Chapter One

A strange, shadowy room, somewhere deep beneath the streets of London.

Of old, old London that had seen so much, in two thousand years, of war and terror and despair. Founded by the conquering legions of imperial Rome and, within twenty years, reduced to ash by raging Boadicea, who, in her fury, killed eighty thousand of her own countrymen and hardly touched the Roman lords at all. Abandoned to the Saxons, decimated by the Black Death, erased once more in the Great Fire, shattered yet again by Hermann Göring's Luftwaffe.

Always falling, rising up, then falling still again...fallen now once more, and yet to foes more strange than plague, or fire, or war.

For London, now, most famous city in the world, had fallen to its own.

Yet in that strange and shadowy room, a tall and equally shadowy figure moved with a slow and confident step, dressed in a long, Puritan tunic of deep, undecorated black. Almost without thought, he flicked on a television set as he passed, then instantly turned his back. After all, he knew exactly what would be broadcasting at that time, and when the show was called The Voice of London, it hardly needed to be watched at all.

But then, anyone looking round the man's home might wonder why he would be interested in such a program anyway.

The room itself was but one of a number of interconnected chambers, their stone walls windowless and each surmounted by a vaulted roof that gave the place an ancient, medieval look, like the crypt of some vast church or cathedral, or perhaps the wine cellar of some Renaissance millionaire. But no hallowed bodies were interred here, no barrels or bottles either. Rather there were treasures of another sort: books, paintings, sculptures,