A volley of tracer rounds came in through the only apparent doorway and smacked into the corpse, thudding into it with loud fleshy slaps.

Huddled behind the corpse, Jack saw that he was indeed inside an ancient chapel-like chamber.

The rear wall of the place had a doorway set into it, but the doorway was entirely filled with a thick slab of metal that shone dully. It was a slab of metal, Jack realised, that he had seen before.

This is the other end of the Emperor’s Route, he thought. If the way had not been shut off earlier, this is where that tunnel after the entry cavern would have eventually led.

On the opposite side of the chapel was a square stone doorway that led outside: the only way out. To Jack’s surprise, dim sunlight seeped in through it.

Unfortunately, another wave of bullets came fizzing in through the doorway and Jack lay flat behind Mendoza’s corpse as it took more sickening impacts.

But then it happened.

The golden cage shuddered . . . and began to lower back down into the hole through which it had entered the chapel.

And suddenly Jack had no choice but to get off it.

Amid a hail of bullet sparks, he leapt away from the corpse, firing Mendoza’s assault rifle as he jumped off the lowering golden cage. The gun fired four shots before it clicked, empty, as Jack slid behind an altar a few feet away . . .

. . . only to slam into someone else already taking cover behind that altar, trying to avoid the same incoming fusillade of gunfire.

Sphinx.

In his wildest imaginings, Jack never thought he’d find himself taking cover from a hail of gunfire with his mortal rival and bitter enemy, Hardin Lancaster XII, the Sphinx.

Cruel yet shrewd, Sphinx was the man who had made Jack’s life a living hell during the trials of the secret cities and the iron mountains.

He was the one who had forced Jack to conquer the flooded city of Atlantis while he’d kept Lily captive in a drowning cell and then made Jack think that Lily had been sacrificed at the Rock of Gibraltar.

Sphinx had variously beheaded nuns or fed them to Vandals. And in his insatiable desire to create a new world order that he alone would rule as an unchallenged tyrant, he had unleashed the Siren bells on the world, putting the populations of entire cities to sleep—many of which he did not intend to wake; he would just let them starve in their comas.

Right now, Sphinx was huddled behind the little stone altar as bullets sparked and ricocheted off its front face. He held an assault rifle of his own that was also evidently dry.

‘It’s him!’ Sphinx yelled above the din. ‘Fucking maniac!’

Jack didn’t need to be told who the problem was.