The Testament

He had seen what remorseless corruption came from the sprawl of the American lifestyle. How could he not? It was all around him, as if he swam in a sea infested with plastic bags filled with iPods of American music, DVDs of American films, cassettes of American TV shows, all in loud and joyful praise of celebrity and consumerism. Not that Djura didn't enjoy a pink Internet peek of Paris Hilton or Pamela Anderson, astonishingly exposed in various positions of sexual congress. The illicit nature of the moving images detonated like bombs on his retinas, providing a thrill he could not begin to define, let alone understand. But that was it; having taken these bites out of the rancid confection of American culture, he was certain his appetite had been sated. Unlike his brother Gigo, who had swallowed it whole and was now importing drugs and "Russian wives" from his five-bedroom triplex in the eternal golden sunshine above Miami Beach.

Gigo also had a cocaine habit as large as a Lincoln Navigator. Djura, passing the row of trash bins that stood near the rear entrance, shook himself. He hated the fact that he knew what a Lincoln Navigator was, knowledge unwanted but that nevertheless seeped into his skull. Evidence against the imagined purity of his life.

Which brought him back to Damon Cornadoro, corruptor on a grand scale. Djura would gladly take the American over Cornadoro, though probably he'd wind up shooting them both. They were infidels. Beneath the surface gloss, how much difference could there be between them?

Checking that the safety on the Tac-50 was off, he slowly pushed open the metal door into the open air. The morning was hot and sticky. Birds sang, insects whined, the hiss of traffic on its way up and down the hillside overspread his concrete bower. A car drove up, letting off a woman and a child. The woman was dressed in Western clothes, though to Djura she appeared Muslim. Her hands were filled with shopping bags. The child-a small boy-was busy licking an ice cream. The car drove off and the woman and child headed for the front entrance to Sinope A Blok. A man, dark-ski

The heat abated a bit. A sea breeze all the way from Sevastopol, still stinking from Russian atomic submarines, tossed the tops of the sheared cypresses like the turbans of bowing imams. Speaking of imams, here came one, long beard aquiver, hurrying along the path toward him. In his wake, an ungainly woman, enveloped, as was proper, from the crown of her head to her sandaled feet in an abaya and a traditional Muslim head scarf. It would not be beyond Cornadoro to desecrate the holy state, to disguise himself as an imam, Djura thought. In fact, it would be just like him.

Squinting through the wan sunlight, Djura tried to take a closer look at the oncoming imam. But this chore was made difficult by the woman whose form obscured the imam's face, the part of him that interested Djaba.

Suspicions roused to full flower, he braced himself against the doorway, raised the Tac-50 into firing position. The imam was big-big as Cornadoro. And he had roughly the same build. This, Djura decided, was his target, but he would not fire until he was certain. Killing a Muslim imam was unthinkable, a disaster that would cause more damage to Mikhail's sons than they were prepared to handle. And so, tense and anxious, he waited with his forefinger curled intently around the trigger. In his mind, he already heard the satisfying sound, the thick, wet splat! splat! splat! of the bullets rending Cornadoro's flesh from bone. And the best part was that he wouldn't have to be close with him-unlike Mikhail, he could avoid the flat, deathly sweep of the push-dagger.

The imam was in range now. He said something sharp to the woman, who nodded in subservient fashion and dropped back several paces, her head down. Lucky for Djura, because now he had a clear look at the imam's face, and he exhaled a deep-drawn breath and his finger relaxed on the trigger. It wasn't Cornadoro, after all.

The imam's eyes barely registered Djura as he swept imperiously through the door. Djura's eyes barely registered the woman as she followed the imam, and so he missed the movement of her right hand as it appeared from beneath her voluminous ayaba, the blade of the push-dagger protruding between the second and third knuckles-knuckles larger and more callused than any female hand.

Djura became aware of the flat sweeping motion and, too late, tried to move. His arms were expertly pinioned behind him. The huge imam! At that instant the push-dagger entered his lower belly. He gave a brief cry as the ayaba-clad woman unwound her head scarf. He saw Damon Cornadoro's eyes burning into him.

"Where are they?" Cornadoro said with a twist of his wrist that caused Djura terrible pain. "Give me the information or your passage to Paradise will not be assured."

Chapter 29

Bravo, staring at the white-on-green squiggles, rubbed his temples with his fingertips. He was all too aware of time passing, time when he and Khalif should have been at the Sumela Monastery. Had he been wrong, was he going down another dead end? Was he doing what he'd accused the Glimmer Twins of doing? Was he making an emotional decision? No, he couldn't let this go. His father sat at his side, his energy pi

"Play the frequencies again, both at once," he instructed Khalif. "But this time turn off all the readouts."

"What?"

"I want to listen-only listen. Do you understand?"

Khalif set the two frequencies to ru

Bravo closed his eyes. If the electronic animal remained dumb, it was up to the human senses to solve the riddle of where the rogue cipher was going. The ear filtered sound and noise day in and day out. It was created to decipher the important sounds from the background wash of the world.

For him, it was only a matter of time before the layers of noise were stripped away and the melody presented itself. This was his business-or, at any rate, part of what he was good at. He could coax out the hidden with his senses-in manuscripts, in human speech, in the feel of forgeries purporting to be genuine archeological finds, in the scents of age and reason, despair and dissolution.

Now, in Khalif's postmodern bunker, having begun the process of wi

"Stop," he cried. "Stop it right there."

Opening his eyes, he had Khalif turn on all the readouts, even the ones that seemed irrelevant or spurious. And there it was: the dumb animal went "Moo."

"Why are we following Michael Berio?" Je

"His real name is Damon Cornadoro. You know it, don't you?"

"My God." Je