The Cold War has ended. The Soviet Empire has imploded. With a scope and
daring not possible until now, an unlikely international alliance of
top-level political, financial, and religious interests sees the way
clear at last to its ultimate goal: the establishment of a single global
society. Utopia. With nothing in common but immense power and a towering
ambition for still more - with world unity and prosperity as their
slogan; with betrayal, scandal, and murder as their ready weapons -
these men have the means and the will to capture as their own the
perfect global machinery for their plans: the oldest, wiliest, and most
stable political chancery in the world. The Vatican. At the vortex of
this lethal struggle already engulfing the society of nations stand the
embattled Pope, a geopolitical genius whose elimination is the
short-term solution to a long-term goal; and two American brothers, Paul
and Christian Gladstone, one a lawyer and the other a priest, who appear
to be the perfect pawns. One falls prey to the sharp teeth of greed for
power. But what the conspirators cannot know is that the other will
become one of the Slavic Pontiff's closest allies... or that he will
discover the darkest of hidden things at the very heart of papal Rome.
From America to Europe to Russia, in broad landscapes and clandestine
corridors, a rich and varied cast - presidents and politicos, simple
saints and savvy sinners, popes and pope-makers and papal wannabes -
clash with each other amid dramatic and sometimes bloody events that
will affect the destiny of every person alive today, and every person
yet to be born.
