And suddenly, two figures sprang up directly behind the black glass. Women, in revolutionary garb, one of them pregnant. As they started to speak, the killer with the raven hair whirled toward them and fired. The bullet hit the glass, shattering it, and the two revolutionary women vanished in a puff of sparkle—because they had never really been there at all. Holograms, Hailey realized, as she dashed full speed toward a doorway that had automatically opened directly across from her. The professor, she realized, was at the controls. When he’d scurried through the door marked “Staff Only,” she’d assumed he was running for his life. She’d misjudged him.

Another bullet crashed past her, but she was already through the doorway. She found herself in another dark room, this one with a descending floor separated into bleacher-like alleys. A vast movie screen wrapped around the entire front of the room, from floor to ceiling. There was an emergency exit next to the screen, but before Hailey was halfway there, she heard those heels again, and dove for the floor.

Just as she hit the carpet, the entire room changed. The movie screen became a vast green field, and even the floor seemed to become part of the theme park vision, so real Hailey could almost smell the grass of Lexington Common. Smoke rose from panels in the walls, obscuring the air around her. Then out of the mist, across the entire front of the room, a phalanx of British redcoats roared toward her, seeming to come right out of the screen, muskets and bayonets bristling. Ear-shattering explosions rocked the room, and the entire floor started to shake.

The woman with the dark hair seemed momentarily stunned or confused, and Hailey didn’t waste the moment. She flung herself toward the emergency exit and hit the door dead center with her shoulder.

Cool, night air whipped her skin as she barreled down what appeared to be a half-covered gangplank. Ahead of her, she saw the ship: a near perfect re-creation of one of the three boats that had been victimized in 1773, now floating in the same water that had once been doused with tea. With a leap, she was on the deck and moving even faster.

In front of her was a row of fake, cubic crates attached to ropes, readied to be thrown into the water during regular museum hours, assumedly by cheering tourists dressed as Mohawks. Hailey lowered her shoulders, tucked the eagle under her arm, and headed for the crates at full speed.

“Katie,” she heard from the gangplank behind her. “Stop!”

But she was already over the crates, and over the ship’s railing, plummeting toward the dark, cold water below.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Seven