"Stage a coup?" Serena asked. "American citizens would never sit still for it."
Conrad shrugged. "What if it's a coup and nobody knows it?"
Serena grew very quiet.
"Astrological symbols are quite different than astronomical alignments," she said softly. "They're open to all sorts of interpretations, not the clean lines and calculations you're used to. Admiral Newcomb may not shed enough light for you to find the globe."
"That's OK," Conrad said. "I know an old Mason who can help us."
"A Mason?" Although Serena knew that most Masons were constructive "builders" of structures and people, their secret society had been corrupted by the Knights Templar, warriors to say the least. Worse, it now seemed clear that the Alignment itself had infiltrated and controlled the Masons at one strategic point during the American Revolution. Who knew how many of their lieutenants and informants they had left behind in the brotherhood? "Can you trust this Mason?"
"My father did."
"Like I said, can you trust him?"
"Serena, I can't even completely trust you. But our options are limited at this point. I don't even know if he's still alive."
Serena looked at Conrad, still stung by his comment about her being untrustworthy, though of course she was, wasn't she? "How are you going to find out?"
"I know someone who might know. I'll contact him at his office at 5 a.m."
"Your friend's in the office at 5 a.m.?"
"Yep."
"What are you going to do until then?"
"Camp out here," he said, looking into the cave. "You want to spend the night with me in the catacombs?"
Little did Conrad know, she thought, but she would like nothing more in this life than to hide out with him in a cave and never come out. And if God and people and the world around them didn't mean so much to her, she would.
"Tempting," she said. "But at this point it's best for both of us if I'm seen out and about and far away from you. If I can break away to join you and this Mason tomorrow, I will. But I'd rather be safe than sorry."
He gave her a funny look. "You said the same thing at Lake Titicaca."
Conrad was referring to when they first met years earlier in the Andes, and as she looked around these wild ravines she felt the same sense of mystery and foreboding.
"Well, you better have these." She removed her backpack and gave him a toothbrush, lightweight trench coat, and a change of clothing.
Conrad studied the underwear. "You know I prefer briefs."
"Please watch yourself, Conrad," she begged him. "This isn't some boy's adventure. Those are real bullets they're firing at you."
It was getting dark in the ravines now, and Serena turned to leave while she could still find her way out. As she began to weave between the twisted branches, she thought she heard Conrad whisper something. By the time she looked over her shoulder, he had disappeared into the darkness.
20
LATER THAT NIGHT Max Seavers stood naked in the bedroom of his Georgetown house and looked at himself in the mirror. There was much to admire-his golden hair, sapphire eyes, aquiline nose, and strong chin, not to mention his rock-hard, six-pack abs. This was not the face of a monster. Moreover, it was what one couldn't see in a mirror-his towering intellect, his genius-that was intrinsically noble.
Soon, he thought, everybody will see it.
He heard the shower in the bathroom turn off. He walked across the plush carpet to his bed, slipped under the sheets and waited for her. As he did, he mulled over the SecDef's directive about finding this thing that Washington had buried and marveled at the absurdity of it all.
For it was in another country, in another time, that his own great-grandfather was asked to help run an organization quite similar to DARPA and to pursue similarly bizarre research for his boss, Adolf Hitler.
Before and during the Second World War, Hitler had German scientists and archaeologists roaming the earth for evidence of the biological superiority of the Aryan race. Few were hard-core Nazis, but fewer still were about to spurn the overtures of the Fuhrer and his ax man Heinrich Himmler, who in exchange for keeping them out of concentration camps offered these academics the kind of funding and resources no university could match.
The Ahnenerbe, as the think-tank was called, was an SS agency established to prove once and for all that Aryans were not just the "master race" or pinnacle of human evolution but also the "mother race" of human civilization. At its peak it counted more than 200 scholars, scientists, and staff among its ranks. And its teams fanned out across the globe in search of evidence in places like Lake Titicaca in Bolivia, the Canary Islands, the Greek Islands, even Tibet. All these places were alleged to have been built by Aryan colonists, and research efforts soon crystallized into one final quest to find the place from which those colonists came.
That place, they concluded, was Atlantis, and its location was determined to be Antarctica. If only they could find its ruins beneath the ice, they could prove once and for all the superiority of the Aryan race and the inevitable triumph of Hitler's Thousand-Year Reich.
Toward that end, Hitler sent U-boats to Antarctica, where teams of Nazis disembarked on the ice cap in search of ruins. They also planted Nazi flags still buried to this day in order to claim the last continent for Nazi Germany.
They came back empty-handed, of course, those who managed to come back at all. Many perished in the otherworldly cold. Those who survived had no relics to show for their pains. Some had no fingers or toes either, as they were lost to frostbite.
None of this surprised Seavers's great-grandfather, Wolfram Sievers, who considered much of archaeology the domain of crackpots. Whereas half of the Ahnenerbe was focused on the past, Wolfram was focused on the future, on genetics and human evolution. Much of his work was inspired by the American eugenics movement of the early part of the twentieth century.
Unfortunately, research required Wolfram to experiment on living subjects, which could be found in great supply among the Jews in the concentration camps. The results yielded a treasure trove of data and the creation of new biotoxins.
Hitler hoped to place the biotoxins in the tips of his V-2 rockets and launch them against the Allies. But the tide of war turned against Hitler and his Nazis, and the work of Wolfram was cut short.
In the end, Germany was split in two by invading Allied forces. "Good Germans" who had served the Ahnenerbe were free to resume their respectable chairs at elite universities. Some, like rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, were even invited to the United States to help the Americans land a man on the moon. "Bad Germans" linked to the Holocaust like Seavers's great-grandfather, however, were executed in Nuremburg for their "crimes against humanity."
Growing up in Southern California with relatives, Seavers hid his true paternity with shame. At Torrey Pines High School he announced his resolve to dedicate his life to creating vaccines that would eradicate pandemic diseases and extend human life. By the time he was a junior at Stanford, he got the backing of venture capitalists to launch his own biotech company back in San Diego.
He made billions but ran into trouble when America's religious fanatics got in the way of his stem-cell research, which required the destruction of aborted fetuses. They called him a baby killer, these Catholic and evangelical Christian hypocrites, who themselves benefited from his drugs and who carried out "God's work" in Third World countries by administering his vaccines to the poor and sick.
It was then that he began to consider that his great-grandfather, who didn't even work on live embryos but on prisoners as good as dead, may have been misunderstood.
Politics from Nazis or the White House had no place in science, he realized, and neither did religion. But the burdens of government regulations on his company's research became too much to bear. He had nowhere to turn in the private sector-except the Homeland Security-Industrial Complex.