The Delphi Agenda (12 page)

“The door code to Raimond’s building: 2214. The door opens the drawer. It’s the number of the drawer. That’s where we’ll find what he wanted me to find. Come on, it’s upstairs.”

They climbed the spiral staircase to the top floor. Here the ceilings sloped inward under the roofline. The windows looked onto the university rooftops and the troubled sky.

The suite of rooms contained library stacks, a separate windowless chamber lined with bookcases, a small electronics lab and an extensive series of wooden cabinets with wide, shallow drawers.

Number 2214 was on the east side three drawers up from the floor.

Lisa pulled it open.

“Now what are we looking for?” Steve asked.

He was looking at a pile of sheets in glassine sleeves, each with a small label pasted in the upper corner. Other than that, there was no particular order. It looked as if someone had just tossed the entire collection into the drawer and forgotten about it.

Lisa cupped her chin on her palm, supporting her elbow with the other hand. “A document of some kind, I should think.”

“I see,” he said dryly. The drawer contained nothing but documents.

His irony was so palpable she glared. “Sorry. The tape had another number; I think the one we need.”

“I don’t recall any other numbers.”

“A Delta and a Digamma. Letters represented numbers in ancient Greece. Raimond said, ‘Delta Digamma.’

“Delta could mean infinitesimal change,” Steve suggested.

“Really? I didn’t know that. But digamma could be the symbol for six.”

Steve nodded. “So we’re looking for number six, plus or minus infinitesimal change? Unless, and I doubt this somehow, Raimond was thinking of theoretical physicist Paul Dirac's Delta, the unit impulse function with the value of infinity for
x
= 0, and zero elsewhere.” He started to remove envelopes, examine the labels and set them aside on the floor. After a while he added, “These numbers are all over the place. There’s no order at all.”

She examined one of the envelopes in the light from the window. The sheet of papyrus inside was covered with Greek lettering in an elegant hand. “This is a complaint supposedly written by a bride to the local magistrate. Her husband failed to plant the fields she brought to the marriage in her dowry and she’s divorcing him.”

“I guess she was what you would call empowered? Why supposedly written?”

“It’s a forgery, and not a very good one, clumsy hand, anachronistic vocabulary. For tourists.” She tossed it aside. “Do you think Raimond wanted me to multiply the numbers? I just don’t see how. Add or subtract an infinitesimal quantity, maybe seven or five?”

He spread out a handful of the envelopes. “Here I have number two, then 2409, 156B, 9600….” He trailed off and sat back on his heels. “There must be hundreds of these things in here.”

“This is the right drawer, I’m sure of it, so we’d better get to work. We’re looking for Delta six, so let’s look for five, six, or seven.”

All the envelopes were on the floor and they had found none of the numbers. “I don’t understand,” Lisa said. “He wrote Delta-Digamma. He must have meant something else.”

“Maybe the number wasn’t in the tape. Maybe the other number is somewhere else. He sent you to the Procroft, so the door code makes sense. But Delta-Digamma doesn’t match anything. What about Delta?”

She hugged him hard. “You’re a genius,” she whispered in his ear.

He hesitated before letting his arms close loosely around her. “I’ll take your word for it, but why?”

She stepped away. “Raimond mixed it all up. He was really cautious. He wrote two numbers in the book, Turner’s
Greek Papyri
, a Delta and a Phi. I think the Delta on the tape was directing me to the Delta in Turner, the Delta with a Phi inside. The number we’re looking for is Phi, not Delta at all; that was just a way of pointing from one to the other.”

“So we’re looking for the golden mean, 1.618….”

She shook her head. “No, but he could have anticipated his killer might be fooled into thinking he meant that.”

“Look,” Steve began, “just draw an equilateral triangle inside a circle, and then find the midpoints of two sides and draw a line to the circumference. The ratio between the line inside the triangle and outside will be Phi, the golden mean, a proportion, see? What else could it be?”

“Raimond wouldn’t refer to the golden mean. It doesn’t make sense in the context. In Greece Phi was the symbol for five hundred.”

“I know, but the Golden Mean
is
Greek,” he persisted. “Phi was proposed by Mathematician Mark Barr because it was the first letter in the name of the Greek sculptor Phidias. His sculptures were perfect examples of the Golden Mean.”

“Too modern,” she insisted. “Raimond might make a reference like that, but not here. I vote for the simple number: five hundred and six.”

“So, no Dirac Delta and no Barr Phi?”

“No,” she said decisively, again flipping rapidly through the envelopes. “Five hundred six.” A moment later she gave a cry of triumph and tipped an envelope to extract its contents.

A sudden sound sent them both to the staircase.

There was a scuffle followed by a crash, as if a computer had fallen from a desk. Someone shouted, “Get out of my way.”

Another yelled, “No, don’t!”

There followed the sound of shattering glass and a long scream abruptly cut short.

Captain Hugo was pushing down firmly on his desk with both hands, towering over the man seated before him. “You
lost
them?” A file folder slid to the floor, scattering a fan of papers. He bent down to collect them.

Guardian of the Peace Philippe Dupond shifted uneasily. “They ate lunch,” he said to the back of the captain’s head. “They took a walk, caught a bus. It seemed innocent enough.”

“Innocent?” The captain straightened and replaced the folder on the desk. He regarded its alignment with the edge and shifted it slightly. “She’s a suspect, Guardian. No one is innocent until proven so. Napoleon was right in this. Did they spot you?”

“I don’t think so; they went to Mouffetard. It was crowded and they must have turned off somewhere. I realized I’d lost them when I got to Contrescarpe.”

He was so discouraged Hugo almost relented. “Then what?”

“I went to her building on rue de l’Esperance, but she never returned. I’m sorry, Capitaine.”

“How long have you been a Guardian of the Peace?”

“Three years, Capitaine.”

“You’re no longer an intern, then, so I suppose you did manage to call in to have his portable phone traced?”

“Of course, but without result. He must’ve turned it off.”

Hugo made a chopping motion with the edge of his hand at the desk, but stopped and let it drop before it connected. “Never mind; they won’t go far. Unless Mademoiselle Emmer really did kill Foix she won’t disappear on us. If she does run for it that can only mean she’s guilty and we’ll find her. Maybe they went to Viginaire’s place. There was something between them.”

“Yes, I saw that in the restaurant.”

“Do we know where Viginaire lives?”

Dupond shifted again. “It would appear he doesn’t live anywhere.”

“Well, we know that can’t be true.” Hugo sat down. Mathieu appeared in the office doorway holding a file. “Anything?” Hugo snapped.

“Not much.” Mathieu approached the desk with a cursory glance at Dupond. “The Propreté de Paris didn’t have any street cleaners on Montpensier at that hour, so it was a disguise. Clever, too, since no one remembers what a street cleaner looks like. We’re still canvassing the neighborhood. Many reported suspicious looking Arabs, or Africans, or Asians. One man swore he saw an extraterrestrial, and a woman was convinced her dog had been kidnapped. It’s crazy season. And an elderly woman in the gardens of the Palais Royal saw a nun in some kind of a futuristic wheelchair.”

Hugo grunted.

“Other results: the bullet was a nine millimeter hollow point. They’re trying to trace it, but doubt they can; it’s very common ammunition. Explosive on the door contained a small quantity of Penthrite, so it was probably Semtex. Oh, and the tape.”

“The tape, yes.” Hugo slicked his hair back absently. “You can go, Dupond.”

The Guardian, looking sheepish, bowed his way out. Once he was gone Hugo reached for the folder. “What about the tape?” he asked Mathieu.

The lieutenant placed the folder on the desk. “It’s the metallic kind used to decorate presents,” he said. “It’s sold in all the stores before Christmas. It was slightly damaged by stomach acid. No recording or anything like that on it. The rest of the roll was in Foix’s desk.”

While Mathieu was talking, Hugo flipped open the folder. Several pages were clipped inside along with digital photographs of the wheel marks on the carpet.

Mathieu trailed off, seeing he had lost Hugo’s attention.

The captain flicked his fingernail against a page and looked up. “What did you say before?”

“Pardon?”

“You said something about a nun in the gardens at the Palais Royal. Rossignol’s apartment would look onto the garden, would it not?”

“Yes. A witness mentioned a nun in a wheelchair.”

“Why?”

“I don’t understand.”

“A nun in a wheelchair can’t be all that unusual. Nuns in uniform may be less common than they used to be, but why notice this one?”

Mathieu looked at his notes. “She said the wheelchair looked strange, and the nun was staring at the windows along the west side of the gardens, like she was fixed on them or was looking for something.”

“I don’t suppose this witness described what was strange about the wheelchair?”

“She said it had too many wheels. The way she described it, it could have been one of those special things that can climb stairs. The sets of wheels rotated as it climbs. I saw a television special on them. I suppose the nun could have had one of those.”

“Yes? Well, Mathieu, from the width of the tracks and the weight of the object that made them, forensics thinks it likely they match a very sophisticated kind of chair with four big wheels, the kind belonging to a
climbing
wheelchair. It’s not certain, of course, just their best guess, but I do believe you’re correct.”

Mathieu grinned. “You’re not suggesting a crippled nun in a wheelchair shot Dr. Foix? She wouldn’t have been tall enough, for one thing.”

Hugo started scribbling on a Post-it note. “Not in an ordinary wheelchair, but the one suggested by forensics has hydraulic lifts and microprocessor controls. It’s expensive, well beyond the means of an ordinary nun, I would think, so someone must have got it for her. We have a man dressed as a street cleaner and a nun in a wheelchair. It begins to have a funny aroma, does it not, Mathieu? Have someone check sales records for this model. Maybe something will come up.” He handed the paper to Mathieu and went back to studying the forensics report.

* * *

The flames in Teresa’s hut began small, just a few orange flickers barely visible through the half-open door where Rossignol’s body was visible on her bunk.

The course of the fire was predictable enough: they grew rapidly, aided by the abundance of combustible material heaped inside and soon angry fire engulfed the room. A few moments later they breached the roof and released boiling clouds of dark smoke into the sullen sky.

“Not
arso vivo,
” Defago mused. “Not burned alive, but condemned to the flames nonetheless. Such is the fate of heretics.” His hand rested lightly on the nun’s shoulder as if he could draw strength from the metal joint inside. They could no longer see the body on the cot through the inferno.

Her breath rasped when she sighed. “It is a shame.”

Defago gave her shoulder a squeeze. “I know.”

“This was my home these last two years.” She reached up and touched his hand. “But I understand the need.”

The great crucifix lay on top of the precious copy of Augustine’s
City of God
in her lap. The agonized face of the Redeemer seemed to flicker with false life. Flames poured through the burning door and licked up the side of the hut.

“I do regret it, believe me,” Defago told her. His voice was tender. “We had nowhere else nearby to use.”

The roof gave a sudden roar and a spiraling tower of sparks shot into the sky. Smoke was already blending into the low cloud, gray on gray. Moments later a ceiling beam crashed into the room, and new constellations of red stars danced for a time and one by one winked out. Ash fell on the two witnesses.

They watched in silence until the flames began to falter. “Well,” Defago said. “That’s one loose end. Now for the girl.”

They returned to the van, dark against the trees beyond reach of the firelight and drove slowly away on the gravel road. In the distance a siren began to wail.

The shattering glass and the scream left behind a shocking silence in the Institut de Papyrologie.

“What the hell was that?” Lisa exclaimed. She shoved the document back into the envelope and slid it into her new large canvas bag. For someone who might have to go on the run it had seemed more practical than her old shoulder bag.

They clattered down the narrow spiral stair.

The front door was ajar. Down the corridor a figure was just disappearing around the corner. “Olivier!” she yelled, starting after him.

Steve held her back. “Look.”

The office was empty. Warm June air floated in through the shattered window beside the secretary’s desk, bringing the smell of flowers. Confused shouts rose from the Court of Honor.

“Stay here!” he hissed, moving toward the window. As he approached the frame a large triangular wedge of glass suddenly dropped free and fell into the courtyard. Someone screamed.

“We have to go!” He grabbed her hand and dragged her from the room. The hallway was empty. They ducked through the door to stairway B. Someone was running down the stairs ahead of them. A door slammed and they were alone.

One flight down new footsteps pounded up toward them.

They hurried from the stairwell and raced down the corridor, past three more stairways and several lecture halls. They were now on the St. Jacques side of the building, away from the Court of Honor. Finally they turned into yet another hallway, breathing heavily. Steve tried door after door, but formal classes had ended and they were locked.