The Atlantis Revelation Read Online Free

correct.”
    “What of Semyaza?” the voice demanded, referring to Yeats.
    “Dead.”
    “Those were not your orders.” There was anger in the voice.
    “It couldn’t be helped,” Midas said, and quickly moved on. “We’re on schedule. T minus eight days.”
    “Keep it that way.”
    The line cut out, and Midas stared at the images of Conrad Yeats on the large flat-panel screen of his computer. He zoomed in on one in particular—of the archaeologist’s DNA. There was nothing remarkable about it save for one thing: It spiraled to the left. All indigenous life on earth has DNA that spirals to the right. To the Alignment, that bestowed Yeats with some mystical meaning, as if the freak of nature somehow possessed some lost pieces of Atlantean blood in his genetic makeup.
    Midas could care less. He closed the image on his screen and, with a few taps on his keyboard, connected with his trading firm mainframes in London. Then he went down to the lower decks and the yacht’s submersible launch bay.
    Next to a double-domed “deep flight” Falcon submarine, designed to fly underwater like a private jet through the air, was the decompression chamber, its hatch wide open, with Sergei and Yorgi waiting for him inside.
    Yorgi didn’t look too good, his stomach hastily patched where the late, great Dr. Yeats had stabbed him with his own harpoon dart.
    “We could have been decompressing instead of waiting for you,” Sergei complained. “Are you trying to kill us?”
    Midas smiled, stepped inside the chamber, and allowed Vadim to close the hatch on the three of them. The air compressor started to hum and raise the internal air pressure to rid their bodies of harmful gas bubbles caused by inhaling oxygen at higher pressure during their dive for the Flammenschwert. The two divers were rubbing their itchy skin and sore joints. They were clearly displaying symptoms of the bends—their lungs alone were unable to expel the bubbles formed inside their bodies.
    “I wanted us to decompress together,” Midas said, taking his seat opposite the two FSB men. “But first I had to see off the Flammenschwert. ”
    Sergei and Yorgi looked at each other. “The arrangement was for us to take it back to Moscow,” Sergei said.
    “ Nyet, ” said Midas. “I have other plans for the Flammenschwert, and they don’t involve the FSB.”
    “You are a dead man if you betray Moscow, Midaslovich,” Sergei said. “Our organization spans the globe and is as old as the czars.”
    “Mine is older,” Midas scoffed. “And now it has something yours does not—the power to turn oceans into fire.”
    “The deal was to use it in the Arctic and split the oil,” Sergei pressed.
    “Like the deal you did with British Petroleum in Russia before you stole their operations and ran them out?” Midas answered calmly as the air inside the chamber started to smell like bitter almonds. “Fools. Higher oil prices may have fueled your regime, but you don’t know how to manage production. So you nationalize it and penalize real producers like me. Now that production has peaked, you have no choice but to stick your noses south into the Middle East and make war. You could have been kings instead of criminals.”
    Sergei and Yorgi began to cough and choke. Sergei said, “What have you done?”
    Midas coughed twice. It would have been easier to throw them into the chamber, crank the dial, and blow their guts out. But it also would have been a mess to clean.
    “As a child in the gold mines of Siberia, I was forced to extract gold from finely crushed ore,” he told them calmly, like a firefighter lighting up a cigarette in the middle of an inferno. “Unfortunately, the only chemical up to the job is cyanide. It’s stable when solid. But as a gas, it’s toxic. I can see you are already experiencing rapid breathing, restlessness, and nausea.”
    Sergei began to vomit while Yorgi crumpled to the floor in convulsions.
    “As for myself, my body developed a