Judgment Day (Templar Chronicles Book 5)

by Nassise, Joseph

Yeah, you keep telling yourself that, that nagging little voice in the back of his mind said to him, but Cade brushed it off.

  The time for debate was over; now it was time for action.

  He slipped his arms through the straps of his go-bag and hefted it onto his back and then picked up his sword. The weight of the bag would slow him down a little, but he’d have to make due. He had no idea if he was coming back the same way and he didn’t want to lose what little equipment he had at his disposal by leaving it behind. The Jeep would probably be towed if his trip took too long, but at least it would be safe at the local lock-up, not sitting around the lot waiting to be broken into.

  Cade took one last look around the room to make sure that he hadn’t left anything behind and then, satisfied that he had not, he stepped up beside the mirror he’d placed on the floor beside the bed.

  He wanted to spend as little time finding the proper path as possible once he was across the barrier, so he began preparing himself for that process now. He stood there a moment, head bowed, clearing his mind of extraneous thoughts. When he was ready he began picturing the oversized dressing mirror he’d seen in the Archives the last time he’d been inside. It was the kind of thing he’d expect to find in the bedroom of a guy like the Edgar Allen Poe or the Marque de Sade, with its thick pewter frame covered with finely sculpted figures of witches and demons and devils, all caught up in acts that would make a back alley prostitute blush. Cade didn’t know where the mirror had come from or what it was doing in the Archives, but he was fairly confident that it was still there. Once an object ended up in the clutches of the custodians, it would take something like the apocalypse to get it out again.

  That mirror was going to be his backdoor into one of the most protected vault’s known to man.

  When he had the image firmly fixed in his mind, when he could practically see every detail well enough to just reach out and touch it, he took a step forward and disappeared through the surface of the mirror.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Colin Ferguson stared at the red light blinking on the screen of the security monitor next to his desk. In all the years he’d served as the Templar’s Seneschal, he’d never seen this particular alert. Nor had he ever really expected to.

  And yet there it was.

  He rose from where he’d been sitting by the fire, reading, and walked over to his desk. He tapped the glass surface and waited a moment for the touch-screen keyboard to appear. When it had, he tapped in a series of commands, querying the security system to be certain he remembered correctly what that symbol signified.

  He had.

  Someone was in the Archives.

  He frowned; he didn’t remember giving anyone access to the vault this evening. Or any evening, for that matter. The archives were off limits to all but a few, select individuals and only he and the Grand Master were allowed inside after the sun went down.

  As the Templar’s Seneschal, it was Ferguson’s duty to manage the day-to-day running of the Order, leaving the Grand Master free to deal with only those issues of the highest importance. He was in charge of managing the seven Preceptors as well as the headquarters commandery here in Rosslyn. One of his most important duties was maintaining the safety and integrity of the archives.

  He cancelled the alert with a flick of his finger and settled into the chair in front of his desk. He entered a handful of commands and suddenly the screen in front of him split into six smaller windows, each one displaying a different section of the archives, as seen by the security cameras mounted in the walls.

  Five of the screens showed nothing unusual.

  On the sixth, a man in dark clothing with a duffel bag slung across his back and a sheathed sword in one hand was just stepping over to the bookshelf that lined one of the room’s four walls. The man’s back was to him, but something about him seemed familiar to the Seneschal.

  Ferguson tapped in a few more commands, activating the camera directly in front of the intruder and zooming in on the man’s face.

  The scars and eye-patch would have been a dead giveaway to the man’s identity if Ferguson hadn’t already recognized the former Echo Team commander.

  Ferguson felt his heart kick into high gear at the sight.

  He’d been following the events surrounding the Adversary with great care for many years and was well aware of the recent incident involving the Necromancer, Simon Logan, and the body of Cade’s wife, Gabrielle. If Cade was here, that meant he hadn’t yet given up hope of rescuing his wife.

  The Seneschal smiled at the thought.

  The end game begins at last.

  He watched as Williams approached the wall of books and began methodically examining the titles on their spines, no doubt searching for something that would shed some light on the situation at hand. Given the number of volumes, and Williams’ lack of familiarity with the way the archives were arranged, it was going to take him days to get through them all. Ferguson had to admire the dogged determination the man showed by his efforts. He wasn’t giving up without a fight, that was for sure.

  Ferguson watched Cade for a few minutes and then made up his mind.

  It was time Williams got a little help.

  The Seneschal leaned forward and got to work. Fingers tapping lightly on the virtual keyboard, he began moving through a series of screens, each one more complex than the last. Ferguson had a reputation for being less than savvy with modern electronics, so those who worked around him on a regular basis would have been surprised at the adroitness with which he navigated through the system menus, shutting down various subroutines and changing the trigger calls on others, essentially rewriting on the fly the entire security system that monitored the archives in a matter of moments. The alert notification was scrubbed. The minute of video that showed Williams bursting through the mirror from the inside was replaced with a loop of tape from earlier in the night, making it seem like the archives were not only empty at this very moment but that they had been that way all evening.

  Ferguson rolled back the tapes and watched them for a moment, making certain that his tinkering wasn’t readily visible. Satisfied, he set the loop to run indefinitely and then shut down his connection to the system.

  With a little luck, no one would ever be the wiser.

  Getting up from his chair, Ferguson crossed the room to where a small, cast-iron safe sat on the floor. The safe was used for storing confidential files or dangerous artifacts while they were being used by the Seneschal and couldn’t be returned to either the subterranean vaults beneath the commandery or the very archives Williams was now searching, as the case might be. Ferguson knew that Williams wasn’t going to find what he needed in the archives and with good reason. The volume that would provide him some of the answers he was seeking wasn’t in the archive at all, but right there in the Seneschal’s safe.

  He reached inside and withdrew a slim, leather-bound journal whose cover was stained with time and cracked by age. He stared at it a moment, remembering the sacrifices that had been made to obtain the information recorded within, then, shaking his head at his own sentimentality, shut the door of the safe with a quiet click. Getting up, he headed for the door, the volume clasped securely in one hand.

  It was time to give the Heretic the information he was looking for.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “The Grand Master will see you now.”

  He damn well better, Preceptor Johannson thought as he rose from the seat he’d patiently been sitting in since arriving at Rosslyn Castle some two hours prior. He was mightily tempted to voice his opinion aloud, but he knew how to play the game and getting visibly annoyed at the Grand Master’s little power play would cause him to lose points in the grand scheme of things. That was something he simply would not tolerate.

  Johansson had been enroute to Scotland for the annual meeting of the seven Preceptors – one Preceptor for each continent - who ran the day-to-day operations of the Templar Order when word of the Heretic’s
escape reached him. It took him a good fifteen minutes to get his rage under control, but by the time he had a plan had presented itself. He’d decided to use his time at headquarters to present his case against Williams to the Grand Master himself. As head of the Order, the Grand Master could do things that a “lowly” Preceptor could not, provided certain truths were in evidence. Johansson intended to use those powers to his direct benefit. By the time he was finished, not only would Williams be branded a traitor and an official enemy of the Order, but he would also be excommunicated and cast out of the faith, if things went the way he wanted.

  Once the sentence had been pronounced on the Heretic, he could be hunted like the rabid dog that he was, Johannson knew. No one would dare argue with the need to do so, for everyone knew you couldn’t let an animal like that run around free, not if you didn’t want it infecting everyone it came into contact with. Swift and decisive action was what was called for in such situations.

  Once the Heretic was eliminated, I can get on with what I came here to do, he thought with satisfaction.

  As the Grand Master’s aide led him down the hall toward the senior official’s private meeting room, Johannson mentally reviewed what he knew of the man.

  Antoine Devereaux had been in command of the Templar Order for the last twenty-five years. He was Parisian by birth and had, in fact, risen to prominence during the ghoul incursion of the early eighties, when he’d led strike after strike down into the catacombs beneath the French capital to root out the foul creatures. His notoriety had brought him to the attention of the former Grand Master, who had taken him under his wing and groomed him to be his successor.

  Johannson liked Devereaux, not only for his gruff, no-nonsense approach to the Order’s ongoing mission, which Johannson was fully in agreement with, but also for his unrelenting war on all things supernatural. The man was determined to rid the world of anything that wasn’t human and Johannson was more than happy to assist him in the process. So far Cade Williams had managed to escape the Grand Master’s attention thanks to his relationship with the Seneschal, but the Preceptor was confident that things would change once the full breadth and scope of Williams’ treason was put on display for the Grand Master to see.

  And he knew he was just the man to do it.

  When they reached the end of the hall, the aide opened the door and ushered Johannson into a small study. A desk said to have been made from the bones of giant demon fought around the time of the Second Crusade stood on the other side of the room and behind it, in a high-backed wooden chair that was austere enough to match his personality, sat Grand Master Devereaux.

  Devereaux was a hard-looking man in his mid-fifties, with a scar across his throat from where a ghoul’s claws had come a little too close for comfort several decades before. He kept his head shaved and had a tattoo of a Celtic cross on either forearm. He was no longer in the top physical condition he’d once been, with a slight paunch visible beneath his shirt, but at six-foot-two he could still be dangerous in a fight.

  He glanced up from the paperwork he was examining when Johannson entered the room, gestured at the pair of similar chairs arranged in front of the desk, and then went back to his reading.

  Johannson took a seat and patiently waited until the Grand Master had read through the document, whatever it was, scratched his name across the bottom with a pen, and then set it aside.

  At last, Devereaux looked up and gave Johannson his undivided attention.

  “My apologies for keeping you waiting so long, Preceptor. It’s been a busy evening and, as you can see, I still have a lot to do. What can I help you with?”

  The Preceptor smiled graciously, while inside all he wanted to do was ring the smug “I’m-too-busy-for-this” attitude out of the man.

  “It’s no problem, Master Devereaux. The news I bear is distressing, however, and I wonder if perhaps another time might be better to discuss it?”

  Devereaux frowned. “Distressing? How so?”

  Johannson glanced down, as if ashamed of what he had to say. In truth, it was to hide the smile that crossed his face; if the Grand Master could be led so easily, this should take long at all. For some reason, he’d thought the man to be cleverer than that.

  Johannson took a deep breath, pretended to hesitate, and then said, “I’m sorry to say that I believe one of our senior commanders has gone rogue and is cooperating with the enemy.”

  That got the man’s attention, just as he’d hoped!

  Devereaux leaned forward. “I’m listening,” he said. “I hope I don’t have to remind you of the seriousness of the accusation you’re making. I trust you’ve done your due diligence before coming here?”

  “Yes, Master Devereaux. I wouldn’t bother you with this unless I was certain.”

  At that point Johannson began laying out his case against Cade Williams, step-by-step, from the night the Dorchester Demon, really the Adversary in disguise, attacked Cade and his wife in their home outside of Boston, to the latest confrontation on the Housatonic River bridge, where Cade had struck several members of his old strike team in an effort to keep them from firing on the creature possessing his dead wife’s body.

  He made sure to describe Knight Commander Williams’ regular insubordination toward legitimate command authority, his blasphemous act in unearthing his wife’s body, and the ritual that had been used to put the Adversary’s spirit into the empty shell that had once been Gabrielle Williams.

  By the time he was finished he thought he’d stated his case pretty damn well and apparently the Grand Master thought so too, for the man’s expression had gone from weary disinterest to outright alarm at all that he’d heard.

  “Where is Commander Williams now?”

  Johannson shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean you don’t know? You just said that your men took him into custody after the incident on the bridge!”

  It was exactly the question the Preceptor had been hoping for and he used the opportunity to play his trump card and seal Williams’ fate. “They did. Williams was arrested and brought back to the commandery for questioning, just as I said. Unfortunately, while waiting for a trained interrogator to arrive, he used witchcraft to escape from the interrogation room.”

  “Witchcraft!” Ferguson exclaimed, spitting the word from his mouth as if the very saying of it was distasteful.

  Johannson nodded. “Yes, sir. He apparently, ah, stepped through the surface of the two-way mirror.”

  Devereaux stared at him without saying anything for a long moment.

  “Stepped through the mirror?” he finally asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, where did he go then?”

  “I have no idea, sir.”

  Johannson noted curiously that the Grand Master’s face was starting to grow red with pent-up emotion.

  “And the Adversary? Where is that thing?”

  “We’re not certain, sir.”

  Devereaux got up from his seat. “Let me see if I have this straight. A senior commander of our most prestigious combat unit appears to be cooperating with a creature that we have, quite literally, been hunting for decades and we’re not sure where either of them are?”

  “I’ve had Echo and Gamma hunting the Adversary for several weeks, but they’ve gotten nowhere. Now, with Williams to track down as well, I’m afraid I’m a bit shorthanded.” Johannson sat back with a shrug. “They could be anywhere, frankly. If we want to catch him, I need the authority to track him down wherever he may be, regardless of preceptorship boundaries.”

  Johannson was betting that a proactive suggestion to deal with the crisis was just what the Grand Master wanted to hear and he was right. No sooner had he finished speaking that Devereaux was calling for his aide.

  “Brooks!”

  The door opened almost instantly and the aide, Brooks, stepped inside, tablet in hand. “Sir?”

  “Take this down.”

  Jo
hannson listened with satisfaction as Devereaux dictated an executive command authorizing the Preceptor to use any means necessary to apprehend and capture Williams and the Adversary. Just as he’d hoped, Williams was temporarily excommunicated and forbidden to exercise his rights and privileges as a member of the Order until such time as his guilt or innocent could be determined by the high council. Even better, the order extended to each of the seven preceptorships worldwide and granted Johannson the ability to requisition any and all supplies he might need to achieve his ends.

  It was all he could have wanted and more.

  Devereaux finished dictating and turned toward him. “You were right to bring this to my attention, Johannson. I’ve been saying for years that corruption from within is our biggest threat and now you’ve shown this to be true. In order to keep our mission pure, we need to watch diligently for those who have fallen from the path and help them find the truth once more.”

  Johannson nodded in agreement and then asked, “But what if they do not want to see the truth? What then?”

  The Grand Master didn’t flinch. “We are the shepherds of humanity, tasked by the Holy Father himself to protect the flock from threats and enemies. Sometimes, if a member of the flock becomes injured or sick, it must be culled from the herd, to protect the greater good. Wouldn’t you agree, Preceptor?”

  Johannson nodded.

  He did indeed.

  .

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Cade stood staring at the wall of books in front of him, wondering just how in hell he was going to find what he needed. Most of the volumes in front of him were written in languages other than English; Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Sanskrit and German being the most common. This wasn’t an insurmountable problem – he’d taught himself Latin as well as ancient Greek and Hebrew over the years in his search for the Adversary and knew a smattering of German – but identifying which volumes contained information relevant to his cause was turning out to be rather difficult.