with ancient blessings and meditations.
That was how kabbalah water came to fill Midas's bluestone spa, with all its miraculous powers of restoration and healing.
The Alignment, of course, had a different term for this kind of allegedly metastasized water: Tears of Atlantis. The Knights of the Alignment consumed it as a special-label drinking water courtesy of the Hellenic Bottling Company, which also distributed Coca-Cola across Europe and the Middle East.
Midas could only smile as he pictured a small team of kabbalists, all sworn to secrecy, chanting away in some obscure distillation room at the bottling plant.
On one crazy level, it made sense to him that water was a conductor of energy and that the quality of the water he took into his body impacted the information being transmitted to his nervous system. At the very least, it gave his London mistress something to do with her friend Madonna besides run off and spend his money on yet another money-losing retail store for her hideous fashion lines.
He stepped down and settled into the warm amethyst-colored waters of the spa. He reclined in the sculptured stone seat built into the bluestone basin and glided his hand past a sensor. Music piped in, and an overhead door of solid bluestone slowly slid over him and locked into place. The glass screen across the entire back of the door enabled him to surf the Internet, watch any television channel, and monitor his businesses around the world. But for now he put on his favorite screen saver of soothing light, closed his eyes, and laid his head back until only his eyes, nose, and mouth broke the surface of the water.
Kabbalah water. Bluestones with healing powers. Such articles of faith were nonsense to Midas. But these immersion experiences in the tank seemed to have arrested the progression of the neurological condition brought on by his long-term exposure to cyanide. Slowly, it was taking over his body and would eventually kill him. He had to stop it. He would do anything to live.
Even cave to the mysticism of the Alignment.
17
Later that morning, the events of Corfu still fresh in her psyche, Serena stared through the tinted window of her limo at the obelisk in St. Peter's Square as Benito drove through the gates of Vatican City on the eve of Palm Sunday and Easter week celebrations.
As she checked her Vertu phone, she couldn't shake the memory of Conrad the night before, the hatred in his eyes. He had left her no message. Nor any clue as to his whereabouts. But she did have an Evite to the funeral of Mercedes Le Roche in Paris on Monday, along with a personal e-mail from Papa Le Roche himself, the Rupert Murdoch of French media, begging her as a friend of the family to attend.
'You have enough worries without him, signorina,' said Benito, looking up in the mirror, reading her thoughts. 'He can take care of himself. You must fix your eyes on Rhodes.'
'I know, Benito,' she said. 'But it's different this time. I feel it.'
'It's always different, signorina. Every time we pass through these gates. And so it is always the same.'
True, she thought as they curved along a winding drive and arrived at the entrance of the governorate. Eight years ago the pope had met her in a secret office here and given her an antediluvian map along with a holy mission to uncover ancient ruins two miles beneath the ice in Antarctica. Four years later, in that very office, the diabolical Cardinal Tucci had revealed to her the truth behind the Church's supersecret order Dominus Dei. Then he had jumped out a window to his death. Now the office was hers.
The Swiss Guards in their crimson uniforms snapped to attention as Serena walked inside. She passed a hive of offices along an obscure hallway to an old service elevator.
In normal times the elevator would take her up to the fifth floor and her suite of offices, which officially interceded on behalf of persecuted Christians in politically hostile countries and unofficially administered the work of Dominus Dei. But these were anything except normal days. She pressed her thumb to a button with no markings that scanned her biometrics, and the elevator descended to the catacombs beneath Vatican City.
She felt like a prisoner in her own castle and remembered the words of Jesus in the Book of Revelation: 'Look, I'm standing at the door and knocking. If anyone listens to my voice and opens the door, I'll come in and we'll eat together.' He had been talking about the door of the human heart, but He just as easily could have been talking about the Church. After all, God had called St. Paul to go beyond his Jewish world in order to bring the message of redemption through faith in Jesus Christ to the Greeks and, ultimately, to Caesar in Rome.
Perhaps it was 'out there' that God had been calling her all along, beyond the walls of the Church. She had cloistered herself here, she had told herself, to protect Conrad and the Church and the world. But maybe she was doing more harm than good. After all, Jesus was more likely to be found beyond the domes and spires and walls of Vatican City, with the people He called 'the least of these.' Not with the rich and powerful or religious, whom she had found to be as poor and weak and worldly in spirit as anybody.
Yet here she was, locked inside the holy gates of Rome.
Serena stepped off the elevator onto a secret floor deep beneath the governorate. She walked down a long subterranean tunnel to a heavy ornate door behind which the Dei kept priceless artifacts collected from around the world and across the ages. If it were her choice, she would have returned most of them to museums in their cultures of origin. But it was not.
Indeed, her choices of late seemed to be more limited than ever.
Waiting for her inside the dimly lit chamber was a young monk from the Dei and the two otherworldly copper globes that he was guarding. Brother Lorenzo was one of the Vatican's top authenticators of antiques and therefore one of its top forgers of art. He knelt before Serena and kissed her ring with the Dominus Dei insignia.
'Your Eminence,' he said. 'Welcome back.'
Serena, extremely uncomfortable, looked down at the top of the monk's bowed head and withdrew her hand from his clasp. The Church didn't allow female priests, let alone female cardinals. But as the head of Dominus Dei, she was automatically considered a 'secret cardinal' appointed by the pope. A secret cardinal to hide the secrets of the Church. Not that the current pontiff, as traditional as they came, would ever acknowledge her as such. But to her amazement, the Vatican did secretly acknowledge the rank of her office, if not the officeholder. Her frighteningly eager underlings, hoping to gain the office for themselves someday, took every advantage to freely address her as such.
'Thank you, Brother Lorenzo. You can call me Sister Serghetti.'
Lorenzo rose to his feet, but his covetous gaze was fixed on the medallion dangling from her neck. 'Yes, Sister Serghetti.'
As she had explained to Midas, legend had it that the ancient Roman coin in the center of the medallion was the very Tribute Penny Jesus had held up when He told His followers that they should 'render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's.' It had been passed down through the ages from one leader of the Dei to the next. Some argued that it represented power greater than the papacy. Which no doubt explained Lorenzo's disturbing fascination with it.
Serena broke Lorenzo's trance with an order: 'The globes, Lorenzo.'
'This way, Sister Serghetti.'
She followed Lorenzo to the small alcove showcasing the globes, one displaying the surface of the earth, the other displaying the heavens. Each sphere was eighteen inches in diameter and resembled the works of the Dutch master cartographer Willem Bleau's studio in the sixteenth century. But these had been constructed thousands of years earlier, although her attempts to date them proved inconclusive.
Both Church and Templar tradition suggested the globes once rested atop the twin columns that stood at the entrance of King Solomon's Temple. But the Knights Templar believed the globes themselves were crafted far earlier. While Noah was building his ark, other children of Lamech were engraving the globes with the lost knowledge of Atlantis and the antediluvian world so that knowledge would survive the coming destruction of the Flood. The globes, the Templars believed, contained or pointed to some pre-Genesis revelation.
