Sidney Sheldon's Angel of the Dark Read Online Free PDF Page A

lines around her eyes and a comfortable layer of fat around her hips, but she was still a beautiful woman. Jibril, on the other hand, had aged terribly. Shrunken and stooped, with the broken veins and yellow eyes of a heavy drinker, he looked twenty years older than he was, and was as sad and embittered as Mahmoud had been happy and generous-spirited.
    He staggered over to Miriam, who was standing with her eldest son, Rafik. She realized immediately that he was drunk.
    â€œSo,” Jibril slurred, “the old bashtard’s gone at lasht, is he? When can I come to you, Miriam? Tell me. When?”
    Miriam blushed scarlet. She had never felt such shame. How could he do this? To me, and to himself? Today of all days.
    Rafik stepped forward. “My mother is grieving. We all are. You need to leave.”
    Jibril snarled. “Get out of my way!”
    â€œYou’re drunk. Nobody wants you here.”
    â€œYour mother wants me. Your mother loves me. She’s always loved me. Tell him, Miriam.”
    Miriam turned to him and said sadly, “Today I have buried two of my loves. My husband. And the boy you once were. Good-bye, Jibril.”
    Â 
    T HAT NIGHT , J IBRIL HANGED HIMSELF FROM a tree in the Menara Gardens.
He left a one-word note:
    Betrayed.
    Â 
    T HE YOUNG GIRL PUT THE BOOK down, tears welling in her eyes. She had read the story hundreds of times before, but she never grew tired of it andit never failed to move her. Sure, she lived in 1983, not 1892; and she was reading the book in a grim, freezing-cold children’s home in New York City, not some Moroccan palace. But Miriam and Jibril’s tragic love still spoke to her across the ages.
    The girl knew what it felt like to be powerless. To be abandoned by one’s mother. To be treated like an object by men, a prize to be won. To be shoved through life like a lamb to the slaughter, with no say whatsoever in her own destiny.
    â€œAre you okay, Sofia?”
    The boy put a protective, brotherly arm around her. He was the only one she’d told about the book, the only one who understood her. The other kids in the home didn’t understand. They mocked her and her old, dog-eared love story. But he didn’t.
    â€œThey’re jealous,” he told her. “Because you have a family history and they don’t. You have royal blood in your veins, Sofia. That’s what makes you different. Special. They hate you for that.”
    It was true. Sofia identified with Miriam’s story on another level, too. A blood level. Miriam was Sofia’s great-grandmother. Somewhere inside of her, Miriam’s genes lived on. The book Sofia held in her hands, her most prized possession, was not some fairy tale. It was true. It was her history.
    â€œI’m fine,” she told the boy, hugging him back as she pulled the thin rayon blanket up over both of them. Even here, pressed against the radiator in the recreation room, it was bitterly cold.
    I am not nobody, she told herself, breathing in the warmth of her friend’s body. I am from a noble family with a romantic, tragic history. I am Sofia Basta.
    One day, far away from here, I will fulfill my destiny.

C HAPTER T HREE
    T HE P ARKER C ENTER IN DOWNTOWN L.A. had been the headquarters of the United States’ third-largest law enforcement agency since the mid-1950s. Made famous by the 1960s television show Dragnet, the drab, nondescript concrete-and-glass building on 150 North Los Angeles Street housed, by 1996, some of the most expensive, state-of-the-art technology found in any police station in the nation, everything from retina recognition scanners to thermal imaging cameras. The Detective Bureau was particularly well equipped, with incident rooms lined with banks of computers and storerooms stocked with a veritable buffet of surveillance gadgetry.
    Unfortunately Detective Danny McGuire was too junior in rank for his investigation to be considered worthy of one of these rooms.