The Atlantis Legacy - A01-A02 Read Online Free Page B

angry protesters and camera crews in Saint Peter’s Square. That she could arouse such strong sentiments seemed impossible. And yet the demonstrations outside were meant for her.
    She was only twenty-seven, but she had already made a lifetime’s worth of enemies in the petroleum, timber, and biomedical industries or anyone who put profit ahead of people, animals, or the environment. But her efforts inadvertently left a few of the people she had hoped to save jobless. Well, maybe more than a few, judging by the mob outside.
    Dressed in her trademark urban uniform of an Armani suit and high-top sneakers, she hardly looked the part of a former Carmelite nun. But that was the point. As “Mother Earth” she made headlines, and with recognition came influence. How else would the style-over-substance media, the secular world, and, ultimately, Rome take her seriously?
    God was another matter. She wasn’t sure what he thought of her, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to know.
    Serena stared through the rain-streaked window. Vatican police were pushing back the crowds and paparazzi. Then, out of nowhere, whap! —there was a loud crack, and she jumped. A protester had managed to slap his placard against the glass: FIND ANOTHER PLANET, MOTHER EARTH.
    “I think they miss you, signorina, ” said the driver in his best English.
    “They mean well, Benito,” she replied, looking at the throngswith compassion. She could have addressed him in Italian, French, German, or a dozen other languages. But she recalled Benito wanted to work on his English. “They’re scared. They have families to feed. They need someone to blame for their unemployment. It might as well be me.”
    “Only you, signorina, would bless your enemies.”
    “There are no enemies, Benito, just misunderstandings.”
    “Spoken like a true saint,” he said as they left the mob at the gate and curved along a winding drive.
    “So, Benito, do you know why His Holiness has summoned me to the Eternal City for a private audience?” she asked, casually smoothing her pants, trying to hide the anxiety building inside.
    “With you it is always hard to say.” Benito smiled in the mirror, revealing a gold tooth. “So much trouble to choose from.”
    Too true, she thought. When she was a nun, Serena was usually at odds with her superiors, an outcast within her own church. Even the pope, an ally, once told Newsweek magazine, “Sister Serghetti is doing what God would do if only he knew the facts.” That made good copy, but she knew that no court of public opinion could protect her within these gates.
    Born of an illicit affair between a Catholic priest and a housemaid outside Sydney, Serena Serghetti was filled with shame as a little girl. She grew up among sordid whispers and hated her father, who denied his patrimony to the end and died a drunken fraud. She silenced the whispers by pledging sexual purity at age twelve, excelling in her study of linguistics and, most shocking of all, joining a convent at sixteen. Within a few years she had become a living example of redemption to the Church and a walking, talking reminder to humanity of its ecological sins.
    It was a good run while it lasted, which was almost seven years. Then, a few months after a personal crisis in South America, she returned to Rome for moral guidance and instead discovered that the Vatican was refusing to pay its water bills, hiding behind its status as a sovereign state and the obscure Lateran Treaty of 1929, which established that Italy must provide water for the 107-acre enclave for free but made no provision for sewage fees. “We neither render unto Caesar the taxes we owe Caesar, nor render unto God the honorwe owe God as his stewards of Creation,” she said when she publicly renounced her vows and embraced the environment.
    It was then that the media dubbed her “Mother Earth.” Ever since, she couldn’t stop people from addressing her as such, or as “Sister Serghetti.” She was probably