The Atlantis Revelation (16 page)

B
ack at the hotel and convention center, Lorenzo crossed the atrium lobby and approached the commanding officer at the security desk. He was an ambitious priest, and Dr. Yeats had given him a golden opportunity to accelerate his rise within the Dei even as he attempted to protect his superiors.

“I just saw the fugitive who murdered Mercedes Le Roche,” Lorenzo said breathlessly. “Conrad Yeats the American. He is here at the summit.”

The Greek looked at Lorenzo’s badge and collar and decided to take the report seriously enough to ask further questions. “Was he wearing a badge, Father?”

“Yes,” said Lorenzo helpfully. “The name was Firat Kayda, and it had a red security stripe for access to the inner zones. Holy Mother of God, maybe this American killed Kayda and has taken his place to kill someone here!”

“Please, Father. Do not repeat this. We will investigate.”

Lorenzo detected a dismissive tone in the Greek official’s voice. “You’re not going to do any such thing, are you?”

The officer picked up a phone. “Firat Kayda,” he said, and hung up.

“That’s all?” Lorenzo said.

“Please wait, Father.”

The officer attended to some papers with the other officers while Lorenzo watched, burning with anger. A minute later, the Greek saw his frown and looked at a computer terminal. “Here it is,” he said, looking at a time-stamped video clip of the moment Kayda had passed through the hotel checkpoint. A concerned expression took hold on the Greek’s face as the facial-recognition program kicked in. “There is a high degree of probability that you are correct.”

“At last,” Lorenzo said.

The Greek started typing furiously. “I am flagging his name and attaching the video for when he presents himself at a checkpoint. He’ll be refused entry and arrested immediately.”

“Don’t forget that he is armed and dangerous, Officer. He has killed and may kill again.”

The Greek looked up warily. “Thank you very much, Father. You have been most helpful.”

Lorenzo made the sign of the cross and walked away.

V
adim was sitting inside the Peugeot parked opposite the Palace of the Grandmaster. He looked past the vehicle ID badge dangling from his rearview mirror to see the silver Mercedes SUV drive through.

He reached back and pulled down the rear seat to access the trunk. Squirming next to the blocks of C4 plastic explosives was a bound, gagged, and badly beaten Abdil Zawas. Vadim had brought the Egyptian to Rhodes directly from Bern hours before the security checkpoints had been set up. Since this car had been registered to a resident for several years, the security forces sweeping the Old Town yellow zone hadn’t opened its trunk.

Abdil was waking up a little sooner than Vadim wanted. The streets were so narrow and cars so few that he couldn’t afford to have somebody walk by while Abdil banged his head and feet to draw attention.

“Siesta isn’t over,” Vadim said, and removed an injection pen from his pocket. “We have to keep you alive long enough for the coroner to pronounce your proper cause of death as a martyr for Allah.” He delighted at the look of horror in Abdil’s eyes. The pen was filled only with a concentrated dose of trazodone to put him to sleep. Nothing painful, unfortunately, and it was a shame to think that the Egyptian wouldn’t be awake for his final moments.

“Don’t you wonder how many of your little sluts will miss you when you’re gone?” Vadim asked, injecting the trazodone into Abdil’s thick neck. “I think you’ll miss them more where you’re going.”

Abdil’s eyes rolled around in panic even as his eyelids grew heavy. In a few minutes it would all be over for the late, great Abdil Zawas.

“I’m going to make you famous, Abdil,” Vadim told the Egyptian. “You’re about to open a new front on the war against Jews and Crusaders. Look at this clip that’s about to be posted on YouTube. Recognize yourself?”

Vadim was about to play the video on his BlackBerry when the device began to ring. It was Midas.

“Security says Yeats is alive and on Rhodes,” Midas barked. “She has betrayed the Alignment.”

“You seem surprised,” Vadim said. “Your plan was always to kill her as soon as she delivered the globes. She knows too much. More than I do. Nothing has changed. Yeats won’t make it in time to interfere.”

“Is everything set?”

“Yes,” Vadim said. “The only street into or out of the Palace of the Grandmaster is the Street of Knights. I’ll take care of her as soon as she leaves the palace.”

“She must not have even a moment to contact anybody with information about what she may have learned from Uriel or figured out for herself,” Midas said, and then there was a pause. “Remember, Vadim. She will be the second car. I repeat: the second car. Not the first. Everything is lost if you mistake the two.”

Vadim said, “I won’t.”

“See that you don’t,” Midas said. “It must look like the first car was the target but that Zawas hit Serghetti’s car instead and blew himself up in the process.”

“Yes,” said Vadim, looking at Abdil’s limp body in the mirror. “I understand.”

A
ll the way down the Street of Knights toward the Palace of the Grandmaster, Serena wondered who Uriel could possibly be. If his role within the Alignment was true to his name, then Uriel could be the one who ultimately possessed the
Flammenschwert
. That pointed to Midas, however, and she braced herself to see his ugly smile waiting for her with the third globe.

“I wish I could join you inside,
signorina,
” Benito said as he pulled the G55 SUV up to the west tower entrance.

“Me, too,” she said.

The Greek attaché Midas had told her about was already waiting with two aides and a cart. Benito opened the rear door, and the aides placed the two steel boxes containing the copper globes on the cart. Serena followed through the entrance.

Inside, they walked past the Medusa mosaic and down a large vaulted corridor to the lower level. It was right out of the blueprints Conrad had shown her back at the lake in Italy. And when they entered the Hall of Knights and left her alone with the globes, nobody had to tell her what room she stood in. Its scale and decor announced itself in a sinister way.

Then the small wooden door on the side opened by itself, and she saw the adjoining chamber and the reflection of a fire bouncing off what could only be the third globe. She pushed the cart inside, next to the round table, and beheld the globe on top.

The third globe.

She stood in silence, staring at it. It was magnificent, like something forged from the depths of a volcano or the mountain copper ore of Atlantis. It closely resembled its celestial and terrestrial cousins and was clearly part of the family. But the dials carved across the surface of this globe marked it as an armillary, built to predict the cycles of the sun, moon, and planets. It was the third element of time that Brother Lorenzo had correctly suspected was missing from their calculations back at the Vatican.

The door opened, and she looked up to see General Gellar, the Israeli defense minister, looking her up and down in surprise.

The feeling is mutual,
she thought. “You’re Uriel?” They had been acquaintances for quite some time, and suddenly, they both looked at each other in a very different way. “What do you want with these globes?” she asked.

“You have to ask?” Gellar sounded offended. “They’re ours. They belong to Israel. You took them.”

“We took them?”

“The Knights Templar stole them from under the Temple Mount along with whatever else they could pillage to fund their wars, increase their powers, and persecute the Jews.”

Serena took it in, trying to figure this all out. “Well, on behalf of the Roman Catholic Church, I certainly plead guilty. And the pope has made official apologies for all that. I wasn’t around at the time, of course. But if I had been, I’m sure that I, too, would have engaged in anti-Semitic behavior.”

Gellar seemed to realize he was being ridiculous—although he clearly regarded the Dei medallion hanging around her neck as if it were a Nazi death’s-head badge.

“You’re not one of the Thirty, General, are you?”

“No,” he said.

“But you’d do business with them.”

“You mean with you? Yes. If Israel had relations only with its friends, we wouldn’t be a country.”

Serena wanted to say “Hey, I’m not Alignment,” but that wouldn’t carry much water here beneath the bowels of the Palace of the Grandmaster, built by the Knights of St. John, a military unit itself and cousin to the Knights Templar. All the same, she had to find out the purpose of the globes and why the Alignment would give them to the Israelis. “You’re going to take these with you back to Jersualem?” she asked.

“To the place where they belong.”

Serena stared at him. “You’re going to rebuild the temple. You’ve just needed to get all the pieces together.”

“Yes.” Gellar was almost defiant.

“To do that, you need to remove the Dome of the Rock mosque.”

“Yes.”

“That would start a war with the Arabs.”

“Yes.”

“And you would defend yourselves, naturally.”

“No,” Gellar said. “You and Europe will defend us if America chooses to sit this one out. And if not, God will protect us.”

“When is all this supposed to happen?”

Gellar smiled. “You had two of the globes and are the great linguist. Could you not interpret the signs?”

Serena realized she could not, but she couldn’t let Gellar slip away without giving her something more. She remembered what Conrad had told her about why he’d given up his dig in Jerusalem: He couldn’t figure out the astronomical alignments of the temple. Without them, he hadn’t known where to dig.

“The alignments of the stars on the celestial globe don’t mirror the landmarks on the terrestrial globe,” she told him. “For example, there’s no star on the celestial globe that mirrors Jerusalem.”

“Not yet,” Gellar told her with a hint of a smile. “That’s why the third globe is necessary. The Hebrew prophets believed that God used the planets to give them a sign that something important was about to happen. Look closely at this globe, and you’ll notice that we’re in the midst of an extraordinary alignment of two symmetrical triangles formed in the sky by six planets. Do you recognize this alignment?”

“Oh my God,” said Serena, seeing it clearly. “It’s the Star of David.”

“This is the star you were looking for over Jerusalem, Sister Serghetti,” Gellar told her. “It’s not a comet or a nova or a so-called star of Bethlehem. This star is the conjunction of planets that the prophet Jeremiah predicted would appear in these last days at the coming of the Messiah. It is this star to which we will align the Third Temple.”

The exit door opened, and Gellar pointed the way out to her. “Thank you for returning the globes to the people of Israel, Sister Serghetti. I will take good care of them.”

She stepped out of the chamber, and as soon as it closed behind her, she knew there was no turning back. A minute later, she climbed into the G55 SUV outside.

“General Gellar is Uriel,” she told Benito, whose face in the mirror registered shock. “The globes are going to the Temple Mount. Surely this means war. Gellar thinks he’s getting a new Jerusalem. But the Alignment is clearly betting on a new Crusade that will see them picking up all the oil and whatever else is left of the Middle East. A new Roman Empire. And that is in nobody’s interest.”

C
onrad waited behind three cars in line at the Liberty Gate to Old Town. Two armored trucks flanked the gate while Greek
Evzones
in tights with submachine guns inspected every vehicle entering the fortress.

He looked at his watch: it was already three-fifteen. By now Serena had probably delivered the globes, blowing his chance to see them. Worse, he had been seen by that Dei disciple of hers, who may have warned her to exit through a different gate.

A soldier waved him up to the gate, and he handed over his license and registration slip. While the soldier ran them through a card reader, a police officer asked him questions. “Where are you going?”

“Church of St. John,” Conrad lied, referring to the church across the Street of Knights from the Palace of the Grandmaster. “I’m delivering this to the icon exhibit.” He glanced over his shoulder at the globe strapped precariously to the back of his seat.

“You call that an icon?” the officer said gruffly.

Conrad recovered quickly and smiled. “A replica of an icon.”

The officer was still grim. “I call that an accident if it fell off your bike onto the road.”

“But it didn’t,” Conrad said when the soldier came back with his ID.

“Firat Kayda?” the soldier said as four others circled him with their machine guns.

“Yes,” Conrad said quietly.

“You’re under arrest.”

Conrad thought quickly as he saw a car approaching from the opposite side of the gate. “I didn’t mean to steal it,” he said, reaching back to the icon as he heard more than one bolt click. “I just wanted to bring it back.”

He pulled the string, and the icon fell to the ground and cracked open. “Oh no!” he said.

While all eyes were diverted to the ground for a moment, he twisted the accelerator and burst through the open gate and took a sharp left behind the tower.

There were shouts and the squeal of brakes and then a delayed spray of bullets that raked the tower. Conrad hit the straightaway down the Street of Knights but saw trouble up ahead: a black S-class Mercedes sedan coming his way, leaving him little room to maneuver on either side. He’d have to cut down one of the two hundred narrow cobblestone streets and lose the police without getting lost himself.

But then he saw a second car—a silver Mercedes G-class SUV—turning out from a gate at the Palace of the Grandmaster and onto the street toward him. As it turned, he saw her in the backseat.

Serena!

Sirens blared behind him, and he glanced at his mirror to see the lights of a police car flashing from behind.

He looked back up the Street of Knights in time to swerve away from the oncoming black Mercedes, taking out the driver’s-side mirror as he whooshed by.

Dead ahead was the silver Mercedes SUV. Conrad could glimpse Benito’s astonished face as it passed a parked Peugeot in front of the Inn of Provence. Everything seemed to go slow-motion as Conrad considered the police behind him, the silver Mercedes ahead of him, and the parked Peugeot.

It didn’t belong there.

And before he could warn Benito, the Peugeot exploded in a ball of fire and blew the Mercedes apart.

“Serena!” he shouted before the shock wave sent him flying through the air.