Read The Atlantis Revelation for Free Online

would be extended to him by the rest. “Why the special treatment, Your Majesty, if I may ask?”
    “All of our guests tonight are special, Dr. Yeats.”
    Conrad watched the crowd move up the grand staircase to the second floor, which opened onto the terrace and gardens outside. The guest list he had seen numbered 150 names—about a hundred from Europe and the rest from North America. Mostly government, finance, and communications types.
    One of them, the new publisher of The Washington Post, he instantly recognized in front of him. Unfortunately, the tall, thin blonde saw him, too.
    “Conrad Yeats, what the hell are you doing here?” she said. “Stepping into your daddy’s shoes?”
    “Hello, Katharine,” he told her. She was wearing her white watch with the rhinestone skull-and-bones face. He had never seen her without it. “You seem to have filled your grandmother’s pumps nicely.” He watched her move toward the bottom of the grand staircase, where her party was waiting.
    “Ah, you know Ms. Weymouth,” Queen Beatrice said.
    “Just a dance or two in high school,” Conrad said. “I thought media was banned from this event.”
    “Not at all,” the queen said. “We have several American and European news organizations represented here. But our participants have agreed not to report on the meeting or to grant interviews to outside press about what transpires. It would defeat the purpose of this forum.”
    “Which is?” Conrad pressed.
    The queen smiled and clasped his hand with both of her own. They were small but firm. “Simply and only to allow world leaders to speak their minds freely.”
    “I’ll do my best,” he said, and turned toward the staircase.
    “Before you do, your friend and sponsor for tonight would like to speak to you in the kaiser’s room,” Queen Beatrice said.
    “Sponsor?” Conrad repeated, stepping toward the room to the right of the reception hall before the queen tugged his arm.
    “That’s the chapel. You wouldn’t want to go there. Maybe later. The iconography is unparalleled. But the kaiser’s room is this way.” She gestured to the short hall on the left of the grand staircase. “It was a pleasure meeting you, Dr. Yeats.” There was an unnerving finality in her voice.
    Conrad bid adieu to the queen, who moved back toward the front steps while he walked down the hall to the kaiser’s room and entered the study. There stood a short, barrel-chested penguin of a man in a tuxedo: Marshall Packard, former U.S. secretary of defense and now acting head of its DARPA research and development agency.
    “Hell, Yeats, is there any woman alive you don’t have a past with?” Packard said.
    Packard must have seen his little run-in with Katharine back in the foyer, Conrad realized. “You’re violating the Logan Act, Packard, you know that,” he said. “You and every American here who discusses anything pertinent to the national security of the United States with foreign powers.”
    Packard walked behind the kaiser’s old desk and made himself comfortable in the leather chair. “Spare me the lecture, Prince Pavlos, and shut the door.”

6
    C onrad sat down in the kaiser’s study and looked at Packard—“Uncle MP,” as Conrad had known him growing up, when he was his father’s old wingman in the air force.
    Packard and his father, the onetime Bilderberger, had been best friends until his father’s first ill-fated trip to Antarctica as an Apollo astronaut on a Mars training mission. Four astronauts made the mission, but only Griffin Yeats returned alive. The Griffter was profoundly changed by the mysterious affair, confounding those who thought they knew him, including his own wife. When the Griffter introduced four-year-old Conrad to the family as an adopted son immediately thereafter, the suspicions only grew.
    Conrad knew that his adoptive mother had enlisted Packard’s help to get to the bottom of the story. But Packard never did. Nobody did. Not even Conrad. Not