Seven Ancient Wonders - Matthew Reilly [65]
‘What?’
‘Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me,’ West said. ‘Twice now Judah and his Americans have arrived at our location only hours after we got there. The Sudan wasn’t conclusive, since they could have tracked the Europeans there. But Tunisia was different. First, the Europeans weren’t in Tunisia. Second, even if Judah has a copy of the Callimachus Text, he couldn’t have found Hamilcar’s Refuge. He needed Euclid’s Instructions to find it and we have the only copy in existence. They followed us there. Someone on our team led them there. Sent up a tracing signal, or somehow got a message out to Judah.’
Wizard’s face fell. The thought of a rat in their ranks actually pained him—he felt like they had all become something of a family. ‘Jack, we’ve been working with these people for ten years. How could any of them undermine our mission now?’
‘Stretch hasn’t been with us for ten years. He’s only been with us for three. And he wasn’t a part of the original team. He crashed the party, remember. And he represents Israel, not the coalition of the minnows.’
Wizard said, ‘But he’s really become a part of the team. I know he and Pooh Bear have Arab–Israeli issues, but I’d say he’s blended in rather well.’
‘And if he hasn’t been making secret reports to the Mossad, I’ll eat my own helmet,’ West said.
‘Hmmm, true.’
West threw out another option: ‘Pooh Bear? The Arab world is five hundred years behind the West. They’d love to get their hands on the Capstone, and Pooh’s father, the Sheik, was unusually keen for the United Arab Emirates to be involved in this mission.’
‘Come on, Jack, Pooh Bear would step in front of a runaway bus to save Lily. Next theory.’
‘Big Ears trained with Judah at Coronado in the States a few months before our mission began—’
‘Freight train,’ Wizard said simply.
‘What does that mean?’
‘If Pooh Bear would step in front of a bus to protect Lily, then Big Ears would step in front of a freight train to save her. And as I recall, you yourself also once went to a US-sponsored training course at Coronado Naval Base in the States, a course conducted by Marshall Judah and the CIEF. That’s not even mentioning your mysterious work with him in Desert Storm.’
West slumped back in his chair, thought about it all.
The problem with a multinational team like this was the motivations of its members—you just never knew if they had the team’s interests at heart or their own.
‘Max. This is not what we need. We’re going up against the two biggest fish in the world and getting our asses kicked. We’re hanging on by our fingertips.’
He took a deep breath.
‘I can’t believe I’m going to do this: conduct surveillance on my own team. Max, set up a microwave communications net around this plane. A net that will catch all incoming and outgoing signals. If someone’s communicating with the outside world, I want to know about it when it happens. We gotta plug this leak. Can you do that?’
‘I will.’
‘We keep this to ourselves for the time being, and we watch everyone.’
Wizard nodded. ‘I’ve got another issue for you.’
West rubbed his brow. ‘Yes?’
‘While you were getting away from Tunisia on that U-boat, I set Lily to work on the Callimachus Text again. It’s odd, she says that the language of the Text gets more and more difficult. But at the same time she herself is progressing in skill: sections that she couldn’t read yesterday, she can suddenly comprehend today. It’s as if the very language of the Text is determining the order in which we can find the Pieces.’
‘Uh-huh. And. . . ’
‘She’s read the next three entries—the Mausoleum one came next and it just said, “I lie with the Pharos”. The next two entries concern the Statue of Zeus at Olympia and the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus.
‘Following on from the ones we’ve already translated, these new entries confirm a curious pattern: the Text is guiding us through the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World from the youngest Wonder to the oldest. The Colossus, the most recently built, came first, then the Pharos, then the Mausoleum. The next two, those of the Statue