The moment each member completed their sign-in a monk stepped in with what appeared to be a sterile swab, cleaned the mechanism, then stepped back, having made it ready for the next person.

"Jesus Lord," the president's voice caught in his throat as a woman stepped before a camera.

"Jane Dee Baker," she said, then gave the place and date of her birth and stepped forward to give a sample of her DNA.

"Chairwoman of the Subcommittee on Intelligence and Counterterrorism." Marten felt the same chilling surprise.

"Democrat from Maine, Mike Parsons's subcommittee," the president finished. "The one Merriman Foxx testified before."

"It's why Mike's dead and his son is dead, and why Caroline is dead," Marten said with no emotion at all. "Mike found out what was going on, or some of it anyway."

"Something else," the president said. "Each person is using his left thumb for the DNA signature. From this angle we can't see it but I would bet next year's congressional budget that every last one of them is tattooed with the sign of the Aldebaran."

• 8:35 A.M.

The soft, melodic chant of the monks floated across the church as the New World delegates returned to their seats. In the next moment the lights dimmed, as if the place was a theater and a performance was about to begin. And then it did.

"Cristina!" Marten blurted as they saw the floor in front of the altar abruptly slide back and a darkened hydraulic stage with swirling fog and eerie theatrical lighting rise up from below like some bizarre Las Vegas extravaganza. Cristina sat majestically in the center of it on a nearly invisible throne, a bright spotlight illuminating her from above as if she were some sort of grand goddess. Now a second spotlight came on nearer the front of the stage. In its glow were three apparent stage-prop severed heads mounted atop Aldebaran crosses.

As if preprogrammed, the automated, remote cameras began to play over the congregation as they inched forward in their seats. This was clearly why they were here, what they had come for and it shone in their faces.

"This Cristina, who is she?" the president asked quietly, clearly and unemotionally trying to understand what was going on.

"She was with Beck and Merriman Foxx in Malta," Marten said.

Just then, and again as if the entire bank of remote cameras had been preprogrammed, one of them moved off to begin a slow pan across the fog and onto the three severed heads mounted atop the Aldebaran crosses.

"My God, Mr. President," Hap said in a voice barely above a whisper. "Those heads are real."

Abruptly ten of the twenty monitors went blank, then two seconds later picked up the visual as another camera moved closer, one by one, showing the heads in extreme close-up. An explanatory caption was superimposed directly beneath each.

The first was that of a man, bald and very old.

Caption: GIACOMO GELA. DIVULGED SECRETS OF" μ" PURPOSE SERVED. TERMINATED.

The second was the head of a woman. "Lorraine Stephenson," Marten breathed in horror and sheer disbelief.

Caption: LORRAINE STEPHENSON. PHYSICIAN. UNSTABLE. SUICIDE.

Then came the last.

"Oh Lord, no!" Marten cried out as he saw the familiar thickset face, the gray hair and trimmed gray beard. Stone-dead eyes staring out at nothing.

Caption: PETER FADDEN. JOURNALIST, WASHINGTON POST. DANGEROUS. TERMINATED.

The voices of the monks grew louder and they saw them file onto the stage through the fog. Heads bowed, their chant continuing, there were fifty of them at least, maybe more. Whatever they were singing was directed wholly at Cristina.

The president looked to Marten. "This is your 'Machiavelli Covenant,'" he said, his voice hushed and grave.

"Yes, I know," Marten rasped with anger. "Just as Demi described it. The only thing that seems changed from the sixteenth century is the technology. The elaborate sign-in process done by hand into a guarded journal with a bloody thumbprint placed alongside the personal signature has been traded for an electronic photograph and DNA sample. The participant's presence in the audience intercut with the video of the ceremony. Confirmation that you were here and took part in what happened. The formal dress is a charming addition. It means you were all too pleased to attend."

"I don't understand," Hap said, bewildered.

"These people are here to witness ritual murder."

"Murder?"

"They're going to kill the girl," the president said quietly.

"How?"

"I don't know."

"Why?" Hap was incredulous.

"This is a very exclusive organization, Hap," Marten's eyes shifted from Hap to the monitors and then back. "The rules of membership require not only wealth and power but complicity in murder so that none dares stray from the chief objective."

"Which is what?"

"The accumulation of even greater wealth and power."

"To dominate globally and in perpetuity, I think is a better way to put it," the president said, thinking out loud as he painstakingly studied each monitor in turn, putting together the people and activity he saw on the screens with what Marten had told him about the Covenant and what he had learned as a Rhodes scholar. "This is an international fraternity of widely diverse and highly influential people who routinely make far-reaching agreements with one another. A great many of them, I would imagine, clandestine. It's an order that may well have been in operation for close to five hundred years and as such would have been a major force in the making of history. A group who, for no greater good than their own benefit, positioned themselves to expand empires by surreptitiously underwriting wars, assassinations, political and religious movements, and even-knowing of Dr. Foxx's involvement here-genocides."

The president turned away from the monitors to look at Hap and Marten. "The idea of a single group being capable of things so huge and terrible and far-reaching and over so long a period, borders on the impossible if not the absurd. It's a statement I would wholly agree with if it weren't for the truth we see up there on those screens and the fact that these people, in particular the ones I know personally, are major global players in investment banking, insurance, law, transport, defense contracting, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, energy, media, and politics-the things every society on the planet depends on for its daily life. You could argue that a great many of them are direct competitors and in total opposition to one another, but taken as a group, in one way or another they control a major part of the world's commerce.

"What I would imagine this weekend has been about-the seminars, the golf and tennis, the dinners and cocktail parties-is how best to conduct business in the coming year. Primarily how to respond to what will happen after the Warsaw assassinations and then to the catastrophe in the Middle East that will take place once Merriman Foxx's plan is executed. The ritual about to be performed there on the stage will irrevocably bind them to whatever course of action has been agreed upon." He looked back at the screens. "It's one of those great conspiracy theories every political theorist, writer, movie executive, and man and woman in the street around the world would love to believe exists. Well, it does exist and probably has for a very long time. The proof is right there in front of us."