Hartwell had cause to think of his first encounter with Preach as he closed his shop promptly at six o’clock. Normally, he would spend two hours at the martial arts club, as he did five days a week, but this evening was reserved for the Alchemists. He was fit and strong now, in both mind and body—that was Preach’s doing, as was so much else in his life.

He opened the locked door at the rear of his shop, trotted down the stairs. Through another door lay a square anteroom, lined with antique books, all valuable, several immensely so. As he always did, he paused, running his hand over the rough cover of one of these. It was very old, the cover made of the cured skin of an animal—mammal, amphibian, lizard, it was impossible to tell, the march of ages having worn away the specificity. It was Trey’s most precious and beloved book. He knew it by heart. One could say it served him as a talisman.

Beyond the anteroom was the much larger meeting chamber, filled with a round polished wood table and seven straight-back cherrywood chairs. Ranged around the buff-colored walls were woodcut portraits of the first ten American presidents.

At precisely 6:25 his compatriots began to arrive. They did so via a rear entrance accessed by a steep flight of stairs that led down to the basement of the town house. In all, six men arrived, all within fifteen minutes of one another, which meant that by seven p.m. the full complement of Alchemists had been achieved. Punctuality was not merely a duty, but a moral imperative with each of the seven. This rectitude was but a single example of their determination to be true to the Alchemists’ motto: Uno Animo, Uno Voluntatis—One Mind, One Will.

At the stroke of seven the men, who had been standing still and silent, their spines as erect as the chair backs, took their appointed seats in a soft rustle of expensive suit fabrics. It was a sound not unlike the susurrus of cicadas at twilight in high summer. In front of each member was a file in a black jacket. A diagonal red stripe ran across the upper right-hand corner, denoting the content as ultra-secret. These files were never taken out of the town house, and at the end of each meeting where they appeared they were put through a shredder, the shreds then incinerated.