Zack stepped closer to take a look for himself. The shaft was dark—the deeper he looked, the darker it got—but Karp had been right, down about thirty feet Zack could barely make out what looked like a denim-clad shape. It wasn’t moving—maybe Nick and Hailey weren’t trying to escape, maybe they were just trying to hide. Either way, Marsh had a point. From Van Gogh’s magnificent cypresses to Botticelli’s bottomless pit.

Still, Zack couldn’t shake the feeling that they were missing something. Maybe someone with Nick’s background, just out of prison, would have panicked and chosen an elevator shaft over a narrow stairwell. But from what Zack knew about Hailey, she was adept at running, and she thought things through. She would have known that the shaft was as much of a dead end as the stairwell—and that it would take much longer to get down those rungs than the steps. The park ranger would be at the bottom well before she and Nick; and if they were simply trying to hide—well, that was hardly likely to work either. Everything about this situation seemed off.

“Why here?” Zack asked, putting words to his thoughts. “Why get themselves in this position in the first place? How does this place connect to the Gardner theft? What were they looking for?”

Marsh rolled his eyes, then glanced from Zack to the Boston police officer.

“Wrong questions, Lindsy. Only one question matters now.”

Marsh grinned, nearly salivating, as he turned back toward the dark shaft.

“Which one of us is going in first?”

*  *  *

Zack was breathing hard, the sweat spreading across the material of his tailored shirt, as he worked his way deeper and deeper down the shaft. The metal rungs felt cold and rough against his hands—some of the bars were so rusted through, he thought they might crack under his weight—but minute by minute, he continued downward, the light dimming the farther he moved from the opening above.

The air in the shaft felt dense and thick in his throat; he tried not to think about the sort of microbes he might be inhaling, molecules trapped in this narrow, current-less hole for more than two hundred years. Molecules once exhaled, perhaps, by some Revolutionary-era soldier, visiting the site to honor some fallen comrade, maybe a famous soldier, a Lafayette, a Washington, a Revere—

The radio on Zack’s belt coughed to life, and he paused against the rungs, pressing the receiver against an ear.

“What the hell is going on down there?” Marsh’s voice burst out into the shaft, echoing off the stone walls. “From here it looks like you’re right on top of him.”