The Lincoln Myth

by Steve Berry

  Damn. She actually did it.

  She tossed the gun over the seat. It thumped to the floorboard on the passenger side. “You think you’re so damn smart.”

  He chuckled. “I don’t know about that. You with your master’s degree, working on your doctorate. I thought maybe you might figure it out on your own.”

  He stopped for a red light. “And you really gave me the sheriff department’s number as your own?”

  “I thought maybe you might turn yourself in.”

  “That just wasn’t nice. I was so looking forward to calling you back.”

  “My loss,” she said. “I think I’ll leave now.”

  “I wouldn’t do that.”

  “And why not?”

  “ ’Cause you’re going to miss out on somethin’ really cool. Might even help that education of yours along.”

  She made no attempt to open her door and he accelerated through the intersection. It was an easy matter to cut across town, find Pennsylvania Avenue, and approach the guard gate for the White House. Before he’d left for Virginia hours ago, Stephanie had called and told him to come here when he was done.

  He wasn’t looking forward to the family reunion.

  “What the crap?” Katie muttered.

  He rolled down his window and prepared to identify himself. “I told you it would blow your mind.”

  They entered through the visitor entrance, a Secret Service agent waiting inside. Katie still carried the hunk of glass, her eyes alight with anticipation.

  “I’ve never been here before,” she said.

  “Neither have I,” he said.

  “You really are an agent?”

  “That’s what they tell me.”

  Their escort led them through a marble hall. Cut-glass chandeliers lit everything in a daylight glow. They passed a portrait of Eisenhower. More presidential images hung at the far end. Kennedy. Johnson. Ford. Carter. Like a recent greatest hits parade.

  They stayed on the ground floor and entered a room with walls sheathed in a red twill fabric. Gold scroll formed a border. The furniture was all upholstered in the same red shade with patterns of gold medallions and more scrolls. The carpet was beige, red, and gold. Another chandelier burned bright. Waiting there were Stephanie and good ol’ Uncle Danny. He hadn’t seen him in thirteen years, not since his father’s funeral. He told himself to be respectful and mind his manners. His boss would want that, no matter what he might feel.

  “Who is this?” Stephanie immediately asked.

  He realized that protocol was being waived tonight. Usually, no one came close to the president without being vetted.

  But this situation was anything but usual.

  Katie, though, seemed remarkably composed, as if she met the president of the United States every day.

  “A problem that occurred too quickly for me to solve, so I brought it along. This is Katie—”

  He suddenly realized he did not know her last name.

  “Bishop,” she said. “Katie Bishop.”

  And she extended her hand for the president to shake.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Daniels said. “Now could you answer the lady’s question and tell me what you’re doing here?”

  “Show him,” Luke said, motioning to what she held.

  Katie handed over the hunk of glass.

  “That came out of the ice pit,” Luke said. “Hidden behind a brick with IV marked on it. I got it out, but Katie here managed to call the locals on me. They were closing in, so I had no choice but to bring her along.”

  “She one-upped you?” the president asked.

  “I know it may be a little hard to believe. I’m having trouble with it myself. But stuff happens. As you certainly know.”

  “I see you still have that smart mouth,” the president said.

  “Probably a family trait. You think?” He caught Stephanie’s glare. “Okay. I’ll stop. Look, I didn’t have a lot of choice. I also thought she might be helpful. She tells me that she has a master’s in American history, and she also knows a lot about Madison. It was either that or get caught, so I took the lesser of two evils.”

  “Okay,” the president said, “Katie Bishop, with your degrees in American history, where are we standing?”

  “The Red Room. Dolley Madison used to have her fashionable Wednesday-night receptions here. That was the place to be in those days. Since then it’s been a parlor, sitting room, music room. Unfortunately, the walls are reproductions, done when Truman gutted the White House. Hillary Clinton changed things to pretty much what you see now. This furniture, if I remember right, is from Madison’s time. What’s really cool is what happened during U. S. Grant’s term. He was afraid there’d be a problem with Rutherford B. Hayes’ inauguration, since he was elected after a trumped-up commission awarded him twenty disputed electoral votes, so he had him sworn in right here the night before.”

  “You know about the Compromise of 1877?”

  Katie smiled. “Now you’re being silly. One of the great backroom deals of all time. Hayes lost the popular vote in the 1876 election to Samuel Tilden, and neither one of them had enough electoral votes. So southern Democrats allowed those twenty disputed votes to go to the Republican, Hayes, in return for all troops being withdrawn from the South, a railroad built west through the South, and legislation to help rebuild what the war destroyed. Finally, they had a bargaining tool and they used it to its max. Grant immediately honored the deal and withdrew some of the troops. Hayes got rid of the rest. With them gone, the Democrats took total control of the South, which they kept until the late 20th century.”

  “Not bad. Pretty good, in fact.” The president motioned with what he held. “Now tell me what this is?”

  “We’ve known about symbols on the bricks in the ice pit for a long time. No one ever figured out their implications. We thought it was just something Madison did. Decorative. Or an idiosyncrasy.”

  “Is that why there are no pictures of the pit on the Internet?” Stephanie asked.

  Katie nodded. “The curators didn’t want any of that Da Vinci Code kind of press, so they sealed it up.”

  “And it’s a good thing they did,” Daniels said. “But you haven’t answered my question. What is it I’m holding?”

  “I’ve been considering that all the way from Virginia. And I think I know the answer.”

  STEPHANIE WAS CLOSELY WATCHING BOTH DANNY AND LUKE. She’d arrived at the White House an hour ago, after finishing with Rowan at the Library of Congress. The senator had spent thirty minutes alone with the Book of Mormon. She’d watched every moment thanks to a closed-circuit feed from a hidden camera used for security in that part of the library. She and John Cole had witnessed Rowan tear a page from the 1840 edition. Cole had winced when that happened, but there was nothing either of them could do. Thankfully, Cole had already examined the book and photocopied the page with the writing. He told her that anomaly had been known for some time, but no one had any idea what it meant. It was one reason why the book was kept in the restricted access collection. Now, it seemed, the mystery may have been solved.

  “Why don’t you have a seat,” the president said to them all. “I want to hear more of what Ms. Bishop has to say.”

  Stephanie was a little perturbed at Luke for involving an outsider. But she’d learned long ago to choose her battles when questioning her agents’ decisions. They were the ones putting their butts on the line. All were highly trained, smart people. Luke had apparently weighed the options and made his call.

  The president carefully laid the glass receptacle on a table.

  “In the early 19th century,” Katie said, “vacuum sealing didn’t exist. Canning technology was just beginning to be explored. Preserving something like paper was tough. The first cans were actually made of glass, but tin eventually replaced that. To save fragile things, they would sometimes seal them in glass.”

  The hunk on the table clearly held something that resembled a small book.

&n
bsp; “Madison was good friends with Thomas Jefferson. Monticello sat only thirty miles away, which in those days was like next door. Jefferson knew all about glass sealing. So maybe he told his good friend James Madison about the technique.”

  The president sat silent.

  So did Luke.

  Unusual for them both.

  Not a word of affection had passed between them.

  Two peas in a pod.

  LUKE WAS DETERMINED TO WAIT HIS UNCLE OUT. DANNY HAD always been a cold one. Interesting how brothers could be such polar opposites. He knew all about his uncle’s sad past, and sympathized some—emphasis on some. Luke’s family had always been close. He and his three siblings got along, brothers in the truest sense of the word. All three of his brothers were married, with children. He was the only one still wild and single.

  “Good job getting this,” his uncle said to him.

  Had he heard right? A compliment? From the great Danny Daniels? For the first time, their eyes met. “That pain you?”

  “Luke—,” Stephanie began.

  But the president held up his hand. “It’s all right. We’re blood. And I probably deserve it, anyway.”

  That admission shocked him.

  “You’re related?” Katie asked.

  The president faced her. “He’s my nephew. He probably would never admit to that, but that’s what he is.”

  “Aren’t you just full of surprises,” Katie said to him.

  He wasn’t interested in mending family fences. He really didn’t give a damn about his uncle at all. He had to be careful, though, around his mother, as she’d always liked her brother-in-law.

  The president motioned to the hunk of glass. “Do the honors, Luke. Break it open.”

  He wondered about all of the kindness but decided now was not the time to fight. He tested the weight. Maybe two or three pounds. Thick glass. A hammer would be good, but his boot might do the trick. He laid the receptacle on the floor atop a rug and popped his heel down hard. Nothing happened. He repeated and the glass cracked. A third jab and it broke away in chunks.

  Carefully, he fished out the small book.

  “Let our historian take a look,” the president said.

  He handed it to Katie.

  She opened its cover and scanned a few of the pages. After a moment she glanced up and said, “Wow.”

  FORTY-FIVE

  SALZBURG

  9:50 A.M.

  CASSIOPEIA SAT IN HER SUITE, HER MIND IN TURMOIL. Everything around her would normally be enticing. The wooden beams, embroidered linens, painted Bavarian chests, teakwood furniture. The Goldener Hirsch seemed an homage to history. But none of it mattered. What consumed her was how she’d managed to embroil herself in such an awful mess.

  Her father would be so ashamed. He’d liked Josepe. But her father, though smart in so many ways, had been so naïve in others. Religion being his main fallacy. He always thought there was a divine plan, one that each person had little choice but to follow. If followed correctly the reward was eternal bliss. If not, then only cold and darkness awaited.

  Unfortunately, her father was wrong.

  She’d come to that realization shortly after he died. For a daughter who’d worshiped her father, that had been hard to accept. But there was no divine plan. No eternal salvation. No Heavenly Father. It was all a story, concocted by men who wanted to fashion a religion where others would obey them.

  And that galled her.

  Mormon doctrine taught that neither sex should be upset if privileges and responsibilities were bestowed on one but not the other. That seemed especially true when it came to women. Every woman was supposedly born with a divine purpose. Foremost was her role as mother. Serving in the home was tagged the highest of spiritual callings. She assumed such rhetoric had been designed to mask the fact that women could never attain the priesthood, or any position of church leadership or authority. Those were exclusively bestowed on men. But why? It made no sense. What was she, twenty-six, when she realized the implications? Just after her mother died. Men had created her religion and men would dominate it. God’s plan? Hardly. She was not going to dedicate her life to raising children and obeying a husband. Not that there was anything wrong with either. Just that neither was right for her.

  An old intentness burned inside. She thought back to a concert in Barcelona. Josepe had chosen the place. El Teatre més Petit del Món. Once the private home of a renowned artist, it had become the world’s smallest theater—Chopin, Beethoven, and Mozart played in a romantic candlelit garden with 19th-century ambience.

  It had been lovely.

  Afterward, they’d dined alone and talked of the church, as Josepe liked to do. She recalled how, increasingly, that topic came to repulse her. But she’d indulged him, as she’d then thought was her place.

  “There was an incident last week, in southern Spain,” he said. “My father told me of it. A member of the church was attacked and beaten.”

  She was shocked. “Why?”

  “When I heard I thought of Nephi, who came upon a drunken and passed-out Laban, lying on the streets of Jerusalem.”

  She knew the story of Laban, who refused to return a set of brass plates, which contained the scriptures needed for Nephi’s family to remain obedient.

  “Nephi realized the fallen drunk was Laban himself, and he felt commanded by the Spirit to kill him. Nephi struggled with that feeling. He’d never shed blood. But the Spirit repeated the order twice more. So he killed Laban and wrote that it was better that one man should perish than a nation should dwindle and perish in unbelief.”

  She could see he was troubled.

  “Why would Heavenly Father order Nephi to do that?” he asked. “It seems contrary to all that is good and right.”

  “Perhaps because it is merely a story.”

  “But what of Abraham’s attempted sacrifice of Isaac? He was commanded to offer his son, even though it was written, Thou shalt not kill. Abraham did not refuse. He was ready to kill Isaac, but an angel stopped him. God, though, was proud of his obedience. Joseph Smith himself spoke of that.”

  “Surely you see that as a parable, not an actual event?”

  He stared at her, perplexed. “Nothing in the Book of Mormon is without truth.”

  “I didn’t say it was false, just that it might be more a story with a lesson than an actual occurrence.”

  She recalled his reluctance to bend.

  For him the Book of Mormon had been absolute.

  “I’m not saying that I would have killed my son,” he said. “But Abraham was brave to obey Heavenly Father. He was prepared to do as commanded.”

  Cotton and Stephanie both had said Josepe killed an American agent.

  Was it possible?

  She’d not heard much of the conversation in the Salzburg chapel, except the last few words spoken just before she made her appearance. Never had Josepe been violent. As far as she knew, that simply wasn’t his character. His forceful denial about killing anyone sounded true. So she had to wonder if she was being manipulated. She wasn’t happy with either Cotton or Stephanie. One had no business being here, treating her like she was helpless—and the other was a liar. She’d hated the friction last night when she went to see Cotton, regretted calling him an ass, but she was angry then and remained so now.

  She loved Cotton.

  But she’d once loved Josepe, too.

  How had she allowed this chaos to gather?

  Part of her own arrogance, she assumed. A belief that she could handle whatever life threw her way. Yet she was not as tough as she wanted everyone to think. Her father had been her rock. But he’d been gone a long time. Maybe Josepe was intended to be his replacement, but she’d ended that relationship. Cotton was a little like her father, but also vastly different. He was the first man since Josepe that she’d thought about in terms of permanency.

  Yet she’d walked away from Josepe.

  And Cotton? What of him? He should go home, but that wasn’t going t
o happen. Stephanie had now involved him, so he would do his job.

  As she should do.

  She reached for her phone.

  A check-in call with Stephanie was scheduled shortly. No way. Not anymore. She deleted all references to Stephanie from her phone.

  Something was wrong here, of that there could be no doubt. Josepe traveled with armed men. Danites? The government, the president in particular, was apparently focused on him—something that also involved a U.S. senator. An American agent was apparently dead.

  And Josepe was the prime suspect.

  How it all fit together she did not know, but she intended to find out.

  With one change.

  She would handle it her way.

  FORTY-SIX

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Saturday Sepr 15th 1787. In Convention

  The main session having adjourned for the day the delegates reassembled after the evening meal for further discussion on a separate point.

  Doc. FRANKLIN rose to confess that there are several parts of this constitution which I do not at present approve, but I am not sure I shall never approve them. For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information, or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise. It is therefore that the older I grow, the more apt I am to doubt my own judgment, and to pay more respect to the judgment of others. Most men indeed as well as most sects in Religion, think themselves in possession of all truth, and that wherever others differ from them it is so far error. Steele a Protestant in a Dedication tells the Pope, that the only difference between our Churches in their opinions of the certainty of their doctrines is, the Church of Rome is infallible and the Church of England is never in the wrong. But though many private persons think almost as highly of their own infallibility as of that of their sect, few express it so naturally as a certain French lady, who in a dispute with her sister, said “I don’t know how it happens, Sister, but I meet with no body but myself that’s always in the right.” In these sentiments, Sir, I agree to this constitution with all its faults, if they are such; because I think a general Government necessary for us, and there is no form of Government but what may be a blessing to the people if well administered, and believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in Despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic Government, being incapable of any other. But I am not unmindful of the caution that our recent conflict has bred within us all. True, I doubt whether any other Convention we can obtain, may be able to make a better constitution. For when you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men, all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views. From such an assembly can a perfect production be expected? So the concerns of those who fear a perpetual, unbending, unbreakable association of States is well taken. We must be mindful that all that is created comes with an end.