The Testament

Chapter 10

Camille Muhlmann, as beautiful and intimidating as she had ever been in her life, was waiting for Bravo and Jenny at Charles de Gaulle Airport as they emerged from security. She was wearing one of her signature Lagerfeld suits, but in deference to the midsummer heat it was of a lightweight fabric, as was her blouse, through which the lace of her bra glimmered enticingly. She waved when she saw Bravo and embraced him, kissing him warmly on both cheeks.

"Mon Dieu, quel choc!" she said softly as she clung to him. "My poor Bravo, to have your father taken from you so prematurely."

Bravo kissed her tenderly, then pulled away, too slowly by Jenny's estimation. But before he could extricate himself entirely, she cradled his jaw in her hands.

"What happened to you? What terrible trouble did you run into?" The concern in her voice was palpable, grating on Jenny's nerves.

"Not here, not now," Bravo said with an abruptness that appeared to disturb Camille.

Instead, he made the introductions. "Jenny Logan, this is Camille Muhlmann, Jordan's mother."

"So you're Bravo's new girlfriend," Camille said.

Bravo frowned. "Camille, I told Jordan-"

Camille held up a hand and as she studied Jenny's face. "You're so lovely. We must find the ways to heal your wounds as quickly as possible, n'est-ce pas?" She squeezed Jenny's hand with an intimacy Jenny's found startling. Then she turned to Bravo. "I quite approve of her, my dear."

She laughed, linking her arm through Bravo's. "I hope you don't think me too forward, Jenny, but when it comes to Bravo I'm inordinately protective. I can't help it, you see, he's my son's best friend and is dear to my heart. He is family, you understand."

"Of course I understand, Madame Muhlmann."

"On such a journey we must dispense with formalities, Jenny. Alors, you must call me Camille."

Jenny smiled through clenched teeth. It appeared as if Camille had deliberately matched her stride to Bravo's, and with every step they took her hip brushed against his. What annoyed Jenny most of all, however, was how much Bravo seemed to enjoy being the center of Camille Muhlmann's attention.

"Luggage, non?" Camille ran the tip of her forefinger along Bravo's jaw. "Ah, you left Washington in such a rush it's a wonder you had your passports."

"Neither of us is ever without them," Jenny said.

Camille swung around, smiling easily. "Yes, and what is it you do, Jenny?"

"I'm a consultant to companies in developing nations," Jenny said without missing a beat. "I help them conform to the standards laid down by the World Bank and the World Trade Organization for international commerce."

"And yet you're here with my Bravo."

"Friendship is as important to me as it is to you, Madame Muhlmann."

Again she took Jenny's hand in that curiously intimate gesture. "Camille, please."

By this time they had reached the car park. The Parisian sky was full of slate-gray clouds, and the morning was already hot and sticky. A low ramble of thunder cut through the traffic noise.

"Now, Bravo," Camille said, "you must tell me what it was you couldn't tell Jordan over the phone. What happened to you in America that caused you both such violence?"

She stopped beside her car, a new dove-gray Citroe"n C5 sedan.

"You haven't rented us a car?" Bravo said.

"I'm driving you myself." When Bravo began to protest, she held up a hand. "These are Jordan's orders, my love. You must see the logic of it. Wherever you need to go, I can get you there faster and more securely. A rental car is identifiable by its license plates-n'est-ce pas?-and will therefore draw attention to you. It is not secure, yes?"

Bravo glanced at Jenny and, ignoring the brief negative shake of her head, said with a smile, "Jenny and I thank you, Camille. You're most kind."

"Bon, that's settled." She opened the car door. "You must be famished, and then we must get you some clothes, the two of you look positively bedraggled." She gestured for Bravo to get in. "While I drive you'll tell me everything."

Bravo opened the back door.

"No, my love, I want you beside me." She turned. "Unless this is not acceptable to you, Jenny."

"Of course." Jenny put a smile on her face, though she feared it was so brittle it would crack at any moment. She hated the way Camille had put it to her, as if it would be her failing if she refused.

Camille slid her hand over Bravo's and her wide-apart eyes held his. They were standing very close. Were their hips pressed together? Jenny sensed Camille Muhlmann's smoldering sexual energy. As she looked at the older woman with the green eyes of jealousy, it seemed to her that Camille's musk swirled around Bravo like Medusa's locks.

As she clambered into the Citroe"n's back, Jenny glared at Bravo, but he had been struck by a sudden melancholy, and his gaze was lost to her. He looked around and realized that his father would never again visit him here, that the haloed lights along the Seine would never again fall on Dexter Shaw as the two of them strolled its banks amid bursts of strained and now longed-for conversation.

As Camille exited the airport, Bravo gave her a short, heavily edited version of what had happened after he had been released from the hospital. Camille made no comment as he described their escape from Jenny's house and the ensuing chase, allowing him to have center stage without interruption.

Bravo did not identify Ivo Rossi or Donatella by name. As for Jenny, he said she was a childhood friend of his from New York. "My sister had invited her to the July fourth dinner," he concluded. "She was detained and arrived after the explosion. When I woke up in the hospital hers was the first face I saw."

"How lucky for you," Camille said as her eyes met Jenny's in the rearview mirror.

"What can I say?" Jenny smiled what she imagined was the ghastly half-frozen smile she'd had plastered on her face ever since she'd met Camille Muhlmann. "I was born under a lucky sign."

Camille swung the Citroe"n onto the A11, heading north to Rouen.

"But, my love, who were these people following you and why?" Camille accelerated into the far left lane. "I must tell you that Jordan has a theory-he's convinced the Wassersturms are behind it."

"Wassersturms?" Jenny said.

"A business deal I was working on for six months." Bravo half turned his head toward her. "We wanted to buy a company in Budapest. Trouble was, there was already a deal on the table with a company from Cologne owned by the Wassersturm brothers. I did some research and found out that through a labyrinth of shell companies the Wassersturms were supplying the Russian mafia with illegal arms. I went to the board of the Budapest company with the evidence and within a week we had the deal."

"Revenge." With an angry shriek of the Citroe"n's horn, Camille raced past a vehicle moving too slowly for her. When she returned to the left lane, she accelerated even more. "The Wassersturms were in a rage when their deal was terminated. Jordan's worried that they're out to take their revenge on you. What's gotten him so upset is that he spent three days in Munich working on another deal with them simply to calm them down."

Bravo frowned. "He shouldn't have done that; there's no reason to trust them."

Camille laughed. "You know Jordan," she said lightly. "If he can get his terms, he'll make a deal with the devil."

"Well, he's wrong about this particular theory. The brothers may scream but I seriously doubt they have it in them to authorize a violent act."

"I take it, then, you have your own theory," Camille said.

"I suspect these attacks have something to do with my father's death," Bravo said after some hesitation.

Camille ventured a glance his way. "Je ne comprends pas. What do these people want with you?"

"I have no idea," Bravo said deliberately. "At my father's insistence, he and I met just before going to my sister's house. The fact is, he wanted to talk to me about something he said was important, but my anger got in the way and I put him off."

"Oh, Bravo." Camille signaled, moving right across the lanes of the A11. "And in this state your father was taken from you. Quel domage!"

The large gray modern office buildings of the northern outskirts of Paris had given grudging way to green fields interspersed with clusters of residential housing no less ugly, unfortunately, than their industrial brethren.

She exited and took the turn for Magny-en-Vexin. They passed between two magnificent alle'es of black-leafed hornbeam trees, a darkened bower with the sky lowered and the air heavy as seawater, arriving at length in the city proper. In the old city, they exited the car to the rumble of thunder and a livid flash of lightning somewhere in the turbulent gloom of the northern sky.

Bistro du Nord was on the rue de la Halle, a small, cozy restaurant three steps down from street level. It was long and narrow, filled with dark wood beams and the simple whitewashed walls of a mas, a French farmhouse. Framed paintings of the countryside, colorful and pleasingly primitive, were hung as if at random.

A young woman showed them to a table at the back, near the blackened mouth of a massive unlit fireplace. Bravo could not help but be reminded of the hearth in Jenny's house behind which was the vertical passageway that had saved them from Ivo Rossi's initial attack.

When Camille went to freshen up, Jenny leaned across the table and said in a hushed voice, "What do you think you're doing?"

"What are you talking about?" Bravo said.

"We shouldn't be taking her-or anyone else-with us to St. Malo."

"You heard her, Jenny. She had a good point. Renting a car might call attention to ourselves."

"There are a million rental cars on the road in France at any given time," Jenny said hotly. "Besides, I very much doubt your father would approve of involving this woman in your hunt for the truth."

"Why would you say that?"

"I simply mean-"

"Do you know your cheeks are flushed?"

"I simply mean," she persevered, "that knowing your father I think he'd feel that it's far more insecure to have her with in than for us to have rented a car, that's all."

"You're sure that's all?"

She picked up the menu, held it in front of her face and muttered, "Bastard."

Bravo took hold of the top of the menu, bringing her face out of hiding. He smiled winningly, but she wasn't about to be charmed.

"Why are you so determined to make fun of me?"

"I like you," he said.

She snorted and was about to make a nasty reply when Camille returned.

"Am I interrupting something? A lover's quarrel, perhaps?"

"Not at all," Jenny said, her eyes lowered to her menu.

Camille sighed. "Lovers are allowed to quarrel as long as it doesn't last long. Alors, you must now kiss and make it up with each other."

"I don't think so," Jenny blurted out, while at the same instant, Bravo said, "We're not lovers."

"No, of course not." Her tone of voice as well as her expression revealed that Camille did not believe him. She took both their hands. "My dears, life is too short to stay angry. Now listen to me, I won't be satisfied until you've kissed and I know all is well between you." She squeezed their hands. "Come on now, there has been too much sadness in your lives lately."

Jenny's eyes were clouded by anxiety, all the worse because she could tell nothing of how Bravo felt. Nevertheless, both understood that there was no getting around this profoundly awkward moment. With Camille looking on, her lips curved in a mysterious Mona Lisa half smile, they both rose and moved tentatively toward one another. Bravo pushed a chair away but even so they halted with a handsbreadth between them.

All at once, he took her in his arms and pressed his mouth to hers. Much to her astonishment, she felt her lips opening under his, felt his tongue enter her mouth, felt her own twine for a moment with his. The breath whooshed out of her and her heart seemed to stop. Then they were apart, standing close but no longer touching, and Jenny's heart rate slowly returned to normal.

"There now, isn't that better?" Camille said with an enigmatic smile.

As they sat Camille discreetly signaled the waiter, and they ordered.

Bravo was again engaged in conversation with Camille, telling her where they needed to go, but not why. Jenny saw this withholding of information as a small victory for her side, as she'd come to think of it. Instead, they discussed the best route to take to St. Malo and where Bravo wanted Camille to drop them once they had arrived. Camille wanted to wait for them, but Bravo refused, telling her that he had no way of knowing how long he and Jenny would need to be in St. Malo and where they might be going after that. In the meantime, the food arrived.

"You're being terribly mysterious," Camille said between dainty bites of raw shellfish.

Jenny, who had an aversion to mussels, clams and oysters in any form, struggled to keep her gorge down while slicing into her steak frites.

"Not that I mind," Camille continued, "but I worry that you're in more danger than you're willing to admit. That is why you don't want me to stay in St. Malo with you, isn't it?"

"Frankly, yes." Bravo put down his fork. "You've already done more than could be expected. I won't put you in harm's way."

"But, my love, it's my decision-"

"No, Camille, it's not. In this instance I'm afraid I must insist. You're taking us to St. Malo, which is more than you ought to be doing. But that's the end of it. Understood?"

Camille regarded him neutrally for a moment. Then she sighed and turned to Jenny. "Dessert, my dear? The tarte Tatin here is not to be missed."

After lunch, Camille took them to the pharmacy she had spoken of, where she bought them various creams and unguents for their bruises, cuts and abrasions. Then they went clothes shopping, changing into the new outfits as they went and consigning their old torn shirts and pants to the trash bin.

Back in the car, Camille drove at high speed, circumventing Rouen. They turned onto the El, heading west, where the road became the EB1. Paralleling the coastline, they passed just south of Honfleur, where in the early nineteenth century the Impressionists reigned, and the posh seaside resorts of Deauville and Trouville. Twelve miles past Caen, the sky that had grown dark just before lunch now lowered enough to touch the tops of the bristling hawthorn trees. The buildings on either side of the highway grew black and menacing. In the distance, the horizon had disappeared in a muddy haze of rain, and then the downpour hit them, drumming against the roof of the Citroe"n, sluiced off to either side of the windshield by the wipers. The car's headlights cut through the hissing gloom like gas lamps on a coal-dark night.

Within an hour they had made the All. The rain had lessened to a heavy drizzle, but the world outside appeared to consist of colors smeared with an Impressionist's brush. They were approaching Avranches when Jenny began to complain of severe stomach cramps. Glancing over his shoulder, Bravo noticed that her face was pasty, beaded with sweat. Several moments later, he spotted one of those peculiarly European travel restaurants whose setting was a bridge over the highway. In the same rest area were bathrooms and several thousand yards further on, a gas station.

Camille pulled over, Bravo helped Jenny out. Camille grabbed a raincoat and, holding it over Jenny, insisted on going with her. Jenny did not have the strength to argue, and together the two women hurried into the low, squat building. Bravo went around to the driver's side of the Citroe"n, the better to keep an eye on the traffic. The light rain was cool, and he enjoyed the feel of it on his face as he pulled out his cell phone and dialed an overseas number.

It would already be night in New York, the blaze of man-made lights dimming the stars, the great energy of the city flowing unabated through the streets while the tops of high-rises disappeared into the clouds.

Emma answered on the first ring, as if she had been waiting for his call.

"Bravo, where are you?"

"In France," he said. "On my way to Brittany."

"What are you doing there?"

"I'm on an errand for Dad. He spoke to me about it just before the… just before the end." There was an uncomfortable silence for a moment. "How are you, Emma?"

"I'm fine. I'm singing again, my voice coach was just here."

"That's wonderful-and your eyes? Any change?"

"Not yet. Never mind, it's you I'm worried about."

"Me?"

"I can hear it in your voice," she said.

"Hear what?"

"Trouble. Whatever Dad wanted you to do, it's trouble, isn't it?"

"Why would you say-"

"Because I'm not an idiot, Bravo, and I resent you treating me like one. The president of the engineering firm I hired read the report to me. The gas line wasn't faulty; it was tampered with."

He looked around to see if the women had returned from the bathroom, but they weren't in view. "You seem to have taken the news in stride."

"Dad was in a dangerous business, Bravo. D'you think I hadn't guessed? And once I had, he confided in me."

"What?"

"In fact, from time to time I helped him. He knew-and so did I-that there was a high degree of risk in his business with the Gnostic Observatines."

There was a short pause, during which Bravo could hear her take a sip-of tea, perhaps. He was trying hard to adjust to this new reality.

"Now that you're launched on this mission," Emma continued, "I want you to know that I can be of use to you."

"Emma-"

"I suppose you think it's different now that I'm blind, but you're wrong. I'm quite capable of taking care of myself-and I can take care of you. I always have."

"I don't think I understand."

"Who d'you think kept tabs on you and reported back to Dad when you and he weren't talking? The estrangement certainly wasn't his idea."

"You mean you spied on me?"

"Come off it, Bravo. I did what was best for all of us-you included. Do you think even now that Dad had any evil designs on you? He was worried, and frankly I don't blame him. You acted like an adolescent, as if he were the enemy, when all he was trying to do-"

Bravo took the phone from his ear and severed the connection. He sat down heavily on the driver's seat. His mind seemed numb, the traffic on the All a distant buzz. A car pulled in and a couple of tourists with skittish teenagers tumbled out, loped through the drizzle into the low building. A large truck rumbled away from the gas station back onto the slick highway. His eyes registered these small comings and goings without comment from his mind, as if he were in a theater, watching a film.

His cell phone buzzed.

"Don't you dare treat me the way you treated Dad." Emma's voice sounded sharp in his ear. "And don't hang up on me again."

"Okay, okay, sorry." Bravo felt sheepish and a bit as if he were hung over. "But you rattled the hell out of me. I mean, here I was wondering how you were getting from room to room, and you tell me that you can provide me with help the way you did Dad."

"I suppose that was a lot to dump on you at once, but really, Bravo, sometimes you're so clueless. If you knew me at all you'd have realized that I've been struggling all my life to live up to you and Dad's expectations. I dealt with that, so I sure as hell can deal with this."

Bravo thought about how poorly Jenny had been treated by the Order. But when he considered this it didn't seem much different from how women were treated in corporate life or most anywhere else for that matter. "Listen, Emma, I… well, you know, when you told me, I thought, there it is again-everybody knew about Dad except me."

"There was a good reason for that, Bravo. You must know what it is by now. Dad was grooming you to take over for him. That's why he trained you, why he was always so hard on you. He wanted you prepared when the time came, but until that day he didn't want you involved in the Gnostic Observatines. It was vital that his enemies believed that you had nothing to do with the Order, that your life had been set on another path entirely. If the Knights of St. Clement had suspected for a moment what he had in mind for you, you would've been in terrible danger."

"There's a woman with me-Jenny-"

"Right, the Guardian. Dad was very high on her."

"I know. He sent me to her. She says Dad believed there's a traitor inside the Haute Cour. Do you have any idea who it might be?"

"No. I think in the final days Dad had narrowed it down to a couple of suspects, but he never got a chance to tell me who they were."

"Right." Bravo turned, saw Jenny and Camille exiting the building. "Maybe you could do some digging."

"Sure, no problem." The tension had drained out of her voice. "I'd love to get back to work."

"How will you… ?"

She laughed. "Oh, Bravo, before there was e-mail, there was the telephone. I have a facility with voices: if I hear a tape I can be whoever I want to be. Don't worry, I did this all the time for Dad. It worked quite well-people nowadays are paranoid about e-mails and electronic files."

Jenny had on the raincoat, and Camille was gripping her with one arm around her shoulders.

"Listen, Emma, about what happened before-"

"Forget it. Now that we understand one another-"

He never heard the end of her comment because at that moment he saw a black four-door Mercedes sedan with German plates heading for the two women. As it closed on them, Jenny pulled Camille out of the way. The Mercedes swerved to come between them and the building. At the last instant, it slowed. A blacked-out window slid down, the offside rear door opened, and he saw the dark glint of metal as a hand gripping a gun appeared.

Before Bravo could make a move, Jenny planted her left foot and with her right kicked the door closed. Then she lunged forward with her upper body, chopped down on the hand, wrested the gun away and fired three bullets into the interior of the Mercedes.

The car shuddered on its heavy shocks as if it had been shot, and it lurched forward. Jenny was whipped off her feet. Bravo could see that the hem of her raincoat had been caught in the closed door.

Emma was screaming through his cell phone as he threw it onto the seat, turned the ignition and put the Citroe"n in gear. He shouted to Camille, who was running after the Mercedes as it dragged Jenny along the rest area. The car was heading directly toward the gas pumps; it didn't seem as if anyone was driving it.

As Bravo momentarily tamped the Citroe"n's brakes, Camille, who was on his side of the car, pulled open the rear door. Even as she jumped into the Citroe"n's backseat he took off, the car slewing alarmingly on the wet blacktop.

"We'll never make it," she said breathlessly. "She's going to go up in a fireball with the assassins."

Bravo could see that Jenny was twisted up in the raincoat and, though she struggled to get free, couldn't extricate herself. Then the Mercedes ran over something and the bump swung Jenny around, slamming her head against the blacktop. Her eyes rolled up in her head and her body went limp, twisting grotesquely.

"The door's the only answer," Bravo said.

"You're insane! To get me close enough you'll risk running her over."

"She'll be dead if I don't try," he answered grimly. "Roll down your window and get ready."

Narrowly missing another car on his right, Bravo took up position just off the Mercedes's right flank. Now for the hard part. Focused solely on Jenny, he depressed the accelerator, creeping up on the other car. Fortunately, he had physics on his side; the force of the Mercedes's passage was pulling Jenny's body in toward its undercarriage, giving him slightly more room to maneuver. On the other hand, he was forced to push the Citroe"n to an unsafe speed; the gas pumps were only several hundred yards away. He forced himself not to think of the beating Jenny was taking. Instead, he concentrated on the outline of her body as if she were part of a puzzle he needed to solve. And yet he hesitated to bring the Citroe"n closer to her. "You'll risk running her over," Camille had said, and she was right. But he had very little time; he needed to act now. Desperately, he maneuvered the Citroe"n so that it was parallel, then matched the Mercedes's speed and trajectory. It was still heading straight for the pumps, and there was nothing he could do to stop it. He risked glancing sideways, glimpsed the driver slumped over the wheel.

"Come on!" he yelled at Camille. "I can't get any closer!" Jenny could be under his wheels in a heartbeat.

Already kneeling on the seat, Camille now stretched her torso out the window. Balancing her hips on the bottom of the window frame, she reached out and grabbed hold of the Mercedes's door handle. Jenny was directly below her, cocooned so thoroughly in the raincoat she couldn't see her face. She pulled the handle once, cursed mightily, tugged again.

"Now!" Bravo cried.

Camille jiggled the chrome handle and the door unlatched partway, but the same law of physics that kept Jenny's body close to the Mercedes was making it difficult to open the door.

"Camille! For the love of God!"

With a tremendous effort, she wrenched the door open. Abruptly released, Jenny's body rolled across the rain-streaked blacktop. Her face was bone white, and Bravo couldn't tell whether or not she was breathing.

He stood on the brakes so that the Citroe"n screeched to a halt. Camille threw the door open, gathered Jenny up. Even before Camille swung the door shut, Bravo had accelerated.

All at once, they were upon the gas pumps. Bravo turned the wheel hard to the left, and the Citroe"n's tires squealed in protest as it fishtailed. People were screaming and running in every direction. Bravo turned into the skid, then accelerated sharply. The car leapt forward like a racehorse at the opening gun. Just behind them, the grille of the Mercedes slammed into the nearest pump, taking it right off its foundation. Gas spewed upward, and with a great sucking whoosh and a fierce burst of heat, the car and the station went up in a nightmare fireball full of twisted metal shards and greasy black smoke.

A great fist rocked the Citroe"n so severely it threatened to roll over. Then a piece of metal, black and twisted, struck the sedan as it was about to reenter the A11, and Bravo was forced to steer in a white-knuckle stagger, barely missing two cars as he entered the traffic stream, until he had the car under full control again.

"How is she?" he asked anxiously as he made his way through the maze of traffic.

"She's unconscious, that much is certain." Camille was using her hands to feel for a pulse. "She's alive. Her heartbeat is strong."

"Thank God," Bravo breathed. The police hadn't arrived yet so far as he could see, but it wouldn't be long, he knew, until they did. In the rearview mirror the greasy fireball was finally subsiding, but now the flames could be seen licking upward into the rain-laden sky.

"Hand me my phone. It's there right beside you," Bravo said, a bit out of breath as he drove. "I have a call to finish."

"My love, how are you?" Camille asked.

When he took the cell phone from her, his hand was trembling visibly.

Chapter 11

Several miles on, Camille made him pull over, and they switched positions. Bravo walked on stiff legs around the back of the Citroe"n. He bent down, extracted part of the Mercedes from the Citroe"n and with a muffled cry hurled it away. He climbed into the back seat, settling Jenny's limp form beside him, her head cradled in his lap. He gently drew wisps of hair off her cheek. In the process, his fingertips caressed the soft flesh behind her ear.

In the rearview mirror, Camille noted how his hand lingered on Jenny, how his gaze had a faraway look. At length, she said softly, "My love, please close the door. We must move on."

In a half daze, Bravo complied. His gaze returned to Jenny, his thoughts as dim and nebulous as the fog that had crept in on the heels of the rain.

"Bravo," Camille said in that quiet voice that never failed to command attention, "the Mercedes had a German license plate."

"I saw," he said automatically.

"We must now consider the possibility that we are wrong and Jordan is right."

She drove quickly and efficiently to a hotel that lay on the landward side of the causeway that stretched out to Mont St. Michel like an entreating hand. It was here that, over the centuries, pilgrims came from all over to worship at the monastery of the Archangel St. Michael, whose statue rose from the pinnacle of the medieval stone abbey at the top of the rocky islet, five hundred feet above the English Channel.

Bravo felt the way those ancient seekers must have felt when they arrived here-exhausted, sick at heart, in need of a miracle. He held Jenny closer to him as Camille got out and went into the hotel. They'd need a miracle, he thought, to get rooms here at the height of summer.

He watched her returning, walking purposefully toward him, a small smile on her face.

"Come, my love," she said as she opened his door. "Our rooms are waiting for us."

The room was clean and neat. It was modern and anonymous, but owing to its position on the third floor its picture window overlooked the channel and the magnificent sight of the Marvel, as Mont St. Michel was sometimes called by the French, now nothing more than a ghostly shadow in the dense and swirling fog. There was a sling-back sofa and matching chair upholstered in a dark tweedy fabric beside the window, with a low wooden table between them. In the middle of the rear wall was the door to the bathroom, and to their right was the bed, flanked by a pair of night tables and lamps. The floor was polished wood, the walls the color of sand. The light streaming in was pallid and watery, entirely without definition, so that no shadow was cast anywhere in the room.

Bravo sat on the bed, holding Jenny in his arms, while Camille used hot water and a washcloth to bathe the back of her head and her hands where they were abraded. He hoped that the raincoat that had trapped her had also protected her from more serious damage while she had been dragged by the Mercedes because right now they were afraid to subject her to the handling required to take it off.

Camille applied one of the antiseptic creams she had bought, and Bravo gently laid Jenny on the bed, pulled a light blanket up around her.

"Camille, we have to find a doctor. Surely the longer she's unconscious the greater the danger."

Camille sat down beside him on the bed and, leaning over, carefully lifted Jenny's lids. "Her pupils aren't dilated-she appears to be sleeping, nothing more."

"But-"

"Come away now, my love." She rose and took his arm. "What she needs most now is rest-as do we all."

"I don't want to leave her."

"And you won't." Bravo was too distracted to notice the small pause. "You must take some time now to look after yourself. Go wash up. Don't look so concerned, I'll watch over her."

Bravo nodded. As soon as he was in the bathroom, Camille carefully and methodically searched the room. She knew exactly what she was looking for, and when she found Jenny's possessions she picked through them with the expert eye of a pawnbroker. At first glance, nothing out of the norm presented itself. This was to be expected; Jenny Logan was a Guardian. But because she was, Camille knew she could not be totally unarmed. She had to have a weapon on her-one that she could take through airport security. And so Camille came at last to a compact, which was slightly oversized and a good deal heavier than any compact had a right to be. Opening it, she found not foundation powder and a pad but a small folding knife. She wasn't fooled by either its size or the mother-of-pearl scales. Activating the switchblade mechanism, she was rewarded with the lightninglike appearance of a wicked-looking stainless-steel blade. With the digital camera in her cell phone, she shot photos of the knife open and closed, dialed a Paris number and sent the photos off. Wiping down the knife carefully, she returned it to the compact moments before Bravo reappeared.

"How is she?" His hair was still dripping wet.

"No change." She gestured to the sofa near the window. "Why don't we sit here where we can easily keep an eye on her."

Outside, the fog had settled like a blanket of snow. The centuries-old image of St. Michael slaying the dragon curled at his feet was visible, but of the massive fortress-isle below it nothing could be seen, so that the fierce and avenging archangel appeared as if borne through the air on vaporous wings.

Camille allowed Bravo to sit in silence for some time, then she began to speak: "Tired as we both are, we must make some decisions. Was this the form of attack you escaped from in America?"

"More or less, yes." Bravo was sitting forward, flexed elbows on drawn-up knees. He seemed hollow-eyed, his face empty.

"Then Jordan was right. The Germans-"

"The Wassersturms have nothing to do with this!" he exploded. Rising, he returned to the bedside, stood staring down at Jenny's pale face. Her freckles had all but disappeared; a faint spiderweb of blue veins was visible at her temple.

Camille gave him some time with her, but not too much. She rose and went quickly to his side.

"Bravo, I'm terribly confused," she said softly. "Isn't it time you told me what's happening?"

When he didn't respond, she turned him around to face her. "Why won't you confide in me?"

"I want you to leave right now."

"What?"

He took her by the elbow and led her to the door. "Get in the car and go back to Paris."

"And leave you here like this? You can't be serious!"

"But I am, Camille. I'm deadly serious."

She made to break away from him, but he held her all the tighter. She struggled for only a moment, then she was still. They stared at each other in an odd contest of wills that mimicked the impassioned struggle between a headstrong teenager and his mother.

"This is no game, Camille. These people are out for blood-"

"What people? Do you know who is behind this? Bravo, you're frightening me."

"Then I've succeeded. Camille, I've put you in enough danger as it is. I'd never forgive myself if something happened to you."

"And what about your friend, Jenny Logan? You would risk losing her?"

At that moment, a sound came to them, like the soft mewl of a cat that hadn't been fed. They both turned, and Bravo let Camille go as he rushed to the bed. Jenny's eyes were open; they were looking blankly around the room.

"Bravo?"

"I'm here." He took her hand as he sat beside her. "And so is Camille."

As Camille came into her line of sight, Jenny said in a cracked voice, "Where am I?"

"In a hotel," Camille said with a smile. "You're perfectly safe here."

Jenny's eyes settled on Bravo. "The Mercedes?"

"Destroyed, utterly," he said. "It hit a gas pump and went up in flames."

"God…" Her head turned to one side and a single tear rolled down onto the bedspread.

"Thank you for saving my life," Camille said, kneeling beside her. "Your courage is extraordinary."

Jenny looked at her but said nothing.

Camille leaned against the night table. "You must rest and regain your strength. We have brought you to Mont St. Michel. It is a sacred place, Jenny. A place for healing both the body and the spirit. It has been so ever since the first abbey was built in the eleventh century. But the very site itself is holy. The monastery was founded in 708 by St. Aubert, the Bishop of Avranches, who was visited in dreams by the Archangel Michel himself. Ever since then Mont St. Michel has been a magnet for people in need from all over the known world. Be at peace now, you need time to recover. Call me if there is anything you want and I shall bring it."

She rose and, smiling, told Bravo that she was going to lie down for a while.

Bravo waited until she closed the door behind her, then said, "How are you feeling?"

"Like I was run over by a freight train."

"You very nearly were," Bravo said, "or something very much like it." He took a breath. "Jenny, did you see who was inside the Mercedes?"

"I had only the briefest glimpse and that was… I keep getting flickers of images. There were two figures."

"Male or female?"

"The one with the gun-he was a man, I'm sure of that. He had a long, narrow face, dark hair and eyes, mid-thirties or so." She closed her eyes for a moment. "Everything's spinning around."

"Here," Bravo said, "see if you can sit up."

He helped her put her back against two pillows. Then he gave her some water. Jenny stared down into the bottom of the glass as if it were a sorcerer's bowl in which the images of her encounter with the Mercedes could be conjured up.

"The driver was a man, as well."

Standing in her room, smoking a cigarette, Camille had to admire the ingenuity of the microcircuits on the listening device she'd planted on the underside of the night table as she knelt down. Her conversation with Jenny had been a diversion while she pressed the tiny device into the unpainted plywood.

"Yes, he was," Bravo said. "I saw him slumped over the wheel after you shot him dead. I think we can reasonably assume that your recollection of the other man is accurate." A small noise interrupted the flow, then Bravo's voice returned. "The Mercedes had German plates. Camille thinks that Jordan might be right about the Wassersturms being after me."

"Surely you don't think that."

"I don't," Bravo said, "but I suppose it would be best to be certain."

"The Wassersturms are a blind alley, and a potentially dangerous one," Jenny said in a voice audibly more firm. "We can't allow anything to interfere with finding the cache of secrets."

"Dear God, no, we can't have that," Camille said into the ensuing silence. When she was certain that the conversation was at an end, she took out her cell phone and tapped in a number.

"Bravo doesn't know where the cache is," she said when her son picked up the phone. "On the other hand, he isn't going to tell me a thing about the devilish labyrinth Dexter has set up."

"Did you actually expect him to?"

"There was always the chance."

Jordan laughed, a piercing, thoroughly nasty sound. "How disappointed you would've been if he'd proved himself such a fool!"

"He's his father's son, after all, isn't he?"

There was a small silence.

"He won't go for the Wassersturm story, and neither will Jenny. I told you," she said, abruptly changing the subject. "That was Osman Spagna's idea, wasn't it?"

"What if it was?" Jordan said somewhat defensively.

"I don't like that man, Jordan. I've told you before. Get rid of him."

"I didn't think Bravo would go for the Wassersturm story, either, but that wasn't the purpose," he said, avoiding an answer he did not want to give. "We needed to build your credibility with them."

"Yes, it's an old confidence trick. The girl didn't like me from the outset, now there's a bond of trust between us." She paused a moment. "About the Mercedes, there were no survivors."

"Survival of the fittest," Jordan said. "If they were good enough Jenny wouldn't have been able to kill them."

"How did you know Jenny did it?"

Jordan laughed again. "I have to have some secrets, Mother, even from you, otherwise I'm just too good a boy."

"Make sure there aren't any more," Camille said sternly as she broke the connection.

Silence.

Jenny, her eyes half-closed, whispered, "Why are you looking at me that way?"

Without answering, Bravo disappeared into the bathroom. A moment later, she could hear the water running. The sound soothed her and her gaze drifted to the picture window, beyond which only the largest form-that of Mont St. Michel itself-could be seen, though indistinctly, no more than a shadow towering from the salt beds of the unseen tidewater. The long afternoon had progressed, but within the white void of the fog there was no sound, no movement, not even a hint that the sun continued to cross the sky. It was as if time itself stood still.

Settling herself, Jenny felt small sticking pains as if beetles roamed over her body, biting her with their pincers. She made incoherent sounds deep in her throat, as people often will when their dreams get the better of them.

After an indeterminate time, she opened her eyes to see Bravo standing over her. The water sounded like a cataract, burbling and rushing as if anxious to get from one place to the next. She had the strange impression that the tide had risen high enough to seep through the foundation, swirling upward to wash into the room and now lapping at her thighs. Her fingers worked the bedspread, searching for evidence that she had floated free of terra firma.

Without a word, Bravo scooped her off the bed and carried her into the bathroom. Once inside, he did not stop but stepped over the lip of the tub. Steam was rising, and it was wonderfully warm. He laid her in the water and, taking up the handheld faucet, ran the hot water over her. Then he began to untangle her clothes. At first, she felt as if the beetles had returned, and she resumed her sounds of distress, but when she was more herself, she understood that her own blood, drying, had made her clothes stick to her and it was this that caused the pain when she'd moved in bed.

Slowly, layer by layer, he unpeeled her. Her blood was dissolving, and it was not an unpleasant sensation. She thought of an orange, whose bitter rind must be stripped away to reveal the sweet fruit beneath. She gazed up into Bravo's face and saw herself reflected in his eyes. She was half naked, and somehow she was neither angry nor embarrassed.

On the other hand, she felt compelled to say, "Why are you doing this?"

As his hands continued with their work, he looked at her for what seemed a long time. "Because," he said at last, "I almost lost you." His fingers, nearly finished, stroked her bare flesh. "Because you mean something to me."

"What?" The hot water cascaded over her, over both of them as he knelt facing her. "What do I mean to you?"

She saw what he wanted to say in his eyes, felt it in the way he cradled her, in the heat rising between them. Her arms came around him and because she couldn't help herself she pulled him toward her. She felt him against her and she was lifted up, not only her body but her spirit. She recalled what Camille said about the healing power of Mont St. Michel.

She felt the steady, strong beating of his heart. A wildness had taken hold of her that was strangely familiar, the deep, soul-shattering yearning that had gripped her before her mother had sent her away to school.

The floodgates, so long held in check, opened. Her head moved forward, her lips opened, and she surrendered herself to everything she wanted, everything that was coming.

When they emerged from the bath, the fog had lifted entirely. It was that time of day, beautiful, mysterious, when the sky is infinite and full of light from an unseen source, when far below, the darkness of evening has already begun to gather, spreading its midnight-blue shadows across roads and cobbles, low walls and foundations, weighing them down, fastening them to the black earth.

They sat side by side, gazing out the window at the Marvel with its two-level walled village curled like the defeated dragon around its feet. The enormous monastery, which was constructed entirely of granite, had foundations that were laid 160 feet above sea level.

"As you probably know, the abbey is Benedictine," Bravo said, "but in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries it was fortified in the manner of a military installation. In fact, Mont St. Michel's position in the channel made it an important outpost when France went to war with England. Immediately, it became both strategic and impregnable. Its defenses have never been breached."

On the wall just above the window were sculpted a cockleshell, a horn and a staff.

Jenny ran her fingertips over the bas-relief. "Do these symbols have a meaning?"

"They're the insignia of Mont St. Michel," Bravo said, "known to every pilgrim who made his way to the islet from the thirteenth century on. This was before the causeway was built, you understand, when the high tide completely cut off the islet from the mainland. Many people drowned in the uncertain tides. It's difficult to know which was more treacherous, the tides or the sea floor. The staff was used to probe for quicksand on the journey out to the abbey, the horn would be used to sound the alarm if the pilgrim was lost in lowering fog or rising water, and the cockleshell was stuck in the pilgrim's hat when he left Mont St. Michel, a symbol that proclaimed his safe and successful journey."

"I wish I had a cockleshell." Jenny put her head back against the sofa.

"Do you want to sleep?" Bravo asked her.

"No," she said, a small smile on her lips. "I'm hungry."

"What should I bring you?"

But her eyes were already closed. In a very short while her breathing became even, and Bravo, rising, brought the blanket over, covering her from feet to neck.

Chapter 12

St. Malo occupied the westernmost part of a small cape that jutted out into the English Channel. The cape was more or less in the shape of a dog's head, St. Malo being the muzzle. They arrived just after 12:30 in the afternoon. The inner core of the city was ancient and beautiful, fortified by a thick stone wall. Around this had been thrown up concentric circles of twentieth-century housing, cheap and ugly, where many of the residents lived and worked. The tour buses, however, drew up in the vast cobbled car park outside the gates to the Old City, where they disgorged their contents of excited, video camera-toting tourists, wanting to tape the highlights, eat crepes and continue to the next stop on their whirlwind tour. There were Germans and Swiss and Austrians, Spaniards, Italians, Britons and, of course, Japanese. As hostile as warring parties, they clannishly' formed into tight knots as if afraid to come into contact with each other. They moved in swarms, under military banners resentfully brandished by their guides.

Camille pulled up adjacent to several of the buses. She looked at Bravo sternly and said, "Are you certain this is what you want to do?"

He nodded. "Absolutely."

"Bon."

"You'll do as I asked and return to Paris," Bravo said a little anxiously.

"I told you at breakfast I would." She kissed Bravo and Jenny both on either cheek and advised them to enter the city amid the forming crush of tour groups.

This they did. As they passed through the ancient gates to the Old City, Bravo glanced over his shoulder, but the Citroe"n was nowhere to be seen.

Amid all the video equipment and digital cameras, the GPS Bravo had taken from Kavanaugh's car was inconspicuous. He punched in the coordinates his father had provided.

They stayed within the knot of the tour group for five or six minutes, but when it began to move out to its first destination, he went to their left. "This way," he said, heading through the narrow shop-lined streets. He led them through the maze of the Old City, heading generally northwest toward the seawall.

St. Malo, more or less midway along the Cote d'Emeraude, the Emerald Coast, was built on the rocky and often wild coast of Brittany, France's north shore. In the old days, it had harbored both merchant sailors and marauding corsairs. At that time, many of the European countries were at war, and the high seas was open territory. The kings of France, Spain, Holland and England did what they could to encourage private owners to arm their ships to attack enemy vessels. The French privateers were known as corsairs after the king's permit, a lettre de course, a formal authorization to carry out their business under strict regulations. Their booty was divided into equal shares split between the king, the ship owner and the crew.

The city was founded by Father MacLaw, a Welsh bishop who fled Wales to Brittany in 538, Malo being the French pronunciation of his name. Despite its advantageous location, the city did not attain real prominence until it was adopted by corsairs, who, growing rich and powerful, fortified it against their enemies both on the sea and on land. By 1590, the St. Malo corsairs had become so influential that they dared to declare the city a republic independent of both the federal and the municipal Breton governments.

Throughout the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, St. Malo acquired considerable wealth, not only from its maritime trade between the Americas and Europe but from its so-called Newfoundlanders, whose fleets fished for cod in the chill waters off the east coast of Canada. However successful these intrepid fishermen were, the bulk of the city's riches and fame was the result of the constant raids of its feared corsairs.

If one knew what to look for, St. Malo's rich and storied history was visible all around in the stone houses, the fortified walls, the brightly colored corsair pennants. Striding along cobbled streets, Jenny and Bravo reached the formidable seawall and now mounted the stone stairs set into its inside face. Gaining the top, they looked out onto the Gulf of St. Malo, beyond which were the gray-blue backs of Jersey and the Channel Islands, rising from the channel like breaching whales. The day was fair and what little breeze came to them was as soft and downy as a feather pillow. The summer sun blazed down from a clear sky. Because of yesterday's rain the normal heat haze had not yet reasserted itself. Every object stood out, sharp as a knife blade, and the vista seemed endless, the thick swath of sun-dazzle as solid-seeming as a pale stone road through a cobalt wood.

"There," Bravo said, pointing. "That's the spot!"

"But for miles and miles there's only water here," Jenny said. "Could your father have etched the wrong coordinates?"

Bravo shook his head. "He knew just what he was doing."

"Then how do you explain this?" Her arms swept out to encompass the infinite waterscape. "And what about the last four numbers-one, five, three, zero-what do they signify?"

Bravo glanced at his watch. "I don't know about you, but I'm hungry. Let's go down and have lunch at that pretty little cafe we passed."

Jenny looked at him sharply. "You know what the last number sequence means, don't you?" She shaded her eyes from the sun with the flat of her hand. The color had returned to her face, the spray of freckles across her nose clearly visible again. "Tell me."

"I don't want to spoil the surprise," he said with a laugh.

They sat in the tiny stone courtyard of the cafe, beneath a gaily striped umbrella, not three yards from the seawall. They could smell the tang of the brine and the sharp mineral scent of the ancient stone blocks. Jenny ate with little appetite. She drank no wine but insisted on iced coffee.

She wanted to talk about Camille Muhlmann but said nothing, afraid of Bravo's reaction. Fear of another sort, terribly familiar, was slithering through her belly like a serpent. Their sublime moment of intimacy should have changed everything, but when she had awoken this morning, her self-made wall had reasserted itself. Worse, she didn't trust her own feelings. After all, she admonished herself, she'd been no more than half conscious-perhaps the whole thing had been nothing more than a fever dream.

Seeing her shiver, Bravo said at once, "Are you all right?"

"I'm fine." There was a patch of sunlight on his face, making the electric-blue color of his eyes even more extravagant. "You don't have to keep asking me. Really."

"But you looked-"

Her face flushed with sudden anger and she shot him a poisoned look. "For God's sake, don't scrutinize me! Paolo Zorzi trained me-and trained me well-for this life. Do we have that straight?"

The remainder of the meal was passed without either of them uttering another word. The happy burble of voices, sudden bursts of laughter, clink of wine-filled glasses, amorous glances passed between couples at neighboring tables all served to depress her so thoroughly that before dessert and a refill of her iced coffee she was forced to closet herself in one of the two minuscule stalls in the cafe's bathroom so that she could burst into tears undetected. Dexter Shaw had charged her with protecting his son. Bad enough that Bravo had already seen her in a weakened state, she was certain he would lose all respect for her if he knew that she'd sunk so low.

After lunch, they mounted the seawall again and stood in the same spot as before. Again, Bravo pointed. "Look!"

As they watched, they saw a ghostly shape rising slowly out of the sea.

Jenny, glancing at her watch, said, "One, five, three, zero. Fifteen-thirty-it's military time! Three-thirty in the afternoon."

Bravo nodded. "My father was referring to the tide tables. See there, the ebbing tide is bringing his piscina to us."

The ghostly shape began to resolve itself as the water of the bay continued to recede. Soon it became clear that they were looking at concrete walls.

"A swimming pool!" Jenny exclaimed.

"Yes, and a damned clever one, too. Look, it's three-sided to hold the sea water and allow anyone coming from the shore to enter, so that people have a place to swim all afternoon long while the tide is out."

They went a little way along the seawall until they came to a flight of steps on its far side.

"Come on," he said.

Clattering down the steps, they emerged onto the beach. Immediately, they were struck by the reflected heat and a stronger scent of brine, along with the odors of aquatic decay, suntan oil and pleasantly perspiring bodies. Down the beach some way was a shack selling raw oysters, frites and cold drinks. The beach was filled with people-women in skimpy bikinis or bare-breasted, men talking, arms folded across their chests. Three children kicked a multicolored striped ball into the surf, where bathers were coming and going.

Bravo and Jenny removed their shoes. He rolled up his trousers and she lifted her skirt, wrapping it like a Turkish towel around the tops of her thighs. Then they walked across the sand, wading out toward the swimming pool, which was still rising from the restless waters of the bay.

Using the GPS, Bravo guided them deeper into the water, which rose to their thighs. When they reached the left wall of the pool, Bravo moved along it to the farthest point. He ran his fingers down the inside of the wall as far as they would go.

"Anything?" Jenny asked.

He shook his head.

Not far from where they stood, Camille leaned against the seawall. She had on a scarf that completely covered her hair, and she had bought a man's felt cap whose shallow brim she kept low on her forehead. Her elbows were on the top of the seawall, and her hands gripped a pair of powerful binoculars through which she peered at Bravo and Jenny. She watched with extreme concentration as Bravo handed the GPS, his passport and his cell phone to Jenny and then sank beneath the water.

Within three minutes, Bravo reappeared. Water streamed off him and his shirt clung to him like rags.

"There's a small, square door flush with the wall," he said as he wiped water out of his eyes. "The problem is that the door has no handle."

"Does it have a lock?"

"That's the other problem," Bravo said. "It's utterly unconventional."

"I know a bit about locks," Jenny said. "What does it look like?"

"It's a tiny square. Do you know of any kind of key that would open a square lock?"

Jenny shook her head, frowning. "But your father wouldn't have led you here unless he'd provided you with a way to open the door."

"I only have the one key he entrusted to me," Bravo said. "I promise you it's not going to open that peculiar lock."

"What else did you find in the boat compartment?" she said.

He dug in his pocket, produced the Zippo, the cuff links and the enamel lapel pin. He stared at them for a moment, trying to think as his father would have thought. The Zippo was far too big and the pin was the wrong shape, but the cuff links were cubes-and they were more or less the right size. He picked up one of them and stared at the groove pattern around its side.

"You're right!" he said excitedly, showing Jenny the grooves. "This isn't simply a cuff link-it's a key! The key to the underwater door!"

He went under the water, but soon-too soon-reemerged.

"It slides into the lock but won't turn."

"The groove pattern is wrong," Jenny said. "Try the other one."

As Bravo submerged again, Camille trained her attention on Jenny. Camille felt that she knew Bravo well enough. After all, she'd had years to absorb all the ins and outs of his psyche. It was critical now that she be able to do the same with Jenny, and her time frame was by necessity terribly compressed. Even her mole inside the Order hadn't known who would assign the Guardian to Bravo, let alone which Guardian it would be. To be truthful, she had been surprised that it had been Jenny.

In any event, if she was to carry out her plan, namely to herd Bravo and Jenny like cattle, separate them, make them desperate, then she needed to be able to get inside both their heads. What interested her now was that though they had spent the night together, Jenny was still maintaining a certain distance. In fact, from her expression and body language, Camille was sure that she was angry-but whether it was with Bravo or herself she could not yet say. Was she frigid or, possibly, gay? This was an important question for Camille because it was her experience that sexuality was a major determinant of human behavior. Camille had been in the next stall when Jenny had locked herself in and started to sob. She felt sure that this was a key moment to getting beneath the Guardian's skin and was frustrated that she hadn't learned what had caused Jenny to break down so hard.

Watching her now with the sun in her eyes, her hair gleaming, her shapely torso emerging from the white glare of the water, Camille found it in herself to admire the woman's recuperative powers, but what she was really concentrating on was the next phase of her plan to peel back the layers that all human beings erect to protect themselves and lay bare the vulnerable points she could exploit.

It was as blue under the water as the arching rock face of the Grotta Azzurra. The pale legs of waders, the hairy bellies of swimmers, Jenny's thighs-everything appeared distorted, save for the door in the concrete wall. Brushing it with the flat of his hand brought out a shine, and he could see that it was some kind of metal-stainless steel, perhaps, to repel the effects of the salt.

As if in slow motion, he extended the cuff link into the lock, turning it forty-five degrees at a time until he was able to press it all the way into the lock. He turned it and pulled. Nothing happened. He turned it the other way, pulled again and the door swung open. With his other hand, he reached in, felt something and immediately pulled it out. It was a small packet sealed in plastic. He checked to make sure there was nothing else inside the box, then he relocked it, extracted the key and, with a strong kick, breached the surface.

The moment he surfaced, he opened his fist just enough for Jenny to see what he held, then together they waded back to shallower water. They moved some distance away from the swimmers, finding a small patch of open water. As Bravo was about to open his fist again, Jenny put her hand over his and moved so that her back was to the shore.

"It pays to be cautious," she said. "We've been spied on more than once, and even though I finished off the Knights in the Mercedes, we can't be certain there wasn't a backup team in place. In fact, knowing how the Knights work, I'd be surprised if there wasn't. Given the stakes, I'll bet they're bending all their resources to keep us in range."

Bravo took a surreptitious look around. "Then why stand out in the open altogether?"

"No point in telegraphing how vigilant we are. Let them think we've forgotten all about them."

Bravo frowned, then nodded. As usual, what she said made good sense. In the shadow thrown by their closely bent heads he carefully opened the watertight wrapping and unfolded a sheet of paper. Inside was a gold coin of a male figure in a beatific pose, one hand raised in benediction. On the sheet of paper was written in his father's neat backward-slanting hand, "A scene of light and glory, a dominion/That has endured the longest among men."

Jenny looked at him questioningly. "What does it mean? More code?"

"In a way," Bravo said thoughtfully. "The quotation is from Samuel Rogers. It was a favorite of my father's, but only my mother and I knew that, I doubt that even Emma knows." He recited the two lines as if they were a prayer. "Rogers was writing about Venice."

"Obviously, that's our next stop," Jenny said. "What about the coin?"

Bravo held it between his fingertips, feeling its deep ridges. He turned it slowly, examining both its face and obverse. "First off, it's not a reproduction. It's very old-ancient, in fact. I think it will tell me where in Venice my father is sending us."

"You mean you don't know?"

"Not yet." He smiled into her concerned face. "Don't look so gloomy, I'll find the answer. When it comes to my father's codes I always have."

His heart beat fast. He was holding the confirmation in his hands. He was on a long journey, one that would keep him connected to his father even after death, for they had played this game often enough during Bravo's childhood-a game of codes, each one exponentially more difficult to crack than the last. At least, that was how it had seemed to Bravo when he was growing up. Now he knew that the lessons his father had taught him in code breaking must have been leading up to this moment. Had Dexter Shaw foreseen his death? Surely not, surely he'd been ensuring that when the time came he'd have a successor.

Bravo closed his fist around the coin. It had been warmed by the sun and by his own blood. The coin, the paper with the quotation, even the Zippo lighter had taken on far more importance. They were not simply the last remnants of his father's life. As cold and dead as he was, they carried the heat of life, the joy he'd experienced each and every time his father had challenged him to match wits. These clues brought him closer to his father than he had been since his childhood-a time when the world had made sense, when he and his father were tied together by the ever more complex and puzzling series of codes, as if they were the only two people in the universe.

Bravo and Jenny moved slowly back to where their shoes lay baking on the pale sand and sat for a time, watching swimmers in the piscina. From a plastic portable radio next to a bare-breasted sunbather came a plaintive pop song by Mylene Farmer. A group of children played in the sand, digging and building a wall from time to time undermined by the water. A pair of German women, pale-skinned and hollow-chested, walked the surf, talking of a pair of shoes they'd seen in a shopwindow. The scent of crepes and wine mingled with the salt tang. The heat of the sun baked into them, drying their clothes, the water evaporating to gritty salt on their skin.

At last, they pulled on their shoes and left the beach and its unique piscina. As they mounted the seawall, Bravo pulled out his cell phone and called the airline, making a reservation on the last flight to Venice.

"I suppose I shouldn't have sent Camille away. We need transportation back to Paris," he said when he severed the connection. "We'll walk into the new city and ask someone for directions to a rental car office."

The Old City was dense with tourists, slowing their trek through its packed streets, but at last they caught sight of the main gate.

"Now's the time to be on our guard," Jenny said.

Bravo nodded and began to walk toward the gate, but he swung around as her hand gripped his arm.

"I'm going first," she said and almost at once raised a hand to stop his intended protest. "It won't matter what argument you use, the outcome will be the same." Her gaze was as steady as it was serious. "You think I'm not up to it, but I promise you I am."

"You did a helluva job protecting me and Camille on the motorway," Bravo said, matching her serious tone. "I guess I didn't tell you that before."

"No," Jenny said, "you didn't."

She let go of him and strode purposefully past. He followed her as she snaked her way through the throng of sightseers streaming through the gate and out onto the cobbled road beyond which stretched the bus-filled car park.

They had to pause, waiting for a gap in the slow crawl of cars backed up along the road. The air was stifling with the accumulation of sun, baking stone and exhaust emissions. People were everywhere: tourists in twos, fours, and larger groups; bicyclists on errands or just out for exercise; children laughing, crying or screaming; exasperated parents tugging at their little hands. Sweet scents came to them of ice cream, sticky candy and cheap cologne. Jenny turned, saw coming toward them a group of perhaps fifteen children between the ages of eight and nine. They were accompanied by three adults, one at their head, one behind, and the third walking alongside.

A gap was opening up in the traffic flow and she was turning away when she saw movement in the corner of her eye. The third adult had broken into a lope, leaving the group of children behind. The other two adult supervisors were paying him no mind, which told Jenny they didn't know him, he'd been using the children as camouflage.

Grabbing Bravo, she plunged headlong into the gap in the traffic, but they were no more than halfway across the blisteringly hot road when she saw the bicyclist bearing down on them. It was a two-pronged attack.

There was no more time for speculation. The cyclist had a length of wicked-looking polished wood in his hand and was lifting it in preparation of delivering a blow. She had to act now.

Pushing Bravo aside, she stood tall, waited for the downswing of the stick and, moving her arm in parallel to its arc, grabbed it and, at the same time, drove the cocked elbow of her other arm into the cyclist's throat. She kicked the front wheel and the bicycle went over, taking its rider with it.

"Run!" she shouted to Bravo. "Run!"

Together, they took off along the road in the same direction as the traffic flow. Horns blared and voices were raised in outrage as they darted in and out between the cars. Risking a glance behind them, Jenny saw the first man had grabbed the fallen bicycle. He swung aboard and took off after them. In one hand he brandished a large gun.

They ran as fast as they could, but because they had to watch out for the lurching cars, stopping and starting as they brushed against them, it was slow and perilous going. The cyclist was gaining on them rapidly. Jenny looked around for alternate escape routes, but the crowd pressed in at every direction. They'd be sitting ducks for the cyclist, unless… She moved them into the thickest part of the throng, using the people around them as a shield.

But at that moment, another, even greater danger presented itself. A silver BMW X5 SUV appeared in the carpark, racing toward them from the opposite direction.

"The vise is complete," Bravo said without rancor.

There was no time for evasive manuevers-the oncoming BMW was upon them. In a moment, Jenny thought, they'd be dead meat, and there wasn't a thing she could do about it.

Chapter 13

Jenny, tensed and determined to do what she could to protect Bravo from the Knights' attack, saw the driver's head pop out of the side window.

"Get in!" he shouted.

Even while she was wondering what Anthony Rule was doing here, Bravo called out, "Uncle Tony!"

Rule risked a quick glance at the cyclist and at once saw the raised gun. "Get in, the two of you! Hurry!"

Jenny opened the SUV's door, placing her body as a shield between Bravo and the gunman. A shot rang out, piercing the window, shattering the glass. Jenny pushed Bravo's head down behind the metal as she bundled him into the backseat. The instant she jumped in, Rule took off. With a fierce blare of his horn he stopped two oncoming cars in their tracks and caused a minor fender bender as the vehicle behind them couldn't stop in time. He turned the wheel over, they jumped the low concrete divider between the road and the car park and, with more room to maneuver, he accelerated into the vast cobbled apron behind the line of tour buses. By this time they'd left the gunman far behind, a fact remarked on by Rule as he checked the rearview mirror.

"I'd have run over the bastard if I'd been alone," he said. Then he chuckled low in his throat. "But if I'd been alone he never would have been here, would he?"

"Speaking of which," Jenny said tartly, "what are you doing here?"

"Wait a minute," Bravo said, "you two know each other?"

"You're welcome," Rule said to Jenny as if Bravo hadn't asked the question. Then, when he saw her frown, his eyes flicked to Bravo in the mirror. "What was I thinking? She's the Ice Goddess, after all."

"The Ice Goddess. That's what the other Guardians call me," Jenny muttered darkly.

"You give them sufficient cause," Rule said.

"Oh, yes," she said, rising to the bait, "it's always my fault, isn't it?"

"And here's a newsflash for you, kiddo, it isn't only the Guardians."

"Why should I give a crap?"

Rule shrugged, as if to say that if she didn't want to take his advice, it was of no moment to him.

Bravo observed this dialog with a growing sense of astonishment. Not only did his father have a life kept secret from him, so did Uncle Tony.

"Shaken up, Bravo?" Rule said, as if reading his thoughts.

"Give me a minute."

Rule drove them out of the rear of the car park and into the new city, turning this way and that as if he were in a video game, making sure their enemies couldn't follow them. Of course, it made perfect sense that Uncle Tony was a Gnostic Observatine. Bravo had always called him Uncle Tony not because he was related but because he was so close with Bravo's father.

"You still haven't told us what you're doing here," Jenny pursued doggedly. "It can't be coincidence."

"Coincidence doesn't exist in the Voire Dei, does it, kiddo?" Rule shook his head. "No, I was following the trail of the second key."

"The second key?" Bravo said.

Uncle Tony nodded. "There are two keys to the cache. Your father had one, Molko had the other. Molko was taken by the Knights, tortured and killed. We have to assume they have the second key."

"So it has turned into a race," Bravo said.

"In a sense," Uncle Tony said. "Except that the Knights don't yet know the location of the cache. Only your father knew it."

"That's why I was being tailed all the way from New York to Washington," Bravo said. He thought of Rossi making sure they wouldn't be shot when they fled Jenny's house, the rubber bullet with which Jenny had been shot at the cemetery. Now he had confirmation of his theory that the Knights hadn't been sent to kill them; they needed to find out the location of the cache. "But Jenny and I took care of that before we came here."

"What you need to understand," Rule said, "is that the Knights of St. Clement are like a hydra-lop off two heads and four more take their place."

"They can't have a bug on Bravo," Jenny said. "He's got nothing on him he had in Washington, not even his clothes."

Bravo leaned forward, his forearms across the back of the driver's seat. "Except for the few things my father left me, and no one except me had any knowledge of where they were or their significance."

Jenny nodded. "They must be using another method to track you."

"What do I do, then?" Bravo said.

"Keep to the plan. Trust your father. That's all you can do," Uncle Tony said. "Meanwhile, Jenny here has your back."

He accelerated past two cars stuck behind a laboring truck. "Sorry about your dad. He was one of a kind-a great man and the best friend I ever had."

"Thanks," Bravo said, "that means a lot to me."

"I know you were Dexter Shaw's oldest friend inside the Order," Jenny said. "Is that why you're here?"

"And you thought it was to check up on you," Rule said with a not unkind snort. He was a tall, rangy man, with the rough and ruddy skin of an outdoorsman. His hair was going gray at the temples and was brushed forward in the style of a Roman senator. "Well, I don't blame you. Kavanaugh took it into his head to light out after you." A livid scar, slightly raised and ropy, ran down the left side of his jaw like an exclamation mark. "I'd say 'poor Kavanaugh,' if only the bastard had deserved it."

Jenny looked at him for a moment, then turned away to stare out the window.

Rule pursed his lips as if he had just tasted something rotten.

"Kavanaugh made a mistake, let's leave it at that," Bravo said. He had grown increasingly uncomfortable with their occasional verbal slaps, and he meant to put a stop to it. "Right now, what we need most is a lift to Paris. We've got a flight out of Charles de Gaulle at nine p.m. for Venice."

Anthony Rule nodded. "Only too happy to be of service." Though he was in his late fifties, time had been kind to him. He had lost none of the casual good looks that had naturally attracted women all his life. "Bravo, to be honest, Dex's death was a shock to me, but it was hardly a surprise. I think by now you must know what I mean. Dex knew he was marked for death, knew his murder was possible, perhaps even inevitable. That's the brutal nature of our war against the powers of evil and corruption. I wish it could be otherwise, but until the Knights of St. Clement are annihilated, it can't. It's as simple as that."

"It seems to me that an enmity that has survived for centuries would be anything but simple," Bravo said.

"Listen to the expert." Rule shook his head. "Instead of waxing philosophical, you should be concentrating that brilliant mind of yours on how the Knights have been able to keep tabs on you."

"My father-and Jenny's-both believed there was a traitor inside the Haute Cour," Bravo said. "Do you?"

Rule shot a quick glance at Jenny in the rearview mirror. "I see you've been doing your job in other ways as well, kiddo."

Bravo noticed that Jenny had returned from her sullen contemplation of the road. At last, Uncle Tony had her full attention.

"Do you have any idea who the traitor is?" Jenny said.

"That was Dex's obsession," Rule said darkly. "As for me, my attentions are elsewhere. I have no opinion."

They were on the motorway now, heading back to Charles de Gaulle Airport. Rule exited the motorway and, slowing considerably, joined the traffic on the secondary road. He took one of his periodic reads of the cars in the side mirror and made two quick turns. "Okay, we're clean."

They were now on a long, relatively straight stretch of road that was perfect for keeping an eye out for tails.

"They want our secrets, Bravo," Rule continued. "But they especially want one secret-the one your father was guarding with his life."

"But I don't even know what that secret is."

"Of course you don't. Jenny doesn't know what it is, and neither does the majority of the Order. But I do." The entrance to the motorway came up fast on his left. Rule was already in the left lane, but there was a broken-down car blocking the entrance and he zoomed past without being able to get on.

Jenny had already turned her torso half around so that she could look through the rear window.

"What's going on?" Bravo said.

Rule sat a little forward, his body tense. "We've got a problem."

"Picked up another tail." Jenny moved slightly closer to Bravo on the backseat to improve her view. "White Mercedes coupe three cars back."

Rule nodded. "That's the one, but my concern is that it might not be the only one."

"What makes you say that?" Bravo asked.

"The broken-down car that was blocking the motorway entrance," Jenny said.

"It kept us on this road," Rule said. He turned the wheel hard, and the X5 skidded slightly. He pressed the accelerator to the floor, and they were thrown backward into their seats.

"Now we'll really see what this can do," Rule said. "I have a twelve-cylinder engine in here that should let us do everything but take off."

Up ahead, Bravo saw a red Audi move over to the left and accelerate to match their speed.

"It's a box, all right," Jenny called out.

Rule nodded again. "They've got us front and rear. Better fasten your seat belts, children."

He wove in and out of the traffic, cutting his lane-changing within a hairsbreadth of disaster. He was deliberately going faster than the traffic flow, and now it was easy to see the two Knight vehicles-the Audi in front, the Mercedes behind.

All at once, the Audi slowed. Rule stepped on the brakes, skidding slightly, and he shifted down to compensate. An instant later, they were slammed by the Mercedes, and he accelerated directly at the Audi. The Audi, smaller and lighter by far than either the BMW or the Mercedes, skittered to life, staying in front of them.

"This isn't good," Rule said. "I have to assume they want us on this road for a reason."

No sooner had he said this than he saw the semi idling up ahead. Its rear doors gaped open, a steel ramp extending down from it.

"That's why they put us in a box," Rule said. "They want to herd us into the semi."

To their left loomed the off-ramp to the motorway. Rule waited until the last possible instant, then he swerved for it. A gray Renault was lumbering along the exit ramp when the driver saw the BMW X5 on a collision course. The Renault's horn blared furiously even as it slewed out of the way. Rule accelerated up the off-ramp and onto the motorway.

They had lost both the Audi and the Mercedes, but now the BMW was heading the wrong way. Horns sounded and brakes screeched as disbelieving drivers struggled to get out of the way without slamming their vehicles into other cars or the guard rails. Mercifully, there was a breakdown area that Rule used to make a screeching U-turn, pulling out into the disjointed traffic flow before his passengers had a chance to catch their breath.

They were by this time northwest of Chartres, and at the exit for the town of Dreux, Rule cut across the entire motorway to take the off-ramp. As he slowed the X5, he pulled out a cell phone and made a brief call, his voice so low that neither Bravo nor Jenny could hear what he said.

Within six minutes they were in Dreux. It was a small industrial town filled with hulking foundries, refineries, sprawling factories where televisions, boilers and chemicals were manufactured. Not surprisingly, it was an ugly and vaguely depressing place, despite its trees and flower beds. The stern and forbidding Gothic St. Pierre's Church was one of the few surviving medieval buildings to remind those with a sense of history that Dreux had once belonged to the counts of Vexin and the dukes of Normandy.

"All the counts of Vexin were members of the Order in their time," Rule said. "In this way, Dreux still belongs to us. These are my people, I can vouch for every one of them."

They were met outside St. Pierre's by a slim young man in jeans and a T-shirt, whose eyes were completely hidden by a pair of glasses with reflective lenses. Ignoring Bravo and Jenny completely, he exchanged keys with Rule. He went straight to the BMW and drove off.

The interior of St. Pierre's was cool and dim. The air was faintly tinged with incense and massed voices raised in hypnotic liturgical chant. Rule led them to a particularly gloomy side chapel dominated by the emaciated figure of Christ, body bent backward, eyes raised heavenward.

They stood close together, listening for hurried footsteps or stealthy movement in the shadows. Bravo felt the Voire Dei close around them, as if they had sunk beneath the Bay of St. Malo. From time to time, he saw small groups of tourists, or a priest striding past on some unknown business, and he was struck by how removed he felt from them. It was as if they existed in an old, dim print he was being shown. And he thought Jenny was right, he could never go back to their reality.

At length, Rule took off his sunglasses and said very softly to Bravo, "You must listen to me closely because I suspect that there may be no other time for me to tell you what your father entrusted me to say. The secret the Order has guarded for centuries, the secret Rome has wanted above all others is this: we have a fragment of the Testament."

"Testament?" Bravo said. "What testament?"

Rule's eyes flashed with a kind of fervor Bravo had never before seen. "The Testament of Jesus Christ."

Bravo's heart seemed to give a painful lurch against his rib cage. "Are you serious?"

"Never more so," Rule said.

A priest walked by, saw them and nodded with a smile. All three fell silent until he had disappeared from view.

When Rule spoke again, his voice was both lower and more urgent. "Tell me, Bravo, in your studies have you come across the Secret Gospel According to Mark?"

"Of course," Bravo nodded. "In 1958, a scholar discovered it in the library of the Mar Saba monastery near Jerusalem. He found a handwritten text on the endpapers of a 1646 edition of Isaac Voss's 'Epistolae genuinae S. Ignatii Martyris.'"

Rule grinned. "Full marks, as usual."

"And they came into Bethany," Bravo recited from the Secret Gospel. "And a certain woman whose brother had died was there. And, coming, she prostrated herself before Jesus and said to him, 'Son of David, have mercy on me.' But the disciples rebuked her. And Jesus, being angered, went off with her into the garden where the tomb was, and straightaway, going in where the youth was, he stretched forth his hand and raised him…"

Rule laughed. "Of course, your eidetic memory."

"Basically, the Secret Gospel has been derided by Bible scholars because it depicts Jesus as a miracle worker, which runs counter to formal Church doctrine. It describes in detail how Jesus resurrected not only Lazarus, as is told in the eleventh chapter of Clement, but this boy and others as well."

"That's correct," Rule said. "And so dangerous was the Secret Gospel deemed that it was secretly suppressed by the Church in the fourth century, and then destroyed. Or so they thought."

"This is one of the secrets in the cache my father was guarding?"

"That's right," Rule said.

"Are you saying that you think it's true?"

"I know it is," Rule said, "because the fragment of the Testament of Jesus Christ confirms it. This is why it is vital that it and the other documents so closely guarded for centuries not fall into the hands of the Knights of St. Clement, for they will surely destroy all trace of them as if they had never existed."

"If what you're saying is true," Bravo said, "then why are you holding on to this secret? It's not only a religious artifact-it's an archeological miracle, a part of history. Why not reveal it to the world?"

"Bringing the Testament to light would violate our basic tenets, and this we will not do."

"I don't understand."

"It's not only the Testament that we possess," Rule said. "We also have the Quintessence."

"What?" Bravo had started, as if pricked by a needle.

Rule nodded. "You heard me."

"The fabled fifth element," Bravo breathed. "Medieval philosophers were convinced that the celestial regions were composed of earth, air, fire, water and the Quintessence-the essence of life itself. I always assumed that the Quintessence was a myth, like alchemy and turning water into wine."

"It's quite real, I assure you," Rule said.

"But what exactly is it? Can you see it, feel it, taste it, or is it beyond man's ability to observe and to quantify?"

"In His Testament, Jesus describes it as an 'oil,' but that term may or may not bear a resemblance to what we think of as oil." Rule leaned in, lowered his voice. "What makes the fragment of the Testament so explosive, so potentially dangerous to the Church, is that in it Jesus writes that it is by means of the Quintessence that he resurrected Lazarus and the others."

"But that goes against Church doctrine. The scriptures say that Jesus resurrected Lazarus by His divine power."

"Indeed, that has been the accepted interpretation since time immemorial," Rule said. "But the Testament of Jesus Christ clearly states that it is the Quintessence that brings Lazarus back to life. Christ makes no mention of a divine power."

Bravo was stunned. "Wait a minute-"

"Yes, yes, you see the mind-boggling implications. If it was the Quintessence that resurrected Lazarus and not Jesus's divine power, then the stories of him being a healer, the stories that the Church has systematically repressed, are true. And it might also be true that when he died his disciples resurrected him using the Quintessence."

Bravo's mind was reeling. At last he understood. "The entire structure of the Catholic faith would crumble because it would call into question whether Jesus was, in fact, the son of God."

"This is why over the centuries kings have been assassinated, regimes have been toppled, countless lives have been lost, blood has been spilled." Periodically, Rule tried to decode the shadows beyond the columns. "Your father told me he read the Testament, authenticated it. There is no doubt it's a fragment of the Testament of Jesus Christ, none at all."

Bravo stood absolutely immobile. To someone with his training, the idea of finding even a fragment of the Testament of Christ was akin to suddenly unearthing the Holy Grail. And, on top of that, to have the Quintessence, as well! The very possibility that Uncle Tony was right took his breath away.

"If the Order has had the Quintessence for all this time, if it actually exists," Bravo said, "then why didn't you use it to heal the sick and infirm?"

"That precise point was the subject of much heated debate in the twelve hundreds between Fra Leoni, the Keeper, and Fra Prospero, the Order's Magister Regens." Rule kept shifting his gaze to areas of the interior. "Two reasons for keeping the Quintessence secret prevailed over all the others: One, man was not meant to be immortal, or even to have his lifetime unnaturally extended. Two, news of the Quintessence would bring out the worst in people. What do you suppose would happen? A stampede, a panic in the general populace. But it would never get that far, because the rich and the powerful would contrive to steal it, to keep the secret for their own benefit, to extend their own lives. By applying the Quintessence at intervals they would live virtually forever."

Bravo's mind was moving at lightning speed. This was why the Knights were in a sudden lather to find the cache-the Vatican was pushing them to find the Quintessence. The pope was gravely ill. Was he ready to die? If so, the Quintessence was his only hope. The closer the pope came to death, the more pressure the Vatican would put on the Knights, the more of their power would be wielded. He'd have to remember that. Even in this day and age, the Vatican's power was a net flung far and wide across the globe wherever Christ had been introduced.

"And so power, already concentrated, would become ever more so," Rule continued. "And then there would be governments, rogue individuals, terrorists who would wish to use the Quintessence for their own ends, rather than for the betterment of mankind. Unmitigated disaster." He shook his head sadly. "No, the Quintessence is too powerful for mankind-it only seems like a gift, but that's the nature of all corrupting influences."

"If you feel that way, then why not destroy it?"

"It's not up to me, is it? But any archeologist will tell you-I'm sure you know this and are testing me-it would be criminal to willfully destroy such a miraculous artifact from the time of Christ. Jesus himself held the Quintessence in his-"

Some movement Rule had been looking for must have occurred because he said, "Come now, quickly, quickly!" and with his arms he guided them deeper into the shadows of the chapel. Groping along the plaster of the rear wall, he found a small glass knob and, pulling on it, opened a small door.

Pushing them into the dark doorway, he said, "This passageway will take you to a side entrance. There are a number of turns, but the door to the outside will be at the far end, not along either wall."

"Who did you see?" Jenny said.

"It doesn't matter," Bravo said. "Come on, Uncle Tony."

"I'm not going with you." Rule put the set of keys the young man had given him into Jenny's hand.

"Oh, no you don't," Jenny said. "I'm not going to let you-"

"You'll do your job," Rule said shortly, "which is to protect Bravo with your life. Leave these people to me. Besides, you have a plane to catch, and if I don't provide a diversion you're never going to make it."

"I won't leave you," Bravo said. "You taught me never to run from a fight, and I sure as hell am not going to start now."

Rule put his hands on Bravo's shoulders. "I appreciate the sentiment, Bravo, really I do, but sentiment has no place in the Voire Dei."

"I don't believe that."

"You'll learn soon enough that I'm right." He gripped Bravo all the harder. "In any case, we all have our roles to play in this war, and yours is safeguarding the Testament and the Quintessence. You're the Keeper: at all costs, you must remember that."

Rule stared into Bravo's eyes. He had the knack of making you feel as if you and he were the only two people in the world. "Since Dex's murder and the deaths of the other members of the Haute Cour, we've been virtually leaderless and terribly vulnerable. If you fail to find the cache or-worse-if the Knights of St. Clement should wrest it from you, we'll be undone. They'll have in their possession all the secret knowledge we have acquired. With the promise of the immortality the Quintessence provides, they could create unprecedented havoc-they will have the wherewithal to entice key personnel within governments, economic combines or even terrorist organizations to do their bidding. They could become an unstoppable force, subverting world policy on every level."

Jenny closed her fist over the keys.

Rule nodded to her gratefully. "The car's a black Audi cabriolet-very sporty, good cover." He told them where it was parked. "Now go!"

He fairly pushed them into the darkness. Then he closed the door and, turning, prepared to meet the Knights he'd seen entering the church.

"The man with the gold teardrop stud in his left ear."

"I see him," Bravo said.

He and Jenny were standing in the dimness of the church's side doorway. Late afternoon sunlight, thick as honey, laid down long shadows. Across the street, leaning against the front fender of the white Mercedes, was the Knight with the gold teardrop stud in his ear. He was trying to look nonchalant, but his eyes were hard and flinty as they scanned each individual that came into range.

"Go to the car as if nothing's the matter." Jenny was all business now. "The important thing is to walk at a normal pace-not too fast, not too slow-and don't look for him."

"He'll see me, and he'll come for me."

"I'm counting on it," she said. And then as Bravo was about to walk away, she added, "As long as he doesn't suspect you're on to him we're okay, understand?"

He nodded and left the protection of the recessed doorway, striding out into the white glare and the deep blue shadows that lapped at his ankles. His heart thumped hard and there was a buzzing in his ears that caused him to walk stiff-legged and a bit too fast. He caught himself and, with an effort, he relaxed, slowed down.

There was movement all around him, and he found the most difficult part was not to look in the Knight's direction. He thought of the essential mystery of film or TV actors that had fascinated him when he was a child: how they had trained themselves to ignore the camera completely. Now he was in the same situation, forced to ignore the man with the gold stud.

"As long as he doesn't suspect you're on to him we're okay, understand?"

He stepped off the curb. Checking for oncoming vehicles, he strode across the street. He could see the black Audi cabriolet, its cloth top up. So far as he could determine, there was no one around it. But how can you be sure? He kept going, his pace remaining constant, though his nerves were screaming.

Movement flickered in the extreme corner of his eye. It was coming from his left, the direction in which he and Jenny had seen the man with the stud in his ear lounging against the white Mercedes.

He's coming!

He kept his focus on the nearby Audi. He told himself that he trusted Jenny, trusted her expertise, trusted her plan. In any event, it was too late for doubts. He'd committed himself and there was no turning back.

Three steps, four, and then a hand gripped his shirt, the long, slender fingers curling, the nails digging into his flesh. He turned, saw a flash of metal-the gold stud-and, below, another metallic flash from the drawn gun raised into a patch of brilliant sunlight.

There was just enough time to take in the look of triumph on the Knight's narrow face before his black eyes rolled up. Jenny, who had come up behind him without making a sound, caught him under the arms just as he collapsed and together, she and Bravo half dragged the man onto the curb.

In response to the inquiring look a passing couple gave them, Jenny said, "Our friend had too much wine at lunch." The couple hurried on, in no mood to have their vacation interrupted.

Leaving the unconscious Knight propped up against an iron fence, Jenny and Bravo got into the Audi and drove away.

They reached Charles de Gaulle without further incident but with little time to spare, which was just as well since neither of them had any appetite for waiting around the airport for the Knights to find them again. In any event, Jenny, on somber lookout from the moment they exited St. Pierre, was convinced they hadn't been followed from Dreux.

All the way to the airport Anthony Rule had been on both their minds, though perhaps for different reasons. Rule had been like Bravo's second father and, in fact, on occasion had stood in for his best friend when Dexter Shaw had been unable to attend his son's school play or athletic meet. Rule, who was unmarried and childless, had openly reveled in his relationship with Bravo, imparting bits of wisdom or tricks for any and all of the physical disciplines the young boy was studying. So it wasn't difficult to understand why Bravo adored him. What seemed obvious now had never occurred to Bravo at the time: namely, that it was no coincidence that Uncle Tony was proficient in all the disciplines he was learning to master and only too delighted to help Bravo toward further success.

"It must have been interesting having Anthony in your life," Jenny said as they were cruising the car park, trying to decipher the confusing signs. The French seemed to have a fetish for making their airports as difficult to navigate as possible. "What was it like?"

"It was great." Bravo pointed to what looked like a space at the far end of the row. "He was like my father, without all the baggage between a father and son."

"Well, that was an answer I wasn't anticipating."

"What's with you and Uncle Tony, anyway?" Someone had parked a car over the dividing line and the spot was too small even for the cabriolet "Do you mix it up like that with all your superiors?"

Jenny shrugged. "More or less, but I can tell you that none of them are like Anthony Rule."

"Don't tell me you have a thing for him."

She winced. "Not in the least." A spot opened up in the next row, and they pulled in. She sat for a moment, unmoving, staring straight ahead at nothing.

Bravo had seen that five-mile stare before, and he knew her mind was working overtime. By now he understood that she had a difficult time revealing anything of herself, and when she did, as she had at Mont St. Michel, she immediately withdrew into the anonymity of her self-made armor.

"It's okay if you don't want to-"

"Shut up," she interrupted in a rush. It was as if once she'd begun she wanted to make certain she said what was on her mind. "I respect Anthony tremendously-he and your father were two of the really good guys. Because of that, it's painful when he ridicules me."

"He ridicules you because he likes you," Bravo said.

"Really?"

He nodded. "He used to do it to me, too."

She had turned to look at him, to make certain he was being sincere. It gradually dawned on him what a terrible price she'd paid for maintaining her position in the Order. She had developed an assumption that when she was with a man she was bound to be the butt of endless jokes.

On impulse, he said, "Dorothy Parker once said that ridicule might be a shield, but it's not a weapon."

She stared at him for what seemed a long time. "Well," she said in a soft voice, "I guess it's safe to say that Dorothy Parker was never a part of the Voire Dei."

She got out of the Audi on the pretext of needing to stretch her legs, but in reality she was afraid that the look on her face would reveal her true feelings. She had been surprised that he had understood the crux of her plight and terribly touched by his attempt to mitigate her anguish by putting it in the words of the famous author feared for her sarcastic wit by men and women alike. Right now, though, having been so recently vulnerable, she could not afford to allow her normal steely facade to waver.

Inside the terminal, they picked up their tickets. As they were going through security, Bravo's cell phone rang. On the other side of the checkpoint, he discovered that Jordan had called. The tone on his voice mail was thin and strained, not at all the sanguine Jordan Bravo was used to.

Jordan picked up during the first ring when Bravo called back.

"C,a va, mon ami?"

"None the worse for wear, Jordan."

"And your friend Jenny?"

"Right beside me," Bravo said with a frown. They were heading toward the gate and he was on the lookout for a bookstore. "You're the one who sounds bad."

"Ah, well, the Dutch have been working me over. Without you, I am lost. You're the one who knows how to handle them-you intimidate them, you see."

"The secret is simple, Jordan. The next time you meet with mem you must be mentally prepared to walk away from the deal. If you are, they'll sense it and back down. They don't want this deal to fall through, trust me."

"I do, mon ami. I will do as you suggest." Jordan took a breath. "But this other matter-I am not encouraged by what Camille tells me. I think you should consider abandoning this quest you seem to be on."

"I can't, Jordan, I'm sorry. This is something I have to do."

"Camille warned me you'd say that. Then you must allow me to provide you with a higher level of security. Where are you now?"

"At Charles de Gaulle. We're taking an Air France flight that gets into Venice at 10:45 tonight."

He spotted the bookseller and, with Jenny at his side, headed toward it.

"Bon. I will make a hotel reservation for you and have you met at Marco Polo Airport. A man named Berio. He'll be armed and will stay with you for as long as you're in the city."

"Jordan-"

"This is non-negotiable, mon ami. I'm not going to risk losing you-my business would collapse inside a year." He laughed, but quickly sobered. "Take care of yourself and of Jenny. You are vulnerable until you step onto the plane."

"Don't worry, Jordan, I'll be careful." He hesitated a moment. "And Jordan…"

"Oui?"

"Thanks."

He made several purchases at the bookseller, then they headed straight for the gate. By the time they arrived, their flight had begun boarding. It was with a palpable sense of relief that they surrendered their boarding passes and passed into the covered jetway.

The flight was full. Under the pretext of using the bathroom Jenny went back down the aisle, checking each and every passenger, committing their physiognomy to memory. Returning to her seat, she buckled up.

"I think we're okay," she said.

"I wonder if the same can be said for Uncle Tony."

"I wouldn't worry about Anthony, he's extremely capable."

"So was my father," Bravo said bitterly.

That silenced her, which, it seemed, was how he wanted it When they had been in the air for some minutes, he took the time to reexamine the items he had discovered in the compartment on his father's boat. He held the gunmetal Zippo lighter in the palm of his hand, slowly turning it over and over.

"When is a Zippo lighter not a Zippo lighter?" Jenny said, trying to reestablish contact.

As if in response to her semiserious question, he pulled off the gunmetal-colored sheath. Inside, stuck into the housing below the wick, was a snapshot of a small boy. It was faded and grainy, but the child's face was plain enough.

"You were such a cute boy," Jenny said, leaning over.

Without a word, he slid the casing back over the photo, pocketed the Zippo.

"Why d'you think your father hid the photo of you?"

"I haven't the slightest idea." At once, he knew he'd made a mistake, and in an attempt to assuage her quickening interest, he added, "It was a complete surprise to me. Didn't Uncle Tony say that sentiment had no place in the Voire Dei?"

"So far as I can tell, Anthony doesn't have a sentimental bone in his body."

"He loved my father, and he loves me," Bravo said. "Anyway, it seems to me that his lack of professional sentiment is an asset."

Jenny put her head against the seat back. "It all depends on your point of view." She closed her eyes.

"Do you think he was right?" Bravo asked suddenly.

"About what?"

"The Testament-and the Quintessence."

She opened her eyes. "You don't believe him?" When he didn't answer, she said, "Your father authenticated it."

"All by himself."

She stared at him, then shook her head. "I don't understand you."

"My father trained me to be a medieval scholar. That means I've got a healthy dose of skepticism when it comes to purported finds regarding Jesus Christ or the Virgin Mary or-"

She leaned over, lowering her voice. "But this is different, don't you understand? The artifacts came into our possession centuries ago-"

"How did the Order get them, where were they found, who passed them on to whom, these are all questions that need to be answered."

"Dammit, Bravo, the artifacts aren't being touted on the Internet by some sleazy archeologist out to make a splash. The Vatican has been desperate to get their hands on them-every pope down through the decades gladly would have given his right arm for-"

"I haven't seen either one with my own eyes," he said doggedly.

"Is that the only thing that will convince you?"

"Frankly, yes."

She stared at him, wide-eyed. "Where's your faith, Bravo?"

"Faith is the bane of scholarship," he said sharply.

"I don't understand. How could Dexter have brought you up without faith?"

He hadn't, of course, Bravo thought, but that faith had been tested, and broken, and he hadn't been able to pick up the pieces since.

"My God," she said softly, "you are difficult." She waited until she was certain he had no intention of responding, then she turned away and closed her eyes again.

Bravo slipped the Zippo into his pocket. One by one, he again examined the other objects, this time in more detail-the two packs of cigarettes he had slit open, the enamel lapel pin of the American flag, the cuff links. Every so often he would nod to himself and his lips would move as if he were talking himself through a complex set of formulae. With the passage of time, the hum of the plane faded into white noise that lulled his fellow passengers to sleep. His seat light, however, remained on. At length, with a kind of reverence, he put his father's effects away. They were far more than effects, of course; each one had a purpose, and he now knew or at the very least could guess those purposes.

He kept the dog-eared notebook on his lap, however, and now he carefully paged through it. In the back, he came upon a section with the curious heading: "Murray's Ear." Curious, that is, to everyone who might stumble on the notebook, save Bravo. The words made him smile. Murray was a character his father had made up when Bravo was a little boy. Murray was a seemingly endless font of stories that fascinated the child, but by far his most wondrous characteristic was his ability to produce gold coins from his ear, a piece of magic that never failed . to delight Bravo as Dexter, in the guise of Murray, sat at the side of his bed at night.

Below the "Murray's Ear" heading was a list of four nonsense words-aetnamin, hansna, ovansiers, irtecta-each followed by a string of eight numbers. He recognized the words immediately as anagrams and at once set to work deciphering them, using the methodology his father had taught him.

When decoded, each spelled out a word in a different ancient language: Latin manentia; Sumerian ashnan; Trapazuntine Greek vessarion; and Turkish ticaret. For a moment, he sat back, studying the words. Their meaning was not readily apparent, even to him.

Then he looked back up at the heading, "Murray's Ear." Gold coins-money-of course! Now he recognized Ticaret, the last of the four words, part of Turk Ticaret Bankasi. These were the names of banks in different cities.

He set to work on the number strings. Again using his father's methodology, he printed them out backward, ignoring the numerals "0" and "6," which his father used as blanks to further confuse any would-be cryptologist. What he was left with was his own birth date and the birth dates of his father, mother, and grandfather. These, he decided, must be the individual accounts in the respective banks.

He did not know whether to be reassured or apprehensive, because either his father had thought of every contingency or, more ominously, he was expecting his son's journey to be both arduous and perilous.

Lost in thought, he put the items away and turned to the Michelin green guide to Venice he had bought at the airport bookstore. He'd been to Venice twice before, once with college friends and once during his tenure at Lusignan et Cie. As he read, he memorized pages here and there, refamiliarizing himself with the city whose history and heritage belonged as much to the East as to the West.

Beside him, Jenny feigned sleep. Paolo Zorzi, her mentor, had taught her from her very first day under his tutelage to look at the big picture. "There is a tendency, especially in high-tension situations, to narrow your focus," Zorzi said. "Of course, naturally enough, you're trying to find the smallest detail out of place. But you must never lose your sense of the big picture, because that is where your sense of right or wrong will come to the fore. If the big picture feels wrong, then you may be certain you'll find a detail out of place."

All her senses were on high alert. There was something about the big picture that felt wrong. The trouble was, she had no idea what it might be. Too, the entire operation had been designed by Dexter Shaw, and when it came to Dex she knew that she couldn't fully trust her sense of right and wrong. He'd had that effect on her-he'd always had.

Really, she was such an idiot. When he'd come to her to assign her to Bravo, she'd made not one sound of protest. What in the world had she been thinking? Working with Bravo, becoming emotionally involved, was turning out to be the most difficult assignment she'd ever been given. Certainly, it was the thorniest, filled as it was with lies, deceit and dangerous pitfalls that were sure to crop up during virtually every conversation that involved Dex. Had he known this would happen? She couldn't get that deeply disturbing thought out of her mind, because Dex had a curious talent for anticipating the future. She'd seen compelling evidence of it more than once, but when she'd asked him about it, he'd merely shrugged his shoulders. One thing father and son had in common: they held secrets.

Silently, she cursed Dex for getting her into this, then, filled with remorse, was immediately ashamed of herself. Settling deeper into the seat, she tried to will herself to sleep. Her body ached in every place it could ache and in several more she'd never even considered. Her head throbbed in sympathy, and she rubbed her temples before she realized that she was supposed to be asleep.

Beside her, she could hear small sounds, and she wondered what Bravo was doing. He was an enigma, impossible to read. Every time she thought she had a grip on who he was, something cropped up to prove her wrong. Take that photo of himself as a child, for instance. You'd think he would have been happy to know that his father carried it with him wherever he went. Instead, she had sensed his instant withdrawal. But in truth, she knew he wasn't the only one to blame. Her own secrets loomed large, feeling like a chasm she was less and less able to cross to get to him.

With an effort, she turned her mind away from Bravo, and once again took that mental step backward, struggling to gain perspective on the big picture. Yes, it was true, she didn't like that big picture, but for the life of her she did not know why.

"I'm having second thoughts about whom I assigned to the Venice task," Jordan said to his mother.

They were gliding through the glittering Parisian night in one of Lusignan et Cie's fleet of limousines. In the low light, sitting side by side, they could be mistaken for brother and sister.

"Perhaps I should use Brunner instead," Jordan continued.

"From Lucerne?" Camille said, her voice unnaturally sharp. "I'm sure that was Spagna's idea. As I've said before, darling, this man has altogether too much influence over your decisions. Besides, Cornadoro is already en route to Venice to be their protector."

Outside, the Seine glimmered beneath the cool blueish light of a half-moon, glimpsed between the sentinel rows of horse chestnuts beneath whose leafy arms Bravo and Dexter Shaw had walked and spoken in secret for almost the last time.

"I can always recall him."

"The decision has already been made."

"You're not angry, are you, Mother?"

"Certainly not."

Camille took a moment to stare out the window at the lovers strolling the cobbled banks and the ornate bridges of the river. Oh, to be young and innocent and in love, she thought. Then, as quickly as she had conjured it up, she banished the thought from her mind, and she was in full control again. Those days were long gone, part of another life, when she had been a different person. Or had she ever been different? Lately, she found it difficult to know. She did not even know whether she would want that life back again because, in the end, it had been nothing more than a cruel mirage, slipping like sand through her fingers.

"I am surprised, however," she went on. "You know Cornadoro's reputation as well as I do. He's the best we have. The very best."

"As Spagna pointed out, he has an exceptionally strong personality and can be headstrong as well as willful."

"He's also extremely clever, utterly ruthless and absolutely loyal." Camille leaned forward, murmured a location to the driver, who immediately turned away from the Seine, heading into the Left Bank's upscale seventh arrondisement. "Now that Ivo and Donatella are gone, it seems to me that he's the perfect choice."

"He's not subtle enough to be able to lure the Guardian away."

"Sometimes women don't respond to subtlety. Surely you know his reputation with women," Camille said. "It's my considered opinion that in this area Jenny Logan is terribly vulnerable. St. Malo gave me the measure of the Guardian. Has Spagna even met her?"

"You have a point."

"This is anything but an ordinary operation, my love. A mistake now could prove irreparable." She looked out as they turned into rue de la Comete, searching for the shop lights.

"Bien. Cornadoro it is," Jordan nodded. "On one condition."

The limo had stopped in front of a shop whose hand-painted sign said Thoumieux Couteaux. They got out, Camille leading the way into the shop. It was small and cramped inside. The walls were covered with photos of knives, the small glass case at the rear displayed three neat tiers of elegant knives, all handmade.

"Bon soir, Madame Muhlmann." The small man bustled out from behind the display case. He had a bald head and the long fingers, elegant as his knives, of a surgeon.

"Is it ready?" Camille asked.

"Bien sur, madame." He smiled shyly. "Precisely to madame's specifications." He held a small knife in his open palm.

Camille took it. It was a small stainless-steel folder with pearl scales. She touched the hidden mechanism and the blade popped open. He slid across the counter copies of the two photos she had taken and sent to him via her cell phone. Consulting them, she satisfied herself that he had made an exact replica the knife she had found hidden away in Jenny's compact.

She thanked the knife-maker as she paid him. Outside the shop, she turned to Jordan. "What is your condition for using Damon Cornadoro?"

"I've told him to use the name Michael Berio. Jenny Logan will recognize his real name, I'm quite certain." Jordan smiled the secret smile he reserved only for her. It was an expression of intimacy, and of complicity. "You're right: we've waited patiently, planned for too long-at this stage we cannot afford any mistakes. You'll monitor him in the field, keep him on a tight leash. Just be careful."

"You know I will," Camille said, entering the limo with him.

The long black car edged away from the curb, turned a corner. In a moment, it had vanished into the stream of nighttime traffic.

Chapter 14

Bravo and Jenny arrived in Venice more or less on time. As Jordan had promised, they were met at Marco Polo Airport by a man who introduced himself as Michael Berio. He was tall and very fit-looking, with wide shoulders, sturdy runner's legs and not an ounce of fat to be seen. His hair, cut long in the current Venetian fashion, was thick and prematurely white, curling at the nape of his neck. His face was wide, with prominent cheeks and jawline and unblinking eyes the color of the lagoon at night. He was dressed in loose black clothes and seemed to move on gimbals, in the manner of a martial arts expert. His eyes lingered on Jenny-not just her face, but her body as well.

He led them outside into the humid night. "I have a private motoscafo waiting for you," he said in a mild voice that belied his physical presence. And there it was, rocking gently at its mooring several hundred yards from the terminal doors, the mahogany facing gleaming, the brass fittings glittering in the moonlight.

As Jenny was about to step onto the motorboat Berio caught her around the waist and swung her onto the deck. He held her a moment too long, his eyes locked on hers, then he went to cast off the lines as Bravo came on board. The guttural sound of the engines echoed off the stone facade of the bulkhead, and they nosed out into the black water.

At all times of the day, Venice appeared suspended between sea and sky, but it was at night when it seemed like a city out of a fairy tale, its design resembling a gigantic seashell. Crossing the flat water of the lagoon at speed, Venice was twinned, its perfect reflection spread across the water like a mirage. The moon, painted as if by Tiepolo in the midnight pigment of the sky, burst across the water in ten thousand tiny scimitars, as if reminding these new guests of the city's Eastern roots, the fabulous trade with Constantinople that in centuries past had made the fortunes of the merchants and doges of the Serene Republic.

Here and there, stars glimmered, their light, along with that of the moon, frosting every detail of the Gothic campaniles, Byzantine basilicas, Renaissance libraries, Flamboyant Gothic palaces.

Standing beside Bravo, Jenny could feel him relax. It was as if the outermost layer he had donned during their flight had been peeled away by the soft wind of the lagoon.

"I feel like I'm home." His voice was tinged with wonder, as if it was filled with the same starlight that made city, sky and sea gleam as one. He took a deep breath, let it out. "Smell that, Jenny? All the centuries, year by year, lie beneath the water, waiting to be resurrected."

He turned to her, saw her quizzical look. "Don't you understand? For centuries, Venice has been the Order's home. It's only logical that the cache of secrets would be hidden here."

They had slowed considerably as they entered shallower waters. The channel was marked by the signature striped poles of Venice. Ahead lay the first sweeping curve of the Grand Canal, which ran through the city like the beckoning forefinger of the dissolute Casanova, once one of La Serenissima's most notorious residents.

On their left rose the magnificent basilica of Santa Maria della Salute. Bravo had always thought it fitting that this was the first major structure one came upon when entering the Grand Canal. Venice had about it a haunting beauty tinged with melancholy. Breathtaking La Salute, for instance, had been commissioned in 1622, in the waning days of the Black Death. The church had been built in gratitude to the Virgin for ending the plague that had ravaged the city's inhabitants.

But, in truth, it was the nature of Venice that was the source of its particular melancholy. Built as it was out of the caranto-the base of clay and sand-of the lagoon, the ineffable beauty of its waterways created a sense of impermanence, as if at any moment it would crumble and sink into the patiently waiting water. This was especially true during the acqua alta, when the lagoon rose into the city, inundating the piazettas and first floors of the palazzi.

On their left, white as a lace veil, the Doge's Palace appeared from out of the darkness, as if brought to life by the moonlight. More than any other single structure, this magnificent feat of Gothic architecture embodied Venice's dizzying reversals of perspective of sea and sky. The ground floor appeared lighter than air, the frothy confection of its many delicate arches, galleries and open arcades supporting a stolid fortresslike structure, complete with militaristic corner towers and capitals.

Each time he entered the Grand Canal, passing between La Salute and the Doge's Palace, Bravo had the eerie sensation of stepping through a mirror into another world where magic had always existed and still did.

The motoscafo, its sleekness somewhat sinister as it glided by St. Mark's Square, passed the sculpture of the winged lion of the Republic-one of fourteen depicted in varying ways in the square. Four of these creatures had appeared to the prophet Ezekiel, and the lion was subsequently adopted as the sign of St. Mark the Evangelist, under whose protection Venice had placed itself.

Somewhat further on, the boat slid to a stop at a small slip, where a fleet of porters in the gold and blue livery of the Hotel d'Oro waited to unload baggage. They seemed slightly confused when none materialized and more than slightly put out until Berio briskly slipped euros into their hands. Here again, the observant visitor could see that he was at the crossroads of West and East. While Venice was one of those cities where anything could be had for the right amount of money, it was also true that nothing could be gotten here without euros crossing the right palm.

Having been amply rewarded for wasting their time out on the dock, the phalanx of porters accompanied the three visitors into the hotel. The lobby was two-tiered (so its guests would not be inconvenienced by the acqua alta) and lit by the glow of fanciful chandeliers of golden fish and lamps of turquoise mermen and sconces of silver shell clusters conceived and manufactured by the master glassblowers of the island of Murano, which lay a small distance away in the lagoon. There was a pair of enormous fireplaces surmounted by carved marble mantels on which sat Louis XIV-style clocks of fired porcelain and ormolu. The settees and chairs were their match in ornateness and style, all filigreed gold, carved wooden cabriolet legs and mounded silk cushions.

Jordan had booked them one room, but since they had dealt with this situation before, they made no comment. Perhaps one room was all he could get: the hotel was filled to capacity. Berio left them, finally, after they had checked in, promising to pick them up in the morning and take them wherever they might need to go. When Bravo tried to tell him they didn't need him, he was insistent.

"Mr. Muhlmann's orders," he said, opening his jacket just enough for them to glimpse the grips of the gun slung in its shoulder holster. He grinned hugely before turning his broad back on them and walking with his rolling gait back the way they had come.

"What d'you make of him?" Bravo said as they went up in the elevator.

"Is he dangerous, or does he merely think he is?"

The doors opened and they got out.

"He couldn't keep his eyes off you," Bravo said.

"You're imagining things."

"No. It was how he looked at you, how he touched you." Bravo put the old-fashioned key into the lock.

"How did he look at me, how did he touch me?" she said.

"As if he was ready to eat you up."

Her eyes flashed. "You aren't jealous, are you?"

He turned the key, pushed the door open, and they went inside. The room was large and looked like the inside of an oyster shell-not only the plush furniture but the walls, as well, were covered in a moire silk fabric. To the left, up two low stairs, was the bathroom; fish swam across its tiles. He walked to one of the Byzantine-shaped windows, which overlooked the canal and the palazzi beyond. Starlight fired a thin crescent at the crown of the basilica of La Salute. The canal seemed to be made of jeweled moonlight and shadows, mimicking the pattern of the silk.

Jenny flopped onto the lush, high bed. "I think you are jealous."

Bravo looked back at her. "Of Vin Diesel?"

She laughed, watching him slyly as he went toward the bathroom.

"I don't know about you," he said, "but I feel like I need an excavating tool to get all the layers of sweat and grime off me."

The light came on, a butter-yellow glow, and then the water began to run. The door had a full-length mirror affixed to it, and by moving a bit on the bed she contrived to watch his reflection as he stripped off his clothes. She didn't want to watch-she knew what she'd feel at the sight of his naked body, but she couldn't help herself. His image, the sound of the running water brought back to her with heart-stopping force their erotic encounter in the tub outside Mont St. Michel.

Her eyes drank him in, the line and form, the play of shadow and light over his musculature. There was something about his flesh-the contours, the texture, the color, even the constellation of birthmarks on the large outer muscle of his upper left thigh-that drew her like a magnet. She was hot and cold, the feeling traveling through her with the astonishing energy of a bolt of lightning, leaving her weak. A bead of sweat rolled slowly down the shadowed valley between her breasts. All at once she could feel the grime on her-the crusty sweat-stink of travel and anxiety-like a rime of salt. Her thighs moved on the bed, and she pressed her palms together between them.

"Bravo," she said, but he couldn't hear her, he'd moved from her view into the fountain of water. It was just as well, she thought. She was not in full possession of all her faculties. She could not be held responsible…

All at once, she couldn't bear to be on the bed a moment longer. On bare feet, she crossed the room to an inlaid fruit-wood bureau. A bottle of wine stood on a silver platter, along with two glasses and a note. She opened the envelope, read the typewritten sentences.

Hearing him padding out of the tub, she said, "A present from your friend Jordan, how thoughtful."

Someone had forgotten the corkscrew. It was of no matter to her. She took out a round compact she'd had specially made for her. It had a lead lining to keep out X-rays. She opened it, removed a small folding knife with mother-of-pearl scales. At the touch of her thumb, the blade zipped open. With a deft twist of her wrist, she uncorked the bottle with it, poured them both wine. When she looked up, he was standing in the doorway in a swirl of steam.

"Pretty nifty."

She smiled, put the knife and compact away.

He was staring at her with a peculiar intensity.

"What?" Her hands were suspended in midair. "What is it?"

"I wonder," he said slowly, "if you'll come over here."

There was only a towel around him, its dampness hinting at the contours beneath.

"You're expecting me to keep my distance."

"Would I have any reason to think otherwise?"

Her expression was very serious as she brought the glasses to where he stood and handed him one. "I haven't had time to wash."

"All the better," he said.

The towel fell at her feet.

When Damon Cornadoro-the man who had introduced himself as Michael Berio-returned to the Hotel d'Oro's dock, marked out with striped poles in gold and blue, it was deserted. But his motoscafo wasn't. Inside, Camille sat smoking, her long, bare, shapely legs crossed at the knee. She lounged, one elbow cocked back, on the white leather bench seat that lined the bulkheads on either side of the cabin.

"Are your charges tucked in safe and sound?" she said when he came down to her.

"So far as I can tell." He went to the bar, poured himself a drink without asking if she wanted one. "You didn't tell me the woman was so attractive."

Camille took a long drag of her cigarette, her eyes glittering. "Excited already?"

He swallowed half his drink. "That one could get a rise out of a corpse."

She got up, then, and walked over to him, placed her cupped hand between his legs. "Let's see, hmmm." Her eyebrows raised in mock surprise. "I do believe you're right."

He dropped his glass and as it shattered onto the deck crushed her in his arms so that she gave a little moan. Then he scooped one arm beneath her knees and, lifting her, set her down at the bow end of the cabin. It was their favorite spot, the seats curving in on themselves, forming an erotic V.

Camille, sitting on the leather, spread herself until one leg was on either seat. Then she hiked up her skirt, but so slowly the movement transfixed him. When her lower belly appeared in the light of the gently swinging brass lamps the breath caught in his throat, and a moment later he was on his knees in front of her.

He let her take a handful of his thick, curling hair, tilt his head back, exposing his throat. "How easy it would be."

He didn't ask her what she meant; he knew.

She took from the bodice of her blouse a small folding knife. It flicked open with the touch of her thumb to reveal a thin, wicked-looking stainless-steel blade. She handled it like an expert.

Leaning forward from the waist, she put the flat of the blade onto his shoulder. "Is it the sight of blood, or the copper taste of it that makes people faint, do you think?"

"I wouldn't know," Cornadoro said. "For myself, I was brought up on it. Blood is mother's milk to me."

She laughed and with a practiced flick reversed her grip on the knife, holding it against his bare flesh as his hands came up to grasp her. She gave a little cry. Of course, she would never use the blade on him, not really. A nick here and there to draw blood to the surface for its scent and feel was all part of their erotic scenario.

The boat rocked back and forth, whether from a passing vessel or from their rhythmic movements it was impossible to say. The lust built as it always did. He was panting to enter her.

"Tomorrow morning, when you go to the hotel," she said, "don't go in, and don't let them see you."

He paused, taken off guard. "But Signore Muhlmann said-"

"It is not your place to remind me what Signore Muhlmann said."

"He was very specific."

"So am I." She twisted her wrist and her fingers spiraled around him. "What will you do now? You are confronted with a dilemma. You can only follow one set of orders, you can have only one master." She brought him forward, and then to a complete stop. "To whom will you give your loyalty?"

Tiny spasms had begun in his hips as he strived to control himself. "Tell me now, quickly," he panted. His eyes closed, and he bit his lower lip until he broke the skin. "Who will win this war?"

"Is it a war you see, Damon?" Camille smiled. "Ah, that is the Roman in you. Romans have war in their blood, yes, they do, it comes all the way from the time of the Caesars, when you ruled the world." Gripping him all the harder, she tilted her head, regarding him with no little curiosity. "You have to ask yourself, how can I win this war? I am only a woman." She said the last word as if it were a slap in the face.

He looked at her, sweat running into his eyes, burning them. "You know what you are," he said in a voice made ragged by desire full to bursting, "and I know what you are."

"So." Her voice was serious, almost grave. "You have made your choice, have you?"

"To victory," he said.

"To the bitter end," she replied.

His bowed forehead pressed into the fragrant valley between her breasts. All at once, she released him and, with a great shiver, he lost control, ramming all the way into her. While he erupted, she tenderly caressed the back of his neck as if he were a child.

The empty wine bottle stood on its silver tray along with the equally empty glasses. The lights had been extinguished in the room, but the curtains hadn't been drawn and spangles of light roamed the walls and ceiling. The lapping of the water could be clearly heard, as if they were at sea. Then the throaty sound of a boat's engine briefly intruded, Italian spoken as provisions for the hotel's restaurant were off-loaded. Some time later, the lapping returned.

Bravo and Jenny lay in bed, side by side, naked, but not touching. They breathed out the fumes of wine and memories.

All at once, Jenny giggled.

"What?"

"I liked that you were jealous."

"I wasn't jealous," he said shortly.

"No, of course not." She couldn't help herself and another giddy sound escaped her lips.

There ensued a small silence, the nighttime sounds of Venice stealing in again, somehow making them feel safe and protected, as if they were a long way from the rest of the world.

"Why did you like it?" he asked, then.

"Guess."

"I feel like I'm fifteen years old," he said.

Her hand moved, fingers curling around his wrist. "I'm frightened," she said into the darkness.

"Of what?" Her changes of mood were mercurial.

"Of what I feel when I'm near you." She bit her lip; it was unthinkable that she should tell him the origin of that fear.

"It's all right," he said. "I understand."

The problem, Jenny thought, was that he understood only what she had arranged for him to understand. Not that her being sent away by her mother-and why-was a lie. Not at all. It was simply that by telling him that story, she had deliberately led him astray-her fear stemmed from another quarter entirely.

Bravo was comforted, taking her silence as agreement, and this led him to let down his guard. "That photo you saw," he said at length.

"The one of you that your father kept with him. I wondered why-"

"It's not of me." He reached over, plucked the Zippo off the night table, opened it. He held the photo up; the child's face was barely discernable in the night-glimmer, as if the image was not really there or had already become indistinct. But perhaps that was because it was a black and white snap that had been hand colored. "It's of my brother, Junior."

"I didn't know."

"You wouldn't," he said. "Junior's dead."

"Bravo, I'm so sorry."

"It happened a long time ago, when I was fifteen, in fact." He put the case back on the Zippo, returned it to the night table. "One winter we were out ice skating. Junior was only twelve then. A group of older boys and girls skated onto the ice and I spotted a girl I had seen a couple of times before. I liked her, but had never had the courage to go up to her. You know how that is."

"Yes," she whispered. "I do."

"I saw her glance over at me and at once I started to go into a couple of double axels. Of course, I was showing off, but I thought I might never get the chance again, and ice skating was one of the things I did really well. While I was performing for her, Junior must have gotten bored-anyway, he skated off. He went farther than he should have and fell through a thin patch of ice." There had been an eerie, evil report, the flat sound of a rifle shot or the sky cracked open. It pierced the clear dry air, pierced, too, his eardrums, a terrible noise he could neither forget nor speak about. At that moment he had realized that life was as thin as an eggshell. "He never surfaced. I pulled my skates off and plunged in. Honestly, I don't know what happened next-the water was so cold I was in shock. But the boys had come over and they pulled me out. I fought them until I was black and blue, two of them held my arms while a third sat on my chest and said, 'Don't be stupid, kid' over and over like it was a nursery rhyme. Still…"

Beside him, she stirred, as if the tragedy had made her heart beat so fast she couldn't stay still.

"I relive that moment over and over," he said, "and I can't help thinking that if they hadn't pulled me out I could have saved him."

"You know that's not true." She rose on one elbow, stared down at him, her eyes spangled. "Bravo, you know it's not. You said yourself that you were in shock. And your brother had his skates on-the weight must have pulled him straight down. There was no chance."

"No chance, right…" His voice died away into the lapping of the water against the side of the hotel.

"Oh, Bravo," she whispered, "this is how you lost your faith, isn't it?"

"He was my younger brother. I was supposed to take care of him."

She shook her head. "You were only fifteen."

"Old enough."

"Old enough for what?"

"It all seems so stupid and self-centered now. I was never going to win over a girl older than I was by three years."

"How could you know that then? Your hormones were running wild."

He stared up at her. "Do you believe that? Really?"

"Yes." She put her hand on his chest, then she drew back, abruptly breathless at the fierceness of his racing heart. "Really."

Gradually the night enfolded them, and though the spangles continued their mysterious journey across the walls and ceiling, they slept, entwined.

Chapter 15

The pale morning light woke them, or perhaps it was the musical sounds of the boatmen's raised voices, ringing like church bells over the water. Looking out the window, Bravo could see that the canal was full of activity-boats, ferries and the like, the daily traffic of the medieval city. Sky and lagoon knitted into one seamless whole, the water everywhere, moving, endless.

Jenny joined him, and they stood for a moment gazing out at the vaporous morning through which the palazzi's rich colors-ocher, umber, burnt sienna and rose-pulsed like an earthbound sun.

Showered and dressed, they went downstairs. They were grateful to see that Berio hadn't yet made his appearance, and they went quickly out of the hotel, into the picturesque piazetta lined with shops still shuttered. He took her to a small cafe on a tiny side street. It was dark and gloomy inside, as if time had collected in the low rafters. He chose a table near one of the small wood-framed windows that looked out onto a canal.

While they waited for their breakfast to arrive, he opened the newspaper he'd bought and, as was his habit, scanned it.

All at once he looked up. "It's official. The pope has the flu."

"If they've gone public, his illness has grown near-terminal," Jenny said. "The Vatican cabal will be putting ever more pressure on the Knights."

"Not to mention global resources and influence." He folded the paper and looked at her. "We're running out of time, Jenny."

She nodded grimly. "We've got to get you to the cache before the Knights can find it."

Pushing the paper away, he handed her the Michelin guide to Venice and told her to turn to a certain page. Venice was divided into seven sestieri, or districts, each one with its own character. She opened the guide book to I Mendicoli, an outer section of the Dorsoduro district, a working-class section little frequented by tourists. I Mendicoli meant "the beggars": its original inhabitants-fishermen and artisans-were extremely poor.

As she read, Bravo took out the coin he'd found in the underwater safe in St. Malo. He looked at it front and back, held it on edge, ran his thumb along the ridged edge, smiling. Again, he thought of the system of cryptography his father had taught him and was immensely grateful both for the lessons and his studiousness.

Jenny looked at him inquiringly. "What should I be looking for?"

"Turn the page," he instructed.

At once, she came upon a photo of the Church of l'Angelo Nicolo`. Just below was a detail of a painting: San Nicolo` dei Mendicoli by Giambattista Tiepolo.

"This is the centerpiece of the church," he said. "Now look at the face on the coin."

She did. It was a copy of the centerpiece, the face of San Nicolo`.

Bravo turned the coin over, showed her the letters on its obverse: Mh Euah Poqchaq Ntceo.

His sly smile turned into a grin. "At first, I thought this coin was old, but then I saw these."

Their breakfast came and they ate ravenously, clearing the dishes away as quickly as they could.

Bravo wrote the nonsense words onto a scrap of paper. On the line below, he wrote a simple equation: 54-42=8.

"There are fifty-four ridges on the edge of this coin," he told her. "There are, as you know, twenty-one letters in the ancient Latin alphabet. Double that, you get forty-two." He pointed to the first letter of the phrase. "My father started out using the code Caesar devised, moving each letter of the original message by four to encrypt it, so alpha becomes delta and so on."

"That's a pretty easy code to break," she said.

He nodded. "That's where the equation comes in. Only the first letter is substituted this way. From then on, eight is the key."

"So the second letter is substituted for the eighth letter in the alphabet."

"Yes, and then we work forward. The third letter of the text uses nine, the fourth letter ten, until we reach twenty-one. Then we go back to eight, and so on."

"So what did your father write?"

Bravo finished up the decoding, then showed her the result.

"In alms cabinet purse." She shook her head. "Do you know what that means?"

"I think we'll have to go to I Mendicoli to find out." He paid the bill and they left the cafe.

With the rising of the sun, dawn had dissolved into a morning already hot and wet. By now the children were at school and the college-age art students on their way to classes in astonishing medieval buildings, sketchpads tucked neatly under their arms as they jabbered away on cell phones.

"God, it stinks," Jenny said as they passed over a canal.

Bravo laughed. "Ah, yes, the stench of Venice is an acquired taste."

"Count me out."

"Given time, you'll change your mind, I guarantee," he said.

Several times Jenny slowed, looking around as if unsure how to proceed, even though it was Bravo who was leading the way.

"What's the matter, don't you trust me?" he said. "You look like you're lost."

"I have a feeling we're being followed. Normally, I'd be able to check reflections in shop windows or in cars' side mirrors, but here that's impossible. At this hour there are few shops and, of course, there are no cars. I've been trying to use the canals, but because it's in motion water is a notoriously unreliable reflective surface."

They moved on, in the midst of a shroud of anxiety. Smells came to them of fermentation-the lees of wine-the whiff of an unseen woman's perfume, the distinct scent of the pale Istrian stone, borne aloft as if on St. Michel's gauzy wings against the deep-green water, from which emanated the ever-present rankness of decay. Even in brightest day, there was about Venice an acute sense of mystery. One was always turning a corner, hearing footfalls approaching or retreating, coming from narrow alleys into ancient campi in which could be seen clumps of elderly men speaking in hushed tones or a dark figure, furtively exiting the square.

Their first stop was in San Polo, where the Rialto Bridge spanned the Grand Canal just as it has since 1172, when the first boat bridge was built. Up until the nineteenth century the Rialto was the only link between the two sides of the city. As they crossed, shops on either side of the bridge were opening, their doors thrown wide and tourist-friendly signs put in windows and beside doorways.

The Banco Veneziana was just past the Erberia, an outdoor market that dated back to the time of Casanova. Here were sold herbs and all manner of produce brought in each morning from the small out islands that dotted the lagoon. The bright spicy scents of green herbs mingled with the heady odors of blood oranges, castradure (baby artichokes) and spareselle (pencil-thin asparagus), as well as perfumed sprays of fresh flowers. As they worked their way through the happily chattering crowds, Jenny, clearly uncomfortable, kept an eye out for tails, which was made more difficult amid the dense bustle of the wholesalers, packing up to make room for the arriving retailers.

The bank was in an arcaded building of the Venetian-Byzantine style-the front was a mass of slender arched and columned windows-that had been rebuilt following the great fire of 1514 that had devastated it as it swept through the city. Like many buildings in Venice, the architecture was full of ornamental filigrees, intricately carved stone statues and stylized Gothic cornerstones. Inside, marble walls rose up to a domed ceiling into which had been set a marvelous mosaic of Venetian ships at full sail.

Behind the high banquette, they found a slim, middle-aged gentleman. Bravo spoke to him for a moment, and he handed over a form on which Bravo was required to write nothing more than the account number he had decoded from his father's dog-eared notebook, not even his name.

The banker took the form and disappeared for not more than three minutes. When he returned, he opened a section of the banquette. He allowed Bravo through, but not Jenny. He was polite and apologetic, but quite firm.

"I trust you understand, signorina," he said. "It is the policy of the bank to allow entrance only to the account holder. It is a question of possible coercion, you see."

"I understand completely, signore," she said with a smile. And to Bravo, "I'll be outside, looking for our friend." She meant Michael Berio, whom she suspected of following them.

Bravo nodded. "I won't be long."

The banker led him across the marble floor, up a staircase into a small hushed anteroom. Beyond was the massive open door to the safety deposit boxes. Of course, the vaults of Venetian banks would be upstairs, rather than downstairs, to protect against the periodic floods.

The banker left him in a small chamber-one of six that lined the left-hand side of the anteroom-and some moments later returned with a long gray metal box, which he put on the table in front of Bravo.

"I will be just outside, signore," he said. "You need only to call me when you are finished." He left without a backward glance.

Bravo sat staring at the box for a moment. In his mind's eye he saw his father seated where he himself now sat, the open box before him, filling it in his mathematically precise fashion. Bravo reached out, put his arms around the box, as if he could feel the last traces of his father. Then, with a convulsive gesture, he threw open the lid.

Jenny stood in the shadows beneath the bank's arcade, peering out at the glare. She leaned nonchalantly against one of the arches and made a good show of looking bored as she sipped a small cup of blood-orange juice she had purchased from a cart just opposite. She savored the sweet-tart taste but nothing else. As her eyes worked the people criss-crossing the campo, she felt a kind of depression weighing on her, as well as a dull headache, as if Dex's ghost were sitting on her head.

The deeper she got into this assignment, the worse she felt. She asked herself again why she had taken it, but the answer was as obvious as it was deflating: Dex had asked her to take it, and she never refused him anything. Hadn't he proved that he knew what was best for her? That had included, she'd assumed, this assignment guarding his son, but assumptions never took into consideration the curve balls reality threw at you. And Braverman Shaw had turned out to be one helluva curve ball. I can't let it go on like this. When am I going to tell him the truth? she asked herself. You have to let it go on like this, she answered herself. The moment you tell him, everything will blow up in your face and you'll have lost him.

"Have you spotted Berio?"

Jenny whirled, startled. "Um, no, but that doesn't mean he isn't here somewhere, spying on us."

"He only wants to protect us."

They began to walk toward the Dorsoduro, leaving the knots of people behind. Their footsteps echoed off the walls and narrow cobblestone streets, whose colors were made illusory by the reflections from the canals.

"What was in the account?" Jenny asked.

"One hundred thousand dollars," Bravo said.

She gave a low whistle. "Wow."

"And this." After a quick check of the immediate environment, he pulled out the SIG Sauer P220. "It's fully loaded with .38s ammo."

Her eyes opened wide. "Damn, that semiautomatic could win a war."

"I guess that's what my father had in mind," he said, pocketing the weapon.

"Do you know how to use that? Maybe you ought to give the gun to me."

"I can shoot an apple off your head at a hundred paces." He laughed. "Don't worry, my father made sure I had plenty of practice with handguns."

For a city that prided itself in architectural marvels, the Church of l'Angelo Nicolo` was remarkably plain. Founded in the sixth century by a group of displaced Genoese, it reflected to this day their essential poverty. Apart from a much needed renovation in the fourteenth century, including what became its signature triple-bay gemel window and the installation of a beautiful portico in the fifteenth century, it remained essentially as it had at its founding.

"Stuck away in this backwater sestiere, it was so far out of the mainstream of Venice's religious life that it had been systematically denied donations from wealthy parishioners and patrons," Bravo said. "Instead, L'Angelo Nicolo` became the de facto sanctuary for the pinzocchere-religious zealots-who sought to do penance within its walls."

"How did it survive?" Jenny asked.

"Good question. One answer is Santa Marina Maggiore, the nunnery built just behind. Apparently, it was money from the nuns that paid for the renovation."

"That must have cost a fortune," Jenny said. "I'd love to ask the nuns how they managed such an amazing feat."

The interior was cool and gray and beautiful, the Tiepolo painting of San Nicolo` awe-inspiring. They stood beneath the central apse surmounted by a Byzantine cornice from the seventh century. At this hour, they were virtually the only people in the church, but now and again they could hear small echoes of hushed voices like the lapping of canal water, a door opening or closing, shoe soles padding along the stone flagging.

Bravo saw a small figure coming through the apse, a priest, who he stopped.

"Excuse me, father, does this coin have any significance for you?"

The priest was an ancient man with a deeply creased face, his skin burnished by the elements to the texture of fine leather. His long white hair and beard were in need of barbering-in fact, he looked more like a mendicant for whom the area was named than a member of the Church. Despite his extreme age, his blue eyes-as electric as Bravo's own-were so clear and penetrating that they seemed to pierce straight through to Bravo's core. After a long, contemplative look, the priest smiled and took the coin. His fingers, too, belied his years, for they were as straight as those of any man one third his age-in fact, save for the skin of his face, he exhibited none of the telltale signs of time's ravages.

The unknown priest gave the front of the coin only a cursory glance, then his fingers, still as deft as a conjuror's, flipped it onto its reverse. He nodded to himself, then looked up, his eyes, bright with secret knowledge, might have contained a touch of humor or satisfaction.

"Wait here, please, signore," he said, bobbing his head.

He went off with the coin and soon disappeared behind a column. Silence, and the dust floating down from on high. Light splayed across the floor, colored by the marble, conjuring up the bouquets of flowers in the Erberia. Three nuns, hands lost within their black robes, passed slowly in procession, walking in perfect unison, as if to a tempo God had provided for them.

"Do you think that was wise?" Jenny said. "Giving him the coin."

"To be honest, I don't know," Bravo told her. "But it's done now."

Two priests, one taller and slender, the other shorter and stout as a wine cask, appeared, walking down the north transept toward them, their faces bent, shrouded in shadow, deep in discussion.

"I'm going after him." Jenny made a sudden move, which startled the priests, for they paused, whispering to each other. By this time, Bravo had stopped her. The priests resumed their stroll, but in a different direction now, away from them.

"Listen, Bravo-"

He made a curt gesture, silencing her. "When it comes to protecting me, you call the shots, otherwise this is my show, got it?"

She bridled, her faced flushed with anger. He could see that she was uncomfortable ceding control to him, and he realized that she still harbored questions about his instincts, his motivations and, even worse, his mental fortitude. No matter that they were intimate in bed, there was still a chasm of distrust between them, which caused him to wonder whether their physical relationship was anything more than a passing illusion. He had been so happy when he'd arrived in Venice last night-he'd been sure that he'd been nearing something he'd been longing for all his life, something so important and vital that at last he might be absolved of the guilt he had felt over Junior's death. And now he was possessed by the sudden sensation of looking down at himself from outside his body, as if he had entered a dream without knowing when or how. Nothing seemed certain anymore; thin ice was beneath his feet, and he felt on the verge of losing his balance and tearing through into the chill water beneath.

Much to his consternation, he found that he and Jenny were glaring at each other.

"You wouldn't be talking to Uncle Tony like this," she said.

"I would, whether you choose to believe it or not. Two people can make decisions, but only if one of them is dead."

His paraphrasing of the famous Ben Franklin saying broke the tension, as he meant it to, and she visibly relaxed.

"Just remember who's taking care of you," she whispered.

Another priest had appeared in the shadows below the triple-bayed gemel window and was beckoning to them.

"I'm Father Mosto." The priest held the gold coin in his hand. He was of medium height, with flat black hair that covered his scalp like a cap. His skin was dark as cocoa mixed with cream, so it was possible that his forebears were originally from Campania, in the south of Italy around Mt. Vesuvius. Perhaps there was even some North African or Turkish blood in him. Though he wasn't big, he gave that impression because he was broad-stoop-shouldered and barrel-chested-with a heavy, brooding face that looked out at the world with an innate suspicion from behind the forest of a beard.

"You're Braverman." He held the coin between his thumb and forefinger. "Dexter's son."

"That's right." Bravo accepted the coin back.

"I recognized you from a photo your father gave me." Father Mosto nodded. "You will come with me now and we shall talk."

When Jenny moved to accompany Bravo, the priest held up his hand. "This is between the Keeper and myself. You may stand outside the door to my rectory if you wish."

Jenny's eyes flashed. "I was assigned to Bravo by Dexter Shaw himself; I accompany him wherever he goes."

A storm of emotion appeared to gather in Father Mosto's face. "That simply is not possible," he said curtly. "You will follow orders. Any other Guardian would not need to be reminded of his duties."

"She's right, Father Mosto," Bravo said. "What I hear, she hears."

"No, it is not allowed." The priest folded his arms over his chest. "Never."

"It was my father's wish and my choice." Bravo shrugged. "But if you persist, we will walk out of here-"

"No, you must not." A small muscle had begun to twitch in the priest's cheek. "You understand why you must not."

"I do," Bravo said. "And yet I will, trust me."

Father Mosto stared at him with a certain degree of belligerence.

Bravo turned and, together with Jenny, began to walk away.

"Braverman Shaw," Father Mosto called from behind them. "You are perhaps not so familiar with the traditions of the Order. Females have no place in-"

He watched them continue moving away from him, and when he spoke again, there was a plaintive note to his voice. "Don't do this, I beg of you. It is against our ancient traditions."

Bravo turned. "Then perhaps it's time you reconsidered what is tradition and what is rote, what is useful and what never should have been."

The priest's face was dark as soot and he rocked a little on his feet, which were as tiny as a girl's. "This is monstrous. I won't stand for it. You are extorting-"

"I'm extorting nothing," Bravo said calmly. "I'm merely suggesting another way of approaching a situation, just as my father would have done if he was standing here in my place."

Father Mosto scrubbed his beard with his curled fingers, his venomous eyes on Jenny.

"Where is your vaunted Christian compassion, Father Mosto?" she said.

Bravo started, certain that she'd upset the delicate balance he'd so carefully created. But then he looked into the priest's face and noticed a subtle softening. Like anyone else, he was not immune to flattery. Too, she had judged the right psychological moment to speak up. Father Mosto saw that she wasn't as compliant or as foolish as he had supposed. Bravo understood, then, just how clever Jenny was. She had been following every nuance of the conversation and knew precisely when the priest was on the cusp of acquiescing. All that had been remaining was an affirmation from her, proving Bravo's position.

An expression, perhaps of resignation, settled on Father Mosto's face. "Come with me, both of you," he said gruffly, and he led them through a thickly painted doorway at the back of the church that was, in fact, part of a panel painting. It was so small that Bravo had to duck his head.

They found themselves in a downward sloping corridor that must have been running alongside a canal because the farther they went, the damper it became. Here and there, water was seeping through the immense stone blocks. A door appeared to their left, just before the corridor reached its lowest ebb. Here there was a metal drain set into the stone from which a sewer reek now and again wafted.

Father Mosto unlocked the door to the rectory and, opening the thick iron-clad wood door, made to step over the threshold. Jenny, however, was looking down the corridor.

"What's beyond there?" she said.

When it became clear he wasn't going to acknowledge the question, Bravo repeated it.

"Santa Marina Maggiore." The priest addressed Bravo through pursed lips.

"The nunnery," Jenny said.

"No one is allowed in there," Father Mosto said.

When Jenny entered he was already behind his desk, a rather ornate wooden affair for a priest. One wall was taken up by a massive oak cabinet, its carved doors chained and padlocked. The only other pieces of furniture were a pair of uncomfortable-looking spindle-back chairs of a wood that was almost black. Above his head hung a carving of Jesus on the Cross. Owing to its lack of windows, the room, which smelled of resin and incense, was claustrophobic.

"I'm afraid I have bad news to impart," he said. "The pope's health has declined precipitously."

"Then I have less time than I had thought," Bravo said.

"Indeed. With the full backing of the Vatican cabal behind them, the Knights have the upper hand now, of that there can be no doubt." He clawed at his beard again. "You see why I was so distraught when you decided to walk away. You're the Order's only hope. Safeguarding our secrets is what will save us. The secrets are our power, our future-they are the Order itself. Without them, we will cease to exist, our contacts will vanish, and the Knights of St. Clement will run rampant." He grimaced. "You see the irony of the situation. We barter the secrets in order to do our work, but also to defend ourselves. Until you find the cache, we are powerless to use our contacts to help us fend off the Knights."

"There is something you must explain to me," Bravo said. "Jenny has assured me that the Order is secular now-apostate-and has been for some time. Yet here we are speaking to a priest, not a businessman or a government official like my father."

Father Mosto nodded. "It is due entirely to your father. While others in the Haute Cour moved away from the religious side of the Order, your father did not. It was he who kept our centuries-old network alive and flourishing."

"You mean he had secrets even from the Haute Cour."

"Your father was correct when he argued for the reinstatement of a Magister Regens. He looked at a wider field, saw a higher level that he urgently felt should be the Order's mission."

"What was it my father wanted the Order to do?"

"Alas, I have no idea. He didn't tell me, and my contacts with the rest of the Haute Cour are, as you can imagine, nonexistent."

Bravo nodded. "I wish my father was here. Now the Order is under attack from inside was well as from outside."

"The traitor, yes. The members of the Order realize the errors their leaders have made."

"Too late for my father."

"Ah, my son, we all owe Dexter an enormous debt. About the future he was positively prescient." Father Mosto put his hand on Bravo's shoulder. "The Order may be in disarray, Braverman, but if you can fulfill your father's mission, if we can survive this terrible crisis, I feel certain that at long last true change can be effected." He gestured. "But I am forgetting my manners. Please sit down."

The chairs were as uncomfortable as they looked. Bravo and Jenny settled themselves as best they could. Through his anger, his assessment of the new information, Bravo did not lose sight of his mission. He made a mental note to call Emma at the earliest opportunity. Maybe she'd gotten a lead on the mole, but as soon as he thought it he knew he was whistling in the dark. Surely his sister would have called him if she'd made even the slightest progress.

The priest spread his hands. "I suppose you've been told that the Order came here because there was no love lost between Venice and Rome, and that's true, so far as it goes." He sat forward, his fingers steepled. "There was, however, another, far more compelling reason. To understand it, we must go all the way back to 1095, when the call went out for the first Crusade.

"Venice is remembered almost solely as a city-state of superb politicians, and that's true-again, so far as it goes. 'Keep safe from stormy weather, O Lord, all your faithful mariners, safe from sudden shipwreck and from evil, unsuspected tricks of cunning enemies.'" His forefinger wagged back and forth. "Cunning enemies, you see? Even then. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

"The prayer I just recited is recorded in the earliest histories of La Serenissima, spoken on the Day of Ascension when the doges of Venice were married to the sea. Because the Venetians were, first and foremost, a seafaring people.

"When the call went out from Rome for able swords to travel to the Holy Land, you would think that those who responded were of a religious bent, wanting to earn their way into the next life. But no, only a handful were soldiers of the Lord; the vast majority of those who took up arms to fight for Rome were opportunists who saw in the wholesale slaughter to come the chance to carve out for themselves fiefdoms, states, even empires in the Levant, as the Middle East was then called."

He raised a hand. "I am well aware that both of you are familiar with this era, but I beg you to indulge me for a few moments."

He rose and came around to stand in front of Bravo and Jenny. It was clear that he was at his most comfortable lecturing. Both his manner and his speech were distinctly old-fashioned, as if he had come from centuries past.

"The doges of Venice were as initially giddy as their rivals in Genoa, Pisa and, latterly, Florence to acquire bases in the Holy Land. Until, that is, they were advised by members of the Order, who pointed out that it would be far better to let others fight and die over foreign lands. Their wise counsel was this: while your rivals fight for land, you use your navy to control the sea. The sea? the doges said. Why would we want to control such a vast and inhospitable place? Because, we told them, when you control the sea, you control trade, not merely in the Adriatic, but in all of the Middle Sea, which we now call the Mediterranean. Through your invincible navy you will set levies on all of the ships coming into Italy from any country, you will regulate trade so as to benefit Venetian business and thus gain more favorable trading terms for your merchants, who will prosper no matter the outcome of the wars.

"Of course the Order had its own reasons for wanting Venice to control trade in the Mediterranean. We wanted to gain safe passage to and from the Levant, because already we had in our possession secrets which hinted at others-far greater-that were buried or had been hidden in areas of the Oltremare."

"Yes, yes," Bravo said, "the Beyond-the-Sea-Cyprus, Syria and Palestine."

"Oh, not only there, but also along the southern lip of the Black Sea, in Trebizond."

He cleared his throat, a certain sign that he did not care to be interrupted. "So persuasive were we that for four hundred years Venice pursued the single-minded goal of superiority at sea. They could not use blockades because ships of that time were neither built or provisioned to stay at sea for long periods of time, so they concentrated on what they knew: convoying their merchant ships from port to port and raiding enemy ports and shipping routes in a cut-and-run fashion.

"By suggesting they use the masts of their warships as siege towers, it was the Order who helped the knights of the Crusades take Constantinople; by their esoteric knowledge of the land beyond the Oltremare, it was the Order that helped the Venetian brothers, Nicolo` and Matteo Polo, father and uncle of Marco. Having heard through our web of highly placed contacts that the Genoese had aligned themselves with the Greeks, who had subjugated the Levant previously, to retake Constantinople they spirited the Polos and as many other Venetians as they could out of the city. Those they could not find or who would not heed their warning were subsequently captured and treated as pirates-were either blinded or had their noses cut off.

"A traitor aided the Greeks in their successful assault on Constantinople, and less than a century later it was another traitor within the court of David Comnenos, Emperor of Trebizond, that caused the city to fall to the Ottomans. We were there, too, the day Trebizond fell, and took from there secrets beyond compare."

"This is all fascinating," Bravo said, "but I came here for a reason. Where is-"

Father Mosto, having jumped off the corner of the desk, now held up his hand. "Listen to me, Braverman Shaw. Each time a traitor has appeared a terrible flow of deaths has resulted, and the Order has been severely set back in its mission. Each time we know that the Knights of St. Clement orchestrated the plan, seducing one of ours to their side. We are in such a period now, and this time our very existence hangs in the balance.

"As you have said yourself-as your father fervently believed-there is a traitor in our midst. What you perhaps do not know is that it was Dexter Shaw's task to ferret out this traitor, capturing him so that through his subsequent interrogation we could trace the conduit back to its source and destroy its head once and for all."

"Interrogation," Bravo said. "You mean torture, don't you?"

"The intelligence needs to be extracted by any and all means."

Bravo shook his head. "My father would never consent to torture another human being."

"The plan was his own idea," Father Mosto said. "It was born of desperation, but all of us in the Haute Cour-the traitor included, ironically-agreed. We're in a war, Braverman. Here, today, at this very moment, there is only survival or death." He made a sweeping gesture. "This is why I must insist that what transpires next be between you and me only."

Jenny jumped up. "I'm not a traitor."

"Braverman certainly believes you're not," Father Mosto said, "but today, at this moment, I do not have that luxury, I am full of suspicion for anyone who is not Dexter Shaw's son."

"How could I be the traitor?" Jenny said hotly. "We all know that he's a member of the Haute Cour."

"In league, perhaps, with a member of those who guard the Haute Cour."

Bravo looked at him. "You don't really believe that, do you?"

"Half of the Haute Cour has been murdered in a span of less than two weeks. Where was their vaunted protection?" Father Mosto shook his head. "The time for making simple assumptions or taking chances is past. Your father would understand, Braverman, and so must you."

Bravo stood, thinking for a moment. At length, he turned to Jenny and said, "Please stand outside the door."

"Bravo, you can't mean that-"

"I need you to make sure we aren't disturbed."

Her face hardened and then she nodded once, curtly. She left the rectory without glancing at the priest.

When they were alone, Father Mosto said, "Do you trust her?"

"Yes," Bravo said at once.

"Absolutely?"

"She was my father's choice. It was his express wish-"

"Ah, yes, your father." Father Mosto's fingers knitted together. "Let me tell you something about your father. He was prescient in a way none of us understood. I wouldn't say he could see the future, exactly, but he seemed to know how things were going to end."

"I've heard that."

"If, as you say, he led you to Jenny, then you can be quite certain there was a reason."

Bravo shrugged. "She's the best Guardian."

"She's not, but leaving that aside for the moment, even if she was, he brought you to her for another reason, something he felt or saw, something to do with the future he knew he was not going to live to see."

Bravo stared at him wide-eyed.

"You can't be serious."

"Oh, I'm perfectly serious, Braverman."

"I would not have taken you for a mystic."

"I believe in good and evil, in the immortality of the spirit, in God's strict hierarchical order. Mystics believe in good and evil, in the immortality of the spirit, in a higher power and in a strict hierarchical order of things, so in the most fundamental sense I do not think that we are so very far apart."

"The Church would view you as a heretic."

"And burn me at the stake? Three hundred years ago, I daresay they would have tried," Father Mosto said flatly. "But consider: both the priest and the mystic are aware that there is far more to this world than man and man's creations. I respect that, and so should you." He pursed his lips. "Where is your faith, Braverman?"

The echo of Jenny's question was like a shot across Bravo's bow and, shamed by his inability to answer such a vital question, he remained silent.

After a thoughtful pause, Father Mosto continued. "In any event, it is vitally important that you keep what I just said about your father's prescience in mind as you move forward through the labyrinth he created for you. That's how you see it, isn't it? A labyrinth."

Bravo nodded.

"Good. Because that's just what it is. A labyrinth to trap the unwary and the deceitful as you make your way through it. I knew your father well. I believe with all my heart and soul that he built this labyrinth to withstand every possibility. It sounds improbable-impossible, even-but as close as you may have been to Dexter Shaw, you couldn't have known him as I did. His mind-well, it didn't work like yours or mine, I assure you."

"I know, he and I had a cipher game that he created-"

"I'm speaking neither of ciphers nor of games, Braverman," Father Mosto said sternly.

Something in the priest's tone warned Bravo, and he leaned slightly forward, concentrating his entire being on what was being said. Father Mosto became aware of this and, so far as he was able, appeared pleased.

"As I said, your father was prescient. He became aware of the traitor inside the Order before any of us. In fact, in the beginning, some of them foolishly disbelieved him."

"But not you."

"No. He spoke to me about his suspicions first."

"Did he tell you who he suspected?"

"No, but I'm convinced that he knew."

"Then why didn't he act?"

"Because," the priest said, "I think he was afraid."

"Afraid? My father wasn't afraid of anything." Into the silence that ensued, Bravo said, "What was he afraid of?"

"The traitor's identity. I think it shook his confidence in his own abilities. It was someone he knew well and trusted completely" Father Mosto produced a folded slip of paper from his robes.

Bravo took it. "What's this?"

"The list," Father Mosto said, "of suspects."

Bravo opened it, scanned the names. "Paolo Zorzi's name is on here." And then the breath caught in his throat. "So is Jenny's." He frowned. "You said the traitor was someone he knew well and had trusted completely."

The priest nodded. "Dexter and Jenny had… some sort of relationship."

"Of course, they worked together."

Father Mosto shook his head. "Their relationship went beyond the professional," he said. "It was both personal and intimate."

There was something thrilling, Camille Muhlmann thought, about dressing in men's clothes-and a priest's at that! Her breasts were bound, and there was padding around her waist to make her look portly beneath the robes. Giancarlo, one of Cornadoro's people, had assumed that neutered ecclesiastical expression so familiar to her the moment he had slipped into the robes. But then it was Cornadoro's contention that Giancarlo wanted to be an actor.

"He's a film whore," Cornadoro had complained when she had announced her intention to use Giancarlo instead of him. "Whenever the American film crews come to Venice he's always following them around like a dog begging for a handout."

"Is he reliable?" she had asked.

"Of course he is, otherwise I would have kicked him out on his ass months ago."

It hadn't been difficult to ignore Cornadoro's rant. Giancarlo was expendable and Cornadoro wasn't, it was as simple as that, a mathematical equation she had come to with a minimum of effort.

The thrill of being a man had mounted as she and Giancarlo had walked down the north transept of the Church of l'Angelo Nicolo`, watching the unsuspecting Bravo and Jenny as they stood near the gemel window. Bound and padded, she felt as if she was a knight in armor, impatient for the battle to commence, and a fierce joy shot through her like a boom of thunder.

She and Giancarlo had waited in the shadow of the white marble statue of Jesus, watching as Father Mosto led the pair back toward the rectory. They had set off after them at a discreet distance and on a more or less parallel path.

Now they were almost at the doorway in the mural when another priest materialized seemingly out of nowhere. He was very old and had long white hair and a scraggly beard badly in need of trimming. As he approached them, his black eyes seemed to pierce her to the quick, so that uncharacteristically she had a moment of panic, convinced that he'd seen beneath her disguise and had unveiled her as a woman. But then he passed on as if he had never seen them, and at last they were free to pull open the door and follow Father Mosto to his lair.

In the reeking stone corridor, she caught sight of Jenny outside the closed door to the rectory. She whispered terse instructions and, nodding, Giancarlo brushed by her.

She watched as he approached Jenny, nodding. Then he had passed on and she removed her shoes. When he was five or so paces beyond Jenny, he turned and seemed to ask her a question, "What are you doing here?" perhaps. It was, Camille had told him, imperative that he immediately put Jenny on the defensive so that she had no choice but to respond, engage him in conversation, narrowing her attention.

As Jenny turned to answer him, Camille flew down the corridor, her bare feet making no sound at all. As she came on, she calculated both the angle of the blow and the power to put behind it. Her eyes were focused on the occiput bone at the base of Jenny's skull, and this is where she struck Jenny, planting her feet, twisting from the hip, the power behind the blow coming all the way from her tensed right thigh, up through her pelvis and torso, infusing her right arm with just the right amount of strength to knock her unconscious.

She was prepared, catching the collapsing Jenny in her arms. She became aware of Giancarlo coming to help her with her burden, but she shook her head, and he stopped, waiting, patient as a dog.

For a moment she had Jenny to herself, back against her bound breasts, lolling head on her shoulder, throat exposed. It was a terribly intimate moment. She put one hand gently against Jenny's neck. Feeling the slow throb of the carotid artery, she extended a forefinger as if it were the blade of a knife. It would be so easy to end her life right here, right now, she thought. But that would be a mistake. The Order would only send another Guardian-one she didn't know-and the meticulous psychological process she had set in motion would have to begin again. This they could not afford. Jordan was under enormous time pressure from Cardinal Canesi to produce the Quintessence and the Testament. If they failed, their entire power base would be jeopardized, perhaps irrevocably. No, her way was the right way, of this she was certain.

Her hand was on the move again, roaming beneath Jenny's robe as if they were lovers in an amorous embrace. She extracted a cell phone, threw it to Giancarlo. Happily, she found the weapon. For a moment, light flashed red and green off the pearl scales of Jenny's switchblade. Camille smiled. She had gone to the trouble of duplicating Jenny's knife because there had been no way for her to know whether Jenny would have it on her or whether she would be able to find it when she needed it. Now she wouldn't have use for the duplicate, she thought, as she pocketed Jenny's switchblade beneath her own robes, bat it would make a fine memento for the secret collection she had built over the years, small items, possibly even insignificant, save for the fact that each possessed a sinister intimacy, stolen as they were from Jordan, Bravo, Anthony and Dexter.

Her moment came to an end, and she nodded to Giancarlo. Together they carried Jenny into a small room down the corridor and set her down. Back in the corridor, she retrieved her shoes and put them back on. Dismissing Giancarlo with another set of instructions, she melted into the shadows.

As Giancarlo hurried back to the church, he heard from behind him the soft snik of the switchblade opening.

Inside the rectory, Bravo sat down suddenly, the hard edge of the chair bringing pain to the backs of his thighs. How could she? he thought. How could she not have told me? When he looked up, Father Mosto was watching him with a keen eye.

"I have no idea whether or not Jenny is the traitor, Braverman, but I do know that your father was too involved to make an objective judgement. It's my belief that this is why he sent you to her, so that you could take the next step he couldn't, so that you could discover the truth about her."

"But it doesn't make sense." Bravo shook his head. "Almost everyone hates and resents her. Wouldn't she be the first to come under suspicion?"

"In fact, she'd be the last person they'd suspect. Consider: she's reviled, made fun of, always in the spotlight, never in the shadows."

"Unless she's out in the field."

The priest said nothing, there was no need.

"Did my father talk to Paolo Zorzi about her? Zorzi trained her, after all."

"Remember that Zorzi is also on the list," Father Mosto said.

Bravo glanced back over his shoulder at the closed door. "Do you believe she's the traitor?"

"I…" the priest began, but immediately faltered. "I am afraid of her, because she was able to get to Dexter in a way no one else could-not even, I believe, your mother."

Something screamed in Bravo's head. "I can't believe it. My father was having an affair with Jenny?"

"I knew your father longer than anyone. It's a fact." Father Mosto's eyes brimmed with empathy. "You must find forgiveness in your heart, my son. Your father was an extraordinary man, he accomplished extraordinary things."

"But he never told us."

"Why should he? Dexter led two lives, Braverman, you know that better than anyone now."

"But Jenny's half his age." Bravo's head came up. "Are you-a priest-condoning what he did?"

"Do you expect me to condemn him?" He sat down opposite Bravo, so close their knees touched. "I was Dexter's friend, first and foremost. I counseled him as best I could but… I needn't tell you that he was a man of secrets. He could compartmentalize his two lives-one didn't intrude on the other, For reasons I can't even begin to imagine, he lived deep inside himself."

He stood, put a hand on Bravo's shoulder. "One thing I know for certain: he loved your mother, deeply and completely. Nothing he did could change that."

Bravo nodded, silent, lost in his own muddled feelings.

"When we are children, we see our parents through a child's eyes. If they fight, we think they must hate each other. But when we become adults ourselves we discover that people-including our parents-are complex. It's possible to fight and still be in love. What you need to keep in mind is that your father never left your mother, never left you and your sister. When your mother fell ill, he was by her side the entire time. And when she died… my God, he grieved for her. A part of him died, I can tell you that."

Father Mosto sighed. "Difficult knowledge, Braverman, but it's better to know the truth, isn't it? All your decisions must stem from the truth."

Bravo looked up. "But Jenny and I…" He couldn't finish his thought. Had she seduced his father as she had seduced him in the hotel room in Venice? Of course, there had been their frenzied coupling at Mont St. Michel, but even then hadn't she reached for him? Yes, he had felt tenderness toward her, but she had reached for him, he'd felt her heat, seen the desire in her eyes…

There was a world-weariness in the priest's eyes, and a certain sadness. "I beg you not to give her your trust as your father did. I beg you to be on your guard."

Too late, Bravo thought bitterly. Too damn late.

Father Mosto was silent, giving Bravo the time he needed as he struggled to clear his mind.

At length, Bravo rose. "It's time we discussed the reason my father sent me here."

The priest nodded, a look of concern on his face. "Of course."

"The alms cabinet."

"Ah, I suspected it was an object here in my rectory. Dexter spent many hours alone here in study and research." Taking out a key, Father Mosto unlocked the enormous wooden armoire, drew the chain off.

At that moment, a bell rang on his desk. For a moment, he ignored it, putting aside both lock and chain. Then, when it kept ringing, he said, "You must excuse me for a moment, I'm needed in the church proper."

As Father Mosto turned the corner of the corridor, he saw that several of the lamps had been extinguished, and he made a mental note to relight them on his way back. He hastened on, his mind on Braverman and Dexter Shaw, which is no doubt why he heard nothing. The assault was so silent, so swift that he felt nothing, until the knife blade sliced across his throat. There was a great pulse inside him, and he started violently, as a gout of blood poured from him. He began to call out, but almost at once a blackness was lapping at his consciousness and he felt a curious lassitude, so that he wanted to sleep even as he attempted to struggle. But struggle against what? His life was rushing out of him with every beat of his heart.

His last thought-he had no last thought. He was dead before he hit the bloody stone floor.

Without waiting for Father Mosto to return, Bravo opened the heavy doors of the cabinet. The inside smelled of age and cedar; the walls of the cabinet were lined with panels of the fragrant wood. There were three widely spaced wooden shelves. He opened the alms box, rifled through the accounting ledger and other miscellaneous papers and files, all without finding what he was looking for. He stood there for a moment, puzzled, breathing in the spicy scent of the cedar. He was certain that he hadn't misread his father's cipher. Where was the purse?

Then something occurred to him. Though they appeared to be old, the richly scented cedar panels were relatively new-the scent of the wood faded over a matter of years, and this armoire looked to be more than two centuries old. Curious, he began a series of sharp raps on the panels.

His ear, attuned to tiny sounds, heard what he was hoping for-a particular hollowness. He dug his fingernails into the gap between the panels and pulled. Peeling back one of the panels, he discovered a small niche from which he pulled out a curious object. It was cool to the touch and shone in the lamplight. Further investigation revealed that it was made of steel-possibly sword steel-beautifully formed into the shape of a small beggar's purse. The domed top was without a handle. Instead he noticed a tiny square cutout. He'd seen that lock shape before.

Taking out the cuff links, he inserted the one that wouldn't open the lock in St. Malo. Sure enough, it fit. Just as he was about to open the beggar's purse, he heard a noise, the sharp bang as of a casement window flying open, followed by what sounded like a groan wrenched from a strangled throat.

In two swift strides he reached the door and flung it open. "Jenny? Father Mosto?"

An empty corridor stretched in either direction. It was eerily silent. Bravo could hear his heart beating, the rush of blood in his ears. A slow drip of water from someplace close at hand. Where the hell was Jenny?

Quickly pocketing the beggar's purse, he hurried down the corridor. At the first turn, he saw a large shape lying on the stone floor.

His heart skipped a beat. "Jenny?"

He ran, and skidded. The flagging wept with the damp of the canal and something more, something sticky and slightly viscous. Blood. A body in priest's robes sprawled grotesquely at his feet. Father Mosto's face, pale and almost greenish, stared up at him, his eyes fixed and glazed. His neck was slit and blood, having at first gouted out, still seeped. Next to him, in the widening pool of blood, was the murder weapon-a knife.

Kneeling down, Bravo examined it closely without touching it. It was a slender switchblade with pearl scales-the one Jenny had used to open the bottle of wine.

Jenny killed Father Mosto? He could hardly believe it. But if she was innocent, where was she?

Hearing a soft scrape, he rose and hurried after what sounded to him like the furtive patter of footfalls. The lamps in this section of the corridor had gone out, and the farther he got from the body, the more steeped in gloom it became until he could barely see a foot ahead of him.

Still, he continued-what else could he do? All at once, he became aware of something behind him and whirled just in time to have his head snapped back by a blow to his forehead. Staggering back, he slammed against a slimy wall and was struck again.

He allowed another blow to strike, but this time grabbed the wrist of the extended arm and was startled to discover how slender it was, how smooth the skin. He was being attacked by a woman.

"Jenny," he panted, "why are you doing this?"

Another blow rocked him, but he refused to let go of the wrist, bending it sharply back, hearing the quick hiss of pain escape from between his adversary's lips. Brushing against her as he turned away from still another blow, he felt the swell of her breasts, and he turned her, about to slide his arm around her throat. But just then she slammed the heel of her hand into his nose. His head snapped back and his vision blurred as tears started from his eyes, momentarily blinding him. His adversary used her advantage to break his grip. He had a brief impression of a female figure running, then it was silhouetted blurrily against the white glare of daylight as she pulled open a side door and vanished.

Bravo shook his head, trying to clear it. Then he stumbled forward, reaching for the door. He found himself on a narrow street running beside the dank water of the canal. A mass of reflections, moving and rippling, rose up to him as if from a painting still being altered by an artist's brush.

Up ahead was the stone arch of a bridge. Sunlight struck his face like a blow, and squinting, he thought he glimpsed a female figure in the crowd hurrying across the bridge. Wiping the last of the tears out of his eyes, he shouldered his way through the mass of sweaty tourists, but he reached the apex of the bridge without having been able to positively identify Jenny. He stood there for a moment, his back to the throng, scanning the people in the square on the other side. All at once, he was swaying, his head swimming, not only from the glare and sodden heat but also from the blows he'd sustained in the corridor outside the rectory.

What other woman would have the physical power and expertise to fight hand-to-hand like that? And then, as if a picture snapped into focus, he remembered what Jenny had said when he'd shown her the Sig-Sauer: "Maybe you ought to give the gun to me." If she were the traitor, of course she'd want the gun.

He was so lost in this excruciating line of conjecture that he didn't notice the two men who came up behind him. Before he understood what was happening, they had pushed him over the side of the bridge. He fell, landing on the deck of a motoscafo. Immediately, a sack was drawn over his head, and the boat took off. His feet were swept out from under him, someone was saying something urgently quite close; he ignored it and fought, but soon his arms were pinioned to his side. Using his forehead as a weapon, he struck out, colliding with one of his captors. He bulled forward, trying to press his advantage, but a precise blow that landed behind his right ear drove him into unconsciousness.

Chapter 16

Jenny awoke in utter darkness. She groaned. Even touching the back of her neck set off a wave of dizziness and nausea that made her cry out. She held her aching head for some time. What had happened? She had been talking to that priest and then…

Woozily, she stood against a wall. It was cold and damp. She put her hand out, encountered stone. Slowly, she moved along the wall until she came to a door. She tried the wrought-iron handle, but the door was locked. She retreated two steps, took a deep breath and slowly let it out. She repeated the process three times, each inhalation and exhalation deeper than the last. Then, gathering herself, she kicked the door open. She staggered back and almost fell. The effort setting off another bout of vertigo and nausea. This time, she turned her head to one side and retched, vomiting up the contents of her stomach.

Out in the corridor, she was greeted by more blackness. It was then she remembered her pocket flashlight. Digging it out, she switched it on, played the beam this way and that. It took her a moment before she saw the body. At first, she thought it was Bravo, and her heart lurched painfully, the ache at the back of her neck redoubling. As she came closer, she saw the curtainlike drape of a priest's robes and recognized Father Mosto.

Cautiously, she went toward where his body lay twisted and bloody. A sudden flash caught her eye, metal reflected by the light. Closer still, she found herself staring at a puddle of blood turned black and shiny as oil by the beam of light. In it, glimmering evilly, was a knife that looked-no, it couldn't be! Checking her pocket, she found her knife gone. She peered more closely at the switchblade on the floor. She picked it up, needing visceral confirmation.

Oh, my God, she thought, it is mine!

Someone had attacked her, stolen her knife and used it to slit Father Mosto's throat. But how did they know she was carrying a knife? No time and no way to answer those questions now.

"Bravo!" she called. "Bravo!"

Running back toward the rectory, she came upon the side door, which was open enough to allow a narrow triangle of light into the corridor. It seemed logical that whoever had taken him had used this to make their escape. Still, just to be certain, she searched the rectory. There was the armoire, its doors agape, an inner panel removed, but no Bravo. Cursing herself, she flew back down the corridor and out the door into the blazing heat.

Almost immediately, she noticed the commotion on the stone bridge that spanned the canal. People were all too willing to tell her about the man who had been pushed over the side of the bridge into the waiting motoscafo.

An old man dressed in impeccable Venetian fashion was incensed. "The terrorists spirited him off!"

"How do you know they were terrorists?" Jenny said.

"They kidnapped him, didn't they? What else could they be? And in broad daylight, can you imagine!" He made a rude gesture, his anger at its apex. "When did Venice become America?"

Camille, watching Jenny from the concealment of a shadowed doorway, was still vibrating with the aftermath of the adrenaline rushing through her system. She desperately wanted a cigarette, but the nicotine would calm her, and she didn't want that just yet. There was nothing like a burst of extreme physical exertion to make you feel alive, she thought. To make you feel vital, to prove that you're still young.

As she observed the progress of Jenny's inquiries, she dabbed absently at the corner of her mouth with a folded bit of cloth. The cloth was already stained with her blood. Her body ached where Bravo had struck her, but it was a delicious pain, verging on the erotic, and the breath came hot in her throat. To be in physical contact with first Jenny and then Bravo, to feel Jenny's warm weight in her arms, to know that she was utterly helpless, and then to move on to Bravo, to know that the two had been lovers, to sense in their musculature the other, like a shadow or an indentation in a pillow with all its intimate scents, stimulated her like nothing else could.

Bravo had not, of course, been as pliant as Jenny. He had fought her, enabling her to assess firsthand the job his father had done with him; it brought him closer to her in a way she found enjoyable. Over the years she had probed and prodded Bravo, mainly through Jordan, in ways he'd never been aware of. It felt good to take the physical measure of him-more than good, it felt right, as if like a sorcerer she had been able to transform an image in a photograph and bring it to life. He was like a beautiful chair she had once coveted, with one leg torn away, tottering, ripe for a fall.

Of Father Mosto she thought not at all. He was of no consequence to her except as an object through which she was separating the lovers, isolating Bravo, revealing the vulnerable spot by which she would at long last destroy him.

Jenny, leaning on the stone parapet of the bridge, was assailed by doubt. She was in the middle of a nightmare, much of it of her own making. She had been so tied up in knots over her growing feelings for Bravo and her guilt in not telling him the truth about herself that she'd allowed her instincts to be dulled. She had forgotten who she was and so had been vulnerable to a clever attack by Knights in priest's robes, for that was the only logical explanation for what had happened. Now Bravo was in the enemy's hands-the worst had happened, and she was to blame.

On top of that, she was acutely aware of being under surveillance. She didn't know by whom. Though only an hour ago she would have assumed it was Michael Berio, now she refused to accede to any such leap of faith. The worst thing she could do was to go by old assumptions. She was in an entirely new game, and if she couldn't adjust-and quickly-the Order would lose everything.

Much as she hated to do it, she'd have to call Paolo Zorzi and admit her failure. She needed help. Reaching for her cell phone, she braced herself for the shower of invective he would direct at her. Then her blood ran cold; her cell phone was gone, too.

She closed her eyes, trying to will away the pain in her head and neck. Breathing slowly and deeply, she allowed the added oxygen she was drawing in to do its work. First things first. She needed to get out from under the surveillance. In Venice, she knew, she could walk for the entire afternoon and still not feel confident that she had lost her watcher. There were no vehicles to get her away, and the boats were all too open and slow to be of any use to her.

Then she remembered something she'd read while glancing through the Michelin guide. Rising from her position, she looked this way and that, as if unsure of which way to go-not so far from the truth. Crossing to the far side of the bridge, she went through the small campo, turning into a side street. She entered a store selling masks. While the proprietor rang up and wrapped a mask for a customer, she had a look around, examining the rows of leather masks that hung on the walls. As its artisans had done with glassblowing, marbled paper and Fortuny silks, Venice had turned mask making into a high art. Masks depicting characters, many from the commedia dell'arte, were worn during Carnevale, which traditionally began the day after Christmas and went to the day before Ash Wednesday. All laws were suspended during Carnevale, and everyone, high-born and low, mingled together-a practice bom of the doge's desire to be able to walk the streets of his city and visit those he wished to lie with, in complete anonymity.

A horde of sad eyes, grotesque noses, grinning mouths peered down at her, and such was the skill of the artisans that each mask seemed alive with emotion: ardor, mirth or menace. There were also long cloaks of sumptuous fabric. These were called tabarro, the shopkeeper explained. When celebrants donned this, along with a mask and a bauta, a black silk hood and short lace cape, they were able to pass their own wife or sister without being recognized.

When the proprietor asked how he could help her, she asked for directions to Rio Trovaso, which, as it happened, was closer than she had thought. She quit the store reluctantly, as if leaving a party filled with fascinating new acquaintances.

It was not difficult to find Rio Trovaso, and she followed it until the intersection with Rio Ognissanti. Turning the corner, she came upon the Squero, one of the few remaining shipyards that built and repaired the city's ubiquitous gondolas. It consisted of three wooden buildings-odd for Venice-and a small dock that fronted the workshop itself.

At once, she went inside. One of the banes of Venice now worked to her advantage. Offering a good deal of money got her an outfit of workman's clothes. Not a single question was asked by the master shipwright who directed the work at the Squero-all the answer he required was contained in the euros she placed in his extended hand. The outfit included a cap under which she placed her hair. Pulling the bill low on her forehead helped, but for good measure, she took a piece of charcoal from the workshop and streaked her cheeks, rolling it between the palms of her hands to darken them, as well.

For another somewhat smaller sum, she had the shipwright take her by means of an interior passageway into the adjoining building, where the workmen lived. He led her through the ground floor and out a side entrance, walking several blocks with her as if she were one of his staff. They entered a cafe, and he left her there some moments later.

In her new disguise, she left the cafe, walking aimlessly, it seemed, for some time. In fact, she was checking for tags, slowly and painstakingly backtracking, doubling and redoubling through streets that were now as familiar to her as her own hometown, until she was satisfied that she was clean.

Then she returned to the area of the Church of l'Angelo Nicolo` in I Mendicoli. She stood for a moment, taking stock of the environment. The street was dominated by police and gawking tourists. Obviously, Father Mosto's body had been discovered.

She wondering if the Knights still had the area under surveillance. They had lost her, that was for certain; would they keep personnel here? She thought not. They would know that she, having lost Bravo, would have no reason come back here. She had to figure that they would be scouring a circular section of the city with an expanding radius as time passed and they failed to find her. They would, in fact, be moving further and further away from this locus.

Setting off, she bypassed the entrance to the church, which was in any event clogged with police and forensic personnel. Instead, she turned the corner and passed into the next street. At the entrance to Santa Marina Maggiore, she stopped and, using the brass bell set into the stucco wall beside the indigo-painted wooden door, announced herself.

If the first order of business had been to free herself from surveillance, the second was to find succor and aid. She could think of no better place to find it than with the nuns of Santa Marina Maggiore.

The door was thrown open almost at once and she was confronted by a pale oval face riven by fear and suspicion.

"What is it, signore?" The nun was young; the horror next door made her query uncharacteristically abrupt and somewhat hostile.

"I need to see the abbess," Jenny said.

"My apologies, signore, but today it is impossible." She could not help glancing up the street toward the side of the church. "The abbess is very busy."

"Would you turn away a supplicant at your doorstep?"

"I have orders," the young nun said stubbornly. "The abbess is seeing no one."

"She must see me."

"Must she?"

At the sound of this deeper, mote mature voice, the young nun started, and turning, saw another nun standing at her shoulder.

"That will be all, Suor Andriana. Tend to the herb garden now."

"Yes, Mother." Suor Andriana made a small genuflection and with a terrified backward glance hurried off.

"Enter, please," the older nun said. "Excuse Suor Andriana, she is young, as you can see, and she is a converse." Her voice was deep, indeed, almost masculine in tonality. She was tall and slender, with the narrow hips of a boy, and seemed to glide across the stone flagging by some mysterious means of locomotion. "My name is Suor Maffia di Albori. I am one of the madri di consiglio, the ruling council of Santa Marina Maggiore."

The moment Jenny stepped across the threshold Suor Maffia di Albori slammed the door shut and threw the huge ancient lock. Without a word, she led Jenny to a stone fount, below which was a basin of cool water.

"Wash your face, please," Suor Maffia di Albori said.

Obediently, Jenny bent over, cupping the water in her hands, splashing it up over her face, washing off the charcoal. When she turned, Suor Maffia di Albori handed her a square of undyed muslin, which she used to dry her face.

"Take off your cap, please." As Jenny did so, the nun made a sound deep in her throat. "Now you may properly introduce yourself."

"My name is Jenny Logan."

"And who or what are you running from, Jenny Logan?" Suor Maffia di Albori was not a handsome woman. She had no need for beauty, for she was possessed of a powerful face with a strong Roman nose, prominent cheekbones and a thrusting chin like a sword blade.

"The Knights of St. Clement," Jenny said. "Two or more of their agents infiltrated the church and murdered Father Mosto."

"Is that so?" Suor Maffia di Albori examined Jenny with the deep-set curious eyes of the intellectual. "Would you hazard a guess as to the method of Father Mosto's murder?"

"I don't have to guess, I saw him," Jenny said. "His throat was slit."

"The murder weapon?" Suor Maffia di Albori said rather coolly.

"A knife-a pearl-scaled switchblade, to be exact."

Suor Maffia di Albori took a quick and determined step toward her. "Don't lie to me, girl!"

"I know because it's my knife. It was taken from me." She explained briefly what had happened to her.

The madre di consiglio listened to the account entirely without comment or expression. Jenny might have been explaining how she'd lost the two euros Suor Maffia di Albori had given her to buy a carton of milk.

"And why have you come to Santa Marina Maggiore, Jenny Logan?"

"I need help," Jenny said.

"What makes you believe that you will find it here?"

"I was told to ask to see the Anchorite."

A deathly silence now fell between them.

"Who told you that?"

"The Plumber."

It appeared as if Suor Maffia di Albori's face had gone chalk white. It took her a moment to recover. "You are that Jenny?"

"Yes."

Suor Maffia di Albori said, "You will wait here. You will not move or speak to anyone but myself, even if spoken to, is that understood?"

"Yes, Mother," Jenny said as meekly as Suor Andriana.

"You are neither converse nor monache da cow. You are not obliged to address me as 'Mother'."

"Nevertheless, I will, Mother."

The madre di consiglio nodded. "As you wish." She turned away, but not before Jenny caught the tiny flicker of pleasure in her eyes.

Jenny, alone in the dark and musty anteroom, stood quite still, waiting as she had been ordered to do. There were no windows, and what little furniture there was-two chairs and a settee-looked as forbidding and uncomfortable as if they had been manufactured for the visiting room of a prison. The floor was a mosaic of the Crucifixion, dimmed now with age and perhaps the waters of the lagoon. Even so, it was clear that only the dullest of colors had been used, because in the convent bright hues were deemed unseemly and to be avoided. On three sides, arches led to an even gloomier interior.

A distant chanting started up, as Sexte, the noon prayer, floated through the nunnery. As always, her mind was filled with Dex. It was he who had told her of Santa Marina Maggiore, who had told her to ask for the Anchorite. Dex was the plumber-it was, he had told her, how the nuns of Santa Marina Maggiore referred to him. When she had asked him why, he had given her that wry, lopsided smile of his that so endeared him to her.

"Like everything else of import, it returns to the Latin, plumb being Latin for lead," he had said. "In medieval times, roofs were made of lead, so plumbers were roofers. The nuns of Santa Marina Maggiore call me the Plumber because they believe I kept the roof over their heads."

"Did you?" she had asked.

Again that wry, lopsided smile dented his face. "In a way, I guess, in money… and in my belief in them."

She wanted to know more, of course, but she hadn't asked him, and he hadn't volunteered any more. Now, against all odds, here she was at Santa Marina Maggiore, asking to see the Anchorite, not even knowing who or what the Anchorite was. But, she told herself, that was how it had always been between her and Dex-he said things, and she took them on faith. It was him she had faith in, ever since… But she didn't want to think about that, and with a violent mental wrench, turned her thoughts in another direction.

She opened her eyes. Below her, Christ's sorrowful eyes beseeched her. What was He calling for? Faith, of course. For a Catholic with faith, life was simple. The phrase "Have faith, it's God will" covered every situation, no matter how disastrous. Life, however, was anything but simple, and it seemed to her that the platitudes that escaped from the mouths of priests were like soap bubbles, unable to sustain themselves, collapsing almost as soon as they were spoken.

Sexte was almost done by the time Suor Maffia di Albori returned. Her cheeks were flushed, as if she was in a hurry to return.

"Come with me, Jenny," she said.

Jenny dutifully followed behind the madre di consiglio.

Passing beneath the central arch, she went through a door, out onto a stone portico held up by delicate columns of pale limestone with trefoil capitals. The portico stepped down into a square garden, divided into four equal plots, each holding different plants. One grew green herbs, another, small fig, lime and pear trees. In a third, she could see the tops of carrots and beets, along with the deeply-hued glossy skins of baby eggplant and the frothy ruffled edges of chicory, while the fourth contained a series of tiny complex leafed plants she could not identify.

It was in this that Suor Andriana worked on her knees, turning over the soil with a trowel, pulling out weeds, carefully trimming the plants. She did not look up as they passed, but Jenny could see her hunched shoulders tense, and she felt a pluck of sympathy for the girl.

The walkways between the sections formed a cross through whose center they passed on their way to the private rooms of Santa Marina Maggiore. Jenny was familiar enough with nunneries to know that she was being accorded a signal honor-normally, no outsider was allowed into the inner chambers.

"It's best I prepare you for your interview," Suor Maffia di Albori said in her sober, vaguely masculine voice. "Perhaps you know that the majority of Venetian nuns came from the upper crust of society. The society inside-our society-is formed along strictly hierarchical lines. There are the monache da cow, the choir nuns, those of noble birth, and then there are the converse, the social inferiors. This was how it was in the fifteen hundreds, and here it remains so today."

They had by this time crossed the garden and had passed through another, larger archway, the portal to the cloistered grounds of the nunnery proper. This part of the structure was set back quite far from the street, closer to the church than Jenny would have imagined. But then Venetian architecture had a way of mimicking the city's streets, which often bent, curling back on themselves. It was inevitable that one got lost in Venice; that was part of the city's pleasurable distinctions.

Sexte had ended and it was very still inside the building, with only the barest suggestion of echoes now and again reaching them, like the soft lapping of the lagoon against ancient pilings.

From a smallish egg-shaped anteroom they entered a long, narrow hallway, completely without ornamentation or color. It had an arched ceiling and electric lamps in wall niches where once torches must have flickered.

At one point, they passed what looked like a coat rack-a long wooden bar into which had been bolted a series of wrought-iron hooks. From each hook hung a long narrow leather strap, one side of which was coarsely matted horsehair.

Unable to control her curiosity, Jenny reached out to touch one, but Suor Maffia di Albori took her hand away.

"Those belong to the nuns, they are private." Her dark eyes regarded Jenny for a moment. "You don't know, do you?" She took one of the straps off its hook, held it by one end. "This is what we call a discipline. It is, in fact, a flail. The discipline is used periodically. Every night during Lent and during Advent three times a week. At other times of the year, twice a month." With a deft flick of her wrist, the flail arched over her head and with a sharp report struck her along the spine. "You look horrified, but the process is imperative to relieve the inner tensions of the body. Like fasting, it better readies the spirit for devotion." With a kind of reverence, she put the discipline back on its hook.

"Before we go any further, it is important that you understand something. Venice is in many ways still a medieval city. It has very little interest in the modern world. Here, time stands still, and we are grateful for that gift. If you cannot grasp this, Venice will surely defeat you." With those last words, she turned on her heel and continued down the corridor.

Jenny took a last look at the discipline, swinging balefully on its hook, before she followed the madre di consiglio to the end of the hall, where it gave out onto another hallway running perpendicular to it, like the head of the letter T.

As they turned left, Suor Maffia di Albori said, "I am from the noble house of Le Vergini. I followed my two aunts and three sisters here, and took the veil while they watched." She turned. "When I was born, my parents asked themselves the same question that all parents of girl-children ask themselves: maritar o` monacar? Would I marry or become a nun?" Her voice was impassive, matter-of-fact. "I was neither shrewish nor in any way deformed by birth or illness or accident. But you see my face, what man would have me? Besides, in that regard I had very little interest in men. I had no choice but to take the veil, where, with a modest dowry, I was married to Jesus Christ. I did not mind, but it was not uncommon for families with many daughters to force some of them into nunneries as a way of saving them from having to pay much larger dowries to prospective husbands."

The ghost of a smile tinged Suor Maffia di Albori's mouth like lipstick. "I seem to be making a habit of shocking you."

"It's not that, but I must say that I feel a certain kinship."

"With a nun? But you're a Guardian."

"I live in the Voire Dei-I suspect the Plumber must have told you about-"

"Oh, yes." The lips pursed, drained of blood now, so that they were almost stark white.

"The outside world is as alien to me as it is to you and your fellow nuns."

"Is that what you think, Jenny?" The madre di consiglio made a curious little gesture that could have meant anything. "Well, then, it's as well you've come to visit us. It's as well I am taking you to see the Anchorite."

"Who is the Anchorite?" Jenny asked.

Suor Maffia di Albori placed an admonishing forefinger across her thin, bloodless lips. "It is not for me to enlighten you." She turned and continued down the hall. "You will see for yourself soon enough."

To Jenny, this seemed an unnecessarily melodramatic pronouncement. She felt Bravo's absence even more acutely, surely he'd know who the Anchorite was. As they proceeded down the hall, she was aware of a deepening gloom-sunlight had never penetrated this far into the convent. She was normally not prone to claustrophobia, but she had the distinct impression that the walls were thicker here and, further, that they were pushing inward, trying to close off this section of the building forever. It was unnaturally still; even the sound of their footfalls was curiously muffled, as if something unseen were trying to strangle it into silence.

At length, they approached what appeared to be the farthest reaches of the hallway, a dead end, as if the builders, having exhausted themselves coming this far, had given up. More curious still, there were no doors, just three barred windows-one on the left wall, one on the right wall, and one straight ahead.

The light was very dim, and Suor Maffia di Albori took down a torch from a niche and lit it. The illumination cast off by the wavering flame revealed a hall made of brick instead of stone blocks, as it was elsewhere.

Suor Maffia di Albori raised the torch as she approached the iron grille of the window straight ahead. "Come, Jenny," she beckoned, "you must stand close. Closer still. Now look inside and present yourself to the Anchorite."

Jenny did as she was bade, approaching until her nose was almost against the square iron rods of the grille. Some peculiar quality of the flame allowed her to see clear across the cell, to the crucifix on the wall. There was a cot and an old-fashioned washstand, nothing more. Except the shadows.

All at once, one of the shadows moved, so that Jenny started back. But she felt Suor Maffia di Albori's surprisingly strong hand between her shoulder blades, propelling her forward. And then, the animated shadow emerged into the flame light, and Jenny gave an involuntary gasp.

"I can only imagine the enormous pressure you've been under," Jordan Muhlmann said as he and Cardinal Felix Canesi stood outside the specially outfitted hospital suite in the private, guarded wing inside Rome's Vatican City. "Seeing to the pontiff's needs, keeping the press corps in the dark, suppressing the inflammatory rumors that his holiness is on the point of death, holding news conferences, creating 'new' speeches by piecing together snippets of the pontiff's unpublished remarks, as well as keeping our friends on the inner council calm."

Cardinal Canesi showed his teeth. "Everything is running smoothly enough and it will continue to run smoothly, God willing, if you do your part."

"How could I not?" Jordan said, smiling. "The special relationship between the Holy See and my organization has existed for centuries."

"Yes. It was the Vatican that brought the Knights of St. Clement into existence, it was the Vatican that underwrote your niissions. You serve at our pleasure."

There was nothing threatening in Cardinal Canesi's tone, but then there needn't be. He held the weight of history and of holy tradition in the palm of his hand. He wanted to make sure Jordan knew from whose hand he was eating.

"And how is the Holy Father?" Jordan said.

"The pontiff is on oxygen. His heart is laboring, his lungs are slowly filling with fluid. I can feel his death, Jordan. It creeps along my own flesh on its way to take him."

Jordan's eyes blazed. "Death will not take him, this I swear, your eminence! We are making progress, the Quintessence will be in your hands within days."

"I am pleased by your faith and by your unswerving commitment, Jordan. I could not have hoped for a better ally." Cardinal Canesi was a homely man. His legs were bandy, his head was oversized; it sat on his rounded shoulders seemingly without benefit of a neck. "It is most gracious of you to take the time to come, to pay your respects in person. Your presence has lifted his spirits considerably."

"For him I would travel twice around the circumference of the world," Jordan said with a reverence that privately disgusted him.

"Before you enter, you must be gowned and your feet and hands covered." Canesi guided him across the hall and into a dressing room. It was small and windowless. A line of pale green gowns hung on pegs. The cardinal took two down, handed one to Jordan, and slipped the other on.

Out the small window, enormous crowds of the faithful came and went across the acres of marble, their foolish placards held high for the news cameras, their eyes lifted as their lips moved in prayer. Here was the power in faith, Jordan thought, the manifestation of Canesi's power. But it was a power from another, an antique age. It was cracked, worn, hollowed out. There was nothing left of it but the facade. The crippled girl guided by her mother, the emaciated man in a wheelchair pushed by his son, they had come here along with all the others to be healed, to be saved, but Jordan knew the truth: they were doomed, just like Canesi.

Jordan turned away from the window and its view on the chamber of horrors, his heart cold as a stone. He had his own problems, and they had nothing to do with God, or even faith.

Canesi said in a low, quavery voice, "How many are dead?"

And then, almost immediately, "No, no, for the love of God don't tell me, I don't want to know."

Jordan felt the contempt burst like a grenade inside him, and all at once he saw the cardinal for what he was: an old man, grappling with the vexing problem of how to keep his power as his world changed. "Suffice it to say, then, that the Haute Cour has been almost fully compromised," he said.

"Almost!" Cardinal Canesi exclaimed.

"We are moving with all due speed." Jordan ground his teeth to be in the presence of such hypocrisy. "You understand, of course, that there is the matter of the puzzle Dexter Shaw created."

"Ah, now we come to the crux of the matter!"

Jordan realized just how much he despised this man. He stood for Rome-a city that was too chaotic, too crowded, too dirty for Jordan's refined tastes, and he despised Vatican City's hothouse atmosphere most of all. The entire might and power of the Catholic Church was focused here like sunlight through a magnifying glass, but so was its essential weakness. A city-state unto itself, it had willfully kept itself at arm's length from the rest of the world. As a result, it existed in a reality of its own, out of touch with its far-flung constituents, painfully slow to react to change of any kind.

"Dexter Shaw had been a thorn in our side for years," Cardinal Canesi said. "As he consolidated his position inside the Order, as he gathered power to him, he created more and more problems for us."

"And for us, he wanted to be Magister Regens," Jordan said. "Which is one of the reasons we took him out."

"I do not want to hear those things!" Cardinal Canesi's face went chalk white. "Have I not made myself clear on this issue?"

"You have, your eminence, but as we both know, these are extraordinary times. So I trust that you will forgive me my small transgressions."

Canesi made a gesture, as if to absolve Jordan of the onus of small transgressions, but still Jordan's keen eyes saw his body betray him. The cardinal moved uneasily, like a bird who has Puffed up his feathers in alarm.

"You know how I rely on you, Jordan."

"Of course, your excellency. And you know how I am relying on your contacts in this time of ultimate crisis. You won't hold back, will you?"

"Of course not!" Cardinal Canesi said hotly. "The pope has three days, perhaps four, the doctors tell me. They are working hard to stabilize him, but even if they do, without the Quintessence he will not recover."

When it came to Cardinal Felix Canesi, Jordan held no illusions. If for some reason events didn't work out as he wished, Canesi would require a scapegoat, and Jordan knew full well who that would be.

Having had more than enough of Canesi, he went back out into the hallway and crossed into the pope's suite. Like all hospital rooms, it smelled of sweet sickness and acrid disinfectant. He stayed for ten minutes, which was all the pontiff had strength for. The Holy Father's face was gray and terribly drawn, but there was still plenty of life left in those pale blue eyes. He had ascended to the apex of the Catholic church more than twenty years ago, and it was clear he was not yet ready to relinquish his power.

"I am Arcangela, the Abbess of Santa Marina Maggiore."

The Anchorite stared up at Jenny with piercing gray eyes that bulged slightly from their sockets. "So you are the Plumber's woman. A handsome one, you are, but so sad!" Her eyes seemed fixed, like an owl's, so that she was obliged to turn her head to look this way and that. She was old and very thin, her skin translucent as rice paper, the blue of the veins in her temples and the backs of her hands startlingly vivid. She had a face the shape of an inverted teardrop, with a wide forehead and a crooked nose. One side of her mouth drooped slightly, and Jenny wondered whether she'd suffered a minor stroke until Arcangela shuffled forward on one lame leg.

"An ancient injury," Arcangela said. "I was nine when I was caught in the acqua aha. I slid and fell and was crushed between a piling and the hull of a boat. My parents said I was careless and, worse, stupid, to be standing at the edge of the fondamenta during the flood, but I loved to watch the water rising because at those times it takes on the color of wine… or blood."

She had a wide mouth with expressive lips that moved seemingly of their own accord. "You have asked to see me?"

"Yes," Jenny said. "May I come in so that I may speak with you in private?"

"You may not," Arcangela said, "principally because there is no way in or out of my cell."

"What?" Jenny was taken aback. "Surely you aren't a prisoner, as Anchorites were in medieval times?"

The abbess smiled, a slow, sly, wonderful grin that served to lessen Jenny's unease. "It is so. I have been walled in of my own volition because, like all Anchorites, the depth of my faith in Jesus Christ has compelled me to reject the world, and live here in isolation. So far as the world outside this convent is concerned, I am already dead. Father Mosto said the last rites over me just before I was bricked in. That was thirty years ago." She turned and pointed. "Look there, the other two windows in my cell. This one, to the left, looks out onto the altar of the Church of l'Angelo Nicolo`, and this one to the right is where I'm fed and where I put the chamber pot when it is filled."

Jenny was somehow terrified by this description. "You mean you haven't seen the sky in thirty years?"

"Why would I do such a thing, you're asking yourself. It sounds like hell, you're thinking." Arcangela's pale eyes were alight with an inner fire. "Am I right?"

"Yes." Jenny, on the verge of being overwhelmed, could only whisper the word.

"Well, it's not faith alone, I can tell you," the Anchorite said. "Such faith is indistinguishable from madness."

She came closer, and Jenny could smell her-a rank, sour, animal smell. It was, Jenny imagined, how human beings must have smelled in the time of Casanova.

"You do not flinch from me-well, that is something," Arcangela said. "I am here, I have been here for thirty years to do penance, to pay for the transgressions my charges commit every day of their lives."

"But your charges are nuns," Jenny said. "What kind of transgressions could they commit?"

Pointing at Jenny, Arcangela addressed the sister. "Look at her, Suor Maffia di Albori. Dressed like our own Santa Marina!"

Jenny blinked. "I beg your pardon?"

Arcangela crooked a knobbed forefinger. "Santa Marina, eighth century, from the Bythian province of Asia Minor." She nodded. "Like you, she dressed as a man-in her case, a monk's habit-and lived among males all her life. We brought her relics here in 1230, when we founded this convent in her name, so that we could walk among men, talk to men, and so advance our Order's work."

"The Order?"

The abbess's eyebrows suddenly shot up like a release of energy or the beginning of an idea. "Ah, Suor Maffia di Albori, now she has begun to make the connections, to piece together the patchwork quilt of clues we have been patiently feeding her."

Jenny's finger's gripped the iron bars of the Anchorite's cell. "You are members of the Gnostic Observatines?"

"As you yourself are," Suor Maffia di Albori said at her side.

"But I was told that-"

"The Order didn't allow women," Arcangela finished for her. "And now you know the truth. From the day Santa Marina Maggiore was founded, our charges have dressed in monk's habits, passing out of this sanctuary and into the world outside. In this way, we made deals with nobles, bartered with merchants, gathered knowledge for the doge and for ourselves. It was we who furthered Venice's way in the world, it was through our contacts in the Levant that the Serene Republic grew rich and powerful."

"And you with it," Jenny said.

Arcangela's face clouded over. "Ah, now you talk like your male counterparts in the Order."

"Oh, no, I was remembering Bravo's comment that the convent had provided the funds for the church's fourteenth-century renovation."

"And how conveniently our generosity over the centuries has been obscured by the envy of some of the members of the Haute Cour-including the late Father Mosto-who want us disbanded, stripped of our power. All because I dared ask for representation in the inner circle."

"But you should be part of the Haute Cour," Jenny said.

"You believe that-and so did the Plumber. It was he who stood up for us, he who, when shouted down by the others, came to our aid and helped us without anyone else knowing."

That was just like Dex, Jenny thought, tears standing in her eyes.

"We have nothing of our own, else why would we have needed the Plumber's help?" Arcangela said. "We have never wavered from the tenets of poverty laid down by St. Francis for the Observatines. Of course, wealth in many different forms did, on occasion, come our way. But always it was used to help others, for the furtherance of the Order. Our loyalty is unquestionable."

The forefinger was raised again. "And the work for which we are vilified is highly dangerous. When, in 1301, the first of our charges was killed in Trebizond on a mission of grave importance, Santa Marina Maggiore underwent a sea change. The day our sister in Jesus Christ was brought back here from Trebizond, the then abbess, Suor Paula Grimani, swore to become an Anchorite in penance. Within three days, the bishop of Torcello arrived to administer the last rites and the first of our abbesses was bricked in. The penance has become perpetual."

Jenny shook her head. "But to consign yourself to a living hell."

"Do you not understand the purpose of penance?" the Anchorite asked. "Perhaps I should have quit smoking or given up raisins. Do you think such deprivation adequate for the loss of a life?"

"Of course not, but you could have stopped. You could have ordered your charges to return here and never leave again."

"Yes, I could have done that," Arcangela said, "but then I wouldn't have been fit to be abbess. Then our trove of secrets would have been depleted centuries ago, and that would have been the end of the Order."

"So you did most of the work, and the monks took the credit."

"It wasn't as simple as that, the monks were always quite active. But they don't think as we do, do they?" Arcangela said. "And they don't have access to our resources. You see, for centuries Venice's prostitutes came here to pray, to seek penance and have the Virgin Mary absolve them of their sins." She shook her head. "You know, many of them are closer to God than the so-called legitimate citizens of the city."

Arcangela moved a little more into the light, which only underscored the ravines etched into her face. "It was the whores who had access, you see, to everyone from the doge on down, and it is we who had access to the whores. At night, they lie next to politicians, merchant-princes, even Holy Fathers, and the whispered confidences passed in the aftermath of their work came straight to us. It was the masks, you see. It was easy in a city of masks, where identities were hidden, for anyone, married or clergy-even the doge-to move unrecognized through Venice, to visit anyone he wished without fear of being found out. This is why it is often said that what the whores of Venice don't know isn't worth knowing."

"The monks must have hated that you had sources not available to them."

"Of course they did, and they made our lives miserable because of it. They knew the nature of our transgressions. They knew we could not complain or go around them-we could not bring that kind of attention to ourselves. We're females, after all, we cannot give confession or communion or sermons, so even we-who ventured beyond the cloistered walls to further our Order-are in a way all prisoners."

"Nothing has changed," Suor Maffia di Albori said. "It is as I told you."

"I remember," Jenny said. "I won't be defeated by Venice."

"Good, good." Arcangela moved until her clawlike fingers touched Jenny's. Her skin was as smooth as silk. "So, now I will answer your question."

Jenny frowned. "But I haven't asked you yet."

"No need," the abbess said. "An emissary of the man you wish to see has just arrived. Suor Maffia di Albori will take you to him."

"The man? Who-?"

"Why, Zorzi, of course. Paolo Zorzi," Arcangela said shortly. "Now go." She waved a hand vaguely. "I am unused to all this talk and my head hurts."

Jordan passed out of Vatican City into the sprawl and clutter of Rome proper. It was well that his hired car was air-conditioned, Rome was sweltering. At the Piazza Venetia, he turned, inching past the Forum, which was so choked with tourists it was impossible to make out the lower stories. He rose toward the Campidoglio and passed over it and out of the centro storico-the heart of Rome-arriving at the Bocca della Verita` and then on into the Aventino, a calm, leafy district of large old villas, studded with embassies and a scattering of upscale apartment buildings.

Jordan observed everything through the tinted windows, at a remove from the overheated chaos of the Roman afternoon.

He pulled out his cell phone and dialed Camille. When she answered, he asked her for an update on the situation in Venice.

"Have no worries. Everything is on schedule, my love," she said.

"Good, because Canesi's been flexing his muscles again." He barked a short laugh. "Unfortunately for him, his muscles have begun to wither away."

"What a pity."

"How is Signore Cornadoro behaving himself?"

"Perfectly, my love. And now I must ask the same of Signore Spagna."

"Osman is no concern of yours, Mother. Your focus should be on Bravo."

"When have you ever had cause to doubt my focus?"

Jordan felt an unpleasant quickening of his heartbeat, a response to the whiplike flick of his mother's displeasure. His anger at himself flared. "Results, Camille, are what matter now. Results. All other issues fade to insignificance. Your world is Bravo, and only Bravo. Everything now rests on your shoulders."

He ended the call with a mixture of anxiety and elation, before she could come back at him. Pulling up in front of a stately embassy building flanked by pencil cypress trees and coral bougainvillea, he deliberately turned off his cell phone. Emerging from the car, he was hit with a wave of heat that fairly staggered him. As he walked up the Istrian stone steps, the front door opened and Osman Spagna, bowing slightly, ushered him into the cool, air-conditioned interior.

"It is a pleasure to see you again, Grand Master."

Jordan nodded as he followed Spagna through the facade of the Cypriot embassy offices. In reality, there was no Cypriot embassy in Rome. Those duties were handled for Cyprus by the New Zealand embassy. This building, in fact, housed the headquarters of the Knights of St. Clement of the Holy Blood.

Spagna used a special key to unlock a door set flush in the wood paneling and, moments later, he and Jordan were seated at a polished tulipwood table in a high-ceilinged room, with double doors at one end and at the other windows that looked out over manicured lawns and trees. The magnificent view, however, was not visible, as the heavy velvet drapes were drawn across the expanse of glass. The walls were devoid of any decoration; there was nothing in the room to indicate its use.

"The documents are complete, Grand Master," Spagna said, pushing across a folder for Jordan's perusal. "Everything is as you specified."

Jordan avidly read through the signed contract selling off the building they were in, the one that had housed the Knights for decades. "No one knows about this, you're certain?"

"Quite certain," Spagna said. He was a short, stocky man, with dark skin, a large nose and a ferret's cunning eyes. With his calculating, mathematical mind he was the natural counterpart to Jordan, the engineer essential to the empire builder. "As you can see on page five, paragraph seven, the language is quite specific. The buyer cannot reveal the transaction for three months after he takes possession. Since it will be his residence, this presented no problem for him."

Jordan sighed as he looked up. "At last we are leaving here, at last we will be free of Rome, the Vatican, and Cardinal Canesi."

Spagna nodded. "It is, indeed, the last step toward our freedom," he said. "You and I have spent the last decade using Lusignan et Cie's resources and contacts to secretly replace the power and capital that had been provided for us by the cardinal and his cabal of Vatican insiders."

This was why Jordan had come to Rome, not to kowtow to Cardinal Canesi or to pay his respects to the pope, but to gather in the last piece of his plan. "It's done then-my dream has become a reality. From this moment forward, the Knights are no longer tied to Canesi or the whims of the pope. We are free to forge our own destiny."

He rose and Spagna with him. Together, they threw open the double doors to an enormous conference room. As they crossed the threshold, the thirty-five individuals-businessmen, politicians, economists, financial managers, currency and commodity traders, think-tank members from twenty different countries-rose as one from their seats around the rosewood table and stood beneath a banner embroidered with the seven-pointed purple cross, the emblem of the Knights of St. Clement.

"Gentlemen," Jordan said, "I come with the momentous news all of us have been waiting for." He circled them until he was directly beneath the banner. In an instant, he had tugged at a corner. The banner fluttered down, piled around his feet. Beneath it was revealed a new banner: one which depicted a Gyronny shield: lines radiated from the central point outward, dividing the field into six triangular sections. At its center was a guardant Gryllus, a mythical beast, a monstrous grasshopper with the head of a snarling lion. This was the emblem of the Muhlmanns.

Jordan, his face flushed with victory, turned to the assembled. "The Knights of St. Clement, as we have known them, are dead," he said. "Long live the Knights of our own making!"

A glorious destiny, he thought amid the rising clamor, made possible by the death of Dexter Shaw, by the slow dismantling of Braverman Shaw. Because when Bravo finally found the cache of the Gnostic Observatines, Jordan would take possession of it all, including the Testament of Jesus Christ and the Quintessence, which he never had any intention of turning over to Canesi. No, they would be his to do with as he wished. Even Camille did not know that he planned to anoint himself with the Quintessence and so become as close to immortal as Methuselah himself.

But he was not thinking of godhood now-that was for the future. For now, he contented himself with imagining the endgame, when Bravo would be on his knees, when he would tell him the truth. He wanted to see the shock and betrayal in Bravo's face just before he ended his life.

Chapter 17

Bravo was in Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village. He was sitting across from his father. Between them was a square stone-and-concrete table in which was set a chessboard. He had chosen the Giuoco Piano/Two Knights Defense as his opening because it gave him two options instead of one. But after the sixth move he could see that it was no good-slowly but surely, as always happened, his father was getting the best of him.

Dappled sunlight filtered through the plane trees and the sounds of kids skating or throwing a Frisbee floated like balloons through the soft late spring air. Pigeons-the flying rats of New York-strutted across the hexagonal pavers, greedily searching for the stray crumb.

As Bravo was moving his knight to c3, Dexter said, "What would happen, do you think, if you chose not to gambit your e-pawn?"

Bravo thought about this for a moment. He now knew the knight to c3 was a tactical mistake-his father had in his way said as much. Following the strategy out, he saw the flaw, then he turned his mind to alternatives, finally pushing his bishop to d2.

Dexter sat back, pleased. This was his standard methodology of teaching his son. He never told Bravo what to do, but rather nudged him to rethink his strategy, find the flaw himself and then, armed with that knowledge, come up with a better solution.

After the game, they packed up the pieces, according to custom the kings and queens first, the pawns last. Dexter said, "Remember when you soapbox-raced around the fountain?"

"That was some racer you made me, Dad. It let me beat everybody."

"That was you, Bravo. You were born with the desire to win."

"I lost, though, that one time."

Dexter nodded. "To Donovan Bateman, I remember it vividly."

"He shoved me and I fell."

"You came home with that knee of yours all bloody-and when you took off your clothes and your mother saw your whole side black and blue she almost passed out."

"But you patched me up, Dad, good as new. You said you were proud of me."

"I was." Dexter slid home the top of the black and white box that held the chess pieces. "You didn't cry, or even flinch while I was cleaning the gravel out of your kneecap, even though it must've hurt like hell."

"I knew as long as you were there everything would be all right."

Dexter put the box under his arm and they stood up. "I'd like you to come back home and stay for a while."

"Are you all right, Dad?"

They had cremated Steffi less than a week before, Dexter standing silent, head bowed, Bravo on one side of him, Emma on the other, as the coffin entered the massive retort. Dexter had wanted-perhaps needed-to see the process through from beginning to end, and they wanted what he wanted. The fire would be on, they were told, for two hours, so they went out to an old-fashioned luncheonette. It had a soda fountain with chromium stools along one side and vinyl-clad booths on the other. The old waitress wore black, as if in mourning, and the tiny black and white floor tiles were hexagonal like the machine in the crematorium that crushed the bones. They saw their gray, shocked faces in a mirrored strip that ran above the soda fountain. Strange to say, for that two-hour span the family was the closest it had ever been. They ate turkey sandwiches, which came with dressing and a tiny paper cup of cranberry sauce, and drank chocolate ice cream sodas and remembered Steffi. There was something about the reduction of the human body to its basic carbon form that was liberating. This was, at least, what Dexter told his children both then and later, when they scattered the two pounds of ashes into the fallow ground of the small garden at the back of their brownstone where, months later, irises, dahlias and roses would spring up in delight.

"It wouldn't be for long." His father looked at him and, for the first time, revealed all the pain Steffi's suffering and death had unleashed on him. "It's only that when I pass by your room at night I want to see your head on the pillow, that's all. Just for a while, okay?"

"Sure."

Dexter stopped beside a plane tree, his hand running across the sun-splashed bark, pied as the coat of their neighbor's mutt. "Sometimes, Bravo, late at night when I walk through the house I see her, or hear her coming through the door, her voice calling to me, so warm and tender, you know, like this sunlight…"

In the twilight that lay between unconsciousness and consciousness Bravo was reluctant to let his father go. As Dexter's face threatened to dissolve in the mist, Bravo thought of the Quintessence and his heart leapt at finding it, of applying it to his father's body, of seeing him resurrected. But almost immediately, he knew it was not to be. Resurrection was not what his father would have wanted. How could he know that so absolutely? Because he knew that his father must have had these selfsame thoughts after Steffi had died. He'd had access to the cache of secrets and, therefore, the Quintessence. Why not use it to bring his beloved Steffi back to life? Because he agreed with Uncle Tony, the Quintessence was not for humans. It went against the natural laws of life; using it would upset the careful balance of nature, resulting in unknowable, and possibly disastrous, consequences. This was why the Order had so zealously guarded it for so many centuries, this was why he must not fail in the task his father had given him. He knew this in a visceral way now, a way he could not have understood before. Because even though he knew it was wrong, he could feel the powerful lure, the possibility, improbable though it might seem, of having his father resurrected, returned to life. They could complete all the hesitating conversations that, as adults, they had left dangling, they could let down their guard, produce for each other explanations for their thoughts and actions. They could at last begin to understand each other fully, and in each other's presence reach the serene state of forgiveness.

Rising at last into full consciousness, he rolled over and groaned. He felt that something basic was different and it took him a moment to realize the rocking of the water was absent, he was no longer in the motoscafo. Opening his eyes, he discovered that the hood had been removed. He was in a small, cramped room with a simple cot and bedding, on which he was lying, an unadorned scarred wooden chest atop which sat a utilitarian white porcelain pitcher and bowl. On the wall above the cot was a wooden crucifix. He was in a monastic cell.

Light streamed through a window. Though small, it was open and unbarred-odd for a prison cell, for he had to assume that he had been captured by the Knights of St. Clement. Jenny's mission had been to kill Father Mosto and then lead him to the apex of the bridge where the Knights were waiting for him. He lay for a moment more, mulling over her treachery. She had fooled him, just as she had fooled his father. He vowed that would never happen again. If he got out of here.

Painfully, he rose and approached the small window. Outside, he saw a beautiful cloister and, beyond a stone wall, rows of finely cultivated trees. As if they had been waiting for his appearance in the window, two figures came into view. They were wearing monastic robes, hooded like Capuchins, but their faces were hard-lined and decidedly grim.

"I suppose you're wondering if they're guards."

He turned to find himself facing a heavyset man with blue jowls and curious eyes. He was nearly bald, with a tuft of fine, sandy hair running around the rim of his deeply tanned pate. He, too, was clad in monastic robes.

"They are," the man continued, "but not in the manner you think. They're here to protect you."

Bravo gave a harsh laugh. "Do you mean the men who threw me over the side of the bridge and beat me senseless, or are you talking about someone else?"

"My people rather overzealously defended themselves. I'm told you're exceptionally strong. A bull, they tell me."

"I don't believe you," Bravo said. "Whatever you Knights of St. Clement want from me, I won't give it to you, no matter what you do to me."

The man showed very white teeth when he grinned. "Well, I am most very pleased to hear that, Braverman Shaw. Spoken like a true Keeper."

"You know who I am, obviously. But I have no idea who you are."

"My name is Paolo Zorzi." His thick eyebrows rose. "Ah, I see you've heard of me."

"You're not Zorzi, or anyone connected with the Gnostic Observatines."

"But I am."

"Convince me."

"I understand your skepticism, and once again I applaud it." He dug something out from the back of his waistband. "Step number one." He held out the SIG Sauer that Bravo had taken from his father's safety deposit box.

Bravo looked at it, then at Zorzi's face. "Either it's not loaded or the firing pin has been removed."

The man who called himself Zorzi shrugged. "My friend, there's only one way to find out."

Bravo took it gingerly from the outstretched palm. He checked the firing chamber, the magazine clip and the firing pin. So far as he could determine, the gun was just as it had been when he'd taken possession of it.

The man cocked his head. "Really, how you obtained it is something of a mystery to me, but I must say I'm pleased that you are armed."

He gestured. "Step two, do you feel up to a walk?" When Bravo made no move, he crossed to the door, flung it open. Bravo could see that the stone corridor was empty of guards.

"Please. I will answer all your questions. My name is Paolo Zorzi. Really and truly."

They went down the corridor and out through a small round-topped wooden door with massive iron bolts running clear through it. Outside, they stayed in the shade. Despite the closeness of the lagoon, it was hot and fairly stifling. They continued walking and Bravo still did not see any guards. He began to relax a little-or was that what this man wanted? he wondered. In a moment, a small breeze sprang up, ruffling the dark water, cooling him.

"All right, Signore Zorzi, where am I?"

"On the island of San Francesco del Deserto. In the lagoon, not far from Burano. More specifically, you're in a monastery-a holy place, actually. In the thirteenth century, St. Francis was returning from the Holy Land, where he was preaching the Gospel. His ship was caught in a terrible storm and was on the verge of breaking apart when, suddenly, the tempest abated, and in the ensuing halo of piercing blue sky overhead, a flock of white birds appeared. They began to sing sweetly, leading St. Francis to this island."

Seeing Bravo wince as he sat down, Zorzi said, "You should see the bruises on two of my Guardians."

All at once, Bravo remembered the urgent voice close at hand on the motoscafo. He had not listened, he hadn't wanted to listen. Now he knew he should have.

"Why have you brought me here?" he said.

"Because when you ran out of the church you were in imminent danger. The Knights were in the process of surrounding the area."

Behind them, the monastery crouched, closely held, guarded as a fortress. One end of it was crumbled. Their passage disturbed the soft earth, and from beneath the weeds and grasses came the sweet scent of decay. "It seems I'm facing another danger, closer to hand. I'm speaking now of my Guardian."

"Who?" Zorzi's eyes got hard. "Jen?"

Bravo nodded.

"Nonsense. I trained her, but I think you must already know this, yes?" Zorzi's face grew dark, engorged with bloody rage. "So you mean to disparage me? She's my brightest student-a prodigy, one might say."

"Take no offense, something's happened to her. She killed Father Mosto and assaulted me. This was minutes after Father Mosto warned me that my father suspected her of being a traitor." He didn't tell Zorzi that the list Father Mosto had showed him also had Zorzi's name on it. Who was he to believe? Who was he to trust?

"But what you say is monstrous. She of all people-"

"She of all people, yes. Distrusted and abused by the Order, she had plenty of motivation to betray us."

Zorzi shook his head. "But not me, she would never betray me. There must be another explanation."

"Tell it to me, please."

There was no response from Zorzi, who turned away, hands clenched into fists. Far out, Bravo could see a boat, but through the heat haze it looked like a mirage or an ancient Roman trireme. The lagoon was as flat as a desert, why shouldn't it produce mirages? He thought of Jenny-the look in her eyes, the smell of her skin, the feel of her hair. The degree to which he had relied on her was only now becoming apparent, and this reliance had led him to let down his guard with her. Had his father done the same? Had she gotten under Dexter's skin the way she had gotten under his? Father Mosto was certain of it. "I am afraid of her," he'd said, "because she was able to get to Dexter in a way no one else could." Jenny had killed him, she was the traitor, as Dexter had feared. Looking into the lagoon, Bravo saw reflected the sky-or was it the sky in which he saw reflected the lagoon? Dizzied, he could no longer tell, everything he had assumed was inverted.

"After what I've done for her…" Zorzi's voice cracked. "I will interrogate her. And if she is guilty, then I will kill her myself."

"I'll be right beside you," Bravo said.

Zorzi turned back to him, his face now appearing more normal. "You'll do nothing of the sort, my friend. You are the Keeper, you know what your mission is. Nothing must deter you or even slow you down. You must find the cache of secrets and keep it safe from the Knights."

"But I don't know where the cache is."

"Don't you?" Zorzi pulled out the steel beggar's purse Bravo discovered inside the alms cabinet. "Step three." He handed it over.

"You took this from me?"

"For safekeeping only, I assure you."

Zorzi's arm was still stretched out and Bravo saw an eagle in midflight tattooed on his forearm.

Seeing the direction of Bravo's gaze, Zorzi chuckled. "I wear the eagle with pride, Bravo. Only six or seven families in all of Venice were allowed to display the eagle or the lily on their coat of arms. My family goes all the way back to the seventh century, further some say, all the way to the founding of Rome."

"Zorzi, yes," Bravo said thoughtfully. "Your family is one of the Case Vecchie, the old houses. The twenty-four founding families of the Republic."

Zorzi raised his eyebrows. "Now I am truly impressed. Few people know this, others disbelieve the claim. Nonetheless, it is valid and binding."

They walked a little farther away along the shore. The sunlight beat down on the water of the lagoon, turning it to the color of molten metal. Shore birds swooped and called amid the rush beds. Farther out were a series of barene, salt-flats-clay and sand, really-deposited over time by the currents, feeding ground for warblers and marsh harriers alike.

"I will leave you to read the tea leaves left for you by your father," Zorzi said, and he strode off toward two of his men some five hundred yards down the islet shore.

Bravo, grateful to be alone during this process, looked at the square lock. It was the same size and depth as the lock in the underwater safe in St. Malo. He inserted the second cuff-link key into the lock, turned it one way, then the other. The steel beggar's purse popped open.

Inside, he discovered a rolled-up slip of paper with another cipher handwritten on it. He studied it carefully. This one was naturally enough of a different and more complex nature than the modified substitution code devised by Caesar. Bravo could see that it required a code book, so it stood to reason that his father had supplied him one.

He took out the small, ratty notebook. It was the only possible place his father would have inscribed the code protocol. Climbing the seawall, he sat on the white stone, looking out into the fog-gripped lagoon. Water and sky were indistinguishable, all was reflection, and once again he was gripped by this sense of inversion, as if Venice itself was a lens through which he was now forced to look.

With an almost obsessive patience, he went through the notebook, searching for page, line and letter numbers, the usual sources for the key to this form of cipher. Of course, he could start by listing the letter frequencies in the encrypted text-for instance, in English e was the most used letter and t the second most used. Each letter of the alphabet had a percentage of frequency. Also, vowels tended to associate with one another-such as ou and ie, whereas consonants rarely did.

Letter-frequency decryption went all the way back to the ninth century. The Arabic scientist Abu Yusuf al-Kindi provided the first known description of it. However, al-Kindi's code-breaking method was most useful in lengthy messages-the longer the encrypted text, the better the letter-frequency method worked-and this text was short. Second, and more important in this instance, was that letter frequency changed depending on which language one was using. For instance, the two most used letters in Arabic were a and l. Bravo knew, however, that there would be no less than five different languages in the text. This was typical of his father, who loved nothing better than to take a classic cipher and stand it on its ear so that it would baffle even an expert code-breaker.

With his eidetic memory, Bravo could, of course, have used these methods to laboriously try to break his father's cipher, but he had neither the time nor the confidence that he would be successful. Therefore, he required the key.

Once again, he went through the notebook, this time from back to front. On one page near the middle of the notebook, he came across the note, "There must be a reason for all this movement." By itself, it meant nothing, but on the next page forward, he came across the same sentence reversed, as if his father was working out a new cipher. When it came to ciphers, his father loved inversions. Bravo might not have noticed this one had he not been leafing through the notebook from back to front. Taking out a pen, he put the two sentences together, one right beneath the other. There were letters that lined up: t and e, which was interesting if one were thinking of letter-frequency decoding, but Bravo knew this was just the sort of false lead his father loved to insert into his cipher keys. But it was a clue that the key was a variant of the 3DES, the triple Data Encryption Standard, developed in the mid 1970s. E was the fifth letter of the alphabet, t, the twentieth. Subtracting 5 from 20 left 15. Subtracting 2, for the two letters, e and t, left him with thirteen. M was the thirteenth letter of the alphabet. He turned his attention to the m, which was the sixth letter in the first sentence, the fourth in the second sentence. He added the two, then subtracted the number of matching letters that came before the m's. The result was eight. He had his key.

Bent over, he moved through the cipher. When he was done, this is what his father had left him: "Remember where you were the day you were born and the name of your third pet."

He'd been born in Chicago, but try as he might he couldn't figure how he could possibly connect that with anything in Venice. At length, he went on to the next bit. His third pet had been a dog-a stray mutt so disheveled-looking he'd called her Bark. So he had one piece of the puzzle his father had meant for him to solve.

Remember where you were… He was born in St. Mary of Nazareth Hospital.

But how could that help him? There must be over a thousand statues of Mary in the city, and, in any event, what possible connection could Mary of Nazareth have with the word bark?

He looked up. The afternoon had slipped away. A cool breeze, marking the onset of sunset, ruffled his hair. His shirt was stuck to his back. With a sigh, he closed the notebook and placed the coded paper back in the alms box. Then he clambered down off the seawall in search of Paolo Zorzi.

There was a moment when Anthony Rule felt lost at sea. As was typical in summer, an afternoon mist had risen, bom of the heat and the humidity that lay over Venice like a shroud. He was adrift in the whiteness with only the pulsing disk of the sun visible as it heated the atmosphere. For a moment his hand rested on the wooden tiller of the topo-a light sailboat used for fishing-without trying to guide it in any particular direction. He felt a kind of fierce elation in being lost, absolutely invisible to the rest of the world, as if now he could be anyone he chose to be. The sense of freedom was enormous.

He had passed south of Burano with its lace makers' shops, so colorful they looked for all the world like the set of a merry operetta. He was a skilled and crafty seaman: he loved boats of all kinds and felt as at home on the water as he did on dry land. Getting the owner to trust him with his topo was only a matter of two hundred euros in addition to the normal hourly rate, which Rule knew was inflated. He paid the tariff in advance without bargaining. Better to have the owner think him stupid and forget him than to be clever and stick in the man's memory.

The topo felt good under him-solid and responsive. It had been made in Chioggia, where they were first created, and he felt comfortable in it, almost as if it were a part of him.

In Dreux, he had dealt with the Knights of St. Clement in the usual fashion, but ever since the rescue in St. Malo his mind had been focused on Bravo. After talking with him for five minutes, he had cursed himself for forgetting just how intelligent and resourceful his "nephew" was. That was when he'd decided to alter his mission. His elite standing allowed him this singular flexibility, and so he had followed Bravo and Jenny to Venice. Quite naturally, his concern skyrocketed when he observed Paolo Zorzi's preemptive move on the bridge near the Church of l'Angelo Nicolo`. He knew full well Dexter's feeling toward Zorzi, and now that Zorzi had Bravo the situation, already tenuous, was on the brink of disaster.

All at once, Rule could see, like ghosts in the mist, the outlines of trees: the parkland of San Francesco del Deserto. Immediately, he furled the two sails and allowed the topo to drift forward on the current. No doubt the Franciscan order that inhabited most of the islet had no idea of Zorzi's presence-or perhaps Zorzi had paid off the right people. Rule had had enough dealings with him to know how adept he was at circumventing both laws and customs.

The one thing he didn't know-the crucial bit of intelligence that worried him-was how many Guardians Zorzi had with him on the islet. It had to be enough to keep him secure but not enough for them to become obvious to the Franciscans who lived here.

The islet was oddly more or less square in shape, and Rule had aimed for the side that was most heavily forested, the farthest away from the monastery itself. Here and there through the mist he could see the wall that ran around the edge of the islet, just beyond the narrow shingle of rock.

His thoughts returned to Bravo. How many times, in years past, had he and Dexter spoken of Bravo? Long ago he had lost count. But he was the one who had encouraged Dexter to train his son, over the protests of Stefana. The issue was volatile. Once, Dexter and Stefana had almost broken up over it, Dexter coming to stay with Rule for almost three weeks. Bravo had been seven, and Rule had visited him several times, bringing him gifts, taking him to the zoo and, once, to Radio City to see the Easter show. He had perpetrated the myth that Dexter was away on business, and Bravo had never questioned him. It was the first time that Rule had understood the true nature of his relationship with the child, and he was filled with profound emotion.

At home, Rule had said nothing to Dexter, content to allow him to come to his own conclusions. When it came to his family, Dexter was the last person to need advice, so Rule had provided something more meaningful than advice: companionship and comfort. The rest, he felt, would take care of itself. And it had: Dexter had returned to Stefana, and Bravo's training had continued with redoubled intensity.

Judging that he was in close enough, Rule prepared himself, clambering down into the middle part of the boat, where it wasn't decked over. The hold stank of fish. The topo was nearing the shingle. It would surely bring two of the Guardians-perhaps three. It didn't matter. He had come to get Bravo, and get him he would, by any and all means.

Bravo found Paolo Zorzi a hundred yards away, leaning against the seawall, smoking languidly, as if he hadn't a care in the world. Yet he stood up quickly enough when Bravo softly hailed him.

Zorzi flicked the rest of his cigarette away, a bright spark fading into the mist. "Did you work out the code?"

"Unfortunately, no," Bravo lied. He was still mindful of Zorzi's being on his father's list of possible suspects. "I'll need a bit more time."

Zorzi spread his hands, smiling. "Not to worry. That's one thing we have here in abundance."

Beneath a misty, silver-blue sky, they headed back to the monastery. On the way, Bravo counted three Guardians; they regarded him with a curious mixture of boredom and anxiety.

"You must be hungry," Zorzi said affably. "Let's sit down to table and afterwards if you wish I can help you with the cryptography. I'm an old hand at that sort of thing, and I have a number of seminal texts I can lend you."

"I'd be interested to see the books," Bravo said neutrally. He had no intention of allowing Zorzi anywhere near his father's cipher. "And now that I think of it, I'm famished."

They passed another two guards, who flanked the side door, and passed inside. The smell of stone and candle wax filled the rather gloomy interior. The image of Jesus hung on the walls.

They entered a large room. The stone walls were thick and without adornment of any kind. There were no windows. The space seemed cold and forbidding, giving the impression of at one time being a stronghold or keep.

A heavy plank trestle table was set for a meal-though not obviously dinner, which would be taken much later in the evening. Still, tall white candles flickered in silver holders, and several dishes were laid out: a simple seafood risotto and sarde in saor, an ancient recipe involving marinating fresh sardines in vinegar-drenched onions. It was a typical mariner's dish, used to prevent scurvy on long voyages.

As they sat down, Zorzi poured wine from a bottle. He said, "What form did the cipher take-was it a transposition code or possibly one of your father's clever substitution variants?"

Bravo smiled. "The sarde in saor is excellent."

"Try the risotto," Zorzi said, again all affability. "You'll find it as good or better."

In fact, it was, and Bravo said so.

Zorzi seemed pleased, though somewhat preoccupied, it seemed to Bravo. Bravo was hardly surprised, as his suspicions were growing exponentially. He had now turned his mind to leaving here without either Zorzi or any of his henchmen following him. Even though he had yet to find the solution to his father's most recent cipher, he knew he had to get away from this island and from Zorzi as quickly as possible.

When the topo emerged from out of the mist, the Guardian patrolling that section of the shoreline immediately called to two of his companions, as Zorzi's protocol dictated. Zorzi had told them that the guest must not be disturbed for any reason, only Zorzi himself was to be allowed access. An odd order, but they followed unquestioningly nonetheless, for that was how he had trained them.

By the time the others arrived, the prow of the boat was scraping against the shingle. The topo seemed to be carrying one passenger. They hailed it in the Venetian dialect, then in Roman Italian, and, finally, in French, without receiving a response. As they cautiously approached, they saw that the figure was hunched over, an old man clutching a cane apparently to keep him from falling forward.

Still, they were on their guard, and even more so as they boarded the topo, because at once the old man stood up, though still horribly bent over. He spoke to them, then, his voice so thin and quavery they were forced to approach him to hear that he said: "I didn't give you permission to board my vessel."

His face was hidden by a white mask, and he wore the traditional bauta and tabarro though it was nowhere near Carnevale. His dementia caused them to snigger.

"You, sir, are on the island of San Francesco del Deserto," the Guardian who first spotted the topo said. "You're trespassing on our property."

"But how could that be?" The old man's voice had taken on ah ugly querulous tone. "You don't look like Franciscan monks to me."

The Guardian lost patience. He had better things to do than to contend with an old, demented Venetian who thought it was February. "You'll have to leave, old man."

"Who do you think you are, talking to me in that rude manner?" The old man raised his cane threateningly.

The Guardian laughed and grabbed the cane. "That's enough foolishness-"

In one stunningly swift motion, Anthony Rule drew back his arm, freeing the thin blade from its cane casing and, before the Guardian could say another word, thrust a foot of razor-sharp forged steel through his heart.

As he withdrew the blade, while the Guardian thrashed and frothed, the other two Guardians sprang into action. They came at Rule from the left and the right simultaneously. He feinted right, moved left, neatly spitting the second Guardian with his sword-cane. But now the third Guardian struck the hand that held the sword so hard it went numb, and the sword dropped to the deck.

The Guardian drew a gun and leveled it at Rule.

"Take off your mask and bauta," he ordered.

Rule did as he asked.

His eyes opened wide. "Signore Rule! What are you-?"

"I can explain everything."

The Guardian shook his head. "You will explain to Signore Zorzi and no one else."

"That's precisely what I won't do. I-"

"Be still!" The Guardian indicated the mask and bauta. "Drop them both to the deck. Now!"

As Rule dropped the bauta, he flicked the mask hard and fast. It spun into the Guardian, its sharp edge laying open the bridge of his nose. As the Guardian reared back, Rule moved forward. One hand wrested the gun out of the Guardian's hand while the other struck him in the solar plexus. He doubled over and Rule drove his balled fist into the side of his neck. The Guardian went down and stayed down.

Quickly and with an economy of motion, Rule stripped the Guardian of his clothes and, throwing off his voluminous cloak, pulled them on over his own.

"You don't want to show me the cipher." Zorzi shrugged, poured espresso from a small metal pot set above a flame. "Fair enough, you're the Keeper, it's your decision." He smiled broadly as he pushed one of the tiny cups over to Bravo. "Your father was tight-lipped just like you. In fact, I am struck by how similar you two are. He and I were close, when he was abroad I supplied him with whatever he needed-men, materials, you understand."

Bravo understood more than Zorzi knew. It was time to go on the offense, he thought. "He relied on you."

"Yes, of course. Absolutely. We confided in one another."

Bravo knew he was lying. For the first time since he'd found Jenny's bloody knife beside the corpse of Father Mosto, he felt on solid ground again. He knew where he and Zorzi stood. Carnevale was over, the masks had come off, good and evil were restored to their proper corners in the Voire Dei. Satisfied, he said, "Have you had any word on Jenny?"

Zorzi drank his espresso straight and in one shot, as if it were a macchiato. "We have discovered where she is."

All at once, Bravo had no interest in Jenny or in her fate. She had made her bed, now she could lie in it. She had gulled him, in much the same way, he imagined, that she had gulled his father. The traitor's identity had shook Dexter to his core, Father Mosto had said. "It was someone he knew well and trusted completely." Bravo felt suddenly sick to his stomach and wanted nothing so much as to rid himself of the rich food Zorzi had fed him. They were both traitors-Jenny and Zorzi, collaborating together to undermine the Order and bring it down.

"There is something I must ask you." Zorzi frowned. "I am wondering whether you have had any contact with Anthony Rule."

"Why do you ask?"

"Ah, then you have seen him recently."

"As a matter of fact I haven't seen Uncle Tony in more than a year." With his hatred as a catalyst, Bravo found that it wasn't difficult to lie to this man.

Zorzi shrugged, and Bravo now understood. The gesture of indifference masked what was important to Zorzi.

"I'm not prying, you understand." Zorzi licked his lips. "I simply ask because I don't trust this man. In fact, I believe he's the traitor in our midst."

"What makes you say that?"

"I hear the sharpness in your tone. I understand, of course-he's your 'Uncle Tony.' Perhaps it was a mistake to bring this up with you, but it was for your own good, and after all I had assumed you were sufficiently mature to be able to separate your personal feelings from the objective truth."

"The cipher," Bravo said shortly. "I'd like the work on it now." It was becoming more of an effort to keep his anger under control. He was finding Zorzi tedious and sinister. "I'd like to see those books."

"Of course." Zorzi could not keep the excitement out of his voice. He rose. "I'll only be a moment."

Was this the time to make his escape? Bravo wondered. He turned in his chair. But no, a Guardian stood in the open doorway, regarding him as if he were a sea bream newly drawn from the lagoon and set out for feasting. His fingertips touched the butt of the SIG Sauer. Of course, he could draw the gun, but then everything would change. He would be instantly pitted against all the Guardians. Worst of all, it would bring him and Paolo Zorzi into direct conflict, on Zorzi's own ground with his people all around him. Bravo did not care for those odds. No, the SIG Sauer was an instrument of last resort.

"What's your name?" Bravo asked at length.

"Anzolo," the Guardian said laconically. His eyes were hard as Istrian stone.

"Do you know where Signore Zorzi has gone?" He rose. "I'd like to ask him a question."

"You are to wait here until Signore Zorzi returns."

The Guardian stood against the door, blocking his way. There was no question: despite Paolo Zorzi's protestations to the contrary, Bravo was a prisoner.

Chapter 18

Through a stand of willowy trees, Rule spotted the two Guardians flanking the monastery door like a pair of sphinxes. One had a white scar under his chin, the other, taller, had eyes as gray as the Venetian mist. They looked implacable-also a little restless. Well, that would soon change, thought Rule, as he broke through the trees and strode purposefully toward them.

The moment they saw him, he knew something was wrong. Though they smiled and offered him a silent hail, he could see their feet spread out slightly, their legs flexed, their shoulders rounded as the muscles tensed. They had heard something-from one of the Guardians who'd boarded the boat? That seemed the only possibility. Rule imagined one of them reaching his cell phone before he died.

The element of surprise ruined, he sprinted straight at them. The thing was to get them moving. They came at him, challenging him, as he knew they would. Turning his back on them, he darted back toward the stand of trees. They might have guns, but like the Guardians on the boat, they wouldn't use them, for fear of alerting the Franciscan monks on the other side of the island.

In the trees, he engaged them, using the blade of the sword-cane as an offensive weapon, darting in and out, using the trees for defense against their short, slightly curved Byzantine fighting knives. He knew these weapons well-they could be thrown as well as thrust. The curved blade had a purpose-it would open up a wide swath of flesh even on a partially deflected slash. He had no room for error, which was just the way he liked it. Living on the edge was Rule's reason for being in the Voire Dei in the first place. It was better than tightrope walking, more intoxicating than mountain climbing, more addictive than skydiving.

Lunging forward on one flexed leg, he deliberately exposed himself to the Guardian with the scar. Grinning fiercely, the Guardian swung his fighter with an evil whistling sound. Rule ducked, felt the blade whir past the crown of his head and embed itself in the trunk of the tree. He came up, leading with his left shoulder, his elbow cocked. But the Scar had anticipated him, had let go of the Byzantine fighter and slammed his fists into the side of Rule's head.

Rule staggered back, felt rather than saw the approach of the Guardian with the gray eyes. He grabbed a handful of Gray Eyes's garment and swung him around. White Scar had by this time wrenched his fighter free and now was swinging it in a swift, shallow arc toward Rule. The crescent blade buried itself in Gray Eyes's chest, and immediately Rule shoved him away, came after White Scar in a direct attack.

White Scar's eyes opened wide with the shock of wounding his own compatriot. That was all the time Rule needed. He stabbed outward, driving the blade of his sword-cane in from an extreme low angle. Scar coughed once, and blood bubbled out of his mouth. He looked down in astonishment and fell to his knees, his hands cupping his abdomen. He had forgotten all about Rule, who took the opportunity to kick him hard in the side of the head. The Guardian toppled over, unconscious.

Without a backward glance, Rule left them, entering the darkness of the monastery, unseen and unheard, like a wraith.

"He's coming," Alvise said.

"Well, now," Paolo Zorzi said, "events have taken on an entirely new shape, haven't they?"

"Three dead, two wounded."

"He'll pay for each outrage," Zorzi growled, "as well as for the rest."

The two men were striding down the hall from the refectory. Alvise, a Guardian with a firm hand and short legs, was hard-pressed to keep up with the long strides of his master.

"It is essential that we keep Braverman Shaw isolated in the refectory," Zorzi said, "now more than ever."

Alvise nodded and spoke briefly into his cell phone. "Done," he said.

"Now we must prepare for Signore Rule's unscheduled arrival."

"This will be a pleasure," Alvise said, but he fell abruptly silent as Zorzi took his arm and swung him around.

"If you underestimate this man, even for an instant, he will kill you."

Alvise, his face drawn and serious, said, "I will kill him before he has the chance."

Paolo Zorzi's mouth opened in a silent laugh.

Something had happened in the last thirty seconds, of this Bravo was certain. Anzolo had received a call on his cell phone, and his eyes had betrayed him. They had cut to Bravo and then had moved quickly, almost furtively away as he turned his back on the refectory. Bravo knew the call concerned him, that Anzolo was getting instructions-probably from Zorzi himself. It seemed clear that Zorzi had no intention of returning with the cipher texts-or possibly returning at all. During the meal he had made his last pitch to Bravo, trying the soft route of insinuating himself into the deciphering process, in order to discover where Dexter Shaw meant to send his son next. This ploy having failed, he had obviously decided to move on to the hard route. Bravo could only imagine what horrors that might entail. He had told Camille that this wasn't a game, that the Knights were out for blood-his blood.

The moment he stood up, Anzolo whirled around, a stiff smile stitched to his face. "Please sit down."

"I'd like to talk to Signore Zorzi."

"I'm sorry, Signore Zorzi is otherwise engaged."

When Bravo made no move, Anzolo took a step into the room. "Please sit down." His face hardened. "Your espresso is getting cold."

"I've had my fill of espresso."

Bravo was careful to keep an edge out of his voice. Nevertheless, Anzolo took another step into the refectory.

"I really must insist."

"All right." Bravo smiled easily as he took his chair, lounging slightly forward. He changed the tone of his voice. "Would you like a cup? There's plenty left."

"Thank you, no."

But the tension had gone out of Anzolo's body, which was Bravo's objective. He swung another chair around, leaning on it with his forearms. It seemed darker in the room now, the golden discs thrown off by the candlelight somehow smaller and dimmer. And then one candle guttered and went out, and it was darker still.

"Anzolo-you don't hear that name much."

"Oh, but you do in Venice, signore, it's our dialect."

"Really? What is the Italian equivalent?"

Anzolo's brow wrinkled in thought, then his face brightened. "Ah, yes, Angelo."

Bravo threw the chair sideways so quickly and so hard that Anzolo was taken completely by surprise. It struck him in the face, and he fell in a kind of swoon. Blood was spattered in a fanlike arc across the slats of the chair back.

Bravo was up and on him in an instant, but Anzolo was only lying there, regaining his equilibrium, and when he felt Bravo grip him, he jackknifed his torso. His knee went straight into Bravo's solar plexus, and Bravo doubled over as all the air was driven out of him.

Anzolo drove a fist into Bravo's side. "Don't fight me," he said.

Ignoring him, Bravo lashed out, connecting with Anzolo's rib cage, but he had no leverage, and Anzolo brought his weight to bear.

"I warned you."

He jammed his forearm against Bravo's throat.

IN a defensive half crouch, Anthony Rule crept through the monastery corridors. He had encountered no one and nothing, which was both puzzling and somewhat alarming. He had expected to come across at least a couple of Guardians.

Up ahead he saw a door on his left that was partially open. Approaching it with caution, he contrived to peer inside. A man was hunched over a table on which several thick books were open. He was paging through one. Then he turned to search through another stack of volumes, and Rule caught a glimpse of the side of his face. It was Paolo Zorzi. The muscles of Zorzi's broad back and shoulders bunched and rippled as he stretched and torqued his torso, as if he were a lion or panther. Rule thought about Zorzi's deep and abiding hostility toward him and knew it stemmed from his friendship with Dexter. The nature of jealousy, he considered, momentarily caught by the thought, was to be like a serpent, slithering this way and that through the thicket of other, more obvious emotions. But it colored everything, even the intentions of the most clear-eyed people.

Rule smiled, his lips a thin, cruel line. This was all too easy-no Guardians and now Zorzi presenting himself through a partially open door, his back turned, a perfect target. Rule could smell a trap even from this distance, and so he moved on, past the bait meant to tempt him. He wanted Zorzi, of course, but he had come for Bravo, and he wasn't going to leave without him. He held no illusions as to how dangerous it was for Bravo to be with Zorzi. It was Zorzi, he suspected, who had tried to undermine his relationship with Dexter Shaw, and now that Zorzi had Bravo he imagined the same thing happening all over again-Zorzi would try to poison Bravo against him.

The room Zorzi was in was windowless, a place where logic said they would be holding Bravo. Also, he could see that the texts were on ciphers and decoding-Bravo would be working on the cipher Dexter had left for him here in Venice. Chances were, then, that Bravo was inside the room, somewhere where Rule couldn't see him. In any case, Rule knew that he couldn't afford to ignore the possibility. That meant he needed to gain entrance to the room by means other than the invitingly open door.

He stole past and soon came to a left-hand branch that, he calculated, would bring him along the right-facing wall of the loom. Risking a peek around the corner, he saw a Guardian standing beside a closed door that could only lead into the room.

Pulling the hood of his appropriated robe up over his head, he walked with the sword-cane hidden behind him and his head down directly toward the Guardian. The man, a young, slender Venetian with a face still in the process of maturing, said, "You're ten minutes early, but I could use the relief."

Rule threw a punch to his solar plexus and then, as the Guardian doubled over, chopped down on the exposed back of his neck with the edge of his hand. Rule caught the Guardian as he slumped into unconsciousness and dragged him further down the hallway into a corner, where he piled him into the shadows.

Returning to the closed door, he put his ear to it. He could hear a voice he recognized as Zorzi's and someone else replying, but the second voice was too far away for him to be certain it was Bravo's.

He breathed deeply and slowly, his fingers tightened on the hilt of the sword-cane. His other hand gripped the doorknob, turning it slowly to the left. He was opening the door slowly and silently when he felt a tiny flicker of pain in the side of his neck. He started, turning instinctively, his senses already swimming as if he were drunk, and saw a face leering at him like a Carnevale mask.

Struggling through the chemical fog of the drug, he understood what had happened, and he pulled out the tiny dart that had embedded itself in his neck.

"Too late." The leering face laughed.

A moment later, the world disappeared from view, and Rule toppled over.

Bravo's eyes were bulging and there was a burning in his lungs. He knew if he didn't get oxygen soon he'd lose what was left of the strength in his limbs. Once that happened, he would be helpless. He couldn't let that happen.

In his mind's eye, he saw his father, and he a boy of eleven, learning how to use his body, to stretch it past its assumed natural limits.

"Relax, Bravo," his father said. "When you try too hard, your body will resist you. Mind and body need to work together, like a team."

Instead of continuing to fight Anzolo, Bravo let his limbs go limp. He allowed his eyelids to flicker, his breathing became erratic. His reward was the grin on Anzolo's face as he bent forward to apply more pressure. That was when Bravo slammed his forehead into the bridge of Anzolo's nose. A fountain of blood gushed out, and Anzolo reared back.

Bravo twisted from his hips and Anzolo lost his balance. Bravo rose up and brought the full force of his fists against the other's ear. Anzolo went down and Bravo was on him.

"Where is Zorzi?" He slammed the back of Anzolo's head against the stone floor. "Tell me where he went!"

Anzolo told him.

Bravo released him and began to turn away. Anzolo grabbed at him in desperation, trying to gouge out his eye, but Bravo used the Guardian's own momentum against him, swinging his body around in a shallow arc, using the entire force of it behind his cocked elbow. He felt the clavicle shatter, and then the Guardian collapsed onto the refectory floor.

In an instant, Bravo was up and sprinting out the door.

"The neurotoxin will only last two or three minutes," Alvise said.

"That will be sufficient," Paolo Zorzi said as he stared into Anthony Rule's slack face. Rule regarded him with the peculiar wide-eyed stare of the newly paralyzed.

He and Alvise had carried Rule into the room, setting him down on a chair to whose legs they had lashed his ankles. His hands were tied behind his back.

Alvise already had a knife out, its gleaming point pressed against the hollow at Rule's throat.

"How d'you like the feel of this, Rule?" he said. "How d'you think it's going to feel when I push the blade in inch by agonizing inch."

"Careful," Zorzi said mildly, as if he did not mean what he said.

"I want him to pay for each and every sin he has committed."

"I'm afraid that would take several lifetimes." Zorzi took a handful of Rule's hair. "Wouldn't it, Anthony?"

"You were asked a question." Alvise dug the point of the blade in, turning it so that a drop of deep-red blood was held on the forged stainless steel. "Rude of you not to answer."

"Your time has run out." Zorzi bent over him, staring into his ferocious half-glazed eyes. "You no longer have Dexter Shaw to protect you. You're alone and naked in front of your judge." He jerked on Rule's hair. "I will now pronounce sentence and Alvise will act as executioner, a mantle he is all too eager to don in your honor."

Zorzi's lips pulled back from his teeth. "You are guilty, Rule, guilty on all counts. And now I have the satisfaction of informing you that the sentence of death will be carried out."

Zorzi was aware of a blur of motion, and then Alvise was falling and there was blood spattering on him like rain. He jerked erect and looked at Bravo, who was pointing the SIG Sauer at him.

"What do you think you're doing?"

"Untie him," Bravo said, gesturing at Rule.

"That would be most unwise. You have no idea what you're doing, what a grave mistake you're-"

"Shut up and do it!" Bravo said. He stood far enough away from Zorzi that the other had no chance to reach him.

"I won't." Zorzi shrugged. "Go ahead and shoot me while you have the chance. No? I see, you haven't the nerve or the fortitude. Coward! Of what use are you to the Order?"

He rushed Bravo, who pulled the trigger of the SIG Sauer. Nothing happened: the trigger was frozen in place. Zorzi was upon him, slamming him backward against the wall. He was grinning grotesquely, like some evil ogre out of a Grimm's fairy tale. "The gun is useless, it won't fire, and now where are you, do you suppose?"

Bravo slammed the butt of the gun into the spot behind Zorzi's ear. Zorzi went down, just as Alvise had, and stayed down.

Quickly, Bravo untied Rule. "Uncle Tony, can you hear me?"

Rule's lips moved slightly but no sound emerged. His eyes were clearer and more focused.

"What did they do to you?"

"Neurotoxin." Rule's voice was thin and reedy, as if he hadn't used it for some time. "Delivered with a blow-dart."

"Can you stand up? Here, let me help you." Bravo put his arm around Rule and lifted. He grunted with the drag of the dead weight, all the bruises and contusions he'd sustained in his hand-to-hand combat with Anzolo burning into him like tattoos.

Then Rule began to regain some motor control, and he took more and more of his own weight into his legs and hips.

"How did you find me?" he said.

"I came looking for Zorzi."

Rule nodded, still groggy. He turned back toward Zorzi. "Kill him, Bravo. It's the perfect time."

"Uncle Tony, we have to get out of here now."

Still Rule resisted. "Do it, Bravo."

"No, Uncle Tony, not in cold blood."

"You'll regret it. The sonuvabitch will come after you."

"I'm not a murderer."

"This isn't murder, it's an execution." Rule held out his hand. "Give me the gun."

"Uncle Tony, no."

But Rule had grabbed the SIG Sauer and, aiming it at Zorzi, pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. Taking advantage of Rule's surprise, Bravo wrested the gun away from him. For a frozen moment they stood staring at one another.

The next instant, they heard a noise in the corridor just outside the door, and the two of them froze. Rule put his forefinger across his lips, crossed silently to the door, and without a moment's hesitation, swung it quickly open.

A Guardian with his hand still on the doorknob stumbled in, and Rule drove a knee into his midsection with such ferocity that he broke several ribs.

"Come on!" Bravo whispered, taking the opportunity to get Rule out of the room and away from Paolo Zorzi. As much as he hated the traitor, he could not be a party to his cold-blooded murder. Did that make him weak, a coward? Would his father have made a different choice? This was the Voire Dei, after all-he was far away from the civil and criminal laws that governed other people. But what about the laws of morality? Did being a part of the Voire Dei give him the right to abrogate those? Even if it did, he still had a choice in the matter and, for better or worse, he had made his.

The corridor loomed, silent and deserted. Rule showed him the way and they retraced his steps back to the side door. By the time they passed through it, he had regained much of his strength and all his animal cunning.

"However many Guardians are remaining will be combing the island for us," he said. And he was right, for as they approached the shingle where he had beached the topo they saw two Guardians keeping watch on it.

"How are we going to get off the island?" Bravo whispered.

"I have a plan," Rule said.

Uncle Tony always had a plan. As far back as Bravo could remember, Uncle Tony had a plan for every contingency. If you needed to get from point A to point B, he knew the fastest route, the most circuitous, the most devious, as well as the most sensible.

They moved off, Rule leading the way. The long summer twilight had ended and it had grown dark, but out on the lagoon strings of pale yellow lights marked the perimeters of the deep water channel. A gull passed by overhead, calling in its plaintive voice, and then it swooped down, skimming the water, which picked up tiny phosphorescent lights like glimmering bangles on the double bracelet of the channel.

As they passed the pitch-black outlines of pine trees, Bravo could see more lights, pouring from a section of the Franciscan monastery. The air smelled resiny, and then a whiff of the lagoon reached them-bleached stone and clams, salty weeds that twined in the depths.

As they approached, they could make out the cluttered sound of many voices.

"The Franciscans have turned the island into a tourist destination," Rule said. "Once a week, they have an evening tour. We can mingle with the crowd and hitch a ride on the ferry."

But when they arrived in the shadows cloaking the outskirts of the dock, they saw that passage on the ferry would be impossible. Three Guardians were patrolling the area, no doubt having given the Franciscans a plausible cover story as to why they needed to be there.

They crept around to their left in a rough semicircle and saw a motoscafo tied up on the other side of the large ferry. Moving from shadow to shadow, they circled toward it. A Franciscan monk was unloading the last of a pile of small barrels from the rear deck of the motoscafo. People continued to stream onto the ferry, which sounded its horn twice, as warning of its imminent departure.

As they watched, another monk appeared to help the other carry the barrels into the monastery. When they were both out of sight, Bravo and Rule ran to the motoscafo and jumped aboard. The two monks reappeared and picked up two more barrels. The last of the tourists had boarded the ferry, and now it gave another long hoot of its horn as its engines began to churn.

Rule climbed behind the wheel and fired the ignition. Bravo let go the lines holding the motoscafo at the dock. The monks had just disappeared into the monastery, and Rule took advantage of the moment to ease the boat forward. Their window of opportunity was short, the monks would reappear at any moment, but he resisted the urge to surge forward and instead matched his speed with that of the ferry. They moved out in tandem, the motoscafo hidden from the Guardians by the bulk of the ferry. A night heron crossed their path, silent as death, and as the land slipped away through the black, purling water they got one last bracing whiff of the pines on San Francesco del Deserto.

Then the yellow lights were upon them and they were in the channel, free.

After many hours the celebration of the new Knights-the Knights of Muhlmann, as Jordan privately thought of them-was still in full swing. A twelve-course dinner catered by Ostaria dell'Orso, one of Rome's finest restaurants, along with five cases of vintage Brunello di Montalcino had been consumed. The assembled had settled in for Cuban Montecristo Coronas, snifters of cognac and dark chocolate truffles, each one imprinted with a miniature of the Muhlmann shield, flown in that day from Belgium.

Jordan, his belly full, his head alight with his victory, was just finishing his second glass of the luscious Hine 1960 when Osman Spagna tapped him discreetly on the shoulder. One look at his expression caused Jordan to rise and follow the short man into the room where he had signed the contract on the villa. Behind him Spagna closed the double doors. Jordan saw before him four of the most influential and wealthy Knights: a Netherlands diamond cartel merchant, an English MP, an American money manager and the president of a South African-Australian metals conglomerate.

"Gentlemen," Jordan said, approaching them. "What have we here?" He laughed. "A meeting of the minds?"

"We fervently hope so, Grand Master."

They left it to the English MP, which was a bit of a surprise. Jordan had expected the American to be the mouthpiece. But they had opted to take the smooth path, the gentlemanly action.

"We'd like a bit of a word," the English MP said in his mildest and plummiest tone. "In theory, we have no problem with the action you've taken-"

"The coup," the American said, arching forward on the balls of his feet.

"Something stinks in here." Jordan stared hard at the American. "Is it a mutiny I smell?"

The MP moved at once to smooth the feathers ruffled by the American's injudicious remark. "Nothing of the sort, I assure you. We all recognize you as Grand Master, we all believe you're the man for the job."

Jordan, waiting for the shoe to drop, said nothing. He was good at waiting, better than the four of them put together, he'd wager.

The MP, rail-thin and pasty faced, cleared his throat. "We do, however, envision a potential problem."

"A large one," the American interjected. He was a big, beefy man with a Midwestern accent and the overly aggressive stance of a football thug.

No one was willing to restrain the American, Jordan noticed, which meant he was the designated attack dog. Smart move on their part.

"And that would be?" Jordan said.

"Your mother," the MP said silkily. "It's no secret that she's wanted to take control of the Knights. We've tolerated her machinations out of respect for you, Grand Master, but now… now she's inserted herself into the field with Damon Cornadoro, and we wonder… well, we wonder whether she would be playing so active a role in this most crucial venture if she wasn't your mother."

A stifling silence now descended on the six men. The MP cleared his throat again, someone-the Netherlander perhaps-coughed nervously.

"It was my plan," Jordan said evenly. "You're questioning it now?"

"Not at all," the MP said at once. "However, reports have come to us of her activities and we think something needs to be done to rein her in."

"You don't know my mother," Jordan said.

"On the contrary, I think we know her quite well." The South African stepped forward, placing a thick dossier on the table. He watched Jordan as he opened its cover. Inside were a series of surveillance photos of Camille and Cornadoro locked in amorous embrace.

After a moment, the MP said, "This is a dangerous cocktail, Grand Master. Surely you can understand our concern."

Indeed he could, better by far than any of them. Damn her to hell! With a hand he scarcely felt he pawed through the mess of photos, one more explicit than the next. Careful to keep his expression neutral, he said, "I appreciate your diligence, gentlemen, but I already know about my mother's indiscretion." This was a lie, but a necessary one. These men must never know they knew more about his family than he did.

"Surely you can see it's more than an indiscretion," the MP said.

The American stepped forward. "I think what you smelled, Grand Master, is a conspiracy between the two of them."

"I have the situation well in hand," Jordan said, "I assure you."

"Excellent," the MP said. He was beaming now. "That's all we needed to know, Grand Master. We'll leave the rest to you." He pointed to the dossier. "Rest assured all copies have been destroyed."

Spagna opened the double doors, the murmur and aromatic smoke drifted in from the larger room, and the four, their business completed, headed briskly for the door. The last of the group was the American. As the others departed, he turned back as if in afterthought and, strolling back to Jordan, whispered so only he could hear: "You know what you have to do, don't you? What is it the English say?" He grinned. "Oh, yeah, 'Off with her head!'"

Chapter 19

"So how is it with you, son?" Dexter Shaw said.

Bravo looked down, then away. "Oh, you know. The same."

"We haven't seen each other in over six months. You've been at Stanford and I've been away."

Father and son were sitting at an outdoor Burmese restaurant off M Street. It was summer, and Georgetown was cooking. Bravo had come up to see him, and Dexter had taken the afternoon off. That evening, they were scheduled to hear the Washington Philharmonic, sitting in the president's box.

"Anyway," Dexter went on, "what I meant was girls." He sought to catch his son's eye. "Do you have one-a special one, I mean?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know?" Dexter cocked his head. "Surely you can't mean that." Then, after a long beat, "Ah, I see. You don't wish to tell me. It's all right, Bravo, if you don't want to share-"

"Share? Why should I share?" Bravo blurted out. "When have you ever shared anything with me?"

Dexter blinked. "I can think of any number-Anything important, Dad." Bravo had been unable to keep the exasperation out of his voice, "And, come to it, when have you ever come out to Stanford-"

"A year ago October, I believe it was."

"Sure, you were on your way to, where was it?"

"Bangkok."

"Right, Bangkok. We were going to have lunch, go to the theater. I got tickets, and then-"

"My schedule changed. I told you, Bravo. I'm very sorry, but there was nothing I could do."

"You could have stayed."

"No I couldn't," Dexter replied, "I don't have that sort of job, I never have."

Lunch came then, and they both fell silent, grateful for the distraction of eating. Fragrant smoke from the charcoal oven wafted through the leafy garden, strung with colored paper lanterns. Laughter and the murmur of other voices, the clink of tableware against plates, traditionally garbed waitresses silently coming and going.

At length, Dexter put down his fork and said, "Honestly, I would be interested to hear about anyone special in your life."

Bravo looked up, and his father smiled at him, an expression that brought him back to when he was younger, to the best days of their relationship. Still, doggedly, he said nothing. He felt keenly the spite his father's on-and-off attention brought out in him, the disappointment at his long absences, his father's refusal to talk about them.

"All right," Dexter said, "then I'll tell you about my first love." He took a sip of beer, his expression turning even more thoughtful. "She was smart and quite beautiful, but the main thing about her was that she was going out with my friend. I'd met her at a party-a pretty drunken affair-and we'd started talking while my friend was in a stupor, head in the lap of another girl who was also unconscious.

"Anyway, we hit it off. We were both so embarrassed we didn't know quite what to do, for days after walking around in a painfully pleasant haze-you know the sort I'm talking about, neither of us could sleep or eat. All we could think about was, well…

"Finally, we couldn't take it anymore and we met on the sly. Afterward, I wondered whether that was what poisoned the relationship. It was rather fierce, not that it lasted very long, but it felt like forever."

Dexter's ironlike hands sat atop the table. "One might have thought that the deceit necessary to sustain the relationship would have worn me out, but, really, that was no problem for me. But what I found out… you see, as a young man I was lonely as only young people can be. I had temporarily-and rather thoughtlessly-severed my relationship with my parents, I was never a joiner, and so I was alone. This girl-I saw in her a way to make a connection, to come in out of the cold, as it were." He laughed. "Human beings are so stupid sometimes, they think that sexual intercourse will alleviate their essential loneliness. In fact, sex only reinforces reality-it's a vivid reminder of how truly alone they are.

"You see, Bravo, it's not a question of whether one is alone or not, it's a question of what one does with one's aloneness." He cocked his head again. "Does one give in to sullenness and despair, or does one begin to learn about oneself? Without that knowledge, how can one begin to make connections with anyone else?"

"Is this another lesson?" Bravo said boorishly. "I'm not ten anymore."

"No lesson intended or implied, Bravo. I was only trying to tell you… to do what you wanted me… to share."

Bravo looked away, biting his lip.

"What I mean to say, Bravo, is that you and I… we're different from other people. We're… well, I guess you could call us outsiders-it's far more difficult for us to find ourselves. Sometimes I ask myself what I have to do in order to be saved."

"Saved?" Bravo's head swung around to engage his father's eyes. "Saved from what?"

"From evil," Dexter said. "Oh, I don't mean the kind of evil encountered in the Crusades, at Auschwitz and Buchenwald, Hiroshima, in Angola and Bosnia, I don't mean the astonishing cruelty of mankind. This evil grips the mind and won't let go. It is a nausea of the soul, when you think nothing you possess can save you. 'What am I doing here?' you think. 'What is my purpose?'"

He held his glass of beer between his powerful hands as if it were a stalk of wheat. "You and I, Bravo, are not what we had assumed ourselves to be. It's natural, I suppose, to ask, Why? The answer is: because there is a power inside us. Are we supermen? No. But perhaps we are like artists; we are not hollow men, as Eliot so accurately termed them, though that may be our first reaction. Like all artists of every stripe, our desire, then, is to escape-escape the horror of the mundane, to become something better, to lead others along the same path-to, in a sense, save them from themselves."

Bravo was held spellbound. He understood every word his father said, understood it with every fiber of his being, understood down to his very soul. The knowledge shook him to his core.

Dexter shrugged. "If you don't get it now, I trust that one day you will."

But I do get it, Bravo thought, and was about to tell his father as much, when Dexter glanced down at his watch.

Jesus, Dad, no. Don't do it…

"I'm sorry, Bravo, but I have to get to the airport. I'm afraid I'm off again." Dexter pushed over two tickets along with a pass richly embossed with the presidential seal. "You take your girl-the one you won't tell me about-to the Philharmonic. Trust me, she'll love sitting in the presidential box."

Fuck the presidential box, don't leave me again…

Glimmers on the water seemed to follow them in the gray churning wake. Sky and sea were painted the same shades of purple and black. The low islands of the lagoon were strung out like a gigantic cipher. It seemed to Bravo now, standing beside his Uncle Tony, the motoscafo's engine thrumming through the soles of his shoes, moving through this dark and misty lagoon of antiquity, that Venice belonged to his father. Lights of unknown origin played over the water, refracted and reflected into shapes of cold flame that illuminated the shallow inky waves, smooth as glass.

Bravo took out the SIG Sauer. He tried not to think of Uncle Tony snatching it from him, firing at Zorzi point-blank. Perhaps in the Voire Dei it had been the right thing to do, he didn't know. "I don't understand," he said, wrenching his mind away from black thoughts. "I checked it after Zorzi gave it back to me."

Rule glanced over. "Didn't fire it, though, did you? The trigger won't go all the way back. Zorzi sabotaged it before he gave it back to you."

Bravo had been so sure that the gun was working properly, but then he heard the flat, shivery crack of the ice breaking and he shivered. The last thing he needed now was a flight of fancy or an echo from the past. Setting his mind on the job at hand, he sat on the gleaming varnished mahogany deck bench and carefully laid down each part of the weapon as he dismantled it. When he got to the trigger mechanism, he discovered something that had escaped his first cursory inspection-something was stuck there, jamming the mechanism.

"You see?" Rule said.

Bravo unfolded the object, examining it carefully. "This isn't Zorzi's doing. My father left it for me to find. He taught me to break down a gun before you use it, that was rule one. I just never had the time."

Rule peered at it. "All I see is a ball of old cloth."

"Not any cloth." Bravo unraveled it. "Linsey. It's a very low-quality linen and wool mixture which was said to be the material used for both Mary's head scarf and Lazarus's cloak." He was remembering the cipher his father left for him in the steel beggar's purse: Remember where you were the day you were born. St. Mary of Nazareth Hospital.

Not Mary of Nazareth, he thought now. "Isn't there an island in the lagoon that has a church named after Mary of Lazarus?"

Rule nodded. "It was used as a way station for pilgrims on their journey to the Holy Land. The church is long gone now." He thought for a moment. "Lazzaretto Vecchio lies due south, just below the Lido." He turned the boat in that direction. "In the old Venetian dialect, Mary's name became nazaretum and eventually, in the way of all languages, further distorted into lazaretto. Over the centuries, the island has had many incarnations. In the fourteenth century, for instance, it was used to quarantine plague victims during the city's first great epidemic." Moving out of the channel into the lagoon proper, he put on speed. "It's still quite lovely, but nowadays, it's only a center for stray dogs."

Remember the name of your third pet. Bark.

Bravo laughed out loud.

Jenny, in the company of Paolo Zorzi's emissary, arrived on San Francesco del Deserto to find her mentor with a bandaged head and in a foul mood. She was nervous and upset, but by far her overriding emotion was one of guilt.

They sat in the refectory, which she found oppressive and gloomy. Candles guttered all around her, and there was soot in the air. To her surprise, there were four other Guardians in the room. She waited for Zorzi to speak, but he did not acknowledge her presence in any way. Instead, he stared down at a message he had apparently just been given. Jenny would have given anything to know what was in it. As her gaze redirected itself to Zorzi, she noticed his red-rimmed eyes. He looked like he hadn't slept in two or three days.

At length, he said, "Father Mosto was murdered."

"And Bravo disappeared," she blurted in response, "more than four hours ago, and you've kept me waiting all this time. How else will you punish me?"

Zorzi looked up, impaling her with his implacable eyes. "Speaking of Braverman Shaw," he said softly, "you never delivered the message I ordered you to give him, did you?"

"That Anthony Rule is the traitor? No."

"Why?"

She knew that velvet voice, and she winced thinking of the iron fist behind it. "Because I don't believe it."

"It's not for you to decide these matters!"

Already on edge, she started at the sharpness of his voice.

"I was right when I counseled Dexter Shaw not to assign you to guard his son."

"And you were the one who trained me." Jenny was unable any longer to hide her bitterness.

"Precisely my point."

"You were harder on me than you were with your male pupils, you made damn sure of that."

Zorzi ignored her outburst. "I never should have listened to Dexter. Every instinct at my command told me he was making a mistake."

He regarded her with a look he reserved for those who had disappointed him. She could feel that he had removed himself from her sphere, that whatever she might tell him-whatever excuses she might put forward-would now fall on deaf ears. He was done with her.

Jenny, absorbing all this, was filled with despair. She stood, her head pulled into her shoulders, which were slightly hunched, as if she needed to protect herself from the assault of his words. She had always thought that he'd believed in her; now she knew that had it not been for Dex's intervention, Zorzi would have rejected her as the others in the Order had wanted to do. His belief had been in Dexter, not in her.

Still, she was not yet prepared to give up. "Why are we siting here when we should be trying to find Bravo?"

"I'd rather talk about you," Zorzi said. "Tell me what happened."

"I was guarding the rectory where Bravo and Father Mosto were talking. I was attacked from behind, overpowered. The next thing I knew, I woke up in a utility room. When I went out into the corridor, I found Father Mosto with his throat slit and my knife beside him in a pool of blood."

"Your knife."

"Yes."

"How do you suppose it got there?"

"That's obvious. Whoever assaulted me took it."

"How would they know you had it on you?"

Jenny's heart skipped a beat. She glanced around at the four other Guardians, who were hanging on every word that was said. For the first time she viewed her situation in another light.

"Is this an interrogation? Do you think I murdered Father Mosto?"

Zorzi rose, paced back and forth in front of her. "As you know, there is a traitor in our midst. Lately, as the death toll has mounted, it has occurred to me that there may be more than one traitor." He stopped and leveled his gaze at her. "You see what I mean."

"All I see is that I've got to go after Bravo," she said doggedly. "I screwed up; it's my responsibility-"

"I'm afraid I can't allow that."

"You think I'm a traitor," Jenny said in a strangled voice.

There was that look again, reasserting the distance he'd put between them, and when he spoke, his tone was cold and unforgiving. "You failed to protect our most important asset; that is unforgivable. As if that weren't enough, consider the situation from Bravo's point of view. He finds the body, the throat slit, your bloody knife beside the corpse, and you gone. What would you think if you were him?" Zorzi crumpled the message in his hand with a kind of cold fury that terrified her. "His position is the same as mine, he can't afford to trust you."

She stood up. "You can't just-" She stopped, turning as the four other Guardians came toward her. "This isn't right," she said weakly, and felt immediately foolish, because if she were in Zorzi's place she knew she'd do the same thing he was doing.

"Now I must leave," he said, "to try and clean up the mess you made." He turned back. "Pray for me. Pray that I find Braverman Shaw before it's too late."

With that damning accusation, he and two of the Guardians swept out. The heavy wood and iron door of the refectory slammed shut behind them.

Another wave of despair filled her, fueled by her sense of outrage and helplessness. She had lost the confidence of her mentor and was being detained by her own people, all because she had been implicated by her inattention, her schoolgirl crush, her own stupidity. Why hadn't she taken a page from Anthony Rule's book and kept herself free of emotional entanglements?

The two remaining Guardians stared at her with looks of mixed pity and hostility. She turned away. The hostility she could handle-she always had. It was the pity that unnerved her. To compound her stupidity, she took a wild couple of steps toward them. One backhanded her across the face while the other moved away, so he could cover her from a different angle. She staggered back, and the Guardian pushed her down into a chair and told her to stay there.

She glared up into his sneering face.

"This is how I always knew you would end up." He looked at her as if she were a cockroach he was about to grind beneath his boot. "You're a failure-worse, you're a disgrace." He spat onto the patch of floor between her knees before stalking away.

Jenny swiveled around and put her arms on the table. She thought of the mess she had made of her life. She thought of Ronnie Kavanaugh and of Dexter Shaw. She thought of the other path that might have been, the path that had been snatched away from her, in whose terrible aftermath Dex had appeared to save her. But had he saved her? she thought bitterly. For what? For this?

She put her head down on her forearms. Last of all, she thought of Bravo. She hadn't wanted to think of him, but now in her misery she could not help herself. He could have been the one to save her, truly and finally, as in the end Dex had been unable to do. She thought she understood now why Dex had wanted her to guard his son. With his uncanny prescience, he knew-he had to have known, she was certain of it.

All at once, she heard the low derisive laughter of her guards-her former compatriots-and the sound cut through her like a knife blade. She was immediately ashamed; they could see for themselves the weakness they had always suspected would one day lay her low.

Then, into her mind appeared the image of Arcangela-and with it the memory of the life she had led, of the almost insupportable deprivations she had endured so that her charges could carry out their work. Sacrifice seemed inadequate for the path she had chosen. Either way, though, it was her courage now that seemed to wind through Jenny's veins and arteries like a vine that, though abused by frost and axe, refuses to die. Instead, it grew green in the springtime of her emotions. And now she realized that Arcangela had given her something more precious even than the advice and support she had taken from Dex-the Anchorite had given her a chance to take back her life.

Now, through the lens of Arcangela's uncanny eye, she saw how she was repeating with Bravo the mistakes she had made with Ronnie and, to some extent, with Dex. She had fallen under their spell. Why? Because she felt that on some level they would save her. But no one had come to save Arcangela; she had the inner strength to save herself.

While she was with the Anchorite she had been awed and, to some extent, cowed by both the extremity of Arcangela's circumstances and depth of her inner strength. Now she realized that she herself possessed the same courage. It only remained for her to claim it.

Easier said than done, because here she was, a prisoner, with Paolo Zorzi doubtless on his way to find Bravo, and she had her head in her hands, weeping. No wonder the two Guardians were laughing at her. She was about to lift her head up, to defy them once again, when it seemed as if she felt the touch of Arcangela's hand on her defeated shoulder, staying her.

Wait, a voice inside her head whispered, there's a better way.

She remained where she was, her head on her forearms, and continued to weep. All the while, her mind was working in fifth gear. If they thought her weak, then let them believe it all the more, for once let their perception of her work to her benefit. This was what Arcangela would do, she was sure of it. Arcangela, who had used the means forced on her, the means no one else wanted, to achieve extraordinary ends.

She began to sob, her shoulders hunched and trembling visibly.

"Look at her." One of the guards laughed. "Better bring her a handkerchief."

"A towel is more like it," the other guffawed.

She heard the scrape of boot soles on the worn stone floor, the creak of old wood as one of the Guardians bent over her chair. She could smell him and knew precisely how close he was to her.

"Here, take this," he said shortly, "before you bring on the acqua alta, ha ha-"

She flung out an elbow, putting all her physical strength and her outrage into it. The cocked elbow landed square in his eye socket and he gave a cry, muffled by the hands clasped to his face. The second Guardian started toward her, but she had the first one around the throat, had his throwing knife out, and she brandished it.

The second Guardian checked only for a split instant. Then he grinned.

"Don't make me use this," Jenny warned.

The Guardian lifted his bladed weapon, the scimitar curve gleaming in the candlelight. "Do I look worried?" he said with a smirk. He came on, his weapon swinging back. "You don't have the guts."

Jenny threw the knife butt first. With expert precision, it found the place just above his nose. As he fell, unconscious, Jenny smashed the first Guardian's face into her upraised knee and he, too, collapsed.

Jenny ran through the darkness. As soon as she had cleared the seawall, she could hear the lagoon lapping at the shingle-Overhead, the sky had cleared. Stars, brilliant as Byzantine lamps, blazed down in splendor through the last wispy tendrils of mist. A stiffening breeze lifted stray tendrils of hair from her face, streaming them behind her. Her heart beat fast, but she felt lighter than she had in some time. She had her mission, and for the first time, it seemed, she was sure about who she was.

She ran toward the light that streamed from the cabin, toward the sharp odor of diesel fumes that billowed into the night. The motoscafo was still there. She saw Zorzi and several others in the last stages of preparing for its departure. For some reason, they had transformed the motoscafo into a police vessel, complete with decals and flag flying from the bow. As she entered the black water, the lines were cast off, and the burbling of the engines deepened in pitch.

She swam powerfully, her arms reaching out, her legs scissoring, and she came up alongside just as the engines produced a throaty roar. The bow lifted and she grabbed hold of one of the bumpers on the side as the boat got under way. She felt the sudden pull on her shoulder sockets and compensated, relaxing. She should have been out of breath, but she wasn't. She had taken control of her own life, just as Arcangela had meant her to do, and she was exhilarated.

Chapter 20

Bravo and Rule came ashore on the jutting square of Lazzaretto Vecchio that was fully forested. The night was very dark, but some stars were out, and to the west a cloud was illuminated from behind in theatrical fashion by the moon. The cloud looked veined and muscled, like an ancient god awakening from the sleep of eons.

"The traitor has laid low for quite some time," Rule said, "funneling information slowly but surely to the Knights of St. Clement. But now, with you on the hunt for the Testament, he's had to show his hand."

"You mean Zorzi."

Rule nodded. "I'm afraid so." He switched on a flashlight he had found in the cabin of the boat. "He was one of your father's closest associates. He knows almost as much about Dex as I do. He's after you now. He's cunning, devious and extremely dangerous. In fact, there's mounting evidence that he's quietly turned all his Guardians against the Order. They obey him and only him. I'm afraid you can't trust any of them."

Rule spread a tarp used to protect the foodstuffs the Franciscans brought to the island over the motoscafo.

"We were lucky on the way over here," Rule continued. "The monks surely must have reported the theft of this boat to the police. We'll have to keep a sharp eye out for them when we leave."

They turned away from the motoscafo. It was sufficiently hidden from a cursory sighting from a passing patrol boat but certainly would be found by a closer search. They would have to be well away from here before that happened, Bravo knew, which meant he had very little time to find his father's next cipher.

"I'll show you where the ruins of the old church are," Rule said as they struck out for the interior.

"How did you know where I'd been taken?" Bravo said.

"I followed my suspicions. I've had my eye on Paolo Zorzi for some time."

"Now this is just like old times."

Rule smiled, his eyes briefly touching Bravo in that familiar way.

The trees were thick in this area, a lush wetness spread beneath them. The rich air smelled dank.

"I want to thank you," Bravo said.

"I should thank you for saving my skin with Zorzi."

"You would've found your own way out," Bravo said, "but that's not what I mean."

Rule shot him a quizzical look.

"The winter Junior died I was royally pissed off at you."

"As I recall, you made no bones about it."

"I'm sorry about that."

"Old news."

"No, it isn't. I was angry at you for taking my father away."

"Yeah, well-"

"No, listen, Uncle Tony, I need to say this. I was a kid then, I was only thinking of myself, my own pain. I wasn't thinking of how bad it must have been for my father." There was a small silence. He wished Uncle Tony would say something, add an affirmation. "You knew he needed to get away, didn't you? You knew he would break down if he didn't."

"He sounded so bad when he called I knew I couldn't let you see what might become of him. A child shouldn't see his father in such grief, it was hard enough on you as it was."

"Where did you go?"

"Norway. We went hunting, moose and red deer mostly. Your father was some crack shot. One day-it was snowing, I remember-we came across some tracks that were unfamiliar to me. Very fresh they were, otherwise the snow would've covered them. Anyway, Dex got excited. He made us track the damn thing until the snow grew blue as the sun neared the horizon. Just for this one look we got of it-a wolverine. Even in those days they were rare enough."

"Did you shoot it?"

"Are you kidding? Dexter was in awe of it, he put up his gun and just sat in the snow like a little kid, watching. And you know I think the beast knew we were there-or at least that Dex was there, because once it looked in our direction and flinched. But it never bared its teeth and it didn't run." They were in a small grove of slender, wind-whipped pines now, and Rule pushed a springy branch out of their way. "That was one memorable trip. I saw your father sink down to the depths and then rebound. Out there in the whiteness, communing with that wolverine, he found the salt of life again."

Bravo felt once again the terrible weight of his father's passing, but this time it was leavened with a brush as if from the wings of a great bird that had swooped out of the blackness of the night. I guess you could call us outsiders-it's far more difficult for us to find ourselves. Sometimes I ask myself what I have to do in order to be saved. Revealed to him now was yet another layer of what his father had told him that summer afternoon in Georgetown-the difficult truth that he himself had learned about human connection and the world of the outsider.

"You were always a good friend," he said, his throat and his heart full, "to my father and to me."

Rule cuffed Bravo affectionately. "Sometimes you remind me so much of Dex it's uncanny." He paused, then, sobering, "I know how Junior's death affected all of you-especially you. You did everything you could. It wasn't your fault."

Bravo shivered, hearing an echo of Jenny telling him the same thing. For a moment, he flashed on her as she had been in Venice-the hotel room, the shower, the bed. He heard again the voices of the deliverymen, floating up from the canal like morning vapor. He felt her caress, heard her whispering in his ear. Then he heard again the eerie, evil report of the ice cracking beneath his feet. She had caressed his father, had whispered in his ear just as she had with him. He felt a certain horror, a creeping along his spine, and he shivered again as they pressed on.

They came to the crumbling stone foundation of the church without seeing another soul. Part of the building had latterly been turned into the dog kennel. One wall of the old church reared up, black and glistening, as crevassed as an old soldier's face. It had been broken in two.

"Now what? There's not much here," Rule asked as they surveyed the scene.

Bravo stared at the wall. Remember where you were the day you were born. Remembering St. Mary of Nazareth Hospital had brought him this far. Where was the hospital in Chicago? He strained to recall. Then he had it: 2233 West Division Street.

He went to the break in the wall-the division-and walked ten paces west, ten being the sum of the four numbers of the hospital's address. He knelt on the grassy ground at the base of the wall. Rule joined him and together they began to dig with their hands. Three feet down they found a parcel wrapped in oilskin.

Far out across the water, trembling lights from the Lido pointed like a crooked finger toward them. A gull cried several times, the plaintive sound diminishing into a sudden rush of air.

Mindful of the police search that had doubtless already begun, they headed back to the motoscafo at a quickened pace. Bravo unwrapped the package. Inside was a small silver Greek cross. Wrapped around it, like a beehive or a wasp's nest, was a skein of red threads.

"What do you make of it?" Rule said, peering over his shoulder.

Bravo shook his head.

They reached the boat without incident. The tarp was in the same position in which Rule had left it. Quickly, they stowed it and cast off. Rule handed Bravo the flashlight. While he maneuvered the motoscafo away from Lazzaretto Vecchio, Bravo switched on the flashlight and holding the Greek cross in its beam unwound the short lengths of red string. There were twenty-four. The area on the body of the cross that was now revealed had three words etched into it. Bravo knew that this was a two-key fractionation system cipher. One of the most famous field ciphers, it had been employed by the German Army during World War I. The first two words were the keys, the third word was the encrypted text. He opened his father's notebook to a blank page and began to work.

The cipher system was based on the ADFGVX cipher, which used a 6?6 matrix to substitute-encrypt the twenty-six letters of the alphabet and ten digits into pairs of the symbols A, D, F, G, V and X. The resulting biliteral cipher was only an intermediate cipher, however. It was then written into a rectangular matrix and transposed to produce the final cipher.

What Bravo came up with was a single word: sarcophagus.

"Where are we headed now?" Rule said at length. "Do you know?"

"Back to Venice," Bravo said, pocketing the notebook and cross. The red threads he dropped into the dark, ruffled water as if they were the last vestiges of his father, who had been here and, by this gesture, was here again.

Dawn was extending its long pearly fingers across the flat expanse of the lagoon. For a few moments they were alone on the water. The oblique light turned the surface into sheet metal through which their boat cut cleanly, like a honed knife. Birds called and circled, roused from the sleep by the dawn and the hunger in their stomachs. They swooped and called to one another as they hunted, submerging themselves briefly to snatch a fish between curved bills.

There were other hunters on the lagoon. As the motoscafo rounded the end of the Lido, they saw the police launch, and immediately Rule cut his speed.

Bravo came up alongside him. "What are you doing?"

"You'll see."

Rule had not changed course. In fact, so far as Bravo could tell, he was pointing the bow of the boat directly at the police launch. And now, though Bravo knew that the flatness of the lagoon in certain light could fool the eye and even create mirages, just like in the desert, he was certain that the police launch, having spotted them, had put on speed. He could see the bow lift and the new charge of foam fountaining behind it.

"Uncle Tony-"

"Have faith, Bravo. Have faith."

The police launch rocketed toward them, its speed and noise scattering what was left of the breakfasting birds. Bravo could make out the men aboard, though not yet their individual faces or their uniforms.

He heard a sound then, like the noise wind makes when it catches the rigging of a boat and tautens all its sails. But of course the motorboat had neither rigging nor sails, and then he realized that it was Uncle Tony, who was humming happily to himself. He was in his element, commanding a fast boat, about to go head to head, as it were, with adversaries. This is what he lives for, Bravo thought This is why the Voire Dei drew him like aflame.

The police launch was closing at what Bravo considered alarming speed.

Rule stopped his humming long enough to say, "Hold on," out of the side of his mouth.

Bravo clutched the railing with both hands as Rule shoved the throttle forward and the motoscafo leapt forward. He had an instant's glimpse of the astonishment in the eyes of the policemen aboard the other vessel as the motoscafo suddenly bore down on them, and he felt a shock go through him. Then Rule had turned the wheel hard to starboard. He had threaded the needle with an expert's hand, and the motoscafo veered off with a breathless rush, its port side lifted as it slashed through the water, creating a wave that swept aboard the police launch like a shipload of pirates.

Then they were away, headed northeast, in the general direction of Venice but more closely aimed at another islet whose northern flank presented itself to them to starboard. Bravo, glancing behind them, saw the swamped police launch swinging around, and with a roar it put on all speed to follow them.

"There's something about that boat," Rule said. "It's longer and lower in the water than the launches used by the Venetian police."

"You're right. I recognized a Guardian. That isn't a police launch at all."

Rule nodded. "Zorzi's picked up our trail."

The islet was coming up fast on their right. It was deserted, full of reeds and birds and the clean-sweet smell of decay. They had to be careful now because the water was shallow enough in spots to ground the boats. Long sandbars rose here from the depths of the lagoon to provide feeding grounds for birds as well as natural platforms for clamming.

The sun was fully above the horizon now, looking red and bloated, as if ill with a fever. The light, stronger, shot across the water in wavering lines, making the islet seem farther away than it was. The air was warming quickly, creating a period of disorienting perspectives and bewitching mirages.

"We can't let him stop us," Bravo said, leaning in so he could speak over the engine's heightened bellow. "You've got to get me to Venice."

Rule swung the wheel hard over. "Don't worry," he said grimly. "I mean to take Zorzi out of the picture once and for all."

If Paolo Zorzi were any other kind of man he would have blown a blood vessel by now, but he hadn't worked his way into the upper echelon of the Gnostic Observatines by being impatient or impetuous. "All things in their season" was his unspoken motto, and even in this chaotic moment when the tenuous future hung in the balance, he remained deathly calm. He neither cursed himself nor his crew for having failed to respond adequately to Anthony Rule's kamikazelike tactic, but he did resolve not to allow Rule to surprise them again.

Now, as they once again raced after Rule, he took the wheel himself. Instead of following directly in Rule's wake, he quartered in from the port side, effectively pinning Rule into the shallow passage of water between his oncoming motoscafo and the northernmost corner of the islet up ahead. He grinned as he came on. With each second that passed Rule's options were becoming more limited. Soon, he'd be out of options altogether.

"You see what he's trying to do," Bravo said. "Pin us into grounding ourselves on the shoals close to the islet."

"In this as in all things, he is bound to be disappointed." Rule's voice was low and fierce. The wind had got between his open lips, pulling his cheeks back from his bared teeth.

"But you're heading right for the shallows," Bravo said.

Rule said, "Zorzi will be well pleased for the same reason."

In the deceptive light, he could not make out the distinctions in the color of the lagoon that in late morning through late afternoon mariners used to differentiate the deepwater channels from the shoals that could wreck them. Charts were all well and good elsewhere, but the combination of the changing light and the treacherous tides often rendered the maps useless in all but the few major deepwater passages.

Ahead, Bravo could see the islet coming up fast-the sea fields of quivering reeds, the glistening tide pools, a dark wave, the rising and falling of the birds over their nests, and just beyond, like a series of wavecrests, a pair of barene, salt flats that were actually sandbars, pale as a woman's throat, the smaller one closer. On the one farther from them a dozen or so men stooped, their feet and ankles hidden beneath the water as they went about their morning's work, gathering clams that would be consumed that afternoon and evening in Venice's restaurants.

Rule kept glancing over his left shoulder as if worried about the police launch vectoring in off the port quarter. He kept edging in closer and closer to the islet. The launch, having maintained full speed, had gained on them. Apparently, this was precisely what Rule wanted, for he made no effort to push his own throttle forward. This would be consistent with a captain concerned with grounding his boat.

The police launch was now-by Bravo's admittedly inaccurate estimation-only three boat-lengths behind them. As it had been before, it was all about timing.

"Uncle Tony," Bravo shouted, "they're drawing guns!"

Rule veered abruptly to starboard, seemingly into the heart of the shoals. Bravo shouted again, this time in apprehension.

But instead of grounding, the motoscafo shot forward as Rule now put on speed.

"There's a deepwater channel here," Rule said. "It's unmarked because of how narrow it is. Also, it all but vanishes during the low tides."

Bravo, listening, had turned his body perpendicular to Rule's so that he could look ahead and behind with equal ease. The police launch, having had too short a time to adjust its course fully, had grazed the edge of the sandbar and was now heading in the wrong direction. However, at Zorzi's shouted order, the launch swung around in a tight arc, headed into the channel. It put on all speed as they went through the channel into the open water after the motoscafo.

The police launch must have had a more a powerful engine, because it closed the distance between them with appalling speed.

"They're right on top of us!" Bravo shouted, as the first warning shots were fired across their bow.

The moment Zorzi's motoscafo had first put on speed, Jenny had drawn her legs up through the rushing water-no easy task in and of itself-curling her body into a ball as she tucked her feet into the webbing of the draped line that held the bumper against the side of the boat.

She might have thought it a minor miracle that she hadn't been discovered, except that everyone aboard Zorzi's motoscafo-Zorzi included-was so intent on finding their prey they had no eyes for anything else.

She heard their voices over the engine noise. Occasionally, she could even make out a sentence or two, though she struggled to make sense of what she picked up. Zorzi kept referring to Anthony Rule as "the Traitor," which though wrongheaded was, she supposed, consistent with what he believed. It was the Guardians' responses to him that she found puzzling. They spoke to him as if he and he alone were the head of the Gnostic Observatines.

Rule held fast to his northwest course, even with the launch gaining on them. More shots were fired, and then Bravo had drawn his SIG Sauer and was returning the fire.

"Forget that," Rule shouted, "and hold on."

An instant later, he had turned the wheel hard to starboard. At the same time he shoved the throttle all the way forward, asking for and getting every ounce of speed the engine was able to generate. The bow, and then the entire front end of the motoscafo, lifted free of the water.

Bravo tossed this way and that, could see that they were headed directly at the first of the two barene. The clammers, having caught sight of the chase, now stood, staring transfixed as the boats roared toward them. No one-Bravo included-believed that Rule would allow the motoscafo to ground itself. Surely, they reasoned, he'd break off, as he had when he'd made the run at the police launch, feinting at the last possible instant.

But that moment came and went-Bravo could feel it, and he braced himself against the polished wood. Three seconds later, the keel of the boat grazed the rise of the sandbar. Instead of grounding on the barene, Rule used it as a launchpad for the boat. The motoscafo took off into the air, rising in a graceful arc that took them over both sandbars.

"Yahoo!" Rule shouted as they struck the lagoon beyond both sandbars. The double screws bit into the water, and with a massive blast the boat took off, heading straight for Venice.

Bravo, looking behind them, saw Zorzi's launch had broken off and was bobbing at idle beyond the barene.

Rule fumbled in his clothes. "Where's that damn pack of cigarettes when I need it?" He laughed, half-giddy with their spectacular success.

"Guess I can't bum one off you, can I? " There was a slight pause. "So where shall I head this thing? You must know by now where we need to go."

Camille, on a sleek black and white motoscafo on the Grand Canal, held the cell phone to her ear and waited, her blood humming in her ear. She was aware of a slight sensation of anxiety, which she put down to anticipation. The call from Anthony Rule had come in just as he promised, everything was falling nicely into place.

"Castello," Bravo's voice said in her ear. "The Church of San Giorgio dei Greci."

"All right." Rule's voice now. "We'll make our way from the lagoon side via canals to the Fondamenta della Pieta`. We'll be there, I estimate, in fifteen minutes. That suit you?"

Camille, having heard enough, put her cell phone away and gave orders to the captain to take her with all due speed to Fondamenta della Pieta` in Castello. Then she moved away to where Damon Cornadoro stood, a deep scowl on his handsome face.

"My dear Damon, you look positively sullen," she said brightly. "Please don't tell me you've succumbed to jealousy."

"Can you blame me? Rule was your lover."

Camille took out a cigarette and lit it. "What of it?"

"The affair went on for years. It has occurred to me more than once that you still have feelings for him."

"If I do, it's none of your business."

"But your son-"

"What about my son?" she said sharply.

"I always wondered…" He let her hang there suspended for a moment, her eyes riveted on him, her breath stilled, a small victory, to be sure, but a victory nonetheless. "I always wondered whether Rule was Jordan's father."

She turned away, her eyes dark, unfathomable.

The topic of her son's father was taboo, he knew that, so he came after her, almost as a supplicant. "I'm your lover now, Camille. Do you think I would share you?"

Camille blew smoke out through her half-open lips as she contemplated the magnificent palazzi passing by on either side of the Grand Canal.

"Camille?"

She wouldn't think of Jordan's father, she wouldn't. So, to calm herself, she turned her mind to other matters. It both fascinated and depressed her that men thought only in terms of possession. I don't have that, I want it. Now that I have it, I will never let it go. Of course, what made them predictable made them susceptible to her. So. What should she tell this lover of hers? Certainly not why she had taken Rule as her lover, certainly not that she still loved him in the manner she loved any object precious to her. In truth, Camille was never so lonely as when she was with a man. They were so easily satisfied, so quickly sated, and then what happened? Their quick-shift attention turned elsewhere, you could tell them to go fuck themselves and they never even heard it.

Inevitably, however, there were men who presented her with something of a challenge. Anthony Rule, for one. Turning him away from the Order of Gnostic Observatines had been a long, slow, arduous and often perilous path. It had been a deeply considered and meticulously planned military campaign. For all those reasons-and, of course, others-it was without question a crowning achievement in her life, and a stunning success coming on the heels of such a devastating disappointment. Over the years, the intelligence he had provided had been invaluable to her and to Jordan. And the most satisfying aspect was that it was he who had passed her this ultrasensitive intelligence.

"You have nothing to worry about, my love," she said now. "Anthony Rule is my past. You are my present."

Even over the noise of the engine she could hear Cornadoro's released breath. She almost laughed at how immediately he responded to the stroking. It was, by this time, something of a Pavlovian response. He wanted-no, needed-to believe her. Men, obsessed with proving to each other how strong they were, were essentially weak. She had proved this maxim time and again even with the hard cases like Rule and Cornadoro. Then there was Dexter Shaw-but there was bound to be one, she told herself in a quick gloss of the past. What was he but the exception that proved the rule? She consoled herself with the thought that men had such a narrow definition of coercion. What did men-who after all were most comfortable with a cudgel in their hand-know of coercion? The velvet glove was anathema to them. Though they responded to it beautifully, even, she might say, movingly, they continued to deny its existence. All the better for me, Camille thought. Which was why throughout history there always had been successful women, clever and resourceful, who used their forced servitude as a cloak of anonymity behind which they wielded their own form of velvet glove to devastating effect.

Camille held no sympathy for women who took a beating from their men, whether physical or emotional. Hardly surprising, since she had nothing but the deepest contempt for weakness of any kind. It was her opinion that weakness was what got them into the abusive situation and it was weakness that chained them there. There was no situation that the human mind couldn't work itself out of. She believed this with the single-minded fervor of a religious zealot. It was, in fact, for her a form of religion, so closely did she adhere to the tenet. It was the one idea she could accept as gospel.

They approached the Fondamenta della Pieta`, and Cornadoro leapt ashore before the captain even tied up the boat.

"I will come to you soon," she crooned to Cornadoro as if he were a baby longing to suck at her breast. "In the meantime, make your way to the church. And for the love of God be on your guard for Zorzi and his Guardians. I have no doubt that he will kill you on sight, if you give him the opportunity, just as he will now kill Anthony Rule."

Chapter 21

Walking south from the Fondamenta della Pieta`, Bravo and Rule found the Church of San Georgio dei Greci without difficulty. Three times, they had paused or taken small detours to ensure themselves that no one was following them. Though still early, the day was already hot and sticky. White clouds hung motionless against the sky as if nailed in place.

The church presented an elegant facade to the street down which they walked, a remarkably simple affair, at least in terms of Venice's hyperventilating architecture. The only Greek Orthodox church in Venice, it had been built in 1539 when there was a thriving Greek population, many of whom had traveled for centuries with the seafaring Venetians to the Levant and settled in important trading communities along the south coast of the Black Sea, where their religion became the dominant form of worship until the Muslim Ottomans drove them from Trebizond in the fifteenth century. Now there were less than a hundred Greek Orthodox in all Venice.

The interior of the church, with its high, barrel ceiling, seemed empty and cavernous. There were few people about-! an old woman kneeling, her hands clasped, as she faced the enormous gilt cross, a heavy man with tousled hair in earnest conversation with a tall, cadaverous priest with a humpback under his long black cassock.

The lack of people seemed endemic, as if something vital had hollowed out the interior, keeping intact the magnificent architecture and sculpture but leaving behind, as after a receding glacier, the peculiar barrenness of a moraine-a landscape devoid of both plants and the earth in which they would grow.

Like all Greek and Russian Orthodox churches, San Georgio dei Greci had a notable iconostasis, a wall of icons that was Byzantine in origin. Historically, the iconostasis had served as a kind of threshold or fence, a symbol of the division between the sanctuary and the nave, between heaven and earth, the divine and the mortal, but over the years it evolved into a wall into which the individual icons were set. As with all religions, what had once been correctable was now quite literally set in stone.

As soon as the tall priest noticed them, he broke off with the heavyset man and came over to where they stood.

"My name is Father Damaskinos," he said in a voice that made it seem as if his mouth was full of gravel.

Italian wasn't his first language, Bravo thought, and so he replied in Greek, giving their names.

The priest's eyes opened slightly in surprise and delight. "You speak Greek very well, what other languages do you know?"

"Trapazuntine Greek," Bravo said.

Father Damaskinos laughed softly. He had shoulders like a wire hanger and the head, small-eared and large-toothed, of a leopard. His hunchback was slight, from some angles seeming not to exist, so that he appeared, like many others of his height, merely stoop shouldered.

He replied in the same ancient form of his language, "Then of course you must have come to the Church of San Georgio dei Greci for a specific reason."

"I've come," Bravo said, "to see the crypt."

"Crypt?" Father Damaskinos's narrow brow furrowed deeply. "You are misinformed. We have no crypt here."

Bravo turned to Rule. "Uncle Tony, do you know this man?"

Rule shook his head. "He is not one of us."

Father Damaskinos's black eyes seemed lit from within his leopard's skull. "One of us? What does this mean?"

"Bravo, we have no time for this," Rule said.

Nodding, Bravo took out the Greek cross and held it in his open palm. For a moment Father Damaskinos said nothing. Then he took it as gingerly as if it were a scorpion. He examined every inch of it, most of all the inscription.

At length, he returned the cross to Bravo's palm. "Where are the red threads?"

"Gone," Bravo said.

"Did you count them?"

"There were twenty-four."

This odd exchange had the terse, staccato tempo of a spy's recognition code.

"Twenty-four," Father Damaskinos said. "You're certain? No more, no less?"

"That's right. Twenty-four, exactly."

"Come with me." Father Damaskinos turned abruptly on his heel, leading them across the checkerboard floor, to a door at the extreme left side of the iconostasis. Inside was a tiny space, seemingly carved out of the church's stone blocks. Father Damaskinos took a torch from a black wrought-iron ring set into the wall and lit it.

"For obvious reasons," he said, "there is no electricity in the crypt."

They descended a spiral staircase, its marble treads so well worn they dipped in their centers. Because this was Venice, the crypt was not as far down as it would have been in cities built on dry land. It was damp and cold as a refrigerator. The stone floor was awash in water and, here and there, tiny shelled creatures marched up and down the slick walls, their multiple legs clicking like the pens of an army of clerks.

"Our crypt is a secret place, its existence zealously guarded."

The crypt was larger than Bravo had expected. Two rows of stone sarcophagi stretched away from them, separated by a narrow aisle. Into the lid of each sarcophagus was carved the likenesses of those buried inside. Some held crosses, but others clasped swords to their chests.

Father Damaskinos faced Bravo. "You are Dexter's son, are you not?"

"Yes. How did you know my father?"

"We had a friendship based on mutual trust, we believed in the same thing: the overarching power of history. Your father was a great student of history, you know. Occasionally, I would translate ancient documents that even he couldn't decipher. In return, though I never asked for it, the church received a monthly stipend from an account that Dexter set up for the purpose."

Father Damaskinos addressed Rule. "You appear surprised that he would turn to someone outside his Order, but consider: for centuries, there has been an alliance between the Order and the Greek Orthodox-the Orthodox Church having provided the Order with information and even secret documents in the early days when members of the Order traveled to the Levant-Samsun, Erzurum, Trebizond. This alliance was a natural one, born both of necessity and self-defense since both the Greek Orthodox Church and the Order were enemies of the pope."

They walked through the water, down the aisle. It was curious, Bravo thought, that though this was the resting place of the dead, he could sense more life down here than he had in the church above. Like his father, he had an acute sense of history. For him, history was a living thing with an endless supply of stories, of lessons to apply to the present of one's own life. He could remember innumerable times he and his father had read historical texts-their favorites the living words of those who had lived through history, unaltered and unexcerpted by historians with their own perspectives, their own axes to grind. The danger in studying history, Dexter had told him, was in not going to the source.

"So you have become part of the Voire Dei," Father Damaskinos said, "and now nothing seems the same."

"I felt that way the moment my father died."

"I, too," the priest said soberly. "Your father was a unique individual. I wonder whether you are like him."

"You mean his gift of prescience."

Father Damaskinos nodded. "Your father saw the battle that began in the Voire Dei and spread to the world outside in, shall we say, larger terms than the others. He saw that the battle had commenced on political terms, that it had remained so for centuries. In the fifteen hundreds it might have had the trappings of a religious conflict, but the underlying motivators were strictly political. Centuries later, those, like the Communists, who refused to recognize the changes afoot, who couldn't see that the battle had shifted to economic terms, were doomed.

"The lust for economic supremacy is the engine that has driven the Voire Dei-as well as the larger world-for more than twenty years now. It, like the idea of political power before it, has become so entrenched in the thinking of the participants that they have become as blind as the Communists to the changes at work. But your father knew-he saw that the imperative of economic superiority was slowly being eroded by the rise of religious conflict. The so-called economic reasons for the conflict-that is, the scramble for oil-were once again trappings. You see the importance of history? Beneath those false trappings is the religious motivator.

"Fundamentalism, you see? The Christians on one side, the Islamics on the other. It is no longer simply Israel the Arabs have to fear, but America with its increasingly powerful fundamental Christian constituency. This is a conflict that goes beyond the traditional scope of the Voire Dei, as we have known it, and yet it brings the Voire Dei into particular focus and prominence because what your father saw coming is an age of the New Crusades. Make no mistake, it is the future, and those who ignore its growing importance are doomed to be ground beneath its powerful heel."

Seeing the smirk on Rule's face, Father Damaskinos broke off. "You do not agree, Mr. Rule?"

"No, I don't. The Order is purely secular now, no one knew that better than Dex. The idea that he had become interested in religious infighting is absurd."

"And yet the pope still sends his minions after you-now with ever-increasing fervor."

"The pope knows nothing of this," Rule said shortly. "If he has those around him like Cardinal Canesi, so much the worse for Rome. Even so, Canesi has no religious axe to grind-it's the politics of power he has on his mind. Do you really think he gives a fig about the Testament of Christ? No, the Testament is his enemy. It negates the very power base he has built for himself. It's the Quintessence he's after, my friend. Only the Quintessence will save his sorry skin now."

"He will never get the Quintessence. The good cardinal is doomed."

"He very well may be," Rule said. "But with the pope having only days to live, you can be damned certain he's going to do his best to destroy the Order first."

"How very against God you are."

"Over the years, Father, I've learned the high art of atheism."

"That is a pity," Father Damaskinos said.

"What a surprising comment." Rule didn't bother to hide his disgust. "I've had enough talk of religion and doom to last me a lifetime. Let's get on with it."

Jenny was finally on dry land, for which she could only offer up a silent prayer of deliverance. Her arms were numb, and her legs trembled like a foal trying to keep its feet. A sharp pain at the base of her neck seemed connected to the violent headache that had driven its spike between her eyes.

She crouched in the shadows, not far from Paolo Zorzi, who had gathered his Guardians as soon as they had scrambled off the boat at the fondamenta in Castello. Zorzi had his cell phone to his ear. Her position was such that the acoustics of the street brought her every word he said.

"Where are they now?"

He had marshaled, she had gathered, all the resources at his command, using his men at fixed points like the coastal watch-towers that kept track of marauding Corsair ships, like signal fires that transmitted dire news from city to city.

"The church," he was saying. "Yes, of course I know it."

He turned, his expression set, impatient, annoyed and, Jenny hoped, quite possibly chagrined. During the journey across the lagoon, she had discovered that he had been the one to capture Bravo, but Bravo, thank God, had escaped, along with Rule. It was Bravo and Rule they had been chasing across the lagoon. She had not been able to tell this before, curled on the opposite side of the boat. But now Zorzi and his traitorous Guardians had picked up their trail again, and from the sound of the conversation they might soon have them surrounded.

All she had to do now was to think of a way to stop them. She almost wept with the futility of it-what could she do, one woman alone and unarmed against this well-trained, disciplined cadre?

"There is no good news this day, save one thing," Zorzi was saying. "The crisis generated by Braverman Shaw has at last drawn our enemy out of hiding. Anthony Rule is the traitor, this information is incontrovertible."

Who was he speaking with? Not another of his cadre, as she had first supposed. You're lying! Jenny wanted to shout. You're the traitor!

She wished she could accost each and every Guardian and tell them the terrible mistake they were making. Instead, she had to crouch here, trembling like a fawn and watch her world go to hell. She couldn't let that happen, no way-

"It's a delicate operation, of course," he continued. "Bravo must not be further injured in any way. The trauma of his father's death-yes, though I was six thousand miles away, I take full responsibility. Yes, sir. But you must understand, the delicacy of this operation is extreme. Not only must we extract Braverman Shaw safely but we must do so without killing Rule… Of course, I'm certain. What good will it do us to shoot him dead now?" He walked a little away from the knot of Guardians, closer, as it happened, to where she crouched in a shadowed doorway. "This is our chance to turn the tables on the Knights. Imagine the intelligence about them Rule must be carrying inside his head." Zorzi switched his cell phone to his other hand, his other ear, while he flexed the one that had been holding the unit. "No, sir, I will not handle the interrogation myself. You know my history with Rule; we've never seen eye to eye. How would it look if I handled his interrogation? No, that I will leave up to you, sir."

All at once, Jenny realized that she was shaking all over. What was wrong with this picture? Paolo Zorzi should have been advocating Anthony Rule's death-if only to protect himself. Not only was he advocating the capture of Rule, but he was refusing to lead the interrogation. What Zorzi was saying made no sense to her. And then, with a icy ball forming in her stomach, she realized that if Zorzi wasn't the traitor-if, in fact, he was telling the truth and, instead, Rule was the traitor, the conversation made perfect sense.

Jenny put her head against the door and closed her eyes against the spinning of the world around her. She felt sick to her stomach. Rule was the traitor-Rule, who had been so close to Dex his son called him Uncle Tony. It was perfect-so perfect that she wanted to gag. So many unexplained anomalies raced through her head. No wonder the Order had been losing ground to the Knights, no wonder they'd now been losing key men-including Dex. It had all been Rule's doing.

Without her being aware of it, her fingers curled, her hands turned to fists she planned to furiously employ at the first opportunity.

Bravo became aware of Father Damaskinos's keen eye on him.

"When it came to the Order, your father had a particular interest, Bravo. I wonder if he shared it with you."

The priest spoke in such easy, even tones it was possible to believe that this was not a test. But only for a moment. Bravo smiled, because he liked Father Damaskinos, liked especially his caution in this new time of terrible peril for those in the Order as well as for those who befriended members of the Order.

"He spoke to me often of Fra Leoni."

"Yes, indeed. Fra Leoni was the last Magister Regens of the Order. Afterward, the so-called Haute Cour-the committee originally formed to advise the Magister Regens and see that his dictums were carried out correctly-evolved into an egalitarian ruling body." Father Damaskinos looked at Rule as if in defiance, but Rule was silent. "There seemed little about the Order's hallowed leader that Dexter did not know. He also knew that the only way for the Order to evolve, to become a major force in the modern world was to elect a new Magister Regens."

"Does one of these sarcophagi hold the remains of Fra Leoni?" Rule's interest had suddenly quickened.

"Now that would be something, truly," the priest said. "However, you must know that the whereabouts of the crypt was so zealously guarded over the centuries that it has now become something of a legend. In fact, no one knows whether it actually exists."

"My father believed it existed," Bravo said.

"That's right," Father Damaskinos said, "but I believe that even he had no clear idea where it might be."

"Do you know the names of those buried here?" Bravo said.

"Of course," Father Damaskinos replied. "These are all Venetians who secretly helped us in centuries past. Their names are engraved on my memory, which is, of course, the only place they exist."

Bravo asked him to recite the names. When he was finished, Bravo said, "Please lead me to the sarcophagus of Lorenzo Fornarini."

"Of course." Father Damaskinos led them two-thirds of the way down the crypt, pointing to a sarcophagus on the left.

The Fornarini were, like Zorzi, one of the Case Vecchie, the so-called old houses, the elite families that had founded Venice: the twenty-four. This was the meaning of the twenty-four strands of red thread wound around the Greek cross. The three ciphers taken together read: in the Church of San Georgio dei Greci is a sarcophagus of a member of the twenty-four.

"As your father knew very well, Lorenzo Fornarini lived at the end of the fourteen hundreds and was a Knight Templar," Father Damaskinos said. "He was at Trebizond when it fell to the Sultan Mehmed II. In Trebizond, however, he secretly renounced his allegiance to Venice and became a member of the Greek Orthodox church, which was why he was secretly brought here. Members of the clergy there declared him a hero. But he was denounced by Andrea Cornadoro, another member of the Case Vecchie and a knight with an exceedingly evil reputation.

"He and Lorenzo Fornarini fought each other over three years and two islands before Cornadoro finally killed Fornarini. The priests preserved his body, wrapped it like a mummy and brought it back to be interred here. Like Fra Leoni, Lorenzo Fornarini was a hero to Dexter."

"Help me," Bravo said to Rule.

Together, they moved aside the stone lid just enough for Bravo to peer inside. He stared for a long moment at the skeleton of Lorenzo Fornarini. In the flickering light from the torch all time and space seemed obliterated, and he saw again the knight who had fought so valiantly against the Ottoman horde.

Then the spell was broken and, leaning over, he reached in. Between the ribs of the skeleton, he found a PDA, which was lying on something long and narrow. He removed both items. With the PDA was Lorenzo Fornarini's dagger, beautifully preserved in a chased steel sheath.

Bravo examined it, then turned on the PDA. Up came a long series of letters and numbers. His father had turned the PDA into a one-time pad-or Vernam cipher. Gilbert Sandford Vernam was an American cryptographer. In 1917, while working for AT&T, he invented the one-time pad cipher system, still the only cipher so secure that it had never been broken. The keystream of the Vernam cipher was the same length as the plaintext message and consisted of a series of bits generated completely at random, hence its invulnerability even to modern-day supercomputers.

They went back up into the church, noted the women's stalls above the entrance were empty, and sat there.

The problem Bravo needed to solve was where his father had secreted the one-time pad he would use to decode the cipher into plaintext. His first thought was that it was somewhere in his father's notebook, but after a quick perusal, he realized that the keypad would be too obvious there. He looked at the enamel American flag lapel pin, to no avail. Then he took out the pack of unopened cigarettes he'd found with the other objects. On its bottom was stamped a sell-by date and a lot number. However, the lot number contained symbols as well as letters and numbers. With mounting excitement, he counted the string-it was precisely as long as the keystream on the PDA.

He entered the lot number on the PDA's keypad and pressed the calculate key. The resulting decoded cipher was a riddle in ancient Greek.

"What can run but never walk? Has a mouth but never talks? Has a head but never weeps? Has a bed but never sleeps?" Rule read over his shoulder. "What does that mean?"

"It's a river." Bravo laughed. "When I was a child, there was an epic poem I loved that my father used to read me. It began, 'By the waters of Degirmen did King David lose his life/When he was betrayed and the Conqueror took all that was his…'

"David was the last of the Comneni, the storied family that for centuries ruled Trebizond, the wealthiest of the Black Sea trading cities. Degirmen is the name of the river that flows through Trabzon, as it's now known."

Father Damaskinos was nodding. "The Comneni were Greek Orthodox. David, the last of the line, was betrayed by one of his ministers, and Trebizond, long thought impregnable, fell in 1461 to the army of Mehmed II, sultan of the Ottoman Empire, known as the Conqueror."

Bravo looked at Rule. "The Testament isn't in Venice, as I had thought. I have to go to Turkey, to Trabzon."

"So the journey continues," Rule said with an obscure kind of weariness.

Bravo scarcely heard him. For the first time, he was struck full force by the sense of his father's unfinished life, and he touched a sorrow inside himself so intimate and painful he'd never suspected it was there.

The Church of San Georgio dei Greci stood in the glare and musty heat of the Venetian morning. Paolo Zorzi and his Guardians had gathered in the blue shadows that were slowly being eroded by the brilliant sunlight. Someone, in a nearby campo, was singing an aria in a fine, untrained voice. The notes floated across the canal like soap bubbles, making the air glisten.

The Guardians were wide-eyed, their lips half parted with the forces of their breath. Jenny could see on their faces that curious mixture of anticipation, tension and anxiety as they geared themselves up for war.

She burned to walk up to her mentor and offer her services, but she knew better. The frame-up had worked this well: he no longer trusted her, and no matter what he might say to the contrary she had the evidence in his eyes to remind her that she could no longer trust him. He had lied to her about Bravo, and once the lies began they became a torrent and then, simply, the way things were. She had her own example to go by.

No, she realized, she was on her own now, cut off from the Order that had betrayed her. She'd never been a valuable asset to them, merely an accommodation between friends. In her current state, she could even work up a hatred for Dex for interfering, for treating her like a thing instead of a human being. He had sold her into slavery in much the same way Arcangela's parents had sold her. The Order or the nunnery, what did it matter? She and Arcangela were both imprisoned in cages carefully and ingeniously manufactured by men. The difference between them was that Arcangela had figured out a way to escape hers.

She started. Zorzi and his Guardians were on the move, approaching the church in a concerted and controlled wave, all entrances and exits covered, blocked and, finally, used. She waited until the last possible instant, until just one Guardian was left to go through the front door, and then she stepped up behind him, punched him hard in the kidney and as he reacted, slammed his head against the church's stone facade. She climbed into his robe, took his gun, and then, like quicksilver, she slipped into the church.

Bravo saw movement out of the corner of his eye and Rule, with an animal's keen defense mechanism, felt the imminent peril.

"He's here," Rule said. "Zorzi."

Bravo pushed Father Damaskinos down behind the dark wood of the women's stalls and said quietly but firmly in Trapazuntine Greek, "Don't move, not for anything, do you understand?"

The priest nodded and then, as they were about to turn away, saw the SIG Sauer in Bravo's hand. Reaching beneath his black cassock, he pulled out a gun, handing it to Rule butt first.

"Even here, there are times when one needs protection," he whispered.

Rule nodded curtly, a gesture that reminded Bravo of a military salute, a coded recognition one soldier gives to another.

"Godspeed," Father Damaskinos said.

Rule brandished the gun. "God has nothing to do with it."

They crept partly out from behind the partition of the stalls. From this vantage point they could see the enemy crawling like maggots-Paolo Zorzi and four Guardians. But they knew there were others-there had to be-in other parts of the church not visible to them.

"They won't hurt you, or at least they'll try not to," Rule said grimly. "As for me, I'll be dead in the blink of an eye if I let them get a clear shot at me."

"Then we have to make sure they don't get a clear shot at you," Bravo said.

Rule laughed briefly and silently. He ruffled Bravo's hair, as he'd done when they were both much younger.

"This is what I admire most about you, Bravo. Your absolute loyalty is a refreshing change for me."

"You're saying loyalty has no place in the Voire Dei."

"I would never tell you that," Rule said seriously. "Never."

"Never, "Camille had told him. "You must not interfere." Damon Cornadoro was a sentinel in the shrinking shadows that still lurked around the church of the Greeks, semiderelict and of no value to him or to anyone he knew. He was not cut out to be an observer; his skills were best served in the furtherance of action. And, as he observed the Guardians moving in as they ringed the rear and sides of the church, he decided to ignore Camille's express order.

He knew the endgame had begun, and he would be damned if it would take place without him. He went into action, if he thought about it at all, because it pleased him; the lure of bloodshed was irresistible. But there was another reason locked away beyond his understanding. His willful disobedience stemmed from the look that had come into Camille's eyes when she took the call from Anthony Rule. He had felt their connection, even displaced by wireless electronics. He could see the slight tremor in her hand that held the cell phone, the sexual flush that came to her cheeks. Worst of all was the sighting of Rule himself in her eyes. She had been staring at him-Cornadoro-but it was Rule she was seeing.

And so he moved, rage and spite informing every movement, every decision. He made no sound in the dimness of the church, coming upon each Guardian unsuspected and undetected. He took them down with an economy of movement but with a terrible excess of pain. He never saw their faces, never cared to see them; his eyes were filled with someone else. He possessed the fixed gaze of a killing machine and was unstoppable.

Until, that is, he felt the familiar touch on his arm and, swinging around, found himself staring into her eyes.

"The staircase is the key," Rule said. "For us, it's the only way in or out."

Bravo nodded. The spiral staircase up to the women's stalls was narrow. A creak from one of its wooden treads hidden behind a curving wall brought them up short.

Rule's eyes opened wide as he pointed a forefinger downward in the instant before he wrapped himself into a ball and tumbled down the staircase. Bravo, understanding the plan, followed him, the SIG Sauer at the ready. He heard the surprised grunt as Rule made contact with another body, and he leapt around the wall, saw the Guardian staggering back and slammed the butt of the gun into the man's temple. The Guardian collapsed, half on Rule, who immediately threw him off and sprang up.

"Nice going," he whispered.

"I saw four, plus Zorzi," Bravo said.

"Now three, plus. But it's Zorzi I have to worry about." They paused behind a wall to catch their breath and to reassess tactics. "I've always believed that the best strategy is the last one the enemy thinks of. Zorzi's got superiority in numbers and, he thinks, the edge of surprise. He can't help but believe that he's got us on the defensive. Therefore, we go on the offensive. We stalk him-and only him-as he's been stalking us. What do you say?"

What was Bravo to say? Rule was older, with far more field experience and an unblemished record of getting out of even the hairiest tactical situations. Besides, what he was proposing made sense: Bravo never liked the feeling of being back on his heels.

"Let's do it," he said.

Rule nodded. "We go everywhere together. We're a team, get it? No suddenly taking off on your own, no individual heroics-that'll screw everything six ways from Sunday."

They moved out from behind the wall, bent over and scuttling like scarabs until they were behind a massive column. In that time, Bravo saw that what few people had been in the church had been evacuated. The field had been cleared for battle.

Bravo saw another Guardian appear from behind a column twenty-five feet away. He was looking straight ahead, not in their direction. Rule grabbed his shoulder as he was about to move.

"An excellent way of cutting down the odds further, that's what you're thinking, isn't it?" Rule whispered in his ear. "But that's just what Zorzi wants us to think. The man's a decoy, a means to flush us out." He gestured in the opposite direction. "Remember, we're after Zorzi. He's the key. Once we have him, the battle's won."

As Rule dictated, they moved in tandem, quickly and cautiously. The sun was high enough now for light to pour in through the windows, creating patches of bright color on the floor and walls. The windows themselves were invisible save as a white glare. As a result, the shadows in the interior were as deep and dark as if it were midnight.

"We look for two together," Rule said, as they traversed the circumference of the interior. "In these situations Zorzi always has a Guardian watching his back."

"Clever thinking."

"No, it isn't," Rule said. "It's predictable and therefore a security risk." He pointed ahead of them. "But it does give us an edge."

Bravo saw the two figures, and a thrill of hatred went through him. Who knew how much intelligence Zorzi had passed on to the Knights, how many deaths were on his hands, including the murder of Dexter Shaw? Bravo felt his teeth slide together, grinding in rage.

He was in such a keyed-up state that when Rule said, "You take the Guardian, I'll take Zorzi," he almost said, "No, I want Zorzi for myself." But then he came back to his disciplined self. Now that they were so close to beating the odds stacked against them, he desperately didn't want to screw things up six ways from Sunday.

They circled around until they were on the left side of Zorzi and his Guardian bodyguard. They could see Zorzi talking urgently into his cell phone, no doubt repositioning his men as they quartered the church's interior. The bodyguard was watching his back. Doubtless they had found the Guardian that Bravo had knocked cold, and their nerves, already taut, had begun to vibrate.

There was less than ten feet between the enemies, and with Zorzi intent on his troop movements there would never be a better chance. Bravo and Rule leapt at the two men. Bravo slammed his fist into the Guardian's rib cage, then brought the butt of the SIG Sauer into play. The Guardian swiveled, forcing Bravo to turn with him. The Guardian drove a knee into Bravo's solar plexus and grabbed his hair, jerking his head up and swinging him around.

Everything happened very quickly after that. Bravo saw out of the corner of his eye two Guardians rushing toward him. One leveled a gun at him, and improbably, it seemed as if the other Guardian knocked the gun out of his hand and brought him down. His eyes, teary from the blow to his stomach, might have failed him for a moment, or then again, he might have been subject to a wishful mirage like those manufactured at times by the lagoon.

Then he was fully engaged with the struggle with his own Guardian, who had him on his knees. Bravo reached up, pulling the Guardian down, using his own momentum against him as he drove a blow directed at Bravo's head. The man, surprised, toppled head over heels and Bravo grabbed his ears, slammed his head against the floor. Panting, he rose to see Rule with his forearm across Zorzi's throat. He had him, the battle was won. It seemed Zorzi had in some sense given up, for he had seen Bravo. His mouth began to work, words tumbling out, rushed and barely comprehensible. Despite his caution, Bravo started to move closer, so that he could hear what the traitor had to say at the moment of his defeat.

But Rule had pulled the gun given him by Father Damaskinos, and now as Bravo looked on he shot Paolo Zorzi three times in the chest. Zorzi's eyes opened wide, his body recoiled violently backward. Still, his eyes were on Bravo and he continued to talk, but his mouth was full of blood, there was blood everywhere and there were no more words left to say.

Rule, a gleam of triumph in his eyes, was just turning away from his last look at Zorzi's corpse when another shot sounded. Rule spun around. A sudden spray of blood as he was shot a second time, and he flew into Bravo's arms as if he were Icarus, who dared too much and was now fallen from the sky.

Behind Rule came the Guardian Bravo had seen before out of the corner of his eye. The figure was smaller than the others, and when the hood of the robe was pulled back, Bravo saw Jenny's face. Jenny with a gun in her hand, Jenny who had shot Uncle Tony.

Bravo could feel Rule against him, shuddering, struggling to breathe, which was odd because he felt so warm, warm and wet, never more alive than he was now in his convulsions.

"Bravo, listen to me," Jenny began.

The sweet-copper odor of fresh blood clogged Bravo's nostrils. Uncle Tony was in his arms, gasping, coughing blood, dying, and a red haze obscured thought and reason. He lifted the SIG Sauer.

"I don't want to hear your lies."

"I'm asking you to listen to the truth-"

"The truth is you shot Uncle Tony dead. Were you also responsible for planting the bomb that killed my father?"

"Oh, Bravo, you know better than that."

"Do I? I feel as if I don't know anything-about you, the Order, the Voire Dei."

"I took one down." She pointed to a fallen Guardian. "I took one down to protect you."

Bravo aimed the SIG Sauer at her. "I don't believe you."

"God, how can I convince you?"

"Liar. Don't even try."

She bit her lip because she was a liar. She had lied to him from the moment he'd come to her door and she'd never stopped, and now the truth had become so incendiary that she knew she had lost her chance with him.

Feeling her failure like a millstone, she dropped her weapon. "You won't shoot me like this, I know this much about you." She held out a hand. "Let me at least help you put him down."

"Don't come any closer!" he shouted. "If you move I will shoot you." It was as if the words were being forced out of him like drops of blood. His face was white and stricken.

"All right, Bravo. All right. But you must know that I didn't kill Father Mosto. I was framed."

"With your own knife?"

Jenny squeezed her eyes shut for a moment. How else? she wanted to say, but the explanation, the situation seemed at this moment too much for her. And, in fact, she lacked any evidence, not to mention the crucial answer of who had murdered the priest. Her hesitation was a mistake.

"Back away!"

The harsh tone of his voice made her jump. Her eyes flew open. There was so much to say, but the look of hatred on his face strangled her, turned the words in her mouth to stones.

"I should kill you dead for what you've done."

"He was the traitor, Bravo. I know you don't want to hear this, but Rule was-"

"Shut up!" If he hadn't still been cradling Uncle Tony he felt sure he would have struck her with as much force as he could muster. He wanted to see her on her knees, swaying, dizzy with the blow he had delivered, the weight of his enmity. He wanted to see her pay for her unspeakable treachery, but it was not in him to kill her in this way.

Slowly, keeping his eyes on her, he lay Rule onto the cold stone. The anguish he felt at leaving Uncle Tony here almost finished him, but no matter what horror had occurred he was determined to remain strong. He did this for his father and because in the core of him he still could distinguish good from evil, even in the hell of the Voire Dei.

"I'm leaving now," he said in a cold, detached monotone, the only voice he dared summon up. "If you try to follow me, if I see you again, I'll kill you. Do you understand?"

"Bravo-"

"Do you understand?"

The fury of his voice went clear through her, robbing her of coherent thought. "Yes." She'd say anything not to hear that tone of voice again.

By some superhuman force of will she held her tears in check until Bravo, backing warily away, melted into the shadows that seemed to reach out long tendrils to embrace him. Then her vision blurred and, swept up by an almost unbearable loneliness, she sank to her knees, feeling like a blind woman for the last mortal remains of Paolo Zorzi.