Every now and then Hercules would pause to dust himself off, and Washington could only marvel at his slave’s fine clothing, gold pocket watch, and ornate buckles. Hercules was probably the best-dressed slave in the United States. It was a shame to involve him in all this nasty business.
“Do you realize you are a finer specimen of fashion than I am,
Hercules?”
“You allow me to sell leftover foodstuffs, sir.”
“And your profit?”
“About $200 last year, sir.”
Washington shook his head. This was a new world.
Finally, they lowered two kegs of gunpowder down the well, and left a long trail of powder behind them as they exited the cave.
Outside in the dark, Washington took in the fresh air and looked at his nervous slave.
“You’ll be going back to Philadelphia by way of New York,” Washington told Hercules, and handed him an envelope intended for Robert Yates, chief justice of the New York Supreme Court. “You know where the designated drop box is buried?”
Hercules nodded. “Just outside that farm.”
“That’s right,” said Washington. “You best be going now. We’ll talk again when I’m back in Philadelphia.”
“Yessa,” Hercules said, and ran off through some branches to his horse and untied him.
Washington watched Hercules gallop off and then turned to the cave and removed his pistol.
Washington raised his arm and leveled his pistol at the cave. “God save America,” he said, and fired a single shot.
There was a flash from somewhere deep inside the cave, and then a deep, thunderous explosion, setting off several more as the entire back of the cave collapsed. A blast of dust and the smell of sulfur billowed out from the mouth of the cave, burying the globe until Kingdom Come or until Stargazer could come for it, however fate would have it.
When the smoke cleared, Washington was gone.
Conrad found the cave on the other side of the creek behind its cloak of vegetation. He parted the curtain of roots and entered the damp passage. It felt like he was going back in time, searching for his lost childhood, his origins, his father. In a way, he was. Because here in this cave everything came together:
Tom Sawyer
, those many days with his dad digging out the cave, even the Sarah Rittenhouse
Armillary in the park a hundred feet up where he used to jog.
It was always here
, he marveled.
All this time.
There was a movement in the dark, then the blinding glare of a headtorch. Conrad blinked for a moment until he saw Serena’s angelic but dirty face, a halo of light behind her, and a shovel on her shoulder, ready to bring it down on his head.
“Thank God, Conrad,” she said. “You made it. I wasn’t sure if I got your directions right.”
He wanted to wrap his arms around her, tell her how much he loved her and drag her away from all the nonsense that kept them apart. Instead, he grabbed her by the throat.
“You dirty, pretty liar,” he told her. “You knew there were two globes all along, and you didn’t tell me.”
“They always come in pairs, Conrad,” she said, choking. “Terrestrial and celestial. I assumed you knew that.”
He tightened his grasp. “Or maybe you and your friends at the Vatican wanted to keep them for yourselves.”
“Please, Conrad, I know you didn’t kill Brooke.”
He looked into her dark, smoky eyes and let go.
She gasped for air.
“Brooke,” he muttered, remembering his last glimpse of her tied to the bed in the hotel room, feeling the hurt of what must have happened to her after he left pressing down on him. “Seavers did it, I swear.”
“I know,” Serena said, swallowing hard, trying to catch her breath. “Here, take this. We don’t have much time.”
She handed him a shovel.
MONTROSE PARK
I
T WAS JUST AFTER 7 P.M.,
the sun setting over the horizon, when the corporal from the Army Corps of Engineers crawled out of the sewer on R Street near the armillary to break the news to Max Seavers, who had the area roped off by his disguised Detachment One Marines.
Seavers, who was hunched over a geological survey of Rock Creek Park in the relative quiet of the playground by the armillary, had noticed the drilling had stopped. “What’s wrong, Corporal?”
“We tagged something, but we’re not sure what,” the corporal said. “So we’re tripping right now.”
“English, Corporal.”
“The casing—er, the tube we dropped down to set off the charges developed a spur of some kind. So we’re bringing the drill bit back up. Once we’ve tripped the bit back up, we’ll send down a mill to bore out the casing. After we retract the mill, the bit will have to be tripped down again.”
The only thing Seavers understood was that this was going to cost him even more time. And he had already allowed Yeats too much. “How long is this going to take, Corporal?”
“It’s going to cost DARPA about a hundred grand for the new drill bit and about a million for the day, as far as the GSA is concerned,” the corporal said. “We’ve got seventy-five men and a lot of equipment down there, sir. This is a massive operation to throw together so fast.”
“I didn’t ask about the cost, you penny-pinching bureaucrat,” Seavers seethed. “I asked how long.”
“The trip is going to take about twelve hours each way.”
That was 24 hours from now, Seavers realized, just when he was going to be accompanying the Chinese Olympic officials to the Washington Monument.
“That’s unacceptable, Corporal. How much further do you have to go?”
“About two hundred feet before we hit what looks to be a cavern, although it’s partially collapsed,” the corporal said. “But we’ve hit the harder, more resilient metamorphic rock that’s in the way, sir. It’s got schists, phyllites, slates, gneisses, and gabbros.”
At this point, Seavers knew more about the geology of America’s fourth-oldest national park than he ever wanted to. Designed for the preservation “of all timber, animals, or curiosities…and their retention, as nearly as possible,” the park was 15 kilometers long and almost two kilometers wide, a sanctuary for “many and rare and unique species,” according to the act of Congress that created it.
Those species right now included Conrad Yeats and Serena Serghetti.
“Hold on, Corporal,” Seavers said, and radioed Landford at the mobile command post. “Where is the NPS in the hunt for our terrorists?”
“Nothing yet, sir,” Landford reported. “But they’ve got all available rangers and police on horseback and foot sweeping the creek area.”
Unfortunately, as Seavers now knew, Rock Creek itself ran almost 53 kilometers, and the entire Rock Creek “watershed” covered almost 50,000 acres. Worse, it cut through deformed metamorphic crystalline rocks that were dotted with innumerable sinkholes, caves, and caverns. A quarter of the area was within the boundaries of the federal district, making it a virtual urban Tora Bora in which Yeats could hide for some time.
Seavers looked down at his geological map showing the vast cave systems throughout the area. He was positive Yeats and the nun had followed one of them to wind their way back beneath the armillary. At some point, if he didn’t beat them to the globe, they would have
to come out, and when they did, he wanted them captured immediately.
But he was taking no chances.
“Corporal, you’re done drilling,” Seavers said. “We’re going to drop a suitcase bunker buster bomb down the casing. It should easily penetrate the remaining two hundred feet of rock to hit the cavern.”
The corporal looked shocked. “You drop a mini bunker buster, sir, and you’ll probably collapse the cavern, burying whatever it is you’re looking for.”
“We can always dig it up,” Seavers said. “I just don’t want it going anywhere.”
T
HE WALLS OF THE ANCIENT WELL
were lined with stone, which made Serena wonder if it had been used for something sacred or ritualistic. It appeared to have been originally constructed with pure Algonquin muscle, probably two or more Indians working side by side. As such it was wide enough to accommodate both her and Conrad. He did the digging while she hauled up the dirt.
“Mother Superior always told me that if you ask God to move your mountain, don’t be surprised if he gives you a shovel.”
“Did she teach you to lie and cheat, too?” Conrad asked with a grunt, digging his shovel deep into the dirt. “You knew Brooke was Alignment from the start, Serena, didn’t you? But you didn’t warn me. You didn’t lift a goddamn finger until after I found my orders as Stargazer from Washington.”
“What did Brooke tell you, Conrad?”
“That Seavers is going to release a bird flu virus at the Olympic Games in Beijing next month.” He tossed a shovelful of dirt into a bucket. “Actually, he’s going to release it tomorrow at the National Mall. But the contagion won’t start until the Olympics so that everybody will assume it started in China. America gets to give the smart vaccine to its friends and deny it to its enemies at home and abroad. Seavers is just the Alignment’s trigger man for the Apocalypse. The globe we’re after is what they’re going to use to somehow justify the ‘cleansing’ and their New World Order.”
Like a dark shadow the revelation came upon her and she shivered.
“The bird flu,” she repeated. “Oh, my God, Conrad. I should have known. As a linguist I should have known.”
“Known what?”
“The word
influenza
comes from the Old Italian,” she said. “It means a ‘bad alignment of stars.’ The ancients associated the outbreak of plagues with astronomical conjunctions.”
“Yeah, well, this time the Alignment is going to make it happen.”
“We have to stop him, Conrad. But how in the world are we going to get to him?”
“We’re never going to find that needle in that haystack,” he said, breathing hard. “There are going to be a half million people picnicking on the Mall for the concert and fireworks. And security has never been tighter.”
As she watched him redouble his digging, Serena tried to make sense of this new revelation. Suddenly, she said, “I know where he’s going to do it.”
Conrad stopped digging for a moment, to catch his breath and listen.
“I heard Seavers talking to a Chinese official at the prayer breakfast. He’s going to the top of the Washington Monument when all the visiting Olympic officials go up to see the fireworks. We have to call it in to the president and Secretary Packard.”
Serena tried her cell phone, but of course there was no signal, not this deep under the earth.
“Like they’re going to believe us, anyway,” he said, and she heard a definitive clank of the shovel.
She got down on her knees and helped him clear the remaining dirt away to reveal the bottom of the well. She felt her stomach turn over.
“It’s not here,” she said, desperation in her voice. “The globe is gone. We have to leave and warn the White House about Seavers. We have no choice now.”
“No, it’s here.” Conrad wiped his brow and looked up the walls of the well. “I know it. We haven’t gotten below the water table yet. Step back.”
Serena moved aside as he lifted his heavy shovel into the air like a man with a sledgehammer at a county fair about to ring the bell and impress his girlfriend. “What are you doing?”
“This is a false bottom.” He brought the shovel down on the stone bottom of the well. Sparks flew from the thunder of the blow. Conrad lifted the shovel up again and brought it down even harder, and she heard a loud crack. “Help me lift these out.”
It took a half hour to haul up the stones, and another hour of digging before Conrad’s shovel produced a distinctive clink. He had struck something metal.
It was the globe.
Conrad set the shovel against the wall of the well, pulled out a cigarette from the pocket of the shirt he had lifted from a homeless man and lit it.
Serena stared at him. “What the bloody hell are you waiting for!” she said, worried that Max Seavers and his armed dupes could be on top of them any moment.
Conrad took a slow drag from his cigarette and blew out a perfect ring of smoke. She watched the “O” hang in the air, expand and break up as it floated away into nothingness. Finally, he spoke:
“Brooke said something else back at the Hilton.”
She could feel her stomach tighten. He always did this—chose the worst moments to bring up something he had been turning over for hours, days, weeks, or even years. “Not now, Conrad. Please.”
“She said you knew something about my blood. Something you’ve always known. Something I had to see to believe.”
Serena took a deep breath, walked over, and removed the cigarette from Conrad’s mouth. She took a slow, deep drag, returned the cigarette and blew smoke back in his face. “You really want to play this game now, of all times?”
“Yep.”
She got down on her knees in the bottom of the well and started digging desperately with her hands while Conrad watched her. “It’s not your blood so much as your DNA.”
“You had my DNA analyzed?”
“After Antarctica,” she said, her voice tightening.
“What did you take from me?”
“A lock of hair,” she said. “We can do this later, Conrad. Please help me. Help yourself.”
“Why did you have my DNA analyzed, Serena? You didn’t really believe what my father said there, did you? There’s nothing special about my DNA. You don’t think I had myself tested? I’ve seen the numbers, read all the tables. No unusual strands or combinations, Serena.”
“Conrad, you’re impossible!” She could see the top of something metallic just beneath the dirt.
“You know something I don’t, Serena? You usually do.”
“It isn’t explained in analysis, Conrad. You have to see it.”
“What the hell are you talking about, Serena?”
She rose to her feet and looked at him. “You want to know, Conrad? Fine. Your DNA strand spirals to the left.”
“Of course it spirals. That’s what the double-helix is all about.”
“Except that the DNA of every indigenous organism on planet Earth spirals to the right.”
She watched his hard face, watched his penetrating eyes study her, until his mouth softened and he dropped his cigarette and stamped it out. “So what do you believe, Serena?”
“I don’t know what to believe now, Conrad. Only that I love you and want to be with you if we get out of this mess. I realized that the moment I thought it was you who was dead in the room and not Brooke. But we have to pull out whatever is under our feet and get it before Seavers does, or we’re history.”
She wrapped her arms around Conrad’s neck and leaned up and kissed him full on the mouth. She could feel her heart pounding out of her chest and his arms wrapped around her waist, pulling her tight. Then he slowly let go and she looked up at his face, grim with determination.
“Let’s dig this thing up.”