The Testament

Chapter 22

In the soul-wrenching desolation of the aftermath, Father Damaskinos emerged from the shelter of the women's stalls. Leaning over the balcony railing he saw the human carnage and fell to his knees, his head bowed in prayer for the dead and the dying. He had no thought for the police or the laws of the world outside; the air in his church-the house of God under his stewardship-was black with the soot of mortal sins. The need for spiritual cleansing and forgiveness was the only thing on his mind as he sank deeper in prayer, first seeking forgiveness for himself, for his own role in the madness below him.

But in the midst of his holy work, his head jerked up, his eyes flew open, and slowly he rose and his gaze fell on a slim figure advancing across the floor like a fawn crossing a forest glade. His heart gave a painful lurch against his ribs, so that his left hand clawed at his chest.

It was the devil, the devil was in his church. All plans of forgiveness fled like a flock of startled birds before an onrushing storm. His house didn't need forgiveness, it required an exorcism. With this terrifying revelation, Father Damaskinos turned and fled.

Jenny was numb with shock. But gradually she became aware that a shadow had fallen across her. Someone was approaching. She lifted her head and, turning, tensed herself for the inevitable Guardian attack. But, instead, she recognized Camille Muhlmann. She breathed a sigh of relief, the floodgates opened and she began to weep. Camille knelt beside her, enfolding Jenny in her arms, rocking her back and forth.

For Jenny, her abandonment was overrun by the blinding pain of the past, which had begun with her meeting Ronnie Kavanaugh. It had been in London, fittingly enough, in a casino belowground, where high rollers, Kavanaugh among them, spent the night with bejeweled toys on their arms. He had been on assignment, had been playing roulette and chemin de fer for hours. She had been on leave, after chipping a bone in her arm running down a Knight in a speedboat on the Thames.

When Kavanaugh had approached her, Jenny was startled, and she was understandably flattered when he'd told her he'd noticed her the moment she'd walked in. He'd asked whether she was a gambler, and when she'd said she didn't understand the impulse behind it he'd laughed. His eyes glowed with a kind of feral light she felt rather than saw. He wore a thick-striped shirt and a midnight-blue tuxedo of handsome cut. Gleaming shoes, almost like slippers, clasped his feet. He smelled pleasantly of sandalwood and sweat. A faint halo of cigar smoke hovered above his curly-haired head.

Their affair had started that night, she supposed, though she hadn't allowed him to take her to bed, as he'd desired. She wanted him-his elegance, sophistication, charm, not to mention his fiercely handsome face with its enticing hint of cruelty, all drew her like a moth to a flame. But she was also a little afraid of him, afraid that she couldn't handle him, that his energy would simply absorb her and that lying next to him she would cease to exist. Despite these fears-possibly because of them-within a day of their first meeting she had succumbed to him.

Their affair, torrid and breathless, lasted a little more than three months-a record, it turned out, for him. During that time she gave herself to him wholly, gave herself over to her own lust for perhaps the first time in her life, and there came a time-how quickly it had arrived chilled her-when she knew she'd do anything for him.

Anything, yes. But everything?

The day he broke it off, her period was already a week late. She cried for three days straight. Still, her blood didn't flow. Finally, she dragged herself to a pharmacy and, in the desolation of her hotel room, took the test. Then she went out, bought another and took it again. She couldn't believe it-she was pregnant.

In utter despair, she went to him, foolishly, hysterically-how on earth could she be expected to think clearly?-and told him, hoping against hope that he would be overjoyed, that he would take her back, that he would propose a future together. Instead, he hit her, backhanded her casually, cruelly, and told her to get it taken care of.

"What a mess you've made of things," he'd said. His voice did not drip with contempt; that would have implied emotion was involved. Much worse for her, it was cold and detached. "Haven't you ever heard of the pill? Too young, too stupid, I should've known." He shook his head, clearly disgusted by her hysterical sobbing. He bent down, hauled her to her feet. "I know a place, I'll take you there." His hand had gripped her jaw, made her look at him. "You're lucky, you know that? If anyone else inside the Order knew about this you'd be out on your ass, no excuses tolerated. Don't worry now. I'll take care of it and it'll be as if it never happened. Come on now, don't even think about it, don't be stupid again."

And so she hadn't thought about it again, until much, much later, until it was all over and there was nothing inside her but an empty place she was certain would never be filled. It wasn't until nearly six months later, on the island of Rhodes, awakened by the coming of dawn, the arrival of danger, that she understood what Ronnie Kavanaugh had done to her. Of course he wanted her to say nothing, get the "problem" fixed and they all would live happily ever after. It wasn't her career he was concerned about, it was his own. If word got out that he got a Guardian pregnant it would be bye-bye Kavanaugh, and that he would not have.

Why hadn't she gone to her father, why hadn't she sought his help? Because he had been helping her all her life: she was an adult now, and if she was in trouble it was up to her to battle her way through it.

She'd tried, she'd tried, but…

Camille, feeling Jenny's heart lurch against her own, held her tighter, murmuring in her ear. She felt the unfamiliar burn of tears against her eyelids, but they were for herself, not for Jenny. On the scrim of her mind, she saw the sprawled body of Anthony Rule, with an altogether unfamiliar blank expression, as if he were a wax model from Madame Tussaud's, some simulacrum that had been mistaken for Rule.

She summoned the specter of her own abandonment, and with some effort tears came to her eyes, rolled slowly down her cheeks for Jenny to see and to misinterpret. Wasn't it possible that she was the least little bit empathetic to the pain and misery of Jenny's abandonment? After all, she herself had been thrown away like an old rag after expending years to the mental care and feeding of the Knights of St. Clement. She had guided them from behind the scenes, using her breasts and her thighs, her lips and her fingers, busy pillow talk that translated into political know-how. But the moment she tried to step out of the shadows, the moment she had reached for the power itself, she had been rebuffed by the very same senior men who had absorbed her ideas in the dead of night and implemented them as the sun rose high in the sky. She had made them stronger, more powerful, extending their reach into the heart of the Gnostic Observatines-a place they themselves had failed to breach. Still, they had rejected her bid to lead them, without, she felt certain, even much of a debate. A knee-jerk reaction was more like it. And so she had crept back into the shadows, licking her wounds, had settled for manipulating them into elevating her son into the position meant for herself. Another pyrrhic victory, leaving a bittersweet taste in her mouth.

But no, that abandonment was nothing to the one she had felt when Dexter had left her. Her fall from Eden, the destruction of dreams, the end of all things. As for Anthony, he was gone from her bed, from between her warm thighs, from her web, but she had to admit that the thrill his lovemaking brought her was due not to his own skills but to the hot gush of revenge she enjoyed against not only the Order but Dexter each time he thrust into her and let go. Anthony was the mailed fist she wielded against the Gnostic Observatines. Anthony had belonged to her, only her. Even Jordan, who knew of Anthony's existence, had not known his identity. How well she had deceived Anthony-deceived everyone, including her own son. But then deceit was what she lived for…

All at once, she felt Jenny's arms around her, the vibrant twanging of her nerves. Misery and pain, Camille's meat, the psychological state off which she feasted. Yes, Anthony was gone, but she wasn't alone. She had Jenny to gull and manipulate.

"It's all right, it's all right," she whispered. "I'm here now."

She rose, the weight of her new instrument against her.

"Jenny, what happened?"

With muscular aplomb she hustled Jenny out of the Church of San Georgio dei Greci, out into a muddled late afternoon glaze and the frenzied fanfare of approaching sirens. The police launches began arriving. She and Jenny needed to be gone before the operatives of society began swarming. "Michael Berio called me, frantic." Michael Berio was the alias Damon Cornadoro had used with Jenny and Bravo. "When you gave him the slip outside your hotel. Good thing, too. If he'd called Jordan, my son would have sacked him without another word."

She hurried with Jenny to a small cafe, where she ordered them double espressos and pastries layered with chocolate, to give them a quick energy boost.

When Jenny returned from cleaning herself up in the ladies' room, Camille took her hands, cold as ice. "Now tell me," she said softly. "I know today has been monstrous, a terrible ordeal. Just do the best you can."

Jenny told her what had happened-how she'd been framed for the murder of Father Mosto, how Bravo had been captured, how he believed her to be a traitor working with her mentor Paolo Zorzi, how she'd learned that Anthony Rule was, in fact, the traitor.

When she came to the part about Bravo not believing any of it, Camille said, "Of course he doesn't. Rule was like an uncle to him. Rule partially raised him."

The espressos and pastries arrived, and for a while the two were silent. The cups were painted porcelain, the plates chased silver. Inside, rosy-cheeked angels romped across billows of pink clouds. People came and went, voices were raised in laughter or in brief quarrels. On the far side of the canal, they could see the flash of the police launch and the dark shapes of uniforms, blocking out the fiery sun that slowly sank through the western sky. There was an efficiency about their movements, as if each was a cog in a machine. The thought lightened Camille's heart. She had been quits with society for years, but it was always pleasant to have her decision reaffirmed.

Seeing Jenny push aside her uneaten pastry, she said, "What's the matter, don't you like the sweet?"

"It's fine, I'm just not hungry."

"But you must eat." Camille took up Jenny's fork, handed it to her. "You must keep up your strength, we have a long road ahead of us."

Jenny's head came up. "What do you mean?"

"I mean we-the two of us-will go after Bravo."

Jenny's expression was bleak. "He said he'd kill me if he saw me again."

"You let me take care of Bravo, darling."

Jenny shook her head. "Camille, I'm so grateful for your help. This trip has turned into a nightmare."

"I understand, your friend-"

"No, you don't understand. I was assigned to protect Bravo, and now I've failed."

"Assigned? By whom?"

Jenny bit her lip. All her training cautioned her to keep her mouth shut. But under these circumstances, cut off from everyone and everything that had been her support system, she saw Camille as her only chance to redeem herself, to succeed in the vital mission Dex had assigned her, to stay close enough to Bravo to keep him safe from those who would kill him. In halting sentences, she told Camille a basic outline of the Order, and of their mortal enemies, the Knights of St. Clement.

"I knew there was more to this than Bravo was willing to tell me." Camille briefly gripped Jenny's hand. "I'm grateful you've confided in me, darling. Now I'll have a better idea of how to proceed."

How well she deceived Jenny, she mused, just as she had deceived Dexter-at least as well as she had deceived Anthony Rule. It was simply that Dexter had proved the tougher man to crack-too tough for her. He had melted, but only for a little while. She'd had hopes-real hopes-that the plan she had conceived would work, that she would seduce Dexter from his marital bed and from the Order, that he would divorce them both, Stefana and the Gnostic Observatines, that he would marry her, that he would turn over the cache of secrets. And she had come within a hairsbreadth of keeping him. Only the untimely death of his younger son, Junior, had turned him back to his wife and his two remaining children. If not for a crack in the ice, Dexter Shaw would have been hers.

"I see what I've done," he'd told her three months after Junior's death.

They lounged on a bench in Pare Monceau, amid the expensive landscaping that would soon turn lush. He had bought her chocolates, as if they were sweethearts, young as she felt in her mind. Spring was coming, she recalled, the cherry blossoms in first pale pink blush. But not for long; in a matter of days they, like Dexter, would be gone.

"Anthony took me hunting in Norway." His voice contained an odd note, she remembered, as if strained. "One day we came across the track of a wolverine-very damn rare creature. We tracked him all day in the snow, I couldn't let him go, I was half-crazed with the need to find him. But was it to kill him? No.

"I saw him, and in the same instant he saw me, and we recognized each other. And it was as if someone had held up a mirror to my face, I knew that an intimate connection existed between us. I knew that we were both dangerous, both capable of rending flesh, of inflicting enormous pain, and I knew that this was what would happen if we went on, Camille."

"What about me?" she'd cried. Now she knew, she'd heard it coming-that strained note in his voice-but she hadn't wanted to acknowledge it. She hadn't wanted to entertain the notion of failure. "What about the plans we've made together? The life-what about Jordan?"

"It was a risk, Camille. You knew it and I knew it."

When she had begged him to reconsider, he had landed his most stinging blow: "You're dangerous to me, like poison. Stay away from me, Camille. I mean it."

In retrospect, she recognized the studied coolness, with each word spoken the intimacy draining out of him like sand through an hourglass. With the confidence offered, he was already distancing himself from her. It was an old trick, one she'd used many times, and so later she cursed herself for letting him blindside her, because he was the one, the one for whom she might have given up everything-abandoned the Knights, her ambition, all that had sustained her. For him, and only him, would she have deviated from her meticulously designed plan. Only for you, Dexter…

She had told Jordan how Dexter had cruelly abandoned her as soon as he was old enough to understand. She had him trained, sometimes by her own iron hand, and together they had schemed. Unsurprisingly, he was a clever boy-more clever, by far, than any of his classmates. He had outshone them like the sun outshines the moon.

After Dexter left it was Anthony Rule who became the object of her rage. If only Rule hadn't taken Dexter hunting, if only Dexter hadn't seen the wolverine… All she wanted was to turn back time, to return to the moment before the ice cracked, before Junior dropped through and never reappeared.

And so with her mind fixed, Anthony Rule became her next target, and what a sweet prize he turned out to be! She'd had to go slowly-so slowly, in fact, that more than once Jordan lost patience with her. But then Jordan was always impatient. Where did that trait come from? she wondered. Surely not from her and not from his father, either.

Camille once again turned her formidable attention on Jenny.

"Don't worry now. We'll be like the angels," she said, "watching out for him and guarding him from harm."

On the other side of the canal the police launch had begun to move off, the investigators had finished their business. The tiny cafe had become more crowded. It was very hot. Twilight had come to Venice.

It wasn't by chance that Bravo found Father Damaskinos; he saw the priest flee the church, as if having seen a ghost. Bravo couldn't blame him. There was a bloodbath on the checkered marble floor of his house of God. And it had been the priest who had given the gun to Anthony Rule.

Bravo stalked him as he would a petty criminal-a pickpocket or sneak thief. With his mind rattled by shock and grief, it was all he could think of to do. Much like a wounded animal, he was running on pure instinct. His higher functions, torn apart by what they had witnessed-Jenny's unimaginable betrayal, the life spurting out of Uncle Tony, the light going out of his eyes, the power and the solace he represented dimmed to ash-now ceded control of his movements and thoughts. Terror, disbelief, rage, revenge all bowed down before the necessity for survival.

Keeping the hurrying figure of Father Damaskinos in sight, he staggered through a small campo, where a clutch of old men leaned against the ancient stone wellhead in the center, a monstrous Cyclopean eye clouded by their cigarette smoke; over a severely arched bridge, reflections moving in mysterious and vaguely ominous ripples across the surface of the canal; down a narrow, crooked alley through which wafted unseen voices, a brief twist of an aria, an abrupt, harsh laugh, the gods of Venice commenting on his plight.

As he proceeded, he clutched Lorenzo Fornarini's dagger in a death grip. He felt marooned on an ocean from which there was no sight of land in any direction. A blind man in the Voire Dei, he had only this dagger and his father's last coded message to guide him, all else was deceit and lies, questions he couldn't answer.

He needed to leave Venice as quickly as possible, this was an imperative that stuck in his mind like a declaration of war. And he needed to take Lorenzo Fornarini's dagger with him. He had an idea, but he required the services of Father Damaskinos.

The hiding place Father Damaskinos chose was the Scuola San Nicolo`. Founded at the end of the fifteenth century to protect the rights of the Greek community in Venice, it had latterly become a museum. Bravo followed the priest inside and was immediately surrounded by hundreds of religious icons, displayed on the walls in tiers and in glass cases.

Father Damaskinos was standing in front of a vitrine housing the icon of a twelfth-century saint. The gold-leaf halo shimmered above a long, heavily bearded face. Father Damaskinos's hands rose and clasped at his breastbone, and his bloodless lips moved in silent prayer so that, save for the halo, there was little to differentiate between the priest and the saint.

Bravo moved silently toward him. At this hour there was virtually no one else in the museum. Watery light filtered in through windows high up in the walls, casting cubes of pallid light, waking the icons from their long slumber.

Though Bravo spoke the priest's name under his breath, Father Damaskinos started as if pinpricked. He whirled, his eyes showing whites all around. He was clearly terrified.

"Bravo," he said, "you're alive, God be praised! I was so afraid-I didn't see-"

"It was a fiasco, Father. A complete disaster. Uncle Tony was killed, shot to death by…" He shook his head. His chest hurt as if it had been he, not Uncle Tony, who'd been shot. He wanted to scream until his throat bled. "Traitors. I've got to get away from the traitors."

"Yes, I understand." But Father Damaskinos seemed preoccupied, and he looked furtively around, as if at any moment he expected someone to burst through the museum doors. He had a pale, hunted look.

"But I must take Lorenzo Fornarini's dagger with me," Bravo went on quickly. He had his own terrors to deal with. "Father, I can do that if you write a letter affirming it as a religious antiquity being repatriated to Turkey."

"That is where you're going?"

"Yes, to Trabzon."

The priest nodded, but in a vague, preoccupied way that caused Bravo to speak his name once again.

The priest started, staring at Bravo as if he were an apparition.

"Father, what is it?"

Father Damaskinos's eyes snapped into focus. "Yes, yes, I will do as you ask, of course. But-"

Bravo looked at him enquiringly. "Yes, Father?"

For a moment, something dark appeared to pass before the priest's eyes, then like a cloud it was gone. "Nothing."

"Father, you did the right thing."

"What?" The one word escaped his lips like a gasp. It seemed his terror had tightened another notch.

"The gun, Father. Giving the gun to Uncle Tony."

"I don't know. God will forgive me, but I don't know…"Father Damaskinos put his hand on Bravo's shoulder and with an effort pulled himself together. "Just be careful, my son. Be very careful. You're up against… the most dangerous opponent."

Bravo's brow furrowed and he shook his head.

Father Damaskinos wiped his lips free of the spittle that had formed there. "It's the devil, you see," he said with a soft exhalation of sour breath. "The devil has entered the field of battle."

Chapter 23

At the Trabzon airport, where Bravo stood waiting for the suitcase into which he'd packed the dagger, the air was filled with a blinding hail of Turkish and Arabic, falling on his ears like soft hammer blows, like someone chopping cabbage, like the ten million grains of a sandstorm. He eavesdropped on nearby conversations, attuning his ear to the harsh, rapid-fire music of the East. He hadn't heard Turkish spoken in some time, and as he thought of answers to questions posed by the men, women and children crowding around him at the baggage carousel, he spoke them in Turkish and Arabic under his breath.

He snatched his bag off the carousel and took it into a stall in the men's room. After assuring himself that the dagger lay undisturbed just as he had packed it, he washed his face and hands. Looking up into the stained mirror, he wondered who was staring back at him. A death's-head, it appeared, as haunted-looking as Father Damaskinos in the Scuola San Nicolo`. He turned away, a bit frightened by what had happened to him, what he was becoming.

Back in the crowded, echoing terminal, he took a long, lingering look around with what he felt was a thoroughly justified knife-edge of paranoia. No one appeared to be paying him the slightest attention. With his bag clutched in one hand, he went out into the humid night.

He took a wheezing, skeletal taxi into the city, which was built on a steeply sloped shelf of rock that rose from the scimitar harbor front up into the foothills of the hazy blue and ocher mountains that for centuries had acted as a miraculous natural barrier against a landward invasion. As Trebizond, the city had been tucked securely behind thick walls, modeled after those that protected Constantinople.

Looking upward into the dark heart of the lamp-lit mountains, Bravo could feel the shape, the weight of Trabzon's history. When Constantinople fell to European armies in 1204 as a result of the Fourth Crusade, three smaller Greek empires emerged from the wreckage: Nicaea, Epirus, and Trebizond. Alexius I, a grandson of the Byzantine emperor Andronicus I Comnenos, made Trebizond the seat of the grandest and richest of the three. What the Comneni emperors understood the moment they and their army landed at Trebizond was the city's almost magical location. Situated at the beginning of the road that connects the southern Black Sea coast to Iran, as well as sitting at the gateway to the Zigana Pass through Erzurum and thence into the interior of Anatolia, its strategic importance could not be overstated. Thus the Comneni became the architects of Trebizond as a major East-West trading nexus, where Christianity met-and, during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, famously clashed with-Islam, for Trebizond was intensely coveted by the Greeks, who developed "the Fortunate City," the Latins, who traded through it, and the Ottomans, who considered it stolen from under their noses.

Through the cleft in the dark mountains he imagined the long, jangling train of tawny-gray camels snaking into the city through the narrow, well-defended valley of the Pyxitis, bringing untold riches to the anxiously waiting merchants and entrepreneurs of Venice, Florence, Genoa, as well as the Vatican, for in its day Trebizond had been home to many a warrior-priest.

The rattletrap taxi dropped him at the Zorlu Harbor Hotel, where he had booked a room overlooking the placid Black Sea. The night itself was inky with low-hanging clouds, starless, moonless. The unseen cries in Turkish and Arabic mingled with the desperate barking of the lean street dogs. Outside his window, boats slid past as if across a theater stage. He unlocked the glass door and went out onto the balcony, stood at the edge, inhaled the exotic scents of sumac and myrrh, turmeric and mint, absorbed the strange cacophony of the city. From an open doorway of a seaside club, the trill of Turkish music, the authoritative strum of oud and balzouki. The staccato bass of diesel trucks, the hyperventilating percussion of the motor scooters. Then could be heard the alto and tenor voices. In the ululations, the rise-and-fall toccata of the languages, he could hear hints of Venetian arias, Byzantine twists brought westward across the watery divide by caliphs and sultans, terrifying Seljuks and Mamalukes. He heard what might have been a call to prayer and lifted his head. The black leviathan of an oil tanker was lumbering west. Across the sea lay Ukraine, a country more foreign even than this one.

He ate a meal of dorade grilled with olive oil and mint beneath a shower of charred oregano. He turned the white flesh inside out, away from the translucent infrastructure of the skeleton, a grid of mathematical ingenuity. Wouldn't it be marvelous, he thought, to create a cipher based on such an organic grid.

He slept then, though he hadn't meant to, sprawled diagonally on the bedspread, his rumpled clothes still on, the remnants of dinner piled on the white linen-covered cart.

In his sleep, he dreamed, and in his dream his father came to him once again. His father in his bath, the water rushing in, the steam rising, Dexter's head thrown back, his wet hair slicked away from his broad forehead. His father at his ease, but not vulnerable, never vulnerable.

He had shaved once while his father was in his bath.

"I suppose you've read all the news dispatches from Somalia," Dexter had said in a matter-of-fact tone.

"Yes." He knew that his father was referring to the deaths of American marines and the subsequent alleged massacre of Somali civilians that so incensed certain members of the United Nations and which the American administration vehemently denied.

"That's where I've just come back from, Bravo. Angola. Do you want to hear the truth?"

"The New York Times isn't reporting the truth?"

"They're reporting a truth," Dexter said, "just like Time and CNN and Reuters and everyone else."

Bravo had put down his razor. "How many truths can there be?"

"If one person believes a story, it becomes a truth-for him. That's why history is such a mare's nest: it's difficult to determine what happened as opposed to what people thought happened, wanted to happen, felt should have happened. The slant is everything, Bravo. The spin. Remember that."

Bravo watched whisker-laden suds swirl down the drain. "What happened in Somalia, Dad?"

"We got our butts kicked, that's what happened. The generals made a terrible miscalculation. Hubris, Bravo. It happened to the Romans and it happened to us. We thought of ourselves as unbeatable, we thought of the Somalis as a lower form of soldier. Then they tail-whipped us and because the secretary of defense got pissed off we went in and slaughtered-thousands-indiscriminately. Their crime was that they were Somalis, and we made sure they died for that crime."

"So Ambassador Perry was lying when he denied-"

"Perry was being the loyal mouthpiece for the administration. He told the truth just as it was written out for him by the president's policy wonks."

He had turned to his father. "You're sure about this?"

Dexter gestured with a soapy arm. "Look for yourself."

He saw a black folder sitting on the closed toilet seat and, drying his hands, opened it. Inside lay six photographs-aerial shots, taken from aircraft, of bodies, mounds of dead bodies, Somali bodies, not only soldiers but civilians. There was something sickening in the godlike view, the detachment from the human catastrophe. He found his hands shaking.

"You're the last person who'll ever see those," Dexter said. "In ten minutes I'll burn them to ash."

He had looked up, into his father's eyes. "Why did you show me these?"

Dexter sat up, the water purling off his shoulders and chest. "Because I want you to know the truth, because we live in the land of the blind and I don't ever want you to be blind. I want you to see what's around you, Bravo, even if it's painful, even if it's not what you want to see. Because doing the right thing is not the goal, doing the best thing is what you must strive for. If you learn nothing else from me, that will be sufficient…"

Bravo awoke, gasping. Sweat ran down his face. It was morning. Sunlight streamed down onto the harborside, its reflection burnishing the north-facing windows. He threw off his clothes and stood under a cold shower until his flesh was raised in goose bumps, until he shuddered with the chill. It was when he was toweling off that his father's words ran through his head again like an electronic news ticker. Wrapping the towel around him, he padded back into the room and, sitting cross-legged on the bed, allowed the dagger to rest in his hands as if it were a sacrificial blade. He pulled the dagger from its scabbard. How many Saracen hearts had this blade sundered, how many Ottoman bellies had it torn open, how many Knights of St. Clement's ribs had it shattered?

The lamplight spun off the blade as he moved it but also revealed something else. Carefully, he placed the dagger on the coverlet and picked up the scabbard. It was lined with blood-colored velvet, a fabric not used by bladesmiths because the constant abrasion of the weapon being drawn and scabbarded would have soon destroyed the nap. And even if it had been used on this particular piece, the velvet would not have survived the centuries intact.

Scrutinizing the inside of the scabbard, he could see a small edge lifted slightly from the steel. Plucking at it, he found that the velvet lining pulled away easily enough, revealing the leather beneath, worn shiny, dark with oil and, possibly, blood. On the reverse side of the velvet, he found written in his father's hand a name: Adem Khalif, along with a phone number. Just below appeared two words, one above the other:

VINE

PURPURE

There was an altane, a roof terrace, outside Father Damaskinos's apartment. Nowadays altane tended to be used to dry washing, but in the past women would sit out on the terrace in a wide-brimmed hat. Though the brim kept their skin youthful and pale, the hat was crownless, exposing their hair to the sun, hair that had been soaked in a solution that helped the sunlight bleach it blond.

The apartment was a haven for the priest, a place high up-the third floor was high in Venetian terms-away from the constant consumerism of a city obsessed with consumerism. Father Damaskinos was especially relieved to be home after this nightmare day. He had eaten nothing since noon, but found he had no appetite for either food or drink-in his mouth was the salty-copper tang of human blood, imagined, to be sure, but no less terrifying for that.

It was the altane he was thinking of on this hot, humid night, and the moment he closed the door of his apartment behind him, he crossed the Byzantine carpet and threw open the window beyond which the terrace beckoned. As he did so, he noticed a shadow, large and blocky. He craned his neck to see what it might be and the shadow moved, startling him. All at once the shadow resolved itself into a human figure, a large man who grabbed him with two powerful fists and shook him until his teeth rattled.

He looked into a pair of eyes the color of the lagoon at night, a distinctive face, part of a long bloodline to those students of Venetian history.

"Cornadoro," he breathed, "what are you doing here?"

"Let's step into your parlor, Father." With an enormous bunching of muscles, Damon Cornadoro threw the priest back through the open window. With a lightness belied by his size, Cornadoro stepped onto the Byzantine carpet and hauled Father Damaskinos to his feet.

"Answers, Father," he said. "I require answers."

"To what?" The priest shook his head. "What could I possibly tell you?"

"The whereabouts of Braverman Shaw."

Father Damaskinos's eyes showed white all around and his nostrils flared as if he had scented the approach of his own death. Nevertheless, he said, "I have no idea-"

The last word was snatched from his throat, ending in a high-pitched sound not unlike that of a stuck pig.

"You scream just like a girl, you know that, Father?" Cornadoro's breath was thick with bile and liquor. He made a sudden grab. "You aren't a female under all those robes, are you, Father? Oh, yeah, I've heard all the stories." Cornadoro frowned, as if disappointed. "But, no, there's no need to look further, is there, Father, though of what use a cock is to you I can't imagine."

With a violent tug, he drew Father Damaskinos off his feet. "Now where is Braverman Shaw?" His eyes, pits of darkness, seemed merciless. "I won't ask again."

"I… I don't know."

Cornadoro kissed the priest on his hairy cheek. "Ah, Father, now you've made me happy."

He shoved Father Damaskinos into a chair, took a candle from the marble mantelpiece, lit it. He brought the flame close to Father Damaskinos's face.

"Father, I'll tell you something about me. I'm an old-fashioned man. Not for me the modern innovations of torture. I like the tried and true." With that, he grabbed the priest's hair, at once pinning him to the chair and pulling his head back. "Now in five seconds I'm going to set your beard on fire. You have until then, not a moment more." He jerked on the curling hair, making the priest's eyes tear. "Do not mistake me, Father. You will not get a second chance, I will fucking burn you alive."

"No," Father Damaskinos stammered.

"Five, four…"

"You wouldn't." In his terror, he had reverted to his native Greek.

"Three, two…"

"This cannot be happening. I refuse to believe-"

"One, zero."

Cornadoro brought the tip of the candle flame in contact with the edge of Father Damaskinos's beard. At once, the hair caught fire and, screaming, the priest arched up off the chair. Cornadoro kneed him in the solar plexus. The air began to stink.

"Stop! All right! Stop!" Father Damaskinos managed to get out. "He went to Trabzon! Trabzon, Turkey!"

"Too late." The wicked blade of a push-dagger protruded from between the curled second and third fingers of Cornadoro's right fist. "I told you you wouldn't get a second chance." And with a terrifying efficiency he slashed the priest's neck from ear to ear.

Jordan Muhlmann called Osman Spagna the moment he stepped onto the waiting motoscafo. Behind him rested the Lusignan et Cie Gulfstream G-550 jet on the tarmac of Marco Polo Airport. He had not told his mother he was coming to Venice, and of course, Cornadoro knew nothing of his whereabouts, either. He had people here keeping both of them under surveillance, people he should have used long ago. No matter. He would take care of everything, just as he had promised the Knights of Four, as he thought of them since their intervention on the night of his ascension in Rome.

Spagna said, "I assume you want to do something about the American." Spagna, used to cell phone conversations, would never use a name over the air.

"Indeed, I do."

With a sinister burble of its brawny engine, the motoscafo took off, heading for the lagoon.

"I can take care of that."

"Not that way." Jordan knew Spagna's meaning only too well; for a backroom engineer he was a bloodthirsty fellow. "Something better is called for here, an indelible lesson to be learned. I want the American obedient, not dead, otherwise I will simply have a hole to fill that I cannot afford now."

"Understandably," Spagna said.

The clammy night air clung to Jordan like a shroud, making him restless, and he moved to the side of the motoscafo. They approached the hotel landing where two of his Knights waited for him. "Let me see, he loves cars."

"What American doesn't?"

Jordan laughed. "Ferraris, isn't it?"

"Quite a passion," Spagna said. "He's got twelve."

"Not for long." Jordan's nose wrinkled as he stepped out onto the landing. This stench is positively medieval, he thought. Venice was like death, a rotting corpse someone had forgotten to bury. He shook hands with the Knights, but he couldn't wait to move on. "Personally, I don't care for Ferraris, too damned showy. Arrange something, Osman."

"Immediately." Spagna could not hide the glee in his voice. "He's got two vintage autos that he can never replace."

"Still, if I am any judge of character the loss will only just get his attention. Like all Americans, this one needs to be punched repeatedly in the head before he learns his manners." Jordan, his mind racing ahead, said, "As I remember, he has one child."

"A daughter, nineteen," Spagna confirmed. "And quite beautiful judging by the photo I have here. She is-how do the Americans say it? Ah, yes-the apple of his eye."

"America is a dangerous country, they tell me, the cities so full of violent crime-rapes and beatings, so forth." Jordan stepped away from his Knights, to the end of the landing, lowered his voice. "This is delicate, Osman. I don't want an investigation. A simple robbery, an encounter on a dark street, a working over, followed by an ambulance, a stretcher, hearts in throats, parents in tears, in the end a recovery of sorts, you know what is required."

"Indeed I do, sir."

Jordan put away his phone and went to join his Knights. He was unaccountably eager to get an update on what his mother and Cornadoro were conspiring behind his back. The first word whispered in his ear lifted his spirits considerably.

"I know where Trabzon is," he said. He was thinking of the Knights' attack on the Order's headquarters so many centuries ago, he was thinking about how history does, indeed, come full circle.

The sky was low, grainy as a sleepless soldier's eye, grayed-over with militant clouds when Bravo left the hotel in his reeking clothes. It was already early afternoon-he had slept almost twelve hours straight. He went first to Ataturk Alani, the enormous central square of the city, heading due west from there down a street lined with clubs and clothing stores. It was an altogether ugly place, monstrous slab-sided buildings hulking like defeated wrestlers too dazed to get up off the mat. It could be said that Trabzon was a city of contrasts, but in a way that exploded his luscious visions of local history. The ancient and the modern rubbed shoulders in shabby splendor, but, unlike in Venice, the concrete imperative of the present relegated the splendid, blood-soaked past to the rusting alleyway trash bin.

Entering a shop with up-to-date clothes in the window, he bought himself an entire new outfit into which he changed before leaving the shop. His old clothes he relegated to a dust bin outside. Soon after, he made his way to Ortahisar, the Middle Fortress, the old section of Trabzon. Twice as he wended his way through the bazaar, he thought he was being followed, but one would-be pursuer turned out to be a Russian merchant eager to sell him a set of hand-painted nesting dolls, the other a boy on a bicycle who had nothing more on his mind than racing from point A to point B in the fastest possible time. Still, he could not help being reminded of the attack outside the walls of St. Malo from which Uncle Tony had saved him and Jenny. At the thought of Uncle Tony his eyes started to smart, and he wiped away tears of pain and longing.

When he had spoken to Adem Khalif on the phone, his father's contact had reported being out of the city. Khalif had suggested meeting for drinks and dinner at a cafe on the hill. Bravo crossed one of the two bridges that linked the oldest part of the city to the modern concrete one. The bridges spanned twin ravines, carved out of the bedrock long ago by the furiously gushing rivers-one of which, the Degirmen, was the last clue Dexter had left for Bravo in Venice.

The cafe was perched on a hill, as old and crumbling as its wooden neighbors. Adem Khalif was seated at a table in front and, spotting Bravo, he rose, lifting a brown arm in greeting. Khalif was a broad-backed man with huge shoulders and upper arms. His was not a handsome face, but it was powerful. He was dressed neatly in slacks and a polo shirt. Clearly, he was no priest.

Burly fishermen and slit-eyed oil company executives were their companions, smoking harsh Turkish cigarettes and eyeing a trio of exhausted looking "Natashas," ex-Soviet prostitutes, all rancid smiles and high, pointed breasts, fueling up for their nightly chores with strong coffee, ekmek-sourdough bread-local butter, and the ubiquitous black olives known as zeytin.

"So you are Braverman Shaw, your father talked about you constantly." Adem Khalif spoke perfect English, though with a slight British accent. When Bravo said he'd prefer they speak in Turkish, Khalif was overjoyed. His smile was lopsided and wide, bristling with the glitter of gold teeth.

They sat at a small round table of rough mosaic, near a wrought-iron railing. The rain, forecast by the angry clouds, arrived like a drunken guest, drenching the margin of the terrace beyond the protection of the faded striped awning. It was, if possible, more oppressive here than in Venice.

"Gloomy weather," Bravo said as he sat down opposite Khalif.

"This is summer on the Black Sea." Khalif shrugged. "One gets used to anything." He poured from a bottle of raki and they clicked their glasses together. Khalif watched Bravo as he drank the fiery liquor.

"No smoke coming out of your mouth, good, good," he said as he refilled Bravo's glass. He had an outsized presence, seeming to fill the cafe with light, with life. "You know, for me, it is always of great interest to meet Americans. America reduces other cultures to a state of transparency. In its place, it exports many things of bright colors: Britney Spears, Bruce Willis, anorexia, Fords bigger than Cadillacs, Hummers bigger than Fords. America has become a country of extremes, and so it engenders extreme responses. The rest of the world wants to either run under America's skirt or chop off its head."

"Which camp are you in?" Bravo asked.

Adem Khalif laughed. "Do you mind if I smoke?"

"Not at all."

"Well, that is a relief." He took some moments lighting up a Silk Cut. "These British brands, very difficult to obtain here. I go to a lot of trouble for my habit." He shrugged. "But then who doesn't, yes?"

Another bottle of raki appeared. When they were alone again, he hunched forward, his voice lower and somehow conspiratorial. "I am not a member of the Order. I was a conduit for Dexter Shaw-a resource for both practical knowledge and spycraft. I was, in a word, Dexter's eyes and ears on this part of the world." He took a bit of tobacco off his ruddy lower lip with the tips of thumb and little finger. "This is in answer to your question about which camp I am in, you see?"

Bravo said that he did.

"But now let me ask you whether you think it's wise for America to raise such extreme responses."

"I don't, no, particularly so because despite their power the extremists in America are a tiny minority."

"But like all extremists everywhere, what havoc they can cause, yes?"

"Absolutely." Bravo took more raki. "What was my father interested in out here?"

Khalif smiled. "The current state of mind of the Muslim fundamentalists, the extremists, as well as their movements. I was monitoring both for him."

"Do you know why?" Bravo asked.

"I never asked," Khalif said. "This is not something someone in my line of work would do."

"Would you hazard a guess?"

"It is coming on time for dinner, shall we order?"

Bravo asked Khalif to choose, which made Khalif happier still.

"You will love the food here," he said, "everything sparkles fresh from the sea." When the waiter had gone, he topped off their glasses. His gold teeth glittered. He looked like he should have a pegleg and a wicked cutlass between his teeth. "Guesses are inherently dangerous. Having said that, I will tell you what I believe was your father's concern.

"It had to do with America, and with Islam-with the fundamentalist religious elements who are diametrically opposed to one another, who want nothing less than to see each other wiped from the face of the earth." He looked around suddenly. "This place, this Trabzon, it doesn't look like much now, but the importance it once held for both East and West, for Christian and Muslim, is incalculable. It was the center of trade, and trade breeds wealth, wealth breeds warfare, just like religion. Here, still, in this slum, East and West mingle, trying to get the better of one another. Your father, I believe, saw the coming of the new religious war, the last Crusade, if you will, and he wanted very much to do everything in his power to stave it off."

"So that was why he wanted to be Magister Regens."

"Through the power of the Order, judicious use of its cache of secrets-oh, yes, I know of the cache's existence, though little, I'm afraid, of its contents. There is great power there, and influence, this much I do know. But it would take a special man, indeed, to take control of the Haute Cour, to be elected Magister Regens."

"There was also the matter of the traitor hidden in the midst of the Haute Cour. I imagine he would have worked dutifully to frustrate my father's plans."

"I would think he made circumstances more difficult for Dexter, yes."

"I found him," Bravo said. "In Venice. Paolo Zorzi."

"Zorzi! But this is incredible news." Khalif shook his head sadly. "I know Zorzi, and liked him, as did your father. I thought him intensely loyal."

"Then he did his job well," Bravo said.

"Did?"

"He's dead. Uncle Tony-Anthony Rule-shot him before he himself was killed by a second traitor, one of Zorzi's Guardians named Jenny Logan."

"My God, the tragedy is doubled and redoubled." Khalif rubbed his chin. "Heartfelt condolences, my Bravo, what a terrible series of shocks you've had." He lifted his glass. "A drink to departed friends."

They clinked glasses and drank deeply of the strong, harsh raki.

"And the inferno to our enemies, eh?" Khalif cried.

The glasses clinked again and this time they drained them dry.

The food came then, a veritable feast, seven plates or more, and they fell to consuming it. The steady rain had morphed into a fine drizzle that kept the concrete and roof tiles dark and gleaming. Lights had come on, steaming in the wetness. Illumination harsh as the local tobacco threw into prominence the bow-backed workers trudging across the bridges that spanned the ravines. The Natashas were long gone, presumably now hard at work seducing what tourists had wandered, half-stupefied, into their territory. An eerie hissing rose from the pavement, as if the drizzle were tiny pellets of ice. The low sky was the color of a deep and painful bruise.

Bravo was lost in thought. At length, he said, "I never realized how difficult my father's life was. He was battling the Knights and members of his own Order."

Adem Khalif nodded. "Your father had vision, this is undeniable. In this he reminded me of Fra Leoni, the last Magister Regens of the Order, but he lacked a certain-how shall I put this-a certain ruthlessness. I don't mean to give offense, I loved Dexter as if he were my brother, but his expertise lay in other areas. His genius lay in planning for the future. He wasn't the warrior required of a Magister Regens. What was required was digging deep into the lower echelons of the Order, that's where his support would have come from." Khalif's eyes twinkled. "It's a lesson his successor should learn."

Bravo put down his fork. "You mean me."

Khalif spread his hands. "Who else? You are Dexter's son, he chose you from an early age to follow in his footsteps."

"I've heard this before."

"Of course by now you have, but have you ever asked yourself why he chose you? It wasn't because you were his son, that wasn't Dexter's way. The Order was too important to him, it was his life. He chose you, Bravo, because he knew. He saw your future, just as, I firmly believe, he saw his own death. It is the passing of things, from father to son, the building of a legacy, do you see? This I know." He thumped his chest with his fist. "I feel it here."

"If my father had this so-called second sight, why didn't he know the identity of the traitor inside the Order?"

Khalif cocked his head to one side. "I hear your skepticism, Bravo, and I grieve at your lack of faith. Do you think second sight is like a flashlight that can be turned on and off at will? This adolescent idea is from the comics. Your father wasn't a superhero. He was gifted with something unknown and unknowable, it cannot be questioned or parsed. The more you try to understand it, the more enigmatic-and improbable-it seems." He shrugged. "But I cannot tell you to have faith, you must find it on your own."

There was silence between them for some time. Khalif went back to shoveling grilled octopus into his mouth. Bravo, his appetite vanished, turned away. Light thrown off by the buildings on either side lit the top of the ravines like a livid scar, but below was the utter darkness of the abyss, as if the ravines were bottomless, a crack clear down to the earth's core. On the bridges, the procession of people continued unabated. He observed a smattering of women now, young, pretty, perhaps more Natashas on a cigarette break. An old man walked beside a small boy, a large, square hand on the boy's narrow shoulder. The boy looked up, asked a question, which caused the old man's face to crease deeply in a smile that made him look twenty years younger.

"I need an answer," Bravo said, turning back. "Is there a building in Trabzon with a spiral staircase?"

Khalif, sucking at his teeth, thought for a moment. "In fact, there is. At the Zigana Mosque. Why do you ask?"

Why? Because vice, the first of the words Dexter had written on the velvet scabbard lining, was derived from the French word vis, a vine. In medieval times, a vice was a spiral staircase, as in the twisting of a vine's woody tendrils.

"Come, come," Khalif said, "you've stopped eating. It's a sin with such fine food."

The clear note of affection in his voice caused Bravo to turn back to him. "On the matter of faith, ever since I started on this journey, my father has come to me in dreams and at… other times. At first, I thought little of it, putting the visions down to a symptom, an aftershock of his violent death, but now I don't know, I feel as if… as if in a way he's still with me."

A huge grin spread across Adem Khalif's face. "On the matter of faith, my Bravo, I believe you're on your way to finding yours."

"Secrets," Camille Muhlmann said. "We all have secrets, God knows I have a fistful of them."

She and Jenny rode in a jouncing taxi on their way into Trabzon from the airport, having caught the evening's last flight out from Venice, via Istanbul. High up, the sky was still indigo, but below the dark undercurrent of the night held sway, pierced here and there by lights, glimmering sickly yellow, as if irradiated.

"I had a lover who treated me badly-very badly." Camille shook her head with a grim and rueful smile. "What woman hasn't? One-at least one. But what I can't make out is why-why do we choose these men who will abuse us physically, mentally, emotionally? Is it because we feel we deserve to be punished, Jenny, or is it cultural, passed down from oppressed female to oppressed female? Is it true we can't help but feel the same way our mothers and grandmothers did?"

Jenny shook her head. "I don't think it matters. What's important is that we can change, that we make different decisions, braver decisions."

Camille raised her eyebrows. "Really? How do you propose we do that when men stand in our way no matter which way we turn?"

"It might be that we walk away from them, from everything they've built, everything they stand for." Jenny stared out the window for a moment, watching the fast accretion of concrete spreading over the green countryside like a pernicious skin disease. "I used to think that, anyway." Yes, she had, in the aftermath of her disastrous breakup with Ronnie Kavanaugh. In fact, she'd been sure of it. Then she had met Dexter Shaw, and everything in her life had changed. Or had it? Wasn't Dexter another of her male crutches? Arcangela would no doubt pity any woman with such a psychological need.

"But now, obviously you don't." Camille held up a pack of cigarettes, and Jenny nodded.

As Camille lit up, she said, "I would very much like to know what happened. Will you tell me?"

Jenny took the cigarette from between Camille's lips, took a long drag, let the smoke out slowly, then handed the cigarette back. "I discovered that the way to change things is to do all the things men do, only better."

"Beat them at their own game."

"In a way," Jenny said, "but only in a way. Their game is the only game, that's the hard thing to get set in your head because it's just not the way you want it to be. Then you have to learn to skin the cat another way."

"Pardon?"

Jenny smiled. "Sorry. 'There's more than one way to skin a cat.' In American slang the saying refers to a catfish, which is always skinned before cooking. What it means is that there's more than one way to get the job done."

Camille held out the cigarette and Jenny took another drag before giving it back. "I don't want to ever again be attracted to a man who can abuse me."

"What kind of abuse was it?" Jenny asked, as casually as she could with her heart pounding hard in her chest.

"Psychological," Camille said after a moment. "And I fell right in line with what he wanted. Mon dieu, what an obedient little girl I was!"

So was I, Jenny thought.

"It's humiliating to think of the traps we fall into, isn't it?" Camille observed.

"Especially because we fall so willingly, because it's so difficult to get out."

"And even pain isn't enough to extricate us."

"No. Often, it isn't." Jenny turned to Camille. "There was a time I applied to a convent. Can you imagine such a thing? For eight months I studied to take the veil. I was very young, I didn't understand, I had no friends, I was afraid of men, I was sure I didn't fit in."

"But, my dear, it's clear from what you say that you had no calling."

"That's what the Mother Superior said when she called me into her office."

"Lucky for you she was so discerning." Camille shuddered. "What a place to end up!"

"I was devastated," Jenny said. "I saw it as another failure."

Camille smiled. "The failure to understand God is the mark of a clear-eyed pragmatist."

Jenny laughed. She sat in silence for a time while the taxi rattled on and the radio blasted out staticky music that sounded like two people clashing ash can lids together while screaming at the top of their lungs.

"Down deep," Jenny said, "we're all obedient little girls."

She turned to Camille and, as if on cue, they smiled at each other.

What a perfect idiot you are, Camille thought through her smile. And we have our lovely Dexter to thank for that, don't we? He's the one who picked you up like a bad penny and made you shine again after the abortion-but to what end, darling? So you could be my plaything, so you could assist in the last phase of his destruction: the death of his son. And there were those-Anthony included-who were convinced that Dexter had the gift of second sight, that he could see the future. Her smile widened and a tiny laugh escaped her.

"What's so funny?" Jenny asked.

"I was thinking that we are also bad girls, that we want what we want, that we should have what is due us."

"Yes, Camille, indeed we should."

Camille was quiet again, smoking her cigarette down to the end. The taxi had no windshield wipers but the driver, reclined casually in his seat, seemed not to notice as he peered through the rain-stippled windshield. Camille thought briefly of Damon Cornadoro, who had been seated behind them in the last row of the plane to Trabzon. Jenny had seen him, of course, on her way to the bathroom, and had told Camille on her return that she felt that much safer against the forces of the Knights of St. Clement massed against her. Little did she know that it had been Cornadoro who had obtained news of Bravo's next destination from the late, unlamented Father Damaskinos.

Now she was heading into uncharted territory. The Knights had no one in Trabzon-it was not part of their territory. That was when she had phoned Jordan.

"It's all right," he had assured her. "Cardinal Canesi and his cabal are using every ounce of influence at their disposal. That means all the priests in the city and its surrounds will be our eyes and ears. I'll download a list of their names and contact numbers to your phone when we're done."

Crushing out the butt beneath her heel, Camille turned to Jenny and said, "I know you have secrets, as we all do. Alors, it's your expertise-and quite possibly your contacts-that will enable us to find Bravo and keep track of him now," she lied. "I've done as much as I can through Lusignan et Cie's resources, but here in Trabzon, I'm frankly blind."

She took Jenny's hands in hers. "In this crisis, we have only each other, we must trust each other or we'll fail Bravo, and we cannot let that happen, n'est-ce pas?"

Jenny leaned forward, delivered instructions to the driver that Camille could not hear. A moment later, the taxi swerved to its left. They zipped past the stripped-out carcass of a car, accelerating in a new direction.

Khalif and Bravo strolled the narrow, twisting streets of the Avrupali Pazari-European Market in Turkish-which was actually run by e'migre's from the former Soviet republics. Russian or Georgian was spoken here, virtually no Turkish. Bare bulbs, strung from lengths of flex, lit up the colorful wares. There were no T-shirts or baseball hats, none of the commercial souvenirs that had become ubiquitous in Florence or Istanbul, more touristed destinations. Here the wares tended toward native crafts, rugs from all over Turkey, the hills of Afghanistan, even Tabriz, hand-beaten copperware, Russian nesting dolls. Dealers in imported vodka, local antiquities, Asian hashish plied their trade.

"As a student of medieval religions you're no doubt disappointed to see what's become of fabled Trebizond, eh?" Adem Khalif said. "Overrun by ex-Soviet citizens who consider themselves entrepreneurs-they're all chasing capital. It certainly has its amusing side."

"I can see why you got on so well with my father," Bravo said, "he always had a soft spot for philosophers."

Khalif chuckled. "Street philosophers, perhaps."

"I find it interesting that he didn't use you to keep track of the Knights of St. Clement."

"I didn't say that, exactly, but Dexter was keen to have an ear to the ground at all times, because he knew it's not only the elephant that can run you over."

"Meaning?"

"The Order is interesting and, in many important ways, useful, but as an outsider looking in it seems to me that its members are too concerned with the Knights of St. Clement and nothing else. Your father wasn't like that, he always had the big picture in mind. The constantly changing nature of the world-be it politics, economics, religion-was his meat. He moved in a far larger world than any of the others."

It had begun to rain harder again, in glistening silver lines, dots and dashes, like Morse code being broadcast from heaven. They were moving from street to street in a pattern Bravo tried to make sense of, but the labyrinthine twists and turns of the bazaar defeated all his efforts.

"Toward that end, he supplied me with massive amounts of equipment," Khalif went on. "Electronic eyes and ears of the most sensitive and sophisticated nature, so that I could record for him all the coded signals that day and night fly through the ether."

"All of them?"

Khalif nodded. "Massive amounts-you can't imagine. But he would come and sort all of it out. He knew what he was looking for, of this you can be sure."

"This wasn't official Order business?"

"Your father's alone." Khalif lifted a forefinger. "I'm bringing you to the Order's official representative now, so not a word. If there is any news you should know before you continue, he will have it."

They had reached a carpet shop. A young Georgian girl, no more than seventeen, was standing outside, hawking the wares. She had a slim body and dark eyes. Her thin hair was pulled back in a ponytail.

"Irema."

She kissed Khalif on both cheeks as he introduced Bravo.

"Father is inside," she said in Turkish.

"Is he busy?" Khalif asked.

"Always," she said with a shrug.

They passed through the narrow doorway, into a dim interior throbbing with Arabic dance music and dust. The walls were hung with carpets, which also lay in neat stacks in a checkerboard pattern across the floor, so that one was forced to take a winding path to the rear of the store.

Khalif grinned, flashing his gleaming gold teeth. "His name is Mikhail Kartli. You'll like him, once you get used to him." He put a warning hand on Bravo's arm. "This is a man, no matter his manner, who deserves your respect. He still fights the Azerbaijani and the Chechen terrorists. The Azerbaijan government wants whole areas to be renamed from the Georgian toponyms to the Azerbaijani-same with people's surnames. As for the terrorists, they continue to try moving their bases into Georgia. He spent six years defusing Chechen bombs. You'll see when you shake hands."

It wasn't easy getting within spitting distance of Mikhail Kartli. Cell phone to one ear, he was surrounded by a clutch of merchants, gesticulating like bond traders while calling out softly but urgently under the music, which served to mask their business from outsiders and passersby. As they approached, Bravo recognized not only Georgian but Russian, Turkish, Italian, Arabic being spoken. It didn't take long to realize that these weren't carpet merchants but traders in oil, natural gas, currencies, precious metals, diamonds, as well as arms and all manner of war materiel.

The heady stench of money was in the air, the confluence of sweat and greed, grime and blood, power and deceit. Here beat the heart of modern-day Trabzon, which, despite appearances to the contrary, was still a potent nexus point between East and West, currency and commodities snaking like veins and arteries into the four corners of the world, the flow of capital pumped with the speed of sound irrespective of race, religion or political affiliation.

While they waited, Bravo took a long look at the Georgian. He was as stubby as a pencil end, as tough-looking as a bale of razor wire. He had the wide-apart stance of a street fighter and carried his football-shaped head low in the bulwark of his shoulders, as if from long years of defending himself, his family, his country. His hair was thick, black and wild, fiercely growing low on his forehead. As a consequence, the paleness of his eyes, rimmed by long lashes, were startling.

In the middle of his personal chaos, he saw Adem Khalif and briefly inclined his head. Then his eyes slid toward Bravo, and they opened so minutely anyone else but Bravo himself might have missed the reaction.

Eventually, the music changed and the crowd thinned sufficiently for Khalif to lead Bravo to the Georgian's side, where he introduced them. Kartli held out his right hand, which consisted of thumb and forefinger only. Bravo gripped it, felt the pressure of the healed-over nubs that used to be fingers and thought of this man defusing Chechen bombs, thought of one detonating, taking part of the hand with it.

"Your father was a good man," Mikhail Kartli said laconically in perfect Turkish and, snapping his fingers, called for liquor. He took possession of the bottle, pouring the clear liquid into three water glasses. Bravo did not ask what it was. It was like liquid fire going down, and the afterburn tasted not unpleasantly of anise and caraway.

Kartli excused himself, finishing up the last pieces of his business. Then he turned the cell phone over to a younger version of himself-doubtless his eldest son-and they retired through a shadowed door in the rear.

A narrow, cramped corridor suddenly led out onto a bare poured-concrete terrace. An awning flapped above their heads. Rain pattered down on the crumbling city. Kartli stood spread-legged, a bantam fighter gazing down on the site of many victories. The small merchants with their painted dolls and their charcoal-braised cuttlefish, their burgeoning libraries of pirated DVDs of popular American movies looked up to him much as a small-arms dealer will genuflect before the trader in nuclear weapons.

He unfolded his arms, lit a thin black cigarette with a gold lighter. "This is not a civilized place," he said, seemingly to no one in particular. "To believe so has been the fatal mistake of many over the centuries, especially the Greeks, who came here first to tame Trebizond. The Venetians, as well, though they were more clever than the Greeks, because they were less trusting. But, in the end, Trebizond belonged to the Ottomans, and the Ottomans were not civilized, not at all. Look what they became. Turks! And then, more recently, there were the greedy Russians, speeding across the Black Sea as fast as their boats could ferry them." He shook his head sadly, throwing off the peculiar electricity of currency, as if even now he was manufacturing it somewhere inside his own body.

"Thank you for taking the time to see me," Bravo began.

"The pope is dying," Mikhail Kartli said over Bravo's last several words, "there is scarcely any time left."

"That's why I've come to you. My situation has become increasingly desperate."

Kartli turned to Bravo, the ugly black cigarette between his brilliant red lips. "You see, this is just the kind of situation the Order decided long ago to guard against. Do you think Canesi wants to save the pope's life for humanitarian reasons? Of course not. It's power, and power only. He wants to save his own skin. A new pope, clever and in his prime, surely would not tolerate their power, he'd sweep them aside like so much kindling."

A certain grit lay underfoot, like sand from the desert, like gold dust ready to be swept up and transshipped.

"How up-to-date is your news of the pope's health?"

"What do you take me for? An hour old, not a moment more." Mikhail Kartli's pale eyes bored into Bravo's. "You are in more danger than you can imagine, my friend. Elements have been awakened-new informers, the Vatican's eyes and ears-that I can neither identify nor control."

Kartli suddenly caught sight of the chased scabbard and the hilt of the dagger tucked into Bravo's waistband and his eyes narrowed. "What is this? Surely it cannot be Lorenzo Fornarini's dagger."

"It is." Bravo removed it to show him. "I've been to his sarcophagus in Venice."

"My God, Fornarini's dagger!" Kartli took another deep drag of his cigarette. "Through the priests at Trebizond, Lorenzo Fornarini was introduced to the Order, was converted to their cause, and swore allegiance to protect them, which he did with both courage and discipline, which as you can imagine impressed the fathers no end.

"Some years later, when they were attacked by the Knights of St. Clement, he was present outside the Sumela Monastery, at the last moment intervening to save Fra Leoni from Fra Kent, a traitor from within the Haute Cour. This was when Fra Leoni was the Keeper, before he became Magister Regens.

"Fra Leoni was wounded during his fight with Fra Kent. By the time he reached the cache of secrets his wound was festering, there was no doubt that he was dying. By prior arrangement, he was met by Fra Prospero, the Order's Magister Regens-in those days, both the Keeper and the Magister Regens held keys to the cache. Together, they made a monumental decision: they availed themselves of the secret of Christ's Testament. Following the directions set out by Jesus, the Magister Regens anointed Fra Leoni with the Quintessence, the sacred oil that Christ used to resurrect Lazarus and, according to the Testament, others.

"Fra Leoni was not only healed, but he lived another 350 years, eventually ascending to become Magister Regens and guiding the Order through dark and difficult times. Some believe that he died, finally, in 1918, during the worldwide influenza epidemic, but of course there are no records and so no way to know for certain."

At that moment, a bit of raucous electronic melody sounded and the Georgian pulled out another cell phone, flipped it open. He listened for a moment, then he said, "Do it. Do it now."

Closing the phone, he said to Bravo, "Someone known to you is approaching. One of my people has spotted Jennifer Logan, the traitor-oh, yes, word spread quickly within the Order. I have ordered her executed. I have someone standing by who will shoot her dead."

Chapter 24

"No," Bravo said.

Mikhail Kartli smiled thinly. "You are in my house now."

"But if you kill her you'll never find out if she and Paolo Zorzi are the only ones to have infiltrated the Order. What if there are more? She's our best chance to find out."

The Georgian knew a good argument when he heard it. Flipping open his cell phone, he pressed a speed dial and said into the mouthpiece, "Stand down and deliver her instead."

His grin grew fierce. "I only hope that you have the courage of your convictions. I hope you have the stomach for articulated interrogation. Your father certainly didn't."

"There are other ways," Bravo said.

"Name one." The Georgian said this without an edge of menace, he simply wanted to know.

"The woman is desperate to get me to believe that someone else is the traitor. She wanted me to believe that someone set her up for the murder of Father Mosto in Venice, and I almost believed her, until she shot Anthony Rule dead." He did not mention his very personal hatred of Jenny for seducing both his father and himself. "I can talk to her, I can deal with her. She'll listen to me."

"In that event, I would be exceedingly careful. Have you thought about how she followed you here?"

Bravo stared at the Georgian.

"Did you tell Father Damaskinos you were coming to Trabzon?"

Father Damaskinos had asked him where he was going next, and Bravo had told him.

"Yes, of course you did," Kartli said, answering his own question. "She must have been the one who interrogated him and murdered him."

"Father Damaskinos is dead?"

"One of our people found him in his apartment last night and contacted me immediately." The Georgian spat again, more heavily this time, as if it was an uttered curse. "His face was burned, then his throat was slashed in a very particular manner."

"What do you mean?"

"It was made with a push-dagger. How do I know? A push-dagger is made for stabbing, not slashing, so when it's used for slashing the wound is unmistakable." Kartli paused for a moment. "I know someone who kills in this manner; he's a Knight of St. Clement assassin. He must have trained her. Does this girl carry a push-dagger?"

"I never saw one on her," Bravo said, "but all along the bitch has been full of surprises."

"Do you think it wise," Damon Cornadoro said as he watched Jenny passing through the narrow streets of the European Market, "to allow her to go off to meet with Bravo alone?"

Camille studied his handsome face, admiring him as if he were a statue sculpted by Michelangelo. She put a slender forefinger, warm against his cool flesh, across his lips. "What's the matter, my love? Do you think she can persuade him to the truth, rather than the ever more plausible lie I have laid out for him?"

"Rational argument has nothing to do with it. There is chemistry between them, I felt it the night they arrived in Venice. When I lifted her on board the motoscafo, when I put my hands on her waist and drew her close to me I thought he was going to kill me."

Camille laughed. "Mon dieu, what an imagination you have, darling! They fuck and you see skyrockets."

Cornadoro shrugged his huge shoulders. "Now that he's isolated I want to make sure he stays that way."

"Oh, and whose idea was that, Damon, yours or mine? Don't you worry, when it comes to isolation I know all the ins and outs. He hates her now, she killed his beloved 'Uncle Tony,' just as I planned it."

She could feel his heat, the brief tremor as his yearning responded to the proximity of her body. On the pretext of keeping Jenny in view, she contrived to lean ever so slightly against him, so that the tips of her breasts, the small platter of her belly, the strong pillars of her thighs imprinted themselves briefly on his muscles. "Not all men are like you."

"Women rarely get what they want, Camille, though what that might be eludes me."

He smiled the smile that was impermissible, the smile that revealed his weakness to anyone who, like her, was clever enough to see it. His weakness she knew well, and it made her long for the heady days of Dexter, a man who grasped the big picture and never let go.

"But you-you're different-you know men better than any other woman."

"Better than they know themselves," she said casually. "That's the point, isn't it?"

"How do you do it? That's what I'd like to know."

She ran her nail across the stubble of his cheek, as if tracing out a scar. "Poor baby. If you have to ask, you'll never understand."

He grew angry then, which is what she wanted, his eyes blazing, his reflexes animal sharp. When he made to grab her, she danced lithely away. But she didn't laugh at him. With each of her men she knew where to draw the line, and she never transgressed. That was her secret. She had failed only once, with Dexter Shaw-not that Cornadoro would ever find out.

"Alors, you have the Husqvarna," she said, referring to the sniper's rifle. "It's time to take it to the rooftops."

They stood facing each other: Bravo and Jenny, amid the bustling, noisy, anonymous street. No one in their view paid them the slightest attention, but there were others, hidden from them, who were very much interested in what they said and did.

"I said if I saw you again I'd kill you," Bravo said.

Jenny spread her hands. "Here I am." She had to bite her lip to keep from screaming. How on earth was she going to make him understand?

"Are you armed?"

She laughed, a bitter sound she immediately wanted to spit out like the white under-rind of a lemon. "Do you imagine I'd shoot you?"

"You shot Uncle Tony-"

"Because he was the mole, he was the traitor-"

"You slashed Father Damaskinos's throat after you set fire to his face."

"What?" Her eyes opened wide. "What did you say?"

He came toward her, hating her and at the same time marveling at the naturalness of her performance. "Where is it?"

"If Father Damaskinos is dead you can be sure I had nothing to do with it," she said with a good deal of alarm.

"I'm no longer sure of anything." He'd had enough of her feigned innocence. "The push-dagger-where is it?"

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"I want it!"

"You're crazy! I don't know-"

Taking her by the wrist, he pulled her out of the dust and the grit into the shadows beneath a dilapidated awning. They appeared to be a couple in the middle of a minor dispute, that was all.

"Let go of me," she said quietly, balefully. Despite her best efforts, her anger at what she saw as his obtuseness was getting the better of her. What was the use of trying to explain what had happened to her? One look at his stony, closed-down face told her that he'd never believe her. He didn't want to. And it was this last realization that spun her down into the lowest depths of despair.

"Listen, you," Bravo said, "Mikhail Kartli-surely you know who he is-wants you dead. He had sent one of his men to shoot you for being a traitor to the Order-"

"I'm not a traitor-"

"Shut up!" He jerked her around and she nearly tripped a portly Turk negotiating hotly to buy a copper kettle. He ignored the Turk's brief alarm, ignored, also, the deep circles under Jenny's eyes, the unnatural pallor of her cheeks, as if the pith of her was disintegrating, as if something had devastated her from the inside out. Which was difficult, because it meant ignoring the painful lurch the sight of her gave his heart-despite her lying, her deceit, her murderous treachery he felt… God help him. Again, his heart contracted, and he wondered whether he could forgive himself for loving her still. "The only reason you're still alive is that I told Kartli I'd talk to you-that I'd get out of you whether there are any more moles inside the Order."

"I have no idea. You'd have to ask Anthony-"

Rule's name became a scream as he dragged her back into the street. It was his love, he realized with a shock that literally sickened him, that bore his rage on high. His hatred of her was not a professional hatred-he was ignoring Uncle Tony's admonition to disinvolve himself personally, to keep his head well above the rising tide of the Voire Dei's toxic sludge. He loved her and she was evil. How on earth could that be?

"It's to be the hard way, then," he said with exaggerated grimness. "I'll take you to Kartli. He has all manner of articulated interrogation in mind to make you talk." Her eyes found his, and the part of himself that loved her still shied away from her challenge, disengaging at the last instant, so that a stranger with his mouth said: "In other words, torture."

Jenny was stricken, felled as if by a bolt of lightning. "How can you-? God in heaven, how can you even contemplate such a monstrous thing? I'll fight you tooth and nail right here, you know that."

Something buzzed past her cheek, soft as a moth, causing her to gasp, take an involuntary step back. Just beyond her reach, the portly Turk lost control of the kettle, his arms splayed out, pitching forward into the copper merchant as the bullet caught him between the shoulder blades.

Instantly, the market erupted into a tsunami of shouts, gesticulations and pounding feet. People ran in every direction. The melee flung Bravo and Jenny apart, and Jenny took the opportunity to sprint away into the crowd. There was no point in attempting to follow her, for she was soon lost to his sight and he was borne away on the rising tide of panic.

"You told me-"

"I am a man of my word," Mikhail Kartli said firmly.

"And yet one of your men tried to kill her."

The Georgian stood with his arms crossed. A tattoo of a hawk with open wings showed on the inside of one wrist, a controlled burst of colors on the brown flesh. "Correction. Not one of my men."

"Then who?" Bravo demanded.

"You're doubting me?"

"I'm simply asking."

Kartli's brows gathered darkly and there was a hitherto unknown thickness in his voice. "No, you're accusing."

"That's your interpretation, not an accurate one."

Adem Khalif tried to extricate Bravo, to spirit him away from the rising peril. But Bravo shook Khalif off, stood his ground.

The three men formed a triangle at the entrance to the Georgian's shop. Around them were Mikhail Kartli's offspring-four adult sons, built like their father and no less muscular-and the daughter Khalif had spoken to on their way in. There was a different kind of tension now from the one Bravo had observed earlier. Kartli's clients were gone, the ones still needing to do business hustled away moments ago by the eldest son to whom Kartli had given one of his cell phones.

"Irema, your place is at home with your mother," Kartli said to his daughter.

"But, Father-"

Her protestation was cut short as one of her brothers cuffed her on the side of her head. She uttered no sound, but bit her lip until the blood flowed.

Kartli did not reprimand his son. Instead he said to Irema, "Go this instant. You will be punished, but not as severely as if you force me to send your brother as escort."

Irema glared at the brother who had struck her, and then with naked curiosity, momentarily turned her gaze on Bravo. A moment later, avoiding her father's murderous stare, she fled into the maze of the bazaar.

There was red dust in the street. It coated their shoes and the bottoms of their trousers. It had sunk darkly into the creases of their palms, mimicking dried blood. A kind of animal musk was rising with the dust and the tension, the scent of a pair of mountain goats about to lock horns. In the end, only one of them would be left standing, and they both knew it. This was the end that Adem Khalif was working mightily to avoid.

"Obviously, there has been a miscommunication, a misunderstanding," Khalif said in Georgian. "This is not the time to quibble over such trivial matters and, in any event, Mikhail, wouldn't it be wiser to take the discussion inside?"

No one paid him any mind.

"I could have gotten her to talk," Bravo said. "Instead, an attempt was made on her life and now she's lost to us-the opportunity is lost. I don't consider that trivial."

"She was lost through your inexperience," Kartli said imperiously. "You were the one with her in the field."

Bravo swung at Kartli. The Georgian took the blow on his shoulder, grabbed Bravo's wrist and began the process of breaking it.

Bravo slammed his fist into Kartli's stomach to gasps from the onlookers. Released, he inadvisably took a step forward, ran right into a left-handed uppercut from the Georgian that dropped him onto his backside. Kartli came on in a low brawler's crouch. Bravo, half-dazed, waited until as long as he dared, regaining his breath, before he drew Lorenzo Fornarini's dagger.

Kartli froze in mid-stride, but his four sons moved toward Bravo, until the Georgian held up a hand. His blazing eyes were on Bravo, not them.

"Have a care," Kartli said with a strange intensity. "I told you to make damn sure you knew when to use it."

As Bravo's fist tightened on the dagger's hilt, Khalif intervened again. "Listen, both of you, if the Order is divided against itself, then, truly, all is lost."

Kartli sneered. "He comes here, this American, with his hand out, asking for help. Then, in the same breath, he orders me to crouch at his side like a dog, then he accuses me. Like a dog, he strikes me, expecting that I should happily grovel before him." He spat heavily. "Should any of this be a surprise to me? The day dawns when the horns of the rampaging beast will gore even the most prudent of onlookers. This is the American way, isn't it, all over the world."

"This is the Voire Dei, Kartli, we're both-"

The Georgian cursed in Georgian and in Turkish. "What do I say to someone whose government has allied itself to the Moscow criminals who continue to persecute my people without mercy?"

"For the love of God-"

"Another point that must be clarified, American-whose God do you invoke, mine or yours?"

"We're both human beings."

"But we're not equal, are we? You wish to use me, just as your government uses the Russians for their own end."

Adem Khalif said quietly but urgently, "Mikhail, after all, Bravo is the Keeper, it's your duty to protect and to help him."

"Such arrogance in a Keeper. And now you side with him." Kartli hawked and spat into the dirt.

Bravo, grief and frustration once again flaring into anger, began to advance on Kartli, but Khalif grabbed him, held him back with a grip like iron.

"Don't do this," he whispered in Bravo's ear. "I warned you, this man is very dangerous, easily provoked." To the Georgian, he said, "Since when have you known me to take sides? I, who have broken bread with you, who have changed your children's diapers, who have sat in counsel with you. We are friends, Mikhail. Friends."

"Then back away from the American."

"Only to see you kill him," Adem Khalif said sadly.

"He drew a weapon in my house. He has committed a mortal offense."

"You were friends with his father."

"Dexter Shaw is dead," the Georgian said. "My obligation died with him."

"But the Order, your vows-"

"I have taken enough from these people." Kartli's hand flashed down. "It is finished."

"At least allow him to walk away," Adem Khalif said. "The death of Dexter Shaw's son will be a heavy weight to bear."

"Let him go, and step back," Kartli said simply.

Khalif did as he was told, but not before he managed to whisper in Bravo's ear, "Sheath the dagger and wait… Wait."

And there Bravo stood, the dagger sheathed, alone, waiting. A terrible silence strangled them, the furious bustle of the street faded away as if it had never existed. And all the while the Georgian's eyes never left Bravo's. There seemed to ensue a curious contest of wills, silent, lethal.

Very slowly, Bravo pulled out the scabbarded dagger, held it out, an offering to propitiate Mikhail Kartli or, perhaps, his god.

"You seek to buy me off," the Georgian said. "How American."

"There is no price on this dagger," Bravo said. "It is yours."

Kartli shook his head, as if at something infinitely sad. "No, Keeper, where you travel you will need it."

Bravo lowered the dagger.

"Go now," Mikhail Kartli said.

Bravo turned, saw that Khalif made no move to go with him. The circle of the Georgian's sons parted as he neared it.

Just before he stepped outside the ring, leaving the Georgian's aegis forever, out into the streets of Trabzon, Mikhail Kartli said, "Pray to whatever god it is that moves you, for without him you are truly lost."

Chapter 25

Bravo sat in the same cafe' on the hill in the Ortahisar quarter where he had first met Adem Khalif, hoping that if he stayed long enough the Turk would come. The cafe smelled of burnt cigarettes and cat urine, but the coffee was thick and strong. From his tiny table he had an excellent view of the main arteries of the Old City, the ravines in which all light was absorbed. He realized that he could not bear to be in any section of the new city, grown like a gross shell around the jewel of long-lost Trebizond. He wanted to recapture that fabled city, wanted to walk its streets, hear the regal sound of Trapazuntine Greek being spoken, watch the stately round ships sailing in from Florence or Venice, Cadiz or Bruges, ready to take on the exotic cargoes waiting for them in Trebizond's bursting warehouses. And on the horizon, the sinister slash of the black sails, the threat of the Seljuk pirates. He pulled out his cell phone. In the middle of dialing Jordan's number, he stopped. Jordan was his closest friend in the world. Bravo had already asked him for help and Jordan had generously agreed, but now it was too dangerous to involve him further. Bravo knew he didn't want to endanger anyone else, especially his friend.

He put his head in his heads. He wanted another life, or at least to roll back the clock. He pictured himself standing on the corner of Sixth Avenue in New York, watching his father walk away. If only he'd gone after him. But, really, what good would it have done? Delayed what was already set in motion, nothing more. It was dispiriting, the idea that he'd been helpless, trapped like a cog in a huge machine, grinding forward with inexorable precision…

"It's time to see your grandfather, Bravo."

He looked up, saw his father's weather-beaten face. They were in their house in Greenwich Village and he was nine years old.

"I know you don't want to go."

"How d'you know that?" Bravo said.

"Because you just asked Mom if you could help her dry the breakfast dishes."

Bravo set down the dish towel. He knew his father had made a joke, but just then it didn't seem all that funny.

Dexter put a hand on his son's shoulder. "Your grandfather wants to see you, he asked about you specially this morning."

"Doesn't he want to see Junior?" Bravo asked, thinking misery loves company. Emma was far too young to be brought to the nursing home.

"Junior's not feeling well," Dexter said.

That wasn't it at all, and Bravo knew it. He'd overheard his parents talking about it several weeks before. They'd deemed Junior too young to go, a decision that only added to Bravo's resentment.

The drive to the nursing home wasn't short, but to Bravo it seemed to take three minutes. Fleets of semis rumbled, factories belched smoke, and he had to roll up the window so as not to be overcome by the reek of chemical waste that smelled like burnt tires and cat piss.

The nursing home, somewhere in the unfathomable hinterlands of New Jersey, was a large Georgian redbrick building that seemed like one of those thoroughly unpleasant London institutions Dickens so brilliantly described. Bravo sat in the car, listening to the hot engine tick over like a mechanical heart, waiting for it to slow and, finally, stop. He stared straight ahead even after his father had clambered out, a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach.

"Bravo?" Dexter opened the passenger's-side door and held out his hand.

Bravo, in his own way resigned, took it, and together they went up the cement walk to the front door. Just before it opened, Dexter said, "You love your grandfather, don't you?"

Bravo nodded.

"That's all you need think about, okay?"

Bravo nodded again, not trusting himself to reply.

The smell inside the nursing home was unspeakable. Bravo tried to hold his breath, just as he always did, but it was no use. He inhaled and felt himself gagging before he was able to settle his system down.

They found Conrad Shaw in the solarium, amid bright sunlight and the unnatural humidity of hothouse flowers and potted plants. As usual, he'd ordered his wheelchair to be set as far away from the other patients as possible. He was bald now, though up until ten years ago he'd had a thick shock of white hair of which he'd been inordinately proud. His thin flesh, speckled as a robin's egg, was carved by age and disease so close to the skull that it had taken on the color of the bone beneath. Once, he'd been a big man, robust and reckless, dapper and possessed of a raucous laugh he dispensed with great generosity.

The pity was that these gifts had been snatched from him all at once. The stroke that had felled him had been a serious one. Now his heart was damaged and he wore a pacemaker. His legs were useless, as was the right side of his body. His features sagged horribly, as if he was subject to a gravitational force of extraterrestrial virulence.

He had not adjusted well to his altered circumstance. It was as if all joy had been squeezed out of him. If he was pleased to see his grandson there was no way for Bravo to tell. His grandfather fixed him with his one good eye, gripped him with his one good arm in what Bravo came to think of as a death grip, as afterward he regarded the bruise.

"How are you, Grandpa?" Bravo asked.

"Where's my pipe, boy? What did you do with my pipe?"

"I haven't seen your pipe, Grandpa." Bravo wiped a bit of spittle from the flaky corner of his grandfather's mouth.

"Don't do that!" Conrad let fly the back of his good hand. "Broke it, did you?" He pinched Bravo's arm hard, his fingers like steel pincers. "Deliberate disobedience, knowing you."

"Dad, Bravo didn't take your pipe. You lost it last year," Dexter said, gently extricating his son.

"Lost, my ass," Conrad snorted. "I know when something of mine's been stolen."

Dexter closed his eyes for a moment, and Bravo could almost hear him silently counting to ten. "Forget the pipe, Dad, you know you can't smoke anymore." Dexter affixed a smile to his face and using his most diplomatic voice, said, "I know you're happy to see Bravo, you asked for him this morning."

"I asked for coffee with half-and-half this morning," the old man said irascibly. "If you think I got it you don't know a damn thing about this hellhole. It's a toilet masquerading as a hotel."

Every time Conrad saw Dexter, he begged his son to end his life. This was why Dexter had taken to bringing Bravo with him. The old man would never consider voicing his request while Bravo was around.

Bravo didn't react so much to the frighteningly swift decrepitude that had come upon his grandfather as to the terror, unvoiced but felt as only a child can feel it, of the old man's death wish. He deeply hated being dragged here against his will, having to see the waste that disease inflicts on even the strongest, most capable of men, of being hauled into close proximity with death when he did not even understand what death was.

"I don't want to go back there ever again," he said on the way home.

"That's what you say every time." Dexter's voice was deliberately light, as if they were bantering about some beloved topic.

"This time I mean it, Dad," Bravo said as forcefully as he knew how.

"Your grandfather doesn't mean any of those things he says, Bravo. You know that inside he's happy to see you."

Bravo looked away.

"What is it?"

Again, silence.

"C'mon," Dexter urged. "You can tell me anything, you know that."

"I don't want to die."

Dexter gave him a quick look full of fatherly concern. "You're not going to die, Bravo. Not for a long, long time."

"But Grandpa will."

"All the more reason for you to see him, as often as possible. I want you to remember-"

Bravo, in a sudden rage fueled by grief and frustration, shouted, "Remember what? A walking skeleton, something out of a nightmare?"

Dexter signaled and pulled over into the breakdown lane, where he stopped the car. Turning to his son, he said, "No matter how your grandfather looks now, he's the same inside, he's a man who has accomplished great things. He deserves your attention and your respect."

With a child's clear access to the truth, Bravo said, "I don't think he's the same inside."

This brought Dexter up short. He turned his head, one arm draped over the wheel, watched the lines of cars and trucks whizzing by. The car rocked in the fluted edge of their slipstream.

"You're right." Dexter Shaw sighed. "I've been fighting against it, but my father isn't the same inside, he's been brought low."

It was the first time Bravo had seen his father cry. It wouldn't be the last.

Bravo put his hand on his father's shoulder. "It's okay, Dad."

"No, it's not. I shouldn't be taking you every week. It's selfish."

"Hey, Dad-"

"My father was everything to me. To see him like this…" Dexter shook his head. "But these are the consequences of life, Bravo. One has to own up to them, take them like a man."

"Then we will."

Dexter Shaw looked at his son.

"I mean, we're together, right?" The nine-year-old Bravo flashed a courageous smile. "We're men, right?"

Like a cool breath on his cheek, Bravo felt his father's departure, and he opened his eyes. The light had lowered, the lengthening shadows were the color of lapis. Still no sign of Khalif, and now Bravo knew that he wouldn't come. His coffee was cold and he called for another, along with something to eat. "Anything but pulpo," he told the waiter. He was up to here with octopus.

It was a mistake to have picked a fight with Mikhail Kartli. The imprudence of it shocked him even now. But there are times when control goes out the window and then you simply have to make the best of a bad situation. Take the consequences like a man.

His coffee came and he drank a bit of it, burning the tip of his tongue. With a clatter, he put the cup down and called Emma. He was eight hours ahead of New York. By all rights, he should have woken her up, but she answered immediately and there was no trace of sleep in her voice.

"My God, Bravo, where have you been? I've been trying you for the better part of a day."

"Out of cell range, obviously. Listen, I found the mole."

"You did? Who is it?"

"Was. Paolo Zorzi. He's dead."

"Zorzi?" There was silence for a moment, then Emma said, "I don't know."

"What d'you mean? He was one of the names on the list Dad made. Father Mosto showed it to me in Venice."

"Ah, Bravo. That list was one of Dad's ploys, nothing but disinformation, in case it somehow fell into the hands of a Knight."

He sat up straight. "You're joking, right?"

"Think about it a minute. This is Dad we're talking about. Do you really think he'd leave a list of suspects lying around, especially an unencrypted one?"

Bravo's head had begun to pound. "But Zorzi had me beaten, captured… Are you telling me he wasn't the traitor?"

"No. What I'm saying is we can't be sure. The only list Dad compiled was in his head."

"But you were doing research for him. You know all the suspects. Was Zorzi one of them?"

"At one point, yes."

A cold ball of fear was congealing in Bravo's stomach. "What does that mean?"

"About a month before he was killed Dad had me stop all the background intelligence I was digging up."

"Why?"

"That's what I asked him. All he'd say was that he'd made a breakthrough, that he had to do the rest of it alone. I begged him to let me help, but he was adamant. You know how hard-headed Dad could be."

He certainly did know. "But why all of a sudden did he cut you out?"

"I've tried a dozen theories. None of them makes sense."

"What," Bravo said, "if the breakthrough involved a new suspect very close to Dad?"

"But why would he-?"

"Someone he didn't want you to know about-especially that he was very close to her."

"Her?"

"Jenny Logan-the Guardian. No wonder Zorzi was a prior suspect; it was one of his people who was the mole. She probably left clues leading Dad back to him. But it didn't work-or at least, not for long. I think he assigned her to me hoping she'd trip her hand conclusively and I'd find her out. Which is exactly what's happened."

"I don't know, Bravo, that's a lot of danger to expose you to."

"No more than what he'd been training me for."

"Still, it was a monumental gamble on his part, don't you think?"

"The stakes are high, Emma, I don't have to tell you that." He thought a moment. "What were you doing for Dad after he pulled you off the background checks?"

"Nothing all that important. Checking the Order's audio logs of their London-based intel. Honestly, I don't know why he wanted it vetted."

"Me neither," Bravo said. "But you know Dad, somewhere there was a reason. Can you manage-?"

"Blind, you mean? I've been trying to tell you since you called but you kept laying bombshells on me. Some of my sight has come back."

He let out a whoop of delight. "Emma, that's fantastic!"

"It's only in one eye so far and my vision's not that great, especially distances. It may never be, the doctors tell me. But I can see the computer screen well enough, especially with the great hulking magnifying lens I had made."

"Then you can continue vetting the London audio intel."

"But it's sooo boring," Emma moaned in her most theatrical voice.

"Look, I've recently discovered that Dad was working on fundamentalist movements in and around the Middle East. There's a long history of fundamentalist training and staging activity in London, as you know, so while what he's asked you to do might seem boring, it could have very serious implications."

"Okay, okay, you've sold me, but promise me you'll stay in touch more often. Where are you, by the way?"

"Best not to tell you."

She laughed. "Now you sound just like Dad."

"Get cracking on that London intel."

"Right. Take care of yourself."

"Emma, I love you."

He severed the line and put the cell phone away. By that time the food had come. He ate without tasting a thing. With the information about Emma and Jenny buzzing in his head he didn't know whether to laugh or to cry.

The light was fading. Along Trabzon's crescent shoreline the sea was zebra-striped. Boats lay at anchor or in their slips, rocking gently as if they were children drifting off to sleep. In the heart of the Old City, Damon Cornadoro turned a corner, went down the block toward Mikhail Kartli's carpet shop. He had his orders and, like all loyal soldiers, he would carry them out to the best of his abilities, and he would succeed. With all the bewildering variables in the world, Cornadoro was grateful that his skills weren't one of them. He was absolutely confident in himself. He did not, like others, feel fear. The sensation was unknown to him-ever since, on a dare, he had stuck his arm in the flames of a Venetian street fire. He had been sixteen at the time, but street-smart beyond his years. Though a scion of one of the Case Vecchie, he preferred to slum. When he'd been challenged, he knew just what to do. He'd turned away, rolled up his sleeves and rubbed his hands together, as if preparing himself for the ordeal. In fact, that was precisely what he was doing, though not in the way any of the onlookers understood. He was coating his right arm with axle grease.

During this time he was keeping up a steady stream of boasting, daring more people to bet against him, furthering his odds. Classic misdirection, diverting the onlookers' attention from seeing how he was protecting his arm. Then, so quickly it brought a gasp to those crowded around, he thrust his right arm up to the elbow into the crackling fire, held it there for a full thirty seconds, before removing it. Holding up the arm, he laughed at the looks of astonishment on their faces, and jovially collected his winnings.

Now as Cornadoro came upon the Georgian's shop, he felt no trepidation, simply a desire to accomplish his task. Camille had warned him not to underestimate Kartli; Cornadoro had learned to take her warnings seriously.

The young girl Irema, the Georgian's daughter, who Kartli had ordered home during his altercation with Braverman Shaw, had not, in fact, done as her dear papa had ordered but had melted into the throng, hanging at the fringes, moving here and there, watching the shape of her father's anger. Cornadoro had noted this, and he would not forget. He passed her now as she at last decided that it was time to leave.

One of her brothers was folding small rugs, taking them off the rickety wooden stands outside the shop, preparatory to bringing them inside for the night.

"We're closed," he said without looking up or pausing in his work. "Please come back tomorrow morning."

"I must see Mikhail Kartli," Cornadoro said.

The young man glanced up. "Must?"

"I've come a long way to see him." Cornadoro stood his ground. "All the way from Rhodes."

At the last word, the young man stopped folding rugs. Something swam in his eyes-what was it? Fear, consternation, perhaps a bit of both. So it should be; Rhodes was the home of the Knights of St. Clement. Cornadoro was pleased.

The young man put down the rug. "Please wait here," he said as he turned on his heel and disappeared into the interior of the shop. Lights, the yellow of a mongrel's tooth, were coming on all over the city. New reflections turned the shopwindows into blind eyes.

Mikhail Kartli appeared in the doorway, spent a moment warily eyeing his visitor. At length, he emerged onto the street. "What can I do for you?"

"I think it's more what I can do for you."

Cornadoro stepped briskly forward but stopped when the Georgian held up his hand.

"First, your weapon of choice. The push-dagger, if you please."

Cornadoro laughed good-naturedly. "I commend you, Georgian, your intel is excellent." He produced the push-dagger he'd used to slit Father Damaskinos's throat, held it out, handle first. Kartli nodded and his son took it.

"For safekeeping," Kartli said. "It will be returned to you when you leave."

Cornadoro inclined his upper torso in a slightly ironic mock-bow. He now produced a small metal tin, which he held out to the Georgian.

"What is this?"

"A gift," Cornadoro said, "from one connoisseur to another."

"Open it, please," Kartli commanded.

"By all means." Cornadoro freed the latch, raised the box's top. At once, a delicately aromatic scent perfumed the air.

Kartli's eyes opened wide. "Bai Ji Guan."

Cornadoro nodded. "White Rooster Crest, a first generation tea, as you know, one of the four WuYi Mountain rock oolongs."

"Very rare, very costly," Kartli said, taking possession of the box.

Cornadoro shrugged. "If it pleases you, there's more where that came from." Inside he was smiling broadly; Camille had been right again, they'd scored a direct hit.

"Come with me," Kartli said, leading the way into the interior of the shop. Oil lamps had been lit, spilling pools of warm light across the magnificent tapestry of the rugs. The son brought coffee-no tea and no food. This form of the ritual told Cornadoro that the meeting was preliminary, the intentions of his host at this point neutral.

He sat on a pile of Tabriz carpets, accepted the coffee with-out sugar. After they had both partaken of the coffee, he put aside his cup. The son lounged in the background, text-messaging on his cell phone.

"You know me."

Kartli nodded. "Damon Cornadoro. Knight of St. Clement."

"Not so, I never took the formal vows."

Kartli cocked his head. "Am I wrong, are you not working for the Knights?"

"On occasion I do," Cornadoro acknowledged. "I am, however, an independent operator."

"Then we are the same, you and I. As of today, I have severed my affiliation with the Order."

This comment piqued Cornadoro's interest. Had he not observed the Georgian's falling out with Braverman Shaw with his own eyes, he would have been suspicious of such a radical change.

"One avenue closes," he said, "others open to take its place. It is said that Cherry Bateman trained you."

Cornadoro inclined his head. "Bateman is the avenue I chose-or perhaps it is more accurate to say that he chose me."

"Bateman is an American."

"I am Venetian and you are Georgian. What of it?"

"All across the globe," Mikhail Kartli said, "nationalism is on the march. It is a source of strength nothing else can match." He eyed Cornadoro shrewdly. "I think you know this."

"Cherry Bateman is an American by birth only. He is a citizen of Italy, he has renounced America. He has renounced his son Donovan, who remains in America."

"This would make a difference."

"Of course. It is important to see things as they are, rather than as they seem to be." Cornadoro spread his hands. "You and Bateman. I could be mistaken, of course." He allowed himself a smile. "It wouldn't be the first time. But in the event I'm not wrong I would be prepared to arrange an introduction. You might find your time in the Veneto extremely constructive-as well as potentially helpful to the Georgian cause."

"And in return, you would want… what?"

"Information." Cornadoro smiled outwardly, even as he relaxed inwardly. He felt the unmistakable tug of the hook going in. "Information on Braverman Shaw."

Chapter 26

When an Islamic said "Geometry is God manifest," he meant it literally. The first-century mathematician al-Biruni codified geometry, called it geodesy and classified it as a philosophy both natural and religious, dealing with matter and form as they combined with time and space.

The interior of the Zigana Mosque, a beehivelike geodesic dome composed of pointed arches of honey-colored stone, was based on al-Birani's sacred geometry. There was, indeed, a spiral staircase to one side that led up to the minbar, the sacred pulpit. It was constructed of a black wood, perhaps ebony, and was highly polished, shiny as glass.

Bravo stood looking at it for some time. The peculiar geodesy of the interior made the slightest whisper audible from clear across the mosque. He held everyone in his view. There appeared to be no threat, and gradually, as if he were swimming through clear azure water, a profound calm settled over him.

There were few people about. From somewhere, the melodic ululation of a prayer came to him, muffled by the space, further blurred by its own echoes. The door opened at his back and he felt himself stiffen slightly. Too late he realized that he should have immediately moved so as to keep an eye on who entered and exited. Two solemn men, thin and brown and bearded, passed near him. He could smell the spice of their passage. Shoulders touching, they walked down the aisle, away from him. No threat.

Taking a deep breath, he crossed the dusky mosque, through three identical pointed arches. At the elegant ebony corkscrew of the staircase, Bravo stood still as a statue, his head bowed as if he were preparing for the salat. In fact, he was thinking of the second word his father had written on the strip of velvet.

Purpure was medieval English, the heraldic term for purple. However, it was not always possible to use color, so on black and white drawings it was indicated by lines drawn from upper left to lower right or, in heraldic terms, from sinister chief to dexter base. The next cipher was at the base of the spiral.

Jordan had his mother in his sights. Spying on her was an interesting experience; it caused him to wonder if she had ever spied on him. At this moment, he was willing to bet that she had. Through powerful field glasses, he watched her as she crossed the street in front of her hotel. As always, she was impeccably dressed-pin-striped tailored shirt, yellow linen skirt that showed off her long, beautiful legs. She slid into a battered landscaper's truck. Behind the wheel sat Damon Cornadoro, her lover, her coconspirator.

Jordan felt the murderous urge to take a gun from one of his men. He imagined himself getting out of this van with its blacked-out windows, striding down the street. He'd tap on the window of the truck and when Cornadoro wound it down, Jordan would shoot him dead. Blood and brains all over her fashionable blouse and skirt, her makeup ruined. He wondered if she'd have any other reaction…

His cell phone rang.

"The American wants to see you," Spagna's voice buzzed in his ear.

"I imagine he does."

"He's extremely upset."

"I don't blame him." Jordan hadn't taken his eyes off the couple. Next to him, one of his Knights sat in front of a tape recorder, earphones clamped to his head. "Tell him I'll see him in due course. In the meantime, tell him I want a token of his fealty."

"Something of significance to the American," Spagna said, all ears.

"His daughter." Jordan made a gesture to the Knight sitting beside him. "Tell the American I'll take care of her rehabilitation, the best of everything, all expenses paid."

"He's sure to ask for how long."

"Tell him she will be with me for as long as I wish it."

Spagna chuckled. "He'll scream bloody murder."

"I am quite certain it will make him even more miserable than he is now."

He closed out the connection. In response to his signal, the Knight had passed him a set of earphones. Donning them, he heard every incriminating word his mother and Cornadoro said. Plus, they unknowingly brought his field intelligence up to date. The parabolic microphone aimed through the window by one of his Knights was working to perfection.

Bravo kept one eye on the door as, occasionally, someone entered the mosque or left. Each time, he could feel his heart racing. He was not only worried about the Knights, but those who were loyal to Mikhail Kartli. He had offended the Georgian, and though Kartli had allowed him to walk away unharmed, there was no telling if or when he'd change his mind, give the order to have Bravo found and terminated. Bravo had no doubt that Kartli possessed both the power and the will to carry out the directive, and it wouldn't be only his sons who would jump at pleasing him-to anyone in his employ it would be a matter of honor.

As he knelt in front of the ebony spiral, he was never more aware of being alone in a hostile environment. He thought he had developed a kind of sixth sense when it came to the Knights, but as to Kartli's men, anyone and everyone who passed him a bit too slowly, looked at him a bit too long, moved when he did or glanced away when he tried to meet their eye was suspect. Under the heavy burden of these circumstances the only thing to do was to keep moving. If he stayed too long in one place he was surely a dead man.

He could feel the Roman ruins beneath his feet, as if they were tree roots running down into the living rock. He could hear the chanting of the priests in Trapazuntine Greek, see the entrance of the emperor in white silk and golden imperial eagles, crowned in his bejeweled imperial mitra, flanked by his Kabasitai, his imperial warriors, ceremonial golden swords lifted to honor him.

Movement off to his right caught his attention. Without turning either his head or his body, he saw the two bearded men, who looked even more solemn now as they knelt on small prayer rugs they had laid over the mosaic floor. They were on the opposite side of the mosque, just slightly behind where he knelt. Their foreheads were pressed against the rugs, which gleamed richly in the light, their deep colors burnished like polished metal. Something was wrong, something hidden in plain sight he was missing-what was it?

There came now at the nape of his neck a delicate prickling that advanced down his spine like a venomous serpent. All at once, he sensed a trap, its jaws closing around him, but glancing around he could find no imminent threat.

Still, he resolved to find his father's next cipher and get out as quickly as possible. Looking down, he studied the pattern of the mosaic floor at the base of the spiral. At first, it seemed the same as it was in other parts of the floor, but as he knelt down he could see various differences. For instance, here a green tile was blue, over there eight red tiles where elsewhere there were four, and at various intervals what were orange tiles in other areas of the floor were here white. Following these small anomalies outward, he found that they ended in straight lines and that, further, they corresponded precisely to the width and length of the "Goldenhead" painting, a moire of Mother Mary, coated in gold.

He looked at the color changes-red, white, blue-and pulled out the enameled lapel pin, one of the items his father had left for him in the boat in Washington. He had already examined it, determined that the American flag had the wrong number of stars and stripes.

He looked up, saw that a priest in a hooded robe with a wide cinched waistband-an imam? he couldn't be sure-had appeared and was now talking to the two bearded men, interrupting their prayers. All three of them looked grim as pallbearers. There was something familiar about the priest, either in his physiognomy or in the way he stood, possibly both. Bravo chanced a quick direct look, but the priest had turned his back, and with the hood up he could make out no distinguishing characteristic. Perhaps, after all, he'd been mistaken.

Once again, he returned to his work, though his feeling of unease had increased exponentially. Having determined the area of the color-altered section of the mosaic, he now found the tile at the exact center. From this point, he moved up five tiles, the number of missing stars in the flag pin, then three to the right, the number of missing stripes. He encountered an ocher tile. Nothing there. Now he reversed the direction, went up five tiles, three to the left, where he encountered a green tile. Nothing. Next, down five, right three. This brought him to a black tile. Down five, left three: a brown tile. No red, white or blue tile, as he had been expecting. Now what? He moved, his shadow moving with him. Oblique light played over the mosaic, drawing his eye back to the black tile. Running his fingertip over it, he discovered that it was slightly rounded rather than flat like the other tiles.

With his forehead almost touching the floor in a position not unlike that of the prayerful bearded men on their rugs, he inspected the black tile more closely. It appeared to be made of a different material than those around it.

Inserting his nail into the space between the tiles he was able to pry it up with surprising ease. The stone was shiny, black as midnight. He rubbed the pad of his thumb over its surface for several seconds, then brought it near the floor, saw that it had attracted, by way of static electricity, a fine coating of dust.

The test served to prove his suspicion that this was not another mosaic tile, but rather a small piece of jet-more specifically oltu tasi, a stone used for jewelry and the like, which had been worked by the monks of the Sumela Monastery in the mountains just above Trabzon. From the cavity into which the stone had been set he plucked out a folded slip of paper.

It was at this moment that he became aware of movement off to his right. The priest had left the bearded men and was walking in deliberate fashion toward him. As he did so, he lifted one hand, cupping the fingers of his right hand to draw back the hood of his robe. Bravo was aware that the inside of the mosque had been overcome by a kind of unnatural hush; save for himself and the three other men it was, improbably, deserted.

The priest passed through a diagonal shaft of light and Bravo recognized Adem Khalif. Why had he been talking to the two bearded men? Whose side was he on-Mikhail Kartli's? It seemed that Trabzon belonged to Kartli, even though it was Khalif who was the native.

As if in confirmation of this hypothesis, Bravo saw the two bearded men rolling up their prayer rugs. Again, the light played off the rugs' nap, revealing all its sheen and rich colorations. And now, with a single indrawn breath, Bravo understood what had been disturbing him, what was hiding in plain sight: the rugs were silk-they were far too valuable to be used as daily prayer rugs. The bearded men hadn't come into the mosque for prayer, they were emissaries of Mikhail Kartli, the carpet dealer. Adem Khalif, making the only practical choice he could make, had allied himself with the Georgian. It was as he had feared: ally and enemy alike were after him.

Bravo turned and ran. He heard Khalif's voice raised behind him, but the sound was cut short as he sped around a cluster of columns, sprinted toward the door. The two bearded men were also on the run, trying to cut him off before he reached the front of the mosque.

He veered one way, then another, in an attempt to throw them off, but they came on. Risking a glance over his shoulder, he discovered why: Khalif in the imam's robes was closing in from the opposite direction. Again, he called out, but Bravo refused to listen, he would not be distracted. He had to concentrate on survival, and right now that meant making a clean escape from the trap.

A wooden bench was coming up too fast and he leapt over it, banging the trailing toe of his left shoe just as he went over the top. He twisted in midair, stumbled badly as he came down, lost several vital steps. One of the bearded men, taking advantage of his falter, launched himself into the air like a human missile. He struck Bravo in the small of his back, driving Bravo to his knees. The man reached out, seeking to end the encounter quickly, and Bravo slammed his cocked elbow into the bridge of the man's nose. Blood exploded, the man's grip on him vanished and Bravo gained his feet.

Adem Khalif was upon him by this time. As Khalif began to shout, Bravo plunged a fist into his solar plexus. Khalif groaned and doubled over. Leaping over him, Bravo was up and running again, between the twin columns flanking the entrance, out the door, down the steps and away.

Whirling out into the slate and gunmetal-gray evening, Bravo plunged into the crowds and almost at once lost all sense of direction. He allowed the flow to move him like a piece of jetsam thrown off a ship. At the moment, it did not matter to him where he went, as long as it was away from his enemies. Borne along on this human tide, he absorbed flashes of color, the scents of spice, strong coffee, anxiety and foreboding. The day was ending and, with it, all the mixed blessings and tiny setbacks that accompanied the preoccupations of each person he passed. The rhythms of languages and street argot fell on his ears like the beat of prayer drums.

The precious few moments of blissful anonymity passed through his fingers like sand. It wasn't long before he spotted one of the bearded men and, not far behind him, the other one, trying to stanch the flow of blood from his broken nose on the stained sleeve of his shirt.

Had they spotted him yet? He didn't know, he only knew they were heading in his direction. At once, he veered off to his right, out of the crowd flow. Yes, he was exposing himself for a moment, but he felt the risk was worth his gaining a safe haven.

He took a side street, trying not to break out into a run, to keep his pace more or less equal to that of the people around him. But the hard beating of his heart, the spurts of adrenaline rushing through his system made this difficult. And then, with an anxious glance behind him, he saw the two men shoot like sharks out of the surf on the main street, heading down the side street he had taken.

He plunged into the shadows of a narrow alley, stinking of garbage, creosote and offal. Dogs barked, heralding his presence, and the triangular head of one of them peered at him briefly before vanishing in a second explosion of barking.

He moved on, forcing himself to continue, even while he wondered whether he had made a mistake. No shops presented themselves, no doorways in which he could seek sanctuary. His smoldering fear burst into flame when he glanced back to see other shapes entering the alley. The bearded men? He heard the quickened pace of their footsteps. Who else but the bearded men?

He stumbled on, picking up his pace, hurrying around another corner, where the alley bent like an old woman's back. But scarcely a few meters on, he was brought up short. There, standing in front of him was Adem Khalif.

"You understand that this could backfire," Jenny said as they approached the entrance to Mikhail Kartli's house. "It's likely that Kartli has already heard the rumor that I murdered Father Mosto."

"In that case, you will implicate the priest," Camille said evenly, "absolving yourself."

"You want me to vilify Father Mosto?"

"I want you to help us find Bravo," Camille said quietly. "If that means lying to your contact about someone else's integrity I don't see that you have a choice."

Her manner was both forthright and steadfast. There was an iron will, a certain determination in her that reminded Jenny of Arcangela.

"What does it matter to Father Mosto, anyway?" Camille added. "He's dead."

"Kartli may not believe me."

"He will because you'll sell it to him." Camille lifted a hand, ran her fingers through Jenny's hair. "I have faith in you, Jenny." She smiled. "Don't worry, I'll back up whatever story you tell."

Jenny turned, knocked on the front door in a singular pattern not unlike Morse code. Camille took note with one part of her brain, but another part was thinking how amusing it was to fabricate feelings for someone you were manipulating. Artificial, slippery as oil, they could not sink their curved barbs into your flesh, could not hurt you in any way.

The door opened, revealing the lined, sober face of Mikhail Kartli. He ushered them into a small, rather dark sitting room, enrobed in heavy curtains. Lamps burned, illuminating a low ceiling, muscularly beamed. A series of small, exquisitely hand-knotted silk rugs hung on the wall, arranged as if they were paintings in a high-end art gallery. Camille glanced around as she sat on a heavy upholstered chair. He served them tea, dark and fragrant and steaming, from an old and well-used service on a magnificently hand-tooled copper tray. There was a selection of European biscuits from which they selected one each, more out of courtesy than hunger.

Camille had deliberately seated herself perpendicular to Mikhail Kartli so that she could watch him without seeming to do so. The Georgian was of great interest to her, since he had been the Order's mainstay in Trabzon, a city that had for many years gone unnoticed by the Knights of St. Clement. He had told Cornadoro that he was newly freelance, a soldier for hire. She sipped her tea, settling back to gain his measure while Jenny did the talking.

Kartli was speaking of mundane matters: the humidity, historical sites, the food-he recommended several restaurants. He would not, of course, ask them why they had come or how he could help them. That was not, Camille knew, how these people operated. They were cagey, you had to coax them out of their lairs. They needed to get the measure of you, as they might examine the glimmer of a creature plucked from beneath the ocean's waves.

With mounting interest she saw that, despite Jenny's stated fears, the younger woman was adept at speaking to Asians. Camille had discovered that as a rule Americans did not know how to treat either Europeans or Asians. To them, everyone in the world either shared America's values and customs or was of no import to them. Jenny's attitude was neither usual nor automatic. Camille adjusted upward her opinion of Jenny's abilities.

Kartli peered at Jenny from beneath hooded eyes. He had not moved during the introductions. Indeed, it was difficult to see the rise and fall of his abdomen, to ascertain whether he was still breathing.

"I'm going to tell you the truth," Jenny said now. "In Venice, I was set up as the fall guy for Father Mosto's death. My sin was not being alert enough to stop the attack on me, just before Father Mosto was murdered."

Kartli lifted the hand that until this moment had been propping up his chin. "You say you're telling me the truth." The hand waggled back and forth in equivocation. "You do not know me. What have I done to deserve this signal honor?"

"You're the Order's man in Trabzon," Jenny said.

"Therefore, I am trustworthy. But it seems these days no one, inside the Order or out, is to be trusted."

Jenny said, "I have nowhere else to go, nothing left to lose."

There was as slight pause.

"And this Father Mosto… ?"

"I don't pretend to know much about him. He's not important."

"A man's death-"

"What is vital for you to understand," Jenny pressed, "is that Anthony Rule was the Knight of St. Clement mole inside the Order-not me, not Paolo Zorzi."

Kartli's gimlet eyes never strayed from her face. "Paolo Zorzi was your mentor." It was not a question. "Difficult to believe he had turned against you, was it?"

"Actually, it wouldn't have been hard to believe at all," Jenny said. "He was perfectly placed."

"Yes, he was."

"But Rule would have been the smarter choice," she went on. "He was Dexter Shaw's closest confidant."

Kartli made no further comment, and nothing in his expression gave Jenny the slightest clue as to his thinking. Lacking such a guidepost, she had no choice but to plunge onward. "The bottom line is that we have to find Bravo before the agents of the Knights do, and keep him safe."

"I don't see how I can help you."

"You must have met him, that much we have surmised," Jenny said. "Like me, he had nowhere else to go in Trabzon."

"And I say again, I don't see how I can help you. I no longer work for the Order."

Jenny took a breath, as if she were about to move out into deeper water. She sat forward, her upper body angled toward Kartli, and Camille at once took note because a new, uncataloged tension had come into the muscles of her body, an expression of the deepest concentration flooded her face. She appeared undaunted by what Kartli had said.

"I want to tell you about Braverman Shaw," she began, and oddly enough, Kartli, though he might have wanted to, resisted the urge to stay her.

Jenny talked about Bravo in the most impassioned way, and Camille noticed something. Like a fly in a web, the Georgian's attention had been caught. Kartli, like Camille, had fastened onto the upwelling of genuine emotion as she conjured up Braverman Shaw for him.

This was of the most intense interest for Camille. Jenny was the vulnerable spot, the pivot point that would tip the scales and bring Bravo rushing to her, and now, for the first time, she began to understand the depth of Jenny's feelings for Bravo. Whereas before she had assumed a schoolgirl crush, a romantic infatuation brought about by intimate contact that could bond those in battle-she herself had had her share of fiery but short-lived affairs-now she heard the truth from Jenny's own mouth. Much to her surprise and consternation, Cornadoro had been right, after all. Jenny was committed to Bravo, truly, deeply, unshakably.

Camille took a deep breath, let it out slowly. This information changed everything.

Possibly Mikhail Kartli felt the same way, for he said, "I don't know where Braverman Shaw is."

Something passed across Jenny's expression. No more than a flicker, it was nevertheless picked up by Camille's keen eye. Friend or foe, this was how Jenny was coming to judge everyone she met. If they couldn't help her-or wouldn't-they became her enemy. For her the middle ground had disappeared, had been rendered meaningless by the betrayals she had suffered on this assignment. It would be wise to keep in mind her new way of looking at the Voire Dei, her rapid learning curve, Camille decided.

"In that case," Jenny said now, "I could really use a handgun."

"Luger or a Witness?"

"Is the Witness a Tanfoglio?" Jenny said. "I like the way the Italians make it."

Kartli smiled, as if she had passed a test. "The Tanfoglio Witness will cost you more."

"And extra ammo," Jenny said. "I aim to get my money's worth."

As Bravo went into a defensive stance, Adem Khalif raised both hands palms outward in an unmistakable gesture of placation.

"I mean you no harm, Bravo, truly."

"What about those two behind me?"

"They mean you no harm, either."

"Bullshit They belong to Mikhail Kartli."

"True enough," Khalif acknowledged, "but Kartli is no more your enemy than I am."

"Now I know you've lost your mind." It was maddening trying to keep track of both Khalif and the two bearded men at the same time, surely their intention. "I don't have to remind you that I offended Kartli. Mortally. He's out for my blood."

Adem Khalif inclined his head slightly. "So it would seem to anyone observing the incident."

There was a short pause, during which Bravo digested the implications of this comment. The feral dog had reappeared, no doubt lured by the prospect of fresh meat. One of the bearded men lofted an empty beer bottle in a low arc over Bravo's head, striking the animal in the side. It yelped in pain and vanished.

"Someone was observing us?" Bravo said.

"It was why Mikhail ignored my advice to take the argument inside his shop." Khalif ventured the ghost of a smile. "I wondered about that at the time. It is foolish to air one's business in public, and Mikhail Kartli is anything but foolish."

"True enough," Bravo nodded.

"I have more to tell you," Khalif said, "but, I beg you, somewhere more pleasant, yes?"

"What about the Glimmer Twins over there?"

Khalif's gaze shifted to the two bearded men behind Bravo. "Bodyguards for you. Kartli's express orders. I wouldn't disobey them"-he shrugged-"though I suppose it is your choice."

Bravo waited a beat, considering. "I can dismiss them at any time."

"Of course."

Khalif's brown eyes met his without any hint of deception.

"All right," Bravo said. "Lead on."

A twenty-minute walk through the maze of the bazaar brought them to an unmarked door in a seedy building on a street sticky with beer. Here and there, garishly painted Natashas lounged and leered fiercely.

The door, its green field of peeling paint sadly faded, opened at Khalif's first knock, and they entered. The interior looked like Hollywood's idea of an Oriental opium den circa 1950-red wallpaper, yellow songbirds in bamboo cages, huge brass hookahs beside plush sofas, women in long, sleek, high-slit shantung silk dresses. On one wall, a painting of a lush naked woman, erotically sprawled on a divan, smiling with enigmatic malice.

The four men were completely ignored by the women, whose languid movement about the rooms reminded Bravo of exotic fish in a tank. Khalif nodded to an older woman with an inch of pancake makeup on her face, who directed them to a private room, then closed the door firmly behind them.

On the central table was a flagon of raki, eight bottles of beer, a decanter of single-malt scotch and a fistful of glasses. Bravo and Khalif took seats. The Glimmer Twins remained outside, presumably flanking the door.

Khalif gestured at the liquor, but Bravo shook his head.

"Mikhail suspected that you were being followed," Khalif said. "Further, he felt there was only one way-sure and quick-to find out. He gave the impression of a serious falling out. I played my own part-unwitting, as it happens-of trying to be the mediator between two hotheads. His ruse worked. Not an hour after you left his shop, a man arrived. By that time I, too, had departed, though in the company of one of Mikhail's sons-to keep me from contacting you, or so I believed."

Khalif drew out a cell phone, turned it so Bravo could see the color photo on the screen. "Taken by one of Mikhail's sons. Look familiar?"

"Yes." Bravo frowned. "That's a man named Michael Berio. He met us in Venice, hired by a friend of mine."

"I'm afraid your friend's been duped-and so have you," Khalif said. "His real name is Damon Cornadoro. He's a member of one of Venice's Case Vecchie."

"One of the twenty-four founding families of Venice." Bravo nodded. "Like Paolo Zorzi."

"More importantly for you and for me," Khalif said, "he works for the Knights of St. Clement. In fact, he's their top assassin."

"Christ, and he's here."

"Here, and asking after your whereabouts. This is what Mikhail told me after his son summoned me back to his shop." Khalif opened one of the beers, took a deep swallow, set the bottle down. "Bravo, I must tell you that the fact that the Knights have sent this man after you is the worst possible news. He is powerful, determined, clever, and very, very nasty. These traits have been bred in his bones, in his very blood."

"And now he's insinuated his way into my best friend's good graces." Bravo shook his head and took out his cell phone. At once, Khalif stayed him. "What are you doing?"

"Calling my friend Jordan. I have to warn him-"

"The moment you do that, you alert Cornadoro you're on to him. Think, Bravo-is that what you really want?"

"If he's half as nasty as you make him out to be, you bet I do."

"And then what will happen, do you think?"

Bravo fought to put aside his anxiety over Jordan's safety. Fought to bring himself back to the here and now. "You're right, of course. The Knights will send someone else, someone we won't know about, someone we have no hope of controlling."

Khalif looked shocked. "Mikhail and I were talking about killing Cornadoro. Controlling him is-"

"Terrifying, yes, I agree. But killing him now will have the same effect as my calling Jordan. The Knights want what my father was guarding, what he's leading me toward. They won't stop with Cornadoro's death."

"Obviously you have something in mind." Khalif opened the decanter of scotch and filled two tumblers. "Tell me, please. We are in this together."

Damon Cornadoro found Irema, the Georgian's daughter, at the Trabzonspor Club in the Ortahisar. It was named after one of Turkey's most famous football teams, and its decor showed their colors in pennants and photos signed by past and present team stars. All the serving girls wore team jerseys that came down to the middle of their bare thighs. Turkish techno music squalled from four large black speakers parked in the corners of the black-painted room. Television screens showed highlights of past games. The smell of beer and pot smoke hung like a pall.

Cornadoro sat at the bar and ordered a beer. Irema was sitting at a round table in the far left-hand corner with a number of her female friends. They were drinking and laughing. One of them, a heavyset girl with a flattish face, got up and danced while they laughed and clapped, and they bought her a beer when she sat down, flush-faced. It was all very innocent, which had immense appeal for him.

An hour and three beers later, he rose, went over to Irema and asked her very politely to dance. She looked up at him with her large, dark doe eyes, possibly to see if he was about to pull a joke on her-maybe he had come over on a dare from his buddies, maybe there was money riding on her response. But she saw only sincerity in his face-a handsome face, a face that was both sensual and sexual, a face that stirred her. She heard the laughs, the lewd encouragement from her half-drunk friends. Half-drunk herself, she held out her hand in a curiously formal gesture and allowed him to pull her gently onto the club's minuscule dance floor.

She had it in her mind to dance with him for one song, but the one song morphed into three, three melted into six, and on and on she danced, feeling their hips bump, their middles meld, their pelvises grinding as she moved ever closer to him.

"My name is Michael," he said, speaking to her in Georgian.

Her besotted eyes opened wide. "Just like my father."

"I am not your father," he said, swinging her around.

She laughed. "Oh, my God, no, you're not." She was breathless and flushed.

She told him her name and he said it was beautiful, that she was as lithe and graceful as the deer for which she was named.

She laughed again and held on to him as they spun, her arms around his neck trembling slightly with the onrush of her emotions. With her mother's delicate features and cool, porcelain skin, she possessed a freshness that was appealing. Her long black hair was pulled back in a ponytail, which whipped this way and that as she whirled around.

For Cornadoro's part, it was easy for him to make her believe he liked her-he did like her, in the way he liked virtually all women: their animal scent set his blood to boiling. There resided in him a certain insatiability that was like an itch he'd long ago given up trying to scratch. He wanted what was between a woman's legs, simple as that. And as superb a lover as Camille Muhlmann was, what she demanded of him was difficult for him to maintain: monogamy. He had never complied, not really. At first, he'd tried, but he'd failed so quickly-who had it been with, the dirty-blond American teenager on holiday or the sinuous Taiwanese five years younger than he had guessed or possibly someone else altogether, he could never be certain-that he'd never attempted it again. Instead, he had perfected his lies-no easy feat with Camille, something of a human lie detector-so that he could remain in her bed. He didn't want to lose that pole position, for many reasons, both carnal and political.

Camille was brilliant, no question, but the basic problem with her was that she was old. What he craved most was fresh meat, young and dewy and luscious in its innocence. Like Irema. Plus, he didn't like Irema's father, which gave the act of seducing her a frisson that made him lick his chops with anticipation.

As their dancing progressed he could feel her falling under his spell. It was a physical thing he experienced in his throat and his arms and his groin; it was like sex, like death. The blackness of the abyss was where he drew his sexual energy, it was what made it so feral, so irresistible.

He danced with her and, as he did so, he could feel that old familiar feeling creeping along his skin. He loved Irema and he made her feel it, though, of course, the source of it remained unknown to her. He loved her for the information with which she would provide him.

No lights were on when he brought her to his hotel room. The glimmer of the city came through the jalousied window in pale horizontal stripes, illuminated her like a neon sign. He told her to strip and she did, slowly before his greedy, glittering eyes. Then he told her what else to do. She didn't seem to mind; in fact, she liked it. She was used to being ordered around, there was a high degree of comfort in the known, but he suspected from looking at her that wasn't what she wanted, not really. And tonight he was determined to give her what she really wanted.

Naked, she looked more like a girl, small breasts, slim hips, tiny waist. But her legs were long and nicely rounded, and her rump… He had her continue to stand with her back to him, her arms at her sides. She was wholly unself-conscious about her nakedness, unafraid about what he might do with her. He had her trust, and this, more than anything, inflamed him.

He popped the buttons on his shirt pulling it off, and he was already so rigid that his trousers gave him a struggle. She turned in response to his growl of frustration and used her nimble fingers to unbuckle his belt, unzip him. As his trousers came down so did she, until she was on her knees. He ripped the band from her ponytail, twined his fingers in her loosed hair.

When he lifted her, her legs opened, her thighs gripping his hips as she gave a little moan. He felt her skin against him, warm, smooth as ivory, the bony hardness of youth still upon her. Enough to tip any man over the edge, but he held on, leading her up the sexual arc until, shuddering and groaning, she reached the apex. One wasn't enough for her, he'd known that from the start. Hot little thing. Like a star, intent on burning to a cinder. He waited her out, he was adept at that; in fact, the denial fired his nerve endings to the fever pitch he longed for, had to have.

But he needed her to feel that, too. She didn't have his reserves, didn't understand what was happening, trembled uncontrollably as he brought her to the final brink, then pulled them both back, over and over. Tears came and she clasped him desperately, implored him to finish it.

It wasn't until she said, "Why are you waiting, it's torture, I'm dying," that he ended it for both of them, so that she crawled up onto him, over him, seeking a way to be inside him as he emptied himself inside her.

Afterward, she asked for it again so quickly he almost laughed. She had never come down from her last orgasm, she was soft and warm as taffy, the black pupils of her eyes as dilated as if he had given her opium. This was the moment he had been manufacturing all evening, the moment to ask her for what he wanted while she wasn't thinking clearly, or at all.

"Of course I'll help you." She guided him back into her with a deep-felt sigh. "No one has ever asked me for help before."

"Not even your brothers?"

"All I ever get from them are orders." Her fingers cupped him, caressing. "You'd think they'd be more enlightened." She maneuvered herself above him, straddling his girth, stretching her thighs to their limits. The slight pain made the pleasure all the sweeter. "That's what we were talking about in the bar when you came over."

"They all feel that way, don't they," he said, "all your girlfriends."

"Oh, yes," she moaned, but he couldn't be sure that was an answer to his question because she was trembling again from head to toe and her eyes were rolling in her head.

He held on to her as she let go, feeling the frantic bucking of wild youthful energy as if it were a shot of adrenaline into his own system.

At last she was spent, or as near as she could get, but still she wanted to hear the phrase he had pumped out all night long, "Whatever you want, Irema. Whatever you want." When had she ever heard that from a man? In her secret discussions with her girlfriends, sitting in front of a mirror while she applied lipstick, in her dreams at night as she tossed and turned in fretful sleep. But in real life, from a flesh-and-blood male-one who held her, kissed her, caressed her, entered her with such tenderness, until she screamed at him to do otherwise? This night, never before. This night only.

Which was why she would do anything to ensure that it never ended, including convincing herself that everything he told her was true, must be true because of how she felt about him, because of what he had given her freely, and would do so again whenever she wanted it.

"Your father and I work for the Order." He held her gently, rocking her, just as she liked. "The only difference is he works in the field-in his case, here in Trabzon-while I am stuck in an office in Rome. For the most part. Every so often, I'm asked to go into the field to check up on operatives. But anonymously, you know. So your father must never know that I was here or that I was asking about his activities. It would cost me my job, with no opportunity to explain myself, do you understand, Irema?"

She nodded. Her heart was thumping as hard as if he were still thrusting into her. She vaguely understood that her father was more than a rug merchant. For one thing, there were the men who sought him out-they came and never left with a rug. For another, her father was far richer than any rug merchant of her knowledge. Also, people-Georgian, Russian, Turkish, whatever-inclined their heads to him when they passed him in the street. He commanded respect. So, though she had never been allowed in the shop during business hours, her eyes and ears had been open, picking up bits and pieces here and there, far more, she suspected, than her father knew.

"I've been here three days now, talking to his associates," he said, "and everything seems in order, except for one thing."

Irema stared at him. The thumping of her heart had turned painful-something bad couldn't happen to her father, it couldn't.

"What is the one thing?" she asked in little more than a croak. The grit of fear had parched her throat.

"Earlier today your father had an… altercation with another member of" the Order." His face was stern, scaring her all the more. "This was a very important member of the Order, Irema, very high up in the ruling body."

"Very high up?"

He nodded. "Very. Your father sent him away, refused to give him the help he requested. I have to tell you that this is an extremely serious breach of protocol."

"Protocol?"

"My bosses are pissed off."

"Oh!" She put her hand over her mouth as she giggled delightedly.

"Irema." He took her hand away from her mouth. "This is no laughing matter, I assure you."

"Oh, but it is!" At last her heart was light, and she felt an exhilaration inside herself. She never could have believed it, but hers was the power to exonerate her father from false reports that would have doomed him with the Order. She had overheard enough, had pieced enough together to make a patchwork quilt, and although she had also heard her father tell her brothers numerous times never to tell outsiders family business, she knew this was different. She was helping her father with the people who paid him, who were the source of all the money, all the respect that he had worked so hard for. How could that be wrong? Also, this man and her father were allies. So she told her sweet lover what she knew:

"That altercation was a ruse."

"A ruse?" He rose up on one elbow, his shadowed face hard and craggy. "What do you mean?"

"My father would never be so rude to another member of the Order. I heard him talking on the phone to one of my brothers. It was all faked, in case someone was watching."

"All faked." Her lover lay back, his hand resting on her soft, soft belly. "Ah, Irema, my love. It was all faked."

Once he started to laugh he couldn't stop.

Chapter 27

Bravo saw Jenny on the split-level terrace of the Sumela Cafe', with the silver platter of the Black Sea spread out below them. Adem Khalif had taken him here for a late-night dinner. Bravo should have been exhausted, but he wasn't. He had read articles about the so-called adrenaline high soldiers experienced in the heat of battle, but until now he'd had no direct experience with the phenomenon.

Seeing her in profile, bathed in desolate moonlight, he recalled the stricken look on her face during their brief encounter in the bazaar. Then she turned and the nape of her neck was exposed to him, the long sweep, pale in the moonlight, the gentle slope leading to the base of her skull, the fine down of hair, the perfect vulnerable arc. For a moment all his anger, rage and urge for revenge slipped away, and he was left naked, as vulnerable as she seemed, with all his suppressed emotions exposed.

Not only to him, apparently, because Khalif, standing with him shoulder to shoulder, said, "Bravo, what is it? Do you know that woman?" He drew a gun. "She is one of your enemies."

At a table not far away, the bearded Glimmer Twins, still with them, raised their heads. They half rose off their chairs, their upper bodies tilted slightly forward as if they were sprinters at the starting line.

"Pot that away," Bravo said, without looking at Khalif, because Jenny had moved a pace and now he could see that she was with another woman: Camille, his Camille. What in the world was going on?

He began to walk toward the table where the two women sat, chatting as if they were friends-no, something in their attitude convinced him that the connection between them had become more intimate.

"Bravo, do you think this is wise?" Khalif said.

"Stand guard here," Bravo answered him. "Keep your hand on your gun, if you must, but don't try to stop me."

Khalif didn't, and though he was filled with foreboding he waved Mikhail's men to sit back down. He'd heard that tone of voice before, from Dexter Shaw, and he knew better than to interfere.

Camille paused in midsentence, and Jenny saw the woman's eyes shift to a spot behind and just to the right of her. She turned. At the sight of Bravo her heart thudded in her breast and the sudden quick rush of blood to her head made her dizzy. She wanted to rise and hit him, as surely she would have in the bazaar had the bullet from the assassin's gun not struck the merchant beside her. She tasted blood in her mouth, and realized that she had bitten her lip.

"I want to speak with you," he said as he came up. "Now." Her hands balled into fists, but then she realized that it was Camille he was looking at, Camille to whom he had directed his command. He hadn't looked at her, hadn't acknowledged her presence, as if she were a ghost occupying a place in another world.

Camille rose and said, "Of course, my love," leaving her without a backward glance.

Bravo stood with Camille at the edge of the terrace. Low clouds obscured the northern horizon. High above, there was a palely glowing ring around the moon. Down the length of the light-strung terrace he was aware of Adem Khalif slowly sipping a glass of raki, watching them, exuding worry like musk.

As for the Glimmer Twins, his image swam in their dark, avid eyes; they were itching to be needed.

"What the hell are you doing here?" he asked Camille in a ragged voice.

"What do you think? Keeping an eye on you, trying to keep you safe."

"It's you I'm worried about," he said angrily. "You shouldn't be anywhere near here. And certainly not with her."

"Who? Jenny?"

"Yes, Jenny. She's murdered three people: two priests and Uncle Tony. Are you out of your mind?"

"Listen to me, my love, you have to stop thinking of me as a helpless female." She shook out a cigarette, lit it, regarded him through the veil of aromatic smoke. "I wouldn't be here if I wasn't more than capable of taking care of myself." She blew out a spiral of smoke. "As for Jenny, you know what Sun Tzu wrote: 'Keep your friends close, your enemies closer.'" She looked at Jenny, smiled reassuringly into her face, before turning back.

"Sun Tzu had something else to say about the art of war," Bravo said. "Every battle is lost or won before it begins."

"Meaning?"

"If you don't know, you surely don't belong here."

"Ah, Bravo," she chuckled, "always testing me."

A breeze rose up from the coolness of the water, stirring her hair against her cheek. Music, trafficking in high spirits and a lover's touch, insinuated itself onto the terrace, reminding them how far removed they were from the rest of the world.

"I was prepared for this the moment I left Paris." She eyed him speculatively. "You think not?"

"I think it's damn odd you being here."

"Do you suspect me now? Of what?" She dropped her cigarette, ground it beneath her heel. "Dammit, Bravo, if I didn't love you so much I'd slap you. You're like a son to me. I mean to protect you, something Jenny only pretended to do."

Bravo rubbed the side of his head. He was exhausted, both physically and emotionally. His head pounded with a million different strands, possible paths he might take, he ought to take. The specters of what lay at the end of those paths haunted him day and night.

"Listen, we're friends now, Jenny and I," Camille said in a softer tone. "We're close, and getting closer. I know how to gain her trust, woman to woman. She tells me things."

"No doubt. Like she's innocent."

"Of course, but who's listening?"

"She's guilty as sin-and she's dangerous."

"I allow her to think I believe her, she lets down her guard. Perhaps tomorrow I'll know part of her plan."

"She'll never tell you what she's planning, Camille. She knows how close we are."

"She's been cut off from all her traditional sources, so she's slowly coming to rely on my advice. Why shouldn't she? I'll stay with her, I'll be your mole in the enemy camp." She put a hand on his arm, squeezed. "Let me do this for you, Bravo." She smiled and kissed his cheek. "Alors, don't worry so. She won't hurt me."

"She isn't the only one you have look out for," he said, lowering his voice. "That man Jordan hired, Michael Berio-his real name is Damon Cornadoro. He's a professional assassin."

"Mon dieu, non!" What a delicious thrill ran through her when she lied to him now; it was almost as deep a charge as lying to Dexter had been. "Are you sure?"

"Absolutely. He's been sent by enemies of my father to shadow me until I find what my father sent me to find. Then he means to kill me and take it."

"But what is it, my love? What could be so terribly valuable?"

"It doesn't matter. What matters is that you keep as far away from Cornadoro as you possibly can."

"I promise."

"Camille, for the love of God don't be flip. I have enough on my mind. I don't want to worry about you."

"Then don't," she said firmly. "I told you. I can take care of myself." She laughed softly, put her hand against his cheek. "I assure you, I will not become your damsel in distress."

He stared into her eyes and knew that she had made her decision; nothing he could say would sway her. He nodded, acquiescing, and pulled out his cell phone. "Then promise me you'll stay in touch, all right?"

She took out her own cell phone, nodded. "I promise." As he was about to turn away, she said with great concern in her voice, "Bravo, have you any idea yet where you're going next?"

"No," he lied. He didn't care what she said, he wasn't going to allow her to put herself any further in harm's way.

Midnight. Irema was home, safely tucked in bed, lips and breasts nicely bruised, drugged on sex and love, dreaming deeply of Michael. But Irema's father was far from home, far from the bed warmed by the lush body of his wife. Instead, he passed through the streets of Trabzon like a wraith. Music, reaching his cocked ears, failed to move him, drunken couples staggered by without seeing him. A solitary bicyclist crossed his path like a black cat. Smoking fiercely, he strode past two churches that had long ago been turned into mosques. Their magnificent Byzantine facades were dark as soot, faded now, as was almost everything in Trabzon. Cracks and crumbles showed everywhere. If he listened hard enough he could hear the buildings groan like the crippled veterans of long-ago wars.

His cell phone buzzed and he answered it. Adem Khalif's voice appeared in his ear like a djinn, talking of a plan to trap Damon Cornadoro. He was impressed by Braverman Shaw's plan, which, viewed objectively, had a certain merit. His mind spinning in several directions at once, he listened to the end, then agreed. "What route are you planning to use? All right, my people will be deployed before dawn."

He disconnected, called his eldest son and told him what was required. Then, because he was approaching his destination, he put away his cell phone.

Midway down a small, disordered side street stood an old but structurally sound building he had purchased many years ago. It looked no different than its slope-shouldered neighbors; it bore no sign on its peeling front, was surely mistaken by almost everyone for a private residence. Inside, however, it housed the Church of the Nine Martyred Children.

Kartli had named this tiny outpost of his Georgian Orthodox religion for the young pagan children of Kola who, of their own free will, had embraced Jesus Christ. They were baptized by the local priest and left their families to be brought up by Christian families, according to the ways of the Savior. Their parents came after them and dragged them back home, but when their children would not eat pagan food or drink pagan drink, when they instead spoke the words of Jesus Christ, their parents were so enraged that they mercilessly beat the village priest, drove him from Kola. One last time they asked their sons and daughters, many not more than seven years of age, to return to their pagan ways. When the children refused, the parents took up stones and beat their own children to death, as a lesson to the other children of Kola.

Mikhail Kartli paused to take in the holy surroundings. He was immensely proud of this church, glad of the name he had chosen for it, because it was a reminder of how the world really worked, of the terrible prejudices that ran like poison through the bedrock of mankind. Not that he needed such a reminder even here in Trabzon so far from home, but everyone else-including his children, especially wild Irema-did.

Nothing looked as it did in daylight. Shadows distorted all the shapes. Illumination came from two sources: a Byzantine oil lamp and a naked lightbulb. Like everything in the city the light was an uncomfortable juxtaposition of old and new-elements that should have been allies seemed to be enemies. The interior was sparsely furnished, appropriately bare save for the large portrait of the Virgin Mary, the iconostasis, the pulpit, a scattering of scarred wooden benches and, of course, the confessional. It was to this dark wooden structure that Mikhail Kartli came twice a week like clockwork to give his confession. Since the priests of the Church of the Nine Martyred Children were housed by Kartli at his expense, they were only too happy to oblige his habit, especially since the habit so eloquently expressed his devoutness.

At seven minutes after midnight, he opened the door to the confessional, settled himself on the narrow seat.s Through the latticework of the carved wooden screen the profile of the priest was visible. He recognized Father Shota, one of his favorites. This pleased him. He and Father Shota had spent many hours talking of the history of their religion.

The Apostle Andrew, the brother of St. Peter, had come to Georgia to preach the Gospel, bringing with him the Holy Mother's Uncreated Icon-not created by the hand of man, an icon of divine origins. From that time forward, Mary became Georgia's protector. Over the intervening centuries the Georgian Orthodox religion had been heavily influenced by the Christians of the Byzantine Empire, so it was fitting to Mikhail Kartli, an ardent student of history, that he had brought the religion back home, completing the circle, the end returned to the beginning.

"Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned," he began.

And Father Shota replied, "Behold, my child, Christ stands here invisibly receiving your confession. Do not be ashamed and do not fear, and do not withhold anything from me; but without doubt tell all you have done and receive forgiveness from the Lord Jesus Christ. Lo, His holy image is before us-"

Without warning, the latticework screen shattered inward. Kartli, struck in the face by shards of wood, raised his arms defensively, and so received the priest into his hands as the man crashed through the aperture.

"Father Shota!" he cried.

Eyelids fluttering spastically, the priest tried to answer, but pink bubbles foamed in his open mouth. Kartli felt the slow creep of blood, warm and viscid, smelled the nauseating sweet-coppery odor. Cradling the priest's head and shoulders, searching desperately for the strength of vital signs, he was unprepared as the door to his side of the confessional flew open.

With barely a chance to turn his head, Kartli had a momentary impression, blurred and imprecise, of a grinning face. With a swift and vicious thrust, his maimed right hand was pinned to the back of the confessional by a spike impaled through the center of his palm. Oblivious to the pain, he tried to use his left hand to strike out at his attacker, but burdened with Father Shota's weight, he was essentially helpless.

Damon Cornadoro produced his push-dagger and grabbed a fistful of Father Shota's hair.

"No!" Kartli cried. "For the love of God, spare him!"

"Spare him? Why? He was the one who betrayed you. He told me where you'd be tonight." With the sickening precision of a surgeon Cornadoro slashed the edge of the push-dagger across the priest's throat. Putting his knee into the small of the corpse's back, he used Shota to pin the Georgian firmly in place. The priest's head lolled at an unnatural angle, his expression was one of terrified astonishment.

"How easily lies come to you, Georgian." Cornadoro leaned in. "Did you think I wouldn't find out?"

Kartli stared at him, stony, utterly silent. The initial shock was over: the barbarism could not affect him-he'd seen worse in his day-but the loss, he knew, would stay with him a long time.

"Don't you want to know how I found out?"

Kartli spat into the hateful face. He knew how to handle death-lovers, God knew he'd had enough experience. Show them fear and they lapped it up like cream. Cornadoro's mouth twitched in a parody of a smile.

There was something distinctly unsavory about the grin; with a repellent shock Kartli recognized the taint of lechery.

"It was Irema. Yes, yes. Your lovely daughter, your jewel." Cornadoro's head was inches from Kartli's face; his intimate tone brought home as nothing else could the stark horror of his words. "Her small breasts high on her chest, the dark nipples…"

Kartli convulsed, struggling against the pressure exerted against him. "You lying piece of filth!"

"The oval birthmark just over her left hipbone-like a tattoo, better even-very sexy, if you think like I do."

Kartli erupted, his eyes standing out, his face flushed with blood. "I'll kill you!"

"And the best part, Georgian, is how she fucks."

Cornadoro did everything but lick his chops. Dizzied, Kartli could feel the other's lust, the unequivocal affirmation, the lethal power of his words.

"Like an animal, wrapping her legs around me, begging for it over and over again. I swear she could drain a warhorse."

Kartli shouted as his ancient ancestors had surely shouted on the bloody fields of battle. With his left hand, he grabbed the end of the spike protruding from his palm and wrenched it free. Blood spurted, but he was beyond caring, beyond feeling anything. An animal himself, he was taken by blind rage. Somewhere in the back of his mind a voice of warning, of prudence sounded like an echo from another age, but it was quickly drowned out by the martial drumbeat of his blood.

"That's right," Cornadoro half sang in counterpoint to the threat of the spike. "That's right, come on."

The point of the spike pierced the muscle of Cornadoro's shoulder. The Georgian was powerful, stronger than Cornadoro had expected. Kartli tried to twist the spike, to sink it deeper, to open the meat of Cornadoro's shoulder. Cornadoro struck the Georgian's ear so hard his head bounced. Even in the strongest of constitutions such a concussive blow stopped thought and action in its tracks. Cornadoro tried to rip the spike away while Kartli's eyes showed white and he fought to stay conscious.

Running on instinct, on the need for survival, the Georgian lifted his knee from between the corpse's legs, buried it in Cornadoro's groin.

The Georgian drove the spike downward. Taking the brunt of it on his biceps, Cornadoro chopped down with the heavy, callused edge of his hand against the side of Kartli's neck, into the carotid artery. He applied pressure that ran all the way up from his feet, wrenching away the spike, reversing it, driving it into the Georgian's chest just beneath the breastbone. Kartli's eyes opened wide. He did not utter a sound, though Cornadoro knew he must have been in excruciating pain. His will to live was, even in Cornadoro's experience, extraordinary. A last gift was in order, a lifting of a mystery.

"I know what you're thinking, Georgian," Cornadoro said. "But it isn't religion or politics or nationalism that drives me."

"You're nothing, less than nothing because you have no belief, no faith, no soul." Mikhail Kartli's voice was a hoarse whisper. "With you it's all about commerce."

Cornadoro laughed, suddenly delighted. "On the contrary, as I told you when we first met, it's about the information. Secrets, the unknowable made known; everyone becomes vulnerable."

Kartli's fingers squeezed Cornadoro's neck, the last, desperate struggle, the terminal fight for survival, and with an almost superhuman effort he nearly managed to drive Cornadoro into unconsciousness. But the pressure on his carotid had weakened him past a vital threshold, cutting off blood and oxygen to his brain long enough to impair his coordination and reaction time. With a grunt, Cornadoro reasserted control, a control that, for Mikhail Kartli, would never cease.

"I have made you vulnerable, Georgian." Cornadoro clamped one hand at the nape of the other's neck. "I have defiled your daughter. You were dead two hours ago."

With his usual surgeon's precision, he swiped the push-dagger in a shallow arc that opened the Georgian's throat. Cornadoro studied Kartli's face as if he could in some way absorb the spark of life as it went out of the eyes. Then he wiped the push-dagger on Kartli's trousers and turned away. By the time he removed himself from the confessional, he had already forgotten both his victims.

Chapter 28

As the pope breathed shallowly in his holy sickbed, as Cardinal Canesi paced the Vatican hospital corridor, continued to burn up the cell airwaves with threats and false promises to every Turkish priest he could track down, Bravo and Adem Khalif set out for the Sumela Monastery. Dawn, once a promising broken-shell pink on the eastern horizon, had been swallowed whole by Black Sea clouds, hanging like a dank curtain, obscuring the mountaintops. The air was as heavy as grease, stirred fitfully by a reluctant breeze. The sea, as they ascended, looked less and less real, appeared creased, solid, like a sheet of aluminum foil.

Once, they would have risen toward the Zigana Pass on the backs of sure-footed horses or stout donkeys laden with goods bound for the interior of Anatolia or, if they were enterprising enough, beyond, following the long and treacherous camel route all the way to Tabriz, in northern Persia. In their case, Khalif's rattletrap car would have to do, spewing sulphur-dioxide particulates every time he changed gears. The car was full: in the backseat, the Glimmer Twins, heavily armed, consulted their cell phones as if they were the Delphic Oracle. The phones, wirelessly connected by satellite to the Global Positioning System, gave them a god's-eye view of the trip. They were in contact with their brethren, Kartli's people, deployed in strategic positions, monitoring the traffic along the car's route through high-powered field glasses.

Bravo's cell phone gave a stuttering burr, but when he answered it, the signal was gone, with no record of who had called. He thought, then, of Emma, dutifully cross-referencing the London intel Dexter had assigned to her. He found he very much wanted to talk with her, as if hearing her voice would restore a semblance of the equilibrium he had lost with each betrayal, each death.

He held the slip of paper his father had interred beneath the tile of oltu tasi at the Zigana Mosque, along with his father's notebook. The cipher was a long one, a veritable bitch, and Bravo was having great difficulty decrypting it. Part of the problem was that the cipher seemed as if it was incomplete, but he knew that couldn't be.

Beside him, Khalif kept up a steady stream of stories from the Order's past, mostly about Fra Leoni. "Fra Leoni was both a genius and a saint, and here is why. Have you heard of Leon Alberti?"

Bravo glanced at him briefly. "Of course. He was the father of the Vigene`re cipher, the greatest cryptologic breakthrough in more than a thousand years. He was also a philosopher, painter, composer, poet and architect. He designed Rome's first Trevi Fountain, and it was his book, the first ever published on architecture, that sparked the transition from the Gothic to the Renaissance style."

"And who do you suppose ensured that his book was published?" Khalif said.

"I have no idea." Part of his mind was still working on the perplexing cipher.

"His good friend and confidant, the man from whom he learned the philosophy of cryptography on which the Vigene`re cipher is based. Fra Leoni."

His interest sparked. "So Fra Leoni was the cipher's godfather."

"Exactly so." Khalif nodded. "Shortly after taking over as Magister Regens, Fra Leoni discovered that a number of the Order's secret ciphers had been intercepted and decoded by the Knights. He knew it was essential that he invent an unbreakable cipher system, and he had the basis of an idea. Instead of a substitution cipher, he wanted to work on the notion of using two cipher alphabets simultaneously-the first letter of the message would be encoded using the first alphabet, the second letter encoded with the second alphabet, the third letter encoded with the first, and so on. He reasoned, quite rightly, that employing two alphabets instead of the traditional one would thoroughly confuse anyone attempting to break the cipher. To this end he recruited Alberti to aid him in his quest.

"This was around 1425, but Alberti died before he had completed his task of a fully formed method of encryption. Over the years, Fra Leoni turned to others in the Order: a German abbot, an Italian scientist and, finally, a French diplomat, Blaise de Vigene`re, who Fra Leoni contrived to have assigned to Rome. This was in 1529. Fra Leoni showed him Alberti's original treatise, along with the notations of the other members of the Order. It took Vigene`re and Fra Leoni another ten years before the cipher was engineered to perfection."

"And for the next two hundred years or more it was unbreakable, so it must have served the Order well," Bravo said. "The British cryptographer Charles Babbage broke the Vigene`re cipher in 1854."

"Ah, but his discovery was never published in his lifetime." Khalif rumbled off the road briefly to bypass a herd of goats, who looked at them with slitted demon's eyes. "It wasn't until the 1970s that-"

"Wait a minute," Bravo said, "you're not telling me that the Order had something to do with the suppression of Babbage's breakthrough."

"Charles Babbage was a member of the Order."

"What? Explain this to me."

"Under no circumstances." In a death-defying maneuver, Khalif pulled out into the oncoming traffic lane to surge past a truck whose diesel engine seemed on the verge of issuing a death rattle. "In this I must be your father's advocate. You have enough information to work out the solution for yourself."

The rearview mirror revealed that the Glimmer Twins were knee-deep in their own excited conversations. It was going well, then. Bravo tried not to be inordinately pleased, but he couldn't help himself. At last things were turning his way. Except for this damnable cipher his father had left him, whose key still eluded him.

Redirecting his thoughts to the problem Khalif had proposed, he said, "If I were Fra Leoni and had spent so much time and mental energy on creating this polyalphabetic cipher, if I was going to depend on it for the Order's secret communication, I'd want to make damn sure it couldn't be broken."

"How would you do that?"

"I'd use the same method I'd used to create it-put a team together to work on breaking it."

The twinkle in Adem Khalif's eye heartened Bravo; he was on the right track.

"And once they had broken it?"

"I'd make damn sure no one knew about it until I could come up with another, even more secure cipher. Which the Order must have accomplished in 1970."

"Quite right."

Bravo shook his head in awe. "And shortly thereafter, Babbage's discovery was made public."

"That was your father's doing." Khalif gave him a brief glance. "You know it was your father who invented the new cipher-the Angel String. Fra Leoni having died some decades before, it was your father who took up his torch. It seemed to me that he had an almost mystical bond with Fra Leoni." He shrugged. "Perhaps-I don't know this for a fact, you understand-your father managed to meet Fra Leoni. Don't give me that look, it's altogether possible, you know. When your father put his mind to something, he almost always succeeded."

The Angel String was his father's creation-he should have known that because his father had talked to him about how the Vigene`re code was broken: a method was devised to determine the length of the keyword. The cipher was then broken down into sections corresponding to that number of letters. These manageable chunks were then analyzed for letter frequency. The whole idea of the next-level cipher, his father had told him, was to do away with the keyword. But then the encoder would be mired in a jungle of multiple alphabets without a place to start his encryption.

Then something clicked in his mind. Drawing out the lighter his father had left him, he opened it, slid out the photo of Junior. Odd that his father had chosen a black and white shot that had been hand-colored: red, blue, green… In fact, now that he looked at it closely, Junior's face was yellow, not flesh-colored.

Turning to a blank page of his father's notebook, he jotted down the colors of the visible spectrum. It started with red and ended with purple. Assigning a number to each color brought him to 1543. So he was to use the first, fifth, fourth and third alphabets in that order. Referring back to the Vigene`re grid he had used before, he began his decrypting.

Behind him, the conversation of the Glimmer Twins became more intense. He ignored it for as long as he could, until their excited chatter filled the interior of the car. By that time, he was halfway through turning the cipher into plaintext and was already deeply troubled by what he'd read.

Tearing himself away from his work, he turned halfway around in his seat.

"A sighting?" he said.

"Here's where we are," one of them, whose name was Bebur said, pointing to a screen glowing like a fusion reactor.

"And here's Damon Cornadoro," Djura, the other, said. Beneath the bandages, his nose was dark and swollen where Bravo had struck him in the Zigana Mosque. "His truck is a half kilometer behind us."

"Excellent. The plan is working."

"Not exactly," Bebur said. "Mikhail gave orders to shoot him on sight. Somehow, he managed to completely elude the ambush. He's still behind us."

"What did he say?"

"I told you last night," Camille said as she drove the rented car through heavy traffic.

"I've been thinking about it, all night, as it happens," Jenny said. "I don't believe you."

Camille glanced carefully at her, trying to gauge the anger that had been building inside her. The idea was to turn it against Bravo, not to let it bleed onto herself.

"Why on earth would I lie to you?" Camille hit the horn as she maneuvered around two ancient autos, whose drivers were screaming at one another.

"You said it yourself. Bravo is like a son to you. You'd sacrifice me to protect him." Jenny turned to Camille. "What you don't seem to get is that I want to protect him, too."

"Even after what he's done to you? Accused you of murder, of being a traitor. Even after he's threatened to kill you himself?"

"I love him, Camille."

"He's given up on you," Camille said. "He said as much last night."

"It doesn't matter."

Camille shook her head. She was genuinely perplexed. "I don't understand you."

"Isn't that what love is all about? A feeling that transcends difficulties, misunderstandings, disappointments, seeming betrayals?"

For the first time in her life Camille felt stymied, at a loss for words. Her confusion stemmed from her memories of Dexter. Her anger at him, at his betrayal, had been monumental, all-consuming. Now, facing Jenny's immutable emotion, she was forced to confront the flicker of her own. She had loved Dexter, yes. She had been gripped by a fever that had threatened to turn her inside out, turn her from her avowed purpose. It had, in fact, frightened her so thoroughly that she had shut down the feeling, gritted her teeth, gotten on with the job of turning him against those he loved the most. Only it hadn't worked. She had failed, which was bad enough. But, far worse, there had come a moment when she recognized that she herself might turn against those she loved most. For him. For him.

She slammed the wheel with the heels of her hands.

"What is it?"

"Nothing," Camille said thickly. "Nothing at all."

Lies. Lies, lies and more lies. It was Dexter she had cared for, only Dexter. And Jordan? She'd had her chance to love him, but instead she had fed him bile and hatred with her milk. She had raised him for one purpose: to be her instrument for revenge on the Knights as well as on the Order. She wanted to bring them all down. Now it was too late. He had moved too far from her, as far as the dead moon was from the earth. When it came to Jordan, she could feel nothing at all.

"I don't believe you." Jenny's eyes searched Camille's face. Again, the murmur of Arcangela's voice resounded in her mind, the echos of courage, vigilance, daring, perseverance. These were, she realized now, the same qualities that Paolo Zorzi had sought to pound into her with every blow he had struck at her. All at once, she felt renewed strength flow into her from a source she never before had known existed inside her. She saw Ronnie Kavanaugh, and Dexter, too, in their rightful places. They, along with Paolo Zorzi and, of course, her father, had been part of her rite of passage, elements of the crucible in which the person she was now had been forged-in pain and misery, both of which had only made her stronger in the end. She knew that now, with a certainty that pierced her through and through.

"What aren't you telling me?"

Camille, alert as a hunting dog, glanced at Jenny. Another thunderbolt came at her. Something had happened while she hadn't been looking. Jenny was no longer the lost, vulnerable, betrayed woman she had seemed just a short time ago. Camille felt the danger prickling along her arms. The silken hairs stirred at the back of her neck. Jenny would no longer simply accept her lies. She would have to do something that went entirely against her grain: she would have to tell her the truth.

"I envy how you feel about Bravo," she said, fighting a certain nausea. Telling the truth always turned her stomach. "Because I can't feel any of that. I'm dead inside, Jenny. Dead."

"Camille, what are you saying? I know you love Bravo-and you must feel the same about your son."

Camille stared hard at the traffic snaking up the steepening hill. She felt lost, and alone. What of it? She had her purpose-her decades-old plan-to snuggle up to. Vengeance was a warm and cozy curl-up. Best of all, vengeance couldn't betray you.

"Listen, what Bravo and I spoke about last night-I offered to be his mole with you, to report to him about you."

"You didn't defend me, you didn't tell him the truth?"

"He wasn't in any mood to listen, trust me."

"But why play into his horrific delusion?"

"It was the only way I could get him to tell me where he was going next."

The lie felt good on Camille's tongue, like melting butter. In fact, it was Cornadoro she was following, but, of course, she had no intention of telling Jenny that. Telling the truth in the service of her vice she could tolerate. Other than that, never. Never again.

Like a remora stuck to their side, Damon Cornadoro wasn't going away, Bravo reasoned, until or unless they put him away. This strain of logic had a certain unmistakable appeal. "There's no point in trying to outrun him or hide from him. I've tried that, and it's worked against me," he had told Khalif last night.

When Khalif had suggested a decoy car, Bravo had shaken his head. "We're following the wrong train of logic. What we need to do is to make his extraordinary expertise work for us."

So he had proposed his plan and Khalif had relayed it to Mikhail Kartli, who had approved it. Or so Bravo and Khalif had believed. Apparently, Kartli had had his own ideas. His people had tried to gain their revenge on Cornadoro prematurely by ambushing him and had failed. Worse, Cornadoro now knew they were on to him. Going after him now would be like putting their heads into a wasp's nest.

If that weren't enough, the Glimmer Twins in the backseat were restless, their mounting anxiety palpable.

"It's essential that we keep to the original plan." Ostensibly, Bravo was speaking to Khalif, but everyone in the car knew he was addressing the Glimmer Twins. "We've worked out how to take him at the mosque, and that's what we must do."

"We have a better idea," said the Glimmer Twins in almost perfect unison.

Djura opened a long canvas bag that lay across their feet and took out a pair of McMillan Tac-50 rifles, each equipped with a Leupold 16x sniper's scope. The rifles used huge 12.7-millimeter ammo that, even with a near miss, would tear a human being apart. With a sickening jolt Bravo thought of Mikhail Kartli's order to have Jenny shot to death in the bazaar.

"Let us off a hundred meters ahead," they said, their intent perfectly clear.

"Your people failed at that once, what makes you think-"

Before Bravo could continue, his phone pulsed against his hip.

"Emma."

"Thank God I got through." She sounded breathless and not a little frightened.

"What is it?"

"You were right to have me keep on with the assignment Dad gave me. Vetting the London intel wasn't make-work."

She swallowed so hard Bravo could hear her.

"It turns out he wanted me to help him with ferreting out the traitor, after all."

"Hold on." He told Khalif to pull over. "Don't let them do anything stupid," he added as he got out of the car. With some trepidation, he walked a little away, put his back to them. He watched the ghostly creep of the sun behind a bank of misty cloud. "All right, go on."

"I assume you know that for the last several years Uncle Tony had been working out of London."

"Of course," he snapped. "Emma, what did you find?"

"Everything seemed okay, until I got to Uncle Tony's weekly intel report-the most boring, routine stuff."

"The ones no one would look at twice."

"Right. Except Dad." The sound of her breathing was communicated along the signal. She was so distant, and yet she sounded as if she was in the car with Khalif and the Glimmer Twins, every tiny sound revealed to him, sharp and painful as a nail being driven home. "It seems as if there's a cipher hidden inside the coded weekly intel digest Uncle Tony was sending to Washington. It's not one of ours, of that I'm certain. I think Dad had found it and was in the process of deciphering it when he was killed."

Bravo, the breath knocked out of him, staggered a couple of steps before he leaned against a poplar tree. Once again, he heard the terrible sound of the ice cracking, felt in his soul the pain of another loss. Uncle Tony was the traitor. Someone so close to him that Dexter's world must have been turned upside down when he unearthed the identity. Just as Bravo's now was. Like his father before him, his reality had been upended, his sense of good and evil tested. The love Uncle Tony had shown him, the games they had played, the advice he had offered-all lines an actor speaks on stage. He had wormed his way into Bravo's heart, used him as cover to plant himself deeper and deeper in the Order's core. It was impossible to believe, and yet he had to believe it because it was true.

And then he was hit between the eyes with another truth.

"Bravo?" Emma said in his ear. "Are you still there?"

He put a hand to his forehead. He felt as if he was about to lose his mind. "Emma, I was so sure that Paolo Zorzi and Jenny were the traitors." He had mistreated Jenny, accused her, cut her off, threatened her. He had refused to listen to her side of things, he hadn't recognized the truth when she had offered it to him. The bitter taste of self-loathing was in his mouth. "How could I have been so wrong? Jenny's innocent."

"Zorzi could still be guilty."

"I don't think so. It was Uncle Tony who built the case against Jenny. He deliberately misled me. He wanted me to believe Jenny was the traitor in order to keep himself from being found out." The specter of the blood-spattered scene in the Church of San Georgio dei Greci rose up in his mind. "Oh, Christ, now I understand everything. When Uncle Tony shot Zorzi, Jenny must have realized that Uncle Tony was the traitor."

He saw Jenny again as she had been on the restaurant terrace in Trabzon, the elegant sweep of her neck exposed, cooled by moonlight to the color of alabaster. He recalled with a guilty ache how he had deliberately snubbed her in order to warn Camille about her and Damon Cornadoro. Most of all, his own shameful threat echoed in the theater of his mind: "If you try to follow me, if I see you again, I'll kill you."

"Of course she shot Uncle Tony," he said now. "Knowing he was the traitor, seeing him shoot my mentor to death, I would have done the same thing." But what about Father Mosto and Father Damaskinos? he asked himself. Did she kill them or had she been set up ?

"Dad found out Uncle Tony was the traitor, that was the breakthrough he talked about." Emma was working it out as she spoke. "All he was lacking was rock-solid proof, which is where I came in."

"Tony's plan was brilliant, don't you agree? No need for dead-drops or unexplained trips, no deviation whatsoever in his normal patterns." He thought for a moment. "Have you discovered where the cipher was going when it was pulled off the electronic transmissions?"

"I would have to have copies of the real-time transmissions," Emma said. "All I was able to do, after tons of sifting too tedious to go into, was compare the transmissions at the point of origin and the point of destination. That's how I came up with the discrepancy."

"Can you send the cipher to my cell phone?"

"That I can do."

"Along with the frequency Uncle Tony used to send the transmissions."

"They varied week to week, but I can send you a list."

"Good," Bravo said. "Do it now."

"You have an idea, don't you?"

Khalif got out of the car, an anxious look on his face. He was gesturing back toward the car, the Glimmer Twins were no doubt itching to fire their Tac-50s.

"I think I do."

"You keep sounding more and more like Dad."

Why did everyone tell him that? "Emma, I have to go."

"Wait, Bravo-there's something else I found out, something you should know. Dad was involved with Jenny."

Bravo closed his eyes. He didn't want to hear confirmation of Father Mosto's suspicions, and yet he heard himself say, "Involved how?"

"I… I don't really know. But it's a fact that he rented an apartment for her in London."

"How long did he keep her?"

"Bravo, please calm down. There's no hard evidence he had an affair with her."

Bravo pressed his thumb and forefinger into his eyelids to try to stop the vicious headache that had erupted behind his eyes. "How long, Emma?"

"Eleven months."

"Jesus. He was keeping her."

Silence. So he issued the challenge: "Give me another explanation, Emma."

More silence. Khalif had begun walking toward him.

"I really do have to go."

"I know. Stay safe, Bravo."

"You too."

"Keep me posted." Her laugh had a stinging ironic edge. "I don't like being in the dark."

"Neither do I." Were those tears in his eyes? "Thanks for the due diligence, from me and from Dad."

Bravo, walking back to the car, met Adem Khalif halfway. "You told me that my father liked to have his ear to the ground, that you were his eyes and ears in the Middle East." Consulting the text message that had appeared on the screen of his cell phone, he showed Khalif the list of numbers. "Did you monitor and record traffic on any of these frequencies?"

Khalif squinted into the small screen. "There are too many here. We'd have to go to my office to check."

"Despite what those two are thinking," Bravo said with absolute assuredness, "we have to go there now."

"Bravo, I have to repeat what you've already said: it's not a good idea to deviate from the original plan."

"Too late for that," Bravo said grimly. "Your friend Kartli already blew the plan to kingdom come."

Khalif's office was two-thirds up the steep Trapezuntine hillside, an apartment in a modern high-rise, one of five identical balconied towers, white proletarian milk cartons, known as Sinope A Blok. A winding drive led up to the main entrance. On either side of the black asphalt, sheared cypresses were ranked like saluting Soviet militiamen. Pink Colchian crocuses, thinly planted as if in afterthought or in grudging protest, waved in wan greeting. While Bravo and Khalif sat uncomfortably in the ticking car, the Glimmer Twins reconnoitered the property, moving in and out of the scimitar shadows of the rustling trees. Of particular interest to them were the maintenance men high up on movable scaffolding, sandblasting the side of the building.

"I don't know how anyone lives here," Khalif commented, "the construction is Soviet style, so poor they're always having to replace sections of the facades or reface entire lines of terraces."

He shook out a cigarette, lit up. Snorting smoke, he said, "Don't worry about those two, you can trust them with your life."

"Even the one with the broken nose?"

"You're thinking like an American." Khalif picked a fleck of tobacco off the tip of his tongue. "You surprised Djura. Before you attacked him, he was certain you were a coward. The pain means nothing to him, but your decisiveness does."

Bebur appeared, a cell phone clutched in one hand, a Mauser in the other. He was ashen faced.

"You've found someone?" Khalif asked. "What's happened?"

"It's Mikhail," Bebur said in an eerie monotone. "He's been killed, murdered late last night in our church, along with one of the priests." His expression was fixed and concentrated, his back ramrod straight, his stance wide, his limbs slightly flexed, his hands open and at the ready. In short, he was a soldier who'd received a field promotion. "His wife awoke to discover he hadn't come home last night. That in itself was not alarming, but when he failed to appear at the shop, failed to answer his cell, his sons called around and went to the church. Understandably, they are in a frenzy."

Bravo got out of the car. "Who did it?" Standing, facing Bebur, he looked at him as if for the first time, soldier to soldier. "Who killed Kartli?"

"Damon Comadoro."

Khalif tossed his cigarette out the window, slid out from behind the wheel to stand beside Bravo. "You know this for a fact?" he said.

Bebur nodded. "Both of them were finished with a push-dagger. Cornadoro's signature." He turned as Djura trotted up.

"All clear," Djura said. "So far."

Bravo started. "Did you say a push-dagger?"

Bebur nodded. "Yes, you can tell-"

"I know, the push-dagger is made for stabbing, so its slash wound is unique." Kartli had told him when he'd relayed the news of Father Damaskinos's murder. "His throat was slashed in a very particular manner," Kartli had said. "It was made with a push-dagger. I know someone who kills in this manner; he's a Knight of St. Clement assassin."

The last piece of the maddening puzzle fell into place. "Damon Cornadoro," Bravo said.

The three of them were staring intently at him.

"What?" Khalif said.

"It wasn't Jenny who killed Father Damaskinos in Venice, it was Cornadoro." Now he had his proof, she'd been telling the truth all along. He recalled her stricken expression when he'd told her that Father Damaskinos was dead. He'd been so angry he'd automatically assumed she'd been playing a part. Now he knew her reaction had been genuine. Logic led him back to Father Mosto. Jenny had claimed that she'd been framed for his murder. Cornadoro was more than capable of such a scheme, and he'd been in Venice at the time of Father Mosto's demise.

Bebur said now, "Mikhail's sons demand immediate revenge."

"They wanted us back at the shop for instructions." Djura looked Bravo in the eye. "Now we will do what we have to do, with no interference from you."

"Cornadoro is smart, very smart, you know this," Bravo said. "Killing him was never going to be easy, but now that he knows our intent, you'd be fools to confront him directly."

Djura lunged at Bravo, his hands up and grasping, but Bebur stepped in front of him.

Khalif threw up his hands. "Are we to be enemies now for real?" he cried.

"We are not enemies." Pushing back against Djura, Bebur eyed them. "But don't mistake our loyalties. We will not follow your orders."

"Even if they make sense?"

"We will not wait for the mosque." Djura pointed to the terraced high-rise. "Up there we'll have the perfect vantage point."

Khalif nodded, and Bravo knew better than to protest. The decision had been made; for good or ill, the die had been cast.

Watching them retrieve their rifles from the backseat of his car, Khalif spat onto the concrete. "Don't underestimate them."

"I don't like it, it's an emotional decision."

"No, my friend, it's a business decision," Khalif said. "In killing Mikhail, Cornadoro crossed an unforgivable boundary. The sons have no choice. To protect themselves and their interests, their revenge must be swift and merciless. Otherwise, scenting weakness, the vultures will follow and eventually the sons will lose everything Mikhail worked so hard to build."

Up on the eleventh floor, Bebur insisted on unlocking the front door. Djura brushed by Bravo with no hint of animosity or grudge; his hostile reaction had been purely of the moment. Once they had assured themselves that the apartment was secure, they allowed Khalif and Bravo in. Bravo watched as they stepped gingerly out onto the terrace, which overlooked the front drive and, far below, the blue expanse of the sea. Despite their bravado, their continuing sense of responsibility toward his safety was touching.

After conferring among themselves, Djura came back in, heading out the apartment's front door, presumably to cover the building's rear service entrance, while Bebur hunkered down, peering through his rifle's sniper-scope in anticipation of seeing Cornadoro's truck.

Bravo called out and, as Djura turned, he crossed the living room.

"I appreciate everything you've done." He held out a hand. "I'm glad you have my back."

Djura looked him straight in the eye and without changing his expression one iota took Bravo's forearm in his heavy grip. Bravo did the same. Saluting like ancient Romans on the soon to be blood-soaked battleground of Erzurum or Tabriz.

Khalif led Bravo into the kitchen.

"Fancy a beer?" he said, hand on the refrigerator door handle.

"You've got to be kidding."

Khalif laughed. Depressing a hidden lever, he pulled on the door and the entire refrigerator swung open, revealing a hidden suite of rooms. As they stepped through, Bravo saw that the refrigerator was hinged on two sets of concealed gimbals.

Khalif's workspace was cold as the interior of the refrigerator through which they had come. It was sealed, HEPA-filtered, entirely self-contained. Heavy blackout drapes hid the windows so completely that not even a crack of daylight seeped through. Banks of electronic equipment, much of it incomprehensible to Bravo, lined two entire walls from floor to ceiling. It was like a twenty-first-century library: devoid of books, for that matter of any printed material, overflowing nonetheless with information that kept arriving invisibly, as magically as the water-filled buckets of the sorcerer's apprentice.

Khalif seated himself at the center of this metropolis of intelligence. Bravo, beside him, read off the list of frequencies Emma had sent. As it happened, Khalif had electronic copies of them all. Hardly surprising, given what Bravo had recently learned about his father's methodology in tracking down the identity of the traitor inside the Order.

The next step was to isolate Uncle Tony's rogue cipher, the parasite deep inside the intestines of the main carrier report. There was no point now in trying to decrypt the ciphers-that would come later. What he wanted to ascertain was who had taken the encrypted message as it was en route from London to Washington.

This proved simpler than he had imagined, since Khalif quickly discovered an electronic file-composed by Dexter Shaw-of all the retrieved rogue ciphers. Clearly, Dexter had been working on decoding them. There was no record of how successful he had been, though Khalif searched the database thoroughly.

Impatient, Bravo said, "Let me take a look."

Khalif slid out of the way and Bravo, fingers dancing over the workstation keyboard, returned to the original carrier reports as they had been when they'd left Uncle Tony's London location. First, he engaged the audio spectrum-analyzer to pinpoint the moment the rogue cipher had been plucked out of the main text, but when that failed he was forced to think a bit more in depth.

Surely his father would have followed his line of reasoning. He would have used the spectrum-analyzer and any number of other electronic aids in his attempt to find the precise moment the rogue cipher was taken. And he had failed. Bravo sat back, silently contemplating the wall of gadgetry, as sophisticated as a spaceship's control panel, which winked and blinked back at him like some dumb animal. He needed to return to the beginning, to find another line of reasoning that wasn't so obvious-that had not occurred to his father. He needed to make the dumb animal moo.

There was another way, there was always another way. He sat still as a statue, immersed in furious contemplation. Forget about finding the precise moment of acquisition, that was a dead end. It occurred to him then that there was no need to stay within the Order's frequency, that was the beginning of the dead end. If he was to truly return to the beginning, he needed to listen outside the frequency.

He asked Khalif to analyze the surrounding frequencies from the beginning of Uncle Tony's report. Khalif obliged, but again the readouts showed nothing but the norm. The damn dumb animal still refused to moo.

Djura, carefully wending his way through the cinder block bowels of Sinope A Blok, loaded Tac-50 beautifully balanced in his hand, was feeling good. An unwanted weight had been lifted off his shoulders. Being shackled to the American had rankled, gotten under his skin like a burr he couldn't reach. A warrior the American might be, but he was not family, not blood; he could betray them at any moment, as all Americans were known to do when the lure of money, power, cultural hegemony beckoned to them. Their corruption was complete, from the flesh down to the soul. Their naked greed, the measureless avarice would, in the end, prove to be their undoing, of this Djura had no doubt. But until that end arrived with the suddenness of an apocalyptic thunderclap, their gluttony was a contagion-at all costs to be avoided.

That Mikhail and his sons were capitalists bothered him not at all. They made money, yes, lots of it, but, like him, they had faith, which led them to use their wealth to help their people back in Georgia, rather than keep a revolving stable of young women, rather than buy out Tiffany's or the nearest Rolls-Royce dealership.

He had seen what remorseless corruption came from the sprawl of the American lifestyle. How could he not? It was all around him, as if he swam in a sea infested with plastic bags filled with iPods of American music, DVDs of American films, cassettes of American TV shows, all in loud and joyful praise of celebrity and consumerism. Not that Djura didn't enjoy a pink Internet peek of Paris Hilton or Pamela Anderson, astonishingly exposed in various positions of sexual congress. The illicit nature of the moving images detonated like bombs on his retinas, providing a thrill he could not begin to define, let alone understand. But that was it; having taken these bites out of the rancid confection of American culture, he was certain his appetite had been sated. Unlike his brother Gigo, who had swallowed it whole and was now importing drugs and "Russian wives" from his five-bedroom triplex in the eternal golden sunshine above Miami Beach.

Gigo also had a cocaine habit as large as a Lincoln Navigator. Djura, passing the row of trash bins that stood near the rear entrance, shook himself. He hated the fact that he knew what a Lincoln Navigator was, knowledge unwanted but that nevertheless seeped into his skull. Evidence against the imagined purity of his life.

Which brought him back to Damon Cornadoro, corruptor on a grand scale. Djura would gladly take the American over Cornadoro, though probably he'd wind up shooting them both. They were infidels. Beneath the surface gloss, how much difference could there be between them?

Checking that the safety on the Tac-50 was off, he slowly pushed open the metal door into the open air. The morning was hot and sticky. Birds sang, insects whined, the hiss of traffic on its way up and down the hillside overspread his concrete bower. A car drove up, letting off a woman and a child. The woman was dressed in Western clothes, though to Djura she appeared Muslim. Her hands were filled with shopping bags. The child-a small boy-was busy licking an ice cream. The car drove off and the woman and child headed for the front entrance to Sinope A Blok. A man, dark-skinned, middle-aged, appeared, smoking a cigarette and talking on a cell phone. He strolled down to the curve of the driveway and stood in a patch of sunlight. A moment later, a car swung into view and he got in. The car pulled away, the sound of its exhaust echoing off the soundboard of the high-rise.

The heat abated a bit. A sea breeze all the way from Sevastopol, still stinking from Russian atomic submarines, tossed the tops of the sheared cypresses like the turbans of bowing imams. Speaking of imams, here came one, long beard aquiver, hurrying along the path toward him. In his wake, an ungainly woman, enveloped, as was proper, from the crown of her head to her sandaled feet in an abaya and a traditional Muslim head scarf. It would not be beyond Cornadoro to desecrate the holy state, to disguise himself as an imam, Djura thought. In fact, it would be just like him.

Squinting through the wan sunlight, Djura tried to take a closer look at the oncoming imam. But this chore was made difficult by the woman whose form obscured the imam's face, the part of him that interested Djaba.

Suspicions roused to full flower, he braced himself against the doorway, raised the Tac-50 into firing position. The imam was big-big as Cornadoro. And he had roughly the same build. This, Djura decided, was his target, but he would not fire until he was certain. Killing a Muslim imam was unthinkable, a disaster that would cause more damage to Mikhail's sons than they were prepared to handle. And so, tense and anxious, he waited with his forefinger curled intently around the trigger. In his mind, he already heard the satisfying sound, the thick, wet splat! splat! splat! of the bullets rending Cornadoro's flesh from bone. And the best part was that he wouldn't have to be close with him-unlike Mikhail, he could avoid the flat, deathly sweep of the push-dagger.

The imam was in range now. He said something sharp to the woman, who nodded in subservient fashion and dropped back several paces, her head down. Lucky for Djura, because now he had a clear look at the imam's face, and he exhaled a deep-drawn breath and his finger relaxed on the trigger. It wasn't Cornadoro, after all.

The imam's eyes barely registered Djura as he swept imperiously through the door. Djura's eyes barely registered the woman as she followed the imam, and so he missed the movement of her right hand as it appeared from beneath her voluminous ayaba, the blade of the push-dagger protruding between the second and third knuckles-knuckles larger and more callused than any female hand.

Djura became aware of the flat sweeping motion and, too late, tried to move. His arms were expertly pinioned behind him. The huge imam! At that instant the push-dagger entered his lower belly. He gave a brief cry as the ayaba-clad woman unwound her head scarf. He saw Damon Cornadoro's eyes burning into him.

"Where are they?" Cornadoro said with a twist of his wrist that caused Djura terrible pain. "Give me the information or your passage to Paradise will not be assured."

Chapter 29

Bravo, staring at the white-on-green squiggles, rubbed his temples with his fingertips. He was all too aware of time passing, time when he and Khalif should have been at the Sumela Monastery. Had he been wrong, was he going down another dead end? Was he doing what he'd accused the Glimmer Twins of doing? Was he making an emotional decision? No, he couldn't let this go. His father sat at his side, his energy pinning Bravo to his seat. There is an answer. Use what you know, Bravo, Dexter Shaw whispered inside his head.

"Play the frequencies again, both at once," he instructed Khalif. "But this time turn off all the readouts."

"What?"

"I want to listen-only listen. Do you understand?"

Khalif set the two frequencies to running simultaneously. A complex melody of beeps, hisses and squeals filled the room. At first, the cacophony sounded like a longed-for response to a SETI transmission-communication in an alien language-or the aural equivalent of the incomprehensible scrawling of an autistic child, both of which contained a message, no matter how deeply buried.

Bravo closed his eyes. If the electronic animal remained dumb, it was up to the human senses to solve the riddle of where the rogue cipher was going. The ear filtered sound and noise day in and day out. It was created to decipher the important sounds from the background wash of the world.

For him, it was only a matter of time before the layers of noise were stripped away and the melody presented itself. This was his business-or, at any rate, part of what he was good at. He could coax out the hidden with his senses-in manuscripts, in human speech, in the feel of forgeries purporting to be genuine archeological finds, in the scents of age and reason, despair and dissolution.

Now, in Khalif's postmodern bunker, having begun the process of winnowing the wheat from the chaff, he discerned the melody. And having defined it, listened to it, locking in its mathematical pattern, its sine-wave rise and fall, he heard the anomaly.

"Stop," he cried. "Stop it right there."

Opening his eyes, he had Khalif turn on all the readouts, even the ones that seemed irrelevant or spurious. And there it was: the dumb animal went "Moo."

"Why are we following Michael Berio?" Jenny said from her seat beside Camille in the small red sports car. It was a Soviet-made vehicle, and therefore wasn't a sports car at all but a Russian travesty. "Your own man."

"His real name is Damon Cornadoro. You know it, don't you?"

"My God." Jenny's face had drained of color. "The Knights' hired assassin? I've seen more than a dozen photos purporting to be him, all of different people. Christ, how could I not have known?"

"Don't blame yourself," Camille said. "He fooled me as well." Of course this wasn't true, no one fooled Camille, but from the moment she had understood the connection between Jenny and Bravo, she knew she'd have to change her plan. Isolating Bravo was no longer the object; co-opting him was. For that, she knew she'd need Jenny's help, which required her to spin a whole new web of lies.

Camille tossed her head. "You're the expert, you tell me-how dangerous is this Cornadoro?"

Jenny glanced at her nervously. "How about eleven on a scale of one to ten."

"That bad?"

"You heard the backfiring before, the squeal of tires? And then, a bit further on-"

"The accident that delayed us, yes, what about it?"

"I took a long look. That was no accident," Jenny said grimly. "So I doubt those sounds were backfires."

"What are you saying?"

"I think Kartli's men attempted to attack Cornadoro-an ambush, perhaps. I'd bet anything they were rifle shots we heard, and the squeal of tires was the target ramming the attacking cars. I've read Cornadoro's dossier-that sounds like him."

Camille considered. Trust was what she was soliciting from Jenny, and empathy was the path she had chosen to that trust. If she didn't feel it, Jenny wouldn't either.

"If, as you say, Cornadoro was the target, then it's safe to assume that Bravo was involved in the ambush," Camille said. She had had time to reason out her course of action during the bumper-to-bumper that led up to the police swarming like ants around the aggressively wrecked cars. She had craned her neck to see the blood, without any luck. "He needs to know that Cornadoro escaped and is still on his tail." She thrust her cell phone at Jenny. "Call him and tell him."

Jenny didn't move a muscle. "Me?"

"Why not?"

"You know why not. He still believes I murdered his Uncle Tony, still believes I'm working for the Knights."

"Then now's the time to show him that you're on his side." She gave Jenny a small smile. "My dear, listen, he hasn't believed a word you've told him. He told me so himself." She nodded. "Look, there's Cornadoro's truck up ahead. We haven't a moment to lose, he's already left it. Courage is what's required now. Number three."

"All right." Jenny nodded, took the cell phone. Heart hammering in her chest, she punched in the speed-dial number.

"Camille-"

The sound of his voice struck her like a physical blow. "It's Jenny, Bravo."

"Jenny, I-"

"No, don't hang up." A certain terror gripped her at the thought that she would blow this one chance to prove herself to him. "Listen, listen, I'm with Camille," she said in a rush. "We've been following Cornadoro-"

"You what?"

She winced at his shouted response but pressed on, determined. Courage. "There was an ambush, two cars were involved, I don't know how many men, though you probably do."

"It was a total screwup, Kartli's idea, not mine, but he's dead now-Cornadoro killed him just like he killed Father Mosto and Father Damaskinos."

An indrawn breath was all she could manage. Her head was swimming.

"I know Uncle Tony was the traitor."

"Bravo, Bravo!" She bent over, almost ill with relief. "But how-?"

"Jenny, I have to go. Really."

"Wait, wait! Cornadoro is coming, he's still coming."

"Where are you now?"

"At some huge high-rise housing complex."

Sinope A Blok.

"It's a number," Khalif said, staring at the readouts. "A phone number."

Bravo, his cell phone still cradled in one hand, said, "Cornadoro is here."

Khalif pointed. "Take a look at it while I go tell Bebur."

As he went through the refrigerator door, Bravo took a close look at the number. It wasn't a London number, not even an English number. There were two prefixes: a country code and a city code, and he recognized them both: Munich, Germany. A warning bell went off in his head, a deadness was growing inside him, a sick feeling, intimation of a new and monstrous reality.

Khalif returned, pulling the hidden door shut behind him. "He hasn't seen anything suspicious," Khalif said as he retook his seat. "He said he'd call Djura to warn him."

Bravo hardly heard him. "Give me the overseas code for Munich, Germany," he said, because they would be different here than in England.

He dialed the number, and when he heard the deep male voice on the other end of the line, he felt as if the floor had given way beneath him. Nightmare came rushing at him with a ghoulish grin.

It was Karl Wassersturm's voice he heard in his ear. It was to the Wassersturm brothers that Uncle Tony had been transmitting the rogue code. From his eidetic memory he unspooled part of the conversation he'd had with Camille on their way to St. Malo:

"The Wassersturms were in a rage when their deal was terminated," Camille said in his mind. "Jordan is 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."

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

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

But the thing was, what had stuck in Bravo's mind, what he hadn't been able to make sense of, was that Jordan should have known better than to do business with the Wassersturms no matter what kind of terms they offered. They were bad news-tied into illicit arms dealers and, possibly, terrorists-bad to the bone.

"Karl, it's Jordan." He spoke in German, summoned up Jordan's intonation, his French vocal quirks.

"Why are you using this line?" Wassersturm said in his gruff, no-nonsense manner. "We agreed to leave it solely to relay the… information."

Here was the reason, the connection between the Wassersturms and Jordan, revealed in all its ghastly glory.

Grimly, Bravo said, "You missed this month's, didn't you?"

"You know, like clockwork always." The anxiety in Karl Wassersturm's voice was palpable. "You get the information minutes after I pull it off the transmission, almost no delay, that's how you set things up. It isn't my fault, I swear. No transmission came through this month."

"If you're holding out on me, Karl, I swear-"

"But, no, Jordan, absolutely not. The thought never entered my mind. You told me, didn't you? It's your cipher. I don't understand it, you warned me it couldn't be broken, what good would holding out do me?"

"None at all," Bravo said in Jordan Muhlmann's sternest voice. "See you remember that, Karl. I'll be in touch."

He threw the cell phone across the room. Overwhelmed by the personal horror-the unimaginable betrayal-staring him in the face, he put his head in his hands.

Cornadoro's truck was empty when Jenny and Camille pulled up behind it. Jenny, the Witness handgun she had bought from Mikhail Kartli at the ready, got out, made a thorough search. By the time Camille joined her, she had found something interesting.

She hauled the battered metal box out of the well below the truck's front seat. "Look at this," she said, flipping open the too Inside were three layers of theatrical makeup; bits of hair in different colors for eyebrows, mustache, beard; small plastic cases containing colored contact lenses.

Camille fingering the selection of prosthetic noses, chins, cheeks and ears, said, "What does this mean?"

Jenny had already grabbed her phone, was pressing the speed dial over and over, without success. "Shit, he's not answering." She began to sprint toward the high-rise.

Camille knew exactly what the contents of the box meant-she'd seen Damon in a number of his disguises and knew he was an expert at changing his appearance, the reason the Order had never been able to obtain an accurate photo of him. Hurrying after Jenny, Camille considered her options. She could, of course stop Jenny right now, just as she had done in the corridor of the Church of l'Angelo Nicolo`, just before she'd murdered Father Mosto. But that would be the height of folly. She needed Jenny now as the lure to bring Bravo to her. What she didn't need was Damon tramping around, killing people right and left Up to this point, he had been useful, that was true enough but the situation in the field had changed drastically, and any general unable to alter the plan of battle as the fighting saw fit would inevitably go down to defeat.

"My best friend is an actor. I've seen those kits before, Camille said, coming up on Jenny's right shoulder. "I saw what was missing, I think I know what he's going to look like.

Camille had been right, Bravo realized, though in a way she couldn't possibly know. Jordan had, indeed, made a deal with the devil. He hadn't been scammed by Damon Cornadoro-he'd asked for Damon Cornadoro. Jordan, his best friend was a Knight of St. Clement-not simply a Knight but the leader, because he was the architect, he was behind everything-Dexter's murder, the concerted attack on the Haute Cour the pursuit of the Order's cache of secrets.

Bravo groaned. To top it all off, he'd been working at Lusignan et Cie, for Jordan, toiling away for years in the enemy's shell corporation. What if Jordan had given him tasks that destroyed businesses secretly owned by members of the Order? Oh, God, had he himself been doing the devil's work?

He didn't want to believe it, couldn't believe it wholly, not yet-it was too huge, too terrible, it was unthinkable. And yet, the evidence was irrefutable. This couldn't be happening, not to him. But, in this instance, denial was lethal. Bravo knew that, and he shook himself, urging himself to come to terms with a truth he never could have imagined he'd one day be forced to face.

How to understand the nature of a human being who could be so false, so two-faced: your best friend, your most implacable enemy. It was as if the sun had suddenly begun to rise in the west or the oceans had turned to stone. But when he took a mental step back, like it or not, he was struck by Jordan Muhlmann's brilliance: what better place for Jordan to camp than on his enemy's doorstep, what better vantage point from which to observe and to plot the order of battle?

And with this realization came the beginning of acceptance-a sadness so piercing it left a pain in his chest.

He lifted his head, a sudden terrible thought bubbling up to the surface: what if Camille knew everything, what if she was part of Jordan's scheme? Why not? They were close, she worked at Lusignan et Cie, she would do anything for her son, she had told him so herself. Even the devil's business? He didn't know. Her shocked reaction to learning of Cornadoro's identity seemed genuine enough, but how could he know with any certainty?

He felt the swift, bitter flood of paranoia. He heard his father's voice, as if from far away, coming nearer with each beat of his heart. "Paranoia is a skill to be developed in certain professions," Dexter Shaw had told his son. "The most useful thing about being a paranoiac is that you won't be shaken by failure."

What profession had his father been talking about? the young Bravo had wondered. Now he knew. He'd have to be wary of Camille, gauge her reactions in a different light until one way or another she proved her loyalties.

A tremendous percussion shook the walls and rattled the electronics on their steel shelves. It sounded as if a bomb had gone off in the part of the apartment beyond the hidden door. He jumped and Khalif leapt to his feet. Ominously, three reports followed one upon the other-shots from a handgun, there was no mistaking the sounds, no doubt at all. A moment later, something hard slammed into the front side of the refrigerator.

Khalif hurried to the bank of electronics and, as the pounding started up rhythmically, quickly and methodically pressed a series of buttons.

"I'm wiping all the hard drives," he said, as much to himself as to Bravo. "I have all the critical data backed up elsewhere." Then he drew back one of the blackout curtains. Pushing two raw metal levers up freed the plywood panel he had attached over the window. Together, he and Bravo took the panel down.

Khalif threw open the window to a blast of noise and a mini-tornado of concrete dust from the sandblasting. Below was a sloping concrete ledge, no more than a decorative stripe on the milk-carton facade. It was so narrow there would be no room for error. One misstep would send him hurtling to his death below.

The crashing on the other side of the refrigerator was louder, more immediately threatening.

Bravo hesitated only a moment before he followed Khalif out onto the ledge. Khalif had already begun to edge to his right, toward the corner of the building. To Bravo, it seemed like a long way away, though it couldn't be more than a hundred meters. Where was Khalif headed? To a window in another apartment on the floor? That would only postpone the inevitable.

Bravo watched Khalif and, like him, refused to look down. Instead, he concentrated on keeping one hand against the concrete block of the building facade, putting one foot in front of the other in the straightest line possible. A sudden gust of wind swirled up the sheer building face, rippling against his left flank, causing him to stop and steady himself until it died back.

Khalif reached the corner and vanished around it. Screwing up his courage, Bravo followed, his hands gripping the corners, and he slid around it.

Beyond, he could see the workers' bamboo scaffold. His view was distorted by the shroud of plastic sheeting the workers had erected in a futile effort to keep the concrete dust at least marginally controlled. Bravo could make out two figures in overalls, faces goggle-eyed behind masks that kept their lungs clear. One of them was hunched over, wielding the heavy sandblaster, working slowly and deliberately. The other, just beyond him, was bent over the rope railing of the scaffold, presumably calling to the workers below down. They looked like old men; their hair was white with dust.

Khalif had reached the edge of the scaffold. He swung the plastic sheeting out of the way. As he stepped over the rope barrier, the worker nearest him turned, awkwardly waved one arm, warning him away. Khalif ignored him and the worker put down the sandblaster.

Khalif was trying to explain the situation, but the generator that powered the sandblaster was still pumping out noise at deafening decibels, and it was clear the worker couldn't hear him. By this time Bravo, too, had swung onto the scaffold. The two men were now so close that Bravo lost sight of the worker behind Khalif's broad back. It was natural then for Bravo's gaze to fall on the second worker. He was still bent over the railing, but now, without the interference of the plastic sheeting, Bravo could see his bloody hands, his bloody mouth, his bloody neck, ripped from one side to the other.

Bravo leapt forward. The first worker was removing his mask, a natural gesture as far as Khalif was concerned. Obviously, the man wanted to hear what Khalif was saying. But Bravo knew the movement was a ruse-a misdirection-for while Khalif's gaze was drawn to his face, the worker had produced a push-dagger from a pocket of his overalls.

"The worker," Bravo shouted, "it's Cornadoro!"

Khalif stepped back, but Cornadoro was already swinging the push-dagger, the arc of the blade sweeping in on the Turk's chest. Khalif swiveled, leaning heavily into the rope barrier as the blade ripped through the light linen of his shirt, baring his flesh. But the blade kept going, its arc continuing, until its target became clear.

The honed steel sliced through the rope barrier against which Khalif had tumbled. His arms shot out as he lost balance. Bravo threw himself forward, reaching out for Khalif's hand. Too late, he snatched at dead air. Looking over the side, he saw Khalif, clutching the end of the cut rope, swinging back and forth under the scaffold. Eleven floors below, he caught a glimpse of Jenny and Camille running toward the building.

Bravo took one lunge at the rope in hopes of hauling Khalif up, but Cornadoro swung the push-dagger, forcing Bravo to roll away from the edge, away from the only position from which he could save Khalif from falling to his death.

Lashing out with his right foot, Cornadoro drove Bravo's body beneath the rope barrier at the inner edge of the scaffold and into the side of the building. The scaffold rocked, banging against the concrete facade as Bravo struggled to keep from falling through the gap between it and the building.

Cornadoro struck him as he got to one knee, then grabbed him, pulled him off his feet. Their faces were very close. Bravo could smell the animal stink of the man, could feel the heat of his bloodlust and something else, something cool and detached: the total absence of fear.

"I want the cache of secrets." Cornadoro's voice was like a file sawing against Bravo's flesh. "Where is it? I want it. Where is it?" He flung Bravo against the side of the building. "Give me the information, or by Christ I'll rend you limb from limb. I'll leave you no man at all, or worse. When I'm done you won't even be human, you'll beg me to kill you."

From the first, Bravo had tried to get to Lorenzo Fornarini's dagger, but when he'd struck the concrete wall the knife had shifted, and now he couldn't reach it no matter how hard he tried. In any event, there was no time now because Cornadoro, swinging the push-dagger like a reaper, was about to make good on his threat.

The point of the push-dagger rushed in at Bravo. He tramped heavily on Cornadoro's instep, and as the bigger man reacted, he went straight for the inside of his wrist, digging thumb and forefinger into the nerve and tendon bundle. The push-dagger clattered to the bamboo beneath their feet.

With an animal growl, Cornadoro rabbit-punched Bravo in the kidney, then drove his knee into Bravo's chin. Bravo went to his hands and knees. Cornadoro smashed his fists into Bravo's spine. Bravo collapsed onto the sandblaster.

It was the machine's vibrations that kept him from slipping into unconsciousness. As Cornadoro stooped down to deliver the paralyzing blow, Bravo grabbed the sandblaster and flipping onto his back, aimed the nozzle at his tormentor, pulled the trigger.

Cornadoro bellowed, staggered back, and Bravo got to his feet, pressing his attack. Cornadoro let him commit himself before using powerful arms, elbows first, to knock the sand-blaster away. Now Cornadoro clapped one huge hand around Bravo's neck and pressed on his carotid.

Bravo's arms flailed, he gasped for breath, but the blackness of the abyss was all around him, obliterating his senses one by one.

Both Jenny and Camille saw what was happening eleven floors up on the scaffold. For Jenny, her worst fears were being realized-Bravo was going to die, and she would be too late to save him. Camille, too, felt the unfamiliar stab of fear. Just as Jordan had predicted, Damon had overstepped his authority. What did he think he was doing attacking Bravo? Unless he wanted the location of the cache of secrets for himself, unless he thought he could torture the location out of Bravo. The fool.

And so both women ran, side by side, both locked in their own fears and anxieties. No doubt that was why neither of them saw the man hurtle out of the trees where he had been hiding. He leapt onto Jenny because she was the one with the gun. He tackled her, digging his heels in while twisting his upper torso, using her own momentum to bring her down so hard that the heel of her hand struck the concrete rim of the walkway and the gun skittered away from them both.

Camille stood less than eight meters away. She knew the man-the Albanian, one of Jordan's hand-picked Knights of the Field. The implications of his being here, spying on Damon-and on her-were as immediate as they were dire. Jordan no longer trusted her; he meant to get the Order's cache of secrets for himself. Camille experienced a moment of indecision, unusual for her. She could either help Jenny against the Albanian or try to save Bravo, she couldn't do both. Picking up the Witness, she turned and ran.

Using his last ounce of strength, Bravo slammed his knee into Cornadoro's groin. He had the angle, the angle at which the genitals are at their most vulnerable, when the proper force could produce the maximum damage.

The moment he connected, bone against soft tissue, the big man bellowed and let Bravo go. The primitive part of the brain, the part a human being used to keep himself alive, told him that he'd never survive alone on the scaffold with Damon Cornadoro, so he'd done the other thing. Without hesitation, he vaulted over the scaffold's side.

He fell.

But not far. He grabbed onto Khalif, wrapping both arms, heavy as lead weights, around the Turk's waist. Together, they swung in dangerous arcs, while Khalif groaned at the strain on his arms, shoulders and back. Above them, Cornadoro was on hands and knees, his eyes were watering and his head was wagging back and forth like a wounded bull. Then, ignoring all pain, he scooped up the push-dagger and began to saw at the hanging rope-Bravo and Khalif's lifeline.

"My shoulder is dislocated, I can't get to him," Khalif said. "But you have a chance. When I let go, grab the rope and pull yourself up."

"Are you crazy?" Bravo said. "You're not sacrificing yourself for me."

"Why not? It's my life," Khalif said. "Besides, you'd do the same for me."

Camille ran until she had a clear shot up through the folds of plastic sheeting to the scaffold on the eleventh floor. Kneeling, she raised the Witness, bracing one hand on the other, forming a steady tripod. She got Damon in her sights, took a breath, exhaled. Her forefinger tightened on the trigger.

Bravo, fighting to keep Khalif from dropping off the rope, scrambled up the Turk's body, grabbed the rope and clamped his legs around Khalif's waist, holding the man fast.

"These heroics will do you no good," Khalif said as he tried to free himself from Bravo's embrace. But at that instant two shots sounded from below, a spray of blood struck them, hot and strong, and Cornadoro staggered backward across the scaffold. They glanced down to see Camille in her marksman's position. Then Jenny had joined her and the two women were running toward the pulleys that controlled the scaffold's vertical movement.

"Jesus Christ," Bravo said, as the scaffold began its descent.

"God is good," Khalif breathed.

A moment later, a body fell past them, spraying them in the face and chest with more blood-Damon Cornadoro on his long journey to hell.

Chapter 30

The first face Bravo saw when he opened his eyes was Jenny's.

"Where am I?"

"In the back of Damon Cornadoro's truck." Jenny held a cool towel to his forehead.

"What happened?"

"Cornadoro's dead-Camille shot him and he fell from the scaffold."

"I saw that." When he moved he could feel the deep ache in every muscle of his body. "Where were you?"

"I was going hand-to-hand with someone Camille told me works for Jordan, but that makes no sense, does it? It's why she insisted we get out of there before he knew what was happening, why I stole the truck." She grinned. "I hot-wired the ignition."

They were pushed together as Camille took a turn at speed.

"But about this thing with Jordan," Jenny said, "Camille must be devastated. I don't know how she's going to get over it. You'd better have a talk with her as soon as you feel up to it. Anyway, you passed out as we were bringing you down. We just dropped Khalif off at the hospital; he's got a dislocated shoulder for sure, but there also may be a break in his right ulna."

"Camille's driving?"

She gave him a small smile. "Isn't she always?"

"Where to?"

"The Sumela Monastery. Khalif told us that's where you were headed, right?"

He closed his eyes. It was happening just as his father had predicted in his last cipher: he was not going alone to Sumela. All at once, he felt as if the puzzle his father had left him had gotten the better of him. He felt the urge to stop running, to give his brain a rest. Most of all, he wanted to sleep, not get up for a week or two.

He fought the unnatural lassitude, struggling to clear his mind and marshal his thoughts. He felt sure he could trust Camille. If she had been working with Jordan she never would have shot Cornadoro. Besides, now it appeared as if Jordan had sent someone to spy on her and him-the man Jenny grappled with. Which meant Jordan was growing ever more powerful, ever more willing to take risks. The pope lay on his deathbed, only the Quintessence could save him. Meanwhile, Bravo was feeling the tightening of the vise the Knights and the Vatican had prepared for him. He was nearing the end of his journey, and now he held no illusions. Jordan would do anything, risk anything to get his hands on the cache of secrets and the Quintessence. The twisted vines of the Voire Dei had almost worked themselves into a recognizable pattern. Almost.

He closed his eyes for a moment, allowing the jouncing of the truck to lull him.

"Bravo, Bravo," Jenny said with some urgency. "Camille called Khalif. He said that in Macka there is a modern clinic for the increasing number of hikers and rock climbers who backpack into the Black Mountains at all times of the year, even winter. There's a trauma center there, we can stop-"

"No," he said at once, his eyes snapping open. "We must go on to Sumela."

Their eyes locked, and at length she nodded, but he could tell she wasn't happy abut it.

He wished Khalif was with him. But now there was something he had to do on his own.

"Jenny-"

She stopped him with a hand on his cheek. "We can talk about this later."

"No, I have to tell you. I didn't trust you, I didn't believe you when Cornadoro hung Father Mosto's murder on you, I didn't understand when you shot Uncle Tony. There was no way then I could have believed-"

"Anthony fooled everyone, Bravo. Even, until the very end, your father."

It was only now that he noticed the dark circles around her eyes, her hollow cheeks, the blue veins at her temples, as if her skin had thinned to parchment. But these marks of exhaustion and emotional pain did not mar her beauty. Rather, they allowed him to see the newfound steely quality she had acquired while they were apart. Very soon, he knew, he'd have to ask her what had happened to her, how this change had come about "There's something else."

Her fingertip brushed his lips. "Can't you let it rest for now?"

"I've waited too long already. Father Mosto told me that you and my father were having an affair. I was so angry I couldn't see straight. That's what clouded my instinct, my judgment of you-"

"But, Bravo, I never had an affair with Dexter."

Bravo felt a roaring in his head. "I don't understand. The flat he set up for you in London…"

"Ah, you know about that." She sat back, her eyes turned inward.

He took her hand in his. "Don't lie to me about this, Jenny. Just the truth, only the truth."

Her eyes were firmly focused on the past. "The truth, okay." She nodded, but she couldn't bring herself to begin. Then she took a deep breath, let it out. "I had an affair, but it wasn't with your father."

"Who, then?"

"Ronnie Kavanagh. He got me pregnant then browbeat me into having… having it taken care of. He threatened me, warned me that if I didn't it would be the end for me in the Order. I was young, devastated, confused. I did what he told me to do. But it nearly finished me, psychologically. It was your father who took care of me-he was so kind, so understanding-and here I was terrified he'd give me away to the Haute Cour and, like Ronnie said, I'd be out on my ass. But he kept my secret. He talked to me about the baby, about what it meant to lose a child, but I never knew until you told me about Junior."

"He would never have told you himself, especially not in your state of mind."

"No, of course not," she said. "Instead, he told me endearing stories of fairies and elves."

"Did he tell you about the elf who could turn water into fire?"

Jenny's eyes lit up. "Yes, and the one about the fairy who wasn't invited to the Midsummer Night banquet-"

"And in retaliation put a spell on the fireflies hired to illuminate the party so they turned into wasps."

They both laughed softly.

Jenny sighed as she allowed the memories their due. "On days when I was really bad, he would tell me jokes of talking animals-clever, sinister and loving-that made me laugh despite myself."

"The zebra who bet his stripes, and lost-"

"The parrot who captained a pirate ship-"

"The greedy terrier who ran his company into the ground."

She laughed again, delighted as a child, and Bravo could imagine how his father had been taken with her, how he might have seen her as a surrogate child that eased the misery of Junior's death.

"And then there were the books we read together," Jenny continued, "historical novels of unimaginable hardship, loss and ultimate triumph. I knew what he was doing, and it worked. He was so empathetic, so attuned to my depressions and black moods I should have known, or at least suspected, he'd gone through his own tragedy. Over the year he took care of me I came to love him. Not so surprising, I guess. But I loved him like a father, and he never had any designs on me. On the contrary, he was the only man who made me feel safe-up until you."

"What if I have designs on you?" Bravo said.

Cheeks flaming, Jenny looked down at him. "I'm different now, I'm counting on it."

The Sumela Monastery, set into the bedrock of the sheer mountainside, rose into the cobalt sky like the fortified portal of a Roman citadel. They lacked delicacy and finesse, these golden buildings; defenders of the faith, they seemed built for war.

"A war is what we'll have now," Camille said.

"There's no other way?" Bravo asked her.

"Sadly, my son has made his choice," Camille said. "With the pressures at play, the stakes so high, I doubt he could change his mind now, even if he had a mind to do so."

The three of them stood in the arched shadows of the ancient aqueduct that long ago had provided water for the monastery. Nearby was Cornadoro's truck, which Camille had parked on the narrow, twisting street some distance from the rank of tour buses, disgorging flocks of people armed with name tags, water bottles and digital cameras. No one seemed interested in their presence, but now each of them, infected with paranoia, studied the horde with obsessive interest.

Bravo turned to Camille. "I thought Jordan was my friend." He had explained, in as bare-bones a way as possible, the history of the Knights of St. Clement and Jordan's involvement in it. "How could he have betrayed me so callously?"

"He's a consummate actor, and for that I must take the blame." Camille stared up at the series of arches that carried the aqueduct on their brawny shoulders up the sheer cliff. "He never knew who his father was, but it's only in retrospect that I see how bitter he had become. I think now that it put a shell around him, turned him inward upon himself. But it would have done him no good had I told him; he'd have gone off on a futile and disappointing quest." She bit her lower lip. "Poor Jordan. We can't regain the past, much as we might want to."

"No point in recriminations," Bravo said.

"Yes, what's done is done, n'est-ce pas?" she said bitterly. All at once she fell into Bravo's arms. "Ah, Bravo, my only child has betrayed me as unforgivably as he has you."

"We should go on," Jenny said as she urged them out from the shadow of the truck, "as quickly as possible."

"Yes, yes," Camille said, coming back to herself, "tell us what we must do, Bravo. We're both here to help you."

Jordan Muhlmann had switched from the van to an air-conditioned car for the drive up into the mountains. Lucky for him, since the trip entailed three hours of jouncing as the snaking road became steeper, full of hair-raising switchbacks, and just past the town of Macka, when they'd turned off to the left, the road, steeper still, became a shambles. He had three Knights with him, few enough to be unobtrusive, sufficient, he judged, to get the job done.

He had been here before-irony of ironies, with Bravo himself. Three summers ago. They had taken what was to be a two-week vacation in Ibiza, but after six days of immersing themselves in nonstop hedonistic bliss they had decided to leave the two beautiful blondes who, like greedy remoras, opened their mouths on sweaty dancefloors, trendy all-night lounges, swampy hotel beds, damp sand dunes. They left the women without a word and had run away from the predatory island to the end of the earth, which, for them, had been decidedly nontrendy Trabzon. A depressing slum, whose only saving grace had been the Sumela Monastery.

Now here I am again, Jordan thought, back at Sumela with my old friend as he ends his journey in search of the Order's cache of secrets. Christ, it was here all along. Irony, indeed. But irony was hardly unknown to him. On the contrary, sometimes it seemed to him as if his entire life was one grotesque irony. Take his relationship with Bravo, for instance-what could be more ironic than that? Friends, they had been friends: shared secrets, intimacies, close encounters with the opposite sex in Ibiza, Paris, Stockholm, Cologne and elsewhere. However, everything he had shared with Bravo had been a lie-even the girls. Jordan had a penchant for having two at once, something someone as straight-laced as Bravo would never understand or condone. Besides, his mandate with Bravo had been to get as close to him as he possibly could. What was the phrase his mother had used? "You have to get under his skin in order to know him, and you need to know him in order to manipulate him."

The precarious trip proved beneficial, though Jordan felt as if he were moving through a minefield laced with hidden trip wires. Everything they said to each other contained the possibility of disaster. Everything had to be withheld from Bravo. Everything…

His cell phone burped. He knew who it was even before he looked at the caller ID.

"Mother," he said with a smirk he was happy to conceal from her.

"What are you doing, darling, having me followed?" Her voice was as rich as butter. "Your man almost ruined everything."

"I should think it was Damon Cornadoro who holds that dubious distinction."

Silence on the other end of the line; he'd rarely been able to cause her to miss a beat.

"Admit it," he continued. "I was right about Cornadoro. In the end, he could not keep to discipline."

"It was the Quintessence that corrupted him."

She said it as an admonition-not in retrospect about Cornadoro, but to him. He knew it, and it infuriated him further.

"You and Cornadoro…" His voice clotted with emotion.

"What about me and Cornadoro?" his mother said blithely.

"I know he was your lover. What kind of pillow talk-"

"My pillow talk only goes in one direction, darling, you know that." But her voice had grown steely. "You're not becoming suspicious of me, are you? Because that would be a waste of your precious time-"

"My man was on surveillance because I was suspicious of Cornadoro," Jordan said. It was a half truth, anyway. He had gotten a firm grip on his emotions; no more stupid outbursts from him that would give her a clue to his current frame of mind. "You can't blame me for that."

"Certainly not, darling. On the contrary, I applaud your prudence."

"And I applaud your clear-eyed ability to shoot your lover."

"It was hardly difficult, there was never any emotion involved. Cornadoro served a purpose-when it came to an end, so did he." There was a brief pause. "But I do resent being spied upon, and especially by that horrid Albanian."

Jordan glanced over at the driver. "That horrid Albanian is sitting right here beside me."

"What are you saying? Jordan, are you in Trabzon?"

"No, I'm in Sumela, Camille." With three Knights of the Field: the Albanian, the German and the Russian, formerly of the FSB, but he wasn't about to tell her that. Now his voice turned steely. "I'm here to pick up the pieces, to make the corrections you have been unable to make."

"Idiot!" she said in his ear. "Everything has gone precisely according to plan. Bravo trusts me completely, as does Jenny. I'll be in on the end when he opens the Order's cache."

"No, Mother, that honor is mine." He signaled to his Knights, got out of the car.

"If you show yourself now, all will be lost," she said. "The minute he sees you he'll understand everything."

Jordan signed for his Knights to fan out. "Don't concern yourself, Mother. I'll make my appearance at the right moment." He watched his Knights moving up toward the monastery. "Shock tactics, something I learned on my own." He began to walk toward the steep stone stairs that led to the buildings themselves.

"Even your being here-you're making a mistake, Jordan."

"You let me worry about that."

"Dammit, I've spent decades orchestrating this-"

"The last four years I've nurtured Bravo because you told me to, because of what I never had, because of what you promised me."

"Don't be a child, darling."

He felt as if he had been stuck with a cattle prod and, with an animal growl, leapt up the stairs.

"I'll have my revenge, Jordan." The steel reappeared, like the claws on a cat. "Don't spoil it."

"Is that a threat? I sincerely hope not, because I hold the ace of spades, the information you've gone out of your way to keep from Bravo. The one-"

Her gasp produced a little thrill that ran right through him.

"So, enough of this posturing," he concluded. "Get out of my way, Mother, get out of my way now."

Chapter 31

The Sumela Monastery was ancient, dating back to the fourth century after Christ. Founded in honor of the Virgin Mary by two Athenian priests, it was named Sumela, from the Greek melas, meaning black. Whether the founders were influenced by the Karadaglar-the Black Mountains-in which they built their monastery or by the color of the icon of the Virgin Mary they brought with them remained an unanswered question.

Bravo had cause to think on this enigma as he and the two women moved past the complex, which housed the Rock Church, several chapels, kitchens, student rooms, a guesthouse and library. After renovation in the thirteenth and nineteenth centuries, the monastery was finally abandoned in 1923, following the three-year Russian occupation of Trabzon.

Now it was nothing more than a tourist attraction. But through Khalif Bravo knew the Order had been here. Through the twelfth century, King Alexius III and his son Manuel III had contributed to the wealth of Sumela, had used it as one of their eyes in the Levant.

The mystery of Sumela's name mirrored the mystery of his father's last cipher: a long set of instructions, unambiguous and yet mysterious-the most mysterious of all of them raising more questions than it answered.

Beside him, Camille hiked silently, tirelessly. If Bravo hadn't been shown evidence of them already, he would have marveled at her physical competence and stamina. Behind them both came Jenny, backtracking, quartering through the trees and underbrush as they made their way up the mountainside, farther and farther from the tour groups.

Just past a particularly rocky stretch, she called them to a halt in a small copse of pines.

"I saw something," she said softly. "I think it was the man who tackled me on the grounds of the high-rise."

Keeping his father's last message in mind, which he needed to do at all times now, Bravo was unsurprised. "Circle back," he told Jenny. "See if you can get around him."

"He's Jordan's man," Camille said. "I'll go with you."

"I think that's unwise," Jenny said.

"Why? Don't you think I can be of help?"

"It's not that."

"What, then? He's unlikely to be alone. I know Jordan better than either of you."

"She's right." Bravo kept his gaze on Jenny. "I need both of you at my back now, all right?"

Jenny nodded.

"Meanwhile, I'll continue on," he said. "According to my father's instructions the cavern where the cache is buried is about a kilometer northeast of here. Come as quickly as you can."

The Albanian had a long memory. He could resurrect every man who had ever attacked him, every man he had killed or maimed. The number was more than a few, less than a shitload, as he liked to joke with his fellow Knights of the Field when he was half drunk. But in all that time he'd never come up against a woman, let alone been bested by one-until he'd attacked Jenny. Furious, he was out for blood-her blood. Before this day was done, he'd hold her bloody head in his hands, this he had vowed to himself.

He moved through the forest without sound, as he had been taught. He could smell the pine sap, the leaf mold, the must of mushrooms, the sweetness of ferns and wildflowers. He listened, automatically filtering out the small sighs of his own breathing, the inner sound of the blood pumping behind his ears. He was scenting for Jenny as a bloodhound hunts a body-the quick or the dead, it made no matter to the bloodhound, but it mattered plenty to the Albanian. The scent of his quarry had not left his nostrils; it lingered there, as if mocking the surprise she had delivered to him. Her smell had become the smell of his own defeat.

He saw her first, just a flash that might have been the quick-winged streak of a bird taking off from the underbrush, but he was downwind of her and her scent came to him, distinct as ammonium carbonate. With a grin in his face he set out after her, hunched over, running low and quick, taking as direct a route as he dared. The faster he came upon her the better. His hands curled into fists, then flexed outward, stretching his leathery fingers. He saw her again, and he corrected his approach, veering a bit to the left. She had seen something or someone-perhaps the Russian, who had taken the sprinting lead-and was after it with a single-minded intensity that gave him an advantage. He sprinted forward, taking his opening. He meant to make the most of it, to make her pay, to bring her down and, between his thighs, to beat her senseless. He couldn't take too long-there was the Russian to think of. He didn't want the Russian to get all the glory, he wanted to be in on the end, when the cache of secrets was opened.

With this on his mind, he rushed forward. Jenny heard him at the last instant, began to turn even as he buried one fist into her kidney. Her eyes opened wide, the breath was knocked out of her and she fell, rolling and gasping.

The Albanian laughed, then, couldn't help himself, a short bark appropriate to the hunting dog that he was, shaggy-haired, muscular, red-meat-loving, loyal. He dropped onto Jenny, his arm cocked for a follow-up stunner to the bridge of her nose, when she reared up, crashed her forehead into the point of his chin. His head snapped back, his teeth clashing. Blood filled his mouth from where he had inadvertently bitten his tongue.

He reached down, but she swatted his wrist away with a remarkably powerful jab and, lifting one hip, tried to displace him, to regain some leverage. But he wouldn't let her, his superior bulk weighing her down. And now, while he struck her with one hand, his other clamped itself around her throat. He pressed down.

Then he heard a percussion-a gun firing. He looked down at the blood leaking out of his chest. He felt nothing, however-no pain, nothing at all. It was as if he had been anesthetized. His grip did not loosen on the Guardian's throat. Her face was congested with trapped blood, darkening the skin, and her eyes were bulging. He felt, then, the whisper of someone coming up behind him and he waited, waited, while the world slowly pulsed to his laboring heart, his damaged lungs. Still, he felt nothing at all, and so at the last possible instant, he twisted his torso. Now the pain came, excruciating, blinding pain, but he ignored it as he struck out with his free hand, knocking the gun out of Camille Muhlmann's hand, grabbing her, jerking her off her feet. His grin grew wider-two birds with one blow. He took his hand off Jenny's throat, curled the fingers into a ball, cocked his arm. That was when he heard the snik! of a blade opening, saw the ripple of sunlight as it ran across the edge of stainless steel. Then she had plunged the knife into his throat and he began to thrash like a fish out of water.

Jenny, eyes watering, choking on her own breath, was showered with the Albanian's blood. Half unconscious, she didn't immediately know what had happened. Not until she saw Camille appear, gun in hand. The first thing she thought of was how grateful she was not to have asked for it back. Then, with mounting horror, she saw what the Albanian did, how strong and determined he was even after being shot. The taste of her own death was in her mouth. Still, the moment the Albanian withdrew his hand, she raised herself on her elbows. He had turned away from her to attack Camille. She was about to strike him in the vulnerable spot on his neck where a major nerve bundle was located when she saw Camille drive something into his neck. The knife was in front of her face, she saw it and there was no mistaking what it was: an exact duplicate of her own switchblade, the one used to slit Father Mosto's throat. In that instant so many things clicked into place: why she had been bothered by the big picture, Rule's nonresponse when she had said that the Knights must be using another method to track Bravo. Most of all, who had knocked her unconscious in the Church of l'Angelo Nicolo` and then slit Father Mosto's throat.

Then she saw Camille looking at her, and by her expression knew that she understood what was going through Jenny's mind.

"Camille-"

But it was too late, Camille was already lunging at her, and the blade sank into her.

As Bravo wound his way upward, he could hear the soft splash of the Cauldron, the spring deemed sacred by the Orthodox Greeks. Through the trees and clumps of crocuses, Grecian anemones, and snowdrops he made out stone ruins and the remnants of carved marble columns from another era.

The land fell steeply away now, into a small valley amid the towering Black Mountains, at the end of which was the cavern. Birds flew, diving and twittering, while honeybees hovered over wildflowers, droning away at their endless work. The long afternoon had reached the zenith of its heat, even here so high up. The merciless sun beat down without the intervention of cloud or mist, the sky was that particular depthless blue peculiar to high altitudes, appearing vulnerable as an eggshell.

As he was crossing the valley, he heard from behind him the report of a single gunshot, echoing off the surrounding cliffs. He paused and almost turned back, then, but he remembered his father's explicit instructions, he remembered his mission, what he had vowed to protect at all costs, and with an effort and a heavy heart he put Jenny and Camille out of his mind, hurrying across the remainder of the flat ground.

Up ahead, he could see the mouth of the cavern, amid a number of others, guarded on either side, as his father had written, by two pencil cypresses. As soon as he entered its shadow he turned and, crouching down, looked out across the small verdant valley. At first there was nothing to see but the birds and insects, but the afternoon was waning, and it was in the lengthening shadows that he first spotted the movement. An arm, a shoulder as big as a haunch of deer came into view from behind a tree trunk. Then the side of a football-shaped head, a black eye, a face he identified as Russian through its dour expression, the manner in which the eye took in the valley in quick, precise vectors. Bravo moved then, rising to his feet, and the Russian's gaze centered on the mouth of the cavern. He'd seen movement, a slight difference in the depth inside the shadowed mouth. Bravo retreated and the Russian came silently on, exposing himself only for an instant until he found another natural feature behind which to crouch.

He was coming now and there was nothing Bravo could do to prevent it.

Jenny opened her eyes, saw sunlight filtering down through a layer cake of leaves. A swift flew by, its sharp call bringing her fully alert. Short-term amnesia gripped her and she felt a chilling wave of panic, but then she sat up and pain lanced through her side. Everything flooded back, then: the fight with the Albanian, Camille shooting him, stabbing him-the pearl-scaled switchblade, the twin of hers, that Camille used to attack her. Putting her hands on her waist, she felt the sticky warmth seeping out of her. The blade had been partially deflected by a rib; she knew the wound wasn't deep, wouldn't be fatal. Nevertheless, loss of blood could render her useless. Ripping off the bottom third of her blouse, she wrapped it around her rib cage so it covered the wound, tied it as tight as she could stand.

Where was Camille? She looked around, found herself alone in the forest, with only a corpse for company.

"Christ!"

She levered herself onto her feet with the help of a tree trunk against which she leaned. Her head swam and whatever was in the pit of her stomach threatened to disgorge itself. Her pulse pounded, and she forced herself to take a series of long, deep breaths.

Pushing away from the tree, she started her search for the Witness, but the gun was nowhere to be found. Bad news-that meant that Camille had found it and was still armed. She wished she had her cell phone so she could warn Bravo of his friend's treachery.

Still, there were weapons to be had-she could see the muzzle of a gun peeping out from under her attacker's waist-all she needed to do was roll his corpse over. There was a terrible stink rising up from him, almost unbearable as she knelt beside him. Her hands hovered above his torso as she gathered her strength to roll him.

"All right now," a voice said in German-accented English, "back away."

Reflexively, she looked over her shoulder, saw Kreist, a Knight of the Field whose face and dossier were known to her.

"I'm injured," she said, indicating the makeshift tourniquet, though which blood was already beginning to seep. "I can't move."

"You're not listening to me," Kreist barked. "I said back away. Now!"

Jenny took some rather obvious gulps of air. "Give me a moment, will you?" The hand closest to the corpse gripped the muzzle of the gun. "My head is still swimming."

Kreist took a threatening step toward her. "I will not ask you again."

Saying a silent prayer, Jenny said, "All right, all right, I'm getting up now, okay? Just don't shoot."

Kreist spat. "Little bitch, what the fuck are you doing out here?"

Jenny began to get to her feet, in doing so showing him quick a bit of her provocatively bare midsection. She saw his eyes shift. At the same time, using all her strength, she jerked the gun free of the corpse's bulk, grabbed the grips with her other hand and, turning, pulled the trigger. Kreist, not understanding, staggered back and, Jenny, remembering all too vividly what had happened with the first attacker, kept firing until she had put four shots into the German and he was lying face up on the ground, his eyes fixed and staring.

Without a backward glance, she turned and ran, ignoring as best she could the searing pain in her side, the blood seeping from her wound. Once, she fell to her knees, winded, exhausted, her head lolling, but she heard Bravo's voice in her head and she forced herself first to her knees, then to her feet, put one foot in front of the other, faster, faster.

"The cavern is a kilometer northeast," he had said.

The cache was hidden beneath a semicircular altar to the Greek goddess Aphrodite. The stone altar was without adornment of any kind, having been looted decades ago. In fact, had not his father delivered precise instruction as to how to find it, Bravo might never have known its original use. Bravo had a flashlight, but it was not necessary here. This section of the cavern was a honeycomb of small caves, passages and chimneys, some of which rose all the way to the surface of the mountainside. As a consequence, sunlight, colored by the greenish minerals in the rock, provided eerie illumination. Along with the light came sound, the wind moaning in mournful melody, as if through a gigantic panpipe.

He positioned himself in front of the dark stone altar on which, presumably, animals had been ritually slaughtered by pagan Greeks before the Virgin Mary came to these shores, perhaps even after, for the goddess of love held a special place in the hearts of Greeks. Wasn't everyone in need of her help?

He heard a sound, no more than the wind made, soughing through the chimneys, and the hair at the back of his neck stirred. He was not alone in the caverns-the Russian, and behind him, surely, Jordan. What had happened to Jenny and Camille? Who had fired the shot? Were they okay?

He heard the sound again, nearer to him this time, and he put his plan into effect, leaping to his right, arms outstretched in front of him as he hurled himself through one of the holes in the cavern.

He winced at the deafening sound of a gun being fired, the echo roaring through the passage he was in. When he turned, he saw the Russian on his hands and knees, coming after him. The Russian paused, raised his Makarov. Just before he squeezed off another shot, Bravo leapt upward into a chimney. Under cover of the noise, he scrambled into the first passage he came to. He crouched there, waiting, steeling himself for what had to be done.

The moment he saw the top of the Russian's head he attacked, slamming the heel of his hand against the Russian's ear. Launching himself forward, he kicked down, dislodging the gun from the Russian's hand. This was essential-it disarmed his adversary and evened the playing field-but it also allowed the Russian the time he needed to recover from the blow to his head.

The man reached out, butting his head into Bravo's sternum. As Bravo fell back, the Russian hauled himself out of the chimney. In the horizontal passage there was precious little room to maneuver. Within the space of three blows being delivered, Bravo had the measure of the Russian. He was ex-military, FSB or perhaps Spetsnaz. The modern battlefield being what it was, these soldiers had little use for hand-to-hand combat and so were trained only in what was known as "short and sharp," the killing blow to be delivered within thirty seconds of engagement.

Having absorbed three of the Russian's blows on bone and heavy muscle, Bravo got inside his adversary's defenses, broke the man's nose with the edge of his hand, his cheekbone with the knuckles of the other.

But he was mistaken if he thought that would finish off the Russian. It only got him going. He rushed Bravo, bulling him backward against the passage wall. Pinning him there with his superior weight, the Russian began a series of lightning-quick blows to Bravo's body and head, aimed at numbing Bravo's major upper-body muscle groups. Without them, Bravo couldn't defend himself, let alone launch a counterattack. Within moments, he'd be helpless.

He was going into shock, his vision a blur. He tried to get at Lorenzo Fornarini's dagger, but his side was pinned to the wall. He had only one hope. With his free hand, he dug in his pocket. Switching on the flashlight, he shone it directly into the Russian's eyes.

The Russian, blinded, staggered back, slammed into the opposite wall. Bravo went in beneath his raised arms, buried a knee in his groin. As the Russian doubled over, Bravo drove the same knee into the man's chin. His head snapped up and Bravo delivered a blow to his temple. The Russian slid to his knees, tears streaming down his face, but still managed to grab hold of Bravo, shake him until his teeth rattled. The man opened his mouth to bite Bravo, to rip a chunk out of him, and Bravo smashed the flashlight into his face, again and again, the blood running, the skin flayed off, until at last the Russian keeled over.

Blood was everywhere. Bravo collapsed where he stood. He put his head in his hands, but they were shaking so badly he immediately lifted it up back. The Russian wasn't breathing, he was gone.

His body aching, Bravo crawled to the edge of the chimney, shinnied slowly down it, his knees pressed to either side of the hole, until at length he dropped to the cavern floor. He saw the gun he'd kicked from the Russian's hand and, bending over, reached for it.

At that moment, pain exploded at the back of his head, and he pitched forward into unconsciousness.

Chapter 32

"I have to hand it to you, Bravo-you and your father-you ran quite a race." Jordan came around into Bravo's line of vision. "But, in the end, all your scheming, all your machinations didn't matter, because here we are and-" He held something shiny between the first and second fingers of his right hand. "Here it is-the key to the Order's cache, the key to immortality."

He crouched down beside Bravo, who lay on the cavern floor, hands behind his back, wrists and ankles tightly bound. "Go ahead, by the way, try as hard as you can to work your way out. It won't do you any good."

"Why are you doing this, Jordan? What happened to you?"

Jordan laughed. "You make it sound as if I'm suffering from a blow to the head. Poor Bravo. I never was the helpful, straight-shooting lad I pretended to be. I did a good job lying to you, don't you think? No, don't bother to answer. It doesn't matter what you think anymore." He patted the top of Bravo's head, as if he were an old pet who'd sadly but inevitably come to the end of his life.

"Happily, that phase is over, along with pretending to listen to my mother. While she's been out here, keeping tabs on you, I've staged a coup d'etat of sorts. The Knights tied to that disgustingly inbred cabal at the Vatican, the Knights my mother has been desperate to take over, the Knights of St. Clement are no more. They're my Knights now-the Knights of Muhlmann."

"That will be enough."

Jordan's head whipped around and Bravo strained to get a look, though he recognized the voice well enough.

Camille stood, training the Witness on her son. "Untie him."

Jordan laughed. "Mother, you can't mean it."

"But I do, darling, I very much do."

"Are you still pretending to be his friend? I've already told him you're not. You're every inch his enemy, just like me."

"Fortunately, I'm nothing like you, Jordan. I killed the Albanian, by the way, and judging by the amount of blood dripping down that shaft I'd say Bravo put away your Russian, what's his name, oh, yes, I remember, Oberov."

"Did you sleep with him, too, Mother?" Jordan said bitterly. "Have you slept with all the Knights of the Field?"

"You're not jealous, are you, darling?" Camille waggled the business end of the gun. "Now do as I say. Untie him."

"Really, Mother, it's unnecessary because, you see, I've already-"

"Now, you stupid child! And not another word!"

Blood rushed into Jordan's face in direct proportion to the amount that fled his heart. As he mechanically undid the knots he'd so painstakingly and lovingly tied, it seemed to him as if his heart had ceased to beat. He was still breathing, still moving, still thinking, but on another level whatever had been left of his heart had vanished beneath a shell as hard, as immovable as the black rock of this mountain. Cocooned within the organization of the Knights he'd always felt separate, apart from the rest of humanity-and grateful for it, too. But now, for the first time, he felt the chill of the space he occupied, as if his aloneness had taken on another, altogether baleful quality, as if he had misread it all along, hadn't realized until this moment that it was, in fact, a vacuum, greedily absorbing light, connection and emotion.

"There." He stood back. "It's done." He turned to his mother, to the woman who he despised most in the world. "But toward what end?" He held up the key for her to see. "I already took it from him. I did what you dreamed of doing."

"No, Jordan. I'm your mother, you will obey me."

"My time of servitude to you has ended. And do you know why? I'm no longer willing to be bound by your secret."

A look of horror marred Camille's beautiful face. "Jordan, no! You can't!"

"But I can, Mother, and I will." He turned to Bravo. "Here it is in a nutshell, my friend-my very good and faithful friend-the short story of the lie your entire life has been. My mother was your father's mistress. That's right, he was shacking up with her for years, while you and your siblings were growing up and, in one case, dying. Your mother never suspected and you were too young. In any event, he was so good at keeping secrets, wasn't he? And then, when you were just past your fifth birthday, she became pregnant with his child."

"Wait," Bravo said.

Jordan laughed harshly. "Oh, look at his expression, Mother, isn't that the look you've dreaded? Yes, yes, I think so! I, too, am your father's son, so that makes us, what, brothers, yes? Well, half-brothers, if you need to be technical. Not to worry, it's all relative under the skin." He laughed again.

"Wait," Bravo repeated. His head was pounding so hard, he felt as if his brain would explode at any minute. He turned to Camille, "Is this true?"

Jordan continued, relentless. "He betrayed your mother, he would have betrayed you, too, so Camille believes. She says he had agreed to leave you-leave his family-to live with her, with us. But then your brother Junior died, and he couldn't bring himself to make the break."

Bravo stared into Camille's face and for the first time saw naked emotion. It was so raw, so devastating that he had the urge to turn away, as if from a terrible injury. And so the truth burst in on him with the force of a grenade blast.

Jordan shrugged. "If it makes you feel any better, I don't believe that fairy tale. Your father never would have left his family. He didn't want my mother, he didn't want me, either. He proved that over and over when I tried to contact him."

Camille's head swung around, her eyes open wide. "You did what? I expressly forbade you to contact him."

"Did you really think I'd listen to you? Jesus Christ, he was my father. Of course I tried. But he wouldn't see me, wouldn't even talk to me. You see, Mother, if he never wanted anything to do with me, why would he leave his family for you?" He laughed. "Dexter Shaw played you just as you were playing him."

"You're insane. Dexter never knew a thing."

"You're right, Mother, I have no proof, except what was once in my heart, and now I can never reach it again. C'est la guerre." He shrugged. "It's of no matter now, is it? We planned Dexter Shaw's death and now he's dead. End of story." He pointed. "What matters is that we've succeeded. After we tortured Molko to no avail we knew Dexter wouldn't talk, no matter what we did to him, so we had to find another way to the cache. And that way was you, Bravo. We knew from our man inside the Order that Dexter had trained you to be his successor. We realized what we needed to do was take Dexter out. Difficult, almost impossible, but in the end we did it. We banked on you leading us to the cache; we knew we could control you, we'd had so much experience at it.

"And we were right. You solved every cipher your father threw at you. Because he had trained you, you knew him better than anyone. You had the knowledge he'd given you, locked away inside you. You see, Bravo, you've never stopped working for me. Don't you find that ironic?"

Bravo wanted to curl up and die, he wanted to lash out. An inchoate shrieking filled his mind so that he could not speak, could not think clearly. He could only listen to the horror that came pouring out of their mouths: the lie of his own abominable existence.

Jordan moved slightly, a twitch of long-held expectation. "Now, finally, the time has come to open the cache; everything inside will be mine."

"Alors, that was always what you longed for, wasn't it?" Camille fairly spat out the words. Her mind was still reeling at the possibility that Dexter had seen through her lies. No one else ever had, how could he? "You didn't care about my revenge, about the destruction of the Order. You wanted their secrets for yourself."

"Oh, yes. Especially the Quintessence. With it, I can rule the world."

"No." Jenny moved into one of the circles of sunlight, the Albanian's gun aimed at them. "You'll never get the chance now." All at once, chaos. Everything happened simultaneously, in the blink of an eye. Camille turned, aiming the Witness at Jenny, Jordan grabbed Bravo who had managed to get to his knees. Jenny squeezed off two shots, both of which struck Camille in the chest, taking her off her feet.

She slid across the floor, fetching up against the far rock wall. Not that she felt the impact; she was already dead. But by the time Jenny swung the Albanian's gun back to Jordan, he was standing behind Bravo, Lorenzo Fornarini's dagger poised across Bravo's throat.

"You have his life in your hands, Guardian," Jordan said. "What will you do, I wonder?"

Bravo called to her, but she had already thrown the gun aside.

"There's a good girl." Jordan tossed the key at her. "Pick it up." When she did, he pointed to the altar where Bravo had begun to dig. "There. Go on. You know what to do."

Jenny began to cross to the altar.

"Not so close," Jordan ordered. "I'm not about to give you that chance."

Obediently, she altered her course. As her position changed, Jordan swiveled, keeping Bravo's body between himself and Jenny. She knelt and began to dig with her hands. Within ten minutes she had come to a hard surface. She brushed away the dirt, revealing the top of a box.

"Go on," Jordan said as he pushed closer, Bravo in front of him. "Faster."

The box, as Jenny uncovered it, was perhaps forty-five centimeters in length by about half that in width and depth.

"Now lift it out."

"But I-"

"Do it!" Jordan shouted.

Gritting her teeth against the pain, Jenny reached into the hole she had dug and with a grunt lifted it out. The effort cost her a great deal both in energy and in blood. She knew she was nearing the end of her rope, that she would have to get to a doctor sooner rather than later or the wound might turn fatal. At the very least, she was in danger of passing out from loss of blood.

"Now use the key," Jordan said, his voice as avid as his eyes. "Open the cache!"

Jenny did as she was told, sliding the key into the old-fashioned lock. She turned it to the left, heard the tumblers click. All at once, a wave of black despair inundated her. This can't be happening, she thought. I was supposed to help protect the cache, not help the Knights steal it.

With numb hands, she opened the lid. She peered inside, aware of Jordan bending over to get his first look at what he'd lusted after almost all his life.

But there was nothing inside, nothing at all.

Jenny began to laugh, Jordan cried out in rage and dismay, and that was when Bravo twisted his torso, viciously slammed his elbow into Jordan's kidney. While Jordan was still off-balance, Bravo threw him forcibly into the rock wall. Jordan slashed out blindly with the dagger and Bravo chopped down with the edge of his hand. Jordan's hand went numb and he dropped the weapon.

He struck out with his other hand, then rushed at Bravo. They hit the wall again, then, as they grappled, fell backward into an opening. Bravo punched Jordan, but it was without his full force. He kept trying to understand his new reality: Jordan was his brother. Jordan, however, was holding nothing back. He pounded Bravo, as Bravo retreated back along the passage toward a shaft of sunlight.

Jordan was on top of him, connecting repeatedly with punishing blows to his head and torso.

Bravo pushed back and they crouched, staring at each other, panting, abruptly motionless. "Why are you doing this?" Bravo gasped. "Because my father rejected you, is this what it's all about? You should have come to me."

Jordan bared his teeth, an animal scenting the kill. "And then what? You would have hated me, just like your father did. You would have taken his side."

"His side?"

"I was his little mistake, an indelible stain on his stellar reputation. I was the reminder of what he had done, of his betrayal. Why else do you think he wanted nothing to do with me?"

"I don't know," Bravo said truthfully. "But if you'd come to me, if you'd told me the truth, we could have worked it out. We were friends; we're brothers, after all."

"I'm not your friend, I'm not your brother," Jordan said. "I'm your enemy."

"It doesn't have to be that way."

"But it does. There's no other path for us than to be at each other's throats."

"Why? You said it yourself: the Knights have been reborn. The old enmity between them and the Order can be a thing of the past. Think of what we could do if we joined forces, the good we could achieve."

"Oh, yes, of course-why wouldn't I love to be your right-hand man?"

"Christ, Jordan, that isn't what I meant at all."

"Oh, but it is. You're just like your father: arrogant, judgmental, you think you're smarter, better than anyone else. No, thank you, I have my power base, I've spent years sacrificing, compromising, kowtowing to my gorgon of a mother, all in the service of consolidating it. Fuck you, I'm not going to share it with you or anyone else."

Bravo tried not to think about how he'd been just that way with Jenny-felt he knew more, condemned her, and had been proven wrong. Had he done the same with Jordan? "Listen," he said with mounting desperation, "you're making a mistake-"

Jordan smirked. "It's so like you to think that, isn't it? You see how right I am about you?"

Bravo tried to ignore what Jordan was saying, ignored the accusations that had sunk their barbed tips deep into his psyche. It would be easy to dismiss Jordan as a deluded monomaniac, but the truth was he knew Bravo too well, knew his failings just as Bravo now knew Jordan's. Still, some font of goodness inside him impelled him on what he now knew was a fruitless course. "Despite what you think, we still have a chance, if you only-"

"Listen to you? I'd rather slit my wrists."

"I'm offering you a family, Jordan. Why can't you see that?"

"Why can't you see that you're trying to lord it over me again? Not again, Bravo, never again, this I promise you. You're the one with a past, a history, a family. Offering me a family? No, you'll come to pity me, if you don't already. In fact, the process has already begun. It's pity that has motivated you to make your offer. 'Poor Jordan,' you think. 'I can help him.' But you can't help me, Bravo, you'll only want to take over, to make decisions for me, to tell me what's right and wrong. You always felt you knew the difference between good and evil, but it turned out that you knew nothing.

"You have what I want, what I never will have. Can you give me that? Would you, if you had the chance? You fucking-"

He leapt at Bravo, struck out blindly, with a rage-filled heart, with the full intent to maim, to destroy what he hated most. Bravo defended himself as best he could, but all too rapidly he was being plowed under by the ferocity of Jordan's rage. He kept retreating down the passage, further and further toward the shaft of sunlight, until at length, Jordan knocked him partway into the chimney and, with one leg hanging in space, he saw that it not only went up, but down as well.

Blocking Jordan's next blow, he tried to twist himself back from the brink, but Jordan blocked him with his body, forcing him back against the rim on the rock floor. He could feel the shaft of air at his back. His foot slipped over the edge. How far down did the chimney plummet?

Taking advantage of Bravo's momentary loss of concentration, Jordan got inside his perimeter of defense, landing a blow to his ribs. Bravo went down onto his knees. Jordan struck out with his foot, but Bravo caught it before it could land, took Jordan off his feet. Bravo fought his way on top of Jordan, swinging his balled right fist into Jordan's face. In so doing, they both moved further over the edge.

Bravo struck again, but this time Jordan was ready, blocking the blow as Bravo had blocked his kick. Twisting Bravo's arm, he reversed their positions. Now it was Jordan who was on top. Very quickly, Bravo realized his intention. Jordan was pushing and shoving, trying to tip Bravo over the edge, to push him into the rock chimney, to be rid of him forever.

Bravo's head and shoulders were already into the chimney. In a moment, he'd be too far over the edge to be able to save himself. It was now or never. He knew he had to put aside his feelings of wanting to save Jordan from himself, of forging by his will alone a new expanded family that would, somehow, expunge the bitter taste of his father's betrayal. As Jordan had said, it was pure arrogance. He couldn't do it: he would fail, and if he persisted, he would certainly die trying.

He looked up into the face of his enemy, absorbed his vicious blow, saw a vulnerable spot and, as Jordan drew his fist back to repeat the blow, used the points of his stiffened fingers to jab Jordan in the spot between his sternum and diaphragm. Bravo struck hard and true, disrupting the important nerve bundle.

Jordan reared back and Bravo rose up, shoving him hard so that his head struck the rock wall. He toppled off Bravo, fell forward, pitching over Bravo's head, down into the chimney.

Bravo flipped over, reflexively reached out in an effort to catch him, but there was no chance, there was never any chance. Jordan was gone.

Jenny grabbed him as he crawled out of the rock passage.

"Jordan?" she asked.

He shook his head. He felt light-headed, his hands cold and bloodless. He reached for her, as a drowning man reaches a line thrown overboard. She winced, bit her lip so as not to cry out, and through his own pain and misery, he realized that she, too, was hurt.

"Jenny, what happened?" Then he saw the tourniquet she'd tied around her abdomen. "You're hurt."

"A flesh wound, that's all. Nothing to worry about."

But her blood-soaked shirt told him otherwise. "We've got to get you to a hospital, or at the very least a doctor."

She nodded. "But first, there's something I have to show you." Leading him over to where Camille lay, she lowered herself gingerly until she was squatting, then she went through Camille's clothes until she found what she was looking for, which she displayed in her palm.

Bravo knelt beside her. "Your knife."

"Not quite." Jenny drew out her own small switchblade.

"They're identical." He looked at her. "She had a duplicate made. That means-"

"She found my knife."

"At the hotel in Mont St. Michel, while you were unconscious. I went to the bathroom, left her alone with you. I didn't want to leave you, but she assured me it was okay."

"Of course it was, she was poring through my things."

He looked down at Camille's face, pale, porcelain-beautiful even in death. "She slit Father Mosto's throat, not Cornadoro. She jumped me in the corridor outside his office."

"I wonder how much she enjoyed it," Jenny said bitterly.

"Jenny-"

"She must have enjoyed tearing us apart."

Bravo nodded sadly. "That was her plan all along, I can see it now."

With a soft groan, Jenny rose. "What a supreme bitch."

A gorgon, Jordan had called her. In this, too, he wasn't wrong, Bravo mused. But she had been even more than that. He rose at last to stand with his arm around Jenny, looking down into the face of the devil seen and recognized by Father Damaskinos.

Chapter 33

Sunset shrouded them in its cool embrace. The sky was on fire, layered with tiers of pink clouds. It was a relief to be free of the cavern, of the horrors that had awaited them there.

"The cache," Jenny said. "What happened, Bravo? Did your father lead you astray?"

"On the contrary," he said. "I never read you or Camille his last cipher, because he warned me against it."

"What do you mean?" In the soft swirl of shadows in the small meadow, she turned. "Wait, he knew you wouldn't be alone, didn't he?"

"Well, it was a supposition, one that makes good sense when you think about it," Bravo said. "You see, the moment the Knight attack began, he'd taken the precaution of moving the contents of the cache out of its original container. But he was adamant that if I was with anyone-anyone at all-I go to the original burial site. This way, I could draw out whoever was against me. Over the centuries, the power of the Quintessence has had the ability of corrupting even those who thought themselves steadfast. My father was told that it was the origin of all the traitors within the Order."

Jenny looked at him with the sun in her eyes. "He was told? By whom?"

"Fra Leoni."

An early evening wind had sprung up. All around them, the wildflowers bobbed, bent their heads as if in obeisance.

"He's still alive." Jenny's voice was an awed whisper.

"Against all logic, it would seem so."

"Logic has nothing to do with it," Jenny said. "It's all about faith."

He nodded. "I understand that now."

"It's here," he said, kneeling by the Cauldron, the sacred spring of the Orthodox Greeks. From the reddish earth in front of him rose the cracked plinth of an ancient pillar. Jenny leaned on his shoulder as she lowered herself beside him. Bravo cleared away a layer of pine needles and leaf mold. Beetles and centipedes scuttled for safety. The smell of decay that fed new life rose up to them like the aroma of a cool morning.

"Are you all right?" Bravo asked. "You can do this?"

She smiled, and all the pain was erased from her face. "I can do this, I have to do this."

Together, they dug down, lifting handfuls of earth, piling it higher and higher until there appeared beneath the worked stone plinth a small wooden chest. Painted with primary-colored boats, fish and birds, it was wholly unlike the original container she had unearthed in the cavern.

Bravo sat back on his haunches and laughed. "It's the toy chest I had as a kid."

"Oh, Bravo." Jenny put a hand on his shoulder.

Silently, reverently, they went back to work, brushing the last of the earth off the top of the chest, digging out the sides. At last, it was revealed, and they lifted it out.

As Bravo reached out to open it, Jenny said, "I don't think-" Then her eyes rolled up and she collapsed. At once, he laid her flat, listened for her breath, took her pulse. She was alive, but his hand came away covered in blood. Quickly now, he took off his shirt, ripping it into strips. With a rising sense of urgency, he unwound the tourniquet she'd fashioned out of her own shirt. He was appalled to see the wound. He wiped away the blood seeping out of it. There was no doubt, the wound was far more serious than she'd made it out to be. He bound her again, using two of the strips he'd made of his shirt, making a double layer, tying them both tighter in an effort to cut down on the rate of blood loss. He looked around. Of course there was not a soul in sight. It was at best a kilometer to the Sumela Monastery, and from there a twenty-minute ride to the clinic at Macka. He took her pulse again and was alarmed to discover it slower than it had been before. If it became erratic… Even so, he might not get her back to civilization in time.

He wiped his sweating face, turned to face his toy chest. He knew what lay within. With a trembling hand, he opened the chest. Here were the secrets the Order had been amassing for centuries-documents, secret treaties, clandestine histories, suppressed memoirs, incriminating financial records. And there, among them, was the Testament of Jesus Christ. He touched it, but did not pick it up. Funny, now that he had found it, he had no time to read it. His attention was elsewhere: the small clay phial with its stone stopper.

The Quintessence.

All he had to do was open it, apply the tiniest amount to Jenny's wound. She would be healed, her life saved. How could he not do it? He picked it up, cupped it in his two palms. It was almost without weight, as if its contents were lighter than air, like angels' wings.

Open it, apply a small amount to her wound. She would live-absolutely, no question. If he didn't, there was only faith to go on, faith that he could get her to the clinic, that he could save her.

His fingers curled around the stopper.

And then what? What would happen to her afterward? Would she live to be 150 years old? two hundred? four hundred, like Fra Leoni? Would she want that? Had he the right to do it, to change the natural order? Surely, his father had had the same agonizing decision to make when Steffi grew gravely ill…

And then his father appeared beside him.

"Dad, what should I do?"

"It's your decision now, Bravo."

"I love her, I don't want her to die."

"I loved Steffi, I didn't want her to die."

"But you betrayed her, you slept with Camille."

"I'm human, Bravo, just like everyone else."

"But you're not like everyone else, Dad!"

Dexter smiled. "When you were a child, it was good for you to see me that way, it gave you comfort and security, that's the way of the world. But now you're an adult, you have to accept me as I really was, you have to provide your own comfort and security…"

Bravo, blinking away tears, found himself once again alone by the seething Cauldron, Jenny beside him. He heard her labored breathing, looked down again at the vessel that held the Quintessence.

Faith. Was his faith strong enough?

He carefully replaced the Quintessence in the chest. But it was as if the phial were alive, it was so difficult to let it go, to pull his hand away. With an extreme effort he did, closed the lid and lowered the toy chest back into the hole his father had made for it.

The buried Quintessence nevertheless beat like a telltale heart as he replaced the soil, tamped it down, replaced the bed of pine needles and forest detritus. Then, with a fervent prayer to the Virgin Mary, cradling Jenny in his arms, he began the trek back to Sumela.

Eight hours later, in the middle of the night, Jenny awoke in terrible pain. She cried out. Then Bravo had her hand, was bending over her. She could see his face in the soft lamplight.

"Where am I?"

"Macka," he said. "Next door is the clinic's surgery."

"The cache?"

"It was just where my father buried it," he said. "Breathe easy, Jenny, it's safe."

"I want to get out of here." She tried to rise, moaned. With a rattle of tubes that ran into her, carrying blood and saline, she sank back against the rough pillow.

"Tomorrow or the next day," Bravo said, "when your fever is completely gone, we'll move you to Trabzon."

"We?"

"I called Khalif. He's out of the hospital and is all too happy to come get us with an ambulance. I wasn't going to trust you to a car for the three-hour drive out of the mountains."

He gave her some water, waited a moment while she swallowed. "Go back to sleep now, you need your rest."

"And you don't?"

He laughed, but all she could muster was a smile. For the moment, it was enough.

"Bravo, what will happen now?"

"Now that I have control of the cache, you mean?" He watched her eyes, large and serious. The time had passed for joking, he saw. She needed answers, no less than he had, which was why he hadn't slept a wink since he'd brought her to the clinic at Macka. He'd been too busy thinking, then making a series of calls.

"I've spoken to my sister, Emma," he said. "She's the net-worker, in touch with all the members of the Order, at every level. They have voted. I'm the new Magister Regens."

Her eyes opened wide. "And what of the Haute Cour?"

"It will advise me, just as it advised the Magister Regens centuries ago. New members will have to be nominated, of course. The first one I'll nominate is you."

"Me?"

He laughed again, more softly.

"Then you must also nominate a Venetian nun named Arcangela."

"The Anchorite-yes, I know about her." He nodded his assent. "It's past time the valuable women of the Order were recognized, their ideas, schemes and insights brought fully into the fold."

"And where will we go from here?"

"Sleep now, Jenny. Tomorrow will be soon enough-"

"Not for me. I won't sleep until you tell me."

He sat in the semidarkness contemplating her question. It was a good one, the only one that counted, and he had pondered long and hard through the night as to what needed to be done.

"First, you and I will move the cache to a safer place. I'm going to need time to evaluate its contents, determine what our power really is. The Order needs to continue my father's work. Even as we talk here, the world is changing, and not for the better, I fear. There is a new war coming, Jenny. In fact, it's already begun. My father knew it, and now so do I. A religious war that will rock every nation unless it can be averted. The fundamentalists on each side-the Christians and the Islamics-are determined to exterminate the other, and neither cares who gets in their way. We can't let that happen, can we?"

"No," she said. "We can't."

"Then you'll help me." His excitement rushed out of him like sparks from an engine. "The first order of business is to make contact with all the elements of the Order's ancient religious network my father kept alive and running."

Jenny smiled. It was what she most wanted to hear. But she was already slipping into sleep, and she answered him only in her dreams.

Khalif did not arrive alone. With him when he drew up in the ambulance were two paramedics, who immediately jumped out with a stretcher and went to get Jenny. When Bravo was done directing them, he came out into the narrow street to greet his friend. Khalif's shoulder was bandaged and his arm was in a cast; nevertheless the Turk seemed remarkably chipper.

"Your call was manna from heaven. It's good to be back in the game."

They embraced was if they were long-lost brothers.

Khalif's face turned sober. "How is she?"

"She'll be okay, she's tough."

It was only then that he noticed another figure standing in the shadows across the street. At first, he seemed unfamiliar. Then Bravo recognized him as the old priest he had first given the coin to at the Church of l'Angelo Nicolo` in Venice. He remembered Jenny asking him if he could trust the old man. Somehow, Bravo had known that he could.

The electric blue eyes watched him as they had in the church, with a mixture of curiosity and amusement. But now there was something else in them: he no longer felt a child in the old priest's eyes.

The paramedics appeared with Jenny on the stretcher. They paused long enough for Bravo to lean over, press his lips to hers.

"I'll be right next to you," he said, "all the way home."

The paramedics put her into the rear of the ambulance, and Khalif climbed in after them. The driver sat behind the wheel, picking at his nails. A dog barked somewhere along the sun-blasted street, otherwise all was still. Not another soul in sight.

The old priest crossed the street.

"You didn't use the Quintessence, did you?"

Bravo felt the weight of the priest's solemn gaze on him. He had spoken in Trapazuntine Greek, but Bravo suspected it could just as well have been Latin, or Greek or any number of ancient languages.

"No," he replied in the same language.

"Why not?" the old priest asked. "You had cause."

"But not just cause."

The old priest's robes were black, his long, wild hair pure white. Around his neck was a short chain that held a key-a key, Bravo saw now, that was the twin to the one his father had left for him, the key that opened the original chest that had for centuries held the order's cache of secrets. It was the key held by Jon Molko, Dexter Shaw's backup. Dexter must have given it to the old priest for safekeeping.

The old priest inclined his head imperceptibly. "I've waited a long time for this moment."

Bravo took a deep breath. He knew he was looking at living history. "And if I'd opened the Quintessence?"

The old priest smiled. "It is sealed with wax, but over the centuries the seal cracked, and when your father removed the lid he found that the contents had evaporated."

Bravo waited, stunned. His heart was a trip-hammer beating in his chest. "He tried to save my mother."

"Though I counseled against it." The old priest locked his fingers together. "He wanted to be Magister Regens. His idea was correct, but he was not the one. Now you know why."

Bravo bowed his head for a moment, trying to gather himself. Then he said, "What is to be done with the Testament?"

The old priest's gaze held steady. He had not blinked once, not even in this bright sunlight. "That is for you to decide."

"It is not for me alone to decide. I am asking for your advice."

The old priest stroked his beard for a moment. "You already understand the extreme danger of the Quintessence, you've felt it yourself. The Testament of Christ is just as dangerous. What it contains-the words of Jesus-has the power to upend all Christianity. Is this what you want?"

"But it's the truth."

"Ah, yes, the truth." The old priest took a step toward him. "During its long history the Order has continually struggled with the truth. How the debates raged back and forth within the Haute Cour! Now I must ask you what we asked ourselves: which will better promote the natural order of things, truth or perception? When you have answered that question, Bravo, you will know what to do with the Testament."

He began to walk up the street, in the direction of Sumela. "Wait," Bravo said. "Will I see you again?"

The old priest paused. "Oh, yes."

"What shall I call you, then. Surely not Fra-"

"That name is ancient, it has outlived its moment," the old priest said at once. "Call me, rather, by my Christian name, the name my father and mother gave me at birth. Call me Braventino."