THE COVENANT

For two hundred and forty years, five Americans have been meeting in a cabin in the Virginia mountains.

They are not elected. They are not appointed. They answer to no body that can be named, no authority that can be challenged, no record that can be subpoenaed. They were created in secret by George Washington in the final months of the Revolution, at the request of an Englishman named Colville, in an arrangement whose terms were set before the republic had drawn its first breath.

The covenant is simple: when the country moves in a direction that threatens the order, England sends a message. The Five act. Their successors do the same.

They have moved money and shifted appointments and tilted the direction of congressional votes. They failed, once, to protect a president. They have removed others — quietly, medically, without a trace. They positioned themselves around a catastrophe in the summer of 2001 and watched it happen and have lived with what that means ever since.

Now a new directive has arrived. The Five have two weeks to deliberate. A soldier. A federal judge. A woman who understands how information becomes truth. A senator who has never found the yes difficult. A man at the end of thirty-one years who is about to hand everything he carries to someone who doesn’t yet know she’s going to carry it.

The Covenant is a novel about power and complicity, about the distance between certainty and conscience, and about what it costs to believe that five people in a cabin in Virginia are the last thing standing between the republic and something worse.