"Come on," Victor said. "The sooner we get you off the streets and hidden away, the happier I'll be." Even his voice had changed. It was firmer, more confident, although his accent stayed the same.

The staircase smelled of dust, and the flats it led to looked shabby. But only from the outside. When Victor used another key on the nearest door-there was a battered aluminum figure 1 screwed into the peeling paint work-it opened into a bright, well-furnished apartment. Em looked around in bewilderment. This wasn't a rich man's flat, but there was carpet on the floor and a dishwasher, washing machine, electric cooker, and breakfast bar in the kitchen area. There was even a small piano in the living room. Did Victor own this place? So what was he doing sleeping in shelters?

There were dead bolts on the inside of the door, and Victor slammed all four of them across before turning back to Em. "It's steel lined," he remarked. "Need a battering ram to get through it, so you'll have plenty of time to escape if they do find you. Which they won't." He moved over to the window and twitched the curtain aside. Behind it was a small, brushed-steel lever set into a metal plate. "Releases an escape chute," Victor said. "You can be out of here and on the street in seconds. It's mechanical, so it will work even in a power cut."

"Who are you?" Em asked soberly. By now only a muppet would have failed to work out that Victor wasn't what he seemed to be-or at least not what he had seemed to be. This was no down-and-out, wherever he'd been sleeping lately.

"Would you like coffee? There's some quite decent Costa Rican in the cupboard."

"Is this one of those 'if you tell me who you are, you'll have to kill me' deals?"

Victor smiled for the first time. "Something like that."

"You're MI5, aren't you?" Em blurted. It was like something out of a movie, and even as he said it, he didn't believe it; but it was no more unlikely than everything else that had been happening to him since his father died.

Victor shook his head. "No. No, I'm not. Let's just say I work for something called Section 7. It's a bit more secretive than MI5."

Em blinked. "More secret than MI5? More secret than the Secret Service?"

Victor shrugged. "You can find MI5 headquarters in the phone book; they even have a website. Nothing very secret about that, is there? But you won't find Section 7 listed anywhere; and if you could persuade anybody in authority to talk about it at all, they'd deny our existence."

"So that's all you're going to tell me?"

"Actually, no, it isn't. If you give me time to make the coffee, I'm going to tell you a great deal. Including some stuff even MI5 doesn't know about."

The smell of percolating coffee reminded Em that the last thing he'd eaten was a small bag of chips in the railway station the night before, and suddenly he was ravenous. He began to open cupboards in the kitchen area.

"There's the remains of a cooked chicken in the fridge," Victor told him. "I need to stock up properly now that there are two of us, but it'll keep you going." He began to pour the coffee into two large mugs and handed one to Em. It bore an inscription in multicolored script: YOU'RE JUST JEALOUS BECAUSE THE VOICES ONLY TALK TO ME.

Em skipped the knife and fork to savage a chicken leg held in his fingers. Victor watched him over the rim of his coffee cup with an expression of amusement. After a moment, he opened a drawer in the table and threw across a paper napkin. Em used it to wipe his mouth, then his fingers as he asked, "Did you dye your beard?"

If Victor was surprised by the question, he didn't show it. He shook his head. "This is my real color. I washed out the white and the gray. Didn't need it anymore."

"Why didn't you shave it completely?" Em took his first sip of coffee. It was excellent.

"I have rather a distinctive scar. The beard hides it." He reached across to pick a sliver of meat from the chicken. "Facial scars are rare-they mark you out. But lots of men wear beards."

"Is Victor your real name?"

"No, but you can keep using it."

"Do you live here?"

"At the moment, yes."

"Why were you in the Salvation Army shelter pretending to be homeless?"

"I was looking for you."

Em stared at him. The old familiar feeling of sinking out of his depth came back full force. There was so much going on he didn't understand. "How did you know I'd be there?"

"I didn't," Victor said. "When I found out that you were on the run, it seemed a homeless shelter would be a good place to start looking. I got lucky." He shrugged. "There aren't very many shelters in the town."

"I was going to sleep under a bridge," Em said inconsequentially.

Victor gave him a cynical glance. "I don't think so," he said. "Sleeping outdoors sounds easy until you actually try it. Then you head for the nearest shelter. It's only when you can't get in anywhere that you end up under a bridge or on a park bench. But you were a quick learner with the railway station and very brave trying the tunnel."

Em didn't want to think about finding a place to sleep tonight (except that he was going to sleep here, wasn't he, in this safe house, with Victor?), didn't want to think about the people chasing him. What he wanted was answers. "Victor," he said, "what's all this about?"

"Have you ever heard of the Knights of Themis?" Victor asked.

Chapter 21.

"The year was 594 BC; the country was Greece; the city was Athens. . . ."

"What was the weather like?" Em asked.

Victor glared at him. "Do you want to know what's going on or don't you?"

"Sorry," Em said contritely.

"There were actually riots in the streets," Victor continued. "The poor in Athens were tired of being pushed around by the nobles and having no say in what happened to them. So the Athenians called in a man named Solon to act as mediator, and he set up a whole series of reforms-new laws, what amounted to a new constitution, really. These laws were the first steps toward political democracy, the first time such a thing happened anywhere in the world."

"Good for him," Em murmured.

"Solon was a very wise man," Victor remarked. "But unfortunately, his reforms pleased nobody. The nobles thought they went too far; the poor thought they didn't go far enough. Solon went off on a world tour-that's when he discovered the Egyptian records of Atlantis that Plato wrote about-and left them to sort themselves out. While he was away, a group of the most conservative nobles banded together to form the Knights of Themis."

Em frowned. "Knights of . . . ?"

"Themis. She was one of the ancient Greek Titans, the embodiment of divine order. She represented the old laws and customs. The Athenian nobles liked her because they wanted to go back to the way things were before Solon stuck his nose in. Specifically, they wanted to get rid of this newfangled democracy business. The Knights of Themis was a political movement in the form of a secret society dedicated to the overthrow of democracy. The society itself was organized something like today's Masonic Lodge, with initiations into various degrees. There were oaths pledging obedience to the superiors of the order and binding members to absolute secrecy about their plans, aims, and methods."

Em frowned. "And I should be interested in this because . . . ?"

"Because the Knights never went away," Victor told him bluntly.

"Wait a minute," Em cut in. "A political movement founded in Greece more than two and a half thousand years ago is still in existence today?"

Victor shrugged. "Why not? Democracy was a political movement founded in Greece more than two and a half thousand years ago, and that's in existence today. Believe me, the Knights of Themis are still very much active. Antidemocratic movements have always been able to attract influential people. Their main goal now is a unified world under a single government."

"No more wars," Em murmured.

"No more democracy." Victor scowled. "Their ideal world government is one completely controlled by themselves."

After a moment Em said cautiously, "Yes, but we don't have a world government, democratic or not; and not much sign of one."

"We have a united Europe," Victor said.

"Yes, but that's just trade. The European Union is just trade."

"That's certainly the way it was sold to the voters, but it's not just trade anymore. There's a European parliament and a European legislature, and the laws they bring in are binding on all the member states. They don't call it a United States of Europe yet, but that's where it's heading; and it's getting stronger and more powerful every year."

Em began to smile. "You're not trying to tell me that the Knights of Themis-"

"Were behind the European Union?" Victor interrupted him. "That's exactly what I'm trying to tell you. Just like they were behind the two world wars. The next step for Europe will be to abolish national governments and create a single, central, all-powerful government for the whole continent. And guess who'll be running that?"

Victor obviously wanted him to say the Knights. Em actually said nothing.

Victor knuckled his eyes tiredly. "In fact, their plans for Europe are so far advanced, they've now moved on to the second stage: the establishment of a new world order."

"What's that?"

"The abolishment of all sovereign states everywhere and the creation of a single world government."

Em finished his coffee in a single gulp. "Hard to swallow."

"The coffee or the concept?"

"The concept. The coffee's fine."

"They're not doing it all at once. The idea is to integrate various countries into greater unions, then unify the unions. You already have the European Union. There's also an emerging Asian Union: China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. It's all economics at the moment, but that's the way the European Union started. There are also proposals on the table for a Central Asian Union to unify Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan; and for a South Asian Union that would be bigger than the rest of them put together. That one's going to bring together forty-three different countries all the way from Saudi Arabia to the Philippines . . . and the creepy thing is, the South Asian Union includes major players from the Asian Union and the Central Asian Union, so you're already seeing a potential union of the unions."

Em opened his mouth to say something, but Victor was in full flight.

"Once you take an interest in the world as a whole, you can see the hand of the Knights everywhere. But the really interesting part is what they're doing to America."

"The Land of the Free," Em murmured.

"Not anymore," Victor told him.

Chapter 22.

"After 1945," Victor said, "the Knights decided to take over America."

"They what?" Em gasped.

"You heard me," Victor said. "America is unusual among modern democracies in that so much power is concentrated in the hands of one man: the president. Much more than our own prime minister, you can be certain. Put a Knight of Themis in the White House, and you effectively take control of America for at least four years-eight if you play your cards right."

"But they haven't done it, have they? They haven't put a man in the White House?"

"Oh, yes, they have."

Em stared at him in disbelief. "The current president?"

Victor shook his head. "Not him. They couldn't control the backlash against their plans to expand America's involvement in the Middle East. But the Knights have their own men in the Senate and the House of Representatives, and there are a whole host of lobby groups that secretly support their aims. They've also infiltrated the commercial and financial sectors big-time. Apart from that, they've had their men in the White House off and on since Washington. They even went public about it in 1957."

"What happened in 1957?"

"They issued the current dollar bill." He obviously caught Em's blank look, for he asked, "You don't have a dollar bill about your person, do you?"

"I've never even seen one."

"Your education has been sadly lacking," Victor said. He extracted a bill from his wallet. "Souvenir of my last trip to New York. Now look . . ." He placed it facedown on the table and smoothed it flat. "What's that say?"

Em glanced at the banknote. "'In God we trust.'" Em looked up at him. "All others must pay cash." As he said it, he realized it was only the second joke he'd cracked since his father died. He was still desperately sad, still missed the old boy terribly; but the coiled spring inside his gut seemed to have eased when he wasn't paying attention. He was returning, very slowly, to something like his old, cheerful self.

"Very funny," Victor said sourly. "To the left of that-the Latin."

Em looked to the left of the ONE on the dollar bill. Within a circle there was a drawing of an eye inside a pyramid with some wording around it. The drawing looked vaguely familiar, but for the life of him he couldn't think why. He forced himself to concentrate on the wording. "'Annuit cptis,'" he read slowly. "'Novus ordo seclorum.'"

"Which means?"

"Bit rusty on the old Latin, I'm afraid," Em told him.

"Annuit cptis means 'favors the beginning.' Novus ordo seclorum near enough translates as 'new world order.' Put the whole thing together and you have the message: The Knights of Themis want to start a new world order. And since it was printed right there on a dollar bill, the implication is that the USA also wants that."

"Does it?" Em asked. He was beginning to feel at sea. Politics at home had never been an interest of his, and American politics was a complete mystery. He believed what Victor was telling him, but he couldn't seem to get any overall picture into his head.

"There are signs," Victor said. "It certainly wasn't long before that message came out into the open: the first President Bush publicly announced that he favored a new world order in 1990 during an address to the United Nations. By that time, Themis even had the Russians on board. Premier Gorbachev was calling for a new world order as early as 1988."

"Yes, but talking about it and doing anything about it are two different things."

"Ever hear of the North American Union?"

Em shook his head. "No."

"Neither have most of the American people. It's a Themis plan to set up a union of the United States, Canada, and Mexico. There's going to be a common currency called the amero. It's just like the European Union, and it's the first step toward a single state that will take in the whole of the Americas, north and south. Nobody's ever voted for it, but plans are moving ahead just the same. That's what I mean about taking over America. Anybody who criticizes the idea is accused of political scare tactics-I quote President George W. Bush on that."

"You're saying," Em said carefully, "this North American Union is part of a new world order?"

"I've told you how these people work. First you unify countries, then you unify the unions. We've already got a European Union; we're well on the way toward one or more Asiatic unions. Add in a union of the Americas, centralize power, and you've got a world government."

Em went back to a much earlier thought. "Would that be such a bad thing?"