And now he was there, his discovery, the thing that was going to change his life. Hancock’s trunk. It had survived Revere’s adventure back in April 1775, survived the many years, decades, centuries, and had ended up, rather ignominiously today, in a museum in Worcester, Massachusetts, where it was kept in a hermetically sealed basement storage unit, and annually put on display for local schoolchildren. It hadn’t been easy for Charles to get permission to run a radiological study on the case—first an X-ray, then a CT scan—but what he’d discovered had made all the red tape he’d had to cut through worthwhile.

Because what he’d found was bigger than a cache of Revolutionary War documents. Bigger than Revere’s connection to the Freemasons, or the importance of his spy network, his Mechanics. What Charles had discovered was a secret that, had the British succeeded in capturing Hancock’s trunk, wouldn’t just have changed the course of the Revolution—but of human history.

While Charles’s thoughts were racing backward to the moment when he’d first seen it for himself on that portable CT scanner, the woman at his computer scrolled through his paper to that very image. And now there it was, on his laptop screen, in stark black and white. A radiographically enhanced image from a piece of parchment, hidden within the wood of the back wall of Hancock’s trunk.

And yet, as incredible as that image was, it wasn’t the whole story, not by a long shot. Because what the woman at his computer couldn’t possibly know, was that the paper on Charles’s computer wasn’t complete. He’d purposefully kept the very best part to himself, something he would reveal after the paper made its rounds and turned the world upside down. His second discovery: one that rivaled, and surpassed, his first.

He turned his attention from the screen to the woman, wondering what she was thinking, what that image meant to her. But her eyes, those dark, perfect ellipses, those hieroglyphic eyes, told him nothing. In fact, as he stared into them, they began to shimmer, shiver, swim.

“I don’t feel right,” Charles finally mumbled.

And then he noticed that his tongue felt abnormally large. His shoulders seemed to stiffen, and a tingle moved down the skin of his legs. Was he really still drunk? No, it was more than that. Was he having a stroke?

“What’s wrong with me?” he stuttered.

He tried to take a step, but his legs wouldn’t move right. His hand opened and the mug fell to the floor, hitting the carpet with a thud. Then Charles was falling, too. He reached out to catch the coffee table—but his arm was as weak as his legs. He hit the floor next to the mug, shoulder first. He fought hard to twist his body so he could still look upward, toward his desk.