“It’s not of this earth. It’s probably some kind of astronomical phenomenon. I’ll know it when I see it.”
“Hot damn, Conrad, looks like you really are the Sun King.” Yeats slapped him on the back for the first time in years, and Conrad couldn’t deny it felt good. “But where exactly are we supposed to consult this Shining One? There are millions of stars out there.”
Conrad said, “We’ll follow the map on the scepter.”
“What map?”
“The four constellations.” Conrad showed Yeats the 360-degree digital scan he had taken of the obelisk. “See? The zodiac signs of Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, and Aquarius.”
Yeats looked at the image. “So?”
Conrad tapped his device. “So if this city is astronomically aligned, then maybe these celestial coordinates might have terrestrial counterparts.”
“Maybe?” Yeats said. “You’ll have to do better than that.”
“We already know P4 is aligned with the middle belt star of Orion, Al Nitak,” Conrad said, and Yeats nodded. “In the same way we might find strategically positioned shrines in the city that are aligned to Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, and Aquarius.”
Yeats furrowed his brow. “Meaning we follow the pavilions or temples that correspond to these signs like some kind of heavenly treasure trail?”
“Exactly.”
“So these celestial markers will lead us to Aquarius,” Yeats said. “And then we find its terrestrial double.”
“That’s right,” said Conrad. “It’s dusk outside now. Soon the stars will be out. They’ll serve as our map and lead us to some kind of monument dedicated to the Water Bearer. That’s where the Shining One will be, to lead us to the Shrine of the First Sun.”
Yeats nodded. “And everything we’ve spent our lives searching for.”
28
Inside the Temple of the Water bearer,starlight seeped into the chamber where Serena stood tied to a post. It was her punishment for refusing to help Colonel Zawas translate his map of Atlantis. To help Zawas locate the Shrine of the First Sun would be to betray Conrad, she reasoned, having concluded that Conrad, for all his faults, was still her best hope in stopping a global cataclysm. But even if Conrad could reach the shrine first, Zawas still had the scepter. Somehow she had to hold on long enough to figure out a way to steal it.
She could hear voices outside, and three dark silhouettes filled the doorway, blotting out the heavens. It was Jamil, flanked by two Egyptians. Serena stiffened as he unfurled a towel with assorted knives and needles across a small table.
“Colonel Zawas was disappointed he couldn’t persuade you to cooperate, Doctor Serghetti,” he said. “Now it’s my turn.”
“So I see,” she said, staring at the cruel instruments on the table. “Isn’t this a bit over the top? I already told Zawas that I don’t know where the shrine is. Honest. If I did, I’d tell you.”
“A brave front, Doctor Serghetti, really.” Jamil looked over his wares, stocked mostly with syringes, knives of various shapes, and shock rods. “Ah, the tricks your Inquisition taught us.”
He picked up a two-foot-long black club. Suddenly it came to life like lightning. It was an electric shock baton.
“This is my favorite,” he said, waving it in front of her. A bolt of blue electricity sizzled between two metal prongs. “Each jolt delivers seventy-five thousand volts. A few pokes would leave you unconscious. A few more, dead.”
“Is this what you intended your life to become, Jamil?”
Jamil cursed and tried to force her jaw open. She turned away. But he shoved the baton into her mouth. She choked on the metal rod as he dug it deeper.
“The Chinese like to shove this down a prisoner’s throat and charge it up,” he said as she gagged. “The current that races through your body will leave you crumpled on the floor in a pool of blood and excrement and in extreme pain.”
She could feel the hot metal prongs at the back of her throat and moaned. But Jamil pulled it away and pushed the button again so she could see the blue electric charges flash between the prongs.
“There are other places I could ram this,” he told her, and she unconsciously squeezed her thighs together. “Good,” he said with a smile and set the shock rod down on the table. “I see you understand.” He then picked up a syringe and with the back of his finger flicked the hypodermic needle. A yellowish fluid spurt out. “Now we can begin.”
A few hours later, Serena regained consciousness and found herself in the dark, staring at a makeshift lantern Jamil had hung from the ceiling-his shock rod swinging on a rope, making grotesque zapping sounds as it flashed. She tried closing her eyes, but the zap-zap of the shock rod only seemed to grow louder. Or maybe it was the drugs injected into her bloodstream that made her feel so sloshed.
Somehow she sensed another presence in the chamber and opened her eyes to see a long shadow on the wall. Her eyes drifted to the doorway, where a fuzzy figure stepped inside.
“Conrad?” she said.
“It’s nice to have dreams, Doctor Serghetti.”
It was Zawas. Serena hung her head again as he walked over to the small table where Jamil had left his tools of torture.
“I’m told you haven’t been terribly cooperative,” Zawas said, examining Jamil’s toys. “It was all I could do to keep Jamil from permanently erasing your memory with those chemicals of his. But he is an animal. He gives Arabs everywhere a bad name. You know that most of us are not at all like him. You must understand this. Your Church has priests who molest children. Yet you aren’t about to abandon your mission. Neither am I.”
She said nothing as he looked around the chamber. Her pack on the floor caught his eye. He circled round it and watched her face. Then he lifted it to the table and unzipped it. He began to rifle through its contents, examining her personal belongings-water purification tablets, hot water bottles, a flare, and the like.
Then he came to her green thermos. Her chest constricted as he began to unscrew the top. She prayed he wouldn’t find the blueprint inside the secret shell. For all she knew, that blueprint contained enough information for him to find or deploy this unlimited power source he was searching for in the Shrine of the First Sun.
“You remind me of Pharaoh, Zawas,” Serena said. “You know, from the Bible.”
He seemed amused and put the thermos down on the table. “Then you know my authority comes from the gods themselves and you must answer to me.”
“The gods of Egypt were defeated once before,” she said. “They can be defeated again.”
“History is about to be rewritten, Doctor Serghetti. But first I must find the Shrine of the First Sun. So far, its location has eluded me. As has Doctor Yeats. Oh, yes, he’s alive. I know this because several of my men are missing,” he said. “He killed them, just like he’s killed so many others in Atlantis thus far in his selfish quest for the origins of human civilization. I know all about this man. He cares little for the consequences of his actions on governments, people, even the very sites he excavates. It’s a good thing I saved you and the Scepter of Osiris from him.”
Serena said nothing, because there was no defense against Zawas’s accusations. They were true.
“Unlike the reckless Doctor Yeats, however,” Zawas went on, “I appreciate and want to preserve natural beauty in all its forms, especially the feminine. I would hate to see a monster like Jamil mar you in any way.”
That was a lie, she knew. “So you’re a gentleman among the barbarians.”
He looked at her carefully. “I see we understand each other well. It’s not as if the Catholic Church hasn’t wrapped itself up in nobility and social mercy only to make pacts with the devil at convenient points in history.”
