She answered her cell halfway through her “Oh Susanna” ringtone. “Erica Danforth,” she said, anticipating a friendly voice.
“Erica, it’s Kevin Pierce.” Kevin was a good friend, and the Director of the Smithsonian’s Museum of American History. Erica had met him about 10 years before when he was curator at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. They’d created an immediate bond steeped in a common infatuation with American history. When he’d taken the job at the Smithsonian, it hadn’t hurt being close to him. “Did you see this thing about the Wilton robbery?”
Usually there was small talk first, so she knew there must’ve been something pretty significant happening. “This thing about the Wilton robbery... Apparently I haven’t. What’s up?”
“You should be able to do a quick Google search and find out,” Pierce said. “These two guys approached Christie’s and want to auction off gold bricks that they say are the ones stolen from Joe Wilton in 1849.”
“How would they know that?” Her first reaction was defensive. That was her gold to find, if anyone’s.
“From what I’ve read, it’s stamped with the logo of Wilton’s mint. Only, not all of it’s there – they’ve got 42 bars. If I remember correctly there were around 50.”
“Sixty,” Erica corrected him without thinking. She was having trouble processing the information – a treasure lost over 150 years ago suddenly showing up? “Where did you say they found it?”
“I didn’t yet. Buried underneath some barn in Arizona.”
“Some barn in Arizona,” she said quietly. She’d been reduced to only being able to repeat her friend’s words as her mind tried to create some historical path that might have gotten the gold from the Sierra Nevadas to Arizona.
“Now you know everything I know,” Pierce continued. “I’m sure you can find more on-line. What I need to know from you is how legit this is. If it is, we’ll get in there before it hits the auction block and make a deal with them. This is huge if it’s true.”
“Well, yeah. Enormous. Two guys, you said?” She felt as though there were a fog around her – as if there was nothing else going on in the world right at that moment. She wanted to fight these two guys that she knew nothing about. Literally fight them. Fisticuffs to the death.
“I’ll send you a link. The Times ran a picture of them in this morning’s edition. Check your e-mail.”
Pierce said goodbye and hung up his end of the line. Erica lingered behind with her phone still to her ear. For someone who spent her life studying the mysteries of history, it was wholly unexpected that one might be solved. Clues just didn’t appear out of nowhere like they would in a murder investigation. History gets buried – either in people’s memories or literally in the earth – leaving historians to hypothesize about what actually happened. There were few instances of lost information being found, the most famous being the Dead Sea Scrolls. But Erica always assumed a higher power was creating that particular opportunity. Why and how Wilton’s gold would resurface after a century-and-a-half of looking was unanswerable; the chances of those who found it actually recognizing its potential historical significance, and knowing to try to auction it off... that was what really made this immediately unbelievable, if not simply suspicious.
She clicked off her phone and jumped over a stack of magazines, crossing the room to her waiting laptop. She’d been sitting at her desk reading her students’ papers on Santa Ana, and had been in the midst of being pleasantly surprised when the phone had rung. By personal choice, her home was small, her living room serving double duty as her office. She even kept the room TV free, only engaging in her guilty pleasure of watching American Idol in the bedroom. She wasn’t one to mix work and play.
Pulling the link from Pierce’s waiting e-mail, she rang up the New York Times web site. Sure enough, one of the lead stories was headlined “American Treasure: Gold Rush Booty Unearthed.” She started into the story, but her phone rang again. She looked at the screen – the Museum.
She answered. “I know, I know. I’m reading it now.”
“Pretty crazy, huh?” Lionel Baird, on the other end of the line, was a docent at the California Gold Rush Museum where Erica had worked during grad school and now served as an adviser, and a pretty good researcher as well. He’d recently asked Erica for a reference for a full-time position at the San Francisco Museum and Historical Society. His call reminded her that she hadn’t finished the letter yet. “Road trip?”
“I don’t know yet,” she said. “Lionel, let me call you back.”
“Yeah, that’s fine. Before you go, though, I just wanted to let you know that a guy was here looking at the Wilton diary.”
Probably the only thing Lionel could say that would make her stop. “Really? Who? When?”
“A guy named Dixon or Dexter or something like that. A historian from the East Coast. He only looked at it on-site for a couple minutes so I didn’t take down his name or anything. But he was here a couple months ago, and then again a couple days ago.”
“And then someone shows up in New York trying to pawn the gold? Doesn’t that seem odd to you?”
“I’m just saying,” Lionel said with a don’t-ask-me laugh. “Call me if you need anything. If I hear anything else, I’ll let you know.”
Again, Erica hung up, this time free to delve into the story. There weren’t many details – two guys, Dr. Jeff Jacobs and Emeka Henderson, both from New Jersey, while razing a barn on a piece of property that had been in the Henderson family for a half-century, stumbled upon 42 bricks of gold buried in a hole three feet underground. The gold was preserved in a burlap satchel and was in pristine condition. Through some amateur research on the web, they linked the gold with the Wilton heist. Knowing they’d unearthed a significant historical treasure, the two had approached Christie’s auction house to see what their spoils were worth. While the gold hadn’t yet officially gone to auction, “experts” quoted in the article suggested that the bricks might attract bids upwards of $20 million.
She sat back in her chair and caught her breath. As the country’s foremost expert on Joe Wilton and the Gold Rush, in general, Erica expected that she would soon be getting a call from the auction house to confirm the validity of the claim. But she wasn’t willing to wait that long. She dialed Pierce back.
“Kevin, how do I get hold of Christie’s? I need to be in on this.”
“I’ll send you the number of the guy who called me. No idea his title or role over there – just that he’s got something to do with this somehow.”
“So you know, if it’s real and you can strike a deal, I’ll also want at least one of those bricks for the Gold Rush Museum.”
“I assumed you would. Best of luck.”
While she waited for Pierce’s next e-mail to arrive, Erica looked at the picture of the two guys. They appeared to be normal guys that you’d see at Starbucks or on the BART – dressed in khakis and untucked button down shirts for their big front-page picture. It wasn’t the sharpest picture, and it wasn’t exactly posed, so it was difficult to make out their faces. Though both appeared to be smiling broadly, which was to be expected.
She thought about Connie, and what her reaction would be after her diatribe the other day.
Being the consummate researcher, Erica flipped over to an open window on her screen and ran both names through a Google search. The first dozen entries on each were, of course, now about the gold discovery, but then she got into some meat. There wasn’t too much on Emeka beyond his LinkedIn page, which said he was a former Marine now employed by FedEx as a driver. Not being a part of Emeka’s social network, Erica couldn’t get much information on him.
Dr. Jacobs, on the other hand, had a wealth of information on him, mostly related to a federal stimulus grant he received to research “particle acceleration and replication.” There wasn’t much detail on what that meant, but with some digging Erica found that Jacobs’ company had received approximately $40 million from the American Recovery and Reinvestmen
t Act of 2009 for his project. Nice chunk of change – Erica imagined it had something to do with defense. The government wouldn’t be spending that much on it otherwise.
Her e-mail beeped at her and she switched back to her inbox. Sure enough, the e-mail from Pierce had the name and contact information for a Benjamin Shipley with Christie’s in New York. There was also another note from her friend: “Here’s another article, this one from the Post. Story is taking off... Get on it!”
Erica instinctively clicked on the Post article, which took her to its own version of the story. No more as far as details, but a larger picture. In this one, she could see their faces. Now that she knew his background, Dr. Jacobs looked like your typical young academic, the look on his face showing that he’d spent much more time in a lab than in front of cameras. The other guy, Emeka, didn’t look like an ex-Marine in what she would describe as the stereotypical sense of the word, but he was wiry and muscular, more like one of those ex-Marines who you knew could take you apart in six seconds if you were on the wrong side of the altercation. He did have a scar across the lower half of his left cheek that suggested he hadn’t won all of his fights.
She picked up her phone once again and started to dial Benjamin Shipley in New York, but stopped, staring at the picture again. She rose from her chair quickly enough to send it toppling backwards onto the floor behind her, headed for her bookshelf. Erica’s collection of historical books was impressive – made even more so by the fact that she had triple the number of volumes in her “guest” bedroom, as well. What she needed was handy, however, among her more utilized collection.
She thumbed across the row of Gold Rush books until settling on a section focused on California and pulled out a small mustard colored book. It was a museum gift shop copy of Joe Wilton’s Diary, a replica of the original on display at the Gold Rush Museum. Though she’d actually pretty much memorized the book, she needed the visual to confirm what she remembered. She flipped through the pages to Wilton’s recount of the heist and read:
“We came across a tight spot, the mountainside rising up on both sides of us. I should have known we were vulnerable and adjusted course, but it looked passable. It was slightly before sundown, and we were to set up camp on the other side. Unfortunately, as we traversed the narrow pass, we were beset by bandits. To protect our persons, I fought them off before being subdued. I believe I may have mortally wounded the largest of the group, but one, with a grotesque scar on his cheek, was very quick, and overtook me at knifepoint. However, we were blindfolded and the bandits made off with our gold.”
The scar. It was a pretty incredible coincidence. She was by no means a conspiracy theorist, but what had transpired in the last twenty minutes of her life was unconscionable. Still, she shook her head at the connection and told herself to come back to reality. One way or another, to gold looked to have been found, and she would need to engage quickly.
She returned to her desk and dialed the number Pierce had sent her.
“Dr. Danforth, you’ve saved me a call,” Shipley said. “How quickly can you get to New York?”
CHAPTER EIGHT
September 20, 2015
Jeff and Emeka sat comfortably at a patio table outside a swank French-Thai bistro in midtown, waiting for their lunch hosts. The weather had rebounded and it was a beautifully sunny day in the city, which made Jeff regret wearing his sport coat, as he was already starting to sweat. He knew full-well that he could take it off and hang it on the chair, but didn’t want to do so before his fellow lunchers arrived. Something told him it would be rude – especially when one of them was from Christie’s auction house. To Jeff, it seemed like they would be used to a higher class of lunch guest, and while he wasn’t going to put on a tie for them, the least he could do was keep his coat on. Of course, it was all part of the act. After all, no one with any degree of sophistication ever stumbled upon a lost American treasure – it was always some bumpkin, rags-to-riches story. While he couldn’t play the role of bumpkin since a simple Facebook search would show that he was a prominent scientist, he could at least let people react to him under the assumption that he was completely out of his element. When in reality, he was well-prepared for this lunch meeting.
The person joining them was named Dr. Erica Danforth, a historian from California who was recognized as the foremost authority on the California Gold Rush. Strangely, before the lunch invitation, neither Jeff nor Dexter had ever heard of the woman. When they were researching the Wilton job she hadn’t come up at all, and as the “foremost authority” one would have expected they’d have crossed paths.
In preparation for this lunch, however, Dexter had researched and then briefed Jeff long into the night. The session was mostly due to Dexter’s paranoia. It was ludicrous for anyone to imagine that time travel was even a remote possibility, so Jeff humored his friend and sat through the spiel. While trying to be respectful, he’d intentionally tried to zone out through some of it because he really didn’t want to go into the conversation knowing too much. He didn’t want to appear too educated on either the Gold Rush or Dr. Danforth. But he had paid attention enough to learn that she was a professor from Stanford, was connected to the Gold Rush Museum where Wilton’s diary was kept, and was also a regularly featured expert on the History Channel. Additionally, Dexter had shown him a Facebook photo of her standing in front of the Golden Gate Bridge, so he had some idea what she looked like.
“I’m starving,” Emeka said. He didn’t seem to care too much about the importance of appearances helping to carry out their plan. Frustrating as that characteristic might be at times, it was actually why Jeff had recruited him to the team – he possessed a profound ability to keep cool in any situation. Emeka was a high school classmate of Jeff’s who’d gone into the military after graduation. That’s not to say they were friends, but they didn’t not get along – their primary bonding experience being riding in the same limo to prom because Emeka had asked Jeff’s girlfriend’s best friend to go with him. They had very different interests, with Jeff serving on math and science teams and Emeka the scrappy point guard for the basketball team. After high school they’d gone their separate ways.
It was in an alumni newsletter, however, where Jeff had learned of Emeka’s valor and ability, the recount telling of how, after several members of his battalion had been wounded by a roadside mine in Afghanistan outside of Kabul, followed immediately by the advancement of a handful of Taliban soldiers, Emeka had fought off the attackers with only a knife until help could arrive. He himself had been injured in the fight, and he was sent home to recover. Since it was near the end of his tour, however, he remained in the states and took a job with FedEx in his hometown. It was in that role that he’d delivered a package to Jeff’s lab – amazingly enough, the first delivery to his building after the federal stimulus grant was awarded – and the two developed a friendship. Interestingly, this was before Jeff had even stumbled upon his discovery of time travel. Sometimes he couldn’t comprehend how fortuitous fate could be.
Like Dexter, Emeka hadn’t needed a demonstration of the time travel device before signing on. When Jeff told him his plans and asked for help over chili dogs and onion rings at the greasy spoon where their classmates used to go after football games, it was like Christmas morning for him. The Wilton job was his first experience with time travel and, as expected, he’d been up to the task.
Now, they sat in midtown Manhattan waiting to convince some particularly influential experts that they’d just happened to end up finding some priceless American treasure on a ranch.
Their waitress came by and brought their drink order, and as she left, Benjamin Shipley from Christie’s, who they’d met the day before, approached the table along with a younger, brown-haired woman sporting a light, red sweater and a floppy ponytail. Both he and Emeka rose to greet them, shaking hands and exchanging introductions before returning to their seats.
“You have to imagine that for someone like me this is tremendously exciting
,” the woman, Erica, said.
“Someone like you?” Jeff said, smiling and taking a sip from his glass.
“I’ve been studying the Wilton heist since high school,” she said. “I did my dissertation on it, I’m the researcher-in-residence at the California Gold Rush Museum. I lobbied the State of California to make the site of the robbery a historic landmark. For me to find out that someone has found the gold – the evidence of that event – is overwhelming.”
Jeff was intrigued by her connection to the sign they’d discovered when they came back from 1849, the one thing she’d said they didn’t already know. Item #1 to not reference in this conversation. “Can I ask why you’ve latched onto that particular story?”
“Well, you’ll be interested to know that I’m the direct descendant of Lucius Fitzsimmons, who was one of the men on Wilton’s team. His longtime friend and his driver, actually.”
“Is that true?” Jeff tried implicitly not to look at Emeka. The fact that they’d met Lucius Fitzsimmons in person just a week before, and that Emeka had held a knife to his throat, became more real as he stifled any reaction.
“It is. So you can understand my enthusiasm. My understanding is that you’re a physicist?”
Jeff nodded, focusing and reminding himself again to be extra conscious of his facial expressions. “That’s correct. I have a lab in North Jersey.”
The waitress returned and took the rest of the table’s drink orders. Jeff again considered taking his jacket off, but reneged, instead watching intently as Erica ordered an unsweetened iced tea. He missed Shipley’s order.
Fortune Page 6