The Atlantis revelation

30

Conrad looked at Serena across the table outside the boathouse. She was clearly enjoying the lakeside dinner personally prepared for them by Chef Stefano Baiocco: fish soup with tiny squids, Parma ham with prawns and artichoke hearts, Lake Garda white fish called coregone, and homemade tagliolini with pesto. All paired with the most amazing wines.

When all the plates were cleared and the sun had finally set, Conrad sat back and listened to her telling him everything.

According to the New Testament gospels, Judas had sold out Jesus to the ruling religious council of the Jews, the Sanhedrin, for thirty pieces of silver. Those shekels came out of their temple tax coffers. After the Sanhedrin turned Jesus over to the Romans and it was clear that the Romans were going to kill Jesus by crucifixion, Judas was filled with remorse and hanged himself. Before he did, however, he returned to the temple and threw his money at the priests. The priests, recognizing at this point that the shekels were blood money, couldn't deposit them back into the holy temple treasury. So they used the money for charity. They bought some land and turned it into a cemetery for paupers who couldn't afford a proper burial.

"That much I know," Conrad said. "Go on."

According to the tradition of Dominus Dei, Serena told him, the man who sold his land to the Sanhedrin used the thirty pieces of silver to purchase another piece of land. This land he purchased from St. Matthew, the former tax collector and disciple of Jesus who wrote the authoritative gospel account of Judas's coins. The land Matthew sold, moreover, was land that Judas had purchased for himself with money he had stolen from the disciples' slush fund.

Conrad knew that apocryphal traditions were hard to authenticate and too often served the agendas of those who propagated them, so he was suspicious. "Why would Matthew even want that money?" he asked her. "What did he do with it?"

"Church tradition doesn't really speculate on what happened to Matthew, but somehow the coins got to Rome," she told him. "The Dei were established in the courts of Caesar well before St. Paul arrived in Rome and was beheaded by the emperor Nero. They were the secret Christians among Caesar's staff and praetorian guard that Paul referred to in his last letters from prison before his execution."

"So they just watched Paul's head roll down the palace steps?" Conrad asked dubiously. "Nice friends there, Serena. But I guess you have to save your own ass before you save the world. Is that what Jesus said? No, I guess not."

"I'm not excusing the Dei, Conrad. I'm just telling you their history. Because the Roman emperors established themselves as gods, any Christian who claimed to serve another god faced death. So instead of using the old codes of crosses and fishes, which Rome's imperial intelligence services had cracked, they used the silver shekels to identify themselves to each other."

"And how long did that work?" Conrad asked.

Serena gave him a funny look. "For about three hundred years, at which point the emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and it became the official religion of the Roman Empire."

"And completely corrupted by power," Conrad added. "At some point these coins stopped being heirlooms passed along after death. They became objects to be possessed by killing their owners in order to move up in the ranks of the Alignment."

"I don't know when it started, exactly," she said. "Maybe with the Knights Templar."

"What the hell are you doing with these people, Serena? That's what I want to know. Especially after you pledged your undying love to me under the Mall in Washington, D.C., only to ditch me and steal that terrestrial globe."

She seemed to visibly tense up at the mention of the globe, and Conrad was glad to see it was still a sore point with her, too.

"The Alignment had targeted the U.S. ever since its founding and was on the verge of taking over the American republic from within until you stopped it," she began. "But when you left me alone there under L'Enfant Plaza with the globe, the secret seal of the United States, and those creepy Houdon busts of America's 'other' founding fathers, I didn't know if you were going to succeed in stopping the Alignment and come back for me."

"So you stole the globe."

"If the Alignment had succeeded in taking over the federal government, they would have had both globes, Conrad. I couldn't take the risk, especially after I recognized the face of one of those busts. The family resemblance, together with my knowledge of his history, led me to realize that Cardinal Tucci of Dominus Dei was a member of the Alignment. I had no idea that the Dei itself was an organ of the Alignment until after Tucci's suicide and his passing of the mantle, or rather medallion, to me."

It took an incredible amount of willpower, but Conrad maintained an even tone of voice. "You didn't have to stay."

"I was just supposed to run off with you, make love, have babies, and let the world go to hell?"

"Yeah, if the alternative is hooking up with the devil."

"Sometimes you have to join them to lick them, Conrad. The Dei is just one thread of the Alignment, the ecclesiastical thread, represented by one coin-mine. Destroying my cell would do little to hurt the larger organization. You know the Alignment traces itself much further back than the Church, to before the Egyptians and even Atlantis. They use empires and religions and new world orders like locusts consuming one host after the other. Now these coins are in the hands of the world's most powerful political, financial, and cultural leaders."

Conrad sighed. There was no way she was going to bed with him tonight. "So you want to put names to faces."

"No, I want to put faces to the names I've got."

She explained that the Alignment had organized itself along the ranks of angels. There was the grandmaster at the top, surrounded by a council of thirty "knights." In addition to possessing one of the original Judas coins, each knight had a divine name that described his or her nature and role within the organization.

"Sorath is the name of the grandmaster," she told him. "Sorath is a fallen angel whose number, Rome believes, is 666. I have no idea who he is, but I assume he will be in Rhodes, where the Council of Thirty will be gathered for the first time in three hundred years."

"Why now?" Conrad asked, although he knew that the recovery of the legendary technology of Atlantis in the Flammenschwert was certainly one factor. But he suspected it wasn't the deciding factor.

Serena shrugged. "I guess I'll find out when I get there."

There was something she wasn't telling him, but he couldn't put his finger on it. "What about you, Serena? What's your name?"

"Naamah," she said, looking down. "The fallen angel of prostitution who is more pleasing to men than to God."

Conrad decided he didn't want to go there in this discussion. She was already scaring the hell out of him. "And Midas?"

"Well, he's clearly inherited Baron von Berg's rank," she said. "His name is Xaphan-the fallen angel who keeps the fires of hell burning at full blast."

"You got that right," he said, and decided to tell her all about Baron von Berg's lost submarine and the Flammenschwert.

She looked stunned, as if everything made sense to her now. "I know the legend of Greek fire and its use during the Crusades, but I never imagined that the Nazis had found a way to tap Atlantean technology."

"Apparently, they did. I've seen the technology up close and personal."

He could see she was lost in thought when something like a flash of lightning flickered across her soft brown eyes. "And what about Baron von Berg's safe deposit box in Bern?" she asked. "What did you find inside?"

"This," he said, and slapped down the Shekel of Tyre on the table. "See, I've got one, too."