By Lewis Perdue

A priceless work by Leonardo Da Vinci holds the key to a secret so devastating that the Vatican will stop at nothing to prevent the world from knowing. The secret is contained a Da Vinci Codex, a collection of his art and writings.

The hot pursuit of the secret results in the deaths of DaVinci scholars around the world, murdered by a mysterious brotherhood of ultraconservative Catholic monks who trace their bloodline to the original Vicar of Christ, St. Peter.

Enter Vance Erikson, one of the world’s leading DaVinci scholars, an unconventional man who discovers a sophisticated and never-before-detected forgery of several pages in a priceless DaVinci Codex he has discovered and acquired for the private collection of super-wealthy renegade oilman Harrison Kingsbury. Erikson presents evidence at a press conference that the forged pages are actually substitutes for the codex’s original pages, The worldwide question becomes: What is contained in the missing pages?

As soon as Erikson’ discovery and the forgery is made public, he becomes a target for assassination. His search for the missing Da Vinci Codex pages takes him back through the rich field of DaVinciana and straight to Italy where dodges attack after attack. But it appears that his shadowy assailants are not trying to kill him, but to kidnap him.

In Italy, his path crosses art expert and journalist Suzanne Storm’s who had previously crossed swords with Erikson. In a series of narrow escapes in which they must rely upon each other for survival, they set aside their previous differences and romance grows.

When Storm is kidnapped, Erikson follows the trail to a monolithic and well-guarded monastery on the shore of Lake Como, near Bellagio. When Erikson tries to free Storm, he is captured himself and learns that the monastery belongs to their pursuers, The Elect Brothers of St. Peter. All of the monks trace their bloodline directly to the union of St. Peter and Mary Magdalene. They believe they are the True Church and seek to overthrow the Pope and current Vatican structure.

Through history – including periods when there were multiple Popes all battling for the throne of St. Peter -- those wishing to overthrow the Vatican have allied themselves with secular powers. The Elect Brothers of St. Peter have allied themselves with the Bremen Legation, a Trilateral Commission-like global conspiracy of giant multinational corporations and top elected officials controlled by the Legation.

Erikson and Storm find that it is the Bremen Legation that really wants to find the missing DaVinci codex pages. The Elect Brothers agree to use its worldwide network of committed, fanatical monks to find the missing pages. They have started with the top DaVinci scholars, torturing to death those without answers.

Erikson and Storm escape, locate the missing pages and find that they are DaVinci’s observations on lightning and electrical phenomena. It’s well known that many of Leonardo's inventions -- as evidenced in his drawings and writings from the helicopter to the bicycle, parachute and methods of building armed fortifications –- have needed to wait centuries before the technology was available to build them.

In this case, DaVinci’s drawings and writing reveal a previously un-thought-of way of looking at lightning and electrical discharges. Leonardo’s unorthodox observations will allow modern-day scientists to solve the remaining issues that have prevented the construction of charged particle beam weapons – the ultimate military weapon.

With Harrison Kingsbury’s help (during which he dies heroically) Storm and Erikson not only recover the codex pages, but also an astounding data base of incriminating evidence on leaders around the globe, a database they use to keep themselves alive and to slowly dismantle the Bremen Legation.