The Atlantis revelation

20

The next morning Conrad woke up at the Sultan's Palace to find a handwritten note from Nichole on the pillow next to him. She had gone snowboarding on Videmanette Mountain and wanted to meet up at Glacier 3000 for lunch at two p.m. He looked at the clock and saw that it was already ten. He had slept over twelve hours.

There was a continental breakfast with a newspaper on the table. He put his feet into the slippers waiting at the bottom of his bed and tied on a robe. Then he poured himself some hot coffee from a silver pot and sat down at the table to look at the copy of the French daily Le Monde.

There was a picture of Mercedes on the front page with a headline: monday services in france for mercedes le roche, 32.

He found a smaller picture of himself on the jump on page eight. How on earth could Nichole not know he was a fugitive? He had to pray she hadn't seen it or never bothered to read a newspaper. He took comfort that the latter was more than probable.

Conrad figured Midas would have to show up at the funeral to put on a brave public face. Which gave him the perfect window: While Midas was in Paris at the funeral, Conrad would hit the bank in Bern.

Conrad put down the paper and saw that an envelope had been slipped under his door. He walked over and picked it up. Inside were architectural blueprints for the bank in Bern, marked up in French. An attached note from Abdil, written neatly in a female hand, instructed him to come up to the penthouse to meet with a Ms. Haury.

Conrad had no idea who Ms. Haury was, but he knew he had to keep moving forward and stay a step ahead of the Alignment, Interpol, and everybody else who was after him now. He had to get whatever was inside Baron von Berg's safe deposit box in Bern. It was his only bargaining chip.

He opened a closet filled with made-to-measure suits for him from Milan's Caraceni. The fabrics, fit for a prince, seemed to be cut from another world and fit perfectly.

A tailor would have had to work at gunpoint to pull this off so fast. Considering it was Abdil who had placed the order, Conrad could only wonder.

The two security guards posted outside his door escorted him down the hallway to the elevator. As they ascended to the penthouse, Conrad realized he couldn't have taken the elevator down to the lobby even if he'd wanted to.

The only way out of this palace was up.

Abdil's penthouse looked completely different in the full light of day. Conrad could have sworn it was fully refurnished, even the sculptures and art on the walls. Now it looked like a corporate boardroom of palatial proportions.

But there was no Abdil, only a curvy blonde standing next to the huge conference table, on which sat an ornate brass safe deposit box with a stainless steel door sporting four shiny brass dials and a brass keylock.

"I'm Dee Dee," the woman said, "the American CFO of Abdil's collectibles division. I understand from Mr. Zawas that you want to make a withdrawal from your box at the Gilbert et Clie bank in Bern."

"That's right," Conrad said, looking at the box with the four shiny brass dials. "I suppose it's too much to hope that this is the box in question."

"I'm afraid so," she said. "But the box you'll be opening will almost certainly be of this type. Take a seat."

Conrad sat down in a thronelike leather chair and listened to the polished Dee Dee explain the history of the box as if she were showcasing it on the Home Shopping Network.

"Any Swiss box with a number in the seventeen hundreds at Gilbert et Clie is among the most precious antique boxes in the vault," she told him. "That's because it's a triple-lock box. Very unusual. Only a few were manufactured in 1923 by Bauer AG in Zurich. Extremely rare."

Conrad touched the brass and steel box. It was only about three inches wide, two inches high, and seven inches long. Just how big was the secret Baron von Berg hoped to hide in such a small box?

"I see only two locks on the door," he said. "The four-dial combination lock and the keylock next to it."

"That's all you're supposed to see," she told him. "The distinctive combination lock you can't miss. It has four alphabetic brass dials for a total of 234,256 possible combinations. This is a lock you never forget."

Neither did Baron von Berg, thought Conrad, already imagining himself turning the four dials in sequence to line up the letters A-R-E-S. "What about the other two locks?"

Dee Dee nodded and said, "The two other lever locks share a mechanism housed inside the box's single keyhole."

"Two locks inside one keyhole?" Conrad repeated. "How does that work?"

"With two keys, of course," she said, and placed two keys on the table. One was silver, the other gold. "One bank key and one client key. Let me show you. I'll be the bank, you be the client."

She handed him the gold client key and picked up the silver bank key. "First things first. You need to open the combination lock. I've set the code for this box. It's OGRE."

Conrad turned the first dial to the letter "O," the second to the letter "G," the third to the letter "R," and the fourth to the letter "E," and heard an unmistakable click inside the box. "Wait a second," he said. "If the client has to open the combination lock first, before any keys are inserted, then the banker will know the combination to the client's box."

"Yes, but the client will change the combination before he closes the box," she told him. "It's like changing passwords on a computer system, only more secure." She held up the silver bank key. "Now for the tumbler-lever lock. It has seven brass levers and two different bolt levers for a total of nine levers." She inserted the silver key into the single hole. "The bank key moves the three top levers and the top bolt lever to unblock the first part of the lock." She turned the key and then removed it. "This enables you, the client, to insert your key. Go ahead."

Conrad inserted his gold key into the hole and turned it until he felt it stop.

"Your key moves the four bottom levers and the bottom bolt lever," she said. "The bottom bolt lever is connected to the door bolt and the combination lock. That's the resistance you're feeling."

"Why won't it open?"

"Each dial of the alphabetical combination lock needs to be on the proper letter in order for you to be able to turn your key ninety degrees into a vertical position."

Conrad checked the dials again. They clearly spelled OGRE. "The dials are right. What's the problem?"

"The problem is that you're not finished yet," she told him. "Once the client key is vertical and the bolt is partially retracted, you need to scramble each dial again so your key can turn fully to the right and open the lock."

Conrad shook his head. Von Berg, you paranoid son of a bitch, he thought. Then again, he'd have watched his back, too, if he had worked for the world's craziest dictator.

Dee Dee seemed to feel she owed him an explanation. "Scrambling the combination before the door was opened was supposed to ensure that nobody else in the vault besides the banker could see the baron's secret combination while he was busy inspecting the contents of his safe deposit box."

"And if I make a mistake along the way somehow?"

"No second chances," Dee Dee said. "The box's chemical seal will break and destroy the contents. That's why a man as powerful as Roman Midas can own the bank and still not get to the contents of Baron von Berg's box. You have only one shot to open a box of this type. Go ahead. Give it a try."

Conrad turned the key, and the lock clicked open. He lifted the box lid and saw stacks of U.S. dollars-Ben Franklins. There had to be ten million dollars in the box. Conrad looked up to see Dee Dee lock eyes with him. "You will exchange the contents of your box for this one with Mr. Zawas after you leave the bank," she said, pausing to make sure they understood each other. Abdil Zawas didn't miss a trick; he wanted to give Conrad every incentive to come back after the job.

"I get it," Conrad said. "And if I don't show, I'm sure Mr. Zawas has a bigger box to stuff my corpse in."

"Mr. Zawas said that what you are after is not the contents of the box but the information those contents convey," Dee Dee said, and closed the box. "That being the case, he wants the contents for himself and is happy to pay you for them at this agreed-upon price."

"Fine, but there's only one problem," he told her. "I have the combination code, but I don't have a client key."

"The bank probably does," Dee Dee said. "Clients like Nazi generals who traveled to far-flung or dangerous parts of the world often allowed the banks to keep their keys because they didn't want to lose them. As long as they didn't forget their box number or combination code-or share them with anybody else-it was pretty foolproof."

"Even if I don't look like Baron von Berg's heir or, worse, I'm recognized on sight?"

"The bank's huissier will know you have business there as soon as you write down your box number, and she'll conclude from the seventeen hundred series that you're one of the bank's largest clients."

"No biometrics or anything?"

"Only in the movies," Dee Dee said. "The genius of the Swiss security system is that it's plain and transparent. You don't have to worry about somebody hacking your computer system and accessing your data or faking your biometrics. Locks, keys, and combinations beat the computer chip any day. Like the pyramids of Egypt that you raid, Swiss boxes will survive the ages. Think of this bank as just another tomb to raid, and you'll be fine."

"And when I present the box number and the huissier promptly informs Midas that someone has come to open the box?"

"Oh, they'll let you open the box," she said. "They just won't let you walk out of the bank with it. I can't help you there. But Mr. Zawas says you have the architectural blueprints to the bank."

"Yes," Conrad said. "But I don't know how accurate they are."

"I'm afraid that's a combination I can't help you with," she told him. "No doubt Sir Roman Midas has made some modifications to the bank not reflected in your schematics."

"No doubt," Conrad said.