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

by Rob Swigart

  She translated. “Prophecy more ancient than Papist scripture: C D years hence and more in North Iberian mountains a child contested by a serpent. Protect.”

  “CD? Numerals, then, four hundred years,” Steve said.

  Lisa nodded. “Fifteen eighty-five plus four hundred and more. He doesn’t say how many more; it could be today.”

  “We have a more precise location: Northern Spain.”

  Pan frowned with distaste. “Contested by a serpent. What the hell does that mean?”

  “A pattern is forming,” Lisa said. “Thanks for your help.”

  “Oh, sure.” The physicist waved a dismissive hand and returned the miniature to Steve. “Toss me aside now you have what you want. You’ll have all the fun and I’ll have nothing but my boring day job.”

  Steve slipped the painting back into the lantern frame. “I doubt your day job is that boring, Pan.”

  “Electronic warfare,” Lisa added. “Cybercrime. Porn.”

  Pan burst out laughing. “So he told you about that, did he? You’d be amazed, the places people hide messages.”

  “Goodbye, Pan,” Steve said.

  “No, seriously, don’t you want to know where people hide things? Not just porn!” the physicist called after them.

  “Just looking for an honest man,” Lisa said, holding up the lantern.

  The door closed behind them. She took Steve’s arm and they strolled through the lobby and out into the night.

  Frédéric and Walid

  Steve’s warning had redoubled Frédo’s anxiety and driven him to lock himself in his office at the École pratique des hautes études at the Sorbonne. He cowered there throughout the afternoon, feeling like a rabbit hounded down in its warren.

  Usem was gone. Frédo had confided his fears to Lisa Emmer, and right after that someone had attacked her. With poisonous snakes, no less! Usem’s emails had mentioned snakes. His paranoia was justified. Whatever had befallen Usem was going to happen to him!

  Whoever they were, they were watching. They’d watched him enter Lisa’s apartment, watched him leave. They knew who he was and where he worked. They were certainly coming for him. His enemies were faceless, implacable, and terrifying.

  Time passed. The secretary went home without saying goodbye. Someone rummaged in the file cabinets in the outer office and around dusk knocked on Frédo’s door. He didn’t answer and they went away.

  Night fell. Far below, the ground floor buzzed with unhurried activity and a Friday evening lecture sent indistinct conversations floating up from the street. Toward midnight the sounds died away and he was alone.

  What could he confess to these people, really? Usem had found a tablet? They knew that. He could tell them about the Thaumastos Letter, but it wasn’t clear why Usem had asked about it. That was all, really. He, Frédéric Daviau, knew nothing important. They only wanted him because he had visited Lisa, another obscure scholar. That was silly; he had every right to dine with a colleague! His fears were groundless.

  These thoughts were not particularly reassuring, but they did give him a dollop of courage. He opened his office door, crossed the foyer, and checked the hall. The ceiling lights reflected off polished parquet. A fire extinguisher snugged against the wall near the corner. Shadows pooled in the elevator bay. All the other office doors were closed.

  He trembled on the threshold, frightened and ridiculous. Really, there was nothing to be afraid of. Whoever they were, they wanted Usem and his cursed tablet. Now they had him and soon they would know what he knew, whatever it was. Then they would get the tablet, if he hadn’t died first. Usem was old and frail. He wouldn’t last long under torture.

  What was he thinking? People didn’t torture in this day and age, not now, in the twenty-first century!

  Pfah! He would stay in his office until morning. The foyer where the secretary sat was equipped with a snack machine and a water cooler. In the morning, even though it would be Saturday, there would be people around and he could leave with impunity.

  Silence gathered, became a towering wave of viscous black, and slowly rolled through his office. To relieve the pressure he opened the window. A wall of warm, humid air moved in. Squeezed between humidity and silence, he could scarcely breathe. Traffic was light. A few cars passed, paused at the corner, went on.

  He was about to turn away when a brown sedan pulled up at the opposite curb. He slid to one side and watched. Minutes ticked by and his nerves grew taut again. The driver was casing his office; he knew it. The driver was invisible, but it was dark and the angle was high. He eased the window closed, switched off the lights and stared down at the car.

  What were they after? Lisa must be asking the same questions. He was sorry now he had burdened her. She was young, and oh, so fragile. Steve looked tough, true, and seemed devoted to her. Still, what could she do about the information he’d given her? He’d been desperate, and had turned to the only person he thought would understand. It was his fault. He had endangered her. Perhaps he should go back?

  Foolish. She was just a scholar; she couldn’t help. What could he say? Reassure me, I’m afraid of my own shadow?

  He dozed in the office chair, but kept jerking awake. Around two he gave up. Tired of his fears and the oppressive building, he slipped out to the foyer, unlocked the outer door, closed and locked it behind him, and started toward the elevators. His footsteps echoed on the parquet.

  He was halfway there when the elevator began to whir, cables spooling near the roof, the car rising toward him. He jumped. The vast emptiness of an official building at night closed around him. He was utterly alone.

  On impulse he grabbed the extinguisher from its mount and shut himself in a tiny utility closet, leaving the door ajar. He could see a vertical sliver of the opposite wall and floor.

  The whirring stopped. Doors slid open. The clash of the doors closing was almost deafening. He shrank back against shelves of cleaning products. A plastic bottle fell. He caught it in time and put it back. His hand was shaking. The fire extinguisher was heavy in his other hand, dragging his arm down. He gripped the handle.

  He heard only his own breath. A sudden shape flitted past his sliver of corridor, too quickly to tell if it was man, woman, or ghost.

  He waited, now holding his breath. A slight squeak down the hall alarmed him, but it was just a floorboard settling, not an intruder hunting him. He put his eye up to the opening. He could see very little more. Wall, floor, shadow.

  Did someone send the elevator up, trying to spook him? If so, they succeeded.

  Still, he waited.

  A vague shadow spread like a stain along the floor and solidified into a man. All Frédo could see of him was a light colored, perhaps tan, windbreaker, blue jeans, gray sneakers, and part of a darker bearded face in deep shadow.

  The man paused to look around.

  After a moment he disappeared toward the office. A few moments later, the deafening sound of splintered wood and the creak of the office door broke the silence.

  Frédo knew the man was looking for him. More sounds followed: a chaos of chairs overturning, books falling, drawers thrown. Silence returned.

  Still Frédo waited. The hand gripping the fire extinguisher trembled.

  The intruder reappeared, exposing his side and back. When he stepped forward, out of sight, Frédo let out a long breath, ready to leave his refuge as soon as he heard the elevator doors. Instead, the man reappeared. He stopped in the gap and pivoted slowly, stopping when he saw the utility closet door ajar. He looked directly into Frédo’s eyes, reaching for the door. A moment’s hesitation and he threw it open.

  Frédo swung the fire extinguisher upward as hard as he could. The bottom edge glanced off the man’s jaw and cheek and sent him tumbling back. Frédo was already swinging down at the man’s exposed head. The extinguisher connected with a disturbingly wet sound.

  The man collapsed, a small pool of blood seeping from under his head.

  Frédo straddled the body and bent dow
n. The name Walid was stitched over the pocket of the windbreaker. Frédo had just killed an innocent man, some poor maintenance worker or security guard!

  He dropped the extinguisher and backed away in horror, tripped on the man’s foot and he fell onto the body. He was frantically pushing himself away when his hand found something hard in the jacket pocket. He reached in and discovered a small revolver.

  Oddly, relief flooded him. This was no maintenance worker. Frédo stood and placed the revolver in his own pants pocket without thinking. Mechanically, he picked up the extinguisher, checked it for blood, and replaced it in its holder.

  As he started back to his office, the dead man groaned.

  “Oh, no!” Frédo took a step back, staring at the body in horror.

  The dead man’s limbs twitched.

  Frédo looked around and grabbed the first thing he saw, a roll of mustard colored duct tape from the utility closet. He tore off a long, sloppy stretch and wound it around the lower legs of this man, inexplicably alive.

  He was tearing off another section of tape when a feeble pat on his shoulder made him jump. The man’s hands were still free! He was not conscious enough to do him real harm, but to be certain, Frédo gathered the wrists together and wound turn after turn of tape around them as well. Then he propped the near comatose man into a sitting position and wrapped tape around his upper arms and torso. The man groaned, eyelids fluttering, so Frédo put several layers of tape over his mouth, and then, for good measure, added more layers over his eyes and around the back of his head. Clumps of hair, still tacky with blood, stuck out between the strips.

  Frédo examined his work. The stocky bearded man, face nearly covered with yellow tape, upper body, ditto, hands bound together, legs, too, the tape wrinkled into careless folds and creases, stuck together, buckled and overlapping in a chaos of confinement, was now a shapeless bundle on the floor.

  Frédo propped the bundle at an angle against the wall opposite the closet. One of the man’s shoelaces was undone. Too bad, but he wasn’t going anywhere. Frédo squatted by the closet to think. Could his name really be Walid?

  Walid started to moan. His body writhed. The tape wrapping stretched and tightened. Apparently he was trying to shout, but all that emerged were nasal snorts and grunts.

  Frédo was not inclined to answer. The gun in his pocket was heavy and menacing. Not menacing so much to its previous owner, of course, but to Frédo himself. His own sudden power frightened him.

  He watched. It took several minutes for the man’s struggles to subside and finally come to a stop.

  With a tight nod Frédo returned to the offices. The outer lock was shattered. His own office door was hanging by one hinge, the room in shambles. It would take weeks to retrieve and replace everything. His computer was on the floor. He put it back on the desk and tried it, but it was beyond repair.

  He sat down at the secretary’s desk and scratched absently at his temple. Tiny white flakes fluttered onto the desk. He was Frédéric Daviau, forty-nine years old, almost married once, a competent scholar but far from a man who acted rashly. He shared a rather large apartment in the fourteenth arrondissement with his sister, a nurse at the Val de Grâce army hospital. The closest he felt to passion was a mild interest in fourth century Greek paleography.

  He had to discover why they were stalking him. The only way to find Usem was to go back to Lisa Emmer and Steve Viginaire.

  His watch read 3:38 in the morning. Before he contacted the others, he would do a little research of his own. He sat at the secretary’s computer and went to work.

  Dawn had seeped through the windows when he leaned back with a sigh. Several pages of handwritten notes lay on the desk. A popular news site filled the screen with headlines: a Papal decree, a gift of several rare vipers to the Jardin des Plantes, a bombing in Lebanon, a grisly murder in London, the birth of the ex-president of a former Soviet country’s child, with, he was sure, nothing miraculous about it. He looked at the window. Five drops spattered against it. He waited, but the rain stopped.

  He thought of the man in the corridor rolled up in orange duct tape and something snapped, like the breaking of a green twig. Everything changed. He stared vacantly out the window for long minutes contemplating this new phenomenon.

  With a start he shook himself back into the present. He picked up the office phone, put it down, took out his cell phone, and put it away. With a grim smile he picked up the secretary’s handset. “I’d like to report an assau… uh, attempted burglary at the Sorbonne,” he said quickly in a squeaky falsetto, adding the location and hanging up.

  He bought snacks from the vending machine and drank from the water cooler. He stared out the window for an hour, his mind empty of coherent thoughts, accumulating anger and resentment until he quivered with a new form of energy. Perpetual motion, he vaguely thought. Unlimited, free, empowering energy.

  He sent Steve a text, stuffed his notes inside his jacket pocket, and left the office. He paused in the doorway and looked at the man still propped against the corridor wall, shook his head and continued toward the elevators. What would Walid tell the police about him? That a skinny, middle-aged scholar had subdued him?

  Doubtful he would mention the gun.

  The orange bundle was motionless. Frédo stepped over it. His rage burned white and pure, more vibrant than anything he had ever felt.

  He summoned the elevator. When the doors opened, Walid twisted toward the sound and emitted another series of muffled grunts. The doors slid shut and cut them off.

  The security guard at the metal detector by the entrance was dozing, chin on chest. His hand rested on a table near a paper cup of coffee. The cream had congealed into an archipelago of yellow islands.

  Frédo passed out through the machine. It buzzed loudly. The guard snorted, his mouth opened and closed, and he let out a terrific snore. His eyes opened sleepily. Frédo nodded at him.

  Already people were arriving at the entrance, students, scholars, maintenance men, even parents bringing their teenagers in to visit. Not many— it was a Saturday, after all,— but enough. The guard would have to start working.

  Frédo smiled. He felt something different in his walk. He seemed to bounce and float through the courtyard to the main entrance.

  A FEDEX truck was just pulling up, first delivery of the day.

  On the street, the small but important notion bloomed in his mind: he, Frédéric Daviau, had become a man with a small, snub-nosed revolver slapping against his thigh with every step.

  The Children’s Hall

  Seven hundred kilometers southwest of Paris, Spain juts into the cold Atlantic, forming the southern boundary of the Bay of Biscay. Parallel to the coast, the Picos de Europa range fends off the storms spiraling down from England, disrupting tourist ferry traffic from Plymouth.

  At the western end of the range and over a mile above sea level brooded a series of ancient buildings called the Monasterio de San Akakio, founded a century after the Moorish invasion of Spain in 711 AD. A long succession of Caliphs, tyrants, monarchs, dictators, and presidents had tolerated, ignored, and ultimately forgotten about it.

  Although the real Saint Akakios followed the Eastern Rite, the now forgotten founders of the monastery chose him as their patron because of his outstanding virtue. In the Ladder of Divine Ascent, St. John Klimakos tells of how Saint Akakios was canonized for his obedience and humility. “Obedience,” Klimakos said, “is the mortification of the limbs while the mind remains alive. Obedience is unquestioning movement, voluntary death, simple life, carefree danger, spontaneous defense by God, fearlessness of death, a safe voyage, a sleeper’s progress. Obedience is the tomb of the will and the resurrection of humility. A corpse does not argue or reason as to what is good or what seems to be bad.”

  Those who dedicated themselves to God at the monastery in the mountains far from the temptations of a city assiduously applied this lesson to the young, tarnished women who, over the past millennium had had the misfortune t
o fall under their care. No matter the girls were almost always victims of corruption, rape, or incest; the monks and nuns of Saint Akakios thought of them as mere corpses that must live, free of curiosity, in resurrected humility.

  Celia, like many in the Children’s Hall, admitted no memory of her defiler. Most of the girls lost to God preferred not to remember. Others gave up the names of their aggressors or seducers without a second thought, but always too late; the men were long gone.

  No one, least of all Celia herself, knew that she, above all those who passed their nights and days in the cells along this long, echoing hall, seemed to perfectly express the patron saint’s definition of obedience. Few, from the Prior down to the lowliest gardener, gave her more than a glancing look. Few knew her name or paid attention to her large, ungainly form, which only grew more awkward as her pregnancy advanced. Few remarked her drab brown hair hanging beside her round face, the slick, pale skin and colorless opacity of her eyes. Out of pity, a kitchen boy slipped her scraps of food from time to time, for she was often hungry. Other than that, the girls, like the staff, scarcely noticed her. Only two, Sister Mary Lamiana and Father Colmillo, had succumbed to a morbid fascination with her stolid endurance. She may have been the perfection of Obedience but they had seen her as the epitome of spiritual corruption above all the other girls. Her stubborn endurance only annoyed them.

  Celia never thought of their attentions as torment. Despite her fear of Father Colmillo and dread of Sister’s heavy tarnished silver cross, she had endured for months without thought. It was what was.

  She passed most of her days alone in her room, rocking back and forth, hands clasped over her swollen belly. Sometimes she hummed a crude sort of lullaby, reedy and cracked, but somehow soothing, or fell still and remained in silence. The child inside scarcely intruded on her thoughts. Outwardly she appeared bemused, even vacant.

  Many of the girls in the Children’s Hall carrying babies talked among themselves, so the concept of childbearing was not a secret from her.