'Casper, if I told you that I'd then have to cut out your tongue, slit your throat and rip out your heart from your chest.'
The reference to the traditional Masonic lore punishments for revealing secrets of the fraternity were well known and Casper was smiling as he protested.
'That's fine, I can handle it; my wife does that every time I get home late from work. Anyway, you're not a Freemason so it doesn't count!'
'It counts when I need a job done quickly; alternatively I can buy you that lunch for the favour,' Jackson responded drily.
Casper emitted a chuckle.
'Sounds fair, make it next Wednesday then, the canteen always has the best menu on a Wednesday.'
'Will do, speak later.'
Jackson replaced the handset but did not remove his hand, pausing for a moment with his arm outstretched as he thought of possibilities. He turned back to the monitor and read though the flag profile again before sending Casper the details.
Just under half an hour later, Jackson's phone purred to life; he recognised the caller ID on the small display screen and quickly snatched up the receiver from the cradle.
'Casper, what do you have for me?'
'Not much I'm afraid, this is a bit of a weird one.'
'A flag from 1946 is bound to be a little strange.'
'Yeah, not like this though,' Casper said incredulously, 'the chronological parent trace goes back to the '30s and the sibling traces go back even further, way further, we're talking about pre-independence!'
Jackson paused for a moment to rationalise Casper's turn of phrase.
'Independence? Do you mean as in the Declaration of Independence? That's late eighteenth century, are you kidding me?'
'Nope, the very same, this stuff should be right up your street. The child trace is just as strange; most of those references date from the Second World War and are still classified, which is why they didn't appear on your flag profile. Frankly Jackson, even if you offered to take me on an all-expenses paid trip to Vegas I still wouldn't be able to get you these documents.'
'Will you send me what you do have?'
'Sure, but most of the stuff that I can send you is declassified anyway, some of it is even in the public domain, any conspiracy nut on the street can request copies of this stuff via the agency website as part of the Freedom of Information Act.'
Jackson contemplated reasons for the obvious conflict in the sensitivity of the material, none of which made sense to him.
'Are there any clues as to why the other material is still restricted?'
'Well, it might just be an oversight. The material may not have gone through a declassification process yet, it happens all the time. Alternatively, it may be due to project compartmentalisation. In any case, you may be able to do some detective work to find related documents that were never linked in properly which could give you a clue as to their content.'
Jackson reclined in his chair, the coiled handset cable bouncing as it was pulled taught.
'Such as? Look Casper, you know that I know this system backwards and forwards. What makes all of this so special that I've not seen this situation before?'
The inaudible shrug that Casper enacted was conveyed by the tone of this voice.
'Well, fraternal societies don't usually attract such official secrecy and like I said, although the classification may now be redundant, the material may have been compartmented to a project that is still current and so still remains restricted, although granted, sixty odd years is a long time for a project life-cycle.'
Jackson rubbed the smooth bump of his shaved chin and pondered that highly classified material generally remained as such for one of two main reasons.
The first reason was concerned with historical decisions still deemed as embarrassing and damaging to the national reputation or likely to cause public dissent, no matter the ideological affiliation of the presiding government. Such political hot potatoes usually cooled down within seventy-five years and could be revealed to claim cheap accolades of open government and freedom of information.
The second reason concerned technological innovation, but such concerns usually had a shelf-life of around twenty-five years since every generation brought with it the advances in technology that made the previous secrets redundant. In some cases, the release of previously secret technologies acted as sleight of hand misdirection from aberrant modern developments.
'Can you get information on the project references?' asked Jackson.
'Nope, they're rated high enough not to actually show the classification. As far as normal searches are concerned they don't exist,' Casper chuckled.
'Looks like you found yourself a black project my friend.'
'That's comforting to know! So what now?'
'Well, the flag itself has been sitting around for decades and was inherited from the old paper based indexes and loaded up into the first automated systems back in the swinging sixties. Some of the cross-references could have been missed because it was such a manually intensive job back then, which means that some stuff might not have inherited the right security classification or have been compartmented properly.'
'Alright, so they'll just be sitting out there?'
'Yeah, exactly, you might find some orphaned documents that were never analysed properly to determine the appropriate classification. Let's just say that your particular area of interest wouldn't have been high on the 'to do' list, it's unlikely that it would have been given priority especially considering the age of the documents. It'll mean trawling the library manually using a few Boolean searches and I'm not saying that you're guaranteed to find anything anyway, but, it's worth a shot.'
Jackson understood what he had to do and sat upright again.
'That's good enough for me Casper, send me what you have and I'll take it from there. I definitely owe you lunch for this!'
'Yeah, but not in the canteen though, you can buy me a proper dinner in a proper restaurant for this!'
'Why Casper, people will begin to talk.'
Casper snorted at the innuendo.
'Hey, for the place I have in mind I don't give a crap what people say! You can drive us into DC, I know a great seafood restaurant on MacArthur Boulevard just near the reservoir and they do the best fried Ipswich clams I've ever tasted!'
'Alright my friend, you have yourself a deal. We'll talk later!'
Jackson put down the phone and turned to his keyboard and monitor. Before Casper sent his mail he had a few things that he could check, in particular, he wanted to refresh his own knowledge of eighteenth century fraternal societies.
The office had started to fill up as Jackson's colleagues turned up for work in a slow but steady trickle of morning arrivals. Each new face elicited a greeting and some idle banter about the end of the week, however, Jackson was growing more and more agitated as he waited for the material from Casper to be sent through. He had skimmed through a number of documents within the system but found himself inattentive and disconcerted by the promise of revelation yet to be delivered.
Regularly distracted by the soft two-tone chords emitted from his monitor speakers as new messages arrived, Jackson was unfailingly disappointed at each interlude. His adrenaline levels rising, a surge of anticipation washed over him as the sound of yet another message appearing on his screen induced the now familiar Pavlovian reaction in him, however, this time the sender identification and subject heading clearly marked it as containing the details he had been expecting and he eagerly pulled his chair in tight to the desk and rapidly double-clicked the entry to open it.
Jackson made the conscious effort to focus himself and read through the flag profile again; the notification had been triggered during a regular internet trawl the previous evening at 18:49 local time, however, network information showed that the original event had occurred almost four and a half hours prior. Details of the book had been loaded onto eBay, the online auction site, at around 14:24 Eastern Standard Time the previous day, however, since the upload had been actually been initiated in Europe, The Netherlands, this equated to 20:24 Central European Time.
Jackson glanced at his watch, it was now eight o'clock in the morning in Langley Virginia and with six hours time difference that meant it was two o'clock in the afternoon in Western Europe.
With his forearms resting on the edge of the desktop, Jackson's fingers hesitated above his keyboard as he scanned down the list of references that Casper had managed to locate. He was keen to instigate his full research however he now had a gnawing doubt tunnelling through the pit of his stomach; it was the timing that was bothering him.
It could take him a full day to appraise the material that Casper had sent and even longer to run a full search for the orphaned documents albeit with no guarantee of success. That could take him well into next week.
He pulled up a screen linking him to the internet via a secure proxy server and accessed the eBay website. Copying and pasting in the details from the flag he quickly brought up the auction site details for the book. Jackson paged through the advert carefully, considering that the subject header was simply a concoction of marketing keywords to grab a potential buyer's attention; '1735
Dirigo Lux
Rutilus Faber Alchemy Masonic Secret Societies VERY RARE'.
The seller had loaded some page scans onto the site showing various line drawings and prints with some of them appearing to be woodcuts. The book was definitely possessed of an occult theme and there were subtle references to alchemy in the images, although to the informed eye they were glaringly obvious. Based on the content of the pictures, Jackson gauged that in all likelihood the book was not Masonic or indeed, anything to do with mainstream Freemasonry, however, he was certain that it represented occult knowledge whether directed by a secret society or not. Whatever the case, he was conscious of the fact that without the full text he was simply guessing.
A couple of cursory public domain searches for the title turned up only obscure references and some rather cryptic extracts pasted onto a well subscribed but universally derided conspiracy theory message board. Jackson registered the details and copied the text, storing it in a work folder for later analysis although the Emanationist Philosophy professed in the passages was entirely familiar to him.
In fact, the book had struck a deep chord with him and a monochromatic half-remembered dream was suddenly reinvigorated with all the colour and radiant light of a spiritual epiphany. In spite of his excitement, he retained his sense of objectivity, knowing that he needed to clarify the source of the material before jumping to any conclusions.
Apart from the handful of references he had located, after a few more searches it was clear that he would get nothing of significance from the internet without defining some new trawl vectors, although at least somebody somewhere already appeared to be aware of the book. As he expected, a further search for the indicated author's name returned the same references as the previous title search and as an oddity, also provided a link to a comment posted to an article concerning pollution on an international news site. Unfortunately, a shared forename and surname was no guarantee of identity or evidence of a connection, especially since the author had almost certainly been dead for almost three centuries, if in fact he had ever existed.
The internet had provided a quick litmus paper test of the prevalence of references to the book in the public domain, but Jackson knew that he would need to examine the official library indexes to gather more 'academic' information. He would set up a trawl vector for the largest and best collections in the country, the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution Library, Queens Library in Jamaica, New York, even the collections in universities such as Harvard, Princeton, and Duke. From his console, he could initiate a search of all the integrated library systems in the entire country, but due to the scale of the search, he knew would have to set up a batch run to provide the results overnight.
Checking the eBay sale further he saw that the first couple of paragraphs from the text had apparently been transcribed into the body of the advert along with a full physical description of the book. Everything seemed authentic and this was perhaps reflected in the price despite the fact that it was devoid of the provenance which would have raised its value substantially higher. The seller had placed the book for sale at six hundred Euros, just over eight hundred US dollars at the current exchange rate, but more importantly for Jackson, it had already been purchased; in fact, the records indicated that it had been bought within a couple of minutes of appearing on the site. Jackson's heart sank.
Although he could readily obtain the contact and address details of the seller, the account details and a full profile of the buyer were not freely available to him and the segregation of personal details rules meant that in order to obtain those records he would need to go through official channels which would take time. It was often erroneously assumed that anybody within the CIA could pull such details on a whim; however, the controls in place to protect personal data were quite strict even if regularly neglected in popular fiction.
Jackson knew when to trust his instincts and everything about this situation suggested to him that he had to retrieve this book as soon as possible. He needed to call in a few favours.