The Testament

"Shut up!" he snapped.

Dead air silence. And then…

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

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

Rossi called softly and his men began to move.

The occupation of the basement came to them through sound and vibration. Bravo tried not to think of the pursuit as he continued after Je

Just above him, Je

Bravo felt Je

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

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

By this time, Je

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

The engine growled to life and she threw the SUV in gear. As they shot away from the curb, Bravo watched the rearview mirror fill with ru

As Je

They were racing down Little Falls Street.

"I thought I recognized someone."

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

"Hey, take it easy!"

"You were the one who warned me they were going to shoot," Je

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

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

"I did," Bravo said after a moment. The sharpness of her tone angered him, but beneath that he realized that the urgency she projected had the effect of focusing him. This a

"You're sure?"

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

"Was he with a woman?"

"What?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Just who are these two?" he asked.

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

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

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

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

Je

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

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

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

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

"Meaning?"

"It's true that the Knights tried to a

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

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

"Again, I-"

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

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

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

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