The Delphi Agenda (9 page)

She looked expectantly into Rossignol’s eyes.

So far the scene had been too preposterous to believe. He was confined in a Medieval dungeon under threat of torture by a nun. Even the smoothness with which he had been captured and sedated seemed unreal.

But now, for the first time, he felt real fear. They knew about the girl! “If the Inquisition was not supposed to spill blood,” he said with a ragged smile. “You must be planning a public burning. Of course, that’s not done any more, so I suppose it will have to look like an accident.”

This time she slammed the barrel of the Glock on the back of his hand. He felt the small bones break and shock flooded him. He bit through his lip, filling his mouth with blood, but did not cry out.

She crooned, “I thought I had made it clear that the prohibition is no longer in force. The Order has complete discretion in this matter, and has had for a very long time. Only through extreme measures have we been able to bring this matter so close to a final conclusion.”

Sweat stood out on Rossignol’s forehead, but his voice was steady. “That explains how you could shoot Raimond Foix.” It also meant they didn’t believe it was really finished. Could he find a way to convince them they had won?

The nun’s wintry smile stretched her thin, dry lips.

He said, “Since you’re going to kill me, too, why should I tell you anything?”

The smile faded. “Your choice is between a long and very painful death, or a short, merciful one. God prefers mercy, but this matter is too important to be hindered by weakness. His will must be done.”

Rossignol forced himself to smile back, feeling the blood slick on his teeth.

His defiance seemed to unsettle her, for the beads moved more rapidly through her fingers. One of the figures in the shadows stirred and detached from the others. He was a tall, thin man who stayed just outside the circle of light, examining Rossignol. After a moment he struck a match and lit a cigarette. Rossignol couldn’t see the face behind the flare of light.

After exhaling a long slow plume of smoke the man, speaking a quiet, unhurried French, said, “We have had many centuries of experience in persuasion. You know the Pythos is dead, the last of a long line; there are no successors. We have, over the centuries, killed others, many of them. There is no regret for those deaths; they were necessary. God’s creation must be protected from the satanic plague of paganism and barbarity, with sword and torch and pain, as needed. No price is too high. There really are some things man should not know, M. Rossignol, things that belong to God’s domain and the Holy Mother Church.”

His voice fell to a low, caressing purr, more ominous even than the nun’s. “Our Order,” he continued smoothly, “has nearly completed its work. With the elimination of Raimond Foix the only institution surviving from the misguided past is finished. You, and perhaps the girl, are merely loose ends, but the Order leaves nothing to chance. It is our sacred duty. Once these matters are settled, we will have fulfilled our destiny. You can only imagine our satisfaction, after all these centuries.”

He leaned into the light and Rossignol saw an older man with a gray beard. One eye drooped slightly, and his breath carried the strong smell of cigarettes, yet the face was kindly, compassionate. Furrows of concern divided his brows. “My name is Defago. I want you to remember my name for the rest of what life is left to you. We want the rest of the Alberti cipher disk, M. Rossignol.”

“You’re from Languedoc,” Rossignol said, averting his face. “A Dominican, I would guess, though out of uniform. Are you an Inquisitor? The Inquisition no longer exists.”

Defago straightened the knot of his black tie and smoothed his lapel. “Don’t play games, M. Rossignol. We are not fools. We know who you are. The Order and its predecessors have been pursuing the Pythos for sixteen centuries. Our struggle has been long, and at times seemed agonizingly slow, but the Order is patient, and now, finally, today, our patience is rewarded. All we want is the disk, and we will get it.”

“Even if you had it, you would still need the keyword,” Rossignol replied, yielding some of the pretense he didn’t know what they were talking about. “Not to mention a message to decipher.”

The friar gazed at Rossignol the way a father looks at a son who has disappointed him. “We’ll have the message, you may be sure. We’ll have everything we need. And since Charles Babbage broke the Alberti cipher in the nineteenth century, we won’t really need the keyword, will we? But we believe the cipher disk itself may be important, something about the disk itself. A simple monalphabetic substitution cipher hardly seems worth all the trouble you went to if it weren’t important. Therefore we will have it,” he continued with an air of irrefutable logic. “If it’s important to you, then it’s important to us, don’t you see? You may give us the keyword as well if you wish, but I don’t think it will be necessary as long as we have the rest of the device.”

Despite the pain in his hands and knee, and the growing chill, the banker retained his poise. “I don’t believe so.”

“Touching faith, M. Rossignol.” Defago moved beside the wheelchair and took a deep drag on his cigarette. He exhaled slowly, grinding it out on the stone floor with his shoe, and let his palm fall softly onto the nun’s shoulder. “You’ve met Sister Teresa. Say hello to M. Rossignol again, Tish.”

Instantly she slammed the barrel of the Glock on the back of his other hand. This time Rossignol grunted with pain when the bones cracked.

“As you can see,” Defago continued conversationally, “Tish was once seriously injured. She has suffered much already. Her wounds were grievous indeed. She lost a foot, an ear and much flesh. This shoulder here is metal. Each day pain burns her body. If you could see the scars! She’s torn and charred, yet in spite of this, or, perhaps, because of it, she has become our holy instrument, unshakable in her resolve and without mercy in pursuit of her mission.”

The nun reached up with her free hand to cover his. His grip tightened on her shoulder, and a fleeting expression of pain washed over her face. Instantly it turned to rapture.

Defago squeezed again. “You will save us time if you tell us what we must know.”

Rossignol pressed his lips together.

Defago nodded. Two men stepped forward, released him from the chair and roughly tied his chest and knees to ropes hanging from the distant ceiling. When he was suspended in a seated position over the Judas Chair, Defago asked, “Where is the rest of the Alberti disk?”

Blood drooled onto Rossignol’s chest, which heaved with the effort of breathing. “I don’t know,” he managed to whisper. He bent his arms but his useless hands only twitched, unable to grip the ropes. His knee was already black and grotesquely swollen.

Defago nodded. Pulleys creaked in the darkness overhead.

The cold iron point of the pyramid had barely touched his skin when Rossignol began to scream. Defago made a gesture and they raised the banker a few centimeters. His body swayed above the stool.

Gloom swam in his eyes. He saw two Defagos, two Sister Teresas. How much of this could he bear? If he confessed too soon they would not believe him. If he told them where they could find the disk they would only keep him alive until they found it and then kill him. If they discovered he had lied, they would torture him again. He had no idea if they could retrieve the real message, the one encoded with the Alberti disk, the one that Foix had hidden for Lisa. He, Antoine Rossignol, did not know where it was, but he did know it was intended for her, and that this was something he must never reveal. To confirm their suspicions would be to condemn her to death.

He was helpless, and could expect no rescue. There were no good options.

This had always been a possibility, though he had never truly believed it would happen to him any more than he believed they would really kill the Pythos. Perhaps he had grown complacent. Only a few weeks ago Foix had told him the girl was almost ready. It seemed he had relaxed his vigilance. Now it was the end.

Despite his labored breathing he ignored the men manipulating the ropes and kept his half-closed eyes on Defago and the nun. He had to keep conscious and aware long enough to judge the right time for confession. It must not be too soon, and certainly not too late, when he really might tell them things he shouldn’t. He had to protect the girl above all other things.

Again they lowered him. The pain, limited at first, gradually grew until his vision ran with red and his arms flailed, vainly trying to seize the ropes. He began to scream, a series of staggered shrieks broken only by brief pauses to suck in more air. Screaming seemed to help, so he kept it up until his voice grew hoarse and his vision had black fringes.

The Inquisitor and the nun watched him closely. Perhaps he was imagining the ecstatic look that illuminated their faces. Was it really compassion that touched their eyes and played around their lips?

He was not a young man and his strength was limited. His hands were broken and useless, his knee a black hole of pain, his mouth was full of blood, he was cold and utterly humiliated, and with every second that passed the pain increased. He could feel the muscle begin to tear as the metal point slowly penetrated.

Almost time.

It didn’t seem possible, but the pain intensified. They raised and lowered him at unpredictable intervals and different speeds, sometimes lowering his torso, sometimes his legs, so the point worked its way deeper inside. They would give him brief moments of respite, which only increased the agony when they lowered him again.

Time!

“Please,” he moaned. “Please.”

The pain slowly receded, leaving exhaustion and growing darkness.

“Yes?” Defago crooned.

“I’ll tell you what I know,” Rossignol gasped. “Please. I don’t know much, but I’ll tell you everything I can.”

They strapped him back into the chair and he began to talk in a low, exhausted voice, revealing little by little the details of the story that had been so carefully prepared many years before.

Steve glanced sideways through the window at the Rue Lanneau. The man in the raincoat was huddled under the eaves across the street ostentatiously examining a map. The rain had let up, but still fell lightly on the slick street. The empty outdoor tables of the restaurant were pushed against the ivy.

They were by the wall opposite the window. Nearby, a flickering orange fire struggled with the gloom from outside. Despite the dark afternoon, the heavy mantle and dark beams supporting the low ceiling seemed to exude a cozy atmosphere of warmth and cheer.

“That was delicious and I thank you.” Lisa folded her napkin and placed it neatly beside her plate. “Now perhaps we could discuss my problem.”

“
Our
problem.” Steve grinned, but a shadow of concern darkened the corners of his eyes.

She leaned back, considering. She had just met this man, had no idea who he was, or who Rossignol was, for that matter. But the banker had been close to Raimond, who had told her to listen to him.

Besides, looking into those clear blue eyes, she had a feeling she could count on him. “I’ve been thinking about the messages, the ones I can recognize, anyway: the windows, the books, and especially the
skytale
. He wrote, ‘The door opens the drawer. Seek the Procroft.’ I remembered when I took my first bite of the duck that Procroft is the name of one of the more obscure collections at the Institute of Papyrology.”

“Pardon?”

“Stanley Procroft was a minor British collector in the eighteen-eighties. While working for the British administration in Egypt, he purchased several dubious lots of papyrus from a dealer in Cairo. He couldn’t make sense of them himself and in the end donated the entire collection to the British Museum, which reluctantly accepted: provenance was lost, there was no indication where they came from originally, and at least a few seemed to be forgeries. Then somehow during the late nineteen-twenties one of the first papyrologists at the Institute here heard of it and offered to take the Procroft off their hands. It was a way of building up the collection. It’s been in a drawer at the Institute ever since; I don’t think anyone’s ever really looked at it.”

Steve was impressed. “Yet you remember this name?”

“Sure. I haven’t looked at the collection – it has an unsavory reputation – but the name’s fairly unusual. I guess it caught my attention.”

“Perhaps we should go there.”

“What for? I don’t see how it would help. Except to make a bad rhyme I have no idea what Raimond meant by ‘the door opens the drawer.’ It makes no more sense than ‘Seek the Procroft.’ Unless you think there might be something in the collection?”

“Maybe if you were there, in the room, it would come to you.”

She knitted her brows. “Do you think so?”

“Foix was pointing you that way, wasn’t he?”

“I suppose so. But I don’t know what’s going on, why he was killed. Was he involved in something criminal? Drugs, state secrets, guns? It’s ridiculous, Steve. He was a harmless old man, kind and sweet and very, very smart, full of vigor and humor and good will…. I just don’t understand.”

“All the more reason to follow his lead, don’t you think?”

“All right, what have we got to lose? What about our man out there? Do we lead him along?”

The man was looking up the rue Lanneau as if expecting someone. He saw they were looking at him, and lifted his map to hide his face. He was so clumsy the effect was almost comic.

“The Institute is in the Sorbonne?”

She nodded.

“If he’s Hugo’s man, Foix warned us away from the police, so we can’t exactly take him with us. If he isn’t Hugo’s, then we definitely don’t want him following us.”

“Agreed.”

“We’re only two streets away from the Sorbonne, but we have to lose him before we go there. Well, nothing says we have to leave through the front door. Take the stairs past the fireplace. There’s an outdoor garden. I’ll follow. That way he may think we’ve just gone to the rest room. If he follows, we’ll improvise.”

She rose gracefully, touched the back of his hand with a fleeting smile, and slipped past the thick mantle of the fireplace.