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

by Rob Swigart

  Across Salle Botta the series of narrow windows, black with grime, overlooked the courtyard. If he could get one open he might be able to stash the tablet in the rain gutter.

  But the windows did not open, had never opened.

  In despair he started down the stairs again, trying to visualize the layout of the building. There were meeting rooms on the ground floor, offices on the first, administration on the second, more meeting and seminar rooms on the third, and this floor with its attic and a few other seldom used storage rooms.

  The administrative office on the second floor could send and receive packages. There was a cabinet with boxes, forms, everything he needed.

  His fingers trembled as he made out a FEDEX mailing label. He addressed it to Frédéric Daviau, second day delivery, and listed Administrator above the return address.

  Doors were opening and closing. Rough voices were calling for anyone remaining in the building to evacuate, there was a fire emergency

  Usem shoved his computer case and the tablet in its glassine envelope into a box, packed it with foam, sealed it, slapped on the label, and stuffed it among the other outgoing packages. Suddenly his cell phone started ringing, muffled inside the computer bag inside the box. He hesitated, trying to decide whether to open it again to answer. Perhaps it was Frédéric. While he dithered, the ringing stopped: his voicemail had picked up.

  He heard voices right outside and rushed to the secretary’s desk just as the door opened.

  “Sorry,” he said to the fireman. “I was just going. I just stopped in to see if the secretary was here, but he seems to have left already.”

  The fireman, swaddled in protective gear, took his arm firmly. “Come along,” he ordered. The protective mask and filters distorted his voice.

  Usem asked, “Where?” The tiny wave of relief after getting rid of the computer and tablet did little to stop his resurgent terror.

  Without answering, the fireman rushed him down the stairs and out the entrance past the fire trucks. Usem tried to protest, to call for help, but there was so much noise and confusion, and he was with a fireman, so no one paid attention. The fireman bundled him into a waiting ambulance. The doors slammed. The siren started and they raced up Cardinal Lemoine.

  “Where are we going?” Usem asked. His voice shook.

  “Go to sleep,” a second fireman said. The sting on his arm lasted only a second, but in that second Usem thought of the girl’s voice on his laptop impossibly reciting the words of the tablet.

  Dinner with Frédéric

  Steve and Lisa avoided the worst Paris traffic by taking side streets back to Lisa’s apartment on the rue du Dragon. The garage door swung open in answer to Steve’s voice command. He drove down to the underground parking. The door was already closed by the time he had spun the car to face the exit: elapsed time, twelve seconds. Lisa often thought this must seem unnatural to any witnesses, but no one had said anything. People on the rue du Dragon minded their own business.

  The apartment’s hidden infrastructure had not been so intricate or expensive when Lisa’s mentor, Raimond Foix lived there, but his security, though serious, had proved inadequate, and he had died.

  It was different now. The garage door wasn’t the only upgrade Steve had overseen. Not only had the Delphi Agenda quietly purchased all the apartments around the court, but the courtyard, stairs, and elevator were filled with multi-spectral sensors, culminating in the foyer outside the living quarters on the upper two floors. Redundant communication systems, backup emergency power (below the garage), and a private intranet that connected to what Lisa insisted on calling “affiliates” around the world gave her instant access to a full range of real-time information. The problem was overload from the constant scans for intruders, listening devices, stray fingerprints, foreign chemicals.

  The ride up four flights passed in the same silence that had prevailed since leaving Fontainebleau. Steve was on high alert; Lisa was deep in thought.

  When she came home the system would sometimes chide her in its infuriatingly soothing, androgynous voice: “Mlle. Emmer, you did not look into the camera. Please remember to do so.”

  Once she replied, “I don’t know where the damn camera is.”

  “It can see you, Mlle. Emmer. Just a glance, if you please, for the retina scan.”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “That’s perfect, Mlle Emmer.”

  She waved her hand. “Fine, fine, just open up, please.”

  The system behaved differently with Steve, and when they reached her floor, the door swung back as soon as the elevator stopped.

  “Why are you smiling?” he asked.

  “Your security is uncooperative and bossy with me.”

  He looked around in mock concern. “Really? I find it quite friendly and efficient.”

  “It’s your damn system. It knows you.”

  Nothing had changed: the polished parquet of the foyer, the replica Greek amphora that doubled as an umbrella stand, the harpsichord in the niche by the window. She hadn’t touched the harpsichord since Raimond’s death. The facsimile edition of Byrd’s My Ladye Nevells Book, the music they last had shared, was still open to Sellinger’s Round.

  A clatter from the kitchen stopped abruptly and a burly man poked a broad head capped by a white toque through the swinging door. “Ah, bon,” he exclaimed with evident delight. “Vous êtes là. I’m planning for dinner some fresh Saint Jacques in a light sauce vierge aux herbes. The scallops are from the fish market on the rue Mouffetard, where I bought them early this afternoon. I presume you’ll be having dinner? Both of you?”

  Lisa replied, “Dinner for us, yes, plus one more, please. A colleague.”

  With a quick nod Alain emerged all the way through the door, which swung to and fro behind him, and stood with his hands on hips, head cocked. The effect of the tilted toque on the large, grizzled head, and the fierce scar down one cheek past a dainty mustache and across the chin, was comic. There was nothing comic about his urbane air of competence or the coiled energy of his stance. He may have endured insults and injuries in the past, but he was prepared for anything life could throw at him, or at his employers. He had merely transferred his loyalty to Steve’s predecessor intact to Lisa and Steve. He was the fixer, the silent secretary, the valet, a member of a close-knit family.

  At this moment, he was the chef, a job he took more and more seriously as time went by. “Man, or woman?” he growled. “It makes a difference, you see. The, uh, aggressiveness of the sauce.”

  “Man.”

  Steve added. “Tall, stoop-shouldered, dandruff.”

  Alain removed his toque. He ran a thick, calloused hand over close-cropped gray hair and frowned. “Delphi business? Extra security?”

  Lisa thought this over. “Provisionally, yes. If what he tells us turns out to be more ordinary we can relax. His name, by the way, is Frédéric.”

  “Ah, oui,” the chef grunted. “From the École Pratique as I recall.” He set the toque back on his head, patted it in place, and returned to the kitchen. Immediately he popped his head out again. “The hour of twenty?”

  “Eight o’clock, yes.” Lisa still preferred American time.

  Upstairs in the study she glanced at the ornate desk with its high gallery and battered cupid, and decided not to sit there. It was too formal, too thick with memories of her predecessor. She sat on the small couch before the wall of shelves filled with sets of authors from Austen to Zola. Steve took the armchair by the door to the bedroom.

  Opposite the desk two glass-fronted bookcases bracketed the tall windows overlooking the court. They contained Raimond’s collection of rare books.

  Lisa, still in climbing shorts and shoes, slumped forward, hands dangling between her knees and stared at the muted Sarouk carpet.

  Steve cleared his throat. “Two things.”

  She didn’t look up. “Yes?”

  “The face. What did you feel when you saw it?”

  She frowned, still l
ooking down, considering the question. “Fear,” she said at last.

  He sat back. “So.”

  “Yes. So.”

  “All right. Frédéric sent several texts. You’ve been brooding ever since.”

  She looked up then and smiled faintly. “Brooding, say you, Étienne Viginaire?”

  “Uh-oh,” he muttered. “I know it means trouble when you use my French name.”

  She wandered over to the bookcases and stared through the glass at the rich leather spines. Books printed and bound in the fifteenth century. Illuminated manuscripts carefully copied and painstakingly illustrated in the twelfth, the works of authors, copyists, typesetters, leatherworkers, binders, and gluers, all nameless and forgotten… Standing here in the present moment, she was their future. Each volume had a story, a history of purchases, sales, gifts, collectors, readers, scholars, the intense and the indifferent. All came together, here, now.

  But she was also the past of multiple futures. She was a pivot, a fulcrum in the flow of time. Very few knew she was the Pythia of the ancient Delphi Agenda. She had the gift of vision; she could see the future, though imperfectly, partially. Her gift was unknown to the men and women of power and influence who depended on advice solicited from the Delphi Group, the public face of the Delphi Agenda.

  Despite the resources she commanded, she did not enjoy the responsibility. She did not enjoy it at all. She turned back to Steve and said simply, “I’d rather be climbing.”

  He nodded. He knew her fugues, her states of mind, and her extraordinary talent. “So, Lisa Emmer, tell me what you saw. Why is Frédo coming? What did he tell you?”

  She glanced at her watch and stood. “I’d better get ready. I’ll let him tell us in his own words. His messages were… odd.” She disappeared into the bedroom and closed the door. After a moment Steve went down the hall to the guest room.

  Two hours later she came down, paused at the landing, and descended toward Steve, seated on the harpsichord bench. She had tied her golden hair up and back in a discrete swirl at the nape. A modest silk dress the color of lapis lazuli flowed around her legs. Her expression was composed.

  “Better,” Steve murmured, standing up. “Much better.”

  The smile of appreciation touching her lips brightened her eyes as well. “Frédo should be here soon.”

  And as if in answer, the street door chimed and a tall man appeared on the intercom screen. “Him?” Steve asked.

  She glanced at the figure shifting uneasily from foot to foot and nodded. “Tell him to come up.”

  Steve told him the elevator code and they waited. Moments later he appeared in the foyer between the elevator and the apartment. His image cycled through a series of spectra— infrared, thermal, electro-magnetic, chemical. Despite his loose slacks the tremor in his legs was evident, as were the moist streaks on his white shirt where he had wiped his palms.

  Steve grinned. “He doesn’t appear to be armed.”

  The door clicked open. Strain was evident in his ashen pallor and the dark parchment circles under his eyes. His lips writhed. “Enfin,” he muttered in a low voice, tense as a piano wire about to break.

  Steve took his arm and led him inside. “You’re safe here,” he said, offering a chair.

  “M-merci.” The man fell into the chair as if everything holding him upright let go at once. He tilted his head back and breathed heavily through his nose. His prominent Adams apple bobbed when he swallowed.

  Lisa pulled another chair close to him and said to Steve, “Perhaps we should put off dinner while Frédo tells us what’s upset him. It seems a bit more serious than translating papyrus.”

  Frédo looked at her gratefully but his eyes were troubled. “Yes, please. I don’t think…”

  Steve left to inform Alain.

  Lisa watched closely. When Steve returned and sat down, she said, “Take your time, Frédo. You’re here. Nothing’s going to happen.”

  Frédo’s head snapped forward. “You can’t know that!” he exclaimed. He twisted his hands together between his knees. “Never mind, I’m sorry. I’m anxious.”

  “We see that.” Lisa’s soft, throaty voice was a caress, calming and reassuring. “Please tell us what happened.”

  “Start from the beginning,” Steve suggested.

  “Oh, right, yes, yes. Tell you why, yes. I texted you when I got the email from Brother Usem. I don’t suppose you know him?”

  Lisa shook her head.

  “Well, I’ve known Usem Izri for several years from early Church history meetings. He’s a Jesuit, very dependable, very calm. Steady. I never really understood what his research has to do with Church history. I mean, what he studies was all so long before the Old Testament was even written, though of course there are parallels, stories that return in the Bible, that sort of thing, so perhaps that’s why. He was looking at old texts, I mean, of course he was, that was what he did…” He collected himself with a long indrawn breath, let it out, and continued more calmly. “He found a tablet, something world-changing, he said. He had figured out a way to put it back together.”

  “He hadn’t actually read it?” Lisa’s voice was low and calm.

  “Not when he sent the email, I think, but he was very excited, even manic. He insisted I see him as soon as possible. You have to understand he wrote me very early this morning, around four o’clock. I didn’t read his message until this afternoon. That’s when I contacted you.”

  “Go on.”

  “He told me to meet him at his apartment. He should have texted me if it was urgent, but his old brick of a cell phone doesn’t text. Anyway, when I read his email I checked my phone. He had called, but while I always look at texts, I rarely answer the phone. He knows that; you know it, too. What could be so urgent about old manuscripts? Anything they might have to say can wait a few more hours, eh, after thousands of years? Like I texted you earlier, what he found, or was about to find, was really old, over four thousand years old. A birth, he said: a child who would be… ‘disruptive.’ That was the word he used. You probably don’t believe in visions, but…”

  Steve’s brief smile at Lisa was less than a ghost, but her eyes pleaded caution. No need to mention her own vision. “Go on,” she murmured. “The prophecy, that was the tablet?”

  “I guess so, yes, part of it. That’s what he claimed.” Frédo rose to his feet and made a circuit of the room, pausing to examine small artifacts. He spent several minutes holding a small reproduction of a Cycladic head before putting it down with an audible sigh. Steve and Lisa watched without speaking.

  He paused in front of them, resumed his pacing. When he finally spoke his voice was far away. “His vision. Late at night. You know what it’s like then, seeing things in the small hours. Things like that can’t be trusted; the mind plays tricks. He hadn’t put the pieces together, but he was beside himself. Not himself at all. He’s a quiet man, so calm, a plodder. Yes, I would say he plods through life. Brother Usem was thorough, methodical. This mania, or hysteria, was unlike him. Not like him at all.”

  He sat on the harpsichord bench. He touched a key. The note was isolated in silence, a single pure sound, yet somehow dissonant. After a moment he straightened. “I played when I was young, you know. Piano. They said I was good. I even gave a concert once, in Lyon. I was fifteen. My mother told me years later she was so proud, she had flowers sent backstage, but they went to the wrong dressing room and I never got them. We laughed about it later, but at the time it was… well.”

  “We’ve put off dinner long enough,” Steve suggested gently. “I think your story could continue accompanied by food, no?”

  Frédéric was taken aback. His nerves seemed to grow worse whenever he strayed from the topic. With an effort he brought himself back. “Ehm, yes, perhaps you’re right. I have trouble focusing.”

  Lisa stood gracefully and led the way to the dining area.

  Alain served the first course, pissaladière, a baked onion and anchovy casserole. Steve tried to put Fr�
�déric at ease by asking about his family. Lisa scarcely listened. Instead she observed their guest. He often failed to respond appropriately. Whatever had frightened him was serious, yet he was reluctant to share it.

  He thought Lisa was a colleague, and had no idea she was also head of a shadowy organization known to only a few as the Delphi Agenda. He knew nothing of the resources she commanded, the abilities she and her close-knit staff of researchers and agents could summon.

  So he had no idea he had come to the right place. As far as he was concerned she was a simple scholar who might understand what he was talking about, this tale of tablets and legends. He didn’t really believe she could help him. He was desperate, certain he had nowhere else to turn.

  Alain delivered the scallops and withdrew. Lisa concentrated on her meal, and, without looking, suggested he continue with his story. The sense that Frédo’s story was connected with her vision earlier was growing, and with it a sense of unease. I can’t do this, she thought. I’m not ready. If Raimond were here…

  But Raimond was gone and she was the Pythia. Her fork felt leaden in her hand.

  Frédo picked at a scallop, clearly trying to decide what to say, or how much to say, or whether to continue. This was all a mistake, a trivial matter he could attend to himself. Or it could be as urgent and terrifying as it felt. He looked up, a scallop skewered on his fork. “Well, he wrote me again, today. He succeeded in reassembling the tablet. It terrified him. His message was sent early afternoon, 13:43 to be precise, that’s one-forty…”

  “I understand,” Lisa assured him. “Please go on.”

  “Yes, well. His vision had been correct; the tablet contained a prophecy. He had to talk to me in person. I thought of you at first because it had something to do with a papyrus I found last summer in Egypt, you remember?”

  “Refresh my memory.”

  Frédéric grunted. “You’d have to read it to really understand. I didn’t think it important at the time, an obscure fourth century letter on high quality parchment from a Greek Christian named Thaumastos to an unnamed recipient in Eastern Anatolia. I had told Usem about it, thought he might be interested. Thaumastos was asking about a legend, a miraculous child. That could be Isaak, you know. Abraham was ninety-nine years old and his wife was ninety-one when she conceived: certainly miraculous. Even today Muslims believe Abraham was born in a cave in Urfa, in eastern Turkey.”