The Swetky Agency - The Fiddler's Call

Submission Synopsis

The Last Emissary of Perdition
by Steven Rinehart

Length:
134,800

Genre:
Suspense

Psychological Thriller
Horror

Sentence:
An addicted gambler begins to suspect a certain woman who buys large quantities of meat each month may be part demon and may be subtly manipulating him into helping her kill two foreigners.

Blurb:
A young man who works at a butcher store becomes infatuated with a beautiful raven-haired stranger named Symantha who buys extraordinary amounts of beef each month from his store. She seems to know things about him he can’t explain. Two men who come looking for her eventually concede they are federal law enforcement officers acting on an extradition request from France. Instead of apprehending her when she returns, they attempt to execute her. Ryan kills one of them protecting her and the other flees with Symantha. Ryan is taken into custody by the Salt Lake Police only to discover the two federal agents he thought he was working with were impostors. On the verge of being charged with murder, he begins his own investigation of the shooting, and slowly is lead from strange clues to suspect that Symantha is a part demon apocalyptic visionary, attempting to usher in the End of Days, and may be using him to further her plans.

Synopsis:
The novel’s antihero, RYAN, is a hopelessly flawed individual whose life is spiraling downwards in the throes of a gambling addiction. He becomes infatuated with a mysterious woman who visits his butcher store each month and makes inexplicably large purchases. She buys entire sides of beef, and insists that they be uncut. Her name is SYMANTHA, and she never reveals the reason she needs such large amounts of raw meat.

Symantha seems to know things about Ryan he can’t explain. Her speech and behavior are peculiar. She tips him by giving him an antique cigarette lighter inscribed with mystic symbolism reminiscent of a coin once carried by an eccentric, 19th century Mormon prophet who believed he had seen a werewolf in Tennessee. Ryan later discovers it is written in a cryptic language created by the Mormon Church after trekking west called the Deseret Alphabet.

After several of Symantha’s visits, Ryan becomes suspicious of two individuals who seem to be spying on the store. He threatens them in the street and they later introduce themselves brandishing federal ID’s. They are federal law enforcement officers seeking a woman that frequents Ryan’s establishment. They know from her checking account records that she makes large purchases from the store each month, on the same day of the month, and explain that this is the only pattern they have of locating her. She moves periodically from one obscure city to another across the globe, and they are seeking her at the request of French DST, the Direction Sécurité Territoire, who want her for a quadruple homicide committed in Europe years ago. They intend to arrest her, and transfer her to the custody of the U.S. Marshals Office for extradition back to France.

Ryan reluctantly agrees to cooperate with the manhunt until, as predicted, Symantha enters two days later to make her purchase. But the agents do not arrest her. They draw silenced weapons. They beat her, shoot her, and just as they are about to end her life, Ryan unholsters a pistol beneath the counter and attacks them, killing one.

A gunfight ensues between Ryan and the surviving agent, during which the wounded Symantha hobbles off and flees the store. The remaining agent runs out of ammunition a few moments later and jumps through a bullet-ridden window, also fleeing the store, which is now destroyed, leaving only his bloodied partner dead behind him.

The Salt Lake Police quickly arrive on scene, followed shortly thereafter by the FBI. A business card marked with a phrase from an obscure Mormon prophesy about the end of the world is found near the body along with other enigmatic pieces of evidence, including silver bullets and gold bullet casings. Ryan is taken into custody, only to discover the men he attacked were not FBI agents at all, and the FBI has no information about them. Their names are aliases of 16th century British witch hunters. Equally perplexing, there is no I.D. on the body in the store. Ryan is reluctantly released while two homicide detectives from the SLPD begin an investigation of everything that transpired.

Ryan tries to carry on with school a distressed and defeated man as the SLPD becomes increasingly convinced, from bizarre evidence at the scene, that there was no Symantha; that she doesn’t exist; and that he has fabricated the entire story. Blood found in the store, allegedly from her wounds, is determined to be that of a canine, not a human. Other forensics evidence also contradicts his story. Ryan seems to have forged her checks. They suspect the shooting was mob related, and that Ryan actually killed the man he did to avoid paying a gambling debt his victim may have been there to collect. As the investigation progresses, a special agent from the FBI’s Internal Affairs Department, who is auditing the Milwaukee, Wisconsin field office, begins to take a strange interest in the case, and seems to be keeping tabs on the investigation from afar.

On the verge of being charged with murder, Ryan begins his own investigation, desperately trying prove Symantha exists and exonerate his name. He is assisted by his two roommates. At a loss to explain why she needed the beef she purchased, he stakes out the only other butcher’s store near the Rockies where Symantha could purchase an entire side of beef, wondering if whatever impetus compelled her to purchase the beef in his store might once again compel her to purchase elsewhere. He waits late one evening until, as he suspected, Symantha appears. She drives off with her beef; and, unwilling risk losing her again, he follows her. Evening becomes night. She ascends high into the Uintah Mountains near Colorado under a full moon. Ryan kills his headlights and follows her up a winding, dirt road to a secluded meadow, where he witnesses the horror of evil’s ancient hand. Watching her from the scrub oak, Symantha ties the side of beef into a pine and transforms into a terrible beast. She devours the meat voraciously. Ryan snaps a picture of her with a camera he’s carrying. The camera’s whine catches the beast’s attention, and he flees madly to his car, chased by the theriomorph. He is bitten through the window in the shoulder and escapes, but passes out from blood loss and crashes on the highway, where he is taken to the hospital by a forest ranger and barely survives.

Over the next few weeks Ryan’s receding hairline gets thicker. His vision gets sharper. His appetite increases. Ryan falls victim to the same lycanthropic curse that plagues Symantha, and begins to suspect she actually tricked him into following her into the mountains. Like Eve, she has rallied him to share her damnation, and he has followed her from the garden.

As Ryan reels alone in despair one rainy night, clinging to his last vestige of sanity, Symantha appears at the doorway. She drags him back to the mountains, near an Indian Burial Ground called Skinwalker Ranch, where she holds him captive and teaches him the horrors of the future he faces. He is an heir to the Curse of Cain, and though she has outcast him from the brighter world, peace is still possible with each other. She prepares him for the coming lunar cycle when he too will change. Those hunting them are the Vicars, an ancient group of Catholic priests from the Dominican Order, who intend to kill Symantha in part to prevent her from finding three treasures they believe she will use to usher in the Apocalypse.

Ryan learns that Symantha remained in Utah after the Vicars discovered her to finish a dowsing-inspired search for the very gold the Vicars fear she is seeking, and that Ryan may play a part in thwarting certain preternatural protections that guard it. Symantha is revealed to be an apocalyptic visionary of sorts, foreseeing near-future events, and seeking gold for unholy purposes. She jumps from dimension to dimension, searching for a man called the Heterodoxer.

Important to the plot is a riddle given to Symantha 500 years before that begins to make eerie sense to them both. The riddle suggests Symantha will find her mate and avenger in the midst of events much like those confronting them. This riddle is scripture to Symantha, and was obtained when she was girl in her father’s care during a twisted Abraham and Isaac type episode.

A slow-burning romance grows between Ryan and Symantha. Ryan realizes his only hope of happiness, peace and salvation is through her. After Ryan morphs completely into a beast under the full moon, they exchange wedding vows in a strange marriage in the mountain tops.

The Vicars kill Ryan’s roommates. Convinced Ryan is responsible, the FBI and SLPD put out an all points bulletin for him and the strange Special Agent Lund shows up from Wisconsin to lead the manhunt.

In the climax of the book, Ryan creates nitroglycerin from a cache of university chemicals, which he and Symantha use to blow up an abandoned building where the Vicars are hiding. The Vicars realize what is about to happen and flee the building, which explodes moments later. They attack Ryan on the interstate as he escapes in an old Corvette Stingray, and chase him down I-80, exchanging fire, and wrecking havoc on surrounding traffic. The Utah Highway Patrol pursues the two cars across the desert towards Nevada, and the FBI soon follows in a helicopter. In all the chaos, the prophetic riddle given to Symantha 500 years before is fulfilled. The Vicars are killed, and Symantha and Ryan are run off the road by the UHP, where they survive only to face an army of police speeders, guns, and law enforcement officers, all without escape. In the final scene, Ryan and Symantha die at the hands of those pursuing them, but rise together alive again (not having been killed with silver), and escape the death they shared.

The book is one of hate, rebellion and exile, but also one of forgiveness and salvation. It is ultimately the story of two unearthly creatures finding some semblance of peace with one another in this life, and finding exaltation is impossible alone. Violence, lies, loneliness and death can hurt us, but not overcome us. Corrupt cops, loyal friends, overzealous prosecutors, and struggling young men paint the pages. The book begins as a legal thriller, grounded solidly in no-nonsense rationalism, then slowly progresses away into mystery, the paranormal, and terror.

The plot is interwoven with touches of Mormonism, Rosicrucianism, numerology, astrology, Masonry, and other mystic themes that played actual roles in the settlement of the West. There are over 300 hundred references in the novel to American and European religious and historical events, all which have been exhaustively researched. The Last Emissary of Perdition also contains never published information on several unexplained real world phenomena involving wolves, including the Beast of Bray Road, the Beast of Gevaudan, Skinwalker Ranch, and Pennsylvania’s Die Woolfman’s Grob.

It is worth noting that some of the matter appraised in the novel may become a subject of interest for mainstream audiences the world over when Dan Brown's sequel to The Da Vinci Code hits the shelves later this year (entitled The Solomon Key), which is thought to center on a Mormon-Mason treasure hunt and to touch on the themes covered in The Last Emissary of Perdition.

Afterward and Hook

For decades, historians have speculated that Montezuma’s Lost Treasure is hidden near Kanab, Utah. It is said the Aztecs buried it “in the North,” to protect it from invading Spanish conquistadors, but it’s never been found. The movie Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade opens with a scene in Southern Utah, in which treasure hunters have just found the gold Cross of Coronado, only to have it promptly stolen by the Boy Scouts. For 500 years, treasure hunters have wandered in and out of the South Utah Desert, convinced gold is hidden in the sand. The historical record indicates they have all failed, from Coronado on down the line, until perhaps 2005, when a young man wandered into a cave in the summer while looking for arrowheads.

Scott Taylor is a hiker from Delta who purportedly found $120 million worth of gold bars stamped “U.S. Cavalry” in the West Desert in late May of 2005. I met Scott at his father’s market in Deseret, Utah after stopping to refuel a Seneca II while flying back from taking the bar exam in San Diego. Like others, I had heard about the shocking find he allegedly made in Millard County, and was fascinated by it.

Anyone familiar with his story knows that it was widely reported in June 2005 that, while searching for arrowheads, Scott may have stumbled across a cave in which he found old crates containing civil war era rifles, dynamite, a revolver, and, most notably . . . gold bars. Depending on which news report you heard, he found between 137 to 280 gold bars, worth $70 - $200 million.

Scott claims to have sat and stared at his discovery for seven hours, contemplating the astonishing event that had just transpired. He realized he had an equally astonishing problem. His discovery was on federal land under the stewardship of the Bureau of Land Management (“BLM”). It was likely protected by the Archeological Resources Protection Act; and, at least formerly, had belonged to the U.S. Army. Anything he removed from the site would be a felony three ways over.

Scott consulted with a BYU professor and the law firm of Fabian & Clendenin in Salt Lake City, and demanded a 40% finder’s fee to show the BLM and the Treasury Department where the gold was located. News channels were quick to pick up the story, and soon the small town of Delta was overflowing with adventurers from as far away as China and Germany. In what would have been a true Indiana Jones-like event, a deal was almost negotiated for Scott to take the Treasury Department to the gold, with a film crew, under an armed escort of the National Guard, including tanks. But try as Scott did, the government, particularly the BLM, refused to promise him any percentage of the find, and demanded to know where the gold was under the threat of lawsuit for facilitating a public hazard (the dynamite could be dangerous, they reasoned).

Having failed in his negotiations to obtain a finder’s fee, being threatened with civil and criminal action, and scared of the sudden pestering by treasure hunters, Scott refused to communicate any further with the media or the government beginning in late July 2005. It was under these circumstances that I met him six weeks later in Deseret.

Scott could have as easily knocked me across the West Desert as talked to me. He is 6’4 and built like a linebacker. He was thirty-three years old. He had a goatee and a deep tan, and had been breaking horses the morning I met him. To my relief, he tolerated my questioning and turned out to be a gracious gentleman.

We discussed his situation and I made several subsequent visits to Delta. Each visit I left with new details about his discovery not reported in the media, and a renewed appreciation of his predicament.

Among many interesting facts, I learned that Scott had found evidence in the crates indicating the gold was left there no earlier than 1879. He had a very accurate idea of the gold’s value, which he placed at $88 million. The bars were thirty-four pounds a piece, and each stamped with a number and a cursive mark.

Many of the items in the cave were stamped “U.S. Cavalry,” but Scott never indicated to me that the gold itself was so stamped, as other reporters have asserted. Numerous army expeditions and cavalry regiments are known to have wandered through, or near, Delta, beginning with Johnston’s Army in 1857. They all carried gold to pay soldiers and buy supplies.

For my own protection and Scott’s, I did not see any extrinsic evidence proving his discovery was real though it was offered; and, to this day, I have seen none. Many people maintain that the fact that Scott apparently took nothing from the cave is proof he fabricated his entire account, but can the fact that Scott has nothing to show really be taken as evidence he is lying about it? If Scott did have proof his discovery were real, in the form of items looted from the site, would we know about it? Would it be dangerous, for personal and legal reasons, for him to show that proof to others? And once he had the items he wanted from the site, would he then want the site to be discovered to exonerate his claim, and discovered in a way that would help the Millard County economy?

These questions are for each reader of this book to answer. I suggested to Scott we might accomplish his goals by hiding clues to the location of the gold in a rather strange novel I had written in law school and was revising. Behold, The Last Emissary of Perdition. To the extent it offends the sensibilities of any brother, sister, friend or reader, I implore your forgiveness.

If the gold exists, the clues to its location are contained within it, and this book is as close to revealing its whereabouts as Scott will ever come. Of the twelve clues herein ensconced, eight lead to the original cave, and four to a second location where proof that the original location exists can be found. I do not understand Scott’s clues, but they have been carefully crafted and encrypted in the text. I do not intend to look for the find, and to the extent that I do understand the clues, I won’t discuss them.

--Steven Rinehart
03 December 2005

Bio:
Steven Rinehart graduated with a Juris Doctorate from the University of Utah
College of Law in 2003. He studied English and Computer Science as an
undergraduate at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, and hosts The
Unspoken Word, a radio talk program on K-TALK that explores historical, cultural,
religious and political issues; and which can be heard live online at
www.stevenrinehart.com. He is an avid pilot and scuba diver.

He has founded, run, and sold several Internet websites, including
www.DiamondBlaze.com and www.PrizeWise.com. He has owned jewelry and
sporting goods stores in Utah and California, and published two brief articles on e-
commerce.

Endorsements:
2 Law professors & and a treasure hunter