The Atlantis revelation

33

1740!" Conrad shouted, and bolted upright in bed.

He opened his eyes. He was inside an Airstream trailer with a loud but familiar hum around him. The air was cold, and there was a woman sitting next to him, but it wasn't Serena. It was Wanda Randolph, the former U.S. Capitol Police officer who had taken shots at him in the tunnels beneath the U.S. Capitol.

"Where am I?" he asked.

"You're on U.S. soil now, so to speak," she said, and smiled. "Everything's okay."

He looked at the wires and electrodes attached to his body. "The hell it is," he said, and with his right arm struck Wanda in the head and knocked her against the Airstream's wall. He pulled off the wires, opened the trailer door, ran out into a cavernous hangar, and looked for an exit.

"Stop!" Wanda shouted, running up behind with a gun pointed at him.

He ran past a chopper and a tank to a large door and found the button to open it. Warning lights flashed and an alarm sounded. As the door slowly opened from the top down, Conrad realized where he was even before he saw the curvature of the Mediterranean Sea thirty thousand feet below.

There were more shouts and the thunder of boots on the metal flooring, and Conrad turned to see a team of U.S. airmen surround him with their guns drawn.

"Step away from the panel, sir," an airman ordered.

Conrad knew he was going nowhere and stepped away.

The airmen holstered their guns and closed the door as Wanda escorted him back to the Airstream trailer, where Marshall Packard was waiting with some files.

"Good, you're up," Packard said.

"Where's Serena?" Conrad demanded.

"On her way to Rhodes," Packard said. "She exchanged you for our celestial globe. She was actually going to attempt to slip a forgery past the Alignment, which never would have worked. Now she can deliver the goods at the EU summit and be our eyes and ears inside the Alignment."

Conrad shook his head. "You don't need me, Packard. Why did you do it?"

"Your girl said she needed you off the playing field to convince the Alignment you're dead, like she promised, and she had some bizarre notion that you might not play along," Packard said. "So we'll keep an eye on you."

"Not a chance," said Conrad. "You know she's dead meat once she turns over those globes."

"That's a risk she's willing to take to identify the remaining officers of the Alignment. Meanwhile, we've already seen both globes and know what the Alignment is getting. So there's no downside for us."

"You're idiots," Conrad said. "The globes work together. You have no idea what the Alignment has."

"Enlighten me."

"The number of Baron von Berg's safe deposit box was for the date 1740."

"Yeah, yeah, we're ahead of you, son," Packard said. "The only thing that popped up in history for that year was the death in Rome of Pope Clement XII, who had forbidden Roman Catholics from belonging to Masonic lodges on pain of excommunication. Von Berg's joke. Ha, ha."

"Joke's on you, Packard. That was also the year that the Masons in Berlin established the Royal Mother Lodge of the Three Globes. I don't know why I didn't see it before. I guess I needed Baron von Berg and his box number to finally make the connection."

The color drained from Packard's face. "Three globes?"

"That's right," Conrad said. "There were three of them all along. The Masons must have kept one in Europe and let the other two go to the New World. How much you want to bet that the Alignment has had the third globe all along? Now Serena is about to hand them the other two."

"But for what purpose?" Packard demanded. "What the hell do three globes do that two globes can't?"

"Reveal the target and timetable for detonating the Flammenschwert, that's what," Conrad said.