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The story began in 1820 when Thomas J. Beale rode into Lynchburg, Virginia, and checked in at the prestigious Washington Hotel. Handsome and charming, Beale spent the winter in Lynchburg, befriending the innkeeper and wooing the ladies. He left town in March, as quickly and mysteriously as he came, and he wasn’t heard from again for nearly two years.

He returned to spend another winter in 1822, enchanting the town once again with his winsome personality and unmatched attractiveness. This time he left a locked iron box containing “papers of value and importance” with the innkeeper. The innkeeper placed the box in a safe and didn’t think much more about it until he received a letter from Beale two months later.

It contains papers vitally affecting the fortunes of myself and many others, Beale wrote. Should none of us ever return, you will please preserve carefully the box for the period of ten years from the date of this letter, and if I or no one with authority from me during that time demands its restoration, you will open it, which can be done by removing the lock. You will find . . . papers which will be unintelligible without the aid of a key to assist you. Such a key I have left in the hand of a friend in this place, sealed and addressed to yourself, and endorsed not to be delivered until June 1832.

Beale never passed through Lynchburg again, and his friend never sent the key. Absent the key, the innkeeper saw no point in opening the box, until his curiosity won out in 1845, more than twenty years after he last saw Beale. The box contained three enciphered pages of numbers, together with a note from Beale in plain English.

In the note Beale explained that he and some friends had struck gold near Santa Fe during the summer of 1820. He made two trips to Lynchburg to bury the treasure and then enciphered the three notes included in the box. The first note set forth the location of the treasure. The second note contained a description of the treasure. The third note listed the relatives of the men who should receive a share of the treasure.

For twenty years the innkeeper tried to decipher the notes without a key, but his quest ended in failure. When he turned eighty-four, the innkeeper conceded defeat and realized that the secret of the Beale ciphers would die with him if he didn’t tell somebody. He entrusted the Beale ciphers to an anonymous friend, who in turn tried his hand at solving the ciphers for another twenty years. Miraculously, he was able to solve the second of the ciphers, revealing the description of the treasure with a twenty-first century value of more than twenty million dollars. But he could never crack the first cipher, the one containing the location. And so, more than twenty years after he first obtained possession of the Beale ciphers, the friend decided to turn over custody of the matter to the world.

In 1885 this man anonymously published a pamphlet titled The Beale Papers. He refused to reveal his own name, “to avoid the multitude of letters with which I should be assailed from all sections of the Union, propounding all sorts of questions . . . which, if attended to, would absorb my entire time. . . . I have given all that I know of the matter [in this pamphlet] and cannot add one word to the statements herein contained.”

The pamphlet contained copies of the Beale ciphers and detailed their history. The author also described how he had solved the second Beale cipher after years of work. He initially assumed that the page contained a substitution cipher, with various numbers being substituted for letters of the alphabet. Since the code contained numbers as large as 807, the author assumed that Beale had done what Edgar Allan Poe and numerous others had done to defeat frequency analysis—used several different code symbols to stand for the more popular letters.

One popular way to create a key for such a cipher had been through the use of a book cipher. In this type of cipher, a code maker would first number the words in a book or document. The first word would be number one, the next word number two, and so on. That number would always refer to the first letter of the word that matched the number.

By applying this analysis, the author of the Beale pamphlet discovered that Beale had used the Declaration of Independence as the key for the second Beale cipher. But the first Beale cipher, the one that contained the location of the treasure, did not prove so easy to crack.

And still today, more than one hundred and twenty years after publication of the Beale pamphlet, the biggest computers and brightest minds have been unable to solve the cipher that holds the key to a buried treasure worth twenty million dollars.

Until now?

Even at seven o’clock in the morning, Nikki grasped the significance of this piece of history. The mention of twenty million dollars could wake a girl up fast.

“Judge Finney used the beginning of Beale’s first cipher, number for number, as his key for chapter 7,” Wellington explained. He looked at the page again, with a sleep-deprived trance that Nikki found unnerving. “Which means that the judge must’ve cracked a cipher that most cryptanalysts concluded was impenetrable.”

Nikki tried to blink herself fully awake. Her boss? A millionaire? A multi-multimillionaire?

“And,” Wellington continued, dejection creeping into his voice, “it means that unless we can solve the first Beale cipher, we might never be able to decrypt the message Finney sent on TV last night. The key to the Beale cipher might die with him.”

“Have you got any coffee?” Nikki asked.