"Is everything set?"
"Yes," Vadim said. "The only street into or out of the Palace of the Grandmaster is the Street of Knights. I'll take care of her as soon as she leaves the palace."
"She must not have even a moment to contact anybody with information about what she may have learned from Uriel or figured out for herself," Midas said, and then there was a pause. "Remember, Vadim. She will be the second car. I repeat: the second car. Not the first. Everything is lost if you mistake the two."
Vadim said, "I won't."
"See that you don't," Midas said. "It must look like the first car was the target but that Zawas hit Serghetti's car instead and blew himself up in the process."
"Yes," said Vadim, looking at Abdil's limp body in the mirror. "I understand."
40
All the way down the Street of Knights toward the Palace of the Grandmaster, Serena wondered who Uriel could possibly be. If his role within the Alignment was true to his name, then Uriel could be the one who ultimately possessed the Flammenschwert. That pointed to Midas, however, and she braced herself to see his ugly smile waiting for her with the third globe.
"I wish I could join you inside, signorina," Benito said as he pulled the G55 SUV up to the west tower entrance.
"Me, too," she said.
The Greek attache Midas had told her about was already waiting with two aides and a cart. Benito opened the rear door, and the aides placed the two steel boxes containing the copper globes on the cart. Serena followed through the entrance.
Inside, they walked past the Medusa mosaic and down a large vaulted corridor to the lower level. It was right out of the blueprints Conrad had shown her back at the lake in Italy. And when they entered the Hall of Knights and left her alone with the globes, nobody had to tell her what room she stood in. Its scale and decor announced itself in a sinister way.
Then the small wooden door on the side opened by itself, and she saw the adjoining chamber and the reflection of a fire bouncing off what could only be the third globe. She pushed the cart inside, next to the round table, and beheld the globe on top.
The third globe.
She stood in silence, staring at it. It was magnificent, like something forged from the depths of a volcano or the mountain copper ore of Atlantis. It closely resembled its celestial and terrestrial cousins and was clearly part of the family. But the dials carved across the surface of this globe marked it as an armillary, built to predict the cycles of the sun, moon, and planets. It was the third element of time that Brother Lorenzo had correctly suspected was missing from their calculations back at the Vatican.
The door opened, and she looked up to see General Gellar, the Israeli defense minister, looking her up and down in surprise.
The feeling is mutual, she thought. "You're Uriel?" They had been acquaintances for quite some time, and suddenly, they both looked at each other in a very different way. "What do you want with these globes?" she asked.
"You have to ask?" Gellar sounded offended. "They're ours. They belong to Israel. You took them."
"We took them?"
"The Knights Templar stole them from under the Temple Mount along with whatever else they could pillage to fund their wars, increase their powers, and persecute the Jews."
Serena took it in, trying to figure this all out. "Well, on behalf of the Roman Catholic Church, I certainly plead guilty. And the pope has made official apologies for all that. I wasn't around at the time, of course. But if I had been, I'm sure that I, too, would have engaged in anti-Semitic behavior."
Gellar seemed to realize he was being ridiculous-although he clearly regarded the Dei medallion hanging around her neck as if it were a Nazi death's-head badge.
"You're not one of the Thirty, General, are you?"
"No," he said.
"But you'd do business with them."
"You mean with you? Yes. If Israel had relations only with its friends, we wouldn't be a country."
Serena wanted to say "Hey, I'm not Alignment," but that wouldn't carry much water here beneath the bowels of the Palace of the Grandmaster, built by the Knights of St. John, a military unit itself and cousin to the Knights Templar. All the same, she had to find out the purpose of the globes and why the Alignment would give them to the Israelis. "You're going to take these with you back to Jersualem?" she asked.
"To the place where they belong."
Serena stared at him. "You're going to rebuild the temple. You've just needed to get all the pieces together."
"Yes." Gellar was almost defiant.
"To do that, you need to remove the Dome of the Rock mosque."
"Yes."
"That would start a war with the Arabs."
"Yes."
"And you would defend yourselves, naturally."
"No," Gellar said. "You and Europe will defend us if America chooses to sit this one out. And if not, God will protect us."
"When is all this supposed to happen?"
Gellar smiled. "You had two of the globes and are the great linguist. Could you not interpret the signs?"
Serena realized she could not, but she couldn't let Gellar slip away without giving her something more. She remembered what Conrad had told her about why he'd given up his dig in Jerusalem: He couldn't figure out the astronomical alignments of the temple. Without them, he hadn't known where to dig.
"The alignments of the stars on the celestial globe don't mirror the landmarks on the terrestrial globe," she told him. "For example, there's no star on the celestial globe that mirrors Jerusalem."
"Not yet," Gellar told her with a hint of a smile. "That's why the third globe is necessary. The Hebrew prophets believed that God used the planets to give them a sign that something important was about to happen. Look closely at this globe, and you'll notice that we're in the midst of an extraordinary alignment of two symmetrical triangles formed in the sky by six planets. Do you recognize this alignment?"
"Oh my God," said Serena, seeing it clearly. "It's the Star of David."
"This is the star you were looking for over Jerusalem, Sister Serghetti," Gellar told her. "It's not a comet or a nova or a so-called star of Bethlehem. This star is the conjunction of planets that the prophet Jeremiah predicted would appear in these last days at the coming of the Messiah. It is this star to which we will align the Third Temple."
The exit door opened, and Gellar pointed the way out to her. "Thank you for returning the globes to the people of Israel, Sister Serghetti. I will take good care of them."
She stepped out of the chamber, and as soon as it closed behind her, she knew there was no turning back. A minute later, she climbed into the G55 SUV outside.
"General Gellar is Uriel," she told Benito, whose face in the mirror registered shock. "The globes are going to the Temple Mount. Surely this means war. Gellar thinks he's getting a new Jerusalem. But the Alignment is clearly betting on a new Crusade that will see them picking up all the oil and whatever else is left of the Middle East. A new Roman Empire. And that is in nobody's interest."
41
Conrad waited behind three cars in line at the Liberty Gate to Old Town. Two armored trucks flanked the gate while Greek Evzones in tights with submachine guns inspected every vehicle entering the fortress.
He looked at his watch: it was already three-fifteen. By now Serena had probably delivered the globes, blowing his chance to see them. Worse, he had been seen by that Dei disciple of hers, who may have warned her to exit through a different gate.
A soldier waved him up to the gate, and he handed over his license and registration slip. While the soldier ran them through a card reader, a police officer asked him questions. "Where are you going?"
"Church of St. John," Conrad lied, referring to the church across the Street of Knights from the Palace of the Grandmaster. "I'm delivering this to the icon exhibit." He glanced over his shoulder at the globe strapped precariously to the back of his seat.
"You call that an icon?" the officer said gruffly.
C
onrad recovered quickly and smiled. "A replica of an icon."
The officer was still grim. "I call that an accident if it fell off your bike onto the road."
"But it didn't," Conrad said when the soldier came back with his ID.
"Firat Kayda?" the soldier said as four others circled him with their machine guns.
"Yes," Conrad said quietly.
"You're under arrest."
Conrad thought quickly as he saw a car approaching from the opposite side of the gate. "I didn't mean to steal it," he said, reaching back to the icon as he heard more than one bolt click. "I just wanted to bring it back."
He pulled the string, and the icon fell to the ground and cracked open. "Oh no!" he said.
While all eyes were diverted to the ground for a moment, he twisted the accelerator and burst through the open gate and took a sharp left behind the tower.
There were shouts and the squeal of brakes and then a delayed spray of bullets that raked the tower. Conrad hit the straightaway down the Street of Knights but saw trouble up ahead: a black S-class Mercedes sedan coming his way, leaving him little room to maneuver on either side. He'd have to cut down one of the two hundred narrow cobblestone streets and lose the police without getting lost himself.
But then he saw a second car-a silver Mercedes G-class SUV-turning out from a gate at the Palace of the Grandmaster and onto the street toward him. As it turned, he saw her in the backseat.
Serena!
Sirens blared behind him, and he glanced at his mirror to see the lights of a police car flashing from behind.
He looked back up the Street of Knights in time to swerve away from the oncoming black Mercedes, taking out the driver's-side mirror as he whooshed by.
Dead ahead was the silver Mercedes SUV. Conrad could glimpse Benito's astonished face as it passed a parked Peugeot in front of the Inn of Provence. Everything seemed to go slow-motion as Conrad considered the police behind him, the silver Mercedes ahead of him, and the parked Peugeot.
It didn't belong there.
And before he could warn Benito, the Peugeot exploded in a ball of fire and blew the Mercedes apart.
"Serena!" he shouted before the shock wave sent him flying through the air.
42
Serena found herself on her hands and knees on the street. The SUV had been split open. She tried to get up but couldn't. As she crouched there, numb from shock, she could see Benito barely moving on the other side of the burning wreck.
"Oh my God. Benito!"
She crawled on all fours toward him. Half his face was burned off, but his arm was moving. Then she saw his insides spilling out. "Oh God." She reached toward him but was still several feet away.
Benito knew he was dying and struggled for breath. "Do not be afraid, signorina, for he will take care of you now."
Just then a shadow fell across Benito's face, and Serena looked up to see a twisted face with an eyepatch standing over her. She screamed as the man pointed a gun at her.
"Last rites," he said in a Russian accent, and pulled the trigger.
She heard the shot but felt nothing. The assassin fell facedown in front of her. She stared in shock and heard her name.
"Serena!"
It was Conrad driving up through the smoke on a motorcycle, like a demon from hell. Behind him were the police, chasing him like the Furies.
He braked to a halt and pulled her up to her feet. "Come on."
She couldn't leave Benito. "I can't."
"Hurry," Conrad said, and dragged her by the arms and plopped her on the back of his bike. He slid in front of her and took her slack arms and wrapped them around his waist. "Please, Serena, hold on."
"I told you not to come, Conrad," she said breathlessly, bitterly, and started crying. "I told you."
"This was set up long before I got here, Serena, long before you got here." He kick-started the bike, and she could feel it roar to life beneath them. He was going to carry her away, and her work wasn't done yet.
"The council meeting tonight. I have to stay."
"I'm sorry, Serena," she heard him say as the rear tire squealed and they drove off.
43
Conrad squinted at the setting sun as he raced out the west end of the Street of Knights into Kleovoulou Square, the police close behind. He could feel Serena's heart pounding as she barely held on. He turned onto the wide, shady Orpheos Street and, to the right, spotted the wall linking the interior wall and the main wall of Old Town. He found what he was looking for-the Gate of St. Anthony-and rode up the ramparts, leaving the police cars blocked below him.
He flew past the iron benches and artists drawing portraits of tourists, scattering easels and eliciting shouts and curses. Then he turned left into a dark tunnel.
A moment later, he burst out of Old Town through the impressive d' Amboise Gate. Two policemen started shooting as he drove across the arched bridge and over the dry moat into the New Town. He cut right onto Makariou Street and thundered down toward the harbor.
"I've got a seaplane by the windmills at the breakwater," Serena said, coming to life.
"I've got a boat, I think. One of Andros's."
"I'll fly us out," she said.
There were sirens growing louder from all directions. All at once the street opened up into Kyprou Square, and he could see two triangular traffic islands in the middle of an intersection of seven streets from seven angles. There were no traffic lights, and most of the cars whizzing through were police or driven by Greek citizens.
"Hang left!" Serena shouted.
"Right," he said.
"Left as in straight ahead!"
"I know!" he shouted, and drove in the channel between the two islands to the other side, barely clearing two cars that hit their brakes.
Conrad could hear the squealing and then the crash of metal and horns behind him. In his mirror, he saw that three police cars had locked fenders.
He turned right and slowed down as he passed Starbucks and the post office and vanished into the early-evening shadows that had fallen across the seaside cafes.
At the breakwater front by the secluded windmills, Conrad could see Brother Lorenzo waiting by the Otter seaplane. The priest started to shake at the sight of him. Conrad drove up the stone pier to the edge of the water.
"They're saying a roadside bomb went off in the Knights' Quarter," Lorenzo said breathlessly as he helped Serena off the bike. "Two bodies were found."
"Benito," she told him.
Lorenzo looked at Conrad. "They said that the Israeli defense minister was the target and that the Egyptian terrorist behind it, Abdil Zawas, accidentally blew himself up. Your picture is on the television as one of his associates."
"Point that bony finger at me and I'll break it off," Conrad snapped. "What the hell are you doing here?"
Serena stopped him with a weak hand. "His instructions were always to fall back here if we ran into trouble," she said, and climbed on board and started the props.
Conrad glared at Lorenzo, who quickly followed Serena into the Otter and frantically waved him in.
Conrad rolled the motorcycle into the water, climbed into the plane, and pulled up the door behind him. Soon they lifted off into the evening sky and banked to the east as Conrad looked down to see flashing lights descend on the harbor below.
44
It was almost ten o'clock that night on Rhodes when a triumphant Roman Midas walked out onto the steps of the Palace of the Grandmaster with assorted European leaders and waited for his limousine. He was in a tuxedo after a spectacular black-tie concert outdoors in the courtyard, made all the more poignant by the violence of that afternoon's car bombing.
"Gellar and the Israelis were bloody lucky," he had heard the British prime minister tell the German chancellor before the concert. "A tragic loss for Sister Serghetti, however. Good drivers are hard to find."
"Oui" was all he heard from the French president afterward, who could understand why she'd chosen to skip the concert. "But I'm mo
re troubled by intelligence reports that this YouTube video from Zawas signals an imminent attack on a much bigger target."
All of them had enjoyed the concert.
Some, Midas knew, more than others. While most of the dignitaries sat in chairs under the stars and listened to the Berlin Philharmonic, seventeen of them sat in chairs under the courtyard, in the Hall of Knights, and listened to Sorath lay out the plan for world peace.
None of the faces were ones he had expected, and yet by the end of the meeting, he couldn't possibly imagine anybody else qualified to carry out the plan.
As for the plan itself, it left him in awe.
The Solomon globes were back in the hands of the Jews after so many centuries. Now General Gellar and his ultra-Orthodox friends possessed their final puzzle piece to begin construction of a Third Temple. Only the Al-Aqsa Mosque stood in their way, and Gellar was all too willing to let the Alignment do the dirty work for him and call it an act of God. All Gellar had to do was use the globes to transport the Flammenschwert into place beneath the Temple Mount.
There would be an uprising from the Palestinians, of course, quite likely igniting a wider war. When all reasonable avenues of diplomacy had been exhausted, which was always the case in the Arab world, the international "peace process" that Gellar had bound Israel to at this EU summit would come into play-too late for Gellar to realize that he had betrayed his country for his religion. Not that there would be room for either in the new world order. Jerusalem would be occupied by international peacekeepers, and the new temple would become the throne of the Alignment to control the Middle East.
Most amazing of all, by bringing the three Solomon globes to their final resting place, Gellar would essentially activate them at their point of origin, revealing the real prize beneath the Temple Mount that Midas and the Alignment were after. It was a revelation greater than anything found in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam, and the foundation of a master civilization that would supplant anything that had come before in human history.
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