The Lost Symbol

Nola could still recall bits and pieces of the deciphered sections: The information was gathered and transmitted underground to an unknown location. It was totally invisible. hows that possible. they used the earths magnetic field.

Nola had never paid much attention to the sculpture or cared if it was ever fully deciphered. At the moment, however, she wanted answers. “Why are you showing me Kryptos?”

Parrish gave her a conspiratorial smile and dramatically extracted a folded sheet of paper from his pocket. “Voilà, the mysterious redacted document you were so concerned about. I accessed the complete text.”

Nola jumped. “You snooped the director’s classified partition?”

“No. That’s what I was getting at earlier. Have a look.” He handed her the file.

Nola seized the page and unfolded it. When she saw the standard Agency headers at the top of the page, she cocked her head in surprise.

This document was not classified. Not even close.

EMPLOYEE DISCUSSION BOARD: KRYPTOS

COMPRESSED STORAGE: THREAD #2456282.5

Nola found herself looking at a series of postings that had been compressed into a single page for more efficient storage.

“Your keyword document,” Rick said, “is some cipher-punks rambling about Kryptos.”

Nola scanned down the document until she spotted a sentence containing a familiar set of keywords.

Jim, the sculpture says it was transmitted to a secret location UNDERGROUND where theinfo was hidden.

“This text is from the director’s online Kryptos forum,” Rick explained. “The forum’s been going for years. There are literally thousands of postings. I’m not surprised one of them happened to contain all the keywords.”

Nola kept scanning down until she spotted another posting containing keywords.

Even though Mark said the code’s lat/long headings point somewhere in WASHINGTON, D.C., the coordinates he used were off by one degree-Kryptos basically points back to itself.

Parrish walked over to the statue and ran his palm across the cryptic sea of letters. “A lot of this code has yet to be deciphered, and there are plenty of people who think the message might actually relate to ancient Masonic secrets.”

Nola now recalled murmurs of a Masonic/Kryptos link, but she tended to ignore the lunatic fringe. Then again, looking around at the various pieces of the sculpture arranged around the plaza, she realized that it was a code in pieces — a symbolon — just like the Masonic Pyramid.

Odd.

For a moment, Nola could almost see Kryptos as a modern Masonic Pyramid — a code in many pieces, made of different materials, each playing a role. “Do you think there’s any way Kryptos and the Masonic Pyramid might be hiding the same secret?”

“Who knows?” Parrish shot Kryptos a frustrated look. “I doubt we’ll ever know the whole message. That is, unless someone can convince the director to unlock his safe and sneak a peek at the solution.”

Nola nodded. It was all coming back to her now. When Kryptos was installed, it arrived with a sealed envelope containing a complete decryption of the sculpture’s codes. The sealed solution was entrusted to then — CIA director William Webster, who locked it in his office safe. The document was allegedly still there, having been transferred from director to director over the years.

Strangely, Nola’s thoughts of William Webster sparked her memory, bringing back yet another portion of Kryptos’s deciphered text:

IT’S BURIED OUT THERE SOMEWHERE. WHO KNOWS THE EXACT LOCATION? ONLY WW.

Although nobody knew exactly what was buried out there, most people believed the WW was a reference to William Webster. Nola had heard whispers once that it referred in fact to a man named William Whiston — a Royal Society theologian — although she had never bothered to give it much thought.

Rick was talking again. “I’ve got to admit, I’m not really into artists, but I think this guy Sanborn’s a serious genius. I was just looking online at his Cyrillic Projector project? It shines giant Russian letters from a KGB document on mind control. Freaky.”

Nola was no longer listening. She was examining the paper, where she had found the third key phrase in another posting.

Right, that whole section is verbatim from some famous archaeologist’s diary, telling about the moment he dug down and uncovered an ANCIENT PORTAL that led to the tomb of Tutankhamen.

The archaeologist who was quoted on Kryptos, Nola knew, was in fact famed Egyptologist Howard Carter. The next posting referenced him by name.

I just skimmed the rest of Carter’s field notes online, and it sounds like he found a clay tablet warning the PYRAMID holds dangerous consequences for anyone who disturbs the peace of the pharaoh. A curse! Should we be worried?:)