Книга - The Crimson Code

The Crimson Code
Rachel Lee


December 25: A bomb rips through a packed cathedral in Jakarta.

As the hours pass, terrorist explosions continue around the globe, triggering worldwide panic and creating a nightmare beyond words….

Inside the covert agency known only as Office 119, agents Renate Bachle and Lawton Caine are called upon to identify the groups responsible for the bloodshed. But the so-called Black Christmas attacks are nothing more than a smoke screen for a far more sinister conspiracy. At its heart are ruthless secret societies with blood ties that date back thousands of years, whose goals are nothing less than global domination.

Renate and Lawton are only beginning to fathom how far the darkness extends. With the U.S. president set to deploy nuclear weapons against the wrong targets and religious violence erupting across Europe, they must untangle the interwoven plots before time runs out and Armageddon becomes a terrifying reality.









Praise for RACHEL LEE


“A highly complex thriller…deft use of dialogue…”

—Publishers Weekly on Wildcard

“Rachel Lee deserves much acclaim for her exciting tales of romantic suspense.”

—Midwest Book Review

“The Crimson Code is a smart, complex thriller with enough twists to knot your stomach and keep your fingers turning the pages.”

—New York Times bestselling author Alex Kava

“A suspenseful, edge-of-the-seat read.”

—Publishers Weekly on Caught

“With its smartly paced dialogue and seamless interweaving of both canine and human viewpoints, this well-rounded story is sure to be one of Lee’s top-selling titles.”

—Publishers Weekly on Something Deadly

“Rachel Lee is a master of romantic suspense.”

—Romantic Times BOOKclub




The Crimson Code

Rachel Lee







www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)


To Leslie Wainger, who has always believed in us and who has helped us grow.




Contents


Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Epilogue




Prologue


Jakarta, Indonesia

Arief Sarwano looked at his children sitting in the pew beside him and smiled. Christmas had been kind to his family this year. The electronics firm that employed him had done well, churning out over two hundred thousand units of CyberJoey, the animatronic baby kangaroo that was the year’s top-selling Christmas gift in Australia. It had been Arief’s project, and he had done much of the design work himself. At that moment, tens of thousands of Australian children were clapping their hands in glee as the plush robot hopped around their Christmas trees and thumped its tail on their floors.

Others might think it absurd that he had poured two years of his life into three pounds of plastic, nylon, silicon and metal that modeled one of the earth’s most recognizable animals in a way calculated to attract the attention of five-to nine-year-old children, not to mention the shopping dollars of those children’s parents. But as Arief saw it, making children smile was a noble vocation.

And, when a project hit big, a profitable one. The success of CyberJoey had meant, not only a promotion and a raise, but also a healthy bonus. That bonus would ensure that his daughter could realize her dream of going to the United States to attend Notre Dame University next fall. She wanted to study medicine, in America, at the Catholic university. Not a Catholic university. The Catholic university, the best in America. He chuckled at the memory of the many times she had chided him on that point.

He looked up at the choir and found her in the alto section, slender and beautiful, her long dark hair falling around a face that each day reminded him more and more of her mother. For an instant, he felt the pang again.

The loss of his wife of twenty years, a victim of cancer, had blighted the past two Christmases. Arief had dealt with that loss by pouring himself into his work. In the past months, however, he had come to think that his wife’s spirit inhabited every CyberJoey. The toy’s eyes had been modeled on hers. And if just one Australian child looked into those eyes and saw love, then Arief’s wife was still alive in that child’s heart.

The Jalan Cathedral was packed, which was no surprise. The noonday Mass on Christmas was always the most crowded. But it was the one Arief had attended for the past twenty years, the continuation of a family tradition that began at seven in the morning with presents and continued through the late-afternoon dinner. His daughter, rather than his wife, would cook that dinner. But the traditions remained alive, and, with them, a sense of hope that one day Arief would feel whole again.

It was that thought which was shattered by the blinding flash, followed immediately by the crushing force of concussion, as the cathedral turned from a doorway to heaven into the depths of hell in the blink of an eye. Arief’s last vision, burned into his retinas, was of his daughter being tossed by an unseen hand through a stained glass window. Then the flames consumed him.

Baden-Baden, Germany

Michael Zeitgenbach could not hear the screams around him. The concussion had shattered his eardrums. In an instant, the still peace of the sunrise Mass had shattered, and in its wake he could feel only the crushing weight of stone on his lower body. His wife, Kirsten, ought to be beside him, somewhere, but the world was black, the air thick with dust and ash.

He ought to be hurting more, he knew. Instead, he could feel only distant pressure from the waist down. As he reached down, trying vainly to push himself free from eight hundred pounds of bloodstained granite, he realized he was going to die. Protruding from his belly was the stem of a chandelier that, seconds earlier, had hung from the ceiling. When he tried to move it, mind-shattering pain exploded through his body. Kirsten, a doctor, would have told him that the metal had pierced his spine.

But Kirsten was not there. She ought to be. They had been sitting together, hand in hand, listening to the traditional Christmas morning readings, when the world had turned upside down in a flash of fire and thunder and darkness. But, reaching around as best he could, he felt no one. No one…except a young girl. Stretching his arm out, he felt the tiny hand.

His niece’s hand. He knew it was her, because the wrist still bore the charm bracelet he had given her that morning. One gift, he had said, then the rest after Mass. The rest would never be given, for her hand was limp in his, and he could find no pulse.

Tears prickled at his eyes as he reached to the other side, above him, anywhere, hoping against hope to spend his last moments touching Kirsten. But it was not to be. She might lie only a meter away, or she might be buried beneath the stone that had crushed his legs. Regardless, he could not find her.

And so he took his niece’s hand once more in his, the limp fingers the last human contact he would carry with him into eternity.

Boston, Massachusetts

Kevin Daugherty worked with the fury of a man possessed. He had felt the rumble through the floor of the firehouse an instant before the thundering boom had shattered the windows around him. Like the other men of his company, he had resented the Christmas Eve shift. He had wished he could be at Midnight Mass with his wife, Mary, and their two children, his parents, brothers, nieces and nephews. Midnight Mass had always been a Daugherty family tradition.

Well, now he was at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross. Not as a worshipper, but as a fireman. As a son, brother, husband and father, looking for his family. Crouching beneath the wall of water being thrown up by the hose team behind him, he and his partner kicked aside broken glass, and lifted shattered and still burning pews, hoping for any sign of life in the blackened faces.

Kevin’s grandfather had told stories about bomb-shattered buildings in France, back in the early weeks after D-day, and a second cousin in New York had helped to pick through the wreckage of the World Trade Center. A four-year veteran, Kevin had seen his share of burned-out buildings. But nothing could have prepared him for what he saw now.

“Daugherty, you have to get out of there.” His captain’s voice crackled over the radio.

“There may be survivors,” Kevin answered. “My family is in here somewhere. I’ve got to find them.”

“We’re going to lose the building,” the captain said. “You have to get out. Now. That’s an order, Daugherty.”

Kevin shook his head and kicked aside burning missals, clearing a path to the next row of pews, until he felt a hand on his shoulder, pulling him. He turned and saw his partner, Gerry O’Brien, eyes wide behind the breathing mask.

“We gotta go, Kev,” Gerry said, pointing upward. “It’s coming down.”

Kevin looked up at the roof section above him, watching it swell and recede as if breathing with the heat of the flames. It would not last another two minutes, he knew. Once a building started to breathe, it gave way. It was basic firefighting training: Get out.

But his wife was here somewhere, along with Kevin Junior and little Becky. He couldn’t just leave them to the merciless fire, leave them to be nothing but charred forms to be pulled out days later, when the embers had cooled enough for rescue teams to pull apart the wreckage. Mary and Kevin Junior and Becky couldn’t be hauled out like so many slabs of barbecue.

“I’m not going,” Kevin said. “I have to find them.”

“Anyone still in here is dead already,” Gerry said. “And we’re gonna be dead, too. We’re pulling out. Now.”

“You go,” Kevin said.

Gerry shook his head. “It doesn’t work that way, Kev. You stay, I stay. I go, you go. Are you going to kill me, too, along with them?”

And there was the truth of it. Kevin’s partner, and the hose team, wouldn’t abandon him. If he stayed in the inferno, they would die with him. He had no right to heap their families’ grief atop his own. Slowly, slowly, his fingers opened and the fire axe fell from his hands. The bitter tears clouded his vision more than the smoke around him as he shuffled back behind the hose team and began to make his way out.

He could escape the wreckage of the cathedral. He could not escape the wreckage of his heart.




1


Rome, Italy

Renate Bächle had dragged Lawton Caine to Midnight Mass at St. Peter’s Basilica. How she had gained the coveted tickets to hear the pope serve one of the two most beautiful Masses of the year, she would not say. She had merely given him a look from those icy blue eyes of hers that these days sometimes even held a twinkle. They had twinkled when he asked.

Lawton Caine, formerly Tom Lawton of the FBI, now a dead man with a new identity working for the U.N.’s ultrasecret Office 119, would ordinarily have skipped Mass entirely. He was a lapsed Catholic who liked being lapsed.

But this Midnight Mass…it was unlike any he had ever attended. There was no sense of urgency, no sense that a schedule must be met, no tired children longing for their beds and keeping parents preoccupied.

No, this had been a Mass devoted to true spirituality. Every moment had been treated as if it were the end in itself. Dignitaries from all over the world had shared in the solemnity and celebration, and Tom had walked out of the Basilica feeling as if he had for the very first time come in contact with the core of his Catholic faith. As if for that brief period he had stepped out of time into eternity.

In short, he’d been wowed.



Renate, too, had been wowed. For those moments, she had allowed herself to feel something she hadn’t felt in a long time: vulnerable. She had opened herself to the miracle that the Mass was supposed to be. Of course, that vulnerability couldn’t last long. Vulnerability seemed to be something she had virtually erased from her nature.

But after the Mass, she had mentioned to Lawton that she missed home and the Weihnachtsmärkte, the traditional Christmas markets set up in every German city and town. She let her thoughts drift back to memories of those festive squares, decorated with holiday lights, where carols, laughter and Glühwein flowed in equal measure. To his surprise, she had carried him away with her into the city of Rome, to a small German restaurant that was open all night. There they drank the traditional hot spiced wine, joined in the carols and ate bratwurst that, if it could not take the whole of her back home, could at least take her taste buds there.

Tom, she knew, was missing Miriam Anson and Terry Tyson, friends from his previous life with the American FBI and the closest thing he had to family. She hoped that the restaurant gave him at least some sense of a home.

They left at five in the morning and wandered the darkened streets of Rome, taking in the age of the place, the history that seemed to fill even the air. They spent some time at the Trevi Fountain, shivering in the cool air, receiving a blessing from a passing monsignor who paused to smile at them—probably thinking they were lovers. He made a swift sign of the cross over them, murmuring the Latin words: In nomine Patris, Filii et Spiritu Sancti.

Magical.

“Right about now,” Renate said, “my parents and the rest of my family are sitting in Mass back home.”

She rarely spoke of her family. She, too, was officially dead, as were all of the agents at Office 119. They were a small community of people without country, without family. Save for each other.

Tom reached out and squeezed her hand. She didn’t pull away.

All of a sudden, the magic shattered.

They heard a rumble and saw flames rise into the predawn sky. Almost at the same instant, both their pagers went off, hers with a shrill beeping, his with a demanding buzz.

They exchanged worried looks and hailed the first cab they could find. Renate slammed the door on vulnerability. It was time to work.



“The bombs exploded within minutes of each other,” the man they all called Jefe was saying. In his past life, Tom had known him as John Ortega, a fellow FBI agent. Now his name was unknown and unspoken. He was simply Jefe. Chief. “Midnight Mass in Boston. Early-morning Mass in Baden-Baden, and here in Rome. Noon Mass in Jakarta. All were timed for fifteen minutes after the hour. I guess they didn’t want to miss the late arrivals.”

“Baden-Baden.”

Renate whispered the name. Her face went from rosy to ashen in a single instant.

Jefe paused, his attention drawn from the other agents to Renate. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“My…family,” she said, breaking the unwritten code of silence about such things, a code enforced by the desire to protect loved ones left behind.

Color returned to Renate’s face, but it was not the glow of earlier that morning. Whatever warmth she had felt then was freezing now into a cold, killing resolve.

Tom met her eyes and pressed her shoulder. “Take it easy, Renate. You can’t do a damn thing right now.”

“Yeah,” said the chief. “Besides, the info is still scattered. We don’t know anything for sure yet.”

Renate’s eyes fixed on the chief. “My entire family was at the six o’clock Mass in Baden-Baden.”

From outside, the endless wail of sirens could still be faintly heard.



Intel continued to come in to the office, but it remained sparse for hours. The chaos in each stricken city was such that little information was being sent out of the affected areas. Everyone was too busy dealing with the death and destruction.

A huge rear-projection screen displayed a world map, political boundaries in blue, continents outlined in green. As the morning progressed, red dots appeared by more and more cities, as reports came in.

Large television sets built into another wall were tuned to CNN International, Al Jazeera and other European, Asian and American networks. Pictures of destruction began arriving, but little was actually known.

Eventually the news began to identify other targets: a North Sea drilling rig, a pipeline in Turkey, nuclear weapons assembly plants in New Mexico and Kiev and the computer files of the New York Stock Exchange.

Despite the other targets, the chaotic map soon told a horrifying story. There was no question that the Catholic Church was a primary target of this terrorism. Along with the other targets, a major cathedral had been destroyed in each time zone. The only exception was Baden-Baden, where the target had been a simple family parish in the foothills of the Schwarzwald.

“And Baden-Baden doesn’t fit,” Tom said, looking at the map. “Why two churches in the same time zone? Why not another cathedral? Why not Köln, or Notre Dame in Paris?”

“None of it fits,” Jefe said, reading from a computer screen. “The initial reports say no one was injured in the attacks on economic targets. The workers on that North Sea rig say they were given time to evacuate before the rig was blown. And yet they blow up churches with thousands of innocent worshippers. It doesn’t make sense.”

As he spoke another light winked on, this one in South America. Brazil. Rio.

“Maybe they hit Baden-Baden because there was extra security in Paris and Cologne,” Margarite Renault said, her English accented by her French background. A former member of the Sûreté, she was around forty, with classic Gallic features, dark hair and eyes. “The European nations have beefed up their antiterrorist activities. Maybe Baden-Baden was a target of opportunity.”

Renate could listen no longer. She knew what had been done—and why. There was no reason to dance around the issue. Justice demanded honesty. “It wasn’t a target of opportunity. They murdered my family. They couldn’t find me, so they murdered my family.”



A half hour later, Margarite found Tom in a side cubicle. She lowered her voice so she could not be overheard. “I am worried about Renate. She is always so controlled, but this…” A shrug. “This she cannot control. It has happened. Now she must—how you say?—deal with it.”

Tom nodded slowly. He was more worried about Renate than he wanted to admit. If her entire family had been in the church that had been blown up, he didn’t have to guess how she would react. She was tough and disciplined, but the cold, hard look in her eyes left no doubt where her thoughts were running.

His heart would not allow him to leave her alone in her shock and rage. He entered her office and sat in the chair beside her desk. “Renate.”

She ignored him, tapping away at her keyboard.

“Renate.”

Slowly she looked up. He wanted to see emotion in her eyes. Any emotion, even anger. All he saw was the icy coldness of a lifeless glacier. “I’m working.”

“You’re not working,” he dared to say, then plunged on before she could argue. “You’re looking for revenge.”

Something sparked then in those cold blue eyes. “Don’t I deserve it?”

“You don’t know anything for sure.”

With a swift gesture, she turned her flat-panel monitor toward him. “You see? My family’s kirche. It’s on the list. They are dead.”

He felt his heart crack for her. “Maybe…”

“No maybe. Don’t tell me maybe. I know.” For the briefest instant, a fathomless grief broke through, crumpling her face. Then it was gone, so fast he wasn’t sure he had seen it.

“Just remember our mission,” he said. “Our mission, Renate. Don’t forget who we are. We are not them.”

“They are animals,” she said coldly. “And I am going to kill the ones who hurt my family. I am going to kill them with my own hands.”

“Renate.”

But she had turned away, pulling her monitor back and resuming her online hunt for information.

Oddly, he found himself thinking of Midnight Mass again, and offering a silent prayer that Renate’s family had for some reason not been in that church. But as he turned away and glimpsed the horrific images that were now filling all the TV screens, he decided that God was probably not in a very good mood today. In fact, God was probably not listening at all.



By late afternoon, figures were arriving. None held the mind-numbing counts that had come from the tsunami in the Indian Ocean the previous Christmas, but though the numbers were smaller, the details were just as horrifying. These bombings had not been an act of God. As the acts of men, they were heinous beyond belief, worse even than the Twin Towers in scope. “Black Christmas,” as the networks had begun to call it, would undoubtedly go into the annals of history along with 9/11.

Renate sat at her desk, her demeanor a cloak of ice, as if she had frozen every feeling. Tom checked on her frequently, but she never looked up, choosing instead to keep working at the computer, seeking backdoor information.

They were all doing the same. They all had informants, covert contacts in their old agencies, a collective net cast around the world. Weeks ago they had begun to detect signs that a major terrorist operation was in the works, but they had been unable to pin it down. Equally ominous, no one was claiming responsibility. Usually terrorists were all too eager to step forward and thumb their noses at the world.

Silence reigned. From the dust and the fire came only the cries of victims.

So far, heads of state had been quiet, as if awaiting information before speaking. Only the pope had released a brief message, speaking of martyrdom, grief, consolation and forgiveness.

Forgiveness. Tom doubted that there would be much of that for a while.

Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

Betrayal.

Ahmed Ahsami curled his fists in anger as he watched the reports on three television screens. The BBC, CNN and Al Jazeera were unanimous in their focus on the cathedral bombings, with the other work—the real work, carried out by real soldiers—given only a passing mention. He felt the anger burn in his belly like a white-hot flame.

Betrayed.

He never should have trusted them. Fanatics could not advance the cause of Islam. But he had made a deal with the devil, and the devil would have his due.

Three years of careful planning had been turned to dust, and worse, in the past twelve hours. Three years of arguing, cajoling, convincing his Islamic brothers that they would have to walk a new path if ever they wanted true peace and freedom. Three years of reconnaissance, recruiting, training and more training, to create a network of special operations teams truly worthy of the banner of Allah. Three years directed toward a single goal, a day that would mark forever the ascendance of Islam as a major military and political power.

Betrayed.

On a desk beside him sat a DVD, a DVD the world would never see. It was to have been delivered to the offices of Al Jazeera two hours ago. By now the world would have known the name of Saif Alsharaawi…the Sword of the East. By now the world would have seen the face of Ahmed Ahsami, the face of moderation and determination, every word in his speech carefully crafted.

True justice, true peace, cannot be bought with the blood of innocents…. Islam, like its cousins Christianity and Judaism, deplores the taking of innocent life…. We have shown that we can strike legitimate military and economic targets anywhere, at any time, and that we can do so with justice in our hearts and Allah on our lips…. We ask only that the West leave the Islamic people to govern ourselves, by our own beliefs and our own standards, to pursue our own dreams with the guidance of Allah….

The speech was to have been an olive branch, offered up with the sincerity of a people who had received too much injustice and renounced delivering more. The days of Al Qaeda and Hezbollah, of suicide bombings intended to cause the greatest possible loss of life, were past. Islam could not stand with its feet in a pool of blood. If he and his brothers were to win this war of ideas, they would have to do so by complying with the true will of Allah…and the laws of war.

These were the arguments he had made again and again, as he had risen to the top ranks of Saif Alsharaawi. He had personally approved every target, vetting each for military legitimacy. Oil rigs and pipelines, the nuclear weapons plants, the New York Stock Exchange—the heart of Western materialism—all of those, and the other targets he had intended to strike, were selected after careful evaluation.

The forces of Islam could not match the West in terms of nuclear weapons, guided missiles, aircraft or warships. Ahmed knew that and accepted it. Indeed, he had decided to make that mismatch a cornerstone of his planning. For while he might lack high-tech hardware, he could more than match his opponent in special operations forces: carefully selected, highly trained, highly disciplined and highly motivated. They would be Saif Alsharaawi, the Sword of the East, a surgical strike weapon capable of winning military victory without sacrificing political or moral legitimacy.

But he had not had enough strike teams for today’s attacks, and so he had made and forged what was to have been an alliance of mutual gain. And his allies had betrayed him.

Worse, they had betrayed Islam. For as efficient as his teams had been, the bombings of the cathedrals had wiped out any possibility of moderation. And the West would strike back not at his allies, but at Islam. The senseless bombing of churches would accomplish nothing except to continue and intensify the Fourth Crusade already being waged against his people.

Ahmed knew what he had to do. And once his anger had passed, he would find a way to do exactly that.

He would turn their betrayal against them.


Moab, Jordan, 1230 B.C.

“It is time.”

The young Levite, Elezar, looked at Moses with something akin to fear. The youth was not yet old enough to become a priest, so he was still serving Moses and learning the holy ways, as he had been since his twelfth year. Serving a man who spoke with the Lord through the fire and smoke was often unnerving.

But nothing was as unnerving as this announcement, for it meant that Moses was about to die. Elezar could not imagine a world without Moses. Could not imagine that his own revered great-grandfather Eleazar was fit to take Moses’s place. Eleazar was a great priest, true, and could enter the tabernacle that held the terrifying Ark without injury or death but…

Moses was everything to these people, though they often failed to recognize it. They were a stubborn people, difficult to please, often quick to grumble when Moses was not there to steer them. Elezar tried hard not to be that way himself. But now he wanted to cry out to the Lord against the sentence that had been set on Moses.

“Come,” said Moses, picking up a staff and waving the young man to do the same. “We must climb Mount Nebo.”

Leaving the encampment on the plain behind them, they began to climb into the Pisgah Mountains toward Nebo, the highest peak. Elezar half expected to hear the rumble of the Lord’s voice, or see fire atop the peak as his ancestors had seen at Mount Sinai. Which was really not Mount Sinai, but Moses would not tell him where it really was, and none remained among the tribes who could recall, for all who had set out from Egypt with Moses were now dead.

After a long, hot climb, they reached the top of Mount Nebo. Moses spread his arms wide as if to embrace the breathtaking view.

“There, Elezar, you see? There is the land that was promised to the sons of Israel. I will not enter with the tribes, nor will you.”

Elezar stiffened. “But I thought…”

Moses turned to him, his eyes kinder than Elezar had ever seen them.

“Let us sit a while and talk, Elezar.”

Though it was said he was over a hundred and thirty years old, Moses sat with all the ease of a youth like Elezar on the hard, rocky ground. Elezar sat facing him.

“There are things you must understand, Elezar.”

The young man could no longer hold silent. “It is wrong that you cannot enter the Promised Land. It is wrong that you must die for such a small error when so many of our people have made larger ones and lived! Why can you not offer an atonement sacrifice? Why is the Lord being so harsh with you?”

Moses listened to the protests, smiling a little all the while. “My time to leave has come. I am no longer needed here. But I do not want these people to feel abandoned.”

Elezar knitted his brow, sensing there was something behind those words.

“Child, do you know your lineage?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Do you know the line of your mothers?”

Elezar hesitated. “I know best the line of my fathers.”

“You perhaps do not know then that you are descended from my line, as well. My daughters and their daughters married your fathers many times over. You are a Levite, but you are also mine.”

The news caused a trembling in Elezar, like a leaf disturbed by the wind. “It has not been told to me.”

“It was as I wished it. Until now. There are things you must understand, mysteries you must learn. These mysteries were once the pride of Egypt. They were set down on a sappir gemstone, written by Thoth himself, and discovered by my brother, Pharaoh Akhenaten, when we were but children. We studied the stone throughout our youth. And Akhenaten was the first to fully understand it. Thus he began the worship of the One True God… Aten…our Lord. The stone was once in the Ark. Now…”

Moses opened his leather bag and showed Elezar a polished sapphire pyramid, so small that it fit in the palm of the hand. A blue pyramid that seemed to hold as much depth as the night sky. Elezar gasped, amazed as he thought he saw shapes dancing within the stone. But he could not imagine such a thing, that Moses would steal from God himself.

“Relax, my son,” Moses said, reaching out to pat Elezar’s shoulder. “As I said, this is not the tablet of the law. This is far older. And far too powerful to leave in untrained hands. The Hebrews are a great people, but too stiff-necked for their own good sometimes. A knowledge such as this, in the hands of a people preparing to make war, would be…horrifying. But I have left them the Urim and the Thummim, which will be enough to aid them.”

“What is this power?” Elezar asked. “Is God not the only power that exists?” He felt his world reeling.

“There is only one God, and he is our only God.” Moses opened a small pouch and from it poured a fine white powder. “Manna,” he said. “The Hebrews think it came down from the heavens. In fact, it is a recipe from this stone, and El Shaddai showered it upon us at night as we camped near the foot of the mountain. Eat some, my son, for it will give you long life.”

Gingerly, Elezar reached for the powder, allowing Moses to pour some into his hand. He tasted of it and found it not unpleasant, though not exactly savory. It had the slightest hint of honey to it. The climb had dried his mouth and throat, making swallowing difficult, but he had brought a water skin and was able to wash it down. Moses, too, ate of the powder.

“Now,” said Moses, “the people will think I have died. You will descend the mountain and tell them I have gone to my fathers, and then you shall cleanse yourself as the law requires after touching a corpse. By this they shall believe I am dead and that you have buried me.

“Then, by night, you shall return to me. We must go to the place where your real training can begin. The mysteries must pass down, and you will be their messenger.”

Elezar’s jaw had fallen. “I am to lie?”

“It will not be a lie, for I am returning to my fathers. And as far as my people are concerned, I will be dead and gone. As will you. It will be years before you re-enter the world, Elezar, and when you do, you will be a man much changed, for you will know the secret teachings of El Shaddai.”

El Shaddai. The Lord of the Mountain.




2


Guatemalan Highlands, Present day

Father Steve Lorenzo had no idea of the carnage spreading around the world on that Christmas. His goal in life had become very simple: to keep himself and his flock alive. For the past fourteen months, he and his Quiche companions had wandered these mountains, hunted by both the Guatemalan police and the rebels. His once smooth chin now sported a bushy beard, and he could hardly remember the sensation of a hot bath.

And yet it was Christmas, and most of his friends were still alive to celebrate it.

He had no vestments. His cassock had long since given way to peasant clothing offered to him by his friends, who could hardly spare even that. He wore sandals one of his flock had made from vine and sections of tire rubber.

And never had he felt closer to God.

When life seemed its worst, as it had often since the police attack on the village of these people, he found a deep well of spirituality that reminded him of the early days of Christianity, when to hold faith in Jesus brought persecution and often demanded flight. Those early Christians had possessed little more than his tiny flock of survivors. In this time he lived as the early martyrs had lived, and it refreshed his faith even as it wore him out.

But his little band was well versed in the skills needed to survive in these mountains. The food might not be as reliable, nor always as familiar, as their rich fields of maize and their herds of sheep, but the forest was bountiful in its own right, and his friends knew how to use everything it provided.

This Christmas morning he celebrated Mass yet again on an altar made of fallen trees, with tortillas made of corn flour he had managed to purchase—along with beans—from a village they had passed a few days ago, with the few quetzals remaining in his pockets. The women had made the tortillas, patting them back and forth to flatten the balls of dough with an expertise that came from lifelong experience. They had been lightly cooked on a rock set amidst the burning coals of a fire. A nearly smokeless fire. Steve was still amazed that they could manage that here in the jungle.

He used the chalice and paten given him on his ordination so long ago by family and friends. The years had burnished them, and now when he touched them he remembered the faces of all his loved ones. Yet he was determined that when the time came, he would sell them without regret to keep these people alive.

It had been a long time since he had even thought of the Kulkulcan Codex, or the reason he had been sent to these people. The Church’s concern was so far away now, so remote.

He smiled into the faces of his flock and lifted a tortilla for all to see. Esto es mi cuerpo. This is my body.

This was all that mattered.

Fredricksburg, Virginia

Earlier that morning, FBI agent Miriam Anson was in church with her husband, Terry Tyson, a D.C. homicide detective, when her pager began to vibrate insistently. She had been tempted to ignore it entirely until after the service—this was Christmas, after all—when it started buzzing a second time. She turned to Terry, about to whisper an apology, when she saw he had pulled his own pager off his belt and was looking at the number.

Damn! The word exploded in her head, and she touched Terry’s arm. He looked at her, and she jerked her head toward the rear doors. He nodded and followed her just as the congregation stood up to sing a hymn. Nearly a thousand voices singing “Pass Me Not” followed them out into the frigid morning air.

Fredericksburg, beneath a bright blue sky and a layer of fresh snow clinging to trees and patches of grass, looked beautiful this morning. Picture-postcard perfect, Miriam thought as she grimly pulled her cell phone from her purse and dialed. Terry turned his back to her and did the same.

If they were both being paged…

“Anson,” Miriam said into her phone. “Kevin Willis called me.”

Kevin’s voice sounded in her ear a second later. “Come in now,” he said. “Black Crescent.” The current code for terror attack.

All Christmas spirit vanished from Miriam’s heart. “I’m on my way.” She flipped her phone closed and saw Terry turning to her, his dark face creased with consternation.

“I have to go in,” he said.

“Me, too.”

Now, hours later, as she sat through one briefing after another on the growing worldwide horror, Miriam wondered at the hearts of men who could perpetrate such atrocities on this holiest of days.

It would be so easy to give in to hate. But hate would not bring her any closer to justice. It would only push her closer to the very evil she fought.

As the briefing officer presented yet more grim statistics and the anger flashed through her, Miriam reminded herself of the central truth of the Christmas sermon she had heard: God appears in this world in stables, not in mansions or palaces, in the quiet of the human heart and not in a blaze of herald trumpets.

And not in the blinding, crushing explosions of bombs.

No, she couldn’t blame God for this one. Humans had done this all on their own. And if Miriam could help track them down, in the dark, silent corners where they hid…that would be the coming of God in this madness.

Rome, Italy

“I have to go to Baden-Baden,” Renate said to the chief. Lawton Caine, who was in the office, too, looked at her with something between sympathy and concern.

Jefe looked at her as if she were mad. “Are you out of your mind? You know the rules we play by.”

“They murdered my family,” she said tautly.

“I know.” The chief’s voice dropped with sorrow. “But you’ll do no good there now.”

“I have to go.”

“Damn it!” Cursing might be considered extremely impolite by Germans, but for once Jefe didn’t seem to care about cultural sensibilities. “Haven’t you noticed the pattern? Baden-Baden doesn’t fit.” He slapped his open hand against the paper map of the world on the back wall of his office, a map that covered nearly the entire space. “If you’re right, they’re after you!”

Lawton stiffened and straightened. “They think she’s dead.”

She shook her head. “After what happened in Idaho and Montana, they know better. There was absolutely no reason to pick that church in Baden-Baden if they thought I was dead. The grudge is an old one, Law. A very old one. What I did to the Brotherhood…”

The chief compressed his lips tightly. “I’ll have to forbid it. You stay here, Renate, where your skills can actually do some good.” He sighed. Then he ran his fingers impatiently through his dark hair. “Okay,” he said. “Renate, why don’t you tell me who would have the funds to support this attack, apart from the Saudi royal family.”

Renate regarded him stonily. “The Frankfurt Brotherhood.”

“Precisely! So why hit a parish church in Baden-Baden? To get you there. They’re hoping you’ll go to find out what happened to your family. Bookworm shows up again in her hometown. Renate, you nearly exposed them a few years ago. I don’t think they’ve forgotten.”

Renate lowered her head for a moment. Then she looked straight at the chief, her eyes like chips of glacial ice. “I’ll take a job as a dealer at the casino. I’ll change my appearance. My father worked there, and there will be talk. Plenty of it.”

“You’d be recognized within an hour. Renate, we could even give you contact lenses, hair dye and facial implants, and your old friends would still know you. You’re entirely too distinctive.”

“I’m not going to let them get away with this,” she said. “This is not negotiable, Jefe. I’m going to take the Brotherhood down. And I’m going to take out the son of a bitch who planted the bomb in my family’s church. It’s only a matter of how.”

“Then for God’s sake, let’s think about the how,” Lawton said. “He’s right. Going into Baden-Baden would do nothing but sign your own death warrant. Hell, we’re not going to find them in Baden-Baden anyway. You know that.”

“What’s their weakness, Renate?” Jefe asked. “The most you’ll find in Baden-Baden is a hit team waiting for you. A hit team you won’t even be able to trace back to them. So what is their weakness?”

“Money,” she said, instantly. “It’s their power base. It’s the blood running in the veins of the Brotherhood.”

“Well, blood runs back to the heart and the head,” Lawton said. “If we follow the money, we find the people who killed your family.”

“You can’t follow their money,” Jefe said. “They’re all bankers. They can hide money with the best of them. And you don’t even have a thread to pull to get all of it started. Renate, I know how you’re feeling, but the right thing to do is to focus on Black Christmas.”

“Our entire office is focused on Black Christmas,” she said, her voice dripping icy resolve. “The police agencies of the entire world will be working Black Christmas. You can spare me. You know that.”

“And we do have a thread to pull,” Lawton said. “We have Jonathan Morgan. Edward Morgan’s father. Edward was Brotherhood. If he was, his father is.”

Lawton had been on the case when Edward Morgan had masterminded the plan to kill U.S. Senator Grant Lawrence—at the time the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination—as well as financing a training camp for Guatemalan revolutionaries in Idaho. Although Lawrence had survived, he was now out of the presidential picture, seemingly content to be the senior senator from Florida. None of it could be proven in a court of law, however. None of it. That loose end still troubled Lawton more than he could say.

“That still doesn’t explain how you’re going to track their money,” Jefe said.

“Banks have a private Internet,” Renate said. “That’s how they transfer money, and I’ll bet the Brotherhood uses that network for its communications. If we can hack into that network, we can find them.”

“And how are you going to do that?” Jefe asked.

“I’m going to Frankfurt,” Renate said. “I broke in once before. I can do it again.”

“You’re not going alone,” Jefe said. “Lawton, you’re with her. You’ll need a computer guy, too. Take Assif Mondi from information services.”

“We may end up needing more than that,” Lawton said. “Niko Petropolis is available. He just got out of rehab. He took a bullet on that operation in Chechnya, remember?”

“I’ll have to ask the doctor if he’s field ready,” Jefe put in.

“So ask,” Renate said. Her voice was steely with resolve.

“Oh, I will,” Jefe replied. “But first, tell me what you have in mind.”




3


Saint-Arnans-la-Bastide, France

General Jules Soult, formerly of the French Army and now retired, sat in his study, enjoying a Cuban cigar as he looked up at the portrait of his renowned ancestor Marshall Jean Soult. The Marshall had built a great reputation in his service to Napoleon, although after Napoleon’s first exile he had briefly collaborated with the Bourbon king.

Soult pondered that collaboration as the television behind him continued its incessant assault of news about Black Christmas. Collaboration, he deemed, was often necessary for a man to achieve his ultimate goals. No shame therein.

Jules turned his head a fraction and watched the stream of videotape showing the worldwide destruction. He told himself he was sorry for all the lives lost and crossed himself while murmuring a small prayer as he had learned during his Catholic upbringing.

But the truth was that this plan had been his. Well, with a few added directions from his Order, an order that dated back to the Knights Templar. He still didn’t understand why they’d wanted to make that ridiculous detour to the small church in Baden-Baden, but he was a man who followed his instructions—to a point.

He turned back to the portrait of the first famous Soult. They were both military men, and as such they understood that there was a human price for every gain and every loss. Today’s activity was a major gain.

While the world reeled and grieved and hunted Islamic terrorists, his men would be doing their stealthy work in the streets.

Jules Soult was a man who studied history intently. George Santayana had said that those who do not study the past are condemned to repeat it. Soult agreed. One must study history in order to learn where the world’s great leaders had gone wrong and to improve upon plans that had gone awry in the past, one way or another.

Take Hitler, for example. Napoleon had tried to invade Russia and had been defeated by the winter. Hitler had not learned sufficiently from Napoleon’s lesson and had expected too much of his panzers.

Soult was determined not to repeat anyone’s mistakes. There was much to be learned in the historical record. Europe had passed the age where an emperor might be accepted, but it had not passed the day when it would accept a strong, unifying leader.

Soult knew he was that leader. His bloodline traced directly back to the Merovingian rulers of Europe, the blood that every ruler since the first century had carried or married into. He might never wear a crown, but he still believed he could reestablish a dynasty.

Much the way Hitler had. Only he would not make the same mistakes. No, he had studied history, and he knew what to avoid.

Hitler had lacked the gift of Islamic terrorism by which to demonize a people. For all of the long-standing hatred of those whom the bastard Church said had murdered the Christ, the Jews had done nothing to harm their European neighbors. And never again would the people of Europe be led to demonize an innocent race.

But radical Islam…that created an opportunity, one that he intended to exploit to the fullest. He had insinuated himself into the planning of Black Christmas—anonymously, of course—and ordered the bombings of the cathedrals. The original Black Christmas plan would not have served his needs. But what had actually happened would work perfectly.

European Muslims would be his scapegoat, the people against whom he could direct violence and thereby distract the people of Europe from his true aims. Moreover, as they joined in the violence against Muslims, they would become inured to hatred and killing. That coldness of heart would serve him well when the time came to recapture the rightful seat of Merovingian power.

Soon the phone would ring, and like Hitler before him, Soult would be given a free hand to conduct espionage against his enemies. He would hire his Ernst Röhm, create his brownshirts to incite the very violence he was sworn to prevent. Confidence in governments would falter, and when it did, he would step into the void.

That much of Hitler’s plan had been sheer genius. But he would not repeat that madman’s mistakes. No, Soult would do what Hitler could not, nor Napoleon before him. And Black Christmas was the key that had opened the doorway to his future.

He smiled up at the portrait, then took another satisfying puff on his cigar. The ducks were lining up beautifully.

It was a shame so many had died. He would light a candle for them. The Lord would certainly understand, because it was nothing less than the Lord’s birthright that he intended to reclaim.

As if on schedule, the telephone rang. He had been told to expect the call, and he knew who she was and what she wanted even before he picked up the telephone. There were advantages to having connections in the highest and most secret circles of power.

“General Soult,” he said, speaking in accented English.

“Ah, General,” the woman said. “You answer your telephone in English now?”

“I assumed it would be another American reporter asking for an interview,” he lied. “Apparently I was wrong. You are German.”

“Yes,” she said. “My name is Monika Schmidt. I am the director of the European Union—”

“Department of Collective Security,” he cut in. “I have seen you on the news many times today. You have had a very bad few days.”

“We have all had a very bad few days, General,” she said. “Once again, we find that our enemies are more resourceful than we had thought. And that we…”

She didn’t need to finish the sentence. The European news media had been finishing it for her for nearly twenty-four hours. How had the vaunted EUDCS, with its contacts in Interpol and the United States, totally missed the planning for Black Christmas? Frau Schmidt did not have an answer for them, though Soult could easily have supplied it. He had, after all, spent much of his career in French military intelligence. And he had used the skills he had learned there to direct the counterespionage operations for the men who had carried out the attacks.

“These things are always more complex than the public realizes,” he said, trying to affect a tone that mixed professional sympathy with the wisdom of experience. “It takes many years to develop the kinds of contacts that would have provided warning for such an operation.”

“And that is why I call you,” she said. “I have spoken with my superiors and explained to them the need for better human intelligence. You served in Chad and directed the French network in Algiers. You have worked in the Arab community before. You know these people.”

His contacts had not erred. She was, in fact, offering him a position—the very position toward which he had worked for fifteen years.

“Yes,” he said, smiling as he drew on his cigar. “I do. So, Frau Schmidt, how can I be of service to the European Union?”

Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

Monsignor Giuseppe Veltroni carried many problems on his back as he rode in a taxi through the streets of Riyadh to his appointment. To arrive here within two days of the attacks on so many Catholic churches was to put his neck on a chopping block. The people here cheered the destruction, of course. The “man in the street” did not understand the contributions the Church had made toward peace with and for the Muslim world. The average Saudi seemed all too unaware of how much work the Church had done for the Palestinians.

And this little detour was exceptionally dangerous, since he had deserted the protective phalanx the Saudis had provided for him in his capacity as an official representative of the Vatican. But he could not afford listening ears or spying eyes this afternoon. This afternoon he needed to be one-on-one with a man he had nearly come to trust, a man who seemed to have utterly broken that trust.

Beyond that, he was gravely concerned about the fate of Steve Lorenzo. Months had passed since the Guatemalan police had attacked Dos Ojos in an attempt to arrest a rebel involved in the bombing death of the U.S. ambassador. Since then, nothing had been heard from or about the priest he had sent there to find the Codex.

Monsignor Veltroni had virtually adopted Lorenzo, loved him as a son, and felt deep worry about whatever might happen to him. Except… Steve must be dead, or he would have gone to the bishop in Guatemala City, surely?

Veltroni’s heart ached and he wished there was something he could take back, some decision he could unmake so that Steve would return whole and unharmed. Yet he could not be sure the priest was dead, for no remains had ever been found. Perhaps he was still searching for the Codex?

If so, and if he was still with the survivors of Dos Ojos, Steve had both the Guatemalan police and army after him.

And perhaps someone else. Rumors had surfaced in Veltroni’s extremely sensitive intelligence web that someone called “The Hunter” might be pursuing the Codex, as well. If so…Steve faced more trouble than he could possibly imagine.

With a sigh, Veltroni adjusted his mufti, in this case a djellaba with a hood, so that he might blend in better. Beneath he wore his priestly black and his pectoral cross, but he knew better than to think they would save him from harm here.

The cab pulled up before an almost palatial residence. Ahmed Ahsami, a Saudi visionary, was also a member of the Saudi royal family, one of the more minor princes who could live a comfortable lifestyle but not an excessively lavish one. He was also an important official in the oil ministry. Apparently his lifestyle was comfortable enough that one of his employees stepped forward to pay the cab driver before Veltroni could fumble with the unfamiliar currency.

Then, without a word, he was led along surprisingly cool tiled hallways, past beautiful wall mosaics bright with color and into an interior courtyard, where an extravagant fountain bubbled cheerfully and a riot of green plants grew as if this were their native terrain.

The employee—servant?—motioned him to a padded bench. “Sheik Ahsami will send for you shortly.”

Shortly turned into ten minutes, but then the servant reappeared and motioned for Veltroni to follow. At once he was led into a spacious room that forsook the grandiosity of the rest of the building for a very businesslike aspect. Ahmed Ahsami, dressed casually in chinos and a blue business shirt, at once rose and came to greet him.

“Monsignor! It is good of you to come. And I can assure you that you were not followed. So we speak freely, yes?”

Veltroni’s eyes narrowed. “That is the entire reason I have made this trip, Sheik.”

“Please, call me Ahmed. I think we now have more in common than you believe.”

Before the discussion could proceed, however, in the best tradition of desert tribes a repast was laid before them on a long table. Hospitality first, then business. Veltroni chafed, but knew he would insult Ahmed if he did not partake with enjoyment and a considerable amount of inane chat.

As he sipped the powerful Turkish coffee, Veltroni studied his host. The initial smile had faded into a look of deep thoughts that did not run in pleasant waters. While he spoke the correct words as dinner was consumed, Veltroni could tell this was not a man in a state of silent celebration. When they had finished and retired to Ahmed’s drawing room, Veltroni knew it was upon him to break the ice—or shatter it.

“I needn’t tell you how I feel about the Christmas attacks,” Veltroni said. “The Vatican is justifiably and righteously angry. This was a very dangerous gambit, my friend…whoever did it.”

Ahmed studied him carefully, but Veltroni did not flinch. The accusation hung between them, and the burden lay upon Ahmed to dismiss it. Or to admit to it. Without one or the other, the Stewards could have no further dealing with Ahmed. Promises of peace could not survive acts of malicious brutality.

Finally, Ahmed spoke. “The situation is…complex, Guiseppi. There were acts on Christmas for which I and my men were responsible. There were others in which we were betrayed.”

“I know the answer, but I have to ask. You did not authorize the cathedral bombings?”

Ahmed shook his head. “No, my friend. All the attacks were to be on legitimate military, political and economic targets.”

“Like the oil platforms?” Veltroni asked.

Ahmed drew a breath. “Yes, like those. And as I’m sure you know, none of the workers there were injured. After all, why else did we choose to act on Christmas, a time when most at the intended targets would be safely at home? My teams had explicit instructions. They carried out their orders with professional discipline. Alas, my allies—” he spat out the word with anger “—had other ideas. Now we all lose.”

“Yes,” Veltroni said. “We all lose. I don’t suppose you will tell me about these…allies.”

“One betrayal does not justify another,” Ahmed said. “Even if they have no honor, I must answer to Allah for what I have done and what I will do.”

Veltroni considered that statement. Was there honor in protecting someone who has betrayed you, and who in that betrayal has committed mass murder? Once again, he found himself wishing he knew more of Ahmed’s religion. But Islam, like Christianity, suffered from sectarian schisms that rendered simple analysis impossible. Veltroni had no idea of Ahmed’s personal Islam or the tenets he held most deeply.

Of course, there was always the possibility that Ahmed was refusing to reveal his allies because he feared retribution if they were exposed. This would hardly be the first time someone had rationalized self-interest in terms of religious belief. Still, Veltroni did not think it likely that Ahmed would bend on this issue. At least not tonight.

“You understand,” Veltroni said, “that I may have trouble with my superiors over this. They will find it hard to sit back and do nothing after so many of our cathedrals have been bombed. And there is only one direction in which they will look.”

Ahmed’s handsome face creased with both anger and concern. “Of which superiors do you speak? Your superiors at the Vatican? Or your masters in your secret order?”

Veltroni froze. He never would have imagined that Ahmed could have learned anything about the Stewards of the Faith as a secret order. Especially when they appeared to stand in plain sight for all to see.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Ahmed shook his head. “You don’t fool me, my friend. Your Stewards may have a public face and the pope’s blessing, but I am not stupid. What we have discussed together tells me that you have a purpose other than the simple ones of the pope.”

“The Stewards of the Faith are dedicated to preserving the Catholic Church. There is no secret in that.”

“Perhaps not.” Ahmed sighed. “Perhaps only your methods raise doubt. Somehow I do not think the Holy Father, as you call him, would approve of some of what you have agreed to.”

“The Holy Father lives in a simpler world. Reality must be dealt with.”

“Yes,” Ahmed answered. “And now you must trust me to handle reality. I will deal with these traitors because they have harmed my cause.”

For a few minutes, neither man spoke.

“Trust me,” Ahmed said again. “I am as angry as you and your Church.”

Finally Veltroni nodded. When he spoke, his tone intimated a threat that his words did not. “We are left to trust in God. God—Allah—will honor our sincere efforts toward peace, however they may go awry.”

“Yes,” Ahmed said, rising. “Thank you for coming, my friend. You are always welcome in my home. Perhaps you can…buffer…the opinions of your superiors, as they consider these horrors. I have no wish to incite another crusade.”

“Nor do we,” Veltroni said. “Nor do we.”



After Veltroni left, Ahmed Ahsami called for a glass of brandy—one of his few secret vices—and pondered the conversation. Yes, he would deal with the traitors who had blown up the cathedrals. He had already set the wheels in motion to find them and kill them.

But the Catholic Church was now a wild card on the board. The pope had spoken of forgiveness, but Veltroni’s words had carried an implicit threat. Perhaps his doubts about the Stewards of the Faith were correct.

But correct or not, at the moment they were not his greatest concern. He could deal with them later if it became necessary. For now he had to find the men behind the true horror of Black Christmas.

And kill them all.




4


Frankfurt Airport, Germany

“You know,” Assif Mondi said—in English, for the benefit of the rest of the group, who all spoke English but otherwise diverged greatly in their linguistic skills—“it would have been better if you had wanted to crack into this network a few years ago.”

Renate simply stared expressionlessly at him. All the tears she had shed in the privacy of her apartment since Black Christmas had turned into something harder than diamonds. Sometimes her nostrils flared a little, anticipating the scent of blood. The blood of the killers. No one knew it, though, and no one would, because if they learned of it, she would be removed from this case instantly. But deep inside her, the only purpose she had left, the only desire that existed, was to destroy any and all who had taken part in the killing of her family.

But Assif was on his hobbyhorse now and not likely to slow down. “A few years ago the banks were on dial-ups. Can you believe it? They used X.25 protocol, which was a good protection, but not unhackable. Now you want me to break into SWIFTNET, a dedicated hardwired network with the most powerful NetScreen encryption devices made. They have firewalls, massive encryption, and worse, they have an untrust fallback.”

“Untrust?” Lawton asked.

“If the NetScreen device senses anything unusual in the connection, it will immediately fall over to a backup connection. On a different line.”

“Oh, goodie.”

Assif looked at him, then nodded. “Exactly.”

Renate spoke, feeling a flame-lick of the fury that had filled her since Christmas. Assif, she was sure, had no idea how close to the edge he was walking with her. “Are you saying this is impossible?”

“If I thought it was impossible, I would not have come. I am here. It is not impossible. But don’t expect it to be fast.”

They were standing on the chilly, windblown concrete platform at the Frankfurt Airport, awaiting a train to take them to the Frankfurt Main Station. From there they would catch a tram to the business suite Office 119 had rented for them.

Right now there were only a few people inside the steel-and-glass tunnel, farther along the tracks, but Renate glanced toward the escalators and saw more arrivals beginning to appear. The sky through the overhead glass remained gray and uninviting, maybe even promising snow. The chill nipped at her nose.

“Let us talk later,” she said to Assif. Then, surprising Lawton, she pulled out a pack of cigarettes, moved toward the smoking area on the platform and lit one.

Lawton exchanged looks with Assif, who was a handsome Indian with the friendly features of the Punjab. Assif shrugged; then they both followed her.

“Local color,” she said when they joined her. “And the smoking section is here at the end of the platform, where we’re most likely to have privacy.”

Assif laughed. “Then give me one, please? I haven’t smoked since I left New Delhi.”

Lawton stepped upwind. Renate noticed the movement, and something almost like amusement flickered in her eyes before dying. Dying again beneath the ice of death.

They let the first, and then a second, train leave for Frankfurt. Assif and Renate were still chatting casually when a compact, powerfully built man joined the growing number of travelers in the smoking area. He watched indifferently as another train arrived and departed. A short time later, he alone remained with them.

He turned and took a couple of strides their way. “Renate,” he said, holding out his ticket as if he were asking directions. “Are we all here?”

“Yes, Niko. You know everyone?”

He nodded. “By reputation, at least. You must be Lawton Caine.”

Lawton did not extend his hand but simply gave an affirmative glance, as did Assif when Niko greeted him.

When they at last boarded the train to the city, they took seats in separate cars. The essence of the team was now together.

Guatemalan Highlands

Paloma drew Steve Lorenzo away from the rest of the villagers. Most were already asleep, wrapped in colorful wool blankets they carried with them nearly everywhere, blankets that now provided the only protection they had from the elements, except for the tree canopy above. As was so often the case, water dripped steadily from a light rain, and the lanolin in the wool repelled it.

Steve was grateful for his own blanket, a gift from Paloma, the tribe’s elderly bruja. The word could be translated as witch, but in Steve’s estimation it would be fairer to call her a shaman, or, better yet, curandera, healer.

Hundreds of generations of knowledge lay behind Paloma’s lively dark eyes, knowledge of curative properties that U.S. pharmaceutical companies would give—or take—nearly anything to discover and patent.

“You are a good man, Padre,” she said to him as they settled on the damp, dead leaves that carpeted the forest floor.

“I only do what I must, Paloma.”

“Only a good man would say that.” Her eyes caught a little of the moonlight that filtered through the canopy and seemed to smile at him. “We are approaching a volcano.”

He nodded reluctantly. “I’ve felt the rumblings.”

“All the volcanoes have become active since the terrible things that happened in Asia.”

Steve had heard the news of the horrifying tsunami in one of his stealthy village visits to buy corn. He had shared it with Paloma, who had accepted it stoically. But what would he have expected? Considering what her people had been facing since the day the village had been attacked in an attempt to arrest Miguel Ortiz, she was hardly likely to care much about hundreds of thousands of dead halfway around the world. These people were in scarcely better straits.

“The gods are angry,” Paloma told him now.

He sighed, then smiled when a quiet laugh escaped Paloma.

“I know,” she said. “You think your God loves us too much to do such things. But have you forgotten your own stories of the Great Flood? The story of Job?”

Job was a bit of Bible lore that Paloma dearly loved and had taken much to heart. To her, his story seemed to symbolize everything Mayan in some way.

“I haven’t forgotten,” he admitted.

“So do not deny your god his anger with us. For we have not been a very faithful people.”

After living all this time with this particular group of Mayans, Steve could see absolutely nothing in them about which God should be angry, unless it was their unspoken insistence that there was more than one god…something the Bible itself left just a bit ambiguous.

“Paloma, your people have done nothing to earn any god’s wrath.”

“Perhaps we have not. But there are others…and the innocent always seem to suffer with them. Do you not feel it?”

Steve hesitated. He wasn’t sure he wanted to go down this path with her. “Bad things sometimes happen to good people,” he said finally, falling back on aphorism. “He makes the rain to fall on the just and unjust alike.”

Paloma nodded. “You asked about the Kulkulcan Codex.”

Steve froze. All of a sudden time vanished, and he remembered Monsignor Veltroni’s charge to him so long ago in Savannah, before he had sent Steve here. “Yes, many months ago. My Church wanted it.”

“They fear it.”

“Yes.”

“And would destroy it.”

Steve shook his head. “I don’t know, Paloma. They might hide it somewhere, but I’m not sure they would destroy it.”

“They cannot destroy it.”

Steve forced himself to wait patiently. With Paloma he was ever the student, and with Paloma he had learned true patience.

“The Codex,” Paloma said presently, “cannot be destroyed. It is impossible. It is so old it predates the Maya, the Olmec. It predates the Viracocha who brought it to us.”

“Viracocha?”

“It is one of his names. You will find he has many and was known throughout this entire part of the world, not just here in the land of the Maya, but among the Inca, also, and perhaps in other ways among our brothers to the north in your country. I do not know. My world is mostly the Mayan world.”

Steve nodded, then murmured his understanding, thinking that in the dark of this darkest of nights, she might not see the gesture.

“Viracocha, Quetzalcoatl, Kulkulcan…many names. One man. One very holy man. He brought teachings of love, forbade human sacrifice, although many who followed him did not remember that. He brought the Codex to us, as well, and ultimately it was the Codex that caused the wars that sent my people fleeing into jungles for sanctuary.”

“They warred over the Codex?” Steve found that difficult to believe.

“Yes,” Paloma said simply. “For the first time in my people’s history, we made war not to take captives but to kill. And all for the power of the Codex.”

Frankfurt, Germany

The rented suite in a tall office building in the financial district was already outfitted with standard furnishings. In a back room, however, they found the other equipment Office 119 had quietly arranged to have delivered. They spent several hours opening boxes. Since most of them had been shipped from within Germany, their contents were plain to see as bubble wrap and foam popcorn were removed. But a few items, electronics of some kind, had been shipped from outside the country, hidden beneath false bottoms in wooden crates.

It wasn’t that the contents were illegal. It was that Office 119 didn’t want to leave a trail to this suite.

Assif, Niko and Renate set about connecting all the computer equipment, some of which looked as if it had been intended for military use, while Lawton helped as best he could.

“We have TEMPEST shielding,” Assif remarked as he studied some of the equipment.

“Good,” Renate said flatly. “I hacked them once before. I am sure they are much more careful now. And if they have any reason to suspect that someone is hacking them now, they will try to track the hacker.”

She caught Lawton’s confused look and motioned him over to a window that gave him a neck-craning view of some of the surrounding buildings. “You see all the microwave dishes? Many of them are listening, not sending. Without TEMPEST shielding, someone can hear the electronic noise of our computers and decode it to figure out what we’re doing.”

Lawton nodded. Why did he feel he had just slipped back into the days of the cold war? Maybe he had. The names changed, but the basic plot never varied. “Like the good old bad days of the USSR,” he remarked.

Renate leaned back on a desk and folded her arms. “You Americans can be so naive.”

He bristled a little. Any naiveté he had once owned had perished on a beach in Los Angeles when a little girl saw her father killed before her eyes and blamed Lawton for it. “And you Europeans think you have the corner on sophistication.”

Renate shook her head. “Some do, perhaps. I think we’ve merely warred ourselves into a terminal case of Weltschmerz.”

World weariness. Lawton might have laughed at that, had he not been so disturbed by the frightening vibes he kept getting from Renate. She needed watching. “So what are you trying to say?”

“Everyone in Europe wants to say the last pope helped bring down the Soviet Union. Your people want to say it was your President Reagan. Shall I tell you the truth?”

One corner of Lawton’s mouth lifted. “I can take it.”

“The USSR was brought down by the Frankfurt Brotherhood.”

“Oh, come on….”

“It’s true. They refused to capitalize the Soviets in any way, which forced them into a state of poverty and bankruptcy. And the reason for that was simple.”

“Yes?”

“There was no way for the Brotherhood to make money on the communist system. They looked at the Soviets and saw huge resources and a huge labor pool they couldn’t take advantage of until after the communist government collapsed. Now there are investment opportunities. It may take decades, but the Brotherhood is patient. Very patient. They can wait centuries, if necessary.”

Then she went back to work, leaving Lawton to mull that over.

Niko went out to get them a meal, and while they ate, Assif stood next to a whiteboard and began to outline what they would need to do. “First, we have to get into the bank.” He wrote swiftly, then snagged another bite of his sandwich.

“Could we pose as an international business seeking access to SWIFTNET?” Niko asked, glancing down at a file folder full of research data. “It says here that banks are offering businesses access to the network.”

“No, we can’t,” Assif said. “First, only a handful of businesses have purchased access to SWIFTNET, and they are all major players in international finance. Second, these business clients are offered only limited access, and they are blocked from the areas of the network I need.”

“And most important,” Renate added, “our target is a private bank. Like most private banks, it has no public access, no lobby. Clients do not come in off the street. The bank solicits them…personally.”

“How can we get on their list?” Lawton asked.

“We can’t,” Renate answered simply. “The target’s clients are very wealthy families, many of them present or former nobility, and huge private trusts. These are not the sort of bona fides that can be manufactured.”

“So if I understand correctly, we have no legitimate way to enter that bank,” Niko said.

“Correct,” Renate answered.

“Utility access tunnels?” Lawton asked. “If we can find their network cables, can we tap in from there?”

“Of course,” Assif said. “If we could isolate the network cables. But the only way to do that would be to sample all their communications cables at a time when we know they are making a SWIFTNET transmission. And it has to be a transmission whose content we already know, so I can be sure I have the right lines.”

“Which brings us back to getting inside the bank,” Renate said. “With no legitimate way to do so.”

“A black bag job,” Lawton said. Renate arched a brow in a silent question, and he continued. “Covert entry.”

“Yes, precisely,” she said. “A black-bag job.”

“Then we need to know their security,” Niko said. “Working hours. How many people are in the building at what times of day. Whether there are guards at night, and how many. Electronic security, both external and internal. I’m sure their computers are password protected. If we are going to send a transmission, we will need a password.”

“In short,” Assif said, staring at the whiteboard as if it might reveal the secrets of the universe, “we need to know their security as well as their security chief does.”



Late that night, while Niko and Assif worked steadily in the back room to create what Assif insisted would be an ideal configuration of equipment for the job ahead, Lawton found Renate at the large glass windows in an unlighted executive office.

With her arms wrapped around herself, she was staring out pensively at the Frankfurt night. Beyond the glass, lights sparkled in the cold air. Traffic had almost disappeared, leaving the streetlights starkly alone along the roads. A few offices in the surrounding buildings remained lit, probably for cleaning crews. At any other time, it would have been beautiful.

Right now all Lawton could see was a threat, and he suspected Renate was seeing the same thing.

He moved to her side, joining her perusal of the night beyond the glass.

“You hate these people,” he said quietly.

“Wouldn’t you?” she asked, her German accent more in evidence than usual. “They tried to kill me. They killed my best friend. Now they have killed my family. What had my family ever done to them?”

“They produced you.”

She glanced at him, and in the light from without, he thought he detected a flicker of mordant humor in her face. Even that was an improvement over her favored glacial aspect.

“I want to know,” she said finally. Her voice seemed thick.

“Know what?”

“Who betrayed me.” She faced him briefly. “Someone betrayed me. How else do they know I’m still alive?”

“Perhaps your father…”

“My father knew as much about me being alive as your Miriam in Washington knows.”

“Not my Miriam,” he reminded her.

She shrugged. “She knows. Would she ever reveal that?”

Lawton thought about it. “No.”

“My father knew my life was at risk. After all, he had received word of my death long before I was able to tell him I still lived. Think about it, Lawton. He had already grieved for me. Do you think he would do anything to make that happen a second time?”

“No.”

She nodded once, shortly, then returned her attention to the night.

“What the hell did you do to these swine?”

He thought he saw a faint upward tip of the corner of her mouth, but it was so fleeting it might have been an illusion of the odd lighting.

“Well,” she said slowly, “at one time I worked for the Bundeskriminalamt, the BKA. Like your FBI.”

“Yes, you told me about that when we were in Idaho.”

“I was…I think the English phrase is ‘a forensic accountant.’ Fraud and money laundering.”

For a second Lawton was surprised. “In the field, you sure don’t act like any accountant I’ve ever known.”

“And you don’t act like a lawyer, yet you graduated from law school. We both had to…face difficult and dangerous people. So our training went beyond accounting or law.”

“And the Frankfurt Brotherhood?”

“Very quiet, very well concealed. I was not looking for them at first. But then I began to notice strange things. Little fingerprints on affairs reaching far beyond Frankfurt, far beyond Germany. The movement of money can reveal so much.”

“It certainly can.”

“So I set up a task force. I admit I was the most dedicated. In fact, I admit I became obsessed, especially when it became apparent these people could never be exposed publicly or tried for their crimes. In time I knew more than anyone else. The task force was disbanded as a waste of funds when nothing could be proven.”

He nodded, encouraging her.

“So I took my fight underground. Even my superiors did not know what I was doing. I hacked into the Brotherhood’s systems and files. And then, quite illegally, I began to give little bits and pieces to the press. I was growing very close to exposing them to the public when they attempted to kill me and instead killed my friend. She was…well, I loved her a lot, Lawton. Not…that way. But maybe even more than that.”

“I’m sorry.” He could identify with her feelings and had an urge, the first one in a long time, to reach out and embrace someone simply to offer comfort. He had some idea of the hell this woman had gone through.

“That is when Office 119 snatched me away. Literally. Before I could do something stupid, like reappear. When they told me what my job would be here, I refused at first. I wanted to go after them right away. Maybe I should have. Maybe my family would still be alive.”

“I’m so sorry, Renate.”

She faced him then. Tears were streaming down her cheeks, revealing the grief that was tearing her apart. But her eyes were as hard as steel.

“I will not rest until I have broken them.” Her voice was level, harsh. “The world is full of conspiracies, but these…Schweine.” She shook her head and a tremor ripped through her. “They are responsible for Black Christmas. I know it. I just need to find out why.”

“Power,” Steve answered. “Isn’t it all about power?”

Renate nodded. Soundless tears still poured down her face. “I know these people. They financed all of this for some arcane reason of their own, and I’m going to find out what it is.”

“And then?”

But she didn’t answer, as if she knew the Hydra had too many heads. They might foil the Brotherhood’s plans, but how could they ever root out all the members themselves?

Another tremor ripped through her, and this time Lawton didn’t hesitate. He pulled her close and hugged her. She leaned against him, weeping silently for a long time, and all the while Lawton stared over her head into the night and began to consider the utter hopelessness of their goals.

Wipe out this evil of man against man?

Perhaps when the last two humans disappeared from the planet.




5


Washington, D.C.

President Harrison Rice sat in a wingback chair, looking at his National Security Advisor. Phillip Allen Bentley had not been Rice’s first choice for the position. In fact, Rice would not have chosen Bentley at all. When he had announced the nomination, Rice had spoken to the press of Bentley’s twenty years of service with the State Department, in a variety of postings. And that, coupled with Rice’s close association with the key senators on the Foreign Affairs Committee, had set the tenor for Bentley’s confirmation hearings.

The name of Jonathan Morgan had never come up, and certainly not in the White House. But Bentley’s presence, so unwelcome, served as a constant reminder.

What Harrison Rice knew—and hoped no one else had discovered—was that his old college roommate and lifelong friend Edward Morgan had masterminded the assassination attempt on Rice’s rival in the Democratic primaries: Grant Lawrence. Edward was dead now, a loose end tied up. Edward’s father, Jonathan Morgan, had come to Rice shortly after the election and explained Rice’s tenuous political position, making it clear that “his people” would expect Rice’s obedience. And the death of Edward left no doubt as to the price of disobedience.

Afterward, wild for some escape hatch, he had called for a private meeting between himself and the Director of the FBI, seeking an update on the Lawrence assassination attempt. The meeting had been held away from any possible ears or microphones, at a hunting lodge in West Virginia. Instead of learning that Jonathan Morgan had been lying, he learned that the Bureau had suspected Edward Morgan’s involvement but could not find hard evidence. If the FBI couldn’t prove it, then Rice had no hope of blowing a noisy whistle on the conspiracy. The “debt” would have to be paid.

Bentley’s appointment was the first installment, and although his influence in the administration had thus far been minimal, Rice knew that couldn’t last. Black Christmas had changed everything.

“If we handle this well,” Bentley continued, “we can form an international consensus. Black Christmas proved to the world what 9/11 should already have made obvious, that Islamic terrorism is an imminent threat to global security. The United States must act, and act decisively.”

“Of course we must,” Rice said. “But this kind of response…I mean, do we even know for sure who did this? As heavily as we’ve infiltrated Al Qaeda, wouldn’t we have known if they were planning something on this scale? And let’s not forget that Pakistan has been an ally in the war on terrorism. And they have nuclear weapons of their own.”

“Who else but Al Qaeda could have carried out such an attack?” Bentley replied. “We know they’ve wanted another high-profile strike, and we know they’ve become a global, pan-Islamic ideological movement. As the 2003 subway bombings in Madrid demonstrated, Al Qaeda’s leadership doesn’t have to be directly involved in a given attack. They’ve become a rallying cry for disaffected Muslims around the world. A mention here, a suggestion there, and indigenous Muslim radicals would gladly have performed the Black Christmas strikes on their own.”

“But the coordination,” Rice said. “You can’t tell me these attacks were independent, coincidental actions.”

“No,” Bentley conceded. “There would have been some coordination in terms of time. But the varying nature of the attacks themselves suggests multiple actors, working independently. And the complete absence of solid intelligence before the attacks seems to confirm that. So yes, Mr. President, I think it’s safe to conclude that this was an Al Qaeda coordinated operation. And we know their senior leadership is clustered in the remote regions of western Pakistan.”

Rice rose to his feet and turned to look out at the White House lawn. The snow on the ground was white and even, a pristine backdrop to a conversation that no U.S. president had seriously entertained since the end of the Second World War. For a moment, he let himself wonder if the mountains of Pakistan were also covered with snow at this moment, and whether some Al Qaeda leader was looking out from a cave entrance at a scene of picturesque beauty. He shook the image from his head and turned back to Bentley.

“Why not special operations forces? If we know where these people are, why not go in and get them?” He picked up Bentley’s memo. “I mean, why this, of all things?”

Bentley opened his hands, palms up. “Those caves are natural fortresses, Mr. President. They stretch hundreds of feet into the mountains, and they’re interconnected by man-made tunnels. That’s too big a target for commando-style operations. Defense tells me they would need at least a reinforced brigade to assault that kind of target, and we would take heavy casualties. Their projections are based on operations against cave complexes in Iwo Jima and other Pacific islands during World War II. They’re saying forty to sixty percent.”

Rice recoiled at the prospect of three or four thousand dead Americans. “But this isn’t 1945, Phillip. We have better technology now. We have the best military the world has ever known. I can’t believe—”

“Mr. President,” Bentley said, “cave-clearing operations are straight-up infantry battles. Those fights haven’t changed much in centuries. All the high-tech gizmos in the world mean little or nothing in that setting. It would come down to men with rifles and bayonets, groping along in the darkness, having no idea of the terrain ahead of them, against an enemy who knows every inch and is ready to go meet Allah. No, Mr. President, the ground option simply is not militarily viable. It would be a bloodbath, worse than Iraq, and the American people would not stand for it.”

Rice nodded slowly. “Okay. And conventional bombs? We have twenty-thousand-pound, armor-piercing bunker busters. We used them in Iraq. Why not there?”

Bentley shook his head. “They are designed for man-made structures, sir. Not for mountains. This is our only viable military option.”

“Our only viable military option,” Rice echoed. “You want me to blast a hole in Pakistan—an ally—with nuclear weapons.”

“Yes, Mr. President,” Bentley said. “With nuclear weapons.”

Cairo, Egypt

Guiseppi Veltroni strolled along Midan Talaat Harb, admiring the neoclassic architecture. Despite its haze, Cairo was still a beautiful city. When he had first met Nathan Cohen, years before, Cohen had offered to take him to the Valley of the Kings and the Giza Plateau. But to Veltroni, that was “tourist Egypt,” too far removed from the experience of the common Egyptian. Veltroni preferred Cairo or Alexandria, where he could watch the comings and goings of ordinary people, gauge their moods and feel the pulse of their nation.

During the day, Cairo hummed with a rhythm as old as time. Men and women shopped at outdoor markets, bargaining for the best prices on vegetables, meats, clothing and other necessities. It was this sort of human push and pull that had first drawn Veltroni from the tiny village of his birth to the sprawl of Rome, and while he still went home to visit, his heart remained in city life.

His Arabic was barely passable, but he could still learn much from facial expressions and body language. The woman at the lemon stand, for example, seemed untouched by the events of Black Christmas. In her weary face, he saw a woman for whom life was not global in its reach. Not for her the machinations of power or the whispered schemes of men who would do whatever they thought necessary to gain an advantage. Her life was simple, and in that simplicity, he saw a beauty he had long since forsaken.

“You are probably right, my friend.”

Veltroni turned to see Cohen standing beside him. As always, the man seemed to appear out of nowhere. Perhaps more irritating, and also as always, Cohen seemed to be able to read his thoughts.

“One day I will learn how you do that,” Veltroni said, not extending a hand in greeting.

“It would be better for all of us if you did not,” Cohen replied. He pointed to an outdoor café across the street. “Come, let us have fine Turkish coffee and talk. There is much we need to discuss.”

“Perhaps,” Veltroni said, following Cohen to a table. “If you had news of my brother priest in Guatemala, I would be more inclined to listen to the rest of what you say.”

“Ahh yes,” Cohen said, sitting. “That would be Father Lorenzo, no?”

Veltroni nodded. “As always, your knowledge of my activities exceeds my knowledge of yours.”

“And that, too, is probably for your own good,” Cohen said, before switching to Arabic to order for both of them. After the waiter had gone, Cohen turned to Veltroni. “The good Father Lorenzo is alive, my friend, or was when last my sources heard of him. He and the villagers of Dos Ojos have gone into hiding in the mountains, hunted by both the government and the rebels. And also by your enemies.”

Veltroni’s heart squeezed. While he and Lorenzo had taken the same oath for the preservation of the Faith, an oath that bound them even unto death, he had no desire to test the limits of that commitment, for himself or for his friend and protégé.

“And what can your…sources…do to protect him?” Veltroni asked. “Some quid pro quo would not be amiss.”

Cohen shook his head. “Even our reach has its limits, Monsignor. If I could guarantee your friend’s safety, I would. But that is not in my power to do.”

“And Black Christmas?” Veltroni asked. “Was that in your power to prevent?” It was almost an accusation, a sign that his diplomatic abilities were becoming strained by his concern about recent events—and by Cohen’s opacity. Veltroni forced himself to draw a steadying breath. Like it or not, he couldn’t afford to offend any contact, least of all one about whom he knew so little.

“I wish it had been,” Cohen said. “What happened last week served only the basest of human impulses. That horror will only beget more horror. Even now, there are those who are discussing the most awful of consequences.”

“Your choice of words is disturbing, Mr. Cohen.”

“It should be, Monsignor. There are those who will pause at nothing to pursue their ends, and who will use these attacks as a way to justify more bloodshed.”

Veltroni felt chilled despite the warmth of the Cairo afternoon. Time. All of a sudden it seemed there was no time.

“When?” he asked numbly.

Cohen shrugged and sipped his espresso. “The sword must be rattled first. You will hear it rattling.”

Veltroni closed his eyes, suddenly wondering how it was that he could be sitting here on a sun-drenched street in Cairo, watching ordinary people go about their ordinary lives and discussing the unthinkable.

“Monsignor,” said Cohen, leaning toward him, “I will give you something to think about.”

Veltroni’s eyes snapped open.

“Consider whether you are protecting your Church or your faith. They are not one and the same. As for the Codex you sent your young friend to find…you would be wise to pray that he does not find it. You have no idea what events you and your enemies have set in motion, Monsignor. No idea at all. For myself…” Cohen shrugged. “Armageddon will happen. Now or later.”

He rose and threw some money on the table to pay for the coffee. He paused and spoke one more time. “There is a reason, Monsignor, that your Church holds no specific doctrine about whether Yeshua ben Yusef was married. Your Church has shown wisdom in that, and you ought not ignore that wisdom. Be willing to let the truth be the truth.”

Then he turned and disappeared into the crowds on the street before Veltroni could say another word.

At that point, if the sky had darkened and lightning had begun to shoot from the clouds, Veltroni would have been no less disturbed. Nor felt any less that he was on the cusp of a division between realities.

His head suddenly rang with Pilate’s infamous question: What is truth?

And for the first time in his life, Giuseppe Veltroni wondered if he had ever known the answer.

Frankfurt, Germany

Jonathan Morgan rarely came to Frankfurt these days. He was getting too damn old for international flight, even on a private jet. Eight hours in cramped quarters seriously annoyed him. At his age he’d earned the right to spend time fishing and tending his collection of orchids.

Instead, he’d been summoned to a meeting in no uncertain terms. It was all his son’s fault, he thought grimly as he stretched stiff joints before attempting to climb down the stairs to the apron. If Edward hadn’t screwed up and needed to be eliminated, he would have been the one making this hellacious trip.

A car awaited him, he saw. And Frankfurt’s winter weather hadn’t improved a damn. Cold and gray, threatening snow.

His valet buttoned his overcoat snugly and helped him wrap a muffler around his throat. On his head was perched a stylish gray merino hat.

He descended the stairs easily, now that he had worked out the kinks. For a man in his late sixties, he was in remarkably good shape.

Inside the car sat Wilhelm Tempel, one of the oldest and most esteemed members of the Brotherhood. Wilhelm’s family had been one of the founders of the Berg & Tempel private bank, the very core of the Brotherhood. Their association with the bank went back to the thirteenth century. Despite long association and several centuries of marriages between Morgans and Tempels, Jonathan Morgan still fell like something of an upstart beside this man.

“It is good to see you, Jonathan,” Wilhelm said warmly enough. “It has been too long.”

Jonathan smiled. “That trip is too long for men of our age, Wilhelm.”

“This could not be discussed any other way. As good as our communications security is, one must never be too trusting of technology.”

Jonathan nodded. “I agree.”

Wilhelm smiled. “I am told the Hunter is on the trail, Jonathan. He is closing in.”

Jonathan felt his heart leap as it had not leaped in years. “How close?”

Wilhelm’s smile broadened. “Let’s discuss it with the others over the very fine meal my chef is preparing. I even have a bottle of that fine Riesling you enjoy so much.”

Jonathan forced himself to be patient, but it was not easy. That the quest might be completed in his lifetime! And if so, he knew exactly what that completion would trigger—and who would rake in the profits.




6


Guatemalan Highlands

This was the dry season? Hah!

The Hunter lay among the thick growth while rain dribbled onto his back. This was supposed to be the best time of year in this godforsaken country, but instead it was miserable. He supposed some weather forecaster would blame it on El Niño or something like that. As if it made a bit of difference on the ground.

He’d been out here for weeks now, following some priest who was supposedly looking for the Kulkulcan Codex. His masters believed the priest would find it faster than the Hunter could. They, of course, were reckoning without adequate knowledge of the Hunter’s exquisite interrogation techniques. But then, they wanted the priest, too, as if they suspected him of holding some special information apart from the Codex.

His finely honed sense of people told him the priest was nowhere near finding the damn Codex. Even if that had been Lorenzo’s mission, affairs had pushed him onto another tack. The Hunter hadn’t experienced the least difficulty learning the story, even after all this time. These Indios had little to occupy them other than work, religion and gossip. They loved to talk about almost anything, but they particularly liked to talk about injustices against themselves and their fellows. The story of what had happened at Dos Ojos was beginning to take on all the proportions of an epic myth. Some were even murmuring that the bruja at Dos Ojos had made all the survivors invisible.

The Hunter knew better than that. They were invisible, all right, but there was no magic involved. It was simply that they knew the ways of these mountains better than he ever could. No matter what he did, he always seemed to be two or three days behind these people.

And as he plotted each campsite he discovered on his map, it began to seem to him they were moving in circles. Very big circles, but in no particular direction, unless you counted the miles they had put between themselves and Dos Ojos.

He bit into a piece of jerky and watched the rain drip from the narrow brim of his olive-drab pork-pie hat. He prided himself on his skills, smarts and utter ruthlessness. But right now he was beginning to wonder if a bunch of ignorant natives were going to outsmart and outrun him forever.

Neither his employers nor his masters would accept that. Either he found the priest and the Codex, or he died trying. There were no alternatives. Cursing silently, he pressed on into the jungle.

Frankfurt, Germany

Jonathan Morgan was pleased with his suite. While the Steigenberger Hotel was comparatively new, especially in a country where businesses proudly proclaimed centuries-old heritages, it offered both luxury and convenience, and had a well-earned five-star rating. Had he been merely a tourist visiting Frankfurt, he might have thought he had tumbled into a traveler’s delight.

But he was not on a tourist visit, and as he surveyed the faces of the other men in the room, he found himself unable to relax in the posh comfort of his accommodations. This was business, pure and simple. And it was an ugly business, at that.

“So,” the German said, “is your president prepared to use nuclear weapons?”

“He seems resigned to the prospect,” Morgan replied. “But this is hardly an easy decision for any man to make. He is a bold man, however. Once he accepts that there are no alternatives, he will move forward with our plans.”

“Make sure he does not move too quickly,” the Londoner replied. “You must remember that our plan depends on a confluence of events. The Vatican will doubtless object to the use of nuclear weapons, and the Catholic Church still has great sway in many quarters of the world. We need to preempt that objection.”

“Our friends are on the cusp of finding the Codex,” the Austrian added, nodding. “Its revelation will be major news, despite all that is happening, much as was the St. James Ossuary a few years ago. This, however, will be much greater—proof that Mary Magdalene was the wife of Christ, and that her grandson brought the true gospel of Christ to pre-Columbian America. That will demolish the voice of the Vatican in world events and leave us with an open field in which to operate.”

“I am familiar with our plans,” Morgan said, trying to contain his displeasure at being lectured. Would Europeans never accept that Americans were not recalcitrant children who needed to be reminded at every step of a process? “But you must understand the nature of American politics. While Harrison Rice is ours to control—to a point—have no doubt that he and he alone is the president of the United States. He and he alone has the power to authorize the use of nuclear weapons. Do not expect him to totally cede that authority, not even to us.”

“Hold on,” the German said. “You told us that if this worked, we would—in your son’s words—own the President of the United States. We took grave risks in underwriting Edward’s plan. Were it not for our contacts in your news media, the conspiracy to assassinate Grant Lawrence—and your son’s involvement—would have been exposed for the world to see. Now you are telling us that, despite those risks and the ultimate success of the plan, we cannot rely on President Rice to do what he is told, when he is told?”

Morgan paused to light a cigar, both because it allowed him time to frame his response and because he felt it necessary to make them wait for his answer, in order to regain the initiative. He was not accustomed to being interrogated, and the fact that the three of them had obviously prepared privately for this meeting did nothing to make him more amenable.

“Yes,” he said, finally, “that’s exactly what I’m telling you. He holds the most powerful elected position in the world. It takes little time for the import of that to settle upon a man. He was no one’s lapdog, even when he was in the Senate. Now, my friends, he will cooperate with us. But cooperation and slavish obedience are different, and we must accept the former without demanding the latter, lest he decide to use the power of his office in ways that could be even more harmful to our cause.”

“Unacceptable,” the Londoner said. “If you are implying that he might become a threat, then we remove him and replace him with someone more amenable.”

“You can’t do that,” Morgan said, leaning forward, his anger flashing. “I don’t have to tell you the geopolitical realities. You now have your European Union, but have no doubt that you are not yet a global superpower. The United States could crush you several times over, with little or no damage to itself. While the U.S. can no longer lead Europe around on a leash like a captive hound, the roles have not been reversed. And there are political sensitivities that Harrison Rice cannot ignore.”

“What sensitivities exceed our having bought and paid for his office in blood?” the German asked.

“Anti-Arab violence is on the rise,” Morgan said. “We knew it would happen. It was part of our plan. But do not forget the pressure that places on Rice. The American people are demanding a response. He cannot afford to look impotent in the face of what is nothing less than a global declaration of war. And we have told him that only one response is possible. We cannot now ask him to sit on his hands and wait for permission to act.”

Morgan rose to his feet, his anger demanding physical movement, lest it manifest in words he might not live to regret. “Your friends must accelerate their search for the Codex. They have been searching for nearly two years. The Codex was to have been revealed months ago, and now you tell me that the president must commit political suicide by waiting indefinitely before responding to Black Christmas? No, my friends, that simply is not possible. At the very least, we must give him a politically acceptable interim response. We must provide a way for him to appear prudent without appearing cowardly.”

“Yes, I understand,” the Austrian said, his tone softening. “The European people are also demanding a response. Obviously we cannot expect Herr Rice to, as you put it, sit on his hands.”

“Yes, of course,” the Londoner agreed. “Perhaps we have been too…forceful…in our approach today. I assure you, Jonathan, we are all aware of the political realities. We have spent decades creating those very realities.”

“I believe I can offer the necessary alternative,” the Austrian said. “We know one of the Black Christmas cells is in Vienna. If we could arrange for their…disposal…in a manner that could be attributed to a joint U.S.-European action, would that assuage the political pressure on Herr Rice?”

“The American people will want results they can see,” Morgan said, shaking his head. “After the 9/11 attacks, if you recall, there was a demand for visible action. The fact that covert teams were all over the world, taking down Al Qaeda cells, was not enough. The American people wanted, needed, to see tanks rolling across the desert.”

“I am sure it can be arranged for this to be very visible,” the Austrian said. “And there will be no U.S. casualties.”

“What do you have in mind?” Morgan asked, curious.

“Unless I am very mistaken,” the Austrian replied, “our friends will want revenge for their plans having been twisted to our ends. So we will let them have it. Except that we will arrange for Herr Rice take the credit for it.”

The plan had merit, Morgan thought. It was elegant, a quality he had always admired, all the more so in recent months. Edward’s plan had been too complex, and that had very nearly been its downfall. It was, Morgan thought with satisfaction, good to be working with professionals again.

“That should work,” Morgan said, returning to his seat. “Yes, that should work well.”

“Very good,” the German said. “Which brings us to the final item. How do we find and kill Bookworm?”

Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

Ahmed Ahsami studied the report that his lieutenant had brought that morning. It fit in well with other reports he had gleaned over the past days. Knowing that Saif Alsharaawi would find them in the Arab world, the traitors of Black Christmas had instead chosen to hide out in Europe. He should have expected such cowardice.

“Yes, Yawi,” he said. “This is quite good. And we’re sure of the source?”

“Our colleagues in the Arab Bank are loyal,” Yawi said. “I asked them to flag that account number and notify me immediately of any transactions. They have no idea why I asked for the information. But they complied.”

“Eight thousand euros,” Ahmed said, folding his hands on his belly and looking up at the ceiling. “That is an odd amount. Not enough to buy new identities. Not enough to relocate into anonymity.”

“Perhaps they believe they already have,” Yawi said.

“I believe they do,” Ahmed said. “I think this is for living expenses.”

“What a shame,” Yawi said, a faint smile on his face.

“What is that, my friend?”

“Their living expenses will be their deaths.”

Ahmed couldn’t resist the chuckle, though he made a note to pray for forgiveness in tonight’s evening prayers. He ought not to take joy in what he was doing, however necessary it might be.

“How soon can we get a team to Vienna?” Ahmed asked.

“We can be ready to leave in two days,” Yawi said.

“Fine. See that you are. And leave none alive.”

Once Yawi had left, Ahmed considered what he had just done. He had ordered the death of fellow Arabs, fellow followers of Islam. The Koran forbade killing, but most especially the killing of other Muslims. But may Allah forgive him, it had to be done.

Al Jazeera hadn’t been alone in reporting on the rising tide of anger against Arabs. It had been too much for even the Western media to ignore. Mosques had been desecrated. Two Arab businesses burned in Los Angeles. Unless the world could see that Arabs would police themselves, there would be no alternative save for more Western intrusion into the Arab world.

And so these traitors must be found and killed. And it must be made clear that they were found and killed by Saif Alsharaawi. Then, perhaps, Ahmed could finally release the video he had made before Christmas and begin to paint for the world a picture of a more civilized, if equally determined, Arab leadership.

Ahmed trusted that Allah would understand.




7


Frankfurt, Germany

“Well, there’s hope,” Niko said, shrugging off his down jacket, careful not to let the melting snow drip onto the sensitive electronic equipment that crowded the office. He looked at Renate. “Your old friends in the Brotherhood are good, but they aren’t perfect.”

“Meaning?”

“They’re smug.”

“I assume we finally have some good news?” Renate said, the tension evident in her voice. During the past week she had grown thinner, and everyone in the group had taken to pressing food on her. She had begun to eat again only that morning after Assif had shouted at her.

“If you want to starve yourself to death, okay!” he’d said in exasperation. “But can you at least wait until after the mission? You could endanger someone’s life if you’re not at the top of your game.”

Since then she had eaten two full meals, although it was clear she hadn’t enjoyed them.

The past six days had seemed like an exercise in futility. Every plan they had conceived had run into a morass of technical difficulties. Berg & Tempel AG, the target bank, was a tough nut to crack. Any hope of tapping into their communications without making a physical entry into the bank itself had been lost in the spaghetti of optic cables that ran beneath Frankfurt’s streets. And Berg & Tempel’s ornate, nineteenth-century stone building sat squarely amidst the towering steel-and-glass monoliths of the banking district, where the underground electronic labyrinth was at its most complex.

“I spent the day eating pommes frites in the Jürgen-Ponto-Platz,” Niko said, taking a seat. “I learned more than I want to know about the murder of Jürgen Ponto, and if I never eat another fried potato, it will be too soon. But it was worth it.”

“Yes?” Renate asked. She was in no mood to play the game of twenty questions. “So what did you learn?”

“Berg & Tempel is right across the street, at the corner of Kaiserstraße and Westendstraße,” Niko continued, as if unaware of the tart tone in her voice. “I was able to watch their comings and goings all afternoon and into the evening. They’re good, but they’re also lazy.”

“How so?” Lawton asked.

“It’s a private bank. No lobby. Customers visit by appointment only.”

“Right,” Renate said impatiently. “We know this. This is what makes them so difficult to penetrate.”

“On the contrary,” Niko said. “This is what makes them easy to penetrate. Their security is very lax. They probably don’t have a vault, or if they do, it holds no cash to speak of. Most of their work involves shifting investments around and sheltering their clients from taxes. There is little to attract thieves, and thus little reason for the kind of tight security you would find in an ordinary bank. I was able to walk right in, under the guise of delivering a parcel. What’s more, once I got past the front desk, I was able to wander the building for fifteen minutes before someone saw that I looked lost and gave me directions.”

“So Lawton could make his entry as a Fahrrad-Kurier,” Renate said. “A bicycle courier.”

“Yes,” Niko said. “Easily, in fact. And that’s not all. I checked out the internal security. Unless they’re very good at hiding cameras, there aren’t any except at the front door. The computer room uses key cards, as do the senior executives’ offices, but beyond that, anyone in the building can go just about anywhere.”

“Nighttime security?” Renate asked.

“A guard at the front desk,” Niko said. “Unless there were other guards that came in by other entrances, he’s the only one. He looks to be a college student making some extra money by working as a night watchman. He locked the doors after the employees left, and twenty minutes later he was drinking coffee with his head buried in a textbook.”

“Key cards,” Lawton said. “If they have key cards, they probably log entries automatically.”

“Right,” Assif said, “but those logs would be kept on their computers. Once I know what system they use, I can tell you how to modify the log files.”

“This could work,” Lawton said, nodding. “I go in just before close of business and disappear into a men’s room or closet. Once everyone’s gone, and assuming I can get a key card, I’m into the computer room, with comms to Assif, in the utility tunnel below the bank. He tells me what to do to send a SWIFTNET message, so he can tap the correct line, and tells me how to erase my key card entry from the log file. Then I hide out until morning, wait until things are busy, and leave as if I had just dropped off the parcel. It’s simple, and clean.”

“Yes,” Assif said. “That can work.”

“If we can get a key card,” Renate said. “And if we can get Assif to the right utility junction box.”

“And don’t forget the bicycle,” Niko said.

Lawton looked at him. “I don’t understand.”

“The couriers lock their bicycles at a rack outside the bank,” Niko said. “Someone will notice if it’s there when they leave and still there in the morning. So one of us will have to pick up the bicycle without looking as if we’re stealing it, then return it the next morning.”

Renate walked to the whiteboard and began to write. “Lawton in the bank. Assif in the utility tunnel. Niko, you will handle the bicycle, and be on watch when Assif enters and exits the tunnel. I’ll be here, monitoring our communications and the police scanner.”

Lawton nodded. “So we need to find the utility junction box and get a key card. Then, I think, we’re good to go.”

Renate looked at Niko. “I need you to go back to the Jürgen-Ponto-Platz and watch the bank employees as they come to work. We need to identify those who work in the computer room.”

“And how am I supposed to identify which employees work in the computer room?” Niko asked.

“I’ll go with you,” Assif said, breaking into a smile. “I can spot a fellow geek from a kilometer away.”

“Good,” Renate said. “Then we start surveillance on the computer room employees. One of them is sure to be single and male. And I will get the key card from him.”

Her tone left no doubt that she would do anything, anything at all, to achieve the downfall of those who had killed her family. Whatever conscience she might once have owned had been blown away by a bomb in a simple church.

Vienna, Austria

Yawi Hassan had spent the day in a café on the Gellerplatz, watching the apartment house two blocks down Quellenstraße. Three hours earlier, laughing children had streamed from the Catholic school across the street. Yawi was struck by the irony: terrorists who had murdered thousands of Catholics on Christmas Day were hiding out in an apartment house two blocks from a Catholic school.

Now a last group of students, young teenage boys, Yawi guessed, freshly showered after an athletic practice, approached him. With his limited German, Yawi realized they were asking him to settle a dispute over which Austrian football club would be strongest that year. Although he knew nothing of Austrian football, Yawi chose from among the team names the boys pressed upon him.

“Rapid ist sehr gut,” Yawi said.

“Ja!” answered the boy who had offered that club. “Rapid wird immer dominieren! Die san leiwand!”

As the boy broke into a wide grin, the other boys objected. Much to Yawi’s relief, for he had not understood the boy’s reply, they took the disagreement with them as they walked to the tram station. He smiled and shook his head as they left. In whatever language, in whatever culture, boys would be boys.

Now alone again, Yawi reviewed the plan in his head. All the pieces were in place. The last of their seven targets had returned to the apartment only a few minutes before, after a quick stop at a corner market. Even now, Yawi knew that his men were moving into their final preassault positions.

The target was a third-floor apartment, and Yawi and his men had gone over the interior layout several times. Each of his men had a specific assignment from the moment they burst into the open front room. They had rehearsed the assault in an identical apartment building across town until everyone on the team could perform his mission in total darkness and absolute silence. There would be no arrests tonight. Their orders were clear.

Kill them all.

“Ready,” a quiet voice whispered in Yawi’s earphone.

Yawi strolled down the street, taking a final look around. His secondary objectives were to minimize civilian casualties and to extract his men without their being identified. He saw no Polizei in evidence, and at this late dinner hour, there was little traffic on the street.

“Two minutes,” he whispered.

Ninety seconds later, he entered the building and began to ascend the back stairs. He didn’t need to check to ensure that the back exit was neither locked nor blocked. The Austrians were very careful about such matters. And even if they hadn’t been, his men had already verified that fact. As he climbed the stairs, he screwed a silencer on his Tek-9 automatic pistol and cycled the bolt to chamber a round.

Yawi reached the third-floor landing and pulled his ski mask down over his face, then placed his left hand on the shoulder of the last man in his team. That man in turn placed his left hand on the shoulder of the next, until the fifth commando, first in the line, placed his left hand on the door leading from the stairwell into the interior corridor. Now, simply by squeezing the shoulder of the man in front of him, Yawi gave the silent signal to go. In less than a second, the message had been relayed to the lead man, and he pushed open the door.

The corridor was clear, and they moved silently, each holding up fingers to count the doors they passed. One…two…three…four. Yawi checked each man’s count, for in the stress of an assault, he knew not to overlook even the smallest, most basic detail. Certain that they were at the right door, he patted the shoulder of the man in front of him.

That action was repeated up the line, and the lead man extracted a tiny video camera with a fish-eye tubular lens. As the tube slid beneath the door frame, Yawi studied the distorted image on the handheld monitor. He counted six people in the room, two on a sofa along the left wall, two in the kitchen area to the back and two at a small dinner table. A shadow moving in the distance marked the seventh target, walking along the back hallway.

As the lead commando withdrew the camera tube, Yawi relayed the information to his men with hand signals. Each nodded. Now the second man squeezed two small gobs of putty into the gap between the door and its frame, one at the catch for the doorknob, the other at the dead bolt. As that man pressed detonators into the plastic explosive, Yawi and the others readied flash grenades. The second man held up a thumb.

All was ready.

The men flattened themselves against the wall, and Yawi nodded. The second man squeezed a tiny plunger, and two muffled pops sounded almost simultaneously. Yawi felt a momentary rush of satisfaction. His man had done his job precisely as he had been trained, using the minimum amount of explosive necessary to blow the door. The satisfaction was quickly lost in the moment, however, for now he and his men burst into motion.

The lead man kicked the door open, and four flash grenades were tossed in immediately. Two seconds later, the grenades exploded with a rushing whoosh, as Yawi and his men shielded their eyes against the blinding, blue-white glare.

“Go!” he snapped.

The command was unnecessary, for his men were already in motion. The first two men burst in, pistols leveled, marking their targets, the quiet pops as they fired lost in the cries of panic within. Yawi followed and saw that two of the targets were already slumping to the floor, red holes punched in their chests.

Yawi pressed on toward the back of the apartment, his arms extended, left hand beneath his right, supporting the weight of the weapon, moving it side to side, tracking with every turn of his head. A light beneath the bathroom door flicked off, and Yawi fired through the door at the same instant that it seemed to spout holes from within.

He felt the three rapid punches in his chest, knocking him back against the wall, but kept firing, the flimsy door now almost disintegrating before his eyes. He realized he was sitting on the floor, his back against the wall, with an unbelievable tightness in his chest, making it all but impossible to breathe.

Through a gaping hole in the door, he watched his target rise and come toward him, gun in one hand, the other vainly trying to staunch the angry geysers of blood spurting from the side of his neck. Yawi was dimly aware of one of his comrades coming around the corner to check on him, of the target turning and raising his pistol, of three more shots, of the target finally crumpling to the floor, half-atop him.

Mission accomplished, Uncle, Yawi thought. We killed them all.

And then the darkness swelled around him.

Frankfurt, Germany

It all sounded so simple, but Lawton knew it wasn’t. Nothing could be that simple. He drew Renate from the back room into one of the executive offices. “We need to talk.”

“About what?”

“This sounds too simple.”

“Anything sounds simple when it is laid out this way.”

Damn, she was so distant again, as if everything that made her Renate had flown away to another star system.

“Renate, listen to me.”

“I am listening, Law.”

“Then think about it. If this bank really contains the kind of information you think it does, why isn’t it better guarded? The entire Frankfurt Brotherhood could take a fall if their computer records were breached.”

She turned to face him directly. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying the only reason they’d do this is if their records are so heavily encrypted that we’ll probably be wasting our time anyway.”

She shook her head. “First we go for their communications. We hack into their computer system and view their private Internet messages. If we find what we need there, we can talk about what to do next to nail them. But trust me, if we follow the money we’ll find them.”

“But how will we break their encryption? Even the NSA can’t hack SWIFTNET. When they want the information, they get a subpoena.”

She gave him a tight smile. “You must have faith in me. And in Assif. We have done this before.”

“Why do I feel like there’s something you’re not telling me?” he asked.

“Because there are some things that it’s better not to know,” she replied, her icy eyes fixed on him. “Trust me, Lawton. I know what I’m doing here. And we will get what we need.”

She left to rejoin the others, and he followed reluctantly, thinking that he didn’t mind putting his neck in a noose if he could be certain it would serve a purpose. He wasn’t sure of that with this job yet.

Niko was regaling Assif with the story of the murder of Jürgen Ponto.

“He was the head of the Dresdner Bank, back in the 1970s. It was a terrible time in Germany, in Europe. Lots of terrorist groups active. Suzanne Albrecht was Ponto’s godchild, the daughter of a man he’d known since childhood. But he didn’t know she’d joined the Red Army Faction. She showed up at his door carrying a bouquet of roses, acting like the loving godchild. Then she and her two companions tried to kidnap him. He fought back. They shot him five times.”

“Wow,” said Assif, shaking his head. “His godchild?”

Niko nodded. “It makes you think, doesn’t it? You can know someone from the day they were born and still not know them at all.”

“He was the enemy,” Renate said quietly.

“The anger of disaffected youth,” Niko said. “So easy to twist young minds.”

Assif’s face froze as he looked at the television news. “Yes. And it’s happening again.”




8


Saint-Arnans-la-Bastide, France

General Jules Soult sat in the comfortable leather armchair in his library. He puffed on a cigar and studied the papers that had arrived by pouch from Frau Schmidt only a short while ago. The courier was cooling his heels outside, awaiting Soult’s response.

It would be positive, of course. He had every intention of taking over intelligence operations for the European Union Department of Collective Security. He also intended to make very sure that these documents he was to sign would hamper him in no important way.

He was quite pleased to discover that there was nothing to object to in the papers before him. He was assigned full intelligence responsibility and ordered to report directly to Frau Schmidt herself. Apparently the good German woman had no desire for any dirt to get past the two of them. That pleased him.

His operational budget would be generous, and while his operatives were forbidden to use deadly force except in self-defense, Soult wasn’t worried about that detail. His people would ensure that he retained plausible deniability.

Satisfied, he signed and initialed the first set of documents, keeping a copy for himself, and slipped the executed version back into the pouch. He touched a button on his desk, and moments later his butler appeared. An English butler, of course. There was something about the way the English buttled that remained without compare.

“For the courier. Then I should like my brandy.”

The man bowed, accepting the pouch. “At once, Monsieur le Général.”

Soult sent the butler on his way, then reached into his top right desk drawer and pulled out a remote control. With the touch of a few buttons, the library wall to one side opened and revealed a large-screen television. As always, it was already tuned to a news network. Today he chose to listen to one out of Germany. It always paid to have a wide variety of sources.

What he saw pleased him immensely. Students in Berlin were burning pictures of Osama bin Laden. The Islamic Center in Vienna had suffered from graffiti and broken windows. The violence was still only in the stage of small outbreaks. But it would provide perfect cover for what was to come.

He was still smiling when his butler returned with his Napoleon brandy on a silver salver. The man placed the snifter carefully on Soult’s desk and began to bow out.

“Wait, Devon.”

The butler paused and straightened to attention. “Monsieur?”

“Have you seen the news about the public attacking mosques? And protesting?”

“Yes, sir.”

Soult turned to look the man in the eye. “What do you think of it?”

“I can understand the anger, monsieur, but the actions accomplish nothing of purpose.”

Soult nodded slowly, and dipped the mouth end of his cigar in the brandy for a moment. “What would be your idea of a proper response?”

Devon’s eyes widened only a fraction, and only momentarily, before he resumed his customarily formal demeanor. “I’m quite sure I don’t know, sir. I am merely a butler.”

Soult chuckled. “And a diplomatic one at that. Don’t you feel the least urge to strike back, to seek vengeance, no, justice, for these atrocities?”

Devon hesitated. “What I feel, sir, is not necessarily a wise response. Yes, I feel loathing for persons who could commit such crimes. But does that give me the right to take the law into my own hands?”

With that, before he could be questioned any further, Devon and his salver disappeared from the library.

Soult studied the curl of smoke rising from his cigar, then glanced at the news again. Devon would bear watching, he decided. Then, a moment later, he changed his mind. Devon had spoken as a rational, mature man who had been raised in a culture of law. And everything that he himself was about to do would be under the color of law. And if it were so, then Devon should have no reason to object, not that Soult had any intention of letting his butler in on his secrets. Still, he knew better than to presume that a butler—even one as impeccably trained as Devon—would be oblivious to what happened around him.

Reaching for the phone, he placed a call. When his comrade answered, Soult spoke in flawless Spanish. “I have the position, but I must attend to administrative details before I can issue a contract. However, you may begin your recruiting efforts immediately.”

He hung up and sat back in his chair. Everything was going as it should. Another smile creased his face. Every revolution required an army, and soon he would have his. What’s more, the very government he intended to seize would be paying for that army. The effortless irony of his plans gave him a heady feeling of power, almost a rush. Better than Napoleon brandy and Cuban cigars.

But even as he was feeling smugly content, the news broke away from its coverage of random acts of malice to something far more deadly.

“Today in Vienna,” the reporter said, “special agents of the EU and the United States carried out a joint strike on a terrorist cell believed to have been involved in Black Christmas….”

Soult sat forward quickly, brandy forgotten, and turned up the volume. Pictures of bodies being carried out flashed across the screen, along with exterior shots of a nondescript concrete apartment house of a type that had become common after the war, a type Soult felt was a blight on the beauty of Europe.

Bodies. Nine terrorists killed in a fierce gun battle. And then the face of the American president, Harrison Rice. “This is only the beginning,” the president said. “We will hunt down these terrorists to the last man. In cooperation with our European allies, we will not allow these atrocities to go unavenged. Thank you.”

Soult sat back slowly. For the first time that day, he sensed something at work that was beyond his knowledge. Beyond his control.

Every bit of triumph he had been feeling vanished like a puff of smoke from the end of his cigar.

Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

Ahmed Ahsami watched the television, absolutely livid. His men had gone in there to take out those terrorists, but the situation had been snatched away. Among the nine “terrorists” whose pictures were now being broadcast to the world was Yawi. His sister’s son.

He slammed his hand down on his desk over and over, grief and anger warring on a scale that was beyond speech, beyond description. At that moment he could have blasted the entire world into oblivion.

Someone was using him. Someone he thought was an ally. Nothing else could possibly explain this. The information had come to him about the location of the terrorists, but it had apparently gone to someone else, as well. How else could Austrian and American commandos have arrived just minutes after the survivors on his team had withdrawn? That could not have happened by coincidence.

His nephew and Isa had been killed, offered up like sacrificial lambs, and were now being labeled as part of the terrorist cell. And the American president was standing smugly before a bank of microphones, his Alabama drawl and artificially confident smile reminiscent of nothing so much as a plantation owner swearing that rebelling slaves would be hunted down.





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