‘Yes, it’s particularly striking,’ Iolanthe said. ‘We can’t waste any time. Chloe might have realised her error by now and be on her way here. We have to get in and out before she arrives with her muscle.’

It turned out that, apart from a few custodial staff, the Zampieri estate on Tenedos Island was empty.

According to some grizzled fishermen at the town’s wharf where Nobody brought their seaplane in to dock, the Zampieri family had departed from their hilltop mansion the previous evening rather suddenly.

That in itself wasn’t particularly unusual. They had left instructions for the maids and gardeners to keep the estate in good order and to expect them back in a few months.

‘After the world has changed forever,’ Nobody said as he, Iolanthe and Bertie drove from the main town in a rented car, heading in the direction of the Zampieri estate.

Iolanthe nodded. ‘They left for the safety of their royal rendezvous point.’

They got the lie of the land quickly.

A couple of fat security guards manned the entry gate to the estate.

A few more roamed the perimeter fences listlessly. They were lazy local rent-a-guards, used to an easy gig in a quiet place. One was asleep at his post.

Nobody and Iolanthe quickly took care of the guards idly manning the estate’s massive boathouse under the cliff and, with Bertie joining them, hurried inside it.

Inside the giant boathouse, tied up to the dock there, was an enormous megayacht. It was a huge shining thing, four storeys tall and two hundred feet long. And fitting entirely inside the warehouse-sized boathouse.

Iolanthe ran right past it.

‘This way,’ she said.

She guided them to an old rusty iron door set into the rough stone wall at the rear of the boathouse. The wall was clearly part of the cliff face that the boathouse backed up against.

Iolanthe used a drill on its lock and hurled the door open. Its rusty hinges squealed with disuse.

They hurried through it and down a long stone-walled canal with paths cut along its sides. The canal was about as wide as a train tunnel and clearly carved by the hands of men.

After running for about a hundred metres, guided by the beams of their flashlights, the three of them emerged in a wider space.

Nobody froze.

They’d arrived at a stone jetty—essentially an underground dock for ancient boats—and the ceiling above them shot skyward into darkness.

But even then he could see some features in the gloom.

Towering statues—each fifty feet tall and cloaked in shadow—lined the high walls on either side of him.

And right in front of him, in pride of place in the centre of the space like some kind of prized museum exhibit, mounted on a steel cradle, was an old Greek-style trireme boat.