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

by Rob Swigart

  Three well-dressed men went into the Viper Room. The last placed a Temporarily Closed sign on the door before going in. “Uh-oh,” Frédo said under his breath. “That can’t be good.”

  A couple read the sign and wandered away, towing three disappointed children. Vipers sounded like fun.

  An alarm came to life somewhere in the back of the building. Visitors looked around hesitantly before moving toward the exit, following the instructions on the wall. Steve and Frédo lingered.

  The Viper Room door opened. “Here they are,” Frédo whispered.

  Two men flanked Lisa. Ibrahim and the third man were close behind. They walked in a tight group toward the exit.

  “Ibrahim’s holding something,” Frédo murmured. “Gun?”

  “Not a gun,” Steve said. “Snake.” He shook his head. “Figures. He must’ve smashed a cage and grabbed one. Explains the alarm.” He said into his phone, “OK, Alain, they’re on the move.”

  They merged with the crowd and followed Lisa and her escort outside.

  Ibrahim turned north toward the river, apparently unhurried.

  “Exit on the Quay near Cuvier,” Steve told Alain.

  “On my way.”

  They walked past the large nineteenth century Reptile Lab. It was a research facility closed to the public, but for a moment Steve thought Ibrahim might try to duck through to the maintenance entrance on Cuvier. He was relieved when they continued toward the quay and out the gate.

  The door of a white van waiting at the curb slid open. Once Lisa and the others were inside, the van pulled away. A gray sedan replaced it. Steve bundled Frédo into the back and settled in front, slamming the door. “Not too close,” he said.

  Alain merged with traffic, staying four cars behind the white van.

  Frédo kept clicking the safety of his revolver on and off, on and off, until Steve told him to please put it away. “It’s probably loaded, remember?”

  “Sorry,” Frédo said.

  They followed the van around the circle at the Austerlitz Bridge.

  Steve’s phone chimed with a message from Ted, a photograph Steve had sent earlier of Ibrahim with Lisa on the bench.

  He read the text aloud. “Ibrahim Sabbah, b. Aleppo, date unknown. Electrical engineer. Disappeared 12 years ago, rumored KIA in Iraq. He’d be approx. 46 today. No documented connection with Ophis Sophia, but we guess he’s a high level member. Has the same last name as Hassan-i Sabbah or Hasan bin Sabbah, the Old Man of the Mountain (Qazwin, near the Caspian Sea, alt. 1800 m.).”

  The van pulled to the right and slowed, allowing traffic to pass. “They’ll make us if I don’t pass with everyone else,” Alain said.

  “Go ahead,” Steve answered. “Lisa’s GPS is on.”

  Alain moved to the left lane and passed the van.

  Steve continued reading. “Sabbah was founder of the Hashishin, popularly known as the Assassins, 11th century. Their use of hashish is in doubt. Ibrahim’s possibly a descendent. The feda’in, assassins willing to die at their master’s word, were well trained not just in killing, but languages, deceit, disguise. These are skills Ibrahim appears to possess. Assassins favored the knife, usually poisoned. Snake venom? These people may be trained in the ancient ways. Just so you know. By the way, Sabbah’s famous saying, ‘Nothing is True, Everything is Permissible,’ was probably not his. Happy hunting. T.”

  Frédo had grown more excited through this recitation. “Assassins? Real assassins?”

  Steve answered, “Not any longer. The Assassins no longer exist.”

  “But they did.”

  Steve turned to the driver. “Don’t worry about the van. Turn right at Pont de la Concorde.”

  The old sedan rattled forward and the van disappeared in the traffic behind them. “Where do you think they’re going?” Alain asked.

  “Monceau.” He gave Alain the address.

  “You sure?”

  “No, but it’s the most likely.”

  Just before the bridge Lisa’s GPS went dark. “Merde,” Steve muttered. “Ibrahim must’ve found it. Clever devil, but never mind, we’ll get there first.”

  Alain wove skillfully through Paris traffic. “You really think that’s where they’re holding Usem?”

  “Lisa believes it. So do I.”

  Frédo leaned forward. “Then we’ll save him?”

  Steve looked back. “Eventually.”

  They crossed the bridge and sped along the Place de la Concorde. On the Boulevard Malesherbes Alain slowed. “You sure about this?”

  “Di doman non ce certezza,” Steve quoted. “Nothing is certain about tomorrow; not even Lisa can predict day to day detail.”

  “I know.”

  “What are you talking about?” Frédo, leaning between the front seats, asked. “She some kind of seer?”

  “Oh, well,” Steve waved this away. “She directs the Institut de Papyrologie.”

  “Then why’s she a hostage? I’d really like to know what’s going on.”

  “Put that gun away,” Steve said, pushing the barrel to one side. “You might hurt someone.”

  “Not till I have answers.” He was unhappy, but put the gun back in his pocket.

  “Lisa is a bit more than a scholar,” Steve admitted.

  Frédo snorted. “A bit more?”

  “She’s a… consultant.”

  “Oh, I see, a consultant. There’s a demand for consultants on old papyrus, is there?”

  “Sarcasm doesn’t help, Frédo. I’m telling you what I can. She advises clients, shall we say. About their best course of action.”

  “Oh. Sounds like a business. So, she’s a business consultant?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Then what’s she doing with these… snake charmers?”

  Alain stared straight ahead, was trying unsuccessfully to suppress a grin. He carefully stopped at lights, accelerated smoothly, stayed in his lane, all very correct and law-abiding.

  “You tell me,” Steve suggested. “You contacted her, remember?”

  “Oh.” Frédo leaned back and crossed his arms with a sour look.

  They cruised a narrow street past a wrought iron fence. The gate was decorated with gold sculptures and gilt spikes. It was closed. Three men were standing at the far end of a gravel courtyard near a large black door with polished bronze knockers. They pretended casual conversation, but their body language was anything but casual.

  “They’re expecting someone,” Alain muttered.

  “Let’s hope it’s the white van,” Steve said. “Find a place to park on the other side of the avenue where we can watch the entrance. It’ll be handy when we need the car.”

  Alain parked and tossed a police card on the dashboard.

  “What do we do now?” Frédo wanted to know.

  “We wait.”

  Long minutes passed with no sign of the van. The tops of locust trees in the park stirred restlessly, dark against lighter gray as daylight subsided.

  Alain leaned back in the driver’s seat and watched under lowered lids.

  Steve glared at the house, asking himself why Lisa had told the Bookbinder she’d pick up the tablet tonight. Was it because she hadn’t yet made this insane plan to get herself kidnapped? Or did she think she would be free by then? True, she was the Pythia, but could she really see such details before they happened?

  Useless to waste time on speculation. It was late. The van wasn’t coming. This must be the wrong house; Ophis Sophia must be holding Usem at one of the other Paris properties, probably the Butte aux Cailles.

  Lisa was on her own.

  Steve’s jaw tightened. Anger. Behind him, Frédo hummed some ludicrous romantic song from the 1930s, a jaunty, sophisticated, and confident man without a care in the world. Perhaps, Steve thought, the word ‘consultant’ had soothed him. He scowled at the windshield, as if offended.

  Alain stirred. Steve was about to tell him to move on to the Butte aux Cailles when the van appeared at the end of the street.
The gate swung open and closed behind it.

  Alamut

  Lisa and Ibrahim, along with Lean, Wide, and Tall, passed through the black door and small anteroom of the house at Monceau into a large circular foyer packed with utilitarian technology but bare of ornament. A thick-necked man to the left of the inner door watched a pair of monitors, an assault rifle at his side. He gave her a brief glance without discernible expression. The others quickly vanished through various doorways, leaving her alone with Ibrahim and the guard. Though an enormous crystal chandelier spread from the domed ceiling like a monstrous web, its light was weak.

  “Very nice!” Lisa exclaimed with forced enthusiasm. “Who’s your decorator?”

  Her host returned the pleasantry with a fleeting grimace. “Sarcasm,” he murmured, handing the guard the black leather tote from the car.

  The bag squirmed and hissed when the guard dropped it on the floor and pushed it under the desk with a booted toe.

  Various video feeds showed Lean and Wide climbing the spiral staircase opposite, the now empty courtyard and the hood of the van, a back yard with a high stone fence with a narrow iron gate. Home again, home again.

  She finished her survey and turned to him. “Not really sarcasm. M. Ibrahim. This is surely one of the oldest houses left on the Parc Monceau. It’s in a beautiful part of Paris. It is a nice place, nineteenth century but sophisticated and modern in its appointments.”

  “I’m afraid I believe that is sarcasm. And you tried to bring along a GPS, which was disappointing, since it implies you were prepared to be invited along.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, why would I mistrust you? I always have a tracker on my bag. I keep losing the damn thing.”

  “Mph. More sarcasm.”

  “Well,” she smiled. “If you thought we were going to kidnap you, you’d have done the same.”

  His expression thawed, almost returning to a smile. “Quite so.”

  “Just in case someone would be looking for you, of course.”

  “How disappointed your friends must have been when your GPS went dark.”

  She shrugged.

  The broad spiral staircase was to the right. A door nestled in the curve opened onto a modest sitting room. Ibrahim led her in and offered a deep, low, thickly cushioned chair in a watery undersea green and blue silk. Opposite was an ornamental fireplace topped by a marble mantel holding a stylized Cycladic sculpture of a woman’s head. “Authentic?” she asked.

  He tipped his head.

  “An antiquity, then?” she insisted.

  His smile became subtly perplexed. “That disturbs you.”

  “I’m an historian,” she said, answering a question he had not asked. “I do find trafficking in antiquities unsavory. We lose too much knowledge when we lose context.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it. I, too, am an historian, but such things do not bother me. The past is just another resource, like wheat or oil.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “No doubt you believe that. So, tell me about it, your history.”

  “Mmph.” He sat in a chair opposite and folded his hands fastidiously across his chest. “Ophis Sophia.”

  “Yes, tell me about Ophis Sophia.”

  “The world is at a dangerous junction,” he began. “Of course you know this. Climate change, religious wars, terrorism— the list is long. In response, apocalyptic sects appear everywhere in the world. New ones. Old ones returning. Catholic, Muslim, Hindu. Even Communist. Nihilists.”

  “They never really go away, do they?” she observed. “Fundamentalists, I mean.”

  “Yet always they seem so very new, so… untried. Inauthentic. They’re based in the present, despite forced nostalgia for a nonexistent past.”

  “Jihad,” she suggested.

  He brushed this away with an open hand. “Among so many others.”

  She waited, but he had fallen silent. Not absent; listening. She wondered what for.

  He cleared his throat. He wanted her to say something, so she did. “Your cult, though, is different, isn’t it? Your fundamentalism is ancient. Authentic.”

  “Ophis Sophia is Greek, a relatively modern name,” he agreed pleasantly. They might have been friends, sharing an intimate conversation. “Our traditions go back to the beginning, long before anything was written down. Origins passed from generation to generation, back to the real beginning.”

  She composed her face. “Do you have a date for this beginning?”

  “How could we? No one possesses that information. We’ve studied the matter very carefully for thousands of years: linguistic analysis, comparative mythology…. An evolutionary family tree, so to speak. We’re quite certain our truth already existed sixty thousand years ago. Earlier than that we are on less firm ground.”

  The date almost surprised her. “Why sixty thousand in particular?”

  “When humans spread out of Africa. The Great Snake, the first being, the very first, you understand, was water, chaos. She was the Divine Mother. Hidden inside her was a yearning for something new, unknown: order, children. She was there at the beginning of human culture, the Big Bang, so to speak. Just as we can’t know what happened at the moment of the cosmic Big Bang, so we can’t discern what happened back in Africa. I don’t need to share with you the mythologies of the world, do I?

  “Of course not; you’re interested only in the contents of the Tablet of Destinies because now the world’s at a… a crossroads, and the choice we make is the most important ever. Climate will continue to change, glaciers to melt, population to grow.”

  He shrugged. “Rest assured, these things are coming to pass. The world could slide into barbarism and war over dwindling resources, water, food. That would be a choice. But if we can unite under one— there’s no other word for it, is there?— one truth: the sign, the teachings, the glory of the Wisdom Serpent, the Greeks’ Ophis Sophia. To the Akkadians she was Bašmu, to the Sumerians Muššatur.”

  He stopped, apparently embarrassed by his own zeal.

  “Go on,” she urged softly. “I’m quite interested.”

  He continued more calmly. “In the beginning the serpent was water, and water was the serpent. She moved close to the ground with the soft hiss of water on water. She moved sweetly under the ground. At other times, she flowed violently above, lashing at all in her way. Do you see? She is in the waves on sand, the rolling of pebbles in the surf. From the first, people watched her, studied her ways. They listened to her moods and words. Don’t get the idea she was a god; she does not judge, neither for deeds nor words. It is true that, were it her will, she could seize a man and carry him to his death. She could devour or she could nurture and educate. In Australia she was the great python Julunggul who could swallow and regurgitate. In Greece she was the dragon Ophioneus. All depends on her, everything that is, or was, or will be. She’s the kernel and body of wisdom, greater than any man or community of men or all the works of man combined. She is what existed before God was invented, before the gods existed, when there was nothing but Muššatur.”

  “And she’s not unhappy the world has set her story aside for others.”

  “Of course not. Happiness is no concern of hers, only the order of things. She lives and moves through the world in her way.”

  A man glided soundlessly into the room and flowed toward her. His walk was sinuous and crablike, giving off an impression of suppressed power more pungent than any odor, and she felt fear. Ibrahim stopped talking.

  The man stopped before her, the wide crimson sash of his black robe at the level of her eyes. He crowded her so closely his presence confined her to the low chair. Looking up at him she thought he might well be the ugliest man she had ever seen.

  His fathomless black eyes caught and held hers. “Welcome to Alamut, Dr. Emmer.” He gave a slight bow. “ I am Nizam al-Muriq.”

  It took a moment to find her voice. “Thank you,” she said, and had to repeat it. “Thank you. You’re the Teacher.” She remembered Marianne telling her a man they ca
lled Teacher wrote a pamphlet in which he claimed Ophis Sophia was the original religion, the first, the most true. Was that only yesterday?

  The nearly hairless skull mounted on a bent neck bobbed in a perfunctory, supremely cold gesture, the closest he would ever get to showing pleasure, she was sure. Ibrahim faded from her view; this man was the Teacher. His power ran through her like a snake’s sideways slither.

  So she smiled, sending him warmth. “Alamut? Headquarters of the Assassins. Ingenious.”

  Nizam’s expression did not flicker. He was impossibly still, thickly veined hands motionless just below his crimson sash. “You do know your history, Dr. Emmer, but rest assured, we follow no sect, not Isma’ili, not Salafi, not Maronite, not Catholic. Ibrahim here carries the family name of Hasan-i Sabbah, but he also is not Isma’ili, not Salafi, not Maronite, not Catholic. Alamut means ‘eagle’s teaching’ because the eagle rises high in order to see far. He does this for the Wisdom Serpent.”

  “Not a cult, yet you claim the Assassins as your own.”

  An almost inaudible sigh escaped him. “At one time Sabbah’s feda’in helped our cause, and for that we honor them. I am the current Eye and Speaker for the Wisdom Serpent and Teacher of her followers. Ibrahim is my right hand.”

  “Snakes don’t have hands,” Lisa observed.

  “Now you show your ignorance, Dr. Emmer. Where is the Tablet?”

  Instead of answering, she continued to smile while counting silently to ten.

  He proved less patient than she. She had reached eight when he said, “Never mind. We have Usem, and we have you.” His unblinking eyes remained fixed on hers.

  She had to look up. He might have been a statue draped in shiny black silk, towering over her.

  Ibrahim used the momentary silence to stand up with a slight cough and move behind his chair. Lisa kept her gaze on Nizam.

  “Some people have a gift,” Nizam began. His tone was relaxed, even conversational. “Often they don’t know they have it. I call it the gift of eagle sight. Long ago, more than forty years now, I met someone who possessed it.” His head tilted slightly, and a highlight on the black surfaces of his eyes glimmered and went out. “He was an ancient, shriveled man, someone you would never look at twice, but he knew things that would happen before they unfolded.”