"But to endorse it as president after the U.S. Constitution was ratified? What was he thinking?"
"He was thinking like most Americans that the federal government and its lands were all of a few square miles of marshland on the Potomac, dwarfed by the giant states like Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York. He had no idea it would consume the continent as an empire with warships controlling the seven seas and military garrisons around the world and in space."
Conrad looked at the two seals, the eagle and talons for the United States and the pyramid and Lucerific eye for the New Atlantis, and recalled what Brooke had said: The Alignment wasn't merely a shadow government, it was the government. Or, rather, the other side of the federal government. It always had been; it just hadn't come to light-yet.
"What's wrong, Conrad?"
"I know why the Alignment signed this and why Washington had to go along at the time. And it's obvious why every president aware of its existence has tried to keep it from coming to light, if only to preserve the Union. But to a large extent the Alignment has already succeeded beyond its wildest dreams and the federal government is so strong-taxes to boot-that in a de facto way America IS the New Atlantis. So, aside from some historical or perverse moral justification, what possible reason could the Alignment have for risking its agenda to grab the treaty?"
"I can think of twelve, Conrad."
She showed him the signatures of those representing the Regency of the New Atlantis.
Conrad looked through the signatures. Members of Congress, American patriots, Founding Fathers who supported a strong federal government. "Holy shit. These names."
"Some of the most famous in America, along with some I've never heard of," she said. "These are the ancestors of those who are going to make the Atlantis prophecy happen one way or another. This is what Washington was trying to warn us about, and to do it he used L'Enfant's layout of the city and Savage's portrait in the National Gallery and the letter to Robert Yates for you to open more than two centuries later. To lead us to this Newburgh Treaty and its signatories. So we could know the families, trace them to the present day and have a fair idea of who its leaders are."
Conrad said, "Which means if we can find their descendants today…"
"We can find out who is behind what's going to happen-who Seavers is really working for-and stop them." Serena paused as she scanned the treaty, her face pale.
Something had struck her, and Conrad realized it wasn't in the body of the charter. Rather, it was one of the signatures.
Conrad brushed off bits of loose dirt that had fallen onto the treaty from the ceiling. He looked at the names again, starting with Alexander Hamilton, and one in particular, the designated Consul General of the Regency, jumped out at him: John Marshall.
Conrad's mind whirred. Marshall, a lawyer at the time of the Revolution, became chief justice of the Supreme Court within a year of Washington's death and over the next 30 years did more than anybody else to expand the powers of the federal government. Then he made the connection:
Marshall was also a cousin of Thomas Jefferson and, as such, the sitting president's great-great-grandfather on his mother's side.
"Holy shit!" he said as the walls began to shake violently. "We've got to get out of here."
Serena grabbed her backpack as the roof of the cave started to collapse. Suddenly smoke filled the cave. Then everything went black.
PART FOUR
45
CONRAD WOKE UP in complete darkness, a black hood over his head, chilled to the bone. He sensed he was deep underground and could feel the low rumble of large, powerful machinery nearby. Something very sharp was pressing on his chest.
"Serena?" he called out.
He heard a laugh. It belonged to Max Seavers. "You're an inspiration, Yeats, I'll give you that."
Then the black hood came off and Conrad looked up to see Seavers standing over him, pointing an ornate dagger at his chest. Conrad tried to move, but his arms and legs were strapped to a restraint chair, bolted to the floor of a windowless room with stone walls and a metal door.
"Do you like my dagger, Yeats?" Seavers said, pushing the point into Conrad's sternum. "Your old friend Herc gave it to me before he died and joined Danny Z in the Great Beyond. He said it once belonged to a legendary 33rd Degree Mason of the Scottish Rite or some such, and that the Masons used the dagger in rituals to initiate candidates into a perverse system of levels or degrees by which they replicate themselves. Apparently the candidate for the First Degree is hooded and brought into the Lodge. There, at the point of a dagger, he undergoes ritual questioning. Welcome to my Lodge, Yeats. Maybe you can work all the way up the ranks like Herc."
As he struggled to get his bearings, Conrad remembered what Brooke had told him about the weaponized bird flu virus Seavers was going to release, and what Serena said about Seavers hosting the Chinese at the Washington Monument for the fireworks.
"The Fourth of July concert on the Mall," Conrad said. "You're going to release your contagion on Chinese officials during the fireworks. At the only moment in history that the monuments will be directly below their designated stars."
"Impressive, isn't it?" Seavers said as he walked out of sight behind him. "I was surprised to discover there's actually some science behind what you allegedly do for a living as an astro-archaeologist. The stars in the sky rotate like some giant odometer every 26,000 years or so. Washington one-upped the Egyptians by ordering his chief architect L'Enfant to align the sites of as-yet-constructed monuments not to the position of the key stars of their day, but to their positions on this day, July 4, 2008, when the Regency of New Atlantis could make its claim and dissolve the United States."
"Tell me something I don't know, Seavers."
Seavers obliged. "When my masters in the Alignment thrust this great responsibility upon me, I knew that I had to make it special for them, seeing as they actually believe in mystical astrological signs and all. So I took a page from your book and decided to coordinate our strike with the heavens."
"Is that what you call killing, what, a billion Chinese and a third of the world's population?"
"It's written in the stars, sport. Today the sun begins a 28-day path across the skies from Washington, D.C., to Beijing, where it will experience a total eclipse at dusk on August 1, exactly seven days before the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games. My time-delayed virus on Earth mirrors the sun's path in the heavens like some cosmic fireball. As above, so below. By the time they light the Olympic torch, the first symptoms of the global human-to-human bird flu pandemic will appear, igniting international chaos and cries to build a new Great Wall to quarantine China. Poetic, isn't it?"
"You're deranged."
Conrad craned his neck to see a dozen syringes, needles, and tubes laid out on a table along with rolls of adhesive tape, bags of saline solution, handcuffs, and leg irons. He shivered. "Are you really going to use all that on me, or is it just for effect?"
Seavers put on a pair of surgical gloves, selected a vial and held it up to the fluorescent light. "This is for somebody else."
As he spoke the door opened and two lab technicians rolled Serena in on a gurney. She was strapped down flat and showed little movement.
"You bastard!" Conrad snarled.
Seavers slid the vial into a syringe gun and put it to Serena's neck.
"This is a special formula of the bird flu virus minus the incubation inhibitor," Seavers said. "Tell me where you put that star map you stole from the celestial globe or I pull the trigger and Sister Serghetti is the first to die."