Thomas Greanias - The Atlantis Prophecy

Seavers began to laugh. "Are you performing last rites for your beloved Yeats?"

"For you, Seavers," she said. "Because there's no air conditioning where you're going."

"Now, now, Sister Serghetti," Seavers said, in a soothing tone Conrad found very creepy. "Even Jesus forgave his enemies when he was dying on the cross."

"Well, you can go to hell, Seavers!" she screamed. "You have no excuses. You know exactly what you're doing."

Max Seavers's face screwed up into a twisted mask of pure hatred, and Conrad anxiously watched him walk to the instrument table and return with a roll of duct tape.

"That mouth." He tore off some tape and slapped it across Serena's lips. "Somebody in Rome should have shut you up a long time ago."

Then he plunged the syringe gun into her neck again, this time deep enough that Conrad could see a trickle of blood.

"Give me the call number for the book, sport, or I shoot."

"I don't know the call number," Conrad said, panicking as he saw Serena struggle, her eyes wide and her cries muffled. "But it's an old book and there can't be more than a couple of copies in special collections. I'm telling you the truth."

"We'll see when I come back from my previously scheduled engagement," Seavers said and pulled the trigger.

Serena's neck twitched like she'd taken a bullet.

"No!" Conrad shouted.

Seavers laid the syringe gun down, studying Serena as he spoke to Conrad. "She'll be fully infected within a few hours unless I administer the vaccine. But once she starts showing symptoms nothing can save her, not even my own vaccine, and she'll be dead by dusk. So you better pray to her God that I find that map. Or you'll watch her die before your eyes, and then I'll kill you."

With that Seavers walked out past two Marines posted outside the door, which rumbled shut and locked with a thud.

MORE THAN 20 security checkpoints had been set up around the National Mall in preparation for the day's Fourth of July parade and festivities, which slowed an impatient Seavers on his way to retrieve the star map from the Library of Congress. That map, together with the Newburgh Treaty, was his insurance policy just in case he pulled the trigger on the bird flu contagion and Osiris suddenly decided he was of no further use to the Alignment.

Sitting in the rear of the black SUV with a Marine driving, Seavers pulled out a laptop computer from his briefcase and called up the Library of Congress website. He typed in the name of the book on obelisks that Yeats had given him. It was in special collections on the second floor of the Jefferson Building. He jotted down the call number.

He then removed the folded Newburgh Treaty from the left breast pocket of his suit jacket and reviewed the signatures, some famous and others obscure. He typed the names into his laptop to cross them against current U.S. political leaders. He wanted to see where the genealogies matched ancestor with descendant. A far more detailed analysis would be required later on, he knew, but almost immediately several names popped up and surprised even him.

"Well, would you look at that?" he said to himself with a soft whistle.

First, there was the sitting U.S. president himself, a "man of faith" that Seavers would not have guessed in a million years. Could he be Osiris? The president's lineage didn't necessarily mean he was Alignment, only that it was likely.

Then there were the leading Democratic and Republican presidential candidates. Both had blue-blood family ties to the Alignment, ensuring that whoever was elected in November would stick to the Alignment plan. These names he more readily accepted as leaders of the Alignment.

Finally, there was Senator Scarborough-a real shocker since Brooke had been led to believe otherwise. So had Seavers.

He could only imagine what Scarborough was feeling now that the senator most surely had been given news of his daughter's death. And Seavers could definitely thank his lucky stars that Conrad Yeats was taking the rap. As soon as he grabbed the star map he would call in the orders to kill Yeats, before anybody in the Alignment could interrogate him.

Seavers shut the laptop and looked out his window. It was going to be a hot and sticky day.

By the time he walked into the special collections room at the Jefferson Building, his shirt was soaked with sweat. The Library was closed to the public today but not to members of Congress and the executive branch. He flashed his ID to the lone female staffer at the desk, wrote out a request for the Obelisks book and waited. She returned with a copy.

He took the book to a cubicle and opened it. Nothing!

He returned to the desk and asked the woman for the second copy. She checked her computer and said, "It's still in the carts, we haven't shelved it yet."

As calmly as he could, Seavers said, "Well, do you think you could check the carts? Please."

She flinched at his intensity. "It may take me a few minutes. We only have a skeleton staff today."

Seavers said nothing, and quietly fumed for almost fifteen minutes before she returned with the book.

"Here you go," she chirped. "It was between-"

"Thank you," he said, cutting her off and taking the book to the opposite corner of the room, out of her line of sight.

He cracked the book open and found the paper folded lengthwise and tucked inside the spine, in the space between the cover and the binding. He unfolded it and saw Washington's signature on one side and the star map on the other.

Seavers reluctantly had to give Yeats credit for not only finding both globes but thinking clearly enough to hide the star map among the millions of books at the Library of Congress as a bargaining chip.

But now that chip was cashed.

Seavers pulled out his BlackBerry and made the call. "This is Seavers. Terminate prisoner 33."

SERENA HEARD THE DOOR to the cell open and looked up from her gurney as two Marines, their faces all business, walked in. One of them went to the table with the syringes. The other marched straight for Conrad in the restraining chair and started thumping Conrad's left forearm with his finger, looking for a vein.

She tried to shout, but her cries were muffled by the duct tape across her mouth.

"You strapped him so tight, you cut off his circulation," the Marine complained to his comrade. "I can't find a vein."

The other Marine, who was preparing an IV apparatus, said, "Keep poking him with a needle until you find a gusher."

Serena watched as the Marine attending to Conrad loosened the strap on his left hand to allow for more blood flow. Still without luck, he then tried the right arm and struck blood with a needle. He slipped a catheter into Conrad's vein. The catheter tube was connected to two bags of a clear solution.

Conrad glanced at her and then spoke to the Marines. "Max Seavers was responsible for the deaths of Brooke Scarborough and a Capitol Police officer," Conrad said. "And he's going to be responsible for a billion more if you don't help me."

Either the mention of Brooke or the CP seemed to get their attention. But it didn't slow their work. The Marine with the syringes placed them in order. "He gets sodium pentothal sedative first, then the potassium chloride to paralyze him, and then the lethal injection."

Serena suspected the Marines wouldn't even need the lethal injection, because the only thing potassium chloride paralyzed was the heart: it stopped it cold. She started squirming in her straps, moaning as loud as she could. But the Marines ignored her.

Conrad said, "Seavers is working with terrorists against the U.S., and now you're working for them, too."

The Marine securing his catheter said, "Then why are you the one on death row in a black ops prison?"