One day in the summer of 1998 he had been waiting to meet his stockbroker at a downtown restaurant that ran a sweepstake on what the Dow Jones industrial average would be at year’s end. The bids were displayed on a board at the rear of the bar, and as Jake stared at the numbers he felt one of those familiar gut wobblies, like when you know that there’s this monster fatal error lurking somewhere in the program you just wrote. So when his broker showed up he told her to dump his stock, thereby quite possibly contributing to the spectacular Nasdaq collapse a few weeks later. Then, instead of trying to reinvent himself as a vulture capitalist or pissing his capital away on some start-up dotcom company dedicated to revolutionising the way America buys toilet paper, he had put it all into real estate in time to clean up on the biggest property boom the city had ever seen. This had brought him an even bigger fortune, but best of all it had brought him Madrona, who had been working as a greeter for the firm that managed his portfolio of investments. Okay, he was forty-five and she was twenty-three, but so what? Ageing was an option and Jake had opted out.

It was only once they were married that he found out Madrona came from a fundamentalist Bible Belt family and believed that when the end times came, believers would be spirited up to heaven in the Rapture while Jesus and the Antichrist duked it out in the scorched wasteland below. Up until then, religion had been pretty much off the radar for Jake, but the more he heard about the coming Apocalypse — and Madrona had told him plenty, particularly back in the early days — the more interested he got. He hadn’t bought into the sales talk and begging letters of the sleazy pastor out at the glass-and-plywood church where Madrona worshipped, but their promotional material plus some trawling on the web made the general scenario clear, and also that millions of other Americans, including the president, believed in it.