Gold — Steven Savile

"I am Solomon. Remember my name."

How could the world forget? The cardinals were dead, murdered with the eyes of the world watching intently. The people that were supposed to protect them had failed spectacularly. The promise had been for forty days and forty nights of fear. Now the dying has begun with that first burning body in Trafalgar Square.

The media speculate that it is an attack on faith, that Solomon is out to destroy all symbols of Christianity. They fear for the holy relics, the Shroud of Turin, the Spear of Destiny, all of the fragments of the true cross, anything and everything sacred to Rome, but it is much more than that.

Forty days and forty nights of fear. Can the world survive the nerve-shredding anxiety that kind of fear brings with it without turning on itself?

As the first ghost planes falls out of the sky, all of its passengers and crew dead, killed by some toxic nerve agent released by one of Solomon's sleeper agents, the answer seems to be a resounding no. The enemy is too big. Too strong. The stakes too high.

But that impossible fight was exactly the kind of threat his team of misfits had been assembled to face down. They were the only ones capable of acting outside the law, no restrictions on how far they can go to protect the Realm, no action too extreme -- because they aren't there. They don't exist. Everything they do and have done is deniable.