The entrance to the motorway came up fast on his left. Rule was already in the left lane, but there was a broken- down car blocking the entrance and he zoomed past without being able to get on.
Jenny had already turned her torso half around so that she could look through the rear window.
'What's going on?' Bravo said.
Rule sat a little forward, his body tense. 'We've got a problem.'
'Picked up another tail.' Jenny moved slightly closer to Bravo on the backseat to improve her view. 'White Mercedes coupe three cars back.'
Rule nodded. 'That's the one, but my concern is that it might not be the only one.'
'What makes you say that?' Bravo asked.
'The broken-down car that was blocking the motorway entrance,' Jenny said.
'It kept us on this road,' Rule said. He turned the wheel hard, and the X5 skidded slightly. He pressed the accelerator to the floor, and they were thrown backward into their seats.
'Now we'll really see what this can do,' Rule said. 'I have a twelve-cylinder engine in here that should let us do everything but take off.'
Up ahead, Bravo saw a red Audi move over to the left and accelerate to match their speed.
'It's a box, all right,' Jenny called out.
Rule nodded again. 'They've got us front and rear. Better fasten your seat belts, children.'
He wove in and out of the traffic, cutting his lane-changing within a hairsbreadth of disaster. He was deliberately going faster than the traffic flow, and now it was easy to see the two Knight vehicles-the Audi in front, the Mercedes behind.
All at once, the Audi slowed. Rule stepped on the brakes, skidding slightly, and he shifted down to compensate. An instant later, they were slammed by the Mercedes, and he accelerated directly at the Audi. The Audi, smaller and lighter by far than either the BMW or the Mercedes, skittered to life, staying in front of them.
'This isn't good,' Rule said. 'I have to assume they want us on this road for a reason.'
No sooner had he said this than he saw the semi idling up ahead. Its rear doors gaped open, a steel ramp extending down from it.
'That's why they put us in a box,' Rule said. 'They want to herd us into the semi.'
To their left loomed the off-ramp to the motorway. Rule waited until the last possible instant, then he swerved for it. A gray Renault was lumbering along the exit ramp when the driver saw the BMW X5 on a collision course. The Renault's horn blared furiously even as it slewed out of the way. Rule accelerated up the off-ramp and onto the motorway.
They had lost both the Audi and the Mercedes, but now the BMW was heading the wrong way. Horns sounded and brakes screeched as disbelieving drivers struggled to get out of the way without slamming their vehicles into other cars or the guard rails. Mercifully, there was a breakdown area that Rule used to make a screeching U-turn, pulling out into the disjointed traffic flow before his passengers had a chance to catch their breath.
They were by this time northwest of Chartres, and at the exit for the town of Dreux, Rule cut across the entire motorway to take the off-ramp. As he slowed the X5, he pulled out a cell phone and made a brief call, his voice so low that neither Bravo nor Jenny could hear what he said.
Within six minutes they were in Dreux. It was a small industrial town filled with hulking foundries, refineries, sprawling factories where televisions, boilers and chemicals were manufactured. Not surprisingly, it was an ugly and vaguely depressing place, despite its trees and flower beds. The stern and forbidding Gothic St. Pierre's Church was one of the few surviving medieval buildings to remind those with a sense of history that Dreux had once belonged to the counts of Vexin and the dukes of Normandy.
'All the counts of Vexin were members of the Order in their time,' Rule said. 'In this way, Dreux still belongs to us. These are my people, I can vouch for every one of them.'
They were met outside St. Pierre's by a slim young man in jeans and a T-shirt, whose eyes were completely hidden by a pair of glasses with reflective lenses. Ignoring Bravo and Jenny completely, he exchanged keys with Rule. He went straight to the BMW and drove off.
The interior of St. Pierre's was cool and dim. The air was faintly tinged with incense and massed voices raised in hypnotic liturgical chant. Rule led them to a particularly gloomy side chapel dominated by the emaciated figure of Christ, body bent backward, eyes raised heavenward.
They stood close together, listening for hurried footsteps or stealthy movement in the shadows. Bravo felt the Voire Dei close around them, as if they had sunk beneath the Bay of St. Malo. From time to time, he saw small groups of tourists, or a priest striding past on some unknown business, and he was struck by how removed he felt from them. It was as if they existed in an old, dim print he was being shown. And he thought Jenny was right, he could never go back to their reality.
At length, Rule took off his sunglasses and said very softly to Bravo, 'You must listen to me closely because I suspect that there may be no other time for me to tell you what your father entrusted me to say. The secret the Order has guarded for centuries, the secret Rome has wanted above all others is this: we have a fragment of the Testament.'
'Testament?' Bravo said. 'What testament?'
Rule's eyes flashed with a kind of fervor Bravo had never before seen. 'The Testament of Jesus Christ.'
Bravo's heart seemed to give a painful lurch against his rib cage. 'Are you serious?'
'Never more so,' Rule said.
A priest walked by, saw them and nodded with a smile. All three fell silent until he had disappeared from view.
When Rule spoke again, his voice was both lower and more urgent. 'Tell me, Bravo, in your studies have you come across the Secret Gospel According to Mark?'
'Of course,' Bravo nodded. 'In 1958, a scholar discovered it in the library of the Mar Saba monastery near Jerusalem. He found a handwritten text on the endpapers of a 1646 edition of Isaac Voss's 'Epistolae genuinae S. Ignatii Martyris.''
Rule grinned. 'Full marks, as usual.'
'And they came into Bethany,' Bravo recited from the Secret Gospel. 'And a certain woman whose brother had died was there. And, coming, she prostrated herself before Jesus and said to him, 'Son of David, have mercy on me.' But the disciples rebuked her. And Jesus, being angered, went off with her into the garden where the tomb was, and straightaway, going in where the youth was, he stretched forth his hand and raised him…'
Rule laughed. 'Of course, your eidetic memory.'
'Basically, the Secret Gospel has been derided by Bible scholars because it depicts Jesus as a miracle worker, which runs counter to formal Church doctrine. It describes in detail how Jesus resurrected not only Lazarus, as is told in the eleventh chapter of Clement, but this boy and others as well.'
'That's correct,' Rule said. 'And so dangerous was the Secret Gospel deemed that it was secretly suppressed by the Church in the fourth century, and then destroyed. Or so they thought.'
'This is one of the secrets in the cache my father was guarding?'
'That's right,' Rule said.
'Are you saying that you think it's true?'
'I know it is,' Rule said, 'because the fragment of the Testament of Jesus Christ confirms it. This is why it is vital that it and the other documents so closely guarded for centuries not fall into the hands of the Knights of St. Clement, for they will surely destroy all trace of them as if they had never existed.'
'If what you're saying is true,' Bravo said, 'then why are you holding on to this secret? It's not only a religious artifact-it's an archeological miracle, a part of history. Why not reveal it to the world?'
'Bringing the Testament to light would violate our basic tenets, and this we will not do.'
'I don't understand.'
'It's not only the Testament that we possess,' Rule said. 'We also have the Quintessence.'
'What?' Bravo had started, as if pricked by a needle.
Rule nodded. 'You heard me.'
'The fabled fifth element,' Bravo breathed. 'Medieval philosophers were convinced that the celestial
