The Atlantis revelation

40

All the way down the Street of Knights toward the Palace of the Grandmaster, Serena wondered who Uriel could possibly be. If his role within the Alignment was true to his name, then Uriel could be the one who ultimately possessed the Flammenschwert. That pointed to Midas, however, and she braced herself to see his ugly smile waiting for her with the third globe.

"I wish I could join you inside, signorina," Benito said as he pulled the G55 SUV up to the west tower entrance.

"Me, too," she said.

The Greek attache Midas had told her about was already waiting with two aides and a cart. Benito opened the rear door, and the aides placed the two steel boxes containing the copper globes on the cart. Serena followed through the entrance.

Inside, they walked past the Medusa mosaic and down a large vaulted corridor to the lower level. It was right out of the blueprints Conrad had shown her back at the lake in Italy. And when they entered the Hall of Knights and left her alone with the globes, nobody had to tell her what room she stood in. Its scale and decor announced itself in a sinister way.

Then the small wooden door on the side opened by itself, and she saw the adjoining chamber and the reflection of a fire bouncing off what could only be the third globe. She pushed the cart inside, next to the round table, and beheld the globe on top.

The third globe.

She stood in silence, staring at it. It was magnificent, like something forged from the depths of a volcano or the mountain copper ore of Atlantis. It closely resembled its celestial and terrestrial cousins and was clearly part of the family. But the dials carved across the surface of this globe marked it as an armillary, built to predict the cycles of the sun, moon, and planets. It was the third element of time that Brother Lorenzo had correctly suspected was missing from their calculations back at the Vatican.

The door opened, and she looked up to see General Gellar, the Israeli defense minister, looking her up and down in surprise.

The feeling is mutual, she thought. "You're Uriel?" They had been acquaintances for quite some time, and suddenly, they both looked at each other in a very different way. "What do you want with these globes?" she asked.

"You have to ask?" Gellar sounded offended. "They're ours. They belong to Israel. You took them."

"We took them?"

"The Knights Templar stole them from under the Temple Mount along with whatever else they could pillage to fund their wars, increase their powers, and persecute the Jews."

Serena took it in, trying to figure this all out. "Well, on behalf of the Roman Catholic Church, I certainly plead guilty. And the pope has made official apologies for all that. I wasn't around at the time, of course. But if I had been, I'm sure that I, too, would have engaged in anti-Semitic behavior."

Gellar seemed to realize he was being ridiculous-although he clearly regarded the Dei medallion hanging around her neck as if it were a Nazi death's-head badge.

"You're not one of the Thirty, General, are you?"

"No," he said.

"But you'd do business with them."

"You mean with you? Yes. If Israel had relations only with its friends, we wouldn't be a country."

Serena wanted to say "Hey, I'm not Alignment," but that wouldn't carry much water here beneath the bowels of the Palace of the Grandmaster, built by the Knights of St. John, a military unit itself and cousin to the Knights Templar. All the same, she had to find out the purpose of the globes and why the Alignment would give them to the Israelis. "You're going to take these with you back to Jersualem?" she asked.

"To the place where they belong."

Serena stared at him. "You're going to rebuild the temple. You've just needed to get all the pieces together."

"Yes." Gellar was almost defiant.

"To do that, you need to remove the Dome of the Rock mosque."

"Yes."

"That would start a war with the Arabs."

"Yes."

"And you would defend yourselves, naturally."

"No," Gellar said. "You and Europe will defend us if America chooses to sit this one out. And if not, God will protect us."

"When is all this supposed to happen?"

Gellar smiled. "You had two of the globes and are the great linguist. Could you not interpret the signs?"

Serena realized she could not, but she couldn't let Gellar slip away without giving her something more. She remembered what Conrad had told her about why he'd given up his dig in Jerusalem: He couldn't figure out the astronomical alignments of the temple. Without them, he hadn't known where to dig.

"The alignments of the stars on the celestial globe don't mirror the landmarks on the terrestrial globe," she told him. "For example, there's no star on the celestial globe that mirrors Jerusalem."

"Not yet," Gellar told her with a hint of a smile. "That's why the third globe is necessary. The Hebrew prophets believed that God used the planets to give them a sign that something important was about to happen. Look closely at this globe, and you'll notice that we're in the midst of an extraordinary alignment of two symmetrical triangles formed in the sky by six planets. Do you recognize this alignment?"

"Oh my God," said Serena, seeing it clearly. "It's the Star of David."

"This is the star you were looking for over Jerusalem, Sister Serghetti," Gellar told her. "It's not a comet or a nova or a so-called star of Bethlehem. This star is the conjunction of planets that the prophet Jeremiah predicted would appear in these last days at the coming of the Messiah. It is this star to which we will align the Third Temple."

The exit door opened, and Gellar pointed the way out to her. "Thank you for returning the globes to the people of Israel, Sister Serghetti. I will take good care of them."

She stepped out of the chamber, and as soon as it closed behind her, she knew there was no turning back. A minute later, she climbed into the G55 SUV outside.

"General Gellar is Uriel," she told Benito, whose face in the mirror registered shock. "The globes are going to the Temple Mount. Surely this means war. Gellar thinks he's getting a new Jerusalem. But the Alignment is clearly betting on a new Crusade that will see them picking up all the oil and whatever else is left of the Middle East. A new Roman Empire. And that is in nobody's interest."