by Rob Swigart
TABLE OF CONTENTS
THE DELPHI AGENDA
TABLET OF DESTINIES
Also by Rob Swigart
About the Author
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
HOW ABOUT A FREE BOOK?
Keep up to date on terrific new books, and get a freebie at the same time!
First click here to join our mailing list and get Louisiana Hotshot!
Confirmed grump Eddie Valentino placed the ad. Hotshot twenty-something Talba Wallis knew exactly how to answer it.
And thus was born the dynamic duo of New Orleans private detectives, one cynical, sixty-five-year-old Luddite white dude with street smarts, and one young, bright-eyed, Twenty-First century African-American female poet, performance artist, mistress of disguise, and computer jock extraordinaire. Think Queen Latifah and Danny DeVito in a hilariously rocky relationship— yet with enough detective chops between them to find Atlantis.
5.0 out of 5 stars Julie Smith’s Triumphant Return
Long time fans of Julie Smith's witty mysteries will not be disappointed by this new title. Spinning off a character from her latest Skip Langdon mystery “82 Desire”, Talba Wallis, this book definitely ranks up there with Smith's Edgar Award winning “New Orleans Mourning.”
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. Who 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.
His eyes sparkled like fragments of ice, but the smile that broke over his face was the warmest thing she’d ever seen. “You’re not going to be a cheerleader.” He shook his head, and his long, wispy white hair floated like an exotic pale seaweed. “That’s not for you, empty posturing for ephemeral sport.”
She was polite. “What do you suggest?”
He laid a finger alongside his nose. “Ah.” He lowered it to point at her, and looking suddenly serious said, “You can study with me.”
“And you will teach me what, exactly?”
“Life!” He gestured expansively. “I will teach you life. Plato, of course, and Homer, and Thucydides. And Hesiod. But above all, life. How could you go wrong?”
“You can’t be serious,” she said, pulling the door open.
“You had both chicken pox and delayed menarche, possibly from excessive sports. As a child and adolescent you sang contralto in a choral group. You like Indian food, crossword puzzles and dry white wine. You don’t believe in astrology. You have a destiny and it is not on some sports field, marriage to a handsome but bland man, charity. That’s your mother’s life, not yours.”
She let go of the door. He was right; she could do better.
She had never looked back.
She had always suspected it, but only at that moment, at six minutes past eight on a Friday morning in June, when the unmarked police car started to pull away from the metro station and the horn began squawking, did she know with certainty that her first encounter with Raimond Foix had not happened by chance.
2.
Under a morning sky heavy with swollen gray clouds, a dark panel truck wound up a narrow dirt road through a tunnel of dense forest. On the side of the truck in darker gray were the letters A G O N.
A stone cabin appeared in a constricted clearing. The van stopped in front. The engine switched off and the driver climbed out with a grunt. His thick neck sloped up to a close-cropped gray head, which he rolled back and forth a couple of times, as though to relieve tension.
He went to the passenger door and opened it. The assassin crossed the gravel to the cabin door, which swung open. She paused at the threshold before walking inside. The door swung closed, shutting out the night.
It was more cell than room: walls of gray stone, flagstone floor, dark, heavy beams supporting the ceiling. There were no windows. There was a toilet and sink in one corner, a cot bolted to the wall, a table, a mirror, and a chair. A large crucifix on the west wall depicted a skeletal, tormented Jesus in exquisite, if macabre, detail. His lips were pulled back in agony as if He were straining to take one more labored breath. The bare, low-wattage bulb cast deep shadow beneath the table.
She leaned against the table for a moment before turning to the cross. The van’s engine started up. The sound was faint through the thick stone of the walls. Tires ground on the gravel and quickly faded away, leaving silence.
After several minutes in meditation, she removed the watch cap and let her dark blond hair shot with gray cascade over her back. Hairless, deeply puckered scar tissue surrounded the dark hole which was all that remained of the ear. She stared unflinching at the mirror. She was only thirty-nine, but could be taken for older. Her reflection no longer frightened her.
She glanced restlessly around the room, returning finally to rest her dark eyes on the cross.
Her wide face might have been carved of the same stone as the walls. In the dim artificial light it carried the same gray hue, the same flinty impassivity.
She let out a deep, shuddering breath and with calm determination removed her gloves and stowed them away as well. The deep tan on her hands set off the complex web of white lines that covered them. A Taliban improvised explosive device along a dusty road in Southern Afghanistan in 2002 had put her in a hospital for the better part of two years. That explosion might now be far in the past and buried in memory, but it had changed her life forever.
Once, early in her convalescence, that strange Frenchman Raimond Foix had come to visit. He had been kindly and interested, and at first she had felt a surge of hope that he was bringing to her, the broken remains of a woman, a purpose, a reason to live. He had asked her questions, strange questions. Had she known before the bomb went off it was going to happen? Had she seen things in her dreams, things that came true? Could she sing?
She was bitter, though, and gave the wrong answers. She had known nothing but a grinding fear before the deafening shock. No, she said, she could not sing, she hated music almost as much as she hated the Taliban.
The faintest trace of disappointment passed over his face. He left shortly after and took away her hope.
Fortunately, she had met Brother Defago soon after, and he had brought her to the Mission and showed her she could still be useful. This fight had been going on since before the birth of the Church.
She turned the chair around to face the cross, folded her hands in her lap, bowed her head and spoke for a long time, as if engaged in a one-sided conversation. The language was Latin.
When she was done she leaned down and removed her soft leather slippers and socks and set them on the floor by the cot.
From her shoulder bag she carefully removed a leather-bound folio and set it on the table. The book was titled De civitate dei by Aurelius Augustinus, known to the world as Saint Augustine, published in Venice by Nicolaus Jenson in 1475, printed on vellum with an opening illumination by Girolamo of Cremona. It was worth a small fortune. She carefully pushed it to one side, reverently placing her palm on its cover for a moment as if drawing from it some sustenance more spiritual than physical.
With a sigh she withdrew the Glock from the holster under her coat and set it beside the book. The silencer and extra clips of ammunition followed. She shrugged out of the coat and hung it on a hook beside the door. She removed her shirt, folded it and placed it on the table. She was now naked to the waist. Her breasts were small mounds over a well-muscled chest. A wide, jagged red scar ran from the back of her head down the left side of her torso, front and back. The shoulder on that side was lumpy and misshapen, laced with scar tissue, but she moved the titanium joint with the ease of long practice, though the lines of pain and suffering alongside her mouth tightened.
Wi
th another shuddering breath she pushed herself to her feet, undid her belt and let the trousers fall. Her legs, like her hands and arms, were webs of scar tissue. In places the muscle was deeply dented where gangrene had been removed. The right foot was prosthetic, a heavy metallic parody of a real foot, marginally functional. Lifting the leg, she rotated her artificial ankle several times, producing a clicking sound.
Finally, wearing only a pair of olive drab underpants, she took two steps and sat on the rough gray wool blanket of the cot. Her legs may have been shattered, but her upper body was highly developed and moved as if her clearly defined muscles were sunk in oil. She gripped the edge and did a series of lifts, raising her body, still in the seated position, a half a foot or so from the cot and lowering it slowly, over and over. Sweat stood out on her forehead and her arms began to tremble, but she continued lifting and lowering herself. She counted fifty and settled onto the cot. The lines along her mouth were deeper, and crimson as if lit by hidden fire behind them.
At the table once more she began tearing down the Glock. She was in the middle of cleaning it when she set it aside and turned on her cell phone. She speed dialed a number.
“Tisiphone,” she said, speaking slowly and without pause. “It’s done. No problem.” She let out a low, rasping laugh. “I literally took his breath away, can you imagine? It went as planned. It was good we anticipated he would lock his study even though he thought he was alone. He didn’t have much time to react: ninety seconds at his study door until I blew it open. When I entered he was just sitting at his desk. No doubt he trusted the door and all his security devices. Trust misplaced, of course.” Again she uttered that unpleasant rasp. Once it was under control she took a deep breath and continued. “I left some books on the floor. There were two things on the desk: a book called Greek Papyri, closed, and a list of names and dates, nothing relevant. Nothing else was out of place and the police were on their way. Too soon, in my opinion, but that’s your problem; I thought it best to leave. For God and Saint Dominic.”