The Delphi Agenda
Page 33
“If there is anything further we can provide you, please do not hesitate to contact us.”
“Well, there you are,” Hugo said. “I don’t suppose we’ll ever know what this was all about, but everyone is satisfied, Mathieu: Quai d’Orsay, the Prefect. The perpetrators of the unfortunate incident at St. Denis have met with justice. Apparently that monk was deranged and strangled this Lacatuchi fellow after all. It appears that he and the nun were guilty of the death of Guardian of the Peace Dupond as well. No doubt they committed suicide together out of guilt. The survivor, Xavier LaMartine, claims he was just a kind of secretary who shaved his boss twice a day, that’s all. Since they shot him, too, this may well be true. At any rate, he refuses to say more.” He slipped the fax into a thick folder labeled with a number and the words Case Closed. “When the other materials arrive from the Vatican, please add them to this folder for me, Mathieu, and file it.”
“Of course, sir.”
“On the other hand, Mathieu,” Hugo said jovially, “they would deny everything, wouldn’t they?”
“I expect so, sir. But what about the Emmer woman?”
The Captain frowned. “I don’t think I want to hear about her any more, Mathieu. She’s the heir to Raimond Foix, a man well connected in France; indeed he seems to have something of a worldwide reputation. We can presume she’s completely innocent, just a bystander.” He paused. “She was a lovely young woman, wasn’t she? I wish her well.”
60.
Lisa and Steve stood in full sunlight on the running track of the ancient stadium, their backs to the looming white limestone cliffs of Mount Parnassus. A brisk breeze blew up from the town of Itea on the Gulf of Corinth and whispered in the pines and cypresses to their right. Ted and Marianne waited beside them.
“Is it safe?” Lisa asked.
“Aside from that tour group over there, yes.” Ted nodded toward the group of garishly dressed tourists near the starting blocks at the other end of the stadium. They were two hundred meters away, gathered around their tour guide.
“Then let’s do this.”
She lifted the lid of the wooden box filled with gray ash. The breeze picked up a few grains and whirled them. Lisa closed it again. “He would have liked this,” she said softly. “To return to the beginning. When we were here three years ago …” She stopped, collected herself and continued. “We were down by the theater. He was eighty-one, I was twenty-nine. His shirt was dark red. I wore blue. I picked the color because it matched my eyes. He always liked that. He never told me what I was supposed to do. Why didn’t he warn me?”
To Steve her melancholy smile was almost unbearably sweet.
She answered her own question. “He didn’t warn me because I had to do this on my own. Finding the Founding Document was like taking a PhD oral exam all over again, a test with an uncertain outcome. I had to follow the trail, find my own answers. What if I had failed?”
Marianne touched her shoulder. “You didn’t fail. But if you had, what would that have meant to the world?”
“It would certainly have meant the end of the Pythos.”
“And the end of the Order,” Ted added.
Lisa inclined her head. “That, too.”
“I repeat,” Marianne said. “So what?”
“Ah. Then there would be no future. Not for us, probably not even for the world, which is still in grave danger. It was such a fragile moment. He had such trust in me. It’s good we didn’t fail after all.” She reflected for a moment and then laughed. Her laughter grew until she doubled over for a moment. Finally she straightened and wiped tears from her eyes. In answer to their looks she said, “It just struck me as funny. What if we aren’t the only ones?” She shook her head. “No, we aren’t alone, I’m certain of it. There were, are, many Delphi Agendas, all over the world. Oh, it will be so much fun to meet them now, won’t it?”
With another look around she opened the box and tipped it. The wind picked up the grains of ash and lifted them in a spiral. Soon they were spinning among the stones and down along the red dirt of the running track. The dust seemed for a fraction of a second to reform into the wavering shape of a man. Then it dissolved and was just a gray-white line streaming away in the wind.
It seemed to take forever for the box to empty, but finally it was done.
They stood in silence. The breeze sent Lisa’s hair streaming. A few tendrils whipped in front of her face and eyes. She brushed them back.
“Something’s changed,” Steve said with a sad smile. “You’re different.”
“Yes.”
Ted and Marianne walked away toward the opposite side of the track. He was saying, “The people here may have been telling people what was going to happen, but they were still betting on the games.” They stopped in the middle and looked back at Steve and Lisa. “Isn’t that curious, Marianne?”
“Yes, Ted, they were betting on the games. It’s ironic, I suppose.”
“And what does that tell us, love?” Their conversation faded, carried off by the breeze.
Steve took the box from Lisa’s hands and closed it. “What happens now?”
Her answering smile was bright. “Who knows, Steve Viginaire?” She laughed gaily. “As Lorenzo di Medici said, ‘Di doman non ce certezza. The future is uncertain.” She put her arms around him and whispered in his ear. “Won’t it be interesting to see what we make of it?”
THE END
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The next Rob Swigart thriller is VECTOR. Find it at www.booksBnimble.com
The Thriller in Paradise Series:
VECTOR
TOXIN
VENOM
Also by Rob Swigart
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
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] smoothes 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, Xibalbá 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.
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