Stories that start where the map ends.

In a refugee camp in Darfur, a starving boy hands a doctor a gleaming metal cylinder he dug out of the desert. In a London laboratory, six scientists date the rock around it to 250 million years. Then the cylinder switches itself on.

It is a probe from a civilisation far older than ours, and it has been recording life on Earth since before the dinosaurs. What it knows about the origin of human beings could shake every faith on the planet. The scientists vanish with it. The CIA follows. So does an alliance of Rome, Jerusalem and Riyadh, which has hired the most expensive assassin in the world, a figure known only as Shadow. Their one protector, the antiquities hunter Yoshi Araki, keeps them a step ahead from Miami to the Florida Keys, until Shadow corners them in a burning laboratory and Yoshi discovers who Shadow is.

Written in Latin at the end of a long life and presented in the translation of an Oxford philologist, The Codex is the book Danielle and Bradley dug up at the end of The Time Passenger. It begins on a March morning in AD 6, with a naked man waking near the Dead Sea in the middle of a revolt, and it ends seventy years later in the mountains of northern Japan, where a healer the villagers call Yuta is buried on a hill above Herai with his book.

In between: a Roman garrison, a slave girl bought and freed, seventeen years on an Egyptian estate, a village teacher in Galilee, and the one thing Jude was never trained for: knowing exactly how the story ends and being unable to change it.