The Theta Prophecy by Chris Dietzel

anyone could accrue wealth from that trade, it took someone with a true acumen for business to turn that money into a fortune. While other fur traders tried to outdo one another, Candenborn saw that the real money was in owning land and lending money for interest. Having watched the fur traders undercut and fight with each other, he was happy to get out and move on to a different industry. He didn’t need to be the best at any one thing; he was happy to be great at many things.
    Now, he had more money than he could ever need. To show this, there were days when he gave everyone he passed on the street a silver dollar, just because he could. He had dined with John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. He owned enough territory on the east coast that if it was all put into one parcel of land, it would be bigger that the state of Massachusetts.
    Although he didn’t need more than he had, he liked knowing he could have more if he wanted it. That was why, when the whispers about Oak Island didn’t die down, the way they had about the rumored sunken treasure off the coast of North Carolina or the bandit’s buried gold in Virginia, he made up his mind to find out once and for all what was there.
    With the amount of money he could throw at the project, it wouldn’t matter if the men continued digging down a thousand more feet underground. Candenborn even told one of his close associates, “Hell, I don’t care if they keep finding those wood planks until they dig straight through to China.” People knew he wasn’t just bragging; he really would spend whatever amount of money it took to find the jackpot.
    The team he sent to Oak Island consisted of twelve men. Ten men to perform the manual labor, one to oversee the project, and one to cook and maintain the camp for everyone else. He would have been willing to pay to have a thousand men sent there to dig the hole, but being practical, knowing that would mean ten men were actively working while the other nine hundred and ninety were sitting around making jokes, he opted for the much smaller team.
    Candenborn, unlike some of the other wealthy men who sent expeditions to Oak Island, even went there with the crew to see the hole for himself. This way, when they found the treasure, he could give his firsthand account of what the island had been like.
    But Candenborn, unlike his predecessors, didn’t have to wait long before his men found something of note. He had only planned to stay at the island for three days before heading back to New York City. But after the first day, his men found something after only digging an additional ten feet.
    When his men, one hundred feet underground, called up to him, he told them he would descend the long ladder to see what it was for himself. As he descended into the dank, mosquito-ridden hole, he fully expected to find that his men had uncovered yet another set of the wood planks that the other searchers had found every ten feet.
    Even so, he wanted to look at them personally before they were disturbed. He knew better than anyone that success came by paying attention to the details that other men would overlook. Stories had spread about charcoal markings next to some of the planks, yet no one had taken time to record if they had been words, numbers, or symbols, and so they were lost to time. The same mistake wouldn’t happen on his watch. He hadn’t become a millionaire, an obscene level of wealth in those days, by ignoring subtle signs that other men didn’t even realize were there.
    Maybe the earlier crews, in their haste to become filthy rich, had missed an important message when they tore up the wood planks rather than taking the time to figure out why the person who put them there had written on some of them. These were the things that only a man who already had obscene wealth would slow down and look for. After all, although he was excited to find a genuine chest of pirate booty, he was already one of the five richest men in the country. What was