The Lucifer Gospel Read Online Free PDF

sledgehammers lying around and piles of broken marble and granite slabs: grave robbers stealing the actual graves themselves, the descendants of Saladin’s builders who stripped the pyramids of their smooth outer facings to raise the city.
    She stopped just outside the death house and listened, trying to slow her breathing and the rattletrap beating of her heart. As far as she could tell the man with the machete and no tongue was no longer after her. Either that or he was being a lot quieter about it. The real question of course was why he had been after her in the first place. She was a woman in a strange place, and alone at that, but unless the lunatic sword wielder simply wandered around the City of the Dead looking for damsels in distress, he was after her for a reason.
    For the life of her though she couldn’t figure out what possible reason there could be. Her recent exploits in the shady world of looted art, old conspiracies, and Vatican politics didn’t have anything at all to do with Egypt; the works of art she’d managed to unearth, literally, from beneath the streets of New York hadn’t included any Rosetta Stones or pharaohs’ treasures. And even if they had, who would want to kill her now? That part of her life was over.
    Or was it?
    If she was right the man with the machete had been waiting for her like a hunter waiting to stalk his prey. That meant he had to have known she was coming to the City of the Dead today, and the only person who knew that other than herself was Hilts—a man who had introduced himself to her on an airplane, a man who had said he was part of the expedition but who had only offered his name to Achmed the driver. And who, for that matter, was Achmed, except a young man holding a sign that said “Adamson”?
    She had taken it all on faith. As her friend Michael Valentine would have told her, the essence of any good confidence trick was just that, a trick of confidence, depending on the victim’s faith that what he or she was seeing was true because it was what was expected. Hilts knowing who she was, her background, her father’s name and reputation, Michael’s background… all of it was readily available in the archives of any major newspaper that had carried the story a year ago, or on the Internet. She’d fallen for it hook, line and sinker, believed it because she wanted to, because Hilts was a good-looking, intelligent man with a ready smile and an interesting patter.
    Finn swore under her breath. She’d gotten herself into this mess; now she had to get herself out. She quickly looked around the narrow enclosed area once again. A rough ladder made from old lumber leaned up against the right-hand death house. Height. Maybe she could figure out where she was if she got high enough. It was worth a try.
    She ran across the enclosure, threading her way between the graves, and climbed the ladder. She reached the top of the mud-and-plaster building and went to the far edge. Stretching out in all directions was a mazelike sea of buildings just like the one she stood on, split by alleys and paths. Some were so close they shared walls, others were separated like the enclosure behind her. The lower buildings were punctuated here and there with larger ones, some two stories high or even three, with taller, more ornate mosques rising out of the crumbling sea of brick and stone.
    In the far distance she could see the palacelike bulk of the Citadel, built on a spur of limestone that dominated the city a thousand years ago as the Dome of the Winds by Sultan Hatim Ibn Hartama, then brutally fortified by Saladin two hundred years later as a royal seat and fortress for himself and future Abbasid rulers. Between the Citadel and where she now stood she could see a raised highway that seemed to cut directly across the City of the Dead. She could also see something else: just to the right, two hundred yards away, was a small round mosque with windows cut like teardrops. Beside it, in stark