the demolished superyacht.

  The Knights of the Golden Eight were nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Jack, I see the floatplane!’ Sky Monster said into his radio.

  ‘Go now. I’ll cover you,’ Jack’s voice said.

  Sky Monster, Alby and Lily broke cover and dashed across the piazza.

  As they did so, a Knight appeared in the cockpit windows of the Hercules—the pilot, no doubt, who’d stayed with his plane while the other Knights had gone inside—and extended a pistol at them . . . just as the fuselage of the plane all around him erupted in bullet-sparks, from shots fired by Jack on the roof of the Accademia.

  The pilot took cover inside his plane while Sky Monster, Lily and Alby hustled safely past him, hopscotching off the dock onto the wreckage of the Belarus.

  They quickly unlatched the straps tying down the floatplane on the superyacht’s stern and climbed inside it.

  Sky Monster silently marvelled at the controls of the little plane. It was a single-engined Piper PA-18 150 Super Cub—a classic lightweight plane mounted on two long pontoons—only this one came with all the options and it appeared to be brand new. The controls were spotless. It even had a new-car smell.

  Within seconds, he had the nose propeller of the Piper sputtering to life before—voom!—it began blurring with speed.

  Then he guided the
floatplane away from the wreck of the superyacht, edging it between the Hercules and the footbridge in front of the Accademia.

  But the pilot of the Hercules wasn’t going to just let this happen.

  For, right then, the gigantic Hercules powered up and—completely ignoring the incoming police boats and the bleary-eyed people opening their windows on the shore—it began to move.

  Engines rumbling, it jerked backwards, reversing its awesome bulk off the wreckage of the Belarus with a series of loud crunching sounds.

  Then, slowly, it began to rotate laterally on the surface of the Grand Canal, turning to the right, its nose following the movement of the little Piper.

  ‘Jack! Where are you!’ Sky Monster yelled into his radio.

  He had to keep the floatplane moving—or else the Hercules was going to box them in by slamming its nose into the walls on the opposite shore.

  ‘Don’t wait for me!’ Jack’s voice replied. ‘Either I’ll catch up now or I’ll catch up later. You have to get Lily and Alby away.’

  ‘There he is!’ Lily pointed.

  Like a bullet out of a gun, Jack came sprinting out of an alley on the northern side of the museum, running for all he was worth . . .

  . . . at the same time as two Knights of the Golden Eight appeared in the front doors of the Accademia and opened fire, their bullets chasing Jack, strafing the ground at his feet, peppering the wooden rails of the footbridge as he raced up it.

  By this time the Hercules, still rotating, was right beside the high wooden footbridge.

  It was almost perfectly side-on to the direction of the Grand Canal now, its nose only metres away from the northern shore. If it touched that shore, it would block the floatplane from escaping.

  But Sky Monster pushed forward on his thrusters and the little maroon-and-gold Piper squeezed in front of the Hercules’s nose, its left wingtip scraping the wall of a building on the northern shore, and suddenly the floatplane was out in the open with a clear view of the mouth of the canal ahead of it.