"Jeanie London - Retrieval" - читать интересную книгу автора (London Jeanie)

"With power comes great responsibility. Don't let power harden your heart." Then came death, and the battle for his soul. Evil tried to sink vicious talons deep, to rob his salvation, to claim his eternity, but for the choices already made. . .
Enough good choices and Roman earned a trip straight into heaven. Too many bad choices and he'd get the fast track to hell for an eternity of fire, pain, and suffering.
Then there was the other choice: to repent. But not everyone's eternity was so simple, so clear cut. . .
Roman hadn't given much thought to what would



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happen after he died, despite a deep respect that death honored no man's timetable, only its own.
Light so radiant it blinded, not comforting but glaring, ruthless. Light and shadow collided in striking violence, an otherworldly ferocity that pitted a blast furnace of evil against the flashing brilliance.
And finally. . . dominion.
He'd made enough good choices during his life to throw off the demons of death. They grudgingly abandoned the battle for his soul and receded in a violent hiss of writhing blackness.
The angels left Roman, too, ascending in a luminous cloud of light; until he thought he'd be left alone in the void.
Then another angel appeared, burning so bright the light seared Roman's vision, forced him to shield his face. Before he closed his eyes though, he caught a glimpse of flaming eyes and a radiant sword.
"I am the captain of the angelic warriors, and you have a choice before you, Roman Barrymore. You can atone in purgatory, the threshold of heaven," the angel said in an otherworldly voice that swelled with goodness and strength, and sounded oddly familiar. "Or you can delay eternity and accept a special task."
Roman wanted to face the owner of that voice, but the light blinded and burned even through the shield of his raised hands and could he only ask, "What task?"
"A necessary one," the angelic captain said. ''And a difficult one. A battle must be fought for the passage between life and death. Someone must rally forces to fight. . ."



CHAPTER ONE

WAS there any good way to tell a woman she's dead?
Roman Barrymore didn't think so, which left him facing an interesting dilemma. Once he confirmed the identity of the woman running through the park after her fugitive dog, he would have to decide how best to break the news.
The woman was Nina de Lacy. In life, she'd been the Lady of Kirkby, a Brit from a holding near the Welsh border. In death, she was a lost soul, who'd shifted out of the afterlife back into the living world, where she currently existed as if alive.
She wasn't.
Roman had come to reconnoiter and formulate a strategy to achieve mission objective: Retrieval.
Nina couldn't remain in the land of the living. There were any number of reasons why, but most important to Roman was that only she possessed the skill necessary to help him win the battle for dominion of the passage.


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Convincing her to do that job would be a challenge, no doubt. In the short weeks since Roman had agreed to rally an army, he'd learned death wasn't any simpler than life had been. In fact, in some ways, death was proving more complicated.
There was nothing simple about retrieving Nina.
In life, he'd established a reputation by tackling challenges most people had considered impossible. While he was uniquely qualified to tackle the obstacles ahead, even Roman had to admit he'd never had so much riding on the outcome.
Alive, he'd been the director of Sanctus, a covert national security organization whose name was only whispered in the shadows by the handful of political power brokers who knew of its existence. Funded by the Black Budget, Sanctus operated without oversight or presidential sanction.
The position of director was a lifelong appointment that endured the rise and fall of presidential regimes.
As director, Roman had dealt in life and deathachieve mission objective and he saved lives. Fail, and people died.
Now Roman would deal in eternities.
He'd had to die to understand the difference--death was only a passing from physical life.
Eternity meant forever.
Settling in to reconnoiter, Roman glanced around the familiar city park. Sanctus Command was only three blocks away, and he'd often escaped the elaborate maze of secured corridors and monitoring stations to walk and clear his head.
When Roman had been alive, the terrain had been lush with the new green of spring. April marked the onset of city maintenance crews who transformed the

RETRIEVAL 7