Angel City

ALSO BY JON STEELE

The Watchers

War Junkie

Published by the Penguin Group

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Copyright © 2013 by Jon Steele

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Published simultaneously in Canada

Lyrics from “South City Midnight Lady” by Patrick Simmons, © WB Music Corp. and Lansdowne Music Publishers, used by permission of Alfred Music Publishing Co. Inc. Lyric to “The Wheel” by Robert Hunter, copyright © Ice Nine Pub. Co. Used with permission.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Steele, Jon, date.

Angel City : Part two of the Angelus trilogy / Jon Steele.
p. cm
ISBN 978-1-101-62112-7
1. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3619T4338A54 2013 2013009626
813'.6—dc23

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

for

Juanita Hedlund

L
ES CARRIÈRES
(OFTEN REFERRED TO AS “THE CATACOMBS”) ARE
the tunnels and quarries that run for hundreds of kilometers beneath the streets of Paris. They were begun in the twelfth century by miners following limestone deposits to be used for building materials. The Great South System under the Left Bank of Paris is the most extensive section of
les carrières
. It is deeper than the present-day subway, rail, and sewer tunnels. The German Luftwaffe used a section of
les carrières
(near Luxembourg Gardens) as a bunker during the Nazi occupation of Paris.

T
HE
C
ATHARS WERE A
C
HRISTIAN SECT, MOST ACTIVE DURING THE
eleventh through the thirteenth centuries. They believed in the duality of the universe. To them, pure immaterial spirits (souls) were created by a Good God and dwelled amid the stars with angels, while the material world was created by an Evil God who sought to entrap pure spirits in the forms of men on Earth. And though the Cathars believed Jesus Christ to be a “pure spirit,” they did not accept him as the Son of God, nor did they believe he died on the cross. The Cathars did not practice the Catholic sacraments of baptism or Communion; their one sacrament of Consolamentum was offered near death as preparation for the soul's return to the realm of the Good God. In keeping with their beliefs, the Cathars considered the Catholic Church, particularly the physical wealth and power of the Papacy, to be a creation of the Evil God. For these reasons, the Cathars were condemned as heretics.

M
ONTSÉGUR IS THE NAME OF BOTH THE GEOLOGICAL FORMATION OF
igneous rock (called
pluton
) located on the north slope of the southeast Pyrenees and the medieval fortress atop it. It is thought there was a previous structure atop the pluton in the pre-Christian era; most possibly a temple of sun worship. The temple was replaced with a stone fortress during the eleventh century and later abandoned. In 1204, the fortress was refortified by a local noble who opposed the expansion of the Kingdom of France into Occitania (what is now the department of Midi-Pyrénées in southeast France). The noble allowed the Cathars to take refuge in the fortress to escape the slaughter of the Albigensian Crusade, initiated by Pope Innocent III in 1209. In 1233, the Roman Catholic Church ordered the extermination of the “Cathar heresy” through the Office of the Inquisition. In 1243, French Crusaders acting in the name of the Pope laid siege to the last redoubt of the Cathars at Montségur. The fortress of the Cathars was destroyed by the Crusaders at the end of the ten-month siege. The current structure atop the pluton was built over the ruins of the Cathar fortress at the behest of the King of France. It served as a military garrison until the eighteenth century.

T
HE
D
OMINICANS ARE AN ORDER OF PRIESTS ESTABLISHED BY
S
AINT
Dominic in 1215. The order was known as Ordo Prædicatorum, the Order of Preachers. They encouraged devotion to the Virgin Mary through the recitation of the rosary; they were also fiercely loyal to the Pope and many became feared throughout southern France as Inquisitors. With the blessing of the Pope, Inquisitors had the power to subject anyone suspected of heresy to trial by torture and death by burning.

P
ARADISE:
Planet Earth, where the Unknown Creator has set in motion an evolutionary process affecting the future of the universe.

H
ARPER'S KIND:
referring to small creatures born of light and without free will, sent to Earth two and a half million years ago by an Unknown Creator to hide in the forms of men and defend the evolution of Paradise.

T
HE ENEMY,
G
OONS:
referring to those creatures born of light who preceded Harper's kind but rejected the divine will of the Unknown Creator, first taking the forms of men and breeding with human females to create a new race of physical beings, thereby bringing “evil” to Paradise.

SUTF
, OR
S
PECIAL
U
NIT
T
ASK
F
ORCE:
the top-secret division of the Swiss National Police under the command of Inspector Gobet.

H
ALFBREEDS:
children of the enemy who infected Paradise with greed and fear. A term also used by Jay Harper to describe the children bred by Harper's kind in a now abandoned experiment to replenish their numbers in the wake of severe losses.

P
ARTISANS:
human beings in secret service to Harper's kind.

T
IME
W
ARP:
a defensive maneuver in which Harper's kind isolates a small geographical area by locking it in a moment in time.

T
HE
F
IRST
F
IRE:
the flame remnant used in the creation of the universe, brought to Earth by Harper's kind two and a half million years ago to trigger the evolutionary process as planned by the Unknown Creator.

R
ADIANCE:
the potion mixed with a special blend of tobacco and used by Harper's kind to prevent the physical weight of the human form from crushing out the light of their being.

D
EAD
B
LACK:
an injectable potion used by Goons to create a feeling of euphoria while committing acts of evil.

F
LASH:
the ability of Harper's kind to “see” past events in their eyes, as if reliving the event.

S
CAN:
the ability of Harper's kind, and the Enemy, to check another's eyes for levels of pure light or traces of dead black.

I
MAGINING:
a process of conceptualization shared by Harper's kind and human beings.

T
HE
W
AR, ETERNAL AND FOREVER:
the two-and-a-half-million-year-old battle for Paradise, fought in the shadows between Harper's kind and the Enemy.