Judgment Day (Templar Chronicles Book 5)

by Nassise, Joseph

  It was heavier than he expected, much heavier, and once in his hand it seemed to lose that sense of fragility that had surrounded it only moments before. The blade gleamed hungrily and he could almost imagine that it had a life of its own.

  He hefted it in his hand; it was a good, solid weapon, one that would work quite nicely in hand-to-hand combat. Of course, to use it, he was going to have to get up close and personal.

  “Okay,” Cade said. “For the sake of argument, let’s say I believe you. Let’s say I take this thing with me when I confront the Adversary. What then?”

  Uriel smiled and the sight was so disquieting that Cade took a step back.

  “You must either slash the Adversary’s throat or plunge the knife into its heart,” the angel told him. “Once the demon’s blood comes in contact with the blade, the power inherent in the Tear will do all the rest.”

  “The demon’s blood? You mean Gabrielle’s, don’t you?”

  Uriel gave him that pitying look once again. “At this point, Templar, they are one and the same.”

  “But...”

  The angel cut him off. “No,” he said. “There is no more time for questions. I have told you all that I can tell you, have shown you the consequences if you do not do what needs to be done. The rest is up to you.”

  With those words the angel turned away and would speak no more no matter how hard Cade begged him to do so. Eventually, after several minutes of trying, Cade finally gave up. He’d learned all he was going to learn, it seemed. It was time to get on with it.

  He left the tower the same way he came in, noticing as he did so that he had apparently been inside longer than he expected for the sun was just coming up over the horizon. Cade slipped the dagger through his belt and then pulled his jacket down over it before going down to the docks to await the fisherman’s arrival.

  # # #

  After Williams left the island, Uriel turned to a seemingly empty corner of the bell tower and said, “I know you are there. You can come out now.”

  The air in the corner shimmered like the haze rising off a hot desert highway, revealing the form of Seneschal Ferguson standing there. As he crossed the bell tower toward Uriel, the features of his face began to shift and change until he looked like an entirely different individual. Had Williams remained in the room, he would have recognized him as the leader of the scream of angels that had appeared to him after Echo’s defeat of Baraquel deep within the walls of the Eden facility, the same angel that had given him the feather that allowed him to track the Adversary across the Sea of Lamentations to the Isle of Sorrows.

  This time, though, he looked worried.

  “Did he accept the dagger?”

  Uriel nodded.

  “And he knows what to do with it?”

  Another nod.

  A longer pause, and then the newcomer asked another question.

  “Is he ready to do what needs to be done?”

  Uriel turned and looked at his visitor. For a long moment he said nothing, and then he turned and looked out the window to where Cade was making his way back across the lagoon in the prow of the fisherman’s boat.

  “Of course he’s ready,” Uriel answered. “He has my blood in his veins.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  After sending Cade on his way to Heathrow, Riley reported in to Preceptor Johannson, claiming that he hadn’t seen Commander Williams. He was ordered to catch the next flight back to the United States. Luckily, there’d been one headed to JFK in New York within the hour.

  Thanks to the time change, he arrived in New York just before midnight and used one of the vehicles the Templars kept in long-term parking to return to the commandery in Westport, CT. Once back in his quarters, he collapsed on the bed and fell quickly asleep.

  He awoke a few hours later to the sound of his cell phone.

  “Riley here,” he said, once he’d fumbled it out of his pocket and put it to his ear.

  “Where are you?”

  Recognizing Cade’s voice, Riley said, “My quarters. Ravensgate. Why? What did you find out?”

  Cade ignored both questions. “Stay where you are,” he said, instead. “I’ll be right with you.”

  Right with me? How the hell was he...

  There was a crash of glass from inside his bathroom and then the door opened and Cade stepped out, brushing glass shards off his shoulder. He was dressed in the clothes Riley had given to him at the airport and looked like he hadn’t slept since, but there was a manic light in his eyes that he only got when he was on the trail of something good.

  “How on earth...?” Riley asked.

  Cade grinned. “Yeah, pretty cool, huh?”

  “Cool? That’s what you’re calling it?”

  Riley was flabbergasted at what had just happened. Cade had never been able to control his passage through the Beyond before, he knew. Traveling that way had always been a bit of Russian roulette; step through the mirror and hope you ended up somewhere reasonably close to where you wanted to be. What Cade had done was the equivalent of trading a catapult throw for a laser guided nuclear missile.

  “Learned a trick or two over the last couple of weeks,” Cade told him. “But forget about that. I’ve got something better. I know what the Adversary is up to!”

  That caught Riley’s attention. He gestured that Cade should take a seat at the small table that served as his work area but Cade was too hyped up to sit. He paced back and forth while Riley took the chair instead.

  “You’ve heard about the soldiers being kidnapped?”

  Riley nodded. He hadn’t paid too much attention to the news reports, but he was at least aware of them. One missing soldier had been bad enough, with now with five of them missing, the situation was getting plenty of news coverage.

  “All former US soldiers. All in top condition before whatever injury landed them in a coma. All of them with little to no brain activity and existing on life support.”

  “Sounds like they’d be useless to the Adversary,” Riley said. “What am I missing?”

  “They’re just the opposite, actually. They’re perfect for what the Adversary has in mind.”

  Cade explained about meeting the Forsaken One and what he’d learned about the Adversary’s plans to bring back his scream as a result.

  “He’s going to call the other members of his scream out of the infernal plane and give them the bodies of the kidnapped victims as vessels to inhabit on this one. Once he does, it won’t take the fallen angels long to assume control of their new forms, just as the Adversary did with Gabrielle.”

  While Cade talked, Riley used his computer to pull up information on the kidnappings. Scanning it, he said, “Each of the victims were considered to be all but brain dead; in several of the cases, the doctors were just waiting for the family to give the word to take them off life support.”

  “Right. Without an active intelligence to fight, it will be easy for the fallen angels to take over the bodies and make them their own. And if that happens, we’re in for a world of hurt.”

  Riley looked up. “Define ‘world of hurt.’”

  “Biblical-style-cataclysms-right-out-of-the-Book-of-Revelation-with-the-world-divided-up-between-seven-fallen-angels-as-their-personal-hunting-ground world of hurt.”

  Riley knew Cade wasn’t joking; he never joked about things like that.

  Taking a deep breath, he said, “Right. Just another day at the office then. So how do we stop this bastard?”

  “With this.” Cade pulled the dagger out of his belt and laid it on the table in front of Riley.

  Always leery of touching artifacts that he knew nothing about, Riley left it right where it was. “What is it?”

  Cade reiterated what he’d learned from Uriel.

  Riley stared at it for a moment, then looked up at Cade, the question he was about to ask written all over his face even before he said it.

  “You’ll kill Gabrielle if you use this
thing. You know that, right?”

  Cade winced and put the knife away again. “I’m hoping it won’t come to that. Uriel said that I have to draw blood; he didn’t say how much.”

  Riley didn’t say anything for a moment and the hesitation told Cade he was unconvinced. “Don’t worry about that right now. I’ll figure it out when the time comes. Trust me.”

  His former teammate held up his hands in surrender. “No argument here. We still have to find the SOB, unless you’ve figured that out, too?”

  “No, but I think I know how we can do so. I need a list of patients injured in the last, say three months, who are currently in a coma on life support. Can you do that?”

  “Sure. Give me ten minutes.”

  “Olsen could have done it in three.”

  “True, but I’m not Olsen. You’re going to have to live with ten.”

  In the end, it only took him seven minutes. His triumphant smile quickly disappeared when he realized that the search turned up hundreds of patients, far too many for the list to be useful to them.

  “No, we’re good,” Cade told him. “The hospital records will indicate if the patients were or are currently members of the armed services, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. The kidnapping victims were all soldiers, so we can expect the next two to be the same. Cull the list and eliminate everyone who isn’t one.”

  Riley did so, giving them a list with just over 150 names.

  “Still too big,” Cade said, “but at least we’re getting there.”

  They sat together in silence for a moment, thinking, and then Riley began tapping away on the keyboard again.

  “How long does it take for the muscles of coma patients to start to atrophy?” Riley asked. “A few weeks?”

  “Depends upon the shape they were in before the accident, I suspect. I’d guess a few weeks before you’d see significant problems.”

  Riley typed another search string into the computer. “They aren’t going to want to take up residence in bodies that are weak from lack of use, right? So they’ll be targeting the most recent cases. If we narrow our search to those injured in the last few weeks...”

  The computer spit out a list of fifteen names. A quick check confirmed Riley’s hypothesis; all of the previous victim’s names were on the list.

  Cade clapped him on the back. “Well done!”

  Riley shook his head. “We narrowed it down, but we’ve still got nine different candidates to choose from and that’s too many. There’s no way you and I can keep an eye on that number all at once. We could take a guess, but that’s all it would be, a guess. If we get it wrong, the Adversary claims the sixth and final victim he needs.”

  Cade paced back and forth in the small room, thinking it through. Riley was right; they were only going to get one shot at this. They had to get it right the first time.

  The choice didn’t feel random to him; something tied these victims together, but what?

  Make a list, he told himself, and start with the obvious.

  They were all U.S. service personnel. They were all roughly the same age, or at least within several years of each other. They had all been in excellent physical shape right up to the event or injury that put them in the hospital.

  But that was where the similarities ended.

  Three were male, two were female. They had different ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds. Different education levels. Different family backgrounds and situations. They couldn’t have gotten a more diverse group even if someone had actively worked to create one.

  So why these five? Cade asked himself.

  Then it hit him.

  “Can you plot the hospitals were the victims were kidnapped from on a map?” he asked.

  “Sure. Piece of cake.”

  A moment later Riley turned the screen to face him; it showed a map of the eastern seaboard, from Boston the north to Washington DC in the south, and west to Detroit in the west.

  “How about the patients on our possibles list. Can you plot their current locations in blue?”

  A few seconds later fifteen blue diamonds showed up on the map.

  Two of them were within the same general area as the original five. All the rest were farther west, across the Mississippi.

  “Gotcha!” Cade said softly.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Cade lay prone on the edge of the ridgeline, his hips pressed against the ground and his knees shoulder-width apart to improve his stability. In his hands he held an M24 US Army sniper rifle, originally chambered for a 7.62 NATO match slug but now custom refitted to handle a special long-range Templar-designed tracking device similar to those used to tag grizzly bears in the wild. This particular model was also equipped with a Leupold Mark4 10x Mildot scope, which Cade currently had dialed in on the window of a room on the eighth floor of the building downhill from him.

  In that hospital room lay Sergeant First Class Edward Mason, U.S. Army, mortally injured while on patrol in Afghanistan. The sergeant had sustained severe injuries to the skull and was presently in a medically induced coma designed to give the doctors time to figure out how to deal with the growing hematoma inside his skull. According to the records Riley had been able to pull up, no one on the medical staff expected him to recover. If by some miracle he did, the long-term prognosis was that he would spend the rest of his life in a vegetative state, which, given the robust health of the rest of his body, might be for many years to come.

  Mason was a perfect target for the Adversary and that was why Cade was lying on a rooftop with a scoped rifle hoping that his proximity theory was correct.

  Riley was sitting behind the wheel of a van parked a few hundred yards up the road from the hospital. In the back of the van, manning the receiver for the tracking gear, was fellow Echo Team member Jimmy Martinez. When Cade made the shot, it would be Jimmy’s job to call out the directions as the tracked the demon to its lair.

  Two hundred miles away, outside a hospital in Baltimore, another team led by Phil Davis was set up in similar fashion, keeping an eye Ernest Jessup in case the Adversary decided to go after him instead.

  Guessing that the Adversary would take the patients closest to its current position, Cade had decided to focus on the only two patients within the same general locale. Everything ahead of them was depending on Cade’s theory being correct. If it wasn’t...

  Don’t think like that, he told himself. You’ve been right so far and you’re right this time, too.

  He spoke softly into the mike at his throat.

  “Sound check.”

  There was a pause and then Riley’s voice came over the communications headset he was wearing beneath his watch cap.

  “Reading you 5 by 5, Cade.”

  “Roger that. Anything on the news?”

  “Nada.”

  That was good, at least.

  They had been at it for nearly forty-eight hours now with no sign of the Adversary. Even worse, they had no idea if or when he might show up; it was all a big guessing game. The only way they would know they were right was if the Adversary showed up at one of the two locations they were covering or if there was another report of a kidnapping victim elsewhere that fit the bill.

  Cade shifted position slightly and slowly reached out for the water bottle next to him. He was well-covered in camouflage netting and didn’t expect anyone to be looking for him, but old habits die hard and he knew that quick movements drew the eye much more easily than slow ones did. He raised his head a bit to take a gulp and was just in time to see a patch of darkness slip by overhead. He wouldn’t have noticed it if the sky had been even slightly overcast; he caught sight of it only because it blotted out the stars behind it. It was too low to be an airplane and too solid to be a flock of bats, so that left only one option.

  The Adversary.

  He clicked his throat mike twice – the prearranged signal for spotting their target – and settled down behind
his scope.

  For several minutes the space outside the window remained clear, but then a large winged shadow swooped past. It was moving quickly, from left to right, but Cade didn’t try to follow it; he knew right where it would end up and that was good enough for him.

  He kept his breathing even and his grip on the gun light, not wanting to tire himself out before his shot. He’d spent years as a police sniper and the old skills were so ingrained that he didn’t even think about what he was doing at this point, he just did it.

  So he was perfectly calm when the Adversary returned to hover directly outside Mason’s window, some eleven stories off the ground, the muzzle of his weapon rock steady.

  He settled the barrel of his weapon right on the back of the Adversary’s neck. If the gun had been capable of doing the creature any permanent harm, he might have pulled the trigger, but he knew that even a head shot wouldn’t kill the Adversary completely and so he waited for the opportunity they’d specifically come here to find. He was not here to shoot the Adversary.

  You mean Gabrielle, his conscience corrected him, and he found no argument to be made otherwise. Through the scope he could see her long hair sweeping backward in the downdrafts from the wings that sprouted from where her shoulder blades normally would be. From what he could see she didn’t appear much changed from when he’d seen her on the bridge several days ago and for that he was thankful. There was still time yet, it seemed.

  His heart ached for all that his wife had been through, but Cade knew that now was not the time for sentiment. He let out the breath he didn’t know he’d been holding and tried to wall off his emotions, returning to the mindset he’d learned to cultivate so long ago.

  Focus on the target. Focus on the job in front of you. Nothing more and nothing less.

  Gabrielle – no, the Adversary, he had to think of it as the Adversary – raised its fist and smashed the full length window in front of it, the window that led into Mason’s room, and then slipped inside.