Clue #110 Revisited--The Next Level

In my previous blog post, I incorrectly stated that the term "AURORA" had not shown up as a puzzle solution over this past week; I was unaware that a Doubleday official had confirmed that as the answer to Clue #97. In addition, I asserted that the term "WICKHAM" referred to John Wickham; I was unaware that an official at Doubleday had confirmed that the name as it came up in Clue #107 referred to William Wickham. I am very grateful to the community of readers on this blog for setting me straight on the official answers, and I shall redouble my efforts to provide careful commentary regarding the Dan Brown clues sent out by Twitter. I also apologize to the fine folks at Doubleday for suggesting that they were practicing disinformation.

Having said that, I thought it worthwhile to take each of the puzzle solutions mentioned in Clue #110 to "the next level": that is, to give the background of the entities mentioned in each puzzle solution, and show their connections to other Twitter clues. Additionally, I thought I'd take a stab at showing how each clue might connect with The Lost Symbol. As always, your comments are welcome.

Clue #110

Posted at 4:21 p.m. (PDT) on Friday, August 7th:

Hint: AURORA BABINGTON PLOT BLACK HAND BONIFACE VIII CRYPTONYM DOUBLE CROSS SYSTEM MONOPOLY ROBERTO CALVI SURVEILLANCE WILLIAM WICKHAM

The use of the word "Hint" suggests that all of these items are to be considered as a whole, not just as individual clues. I'll return to that notion later in this post. For the moment, though, let's consider each of these puzzle solutions individually.

Aurora

As I mention in my post about Clue #97, a Doubleday executive, Frank Nelson, confirmed that the answer to this puzzle is "Aurora," explicitly mentioning that this refers to the hypersonic aircraft, the existence of which has been rumored in the aeronautical community for years. In addition, as Sandy Tamayo mentioned on the Dan Brown Facebook fan page, in 1992 Steven Douglas photographed the distinctive 'doughnuts on a rope' contrail that seems to be characteristics of the Aurora; this sighting occurred in Amarillo, TX (the coordinates of which show up in Clue #97), and Sandy mentioned that Douglas' description of the engine noise appears in the May 11, 1992 edition of Aviation Week and Space Technology. (There is also another possibility that I mention below.)

Babington Plot

The Babington Plot was mentioned 'way back in Clue #15, and was mentioned this past week in Clue #95. I have just restored my post on Clue #15, where you can read about the plot itself, and the themes that it brings up -- the most notable one being the theme of failed or broken codes that bring about the downfall of conspiracies.

Black Hand

As I mention in my post about Clue #96, the Black Hand were a real political conspiracy in early 20th century Serbia, a conspiracy that committed a political assassination that set in motion World War I. I hypothesized that, in The Lost Symbol, a group going by the same name might be involved in a conspiracy that could result in global warfare.

Boniface VIII

Pope Boniface VIII (1235-1303), as I mention in my post about Clue #98, held very strong opinions against the separation of Church and State. These opinions were shared by some subsequent popes, including Pope Leo XIII, who in his letter Humanum Genus (1884) faulted the Freemasons for their support of the separation of church and state; in turn, the famous Scottish Rite Masonic leader Albert Pike wrote a response defending Freemasonry from the many criticism of Freemasonry found in Humanum Genus.

I speculated that The Lost Symbol might feature a face-off between some conspiracy that supported theocratic rule (that is, rule of the nation by religious authorities), on the one hand, and some component of the Scottish Rite, on the other.

(There is also another way that Boniface VIII might turn up in The Lost Symbol, as I describe below.)

Double Cross System

The Double-Cross System, mentioned in Clue #92, was the famous system created during World War II by MI5, the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), which is parallel in its function to the American CIA. In this system, almost every German spy sent into British territory during WWII was turned into a double agent, supposedly working for the Germans against the British, but actually working for the British against the Germans.

Double agents have shown up in the Twitter clues before, including Benedict Arnold (Clue #30), Edward Bancroft (an associate of Silas Deane, Clue #42), Robert Hanssen (Clue #51), and Aldrich Ames (Clue #55). In a sense, then, what Clue #92 does is further establish that one or more double agents will show up in The Lost Symbol.

Monopoly

Clue #105 indicates that the "conspiracy objective" -- that is, presumably, the objective of the conspiracy in The Lost Symbol -- is monopoly. Monopoly, of course, means "sole control." However, this leaves up in the air whether this is a monopoly of a commodity (like, say, gold--which is often hinted at in the Twitter clues), or a monopoly of power.

Roberto Calvi

Robert Calvi was found dead, hanging by the neck from Blackfriars Bridge in London, which is shown in the surveillance camera feed featured in Clue #101. Calvi was a member of a renegade pseudo-Masonic lodge in Italy, P2, and featured prominently in a banking scandal where an enormous amount of money vanished, bringing down an Italian bank.

There are at least two points of potential relevance for The Lost Symbol. There may be some renegade Masonic group involved. In addition, the novel may well feature a conspiracy involving a vast amount of money -- such as the Confederate gold supposedly stashed away by the Knights of the Golden Circle (Clue #34). (I mean, come on -- how could you have a vast, powerful, high-stakes conspiracy without a pile of cash to fund it all? Let's be practical here!)

Surveillance

Clue #94 indicates that Surveillance is directed "everywhere, to everyone, at all times." (In passing, I note the use of the ancient Atbash cipher in this clue, which dates back at least as far as the composition of the Jewish Bible.)

Surveillance is a frequent theme in the Twitter clues. The question is: does the Conspiracy merely use surveillance as a method to pursue its ends, or is surveillance itself the very heart of the Conspiracy?

William Wickham

In my response to Clue #107, I present the case that the solution to the puzzle posed in that Clue was John Wickham, a Loyalist during the Revolutionary War who was forced to move to the South after the War, and who went on to defend Aaron Burr in his trial for treason, when Burr tried to found an empire in the West--an example later emulated by the real-life Knights of the Golden Circle.

However, I have had it presented to me on good authority that the Wickham of Clue #107 is actually William Wickham, a British spymaster who worked against the French Revolution. Indeed, perhaps both Wickhams make an appearance.

In either case, the implication for The Lost Symbol involves espionage and back-stabbing galore. There is also another possibility, which I describe below -- immediately below, in fact.

Cryptonym

A cryptonym (as mentioned in Clue #103) is a code name used to disguise an intelligence operation; instead of saying "our plot to restore the Merovingian kings to the throne of France" in your communications to your associates, you can simply say, "Operation Sophie's Choice" and leave your opponents scratching their heads in case they intercept your message.

Of course, cryptonyms can also be applied to places, and to people. As noted in Clue #92, the World War II-era British Double-Cross System pinned names like Brutus, Charlie, Garbo, and Zig Zag on its double agents. And it is in this connection that many of the puzzles summarized in this clue, Clue #110, might have a special meaning.

It is entirely possible that terms like AURORA (or AMARILLO!), BABINGTON, BLACK HAND, BONIFACE, CALVI, and WICKHAM will appear in The Lost Symbol as cryptonyms, code names for people, places, or plans that are of importance in some intelligence operation. ("Tell BABINGTON to report to WICKHAM in AURORA about BLACK HAND's progress on PROJECT BONIFACE." I put these terms in capital letters because the practice in an earlier generation was to capitalize cryptonyms in American intelligence reports.)

Putting the Hints Together: Relevance to The Lost Symbol

Here's one way to put it together:

A secret organization for whom assassination is not too far to go (a Black Hand-like group) is at work to further the cause of implementing a full-scale theocracy in the United States (a Boniface-like agenda), which would give them a monopoly on political power. They are infiltrated by law enforcement or the civilian or military intelligence community, but the infiltrators are themselves double-agents (the Double-Cross System) who use the surveillance capacities of their government agencies -- including the use of classified "Black Triangle" high-performance aircraft -- to further the aims of the Conspiracy. The plot requires immense funds (a la Calvi), and perhaps involves achieving a monopoly on the precious metals market. The Illuminati (either the foes or secret bosses of William Wickham) and/or the current incarnation of the Knights of the Golden Circle (once secretly supported by John Wickham) appear in the novel, either opposing the Conspiracy (the Illuminati) or supporting it (an element of the Knights?). However, the Conspiracy begins to fall apart when its code (perhaps patterned on the Atbash cipher? or the Aurora algorithm?) is broken (like Babington's code). (Of course, we haven't worked in the Revolutionary War era or Freemasonry yet.)

Or it might be nothing like this at all. However, you can see many major potential elements of the novel, summarized in Clue #110.

[Above you see the image of the staircase at St. Mary's Lighthouse on Whitley Bay. Supplied by FreeFoto.com. Copyright (c) FreeFoto.com. The image is used here under the first licensing option offered by FreeFoto.com: use permitted with "attribution to the image and a link back to FreeFoto.com."]

Copyright 2009 Mark E. Koltko-Rivera. All Rights Reserved.

Clue #97: Texas: Aurora sighted in Amarillo

Posted at 9:52 a.m. (PDT) on Wed. Aug. 5th:

Black Triangle sighted near here: 35.202187, -101.835552

Plugging the coordinates of the clue into GoogleMaps yields the address 299 SE 11th Avenue, Amarillo, Texas. Looking at the street photos in this locale, one sees not far off a black truncated pyramid of a building, currently housing Channel 7 television, which one might think could serve as the "Black Triangle" of the clue (although that's not it, as you will see). Amarillo also has the distinction of possessing the only facility for nuclear weapons assembly and dissassembly in the United States, owned by Pantex; surely this could be a plot point in an apocalyptic, highest-stakes-possible thriller -- such as The Lost Symbol could well be.

However, as it turns out, the solution to this clue involves, not the location mentioned in the clue, but the identification of the "Black Triangle" itself.

According to a long-standing and consistent set of rumors, the SR-91 Aurora is a hypersonic reconnaissance aircraft, developed for the U.S. Air Force to replace the famed SR-71 Blackbird. (An artist's conception of the Aurora aircraft is shown above; click for a larger image.) Hypersonic aircraft would be among the ultimate surveillance technologies.

As it happens, one explanation that has been given for years for UFO sightings is that at least some of them are glimpses of test flights of secret high-performance aircraft. In fact, as a reader on this blog -- Machine.Elves -- noted in a comment on another post that, some time ago, there was a famous sighting in Amarillo of evidence of the Aurora aircraft. This alerted my trusty research staff -- directed by, and entirely composed of, my brilliant imzadi y esposa, Kathleen Koltko-Rivera -- to discover Sandy Tamayo's comment on the Dan Brown Facebook fan page, noting that:

On March 23, 1992, near Amarillo, Texas, Steven Douglas photographed the "doughnuts on a rope" contrail and linked this sighting to distinctive sounds. He described the engine noise in the May 11, 1992, edition of Aviation Week & Space Technology.

Thus, the "Black Triangle" of this clue refers to a glimpse of the Aurora aircraft, in Amarillo, Texas. As Machine.Elves also pointed out, what I call the more fringe-y part of the conspiracy community claims that Black Triangle aircraft are being used to further the aims of a grand conspiracy that is attempting to create a New World Order (a phrase which is mistakenly claimed to be the translation of "Novus Ordo Seclorum" on the reverse of the Great Seal of the United States; see my comments on Clue #35). (And a great big tip of the hat to Machine.Elves for bringing this all to my attention, with thanks to Sandy Tamayo.) This solution, the Aurora aircraft, was confirmed by Frank Nelson, an executive at Doubleday, Dan Brown's publishers.

It's not hard to see how this might work into The Lost Symbol. As I mention above, the Aurora aircraft would be cutting-edge technology for surveillance -- for either the forces of good or evil. In addition, however unlikely it would seem to me to do this, the Aurora could be used to transport Robert Langdon around the country at Mach 5.

Incidentally, just to complicate matters further, it is worth noting that there is another way in which the term "Aurora" might work into The Lost Symbol. AURORA is also the name for a cryptographic algorithm, that is, a mathematical system to create a coded message. Developed by Sony and scientists at Nagoya University in Japan, the algorithm is said to have certain weaknesses. This is interesting, given that the Twitter clues for The Lost Symbol include several instances of codes that failed, that is, codes that were broken. These include the Enigma machine (Clue #46) and, especially, the code used in the Babington plot (Clue #15 and Clue #95).

[The image of the artist's conception of the Aurora was created on Jan. 6, 2008, by "Henrickson" with contributions from Bret Danielson. It was obtained from Wikipedia, and is used here under license from the Creative Comons Attribution--ShareAlike 3.0 License, and the GNU Free Documentation License.]

Copyright 2009 Mark E. Koltko-Rivera. All Rights Reserved.

Bonus "Clue 31 1/2": Facebook Post: The Six-Pointed Star

Posted, not on Twitter, but on Facebook, at 10:00 a.m. (EDT) on Tues., July 7th:

Dan Brown's publisher invites you to solve this:

43.027239, -85.634995

44.309355, -105.493126

30.335547, -97.711716

43.027239, -85.634995

47.960962, -97.021637

33.706063, -111.939697

33.819089, -84.355774

47.460962, -97.021637

To the best of my knowledge, it was one of this blog's followers, "Bad News," who originally came up with the interpretation that these were paired geographical coordinates of latitude and longitude (in decimal format), each pair of coordinates thus defining a point.

You will note that the first and fourth pairs (or points) are identical; this suggests to me that the reader is meant to draw a line from the first point to the second, from the second to the third, and from the third to the fourth (which is the same as the first point). In the same way, the fact that the fifth and eight pairs of coordinates are identical suggests to me that the reader is meant to draw a line from the fifth point to the sixth, from the sixth to the seventh, and from the seventh to the eighth (same as the fifth).

Connecting up the points in this fashion creates two intersecting triangles on the map of the United States, illustrated above. The first, downward-pointing triangle connects Grand Rapids, Michigan, to Gillette, Wyoming, and Austin, Texas. The second, upward-pointing triangle connects Grand Forks, North Dakota to Phoenix, Arizona and Atlanta, Georgia. The resulting shape, of course, looks like the largest Star of David or Seal of Solomon in the world.

Wow. Where do we go with this? There are at least two interpretations for this clue, one Masonic, and one technological. (Of course, with Dan Brown, these may both be correct.)

The Masonic Interpretation

It is worth pointing out that this shape recalls Clue #1, part of the solution of which is the phrase, "6 points of the Star of David" -- a shape shown here on a continental scale. In that clue, the phrase was encoded in an initial-letter cipher, a traditional Masonic code in use in the real world for almost three centuries.

Thus, perhaps the six points of the Star of David shown here are meant to have some sort of significance in the context of Freemasonry. Of course, all of these cities have at least one Masonic lodge in it, but that is nothing distinctive; almost every American city of any size has at least one Masonic lodge in it.

As it happens, The Lost Symbol clues indicate that the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry has a special place in the novel. The Scottish Rite offers an additional set of degrees beyond the three degrees of initiation in basic Freemasonry. Scottish Rite facilities are far fewer in number than the lodges of basic Freemasonry, although each of these meeting places ("valleys" in Scottish Rite vocabulary) has a much larger number of members than the typical lodge. We see the seal of the Supreme Council, 33rd Degree, of the Scottish Rite shown in the seal in the center of the cover of The Lost Symbol (Clue #31). In addition, some important symbolism of the Scottish Rite rituals of initiation are evident in some of the Twitter clues, such as the "Christogram" clue (Clue #18).

So, what might the Scottish Rite have to do with these six points of the map? As it happens, 4 of the points (Grand Rapids, Austin, Atlanta, and Phoenix) lie within a 15-minute drive of a Scottish Rite meeting place. A fifth point (Grand Forks) lies within a 45-minute drive. Only one point (Gillette, WY) lies a great distance from a Scottish Rite facility.

It also is noteworthy that 5 of the 6 points are in the territory of the Southern Jurisdiction of the Scottish Rite. (Only Grand Rapids, MI, is in the Northern Masonic Jurisdiction.) This is important because of a quirk in the Dan Brown universe.

Dan Brown uses a great deal of research and background sources to create the world of his novels. For example, in writing The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown created his world on the basis of ideas reported as fact in a work of alternative history: Holy Blood, Holy Grail (by Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln). In writing The Lost Symbol, some Brown-watchers believe that Dan Brown is leaning on at least two other works of alternative or speculative history:

• David Ovason, The Secret Architecture of Our Nation's Capital: The Masons and the Building of Washington, DC (New York: HarperCollins, 2000).
• Warren Getler and Bob Brewer, Shadow of the sentinel: One man's quest to find the hidden treasure of the confederacy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003; the 2005 paperback is titled Rebel Gold).

Each of these books makes claims about a man named Albert Pike, who led the Scottish Rite in the Southern Jurisdiction for many years in the 19th century. In particular, the Getler and Brewer book claims that Albert Pike was secretly in league with the Knights of the Golden Circle (Clue #34) a group that supported the Confederacy during the Civil War. According to Getler and Brewer, Pike helped conceal billions of dollars in Confederate gold for use in a future Civil War.

Getler and Brewer write that they build their case on evidence that is circumstantial. I do not think that this is true. In my estimate, their case does not ascend to the level of the circumstantial. Rather, as I see it, their case is essentially built on speculation, even fantasy. They present not a shred of actual evidence to support their case regarding Pike and his allegiances.

However, this might not matter to Dan Brown. Thus, what we may see in The Lost Symbol is a backstory like the following: During the 19th century, there was a conspiracy where Albert Pike helped the Knights of the Golden Circle to hide billions of dollars in Confederate gold at facilities of the Scottish Rite, especially of the Southern Jurisdiction, facilities that were widely scattered about the United States. In the current day, these billions are now about to be put at the disposal of some contemporary Conspiracy, no doubt for nefarious purposes.

The Technological Interpretation

Flashing forward to Clue #97, we find a reference to a classified hypersonic reconnaissance aircraft, the Aurora, described as a "Black Triangle." On our map above, we have two black triangles. How might these be connected?

The Aurora is estimated at being capable of speeds between Mach 5 and Mach 6 (roughly 3,300 to 4000 mph). If one is going to test fly a hypersonic aircraft like this, one must fly it over immense distances. Each of the triangles on the map above could be traversed in roughly an hour by the Aurora, flying at top speed; this would be a good period of time for a test flight.

Thus, it may be that the map is meant to show the flight paths of two test flights for the Aurora aircraft. In The Lost Symbol, the Aurora might be involved in high-tech surveillance -- or, perhaps in something that was more materially destructive. (How could you shoot down a hypersonic bomber that could outrun any missile sent against it?)

High stakes -- that's what I think will find in The Lost Symbol: the highest of stakes.

[The image of the United States with the intersecting triangles was created by the blog author, working with a public domain image of the map of the U.S. located by Kathleen Koltko-Rivera.]