M
ORE THAN 20 SECURITY CHECKPOINTS
had been set up around the National Mall in preparation for the day’s Fourth of July parade and festivities, which slowed an impatient Seavers on his way to retrieve the star map from the Library of Congress. That map, together with the Newburgh Treaty, was his insurance policy just in case he pulled the trigger on the bird flu contagion and Osiris suddenly decided he was of no further use to the Alignment.
Sitting in the rear of the black SUV with a Marine driving, Seavers pulled out a laptop computer from his briefcase and called up the Library of Congress website. He typed in the name of the book on obelisks that Yeats had given him. It was in special collections on the second floor of the Jefferson Building. He jotted down the call number.
He then removed the folded Newburgh Treaty from the left breast pocket of his suit jacket and reviewed the signatures, some famous and others obscure. He typed the names into his laptop to cross them against current U.S. political leaders. He wanted to see where the genealogies matched ancestor with descendant. A far more detailed analysis would be required later on, he knew, but almost immediately several names popped up and surprised even him.
“Well, would you look at that?” he said to himself with a soft whistle.
First, there was the sitting U.S. president himself, a “man of faith” that Seavers would not have guessed in a million years. Could he be
Osiris? The president’s lineage didn’t necessarily mean he was Alignment, only that it was likely.
Then there were the leading Democratic and Republican presidential candidates. Both had blue-blood family ties to the Alignment, ensuring that whoever was elected in November would stick to the Alignment plan. These names he more readily accepted as leaders of the Alignment.
Finally, there was Senator Scarborough—a real shocker since Brooke had been led to believe otherwise. So had Seavers.
He could only imagine what Scarborough was feeling now that the senator most surely had been given news of his daughter’s death. And Seavers could definitely thank his lucky stars that Conrad Yeats was taking the rap. As soon as he grabbed the star map he would call in the orders to kill Yeats, before anybody in the Alignment could interrogate him.
Seavers shut the laptop and looked out his window. It was going to be a hot and sticky day.
By the time he walked into the special collections room at the Jefferson Building, his shirt was soaked with sweat. The Library was closed to the public today but not to members of Congress and the executive branch. He flashed his ID to the lone female staffer at the desk, wrote out a request for the
Obelisks
book and waited. She returned with a copy.
He took the book to a cubicle and opened it. Nothing!
He returned to the desk and asked the woman for the second copy. She checked her computer and said, “It’s still in the carts, we haven’t shelved it yet.”
As calmly as he could, Seavers said, “Well, do you think you could check the carts? Please.”
She flinched at his intensity. “It may take me a few minutes. We only have a skeleton staff today.”
Seavers said nothing, and quietly fumed for almost fifteen minutes before she returned with the book.
“Here you go,” she chirped. “It was between—”
“Thank you,” he said, cutting her off and taking the book to the opposite corner of the room, out of her line of sight.
He cracked the book open and found the paper folded lengthwise
and tucked inside the spine, in the space between the cover and the binding. He unfolded it and saw Washington’s signature on one side and the star map on the other.
Seavers reluctantly had to give Yeats credit for not only finding both globes but thinking clearly enough to hide the star map among the millions of books at the Library of Congress as a bargaining chip.
But now that chip was cashed.
Seavers pulled out his BlackBerry and made the call. “This is Seavers. Terminate prisoner 33.”
S
ERENA HEARD THE DOOR
to the cell open and looked up from her gurney as two Marines, their faces all business, walked in. One of them went to the table with the syringes. The other marched straight for Conrad in the restraining chair and started thumping Conrad’s left forearm with his finger, looking for a vein.
She tried to shout, but her cries were muffled by the duct tape across her mouth.
“You strapped him so tight, you cut off his circulation,” the Marine complained to his comrade. “I can’t find a vein.”
The other Marine, who was preparing an IV apparatus, said, “Keep poking him with a needle until you find a gusher.”
Serena watched as the Marine attending to Conrad loosened the strap on his left hand to allow for more blood flow. Still without luck, he then tried the right arm and struck blood with a needle. He slipped a catheter into Conrad’s vein. The catheter tube was connected to two bags of a clear solution.
Conrad glanced at her and then spoke to the Marines. “Max Seavers was responsible for the deaths of Brooke Scarborough and a Capitol Police officer,” Conrad said. “And he’s going to be responsible for a billion more if you don’t help me.”
Either the mention of Brooke or the CP seemed to get their attention. But it didn’t slow their work. The Marine with the syringes placed them in order. “He gets sodium pentothal sedative
first, then the potassium chloride to paralyze him, and then the lethal injection.”
Serena suspected the Marines wouldn’t even need the lethal injection, because the only thing potassium chloride paralyzed was the heart: it stopped it cold. She started squirming in her straps, moaning as loud as she could. But the Marines ignored her.
Conrad said, “Seavers is working with terrorists against the U.S., and now you’re working for them, too.”
The Marine securing his catheter said, “Then why are you the one on death row in a black ops prison?”
“Because I know what Seavers is going to do,” Conrad said. “He’s going to release a weaponized flu virus on the Mall today during the fireworks.”
The Marine looked at him in disbelief. “On Americans?”
“On a Chinese delegation watching the fireworks from the Washington Monument. They won’t become infectious until the Olympics when it spreads worldwide.”
Something in the Marine’s eyes told Serena that he knew at least enough about Seavers to consider Conrad’s story in the realm of the possible. “And what are we supposed to do? Let you go?”
“No, call the Pentagon. Tell them you have a message from me for Secretary of Defense Packard. My name is Conrad Yeats. And that’s Serena Serghetti.”
Serena nodded up and down as the Marine walked over to her. He turned her gurney around so that her feet touched the wall and he looked down on her face with amazement. “Holy hell, I think it’s Mother Earth!”
The other Marine scowled. “You can’t possibly believe him, Hicks.”
“No, I really think it’s her,” Hicks said, and suddenly turned red-faced as he stared at her. “Remember those…pictures…I downloaded from the Internet.”
“That was her face on some stick model’s body,” the other Marine said. “This one’s got curves.”
Serena felt the bewildered gaze of Hicks. “Look,” Hicks said. “It can’t hurt to at least call in a potential security threat.”
With great relief Serena watched Hicks turn for the door when suddenly the other Marine shot him in the back of the head. Hicks’s arms went up in shock, and then he went down with a crash.
Serena stared at the dead Marine sprawled on the floor face down. The other Marine, obviously Alignment, holstered his sidearm and picked up a syringe with a nasty yellow-greenish color to it. Serena started to panic as the Marine took the syringe over to Conrad, who looked at her with determined eyes.
“Good thing the Pentagon ordered up that stockpile of bird flu vaccines,” the Marine said and pushed the syringe into the catheter.
Serena watched the yellow-green line of fluid wind its way down the long tube toward Conrad’s arm. The Marine watched it, too.
“Say night-night, Yeats,” the Marine said when Serena used her feet to push off the wall and launch the gurney into the Marine’s back.
The Marine shouted in surprise and turned to strike her.
As he did, Conrad snapped his left hand free from the loosened strap, yanked the catheter out of his right arm and plunged it into the Marine’s groin.
“You son of a bitch!” the Marine grunted, eyes wide in shock as he pulled the catheter out. But it was too late. Whatever he had intended for Conrad was in his system now. His eyes glazed over and he collapsed next to his fallen fellow Marine.
“And then some,” Conrad said, and began to unfasten the rest of his straps.
Serena’s heart leapt as Conrad stood up and wobbled, weak at the knees from the hours in the restraining chair. He staggered to the Marines and lifted their swipe cards and guns. Then he walked over to her and with a quick yank pulled off the duct tape.
“Let’s go,” he said.
Her lips stung, but finally she could move them as Conrad freed her.
“I can’t go, Conrad. If I’ve got the bird flu, I’m going to infect everybody. I may have already infected you.”
“Impossible,” he said, and she watched him take a Masonic dagger from the table and put the blade to his forearm. “I’m immune.”
“What are you doing?” she cried as he slit his arm. A scarlet line of blood oozed out.
“Brooke said Seavers used my blood for his vaccine.”
She stared at him. “And you believe her?”
“You said my double-helix spirals to the left instead of the right.” He took an empty syringe and unwrapped a sterile needle and drew his blood out. “Should I believe you?”
He offered her the syringe filled with his blood.
“But it’s just your blood, Conrad. It’s not the vaccine. We don’t know if it will work.”
“It can’t work if we don’t try.”
She took the syringe from him and ran the needle along her arm until she found the right spot. She hated getting shots, but her travels throughout the Third World long ago made them a regular part of her life. She had rolling veins but not deep, which meant she wouldn’t have to penetrate far beneath the skin.
“Do you want me to do it?” Conrad asked impatiently.
“No, I’ve got it,” she said and stuck herself with the needle.
Slowly she pushed Conrad’s blood out of the syringe and into her vein. It felt warm and strange. Then she pulled the needle out, put her thumb on the puncture and held her arm up.
“So how in bloody hell do we get out of here?” she said, standing up. “Those swipe cards can’t open every door in this facility.”
“No, but I bet this will,” Conrad said, and held up a finger—Max Seavers’s missing finger.
C
ONRAD LED
S
ERENA THROUGH
the dark corridor to another metal door, the sixth they had encountered. They hadn’t seen any more Marines, and security cameras were nowhere to be found. But Conrad was beginning to wonder if they were ever going to get out of there, much less in time to stop Seavers.
He used Seavers’s severed finger to open the door and walked into a round conference room dominated by a circular stone table and thirteen white marble busts in alcoves evenly spaced along the wall. In the center of the table was the terrestrial globe.
“The lair of the Alignment,” Serena said. “These busts look to be the work of Houdon.”
“Who?” Conrad asked, his eyes searching for another way out, but he couldn’t find one.
“Houdon,” Serena repeated. “A French sculptor during the Enlightenment who made famous busts of Washington and the Founding Fathers. I’ve seen his work on exhibit at both the Louvre in Paris and at the Getty in Los Angeles. Only these aren’t America’s Founding Fathers. These faces belong to the other founders, to the Alignment.”
Something about the dimensions of the room struck Conrad as familiar and he felt drawn to an empty section of wall between two of the busts. As he stood there, his eyes adjusted enough to make out the faintest outline of a doorway. He pushed it with his hand and the previously invisible door slid open.
“I’ll be damned,” he said. “This is just like the shafts in the sublevels of P4 and the Great Pyramid.”
“The Great Pyramid?” she repeated.
“When I was under the Library of Congress, I saw a monument the Masons proposed in the same chamber that held the celestial globe,” he said. “Some kind of American Memorial, like they feared the worst and wanted to preserve their memory—and America’s—through a monument that would stand as long as the pyramids. This is where I think both they and the Alignment knew it would be, wherever we are. So the Alignment basically graded the site. All it’s waiting for is the pyramid on the surface.”
“And it’s going to go up as soon as America falls,” Serena said.
“We’ve got to hurry,” he said. “If this is like P4, then I know the way out.”
He started for the door but Serena didn’t budge.
“I told you, Conrad. I can’t go with you. I can’t risk spreading bird flu contagion on the surface and doing the Alignment’s dirty work.”
He stared at her. “But I gave you my homegrown vaccine, Serena. If it didn’t work, you’d be showing symptoms by now.”
“We don’t know that for sure, Conrad. And I can’t take that risk. You’re going to have to stop Seavers yourself.”
“And what are you going to do in the meantime?” he demanded.
“I’m going to stay here and wait for you and the cavalry to come back.” She walked up to him, tears streaming down her face, and kissed him. “But if we get out of this alive, I’m going to walk out of here with you and walk away from my life as a nun. If you still want it, we’re going to start a new life together.”
He looked into her wet eyes. “What about the Church?”
She wiped her eyes. “I was supposed to betray you, Conrad, to use you to find the globes and take them from you. Please forgive me,” she begged. “You have to believe I’m sorry.”
Conrad could see she was. “But you always told me you believed that the Church is the hope of the world.”
She shook her head. “Jesus is the hope of the world, Conrad. And the hope of the Church. We are called to be the Church and serve people in His name. I don’t have to be a nun to do that. And I don’t
want to go on without you. I told you. I knew it the moment Max took me to your room and I expected to see your body instead of Brooke’s.”
“You swear to God?” he said.
“You know I don’t like those kinds of oaths, Conrad. But, yes, I swear before God.” She then threw her arms around him and hugged him tight. “Conrad, go.”
He hesitated, then gave her a pistol and swipe card. “In case you change your mind,” he said, and shut the door, leaving her alone with the globe and the faces of thirteen dead white men.
Serena stared at the faces of the thirteen marble Houdon busts. The founding fathers of the Alignment in America. They were so lifelike that she half-expected them to speak to her in the shadowy chamber.
And then one of them did.
It was the second to her right, a face oddly strange and familiar.
When she leaned forward to study the face, she suddenly recognized it.
She gasped. “Oh, my God.”
Remembering the names from the Newburgh Charter that she had memorized, she now knew why Cardinal Tucci wanted the globe at the Vatican.
Dear Lord, my promise to Conrad.
She paced before the globe and her jury of the deceased, praying to God for some answer. The shot that Conrad had given her was clearly kicking in, and she was feeling stronger, more alert. So alert that it frightened her.
The Americans already had the celestial globe that the Masons had buried beneath the Library of Congress. If Conrad succeeded in stopping Seavers, as she prayed he would, then the Americans would have both globes. But if he failed, she now realized that the Alignment would control not only America but also the Church.
With a heavy heart she knew what she had to do.
Conrad, forgive me.
Conrad ran through a maze of corridors until he reached a door without a biometric keypad that would require the finger from Max Seavers. That suggested he was reaching the outer, less secure perimeter. He only needed to use one of the Marine’s swipe cards to unlock it. He cracked the door open and sighed at what he saw: another dark corridor. When he was sure it was clear, he made his way out.
This corridor was different, and he immediately sensed it was some kind of neutral bridge between the Alignment’s secret bunker and the larger world. At the end of it was a pinprick of light and a dull roar. He edged cautiously toward the door that emerged in the light when suddenly it was flung open. A Metro engineer stepped in and froze when he saw Conrad.
“Shit, you military people always scare me,” the engineer said, “skulking around down here like shadows.”
“And because of us you get to celebrate Independence Day,” Conrad said and kept walking, without looking back.
Conrad emerged from a utility door onto a lower platform of the L’Enfant Plaza Metro Station. With no less than three Metro lines intersecting here, it now made complete sense why the Alignment chose the bunker below as their place to meet. But he was spotted across the platform by a D.C. police officer instantly, whose hand went to his mouth as he radioed in.
Conrad ran up the escalators to a food court tunnel, where four more policemen were coming toward him.
The underground food court connected him to the Loews L’Enfant Plaza Hotel, and when he cut across the lobby he emerged into the bright light of day and blinked.
There must have been several thousand motorcycles and leather-clad bikers revving their engines in front of him. Their black leather jackets said Rolling Thunder, and the backs of their bikes boasted American flags.
Conrad caught up to the rear of the group and scanned the nearest tattooed and bearded bikers prepping their machines. He found an old-timer in his sixties with a handlebar mustache and beer gut wearing a black “Ancient Riddles” T-shirt. He was wiping the chrome fork of his BMW chopper.
Conrad stole a helmet on the ground and brazenly walked up to
the man. “Hey, partner, my bike’s busted and I could use a lift,” he said as he offered his hand. “I’m Conrad Yeats.”
The rider rose to his surprisingly tall six-foot-four-inch height and looked down at him. “Anything for the Griffter’s kid. My name’s Marty. Hop on.”
Conrad jumped on the chopper as Marty hit the accelerator and they rode off to join the others in the parade.