Thomas Greanias - The Atlantis Prophecy

DARPA had developed the pocket sonar for Special Ops forces searching for small underground structures like caves that could serve as hiding places for weapons of mass destruction or tunnels for smuggling weapons and terrorist infiltrators across borders. Conrad had adapted the sonar for exploring megalithic pyramids and temples in order to find and map his own secret chambers and passageways. Today he was looking for a hollow space in a foundation stone-the cornerstone.

He had done it once before, under remarkably similar circumstances, when he helped historians in Hawaii find a long-lost time capsule buried by King Kamehameha V in the cornerstone of the landmark Aliiolani Hale building. They knew the cornerstone contained photos of royal families dating back to Kamehameha the Great and the constitution of the Hawaiian kingdom. What they didn't know was its exact location. Conrad helped them find it within ten minutes, using his pocket sonar to locate the hollow spot in the northeast corner of the building.

He had to beat that record now.

Conrad watched the screen of the sonar as he made his way toward the southeast corner beneath the original north wing. For a second he thought he had something, but it turned out to be an old grating in the stone that led to the massive steam pipes.

There are miles of underground utility pipes that provide heat and steam from the Capitol Power Plant to the Capitol campus and surrounding areas. And these miles and miles of pipes were maintained by a team of ten employees from the office of the Architect of the Capitol.

Ten men to maintain miles of underground pipes.

His GPS tracker beeped and then he saw it, the dirt trench he was looking for. It was about three feet wide and four feet deep, dug by a previous Architect of the Capitol along with members of the U.S. Geological Survey. They had used metal detectors to look for the silver cornerstone plate beneath the stone, but had never found it.

If only they had used sonar, he thought. If only they had dug a few feet in the opposite direction.

Conrad aimed the sonar at the wall of large foundation stones to his right. The metamorphic sandstone had been ferried here on boats from quarries in Aquia, Virginia. And on the other side should be the northeast corner of the central section.

He watched the screen…

Ping!

He found a hollow space within the rock and made a crooked X on the stone with a marker. His hand was shaking.

The cornerstone of the U.S. Capitol. This is it! The very stone that Washington laid on September 18, 1793.

Based on the way it was set in the bedrock, it was slightly bigger than he expected-about two feet high and four feet wide.

This was the good part, he thought, the part the Hawaiians wouldn't let him do with the cornerstone back at the Aliiolani Hale. They said digging it up would destroy the building above, which was also a historic treasure. But you didn't have to dig it up to dig out what was inside.

He pulled out his pocket microwave drill, an incredibly useful tool originally developed at Tel Aviv University. The drill bit was a needle-like antenna that emitted intense microwave radiation. The microwaves created a hot spot around the bit, melting or softening the material so that the bit could be pushed in.

Conrad had used it beneath the Great Pyramid in Giza to slip a fiber optic camera into a previously closed shaft, much to the dismay of the Director General of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities, who liked to stage live "opening the tomb" spectacles for the American television networks.

If only this were televised, he thought, I'd be an American hero, maybe get "Ancient Riddles" back on the air. The feds could keep the damn globe so long as I got credit for the find. Then Serena and I…

The dream always got fuzzy in the end, because it was never going to happen with him and Serena. Not in this life, which was about to come to an abrupt end if he didn't finish this job.

With steady hands now, he began to bore a hole a centimeter wide through the sandstone, watching the tip of the drill bit glow an intense purple. The beauty of the microwave was that it was silent and didn't create dust. The only downside was the intense microwave radiation the drill produced. The shielding plate in front of the drill bit seemed awfully small to Conrad, who began to drip with sweat.

It was done in less than sixty seconds. Conrad cut the heat and pulled out the drill wire. He then snaked the fiber optic line through the hole and looked at the screen on his handheld device. The hair-thin cable emitted its own light and would give him a view inside the cavity of the cornerstone.

A few seconds later he saw it: nothing. The cavity was there, but it was empty.

Damn.

He leaned back in the dark, dumbfounded. Why would the Masons drop a recessed cornerstone and not put anything inside? It made no sense.

There was a movement behind him. Conrad turned. A man in a Haz-Mat mask stepped forward into the dim light. He removed his mask and reached for a radio.

"This is Pierce," he called in. "Alert sublevel 2, old furnace area. Suspect cornered."

"You people got here sooner than I thought," Conrad said, clenching his right fist around his handheld. "That's some nifty gear you've got."

"Who are you?"

"I'm you," Conrad told him and delivered a right hook to the man's temple that took him down.

The radio of the unconscious Haz-Mat technician squawked. The signal was breaking up in the subbasement, but Conrad heard enough to know he needed to get out, and he had known from the beginning he'd never get out the way he got in. Now, he could use the technician's gear for where he was headed.

As Conrad zipped up his Haz-Mat suit, a Capitol Police officer entered the old furnace area and saw the body on the ground. The CP drew his weapon and ran over. Conrad stood very still, pointing to the man on the ground.

"He was down here doing God knows what," Conrad said in a muffled voice through his mask.

The CP was bent over the body when he noticed Conrad's dusty wingtip shoes protruding from his newly donned suit, and quickly drew his pistol.

Conrad blocked the officer's arm and the gun fired. The sound of the shot inside the old walls was deafening. Conrad stiff-armed him in the neck, knocking him back against an electrical box, then raced for the grating to the network of old gas pipes.

He heard shouts and looked back to see a team of CP officers, rifles at the ready, running toward him, attracted by the sound of gunfire.

Conrad gave the grating a good hard yank and it came free.

The police were firing now and his mask was fogging up in the dark. A bullet ricocheted by Conrad's ear, sending him to the floor. He popped up again and, on all fours, lunged forward. A moment later he plunged into the steam tunnels.

BY THE TIME Max Seavers arrived on the scene at the old boiler room in the subbasement, a dozen Capitol Police were crowded around the piping entrance.

"What are you waiting for?" Seavers screamed.

But the Capitol Police officer halted his men and pulled out his radio to speak: "Suspect is in a Haz-Mat uniform and has entered the steam tunnels. Repeat, suspect is in the tunnels."

Seavers stared at him: "You're not going after him?"

"We won't even let our dogs go after him," the officer said. "Not down there. Too dangerous. All that crumbling concrete and carcinogenic asbestos. And our phones and radios don't work in the tunnels."

"This is a national security issue! That terrorist could be planting a suitcase nuke to blow up Capitol Hill!"

"That doesn't seem to be the case, sir, based on what we're seeing down here."

"And what the hell do you know?" Seavers said. "It was a CP officer who staged one of the last false alarms here a couple of years back. You know how they knew it was a CP officer? He was so stupid he couldn't even correctly spell out his 'anonymous' warning note."