On the opposite flank of Boston’s inner harbor, it took all of Hailey’s strength and a good bit of leverage to pull Nick the last few feet up the side of the massive, slowly rocking hull of a much bigger, much different ship. Even with the help of the ropes and rigging that dripped like ivy down the side of the great, floating piece of history, it had been an ordeal working her own way up from the skiff, parked in the water some forty feet below. She could only imagine how difficult it had been for Nick, with only one good arm and a fair bit of blood still drenching his shirt and the makeshift bandage they had made from the checkered towel that had once covered the French bronzier Thomire’s diary.

With one last gasp of energy, Hailey leaned back and heaved the bigger man over the railing. Then she collapsed back against the polished deck, breathing hard, next to her backpack, which she’d placed on the deck before helping Nick. It was dark out, somewhere between two and three in the morning, but between the moon and the lights from the pier on the other side of the ship, it was easy to see the details. And even from flat on her back the details were beyond magnificent.

The USS Constitution was nothing like the reconstructed trading vessel Hailey had leapt from, that short hour ago. Stem to stern, the massive Revolutionary warship was more than three times as long, and though the Constitution had been refitted and restored dozens of times over the centuries, it was still a working vessel, the oldest commissioned ship in the US Navy. Normally, a crew of more than sixty still served on it. In Revolutionary times, it carried as many as five hundred.

Thankfully, at the moment it appeared to only be Hailey and Nick on board. Research on her phone had given Hailey the good news that the Constitution was in the midst of a month-long retrofitting and would be docked in its bay by Building Twenty-Two in the Charlestown Navy Yard until it was deemed seaworthy again. Approaching from the water, they’d been able to avoid the guard station on the pier and had made it to the ship’s waterline without much trouble.

Before they’d begun the climb up, Nick had briefly, once again, tried to talk Hailey out of the endeavor. He had agreed with her decision to reach out to law enforcement—first, through her roommate, who had told her about the investigators who had been at her apartment, and then leaving a message for the FBI agent who had given her roommate his card—but now that they were actually there, facing the huge ship in all its glory, he had again had second thoughts about them risking their lives trying to find something that probably didn’t even exist.