Secrets of the Last Castle

by A. Rose Mathieu

  “How does it work?” Grace asked.

  “Both the sender and the recipient of the message must agree in advance on the key. The most common would be to select a letter on the inner circle and line it up with the letter A on the outer circle. For example, if S was lined up with A, the letter S would be deciphered as the letter A and T for the letter B, and so on. The letter S would be the key.”

  “Seems simple.”

  “The coding could get more complex, in that words could be written backward or the first and last letter of each word reversed. It was a time-consuming effort, but nowadays, the computer does the work in a fraction of the time.”

  “So what do you have on our text?”

  “Well, I input it all into the computer, but it doesn’t follow a single key.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that each letter in the text has a different key.” He looked at Grace and Elizabeth who stared blankly back. “Okay, it’s like this. If I line up S on the inner circle of the cipher with the A on the outer circle, then that will decode the first letter. However, the second letter in the text will have a different key. It will not be S to A, but a completely different letter matched with A and so on. I’ve run multiple scenarios through the computer program, but without the master key, it’s an endless set of possibilities. We need the master key.”

  “There were letters that were circled in the text. Could those letters be the key?” Elizabeth spoke up for the first time.

  “Yes, I thought that too. I ran the letters BROWNS OPINION into the scenario, including multiple variations and mixed them around, but it didn’t match. I still got nonsense.”

  “So what? This can’t be deciphered?”

  “We need the master key.”

  Elizabeth moved to a nearby chair to sit and cradled her head in her hands. Grace sat beside her and mirrored her position, while the professor began typing into the computer. The room remained quiet, but for the clicking sound of fingers on keys.

  “Wait a minute.” Elizabeth popped up. “What if the master key is a known document?”

  “What are you thinking?” Grace asked.

  “Brown versus Board of Education, the Supreme Court decision that ended segregation. That would have been on Webb’s mind.”

  “Browns opinion.” The professor began furiously typing. “I can download that decision and have it run against the text. It’s going to take an hour at least.”

  Grace leaned back and stretched out her legs. “We’ll wait.”

  Two and half hours, two cups of coffee, and a bathroom visit later, the professor declared defeat. “It’s just not matching. The computer has run the decision through, starting at every letter from the very top of the title page to the last letter of the opinion. I’ve run it backward and forward, but nothing is working. I’m not saying it isn’t the master key, but if it is, I just don’t know how to make it work.”

  Grace slumped at the enormous letdown and turned to Elizabeth, who sat hunched over with her hands clasped. She could see her fingers turning white from the tight grip. With a forced smile, Grace thanked the professor for his efforts, and he promised to keep at it.

  On the drive back, Grace tried to make conversation, but Elizabeth remained unusually quiet, only answering when necessary and contributing nothing to the discussion. How she missed her bantering.

  “It’s not Brown versus Board of Education,” Elizabeth blurted out, causing Grace to jerk the wheel, and the driver in the next lane to blare the horn.

  “Jesus, Elizabeth, you scared me. A little less animation when I’m driving please.”

  “Webb didn’t write that book,” Elizabeth said with excitement, ignoring Grace’s advisement to keep it down. “That book goes way back, like the Booth papers. It couldn’t be the Brown decision. That was from 1954.” She looked at Grace with the spark back in her eyes before she pulled out her phone and began typing. “Professor Miles said the coding method was popular in the Civil War and there was the cipher disk.”

  “And?” She knew this was going to be good.

  “We’re looking at the wrong decision.” Elizabeth continued to work her phone, and Grace pulled over to give Elizabeth her full attention. “Brown versus Board of Education overturned Plessy versus Ferguson. Plessy was decided in the late 1800s, which upheld segregation, declaring that the concept ‘separate but equal’ was not in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. That is more in line with the thinking of the author of that text.”

  “But why would the circled letters say ‘Browns Opinion’?”

  “Because…” Elizabeth held out her phone to Grace, and she could see the written Supreme Court decision on the screen. “The majority opinion in Plessy was written by Justice Brown.”

  Chapter Thirty

  Elizabeth stared out her office window and watched the rain beat down, finding the melody it played on the lids of the trash cans entrancing. There was plenty to do, but she lacked the mindset to do it. By the time she came up with the idea of Plessy v. Ferguson, Professor Miles had already left the lab, and when Grace finally spoke to him that morning, he informed her that he had classes, and it would have to wait until the afternoon. To wait—to delay an action until a later time or until another event occurs, Elizabeth looked it up. One of the many useless tasks she engaged in while she waited. She even offered to help the workers put in the new flooring in the kitchen, but they simply stared at the stapler in her hand.

  She restlessly shuffled a copy of the Booth pages that were resting on her lap; she had spent part of her morning deciphering them. After the tutorial on decoding from the professor, she decided to take a shot at it and found the pages easy to crack in comparison to the journal. The letter K was the key, and she got it on the first try, figuring it was the most obvious letter from a member of the KGC. The code remained consistent throughout, making its translation easy, but she learned nothing new from what Beadle told her.

  Unable to sit in the chair any longer, she decided to head across the street to pick up a salad for lunch. She wasn’t hungry, but it was something to do. She donned her raincoat and ignored Amy’s advice of taking an umbrella as she walked out the door. Ten minutes later, she returned with a white plastic bag tucked under coat. It was about the only thing dry, and she ducked past Amy’s empty desk trying to avoid her admonishment.

  She peeled off her coat as she entered her office and jumped at the sound of Grace’s voice. “You’re soaking wet. Let me guess, you fell in the toilet?”

  Elizabeth offered no response and instead wrapped her arms around her and kissed her before taking her seat. If Grace was annoyed by her now shared wet condition, she didn’t mention it.

  “Tell me you have some good news.”

  Grace took a seat and slid a folder across the desk. “It was the Plessy decision. It took him less than thirty minutes to crack it once he input it.”

  Elizabeth opened the folder and read the title out loud, “The second secession.” She trailed her finger down the pages mumbling a few words and became immersed in the history of the document. There was no author attributed to the work, but considering that the Plessy decision was issued in 1896, plus the bits of information she gathered from her computer research as she read, the author was likely an early decedent of Frederick Lawton.

  It seemed to ramble at first on societal order, nothing that surprised her at that point, but it began to focus on what she could best describe as a road map aimed at obtaining secession through pure segregation of the races in the post-Civil War era. It started with the call for silencing those that opposed them, citing the assassinations of two early civil rights leaders as an exemplar to be emulated–George W. Ashburn and John Prentiss Matthews.

  From the document and her research, she learned that Ashburn, a vocal opponent of white supremacy, was assassinated in Georgia in 1868. More than twenty members of the newly formed KKK were arrested in connection with his murder, many of who
m were prominent residents of the state and were being represented in the criminal trial by a former Confederate general and the former Confederate vice president. However, Ashburn’s murder trial became a pawn in the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, which was hanging in the balance. Georgia agreed to the ratification of the amendment in exchange for the dismissal of the criminal charges.

  The second name bore an equally troubling tale. Matthews organized the Independent Party in Mississippi, which challenged the controlling local white supremacist Democratic Party. He was assassinated in 1883 while attempting to vote in defiance of the local Democratic Party directive, which forbade anyone to vote in favor of the Independent Party. Despite Matthews’s public execution at the polling place, an all-white jury found the defendant, Ras Wheeler, not guilty, and Wheeler went on to have a successful political career in the state.

  After memorializing the assassinations of these two men, there was a list of names, and although she couldn’t find the other names in her computer search, she assumed that they all met similar fates. She couldn’t help but draw a parallel to the intel reports that were found in back of the book and suspected that Webb was attempting to emulate his predecessor’s vision. During this document’s time, the loss of slavery and secession was fresh on the author’s mind. For Webb, it was the loss of segregation, but they were both trying to hold on to an era that they were losing.

  The document continued to lay out several steps in furtherance of its agenda, focusing on more specific plans for segregating the state’s population through legislation and force. There was a detailed plan for redistricting, gerrymandering at its best, to weaken the legislative power of minority groups, as well as a less detailed plan on creating physical barriers that would separate the races. There was also a call for a state run militia, but its details were vague.

  Elizabeth took a sip from the coffee cup in her hand and then stared at it, wondering how it got there. She looked around her office and realized that she was alone and nearly two hours had passed. She debated stepping out of her office in search of Grace, but didn’t want to lose her train of thought and returned to her computer. She found several details of the document troubling, not because of its racist history, but because she feared history might be repeating itself.

  Grace returned with a sandwich and placed it next to her. “Your mom says it’s your favorite. You need to eat. You’ve been at this for hours.”

  “My mom, huh?”

  “Yup, we’ve had some bonding time while inspecting the new kitchen. Learned a few fun facts. Did you really have an invisible friend?”

  “I was four, and I used to talk to my stuffed bunny, Pebbles,” Elizabeth said with indignation.

  “Did Pebbles answer back?”

  She waded up a piece of paper and tossed it at Grace. “Do you mind if we get back to this?” she asked, gesturing to the document.

  “What do you have?”

  As Elizabeth went through what she learned, it was clear that Grace was already familiar with the document, but she was able to provide more insight as to the historical context from her computer research. “Grace, this reads just like the plan that was created with last year’s redistricting legislation and the governor’s appropriation act, DARA, that is sitting at the Supreme Court. If the court upholds DARA, we will soon have the largest state run military in US history, which the state might need to counter the protests once the government implements the second half of the bill—the eminent domain clause. Under the guise of improving infrastructure, the bill proposes to claim large areas of land to build highways. Combine that with the current rezoning of industrial areas, and we have physical barriers that separate counties, and in some cases cities. I’m sure if we draw it out on a map, we’ll find that race and socio-economics were primary considerations in delineating these boundaries.”

  “And Davis Powers’s confirmation will decide the fate of DARA.”

  “Yes, and Olivia knew this.”

  Grace stood and began to pace. “Even if we went public, there’s nothing illegal about any of this, so far anyway. There’s just not enough concrete evidence to link Powers to any wrongdoing in the Freedom Riders case. We’d never be able to prove that the intel reports came from his safe deposit box. It would be dismissed as speculation.”

  “That’s why Olivia wanted Mrs. Francis to go public with the recording. I’m sure that reel came from the hidden tape recorder in Webb’s office. I’m guessing there’s an incriminating conversation on it that Davis Powers would prefer not go public.”

  “The recording is still undergoing restoration. It’s going to take a week before it’s ready.”

  “We don’t have a week. The state senate is set to vote on Powers’s confirmation next Tuesday, and you know as soon as he’s on the bench, the conservative block will push for a ruling on DARA.” Elizabeth slouched and scrubbed at her face. “This can’t be happening.”

  Grace sat in the chair in defeat.

  “Wait a minute,” Elizabeth said. “Senator McDermott—Professor Dixon said he’s Powers’s greatest opposition. What if he shares this information with his fellow legislators, particularly those on the fence about the judge?”

  “That could put the senator in danger if word got out to the wrong people. He could end up like Reverend Peterson. And we have to remember that we have an informant amongst us.”

  Elizabeth had lost sight of that detail, but her money was on ADA Wilcox. “Understood, but I think it should be Senator McDermott’s choice.”

  * * *

  Grace and Elizabeth sat in the conference room opposite Senator McDermott, and the table between them was strewn with photos and documents. After her conversation with Elizabeth, Grace called the senator’s office and explained the urgency of the meeting. McDermott agreed to the spontaneous meeting with the caveat that it occurred after hours at his district office. After learning the purpose of the meeting, he was uncomfortable with it taking place in his office at the capitol, and Grace seconded that thought.

  They had spent the first hour of their meeting laying out the evidence against Judge Powers, including the sordid history of the White Horse Plantation. The senator listened with rapt attention, only asking a handful of clarifying questions. Now, Grace and Elizabeth sat in silence, which they had done for the last half hour, exchanging only questioning glances, as McDermott carefully studied the documents in front of him. She couldn’t read his body language and had no idea whether he was willing to accept the wild tale that they unfolded before him.

  The senator finally lifted his head and removed his glasses. “This is incredible. I’ve never cared for the governor or his people, but I would have never guessed that they were this nefarious. If I wasn’t so repulsed, I’d say this was genius. I never put it together, and I’ve studied DARA backward and forward.”

  “I don’t think anyone else would either, until it was too late anyway,” Grace replied.

  “So you can’t go public because there is nothing here on Judge Powers that could be proven.” As a former Civil Rights lawyer, the senator seemed to understand Grace’s predicament. “If we go public with this idea that DARA is part of a larger master plan to implement a modern form of segregation, at best we’ll be labeled crazy conspiracy theorist and at worst sued, and we’d be lucky to find night janitorial jobs. So what do you propose?”

  “We don’t go public. We go private,” Elizabeth said with a devious smile. She explained the restoration of the tape reel and that she believed it would be damning evidence against Judge Powers. “But it won’t happen by Tuesday when the senate is set to vote on Powers’s nomination.”

  Senator McDermott nodded. “So you want me to take this behind closed doors to some of my fellow legislators. Let them know what they’re really voting for.” He picked up some of the documents again for inspection. “This could work. Even some of the senators on the other side of the aisle wouldn’t want to be caught voting the wrong way if this hits the fan. We’re i
n election season.”

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Grace sat outside the office of yet another state senator. Jack was at her side, softly snoring. She didn’t blame him. The schedule they had been keeping was wearing her out. She couldn’t imagine the toll it was taking on an octogenarian. It had been three days since she and Elizabeth had the meeting with Senator McDermott, and that was the last time she saw her. They had spoken several times, but once the senator committed to their plan, Grace decided to play personal bodyguard to ensure his safety until the state senate voted on Judge Powers’s confirmation. Given that the protection service was off the books, she was spread thin, and Jack volunteered to assist. She didn’t believe he was truly up to the task, and she certainly wasn’t going to trust him with a gun, but he was an extra body that could stay awake while she got some sleep. She also appreciated his company and learned he had a quick wit and a sense of humor. She saw why he and Elizabeth got along so well.

  Since engaging Senator McDermott, he had attended multiple meetings with members in the senate, but it was unclear whether he had influenced them, as he was met with skepticism and noncommittal responses. It seemed that the senator was more willing to accept the backstory of Judge Powers and DARA than his colleagues. Tomorrow was the confirmation vote for Judge Powers, and they were on their last stop of their covert tour. When the senator emerged through the door, he offered her a shrug, which she took to mean things didn’t seem to go so well. As he gave some last-minute instructions to an aide at his side, she gently shook Jack, who jerked his body to full alert, embarrassed that he fell asleep on the job.