Hailey pulled away from Nick, retrieved her backpack, and started toward the rigging that would lead her back down to the skiff, intending to get as far away from all of this as she could.

“Hailey.”

It wasn’t Nick calling her back, it was the FBI agent, Lindwell, behind her on the deck. She turned slightly, to see that though he still looked like he could barely move, he was now focused on the golden box, containing the strange clapper. “You don’t have to keep running.”

Hailey looked at him. The FBI agent didn’t understand. It went against every grain in her being, standing still. It was something every good card counter knew: when the cards got cold, you got up from the table.

But for the briefest of seconds, she didn’t take that next step. And it wasn’t the FBI agent she was now looking at, it wasn’t just Nick again—it was that gold box, containing the strange clapper.

A clapper, Hailey believed, made for the most famous bell in the world.

Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof. Hailey had recognized the inscription immediately. It was carved into the bronze of the Liberty Bell, the ultimate symbol of American independence.

It seemed insane, impossible, but the math was leading Hailey to one conclusion:

The Liberty Bell wasn’t just the most famous bell in the world. It was quite possibly the most powerful object in existence. A bell designed by Paul Revere to produce a tone that could, for a start, transform lead into gold.

No matter how badly Hailey wanted to keep running, she knew this wasn’t over yet. She started toward the gold box and toward Nick, across the deck of that famous, aging ship, racing the sirens as they grew louder and louder—melding together into one insistent note, sounding almost like the peal of that distant bell.

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Two

It was the third whiskey that finally did the trick.

Adrian Jensen felt his limbs turn to rubber as he sprawled back against the velvet-lined Louis XV fainting couch in the corner of his well-appointed office, tucked in a deserted stretch of the third floor of East Hall on the Tufts University campus. The matching Napoleonic goblet that he’d bought at auction along with the couch—both of which, he’d been assured, had traveled with George Washington’s command tent to not one, but two vaguely important battles toward the end of the Revolutionary War—in celebration of his tenure appointment a decade ago, had somehow, between whiskeys one and three, traveled from his right hand to the corner of his George III mahogany writing desk, which was now shoved up against the door leading out into the hallway.