The Atlantis Revelation Read Free

the Flammenschwert sank in.
    It works. It really turns water to fire.
    Conrad stared at the dolphin’s blackened rostrum and teeth. He felt some stomach acid rising at the back of his own throat and looked away. All around him were incinerated bottlenose dolphins, floating like driftwood across a sea of death.

2
    S VALBARD G LOBAL S EED V AULT
S PITSBERGEN I SLAND
A RCTIC C IRCLE

    S ister Serena Serghetti clutched the metal box containing African rice seeds to her chest as she walked down a long tunnel blasted out of the arctic mountain. High above her, fluorescent lights flashed on and off as she passed embedded motion detectors. Close behind, a choir of Norwegian schoolchildren held candles in the flickering darkness and sang “Sleep Little Seedling.”
    Their heavenly voices felt heavy in the freezing air, Serena thought, weighted perhaps by the tunnel’s meter-thick walls of reinforced concrete. Or maybe it was her heart that felt so heavy.
    The Doomsday Vault, as it was called when it opened in 2008, already housed more than two million seeds representing every variety of the earth’s crops. In time it would house a collection of a hundred million seeds from more than 140 countries here on this remote island near the North Pole. It had been built to protect the world’s food supply against nuclear war, climate change, terrorism, rising sea levels, earthquakes, and the ensuing collapse of power supplies. If worse came to worst, the vault would allow the world to reconstruct agriculture on the planet.
    But now the vault itself was in danger. Thanks to global warming, the shrinking ice caps had spurred a new race for oil in the Arctic. It was the next Saudi Arabia, if someone could figure out a way to extract and transport all that oil through a sea of ice. A few years earlier, the Russians had even planted a flag two and a half miles below the ice at the North Pole to claim its oil reserves. Now Serena feared they were preparing to start mining.
    She passed through two separate air locks and into the vault itself, blinking into the glare of the TV lights. The Norwegian prime minister was in there somewhere, along with a delegation from the United Nations.
    Serena knelt before the TV cameras and prayed silently for the people of the earth. But she was aware of shutters clicking and photographers’ boots shuffling for better shots of her.
    Whatever happened to finding a secret place to pray, like Jesus taught? she wondered, unable to shake a guilty feeling. Did the world really need to see Mother Earth arrayed in high-definition piety 24/7? As if the prayers of the Vatican’s top linguist and environmental czar counted more than those of the anonymous humble field laborer whose hands culled the seeds she now held.
    But this was a cause greater than herself and her tormented thirty-three-year-old soul, she reminded herself. And her official purpose here today was to focus the world’s attention on its future.
    As she knelt, tightly gripping the box of seeds, a feeling of dread came over her. What the vault meant, what it was built for: the time of the end, which the Bible had prophesied would come soon. The words of the prophet Isaiah whispered in her ear: God is the only God. He will draw all people to Himself to see His glory. He will end this world. And He will judge those who reject Him.
    Not something TV audiences wanted to hear.
    She felt a nagging sense of hypocrisy about her performance. A disturbing thought began to bubble up, a thought she couldn’t quite formulate. Her dread began to take shape in the words of Jesus: “If therefore you are offering your gift at the altar, and there remember that your brother has anything against you, leave your gift there before the altar, and go your way. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift.”
    She didn’t understand. She had plenty of people angry with her at the Vatican—for being a woman, for being beautiful, for drawing