THE HAYWOOD INSTITUTE

RYE, EAST SUSSEX

1 June 2012

There was no moon, but the two men stealing through the institute’s rear courtyard kept to the periphery wall anyway. They were dressed in dark clothes, and as they neared the metal skip that flanked the service door, the first one stopped and pulled a balaclava over his head. The second did the same.

A battered halogen light illuminated the doorway from one corner, while a security camera blinked a slow red cadence at the other. The first man—medium height and extremely lean beneath his snug black clothes—pulled a pistol from the holster at his waist, fitted a silencer on the end, and motioned to his partner, who stepped to the side and laid his back against the tall brick wall. He fired twice: once at the camera, which expired in a crack of shocked plastic, and once at the light. The bulb splintered, turning the air dark and briefly alive with invisible glass slivers. The sound bounced across the courtyard, and then a tiny rain of glass reached the paving stones.

The two men remained motionless against the wall, waiting for the shower to end. Over the past few days, the weather had turned warm and settled, and the air smelled of cut grass and night jasmine and scorched powder. The first man closed his eyes, as if he were savoring the promise of summer, and leaned his head against the bricks.

The silence resumed, black and rich, except for a soft chorus of crickets in the grass on the other side of the wall. The first man touched the sleeve of his partner, and together they approached the door. The second man felt along the metal surface for the dead bolt. When he found it, he reached into his pocket and drew out a bump key, which he inserted gently into the keyway. A small jerk, and the key turned obediently to the right. He opened the door and allowed the first man to enter.

Inside, the building was cavernous, laden with an Edwardian atmosphere of wood and polish and magisterial damp. The first man extracted a small torch from the belt at his waist, and the beam found the newel post of a long back staircase. He made an upward movement with the torch, and the second man fell into place behind him, climbing the stairs on silent feet.

Either the men were already familiar with the institute, or they had studied its complex floor plan for many hours. They moved without hesitation up the staircase to the first-floor landing, and then the second, where they turned left and proceeded down a high-ceilinged corridor. The first man slid one hand against the wall, counting the doorways, while the other man followed the buoyant track of the torchlight along the worn carpet. They had nearly reached the end of the corridor when the first man stopped and pivoted to face a doorway on the right. He tested the knob: unlocked.

For an instant, he paused, laying one hand on the smooth vertical plane of the door, while the other clenched the turned knob.

The other man nudged his shoulder and spoke in a flat American whisper. “Go on!”

The office inside contained the usual mixture of old and new. A flat computer monitor perched on a battered wooden desk, littered with paper and photographs stuck in cheap plastic frames; a Keurig gleamed atop an oak bookcase, flanked by a sculptural Habitat K-Cup holder, half-stocked, and a couple of white mugs. But the first man wasted no effort exploring the furniture. A cursory survey, and the beam of the torch flashed up twelve feet to the ceiling next to the long sash window.

“There!” whispered the second man.

“Where?”

“Right there! You see the corner?”

He fumbled against the desk until he found the chair, which he scraped across the rug to a position just beneath the flattened yellow oval of torchlight on the ceiling. He climbed onto the seat and stretched his hands upward, while the first man ran the beam along the plaster. “Hold it still!” he hissed, dragging his fingers back and forth, until the tip of his pinkie caught against a small metal latch.

“Got it!”

“Holy shit! For real?”

“Damn, it’s stiff.”

“Yeah it is. Eighty-five years, bro.”

The latch moved, and a rectangular section of ceiling sagged away from the surface, in a tiny creak of old hinges.

“And there it is,” said the first man. He directed the torch at the crack in the plaster. “Pull it down.”

The second man inserted his fingers into the crack and pushed gently. The hinges squeaked again, louder this time, longer, more like a groan, and the rectangle swung downward, revealing a set of wooden steps folded against the inside.

The second man jumped down from the chair and unfolded the steps. “Saddle up, bro,” he said, and mounted into the attic.

The space was cramped and unfinished, triangular, smoky with trapped heat. The first man set the torch upright on the floor, like a lantern, and the glow illuminated only a small writing table, a bookcase, and a file cabinet wedged beneath the slanted wooden ceiling. On the table stood a green-shaded lamp, and the first man stepped forward and pulled its chain. Nothing happened.

The desk was otherwise empty, except for a thick layer of dust. The second man pulled open a drawer in the file cabinet and whistled. “Stuffed.”

The first man yanked off his balaclava and knelt next to the bookcase. “Take everything you can.”

They worked in silence: pulling out the books from the bookshelf, lifting the files from the cabinet, stacking them on the writing table. The second man also removed his balaclava, and in the macabre underlight of the torch on the floor, a small gold earring flashed in the lobe of his left ear.

When the cabinet was empty, the men placed the files in a pair of dark rubbish bin liners, and the second man straightened and asked, “Anything in the bookcase?”

“Just old history books.” The first man stood akimbo beside the volumes stacked on the floor near the bookcase. He looked over the bags and scowled. “Are you sure it wasn’t in one of the files?”

“Nope. I checked.”

The first man picked up the torch from the floor and shone the beam along the walls. “Damn. It should have been here. We’ve looked everywhere else.”

“We got a lot of good shit here, bro.”

“Yeah, but not the book. We need the book.” He aimed the torch in the space between the bookshelf and the wall. “Come on, little fucker,” he muttered. “Where did you put it?”

“Anso, we gotta go. It’s just a book.”

“It’s not just a book. It’s the key to everything. Six chapters, right? Each one revealing the true story of history’s greatest myths. How? Because he was there, bro. He saw the shit live. He made it happen. And that book is proof.”

“Yeah, well, it’s four o’clock. We gotta go. Sun’ll be up.”

“Dammit!” Anso straightened and kicked the base of the empty bookcase, and a panel fell out from the back of the bottom shelf, making a sharp thud against the century-old wood.

Both men went still. Stared at the bookcase. The slim panel lying flat, like a felled soldier, maybe two feet wide and a foot and a half tall.

“Whoa. What was that?” whispered the second man.

“Shut up!” Anso went down again, on his hands and knees, pointing the torch at the back of the bookcase. The second man crouched next to him.

“See anything?”

Anso didn’t answer. He stuck a hand at the back of the shelf, and a ferocious expression took hold of his face. “Hold the flashlight,” he said to the second man, and he braced his fingers against the side of the bookcase and maneuvered his other hand in the cavity left behind by the fallen panel.

“Hurry, man! We gotta split!”

“Hold on! Just—damn, damn, damn—”

His hand came free from the back of the bookcase, clutching a sheaf of papers bound together by a double loop of plain butcher’s twine.

The second man’s voice sagged with disappointment. “It’s not a book.”

“Of course it’s not a book, fool. He never published it.” Anso drew the papers reverently onto his lap and brushed the dust from the overleaf. The paper was smooth, the twine tough and hardened, catching the dust. He snatched the torch from the second man’s hand.

“Well? What does it say?”

Anso looked up slowly. The torch twitched in his hand, causing a nervy glow to flicker along the side of his face.

“Holy shit, man,” he said. “This is it. The Book of Time, by A. M. Haywood.”

“Haywood?”

“Arthur Maximilian Haywood, right? He’s our guy. The eighth Duke of Olympia. Born in London in 1874 . . .”

“Died?”

Anso rose to his feet, tucked the manuscript under his black shirt, and tapped the stiff rectangle with his gloved right hand. “That, my friend, with a little more damn luck, is what we’re about to find out. Now let’s get the hell out of here before the police show up.”