The 34th Degree

9

As the cart scooted off into the dark tunnel, Packard turned to Deker and said, “You look like hell. When’s the last time you got a decent night’s sleep?”

Packard knew damn well that Deker couldn’t remember his last decent night’s sleep. It had been at least a few years. They passed a guarded gate at a tunnel cross section, were waved through, then sped up, the golf cart’s electric engine humming in the dark.

Deker sat back in his seat and sighed. “Not since I met you, Packard. So what exactly is this mission you have for me?”

“The Flammenschwert, Deker. The so-called Sword of Fire warhead that the Nazis built that could turn water to fire. The original Greek Fire. The Nazis, in their misguided mythology, believed it derived from Atlantean technology. You self-righteously destroyed the last of it under the Temple Mount, so that we couldn’t get our hands on it, and nor could anybody else. Well, now we need to get it back, or at least the formula that created it.”

Deker pondered the odd juxtaposition of his nightmare about the Baron of the Black Order and this conversation. His sixth sense was on high alert.

“How is giving you the power to scorch three quarters of the planet going to help me sleep at night?” he asked sardonically.

“Because you’ll have peace of mind knowing that you kept it out of the hands of those Alignment terrorists who tortured you,” Packard said. “Our intel says they’re scouring Greece looking for any clues to rebuild the device.”

“They’re going to come up empty-handed,” Deker said. “That secret was locked inside the head of SS general Ludwig von Berg. IDF files say he went down with his sub in the summer of 1943. Then the sub slid down the Calypso Deep, lost forever.”

“It’s something else the Alignment is after,” Packard went on. “They want the formulas that General von Berg used to create the weapon. They believe those formulas came from a first-century biblical text that has since been destroyed. But we don’t know for sure. We want you to tell us, and hopefully tell us what it says.”

“The Maranatha text?” Deker asked.

“Now, how the hell did you know about that?” Packard demanded.

“I dreamed about it last night,” he said. “Von Berg stole it from some Greek monks in Meteora who had been hiding it.”

“This is amazing,” Packard said. “Your brain did that all on its own, connecting bits and pieces of information you had come across and putting them together.”

Packard’s surprise sounded fake to Deker. He began to wonder if his recent nights at the sleep lab were really about him extracting information from the dark recesses of his own mind, or if in fact they were about DARPA somehow implanting information. Perhaps to make him more amenable to accepting an otherwise intolerable mission. The timing was simply too suspicious.

Deker said, “But the only reason the Alignment tortured me in the first place was because it knew I had a state secret inside my brain. The information you’re after now was in the baron’s brain. He’s been dead for almost seventy years.”

“Not quite,” Packard said as they pulled up to the underground entrance of some vast structure that Deker guessed was the nearby Veterans Administration Hospital. “He’s inside those walls. Get ready to meet the Baron of the Black Order.”