Conrad squinted at the setting sun as he raced out the west end of the Street of Knights into Kleovoulou Square, the police close behind. He could feel Serena's heart pounding as she barely held on. He turned onto the wide, shady Orpheos Street and, to the right, spotted the wall linking the interior wall and the main wall of Old Town. He found what he was looking for-the Gate of St. Anthony-and rode up the ramparts, leaving the police cars blocked below him.
He flew past the iron benches and artists drawing portraits of tourists, scattering easels and eliciting shouts and curses. Then he turned left into a dark tunnel.
A moment later, he burst out of Old Town through the impressive d' Amboise Gate. Two policemen started shooting as he drove across the arched bridge and over the dry moat into the New Town. He cut right onto Makariou Street and thundered down toward the harbor.
'I've got a seaplane by the windmills at the breakwater,' Serena said, coming to life.
'I've got a boat, I think. One of Andros's.'
'I'll fly us out,' she said.
There were sirens growing louder from all directions. All at once the street opened up into Kyprou Square, and he could see two triangular traffic islands in the middle of an intersection of seven streets from seven angles. There were no traffic lights, and most of the cars whizzing through were police or driven by Greek citizens.
'Hang left!' Serena shouted.
'Right,' he said.
'Left as in straight ahead!'
'I know!' he shouted, and drove in the channel between the two islands to the other side, barely clearing two cars that hit their brakes.
Conrad could hear the squealing and then the crash of metal and horns behind him. In his mirror, he saw that three police cars had locked fenders.
He turned right and slowed down as he passed Starbucks and the post office and vanished into the early- evening shadows that had fallen across the seaside cafes.
At the breakwater front by the secluded windmills, Conrad could see Brother Lorenzo waiting by the Otter seaplane. The priest started to shake at the sight of him. Conrad drove up the stone pier to the edge of the water.
'They're saying a roadside bomb went off in the Knights' Quarter,' Lorenzo said breathlessly as he helped Serena off the bike. 'Two bodies were found.'
'Benito,' she told him.
Lorenzo looked at Conrad. 'They said that the Israeli defense minister was the target and that the Egyptian terrorist behind it, Abdil Zawas, accidentally blew himself up. Your picture is on the television as one of his associates.'
'Point that bony finger at me and I'll break it off,' Conrad snapped. 'What the hell are you doing here?'
Serena stopped him with a weak hand. 'His instructions were always to fall back here if we ran into trouble,' she said, and climbed on board and started the props.
Conrad glared at Lorenzo, who quickly followed Serena into the Otter and frantically waved him in.
Conrad rolled the motorcycle into the water, climbed into the plane, and pulled up the door behind him. Soon they lifted off into the evening sky and banked to the east as Conrad looked down to see flashing lights descend on the harbor below.
44
It was almost ten o'clock that night on Rhodes when a triumphant Roman Midas walked out onto the steps of the Palace of the Grandmaster with assorted European leaders and waited for his limousine. He was in a tuxedo after a spectacular black-tie concert outdoors in the courtyard, made all the more poignant by the violence of that afternoon's car bombing.
'Gellar and the Israelis were bloody lucky,' he had heard the British prime minister tell the German chancellor before the concert. 'A tragic loss for Sister Serghetti, however. Good drivers are hard to find.'
'Oui' was all he heard from the French president afterward, who could understand why she'd chosen to skip the concert. 'But I'm more troubled by intelligence reports that this YouTube video from Zawas signals an imminent attack on a much bigger target.'
All of them had enjoyed the concert.
Some, Midas knew, more than others. While most of the dignitaries sat in chairs under the stars and listened to the Berlin Philharmonic, seventeen of them sat in chairs under the courtyard, in the Hall of Knights, and listened to Sorath lay out the plan for world peace.
None of the faces were ones he had expected, and yet by the end of the meeting, he couldn't possibly imagine anybody else qualified to carry out the plan.
As for the plan itself, it left him in awe.
The Solomon globes were back in the hands of the Jews after so many centuries. Now General Gellar and his ultra-Orthodox friends possessed their final puzzle piece to begin construction of a Third Temple. Only the Al-Aqsa Mosque stood in their way, and Gellar was all too willing to let the Alignment do the dirty work for him and call it an act of God. All Gellar had to do was use the globes to transport the Flammenschwert into place beneath the Temple Mount.
There would be an uprising from the Palestinians, of course, quite likely igniting a wider war. When all reasonable avenues of diplomacy had been exhausted, which was always the case in the Arab world, the international 'peace process' that Gellar had bound Israel to at this EU summit would come into play-too late for Gellar to realize that he had betrayed his country for his religion. Not that there would be room for either in the new world order. Jerusalem would be occupied by international peacekeepers, and the new temple would become the throne of the Alignment to control the Middle East.
Most amazing of all, by bringing the three Solomon globes to their final resting place, Gellar would essentially activate them at their point of origin, revealing the real prize beneath the Temple Mount that Midas and the Alignment were after. It was a revelation greater than anything found in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam, and the foundation of a master civilization that would supplant anything that had come before in human history.
History itself would be history.
In under twenty-four hours, Midas marveled, the Jews once again would be betrayed by thirty pieces of silver. A final Crusade would be unleashed on the Middle East that would ensure lasting world peace and the rise of a new Roman Empire in the twenty-first century. All it would take was a little piece of Atlantean technology tweaked by the Nazis.
If that wasn't the final solution, Midas thought, what was?
Everything, mostly, was following the plan. Midas almost allowed himself to smile. Then he saw Vadim pull up in the limousine. Well, almost everything.
'You look like shit, Vadim,' Midas said as they drove out of the town and into the hills toward the airstrip. 'I'm amazed security let you through. Did you get the bullet out?'
'No,' Vadim grunted, clearly in pain. 'But the bleeding stopped.'
'We'll take care of it after Jerusalem,' Midas said. 'At least you had enough presence of mind to get out of the street after you failed to kill Serghetti.'
'The Inn of Provence is about the only one on the street with a side door,' Vadim explained. 'No problem, what with the smoke and confusion caused by Abdil's explosion.'
Midas said nothing and turned on the television to watch the BBC.
'Despite the terrorist attack on Rhodes today, the twenty-seven European foreign ministers unanimously agreed to intensify their dialogue with Israel on diplomatic issues,' the big-haired anchor said. 'Vice Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs Tzipi Livni said that this is a meaningful achievement for Israeli diplomacy, opening a new chapter in Israel's diplomatic relations with EU states. Israel intends to use the intensified dialogue to convince Europe to increase pressure on the Palestinians over the fate of Jerusalem and ensure that Israel's strategic interests are protected in the Middle East peace process.'
