The Atlantis Legacy - A01-A02 (34 page)

“The savage is the artist Edward Savage,” Conrad said triumphantly. “And this painting is Washington’s way of pointing us to whatever it is he wants us to find.”

T
HE
W
ASHINGTON
F
AMILY
.

As the Gulfstream 550 began its descent over the Atlantic toward the northeastern tip of Long Island, Serena rubbed her tired eyes, opened her window shade, and took another look at the high-resolution printout of the Edward Savage portrait from the image that McConnell had e-mailed her. The original oil, which she had seen herself in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., was larger than life, like America itself. Seven feet tall and nine feet wide, the picture was the only group portrait of the Washington family developed from live sittings.

“The savage will show you the way,” she muttered to herself. “How could I have missed it?”

There was the celestial globe, plain as day, along with a map and clues to its final resting place. The answer was right in front of her, if she could just crack the portrait’s secret. If the L’Enfant confession was to be believed, she and Conrad had four days to unravel this prophecy before America would go the way of Atlantis.

She looked closely at the Washington family sitting around a map of the federal city. According to Savage’s catalogue, Washington’s uniform and the papers beneath his hand were allusions to his “Military Character” and “Presidentship.” With the L’Enfant map in front of her, Martha was “pointing with her fan to the grand avenue”—Pennsylvania Avenue. Their two adopted grandchildren, George Washington Parke Custis and Eleanor Parke Custis, along with a black servant, filled out the scene.

Well, it’s no Mona Lisa.

However iconic today,
The Washington Family
was hardly accurate in its details, let alone any sort of masterpiece. In the seven long years it took to complete the portrait, Savage had never even seen Mount Vernon. That explained the two columns in the background. They didn’t exist. As for members of the Washington family, Savage apparently took individual portraits of each family member in his studios in New York City in late 1789 and early 1790 after Washington’s first inaugural. He then threw them all together in his imagined scene at Mount Vernon.

That would explain the awkward grouping of the family and their stiff poses. Each one stared off into every direction but the map on the table.

Conrad, however, had another explanation.

According to the report McConnell had e-mailed her, Conrad insisted that this bland portrait contained a great secret, one that Washington needed to get just right to preserve for centuries. And Conrad had demonstrated a simple test at the abbey to prove to the monks that the firm hand of George Washington was behind Savage’s seemingly slapdash composition.

Repeating Conrad’s experiment, she laid the picture flat on her tray table and with a marker drew two diagonal lines across opposite corners—one giant “X.” Smack-dab in the center of the portrait where the lines intersected was Washington’s left hand resting on the L’Enfant map.

The controlling hand of George Washington.

This “secret geometry,” Conrad argued, was a sure sign that Washington wanted to show that nothing about this portrait was left to chance. Rather, he was communicating an important message.

And she had to agree.

Conrad Yeats, you clever wanker.

The question, of course, was what that message could be. And clever as Conrad was, she knew he would never guess that “the fate of the world” Washington referred to in his letter to Stargazer was the location of the mysterious globe that America’s first president had buried somewhere under his eponymous capital city.

Or would he? She had underestimated Conrad before, only to regret it later.

Impossible
, she concluded. Not without knowledge of the L’Enfant confession. Which she possessed and Conrad did not.

Using Conrad’s experiment with Washington’s left hand as a clue, she decided to take a fresh look at the portrait and what he was doing with his right hand. It was resting on the shoulder of his adopted grandson, a symbol of the next generation, who in turn rested his hand on the globe.

Just as interesting was what the boy was holding in his hand: a pair of compasses, Masonic symbols of the sacred triangle. It was as if he was about to measure something on the L’Enfant map.

An unbroken chain from the globe to the map
, she marveled,
with nobody to witness it save for the black servant.

Truly, Washington intended this portrait to work with the original L’Enfant map to lead Stargazer to the final resting place of the celestial globe.

All of which made Serena wonder about the more important question that Cardinal Tucci had warned her neither she nor Conrad should ever try to answer:

What was
inside
the globe?

Serena stepped off the plane at the Montauk airstrip to find a sober McConnell waiting for her with a black Mercedes. Dressed in a dark business suit, he stood coolly in the late June heat and opened a door for her.

Serena rode in the back of the town car with McConnell while Benito drove them through the pristine woods and moorlands. The land had once belonged to the Montauk Indians until the federal government of the United States took it a century ago and built a now-abandoned military installation. All that was left of the base now were the ruins of an old, enormous SAGE radar dish and the airstrip. Private jets owned by wealthy men like McConnell could land without much attention.

“So how is our friend Dr. Yeats?” she asked.

“Popular.”

He handed her a printout of an FBI alert to various law enforcement agencies about Conrad’s exploits last week. “They’re not
accusing him of anything. He’s only ‘a person of interest’ at this point. Meaning they don’t want any cop shooting him, or even letting his name leak to the press. They just want their eyeballs peeled in case he pops back up on the grid.”

She looked at the picture of Conrad the FBI used. Somehow his face always came out looking far more menacing in photos than in person.

“Well, I can’t wait to see him as a monk.”

“I’m afraid he won’t give you that satisfaction. In the process of deciphering the letter to Stargazer, Dr. Yeats cracked the meaning of 763.”

Serena felt a pit in her stomach. “Please tell me he’s still at the abbey, Father.”

“I’m sorry.” McConnell shook his head.

Serena stared at him. “You let him disappear on us?”

It was bad enough that Conrad probably suspected she had known about the Savage painting all along, which wasn’t true, and that he couldn’t trust her, which unfortunately, thanks to Cardinal Tucci, was true: her counter-mission was to let Conrad figure out the location of Washington’s globe but take it herself back to Rome. It was the only way to protect him from the Alignment, she rationalized, even at the risk of him hating her forever.

“You know our mission statement requires that we can’t keep anyone against his will, Sister Serghetti. But Dr. Yeats has little incentive to flee far from the only sanctuary he has right now. And a plainclothes security detail is following him.”

She held up the FBI alert. “Others might be, too.”

“Don’t worry. Dr. Yeats is in disguise.”

“Disguise?”

“You’ll need one, too,” he said. “It’s in the bag on the floor.”

Serena looked down at the black bag and pulled out a white bonnet, blue blouse, and white puffy skirt. She couldn’t hide her reaction at this reversal and knew she would have to confess it later.

“And just where in bloody hell did Conrad go?”

NEWBURGH

D
RESSED IN BOOTS, BRITCHES,
and a blue Continental Army coat, Yeats circled the large 25-foot-tall obelisk. It was made of fieldstone, like the Washington Monument, and built more than a hundred years ago by the Masons of Newburgh, New York, to commemorate Washington’s greatest yet least-known military victory.

For it was here at Newburgh and not at Yorktown that the last battle of the American Revolution took place. On this very spot Washington was offered the chance to be America’s first king by his officers. But Washington refused the crown, which he considered anathema to the cause of liberty to which he and his soldiers had dedicated themselves. His officers then attempted America’s first and only military coup.

Washington quelled the coup at the eleventh hour by appealing to their better instincts with a speech that came to be known as the Newburgh Address. Moved to tears, his officers reaffirmed their support for their commander-in-chief.

It was the Revolution’s darkest hour and Washington’s greatest victory.

At least that’s what the history books say.

Today, this last encampment of the Continental Army is known as the New Windsor Cantonment State Historic Site, a state park just off the New York Thruway. Here interpreters in period dress reenact military exercises and show what everyday life was like for the camp’s 7,000 troops and 500 women and children. Nobody on the staff at the
visitors center gave much thought to the lone “cast member” wandering about the 1,600-acre enclave and winding up in front of the obelisk memorial.

Except maybe one. A ruddy, middle-aged man dressed as a Redcoat had given Conrad a funny look inside the gracious Edmonston House when he asked for records of names of those who may have visited Washington at the encampment. There were none officially, but Conrad was allowed to peruse a few journals of the day kept by members of the military. It took hours, but he finally found an entry dated March 15, 1783, which mentioned Washington had a visitor, Robert Yates, in his base home shortly before addressing his mutinous troops.

But there was nothing about the nature of the visit that Conrad could find.

Now he stood outside, bending over to examine the inscription on the obelisk monument, trying to discern what business his nominal ancestor and George Washington had conducted under these extraordinary circumstances.

He found what he was looking for in an inscription on the granite tablet on the south face of the obelisk:

The birthplace of the republic,
he thought when a voice from behind said, “My, don’t you look fetching in breeches.”

He turned to see Serena dressed in a white bonnet, puffy white skirt, and busty blue blouse that simply could not safely contain her natural endowments.

“Don’t you dare say a word,” she warned him. “Or I’ll introduce you to the pleasures of spending the rest of your life as a eunuch. Now, why are we here?”

Conrad walked her over to a long, rectangular log cabin with a line of small square windows, like a church without a steeple. Serena
recognized it from her visitor’s guide as a full-scale replica of the camp’s original “Temple of Virtue,” erected at Washington’s command to serve as a chapel for the army and a lodge-room for the fraternity of Freemasons which existed among the officer corps. On the parade grounds beyond, a musket and artillery demonstration was under way. Every now and then she heard the boom of a canon.

“Picture the scene,” he said. “The British are defeated at Yorktown. End of war, happy ending. All the same, things aren’t looking so good in early 1783. The peace negotiations in Paris are dragging on and on. Congress is balking about the army’s back pay, pensions, and land bounties. High-ranking officers led by Major General Horatio Gates, Washington’s second-in-command and commandant of this Cantonment, threaten to ruin the cause of independence by mutiny.”

“Right, so he confronts them in the Temple of Virtue with his famous Newburgh Address,” she said, wishing right now she had Conrad’s and Cardinal Tucci’s encyclopedic knowledge of American history.

“Except the speech doesn’t work and his words fall on deaf ears,” Conrad said. “So with a sigh he removes from his pocket a letter from a member of Congress that he wants to read to them. But he has trouble reading it and reaches into another pocket and brings out a pair of new reading glasses, which he has never worn publicly. Then he says, ‘Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in the service of my country.’”

This much Serena knew from the visitors guide. “Yes, and moved to tears by the unaffected drama of their venerated commander’s spectacles, the officers vote to affirm their loyalty to Washington and Congress. The Newburgh conspiracy collapses. A month later the Treaty of Paris is signed and the eight-year War of Independence comes to an end. Washington resigns his commission and retires to Mount Vernon. The army disbands. Everybody goes home. End of story. You have a point, mate? Because this blouse is itchy.”

“What if old George’s bit with the spectacles didn’t work?” Conrad asked. “It’s really hard to believe it did if you think about it. What if this wasn’t the birthplace of the republic? What if this was the birth of the empire and this group called the Alignment?”

“You’re reaching, Conrad,” she said. “You haven’t even told me how you came up with Newburgh in the first place.”

“The number 763 on my father’s tombstone. You know, the code you were going to give me if I helped you.”

Serena felt the intended sting of Conrad’s remark. “I thought the Tallmadge code you used on the Stargazer text translated 763 as ‘Headquarters.’ Washington had many headquarters throughout the Revolution.”

“But Tallmadge invented the code for Washington in 1783, when Washington was encamped here at Newburgh,” he said, looking about. Serena could tell he was oh, so close to putting his finger on it. “This is where the paths of my family and Washington intersected. That’s why Robert Yates stormed out of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia six years later and then wrote a book called
Secret Proceedings and Debates
about the formation of the U.S. Constitution. Something happened here.”

Obviously something happened
, Serena thought.
Otherwise this historical state park wouldn’t exist and we wouldn’t be standing here dressed like fools
.

“Just think about it, Serena,” he said. “Washington delivered everything the Newburgh conspirators demanded. The soldiers got their pay. The oldest military hereditary society in the United States was formed with the Society of Cincinnati. Then the U.S. Constitution was ratified, establishing a strong national government and military.”

Which was all true, Serena realized.

According to her literature, Washington served as the first president general of the Society of Cincinnati from 1783 until his death in 1799. The Society was named after the Roman farmer-general Cincinnatus, who like Washington centuries later left his fields to lead his republic into battle. Its noble motto: “He gave up everything to serve the republic.” These days Serena knew the Society of Cincinnati to be a decentralized and outstanding charitable organization, one that she had worked with on occasion. But she wondered if originally it had been something more. Perhaps the Alignment had forced Washington’s hand into creating for them a new host so they would leave the Masons, much like the biblical account of the demon that Jesus cast
out of a man and into a herd of pigs. By the time Washington died in 1799, the Alignment may well have abandoned the Society if they had succeeded, as Washington feared, in penetrating every level of the new federal government. Thus his warnings to future Americans.

Serena said, “You think Washington cut some kind of deal with the military, something that’s coming home to roost now.”

“In four days,” he said, staring at her with his warm, intense hazel eyes. “But we won’t know for sure until we find whatever Washington buried under the Mall in D.C.”

Serena gasped.
He knows.
“What are you talking about?”

“We’re looking for a celestial globe,” he told her. “Just like the one in the Savage portrait. Washington buried it for his ultimate sleeper agent, Stargazer, to recover at the end of time. By some cosmic joke, it appears that I am Stargazer. And only when I find this celestial globe will I fulfill my mission.”

Suddenly it hit her. Not only did Conrad figure out what they were looking for, he knew where it was! How did he know?

“You know where the globe is buried?” she asked, thunderstruck.

“You had the answer in your hands all along. Do you have my letter from Washington? I thought I saw something in there,” he said playfully.

He was referring to the cleavage her blouse exposed. Embarrassed, she turned her back on him, retrieved the letter and handed it over.

“Father Neale told Bishop Carroll that he saw the slave Hercules leaving Washington’s chamber just before Washington died on December 14, 1799.” He unfolded the letter with the map on back, looking around to make sure nobody was watching. “But the letter itself is dated September 18, 1793. See? That’s the date he buried the globe.”

Serena nodded anxiously, berating herself for having missed the discrepancy in dates. “It’s got some astrological significance, doesn’t it?”

“Enough significance that Washington chose that date to lay the cornerstone for the U.S. Capitol—on the hill that Bishop John Carroll’s brother Daniel sold him.”

With that, everything came together, wholly and horribly.

An hour later they drove south out of the New York tri-state area in separate cars, Conrad in McConnell’s black Mercedes making a list of everything he’d need for his operation, Serena in her limo with Benito calling ahead to make sure the new safe house would be ready.

As Conrad and Serena headed toward their designated rendezvous in Washington, D.C., the man in the Redcoat costume was sitting in Horatio Gates’s old headquarters at Edmonston House, calling a number in Virginia as he looked at a picture of Conrad Yeats he had torn from his fax machine the day before.

“This is Vailsgate,” he said. “I need to get a message to Osiris.”