The Cult of Osiris

round in a savage left turn, clearing the concrete by inches.

The harbour opened out before them, Monaco shimmering under the sun on three sides. Eddie aimed for the inner harbour; the outer harbour’s high quays were built for commercial ships and liners, not tiny pleasure craft. They needed to find a lower pier to get ashore.

Nina looked back. ‘Oh, crap!’ The Solar Barque was right behind them, its prow a giant knife blade slicing through the water. Gaining. ‘Faster, faster! Seriously, go faster!’

‘It’s a jet ski, not a jet fighter!’ Eddie complained. ‘If anyone sticks their head over the side, blow it off!’

Nina awkwardly turned in her seat, pointing the gun up at the looming bow. She saw a man lean over the port side, spotting the jet ski. He hurriedly ducked out of sight as she fired a couple of shots.

They entered the inner harbour, Eddie turning to make landfall at the northwestern corner - and saw a new threat powering towards them. Not from Osir’s people; this was a police boat, siren wailing. The chaos outside the harbour had inevitably attracted attention. An officer shouted commands over a megaphone, ordering both vessels to stop. ‘Buggeration and fuckery!’

‘Any friends in the Monaco police department?’ Nina asked hopefully. The absence of an answer was enough. ‘Thought not!’

More figures appeared at the bow railing, guns pointing down—

Nina fired first. One man retreated sharply; the other was hit in the shoulder. He spun backwards, finger convulsively tightening on his trigger . . .

Sending a stream of armour-piercing bullets up the front of the superstructure.

The bridge window blew out - and the captain, at the wheel behind it, was hit square in the forehead. He collapsed over the instrument panel, dead. The throttle control was pushed to full beneath him - and with the other crew members all on deck trying to shoot Nina and Eddie, there was nobody to take over . . .

The police boat altered course to cut off the chase. Eddie darted behind it, the jet ski leaping out of the water as it crashed through its wake. He glimpsed an officer in the stern raising a rifle. ‘Down!’ he warned Nina, looking back to see when the man was going to fire.

He wasn’t. Instead, he was leaping desperately out of the boat, his companions diving off the bow.

A moment later, the Solar Barque ploughed over the smaller craft, ripping it in half. The smashed boat’s fuel tanks exploded, the yacht carving through the fireball as it blindly pursued the jet ski. One of Osir’s men flung himself into the harbour as flames rolled across the foredeck.

‘Jesus!’ Nina cried. ‘Are they insane?’

Eddie turned again, aiming for a small slipway between the crowded quays. The yacht didn’t follow. ‘I don’t think anyone’s driving.’

‘What? But I only winged that guy!’

‘I’m not complaining!’

The Solar Barque surged past behind them, any thoughts amongst its crew of shooting the fugitives replaced by simple survival instinct as they dived overboard. The yacht was powering straight for a clutch of smaller but still hugely expensive vessels in the corner of the harbour, their occupants’ attention suddenly diverted from the racing before them to the rapidly approaching behemoth behind. People fled screaming down the gangways.

‘Get ready to run,’ Eddie told Nina. ‘Soon as we hit land, we leg it, and don’t stop until we’re half a mile away!’

The jet ski shot up the slipway, keel scraping noisily along the concrete. Crash barriers rose ahead: the racing circuit ran right along the harbourfront. Eddie yanked at the controls, but out of the water there was no way to steer the Kawasaki. It hit the corrugated metal, flinging both passengers painfully against the handlebars.

A race marshal nearby saw the unexpected collision and started to run to them - then froze in shock as the Solar Barque, smoke billowing from its scorched bow, rammed into the harbour at close to thirty miles an hour.

The smaller yachts disintegrated into fireballs of multi-million dollar debris as it smashed through them. A larger vessel was flipped on its side - and the megayacht ran up over it to crash down on the quay, its mangled prow ripping apart the crash barriers. The Solar Barque skidded across the track like a steel wall, beaching itself in front of a grandstand as it screeched to a stop.

Mikko Virtanen was still in the lead, powering out of the chicane on the harbour’s northern side - to find a towering white barrier where he expected to see a corner. The marshals came to their senses and frantically waved warning flags, but it was too late for the Finn.

He stamped on the brakes, his car skidding past Nina and Eddie’s position and spinning out before crashing tail first into the hull. Another million dollars of Team Osiris hardware was reduced to shrapnel, what was left of the body whirling back along the track and grinding to a standstill. Again, the car’s designers had done their job perfectly; dazed but unharmed, Virtanen shakily opened his visor and blinked up at the people staring at him over the barrier.

Nina nudged Eddie. ‘You know you said to run as soon as we got to land?’

‘Yeah? Oh, right.’ They sprinted away as more marshals hurried to the scene.

‘You did that?’ said Macy in amazement, indicating a helicopter shot of the beached yacht on a TV screen. ‘Wow! That must be like a hundred million dollars in trashed boats!’

‘I told Osir it’d cost him,’ Nina said, looking warily round the hotel lobby. The fences surrounding the circuit were designed to keep spectators out; exiting hadn’t been hard, but there had been the constant worry that the police were hunting for them as they made their way back to Casino Square. So far, nobody had recognised them - the cameras were focused on the race, not the harbour, until moments before the Solar Barque crashed spectacularly ashore - but she still wanted to get out of the principality as soon as possible. At the very least, there would be several angry insurance companies after their heads.

‘Sucks for Mikko, though. Poor guy. He really thought he was going to win.’

Eddie gave her a look. ‘Wait, you talked to Mikko Virtanen?’

She grinned. ‘I did more than just talk to him.’ Seeing Nina’s and Eddie’s expressions of dawning realisation, she went on: ‘What? I wasn’t going to walk around the streets all night after the casino closed. Where did you think I got this?’ She showed off the expensive soft leather jacket in Team Osiris’s colours she was wearing over her shimmering dress.

‘You didn’t nick it off him, did you?’ Eddie asked.

‘Of course not!’ she said, offended. ‘It was a gift. You know, he’s fast on the track, but in bed—’

‘Okay, heard enough,’ said Nina hurriedly.

‘Nice work in the casino, by the way,’ Eddie told Macy. ‘That big bugger would’ve tackled me if you hadn’t tripped him.’

Macy smiled. ‘I just remembered what you said about always being ready for action - and I figured that with you two, there’s always action.’

‘Unfortunately,’ said Nina, grimacing. ‘But never mind that. There are more important things.’ She took the photo of the zodiac from her pocket and showed it to Macy. Though crumpled, the picture was still clear enough to show the details of the painted relief. ‘I think I figured out where the pyramid is. It’s somewhere near Abydos.’ She quickly explained her reasoning.

Macy regarded the picture in wonderment. ‘That’d make sense. Abydos was supposed to be the site of Osiris’s tomb - nobody’s ever found it, but the Egyptians definitely believed it was near there. All the First Dynasty pharaohs were buried there so they could be close to Osiris. You think the pyramid’s to the west?’ Nina nodded. ‘That fits, too. The western desert was supposedly where the dead went to enter the Underworld, where the sun went down.’

‘What about the “second eye of Osiris”? Does that ring any bells?’

Macy frowned, thinking. ‘The second eye? I dunno. Unless . . .’ Her dark eyes opened wide. ‘Unless it’s something in the Osireion!’

‘The what?’ Eddie asked.

‘The Osireion - it’s a building, it’s meant to be a copy of Osiris’s tomb.’