Thomas Greanias - The Atlantis Prophecy

She opened it and climbed out of the ancient tunnel and into a machinery room. A minute later she popped through a metal door into an underground passageway and startled a group of young Capitol pages. They were exiting the Capitol complex with their supervisors and heading back to their school on the top floor of the Jefferson Building at the Library of Congress.

At this point, Sergeant Randolph knew that even if she saw the perp she wouldn't know him now. She wanted to scream, but it would only scare the Hill staffers.

Her radio, now in range of the command post, squawked.

She picked it up and said, "Suspect's gone native. Time: 1304 hours."

The Jefferson Building at the Library of Congress was the most ornate building in Washington, D.C., the greatest library in history since the Library of Alexandria burned to the ground two thousand years ago. Besides a fifteenth-century Gutenberg Bible, there were ancient maps of Antarctica that showed the subglacial topography of the continent before it was covered with ice, complete with curious addenda by the U.S. Air Force. Then there was a nineteenth-century manuscript copy of U.S. Senator Ignatius Donnelly's worldwide bestseller Atlantis: The Antediluvian World. Most prophetic, perhaps, was a sixteenth-century essay of Francis Bacon's on "The New Atlantis," all about the New World and the land that would become America.

Not that any of that interested Conrad right now as he split from the procession of Capitol pages and passed through a deep arch into the library's central atrium a few minutes later.

The ornate Great Hall was flanked by two grand staircases and constructed almost entirely of white Italian marble. Floating 75 feet overhead was a spectacular ceiling with stained glass skylights, paneled beams, and 23-karat gold leaf accents.

The street exit was just a stone's throw away. He started for it when he saw several Capitol Police officers coming in, talking on their radios.

He turned around and ducked into a public restroom, where he removed his dirty suit jacket and jammed it into a trash can. Then he ripped off his fake goatee and threw cold water on his face. He rolled up the sleeves of his blue dress shirt and looked at himself in the mirror, a relatively new man. After he wiped the dust off his shoes, he walked back out into the Great Hall.

Seeing police at the security station by the main floor exit, he crossed the wine-dark marble floor and climbed one of the marble stairways to the second floor level. There a crowd was pressed against the glass overlooking the East Lawn of the Capitol across the street.

With the polite authority of a Library docent he pushed his way through the bodies toward the window. Then he looked down and realized he had a skybox seat to the mess he had made across the street-police vans, news crews, the works.

All for naught, he thought as he stared out the glass. He had followed his precious "cosmic radiant" in the sky above Pennsylvania Avenue to the dome of the U.S. Capitol only to find an empty cornerstone.

All that remained for him now was to wait for an opportunity to escape the Library, meet Serena at their designated rendezvous, and tell her that he had failed.

Even now, the Statue of Freedom atop the Capitol dome across the street seemed to be mocking him. Made of bronze, it was six meters tall and, standing on the dome, the tallest statue in D.C. since 1863. By law no statue was permitted to be taller. Maybe that's why the statue's back was turned to the Washington Monument rising high into the sky beyond.

Or maybe not.

He caught his breath.

The U.S. Capitol was built to face west. But the Statue of Freedom faced the Library of Congress in the east. In theory this reversal was decided on so that the sun would never set on the face of Freedom, but Conrad suddenly wondered if there was another reason.

He looked again at the gleaming dome of the U.S. Capitol under cloudy skies-the cosmic center of Washington, D.C. What if the cosmic radiant in the sky that paralleled Pennsylvania Avenue didn't end over the dome? What if it kept going? In his mind's eye, he extended the radiant to the east…to right about where he was standing in the Library of Congress.

He turned and walked back through the crowd toward the balcony overlooking the Great Hall and looked down twenty feet below. In the center of the marble floor was a giant sunburst, around which were 12 brass inlays of the signs of the zodiac arranged in a giant square.

This must be what the Masons wanted Stargazer to find: A marker of their own design, laid directly along the path of the city's central radiant.

Conrad could feel his heart beating out of his chest.

A zodiac in the shape of a square rather than a circle symbolically linked the constellations to the flat plane of the earth, not the vast space of the heavens. And a sunburst in the center, if he recalled correctly, represented the cardinal points of the compass.

Meaning the zodiac on the floor of the Great Hall was pointing to a hidden direction on Earth-or under the earth.

The Masons moved the globe. And it was right here, under the Library of Congress.

THAT AFTERNOON Max Seavers marched down corridor nine toward Secretary of Defense Packard's suite of offices on the third floor of the Pentagon. It had taken a half hour for his black Escalade to get there from the media circus at the U.S. Capitol on this overcast Monday afternoon, and he dreaded the inevitable confrontation in store.

This meeting had already been on the books. Seavers was supposed to debrief Packard after his testimony on the smart vaccine before Scarborough's committee. Only now, thanks to Conrad Yeats, Packard would be asking about what, if any, connection there was between the empty cornerstone beneath the Capitol and the bizarre codes on General Griffin Yeats's tombstone at Arlington, and how a dead American general and his elusive son could make them all look like jackasses.

Two MPs saluted as he approached the vault-like doors, and Seavers surrendered his BlackBerry to the receptionist before passing through. Packard's office was classified a SCIF, or sensitive compartmented information facility. No mobile phones, BlackBerries, or other wireless devices were permitted inside. The idea was to ensure that the most classified conversations could be held in this office in confidence, without fear of being overheard.

This afternoon the only other person in the room besides Packard and Seavers was Packard's intelligence chief, Norman Carson, Assistant Secretary of Defense C3I, who sat in one of two chairs in front of Packard's desk. A wiry egghead with thinning hair and a thinner sense of humor, Carson was in charge of all command, control, communications, and intelligence for the DOD, which these days pretty much covered all of America. He was also the executive agent responsible for ensuring the continuity of government should some unthinkable attack or natural cataclysm hit the United States.

Carson didn't bother to get up and shake hands when Seavers walked in, and Packard was already behind his stand-up desk. Seavers took his seat. The vaultlike doors closed heavily behind him in the lobby, then another set in Packard's office closed likewise, sealing them and whatever they said inside.

Packard glared down at Seavers from his desk, which looked like a giant lectern, the ultimate bully pulpit. "What the hell is going on, Seavers?"

"Security cameras in the Capitol confirm it was Conrad Yeats, Mr. Secretary. We ran the tapes through the facial recognition software. He circumvented security and bypassed the detection gates by posing as a congressman from Missouri."