The Feltrinelli family, who made their fortune in lumber, had built the villa at the end of the nineteenth century. By the middle of the twentieth century, in the waning days of World War II, the villa became famous as the final residence of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini before his execution. In the twenty-first century, Swiss management had turned the Villa Feltrinelli into one of Europe’s most private, secure, and romantic luxury hotels, an unspoiled paradise far from the cares of the outside world.
The perfect place, Conrad thought, for a rendezvous with Serena.
A young Swiss miss welcomed him as Baron von Berg in the grand entry hall with a bouquet of rosebuds. Conrad looked past the circular sofa and carved wooden benches to the marble staircase with tall stained-glass windows and gilded mirrors. There were twenty-one guest rooms in the main villa, including the Magnolia Suite where Mussolini had slept. For Serena’s sake, Conrad had booked the private boathouse outside the main villa, away from the other guests.
A sporty Italian bellman named Gianni took Conrad’s weekender bag that he had purchased in nearby Desenzano after his six-hour ride from Bern involving two trains, one passport check, and one transfer in Milan.
“Guten Tag, Baron von Berg,” said Gianni in passable German. “Where is the baroness?”
“She has her own ride.”
They walked outside the covered pergola and past the pool with ducks and terraced gardens toward the lakeside boathouse. Two couples were enjoying afternoon tea on the lawn while a third played a game of croquet. Nothing was forced, including the prosecco offered to Conrad on a floating tray. Life and love seemed to flow quite naturally here.
“We have our own yacht for cocktail cruises,” Gianni told him. “You can arrange for a motor launch to take you and the baroness around the lake and even explore the medieval castle at Sirmione.”
“That sounds wonderful, Gianni,” Conrad said, sipping his drink.
The boathouse was spacious enough, with dark wood paneling and eggshell linens and upholstery. Its tall windows with sheer lace curtains offered a spectacular view of the lake.
Once the young bellman had closed the door on his way out, Conrad turned to find a dessert tray of lemon mousse sprinkled with fruit and edible flowers, a jasmine-scented candle burning on the nightstand, and rose petals strewn throughout the marble bathroom.
The only thing missing from this perfect romantic scene was Serena.
He looked at the antique Rolex, his gift from Baron von Berg. It was almost five o’clock, and Serena’s seaplane was due to land on the lake any minute now.
Conrad removed the watch and adjusted the dial until the Roman coin fell onto the table. He then pulled out a set of two books titled Coinage and History of the Roman Empire that he had picked up at a rare coin shop in Desenzano. The pages were thin, the lines single-spaced, and the font small, which made reading hard, but he found what he needed.
Conrad picked up the ancient Roman coin.
It looked almost like an American quarter, with Caesar instead of George Washington on one side and an eagle on the other. But this eagle looked quite distinctive, with a club on its right and a palm frond on its left. Indeed, it looked just like the medallion Serena wore around her neck.
He took a closer look at the letters engraved around the coin’s rim:
UROUIERAS KAIASULOU
Instantly, he knew the translation. He had come across it on coins during his digs beneath the Temple Mount in Jerusalem:
OF TYRE, THE HOLY AND INVIOLATE
He flipped to a page with the heading “Judas’s Thirty Pieces of Silver” and a quote from the Gospel of Matthew:
Then one of the 12, called Judas Iscariot, went unto the chief priests, and said unto them, “What will ye give me, and I will deliver him unto you?” And they covenanted with him for 30 pieces of silver.
The book said the coin was a so-called Shekel of Tyre, or temple tax coin. It was the only currency accepted at the Jerusalem temple, so it was most likely the coinage with which Judas had been paid for betraying Jesus Christ.
The bust on the front didn’t belong to any Roman emperor, Conrad realized, putting away the coin books. It belonged to Melqarth, the god of the Phoenicians, with a laurel wreath around his head like Caesar’s. Better known as Baal in the Old Testament. Sacrilege to Orthodox Jews, to be sure. But these coins were the only ones close enough to pure silver to be accepted at the temple. Roman coins were too debased.
He searched for a date on the coin. He found it on the reverse side, left of the eagle and just above its club.
EL
That was the year 35 C.E. on the Julian calendar—or 98 B.C., according to contemporary calendars. Well within the time of circulation during Jesus’ lifetime.
It was certainly not the Tribute Penny that Jesus had used to advise followers to go ahead and give their tax money to the state but their whole hearts to God. If anything, the shekel represented quite the opposite—man-made religion that trusted not in the God of heaven but in Caesar and the power structure of this world. The penny was blessed, in short, and the shekel cursed.
Like the Dei.
Conrad’s concentration was broken by the sound of a prop engine. He looked out to the lake and saw Serena flying in. Hopefully with some answers, for once.
29
Serena swung her seaplane over the treetops and came in for her final approach on the shimmering waters of Lake Garda. The breathtaking Villa Feltrinelli rose on the distant shore like a fairy castle. The sheer audacity of Conrad’s selection of such a romantic locale, and this while he was on the run, amazed and angered her. A virgin like her wouldn’t last the night at a place like this, especially with a man like him.
She’d flown her first high-wing Otter as a missionary in the Australian outback. Later, she’d flown in the African bush. This plane was a propeller-driven DHC-3, powered by a single six-hundred-horsepower Pratt & Whitney Wasp radial and fitted with floats, just like the type she’d used in the Andes during her work with the Aymara tribe. That was where she’d first met Conrad, on Lake Titicaca, the highest lake in the world and her personal favorite. No doubt it was an association he had hoped to evoke here.
She prayed in advance for God’s wisdom and strength to do what her mission required of her. The only problem was that she had so many missions these days, often at cross purposes. Her challenge here, she had to remind herself, was to steal from Conrad whatever he’d stolen from Midas, find out what else he knew, and then somehow get rid of him in such a way as to satisfy the Alignment and her own conscience.
Keeping her vows of purity, therefore, was the least of her worries.
She eased back on the throttle and put the Otter down into the water. The water was calm and gold in the late-afternoon sun, perfect to land on because of the enclosed nature of the lake. To her starboard, the hills looked like black paper cut out against twilight. Lots of peace and quiet here, she thought, which suited her just fine after the events of recent days and the days to come.
She taxied toward the boathouse in front of the villa. A man stood on the stone jetty with a rope tie. It wasn’t Conrad. It was a porter from the villa who came alongside the Otter to tie it down.
She switched off the engine and climbed down to the plane’s float. It was definitely more balmy and sensual here than in Paris at this time of year. She steadied herself for a second under the wing while she reached back into the cabin to pull out her little leather backpack. Then she took the extended hand of the young porter, who helped her step onto the jetty.
“Baroness von Berg. The baron is waiting for you.”
I’m sure he is, she thought, and nodded with a smile but said nothing as she followed him down the jetty toward the villa. She could see that the Villa Feltrinelli offered everything a couple like her and the baron could want.
She looked out at the lake. If the porter knew who she was, he was saying nothing. That was one thing she had to give Conrad: Even if every member of the staff
thought the holy Mother Earth had come for a secret tryst with her lover, and hazarded a guess this was her habit, nobody else would know. As much as she wanted to avoid the appearance of moral failure, this scenario was what it was, and people could think what they wanted.
He led her to the boathouse, which apparently was an even more private suite than those that occupied the main villa. Bravo, Conrad, she thought, and thanked the porter.
“Gianni,” he offered helpfully.
She nodded. “Like the legendary soccer player Gianni Rivera?”
“Sí!” he said, eyes wide. “I was named after him.”
Serena smiled. These days Rivera was a member of the European Parliament for the Uniti nell’Ulivo party. She followed Canadian hockey more closely than European football, but she knew enough about Rivera to know that he’d been the Wayne Gretzky of soccer in his day, able to instinctively know where the ball was going before it went there. It was an ability she had tried to cultivate in her own arena, where religion and politics squared off.
She switched to fluent Italian for Gianni’s benefit: “We’ll need his kind of passing game this year if our team is going to have a shot at the World Cup.”
Gianni nodded enthusiastically as the door to the boathouse opened.
A remarkably gorgeous Conrad stepped out and handed Gianni a wad of Euros. “Tausend dank,” he said, and waved Gianni away.
Gianni reluctantly walked off to the main villa, glancing back every now and then as if afraid to leave the baroness in the clutches of the barbarian Baron von Berg.
“I think he’s in love,” Conrad told her, and looked at her with sparkling eyes. “We all are.”
Without warning, he kissed her full on the lips. She threw both arms around his neck and kissed him back passionately. She felt him lift her up like a groom his bride and carry her across the threshold into their suite, where he nudged the door shut behind them and set her down.
She was breathless as they stared at each other, each waiting for the other to break the mood with some glib remark to coolly reestablish the uncrossable cosmic chasm that fate had always thrown up between them.
It’s always me, she thought. I’m always the one to push him away.
But she didn’t want to push him away. She wanted him to do it, prayed to God that he would do it. And Conrad, who could read her soul like one of his glyphless mysteries of antiquity, obliged for her sake and not his.
“Show me yours and I’ll show you mine,” he said.
She blinked. “What?”
He reached up to her neck, his fingers caressing her skin ever so gently. She put her own hand to his. But then he yanked the Dei medallion off her neck, leaving a slight red burn line.
“Conrad!” she yelled, and gripped her throat while he dangled the medallion in front of her face, his eyes on fire.
“So what’s Her Holiness of the Roman Catholic Church doing holding the face of Baal between her breasts?” he demanded.
“I know.” She swallowed hard. “It’s not the Tribute Penny of Jesus.”
“No, it’s a Shekel of Tyre. Just like one of those thirty goddamn pieces of silver Judas took to betray your Lord and Savior.”
“No, Conrad,” she gasped, trying to catch her breath. “It is one of the Judas coins.”
30
Conrad looked at Serena across the table outside the boathouse. She was clearly enjoying the lakeside dinner personally prepared for them by Chef Stefano Baiocco: fish soup with tiny squids, Parma ham with prawns and artichoke hearts, Lake Garda white fish called corégone, and homemade tagliolini with pesto. All paired with the most amazing wines.
When all the plates were cleared and the sun had finally set, Conrad sat back and listened to her telling him everything.
According to the New Testament gospels, Judas had sold out Jesus to the ruling religious council of the Jews, the Sanhedrin, for thirty pieces of silver. Those shekels came out of their temple tax coffers. After the Sanhedrin turned Jesus over to the Romans and it was clear that the Romans were going to kill Jesus by crucifixion, Judas was filled with remorse and hanged himself. Before he did, however, he returned to the temple and threw his money at the priests. The priests, recognizing at this point that the shekels were blood money, couldn’t deposit them back into the holy temple treasury. So they used the money for charity. They bought some land and turned it into a cemetery for paupers who couldn’t afford a proper burial.
“That much I know,” Conrad said. “Go on.”
According to the tradition of Dominus Dei, Serena told him, the man who sold his land to the Sanhedrin used the thirty pieces of silver to purchase another piece of land. This land he purchased from St. Matthew, the former tax collector and disciple of Jesus who wrote the authoritative gospel account of Judas’s coins. The land Matthew sold, moreover, was land that Judas had purchased for himself with money he had stolen from the disciples’ slush fund.
Conrad knew that apocryphal traditions were hard to authenticate and too often served the agendas of those who propagated them, so he was suspicious. “Why would Matthew even want that money?” he asked her. “What did he do with it?”
“Church tradition doesn’t really speculate on what happened to Matthew, but somehow the coins got to Rome,” she told him. “The Dei were established in the courts of Caesar well before St. Paul arrived in Rome and was beheaded by the emperor Nero. They were the secret Christians among Caesar’s staff and praetorian guard that Paul referred to in his last letters from prison before his execution.”
“So they just watched Paul’s head roll down the palace steps?” Conrad asked dubiously. “Nice friends there, Serena. But I guess you have to save your own ass before you save the world. Is that what Jesus said? No, I guess not.”
“I’m not excusing the Dei, Conrad. I’m just telling you their history. Because the Roman emperors established themselves as gods, any Christian who claimed to serve another god faced death. So instead of using the old codes of crosses and fishes, which Rome’s imperial intelligence services had cracked, they used the silver shekels to identify themselves to each other.”
“And how long did that work?” Conrad asked.
Serena gave him a funny look. “For about three hundred years, at which point the emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and it became the official religion of the Roman Empire.”
“And completely corrupted by power,” Conrad added. “At some point these coins stopped being heirlooms passed along after death. They became objects to be possessed by killing their owners in order to move up in the ranks of the Alignment.”
“I don’t know when it started, exactly,” she said. “Maybe with the Knights Templar.”
“What the hell are you doing with these people, Serena? That’s what I want to know. Especially after you pledged your undying love to me under the Mall in Washington, D.C., only to ditch me and steal that terrestrial globe.”
She seemed to visibly tense up at the mention of the globe, and Conrad was glad to see it was still a sore point with her, too.
“The Alignment had targeted the U.S. ever since its founding and was on the verge of taking over the American republic from within until you stopped it,” she began. “But when you left me alone there under L’Enfant Plaza with the globe, the secret seal of the United States, and those creepy Houdon busts of America’s ‘other’ founding fathers, I didn’t know if you were going to succeed in stopping the Alignment and come back for me.”
“So you stole the globe.”
“If the Alignment had succeeded in taking over the federal government, they would have had both globes, Conrad. I couldn’t take the risk, especially after I recognized the face of one of those busts. The family resemblance, together with my knowledge of his history, led me to realize that Cardinal Tucci of Dominus Dei was a member of the Alignment. I had no idea that the Dei itself was an organ of the Alignment until after Tucci’s suicide and his passing of the mantle, or rather medallion, to me.”
“I was just supposed to run off with you, make love, have babies, and let the world go to hell?”
“Yeah, if the alternative is hooking up with the devil.”
“Sometimes you have to join them to lick them, Conrad. The Dei is just one thread of the Alignment, the ecclesiastical thread, represented by one coin—mine. Destroying my cell would do little to hurt the larger organization. You know the Alignment traces itself much further back than the Church, to before the Egyptians and even Atlantis. They use empires and religions and new world orders like locusts consuming one host after the other. Now these coins are in the hands of the world’s most powerful political, financial, and cultural leaders.”
Conrad sighed. There was no way she was going to bed with him tonight. “So you want to put names to faces.”
“No, I want to put faces to the names I’ve got.”
She explained that the Alignment had organized itself along the ranks of angels. There was the grandmaster at the top, surrounded by a council of thirty “knights.” In addition to possessing one of the original Judas coins, each knight had a divine name that described his or her nature and role within the organization.
“Sorath is the name of the grandmaster,” she told him. “Sorath is a fallen angel whose number, Rome believes, is 666. I have no idea who he is, but I assume he will be in Rhodes, where the Council of Thirty will be gathered for the first time in three hundred years.”
The Atlantis Revelation Page 13
