Infernal Games (Templar Chronicles Urban Fantasy Series) (13 page)

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B
ruised
and bleeding, Cade made his way back through the woods to the school parking
lot where he’d left his car.

To
his relief, the vehicle was right where he had left it. He staggered over,
unlocked the trunk, and put his sword inside but kept the pistol with him.
He’d take the chance of someone seeing it on the seat beside him, as there was
no way he was going to be walking around empty-handed, not after the last few
days. He shut the trunk and returned to the front seat. No sooner had he settled
in behind the wheel that the phone in his pocket chimed.

Digging
it out, he discovered he had a text.

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C
ade had to use all of his control to keep
from hurling the phone against the windshield. If he did that, and it broke,
he’d have no way of reaching the Necromancer.

Cade
was going to kill him, there was no doubt about that, but for now he fought for
control and just managed to hold onto his anger. Barely.

His phone
chimed again.

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T
he Staff of
Anubis. You know where it is.

48 hours.

“You have got to be fuckin’ kidding me,” he
said. Logan was correct; Cade did know where the Staff of Set was. He’d been
the one to secure it on the Order’s behalf. Given the power the staff was
believed to control, there was only one place the Order would feel safe storing
it.

In
the vault-like reliquary deep beneath the Bristol commandery.

Only
one of the most guarded places in all of North American, particularly after
Logan and his cronies had broken into it half a year ago!

How
the hell was he going to break into the reliquary and steal the staff without
being seen and recognized? He had been in and out of the commandery so many
times in the last several years that he knew most of the people stationed there
on sight and vice versa. There was no way he was going to be able to slip
inside without being noticed; someone was bound to see and recognize him.

“You
have got to be kidding me,” he said again.

For
what felt like the thousandth time he regretted his inability to control his
travel via the mirror’s road. If he’d been able to control his Gift, getting
in and out of the commandery would have been a snap. All he would have had to
do was take a mirror to a secluded spot outside the commandery, step through it
into the Beyond and then step back out again through a different gate into the
reliquary itself. Finding a gate into the reliquary would have been easy;
there was more than one mirror in the vault.

Unfortunately,
that’s not how it worked. Not with his level of skill, at least. Traveling in
and out of the Beyond was a lot like playing Russian Roulette; you never knew
where that next step was going to take you or if you’d even live to tell about
it.

No,
he’d have to come up with a better idea.

And
he had less than forty-eight hours to do it.

The
sound of sirens in the distance caught his attention.
Finally responding to
all the gunshots, I guess
, he thought, and decided that it was high time he
got himself out of there before he was forced to deal with questions for which
he didn’t have any real answers.

Half
an hour later Cade was soaking in the tub at the safe house, letting the
superheated water wash the blood from his flesh and ease the ache from his
muscles. He’d gotten away with minimal damage, considering the threat he’d
faced. The wound in his upper arm had taken four stitches to close, stitches
he’d been forced to put in himself since he had no one to help him. The holy
water he’d splashed over the injury first to kill any infection had hurt worse;
the liquid bubbling and boiling like he’d just poured hot acid on his skin. It
looked worse than it had before by the time he was done, but at least he was
confident that he wasn’t going to catch some strange disease from the corpse
hound’s claws. Who knew where those things had been?

He
laid his head back against the edge of the tub and wracked his brain for some
idea of how he was going to penetrate the commandery and get inside the
reliquary. He’d already wasted an hour and he still didn’t have a clue. Brute
force was definitely out; they’d gun him down first and ask questions second.
Unfortunately, the stealth approach was also out of the question. He should
know, for it had been his job to beef up the security in the face of the
Necromancer’s attacks earlier that year. If they were still following his
recommendations then a mouse couldn’t fart in that place without the Templars
knowing about it.

That
left only subterfuge. He had an inkling of an idea as to how he might get onto
the grounds – it wasn’t a great one but at least it would serve its purpose.
He would still need to penetrate the vault after that and he didn’t have a clue
how to go about doing so.

He
lay there, watching the steam rise from the surface of the water, insubstantial
as a wraith, and felt the clock ticking down, minute by minute by minute.

There
had to be a way!

Frustrated,
he put his palms on either side of the tub and abruptly pushed himself out of
the water. He couldn’t just sit there; he needed to be doing something.

He
grabbed a towel and wrapped it around his body as he stepped over to the sink,
intending to brush the sour taste of despair out of his mouth. The mirror
above the sink had fogged from all the steam and as he reached to wipe it away
his reflection flickered like a ghost in the background.

As
his palm wiped the condensation away, the realization of what his subconscious mind
had been trying to tell him for the last twenty minutes hit him like a runaway
truck. He stood there, grinning stupidly at his reflection as he thought it
through and decided that it might just work.

First
thing he had to do was get in touch with a dead man.

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A
brams
lived on the third floor of an apartment building in Norwalk, the next town
over from the safe house’s location. It took Cade less than ten minutes to
drive over there, find a parking spot in the small dirt lot next door, and
climb the three flights of stairs to Abrams’ apartment.

He
paused outside the door, pretending to be looking for his keys, as an Asian
woman - Thai or maybe Philippino, Cade wasn’t certain – went past him and down
the stairs to the next floor. When she’d gone he leaned in toward the door,
listening. He could hear voices in the background, but the laughter sounded
canned and he suspected it was just the television.

Cade
took a final look around to be certain no one was watching and then drew his
pistol from the shoulder holster he wore underneath his jacket. Gun in hand,
he raised one booted foot and brought it smashing back down against the
apartment door directly to the right of the lock.

The
door flew open and bounced off the opposite side of the narrow hallway, but
Cade was already past it, moving forward into the apartment with his gun out
before him in a ready position. There was an open doorway to his right –
kitchen, empty – and then a living room to his left, where a wiry-looking man
in jeans and a sweatshirt had just leapt off the coach and was reaching into
the drawer of the small table near the sofa.

Cade
didn’t need to be told what was in that drawer; he knew it was a weapon of some
kind and acted according, slamming one foot against the outside of the drawer
and pinning the man’s hand inside.

“Arrgh!”
the man yelled in pain. “My hand!”

“Shut
up!” Cade told him, pointing his gun at the man’s forehead. “That’s what you
get for thinking you can pull a gun on me!”

Lenny
Abrams put his other hand in the air in surrender. “I didn’t know it was you!
Honest! All you had to do was knock and I would have let you in!”

“Yeah,
right. Tell me another, Lenny.”

“I
swear, I swear! Come on, let me go! You’re gonna break my hand!”

Cade
put the barrel of his weapon right against Lenny’s forehead and the medium
abruptly went still. That didn’t stop his pleading, though.

“Please,
please, please, don’t shoot. I didn’t know, honest, I swear!”

Cade
ignored him. “You’re going to take your hand out nice and slow, right Lenny?”

The
other man nodded.

“Cuz
you know what will happen if you don’t, right?”

“Yeah,
yeah, yeah. I’ll be good; promise!”

Cade
took his foot off the drawer and backed up a few steps, out of Abrams’ reach.

“What
the hell do you want?” Abrams asked sullenly, as he yanked his hand out of the
drawer and collapsed on the sofa, cradling his injury with the other hand in
the process.

“I’m
in need of your services, Lenny, and lucky for you, I’m even willing to pay for
them.”

Lenny
Abrams was a medium. Cade had run into him a few times in the past. Abrams
had kept his nose clean after a warning from Cade to stop bilking his clients
with fake seances and so Cade hadn’t turned him in. The Order frowned heavily
on people who called up the spirits of the dead just to satisfy the curiosity
of the living and would have quickly made Abrams life miserable had he been
turned in, which put Abrams in Cade’s debt.

Cade
was about to call in his marker.

At
the mention of getting paid, Lenny forgot all about his injured hand. “What,
exactly, do you need me to do?” he asked.

Cade
told him.

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T
he
idea was a simple one. Call up the spirit of the man who had last been in
charge of the reliquary, Nigel Stone, leader of the Custodes Veritatis, the
secret sect that cared for all of the Order’s artifacts, and ask him if there
was a backdoor into the vault.

The
question in Cade’s mind was whether or not Lenny Abrams could manage to call up
the dead man’s spirit and keep him there long enough for Cade to get the
answers he needed.

Lenny
certainly thought he was up for the challenge.

“Seriously?
That’s all you wanted? I thought you were going to ask something difficult.
Give me a few days and I’ll...”

Cade
was already shaking his head. “I don’t have a few days; I need you to do it
now.”

“Now?
As in,
right
now?”

Cade
just looked at him.

Lenny
glanced at the gun in Cade’s hand and then back at the steely look on Cade’s
face. He sighed in surrender. “All right. Where do you want to do this?”

The
kitchen table seemed like a decent place to Cade.

The
reality of the situation was that Abrams was the real deal. Just as Cade had
the ability to read the psychic residues left on objects by those who last
touched them or the gift of walking the mirrors’ road, Abrams was connected to
the spirit world in a way that few others were. As a result, he didn’t need
anything beyond his own innate skills to connect with the spirits of the dead.
All the pomp and circumstance that he put into the sceances he performed for
clients was just that – pomp and circumstance. It didn’t impact the success or
failure of his efforts at all.

All
Abrams needed to do the job was himself.

The
two men sat down opposite each other at the kitchen table.

“What
can you tell me?” Lenny asked.

Cade
said, “Stone died alone after being tortured by a group of necromancers who
reanimated the body of his dead little girl and let her chew through his
internal organs until he bled to death.”

Lenny
stared at him.

“Tell
me you aren’t serious.”

“Do
I look like I’m joking?”

Lenny
hesitated, started to say something, then thought better of it. Instead he put
his hands flat on the table top, palms down, leaned back in his chair, and
closed his eyes. “What was his name again?”

“Nigel
Stone.”

Names
have power. It was one of the basic rules underlying the supernatural world,
Cade knew. With the right name, one could do some incredible things. It was
with the creature’s true name that Riley had been able to bind the angel
Baraquel in the tunnels of the Eden complex and how Cade had called the scream
of angels that had torn Baraquel to pieces shortly thereafter. Names have
power and a name was all Lenny needed to locate the spirit of the dead man and
drag it, kicking and screaming, back into this world for a little chat.

“Given
the way he went out, I don’t suspect he’s going to be all that happy to be
brought back,” Lenny warned, without opening his eyes. “Don’t blame me if he’s
too pissed to answer your questions.”

And
without further ado, Lenny called to the dead.

It
happened so quickly that for a moment Cade thought he was faking it. One
moment Lenny was sitting, half slumped in his chair, hands flat on the table in
front of him in a relaxed position, and the next he was sitting up ramrod
straight in a manner that made it look like someone had shoved a piece of steel
rebar down along his spine.

Cade
leaned forward. “Nigel? Nigel Stone? Can you hear me?”

“I’m
dead Williams, not bloody well deaf.”

The
voice coming from Lenny’s mouth was tinged with a thick British accent and was
very clearly not his own. Cade felt the hair on the back of his neck stand on
end.

He’d
only spoken to Williams once, after the attack on the Broadmoor Commandery.
Their conversation had been short, and conducted over a cell phone, but even so
Cade knew he was talking to the same man. The voice, the accent, even the
speech patterns were the same.

On
the drive over Cade had thought long and hard about how to gain Stone’s
cooperation in breaking into the reliquary. The man had spent half his life
protecting the objects inside the vault. Getting him to offer up his secrets
would be against pretty much everything he had worked toward as a knight and as
commander of the Custodes Veritatis.

But
Cade thought he’d come up with just the thing. He leaned forward and asked,
“How’d you like to help me gut the bastard that did that to your little girl?”

In
the seat across the table, the body of Lenny Abrams smiled a shark’s smile.
“What do you need to know?”

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R
iley
was following up on the umpteenth sighting that had come into the command
center of a man fitting the Necromancer’s description when Tech Sergeant McGreevy
walked up and tapped him on the shoulder.

“I
think I’ve found him,” she said.

Riley
held up a finger telling her to wait and then motioned for her to follow him as
he got up and walked out of the operations center. He found an empty office a
few steps down the hall and ushered her inside it.

If
she found the subterfuge unusual, she didn’t say anything.

Once
they were alone, Riley said, “Okay, what have you got?”

“I
got one hit off the false IDs you gave me. Knight Commander Williams caught a
flight to Paris the night after the Necromancer escaped and returned two days
later, right about the same time Echo Team did. If you’d been flying
commercial, you probably would have ended up on the same flight.”

Riley
nodded; he’d figured they would be able to track that one down and was glad
that his hunch had proven correct.

“After
that I’ve got bupkiss on the IDs; he disappeared back into the woodwork as soon
as he returned to the States. Whatever he’s doing, he’s not doing it under any
of those names.”

Riley
opened his mouth to say something, but McGreevy held up her finger in a
wait-a-minute gesture.

“However,
I think I’ve got something much more interesting on the safe house issue. Like
I said before, we can’t track individual use of the safe houses, only that
they’ve been accessed by someone with the proper authorization codes. We can
tell when the gates have been opened and when the alarms are turned on and off,
for instance.”

Riley
wanted to tell her to get to the point, that he knew all this, but he
restrained himself. No sense alienating her just because he didn’t have enough
patience to go around today.

“In
the last forty-eight hours there have been three safe houses accessed in a
hundred mile radius surrounding the commandery. Of those three, I’m fairly
confident that I can match the use of the house to teams involved in routine
assignments.”

“So
they’re all legit?” Riley didn’t see how that helped them.

“Yes,
I think so. It doesn’t totally rule out Commander Williams as one of the users,
but I’m about seventy-five percent certain it isn’t him. I know that doesn’t
help us, except from an exclusionary viewpoint. But while I was looking into
those three instances, I discovered that there was a false alarm report from a
fourth safe house in the same general area. The system came back up again
almost immediately, and appeared to be operating properly after that, so a team
wasn’t dispatched to the location to check it out physically.

“All
of which means that it could...”

“...have
been Cade monkeying around with the security system and making it look like an
accident,” Riley finished for her. “Good work, McGreevy!”

“Thank
you, sir.”

“Any
activity at the location since?”

“No,
sir.”

That
didn’t necessarily mean anything, Riley knew. If Cade had found a way to bypass
the alarm system, he could be there right now, hanging out and resting up for
whatever he planned to do next and they would still be getting a negative
readout on their end. It sounded like it was worth checking out.

“Address?”

McGreevy
handed him a slip of paper with the address printed on it in neat block
letters.

“Thank
you, McGreevy. Not a word, right?”

She
smiled. “A word about what, sir?”

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I
t
took Riley just shy of two hours to assemble the necessary resources and line
up the clearances he needed from those above him in the command structure to
make the take-down. Normally the Order frowned on assaults in broad daylight,
which is why he bothered to get permission in the first place, but anything to
do with the Necromancer was a priority at the moment and no questions had been
asked.

That
was good, because he’d prefer not to have to lie about it if he could avoid
it.

When
he had the go-orders in hand he assembled his team in one of the briefing rooms.
He decided to use only Echo’s command unit, knowing it would be less conspicuous
and he’d be better able to control the flow of information concerning the
operation as a result.

He
waited for Simmons, Martinez, and Ortega to join him in the briefing room and
then shut the door. The men had been alerted that there was an op in the
works, but hadn’t received any details beyond that. It was time to bring them
up to speed.

When
the men were seated, Riley hit the projector and threw a satellite picture of
the safe house up on the wall.

“This
is one of the safe houses in Norwalk. Early yesterday afternoon a suspect we
believe can provide information on the whereabouts of the Necromancer slipped
past the building’s security and took up temporary residence inside. The
possibility is good that he is still there.

“Command
has ordered that we execute a smash-and-grab on the individual in question and
bring him in. The safe house is in a reasonably well populated area and so
we’ll be going in under cover as U.S. Marshals. Word will be going out to
local law enforcement that a team will be executing a warrant at that location,
which should both keep them off our backs and deal with any civilian reports
that come into them while our mission is under way.”

Riley
could see the three men glancing back and forth at each other and he knew
exactly what they were thinking.
How did an ally of the Necromancer know
where one of their safe houses was, never mind how to defeat the security to
get inside it without setting off an alarm?

If
he was going to have their earnest cooperation, Riley knew he was going to have
to share his suspicions with them.

He
flipped off the projector and turned to face them.

“I
know what you’re thinking, so let’s clear the air. I have reason to believe that
the Necromancer has coerced Knight Commander Williams into helping him, most
likely by holding one or more hostages to ensure Commander Williams’
cooperation.”

He
let that sink in for a moment and then went on. “I further believe that
Commander Williams’ presence inside that safe house is part of a clever plan to
allow him to be taken by our people without it appearing that he has reneged on
his agreement to assist the Necromancer in exchange for the continued safety of
the hostages.”

It
wasn’t too far from the truth. After all, he did believe that the Necromancer
was holding a hostage, Cade’s wife in fact. He just hadn’t chosen to mention
that hostage in question wasn’t actually alive, in the regular sense of the
word.

It
was a lie, yes, but it was a necessary one and he could live with himself for
telling it. Still, he made a mental note to include it in his next
confession. For the moment, that would have to do.

Ortega
raised his hand. “Rules of engagement?”

“Non-lethal
force unless and until Commander Williams chooses otherwise. I want to talk to
him not turn this into the gunfight at O.K. Corral. I don’t think I have to
remind any of you just how good a fighter the knight commander is, do I?”

All
three of them shook their heads; they’d served under Cade, just as Riley had,
and were well aware of their former commander’s martial prowess.

“Questions?”