The shadow war

by Glen Scott Allen

  John Morris? John Morris was brother to Gouverneur Morris, and famous for his collection of antique paintings and prints. And books. Books like the ones they'd seen at the Morris Estate.

  He returned to the side room and placed the book back where he'd found it in the shelves. Then he crossed to another alcove on the other side. Here, the shelves contained copies of letters from various Founding Fathers and other Colonial luminaries. He searched until he found a collection titled Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution.

  With that book in hand, he went back to the alcove and flipped through the pages until he came across a collection of letters Franklin had written while he was serving as the minister plenipotentiary to France. He read through them quickly, until he found the one he wanted, dated 15 March 1783, to the superintendent of finance of the United States-one Robert Morris: Honor'd Sir: Friday last order was given to furnish me with 600,000 livres immediately, and I was answered by M. de Vergennes, that the rest of the 6,000,000 should be paid in quarterly in the course of 1783.

  I pressed hard for the whole sum demanded, but was told it was impossible.

  Our people certainly ought to do more for themselves. It is absurd the pretending to be lovers of liberty while they grudge paying for the defence of it.

  But those "Triangulists" of the recent Newburgh intrigue do no good for our reputation abroad. Any knowledge of such things could hurt our credit and the loan in Holland, to say nothing of sullying our reputation as a true Democracy, and would prevent our getting any thing here but from government.

  I hope your disassociation from those rogues is immediate and compleat.

  I am amp; c.

  (Signed) B. Franklin.

  Benjamin leaned back, then read it again to make certain he'd seen what he thought he'd seen.

  There it was: Franklin chastising Robert Morris for his "Triangulist" allies and suggesting that any whisper of the Newburgh conspiracy in the corridors of power in France or Holland, the two major financial supporters of the nascent United States, could irreparably harm his efforts to obtain loans.

  He remembered now: he'd read through these letters when he was doing his research on Franklin's pyramid code. He'd seen that reference to the Newburgh conspiracy-but that time news of the aborted coup had reached Franklin in France-as well as the mention of "Triangulists" among the Colonial government.

  But at the time he'd interpreted the word "Triangulists" as all Colonial scholars had throughout history: as a sarcastic slap at those in the Congress who'd been less than enthusiastic about formalizing true democracy-full and popular representation in the Constitution-and instead seemed to be maneuvering for a form of government somewhere between democracy and a parliamentary monarchy, as in England. Triangulists, it was thought, were those hedging their bets, people who had either begun the Revolutionary War as outright Tory sympathizers, like Gouverneur Morris's parents, or spent it agitating for appeasement with the British. The delegates so referred to, it was assumed, were the American version of aristocrats. People like Gouverneur Morris and Alexander Hamilton, for instance. And people like General Horatio Lloyd Gates.

  He replaced the book where he had found it, then exited the Special Collections room and went to the elevator.

  It was while he was waiting for the elevator that he noticed a man who was standing near the railing, apparently taking in the compelling architecture of the library. But something struck him as odd about this would-be tourist. Then he saw it: he was wearing an earpiece cell phone. And such equipment didn't work in the library. Or at least it wasn't supposed to.

  When the elevator door opened, Benjamin stepped in and pushed the button for the basement. He saw the man start toward the elevator. Benjamin pressed his ID badge against an electronic scanner on the elevator control panel, then quickly pressed the Close Door button. The doors eased shut just as the man-someone with dark glasses and very close-cropped brown hair-reached the doors. Benjamin saw the look of frustration on his face.

  Once the doors had closed, Benjamin took off the hat and leaned back against the brass railing, unsure what to do next. He really hadn't thought about being followed, assuming that, if the Foundation knew where he was, they would simply report him to the authorities. He had to think quickly.

  Too soon the doors opened in the library's basement. He looked around. He thought of pressing the emergency or fire alarm button to lock out the elevator, but that would require them to clear out the whole building. And, while he knew places he could hide, they might simply close the library for the afternoon, and then he'd have a tough time explaining himself when he tried to exit and found the place crawling with D.C. police and firemen. Then he thought of another plan.

  He went to his old office. He looked for an unoccupied cubicle, used the phone to dial security. He identified himself, and then said he'd seen "someone strange" lurking about on the second floor with an earpiece cell phone. Maybe he had a cell phone camera as well? Those weren't allowed in the library, were they? He didn't want to be a bother, but… He was told someone would check it out immediately.

  He hung up. Even if security didn't find the guy, still he thought the appearance of several security personnel, all clearly looking for someone, would either delay his pursuer, or perhaps discourage him completely, and he'd wait outside, to pick Benjamin up when he exited the library.

  But he had another plan to deal with that eventuality.

  Benjamin left the office and walked down the hall to the preservation storage area. There was indeed someone on duty inside, an employee named Larry that Benjamin knew slightly.

  "Benjamin!" Larry greeted him-a little too loudly for his comfort. "Back from that think tank already?"

  "Sort of," Benjamin hedged. "They needed me to check on something in the storage room, see if it's still here."

  "And they sent you all the way down here to do that? Why not just call?"

  "Hey," Benjamin shrugged, "it's their dime, right?"

  Larry laughed, patted him on the back. "Yeah, wish it was my dime, ya know?"

  He unlocked the room, switched on the dull blue lights overhead.

  "You know the drill," Larry said. "Knock when you're done."

  Benjamin nodded, thanked him, and Larry closed and locked the door from the outside.

  And it suddenly occurred to Benjamin: if they had wanted to trap him here, they'd just done it.

  The room was essentially a large warren of shelves, the shelves composed of bins, and the bins labeled according to subject, date, and, in some cases, donor. Benjamin thought back: the bin he'd been working on when he'd encountered the diary had contained case history files from some of New England's more infamous asylums for the insane from the Colonial and nineteenth-century millennial period.

  But first he went to a small podium set near the door, opened a cabinet, and took out a pair of latex gloves from a box that was always kept there. Many of the documents in this room-where the humidity and temperature were carefully controlled-were sensitive to even the small amounts of acid in human sweat.

  Walking carefully past the bins, he tracked down the section devoted to medical records, and then worked backward to the period 1750-1820. Set very far back in the room, almost hidden in the cul-de-sac formed by three shelves, he found the original crate he'd been examining all those months before: documents donated by the American Medical Association. And then, right next to it, just as he remembered, was a smaller crate, with the name MORRIS, S.-1968 written by hand on a small index card and taped to the crate.

  Benjamin pulled the crate very carefully forward on the shelf. He peered over the edge into the dim interior. He realized he'd been holding his breath for some minutes. The blue-tinted lights barely illuminated the contents. Regular lighting was too yellow for sensitive paper, and fluorescents were out of the question.

  He pulled the crate a little farther forward-and suddenly its weight shifted, and the crate came tumbling toward him off of the shelf. He fell to th
e floor but managed to stop the crate from hitting his body. He stopped, listening, worried that the sound would bring Larry to see if everything was okay. But after a moment he realized the sound hadn't been nearly as loud as he feared.

  He gently set the crate on the floor. He reached in, toward a large clear plastic container, one of the hermetically sealed bags used to contain specimens prior to restoration. There was no identifying information, which was unusual. Inside the bag was what appeared to be shapeless brown wrapping of some kind. Leather-so old it was almost as stiff as cardboard.

  He lifted the bundle carefully out of the crate. Very carefully he unsealed the bag and extracted the bundle, then folded back the flaps of the leather.

  Inside he could see the first page of a book, yellowed with age and discolored with mildew. In the middle of the page were perhaps a dozen handwritten lines… or once had been. Now, the lines were unreadable: faded, smeared, disintegrated. All that remained was a single line of text.

  R 6:12-HPB

  Just as he'd remembered.

  He carried the bundle to a small table nearby, switched on the specially filtered reading lamp, and set it down.

  Pulling back the leather wrapping as carefully as possible, he could now see that, while the book had a hard cover of black leather on the back, there was no matching front cover. Examining the spine, he could just make out evidence of a very clean cut. Someone had neatly removed the front cover and first page.

  They'd been willing to multilate such a treasure, but not destroy it? Strange priorities, Benjamin thought.

  He lifted the book and examined the top edge. He could see that many of the pages were practically melted together with age. To open it at the wrong place would be to tear these pages, or perhaps rip them out of the binding. He would have to be very careful, indeed.

  Very slowly, he lifted the first page of the book.

  Benjamin's hands were trembling.

  He lifted them, watched until the trembling stopped. Then he rose, went back to the podium in the front of the room, and reopened the cabinet. Inside was a large yellow legal pad and several pens. He took the pad and one of the pens and returned to the table.

  He sat down and, checking the edge of the page, made sure it was one that could be turned without damage. It was. He turned the page and began to read.

  Almost immediately he began making notes on the legal pad. When he was done, again he examined the page's edge, but this one was clearly sealed to the next one. He simply couldn't risk trying to separate them, and he discovered he had to turn to several pages farther on.

  Working this way, reading a page or two, then forced to skip several that were inseparable, he continued to make notes. He filled one of the legal pad pages, then another.

  And another.

  CHAPTER 30

  Benjamin sat across from Anton, the small oval coffee table in his second-floor study between them. Spread across the table were a dozen yellow sheets from the large legal pad, covered with notes in Benjamin's tidy, squarish printing-so similar, he realized, to his father's.

  Benjamin sat slumped against the back of the overstuffed couch. Ever since he'd returned to Anton's from the library, he'd felt the desperate urge to simply collapse and fall asleep. But his mind was far too excited by what he'd discovered to allow him to do that. And, if he was to attend the reception that evening at the Russian Cultural Center, he needed, somehow, to stay awake.

  So he was drinking yet another cup of coffee-or rather glass of coffee. Anton had handed him the tall, flat-bottomed glass set on a saucer, warning him it was "black as the Devil's heart." Benjamin could see a sludge of grounds in the bottom, but he'd tried it anyway, discovered he liked it. First strong scotch, now strong black coffee… What other risky tastes remain undiscovered? he wondered.

  As far as his "tail" at the library, feeling rather proud of himself, Benjamin had explained to Anton how he'd ditched him. Exiting the library when he was finished with the diary, he'd gone straight to the tunnel that ran from the basement of the Jefferson Building, under Second Street, to the James Madison Memorial Building. The tunnel was only accessible to library staff, and he'd known his shadow would never gain entry without identification; probably didn't even know of its existence. Once outside the Madison building, he'd immediately caught a cab to Anton's row house in Georgetown.

  "Anyway, it's all there," Benjamin said, waving toward the yellow pages. "That is, everything I could get from the undamaged pages of the diary. But I don't know how you're going to enter it into Dr. Fletcher's program."

  Besides the coffee, Anton had brought Benjamin some cheese and bread, but Benjamin hadn't touched any of it. He was simply too tired, and too energized, simultaneously, to even think about food.

  Anton began, "Jeremy Fletcher very smart guy. This," he pointed to the laptop, " Grandiozno. Genius. Words in, formula out. But explain to me what's here." He pointed to the notes Benjamin had made. "Maybe it make my job little easier."

  "Well." Benjamin rubbed his eyes. "You have to understand, much of the diary was too fragile, or too illegible, to read. So I had to piece all this," he waved at the yellow pages, "together, fill in some gaps from what I already know about the period. And make some guesses, which might not-"

  "Don't excuse," Anton said, "just say 'maybe.' "

  Anton's impatience reminded Benjamin of when Wolfe would interrupt him when he got too "lecturey." He experienced another twinge of sadness over Wolfe's disappearance. He shook it off, realizing he'd have to save such feelings for later, when, hopefully, there would be time for them.

  Where to begin? Probably, he thought, at the beginning.

  "What you have to understand, Anton, is that the Puritans weren't all the same. As I explained to Samuel, there were sects, factions, rivalries."

  "Is always so," said Anton. "Why Puritans any different?"

  "Well, one of the strongest rivalries was between the strict Puritans and a group known as the Antinomians. My father had always assumed that Hessiah Bainbridge-Harlan's father-was part of this radical group, because, when Anne Hutchinson and the other Antinomians were banished from Massachusetts in 1638, Hessiah went with them to Rhode Island. And he took his young son and wife."

  "Banished?" said Anton. "Sounds like Tsar times, with dissidents and Siberia. And why you say 'assumed'? Your father not right?"

  "I'll get to that," Benjamin said. "Anyway, the stricter Puritans considered the Antinomians blasphemers because they believed that each individual was capable of receiving God's grace all by him or herself, without the 'guidance' of the Church fathers."

  "Bad for monopoly," said Anton, smiling.

  "Exactly. But there was another reason the Antinomians were banished. You see, Harlan's father had been one of the so-called Radicals calling for better relations with the Native Americans. His dream was to build a Prayer Town that could serve as a kind of cultural embassy, where the Natives could learn English and European customs-and of course religion. According to everything my father and other scholars knew about Hessiah Bainbridge, this dream was his driving passion.

  "But according to the diary, there was another group among the Puritan conservatives, a group I'd never heard of; a group Harlan names as the 'Congregation of the Eye of Providence.' They were the most doctrinaire of all the Puritans, the most fanatically devoted to the idea that the New World had been given to them by God to create a pure society, free from the corruption of Europe.

  "This group considered any plans for peaceful relations with the Indians to be a dangerous threat to their vision of this new society, this New Jerusalem. According to Harlan, they didn't want the Natives converted; they wanted them gone."

  "How is it so," Anton asked, "you never heard of these eye guys before?"

  Benjamin smiled. "Well, not by that name. There are vague references to the 'Guardians of Purity,' and similar descriptions," Benjamin replied. "No one's ever discovered any declaration of their principles, no sermons that mention them
directly, no tracts or stories. Most Colonial scholars thought these references were a joke, a nickname to make fun of the humorless fanatics among the Puritans."

  "But now?" Anton prodded.

  "These," Benjamin pointed at the notes, "are excerpts from Harlan's diary. And he knew these 'Eye of Providence' Puritans were not a joke. He knew they were well organized, absolutely dedicated, and mortally dangerous to anyone they considered a threat. And that they were dead set against any plans to establish better relations with the Native Americans. He knew in fact that they planned to use the Natives as a bogeyman to scare the increasingly secular Puritans back into line."

  "And how he know all this?" asked Anton skeptically.

  "Because his father, Hessiah, was one."

  For the first time, Anton looked surprised. "But you said he was be-friends-with-Indians guy?"

  "He was what I guess you would call a double agent," Benjamin said. "At first, Harlan was too young to understand. But eventually he came to realize that the Congregation of the Eye of Providence had planted Hessiah with the Antinomians to keep watch on them, to sabotage their plans. The irony was, by the time Hessiah died in Rhode Island, Harlan himself had become someone who truly did believe in Prayer Towns. He writes about an 'epiphany' he had, wherein God revealed to him that their true calling was to live peacefully with the Natives. To convert them, yes; but also to learn from them and thus build the sort of tolerant new society appropriate to a New World. By then, Harlan had come to hate the Eye of Providence fanatics and everything they stood for, which as far as he could see was merely the maintenance of absolute power by creating false enemies."

  Anton snorted. "Very old story."

  Now Benjamin was surprised. "You mean, you understand them?"

  "For seventy-five years," Anton said, looking suddenly serious, "Party keeps power by telling people enemies everywhere: counter-revolutionaries, wreckers, secret conspiracies. Stalin says Trotsky main bad guy, makes everything bad happen in USSR. Trotsky says, if I'm so powerful, how come Stalin's in Kremlin, and I'm in exile?" He laughed. "But nobody listens. People needed enemies. Stalin's propaganda tell them what they already believe. Is how good propaganda works, yes?" Anton smiled. " Maybe even in America."