“Very good,” Darius replied. This event was the catalyst which would set the plan in motion. “It is imperative we are prepared. Much hangs on the outcome.”
“Yes, sir, I believe we are ready,” Alexandra replied. “We will leave Dubai on Tuesday evening the twelfth and arrive in Tel Aviv a few hours later. The Israeli Interior Ministry will provide transportation from the airport to the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. You are scheduled to speak at the ribbon-cutting ceremony on the thirteenth at one p.m. Jerusalem time—about six a.m. New York time.”
Darius smiled. His speech would be completed just before the markets opened in New York. Dylan would have his hands full Wednesday morning. It had taken him years to reach this point, and he was beginning to feel the excitement. The realization of what he had accomplished, what they had accomplished, filled him with a sense of incredible pride. He would soon be the most powerful man in the world. Nations would do his bidding.
He set the pencil down on his desk and looked at Alexandra. “Are you ready for your part in this?” he asked.
With heartfelt zeal she replied, “I have been dreaming of this opportunity my whole life. We are really going to make a difference in the world. Just like you promised.”
Alexandra noticed Darius’s normally unemotional face give a fleeting smile. It almost seemed as if it was mocking. Was it her imagination, or was there something dark in his expression? Involuntarily, she felt goosebumps rise along her skin. This was the first time she had ever felt uncomfortable in his presence. Her overexcited imagination must be playing tricks on her.
She stood up. “Is there anything else we need to discuss before I go?”
Standing and walking around the table, he placed his hand on her shoulder as he said, “Two weeks from now you will be the wealthiest and most powerful woman in the world. I know you will be able to make a difference for the benefit of all mankind. With this power, we will have a responsibility to do what we think is right for the greater good of all.” Darius walked with her to the door. “Let’s schedule one more team meeting on the eleventh so we are all on the same page before we set this in motion. Things will really begin to move fast now.”
She agreed aloud, wishing she could shake the small premonition she had felt when she saw him smile. Preoccupied, she walked slowly back to her office.
Darius closed the door behind her. “The greater good of all” had been part of the philosophy of the Order for several hundred years. Now he was in a position to put his own version of that philosophy into practice in a spectacular fashion. Only, the Order would be on the receiving end of the idea this time. It was his duty, Darius had convinced himself—for the benefit of all mankind.
Sitting back down at his desk, he turned on his computer and opened a file named Sizdah-bedar. He thought of this file affectionately as File 13. Sizdah-bedar was a Persian festival celebrated on the thirteenth of Nowruz. Nowruz, literally “New Light,” was the first month of the Persian calendar. Sizdah-bedar literally meant getting rid of thirteen (bedar—getting rid of; sizdah—thirteen). In some Persian traditions, the holiday commemorated the victory of the Angel of Rain over the Demon of Drought. The first twelve days of Nowruz were a national holiday. Getting past the thirteenth day was considered a good omen.
Darius considered the symbolism fitting. He, the water man of Aquarius Elemental Solutions, battling the Order and their Demons of Drought. If he had his way, he would expose them and their secret.
After finding his first mention of the secret in the London library many years ago, compiling and perusing File 13 had become a weekly ritual. Since that day over ten years ago, he had been accumulating every piece of evidence he could find.
It had all started when he found the handwritten note in an old manuscript he was reading about the Knights Templar—no, really, it had begun a little further back, in college. In his first year, Darius had joined one of the many fraternities. It was his first introduction into the world of secrets and symbolism. After leaving college, Darius joined the Brotherhood of Freemasons. When he moved to London, he joined the Four Crowns Research Lodge No. 2013. He did not understand the implications at the time, but the Four Crowns Lodge had been established in 1886 for the purpose of gathering in one place all the teachings, history, and writings associated with Masonry. The founding documents required that a group of forty of the most prestigious members of the lodge in England be the governing council.
The following year, the Correspondence Circle was added to the lodge. Any member in good standing was allowed to become a part of this effort. In the first ten years, the Circle printed a fifty-volume encyclopedia on the esoteric teachings of the world’s mystery religions. This encyclopedia they called the Ars Quaruor Coronatorum. The knowledge gained by their efforts gave rise to sub- or clandestine lodges. These so-called irregular lodges put into practice the occult knowledge accumulated by the mother research lodge. They quickly became some of the most infamous secret societies in the world. Stella Matutina, the Society of the Golden Dawn, Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO), the Thule Society, and the Order of the Temple of the East all had their roots in the discoveries of the Four Crowns Research Lodge. Some of the greatest monsters in history were nurtured on their teachings.
Darius had joined the Circle of Correspondence with a genuine interest in symbols and symbology. It was after joining the Circle that Darius first learned of the Order, a group of men and women chosen from the highest levels of the secret societies of the world. Their motto: “Enlightenment is the end which justifies our means.”
His investigations led to the discovery of this group’s influence in subverting the independence of his homeland, Persia. Their activities, in conjunction with British intelligence and the CIA, led to the overthrow of the democratically elected leader of Persia, Mohammad Mosaddegh, in 1953. Mosaddegh’s great sin was his desire to nationalize the oil industry of Iran and renegotiate the terms of their oil contracts. From the early 1900s through both World Wars and into the early 1950s, England was almost entirely dependent on Iranian oil. An independent Iran was not acceptable to the Order’s plan for the Middle East. Their destabilizing efforts continued, and it was these efforts which Darius believed had ultimately led to the death of his father. With this newfound information, Darius secretly vowed revenge against the Order. He became obsessed with uncovering their activities through their various corporate, political, and social associations.
One night in the Four Crowns research library, his efforts took a new direction. Darius found a small, torn piece of handwritten note in an ancient manuscript on the Knights Templar. It read, “. . . knowledge of the 13th Enumeration.” Darius, curious of the meaning of the scrap, had approached one of the senior members of the research lodge. He could tell by the man’s poorly veiled surprise that he had found something important. He was informed that it would be looked into. Later, when Darius followed up on the note, he was told that there were no records of any so-called “13th Enumeration.” Still curious but now also cautious, Darius dropped the subject and began a clandestine effort to learn the truth.
After that night, Darius was never left alone in the Four Crowns research library again. And from that night to the present, Darius had pursued the secret.
Over the intervening years, Darius had learned much tradition and superstition, but little tangible evidence surrounded the prominence of the number thirteen in history. He searched for every bit of knowledge on the history of thirteen in the cultures of the world, hoping it would provide him clues to the meaning of the 13th Enumeration. He knew from the subsequent information he gathered that the 13th Enumeration was the great secret of the Order. He had been astounded to learn that the knowledge of this secret was also the Order’s greatest fear. Every time information surfaced that even hinted at its possible discovery, it was quickly destroyed. When it could not be destroyed, the Order employed deception and superstition to cover the truth. They had been so effective that after all these years, Darius still did
not know the exact nature of that which he sought. He had often wondered if the keepers of the secret even knew the exact nature of their fear.
All the research Darius had gathered was in File 13 in front of him. He read down the list of people and events and chose one to review. Often when he reviewed the files, he gleaned new information. Information which led him to the next clue. Tonight he chose the Frishmuth file.
William Frishmuth was born in 1830 in Coburg, Germany. He attended Gymnasium Ernestium in Gotha, Germany, after which he spent a year learning from Fredrick Wohler, the famous German chemist. It was Fredrick Wohler who isolated aluminum in 1827. After studying as a chemist, William Frishmuth traveled through South America, the Caribbean, and the United States. In 1855, he settled in Philadelphia and became a US citizen.
In 1860, he spoke vehemently in support of the abolitionist cause. He was a staunch supporter of the emancipation efforts of Abraham Lincoln during his 1860 presidential campaign, and he became a close acquaintance of President Lincoln. At the start of the Civil War, Lincoln requested that the secretary of war appoint William Frishmuth as a secret agent. Frishmuth’s activities during the war reportedly earned him two hundred dollars from President Lincoln’s private purse. Later, during the war, Frishmuth was granted permission by Lincoln to raise a regiment in the Pennsylvania 12th Cavalry. With the confirming sanction of Pennsylvania’s governor, he raised the 113th Regiment and was commissioned a colonel. His service lasted only a short time before he resigned.
Darius well knew that it could be argued that the presidency of Abraham Lincoln was born out of the Morgan Affair and the anti-Masonic movement that saw Masonry go from fifty thousand members to five thousand in a short period of time. The Anti-Masonic Party (the first third party in America) joined with the Whigs in the New Republican Party and nominated Abraham Lincoln as their presidential candidate. After his election, President Lincoln’s push for an amendment to the constitution for the abolishment of slavery was a double insult to the South.
At the time of the Civil War, Charleston, South Carolina, was the headquarters of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry. South Carolina was the first state to secede from the union. In all, eleven states were considered to have officially seceded from the Union—but to those who understood the symbolic nature of the struggle, the thirteen stars on the secessionist flag told the tale of the Templars’ infiltration into Masonry.
P.T. Beauregard, on April 12, 1861, ordered the attack on Fort Sumter, South Carolina, which was acknowledged as the first shot fired in the Civil War. Beauregard, a Freemason and member of the Knights of the Golden Circle, was praised throughout the South as the “South’s first Paladin.” Jesse James and John Wilkes Booth were also purported members of the Knights of the Golden Circle. After the war, due to the publicity of the conspiracy trials surrounding Lincoln’s assassination, Albert Pike and several others met and decided to change the name of the Knights of the Golden Circle to the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Their new name was taken from the Greek term Kuklos, or “circle.”
President Lincoln’s push for the thirteen amendment was a direct affront to the South both economically and symbolically. Economically, the thirteenth amendment undermined the ability of the South to compete—much of the wealth of the South was built upon the efforts of their slaves. Symbolically, the South, as a stronghold of Templar Masonry, saw the thirteenth amendment as an insult to these institutions as well.
After the death of Lincoln, Frishmuth became interested in law. He also served for some time as a colonel in the Pennsylvania National Guard. Later, in the 1870s, he returned to his interest in chemistry and for several years was one of the few producers of pure aluminum in the United States. He sought and was awarded many patents for his process of chemical separation of aluminum. An article in The New York Times on November 25, 1884, indicated the backers for his patents were “foreign capitalists . . . Their intentions . . . similar to the policy pursued by the Rothchilds.” These “English capitalists,” Darius knew, were the same capitalists who only twenty-five years later sought to control the oil resources of his homeland, Persia. Every time Darius read over this file, his blood boiled.
In 1884, William Frishmuth was requested to submit a bid for a copper, brass, or bronze capstone, plated with platinum, for the Washington Monument. Frishmuth had done other plating work for the monument, so Colonel Thomas Lincoln Casey of the Corps of Engineers sent over the request for the bid. Instead of proffering a bid based on the specifications of Colonel Casey, Frishmuth suggested an aluminum capstone be cast for a price of seventy-five dollars. Due to the difficult nature of refining aluminum at the time, it was approximately the same cost as silver. Colonel Casey agreed, and William Frishmuth, after some difficulty, cast the single largest piece of aluminum up to that point in history. After the capstone’s completion, Frishmuth, to the chagrin of Colonel Casey, loaned the capstone to Tiffany’s for a few days in order that members of the public might view the work. The capstone was placed on the ground, and the general public was allowed to step over it in order to say, “I stepped over the top of the Washington Monument.” After Frishmuth finally relinquished the capstone to Colonel Casey, he gave a bill for the work of $256.10. Colonel Casey was enraged to find the bill was $175 more than agreed upon. They finally settled on $225.
What had first sparked Darius’s interest in the story was Frishmuth’s commissioning of the 113th Regiment of the 12th Cavalry. Often, Darius had found that members of the Order used the language of symbols and symbolism to communicate information that most did not understand. Darius did not know, nor could he find, whether the 113th designation was just the natural order of numbering for the Frishmuth regiment or something more. In his mind, anyway, it was the casting of the capstone which told him there was more to the story than history recorded.
The capstone of the Washington Monument consisted of two parts. The main body of the capstone was thirty-three-hundred pounds and made of stone. The very tip was made of one hundred ounces of aluminum cast by Frishmuth. Having been a member of Freemasonry for many years, Darius understood the significance attached to the number thirty-three. To Darius’s knowledge, what had never been mentioned before in the context of the aluminum capstone was that aluminum’s atomic number was thirteen, and its Latin name meant bitter salt. Interestingly, the sum of a Fibonacci sequence up to thirteen was in fact thirty-three. Was it all just a strange coincidence, or was William Frishmuth a secret member of the Order? Or more likely, was William Frishmuth a genuine friend of Abraham Lincoln and his aluminum capstone a clever symbolic testimony to the “bitter salt” of the death of his friend, the president, at the hand of Southern Templar Masonry? On August 1, 1893, William Frishmuth was found dead of a “self-inflicted” gunshot wound to the head.
Darius closed the Frishmuth file with no more insights than the last time he had read it several years ago. Still his instincts told him there was something he was missing. Thirteen . . . a number that for centuries had inspired secrets and superstition.
Chapter 13
Dallas, Texas
The phone rang, startling Zane awake. He looked over at the clock on the wall and saw it was seven a.m. He rolled over, grabbed his cell phone, and in a groggy voice said, “Hello?”
Sam McKinney’s loud “Good morning, bro!” came pounding through his head.
“Good morning, Sam, how have you been?” Zane asked sleepily.
“Good—work has been good, and not much is new on my end. How about you? How was your trip to the Holy Land? Did you find the lost Templar treasure or the ark of the covenant?”
“No,” Zane replied, “I just practiced my shoveling and wheelbarrow skills.”
“Bro, if you want to just dig in the dirt, you can come over to my house anytime. I have tree holes that need to be dug. Who knows? You might even find some buried treasure.”
Zane laughed. “Speaking of buried treasure, Sam, how is that penny stock you said would make David and me wealthy
some day?”
Zane never missed an opportunity to razz Sam about it. “What price did you buy that at again? Didn’t you say it was a steal at a penny a share? Sam, last time I looked it was $.0002 cents a share. That two hundred dollars you begged David and me to invest is now worth four bucks. That doesn’t give me the warm and fuzzies, my friend. If my math is right, your investment of a thousand is now worth twenty bucks. Talk about buried treasure. This dog is in a hole so deep it would take an elevator to find it.”
“Okay, okay, I get it,” Sam replied with a good-natured laugh—tinged with a note of embarrassment. He wasn’t about to tell Zane the stock price was now $.00012. “You just don’t have enough faith, man. I’m telling you, this stock is going to surprise you someday.”
“Dude,” Zane laughed, “the only thing that will surprise me about this stock is if it is still trading in another year. How you ever talked David and me into each buying two hundred bucks worth of that dog I will never know.”
“I’m telling you I have a hunch about this one. The guy who started the company has got some real talent gathered around him, and he could not have attracted them unless he had something cooking.”
“Okay, bro,” Zane replied, “but don’t expect me to hold my breath.”
The good-natured banter out of the way, Sam asked, “Did you get to do any good climbing while you were over there?”
Zane laughed as his mind went back to Israel and his precarious climb up the cliff. “Yes, I had some really good climbs.”
“Well . . .?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” Zane laughed.
“Try me.”
Zane smiled to himself. This was going to be fun. “Well, it happened like this… I was just out hiking, minding my own business, when I noticed an incredibly beautiful girl free soloing a 5.13 route. As I drew near, a rock fell and cut her leg. She was injured and in dire straits . . .”
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