Thomas Greanias - The Atlantis revelation

In the ballroom, Serena found the EU heads of state seated in front of their national flags around a pentagon of tables beneath Murano crystal chandeliers. Around the leaders was a much larger ring of tables packed with diplomatic staff, international press, and banks of equipment for audiovisual and simultaneous interpretation.

She made her way behind the press area, glancing up now and then to see the image of a talking head flash across the large screen over the stage. She could only guess how many of those faces belonged to the Thirty. Whoever her counterparts of the Alignment turned out to be, Serena was convinced that the message of the Templar globes and this EU summit were connected symbiotically. The origins of the globes had been traced to King Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem, after all, and it was the future of that city under discussion in this ballroom.

She found Benito backstage with the globes, which were disregarded by all the technical people moving to and fro as mere set pieces and part of the show, somebody else's responsibility.

Midas was there, too, and he wasted no time. "You have something for me?"

Serena removed the Shekel of Tyre from her pocket and handed it to him.

He didn't take her word for it and took out some sort of pocket-sized device to shine an infrared light on it. "The ancients used some kind of polymer material on the coins. The effect is like an invisible UV stamp. See?" he said. He showed her the coin under the light, and to her amazement, she saw four arrowlike markers emblazoned at the cardinal points around the bust of Baal. They made a cross, and she recognized it as the adopted flag of the island's Knights of St. John.

Midas held up his infrared device and said accusingly, "I used this on your celestial globe here, too. It's a fake."

"I have the real one in my car outside. You were to give me further instructions?"

Midas seemed pleased. "You are to take the globes to the west entrance of the Palace of the Grandmaster at three o'clock, where you will be met by a nameless Greek attache and directed to a chamber where you will present the globes to Uriel," he told her. "You have ten minutes."

She left Lorenzo and the faux celestial globe at the convention center and climbed into the back of the SUV with the two genuine globes. Benito pulled onto the access drive, and the police waved them through the exit gate.

Uriel, she thought. Serena had never heard that name among the Thirty. But she knew that Uriel was the name of the angel in Genesis who guarded the gate to the Garden of Eden with a flaming sword after God kicked Adam and Eve out of paradise. Conrad's information about the Flammenschwert weapon was beginning to make sense, and she was eager to find out who this Uriel could be.

As they drove toward the Palace of the Grandmaster, she could tell Benito was impressed with her acquisition of the genuine celestial globe but concerned all the same.

"And Signor Yeats?" he asked, glancing at her in the rearview mirror.

"With the Americans," she answered.

Benito bit his tongue, but Serena could read his eyes: That man will hate you for the rest of your life, you cold, heartless bitch. Well, he wouldn't say that. Benito didn't swear, and he knew more than anybody else what was necessary. He seemed sad all the same, though.

But she had come to Rhodes to unmask the Alignment. In a few minutes she would deliver the globes, as promised. In a few hours she would attend tonight's Council Meeting of the Thirty. Then everything she had worked for and sacrificed-including a life with Conrad-would pay off once and for all.

The Greek pilot brought the Super Puma Eurocopter over Rhodes at nine hundred feet, steering clear of the EU summit's security red zones below and following an alternative glide path to the airstrip. The skies were clear and offered Conrad a spectacular view of the island below.

"Security zones?" Conrad asked in broken English with the best Turkish accent he could make up. His attempt was so bad it actually worked, cracking up one of the Greeks. Another, named Koulos, decided to help the confused Turk get a lay of the land.

"The red inner-security zones are around the Palace of the Grandmaster in the Old Town down there, and the Rodos Palace hotel and convention center are in New Town over there," Koulos shouted in English above the whir of the rotor blades. "They are linked by the harbor drive. Only authorized personnel or security assigned to those zones can pass through the checkpoints."

Conrad nodded.

"The walls of Old Town outside the Palace of the Grandmaster are the perimeter of the yellow outer-security zone. No vehicles without proper registration and full inspection are allowed through the gates."

Conrad pulled out the military BlackBerry Packard had given him with the GPS tracking program. He called up the satellite map of Rhodes from Google Earth and tried to find the pulsing blue dot that represented the celestial globe Packard had given Serena. The glare from the sun outside the chopper windows made it too difficult to read the screen until they landed and he jumped off onto the tarmac.

That was when he got the fix: The globe was in the red zone at the convention center, hopefully with the other two.

Conrad signed for his police motorcycle as Firat Kayda. Though the bike belonged to the police department, it wasn't an official police motorcycle and had no siren. When he reached the convention center, his ID badge worked beautifully, and he was able to glide through the checkpoint to the main entrance of the hotel, allegedly to meet his Turkish superiors.

He followed the GPS signal through the hotel atrium and into the airy exhibition area where all kinds of "green" technology companies promised to turn the Middle East into a tropical paradise for investment and generate fat profits to European investors. "More than oil" seemed to be the theme, highlighting the commercial benefits of peace in the region.

The bright sunlight provided him with the perfect excuse to keep his sunglasses on, like many others, and look nondescript as he passed a spectacular circular staircase toward the Delphi Amphitheater.

He stopped outside the door and put away his BlackBerry. The security guard glanced at his badge and nodded.

Conrad slipped into the back of the three-level amphitheater, which was packed with almost six hundred delegates. Up on the stage, speaking from the podium before an impressive array of flat-panel screens flashing all sorts of logos and graphics, was Roman Midas.

What does he have to say that any of these people want to hear? Conrad unconsciously shrank back against the wall with a group of bystanders who couldn't find seats. He felt like a convict in a police lineup for Midas to pick out. But all the lights and attention were on Midas now, and Conrad doubted the man could see anyone beyond the front row.

"It's the new alchemy," Midas proclaimed. "Water springing forth from the desert."

High-definition graphics showed how the same deep-mining technology that Midas Minerals amp; Mining had used to extract oil from the "world's most difficult to reach substrata" could now be harnessed to extract water from the hidden rivers and aquifers of the Sinai Peninsula.

Midas said, "The dust bowl becomes the bread basket of the Middle East, freeing the region from dependence on foreign agriculture and offering local populations the opportunity to grow and export more than oil."

The names of various Israeli and Arab partners popped up on the screens to underscore the international cooperation of this "consortium of leading industries" to "rid the Middle East of its dependence on oil."

Well, that's a new one, Conrad thought as he slowly made his way along the curving back wall of the room. He suspected he would come upon a door leading to a projection booth or control room of some kind, which was probably as obscure a place as any to store the globes until they could be moved. He couldn't imagine them alone without armed security. But the only door that appeared was the other rear exit.