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By Root 845 0

circulation, the amount of counterfeit bills produced using electrophotographic equipment was doubling every year. Scanners, ink-jet printers, and computers were developing so fast that they were even beginning to replicate microprinting. Many of the new counterfeiters were teenagers, natural masters of new technology who wanted spending money. They’d run off a few twenties and try to pass them at music stores or McDonald’s. The Secret Service dubbed them “digifeiters,” a name that offered little consolation to elite agents who were now spending much of their time chasing kids. Under pressure from both the Service and the Federal Reserve, the Treasury Department decided to take drastic measures. America’s currency, it concluded, needed a complete overhaul. For the first time in sixty-six years the almighty dollar was going to change.

Treasury formed the New Currency Design Task Force, a group of a dozen men and women led by a bright, career BEP official named Thomas Ferguson who had been skeptical of the 1990 changes as being too moderate. With free rein to design a completely new currency, Ferguson immediately went about implementing security measures the likes of which Americans had never seen. The final product, which Art first glimpsed that day in the bookstore, was the Series 1996 hundred-dollar note, and it was so unlike every other bill before it that Treasury simply called it the “New Note.”

The first change—and the most visually dramatic—was Franklin’s portrait. Using the original Duplessis painting as a guide, BEP engravers enlarged it by fifty percent. The new, “supersized” portrait accommodated much greater detail and line count, making it far more difficult for scanners to render. A straight scan would also produce a “moiré pattern”—an optical effect that turned the portrait’s otherwise muted background into a jarring mess of geometric waves upon printing. Even Franklin’s lapel was microprinted with the words United States of America.

The denomination marks were the next most notable change. As in the portrait, the BEP enlarged them to include fine lines, but the mark on the lower right-hand corner boasted something truly space-age. It was now a bright, metallic green, which changed to black depending on the angle you looked at it. The technology behind it, optically variable or “color-shifting” ink, was based on the same protective film that coats the windows of the Space Shuttle.

There were also many small, less noticeable changes as well. The back of the note—which had long been easy prey for counterfeiters because of its uniform color—also featured fine line, moiré-producing printing in the oval around Independence Hall. There was an extra serial number, a new Federal Reserve indicator, a universal seal, and numbers indicating which plate had been used for production, but these were mostly for internal tracking purposes. Out of all the changes, the one that turned out to be the most effective was one of the oldest printing techniques in the book.

Hold any U.S. bill above a dollar in front of a light source, and as in the moon letters of fantasy novels you will suddenly see a smoky image paralleling the portrait. This is the watermark, a printing technique invented by Italian papermakers in the thirteenth century. Although it was otherwise invisible, unlike the security strip it smacked of mystery, a secret image that was not only incredibly difficult to replicate, but also harkened back to something runic and old-world. There was a little bit of magic in the watermark that caught people’s interest—and that, by far, would be its greatest power.

The New Note was released to the world on Monday, March 25, 1996—less than two months after Art Williams disappeared into the rabbit hole of Texas’s penal system. On that day, hundreds of armored trucks set out from the nation’s thirty-seven Federal Reserve offices. In a wondrous system that has gone on almost every weekday since 1913, their holds were filled with bills meant to satisfy America’s $125-billion-a-day appetite for paper currency. There’s no other