Thomas Greanias - The Atlantis Prophecy

"That guard is our only chance of finding out what really happened in the processing room," she said. "I'll see what I can get out of him before he goes into surgery. You keep working the DOD detail. They can sweep the tunnel clean but they can't seal it off forever."

The ambulance was getting ready to go. The first EMT had gone behind the wheel and the second one was about to close the doors in the back.

Wanda sprinted up before the doors shut and flashed her card from the ERMET. "I'm a certified EMT-2 and need to talk to the security guard if he comes to," she said to the attending EMT. "What's his status?"

"Looks like he's lost a lot of blood, but I couldn't find the entry wound. I was going to clean him up some more on the way over and start a transfusion."

"And Dr. Seavers?"

"Lost a finger and consciousness. Possible concussion from a nasty blow to the back of the head."

"I'll handle it. You stay in touch with the ER up front with the driver," she said as the EMT closed the doors on her.

The ambulance shot out down 2nd to Pennsylvania with its lights full on and siren blaring. Wanda, seated on an uncomfortable, foam-padded vinyl seat with one hand on a stainless steel grab handle, looked down at the guard.

He lay on a fold-out stretcher, held with three straps and a white blanket. She adjusted the light blue pillow behind his head.

The guard stirred and she held his hand. His hair was matted with blood.

"He shot me," he groaned, eyes still closed.

"I know," she told him. "His name was Conrad Yeats. But you killed him. They just zipped up his body and sent him to the morgue."

"No, him."

He lifted his finger and pointed to Max Seavers in the other gurney, who was just beginning to stir with consciousness.

"Max Seavers?"

The guard nodded and seemed to pass out again by the time the ambulance pulled up to the emergency entrance on 23rd Street. The ER at George Washington University Hospital, just blocks from downtown D.C.'s monuments and government complexes, was a Level 1 Trauma Center. It was where President Ronald Reagan was rushed after being shot in 1981, the year Wanda was born, and it was where she herself had been sent on more than one occasion for smoke inhalation and suspected carbon monoxide poisoning from the subterranean tunnels she frequently explored beneath the city.

A reception team was waiting to transfer the guard and Seavers to the ER. The security guard was carried in first while Wanda helped the hospital paramedics roll a moaning Max Seavers into the ER.

Seavers seemed to be regaining strength quickly, and Wanda bent her ear to listen to what he was trying to say. Then she noticed his bloody finger stump pointing to the empty gurney inside the ER.

"Don't worry," she told him. "The guard made it out alive, too. Probably in surgery already."

Seavers's eyes widened and he bolted upright, startling her and the attending ER technician. He angrily pulled the IV drip out of his forearm and looked around.

"You stupid bitch," he said to her, his eyes on fire. "That was Yeats in the ambulance. He pulled a switch!"

She ran out of the ER and saw a discarded, bloody uniform stuffed into a trash bin. The security guard from the Library of Congress was gone.

CONRAD, now wearing a white dress shirt and raincoat stolen from a doctor's locker back at GWU Hospital, got out of the cab at Dupont Circle. He walked several blocks in the drizzling rain up Connecticut toward the Hilton, which even at 1 a.m. was swarming with cabs, limos, and security as visitors from around the world were checking in for the next morning's Presidential Prayer Breakfast.

The way it was supposed to work, Conrad would walk into the lobby, ride the elevator to the tenth floor and go to room 1013, where Serena had already seen to it that he was checked in under an alias, Mr. Carlton Anderson. Then he was to call room service using the room phone and order a pastrami sandwich. Some mole on the staff under her control would then let her know that he had arrived safely and she would come to his room and see what he found in the globe and plot the best way to get it to the president at the prayer breakfast.

The problem, he immediately discovered upon entering the Hilton, was that his picture was on every TV screen in the hotel bar. News reports called him a "person of interest" in connection with a terrorist attack on the Library of Congress, in which a Capitol Policeman was slain. The FBI was pinning the blame on former Pentagon analyst-turned-Starbucks barista Danny Z, now an "Islamic extremist" and the "mastermind" behind the attack.

Those bastards, Conrad thought.

He slipped into the mainstream of boisterous late-night patrons and followed them past the gift shop to the elevator banks, which were packed with still more people. It was a mob, many of them smiling and making conversation.

Who are these people? he wondered. And why were they alarmingly cheerful at this hour?

Conrad stood in the middle of the mob, aware of a few glances from a couple of bodyguards around the president of some African country. He just had to grin and bear it.

It took three elevators before one opened with enough room for him. He stepped in, saw that every single button was lit up, and sighed. It would be a long ride up. At every floor it stopped, a couple of people would step off, and four more would be outside waiting to catch the elevator on the way down.

"Suck it up!" ordered a loud one from Texas, whose wife, a petite blonde, kept eyeing Conrad. "Always room for one more for Jesus!"

Finally, it was just him and the couple from Texas.

"Thought you could escape, huh?" the husband said, smiling. His name tag read Harold from Highland Park, Texas. "My wife says she knows you."

Conrad stood there, flat-footed.

"She says you're Pastor Jim. You wrote that book A Church of One."

Conrad paused for a moment and smiled. "So you liked it?"

"No, but Meredith did," Harold said, and turned toward his wife, whose lipoed waist and silicon breasts defied the laws of natural aging. She could have been anywhere from 30 to 50 years old, depending on where she was between her Botox injections. "See, honey, I told you we'd meet all the big shots here."

"You look much younger than your picture," she said and squeezed his arm enthusiastically. But her husband Harold didn't seem to notice.

Conrad remembered something Serena always used to tell him and said, "Now don't go looking at the outside, Meredith. The good Lord looks at the heart."

She sighed. "So true, Pastor Jim."

The elevator door opened on the tenth floor, and Conrad exhaled as he stepped off along with Harold and Meredith. He turned down a hallway and walked briskly to Room 1013, hearing Meredith's heels clack behind him. He looked over his shoulder to see the couple wave good night and enter their room across the hall. He looked both ways and then inserted the coded plastic key card Serena had given him to unlock the door.

Once inside he immediately picked up the phone on the nightstand and called room service. "I'd like a pastrami from your all-night menu. Thanks. Oh, and a Sam Adams." Then he went to the bathroom and turned on the shower.

As the water heated up, Conrad removed the silver cornerstone plate from inside his raincoat. He rubbed his thumb over the dent from the bullet Seavers intended for his heart.

He placed the silver plate on the dresser next to a golden ticket that Serena had left for him. The embossed letters read: 57th Annual Presidential Prayer Breakfast Thursday, July 3, 2008 Next to the ticket was a 10 x 14 souvenir reproduction of The Washington Family portrait by Edward Savage. Apparently Mr. Anderson had taken a day trip to Mount Vernon and the new museum. There was even a sales slip from the gift shop.