The Atlantis Prophecy

33

CONRAD, now wearing a white dress shirt and raincoat stolen from a doctor's locker back at GWU Hospital, got out of the cab at Dupont Circle. He walked several blocks in the drizzling rain up Connecticut toward the Hilton, which even at 1 a.m. was swarming with cabs, limos, and security as visitors from around the world were checking in for the next morning's Presidential Prayer Breakfast.

The way it was supposed to work, Conrad would walk into the lobby, ride the elevator to the tenth floor and go to room 1013, where Serena had already seen to it that he was checked in under an alias, Mr. Carlton Anderson. Then he was to call room service using the room phone and order a pastrami sandwich. Some mole on the staff under her control would then let her know that he had arrived safely and she would come to his room and see what he found in the globe and plot the best way to get it to the president at the prayer breakfast.

The problem, he immediately discovered upon entering the Hilton, was that his picture was on every TV screen in the hotel bar. News reports called him a "person of interest" in connection with a terrorist attack on the Library of Congress, in which a Capitol Policeman was slain. The FBI was pinning the blame on former Pentagon analyst-turned-Starbucks barista Danny Z, now an "Islamic extremist" and the "mastermind" behind the attack.

Those bastards, Conrad thought.

He slipped into the mainstream of boisterous late-night patrons and followed them past the gift shop to the elevator banks, which were packed with still more people. It was a mob, many of them smiling and making conversation.

Who are these people? he wondered. And why were they alarmingly cheerful at this hour?

Conrad stood in the middle of the mob, aware of a few glances from a couple of bodyguards around the president of some African country. He just had to grin and bear it.

It took three elevators before one opened with enough room for him. He stepped in, saw that every single button was lit up, and sighed. It would be a long ride up. At every floor it stopped, a couple of people would step off, and four more would be outside waiting to catch the elevator on the way down.

"Suck it up!" ordered a loud one from Texas, whose wife, a petite blonde, kept eyeing Conrad. "Always room for one more for Jesus!"

Finally, it was just him and the couple from Texas.

"Thought you could escape, huh?" the husband said, smiling. His name tag read Harold from Highland Park, Texas. "My wife says she knows you."

Conrad stood there, flat-footed.

"She says you're Pastor Jim. You wrote that book A Church of One."

Conrad paused for a moment and smiled. "So you liked it?"

"No, but Meredith did," Harold said, and turned toward his wife, whose lipoed waist and silicon breasts defied the laws of natural aging. She could have been anywhere from 30 to 50 years old, depending on where she was between her Botox injections. "See, honey, I told you we'd meet all the big shots here."

"You look much younger than your picture," she said and squeezed his arm enthusiastically. But her husband Harold didn't seem to notice.

Conrad remembered something Serena always used to tell him and said, "Now don't go looking at the outside, Meredith. The good Lord looks at the heart."

She sighed. "So true, Pastor Jim."

The elevator door opened on the tenth floor, and Conrad exhaled as he stepped off along with Harold and Meredith. He turned down a hallway and walked briskly to Room 1013, hearing Meredith's heels clack behind him. He looked over his shoulder to see the couple wave good night and enter their room across the hall. He looked both ways and then inserted the coded plastic key card Serena had given him to unlock the door.

Once inside he immediately picked up the phone on the nightstand and called room service. "I'd like a pastrami from your all-night menu. Thanks. Oh, and a Sam Adams." Then he went to the bathroom and turned on the shower.

As the water heated up, Conrad removed the silver cornerstone plate from inside his raincoat. He rubbed his thumb over the dent from the bullet Seavers intended for his heart.

He placed the silver plate on the dresser next to a golden ticket that Serena had left for him. The embossed letters read: 57th Annual Presidential Prayer Breakfast Thursday, July 3, 2008 Next to the ticket was a 10 x 14 souvenir reproduction of The Washington Family portrait by Edward Savage. Apparently Mr. Anderson had taken a day trip to Mount Vernon and the new museum. There was even a sales slip from the gift shop.

Nice, Serena.

Then he took a shower and found a complete wardrobe hanging for him in the closet. Instead he put on a bathrobe and waited for Serena, hoping she'd really bring him that pastrami because he was famished.

As the minutes passed with no Serena and no pastrami, he found his eyes drifting back to the souvenir copy of Edward Savage's portrait The Washington Family. He had used it to find the globe. Perhaps it held some secret to the meaning of the contents of the globe, namely, the star map.

But the only thing new he noticed in the portrait was the column-or rather, two columns on either side of the panoramic view of the Potomac. Mount Vernon, of course, had no columns like that.

He remembered the giant Masonic board depicting King Solomon's Temple in the secret chamber beneath the Jefferson Building. It, too, had similar columns. But something about those pillars was different from Savage's. He couldn't put his finger on it, but he was sure of it.

Then it hit him: The columns at the entrance of King Solomon's Temple had two orbs on top of them.

Two globes.

The Savage portrait hinted at it all along. That's why there were two suns on the celestial map.

There's a second globe!

But, of course, he realized. They always came in pairs.

Old Herc must have known there were two. Why didn't he tell me?

He looked again at the Savage portrait, realizing that if there were two suns representing two globes, there were probably two landmarks designating their location. If Martha Washington's fan pinpointed the cornerstone of the U.S. Capitol in the east then perhaps…yes, young Eustice-a virgin, no less, at least in symbol-was holding the L'Enfant map at the western horizon. Her fingers pinched the horizon just behind the starburst in the guard of Washington's sword-surely a symbol of the sun.

That would place the location of the landmark somewhere in…Georgetown.

Only there was no celestial landmark in Georgetown, at least none that Conrad knew of, and he knew them all, or so he thought.

Conrad sat quietly, running through any correlation he could think of when he heard a knock at the door.

He rose to his feet and walked over to the door. He looked out the peephole to see Brooke standing in the hallway.

His heart stopped.

"I know you're in there, Conrad," she said. "I saw you in the lobby. Please let me in. Everybody's been looking for you, and I've been worried sick."

Conrad, his mind racing ahead to Serena's impending arrival and the resulting fireworks, realized it was better to have Brooke inside the room than outside, so he opened the door.

Brooke came in wearing an expensive but modest dress that still managed to show off her amazing figure. Her eyes swept the room, resting on the silver cornerstone plate on the dresser. She wrapped her arms around him and kissed him.

"Thank God you're OK, Conrad. Where the hell have you been? What's going on? The police have been asking questions, the FBI, and now your face is plastered all over the news. My news director called me and asked me if I had seen you and said you were about to join America's Most Wanted."

"You'd never believe me."

"Try me."

"The feds think I attacked the U.S. Capitol and Library of Congress and killed some people."

Her eyes widened. "And did you?"

"Well, yes. But I didn't kill the people they say I did."

"You just killed different people?"

"Yes."

"Oh, my God, Conrad. You better tell me everything."