Thrillers in Paradise

by Rob Swigart

  A light trade wind soughed through the branches of black pine against the wooden fence. Koi hung golden and orange in the pond, moving their fins gently. Patria looked up. “Something happened. It’s like the color has gone out. I see it all in black and white and gray.” She bit at her lower lip. “I love Chazz, but…”

  The silence grew, first light, then heavier.

  “I can’t let him touch me,” she said finally. She was looking down again. She pushed her cup away.

  “It will take time. The horror…” Kimiko did not smile or try to reassure her. Patria was glad of that.

  They didn’t talk about it for a time.

  Patria let her hand drop protectively on the side of the stroller, made a circle around her child for a moment. “Yes,” she said at last. “So ugly, all of it. He told the others, the soldiers, he was doing a job, sanctioned. But he meant to kill his mother. That was what he really wanted all along. Not Noel Taviri, but his mother.”

  “What about the women, Richards and the other one?” Kimiko wanted her to talk, now.

  “He hated women. Once he killed her, Jacqueline Guillaume, he was cut loose from whatever bound him to the human. There’s no other way to understand it. He could make people believe. You saw that house. He killed the old woman as if she didn’t count. He painted the walls with those images. He poisoned Cavanaugh, Meissner, the woman in Raïatéa. He killed Duvalois – they got the dental patterns back. His fingerprints were on the jar. It’s like he slipped his gears, was running out of control. Not just ugly, though. Evil. He believed in himself as a bokor, a sorcerer. He thought he was invincible, immortal. He had conquered death, of course. Sex was part of it. Sex is always part of it.”

  “What he did to you, he…”

  “No. I can’t. He didn’t really rape me, you know. Not completely. But it was so… filthy. I can’t stand to be touched, now.”

  “Time.”

  “Maybe. Maybe time. But I’m a scientist. I tell myself I should be able to detach, take the long view. It was all so… interesting, for an anthropologist. But I can’t. I was involved. It touched me. I’m not even sure I can do it any more, my profession. He stole that from me too. He took everything.”

  “Revenge?”

  Patria shrugged then and tried a smile. It almost worked. “He lost an eye, they say. I don’t care. His face is marked too. Revenge? I suppose. He’ll carry the marks as long as he lives. It doesn’t matter. Not now. I can’t go back.”

  She stopped talking then.

  Kimiko spoke. “Have you told Chazz?”

  “He knows.”

  “What will he do?”

  Patria spread her hands on the table. “I don’t know. He doesn’t talk.”

  Fire roared in the sea. Sheets of superheated steam coruscated over the congealing rock, blue flame. Chazz Koenig floated just above the bottom of the sea and watched the end of everything. He thought this was the birth of new land, new promise. But it did not feel that way. It felt like destruction; it felt like the end.

  The octopus clutched his arm. He let the arm hang limply near the reef. The destruction was far enough away, and it was slowing. Soon the volcano would stop its rage. Pele’s rage. She would go back to sleep. The sea would be tranquil again; it would start to work away at the land again.

  A tentacle reached down, a question mark in the sea. The octopus was letting go. Soon it dropped away, settled near the coral. The fire in the water was no threat here. Chazz watched through the glass of his mask as the creature changed color. It was hard to pick it out against the jumble of sand and stone and coral, only the smooth motion of an arm reaching out, uncurling, to clutch at a stone. Then a sudden swift movement and Plato was gone.

  Sometime later Chazz broke the surface. He handed his tanks to a sailor and climbed onto the fantail of the Coast Guard cutter. Commander Shafton stood in a starched white uniform, riding the swells; he reached out and gave Chazz a hand.

  “Thanks.”

  “No problem,” Shafton said. “All part of the service. Everything go all right?”

  “Plato’s home.” He turned away, watching the waves: his name, written in water.

  The officer nodded. “Well, Lieutenant? Shall we go back?”

  Takamura lifted his sunglasses dangling from a black cord around his neck and put them on. He put his porkpie hat on his head and looked at Commander Shafton. “Yes. ‘You can go home decked in the shining garments of success.’”

  Shafton looked down at his brilliant white uniform. “What’s that? Oh, yes. Charlie Chan, of course.”

  Cobb Takamura nodded. A sailor handed Chazz a large white towel, and he began drying his hair. “Got a phone call,” Cobb told him. “Wonderful gadgets on these state-of-the-art federal vessels. The four Frenchmen had hired a dive boat. The captain apparently drowned himself in whiskey after banging his head on the galley counter. Twice. This raises some questions we will have to ask.”

  Chazz grinned. “I never really liked them much.”

  “Nor I. Also, Meissner will recover.”

  “Oh. That’s nice. What about the girl.”

  “Some improvement. They have hopes. And the boy, Danny Cavanaugh. He has amnesia, doesn’t remember what happened to him. But he went home.”

  Shafton said. “It’s all over, then. All’s well now.”

  “Yeah.” Chazz said. “All’s well.” He finished drying himself and tossed the towel into a plastic hamper.

  Shafton gave an order. The cutter made a wide sweeping turn and headed out to sea, back toward Kauai.

  The End

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  Other Books by Rob Swigart

  The Thriller in Paradise Series:

  VECTOR

  TOXIN

  VENOM

  As Well As:

  THE DELPHI AGENDA

  Archaeology Novels:

  STONE MIRROR

  XIBALBA GATE

  Satire:

  LITTLE AMERICA

  A.K.A. A COSMIC FABLE

  THE TIME TRIP

  Science Fiction:

  THE BOOK OF REVELATIONS

  PORTAL

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  About the Author

  ROB SWIGART is the author of one nonfiction book, four electronic fiction titles, and 11 novels, including Little America, declared as “Wildly funny…” by the LA Times, and hailed as a “Bold and brassy… breathless romp with prose that crackles like a live wire, bites like a rabid dog, [and] smooths like 30-year-old Scotch,” by the San Francisco Review of Books. His classic and highly revered interactive novel Portal has attained near cult status as the first ever narrative “game” produced by Activision, published two years later as a hard copy novel by St. Martin’s Press, and heralded as “spooky, audacious, breakthrough science fiction” by Timothy Leary.

  Now a visiting scholar at the Stanford University Archeology Center, Swigart’s most recent books include The Delphi Agenda, as well as two teaching novels, Xibalba Gate, a novel of the Ancient Maya, published by AltaMira,
and Stone Mirror, a novel of the Neolithic, by Left Coast Press. These works weave near-future science fiction with famous and obscure archeological events, melding true fact and fiction as a conscious product of Swigart’s lifelong passion for using narrative to tell stories of the past as found in material records. He is currently working on a nonfiction book about the Neolithic.

  Praise for Rob Swigart

  “Bold and brassy … breathless romp with prose that crackles like a live wire, bites like a rabid dog, [and] smooths like 30-year-old Scotch.”

  —San Francisco Review of Books

  Swigart is one of the few thriller writers with a poetic sense…(who) knows how to give high velocity to an action mystery.

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  THE DELPHI AGENDA

  By

  ROB SWIGART

  booksBnimble Publishing

  New Orleans, La.

  The Delphi Agenda

  Copyright 2012 by Rob Swigart

  All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  First booksBnimble Publishing electronic publication: November, 2012

  ISBN: 9781617506024

  www.booksBnimble.com

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  1.

  Prudence is the knowledge of what is good, what is bad, and what is neutral. Its parts are memory, intelligence, and foresight (memoria, intelligentia, providentia). Memory is how the mind recalls what has been; intelligence is how it ascertains what is; foresight is that by which something is seen before it has occurred.

  —Cicero, De inventione

  Make two into one, inside like outside, outside like inside, above like below. Make male and female into one, so male is not male nor female female.

  —Gospel of Thomas

  Urged on by the buzzing boarding signal, Lisa Emmer, clutching her elbow against her shoulder bag, hurried up the last steps at the elevated Corvisart Metro station and stepped into the first car. The doors had begun to close when someone seized her arm and pulled her back to the platform. Only after the train had started to pull away did she turn. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  But already she knew. The dread came back as if it had never left.

  “Mademoiselle Emmer? Would you come with us, please?” His English was lightly accented but unmistakably Parisian. He pronounced her name in the French way, with an accent over the initial “e”. It sounded like the verb aimer, to love.

  “Who is ‘us?’” she demanded. “And why should I?”

  He smiled politely, showing even teeth. Behind him stood two others with nearly identical gray suits and attentive posture. “I’m so sorry, please excuse me,” he said. “I have been impolite. I am Captain Hugo of the Paris Police.” He allowed her to examine his identification.

  “Any relation?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Victor Hugo. Les Miserables.” She was pushing the fear away. She didn’t want to know what had happened, though tendrils of dread were growing like some kind of vine through her viscera.

  “Distant.”

  “Ah. Am I under arrest, Captain Hugo? Am I accused of a crime?”

  “Ah, no, no, Mademoiselle, not at all.”

  “Am I suspected of being involved in a crime?”

  “No, Mademoiselle.”

  “Well, I am on my way to a meeting, a meeting that is very important to me. So if I am not a suspect or under arrest, I must insist that I catch the next train.”

  “I’m sorry, Mademoiselle.”

  “You detain me? I must ask why.”

  “We require your assistance, a matter of importance.”

  She snapped her gaping mouth shut, feeling like a fool. This too helped push the dread back into the shadows. “The Préfecture de Police needs my help? How is this possible? It says on your identification that you are from the Police Judiciaire, which as I understand it means you investigate crimes. You don’t work on traffic accidents, and anyway I don’t have a car. I study old writing, mostly Greek, Captain, from third and fourth century Egypt. True, we’ve uncovered a few crimes over the years, but they happened almost two thousand years ago, and I think the statute of limitations must have run out…” She was thirty-two years old, an American living in Paris, an ordinary person.

  Captain Hugo did not smile at her attempted pleasantry. “Please, Mademoiselle, this is a grave matter, not to be taken lightly.”

  She bit her lip. The meeting with the Fondation Roullot at the Tour Montparnasse would have to wait, though missing it might damage chances of renewing her grant. And the view of Paris from their offices…. “May I ask what it’s about that I require the intervention of someone of your rank in the Paris Police?”

  The policeman did smile this time. “You are acquainted with our organization, I see. You are also acquainted with Raimond Foix.”

  Here it was, what she had feared most. “Yes. What of it? Has something happened?”

  She looked up and down the deserted platform. In each direction she could see the green canopy of the trees along the boulevard Auguste-Blanqui. The sky was a faultless morning blue, though rain was forecast for later in the day. Rain was always forecast for later in the day. It was summer in Paris, and the rain seldom showed up.

  It was impossible. Nothing could have happened to Raimond. He was as enduring as the pyramids. She had sat transfixed through his amazing lectures on Hesiod, Greek mythology and religion. He had taught her the language, history and philosophy of the ancient world. He had spoken of other things, too – the development of the early Christian church and its conflicts with Manicheans and Gnostics, the Crusades, the many turning points in human history, beginning, she remembered, smiling inwardly, with the origins of butchery and meat eating two and a half million years ago. He had once suggested, she had assumed jokingly, that there had always been, beneath the stream of human history, a hidden, titanic, even epic struggle between two opposing views of the world.

  He was her mentor, and more. He was her friend.

  Captain Hugo cleared his throat. “I’m afraid so, Mademoiselle. Professor Foix is dead.”

  “Dead?” The leaves seemed to acquire a strange quality, as if the color had drained away. A train screeched around the bend from the Glacière station and stopped on the opposite quay. People got off, two or three others hurried up the steps and got on. The train departed and once more both quays were empty. Somehow her bag, with the precious manila envelope containing her grant application, dropped to the platform. She bent to retrieve it.

  “What happened?” she said, straightening.

  “That is what we are trying to determine, Mademoiselle Emmer.”

  “Tell me.”

  “He was assassinated, Mademoiselle.”

  “That’s impossible. He wouldn’t hurt a fly. He was an old man, completely harmless. Wh
o would kill him?” She realized with a start she had already spoken of him in the past tense, as if she half expected this.

  “Please, Mademoiselle. We have a car.”

  She nodded numbly and followed them down the stairs.

  It was Foix who had rescued her from a life of vapid consumption, the life toward which she had been speeding like an arrow, from middle school in the suburbs of Chicago to university in California. One fine fall day in her freshman year she was at the door to the gymnasium for her first practice on the cheerleading team. After all, what else was a homecoming queen supposed to do, even if the high school was in a small suburban Illinois town? It was a natural progression. She was a decent athlete, a cheerful if somewhat shy girl, not small, but compact, with blonde hair and a small dimple on her left cheek she hated. She thought it made her look lopsided. She was unaware of her considerable grace when in motion, but Captain Hugo was not. She had tried hard to know the right brands, wear the right clothes, say the right things, think the right thoughts. It was her way of fitting in, of being like everyone else, a disguise she had perfected through years of effort.

  And then it was all blown away like the last remnants of morning fog. She was reaching for the handle when a voice behind her said, “You can do better than that.”

  Professor Foix was already old, but his cornflower eyes twinkled in their nest of wrinkles. His look was quizzical.

  “I beg your pardon?” She started to open the door.