The Devil Colony (59 page)

Then there was Gray. He’d sunk into a dark pit of despair, but what would arise out of it: a stronger man or a broken one?

Only time would tell.

So Painter kept quiet for all their sakes. Even coming here was not without risk, but he had to chance it.

Reaching the top of the steps, he crossed under the dome and into the Capitol Rotunda. The huge vaulted space echoed with voices. He sought the second-floor gallery, where giant twelve-by-eighteen-foot canvases circled the dome’s walls. He found what he was looking for easily enough on the south side. It was the most famous painting up here:
Declaration of Independence
by John Turnbull.

He stood before it, sensing the waft of history that blew through this space. He stared at the brushstrokes done by a painter’s hand centuries ago. But other
hands
had also been involved in this piece, just as influential. He pictured Jefferson guiding Turnbull, preparing this masterpiece.

Painter gazed up, studying every inch of it, connecting to that past.

The massive canvas depicted the presentation of the Declaration of Independence to Congress. Within this one painting, John Turnbull attempted to include a portrait of everyone who signed the Declaration, a memorial to that pivotal event. But Turnbull couldn’t manage to fit everyone into it. Yet, oddly enough, he did manage to get
five
people painted in there who had never signed the final draft.

So why include them?

Historians had always wondered.

In his research, Painter read how John Turnbull had offered some obfuscating answers, but none satisfactory—and it was indeed Thomas Jefferson, master of ciphers and codes, who oversaw the completion of this masterwork.

So was there another reason?

At least Meriwether Lewis believed so.

The words deciphered from the buffalo hide ran through Painter’s head as he stared at the strokes of oil on the canvas:
Jefferson will leave their name in paint. You can find it thusly: In the turning of the bull, find the five who don’t belong. Let their given names be ordered & revealed by the letters
G, C, R, J, T
and their numbers 1, 2, 4, 4, 1.

It wasn’t a hard cipher to decode.

Turning of the bull
referred, of course, to Turnbull, who had been commissioned to do many public paintings in early America.

Find the five who don’t belong
indicated the five nonsigners depicted on the canvas:

John Dickinson
Robert Livingston
George Clinton
Thomas Willing
Charles Thomson

The last of that list, Thomson,
did
sign an early draft, but he was
not
invited to inscribe the famous version with its fifty-six signers.

The next bit of the passage—
Let their given names be ordered & revealed by the letters
G, C, R, J, T—simply meant taking their first names and putting them in the order of those five letters listed.

George
Charles
Robert
John
Thomas

Then all that needed to be done was to select the corresponding letter in each name that matched the number:
1, 2, 4, 4, 1.

The name of Meriwether Lewis’s enemy, the traitorous and secretive family who had confounded the early Founding Fathers, was
Ghent
.

It seemed meaningless at first—until Painter pondered it more, especially in light of the conversation he had had with Rafael Saint Germaine. The Frenchman had mentioned that the Guild was really a group of ancient families who had been accumulating wealth, power, and knowledge over centuries—possibly millennia—until in modern times only one family remained. His story closely matched Lewis’s tale of the purging of America, in which one family turned out to be rooted too deeply to remove,
with ties to slavers & rich beyond measure.

Were these two stories speaking of the
same
family?

Ghent.

Again, Painter might not have attributed much to this code breaking, except for one nagging coincidence. Ghent was a city in
Belgium
. That country had kept popping up of late: the team who attacked Gray in Iceland had come from there, as had that smaller burst of neutrinos similar to those at Fort Knox.

So Painter had kept on digging. Ghent was a common surname for people from that city. Someone was
John of Ghent
or
Paul of Ghent
. But in more modern times you became simply
John Ghent
or
Paul Ghent
. And sometimes just the anglicized pronunciation was used, as it was easier to spell phonetically.

And that’s where Painter found the truth—or so he believed.

Not that he could do anything about it.

He stepped farther back from the painting, taking in its entirety. He studied the figures of Jefferson and Franklin, picturing them standing before this same painting, faced with the same challenge and threat. His own hands were tied as surely as the Founding Fathers’ had been.

During Painter’s research concerning the suspected family, he had discovered that they indeed had roots going back to Ghent, had even used that name before extending their reach to America. They’d been in the colonies at the beginning, entrenched in the slave trade to such an extent that any attempt to remove that single family by force could have ripped the new union apart.

They were the weed in the garden that could not be pulled.

And they still were today.

As America grew, so did this family, rooting and entwining into multiple industries, corporations, and yes, even in the halls of government. They were a thread woven throughout the fabric of this country.

So was it any wonder that Sigma could make no headway against them?

Rafael had said this ancient group of families—
the secret in secret societies
—went by many names, whispers that were only shadows: the Guild, Echelon,
familles de l’étoile,
the star families. But Painter knew the true name of the enemy—then and now—anglicized for the American tongue.

They were the Kennedys of the South.

But no longer were they called
Ghent
.

Now they were called
Gant
.

As in President James T. Gant.

Author’s Note to Readers: Truth or Fiction

While I’d like to say this entire story is true, that would, of course, be
fiction
. So for these last few pages, I thought I’d separate the wheat from the chaff, the truth from the fiction. The three big-ticket items that became the foundation for this book concern Mormonism, early Native Americans, and our Founding Fathers. As you might imagine after reading this novel, these topics do intertwine. But I’ll try to break them down as clearly as I can:

Mormonism.
While I was raised Roman Catholic, I’ve always been fascinated by the Book of Mormon, especially by its take on early America. The specific mystery at the heart of this text is the Mormon belief that Native American clans originated from a fleeing lost tribe of Israelites. While modern DNA emphatically disputes this, pointing to an Asiatic origin for early American natives, I read a fascinating paper that can be found online, a paper that balances Mormon belief with modern genetic science: “Who Are the Children of Lehi?” by D. Jeffrey Meldrum and Trent D. Stephens.

In this book I also broach the commonality between Hebrew and Native American languages (specifically Uto-Aztecan). If you’d like to know more (I only mention a few examples in the book, but there are hundreds), check out the article that can be found online: “Was There Hebrew Language in Ancient America?” by John L. Sorenson.

According to the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith translated the text from a collection of gold plates written in a language called “reformed Egyptian,” an advanced form of Hebrew with elements of Egyptian. I borrowed a language from the Middle Ages, named the Alphabet of the Magi, to stand in for that script, as the Magi Alphabet was also derived from Hebrew. Also caches of strange metallic plates—golden and otherwise—have been discovered throughout the Americas. Most are hoaxes, but some come with some substantial provenance. I’ll leave their veracity up to you to decide.

Native American History.
Segueing into this topic, I should mention that there was much friction between Mormon settlers and Native Americans in the mid-1800s, including massacres and wars. But the Northwestern Band of Shoshone of Brigham City is known for being a Mormon Indian tribe.

1.
Chief Canasatego
is a real Iroquois leader who had a profound impact on the founding of America. Many people do believe him to be a lost Founding Father. The story related about the arrows and Franklin and how it led to the bundle of arrows in our national Great Seal is true.

2. As is
Resolution 331
, passed in October of 1988, which acknowledges the influence that the Iroquois constitution had upon our own founding documents, including the Declaration of Independence.

3. For example, in 1787, John Rutledge of South Carolina read to members of the Constitution Convention from Iroquois law, words written 250 years before our constitution. Here are those words he read:
“We, the people, to form a union, to establish peace, equity, and order . . .”
Sound familiar?

4.
Caucasoid remains
from ancient America have been discovered in various regions of the United States and baffle anthropologists. A few of those are: Kennewick Man, Spirit Cave Mummy of Nevada, Oregon’s Prospect Man, and Arlington Springs Woman. And there are many more.

5. Some of the oldest petroglyphs found in America are the Coso Petroglyphs, found above the China Lake basin in California, dating back sixteen thousand years.

6. A new study based on carbon content in stalagmites suggests that the Native American population in pre-Columbian America may have numbered over 100 million. That’s more people than were living in Europe at that time.

7. For more about Indian legends associated with Yellowstone, check out
Storytelling in Yellowstone: Horse and Buggy Tour Guides
by Lee H. Whittlesey and
Indian Legends from the Northern Rockies
by Ella E. Clark.

8. The disappearance of the Anasazi continues to provoke great interest and speculation. One of the newest theories is that the Anasazi discovered a new faith, and this resulted in a religious war that wiped them out. Also, it is said that the eruptions that raised the Sunset Crater also had a huge impact on their ultimate fate.

Founding Fathers.
We talked about Chief Canasatego as the
lost
Founding Father. Now let’s look at those who were not lost.

1.
Thomas Jefferson
was a scientist, statesman, inventor, and politician. He was unique in that he also wanted better relations with the indigenous population in America. His interest was such that he built a huge collection of Native American artifacts that he kept at Monticello. Most of it mysteriously vanished after he died, including a decorated buffalo hide (and yes, Meriwether Lewis died on a buffalo-skin robe). Jefferson also did indeed send a secret letter to Congress to admit that a major purpose of the Lewis and Clark expedition was to spy on the Indians. And yes, he did help found the mint with his friend David Rittenhouse. And he was very fond of secret codes and ciphers, inventing several himself, including a code he used with Meriwether Lewis. And like Native Americans of the time, he had a profound interest in fossils.

2.
Benjamin Franklin
was indeed fascinated by the Laki eruption, which killed six million people and likely contributed to the factors that caused the French Revolution.

3.
Meriwether Lewis
(okay, he’s not a Founding Father, but I’m putting him here because he was a friend of Jefferson’s and a contemporary of the others). He was a soldier, spy, and scientist, so he would make a great Sigma Force member. He and Clark did indeed miss finding Yellowstone by a mere forty miles. Also, the quote from an early pioneer, hinting that the Indians were hiding something powerful inside Yellowstone, is a real quote. So, it’s hard to believe Lewis’s expedition never found Yellowstone . . . and so I wrote this story. It’s also true that Lewis’s death was considered a suicide, but mounting evidence now points to murder, most likely assassination. The burial site is as accurately described as I could make it.

The Great Seal.
I already mentioned how the story of Chief Canasatego and the arrows is true. But so is the fact that the
olive branch
and
bundle of arrows
are the symbols representing Manasseh, one of the ten lost tribes of Israel. And it is this very tribe that the Book of Mormon suggests came to early America. Additionally, both Jefferson and Franklin had initially proposed that the Great Seal depict scenes of exiled Israelites. They lost that debate, but here are some thoughts to chew on. Could the symbols of the olive branch and arrows be a remnant of the two men’s original proposals? If so,
why
were the Founding Fathers so obsessed with the lost tribes of Israel?