Monday, February 22, 2001, was one of those surprisingly warm midwinter days that falsely prophesied the arrival of spring to the inhabitants of the Atlantic seaboard. The sun was bright all the way from Maine to the tip of the Florida Keys, providing a temperature variation astonishingly less than twenty degrees Fahrenheit. It was to be a normal, happy day for the vast majority of people living within this lengthy littoral, although for two exceptional individuals, it was to be the start of a series of events that would ultimately cause their lives to tragically intersect.

1:35 P.M.

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Daniel Lowell looked up from the pink phone message he held in his hand. Two things made it unique: First, the caller was Dr. Heinrich Wortheim, Chairman of the Department of Chemistry at Harvard, saying he wanted to see Dr. Lowell in his office, and second, the little box labeled URGENT was marked with a bold X. Dr. Wortheim always communicated by letter and expected a letter in return. As one of the world’s premier chemists occupying Harvard’s lofty and heavily endowed department chair, he was eccentrically Napoleonic. He rarely mixed directly with the hoi polloi that included Daniel, even though Daniel was head of his own department, which came under Wortheim’s authority.

“Hey, Stephanie!” Daniel called out across the lab. “Did you see this phone message on my desk? It’s from the emperor. He wants to see me in his office.”

Stephanie looked up from the dissecting stereomicroscope she’d been using and glanced at Daniel. “That doesn’t sound good,” she said.

“You didn’t say anything to him, did you?”