Raising Atlantis

3

Dr. Serena Serghetti skimmed across the emerald rice fields at two hundred feet, careful to keep the chopper steady. The sun had burst through the dark clouds, but thunder rumbled across the lush mountainside, and rain threatened.

She was nearing the town of Lhokseumawe in the war-torn corner of Indonesia that used to be known as the Dutch West Indies. There were twenty thousand orphans in the province, casualties of a decades-long struggle between Acehnese separatists and the Indonesian military. Now Al Qaeda terrorists had injected themselves into the mix on the Muslim side, making the situation even more combustible. She had to do something to help these children whom the rest of the world had forgotten.

As she passed over the wetlands, she glanced down and saw the sun glint off the oil slick. A discharge from an oil well in Exxon Mobile’s Cluster II had contaminated the local paddy fields, orchards, and shrimp farms. It had happened before, but this leak looked far more threatening. The widows and orphans in the nearby villages of Pu’uk, Nibong Baroh, and Tanjung Krueng Pase would be devastated. They would have to move to another area for at least six months, maybe a year, their sustenance wiped out.

She was about to flick on the onboard remote camera when a voice spoke in her headphone in heavily accented English. “Welcome to Post Thirteen, Sister Serghetti.”

She glanced starboard and saw an Indonesian military chopper with side-mounted machine guns keeping pace with her chopper. The voice spoke again. “You are going to land on the helipad in the center of the complex.”

She banked to the right and started to climb when four bullets raked the side. “Land immediately,” the voice said, “or we’ll blow you out of the sky.”

She gripped the joystick tightly and dropped lower toward the helipad. She lightly touched down on the platform as soldiers in field greens surrounded her chopper, fingers gripping their M-16s.

They were Kopassus units-Indonesian special forces-based at nearby Camp Rancong, she realized as she stepped out of the chopper with her hands up. Camp Rancong, the site of many reported tortures, was owned by PT Arun, the Indonesian oil giant, which was itself partially owned by Exxon Mobile, which facilitated Post Thirteen.

The wall of Kopassus forces parted as a jeep drove up. It braked to a halt and an officer, a colonel judging by his shoulder boards, stepped out and sauntered over. He was a slim young man in his twenties. Behind him straggled an older, bloated Caucasian civilian, whom by his lethargic and nervous demeanor Serena guessed to be the site’s token American oil executive.

“What is the meaning of this?” she demanded.

“The infamous Sister Serghetti,” the colonel said in English. “You speak Acehnese like a native but certainly do not look like one. Your pictures in the media don’t do your beauty justice. Nor hint of your skills as a pilot.”

“I learned on the job, Colonel,” she said dryly in her native Australian accent.

“And which job would that be? You seem to have so many of them.”

“Dropping food and medical supplies to the poorest of the poor in Africa and Asia because their governments are so corrupt that U.N. shipments rarely make it to their intended villages,” she said. “They either disappear or rot on the docks because the roads are impossible to drive.”

“Then you’re in the wrong place, ma’am,” said the American in a southern drawl. “I’m Lou Hackett, the chief executive for this here operation. You should be in East Timor helping the Catholics stand up to Muslims. What the hell are you doing here in a pure Muslim province like Aceh?”

“Documenting human rights abuses, Mr. Hackett,” she said. “God loves Muslims and Acehnese separatists too. Maybe even as much as American businessmen.”

“Rights abuses? Not here,” Mr. Hackett said. He was keenly watching her chopper, now being stripped by a crew of Kopassus technicians.

Serena looked him in the eye. “You mean that’s not your oil slick out there soaking the local shrimp farms, Mr. Hackett?”

“I would hardly call an innocent accident a human rights violation.”

Mr. Hackett wiped the sweat from his brow with an old, worn handkerchief. She noted a logo on it. It was the seal of the president of the United States. A trinket, no doubt, from some campaign fund-raiser.

“So your company didn’t build the military barracks here at Post Thirteen where victims of human rights abuses claim to have been interrogated?” she went on, glancing at the Indonesian colonel. “Or provide heavy equipment so the military could dig mass graves for its victims at Sentang Hill and Tengkorak Hill?”

Mr. Hackett looked at her as if she were the problem and not his oil discharge. “What do you want, Sister Serghetti?”

The Indonesian colonel answered for her. “She wants to do to Exxon Mobile and PT Arun what she did to Denok Coffee in East Timor.”

“You mean break the grip of a cartel controlled by the Indonesian military and let the people sell their goods at market prices?” she asked. “Hmm, now that’s a thought.”

Hackett had clearly had enough. “Hell, if the East Timorese want to be slaves for Starbucks, that’s their business, Sister. But when you threw the military out of the coffee business, they took a special interest in mine.”

“Here’s another thought, Sister Serghetti,” the colonel said, handing her a sheet of paper. It was a fax. “Leave.”

She looked the fax over twice. It was from Bishop Carlos in Jakarta, winner of the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize. It said she was urgently needed in Rome. “The pope wants to see me?”

“The pope, the pontiff, the Holy See, whatever the hell you call him,” said Mr. Hackett. “I’m a Baptist myself. Just call yourself lucky to walk out of here.”

She turned toward her chopper in time to see several soldiers carry away the dismantled cameras from its belly.

“And the people of Aceh?” she pressed Mr. Hackett as the colonel nudged her toward his jeep. He was apparently keeping her chopper. “You can’t pretend this isn’t happening.”

“I don’t have to pretend anything, Sister,” Mr. Hackett said, waving her a smug good-bye. “If it ain’t in the news, it ain’t happening.”

Twenty-four hours later, Serena leaned back in the rear of the unmarked black sedan as old Benito nudged it through the angry protesters and camera crews in Saint Peter’s Square. That she could arouse such strong sentiments seemed impossible. And yet the demonstrations outside were meant for her.

She was only twenty-seven, but she had already made a lifetime’s worth of enemies in the petroleum, timber, and biomedical industries or anyone who put profit ahead of people, animals, or the environment. But her efforts inadvertently left a few of the people she had hoped to save jobless. Well, maybe more than a few, judging by the mob outside.

Dressed in her trademark urban uniform of an Armani suit and high-top sneakers, she hardly looked the part of a former Carmelite nun. But that was the point. As “Mother Earth” she made headlines, and with recognition came influence. How else would the style-over-substance media, the secular world, and, ultimately, Rome take her seriously?

God was another matter. She wasn’t sure what he thought of her, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to know.

Serena stared through the rain-streaked window. Vatican police were pushing back the crowds and paparazzi. Then, out of nowhere,whap! -there was a loud crack, and she jumped. A protester had managed to slap his placard against the glass:FIND ANOTHER PLANET, MOTHER EARTH.

“I think they miss you,signorina,” said the driver in his best English.

“They mean well, Benito,” she replied, looking at the throngs with compassion. She could have addressed him in Italian, French, German, or a dozen other languages. But she recalled Benito wanted to work on his English. “They’re scared. They have families to feed. They need someone to blame for their unemployment. It might as well be me.”

“Only you,signorina, would bless your enemies.”

“There are no enemies, Benito, just misunderstandings.”

“Spoken like a true saint,” he said as they left the mob at the gate and curved along a winding drive.

“So, Benito, do you know why His Holiness has summoned me to the Eternal City for a private audience?” she asked, casually smoothing her pants, trying to hide the anxiety building inside.

“With you it is always hard to say.” Benito smiled in the mirror, revealing a gold tooth. “So much trouble to choose from.”

Too true, she thought. When she was a nun, Serena was usually at odds with her superiors, an outcast within her own church. Even the pope, an ally, once told Newsweek magazine, “Sister Serghetti is doing what God would do if only he knew the facts.” That made good copy, but she knew that no court of public opinion could protect her within these gates.

Born of an illicit affair between a Catholic priest and a housemaid outside Sydney, Serena Serghetti was filled with shame as a little girl. She grew up among sordid whispers and hated her father, who denied his patrimony to the end and died a drunken fraud. She silenced the whispers by pledging sexual purity at age twelve, excelling in her study of linguistics and, most shocking of all, joining a convent at sixteen. Within a few years she had become a living example of redemption to the Church and a walking, talking reminder to humanity of its ecological sins.

It was a good run while it lasted, which was almost seven years. Then, a few months after a personal crisis in South America, she returned to Rome for moral guidance and instead discovered that the Vatican was refusing to pay its water bills, hiding behind its status as a sovereign state and the obscure Lateran Treaty of 1929, which established that Italy must provide water for the 107-acre enclave for free but made no provision for sewage fees. “We neither render unto Caesar the taxes we owe Caesar, nor render unto God the honor we owe God as his stewards of Creation,” she said when she publicly renounced her vows and embraced the environment.

It was then that the media dubbed her “Mother Earth.” Ever since, she couldn’t stop people from addressing her as such, or as “Sister Serghetti.” She was probably the world’s most famous former nun. Like the late Princess Diana before she died, Serena was no longer part of the church’s royal family and yet somehow had become its “Queen of Hearts.”

Swiss Guards in crimson uniforms snapped to attention as her sedan pulled up to the entrance of the Governorate. Before Benito could open the door for her and offer her an umbrella, she was already climbing the steps in the rain at a leisurely pace, her sneakers splashing in the puddles as she looked up to the sky and enjoyed feeling a few drops on her face. If her history with the Vatican was any guide, this was probably the last breath of fresh air she’d be enjoying for a while. A guard smiled as she passed through the open door.

It was warm and dry inside, and the young Jesuit waiting for her recognized her instantly. “Sister Serghetti,” he said cordially. “This way.”

There was the buzz of activity from various offices as she followed the Jesuit down a maze of bureaucratic corridors to an old service elevator. To think it all started with a poor Jewish carpenter, she thought as they stepped inside and the door closed.

She wondered if Jesus would find himself as much a stranger in his church as she did.

She frowned at her reflection in the metal doors of the elevator and smoothed out her lapels. So ironic she should care, she realized, knowing the silk and wool were spun by the sweat of some poor child in a Far East factory to feed the global consumer market. The clothes and the image they projected represented everything she hated, but she used them to raise money and consciousness in a media age more obsessed with a former nun’s look than her charity. So be it.

But would Jesus wear Armani?

It was an insane world, and she often wondered why God had either made it that way or had simply allowed it to mutate into such an abomination. She certainly would have managed things differently.

The office she was looking for was on the fifth floor and belonged to the Vatican’s intelligence chief, a cardinal named Tucci. It was Tucci who would brief her and escort her to the papal residence for her private audience with the pope. But the cardinal was nowhere to be found. Still, the young Jesuit ushered her inside.

The study seemed older and more elegant than befit Tucci’s reputation. Medieval paintings and ancient maps graced the walls rather than the more modern, contemporary art that Tucci was reputed to favor.

Older and more elegant still was the man seated in a high-back leather chair with a pair of seventeenth-century Bleau globes on either side. The white regalia with the gold lace at the throat perfectly offset the silver hair. He looked every bit an urbane, handsome man of the faith, and the eyes, when he glanced up from the file he was reading, were clear and intelligent.

“Sister Serghetti,” said her Jesuit escort, “His Holiness.”

The pope, whom Serena instantly recognized, needed no introduction. “Your Holiness,” she said as the Jesuit closed the door behind her.

The great man seemed neither stern nor beatific to her. Rather, he radiated the businesslike aura of a CEO. Except that this corporation was not traded daily on the exchanges of New York, London, and Tokyo. Nor did it forecast its future growth in terms of quarters, years, or even decades. This enterprise was in its third millennium and measured its progress in terms of eternity.

“Sister Serghetti.” The pope’s voice conveyed genuine affection as he gestured to a chair. “It’s been too long.”

Surprised and suspicious, she sank into a leather chair while he looked over her Vatican file.

“Ozone protests outside the United Nations headquarters in New York,” he read aloud in a quiet yet resonant voice. “Global boycotts against biomedical companies. Even your Internet home page registers more hits than mine.”

He looked up from the file in his lap with quick, bright eyes. “I sometimes wonder if your obsession to save Earth from the human race is motivated by some deeper, inner desire to redeem yourself.”

She shifted in her leather seat. It felt hard and uncomfortable. “Redeem me from what, Your Holiness?”

“I was acquainted with your father, you know.”

She knew.

“Indeed,” the pope went on, “I was the bishop to whom he came for advice upon learning that your mother was pregnant.”

This Serena did not know.

“He wanted your mother to have an abortion.”

“That doesn’t surprise me,” she said, scarcely able to contain the bitterness in her voice. “So I take it you advised him not to?”

“I told him that God can make something beautiful even out of the ugliest of circumstances.”

“I see.”

Serena didn’t know if the pope expected her to thank him for saving her life or was simply relating historical events. He was studying her, she could tell. Not with judgment, nor pity. He simply looked curious.

“There’s something I’ve always wanted to ask you, Serena,” the pope said, and Serena leaned forward. “Considering the circumstances of your birth, how can you love Jesus?”

“Because of the circumstances surrounding his birth,” she replied. “If Jesus was not the one, true Son of God, then he was a bastard and his mother, Mary, a whore. He could have given in to hatred. Instead he chose love, and today the Church calls him Savior.”

The pope nodded. “At least you agree the job is taken.”

“Indeed, Your Holiness,” she replied. “He gave you a pretty good job too.”

He smiled. “A job which I’m told you once said you’d like to have someday.”

Serena shrugged. “It’s overrated.”

“True,” the pope replied and eyed her keenly, “and rather unattainable for former nuns who have repeated the sins of their fathers.”

Suddenly her camera-ready facade crumbled and she felt naked. With this pope, a private audience was more like a therapy session than an inquisition, and she had run out of righteous indignation to prop herself up.

“I’m not sure I understand what His Holiness is getting at,” she stammered, wondering just how much the pope knew. Then, remembering the fate of those who so often underestimated him, she decided it was best to come clean before she further embarrassed herself. “There was one close call, Your Holiness,” she said. “But you forget I’m no longer a nun nor bound by my vows. You’ll be happy to know, however, that I plan to remain celibate until I marry, which I suspect will be never.”

The pope said, “But why then did-”

“Just because we did not physically consummate our relationship did not mean we did not emotionally,” Serena explained. “And my feelings left me no room for doubt that I could not be a bride of Christ in this life and burn with passion for a man. Not without being a hypocrite like my father. So if you’re thinking of using this issue to undermine my credibility-”

“Nonsense,” said the pontiff. “Doctor Yeats’s name came up in an intelligence report, that’s all.”

“Conrad?” she asked, awed by the Vatican’s operatives.

“Yes,” said the pope. “I understand you met him in Bolivia during your former life as our most promising linguist.”

She leaned back in her chair. Perhaps a manuscript had turned up that required translation. Perhaps His Holiness had a job for her. She began to breathe easier. She was relieved to escape the subject of her celibacy, but the pope’s reference to Conrad had aroused her curiosity.

“That’s right. I was working with the Aymara tribe of the Andes.”

“An understatement,” the pope said. “You used the Aymara language to develop translation software for the Earth Summit at the United Nations. This you accomplished with a personal laptop computer after experts at a dozen European universities using supercomputers failed.”

“I wasn’t the first,” she explained. “A Bolivian mathematician, Ivan Guzman de Rojas, did it in the 1980s. Aymara can be used as an intermediate language for simultaneously translating English into several other languages.”

“Six languages only,” the pope said. “But you’ve apparently unlocked a more universal application.”

“The only secret to my system is the rigid, logical structure of Aymara itself,” she said, her confidence returning in force. “It’s ideal for transformation into computer algorithm. Its syntactical rules can be spelled out in the kind of algebraic shorthand that computers understand.”

“I find this all quite fascinating,” he told her. “As close to hearing the whisperings of God as man may likely get in this life. Why ever did you give it up?”

“I still make a contribution now and then, Your Holiness.”

“Indeed, you are quite the freelancer. Not only are you Mother Earth and an official goodwill ambassador for the United Nations, but I see you worked on the Latinatis Nova et Vetera,” he said, referring to the Vatican’s “new look” Latin dictionary designed by traditionalists to catapult the ancient tongue of Virgil into the new millennium.

“That’s right, Your Holiness.”

“So we have you to thank for coining the Latin terms fordisco and cover girl -caberna disco the cariaand terioris paginae puello.”

“Don’t forget pilamalleus super glaciem.”

The pope had to pause to make the mental translation. “Ice hockey?”

“Very good, Your Holiness.”

The pope smiled in spite of himself before growing very serious. “And what do you call a man like Doctor Yeats?”

“Asordidissimi hominess,” she said, not skipping a beat. “One of the dregs of society.”

The pope nodded sadly. “Is this man the reason why you chose to suppress your gifts, leave the Church, and run off to become Mother Earth?”

“Conrad had nothing to do with my decision to devote my energies to protecting the environment,” she said, sounding more defensive than she intended.

The pope nodded. “But you met him while working with the Aymara tribe in Bolivia, shortly before you left the Church. What do you know about him?”

She paused. There was so much she could say. But she would stick with the essentials. “He’s a thief and a liar and the greatest, most dangerous archaeologist I’ve ever met.”

“Dangerous?”

“He has no respect for antiquity,” she said. “He believes the information gleaned from a discovery is more important than the discovery itself. Consequently, in his haste to uncover a virgin find he will often destroy the integrity of the site, future generations be damned.”

The pope nodded. “That would explain why the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities has forbidden him from ever setting foot in Luxor again.”

“Actually, the council’s director general lost some money to Conrad in a card game when they were consulting on the Luxor Casino in Las Vegas,” Serena said. “The way I heard it was that he paid Conrad off with a Nineteenth Dynasty statuette and that Conrad’s been trying to unload it on the black market ever since. He needs the money, badly I understand, in order to keep going. It would make a wonderful addition to our collection here if you’re interested.”

The pope frowned to show he did not appreciate her dry sense of humor. “And I take it the story is the same in Bolivia, where Doctor Yeats was barred a year after your encounter with him?”

Serena shrugged. “Let’s just say that he found a certain generalissimo ’s daughter to be more interesting than the ruins.”

“Do I detect a note of jealousy?”

Serena laughed. “There will always be another woman for a schemer like Conrad. The treasures of antiquity, on the other hand, belong to all of us.”

“I’m getting a clear picture. Whatever did you see in him, Sister Serghetti, if I may ask?”

“He’s the most honest soul I’ve ever met.”

“You said he was a liar.”

“That’s part of his honesty. What does he have to do with all this?”

“Nothing, really, beyond his effect on you,” the pope said, but Serena felt there was more to it than that.

“But what am I to you, Your Holiness, if you’ll forgive my asking? I’m no longer a Catholic nun or Vatican linguist or any other official appendage of the Church.”

“Be it as a nun or lay specialist we contract with, Serena, you’ll always be part of the Church and the Church will always be part of you. Whether you or I like it or not. Right now, our chief interest is in how the Aymara came up with their language. It’s so pure that some of your colleagues suspect it didn’t just evolve like other languages but was actually constructed from scratch.”

She nodded. “An intellectual achievement you’d hardly expect from simple farmers.”

“Exactly,” said the pope. “Tell me, Sister Serghetti, where did the Aymara come from?”

“The earliest Aymara myth tells of strange events at Lake Titicaca after the Great Flood,” she explained. “Strangers attempted to build a city on the lake.”

“Tiahuanaco,” said the pope, “with its great Temple of the Sun.”

“Your Holiness is well informed,” Serena said. “The abandoned city is said to have originally been populated by people from ‘Aztlan,’ the lost island paradise of the Aztecs.”

“A lost island paradise. Interesting.”

“A common pre-Flood myth, Your Holiness. Many myths speak of the lost island paradise and have a deluge motif. There’s the ancient Greek philosopher Plato’s account of Atlantis, of course. And the Haida and Sumerian, too, share a similar story of their origins.”

The pope nodded. “And yet it’s hard to imagine two more different cultures than the Haida and Sumerian, one in the rainy Pacific Northwest of America and the other in the arid desert of Iraq.”

“That a common myth of some event is shared by disparate cultures isn’t evidence that such an event took place,” she said dryly, the academic in her taking over. “Fossil records and geology, for example, tell us there was a flood, an ice age, and the like. But whether there was a Noah who built an ark, and whether he was Asian, African, or Caucasian, is pure speculation. And there’s certainly no proof of any island paradise.”

“Then what do you make of these similar stories?”

“I’ve always considered them to be indicators of the universality of the human intellect.”

“So to you Genesis is nothing more than a metaphor?”

She had forgotten the pope’s habit of turning their every conversation back to her faith. She slowly nodded. “Yes, I suppose so.”

“You don’t seem so sure.”

“Yes, definitely.” There, she said it. He had forced her to say it.

“And the Church itself? Just a good idea gone bad?”

“Like all human institutions, the Church on earth is corrupt,” she said. “But it’s given us hospitals, orphanages, and hope for the human race. Without it civilization would sink into a moral abyss.”

“I’m glad to hear you say that.” There was tenderness in the pope’s eyes and a tone of disbelief in his voice as he asked her, of all people: “Sister Serghetti, I want you to pause and consider whether the Spirit is prompting you in your heart to take on a holy mission that may truly make you worthy of your calling as Mother Earth.”

The only thing the Spirit was telling her was that something wasn’t right here. She had rebuked the Vatican and left the Church. Now the pope was asking her to be his official emissary. “What sort of mission?”

“I understand you are an official observer and adviser to the implementation of the international Antarctic Treaty.”

“I’m an adviser for the Treaty’s Committee for Environmental Protection,” she explained. “But I represent Australia, Your Holiness, not the Church.”

The pope nodded and tapped his fingers on his arm-rest. “You know those recent news reports about seismic activity in Antarctica?”

“Of course, Your Holiness. A glacier the size of Delaware was sliced off last month after the most recent temblor. And another one the size of Rhode Island broke away before that. In short order it may all add up to the equivalent of the entire eastern seaboard of the United States.”

“What if I told you that our intelligence sources have located a secret and illegal American military expedition in Antarctica, in land claimed by your own homeland, Australia?”

“I’d say the Americans are violating the Madrid Protocol of 1991, which established Antarctica as a zone of peace reserved exclusively for scientific research purposes. All military activities are banned from the continent.” Serena leaned forward. “How do you know this?”

“Three U.S. spy satellites recently disappeared from orbit,” he explained.

She blinked. How long had the Vatican been in the business of tracking foreign spy satellites? “Perhaps they stopped working or were deliberately destroyed,” she suggested.

“Dead U.S. satellites are usually left in orbit,” the pope explained as easily as if he were discussing New Testament hermeneutics. “And if one satellite, let alone three, had died, congressional overseers would have made more noise than Vatican II. That did not happen.”

“I’m afraid we’ve stepped beyond my area of expertise, Your Holiness,” Serena said. “What are you suggesting happened?”

“The satellites were placed into orbits that would move more slowly across the skies than other high-altitude spy cameras, giving them more time to photograph targets.”

“Targets?”

“Military strikes are usually mounted immediately before a spy satellite passes overhead, so they can record the damage before the enemy has time to cover it up. But after the latest seismic activity in Antarctica, no known spy satellites would have passed over the affected area. That suggests that one or more of the missing satellites may be watching.”

“Are you suggesting the U.S. military is actually causing those seismic shock waves?” she asked.

“That’s what I want you to find out.”

She sat back in her chair. The pope had no reason to lie to her. But there must be more to this than what he was telling her. Why else would the Holy See take such profound interest in an empty continent populated by more penguins than Catholics?

“Is there something more you want to tell me?” she asked. “Does it involve Doctor Yeats?”

The pope nodded. “He apparently has joined the American expedition in Antarctica.”

So it did involve Conrad, she realized, but in an altogether unexpected scenario. “Why would the American military need an archaeologist?”

The pope said nothing, and Serena knew in an instant that the Vatican was enlisting her help as a linguist and not as an environmentalist. All of which meant the Americans had found something in Antarctica. Something that would require the expertise of archaeologists and linguists. Something that had clearly rattled the Vatican. The only reason the pope was reaching out to her was because he had no other choice. The Americans obviously weren’t consulting with him. But perhaps they should have, she suddenly realized.

“You have something to show me, don’t you, Your Holiness?”

“I do.” With gnarled fingers, the pope unfurled a copy of a medieval map across his desk. It was dated 1513. “This was discovered in the old Imperial Palace in Constantinople in 1929. It belonged to a Turkish admiral.”

“Admiral Piri Reis,” she said. “It’s the Piri Reis World Map.”

“You recognize it, then.” The pope nodded. “So you’ve undoubtedly seen this too.”

He passed across an old U.S. Air Force report. It was dated July 6, 1960, code-named Project Blue Book.

“No, I haven’t,” she said with interest, picking up the slim report. “Since when does the Vatican have access to classified American military intelligence?”

“This old report?” the pope said. “I’d hardly call it classified. But the addendum is.”

She thumbed through the pages, written by the chief of the cartographic section of Westover Air Force Base in Massachusetts. The conclusion of Air Force officials was that the Antarctic portions of the Piri Reis World Map did accurately depict the Princess Martha Coast of Antarctica and the Palmer Peninsula.

Her eyes lingered on the last page, where Lieutenant Colonel Harold Z. Ohlmeyer of the Eighth Reconnaissance Technical Squadron wrote:

The geographical detail shown in the lower part of the map agrees very remarkably with the results of the seismic profile made across the top of the ice cap by the Swedish-British-Norwegian Antarctic Expedition of 1949. This indicates the coastline had been mapped before it was covered by the ice cap. The ice cap in this region is now about a mile thick. We have no idea how the data on this map can be reconciled with the supposed state of geographic knowledge in 1513.

Then came the Pentagon addendum, dated 1970 and handwritten in bold strokes by USAF Colonel Griffin Yeats. She knew that this was Conrad’s father, and it made the hair on her neck stand on end. The note said:

All future reports regarding Piri Reis World Map and Project Sonchis shall be passed through this office and classified accordingly.

“Sonchis,” she repeated, closing the report.

“Any significance?”

“There was an Egyptian priest named Sonchis who allegedly provided Plato with his detailed account of Atlantis.”

“Admiral Reis’s map states it is based on even earlier source maps going back to the time of Alexander the Great.”

“You’re saying what exactly, Your Holiness?”

“Only an advanced, worldwide maritime culture that existed more than ten thousand years ago could have created these source maps.”

Serena blinked. “You believe that Antarctica is Atlantis?”

“And its secrets are buried under two miles of ice,” he said. “What we are dealing with is not just a lost ancient civilization, but the lost mother culture your friend Doctor Yeats has been searching for, one possessing scientific knowledge that we have yet to comprehend.”

“If this turns out to be real it will throw many things into question,” Serena replied, “including the Church’s interpretation of the Genesis account in the Bible.”

“Or uphold it,” the pope said, although he didn’t sound hopeful. “But should that be the case, we are all the worse for it.”

“You’ve lost me, Your Holiness.”

“God has shown me a prophecy about the end of time,” he said. “But I have not revealed it to the Church because it is too terrible to contemplate.”

Serena sat on the edge of her seat. Her usual concerns aside, this pope certainly seemed to have control of his senses and be of sound mind. “What did you see, Your Holiness?”

“I saw a beautiful rose frozen in ice,” the pope said. “And then the ice cracked, and out of the crack came fire and a war waged by the sons of God against the Church and all mankind. In the end the ice melted and tears rolled off the petals of the rose.”

Serena recalled the sixth chapter of Genesis, which said that the “sons of God” ruled the Earth in an ancient epoch of time. Their offspring, born of women, did so much evil that God destroyed them and the entire human race in the Great Flood, save for Noah and his family. But Serena also recalled that apocalyptic visions, whether from the Bible or from the mouths of young Portuguese shepherds, do not detail the future in high-definition clarity. Instead they synthesize it and set it against a unified, timeless backdrop of symbols that require interpretation.

“So Your Holiness feels that this vision, the myth of Atlantis, and the current American military activities in Antarctica are altogether one and the same?”

“Yes.”

She tried to mask her doubt, but each element alone strained credulity. “I see.”

“No, you don’t,” he said. “Look closer.” The pope held a rolled-up parchment in his hand. “This is one of the source maps we believe Admiral Reis used. The map, really.”

Serena slowly reached forward and took the map from the pope’s hand. As soon as she clutched it in her own, she felt a jolt of anticipation surge through her veins.

“It has Sonchis’s name on it,” the pope said. “But the rest of the writing is pre-Minoan.”

She said, “Give me a few weeks and-”

“I was hoping you could decode it on the way to Antarctica,” the pope said. “I have a private jet fueling up on the runway for your journey.”

“My journey?” Serena said. “You said it yourself, Your Holiness. This city, if it truly exists, is buried under two miles of ice. It might as well be on Mars.”

“The Americans have found it,” the pope insisted. “Now you must find them. Before it is too late.”

The pope placed one hand on the terrestrial globe to his right and the other on the celestial globe to his left.

“These globes were painted by Dutch master cartographer Willem Bleau in 1648,” he said. “At the time they, too, displayed the ‘modern world.’ Unfortunately, they depict an entirely wrong version of the planet and the heavens. Look, California is an island.”

She looked at the terrestrial globe and saw monsters in the sea. “I’m familiar with Bleau’s work, Your Holiness.”

“What everybody once thought was true is false,” he replied. “A warning that the way we see the world today will probably look equally wrong a few centuries hence. Or a few days.”

“A few days?” Serena repeated. “Your prophecy is to be fulfilled within a few days and you have not revealed it to the Church?”

“There are bitter spiritual, political, and military implications, Sister Serghetti,” the pope said, continuing to address her as a nun, a member of the family, and not an outsider. “Just consider what would happen should moral anarchy reign on Earth because humanity has cast aside the Judeo-Christian tradition.”

“I have, Your Holiness, and that day came a long time ago to the rest of the world outside Rome.”

The pope said nothing for an uncomfortable minute. Finally, he cleared his throat and said, “Have you ever wondered why you chose to join such a secure and predictable surrogate family as the Church?”

Serena remained silent. It was a question she took pains to avoid asking herself. The truth was that despite her public differences with it, she believed the Church was the hope of humanity, the only institution that kept an amoral world from spinning out of control.

“Perhaps because as a nun you felt it would be easy for you to be right with God,” the pope said. “Perhaps because you desperately needed to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you were acceptable to him.”

The pope was probing so close to the truth that it was almost too unbearable for Serena to remain in the room. She wanted to run away and hide.

“It’s not by my good deeds but by God’s mercy through Christ’s atoning death on the cross that my immortal soul is saved, Your Holiness.”

“My point exactly,” the pope said. “What more do you hope to add?”

Serena could feel the emptiness inside her like a dull ache. She had no answer for the pope but wanted to say something, anything. “Banishing me to Antarctica to expose the Americans isn’t going to-”

“Finally make you worthy of your calling as Mother Earth?” The pope looked at her like a father would his daughter. “Sister Serghetti, I want you to go to nature’s ‘last wilderness’ and find God-away from all this.” He gestured to the books and maps and works of art. “Just you and the Creator of the universe. And Doctor Yeats.”