Vadim was sitting inside the Peugeot parked opposite the Palace of the Grandmaster. He looked past the vehicle ID badge dangling from his rearview mirror to see the silver Mercedes SUV drive through.
He reached back and pulled down the rear seat to access the trunk. Squirming next to the blocks of C4 plastic explosives was a bound, gagged, and badly beaten Abdil Zawas. Vadim had brought the Egyptian to Rhodes directly from Bern hours before the security checkpoints had been set up. Since this car had been registered to a resident for several years, the security forces sweeping the Old Town yellow zone hadn't opened its trunk.
Abdil was waking up a little sooner than Vadim wanted. The streets were so narrow and cars so few that he couldn't afford to have somebody walk by while Abdil banged his head and feet to draw attention.
'Siesta isn't over,' Vadim said, and removed an injection pen from his pocket. 'We have to keep you alive long enough for the coroner to pronounce your proper cause of death as a martyr for Allah.' He delighted at the look of horror in Abdil's eyes. The pen was filled only with a concentrated dose of trazodone to put him to sleep. Nothing painful, unfortunately, and it was a shame to think that the Egyptian wouldn't be awake for his final moments.
'Don't you wonder how many of your little sluts will miss you when you're gone?' Vadim asked, injecting the trazodone into Abdil's thick neck. 'I think you'll miss them more where you're going.'
Abdil's eyes rolled around in panic even as his eyelids grew heavy. In a few minutes it would all be over for the late, great Abdil Zawas.
'I'm going to make you famous, Abdil,' Vadim told the Egyptian. 'You're about to open a new front on the war against Jews and Crusaders. Look at this clip that's about to be posted on YouTube. Recognize yourself?'
Vadim was about to play the video on his BlackBerry when the device began to ring. It was Midas.
'Security says Yeats is alive and on Rhodes,' Midas barked. 'She has betrayed the Alignment.'
'You seem surprised,' Vadim said. 'Your plan was always to kill her as soon as she delivered the globes. She knows too much. More than I do. Nothing has changed. Yeats won't make it in time to interfere.'
'Is everything set?'
'Yes,' Vadim said. 'The only street into or out of the Palace of the Grandmaster is the Street of Knights. I'll take care of her as soon as she leaves the palace.'
'She must not have even a moment to contact anybody with information about what she may have learned from Uriel or figured out for herself,' Midas said, and then there was a pause. 'Remember, Vadim. She will be the second car. I repeat: the second car. Not the first. Everything is lost if you mistake the two.'
Vadim said, 'I won't.'
'See that you don't,' Midas said. 'It must look like the first car was the target but that Zawas hit Serghetti's car instead and blew himself up in the process.'
'Yes,' said Vadim, looking at Abdil's limp body in the mirror. 'I understand.'
40
All the way down the Street of Knights toward the Palace of the Grandmaster, Serena wondered who Uriel could possibly be. If his role within the Alignment was true to his name, then Uriel could be the one who ultimately possessed the Flammenschwert. That pointed to Midas, however, and she braced herself to see his ugly smile waiting for her with the third globe.
'I wish I could join you inside, signorina,' Benito said as he pulled the G55 SUV up to the west tower entrance.
'Me, too,' she said.
The Greek attache Midas had told her about was already waiting with two aides and a cart. Benito opened the rear door, and the aides placed the two steel boxes containing the copper globes on the cart. Serena followed through the entrance.
Inside, they walked past the Medusa mosaic and down a large vaulted corridor to the lower level. It was right out of the blueprints Conrad had shown her back at the lake in Italy. And when they entered the Hall of Knights and left her alone with the globes, nobody had to tell her what room she stood in. Its scale and decor announced itself in a sinister way.
Then the small wooden door on the side opened by itself, and she saw the adjoining chamber and the reflection of a fire bouncing off what could only be the third globe. She pushed the cart inside, next to the round table, and beheld the globe on top.
The third globe.
She stood in silence, staring at it. It was magnificent, like something forged from the depths of a volcano or the mountain copper ore of Atlantis. It closely resembled its celestial and terrestrial cousins and was clearly part of the family. But the dials carved across the surface of this globe marked it as an armillary, built to predict the cycles of the sun, moon, and planets. It was the third element of time that Brother Lorenzo had correctly suspected was missing from their calculations back at the Vatican.
The door opened, and she looked up to see General Gellar, the Israeli defense minister, looking her up and down in surprise.
The feeling is mutual, she thought. 'You're Uriel?' They had been acquaintances for quite some time, and suddenly, they both looked at each other in a very different way. 'What do you want with these globes?' she asked.
'You have to ask?' Gellar sounded offended. 'They're ours. They belong to Israel. You took them.'
'We took them?'
'The Knights Templar stole them from under the Temple Mount along with whatever else they could pillage to fund their wars, increase their powers, and persecute the Jews.'
Serena took it in, trying to figure this all out. 'Well, on behalf of the Roman Catholic Church, I certainly plead guilty. And the pope has made official apologies for all that. I wasn't around at the time, of course. But if I had been, I'm sure that I, too, would have engaged in anti-Semitic behavior.'
Gellar seemed to realize he was being ridiculous-although he clearly regarded the Dei medallion hanging around her neck as if it were a Nazi death's-head badge.
'You're not one of the Thirty, General, are you?'
'No,' he said.
'But you'd do business with them.'
'You mean with you? Yes. If Israel had relations only with its friends, we wouldn't be a country.'
Serena wanted to say 'Hey, I'm not Alignment,' but that wouldn't carry much water here beneath the bowels of the Palace of the Grandmaster, built by the Knights of St. John, a military unit itself and cousin to the Knights Templar. All the same, she had to find out the purpose of the globes and why the Alignment would give them to the Israelis. 'You're going to take these with you back to Jersualem?' she asked.
'To the place where they belong.'
Serena stared at him. 'You're going to rebuild the temple. You've just needed to get all the pieces together.'
'Yes.' Gellar was almost defiant.
'To do that, you need to remove the Dome of the Rock mosque.'
'Yes.'
'That would start a war with the Arabs.'
'Yes.'
'And you would defend yourselves, naturally.'
'No,' Gellar said. 'You and Europe will defend us if America chooses to sit this one out. And if not, God will protect us.'
'When is all this supposed to happen?'
Gellar smiled. 'You had two of the globes and are the great linguist. Could you not interpret the signs?'
Serena realized she could not, but she couldn't let Gellar slip away without giving her something more. She remembered what Conrad had told her about why he'd given up his dig in Jerusalem: He couldn't figure out the astronomical alignments of the temple. Without them, he hadn't known where to dig.
