“Well, Bodie and his team have been busy,” Butcher said. “Not only have they visited Atlantis, but they were recently seen in Karachi too. Add to that a sighting in Cairo that wasn’t confirmed, and we have an interesting pattern.”
“What about now? What about right now?” Pang growled.
Butcher shrugged. “Nothing since Karachi. Probably still in Pakistan.”
Pang glared at him. “Is that it?”
“No. Not really. If you wanna give me some space, I’ll try to break it down for you.”
Heidi grinned. Pang narrowed his eyes but backed away to lean rigidly against the room’s rickety wardrobe.
Butcher sat back, still flicking at keys. “I’ve fed everything into the computer program. First, the information we gleaned from that last building where you guys killed all those guards. The company, Tracelyn Holdings, is practically impossible to trace any further. We’ve tracked it from Mexico and those crashed vehicles, to Italy and a pair of criminally-run data processing points. But the last building was the main hub. I have an address for a company that owns Tracelyn Holdings and it’s in southern Italy.”
“What’s the name of the company?” Heidi asked, still unwilling to accept that she knew who had kidnapped Bodie and still very much active.
“It’s called Luminaire,” Butcher said. “And, man, I’ve never seen so many firewalls, so much security surrounding a single entity. I couldn’t break in to look at their information with an NSA supercomputer.”
“We don’t need to.” Heidi sighed, stood and walked to the window. “I’m 95 percent certain I know who they are.”
Ignoring Pang’s icy glare, she brought them up to speed on the Illuminati; how they had been the subject of her and Bodie’s first joint mission for the CIA; how they’d found and recovered hundreds of valuable, lost relics from the underground station at Olympus; and how, recently, they’d turned up at Cadbury Castle, intent on taking the Holy Grail for themselves. Clearly, they were still active and searching for something. Clearly, they wanted Bodie and friends to pay for what they did.
“Does that include you?” Pang asked. “I remember what you told me of the Illuminati back in England. It wasn’t a whole lot. If you’d leveled with me—”
“It may include me.” Heidi shut him up. “And to be fair, I think I’d rather talk to them than you, Pang.” She turned to Butcher. “Feed that into your program and see if anything else comes up.”
“Fuck me,” Butcher swore uncharacteristically. “That changes the entire result. I don’t... don’t understand.”
“This program of yours. What does it draw from?” Heidi asked.
“Good question. Well, you have the usual suspects—internet databases. You have other databases of information that’s been suppressed. Files held within agencies like the NSA, CIA, FBI, etcetera. European agencies too. Lists of old, now digitized text, reams of it. You know how every time you put a search term in Google or Bing or whatever these days, it mostly brings up adverts?”
“Yeah, not the way it was when it was useful,” Heidi agreed.
“Aside from monetary considerations that’s being done on purpose. It stops the normal person digging around too much. Everything is harder to find, harder to verify and harder to separate from the plethora of fake news.”
“Is there a point?” Pang broke in.
“Sure there is. Using this far more enhanced, properly focused program, we are left with just a few results. No results are random, I might add. The Illuminati are heavily represented, and links to the recent troubles and everything in the past. The more interesting connection though comes between Cairo, Karachi and Atlantis, the latter being the one that really ties it all in. Apparently, there are ten vortices at equidistant points around the world—five positive and five vile. Three are in those places, and we have another in Algeria, where I believe there was some recent trouble too?”
Heidi was barely keeping up. “Vortices? What do you mean by that?”
“I’m learning as we go along. I guess the easiest way to describe it is through Feng Shui, which everyone knows. There are sweet spots, or sweet paths, where things grow better, heal better and just feel better. If you arrange buildings, possessions and homes in certain ways, they return an elevated feeling of wellbeing, of happiness and security. It’s happened for decades; nobody really knows why. Feng Shui is the art of harmonizing people with the earth, using the magnetic, invisible forces that flow from ocean to ocean known as qi. There’s a lot of evidence that this practice works that I won’t go into just now, but it was once widely used to orient buildings, tombs and other structures. These vortices seem to be the most potent of these sweet spots. And I think that ties in to the mentions of sanctums I found earlier.”
As Butcher took a breath, Pang asked: “Why is this relevant?”
“First, Bodie has been to at least three in the last few days, maybe four. Second, there’s been conflict at each one. Third, there’s an old Illuminati prophecy that tells of the order procuring ore from every sanctum, mixing it into some crucible, and then reaping the reward of the Ishtari. An old, old society called the Ishtari—bad dudes if ever there were any—handed this prophecy down through the ages. The interesting thing is that the Ishtari are now the Illuminati.”
“So Bodie’s grabbing ore from all ten places to stop the friggin’ Illuminati now?” Pang rolled his eyes and let out a huge sigh. “And I thought searching for the Holy Grail was a low.”
Heidi ignored his negativity. “Do you have a copy of the prophecy?”
“Sure. Ten sanctums to seek along ancient causeways. Five vile and five worthy, their purest life-blood to the crucible, to reap the reward of the Ishtari, and reign through His glorious power.”
“Listen, that’s all great,” Pang put in. “Fantastic. Awesome research,
