The beer felt heavy in my belly. Suddenly I longed to get out of this smoky bar—out of the noisy, crowded city altogether—away from Peter and his crazy ideas, and the Order, which was at the center of it all.

Peter was desperate for me to understand, to believe, I saw. But I didn’t want to believe; I didn’t want to know. I shook my head.

“Even if you’re right,” I said, “what do we do about it?”

He smiled, but his smile was cold. “Well, that’s the question. There’s no point negotiating with Rosa, or anybody else in there, because she isn’t in control. The organism we are dealing with is actually the collective—the Order—the hive that arises out of the interactions of the Coalescents.”

“How do you negotiate with an anthill?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “But first we must decide what we want from it . . .”

His cell phone went off, annoyingly loud. He pulled it out of his pocket, inspected its screen, and turned white. “I’m sorry,” he said.

He gathered up his gadgets and bustled out of the bar. Without breaking step he got into his car, started it up, and drove away, lurching into the dense Roman traffic. Just like that, leaving me with a bill to pay and a walk home to the hotel. I was astonished.

When I got to the hotel he wasn’t there. I wouldn’t see him again, in fact, for days. When I did it was in drastically different circumstances, after I received a panicky phone call from Rosa.

And it was only later that I found out it was at that moment in the café he had learned of the explosion at the lab in San Jose.

Chapter 48

Chapter 48

Rosa glared at me. “What have you done, George? What have you done?”

“Is this about a man called Peter McLachlan?” I’d told Rosa nothing about Peter before now; I’d had no reason to. “I haven’t seen him for days, and he’s not answering his calls . . .”

“He’s here,” Rosa hissed.

“What?”

“Inside the Crypt.”

I just stared at her, disbelieving.

Rosa had met me in the Order’s surface office on the Cristoforo Colombo. Compared to her sly manipulation of a few days before, there was no warmth, none of her seductive talk of family and blood, no touching. In that bright, sunlit, modern office, she was a pillar of hostility and anger.