Lisa Emmer Historical Thrillers Vol. 1-2 (Lisa Emmer Historical Thriller Series)

by Rob Swigart

  “Besides money? Vaults.” Steve made an effort to look angry but couldn’t help laughing. She was right.

  “You work for M. Alain?” she asked the guide.

  The Turk nodded.

  “And?”

  “You are to discover the number, Mademoiselle Emmer. If you find the sign and the number, I am to take you to the bank.”

  “The account number, I suppose.” She looked around wildly, calmed herself and took a deep breath. “All right, then, let’s find it.”

  Cars honked, jockeying for position. Some came dangerously close, passing one another on the narrow street. Conversations started up, moved away. Several men paused to shout into their cell phones.

  Suddenly she grinned and crossed the street to the stairs, ignoring the cars. Steve and Ilkay followed.

  She made a rapid circuit of the staircase. When she had returned to the bottom she said, speaking to herself, “Ten up, then four, fifteen, ten, same coming down, with one extra riser on the right side for the slope of the street.” She smiled brightly.

  Steve looked his question: so?

  "The account number is 20-4-30-4-21,” she said.

  Ilkay’s smile broke wide open. “Very good, Miss Emmer. Now, if you don’t mind, time is getting short. The bank closes at five.”

  Steve shook his head. “How did you do that?”

  “Add the number of steps for each flight, starting at the top, descending to the street of banks.”

  “How do you know it’s right?”

  She shrugged. “Everything points to it.”

  She looked at Ilkay, who bowed graciously and said, “Shall we go?” He gestured for them to accompany him to the bank less than fifty meters down the sloping street.

  A painted green and white sign worn nearly illegible by rain and sun identified it as Revabank. It was a narrow, three story brick structure dating from the early nineteenth century. Its modesty made it easy to overlook, dominated as it was by its taller and more impressive neighbors, one a bank with a newly renovated marble façade, the other an even more imposing national financial institution.

  An ancient man inside was just lifting a hanging sign in the glass door that said “Açık” when they knocked. He nodded, turned the sign and let fall against the glass. Though it now read “Kapalı,” he opened the door with a stiff bow. “Ilkay Bey,” he murmured.

  Revabank was dark and narrow and devoid of other customers. Sallow light fell through dusty front windows. The ancient shuffled to the single teller window, lifted the barrier and led them to an even smaller room with a steel grated door. This he opened with an enormous key suspended from a ribbon around his neck. Inside was a wall of grimy safety deposit boxes, each identified by a long, hyphenated number. They looked as if they predated the First World War, if not some more ancient, long forgotten conflict. An antique wooden file cabinet stood in a corner.

  Ilkay searched through the drawers. The paper folders threatened to crumble to dust as he leafed through them, reading their labels aloud. With a grunt of satisfaction he pulled one from a drawer and held it up. “You see? 20-4-30-4-21.”

  It contained a key wrapped in a sheet of paper with the number 2214-506 written on it in a spidery cursive hand. “That figures,” Lisa muttered. “Raimond’s door code and the Procroft number.”

  Ilkay nodded at the ancient, who shuffled to another cabinet mounted on the wall and unlocked this with another enormous key. A rack of safe deposit box keys hung there, looking as if they had been undisturbed for decades, if not centuries. He pored through the keys, a fingertip darting between his thin lips and the ranks of keys. Finally he selected one.

  He and Ilkay inserted their keys into box number 2214-506, turned them, and very solemnly removed the dark gray metal box inside. This they placed on a square of green plush on a shelf. The ancient bowed once again and retreated to the front room. Ilkay stepped back as well.

  Lisa tugged at the latch, but it had rusted shut. She looked helplessly at Steve and he also tugged. The box slid across the plush but refused to open.

  Ilkay rummaged in a drawer and produced a screwdriver, which proved effective.

  The box was packed with shredded brown newspaper. They found a date on one fragment of an English language newspaper: February 17, 1843. Other dates, even earlier, appeared in many languages.

  Cradled inside was a bronze circle with a partial Latin alphabet inscribed in lower case characters around the outer edge.

  Steve turned it over. The inner rim was recessed to retain a disk. Equidistant around the edge were three inverted Vs creating the tips of a triangle. A vertical line scribed through one of the Vs and continued on the opposite rim to the edge. Inside all three Vs were tiny bronze catches to hold the inner disk in place.

  Beside one were the letters: MCDLXII. “Same date as the other,” Steve murmured. “I think it’s the outer part of the real Alberti.”

  Ilkay said, “This item has been in the possession of this bank some time. Before that,” he spread his hands, “it resided elsewhere.”

  “This is good, Ilkay,” Lisa said. “You see the triangle, bisected by a line, Steve? It will complete the same symbol, a Phi inside the Delta. This is it, all right. I think it’s time we go back to Paris.”

  41.

  A little after six-thirty the door to the Dominican’s lodging opened and Brother Defago came down the parking ramp and turned toward the van. Sister Teresa’s elaborate wheelchair rolled smoothly alongside him.

  They passed the van and approached Dupond’s car parked behind it. He watched surreptitiously, feigning sleep, hat over his face. The monk was saying, “…where they are, but the Emmer woman must have at least part of the disk, and the real message as well.”

  So, he thought, they were looking for a disk of some kind, an object. He could only sell that to one client. But what was the message? That might be even more useful.

  The nun pivoted her chair in a slow circle, scanning the street. She stopped at the Peugeot.

  The monk peered inside. “Some guy,” he said, rapping gently on the window. When there was no reaction he straightened and shrugged. “Asleep.”

  “Good. Nonetheless…” She walked toward the back of the car.

  Dupond didn’t know if she carried her pistol, but even if she didn’t he gave thanks they hadn’t recognized him. He had suddenly felt very vulnerable.

  Defago’s voice was muffled but still audible. “Half of our disk, the part we got from Rossignol, might be real. If the Emmer woman has the other half, the real one, it would be best to reunite the two.”

  “We’d have to bargain, and that would mean sharing the information with our adversaries. His Eminence wouldn’t like that,” she said scornfully. “He wants it all. And he’s right, you know; the only way the Struggle will end is with the destruction of the Pythos’s organization, all of it. That includes getting our hands on the Founding Document we keep hearing about.”

  “What if this Emmer woman proves as resourceful as Rossignol?” the monk reflected thoughtfully. “His Eminence won’t be so easy to satisfy.”

  Though he was out of sight, Dupond could almost see the contemptuous curl of the monk’s lip when he said the name.

  Sister Teresa rolled to the van and back. She stopped beside Dupond’s front fender. She carried a book. “We have to lure them,” she said thoughtfully, biting her lower lip. “But how? We don’t know where they are.”

  Defago moved into view. His eye twitched. “They should be looking for us,” he mused. “They know how Foix died. Maybe we should let them find us, after all.”

  She raised a hand to touch his arm and the book started to fall. She snatched it back, looked at it a moment, then held it up. “You’re right, my priest. Perhaps we should.”

  “What is this?”

  Her veil shook. “It’s an Augustine. City of God, my priest.”

  He weighed it in his hands. “Heavy,” he murmured. “And old.”

  “Oh, yes, very o
ld. I took it from Foix’s apartment after he died.”

  “You stole this?”

  She lowered her head. “I confess I did.”

  “You should not have done that.” His voice was carefully neutral.

  “I know, but I could not resist.”

  “If the police…?”

  “How could they? It was on the floor with many others. We entered and left like shadows, my brother, leaving only the chair’s mystery trail.”

  “Yes, but still…”

  “Please, Father. This book would not be missed, except by one who would want it.” She paused and said in wonder, “By one who would want it. I wonder I did not think of this earlier. ”

  He turned thoughtful. “Think of what?” But he knew.

  “The Emmer woman would want it, don’t you think? It’s valuable, full of sentiment. It belonged to the old man. She is his heir. She would want it back.”

  “You would give it up?” Now his voice shook with admiration.

  “If giving it up brings us closer to our goal, my priest, I would. Afterward, perhaps…” Her voice trailed off.

  He replaced the book carefully on her lap. “Very well, perhaps it was God’s will you took this thing.” He gazed into the distance for some time. “I wonder…” he began.

  “Wonder what?”

  “The books were scattered on the carpet. I wonder if that meant something.”

  “What could it mean? There was no order, no purpose I could see. Maybe he was putting them away and the chair alarmed him so he locked the door. We wanted to frighten him. Would he have dropped those books if he weren’t afraid?”

  “Perhaps we should have considered this before.” Defago’s voice was dry, yet tender, still admiring.

  “Think, my priest. If he used the books to send a message and she knows it, she’ll want this one all the more, don’t you see?”

  He came to a decision. “Very well, it’s worth a try. I don’t believe she’s motivated by money. I think she’s a simple scholar, but even if she’s the next Pythos, sentiment might work, indeed, and even better if it has some other meaning for her, but we have to draw them to us. We will leave messages at all the numbers we have. If they take the bait, we will meet somewhere, a place we choose most carefully. A first they will refuse, and perhaps a second, but then we will lure them to the abbey.”

  “We will do it, my brother. But what of the disk, the Founding Document? It isn’t likely they’ll just bring them along.”

  “No, we must convince them to bring it all to the abbey. Then we’ve only to put them to the question.”

  The smile lines at the corners of her eyes deepened for a moment. “I think I would like that. You did promise me they would beg, my brother. You did promise.”

  “Yes!” He clapped her on the shoulder. “Let us set to work, then.”

  As she turned and glided away from him, Dupond clearly saw both the twitch of pain at the corner of her eyes and her strangely contented smile.

  That smile should have warned him, but the notion that the nun and Defago had spoken for his benefit never crossed his mind.

  He remained in his vehicle after they had gone back inside. The building now presented a blank face: there were no lights in the windows, no one left and the door remained firmly closed.

  No doubt they had come outside to avoid speaking in front of others inside and thought he was asleep. Their plans, then, were secret, and did not represent general church policy. What other explanation could there be for such indiscretion?

  No matter, he knew enough. They were going to trap Lisa Emmer and the Canadian. They wanted some things she had, a disk and a document.

  They weren’t the only ones who wanted things from Lisa Emmer.

  He was no closer to finding her, but if Defago and the nun were successful, they would find her for him. Hugo would be unhappy when he failed to deliver them, but he could placate the policeman with bits of information. He had only to keep it vague enough to stall for time. Once he had the disk and the message, he could call in the police, and his employers in Washington. After all, by then he would have everything both groups wanted.

  Or so he hoped.

  42.

  Later that night the two parts of the Alberti cipher lay side by side on the safe house table. Steve carefully placed the printout from the lab beside the original Procroft 506 document.

  Lisa assembled the two disks. “The back is what’s important,” she said, turning them over. She carefully lined the triangle with its tips so the two dates were in alignment, bisected by a vertical line.

  “Symbol of the Pythos,” she said. “This might be the key. Very simple, even obvious.”

  “To someone who has the true disk!” Steve added dryly. “Our adversaries must be pretty frustrated and angry by now.”

  “Let us hope so.”

  “It won’t be pretty if they find us.”

  “We’ll decipher this. If it leads to the Founding Document, we’ll make sure it’s safe and then deal with them.” She sighed. “There’s so much I don’t know, don’t understand.”

  “For instance?”

  “For instance, how do we find my successor?”

  He grinned. “Isn’t it a little early to be thinking about that?”

  She was grave, though. “They’re dangerous, Steve. They kill for their beliefs, a luxury we don’t have. If I die, there’s no one to take over.”

  “There’s probably a list of some kind,” Steve began.

  “Probably, but I don’t know how the succession works, and I should. I need more time with Ted and Marianne, and I can’t take it, not now.”

  “Then you can’t die.”

  She sniffed. “I’ll try to keep that in mind.”

  Steve shook his head. “About this disk, this symbol might identify it as belonging to the Pythos but we still need a keyword.”

  She looked dubious. “Possible; it would be more secure, but would it really be necessary, or even wise? This disk was well hidden, the two sections kept far apart, and a decoy left in place. And besides, the Pythos knows something about the future.”

  “Prophesy,” Steve muttered. “All right, let’s see what this gives us.” He set to work, reading off the letters of the palimpsest text one by one, comparing their appearance on the inner disk with the outer rim’s alphabet and writing down the plain text that resulted.

  When he finished he sat back. “What do you think?”

  She leaned over the sheet of yellow legal paper. “It’s Bruno all right, writing in Latin.”

  “Can you read it?”

  She glared at him. “Of course I can read it. His language is ornate, but clear. Very sixteenth century. Very….”

  Something without edge or form flowed up from the page and enveloped her in sudden darkness and cold. She had the sense of swirling snow, an enclosed room, a fire.

  Never had a fugue done this to her before: she was aware of two times, two places at once, the frightening sense of dislocation in one, and the room, the document, Steve looking thoughtfully at the page. She was firmly Lisa Emmer. At the same time she was something else, a presence, a ghost. In that moment she knew that this was four hundred years in the past and the man hunched over a plain wooden table was Giordano Bruno.

  He was muttering angrily – mostly half words, exclamations, vague grunts that conveyed contempt, anger, or disgust.

  His chair was hard. This he preferred; it helped keep him awake and attentive to the objects before him: a mechanical disk made of bronze, a pen, an inkwell, a leaf of new parchment and some blank sheets of precious paper, real Italian paper, not papyrus but hemp and linen scraps mulched and pressed and dried. The point of his quill trembled over a blank sheet as if ready to plunge into its virgin heart.

  He was a small, bearded, irascible man with eyes as sharp as his tongue, an apostate priest and dissident scientist, and usually the words flowed from him, sharp, satiric, learned. This night, though, he was just killing time, wait
ing. The words simply wouldn’t come.

  Vague sounds leaked up through the thick floor from the tavern downstairs. He could hear the muffled clink of cutlery, occasional roars of laughter, the background murmur of conversation. A brief vision rose to tempt him: dark foaming ale in a great tankard or a flagon of raw Neapolitan wine. Some cold meat, an acquiescent maid….

  He shook his head. Not tonight.

  At that moment came a knock. He snapped, “Come.” When he saw the big man made bigger by a heavy coat, he exclaimed, “You!”

  His visitor had a surprisingly soft voice. “They told me downstairs you were here, Giordano.” He spoke Italian.

  Bruno laughed. “They? My fat proprietress speaks neither Italian nor Latin, only German, so how then did you communicate with her? Especially above that racket?”

  The giant grinned. “It took some shouting, sure, but finally she understood. ‘Ach, Herr Bruno!’ She pointed at the ceiling and her fat finger looked like pale salami ripe enough to eat. ‘Ja, ja!’ she said. And here you are.”

  “Yes, that is the way it would happen,” Bruno agreed. He put down his pen and waved at the chair opposite. “Please, Usignuolo, sit. You have something.” It wasn’t a question.

  The other grunted.

  “Well? Tell me.”

  “Two weeks hard riding through damnable weather, all the way from Venice, Bruno.” It fell just short of accusation.

  “Ah,” Bruno nodded. “Mocenigo, then.”

  Usignuolo tipped his chin. “Mocenigo.”

  The philosopher leaned back and rubbed his temples. “That cursed patrician’s been hounding me since the Book Fair last year, September. Wants me to come back to Venice, live in his palazzo, teach him the arts of memory, he says. I’ll get the best of treatment, he says. He says he’s rich, powerful, and influential. I can even take a professorship in Padua if I want. He’ll protect me from the Inquisition, he says. I get no peace, and oh, he’s tempting me.” Bruno sighed. “Then I realized this could be the opening I’ve been seeking. But I had to know, so I sent word.”

  “You suspected him from the beginning.”