THE LIST

A dead man is killing his way across Europe.

January 1990. British nuclear-intelligence officer James Calder resigns from MI6, fakes his own death, and disappears into a small harbor on the French Atlantic coast-with a suppressed pistol and a list of names.

The names belong to the Coordinators of the Custodia Auspiciorum, an institution that has operated in the shadows of European power for sixteen hundred years. Its mark is on every banknote in his pocket. Its people killed the woman he loved. And the list was given to him by his former wife, a Latinist who has spent nine years quietly decoding the institution from a kitchen table, in cottages the institution has never thought to look at.

One name at a time, Calder works the list-Marseilles, Brussels, Berlin, Vienna-each kill carrying him closer to the institution's inner circle, and closer to the people now hunting him.

And in a rented cottage in the north, Margaret Howell writes Latin papers that only one reader in the world can understand. The reader is one of the seven men her former husband is coming to kill. He has begun to write back.

THE LIST is the second novel in THE ORDER, the sequence that begins with THE LINE BETWEEN LIES. It is about marriage that doesn't end at divorce, silence as a working language, and a simple arithmetic: seven names, one gun, and an institution that has spent sixteen centuries making certain no one finishes the list.