Salem's Cipher (31 page)

88

Montvale, Virginia

T
he 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

T
hey'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 said.

“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.

Salem set Beale's note aside. The three pages underneath were a thicker parchment. The top started out with this:

Articles of agreement and capitulation, made and concluded
this ninth day of August, one thousand eight hundred and
fourteen, between major general Andrew Jackson, on behalf
of the President of the United States of America, and the
chiefs, deputies, and warriors of the Creek Nation.

Salem skimmed the section blaming the Creeks for starting a war against the US until she got to the First Article.

The United States demand an equivalent for all expenses incurred in prosecuting the war to its termination, by a cession of all the territory belonging to the Creek nation within the
territories of
the United States, except that lying west, south, and south-eastwardly, of a
line to be run and described by persons duly authorized and appointed by the President of
the United States.

The treaty then went on to describe in great detail the land the Creek were to keep, with Article 2 underscoring the Creek's claim to most of Alabama and southern Georgia:

2nd—The United States will guarantee to the Creek nation
the integrity of all their Territory within said line to be
run and described as mentioned in the first article.

The rest of the treaty was devoted to the language of peace, including the Creek agreeing to no longer collude with the British, to remain in their designated lands in Alabama and Georgia, and to never again engage in conflict with the United States. The entire third page was given over to signatures, the spider webs of ink impossible to read in some places, though Salem clearly made out the signature of Andrew Jackson along with some others—Faue Emautla, of Cussetau; William McIntosh, for Hopoiee Haujo, of Ooseoochee; Eneah Thlucco, of Immookfau.

“Are these official?” Bel asked.

“They sure look like it,” Salem said. “You know what this means?”

“Andrew Jackson not only morally stole Indian land. He broke established law to do it,” Ernest said.

“I don't know.” Bel rubbed her cheek. “Weren't treaties broken all the time?”

“Yeah, but that was then. This is now.” Salem swiveled to count all the pots of gold and gems the vault contained. “With this treasure on their side, the surviving Creek nation could muck up the courts for years while this gets figured out. Jackson built his fortune on a falsehood, which means the Hermitage Foundation did too. They might survive this going public, but they might not.”

Bel whooped.

Ernest leaned over and scooped them both into his arms. “I can't believe you two did it. You're going to put a vault-sized dent in the Hermitage!”

“Not if we don't get out of this hole,” Bel said. “Salem, you first. Tuck those papers into your pants and let's go.”

“Wait, what's this?” A slip of paper freed itself from the roll. It was half the size of the land deeds but tucked between them. She picked it up and shined the flashlight on it. “It looks like some sort of code.”

“Gawd, no,” Bel groaned.

“I'm taking a picture.” Salem lined up her phone. “We can deal with it later.”

The code consisted of columns of seemingly random letters as opposed to the numbers Beale had used in his famous ciphers. She snapped a couple shots, rolled the papers back up, and tucked the works into the back of her pants.

They'd parked their car on the side of the road over five hours ago. They'd changed history in that time.

Salem held her arms toward the fading sunshine, her shoulders stiff with fatigue. “Ronald, I'm coming up!”

Ernest climbed on top of the clay pot immediately under the hole and made a bridge with his fingers. Salem stepped into it and used his leverage and the rope to wrench herself up and out. The warmth of the dappled fall sunshine was a relief after the close air of the vault. She hoisted one knee over the edge, and then the other, turning to look for Ronald.

She found him lying on the ground, blood pulsing from a gash in his throat.

A man stood behind Ronald's corpse, holding a knife to the throat of a woman.

Her face was swollen and battered, but she was recognizable.

The killer looked tired, his clothes rumpled, but he was still breathtaking.

His snake eyes studied her.

He held his finger to his gorgeous mouth, his meaning unmistakable.

Make no noise or sudden movement. I want your friends here for this.