Soon Kush was trudging from his Marlborough Street apartment toward the library. John's words whirled in his head.

Disappeared. 

Insurrection.

Eastern Standard Time.

On his way he had to walk through Boston's Back Bay, once a fetid tidal flat but now one of the country's most elegant neighborhoods thanks to a massive landfill project begun in the 1860s and not completed until twenty years later. 

He crossed the historic Commonwealth Avenue Mall, one of the nation's oldest and largest.

With typical Boston traditionalism, the Mall is one of the few in the nation without an anchor store.