The incident soon faded from attention: bomb attacks in crowded cities are sadly commonplace nowadays. The authorities are still digging, of course. A common theory is that maybe there is some kind of trail back to the usual suspects in the Middle East. But a consensus seems to be emerging that it must have been Peter who was primarily responsible for both attacks, in San Jose and Rome, and that he was some kind of lone nut with an unknowable grudge, for no other link has been found between the geometric optics lab and the big hole in the ground in Rome.

As for that great underground city under the Appian Way, before the authorities were able to penetrate it fully—and I’ve no idea how they did it—the swarming drones cleared it out. There was little left to see but the infrastructure, the rooms, the partitions, the great vents for circulating the air. The purpose of some rooms was obvious—the kitchens with their gas supply, the dormitories where the frames of the bunk beds have been left intact, the hospitals. Some other chambers I could have identified, had anybody asked me, like the nurseries and the deep, musty, mysterious rooms where the mamme-nonne had lived. They even dismantled their suite of mainframe computers.

It was obvious to everyone that some great project had been sustained down here, for a long time. But it was impossible to say what that project might have been. Conspiracy theories proliferated; the most popular seems to be that the Crypt was a Doctor Strangelove nuclear war bunker, perhaps built by Mussolini himself.

Remarkably enough, the Order itself wasn’t linked with the Crypt. Somehow the surface offices closed off their links with the underground complex—they must have been prepared for an eventuality like this—so that they were able to pose as just more accidental victims of the disaster. When things calmed down they even continued to sell their genealogy services, presumably based on local copies of the Order’s core data. You’d never have known anything happened.

Not all the drones from the Crypt vanished into the alleyways. As it happened Pina, Lucia’s untrustworthy friend, suffered a broken arm when she fell through a smashed ceiling, and was trapped under rubble. The drones couldn’t get her out before the firefighters reached her. She was taken to one of Rome’s big teaching hospitals. I conscripted Daniel’s help to hack into the relevant hospital files to find out what happened.