The Atlantis Revelation Read Free Page B

chopper and one for guests. At 595 feet, the Midas was longer than the Washington Monument was high and, by design, resembled a shining stack of sliced gold bricks. Today those bricks sat atop the sparkling blue waters of the Ionian Sea near the Greek island of Corfu.
    Not bad for a Russian orphan turned British tycoon, Roman Midaslovich told himself as he stood on the aft-deck helipad. He watched while a winch transferred the unmarked crate to the awaiting helicopter, its blades whirling for takeoff.
    Midas’s London-based trading firm, Midas Minerals & Mining, had made him the world’s richest trader in minerals and metals futures, and his patronage to the art world had won him a knighthood from the queen. It had also made him a top lieutenant inside the Alignment, a centuries-old organization whose leaders fancied themselves the political if not the biological descendants of Atlantis. Utter rubbish, Midas had thought when he first heard the Alignment’s claim to have orchestrated the rise and fall of empires across the ages. He alone was responsible for his rise from a Russian orphanage and the mines of Siberia to the trading pits of Chicago. But then the Alignment had orchestrated his entrée to the jet set of London and awarded him seats inside some of the international organizations that truly set the world’s agenda: the Club of Rome, the Trilateral Commission, and the Bilderberg Group. Now he was a believer.
    He waved off the pilot and watched the chopper lift into the sky. Then he turned to see Vadim Fedorov, his number two, standing before him in all his steroid-pumped muscularity. “They’re waiting for you in the decompression chamber, sir,” Vadim said.
    “They” were two of the other divers from the Nausicaa extraction, Sergei and Yorgi. As far as everyone else was concerned, they were the only people who had seen the Flammenschwert besides himself and the pilot of the submersible, whom he had already dispatched to the ocean depths. Meanwhile, the helicopter would carry the crate to the airstrip on Corfu, and Midas’s Gulfstream V private jet in turn would fly it to its intended destination.
    “Is everything set?” Midas asked.
    Vadim nodded. “You were right. They are FSB. Sergei sent a text message to Moscow almost immediately after they surfaced.”
    “They never really went away, you know.”
    Midas was speaking of Russia’s ancient secret police, which, after the czars, had become the Soviet Union’s feared KGB. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia’s first president, Boris Yeltsin, had dismantled the KGB and renamed it the Federal Security Service, or FSB.
    Many deeply disillusioned agents, such as Sergei and Yorgi, had gone into the private security business, ultimately supplanting the mafia in running Russia’s “protection” rackets. Others, such as Russia’s former president and prime minister Vladimir Putin, had penetrated the government. Today in Russia, three out of four leading politicians boasted a background in the security forces, and almost every large Russian corporation was run by ex-KGB executives with personal ties to Putin.
    Sergei and Yorgi, despite their employment agreements with Midas Minerals & Mining, were Putin’s men and as such no longer of any use to Midas. “Tell them I’ll be down in a moment. First I owe Sorath a progress report,” Midas said. Vadim nodded.
    Midas entered his stateroom and poured himself a drink while he waited for the coded signal to connect. Right now Sorath was just a code name to a voice on the other end of the phone. Midas had no idea who Sorath was or if they had ever met. But all his questions would be answered soon enough.
    “This is Xaphan,” Midas reported as soon as a light told him he was on a secure connection with Sorath. “The sword has been removed from its sheath and is en route to Uriel. A successful test has proved the design is safe for deployment and that the device’s criticality formulas are