Salem's Cipher

by Jess Lourey

  He slammed his hand into the steering wheel.

  When Barnaby had called, his command had been clear.

  “Take her with.”

  “She’ll slow me down. Why do I need her?”

  “Geppetto tells me you failed outside the Dolores Mission.”

  Jason’s cheek twitched, took a new shape, popped back. When he’d met Geppetto outside Mission Delores, Geppetto had placed his hand on Jason’s shoulder.

  He’d squeezed.

  Just a bit.

  Enough to steal Jason’s breath.

  To remind him of those nights in the Lower 9, when it was his turn with Geppetto.

  To make sure he remembered that single job in Minnesota fourteen years earlier.

  To let Jason know that his crack could come again, at any time.

  Jason despised Geppetto for that, but he hated himself worse for not reaching for a knife and skewering that meat hook of a hand like a kebab, for not even pulling away. That was Geppetto’s power, to teach you that attempting escape hurt worse than letting him have his way, to brand that message deep into your soul.

  Adding insult to the promise of injury, the women had escaped their grasp outside the mission. Jason had watched across the street as Wiley fumbled with the middle bell, nearly falling before popping a drawer hidden in the bell’s harness and removing something. He saw them exit the front door, and he’d issued a terse command to Geppetto: Hold Isabel, don’t hurt her.

  Even with her hair chopped, she took his breath away.

  But then the FBI agent arrived, followed two hours later by this phone call from Barnaby.

  “Yes, we failed. The daughters weren’t able to stay for the interview as we’d hoped.” Jason didn’t like that his voice sounds whiny, or that Barnaby’s good cheer had disappeared days ago and had not returned.

  “It’s not just the docket anymore,” Barnaby says. “They have the location to Beale’s vault. This is a Code Blue. I need you.”

  That announcement knocked the whine directly out of Jason.

  He felt himself grow taller.

  Barnaby continued, “I need stealth. If I send in the entire workforce, Wiley and Odegaard might run before they open the vault, and we’ll have nothing. That girl is the only one who can get inside, so make sure she does. A plane is waiting for you at SFO. We’ll have the Underground leader in a car for you when you land.”

  Jason didn’t want to ask again. “Why do I need her?”

  A pause announced Barnaby’s displeasure. “You may not, but if it comes to it, what would you do if someone was about to dismiss your mother in front of you?”

  “Anything.”

  Jason meant it. Killing his mother was his job.

  Barnaby’s genteel voice broke into Jason’s mental stroll. “Wait until they enter the vault to be sure it’s possible. Then downsize them all. We won’t need their work any longer. We won’t need any outside employees.” His tone became reverential. “Once we have what’s inside the vault, the Hermitage will be untouchable.”

  “What do I do after they’ve been dismissed?”

  “We’ll have a human resources crew on hand, just out of sight, poised for cleanup. You’ll tell them when to arrive. I don’t want them there until everyone is terminated. Understand?”

  “Yes sir. Thank you.”

  Barnaby cleared his throat, his tone chiding. “They’re your backup, too, if you aren’t able to decruit everyone on your own. You’ll inform HR when you go in. You’ll have ten minutes from that point to finish the job. If they don’t hear from you within that time, they swarm. But that won’t happen, will it, Jason?”

  The words stung. “No sir.”

  “Good man.”

  Barnaby had better believe it.

  Everyone would be dead when Jason was done.

  88

  Montvale, Virginia

  The three of them had picked up a rental car at the airport, purchased shovels, pickaxes, and a high-powered GPS at a Home Depot just outside of Richmond, and inputted Beale’s coordinates.

  The GPS led them to Montvale, Virginia, then south to Porters Mountain Road. A sugar maple and pine forest hugged the sides of the winding highway. Mountains—or at least they looked like mountains to Midwest-raised Salem—circled the robin’s-egg blue of the sky. Although they had yet to pass a farm, the air carried the earthy smell of manure and spicy plants, like tomatoes or dandelions.

  They’d been on Porters Mountain Road for three miles when the phone commanded them to drive straight into the center of the woods. Bel had parked the car on the shoulder, and they’d packed up their equipment and started hiking in and up, Bel carrying her share of the load even though her shoulder was clearly still bothering her.

  The forest air smelled musky, like snake dens and decomposing leaves. The trees stayed dense, but the ground transformed from spongy to stone. In the distance, Salem heard water crackling along a rocky creek. It reminded her of the sound of bacon frying. Birds screeched overheard. Sweat began to inch between her shoulder blades despite the molasses-thick shade of the trees. When they reached a rocky outcropping shaped like three triangles, the GPS informed them that they’d

  arrived. They went to work on the middle stone, trying to pry and budge it.

  That’s why they had been taken completely off guard by the man.

  “Hands up. All three of you.”

  Bel, Salem, and Ernest dropped their tools and turned slowly.

  “Tell me what you’re doing.” The elderly man’s sing-song accent was at odds with the shotgun he had trained on them and his gnarled face. He wore a flannel shirt and faded jeans tucked into work boots. A noon sun shone overhead, speckling the forest.

  They didn’t have a weapon of their own. Bel couldn’t risk an unregistered gun in her bag, even if they’d had time to check it.

  “Sir, put the gun down.” Bel’s voice was steady. “You can see we’re unarmed.”

  “Please,” Salem begged, her hands in the air. To have come this far, to be so close to saving their mothers, only to be gunned down by this stranger was inconceivable.

  “I can see you’re trespassers, and I’m within my legal rights to shoot you.” He tossed his chin at the pickaxes they’d dropped at their feet. “Treasure hunters?”

  “Yes sir,” Ernest said.

  “Bah.” The man spit to his left, but he didn’t lower the gun.

  “Is this your land?” Salem asked.

  He nodded. “And my father’s, and his dad before that. And I’ll be g’all damned if you get to come and go as you please on what is rightly mine. If I chase off one treasure hunter a week, I chase off ten.”

  Salem licked her lips. “Has Beale’s vault been discovered?”

  “Hell if I know. I’ll ask you kindly to pick up your equipment, walk back the way you came, and never return.”

  Salem’s stomach dropped, but she followed his instructions, as did Ernest and Bel. They grabbed their tools, including the GPS, and started walking away.

  “Sir,” Ernest said, stopping.

  The man’s gun was still trained on them.

  “Do you have a mother?”

  “A’course,” he said. “And two legs and a dog. What’s that to do with anything?”

  “We’re trying to save one of these women’s mothers.”

  The man made a sound like air leaving a tire and cocked an eyebrow at Salem and Bel. “Which one?”

  “Please.” Salem stepped forward. He’d let the tip of his gun fall, but he raised it back. “We don’t know. We just know that somebody kidnapped our mothers, but one of them may still be alive. If we can get to the vault, they might return her.”

  He laughed, then paused. “You’re serious?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s a new one.” He dropped his gun again,
scratching his chin. “I’m quite sure I don’t believe you, but a good story deserves a reward. I tell you what, though, I’ve been hunting these woods since I was knee high to a grasshopper. If there were a treasure in these rocks, I’d have found it.”

  “Sir?” A hunch burned Salem’s throat.

  “Yup.”

  Miss Gram guards the truth. What if it was more than a tip to the anagram contained in the ciphers? What if it marked the actual vault? “Have you noticed any symbols around here, ever? You know, when you were hunting?”

  “Like pentagrams or something?”

  “Probably not,” Salem said. “Something smaller.”

  “Nope,” he said, yanking a handkerchief out of his back pocket. He blew loudly and returned the cloth. “Just the electric company’s stamp over the yonder hill.”

  Salem forgot to breathe. Miss Gram, rearranged, made Ma Rigs Ms, Mags Rims, and Mass Grim.

  It also made Mrs. Sigma.

  The original Greek letter sigma, used frequently in modern mathematics, was usually referred to as lunate sigma, or the female sigma, because of its crescent shape.

  Mrs. Sigma guards the truth.

  Emily Dickinson had included the symbol below her name in both messages she’d written. Writers were taught to represent sigma with more of a buckle in the middle, comparable to an English capital E, like the first letter in electric.

  Exactly what you’d expect to see for an electric company’s stamp.

  “Never would have found the stamp,” the man said, pointing at it. Once he’d made up his mind about the three of him, he’d been a genial host, introducing himself as Ronald. “Except a burrow of groundhogs set up here. I don’t mind ’em, but the wife didn’t like what they did to her garden. I tracked them back to their home and made to set up traps.

  “You have to secure the trap to the ground or the animal runs away with it,” he explained to Ernest, as if the 6'7" city boy was the only one who could truly understand. “I stuck one in right here and it wouldn’t go. Not surprising, since much of this is rock. I moved the grass aside to be sure, and there was the electric company stamp. Funny, because there’s no electricity over here.”

  He kept talking to Ernest while Salem and Bel dropped to their knees, ripping out grass and pushing aside dirt. Their work revealed the metal disk—bronze, the size of a dinner plate, a large Σ stamped in its center.

  They both sat back on their heels. Salem’s skin tingled.

  Ronald stepped over to them. “That’s it. There you go! Good work, girls.”

  “You found it, Salem,” Bel said. “I can’t believe it. You found Beale’s vault.”

  “We all found it,” Salem insisted. Was it possible to have an excitement-­induced heart attack?

  “Maybe,” Bel replied. “But you’re going to be the one to open it.”

  Ronald leaned his gun against a nearby tree. “How’s that? Open it?”

  “We think this is the marker for the Beale vault, sir.” Bel stood awkwardly, her arm in its sling, and brushed off her knees. “If you’re familiar, the second cipher says the treasure is six feet under.”

  Ronald took Bel’s place next to Salem, his gun forgotten. “Well, I’ll be. You know people been looking for this for lifetimes, right?”

  Salem felt all the grooves on the stamp. In mathematics, sigma usually represented the sum of a series. She suspected Thomas J. Beale used it to represent the lunar, or feminine. Neither piece of information helped her. “Hand me the pickax.”

  “You’re not going to destroy it, are you?” Bel asked.

  “I want to dig around it.” Salem took the tool Ernest handed to her, using the blunt edge like a hand spade to clear the area immediately surrounding the bronze stamp. A wider metal circle emerged under that. “Help me!”

  All four of them went at it, digging until their shoulders ached and sweat stung their eyes. They widened the circle, and then another circle around that. After an hour, they had discovered the top of the vault. The stamp was welded to a circle the size and shape of a manhole cover, which sealed what appeared to be a room-sized, rusted metal container buried in the ground, sloping out and down from the manhole. Salem guessed it was shaped like a giant whiskey jug if she could see it from the side.

  “Now what?” Bel asked. They’d stopped, panting, the circle of earth they’d cleared forming a natural ledge they could all sit on to study the manhole cover. “A blow torch?”

  “Let’s get these pickaxes between the lid and the base and see if we can pry it open,” Ronald offered. He tried first, but there was no crack to stick it in. Even after a few directed swings with the pickax, there was no purchase.

  Bel scratched her head. “I think it needs your sweet touch, Salem.”

  “I don’t know what to do,” she wailed. “I’ve felt every square inch of that cover, pressed and pulled on every bit of it.”

  “What about pushing together?” Ronald asked. “You pushed down, but how about toward? Like squeezing?”

  “What would you squeeze?”

  “The edges of this E.” Ronald pointed toward the tips of the sigma symbol. “It’s itching to meet up with itself.” He leaned forward and demonstrated, his long fingers touching the points and pinching.

  The vault underneath them shifted.

  “Do it some more!”

  He squeezed again. The earth rumbled some more, and the manhole cover popped up an inch with a pneumatic hiss. The air it released was bitter with age.

  “Help me push this lid open,” he said. They all came around to his side and put their shoulders into it. The manhole slide to the side, still attached but no longer covering the opening. An absorbent darkness stared back at them.

  Ronald whistled low. “I hope one of you brought a flashlight.”

  89

  Beale Vault

  They’d brought two.

  Bel shined hers into the vault. It was no more than ten feet deep with waist-high terra cotta pots lining the floor and shortening the distance between outside and in. The hole was only wide enough for one person at a time to stick in their head. Bel volunteered, tipping her upper body over the edge while Salem held her feet.

  “More clay pots,” she said, her voice echoing. She yanked herself back out and pulled off her sling. “I’m going first.”

  “I’m going to tie your rope around that tree while you go in,” Ronald said, pointing at a pine. “Only a fool and a ground hog go into the ground without a way out.”

  Ernest went second. He was tall enough to stand on one of the clay pots and pull himself out, if need be, so Salem lowered herself down next, the second flashlight tucked into the waistband of her khaki pants. She eased her feet between a cluster of pots so she could stand firmly and flashed her light into the farthest reaches. The vault was indeed shaped like a jug, the floor a circle with a 12-foot diameter, clay pots lined three high on the perimeter. There were at least a hundred of them.

  Salem slid the lid off the waist-high pot nearest her. It made a scraping sound. It was packed to the brim with circles of gold. She grabbed a fistful, the sun shining through the opening of the vault and lighting up the treasure.

  A shadow dimmed the sun overhead.

  Salem glanced up, throat tight. They should have waited for the rope to come down. They were at the mercy of Ronald, a stranger.

  His face peered down, followed by a rope. “That what I think it is?” he asked.

  She held up her hand to him. Five feet separated them, but he still reached for the gold.

  He smiled. “I’ll be hot-damned. I’ll stay up here. One of us should.”

  Trust no one.

  Salem shone her light toward Bel, whose back was to her. “Find anything?”

  “Every urn I’ve opened contains gold, or jewels, or silver.”

  “Same here,” Ernest sa
id.

  “Keep looking. We need to find whatever it is that’s going to ruin the Hermitage.”

  The scraping of terra cotta pots being opened filled the space, echoing off the walls, interrupted by the occasional gasp as Bel uncovered a container of rubies, or Ernest found a small cask filled with loose pearls, like a vase of creamy marbles. It was amazing, glorious, beyond belief. Without a car and GPS, it would have taken months to locate this spot, if it would have even been possible. Thomas J. Beale couldn’t have conceived the world his treasure would be born into.

  “Wait!” Salem said. Her light shined off a pot different than the rest. It had a lightning bolt cast into its side.

  Here you will find the treasure, and the Lightning Bolt …

  She waded through the maze of pots until she stood in front of it. The lightning bolt pot was stacked on top of another and stood at chest height. She slid off the top and tipped the pot to peer inside. It contained rolls of paper. She pulled them out.

  “Come here and hold my flashlight!”

  Ernest reached her side first, Bel seconds after. With shaking hands, she unrolled the paper on a nearby ledge. The first one was a letter signed by Thomas J. Beale and dated 10 August 1814:

  Major General Andrew Jackson altered the Treaty of Fort Jackson, falsely, after the Chiefs entered their signatures. My men have intercepted the one true original, which rests herein. If the accurate Convention is brought before the Nation’s eye, Jackson cannot rewrite history. The whole of Alabama and the valuable parts of Coosa and Kahawha containing in all approximately twenty-three millions of acres are NOT articles of the Creek’s cession. Major General Jackson has created copies that cast out this fact, but they are unconsummated by the signatures of the Chiefs of the Creek Nation and contain only the letter X where a name should be. With the Truth herein, and the strength of the Creek Treasure encased in this vault, the Indians keep Alabama and Georgia, and Jackson’s fortune and reputation are struck a fatal blow.

  —Thomas J. Beale

  “Holy shit,” Salem said. “Alabama and Georgia legally belong to the Creek nation?”

  “Let’s see the treaty,” Bel insisted.