PINE GAP COMMUNICATIONS FACILITY
ALICE SPRINGS, CENTRAL AUSTRALIA
SEPTEMBER 2007
IN SIMILAR fashion, Lily would sometimes travel with Jack to check in with his Australian superiors.
Usually, he met them in Fremantle at the SAS base there, but on one occasion (which Lily had particularly enjoyed) they had met Jack’s bosses at the Pine Gap facility outside Alice Springs, in the barren heart of the Australian desert.
It was an ultrahigh-security US–Australian communications installation with dozens of antennas, many low buildings half-buried in the earth, an electrified fence, and armed perimeter guards. Lily was told that, officially, Pine Gap performed routine satellite links to and from US military satellites.
“Yeah,” Sky Monster had scoffed, “so what does the five-hundred-foot iridium antenna that plunges into the earth underneath Pine Gap do, then? And why do they guard it so intensely?”
Unfortunately for her, Lily never got to see any gigantic underground antennas during her visit to Pine Gap.
What she did see was a whiteboard covered with grainy eight-by-ten photographs: surveillance photographs of men and women whom she was instructed to avoid at all costs if she ever saw them.
Next to a photo of Father Francisco del Piero (his photo had a red “X” slashed across it) was one of a severe-looking black-haired Catholic cardinal. It was captioned:
CARDINAL RICARDO MENDOZA
VATICAN CITY; UNDER SECRETARY FOR THE
CONGREGATION FOR THE DOCTRINE OF
THE FAITH (CDF).
EXPERT ON THE “TRISMAGI.”
SUSPECTED MEMBER OF “THE OMEGA
GROUP” WITHIN THE VATICAN.
“The Vatican’s replacement for del Piero,” the intelligence man giving the briefing said. “The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is the most powerful curial group in the Vatican. Oversees Catholic doctrine. It was once called the—”
“The Holy Inquisition,” Jack said.
“That’s right.”
“Wasn’t the new pope, Benedict XVI, the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith before he was elected pope?”
“He was,” the briefer said. “And since Benedict’s election, Cardinal Mendoza has been very busy, personally visiting Vatican embassies all over the globe: in the US, India, Brazil, and Cambodia.”
“Cambodia?” Jack frowned.
“Yes. Just last month, the new pope himself called the Cambodian president to arrange an audience between the president and Mendoza. The Church is mobilizing.”
“Hmmm,” Jack said, concerned.
There was one other photo on the whiteboard that seized Lily’s attention—a photo she would never forget.
It depicted a man with half a face. He was utterly grotesque: with short, shaved black hair that receded in a stubbly widow’s peak, sickly yellow-rimmed eyes and—yes—the lower left half of his jaw was missing. It looked as if a wild animal had bitten a chunk of it out, ripping it clean off, leaving an ugly void that had been filled with a crude steel replacement jaw.
His caption read:
GENERAL VLADIMIR KARNOV
CALL SIGN: “CARNIVORE”
NATIONALITY: RUSSIAN
EX-KGB; FSB; RETIRED 2006
IMPLICATED IN 9 ASSASSINATIONS OF RUSSIAN
JOURNALISTS BY RADIATION POISONING IN
WESTERN COUNTRIES FROM 1997–2006.
WHEREABOUTS UNKNOWN.
Lily stared at the man’s horrific face.
“We recently intercepted an encrypted phone call from the Queen’s retreat at Balmoral to Windsor Castle,” the briefer told Jack. “A partial decryption uncovered the words ‘. . . before Carnivore gets involved . . .’ in the conversation.”
“A new player?” Jack said.
“If he is, he’s a dangerous one. He’s got a serious reputation,” the briefer said.
“Only who is he working with?” Jack asked. “Or is he in this on his own?”
Lily couldn’t help but remember Carnivore. His hideous face invaded her dreams for weeks after that meeting.
DECEMBER 2007 – JANUARY 2008
AFTER THE LAYING OF THE 2ND PILLAR
BUT THERE were happier times, too, like when Jack taught her self-defense, when she and Zoe did girly things, and when she hung out with the twins.
In the short time she’d spent at Little MacDonald Island after the laying of the Second Pillar, before she had been whisked off to Perth with Alby, Lily had enjoyed getting to know Lachlan and Julius Adamson.
She found them hilarious: always finishing each other’s sentences or talking enthusiastically about some new cheat code they’d found in World of Warcraft or some ancient palaeolithic site they’d been studying. They were like kids in adults’ bodies.
Lily remembered first meeting the two freckle-faced redheaded twins on the way to Stonehenge in early December 2007, when they had performed the light ceremony there.
Scottish by birth, Lachlan and Julius had been grad students at Trinity College writing separate Ph.D. theses on the various neolithic civilizations of the world; Wizard had been their supervisor and this had been why he’d brought them along to Stonehenge.
Their desire to learn new things seemed boundless. One day at Little MacDonald Island, Lily mentioned it to Jack.
“Lachlan and Julius are pretty special guys,” Jack said. “They just love finding stuff out. It’s as if they have to learn something new every day. They’re also, I should add, great friends.”
“How do you mean? They’re brothers.”
“Yes, they’re brothers, but they’re best friends, too—and that’s not always the case. Look at Pooh Bear and Scimitar. Lachlan and Julius always look out for each other.”
“But they squabble all the time!”
“Sure they squabble, but they always settle their differences, because they’re such good friends. Lily, if I can teach you anything in life, let me teach you this: a friend’s loyalty lasts longer than their memory.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You might not have experienced this yet, but over the course of a long friendship, you might fight with your friend, even get angry with them, like Lachlan and Julius do. But a true friend will forget that anger after a while, because their loyalty to their friend outweighs the memory of the disagreement.”
“So what happened with Pooh Bear and Scimitar?” Lily asked. “Why aren’t they friends anymore?”
“They chose different paths a long time ago,” Jack said softly. “Unfortunately, those paths intersected recently.”
“In that mine in Ethiopia. What happened there, Daddy? How could Scimitar leave his own brother to die?”
“Scimitar and Pooh Bear are very different men, kiddo. Pooh Bear sees the world in a broad way, like we do, as a place for everyone; Scimitar sees it in a very narrow way, as a place only for people like him. As for brotherhood, sadly, Scimitar doesn’t see Pooh Bear as his brother anymore.”
“What about Pooh Bear? Does he still love Scimitar?”
“You should ask him. But you know our Pooh Bear: he’s two hundred pounds of walking, talking loyalty. Look at what he did for Stretch in Israel. I reckon he’ll always think of Scimitar as his brother even if Scimitar doesn’t think the same way about him.”
Lily paused for a moment, thinking—about her own brother, Alexander, who, raised to rule from an early age, was unlikely to ever be her friend. Then she thought about Alby, her best friend, ever loyal.
“Alby and I never fight,” she said. “We’re great friends.”
Jack nodded. “I agree. I think you two will be best friends for life.”
Beyond that, it had to be said that Lily’s life was pretty good.
During that Christmas at Little MacDonald Island, Jack had given her a pair of Heelys “roller sneakers”—they looked like regular sneakers, only each shoe had a roller-skate wheel in the heel, allowing you to roll down hills. Of course, Lily’s were pink and
she wore them everywhere. For the first week, she even wore them to bed at night.
Then in early January 2008, while Jack and the others had gone to Israel to rescue Stretch, she had stayed at Alby’s home in Perth—and while she would never admit it, staying with Alby had given her a nice taste of suburban normality.
Except for one thing: the time Lily discovered that not all dads were as awesome as Jack.
While Alby’s mom, Lois, was an attentive mother, Alby’s dad was a different story. A mining engineer from America working in Perth, he preferred to spend time with Alby’s older brother, Josh. Josh was taller and more sporty than the smaller and bespectacled Alby. Josh was a top athlete at school.
Lily noticed that on weekends Alby’s dad would always prefer to throw a football at the park with Josh than sit with Alby at his telescope. And she saw how it saddened Alby.
If only his dad knew the truth, Lily thought as she sat in the main cabin of Halicarnassus, wearing her scuffed pink roller sneakers and flying eastward out of Mongolia in the predawn light.
Alby had been indispensable in all this. After all, it was he who had discovered the location of the sixth sacred stone, the Basin of Rameses II, in England. That discovery had resulted in Pooh Bear, Stretch, and the twins flying out for the UK while Jack, Zoe, and Lily had gone to Mongolia.
At the thought of him, Lily decided to send Alby a message via the net. She got no reply. He mustn’t have been at his computer.
She tried calling him, but no one answered.
That was weird. There was no reply from Alby’s home at all.
THE BASIN OF RAMESES II
(BRITISH MUSEUM)
THE BRITISH MUSEUM
LONDON, ENGLAND
FEBRUARY 28, 2008, 1700 HOURS
12 DAYS TO THE 3RD DEADLINE
THE SECURITY staff had been watching him from the moment he’d set foot inside the British Museum.
It wasn’t that they were racist, it was just that Pooh Bear perfectly matched the description of a “man of Middle Eastern appearance.” And in these fearful times—especially after the public transport bombings in 2005—racist or not, men of such appearance were watched closely when they entered public places wearing bulging backpacks.
And even though his backpack had successfully passed through the metal detectors, they watched him anyway.
Which meant they hardly noticed the other two members of Pooh’s team entering the British Museum behind him—a pair of red-haired Scottish twins wearing Transformers T-shirts (one bearing the Autobot symbol, the other the Decepticon symbol) underneath khaki gardeners’ overalls and carrying plastic lunchboxes filled with a mossy green saladlike substance.
It was Alby’s late discovery—made just as Jack had been leaving for Mongolia and just before Alby himself had been kidnapped by Vulture and Scimitar—that had seen Pooh Bear, Stretch, and the twins sent to the British Museum, tasked with finding the sixth and last Ramesean stone: the Basin of Rameses II.
Alby had made the crucial connection that revealed the Basin’s whereabouts: a link between Egyptian artifacts and one of the five warriors, Napoleon.
This had occurred when Alby had pondered why the Rosetta Stone, perhaps the most famous Egyptian artifact ever found, stood proudly in the British Museum when it had been discovered in 1799 by French soldiers serving under Napoleon. Why, he asked, was it not on display in the Louvre?
The answer was that the British had defeated Napoleon’s forces two years after the Stone’s discovery and relieved Napoleon of all of his Egyptian finds.
So Alby had embarked on a mission to learn just what other artifacts Britain had taken from Napoleon’s forces.
It was a long and tortuous history, filled with accusations of dishonesty and theft on the part of both nations and in which the only apparently true statement was that “the incredible stone from Rosetta and sixteen other crates of the most varied Aegyptian antiquities” arrived in London aboard the captured French warship, the L’Egyptienne, in 1802.
Among those sixteen other crates, Alby found a reference to a small stone basin called “The Basin of Montuemhat.”
So he had looked up Montuemhat.
Montuemhat was a colorful character from Egyptian history. Around 660 B.C., he had been the “Mayor” of Thebes and the regional governor of all of southern Egypt.
Importantly, he had held court in the Ramesseum, the former palace of Rameses II, living and ruling in the very same rooms that Rameses the Great had occupied 600 years before him. It was entirely possible that a long-lost basin Montuemhat had used in the Ramesseum could have actually belonged to Rameses.
Studies of the Basin of Montuemhat had revealed that, though damaged, it actually contained not a single reference to Montuemhat at all. The name, it seemed, had been given to it by a lazy French curator, lumping it in with some other finds. And then Alby saw a picture of it on the Web . . .
. . . and saw some carvings in the Word of Thoth cut into its rim. Translated later by Lily, they read:
THE CLEANSING BASIN
He had found the sixth sacred stone.
And where was it now?
In the British Museum, sitting quietly in a corner of the Egyptian wing, ignored and unnoticed by the thronging crowds, eighty feet from the spotlit glass case that housed the Museum’s greatest prize: the Rosetta Stone.
And that was why Pooh Bear and his subteam had been dispatched to Britain now: to steal the Basin of Montuemhat from the British Museum.
POOH BEAR strolled around the great museum’s magnificent fully enclosed concourse, all the while watched by museum security.
He stopped at the museum’s café, where he ate lunch under the watchful gaze of an enormous Easter Island statue. The statue, or moai, had been in the news recently: stolen by the British from Easter Island in 1868, the Easter Islanders had been petitioning the British government to give it back—which of course the British refused to do. When the statue was recently repositioned as a decoration in the museum’s cafeteria, the Easter Islanders were outraged and renewed their demands for repatriation of the moai.
At one point during his lunch, Pooh Bear made a phone call on his cell, looking around cautiously as he did so, knowing he was being watched.
Then—also according to plan—he went to the men’s room, leaving his backpack unattended in the concourse café. It took the nearest security guard exactly twelve seconds to hear the soft “beep-beep . . . beep-beep” coming from the unattended bag.
The museum went into bomb-scare mode.
A single-tone warning siren blared out and a courteous but firm announcement was made for all patrons to evacuate the museum.
A heaving stream of people converged on the exits, hundreds of schoolchildren, tourists, museum staff, and members of the public.
Pooh Bear—emerging from the men’s room—was immediately detained by four security guards and hauled away.
Among the throng of people who gathered in the wide courtyard out in front of the British Museum were two red-haired men wearing gardeners’ overalls over Transformers T-shirts.
They pushed between them a wheeled cart, on which was a small stone basin of some sort. It looked like an ornament from one of the museum’s many water fountains, all the more so since it was covered in a green moss.
By all appearances, the two gardeners had been wheeling it out for cleaning when the alarm had been raised and the museum evacuated.
* * *
Fifty minutes later, a British Army bomb squad would discover that the beeping object in Pooh Bear’s backpack was a Nintendo DS handheld game unit, which he’d accidentally left switched on. The DS had been asking him if he wanted to continue playing.
Naturally, Pooh Bear was released to a chorus of bashful apologies, although he was warned not to leave his backpack lying around in a public place again.
The British Museum was reopened shortly thereafter.
Strangely, however, the two red-haired gardeners and the mossy stone
basin were nowhere to be found. They’d last been seen heading away from the crowd massed in front of the museum, toward a parked van driven by a tall thin Israeli.
EASTERN RUSSIA—LONDON, ENGLAND
MARCH 9, 2008, 0145 HOURS
2 DAYS BEFORE THE 3RD DEADLINE
THE HALICARNASSUS sat parked on the runway of an abandoned Soviet air base deep in the mountains north of the Russian Pacific seaport of Vladivostok.
After escaping from Genghis Khan’s Arsenal in the Gobi Desert and hiking their way back to the Hali, Jack, Lily, Zoe, and Sky Monster—along with their prisoner, the wounded Tank—had flown eastward, arriving here only a few hundred miles from the Japanese island of Hokkaido.
It was late. A full moon illuminated the grim mountain peaks around the Halicarnassus. And it was cold, twenty below. In fifteen minutes, Jack was scheduled to check in with Pooh Bear’s team in London.
Still reeling from the loss of Wizard—Lily had hardly spoken in the days since the dreadful confrontation at the Arsenal—Jack tried to keep them all busy.
They attempted to contact Alby again in Perth but got no response.
“Odd,” Jack said.
“Yeah. Usually, he answers on the first ring, he’s so keen to be involved,” Lily said.
What they did receive, however, was an e-mail from Alby, containing the times of the Titanic Rising on the Pillar-laying dates, plus a theory Alby had about tsunamis caused by the Dark Sun.
“Not a bad theory,” Jack observed. “That kid’s smarter than half the adults I know.”
He checked the list of times Alby had added to the dates taken from the Mayan Killing Stone:
3RD PILLAR—MARCH 11 (0005 HOURS—JAPAN)
4TH PILLAR—MARCH 18 (0231 HOURS—GMT)
5TH PILLAR—MARCH 18 (0231 HOURS—GMT)
6TH PILLAR—MARCH 20 (1800 HOURS—MAYA/MEXICO) [THE DUAL EQUINOX]
The Third Pillar had to be laid by March 11. Two days away.
Jack considered what he knew about the Third Vertex: the golden plaque at the First Vertex had called it “The Fire Maze”; the Third Pillar was hidden somewhere in there in its own internal maze; and according to the Twins, the whole complex was located somewhere on the northwestern coast of Hokkaido.
The Five Greatest Warriors Page 13
