The Atlantis revelation

16

Midas couldn't help but note all the sale items on display in the storefront windows along an empty Bond Street in the early morning as Vadim drove the Bentley toward the worldwide headquarters of Midas Minerals amp; Mining. The golden glass tower was designed to look like a stack of gold coins overlooking the River Thames. But the global financial depression had come into full force by the time it was finished, making it a symbol of excess from an earlier gilded age.

His beloved mega yacht was another symbol of that era, and the Times of London had taken the liberty of printing two pictures-before and after-on the front page by the time Midas had landed after his unplanned early departure from Corfu two hours ago. Below the fold was a smaller story about the murder of Mercedes.

That goddamn American. Yeats left me no choice.

Midas hated losses, and to take them at the hands of a two-bit pirate like Conrad Yeats was doubly humiliating. He hated feeling like he was cornered.

Now his BlackBerry smartphone was vibrating in a manner that told him Sorath was calling. Midas reached into the long trench coat he had put on upon landing-the air in London being considerably more chilly than on the tropical island of Corfu-and answered the phone.

The disembodied voice of the grandmaster of the Knights of the Alignment was chillier still, and wasted no time making accusations.

"I warned you not to attempt to kill Yeats, Midaslovich. You betrayed yourself to the Americans, and now you are brazen enough to think you can bargain with us."

Sorath sounded particularly displeased, but maybe it was just because there was a deeper bass level than usual in the harmonics of the voice scrambler that disguised his identity. For the past year Midas had tried to find a voiceprint match, all in vain. Only a face-to-face at the Rhodes summit next week would reveal the grandmaster's true identity and whether or not Midas already knew the man.

"I've done no such thing," Midas replied coolly.

"Then why, after all we've done for you, did you feel the need for extra insurance?" the voice said. "I'm speaking of the American strike inside Baku an hour ago."

"They found nothing," Midas said. "And neither did the man you had in place to relieve me of the Flammenschwert."

"What have you done with it?" Sorath demanded.

Midas smiled. Sorath wasn't God, and it was pleasant to hear him admit as much. The grandmaster of the Knights of the Alignment wasn't omnipotent, and he certainly wasn't omniscient, or he would have known from the start that Midas never would have allowed himself to become expendable to anybody.

Which was why Midas had offloaded the Flammenschwert from the Midas to his second submersible while making everybody think he had sent it off by chopper. That submarine was completely undetectable as it made its way underwater until the proper time for it to surface. Meanwhile, Midas was untouchable.

"My orders were to bring the Flammenschwert to Uriel," he said. "And so I shall. Nothing has changed."

"Yeats changed things. Mercedes Le Roche is dead, and you're being tracked by the Americans and Scotland Yard."

Midas turned to look out the rear window and saw the unmarked police car in the distance. Two of them had been following him ever since his private jet had landed at Heathrow.

"KGB, CIA, MI5, it matters little to me," Midas said. "I've dealt with them all, and I'm happy to provide misdirection by simply going about my business as usual. I'm here in London for the weekend, then to Paris for Mercedes's funeral, and then off to Rhodes as scheduled."

There was a pause on the other end. "Did you find the code to Baron von Berg's box?"

Midas said nothing as Vadim pulled the Bentley up to the main entrance of the Midas Center.

"You know the requirements for full membership in the Thirty, Midaslovich," Sorath said. "I'd hate to have you miss our little private gathering during the Rhodes summit."

Midas heard the telltale series of beeps signaling that Sorath had hung up and their scrambled transmission was over.

Midas rode a glass elevator up from the sparkling six-story atrium of the hotel, shops, and offices into the tower of private condominiums. Few Britons knew or cared that the award-winning building, his firm's trading in precious metals, his widely publicized purchases at art auctions at Sotheby's, and even his knighthood by the queen all had been part of the Alignment's strategic branding effort to paint him as something other than another former Russian oil oligarch. Even if that was how Sorath and the Alignment preferred to treat him.

Midas walked into his bedroom and into the second of his vast walk-in wardrobe rooms. On the racks hung dozens of Savile Row suits like the one he was wearing, and on the walls hung several million-dollar paintings he had purchased at Sotheby's and later found too ugly to hang anywhere else.

He sat on one of the overstuffed chairs and unlaced his shoes, pulled off his socks, and removed every strip of clothing. He then stood before the row of mirrors and examined his sculpted physique.

He still had a six-pack abdomen, although he'd once boasted an eight-pack when he went fishing with Putin a few years back. The former Russian president always liked to remove his shirt in the great outdoors for the cameras, so the people would know their leader was virile and strong. Putin had not liked it when Midas removed his own shirt and showed him up, and Midas was never invited fishing again.

He saw his right hand trembling slightly in the mirror and closed it into a quiet fist. He opened it, and the fingers began to tremble again. With a sigh, he pushed a button, and the mirror slid open like a door to reveal a stone chamber with a glowing spa in the center. The Tank, as he called it, was his only real weakness and altar to the mysticism of the Alignment. But the reality of his long-term exposure to cyanide as a child and the resulting neurological condition had forced him to seek a cure regardless of its source. Without a cure, he would eventually suffer the same fate as the divers he had gassed in the decompression chamber aboard the Midas.

Lining the floor, walls, and ceiling of the chamber were bluestones from the same quarries used by the ancients centuries ago to erect the monument of Stonehenge, Britain's darkest mystery. Most archaeologists believed Stonehenge was an astronomical observatory of some kind, erected around 2500 B.C. But others long had suspected the bluestones were far older and that Stonehenge was a place of healing for pilgrims from all across Europe.

Bluestones, it seemed, were prized for their healing properties. And it was none other than Conrad Yeats, ironically, who had used the stars to help a team of British archaeologists from Bournemouth University pinpoint the exact location in Wales from where Stonehenge's massive bluestones were quarried-Carn Menyn Mountain in the Preseli Hills of Pembrokeshire.

As for the spa in the center of the bluestone floor, Midas's mistress in London, Natalia, had filled it with kabbalah water. Her friend the American pop star Madonna had sworn by it when she purchased a flat in the tower.

Kabbalistic wisdom, Natalia had told him with a straight face, taught that water was God's medium for the creation of the world and was the essence of all life on earth. In the beginning, God's spirit moved across the face of "the deep" that was pure, positive, and healing energy. But then the "negativity" of humanity-she refused to use the word "sin"-by the time of Noah's Flood had changed the nature of water into a destructive force of floods, tsunamis, and the like. Kabbalists believed that water could be returned to its primordial state of good by infusing it with ancient blessings and meditations.

That was how kabbalah water came to fill Midas's bluestone spa, with all its miraculous powers of restoration and healing.

The Alignment, of course, had a different term for this kind of allegedly metastasized water: Tears of Atlantis. The Knights of the Alignment consumed it as a special-label drinking water courtesy of the Hellenic Bottling Company, which also distributed Coca-Cola across Europe and the Middle East.

Midas could only smile as he pictured a small team of kabbalists, all sworn to secrecy, chanting away in some obscure distillation room at the bottling plant.

On one crazy level, it made sense to him that water was a conductor of energy and that the quality of the water he took into his body impacted the information being transmitted to his nervous system. At the very least, it gave his London mistress something to do with her friend Madonna besides run off and spend his money on yet another money-losing retail store for her hideous fashion lines.

He stepped down and settled into the warm amethyst-colored waters of the spa. He reclined in the sculptured stone seat built into the bluestone basin and glided his hand past a sensor. Music piped in, and an overhead door of solid bluestone slowly slid over him and locked into place. The glass screen across the entire back of the door enabled him to surf the Internet, watch any television channel, and monitor his businesses around the world. But for now he put on his favorite screen saver of soothing light, closed his eyes, and laid his head back until only his eyes, nose, and mouth broke the surface of the water.

Kabbalah water. Bluestones with healing powers. Such articles of faith were nonsense to Midas. But these immersion experiences in the tank seemed to have arrested the progression of the neurological condition brought on by his long-term exposure to cyanide. Slowly, it was taking over his body and would eventually kill him. He had to stop it. He would do anything to live.

Even cave to the mysticism of the Alignment.