As she was putting away her paraphernalia, he said, "Will you tell me now why my father had you make the glasses?" Already, he was feeling better now, his head remarkably clear, as if he had fallen deeply asleep for a half hour.

She returned to her seat beside him. "The glasses are important for one thing only: what is etched into the right lens." She plucked them off the table as if they were crown jewels. "It's also why we had to risk coming here."

Without another word, she rose, and he followed her across the basement to a plywood door he hadn't noticed before. She pulled it open and he found himself in a small, cramped laboratory filled with equipment he could only guess at.

"This is where you ground the lenses?"

She nodded, seating herself at a backless stool. "No optician's office would have the machinery needed." She pulled over a goosenecked lamp, turned it on. Brilliant light flooded the worktable. She put her hand on a squat metal machine that looked to him like nothing more than a deli meat slicer. "This is a very special grinder; I designed it myself."

"What I don't understand," Bravo said, "is that if you ground the lenses why can't you simply tell me what's on them?"

Jenny gave him a sly smile. "I may have ground the lenses, but I didn't etch them. Your father did."

"He was here? He did it himself?"

"After a little practice, yes. He was an astonishingly quick learner."

"Yes, that was one of his extraordinary abilities." Bravo thought of the porch behind the shingled house in a never-never dreamland.

"After he etched the lenses, I sealed them with a specially formulated coating."

"So the etching would appear only under certain conditions."

"That's right."

Jenny turned off the goosenecked lamp, twisted it so that it was pointed at a bare wall, then snapped on another switch. An oval of eerie greenish illumination was cast on the wall.

"Here goes," she said, taking the glasses and placing the right lens between the light and the wall.

Nothing.

She moved the glasses slightly so that the right lens was in the greenish glow. Immediately, a set of numbers appeared within the oval of illumination.

"Magic!" Jenny said with a small laugh. She turned to look at Bravo, who was scrutinizing the numbers.

"Do you know what they represent?" she said.

He frowned in concentration. "To be honest, the groupings look vaguely familiar, though I can't say why."

"A mathematical formula, maybe."

"Yes, that would make sense." He grabbed a pad and pen from Jenny's workspace, jotted down the series of numbers and spaces precisely as it was projected. "The fact is, though, mathematical formulae are difficult to decipher. Right now I think you'll agree that we don't have time to work on it. Unless there's another reason for us to remain here, I think we should leave as quickly as possible."

"I agree." Switching off the lamp, Jenny handed the glasses to Bravo and stood up.

They went back up into the dark house. Light from the winding street and the neighboring houses came through the window in a haloed glow.

Careful to stand well back, Jenny peered out at the street. She was so still he could barely see the rise and fall of her breast.

"What are we waiting for?" he said, but she immediately raised a warning hand to silence him.

After a moment, she moved further back into the shadows of the room, taking him with her.

"We can't leave," she whispered, "at least not as we are."

"Donatella?"

"The delivery truck across the street."

"What about it?" he said.

"If it was here on legitimate business its lights would be on, wouldn't they?"

He stared out at the darkened van. Was someone-Donatella-in there, clandestinely watching them? The thought sent an unpleasant chill down his spine.

"That's a hell of an assumption to make."

"I saw that same truck when we were on our way to the cemetery."

Bravo let out a long breath. "What do we do?" he said. "We can't stay here."

"No we can't. And as you've pointed out, the quicker we make our exit, the better. Our only chance is to change our appearance." She turned her back to him, as he had done with her, and said, "I need your help."

She instructed him on how to braid her hair and pin it up onto her head. The hair cascading down her back was thick, heavy and lustrous. When he first took hold of it, the sensation was new to him, clear and direct without prior associations. What she was asking him to do was basic, so simple she could have done it herself. But for him it was intimate and erotic, so that when he was done, he was reluctant to let go. He wondered, fleetingly, whether her request had been a deliberate attempt at reconciliation-or a stab at binding him to her.

They went back to the door to the garage. In the mudroom, she grabbed one of the baseball caps, set it firmly on her head, pulled on one of her father's windbreakers, gave Bravo an argyle cardigan to wear.

They crossed the garage, hurried past the vintage Mercedes and passed through a door on the far side, entering the gardener's shed. Jenny immediately went to one wall against which sat a collapsed wheelchair. She unfolded it and gestured.

"Take a seat."

Bravo stared at her for a moment, then he gave a low laugh. Shaking his head in wonderment, he settled himself into the wheelchair's leather seat.

"Hunch over, try to pull your shoulders up around your ears." Jenny pulled on a pair of fingerless driving gloves. "That's right. Think like an old man."

Bravo's hands on the armrests began to tremble.

"Nice touch," Jenny said as she wrapped him in a shawl. Then she pulled open a side door and wheeled him through. "Here we go."

Donatella, sitting behind the wheel of the delivery truck, did not expect a light to go on in the house; she was looking for movement. With the ATN PVS7-XR5 Night Vision goggles strapped to her head, she looked strange, like some sort of giant nocturnal sloth. While the infrared function couldn't penetrate walls or glass, it was providing an accurate reading. Apart from a single ghost reading as she was setting up the equipment-and that might have been a cat or a racoon-there had been no human movement around the house. That did not mean Braverman Shaw and his Guardian weren't inside-just the opposite, to her way of thinking. After all, how many places did they have to go?

Why this Guardian had been assigned to Shaw remained a mystery to Donatella, one that nagged at her. She did not like mysteries, especially when they applied to Dexter Shaw, who had been legendary for the mysteries with which he surrounded himself. His demise had been attempted three times since she had joined the Knights of St. Clement, all without success. The successful attack had been in the making for months, maybe even years-long before the crisis had come upon them and the timetable had been moved up. The desperate rush had necessitated that less competent people be utilized, and this had inevitably led to some mistakes. She was certain that Braverman Shaw's Guardian knew that the recent deaths of the five members of the Haute Cour was a concerted attack by the Knights, a push to finally gain the cache of secrets the heretical Order had been hoarding for centuries.

She shifted her head, so that another vector of the property was visible. Despite the fact that she was an enemy, Donatella felt a certain secret kinship with Braverman Shaw's Guardian that had nothing to do with philosophy and everything to do with gender. Ivo, like the male Guardians of the Order, hated Jenny's status, hiding that hatred behind a cruel and unjust derision. As a result, Ivo had consistently underestimated Jenny's abilities, and Donatella would not put it past Dexter Shaw to have assigned Jenny to guard his son for just this reason.