Lost Empire (Fargo Adventures 2)

Sam replied, “It’s spatial mathematics—curved surfaces, deformed areas. The Mobius strip is a good example.”

“Then it’s no surprise Blaylock had a thing for the Fibonacci spiral. Sorry, Julianne, go on.”

“A month after he graduated, he was hired by the War Department.”

“As a cryptologist,” Remi predicted.

“Right. By all accounts Blaylock was a genius. A prodigy.”

Sam and Remi looked at each other. Given the references to the Fibonacci sequence and the golden spiral they’d found in Blaylock’s journal, they’d wondered if there were more to the journal than met the eye. Namely, hidden messages or codes. Over the years they had learned many things about those who hide and hunt treasure, but one lesson stood above all: People will go to extraordinary lengths to keep their obsession from prying eyes. If this were true in Blaylock’s case, he would likely use the method he knew best—mathematics and topology.

Severson continued: “A few days after Fort Sumter was attacked in April 1861, Blaylock quit his job and joined the Union Army. After initial training he emerged as a second lieutenant and was immediately thrown into the fray, fighting throughout July and August in several battles: Rich Mountain, Carrick’s Ford, First Bull Run. Apparently he proved himself much more than your average math nerd. He was promoted to first lieutenant and acquired a chestful of medals for gallantry.

“The following spring, in 1862, he was transferred to the Loudoun Rangers and served under Samuel Means, who was in turn under the direct aegis of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. Sam, as you already mentioned, the Loudoun Rangers were the equivalent of a modern-day Special Forces. They worked in a small unit, behind enemy lines, living off the land, conducting raids, sabotage missions, and intelligence gathering. They were a tough bunch.

“Shortly before the Rangers were absorbed into a regular army unit in 1864, Secretary Stanton tapped Blaylock and a few others for recruitment into the Secret Service. A few months after that Blaylock surfaced in Liverpool, England, under the name Winston Lloyd Babcock, where he worked undercover for a man named Thomas Haines Dudley.”

Sam said, “Lincoln’s spymaster.”

“You know him?” Severson asked.

“I’ve read a few books where he’s featured. He was Quaker, as I recall. U.S. Consul in Liverpool. He ran the Secret Service spy network in the UK.”

Severson added, “He had almost a hundred agents, all of whom were dedicated to stopping the covert flow of supplies from Great Britain to the Confederacy. While England was officially neutral during the war, there were a great many Southern sympathizers, both in and out of the government. Care to guess what Blaylock’s primary assignment was?”

Remi answered; both she and Sam had been reading between the lines. “The reflagging of merchant ships for Confederate Navy use,” she said.

“Right again,” replied Severson. “Specifically, Blaylock ran a cell that was focused on a ship called the Sea King—later known as the CSS Shenandoah.”

“The one that got away,” Sam said. “Not only that but got away and spent the next nine months wreaking havoc with Union shipping until after the end of the war.”

Severson continued: “For Blaylock it was a personal and professional disaster.”

“Professionally?” Sam repeated. “Was he reprimanded? Relieved of duty?”

“I found no evidence of that. In fact, quite the opposite. Thomas Haines Dudley was an avid supporter of Blaylock’s. He wrote several glowing evaluations of him. In an 1864 letter to the chief of the Secret Service, William Wood, he called Blaylock ‘one of the finest agents I have had the pleasure to have in my employ.’ I suspect Blaylock simply took the failure so personally that it impacted his work. Two weeks later he boarded a ship in London for the return voyage home. When he got there he discovered that his wife, Ophelia, had died while he was in transit. In a bit of tragic irony, she’d been killed during a raid by a Confederate guerrilla band known as Mosby’s Rangers—one of the very units Blaylock had fought against during his time in the Loudoun Rangers.”

“My God,” Remi whispered. “That poor man. Do we know whether Ophelia had been the target? Did Mosby and his men seek her out because of her husband?”

“It doesn’t appear so. By all accounts she was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“So not only did Blaylock come home in disgrace, but he came home to find the love of his life snuffed out,” Sam said. “Remi, I’m starting to think the malaria was only part of his mental problems.”

“I agree. It’s understandable.”

“As is his obsessive personality,” Severson added. “Selma e-mailed me the ship sketch he did. To rename a ship after a woman . . .That’s true love.”

Remi asked, “Julianne, did they have children?”

“No.”

“What happened after he got home?”

“There’s not much to tell. I found only one record of him. In 1865 he was hired by a newly founded school called the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It appears Blaylock settled back into civilian life as a math teacher.”

“Until March 1872, when he resurfaced in Bagamoyo.”

“And four years after the Shenandoah was sold to the Sultan of Zanzibar,” Remi said, then added wryly, “a mother of all coincidences. Unless Blaylock’s grief had turned to rage. The Shenandoah got away on his watch and his wife died in the process. If he was actually insane, he may have somehow come to blame the Shenandoah for his loss. It’s a stretch, but the human mind is a mysterious thing.”