“We did a global search for the combination of names Fortescue and Franklin,” Sharyn said, “but we came up empty-handed.”
“It’s as if all records had been purged,” Heisman said. “Someone definitely seemed to be covering their tracks.”
“So I expanded the search beyond Franklin and tried all manner of alternate spellings for Fortescue. Still nothing. Then I simply tried putting in the man’s initials, Archard Fortescue. A.F.”
She glanced to Heisman, who smiled proudly. “That’s where we found it.” He picked up a sheaf of brittle yellow pages. “In a letter from Thomas Jefferson to his personal private secretary, Meriwether Lewis.”
“Lewis? As in Lewis and Clark. The two explorers who crossed the continent all the way to the Pacific.”
Heisman nodded. “One and the same. This letter to Lewis is dated June 8, 1803, about a year before the two left for that adventure. It concerns a discussion about a volcanic eruption.”
Gray didn’t understand where this was going. “What does a volcano have to do with anything?”
“First of all,” Heisman explained, “such a discussion wasn’t unusual—probably why this note drew no notice and wasn’t expunged with the rest. Over the course of their relationship, Lewis and Jefferson often discussed science. Meriwether was former military, but he had been educated in the sciences and had great interest in the natural world.”
Gray realized how much that sounded like any member of Sigma.
Heisman continued: “The two were very close friends. In fact, their families had grown up within ten miles of each other. Jefferson trusted no one more thoroughly than Lewis.”
Monk nudged Gray. “So if Jefferson was keeping secrets, there’s one person he’d surely take into his confidence.”
Heisman nodded. “In this letter, one name comes up over and over, a man cryptically identified only as A.F.”
“Archard Fortescue . . .” Gray said.
“Plainly Jefferson did not trust writing the man’s name in full, which was very much in character for this Founding Father. Jefferson had a great interest in cryptography, even developing his own secret cipher. In fact, it wasn’t until the last year or so that one of his codes was finally cracked.”
“That guy was paranoid,” Monk said.
Heisman glanced to him, offended. “If Franklin’s earlier letter was accurate about some great enemy besieging the new union in secret, maybe he had reason to be. This same paranoia may have fueled Jefferson’s purging of the Army during his presidency.”
“What are you talking about?” Gray asked, growing intrigued.
“Just after Jefferson was elected president following a bitter campaign, one of his first orders of business was to reduce the standing army. He chose Meriwether Lewis to help him decide which officers were competent and which were not. Lewis communicated his findings back to Jefferson via a system of coded symbols. Some historians suspect this purge had less to do with competency than it did with loyalty to the U.S.”
Monk glanced significantly at Gray. “If you wanted to weed out traitors, especially those leading armed forces, this would be a good way of going about it in secret.”
Gray knew the difficulty Sigma had in purging Guild moles and operatives from their own fold. Were the Founding Fathers trying to do the same? He pictured Lewis’s involvement in this affair. Soldier, scientist, and now spy. The man sounded more and more like a Sigma operative.
Seichan crossed to the table and took a seat, plopping heavily into it, looking bored. “All well and good, but what the hell does this have to do with volcanoes?”
Heisman seated his reading glasses more firmly on the bridge of his nose and spoke stiffly. “I was just getting to that. The letter addresses an eruption that occurred exactly two decades prior. To the day, in fact. The twentieth anniversary of it. The Laki eruption. It was the deadliest volcanic eruption of historical times. In its aftermath, over six million people died globally. It wiped out livestock, and crops failed around the world, leading to massive famines. It was said the skies turned bloodred, and the planet cooled enough to cause the Mississippi to freeze over as far south as New Orleans.”
Sharyn interrupted, lifting one of the papers she’d been sifting through when Gray first entered. “Here’s Benjamin Franklin’s own words describing the eruption’s effect. ‘During several of the summer months of the year 1783, when the effect of the sun’s rays to heat the earth in these northern regions should have been greater, there existed a constant fog over all Europe, and a great part of North America.’ Franklin became obsessed with this volcano.”