"Conrad prefers a Glock," Serena said quickly. "He didn't kill Mercedes."
"No, he was either killed with her or is about to join her," Packard said sharply before he hung up.
Serena looked out her window to see Benito pulling up in the car, then talking to the Greek police as he stepped out. They were conducting a plane-to-plane search for Conrad Yeats. They were paying particular attention to her plane, no doubt courtesy of Midas. They needn't have worried.
Benito boarded the plane, shut the door, and sat down in the aisle across from her as the engines grew to a dull roar. They were cleared for takeoff. She held her breath while Benito solemnly fastened his seat belt and looked at her with sad, soulful eyes.
"I'm sorry to tell you, signorina, that once again Dr. Yeats has fooled us all."
She breathed a sigh of relief. "Thank God."
14
Conrad looked at himself in the broken mirror of his private compartment as the Czech-built diesel locomotive hauled the train clickety-clack across the Albanian countryside. He had boarded the train as a swarthy Mediterranean workman and would disembark as a Central European businessman in a dark Brooks Brothers suit, with lighter hair, goatee, and spectacles.
That was assuming the train reached the end of the line. The Mother Teresa international airport in Tirana was only an hour away, but they were going less than thirty-five miles an hour.
Conrad had escaped Corfu and crossed the Adriatic to the southern coast of Albania in under thirty minutes, all thanks to the hydrofoil Andros had provided, along with fake passports, a bag of disguises, and two untraced smartphones, a BlackBerry and an iPhone, each operating on a separate network carrier. From the beach at Durres, he had made it to the local train station, where he first saw the news about Mercedes and his picture on all the news websites on his iPhone.
Goddamn bastards, he thought as he gave himself a final once-over in the small mirror.
He was thinking of Midas and the Alignment, Packard and the U.S., and even Serena and the Church. Everybody, in the end, was in bed with each other when they weren't killing each other. Also, it bothered him to no end to see that he had better cell phone reception in Albania than he had back in the States: He had just received his electronic boarding pass from Swissair in his bogus identity's e-mail inbox.
He put away his makeup and glared at the only other passenger in the private compartment of this secondhand railroad car: Baron von Berg. Sitting on a torn seat, the skull taunted him with its jagged grin and the secrets it once possessed.
It's all in my head.
Conrad pulled out the Glock he kept tucked inside his back waistband. Aiming the butt of the pistol like a hammer over the skull, he brought it down on the silver plate, smashing the skull to pieces. He looked at the fragments of bone scattered around the silver plate on the table.
Nothing. The skull was indeed empty.
Then he picked up the silver plate. He turned it over and held his breath. There was a glint of small engraving in the silver.
"Von Berg, you crazy bastard," Conrad said as he took a closer look at the engraving.
It was a string of eight characters-four numbers followed by four letters: 1740 ARES.
There it was: 1740 had to be the number of Baron von Berg's safe deposit box in what was now Midas's Swiss bank. And ARES had to be the combination.
This was the four-digit code Midas was looking for.
He had it and Midas didn't.
But with the Alignment, there was always more, he knew. Nothing could be taken for granted.
Ares was the name of the ancient Greek god of war. The astral projection was the constellation Aries, the first sign of the zodiac. The planet Mars, with the Roman name of the same Greek god, had entered the sign of Aries two weeks ago on March 20, the spring equinox.
A coincidence?
Not for these Alignment bastards. Every day and date had some sort of bizarre meaning for them, if for nobody else.
There was probably an astrological connection that could throw light on the baron's 1943 plans for the Flammenschwert and Midas's plans for it in the new millennium.
Mercedes had said something about seven more days. That would be one week from today-Good Friday for Christians around the world, according to the Gregorian calendar. There would be a full moon that night, followed the next day by the Jewish Passover and the day after that by Christian Easter.
Beyond those dates, Conrad saw nothing else of astrological or astronomical significance on the calendar while the zodiac was fixed in Aries.
Seven days.
Whatever was going to happen with the Flammenschwert was going to happen then. And the religious significance of the dates only further confirmed the magnitude of the Alignment's plot, whatever it was.
The train's wheels made a high-pitched screech, and Conrad looked out to see a sheer cliff as the train hugged a mountain above the Adriatic. He took the opportunity to toss the silver plate out the window and scatter the remains of the skull over the waters. Not quite a proper burial for the Baron of the Black Order, but it would have to do.
By the time the train pulled into the station in Tirana, he was all packed up and ready to step off into his new identity. He scanned the platform for any security and grabbed a cab to the Mother Teresa airport.
An hour later, he leaned back in his seat as the Swissair plane lifted off the runway and banked toward Zurich. The seat belt sign blinked off a few minutes later, and flight attendants took drink orders. He ordered two Bloody Marys, one for Serena and one for Mercedes, painfully aware that he'd just had a very close call and that this was the last free pass he'd enjoy on the journey before him.
PART TWO
15
BAKU, AZERBAIJAN
A darkened military car carrying one American and three Azerbaijani special forces commandos rolled through the city's old town toward the harbor before dawn. Riding shotgun in the front passenger seat with an AG36 40mm grenade launcher across her lap was the American, a knife-thin black woman in her early thirties with short hair and sharp features. Her name was Wanda Randolph, and her mission was to intercept and secure a mysterious shipment that had landed at Heydar Aliyev International Airport, sixteen miles east of Baku. The airport's advanced Antworks computer software and scanner system had tagged and tracked the crate through the cargo terminal's state-of-the-art X-rays and radiation detectors to an awaiting van. The van had taken the crate to a warehouse on the Caspian, where it was waiting to be loaded onto an oil tanker.
The operation was code-named Feuerloscher-German for "fire extinguisher."
The commando raid was to be carried out jointly by American and Azerbaijani special operations forces and locals. The mission had been mounted rapidly overnight on orders from the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Department when the location of the crate had been confirmed. Another dozen American commandos in a specially equipped Black Hawk were ready to swoop in if the team got pinned in a gun battle.
Wanda glanced up from the glowing GPS map that General Packard had sent to her handheld computer. The ancient walls of the Palace of the Shirvanshahs, the Maiden Tower, and the Juma Mosque rose up on either side of the narrow, twisting alley. Then the car cleared the maze of buildings, and the pitch-black Caspian Sea spread out before them, marked by the lights along the waterfront.
The Caspian was called a sea because, at 143,244 square miles, it was the world's largest lake, smack between Russia to the north and Iran to the south. Azerbaijan occupied the western shores, and tonight it felt as if the city of Baku stood at the edge of the world, a world that itself was teetering on the brink of a bottomless abyss.
"Take a left," she told the driver, a young macho gun named Omar.
"Yes, ma'am," Omar said in a bogus Oklahoma accent, eliciting muffled chuckles from the other two in back. All three had been trained in a cross-cultural Oklahoma National Guard training program with the U.S. Army and loved to play the American cowboy in the new
Wild West here on the Caspian. But none had ever been ordered to listen to a woman, let alone one of color, and they resisted. The election of America's first black president, it turned out, wasn't going to change human nature or much of anything else in this world.
They turned onto Neftchilar Avenue and drove along the waterfront boulevard and marina. They quickly passed the state oil company and government house and, a few minutes later, were surrounded by the oil derricks and pumps of the east harbor.
At last she could make out the warehouse where the van with the crate containing the Flammenschwert was parked. She directed Omar to park at the adjoining oil terminal, then led them to a communal outhouse.
"Why have we stopped?" Omar said once they were inside and could talk quietly. He was breathing through his mouth because of the stench. "The warehouse is the other way."
"Sorry to disappoint you, Omar. But we can't go storming in like Rambo if there's any chance they've got some kind of nuclear device. We've got to take them by surprise." She unfolded her schematics of the sewer tunnels. "No radios," she instructed them. "We stick to light signals until we get to the warehouse, and then it's hand motions."
She looked up and locked eyes with each man as she spoke. She wanted to make sure they understood her perfectly.
Standing around in their black-on-black Texas Ranger baseball caps, flak jackets, and special night-vision hazmat masks, the Azerbaijanis could pass for one of her old U.S. special forces teams. Wanda had gotten her start years earlier in Tora Bora and Baghdad, crawling through caves and bunkers and sewers ahead of American troops in search of al-Qaeda terrorist leader Osama bin Laden and, later, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Bomb-sniffing dogs had the noses to find explosives, but they didn't have the eyes or sense to look out for trip wires in the dark. So she was always the first one in. Later on she was recruited by the U.S. Capitol Police to establish a special recon and tactics squad, or RATS, to police and protect the miles of utility tunnels beneath the U.S. Capitol complex. "Queen Rat," they called her.
But Omar and his friends weren't at that level of professionalism yet. They were inexperienced in these kinds of operations, a political necessity for a "joint" American-Azerbaijani mission that was anything but. Tonight was a baptism by fire.
"This outhouse is connected to an ancient sewer that pipes into the modern one under the warehouse," she told them, pointing to the map. "We come up from beneath, use a camera to get a readout, and then we hit them and secure the package."
She double-checked to make sure they had properly inserted the translucent magazines of their laser-sighted G36 machine guns. Their short-stroke gas systems enabled them to fire tens of thousands of rounds without cleaning, perfect for these guys. Then she proceeded to unbolt one of the rusty metal latrines from the concrete floor to reveal a big black hole.
Omar could only stare in horror as the mission she described on the schematic finally sank in. "This is a shithole!"
"That's what we Americans do, Omar. Climb through shit-holes all over the world to make it a safer place."
He shook his head in horror. "I cannot fit through that," he said with disdain. "My shoulders are too wide."
Which was true. A man's shoulders were often the limiting factor in this kind of work. For women, it was their hips; Wanda's were unusually slim. But while women could do little to narrow their pelvis, men had other options.
"Dang, Omar, you're right. Here, let me take a look," she said, and with an open palm made a powerful thrust to Omar's right shoulder. The blow dislocated his shoulder, and it dropped like a hanging outlaw in an old western. "Oops."
"You American bitch!" he cried. "You broke it!"
"I can fix it when we get out. But now you can squeeze in."
He opened his mouth to protest, but she gave him her angry-black-woman death stare until he calmed down. She then strapped her grenade launcher to her back, slipped on her mask, pushed aside the metal latrine, and dropped into the sewer.
It was cool and dark in the tunnel as she crawled on all fours through the river of filth and oil. One spark and they'd all burn to a crisp. It had been in a crumbling, asbestos-lined tunnel much like this one that she had first met and shot at Conrad Yeats. Yeats had been America's most-wanted man at the time. Now he was Europe's most-wanted man. Or he would be once news got out that he had blown up billionaire Roman Midas's mega yacht and allegedly killed his French media scion girlfriend.
But General Packard had been proved right again: The sight of Yeats had been enough for Midas to double-check his operations and, in so doing, betray the location of the package she was after. The breakthrough had come when the tail sign of Midas's twin-engine G650 was caught over the Black Sea by the cockpit cameras of an unmanned Israeli G550 AWACS, or airborne early warning aircraft, equipped with the Israeli Phalcon radar system and satellite data links. The Israeli plane's onboard SIGINT equipment then captured and analyzed the pilot's electronic transmissions and traced them to a cell phone owned by Roman Midas.
Wanda followed the schematics to reach the end point under the warehouse. She snaked a fiber-optic camera through the grating of a drain and got a visual on the van sitting on the loading dock.
She signaled her team, and they took up positions beneath the grating. It was the size of a manhole cover back in the States. She poked it with the barrel of her AG36 and found it heavy but movable. She slid it slowly across the concrete floor and climbed out into the warehouse, followed by Omar and his buddies, who looked like rats on a drowning ship coming up for air.
Omar's arm was dragging. Wanda put her slimy hand over his mask and, staring into his wide eyes, hammered his shoulder back into place while she muffled his cry. They moved out quietly, awaiting her signal.
The van sat there in the dark with a driver behind the wheel while the sound of a motorboat grew louder. She looked through her nightscope and saw two flashes from the sea. The van replied by flashing its headlights twice. A minute later, a boat pulled up, and four black-clad men jumped out.
The van door slid open to reveal the driver and a crate. The driver stepped out to meet the men but then dropped to the ground as one of the seamen slashed a knife across his throat. The killer silently kicked the body into the water and walked to the crate and hauled it over. He flashed a sign. Now four men appeared. He cracked open the box and lit a cigarette.
Wanda squeezed the trigger, and Mr. Marlboro crumpled to the ground. By the time his companions saw, it was too late. A hail of bullets from the Azerbaijanis rained down on them and riddled the van with bullets.
"Stand down!" she shouted, and ran over to the crate while the others jogged after her. "It's a miracle you didn't blow us all up!"
She broke open the crate to find a dead dolphin on a block of dry ice. The stench was rank. She heard something behind her and turned to see one of her boys puking out his last meal: lula kebab with walnuts. She was about to call this red herring in to Packard, but he had already seen everything from her head camera and was cursing loudly into her ear.
She ripped off her earpiece and looked at Omar, who had helped himself to the Marlboro of the dead man and was smiling. "You see something funny here, Omar?"
Omar started laughing.
She repeated, "I asked if you see something funny here."
"You," Omar said, pointing the cigarette at her as he blew a perfect ring of smoke. "You have shit on your face!"
16
LONDON
Midas couldn't help but note all the sale items on display in the storefront windows along an empty Bond Street in the early morning as Vadim drove the Bentley toward the worldwide headquarters of Midas Minerals amp; Mining. The golden glass tower was designed to look like a stack of gold coins overlooking the River Thames. But the global financial depression had come into full force by the time it was finished, making it a symbol of excess from an earlier gilded age.
His beloved mega yacht was another symbol of that era, and the Times of London had taken the lib
erty of printing two pictures-before and after-on the front page by the time Midas had landed after his unplanned early departure from Corfu two hours ago. Below the fold was a smaller story about the murder of Mercedes.
That goddamn American. Yeats left me no choice.
Midas hated losses, and to take them at the hands of a two-bit pirate like Conrad Yeats was doubly humiliating. He hated feeling like he was cornered.
Now his BlackBerry smartphone was vibrating in a manner that told him Sorath was calling. Midas reached into the long trench coat he had put on upon landing-the air in London being considerably more chilly than on the tropical island of Corfu-and answered the phone.
The disembodied voice of the grandmaster of the Knights of the Alignment was chillier still, and wasted no time making accusations.
"I warned you not to attempt to kill Yeats, Midaslovich. You betrayed yourself to the Americans, and now you are brazen enough to think you can bargain with us."
Sorath sounded particularly displeased, but maybe it was just because there was a deeper bass level than usual in the harmonics of the voice scrambler that disguised his identity. For the past year Midas had tried to find a voiceprint match, all in vain. Only a face-to-face at the Rhodes summit next week would reveal the grandmaster's true identity and whether or not Midas already knew the man.
"I've done no such thing," Midas replied coolly.
"Then why, after all we've done for you, did you feel the need for extra insurance?" the voice said. "I'm speaking of the American strike inside Baku an hour ago."
"They found nothing," Midas said. "And neither did the man you had in place to relieve me of the Flammenschwert."
"What have you done with it?" Sorath demanded.
Midas smiled. Sorath wasn't God, and it was pleasant to hear him admit as much. The grandmaster of the Knights of the Alignment wasn't omnipotent, and he certainly wasn't omniscient, or he would have known from the start that Midas never would have allowed himself to become expendable to anybody.
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