It was not that he didn’t trust that circle, but they had enough burdens at the moment. Monk had his new baby girl, Harriet. The man had proffered his resignation early that morning. Painter had agreed to keep it on file but convinced him to take family leave and use the time to reconsider. Hopefully, the life of crying children, diaper changes, and a long stretch of downtime would change Monk’s mind, but Painter doubted it. Monk was a family man at heart. And a week ago, they’d all seen the consequences of his trying to live a double life.
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, John Smith translated the text from a collection of gold plates written in a language called “reformed Egyptian,” an ad
vanced 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?
Science Tidbits. I try to be as accurate as possible in regard to the science in my novels, so most of the factoids are based on some manner of realistic data. I thought I’d signal a few here.
1. The Super-Kamiokande detector is a real facility doing subatomic particle research using a tank full of fifty thousand tons of ultrapure water. And yes, sixty billion neutrinos pass through your fingernail every second—and those particles still remain a mystery to modern physics.
2. The novel contains much information about volcanism. Most of it is true, including the fact that you should be careful about drilling into geothermal levels. Explosions and lava production have resulted.
3. On a minor note, the Underground Physics Research Laboratory at BYU is indeed buried underground north of its science building (sorry for blowing a hole in it).
4. Evidence of ancient nanotechnology does exist in Damascus steel, ancient medieval glass, and some hair dyes. As to modern nanotech, I went into that at length in the foreword: all true . . . and yes, that scary.
5. Weaponry in the book: Taser XREP shotguns, flashbangs, up-armor kits for Humvees, and one kick-ass cattle dog. All real.
Places. We’re mostly in America, so it must be real.
1. There is a Serpent Indian Mound, but it’s in Ohio, not Kentucky.
2. Sunset Crater does have lava tubes that hold ice all year round in the Arizona desert.
3. Wupatki does have a blowhole that opens into seven million cubic feet of cavern space and gusts of wind of up to thirty miles an hour do blow through it.
4. Crack-in-the-Rock Pueblo is a real place.
5. The Westman Islands south of Iceland do have the largest orca population (so, of course, they had to play a role). Ellirey Island can only be reached by rope and does have a small lodge on its top. Heimaey Island is indeed known as the Pompeii of the North.
6. Most of the landmarks in Yellowstone are accurate, including Fairyland Basin with its scatter of geyserite cones. And yes, since the 1990s, fewer than thirty people have visited that beautiful and strange little basin.
7. And yes, the Yellowstone caldera is due to erupt. It’s late, in fact. The geological information that Chin gave regarding an impending eruption of the supervolcano and its aftermath is true. So it’s not a matter of if that supervolcano will erupt, rather of when.
Other Books of Interest. While a long bibliography could be given here, I thought I’d share the books that are of the greatest relevance to this novel.
1. Solomon’s Power Brokers by Christopher Knight and Alan Butler (specifically for information about the “star families”)
2. Jefferson and Science by Silvio A. Bedini
3. Southern Paiutes by LaVan Martineau
4. American Monster by Paul Semonin
5. Unearthing Ancient America by Frank Joseph
6. The First American by Christopher Hardaker
7. Founding Fathers, Secret Societies by Robert Hieronimus, Ph.D.
Acknowledgments
As this book has been two years in the making, the debt of gratitude I owe o
n it is long overdue. So let’s get started. First, I mention this group in every book, and it’s still not enough. They’re my first readers, my first editors, and some of my best friends. I wanted to take this moment to acknowledge those folks who’ve been my bedrock over all of these past years: Penny Hill, Judy Prey, Dave Murray, Caroline Williams, Chris Crowe, Lee Garrett, Jane O’Riva, Sally Barnes, Denny Grayson, Leonard Little, Kathy L’Ecluse, J. M. Keese, and Scott Smith. And again I owe an extra big thanks to Steve Prey for all of his spectacular help with the maps and some crafty handiwork with the Great Seal of the United States. Beyond the group, Carolyn McCray and David Sylvian have kept me upright and moving through the best of times and the worst. Somewhere I probably owe fellow scribe Steve Berry for something (so consider yourself covered, Steve). And, of course, I do know what I owe everyone at HarperCollins: Michael Morrison, Liate Stehlik, Seale Ballenger, Danielle Bartlett, Josh Marwell, Lynn Grady, Adrienne Di Pietro, Richard Aquan, Tom Egner, Shawn Nicholls, Joyce Wong, and Ana Maria Allessi. Lastly, of course, a special acknowledgment to the four people instrumental to all levels of production: my editor, Lyssa Keusch, and her colleague Wendy Lee; and my agents, Russ Galen and Danny Baror. And as always, I must stress that any and all errors of fact or detail in this book fall squarely on my own shoulders.
About the Author
New York Times bestselling author JAMES ROLLINS holds a doctorate in veterinary medicine and resides in the Sierra Nevada mountains. An avid spelunker and certified scuba enthusiast, he can often be found underground or underwater.
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