The Lincoln Deception Read Online Free Page A

War Edwin Stanton on the night before the assassination, and was with Booth the next day. The prosecutors accused him of aiming to kill General Grant but presented little evidence to support the accusation.
    Samuel Arnold’s connection was thinnest of all. Like O’Laughlen, he was part of the original kidnapping plot. Eighteen days before the assassination, Arnold urged Booth to abandon all plans against Lincoln. No evidence placed Arnold in Washington on April 14.
    The four lesser conspirators—Arnold, O’Laughlen, Spangler, and Mudd—went to prison at the pestilential Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas, a sweltering hole surrounded by the Gulf of Mexico. O’Laughlen died of fever there. In early 1869, President Johnson pardoned and released the other three.
    One prominent conspirator was never convicted. Following the assassination, young John Surratt sped to Canada, where Catholic priests hid him. With more priestly assistance, Surratt reached Vatican City in Rome where he enlisted in the Papal Zouaves, a contingent of guards. When a fellow Marylander revealed Surratt’s presence to American diplomats, he fled to Egypt. He was seized on an Alexandria dock in late 1866, still wearing the baggy trousers and brocade jacket of his Zouave uniform. Tried in a Washington, DC, federal court, not before a military commission, Surratt won a hung jury and went free when the government declined to try him again. Newspaper articles attributed the jury deadlock to pro-Southern sympathies. Fraser could think of no better explanation.
    The key witness at both trials was Louis Weichmann, a young friend of John Surratt’s who boarded at Mrs. Surratt’s house on H Street, east of Seventh Street. Weichmann described meetings among the conspirators at the house, particularly between Booth and Mrs. Surratt. The friendship between those two intrigued Fraser. What did the dashing young actor have in common with the Catholic widow in her early forties? Yet she seemed to be Booth’s closest confidante among the conspirators. The others were beneath Booth. Atzerodt and Herold were no more than toadies. Lewis Paine represented brute force. Fraser imagined that Mrs. Surratt and her son dealt with Booth as equals, perhaps owing to their shared connection with the Confederate secret service.
    Late one night, seated in his kitchen with a cold cup of coffee before him, reading yet another book on the conspiracy, Fraser returned to an idea that gnawed at him. During the trial, Mr. Bingham repeatedly claimed that the Confederate government was behind the assassination, but he never backed up the accusation. After the trial, critics scoffed at Mr. Bingham’s claim. Fraser decided that was the most important question. Was Booth’s planetary system part of an even larger system? Was Booth doing the bidding of others?
    If Fraser could figure that out, he could vindicate Mr. Bingham. Fraser would like to do that, but there was more to it. Working on the assassination, he felt something he couldn’t remember feeling: that he was part of the cause his father died for. Having tasted that feeling, he hungered for more of it.

Chapter 3
    C areening along ten miles of bad roads from Cadiz to Adena, Fraser mused that it was too nice a day to lose a leg. Spring had finally come to eastern Ohio, but in the coal mines every season was dangerous. The telegram said: MINE ACCIDENT. LEG CRUSHED. COME SOONEST . Please, he silently asked the god of spring, make it below the knee. He shouted for the horse to pull harder up the hill. He didn’t like to use the stick, but he did like to go fast, and now he had to. “Hah,” he cried. “Hup! Hup!”
    The mine, a new one, was east of Adena. The line of miners’ shacks was uphill from the gash in the earth that swallowed the men every morning. He pulled up at a cabin where people spilled out the door and into the road, just before the mine works. A man reached