The Rose Conspiracy Read online

  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 througho
ut 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.

  And she was a dead ringer for his client, Vinnie Archmont.

  CHAPTER 19

  As he left baggage claim, Blackstone walked over to his Maserati at the Reagan National Airport parking lot. He called Reverend Lamb from his cell phone but got his voice mail.

  “Uncle,” Blackstone said in his message, “it’s J.D. Just got back from the UK. I was wondering if you and I could chat about a new case I’m handling. Call me.”

  Then he retrieved a voice mail from Frieda his secretary. She said his office had received an “urgent” message.

  “A man called,” Frieda recounted. “He said it was about the Langley murder case. He wouldn’t give me his name or contact information. But he said that you needed to be at the construction site down by the federal courthouse, just off Constitution Avenue, by four p.m. today. That you need to talk to a Mr. Dennis Watkins there. Some kind of supervisor. That this Mr. Watkins has some crucial information, and would fill you in down there.”

  Blackstone drove out of the parking lot, and through early crosstown rush-hour traffic. It was ten minutes to four when he swung up to the large office building under construction.

  He parked his car and quickly made his way over to a makeshift office in a trailer, where he introduced himself to a foreman there.

  The foreman grabbed his walkie-talkie and spoke to someone. Then he handed a hard hat to Blackstone and said to follow him. As they crossed the construction site, Blackstone could see that the girders were in place, the floors had already been laid, and now they were raising the walls. There were huge blocks of marble being swung into place around the base with the help of cranes.

  When they reached a corner of the building, there was a man in a short-sleeve white shirt and a hard hat looking over drawings on a large work table. The foreman introduced Blackstone to Dennis Watkins, the man in the white shirt.

  “Got your message,” Blackstone began. “Can we talk in private? I am curious about any information you may have.”

  “Mr. Blackstone, I appreciate everything you’re trying to do on this nasty business,” Watkins began. “But if you don’t mind, I want to withhold comment until I show you this, and you see it with your own eyes. Frankly, I think this is going to make your whole job a lot easier. You know, easier to defend your position.”

  Blackstone was puzzled, but obliged by following him into a large construction elevator with metal mesh sides and an open top.

  Watkins pushed a green up button and the cage door automatically locked with a loud clang as the elevator slowly shuddered upward.

  Suddenly, something up above caught Watkins’s attention as he craned his neck straight up to see. Then he slammed his fist into the red stop button and snatched his walkie-talkie off his hip.

  “Gerald, this is Watkins,” he shouted. “Hey, we’ve got one of your marble fascia blocks hanging in the air over the northeast corner elevator. It’s hanging down from crane number three. Three floors up. The thing’s dangling right over our heads! Swing that thing away from here, will you?”

  Blackstone looked up at the huge white stone block, suspended directly over them about thirty feet over their heads. It was dangling from a cable connected to a crane arm.

  Then Blackstone noticed the title on the hard hat of the man in the elevator with him.

  It read, Dennis Watkins—Chief Architect.

  Then something lit up in Blackstone’s mind and he muttered, “The Great Architect.”

  “That stone block over our heads,” Blackstone said in a rushed voice. “Tell me, quick. Is it right-angled?”

  Watkins threw him a befuddled look.

  “Yeah. Sure. All of them are, I think.”

  Blackstone quickly looked through the metal mesh down to the ground. The elevator was only about six inches off the ground. Blackstone grabbed the cage door handle and jiggled it, but the safety feature on the cage door had automatically locked it shut on the ascent.

  Just then a voice squawked at them from Watkins’s walkie-talkie.

  “Dennis, this is Gerald. I sent Tony up the ladder to crane number three. There’s nobody at the controls. But the control booth door is locked. You guys have to get out of there! He says the tow cable is in the descend position, from what he can see. There’s a piece of metal jammed in the gear. That’s all that’s keeping it from coming down. Get outta there now!”

  Watkins hit the yellow down button two times in a row. Nothing happened. Then he reached for the green up button, but Blackstone grabbed his arm to stop him.

  “You move us up and we’re dead!” Blackstone yelled. “I am the target here.”

  “Let’s climb up the sides,” Watkins shouted, and tried to lift himself up using the spaces in the metal mesh as finger holes.

  “No time!” Blackstone yelled back.

  “The block is coming down!” the voice in the walkie-talkie was screaming.

  “Do as I do and we’ll both live,” Blackstone blurted out and threw himself down on the riveted metal floor of the elevator. Watkins looked up just as the large marble block came hurtling down at them. He threw himself facedown next to Blackstone.

  A split second later, the daylight overhead was completely eclipsed by the huge stone block that was now dangling over them, just a few feet over their heads. As it swung from side to side, it banged into the sides of the metal cage, sending vibrations through the elevator. The two men were breathing heavily as they lay on the floor. “Lift it up…lift it out of here,” Watkins muttered.

  Up at the crane, Tony had broken his way into the crane’s operating booth and then pulled the lever, reversing the tow cable. Slowly the huge block of stone was lifted up and out of the elevator cage and away from them, and then lowered safely to the ground.

  Watkins yelled for a ladder to climb up to the top of the stone block to examine it. By then, the project engineer showed up and scampered up the ladder to the top of the block with Watkins. Blackstone followed quickly after him.

  The three men stared at the place on the stone face where the cable hook was connected to a metal loop imbedded in the marble.

  “What in the world…” Watkins said.

  “A Lewis grappling assembly,” Blackstone announced, nodding as if that meant something important.

  “Absolutely right,” the engineer chimed in. “Haven’t seen one of those since engineering school. Really old-school stuff. Three tapped metal key wedges, two angled ones, one straight one in between them in the middle, all inserted together into the stone face. Connected by a vertical bolt, holding the loop in place for hoisting.” Then he added, looking at Watkins, “Dennis, this antiquated thing isn’t ours.”

  When the three of them were on the ground level again, the engineer shook Blackstone’s hand and introduced himself.

  “You guys at the building inspector’s office,�
�� the engineer said to Blackstone, “really know your engineering stuff.”

  “Building inspector’s office?” Blackstone said with amazement. “You’ve got the wrong guy. I’m a lawyer. And a law professor.”

  There was a stunned silence.

  “I was told,” Watkins interjected, “that a Mr. Blackstone in the District of Columbia inspector’s office was coming over here. I was led to believe you were the guy who was pitching for us at City Hall to help us resolve the permit issue over our girder configuration on the fourth floor.”

  “Who told you that?” Blackstone asked.

  Watkins shook his head. “Can’t remember. But I am going to chase this down. This is very weird.”

  Then Watkins looked at Blackstone. “How exactly did you know that our lying flat on the floor was the only way to survive?”

  “Because I knew,” Blackstone replied, “that the marble block would stop short of hitting the ground.”

  “He’s right!” a voice shouted out. It was Tony, the crane operator, who had just arrived to join them. He was carrying a metal cable lock in his hand.

  “This thing was set on the cable,” Tony explained pointing to the lock, “so the block would be reeled down—but not all the way. It was set to stop short.”

  Watkins turned to Blackstone again.

  “You still haven’t answered my question. How did you know so much about that marble block, mister? And why was it set so it wouldn’t reach the ground?”

  Blackstone grinned, cocked his head a little, and then he answered.

  “I take your question to indicate two things,” Blackstone said. “First, that you don’t know anything about me or why I am came here today.”

  “And the other thing?” Watkins asked.

  “That your question is proof to me,” Blackstone said, his voice growing a little more somber, “that you, sir, have never been initiated into the mysteries of the Freemasons.”

  Then, as Watkins and the project engineer tried to make sense out of Blackstone’s cryptic response, Blackstone looked around, taking in the vista around him, from his position at the construction site.