The Devil Colony (20 page)

“Okay. But trust me, being housebound with you is not something Monk is dreading.”

“Who was talking about
him
?”

Gray heard the exasperation in her voice, but also the warmth. He had a hard time imagining such a life, the intimacy of two sharing everything, of children, of the simplicity of a warm body beside you every night.

“I’ll bring him home safe,” he promised.

“I know you will.”

After settling a few more details, they signed off.

Across the seat, Seichan leaned against the side door, arms crossed. It looked like she had been dozing, eyes closed, but he knew she’d overheard every word. This was confirmed when she mumbled, not bothering to open her eyes. “Road trip?”

“Seems so.”

“Lucky I packed my sunscreen.”

A short time later, the Town Car pulled up to the National Archives Building. Monk met them inside. He wore a wide grin, his eyes bright, and waved to them impatiently, plainly excited.

“Iceland,” he said as he led them back to the research room. “Can you believe it?”

From his manner, he was clearly enthused about doing a bit of fieldwork. But there remained a mischievous gleam to his eye. Before Gray could inquire further, they’d reached their destination.

The research room had undergone a dramatic transformation since they’d last been there. Books, manuscripts, and maps, along with stacked file boxes, covered the surface of the conference table. All three microfiche readers along the wall glowed with pages of old newsprint or pictures of yellowed documents.

Amid the chaos, Dr. Eric Heisman and Sharyn Dupre had their heads bowed over one of the boxes, searching its contents together. Heisman had shed his sweater and rolled up his sleeves. He removed a thin dog-eared-looking pamphlet and added it to a pile.

“Here’s another of Franklin’s monographs about the eruption . . .”

They looked up as Monk returned.

“Did you tell him?” Heisman asked.

“Thought I’d leave it to both of you. You’ve done all the hard work. All I did was order pizza.”

“Tell us what?” Gray asked.

Heisman looked to Sharyn, who still wore her tight black dress, but she had pulled a long white coat over it and had donned thin cotton gloves for handling fragile documents. “Sharyn, why don’t you start? It was your inspired suggestion that opened the floodgates. Then again, your generation is much more proficient with computers.”

She smiled shyly at the praise and gave her head a slight bow of thanks before turning to Gray and Seichan. “I’m sure we would have found it eventually, but with a majority of the Archives’ documents digitally copied, I thought we could sift through the records more efficiently by expanding and generalizing the search parameters.”

Gray hid his impatience. He didn’t care how they found it, only what it was. Still, he noted the amused twinkle in Monk’s eye. His partner was holding something back.

“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,
w
hen 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.”

“And apparently with good reason,” Heisman added, drawing back Gray’s attention. “According to this letter, Archard Fortescue was present at that eruption—even felt guilty about it, as if he’d caused it.”

“What?” Gray couldn’t keep the surprise from his voice.

Seichan spoke while he struggled to understand. “Excuse my lack of geographical prowess, but where is this volcano?”

Heisman’s eyes widened, as if suddenly realizing he’d never told them. “In Iceland.”

Gray turned to Monk, who wore a big, amused grin. This was the detail he’d been hiding. Monk shrugged. “Looks like we’re following in that Frenchman’s footsteps.”

3:13
A.M.

As the others discussed the volcano’s location using various maps spread on the table, Seichan sat to the side, fingering a tiny silver dragon pendant hanging from her neck. It was a nervous habit. Her mother had always worn one of the same. It was one of the few details she still remembered about the woman.

As a child, Seichan would often stare at the tiny curled dragon in the hollow of her mother’s neck as she slept on a small cot under an open window. While night birds sang in the jungle, the moonlight reflected off the silver, shimmering like water with her mother’s breathing. Each night, Seichan imagined the dragon would come to life if she just watched it long enough—and maybe it did, if only in her dreams.

With a flare of irritation at such sentimentality, Seichan let the silver charm drop from her fingers. She had waited long enough. No one seemed to be addressing the most obvious question in the room, so she asked it.

“Back to that letter, Doc.” All eyes turned to her. “What did you mean when you said that the Frenchman felt
guilty
about the volcano blowing up?”

Heisman still had the sheaf of papers in hand. “It’s here in Jefferson’s letter.” He cleared his voice, picked out a passage, and read it aloud.
“ ‘We have at last heard from A.F. He has suffered greatly and carries a heavy heart after all that befell him during the summer of the year 1783. I am very mindful that it was in supporting our cause that he followed the trail marked on the map recovered from the Indian barrow, a prize he gained at much grievous personal injury due to the ambush by our enemy. A.F. yet bemoans the volcano he caus’d to be born out in those seas during that summer. He has come to believe that the great famines that struck his home shores following that eruption were reason for the bloody revolutions in France, and bears much guilt for it.’ ”

Heisman lowered the pages. “In fact, Fortescue might be right in that last respect. Many scholars now conjecture that the Laki eruption—and the poverty and famine that followed in France—was a major trigger for the French Revolution.”

“And from the sounds of it,” Gray added, “Fortescue blamed himself. ‘
The volcano he caus’d to be born.’
What did he mean by that?”

No one had an answer.

“So then what do we know?” Seichan asked, cutting to the quick. “From that first letter, we know Franklin called on Fortescue to find a map buried in some Indian mound. From the gist of
this
letter, he succeeded.”

Gray nodded. “The map pointed to Iceland. So Fortescue went there. He must have found something, something frightening or powerful enough that he believed it caused the volcanic eruption. But what?”

“It was possibly hinted at in the first letter,” Seichan offered. “Some power or knowledge that the Indians possessed, knowledge they seemed willing to share, possibly in exchange for the formation of that mythical Fourteenth Colony.”

“But that deal got screwed up,” Monk said.

Heisman’s assistant had been sifting through the piles of paper. “Here’s the passage again,” she said.
“ ‘The shamans from the Iroquois Confederacy were slaughtered most foully en route to the meeting with Governor Jefferson. With those deaths, all who had knowledge of the Great Elixir and the Pale Indians have pass’d into the hands of Providence.’ ”

Gray nodded. “But now we know that one of the shamans lived long enough to reveal the location of a map, possibly a map to a fount of that knowledge. That’s what Fortescue was sent to find.”

“And apparently he succeeded,” Monk added. “Maybe it was that
elixir
mentioned in the letter
,
or something else. Either way, he believed it was powerful enough to trigger a volcanic eruption. Afterward, he was racked with guilt.”

“Until twenty years later, when Jefferson summoned him again,” Heisman said.

Seichan turned to the scholar, realized she was fingering the dragon charm, and forced her arm down. “What do you mean?”

Heisman fixed his glasses and read again from the letter.
“ ‘After such tragedy, I am loath to drag A.F. yet again into another search, but his warmth and high regard among the aboriginal tribes of this continent will serve us well for that long journey. He will join you in Saint Charles, well enough in time to secure what he will need to join your excursion to the West.’ ”

Gray leaned forward. “Wait. Are you saying Fortescue joined the Lewis and Clark expedition?”

“Not me,” Heisman said and shook the papers in his hand. “Thomas Jefferson.”

“But there’s no other record—”

“Maybe they were purged, too,” Heisman offered. “Like the rest of this man’s records. This letter is all we could uncover. After Fortescue leaves on this expedition, he’s never mentioned again. At least as far as we can tell.”

“But why was Jefferson sending him with Lewis and Clark?” Gray asked.

Seichan guessed the answer, sitting up straighter. “Maybe Iceland wasn’t the
only
place marked on that Indian map. Maybe there was another spot. One out west. Iceland would have been closer, so they investigated that one first.”

Gray rubbed a finger along the edge of his right eye, one of his habits when struggling to connect pieces of a mental jigsaw puzzle. “If there was another site, why wait twenty years to go look for it?”

“After what happened the first time,” Monk said, “do you blame them for being more cautious? If Fortescue was right, their actions killed six million people and triggered the French Revolution. Of course they’d be more careful a second time.”

Heisman interjected. “There’s further support in the historical record that Lewis and Clark’s mission wasn’t purely for exploration. First, Jefferson all but admitted it.”

“What do you mean?” Gray asked.

“Prior to the expedition, Jefferson sent out a letter in secret, meant only for members of Congress. It revealed the true reason for the trip: to spy on the Indians out west and to gather as much intelligence about them as possible. Second, Jefferson had also developed a private secret code with Lewis so that messages sent back could be read only by Jefferson or those loyal to him. Does that sound like a yearlong nature hike? Jefferson was clearly looking for something out west.”