PROLOGUE

It was midnight and the November wind raked the eaves of the great house. Inside one of the bedrooms, the tall man stared out through the window from his seat at the long writing table. Overhead, his pet mockingbird flew from one end of the room to the other, finally settling on the man’s shoulder.

He was sure he’d heard a sound outside, a jingling of harness. Ordinarily, a visitor would not arrive this late, but the man was expecting someone, and he dreaded what the visitor was going to say.

Perhaps it had been his imagination. He drew his woolen robe close and settled back to consider the papers spread before him. Nine months had passed since the burden of office had been lifted from his shoulders, but there was no such thing as retirement. He was immersed in the building of a great university, whose buildings he was designing himself, and his social life was as busy as ever, for scientists, inventors, and diplomats all sought him out. It was only late at night, when his guests had retired, that he could be truly alone.

But tonight his mind was not on his studies. Too much troubled him: A trusted friend was dead, and it was the details that the tall man had to learn. The details were all-important. What had his friend found out? What had he told others? What evidence had his friend possessed? There were sinister forces at work, and now, with the country again on the verge of war with a foreign power, the nation’s survival could depend largely on what a dead man had known.

The tall man rose and went to the cabinet in one corner of the room, where he took out the decanter of water and poured himself a drink.

Damn it, he should never have put a friend in that position. The pressure had been too great and there were signs his friend had cracked under the weight. But what else could he have done? The man he’d appointed first had been the author of the present trouble, and the tall man had needed someone to assess the extent of the damage.

As he stared out through the window at darkness, a soft knocking reverberated from the door.

The man sighed. His hearing had not lied: The visitor he expected had arrived and there was no delaying the inevitable. He went to the mirror, gathered his graying red hair into a knot at the back, and tied it. Then he took a deep breath and turned back to the door.

“Yes?”

The door opened slowly, revealing the face of one of his servants.

“A visitor, Master Jefferson. He said you were waiting for him.”

Thomas Jefferson, lately president of the United States, but now a gentleman farmer who dabbled in politics, nodded gravely.

“I have indeed. Please show him in.”

Almost two hundred years later, that was how I imagined it happening. Two hundred years too late …