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temples. “You’re telling me we’re looking at a plot to assassinate the Pope, okay, I’ll buy that, but a plot dating back to a sect that committed mass suicide two thousand years ago? Now that’s . . . special. And not special in a good way, I might add”—he sucked in a disbelieving breath—“as if that wasn’t enough, not only has our whistleblower been dead for the best part of five hundred years, he just happened to be a fortuneteller who couldn’t spell Hitler and marked Saddam as the Antichrist. Does that about sum it up?” He looked around the table. “I mean, seriously, do you have any idea how bloody ridiculous that sounds?”
    Lethe met his gaze full on and held it. He was the youngest of the group by a good decade, and right then he looked it. He touched the black frame of his glasses. “I’d say we’re merrily skipping down the yellow brick road into Looney Town,” Lethe agreed with a wry smile, “but what we’ve got here is a link. The modern world is all about links, degrees of separation and joining the dots. The only thing that makes any kind of sense is that something happened at Masada and these people burned themselves alive because of it. I’m not claiming it makes a good kind of sense.”
    Noah didn’t know much about the kid. The old man had introduced him to the team as a researcher. Noah had always assumed that meant hacker. He was the archetypal nerd with his thick-framed glasses and tufts of beard that really didn’t seem all that keen to grow through. Lethe took his glasses off. Without them he looked another five years younger, if that was possible. Noah liked the kid, even if he spent too much time jacked into the neural net or whatever it was he did as a substitute for having a healthy sex life.
    “I think that’s a bit of a leap of logic,” Orla Nyrén interrupted his train of thought. Noah looked her way, worried for a moment that he might have said part of what was going on in his head. Thankfully, she wasn’t looking at him. Orla brushed that errant strand of hair away from her face again. She moved her cell phone so that it sat exactly perpendicular to her on the table. It was a tiny adjustment that smacked of an obsessive need for order that went beyond needing things around her to make sense. It was all about controlling her world and what happened in it. Noah could respect that so long as it didn’t involve turning widdershins three times and rolling up a trouser leg before opening a door.
    “That it might be, but anything else would mean a second layer of coincidence, wouldn’t it?” Lethe reasoned. He pinched at his nose. It was obvious he’d been staring at computer screens for hours; his focus had that kind of glazed quality life online brought with it. “If it isn’t Masada that links these suicides, then it is either a totally random collusion of circumstance, a coincidence to the power of thirteen, if you like, or somewhere out there, there’s another singularity where these thirteen unfortunate souls come together. My money is on Masada though, not a black hole. Occam’s Razor and all that,” Lethe said.
    “Look hard enough and you’ll start to see conspiracies everywhere,” Orla shrugged. “And forgive me, but I don’t exactly see how this falls under our remit. We aren’t bodyguards. If someone is out to kill the Pope, we should pass on what we know to the authorities and wash our hands of it.”

    “Very Pontius Pilate of you, my dear,” Sir Charles said, settling back in the seat of his wheelchair. “However, our remit is whatever I say it is on any given day. You knew that when you took this particular king’s shilling. Now, given the links to Masada and the Sicarii, I believe we are in a unique position to investigate. Perhaps our martyrs did find something on their excavations. It isn’t out of the question. And when you consider the fact that Masada is a biblical site, anything they found would very definitely fall under our