Eric Lustbader - The Testament

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.

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.