Assisi had been fantastic as well. Poverty, chastity and obedience were not Hunter’s special areas of interest; in fact, chastity was the last thing he had on his mind, especially when it came to Lucy, who he was increasingly fascinated by. In any case, despite his contempt for these three phoney virtues, he could see that Catholics, a captive market of 1.2 billion consumers, really got off on the Assisi pilgrimage deal. St Francis had been Italy’s patron saint since 1939, a tough year to start a tough job, but he was also a global icon of authenticity and exceptionalism, a Catholic who wanted to be a Christian; not a politician, a murderer, a paedophile or an art collector, but a Christian. Powerful message. As to the Blessed Fra Domenico, himself a Franciscan contemplative, living in a hut in the woods near St Francis’s old hermitage, he was a logistical pain in the ass, who had taken a vow to remain on a silent retreat, forcing Saul’s team to get a scanner, a generator and a whole bunch of special equipment down leafy slopes, outcrops of rock and rutted paths, to his fucking hut in the woods. If anybody ever doubted that humility was the ultimate arrogance, they should drop in on the Blessed Fra Domenico, but when they finally scanned him, he turned out to be an El Dorado of data that was going to take Brainwaves to another level. ‘BFD’, as the team took to calling him, had been on retreat for thirty years and had a quotation from St Anthony of Padua over the door of his hut which turned out to mean, ‘Contemplation is more precious than all works, and nothing else desirable can compare to it.’ Father Guido, the kindly Abbot in charge of the contemplative division of the Franciscan Order, had eventually been persuaded that he would be doing God’s work by agreeing to get BFD into the test tube to submit to an hour’s scanning, allowing the faithful to witness the cerebral stigmata of such a prodigious ascetic discipline. What blew everybody’s minds when they saw the scans was that BFD’s language-processing centres were off the charts. The dual pathways connecting the auditory cortex to the frontal lobes were like the Yangtze and the Ganges in full flood.

‘Holy shit,’ said Saul, ‘look at that middle temporal gyrus!’