“But you’re going to leave me.”
“I’m not going to stay with you, if that’s what you mean.”
“Then what’s the point?”
“I want to help you,” he said.
She looked at him with disdain, seemingly surprised by his naïveté. “I don’t care how much money your crazy Arab friends have, Conrad. Nobody runs away from Midas. He’ll find you. And your friends will give you up in a heartbeat for less than the price of this.” She held up her hand to show the glittering diamond bracelet dangling from her wrist. From the looks of it, Conrad calculated that it had cost Midas at least $1 million. A trinket for him, a handcuff for her.
“I’ll give you thirty minutes before I call Midas,” she said with finality. “Enough time to make it to the airport and take off.”
“And you?” Conrad asked as he stood up and walked to the closet.
“I’ll tell him you were asking about the Flammenschwert and that I offered to put you up at my apartment in Paris. Old Pierre will let you in.”
Conrad pulled out his bag and slung it over his shoulder. “What happens when I don’t show?”
She shrugged. “We’ll all know you lied. Like you always do.”
12
Vadim was parked across from the service entrance of the Andros Palace in the dark, making his calls while he waited for Mercedes to emerge. He set his 9mm Rook on the passenger seat next to his copy of The Four-Hour Workweek.
Despite his boasting to Yeats, his Vadimin vitamin supplements were not selling as well as he had hoped. So while Yeats was undoubtedly making love to Sir Midas’s French blyad, Vadim was on his cell phone making calls on behalf of the collection agency Midas owned in Bangalore to shake down money from customers behind on their credit card payments. He took perverse pleasure in squeezing money from the debt-ridden pockets of Americans and their knowledge that foreigners were doing it.
A figure stepped outside the hotel—Yeats, from the looks of him at a distance—and climbed into a black BMW 7 series sedan. Vadim started his car and caught a glimpse of his own face in the mirror. He saw the patch over his eye and cursed. The BMW drove off.
Vadim pulled out and had started to follow it around front when Mercedes emerged from the hotel’s main entrance and walked toward him. He stopped and let her climb in the back.
“You were supposed to kill him,” Vadim said as he drove off after the BMW.
“So were you,” she said sharply. “He’s going to the airstrip.”
Vadim looked up in the mirror. “And from there?”
“Athens, Dubai, God knows where,” she said. “I invited him to my place in Paris.”
Very clever, Vadim thought. She had guessed that Vadim’s orders were to kill her as soon as she killed Yeats. This way she had hoped to keep herself alive a while longer. But if Yeats got off the island alive, Vadim’s orders were to kill Mercedes instantly and make it appear that Yeats had done it. The time of death would be vital for the Greek coroner’s report.
The car with Yeats stopped ahead. Two police cars were blocking its path. Vadim slowed down and watched as the police made the passenger step out of the limousine for inspection. Only it wasn’t Yeats. It was a slightly younger man—Chris Andros III, the Greek billionaire.
“What is the meaning of this?” Andros asked.
“Signomi, Kyrios Andros. We thought you were somebody else.”
“Obviously, you’re mistaken. What do you want?”
“Where are you going?”
“My jet. I have business in Athens, as you know.”
“Our apologies,” the police officer said.
Vadim didn’t bother to watch Andros get back in his sedan; he had already reversed course and was driving back on a small dirt road. In the mirror, he could see Mercedes getting nervous.
“Where are you taking me?” she said.
Vadim pulled to a stop and looked over his shoulder at her. She was scared. She should be. “Did you lift Dr. Yeats’s fingerprints like Sir Midas requested?”
“Yes, off a bottle of wine,” she said, and handed him a white card with Dr. Yeats’s fingerprints trapped on clear tape. “What is Conrad supposed to have done now?”
“Killed you with this gun,” said Vadim as he leveled his Rook over the seat and shot her twice in the chest.
13
At the Corfu airport, the twin turbofan Honeywell engines of Serena’s private Learjet 45 hummed while she ran through the preflight checklist with the pilot and copilot. Both had more hours in the air than she did, and both were former Swiss special forces airmen she trusted with her life, let alone a short fifty-minute hop to Rome. But she hadn’t heard from Conrad yet, and this took her mind off him for the moment.
“Check the thrust reverters again,” she said when she was finished. “I thought I heard something.”
She went back into the passenger cabin, sat down in a recliner seat, and glanced outside her window at all the private Gulfstreams lined up to go. The scene was the same in Davos, Sun Valley, San Francisco, and everywhere else she had ever seen the billionaire set meet. Her own Learjet was a hand-me-down from an American patron who had moved on to an even more expensive pair of wings. All the planes on the tarmac this morning resembled a line of luxury cars exiting a parking lot after a sporting event. Only this event—the sixtieth Bilderberg meeting—had barely begun.
Now it was over.
Conrad was right: Every European and American master of the universe was scrambling to escape the island before the police and paparazzi could question him or her. The weekend conference was in shambles, along with Sir Roman Midas’s great superyacht, which no doubt was going to fire the imaginations of Bilderberg conspiracy theorists for years.
The truth, of course, was much simpler: Conrad Yeats.
Wherever he was.
The Vertu phone she was clutching in her hand vibrated. It was Marshall Packard, calling from his private jet on the other side of the runway. “You’re losing your grip, girl,” he barked. “Where the hell is Yeats?”
“I don’t know,” she said, alarmed. “What’s going on?”
“Turn on the goddamn TV.”
Serena clicked a small remote to turn on the cabin’s TV. The local Greek channel came up first, but she didn’t have to be fluent in Greek to understand the picture of Mercedes Le Roche—dead at thirty-two. She had been found at a local beach, shot in the chest.
“Oh, no,” Serena said under her breath. “Conrad.”
As if on cue, Conrad’s picture showed up. He was the prime suspect in her death. His fingerprints had been found all over the murder weapon—a 9mm Rook.
“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 Durrës, 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
Baku
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 Feuerlöscher—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.”
The Atlantis Revelation: A Thriller Page 7