"Kill the lights."

"I won't be able to see."

"Kill them now!"

She switched off the lights and instinctively eased off the gas, but Gabriel shouted at her to go faster, and soon they were plunging through the luminous glow of the moonlight. They entered a grove of scrub oak and umbrella pine. The track hooked sharply to the right. The headlights of the Fiat were nowhere to be seen.

"Stop!"

"Here?

"Stop!"

She slammed on the brakes. Gabriel threw open the door. The air was filled with a choking dust. "Keep going," he said, then leapt out and slammed the door shut.

Chiara did as she was told, continuing in the direction of the mountain ridge. A few seconds later, Gabriel could hear the Fiat speeding toward his position. He stepped off the track and knelt behind an oak, the Beretta in his outstretched hands. As the Fiat came hurtling around the corner, Gabriel fired several shots into the tires.

At least two exploded. The Fiat instantly lost control, bucking and fishtailing, before the centrifugal force of the turn threw it into a violent leftward roll. Gabriel lost count of how many times the car flipped over; a half-dozen at least, perhaps more. He rose to his feet and slowly walked toward the crumpled mass of steel, the Beretta at his side. Somewhere, a mobile phone was ringing.

He found the Fiat wheels-up, resting on its smashed roof. Bending down, he peered through a shattered window and saw the driver, lying on what was once the ceiling. His legs were twisted grotesquely, his chest crushed and bleeding severely. Still, he was conscious, and his hand seemed to be reaching for a gun lying a few inches beyond his fingertips. The eyes were focused, but the hand would not obey the commands of his brain. His neck was snapped, and he didn't realize it.

Finally, his eyes left the gun and settled on Gabriel.

"You were a fool to chase us like that," Gabriel said softly.

"You're an amateur. Your boss sent you on a suicide mission. Who's your boss? He's the man who did this to you, not me."

The man managed little more than a gurgle. He was looking at Gabriel but his gaze was somewhere else. He did not have long to live.

"You're not hurt too badly," Gabriel said gently. "Some cuts and scrapes. Maybe a broken bone or two. Tell me who you're working for, so I can call an ambulance."

The man's lips parted, and he emitted a sound. Gabriel leaned close so he could hear.

"Casszzzz ... Cassszzzzzz.... Zzzzzzz...."

"Casagrande? Carlo Casagrande? Is that what you're trying to tell me?"

"Cassszzzzzz.... zzzzzzz. ..."

Gabriel reached inside the dying man's jacket and gently patted around until he found a wallet. It was soaked with blood. As he dropped it into his pocket, he could hear the telephone ringing again. It had ended up somewhere in the backseat, by the sound of it. He peered through the opening where the rear window had once been and saw the phone, power light aglow, lying on the ground beneath the trunk. He stretched out his hand and took hold of it. Then he pressed the send button and brought it to his ear.

"Pronto."

"What's going on up there? Where is he?"

"He's right here," Gabriel said calmly in Italian. "In fact, he's speaking with you right now."

Silence.

"I know what happened in that convent," Gabriel said. "I know about Crux Vera. I know that you killed my friend. Now, I'm coming for you."

 "Where's my man?"

"He's not doing so well at the moment. Would you like a word with him?"

Gabriel placed the telephone on the ground a few inches from the dying man's mouth. As he stood up, he could see the lights of the Peugeot bouncing toward him along the track. Chiara braked to a halt a few yards from where he was standing. Walking back to the car, Gabriel could hear only one sound.

"Casszzzz... Cassszzzzz... Zzzzzzzz...."

ST. CEZAIRE, PROVENCE

Gabriel searched the dead man's wallet by the jade-colored glow of the dashboard lights. He found no driver's license and no formal identification of any kind. Finally, he discovered a business card, folded in half and tucked behind a photograph of a girl in a sleeveless dress. It was so old he had to switch on the overhead light in order to make out the faded name: paulo olivero, ufficio sicurezza di vaticano. He held it aloft for Chiara to see. She glanced at it, then returned her eyes to the road.

"What does it say?"

"That there's a high probability the man I just killed was a Vatican cop."

"Great."

Gabriel memorized the telephone number on the card, then

 tore it to shreds and flicked it out the window. They came to the autoroute. When Chiara slowed for guidance, Gabriel directed her west, toward Aix-en-Provence. She lit a cigarette with the dashboard lighter. Her hand was shaking.

"Would you like to tell me where we're going next?"

"Out of Provence as quickly as possible," he said. "After that, I haven't decided."

"Am I allowed to offer an opinion?"

"I don't see why not."

"It's time to go home. You know what happened at the convent, and you know who killed Benjamin. There's nothing else you can do but dig yourself deeper into a hole."

"There's more," Gabriel said. "There has to be more."

"What are you talking about?"

He stared absently out his window. The landscape was stark and windswept, red dust in the air. He saw none of it. Instead, he saw Sister Vincenza, sitting on the very spot where Martin Luther and Bishop Lorenzi had sealed their contract of murder, telling him that Benjamin had come to the Convent of the Sacred Heart to hear about the Jews that had taken refuge there. He saw Alessio Rossi, stinking of fear, fingernails gnawed to the quick, telling him how Carlo Casagrande had forced him to abort his investigation of missing priests. He saw Sister Regina Carcassi, listening to Luther and Lorenzi calmly discuss why Pope Pius XII should remain silent in the face of genocide, while a child slept with his head in her lap, a rosary wrapped around his hand.

And finally he saw Benjamin, a boy of twenty, myopic and round-shouldered, brilliant and destined for academic greatness. He had wanted to be a part of the Wrath of God team as badly as Gabriel had wanted to be released from it. Indeed, Benjamin had wanted to be an aleph, an assassin, but his methodical brain did not leave him with the skills necessary to point a Beretta at a man's face in a darkened alley and pull the trigger. It did give him all the tools necessary to be a brilliant support agent, and never once did he make an error--even at the end, when Black September and the European security services were breathing down their necks. This was the Benjamin Gabriel saw now, the Benjamin who would never stake his reputation on the word of a single source or document, no matter how compelling.

"Benjamin wouldn't have written a book implicating the Catholic Church in the Holocaust based only on Sister Regina's letter. He must have had something else."

Chiara swung to the side of the autoroute and applied the brakes. So?

"I worked with Benjamin in the field. I know how he thought, how his mind worked. He was careful to a fault. He had backup plans for his backup plans. Benjamin knew the book would be explosive. That's why he kept the contents so secret. He would have hidden copies of his important material in places his enemies wouldn't think to look." Gabriel hesitated, then added: "But places his friends would think to look."

Chiara stuffed her cigarette into the ashtray. "When I was at the Academy, we were taught how to walk into a room and find a hundred places to conceal something. Documents, weapons, anything at all."

"Benjamin and I did the course together."

"So where are we going?"