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?"
"Si!" 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 coregone, 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."
It took an incredible amount of willpower, but Conrad maintained an even tone of voice. "You didn't have to stay."
"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 coi
n-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."
"Why now?" Conrad asked, although he knew that the recovery of the legendary technology of Atlantis in the Flammenschwert was certainly one factor. But he suspected it wasn't the deciding factor.
Serena shrugged. "I guess I'll find out when I get there."
There was something she wasn't telling him, but he couldn't put his finger on it. "What about you, Serena? What's your name?"
"Naamah," she said, looking down. "The fallen angel of prostitution who is more pleasing to men than to God."
Conrad decided he didn't want to go there in this discussion. She was already scaring the hell out of him. "And Midas?"
"Well, he's clearly inherited Baron von Berg's rank," she said. "His name is Xaphan-the fallen angel who keeps the fires of hell burning at full blast."
"You got that right," he said, and decided to tell her all about Baron von Berg's lost submarine and the Flammenschwert.
She looked stunned, as if everything made sense to her now. "I know the legend of Greek fire and its use during the Crusades, but I never imagined that the Nazis had found a way to tap Atlantean technology."
"Apparently, they did. I've seen the technology up close and personal."
He could see she was lost in thought when something like a flash of lightning flickered across her soft brown eyes. "And what about Baron von Berg's safe deposit box in Bern?" she asked. "What did you find inside?"
"This," he said, and slapped down the Shekel of Tyre on the table. "See, I've got one, too."
31
Serena stared at the coin on the table and fully grasped Midas's predicament and her own. Midas had been claiming some sort of provisional status within the Thirty based on his control over Baron von Berg's box, with the assumption that somehow, someday, he would possess its contents. Now Conrad had the coin and, technically, membership in the Alignment.
Until somebody like Midas or herself killed him for it.
"How did you get this?" she asked. "And why couldn't Midas?"
Conrad explained the code in the metal plate from Baron von Berg's skull, the self-destruct box in Bern, and how he'd circumvented all the security and escaped. He smiled and said, "So I guess we're going to Rhodes."
Serena was shaking inside. "I don't think so, Conrad."
"Names and faces, Serena. Names and faces. And, I'll bet you, the designated target for the Flammenschwert."
She couldn't let it happen, she realized. But she didn't want to fight him now. "We'll need a plan," she said. "A good one."
"How about this one?" he said, and produced a long tube he had been keeping under the table. It was a roll file, and inside were architectural drawings of a massive fortress. He spread them across the table. "Look familiar?"
"The Palace of the Grandmaster," she said. "Where did you get these?"
"Beneath the floorboards in the Magnolia Suite of the main villa."
"Seriously, Conrad."
"Seriously," he told her. "This was the last residence of Mussolini before he was executed. Rhodes belonged to the Italians back then, and Il Duce had grand plans for his Palace of the Grandmaster."
"It wasn't his," Serena said. "It was built by the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem in the seventh century."
"True, but that palace was pretty much demolished by the explosion of Turkish gunpowder centuries later. Mussolini restored and modified it between 1937 and 1940. These are the plans of the architect Vittorio Mesturino."
Serena didn't like the direction of this conversation and had to change it, put Conrad back on his heels. "How could you possibly know there were blueprints beneath the floorboards in the Magnolia Suite?"
"I didn't," he said. "But the hotel staff told me that was the suite Mussolini slept in, and I knew from his other residences where he liked to hide documents."
"Everybody missed it during the hotel's renovation?"
"The beauty of preservation," he explained. "The charm of this place is that most everything is as it was. Now look at the blueprint. There's a secret council chamber under the palace that's not shown in any contemporary floor plans. It's directly beneath the large courtyard in the center of the palace. That's where the Knights of the Alignment are going to meet."
Serena stared at the blueprint and then looked up at Conrad, who was studying the schematics and clearly making plans in his head. Yet again his genius genuinely frightened her. She was a careful strategist, but Conrad was opportunistic to a fault, able to find an opening when all doors seemed closed and bullets were raining down. That wasn't going to save him on Rhodes, though. Nothing would, if he actually stepped foot on the island.
"I think we should look it over after dessert," she said. "I'm going to shower and change first. It's been a very long day, and the week ahead is looking longer still."
She excused herself and walked into the boathouse. It was lavishly appointed, and she half believed she was capable of going to bed with Conrad that night. It could be their last chance ever. She picked up her backpack from the bed and went into the marble bathroom with flower petals everywhere. She splashed water on her face, feeling the queasiness of betrayal.
She pulled out her Vertu phone from her backpack and placed a call. The voice on the other end said, "Well?"
"I've got him," she said. "He's yours."
32
Conrad sat on the bed, anxiously waiting for Serena to emerge from the bathroom and wondering exactly what he'd see. There wasn't a lot of room in her little backpack for a change of clothes or a nightgown. But in every previous do-or-die moment of physical intimacy between them, she'd always managed to surprise him and leave him wanting.
"Conrad?" she called from the bathroom. "How did you find out which box was von Berg's?"
"It was etched beneath the metal plate in his skull."
"What was the code?"
"ARES, the god of war."
"Makes sense," she called out. "And the box number?"
"1740."
There was no response.
Conrad paused, wondering if he should say anything. Then he looked up to see Serena step out of the bathroom wearing only his white dress shirt, which managed to both hide and highlight her irresistible figure. He swallowed hard and stood up as she approached him.
She stood barely an inch away from his face, looking up at him. Their bodies did not touch, but he felt an unmistakable exchange of sexual energy between them.
"Do you really think it's a weapon forged from the technology of Atlantis?" she asked.
"I think it really turns water to fire on some molecular level, and that von Berg had a connection to Antarctica, which might have a connection with Atlantis."
"You're the one with the DNA of angels, Conrad. The Alignment and Americans both think you've got traces of Nephilim blood."
The Nephilim, according to the sixth chapter of Genesis, were the offspring of the mysterious "sons of God"-fallen angels, according to some
theologians-who bred with women. Their civilization was wiped off the face of the earth by the Great Flood, which the Bible said was God's wrath upon a corrupted humanity.
"You say Nephilim and I say Atlantean," Conrad said. "But at the end of the day, we all share the same ancestral DNA."
"Some more than others."
Conrad shrugged. "Hasn't helped me yet."
"But it helped me back in D.C.," she reminded him. "Your blood provided the vaccine that saved me from the Alignment's military-grade flu virus."
"Oh, right," he said. "We've already swapped bodily fluids."
Serena's warm gaze embraced him even as she maintained her one-inch distance. It was all Conrad could do to keep from grabbing her.
"Why did you come back, Conrad?" she asked him. "After what I did to you?"
"I knew there were other forces at work, Serena," he told her. "I had to find out what they were."
Her face looked sad, defeated. "And then what?" she pressed him. "What were your plans for our future-if we had one?"
"You mean if you weren't a member of the Alignment? Or a nun?"
"Technically, I'm not a nun. I had to give up my role with the Carmelites for the Dei. And since the Dei doesn't recognize women as such, I'm pretty much a lay leader in the Church."
Conrad felt a glimmer of hope. "That's wonderful," he blurted, grasping her hand. "The best news yet."
"So how many children do you want, Conrad?" she asked, obviously trying to scare him. She was no wallflower. "You'll have to take care of them, you know."
"Me?" he asked.
"Just because I'm not a nun doesn't mean I'll be giving up the Lord's work traveling to the farthest corners of the earth to help the helpless."
The Atlantis revelation a-3 Page 13
