ROCK CREEK NATIONAL PARK
I
T WAS SET FOR 6 P.M.
However things went down at the Capitol, Serena was to rendezvous with Conrad in Montrose Park at the edge of the vast Rock Creek National Park north of Georgetown. But it was half past six already, and there was no sign of Conrad. She was worried sick.
Carrying a backpack and dressed like a college coed in a white tank top, sunglasses, shorts, and flip-flops, Serena strolled past the tennis courts, picnic tables, and playground in search of what Conrad told her would be “an unmistakable celestial marker.”
And suddenly there it was: the Sarah Rittenhouse armillary, a sundial of sorts. Actually, on closer inspection, it was a classic Greek celestial sphere comprised of three interlocking rings that represented the motion of the stars encircling the earth. The outermost band of the ecliptic featured the raised constellations of the zodiac. Piercing through the rings was an arrow that pointed to true north.
But still no Conrad.
She set her sunglasses atop her brushed back hair for a moment and adjusted the volume of her iPod as she waited, pretending to admire the armillary. It stood on a marble pedestal and according to the plaque was dedicated in 1956 in memory of some society woman named Sarah Rittenhouse.
“Sarah Rittenhouse was some matronly preservationist who saved this park from nasty developers back in the early 1900s,” said a voice from behind her. “Reminds me of somebody I know.”
She turned to see Conrad in a dress shirt and suit pants, a hardcover book clutched in his hand. He looked like a university professor. “So where’s the globe?”
“I’m fine, thanks.” He stared at the celestial armillary. “This is where I first saw Brooke after you disappeared on me. She was walking her dog.”
“We have all of three days to stop the Alignment,” Serena said, frustrated. “Did you find the globe?”
“No, but I know where it is.”
She started walking briskly away from the armillary, where they might be seen if they stood together too long. “You told me the globe was in the cornerstone of the Capitol.”
“It was,” he said, guiding them down a cobblestone walkway called “Lovers Lane” to the ravines of Rock Creek Park. “The Masons moved it for safekeeping.”
“But it was already safe in the cornerstone, right?”
“Not after the British burned the Capitol down to its foundations during the War of 1812. I think the Masons felt they had to move it before the Alignment got to it. At least that’s my guess.”
“Your guess?” she repeated, unable to disguise her dismay. “And where do you guess the Masons moved it?”
“Under the Jefferson Building at the Library of Congress.”
Serena shook her head. “That site was never in L’Enfant’s original plans for the city.”
“No, but the cosmic radiant cuts right through the Capitol dome to the Library’s Great Hall.”
Serena had heard enough. Time was running out and they had nothing. “You and your blasted radiant, Conrad! We could follow it around the world a dozen times and still never find the globe.”
“But the Masons knew that,” he said, and stopped them in their tracks near a stream that she assumed was the eponymous Rock Creek. “They knew they were ‘going off the grid,’ so to speak. So they left clues for Stargazer in the form of zodiacs.”
“Zodiacs?”
“The Jefferson Building is a hive of them,” he said. “Scholars have counted seven zodiacs, but the docents have counted eleven. I counted fifteen.”
Serena stared at him. “Wait a minute. When did you count the zodiacs?”
“This afternoon.”
She nearly screamed. “I’m out of my bloody mind wondering if you’re alive, and you’re loitering around the Jefferson Building after breaking into the U.S. Capitol across the street?”
“Calm down,” he said, looking around and taking her by the arm. “I was already there, so I took advantage of the opportunity.”
Serena angrily twisted her arm out of his grip. “Well, if you found the accommodations so comfortable, why didn’t you just spend the night?”
“I thought of it. But I couldn’t crack the zodiacs. Then I saw the central arch to the east of the main zodiac in the Great Hall. The top of the arch is inscribed with the names of those responsible for the construction of the Library, starting with Brigadier General Thomas Lincoln Casey.”
Serena huffed. “And Casey is important because?”
“He was a Mason like Washington and L’Enfant,” Conrad said. “He not only supervised the completion of the Washington Monument, but he also built the Library of Congress from the ground up.”
They were deep in the ravines of the park now, and Serena was wondering where Conrad was leading them.
“So you believe that Casey and the Masons built the entire Library of Congress as some kind of cosmological citadel to protect the celestial globe?”
“I do.”
“It’s a nice theory, Conrad, but we need hard evidence to link Casey to the last known resting place of the globe. You said it was the cornerstone of the U.S. Capitol.”
“It was,” he said. “And after the British destroyed the original north wing of the Capitol in 1814, it was Casey who wrote up the damage report for the Architect of the Capitol at the time, then Benjamin Henry Latrobe.”
Serena knew the name of Benjamin Henry Latrobe. He had designed America’s first cathedral in Baltimore for Archbishop John Carroll with input from Thomas Jefferson. Suddenly Conrad didn’t seem so crazy.
“So that’s when you think Casey and the Masons removed the globe from the ruins of the Capitol.”
“Exactly.”
“You were busy at the Library.” She jabbed at the old hardcover book he held—
Elements of Astronomy
by Simon Newcomb. “Did you check out that book?”
“I’ll bring it back when I break into the Library.”
There wasn’t much Serena could say at that point. There was no going back, and Conrad was determined to go forward. “So who is Simon Newcomb?”
“He was an admiral in the U.S. Navy and probably America’s most brilliant astronomer of the 19th century,” Conrad explained. “And years before Casey became Chief of the Army Corps of Engineers and built the Library of Congress, he was Newcomb’s assistant. Amazing how everything connects, isn’t it?”
“So you think by reading Newcomb’s popular astronomy guide you’ll tap the minds of the people who built the Library of Congress.”
“That’s the idea” he said. “Once D.C. started deviating from the original L’Enfant plan, the Masons had to find a way of communicating outside the hard landscape of astronomical alignments. So they resorted to symbols in the form of zodiacs. If I can reconcile the zodiacs with the Library’s extensive renovation plans on file, I bet I can find a sealed-off access tunnel somewhere that will lead us to the globe.”
Conrad paused to scope out the surrounding woodlands. Convinced they were not being watched, he stepped into some nearby brush. “Follow me.”
Serena followed him through the dense foliage, her hands up to keep the branches from her face, wondering what he wanted to show her. They were off any beaten trail now. Conrad stopped a couple of minutes later in front of a small cliff in the ravines, and parted a curtain of vines to reveal the mouth of a cave.
“I used to hide out here as a kid,” he told her. “There’s an old Indian well in the back. The cave collapsed at least a hundred years ago, so my dad and I used to come out here and dig it out, bit by bit. Every spring we’d plant shrubs to cover any trace of the path.”
Serena nodded. She wasn’t even sure if she could ever find it again herself if she had to. But this cave was certainly a better safe house for Tom Sawyer here than the penthouse, which was surely under surveillance now.
She said, “Tomorrow night I’m at the Hilton for the annual media dinner and then the Presidential Prayer Breakfast the following morning. The day after that is the Fourth of July.”
“I get it, game over,” Conrad said. “I’m going to have to hit the Library of Congress tomorrow night at the latest if we’re going to have any chance of nabbing the globe and making any kind of sense of it to stop the Alignment.”
“Stop them from what, Conrad?” she pressed. “If we know what they’re going to do, then maybe we don’t need the globe.”
“Oh, we need the globe,” Conrad assured her. “And I’m guessing the Alignment is going to do what it failed to do in 1783.”
“Stage a coup?” Serena asked. “American citizens would never sit still for it.”
Conrad shrugged. “What if it’s a coup and nobody knows it?”
Serena grew very quiet.
“Astrological symbols are quite different than astronomical alignments,” she said softly. “They’re open to all sorts of interpretations, not the clean lines and calculations you’re used to. Admiral Newcomb may not shed enough light for you to find the globe.”
“That’s OK,” Conrad said. “I know an old Mason who can help us.”
“A Mason?” Although Serena knew that most Masons were constructive “builders” of structures and people, their secret society had been corrupted by the Knights Templar, warriors, to say the least. Worse, it now seemed clear that the Alignment itself had infiltrated and controlled the Masons at one strategic point during the American Revolution. Who knew how many of their lieutenants and informants they had left behind in the brotherhood? “Can you trust this Mason?”
“My father did.”
“Like I said, can you trust him?”
“Serena, I can’t even completely trust you. But our options are limited at this point. I don’t even know if he’s still alive.”
Serena looked at Conrad, still stung by his comment about her being untrustworthy, though of course she was, wasn’t she? “How are you going to find out?”
“I know someone who might know. I’ll contact him at his office at 5 a.m.”
“Your friend’s in the office at 5 a.m.?”
“Yep.”
“What are you going to do until then?”
“Camp out here,” he said, looking into the cave. “You want to spend the night with me in the catacombs?”
Little did Conrad know, she thought, but she would like nothing more in this life than to hide out with him in a cave and never come out. And if God and people and the world around them didn’t mean so much to her, she would.
“Tempting,” she said. “But at this point it’s best for both of us if I’m seen out and about and far away from you. If I can break away to join you and this Mason tomorrow, I will. But I’d rather be safe than sorry.”
He gave her a funny look. “You said the same thing at Lake Titicaca.”
Conrad was referring to when they first met years earlier in the Andes, and as she looked around these wild ravines she felt the same sense of mystery and foreboding.
“Well, you better have these.” She removed her backpack and gave him a toothbrush, lightweight trench coat, and a change of clothing.
Conrad studied the underwear. “You know I prefer briefs.”
“Please watch yourself, Conrad,” she begged him. “This isn’t some boy’s adventure. Those are real bullets they’re firing at you.”
It was getting dark in the ravines now, and Serena turned to leave while she could still find her way out. As she began to weave between the twisted branches, she thought she heard Conrad whisper something. By the time she looked over her shoulder, he had disappeared into the darkness.
L
ATER THAT NIGHT
Max Seavers stood naked in the bedroom of his Georgetown house and looked at himself in the mirror. There was much to admire—his golden hair, sapphire eyes, aquiline nose, and strong chin, not to mention his rock-hard six-pack abs. This was not the face of a monster. Moreover, it was what one couldn’t see in a mirror—his towering intellect, his genius—that was intrinsically noble.
Soon,
he thought,
everybody will see it.
He heard the shower in the bathroom turn off. He walked across the plush carpet to his bed, slipped under the sheets and waited for her. As he did, he mulled over the SecDef’s directive about finding this thing that Washington had buried and marveled at the absurdity of it all.
For it was in another country, in another time, that his own great-grandfather was asked to help run an organization quite similar to DARPA and to pursue similarly bizarre research for his boss, Adolf Hitler.
Before and during the Second World War, Hitler had German scientists and archaeologists roaming the earth for evidence of the biological superiority of the Aryan race. Few were hard-core Nazis, but fewer still were about to spurn the overtures of the Führer and his ax man Heinrich Himmler, who in exchange for keeping them out of concentration camps offered these academics the kind of funding and resources no university could match.
The Ahnenerbe, as the think-tank was called, was an SS agency established to prove once and for all that Aryans were not just the “master race” or pinnacle of human evolution but also the “mother race” of human civilization. At its peak it counted more than 200 scholars, scientists, and staff among its ranks. And its teams fanned out across the globe in search of evidence in places like Lake Titicaca in Bolivia, the Canary Islands, the Greek Islands, even Tibet. All these places were alleged to have been built by Aryan colonists, and research efforts soon crystallized into one final quest to find the place from which those colonists came.
That place, they concluded, was Atlantis, and its location was determined to be Antarctica. If only they could find its ruins beneath the ice, they could prove once and for all the superiority of the Aryan race and the inevitable triumph of Hitler’s Thousand-Year Reich.
Toward that end, Hitler sent U-boats to Antarctica, where teams of Nazis disembarked on the ice cap in search of ruins. They also planted Nazi flags still buried to this day in order to claim the last continent for Nazi Germany.
They came back empty-handed, of course, those who managed to come back at all. Many perished in the otherworldly cold. Those who survived had no relics to show for their pains. Some had no fingers or toes either, as they were lost to frostbite.
None of this surprised Seavers’s great-grandfather, Wolfram Sievers, who considered much of archaeology the domain of crackpots. Whereas half of the Ahnenerbe was focused on the past, Wolfram was focused on the future, on genetics and human evolution. Much of his work was inspired by the American eugenics movement of the early part of the twentieth century.
Unfortunately, research required Wolfram to experiment on living subjects, which could be found in great supply among the Jews in the concentration camps. The results yielded a treasure trove of data and the creation of new biotoxins.
Hitler hoped to place the biotoxins in the tips of his V-2 rockets and launch them against the Allies. But the tide of war turned against Hitler and his Nazis, and the work of Wolfram was cut short.
In the end, Germany was split in two by invading Allied forces. “Good Germans” who had served the Ahnenerbe were free to resume
their respectable chairs at elite universities. Some, like rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, were even invited to the United States to help the Americans land a man on the moon. “Bad Germans” linked to the Holocaust like Seavers’s great-grandfather, however, were executed in Nuremberg for their “crimes against humanity.”
Growing up in Southern California with relatives, Seavers hid his true paternity with shame. At Torrey Pines High School he announced his resolve to dedicate his life to creating vaccines that would eradicate pandemic diseases and extend human life. By the time he was a junior at Stanford, he got the backing of venture capitalists to launch his own biotech company back in San Diego.
He made billions but ran into trouble when America’s religious fanatics got in the way of his stem-cell research, which required the destruction of aborted fetuses. They called him a baby killer, these Catholic and evangelical Christian hypocrites, who themselves benefited from his drugs and who carried out “God’s work” in Third World countries by administering his vaccines to the poor and sick.
It was then that he began to consider that his great-grandfather, who didn’t even work on live embryos but on prisoners as good as dead, may have been misunderstood.
Politics from Nazis or the White House had no place in science, he realized, and neither did religion. But the burdens of government regulations on his company’s research became too much to bear. He had nowhere to turn in the private sector—except the Homeland Security–Industrial Complex.
And it was here, outside the gaze of Wall Street and the world, that Seavers found not only billions of dollars at his disposal but the cloak of “national security” to perform the kinds of research and experiments—mostly on enlisted soldiers—that he would never have been able to pull off in the private sector. Literally decades of research had been compressed into less than 36 months. The result was the SeaGen smart vaccine, his crowning achievement.
Now, however, like his great-grandfather, he was reduced to dealing with imbecile masters at the Pentagon, hunting for buried globes, and crossing swords with “astro-archaeologists” like Conrad Yeats.
What an insane world,
he thought.
Time for a new one.
Seavers heard the bathroom door open and saw a whiff of steam
from the shower billow out. Then a long, tan leg emerged from the mist and the naked form of Brooke Scarborough stepped toward him.
Seavers admired Brooke’s body as she walked over and slipped under the sheets next to him. It had been weeks since they had sex, and it infuriated him that he had to share Brooke with Conrad Yeats.
Worse, she had put him in a bind with the Alignment, which wanted her dead after she had allowed Yeats to find the code book right under her nose and slip away. He had intervened on her behalf, arguing that the death of Senator Scarborough’s daughter would only bring even more unwanted scrutiny at the eleventh hour. Moreover, if there was anyone Yeats would turn to once he popped back up on the grid, it would be her. The Alignment bought his argument, and she had won a reprieve.
So far, however, Yeats seemed to be able to live without her. Brooke was certain that Yeats felt so guilty about reconnecting with Serena Serghetti that he was hiding from her as much as he was the Alignment. If so, Yeats was a weaker man than he thought.
“The president and Packard told me about the globe,” he said. “Did you know this was what that tombstone and book code nonsense was all about?”
Her silence said yes. He didn’t know which annoyed him more: that the Alignment had kept him out of the loop or that she had. As a biological legacy of the Alignment, he always resented it when those adopted into the organization knew more than he did. Especially the true identity of one or more of the 30 who ruled the Alignment and knew all the names and faces. In two days so would he.
“They want me to find it.”
“You?” She looked at him with frightened eyes. “Have you told Osiris?”
“Of course. Nothing’s changed. I simply have to keep this globe from falling into the hands of either the Church or the State. And now the federal government has given me the men and muscle to do that. Meanwhile, you’re going to have to be on the lookout for Yeats. He has few places to turn now. One of them is bound to be you.”
She said nothing.
It was an awkward pause, but Seavers didn’t mind her discomfort. In fact, he took perverse pleasure in it and the knowledge of pleasure soon to come.
“Max, you’re as cool and confident of yourself as ever,” she told him. “But you only know Conrad Yeats the specimen. Not the man.”
“Unlike, say, you?” he replied with ice in his voice.
She was terrified. He could see it in her eyes. “I’m just saying that there’s always a body count when people go after him.”
Seavers let out a loud laugh and couldn’t stop laughing. It was too funny, really.
“After tonight, Brooke, the only body you’ll need to worry about is yours.”