The Testament

Chapter 1

On an exceptionally hot and humid July fourth, Dexter Shaw turned a corner and all at once found himself back in the tense days and edgy nights of his youth. Perhaps it was the sight of the nubile young woman in her sleeveless halter top or the drugged-out young man sitting in the hot shade of a white-brick building, a somnolent dog at his side, a cardboard sign between his knobby, scabbed knees, scrawled with the message, "Please Help. Lost Everything."

On the other hand, perhaps it was something else altogether. Confronting the crowds milling through Union Square Park, he felt as if he were a swimmer, far from the teeming shore, guided and controlled by winds and currents seen only by him. He experienced this separation even more keenly as he edged his way into the human surf. Secrets had a way of making you feel alone even in the midst of a jostling throng. It was true. The deeper the secrets went, the more profound the isolation. The murmuring of lovers, the chatter of friends, the morse-code conversations of businessmen on cell phones, mundane all, and yet to him they seemed exotic, so far were they from his own life. Of course, this had been his reality for decades, but today his own anxiety had transformed these differences into knife blades whose edges he felt against his ruddy skin like an immediate threat.

He became aware of a tall, emaciated man with an unkempt beard hiding most of his face moving toward him.

"I am he that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore, amen; and have the keys of hell and of death!" the man shouted at Shaw, quoting Revelations. His hollowed-out eyes drilled into Shaw's, as if commanding his attention. "Write the things which thou hast seen, and the things which are, and the things which shall be hereafter!"

Shaw moved away, but the voice, shrill and hard as cement, followed him: "The mystery of the seven stars which thou sawest in my right hand, and the seven golden candlesticks. The seven stars are the angels of the seven churches: and the seven candlesticks which thou sawest are the seven churches!"

It was the voice of war, the herald of doom. Ever since he had gotten word of the pope's illness, he'd known with a chill creeping through his bones, even before the murders began. Unless he could find a way to stop it, the countdown to Armageddon had begun.

The nauseating stench of death filled his nostrils, the sight of spilled blood filled his eyes. Shaking off the visions, he made his way through the crowds at the Greenmarket where, moments later, he spotted the Eastern European. He was a Knight of the Field, an operative involved in wet work-that is to say, killing enemies of his organization, of which Shaw was definitely one. A moment later, he had melted into the throng.

At once, Shaw left the market, went into one of the department stores on the south side of 14th Street. There, he spent the better part of twenty minutes, moving slowly from section to section. The Knight of the Field picked him up in housewares, where Shaw perused a display of kitchen utensils. His tail was patient and, if Shaw's skills hadn't been honed to razor-sharpness, he might not have noticed him at all. The Knight looked different-he had rid himself of his sports jacket, wore instead a neutral-colored Polo shirt. He seemed fascinated by a set of fine china, then once again vanished, only to reappear in men's sportswear at the extreme periphery of Shaw's vision. He never looked at Shaw, not even in his direction. He was very good.

Shaw selected several dress shirts, moved toward the rear of the store where the dressing rooms were located. The Knight of the Field drifted after him, interested because of the emergency exit at the end of the corridor.

The first three dressing rooms were occupied, which suited Shaw's objective. Keeping his eye on the emergency exit, he kept going. The Knight moved behind him, silently closing the gap. Shaw could feel the man's approach, and he lengthened his stride. His pursuer, overcompensating, came at him too quickly.

Shaw spun around, threw the dress shirts into the Knight's face. As he did so, he drew a potato peeler he'd palmed off the display in housewares across the Knight's cheek. Shaw grabbed the Knight's shirtfront, slammed him into the empty dressing room on the right, kicking the door closed behind him. No Knight would follow him to where he met with his son, this he vowed.

"What good is this?" the Knight said, wiping his cheek. "Do you think you can stop us?" He laughed. "It's already too late. Nothing will stop us."

Shaw hit him in the side, just at the end of his rib cage. The Knight bent but did not break. He half turned, drove his cocked elbow into Shaw's chin. He'd aimed for Shaw's throat, but Shaw had just enough room to shift away. Still, the blow made pain explode in his head. The Knight followed up his advantage with a kidney punch. Shaw landed a blow on his sternum.

Beneath the harsh light, their reflections blurred, they fought in silent, intense fashion, striking and blocking like martial artists, feinting and parrying like fencers, using short, sharp, vicious blows dictated by the tiny room.

Until they stood locked together as if in a lover's embrace.

"You're finished," the Knight said. "It's the end."

Freeing one hand, Shaw buried his thumb into the soft spot beneath the Knight's left ear where the carotid artery pulsed. The Knight, seeing his end, fought like a maddened beast, but no matter what he did, Shaw held on, tenacious as a bulldog. At last, the Knight lost consciousness, slipping to the floor.

Shaw took a moment to calm himself while he rearranged his clothes. He thought about what the Knight had said: "It's already too late. Nothing will stop us." Could it be true? he wondered. Could the Knights be further along than even he knew? The possibility chilled him to the marrow. It was now more imperative than ever that he talk seriously with Bravo. Whatever ill feeling stood between them, they must put it aside.

He stepped briskly back into the corridor. Quickly, with a keen and wary eye toward more possible Knights, he exited the store through the employees' entrance on 13th Street.

From there, he plunged into the heart of the Village, turning south onto University Place, then west onto 11th Street. Alone again, he might have slowed down, but instead he hurried on at the same alarmed pace. What breeze had existed in the park had died. A midsummer haze bleached all color from the sky, and the air was freighted, which, combined with the stillness, clung to him with an unwanted intimacy.

So, despite all his precautions, they knew his location. Perhaps not so surprising, considering the meticulous planning behind the concerted attacks of the past two weeks, culminating with Molko's capture. Molko had been tortured and, when that proved fruitless, killed-an hour, perhaps even less, before Shaw had mounted a rescue mission.

Terrible luck. He and Molko had discussed the issue more than six months before the first killing. Molko, to his credit, had accepted Shaw's plan without protest. But within hours of the meeting, Molko had been taken, tortured and killed. Shaw had to assume that the enemy had the second key.

The keys of hell and of death.

He found French Roast, the cafe Bravo had suggested, and went inside. His son hadn't arrived as yet so he asked the pale question mark of a woman at the podium for an outdoor table. At the tiny metal table, he sat in the sun, ordered a cafe' au lait and thought of the Knight of the Field, and of the prophesies of Revelations. He knew a lot about prophesies, far more than most people. "The things which thou hast seen, and the things which are, and the things which shall be hereafter. …" He imagined that the words spewed out by the religious zealot referred to the war footing on which he found himself.

The cafe' au lait arrived, and he tore open three packets of sugar. Taking the oversized cup in his two hands, he sipped and immediately thought, Goddamn French coffee. It's strong enough to strip the lining off my stomach. Where's some good old Maxwell House when you need it? Typical of Bravo to suggest this place, he mused. But then Bravo had spent the last three years in Paris, much to Shaw's dismay. Perhaps some of his colleagues' virulent anti-French sentiment had rubbed off on him, but that was not the reason for his displeasure.

Pushing the offending coffee away, he glanced at his watch. Where was Bravo, anyway? Twenty minutes late. Well, he was flying in from Brussels. Thank God he had consented to come to the family reunion after all. Jordan Muhlmann, the president of Lusignan et Cie, had sent him to Brussels for an important conference on risk management, but no sooner had he arrived than Shaw had talked him into coming.

"I'm best off not telling Jordan," Bravo had said from far-off Brussels. "He doesn't like change."

"I'm not surprised," Shaw had murmured.

"What? Dad, speak up. I can't hear you."

"I said you're doing the right thing, Bravo. Emma would have been devastated. Just get on the next plane to JFK and be done with it."

Truth to tell, Bravo must have wanted to come, because ever since he had informed Shaw that he had accepted the job at the multinational financial consulting firm of Lusignan et Cie, there had been a subtle rift between the two. Not that you could call it a war, exactly, but a certain chill had sprung up between them, their phone conversations shortened, their meetings less frequent. This was not what Shaw had desired-far from it. But experience had shown him that his son was as hardheaded as he himself was. Even though he had made it adamantly clear that he had wanted Bravo to continue his research work in medieval religions, his son instead had taken Muhlmann's highly lucrative offer. At least Bravo had continued the rigorous program of physical training he had insisted on.

Nevertheless, from the moment Bravo had met Muhlmann, the air had stunk of betrayal, but only to Shaw. While he never stopped loving Bravo, he had blamed his son, and, what's more, Bravo was smart enough to know it. But then again, Bravo didn't know the real reason Shaw had been so intent on him continuing his studies. How could he?

Tensely, Shaw watched the waiter navigating with a charming swing of her slim hips the narrow aisles between the round tables. She asked him if he wanted to order and he said not yet.

More than anything else Shaw wanted to mend the rift, more painful to him than he had ever allowed Bravo to know. Today had seemed to him to be the right time to start. The tradition of reuniting every July fourth that had been started by Dexter's late wife, Stefana, had been continued by their daughter, Bravo's older sister Emma, at the family townhouse in which she lived. Still, knowing his son as he did, he had been leery of rushing the rapprochement. But now, suddenly, he had run out of time. Circumstances not of his making had determined that he have the conversation he'd always imagined he'd have with Bravo, though not at this time and certainly not in this hurried manner.

Not that Shaw hadn't done his best to prepare Bravo for this moment. But then Jordan Muhlmann had stepped in and altered everything. Now he was not only Bravo's boss, he was his best friend. Never mind. Bravo was coming, and in a few moments both their lives would change forever. If Shaw had any doubts about his son, he had pushed them into the recesses of his exceptionally ordered mind.

He had faith that Bravo would be up to the task, no matter how daunting. He had to be. As the waiter moved out of his field of vision he saw a man crossing the street toward him. As he approached, Shaw felt his own muscles tense. The man picked up his pace and raised an arm. Then he was striding past Shaw, smiling, into the arms of a waiting woman, who embraced him with uncompromising passion. Just as Steffi had once embraced him.

Don't go there, he admonished himself. But there she was in his mind's eye in the hospital bed, little more than a skeleton, wasting away while he looked on helpless and enraged. What was life when you waited for death? Could it ever be more than that?

"I am he that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore, amen…"

The words came back at him with the force of a boomerang. If only Steffi hadn't died, if only… But it wasn't meant to be. As his wife lay dying, his heart had broken.

"The keys of hell and of death.…"

Then he saw Bravo coming toward him and his heart leapt. He was sure that what he had done, what he was about to do, was the right thing-the only answer to the only question that mattered to him.

"Write the things which thou hast seen, and the things which are, and the things which shall be hereafter! "

He had already done that in the way he and Bravo knew best.

From the moment he saw his father sitting in sunlight at French Roast, Braverman Shaw was filled with conflicting emotions. The small boy in him wanted to run down the block, his arms open wide; the teenager wanted to thank him for the designated path he'd insisted on for his son, for Bravo had forgotten nothing of his studies in medieval religion, had lost little of the excitement he'd felt from the first day his father had cracked open the thick, illustrated book he kept by his bedside, introducing the child to the mysteries that would consume him for years to come. But the adult, who felt that he had been manipulated, took on the very attributes he hated most in his father, so that they came together not as father and son but as unstoppable force and immovable object. That term-immovable object-was appropriate, Bravo thought, for the man whose life and motives he found ever more puzzling and opaque.

"Dad."

Dexter Shaw stood. "It's good to see you again, Bravo."

They shook hands, formally and rather awkwardly, and sat down.

Braverman Shaw was thirty, taller than his father by a head, slimmer, but with the wide shoulders and long, powerful legs of a swimmer. In his own way, he was just as handsome. His hair was dark and curling, his eyes a blazing blue. He had the singular look of a seeker after knowledge, not of a risk management consultant. Emma had nicknamed him Bravo when she was six and Braverman was four. The name had stuck.

Bravo, eyeing the virtually untouched cup of cafe' au lait, said, "Too much flavor for you, Dad?" He said it in a bantering tone-whether to break the stony silence or as a form of self-defense he couldn't say.

Either way, it rankled Shaw, ruffling feathers he'd prefer remained sleek and undisturbed, especially now. "Why must you do that?"

Bravo called a waiter over. "Do what?"

"Provoke me."

Bravo ordered a double espresso. When the waiter had gone, he said, "I was under the impression we provoked each other." He engaged his father's eyes with his. "Don't you enjoy it?"

"As a matter of fact, I don't."

The espresso came. It had been six months since the two had seen each other. An undercurrent of loss and a certain sorrow was passing between them, amplified by the prickly exchange. It was the particular friction that arises between two people who are too much alike. Without the buffer of his mother, who had died ten years ago, sparks often flew between them. This was true even before Jordan Muhlmann, whose mere presence seemed to have aggravated the problem, possibly because he was French and Dexter's dislike of the French was all too well-known to Bravo. We're both headstrong, Bravo thought. Not to mention opinionated, forceful and determined.

Dexter shifted in his seat. "I want to talk to you about your future."

No, Bravo thought at once, I simply can't do this again. "Dad, you're always wanting to talk to me about my future. I'm too old for lectures-"

"First of all, you're never too old to learn something new. Second of all, this isn't a lecture. I want to make you an offer."

"Does the State Department have you recruiting now?"

"This has nothing to do with State." Dexter Shaw leaned forward, his voice low, urgent. "Remember your old training?"

Again out of self-defense, Bravo glanced at his watch. "We're late, Dad. Emma must be wondering what's happened to us. Besides, I rushed in from the airport without any time to get her a present."

Dexter sat back and gave him a basilisk stare. "You know what I think? I think Muhlmann sent you to Brussels deliberately."

Bravo's head came up. He was like a dog on point. "Now don't start-"

"Muhlmann knows perfectly well about your annual family reunion."

Bravo laughed. "You're not implying that he set up an international conference just so-"

"Don't be absurd, but he could have sent someone else."

"Jordan trusts me, Dad."

A silence descended over them, thick with the implied accusation. Horns blared as a car lurched out into traffic, and with a metal clang the rear doors of a delivery truck opened.

Dexter Shaw sighed. "Bravo, can we call a truce? It is urgent that we talk. In the space of a week, the world has changed-"

"After dinner."

"I told you this was urgent."

"I heard you, Dad."

"I don't want Emma-"

"To overhear. Of course not. We'll go for a walk, just the two of us, and you can make your pitch."

Dexter shook his head. "Bravo, it's not a pitch. You have to understand-"

"It's late and getting later." Bravo stood, putting money on the table. "You go on to Emma's while I forage for a present."

"I'd like to go with you."

"So she'll be pissed at both of us?" Bravo shook his head. "You go on, Dad."

As Bravo turned away, Dexter Shaw took his son's arm. There was so much to say, so much that needed to be communicated and now, at the eleventh hour, with bells tolling in his head, he knew that he should feel closer to Bravo than he ever had. Instead, there was between them a kind of chilly chasm he recognized as being of his own manufacture. He had tried to shield his son from the terrible responsibility of what was to come for as long as he could, but what, in the end, had he accomplished except to make him feel as if he wasn't trusted, as if he'd been manipulated for an unknown reason. Secrets, lies and the truth, he thought now, sometimes there wasn't much to choose from between them.

In any case, he had chosen, but it wasn't until this moment that he understood the depth of his failure. Steffi had warned him that it would come to this, Steffi who had known him-and their son-better than anyone. She had begged him not to involve Bravo in his shadow life-she'd ranted, wept, she'd flown at him like a hellion-and still he'd held fast to his convictions.

My darling Steffi, wherever you are, please don't hate me. But of course she had, just as he knew completely and irrevocably that she had loved him with all her heart and soul. She could not have helped but fear him-that other Dexter Shaw who was rigid, rule-formed, intractable, who disappeared for days or weeks at a time into a world she of necessity only dimly knew. At last, spent and defeated, she had said to him, "You're like a rock, all of you-no blood, no feeling, no hope at all of change or movement. This is the life you will condemn Bravo to."

Tears welled in his eyes, the sudden onrush of unfamiliar emotions rendering him inarticulate. There was a chance now to change all that, but, no, it was too late. The die had been cast, what choice he'd ever had had been stolen from him. That was the essence he saw now in a moment of blinding revelation, the heart of the matter that Steffi never understood and he could never explain. In his world, choice was nothing but a dangerous illusion, offered up by a cunning devil.

"Dammit, son."

For a moment, Bravo was shaken-his father never cursed. Whatever was on his mind was important, he knew that much. But now, really and truly, they had no time. Carefully he disengaged himself. His voice, when he spoke, was warm and conciliatory. "I'll be along soon enough, and then we'll have our talk. I promise."

Dexter Shaw hesitated, gave his son a resigned nod, turned and headed to the curb. Bravo watched him crossing the avenue, then turned and headed south. But where was he going? He suddenly realized that he had no idea what to get Emma. His father was the one who always knew what his children would like best. Reluctant as he was to feel once again the pressure of his father's judgment, he nevertheless swallowed his pride and, dodging traffic, jaywalked at a run across Sixth Avenue. By the time he'd gained the west side, Dexter was trotting up the stairs to the brownstone. Bravo called after him as Dexter went through the outer door.

Bravo ran all the faster, hoping to get his father's attention before Emma buzzed him through the inner door. He was mounting the front steps when the explosion blew out the front windows. The heavy front door, torn from its hinges, slammed into him, lifted him bodily, throwing him into the street.

Immediately, there came like ravens' cries the harsh screech of brakes, alarmed voices raised in anxious shouts, but Bravo, unconscious, was already oblivious to the growing chaos.

"No," his father said to him once again.

Bravo lifted his nine-year-old head with its inquisitive blue eyes and tousled hair. "Where did I make my mistake?"

"It's not a matter of making a mistake." Dexter Shaw knelt down. "Listen to me, Bravo. What I want you to do is use your mind and your soul. Intellectual pursuits will only get you so far in life because all of life's great lessons involve loss." He glanced down at the puzzle he had set before his son. "A 'mistake' is something mechanical-a wrong way of acting, maneuvering, thinking. A mistake is a surface thing. But beneath the surface-where loss manifests itself-that's where you must begin."

Even if Bravo hadn't understood every word his father used he couldn't mistake the meaning or the intent. Manifest, he thought, turning over the word in his mind. It was strange and beautiful, like a gem he'd once seen in a store window, gleaming, faceted, deeply colored and, somehow, mysterious. He could feel his father's intent, a living thing, as palpable and intimate as a heartbeat. He knew what his father wanted for him and, naturally enough, he wanted it, too.

I want to manifest myself one day, he thought, as he threw himself mind and soul into solving the puzzle his brilliant father had devised for him.

A sharp pain racked him, threatening to draw him far away, and he fought against it, fought as hard as he could. More than anything, he wanted to stay by his father's side, to complete the puzzle because puzzles linked son to father in a very private and mysterious manner. But another spasm of pain clouded his vision and his father's face flickered like quicksilver, swimming away into a mist of voices that all at once had gathered around him like a murder of crows…

"At last. He's coming around."

"It's about time."

Bravo heard these voices as if through a wall of cotton. He smelled a masculine cologne cutting through a peculiar sickly-sweet scent. He began to retch, felt strong hands on him, wanted to shake them off but lacked the strength. He had trouble stringing two thoughts together, as if he no longer wanted to think.

On opening his eyes, he was presented with two hazy shapes. As his vision slowly cleared these shapes resolved themselves into two men standing over him. The older one was slight. He had very dark skin and Indian features; he was in a white coat-a doctor. The other, perhaps a decade younger, had a face as rumpled as his suit. Bravo noticed his jacket had one frayed cuff. The strong cologne was coming off him in waves.

"How are you feeling?" the doctor said in a slight singsong accent. He had cocked his head, like one of those crows Bravo had imagined. His coffee-black eyes scanned the electronic readouts flickering above Bravo's head. "Mr. Shaw, please say something if you can hear me."

The invocation of his family name came like a splash of cold water. "Where am I?" Bravo's voice sounded thick and peculiar to his ears.

"In hospital. St. Vincent's," the doctor said. "You've got some deep bruises, contusions, burns here and there and, of course, a concussion. But most fortunately nothing broken or burst."

"How long have I been here?"

The doctor checked his watch. "It's just about two days since they brought you in."

"Two days!" Bravo put a hand up to one ear, but the doctor's slim brown hand stopped him. "Everything sounds muffled-and there's a ringing…"

"Your proximity to the explosion caused a degree of temporary hearing loss," the doctor said. "Perfectly normal reaction, I assure you. I'm relieved that you've regained consciousness. I don't mind telling you that you had us all a bit on edge."

"That damn heavy door saved you, Mr. Shaw, that's a fact," the younger man said in a heavy New York accent.

And then it all came rushing back-the sprint up the block, mounting the worn limestone steps, a fury of sound and then… nothing. All at once everything looked flat. He felt hollow inside, as if while he was unconscious some great hand had passed through skin and tissue to scoop out his insides.

The doctor's brow wrinkled. "Mr. Shaw, did you hear me? I said that within a matter of days your hearing will be unimpaired."

"I heard you." In truth, Bravo had received this news with an equanimity bordering on stoicism. "My father?"

"He didn't make it," the suit said. "I'm sorry for your loss."

Bravo closed his eyes. The room began to swim around, and he seemed to be having trouble breathing.

"I told you. It's too soon," the doctor said from somewhere over Bravo's head. Then he felt a warmth, a sense of calm enter his system.

"Relax, Mr. Shaw," the doctor said. "I'm just giving you a bit of Valium."

Still, he struggled against it-the Valium and the tears that burned his lids, tears that leaked out onto his cheeks, humiliating him in front of strangers. "I don't want to be calm." He had to know… "My sister. Is Emma alive?"

"She's in the room down the hall." The suit had taken out a pad and pencil. No PDA for him.

"Don't worry about her. Don't worry about anything," the doctor added soothingly.

"I need some time with him," the suit said gruffly. There followed a minor altercation, played out on the edge of Bravo's consciousness, which the suit ultimately won.

When Bravo next opened his eyes, the suit was looking at him out of liquid brown eyes, slightly red around their edges. Dandruff lay on the shoulders of his jacket like ash from a fire. Or an explosion. "My name's Detective Splayne, Mr. Shaw." He held up an ID tag. "NYPD."

Beyond the door, a conversation had started up, one voice old and querulous. The squeak of rubber wheels took them away. Bravo endured the deathly silence as long as he was able. "You're sure. There isn't any mistake?"

The detective produced two photos, handed them to Bravo.

"I'm afraid he took the brant of the blast," he said softly.

Bravo looked at his father, or rather what was left of him, laid out on a slab. The second photo, unspeakably stark and therefore vile, was a close-up of his face. The pictures looked unreal, something from a gruesome Halloween prank. Bravo felt almost dizzy with sorrow and despair. His vision swam and, unbidden, the tears came again.

"Sorry, but I gotta ask. That your father? Dexter Shaw?"

"Yes." It took him a very long time to say it, and when he did his throat felt raw, as if he'd been screaming for hours.

Splayne nodded, pocketed the photos and went and stood by the window, silent as a sentinel.

Bravo wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. "How… how is Emma?" He found that he was almost afraid to ask.

"The doctor says she's out of the woods."

Splayne's words momentarily reassured him, before the full force of his father's death came rushing back to him, blotting out everything. Dimly, he became aware of the scrape of a chair's legs, and when he next opened his eyes, Splayne was sitting beside the bed, watching him, patient as a cat.

The detective said, "I know this is difficult for you, Mr. Shaw, but you're an eyewitness."

"What about my sister?"

"I already said."

" 'Out of the woods.' What does that mean?"

Splayne sighed as he ran a huge hand across the worn facade of his face. "Please tell me what you remember." He sat still, hunch-shouldered, directing all his attention at the man lying on the hospital bed.

"When you tell me Emma's condition."

"Christ, you're a piece of work." Splayne took a breath. "Okay, she's blind."

Bravo felt his heart jolt. "Blind?"

"They've gone in and done whatever they could. The doc says that either she regains her sight in a week or two, or the blindness will be permanent."

"Oh, God."

"See, this is what I wanted to avoid." Splayne leaned forward. "You aren't gonna pass out on me, are you?"

With fingers like steel pincers, he steered Bravo's face in his direction, stared hard into his eyes. There was a slight cast to the left eye, as if something terrible had happened to that side of his face. Bravo caught the other's intensity, allowed it to bring himself back from the edge of panic and despair. His father dead, Emma blinded, all in the space of a single breath. It was too much, he couldn't accept it as the truth. There must be another reality out there-one in which his father had survived, where Emma hadn't lost her sight-if only he could find it.

"Mr. Shaw, I need you to tell me what happened. It's important, okay?"

"Yes," Bravo said in a reedy whisper. "I understand." He recounted as best he could what he remembered of the brief chain of events just before the explosion.

When he had finished, the detective looked at him. "To be honest, I didn't expect much more than that."

"Then why was it important to talk to me?"

"Hey, I gotta close this thing out, otherwise the paperwork will hound me like a bitch in heat."

Bravo felt a renewed surge of anger. "Do you know what caused the blast?"

"Gas leak in the basement. It was an old brownstone, maybe the heating system was in need of repair. The fire department's going over the place now." Detective Splayne's pen was suspended over the notebook. "One other thing, who's Jordan"-a quick glance down to his notes-"Muhlmann? He's been calling twice a day to check on your condition."

"He's my employer and my friend."

"That's what he told me. So. Anything else?"

Bravo shook his head.

"Then my work here is finished." With a sense of finality, Splayne closed his notebook. "I wish you well, Mr. Shaw."

"That's it? That's where the investigation ends?"

Splayne shrugged. "To tell you the truth, Mr. Shaw, it's where most investigations end. This is a big city, millions of people in it walking in shadows, running away from the light, crawling in the sewers like maggots. It's the maggots I get to spend time with, day in, day out. This here's clean and clear-cut compared with the shit I get most days. I swear, it's enough to hollow you out inside, turn even a hard-case optimist into a cynic." He rose. "Like I said, I'm sorry for your loss, but it's time I was getting to where I'm really needed."

Bravo, still fighting the effects of the Valium, twisted in bed. There was a question he'd wanted to ask. What was it?

"Wait a minute, did you talk to my sister?"

But Splayne had already gone.

Bravo lay back for a moment, his head swimming. The moment he closed his eyes his father reappeared. "All of life's great lessons involve loss," Dexter Shaw said and laid his hand on his son's damp brow. "Don't forget what I've taught you now."

With a growl, Bravo pulled the Valium drip from his arm, ripped off all the monitoring devices. He sat up, swung his legs off the high bed. The floor felt cold as ice to his bare feet, and when he put his full weight on them he was obliged to clutch the bed linens lest he fall. His heart pumped hard in his chest, and his legs felt as if their bones and muscles had dissolved during the forty-eight terrible hours he'd been unconscious.

He had to shuffle across the room to the door, and when he opened it he was confronted by an angry-looking nurse, clucking away like an offended nun.

"What have you done, Mr. Shaw?" She had a wide nose, a firm jaw and cafe'-au-lait skin. "Get back in bed this minute."

She had reached out to turn him around, but Bravo checked her, "I want to see my sister."

"I'm afraid that's im-"

"Now."

He held her eyes for so long she knew he wasn't going to back down.

"Look at you, weak as a newborn, you can't even walk." Still, his eyes would not let her go. At length, capitulating, she fetched a wheelchair, brought it around behind him. He sat down, and she pushed him forward.

Outside Emma's room he held up a hand. "I don't want to go in there like this. Let me walk."

The nurse sighed. "In her current condition she won't know the difference, Mr. Shaw."

"Maybe not," he said, "but I will." Hands on the armrests, he levered himself up. The nurse stood, watching him, arms crossed over her bosom, as he grasped the door frame and moved slowly into the room.

Emma, reclining on the bed, looked a mess. Not only her eyes but the upper half of her face was heavily bandaged. He sat on the edge of the bed, sweating alarmingly inside his gown. His heart was pounding so hard it threatened to squeeze through his rib cage.

"Bravo." Emma's voice, rich and musical, varied as an artist's palette, rose to him, the one word like a song.

"I'm here, Emma."

"Thank God you're alive." Her hand fumbled for his, found it and squeezed. "How badly are you hurt?"

"It's nothing compared-" He barely had time to choke off the rest of the sentence.

"Compared to me, you mean."

"Emma."

"Don't do that, don't you pity me."

"It isn't pity."

"Isn't it?" she said sharply.

"Emma, you have every right-"

"Don't be such a good sport!" She turned back. "Who should I be angry at, Bravo? Who did this to me?" Then she shook her head. "It's disgusting. I've had enough of terror and anger and self-pity."

With an enormous effort of will she smiled, and like sunlight flooding the room he saw her as she had been, carriage erect, her mouth open wide, honey-colored hair flying in the wind created by the stage fans, her huge emerald eyes, wide cheeks and generous mouth so much like their mother's, one hand uplifted as the aria emerged from her, glorious and full-born, as he always imagined Puccini had heard it when he'd first composed it.

"I've waited two long horrible days to feel you, to hear your voice." She took his hand again. "This makes me happy, Bravo, this cuts through my endless night. Even in my worst, blackest moments, I was able to rise above it long enough to pray for your recovery, and God heard my prayers and kept you safe." Her smile widened. "So now I want you to do the same-to rise above your anger and your self-pity. I want you to have faith, Bravo, if not for yourself, then for me."

Faith? Faith in what? he asked himself. His father had wanted desperately to tell him something, and because he had hardened his heart, because he hadn't been able to forgive him for his manipulations, he'd never know what was so important. His jaw clenched. Wasn't forgiveness a major component of faith?

"Emma, Dad is dead and you're-" His throat was filled with bitter bile.

She placed her soft hands on either side of his face, as she had done when, as a child, he had become agitated and frustrated. She pressed her forehead to his. "I want you to stop and listen," she breathed in a musical murmur, "because I'm sure that God has a plan for us, and if you're filled with anger and self-pity you'll never be able to hear it."

His throat was clogged again with all the emotions boiling up from inside. "Emma, what happened that day?"

"I don't know. Honestly, I can't remember." She shrugged. "Maybe it's a blessing."

"I wish I could remember something-anything-about what happened."

"A gas leak, that detective said. An accident. Put it behind you, Bravo."

But he couldn't, and he couldn't tell her why.

"Now I need you to help me get to the bathroom," she said, breaking into his thoughts.

When Bravo stood up his legs felt stronger. They reached the bathroom without incident. She seemed strong to him, despite what had happened to her. Was that her faith he felt, deep and rippling like a stream at spring's first thaw?

"Come inside with me," she said, drawing him in before he had a chance to protest. She locked the door behind them, then opened her hand, revealing a pack of cigarettes and a small lighter. "I bribed Martha." Martha was her personal assistant.

She sat on the toilet and with surprisingly little difficulty lit up, drawing the smoke deep into her lungs and holding it there. On the exhale, she said with a laugh, "Now you know my secret, Bravo. The smoke gives my voice that depth the critics so rave over." She shook her head. "God works in mysterious ways."

"What does God have to do with it?"

At once, she stood up. "Oh, Bravo, I hear the anger, you can't keep it out of your voice. I wonder if you know how ugly it is, how it distorts the beautiful tenor of your voice."

"It's you who has the beautiful voice, Emma."

She stroked his cheek with her fingertips. "We both have Mama in us, only maybe-just maybe-I have a bit more."

"I know you thought Dad loved me more," he blurted out, because it had been on his mind.

"No, Bravo. He loved me, too, but you and he had some-I don't know-some special connection. It hurt me so to see the two of you at odds." Her face turned up to his. "Have you cried yet, Bravo? I know you have." Her fingertips traced the bandages over her eyes. "I envy you that luxury."

"Oh, Emma."

"The first few hours afterward when I was first hit with what I had lost I fell into a black pit. But faith is a tree, growing new branches even in the face of a storm. And when the time is right, those new branches bear fruit. It's faith that sustains me, faith that makes sense out of chaos, faith that holds the world together in the face of crisis." She took another, smaller drag from the cigarette. "I wish I could make you understand. When you have faith, despair is not an option. I grieve for Dad. Inside I'm crushed because a part of me has been ripped away and I'll never get it back. That, at least, I know you understand. But I also know that his death, the loss of my sight, either temporary or permanent, is for a reason. There is a plan for us, Bravo. My faith shows it to me, even without the use of my eyes."

"Was it God's plan to have Dad blown up, for Mom to waste away?"

"Yes," she said firmly and deliberately. "Whether you can accept it or not."

"I don't understand how you can be so sure. This is a part of you I never got, Emma. What if your faith is an illusion, what if there is no plan? That would mean that there was no purpose."

"No purpose we can yet see."

"Faith. Blind faith is as false as everything you rail against." Bravo thought of what Detective Splayne had said, and his hands curled into fists. "How can you live in such a world and not be cynical?"

"I know your cynicism is a facade, because cynicism is just another word for frustration," Emma said softly. "We spend so much time trying to maintain control over everything that governs our lives, but it's futile-and terribly frustrating-because, really, what can we control? Almost nothing. And yet we still seek the impossible, even knowing that it's a hollow pursuit. What can fill the void, can you tell me? No. But, listen, listen, when I let go of everything, when I sing, I know." Her cigarette had burned down, unsmoked. She must have felt the heat on her fingers because she groped behind her, flicked it into the toilet. With a brief angry hiss, its lit end winked out. "Bravo, the explosion may have taken my sight, but miraculously it left me my most precious possession-my voice is unharmed."

He held her tight then, feeling her substance, as he always had, ever since he could remember. "I wish I had your faith."

"Faith is a lesson to be learned, just like everything else in life," she whispered in his ear. "I pray that one day you'll find yours."

And in his other ear his dead father whispered: "Beneath the surface-where loss manifests itself-that's where you must begin."

Chapter 2

"Bravo, I am so relieved to hear from you," Jordan Muhlmann said when Bravo finally returned his call. "I haven't heard from you in days. I was going out of my mind with worry."

"I'm sorry, the concussion has made things a little fuzzy," Bravo said into the cell phone.

"Yes, of course. As long as I know you're all right."

"I'm fine." He was walking down the street toward his bank. He had recovered enough to be discharged from the hospital and he was ready to leave New York; there was only one thing to consider-besides, of course, Emma.

"You can't be fine, Bravo," Jordan said. "It's altogether understandable that you're not."

"You're right, of course."

"It's not simply what I say, mon ami. It's what I feel. You are family, Bravo, you know that."

Of course Jordan would understand. Though he was six years younger than Bravo, they had bonded almost immediately. During one long drunken evening in Rome, when they had freely exchanged confidences, he'd told Bravo that he'd lost his father at an early age, and mourned him still. He knew about family and loss. All at once, Bravo missed Jordan, his life in Paris. They spent so much time together, had gotten so close in the space of just over four years, they were like family. "On that score, I have no doubt."

There was a cop on one corner, leaning against his car, drinking coffee out of a paper cup. Across the street a little girl skipped along with her dog, her mother by her side. Just behind the girl and her dog, a man and woman held hands. They were young, both blond and blue-eyed. He wore black slacks and shirt, she a short skirt and sleeveless top.

"Listen," Bravo went on, "I'll be home in a couple of days. I want to get back to work."

"Non, you have more important matters to deal with."

A dam burst, and Bravo's eyes abruptly filled with tears. "My father dead, my sister blinded-this is a nightmare, Jordan."

"I know, mon ami. My heart goes out to you-Camille's, as well." Camille Muhlmann, Jordan's mother, was his advisor, and an integral part of Lusignan et Cie. "She wishes me to tell you that she's sick with grief."

"As always, she's exceptionally kind. Thank her for me," Bravo said.

"Take your time. Do whatever you have to do. In all things you have my support, whatever you need you have only to ask."

The woman laughed at something her lover said and glanced at Bravo. She had the face of a hungry cat.

"Thank you, Jordan. I appreciate… everything."

"Ah, no. I just wish I could do more."

The couple had stopped to chat with the cop, but the woman's eyes remained on Bravo. She smiled a secret catlike smile behind her lover's back.

"You scared the hell out of me, you know. You could've been jailed, and then where would I be?"

The lovers had moved on, but the woman's smile lingered in his mind.

"Now listen to me, mon ami, you must take your time winding up your father's affairs. We will manage without you. And, Bravo, remember, you must call on me if there's anything I can do. Here in Paris, so far away, I feel helpless. It will be better for both of us if I can help in some way."

He was outside the bank. "Merci, Jordan. Just talking to you… this connection. You know, I feel a whole lot better."

"Then I am happy. Bon, a biento^t, mon ami."

Putting away his cell phone, Bravo went through a glass door into the bank. As he crossed the marble floor he remembered his father taking him in here when he was eight, recalled with a startling vividness the confidence he felt with his hand clutching his father's. Dexter had opened up the account for him. When he'd turned eighteen, at his father's behest, he'd gotten the safety deposit box. Though he now lived a continent away, he'd never gotten rid of them. Their importance to him was immeasurable. Wherever he might be in the world, part of him always would remain here in New York.

At the rear of the bank, he asked to see the manager. Within moments, a middle-aged woman in a conservative business suit was escorting him downstairs to the vast vault where the safety deposit boxes rose in gleaming reinforced steel banks. The vault had about it the oppressive look and air of a mausoleum.

Inside, he sat in a curtained booth while she went to fetch the box. He knew he was lucky to have a friend like Jordan. They had met in Rome five years ago when Muhlmann had come to the university where Bravo was then working. Bravo had had a unique position in the department of medieval religions. He was not expected to teach but to research the ages-old mysteries that dogged his field. Though Bravo was then still in his twenties, he had already gained something of a reputation not only as a scholar but also as cryptanalyst. As it happened, that very field of knowledge fascinated Jordan, and he was eager to observe firsthand Bravo's facility in decoding medieval texts and solving seemingly unsolvable puzzles.

Jordan had stayed in Rome six weeks. During that time, he and Bravo had struck up a close friendship based on common interests and outlooks. They had studied together, run track and hit the heavy bag together, had even squared off in fencing matches-remarkably, their skills matched each other in the e'pe'e and the saber. They went out to dinners and got drunk on good food, excellent wine and fascinating talk. Finally, Jordan had made Bravo an offer to join Lusignan et Cie. Bravo at first declined, but Jordan had persisted and, eventually, after some further back and forth, he had managed to persuade Bravo to come work for him.

The manager returned with a long flat gray metal box and, setting it down on the table in front of him, left him. He took out the key and opened it. Inside, he discovered stacks of money, neatly wrapped and bound, his secret fuck-you money. Yet another thing Dexter Shaw had taught him. There were two layers, each double bundle bound together. He untied the lower left-hand corner bundle, pulled from between them the key his father had given him six months ago.

The meeting had been brief but unprecedented inasmuch as Dexter had flown into Paris, something Bravo couldn't recall him having done before. They hadn't even sat down but instead at Dexter's suggestion had crossed the Seine on the Pont d'Iena, walking briskly along the rather unlovely Quai de Grenelle. The morning was unnaturally warm for a normally raw and forbidding February, and people could be seen strolling happily with their winter coats open or slung over their arms. Once they passed the Hotel Nikko the tourists vanished and the natives dwindled, which was apparently the whole point of the exercise. That was when Dexter had handed him the key, an old-fashioned item, odd in both shape and design.

"If something happens to me," Dexter had said, "you'll need this."

"If what happens? Dad, what are you talking about?" Another dark and unfathomable secret, another bit of shrapnel lodged in his chest so close to his heart he could feel it flutter.

The sky was the color of peat. The overheated weather was causing mist to rise off the river, smudging the outlines of the buildings on the Right Bank. Halos throbbed around the moving lights. A horn hooted mournfully as a barge slid slowly past them. Down on the lower quai a dog was running loose, its tongue out and lolling. The leaves of the horse chestnut trees rustled, as if anxious.

"Just listen, Bravo. Put the key somewhere safe, will you promise me that? And if something happens, take the spare key I gave you and go to my apartment." Dexter Shaw had smiled, gripping his son's shoulder. "Don't look so stricken. Chances are it'll never come to that."

But now it had. Detective Splayne believed that the explosion had been caused by a gas leak, and that conclusion had been confirmed by the FDNY. Sitting here, staring at the key with the globular burr on the end, the seven incisions along its length, each in the shape of a star, Bravo couldn't help but ponder what had been on his mind from the first-what if both Splayne and the FDNY were wrong? Six months ago Dexter Shaw had traveled all the way to Paris, a place he despised, in order to deliver to his son the presentiment of his impending death. Steeped in the real and true mysteries of medieval religions, Bravo was not a believer in the occult. His father wasn't psychic-he'd known something, or at the very least had had a strong suspicion that his death was coming.

Shaking himself from the ominous web of his thoughts, Bravo pocketed the key, along with two packs of bills. Then he closed and locked the box and, emerging from the booth, handed it back to the patiently waiting manager.

Not for the first time, he considered the possibility that Dexter Shaw's job at the State Department was only a cover and that he was, in fact, a spy.

"I think he's yummy," said the young woman with the face of a hungry cat.

Rossi shook out a cigarette and lit up. "Donatella, you surprise me. You need to be more discriminating."

"Don't be jealous, darling." She ran her long fingers over his biceps. "I have no intention of leaving you for Braverman Shaw."

"But a one-night stand wouldn't be out of the question, hmm?"

When she reached for his black silk shirt, she used her nails so that he could feel her through the tissue-thin fabric as she drew them across his chest. "How nostalgic!" she murmured. "You remember our first meeting."

"How could I forget?" Rossi glanced past her to the bank's entrance.

They sat at a cafe diagonally across from the bank into which Bravo had vanished some ten minutes before. They had chosen a table situated slightly back from the window so that they could surveil the street without themselves being seen. Rossi and Donatella spoke perfect, unaccented English, but when no one else could hear they had fallen into the habit of communicating in the precise, almost formal version of the language used by all Romans.

All at once, he grasped Donatella's porcelain wrist.

"You're hurting me!" she gasped, but he did not relinquish his iron grip.

Slowly, he manipulated her wrist until her hand revealed what it held: the pendant at the end of the gold chain around his neck. "I told you, didn't I? What did I say?"

Donatella pouted, her fingertips caressing the seven-pointed purple cross. "But it's so beautiful."

Rossi knew that she meant powerful. She always said beautiful when she meant powerful.

"All the more reason to keep it hidden." Without taking his eyes off her face, he unwound her fingers so that the pendant disappeared beneath the opening of his shirt. "What do you think the consequences would be if our Mr. Shaw should catch a glimpse of it?"

Donatella swung around, her cat's eyes raking the baking street. "He'd know," she said in an unmistakable finality. "He'd know everything."

Outside, a fist of heat greeted Bravo rudely. After the chilly, metallic semidark of the vault, the light was blinding, but already he was wondering if he'd seen the man across the street before. He looked vaguely familiar, but Bravo couldn't quite place him.

Bravo moved off, and the man went into motion. Turning the corner, Bravo saw him reflected in a store's plate glass window, against a background of earthy Moroccan pottery and bright Turkish plates. It was his gait that gave him away, that brought back the woman's feline smile while her lover spoke to the lounging cop. Her eye contact had been deliberate-she was attempting to keep him from remembering her lover, who had now taken up the surveillance.

Or was he imagining it all? He wasn't paranoid, and he was no spy. Perhaps, neither was his father. But he didn't believe that, not really. The evidence was mounting, and now with this strange key in his possession he had become part of the game. If only he had a clue what the game was.

Emma had taken a suite in an exclusive boutique hotel not far from St. Vincent's while the brownstone was being repaired. Her bandages were smaller, and he could see that her hair had started to grow in. Martha, who had opened the door for him, was busy fixing lunch in the galley kitchen.

Bravo had spent fifteen minutes walking away from the hotel and then back again, ducking into a convenience store and suddenly out again, until he'd satisfied himself that neither the man nor his female partner was shadowing him. Only then had he entered the hotel.

He came in and kissed his sister on the cheek. "How are you?"

"Better." She smiled. "And you?"

"Ready to roll."

Keeping the smile on her face, she said, "You know, I get the feeling that you've been wanting to tell me something for days. Now that you're about to leave I really think you ought to tell me."

He looked around, but Martha, humming to herself, was oblivious. "It's about Dad. I…"

She cocked her head. "Bravo, this is me." She patted the sofa and sighed when she felt him sit down beside her. Feeling his warmth beside her, she said softly, "It's all right. Whatever it is, surely saying it will help. Have faith."

Bravo pressed his thumbs against his eyelids as if he could relieve the pressure building inside his head. "That day, Dad had something to tell me. It was important, at least it was to him. And I kept putting it off. I told him that we'd talk after dinner." Like a sprinter always gaining on him, that terrible day overtook him again, rendering him mute.

"Maybe what he had to say to you was important," Emma said. "But that's not the issue. You've got to go on, and you won't be able to do that unless you can forgive yourself." Emma put her arm around his shoulders. "Do you think you can do that?"

Bravo kept silent, knowing that she neither wanted nor required an answer. He simply listened, gave himself over completely to what she was saying. The truth was, despite whatever sibling-type fights they'd had when they were young, he'd always admired her, not just for her talents but for her innate intelligence.

"Before you turned your talents to risk management you were a scholar. The fact is, you're still a scholar, just as I'm still a singer. We're who we are, Bravo, whether or not we choose to believe it, because it's imprinted onto us at birth. By God? Yes, by God, through genetics. A risk manager is what you do, but that's not the same thing, is it? Dad understood that, even when you yourself lost sight of the fact."

Well, that was something, he thought as he walked out of the hotel. More than something. Right now, it was all he had.

Chapter 3

Bravo traveled to Washington on the shuttle, checking the faces and demeanor of his fellow passengers both in the terminal and on the plane. He took with him the two keys-the seven-star key, as he'd come to call it, and the more pedestrian Medeco key to his father's apartment-and nothing more, except for the money he'd taken from his safety deposit box. He didn't know why he'd brought the money-a hunch, or a presentiment similar, perhaps, to the one that had brought his father to the Quai de Crenelle six months ago. One other thing: he also carried in his head a growing constellation of facts in search of a pattern.

The dense southern humidity rolling up the edge of the Chesapeake attempted to smother him the moment he strode out of the terminal. Halfway toward the rank of taxis, he stopped, as if abruptly unsure of himself. The sky was a uniform white, tinged with the palest blue lower down, away from the burning sun. Small eddies of a spendthrift wind stirred fistfuls of soot and candy wrappers into brief trembling spirals. Without warning, he turned and purposefully retraced his steps. Back inside the terminal, he walked past the huge plate-glass panels, watching the crowds coming and going. What he was looking for he could not at that moment have said, but like an animal with its snout to the wind he had responded to a peculiar prickling in the hollow between his shoulder blades. He went and got himself a cup of coffee, stood sipping it while he covertly watched the faces of passersby. Part of him felt ridiculous, but another, growing part of him, would not allow him to relax.

At length, satisfying some deeply buried instinct, he threw his paper cup into the trash and headed back out to hail a taxi.

Dexter Shaw had lived in a modest one-bedroom apartment in Foggy Bottom, that curious section of Washington between the White House and Georgetown. A century ago, the low-lying area was damp and swampy, owing to its proximity to the Potomac. Fog swirling in off the river often combined with a thick, greasy airborne mass, an industrial London-like smog emanating from the nearby Washington Gas and Light Company, Godey's lime kilns and Cranford's Paving Company. Nowadays, it was home to many legislators and a good place to network, which was, after all, the currency that greased the wheels of DCs curiously old-fashioned engine.

The apartment complex was in a huge redbrick building that took up most of the block on H Street. It was a modern, completely anonymous structure without ornament or interesting angle, form following function, typical of an unfortunate school of postmodern architecture.

Identifying himself to the uniformed doorman, Bravo took the elevator up to the twelfth floor, went down the blue-carpeted hallway. He slipped the Medeco key into the front door to his father's apartment. It didn't work. He tried again, wriggling it back and forth as if perhaps it needed only some small encouragement to fulfill its function.

He was about to try for a third fruitless time when he heard a voice behind him and, turning, found a small, dark-faced man coming toward him.

"I'm Manny-the super. Johnny-the doorman-phoned down to tell me." He offered his hand. "You're Mr. Shaw's son, ain't you?"

"That's right," Bravo said.

"We were all tore up when we heard of Mr. Shaw's untimely passing. Everybody in the building liked him. He was quiet, you know, kept to himself-but friendly all the time."

My father, the politician, always honing his image, Bravo thought as he thanked the man. "I thought he'd given me the key to the apartment, but it doesn't work."

"No worries." The super took out a ring of keys and, searching through them, inserted one in the lock, opened it. He stood back for Bravo to enter.

"I gotta stay here while you have a look around," he said. "Building rules. You understand."

Bravo said that he did. But when he entered the apartment, he realized that he understood nothing at all. The apartment was empty. As he moved through it, looking in all the rooms and closets, he could find not a stick of furniture, not an item of clothing, nothing that would indicate that the apartment had ever been occupied.

Stunned, Bravo turned to the super. "I don't understand. Where are all my father's belongings?"

The super pursed his lips. He smelled of tobacco and sweat. "I thought you'd have known. They removed the contents of the apartment days ago."

"They?" Bravo shook his head. "Who are 'they'?"

The super shrugged his shoulders, "State Department, government men. Showed me their ID and everything. Was there something in particular you was looking for?"

Bravo shook his head, unable to speak. His father's entire life, where had it gone?

The super gave him an almost furtive look of pity and said that, after all, he thought in this one instance it would be okay to leave Bravo alone in the apartment. Bravo thanked him, and he left.

Bravo closed his eyes, breathing deeply as if trying to find a lingering trace of his father. His eyes snapped open and he went again from room to room, checking drawers, closets and cupboards in the kitchen and bath. Not only had the contents been removed, but the apartment had been thoroughly cleaned from top to bottom. Sanitized. He'd once heard his father use the term when they'd had to abandon the embassy in Nairobi several years ago.

He took out his cell phone and called his father's office at State. After several minutes, he was connected with Ted Coffey, a senior analyst his father had introduced him to several times.

"Hey, Braverman, I'm so sorry. How are you doing?"

"As well as can be expected, I suppose," Bravo said.

"And Emma?"

"Also."

"We all miss him, you know, but no one more than me. He was a goddamned fixture around here. Twenty-plus years, I can hardly believe it myself. Frankly, I don't know what I'm going to do without his expertise. That goddamned analytical brain of his simply can't be replaced, and everyone here knows it."

"Thanks, Ted. That means a lot to me." Bravo walked into the center of the bedroom, turning slowly in a full circle. "Listen, Ted, what did you guys do with my father's belongings?"

There was a moment's pause. "I don't understand."

"Well, I'm standing in his apartment in Foggy Bottom and there isn't a stick of furniture or an item of clothing here. Everything's been cleaned out."

"It wasn't us, Braverman."

"The super said some government men came. He saw their IDs."

"I don't care what the super said," Ted Coffey said. "No one authorized the removal of the contents of Dex's apartment, and that's a fact. Strictly against departmental policy."

Bravo stood for a moment in the silent, bare apartment. Vainly, he tried to imagine his father in this place. Thanking Coffey for his time and heartfelt condolences, Bravo closed the connection.

He looked down at the Medeco key, using his remarkable memory to once again recreate the conversation on the misty Parisian quai. What was it exactly his father had said? Ah, yes. "If something happens take the spare key I gave you and go to my apartment." He'd never said that this was the key to the apartment. Bravo turned the key over and over, light glinting off its machined facets. What had he meant, then?

Assuming he'd wanted Bravo to go to his apartment if something happened to him, why was there nothing here? Again, he felt the peculiar pricking between his shoulder blades. Was this a warning of some kind? Bravo remembered the couple outside the bank, shadowing him. What did they want?

As these thoughts rolled around in his head, he was staring at the key, and now he thought he saw something glittering that he hadn't noticed before. Taking it over to the window, he saw etched into it a string of sixteen tiny letters. They seemed to have no rhyme or reason-certainly they formed no known word. Bravo wondered what they signified.

All at once, a familiar thrill raced through him. He was thinking of the grand games he and his father would play-the messages his father would leave for him in code-which would drive his mother crazy because only he and his father could read them.

It was a basic number substitution code that needed to be worked out because some of the letters were used to tell you which letters to substitute for the ones written. Taking out a pad and pen, Bravo wrote down the letter string, then sitting with his back against the radiator, set to work. What would have baffled a cryptographer was laid out for him like a blueprint. Within five minutes he'd broken the code and what appeared before him was a single word: gangplank.

He knew, of course, what a gangplank was, but he had no idea what his father meant or why he had bothered to encrypt the word. Sunlight, filtered through dirty panes of glass, shot repeating patterns across the parquet floor and barren walls, sadly emphasizing the utter emptiness of the space, which had been scrubbed clean of every last vestige of Dexter Shaw's presence.

As Bravo took one last circuit around the apartment, he searched his memory for an instance of the word gangplank, but he couldn't recall his father ever using it. Leaving the apartment was more difficult than he had imagined. He recalled with a painful vividness his mother's illness and felt now as he had each time he'd left her dying in the hospital: heartsick that she was held prisoner by her illness, by the betrayal of her body, when he was fit and free to walk into the cool neon-lit evening air.

At the elevator, he paused and turned back toward the apartment door. If only he could reach inside and extract whatever was left of his father.

On the way through the lobby, he asked the doorman for directions to an Internet cafe, the closest of which, it turned out, was on 17th Street, more or less midway between Dupont Circle and Scott Circle. He called a cab and waited in the cool of the lobby until it pulled up to the curb.

Ten minutes later, he was sitting at a computer terminal, an iced coffee and a roast beef sandwich at his right elbow. He searched gangplank, but so many results came up that he knew he'd have to narrow his search criteria.

As he munched through half his sandwich, he considered the possibilities. Going on his father's principle of hiding in plain sight didn't work with this particular problem, because Dexter Shaw had gone to a lot of trouble to encrypt the word. Why would he do that? Bravo frowned, concentrating. He no longer tasted the sandwich, no longer heard the soft murmur of voices of those around him; he'd entered into that extraordinary private world his father had observed in him even at an early age. His entire being was directed at unraveling the puzzle at hand. And in the silence of his concentration something came to him. If his father had hidden the word, then gangplank was something well known-something in plain sight. Bravo's head came up. He knew he was right-his father had simply applied his "hidden in plain sight" dictum in a different way.

Putting what was left of his sandwich aside, Bravo returned to the computer terminal, his fingers flying over the keyboard. On one of the many Washington, DC, sites, he typed in the word gangplank. What he came up with surprised him. Gangplank was the name of a marina within walking distance of the Washington Monument and the Capitol Building.

At the marina office, a grizzled old-timer with a cigarette between his bloodless lips told him that there was no boat registered in the name of Dexter Shaw or anyone named Shaw for that matter.

Thanking the old-timer, Bravo walked down to the water and out onto the slips. The day was overspread with a glare of haze that reduced the visible spectrum of light, leveled everything to the dull colors of old laundry. He inhaled the sharp, almost rotten mineral smell of the water as he passed one boat after another. He didn't yet know what he was looking for, but there must be something here-his father's message told him so. Then, on the third slip over, he saw a dark blue and white thirty-seven-foot Cobalt 343. Steffi was stenciled across its stern plate in gold. Steffi, his father's pet name for Bravo's mother. He stood very still, his aspect tense and watchful. It could be a coincidence, but he didn't think so. He didn't believe in coincidence.

He glanced down at the mysterious Medeco key. The more he thought of it, the more it seemed likely that his father would not have kept a boat registered under his own name, especially in light of what had happened to the contents of his apartment after his death. The boat meant something, he suspected, something vitally important, otherwise Dexter wouldn't have named it Steffi, then hidden it so that only his son would find it.

All at once, the marina appeared bleached out, the skyline of DC receding to some other reality. He was alone on the wooden slip, feeling the last remnant of his father he'd been searching vainly for in the apartment. A connection had been established through the boat, a kind of umbilical that drew him ever closer.

It was with this profoundly altered sensibility that Bravo went aboard. He was looking for clues now, the part of his father that remained after his death: an elaborate set of clues and codes that would guide him-and only him-to what his father wanted him to know. He paused, considering this notion for a moment. What if there were others after whatever it was Dexter wanted his son to find, others he was wary of, even afraid of? Bravo thought of the blond couple, the man's incongruous shoes, the woman's feline smile that now seemed to him sinister, a sign not of a flirtation but of a secret she knew and he didn't.

Once again, he felt that peculiar prickling between his shoulder blades, and with an eerie sense of foreboding, he looked around, abruptly fearful that his inattention would lead to sudden disaster. What if they were here, what if he was being watched as he had been in New York? But no, he saw no one suspicious in the general vicinity. The marina was quiet, virtually deserted. Anyone trying to spy on him would have been revealed in an instant. And yet, as he looked farther afield, he saw high-rises whose dizzying banks of windows faced him. Behind any one of them someone could be standing with high-powered binoculars or a telescope, recording his every movement.

With an acute and uncomfortable sense of his own helplessness, he turned and, with equal parts resignation and determination, concentrated on what had to be done now. He began his search in the crescent high-tech cabin with its cream-colored seating-area storage compartment and head, but found nothing there. Returning deckside, he spotted a compartment door just to the left of the wheel, below the array of dials. In its center was set a Medeco lock. With his heart beating fast, he fitted the key into the lock, turned it. The door popped open.

Inside, he discovered a rat-eared address book, a pair of cubic gold cuff links, an enamel American flag lapel pin, a pair of eyeglasses, two packs of cigarettes, a gunmetal Zippo lighter. That was it. Taking this assortment of everyday items, he returned to the cabin, where he slit both packs of cigarettes down the sides, spilled out the contents. To his disappointment, he found only cigarettes. These he slit, too, pawing carefully and vainly through the tobacco.

He held the cuff links in the palm of his hand, as if he could feel in their considerable weight the lingering presence of his father. Flipping open the Zippo, he lit the flame and almost immediately extinguished it. His vision went blurry as he peered through the glasses. They weren't magnifying lenses that could be picked up at any drug or convenience store, they were prescription lenses.

He held the glasses at arm's length, wondering, because so far as he knew Dexter Shaw had perfect vision, he'd never needed glasses.

But perhaps he was wrong, perhaps this was one other thing his father had kept from him. There was only one way to find out. He leafed through the address book, found the number of his father's opthamologist and called him. He was busy with a patient, but when Bravo told his receptionist who he was, she retrieved Dexter Shaw's file.

"Glasses?" she said when she came back on the line. "Why would Dr. Miller prescribe glasses for Mr. Shaw? His vision was exceptional. He had no need for glasses, even reading glasses."

And yet, here he was holding glasses with prescription lenses. Another clue? What other hypothesis was there? He decided that he'd have to go with that one until it proved incorrect.

Now he examined the glasses more closely. On the inside of the right temple was the manufacturer and the model. On the inside of the left was stamped the name and address of an optician. He phoned a taxi service, then carefully gathered up everything he'd found and left the boat.

Walking briskly back down the slip and out of the marina, he kept an eye out for anyone loitering or seeming to work when he actually wasn't. Two teens on bikes sped past him, and a middle-aged man carrying a six-pack of beer and a too-large gut strode by. Bravo turned and watched him walk out onto the slip, climb aboard a boat named TimeGoesBy. Then he resumed walking, hurrying up the street to where the red and white taxi was waiting, engine idling. He got in, gave the driver an address in Georgetown.

Twelve minutes later, he got out in front of the Four Seasons Hotel, an elegant low-rise brick building at 2800 Pennsylvania Avenue. Without looking around, he strode into the lobby, then turned right and stood, shoulder against a column, peering through one of the huge windows at the avenue. The atmosphere was cool, hushed, serene, a perfect sanctuary to gaze out upon the world and once again wonder whether he was being vigilant or paranoid. For a time, he watched taxis and Town Cars pulling up, disgorging fashionable women in stiletto heels and expensive coifs, festooned with shopping bags. Two businessmen stood smoking and chatting, then moved off. He saw no one suspicious, yet he had to wonder whether he knew what to look for.

Exiting via the side entrance, he walked a dozen blocks, turning at length onto P Street where, a block further on, he came upon Trefoil Opticians. The owner's name-Terrence Markand-was stenciled in discreet gold letters on the window. It was a clean, well-lighted store in an old brownstone Federalist building. While the man behind the counter adjusted a pair of sunglasses on a woman, Bravo perused the displays of high-tech, fashionable frames with heart-stopping prices. Behind him, the woman walked out of the store. The man at the counter was tall and gaunt, with sunken cheeks and the complexion of an avocado. He gave Bravo a narrow smile along with his attention.

"How can I help you, sir?"

"Are you Mr. Markand?"

"I am, indeed." The smile stretched a bit.

"My name is Braverman Shaw," Bravo said, holding out the glasses. "I found these among my late father's effects. Your name is on them so I assume you made them for him."

"You're Dexter Shaw's son?" Markand said with an odd brittleness. "I read about his untimely death. I'm so sorry for your loss." He seemed on the verge of saying something more, then thought better of it, biting his lip.

Bravo nodded his thanks. "I wonder if you could tell me anything about the glasses."

"What would you like to know?"

"The prescription, for instance."

Markand didn't bother to examine the lenses. "I can't, because I didn't grind them. Mr. Shaw's arrangement was with the technician who did grind them."

Bravo took back the glasses. "I'd like to speak to him."

"Her," he corrected. "I'm afraid she no longer works here."

"I see. And why is that? An altercation of some kind?"

"Not at all." Markand peered at Bravo for a moment, his lips pursed. "She just up and quit, without any notice, mind you. Young people, no manners at all, wouldn't you say?" He shook his head ruefully. "Damn shame, too, she was the best tech I'd ever had, and I've been in business almost thirty years. Take those glasses, for instance, the lenses are ground using a technique I couldn't even begin to guess at."

"When did she leave?" Bravo asked.

"Ten days ago, precisely. She walked out of here and didn't even bother to collect her back pay, either."

Ten days ago, Bravo thought. The day after my father died.

Markand frowned. "But she did leave me an envelope, said it was for you." His rather delicate hands rested on the glass countertop. "No offense, but would you mind showing me a picture ID? Just so I can be absolutely sure, you understand."

Bravo dug out his US driver's license. The optician nodded, then reached under the counter, unlocked a drawer and extracted a heavy vellum envelope, archaically sealed with red wax.

Opening the envelope, Bravo discovered a slip of paper on which was written an address in a clean feminine hand. He looked up to see the cadaverous optician regarding him with a tense smile.

"Good news, I trust?"

"That has yet to be determined," Bravo said as he folded away the paper.

The optician nodded. "Then there is nothing left, Mr. Shaw, but to wish you a good day."

The moment Bravo left his shop, Markand turned, and with a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach, went back into his office. It was opposite the grinding lab and smelled of heated sand and plastic, and now something more. Donatella lounged in the swivel chair behind his desk, her wide lips forming a half smile that spoke of the kind of mystery that put dread into Markand's painfully thudding heart.

"You did well," she said. "He came just as you said he would."

"My granddaughter," the optometrist said. "I want her back."

"In time." Donatella sat up.

"If you've harmed her-"

"What?" Donatella's eyes grew flinty as she pushed the chair back and came around the side of the desk. "What will you do, Markand?" She laughed unkindly as she patted his cheek.

He couldn't help himself, but involuntarily tried to recoil. In a terrifyingly quick movement, she grabbed the back of his head.

"I would tell you not to worry, but, actually, you have a great deal to worry about, Markand. We haven't finished with you."

He closed his eyes and whimpered like a child.

Donatella, her face very close to his, shook him like a rag doll until his eyes popped open, wide and staring. She could see the whites all the way around, and this pleased her enormously. "You understand, don't you, that Angela's life is in your hands."

He shuddered, almost overwhelmed with nausea. There was something unspeakably offensive-evil, even-hearing his only granddaughter's name spoken by this creature. For that was how Markand had come to think of her-considerably less than human-a nightmare beast who, with her male counterpart, had stolen into his life and now held it hostage. His training meant nothing now; only Angela mattered. He would endure any humiliation or deprivation, he would sell the soul of everyone around him in order to ensure her safety.

"What do you want me to do now?" he said hoarsely.

Donatella placed a clamshell cell phone into his trembling hand and said, "Call him."

Markand opened the phone and dialed a local number. "He just left," he said when he heard Rossi's voice. "Of course I know where he's going, I already told you. Yes, I'm sure." He could feel the creature's eyes on him like the breath of a fanged beast, jaws gaping, and his bowels loosened.

Plunged in contemplation, Bravo walked back to the Four Seasons where he picked up a taxi. He told the driver to take him across the Potomac to Falls Church, Virginia. The address on the slip of paper was an old stone house with a steep slate-gray shingled roof on a quiet, tree-lined street. A surf of pink climbing roses decorated the white picket fence that enclosed the front yard, which was shaded by a Bradford pear tree on one side and a cut-leaf Japanese maple on the other. A thick four-foot privet hedge was planted up against the foundation. Between neat rows of sheared azalea, a moss-edged flagstone path led to a door lacquered blood-red.

The door opened even before he had a chance to ring the bell, revealing a slim, lovely young woman with cinnamon hair pulled back in a ponytail from her wide forehead and large gray eyes, slightly upturned at their outer corners. "Yes?" she said in a tense voice.

"I'm Bravo Shaw."

"What took you so long?" she said, making room for him to step inside.

The expected welcome draft of cool air did not come. In fact, despite the stone walls the interior of the house was quite warm, seemingly without any air stirring at all. He saw a polished wood floor, devoid of any carpets, a sofa of a nubbly umber fabric and two matching chairs, a glass coffee table with curved bronze legs, an oversized stone fireplace one might expect to find in a hunting lodge. Against one wall was an antique walnut breakfront, displaying plates and bowls behind diamond panes of glass, and on the other a large painting-a portrait in dark, brooding hues of a seated woman, young and arresting, her hands held loosely in her lap, her head thrown back almost in defiance, pale eyes regarding the viewer with a peculiar intensity; there was about her the intent of motion, as if she were an arrow in a drawn bow, about to catapult across the room.

"Are you-?"

"Jenny Logan. I made those glasses to your father's specifications." Her gleaming oyster-gray sleeveless blouse and hip-hugging jeans revealed her fitness as well as showed off her shapely legs. Her shoulders were square, her arms sun-browned and firmly muscled, her neck long and elegant. She gave the impression of scrutinizing everyone and everything she came upon.

"Why?" Bravo said. "And why did my father want me to meet you?"

She was about to answer, when her head swiveled. Her entire body tensed. Bravo, concentrating, heard it, too, and he was already moving toward the front door. But she stopped him, pointing to a pair of men emerging from a dark sedan, running full-tilt toward the house. At that moment, a thunderous crash reverberated through the house as the back door yielded to a handheld battering ram.

Chapter 4

Jenny grabbed Bravo's hand, pulling him through the living room, seemingly toward the back of the house. But in the hallway, she flipped up a patterned runner, revealing a trapdoor. As they heard voices shouting, the panting of determined men, she lifted the door.

Voices came to them, harsh and urgent; curt orders were given, and then they heard the pounding of heavy feet. The house was completely surrounded. By whom? Bravo had no idea, and now was definitely not a good time to ask Jenny.

Down he went, missing the first three rungs of a vertical iron ladder, wrenching his right shoulder. With a soft grunt he balanced himself as she came down after him. Glancing up, he saw her pause to pull the runner back over the trapdoor as she silently lowered it and threw a thick steel bolt, locking them in.

Rossi, loaded Glock at the ready, followed the two men into Jenny Logan's house. At once, he signed to them and they dropped the battering ram, drawing their weapons and sprinting down the hall. For his own part, Rossi leapt up the stairs, taking them three at a time. He went methodically through the second story, checking the two bedrooms and closets. He was a master of precision, not someone who fired a gun wildly, spraying the vicinity in the vain hope of hitting his target.

He hated this assignment and, in particular, he hated being in America. He longed to be back in Rome with its sundrenched streets, the excited jabber of friends and neighbors, the grit of centuries long past under his fingernails. Here, everything was bright and shiny, gobbled down fast-food style in insatiable amounts, ugly in its aggressive newness. As he went through closet after closet, he reflected sourly that for America nothing was ever enough, no matter how much it had or would ever have. He saw with Old World sensibilities a kind of hysteria that lived beneath the skin of every American, that brooked no recourse, no negotiation, no… what was it the Americans liked to say? It's my way or the highway. Oh, to be back on Via dell' Orso with the earthy smells of brick and fresh-baked bread, slyly eyeing the young women with wide hips, thrusting breasts and flashing eyes!

By the time he reached the bathrooms, he was joined by the two men who'd used the battering ram. They shook their heads in the negative. He ripped down the shower curtains, stomped on the tile floors, hammered against the walls in search of hidden trapdoors to hidey-holes. He had no illusions about this being a normal house. The occupant was no normal female; she would have spent months in the preparation for just such an invasion.

"Well, they're here somewhere, either in the attic or the basement," Rossi said as he led them out of the second bathroom. "You two find the attic and get in. I'll take the others into the basement."

For a few moments, they were in utter darkness. Bravo could hear her breathing, smell his scent and hers mingling as she stepped off the ladder in close quarters. All at once, louder sounds-muffled through the floorboards-came to them as the house was fully occupied. How many men? Bravo asked himself. Two in the front, the same number in back? More?

He very badly wanted to talk to Jenny, but now she was taking his hand again, leading him across the basement, which smelled of stone, old wood and paint. She had no trouble negotiating the space in the darkness, which led him to believe she'd performed this drill many times before. Why? Had she been expecting this attack? It was becoming clear to Bravo that his father had been involved in something secret, something deeply hidden, even from his family. Why had he kept his secret life from them? Why had he deceived them for so many years? What kind of person could do that?

Thoughts stuck in his mind like thorns he couldn't reach. They had stopped in front of what seemed to be a solid stone wall. He reached out, confirmed his supposition. All at once, he heard an explosion, and he winced, sweating freely, memories of the other, larger explosion that had caught him vivid in his memory and now the heart-stopping moment of impact brought immediately and terrifyingly into the present. The basement door had been shattered by a gunshot and now came the quick and ominous scrape of shoe soles against concrete.

Then he felt her hand on his shoulder, pressing firmly, and he crouched down beside her. He heard her scramble forward and followed her into what at first appeared to be a recess in the wall. But once inside, he felt a draft of sodden heat and, glancing up, saw the gauze of pale sky contained in a black frame, an abstract image of the world outside. This was the chimney or, since no flue was visible, a space hidden behind the chimney. In the dim light, he could see Jenny pushing down on a square section of the stone wall-a door, he saw now, set on rollers, that fit precisely and securely into the space through which they had entered the chimney. When the door was in place, the wall appeared seamless.

Jenny turned in the cramped space and, picking up a paint can she must have grabbed in the basement, began to climb up a series of metal rungs set at regular intervals into the brickwork. Without hesitation, he followed her.

With a soft grunt, Rossi blew apart the lock on the door to the basement. As he raced down the stairs, his two men close behind him, he felt the familiar swirl of venom in the pit of his stomach. There was something about blood, the rising of it in his own body, the heat it produced rushing into his palms, fingers and toes, the copper taste of it as if he had bitten clear through a metal bar, that made him feel elemental, larger than life, immortal.

His nostrils flared like a wolf on the hunt. They were down here, their scents like a fading vapor trail in the sky. He lifted his left arm and the two men switched on battery-powered floodlights. At once everything was thrown into stark relief. There was no place to hide, no nooks or crannies, no shadows save their own, trailing obediently after them.

He directed them to the walls first. They pounded on the concrete with the butts of their semiautomatic rifles, pulled cartons and boxes away to peer behind them. Rossi knew that there must be a way out of the basement. The woman would not have taken Shaw down here without one. It was simply a matter of finding it.

While the men systematically stabbed at the walls and floor, he checked everything else. There wasn't much that could be of use to them: a boiler, a hot water heater, the solid brick rectangle of the chimney, no central air or vacuum. The boiler and heater stood away from the wall. Nothing there for him, so he turned his back and went over to the brick chimney. He walked all the way around it, then stood staring at it, wondering why it went all the way down to the basement. There was no opening that he could see, no reason for it to be here.

He put the flat of his hand on the brick, closed his eyes. One of his men said something to him.

"Shut up!" he snapped.

Dead air silence. And then…

He felt-or thought he felt-a trickle of vibration transmitted through the brick, coming to him from inside the chimney.

What if there was an opening in it that led upward?

Rossi called softly and his men began to move.

The occupation of the basement came to them through sound and vibration. Bravo tried not to think of the pursuit as he continued after Jenny, climbing until surely they were past the first floor. He saw no opening to the fireplace and realized that the shaft they were ascending was built behind the bricked-off real chimney.

Just above him, Jenny kept up a steady pace. He estimated that they were now above the second floor, the attic, the roofline. All the while, the air inside the chimney grew hotter and wetter, the patch of sky expanding until momentarily it grew dark as Jenny's body eclipsed the sunlight. Then she was out and he could see her face peering down at him. "Come on," she mouthed urgently. "Come on!" He emerged into the blazing sunshine. He squinted as he joined Jenny, who was sprawled on her belly across the slate roof tiles. The roof pitched downward so that as he crawled forward to lie shoulder to shoulder with her he could see the street at the front of the house. A black Lincoln Aviator was parked at an angle, blocking the street, its curb-side doors open. A man sat smoking in the driver's seat. One hand was draped across the wheel, gripping a gun. Another man leaned against the Aviator's front fender. He was staring fixedly at the front door. If he was armed, he was hiding it well.

Bravo felt Jenny touch his arm. Her scent came to him, lavender and lime. Her hair shone copper in the hazy sunlight. She was pointing to herself, making a gesture. He was about to ask her what she meant when she began to slither away. He moved after her, but she frowned, holding him in place.

"Stay here," she mouthed. "Wait for me."

He nodded, watched her crawl to the side of the roof. There, she pried open the lid of the paint can, set it at the edge of the tiles. Then, turning briefly onto one hip, she took out a lighter, flicked it on. In one practiced motion, she lit the contents of the paint can and shoved it over the side. As she came back toward him, there came a crash, then, an instant later, a shout and a chorus of raised voices as a plume of oily smoke rose up, followed by the first ruddy lick of flame.

By this time, Jenny was at his side, and together they moved to the edge of the roof. Below them, the Aviator stood deserted, its driver and companion having run toward the commotion at the side of the house. Jenny went over the edge, landing in the thick privet hedge. Bravo dropped down after her. Branches cracked beneath his weight and he felt his shirt tear in several places, bright pinpricks of pain across his shoulders and back.

Then she was hauling him out of the hedge, and they ran across the sidewalk to the Aviator. Pushing him in, she climbed behind the wheel. The keys were in the ignition, no doubt to better facilitate a quick getaway should the need arise.

The engine growled to life and she threw the SUV in gear. As they shot away from the curb, Bravo watched the rearview mirror fill with running figures. He squinted, then turned around. Was that the man who had been outside the bank in New York, following him? A figure beside him raised a gun in the Aviator's direction and Bravo shouted a warning to Jenny, but just before they swerved around a corner, he thought he saw the man push the gunman's arm down toward the pavement.

As Jenny took another turn, she said, "Why did you turn around?"

They were racing down Little Falls Street.

"I thought I recognized someone."

"Well, did you or didn't you?" she said shortly. Amid an outraged bray of horns and squeals of tires she turned left onto Route 7.

"Hey, take it easy!"

"You were the one who warned me they were going to shoot," Jenny said without taking her eyes off the road. "Do you think they won't try to follow us?"

She maneuvered the Aviator around a lumbering delivery truck and accelerated. By the angle of the sun, Bravo could tell that they were heading roughly southeast.

"You didn't answer my question," she continued. "Did you recognize one of the house invaders?"

"I did," Bravo said after a moment. The sharpness of her tone angered him, but beneath that he realized that the urgency she projected had the effect of focusing him. This annoyed him even more. "I saw him before in New York City."

"You're sure?"

Bravo nodded emphatically. "Yes. He was following me."

"Was he with a woman?"

"What?"

"Young, striking in an aggressive sort of way."

Bravo turned his head so sharply his vertebrae cracked. "How did you know?"

"It was an educated guess." She gave him a tight smile as she made a hard right through a light turning red, onto Lee Highway. Horns shouted again, and a voice cursed briefly. "The man's name is Rossi. Ivo Rossi. Usually, he works in tandem with a woman named Donatella Orsoni."

"They looked like lovers when I saw them together."

"Animal magnetism," she said dryly. "But I wouldn't want to be made love to by either of them."

She headed right onto Jackson Street and then by way of small residential streets toward a growing swath of green.

"Just who are these two?" he asked.

"Members of an ancient sub rosa group known as the Knights of St. Clement."

She said this so nonchalantly that he almost missed her trailing phrase: "You've studied them, I imagine."

Indeed he had. He'd read all there was to read about them.

"The Knights were instrumental in bringing the papal word of God to the Holy Land before, during and after the Crusades."

Jenny nodded, frowning. "In doing Rome's bidding, they were the pope's thinly veiled fist against both the Islamic infidel and those religious sects the pope or his puppet council deemed heretical to current teaching. Rossi and Donatella are Knights of the Field, named after the warrior-priests of their order sent to the Holy Land to fight the Ottomans during the Crusades. These people are expressly trained to kill."

It was impossible to hear about the Knights without also thinking of the Order. "How do you know so much about them?"

She glanced at him for a moment. "I'm their mortal enemy. I'm a member of the Order of Gnostic Observatines."

"This can't be. History records that the Knights of St. Clement wiped out what remained of the Order in the late eighteenth century."

"There's history," she said, "and then there is the secret history of the world."

"Meaning?"

"It's true that the Knights tried to annihilate us, but they failed. Every time they attacked, we went deeper underground."

"The Order still exists, the Knights of St. Clement still exist."

"You yourself have seen two of them. What else fits the pattern of the last several days? What else fits the pattern of your whole life, for that matter?"

"Again, I-"

"Your training in medieval religions, your physical training, your father's unexplained absences."

Bravo felt a ball of ice forming in the pit of his stomach. Much to his horror, incidents and thoughts, suspicions and seemingly disparate long-held notions started fitting together.

Glancing over at him, she saw all this on his face. "You know it now, don't you, Bravo? Perhaps, somewhere deeply hidden inside you, you always knew it. Your father was a Gnostic Observatine."

Bravo felt like a vise had been put to his temples. He had trouble breathing. He looked out the windshield, hoping for a kind of solace in nature, but now that they were closer, he could see amid the trees monuments of carved white stone and granite as speckled as a bird's egg: National Memorial Park. She was taking him to a cemetery.

Superimposed over this scene was the specter of his father's face, and then the familiar voice: "No matter how hard you try, you can't outrun the past."

Ivo Rossi, Knight of the Field, astride a powerful black and yellow K 1200 S BMW motorcycle, rendezvoused with the delivery truck Jenny had passed on Route 7. Donatella was behind the wheel, handling the three-ton vehicle as if it were a Honda Accord. They spoke to each other by cell phone in the stripped-down, almost codelike sentences of people intimate with each other.

"According to the electronic tracker in the Aviator, they're on Timber Lane, heading due west," Rossi said.

"The cemetery." Donatella was always one step ahead of everyone. That was what made her so valuable to Rossi and so scary to everyone else. They had known each other since they were preadolescents, finding each other in the crawling filth of Rome's back alleys, exploring a sexual landscape both new and dangerous. Opportunistic to the core, they survived by feeding off the misfortune of others, which more often than not they themselves manufactured.

The moment of their first encounter was forever tattooed on his memory. Lithe and impossibly thin, she had been running down the narrow street where he had been looking to break into the back of a store for money or food. She was lit up from behind by the headlamps of a battered Fiat jouncing after her. Her eyes were wide and staring, her mouth was open as she sucked in air. She had been running a long time; he did not need to see the desperation on her face to know this was clearly the end of the chase. He had hefted the crowbar in his hand and, as the Fiat approached, had slammed it into the driver's-side windshield. The Fiat bucked and swerved like a wounded beast. It slid along an ancient brick wall in a shower of sparks. Even before it came to a stop, the driver had leapt out. He was dressed in a long black leather coat. There was a gun in his hand. Rossi, at a dead run, had swung the crowbar again, cracking the man's wrist. The gun went flying and the man turned, drove a balled fist into the pit of Rossi's stomach. Rossi bent double, gasping and helpless, and the man yanked the crowbar out of his nerveless fingers. Rearing back, he drove it point first toward the top of Rossi's head, but Donatella had scooped up the man's gun and, walking purposefully toward him, had emptied the clip into him.

Since then, they had been like twins, recruited into the Knights of St. Clement together, training together as Knights of the Field, whose bloody purpose they quite naturally understood. Often, they began and finished each other's sentences, thought the same thoughts, for the same reasons. They had been set loose together, stalking prey, infiltrating organizations and institutions as their orders dictated. Always, they had done what had been asked of them, willingly, happily, with a devout-almost holy-sense of purpose, for the Knights of St. Clement had become the orphans' mother and father.

"It's not logical, of course," Rossi said as they sped west. The highway was filled with cars, trucks, SUVs, limitless possibilities. With a familiar burst of exhilaration, he was aware of what his life in the Voire Dei had given him. It had legitimized his natural instincts; instead of running from the law, he and Donatella were beyond it, immune. Only another member of the Voire Dei could understand what he was and oppose him, but with the death of Dexter Shaw there was no one left for him to fear, certainly not this Guardian and her hapless charge.

"But what would you expect of her," he said, "once you take into consideration what's on her mind every day and every night?"

"A weakness that will prove their downfall." Donatella smoothly upshifted and accelerated. On a mission, she felt the world open to her like a flower, and she was happy. In the dead spaces between, she starved herself sexually, suffered from insomnia and bit her nails until the quicks bled. At those times, there was no emotion in her but pain, and none other that she could imagine. Now, however, purpose hummed inside her like a hive of bees, and she felt that there was no pain, no deterrent capable of stopping her or even giving her pause.

The cemetery spread out all around Jenny and Bravo, a vast, hushed, peaceful city of the dead-lush and green, smelling of new-mown grass, loosestrife and wild onion. There was a respite of sorts in the deep shade of the old oaks, hawthorns and Virginia pines. Birds flittered among the heavily laden branches and the drone of insects was everywhere. Directly behind them were the gates to Miamonides Cemetery, and on their left, to the south, was the larger, more imposing National Memorial Cemetery.

Jenny led them at a fast clip down a paved walkway between two rows of squat stone mausoleums-a necropolis gleaming dully in dappled sunlight.

As if at last making up her mind, she stopped abruptly and turned to him, engaging his eyes with her own. "Listen to me, Bravo, I need to tell you something. Your father was killed by an explosive charge."

Bravo felt something clench painfully in his belly. "But the police said that it was a gas leak." All at once he felt dizzy. "They assured me it was an accident."

"That's just what they-and you-were meant to believe." Jenny stared at him for a moment, unblinking. "But his death was no accident. Dexter Shaw was murdered."

"How do you know that?" He was aware that his voice was harsh, almost antagonistic. He didn't want to believe her. Of course he didn't want to believe her.

"Dexter Shaw was a member of the Haute Cour-the inner circle, the leaders of the Order. Over the past fifteen days, five members of the Haute Cour have been killed-one choked to death on a fish bone, another was a victim of a hit-and-run incident. The third fell-or rather was pushed-from the balcony of his twentieth-floor apartment, and the fourth drowned while he was boating. Your father was the fifth."

Bravo followed her account with a sense of mounting horror, and all at once a memory flooded through him. "I want to make you an offer," Dexter Shaw had said in characteristically cryptic fashion. "Remember your old training?" This bit of the last conversation he'd had with his father stuck in his mind like a moth pinned to a lepidopterist's table. She was right, and he knew it. Of course. He'd known it, he realized with a start, from the instant she had said it. It was as if the multiple shocks of his father's death, his sister's maiming, his own concussion had caused a latent instinct to arise in him-a long-held sense of danger, conspiracy, secrets, a sense of a hidden world he'd inherited from his father.

They had begun to walk again, urged by Jenny, as if she knew that movement-even of the most pedestrian sort-was what he needed most now.

"Breathe, Bravo," she said to him softly, kindly, as she observed him. "You'll feel better the more deeply you breathe."

He did as she said and in the process felt keenly a sensation of being in her hands. It was not altogether unpleasant, for he was in the midst of a dawning realization that ever since he'd awoken in the hospital his world was changed forever. Sometime during his state of utter unconsciousness he'd entered an unknown territory. Suddenly alone, he was grappling to come to terms with a new world order of which he had no knowledge.

"I need some answers," he said. "From my studies, I know that the Gnostic Observatines were a supposedly heretical sub-order of the Franciscan Observatines, who broke with both the traditionalists and the mainliners. Is it still a religious order? And what about you? I was under the impression that the Order was strictly male."

"Once it was," Jenny said. "And believe me, there are those in the Order who wish it was still, who bear me nothing but ill will. We will get to them in time, but for the moment, to answer your first question, the Order is now apostate, we've moved out of the strictly religious sphere."

"Why?"

"Once, religion was the law, the supreme power in the world, but gradually that power eroded, ceded to kings, warlords, parliaments and presidents. As religion's power waned, the Order moved with the times, into the power centers of the secular world. We became businessmen and politicians.

"And all the while, we followed the Knights, whose mission it was to keep power concentrated in as few hands as possible: the Kaiser, Hitler, Mussolini, you get the picture."

"Are you telling me that the Knights of St. Clement were behind-"

"They certainly played their part, they greased the wheels, and we-the Order-did our part to stop them, to ensure the democratization of power. This is the essence of the clandestine world-we still call it by its ancient name, the Voire Dei, the Truth of God-in which we operate, Bravo."

"But if the Order is no longer religious in nature, what has it become?"

"Through the 1940s, we kept Hitler mesmerized with a blizzard of astrological charts from which he made every wrong decision he could make, overextending his army in Russia and Western Europe. We kept the Nazis from learning about the Manhattan Project, despite Werner Heisenberg's work as Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Berlin. In 1945, members of the Order spoke to Harry Truman to ensure the atomic bombing stopped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Since then, we have strived to limit the proliferation of nuclear weapons. In 1962, one of us met with Nikita Khrushchev in a dacha outside Moscow and persuaded him to back off his stand on Cuba.

"Through economic means, we spent a decade ensuring the fall of Communism and the breakup of the USSR. Today, we work continuously in Africa to stop the spread of disease, in Eastern Europe to keep governments stable, in Western Europe and Asia to educate Mamies, to try to protect them from the desperate measures of terrorism. Extremism catches hold when all hope is gone, when a human being has been stripped of everything except hatred. We do all this behind the scenes, otherwise we'd continuously be under attack by the Knights. Sometimes we're not successful or only partially successful-the onrush of world events is sometimes overwhelming. But with the original mission St. Francis gave us to travel the world to do good, to keep nothing for ourselves, we have persevered. Until now, when the entire world is threatened, when at any moment it might come under the thumb of the Knights of St. Clement."

She turned, and together they hurried down the path, a narrow aisle between the granite gravestones and polished marble mausoleum walls.

"The secrets in the cache are our power," she continued. "At first, they were the schemes of kings, merchant-princes, cardinals to murder their rivals, to corner the Dutch commodities markets that we ourselves created in the seventeenth century. Later on, plots by governments to back this dictator, assassinate that one, to wage war and then, afterward, award the plum contracts for infrastructure rebuilding to companies who contributed to their election; backdoor politics that distributed aid sent to poor countries into the hands of political leaders who needed it least. Embezzlement, coercion, treason, shall I keep going? The under-the-table deals between businesses to wipe out rivals, the embezzlement of funds, the breaches of fiduciary trusts, the venality of those at the top of the ladder of power. All the injustices man commits against his fellow man.

"Used judiciously, our knowledge of all these and more gives us a unique wedge, opening doors otherwise closed to all outsiders. It allows us to influence leaders, politicians, businessmen into making decisions beneficial to the world, and to the prospect of peace."

"And the Knights want war?"

"The Knights want our secrets-our power. I assure you they would not use them so judiciously. They seek to consolidate their power, to at long last break free of the Vatican's yoke. They want to influence governments and business to their own ends."

It seemed odd to him now, but he had always suspected there was more to history than could be read in any library book or doctoral thesis. And why not? His father had trained him to intuitively understand the nature of secrets, to not only accept their existence but learn to unearth and unravel them.

"The secret history of the world," he said, repeating the phrase she had used.

She nodded. "And up until now we've managed to thwart all their efforts. Just so you understand the stakes: what happens in the next week will be crucial not only to the survival of the Order but to the world itself."

"But why now?" Bravo said. "The Knights have been trying to steal the cache for centuries."

"The pope is gravely ill."

"There's been no news-"

"Of course there hasn't-not yet, anyway. The Vatican has seen to that. But his illness has thrown the Vatican into chaos-especially the cabal of cardinals who back the Knights. The Knights have used the panic to galvanize the cardinals' full power behind them once and for all-lengths to which even these cardinals had been afraid to go until the pope was incapacitated. The Knights have come after us as never before. This is the Order's last stand, Bravo. Here we survive, or die."

"How many of you are there?"

"Five hundred, give or take."

"Not so many."

"We're strewn around the globe, in every major country and a smattering of minor ones, but of members like myself there are less than fifty. I'm a Guardian. Have you come across word of us in your studies?"

Bravo shook his head.

"I'm not surprised. The Guardians were deliberately undocumented, a closely held secret. It was-and is-our job to keep the others, especially members of the Haute Cour, safe from harm."

He felt suddenly angry. "And yet you and your fellow Guardians allowed five of the Haute Cour to die. Where were you when my father was killed?"

"Remember I told you that one of the Haute Cour drowned while boating? He was my father. I was in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay when your father was killed. I was in a wet suit, searching for my own father's body."

Her words momentarily took the edge off his rage. "Did you find him?"

"No. The tides were strong and a two-day storm offshore had churned the water to murk. It was impossible to see anything clearly, let alone find a body."

"I'm sorry," Bravo said.

"So am I."

His anger fought to reassert itself. "If it wasn't you, then who was assigned to protect my father?"

The knifepoint of his voice pricked her. "Are you out for revenge, Bravo?" she said shortly. "If so, I suggest you save it for those who murdered him."

Racked by his own tragedies, he hardened his heart against hers. "You didn't answer my question."

They had come to the end of the necropolis, though there was a scattering of other mausoleums in the near distance. They stood facing one another, glaring.

"Your father ditched his Guardian some time before he met you. He also disabled a Knight of the Field who was shadowing him. He was an expert at losing himself whether he was in a crowd or not, and, in retrospect, it's clear he wanted to be alone with you-completely alone."

Bravo took some moments to digest this as they continued down the path she had chosen, then he slowly let out his breath. "You seem to have all the answers, and you're resourceful. Is that why my father led me to you?"

"I wish I did have all the answers." She cocked her head. "Why did your father ditch his Guardian, why did he want to be alone with you?"

I want to make you an offer. Remember your old training?

"I don't know," he said, but there was another clutch in his stomach and he had to fight the urge to hit something. He knew what his father had meant for him, all right. The only question was whether he'd accept it. "No," he said after a moment's thought. "He asked if I remembered my old training. Of course he knew I did, he was simply preparing me. I'm certain he was going to ask me to join the Order."

For a moment she was silent, checking the immediate vicinity as she had done at random intervals ever since they had stolen the SUV. Judging by the dates on the gravestones-all in the eighteenth century-they had entered the oldest section of the cemetery.

"I'm hardly surprised."

"You're not?"

"Your father was someone different, special. He was far more than simply a member of the Haute Cour," she said slowly and deliberately. "But to understand this, I have to start from the beginning. As you know, the Gnostic Observatines were once Franciscans."

Bravo nodded. "The original Order was founded in the thirteenth century by followers of Francis of Assisi, and almost immediately upon his death there were those friars who believed that they should be living in apostolic poverty. This angered the pope no end because it was the Church that owned the riches accrued to its Orders. But it wasn't until 1517, almost three hundred years after the death of St. Francis, that the Order formally split into two separate factions, the Conventuals, who wanted to stay put, and the Observatines, who were convinced that St. Francis wanted them to remain itinerant-wanderers exploring far-flung territories so as to bring the word of Christ to those most in need of His gospel.

"Some Observatines knuckled under and even became the pope's envoys on forays to the Levant in order to gain troops and money for a crusade against the increasingly aggressive Ottoman empire. At the time, the Ottoman's powerful navy was taking the islands of the eastern Mediterranean and had begun to threaten even the Republic of Venice.

"But the Gnostic Observatines resisted the pope's edicts for them to renounce their apostolic poverty. They refused and, at length, they had no choice but to flee, going underground. The pope, angered, sent one of his military orders-the Knights of St. Clement, based in Rhodes-in an effort to once and for all bring them to heel."

"For those few of us academics who remember anything about the Gnostic Observatines at all, that is what passes for common historical knowledge. It is correct in the general, but false in its particulars," Jenny said. "Long before the official schism was recorded in history, an internal battle arose, leading to a horribly acrimonious secret rift in the Order. This was scarcely surprising. From the first, the Dominicans and Benedictines, the older and more established orders, aligned themselves against us."

"Why, exactly?"

"For the same reason I was drawn to the Order," she said. The trees left only small ovals of sunlight winking through the rich green of the leaves, through which they picked their way, side by side, like lovers on their way to a trysting place. "We had an advantage in being formed later than the other orders. We had the benefit of William of Ockham."

"Ockham's razor."

"A theory that followed an Aristotelian path different from Thomas Aquinas's faith-based doctrine. Aquinas had moved beyond Aristotle in saying that when we understand the laws of nature we begin to perceive God's plan. 'Ockham's razor' argued that Aquinas was dead wrong: by insisting that reason was the path to unlocking God's intentions, he had demystified God. So a split was formed that would exist forever more.

"The Order followed Ockham in believing in the basic separation of faith and reason, religious doctrine and scientific investigation. How can an astronomer deduce from the orbits of the planets God's design? How can man, using concepts created by the mind of man, possibly come to know God's will?"

Nearing its end, the path pitched gently down toward a low-lying field that bordered a placid-looking pond, drowsing in the heavy sunlight. A high stone wall, the farthest limit of the cemetery, was in sight. The gravestones were thin and flinty, with the bony shoulders of extreme age. Some were so obscured by lichen and moss that it was virtually impossible to decipher the inscriptions. Just beyond, where the path ended not far from the stone wall, hunkered a final mausoleum, quite plain. A jagged crack ran up the left side, as if at some time in the distant past it had been dealt a violent blow by vandals. The ancient stone was as rough as a carpenter's palm. The elbow of a tenacious weeping willow root had inveigled its way into the foundation, as if nature itself was making a bid to reclaim what man had sought to preserve.

A small dark bronze door presented itself to them, above which was a stone pediment, wide and low-pitched, blackened by the elements and acid rain, a triangle of sorts in the center of which, thrust into shadow, was etched a name: MARCUS.

As they stood looking up at the name, Jenny said, "What you may not know is that the rift had been predicted-some have said prophesied-by the twelfth-century abbot Joachim of Fiore. Fiore had written a number of compelling apocalyptic tracts which trumpeted a coming age of the Holy Spirit, when the Church would be reformed by two religious Orders, one living in apostolic poverty. Between 1247 and 1257, Giovanni Burelli of Parma was the Minister General of the uneasy Franciscans. He was summarily deposed because he was close to the Spirituals, a sect of Franciscans from whose ranks the founders of the Order would eventually come. The Spirituals were followers of Joachim of Fiore, whose writings echoed precisely their main doctrine and complaint against the rest of the Franciscans. In 1257, the pope ordered Giovanni of Parma to resign, exiling him to Greccio."

Bravo nodded. "I'm familiar with these facts. He was sent to La Cerceri, the Franciscan hermitage on Monte Subasio near Assisi. He was incarcerated there for the rest of his natural life."

"Or so it was reported to the pope." She took out a key, placed it into the lock on the bronze door. "This is where your knowledge ends, this is where the secret history begins."

She opened the door, and they stepped inside. They were greeted by the smell of must and air seeming as old as the mausoleum itself. At first, he thought the inside was clad in sheets of marble, but on closer inspection, he discovered that walls were in fact plaster, painted in a faux marble pattern as beautiful as it was cunning. A pair of bronze crypt doors were set flush with the wall. They were long and narrow to accommodate the caskets within which rested the remains of the dead. At intervals, just above eye level, there were old-fashioned wrought-iron sconces along the walls, some with lights, others obviously receptacles for flowers, for there hung from two of these the glass-encased withered remains of poppies and irises like skeletons in a haunted house.

"In fact, Giovanni was never a prisoner," Jenny continued as she lit the lamps. "As it happened, a number of the friars in charge of La Cerceri were Spirituals. They were not only sympathetic to Giovanni but were instrumental in installing him as the Magister Regens of the Order, which was even then gathering to it secret followers."

Bravo gestured. "But this is a Jewish cemetery, the family name on this mausoleum is Marcus."

Jenny gave him the ghost of a smile, her strong white teeth showing. "Giovanni of Parma had a sister, Marcella. She fell in love with a painter by the name Paolo di Cione, but it wasn't until after they were married that he told her that he was an Italian Jew, that his family name was Marcus."

She put the flat of her hand against one wall. "You see, Bravo, it wasn't simply our insistence on apostolic poverty that so angered the pope that he sent his private army to hunt us down. The Order has a secret-one so important, so potentially dangerous, that only the members of the Haute Cour knew of its existence.

"Consider the logic of it. The Order had taken a vow of poverty and therefore couldn't own anything, as the other orders did. How, then, were we to survive? It was Marcella, Giovanni of Parma's sister, who came up with the solution. It happened that before he was deposed, the pope allowed Giovanni to pick his successor. He chose Bonaventura Fidanza. It was widely believed that Giovanni chose this master at the university of Paris because they were friends, but in reality it was because Marcella knew that Bonaventura had violated his vow of chastity and fathered a child by Marcella's cousin. This secret she confided to her brother, and thereafter the acquisition of certain select secrets became the currency by which the Order continued their work.

"Eventually, as I told you, the cache became a litany of the evil in the world. The important thing to keep in mind now is that with the power of these secrets we were often able, as I said, to influence kings, merchant-princes, generals-at times, if we were very clever and very lucky the course of history was altered by our intervention. We protected those with knowledge, scientists and writers, independent thinkers born ahead of their time who otherwise would have been persecuted, burned at the stake, publicly flogged or hanged. We hid firebrands, muckrakers and whistleblowers so that they could continue exposing the workings of dirty politics, revealing difficult truths. Of course, we didn't always succeed, but we always did our best to work for the greater good of mankind. Still, our work made us anathema to the Vatican, which is a storehouse of secrets, lies and repression."

Jenny's face was half in shadow. Her gray eyes were very large and in them floated motes the same color as the freckles that dusted the bridge of her nose.

"And then, there came into our possession an artifact so valuable that the Haute Cour was compelled to move the entire cache, to protect it with multiple measures. By tradition, two men possessed the key to the cache and the knowledge of where the cache was buried: the Magister Regens and one from among the Haute Cour whom they called the Keeper."

Several strands of hair, glowing like live copper, had come loose from her ponytail, riding against the surge of her cheek, and she pushed them behind her ear. "The Keeper is special, Bravo, never more so than now. There has been no Magister Regens for decades. The Haute Cour governs the Order now. The Keeper is the official key-bearer, but there was one other from the Haute Cour used as a backup, should anything happen to the Keeper."

"You said was."

"The backup was a man named Jon Molko. He was the first taken and tortured by the Knights. When they discovered he wouldn't talk, they killed him, just moments before your father found him."

"What happened to Molko's key?"

"We don't know."

Bravo put his hand in his pocket, fingered the strange key his father had given him six months ago in Paris. His father's key. But what about Molko's key? Did the Knights of St. Clement have it?

"Our cache of secrets," Jenny was saying. "All that keeps us strong, all that will keep us strong is in the Keeper's hands. This awesome responsibility, this terrible burden was handed down from one Keeper to the next through a process of meticulous and painstaking selection." She moved her head back and forth in an intimation of wariness, and the ruddy lights glimmered on her skin, burnished her in a glow that seemed centuries old. Her lips, bright crimson, were half-parted, and her voice, when she continued, was breathless. "Bravo, your father was the Keeper of all the Order's secrets."

It was a curious thing, but the only time Donatella felt at peace was when she was in a graveyard. For this reason she had made herself familiar with the cemeteries in every city to which she had traveled. DC was no exception, and though the area had an inordinate number of cemeteries, at one time or another she had explored them all, in sunlight and moonlight, in rain, snow and fog. And, in truth, there was none she knew better than Miamonides. It had been a long-held belief of hers that an important secret held by the Gnostic Observatines resided in the Marcus mausoleum-the tomb of the sainted Fra Leoni, a personal touchstone for every member of the Order-but not even the last two members of the Order's Haute Cour she and Rossi had dispatched had been able to provide confirmation. A pity, because raiding that tomb would be a psychological blow from which, she was certain, the Order would not recover.

Now, as she realized where the Guardian was taking Braverman Shaw, she felt a slight tremor ripple down her spine, making her tingle. She and Rossi were moving between the mausoleums, on a line more or less parallel with the path down which their quarry walked. They had to be extremely careful, for the Guardian was being exceptionally watchful and, though Rossi might unconsciously underestimate her, Donatella was determined that she would not.

Rossi had no tolerance for anything he perceived as weakness. His faith in Donatella was absolute-a curious anomaly in his feelings about women-and she had no intention of giving him the slightest cause to doubt that faith.

When she saw the Guardian take Braverman Shaw into the Marcus mausoleum she could hardly contain herself. As if sensing her extreme excitement, Rossi approached her and, curling his fingers around her forearm, said softly in Italian, "You won't forget yourself, will you?" His eyes sought hers, engaged them. In his gaze were all the terrible incidents of their shared past, all the pain and despair, all the blood taken and spilled. To him, her vulpine eyes were like a looking glass in which he saw the best of himself and at the same time recognized the worst. "We have our orders, we cannot deviate from them, yes?"

She nodded, but her mouth was dry and her pulse was heavy in the side of her neck. His fingertips on her carotid picked up the throb as if it were a seismic shift. "This is how you are when we're about to have sex," he said softly. "Your eyes change color, your pores exude an intimate odor, and I know that you're ready." He leaned toward her, his nostrils dilating as he inhaled. "You see? But still I must wonder what complex changes take place inside you."

Mutely, she dug in her pocket, produced a small matte-black canister, which she held like a conjurer between thumb and forefinger. Rossi smiled, releasing her.

Weapon drawn, ready, she headed toward her heart's desire.

"Faith is a tree, growing new branches even in the face of a storm," Emma had said. "There is a plan for us." Was she right, Bravo asked himself now, or was this nothing more than a mirage?

But no. At long last, it seemed that he was beginning to understand his father-why Dexter had encouraged the study of medieval religions, why he was bitterly disappointed when Bravo abandoned those studies, his antipathy toward Jordan Muhlmann, who, Bravo could see now, he blamed for leading his son astray. In the case of Jordan, it was a monumental misunderstanding, and Bravo wished more than anything that his father were standing beside him so that he could explain the nature of his deep and abiding friendship with Jordan.

"You said there was one secret greater than all the rest," he said now. "What is it?"

"I don't know," Jenny said in that perfectly sincere voice of hers.

He did not believe her, but perhaps there was a good reason for her lie. The wariness between them likely flowed both ways.

"You still haven't told me why you brought me here." His carefully neutral tone was an attempt to draw her out. "You could have told me the history of the Order anywhere."

"True enough." Her fingertips moved over the veining of the faux marble walls with the questing delicacy of a safe-cracker's. The rest of her, however, was utterly still. "But there is the question of initiation."

"Initiation?"

"Congratulations. You've just become the most important human being on earth."

He stared at her, for the moment unable to speak or even to think clearly.

Jenny turned toward him, her pale, slightly upturned eyes glimmering through the semidarkness of the antique masonry. He recognized in her glance, in the way she stood, a certain complicity. Entombed together in the intimate blood-temperature warmth, they seemed to be moving in concert, returning in ritual fashion not only to the Order's storied history but to Dexter Shaw's lifelong conspiracy. And all at once tears sprang into his eyes because in a sense gloriously real to him, his father was being resurrected before his very eyes.

Her head dipped and the strands of hair came free again, fiery in the lamplight, curled against the ripe duskiness of her cheek. She took his hand to transmit to him, he assumed, her utter stillness. But instead he felt a vibration of intensity so extreme it quickened his blood; he became aware of her intent, as if, like the young woman in the portrait in her house, she was an arrow in a tautly drawn bow, about to be released.

"There is much to do and I doubt that we have much time." As if to underscore her words, there came a hollow sound, ugly and thoroughly unmusical, as a small, matte-black canister hit the stone floor and began rolling toward them. Then the door to the mausoleum slammed shut.

Bravo ran to the door, but it was shut tight; they were trapped. A soft hiss made him turn, and he saw the tear gas foaming out of the canister, a venomous wave that surged toward them.

Chapter 5

Donatella and Rossi, their faces made bestial by black and silver snouts, burst through the bronze mausoleum door. They had waited for precisely three minutes before they had donned the gas masks. Then they had heaved open the heavy door. Weapons at the ready, they rushed inside, taking up first positions, Rossi just inside the door, Donatella into the western corner.

The atmosphere was that of a building after a fire. The gas, having dispersed, now hung in gauzy tiers like industrial smog, obscuring the ceiling. Nevertheless, there was no doubt that they were the only two living people occupying the mausoleum. They glanced at each other. Even through the lenses of the eye pieces, they could read the consternation and anger in each other's eyes.

"They're here," Rossi said, his voice slightly muffled.

Donatella walked along the western wall, eyeing the plaster with its constellations of faux striations. "The Order is fond of secret escape routes." Her head swung around. "You know what to do now."

Rossi, near the doorway, stood in the last of the afternoon's ruddy light. "Now that the time has come, I find I don't want to leave you."

She lifted the gun into his line of vision, deliberately tapped the butt against the rear wall. "You're wasting time."

He grunted and disappeared through the open doorway.

"Now," Donatella said softly, as she returned to the problem at hand, "where are you, my little cockroaches?"

When the canister hit the floor, Jenny and Bravo had at once held their breath. Nevertheless, their eyes had begun to sting and tear, and the delicate flesh of their nostrils swelled painfully. Jenny had turned to the lower of the two crypt doors and with arms spread wide, depressed a pair of hidden studs, all but invisible in the complex pattern of faux veining.

The bronze door had opened, revealing not the mahogany side of a coffin but a swath of mysterious darkness. Already an ache had begun deep in his lungs as his body called out for oxygen. He did not think that they could hold their breath much longer. Apparently, Jenny had come to the same conclusion because she gestured toward the opening. He climbed in, making sure not to hit his head. He was reaching his hand up to feel the surface of the low ceiling-and fighting claustrophobia-when he felt her climb in beside him, and he inched himself further into the recess. In a brief aureole of light, he saw her fingers work something, then the heavy crypt door swung shut. This was accompanied by a peculiar sound, as of air hissing from a damaged tire, and with a renewed surge of claustrophobia, he realized that an air-tight seal had been activated, the better to preserve the mortal remains of the entombed loved ones. Then, as panic was about to set in, he saw Jenny's face as she switched on her pencil flashlight. A sly smile crossed her oval face. And then he understood-the air seal was what would save them from the tear gas. No matter how saturated the inside of the mausoleum got, the gas could not affect them in here.

They started as the sharp report came to them from the other side of the casket door. Bravo felt sweat break out on his skin, but his mouth was abnormally dry. He remembered his father telling him of the terror-filled moments just before the desperate retreat from the Nairobi embassy. "I was sweating all over, but curiously, my mouth was dry. Fear does that to you, Bravo. And I was relieved, which you might find even more curious, but the truth is, those who aren't afraid wind up dead."

At close range Donatella examined the two casket doors, tapping here and there, softly, softly in a rhythmic pattern, her head cocked all the while, her ear close enough to evaluate the sounds returning from her gentle probing.

All at once her eyes widened and she drew out of her pocket a length of a puttylike material. Without haste, she worked the pliable material into the hinges of the lower casket door. She flipped open a lighter and held the flame against one end of the material until with a bright flash it began to burn with a devastating heat. She smiled and, with grim satisfaction, said, "Yes, indeed, I have you now."

Another noise came to them, an evil sound as of the hollow rattle of a poisonous serpent, and then a blast of heat like the livid flame of a blowtorch was transmitted by the metal.

He heard her voice, soft but filled with urgency, "They're melting the hinges off the door. Quickly, now! Go!"

In the brief flare of the penlight he saw her point across his chest to his right, and in an awkward sort of wriggle he began to move, but to where? he wondered.

As if divining his question, she used the narrow beam of her penlight in lieu of words. Turning his head, he saw a passageway that sloped steeply downward, presumably below the mausoleum's foundation. As he wriggled his way toward it he marveled at the ingenuity, for the escape route must have been devised at the time of the mausoleum's construction.

Bravo crawled through the darkness, hemmed in on every side, with the unseen but very much heard enemy howling at his heels. The mineral scent of wet limestone mingled with the odors of decomposition that conjured up images of freshly turned earth, leaf mold, corkscrewed worms and ash. With Jenny close against his spine, he experienced a sense of the space ahead narrowing even further until it was no larger than his own body, and he discovered a fear inside himself, irrational and therefore overwhelming, that he was going to become stuck in this tunnel, unable either to move forward or back.

"What is it?" Jenny whispered in his ear. "Why have you stopped?"

Bravo said nothing. At the same time, he felt incapable of moving.

The heat seemed to follow them, growing in intensity. And with it he thought he could discern the first crack of light as the hinges on the casket door gave out.

Sensing his paralysis, Jenny said, "Lie flat on your back." She slithered atop him. "Press your shoulder blades against the floor." She stared down at him, her breasts flattened against his chest, her breath quick on his cheek. Her heat began to seep into him. There was nowhere left for him to move. Terror crept through him, primitive and compelling, and he fought to keep it at bay lest it lock him in its vise.

"Bravo!"

Light now, definitely, a sliver like the blade of a knife. And then, startlingly, a female voice-undoubtedly Donatella's-sang in a lilting alto, "Come out, come out wherever you are…"

Jenny was gripping his jaw, her eyes boring into him, willing him to comply. As if in a dream he did as she asked, exhaling deeply, and after a moment of slow and torturous maneuvering, he felt her sliding, hips first, then midriff and shoulders, onto the far side.

She took his hand in hers, squeezed it briefly. "It gets wider from here."

Belatedly, he understood. She was ahead of him, in a position to lead them on and, hopefully, out.

The tunnel's ceiling did get higher, but not by much. At the same time the downward slope grew steeper, so that they half slid, half tumbled in a blur of sickening motion, scraped elbows and bruised hips. Bravo recognized a certain grimness to their flight. Like an animal being brought to bay, he felt the pressure of pursuit, as well as the terrible consequences should they be caught.

At length, there was enough room for them to crawl on hands and knees, though every so often the rough ceiling scraped across his back, further abrading his clothes. He felt a growing desire to look back, to judge the progress of their pursuit, but that would have meant stopping. In any case, there was no room to simply look over his shoulder.

They came at last to the end of the tunnel, were faced by a cement wall seeping water. Directly in front of it was an iron ladder that rose vertically and disappeared into what, in the limited light from the pencil flash, seemed to be misty infinity.

Without hesitation, Jenny grasped the rungs and hauled herself upward. Bravo scrambled after her. Just before he rose off the floor of the tunnel, he saw a piercing flash of light coming from behind them.

Jenny, climbing quickly and surely, soon reached the upper reaches of the escape route, which was a circular section of stones-a well, Bravo soon saw. In seconds, they emerged from the wellhead into a small clearing surrounded by dense underbrush and just beyond a pair of massive weeping willows, which provided natural cover and a kind of bower that, rising up and falling in a profusion of cascades, blocked out sun and sky.

The ground was uneven here. To their left, it sloped away steeply; to their right, it rose toward a flat plateau above which the oldest of the headstones could be made out through the trees.

Jenny gave him a small, tight smile of encouragement and began to lead them up toward the graves. At that moment, there was a small rustling off to their left, and Rossi appeared from behind the bole of one of the willows. He was holding a handgun at arm's length, aiming it with his left hand cupped beneath the butt to hold the weapon steady.

Bravo called out, his voice sharp in warning. Jenny was in the process of turning when Rossi fired. She spun toward Bravo, her eyes wide and staring blankly. Then her knees buckled and she toppled over into the grass.

At once, Rossi swiveled toward Bravo, who turned on his heel and took off in a ragged zigzag down the slope toward the sanctuary of the other willow. Something flew by his ear, and he flung himself sideways, tripped over a root and went sprawling head over heels down the slope.

There came a furious crashing behind him, as of a beast run amok. It was Rossi tearing full tilt after him, his head and torso pitched backward to keep himself upright. But at that pace there was no chance to get off a second shot.

Bravo, his attention divided between front and rear, stumbled as his shoe sole skidded off a rock slick with damp moss. Instinctively, he extended an arm, and a jolt of pain shot up from his hand as he went down hard. He was on the bank of the lake by this time, the ground steeply pitched, but his fall had slowed his forward momentum considerably, so that Rossi overtook him with heart-stopping suddenness.

Partly out of instinct, partly out of self-defense, Bravo extended his upper leg. Rossi, in the process of trying to forestall his headlong momentum, was unable to avoid tripping over it. At once Bravo was on him. Caught up in the other's momentum, Bravo found himself rolling over and over as he struggled to keep his grip on Rossi's gun wrist. Faster and faster they spun, locked in a death grip. Weeds whipped by them and mud flew off them as they kicked and clawed at each other, teeth bared, hearts hammering in their chests. They might have been two beasts fighting over territory, over a female, a breeding ground. Fists hammered against muscle and bone-they fought for the advantage of position as well as for the killing blow. Intellect was swept away in the dark undertow of primitive instinct. Preoccupied with survival, they plunged into the lake and immediately disappeared beneath the water. The water became an enemy to them both, slowing them down, entangling them, drawing them down into its airless embrace.

Spray flew as they rose up out of the lake, gasping, locked together. They slipped and slid on the gluey bottom. As they were toppling over, Rossi slammed his forehead into the bridge of Bravo's nose. Bravo felt as if he had been struck by lightning. He must have blacked out for an instant because the next thing he knew, he was under the water again. He gasped, taking in water, choked.

There was a restriction around his throat: Rossi's hands clamped against his windpipe. Rossi was pressing down, knees drawn up as weapons, all his weight centered on Bravo's chest. Bravo struggled, could see nothing through the churned-up water. Desperately he tried to pry Rossi's hands from his throat, but the fingers were like iron, and in his position he lacked leverage.

He began to see spots in front of his eyes, first white, then black; consciousness flickered in and out and he felt a growing lassitude in his extremities. And from this painless place a thought curled like a serpent: Why not let it all go? Why not close his eyes and just drift away?

Arms splayed out, Bravo knew that he was dying. And still, as if working of their own volition, his hands moved crabwise, the half-curled fingers scrabbling through the silt into which Rossi was in the process of burying him. It took him a moment to recognize the feeling transmitted through the fingertips of his left hand to his half-numbed brain. Then he curled his fingers, grasping the hard object, swinging his arm up and around, slamming the object as hard as he could into the orbital bone just above Rossi's left eye.

Rossi, thrashing in pain, relinquished his grip on his throat. Gathering all that remained of his strength, Bravo rose off the lake bed, gasping in a great lungful of air as he swung again. He saw what he held-Rossi's own gun, abandoned in the heat of the hand-to-hand combat-and he brought it down against the vulnerable spot just above Rossi's ear.

Rossi went down, thrashing, but one claw-fingered hand grabbed the front of Bravo's sodden shirt, took him off his feet, back under the water. Rossi struck out blindly, his fist catching Bravo on the cheek and side of the neck. Bravo staggered, felt a wave of dizziness threaten to overwhelm him. Rossi was turning, trying to reverse their positions so that he was once again on top. If he managed that, Bravo knew that he was finished. As blind as Rossi, he reached out. His nails scratched for purchase on the skull, caught at the thick hair and held on as he struck Rossi again and again with the butt of the gun. Finally, there was no more movement left.

More than anything now Bravo needed air. He rose up, but even in death Rossi kept his grip on the front of his shirt. He tried to pry the fingers loose, failed, began to frantically tear off his shirt, but the oxygen in his lungs was giving out, the silty floor of the lake was sucking him down, and he knew he wouldn't make it.

Then, at the last possible instant, hands reached down from above, plunging through the murk, grasping him, hauling with relentless strength. Bubbles streaming from between clenched teeth, he grasped the hairless forearms, female forearms, capable and powerful, and he knew that Donatella had found him and that now that he had killed her lover nothing could save him.

Chapter 6

He had the presence of mind to use the only weapon at his disposal. But in his depleted condition Rossi's gun seemed as heavy and unwieldy as a refrigerator, and even as he lifted it, a blow to the inside of his wrist defeated his wavering aim. It was not a hard blow, and he wondered at that even as he heard a voice.

"Bravo… where is Rossi?"

A female voice, Donatella. Of course she wanted to know where her lover was. If he told her… He began to fight and was restrained. A familiar voice-had he heard Donatella speak before? He could not remember, but he must have because she was shaking him now. He wanted to see her face, to look into the eyes of the woman who was going to kill him, but there was water streaming across his face, and bits of mud and debris from the lake. Still he fought, though pinned, because it was the only thing he could think of to do.

"Rossi, Bravo… Bravo!"

A hand wiped across his face, clearing his vision, and that voice-of course it was familiar. He found himself staring up into a face as familiar as the voice.

"Jenny," he said. She was straddling him, fingers curled around each of his wrists, pinioning him to the ground. "I saw Rossi shoot you. You fell and…"

She leaned over, her eyes fever-bright. "Bravo, where is Rossi?"

"Dead. Rossi's dead. But you…"

"That's right, I'm bruised but unhurt."

He stared, wide-eyed, as she opened her blouse partway so that he could see the puffy bruise, already turning livid, around her collarbone.

"I… I don't understand. The bullet should have torn you apart."

She took Rossi's gun from his hand, ejected the ammo from the chamber, and held it out to him. "Not if it was a rubber bullet."

He sat up then, coughed as she scrambled off him, gave him a hand up. Taking one of the bullets from her palm, he rolled it between his fingers, as if the tactile sensation would help him to understand. "But why would Rossi use rubber bullets?"

"I don't know," Jenny said, "but let's not debate the issue here. We're too exposed and Donatella can't be far away."

Donatella! He looked around. Splashes of light drifted through the leaves of the weeping willow. He looked back up the slope toward the mausoleum, hidden by the trees and underbrush. At any moment Donatella could appear. It was a miracle that she hadn't already. He nodded, then allowed Jenny to lead him around the northern edge of the lake, through a thick copse of beech trees to a low stone wall over which they clambered. His head felt as if at any moment it was going to explode, and he could feel every blow Rossi had delivered like electric shocks running through him with each step he took.

Once on the other side of the wall, they were confronted by a narrow line of river maples beyond which was a road. They could hear the whirr and hiss of two-way traffic, reminding them of the normal world that existed all around them. For a moment, Bravo leaned back against the rough stones of the wall. He felt their age seeping into him, and he listened, as if they had a tale to tell him.

"Bravo, we have to keep moving," Jenny said with some urgency.

He knew that, of course, but he remained where he was. It was imperative that he regain his inner equilibrium, but he was gripped by despair. He had just killed a man. Whether or not that man was also trying to kill him was, in a way, beside the point. It came to him that he had crossed some profound moral boundary, and now, belatedly, he wondered whether his father had had to kill a Knight of St. Clement to protect himself or the Order's cache of secrets. Now, an idea that would once have struck him as unthinkable did not seem in the least shocking. In fact, it seemed probable, and somehow this notion was like a beacon piercing the black despair. In his mind, this connection to the other, secret world that his father had inhabited was like a lifeline, and the moment he grabbed it he felt himself stand up straight. Seconds later, he was following Jenny through the grass and hedges, through the thin line of the flaky-barked maples to the verge of the road.

At last, Donatella emerged from the wellhead. Because of the mechanism that hermetically sealed the interior of the crypt, it had taken her far longer to get through the bronze casket door than she had estimated. Precious time when her quarry was moving farther away from her. She consoled herself with the thought that every step they took brought them closer to Rossi, but, truth be told, she didn't want Rossi to get to them first. She wanted that pleasure all to herself. She'd known it as soon as she had flirted with Braverman Shaw on the street. Drawing attention to herself had been a stupid thing to do, she'd known when she'd smiled at him, but she couldn't help herself. There had been something in him, some deeply suppressed animal part she had recognized instantly and responded to. There had been something profoundly intimate-primal-in that moment, two animals scenting each other in the forest, that she now carried around with her like a photo in a locket.

Just as she carried Ivo's essence with her wherever she went. Her isolation was what made him so vital to her existence. Nothing else mattered but Ivo-and, of course, their prey. She and Ivo had sacrificed for one another, tended one another when they were ill. They had killed together, and when they came together it was with the incandescence of the sun.

The way ahead of her sloped downward toward a veil of weeping willows beyond which was the lake. There were three sets of footprints, prey followed by hunter. She followed them down the slope until she saw something that gave her pause.

Squatting, she ran her hand over the muddy surface where, she was certain, there had been a struggle. Immediately, her head snapped up and with narrowed eyes looked all around her. Then, her body tense, her gun cocked and ready, she rose, following the rolling trail down to the edge of the lake.

There she stood, the water lapping at her boots, while she stared out at the placid vista. A pair of ducks quartering in from the southwest landed with a small flurry, began to paddle across the water toward a group of nesting mallards. There came across the lake a brief quacking, and then all was still. The last of the afternoon light was reflected in the water, giving it a ruddy hue.

Suddenly, her attention was directed toward a disturbance just where the water was reddest, a stirring as of fish nearing the surface, preparing to feast on water spiders and gnats. A moment later, a curved shape broke the surface, wheat-colored and slick-looking. Then it rolled; a Roman nose appeared, then lips and cheeks.

Donatella stood absolutely still, but it seemed to her that the thunder of her heart must shatter her into pieces. No, she told herself, it couldn't be. But then the face turned its blank eyes toward her and she ran, unmindful, into the water. The muck of the bottom pulled at her, slowed her down, making her powerful thighs work all the harder. At length, she reached him, cradled his battered head in her hands. When she kissed his cold and rubbery lips an ice pick pierced her heart.

She opened her mouth and threw back her head. Air filled her lungs and his name was ripped out of her.

"Ivo!"

A void yawned inside her that could only be filled by blood vengeance.

Bravo and Jenny, on their way toward the cemetery's maintenance building, heard the animal howl, and their blood turned cold. They looked at one another but could not bring themselves to utter Donatella's name.

Hurrying along, they arrived without incident at the low brooding building. While Bravo stayed out of sight, Jenny went to reconnoiter. Bravo leaned against a huge chestnut tree and, despite the heat, shivered. Now that the shock was wearing off, the pain rushed through him like a tide, pulsing stronger with each beat of his heart. It was difficult to get Rossi's rage-filled face out of his head. He had never before encountered someone with the will and desire to kill another human being. A chilling memory he would take with him to the grave.

At the sudden throaty roar of a large engine his head snapped up. He saw a hearse moving slowly toward him, and he shrank back. Then the driver's side window rolled down-it was Jenny who was behind the wheel. The hearse slowed, and he loped out from behind the chestnut tree, opened the heavy door and slid in beside her on the bench seat. The moment he slammed the door, she took off in a spray of gravel.

She maneuvered the unwieldy vehicle out of the cemetery precincts. He did not ask her how she had managed to steal the hearse; he didn't want to know and, oddly, didn't much care. She had once again found them a means of escape, that was all that mattered.

"You said that Rossi was dead. What happened after he shot me?"

"I ran," he said. "I ran and like an idiot I fell. He came after me and I tripped him. We went into the lake. He was going to kill me, I could see it in his eyes, I could feel it with every blow."

Jenny let air out of her pursed lips. "Rossi's a trained killer. And yet you survived…"

"Maybe I was lucky, I don't know. I killed him, that's the bottom line."

"You did what you had to do. Your father trained you well."

He was sickened by the look of admiration she gave him, so he turned away, gazed out the smoked window. What was he doing here? He had been pursued, beaten up-he had killed a man. For what? This was his father's battle, but was it his? He realized that he could walk out of here now, buy some new clothes and fly back to Paris, resume his job as if nothing had happened. Everything appeared dark, behind a veil, part of another country through which he seemed to be shooting like a meteor. He wondered whether this feeling of separation was something his father had ever experienced. That was when he understood that something had happened, not only to his father but to him, as well. Strange as it might seem, he was no longer the person who had met his father in the Village for coffee.

"I told you this was urgent."

"I heard you, Dad."

But he hadn't heard his father, not really. And now, even from the grave, his father was again talking to him.

"The first time is always the hardest," Jenny said, misinterpreting his deep silence.

He stiffened. "I don't intend for it to happen again."

"An admirable sentiment, but did Rossi give you a choice?"

"Those were extraordinary circumstances. I don't foresee-"

"No one in his right mind foresees the taking of a life." Her eyes were focused on the road ahead. "But consider this. In the outside world there would be no reason to even have this conversation. You're no longer in society-the world everyone else inhabits, Bravo. You're in the Voire Dei, for good or ill, and believe me the sooner you come to terms with that, the better your chance of surviving will be."

He stared blankly out at the ribbon of landscape whizzing by. He did not want to think about that now-he simply couldn't process it yet, despite Jenny's warning. Instead, as was his habit when he was upset, he set his mind a specific task-that is, to understand why Rossi's gun had been loaded with rubber bullets. And almost immediately a memory popped into his head: Rossi pushing down the gunman's arm as they sped away from Jenny's house. He had not wanted them shot then, and he hadn't wanted to kill Jenny, either. And yet there was no mistaking the set grimace on his face as he'd grappled with Bravo in the lake-had Bravo pushed him over the brink?

He licked his lips, said to Jenny, "I don't think Rossi and Donatella had orders to kill us."

This comment caught Jenny's attention. "What makes you say that?"

"The rubber bullets for one," he said. Then he told her what he had seen as they had sped away from her house.

"Of course!" Jenny said. "They think you know everything your father knew. They want to capture you and get the information out of you."

"But I don't have any information."

"You know that and so do I," she said, "but it's clear they don't."

"Then we have to find a way to tell them."

Jenny laughed harshly and shook her head. "You heard Donatella back there. Do you really think she'd believe you?"

"But it's the truth!"

Jenny glanced over at him, her eyes hard. "In the Voire Dei, there is no truth, Bravo. There's only perception. Donatella and those who control her will believe what they want to believe, what best fits their perception of reality."

Was there another way out for him? he wondered. Or was he fated to continue on with this nightmare?

You're no longer in the world everyone else inhabits.

With the words echoing in his head, he rolled down the window and stared out at the passing landscape. Over the white noise of their passage, he said, "How do you bear such a terrible burden?"

She knew precisely what he meant. "Some like it, you know. The Voire Dei is the only place they feel safe. Others revel in it. In fact, they know of no other way to live. For them, society is pale, indistinct, of minimal interest. They feel privileged to be part of the Voire Dei."

"What do you feel?"

They had left the Falls Church area far behind. Jenny took a turning to the left, went perhaps a half mile into an area of increasingly large and luxurious houses. The hearse navigated a long, snaking road that rose toward the crest of a hill. A half mile on she made a right into one of a number of sweeping streets of large Colonial houses with slate roofs, formal English gardens and impeccably manicured lawns. She pulled into the driveway of a cream-colored two-story house with front columns and an imposing porte cochere. Past that, on the side of the house, was a three-car garage, on the other side of which was a small windowless gardener's shed. She stopped on the concrete apron directly in front of the garage doors and got out. To one side of the leftmost door was a small plastic box. Swinging up the protective panel, she punched in a number and one of the garage doors opened. She got back behind the wheel, drove the hearse into the garage and shut the door. Next to them was a Mercedes convertible.

"My father's house," she said, leading him inside.

"Isn't this the first place Donatella is likely to look for us?"

"The neighborhood is patrolled by members of a private security firm. All the men are ex-cops and they know every face in the neighborhood."

Bravo was astonished. "You can't seriously believe that will stop Donatella."

She heard the edge to his voice. "I don't think you're in any position to make that decision."

"After what we've just been through I sure as hell wouldn't put us in more danger, if I were you. I say let's get out of here."

She put a key into a lock and opened a door. "As a Guardian it's my duty to protect the Order and the members of the Haute Cour." Stepping into the darkened room, she turned to face him. "I promised your father I would protect you, but if you renounce the Order, renounce the role your father trained you for, then my obligation to him is done."

A swath of harsh light banded her face, turning her features hawklike, almost predatory. Her eyes were steady, her expression determined. If she was bluffing, Bravo couldn't detect it. He made to turn; it was important to see how far she would go.

"Have you forgotten your father's glasses? If you leave now, how will you find out what he left for you?"

He turned back. "Where is the Order now that we need them, where are its resources? The Order must have any number of safe houses we can use to hide out in."

"I think you should concentrate on the business at hand," she said coolly. "Leave the rest to me."

"If I left Rossi to you," he said unkindly, "I'd be dead."

"Then surely you don't need me." She turned, but not before he saw the hurt in her eyes. He waited as she disappeared into the darkness.

"Why won't you tell me what I want to know?" he called out.

"Why do you think?"

He could turn now and walk away, but would that put Rossi's death behind him? What's done is done, he told himself. I go back to Paris now, back to my old life. It would be so easy.

But it wasn't easy. He felt rooted to the spot, unable to turn around, let alone walk away. He thought of his father, thought of the way in which he had misjudged everything about him. He'd allowed his own selfish emotions to blind him to the truth. His father was involved in something so important Bravo felt himself enveloped by it. But he also knew that the biggest mistake he could make now was to fight his father's fight out of guilt. He'd end up dead, like as not. No, he had to do this because he wanted to.

Without even consciously realizing what he was doing, he crossed over the threshold and entered the gloom. In darkness, he passed through a small mudroom whose walls were ribboned with wooden pegs on which hung various caps and hats, windbreakers and golf sweaters, before reaching a large country-style kitchen with its center island of blond beech-wood and pale granite. There were acres of cupboards and an old-fashioned bay window, beneath which was a padded window seat. They stood in shadows, listening to the small creaks and hums inside the pipes and ducts of the house.

Outside the multipaned window twilight had descended, cobalt shadows clinging to the flagstone steps, weaving themselves into the shrubbery of the garden. Lights had come on, lemony, haloed in a grainy mist that rose from the ground like a specter. Not far away a dog barked; headlights flashed as a car turned a corner. Cicadas shrilled.

He watched her as she observed the immediate environment with a professional's eye. After a time, he could see that she was analyzing the pattern of the vehicular traffic, her mind working much like that of a bridge or poker player, who is not only aware of what cards are on the table but also weighing probabilities, what might be held close to the chest.

"Are you hungry?" she said, after a time.

"Yes, but I'd like a shower more." He said it harshly, but the moment the words were out of his mouth he knew it was proof of his capitulation.

Wordlessly, she led him to a door beyond which was a standard wooden staircase down to the cellar. She pulled the door shut behind them, turned on a light. Below him was visible a swath of sea-green carpet, the rolled arm of a leather sofa, a section of bare pale-green wall. Reaching the bottom of the stairs, he could see that the place was immaculate-the furniture he'd seen, some more stacked against a wall, a refrigerator and separate freezer, a four-burner stove, a large soapstone sink and counter with a row of drawers beneath-but it was also Spartan and deliberately impersonal, like a hospital waiting room. There were no windows, only metal air grilles. The light, indirect and coolly fluorescent, drained all the colors of warmth.

Jenny showed him to a small, metal-walled bathroom. Inside, he stripped off his filthy, half-shredded clothes. As he was reaching to turn on the shower, he caught sight of his reflection in the mirror. He halted in mid stretch, appalled. His face was cut, bruised and unnaturally reddened, his body swollen, abraded and discolored in innumerable places. He hardly recognized himself, but it wasn't because of the abuse his body had taken. It was the look in his eyes, the particular depthless expression he recognized only too well-it was the look he would see in his father's eyes when the elder Shaw was about to leave home on one of his mysterious trips abroad. As a child, the expression had seemed mysterious, but now he understood what it signified: his father had tuned his gaze away from society-he was returning to the Voire Dei.

Wincing in pain, Bravo stepped into the shower, but the hot water felt unutterably delicious as it sluiced over his naked body. When he emerged, he found fresh clothes folded neatly on the toilet seat, waiting for him. Part of her dead father's wardrobe, he deduced. Opening the medicine cabinet, he found antibiotic ointment and bandages, but he was unable to apply them to the cuts and abrasions on his back. He pulled on underwear and a pair of khaki trousers, then opened the bathroom door.

Jenny had obviously taken a shower in another part of the house because like him she was dressed in fresh clothes-black jeans, black sleeveless top, thin-soled boots of a leather as supple as a ballet dancer's toe shoe. Her face was scrubbed clean and her hair, combed straight back and unbound, fell down to the hollow between her shoulder blades. It was still damp, gleamed with the bronze luster of a helmet. The solid line of her jaw gave her a diligent, almost studious aspect that lent depth and dimension to her beauty. It was the extremely rare kind of confluence that attracted Bravo. The truth was that had he spotted her across the room at a crowded party, he would have found it impossible to leave without talking to her. He had to remind himself that he hardly knew her, had no idea how much he could trust her, save for the fact that his father had trusted her-he'd deliberately steered Bravo to her. That wasn't quite enough.

She had made sandwiches, and there was a carafe of ice water and two red plastic tumblers on an old-fashioned folding bridge table to which she had pulled up a pair of metal folding chairs.

A part of him didn't want to talk to her at all. She was so willful and hardheaded. Then, astonished, he realized that it had been those two words his father had often used to describe him. He waited a moment, unsure how to proceed. In the unkind light, the duskiness of her skin turned sallow, her gray eyes receded into pools of dark shadow. Her wide mouth held no promise for him. How long could he be angry with her for the situation he was in? He felt suddenly spent, as if his anger was a candle that, having burned low, was now guttering.

Turning to reveal his lacerated back, he said, "I need your help."

She hesitated only a moment. Wordlessly, she took the ointment from him. He sat straddling the toilet, bent slightly forward while she applied the antibiotic cream. He was acutely aware of her fingertips as they moved across his shoulder blades.

"Relax," she said shortly. "It will hurt less."

At length, he said, "You never told me how you feel about being part of the Voire Dei."

He heard her let out a breath and wondered if part of her also wished to remain silent.

"I don't think about it at all," she said, "at least not in the way I think you mean; it's my home, just as it was my father's-and yours."

"If it means more killing, I don't know whether it's a world I can commit to."

"That's the billion-dollar question, isn't it?" The stiffness had returned to her voice, but her fingertips never stopped their motion. "I have to tell you that there are those in the Order who don't believe you will, they don't believe you have it in you."

"Really?"

"Don't move," she said sternly. She had begun to apply the bandages. "They don't like me and they don't trust you."

"You don't trust me, either."

"Let's say we don't yet trust each other."

He thought about the truth of her words, as well as the promise they held out. Then his mind made an abrupt leap. "Is that why the Order won't help us?"

"He was the Keeper. Part of his responsibility was to identify and train his successor." It was not an answer to his question, but for the moment at least it was all he was going to get from her.

For some time Bravo thought about what she'd just said. He had been four when his father started him on his course of physical training, six when his father began to read to him from treatises on medieval religion.

"He chose me."

"That's right." Jenny put away the ointment and bandages, washed her hands. "You can finish dressing now." She walked out of the bathroom before he could say anything more.

They sat at the rickety table, eating their sandwiches as an awkward silence settled around them. At length, Bravo wiped his hands on a paper towel and placed on the table the pair of glasses he'd found aboard the Steffi.

It lay between them, a symbol both of what drew them together and what had set them against one another.

"Tell me-"

"We can't go on, unless you commit." She shook her head. "It's no good, you know, blaming me or the other Guardians for mistakes we've made. Now-this moment-is all that matters, whether we go on or leave it here. If we leave, then all is lost. To you, I may sound terribly melodramatic, but the truth is I'm being as forthright as I can. The continuation of the Order, the safeguarding of the secrets that have been entrusted to us for centuries, is on your shoulders. Only you can find the cache, your father made sure of that." She took a breath. "It all boils down to whether he was right about you, or whether he made a fatal mistake."

In that moment, Bravo heard again his father's voice as if he was sitting beside him. "A 'mistake' is something mechanical-a wrong way of acting, maneuvering, thinking. A mistake is a surface thing. But beneath the surface-where loss manifests itself-that's where you must begin."

He gazed down at the glasses, trying to sort out the welter of feeling swirling inside him. As if from a distance, he saw his hand reach out, pick up the glasses and feel the weight of them in his palm.

"Jenny, I want to know something," he said slowly. "Why did you choose to join the Order? Was it because of your father?"

"My father?" A small, bruised sound escaped her lips. "My father did everything he could to stop me, because I was his delicate daughter. He even had someone picked out for me to marry, a nice, dull guy from a prominent family inside the Beltway. It sounds positively medieval, doesn't it? But there you go." She swept a wisp of hair off her face. "When he saw he couldn't dissuade me, he made things so difficult-my training would have broken a lot of men. I fractured my left ulna twice and my right tibula once, and so many bruises… It was torture."

"Why did you persevere? Was it out of spite?"

She laughed. "It so easily could have been, but, no, it was something else."

"What?"

"My faith in what the Order represents: a group of sane men working in an insane world for the betterment of mankind." Her eyes flashed. "I suppose that sounds insipid to you."

"No, but it does sound idealistic."

"Maybe it is." She shook her head. "I don't know about you, Bravo, but I have to have something good to believe in. I have to believe that what I do in the world is going to make it better."

So it all boiled down to faith.

Glancing up, he saw Jenny's pale eyes regarding him steadily, curiously. There was a fervor in her voice-a tiny tremor-he recognized as coming straight from her heart. She believed every word she said to him; now it was up to him to have faith that what she had told him was the truth. It made sense to him. He knew that more than anything his father had wanted to make the world better, despite the odds-or perhaps, knowing Dexter, because of the odds. He knew it because it had been instilled in him.

It seemed to him now that he faced a looking glass that showed him how the world really worked, that shone a different light onto his life up until now. Everything he had experienced, everything that had come before was prelude, had led him to this moment.

He put the glasses gently down. "You said something before about an initiation. I think we'd better get on with it, don't you?"

"You know what 'cupping' is, I imagine."

"Of course," Bravo said. "Medieval physicians believed that illness-what they called 'humors'-resided deep inside the body, that they need to be brought to the surface to be expelled."

Jenny nodded. They were sitting on the folding chairs, which they had brought over to the stove, along with the card table. Apparently, she had turned on the stove some time ago, possibly when he was in the shower, for there was a pot on it, filled with water at the boil.

"Put your right arm on the table," she said, "so the inside of your forearm is exposed."

When he had done as she asked, she took up a pair of long metal tongs. Dipping them into the boiling water, she withdrew three glass items that looked like nothing more than diminutive egg cups. These she set one by one on a paper towel to dry.

"Wouldn't an autoclave be better?" he said.

Jenny gave him a dry smile. "Sometimes the ancient ways are the best ways." She brought the three cupping devices over to the table and sat down beside him.

"Ready?"

Bravo nodded.

She put one of the cupping devices onto the inside of his arm, struck a long wooden match and held the flame to the bottom of the glass. The heat from the air inside began to draw, and the skin inside the ring of glass gradually turned red.

"It isn't 'humors' we wish to draw out of you in the initiation, but obligation. Once you are a part of us there is no changing your mind, no going back. You're a part of the Order for life."

She snuffed out the match just as the cupping was beginning to burn him, he watched as she rose and, opening a drawer beneath the sink, returned with a pewter phial. Unstoppering it, she turned it over. Three seeds fell out into the center of her palm.

"These are the seeds of three trees-cypress, cedar and pine, all evergreens and in their way symbols of eternal life." She placed them one by one in his mouth. "When Adam lay dying, his son Seth placed beneath his tongue seeds from the cypress, cedar and pine that had been a gift to him by an angel. Chew them and swallow," she instructed. As he did so, she said, "It is said-and members of the Order have seen the proof of it-that the cross on which Christ died was made of wood from these three trees. This, the first of the three rites, is a symbol of your death-the severing of yourself from society, the world that you knew. Do you swear that once you enter the Voire Dei you will never seek to leave?"

"I swear," Bravo said as a wave of dizziness rushed through him.

With a deft corkscrew motion, Jenny plucked the cupping glass from his aching arm and, in almost the same gesture, placed the second one in a spot three inches from the first. She lit its bottom as she had the one before.

As his skin again grew angry and red, she said, "In the Book of Revelation, it is written: 'Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, and shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four corners of the earth, Gog, and Magog, to gather them together to battle, the number of whom is as the sand of the sea.' The medieval map of the world found in Hereford Cathedral shows the world as a perfect circle with Jerusalem in its center, like a navel. Near one edge is depicted a legend that tells us that Alexander the Great, in his conquest of the world, encountered the forces of Gog and Magog. He defeated them but could not exterminate them. Instead, he locked them away in the Caspian Mountains, defying what the prophets wrote in Revelations."

She kept the flame against the bottom of the cupping glass even though Bravo's flesh was raised and puckered. The length of the cupping was three times that of the first one. "This, the second part of the rite, symbolizes resurrection, for our most sacred vow is to be standing between Satan's hordes and mankind when the day of Revelation arrives. Do you swear this?"

"I swear." The dizziness returned, more insistent this time. He was beginning to feel like a Sanguinati, the twelfth-century cathedral monks subject to tempora minutionis, periodic bloodletting.

Again, Jenny switched the glasses, removing the second, replacing it with the third, three inches from where the second had been. She opened another drawer beneath the sink, snapped on a pair of latex gloves. This time she returned with a stone mortar and pestle and three tiny glass containers, the contents of which-white, yellow and gunmetal-gray-she deposited into the bottom of the mortar where she began to grind them together.

"Salt, sulphur and mercury," she said, "the three basic elements of alchemy and, therefore, of transformation into a new life." The elements mixed, she carefully transferred them into a peculiar locket half as long as her forefinger, fashioned in the shape of a knight's broadsword.

She looked into Bravo's eyes and said, "Are you prepared to sacrifice your work, your friends, your family for the greater good of your fellow man?"

"I am."

She tapped him on the left shoulder with the alchemical sword.

"Do you swear to safeguard the secrets of the Order, with your life, if need be?"

"I do."

She tapped him on the right shoulder.

"Do you swear to oppose our enemies a` outrance?"

A` outrance. It had been some time since Bravo had heard the phrase, which in medieval terms meant jousting to the death. Now, uttered in this unsettling tomblike chamber, with all the implications that went with it, including the prospect of his own death, the words were as alive and full of meaning as they had been in centuries past.

"I do."

She tapped him on the crown of his head, removed the last cupping device, which had been on three times again as long as the second.

"It is done, heart, body and spirit, you are part of us now."

Chapter 7

Donatella did not know how long she knelt in the water. Ivo's head grew cold and heavy between her hands, as if it had turned to lead. At some point a profound sense of unreality set in, so that it seemed to her that she was cradling an effigy instead of a human being. Dimly, she was aware of the fading light, of the world moving around her, but it was as if at the moment she saw Ivo's head breaking the surface of the lake, his fixed and staring eyes blindly upon her, the entire Voire Dei ground to a halt and was now suspended between them. She wanted to vomit, but she could not; she wanted to die, but she did not. Her body, betraying her, continued to draw ragged breath, sobs pulled from deep in her belly, burning her throat like acid. She began to shiver, the trembling far beyond her control. And though her cheeks were flaming, the rest of her was as cold and heavy as Ivo.

Gradually, she became aware that two long-fingered hands were gripping her shoulders, quieting her tremors. Someone was standing behind her. She felt his warmth seeping into her, and slowly she allowed herself to relax back against his knees and shins.

"I did not believe that this day would come. I did not believe that it would happen this way." The deep male voice reverberated through her like distant thunder. "I remember the day the two of you came to us. You were hollow-cheeked, emaciated, stinking and crusted in grime, and yet in your eyes I saw something." The fingers dug into the flesh of her shoulders, lending her strength as well as warmth. "They were going to throw you out, you never knew that. I stopped them. They were not happy, they said you were my responsibility. I was to train you, and after thirty days you would be tested. If you didn't measure up, you would be thrown back into the street and I would face dire punishment. I smiled at them and accepted. As you know, I love challenges."

Donatella, listening with every fiber of her being, was cast back to the first days with the Knights of St. Clement.

"I worked you hard-mercilessly-and never once did you or Ivo complain. Instead, you worked all the harder, slept standing, ate in quick, ravenous mouthfuls, and returned to your training as eagerly as pups."

"You gave us something to live for," Donatella said thickly. "It was the only gift anyone ever gave us."

One hand released her shoulder, the long fingers tangling in her hair until she groaned.

"One day Ivo came to me. He was sick of training, he said, tired of-how did he put it? oh, yes-tired of performing like a circus animal. 'I am like an arrow,' he told me, 'whose point has been sharpened to a razor edge, but has never been nocked into a bow.' And, you know, Donatella, he was right. That was the genesis of your first mission. Do you remember it?"

"Yes," she whispered.

He caressed her. "How could you not? You were almost killed and I-I was almost undone by an enemy from inside the Knights. Ivo saved us both, didn't he, yes." The fingers pulled lightly, lovingly on her hair. "I never forgot the service he did me that day, now it is time to repay him."

Gently but powerfully he pulled her to her feet, turned her around to face him. "Leave Ivo to me, Donatella. I will bury him with the honor he deserves. No, no." He shook her a little as she fought him. "Listen to me, you have your quarry to think of, you have Ivo's murder to avenge."

She looked into the eyes she knew so well. "But our orders were to capture Braverman Shaw, not kill him. You were quite clear about the matter."

"That was before Shaw murdered Ivo." His thin lips curled into a chilly smile. "Go now. You are loosed upon our enemy a` outrance."

"I've waited a long time for this," Dexter Shaw said. "I never for a moment doubted it would come."

He looked older to Bravo, his beard whitened, longer, the lines on his faced etched more deeply, but then again Bravo himself was a child of eight or nine. Father and son sat on the porch of a shingled house-a place, it seemed to Bravo, that only existed in his dreams. It was late autumn, because the light, vivid and clear, filtered through a mare's nest of bare branches on the perfectly symmetrical beeches. But curiously, he felt no chill. They might have been inside for all the air that stirred. And beyond the trees there was a haze that obscured everything, so that it was impossible for him to tell if there might be houses or fields, brooks or mountains, or even if there were clouds in the sky.

"I killed a man, Dad. I had no other choice."

"Then why blame yourself?" Dexter Shaw said.

"A life is still a life."

"Do you think that, or do you think you should be thinking it?"

"Does it matter?"

"Very much. Haven't I taught you not to fool yourself? You're in a war, Bravo, that's what the Voire Dei is all about-it has been from the beginning. In war there are casualties and there are victors, there's no room for doubt, and believe me when I tell you that semantics breeds doubt. In order to prevail you must cast out all doubt."

Bravo looked bleakly at the figure next to him. My father is dead, he told himself. What am I doing here in this strange place having a conversation with him? He was about to ask his father this question when Dexter Shaw spoke.

"You're one of us now, Bravo, as it was meant to be from the moment of your conception. Your mother knew this, of course, and it terrified her. To be honest, it drove a wedge between us that I was never able to dislodge. She never wanted you to be a part of the Order. 'It's only your belief, Dex,' she'd say, 'only your stupid, stubborn belief. If you love me, you'll promise to keep our baby safe.' No matter what I said, I couldn't make her understand that it wasn't a matter of what she wanted or even of what I wanted. She never forgave me for that, not even at the end."

"You were only doing what you needed to do, Dad," Bravo said. "She had to have known that. And, in your own way, you were doing what you could to keep me safe. I need every bit of the training you forced on me. I wish I'd understood that sooner."

Dexter Shaw sighed. "So do I, Bravo, but there was no way to tell you before now. I don't mean to say that I haven't made mistakes in my life-I have regrets, plenty of them, but I have faith. In you I know I'll find my redemption…"

Head bowed, hunched over, Bravo shivered with the last echo of his father's voice. It was just as well that he was sitting, because he might otherwise have collapsed onto the floor.

"The weakness and vertigo will pass quickly," Jenny said, speaking of the cupping.

As she was putting away her paraphernalia, he said, "Will you tell me now why my father had you make the glasses?" Already, he was feeling better now, his head remarkably clear, as if he had fallen deeply asleep for a half hour.

She returned to her seat beside him. "The glasses are important for one thing only: what is etched into the right lens." She plucked them off the table as if they were crown jewels. "It's also why we had to risk coming here."

Without another word, she rose, and he followed her across the basement to a plywood door he hadn't noticed before. She pulled it open and he found himself in a small, cramped laboratory filled with equipment he could only guess at.

"This is where you ground the lenses?"

She nodded, seating herself at a backless stool. "No optician's office would have the machinery needed." She pulled over a goosenecked lamp, turned it on. Brilliant light flooded the worktable. She put her hand on a squat metal machine that looked to him like nothing more than a deli meat slicer. "This is a very special grinder; I designed it myself."

"What I don't understand," Bravo said, "is that if you ground the lenses why can't you simply tell me what's on them?"

Jenny gave him a sly smile. "I may have ground the lenses, but I didn't etch them. Your father did."

"He was here? He did it himself?"

"After a little practice, yes. He was an astonishingly quick learner."

"Yes, that was one of his extraordinary abilities." Bravo thought of the porch behind the shingled house in a never-never dreamland.

"After he etched the lenses, I sealed them with a specially formulated coating."

"So the etching would appear only under certain conditions."

"That's right."

Jenny turned off the goosenecked lamp, twisted it so that it was pointed at a bare wall, then snapped on another switch. An oval of eerie greenish illumination was cast on the wall.

"Here goes," she said, taking the glasses and placing the right lens between the light and the wall.

Nothing.

She moved the glasses slightly so that the right lens was in the greenish glow. Immediately, a set of numbers appeared within the oval of illumination.

"Magic!" Jenny said with a small laugh. She turned to look at Bravo, who was scrutinizing the numbers.

"Do you know what they represent?" she said.

He frowned in concentration. "To be honest, the groupings look vaguely familiar, though I can't say why."

"A mathematical formula, maybe."

"Yes, that would make sense." He grabbed a pad and pen from Jenny's workspace, jotted down the series of numbers and spaces precisely as it was projected. "The fact is, though, mathematical formulae are difficult to decipher. Right now I think you'll agree that we don't have time to work on it. Unless there's another reason for us to remain here, I think we should leave as quickly as possible."

"I agree." Switching off the lamp, Jenny handed the glasses to Bravo and stood up.

They went back up into the dark house. Light from the winding street and the neighboring houses came through the window in a haloed glow.

Careful to stand well back, Jenny peered out at the street. She was so still he could barely see the rise and fall of her breast.

"What are we waiting for?" he said, but she immediately raised a warning hand to silence him.

After a moment, she moved further back into the shadows of the room, taking him with her.

"We can't leave," she whispered, "at least not as we are."

"Donatella?"

"The delivery truck across the street."

"What about it?" he said.

"If it was here on legitimate business its lights would be on, wouldn't they?"

He stared out at the darkened van. Was someone-Donatella-in there, clandestinely watching them? The thought sent an unpleasant chill down his spine.

"That's a hell of an assumption to make."

"I saw that same truck when we were on our way to the cemetery."

Bravo let out a long breath. "What do we do?" he said. "We can't stay here."

"No we can't. And as you've pointed out, the quicker we make our exit, the better. Our only chance is to change our appearance." She turned her back to him, as he had done with her, and said, "I need your help."

She instructed him on how to braid her hair and pin it up onto her head. The hair cascading down her back was thick, heavy and lustrous. When he first took hold of it, the sensation was new to him, clear and direct without prior associations. What she was asking him to do was basic, so simple she could have done it herself. But for him it was intimate and erotic, so that when he was done, he was reluctant to let go. He wondered, fleetingly, whether her request had been a deliberate attempt at reconciliation-or a stab at binding him to her.

They went back to the door to the garage. In the mudroom, she grabbed one of the baseball caps, set it firmly on her head, pulled on one of her father's windbreakers, gave Bravo an argyle cardigan to wear.

They crossed the garage, hurried past the vintage Mercedes and passed through a door on the far side, entering the gardener's shed. Jenny immediately went to one wall against which sat a collapsed wheelchair. She unfolded it and gestured.

"Take a seat."

Bravo stared at her for a moment, then he gave a low laugh. Shaking his head in wonderment, he settled himself into the wheelchair's leather seat.

"Hunch over, try to pull your shoulders up around your ears." Jenny pulled on a pair of fingerless driving gloves. "That's right. Think like an old man."

Bravo's hands on the armrests began to tremble.

"Nice touch," Jenny said as she wrapped him in a shawl. Then she pulled open a side door and wheeled him through. "Here we go."

Donatella, sitting behind the wheel of the delivery truck, did not expect a light to go on in the house; she was looking for movement. With the ATN PVS7-XR5 Night Vision goggles strapped to her head, she looked strange, like some sort of giant nocturnal sloth. While the infrared function couldn't penetrate walls or glass, it was providing an accurate reading. Apart from a single ghost reading as she was setting up the equipment-and that might have been a cat or a racoon-there had been no human movement around the house. That did not mean Braverman Shaw and his Guardian weren't inside-just the opposite, to her way of thinking. After all, how many places did they have to go?

Why this Guardian had been assigned to Shaw remained a mystery to Donatella, one that nagged at her. She did not like mysteries, especially when they applied to Dexter Shaw, who had been legendary for the mysteries with which he surrounded himself. His demise had been attempted three times since she had joined the Knights of St. Clement, all without success. The successful attack had been in the making for months, maybe even years-long before the crisis had come upon them and the timetable had been moved up. The desperate rush had necessitated that less competent people be utilized, and this had inevitably led to some mistakes. She was certain that Braverman Shaw's Guardian knew that the recent deaths of the five members of the Haute Cour was a concerted attack by the Knights, a push to finally gain the cache of secrets the heretical Order had been hoarding for centuries.

She shifted her head, so that another vector of the property was visible. Despite the fact that she was an enemy, Donatella felt a certain secret kinship with Braverman Shaw's Guardian that had nothing to do with philosophy and everything to do with gender. Ivo, like the male Guardians of the Order, hated Jenny's status, hiding that hatred behind a cruel and unjust derision. As a result, Ivo had consistently underestimated Jenny's abilities, and Donatella would not put it past Dexter Shaw to have assigned Jenny to guard his son for just this reason.

The infrared was picking up movement to her right, and she swiveled her head like a dog on point. The configuration was odd, and she switched to conventional night vision. An old man in a wheelchair was being pushed by a slim young man-possibly his son-in a baseball cap and windbreaker. But then again maybe not. Flicking open her cell phone, she pressed the first speed-dial numeral. When the voice answered, she asked for a list of all the residents on the street. Research was everything, and the resources of the Knights of St. Clement were vast. "I'm looking for an invalid, seventy years of age or above." Ninety seconds later, she had her answer and, her suspicions confirmed, fired the truck's ignition and drew her gun.

"See that black Lexus sedan on the next block?" Jenny said as she pushed Bravo along the sidewalk. "It belongs to my father, he kept it there for emergencies. That's our ticket out of here."

The rain came down in sheets, turning the walls of the houses black and menacing. A car engine coughed to life, and Bravo started. They were perhaps a hundred yards from the Lexus when he heard the deep, phlegmy cough of a truck's engine, saw movement out of the corner of his eye.

Apparently, Jenny had heard it, too, because she gave the wheelchair a huge push, sending it barreling at the Lexus. As she ran, she unlocked the doors electronically. Bravo had wrenched the door open even before the wheelchair smacked into the car's side.

The truck was roaring at them as Jenny launched herself in beside him. He scrambled over as she slammed home the key, fired up the Lexus. Putting it in gear, she stepped on the gas. Tires squealing, the Lexus sped down the street, the truck thrumming ominously behind it.

A single shot rang out, and then they were racing around the first curve, wind whistling, rain thick as sleet against the windshield, picking up speed with every second.

Bending low over the wheel, Jenny steered the Lexus through the road's sweeping curve. Ahead lay the first of the switchbacks as the road followed the steep contours of the hill. They flew past large houses, swaths of lawn and flower-bedecked side gardens. Here and there was the lush, heavily treed open space of a vacant lot, brief glimpses of the area's pristine beauty before the developers had unleashed their bulldozers.

A rising sound caused her to shout, "Take a look behind us!"

But Bravo had already swiveled around as far as he could. "The truck!" he shouted back. "I think it means to ram us!"

Jenny had more immediate things to worry about. Along this middle stretch, the road was pitched much more steeply, and with the slick asphalt and terrible visibility it was taking every ounce of her concentration to keep the Lexus from careening into a curb and overturning. Several times she came perilously close, and Bravo's heart rose up into his throat for fear that they would crash. Then, by some clever trick, she would right their course, and they'd be back on the middle of the deserted road again.

The deep roar of the pursuing truck echoed off the house facades. Bravo could see that it was gaining on them. It was so close now that a passing streetlight momentarily flared along the driver's face. Donatella! She didn't fire again; in this upscale residential neighborhood she wouldn't make the same mistake twice. Instead, she concentrated on devouring the space between them, until the engine became a roar in his ears and he thought he could feel its heat like the breath of a demon hound.

He wasn't far wrong. An instant later, he felt a tooth-rattling jar as the corner of the truck's front bumper struck them. The Lexus went skidding toward the curb, and he saw Jenny whip the wheel over, jerking the car to the left. For a heart-stopping moment, the car skidded, kept to its deadly course. Then it seemed to hesitate, as if unsure what had been asked of it. Just as they were about to hit the curb, the tires caught, the Lexus moved sharply to the left and the crisis was averted. But now the truck's throaty roar seemed to redouble as Donatella drove in for the kill.

Up ahead, a BMW sedan with a teenager behind the wheel was coming toward them with only its parking lights on. Hardcore rap poured out of the open windows. The kid, drunk on beers and music, was going too fast for the road, even if it had been dry and the car had been less powerful. The BMW slewed slightly this way and that as its inexperienced driver tried to deal with the effects of wet leaves and slick patches on the tarmac. His lips were pulled back in a manic grin, but his eyes were wide and staring-it seemed clear that he had not yet seen them.

Jenny checked either side of the road, then taking advantage of his near-panic, maneuvered the Lexus directly toward him. In a flash, the kid saw them, and immediately the BMW changed course. The kid stepped hard on the brakes, sending the car into an uncontrollable skid. In a heartbeat, it had flashed by the Lexus and glanced off the high fender of the oncoming truck.

But instead of braking herself, Donatella pushed the accelerator to the floor. Like an elephant brushes off a fly, the truck swept the dented BMW out of its way. The kid leaned out the window and screamed obscenities.

"She's still coming!" Bravo shouted, and he heard Jenny curse in reply. The roaring was immense, filling the night with its ominous sound. "She's right behind us!"

At the last possible instant, Jenny directed the Lexus into a driveway, across a swath of newly mown grass and onto the neighboring vacant lot, which, judging by the heavy equipment parked on it, was in the process of being cleared. They shot forward as the truck jumped the curb and drove onto the lot. They bumped along for perhaps five hundred feet.

"Oh God," Jenny said in his ear.

They were at the edge of a precipice, hidden until now by trees and the equipment. There was no time to maneuver, no time even to think. In an instant, they went over, plummeting down. They struck the bare earth with bone-jarring suddenness. The Lexus bounced once, catapulted over on its side so that Bravo and Jenny were thrown together.

"Jenny," he said, "are you all right?"

She nodded. "You?"

"Just shaken up."

He reached up, tried to open the window, but the electronics were shot. Lifting his leg, he smashed the sole of his shoe hard against the glass once. The safety glass shattered, but held together. He kicked again and a hole appeared. Using his heel to smash out what shards were left, he levered himself out, then turned and helped Jenny out.

For a moment, they lay on the ground. Regaining his breath was easier than regaining his composure. Above them, the twin beams of the truck's headlights struck out into the night, seeking to capture them in their glare. Then, as Bravo groaned and rolled up onto one elbow, he saw another beam flash out and down, probing the tangled darkness in which they lay. Donatella had switched on a portable searchlight.

Jenny reached out, wordlessly pulling at him so that he followed, both of them crawling into the densest swath of undergrowth. The rain continued unabated, a natural shield against detection.

"Are you all right?" she whispered.

He nodded. "You?"

"Nothing a good night's sleep wouldn't cure." Her face was close beside him. She gave him one of her thin smiles. "Let's go."

They moved cautiously through the underbrush until they reached the road. Keeping to the lush verge, they headed away from the crash site. But they hadn't gone more than a hundred yards when a late-model Lincoln came racing around a curve toward them. Jenny grabbed Bravo, dragged him back into the foliage.

They could hear the purr of the engine as the car slowed and stopped, and they crept further into the jungle of undergrowth. They crouched, listening to the sound of their own breath.

Jenny whispered, "Don't worry. She'll never find us."

At that moment, they heard a rustle terrifyingly close by and, turning, saw the outline of a figure looming over them.

A metallic glimmering brought to them the image of a gun, and a English-accented male voice said in a self-satisfied tone, "I wouldn't count on that."

Chapter 8

"I knew it. I knew you'd run into trouble you couldn't handle."

"Kavanaugh!" Jenny said. "What the hell are you doing here?"

"What do you think?" the figure said. "Watching your sorry ass."

Bravo looked from the man to Jenny. "You know him?" he said to her.

"Braverman Shaw," she said by way of introduction, "meet Ronnie Kavanaugh."

"You poor bastard." Kavanaugh didn't offer his hand. "But all's well now that Uncle Ronnie's ridden to the rescue."

Reaching up and behind her, she undid the braid Bravo had made of her hair. "Kavanaugh is a Guardian, like me."

"Oh, not like you, princess," Kavanaugh said deadpan. "I know what I'm about."

"Is this the sonuvabitch who failed to protect my father?"

"I know you aren't referring to me." Kavanaugh had the cold, hard, domineering sneer down pat. "Surely you can't be that ignorant."

"He was never assigned to your father," Jenny said tightly. "Dexter Shaw would never put up with his attitude."

Bravo glanced upward through the rain to the top of the precipice. All was dark and still. Where had Donatella gone? He scrambled to his feet, held out his hand to help Jenny up. She ignored it, quickly stood beside him.

Kavanaugh gestured like a lord to guests newly arrived at his manor house. "Shall we?"

Under his guidance, they moved off into the thick, black underbrush. As they pushed back bullbriers and squelched through earth churned to mud, Jenny told him about Rossi and Donatella.

"I caught a glimpse of her," Kavanaugh said, "but where's Rossi?"

"Bravo killed him," Jenny said.

Kavanaugh raised his black eyebrows. "Did he now?"

"Drowned him in the cemetery lake."

"A novel manner of murder, to be sure. Well, that's one less bastard to deal with, but now his bitch is out for blood, isn't she." He was a handsome man and, despite the inherent cruelty of his smile, at once rugged and refined. Bravo could picture him in a made-to-measure Savile Row tuxedo, a single-malt Scotch in his hand, playing chemin de fer at a fashionable London casino.

"There's only one road down this way." Kavanaugh pointed toward the hazy globe of a streetlight. "I parked in the shadows just there to the right."

Perhaps a hundred yards from the car he stopped and handed the keys to Jenny. "Here's what you're going to do, princess. You and Shaw will get into the car and drive through the pool of light."

"Are you crazy?" Jenny said. "That's just what she'll be looking for."

Kavanaugh grinned. "Isn't that right. She's so maddened, she'll come after you without a second thought."

"You bet she will," Bravo said, as unhappy with Kavanaugh's plan as Jenny obviously was.

"And when she does," Kavanaugh said slowly, as if reciting the alphabet to a slightly dim child, "I will be waiting to gun her down."

Jenny shook her head. "You're using Bravo as bait. It's too dangerous."

"Strong emotion of any sort-most especially rage-makes one commit stupid acts. I'm using Donatella's rage against her," Kavanaugh said. "D'you have a better notion?"

In the ensuing silence, he drew his gun. "I thought not. Let's get to it."

The car-a large Lincoln-was precisely where Kavanaugh said it would be. Jenny circled the vehicle, her fingertips running lightly over the painted metal.

"Okay," she nodded, "get in."

"You gave in too easily," Bravo said as he strapped himself into the passenger's seat.

"What would you know about it?" she said tartly.

"So you really think this will work?"

Jenny inserted the key into the ignition. "It's a good plan, but I'll deny I said it if you ever tell him. I couldn't stand the smug look on his face."

Bravo regarded her a moment, weighing something in his mind. "You have a thing for him, don't you?"

She snorted. "What? Are you kidding?"

"Your cheeks are pink… princess."

She turned on him. "Don't be an ass."

Turning on the ignition, she put the Lincoln in gear, drove it onto the road, which ran in a more or less north-south direction. On their right was the rock face of the precipice, on their left was underbrush, glades and thick stands of leafy ash, beech and alder. They headed north, and the halo of illumination grew as they neared the closest streetlight.

"See anything?" Bravo said.

"More than you do," she snapped.

The rain had lessened, but a pearly mist had sprung up, blurring distant objects, dimming house lights to a soft, indistinct glow. They drove into the pool of illumination, which lay on the mist like a silver pond. The tarmac was altogether invisible.

They were just passing the streetlight when all at once they saw a large, blocky vehicle coming very fast toward them from out of the mist.

"It's a truck!" Bravo said. "Donatella's truck!"

"Kavanaugh, you bastard, where are you?" Jenny said as she turned the wheel hard to her right and simultaneously took her foot off the accelerator.

The truck came on at the same trajectory. Bravo, risking a look behind them, saw the tall broad-shouldered figure of Kavanaugh step out into the light from behind them. His feet were planted wide and his arms were held rigid as he began to fire into the driver's side of the truck's windshield. Calmly, with a kind of serene confidence, he squeezed off three-four-five shots. They all struck the windshield within six inches of one another.

It was at that moment, as Bravo was marveling at the man's marksmanship, that he heard Jenny say, "Dear God, there's no one behind the wheel!"

"She's dead," Bravo said. "Look at where he shot. She's already dead."

Jenny swerved again, and the truck passed by them, slammed into the streetlight. In a shower of sparks, the pole came down and with it, the utility junction box. When the box struck the tarmac, it smashed open and the line was pulled from its connectors, the live end sending sparks eerily through the low-lying mist.

Kavanaugh had turned to watch the final outcome of his neat handiwork when a bullet slammed into his chest. He spun around, his mouth open in shock, and a second bullet took off one side of his face.

"Someone's firing from that copse of ash across the road," Bravo said. "I saw the flashes."

"Oh, that evil bitch, she deadmanned the truck," Jenny said. "She taped down the accelerator and threw it in gear. That's why the truck never changed course even when I did."

Jamming on the brakes, she drove off the side of the road into dense blackness. Before Bravo had a chance to say a word, she had bolted out of the Lincoln and had vanished into the misty gloom.

Donatella, bent on one knee in the copse of ash trees, watched with an inexpressible bliss the second bullet she had sent flying take off the side of her enemy's head. The resulting spray cut through the mist, coloring it, and she let out a tiny sigh. But her work was hardly done, and she slung the 7.62 SVD Dragunov sniper's rifle across her back.

There was a certain poetic justice in how the situation had changed, she thought as she faded back deeper into the copse. And, yes, a form of beauty that perhaps only she and Ivo could understand. She moved swiftly and silently to her right. Ivo had warned her that the Order would not leave the safeguarding of Braverman Shaw to their lone female Guardian. This argument she had attributed to his inveterate chauvinism, but he had been right. The Order had assigned another Guardian as a backup. Not that it mattered to her now. She knew how to handle Guardians, male or female.

As she moved through the slippery darkness, she smiled grimly to herself. Retribution was laid out in the palm of her hand. She had left the truck several hundred yards north of here along the lower road, to which she had driven in low gear and with all her lights off. It had taken her six minutes to wire the accelerator-longer than she would have liked, but the light was very bad and she could not afford to switch on her searchlight even for an instant. It was essential that her quarry be given no advance warning of her whereabouts.

She reached the battered PT Cruiser without incident. It was precisely where she had been told it would be. Climbing in, she placed the rifle at her feet and her handgun on the seat beside her. Then she drove slowly and without lights toward the nearest of the road's turnouts.

She was south of her quarry. Her intention was to drive north, come at them from behind while they were looking for her up ahead or, if they had been observant, within the area around the copse of ash. But just as she was approaching the turnout, she felt a weight on the off-side of the car and without a moment's hesitation she whipped up the gun and shot three times through the passenger's side window. A moment later, there was a shattering of the window's safety glass and something had her by the throat.

It was a combination of good luck and instinct that caused Jenny to head due south as she left the Lincoln. She knew that it would be a mistake to look for Donatella in the copse of trees. She had fired from there, according to Bravo, which meant the moment she knew Kavanaugh was dead, she'd have left the trees. She was now a moving target, and it was imperative that Jenny find her immediately because it was in the first few minutes after a shoot that the sniper was most vulnerable. To do that, Jenny knew, she had to put herself in Donatella's head. Where would the Knight go now, what would she do? Her job was incomplete; she'd be coming after Jenny and Bravo, but now she would have to substitute speed for the element of surprise. To Jenny, that meant she would not approach them on foot.

Jenny was looking for a vehicle when she heard the sound of an engine coming toward her. The instant she saw the PT Cruiser swing into view she leapt onto the running board.

Through the window she saw Donatella reaching for her gun and she ducked down. The shots passed over her head and she came up, slamming her elbow into what was left of the window. Then, gripping the door handle and using it as a fulcrum, she launched herself feet first through the opening, slamming her shoes into Donatella's face.

Donatella's torso arched up in reflex, and her right arm swept around, her forefinger itching to pull the gun's trigger. But, prepared for this, Jenny took hold of her wrist and twisted. Donatella grunted and the gun dropped from her nerveless fingers onto the seat. Jenny locked her ankles around Donatella's neck, squeezed her legs together, creating a vise. Donatella screamed, tried to reach for her weapon, but Jenny tightened the lock on her neck and, gasping, she abandoned the intent.

Jenny's head and shoulders were still outside the car, and as Donatella stepped on the accelerator, the PT Cruiser leapt forward, slewed on the loose gravel of the turnout and gained the road. Jenny was slammed against the window frame but maintained her choke hold on her foe.

On her side of the road there was a narrow verge and then the almost sheer rock face above, which was the precipice over which she and Bravo had tumbled. Donatella turned the wheel to the right and the car crossed the verge toward the rock face. Sparks shot off the front fender of the PT Cruiser as the metal-work made contact with a stone outcropping, so that Jenny was obliged to grip the top of the open window in order to lever herself the rest of the way inside. In so doing, her ankle grip loosened and, with a violent wrench, Donatella extricated herself. At the same time, she leaned over, her outstretched fingers reaching for the gun.

Jenny kicked out, her heel striking Donatella's rib cage with such force that Donatella lost her grip on the wheel. The car slammed into the rock face, bounced off, shot wildly forward, then struck an outcropping and spun around in two complete circles before its rear end struck the rock wall for the final time. With a harsh grinding of gears and screaming of rent metal, it rode up on two wheels. Skidding back onto the road, it traveled another five hundred feet on its side until it struck the fallen utility pole and then the high square grill of the truck Donatella had rigged.

The two passengers, shaken up and bruised by the short but heart-stopping flight of the careening car, fought groggily for the upper hand, but during the final jarring few feet, Jenny's head struck the dashboard. Even before the car had come to rest, Donatella had grabbed her by the front of her shirt and slammed her back against the door. She struck Jenny once, twice, three times.

A burst of white stars clouded Jenny's vision and searing pain filled her head. She tried to retaliate, but she didn't seem to have the strength. Like a hammer blow about to fall on her, she could feel a manic energy coming off Donatella and was terrified. Groping desperately behind her, she pushed down on the door handle even as Donatella drew back her arm to throw another punch. The door opened, and she fell backward out of the PT Cruiser.

For a moment she lay sprawled on the road, dazed and despairing. Then she felt the rain on her face and, as if taking strength from it, managed to stagger to her feet. Her legs were rubbery, her knees weak; she was dizzy, and when she put her hand to the back of her head it came away smeared with blood.

In the car, Donatella had scooped up the gun.

Bravo waited until the FT Cruiser came to rest. By the dim glow cast by the streetlights north and south of their position, he saw that Jenny was in trouble. But it wasn't until he saw that Donatella was concentrated solely on her that he knew how best to help her. He ran through the swirling mist toward the car, mindful of the downed power cable. He periodically lost sight of his goal and, once, he felt certain that he was running in a circle and had missed it entirely. He stopped then and tried to gain his bearings, but it was like being adrift on a raft in the middle of the ocean. All landmarks were obscured and the light that fell on him seemed perfectly even, sourceless, so that he had no clear idea of which way was north or south. Then a small gap opened, and he caught a brief glimpse of painted metalwork and set off in that direction as fast as his legs would take him.

By the time he reached the car, both women had abandoned it, Donatella with the handgun. But almost at once he saw the sniper's rifle lying on the floor, and reaching in, he grabbed it.

Jenny, in a position that was rapidly becoming untenable, glimpsed Bravo through the oyster-gray mist and knew what she had to do to give herself the ghost of a chance. She ran, fell, picked herself up and on uncertain legs ran again.

Donatella, stalking her, saw the logic of her flight. If Jenny could get far enough away, she would be able to slip away into the mist. The thought of losing her now was intolerable, and Donatella sprinted headlong after her. There was a dim sparking toward which Jenny had headed, and this was the way she went.

Through the thick mist she saw movement, and then a figure, lithe and slim, became briefly visible. She aimed and fired even as she continued inexorably forward. The mist swirled as if stirred by a giant hand, and once again Jenny became visible. Donatella trained her gun on her foe and was about to squeeze the trigger when she heard a voice behind her.

"Drop your gun!"

She turned back, glimpsed Braverman Shaw behind the open car door pointing the Dragunov at her. She laughed to see how amateurishly he held the weapon. He wouldn't be able to hit her, even without the fog. She could kill him with one shot to the head. This she wanted to do more than anything else, and turning fully to face him, brought the muzzle of the gun to bear on him. She could sense Ivo near her, and she spoke to him under her breath so that he would know that his revenge was at hand.

"You heard me! Drop it now or-"

She squeezed the trigger.

Moments before, Jenny had reached her destination, but not in time. Donatella had already shot once, barely missing her. Now, as the mist parted, they could see each other. Jenny had only needed a moment longer, but it was not to be given to her. She held her breath as if that would better prepare her for the onrush of death.

Then Bravo called out and Donatella turned toward him. At once, Jenny crouched down, picked up the broken power cable. There was a buzzing like distant dry lightning or bees swarming and a light that seemed unnatural. As she stood up, she almost pitched over, so dizzy had she become. Her head hurt terribly and her heart was pounding painfully against her rib cage. Staggering forward, she thrust the live end of the cable out in front of her. It touched Donatella just as she pulled the trigger. Her body jerked and spasmed as she leapt a foot in the air. The stench of burned flesh and hair was palpable, making Jenny's gorge rise.

Bravo, who had seen the bullet go wide but did not see the cause, lost Donatella as the mist swirled in again, obscuring the scene. Without a second thought, he quit his position behind the open driver's door and ran, leaping over the utility pole, tearing past the battered truck.

He found Jenny, bloody and breathing hard, standing over Donatella's corpse. He was about to ask about the stench when he saw the power cable still in her left hand.

"Jenny, put it down," he said gently. "Put it down and move away."

For a long moment she did not move, then slowly she looked up at him.

"Jenny…" He slung the rifle and went over to her. Very carefully, he took hold of the cable with one hand and pried her fingers off it with the other. "It's over now," he said, pulling her back and away with him into the thickening mist.

Chapter 9

But it wasn't over.

"I've got to go back," Jenny said.

"Back? Back where?"

"To see Kavanaugh."

"Jenny, we've got to get out of here. There isn't time."

"There's always time," she said, "to say good-bye."

She turned and Bravo went after her, through the underbrush.

He struggled to understand what she was feeling as she stared down the mess the bullets had made of Ronnie Kavanaugh's head and torso. He didn't look all that tough now.

After a moment, he stirred. "Jenny, please come away now. The police could show up at any moment, and if not the police, then motorists who can become potential witnesses to our involvement in two violent deaths."

She lingered for a moment longer, her lips moving silently. Then she nodded. "Let's get out of here."

They hurried back to Kavanaugh's Lincoln. On instinct, he told her he'd drive. She didn't put up a fight. Making a broken U-turn, he headed south, careful to keep to the posted speed limits. The two-lane road quickly became a four-lane thoroughfare and, not long after that, he was able to turn onto the highway. The Lincoln was comfortable and, more importantly, drove well. Kavanaugh had had the foresight to have it completely tricked out with satellite radio, rear object sensors and a global positioning system.

Within five miles, Bravo saw the lighted sign of a gas station. They used the grimy restrooms to clean themselves up as best they could and met back at the Lincoln. Jenny had managed to get all the blood off her, and her hair was glistening with water. When he bade her turn around, he held her hair away, moving her gently into the sodium lights. He could see that the wound was a scrape and that it had stopped bleeding.

"Okay?" he said.

Her eyes flashed and her tone was sharp. "Once and for all, let's get this straight: I'm protecting you."

A gentle breeze fully exposed the nape of her neck, the caramel skin glimmering, the bones beneath gently curved like sea glass. On impulse, he embraced her, holding her fast for a long moment. The instant he let go of her she climbed back into the car without saying a word or meeting his eyes.

Nearing the outskirts of Washington proper, he pulled into an all-night roadside diner, the only eatery open at this late hour. He chose a booth in back where he had a good view of the door and plate-glass window out onto the highway. Instinct had taken over without his being fully aware of it. Jenny sat staring out the window streaked with light and the ghostly reflections of faces. He waited, then ordered for both of them: coffee, eggs over easy, bacon, home fries for him, wheat toast.

When the food arrived, her eyes came back into focus. "I don't like bacon," she said.

Bravo reached over, put her bacon onto his plate. "You like eggs, I hope?"

She stared at him.

"Do you want something else with them?"

"I like potatoes."

Without a word, he used a spoon to transfer his home fries to her plate. He smiled at her as he began to eat.

An old couple paid their bill and left, a middle-aged man with a giant wobbly gut entered, made his way to the counter, his buttocks overflowing the stool, and ordered steak and fries. A young, heavily made-up woman with a lot of hair stood outside smoking. One hip was canted out; her leather skirt barely covered her upper thighs. A car pulled up and Bravo tensed. The heavily made-up woman stubbed out her cigarette and walked on stiletto heels toward the car. The door opened and with a practiced liquid move she slid in. The car drove off and Bravo exhaled softly and went back to his food. Inside the diner, there were perhaps a half dozen other characters. No one seemed to pay anyone else the slightest attention.

"Jenny, talk to me," Bravo said, after a time.

She continued to eat with an eerie kind of mechanical precision, as if she knew she was required to fuel the system but was tasting nothing. Her gaze was neither on him nor on her food but was focused on something-or someone-he would never be able to see.

He had just mopped up the last of his eggs when she suddenly spoke: "It's just that, you know, we didn't bury him."

"Do you really think that would've been wise?"

"Now you're an expert?" As if she had just noticed the food, she dropped her fork with a clatter, pushed the plate away in a gesture of disgust. "This tastes like week-old grease."

"Jenny, do we have to be at odds?"

She stared at him, mute.

"I'm sorry he's dead. I can't begin to imagine what he meant to you, but-"

"You're an idiot, you know that?" she said vehemently. "You think you have it all figured out, but you don't. You don't know anything at all."

A familiar silence rose between them, bristling with the defensive thorns they brought out in each other. At length, he held out a hand, palm up. "Why don't we make a pact to put aside our personal anger and grief, whatever their causes?"

For a long moment she did nothing. The way her eyes searched his face made him think that she was trying to get a sense of whether his offer was genuine.

She drew herself up and her expression became defiant. "You can forget about screwing me."

He laughed, somewhat surprised and, quite possibly, disappointed.

"I'm serious."

"Okay," he said, sobering.

At length, she extended her hand until it rested lightly in his. She looked at him, her eyes glittery, magnified by her tears. "A pact would be good."

Back in the Lincoln, he pulled out the paper on which he'd copied the number-and-space sequence his father had etched onto the lens of the glasses. "I've been thinking about this," he said, "and I think I know what it might be."

"You've had time to work out the math formula?" she said.

"It's the wrong configuration for a formula." He held the paper up so that they could both see its reflection in the rearview mirror. "This is a trick my father taught me when I was a kid. Reverse the entire sequence even though each letter-or in this case, number-isn't reversed. That way, to anyone who doesn't understand the cipher, the sequence will look wrong even if viewed in a mirror." Rummaging through the glove compartment, he found a pad and pen, and while Jenny held up the paper, he copied the sequence down in reverse. What he was looking at were three sets of six numbers, followed by one set of four numbers.

Jenny looked from the sequence to Bravo's face, trying to read his expression. "Well?"

Leaning forward, he took the GPS out of its cradle and punched in the numbers.

Jenny was dumbfounded. "It's a location?"

"The three sets of six numbers are longitude and latitude, down to the minute."

"But what about the last four-digit set?"

"I don't know." He showed her the glowing GPS screen.

"St. Malo," she said. "France, right?"

He nodded. "Brittany, to be exact."

"That's where we're going now?"

"Right." Bravo reached for his cell phone. "But not on our own."

It was already midmorning in Paris and Jordan Muhlmann was in his office at Lusignan et Cie. He was a tall slender man with dark hair, dark, deep-set eyes and a long jaw. His was a powerful face but somehow haunted. He was speaking with a woman in her late forties, her beauty undimmed by time. She was dressed in a chic black Lagerfeld suit, under which she wore a buttery silk blouse. A single strand of matched pearls glowed at her neck, and a gold band with the head of a woman incised into it circled one finger. She sat, wrists crossed over her knee, with a Zenlike serenity.

Outside could be seen rising the sterile white stonework of the Grande Arche de la Defense, which was not an arch at all but a cube with the center carved out of it. Fitting, in a way, Jordan thought, for Paris's modern-day monument to business. Farther away was the solid, magnificently carved Arc de Triomphe, monument to the triumphs of France's last great military hero, Napoleon Bonaparte.

The day was bright and clear with only a hint of clouds low on the northern horizon. The new sidewalks were filled with suits. Though they were from all over the world, you could not tell them apart. They spoke a common language, prayed to a common god, wished upon a common star, and that was commerce. After the cultureless euro, faceless electronic transfers, corporate takeovers that involved two, three or four countries, did any variations remain of the beauty that had flowered here for centuries?

Like everything else in this self-consciously postmodern sector of Paris, the facade of the building Lusignan et Cie owned was in keeping with its surroundings: contemporary, sleek, stark, entirely without character. The office complex was, however, the opposite, filled with Old World garnishments and charm, especially Jordan's office suite, which stretched away in Art Nouveau majesty. There were virtually no hard edges: everything, curved and sculpted in high relief, had an organic shape to it. On the shelves were artifacts from an earlier age-French and German sculpture from the 1920s, pottery from the nineteenth century, fragments of ancient religious scrolls, the guard of a sword purported to be from the Crusades-remnants of civilizations long past. This fascination with history, culture and religion was one of the things that had drawn Jordan and Bravo so closely together.

The intercom buzzed. Muhlmann's secretary said, "It's Monsieur Shaw. He says it's urgent."

Jordan hit the speakerphone switch and picked up the receiver. "Bravo, I have been trying to reach you-as usual." The anxiety in his voice was palpable. "Is everything all right?"

"It is now," Bravo said.

"Ah, bon, that's a relief!"

"But I'm coming to Paris immediately. I'll be arriving early tomorrow morning with a friend of mine, Jenny Logan, and I'll need transportation."

"Of course. You shall have it. Alors, you must tell me more of this Jenny Logan. This is good news, indeed. In the midst of your grief you have found a companion-what is the American word?-a girlfriend."

Bravo laughed. "Girlfriend? Not exactly." He cleared his throat. "Listen, Jordan, I think I ought to tell you that things have taken a very nasty turn here."

"Mon ami, what do you mean?"

"Not over the phone," Bravo said. "But whoever you send must be absolutely trustworthy, do you understand me?"

At that moment, the woman stood up, walked over to Jordan's desk. Her movements were flawless. She held in her magnificent, fierce face the full knowledge of who she was and what powers she possessed. She exuded an innate authority that made it clear it would be foolish either to deceive her or to oppose her.

"Bravo, un moment, s'il te plait." Jordan jabbed the hold button, looked up at her expectantly.

The woman parted her lips and said very softly, "Let me do it, my love."

Jordan shook his head. "It's too dangerous. After what happened with Dexter-"

"Don't fret, I'll be careful," she whispered. Then she smiled.

"Jordan, do you understand me?" Bravo repeated.

He hit the hold button again and said into the phone, "Mow ami, I hear the urgency in your voice and my concern for you grows deeper."

"Then you do understand."

"But of course," he said. "I will come myself."

"Isn't the quarterly companywide directors' meeting this week?"

"Tomorrow, in fact. Not to mention the Dutch, who have come in to finalize the deal you and I have been working on for almost a year."

"What about the Wassersturms?"

"That deal is dead, Bravo, you made certain of that."

"They've proved to be remarkably insistent."

"I'll take care of the Wassersturms, mon ami."

"Then there's no question, Jordan. As you have just confirmed, you have a company to run."

"But you're my friend-more than a friend."

"I know that and I appreciate it," Bravo said. "But send someone else. Please."

Jordan pondered his response to this request for a moment, then he nodded to the woman. "Bon, not to worry," he said into the phone, "I will send someone you know and trust."

"Thank you, Jordan," Bravo said with relief. "I won't forget this."

It was dark on the plane. Late at night, in the jumbo jet thirty-three thousand feet over the black, restless Atlantic, most of the passengers in business class were either asleep or watching the tiny glowing screens of the portable DVD players provided by the airline. But exhausted as Bravo and Jenny were, they could not find it within themselves to surrender to sleep.

Instead, theatrically spotlighted by the lights above their seats, they talked in low tones. There was an unconscious need in them both to get to know each other better. They had survived pitched battles, saved one another from almost certain death. Soldiers fighting side by side in the strange invisible war that defined the Voire Dei, they had forged a link more intimate than sex, and yet they were still strangers to one another.

"The only ones who had faith in me were my father and yours-and of course Paolo Zorzi, my instructor," Jenny was saying. "The others opposed my being allowed into the Order, let alone my becoming a Guardian." The full duskiness of her skin had returned, and in the vertical shaft of illumination it was possible to overlook the bruises and small cuts to which her skin had been lately subject. "But your father was very powerful; many in the Haute Cour were afraid of opposing him to his face."

A flight attendant came by with water, coffee, tea and juice, but they declined. Several individual lights were turned out, and it was even darker now inside the plane. By his calculation they were closer to Paris than they were to Washington.

"Was your initiation like mine?" he asked.

An ironic smile escaped her generous lips. "I'm a woman. It was nothing like yours."

"But you said my father and yours and this Paolo Zorzi believed in you."

Jenny nodded. "Yes, but there are some traditions that even they found impossible to ignore. I was given a simple black robe to dress in, then I was led to a small darkened windowless chamber. Save for four long candles in heavy brass sticks the room was bare, more like a prison cell or an executioner's chamber. It was very cold. The floor was made of ancient stone blocks. I was instructed to lie on my stomach and told to kiss the stone. A black shroud was draped over me. It was gauzy enough so that I could see the candles being placed at my head and feet. While I swore to give myself heart, mind and spirit to the Order, your father and Paolo Zorzi intoned an ancient prayer in a language I couldn't recognize."

"Do you remember any of the words?"

Jenny closed her eyes and her brow wrinkled. She spoke three words, badly, as it turned out. Nevertheless, Bravo recognized the language.

"It's Seljuk," he said, adding, "The Seljuk were the dominant tribe in Turkey in the thirteenth century, and twice successfully invaded the important trading city of Trebizond that the Greeks had founded along the south coast of the Black Sea to supply Europe with silks, spices and, perhaps most importantly, alum-the substance used to bind dyes to cloth."

Jenny asked him to repeat the words until she could speak them correctly.

"Thank you," she said.

"Anytime. Now tell me about the rest of your initiation."

Jenny let out a breath. "Zorzi dug his knuckles into the small of my back until the pain was so great that I gasped and tears came to my eyes.

" 'Thus, like your sisters,' your father chanted in Latin, 'do you come in suffering and in pain to the Order.'"

"That sounds suspiciously like part of the medieval vow for taking the veil," Bravo said.

"Bingo." Jenny nodded. "The initiation was taken directly from the one administered to Venetian women in the sixteen hundreds when they became nuns. They were, in effect, made to witness their own funeral."

"So it seems that throughout its history the Order did accept women," Bravo said.

"It would seem so, though you and I know that history records it otherwise."

He thought about the injustice of this for some time. At length, he leaned closer to her and said, "There's something bothering me." He liked her scent; it made him pleasantly woozy, and he was only too happy to surrender himself to this voluptuous feeling. "You haven't once tried to contact anyone in the Order, and when I asked you about its resources you were evasive. Why?"

She was silent for some time, but her eyes were busy, as if she was trying to work out a particularly knotty problem. At length, she turned to him and said very softly, "It was your father's contention-and my own father's as well, I believe-that there is a traitor within the Haute Cour, someone who has been on the inside for some time, someone trusted, a sleeper, if you will."

"Obviously, you believe it as well."

"I had believed our people to be absolutely safe, untouchable. A traitor is the logical explanation for why the Knights suddenly have been so successful in assassinating five members of the Haute Cour, including your father."

"So, bottom line, we're cut off from our best resources."

"That's what it comes down to." Her eyes were hooded.

"There's something else, isn't there?"

"Yes. Dexter was so certain the traitor existed that he moved the cache of secrets without telling the other members of the Haute Cour."

"That would be just like my father." Bravo put his head back against the seat, and for a moment his eyes lost their focus. "I miss him." He shook his head. "But it's a strange thing-looking back on it, we had what you might call a… difficult relationship."

"Why?"

"He demanded so much from me and I didn't understand his motivations."

But he'd hesitated a fraction too long. Was there was something more he wasn't telling her? Jenny would hardly have been surprised. There were whole sections of her own personal history that she couldn't tell him.

"I know a little of your father," Bravo said, "but what about your mother? I didn't see any sign of her in the house."

Jenny looked away for a moment, as she was wont to do when he'd posed a particularly thorny question. She took a deep breath, let it out slowly and deliberately. "My mother left some time ago. She lives in Taos now. She's a potter, she has a Navajo teacher who I think is also her lover, though she hasn't said as much. Not that she would, that wouldn't be like her at all." She paused, then, almost as an afterthought, she said, "She's learning to speak the language, so she tells me."

"She wants to speak to her lover in his own tongue."

"What a romantic you're turning out to be," Jenny said with a bleak smile. "Sadly, no. More likely it's simply because the language is exceptionally difficult to learn. My mother tends to define herself by challenges."

"Did your father take her leaving badly?"

"Yes, but to tell you the truth I'm not sure of the reason. Did he love her or simply rely on her? You know men. They can accomplish anything in business, but they're helpless as lambs in the house. My father couldn't make himself a cup of tea, and as for using the dishwasher… well, a week after she moved out I had to clean up a ton of suds when he used Dawn instead of Cascade." She shifted in her seat, settling herself more comfortably. She had her shoes off and was curled up with her knees bent and her feet beneath her. "Of course, shortly after that he found someone else, as he was bound to do. He couldn't live alone and I couldn't keep taking care of him, even he knew that much."

"Did they like each other-your parents?" he said.

"Who can say? My father was in his own world, and my mother-I'll tell you a story about my mother. When I was sixteen I fell in love with this guy. We were living in San Diego then. He was a freshman in college, two years older than I was, sweet and kind, and Hispanic. My mother found out about the relationship and stopped it cold."

"How did she do that?"

"She shipped me across country to a boarding school in New Hampshire, where I stayed for two years. I learned to ski and hate boys. I came home after that, but it was too late, he was gone."

"You didn't write to him or-?"

She gave him a wry, bitter smile. "You don't know my mother."

With a soft chime the seat belt light came on, and the same flight attendant came around and asked Jenny to buckle up.

"You trust this man you called?" Jenny said when they were alone again.

"Jordan? With my life. He and I are as close as brothers-closer, even, since we don't have all that sibling-rivalry baggage."

Jenny nodded. "I know what you mean. My sister Rebecca and I were always at it with each other. We're fraternal twins but look very much alike. I can't tell you how many times we stole each other's boyfriends, but when it came to standing up for each other against our parents-especially my mother, who was always trying to play one of us against the other-there was never any question of where our loyalty lay." She sighed. "I miss her. I missed her when I was in New Hampshire. Separating us was another side of my mother's cruelty. She hated us ganging up on her." She sighed. "Becca lives in Seattle now with her partner and two kids. We don't get to see each other as much as we'd like." She turned to him. "How is Emma? She was hurt in the explosion that killed your father, wasn't she?"

"Emma is blind," Bravo said shortly. "She seems fine, but who really knows?"

"Dead? Both of them?" Jordan grunted. "Surprised isn't the right word. I already suspected as much." Phone to his ear, he stared at a small medieval painting of the Madonna and Child. It was wrought with an obvious fervor, which in his opinion lent it an unearthly power. "What I can't fathom is why you waited so long to inform me."

A discreet electronic beep accompanied a light that had begun flashing on Jordan's console. He turned back immediately, saw that the call was coming in on the encrypted line. Only one person was authorized to call him on that line, and right now it was the last person he wanted to speak with. Nevertheless, he knew he had no choice.

"The cleanup?" he said, acutely aware that he had to cut the current conversation short. "Yes, yes, of course. As always, it's understood that police involvement is to be avoided at all costs. But I want you out of Washington immediately. Back here, yes." He was staring at the blinking light. Mustn't keep the caller waiting, he thought. "There will be more work for you, I suspect. I have another call, contact me when you arrive."

He hung up without another word, changed to the encrypted-line receiver. "Cardinal Canesi, forgive me." Felix Canesi was the pope's right-hand man. "A business call from Beijing. You know the Chinese, their formalities are endless."

"I'm a man of the world, Jordan, I understand the intricacies of diplomacy," Cardinal Canesi said in his deep, stentorian tones. "Though I despise being kept waiting, let us speak no more of the matter."

Jordan absorbed this back-handed rebuke with his usual stoicism. "I haven't heard from you in three days. How is his holiness's condition?"

"We come now to the purpose of this interview." Whether it was because he had spent too many decades inside the cloistered walls of the Vatican or because he had a pompous streak, Cardinal Canesi's speech was unnaturally formal, as if he were channeling a religious lord of the nineteenth century. "As you have been informed, his eminence has been in guarded status over the last ten days, but that is about to change."

"Good news, I pray."

"Hardly," Cardinal Canesi said in funereal tones. "His health has deteriorated alarmingly. Frankly-and I must stress that this information is between the two of us-the pontiff is dying. Neither prayer nor medical knowledge seems of any use." With the canny stagecraft of a veteran actor, he paused, the better to give his next words added significance. "Without the-"

"Please," Jordan said sharply.

"Yes, yes, quite," Cardinal Canesi said with a hint of huffiness. He did not care to be reminded of security considerations. "In any event, without what you have promised us there is no hope for him. We simply must have it within the week."

"Don't worry, Felix," Jordan replied serenely. "You'll have it; the pope will not die."

"You have given your word, Jordan. This is a matter of the gravest import. Over the centuries, the Vatican has been anxious to have this most precious of artifacts returned to the bosom of the Church from whence it sprang. Over the centuries, many popes have made it their life's work to retrieve it from the apostate Gnostics who stole it, to no avail. And so it has passed from fact into legend. I must caution you that there are those on the pontiff's council who doubt the… the substance exists."

"It exists, your excellency, of this you may have no fear."

"It is not I who will experience fear should you fail us," Cardinal Canesi said ominously. "We are at a perilous crossroads, nothing could be more clear. This is why we have exercised all our might and influence to help you in your sacred mission. But hear me: we have put ourselves at risk for you.

"His eminence has never declared his wishes for his successor. The college of Cardinals is contentious, filled with over-eager and overambitious individuals, each with his own idea of which direction to lead the Church.

"Again I tell you this in the strictest confidence: either his holiness recovers, or the Church hierarchy will be plunged into an anarchy from which even I cannot say with any degree of certainty it will emerge unchanged."

Jordan knew what that meant: the probability of no more Canesi, no more cabal, no more backing for him.

"Do not fail us, Jordan. Remember: a week, not one moment more."

As he replaced the receiver, Jordan's mind was working furiously, parsing every word, every intonation he had used. He knew the cardinal better than Canesi suspected. His grace was the head of a clandestine cabal of high Vatican officials who attended the pope and depended on his favor in order to put through their policies. Canesi had as much to fear from this pope's passing as did Jordan, possibly more. The cabal needed this pope to continue to support them because over the decades they had gathered to them a veil of secret power the pope knew nothing about; backing Jordan had been only one of their activities. Jordan's plan, years in the making, had been triggered by Canesi's panic.

Jordan rubbed his chin, his face grave. He picked up his cell phone, dialed a number, spoke softly into it. "His grace called. I'm afraid we've run out of time far sooner than we anticipated. A week, not a moment more, he told me. Luckily, Bravo holds the key, which is just how we planned it. But now we will be forced to take further risks."

"Risk is part of the game, my love," the voice said on the other end of the line.

"Risk is what Ivo and Donatella took," he said gloomily, "and look where they ended up."

"But I have a plan. Herd Braverman Shaw and his Guardian angel like cattle, separate them, make them desperate."

Jordan sat up straight, his throat tight. "And then?"

"She is of no consequence," the voice said, "but when he has led us to the secret, he will die."

Jordan faced the window, but his gaze had turned inward. "Just as we planned," he said, "from the beginning."