"Thirty-five dollars, sir." The saleswoman's face didn't move. The Russian woman was gone; the transaction was not.
Gates had noticed nothing wrong. He reached for his wallet, rummaged through it, and came up three dollars short.
The saleswoman was immovable. What followed was ten excruciating minutes of negotiation, appeals to reason, and eventually a card transaction that Gates found deeply humiliating on multiple levels.
He finally made it out of the side hall drenched in sweat. Then, as the relief of escape started to settle, a new dread replaced it: he'd used his card. There was now a documented, timestamped record of his presence at the counter where the Declaration had just been swapped. He walked faster.
Too paranoid to return to his hotel, he went to his father's house instead. He shooed the old man out and unrolled the Declaration with trembling hands. He brushed lemon juice across the back—standard technique for revealing invisible ink. Nothing appeared. He hit it with a hairdryer. Still nothing.
There was nothing on the back of the Declaration of Independence.
The clue was gone. Or it had never been real. Or this whole thing had been an elaborate, embarrassing farce from the start.
He slumped into a chair and stared at the ceiling, sinking slowly into self-doubt.
Elsewhere, Bella and the Brotherhood were examining the real thing.
To ensure Gates had no reason to keep investigating, Bella had never intended to give him a cheap print. The swap had been a precise replica—manufactured by the Brotherhood's own forgers, who had been in this trade for over two thousand years and were masters of the craft. Fabricating a two-hundred-year-old document was routine work for them. It would fool Gates, and it would fool a professional authenticator. There wasn't a flaw to find.
For tonight's operation, Bella had come in her Mentor guise—a white hood, a rapier at her hip, her features deliberately obscured. She sat beside Shaun Hastings, the Brotherhood's historian and analyst, and they examined the Declaration together. 006, present as a guest and participant, stood off to the side with his arms folded.
Shaun applied lemon juice to the back of the original. The Russian woman stood ready with a hairdryer. Slowly, the hidden text emerged from the parchment.
The Russian woman picked up a pen and notepad and began transcribing. "7-9-6… 10-15-8… 14-8-2…" They were all numbers, each set in the same format.
"Is that coordinates?" 006 asked. He was the only outsider in the room, and he knew it. The Brotherhood members regarded him with a faint but unmistakable wariness; they clearly weren't used to letting outsiders watch their work. His curiosity overrode the discomfort. "Latitude and longitude?"
"No. It's an Ottendorf cipher." Bella seemed to notice his confusion and elaborated as she removed her gloves. "Nothing mysterious about the mechanics. The first number is the page. The second is the line on that page. The third is the letter position in that line. String all the letters together and you get the next clue."
006 latched on immediately. "Which document?"
"I didn't know at first," Bella said. "But Dr. Gates handed us the answer without realizing it."
She accepted a thick sheaf of printed pages from a nearby Brotherhood member.
"Benjamin Franklin, at fifteen, secretly wrote fourteen letters to his brother's newspaper. He used a female persona—a middle-aged widow—and signed them Silence Dogood." She paused. "The man apparently also had a taste for dressing as a woman. Look at the Ottendorf numbers." She pointed to the transcription. "The first column only goes up to fourteen. Fourteen letters. It lines up exactly."
On the other side of the table, Shaun had already abandoned the briefing and was bent over the cipher with three others, working through it at speed.
"7-9-6… that's S."
"11-3-5… I."
"9-1-7… A."
Letter by letter, the message assembled itself.
Shaun read it aloud when they had it: "The vision of the treasured past will, at the proper time, appear within the timely shadow before the house of Pass and Stow."
"Pass and Stow?" 006 didn't want to look uninformed, but there was no world in which he was going to pretend he knew what that meant.
Shaun answered without looking up. "John Pass and John Stow. They cast the Liberty Bell together—the bell that was rung on July 8, 1776, when the Declaration was first publicly read. 'Pass and Stow' points to the Bell." He straightened. "It's in Philadelphia. I'll go."
"Go," Bella confirmed. "Thank you, Shaun."
Shaun assembled a small team and headed for Philadelphia. Bella and the rest moved toward New York—her divination had placed the treasure there.
Even an outsider like Ben Gates had managed to claw his way toward the truth clue by clue. It would be naive to assume the Templar Order—the original architects of all of this—had nothing to work from. If they'd thought to track down a living descendant of Benjamin Franklin and run their blood through the Animus, they could reconstruct the ancestor's memories directly. No ciphers, no stolen documents, no archaeology. Just direct access to the source.
That was the Animus's real advantage: if you could go straight to the source, you didn't need to follow clues one by one.
While the Brotherhood moved into position, Ben Gates turned himself in.
Technically, he surrendered, with the person, evidence, motive, and timeline all present and accounted for. Under FBI investigation, he had nowhere to run.
"Dr. Gates." The FBI agent assigned to the case was older than Gates had expected. He dismissed the junior agents, pulled a chair closer, and sat directly across from Gates.
"I want my lawyer present before I say anything."
The agent laughed—a full, unhurried laugh. "Doctor, you have no idea who you're talking to. You've spent years hunting the Templar Order. Well. The Templar Order has found you." He smiled pleasantly. "Anything you'd like to say?"