Past and present collide in the opening pages of The Barbarossa Covenant when retired FBI agent Justin Scott becomes a target for assassination while en route to Rome at the behest of the Vatican’s secretary of state. Before learning why, the reader is whisked back to 1940 wartime London where British Intelligence is working feverishly on an audacious plan to thwart the imminent cross-channel Nazi invasion. With England’s fate hanging in the balance, a papal emissary hand-delivers a sealed letter to Adolf Hitler from a source no mortal would dare ignore or disobey. The letter is lost to history in 1945 with the fall of Berlin—only to surface without warning in the Vatican seven decades later. Penned by an unimpeachable source, it states with a God-given certitude that the time of the Dies Irae (The Day of Wrath) is now. A very troubled pope wants Justin to authenticate or disprove both message and messenger—an admitted all but impossible task as the Doomsday Clock readies to strike midnight.