The Atlantis Prophecy

17

CONRAD RAN THROUGH the dilapidated network of steam tunnels beneath Capitol Hill, hands up to brush aside falling debris from the crumbling ceilings. He could hear his heavy breathing inside his mask and feel the sweat drench his body. He had found the cornerstone but no globe, and right now his only mission was survival.

He knew that all the buildings in the U.S. Capitol complex could be entered through the steam tunnels. But he never imagined their state of repair to be this poor. Not after the feds just spent a billion dollars on the underground Capitol Visitors Center. They must have just sealed off the new construction and said to hell with the steam tunnels.

He came to a cross tunnel. Something inside prompted him to stop and listen. Besides a continuous low rumble in the background, he couldn't hear a thing. But when he looked over his shoulder, he saw the green glow of night vision gear.

He started to run.

A shot rang out, and he ducked as a bullet ricocheted off the tunnel wall. He froze as several chunks of the ceiling came down around him. Slowly he turned around and squinted in the dark.

A thin shadow was wafting toward him. He looked down and saw the glowing red dot on his chest.

Suddenly a beam of white light blinded him and a voice in a ringing alto shouted: "Hands up where I can see them!"

It was a woman's voice, and she was mad as hell.

Conrad put up his hands and heard a deafening crack. But he wasn't shot. It was the floor-it was beginning to crumble.

The policewoman yelled: "Stop!"

But Conrad stomped on the floor as hard as he could. His knees began to buckle. The tunnel floor gave way under him and he plunged into darkness.

Sergeant Wanda Randolph kept her G36 steady in spite of the tunnel collapse, both eyes peering through her electronic red dot sight. But when the smoke cleared, her man was gone.

Quickly but cautiously, she moved through the dust to the crater in the tunnel floor, coughing through her mask. Finger on her trigger, ready to unload a round, she pointed her G36 down and hit her high beams, bathing the rubble below in light. There was no suspect underneath the chunks of concrete.

There was, however, another tunnel, one not on her schematics.

"Sweet Jesus," she said, although she wasn't surprised.

Before she joined the Capitol Police, Sergeant Wanda Randolph spent two years in Tora Bora and Baghdad crawling through caves and bunkers and sewers ahead of American troops in search of Bin Laden and later Saddam Hussein. She was tall and lean, with narrow shoulders and hips that enabled her to slip through holes and places people just weren't created to go. And while dogs could sniff explosives with their noses, they couldn't see tripwires, so they sent her ahead of even the dogs.

It was a year later that ten employees who worked in the Capitol Power Plant tunnels sent a letter to four members of Congress to express their concern that there was no police presence in the underground tunnels. The tunnels provided steam to heat and cool the Capitol campus and ran from the Capitol Power Plant to the House and Senate office buildings, the Capitol and surrounding buildings.

Now she was "Queen Rat," chief of the Hill's special Recon and Tactics Squad. The mission of the R.A.T.S. was to police the crumbling, asbestos-lined tunnels that had become a giant health trap to federal employees and a gaping hole in national security. As dirty and humble as her life's work had turned out to be, she was the best at it and proud to serve the United States of America.

"All R.A.T.S., report," she called into her radio, but knew it was no use even before static filled her earpiece. She flashed her call sign twice into the dark. No response.

As usual, she was on her own.

She climbed down into the new tunnel, using the rubble like a staircase until she reached the bottom and straightened up with her G36 pointed ahead. She hit her high beam again and gasped.

The tunnel wasn't a steam tunnel at all, but something else, like something out of ancient Rome. With one arm still holding up her weapon, she ran her other hand along the stone wall, awed by the solid construction of the stonecutters. She had seen enough tunnels beneath centuries-old cities to know this tunnel was older than the steam tunnels above, which themselves were more than a hundred years old. For all she knew, this tunnel was older than the republic.

Either the government had forgotten this tunnel was here, or knowledge of its existence was way beyond her pay grade. In any case, she had an intruder to capture or kill, and she marched down the corridor.

About three minutes later she saw the perp in his yellow Haz-Mat gear standing before a fork in the tunnel, his back to her.

"Turn around, hands up, or I shoot in three," she shouted, her G36 up and locked on the perp. "One…"

His arms seemed to waver but he wasn't turning around.

She aimed the glowing red dot between his shoulder blades.

"Two…"

Now his right leg seemed to waver, but still he didn't turn around.

She took a breath and tightened her grip on the trigger.

"Three."

One of his arms came down and his body twisted toward her. She wasn't about to wait for him to get off a shot and pulled the trigger, letting loose a burst of fire.

The bullets hit her target in the chest, blowing him back into the tunnel.

She ran down the stone floor to the crumpled body, her G36 pointed at the mask. She lowered the barrel and lifted the mask to see that it was empty. The perp had shed the suit and strung it up.

She looked down one tunnel with her high beams and saw nothing, then down the other and saw a glint of metal. She gave a war cry and ran down the tunnel only to find a shiny vaultlike door at the end.

It was an emergency hatch. All the old sublevel hatches were replaced several years back with new ones. And like all the safety precautions in place in the tunnels, it was designed to keep people on the outside from getting in, not people on the inside from getting out.

She opened it and climbed out of the ancient tunnel and into a machinery room. A minute later she popped through a metal door into an underground passageway and startled a group of young Capitol pages. They were exiting the Capitol complex with their supervisors and heading back to their school on the top floor of the Jefferson Building at the Library of Congress.

At this point, Sergeant Randolph knew that even if she saw the perp she wouldn't know him now. She wanted to scream, but it would only scare the Hill staffers.

Her radio, now in range of the command post, squawked.

She picked it up and said, "Suspect's gone native. Time: 1304 hours."

The Jefferson Building at the Library of Congress was the most ornate building in Washington, D.C., the greatest library in history since the Library of Alexandria burned to the ground two thousand years ago. Besides a fifteenth-century Gutenberg Bible, there were ancient maps of Antarctica that showed the subglacial topography of the continent before it was covered with ice, complete with curious addenda by the U.S. Air Force. Then there was a nineteenth-century manuscript copy of U.S. Senator Ignatius Donnelly's worldwide bestseller Atlantis: The Antediluvian World. Most prophetic, perhaps, was a sixteenth-century essay of Francis Bacon's on "The New Atlantis," all about the New World and the land that would become America.

Not that any of that interested Conrad right now as he split from the procession of Capitol pages and passed through a deep arch into the library's central atrium a few minutes later.

The ornate Great Hall was flanked by two grand staircases and constructed almost entirely of white Italian marble. Floating 75 feet overhead was a spectacular ceiling with stained glass skylights, paneled beams, and 23-karat gold leaf accents.

The street exit was just a stone's throw away. He started for it when he saw several Capitol Police officers coming in, talking on their radios.

He turned around and ducked into a public restroom, where he removed his dirty suit jacket and jammed it into a trash can. Then he ripped off his fake goatee and threw cold water on his face. He rolled up the sleeves of his blue dress shirt and looked at himself in the mirror, a relatively new man. After he wiped the dust off his shoes, he walked back out into the Great Hall.

Seeing police at the security station by the main floor exit, he crossed the wine-dark marble floor and climbed one of the marble stairways to the second floor level. There a crowd was pressed against the glass overlooking the East Lawn of the Capitol across the street.

With the polite authority of a Library docent he pushed his way through the bodies toward the window. Then he looked down and realized he had a skybox seat to the mess he had made across the street-police vans, news crews, the works.

All for naught, he thought as he stared out the glass. He had followed his precious "cosmic radiant" in the sky above Pennsylvania Avenue to the dome of the U.S. Capitol only to find an empty cornerstone.

All that remained for him now was to wait for an opportunity to escape the Library, meet Serena at their designated rendezvous, and tell her that he had failed.

Even now, the Statue of Freedom atop the Capitol dome across the street seemed to be mocking him. Made of bronze, it was six meters tall and, standing on the dome, the tallest statue in D.C. since 1863. By law no statue was permitted to be taller. Maybe that's why the statue's back was turned to the Washington Monument rising high into the sky beyond.

Or maybe not.

He caught his breath.

The U.S. Capitol was built to face west. But the Statue of Freedom faced the Library of Congress in the east. In theory this reversal was decided on so that the sun would never set on the face of Freedom, but Conrad suddenly wondered if there was another reason.

He looked again at the gleaming dome of the U.S. Capitol under cloudy skies-the cosmic center of Washington, D.C. What if the cosmic radiant in the sky that paralleled Pennsylvania Avenue didn't end over the dome? What if it kept going? In his mind's eye, he extended the radiant to the east…to right about where he was standing in the Library of Congress.

He turned and walked back through the crowd toward the balcony overlooking the Great Hall and looked down twenty feet below. In the center of the marble floor was a giant sunburst, around which were 12 brass inlays of the signs of the zodiac arranged in a giant square.

This must be what the Masons wanted Stargazer to find: A marker of their own design, laid directly along the path of the city's central radiant.

Conrad could feel his heart beating out of his chest.

A zodiac in the shape of a square rather than a circle symbolically linked the constellations to the flat plane of the earth, not the vast space of the heavens. And a sunburst in the center, if he recalled correctly, represented the cardinal points of the compass.

Meaning the zodiac on the floor of the Great Hall was pointing to a hidden direction on Earth-or under the earth.

The Masons moved the globe. And it was right here, under the Library of Congress.