‘In the vegetable garden, Father.’

‘Ah,’ said Guido, close to tears, ‘what I wouldn’t give to be with you there now, Manfredi, in the vegetable garden in Assisi.’

Since then he had been praying uninterruptedly: ‘Lord have mercy upon us, Lord have mercy upon us.’

When his plane finally touched down on the runway at Nice, which seemed to have arisen miraculously from the sea at the very last moment, like the finger of God, saving the passengers from drowning in the brilliant waters of the Baie des Anges, Father Guido suddenly realised that due to the administrative demands of his office and his earlier years of managing the immense flow of tourists visiting the many holy sites of Assisi, he had not prayed so long and so fervently since his zealous youth in the seminary. Walking down a corridor pierced by dazzling Mediterranean light, Father Guido understood that far from being a monster, Cardinal Lagerfeld was a great spiritual teacher who had sent him on this outward and worldly journey in order to take him on an inward journey for the sake of his immortal soul. He wept quietly with gratitude, with recognition, with humility and with awe as he followed the increasingly blurred signs for the exit.

John MacDonald had been invited by Saul Prokosh to fly down from Edinburgh to the South of France for a weekend at Plein Soleil, the home of the legendary Hunter Sterling. John was hoping that he would finally get the investment he needed. He had called his company Not As We Know It. It was a Star Trek allusion – ‘It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it’ – which Saul was encouraging him to leave behind. He was fond of the old name, but if the price was right, they could call it Fifty Shades of Grey for all he cared. John had a dream: the creation of inorganic life with no carbon in the mix. Instead of a digital computer that reduced the world to binary information and brought it under the imperium of mathematics, he would make an analogue computer, using matter rather than numbers to inform its simulations. Its rhythms and processes would imitate biology, while freeing the concept of life from the tyranny of carbon. He would synthesise compounds from any of the non-carbon elements to model all the features of life jealously guarded by biology: cellular containment, movement, growth and reproduction. If chemistry could not yet explain life, then the definition of life must be expanded to include the processes that chemistry could describe and demonstrate experimentally.

‘Passeport, s’il vous plaît, monsieur.’

‘Ah, excusez-moi,’ said John, handing over his passport to the policeman in the glass cubicle.