C
ONRAD RAN THROUGH
the dilapidated network of steam tunnels beneath Capitol Hill, hands up to brush aside falling debris from the crumbling ceilings. He could hear his heavy breathing inside his mask and feel the sweat drench his body. He had found the cornerstone but no globe, and right now his only mission was survival.
He knew that all the buildings in the U.S. Capitol complex could be entered through the steam tunnels. But he never imagined their state of repair to be this poor. Not after the feds just spent a billion dollars on the underground Capitol Visitors Center. They must have just sealed off the new construction and said to hell with the steam tunnels.
He came to a cross tunnel. Something inside prompted him to stop and listen. Besides a continuous low rumble in the background, he couldn’t hear a thing. But when he looked over his shoulder, he saw the green glow of night vision gear.
He started to run.
A shot rang out, and he ducked as a bullet ricocheted off the tunnel wall. He froze as several chunks of the ceiling came down around him. Slowly he turned around and squinted in the dark.
A thin shadow was wafting toward him. He looked down and saw the glowing red dot on his chest.
Suddenly a beam of white light blinded him and a voice in a ringing alto shouted: “Hands up where I can see them!”
It was a woman’s voice, and she was mad as hell.
Conrad put up his hands and heard a deafening crack. But he wasn’t shot. It was the floor—it was beginning to crumble.
The policewoman yelled: “Stop!”
But Conrad stomped on the floor as hard as he could. His knees began to buckle. The tunnel floor gave way under him and he plunged into darkness.
Sergeant Wanda Randolph kept her G36 steady in spite of the tunnel collapse, both eyes peering through her electronic red dot sight. But when the smoke cleared, her man was gone.
Quickly but cautiously, she moved through the dust to the crater in the tunnel floor, coughing through her mask. Finger on her trigger, ready to unload a round, she pointed her G36 down and hit her high beams, bathing the rubble below in light. There was no suspect underneath the chunks of concrete.
There was, however, another tunnel, one not on her schematics.
“Sweet Jesus,” she said, although she wasn’t surprised.
Before she joined the Capitol Police, Sergeant Wanda Randolph spent two years in Tora Bora and Baghdad crawling through caves and bunkers and sewers ahead of American troops in search of Bin Laden and later Saddam Hussein. She was tall and lean, with narrow shoulders and hips that enabled her to slip through holes and places people just weren’t created to go. And while dogs could sniff explosives with their noses, they couldn’t see tripwires, so they sent her ahead of even the dogs.
It was a year later that ten employees who worked in the Capitol Power Plant tunnels sent a letter to four members of Congress to express their concern that there was no police presence in the underground tunnels. The tunnels provided steam to heat and cool the Capitol campus and ran from the Capitol Power Plant to the House and Senate office buildings, the Capitol and surrounding buildings.
Now she was “Queen Rat,” chief of the Hill’s special Recon and Tactics Squad. The mission of the R.A.T.S. was to police the crumbling, asbestos-lined tunnels that had become a giant health trap to federal employees and a gaping hole in national security. As dirty and
humble as her life’s work had turned out to be, she was the best at it and proud to serve the United States of America.
“All R.A.T.S., report,” she called into her radio, but knew it was no use even before static filled her earpiece. She flashed her call sign twice into the dark. No response.
As usual, she was on her own.
She climbed down into the new tunnel, using the rubble like a staircase until she reached the bottom and straightened up with her G36 pointed ahead. She hit her high beam again and gasped.
The tunnel wasn’t a steam tunnel at all, but something else, like something out of ancient Rome. With one arm still holding up her weapon, she ran her other hand along the stone wall, awed by the solid construction of the stonecutters. She had seen enough tunnels beneath centuries-old cities to know this tunnel was older than the steam tunnels above, which themselves were more than a hundred years old. For all she knew, this tunnel was older than the republic.
Either the government had forgotten this tunnel was here, or knowledge of its existence was way beyond her pay grade. In any case, she had an intruder to capture or kill, and she marched down the corridor.
About three minutes later she saw the perp in his yellow Haz-Mat gear standing before a fork in the tunnel, his back to her.
“Turn around, hands up, or I shoot in three,” she shouted, her G36 up and locked on the perp. “One…”
His arms seemed to waver but he wasn’t turning around.
She aimed the glowing red dot between his shoulder blades.
“Two…”
Now his right leg seemed to waver, but still he didn’t turn around.
She took a breath and tightened her grip on the trigger.
“Three.”
One of his arms came down and his body twisted toward her. She wasn’t about to wait for him to get off a shot and pulled the trigger, letting loose a burst of fire.
The bullets hit her target in the chest, blowing him back into the tunnel.
She ran down the stone floor to the crumpled body, her G36
pointed at the mask. She lowered the barrel and lifted the mask to see that it was empty. The perp had shed the suit and strung it up.
She looked down one tunnel with her high beams and saw nothing, then down the other and saw a glint of metal. She gave a war cry and ran down the tunnel only to find a shiny vaultlike door at the end.
It was an emergency hatch. All the old sublevel hatches were replaced several years back with new ones. And like all the safety precautions in place in the tunnels, it was designed to keep people on the outside from getting in, not people on the inside from getting out.
She opened it and climbed out of the ancient tunnel and into a machinery room. A minute later she popped through a metal door into an underground passageway and startled a group of young Capitol pages. They were exiting the Capitol complex with their supervisors and heading back to their school on the top floor of the Jefferson Building at the Library of Congress.
At this point, Sergeant Randolph knew that even if she saw the perp she wouldn’t know him now. She wanted to scream, but it would only scare the Hill staffers.
Her radio, now in range of the command post, squawked.
She picked it up and said, “Suspect’s gone native. Time: 1304 hours.”
The Jefferson Building at the Library of Congress was the most ornate building in Washington, D.C., the greatest library in history since the Library of Alexandria burned to the ground two thousand years ago. Besides a fifteenth-century Gutenberg Bible, there were ancient maps of Antarctica that showed the subglacial topography of the continent before it was covered with ice, complete with curious addenda by the U.S. Air Force. Then there was a nineteenth-century manuscript copy of U.S. Senator Ignatius Donnelly’s worldwide bestseller
Atlantis: The Antediluvian World.
Most prophetic, perhaps, was a sixteenth-century essay of Francis Bacon’s on “The New Atlantis,” all about the New World and the land that would become America.
Not that any of that interested Conrad right now as he split from
the procession of Capitol pages and passed through a deep arch into the library’s central atrium a few minutes later.
The ornate Great Hall was flanked by two grand staircases and constructed almost entirely of white Italian marble. Floating 75 feet overhead was a spectacular ceiling with stained glass skylights, paneled beams, and 23-karat gold leaf accents.
The street exit was just a stone’s throw away. He started for it when he saw several Capitol Police officers coming in, talking on their radios.
He turned around and ducked into a public restroom, where he removed his dirty suit jacket and jammed it into a trash can. Then he ripped off his fake goatee and threw cold water on his face. He rolled up the sleeves of his blue dress shirt and looked at himself in the mirror, a relatively new man. After he wiped the dust off his shoes, he walked back out into the Great Hall.
Seeing police at the security station by the main floor exit, he crossed the wine-dark marble floor and climbed one of the marble stairways to the second floor level. There a crowd was pressed against the glass overlooking the East Lawn of the Capitol across the street.
With the polite authority of a Library docent he pushed his way through the bodies toward the window. Then he looked down and realized he had a skybox seat to the mess he had made across the street—police vans, news crews, the works.
All for naught
, he thought as he stared out the glass. He had followed his precious “cosmic radiant” in the sky above Pennsylvania Avenue to the dome of the U.S. Capitol only to find an empty cornerstone.
All that remained for him now was to wait for an opportunity to escape the Library, meet Serena at their designated rendezvous, and tell her that he had failed.
Even now, the Statue of Freedom atop the Capitol dome across the street seemed to be mocking him. Made of bronze, it was six meters tall and, standing on the dome, the tallest statue in D.C. since 1863. By law no statue was permitted to be taller. Maybe that’s why the statue’s back was turned to the Washington Monument rising high into the sky beyond.
Or maybe not.
He caught his breath.
The U.S. Capitol was built to face west. But the Statue of Freedom faced the Library of Congress in the east. In theory this reversal was decided on so that the sun would never set on the face of Freedom, but Conrad suddenly wondered if there was another reason.
He looked again at the gleaming dome of the U.S. Capitol under cloudy skies—the cosmic center of Washington, D.C. What if the cosmic radiant in the sky that paralleled Pennsylvania Avenue didn’t end over the dome? What if it kept going? In his mind’s eye, he extended the radiant to the east…to right about where he was standing in the Library of Congress.
He turned and walked back through the crowd toward the balcony overlooking the Great Hall and looked down twenty feet below. In the center of the marble floor was a giant sunburst, around which were 12 brass inlays of the signs of the zodiac arranged in a giant square.
This must be what the Masons wanted Stargazer to find: A marker of their own design, laid directly along the path of the city’s central radiant.
Conrad could feel his heart beating out of his chest.
A zodiac in the shape of a square rather than a circle symbolically linked the constellations to the flat plane of the earth, not the vast space of the heavens. And a sunburst in the center, if he recalled correctly, represented the cardinal points of the compass.
Meaning the zodiac on the floor of the Great Hall was pointing to a hidden direction on Earth—or under the earth.
The Masons moved the globe. And it was right here, under the Library of Congress.
THE PENTAGON
T
HAT AFTERNOON
M
AX
S
EAVERS
marched down corridor nine toward Secretary of Defense Packard’s suite of offices on the third floor of the Pentagon. It had taken a half hour for his black Escalade to get there from the media circus at the U.S. Capitol on this overcast Monday afternoon, and he dreaded the inevitable confrontation in store.
This meeting had already been on the books. Seavers was supposed to debrief Packard after his testimony on the smart vaccine before Scarborough’s committee. Only now, thanks to Conrad Yeats, Packard would be asking about what, if any, connection there was between the empty cornerstone beneath the Capitol and the bizarre codes on General Griffin Yeats’s tombstone at Arlington, and how a dead American general and his elusive son could make them all look like jackasses.
Two MPs saluted as he approached the vault-like doors, and Seavers surrendered his BlackBerry to the receptionist before passing through. Packard’s office was classified a SCIF, or sensitive compartmented information facility. No mobile phones, BlackBerries, or other wireless devices were permitted inside. The idea was to ensure that the most classified conversations could be held in this office in confidence, without fear of being overheard.
This afternoon the only other person in the room besides Packard and Seavers was Packard’s intelligence chief, Norman Carson, Assistant Secretary of Defense C3I, who sat in one of two chairs in front of Packard’s desk. A wiry egghead with thinning hair and a thinner sense
of humor, Carson was in charge of all command, control, communications, and intelligence for the DOD, which these days pretty much covered all of America. He was also the executive agent responsible for ensuring the continuity of government should some unthinkable attack or natural cataclysm hit the United States.
Carson didn’t bother to get up and shake hands when Seavers walked in, and Packard was already behind his stand-up desk. Seavers took his seat. The vaultlike doors closed heavily behind him in the lobby, then another set in Packard’s office closed likewise, sealing them and whatever they said inside.
Packard glared down at Seavers from his desk, which looked like a giant lectern, the ultimate bully pulpit. “What the hell is going on, Seavers?”
“Security cameras in the Capitol confirm it was Conrad Yeats, Mr. Secretary. We ran the tapes through the facial recognition software. He circumvented security and bypassed the detection gates by posing as a congressman from Missouri.”
“And the biotoxin scare?”
“Haz-Mat teams found an open bottle of industrial cleaning solvent in a janitor’s closet. The vapors set off the false alarm. It was a diversion.”
“Dammit, Seavers!” Packard said. “How the hell did you let Yeats get away?”
Seavers didn’t flinch. “The Capitol Police, who are in charge of security, failed to apprehend Dr. Yeats when he escaped through the steam pipes under the complex. He popped up in the Jefferson Building at the Library of Congress. By the time the Capitol Police reviewed the security feeds, he had left the building.”
Packard nodded gravely for effect, and Seavers resented this flogging for something outside his operational control, especially in front of Packard’s lapdog Carson, no less. “All this after he found the cornerstone beneath the Capitol, something we haven’t been able to do in two hundred years.”
Seavers calmly replied, “And this is important to my initiative with the vaccine because?”
Packard ignored him and turned to Carson. “Norm, what do the symbols on the obelisk mean?”
Carson passed two copies of a leather-bound brief to Packard and Seavers that included four photos, each showing one of the obelisk’s four sides.
“We worked up another interpretation of the astrological symbols,” Carson said. “Based on Yeats’s actions today, we now feel the symbols represent celestial counterparts to the U.S. Capitol, White House, and Washington Monument. Teams have already been dispatched to the White House and Washington Monument to search for their cornerstones.”
Packard nodded. “And the number 763?”
“We confirmed it’s the Major’s code.”
“The Major’s code?”
“Major Tallmadge,” Carson said. “He was George Washington’s spy chief during the Revolution, although by the time he created this alphanumeric cipher system he was a colonel.”
Packard said, “So Yeats is using a code more than 200 years old?”
“He’s using, in effect, the DOD’s very first code, Mr. Secretary.”
“And what exactly does 763 stand for?” Packard demanded. “Should I be quaking in my boots like the president?”
The Pentagon’s top intelligence chief said nothing, although the look in his eyes implied that, yes, they should all be quaking in their boots. “In general terms, sir, 763 is the numeric code for headquarters. Specifically, in this context, it clearly means this.”
Carson wrote a name on a sheet of paper and slipped it to the SecDef. The SecDef picked it up and stared. “Oh, gawd,” he groaned, and was about to crumple it up and toss it into his wastebasket until he thought better of it. “You mean the president’s paranoia might have some basis in fact?”
“General Yeats seemed to think so, sir.”
Seavers, unable to read the text on the paper Packard was holding, cleared his throat. “The president is paranoid about what, Mr. Secretary? I’m afraid I’m lost here.”
“We all are if this prophecy is true.” Packard pulled out a lighter and touched it to the corner of the paper.
Seavers sat forward on the edge of his seat and watched the paper burn. This stage of the briefing was news to him. “What prophecy?”
Packard said, “Let’s just say we think George Washington buried
something under the Mall, and every U.S. president since Jefferson has been trying to dig it up, all under the guise of building or restoring monuments over the past three centuries.”
“Buried what?” Seavers pressed.
“Something very embarrassing,” Packard told him. “Not just for this Administration, but for every president since Washington. Something that casts doubt on the American experiment itself, its origins and destiny. We have to stop it from coming to light.”
Seavers could feel Packard studying him, clearly conflicted. Packard had brought him to DARPA to develop new vaccines and create the perfect soldier, impervious to chemical and biological weapons. That was his reputation as one of the world’s greatest minds in genetic research. Coded tombstones and buried artifacts were not his forte.
Unless he knows about my great-grandfather
, Seavers thought, and suddenly wondered if there had been more to his appointment at DARPA than he had given Packard credit for.
“Mr. Secretary,” he said, breaking the silence, “it would help me a great deal to know what exactly you think Washington buried.”
“A globe, Seavers.”
“A globe?”
“A celestial globe,” Packard said. “Probably about two feet in diameter. The kind of floor globe you find on a stand in the library of lavish estates.”
“Like those Old World bar globes you open and inside you find liquor?”
Packard glared at him. “This has nothing to do with the Old World, Seavers.”
Seavers could only shrug. “But how important can this globe truly be?”
Packard was adamant. “Nothing could be more important to the national security of the United States of America.”
Seavers nodded to show he understood the gravity of the situation. “And you think Dr. Yeats has a shot at finding it?”
“He found the cornerstone of the U.S. Capitol, didn’t he?” Packard began to pace back and forth behind his desk, obviously wrestling with some decision. “Seavers, I want you to find this thing before
Yeats does. Or let him lead you to it, I don’t care. But if he does, he’ll uncover a secret he’s not authorized to know. Nobody is.”
Seavers glanced at Carson, who looked shocked that Packard had assigned him the task, and said, “You’ll give me what I need to do this job, Mr. Secretary?”
“The president has authorized me to have the entire resources of the federal government at your disposal,” Packard said. “You’ve got the gizmos, I’ll give you some muscle, your own black ops domestic response team.” Packard looked at Carson. “Norm, your ass is covered. Just give Seavers whatever intel he needs to find Yeats. It’s embarrassing that he’s walking around D.C., which has more security cameras than galaxies in the heavens, and we still can’t find him.”
“I’ll track down Yeats and whatever it is he’s looking for.” Seavers looked at Packard and Carson. “And Dr. Yeats can take whatever he knows to the grave and join his father.”
“General Yeats may have been a four-star bastard, but I always tried to treat his son like my own. So I hope it doesn’t come to that, gentlemen,” Packard said. “But if it does, Conrad Yeats sure as hell isn’t going to be buried at Arlington with full military honors.”