Lore & Legend

Grandfather John Adams Gates told it like this, the night I was twelve and got too curious for my own good. Solomon's Temple held a treasure beyond anything the world had named — gold, silver, scrolls, the accumulated wonder of a civilization. When the temple fell, the treasure was hidden, found again, hidden again, found again. The Knights Templar finally brought it up out of the dark in the twelfth century. They guarded it for nearly two hundred years.

The Templars, growing more powerful than their kings, eventually became inconvenient to those kings. King Philip of France ordered them rounded up on a Friday in October 1307 — yes, that Friday — and tortured for the location of their wealth. Most of them said nothing, because most of them knew nothing. The treasure was already gone. The Templars who remained free regrouped under a new order: the Freemasons. They carried what they had carried for generations across the ocean.

That's the part American history likes to be quiet about. Several of the Founding Fathers were Freemasons. Several of the men whose signatures are on the Declaration of Independence knew exactly what was buried under the streets of the cities they were building. They left a map. Not on parchment — that would have been found — but distributed across artifacts, languages, and ciphers. A pipe stem here. A newspaper letter signed "Silence Dogood" there. The back of a piece of paper they all signed in 1776.

I know what it sounds like. Riley says it sounds like the kind of story drunk uncles tell at Thanksgiving. But there is a chamber under Trinity Church in Manhattan, accessed by a staircase that gives way to a chamber, that gives way to a chamber, that gives way to a room the size of a baseball stadium full of objects no museum on earth has ever cataloged. I've stood in it. I've put my hand on a sarcophagus older than the United States. The treasure is real. So is the cost of finding it.

My great-great-grandfather, Thomas Gates, was a twenty-two-year-old stable boy in 1832 when he met a dying old man named Charles Carroll. Carroll was the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence. As his life ran out, Carroll passed Thomas a single sentence: "The secret lies with Charlotte." Thomas thought Charlotte was a woman. Charlotte was a ship.

The Charlotte sailed in the late eighteenth century carrying cargo and, more importantly, a coded message intended to be passed to the next generation of treasure-keepers. She got lost in the high Arctic and froze in. Two centuries of ice and wind preserved her better than any museum could have. We found her in a place where the GPS gives up and the cold gets into your fillings. The hold contained gunpowder — Riley remarked, very loudly, on this — and it contained a wooden case, and inside the case was a meerschaum pipe carved with a sea engagement on its bowl and a strange short hexameter cipher etched into its stem.

The pipe stem was the real artifact. The cipher pointed to "the words still kept from the eyes of all," which Ian, with his usual sense of timing, decided meant something hidden behind the Declaration of Independence itself. I disagreed about a great many things with Ian Howe in the days that followed. I never disagreed about the Charlotte. She was the kind of find that makes a career. We blew her up trying to escape Ian, which I will note for the record was Ian's fault. The pipe stem made it out with us.

Franklin was sixteen years old. He worked in the print shop of his brother James, who would not allow him to publish his own writing. So Ben Franklin invented Mrs. Silence Dogood — middle-aged, widowed, quietly opinionated — and started slipping anonymous letters under the print-shop door. James, not knowing, ran fourteen of them between April and October of 1722. Boston wrote back. Several gentlemen wrote in offering Mrs. Dogood marriage. Franklin, twenty years old when he revealed himself, never quite stopped enjoying the joke.

What no one in Boston knew, and what very few historians ever bothered to ask, was that Franklin was already deep in correspondence with a small circle of Freemasons concerning the safekeeping of a great hidden hoard. The Silence Dogood letters were not just a teenage prank. The Founding-era treasure-keepers used the letters as a key text — a published document anyone could pick up, but with a personal cipher impossible to guess unless you knew which letters mattered.

The cipher behind the Declaration of Independence — the Ottendorf cipher Thomas Gates was given by Charles Carroll's grandson — used the Silence Dogood letters as its source text. Page, line, word. Five-line stanzas of trust. Without an original printing of the letters, the cipher is meaningless. Which is why, when Riley and I needed to decode the message hidden behind the Declaration, we had to break into the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia and steal the original letters back from Ian Howe, who had stolen them from the Institute, who had stolen them — politely, with a curator and a bequest — from history. Such is custody. Such is the franchise.

An Ottendorf cipher is a book cipher, named (loosely) for Major Benjamin Tallmadge's contact Maj. Nicholas Dietrich, Baron de Ottendorf, who used it during the American Revolution. The principle is older than that — Aeneas the Tactician proposed something similar — but the form Thomas Gates received was the form Franklin and his fellow Masons preferred.

Three integers per word. The first integer points to the page of the key text. The second integer points to a specific line on that page. The third integer points to a specific word on that line. So a triplet of (44, 5, 6) means: open the book to page 44, find line 5, count to the sixth word, write it down. Move to the next triplet. Continue until the message is finished. Reassemble the words in order. Read.

The reason it is beautiful is that you cannot brute-force it. There is no statistical analysis to perform. The cipher carries no information whatsoever about the language, the letter frequency, or the structure of the underlying message. Without the key text, the message simply does not exist. With the wrong edition of the key text — wrong pagination, different line breaks — the numbers point at the wrong words and produce gibberish. The Ottendorf cipher is, in a real sense, a key shaped like a document.

The cipher Thomas Gates carried was eighty-some triplets long. It pointed to phrases like "the legend writ, the stain affected, the key in Silence undetected." The key text was the Silence Dogood letters in their original 1722 printing. We cracked it on the floor of a hotel room in Philadelphia with Abigail Chase looking over my shoulder, telling me to be careful with the Declaration of Independence I had folded inside an architectural tube. Abigail and I, for the record, eventually got married. And then divorced. And then, possibly, are getting along again. Cipher work is hard on relationships.

There is nothing magical about lemon juice. Apply it to paper, let it dry, then heat the paper gently — a candle, a hair dryer, an iron — and the citric-acid-soaked areas oxidize and turn brown faster than the unaffected paper around them. Anything written on the paper in lemon juice appears, at first faintly, then clearly. Onion juice works. Vinegar works. Urine works (and was, historically, used). Milk works.

Why did the Founders bother with this? Because in 1776, paper was expensive and the British were efficient. A document that reads, on its face, as a fairly ordinary letter — receipts for cordage, complaints about weather — could carry a second message visible only after a candle. The British knew about invisible ink, of course; they used it. But scanning every captured document with heat was time-consuming, and most invisible-ink messages went undiscovered until decades later, in archives, by accident.

The back of the Declaration of Independence carries a message in invisible ink. I am aware how that sentence sounds. The message is a cipher: an Ottendorf cipher pointing into the Silence Dogood letters, plus a map drawn in symbols overlaid on the document's reverse. The message identifies a specific brick in the basement of the wrong building (Independence Hall) where, in 1776, the next clue was buried. The next clue led to the Liberty Bell. Then to a steeple. Then to a cemetery in lower Manhattan. Then, eventually, to Trinity Church.

Riley, the night we did the lemon juice in the hotel bathroom, kept saying "this is a bad idea" in the way someone says it when they have already accepted that the idea is going to happen anyway. He was correct on both counts. It was a bad idea. It happened anyway.

Meerschaum is a soft white mineral — hydrated magnesium silicate — soft enough to carve easily and dense enough to hold detail. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century craftsmen used it for high-end pipes because it could be carved into intricate scenes and because it darkens beautifully with use. The pipe in the Charlotte was new when it was packed away. It never darkened.

The bowl carved a battle that did not occur — a piece of misdirection, since looking up the engagement leads to nothing. The stem carried the cipher. Five lines, sixteenth-century English in the spelling and meter, that begin: "The legend writ, the stain affected, the key in Silence undetected. Fifty-five in iron pen, Mr. Matlack can't offend." The poem points at the back of the Declaration of Independence ("fifty-five" being the signers, "Mr. Matlack" being Timothy Matlack who hand-engrossed the document in iron-gall ink) and identifies the chain to follow: a stain, a key, and silence. The stain is the lemon-juice cipher. The key is the Silence Dogood letters. The silence is, of course, also Silence.

I broke the pipe extracting it from a chest in the Charlotte's hold while Ian Howe stood about ten feet behind me with a pistol he had not yet decided to use. The stem stayed intact. The bowl stayed intact. I have spent my professional life recovering objects of historical importance, and I have rarely been as terrified of dropping anything as I was of dropping that pipe stem. We did not bring it to a museum afterward. The pipe stem went into the same private collection that Ian himself once nearly burned to the waterline. It is, technically, mine. Don't tell the FBI.

The Declaration of Independence is a roughly 24 x 30 inch sheet of parchment — animal skin, not paper — engrossed by hand by Timothy Matlack at the request of the Continental Congress. Iron-gall ink, hand-cut quill. The fifty-six signatures gathered between August 1776 and (in some cases) several months later. John Hancock signed first. Charles Carroll of Carrollton signed last in lifespan; he died in 1832 and his last gift to history was a sentence whispered to a teenage stable hand.

The Declaration is normally housed in the rotunda of the National Archives, encased in a titanium frame, sealed under argon gas at controlled temperature and humidity, surrounded by reinforced cases and visible to the public. It is one of three Charters of Freedom on display. Once a year — preservation gala — it is moved from public display to a private vault for cleaning and rotation. I planned around the gala. I have not yet been forgiven for it.

Riley figured the security system in about forty minutes. We swapped the original out for a souvenir reproduction I bought in the Archives gift shop. (Yes. The Archives sells $35 reproductions on parchment-look paper. Yes, that's how I switched them.) We took the real one to a hotel, turned it over, and applied lemon juice to the lower-right quadrant. A cipher appeared. Specifically, an Ottendorf cipher, plus a partial pictographic map. The cipher pointed to the Silence Dogood letters. The map pointed to Independence Hall.

I returned the Declaration to the Archives at the end of the affair, undamaged and slightly more famous than when it left. Dr. Chase made me pay for one (1) glove. The note Ben Franklin once put on the back — "Original Declaration of Independence, dated 4th July 1776" — is still there. The other note, the one I won't talk about, is also still there. Some words you read in lemon juice and you don't write down.

The Seven Cities of Cibola are usually cataloged as Spanish-colonial fever-dream — Coronado's expedition into the American Southwest in 1540, chasing rumors collected from a Moorish slave named Estevanico who claimed to have seen cities of gold beyond the Zuni pueblos. Coronado found Hawikuh, a Zuni settlement, and pronounced it not gold. He kept looking. He never found anything else. Most modern historians treat Cibola as either a misunderstanding of indigenous wealth or a complete fiction.

What Coronado did not know, what Mitch Wilkinson knew, and what we eventually figured out, is that the legend predates the Spaniards by a thousand years. The Olmec — Mesoamerica's oldest major civilization — had a tradition of a sacred city built into a mountain in what is now South Dakota. The Olmec influence reached further north than mainstream archaeology generally credits. By the time Spanish chroniclers heard whispers of "the city of gold," the actual location had been forgotten by every culture except a small priesthood who passed maps from generation to generation in objects: a noisemaker, a wooden plank, the back of John Wilkes Booth's diary page.

The chamber itself is enormous. It is carved into the mountain that, in the early twentieth century, Gutzon Borglum sculpted into the faces of four presidents. The carving was — Borglum himself knew — partly cover. Mount Rushmore protects Cibola. The chamber contains an Olmec sun-disk, columns of carved figures, an actual lake fed by a redirected river, and several thousand objects in gold. There is also a counterweight system, a flooding chamber, and a single stone bottleneck that one of you, eventually, has to hold open for the others. Patrick Gates held that bottleneck. He is fine. He is also the most stubborn man on the eastern seaboard.

Riley, having been promised gold, spent most of the time in Cibola staring upward and saying "wow." We split the credit. We did not split the gold.

The Book of Secrets is, per the document itself, a private record kept by the Office of the President of the United States and inherited by each new occupant. It is not stored in the White House. Its location is encoded in a series of clues distributed across the Library of Congress, each clue accessible only to the sitting president and a handful of librarians who have worked the night shift since the Reagan administration.

The book is leather-bound, roughly the size of a large family Bible, and it contains entries in many hands. It catalogs information the United States has chosen not to forget but cannot publicly hold: the eighteen and a half minutes erased from the Watergate tapes, the actual location of the Camp David accords drafts, what happened to Area 51's specific physical materials, the events of April 14, 1865 from a vantage no historian has been allowed. It is, as catalogs go, vast. Most of it the public has guessed at without confirmation. Some of it the public has not guessed at, and will not guess at.

I read the Book of Secrets once. I read more than one page. I did not read all of it. The President of the United States — President Peter Sadusky, if you must know — sat across from me in a room I am not allowed to describe and watched while I read. He told me what to say afterward. I have said it. Specifically, what is on Page 47 has been described as "life-altering" and that is the only descriptor I will offer.

Riley wrote a book afterward. He titled it National Treasure: Page 47. It sold poorly. He drives a red Ferrari anyway. He earns his money. He does not earn it from the book.

Borglum himself, in a series of letters and a public proposal, planned a Hall of Records inside the mountain — a chamber behind Lincoln's head where the founding documents and a record of American achievement would be deposited for posterity. Funds ran out. The chamber was begun and never finished. In 1998, a small repository of documents was placed in the partially-completed chamber and sealed.

That is the public story. The actual story is older and less generous. Borglum was a Freemason. He was approached, before construction began, by a small consortium that knew exactly what was inside the Black Hills — that the Olmec city of Cibola, a chamber of considerable size and inestimable value, had been hidden inside a specific peak for several centuries. Borglum was offered a choice: refuse to carve the mountain, in which case the next sculptor would not refuse, or carve it in such a way as to hide the access. He chose the second.

The faces themselves are positioned so that the four heads, viewed in profile from a specific angle, function as a key. Sunlight at the autumnal equinox, refracted through the eye of one of the presidents, falls on a particular ledge below. On that ledge, the next clue. The chain ends with a doorway in the side of the mountain at a height that requires either a helicopter or a Gates. Patrick Gates, my father, refused to be lifted. He climbed. We all climbed.

Inside the doorway is a corridor. Inside the corridor is the Hall of Records, half-completed. Underneath the Hall of Records — under the floor — is Cibola. Borglum knew. The granite he sculpted is a seal as much as a monument. There is something fitting about four presidents guarding gold older than their country.

Page 47 of the President's Book of Secrets is the page that, in the closing minutes of the second film, President Sadusky asks Ben Gates to read. Ben reads it. Ben says, after reading it, that it is "life-altering." That is the entire on-screen description. Ben Gates does not elaborate to his father. He does not elaborate to Riley. He does not elaborate to Abigail. He does not elaborate to the audience.

The mythology around Page 47 is therefore entirely fan-made, which is the kind of thing only happens when the source material is generous enough to leave a deliberate hole. Theories include: the actual location of John F. Kennedy's killer (singular); the proof that Lincoln's assassination was conspiracy beyond Booth; the nuclear codes; the specific language of an alien encounter at Roswell; a list of presidential descendants of Founding Fathers; a list of which presidents personally read the book and which ignored it. The page is the kind of empty box that fans fill, lovingly, with whatever they most want the box to contain.

What I — what we, as a fan tribute — believe is that the secret of Page 47 is, finally, beside the point. Page 47 is a story about what privilege costs. Ben Gates spends two films dragging objects of national importance into the public eye in the name of historical truth. At the end of the second film, the United States government hands him a single piece of information he is not allowed to share. He has crossed a line. He is now a custodian. The genius of the script is that it does not show us what is on Page 47. It shows us what happens to a man's face when he reads it.

Riley wrote a book. The book is also called Page 47. The book is, by all accounts, very sincere and almost entirely speculative. Riley has not read Page 47. Riley has read about Page 47. There is a difference. He drives the Ferrari anyway.

The cipher wheel — independently designed in slightly different form by Thomas Jefferson and by various French and English cryptographers — is, in concept, a stack of carved alphabetic disks rotating on a central spindle. Each disk has the letters of the alphabet engraved around its edge in a different scrambled order. The user lines up the disks so that one row reads off the plaintext. Any other row, then, reads off ciphertext.

Jefferson's wheel had thirty-six disks. The Adams version, built later and to slightly different specification, had twenty-six. The encoded message is meaningless to anyone without an identical wheel — and identical means identical. The disks must be in the same scramble pattern, in the same order on the spindle, and ideally the same age, since wear patterns affect alignment. Jefferson's original wheel disappeared after his death. His writings on the design were rediscovered in the late nineteenth century. The version that exists in the National Archives today is a reconstruction.

What no historian has ever wanted to admit publicly is that there are two more wheels — the Adams cipher wheel, currently held by the Smithsonian and inert, and a third wheel, smaller, of unclear authorship, kept in private hands and almost certainly built for the use of a specific Mason whose identity does not survive the records. The third wheel was used to encode the Cibola map. It was lost to history. It was found, briefly, by Mitch Wilkinson. We took it from him.

We needed it to read a coded message engraved on the underside of a wooden plank we removed from beneath Mount Vernon, at the precise instant a member of our party was kidnapping the President of the United States. I will note for the record that I both took the President hostage and returned him to his security detail in less than thirty minutes. Riley timed it. Riley times most things.