The Atlantis revelation

17

Later that morning, the events of Corfu still fresh in her psyche, Serena stared through the tinted window of her limo at the obelisk in St. Peter's Square as Benito drove through the gates of Vatican City on the eve of Palm Sunday and Easter week celebrations.

As she checked her Vertu phone, she couldn't shake the memory of Conrad the night before, the hatred in his eyes. He had left her no message. Nor any clue as to his whereabouts. But she did have an Evite to the funeral of Mercedes Le Roche in Paris on Monday, along with a personal e-mail from Papa Le Roche himself, the Rupert Murdoch of French media, begging her as a friend of the family to attend.

"You have enough worries without him, signorina," said Benito, looking up in the mirror, reading her thoughts. "He can take care of himself. You must fix your eyes on Rhodes."

"I know, Benito," she said. "But it's different this time. I feel it."

"It's always different, signorina. Every time we pass through these gates. And so it is always the same."

True, she thought as they curved along a winding drive and arrived at the entrance of the governorate. Eight years ago the pope had met her in a secret office here and given her an antediluvian map along with a holy mission to uncover ancient ruins two miles beneath the ice in Antarctica. Four years later, in that very office, the diabolical Cardinal Tucci had revealed to her the truth behind the Church's supersecret order Dominus Dei. Then he had jumped out a window to his death. Now the office was hers.

The Swiss Guards in their crimson uniforms snapped to attention as Serena walked inside. She passed a hive of offices along an obscure hallway to an old service elevator.

In normal times the elevator would take her up to the fifth floor and her suite of offices, which officially interceded on behalf of persecuted Christians in politically hostile countries and unofficially administered the work of Dominus Dei. But these were anything except normal days. She pressed her thumb to a button with no markings that scanned her biometrics, and the elevator descended to the catacombs beneath Vatican City.

She felt like a prisoner in her own castle and remembered the words of Jesus in the Book of Revelation: "Look, I'm standing at the door and knocking. If anyone listens to my voice and opens the door, I'll come in and we'll eat together." He had been talking about the door of the human heart, but He just as easily could have been talking about the Church. After all, God had called St. Paul to go beyond his Jewish world in order to bring the message of redemption through faith in Jesus Christ to the Greeks and, ultimately, to Caesar in Rome.

Perhaps it was "out there" that God had been calling her all along, beyond the walls of the Church. She had cloistered herself here, she had told herself, to protect Conrad and the Church and the world. But maybe she was doing more harm than good. After all, Jesus was more likely to be found beyond the domes and spires and walls of Vatican City, with the people He called "the least of these." Not with the rich and powerful or religious, whom she had found to be as poor and weak and worldly in spirit as anybody.

Yet here she was, locked inside the holy gates of Rome.

Serena stepped off the elevator onto a secret floor deep beneath the governorate. She walked down a long subterranean tunnel to a heavy ornate door behind which the Dei kept priceless artifacts collected from around the world and across the ages. If it were her choice, she would have returned most of them to museums in their cultures of origin. But it was not.

Indeed, her choices of late seemed to be more limited than ever.

Waiting for her inside the dimly lit chamber was a young monk from the Dei and the two otherworldly copper globes that he was guarding. Brother Lorenzo was one of the Vatican's top authenticators of antiques and therefore one of its top forgers of art. He knelt before Serena and kissed her ring with the Dominus Dei insignia.

"Your Eminence," he said. "Welcome back."

Serena, extremely uncomfortable, looked down at the top of the monk's bowed head and withdrew her hand from his clasp. The Church didn't allow female priests, let alone female cardinals. But as the head of Dominus Dei, she was automatically considered a "secret cardinal" appointed by the pope. A secret cardinal to hide the secrets of the Church. Not that the current pontiff, as traditional as they came, would ever acknowledge her as such. But to her amazement, the Vatican did secretly acknowledge the rank of her office, if not the officeholder. Her frighteningly eager underlings, hoping to gain the office for themselves someday, took every advantage to freely address her as such.

"Thank you, Brother Lorenzo. You can call me Sister Serghetti."

Lorenzo rose to his feet, but his covetous gaze was fixed on the medallion dangling from her neck. "Yes, Sister Serghetti."

As she had explained to Midas, legend had it that the ancient Roman coin in the center of the medallion was the very Tribute Penny Jesus had held up when He told His followers that they should "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's." It had been passed down through the ages from one leader of the Dei to the next. Some argued that it represented power greater than the papacy. Which no doubt explained Lorenzo's disturbing fascination with it.

Serena broke Lorenzo's trance with an order: "The globes, Lorenzo."

"This way, Sister Serghetti."

She followed Lorenzo to the small alcove showcasing the globes, one displaying the surface of the earth, the other displaying the heavens. Each sphere was eighteen inches in diameter and resembled the works of the Dutch master cartographer Willem Bleau's studio in the sixteenth century. But these had been constructed thousands of years earlier, although her attempts to date them proved inconclusive.

Both Church and Templar tradition suggested the globes once rested atop the twin columns that stood at the entrance of King Solomon's Temple. But the Knights Templar believed the globes themselves were crafted far earlier. While Noah was building his ark, other children of Lamech were engraving the globes with the lost knowledge of Atlantis and the antediluvian world so that knowledge would survive the coming destruction of the Flood. The globes, the Templars believed, contained or pointed to some pre-Genesis revelation.

The only legend that Serena had been able to authenticate with any degree of certainty, however, was that the globes had been unearthed beneath the Temple Mount in Jerusalem by the Knights Templar.

Centuries later, the Masons took them to the New World and buried them under what would become Washington, D.C. That was where they rested until the twenty-first century, when Conrad Yeats dug them up before the Alignment could.

The globes apparently worked together like some kind of astronomical clock in a manner that Serena had yet to figure out. But she was positive it involved a secret code or alignment between a constellation on the celestial globe and a landmark on the terrestrial globe. After all, Conrad's knowledge that Washington, D.C., was aligned to the constellation of Virgo had led him to the location of the globes. So it made sense to Serena that the alignment of the globes themselves led to an even greater revelation-a revelation that for centuries had eluded the Church, the Knights Templar, the Masons, the Americans, and everybody else.

Everybody, that is, except the Alignment, which had ordered her to deliver the Templar globes next week to the meeting of the Council of Thirty on the island of Rhodes, all under the guise of the European summit on the fate of Jerusalem.

Serena ran her hand over the smooth contours of the continents on the terrestrial globe, marveling at its three-dimensional, holographic look. "Now tell me what you discovered with the terrestrial globe," she said to Lorenzo.

"The terrestrial sphere is full of hidden gear wheels that, in turn, drive the most unique surface dials I've ever seen on an ancient astronomical clock."

"What dials?"

"The northern and southern hemispheres of the terrestrial globe are really dials," he said. "Inside the mechanism are gear trains that drive the dials. The gear trains are driven by a crank that is inserted into a tiny hole at the bottom in Antarctica."

She looked closely at the tiny hole in the ancient landmass of East Antarctica. It was in the shape of a pentagon. "How could I have missed it?"

"It is rather small." Lorenzo pulled out a tiny S-lever that he had reproduced, inserted it into the hole, and began to crank it. "It works like a keylock, moving the hidden gears within the shell."

To Serena's amazement, the surface of the terrestrial globe began to change before her eyes like some kind of high-definition animation. The continents didn't move, but the contours within them shimmered for a moment and locked into place. "What happened?" she demanded.

"This," said Lorenzo, removing the lever and inserting a penlight into the hole. Three pinpricks of light burst forth from the terrestrial globe in the locations of Antarctica, Washington, D.C., and Jerusalem.

"It's a triangle," Serena said decisively. "Just like the U.S. Capitol, the White House, and the Washington Monument. Those monuments lined up with the constellations of Bootes, Leo, and Virgo. Likewise, these three capital cities from the terrestrial globe should line up with three constellations on the celestial globe."

"The problem, of course, is that the real celestial globe is still with the Americans," Lorenzo reminded her. "And you've never seen it with your own eyes, only the terrestrial globe you stole from Dr. Yeats. He's the only person alive who has seen both globes, which puts us at a terrible disadvantage. The faux globe I've created over here is merely my attempt to mirror in astral terms the mapping I've gleaned from the terrestrial globe."

All true, unfortunately, Serena thought. Her plan had been to procure the genuine celestial globe from Marshall Packard in exchange for her intelligence on Russian mining operations in the Arctic. But that plan had gone up in flames on Corfu. So she had been forced to resort to Plan B.

"I did the best I could," Lorenzo explained weakly as he showed her the two globes side by side-the forged celestial globe and the genuine terrestrial globe.

"Oh, dear," she said, unable to hide her disappointment. The celestial knockoff looked markedly inferior next to the terrestrial globe.

"Our metallurgists, meanwhile, tell me that they've never seen anything like the copper-bronze ore from which the original globes were cast," Lorenzo said. "What you see is their best attempt to match its appearance."

Serena tried to suppress her alarm. They had but seventy-two hours to fix this disaster, and there were no second chances with the Alignment. "Give me the penlight, Lorenzo."

Lorenzo handed it to her, and she inserted it in the tiny hole at the bottom of the forged celestial globe. Three pinpricks of light appeared in the constellations of Orion, Virgo, and Aries: the buckle star Alnilam on Orion's Belt, the alpha star Spica in Virgo, and the brightest star, Alpha Arietis, in Aries.

"I selected Orion and Virgo based on what you told me about Antarctica and D.C. And I selected Aries for Jerusalem because Aries is the cosmic Lamb and Jerusalem is where the globes are said to originate."

"I can accept that. Now we have to hope the Alignment will accept the forgery as the real thing." She looked carefully at Lorenzo's creation. "If we can't bring our celestial globe up to the quality of the terrestrial globe, then maybe we can degrade the look of the terrestrial globe without damaging it. Maybe dull it down with a coat of something or other."

"It still won't hold up to Alignment scrutiny," Lorenzo said.

"Of course it won't," she snapped. "I just need it to pass a quick visual and let the Alignment test the terrestrial globe first."

"How are you going to get them to do that?"

She didn't have an answer yet, and she didn't want to indulge Lorenzo's anxiety with an attempt. The best she could do was fool the Alignment long enough for her to unmask the rest of the Thirty. The American Twelve had been unmasked by Conrad. The remaining eighteen members were European, including her as the head of the Dei. That left seventeen more to unmask at the council meeting on Rhodes.

"That's my problem, Lorenzo. Yours is to prepare these globes for their journey to Rhodes. You need to start working with the Greeks to get the globes through security at the EU summit. We're also going to need two custom shell crates with insulated cavities for transport."

Lorenzo nodded and left without another word, closing the heavy ornate oak door behind him.