The Rose Conspiracy (12 page)

Blackstone struggled to focus. He quickly analyzed all three of the ciphers.

The part about Marilyn and Beth he knew too well. And he knew, also, why they followed him, as they often did, into his subconscious world.

And why he could not escape from the dread about them that haunted him constantly.

The symbolic appearance of Vinnie, too, was clear, and so was the rose and her numerical arrangements of her six fingers.

“Rose of 6,” he found himself saying out loud.

As for the third component of the dream, the church bells, he knew that one also. It bore a message he had been suppressing.

And as he started dressing he was thinking about that. About how it was distasteful for him to have to bring his uncle into the Smithsonian murder case. On the other hand, from a strategy standpoint, it would be inexcusable not to. It would be critical for Vinnie's defense to be able to glean some insight from Reverend Lamb's unique knowledge of the Freemasons and the world of esoteric religion, if for no other reason than to calculate how Lord Dee was connected to the Booth diary pages and Langley's notes.

It was decided. When he was stateside, J.D. Blackstone would call his uncle, Reverend John Lamb.

And he would ask him if they could meet and have a talk as quickly as possible.

CHAPTER 18

S
omewhere, flying thousands of feet over the limitless Atlantic, J.D. Blackstone believed he had begun to figure out one small piece of the four-line coded poem that had been jotted down by Horace Langley as he studied the Booth diary.

The first line of cryptic note read,

To AP and KGC

Blackstone had been harboring an idea about who “AP” was. But he wanted to be certain. Now he was.

In his seat in first class, he had a stack of books Julia had ferreted out on the Lincoln assassination, on Booth, and on the Confederate resistance movement at the end of the Civil War. There was also a separate book specifically on the Freemasons. After scanning them, Blackstone was beginning to see a connection.

And what lay in the very epicenter of that tangled web was one man: Albert Pike. For Blackstone, here was the “AP” of Booth's diary entry.

Pike was not exactly a household name in the history of the War Between the States. But then, that was probably fitting, considering the nature of the man and the weird, secretive, philosophical bent he had.

Pike had been a lawyer by trade and even served on the pre-war Supreme Court of Arkansas as a justice. During the war he became a Confederate officer and rallied Indian tribes to attack federal outposts. There was much controversy about whether he had generated Indian “atrocities” against the North. But when the Confederate cause failed, he was charged with treason. After the assassination of Abraham Lincoln,
who was
not
a Freemason, Vice President Andrew Johnson, a high-ranking Freemason himself and also president by succession, narrowly escaped removal from office after being impeached.

Once safe from the attempted removal from office by the Senate, President Johnson then issued an executive pardon to Albert Pike, a Freemason whose thirty-third-degree status actually trumped that of the president. To Blackstone's mind as he delved into the history of it all, Pike's pardon, and his frequent travels in and out of the federal capital despite his status as a war criminal, seemed to stand as one of the Civil War's quiet little anomalies.

A man who bragged of being conversant in numerous languages, well-read in the world religions and philosophies, and an international leader among the Freemasons, Albert Pike met, and was most certainly captivated by, Vinnie Ream, the pretty, coquettish sculptor who had wooed Washington's high society. During their mysterious relationship, Pike arranged for Ream to ceremonially receive several Masonic degrees, despite the fact that women were generally forbidden from joining the Masons.

And in what was either a twist of extreme irony, or a carefully constructed plot, Vinnie Ream was the very person who had persuaded one particular senator, after the impeachment charges had been issued by the House of Representatives, to vote
against
removing President Andrew Johnson from office. That was in 1868, two years after Vinnie met Albert Pike and Pike had received his presidential pardon. The vote influenced by Vinnie Ream would become the pivotal vote that would keep Johnson in the White House. So the question remained—were Vinnie's political efforts on Johnson's behalf a recompense for Johnson having granted a presidential pardon to his fellow Mason and Vinnie's strange soul-partner, Albert Pike?

But all of that was mere history and politics. In Blackstone's mind, that was simply stage dressing for the real drama that had led to Horace Langley's murder at the Smithsonian Castle. It had to be.

Of course, Blackstone figured it was possible there was a rogue Confederate cult group out there somewhere that still cared about the reputation, or the ideas, of John Wilkes Booth. On the other hand, the meticulous, professional sophistication of the murder and theft that
occurred at the Smithsonian did not bear the marks of having been orchestrated by some fringe gang of Southern anarchists.

The more Blackstone read and then integrated his historical research with the facts about the crime, the less this looked like a political operation. Indeed, he thought to himself, it looked almost apolitical. For Blackstone, this was not a political crime. This was something else altogether.

To Blackstone, the murder case clearly had religious elements.

First, there was the wording of the coded poem. Blackstone was assuming that the cipher documented by Langley in his note was connected to the crime, because the note was ripped off the page by the assassin and taken, along with the Booth pages. And the four-line poem did not seem to carry any political connotations. The symbolism was loaded with classic religious archetypes: references to a rose, and a tree, and “gospel's Mary.”

Next, there was the eccentric religious philosopher and thirty-third-degree Mason Lord Magister Dee, who expressed an otherworldly interest in the Booth diary. Then there was, as Blackstone learned in his reading, the unmistakable theology of the Freemasons in their worship of the “Great Architect of the Universe,” as they would refer to God.

Blackstone had neglected to throw away his uncle's latest book on religious heresy, the one Reverend Lamb handed him at their last meeting. When he parked in the airport parking lot before leaving for England, he noticed it was still in the backseat of his car. So he packed it into his briefcase with the other books.

Now he was glad he did.

As he scanned parts of the book, he found that Reverend Lamb had done a nice job, in one particular chapter, of pointing out the connection between the religious beliefs of the Freemasons and the ancient Gnostics. There was also an appendix in the back with some diagrams and explanations of the symbolism and ceremonies of the Freemasons.

As Blackstone considered Lord Dee's desire to obtain the Booth diary because of its possible link to the “ultimate secret” of the Freemasons, it seemed obvious that whatever that secret was, it had some kind of spiritual significance.

For Blackstone, it all seemed very cultic, even ecclesiastical in an unorthodox kind of way.

Then, as Blackstone read on amid the lazy drone of jet engines, he came upon an intriguing news story that appeared in a newspaper shortly after the Lincoln assassination. On April 16, 1865, the day of Abraham Lincoln's state funeral, a brief mention appeared in an extra edition of the Washington
Star.
The article mentioned “recent developments” in the investigation into the assassination that proved “conclusively, the existence of a deep laid plot of a gang of conspirators, including members of the order of the Knights of the Golden Circle.”

“Knights of the Golden Circle,” Blackstone said out loud. “
KGC.
”

The passenger next to him stirred, opened an eye, and then fell back to sleep.

Blackstone paged back to the indexes of each of his books. Only one had a reference to the “Knights of the Golden Circle.” By all appearances, the group originally started a shadowy conspiracy of Confederates and Southern sympathizers bent on creating a slaveholding empire in the Southern states, Mexico, and Cuba, and creating a new republic of immense power and wealth. But when the Civil War broke out, the organization splintered, with many of its members being absorbed into the Confederate army.

What happened next was mired in legend and speculation. By the end of the war, Northerners who held allegiances to the Confederacy had seemed to have transmuted the Knights of the Golden Circle into a new kind of group. It likely planned several scenarios for either the kidnapping and ransom, or the assassination, of Abraham Lincoln, and the overturning of the federal government. Reputedly, the KGC was populated by Freemasons.

As Blackstone saw it then, these were the political anarchists, including John Wilkes Booth, who still held on to wild dreams of a new empire.

But in the person of Albert Pike, there was something else—a religious seer whose philosophical theories added something immensely radical and profoundly transcendent to the Southern sympathizers: a new religious way of looking at the world. A new religion. A new spiritual reality rising up out of the ashes of the terrors and death of war. And Albert Pike was positioning himself to be its new pope.

After several hours of study and note-taking, Blackstone was starting to get the big picture. Blackstone had concluded that his identification
of “AP” and “KGC” in the first line of the coded message was probably correct. Strangely, though, there seemed to be no historical connection between Albert Pike and the Knights of the Golden Circle—or with John Wilkes Booth for that matter.

Blackstone wondered whether Booth was carrying a message, noted in his diary, that was destined for Albert Pike and perhaps the elite hierarchy of the KGC. Blackstone even entertained the possibility that Booth did not know the meaning of the message he was supposed to deliver to Pike. But in any event, it appeared that the message never reached its intended destination.

The eighteen pages of the Booth diary were apparently removed shortly after the diary was taken from among Booth's possessions, after he had been killed in an ambush by the federal authorities.

According to Congressional testimony offered by Lafayette Baker, a police detective who headed up the spy network for Lincoln's Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, the pages of the Booth diary went missing
after
the diary was delivered to Stanton. It was widely believed the diary pages might have shown a connection between Stanton, a Freemason, and Booth. Stanton wanted those pages hidden, not because he wanted to protect some metaphysical secret of the ages, but for much more pragmatic reasons: He didn't want to be implicated in the killing of the president. Secretary of War Stanton's behavior shortly before Lincoln's assassination had raised serious questions about his possible complicity. For instance, Stanton had refused to provide adequate security for the president the night he went to Ford's Theater, even though there had been overwhelming evidence of plots against Lincoln swirling throughout Washington DC.

Blackstone peeked through the small, rectangular plane window and saw the city of Washington spread out below, like a miniature continent of white marble buildings, with the towering spire of the Washington Monument dominating the landscape. He felt certain he had cracked the first line of the coded message. What he didn't know, but had to now frantically find out in order to save his client from the death chamber, was why that strange message might have cost Horace Langley his life.

As the 757 slowly started its descent, Blackstone flipped to the midsection of the Civil War history book, the part with photographs. Abraham
Lincoln. Andrew Johnson. Jefferson Davis. Then he saw another photograph.

And it sent a quick tingle down Blackstone's spine. It was a picture of Albert Pike, the Masonic philosopher and Confederate officer. A stout man with a full flowing beard, and long, rock-star-length hair down to his shoulders. Pike looked like a mirror image of Lord Magister Dee.

But then Blackstone flipped the page to another photo.

And when he did, it made him flinch a little.

It was a photograph of Vinnie Ream, the beguiling nineteenth-century sculptor.