It was the Great Seal of the United States.
He didn't understand. He flipped over the next pages. They were a mix of typed research notes, sketches, and photocopies of an old handwritten letter. Though the letter's ink was faded, the cursive script was precise, written in French. He read the name to which the letter was addressed, Archard Fortescue . Definitely sounded French. But it was the signature at the end, the signature of the man who wrote the letter, that truly caught Gray's attention, a name known to every schoolchild in America.
Benjamin Franklin.
He frowned at the name, then at Seichan. "What do these papers have to do with the Guild?"
"You and Crowe told me to find the true source of those bastards." Seichan turned and pulled open the door. He noted a flicker of fear pass over her features before she looked away. "You're not going to like what I found."
He stepped toward her, drawn as much by her anxiety as by his own curiosity. "What did you find?"
She answered as she stepped out into the night. "The Guild... it goes all the way back to the founding of America."
May 31, 6:24 A.M.
Gifu Prefecture, Japan
The data made no sense.
Jun Yoshida sat in his office at Kamioka Observatory. He stared at the computer monitor, ignoring the aching crick in his back.
The source of the data on the screen came from a thousand meters below his feet, at the heart of Mount Ikeno. Buried far underground, shielded from cosmic rays that could interfere with detecting the elusive subatomic particles, rested the Super-Kamiokande detector, a forty-meter-tall stainless-steel tank filled with fifty thousand tons of ultrapure water. The purpose of the massive facility was to study one of the smallest particles in the universe, the neutrino-a subatomic particle so small that it held no electrical charge and contained almost no mass, so tiny it could pass through solid matter without disturbing it.
Neutrinos continually shot straight through the earth from space. Sixty billion passed through a person's fingertip every second. They were one of the fundamental particles of the universe, yet they remained a mystery to modern physics.
Belowground, the Super-Kamiokande detector sought to record and study those elusive passing particles. On rare occasions, a neutrino would collide with a molecule-in the detector's case, a water molecule. The impact shattered the nucleus and emitted a blue cone of light. It took absolute darkness to detect that brief, infinitesimally small burst of light. To catch it, thirteen thousand photomultiplier tubes lined the massive water tank, peering into that pitch-black tank, ready to mark the passage of a neutrino.
Still, even with such a huge shielded facility, it was a challenge to find those particles. The number of neutrinos captured by the photomultipliers had held at a fairly steady pace over the course of the year-which was why the data on the monitor confounded him.
Jun stared at the graph on the screen. It displayed neutrino activity over the past half day.