Charles Walker, for his part, had never visited Adrian at Tufts; if he had, Adrian would have tried his best to talk some sense into the fool, and perhaps he could have steered him in a direction that wouldn’t have ended with bullets flying through the Tea Party Museum. Then again, try as he might, Adrian couldn’t hold Charles entirely to blame for his present state. Although Adrian still had no reason to believe Charles’s thesis was more than the fictitious ramblings of a fanciful mind—there appeared to be people taking it very seriously.

The eagle from the image in the walls of Hancock’s trunk was real, and someone was apparently willing to kill for it. If Adrian hadn’t crawled into the control room and tinkered with the museum’s special effects, Hailey and Nick would already be dead; or perhaps, Adrian had only bought them a little time—for all he knew, their bodies could right now be floating in the harbor, waiting to be fished out by the local authorities.

Adrian supposed that he should have waited around the museum for the police to arrive. But even as he’d dialed the 911 operator to report what had happened, he’d been heading to his bicycle. Sure, his efforts in the control room had been brave—but any student of history knew that the difference between a hero and a fool was not in the act, but in the aftermath. Five hundred brave Americans died at Penobscot; Paul Revere walked away and into the history books.

Just maybe, the pair had managed to escape with the eagle; and perhaps they had actually made their way to the great tall ship in the Charlestown Navy Yard, and found Revere’s final bell, if it had really remained hidden aboard that two-hundred-year-old vessel. Adrian simply didn’t care. He wasn’t going to risk his life to prove Charles’s absurd thesis wrong.

Because of course that’s what they would discover, even if they had indeed found that bell. A flight of absurd fancy that Adrian should have discarded the moment he’d read it—and the fact that someone was willing to kill over it didn’t make it any more believable. People had been willing to kill for fiction since the dawn of myth and religion.

Adrian exhaled dramatically, now intent on only one thing: marshaling enough heroism to reach that goblet for a fourth shot of that foolishly expensive whiskey—

Before he could move a rubbery limb, there was a loud knocking on the door to his office.