The Jefferson Key

WYATT CONSIDERED WHAT CARBONELL HAD TOLD HIM.

The Magellan Billet.

“Seems like a good place to be,” she said. “Daniels loves it. Odds are his party will retain the White House after next year. It’s the perfect spot for a career woman like me.”

“Except that Stephanie Nelle heads it now.”

He noticed their route, toward Times Square, in the direction of his hotel, the location of which he’d never mentioned to Andrea Carbonell.

“I’m afraid Stephanie has come on some hard times,” she said. “The Commonwealth took her prisoner a few days ago.”

Which explained how his email to Malone in Copenhagen had worked so easily. He’d opened a Gmail account in Stephanie Nelle’s name. Nothing unusual would have flagged on Malone’s end. Field agents regularly used common email providers since they drew no attention, revealed nothing about the sender, and blended perfectly with the billions of others. If Malone hadn’t taken the bait, or had communicated with Nelle outside the email, he would have waited for another time to repay his debt. Luckily, that had not occurred.

He was curious, though. “The Commonwealth is helping you acquire a new job?”

“They’re about to.”

“And what is it you have that they want?”

She laid the folder in his lap. “It’s all explained in here.”

He listened as she told him about privateers, letters of marque from George Washington, an attempt on Andrew Jackson’s life, and a cipher Thomas Jefferson considered unbreakable.

“A friend of Jefferson’s,” she said, “Robert Patterson, a professor of mathematics, conceived what he called the perfect cipher. Jefferson was fascinated with codes. He loved Patterson’s so much that, as president, he passed it to his ambassador in France for official use. Unfortunately, there is no record of its solution. Patterson’s son, also named Robert, was appointed by Andrew Jackson as director of the U. S. Mint. That’s probably how Jackson learned of the cipher and its solution. It’s logical to assume that the son knew. Old Hickory was a big fan of Thomas Jefferson.”

She showed him a copy of a handwritten page that contained nine rows of letters in seemingly random sequence.

“Most people don’t know,” she said, “that prior to 1834 there were few records of Congress. What existed was contained within the separate journals for the House and Senate. In 1836 Jackson commissioned the Debates and Proceedings in the Congress of the United States, which took twenty years to finish. To create that official record, they used journals, newspaper accounts, eyewitnesses, whatever or whoever they could find. It was mainly secondhand information, but it became the Annals of Congress and is now the official congressional record.”

She explained that nowhere in the Annals was there any mention of four letters of marque granted to any Hale, Bolton, Cogburn, or Surcouf. In fact, two pages were missing from the official House and Senate journals for the congressional sessions of 1793.

“Jackson tore those pages out and hid them away,” she said, “concealed behind Jefferson’s cipher. It has done its job well, protecting that hiding place-” She paused. “Until a few hours ago.”

He spotted his hotel down Broadway.

“We hired an expert a few months ago,” she said. “A particularly smart individual who thought he could solve it. The Commonwealth has tried, but none of their hired guns were successful. Our man is in southern Maryland. He’s privy to some computer programs we use for Middle East decoding that apparently worked. I need you to go see him and retrieve the solution.”

“It can’t be emailed or couriered?”

She shook her head. “Too many security risks associated with that. Besides, there’s a complication.”

He caught the implications. “Others know about this?”

“Unfortunately. Two of whom you just sent to the hospital, but the White House knows as well.”

“And how do you know that?”

“I told them.”