The Belial Stone (The Belial Series)

by Brady, R. D.

  There didn’t appear to be any motion sensors or electronic surveillance. They seemed to be relying solely on human security in the form of one truck, which was responsible for patrolling the entire perimeter, and a guarded entrance on the northern side of the property.

  The low-level security was good news for them. It was much easier to slip pass human security than electronic security.

  Watching the truck approach, Jake took a breath, trying to calm the rage building within him.

  The truck’s headlights rolled over them as their Ghillie suits blended seamlessly into the landscape. It didn’t stop.

  Jake gestured to his watch. “Ten minutes.”

  Yoni nodded and moved to the fence with a pair of wire clippers already in hand. He made the first cut and waited. No alarms went off and no guards came running. He made quick work of cutting a hole in the fence big enough for them to crawl through. Once they were through, they repositioned it so that it appeared still intact. Heading north, they kept low to the ground.

  It was silent, with only a slight wind. Jake strained to hear the sound of anything. If there were men here, shouldn't they be able to hear something?

  Doubts flooded his mind and fear crept through him. If they were wrong, then he had absolutely no idea where Tom might be.

  They were only five hundred yards in when his watched beeped. He signaled to Yoni to stop. They flattened themselves to the ground. Seconds later, the lights of the patrol returned. It drove slowly past them.

  “Hurry up,” he urged, watching the truck. This was taking too long. They needed to move faster.

  When the patrol was out of view, Jake jumped to his feet, ready to start back on their path. Yoni grabbed him by the arm and shook his head. He signaled for him to listen.

  Straining, Jake could just make out the sound of a plane. As the noise grew louder, he was surprised to hear that it sounded like a military cargo plane, flying low.

  Looking up, he saw the lights of the plane and noticed that the landing gear was down. As it passed over them, he exchanged a look with Yoni. Without speaking, they both changed direction, following the path of the plane.

  Moving fast, they arrived at a makeshift landing strip another two thousand yards in. Jake’s heart hammered in his chest. This must be the cargo plane that filed the false flight plan every month. But why were they flying in now? Hadn’t they already made this month’s delivery? Could this operation be even bigger than they realized?

  They settled into a small gully two hundred yards from the landing strip. The plane had just rolled to a stop next to a large farm truck and a Suburban. Four armed men exited the Suburban. Two other armed men leaned against the truck.

  Jake grabbed his camera from his pack and started snapping away. Yoni watched the scene through his night-vision binoculars.

  “It’s opening up,” Yoni whispered.

  Jake fixed his camera on the cargo door as it slowly lowered. The commandos stormed into the belly of the plane. Their yells echoed through the open space. Seconds later, shackled men stumbled down the ramp. One man fell as he stepped off the ramp and was kicked in the face by a guard. Jake's grip tightened on the camera. Bastards.

  Another man grabbed the fallen man and helped him stand. Then all of the men were rushing to get into the storage truck. Less than a minute later, the truck and SUV were driving across the field and the plane was turning around to take off again.

  “I guess we’ve found the missing men,” Yoni said grimly.

  Jake placed his camera back in his pack, trying to focus on the task. The anger burning in his chest was making that difficult. This must have been how Tom arrived. He looked at Yoni. “We need to know where they’re going. You up for a run?”

  “Always," Yoni replied, already slinging his pack over his shoulder. The two men took off in the same direction as the vehicles. Jake’s boots pounded into the ground. But in his mind’s eye, each step pounded into the faces of the men responsible for this atrocity.

  I’m coming, Tom. I’m coming.

  Jake could make out a dim light in the distance. As they approached, more trees and shrubberies allowed them to move at a faster clip. They slowed down as the coverage began to lighten. Soon, it all but disappeared. They shifted to an army crawl and stopped at a rock encasement just out of the halo of the lights. Once again pulling out their binoculars and camera, they took in the scene before them.

  Sitting in the middle of this barren acreage was a huge wooden structure. There were no lights along the top of the walls. The only available light emitted from inside the enclosure, bathing the area around it in shadows.

  Jake noticed movement from in front of the enclosure and saw that the truck had pulled to a stop and all the men had been offloaded. They were now being led into the enclosure. The doors to the enclosure opened, but from his position, Jake could not make out anything inside.

  “Jake, you need to see this,” Yoni whispered. He handed him night-vision goggles and pointed to the right of the enclosure.

  Jake put on the goggles and looked to where Yoni had indicated. “What the…?”

  There was a smaller enclosure of some sort with two guards sitting out front. Inside the enclosure, which looked like some sort of large animal pen, were about a hundred men sleeping.

  “Well, I guess we found them,” Yoni said quietly.

  “Yeah,” Jake replied just as quietly taking in the ominous structure and the highly-armed guards. “But how the hell do we get them out of here?”

  CHAPTER 54

  Baltimore, MD

  Laney started as the phone rang. She was reading the Book of Enoch and had gotten lost in the story. She placed her e-reader down and flipped on her phone. “Hello?”

  “Hey. Did I wake you?” Henry asked.

  Stretching her arms above her head trying to work out some of the kinks, she grimaced. “Sadly, no. Sleep doesn’t seem to be happening tonight. What’s going on?”

  Henry sighed. “I think I've found Paul's accomplice. I’m sending you a file. Call me back after you’ve read it.”

  Laney stared at her phone as Henry disconnected the call abruptly. She might not know Henry well, but she was pretty sure practically hanging up on someone was not his usual behavior. Whatever was on the file must have really shaken him up.

  She booted up the computer and pulled up the file Henry sent her. A chill came over her as she began to read and it seemed to get deeper as she kept going. She swallowed hard when she was done, her whole body felt numb as she dialed the phone.

  She didn’t bother with a greeting. “Are you sure it’s him?”

  “I ran it through some recognition programs to match up the features. It’s him, all right.”

  “Which database did you find him in? FBI? Interpol?”

  “No, none of those. I found him in Dom's database.”

  “Is it crazy that I keep hoping there’s another explanation for all this?”

  Henry’s sigh came in loud and clear through the phone. “I know. I tried all the databases I could think of and I had absolutely no luck. Dom’s database was a last-ditch effort. Honestly, I expected the search to be as fruitless as the others.”

  Laney stared at the face on her screen. It wasn’t a friendly face, but there was nothing about it that screamed fallen angel. Of course, she wasn’t sure exactly what would scream fallen angel. Wings? A crooked halo?

  She stared back at the picture. If she was being honest, the man was handsome.

  She glanced back at the description of the man. His legal name was Gideon Wright, but it was the name Azazyel that leapt off the screen at her.

  Azazyel, the most dangerous of the fallen angels. The one who had taught mankind about war and how to use the stones.

  Her heart began to pound as she contemplated the ramifications. This couldn’t be true.

  She stood up, pacing the room. She made a conscious effort to still the tremors that were causing her hands to shake. “Okay. Let’s look at this l
ogically. You had no luck with the other databases, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you sure there aren’t any you overlooked?”

  Henry gave a small laugh. “I tend to be pretty thorough. I’ve covered all of them.”

  She grinned. Right. Head of a multinational think tank. “Okay. So he’s in Dom’s database and from what’s written there, he’s a dangerous man. That still doesn’t mean he’s a fallen angel. What made Dom add him to the database?”

  “Dom had a number of criteria for inclusion but the main ones seem to be unnatural/unexplained abilities, evidence of knowledge of former lives, inhuman healing abilities, and psychopathic traits.”

  “And this man fits those criteria?”

  Henry sighed. “He does. According to the background Dom was able to dig up, Gideon was ruthless on the battlefield, not to mention in his strategies. He had no conscience regarding targets: schools, playgrounds, homes, all fair game as far as he was concerned. Some even argue he was the mastermind behind the attack on the school in Beslan, Russia.”

  She gasped and sank down into a chair. “My God, nearly four hundred people died in that attack. Half of them were children.”

  Henry’s voice was grim. “Like I said, no targets appear off-limits for him. His fighting skills were first noticed when he was thirteen. There’s no record of him having any formal training, but he’s highly skilled in hand-to-hand combat. And from the reports, he’s practically a savant when it comes to weapons.”

  “What about the evidence of former lives?”

  “That’s where it gets really interesting. Apparently, in kindergarten he would tell the other kids he was better than all of them and that one day they would bow before him.”

  She closed her eyes. “Great.”

  “He also told them he was God’s first soldier. He was later expelled from that kindergarten for bringing a handgun to school. His dad swore up and down that the gun had been stripped and in parts at home.”

  She felt her jaw drop. “He put the gun together at the age of five?”

  “Like I said, a weapons savant. About six years later, his parents were killed by an armed intruder. The intruder was never caught. Gideon was in the house at the time. The police suspected him, but they could never prove it. According to the police reports, the kid sat there cool as a cucumber under their interrogation. He never once broke or shed a tear. In fact, he was incredibly polite. Dom contacted the investigating officers. One of them said that that case convinced him there was evil in the world. That he’d never seen an offender before or since that was so cold.”

  Laney was silent as she stared at the man’s picture on the screen. She knew that a normal, non-fallen angel child with that background wouldn’t have a good chance of living within the law. If he was a fallen angel, she didn’t even want to think about the likely outcomes.

  Henry’s voice intruded, as if reading her mind. “I know. It seems impossible. But what if it’s not? What if we underestimate this threat because we can’t wrap our heads around it?”

  “Logically, this all fits. And yet, it all seems so fantastical. But the fact is that, deep down, I’ve had this feeling since the attack at my house. I knew there was more underlying all of this. That the stakes were much higher than we were acknowledging. And with the medical examiner’s report, doubting seems to be the height of stupidity.”

  “But what do we do with this knowledge? How does this help us?”

  “It tells us what we need to prevent. We can’t let Gideon get the stones.”

  “What do you think he’ll do if he finds one?”

  Laney’s thoughts raced through the Book of Enoch and all the other references to the fallen angels she could recall.

  “If the Book of Enoch is accurate, the power contained within the Belial Stones is the power of heaven itself. If Gideon succeeds in acquiring even a single stone, he’ll use it to finally bring about the end of time. He wants to release himself and his brothers from this purgatory of Earth."

  She paused, taking a deep breath. “And he’ll destroy all of us to do it.”

  CHAPTER 55

  Beaver Creek, MT

  Laney woke up late the next morning, if the sun streaming through the cracks in the blinds was any indication. She stared at the ceiling for a moment, wishing she could go back to sleep. She felt like she’d been run over by a car. Since all this began, she had yet to wake up without at least three parts of her body aching in pain.

  She’d fallen asleep on the couch late last night waiting for Jake and Yoni to return. A blanket had been placed over her, so she knew they were back, even though the house was quiet.

  She was surprised she hadn’t woken up when they’d come home. Apparently, she had been so tired that she had slept through not only two men entering the house, but one covering her with a blanket.

  Annoyed with her nonexistent sentry skills, she stretched and headed to the kitchen to put on some coffee. After the coffee was set, she started pulling food out of the refrigerator for breakfast. She had bacon grilling and a second egg-white omelet finishing up when Yoni stumbled into the kitchen and took a seat at the table. She sat an omelet in front of him.

  “Ah, Laney. If I were not a happily married man, I would propose to you. Perhaps in the next lifetime, hmm?”

  She laughed. “Does your wife know how big a flirt you are?”

  “Of course she does. That is why she loves me. She knows that as much as I love women, I love her the most.”

  Skillfully scooping out the omelet, Laney poured in more egg whites to start the third. Jake walked in just as she was adding the tomato, onion, and spinach. He sat across from Yoni and smiled at Laney as she placed an omelet in front of him.

  He raised an eyebrow. “I thought you didn’t cook.”

  “I don’t. Breakfast isn’t cooking.”

  Jake took a bite. “Well, it tastes great. Thanks.”

  Laney smiled. She tried to imagine what it would be like, if it was just her and Jake. A quiet romantic breakfast.

  “Hey, you two want to be alone?” Yoni asked.

  Laney rolled her eyes at him. Reality: A romantic breakfast with her, Jake, and Yoni, the destroyer of moments.

  Jake slapped Yoni on the back of the head and Yoni chuckled.

  Jake caught her eyes and gestured to the laptop. “I downloaded the pictures from last night. Take a look.”

  Laney started to sit down when a knock sounded at the front door. Jake grabbed her and pulled her behind him, while simultaneously pulling his gun from its holster. Yoni was already positioning himself to the side of one of the front windows with his gun out.

  Yoni peered through the blinds. He turned around and smiled. “It looks like we have a few more joining us for breakfast.”

  He walked to the door and opened it. Henry and Patrick walked through the front door with large duffle bags slung over their shoulders.

  Laney let out the breath she’d unconsciously held when Jake had pressed her against the wall. She forced her heartbeat back to a normal rhythm before crossing the room to envelope her uncle in a warm hug.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Jake give Henry that half-handshake, half-hug greeting guys tended to use.

  “Not that we mind the company, but couldn’t you guys have given us a heads-up that you were coming?” Jake asked.

  “I thought you guys could use the sleep.” Henry replied. He turned to Yoni with a grin. “You need to work on your trip wires a little, Yoni.”

  “You’re the only one who’s ever gotten through them.” Yoni grumbled, kicking at the carpet like a kid. “How do you do that?”

  Laney released her uncle and looked past the two men. “Did you two come alone? Is Danny with you?”

  “Danny’s with Dom. We thought it’d be better for him to stay there.” Henry gestured back towards the front door. “But we did bring along five extra men. They’re setting up a patrol on the perimeter. More will be flying in later today.”


  Jake nodded. “Good. I’ll coordinate with them after breakfast.”

  Laney headed back to the kitchen and flipped the omelet she’d left on the stove top. “Why are you two here?”

  Patrick looked at Henry as he answered. “We thought you might need some help with the next part of the plan.”

  “Next part of the plan?” Laney stopped and looked from Patrick to Henry. “We have a next part of the plan?”

  “Not yet. But I have some ideas," Jake replied.

  Patrick glanced past her to the breakfast on the table. "Are those your egg-white omelets? Any chance Henry and I could snag one?”

  She linked her arm with his. “Absolutely. Have a seat.”

  Ten minutes later, she’d scooped the last omelet onto her plate and placed a couple of pieces of bacon next to it.

  Taking her seat, she ate with one hand while scrolling through the pictures on Jake’s computer with the other. “Is that a landing strip?”

  Jake nodded. “Yes. And we were there for the delivery.”

  A chill went through Laney. “Are those men bound?”

  “Yeah. And they were brought to some sort of structure. We couldn’t get a look inside. But it’s safe to say we’ve found the missing men.”

  A startled gasp escaped Laney as she clicked onto the next image. “What is that?”

  Jake leaned over to look at the monitor. “We couldn’t tell until we got home and brightened it up a bit. It appears to be where they put the bodies.”

  “Bodies?” Patrick asked, paling.

  Yoni gave Jake a look of apology. “It looks like when someone dies at the enclosure, they don’t bury them. They place them in a pit just outside the wall.”

  Laney clicked on a different picture, not wanting to look at the macabre scene any longer. “How many men are in there?”

  “We couldn’t tell,” Jake said, his voice strained. “But there were a lot.”

  Laney shook her head. “I know we thought this was what was happening. Somehow, though, seeing the pictures makes it more real.” She hesitated. “Did you see any sign of Tom?”