by Rob Swigart
“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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—San Francisco Chronicle
“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
The mysteries are in the jungle in Vector, the first book in Rob Swigart’s Thriller in Paradise Series.
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What they said about the Thriller in Paradise series:
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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 myst
eries 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.”
Also by Rob Swigart
The Thriller in Paradise Series:
VECTOR
TOXIN
VENOM
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.
Praise for Rob Swigart
“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
“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
TABLET OF DESTINIES
A Lisa Emmer Novel
BY
ROB SWIGART
booksBnimble Publishing
New Orleans, La.
Tablet of Destinies
Copyright © 2016 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.
ISBN 9780986178382
www.booksbnimble.com
First booksBnimble electronic publication: January 2016
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.”
The future is inevitable, but it may not occur.
Jorge Luis Borge
Thursday: Rocher des Souris
Lisa Emmer clung with her feet and hands to a limestone overhang like a gecko on the ceiling. A few centimeters in front of her eyes loomed the rough gray underside of the boulder and, if she raised her eyes, the bright blue sky. Her right foot was wedged against a narrow ridge, while the left extended to a nearly invisible depression near the ground. “Beta,” she called, dropping her head back to look at Étienne Viginaire, the ex-military Québécois she called Steve.
“Left hand. Up,” he said conversationally. From her perspective, his head was upside down a meter from hers. He winked. “A little more. Feel for the crimp. OK, good, now dyno, go for it!”
She lunged upward, switching her left hand to the next hold.
“Right heel hook, level with your head.”
She swung her leg up and caught another ridge.
“Great! Pull up. Easy from…”
The sound of his voice went dead. The rough gray surface was now a broad face, too broad, a woman’s, stone gray and covered with scales, like a snake. Her eyes glared at Lisa, angry and intense. The head turned slowly, in sections, as if speaking to someone to the left, showing an ear caught in a net of black hair like thin, tangled tree roots. When the gigantic face swung back, the lips were parted, showing large square teeth. Not in a smile, for the forehead beamed a kind of anguish, brows raised at the outer ends and squeezed together in the middle, eyes pinched with suffering.
Lisa’s grip loosened. Reflexively she clenched harder. The face vanished and she heard the end of Steve’s sentence, “…here on.” His words echoed: Easy from here on.
Her muscles seemed to liquefy and she dead-dropped from the overhang against him. He staggered back, clutching her before she hit the ground. Both froze.
Lisa was slumped gracelessly in his arms, head back against his shoulder.
His hand held her right breast, right foot braced back. “Well,” he murmured after a moment, easing her to the ground. “That was strange. Where were you?”
He removed his hand. The lingering effect of the moment, though intensely intimate, passed unacknowledged.
She put an unsteady hand on his shoulder, as if without it she would collapse, took a deep breath, shook her head, and slowed her breathing with an effort. “It’s nothing.”
Two sharp vertical lines bloomed between Steve’s white-blond eyebrows. “Not nothing,” he snarled. His anger was sudden, and as suddenly gone.
She snorted. “Double negative does not necessarily mean something.” She took another deep breath and gradually came under control. From then on her breathing maintained a normal rhythm. “Come on, I’ll try again.”
“I won’t let it go, Lisa. I need to know, if I’m to protect you.”
She cocked her head, looking at him. “I may have said this before, but do you realize how intensely blue your eyes are?” Her eyes had cleared, the momentary confusion gone.
“No changing the subject. What?”
She shrugged and turned back to the boulder. Moments later she was laughing at him from the top.
“I love the shadow in your dimple,” he called, aware of the absurdity of the change of subject. But he knew her in this mood, so he scrambled up the boulder with ease.
She glared. “Unsporting, Étienne Viginaire. You’ve done this before.”
“Of course I’ve done this before. Yogi here is a favored challenge.”
“My first time, though.”
“My first time I fell about twenty times.”
It was obvious he was trying to reassure her. “Yeah, sure.” She laughed derisively. “Don’t patronize me.”
“You’re the boss.” His deference was unconvincing.
“All right,” she relented. “At least, I only fell ten times. Eleven.”
“You’re a natural, Lisa. Yogi here is Seven-A difficulty and you did it your first time on a boulder. That’s impressive.”
“Eleventh time.�
�
“Come on, you two, get a move on,” a deep British voice called from below.
They looked over the edge at a pair of sturdy climbers in shorts and baseball caps turned backward.
The first one said, “Let someone else have a go, how ’bout.”
“Right, right,” Steve answered with a quick wave. “Well, Doctor Emmer, shall we tackle a couple of the problems at Canche? The world can go on without us a while longer. But I will not forget your fugue back there, and I will ask again.”
They took the car through the Fontainebleau Forest. Intermittent mid-afternoon sunlight splattered through the branches.
Steve parked at the boulder field called Canches aux Merciers and turned off the engine. “Before we go,” he began. He pushed down the finger she held up and repeated, “Before we go a-bouldering again, I want to know what you saw. I may be just a simple banker, but even from below I recognized that expression. You froze, and then you fell, so I know you saw something.”
“Just a face. And you’re a simple banker with Special Forces experience who knows cryptology, among other highly marketable skills…”
He interrupted her, “What kind of face? Describe it. Male? Female?”
“Female. Angry. And gray, like limestone. It was a brief vision, a hallucination, that’s all. Nothing, as I said.” She opened her door. Before she was halfway out, her cellphone chirped and she sank back into the car to fish it out. “Frédéric Daviau,” she muttered.