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
R OME
L ater 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
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
R OME
L ater 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
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