The habits and ceremonial garments worn by the monks were cut and sewn by four brothers who had learned tailoring. These four had also created the storm suits.

Every suit was a dull blue-gray, without ornamentation. They were finely crafted, with foldaway hoods, ballistic-nylon scuff guards, and insulated snowcuffs with rubberized strippers: perfect gear for shoveling sidewalks and other foul-weather tasks.

Upon Romanovich's arrival, the brothers had begun to put on Thermoloft-insulated vests over their storm suits. The vests had elasticized gussets and reinforced shoulders, and like the storm suits, they offered a number of zippered pockets.

In this uniform, with their kind faces framed in snugly fitted hoods, they looked like sixteen spacemen who had just arrived from a planet so benign that its anthem must be "Teddy Bears on Parade."

Brother Victor, the former marine, moved among his troops, making sure that all the needed tools had been brought to this staging area.

Two steps inside the door, I spotted Brother Knuckles, and he nodded conspiratorially, and we rendezvoused immediately at the end of the reception lounge that was farthest from the marshaled forces of righteousness.

As I handed him the keys to the SUV that Romanovich had driven, Knuckles said, "Fortify and defend against who, son? When you gotta go to the mattresses, it's kinda traditional to know who's the mugs you're at war with."

"These are some epic bad mugs, sir. I don't have time to explain here. I'll lay it out when we get to the school. My biggest problem is how to explain it to the brothers, because it is mondo weird."

"I'll vouch for you, kid. When Knuckles says a guy's word is gold, there ain't no doubters."

"There's going to be some doubters this time."

"Better not be." His block-and-slab features fell into a hard expression suitable for a stone-temple god who didn't lightly suffer disbelievers. "There better be no doubters of you. Besides, maybe they don't know God's got a hand on your head, but they like you and they got a hunch somethin's special about you."

"And they're crazy about my pancakes."

"That don't hurt."

"I found Brother Timothy," I said.

The stone face broke a little. "Found poor Tim just the way I said he'd be, didn't you?"

"Not just the way, sir. But, yeah, he's with God now."

Making the sign of the cross, he murmured a prayer for Brother Timothy, and then said, "We got proof now-Tim, he didn't slip around to Reno for some R and R. The sheriff's gonna have to get real, give the kids the protection you want."

"Wish he would, but he won't. We still don't have a body."

"Maybe all those times I got my ears boxed is catchin' up with me, 'cause what I thought you said was you found his body."

"Yes, sir, I did, I found his body, but all that's left now is maybe the first couple centimeters of his face rolled up like on a sardine-can key."

Intensely eye to eye, he considered my words. Then: "That don't make no sense of no kind, son."

"No, sir, no sense. I'll tell you the whole thing when we get to the school, and when you hear it all, it'll make even less sense."

"And you think this Russian guy, he's in it somehow?"

"He's no librarian, and if he was ever a mortician, he didn't wait for business, he went out and made it."

"I can't puzzle the full sense of that one, neither. How's your shoulder from last night?"

"Still a little sore, but not bad. My head's okay, sir, I'm not concussed, I assure you."

Half the storm-suited monks had taken their gear outside to the SUVs and others were filing out of the door when Brother Saul, who was not going to the school, came to inform us that the abbey phones had gone dead.

"Do you usually lose the phones in a big storm?" I asked.

Brother Knuckles shook his head. "Maybe once in all the years I remember."

"There's still cell phones," I said.

"Somethin' tells me no, son."

Even in good weather, cell service wasn't reliable in this area. I fished my phone from a jacket pocket, switched it on, and we waited for the screen to give us bad news, which it did.

Whenever the crisis arrived, we wouldn't have easy communication between the abbey and the school.

"Back when I worked for the Eggbeater, we had a thing we said when there was too many funny coincidences."

"'There are no coincidences/" I quoted.

"No, that ain't it. We said, 'Somebody amongst us musta let the FBI put a bug up his rectum.'"

"That's colorful, sir, but I'd be happy if this were the FBI."

"Well, I was on the dark side back then. You better tell the Russian he don't have a round-trip ticket."

"You've got his keys."

Carrying a toolbox in one hand and a baseball bat in the other, the last of the storm-suited brothers shouldered through the front door. The Russian wasn't in the room.

As Brother Knuckles and I stepped out into the snow, Rodion Romanovich drove away in the first SUV, which was fully loaded with monks.

"I'll be damned."

"Whoa. Careful with that, son."

"He took both sets of keys off the peg," I said.

Romanovich drove halfway back along the side of the church and then stopped, as though waiting for me to follow.

"This is bad," I said.

"Maybe this is God at work, son, and you just can't see the good in it yet."

"Is that confident faith talking, or is it the warm-and-fuzzy optimism of the mouse who saved the princess?"

"They're sort of one and the same, son. You want to drive?"

I handed him the keys to the second SUV. "No. I just want to sit quietly and stew in my stupidity."

THE LINT-WHITE SKY SEEMED TO BRIGHTEN THE day less than did the blanketed land, as if the sun were dying and the earth were evolving into a new sun, though a cold one, that would illuminate little and warm nothing.

Brother Knuckles drove, following the devious faux librarian at a safe distance, and I rode shotgun without a shotgun. Eight brothers and their gear occupied the second, third, and fourth rows of seats in the extended SUV.

You might expect that a truckful of monks would be quiet, all the passengers in silent prayer or meditating on the state of their souls, or scheming each in his own way to conceal from humankind that the Church is an organization of extraterrestrials determined to rule the world through mind control, a dark truth known to Mr. Leonardo da Vinci, which we can prove by citing his most famous self-portrait, in which he depicted himself wearing a pyramid-shaped tinfoil hat.

Here in the early afternoon, the Lesser Silence should have been observed to the extent that work allowed, but the monks were voluble. They worried about their missing brother, Timothy, and were alarmed by the possibility that persons unknown intended to harm the children at the school. They sounded fearful, humbled, yet exhilarated that they might be called upon to be brave defenders of the innocent.

Brother Alfonse asked, "Odd, are all of us going to die?"

"I hope none of us is going to die," I replied.

"If all of us died, the sheriff would be disgraced."

"I fail to understand," said Brother Rupert, "the moral calculus that all of us dying would be balanced by the sheriff's disgrace."

"I assure you, Brother," Alfonse said, "I didn't mean to imply that mass death would be an acceptable price for the sheriff's defeat in the next election."

Brother Quentin, who had been a police officer at one time, first a beat patrolman and then a robbery-and-homicide detective, said, "Odd, who are these kid-killer wannabes?"

"We don't know for sure," I said, turning in my seat to look back at him. "But we know something's coming."

"What's the evidence? Obviously something that's not concrete enough to impress the sheriff. Threatening phone calls, like that?"