ISBN 0-436-14096-9 (UK hbk)

"One Colonel Ardenti, who has unnaturally black brilliantined hair, an Adolphe Menjou moustache, wears maroon socks and fought in the Foreign Legion, starts it all. He tells three editors at a Milan publishing house that he has discovered a coded message about a Templar plan, centuries old and of diabolical complexity, to tap a mystic source of power greater than atomic energy.

"The editors (who have spent altogether too much time rewriting crackpot manuscripts on the occult by self-subsidizing poetasters and dilettantes) decide to have a little fun. They'll make a plan of their own. But how?

"Randomly they throw in manuscript pages on hermetic thought. The Masters of the World, who live beneath the earth. The Comte de Saint-Germain, who lives forever. The secrets of the solar system contained in the measurements of the Great Pyramid. The Satanic initiation rites of the Knights of the Temple. Assassins, Rosicrucians, Brazilian voodoo. They feed all this into their computer, which is named Abulafia (Abu for short) after the medieval Jewish cabalist.

"A terrific joke, they think -- until people begin to disappear mysteriously, one by one, starting with Colonel Ardenti." [jacket blurb, UK hbk, 1989]

"Quintessential turn-of-the-millennium fiction, a head-spinning extravaganza of mythico-historical speculation, a postmodern folly constructed by a deadly sane man, a devious, wholly unsynopsisable narrative which reads as though it had been modelled on one of those mathematical brain-teasers whose crowning instruction would invariably turn out to be 'now take away the number you first thought of' -- a novel, in short, that doesn't taste like chicken". --Gilbert Adair (in The Postmodernist Always Rings Twice, 1992).

Recommended.