by Rob Swigart
“That’s all? Five people? And two of them are dead.”
“Not dead. You’re the Pythia and Steve is the new Rossignol.”
Steve jumped. “What?”
Ted continued smoothly. “Although they don’t know about Delphi, we have a number of agents we trust in cities around the world.”
“What cities?” Lisa demanded.
“Wait a minute,” Steve protested. “I didn’t ask for this job. Antoine was the Rossignol. He had training, preparation. He knew what he was doing. I don’t.”
“Please, we’ll get to your role, which as I’m sure you know is vital to the Agenda’s operations, but Lisa asked an important question, and she’s the Pythia.” Ted held up his hand and turned in his seat. “Alain?”
“The cities where we have agents have changed over time,” he said, looking up from his laptop. “Traditionally Rome, Istanbul, Paris and London. For the past couple of hundred years we’ve had people in Washington, San Francisco, Tokyo, and New Delhi. Recently we added Shanghai, Johannesburg, Santiago and Rio.”
Steve had settled back and crossed his arms.
“Who are they?” Lisa was poised to take notes.
Ted put his hand over her pad. “We have always been instructed not to keep physical records whenever possible. I believe your memory is good enough.”
She nodded. “Of course.” She put the pen away. “Go on, Alain.”
“Many are retired intelligence officers from various countries. They work on background, general intelligence, fact checking, analysis – in general, keeping their eyes and ears open.”
Lisa squeezed Steven’s forearm. “Spies, you mean.”
“Informants. Researchers. Analysts. We need them.”
“Of course.” She turned to Ted. “And where does the money for all this come from? It must be expensive, not to mention the eighteen million for this plane.”
He began peeling another orange, offered her a section, and when she declined popped it in his mouth. He swallowed and said, “As early as the sixth century BC Delphi was very rich. Many client cities had huge treasuries there and the temple acted as a kind of central bank. Some of that wealth was saved, and has been growing through the end of the Roman Empire, the dark ages, the crusades. Today its assets are considerable.”
He went on to describe the extent of the enterprises in which the Delphi Agenda was a silent partner. The list of corporations, real estate holdings, technology companies, and hidden cash reserves went on for a long time and left Lisa speechless. “Almost as rich as the Church,” she murmured.
“Not quite that rich,” Ted replied gravely.
“How is it possible to keep it hidden so long?”
“Practice, of course.” Ted considered for a moment. “The small number of people who know about it. High trust, close attention to detail, belief in its importance, and certainly luck.”
“I see. Has the core group always been confined to five?”
“Five, yes.” Ted shifted uncomfortably, putting the orange peel aside. He cleared his throat and glanced at Marianne, gazing out the window with a distracted air. Finally he added, “It’s a terrible breach of protocol for us all to travel on the same plane. If something happened the Delphi Agenda would disappear, but this is an emergency. It won’t happen again. I can’t name a time in history when both the Rossignol and the Pythos were killed at the same time, can you, Marianne?”
She turned away from the window. “This is the only time on record they travel together.”
“Anything else?”
Ted cleared his throat. “About our agents around the world: you should get to know them – the next Pythos might be among them. They‘re the best we could find.”
“What exactly am I supposed to look for?”
Ted spread his hands. “Among other qualities, a certain gift for intuition, I think. True, though the Delphi procedure is still much as it has been for over three thousand years, the task is more complex and the technology has had to evolve to keep pace. But in the end it comes down to people. The shape of the future has always been clearer to some than others.”
“Well, I’ve never been one of them.”
“Are you sure? Raimond Foix chose you for a reason.”
She leaned back. The fugue was closer, over her shoulder, breathing on her neck, but this time she could see it, feel it. She felt her whole body relax. Suddenly the fugue felt like an old friend, something she could trust. Ted was right, she did sense things others couldn’t. It was what made her so good at papyrology, seeing patterns, connections, meanings. She was one of them, after all. “Very well, go on.”
“Consider that in Hypatia’s time the Pythos knew the Roman Empire was splitting apart and that the eastern part would continue for a long time. Eventually, of course, the balance would shift back, so the Pythos laid plans to accommodate historical changes. Although the vision is normally partial and blurred, it can be very sharp indeed at times. Giordano Bruno, for instance, became known to the world because the way was prepared for him.” A somber look passed across the librarian’s face. “He did something no Pythos had done before, he tried to act in the world, to change things. This was beyond the mandate of the Pythos, but he knew the western world was tearing itself apart. He spied for Queen Elizabeth during the years he lived in London, trying to help Protestant England counter the power of the Church, a political as well as a religious goal.”
“And was burned at the stake. Was it worth the risk?” Lisa asked.
Ted tried to draw Marianne into the conversation, but she was staring once more out the window. “You’d have to ask him. The Inquisition stopped him, but he saw the general shape of the future and tried to change it. Perhaps he did, just a little. Who can say?”
“All right.”
“One more thing,” Ted added. “There’s the disk, the one the Rossignol was to give you.”
“Which we don’t have.”
Steve stirred. “We’ll duplicate it or get it back.” He put his other hand over hers and she gave him a quick smile.
He nodded. If she was in, so was he.
Alain said, “It belonged to Bruno. We think he enciphered whatever he wrote there, in anticipation of this day, and that’s why you need it.”
“Come on, it can’t be that important,” the banker objected. “As you said, if what Rossignol was going to give Lisa was the outer part of an Alberti cipher disk, then all it has on it is the alphabet; anybody could make one. The inner disk scrambles the letters and creates the cipher. That’s the important part.”
Lisa asked, “Where is it?”
Steve shrugged. “I wish I knew.”
“And the Order now has part of the disk,” she said.
“The unimportant part,” Steve insisted.
“Unless there’s something else about it, something besides the alphabet.” Lisa spoke more to herself than the librarian. “All right, where does this take us?”
“Perhaps to the Founding Document,” Ted said somberly.
“Ah. And what is the Founding Document?”
Ted sighed. “All we know for certain is that it contains information that could destroy the institution of the Church, something so explosive no Pythos has used it before.” He sighed. “I wish I could say more, but before we discuss it further, I think you should examine the papyrus you have with you. We believe it is in there you will learn more, don’t we Marianne?”
Marianne nodded without turning away from the view of cloud tops through the window.
Lisa said, “Even if Bruno wrote it, which I doubt since I think it’s a forgery, there’s nothing on it but some Gnostic texts.”
Ted arched his eyebrow. “Are you sure? Why don’t you take another look?”
28.
Captain Jean-Paul Hugo was struggling to contain his fury. “Lost again?”
His assistants looked at one another. One found something interesting about his shoes. Mathieu coughed delicately. “Dupond said the Emmer girl a
nd Viginaire had arrived in Mirepoix. They went to a house where there was some kind of incident, an explosion, fire. They were inside but when the fire department arrived there was only one dead man in the basement identified from his prints as Cedric Saint-Ange, a Dominican friar. The place was full of burning books; the girl was gone.”
“This is preposterous!” Hugo smacked his desk with both palms. “At the moment Lisa Emmer is our only viable suspect! She had the code to Foix’s apartment. He knew her. She was the only one who could get inside without alarming him.”
Hugo put as much energy into this speech as he could muster, but even as he was speaking he began to doubt his own words. There were other players, and the other players were surely suspects.
“But, sir,” Mathieu objected. “They were friends. Why would he lock the study door if she was a regular visitor? Besides, she doesn’t seem the type to carry explosives, does she?”
Hugo slumped back in his chair. “I know, I know. What I mean is, Emmer’s our best witness, and she’s eluded us twice now, which I find very suspicious.”
Hugo thought of himself as a good man, and more, a good policeman. He hadn’t become a captain because he was stupid or incompetent. His assistants, even Mathieu, were another matter. No, that was unfair. Mathieu did his best, and he was often of use. It was the case getting him down.
“There’s also the nun,” Mathieu suggested.
“Yes, I know, I know, there’s always the nun and her wheelchair. And her monk.” Hugo dismissed this with a wave of his hand. For some reason at that very moment he thought of the cutaway scale model of the beautiful Beaux Arts Gare d’Orsay he was building in his study. It was one of the most beautiful buildings in Paris and now served as a museum, but Hugo’s father had told him more than once of coming home from his years as a prisoner of war through the train station. As a child Hugo had heard de Gaulle announce his willingness to serve his country from the grand hotel attached to the station. That was in 1958. He had always loved the old station, and dreamed of the long-distance trains that came in and out until 1939.
He was currently working on the removable long curved ceiling with its broad skylights, arched windows and decorative medallions.
The station, for he always thought of it as a station and not as a museum of modern art, was just a long block away from the Ministère des Affaires étrangères et européennes. The Gare d’Orsay was a grand lady of Paris and one of the many reasons he loved the city.
He was considerably less fond of the Ministry building, and even more so this day.
Still, he felt calmer and more cheerful, and so smiled for the first time all afternoon. “Did Dupond have any good news for us?”
“Well…”
“Wonderful.” Hugo waved away this sarcastic sally and went on, still smiling wolfishly. “All right, gentlemen, I have something to tell you. I have just today received a telephone call from Quai d'Orsay. Someone in the Foreign Ministry whose name a mere captain in the Paris Police is apparently not allowed to know wanted to speak with me personally. This person I do not know said he was a private secretary to the Foreign Minister himself. A very private secretary, he said. He was calling to inform me that an investigation into the deaths of Raimond Foix and Antoine Rossignol doesn’t serve the interests of the Republic at this time. Delicate international issues are involved. These issues are of concern neither to me nor to the Préfecture of Police. The deaths of Foix and Rossignol were accidents or suicides. Their cases are no longer open.”
He glared at his two inferiors. “He made me angry, that man at the Quai d'Orsay. Very angry. I’m better now, really I am, but he roused my ire, didn’t he? Do you understand me?”
“Yes, sir,” Mathieu answered. “We’ll keep looking. Dupond said the Emmer woman and her friends are on their way back to Paris, so we’ll be waiting.”
“Well, then,” Hugo said affably. He was enjoying himself at last. “That’s a morsel of good news after all, isn’t it?”
29.
Lisa centered the sheet of parchment on the table. “All right, you believe there’s a clue here, correct?”
Ted looked on curiously. “That’s the one from the Procroft Collection, yes?”
She nodded.
“Then yes, that’s it. This is the first time we’ve seen it, isn’t it, Marianne?”
“First time, Ted,” she agreed.
“Is there anything special about it?” Steve asked, leaning over the table.
Lisa trailed her finger along the edge of the glassine envelope. She said without looking up, “Tell me about Bruno. Being famous would run counter to the Hypatia Doctrine, wouldn’t it? The Pythos should be unknown, a secret, not a famous person. So why Bruno?”
“We can’t explain why in the sixteenth century a well-known figure held this position but it seems to be true. We can name only a few others. For example, right before Dr. Foix there was Carter Samuels, an obscure British vicar in Wakefield. Before that, there was Bruno of course, and Alberti, the best known. The others were all humble people like Samuels who left little record of their existence.”
“I see. So what about the Founding Document?” she asked, tapping her fingernail on the glassine envelope. “This can’t be it.”
“No.”
“But you and Marianne believe there’s a clue to it in here?”
“You’re thinking out loud. Good. Please go on.”
She straightened. “If there is a clue, then there’s more here than Bourbaki and a list of quotes in Greek from the Thomas gospel.”
“Yes.”
She moved the envelope around to catch the light in different ways. “It’s a palimpsest,” she said. “There are faint traces of previous writing.”
Steve said, “What? Where?”
“Look at right angles to the writing, between the letters. It’s been scraped and reused. She looked up. “Most palimpsests like this one are on vellum or parchment, which were expensive and rare, and so economical to reuse. But why would Raimond do such a thing, erase something with this kind of history, something this important to his work? It doesn’t sound like him.”
Ted nodded. “Perhaps not, but go on.”
She had the impression she was back in one of Foix’s classes. She continued thinking out loud, “All right, the Thomas gospel wasn’t discovered until the Coptic Nag Hammadi library, so this writing can’t be older than 1945 when Nag Hammadi was found.”
Ted said nothing.
“But Thomas was known before that, of course: whoever sealed the Nag Hammadi library in a jar was trying to hide it from the eyes of the Church after the Council of Nicaea. That was when unauthorized or unapproved doctrines became heretical and subject to harsh penalties. The Nag Hammadi Thomas was a translation from an earlier Greek version; both were lost to history for sixteen hundred years. I presume Raimond had access to a Greek version.”
Ted and Marianne were both smiling. “That’s right,” Ted said. “In 325 the Council of Nicaea proclaimed the unity of the faith and standardized doctrine, very good. One copy of Thomas was hidden in the Nag Hammadi jar, and other copies exist as well. Please, go on.”
“OK. The Founding Document was written shortly after 395 when the priest of Apollo went to Alexandria. By then Nag Hammadi was already buried. Besides, Raimond wouldn’t harm the Founding Document, so this is something else, a text Raimond cleaned and wrote over. You think Bruno?”
“Good.” Ted folded his hands across his belly and smiled enigmatically. “Perhaps you can date the material?”
“Of course she can, Ted,” Marianne said, tapping his arm. “She’s the Pythia.”
“I’m a papyrologist,” Lisa muttered. She slid the page from its envelope and, with her eyes closed, stroked her fingertip very lightly over the surface. She held it up close to the window, where the slanted rays of the afternoon sun could illuminate its surface. She squinted, noting the subtle waves and ripples. She sniffed it.
“I see,” she breathed, slipping i
t back into the envelope. “Much later than the fourth century, perhaps as late as the sixteenth.”
Marianne clapped her hands. “Told you,” she said to Ted.
Lisa shook her head. “So Raimond scraped it and cleaned it and put Bourbaki in deliberately to date it. Then what was the original?”
Ted didn’t know.
“But you do believe it was Bruno? The date is about right.”
“Yes. The Alberti disk also belonged to him.”
“All right. It can’t possibly be the Founding Document unless Bruno copied it here, but from what you say he wouldn’t do that, either.”
“That’s correct,” Ted agreed. “It was forbidden to make copies and Bruno wouldn’t have needed one. He was famous for his prodigious memory and wrote widely on the subject. And remember – no joke intended – he was also very interested in the hermetic tradition.”
“Right. Alchemy?”
“Think of it as natural science, but of course it included chemistry, physics, optics.”
“Good. Let’s assume Bruno wrote something here. Further, let’s assume he was prepared for someone in the future to clean it and re-use it. A good alchemist might have ways of recovering the writing using milk or lemon juice. Or he might have used some other form of secret writing. Could he have foreseen this?”
Ted merely smiled.
“All right, what more can you tell me about the disk?”
Rossignol’s secretary Alain spoke up. “Round, flat, bronze, a few centimeters in diameter. Kept in the secure vault below M. Rossignol’s apartment on the rue Montpensier.”
“Right,” Steve said. “Designed to encrypt and decrypt messages. Rossignol was getting it to deliver to you, which means you need it.”
“You said it belonged to Bruno and he used it to write in code?”
“Technically, if he used the disk, it was to create a cipher, not a code,” Steve corrected. “Specifically, a polyalphabetic substitution cipher using a keyword. You line up the first letter of the keyword with its mate on the outer disk and write out the plain text message on the outer disk, substituting the letters on the inner disk. At an interval agreed to beforehand – every letter or more you shift to the next letter of the keyword. Someone smart might be able to break an enciphered message without the key word, but it would take much longer.”
