Which was why Midas had offloaded the Flammenschwert from the Midas to his second submersible while making everybody think he had sent it off by chopper. That submarine was completely undetectable as it made its way underwater until the proper time for it to surface. Meanwhile, Midas was untouchable.
"My orders were to bring the Flammenschwert to Uriel," he said. "And so I shall. Nothing has changed."
"Yeats changed things. Mercedes Le Roche is dead, and you're being tracked by the Americans and Scotland Yard."
Midas turned to look out the rear window and saw the unmarked police car in the distance. Two of them had been following him ever since his private jet had landed at Heathrow.
"KGB, CIA, MI5, it matters little to me," Midas said. "I've dealt with them all, and I'm happy to provide misdirection by simply going about my business as usual. I'm here in London for the weekend, then to Paris for Mercedes's funeral, and then off to Rhodes as scheduled."
There was a pause on the other end. "Did you find the code to Baron von Berg's box?"
Midas said nothing as Vadim pulled the Bentley up to the main entrance of the Midas Center.
"You know the requirements for full membership in the Thirty, Midaslovich," Sorath said. "I'd hate to have you miss our little private gathering during the Rhodes summit."
Midas heard the telltale series of beeps signaling that Sorath had hung up and their scrambled transmission was over.
Midas rode a glass elevator up from the sparkling six-story atrium of the hotel, shops, and offices into the tower of private condominiums. Few Britons knew or cared that the award-winning building, his firm's trading in precious metals, his widely publicized purchases at art auctions at Sotheby's, and even his knighthood by the queen all had been part of the Alignment's strategic branding effort to paint him as something other than another former Russian oil oligarch. Even if that was how Sorath and the Alignment preferred to treat him.
Midas walked into his bedroom and into the second of his vast walk-in wardrobe rooms. On the racks hung dozens of Savile Row suits like the one he was wearing, and on the walls hung several million-dollar paintings he had purchased at Sotheby's and later found too ugly to hang anywhere else.
He sat on one of the overstuffed chairs and unlaced his shoes, pulled off his socks, and removed every strip of clothing. He then stood before the row of mirrors and examined his sculpted physique.
He still had a six-pack abdomen, although he'd once boasted an eight-pack when he went fishing with Putin a few years back. The former Russian president always liked to remove his shirt in the great outdoors for the cameras, so the people would know their leader was virile and strong. Putin had not liked it when Midas removed his own shirt and showed him up, and Midas was never invited fishing again.
He saw his right hand trembling slightly in the mirror and closed it into a quiet fist. He opened it, and the fingers began to tremble again. With a sigh, he pushed a button, and the mirror slid open like a door to reveal a stone chamber with a glowing spa in the center. The Tank, as he called it, was his only real weakness and altar to the mysticism of the Alignment. But the reality of his long-term exposure to cyanide as a child and the resulting neurological condition had forced him to seek a cure regardless of its source. Without a cure, he would eventually suffer the same fate as the divers he had gassed in the decompression chamber aboard the Midas.
Lining the floor, walls, and ceiling of the chamber were bluestones from the same quarries used by the ancients centuries ago to erect the monument of Stonehenge, Britain's darkest mystery. Most archaeologists believed Stonehenge was an astronomical observatory of some kind, erected around 2500 B.C. But others long had suspected the bluestones were far older and that Stonehenge was a place of healing for pilgrims from all across Europe.
Bluestones, it seemed, were prized for their healing properties. And it was none other than Conrad Yeats, ironically, who had used the stars to help a team of British archaeologists from Bournemouth University pinpoint the exact location in Wales from where Stonehenge's massive bluestones were quarried-Carn Menyn Mountain in the Preseli Hills of Pembrokeshire.
As for the spa in the center of the bluestone floor, Midas's mistress in London, Natalia, had filled it with kabbalah water. Her friend the American pop star Madonna had sworn by it when she purchased a flat in the tower.
Kabbalistic wisdom, Natalia had told him with a straight face, taught that water was God's medium for the creation of the world and was the essence of all life on earth. In the beginning, God's spirit moved across the face of "the deep" that was pure, positive, and healing energy. But then the "negativity" of humanity-she refused to use the word "sin"-by the time of Noah's Flood had changed the nature of water into a destructive force of floods, tsunamis, and the like. Kabbalists believed that water could be returned to its primordial state of good by infusing it with ancient blessings and meditations.
That was how kabbalah water came to fill Midas's bluestone spa, with all its miraculous powers of restoration and healing.
The Alignment, of course, had a different term for this kind of allegedly metastasized water: Tears of Atlantis. The Knights of the Alignment consumed it as a special-label drinking water courtesy of the Hellenic Bottling Company, which also distributed Coca-Cola across Europe and the Middle East.
Midas could only smile as he pictured a small team of kabbalists, all sworn to secrecy, chanting away in some obscure distillation room at the bottling plant.
On one crazy level, it made sense to him that water was a conductor of energy and that the quality of the water he took into his body impacted the information being transmitted to his nervous system. At the very least, it gave his London mistress something to do with her friend Madonna besides run off and spend his money on yet another money-losing retail store for her hideous fashion lines.
He stepped down and settled into the warm amethyst-colored waters of the spa. He reclined in the sculptured stone seat built into the bluestone basin and glided his hand past a sensor. Music piped in, and an overhead door of solid bluestone slowly slid over him and locked into place. The glass screen across the entire back of the door enabled him to surf the Internet, watch any television channel, and monitor his businesses around the world. But for now he put on his favorite screen saver of soothing light, closed his eyes, and laid his head back until only his eyes, nose, and mouth broke the surface of the water.
Kabbalah water. Bluestones with healing powers. Such articles of faith were nonsense to Midas. But these immersion experiences in the tank seemed to have arrested the progression of the neurological condition brought on by his long-term exposure to cyanide. Slowly, it was taking over his body and would eventually kill him. He had to stop it. He would do anything to live.
Even cave to the mysticism of the Alignment.
17
ROME
Later that morning, the events of Corfu still fresh in her psyche, Serena stared through the tinted window of her limo at the obelisk in St. Peter's Square as Benito drove through the gates of Vatican City on the eve of Palm Sunday and Easter week celebrations.
As she checked her Vertu phone, she couldn't shake the memory of Conrad the night before, the hatred in his eyes. He had left her no message. Nor any clue as to his whereabouts. But she did have an Evite to the funeral of Mercedes Le Roche in Paris on Monday, along with a personal e-mail from Papa Le Roche himself, the Rupert Murdoch of French media, begging her as a friend of the family to attend.
"You have enough worries without him, signorina," said Benito, looking up in the mirror, reading her thoughts. "He can take care of himself. You must fix your eyes on Rhodes."
"I know, Benito," she said. "But it's different this time. I feel it."
"It's always different, signorina. Every time we pass through these gates. And so it is always the same."
True, she thought as they curved along a winding drive and arrived at the entrance of the governorate. Eight years ago the pope had met her in a secret offi
ce here and given her an antediluvian map along with a holy mission to uncover ancient ruins two miles beneath the ice in Antarctica. Four years later, in that very office, the diabolical Cardinal Tucci had revealed to her the truth behind the Church's supersecret order Dominus Dei. Then he had jumped out a window to his death. Now the office was hers.
The Swiss Guards in their crimson uniforms snapped to attention as Serena walked inside. She passed a hive of offices along an obscure hallway to an old service elevator.
In normal times the elevator would take her up to the fifth floor and her suite of offices, which officially interceded on behalf of persecuted Christians in politically hostile countries and unofficially administered the work of Dominus Dei. But these were anything except normal days. She pressed her thumb to a button with no markings that scanned her biometrics, and the elevator descended to the catacombs beneath Vatican City.
She felt like a prisoner in her own castle and remembered the words of Jesus in the Book of Revelation: "Look, I'm standing at the door and knocking. If anyone listens to my voice and opens the door, I'll come in and we'll eat together." He had been talking about the door of the human heart, but He just as easily could have been talking about the Church. After all, God had called St. Paul to go beyond his Jewish world in order to bring the message of redemption through faith in Jesus Christ to the Greeks and, ultimately, to Caesar in Rome.
Perhaps it was "out there" that God had been calling her all along, beyond the walls of the Church. She had cloistered herself here, she had told herself, to protect Conrad and the Church and the world. But maybe she was doing more harm than good. After all, Jesus was more likely to be found beyond the domes and spires and walls of Vatican City, with the people He called "the least of these." Not with the rich and powerful or religious, whom she had found to be as poor and weak and worldly in spirit as anybody.
Yet here she was, locked inside the holy gates of Rome.
Serena stepped off the elevator onto a secret floor deep beneath the governorate. She walked down a long subterranean tunnel to a heavy ornate door behind which the Dei kept priceless artifacts collected from around the world and across the ages. If it were her choice, she would have returned most of them to museums in their cultures of origin. But it was not.
Indeed, her choices of late seemed to be more limited than ever.
Waiting for her inside the dimly lit chamber was a young monk from the Dei and the two otherworldly copper globes that he was guarding. Brother Lorenzo was one of the Vatican's top authenticators of antiques and therefore one of its top forgers of art. He knelt before Serena and kissed her ring with the Dominus Dei insignia.
"Your Eminence," he said. "Welcome back."
Serena, extremely uncomfortable, looked down at the top of the monk's bowed head and withdrew her hand from his clasp. The Church didn't allow female priests, let alone female cardinals. But as the head of Dominus Dei, she was automatically considered a "secret cardinal" appointed by the pope. A secret cardinal to hide the secrets of the Church. Not that the current pontiff, as traditional as they came, would ever acknowledge her as such. But to her amazement, the Vatican did secretly acknowledge the rank of her office, if not the officeholder. Her frighteningly eager underlings, hoping to gain the office for themselves someday, took every advantage to freely address her as such.
"Thank you, Brother Lorenzo. You can call me Sister Serghetti."
Lorenzo rose to his feet, but his covetous gaze was fixed on the medallion dangling from her neck. "Yes, Sister Serghetti."
As she had explained to Midas, legend had it that the ancient Roman coin in the center of the medallion was the very Tribute Penny Jesus had held up when He told His followers that they should "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's." It had been passed down through the ages from one leader of the Dei to the next. Some argued that it represented power greater than the papacy. Which no doubt explained Lorenzo's disturbing fascination with it.
Serena broke Lorenzo's trance with an order: "The globes, Lorenzo."
"This way, Sister Serghetti."
She followed Lorenzo to the small alcove showcasing the globes, one displaying the surface of the earth, the other displaying the heavens. Each sphere was eighteen inches in diameter and resembled the works of the Dutch master cartographer Willem Bleau's studio in the sixteenth century. But these had been constructed thousands of years earlier, although her attempts to date them proved inconclusive.
Both Church and Templar tradition suggested the globes once rested atop the twin columns that stood at the entrance of King Solomon's Temple. But the Knights Templar believed the globes themselves were crafted far earlier. While Noah was building his ark, other children of Lamech were engraving the globes with the lost knowledge of Atlantis and the antediluvian world so that knowledge would survive the coming destruction of the Flood. The globes, the Templars believed, contained or pointed to some pre-Genesis revelation.
The only legend that Serena had been able to authenticate with any degree of certainty, however, was that the globes had been unearthed beneath the Temple Mount in Jerusalem by the Knights Templar.
Centuries later, the Masons took them to the New World and buried them under what would become Washington, D.C. That was where they rested until the twenty-first century, when Conrad Yeats dug them up before the Alignment could.
The globes apparently worked together like some kind of astronomical clock in a manner that Serena had yet to figure out. But she was positive it involved a secret code or alignment between a constellation on the celestial globe and a landmark on the terrestrial globe. After all, Conrad's knowledge that Washington, D.C., was aligned to the constellation of Virgo had led him to the location of the globes. So it made sense to Serena that the alignment of the globes themselves led to an even greater revelation-a revelation that for centuries had eluded the Church, the Knights Templar, the Masons, the Americans, and everybody else.
Everybody, that is, except the Alignment, which had ordered her to deliver the Templar globes next week to the meeting of the Council of Thirty on the island of Rhodes, all under the guise of the European summit on the fate of Jerusalem.
Serena ran her hand over the smooth contours of the continents on the terrestrial globe, marveling at its three-dimensional, holographic look. "Now tell me what you discovered with the terrestrial globe," she said to Lorenzo.
"The terrestrial sphere is full of hidden gear wheels that, in turn, drive the most unique surface dials I've ever seen on an ancient astronomical clock."
"What dials?"
"The northern and southern hemispheres of the terrestrial globe are really dials," he said. "Inside the mechanism are gear trains that drive the dials. The gear trains are driven by a crank that is inserted into a tiny hole at the bottom in Antarctica."
She looked closely at the tiny hole in the ancient landmass of East Antarctica. It was in the shape of a pentagon. "How could I have missed it?"
"It is rather small." Lorenzo pulled out a tiny S-lever that he had reproduced, inserted it into the hole, and began to crank it. "It works like a keylock, moving the hidden gears within the shell."
To Serena's amazement, the surface of the terrestrial globe began to change before her eyes like some kind of high-definition animation. The continents didn't move, but the contours within them shimmered for a moment and locked into place. "What happened?" she demanded.
"This," said Lorenzo, removing the lever and inserting a penlight into the hole. Three pinpricks of light burst forth from the terrestrial globe in the locations of Antarctica, Washington, D.C., and Jerusalem.
"It's a triangle," Serena said decisively. "Just like the U.S. Capitol, the White House, and the Washington Monument. Those monuments lined up with the constellations of Bootes, Leo, and Virgo. Likewise, these three capital cities from the terrestrial globe should line up with three constellations on the celestial globe."
"The problem, of course, is that the real celestial globe is s
till with the Americans," Lorenzo reminded her. "And you've never seen it with your own eyes, only the terrestrial globe you stole from Dr. Yeats. He's the only person alive who has seen both globes, which puts us at a terrible disadvantage. The faux globe I've created over here is merely my attempt to mirror in astral terms the mapping I've gleaned from the terrestrial globe."
All true, unfortunately, Serena thought. Her plan had been to procure the genuine celestial globe from Marshall Packard in exchange for her intelligence on Russian mining operations in the Arctic. But that plan had gone up in flames on Corfu. So she had been forced to resort to Plan B.
"I did the best I could," Lorenzo explained weakly as he showed her the two globes side by side-the forged celestial globe and the genuine terrestrial globe.
"Oh, dear," she said, unable to hide her disappointment. The celestial knockoff looked markedly inferior next to the terrestrial globe.
"Our metallurgists, meanwhile, tell me that they've never seen anything like the copper-bronze ore from which the original globes were cast," Lorenzo said. "What you see is their best attempt to match its appearance."
Serena tried to suppress her alarm. They had but seventy-two hours to fix this disaster, and there were no second chances with the Alignment. "Give me the penlight, Lorenzo."
Lorenzo handed it to her, and she inserted it in the tiny hole at the bottom of the forged celestial globe. Three pinpricks of light appeared in the constellations of Orion, Virgo, and Aries: the buckle star Alnilam on Orion's Belt, the alpha star Spica in Virgo, and the brightest star, Alpha Arietis, in Aries.
"I selected Orion and Virgo based on what you told me about Antarctica and D.C. And I selected Aries for Jerusalem because Aries is the cosmic Lamb and Jerusalem is where the globes are said to originate."
"I can accept that. Now we have to hope the Alignment will accept the forgery as the real thing." She looked carefully at Lorenzo's creation. "If we can't bring our celestial globe up to the quality of the terrestrial globe, then maybe we can degrade the look of the terrestrial globe without damaging it. Maybe dull it down with a coat of something or other."
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