Now: in the stands of the Bologna tennis club, Adelmo Manera is distracted and irritated. Forget about watching the game, especially after he’s received his next assignment. He must investigate in total secrecy the murder of a very well-known member of parliament whose body was found at his home with the signs of ferocious torture, a job done by a meticulous professional killer. Manera, a substitute prosecuting attorney with a bit of a shady past but known for being an infallible investigator, cannot imagine what clouds are gathering over his future: the apparent blind alley of the murdered politician is in reality a long road that leads to a far off era and to an enigma that was thought to be forgotten. 1936: the stands of the prestigious Roland Garros of Paris are teeming with English and Nazi secret service agents who are indifferent about the tournament finals but very alert to the movements of a single spectator, the alchemist and scholar of the esoteric Fulcanelli. He is being shadowed to try and get hold of his two notebooks. The only certainty about their contents is that the country that gets them will have an enormous advantage over the others in the war that no one by now seems able to ward off. But the hunt shows itself to be tougher than what was foreseen: the contending nations multiply and even the OVRA, the infamous Fascist political police, wants its part. In fact, one of the two notebooks arrives in Rome at the laboratories of Via Panisperna where the group of physicists led by Enrico Fermi is studying the incalculable potentiality of nuclear energy and where the Fulcanelli’s writings attract like a magnet the prodigious intellect of Ettore Majorana, the genius who mysteriously disappears during that era. As do the two notebooks. Only seventy years later, the investigations of Manera and his occasional colleague, the elegant French agent of Interpol, Olivier Guesdonc, will attempt to shed light on the fate of the notebooks. Paris, London, Berlin, Rome, in a race against time, Manera finds himself playing a game where not only his reputation and his life depend on the result, but also the fate of the planet.