Thomas Greanias - The Atlantis revelation

He looked back up the Street of Knights in time to swerve away from the oncoming black Mercedes, taking out the driver's-side mirror as he whooshed by.

Dead ahead was the silver Mercedes SUV. Conrad could glimpse Benito's astonished face as it passed a parked Peugeot in front of the Inn of Provence. Everything seemed to go slow-motion as Conrad considered the police behind him, the silver Mercedes ahead of him, and the parked Peugeot.

It didn't belong there.

And before he could warn Benito, the Peugeot exploded in a ball of fire and blew the Mercedes apart.

"Serena!" he shouted before the shock wave sent him flying through the air.

Serena found herself on her hands and knees on the street. The SUV had been split open. She tried to get up but couldn't. As she crouched there, numb from shock, she could see Benito barely moving on the other side of the burning wreck.

"Oh my God. Benito!"

She crawled on all fours toward him. Half his face was burned off, but his arm was moving. Then she saw his insides spilling out. "Oh God." She reached toward him but was still several feet away.

Benito knew he was dying and struggled for breath. "Do not be afraid, signorina, for he will take care of you now."

Just then a shadow fell across Benito's face, and Serena looked up to see a twisted face with an eyepatch standing over her. She screamed as the man pointed a gun at her.

"Last rites," he said in a Russian accent, and pulled the trigger.

She heard the shot but felt nothing. The assassin fell facedown in front of her. She stared in shock and heard her name.

"Serena!"

It was Conrad driving up through the smoke on a motorcycle, like a demon from hell. Behind him were the police, chasing him like the Furies.

He braked to a halt and pulled her up to her feet. "Come on."

She couldn't leave Benito. "I can't."

"Hurry," Conrad said, and dragged her by the arms and plopped her on the back of his bike. He slid in front of her and took her slack arms and wrapped them around his waist. "Please, Serena, hold on."

"I told you not to come, Conrad," she said breathlessly, bitterly, and started crying. "I told you."

"This was set up long before I got here, Serena, long before you got here." He kick-started the bike, and she could feel it roar to life beneath them. He was going to carry her away, and her work wasn't done yet.

"The council meeting tonight. I have to stay."

"I'm sorry, Serena," she heard him say as the rear tire squealed and they drove off.

Conrad squinted at the setting sun as he raced out the west end of the Street of Knights into Kleovoulou Square, the police close behind. He could feel Serena's heart pounding as she barely held on. He turned onto the wide, shady Orpheos Street and, to the right, spotted the wall linking the interior wall and the main wall of Old Town. He found what he was looking for-the Gate of St. Anthony-and rode up the ramparts, leaving the police cars blocked below him.

He flew past the iron benches and artists drawing portraits of tourists, scattering easels and eliciting shouts and curses. Then he turned left into a dark tunnel.

A moment later, he burst out of Old Town through the impressive d' Amboise Gate. Two policemen started shooting as he drove across the arched bridge and over the dry moat into the New Town. He cut right onto Makariou Street and thundered down toward the harbor.

"I've got a seaplane by the windmills at the breakwater," Serena said, coming to life.

"I've got a boat, I think. One of Andros's."

"I'll fly us out," she said.

There were sirens growing louder from all directions. All at once the street opened up into Kyprou Square, and he could see two triangular traffic islands in the middle of an intersection of seven streets from seven angles. There were no traffic lights, and most of the cars whizzing through were police or driven by Greek citizens.

"Hang left!" Serena shouted.

"Right," he said.

"Left as in straight ahead!"

"I know!" he shouted, and drove in the channel between the two islands to the other side, barely clearing two cars that hit their brakes.

Conrad could hear the squealing and then the crash of metal and horns behind him. In his mirror, he saw that three police cars had locked fenders.

He turned right and slowed down as he passed Starbucks and the post office and vanished into the early-evening shadows that had fallen across the seaside cafes.

At the breakwater front by the secluded windmills, Conrad could see Brother Lorenzo waiting by the Otter seaplane. The priest started to shake at the sight of him. Conrad drove up the stone pier to the edge of the water.

"They're saying a roadside bomb went off in the Knights' Quarter," Lorenzo said breathlessly as he helped Serena off the bike. "Two bodies were found."

"Benito," she told him.

Lorenzo looked at Conrad. "They said that the Israeli defense minister was the target and that the Egyptian terrorist behind it, Abdil Zawas, accidentally blew himself up. Your picture is on the television as one of his associates."

"Point that bony finger at me and I'll break it off," Conrad snapped. "What the hell are you doing here?"

Serena stopped him with a weak hand. "His instructions were always to fall back here if we ran into trouble," she said, and climbed on board and started the props.

Conrad glared at Lorenzo, who quickly followed Serena into the Otter and frantically waved him in.

Conrad rolled the motorcycle into the water, climbed into the plane, and pulled up the door behind him. Soon they lifted off into the evening sky and banked to the east as Conrad looked down to see flashing lights descend on the harbor below.

It was almost ten o'clock that night on Rhodes when a triumphant Roman Midas walked out onto the steps of the Palace of the Grandmaster with assorted European leaders and waited for his limousine. He was in a tuxedo after a spectacular black-tie concert outdoors in the courtyard, made all the more poignant by the violence of that afternoon's car bombing.

"Gellar and the Israelis were bloody lucky," he had heard the British prime minister tell the German chancellor before the concert. "A tragic loss for Sister Serghetti, however. Good drivers are hard to find."

"Oui" was all he heard from the French president afterward, who could understand why she'd chosen to skip the concert. "But I'm more troubled by intelligence reports that this YouTube video from Zawas signals an imminent attack on a much bigger target."

All of them had enjoyed the concert.

Some, Midas knew, more than others. While most of the dignitaries sat in chairs under the stars and listened to the Berlin Philharmonic, seventeen of them sat in chairs under the courtyard, in the Hall of Knights, and listened to Sorath lay out the plan for world peace.

None of the faces were ones he had expected, and yet by the end of the meeting, he couldn't possibly imagine anybody else qualified to carry out the plan.

As for the plan itself, it left him in awe.

The Solomon globes were back in the hands of the Jews after so many centuries. Now General Gellar and his ultra-Orthodox friends possessed their final puzzle piece to begin construction of a Third Temple. Only the Al-Aqsa Mosque stood in their way, and Gellar was all too willing to let the Alignment do the dirty work for him and call it an act of God. All Gellar had to do was use the globes to transport the Flammenschwert into place beneath the Temple Mount.

There would be an uprising from the Palestinians, of course, quite likely igniting a wider war. When all reasonable avenues of diplomacy had been exhausted, which was always the case in the Arab world, the international "peace process" that Gellar had bound Israel to at this EU summit would come into play-too late for Gellar to realize that he had betrayed his country for his religion. Not that there would be room for either in the new world order. Jerusalem would be occupied by international peacekeepers, and the new temple would become the throne of the Alignment to control the Middle East.