Gregg Loomis - The Coptic Secret

Lang gently pushed the door open. The smell from downstairs grew stronger.

With the door halfway opened, Lang could see into a short hallway, its stone floor partially covered by an Oriental runner.

In a single motion, he was in the hall. He pulled back the slide, cocking his weapon as he swept right and left.

"Mr. Klaus?" he called in a low conversational tone. "Mr. Klaus, dobry den?"

His answer was a silence that seemed to intensify the longer he waited.

The first door off the hallway was to his left. He nudged it open and looked into a bathroom from the last century. A claw-footed tub with the usual European shower hose filled one wall across from a toilet with an overhead water tank. He eased the door shut and tried the next one up the hall. A tiny kitchen contained a small box of a refrigerator, a two-eyed gas range and a microwave. There was barely room for a short wooden countertop and a doorless cabinet filled with mismatched dishes. Through the kitchen, he was looking into part of the dining/living room. A floor-to-ceiling window allowed cheerless sunlight through gauzy curtains.

If Klaus made the sort of money Eon had paid him, he certainly didn't spend it on luxurious living.

Browning held in an extended hand, Lang stepped across the kitchen's cracked linoleum and into the room. Klaus was seated near a corner. Now Lang recognized the odor he had been unable to identify: blood.

Blood soaked the old antiquarian's shirt, blood filled his lap. Blood was puddled on the worn carpet. Blood that was already turning brown and dried into a crust along the jaw-to-jaw slit in the neck.

Lang swept the room with his weapon. Books, manuscripts, scrolls and stacks of loose paper occupied every horizontal surface. And dust.

Either in an unsuccessful defense or death throes as Klaus suffocated or bled to death, the wheelchair had smashed into a sturdy, tufted sofa, knocking a wheel off the axle. It was wedged between the dead man and the upholstery.

Lang surveyed the room. The copy he had come for could be in plain sight and still invisible. It would take hours if not days to sort through the material in this room alone, not even contemplating the shop downstairs and the remaining room at the end of the hall, a room he guessed had been the old man's bedroom. And Lang was fairly certain he didn't have hours. Sooner or later an unanswered phone, a missed appointment, something would result in a visit to this apartment and a grisly discovery.

Lang stepped to a battered end table and looked down on what appeared to be an atlas in a language he couldn't identify. Under it were two rolls of parchment held together by a rubber band.

He was so intent on making at least a cursory search, he barely heard the creak of a floorboard.

Gun outstretched, he whirled.

Too late.

The heel of a hand from behind him hit his wrist, sending the Browning spinning across the room.

A forearm was around his neck, closing his air passage. Another hand held a knife, a long switchblade. Like Baldy's. Probably like the one that had killed Klaus. His attacker's body was jammed against his, making it impossible to use the sword in the cane.

With one hand, Lang dug and clawed at the forearm that was squeezing off his air. With the other, he held off the knife. It was an unequal contest; his assailant was too strong.

Letting go of the choking arm for an instant, Lang drove his elbow backward, jamming the point into a stomach rigid with muscle. There was a grunt and an exhalation of air, but the grip around Lang's neck grew tighter.

A gray fog was growing at the periphery of Lang's vision, a sure sign of oxygen deprivation. The only real question was whether Lang's throat was going to be cut like Klaus's before his air-starved brain went blank.

Unless he did something and did it quick.

But what?

Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport

Atlanta, Georgia

8:31 pm EST

The Previous Evening

Gurt was watching the man who was watching her.

She was quite accustomed to men staring before hitting on her. But this one was pretending to be engrossed in a newspaper, so engrossed that he had been holding up the same page for the last twenty minutes.

She had first noticed him when she and Manfred had arrived at the gate. Not the gate from which they would actually depart, but one chosen almost randomly as a precautionary measure. Just in case someone like the man with the newspaper showed up. She had little doubt he would hang around the departure area until she boarded the flight to… She flicked her eyes to the electronic board behind the check-in booth. To Paris.

That was, of course, one of any number of places she and her son were not going tonight.

The flight to the City of Light was scheduled to push back from the gate in seventeen more minutes. She had deliberately chosen Atlanta's leading airline, knowing its storied inability to make an on-time international departure. She supposed that, being a company based in the languid South, posted arrival and departure times were informational only; that is, the plane would definitely not depart or arrive before the time given. How long thereafter was slightly less predictable than the stock market, future interest rates or the next professional athlete to be accused of steroid use. Experience had taught her that taking an international flight on this airline to connect with a foreign carrier's schedule was a guarantee of time to be spent in unplanned places.

But she was not connecting and what she had in mind would work only with a dominant if inefficient airline.

Between scratchy announcements of varied reasons the Paris flight would be predictably delayed, she attempted to keep a wide-eyed Manfred entertained. Or at least from becoming a nuisance to passengers already irritated by the airline's endless supply of excuses. Walks up and down the concourse or following the lights of planes until they disappeared into the night sky worked for the moment. Whenever she left the gate area, her watcher moved to a position where he could see. Several times he muttered into a cell phone.

She surmised she was not the person her minder's superiors were really interested in. They wanted Lang. She was merely someone who might be going to meet him and therefore worth keeping under observation in case Lang slipped his tether. Perhaps they didn't actually know where he was, a fact she doubted. For all she knew, whatever organization the news reader was working for had already hacked into the airline's reservation system. If so, no wonder they had a man to see where she was going after periodic and less-than-subtle tails for the last few days, tails she had regularly evaded. She booked the flight under her own name. The agency's paranoia as to possible adverse publicity regarding unnecessary pseudonymous travel required it when not on agency business.

Excuses finally exhausted, first-class boarding for the Paris flight was announced. Holding Manfred's hand in one of hers, Gurt rolled her suitcase on board with the other. As anticipated, the flight attendant barely glanced at the two boarding passes before both Gurt and her son were ensconced in large, comfortable seats with leg room large enough for an normal adult. It only took a few minutes before a man stood in the aisle, looking from Gurt to his boarding pass and back again.

"You sure you're in the right seat?" he asked, his tone indicating the answer he expected.

Gurt took a long look at the slip she held in her hand. "Flight one seventeen, two A and B."

By this time the flight attendant had arrived. "Wrong flight, honey. This one goes to Paris."

Gurt stood, feigning both surprise and embarrassment. "I am so sorry." She bent over to unbuckle Manfred's seat belt before retrieving her bag from the overhead compartment. "I hope I have not caused…"