Chloe Carnarvon said, ‘About fucking time. I’ve been delayed here in Salzburg. There’s been an issue with the royal banker. But with Iolanthe dead, there’s no hurry with the Blue Bell now. We don’t need to have it before the Omega Event, just after, so I’ll go to London tomorrow.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’ The spotter hung up and departed.

He never saw Iolanthe and Nobody emerge from within the estate’s main mansion thirty minutes later and flee in one of the servants’ cars.

It took them a whole day of travel, but Iolanthe and Nobody eventually found their way to the Turkish mainland.

Their goal was to find a plane of some sort, any plane that could get them to New York City fast.

Ironically, they found one at a small provincial airport near Hisarlik, the town that tourists from around the world visit believing it to be the site of the fabled city of Troy.

They stole a private jet from that airport—a sleek Gulfstream IV—and took off immediately for New York City.

As night fell, Nobody put the plane on autopilot and joined Iolanthe in the main cabin.

She sat with her eyes closed, clearly still thinking about Bertie and coming to terms with his sacrifice.

When she looked up at Nobody, her cheeks were wet with tears.

Nobody handed her a tissue and as she wiped her eyes, he said, ‘You gotta bring me up to speed here. You said Chloe was going to the wrong obelisk. Care to tell me why?’

‘We caught a break,’ Iolanthe said. ‘Not a big one, it might only amount to an hour or so, but a break nonetheless. Chloe is going to smash open the obelisk in London, but it’s the wrong one.’

‘How so?’

‘The crucial clue to finding the Blue Bell was in that final line of the inscription on Priam’s crown: the Blue Bell is embedded inside the obelisk that gives all life forever.

‘The two obelisks in London and New York were built by the Egyptian pharaoh Thuthmoses III and they are identical. Thuthmoses inscribed both of them with a dizzying array of hieroglyphs that are exactly the same. Except for one tiny detail that only a handful of people in the world know. Both inscriptions conclude with the description of the pharaoh as “Son of the Sun, Thuthmoses III”, only the New York obelisk has one extra line. It finishes with: “Son of the Sun, Thuthmoses III, who giveth all life forever.”’

Iolanthe gave Nobody a hard look.

‘When she finds nothing inside the London obelisk, Chloe’s going to realise that she went to the wrong one. We need to fly directly to New York as fast as we can and go to the correct obelisk, the one in Central Park, and extract the Blue Bell from it before she realises her error.’