Prologue

They killed our mirror, our light, our comfort, our true guide. --- Antonio Pigafetta

Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. June 21, 2000. It was a moonless night, two shadows lurk in the darkness. They broke into the university's security without getting detected. The guards were not negligent of their duty, they patrolled the archaic hallway arches of every 20 minutes. The intruders timed them properly.

In the hallway were wooden chairs with cushions wrapped in leather, wooden tables, and cabinets designed in Victorian fashion and glassed artifacts that pupils can glance and read the labels to. The chandeliers that light the way are a little dim tonight for no person of importance was expected. As you look up the ceiling the design can't be more elaborate in fact it was a triumph of architecture and art combined. Fleur-de-Lis lined up the middle of the arches with golden patterns decorating the trims of the architecture. One will marvel at the sight, but this is not what the shadows were after. They were for something more significant.

They went through the "Nave", the library's entrance called so because it clearly imitates a cathedral approach. The pair went into the "Stacks" where fifteen levels of library materials are housed. It wasn't there. Their source has verified it to them. Moving past the "Stacks" they went into the Trumbull College there they found magnificently glassed the book they came in for. The oldest copy of Pigafetta's First Voyage around the World written in French sometime in 1525, 4 years after Fernando Magallanes met his tragic death in Mactan. The thieves carefully produced a glass cutter, expertly wounding the glass in a perfect circle, held the book, produced a dummy book with the same weight and carefully substituted the two books without tripping an alarm. A few mere seconds later they were gone.