• 7:17 A.M.

The service road took them around the far edges of the golf course and then abruptly down into a wooded glade, then steeply up again, winding through thick conifers toward the church. Marten was just starting a turn and thinking about what they would do when they reached the rear of the church and the service entrance where they were headed when Hap suddenly intruded. He was looking uphill through the binoculars.

"Patrol vehicle coming down. Get off the road," he snapped.

Marten drove another dozen yards, then abruptly turned the cart off the road and through some trees to stop behind a low rock wall.

Hap lifted the machine pistol, Marten slid out the Sig Sauer and then they sat back and watched a four-wheel-drive police car come down the hill. It slowed as it approached, then slowed even more. They could see four uniformed men inside, all looking in the direction where they were hidden.

"Nothing here, nothing here, keep going," Marten breathed.

The car slowed even more, and for the briefest moment they were certain it was going to stop. But it didn't, the driver just rolled it slowly on past and kept on.

"Good boys," Marten said.

"Give them a minute to clear," Hap put down the machine pistol and picked up the binoculars, then turned to follow the police vehicle as it drove slowly down the hill.

"This is fill," the president said abruptly and out of the blue looking at the land around them. "This dirt, this soil base. I've been watching it all along. The further up the road we get, the more obvious it becomes. It's all landfill. Look around, most of these trees are young. Fifteen, twenty years old at most."

"Mr. President," Hap was still looking through the glasses, "the resort is barely twenty years old. They probably graded everything and replanted."

"Except for one thing. The church. How do you put a four-hundred-year-old church on twenty-year-old landfill?"

"Number the stones, then tear it down and rebuild it as it was," Marten said.

"But why? And where was it before?"

"Uh-oh," Hap said abruptly.

"What is it?" The president turned to follow his gaze.

"More security."

A second police SUV had come up the road from below, and the car going down was stopped next to it, their drivers chatting.

"What do we do now?" the president asked.

"Nothing. We try to leave, they'll see us."

"You mean we stay here?"

"Yes, sir. We stay here."

• 7:25 A.M.

Four black-robed monks brought Demi from her cell and walked her down a long, barren, and dimly lit hallway. She wore only sandals and the scarlet dress Cristina had brought for her to wear during the ritual ceremonies the night before. That she had been forced to strip naked and put the dress on in front of the monks meant nothing.

How could it? They had come to take her to her death.

• 7:28 A.M.

The first monk slipped a security card through an electronic reader beside a steel door. The door slid open and they entered another long corridor. To both left and right doors stood open to what looked like physicians' examination rooms. They were small, identical, and had opaque glass boxes mounted on the walls, the kind used for reading X-rays and prints of scans. A stainless-steel examination table stood coldly in the center of each.

• 7:29 A.M.

They passed through another security door and entered a room filled with stainless-steel bunks, the same as the one in the cell she had just occupied. The only difference was that here they were stacked four high to the ceiling on either side of a center aisle and stretched to the far end of the chamber. Enough to easily accommodate two hundred people at a time.

Another corridor and she saw communal toilets and showers. Just past them was what looked like a small commercial kitchen and beyond it an area of stainless-steel tables with attached benches that might have been used for dining. These rooms, like the rooms and corridors she'd seen before it, were empty, as if the entire area had been a beehive of activity that had quickly and purposely been abandoned.

• 7:31 A.M.

The monks brought her through a series of five heavy security doors, one less than ten feet from the other. Then they entered a long, darkened subwaylike tunnel with a single monorail track running down its center. In front of them was a large, sledlike conveyance, completely open save for three rows of bench seats. Four more monks sat shoulder to shoulder on the rearmost bench. In front of them another monk sat alongside-Demi caught her breath as she saw her.

Cristina.

She wore the white gown of the night before and smiled pleasantly, even happily, when she saw Demi.

Immediately Demi was seated next to her. As quickly one of the monks slid in beside her. The remaining monks took the seats directly in front of them. Nine monks to escort two women into eternity.

Abruptly the sled moved off, quickly and silently picking up speed. A second passed, and then two, and then Cristina turned to Demi and smiled the most horrifying smile she had ever seen. Horrifying because it was so warm and genuine and childlike.

"We are going to join the ox," she said excitedly, as if they were about to go on some wonderful adventure.

"We mustn't," Demi whispered. "We have to find a way not to go."

"No!" Cristina suddenly pulled back, and her eyes shone with a terrible and immeasurable darkness. "We must go. Both of us. It has been written in the heavens since the beginning of time."

The sled began to slow and Demi saw they were approaching the end of the tunnel. Seconds later the sled stopped. The monks stood together and led both women onto a platform beside it. Immediately a large door slid open and they were taken into a large room. In the center of it was what appeared to be an oversized commercial furnace.

Demi felt the breath go out of her as she realized what it was-a steel-faced brick retort oven. The room was a crematory. The place where it all ended.

"The ox waits by the fire," Cristina smiled, and then four of the monks led her away.

A moment later the remaining monks took Demi into another room. A woman turned as they entered. It was Luciana. She was dressed in a long black clerical robe, her black hair the same tight bun as the night before, her dark eye makeup accentuated by the same theatrical streaks that ran like daggers from the corners of her eyes to the hollows of her ears, the same hideously long nails once again fixed to the ends of her fingers.

"Sit down," Luciana indicated a lone chair in the center of the room.

"Why?"

"So that I may do your hair and makeup."

"My hair and makeup?" Demi was incredulous.

"Yes."

"Why?"

"You must be beautiful."

"To die?"

Luciana smiled cruelly. "It is a requirement of the tradition."