by Rob Swigart
“They’re watching for us,” she said.
“I would be. Does it matter?”
“Not really, I’m just curious. This is it.”
“How does it feel?”
Her laughter was tight and short. “Uncertain. Momentous.”
“Some Pythia,” he murmured in mock pity, touching her cheek.
She started to push his hand away, but clasped it instead, fingers laced through his. “They won’t understand, will they? They think the Delphi Agenda predicts the future. That’s not the way it works, not at all. The Pythia sees the future, sees all the possible paths.” She turned to him. “Listen, Steve, this is important. You must hear me. I know why the Church has been afraid all these years, why the Order exists, why they have been so implacable in fighting this war, and why they kept it secret even from the people who fight on their side.”
He waited calmly for her to continue.
She did.
“It goes back a long way, Steve, before the Delphic Oracle, before the Old Testament. It’s as ancient as mankind. It’s a secret in plain sight. Our ancestors wandering the forests of old Europe, and before them throughout Africa, in Asia, Australia, everywhere, knew it. There are people who can see, always have been. Gradually, as we gathered into cities, built states and empires, we lost the truth. It became a dangerous technology to those with power, then a dangerous idea. A heresy. In the Middle East it was called the Messiah Medicine, an oil or unguent the initiated spread on their bodies. It gave them the gift if they were open to it. Moses knew about it. The kings of Israel, the early Christians, they still had it in diluted form. It was called the Messiah Medicine.”
“Drugs?” Steve asked.
She shook her head. “A substance, certainly, something that facilitated transformation. But the ability is in everyone. Raimond taught me using drugs once. I had to go back there this afternoon. Now I know. The Messiah Medicine, the unguent, whatever form it took didn’t matter. What matters is what it shows. The future in all its crazy and terrifying reality.”
She took his hand between hers. “A Pythia, or a Pythos…. Anyone can be one. It just means letting go, letting the truth in. And the truth is, that when a person truly sees, that person becomes a god.”
“Are you saying…?”
“What if everyone could see the future? The Church would cease to exist. All that truth would change the way people think and act. The Church, all churches, would cease to exist. They would no longer have a monopoly on truth. Of course they have tried to destroy. We are their worst enemy. They offer consolation in return for faith. We offer a path to ecstasy, to true understanding. With that, the world would change forever.” She paused. “The world will change forever. We are going to give this gift to the world. It is that the Order of Theodosius has been fighting to prevent, that has driven the Delphi Agenda under ground, blocked it every chance it had, prevented Bruno from releasing it. It is the same thinking that killed Hypatia even though she wasn’t a Pythia. She knew we lived in a world of complexity. The priest of Apollo knew it and said so. Complexity means that the world and its systems are non-linear and unpredictable. This does not mean it’s random or chaotic, it means that it is surprising. The world is ready for a surprise, don’t you think?”
“I don’t know,” he confessed. “It sounds dangerous.”
She tried a laugh, but it had no force and quickly died. “Of course it’s dangerous. The Order knows this, and tries to prevent it. Listen, Steve, listen carefully. The Oracle at Delphi, the actual Pythia, was always a woman, over fifty. She was celibate. She went into trance and babbled. The priest interpreted the babbling in perfect hexameters. ‘Trust the wooden walls.’ ‘Cross the river and a great empire will be destroyed.’ The oracles are always ambiguous; they have to be. If you believe an oracle and act on it, you change the future. When you do that, your prediction is false. If you don’t act, disaster overtakes you. Everything is contingent, uncertain. Even when a Pythia knew prediction was impossible because knowing the future changes it, a combination of insight, intuition and knowledge could set certain things in motion. The Oracle was successful because partial as their methods were, they worked out often enough to be useful. Colonies were founded, people recovered from diseases or formed successful alliances because of what the Oracle told them.”
“So we’re in the dark, like everyone else? The Pythos, the Pythia, is a fraud, it’s all flimflam, like the Wizard of Oz?”
After a long silence she said, “No. The Founding Document is the beginning of a centuries-long experiment, an attempt to recover and improve on what shamans have always done, even if dimly, as through a veil, or in a mirror, darkly. We can gain insight, to see in, and thus to see out, but to do that we have to destroy what we are, or think we are. First, they took something from Thomas, though it’s as likely Thomas took it from them: ‘Make male and female into one.’ For hundreds of years only mature women could be a Pythia. Being a Pythia is a state of mind, and to be truly effective it must transcend gender, culture, and context. It requires a detached point of view at a very high level. The Pythia could never have a family, a lover.”
Steve regarded her solemnly. “Are you telling me they bred people for the role?”
She touched him on the cheek. “It wasn’t quite like that, but remember the Camondo Stair, the double helix? They were looking at genetic lines. There have always been people who find it easier to enter trance in order to see what is hidden.”
“A hundred years before the discovery of DNA?” He was skeptical.
She spread her hands. “There it is. They may have been breeding people, too, but they were certainly searching for the right genetic profiles. After the high priest of Apollo met with Hypatia they formalized the search. Records go back sixteen hundred years. We’ll have Ted and Marianne check. If they’ve been doing this since before Hypatia was killed, there must be an incredible database by now.”
“So Raimond Foix was looking for you? He knew you were the one?”
“I don’t know if I was the one. There must be others. I believe Sister Teresa was one, and knew it. I think she hated Raimond because he didn’t choose her. And he knew all about me long before we met. The Delphi Agenda organization is global, they knew the genetic lines, so they watched, they judged. Bruno had it; so did Raimond. It was nonsense, all that mythology about the Pythia having to be a virgin: Bruno loved a wench when he could get one. That’s all window dressing, like the Vestal Virgins, who now that I think about it may have been part of the Delphi Agenda.”
“But you’re a woman, Lisa, not some kind of hermaphrodite. What’s this about making male and female into one?”
“Being able to see – no, to feel – both sides. Many systems of thought divide the world in two parts. The I Ching: yang and yin, odd and even, right and left, masculine and feminine, light and dark. There’s a bias built into the very nature of the lists. We begin with light, for instance, and so assert its primacy over darkness. Or right, which curiously enough is located on the left side when we read the list, at least in western scripts. But the universe knows no such biases. All exists, all is one. The Pythia must be able to see that way. Do you understand?”
“I’m not sure.”
“My fugue states are part of the solution. They allow me to see alternative experiences, points of view, all at the same time. It’s one of the ways of making male and female into one.”
“All right. How does this all relate to the future?
“Prudence,” she said. “Memory, intelligence, and foresight. I keep saying it, because it’s in the documents, in everything Raimond left for me. First, I have to trust myself. I can see the future. With prudence I can see the outlines of what I need to do. This,” she paused, “art requires a very broad and long view of the future. It means seeing humanity as a flow, a complex dynamic system of billions of particles, interacting with the earth, the solar system, the entire universe. I can’t say with certainty what will happen tonight.
I can say that in spite of that we have to go, for Alain, for the Delphi Agenda, for us. We have to release the Messiah in everyone and for that to happen, the Order must disappear.”
“I just hope you don’t end up like Bruno.”
“Bruno saw what was coming. He knew what had to happen, and he told us. The human world will disappear unless we act.”
She held onto his hand and lapsed into silence.
Shadows had gathered under the trees when she asked, “How long?”
He looked at his watch. “Soon.”
She climbed in the passenger seat. He slid behind the wheel and she took his hand again. They sat side by side, staring through the trees at the dark ruin in silence. Once he started to hum a tune and stopped abruptly. He looked at her.
She had closed her eyes. Her head, tilted back, was completely relaxed. The worry lines in her brow and tight lines at the corner of her mouth were gone. He saw her as she must have been at seventeen, when Raimond Foix first approached her.
There was in her face such innocence. She was a budding scholar about to devote her life to something small and safe. Raimond had seen then something she couldn’t have seen herself, that she was going to be the Pythia. Did he already know she would be his successor, and that the great confrontation between two traditions would occur in this peaceful French countryside?
Her hand fell open, releasing his. He suddenly realized that what he felt toward her was envy.
A small, nondescript car motored past well under the speed limit. The driver waved out the window. His hand seemed to stir the turgid air.
Marianne was in the passenger seat, staring straight ahead. She wore a bonnet. She and Ted could be farmers returning from market. They most certainly were not a pair of librarians working for the Delphic Oracle. He drove slowly because of the heat.
Steve saluted. Ted raised his thumb. The car vanished behind a grove of plane trees. Steve watched the road beyond the trees, but the car did not reappear. It would be hidden now, out of sight of the abbey.
“Time,” he said aloud.
Her eyes opened.
“Who are you?” he asked.
She blinked. “Lisa Emmer. Why?”
“Just wondering.” He started the engine and turned onto the abbey road.
53.
Philippe Dupond’s sweat-slick palms threatened to slide off the wheel every time he took a turn. He wiped them on his thighs. He was sure if he didn’t speed he’d arrive too late. Every time this fear arose he pressed harder on the accelerator.
Though he maintained it well, his rusty Peugeot shuddered, the tires whined when he took the turns, and the air-conditioner labored against the intolerable heat. The car just wasn’t built for high-speed chases, and this was a high-speed chase.
Emmer and Viginaire were ahead of him on the road. He had seen to that. He’d warned them the police were after them.
He didn’t want either Hugo or the Prior General to get them, not until he had a plan. They had escaped the safe house and disappeared. It wasn’t until he called Washington that he learned they were on their way, just as Defago and the nun had planned. If the Order lured them to the cellar, Dupond would have to get past the Prior General and that thick-necked “secretary” of his to rescue them. Without a rescue he saw his future crumble; he would have nothing to sell, no bargaining chip.
He touched the butt of his Manurhin MR 93 service revolver. It was no more effective than the nun’s Glock, but at least it wasn’t less so. The feel of it was reassuring.
He couldn’t be late! Already they’d snatched Alain, Rossignol’s attendant, from the hospital. He had to hurry. If he failed this time that fat priest was going to get it all. He would instantly become unemployable at best. At worst he would die.
What about the Church? Shooting inside the royal tombs would be very bad press. Would the Vatican attempt to cover it up, deny the existence of the Order, stonewall while the monk and nun disappeared? They could say the nun was a fraud and had nothing to do with the Church. Could it make that stick? Did it have that kind of power?
They must believe speed more important than stealth, or that it no longer mattered if they were careful. They would get Lisa and Steve and disappear. Neither one would be seen again.
It made no sense either way. The massacre at St. Denis had exposed the Order. It was a huge mistake. It had been so public, and so unnecessary. Innocents killed and wounded. A national monument damaged, the police involved, an international incident. They should be more concerned about security than ever.
He had to admit they probably did have the power. He also had to admit the Vatican might not know about the Order at all.
Still, none of it made sense. This secret conflict had been going on for a long time. Emmer had something both the agency and the religious people wanted very badly. If he had it, he would have leverage.
They must plan to finish this and disappear, the monk and the nun. He increased his speed. What if they had taken Emmer and Viginaire and the abbey was deserted? What if he was too late?
It was unthinkable. Yet he thought it.
He was passing the bridge across the river when there was a frightening thump and the car began to stutter and slew wildly toward the right. He slammed on the brakes and came to a halt with the hood humming in the thick shrubbery of a ditch. In his wake a trail of black smoke hung in the still, humid air like a line of old, soiled laundry.
He was looking at the flat tire when an enormous black SUV with two grim-faced men in the front seat roared past. When the sound of the SUV had faded to silence he opened his trunk and yanked out the jack.
* * *
At 7:46 p.m. Lt. Mathieu telephoned his chief at home.
“I’m preparing dinner,” the captain told him. “Can’t it wait?”
“Viginaire’s car was photographed passing the Arc de Triomphe, sir.”
“Which way was it going?”
“West. I’ve alerted the Yvelines gendarmerie.”
Mathieu could sense rather than hear Hugo summoning patience as if it were a high-order demon.
“And at what time was the car so photographed, Mathieu?”
“Just before eighteen hundred, sir. It took nearly two hours to confirm. Something about the software…”
“Of course,” Hugo said bitterly. “Always the software. I’ll be there in twenty minutes. And order up a couple of SWAT people from RAID to go out there. They’re probably bored and would like a little excitement.” RAID stood for Recherche Assistance Intervention Dissuasion; Research, Assistance, Intervention and Deterrence.
Mathieu hung up. He had hoped it wouldn’t come to this. His boss was especially irritable when he missed dinner.
* * *
The sky had turned a luminous pearl and suede along the tree line and painted an opaque sheen on the river, giving the water a mute, frozen look. Insects hummed and thrilled in the dry weeds. The heat was vicious.
The great hulk of the abbey was shrouded in gloom. Heat shimmered over the plastic debris and broken shards of green and transparent glass in the yard and gave an impression of false life to the blank façade of the squat gray warehouse beside the ruin. The spray-painted graffiti “SPIKE” faded with the light and suddenly winked out.
Steve and Lisa stood by their car. The engine ticked, struggling to cool down. They examined the cracked concrete path to the door. No lights were visible.
Lisa leaned down and blew gently on the pen in Steve’s shirt pocket. There was an answering huff from a tiny speaker set into it. “We’re going in,” she said. “The speaker will be off so we won’t be able to hear you. Any last words?”
Ted’s tinny voice wished them luck. Lisa glanced toward the wood but saw nothing but trees.
Steve twisted the cap and the speaker went dead.
They started toward the door. Lisa sang, “There’s a light/Over at the Frankenstein place…”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The Rocky Horror Picture S
how,” Lisa whispered. “Brad and Janet lost at night come to a mysterious castle. You never saw it?”
“No.”
“Never went to the theater at midnight with an umbrella? Never sang Time Warp?”
“Sorry.”
She shook her head sympathetically. “You were deprived, Steve Viginaire. One day we’ll have to go. You can still see it at midnight sometimes, even in Paris.”
“You’re kidding.”
She pulled the chain and they heard the melancholy peal of a distant bell inside. “Dr. Frank-N-Furter. Very creepy, very funny.”
“Yes, I see.”
He didn’t see at all, she knew that. She was nervous, just making small talk, waiting in front of the door to the castle of the evil prince. There were too many variables and too much was at stake and no turning back.
Unless the door remained closed. If the door remained closed they could try a call to the police, an anonymous tip that Alain might be in the ruined abbey. It would be out of their hands.
She thought of walking back down the broken pavement. Steve was watching her expectantly.
There was no one home. The abbey was deserted. It was a wild goose chase.
“Come on, Rocky,” she said, taking that first step away from the door.
“Are you whistling in the dark?” Steve asked.
The bolt screamed, and the door began to creak open. They looked at each other and burst out laughing. “Cut the melodrama,” she said after a moment. “Just open the door.”
The man standing inside was thick and hideously ugly, with a misshapen face and no visible neck. His head was completely shaved, but this failed to conceal the fact that he was prematurely bald. He wore a black shirt and pants, but the hands that gestured them inside were surprisingly delicate, long-fingered and pale, like those of a pianist.
The vast interior was a place of dust and mildew and abandoned furniture. The man closed the door behind them and led them past empty bookshelves to a fat man in a checked flannel shirt and neatly pressed blue jeans seated on an old sofa. He lifted a soft hand as they approached. The smile under a nose once broken and now bent to one side was bleak and unfriendly. “Ah, Miss Emmer! M. Viginaire! Such a pleasure! Welcome to the Abbey of St. Théophile.” His smile snapped off like a light.