"Your ring has a poison capsule inside. Your monastery is on the western coast of France, across from England, in the territory contested by

France and England during the Thud Crusade. Only someone who'd been approached, to be recruited, by the Fraternity would know these things."

'True. Approached. And now we approach you again." Drew felt suddenly tired. It was all coming back.

There was no escape. His voice shook. "What do you want? If you knew where I was hiding, why did you force me to spend a year... "In a cave in the desert? You had to do penance for your sins. For your soul. To purify you. We kept you in reserve. You refused to join us, but we found a way to encourage you to help us if we needed it."

"Help?"

"Find."

"What?"

"A priest." The room exploded.

1 he concussion struck Drew a millisecond before he heard the actual sound of the blast. The room became bright, then smotheringly dark as he flew back against the wall. The back of his head struck stone. He rebounded toward the table. It collapsed from his weight and the force of the explosion. The impact of his chest against the floor took his breath away. As he squirmed in pain, the room burst into flames. The counter, now obliterated, must have been where the bomb had been hidden.

The waiter behind it and the two men near it never screamed, presumably torn apart by the detonation. But this understanding came much later. He did hear screaming. Not his own. A woman's. Arlene's.

And his urgent loving need to save her brought him back to the flames and the devastated room. Smoke made him gag convulsively. Crawling toward Arlene's anguished screams, he felt someone grab him. He struggled and cursed but couldn't stop himself from being lifted and dragged away. Outside in the hot, dusky, narrow street, encircled by a crowd, he couldn't hear Arlene screaming any longer. He made a final frantic effort to free himself from the arms that encircled his chest, to lunge back into the ruined building. Instead he collapsed. Through swirling vision, he peered up, convinced he was hallucinating, for the face above him... belonged to Arlene.

" 1 was afraid you were dead."

"The feeling was mutual," Arlene said.

He squeezed her hand. They sat on metal chairs in a sandy courtyard enclosed by a high stone wall. Beyond the walls, the din of Cairo intruded on the peacefulness of one of the few churches in this Arab city. A Greek Orthodox church, its bulbous spires in contrast with the slender minarets of a mosque. It was early the following morning.

Shadows filled one side of the courtyard. The heat was not yet oppressive. "When the fire started, I heard you screaming." He continued to squeeze her hand. "I was screaming. Your name."

"But you sounded so far away."

"I sounded far away to me as well. But after the blast, I wasn't hearing anything that didn't sound far away. Even my breath seemed to come from outside. All I knew was, I could move better than you could.

And both of us had to get out of there." He laughed. The laugh made his ribs hurt, but he didn't care. It felt too good to know that Arlene was alive. "How did we escape?"

"Father Sebastian had a backup team."

"Professional."

"They got us away from the restaurant before the police arrived," she said. 'I don't remember a lot after we reached the street, but I do remember both of us being carried through the crowd and lifted into the back of a truck. After that, things got fuzzy. The next thing I recall is waking up in our room in the rectory of this church."

"Where's Father Sebastian?"

"Very much alive," a voice said. Drew turned. Father Sebastian, looking more Italian than Egyptian now that he wore a priest's black suit and white collar, stood in the open doorway. He held a handkerchief to his nose.

When he stepped from the rectory's shadows into the sunlit courtyard, the handkerchief showed spots of blood, a consequence of the explosion.

Drew assumed. The priest brought over a metal chair and sat down. "I apologize for not joining you earlier, but I was celebrating morning mass."

"I could have served for you and taken communion," Drew said.

"You were still asleep when I looked in on you. At the time, your bodily needs seemed more important than your spiritual ones."

"Right now, my psychological needs are even more important."

"And those are?"

"I get miserable as hell when someone tries to blow me up. Under other circumstances, I might believe we simply happened to be where terrorists decided to set off a bomb. In Israel, say. In Paris or Rome. But in

Cairo? It's not on their itinerary."

"That isn't true any longer. While you were away in the desert, Cairo too became a target of terrorists."

"But in an unimportant restaurant, in an out-of-the-way part of the city? What political purpose would the explosion have served? That bomb wasn't placed at random. We didn't just happen to be there when the blast went off. We were the targets."

"For the second time in two days," Arlene added. Father Sebastian straightened his chair. "That's right. For the second time,"

Drew said. "While Arlene and I were crossing the desert..." He told the priest about the two Arab gunmen in the pass. Arlene elaborated.

"You don't think they were simply marauders?" Father Sebastian glanced toward Arlene. "You mentioned an earlier attack by two would-be rapists. In that same pass. Possibly the second pair... They could have been relatives out to avenge..."

"The first two were amateurs,"

Arlene insisted. "But the second pair..."

"If not for the grace of God and a cobra, we'd have been killed," Drew said. "Those men were fully equipped. They were pros."

"Someone knew I'd been sent to get Drew. But I told no one," Arlene said. "So the leak could have come only from within your organization,"

Drew said. Father Sebastian rubbed his forehead. "You don't seem surprised. You mean you'd already suspected--?"

"That the order had been compromised, that someone in the Fraternity was using his position to gain his own ends?" Father Sebastian nodded. "How long have you--"

"Merely suspected? Almost a year. Became virtually certain? Two months. Too many of our missions have ended badly. Twice, members of the order have been killed. If not for our backup teams, the bodies of our fallen brethren would have been found by the authorities."

"And their rings," Drew said. "Yes. And their rings. Other missions were aborted before such disasters could occur. Our enemies had been warned they were in danger and changed their schedules, increased their security. All of us in the Fraternity fear we're in danger of being exposed." Arlene's eyes blazed with resentment

"So that's why you sent me to bring back Drew. You wanted an outside operative, someone not associated with you but nonetheless controlled by you.". Father

Sebastian shrugged. "What's the gambler's expression? An ace in the hole. And indeed," he told Drew, "apart from your skills and reputation, you do seem to have a gambler's luck."

"We all do," Drew said. "For sure, we didn't survive that blast because of skill, but only because the bomb was placed in the only likely hiding spot, away from us, behind the counter in back."

"Two customers and a waiter died in the explosion," Arlene said. 'If you hadn't sent us there..." Father Sebastian sighed. "Their deaths were regrettable-- but unimportant compared to protecting the

Fraternity."

"What's important to me is survival," Drew said, "the chance for Arlene and me to live in peace, some place where you and your colleagues can't get to us."