The Atlantis revelation

PART THREE 34

The early-morning sun glinted off the calm waters of Mandraki Harbor as Midas's yacht, the Mercedes, motored past the long breakwater with its three windmills toward the medieval city of Rhodes. There, atop its highest point, its massive fortress walls dwarfing the city below, was the Palace of the Grandmaster.

At least the Mercedes could enjoy the intimacy of the harbor with its pleasure craft and seaside cafes, Midas thought as they entered the mouth of the harbor. The Midas would have required them to anchor farther away.

Much smaller than the Midas, the Mercedes was a mere 250-footer that he picked up in Cyprus the day after Mercedes's funeral in Paris. He had planned to arrive in Rhodes in the Midas. It had taken two days to acquire a yacht large enough to take in a submersible. Midas had contacted his rogue submersible that had been roaming the deep with the Flammenschwert all this time. As soon as the captain emerged after five days underwater, Midas rewarded him with a bullet to the brain and dumped him overboard.

Now the Mercedes passed between the two defensive stone towers where the Colossus of Rhodes was said to have straddled the harbor. The giant statue had been one of the seven wonders of the ancient world before an earthquake in 226 B.C. brought it down into the sea a century after it was erected.

Midas left the deck and entered his stateroom to admire the magnificent sculpture in the center of the room-a bust of Aphrodite, the ancient Greek goddess of love. The cover was brilliant. As an act of goodwill, Midas would be returning to the Greeks the bronze head of Aphrodite from the British Museum, which he had managed to exchange for several works of art he had purchased at auction from Sotheby's on Bond Street. It had taken months of negotiations with the museum's Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities, but he needed this particular bust to both house the warhead and bring as a gift for the Greeks at the summit.

The beauty of the head of Aphrodite was that it was a sculptural mask of the Greek goddess of love, so the back was missing. That enabled Midas to fit the Flammenschwert warhead neatly inside. The fitted plaster piece on the back of the mask would be tossed once the transfer of the warhead had been made, and the mask could be handed off to the Greeks for display in the exhibition halls of the palace.

Midas ran his finger down the face of the serene mask. The deeply set eyes had come from a complete statue and dated back to the second or first century B.C. It was seventeen inches high, twelve inches wide, and eleven inches deep. The warhead was only six inches in diameter, inside of which were two pounds of Semtex plastic explosive and an initiator device. The detonator would explode the Semtex and ignite the metallic fire pellets of the Flammenschwert. The fire pellets, in turn, would ignite any water around it.

Midas looked at his watch. He was due to deliver the mask to the Palace of the Grandmaster in twenty minutes.

Vadim was waiting on the dock with the limousine and a police motorcycle escort. They placed the packing crate with the Aphrodite mask in the back and then made their way to the palace.

"Where's the bitch?" Midas asked.

"At the convention center," Vadim said.

Midas sighed. He felt vulnerable without his membership coin. His deal with the Alignment had been that he would recover Baron von Berg's coin and the Flammenschwert from the baron's sub in exchange for a seat on the Council of Thirty. But then Conrad Yeats had ruined everything. Fortunately, Yeats was out of the picture now, and the coin would soon be in Midas's hands.

They drove along the harbor toward the Old City. The medieval town of Rhodes was surrounded and defined by a triple circuit of walls, which looked to Midas to be in very good condition. The fortress city seemed to have it all: moats, towers, bridges, and seven gates.

Vadim pulled the limousine up to the security checkpoint at the Eleftherias Gate, or the Gate of Liberty. Only permanent residents of the Old City were allowed to drive on the narrow cobblestone streets. But today dignitaries were allowed through with a police escort.

They followed the stone-paved streets past the third-century temple of Aphrodite and turned onto the main drag, the Odos Ippoton, or the Street of Knights, named for the Knights of St. John, who had established themselves on the island in the fourteenth century and who Midas was convinced must have been a front for the Alignment at one point. At the entrance was the fifteenth-century Knights Hospital, and at the end of the street, opposite the Church of St. John, stood the imposing Palace of the Grandmaster with its spherical towers.

They drove past the massive round towers flanking the main entrance to the palace-where Greek Evzones in uniform stood on either side of the sharp arch-and went around to the west entrance by the square tower, where a Greek cultural attache welcomed Midas and the Aphrodite mask into the grand reception hall. This was the regal backdrop where the opening and closing ceremonies were staged for the cameras, while the sessions and breakout panels took place in the ballrooms, conference centers, and suites at the Rodos Palace hotel and international convention center ten minutes away.

"On behalf of the people of Greece, I thank you for returning to us the Aphrodite head from the British Museum," the attache said.

"It is my pleasure," Midas said. "And I was told I could spend a moment alone with my dear Aphrodite before I handed it over."

"Yes," said the attache. An armed Greek Evzone with an earpiece appeared and led Midas past a Medusa mosaic down a large vaulted corridor. There were 158 rooms in the palace, all bedecked with antique furniture, exquisite polychrome marbles, sculptures, and icons. Only twenty-four of those rooms were open to the public on any given day.

But the room to which Midas was escorted wasn't in any of the tourist guides or public blueprints registered with Greece; it was even closed to the VIPs of the summit. It was a chamber constructed beneath the palace. Closed to all but members of the Alignment, it was known as the Hall of Knights council room.

Midas entered the hall and waited for his escort to leave. Then a door slid open, and he walked into the adjoining chamber with the Aphrodite mask, prepared to hand the Flammenschwert to Uriel.

But Uriel wasn't there-only a single copper globe, split open, resting on a stand on top of a large round table. Inside the globe was an envelope, and next to the round table was a fireplace with a fire burning.

No surprise here, really. Midas had known the identity of Uriel, and vice versa, all along. They weren't supposed to be seen together in public, a rule Midas had violated at the disastrous Bilderberg party. But as this handoff was private, he hadn't been sure what to expect.

He looked at the globe. It was the first time he had seen one of them.

So this is the delivery device.

Not a missile. Not a warplane. But this old globe.

If it had been his choice, Midas would have held on to the Flammenschwert until its detonation. He certainly wouldn't have left it alone here. But the holier-than-thou Uriel didn't want to see the Flammenschwert, much less touch it. And Uriel was the only one who could get it into position and leave the dirty work of pulling the trigger to Midas.

He opened the envelope, read the handwritten note, tossed it into the fireplace, and watched it burn to ashes.

He removed the plaster back of the bronze Aphrodite mask and tossed it into the fireplace, too. Then he put his hand behind the sphere containing the Flammenschwert and turned the mask over until the sphere rested heavily in his hand. He lifted the mask with the other hand and placed it on the table. With both hands, he carefully placed the sphere containing the Flammenschwert inside the globe, where it fit snugly. He sealed the globe shut like a skin over the warhead sphere. The seam along the 40th parallel seemed to disappear.

The door on the other side of the chamber magically opened. He picked up Aphrodite's head, brushed it off, and walked out.