Klindz, sitting in his flat in Earl's Court, listened to Susan saying, "I can't let my baby go. I can't let it go and be killed."

  Then he heard her mother say: "If this man Sarotzini shows up here..." Susan's father, Dick Corrigan, said, "We have to be practical, Gayle. Susan's tired and she's pretty emotional right now. She's had a bad shock and she's had a long flight. These flights knock the hell out of you even when you're strong - remember how we felt when we got back from Europe that time?"

  Her father continued, "I don't think we ought to make any decisions right now. I think Susan needs a bite to eat, a good night's rest and then we'll talk about this in the morning."

  "I'm telling you one thing, Dick," her mother said. "There's no way she's handing over that baby, not to anyone."

  "Gayle, I don't think we ought to rush to any conclusions right now. We're here for you, Susan, and we're gonna take care of you, but I think we're gonna find there's some other explanation for all this," her father said.

  "There's been a lot in the news about surrogate babies just recently," her mother said. "There was a documentary on Channel Nine last week. Maybe we should find a help group for Susan, get some advice?"

  Dick Corrigan raised his voice. "But if John doesn't want this baby, how's Susan gonna make him change his mind? Tell me that."

  "He will," Susan said, with quiet determination. "When my baby's born, he'll change his mind, won't he?"

  Klindz smiled. This was all working out so well. Oh, Susan, I'm so proud of you.

  Shortly after half past seven in the morning, John arrived in his office, drained and fraught with worry.

  He hadn't slept. The one time he had started to nod off, around half past three, Pila had rung him, totally hysterical, from a pay phone at St. Thomas's Hospital, to tell him that Archie was in intensive care.

  If he'd driven straight there and promptly had a row with the ward sister, who wasn't going to let him or Pila see Archie because they weren't relatives. When he got to Archie's bedside, it was a distressing sight. His friend stared blankly ahead, neither responding nor reacting to anything John said, occasionally making an odd flicking motion with his thumb.

  A bolshie junior houseman pumped John for information, then lectured him. He told John that Archie was grossly overweight for his height and age, a heavy smoker, doing a crazily stressed-out job. He had played a hard game of squash, immediately followed by alcohol, and had then gone back to work in the office. That made him a pretty good candidate for a whole raft of problems, and a stroke was one of the possibilities high on the list. They wouldn't know more until they got the test results back in the morning.

  John sat at his desk, his whole life apparently in tatters. He was beside himself with anxiety about Susan, and deeply upset about Archie - hell, he and his friend were the same age, and he'd always considered Archie indestructible. OK, so he wasn't overweight and he didn't really smoke any more, but he was just as stressed as Archie. If something could happen to Archie, it could equally easily happen to him.

  He closed his eyes. Where are you, Susan, darling, hon? Oh, Jesus, where the hell are you?

  He tried hard to put himself in her position. She was pregnant, she was terrified that Sarotzini and Van Rhoe were planning to sacrifice the baby, she was freaked out by the occult shit up in the attic, she was gutted by Fergus Donleavy's death, and now she didn't even trust him.

  Everything, in her mind, was a conspiracy against her or, more particularly, against her baby.

  Somehow, he had to talk sense to her.

  Although he wasn't sure what sense was any more. His tired brain was thinking about all that weird shit up in the attic. About Archie's colleague with the pentagram tattoo and the V6rn Bank as a client. He was thinking about how Zak Danziger had conveniently died soon after the V6rn Bank had become involved. About Harvey Addison dying after they'd gone for a second opinion. Fergus Donleavy dying after warning Susan. Now Archie, down with a stroke or whatever.

  But how the hell could all that tie together? It couldn't. It was easy to get spooked and jump to conclusions; being calm and rational was much harder. It could be just a chain of coincidences, and Susan, with her hang-up about coincidences, could have got herself into a state over nothing. But however much he told himself that, he couldn't convince himself. Not totally. Worry burrowed away at his confidence, undermining it further all the time.

  Susan, where are you? i She wasn't at any of their friends", so where might she have gone. Where would he have gone in her shoes? What was the natural instinct of anyone in trouble? To head for the comfort of home, of parents? California?

  She couldn't have gone to LA, surely. And, anyway, you weren't permitted to fly if you were heavily pregnant.

  Jesus, Van Rhoe would do his tank if Susan had left the country - he didn't even want her to leave London, not even for a few hours. He checked his watch. Seven forty-five. That made it eleven forty-five p.m. in Los Angeles; late, but that couldn't be helped. He looked up Susan's parents" phone number in his address file, and dialled it.

  His father-in-law answered, sounding as if he had just woken up. His tone was more formal and cooler than normal. Probably because it was late, John reasoned.

  "Dick, look, I'm sorry to bother you, and I don't know how to explain this very well - but I think Susan might have had some kind of breakdown. I arrived home last night and there was no sign of her. She seems to have packed a bag and left. I wondered if by chance you or Gayle had heard from her, or whether she'd come over to you?"

  There was a brief silence, then Dick Corrigan said, "No, I - Gayle and I -we didn't hear from her for a couple of weeks - er, Sunday last she called. Sounded fine, a little tired but fine."

  John asked him to call if they heard from her. He promised he would, asking John to do likewise, then hung up.

  John sank his head into his hands. Just in case Susan had sent him an e mail he switched on his computer, and logged on. The usual twenty or so awaited him. Then, scanning through them, he saw that one was from Archie Warren, sent at nine forty-seven p.m. last night, with an attachment. He double-clicked on the message and read it:

  john, all the stuff on vSrn bank here seems to be encrypted. loads of files. if you can decode this file, let me know and i'll copy the rest over to you. read than eat this. arch.

  John stared at it, thinking. Archie hadn't mentioned this at squash -and, from the time it had been sent, he must have gone back to the office afterwards. Archie had found the files on the V6rn Bank, and then he had had a stroke?

  Could there be a connection? Was he crazy to try to make one?

  Or crazy to dismiss it?

  He double-clicked on the attachment, to open it, and seconds later his screen was filled with a jumble of letters, numbers and symbols, meaningless to him. He called Gareth and asked his partner to come into his office.

  A few minutes later, looking more hung-over than usual and dressed in clothes that appeared to have been retrieved from a laundry basket, Gareth was staring at his screen. "PGP," he announced.

  "Pretty Good Privacy?" John said. It was one of the Internet's standard encryption systems.

  "Yup."

  "Can you decode it?"

  Gareth looked at him as if he were addressing a child of three. "Sure, no problem. Give me a Cray supercomputer and four years off and I'd be in with a sporting chance."

  "Shit. You serious?"

  Gareth turned back to the screen. "What's the provenance of this?"

  "How do you mean?"

  "Does it come from someone who knows what they're doing?"

  "Yes, I would think so."

  Gareth lit a cigarette. "So it's probably an NP-complete problem." "Uh?"

  "Nondeterministic polynomial."

  "Want to give it to me in English?" "Sure. You're fucked."

  "Great, that's really helpful, Gareth."

  "To read this, you need to have the encryption phrase - the sender would have it, and the recipient. When you encrypt something in this system, you provide a key, 8-bit, 16-bit, 24-bit, or even higher, depending on how sophisticated you are. It works on a doubling principle, like the grain of rice on the chessboard."

  "What grain of rice?"

  "You stick one grain of rice on the first square, two on the second, four on the third, eight on the fourth, sixteen on the fifth and so on. By the time you reach the sixty-fourth square you have three times the entire world annual production of rice, or something like that. That's the same principle on which this works."

  John stared at him with a feeling of helplessness. "So? There's no way we can read this?"

  Gareth looked round for an ashtray, then flicked ash into the wastepaper basket. "How urgent is it.

  "Seriously urgent."

  Gareth paced up and down the office and windmilled his arms. "Urn, right, OK, urn, I have a friend, right?" He moved towards John and lowered his voice, looking around, nervously. "We were at Sussex together - he's now at GCHOO you know, the top-security government listening place. They have a Cray there, and he's told me this, strictly off the record, that they have the keys to most Internet encryption systems. He's into real ale. I could try to have a drink with him at the weekend."

  John shook his head. "This is really urgent, Gareth. Couldn't you do anything quicker than that?"

  His partner looked at the screen again, and said, resignedly, "Oh, all right, do me a copy. I'll give it a go, no guarantees."

  And Klindz, in a club-class seat, was eating a breakfast of omelette, chipolata sausage and mushrooms, on an early-morning British Airways flight to Geneva.

  Chapter Fifty-four

  His room looked out on to the vineyards and olive groves on the southern slopes of the Ligurian hills. Down below, on the ribbon of road that mirrored the river's tortuous path across the floor of the valley, lay the burnt-out remains of one of Mussolini's last convoys.

  He. was thirteen. The war had been over for two years. Local kids, garages and scrap dealers had long ago picked the carcasses of the trucks and half-tracks clean of anything that could be flogged as a souvenir, or carted away on the back of a van, and now just the hulks remained. They had started to rust.

  This was his life, this room with its low, slanted ceiling and narrow slit of a window, and its dull little paintings of flowers, and its views out over the valley, which was lush in winter and arid in summer, and up towards the firmament. This room and his books were his life. It was the rear of the attic, and there was a sheer drop of several hundred feet below; no one could see in. No one in the village, apart from the couple beneath him who owned the house, fed him, and slaked his thirst for knowledge with a constant supply of books, knew that he was here. Only a tiny handful of people in the whole world even knew that he existed.

  Which was why, when they came for him, he was not expecting it. He never saw those people who burst into his room that night. It happened in a rush of darkness. He was asleep and then he was awake, with a blindfold over his eyes and a foul-tasting gag forced into his mouth.

  Whispered voices around him, he did not know how many, he knew only that he was frightened, and that they were mostly women's. They dragged him from the bed and on to the floor, then hoisted him on to the table that was also his desk. All the time they repeated, over and over and over, "ll Diavolo... 11 Diavolo... 11 Diavolo."

  He heard the woman who looked after him, Signora Vellucci, screaming for them to leave him alone, warning them of terrible vengeance, but they ignored her.

  His nightshirt was ripped off him, and then he was being prodded, poked, examined like a calf at market. A woman's voice said, in a pause between the chanting, "El hail padre, deve averio anhe lui." It is on his father, it must be on him also.

  Another woman, who was pushing the hairs on his head apart, examining the scalp beneath, murmured that Emil Sarotzini's son even had the devil's hair.

  Then a finger probed his anus, pushed hard, coarsely up inside, making him cry with pain into his gag. The finger was retracted, just as harshly, a remark was made that he did not catch and there was a roar of laughter. Then silence.

  Fifty years later, he could still remember this silence.

  He could remember the hands that gripped his wrists, his ankles, his thighs, like a vice. One arm went round his neck, pulling his head so tightly down on to the table that" he could hardly breathe.

  He could remember the fingers seizing his penis and pulling it sharply upwards. And he could remember the panic as he felt the fingers close around his scrotum and another woman's voice saying: "We are not allowed to kill him, but we can make sure the Sarotzini line ends with this boy. He will be the last."

  And then the pain, oh, yes, the pain between his legs from the blade of the knife. And all the loss that followed from it.

  And the words of the Tenth Truth, "A man who feels no thirst for vengeance feels no pain." These words he remembered every time he thought back to that night.

  No one from that village had ever given birth since 1947. Ajane d'Annunzzi was dying, it was known as the Village of the Damned. No one understood what it was about this place, whether it was something in the water from the chemical plant upwind or the high fungi diet the locals ate. Doctors and scientists, concerned about growing infertility around the world, had done many studies, and Ajane d'Annunzzi had achieved fame in medical papers, but no conclusions had been reached.

  Mr. Sarotzini was thinking about this now as he stared across his desk at Klindz.

  It was necessary to think about this.

  "How was your life before I found you, Stefan?" Mr. Sarotzini asked. "It was nothing."

  "And how did I find you?"

  "The Voice," Klindz said. "It was the Voice that came to you."

  "And what did this Voice tell me?"

  "It told you where I was living, where it was possible that you would find me, in a village, in Tanzania in Africa. I was five years old."

  "And what were you doing in this village?"

  "I was learning to track game." "And?"

  "That was all."

  "And where did you come from, Stefan?"

  "I don't know."

  "A missionary nun who was raped by a game warden?"

  "I don't know."

  "Why did the game warden rape the nun?"

  "I don't know."

  "What.do you know, Stefan?"

  "That you came for me."

  "And why did I come for you?"

  "The Voice guided you."

  "And why did it guide me?

  Klindz gazed down at the thick Persian carpet. "Because you had need of me. Especially you had need of a gene I carry. A rare gene."

  "And does this Voice guide you, Stefan?"

  "You guide me."

  "And what are you, Stefan?"

  ""An infant crying in the night: An infant crying for the light: And with no language but a cry.""

  "Who wrote that, Stefan?"

  "Tennyson."

  "And who is your light, Stefan?"

  "You are."

  "So why do you disobey me? Why have you turned weak? Because you are in love? The pleasures of the flesh? These pleasures are a distraction, they are there in your mind every waking moment, they drive you, role you, obsess you, yes?"

  Klindz had no answer.

  "Why did you allow Susan Carter to go to America, Stefan?"

  "Because you instructed me to."

  "And you always obey me? Are you my Pavlovian dog? Do you salivate when I ring bells?"

  Klindz hesitated, and he knew this was a dangerous thing to do. "Yes." "Do you salivate when you think of Susan Carter?" Again Klindz hesitated.

  "I gave you Susan Carter, Stefan, and you let her go to America."

  "My powers are limited," Klindz replied. "I do not have the authority to restrict her."

  There was a flash of anger in Mr. Sarotzini's face. "One telephone call to the airport, Stefan, to inform them how many weeks pregnant she was, and they would not have permitted her to fly. That was all you needed to do."

  Klindz lowered his head in shame.

  "Look at me, Stefan. you are weakened by your love."

  Klindz raised his head and stared back at Mr. Sarotzini, but had no answer. Mr. Sarotzini might have congratulated him for having the presence of mind to ensure Miles Van Rhoe was flown over to America immediately, to be there even before Susan Carter landed, but this was not a moment for praise.

  "You understand this baby is going to need a father, Stefan?"

  Klindz swallowed, nervously. "Yes."

  "Did I honour my pledge to you, Stefan?"

  "Yes."

  "And it was good?"

  "It was good."

  "As good as you had dreamed?"

  Klindz replied: "Virgil said there are two gates of Sleep. One is said to be of horn, through which the Spirits of Truth find an easy passage. The other made of ivory, through which the gods send up false dreams to the upper world."

  "And through which gate did you enter Susan Carter?"

  Klindz thought for a moment because, with Mr. Sarotzini, all questions were traps. "The horn," he said.

  Mr. Sarotzini smiled. "You remember, Stefan, the Fifteenth Truth?"

  Klindz replied, ""To achieve your dream is strength. To repeat your dream is weakness.""

  And now from a drawer in his desk, Mr. Sarotzini produced a barber's razor and handed it to Klindz. "Is this sharp?"

  Klindz tested the keenness of the blade with his finger. He told Mr. Sarotzini that it was sharp.

  Mr. Sarotzini took a cigar from a box on his desk but did not light it. "Only you and I will ever know the truth, and this baby is the truth." He examined the band on the cigar, then stared at Klindz. "I kept my part of our bargain and now you must keep yours. Are you ready to purify yourself, Stefan? To protect yourself against future temptation? To show me that I am wrong and you are not weakened by your love, but strengthened by it?"

  Klindz stifled a fleeting surge of panic. He did not want to do this, he really did not, but he could not disobey. And he must demonstrate to Mr. Sarotzini that he was not weakened by his love. He tried to calm himself. It would be for the best. He trusted Mr. Sarotzini absolutely, and Mr. Sarotzini would not make him do this unless it was for the best. It was going to be painful now, but it would be for the best. And he had made his pledge.