Six Sacred Stones

by Matthew Reilly

  “Th..thanks guys,” Zoe gasped.

  “You’re thanking us?” Wizard said in disbelief. “You’rethanking us? Zoe, did yousee yourself these last few days? You killed a warrior on the Fighting Stone, you deciphered an unconquerable maze, you flew a Neethacovered plane out of Hell and almost died to make sure we all got off it safely.

  “Honestly Zoe, I’ve never seen anything like it. What you’ve done wasextraordinary. Jack West Jr is not the only outandout hero I know. When he was gone, you stepped up to the plate. You’re an absolute wonder.”

  Zoe bowed her head. She hadn’t even thought about what she’d done. She’d just done it.

  Lily gave her a huge hug. “You were awesome, Princess Zoe. Fivestargirl power. Grrrr!”

  And for the first time in days, Zoe smiled.

  BACK AT THE Neetha village, through sheer force of arms, Wolf’s people had taken control of the town.

  Neetha villagers and warriormonks were gathered together on their knees, bound with flexcuffs and guarded by Congolese Army men.

  Switchblade came striding over to Wolf.

  “Sir, we have it,” he said proudly, stepping aside to reveal the Delta man, Broadsword, who held the Second Pillar.

  Wolf’s eyes sparkled at the sight. He took the cleansed Pillar and held it reverently in front of his face.

  “We also found this young gentleman.” Switchblade shoved Alby forward, clutching his wounded shoulder. “Name’s Albert Calvin. Says he’s a friend of Jack West’s daughter.”

  Wolf eyed the little boy before him and snuffed a laugh. “Tend his wound. He comes with us from here.”

  Switchblade went on: “Rapier’s up in the inner sanctum above the maze. He says he’s found the Firestone, the Philosopher’s Stone, and the First Pillar, all laid out on altars.

  He’s bringing them down.”

  “Splendid,” Wolf said. “Splendid. The Neetha took them from Max Epper. This is turning out to be an excellent day.”

  He turned suddenly to Switchblade. “What about the Orb, the Delphic Stone?”

  “It’s gone, sir. As are Professor Epper and his group.”

  Wolf snorted. “Alive or not, Epper won’t be happy. Because he knows that we now have every trump card in the deck: the first two Pillars, the Philosopher’s Stone,and the Firestone.”

  “There’s one more thing, sir,” Switchblade said.

  “Yes?”

  Switchblade nodded to someone, and from the crowd another prisoner was brought forward.

  Wolf’s eyebrows arched in surprise.

  It was the warlock of the Neetha.

  The gnarled old man’s hands were cuffed, but his eyes blazed with rage.

  “And just how canyou helpme ?” Wolf said, knowing the old shaman couldn’t possibly understand him.

  To his surprise, the old man answered him. But he didn’t speak in Thoth. Rather, he spoke in a language that Wolf recognized: Greek, classical Greek.

  “The Second Corner of the Machine,”the warlock drawled in slow but perfect Greek. “I have seen it. I will take you there.”

  Wolf leaned back in surprise, a sly smile forming.

  “Switchblade, Broadsword. Fire up the choppers and call our people in Kinshasa. Tell them to prep a plane for Cape Town. It’s time to get our fucking reward.”

  AS THE HALICARNASSUS soared southeastward in glorious peace, Zoe and the others joined Sky Monster in the seating area immediately behind the cockpit.

  Ono and Diane Cassidy were introduced and Sky Monster explained what had happened to him since they’d left him in Rwanda.

  “After Solomon’s boys arrived with some startup fuel, I flew to the old farm in Kenya and gave my baby a full checkup and refuel, even had a brandnew engine mounted.”

  “You keep spare jetengines there?” Zoe asked.

  “I might’ve…found…some in my travels and kept them for a rainy day,” Sky Monster said bashfully. “Anyway, I’ve been tracking every aerial scramble in central Africa, and sure enough, earlier today, I spotted these Congolese guys on the satellite scanner—in some Clipper transports and escorted by a few US choppers—all heading to this region.

  Figured they’d found you, so I tagged along from a distance. Then when I saw you take off in the other direction, I figured it could only be Zoe flying.”

  “Hadehaha,” Zoe said.

  Sky Monster said, “Hey, where’s Solomon? I gotta thank him for sending that fuel.”

  Zoe shook her head.

  “He died defending me,” Lily said, her eyes downcast.

  “Oh,” Sky Monster said softly. “And Alby?”

  “Don’t even ask,” Zoe said, rubbing her temples, clearly still dealing with that issue.

  “Hopefully, he’s not dead, too.”

  She glanced at Lily as she said this, and their eyes met. Lily said nothing.

  While they talked, Wizard tapped away on a computer, posting an encoded message on theLord of the Rings noticeboard he, Lily, and Jack used for such communications. If Jack was somehow alive, he would check in on the noticeboard eventually.

  “You think Daddy’s still alive?” Lily said, moving behind Wizard as he typed. “Even after that man showed us his helmet?”

  Wizard turned to face her.

  “Your father’s a very resilient fellow, Lily. The most resilient, stubborn, brilliant, loyal, caring, and difficulttokill man I know. As far as I’m concerned, Jack West isn’t dead until I see his unmoving body with my own eyes.”

  This didn’t seem to encourage Lily.

  Wizard just smiled. “We must always retain hope, little one. Hope that our loved ones are alive, hope that good will prevail over evil in this epic conflict. In the face of powerful opponents and overwhelming odds, hope is all we have.

  “Never lose it, Lily. Deep in their hearts, bad people like Wolf have no hope and so they replace it with lust: lust for dominance, for power—and if they ever gain that power they’re only happy because now everyone else is as miserable as they are. Always have hope, Lily, because hope is what makes us the good guys.”

  Lily looked at him. “That Wolf man said on the phone before that he’s my grandfather, Daddy’s father. How can Daddy be so good and Wolf be so bad?”

  Wizard shook his head. “That I cannot explain. The path a person takes in life is often determined by the strangest, most incidental things. Jack and his father are alike in many ways: both are fiercely determined and incredibly intelligent. Only Jack acts for others, while his father acts for himself. Somewhere in their lives, they eachlearned to act in these ways.”

  “What will I be like then?” Lily asked nervously. “I want to be like Daddy, but it seems that’s not guaranteed. I don’t want to make the wrong choice when it matters.”

  Wizard smiled at her, tousled her hair. “Lily, I cannot ever imagine you making the wrong choice.”

  “And now that Wolf man has got Alby,” Lily said.

  “Yes,” Wizard said. “Yes—”

  At that moment, something pinged in the cockpit and Sky Monster went to check on it.

  Two seconds later, he shouted: “What in the name of…?”

  Zoe and the others raced into the cockpit to see what had upset him.

  They found Sky Monster pointing at a satellite aerial map of southern Africa.

  Dozens of little red dots filled the air above the northern border of South Africa. Many more blue dots flanked the western coast just off Cape Town.

  “What is it?” Zoe asked.

  “See all those dots,” he said. “The red ones represent military aircraft, the blue ones warships. And there’s a repeating message coming in over all frequencies: the South African Air Force has blockaded South African airspace to all foreign air traffic—military and commercial. At the same time, their Navy’s formed a perimeter around Cape Town, Table Mountain, and half the Cape of Good Hope.”

  He pointed to a few whitecolored dots on the ocean south of the Cape. “Those white dots, they’re the last
civilian craft that were allowed in about an hour ago. Judging from their transponders, they’re South African–registered fishing trawlers returning from the Indian Ocean. They’re the last ones they’ve let back in. Now all the sealanes are closed.”

  “But we have to get to Cape Town by tomorrow night,” Zoe said.

  Sky Monster swiveled in his seat. “I’m sorry, Zoe, but we can’t do that, not without getting shot down. Our enemies have completely shut us out. They musta bought off the South African government with a boatload of cash. I hate to be the one to say this, but we can’t get to Cape Town.”

  ENMORE MANOR,

  LAND’S END, ENGLAND

  DECEMBER 11, 2007

  LACHLAN AND JULIUS Adamson sat gloomily in the locked library of Enmore Manor, a secluded estate in the far southwest of England near Land’s End.

  The blinking red light of a supersensitive motiontracking unit gazed down at them, tracking their every movement, telling their Japanese captors that they were still where they were supposed to be.

  They sat with Lily’s backpack and nothing else. Only her toys remained in the pack—

  everything else they had of worth had been taken by the Japanese.

  Every now and then, their captors came for them and got them to explain some diagram on their computer or some email that Wizard had written about the Machine.

  Tank Tanaka was always polite but curt, his eyes hard and cold, fixed on a purpose that the twins simply couldn’t comprehend.

  Only once did Lachlan shake him from his trance. “Yo, Tank! Why are you doing this, man! What about your friends, like Wizard and Lily?”

  Tank rounded on him, his eyes flaring. “Friends? Friends! The notion of friendship is nothing compared to the rankhumiliation of a nation. In 1945 my country was dishonored, not just beaten in battle, but beaten like a dog before the whole world. Our Emperor, sent to us by God himself, the last in the longest line of kings on this planet, was belittled in front of the entire world. This was a slur that no Japanese has ever forgotten.”

  Julius said, “But Japan is strong again. One of the richest and most advanced countries in the world.”

  “Robots and electronics do not rebuild honor, Julius. Only vengeance does. I have studied this Machine for twenty years, all the while with vengeance on my mind. In their hearts, all Japanese agree with me, and they will all rejoice when our vengeance is made manifest.”

  “But they’ll bedead, ” Julius said. “If you succeed, all life on this planet will be extinguished.”

  Tank shrugged. “Death is not death when you take your enemy with you.”

  A few times when Tank was out, their Japanese guards conversed in the twins’ presence, assuming that asgaijin the twins did not understand Japanese.

  On one such occasion, as he typed on his computer for them, Lachlan, listening discreetly, snapped up.

  “What is it?” Julius whispered.

  “They’re saying that they just got word from ‘their man in Wolf’s unit,’ some guy named Akira Isaki?”

  “Isaki?”

  “Whoever he is, he’s not loyal to Wolf. He’s working for these assholes. He just called in and told them—oh, shit—that Jack West is dead and that Wolf is now heading for the Congo, going after the Second Pillar. This Isaki will report back when that’s over and tell our guys whether they have to move or not.”

  “Huntsman’s dead?” Julius said. “You think it’s true?”

  “I don’t know what to think. But I do know this: our time is limited. It’s time we flew the coop.”

  Twelve hours later in the dead of night, one of the Japanese guards came to check on them.

  A sensor had detected that one of the windows in the library had been breached, but the motion tracker still showed the twins to be in the library, moving very little, probably sleeping.

  The Japanese guard opened the library door, and stopped dead in his tracks.

  The library was empty.

  The twins were gone.

  The only moving object: Lily’s little robot dog, Sir Barksalot, stomping up and down on his little metal legs, barking soundlessly at the dumbstruck Japanese guard.

  The alarm was sounded and the grounds lit up with floodlights, but by the time Tank and his men had searched the area for the twins, they were already sitting in the back of a pickup truck speeding east, heading far away from Land’s End.

  “So where do we go now?” Julius asked, the wind whipping his hair.

  Lachlan grimaced in thought. “There’s only one place I can think to go.”

  MINE COMPLEX

  SOMEWHERE IN ETHIOPIA

  DECEMBER 11, 2007

  AT THE SAME TIME Zoe was guiding her group through the wilds of the Congo, and the Twins had been making good their escape from Tank’s Japanese Blood Brotherhood at Land’s End, Pooh Bear was languishing in the mysterious Ethiopian mine, suspended above the arsenic pool in his medieval cage.

  Six hours after the shocking death of Jack West—and since his own brother, Scimitar, had left Pooh to die—the working day came to an end, and the Ethiopian Christian guards in charge of the mine shepherded the Ethiopian Jewish miners into their subterranean quarters—dirtwalled caves with planks for beds and rags for blankets. Moldy bread and a souplike gruel was served up for food.

  Once the slave miners were safely locked away, the thirty or so Christian guards gathered around the arsenic pool and stared up at the imprisoned Pooh Bear.

  Torches were lit.

  Chants were intoned.

  A great drum was hammered.

  A fullsized Christian cross was erected and set alight.

  Then the tribal dancing began.

  Once the cross was burning, all the other torches were extinguished, so that it was the only light source in the vast cavern—it lit up the great underground space with a haunting orange glow that bounced off the stone towers halfburied in the mine’s high dirt walls.

  Pooh Bear looked out from his cage in horror. His time, it seemed, had come. He shot a sad look at the deep pit about thirty yards from the arsenic pool, the pit in which Jack had met his end.

  Then, with a clunking jolt, Pooh Bear’s cage suddenly began todescend toward the steaming pool on its chains. At the edge of the pool, a pair of Ethiopian guards were slowly uncranking a spooler, lowering the cage.

  The other guards began chanting quickly. It sounded like the Lord’s Prayer, in Latin, and uttered feverishly fast:“Pater Noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen Tuum…”

  The cage descended.

  Pooh Bear shook its bars.

  “Pater Noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen Tuum…”

  Pooh’s cage was only ten feet above the simmering pool of black liquid.

  “Pater Noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen Tuum…”

  Nine feet, eight feet…

  Pooh Bear began to feel the heat of the pool, the hot steam rising all around him.

  “Pater Noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen Tuum…”

  The chanting continued.

  The dancing continued.

  The drum kept booming.

  And Pooh Bear’s cage kept lowering.

  As his cage descended, Pooh’s eyes flashed from the simmering pool below him to the surging throng of chantinganddancing guards and then over to the blazing cross towering over them all—and somewhere in the middle of the hellish scene, over the booming of the drum, he thought he heard another sound, a kind of banging noise, but he couldn’t see where it had come from and he dismissed it.

  “Pater Noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen Tuum…”

  The pool was only three feet beneath him now, its steaming fumes engulfing him.

  Sweating profusely, with death approaching and no avenue of escape, Pooh Bear began to pray.

  The heavily muscled Ethiopian guard who had hammered Jack West to his horizontal cross was at that moment leading the sacrificial ceremony, banging on the great drum with gusto.<
br />
  His eyes widened with delight as Pooh Bear’s cage came to within a few feet of the deadly pool.

  Now he hammered harder on the drum, heightening the frenzy of the crowd—just as a thick masonry nail came flying through the air from out of nowhereand lodged squarely in his right eye, driving a full six inches back into his brain, killing him instantly, throwing him to the ground, and abruptly ending the beating of the drum.

  Everything stopped.

  The dancing, the chanting, the movement. Even the men lowering Pooh Bear’s cage stopped their cranking.

  Silence.

  The crowd of guards turned.

  To behold a man standing at their rear, beside the blazing cross, fearsomely illuminated by its firelight, a terrifying figure literally covered in his own blood—it was on his face, on his clothes, and most obviously, on the rag wrapped around his wounded right hand.

  Newly risen from the dead, from beneath a great stone slab at the base of a deep stone pit, it was Jack West Jr., and he was pissed as hell.

  IF THE KILLING of Jack West by his own father had raised comparisons to Christ in the minds of the fundamentalist Ethiopian Christian guards, now his resurrection chilled them to the core.

  That he had already silently disarmed four of their number during their wild dancing and now held a gun in his good hand only served to make them believe even more that this man had Godlike abilities.

  Except for one thing.

  Jack West Jr. was not a merciful god.

  It had taken Jack six hours, six long hours of careful shifting and excruciatingly painful movements to get himself out.

  Blocking the fall of the stone slab had been frightening enough.

  As the great slab had been slid across his pit, Jack had thought quickly: the only thing he possessed that could possibly withstand the weight of such a slab was his titanium forearm.