"Okay with me," he said, playing along. "The ruins I explore tend to be in the same places. You can just strap the little guys to your back and swing from trees all you want."
"What's wrong with little girls, Conrad?"
"Nothing," he said. "But biologically, aren't I the one to decide that? Guess there's only one way to find out." He gently pulled her closer to him, and his voice turned tender. "You're the only thing I have to show for my life, Serena. Everything else is dust. That Hebrew slave settlement I found by the pyramids in Giza. Gone. Atlantis in Antarctica. Gone. The only thing I ever recovered were the globes, and you and Uncle Sam stole them from me."
"I'm so sorry, Conrad. I really am."
"No, you don't understand, Serena. I'm okay with it. I don't need to make any great discoveries. We can make our own. You're what I've been searching for all my life. I knew it the moment I saw you. And I don't ever want to lose you."
Her eyes sparkled with tears. She threw her arms around his neck and turned her lovely mouth up to his and kissed him.
His whole body and spirit seemed to come alive as they embraced. He couldn't believe this was about to happen.
"Please forgive me, Conrad, for all I've done to you," she said, kissing him again. "For what I'm going to do to you."
His head was swimming in ecstasy. Or was it something else? He opened his eyes and saw the room spinning behind Serena's blurred face.
"I hate you," he groaned as whatever drug she had applied to her lips took hold of his body.
"Forgive me," she whispered as she kissed him generously, passionately, until he blacked out.
33
1740!" Conrad shouted, and bolted upright in bed.
He opened his eyes. He was inside an Airstream trailer with a loud but familiar hum around him. The air was cold, and there was a woman sitting next to him, but it wasn't Serena. It was Wanda Randolph, the former U.S. Capitol Police officer who had taken shots at him in the tunnels beneath the U.S. Capitol.
"Where am I?" he asked.
"You're on U.S. soil now, so to speak," she said, and smiled. "Everything's okay."
He looked at the wires and electrodes attached to his body. "The hell it is," he said, and with his right arm struck Wanda in the head and knocked her against the Airstream's wall. He pulled off the wires, opened the trailer door, ran out into a cavernous hangar, and looked for an exit.
"Stop!" Wanda shouted, running up behind with a gun pointed at him.
He ran past a chopper and a tank to a large door and found the button to open it. Warning lights flashed and an alarm sounded. As the door slowly opened from the top down, Conrad realized where he was even before he saw the curvature of the Mediterranean Sea thirty thousand feet below.
There were more shouts and the thunder of boots on the metal flooring, and Conrad turned to see a team of U.S. airmen surround him with their guns drawn.
"Step away from the panel, sir," an airman ordered.
Conrad knew he was going nowhere and stepped away.
The airmen holstered their guns and closed the door as Wanda escorted him back to the Airstream trailer, where Marshall Packard was waiting with some files.
"Good, you're up," Packard said.
"Where's Serena?" Conrad demanded.
"On her way to Rhodes," Packard said. "She exchanged you for our celestial globe. She was actually going to attempt to slip a forgery past the Alignment, which never would have worked. Now she can deliver the goods at the EU summit and be our eyes and ears inside the Alignment."
Conrad shook his head. "You don't need me, Packard. Why did you do it?"
"Your girl said she needed you off the playing field to convince the Alignment you're dead, like she promised, and she had some bizarre notion that you might not play along," Packard said. "So we'll keep an eye on you."
"Not a chance," said Conrad. "You know she's dead meat once she turns over those globes."
"That's a risk she's willing to take to identify the remaining officers of the Alignment. Meanwhile, we've already seen both globes and know what the Alignment is getting. So there's no downside for us."
"You're idiots," Conrad said. "The globes work together. You have no idea what the Alignment has."
"Enlighten me."
"The number of Baron von Berg's safe deposit box was for the date 1740."
"Yeah, yeah, we're ahead of you, son," Packard said. "The only thing that popped up in history for that year was the death in Rome of Pope Clement XII, who had forbidden Roman Catholics from belonging to Masonic lodges on pain of excommunication. Von Berg's joke. Ha, ha."
"Joke's on you, Packard. That was also the year that the Masons in Berlin established the Royal Mother Lodge of the Three Globes. I don't know why I didn't see it before. I guess I needed Baron von Berg and his box number to finally make the connection."
The color drained from Packard's face. "Three globes?"
"That's right," Conrad said. "There were three of them all along. The Masons must have kept one in Europe and let the other two go to the New World. How much you want to bet that the Alignment has had the third globe all along? Now Serena is about to hand them the other two."
"But for what purpose?" Packard demanded. "What the hell do three globes do that two globes can't?"
"Reveal the target and timetable for detonating the Flammenschwert, that's what," Conrad said.
PART THREE
34
MANDRAKI HARBOR . MANDRAKI HARBOR . RHODES
The early-morning sun glinted off the calm waters of Mandraki Harbor as Midas's yacht, the Mercedes, motored past the long breakwater with its three windmills toward the medieval city of Rhodes. There, atop its highest point, its massive fortress walls dwarfing the city below, was the Palace of the Grandmaster.
At least the Mercedes could enjoy the intimacy of the harbor with its pleasure craft and seaside cafes, Midas thought as they entered the mouth of the harbor. The Midas would have required them to anchor farther away.
Much smaller than the Midas, the Mercedes was a mere 250-footer that he picked up in Cyprus the day after Mercedes's funeral in Paris. He had planned to arrive in Rhodes in the Midas. It had taken two days to acquire a yacht large enough to take in a submersible. Midas had contacted his rogue submersible that had been roaming the deep with the Flammenschwert all this time. As soon as the captain emerged after five days underwater, Midas rewarded him with a bullet to the brain and dumped him overboard.
Now the Mercedes passed between the two defensive stone towers where the Colossus of Rhodes was said to have straddled the harbor. The giant statue had been one of the seven wonders of the ancient world before an earthquake in 226 B.C. brought it down into the sea a century after it was erected.
Midas left the deck and entered his stateroom to admire the magnificent sculpture in the center of the room-a bust of Aphrodite, the ancient Greek goddess of love. The cover was brilliant. As an act of goodwill, Midas would be returning to the Greeks the bronze head of Aphrodite from the British Museum, which he had managed to exchange for several works of art he had purchased at auction from Sotheby's on Bond Street. It had taken months of negotiations with the museum's Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities, but he needed this particular bust to both house the warhead and bring as a gift for the Greeks at the summit.
The beauty of the head of Aphrodite was that it was a sculptural mask of the Greek goddess of love, so the back was missing. That enabled Midas to fit the Flammenschwert warhead neatly inside. The fitted plaster piece on the back of the mask would be tossed once the transfer of the warhead had been made, and the mask could be handed off to the Greeks for display in the exhibition halls of the palace.
Midas ran his finger down the face of the serene mask. The deeply set eyes had come from a complete statue and dated back to the second or first century B.C. It was seventeen inches high, twelve inches wide, and eleven inches deep. The warhead was only six inches in diameter, inside of which were two pounds of Semtex plastic
explosive and an initiator device. The detonator would explode the Semtex and ignite the metallic fire pellets of the Flammenschwert. The fire pellets, in turn, would ignite any water around it.
Midas looked at his watch. He was due to deliver the mask to the Palace of the Grandmaster in twenty minutes.
Vadim was waiting on the dock with the limousine and a police motorcycle escort. They placed the packing crate with the Aphrodite mask in the back and then made their way to the palace.
"Where's the bitch?" Midas asked.
"At the convention center," Vadim said.
Midas sighed. He felt vulnerable without his membership coin. His deal with the Alignment had been that he would recover Baron von Berg's coin and the Flammenschwert from the baron's sub in exchange for a seat on the Council of Thirty. But then Conrad Yeats had ruined everything. Fortunately, Yeats was out of the picture now, and the coin would soon be in Midas's hands.
They drove along the harbor toward the Old City. The medieval town of Rhodes was surrounded and defined by a triple circuit of walls, which looked to Midas to be in very good condition. The fortress city seemed to have it all: moats, towers, bridges, and seven gates.
Vadim pulled the limousine up to the security checkpoint at the Eleftherias Gate, or the Gate of Liberty. Only permanent residents of the Old City were allowed to drive on the narrow cobblestone streets. But today dignitaries were allowed through with a police escort.
They followed the stone-paved streets past the third-century temple of Aphrodite and turned onto the main drag, the Odos Ippoton, or the Street of Knights, named for the Knights of St. John, who had established themselves on the island in the fourteenth century and who Midas was convinced must have been a front for the Alignment at one point. At the entrance was the fifteenth-century Knights Hospital, and at the end of the street, opposite the Church of St. John, stood the imposing Palace of the Grandmaster with its spherical towers.
They drove past the massive round towers flanking the main entrance to the palace-where Greek Evzones in uniform stood on either side of the sharp arch-and went around to the west entrance by the square tower, where a Greek cultural attache welcomed Midas and the Aphrodite mask into the grand reception hall. This was the regal backdrop where the opening and closing ceremonies were staged for the cameras, while the sessions and breakout panels took place in the ballrooms, conference centers, and suites at the Rodos Palace hotel and international convention center ten minutes away.
"On behalf of the people of Greece, I thank you for returning to us the Aphrodite head from the British Museum," the attache said.
"It is my pleasure," Midas said. "And I was told I could spend a moment alone with my dear Aphrodite before I handed it over."
"Yes," said the attache. An armed Greek Evzone with an earpiece appeared and led Midas past a Medusa mosaic down a large vaulted corridor. There were 158 rooms in the palace, all bedecked with antique furniture, exquisite polychrome marbles, sculptures, and icons. Only twenty-four of those rooms were open to the public on any given day.
But the room to which Midas was escorted wasn't in any of the tourist guides or public blueprints registered with Greece; it was even closed to the VIPs of the summit. It was a chamber constructed beneath the palace. Closed to all but members of the Alignment, it was known as the Hall of Knights council room.
Midas entered the hall and waited for his escort to leave. Then a door slid open, and he walked into the adjoining chamber with the Aphrodite mask, prepared to hand the Flammenschwert to Uriel.
But Uriel wasn't there-only a single copper globe, split open, resting on a stand on top of a large round table. Inside the globe was an envelope, and next to the round table was a fireplace with a fire burning.
No surprise here, really. Midas had known the identity of Uriel, and vice versa, all along. They weren't supposed to be seen together in public, a rule Midas had violated at the disastrous Bilderberg party. But as this handoff was private, he hadn't been sure what to expect.
He looked at the globe. It was the first time he had seen one of them.
So this is the delivery device.
Not a missile. Not a warplane. But this old globe.
If it had been his choice, Midas would have held on to the Flammenschwert until its detonation. He certainly wouldn't have left it alone here. But the holier-than-thou Uriel didn't want to see the Flammenschwert, much less touch it. And Uriel was the only one who could get it into position and leave the dirty work of pulling the trigger to Midas.
He opened the envelope, read the handwritten note, tossed it into the fireplace, and watched it burn to ashes.
He removed the plaster back of the bronze Aphrodite mask and tossed it into the fireplace, too. Then he put his hand behind the sphere containing the Flammenschwert and turned the mask over until the sphere rested heavily in his hand. He lifted the mask with the other hand and placed it on the table. With both hands, he carefully placed the sphere containing the Flammenschwert inside the globe, where it fit snugly. He sealed the globe shut like a skin over the warhead sphere. The seam along the 40th parallel seemed to disappear.
The door on the other side of the chamber magically opened. He picked up Aphrodite's head, brushed it off, and walked out.
35
U.S. NAVAL SUPPORT BASE. SOUDA BAY, CRETE
Conrad watched another F-16 take off from the tarmac and walked back up the rear ramp of the C-17 to Packard's office inside the "silver bullet." Packard had been on the phone ever since they'd landed on Crete. The Greek air base was home to the Hellenic Air Force's 115th Combat Wing, but the U.S. Naval Support Activity Souda Bay occupied over a hundred acres on the north side to support Sixth Fleet operations in the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East. Conrad was waiting to hear if he would get any of that support now.
Packard, still on the phone, frowned at him and slid across his desk the leather binder containing Conrad's hastily prepared but well-documented report on the Three Globes Society and their relationship to the Freemasons of colonial America, the Nazis, and the contemporary Alignment. Conrad picked up the binder and saw Packard's notations in the margins. The most frequent words were "insane," "crazy," "speculation," and "aha." There were no comments on Conrad's outline of possible origins of the globes and whether they were originally housed in King Solomon's Temple, or perhaps some place older still.
Packard hung up the phone and looked at him. "It's going to take a few hours, but I think we can clear you with Interpol so that police everywhere will stop shooting at you on sight."
"You can't do that," Conrad said. "Midas would know that Serena lied to him about my demise. That alone would put her loyalty in doubt with the Alignment. I need an alias with ID to get me through all zones of security."
Packard sighed. "That's going to make it easier to nab the globes?"
"I don't need to steal anything. That's the beauty of it. I just need to see the three globes for myself. In and out."
"Because you think they'll reveal where and possibly when the Alignment will detonate the Flammenschwert?" Packard asked skeptically. "I'm not sure I'm ready to make that assumption."
Conrad said, "I think the leadership of the Alignment will use the message of the globes as some sort of mystical directive for their mystical weapon, even if they manipulate the meaning to suit their ends. So that message is invaluable regardless."
"Serena's whip-smart, son. What makes you think she can't figure it out for herself?"
"Not on the spot, she can't. She hasn't had the time I've had with both globes. And she's a linguist, not an astro-archaeologist. She won't be able to figure out the celestial-terrestrial alignments between the globes, let alone translate them to real-world coordinates. Even if she could, you know they're not going to let her leave Rhodes alive once she's delivered the only leverage she's ever had with the Alignment."
Packard licked a finger and flipped through the report again, clearly still agitated with himself and his analysts for having missed th
e possibility of the existence of a third globe. "So let me get this straight: You think all three used to be in Solomon's Temple and were later buried beneath the Temple Mount when the Babylonians destroyed the First Temple. Furthermore, you think they may have been the Holy Grail that the Knights Templar were after when they started digging up the Temple Mount looking for Solomon's treasures during the Crusades."
"I think they worked to pinpoint a location of some great treasure, but it may not have been gold."
"Then what the hell else could it have been? And don't tell me the Ark of the Covenant."
"Obviously, something of great value. In ancient Egypt and Tiahuanaco and Atlantis, that meant the secrets of First Time or the End Times."
"The Alignment already has the secret of the End Times, son, and it's called the Flammenschwert. That's how they're going to end things for all of us. And that's why we need to find that weapon." Packard's face reddened, and he threw the report down. "I traded the globe for you and got nothing."
There was something just a little too forced in Packard's voice, and Conrad suddenly understood.
"You bastard," he said. "You weren't that desperate to get me. You just wanted to give Serena the globe and make her think she worked for it. What did you do to it?"
Packard sighed. "It's got a tracker."
Conrad slapped his hand on the table, furious. "Like the Alignment's not going to find it and kill her? Then they'll have the globes as well as the Flammenschwert, and you'll still have nothing."
"I told you, son, she's our girl at this EU summit. Both she and Midas are invited. You and Uncle Sam aren't. Security is going to be extremely tight, and the Alignment is supposed to think you're dead. Anybody recognizes you, she's dead."
"She's dead already."
Packard seemed to be going back and forth in his head, weighing the risks and rewards. "Well, I can't send U.S. troops, even Randolph, into this theater," he said, as if thinking aloud. "And when it comes to European summits, trust me, it's always theater."
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