“Oh, it’s a coin from the time of Jesus,” she said, touching it with her fingers. The medallion designated her status as the head of the Roman Catholic Church’s ancient society Dominus Dei, which had started among the Christian slaves in Caesar’s household near the end of the first century. It was also a sign, she was convinced, that as head of the Dei, she was one of the Alignment’s legendary Council of Thirty. She had begun to be more public in her display of the medallion in an effort to ferret out the faces of others in the council. “My order’s tradition says that Jesus held it up when He told His followers to give to God what is God’s and to Caesar what is Caesar’s.”
General Gellar said somewhat dubiously, “That’s supposed to be the actual coin?”
“You know some traditions,” she said, smiling. “There are enough pieces of the cross for sale at churches in Jerusalem to build Noah’s ark.”
Gellar nodded wanly.
So did Midas. “Jesus suffered terribly at the hands of the Jews.”
Oh God, Serena thought, watching for a sign of outrage on Gellar’s face, but there was none. His face was a craggy slab of stone. But then Gellar had fought anti-Semitism from the Nazis, Russians, Europeans, Arabs, and regrettably, even the Church his entire life. He had mastered the art of overlooking the small offenses and forgoing the small battles so long as he won the war. And he had never lost one.
Midas, meanwhile, seemed delighted with the direction the conversation had taken and asked with feigned earnestness, “Tell me, Sister Serghetti, what is Caesar’s and what is God’s?”
Serena sighed inside, having realized she was foolish to believe Midas would be a gusher of information about his Arctic expeditions. “Basically, Jesus said to pay our taxes but give God our hearts.”
“See, this is the problem with the world’s monotheistic religions,” Midas said quite passionately. “And I include the Russian Orthodox Church. They demand people’s hearts. Then they demand people’s hands. Then wars start. The world would be better off without religion.”
“Wars rarely start over religion,” she said diplomatically. “Usually, they start over something two or more parties want.”
“Like land?” Midas asked.
“Or oil?” Gellar echoed.
“Yes,” said Serena. “They simply use the cloak of religion to disguise their naked ambitions.”
“Then let’s remove the masks and solve the problem. Like I am doing. By creating more oil.”
All at once Midas had made himself and technology the uniter of the world and Serena and her presumably backward faith its divider.
“Technology is no cure for evil, suffering, or death,” she reminded Midas. “It is but a tool in the hands of fallen men and women. It cannot redeem the human heart or reconcile the peoples of the earth.”
At that the blood drained from Midas’s face, as if he had seen a ghost, and the hair on the back of Serena’s neck stood on end even before a familiar voice behind her said, “Gee, Sister, how does reconciliation happen?”
Slowly, Serena turned to see Conrad Yeats standing before her in an elegant tuxedo, holding a drink in one hand and a cigar in the other. She blinked and stared at him. There was a smile on his lips but hatred in his eyes. She had no idea what he was doing there, only that with Conrad Yeats, there was no telling what he would do, and she was genuinely frightened.
“Dr. Yeats,” she faltered. “I didn’t know you were a Bilderberger.”
“Oh, they’ll let anyone join these days,” he said, looking at Midas before locking his hazel eyes on her. “So you just forgive and forget?”
There was a pregnant pause, and Serena could feel his gaze on her, along with everybody else’s. Except for Midas. His ice-blue eyes, wide with shock, stared at Conrad in disbelief, and in that split second she grasped that Midas had thought Conrad was dead.
“Forgiveness isn’t the same as reconciliation,” she answered, sounding detached even though her heart was racing faster than her head. “You can forgive someone, like a dead parent, without resuming the relationship. Reconciliation, however, is a two-way street.”
“Interesting,” said Conrad. “Go on.”
“Well,” she said, pursing her lips. “The offending party first must show remorse and ask for forgiveness.”
“And then?”
“Next the offending party must pay some kind of restitution. After he met Jesus, the tax collector Zacchaeus repaid everybody he ripped off four times over to show his remorse.”
“Sounds good to me,” Conrad said, puffing on his cigar. “Is that it?”
“No,” she said. “Last, the offending party must show a real desire to restore the relationship. That takes trust. And trust takes time.”
Conrad nodded and blew a circle of smoke into the air. “What if the offending party doesn’t give a rip or return your calls?”
Serena took a deep breath, aware that Midas and Gellar were gone and the circle had broken up, leaving her alone with Conrad, who was ruining everything. “Then you should forgive them but not resume the relationship in hopes of reconciliation.”
Conrad looked around and acknowledged that they were speaking privately. “Thanks for clearing that up, Serena. I thought I had just one reason to hate you for the rest of my life after you stole from me and then ditched me in D.C. But you keep giving me more.”
“What are you doing here, Conrad?”
“I was going to ask you that very question,” he shot back. “I thought Jesus hung out with the poor, the oppressed, the sick. Not the rich and powerful.”
“It’s not like that, Conrad.”
“Then enlighten me, please.”
She told him. “I think Midas is helping the Russians mine the Arctic. I want to stop them.”
“Interesting,” Conrad said. “Midas tried to kill me this morning.”
“Really?” she said, hiding her concern. That meant both Midas and Conrad knew something she didn’t. It had to be something terrible to bring together two such extreme men in her life. “I hope he has a ticket. The line seems to get longer each year.”
“Lucky you,” he said, looking over her shoulder. “It looks like my number is up.”
At that moment Sir Midas’s girlfriend, Mercedes, waved and headed toward them with a smile. “Conrad!” she called out.
Serena whispered into Conrad’s ear: “Squeeze her for information. She might confess some things to you that she wouldn’t to a nun.”
He looked at her with contempt. “You want me to sleep with her because your vows keep you from sleeping with Midas?”
“Something like that,” she said. “You were going to anyway, weren’t you?”
The look in his eyes told her that she had hurt him, and she hated herself for it. But it was better than him harboring any hope for her, as much as she was dying to be with him. Because there wasn’t any hope as long as the Alignment lived.
“You’re just a cast-iron bitch with a crucifix, aren’t you?” he said.
The words pierced Serena’s heart as Mercedes arrived, but she forced a smile.
“Professor Yeats!” Mercedes said, giving him two air kisses on each cheek.
Serena said innocently, “I forgot you two worked together.”
“Truth be told, Professor Yeats worked for me until he didn’t work out at all,” Mercedes said, and gave her a wicked wink. “Sister Serghetti, if you’ll excuse us, I’m going to have to take the professor away and spread him around.”
Serena wanted to reach out and grab Conrad’s arm to keep him from walking away with the woman. But she could only nod politely as she stood by herself next to the statue of the dying Achilles.
8
Conrad knew that he had come tonight to see Mercedes, whom he reluctantly followed past security down some stone steps into the lower gardens. But the sight of Serena had so thoroughly thrown him that Mercedes could have stripped off her snug gown and invited him to skinny-dip with her in the sea and he still would have passe
d on the opportunity in order to get back to Serena. Or get back at her. He wasn’t sure.
Mercedes, meanwhile, looked incredibly if artificially well sculpted in her silver halter dress. Her forehead and facial features, however, seemed a bit too tight when she turned to him in the dim light of the lower gardens. Sure they were at last alone, she slapped him across the face.
“You bastard!” she hissed. “You stranded me in Nazca with a stolen artifact and a dozen Peruvian soldiers.”
He rubbed his stinging cheek with his hand. “You got out okay, didn’t you?”
“And how do you think I managed that?” she said, tearing up. “You think those pigs cared who my father was?”
It dawned on him what must have happened, the favors she was forced to offer to get out while he was off in Antarctica with Serena. He couldn’t tell her he’d had no choice, because in hindsight, he had. It hadn’t been necessary to leave her on that plateau. He could have insisted that the U.S. military take her and drop her off somewhere safe before proceeding. And he hadn’t.
Conrad said, “You told me later that all was forgiven and forgotten.”
Her eyes turned into black slits, the moonlight giving them an otherworldly glow. “Because I had to,” she said. “I was hoping you’d come back. But you didn’t, did you?”
Conrad, realizing that Mercedes’s feelings toward him were the same as his own toward Serena, felt horrible and gave her his full attention. “I’m here now.”
“No, you came to see her,” Mercedes said, referring to Serena.
“Actually, I came to see your boyfriend,” he said, surprised that he was actually telling her the truth.
She believed him, it seemed, and said nothing for a couple of minutes as they walked down more steps to the beach. There was a tiny Greek fishing village there, with some modest homes behind whitewashed walls. She removed her stiletto sandals, and they walked along the sand to the old stone bridge jutting out into the water.
“This is the kaiser’s pier,” she said. “He used it to go back and forth from his yacht.”
“Like Midas?”
Her slits for eyes softened into a worried look. “What’s your business with Roman?”
“He stole something that belonged to me.”
She forced a smile. “I doubt that.”
“That he stole something?” Conrad asked.
“That whatever he stole belonged to you. What was it, Conrad? Some Greek statue at the bottom of the sea?”
“Something important enough for Midas to blow up my boat and kill my crew over.” He was as serious as he had ever let her see him.
She paused. “And so you decided to come back for more?”
“Did you hear me, Mercedes? Your boyfriend killed people today. You don’t seem surprised. And that surprises me. What are you doing with a monster like Midas?”
“All men are animals.” Her eyes narrowed back into slits. “But Roman is an adult, Conrad, not a child like you. He understands power and money and politics in a way you never could.”
“All I understand, Mercedes, is that Midas seems to have moved on from oil to arms.”
Mercedes sniffed. “I don’t believe you. Midas doesn’t need anything in this world. He’s as rich as, well, Midas. He doesn’t have to steal anything. He can buy it.”
Conrad said, “Then tell me what he’s buying these days besides megayachts and art.”
A shadow passed across her face, betraying the fact that, yes, Midas had bought something interesting lately. “You haven’t changed, Conrad,” she said. “You’re looking for links that don’t exist. The great conspiracy is that there are no conspiracies. Everybody is out for himself. Life is a big black hole. There is no meaning.”
“Your existentialism used to have some romance, Mercedes. What happened?”
Her phone beeped, and she glanced at a text message and shook her head. It must have been from Midas, Conrad thought. “Romance is dead,” she told him. “And so are you if you go after Roman.”
She took his hand to lead him back to the party when two security men came down the steps, talking softly into their radios. “You fool, it’s too late,” Mercedes said, sounding genuinely alarmed.
Conrad looked over his shoulder past the kaiser’s stone pier. A light in the distance grew closer, and soon a dinghy emerged from the mist around nearby Mouse Island, like a boat from the River Styx, with a large, muscular colossus of a man standing at the prow.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.” Conrad had started to turn back to Mercedes when he felt the stab of a needle in his neck and blacked out.
9
A bucket of freezing water brought Conrad to life. He blinked his eyes open. He seemed to be inside the submersible launch bay of the superyacht Midas. The hatch was open wide over the surface of the water. Moonlight reflecting from the sands beneath the yacht bounced around the hold. He was sitting in a chair, his feet bound together at the ankles and his hands tied behind him to the back of the chair.
“What is the four-digit code, Professor?” said a voice with a thick Russian accent.
Conrad looked up to see a bodybuilder type towering over him. Behind him stood two security men and a giant basin of water. They were leaning against a double-domed deep-flight Falcon submarine. Midas must have used the Falcon to transport the Flammenschwert from the Nausicaa to the yacht, Conrad thought.
“I don’t know about any four-digit code,” Conrad said, trying to quickly make sense of his predicament. He should be dead. Maybe Midas hadn’t found everything he was looking for in the Nausicaa and was hoping Conrad had. “But I’m sure glad you told me about it.”
The Russian held up an electric shock baton. Conrad recognized it as the type favored by the Chinese police in torturing Falun Gong practitioners. “Maybe this will jog your memory,” the Russian said.
Conrad shivered as the picture came into focus: He was drenched in water in order to intensify the three hundred thousand volts of electricity this thug was about to apply to him.
“I know you,” Conrad told him, and he realized where he had seen the face. “You’re that ex–KGB guy turned fitness guru with the kettle ball infomercial.”
The Russian paused, seemingly pleased at the recognition. “It is true. I am Vadim.”
“Too bad your website sucks. Bet your online sales of those Vadimin supplements do, too. Is this your day job, or do you have another one at some health spa?”
Vadim cocked his thick head. Conrad was clearly getting inside it, and the Russian didn’t like it. He plunged the electric baton into the fresh harpoon wound in Conrad’s leg.
Conrad gritted his teeth as the voltage shot up his thigh and throughout his body. For a second he thought his head would explode. When the wave of devastating pain finally passed, he dropped his head and saw that the baton had reopened his harpoon wound, which oozed blood.
“Utter a sound, Dr. Yeats, and I’ll shove this baton into your mouth and shock you with a thousand root canals at once until you black out.”
Conrad could smell his own burned flesh. It would take weeks for it to fully heal. Not that Vadim was intending for him to see that day. The Russian pressed the wound with the baton until a shard of harpoon protruded up through the blood. Conrad moaned in agony.
“Go easy on the lad, sport,” one of the other guards said in a British accent. “Midas wants to get the code out of him before he dies.”
So the other two were Brits, Conrad thought. Private security. For all Conrad knew, Midas also employed former Navy SEALs and American mercenaries in his private global army. Who said capitalism was dead?
“Shut up, Davies,” Vadim told the Brit sternly while he trained his eyes on Conrad. “Von Berg’s code,” he repeated. His breath was foul. “Four digits. Like your hand after I cut off your thumb.” He pulled out a cigar cutter. “Or maybe I’ll cut off something else. Now tell me where the code is.”
“Of course!” Conrad cried out. “It’s all in my head!” He s
tarted to laugh uncontrollably, despite the pain. It was crazy, but by rephrasing his demand for the code in terms of “where” instead of “what,” Vadim had triggered an epiphany for Conrad. Now Conrad understood why nobody had found a metal briefcase containing secret codes inside the sunken sub. The paranoid Baron of the Black Order never carried secret papers in a briefcase or on his person on land, sea, or air. Von Berg knew he’d be dead if anybody found them. So he kept the code in his head, literally. And that head was back in Conrad’s room at the Andros Palace Hotel.
Vadim and the Brits glanced at each other. “You find this funny, Dr. Yeats?”
Conrad nodded. “Let me guess. This code Midas wants. You don’t know what it’s for, do you?”
Vadim said, “You will tell us?”
“Hell, no. But Midas is going to assume I did. And then you guys are dead.”
Vadim’s nostrils flared. “What are you talking about?”
“I know what Midas stole from the sub this morning. Don’t you?”
It was clear from Vadim’s expression that he did not.
“Oops,” Conrad said. “Maybe you’re not as tight with the boss as you thought.”
Vadim’s eyes dilated at the truth of Conrad’s words. Indeed, Vadim seemed to be reconsidering his relationship with Midas.
“What’s more likely?” Conrad asked, relentless. “That Midas is going to kill you because I got away? Or because you know what he stole from the sub and where it might be?”
“Kill him,” said Davies. “But get out of him what he knows.”
Conrad looked at Vadim. “The only way to pull it off is like this: You have to make Midas believe you killed me before I said anything. But how is he going to believe that and keep you around? You have to make it look like I killed one of the Brits while trying to escape and that the other one came in and shot me.”
“How stupid do you think I am, Dr. Yeats?” Vadim pulled out a 9mm Rook pistol of the type favored by Russian special forces and put it to Conrad’s forehead.
“Quite stupid, actually,” Conrad said.
The Atlantis Revelation Page 5
