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 megayacht 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 & 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 megayacht was another symbol of that era, and the Times of London had taken the liberty 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.
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 t
hen 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 office 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 el
evator 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.
The Atlantis Revelation: A Thriller Page 8