Iolanthe shook her head again. ‘Like I said, I really don’t deserve a guy like you. But if we get out of this alive, I’ll go on that date.’

Nobody smiled.

An hour or so later, with only a few hours till the Omega Event, they began their descent into New York.

New York City, U.S.A.

28 December, 1900 hours (local time)

[29 December, 0300 hours in the Labyrinth]

Two hours and six minutes till Omega

John F. Kennedy Airport, usually one of the busiest airports in the world, lay eerily deserted as Nobody’s and Iolanthe’s jet touched down on one of its runways.

Night had fallen, but the city that never sleeps was dark and silent.

Nobody and Iolanthe sprinted out of the plane and helped themselves to a nearby charter helicopter—a nice fast Bell Jet Ranger—which Nobody immediately flew toward the famous skyline of New York City.

They boomed over Queens, sweeping low over the freeways and flyovers that led to Manhattan.

Normally at this time of day, those thoroughfares would be clogged with slow-moving traffic.

Today, they were jammed—with countless cars, cabs, trucks and vans—but there was nothing normal about it.

There was no movement.

All the vehicles on the roads were still.

They lay askew or pushed up against each other, banked on the kerbs, or just sitting where they had been when the Siren bell had been rung here.

As their helicopter shot over the steel towers of the Williamsburg Bridge, Iolanthe and Nobody saw hundreds of cars frozen at all angles on the bridge, more victims of the bell.

And then their chopper was rushing through the canyons of New York City—with buildings on either side of it and empty streets below—before it burst out into open space above the wide green expanse of Central Park.

Nobody banked the chopper around, bringing it to the middle part of the park over by Fifth Avenue, and the giant flat building that was the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Behind the Met, they saw it.

It rose above the trees, a great stone thing, grey and pitted, slender and tall; an ancient object truly out of time and place in this most modern of cities.

The New York Obelisk.

Cleopatra’s Needle.

How the towering granite obelisk came to New York City in 1881 was a story in itself.

Just getting it from the docks on the Hudson River over to Central Park had been a herculean effort requiring specially made railway tracks, bridges and custom-designed lifting cranes.

A gift to the United States from the Khedive of Egypt, the obelisk had suffered in the modern polluted air of New York City. Even though it was cleaned often, soot and exhaust fumes had caked it in a layer of urban grime.

Nobody hovered their chopper beside the seventy-foot-tall obelisk.

‘Okay,’ he said, ‘what do we do now?’