was filled with masterpieces and the occasional high French window looking out over the Seine.
And right then, a second team of armed museum guards were running down it, shouting.
West hurled his huge wrench at the first French window in the hallway, shattering it. Glass sprayed everywhere.
He peered out the window.
To see Pooh Bear staring back at him, level with him, only a few feet away . . .
. . . standing on the open top deck of a double-decker bus!
Only one thing stands between the Louvre and the River Seine: a thin strip of road called the Quai des Tuileries. It is a long riverside roadway that follows the course of the river, variously rising and falling—rising up to bridges and dipping down into tunnels and underpasses.
It was on this road that Pooh Bear's recently-stolen double-decker bus now stood, parked alongside the Palais du Louvre. It was one of those bright red open-topped double-deckers that drive tourists around Paris, London and New York, allowing them to look up and around with ease.
'Well! What are you waiting for!' Pooh Bear yelled. 'Come on!'
'Right!'
West threw Lily across first, then pushed Big Ears with the Piece in his backpack, before finally jumping from the First Floor window onto the double-decker bus—just as the onrushing guards in
the hallway started firing at him.
A second after his feet hit the open top deck of the bus, Stretch, in the driver's seat, hit the gas and the bus took off and the chase began.
The big red double-decker bus rocked precariously as Stretch threw it through the midday Paris traffic at speeds it was never meant to reach.
Police sirens could be heard in the distance.
'Go left and left again!' West yelled down. 'Back around the Louvre! Back to the Obelisk!'
The bus took the bends fast, and West came down to look over Stretch's shoulder.
'When we get there, what then?' Stretch asked.
West peered forward—and saw the Obelisk appear beyond the rushing line of trees to their left, its base still shrouded by scaffolding.
'I want you to ram into the scaffolding.'
The double-decker bus screamed onto the Place de la Concorde, almost tipping over with its speed.
The guards at the scaffolding surrounding the Obelisk realised just in time what it was going to do and leapt out of the way, diving clear a moment before the bus slammed into the near corner of the scaffold structure and obliterated a whole chunk of it.
The bus shuddered to a halt—
—and the tiny figure of Jack West could be seen leaping from its open top deck
Up the scaffolding West ran, until he came to the topmost level and saw the Obelisk itself.
The size of a bell tower, it was totally covered in deeply-engraved hieroglyphics. It soared into the sky high above him.
The hieroglyphs were large and carved in horizontal lines— approximately three glyphs to a line, depicting pharaonic cartouches, images of Osiris, and animals: falcons, wasps and in the second line from the very top, owls.
Using the deeply-carved hieroglyphs as hand- and footholds, West clambered up the ancient Obelisk like a child scampering up a tall tree.
Stretch's voice exploded through his earpiece.
'How far away?'
'Keep me posted. Although somehow I think we're going to have more to worry about than the Paris cops.'
West scaled the great stone needle quickly, climbing higher and higher, until even the big red bus looked tiny beneath him.
He came to the top, more than seventy feet above the ground. The Sun reflecting off the golden pyramidion at its peak was blinding.
He recalled the quote from Hessler's notebook:
THREAD THE POWER OF RA THROUGH THE EYES OF
GREAT RAMESES'S TOWERING NEEDLES,
FROM THE SECOND OWL ON THE FIRST
TO THE THIRD ON THE SECOND . . .
. . . WHEREBY ISKENDER'S FINAL RESTING PLACE WILL BE REVEALED.
'The third owl on the second obelisk,' he said aloud.
Sure enough, on the second line of this obelisk—the second obelisk from Luxor—there were three carved owls standing side-by-side.
And near the head of the third one was a small circle depicting the Sun.
He imagined that very few people in history had actually seen
this carving up close, since it was designed to sit so high above the populace—but up close, the carved image of the disc-like Sun looked odd, as if it were not a carved image but rather . . . well . . . a
West grabbed the plug and pulled it free—
—to reveal a horizontal cavity roughly two fingers wide and perfectly round in shape, that bored
Like a kid scaling a coconut tree, West clambered around the other side of the Obelisk's peak, where he found and extracted a second matching plug and suddenly, looking through the bore-hole, he could see right through the ancient Obelisk!
West ignored him, yanked from his jacket two high-tech devices: a laser altimeter, to measure the exact height of the bore-hole, and a digital surveyor's inclinometer, to measure the exact angle of the bore-hole, both vertically and laterally.
With these measurements, he could then go to Luxor in Egypt and recreate this obelisk 'virtually', and thus deduce the location of Alexander the Great's Tomb.
His altimeter beeped. Got the height.
He aimed his inclinometer through the bore-hole. It beeped. Got the angles.
And he was away, sliding down the Obelisk with his feet splayed wide, like a fireman shooting down a ladder.
His feet hit the scaffolding just as six cop cars screeched to a halt around the perimeter of the Place de la Concorde and disgorged a dozen cap-wearing Parisian cops.
'Stretch! Fire her up! Get moving,' West called as he ran across the top level of the three-storey scaffold structure. 'I'll get there the short way!'
The bus reversed out of the scaffolding, then Stretch grinded the gears and the big red bus lurched forwards, just as Jack West took a flying leap off the top level and sailed down through the air . . .
. . . landing with a thump on the top deck of the bus, a second before it sped away toward the River Seine.
From the moment of their daring heist at the Louvre, other forces had been launched into action.
As one would expect, a theft from the Louvre instantly shot across the Paris police airwaves—airwaves that were monitored by other forces of the state.
What Stretch didn't know was that the Paris police had been outranked at the highest levels
