Judgment Day (Templar Chronicles Book 5) (13 page)

Ferguson wasn’t done, however.

“It isn’t what you know that is the problem, Cade. It’s what you don’t that will get you into trouble.”

The former Echo Team stiffened. It seemed the other shoe he’d been waiting on was about to drop...

“Things have been...kept from you, is the best way of putting it, I guess.”

“What things?” Cade said sharply, and then, realizing how he sounded, told himself to calm down. He’d always suspected the Order wasn’t telling him everything there was to know about the Adversary and there was no sense in biting the head off the messenger when someone was finally willing to do so.

“Information.”

“About the Adversary?”

Ferguson nodded. “Yes.

Cade thought about that for a moment. “Why are you telling me now?” he asked finally.

For the first time since entering the room the Seneschal seemed hesitant. “In my view events have reached a critical juncture. Delaying any longer could result in consequences that would be too terrible to fathom.”

Cade didn’t miss Ferguson’s choice of wording. “In
your
view? That would suggest there are others who disagree.”

The Seneschal shrugged. “A question of methods more than anything else, really.”

There was more to it than that, Cade guessed, but the clock was ticking and he didn’t want to be here any longer than necessary. If the Seneschal had the information he needed, regardless of how he came by it or what others thought of it, he’d be a fool not to use it.

“So what do you have to tell me?” Cade asked.

Ferguson shook his head. “I can’t tell you anything. I am bound by an oath not to discuss certain information with anyone outside the senior council.”

But even as he spoke he was taking the journal out from under his arm and placing it atop the stack of books that Cade had piled on the table. Ferguson tapped the cover once, gently, with two fingers, as if to be certain that Cade understood what he wanted him to do, and then took his hand away. Without pause he continued, saying, “I’m sure a clever man like yourself will be able to find the information you need in a library of this size.”

Cade stared at that thin little journal for a moment and then looked up at Ferguson and nodded, not trusting himself to speak. The answers he had been looking for since the night the serial killer known as the Dorchester Demon invaded his home were within reach at last and it felt more than a bit surreal. And if that information gave him a way to save Gabrielle...

A new line of thought occurred to him.

“Would the information kept here have saved my wife?” he asked.

The Seneschal’s response was swift, as if he’d been waiting for that very question.

“Originally, no. The Order had lost track of the Adversary for many years before it surfaced inside that wretched little killer in Boston.”

“And now?”

“If you’d been aware of certain information prior to your confrontation on the Isle of Sorrows you might have chosen to do things differently. Then again, you might not have. The future is never crystal clear.”

There were a lot of things Cade could have said to that, but he didn’t say any of them, choosing instead to remain silent. That was answer enough. There would be time for a reckoning later if events required it. For now, though, he just wanted to see what that book contained.

The Seneschal no doubt recognized his eagerness, for he nodded and turned away. He hadn’t taken more than a couple of steps, though, before stopping and looking back.

“One more thing,” he said.

Cade looked up, his hand on the journal.

“Your, shall we say, unorthodox entrance allowed you to slip past the wards surrounding the archives, but you won’t be able to go out again the same way,” the Seneschal said. “When you leave the archives, take a left at the first hallway junction you come to. There is a room about halfway down the hall that has a large mirror in it. You might want to start there.”

“I suspect it would be much easier if you just led me to the front door,” Cade replied, only half-joking.

But Ferguson shook his head. “You know I can’t do that. Until this whole mess with the Adversary is cleaned up, I need to maintain my distance for the good of the Order.”

Cade wasn’t surprised. “We may not be enemies but then again we’re not exactly friends either, is that it?”

An expression crossed the Seneschal’s face, there and gone again before Cade could fully recognize it, but if he’d had to guess he would have said it was...grief.

The Seneschal’s next words seem to confirm it.

“Trust me, son, no friend of yours would willing send you where I am. Godspeed.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Cade waited until the Seneschal left the room before snatching the journal up and opening it; the man’s cryptic last words quickly forgotten as he flipped through the pages of the book.

The book had been compiled over time and was quite old, if the date on the first page – 1579 – was correct and Cade had no reason to believe otherwise. It had also been written by several different individuals, if the varying handwriting styles were any indication. The words
The Forsaken One
kept jumping out of the text at him and Cade wondered if that was some kind of oblique reference to the Adversary.

Only one way to find out,
he thought. Flipping back to the first page, he began reading.

What he found within those pages was so fascinating that within moments he was lost in the text.

The journal was a compendium of all the information gathered throughout the years on a creature-being-person (he wasn’t quite sure which and the text never said) known as The Forsaken One. This being, for lack of a better descriptor, was first encountered by the Order in Venice in 1579 by Sir Malcom Trent, who noted that while he was observing a battle between “a heavenly angel and a spawn of the pit” he happened to glimpse a third individual, “covered with writhing markings that appeared like serpents of venom,” observing the battle from the other side of the conflict. When he attempted to approach, the individual swiftly departed the scene.

The same creature showed itself to members of the Order at various times throughout the course of the next 400 years, usually during times of war of global turmoil. The journal made it clear that the being, nicknamed the Forsaken One, never become directly involved in any of the events, regardless of how terrible they might be, but merely watched them unfold instead. It was theorized that its mission was to observe, but for who or what reason no one knew.

Several attempts had been made to take the watcher captive, the most recent during a mission in Cambodia near the end of 1975. All had failed. Most of the time the watcher simply evaded capture, but the last attempt had ended with all six Beta Team operatives killed, their heads removed and mailed back to Rosslyn Castle with a message in Latin that suggested that in the future, the Knights mind their own business and keep to themselves.

The incident must have been hushed up immediately, for Cade had never heard of it during his time as Echo Team commander and he thought he knew the history of the Templar strike teams going back nearly a century or more.

All in all, the story made for some fascinating reading. There was just one problem. Cade didn’t have any idea what the hell it had to do with the Adversary.

Why had Ferguson left it for him?

One thing he’d learned about the Seneschal over the years was that he didn’t do anything without good reason. Ferguson knew that Cade was searching for a way to rescue his wife and to eliminate the Adversary. He’d all but said as much earlier. Ferguson wouldn’t have given him the journal if it didn’t have some bearing on the situation.

So what was he missing?

There wasn’t much in the volume after the Cambodia mission. The Grand Master at the time, a man named Brunelli, had been more lenient toward non-threatening supernatural species than either his successor or the current head of the Order. Brunelli had seen no point in further endangering his men, not with how little they knew about the creature or its abilities. He’d ordered that henceforth the Forsaken One would be left to its own devices and the Templars would have nothing further to do with it. All information about the creature had been stripped from the Order’s computers, with just the handwritten record of their previous interactions kept in the Archives for posterity’s sake.

The same record that Cade was looking at now.

So what? What did it matter? This thing certainly wasn’t the Adversary in disguise. Why did the Ferguson want him to read it?

Frustrated with his lack of understanding, Cade was seriously considering tracking down the Seneschal and asking him straight-up what this was all about when he turned to the very last page in the journal. It was blank except for a series of fourteen numbers written in pencil.

453819123311.

Cade recognized the handwriting as belonging to the Seneschal.

What the hell?

He stared at the string of numbers, his thoughts humming.

Clearly this was what Ferguson had wanted him to find. But what did they mean? Right now all it looked like was a random string of numbers.

Perhaps it’s a code,
Cade thought.

Every knight was trained in the use of substitution codes and other, basic cryptograms in case they had to send messages in the open where they might be intercepted by others. Of course that would mean that any other Templar who found the message would be able to decode it as well. Maybe it would only make sense to Cade once it was decoded.

He grabbed a pencil from his go-bag and attacked the code. He tried using each number as a substitution for a letter of the alphabet, based on its position, with A being one and Z being 26. That got him nowhere; the resulting message was just a pile of gibberish. He tried reversing the substitution, making A twenty-six and Z one, but didn’t come up with anything useful that way either.

When that didn’t work, he tried breaking the numbers into sets of three, with the first number representing the page of the journal in which he’d found the code, the second number the sentence counting down from the top, and the third number standing in for the word in that sentence counting from the left.

Thankfully the row of numbers was short and it only took him a few moments to flip back and forth to complete the task.

Unfortunately, that only gave him more nonsense.

He tried pairing the numbers differently. Working backwards instead of forwards. Taking the first, third, and fifth number as a set, then the second, fourth, and sixth number and so on. Dividing them in half, taking the second half and moving it in front of the first, and then trying again from the start.

He tried every method of reworking the code that he could think of and all he got for his efforts was a growing headache.

Cade was on the verge of throwing the journal across the room in frustration when the Seneschal’s parting comment floated across the surface of his mind.

“No friend of yours would willingly send you were I am.”

He went still, thoughts whirling.

Looked down at the numbers.

453819123311.

Would willingly send you where…

“You are the world’s biggest idiot,” he said aloud into the empty room.

Taking his pencil, he put a comma after the seventh number in the sequence, effectively splitting them into two sets of seven numbers each. Then he put a period after the second number in each set, leaving him with two decimal numbers to the fourth place.

45.3819 and 12.3311

It wasn’t a substitution code at all.

It was a set of GPS coordinates.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

A hand shook his shoulder and a voice said, “Sir? Wake up, sir.”

Johannson tried to ignore it, tucking his head down and rolling away from the noise.

“Sir? Sir!”

Groggily, Johannson said, “What?”

The hand wouldn’t stop shaking him. “You need to get up, sir. Commander Williams is here in Rosslyn, sir.”

That was probably the last thing Johannson expected to hear and the resulting shot of adrenaline pushed him a good way toward full wakefulness.

“What? Here? Williams is here?” he asked, as he threw off the blankets and sat up. He put his feet on the floor and let the cold stone banish the last of the fog from his thoughts as he focused his attention on the younger man who’d shaken him awake.

The smell of freshly brewed coffee reached his nostrils and he turned to find a cup waiting for him on the nightstand. He picked it up gratefully and took a sip.

“Talk to me,” he ordered.

“One of the custodians spotted Commander Williams doing research in the Archives about twenty minutes ago. Williams never looked up or acknowledged his presence in any way, so the custodian doesn’t believe he was seen.”

Johannson gulped down the coffee, letting the hot beverage do its trick. When he had finished the cup he put it aside and stood up, reaching for his nearby clothes.

“Is Williams still in the Archives?” he asked while dressing.

His aide nodded. “I believe so. No one has come in or out since the custodian, though I don’t know how Williams got inside in the first place.”

This was his chance,
Johannson thought. With the newly executed order from the Grand Master, he could seize Williams with total impunity. No one would dare to raise an outcry, not even that idiot Riley. Once he had Williams in his control, he could bring in the Inquisition to get the answers they needed out of him.

It was time to play hardball.

He turned to his aide. “Get a squad of knights up here immediately, but don’t tell them what they’re wanted for; I’ll do that myself. Be sure they’re armed with non-lethal containment weapons as well as their usual firearms. Once you’ve done that, I want you to go down to the lower level and prep one of the solitary confinement cells for us to hold him in. Understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. Now go!”

As his aide hurried off, Johannson stepped out of his room into the hall. A member of his protection detail was waiting there for him, as usual. This morning it was a wiry fellow by the name of Dent, who was always itching for a good fight. Johannson found that to be a particularly good omen, for there was no doubt in his mind that Williams was going to put up a struggle when they came for him. They would take him in the end – the Preceptor knew that – but he was pleased to know that he had with him someone who would be more than willing to wade into the fray if it came to that.