"No, but it had a kind of star map on one side and George Washington's signature at the bottom of the other side."
"And this is the reason you walked out on me and got mixed up in this crazy conspiracy? Some map and a signature?"
"Maybe," he said. "I think the star map was originally drawn in invisible ink. But it's what's on the other side that got me into trouble."
"But you said there's nothing on the other side, just a signature."
"I think the rest of that side was written in dissolvable ink. Washington sometimes signed iffy contracts in an ink that would dissolve after a while, effectively making them disappear."
"And you found this invisible-visible parchment in a golden celestial globe?"
"It looked more like copper, really, but yes. And I think the star map leads to the other globe."
Her eyes widened. "There's another globe?"
"Yeah, but I don't know where just yet. I can't believe I was so stupid. There are always twoa celestial globe and a terrestrial globe. Even the old Mason knew it, I could see it in his eyes, but he said nothing."
He was aware of her looking at him in shock and awe. Shock at his lunacy and awe that he apparently thought it was true.
"Do you hear yourself, Conrad? How am I or my father or anybody else supposed to believe you? Show me something other than chopped-off fingers to back up your story, Conrad!"
"How about this?"
He showed her the silver cornerstone plate. The markings captured her attention immediately. He recalled her family had some Masonic background.
"This is the cornerstone plate, Conrad. You actually found the cornerstone of the U.S. Capitol."
"I told you I did."
She looked up at him, hope in her eyes. "No, you don't understand. This is a legitimate story. This is something you unveil on July 4, a piece of Americana. I'll get you to tell your story on Fox. Whatever crazy-ass stuff you add, well, nobody can deny you found this."
"Or that I was the one responsible for the incidents at the Capitol and Library of Congress."
"Let me work on this, work with my dad, bring you in somehow."
"Bring me in? You make me sound like a dog you're afraid is going to come in out of the rain and crap on your carpet."
"If the paw fits, Conrad. Now get dressed."
Conrad walked into the closet and removed his bathrobe. He slipped the finger from Max Seavers into his expensive suit pants and put one leg in after the other.
"Say, Brooke," he called out. "What was his name?"
"Whose name?" she answered from the bedroom, sounding preoccupied, like she was on the phone.
"Your dog's name."
"His name was Rusty," she called back absently as she spoke quietly in the bedroom.
That's right, he thought, remembering that day in the park. Her dog was named after some early American scientist her father admiredDavid Rusthouse or something like that.
Conrad slid his belt through the last loop of his pants, eager to bolt. Any minute Serena would walk in and find him with Brooke, and then he would have still more explaining to do. But the reality was that after what happened at the Library of Congress tonight, nobody was going to believe anything he had to say. Not Serena nor the feds.
His only hope was to find that second globe. To do that he had to find some kind of landmark in Washington, D.C., that aligned with the setting sun, just like in the starburst on George Washington's sword at the western edge of the L'Enfant map in the Savage portrait.
The problem was that the land at the western edge of the district was developed as residential housing or preserved like Rock Creek Park. In other words, there were no obvious monuments or landmarks he could think of.
And then it hit him.
Ritty. The name of Brooke's dog wasn't Rusty. It was Ritty.
As in David Rittenhouse, a famous astronomer during the founding of America who worked closely with Ben Franklin and Benjamin Banneker.
As in Sarah Rittenhouse, the grand dame who two centuries later "saved" Montrose Park in Georgetown from development.
But what was Sarah Rittenhouse really trying to preserve the parkland for?
Conrad felt his pulse explode:
The terrestrial globe!
The armillary dedicated to Sarah Rittenhouse was in fact the landmark he was looking fora monument to the terrestrial globe that Washington buried somewhere below!
How could I have missed it?
Then he knew the answer: In his mind he had always associated the armillary sphere with Brooke's dog, who was urinating on the memorial's base that day he followed the canine back to Brooke's shapely legs and they reconnected.
He quickly tucked in his shirt, and then froze.
How could Brooke forget her own dog's name?
Suddenly their meeting in the parktheir entire "reconnection"smelled like a setup from the start. She must have known that he liked to jog in the park and simply put herself in his path. The irony was that he must have jogged past that armillary a thousand times and never imagined its secret. And neither, he guessed, did Brooke.
Brooke had stopped talking in the bedroom.
From behind Conrad could hear the click of a slider. Slowly he turned and saw her pointing an automatic pistol at him.
"I'm sorry, Conrad." She shook her head. "That fucking dog."
36
CONRAD STARED IN SHOCK at the 9mm Glock in Brooke's manicured hands, his mind trying to make sense of how he could have so thoroughly misinterpreted the nature of their relationship, and how long he had before whomever she called arrived.
"You've got to understand, Conrad, I had no choice," she said. "But you, you still have a choice: Give up the globe or die."
She's either with the feds or the Alignment, he thought. If it's the feds, he could live with it. But, God, not the Alignment.
"Some choice," he said, and coolly walked into the bedroom. Brooke followed him, and he could sense her gun pointed at his back until he sat down in a chair and looked up at her. "So everything we had was a lie?"
"No, Conrad," she said, her voice shaking with emotion. "Everything but us is a lie."
"Like you and Max Seavers?" he said, putting it out there.
"Tell me where you put the star map from the first globe, Conrad, and I'll let you go before he gets here."
Damn. She's Alignment.
He said, "What about the second globe?"
"Max doesn't have to know. But I need something to give him."
Conrad nodded, trying to figure his way out of this. "Does your father know about any of this?"
"No. He's a Mason. That's why it was a coup for the Alignment to nab me as a teenager and then use me to get to you, the son of General Yeats."
"But I'm not his son. Not his real son."
"No, you're much more special," she said. "I know about Antarctica, Conrad. I know about your blood."
Conrad looked at her. "What about my blood?"
"It's the basis for Max's flu vaccine."
Conrad started. "And how's that?"
"Max came to DARPA to genetically engineer the perfect American soldier," she said. "Along the way he discovered certain immunities to disease in the bloodlines of native Americans, specifically the Algonquin Indians. Immunities that had been diluted over the generations. So Max launched a global DNA testing program to connect the lost cousins of the Algonquins in the Americas, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. It was called Operation Adam and Eve. By studying the mutations in Y chromosomes and mitochondrial DNA, Max was able to reconstruct their tribal migrations throughout the globe and trace their roots to Antarctica and one common ancestor: You."
"Me?"
"You're more American than any of us, Conrad. The last of the Atlanteans."
"Atlantis?" Conrad had thought he was ready for anything, but not this. This was over the top even for Brooke. "What on earth are you talking about?"
"You may be of this earth, Conrad, but whatever is
in some of your dormant DNA strands isn't. You're one in six billion. Why else do you think your father was so hell-bent on going to Antarctica in the first place? Or didn't Her Holiness, Sister Serghetti, and her friends in Rome tell you?"
No, she hadn't, Conrad thought, and he hoped to God she was going to beat Seavers to the room so he could personally hash this out with her.
"So I take it you're not going to help me with the feds?"
"The Alignment IS the federal government, Conrad. That's what I'm trying to tell you."
"You cannot seriously expect me to believe that every low-level grunt in the federal government is Alignment."
"No, but they all work for the Alignment, whether they know it or not."
"Not me," he said and with a quick move of his right arm grabbed her arm holding the gun, slammed her body against the wall with his own, and then with a hard twist snapped her wrist.
"Ahh!" she cried, but wouldn't drop the gun. She was almost as tough, physically, as Seavers.
He gave her a sharp elbow in the stomach, spun out as she doubled over and then hit her on the neck, sending her to the floor.
He picked up her gun and pointed it at her head as she slowly rose on all fours.
"You broke my fucking wrist, Conrad," she said.
He dug the barrel of the gun into her temple. "Why do the monuments line up with the stars tomorrow, Brooke? Why now? Why 2008?"
"Something about the transit of Venus or something."
Conrad knew the transit of Venuswhen Venus crossed the path of the sun to the naked eye on Earthcame once every couple of hundred years. But when the transit came, it came in pairseight years apart. As it happened, the world was in the middle of such a transit. The first crossed the sun in 2004, the year he and Serena had their adventure in Antarctica. The next transit was due in 2012. There wasn't anything scientifically significant about such a conjunction, but it held great meaning to the ancients.
"We're between the two transits, Brooke. Why 2008?"
"Something about solar years and the number 225. It's all Alignment esoterica. I'm not at that level."
But Conrad was. The planet Venus takes about 225 Earth days, or about 7˝ months, to go around the sun. At the same time, Venus took more than 243 Earth days to turn on its own axis, making its days longer than its years. Conrad subtracted 225 from the current year, 2008, and came up with 1783.
"Newburgh," he said, recalling the coup attempt Washington allegedly quelled in 1783 at his final winter encampment. "It has something to do with Newburgh."
"I don't know!" Brooke screamed.
He kept pressing her. "What's the connection to my family, Brooke? What did Robert Yates have to do with it? Was he responsible for this?"
Brooke bared her teeth. "He was nobody, Conrad, a side note to history like you want to be. He was the goddamn lawyer."
Conrad paused. "For what?"
Brooke rammed her head into his, and with a scream lunged for the gun in his hand. Caught off-balance, Conrad fell back and brought the butt of the gun down on the back of Brooke's head, knocking her out.
With a heave he pushed her body off him and dragged it to the bed. He then tied her hands to the posts, spread-eagled, as she came to.
"What's going to happen tomorrow, Brooke?"
"I don't know," she moaned. "Only that the Alignment is going to make it happen."
"Not good enough." He tightened the knot around her broken wrist until she winced in agony.
"I'm just trying to save your life!" she cried.
"Funny way of showing it," he said, waving her gun in her face. "Now, for the last time, what's going down tomorrow?"
Her voice, when she finally spoke, had a dead tone. "Max is going to release a weaponized bird flu contagion."
Conrad stared at her. "Where?"
"Somewhere on the Mall, I don't know. But it's got a 28-day incubation inhibitor so that it won't jump human-to-human until August 1. Everyone will assume it originated at the Olympic Games in Beijing."
"So Seavers kills a billion Chinese," Conrad said. "What happens to all the Americans who get saved with his vaccine?"
"You know that, thanks to Congressional gerrymandering, there are only seventeen competitive districts left in America that can swing a national election. Undesirables, including representatives, get their vaccines turned off and die. By the time the voters elect replacement officialsAlignment typesit's too late. A democratically elected coup."
"And this thing from Newburgh is their moral, if not legal justification."
"Oh, God, I loved you, Conrad."
He gagged Brooke and left her writhing on the bed as he placed the gun on the dresser and walked to the door. He slowly opened it and looked down the hallway just as the ding of the elevator sounded.
He quickly walked across the hall and knocked on the second door to the right. It was Meredith from Texas who answered. "Harold, it's Pastor Jim!"
Harold was in the bathroom, vomiting up his dinner.
"May I come in?" Conrad said, stepping inside and closing the door behind him. As he did, he looked out the peephole and saw Max Seavers walking toward his room.
37
THE ELITE CLUB ROOM on the tenth floor of the Hilton was on the same level as Conrad's room, but Serena felt a world away. What she had hoped to be a brief meet-and-greet after the media dinner had stretched into the early hours of the next morning. It was against her nature to not sympathize with and pray for those in need, whatever their station in life. And it was also the perfect alibi for her whereabouts during those hours between the media dinner and the prayer breakfast.
A Hollywood producer was confessing to her that his reason for attending the Presidential Prayer Breakfast was to meet well-heeled "Christian coin" to fund "family movies" to cover his alimony payments and cocaine habits. As he spoke in hushed tones, she couldn't help but steal glances at the large flat-panel TV screen on the wall flashing pictures of Conrad and the swarm of police outside the Library of Congress. The dateline flashed July 3, 2008, across the screen, and it was clear the story was going to dominate the morning news shows in an hour or so. This was what America was going to wake up to.
Dear Lord, she prayed, I hope he's OK.
Her iPhone vibrated and she looked down to see a text message from Benito that Conrad had made it to his room and had called the hotel's room service. Serena let out a low sigh of relief. She wanted to bolt right then, and struggled to maintain a calm expression before this reprobate of a producer who saw American Christians not as a flock to be fed but a market demographic to be fleeced. His "career," it seemed, consisted almost entirely of living off other people while he indulged his talent for making box office flops.
That moment a concierge walked over to tell her that there was a gentleman outside the club lounge who would like to see her. Could Conrad really be that stupid and have left his room? She casually stood up and politely excused herself, pausing only to shake a few hands on her way out.
Max Seavers was waiting for her in the foyer, along with two Secret Service agents.
"What did you do to your finger, Max?" she said, trying to hide her alarm. "And is that a gash on your forehead?"
"Follow me," he said sternly.
He led her down the hallway to the third door on the leftthe room she had reserved for Conrad. She tensed up.
The game's up, girl.
The door was open and two more Secret Service agents were inside. But she couldn't see Conrad.
Only Brooke Scarborough, tied to the bed, spread-eagled, a bullet hole in her head.
Oh, my God, she thought with a shudder. Conrad, what have you done?
"I'm sorry you had to see this, Sister Serghetti, but I need to ask you if you've seen Conrad Yeats at the hotel."
"No," she said, still staring at Brooke. "What does he have to do with this?"
"He's a wanted man," Seavers said. "This was his room. He checked in under the alias Carl Anderson. I thought you
might know something."
"I don't."
Seavers turned to the Secret Service agents. "Not a word to Senator Scarborough or anybody until after the prayer breakfast," he ordered. "We have a killer on the loose. We don't want to give him a heads-up that we're onto him by creating any unusual disruptions. Seal off the room and post two security guards outside the door. I want room-to-room sweeps during the breakfast while everybody is downstairs in the ballroom. This killer isn't getting out of this building."
The Atlantis Prophecy Page 19