Broates gestured for Nina to follow. ‘This way, please, Professor Wilde.’

‘Thanks, Alfred,’ Nina replied sarcastically. ‘You know you’re complicit in a kidnapping, don’t you?’

‘I have faith in Mrs Miller and her lawyers to successfully navigate the legal system on my behalf,’ he replied, with a mocking smile.

Miller, Harhund and Wintz at her back, Nina followed Eleanor and Broates to an elevator. The only buttons inside were for the ground and upper floors – but then the old woman flipped the whole panel open to reveal another behind it. She put her hand on a palm-print scanner, then pressed the lowest button. The doors closed, and the car began to descend.

The ride continued downwards for longer than Nina expected. ‘Where are we going, Mordor?’

‘I don’t merely want to live through the fall of civilisation,’ said Eleanor. ‘I want to rebuild it afterwards. This bunker isn’t just for me – it’s for the survival of the whole human race.’ The elevator eventually slowed. ‘We’re now two hundred feet underground. This place can survive a direct nuclear strike. Not that it should need to; I came here precisely because it won’t be on anyone’s list of targets.’

The doors opened. Broates held the others back so Eleanor could exit first. ‘Welcome to my redoubt, Professor Wilde,’ she said proudly.

Nina was impressed only by the engineering needed to carve such a place from the mountain’s root. Compared to the old-world luxury of the mansion above, this was stark, almost brutal in its use of bare grey concrete. ‘Going for Soviet chic, I see.’

‘Decoration is not my top priority,’ Eleanor said as she led the way down a long, curving passage. Other corridors headed off it; Nina saw an evacuation plan at a junction that revealed the underground complex as a veritable maze. Their location by the elevator was marked by an arrow, but a tunnel at the bunker’s opposite end appeared to lead to stairs to the surface. ‘All the essentials are in place, though. It’s completely self-sufficient for power and water – it has a geothermal generator, and two separate wellheads. Then there’s storage for vacuum-preserved food, seed banks, tools, machinery, weapons; everything people will need to rebuild.’

‘Weapons, huh? So you’re not planning to make a new start preaching peace and love.’

‘You can’t remove violence from man. If you have something others want, they will take it by force – unless you can defend yourself.’

‘And conveniently, if someone else has something you want and you’ve got lots of guns . . .’

Eleanor gave Nina a cutting look. ‘And then there’s the archive. A print and digital library of the sciences, medicine, engineering, our history, our religion – everything worth preserving.’

‘Our history? Whose exactly?’