“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.
Conrad 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 cafés.
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 assorte
d 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 more 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.
History itself would be history.
In under twenty-four hours, Midas marveled, the Jews once again would be betrayed by thirty pieces of silver. A final Crusade would be unleashed on the Middle East that would ensure lasting world peace and the rise of a new Roman Empire in the twenty-first century. All it would take was a little piece of Atlantean technology tweaked by the Nazis.
If that wasn’t the final solution, Midas thought, what was?
Everything, mostly, was following the plan. Midas almost allowed himself to smile. Then he saw Vadim pull up in the limousine. Well, almost everything.
“You look like shit, Vadim,” Midas said as they drove out of the town and into the hills toward the airstrip. “I’m amazed security let you through. Did you get the bullet out?”
“No,” Vadim grunted, clearly in pain. “But the bleeding stopped.”
“We’ll take care of it after Jerusalem,” Midas said. “At least you had enough presence of mind to get out of the street after you failed to kill Serghetti.”
“The Inn of Provence is about the only one on the street with a side door,” Vadim explained. “No problem, what with the smoke and confusion caused by Abdil’s explosion.”
Midas said nothing and turned on the television to watch the BBC.
“Despite the terrorist attack on Rhodes today, the twenty-seven European foreign ministers unanimously agreed to intensify their dialogue with Israel on diplomatic issues,” the big-haired anchor said. “Vice Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs Tzipi Livni said that this is a meaningful achievement for Israeli diplomacy, opening a new chapter in Israel’s diplomatic relations with EU states. Israel intends to use the intensified dialogue to convince Europe to increase pressure on the Palestinians over the fate of Jerusalem and ensure that Israel’s strategic interests are protected in the Middle East peace process.”
Midas turned off the TV and checked his messages on his BlackBerry. He was still bothered by Vadim’s failure. He’d have to get rid of Vadim as soon as he had fulfilled his purposes, two of which were still out there somewhere.
Then he saw the text from the Alignment spy code-named Dantanian.
It read: i’ve got them.
Midas smiled. It was turning out to be an even better night than he could have imagined.
45
Serena set the Otter on autopilot so she could collect herself after the devastating loss of Benito and before whatever end-of-the-world madness she and Conrad would have to deal with now. They would need to land on the water near the coast of Israel and find some way in, if they didn’t get shot down first. But that was for Conrad to figure out, because she could barely think at all.
She looked over at Conrad in the copilot’s seat. The entire flight, she felt him keeping one eye on her and one on Lorenzo, who was fast asleep in the rear of the cabin.
“It doesn’t stop, does it, Conrad?” she asked him. “The death, the violence, the evil in this world?” She couldn’t hold back anymore, and she burst into tears. “He was like a brother to me. My only real family.” She started weeping uncontrollably in a way she hadn’t for years. She knew Conrad had never seen her like this because she had never seen herself like this. Not even in her private moments. But it was as if something had broken inside.
“I can’t do it, Conrad,” she said. “I’m all used up. I have nothing left.”
Conrad held her in his arms as best he could with their seating arrangement and brushed the wet hair away from her eyes. “What matters is what’s required of us,” he told her softly. “I need to know what Gellar told you.”
“I told you what he told me,” Serena said sharply, realizing that she wouldn’t get much more in sympathy and that Conrad was right. “He wants to build a Third Temple and seems to think he’s going to start very soon. The only place to build it, according to Orthodox Jews, is on the Dome of the Rock.”
“Which is considered Islam’s third-holiest shrine and where Al-Aqsa Mosque sits,” said Conrad. “You destroy the mosque, and all hell breaks loose. I get it. Gellar gets what he wants, and the Alignment ultimately gets what it wants. But tell me about this whole Uriel thing.”
“That’s what doesn’t make sense,” she said. “In the Bible, there’s an angel who guards the gate back to Eden with a flaming sword. Some traditions specifically reveal the angel’s name to be Uriel.”
Conrad nodded. “So you figured that Midas was bringing the Flammenschwert to Uriel.”
“But it doesn’t make sense with Gellar,” she said. “He wants to destroy the Dome of the Rock and build a Third Temple for the Jews. The Flammenschwert turns water to fire. But there’s no water in Jerusalem. No lakes, no rivers, nothing. The ancient Jews depended on precipitation from the skies, collecting rainwater in tanks and cisterns.”
He looked at her and said, “You’re forgetting the Gihon Spring and the network of tunnels beneath the Temple Mount.”
She knew where he was going and liked to see him enthusiastic, but this wasn’t realistic. “The Gihon Spring isn’t really a river. That’s why they call it a spring.”
“It could be enough,” he told her. “Back at the EU summit, Midas was pitching his mining technology as a means to extract water from the desert. Some kind of tracing technology that could reveal underground rivers and aquifers with thermal imaging.”
Suddenly she saw it all. “There’s going to be plenty of thermal energy after
he sets off the Flammenschwert.”
“The Temple Mount is honeycombed with well shafts, including one I’ve seen directly under the Dome of the Rock,” Conrad told her. “All you have to do is position the Flammenschwert somewhere in that underground spring system, and boom—you destroy the mosque on the surface and maintain the integrity of the Temple Mount foundations. It’s like a neutron bomb.”
Serena said, “I suppose it would almost look like divine judgment. It’s brilliant, really.”
Conrad nodded. “Gellar gets his Third Temple. The Alignment gets its Crusade when it rises to defend Israel against the Arabs. And Midas gets the water and technology rights.” Then he looked her in the eye. “How much do you want to bet that the warhead from the Flammenschwert is inside one of the globes Gellar took back to Israel? He’s probably placing those globes inside some secret chamber under the Temple Mount right now.”
Serena switched off the autopilot and took the steering column. “We have to warn the Israelis.”
“Which Israelis?” Conrad asked her. “We could be warning the very people who are perpetrating the plan, like Gellar. We need to know for certain who’s not Alignment, and right now, except for me and you—actually, just me—we don’t even know that. We need to get to Jerusalem on our own.”
“I have friends in Gaza,” she said. “Catholics who helped me run food relief supplies through the blockades the Israeli coast guard set up. They could get us official work permits and fake IDs and smuggle us into Israel. I’ll have to splash down within a few miles of shore, though.”
“Now you’re talking,” he told her as she leveled off and prepared for their descent.
Then a voice from behind said, “No water landing, Sister Serghetti. You will take us to Tel Aviv.”
She looked over her shoulder at Lorenzo, who had a gun pointed at her head and was glaring at Conrad.
The Atlantis Revelation Page 17