Thomas Greanias - The Atlantis Prophecy

She looked up at Conrad in wonder. "You're Stargazer."

"What?"

She pushed a button on the partition to reveal Benito in front. "Benito," she said. "The jet."

"Si, signorina."

Conrad recalled that Benito was a former Swiss Special Forces soldier, a crack marksman, and the only Vatican bodyguard who could keep up with Serena on the slopes at Davos during World Economic Forums. He hoped the same was true for the streets of New York City.

"What's going on, Serena?" Conrad asked. "Less than twenty-four hours after you show up on the scene, people die, and my life goes into the crapper."

"That's why we have to get you out of here. You're in grave danger, and so is America and the whole world."

Suddenly a phone started ringing up front and Conrad jumped. The ringtone sounded familiar. It was an old Elton John song, "Benny and the Jets." Benito the driver didn't bother to pick up.

"The jet is fueling up at the airstrip, signorina," Benito said. "If we can reach it."

They turned a corner and Conrad saw the flashing lights of several blue-and-white police cars blocking the road. A young cop approached the limo, hand on his weapon.

"Alignment?" Conrad asked.

"God knows these days. Say your prayers."

Conrad looked at Serena, who crossed one leg over the other and then pulled out a flap revealing a space beneath the rear seat of the limo.

"You're kidding me, right?" he asked.

"Get under and shut up," she told him.

"Whatever happened to the missionary position?"

"May God have mercy on your soul, you wanker." She gave him a final kick inside and pushed the flap back into position behind him.

"Easy does it, Benito." Her voice sounded muffled to Conrad in the dark. He could feel the car slow to a halt. The squeak of a window lowering came next, then Serena's voice. "Yes, officer?"

There was a long pause, and Conrad crouched very still in the darkness. Then he heard the young cop clearing his throat. "Sister Serghetti," he said. "It's an honor."

"Is there a problem, Officer O'Donnell?" she said, reading his badge.

Thank God, thought Conrad. An Irish Catholic cop.

"Nothing concerning you, Sister. Looks like terrorists failed at both Penn Station and the United Nations."

"Is everything OK?"

"Nothing was stolen or destroyed," the officer told her. "But two federal agents, an Amtrak employee, and a cabbie were killed."

"I'm so sorry. Is there anything I can do to help? Do you need to search my car?"

Beneath the seat Conrad punched her in the rear.

"No, ma'am. That won't be necessary. To begin with, you've got diplomatic plates and a search would be illegal."

Conrad heard a shout and then a screech as one of the squad cars reversed and the Mercedes lurched forward as they were waved on through.

"God's angels watch over you, signorina," said Benito.

No, Benito, Conrad thought. She's the angel.

THE NEXT MORNING Serena stared out through the tinted glass of another limo at the towering ancient obelisk in St. Peter's Square as Benito drove through the gates of Vatican City. She thought of Conrad and wondered if it was wise to have left him back at the secret safe house outside New York City before flying here to press their case.

There were a few police outside on the plaza, but no tourists or paparazzi this early in the day. More pigeons than people, really.

"Not like the old days, signorina," said Benito, referring to the protestors and media circus that once surrounded her arrivals at the Vatican.

Back then she was only in her 20s but had already made a lifetime's worth of enemies as "Mother Earth" in the petroleum, timber, and biomedical industries-anyone who put profit ahead of people, animals, or the environment. Today she was an older and wiser 31, but the damage was done: Those inside the Vatican who had ties to these outside governments, corporate CEOs, and other "deep pockets" still didn't trust her and never would.

Which was why she had decided Conrad was better off back at the safe house.

"That was another era, Benito."

"Another pope, signorina."

They curved along a winding drive and arrived at the entrance of the Governorate. The Swiss Guards in their crimson uniforms snapped to attention as Serena walked in.

The old pope, by favoring her with his friendship, had protected her within these walls. In one significant way he still did. Before he died, he shared with her a vision he believed God had revealed to him about the end of the world. And he let others know as much. The halo effect ensured that at least some door would always be open to her here.

The new pope she hardly knew. He was a good man, although she had heard that he had voiced his displeasure at the special favor his predecessor had shown her. Which was reasonable, she concluded, given that the new pope knew her only by her nickname among his former peers in the College of Cardinals: "Sister Pain-in-the-Ass."

That included Cardinal Tucci, gatekeeper of the secret maps collections. She had called Tucci from somewhere over the Atlantic to demand access to the Vatican archives, an extraordinary privilege she had enjoyed under the old pope but which Tucci had revoked with the new pope.

"Sister Serghetti," Tucci said flatly when she entered his office, which was tucked away at the end of an obscure hallway, reached only by an old service elevator. "Welcome back."

Tucci rose from his high-back leather chair, a pair of seventeenth-century Bleau globes on either side, and extended his hand. Only in his late 40s, Tucci was a "secret cardinal." That is, he was appointed by the pope to the position and nobody else was informed of it, although Serena was aware of two others besides herself who also knew.

A secret cardinal to hide the secrets of the Church.

Every Christian, Serena knew all too well, must wrestle with the tension of living in this world without becoming a product of it. But she suspected that Cardinal Tucci had lost that battle a long time ago.

"Your Eminence," she said, and kissed his ring with the Dominus Dei insignia. Dominus Dei meant "Rule of God" and was an order within the Church that predated the Jesuits and traced itself back to the first Christians who served in the palace of Caesar in the first century. Secrecy was their highest value, as it meant survival in the early days of Christianity. Serena didn't like secrecy. It had become an excuse over the centuries for a host of crimes, crimes that made the fictionalized evils of Dominus Dei's upstart cousins in Opus Dei look like acts of charity.

"To what do I owe this pleasure?" he asked suspiciously as they sat down.

"I want to see the L'Enfant Confession," she said, just like that.

Tucci looked at her with undisguised disdain. He seemed tired of her already, and perturbed. Perturbed because she had pressed his aides to wake him up in the wee hours of the morning to take her call. Perturbed by her very existence.

If Tucci wondered how she got as far as she had within the Church, the feeling was mutual. He was boyish by Vatican standards and yet mature enough to sport the smile of a man who experienced enough of life to find it a bad joke. Even his name was ironic, implying he was some indigenous Italian bureaucrat when, in fact, his mother's side of the family came to America on the Mayflower and was Yankee through and through. He came to the Vatican by way of Boston, where he was known as a raucous but brilliant student at Harvard and an even more brilliant priest and professor of American history at Boston College. He had risen very far in Rome, very fast.

Even now, as she awaited a response, Serena couldn't help noticing, with some envy, the medallion that Tucci wore around his neck. In its center was an ancient Roman coin, a silver denarius with the image of the emperor Tiberius. Legend had it that this coin was the very "Tribute Penny" Jesus held up when he told his followers that they should "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's." It had been passed down through the ages, from one leader of the Dei to the next. Some argued it represented power greater than the papacy.