The Five Greatest Warriors: A Novel

by Matthew Reilly

  ‘So why were you chosen to take over from Cohn?’ Lily asked Cieran curtly. ‘You’re a lot younger than he was.’

  Cieran nodded evenly. ‘I have some experience in special projects and covert intellingence work, and even more in political liaising. You can’t imagine how much political liaising you’ve inspired over In last ten years, my little friend.’

  ‘I’m sure I can’t.’

  ‘Rest assured’—Cieran either ignored or did not sense her sarcasm—‘l’ve gone through all of General O’Hara’s files and I’m up to speed on everything related to your case. Tell me, Lily, how is life with the great Captain West?’

  ‘It’s cool. He’s an awesome dad.’

  ‘I saw in the file that he formally adopted you.’

  ‘Like I said, awesome.’

  ‘Do you go to Mass regularly, Lily?’

  ‘Huh?’ What did that have to do with anything? ‘Er, no.’

  Cieran threw a sideways glance at Zoe. ‘She doesn’t go to church?’

  Zoe said, ‘Let’s just say that my faith isn’t what it used to be, Cieran. Along with Jack and Lily, I’ve seen things that have given me cause to doubt the Catholic Church’s true principles.’

  ‘The Church is the way and the light.’

  ‘Yeah, because it’s a sun-cul—’ Lily retorted, but Zoe delicately cut her off.

  ‘It might be for you, Cieran. But not for everyone.’

  Cieran let it go with a shrug that was, again, a little too casual. Transitioning smoothly he said: ‘So, Zoe, can I tempt you to join me for dinner this evening? To further discuss the loose ends of this mission. Perhaps we could go to Flaherty’s and try the pinot noir again?’

  Again? Lily thought, and then, just for an instant, she saw an emotion flash across Zoe’s face, an emotion she’d not seen Zoe show before, but it was gone before Lily could process it.

  ‘Thank you but no thank you,’ Zoe smiled tightly. ‘I think Lily and I will make our report to the operations committee and be on our way.’

  ‘Another time, then,’ he said, never losing his smile. ‘Since we’ll be meeting a lot more often now.’

  Lily tried to avoid formal meetings in Ireland after that, but occasionally she would hear Zoe report to Cieran over the phone, always looking somewhat uncomfortable

  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 ultra-high-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 8x10 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 mobilising again.’

  ‘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 1997-2006.

  WHEREABOUTS UNKNOWN.

  Lily stared at the man’s horrific face.

  ‘We recently intercepted an encrypted phone call from 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-defence, 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 PhD papers on the various neolithic civilisations 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.’

  ‘What 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 alway
s 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 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 the 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 to 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 BRITISH MUSEUM

  LONDON, ENGLAND

  28 FEBRUARY, 2008, 1700 HOURS

  12 DAYS BEFORE 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 hijackings in 2005—whether it was 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 tile 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 salad-like 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 artefacts and one of the five warriors, Napoleon.

  This had occurred when Alby had pondered why the Rosetta Stone, perhaps the most famous Egyptian artefact 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 artefacts 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 L’Egyptienne in 1802.

  Among the information about 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 colourful character from Egyptian history. Around 660 BC, 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, while 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 sub-team had been dispatched to Britain now: to steal the Basin of Montuemhat.

  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.