The War Cloud (26 page)

Washington tried to speak but struggled with it, forcing Hercules to bend his ear. “The republic requires your services,” Washington gasped hoarsely, in so low and broken a voice that Hercules could hardly understand him. He could smell vapors of vinegar, molasses, and butter on the General’s breath. “I would be most grateful.”

Hercules, moved deeply, bowed low. “Massa Washington, I ain’t up to something like this no more.”

But the General seemed not to hear him and ges-tured to Colonel Lear, who held out an envelope for Hercules.

Despite his protest, Hercules took the yellowed en-velope and saw the bold letters written across that spelled STARGAZER. Like most of Washington’s slaves, Hercules couldn’t read, and he often wondered if this was another reason why the General trusted him with these sorts of communiqués. But he knew the code name all too well.

Colonel Lear asked, “Do you know the Christian name of this patriot, this agent with the code name Stargazer?”

Hercules shook his head.

“Neither do I, and I know more about the General’s military papers than anybody else,” Lear said. “But you know where to find him?”

Hercules nodded.

“Very well then. Two of the General’s officers will escort you to the woods outside the Federal District. From there you will take the route the General says you have taken before for him, and deliver the letter to its proper destination.”

Hercules put the letter in his coat, aware of Washington’s anguished eyes following the path of the letter closely. The General preferred his spies to carry secret communiqués at the bottom of their knee-high boots. But tonight Hercules was wearing his shiny buckled shoes, which the General considered far less secure, so that was not an option.

“One more thing,” said Lear, and presented Hercules with a small dagger in a leather sheath. “As a to-ken of his appreciation, the General would like you to have this. It’s one of his favorites. During the Revolution you apparently proved yourself very good with a knife.”

Hercules took the dagger in his hand. Engraved on the handle were strange symbols that Hercules would never understand but which, after decades in the service of his master, he recognized as Masonic. He slipped it under his coat and into his belt behind the small of his back.

The General seemed to approve and strained to say something. He gulped air to breathe and made a harsh, high-pitched respiratory noise that frightened Hercules.

“Hercules,” he gasped. “There is one evil I dread, and that is their spies. You know whom I mean.”

Hercules nodded.

“Deliver the letter,” Washington hissed, his voice losing strength. “Rid the republic of this evil. Preserve’s destiny.”

“Yessa.”

Hercules rose and glanced at Lear.

“You have the final orders of His Excellency General George Washington, commander-in-chief of the United States armed forces,” Lear said. “Carry them out.”

“Yessa.”

Hercules bowed and walked out the door just as Dr. Craik and two consulting physicians rushed in with Martha. As Hercules stumbled down the stairs in a daze and stepped out into the bitter night, the cries of the servants rang in his ears:

“Massa Washington is dead! The General is dead!”

Outside, dispatches concerning the General’s demise were already being handed to express couriers for delivery to President Adams and Generals Hamilton and Pinckney.

Two military aides, meanwhile, were waiting for Hercules with the horses. Hercules faintly recalled their faces. One was a former Son of Liberty. The other was an assassin and an original member of the Culper Spy Ring who helped Washington beat the British in New York. No words were exchanged as Hercules threw a leg over his chestnut-colored horse and they galloped away from Mount Vernon.

They avoided the main roads as they rode north through the outskirts of Alexandria, cutting across farms and orchards in a wide arc until they reached the nape of the Potomac and crossed a wooden bridge a few miles west of Georgetown. Ten minutes later they reached the great woods at the edge of the federal district and Hercules brought his horse to a halt.

“What are you waiting for?” asked the former Son of Liberty.

Hercules looked into the woods. The twisted trees and strange noises had always spooked him, even before that terrible night when he and the General buried the old globe.

Oh, Lord, not here! Please don’t make me come back here!

Hercules remembered the stories about the ancient Algonquin Indians that old Benjamin Banneker, the General’s Negro astronomer, used to tell him when the General used the stars to draw the boundaries for the federal district. According to Banneker, long before Europeans colonized the New World, the Algonquin held tribal grand councils both at the base of Jenkins Hill, where the new Capitol Building sat, and in the ravines of these woods. What they did during those councils, Banneker wouldn’t say. But he did say that the Algonquin were linked by archaeology to the ancient Mayans and by legend to the descendents of Atlantis. The chiefs of their primary tribe, the Montauk Indians, were known as
Pharaoh
, like their ancient Egyptian cousins 10,000 years ago. Banneker told him the word Pharaoh meant “Star Child” or “Children of the Stars.”

Hercules craned his head up to the stars. The clouds had parted like a frame around Virgo. A chill shook his bones. Hercules knew that, by making the layout of the new capital city mirror the constellation, the General benignly sought the blessings of the Blessed Virgin in heaven upon the new republic. But such mysteries spooked him, almost as much as words like
Pharaoh
and
Star Child
.

After all, slaves built the pyramids of Egypt. Would the same be true of America
?

“Let’s move,” demanded the form assassin.

Hercules led his military escort into the woods. For several minutes he listened to the crunch of leaves be-neath hooves as he weaved between the trees in the starlight, a bare branch or two scratching him along the way.

“Thro’ many dangers, toils and snares, I have already come,” he began to sing, repeating his favorite verse from the song “Amazing Grace.” “’Tis grace has brought me safe thus far, and grace will lead me home.”

He tried not to think about old Banneker’s other-worldly stories or, God forbid, the secret cave and the secret globe, which contained the greatest secret of them all. As he sang, his eyes darted back and forth, glancing at the dancing shadows all around. Then he heard the snap of a twig and stopped.

He glanced back at the two horses of his military escort in the darkness. But he could see only one rider–the former assassin. At that moment, he felt the muzzle of a pistol in his back and then heard the voice of the other escort, the former Son of Liberty.

“Get down here, slave.”

Slowly Hercules dismounted and turned. Both soldiers, now standing before him, pointed their pistols at him.

“The communiqué,” said the assassin. “Hand it over.”

Hercules hesitated, staring down the long barrel of the French flintlock.

“The communiqué, slave!”

Hercules slowly put his hand into his coat and removed the letter. He handed it to the former Son of Liberty, who glanced at it and handed it to the assassin.

“Who is Stargazer?”

Hercules said nothing.

“Tell me or we kill your family, too, starting with your two-year-old bastard daughter. We know where to find her. She lives with her mother in Philadelphia. So, again, who is Stargazer?”

“I-I don’t know,” Hercules said.

The assassin’s face turned red with rage and he tapped the barrel of his flintlock to Hercules’ temple. “How can you not know, slave?”

“Because, be-because,” Hercules stammered, “he ain’t been born yet. Won’t for a long, long time.”

“What gibberish is this?” The assassin glanced at the other soldier and grimaced at Hercules. “Give me your coat.”

Hercules stepped back, furious.

“Now, or I put a bullet hole in it.”

Hercules shook his head, trying to understand what was happening. “The republic…”

“The republic dies tonight with the General, his slave, and this Stargazer,” said the assassin. “Now give me my coat.”

“
Your
coat?”

“That’s right, slave.
My
coat.”

Hercules suddenly felt the calm that often washed over him in moments of great danger, whenever the face behind his fear finally revealed itself. As he started to take off his coat, he used his free hand to reach into the small of his back and remove from its sheath the dagger that the General had given him. He held the coat in front of him.

“Throw it on the ground, slave.”

The soldier might as well have asked him to soil the American flag. Hercules had worked too hard to buy this coat to give it up now, especially as they meant to kill him in the end. He had fed too many American soldiers with food his hands had prepared, and had sacrificed too much for his children and the General’s dream of a free nation for men and women of all races and creeds.

Everything, Lord, but not my coat!

“For the last time, slave, throw it down.”

“Not the ground,” Hercules said. “It would get your coat dirty, sir.”

Hercules tossed it through the air to the soldier. For a moment the soldier let his hand with the gun swing to the side to catch the coat, and in that moment Hercules turned to slit the throat of the soldier behind him, the blade slowed only by the catch of an artery. Before the man crumpled over, Hercules hurled the dagger at the assassin who held his coat. The blade struck him in the chest and drove him back against the trunk of a tree. The flintlock discharged aimlessly as he slid down to the ground.

A wisp of gunsmoke hung in the air as Hercules marched over to the assassin, who was gurgling up blood, his eyes rolling in surprise and fear. Hercules yanked the dagger out of his chest. The assassin opened his mouth to scream, but emitted only a low wheeze as the breath of life slowly escaped him.

“
My
coat, sir.”

Hercules picked up his coat, mounted his horse, and looked up at the constellation of Virgo, the Blessed Virgin, watching over him. He slipped the letter to Stargazer into his coat and buttoned up. Then he kicked his horse to life and rode off into the night to-ward America’s destiny.

C
onrad Yeats kept a good three steps behind the flag-draped coffin. Six horses pulled the caisson toward the gravesite, their hooves clomping like a cosmic metronome in the heavy air. Each resounding clap proclaimed the march of time, the brevity of life. In the distance lightning flickered across the dark sky. But still no rain.

Conrad looked over at Marshall Packard. The secretary of defense walked beside him, his Secret Service agents a few paces behind with the other mourners from all branches of America’s armed forces, umbrellas at the ready.

Conrad said, “It’s not often you bury a soldier four years after his death.”

“No, it’s not,” said Packard, a fireplug of a former pilot known for his unflagging intensity. “I wish it hadn’t taken this long. But you’re the only one who knows the extraordinary way in which your father met his end.”

Packard had delivered a stirring eulogy for his old wingman “the Gffter” back at the military chapel up the hill. What Packard had failed to mention, Conrad knew, was that he hated the Griffter’s guts. The two men had had a falling out over Conrad’s unusual role at the Pentagon years ago, which involved identifying secret targets for bunker-busting cruise missiles: underground military installations and nuclear facilities in the Middle East that America’s enemies were building beneath archaeological sites for protection. Packard couldn’t believe that Conrad, the world’s foremost expert on megalithic architecture, would risk destroying civilization’s most ancient treasures. The Griffter couldn’t believe that Packard would risk American lives to pre-serve a few unturned stones that had already yielded all the information that archaeologists like Conrad needed to know about the dead culture that built them. The clash ended with an aborted air strike on the pyramid at Ur in Iraq and the revocation of Conrad’s Top Secret security clearance from the Department of Defense.

“He wasn’t my biological father,” Conrad reminded Packard. “I was adopted.”

There was a lot more Conrad could say, none of it helpful right now. Especially about how he had nothing to do with the planning of this funeral, how the Pentagon wouldn’t even let him see the tombstone his father had picked out for himself before he had died, and, most of all, how Conrad was certain that the man they were burying today could not possibly be his father.

“Level with me, son.” Packard glanced to his left and right. “Did you kill him?”Conrad locked eyes with Packard, the man he called “Uncle MP” as a child and feared more than anybody else except his father. “Your people performed the autopsy, Mr. Secretary. Why don’t you tell me?”

The two men said nothing more on the way down the hill to the gravesite.Conrad suspected that the DOD had spent tens of millions of American taxpayer dollars over the past four years to locate the remains of USAF Gen. Griffin Yeats. It was all in the vain hope of finding out what happened to the billions more his father had squandered in a black ops mission to Antarctica during which dozens of soldiers from various countries had perished.

What Conrad and his father had found was none other than the lost civilization of Atlantis. And just when they were about to uncover its secrets, that ancient world was destroyed in a massive explosion that purportedly killed his father, sank an ice shelf the size of California, and sent a catastrophic tsunami to Indonesia that killed thousands.

The only other survivor of the ill-fated Antarctica expedition besides Conrad was Sister Serena Serghetti, the famed Vatican linguist and environmental activist. But the impossibly beautiful Sister Serghetti, or “Mother Earth” as she was dubbed by the media, wasn’t talking to the United States or U.N. about Antarctica or lost civilizations. Nor was she talking to Conrad.