'They're necessary for the construction of the Third Temple,' Tucci said in triumph. 'By uncovering the globes you have now ensured the rise of the last master civilization.'
'You're insane,' she said.
'Soon you'll be, too.' He placed his empty wine glass down and nodded toward the door. 'Shall we call your guards?'
Serena took a step toward the door and caught a blur of movement in the corner of her eye. She whirled around in time to see Tucci rush toward the window and hurl himself through the glass with a thunderous crash. She heard a scream outside, ran to the sill and looked down to see Tucci sprawled on the pavement below, two uniformed Swiss Guards pointing up at her in the window.
'No!' she gasped.
She heard the door behind her fling open as the guards burst in. She turned from the window to see the captain staring. But not at the broken window and terrible scene outside. He was staring at the Dominus Dei pendant on the floor. She stared at it, too. The chain was unbroken, as if Tucci had removed it first before he had leapt to his death.
'Is everything all right, Sister Serghetti?' he asked her.
'Cardinal Tucci is dead, Captain. Obviously everything is not all right.'
Her heart was pounding as she watched the captain pick up the medallion off the floor with great reverence and hand it to her. He was practically genuflecting, as if he now answered to her.
Somehow he has it in his head that I'm the new head of the Dei.
She took the chain and stared at the ancient Roman coin. Only the pope could nominate the head of the Dei, she knew. But then she recalled the jokes of conspiracy buffs in the College of the Cardinals who said that it was Dei all these centuries who picked the popes.
'Cardinal Tucci was not well,' the captain said suddenly, as if forming his story for the Vatican's press release about the incident. He clearly knew more than he was letting on. 'Arrhythmia, you know. It is a shame his heart should fail while looking out the window.'
'Thank you, Captain. You are dismissed.'
'Very well,' he said and knelt to kiss the medallion now wrapped around her fingers. 'I will post guards outside your door and leave you to your privacy.'
She watched him close the door behind him and sat down in Tucci's chair, suddenly feeling like a prisoner in a cell full of secrets.
She stared at the medallion in her hands, realizing that it was her only way out now. To protect the Church she would have to root out the Alignment, even if it meant joining the Dei. She mourned for Conrad, but knew in her heart that she couldn't abandon the Church to these predators. She had to find out what the Dei was up to.
I do those things I don't want to do, and don't do those things I want to do, she thought, paraphrasing St. Paul. What a wretched woman I am.
Slowly she put the chain with the Dominus Dei medallion around her neck, feeling the silver Roman coin press heavily on her heart.
EPILOGUE
THE RAIN CAME DOWN even harder as Conrad approached his father's tombstone in the dark of night, consumed by an obsession for the truth that the burning of the Newburgh Treaty had only inflamed.
He shined a light on the three-foot-tall obelisk and again read the inscription beneath the engraved cross:
GRIFFIN W. YEATS
BRIG GEN US AIR FORCE
BORN MAY 4 1945
KILLED IN ACTION
EAST ANTARCTICA SEPT 21 2004
He could feel it all coming up now inside him: the anger, the betrayal, the loss-first his father, and now Serena, all over again.
He stared at the numerical strings on one side of the obelisk that had led him to the Stargazer text and the three constellations engraved on the other side that had revealed the secret alignment of America's key monuments.
For some reason he couldn't shake the same uneasy feeling creeping up his spine that he experienced the first time.
There must be more.
Conrad felt a surge of anger and frustration as he leaned back and gave the obelisk a hard kick.
The heavy tombstone barely budged.
Conrad gave it another kick, with feeling.
This time the obelisk, its base loosened from the rain, moved about an inch before it settled back into the muck.
'You goddamn bastard!' he shouted as he kicked it again.
At last the gravestone toppled over on its side in the wet grass.
Conrad stared.
There it was, inscribed in the bottom of the obelisk, now facing him like a picture in stone as the rain washed away the dirt:
A Crusader's cross.
It was an emblem of the Templar Crusaders, a single cross made up of four smaller crosses.
It was also a symbol of Jerusalem.
The cross's four arms were of equal length, symbolizing the four directions and the belief that Jerusalem was the spiritual center of the earth.
He remembered the two columns in the Savage portrait of Mount Vernon, along with the two pillars to the entrance of King Solomon's Temple in that Masonic mural under the Library of Congress. Then he recalled what sat on top of those two pillars-globes with terrestrial and celestial maps.
The globes belonged in Solomon's Temple. Not just the original Temple. But the next Temple. And if each globe was reputed to have originally contained the secrets of Genesis or 'First Time,' then it stood to reason that together the globes worked to reveal the secret of…the end of time.
He stared at the cross, the last secret symbol that his father had left him.
Did Serena know about it? Conrad wondered. She must.
Now he knew, too.
'See you there, Serena,' he said to the pounding rain, and walked away into the night.
ANNEX
