For a brief moment, Adrian’s entire world seemed frozen; the interior of the base of the monument around him was imprinted on his retinas like painted images splayed across static glass. He had his back against the granite wall, and was still facing the bottom of the stairs where the two fugitives had just bounded upward, away, wrapped in a swirling cloud of mysteries—Isaac Newton? A Jeffersonian cipher? Some sort of cryptic book?—and part of Adrian wanted to race right after them, chasing answers, while an equal urge demanded that he turn the other way, seek out whatever law enforcement the man in denim had seen coming, and point them in the right direction. No doubt, the two strangers were indeed criminals; Adrian had no idea what they had done, but it seemed to have something to do with what they’d just discovered on the urn on top of the original Warren shrine—

Adrian shook his head, breaking himself free of the frozen moment, shattering the imaginary glass.

Ridiculous.

Insane.

Charles, what the hell have you gotten me into?

And yet, Adrian was there, in the monument, for reasons just as ludicrous as the thought of invisible writing on a 250-year-old urn.

After Adrian had come to the conclusion that the bell in King’s Chapel was not the bell in the engraving from Charles’s paper, and he’d thought back to the hint Charles had given him, in the guise of the coaster from the Warren Tavern, he’d had no choice but to head back to Charlestown. As he’d told the fugitives, that fool, Charles, had always been obsessed with the Bunker Hill Monument, and had advanced the idea many times, in papers and in lectures, that he’d believed the monument was hiding something. He’d pushed the topic so much, in fact, that one academic reviewer had actually referred to it as “Walker’s Phallacy”; but it had never dawned on Adrian—until he’d been standing in that chapel listening to the wavering bell—that it was perhaps more than simple fantasy.

So he’d come to the monument, not knowing what he’d been looking for. Still, it was no surprise he’d found himself driven to the Warren memorial in the base; the ancient totem had always been a curiosity, even in academic circles.

But Adrian could never have imagined what the urn on top of that memorial had been hiding; a message, carved into the metal by some Revolutionary-era hand. It was a find, alone, that would rock the academic world. And the girl—how she’d figured it out, presumably from that Newton quote, derived from some sort of book? Perhaps something the two of them had stolen from a museum or the private collection of a library.

A Jeffersonian cipher—code hidden on Warren’s urn. Adrian shook his head again.