another thing entirely.'
Tucci was known for playing things very close to his vestments. He was not known for wild speculation or outright disinformation. If he was sharing this information with her, it was because he believed it to be accurate.
'So L'Enfant says he followed Washington's instructions to lay out the city of Washington, D.C., so that key monuments would lock with key stars at a specific date in the future,' Serena said. 'A doomsday warning, if you will. And what's going to happen on that date is revealed by the celestial globe Washington buried.'
'Or by what's inside the globe,' Tucci said. 'Not since the War of 1812 has anyone in Rome believed L'Enfant's confession. But if this map you've shown me is real and Stargazer is real, there can be little doubt that L'Enfant's confession is true. Which means America is in grave peril. Look at the end date.'
She stared down at the date: July 4, 2008.
'So you see, Sister Serghetti, Stargazer has six days to stop the alignment of the monuments with the stars or the United States of America will cease to exist.'
Serena said, 'You mean stop the organization we call the Alignment.'
'They are one and the same, Sister Serghetti,' Tucci said. 'If anything is going to happen in heaven and on earth in six days, you can be sure the Alignment will make it happen. They have been gathering strength for centuries. This conjunction of landmarks and stars-this metamorphosis of America into something its founders never intended-is their raison d'etat. Their twisted sense of destiny is searching for any moral or legal justification to use the United States to unleash their will on this world and wipe out their enemies en masse.'
Serena couldn't hide her shock or skepticism. 'By what power, Your Eminence?'
'Perhaps by some new technology or weapon of mass destruction or some natural wonder that can be exploited,' Tucci said. 'I don't know. Like I told you, I'm a historian and not an eschatologist. But there is one thing that I do know about America in Bible prophecy.'
'What's that?' Serena asked.
'It isn't there,' he said. 'It's as if America never existed.'
Serena grew very still, the utter insanity of everything sinking in still deeper.
'So Washington set up the alignment of monuments as a warning to Americans in the future,' she said slowly. 'And Stargazer-Dr. Yeats-is a kind of ultimate 'sleeper' that Washington essentially sent into the future to stop the Alignment.'
'Crazy, I know,' Tucci said. 'And all from the lips of Pierre L'Enfant, the pompous architect of the American capital who spent his last penniless days wandering the boulevards he laid out and bemoaning the changes from his grand designs.'
'So you think L'Enfant was a delusional l'enfant.'
'I did until you gave me the original L'Enfant map along with Washington's orders for Stargazer.'
Serena looked Tucci in the eye, to avoid any doubt. 'You want me and Dr. Yeats to go under the capitol of the New World Order to dig up this globe and save America from the Alignment.'
'No,' he said firmly. 'I want you to bring the globe back to Rome.'
Serena stared at him, feeling a tingle of fear creep up the back of her neck.
'The world is a better place because of the United States of America,' Tucci said. 'But world civilizations come and go. The Church is forever. If America should collapse as an imperial power or morph into something else, we must be prepared to confront a new New World Order.'
'But Conrad…Dr. Yeats.'
'Is never to see the inside of that globe should you come upon it,' Tucci said. 'Not if you want to save America, or him.'
10
WHILE SERENA had run off to Rome with his map, Conrad was in hiding at her safe house way out in the hills of Westchester County, two hours north of New York City. Here at the Cistercian Abbey of Our Lady of Letters, the brethren wore robes, sang Gregorian chants, and ran an Internet retailer called TonedMonks.com, which sold discounted printer cartridges and other office supplies to churches and charities.
According to the literature picked up by the school groups and tourists that visited the abbey by day, TonedMonks.com was the brainchild of the honorary abbot, 'Father McConnell,' a member of the Catholic lay leadership organization known as the Knights of Columbus. In his former life McConnell had been a billionaire Wall Street hedge fund manager who decided it was far better to have something to live for than enough to live on.
The real story, however, was in a dimly lit, dank crypt beneath the abbey, where Conrad was working around the clock with a team of researchers to crack the codes from his father's tombstone and Washington's letter to Robert Yates.
The abbey and its front, TonedMonks.com, apparently did for Serena and the Vatican what venture capital fund In-Q-Tel did for the CIA: fund new technology to advance the kingdom, in this case the Kingdom of God. The abbey's specialty was document analysis. Serena ran the nuns and a secret archive of historical documents out of nearby Mount Saint Mary's, a local Dominican college on the Hudson where she taught on occasion, while McConnell ran the brothers and analysis in these crypts beneath this abbey.
The monks also made a mean espresso, and by his third day code-cracking Conrad was sleepless, fatigued, and jittery as he reviewed his progress on the screen before him.
He clicked on his digital chart table and reviewed the three constellations of Bootes, Leo, and Virgo. Using a digital pen he connected the alpha stars from each constellation-Arcturus, Regulus, and Spica-to draw a triangle.
He then called up a second window on his desktop, a scan of the terrestrial L'Enfant map, and placed it next to the celestial map. He used his digital pen to connect the three key markers on the terrestrial map labeled 'Presidential Palace,' 'Congressional House,' and 'equestrian statue to honor Washington.' Those were the early monikers for the White House, U.S. Capitol, and Washington Monument.
These, too, formed a triangle.
As he suspected all along, the star map mirrored key landmarks on the ground. The White House was aligned to the star Arcturus in the constellation Bootes, the U.S. Capitol to the star Regulus in the constellation Leo, and the Washington Monument to the star Spica in the constellation Virgo.
But a triangle pointed nowhere.
That's what had stumped Conrad at the beginning. In the past he had used star maps to help find a specific location on earth-a secret chamber under the left paw of the Sphinx in Egypt, for example, or the Shrine of the First Sun in Atlantis. But this star map might as well be a circle, an endless loop. A star map was supposed to point to a specific location on earth.
Or a date in history.
That's when it all clicked for Conrad: These three key monuments along the Mall were not only each aligned to certain stars, but collectively to a celestial clock, to a single moment in time and space that any astronomer-or astro-archaeologist-conversant with the precession of equinoxes would know comes along only once every twenty- six thousand years.
It took him a few hours to work the astronomical calculations and correlate them with the astrology of L'Enfant's day, always a tedious task. That was because astrology was a bogus science, based on discredited beliefs. But it was upon those beliefs that ancient pyramids and monuments were once built. So not only did Conrad need to know some hard science, he had to reconcile it with the flawed worldview of a structure's builders during a particular era in history.
Finally, he was done.
Conrad typed in the password to launch his program and watched the screen. The triangles of the celestial and terrestrial maps slowly began to merge, the former on top of the latter. As they did, a digital calendar at the
