"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 Jenny, climbing until surely they were past the first floor. He saw no opening to the fireplace and realized that the shaft they were ascending was built behind the bricked-off real chimney.

Just above him, Jenny kept up a steady pace. He estimated that they were now above the second floor, the attic, the roofline. All the while, the air inside the chimney grew hotter and wetter, the patch of sky expanding until momentarily it grew dark as Jenny's body eclipsed the sunlight. Then she was out and he could see her face peering down at him. "Come on," she mouthed urgently. "Come on!" He emerged into the blazing sunshine. He squinted as he joined Jenny, who was sprawled on her belly across the slate roof tiles. The roof pitched downward so that as he crawled forward to lie shoulder to shoulder with her he could see the street at the front of the house. A black Lincoln Aviator was parked at an angle, blocking the street, its curb-side doors open. A man sat smoking in the driver's seat. One hand was draped across the wheel, gripping a gun. Another man leaned against the Aviator's front fender. He was staring fixedly at the front door. If he was armed, he was hiding it well.

Bravo felt Jenny touch his arm. Her scent came to him, lavender and lime. Her hair shone copper in the hazy sunlight. She was pointing to herself, making a gesture. He was about to ask her what she meant when she began to slither away. He moved after her, but she frowned, holding him in place.

"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, Jenny was at his side, and together they moved to the edge of the roof. Below them, the Aviator stood deserted, its driver and companion having run toward the commotion at the side of the house. Jenny went over the edge, landing in the thick privet hedge. Bravo dropped down after her. Branches cracked beneath his weight and he felt his shirt tear in several places, bright pinpricks of pain across his shoulders and back.

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 running figures. He squinted, then turned around. Was that the man who had been outside the bank in New York, following him? A figure beside him raised a gun in the Aviator's direction and Bravo shouted a warning to Jenny, but just before they swerved around a corner, he thought he saw the man push the gunman's arm down toward the pavement.

As Jenny took another turn, she said, "Why did you turn around?"

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," Jenny said without taking her eyes off the road. "Do you think they won't try to follow us?"

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 annoyed him even more. "I saw him before in New York City."

"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."

Jenny nodded, frowning. "In doing Rome's bidding, they were the pope's thinly veiled fist against both the Islamic infidel and those religious sects the pope or his puppet council deemed heretical to current teaching. Rossi and Donatella are Knights of the Field, named after the warrior-priests of their order sent to the Holy Land to fight the Ottomans during the Crusades. These people are expressly trained to kill."

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 annihilate us, but they failed. Every time they attacked, we went deeper underground."

"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.