Superimposed over this scene was the specter of his father's face, and then the familiar voice: "No matter how hard you try, you can't outrun the past."

Ivo Rossi, Knight of the Field, astride a powerful black and yellow K 1200 S BMW motorcycle, rendezvoused with the delivery truck Jenny had passed on Route 7. Donatella was behind the wheel, handling the three-ton vehicle as if it were a Honda Accord. They spoke to each other by cell phone in the stripped-down, almost codelike sentences of people intimate with each other.

"According to the electronic tracker in the Aviator, they're on Timber Lane, heading due west," Rossi said.

"The cemetery." Donatella was always one step ahead of everyone. That was what made her so valuable to Rossi and so scary to everyone else. They had known each other since they were preadolescents, finding each other in the crawling filth of Rome's back alleys, exploring a sexual landscape both new and dangerous. Opportunistic to the core, they survived by feeding off the misfortune of others, which more often than not they themselves manufactured.

The moment of their first encounter was forever tattooed on his memory. Lithe and impossibly thin, she had been running down the narrow street where he had been looking to break into the back of a store for money or food. She was lit up from behind by the headlamps of a battered Fiat jouncing after her. Her eyes were wide and staring, her mouth was open as she sucked in air. She had been running a long time; he did not need to see the desperation on her face to know this was clearly the end of the chase. He had hefted the crowbar in his hand and, as the Fiat approached, had slammed it into the driver's-side windshield. The Fiat bucked and swerved like a wounded beast. It slid along an ancient brick wall in a shower of sparks. Even before it came to a stop, the driver had leapt out. He was dressed in a long black leather coat. There was a gun in his hand. Rossi, at a dead run, had swung the crowbar again, cracking the man's wrist. The gun went flying and the man turned, drove a balled fist into the pit of Rossi's stomach. Rossi bent double, gasping and helpless, and the man yanked the crowbar out of his nerveless fingers. Rearing back, he drove it point first toward the top of Rossi's head, but Donatella had scooped up the man's gun and, walking purposefully toward him, had emptied the clip into him.

Since then, they had been like twins, recruited into the Knights of St. Clement together, training together as Knights of the Field, whose bloody purpose they quite naturally understood. Often, they began and finished each other's sentences, thought the same thoughts, for the same reasons. They had been set loose together, stalking prey, infiltrating organizations and institutions as their orders dictated. Always, they had done what had been asked of them, willingly, happily, with a devout-almost holy-sense of purpose, for the Knights of St. Clement had become the orphans' mother and father.

"It's not logical, of course," Rossi said as they sped west. The highway was filled with cars, trucks, SUVs, limitless possibilities. With a familiar burst of exhilaration, he was aware of what his life in the Voire Dei had given him. It had legitimized his natural instincts; instead of running from the law, he and Donatella were beyond it, immune. Only another member of the Voire Dei could understand what he was and oppose him, but with the death of Dexter Shaw there was no one left for him to fear, certainly not this Guardian and her hapless charge.

"But what would you expect of her," he said, "once you take into consideration what's on her mind every day and every night?"

"A weakness that will prove their downfall." Donatella smoothly upshifted and accelerated. On a mission, she felt the world open to her like a flower, and she was happy. In the dead spaces between, she starved herself sexually, suffered from insomnia and bit her nails until the quicks bled. At those times, there was no emotion in her but pain, and none other that she could imagine. Now, however, purpose hummed inside her like a hive of bees, and she felt that there was no pain, no deterrent capable of stopping her or even giving her pause.

The cemetery spread out all around Jenny and Bravo, a vast, hushed, peaceful city of the dead-lush and green, smelling of new-mown grass, loosestrife and wild onion. There was a respite of sorts in the deep shade of the old oaks, hawthorns and Virginia pines. Birds flittered among the heavily laden branches and the drone of insects was everywhere. Directly behind them were the gates to Miamonides Cemetery, and on their left, to the south, was the larger, more imposing National Memorial Cemetery.

Jenny led them at a fast clip down a paved walkway between two rows of squat stone mausoleums-a necropolis gleaming dully in dappled sunlight.

As if at last making up her mind, she stopped abruptly and turned to him, engaging his eyes with her own. "Listen to me, Bravo, I need to tell you something. Your father was killed by an explosive charge."

Bravo felt something clench painfully in his belly. "But the police said that it was a gas leak." All at once he felt dizzy. "They assured me it was an accident."

"That's just what they-and you-were meant to believe." Jenny stared at him for a moment, unblinking. "But his death was no accident. Dexter Shaw was murdered."

"How do you know that?" He was aware that his voice was harsh, almost antagonistic. He didn't want to believe her. Of course he didn't want to believe her.

"Dexter Shaw was a member of the Haute Cour-the inner circle, the leaders of the Order. Over the past fifteen days, five members of the Haute Cour have been killed-one choked to death on a fish bone, another was a victim of a hit-and-run incident. The third fell-or rather was pushed-from the balcony of his twentieth-floor apartment, and the fourth drowned while he was boating. Your father was the fifth."

Bravo followed her account with a sense of mounting horror, and all at once a memory flooded through him. "I want to make you an offer," Dexter Shaw had said in characteristically cryptic fashion. "Remember your old training?" This bit of the last conversation he'd had with his father stuck in his mind like a moth pinned to a lepidopterist's table. She was right, and he knew it. Of course. He'd known it, he realized with a start, from the instant she had said it. It was as if the multiple shocks of his father's death, his sister's maiming, his own concussion had caused a latent instinct to arise in him-a long-held sense of danger, conspiracy, secrets, a sense of a hidden world he'd inherited from his father.

They had begun to walk again, urged by Jenny, as if she knew that movement-even of the most pedestrian sort-was what he needed most now.

"Breathe, Bravo," she said to him softly, kindly, as she observed him. "You'll feel better the more deeply you breathe."

He did as she said and in the process felt keenly a sensation of being in her hands. It was not altogether unpleasant, for he was in the midst of a dawning realization that ever since he'd awoken in the hospital his world was changed forever. Sometime during his state of utter unconsciousness he'd entered an unknown territory. Suddenly alone, he was grappling to come to terms with a new world order of which he had no knowledge.

"I need some answers," he said. "From my studies, I know that the Gnostic Observatines were a supposedly heretical sub-order of the Franciscan Observatines, who broke with both the traditionalists and the mainliners. Is it still a religious order? And what about you? I was under the impression that the Order was strictly male."

"Once it was," Jenny said. "And believe me, there are those in the Order who wish it was still, who bear me nothing but ill will. We will get to them in time, but for the moment, to answer your first question, the Order is now apostate, we've moved out of the strictly religious sphere."