For a few heartbeats they were suspended in darkness, their puddles of suit light overwhelmed by the greater dark.

There was a hiss of inrushing air. Then a coarse gray light flickered into life from fat fluorescent tubes buried in the walls. Abil looked up at the lines of troopers, weapons ready, standing on the floor of the cylindrical hall.

Dower held up her gloved hand. “You hear that?”

They listened in silence. Sound carried through the new air: muffled footsteps from beyond the walls, pattering away into the void beyond. And then more footsteps — many more, like an approaching crowd.

“They have runners,” Dower whispered. “Throughout the warren. Patrolling everywhere. If one of them spots trouble, she runs off to find somebody else, and they both run back to the trouble spot, and then they split up, and run off again … It’s a pretty efficient alarm system.”

There was a noise from behind Abil, carried through the new, thick air. Only a few steps beneath him, there was another lid door, like the one they had come through from the surface. It, too, had a wheel set on an upright axle.

The wheel was turning with a scrape.

“They’re coming,” Dower said, hefting her weapon. “Let’s have some fun.”

The door slid back.

Chapter 50

I like to escape from the crowds. Even in the winter, the center of Amalfi and its harbor area swarm with locals and tourists, mainly elderly British and Americans here for the winter sun.

So I climb the hills. The natural vegetation on this rich volcanic soil is woodland, but higher up the land has been terraced to make room for olive groves, vineyards, and orchards — especially lemons, the specialty of the area, though I swear I will never get used to limoncello ; I can never get it off my teeth.

I like to think Peter would have seen the aptness of my retiring here, to Amalfi. For as it happens it was here, over a century ago, that Bedford, the protagonist of H. G. Wells’s The First Men in the Moon, fled after his remarkable adventures in the moon, and wrote his own memoir. I keep a copy of the book, a battered old paperback, in my hotel room.

Yes, it would have pleased Peter. For what Bedford and Cavor found in the heart of the moon was, of course, the hive society of the Selenites.

I kept hold of Lucia, with her baby, all the way out of that hole in the ground.

When we could get away from the area, I found a cab and took her to my hotel. I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. We attracted some odd stares from the staff, but it did give us a chance to calm down, clean up. Then I called Daniel, whose number, on a dog-eared business card, Lucia had always kept with her.

Peter was the only fatality that day. He really had planted his bomb carefully. It wasn’t hard for the forensic teams to establish his guilt, through traces of Semtex on his clothes and under his fingernails, and to figure out the purpose of his little remote-control radar gun. His true identity was quickly established, and he was linked with the mysterious group that had bombed the geometric optics lab in San Jose.

But that was where the trail ran cold, happily for me. Peter had signed into our hotel under an assumed name, and — as far as I know — never brought any of his bomb-making equipment there. The hotel staff hadn’t seen much of him, and didn’t seem to recognize the blurred face on the news programs.

Still, I checked out — paying with cash, making sure I left no contact address at the hotel — and fled Rome, for Amalfi.

I did bring with me all that was left of Peter’s possessions. It would surely have been a mistake for me to leave them behind. And anyhow it didn’t seem right. I burned his clothes, his shaving gear, other junk. I kept his data, though. I copied it from his machines to a new laptop I had bought in Rome. Then I destroyed the machines as best I could, wiping them clean, breaking them open and smashing the chips, dumping the carcasses in the ocean.

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.

When the doctors began to study her, and dug out the old files they had compiled when she was trapped after that similar accident years before, they were startled by Pina’s “subadult” condition. They were able to trace the mechanism of her sterility. An impaired hypothalamic hormone secretion led to an inadequate gonadotrophic secretion, which in turn blocked ovulation … And so on. I didn’t really understand any of this, and I didn’t know any medics I could trust to decode it for me. I don’t suppose it mattered anyhow, for though the doctors could figure out how the sterility occurred, they couldn’t figure out why. And Pina, evidently, wouldn’t talk.

They kept her in hospital for two months. Strangely, by the end of that time, there were some changes in the condition of her body. It seemed that her glands were starting to secrete the complex chain of hormones that would have been necessary to trigger ovulation: it was as if she was entering puberty at last, at the much-delayed age of twenty-five. Perhaps if all the drones could be removed from the hive, they too would “recover.”

But before this process was complete Pina disappeared from the hospital. She was checked out by “relatives,” just as Lucia had been. I didn’t hear of her again.