The Coptic Secret Read Online Free PDF Page B

telecasts.
    With a single exception, he had never ventured from friendly soil.
    Then he had met Dawn, the woman who became his love, his soul mate and his wife. The collapse of the Evil Empire had meant cutbacks in the agency's budget and resulting reductions in force. It had been to please Dawn, though, he had quit the agency and gone to law school. A small matter. He would have invaded hell had she asked.
    Once his law practice began to blossom, Dawn declined. A loss of appetite and weight resulted in a visit to the doctor and a death sentence. Lang had watched the daily dying of a woman in her early thirties as she metastasized into a wrinkled crone, a sack of bones with claws for hands. He had visited her hours a day, making promises and plans they both knew would never be kept.
    She died with him at her bedside, her cold face shimmering through the tears he made no effort to staunch.
    He fell into a hole every bit as black as the one into which he now sank.
    But Dawn was here. Not the pitiful skeleton his wife had become but the full-bodied beautiful girl he had married. She whispered in his ear, sorrowful at his pain and reluctant to leave him.
    He would have liked to have joined her.
    Then there was Janet, his sister, and Jeff, her adopted son, both dead, murdered in Paris. Across the void, he heard her laugh, scoffing at life's inconsistencies. Jeff still had his baseball cap on backward, was still clad in drooping shorts that almost reached his ankles. Forever Lang's ten-year-old best pal and frequent coconspirator against the established order.
    They both seemed glad to see him.
    Do the dead enjoy?
    Then there were the people who were alive. At least, he thought they were.
    They came only when Lang had his head above the dark tide, when he was in so much pain he could see them only through eyes he could barely open, hear not at all though they seemed to be speaking.
    He was fairly certain some of them weren't even there.
    Francis, the black priest, Janet's former confessor and Lang's best friend, was there more likely than not, his prayers doing Lang about as much good as they had Janet and Jeff. But Lang appreciated him coming even if visitation of the sick was part of the priest shtick anyway.
    Sara, his secretary, came less frequently, for which Lang was grateful. The first two times, she dissolved into tears and had to be led away by a woman in white. The next couple of times she tried to speak but Lang could hear nothing. He was vaguely aware he had an office and a law practice that needed some sort of attention and that was probably where Sara went, but it all seemed very far away, remote from the black tides that engulfed him.
    And he was probably dead anyway.
    Then there was Gurt, the one he was fairly certain wasn't really there. A couple of years after Dawn died, Lang had been in Rome and taken up where he had left off with Gurt Fuchs, a German national and coworker at the agency.
    Tall, blonde and looking like a travel poster for her native country, she moved through a crowd making men stare and women jealous. She had taken temporary leave from the agency to come to Atlanta and she and Lang had lived together for a year or so. Lang had dreamed of marriage and the family he had not had with Dawn. Gurt was not interested. She inexplicably announced she was going back to work in Europe. He had not seen her since.
    Not till now anyway.
    If she was really there.
    Which he doubted.
    Either way, they had exchanged more wisecracks than statements of affection. If he could, he would tell her how much he had loved her, although romantic conversation was hardly his forte or hers.
    Now it might be too late.
    Either Gurt in the flesh or as a chimera would enter the lenslike edge of his vision and stand at the foot of his bed, speaking words that to him were only silence. She hadn't aged since he last saw her, a time span he simply was unable to calculate, so it was unlikely she was real. Reinforcing the idea even more