The Templar Chronicles (53 page)

Clearwater stared at him. “You don’t see it?”

Cade was baffled. Don’t see what? But then it occurred to him that if he were looking for mystical effects he’d probably be much better off using something other than his ordinary eye sight to do it. Turning back to face the bed, he triggered his Sight.

A shimmering wall of emerald green energy completely encased the bed. It was so thick that Cade was unable to see through it. Neither the bed or Gabrielle’s body were visible and he had no doubt that the ward would protect her from everything all the way up to an attack by one of the Fallen. Maybe even one of those, too.

“Satisfied?” Clearwater asked.

Cade deactivated his Sight and turned back in her direction. “Very. Now how do I bring it down if I need to?”

They spent the next ten minutes covering the proper ritualistic phrases that Cade could use to disband the warding and then he helped her gather her things and carry them back down to her car.

“Thanks, Denise. I owe you.”

She nodded. “And don’t think I won’t collect on it.”

They said their goodbyes and Cade watched her drive off into the night. When he could no longer see her taillights, he wandered back inside, changed into dry clothes and camped out in the room next to the bed on which his wife’s not-quite-dead body lay, wondering just what the hell he was going to do next.

CHAPTER SIX

The next morning found Cade at the commandery trapped in a series of planning meetings with the other senior force commanders. He was by nature a man of few words, one who preferred to be doing things rather than sitting around talking about them, but a highly specialized organization like the Templars didn’t run itself on action alone and so several times a week, when he wasn’t out on a mission, he was required to sit through organizational briefings like this one. An officer from Planning and Logistics was currently at the front of the room, outlining the new method for requisitioning additional office supplies that would be put in place for the coming quarter and Cade quickly tuned him out before the man’s nasal voice could set his nerves further on edge than they already were. Instead, his thoughts turned inward, pondering recent events, trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together in a way that made some kind of sense.

It didn’t help that in the last few weeks his entire world had been turned on its ear.

For seven long years he’d believed that his beloved wife, Gabrielle, had escaped the pain and suffering of this world and had moved on to another, better place. He’d taken comfort in that belief, had found safety and solace in the fact that something good, something pure, had emerged from that horrific July afternoon when the supernatural entity that he called the Adversary had invaded their home and stolen her life away, that her death had not been the last and final act in the beautiful performance that had been her life.

Then had come that night seven months ago, when she’d first appeared to him in the darkness of an aircraft cabin high above the eastern seaboard, and his hard won equilibrium had been shattered like so much stained glass. She’d returned to him several times since, both here and in the Beyond, and he’d gradually begun to understand that she wasn’t at rest, wasn’t at rest at all, that she was trapped in some sort of limbo existence, neither here nor there, unable to return to the living and incapable of moving into the gentle peace of the dead.

It was a horrifying realization.

To think that she had been trapped in that hellish existence, alone, for all of those years, made him want to rail at the heavens and hang his head in shame. He’d failed her earlier, when he was unable to prevent the Adversary from taking her away from him, and he’d apparently failed her again, leaving her to languish in that strange half-life on the other side of the Veil.

But last night’s events had been the final blow to whatever equilibrium he had managed to maintain over the years in the wake of his wife’s death. The discovery of Gabrielle’s body, perfectly preserved after seven years in the grave, had struck Cade with all the delicate finesse of a sledgehammer. It made it unmistakably clear that Gabrielle was an important part of whatever plan the Adversary had set in motion, just as Cade himself was.

The question was why? What had the two of them done to deserve being targeted in such a fashion? What made them special? Out of all the billions of people in the world, why had the Adversary chosen them?

Cade’s musings were interrupted by a commotion at the door. He glanced up, startled back into the present, to find Riley standing with his head just inside the entrance, gesturing to him. Excusing himself, Cade joined his senior non-com outside the door.

“Tell me you’ve come to rescue me,” Cade said with a relieved smile on his face.

But Riley could only wearily shake his head. “We’ve got a problem.”

*** ***

The package sat opposite him, just on the other side of the gate, right in the center of the drive where it couldn’t be missed. Looking down at it, Cade could see the big black letters covering the white address label, the handwriting little better than a scrawl but still legible nonetheless.

Cade Williams.

He glanced over at Riley, who said, “The guard on duty is named Samuels. Claims he was at his post in the guard house the entire time. Swears no one could have come down that road without him knowing about it, never mind leave a package right under his nose.”

“Yet there it is,” Cade said pointedly, looking down at the parcel. It wasn’t much bigger than a hardcover book, maybe eight by twelve or so, wrapped in a plain brown paper wrapper like hundreds of other parcels a person sees over the years.

But this one was addressed to him personally.

And it had been delivered to a place that was as far as the general public was concerned nothing more than a private residence. One that was in someone else’s name to boot.

Something was very wrong here.

“Does he think it just dropped out of the open sky?” Cade asked beneath his breath.

There was no answer from Riley, who either hadn’t heard him or simply chose to pretend that he hadn’t. Either way, Cade figured that it was probably best.

The explosives team showed up then and so he moved back a respectful distance, Riley at his side, and the two of them watched the specialists get to work.

The gates were carefully opened, giving the team access to the package, but without disturbing it in any way. A pair of dogs was then brought up, one to check for explosive residue, the other for drugs. Neither of them alerted, so the team leader ordered a pair of bomb techs to approach the package and give it a closer look.

The men were dressed in standard bomb suits that were made from an inner layer of ballistic cloth and an outer layer of fire retardant fabric and were composed of a sleeved coat and trousers, a chest plate and groin protector, and a helmet with face shield. Protective spats were also worn over the feet. The suits made them bulky and slow, but for what they were doing that was just fine. Bomb technicians who were in a hurry usually didn’t live very long.

They laid a large piece of ballistic cloth, a bomb blanket, out on the ground next to the package. Checking first for an anti-lift device and not finding one, the tech used a pair of large metal tongs to gently lift the package and place it in the center of the blanket. Moving carefully, the two men then wrapped the package with the rest of the blanket. The material was designed to help contain the blast if something went wrong. That in turn went inside a heavily shielded transport crate and to Cade it seemed like everyone present breathed a sigh of relief as the door of the crate was closed.

He knew the team would take the package inside where they would first x-ray it from every possible angle before running it through a barrage of additional tests including a full chemical and biological weapons scan and then, and only then, would they attempt to open it to see what it contained.

As they watched the team move off, the crate carried carefully between them, Riley finally gave voice to what they both were thinking. “How did they know where to find you?”

Cade couldn’t answer and that made him nervous, far more so than he cared to admit.

CHAPTER SEVEN

When the news came back that the explosive and forensic teams were finished with the package, Cade assembled Echo Team’s command unit in the main hall’s conference room to go over what they’d found. Along with Cade and Riley, the team consisted of two other sergeants, Nick Olsen and Sean Duncan. Olsen, a veteran who’d been with Echo for fifteen years, almost as long as Riley had, was slim and short, with curling reddish-brown hair and the type of grin that had you constantly looking over your shoulder, waiting for the practical joke. Duncan was the newest member of Echo, having joined several months earlier, just prior to the showdown with the Necromancer and the Council of Nine. He’d been in charge of the Preceptor’s protective detail before having been transferred to the unit at Cade’s direct request. He was younger than the other three men and his blonde hair and good looks probably could have been an asset to him in some other line of work. He was also prone to speaking his mind, regardless of the circumstances, which had brought him in conflict a few times with the way Cade ran the show, but so far he’d been a valuable asset and Cade was pleased with his impulsive decision to add Duncan to the unit.

By now the other two men had heard about the mysterious package Cade had received and so the knight commander wasted no time with preliminaries, instead moving directly into a discussion of what the investigative teams had found. Which, in truth, wasn’t that much. The package had been free of dangerous substances; no explosives, no biological or chemical agents, no mystical wards or traps. It had been plain brown paper wrapped around a simple cigar box, the kind you can buy in any office supply store, both so common that tracking down their specific origins just wasn’t worth the effort. The paper had not held any fingerprints, nor was there any trace evidence such as hair or fiber samples recovered from it. Since it had apparently been delivered by hand, there were no stamps or postmarks that could be used to try and pinpoint where it had come from either. Even the handwriting spelling out Cade’s name on the front of the wrapper turned out not to be handwriting at all, but a computer based font that only looked like handwritten script. It was as clean a dead end as Cade had ever seen in all his years in law enforcement.

Which made the two items the box contained all the more interesting.

The first was a hand-written note on plain white paper, addressed to Cade.

Dear Captain Williams,

Please come quickly. Information has come into my hands that I dare not entrust to anyone else. An old foe has returned and already I fear for my safety and the safety of those around me. Time is of the essence. I will explain further when you arrive.

In Christ,

Father Thomas Martin, S.J.

The second item was a standard 4×6 snapshot of a crowd gathered in front of a church. The lab had confirmed that ordinary Kodak film had been used in processing the picture, the kind available in hundreds of thousands of drug and grocery stores across the country. The shot appeared to have been taken from a moving vehicle, for many of the faces of those gathered were slightly blurred. There was writing on the back of the photo, in the same script as the letter.

Perhaps this will help you see the urgency of my request.

The evidence team had cleared the items for handling so Cade passed them around, letting each member take a good, long look. None of them knew what to make of the photo. It seemed completely ordinary. There were ten, maybe twelve people walking down the street with the church just barely visible in the background. Most of them were looking the other way, though a few had been caught in profile. Due to the quality of the picture, none of them were identifiable, however.

Duncan asked the obvious question. “Who’s Father Martin? And why does he refer to you as Captain Williams?”

“Because the last time I saw him, I was a Captain,” Cade said absently, still staring at the photo and trying to discern the meaning of Martin’s cryptic comment.

Riley took pity on Duncan and tried to bring him up to speed when he saw that Cade was too preoccupied to do so. “We met Father Martin several years ago, shortly after Cade had taken command of Echo. As Cade said, he was just a lowly Captain back then,” he said, earning him an amused glance from the knight commander. “Martin and several other priests in the Boston archdiocese nearby were having trouble with a new cult that had sprung up among the street gangs in the area. They contacted the Order and, since the cult had shown no hesitation to use violence against the Church, a combat squad was sent in to deal with it.”

Duncan shrugged. “Sounds fairly routine.”

“Yeah, you’d think so. Unfortunately, we were way off base.”

“What happened?”

“The squad disappeared without a trace three weeks after arriving in the area. Eight highly trained men. Every single one of them a veteran combat soldier, trained specifically for situations like this. So of course Echo gets the call. Our orders were to find out what happened to the squad and to deal with the cult that had gotten the Order involved in the first place.”

Olsen cut in. “Recognizing that the Order’s initial show of force had done little good, Cade decided to take a different approach. He sent one of our men, a lieutenant, into the neighborhood undercover with orders to set up a safe house and then to make contact with the local clergy. For the first few days, everything went without a hitch. Bishop, Jonathan Bishop, that was the lieutenant’s name, got us a secure location, rendezvoused with the locals, and let us know that it was okay to bring in the rest of the team. But by the time we had arrived, Bishop had vanished, just like the men from First Squad.”

Olsen stared off into space as he continued and from the look on his face Duncan knew he was reliving it in his mind’s eye. “We got a lead that both Bishop and the leaders of the cult could be found in an abandoned warehouse over in Roxbury. Timing was critical. First Squad was guarding the Bishop’s residence in Cambridge and Second Squad was en-route. We knew we couldn’t wait, so Cade made the decision to hit the warehouse with only the command squad, hoping things wouldn’t get too hairy before the reinforcements arrived.”