Franklin Affair by Jim Lehrer

Through the window on the oven door, he watched; after fifteen seconds he retrieved it. The paper was warm but not damaged in any way. He could only hope that the paper from the eighteenth century would react the same way.
    Page one of the real thing: onto the cookie sheet, into the oven. R watched through the window. Words were appearing. He waited a full minute before removing the sheet. He set it on the kitchen counter. There were now words and numbers literally all over the piece of paper.
    Page two—again, and again, and again—he repeated the process for each of the twelve sheets of paper.
    After waiting until the pages were completely cooled to room temperature, he carried them carefully—one at a time—back to the top of Wally’s desk. And then, with the occasional help of Wally’s high-powered magnifying glass, he read each and every word, number, and mark.
    He read quickly, not for detailed content but for an overview, to get a cursory feeling for authenticity and for what these papers were really all about.
    His first conclusion was that everything had been written by the same person. Both the visible and the once invisible words were in the same handwriting. Although certainly no expert, he had read enough eighteenth-century letters to be pretty sure.
    The second conclusion: the writer was somebody who had been active in spying during the Revolution or, at least, was a serious student of the spycraft of the time. There was the patterned separation of what appeared to be a confusing chaos of words but which, when put together, formed the intended phrase or sentence. There was also the most common numbers game. He saw
120
several times. That, as R and all Franklin scholars knew, was the code number for Ben in some of the dispatches he sent and received while in Paris during the war. Adams’s
68
was also there, as were the known numbers for Washington, Hamilton, and Madison. That was in addition to the more straightforward references to them by their initials, which Braxton had picked up from his reading, as well as to their code names. Ben’s was
Light.
    So—conclusion number three—these twelve pages definitely had to do with the leading Founding Fathers.
    Number four: There was no reference, in numbers or initials, to Jefferson. Why not? There were two sets of numbers that appeared to be dates in 1788. Jefferson, R knew, was in France in 1788 as the first official ambassador of the United States of America. That might explain his absence from these papers.
    Number five: Ben was the main focus. R counted twenty-four mentions of his code numbers, name, and initials in the twelve pages. Adams was a remote second with ten. The others had fewer than half a dozen mentions; there were only two for Washington.
    Number six: A crime had been committed—or at least alleged. That crime, as Wes Braxton had said, involved a woman.
    R set down the magnifying glass and got up from the desk.
    He needed a break. He needed to stop.
    Wally always kept a bottle of calvados, the French brandy made from apples, in the house. With a wink to let you know he knew better, Wally claimed it was Ben’s favorite drink when in Paris. Ben was not known as a consumer of any alcohol but wine. Wine merchants have long made hay with Ben’s quote: “Wine makes daily living easier, less hurried, with fewer tensions and more tolerance.” On the other hand, Ben often claimed his relative abstinence was a key reason for his long life.
    Whatever the truth about Ben’s drinking habits, R poured an inch of calvados into a brandy glass and began an aimless pace around the room. He paid no attention to any of the books or any of the Ben stuff. His eyes were not functioning, only his brain, his conscience.
    Why go on? Why know any more? Why, why, why?
    R took two small sips from the glass and made three complete trips around the room before returning to the desk.
    The break was over. It was either