‘Oh, Captain West,’ Sphinx said. ‘You had courage, I’ll grant you that. But you were weak. Weak and sentimental. Motivated by all the wrong reasons. Look where that got you.’

He snorted and said again, ‘Look where that got you.’

Then he tossed the helmet back to the ground and hurried onward, racing down the remainder of the bridge.

From the base of the black tower, Zoe saw them coming.

‘Quick, this way,’ she said, guiding Alby and Lily around the back of the tower, away from the exceedingly steep stairs cut into its front face. ‘We can’t outrun those guns, so we have to hide.’

Clinging to the rocky exterior of the ancient tower, they climbed around it, hanging on by their fingertips and toes, disappearing from view just as Sphinx and Mendoza burst through the last cupola with their assault rifles up.

Sphinx and Mendoza passed by their spot without seeing them and began climbing the steep stairs of the tower, heading for its lofty summit, consumed by their race against Rastor.

When she felt the coast was clear, Zoe crept out from the rear of the tower.

Lily and Alby came out behind her.

‘What do we do now?’ Alby asked.

Lily just stared into space.

Zoe’s mind was a mess. She was literally trying to hold herself together.

She pursed her lips, trying to snap out of it.

‘We have to keep going without him,’ she said. ‘We have to keep trying. That’s what Jack would want us to do. Come on, while we’re still breathing, we still have a chance.’

And so they climbed the black tower, ascending its ultra-steep stairs. Indeed, the stairs were so steep, it was more like climbing a slippery stone ladder.

At last, they came to the summit of the tower, where they found an open-sided temple made of a dozen sturdy trilithons formed into a circle with no roof.

Far above them they saw the golden cage again, now lowering on its cable from a round hole in the cavern’s ceiling high, high above, returning from whatever was up there.

Alby stared in awe at the trilithons ringing the space. ‘This is just like Stonehenge. Or, rather, Stonehenge is like this.’

Zoe was gazing up at the returning gold cage. ‘Sphinx and Mendoza must have just left—’

‘No, only Lord Sphinx left,’ a voice said from behind her. ‘I had to stay.’

Zoe spun, as did Lily and Alby . . .

. . . to see a lone man emerge from behind one of the huge trilithons, gripping a Steyr AUG assault rifle in his hands.

Cardinal Ricardo Mendoza.

‘What happened? Did your boss leave you behind?’ Zoe said contemptuously.