The Atlantis Legacy - A01-A02 by Greanias Thomas

Author:Greanias, Thomas [Greanias, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Thriller
ISBN: 9781439149027
Google: l8cFWLkhDQwC
Amazon: B003E7ETZI
Publisher: Gallery Books
Published: 2009-06-01T14:00:00+00:00

PART ONE

PRESENT DAY

1

ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETERY

ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA

CONRAD YEATS KEPT A GOOD THREE STEPS behind the flag-draped coffin. Six horses pulled the caisson toward the gravesite, their hooves clomping like a cosmic metronome in the heavy air. Each resounding clap proclaimed the march of time, the brevity of life. In the distance lightning flickered across the dark sky. But still no rain.

Conrad looked over at Marshall Packard. The secretary of defense walked beside him, his Secret Service agents a few paces behind with the other mourners from all branches of America’s armed forces, umbrellas at the ready.

Conrad said, “It’s not often you bury a soldier four years after his death.”

“No, it’s not,” said Packard, a fireplug of a former pilot known for his unflagging intensity. “I wish it hadn’t taken this long. But you’re the only one who knows the extraordinary way in which your father met his end.”

Packard had delivered a stirring eulogy for his old wingman “the Griffter” back at the military chapel up the hill. What Packard had failed to mention, Conrad knew, was that he hated the Griffter’s guts. The two men had had a falling out over Conrad’s unusual role at the Pentagon years ago, which involved identifying secret targets for bunker-busting cruise missiles: underground military installations and nuclear facilities in the Middle East that America’s enemies were building beneath archaeological sites for protection. Packard couldn’t believe that Conrad, the world’s foremost expert on megalithic architecture, would risk destroying civilization’s most ancient treasures. The Griffter couldn’t believe that Packard would risk American lives to preserve a few unturned stones that had already yielded all the information that archaeologists like Conrad needed to know about the dead culture that built them. The clash ended with an aborted air strike on the pyramid at Ur in Iraq and the revocation of Conrad’s Top Secret security clearance from the Department of Defense.

“He wasn’t my biological father,” Conrad reminded Packard. “I was adopted.”

There was a lot more Conrad could say, none of it helpful right now. Especially about how he had nothing to do with the planning of this funeral, how the Pentagon wouldn’t even let him see the tombstone his father had picked out for himself before he had died, and, most of all, how Conrad was certain that the man they were burying today could not possibly be his father.

“Level with me, son.” Packard glanced to his left and right. “Did you kill him?”

Conrad locked eyes with Packard, the man he called “Uncle MP” as a child and feared more than anybody else except his father. “Your people performed the autopsy, Mr. Secretary. Why don’t you tell me?”

The two men said nothing more on the way down the hill to the gravesite.

Conrad suspected that the DOD had spent tens of millions of American taxpayer dollars over the past four years to locate the remains of USAF Gen. Griffin Yeats. It was all in the vain hope of finding out what happened to the billions more his father had squandered

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