Tap tapping the keys and out come the words on this little screen, and who will read them I hardly know. I could be dead by the time anyone actually get to read them, as dead as, say Tolstoy. Or Shakespeare. Does it matter, when you read, if the person who wrote still lives? These are the words of Jake Mishkin, whose seemingly innocent job as an intellectual property lawyer has put him at the center of a lethal conspiract in which no one is who they seem. As he awaits a killer-or killers- unknown, Jake writes an account of the events that led to this deadly endgame, a frantic chase that began with a fire in an antiquarian bookstore. Hidden in the binding of one of the chared and ruined volumes is a cache of letters written by a 17th-century British soldier and spy. The letters are encrypted and the key to unlocking the mysterious code has been lost for 400 years. If it is discovered, and the letters are read, they will lead to one of the most valuable items in the history of th