Brooke had stopped talking in the bedroom.
From behind Conrad could hear the click of a slider. Slowly he turned and saw her pointing an automatic pistol at him.
"I'm sorry, Conrad." She shook her head. "That fucking dog."
36
CONRAD STARED IN SHOCK at the 9mm Glock in Brooke's manicured hands, his mind trying to make sense of how he could have so thoroughly misinterpreted the nature of their relationship, and how long he had before whomever she called arrived.
"You've got to understand, Conrad, I had no choice," she said. "But you, you still have a choice: Give up the globe or die."
She's either with the feds or the Alignment, he thought. If it's the feds, he could live with it. But, God, not the Alignment.
"Some choice," he said, and coolly walked into the bedroom. Brooke followed him, and he could sense her gun pointed at his back until he sat down in a chair and looked up at her. "So everything we had was a lie?"
"No, Conrad," she said, her voice shaking with emotion. "Everything but us is a lie."
"Like you and Max Seavers?" he said, putting it out there.
"Tell me where you put the star map from the first globe, Conrad, and I'll let you go before he gets here."
Damn. She's Alignment.
He said, "What about the second globe?"
"Max doesn't have to know. But I need something to give him."
Conrad nodded, trying to figure his way out of this. "Does your father know about any of this?"
"No. He's a Mason. That's why it was a coup for the Alignment to nab me as a teenager and then use me to get to you, the son of General Yeats."
"But I'm not his son. Not his real son."
"No, you're much more special," she said. "I know about Antarctica, Conrad. I know about your blood."
Conrad looked at her. "What about my blood?"
"It's the basis for Max's flu vaccine."
Conrad started. "And how's that?"
"Max came to DARPA to genetically engineer the perfect American soldier," she said. "Along the way he discovered certain immunities to disease in the bloodlines of native Americans, specifically the Algonquin Indians. Immunities that had been diluted over the generations. So Max launched a global DNA testing program to connect the lost cousins of the Algonquins in the Americas, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. It was called Operation Adam and Eve. By studying the mutations in Y chromosomes and mitochondrial DNA, Max was able to reconstruct their tribal migrations throughout the globe and trace their roots to Antarctica and one common ancestor: You."
"Me?"
"You're more American than any of us, Conrad. The last of the Atlanteans."
"Atlantis?" Conrad had thought he was ready for anything, but not this. This was over the top even for Brooke. "What on earth are you talking about?"
"You may be of this earth, Conrad, but whatever is in some of your dormant DNA strands isn't. You're one in six billion. Why else do you think your father was so hell-bent on going to Antarctica in the first place? Or didn't Her Holiness, Sister Serghetti, and her friends in Rome tell you?"
No, she hadn't, Conrad thought, and he hoped to God she was going to beat Seavers to the room so he could personally hash this out with her.
"So I take it you're not going to help me with the feds?"
"The Alignment IS the federal government, Conrad. That's what I'm trying to tell you."
"You cannot seriously expect me to believe that every low-level grunt in the federal government is Alignment."
"No, but they all work for the Alignment, whether they know it or not."
"Not me," he said and with a quick move of his right arm grabbed her arm holding the gun, slammed her body against the wall with his own, and then with a hard twist snapped her wrist.
"Ahh!" she cried, but wouldn't drop the gun. She was almost as tough, physically, as Seavers.
He gave her a sharp elbow in the stomach, spun out as she doubled over and then hit her on the neck, sending her to the floor.
He picked up her gun and pointed it at her head as she slowly rose on all fours.
"You broke my fucking wrist, Conrad," she said.
He dug the barrel of the gun into her temple. "Why do the monuments line up with the stars tomorrow, Brooke? Why now? Why 2008?"
"Something about the transit of Venus or something."
Conrad knew the transit of Venus-when Venus crossed the path of the sun to the naked eye on Earth-came once every couple of hundred years. But when the transit came, it came in pairs-eight years apart. As it happened, the world was in the middle of such a transit. The first crossed the sun in 2004, the year he and Serena had their adventure in Antarctica. The next transit was due in 2012. There wasn't anything scientifically significant about such a conjunction, but it held great meaning to the ancients.
"We're between the two transits, Brooke. Why 2008?"
"Something about solar years and the number 225. It's all Alignment esoterica. I'm not at that level."
But Conrad was. The planet Venus takes about 225 Earth days, or about 7Ѕ months, to go around the sun. At the same time, Venus took more than 243 Earth days to turn on its own axis, making its days longer than its years. Conrad subtracted 225 from the current year, 2008, and came up with 1783.
"Newburgh," he said, recalling the coup attempt Washington allegedly quelled in 1783 at his final winter encampment. "It has something to do with Newburgh."
"I don't know!" Brooke screamed.
He kept pressing her. "What's the connection to my family, Brooke? What did Robert Yates have to do with it? Was he responsible for this?"
Brooke bared her teeth. "He was nobody, Conrad, a side note to history like you want to be. He was the goddamn lawyer."
Conrad paused. "For what?"
Brooke rammed her head into his, and with a scream lunged for the gun in his hand. Caught off-balance, Conrad fell back and brought the butt of the gun down on the back of Brooke's head, knocking her out.
With a heave he pushed her body off him and dragged it to the bed. He then tied her hands to the posts, spread-eagled, as she came to.
"What's going to happen tomorrow, Brooke?"
"I don't know," she moaned. "Only that the Alignment is going to make it happen."
"Not good enough." He tightened the knot around her broken wrist until she winced in agony.
"I'm just trying to save your life!" she cried.
"Funny way of showing it," he said, waving her gun in her face. "Now, for the last time, what's going down tomorrow?"
Her voice, when she finally spoke, had a dead tone. "Max is going to release a weaponized bird flu contagion."
Conrad stared at her. "Where?"
"Somewhere on the Mall, I don't know. But it's got a 28-day incubation inhibitor so that it won't jump human-to-human until August 1. Everyone will assume it originated at the Olympic Games in Beijing."
"So Seavers kills a billion Chinese," Conrad said. "What happens to all the Americans who get saved with his vaccine?"
"You know that, thanks to Congressional gerrymandering, there are only seventeen competitive districts left in America that can swing a national election. Undesirables, including representatives, get their vaccines turned off and die. By the time the voters elect replacement officials-Alignment types-it's too late. A democratically elected coup."
"And this thing from Newburgh is their moral, if not legal justification."
"Oh, God, I loved you, Conrad."
He gagged Brooke and left her writhing on the bed as he placed the gun on the dresser and walked to the door. He slowly opened it and looked down the hallway just as the ding of the elevator sounded.