The Atlantis Prophecy

20

LATER THAT NIGHT Max Seavers stood naked in the bedroom of his Georgetown house and looked at himself in the mirror. There was much to admire-his golden hair, sapphire eyes, aquiline nose, and strong chin, not to mention his rock-hard, six-pack abs. This was not the face of a monster. Moreover, it was what one couldn't see in a mirror-his towering intellect, his genius-that was intrinsically noble.

Soon, he thought, everybody will see it.

He heard the shower in the bathroom turn off. He walked across the plush carpet to his bed, slipped under the sheets and waited for her. As he did, he mulled over the SecDef's directive about finding this thing that Washington had buried and marveled at the absurdity of it all.

For it was in another country, in another time, that his own great-grandfather was asked to help run an organization quite similar to DARPA and to pursue similarly bizarre research for his boss, Adolf Hitler.

Before and during the Second World War, Hitler had German scientists and archaeologists roaming the earth for evidence of the biological superiority of the Aryan race. Few were hard-core Nazis, but fewer still were about to spurn the overtures of the Fuhrer and his ax man Heinrich Himmler, who in exchange for keeping them out of concentration camps offered these academics the kind of funding and resources no university could match.

The Ahnenerbe, as the think-tank was called, was an SS agency established to prove once and for all that Aryans were not just the "master race" or pinnacle of human evolution but also the "mother race" of human civilization. At its peak it counted more than 200 scholars, scientists, and staff among its ranks. And its teams fanned out across the globe in search of evidence in places like Lake Titicaca in Bolivia, the Canary Islands, the Greek Islands, even Tibet. All these places were alleged to have been built by Aryan colonists, and research efforts soon crystallized into one final quest to find the place from which those colonists came.

That place, they concluded, was Atlantis, and its location was determined to be Antarctica. If only they could find its ruins beneath the ice, they could prove once and for all the superiority of the Aryan race and the inevitable triumph of Hitler's Thousand-Year Reich.

Toward that end, Hitler sent U-boats to Antarctica, where teams of Nazis disembarked on the ice cap in search of ruins. They also planted Nazi flags still buried to this day in order to claim the last continent for Nazi Germany.

They came back empty-handed, of course, those who managed to come back at all. Many perished in the otherworldly cold. Those who survived had no relics to show for their pains. Some had no fingers or toes either, as they were lost to frostbite.

None of this surprised Seavers's great-grandfather, Wolfram Sievers, who considered much of archaeology the domain of crackpots. Whereas half of the Ahnenerbe was focused on the past, Wolfram was focused on the future, on genetics and human evolution. Much of his work was inspired by the American eugenics movement of the early part of the twentieth century.

Unfortunately, research required Wolfram to experiment on living subjects, which could be found in great supply among the Jews in the concentration camps. The results yielded a treasure trove of data and the creation of new biotoxins.

Hitler hoped to place the biotoxins in the tips of his V-2 rockets and launch them against the Allies. But the tide of war turned against Hitler and his Nazis, and the work of Wolfram was cut short.

In the end, Germany was split in two by invading Allied forces. "Good Germans" who had served the Ahnenerbe were free to resume their respectable chairs at elite universities. Some, like rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, were even invited to the United States to help the Americans land a man on the moon. "Bad Germans" linked to the Holocaust like Seavers's great-grandfather, however, were executed in Nuremburg for their "crimes against humanity."

Growing up in Southern California with relatives, Seavers hid his true paternity with shame. At Torrey Pines High School he announced his resolve to dedicate his life to creating vaccines that would eradicate pandemic diseases and extend human life. By the time he was a junior at Stanford, he got the backing of venture capitalists to launch his own biotech company back in San Diego.

He made billions but ran into trouble when America's religious fanatics got in the way of his stem-cell research, which required the destruction of aborted fetuses. They called him a baby killer, these Catholic and evangelical Christian hypocrites, who themselves benefited from his drugs and who carried out "God's work" in Third World countries by administering his vaccines to the poor and sick.

It was then that he began to consider that his great-grandfather, who didn't even work on live embryos but on prisoners as good as dead, may have been misunderstood.

Politics from Nazis or the White House had no place in science, he realized, and neither did religion. But the burdens of government regulations on his company's research became too much to bear. He had nowhere to turn in the private sector-except the Homeland Security-Industrial Complex.

And it was here, outside the gaze of Wall Street and the world, that Seavers found not only billions of dollars at his disposal but the cloak of "national security" to perform the kinds of research and experiments-mostly on enlisted soldiers-that he would never have been able to pull off in the private sector. Literally decades of research had been compressed into less than 36 months. The result was the SeaGen smart vaccine, his crowning achievement.

Now, however, like his great-grandfather, he was reduced to dealing with imbecile masters at the Pentagon, hunting for buried globes, and crossing swords with "astro-archaeologists" like Conrad Yeats.

What an insane world, he thought. Time for a new one.

Seavers heard the bathroom door open and saw a whiff of steam from the shower billow out. Then a long, tan leg emerged from the mist and the naked form of Brooke Scarborough stepped toward him.

Seavers admired Brooke's body as she walked over and slipped under the sheets next to him. It had been weeks since they had sex, and it infuriated him that he had to share Brooke with Conrad Yeats.

Worse, she had put him in a bind with the Alignment, which wanted her dead after she had allowed Yeats to find the code book right under her nose and slip away. He had intervened on her behalf, arguing that the death of Senator Scarborough's daughter would only bring even more unwanted scrutiny at the eleventh hour. Moreover, if there was anyone Yeats would turn to once he popped back up on the grid, it would be her. The Alignment bought his argument, and she had won a reprieve.

So far, however, Yeats seemed to be able to live without her. Brooke was certain that Yeats felt so guilty about reconnecting with Serena Serghetti that he was hiding from her as much as he was the Alignment. If so, Yeats was a weaker man than he thought.

"The president and Packard told me about the globe," he said. "Did you know this was what that tombstone and book code nonsense was all about?"

Her silence said yes. He didn't know which annoyed him more: that the Alignment had kept him out of the loop or that she had. As a biological legacy of the Alignment, he always resented it when those adopted into the organization knew more than he did. Especially the true identity of one or more of the 30 who ruled the Alignment and knew all the names and faces. In two days so would he.

"They want me to find it."

"You?" She looked at him with frightened eyes. "Have you told Osiris?"

"Of course. Nothing's changed. I simply have to keep this globe from falling into the hands of either the Church or the State. And now the federal government has given me the men and muscle to do that. Meanwhile, you're going to have to be on the lookout for Yeats. He has few places to turn now. One of them is bound to be you."

She said nothing.

It was an awkward pause, but Seavers didn't mind her discomfort. In fact, he took perverse pleasure in it and the knowledge of pleasure soon to come.

"Max, you're as cool and confident of yourself as ever," she told him. "But you only know Conrad Yeats the specimen. Not the man."

"Unlike, say, you?" he replied with ice in his voice.

She was terrified. He could see it in her eyes. "I'm just saying that there's always a body count when people go after him."

Seavers let out a loud laugh and couldn't stop laughing. It was too funny, really.

"After tonight, Brooke, the only body you'll need to worry about is yours."