A dead body. A cipher in the brushstrokes. A secret five hundred years in the making.
Physicist and symbologist Sebastian Drake has decoded a cipher, sealed an antimatter vessel, and helped build the governance framework that may determine the future of human knowledge. He thought the hardest part was over.
He was wrong.
When a curator is found a person dead in the Grand Gallery — Drake and Vatican intelligence operative Natasha Volkov are drawn into the most consequential investigation in the history of Western civilization.
Hidden in the mathematical structure of The Last Supper. Encoded in the geometry of the Vitruvian Man. Pointing to a document buried beneath the oldest church in Rome.
A document that explains everything the Church has been afraid to say for two thousand years.
Not because the document destroys faith.
Because the document transforms it.
And because the people who have spent five centuries keeping it safe have just decided that the transformation can wait no longer.
THE SECOND FIRE — is a literary thriller of extraordinary ambition and relentless momentum, in which the secrets the earliest days of Christianity converge in a race against time, institutional power, and the specific human terror of a truth whose time has finally come.
Leonardo knew..The Church has always known.
Now Drake and Volkov are about to know too.
And knowing, as they have learned, is never free.
