She asked the receptionist in the museum’s lobby if she could see D. Grover Harris. A few minutes later, she was approached by a skinny, mop-headed young man dressed in jeans. He shook Angela’s hand.

“Hi, Angela,” he said with a bashful grin. “Nice of you to come all this way.”

“No problem, Deeg. Thanks for seeing me.”

Angela had met Deeg at a convention of puzzle fans. They had hit it off immediately. They were both geeks. Deeg was pleasant and good-looking, and impossibly bright. And like Angela, he was low on the institutional ladder. He ushered her into his cluttered office and offered her a seat. The space was hardly bigger than a closet, confirming Harris’s bottom status on the agency’s food chain.

Harris settled behind a paper-covered desk that would have been considered a firetrap by any competent inspector. “You sounded pretty excited on the phone. What’s going on?”

Angela unlocked the briefcase. She extracted the Jefferson file copies and handed them over to Harris without comment. He scanned the pages and found the perforated cardboard on the bottom of the stack. He held it to the light and then placed the cardboard over a page.

“This wouldn’t be a cipher grille, would it?”

“I was hoping you could tell me,” Angela said. “You’re the expert on codes and ciphers.”

“I’m just an aspiring expert who’s been taking courses at the NationalCryptologicSchool.”

“That’s good enough for me,” Angela said. The NSA school trained people from all government departments in the fine points of cryptographic analysis.

“Don’t sell yourself short. You’re the one that picked up on this,” he said. “What can you tell me about it?”

“I think it was misfiled by subject. It should have gone into a Thomas Jefferson file.”

He sat bolt upright in his chair. “Jefferson?”

“Uh-huh. I’m pretty sure the handwriting is his. I’ve compared it to the Declaration, and there’s a small TJ in the lower right hand corner of the cover page.”

He held the page up to his face and let out a soundless whistle. “Jefferson. That would make sense.”

“I’m glad to hear you say that,” Angela said with a sigh of relief. “I was worried that I’d be wasting your time.”

“Hell, no!” Harris shook his head. “Most people don’t know that Jefferson was an accomplished cryptologist. He used ciphers to communicate with James Madison and other government figures. He became proficient at codes and ciphers when he was minister to France.” He rose from his chair. “C’mon. I’ve got something to show you.”