“Professor Epper,”a voice said in English.“This is Colonel Mao Gongli. We know you are in there, and we are coming in. Try nothing foolish, or you shall meet the same fate as your assistant.”
The Chinese troops entered the chamber quickly, abseiling down drop-ropes with clinical precision.
Within two minutes, Wizard and Tank were surrounded by a dozen men with guns.
Colonel Mao Gongli entered last of all. At fifty-five years of age, he was a portly man, but he stood with perfect poise, ramrod straight. Like many men of his generation, he’d been patriotically named after Chairman Mao. He had no operational nickname except the one his enemies had given him after his actions at Tiananmen Square in 1989 as a major—the Butcher of Tiananmen, they called him.
Silence hung in the air.
Mao stared at Wizard with dead eyes. When at last he spoke, he did so in clear, clipped English.
“Professor Max T. Epper, call sign Merlin, but known to some as Wizard. Canadian by birth, but resident Professor of Archaeology at Trinity College, Dublin. Connected with the rather unusual incident that took place atop the Great Pyramid at Giza on March 20, 2006.
“And Professor Yobu Tanaka, from the University of Tokyo. Not connected with the Giza incident, but an expert on ancient civilizations. Gentlemen, your assistant was a gifted and intelligent young man. You can see how much I care for such men.”
“What do you want?” Wizard demanded.
Mao smiled, a thin joyless smile.
“Why Professor Epper, I want you. ”
Wizard frowned. He hadn’t expected that answer.
Mao stepped forward, gazing at the grand chamber around them. “Great times are upon us, Professor. In the coming months, empires will rise and nations will fall. In times such as these, the People’s Republic of China needs knowledgeable men, men like you. Which is why you work for me now, Professor. And I’m sure that with the right kind of persuasion—in one of my torture chambers—you are going to help me find the Six Ramesean Stones.”
GREAT SANDY DESERT
NORTHWESTERN AUSTRALIA
DECEMBER 1, 2007, 0715 HOURS
ON THE DAY his farm was attacked with overwhelming force, Jack West Jr. had slept in till 7:00 A.M.
Normally he got up around six to see the dawn, but life was good these days. His world had been at peace for almost eighteen months, so he decided to skip the damn dawn and get an extra hour’s sleep.
The kids, of course, were already up. Lily had a friend over for the summer holidays, a little boy from her school named Alby Calvin.
Noisy and excited and generally up to mischief, they’d played nonstop for the past three days, exploring every corner of the vast desert farm by day, while at night they gazed up at the stars through Alby’s telescope.
That Alby was partially deaf meant little to Lily or to Jack. At their school in Perth for gifted and talented students, Lily was the star linguist and Alby the star mathematician and that was all that mattered.
At eleven, she now knew six languages, two of them ancient and one of them sign language—it had been easily acquired and was actually something that she and Jack had done together. Today the end tips of her beautiful long black hair were colored electric pink.
For his part, Alby was twelve, black, and wore large thick-lensed glasses. He had a cochlear implant, the miraculous technology that allowed the deaf to hear, and spoke with a slightly rounded inflection—signing was still necessary for those times when he needed to understand extra emotion or urgency in a matter—but deaf or not, Alby Calvin could rumble with the best of them.
West was standing on the porch with his shirt off, sipping a mug of coffee. His left arm glinted in the morning sun—from the bicep down, it was entirely made of metal.
He gazed out at the wide desert landscape, hazy in the morning light. Of medium height, with blue eyes and tousled dark hair, he was handsome in a rugged kind of way. Once upon a time, he had been ranked the fourth-best special forces soldier in the world, a lone Australian on a list dominated by Americans.
But he was no longer a soldier. After leading a daring ten-year mission to acquire the fabled Golden Capstone of the Great Pyramid from the remains of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, he was now more a treasure hunter than a warrior, more skilled at skirting booby-trapped cave systems and deciphering ancient riddles than killing people.
The adventure with the Capstone, which had ended atop the Great Pyramid, had forged West’s relationship with Lily. Since her parents were dead, Jack had raised her—with the help of a truly unique team of international soldiers. Soon after the Capstone mission had concluded, he had formally adopted her.
And since that day nearly two years ago, he had lived out here in splendid isolation, away from missions, away from the world, only traveling to Perth when Lily’s schooling required it.
As for the Golden Capstone, it sat in all its glory in an abandoned nickel mine behind his farmhouse.
A few months back, a newspaper article had troubled West.
An Australian special forces trooper named Oakes had been killed in Iraq, shot to death in an ambush, the first Australian battle casualty inany conflict in nearly two years.
It bothered West because he was one of the few people in the world who knew exactly why no Australian had been killed in battle these past eighteen months. It had to do with the Tartarus Rotation of 2006 and the Capstone: thanks to his performance of an ancient ritual back then, West had assured Australia invulnerability for what was supposed to be a very long time.
But now with the death of that soldier in Iraq, that period of invulnerability appeared to be over.
The date of the man’s death had struck him: August 21. It was suspiciously close to the northern autumnal
