The Atlantis Prophecy

PART FOUR 45

CONRAD WOKE UP in complete darkness, a black hood over his head, chilled to the bone. He sensed he was deep underground and could feel the low rumble of large, powerful machinery nearby. Something very sharp was pressing on his chest.

"Serena?" he called out.

He heard a laugh. It belonged to Max Seavers. "You're an inspiration, Yeats, I'll give you that."

Then the black hood came off and Conrad looked up to see Seavers standing over him, pointing an ornate dagger at his chest. Conrad tried to move, but his arms and legs were strapped to a restraint chair, bolted to the floor of a windowless room with stone walls and a metal door.

"Do you like my dagger, Yeats?" Seavers said, pushing the point into Conrad's sternum. "Your old friend Herc gave it to me before he died and joined Danny Z in the Great Beyond. He said it once belonged to a legendary 33rd Degree Mason of the Scottish Rite or some such, and that the Masons used the dagger in rituals to initiate candidates into a perverse system of levels or degrees by which they replicate themselves. Apparently the candidate for the First Degree is hooded and brought into the Lodge. There, at the point of a dagger, he undergoes ritual questioning. Welcome to my Lodge, Yeats. Maybe you can work all the way up the ranks like Herc."

As he struggled to get his bearings, Conrad remembered what Brooke had told him about the weaponized bird flu virus Seavers was going to release, and what Serena said about Seavers hosting the Chinese at the Washington Monument for the fireworks.

"The Fourth of July concert on the Mall," Conrad said. "You're going to release your contagion on Chinese officials during the fireworks. At the only moment in history that the monuments will be directly below their designated stars."

"Impressive, isn't it?" Seavers said as he walked out of sight behind him. "I was surprised to discover there's actually some science behind what you allegedly do for a living as an astro-archaeologist. The stars in the sky rotate like some giant odometer every 26,000 years or so. Washington one-upped the Egyptians by ordering his chief architect L'Enfant to align the sites of as-yet-constructed monuments not to the position of the key stars of their day, but to their positions on this day, July 4, 2008, when the Regency of New Atlantis could make its claim and dissolve the United States."

"Tell me something I don't know, Seavers."

Seavers obliged. "When my masters in the Alignment thrust this great responsibility upon me, I knew that I had to make it special for them, seeing as they actually believe in mystical astrological signs and all. So I took a page from your book and decided to coordinate our strike with the heavens."

"Is that what you call killing, what, a billion Chinese and a third of the world's population?"

"It's written in the stars, sport. Today the sun begins a 28-day path across the skies from Washington, D.C., to Beijing, where it will experience a total eclipse at dusk on August 1, exactly seven days before the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games. My time-delayed virus on Earth mirrors the sun's path in the heavens like some cosmic fireball. As above, so below. By the time they light the Olympic torch, the first symptoms of the global human-to-human bird flu pandemic will appear, igniting international chaos and cries to build a new Great Wall to quarantine China. Poetic, isn't it?"

"You're deranged."

Conrad craned his neck to see a dozen syringes, needles, and tubes laid out on a table along with rolls of adhesive tape, bags of saline solution, handcuffs, and leg irons. He shivered. "Are you really going to use all that on me, or is it just for effect?"

Seavers put on a pair of surgical gloves, selected a vial and held it up to the fluorescent light. "This is for somebody else."

As he spoke the door opened and two lab technicians rolled Serena in on a gurney. She was strapped down flat and showed little movement.

"You bastard!" Conrad snarled.

Seavers slid the vial into a syringe gun and put it to Serena's neck.

"This is a special formula of the bird flu virus minus the incubation inhibitor," Seavers said. "Tell me where you put that star map you stole from the celestial globe or I pull the trigger and Sister Serghetti is the first to die."

"Don't you dare, Conrad," Serena warned from the gurney. "You know all those stories through the ages about Christian martyrs? This is one of them. But if you cave to this bastard, he'll just off us and it's plain murder. We'll be as much his victims as the ones who get the bird flu."

Not if we survive, Conrad thought, and he wondered why Seavers wanted the star map. It only led to the terrestrial globe and the Newburgh Treaty, which Seavers already possessed. "It's inside a book at the Library of Congress."

"Shut up!" Serena screamed.

Seavers dug the syringe gun into Serena's carotid. "Tell me the title of the book, sport."

Conrad shifted in his restraining chair. In pressing the point of the dagger to his chest, Seavers had nicked one of the straps. Conrad felt it would tear and snap with enough force, but that he still wouldn't be able to free his hands or feet.

"It's in a book called Obelisks," Conrad said, hearing the desperation in his voice and seeing the disappointment in Serena's eyes.

"You bloody fool," Serena said in defeat. "I hope you've made your peace with God."

"You know I did," Conrad said. "In Antarctica. But not with you."

"And you won't in this lifetime, you wanker," she said. "But when I wake up in the next and see the face of Jesus, I want to see yours, too." She began to utter something in Latin.

Seavers began to laugh. "Are you performing last rites for your beloved Yeats?"

"For you, Seavers," she said. "Because there's no air conditioning where you're going."

"Now, now, Sister Serghetti," Seavers said, in a soothing tone Conrad found very creepy. "Even Jesus forgave his enemies when he was dying on the cross."

"Well, you can go to hell, Seavers!" she screamed. "You have no excuses. You know exactly what you're doing."

Max Seavers's face screwed up into a twisted mask of pure hatred, and Conrad anxiously watched him walk to the instrument table and return with a roll of duct tape.

"That mouth." He tore off some tape and slapped it across Serena's lips. "Somebody in Rome should have shut you up a long time ago."

Then he plunged the syringe gun into her neck again, this time deep enough that Conrad could see a trickle of blood.

"Give me the call number for the book, sport, or I shoot."

"I don't know the call number," Conrad said, panicking as he saw Serena struggle, her eyes wide and her cries muffled. "But it's an old book and there can't be more than a couple of copies in special collections. I'm telling you the truth."

"We'll see when I come back from my previously scheduled engagement," Seavers said and pulled the trigger.

Serena's neck twitched like she'd taken a bullet.

"No!" Conrad shouted.

Seavers laid the syringe gun down, studying Serena as he spoke to Conrad. "She'll be fully infected within a few hours unless I administer the vaccine. But once she starts showing symptoms nothing can save her, not even my own vaccine, and she'll be dead by dusk. So you better pray to her God that I find that map. Or you'll watch her die before your eyes, and then I'll kill you."

With that Seavers walked out past two Marines posted outside the door, which rumbled shut and locked with a thud.