Thomas Greanias - The Atlantis revelation

That was assuming the train reached the end of the line. The Mother Teresa international airport in Tirana was only an hour away, but they were going less than thirty-five miles an hour.

Conrad had escaped Corfu and crossed the Adriatic to the southern coast of Albania in under thirty minutes, all thanks to the hydrofoil Andros had provided, along with fake passports, a bag of disguises, and two untraced smartphones, a BlackBerry and an iPhone, each operating on a separate network carrier. From the beach at Durres, he had made it to the local train station, where he first saw the news about Mercedes and his picture on all the news websites on his iPhone.

Goddamn bastards, he thought as he gave himself a final once-over in the small mirror.

He was thinking of Midas and the Alignment, Packard and the U.S., and even Serena and the Church. Everybody, in the end, was in bed with each other when they weren't killing each other. Also, it bothered him to no end to see that he had better cell phone reception in Albania than he had back in the States: He had just received his electronic boarding pass from Swissair in his bogus identity's e-mail inbox.

He put away his makeup and glared at the only other passenger in the private compartment of this secondhand railroad car: Baron von Berg. Sitting on a torn seat, the skull taunted him with its jagged grin and the secrets it once possessed.

It's all in my head.

Conrad pulled out the Glock he kept tucked inside his back waistband. Aiming the butt of the pistol like a hammer over the skull, he brought it down on the silver plate, smashing the skull to pieces. He looked at the fragments of bone scattered around the silver plate on the table.

Nothing. The skull was indeed empty.

Then he picked up the silver plate. He turned it over and held his breath. There was a glint of small engraving in the silver.

"Von Berg, you crazy bastard," Conrad said as he took a closer look at the engraving.

It was a string of eight characters-four numbers followed by four letters: 1740 ARES.

There it was: 1740 had to be the number of Baron von Berg's safe deposit box in what was now Midas's Swiss bank. And ARES had to be the combination.

This was the four-digit code Midas was looking for.

He had it and Midas didn't.

But with the Alignment, there was always more, he knew. Nothing could be taken for granted.

Ares was the name of the ancient Greek god of war. The astral projection was the constellation Aries, the first sign of the zodiac. The planet Mars, with the Roman name of the same Greek god, had entered the sign of Aries two weeks ago on March 20, the spring equinox.

A coincidence?

Not for these Alignment bastards. Every day and date had some sort of bizarre meaning for them, if for nobody else.

There was probably an astrological connection that could throw light on the baron's 1943 plans for the Flammenschwert and Midas's plans for it in the new millennium.

Mercedes had said something about seven more days. That would be one week from today-Good Friday for Christians around the world, according to the Gregorian calendar. There would be a full moon that night, followed the next day by the Jewish Passover and the day after that by Christian Easter.

Beyond those dates, Conrad saw nothing else of astrological or astronomical significance on the calendar while the zodiac was fixed in Aries.

Seven days.

Whatever was going to happen with the Flammenschwert was going to happen then. And the religious significance of the dates only further confirmed the magnitude of the Alignment's plot, whatever it was.

The train's wheels made a high-pitched screech, and Conrad looked out to see a sheer cliff as the train hugged a mountain above the Adriatic. He took the opportunity to toss the silver plate out the window and scatter the remains of the skull over the waters. Not quite a proper burial for the Baron of the Black Order, but it would have to do.

By the time the train pulled into the station in Tirana, he was all packed up and ready to step off into his new identity. He scanned the platform for any security and grabbed a cab to the Mother Teresa airport.

An hour later, he leaned back in his seat as the Swissair plane lifted off the runway and banked toward Zurich. The seat belt sign blinked off a few minutes later, and flight attendants took drink orders. He ordered two Bloody Marys, one for Serena and one for Mercedes, painfully aware that he'd just had a very close call and that this was the last free pass he'd enjoy on the journey before him.

A darkened military car carrying one American and three Azerbaijani special forces commandos rolled through the city's old town toward the harbor before dawn. Riding shotgun in the front passenger seat with an AG36 40mm grenade launcher across her lap was the American, a knife-thin black woman in her early thirties with short hair and sharp features. Her name was Wanda Randolph, and her mission was to intercept and secure a mysterious shipment that had landed at Heydar Aliyev International Airport, sixteen miles east of Baku. The airport's advanced Antworks computer software and scanner system had tagged and tracked the crate through the cargo terminal's state-of-the-art X-rays and radiation detectors to an awaiting van. The van had taken the crate to a warehouse on the Caspian, where it was waiting to be loaded onto an oil tanker.

The operation was code-named Feuerloscher-German for "fire extinguisher."

The commando raid was to be carried out jointly by American and Azerbaijani special operations forces and locals. The mission had been mounted rapidly overnight on orders from the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Department when the location of the crate had been confirmed. Another dozen American commandos in a specially equipped Black Hawk were ready to swoop in if the team got pinned in a gun battle.

Wanda glanced up from the glowing GPS map that General Packard had sent to her handheld computer. The ancient walls of the Palace of the Shirvanshahs, the Maiden Tower, and the Juma Mosque rose up on either side of the narrow, twisting alley. Then the car cleared the maze of buildings, and the pitch-black Caspian Sea spread out before them, marked by the lights along the waterfront.

The Caspian was called a sea because, at 143,244 square miles, it was the world's largest lake, smack between Russia to the north and Iran to the south. Azerbaijan occupied the western shores, and tonight it felt as if the city of Baku stood at the edge of the world, a world that itself was teetering on the brink of a bottomless abyss.

"Take a left," she told the driver, a young macho gun named Omar.

"Yes, ma'am," Omar said in a bogus Oklahoma accent, eliciting muffled chuckles from the other two in back. All three had been trained in a cross-cultural Oklahoma National Guard training program with the U.S. Army and loved to play the American cowboy in the new Wild West here on the Caspian. But none had ever been ordered to listen to a woman, let alone one of color, and they resisted. The election of America's first black president, it turned out, wasn't going to change human nature or much of anything else in this world.

They turned onto Neftchilar Avenue and drove along the waterfront boulevard and marina. They quickly passed the state oil company and government house and, a few minutes later, were surrounded by the oil derricks and pumps of the east harbor.

At last she could make out the warehouse where the van with the crate containing the Flammenschwert was parked. She directed Omar to park at the adjoining oil terminal, then led them to a communal outhouse.

"Why have we stopped?" Omar said once they were inside and could talk quietly. He was breathing through his mouth because of the stench. "The warehouse is the other way."