The Cathar Secret: A Lang Reilly Thriller Read Online Free PDF Page A

something Solomon guessed was an order to halt.
         Solomon kept walking.
         He felt the pain in his shoulder before he heard the first shot. Then there was a single long blast as bullets tore through his body. The snow cushioned his fall. As his vision grew dark, he smiled again. The bastards had lost.
         He would die free.

CHAPTER 6

    Wynn-Three
    Atlanta, Georgia
    December 18, 2012

    W YNTON RATHER CHARLES III WAS NOT GOING to ride the Pink Pig. Even at age three, he had no trouble making his decision quite clear. Other children shouted in glee, waved to camera-toting mommies and nannies and generally had a good time as the improbably swine-headed little train made its way around the track atop one of Lenox Square's department stores.
         Not Wynton. Small feet firmly planted, round face scrunched up in near panic, his first exposure to an Atlanta Christmas tradition was not going smoothly. He had endured, even enjoyed, his brief visit with Santa, smiling from the jolly old man's lap. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he had willingly pet one of the two reindeers in the small corral in one of the mall's giant lobbies. He had not even been intimidated by the mobs of shoppers or the blast of politically correct "Winter Holiday" music.
         But the Pink Pig was another matter.
         "No twain wide, Mommy!" he had shrieked the instant they had exited the elevator to the small, peppermint-trimmed railway station with plastic snow dripping from its eaves. His little hands clutched at his mother's skirt as though demons were trying to pry him loose.
         His mother, Paige, sighed. "Okay, okay, no train ride."
         In her mind the holiday season had been pretty much of a bust. The seventy-degree temperature outside and shoppers riding around with the tops of their convertibles down hardly felt like December. It had been six

years since Paige had seen a white Christmas, her last at Yale Law. Two years as an associate with one of Atlanta's biggest law firms, three more as both an associate and as Mrs. Wynton Rather Charles Jr. And this last year as a full-time parent.
         Sometimes she wondered how things might have been different. She had grown up in a small town in upstate New York. There a white Christmas came every year. She missed the crispness and color of a New York fall as well as the white carpet of winter. Now all she could do was follow Irving Berlin's advice and dream. Atlanta had as much chance of snow on the 25th of December as did Southern California, where Berlin had written his huge holiday hit.
         She had met and married Wynton, a junior partner at the firm. Then Wynn-Three had come along and she had chosen the mommy track, rather than the partnership track, at the firm. It was a career option law firms grudgingly made available as an alternative to possible future sex discrimination suits. The hours were almost as demanding—fifty billable hours a week—and the partners just as unrelenting. After totaling up the cost of a full-time nanny and the near-confiscatory taxes levied by a government more interested in wealth redistribution than productivity, she and Wynton agreed full-time parenthood represented only a minor reduction in net income. Plus, she no longer had to witness her son growing up by descriptions narrated by strangers. She had already missed his first step, his first word, and she was not going to miss anything else. Some things were priceless but she still wondered how long it would have taken her to make partner.
         Now her life was filled with Dr. Seuss, infant car seats, and entertaining a three-year-old instead of corporate mergers and hostile takeovers.
         Regrets? Maybe resentment was more accurate.
         Wynton was gone before his son stirred in the mornings, returning hours after his bedtime. Sometimes Paige let herself suspect the timing was intentional but she remembered the relentless drive for billable hours that would