A gallon jug of Sagardoa flew out of a large pigeonhole and exploded on the stone floor at Sage"s feet, splattering cider everywhere. Instinctively attempting to preserve her six-hundred-dollar shoes, Sage skittered backward, but as Vartan made to spring at her she halted him again with the pointed gun. At the same moment, another jug flew off the top of the rack, right at her head. Sage quickly ducked behind a nearby table as the jug hurtled by and crashed to the floor beside her.
The avalanche of cider pots moved along the line. Sagardoa jugs were flying from high pigeonholes as Sage crouched behind the table, her elbow braced like a sharpshooter"s shot them out of the air like clay pigeons. She took a few potshots at the rack, too, trying to nail her hidden adversary.
At the first shot, Vartan had dragged me down behind our table and toppled it over, spilling the contents book, valuable papers, chess queen, and Chteauneuf du Pape upon the stone floor. We hunkered behind it. The crashes and gunshots continued as the phone kept ringing at the far end of the room.
Vartan expressed my thoughts, "I don"t know who our savior is behind that wine rack, but he won"t hold her off much longer. We must find a way to get at her."
I peered out from behind the loose tablecloth. The place reeked of fermented apple mash.
Sage, in her relatively protected position, controlling center board, had managed to reload faster than Annie Oakley. I prayed that she ran out of bullets before Leda ran out of cider. But even if so, I hadn"t much hope, since her heavies outside, on hearing this commotion, would be crashing in here at any instant.
Suddenly, the phone stopped ringing. A deafening silence filled the room. No crashes. No gunshots.
My G.o.d, was it all over?
Vartan and I peered over the tabletop just in time to see the door of the restaurant burst open. Sage, on her feet, her profile to us, had turned with a smug little smile to greet her cronies. But instead a blur of white trousers, red sashes, and black berets charged through the door into the room, Rodo leading the pack with his ponytail flying, his phone in his hand, and Eremon just behind him.
In astonishment, Sage"s eyes narrowed, and she leveled her gun at them from across the room.
But around the corner of the cider rack, intervening between Sage and her target, sailed what appeared to be a large copper soup tureen on wheels, three feet across and held like a shield. It was barreling between the tables right at Sage. Leda launched the kettle aloft just as Sage fired the gun in her direction. The tureen descended, taking Sage down like a bowling pin but I saw that Leda was knocked off her pins, too, and sitting on the ground. Had she been hit?
While Vartan and the others raced to grab the gun and decommission Sage, I scrambled to make sure Leda was okay, but Eremon beat me to it. He gracefully helped Leda to her feet and gestured to the leaking cider bottle in the rack across the room that the bullet had actually hit. While Vartan secured the gun, a couple of Basque Brigadeers pulled Sage up, yanked off their waist sashes, and bound her hand and foot. Then, as she writhed in furious indignation, still babbling, they dragged her out the door.
Rodo smiled in relief when he saw that we were all okay. I retrieved the diamond bracelet from the mess of broken gla.s.s and wine puddles on the floor and handed it to Eremon. He shook his head and tossed it far out the door into the ca.n.a.l.
Rodo was telling me, "When the Cygne was coming here to work, she noticed some people she recognized, under the wisteria pergola at Key Park. It was La Livingston, who"d come to have me help find you the other day at your uncle"s, and the security men from the morning before the private boum at Sutalde. The Cygne thought it was suspicious, seeing them together right there, just near your house. So when she got here to work she phoned Eremon and me. We thought it was suspicious, too. By the time you arrived here, she was downstairs preparing the fires for tonight and we were already en route. But she phoned again on my cell phone after she heard the entry of another person up here, crept upstairs, and saw that you were in real danger. She told us your friend was threatening you with a gun and those men were posted outside. We laid our plan that the moment we had disarmed the men out there, I would ring the house phone in here. That would be the Swan"s signal to create a distraction inside to divert La Livingston so she wouldn"t shoot you before we could come through the door."
"The Swan "diverted" her all right," I agreed, hugging Leda in thanks. "And not a moment too soon. Sage was getting an itchy trigger finger, and I was afraid we might inadvertently scratch it. But how did you disarm those guys outside?"
Eremon said, "They were derailed by a few Jota moves that they were certainly not expecting. E.B. has lost none of his high kicks. These men have now been turned over to Homeland Security of the U.S. government, which is holding them for bearing illegal firearms within the District and for impersonating Secret Service agents."
"But Sage Livingston?" Vartan asked Rodo. "She seems mad. And with rather the opposite goal of the one you were espousing to the two of us just last night. What can become of someone like her, who was raised to destroy everything in her path?"
Leda said, "I recommend a very lengthy shift at some feminist lesbian spiritual retreat in some very remote part of the Pyrenees. Think we can arrange it?"
"I"m certain that we could," said Rodo. "But there is someone we know who especially wishes to take charge of Sage"s case. I should say, two someones, for their own different reasons. Quod Severis Metes. I believe, if you think of this, you will understand who they are. For now, you know the combination to my safe. When you"ve finished with those materials, don"t leave them lying about there on the floor, do as you"ve done in the past." He winked.
With that, Rodo was out the door, snapping instructions in Basque, left and right, all the way across the footbridge.
Eremon was on his knees, tsk-tsk-ing as he checked out Leda"s scruffed legs and bruises from her fall. He stood, put his arm around her shoulders, and accompanied her to the cellar, to "help with the heavy logs," as he said. I thought there might be hope for something a bit more alchemical there yet.
Vartan and I returned to our place beside the windows where the setting sun now licked the tops of the high-rise buildings across the river, and we started putting away our valuable, dangerous, wine-splashed stash. "The combination to his safe?" he said.
"Basque mathematics," I told him.
I knew that Rodo didn"t have a safe, but he did have a P.O. box up the street, just like mine. The number was 431. He was hinting that the safest route was to get the stuff out of here by mail again, as I"d done before, and worry about the rest later.
I was about to slip The Books of the Balance back into its container when Vartan put his hand on my arm. Looking at me with those dark purple eyes, he said, "You know, I thought she really might kill you."
"I don"t think she wanted to kill me," I told him. "But she was so completely crazed at losing, in just one day, all her wealth, connections, her access to power everything she"s ever believed she wanted."
"Believed?" said Vartan. "She sounded to me quite convinced."
I shook my head, for I thought maybe I"d finally gotten the message.
Vartan said, "But who is it who will "take charge of the case" of a person like her, as Boujaron said? Sage was raised to believe she is something like a G.o.d. Who could imagine anybody who would want to deal with such a person?"
"I don"t need to imagine," I told him. "I already know. It"s my mother and my aunt Lily who will help her."
Vartan stared at me across the table. "But why?" he said.
"My mother even if it was in self-defense, or in defense of Lily Rad did kill Rosemary"s father. And Rosemary was sure that she"d killed my father t.i.t for tat. It appears that Sage herself was raised to be like a tracer bullet, a heat-seeking missile looking for a place to explode. Or to implode. She almost did it right here in this room."
Vartan said, "This might explain your mother wanting to help Sage maybe a kind of atonement. But what of Lily Rad? She never even knew of the Livingstons" connection with your mother."
"But," I pointed out, "Lily did know that her own father was the Black King and her mother the White Queen. She knew the devastation that had swept her own life because of it. She"s known what it feels like to be a p.a.w.n within your own family."
This was what my mother had saved me from.
The Game.
And now I knew exactly what I must do.
I said to Vartan, "This book, The Books of the Balance, and the secret that al-Jabir hid in the chess set have been waiting more than twelve hundred years for someone to come along and release them from the bottle. I think we"re it. I think it"s time."
We stood there beside the wall of windows overlooking the ca.n.a.l, filled with the beautiful rosy flamingo flame of the sunset, and Vartan put his arms around me from behind. I opened the wine-spattered book that was still in my hand. Vartan looked over my shoulder as I flipped through the pages until I came to the small ill.u.s.tration of a matrix of three-by-three squares with a number printed in each. They looked familiar.
4 9 2.
3 5 7.
8 1 6.
"What does it say, just underneath here?" I asked Vartan.
He translated, "The most ancient Magic Square, which is represented here, existed thousands of years ago in India, and in Babylonia under the Chaldean Oracles." Vartan paused to add, "This seems to be some medieval commentator speaking, not al-Jabir himself."
He went on. "In China, this square was used to lay out the eight provinces of the land with the emperor living at center. It was sacred because each number had esoteric significance; also, each row, column, and diagonal adds up to 15, which, if added in turn, reduces to the number 6."
"Six-six-six," I said, glancing up over my shoulder at Vartan.
He released me from behind, and together we took the book closer to the window, where he continued. "However, it was al-Jabir ibn Hayyan, the father of Islamic alchemy, who made this square renowned, in The Books of the Balance, for its other important properties of "correct proportions" that lead to balance. If the four squares in the southwest corner are carved out as shown, they add to 17, providing the series 1:3:5:8 of perfect Pythagorean musical ratios by which, according to Jabir, "everything in the world exists." The remaining numbers in this magic grid 4, 9, 2, 7, 6 add up to 28, which is the number of "mansions" or stations of the moon, and also of letters in the Arabic alphabet. These are the numbers most important to al-Jabir: 17 adds to 8, the esoteric path, which provides the larger "Magic Square of Mercury" made of 8 by 8 squares. This is also the layout of a gaming board with 28 squares around the outside the exoteric or outer path."
"The chessboard is the key," I told Vartan. "Just as my mother said."
Vartan nodded. "But there is more: Al-Jabir invested this ancient wisdom in the symbol of Mercury. Mercury is the only both astronomical symbol of "above" and alchemical symbol of "below" that contains all three important sigils for both: the circle representing sun and the crescent representing moon of spirit, and the cross or "plus" sign, representing the four aspects of matter: four directions, four corners, four elements, four aspects fire, earth, water, air hot, cold, wet, dry..."
"Put them together," I said, "and you have Basque mathematics "four-plus-three-equals-one." The square of earth plus the triangle of spirit equals "One." Unity. Wasn"t that the first gift of Hestia on the tapestry?"
"It was wealth," said Vartan.
"Wealth," I said, "like the "Commonwealth of Virginia," wealth or weal, it means "whole" whole, healthy, holistic, holy. It all means "Unity." "In order to form a more perfect Union." That"s what George Washington, Tom Jefferson, Ben Franklin, what all of them wanted the marriage of heaven and earth, those "s.p.a.cious skies and amber waves of grain." What al-Jabir had already built into the Service of the Tarik"at. That"s the illumination they were all looking for, that New City on the Hill. Not possessing power. Creating balance."
He said, "That"s what you meant earlier, when you said what you thought the message was? When you said it"s not when or where, it"s how?"
"Right," I said. "It"s not a thing, where once you"ve grabbed it and deployed it, you"ll get nuclear weapons, power over others, eternal life. What al-Jabir set down in the chess set is actually a process. That"s why he called it the Service of the Tarik"at The Key to the Secret Way. These are the Original Instructions like trail markers on a path, just as the Sufis and shamans and Piscataway have been saying all along. And if we put all those pieces together and follow those instructions, nothing is impossible. We can set ourselves and the world onto a better path a "way" of illumination and joy. My parents have risked their lives to save this chess set so that it could be used for that higher purpose."
During this, Vartan had set down the book. Now he took me into his arms once again.
"In my case, Xie, if truth is what we"re looking for the truth is that I"ll do whatever you believe is right. The truth is that I love you."
"I love you back," I said.
And I knew that though we would certainly recover the pieces at this moment I didn"t care what else any of the others wanted, I didn"t care about the Game, what it had cost people in the past, or how it might profit us all in the future. I didn"t care what roles others might have chosen for Vartan and me to play, White King or Black Queen. It didn"t matter what they dubbed us, because I knew that Vartan and I were the real thing the alchemical marriage everyone had been looking for these past twelve hundred years, yet couldn"t see when they found it right before them. We ourselves were the Original Instructions.
And for the first time in my life, I felt as if all those ropes that had bound me for so long had been completely cut free, that I could soar into the skies like a bird.
A firebird, bringing light.
Publishing Note.
In the 1980s, I was living in a six-hundred-square-foot tree house in Sausalito, California. Above a sea of acacia trees I had a wraparound view of San Francis...o...b..y, with Tiburon and Angel Island in the distance; eucalyptus trees grew through my front deck; my landlord"s terraced orchid gardens lay on the hill behind me; a thirty-foot-high hedge of night-blooming jasmine bordered the steep drive. That"s where I wrote The Eight, at night and on weekends, on my vintage IBM Selectric typewriter (which I still have in my memorabilia cupboard), while working days at the Bank of America.
I kept asking my friends, "Don"t you think this is the perfect setting for writing a swashbuckling bestseller?" Likely they thought that it was an ideal spot for writing a book that no one would ever buy or read.
But my original literary agent, Frederick Hill, recognized the moment he read The Eight that there were no other books like it. With two interwoven stories set two hundred years apart; sixty-four characters, all pieces in the chess game that was the plot; tales-within-a-tale; Sherlock Holmesian encryption; magic puzzles like Dr. Matrix, The Eight looked more like an intergalactic map of relationships in the universe than a novel. But fortunately, Fred also knew that the publishing team at Ballantine Books, the premier paperback publisher in America, had been looking for a literary property to launch its first-ever hardcover line of books. They wanted something unique neither standard "literary" nor standard "bestseller" fare, something that couldn"t easily be pigeonholed.
The Ballantine team members with this vision were: president Susan Peterson; VP of marketing Clare Ferraro; and editor in chief Robert Wyatt. They acquired The Eight, half completed, in 1987. On March 15, 1988, my editor, Ann LaFarge, and I completed the edit. The book was presented at the American Booksellers a.s.sociation convention in May. We were all surprised by its instant reception, how everyone embraced it as if they"d discovered it on their own. In swift succession, translation rights were acquired by eleven countries; the Book-of-the-Month Club selected the book, author interviews were conducted by Publishers Weekly and the Today show all before the book had even been published here in the United States.
Still, no one knew how to describe it. It was reviewed as a mystery, science fiction/fantasy, romance, thriller, adventure, literary, esoteric, and/or historical novel. As author, I was called the female Umberto Eco, Alexandre Dumas, Charles d.i.c.kens, and/or Steven Spielberg. Over the years The Eight has been a bestseller in forty or fifty countries and has been translated into more than thirty languages largely, to judge from reader opinion, because it is unique.
Readers often asked when I would reprise the plot and characters. But given the interwoven nature of the plot, the kinds of surprises and secrets revealed in The Eight about the characters and the chess set, I thought the only way for the book to remain unique was not to make it into a sequel or a series. But my book, it seems, had a mind of its own; it wasn"t yet through telling its story.
As events in real life unfolded following 2001, as they involved more of the elements of my first novel"s plot oil, the Middle East, terrorism, Arabs, Berbers, Russians, the KGB, chess I knew that I had to revisit the part of the world where the Montglane Service had originally been "invented" by al-Jabir in The Eight: Baghdad.
In 2006, my literary agents, Simon Lipskar in America and Andrew Nurnberg abroad, together convinced me to write the first three chapters of what I"d told them I was planning for the plot and characters in the sequel to The Eight. And the Ballantine team that "lit the match" that brought The Fire to life were: Random House Publishing Group president Gina Centrello; publisher Libby McGuire; and the wonderful Kimberly Hovey, who began twenty years ago as my original publicist for The Eight, who has been publicity director for my other Ballantine books over the years, and who is now Ballantine"s director of marketing.
Finally, I"d especially like to credit my editor, Mark Tavani, for yanking the rug out from under me, in July of 2007, by telling me that I could not just "rest on my backstory" (as we say in fiction) but that I must dive deeper and soar higher.
So I did.
Acknowledgments.
The course of a true book never did run smooth.
As a novelist who would never recognize a smooth path if she saw one, I find that often when you stub your toe against a rock, beneath it you find a pot of gold you"d never have discovered had you been rushing along smoothly, as originally planned. Here I thank as many as possible of those pots of gold who"ve provided pa.s.sion for their work, surprises, and more fascinating knowledge than I ever expected I could squeeze into one novel.
These are listed in alphabetical order by topic.
ALBANIA: Thanks to Auron Tare, director, Albanian National Trust, for our five-year discussion and research on Ali Pasha, Vasiliki, Haidee, Haji Bektash Veli, and the Bektashi Sufi order, the secret weapon that Byron procured for the Pasha; his colleague Professor Irakli Kocollari, for a last-moment synopsis and translation of his landmark book The Secret Police of Ali Pascha, based on original archival sources; Doug Wicklund, senior curator, National Firearms Museum of the NRA, for running to earth the Kentucky repeating rifle, the likely candidate for the "secret weapon" Byron sent Ali.
AVIATION, ALEUTIANS: Thanks to Barbara Fey friend of thirty years, member of the Explorers Club and of the Silver Wings Fraternity (those who"ve flown more than fifty years), who has solo-flown the North Atlantic, Africa, Central America, and the Middle East and has helicopter-skied the Himalayas for the Bonanza and all the technical and fascinating eyewitness input about areas I"ve flown through but have never really seen, and for finding me Drew Chitiea bush pilot extraordinaire and trainer of National Outdoor Leadership School (whose mother, Joan, ran the Iditerod at age sixty-six) who convinced me it should be Becky Beaver, not the Otter, and gave me all the great technical, fuel and refueling, and flight and landing info in which Key is so well-versed; Cooper Wright, who works in Attu for detailed maps and descriptions of flying in the Aleutians and for the great Brian Garfield book The Thousand-Mile War, which describes the weather conditions in World War II.
BAGHDAD: Special thanks to Jim Wilkinson, chief of staff of the U.S. Treasury, for casually mentioning over lunch one day just when I thought I was in the home stretch of writing this book that he"d learned to play chess in Baghdad while he was serving as one of the advance group into Iraq in March 2003. What others think of as serendipity, we in fiction regard as the research writing on the wall. Jim"s valuable input was a critical turning point both for my heroine and for her author. Thanks also for those e-mail addresses!
BASQUES: Thanks to the wonderful Patxi del Campo, former president, World Congress of Music Therapy, for making me familiar with the Basque Pyrenees and a people I thought I already knew; to Agustin Ibarrola, for painting all those trees in the forest of Oma; to Aitziber Legarza, for feeding and housing us; to my late great friend Carmen Varela, for making me spend so much time in northern Spain.
CHESS: Thanks to Dr Nathan Divinsky, past president of FIDE Canada, for finding the chess game upon which this book is based (played by a fourteen-year-old Russian, later world champion) and also for having found that previous game (accurate to the period) played by Rothschild in my book A Calculated Risk; Marilyn Yalom, for conversations about her book Birth of the Chess Queen; Dan Heisman, for being a big support in connecting me with recent goings-on within the chess world and, when Amaurosis Scriptio (writer"s blindness) kept me in the dark about one of my characters for introducing me to Alisa Melekhina (twelve years old at the time) who helped give me rare insight into a child chess compet.i.tor"s perspective on what it feels like to play international compet.i.tion chess.
COOKING: Thanks to the late Kim Young, who won the right to be a chef in Talleyrand"s kitchen at a charity auction (she appears as "the young Kimberly") and who became a lifelong friend sending me gobs of notes on historic kitchens she visited from Brighton to Curacao; Ian Kelly, for chats about his book Cooking for Kings and his fascinating one-man play on Talleyrand"s chef Carme; William Rubel, for his excellent presentation at the French emba.s.sy in D.C., his advice on open-hearth cooking, and his marvelous book, The Magic of Fire, the best treatment I know of in English of the topic; and my friend Anthony Lanier for renovating Georgetown"s Cady"s Alley, creating a great restaurant and a club there that (by serendipity) looks so much like the secret bas.e.m.e.nt of Sutalde.
INDIANS (Native Americans): Thanks to the former head of the Inter-Tribal Council and my friend of nearly twenty years Adam Fortunate Eagle, for introducing me to indigenous reality for the first time; Rick West, founding director of the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) and his wife, Mary Beth, for connecting me with the D.C. area tribes; Karenne Wood, director, Virginia Indian Heritage Trail, for helping to refresh ten thousand years of pre-European history here in Virginia; and Gabrielle Tayac (daughter of Red Flame, granddaughter of Turkey Tayac), for walking the ancient ossuary fields of Piscataway with me and for introducing me through her writings and our conversations to Mathew King, n.o.ble Red Man, and to the Original Instructions.
ISLAM, MIDDLE EAST, FAR EAST: Thanks to Professor Fathali Moghaddam of Georgetown University for our many discussions, his helpful insights, and prepublication papers and books on pre-and post-9/11 terrorist psychology in these regions of the world; the director of the Middle East and Africa Division of the Library of Congress, Mary Jane Deeb (also my fellow novelist and friend), for getting me my first LOC library card and helping me dig out all of Byron"s collected correspondence and a glut of other great stuff; and to Subhash Kak, for his a.s.sistance over the years on all things Kashmiri, and especially for The Astronomical Code in the RgVeda, his connection between Indian cosmology, and fire altars.
MATHEMATICS, MYTHOLOGY, AND ARCHETYPES: Thanks to Michael Schneider, for the Beginner"s Guide to Constructing the Universe and his subsequent workbooks (if I"d had these as a child, I"d be a mathematician today) and especially for finding for me the Islamic phoenixes that fit into the "Breath of G.o.d" tilings in Iran; Magda Kerenyi, for giving me so much "mythological help" over the years and for her many insights into the thoughts of her late husband, the great mythographer Carl Kerenyi; Stephen Karcher, of Eranos I-Ching fame, for information on deep east-west connections and divination; Vicki n.o.ble, for providing me data from three years of her extensive travels and research into female shamanism, especially in eastern Russia; Professor Bruce MacLennan of the University of Tennessee, who has never failed, these past twenty years, to help convert any mathematical puzzle I come up with, regardless of how obtuse or esoteric, into something that will work credibly within a novel; and especially my friend David Fideler, author of Jesus Christ Sun of G.o.d, for telling me so many years ago that 888 (my favorite number) is the Greek gematria (secret numeric decoding) for the name of Jesus, just as 666 is the gematria for mankind; and my friend Ernest McClain, for The Pythagorean Plato and The Myth of Invariance exploring the harmonics of such numbers in the names of the ancient G.o.ds of Egypt and Greece.
MEMORY AND PERCEPTION: First, thanks to Dr Beulah McNab of the Netherlands, for sending me, in 1996, de Groot & Gobet"s Perception and Memory in Chess, still the definitive study, which opened my mind to how chess players think differently than we mere mortals; thanks also to Galen Rowell, the late, great mountaineer and photographer, for his (August 1999) insights, in a private letter, into a similar intuitive process in rock climbing; and thanks especially to my mate, Dr Karl Pribram, for explaining (often under duress) what we know of memory and perception through brain research and how past and future interconnect in our thought processes.
RUSSIA: Thanks to Elina Igaunis for helping all of us Americans to escape from the monks at Zagorsk (and for lending us sweaters in the subzero "Women"s Summer"); and to Richard Pritzker many (mixed) thanks for choosing that Moscow restaurant where, while sipping margaritas, we witnessed an underworld-mob stabbing. Thanks to artist Yuri Gorbachev, for my magical "Bird of Heaven" painting, and to his art dealer, Dennis Easter, for the Russian icon and the David Coomler Russian Icon book. And very special thanks to the late Aleksandr Romanovitch Luria and Professor Eugene Sokolov, for together taking Karl Pribram to the first Soviet Palekh Art Exhibition at Moscow in 1955 and for presenting him with the boxed set of prints of the lacquered art that inspired the first scene of this book.
VOLCANOES AND GEYSERS: Thanks to the Yellowstone Society and all the park rangers and historians for updates on everything from mudpots to volcanoes in my old stomping grounds; the Geyser Observation and Study a.s.sociation (GOSA) and Frith Maier for research and the film of the Kamchatka geysers; and especially to Stephen J. Pyne for his wonderful and definitive series of books on the history of fire that kept on inspiring this book, and to my friend of twenty years Professor Scott Rice of San Jose State University for introducing us.
THE REST: As Nokomis Key would say, if I ever loaded my plate with food that I left uneaten, "Your eyes are bigger than your stomach."
Most of the fascinating research that people have provided me with more than generously over these past many years was, due to the exigencies of plot, unfortunately destined to be relegated to the cutting-room floor, at least for this book.
Thomas Jefferson"s Poplar Forest: Director Lynne Beebe, archaeologists Travis MacDonald and Barbara Heath for decades of research a.s.sistance.
Thomas Jefferson"s Monticello: Foundation president Daniel P. Jordan; William L. Beisw.a.n.ger, Robert H. Smith Director of Restoration; Peter J. Hatch, director of Gardens and rounds; Andrew J. O"Shaughnessy, Saunders Director of the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies; Gabriele Rausse, a.s.sociate director of Gardens and Grounds; Jack S. Robertson, foundation librarian; Mary Scott-Fleming, director of Adult Programs; Leni Sorenson, African-American Research Historian; Susan R. Stein, Richard Gilder Senior Curator and vice president for museum; and especially to Lucia "Cinder" Stanton, Shannon Senior Research Historian, for her many years of research and a.s.sistance.
United States Capitol Historic Society: Thanks to all the foundation people for a.s.sistance over the years, and especially to Steven Livengood for extensive background and a great tour of the Capitol.
Virginia Foundation for the Humanities: Thanks to President Robert Vaughan; Susan Coleman, director, VA Center of the Book; and Nancy Coble Damon and Kevin McFadden of VA Book.
Esoteric architecture, astrology, freemasonry, and design of D.C.: Thanks over many years to authors Robert Lomas and Christopher Knight; astrologers Steve Nelson, Kelley Hunter, and Caroline Casey; and to esoteric architecture experts Alvin Holm and Rachel Fletcher.
Dumbarton Oaks: Thanks to Stephen Zwirn, a.s.sistant curator, Byzantine Collection; and Paul Friedlander for Doc.u.ments of a Dying Paganism on the Hestia Tapestry.
Thanks to Edward Lawler Jr., historian of the Independence Hall a.s.sociation, for his extensive efforts at the President"s House in Philadelphia, which led to saving from obscurity and extinction the slave quarters where Washington"s chef Hercules, Oney Judge, and others lived.