It contained the original Chapter 22 about the Binding of Isaac—the version in which Abraham actually slaughtered his son, Isaac, at the request of a very vindictive God. For the King James version, the rewriters cleansed the story and sent an angel to stop Abraham at the last second.
Iolanthe stuffed the priceless copy into her bag.
She didn’t have much time. She had to be out of here before her brother Orlando got back—
Bang!
She heard one of the outer doors slam open. Damn. She had about ten seconds.
Iolanthe quickly stuffed her recent finds behind some thick books on the shelves and grabbed two random folios as—
Bang!
The heavy studded door to the ancient library was kicked in from the outside, and a squad of armed troops rushed in, followed by . . .
Orlando.
Iolanthe froze on her high ladder, caught in the act, gripping the two folios in her arms.
‘Hello, sister,’ Orlando said evenly.
‘Orlando, I—’
‘There is no need for an explanation,’ Orlando said. ‘You had your chance to stand by my side in the Underworld, and you did not. And now, here, I have seen all I need to see.’
Two of the troopers grabbed Iolanthe roughly by the arms.
Orlando stepped in front of her and stroked her porcelain-smooth cheek.
‘So pretty, you are, my darling sister,’ he said slowly. ‘So very, very pretty.’
Then he slapped her across the face.
‘Not for much longer.’
THE GRAND CANAL
VENICE
Venice, Italy
25 November, 0445 hours
The great waterborne city of Venice lay silent in the night.
The waters of the Grand Canal were calm.
The tourist hordes that would descend on the city in a few hours were still fast asleep in their hotels.
Gondolas and water-buses were tied up to their docks. A few delivery boats puttered away, but, forbidden from travelling along the iconic Grand Canal, they made their way through the city via its labyrinthine network of smaller back-canals.
Geographically, Venice sits in a sheltered bay at the top of the Adriatic Sea. The Grand Canal winds its way through the city in a sweeping reverse S-shape and is essentially the spine of the city, from which all the lesser canals spread.
At the northern end of the city, the canal meets Venice’s only link to the mainland: a superlong and dead-straight road-bridge that provides train and car access to the island.
At its southern end, beside the soaring red-brick bell tower of St Mark’s Basilica, the canal widens dramatically to almost a hundred metres, allowing for larger boat access and innumerable vacation photos.
Historically, Venice is a treasure trove beyond value. From landmarks like St Mark’s Square and the Rialto Bridge, to famous citizens like Marco Polo, to the Republic of Venice’s storied history as a seagoing superpower and its incredible mastery of living over water, it is a city that is unique in all the world.
And on top of all that, there is Venice’s most famous resident, a gentleman known as Vitruvian Man.
It is the famous sketch drawn by Leonardo da Vinci showing the human form’s dimensions within a square and a circle. It resides in the Gallerie dell’Accademia, deep inside the grand old museum, inside a sunless climate-controlled vault. It is rarely seen. Given its stature and delicacy, the priceless sketch is only brought out for public display approximately once a decade.
But it is not the only document kept deep within the Accademia. For the little-known order of monks who maintain the museum have been avid collectors of many arcane and mysterious objects over the centuries.
That night, if one were looking closely, one would have spotted a majestic 120-foot-long luxury motor yacht anchored just beyond the southern mouth of the Grand Canal.
It was a modern behemoth, sleek in the extreme, painted in metallic maroon and gold and containing every conceivable luxury, including a floatplane mounted on its stern (painted in the exact same colours as the yacht) and a personal submarine in its belly, also painted in gaudy maroon and gold.
Named Belarus, the superyacht was the trophy toy of a Russian oligarch who had not yet discovered that it had been stolen from its mooring at his summer home in the Adriatic.
And if one had been looking extremely closely that dark night, one would have seen a V-shaped stream of ripples stretching out from the superyacht, heading into the Grand Canal: the telltale sign of a submarine.
The fighter jet–shaped submarine cruised in almost perfect silence though the pitch-black waters of the Grand Canal.
Built by a company called Deep Flight, it was a ‘Super Falcon’ personal submarine. It seated two people—their heads poking up into individual acrylic domes—and was about the size of two motorcycles attached end to end. It had a long pointed nose and two stub wings that gave it a sleek aerodynamic look.
In the world of super-rich yacht owners, helicopters, floatplanes and speedboats had become passé. The latest thing to own was a personal submarine that launched out of the submerged hull of your yacht.
An inveterate reader of luxury magazines (they were often found in the pilot break-rooms at the exclusive regional airfields that he regularly visited), Sky Monster had told Jack about the Belarus, which was how he had known it was moored not far from Venice . . . with its own compact submarine.
His face illuminated by the dim blue glow of the Super Falcon’s instruments, Jack guided the little submarine up the Grand Canal. Lily sat in the rear seat behind him, looking out through her own dome.
The Grand Canal was pretty deep near its southern mouth, maybe ten metres or so. But it shallowed as they ventured further into it, to about six metres.
Fortunately, the Gallerie dell’Accademia lay only a few hundred metres into the canal and they reached it quickly.
As they came to the venerable old museum, Jack hit the sub’s exterior floodlights and the underwater world of Venice came alive.
‘Whoa . . .’ Lily breathed. ‘You don’t see this on the regular gondola tours.’
If, above the surface, Venice is a crazy hodgepodge of buildings that have been built and rebuilt all over each other for almost a thousand years, under the surface it’s even crazier.
For while the city sits atop 120 small islands, many of its structures are not built directly atop those islands, but rather on pilings and stilts driven into the lagoon floor.
The underwater world of Venice, then, is a hazy maze of stone pillars, crumbling foundations and teetering brick pilings. Steel reinforcement beams have been crudely affixed to the foundations of many of the older buildings to keep them upright. Generally speaking, newer buildings sit flush on the floor of the lagoon, while most of the older ones stand on pilings above it.
‘In its earliest days, the citizens of Venice would toss their excrement out their windows into the canals,’ Jack said as he guided their little submarine under the museum.
The sleek sub cruised through the murk, banking between barnacle-encrusted pilings, its floodlights sabering through the gloom.
‘How hygienic,’ Lily said drily.
‘Richer folk, however, got rid of their waste in a more discreet way. Their buildings were often fitted with a crude form of toilet—quite literally a water closet—a room that had a wide hole in its floor which opened directly onto the water beneath the building. Urine and excrement would be tossed down into it, to be washed away by the tidal flow.’
‘Hard to believe Venice was a hotbed for plague and disease,’ Lily said.
‘True,’ Jack said.
He keyed his throat-mike. ‘Alby, Sky Monster, how’re things up there?’
Lingering outside the mouth of the Grand Canal, out by St Mark’s Square, Alby and Sky Monster stood on the br
idge of the superyacht, Belarus.
It was still dark.
The city of Venice loomed in the night, silent as the grave.
There were no boats, no ferries, no movement.
Alby scanned the sky through a pair of binoculars.
Sky Monster also looked out fearfully. ‘Did I ever tell you, Alby, that I hate being on the ground?’
‘You’ve mentioned it, yes.’
He held up his bandaged right forearm, wounded during the Great Games. ‘When I’m on the ground, shit like this happens to me. But at least you can run when you’re on the ground. I think being on water is even worse—’
Jack’s voice came in over their earpieces: ‘Alby, Sky Monster, how’re things up there?’
‘All quiet out here,’ Alby replied into his mike.
Jack guided the sub between the Accademia’s aged brick pillars.
‘Importantly for us,’ he said to Lily as he looked up at the dark underside of the museum, ‘the Accademia is not only very old, it’s also actually a collection of old monasteries and wealthy homes that were joined together to form a single museum. One of those monasteries belonged to the Order of St Paul and the monks stayed on as caretakers and cleaners—there!’
He pointed upward.
Lily followed his gaze.
A rectangle of rippling water could be seen above them: it looked like a door in the otherwise black underside of the museum.
‘A water closet,’ Jack said.
He brought the submarine upward.
Jack and Lily’s submarine rose inside a tight brick-walled room, its floodlights illuminating the space in a brilliant blue glow.
Jack popped his dome and stepped out. Lily did the same.
The water closet was absolutely covered in dust and cobwebs. A single wooden door led out of it, resolutely closed.
‘This room hasn’t been opened in years,’ Jack whispered.
He went to the door. It was locked from the other side.
But its rusty old hinges were on this side and he made short work of them and within seconds the door was open and Jack and Lily hurried into the darkness of the Gallerie dell’Accademia.
Guided by the beams of their flashlights, they dashed through the silent corridors of the museum’s lower levels, passing offices and storerooms that were off limits to the public, until they came to the museum’s main vault room.
Whereas everything they had seen till then was old—wooden doors, crumbling walls, worn floors—this was modern.
A glistening steel door with a digital lock guarded the vault room.
Jack used a digital scrambler to overcome the lock and with a deep groaning sound, its heavy door swung open.
The vault, of course, was pitch-black, but as Jack and Lily stepped into it, their flashlight beams landed on the space’s central podium.
Jack had seen reproductions of the object lying on the podium hundreds of times, but seeing it in the flesh made him gasp:
Vitruvian Man.
By Leonardo da Vinci.
The famous male nude figure with the mane of shoulder-length hair, standing with his arms and legs spread wide in two positions, touching both a square and a circle. The faded brown parchment on which it had been sketched was almost as famous as the image itself.
Jack had only ever seen it once, during one of its rare public displays, but he had forgotten how small it was. Like most people, he had seen it numerous times as a poster, but the original was far from poster-sized. The great Leonardo had drawn it on a piece of parchment barely larger than a sheet of modern A4-sized paper.
It was, naturally, encased in a frame of bulletproof glass. That frame was thick and it was the size of a small poster.
‘I’m guessing that glass is also ultraviolet-proof,’ Lily said. ‘To protect the image from fading.’
There were a few other artefacts in the vault room: an ancient Greek mechanical device that looked like a sextant, a Roman centurion’s breastplate and, most striking of all, a grey life-sized stone statue of a man with his hands behind his back and his face pointed skyward in what looked like an agonised scream.
By the wall were three large steel cabinets with wide shallow pull-out drawers: the kind that museums kept sketches and parchments in.
Jack yanked open each drawer quickly, scanning the parchment inside each of them with his flashlight.
He saw sketches and drawings that would be the envy of any other museum: Arabian mathematical formulas, Sumerian engravings, even one star map on a papyrus sheet that was titled in Latin, magnum viam portae qvinqve.
Jack translated: ‘“The Five Gates to the Great Labyrinth”. Interesting.’
Lily went to the second cabinet and did the same. Upon opening its third drawer, she exclaimed in an excited whisper, ‘Got it!’
Jack came over and gazed at the contents of the drawer.
It was a classic tracing or rubbing: a sheet of thin paper that had once been placed over the triangular tablet and then someone had vigorously rubbed a piece of charcoal across its surface, causing the inscriptions on the stone to be replicated on the paper in white on black.
Jack and Lily beheld the complete tablet:
Jack’s eyes zoomed to the bottom-right corner of the triangular image, the part that was missing in real life. There were glyphs there written in the Word of Thoth.
‘What does it say?’ he asked. ‘Is it about the third city?’
Lily scanned it. ‘Yes, but . . . oh . . .’
‘What?’ Jack said, alarmed.
Lily said, ‘It says:
The third, Atlas’s mighty citadel, holds back the ocean.
But beware. Begin not your quest until you have companions at all three cities.
For when you open the first, you open the second and the third.’
She turned to face Jack. ‘Orlando said he was going to the first city, Thule, right away. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but if he opens Thule, he triggers Ra and Atlas, too.’
‘This is not good,’ Jack said.
‘No, it isn’t,’ a deep voice said from the darkness behind them. ‘Not at all, fifth greatest warrior.’
Jack and Lily spun.
They hadn’t even heard them enter the vault.
Five men dressed in hooded robes stood calmly behind them, blocking the exit.
Their robes were striking: off-white on the outside but blood-red on the insides of their hoods. The five men also wore ornate chains around their necks from which hung curious bronze-and-glass pendants.
But it was the glares of the five men that struck Jack.
They were piercing, deadly.
Their hands were drawn up into the folds of their sleeves. Whether they held weapons or not was an open question.
Jack’s right hand hovered over his thigh-holster, but he didn’t draw his gun. Yet.
The leader of the group of monks stepped forward. He was in his forties and he had pale flaky skin. His vivid blue eyes darted ever-so-briefly to Jack’s hovering gun hand.
When he spoke, his voice echoed in the vault room.
‘Captain Jack West Jr,’ he said evenly, ‘the fifth warrior, unexpected winner of the Great Games and singular disrupter of a royal system that has governed this planet for five thousand years.
‘It is nice to finally meet you in the flesh. We have been hearing of your exploits for some time now: the finding of the capstone of the Great Pyramid, the decoding of the six Ramesean Stones. Correct me if I am wrong, but you were once known by the nickname Huntsman, after the variety of spider, were you not?’
‘I was,’ Jack said warily.
‘Well, Captain, you have just entered the web of some infinitely more dangerous creatures.’
The leader smiled. It was a truly sinister grin.
Then the
two monks nearest to him removed their hands from their sleeves to reveal fully automatic Glock 19 pistols with long 33-round high-capacity magazines jammed into their grips.
Jack’s eyes locked onto the Glocks.
On full auto, those two pistols could tear him and Lily apart in about three seconds.
He was glad he hadn’t drawn his pistol and he didn’t dare reach for it now.
What he did do was twist his chin ever so slightly, triggering the throat-microphone he wore around his neck.
On the Belarus, Alby and Sky Monster heard the click of Jack’s radio coming online.
‘And this, I assume, is the Oracle . . .’ a stranger’s voice said. ‘. . . The one you raised as your own and named Lily.’
‘Damn it. They’re in trouble,’ Alby said to Sky Monster.
He keyed the radio. ‘Sit tight, Jack. We’re on our way.’ Then to Sky Monster: ‘Let’s move.’
The leader of the monks gazed at Lily.
‘I am,’ Lily replied.
The monk made a strange face, as if wincing.
‘You may call me High Brother Ezekiel. I am, for want of a better title, the leader of our brotherhood.’
He began to pace slowly in front of Jack and Lily.
‘Ours is a very old and very private order within the Catholic Church. We are not smug intellectuals like the Jesuits. Nor are we sanctimonious prudes like the Franciscans. Nor are we vocal. We live away from the world and keep our opinions and our code to ourselves, and so the greater Church leaves us alone.’
As he spoke, the leader fingered the bronze-and-glass pendant hanging around his neck.
Jack noticed that it was actually a very small hourglass and inside its lower glass bulb was a strange dark-grey powder.
The leader went on. ‘To those who are aware of us, we are known as the Fraternal Order of St Paul, quiet and humble experts in holy art and antiquities, devotees of the doctrine of St Paul, and the non-speaking cleaners of this establishment.’
He stopped walking and his glare became severe.
‘But to the more select audience of the royal world, we are known as the Order of the Omega. Studying the Omega Event, the end-times, is our calling, our focus, our reason for being. You have defiled our innermost sanctum. Can you explain yourself?’
The Three Secret Cities Page 8