The Atlantis Revelation Read Free Page A

cameras wherever she went—and that was just within the Church. Outside, there were the oil and gas companies she chided, and diamond merchants, and the exploiters of children.
    But that wasn’t what this word from God was about.
    Conrad Yeats.
    She fought to push his face out of her mind and felt the slightest tremor as her knees pressed against the concrete floor.
    That rogue? That liar, cheat, and thief? What could he possibly have against me? Other than I wouldn’t sleep with him?
    But she couldn’t get his face—his handsome unshaved face—out of her mind. Nor could she forget how she had left things in Washington, D.C., a few years back, after he had saved her life. She had promised to leave the Church and be with him forever. Instead she had stolen something priceless out from under him and the U.S. government, leaving him with nothing.
    But Lord, You know it was for Conrad’s own good and the greater good.
    When she opened her eyes and rose to her feet, she surrendered the box of African rice seeds to the Norwegian prime minister. With solemn fanfare, he opened the box for the cameras, revealing sealed silver packets, each labeled with a special bar code. Then he resealed the box and slid it onto its designated shelf in the vault.
    After the ceremony, she went into the main tunnel and found her driver and bodyguard, Benito, waiting for her with her parka. She slipped it on, and they started walking toward the main entrance to the facility.
    “Just as you suspected, signorina, ” he told her, handing her a small blue device. “Our divers found it at the bottom of the arctic seabed.”
    It was a geophone. Oil companies used them to take seismic surveys of the earth’s subsurface in search of oil, in this case the earth two miles beneath the ice and water of the North Pole. Her visit to the Doomsday Vault had been a cover for her to meet with divers who could investigate for signs of drilling.
    “So someone is planning to mine the bottom of the Arctic,” she said, watching her breath freeze as they stood before the facility’s dual blast-proof doors. Slowly and heavily, the doors opened.
    The arctic air slapped Serena in the face as she stepped outside, where a van with tanklike treads was waiting to take her to the island’s airport, the northernmost in the world with regular flights. Behind her, the exterior of the Doomsday Vault looked like something out of a science fiction movie, a giant granite wedge protruding from the ice.
    The Norwegian island of Spitsbergen had been chosen as the location for the seed vault because it was a remote region with low tectonic activity and an arctic environment that was ideal for preservation. Now oil exploration posed a direct threat to this environment. It would also accelerate global warming’s melting of the ice cap, threatening coastal cities around the world.
    So why was she thinking of Conrad Yeats?
    Something is terribly wrong, she thought. He’s in danger.
    But she couldn’t put her finger on why and blamed her gloomy thoughts on the sweeping vista of endless ice and water spread out before her. It brought back memories of her adventure with Conrad in Antarctica years ago.
    Benito said, “Our divers say there are thousands of them, maybe even tens of thousands, below us.”
    Serena realized he was talking about the geophone in her hand. “It will take them at least six months to map all the underground formations,” she said. “So we still have some time before they decide where to start drilling. That might give us a chance to stop them.”
    “The Russians?” Benito asked.
    “Maybe.” She flipped the geophone over and saw the manufacturer’s name: Midas Minerals & Mining LTD. “But I know who can tell us.”

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    C ORFU

    I f Sir Roman Midas loved anything in his life, it was his prized superyacht. Named after his one true love—himself—the Midas had a two-thousand-square-foot gym, two two-person submarines, and two helicopter pads, one for his