Seven Ancient Wonders

He fell, and his world began to darken at the edges.

Oddly, the last thing he heard before he fell into blackness was Lily shouting to someone: 'No! Forget Alexander! Take me instead!'

His face a mess of blood and dust, West rose from the edge of the platform and turned to head back to the Capstone—

—only to find himself staring into the barrel of Marshall Judah's Glock, just as del Piero had. He froze.

'You should be proud, Jack!' Judah called. 'This is all your doing! You led us to this juncture! But all the while you were working for me! There is nothing you can think of, nothing you can do, nothing you have, that I do not already possess! Why, I even have your little girl to use for the ritual! Tragically, you won't live to see her fulfil her destiny! Goodbye, Jack!'

Judah tightened his trigger finger . . .

'That's not true!' West shouted above the din. 'I do have one thing you don't have! Something that was once yours!'

'What?'

'Horus!'

At that instant, a blurring flash of brown streaked through the air, cutting across Judah's face, and suddenly Judah screamed, his face spraying blood. He threw his hands to his eyes, still half-holding the gun.

Horus swooped clear of the screaming Judah, clutching something in her talons . . . something white and round and trailing a ragged bloody tail.

It was Judah's entire left eye, including the optic nerve.

Horus had ripped it clean from its socket!

Judah dropped to his knees, wailing, 'My eye! My eye!'

At the same time, with his good eye, he saw the Capstone and yelled with even more anguish: 'Oh, God, no . . . !'

West spun too—and he also saw the nightmare scenario take physical form.

For there, standing at the Capstone, having taken Lily from Wizard and ushered her at gunpoint into the sacrificial cavity in the base of the Capstone and having re-filled the crucible inside the cavity with exactly one deben of the fine-grained sand from his black-jade box, was Mustapha Zaeed, now reading from Judah's notebook, performing the ritual of power!

It was Zaeed who had crept unseen from the wing-door of the Halicarnassus earlier, having stowed aboard the plane in Iran after the confrontation at the Hanging Gardens.

It was he who had followed West and Pooh Bear to the rendezvous with Sky Monster and crept aboard the plane through its landing gear, unnoticed—assuming correctly that West would come here to confront the Americans one last time.

Once on board, Zaeed had crept to his old trunk and pulled

from it his prized black-jade box, filled with the fine-grained sand, sand that he had kept for so long in his secret cave in Saudi Arabia—sand unique to the Arabian Peninsula, sand that would bring to the Muslim world a thousand years of unchallenged power.

Now, here, on the platform, it was he who had struck Wizard from behind. As he'd done so, he had spotted Alexander lowering himself over the edge nearby, and he'd been about to grab the boy to perform the ritual, when suddenly Lily had said, 'No! Forget Alexander! Take me instead!'

And so Zaeed had.

Now he only had to utter seven lines.

It took him fifteen seconds.

And there, atop the Great Pyramid at Giza, under the blinding Sun-ray from the Tartarus Sunspot in the roaring wind and the blazing heat, to the horror of everyone else watching powerlessly, Mustapha Zaeed—his voice resonating with evil reverence— uttered the final words of the ritual of power.

This time, West had no doubt that the ritual had been performed correctly.

It sounded like the end of the universe.

Flaring light.

Clashing thunder.

The very Earth shook.

What followed next made man's most spectacular fireworks shows look positively puny.

The dazzling-white beam of light reaching down from the Sun pulsed brilliantly, as if it were doubling in intensity.

An unearthly thunderclap boomed, causing West's ears to ring, and a white-hot ball of superbrilliant energy thundered out of the sky, racing down the length of the vertical beam before rushing headlong into the Capstone . . .

. . . where the Capstone received it within its crystal array.

Inside the Golden Capstone, the energy-burst rushed down through its seven layers of crystals—each layer refining the beam into an ever-smaller, ever-more-intense thread of superluminous light.

And then this superthin beam struck Lily in the heart.

The little girl convulsed, hit by the lightbeam. The beam, however, seemed to pass right through her chest and strike the soil in the crucible.

With a blinding flash, the soil was instantly transformed to cinders.

Seen from the outside, the Capstone shone with blinding brilliance as it received the energy-burst, before with a terrible whump, the white-hot ball disappeared into it, and the phenomenon abruptly ceased and all was quiet, save for a deep humming that came from the Capstone and the drone of the Halicarnassus's engines.

West could only stare at the Capstone, and wonder what had happened to Lily inside it. Could she have survived such a phenomenon? Or had Zaeed been right when he'd said she would die in the ceremony?

Zaeed stood beside the Capstone, his arms raised in triumph, his face upturned to the sky. 'A thousand years! A thousand years of Islamic rule!'

He rounded on West, eyes glowering, hands spread wide.

'The ritual is done, infidel! Which means my people are unconquerable! Invincible! And you— you—will be the first to feel my wrath!'

'Is that so?' West said, jamming a new clip into one of his Desert Eagles and aiming it at Zaeed.

'Fire your weapon!' Zaeed taunted him. 'Bullets cannot help you anymore!'

'Fine,' West said.

Bam!—he fired.

The bullet hit Zaeed square in the chest, sending him jolting backwards. Blood sprayed outwards and the terrorist dropped to the ground, to his knees, his face the picture of shock and confusion.

He stared at his wound, then up at West.

'But. . . how . . . ?'

'I knew you were on my plane after the Hanging Gardens,' West said. 'I knew you'd try to stow aboard. How else were you going to get here? You've been chasing this all your life, you weren't going to stay away. So I let you stow aboard.'

'But the sand . . .'

'While you were hiding in the belly of my plane, I took the liberty

of changing the sand in your black-jade box,' West said. 'It's not the soil of Arabia anymore. What you put inside the Capstone was the soil of my homeland. You just performed the ritual of power for my people, Zaeed, not yours. Thanks.'

Zaeed was thunderstruck. He looked away, considering the consequences. 'Your soil? But that would mean . . .'

He never finished the sentence, for at that moment life escaped him, and Mustapha Zaeed dropped to the platform, dead.

There came a sudden pained shout—'WEST!'—and West spun to see Marshall Judah lunging toward him, blood and flesh dangling from his ripped-open eye socket, and an M-4 assault rifle in his hands, taken from one of his dead CIEF troops.