Blockading the door with the heavy desk had been no small feat, especially considering how hard Adrian’s arms and legs had been shaking when he’d first returned to his office from the evening’s ordeal. It hadn’t helped that he’d biked home—in the dark—at a speed he should never have contemplated sober; twice along the route, he’d nearly been killed by oncoming traffic, and only a truly heroic maneuver over an unexpected pothole in Davis Square had enabled him to arrive at Tufts physically—if not mentally—intact.

He reached out toward the goblet on the desk, but quickly realized that it was now beyond his grasp—and rising from his prone position on the couch no longer seemed an option. He considered trying to reach the bottle from which he’d poured the whiskey, which still sat in the open glass display case behind where he was lying, next to a half dozen other items of various historic importance and value—but that, too, seemed an impossibility. He was all out of heroic energy.

His only solace was that he was in the place he normally felt most secure. Everything around him in his academic throne room, as he liked to think of it, had been carefully curated to highlight his intellectual journey over the past two decades. From the desk to the display case—which contained mostly artifacts once owned by Paul Revere himself, including a flint pistol, accompanied by its bag of powder and lead shot; one of Revere’s retractable walking sticks, a technologically impressive bit of metallurgy which he’d used in his senior years, the handle made of carved walrus ivory of the same sort he’d chiseled into numerous pairs of false teeth; a collection of Revere spoons, shined to near perfection by the man himself; a pair of boots similar to the ones Revere wore on his ride to Concord; and the remains of the fifty-year-old spirit that Adrian had just begun to consume, which had once been owned by a fellow Revere collector, who had thrown in the dusty bottle along with a fife and drum that had survived the failed Penobscot Expedition, which had led to Revere’s court-marshal and discharge from the Continental Army.

That display case, along with the high oak bookshelves brimming with Revolutionary history books and original manuscripts—some centuries old—that lined every wall of the office, had rightly intimidated numerous grad students and undergrads who had dared trouble Adrian during those loathsome hours the university forced him to mingle with the student body between his lectures. They’d also cowed a fair number of visiting scholars who had come to seek his input on usually trivial questions of Revere lore.