Conrad took out the cell phone he had lifted off the body of the assassin aboard the Acela. He had tossed his own phone under the tracks before leaving the platform at Penn Station. The question was whether anybody had found the bodies yet and been sharp enough to start tracking this phone. Probably not. Hopefully not.
He keyed in Serena's number from memory and listened to it ring on the other end.
The driver's phone beeped at the same time. "Yeah?" he said.
Conrad heard the cabbie loud and clear-on his phone.
"Yeah?" the cabbie repeated.
A cold shudder passed through Conrad's body. He stared at the phone's display and realized he had redialed the last number the assassin called. Conrad looked up at the rearview mirror in time to see the slits of the driver's eyes widen.
"You're one of them," Conrad said and pointed the gun he lifted from the dead Marine at the driver's head.
Too late Conrad noticed the driver had only one hand on the wheel and ducked as a bullet burst from the front seat and shattered the rear window.
Conrad pumped a bullet into the back of the driver's seat. The bullet shattered the driver's spine and he slumped forward onto the steering wheel, his arms loose at his side.
Conrad felt sick to his stomach. He tapped the driver on the back of the head. The man's head rolled to the side, revealing a trickle of blood running down his neck.
The cab suddenly accelerated wildly.
Conrad lunged over the seat and put his arms over the corpse to reach the steering wheel, but the car was careening out of control.
A flash in the rearview mirror caught his eye and he looked back through the blown-out rear windshield to see an unmarked Ford Explorer with federal plates and red lights coming up from behind. Suddenly Conrad's shock turned to rage. He wrenched the steering wheel toward the road and the cab shot off.
The federal car gave chase, but Conrad quickly turned the wheel while pulling the brake lever, sliding the cab sideways with a long skid. Then he turned it against the street direction, driving straight toward the Explorer.
The driver of the Explorer didn't have a chance to remove his seat belt and pull out a gun. And he couldn't swerve in time before Conrad drove the cab head-on into the black SUV. Conrad's face slammed into the corpse on impact and bounced back in time for him to see the airbags inflate in the federal car.
He heard sirens closing in a minute later. He staggered out of the cab, his ears still ringing from the crash. Or was that the sound of police sirens growing louder? There was a squeal of brakes. A voice called, "Hey!"
It was Serena calling from the open window of a Mercedes limousine. She kicked open the rear door with the Vatican emblem on it and motioned him inside.
Conrad paused for a second, thunderstruck. She was a vision from heaven. Her lips were moving but he couldn't hear anything. He dove into the back, the door slamming shut behind him as the limousine peeled away.
"Anything else you want to destroy, Conrad, or are we finished for now?" said Serena as Benito swung them into traffic on First Avenue.
He stared at her, incredulous. In her black Armani suit and white silk blouse, she looked completely unruffled.
"I'm fine, thanks."
"Too bad I can't say the same for that poor Amtrak attendant and Marine the police band says you killed," she said softly. "Please tell me the Alignment was responsible."
He stared at her. "You know about the Alignment?"
"If you're referring to the secret, centuries-old organization of military imperialists, then yes," she said. "What an amateur you are, Conrad. The Church has been at war with the New World Order for eons. From the way you talk, you'd think you discovered it. Now hand it over so I can at least make sure you found the proper document."
He produced the map and Serena took it from his hands.
Conrad watched as Serena slowly scanned the map and then flipped it over to study the text. Her hands began to tremble, and Conrad swore he saw what looked like the tiniest pearl of perspiration on her smooth forehead long before she had reached the last paragraph. Conrad had never seen Sister Serena Serghetti, the Vatican's top linguist, ever break a sweat.
She looked up at Conrad in wonder. "You're Stargazer."
"What?"
She pushed a button on the partition to reveal Benito in front. "Benito," she said. "The jet."
"Si, signorina."
Conrad recalled that Benito was a former Swiss Special Forces soldier, a crack marksman, and the only Vatican bodyguard who could keep up with Serena on the slopes at Davos during World Economic Forums. He hoped the same was true for the streets of New York City.
"What's going on, Serena?" Conrad asked. "Less than twenty-four hours after you show up on the scene, people die, and my life goes into the crapper."
"That's why we have to get you out of here. You're in grave danger, and so is America and the whole world."
Suddenly a phone started ringing up front and Conrad jumped. The ringtone sounded familiar. It was an old Elton John song, "Benny and the Jets." Benito the driver didn't bother to pick up.
"The jet is fueling up at the airstrip, signorina," Benito said. "If we can reach it."
They turned a corner and Conrad saw the flashing lights of several blue-and-white police cars blocking the road. A young cop approached the limo, hand on his weapon.
"Alignment?" Conrad asked.
"God knows these days. Say your prayers."
Conrad looked at Serena, who crossed one leg over the other and then pulled out a flap revealing a space beneath the rear seat of the limo.
"You're kidding me, right?" he asked.
"Get under and shut up," she told him.
"Whatever happened to the missionary position?"
"May God have mercy on your soul, you wanker." She gave him a final kick inside and pushed the flap back into position behind him.
"Easy does it, Benito." Her voice sounded muffled to Conrad in the dark. He could feel the car slow to a halt. The squeak of a window lowering came next, then Serena's voice. "Yes, officer?"
There was a long pause, and Conrad crouched very still in the darkness. Then he heard the young cop clearing his throat. "Sister Serghetti," he said. "It's an honor."
"Is there a problem, Officer O'Donnell?" she said, reading his badge.
Thank God, thought Conrad. An Irish Catholic cop.
"Nothing concerning you, Sister. Looks like terrorists failed at both Penn Station and the United Nations."
"Is everything OK?"
"Nothing was stolen or destroyed," the officer told her. "But two federal agents, an Amtrak employee, and a cabbie were killed."
"I'm so sorry. Is there anything I can do to help? Do you need to search my car?"
Beneath the seat Conrad punched her in the rear.
"No, ma'am. That won't be necessary. To begin with, you've got diplomatic plates and a search would be illegal."
Conrad heard a shout and then a screech as one of the squad cars reversed and the Mercedes lurched forward as they were waved on through.
"God's angels watch over you, signorina," said Benito.
No, Benito, Conrad thought. She's the angel.
9
ROME
JUNE 24
THE NEXT MORNING Serena stared out through the tinted glass of another limo at the towering ancient obelisk in St. Peter's Square as Benito drove through the gates of Vatican City. She thought of Conrad and wondered if it was wise to have left him back at the secret safe house outside New York City before flying here to press their case.
There were a few police outside on the plaza, but no tourists or paparazzi this early in the day. More pigeons than people, really.
"Not like the old days, signorina," said Benito, referring to the protestors and media circus that once surrounded her arrivals at the Vatican.
Back then she was only in her 20s but had already made a lifetime's worth of enemies as "Mother Earth" in the petroleum, timber, and biomedical
industries-anyone who put profit ahead of people, animals, or the environment. Today she was an older and wiser 31, but the damage was done: Those inside the Vatican who had ties to these outside governments, corporate CEOs, and other "deep pockets" still didn't trust her and never would.
Which was why she had decided Conrad was better off back at the safe house.
"That was another era, Benito."
"Another pope, signorina."
They curved along a winding drive and arrived at the entrance of the Governorate. The Swiss Guards in their crimson uniforms snapped to attention as Serena walked in.
The old pope, by favoring her with his friendship, had protected her within these walls. In one significant way he still did. Before he died, he shared with her a vision he believed God had revealed to him about the end of the world. And he let others know as much. The halo effect ensured that at least some door would always be open to her here.
The new pope she hardly knew. He was a good man, although she had heard that he had voiced his displeasure at the special favor his predecessor had shown her. Which was reasonable, she concluded, given that the new pope knew her only by her nickname among his former peers in the College of Cardinals: "Sister Pain-in-the-Ass."
That included Cardinal Tucci, gatekeeper of the secret maps collections. She had called Tucci from somewhere over the Atlantic to demand access to the Vatican archives, an extraordinary privilege she had enjoyed under the old pope but which Tucci had revoked with the new pope.
"Sister Serghetti," Tucci said flatly when she entered his office, which was tucked away at the end of an obscure hallway, reached only by an old service elevator. "Welcome back."
Tucci rose from his high-back leather chair, a pair of seventeenth-century Bleau globes on either side, and extended his hand. Only in his late 40s, Tucci was a "secret cardinal." That is, he was appointed by the pope to the position and nobody else was informed of it, although Serena was aware of two others besides herself who also knew.
A secret cardinal to hide the secrets of the Church.
Every Christian, Serena knew all too well, must wrestle with the tension of living in this world without becoming a product of it. But she suspected that Cardinal Tucci had lost that battle a long time ago.
"Your Eminence," she said, and kissed his ring with the Dominus Dei insignia. Dominus Dei meant "Rule of God" and was an order within the Church that predated the Jesuits and traced itself back to the first Christians who served in the palace of Caesar in the first century. Secrecy was their highest value, as it meant survival in the early days of Christianity. Serena didn't like secrecy. It had become an excuse over the centuries for a host of crimes, crimes that made the fictionalized evils of Dominus Dei's upstart cousins in Opus Dei look like acts of charity.
"To what do I owe this pleasure?" he asked suspiciously as they sat down.
"I want to see the L'Enfant Confession," she said, just like that.
Tucci looked at her with undisguised disdain. He seemed tired of her already, and perturbed. Perturbed because she had pressed his aides to wake him up in the wee hours of the morning to take her call. Perturbed by her very existence.
If Tucci wondered how she got as far as she had within the Church, the feeling was mutual. He was boyish by Vatican standards and yet mature enough to sport the smile of a man who experienced enough of life to find it a bad joke. Even his name was ironic, implying he was some indigenous Italian bureaucrat when, in fact, his mother's side of the family came to America on the Mayflower and was Yankee through and through. He came to the Vatican by way of Boston, where he was known as a raucous but brilliant student at Harvard and an even more brilliant priest and professor of American history at Boston College. He had risen very far in Rome, very fast.
Even now, as she awaited a response, Serena couldn't help noticing, with some envy, the medallion that Tucci wore around his neck. In its center was an ancient Roman coin, a silver denarius with the image of the emperor Tiberius. Legend had it that this coin was the very "Tribute Penny" Jesus held up when he told his followers that they should "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's." It had been passed down through the ages, from one leader of the Dei to the next. Some argued it represented power greater than the papacy.
"The L'Enfant Confession?" Tucci repeated, as if he had never heard of it.
Serena said, "The deathbed confession of Pierre L'Enfant, the original architect of Washington, D.C., to John Carroll, the first Catholic bishop of North America."
Tucci looked mystified. "What exactly did Pierre L'Enfant confess?"
"Something to the effect that the major terrestrial monuments of America's capital city are aligned like a map to the stars, as are Egypt's pyramids and South America's Way of the Dead," she said.
"What do you mean the monuments are aligned like a map?"
She showed him a digital photo of General Yeats's tombstone at Arlington, of the side with the four astrological symbols. "These are the zodiac signs for the sun and the constellations Bootes, Virgo, and Leo. Each celestial coordinate has a terrestrial counterpart in the city of Washington, D.C."
"And you're telling me that George Washington had L'Enfant use these constellations to anchor America's capital city?" He inflected his voice in a tone to hint at just how ridiculous and a waste of time the idea was. He glanced at the antique clock on the wall to underscore his displeasure.
"Yes," she said without flinching. "And we can follow those monuments that correspond to the stars like a treasure map."
"And where does this heavenly treasure trail lead?"
"To a specific place beneath the National Mall, or perhaps even a specific date in America's future," she said. "I was hoping you could tell me."
"My forte is American history and cartography, Sister Serghetti, not eschatology," Tucci said, amused. "But, as a historian, I know that Pierre L'Enfant was a Freemason. And I don't have to refer to my Freemasons for Dummies book to tell you that his secret society-like all those who seek the light of God outside of the Holy Church-has had a long and tortured history with us. So you'll have to forgive my skepticism when I ask you why on earth would L'Enfant confess anything to a Catholic priest, let alone Archbishop John Carroll, about this alleged secret geography of the American capital?"
"You mean why under the earth," Serena said, confident that Tucci knew full well what she was about to say. That's why she had come to him in the first place. "It was Daniel Carroll, the Archbishop's brother, who owned Capitol Hill and sold it to Washington. All that land, by the way, once belonged to a Catholic named Francis Pope who called it Rome."
Tucci tapped two fingers to his lips as he looked at her thoughtfully. Finally, he cleared his throat and sat back in his chair.
"There is no L'Enfant Confession, Sister Serghetti," he said. "Never was."
"Like the Alignment?" she asked.
Tucci frowned, aware that she had him there. After all, the sole reason his own group Dominus Dei still existed was allegedly to fight the Alignment threat to the Church. Without the Alignment-fact or fiction-there could be no funding, no foot soldiers for Tucci's order coming from the pope.
"The Alignment is simply an umbrella term for all secret societies aligned against the Church and operating in the shadows of power around the world," Tucci said. "Don't tell me you sincerely believe it's an actual group of warriors who trace their ancient knowledge to the survivors of Atlantis and use the stars to control world events to their own ultimate agenda? Please."
"I didn't until now," she said. "But George Washington was a Mason. As was his chief architect, Pierre L'Enfant. As were fifty of the fifty-six signers of the American Declaration of Independence. Perhaps you could humor me and tell me what link the Masons have to the Alignment-if the Alignment were, in fact, an actual group."
"Why, the Knights Templar, of course," Tucci said, obliging her with a conspiratorial smile.
Tucci was referring to a tiny band of nine French Crusaders at
the end of the first millennium who for nine years protected pilgrims visiting Jerusalem. Legend, Serena knew, suggested they were really searching for some priceless relic like the Holy Grail or a piece of the cross on which Jesus was crucified. Whatever it was, they apparently found it, because the Knights Templar over the next two centuries exploded in membership and money among Europe's nobility. The Church, threatened by the power and influence of its holy defenders, suddenly and expediently decided that the Knights Templar were conspiring to destroy it, and in 1307 launched a seven-year war that ended with the Grand Master of the Knights Templar being burned at the stake.
It was only last year, seven hundred years too late, that the Vatican issued a formal apology for its persecution, and Serena knew that Tucci was that apology's key architect.
Serena said, "I thought the Church, through Dominus Dei, took care of the Knights Templar centuries ago."
"Not quite," said Tucci. "A few Knights escaped to Britain and formed a new network called Freemasonry, once again hijacking another society, this one formed of the builders and bricklayers of the great cathedrals and palaces of Europe. It was only a matter of time before the Masons came to America, penetrated its elites like George Washington, and used their influence to establish a new country and, they hoped, a new world order."
"So do you still consider the Masons to be a threat to the Church?"
"Hardly," Tucci said. "The Alignment long ago left the Masons, having moved on to controlling U.S. policy through the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, and your friends at the United Nations."
There was a twinkle in Tucci's eyes, a glimmer of triumph that he had succeeded in utterly humiliating her for her gullibility and in drawing their little meeting to a resounding close.
"We could go on all day about this, Sister Serghetti," Tucci said. "But like I told you, there is no such thing as the L'Enfant Confession. It's a myth."
"So is this," she said and produced the map Conrad gave her.
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