Zoe gazed at the twins and the kids. “Bet you haven’t seen that before. Come on.” She hurriedly reerected her stepladder, heading for the Firestone. “We’re done. Lachlan, Julius: lower the Altar Stone, put it back exactly where you found it. Then we have to motor. Wizard and Jack are not gonna believe this.”
When the two security guards awoke two hours later, groggy and dazed, they found Stonehenge undamaged, seemingly untouched.
There were several sets of footprints among the central stones, suggesting unusual activity, but nothing was missing. Except for the hole that had once housed the Altar Stone—it had been cleared of dirt—everything, thankfully, was where it should be.
The next day there would be reports from locals of a glowing purple light emanating from the area, but they were quickly dismissed. Every year there were at least a dozen UFO sightings over the Salisbury Plain and numerous other crackpot claims.
And so as dawn came, Stonehenge stood once again, tall and silent, maintaining its centuries-old watch over the ancient landscape.
SICHUAN MOUNTAINS, CHINA
DECEMBER5, 2007, 5:35P.M.
AROUND the same time Zoe and the twins were watching the wondrous lightshow at Stonehenge, Jack and Wizard were soaring over the wild, rugged mountains of central China in the hold of their stolen Hind helicopter, aware that a sizeable portion of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army—some 1.2 million men—were at that very moment mobilizing to hunt them down.
With them were Stretch, Astro, Scimitar, Vulture, and the injured Tank Tanaka.
Sky Monster had taken The Halicarnassus south, just over the Burmese border, where he waited patiently for the extraction call.
“It is absolutely imperative that we get the Philosopher’s Stone,” Wizard said to Jack when they were alone in a corner of the hold. He munched hungrily on some food while he put on clean clothes.
“I got that impression from your notes,” Jack said. “So that’s where we’re going right now. It’s also why we needed to get this helicopter.”
Jack told Wizard about the meeting in Dubai, about the new coalition of nations helping them in this quest— including America and Saudi Arabia—and most importantly, what they had so far deduced from Wizard’s research.
“But I need to know more, Max,” he concluded. “Your notes were good, but we could only piece together so much.”
“Yes, yes…”
“For instance, the part where you said the Sa-Benben and the Philosopher’s Stone were central to everything. Why?”
Wizard’s head snapped up. “Good God, Jack, you didn’t bring the Firestone with you, did you? We can’t allow our enemies to have both it and Laozi’s Stone.”
“No, I didn’t,” Jack said. “Zoe has it. In England. She’s gone to Stonehenge with the Firestone, the twins, and the kids.”
“You got in touch with the twins? Oh,excellent,” Wizard said, sighing deeply. “And Stonehenge. Stonehenge and the Sa-Benben. But, wait, it must be done during the Titanic Ris—”
“Got it covered.”
Wizard stared off into space, smiled. “I only wish I could have been there to see it. I’m glad you figured that out.”
“Wasn’t me. It was Lily’s friend, Alby.”
“Ah, Alby. Smart boy. And such a good friend to Lily. As things get more difficult, she will need companions like him…” Wizard’s voice trailed off, his eyes glazing over into a deep sadness.
As he spoke, Jack scanned the torture scars on the old man’s face, the bruises and gashes, the dried blood on his beard. Wizard had been through the wringer in that prison.
“Oh, Jack,” Wizard said. “The situation is dire. Most dire. It’s like nothing we’ve ever encountered before.”
“Tell me.”
“The world has reached a critical stage in its existence. A turning point has come, a testing point, a time at which the Earth can either renew itself or be destroyed. The Tartarus Rotation was just the beginning, merely the first step in a far larger drama.”
“The coming of this Dark Sun?” Jack prompted.
“The coming of the Dark Sun is only part of it. There are many unexplained things in our world, Jack, and with the coming of the zero-point field, this Dark Sun, many of them will reveal their true purpose. The Great Pyramid and its Capstone are just the start. Stonehenge. Nazca. Easter Island. It all comes together now, with the coming of the Dark Sun. A coalescence of ancient things. But the greatest thing to fear, as always, is man himself.”
“Why?”
Wizard said, “Let me backtrack.”
He grabbed a sheet from his notes, indicated a picture on it that Jack recalled seeing before:
Wizard said, “This is the common symbol for the Great Machine. Now, as you deduced correctly from my notes, the Machine is simply our planet. As the image shows, at six locations around our planet are six underground shrines, pyramidal in shape and inverted, but gigantic, and all pointing down toward the center of the Earth. Note the downward-pointing pyramids in the picture, with the white rectangular pillars sticking out of them.
“While the Machine is depicted in this image as a flat two-dimensional structure, we should picture it three-
