Judgment Day (Templar Chronicles Book 5) (25 page)

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.

For several heart-stilling moments Cade could see nothing but the curtains from inside Mason’s room blowing in the breeze.

Come one! Come on!
he urged silently.

A shadow moved behind the curtains and then the Adversary was back. It stood in the window for a moment, its latest victim hanging limp in her arms, and then it bunched the muscles in her legs and cast itself out in the night.

At that exact moment, Cade fired.

The gunsmiths who had designed the baffling system for the weapon had done an exceptional job; Cade heard nothing more than a short huff as the tracking implant left the barrel and sped toward its target. Cade’s hand was already cycling the bolt and loading another round before his conscious mind caught up with him and he managed to get off one more shot before the angle and the Adversary’s movement made it impossible to manage a third.

He just prayed two would be enough.

He waited until the shadow had passed out of sight before throwing off the camouflage net and scrambling to his feet. He slung the rifle over one shoulder and headed down the trail, trusting his feet to carry him over the uneven terrain while reaching up and keying the mike with a free hand.

“Tell me we’ve got a signal” he said between breaths.

For a moment there was nothing but silence, but then Martinez let out a whoop.

“Two, I repeat, two solid signals, moving west at thirty miles per hour. Damn this sucker can fly!”

Cade grinned; the hard part was done. As long as they stayed in range, they could track this thing to the ends of the earth.

Riley’s voice broke in over the channel. “Meet at the pickup zone in five,” he said and then the line went dead.

They weren’t on a main frequency, but silence was still the better policy. The FBI and other agencies were no doubt already involved in the search for the missing servicemen and the Templars didn’t want to take a chance of being overhead by some local yokel who could mention their conversation to the authorities.

They had what they needed; talk was superfluous at this point anyway.

Cade hustled down the hillside and reached the bottom just as Riley pulled up in the van. Cade yanked open the door, threw himself into the seat, and then pounded the dash with one hand.

“Go, go!” he yelled, but Riley needed no such urging, having already stomped on the gas and gotten them headed toward the road.

“Which way?” Cade asked, looking into the back where Martinez was manning the tracking console. Cade could see the bright red dot signifying their target clearly on the screen.

“East,” Jimmy told him. “Take Washington to the Interstate and then head east.”

The tracking device they were using had a range of over 150 miles, so they normally wouldn’t have been worried about losing their target this early in the game, but the Adversary’s ability to travel literally as the crow flies, albeit much faster, had them a bit on edge. As he watched the screen Cade could hear Riley on the telephone, already recalling the beta team from their position in Baltimore. They had a Blackhawk at their disposal, but it was going to take them a little while to get in the air and head north. Until the chopper arrived on the scene, it was up to Ortega and the others in the van to keep the Adversary in range.

As it turned out, they needn’t have worried. The Adversary climbed to a height of a couple of hundred feet – high enough to be invisible from the ground in the darkness but not so high as to worry about dealing with flight paths of the various aircraft moving overhead – and then slew northeast at a steady pace. Riley followed Interstate 287 south east out of White Plains and into Scarsdale and then picked up the Merritt Parkway where it ran northeast into Connecticut.

The Adversary could have taken its latest victim anywhere, Cade knew, and several of the available options would have made it impossible for them to follow it. South over Long Island Sound and out into the Atlantic, for instance. Or north, all the way to the border and across into Canada. But lucky for them it did no such thing.

No, the Adversary made it easy, flying straight and true on a north by northeast course that paralleled Rt. 15 into the heart of Connecticut until it reached the town of Meriden where it finally stopped.

Riley pulled over to the side of the road while Martinez tried to get a fix on where the Adversary had gone to ground. The signal was still coming in strong and it only took a few minutes to convert the GPS coordinates into a physical location.

Martinez used a handy laptop and Google Earth to get a real-time view of the location, which turned out to be a valley at the base of South Mountain near Hubbard Park, and they could see from the aerial view that a large, sprawling building shaped like a capital letter I with an extra wing jutting off to the center left stood in that precise spot.

“What is that place?” he asked, staring at it on the laptop screen.

Riley and Williams answered at the same time.

“Undercliff Sanatorium.”

Originally opened in 1910 under the name Meriden Sanatorium, the facility had expanded slowly over the years and served a variety of purposes, from a mental hospital, to a center for children with tuberculosis, to a division of the state mental health program. The last patient had been discharged from the facility in the late 1970s and it had lain fallow ever since.

Undercliff had its fair share of ghosts stories, Cade knew. Children laughing when there was no one in the room. The sound of running footsteps and the shouts of orderlies from behind closed and locked doors. The sensation of being watched when you walked down the empty corridors. Given the agony the average tuberculosis patient had endured back at the beginning of the 20th century, Cade had no doubt that the place truly was haunted.

But it still seemed an odd location for the Adversary to hide in.

“It’s the medical equipment,” Riley said under his breath, startling Cade out of his reverie.

“Huh?”

“The medical equipment. That’s why the Adversary picked this place. Finding room to store a half-dozen coma patients is one thing, but having the equipment to keep them alive in the process means he either needed access to some that was already in place or he had to knock over a medical supply company. The former was probably the easiest. With a couple of pet doctors on hand to monitor the patients, it wouldn’t have been too hard to find the gear he needed inside of an abandoned hospital, right?”

Cade had to admit that it made sense.

It also made things much easier for what he needed to do next.

“How far away are Davis and the rest of the team?”

Riley checked his watch. “It’s three hundred miles from here to Baltimore and they’ve been in the air just over an hour...I’d say we’ve got another forty minutes before they get close enough to make a difference.”

Cade nodded. “Good enough. Gives us time to scope the place out, anyway.”

“Roger that.”

It took them fifteen minutes of driving to reach South Mountain and then another ten to find a forest road leading into the woods that was wide enough to accept the van. Satisfied that they couldn’t be seen from the road – not that there was much traffic on it anyway – the three men got out and began making their way through the trees to get a look at what they were up against.

When they reached the edge of the hospital property they discovered that it was surrounded by eight-foot high chain link fencing with barbed wire strung along the top. The fencing was old, however, clearly put up decades ago to keep the curious public out when the hospital had first shut down, and it didn’t take long to find a section that had fallen into so much disrepair that a gap had formed that was large enough to admit them.

They didn’t pass through it, however, just marked it and continued their inspection of the perimeter. Twice they saw roving pairs of guards, but both times they were given plenty of advance warning thanks to the noise the guards were making between them and Cade and his two companions were able to slip into the undergrowth and wait for the patrol to pass without being seen.

By the time they had circumvented the entire property, it was clear that something out of the ordinary was going inside. They saw additional guards at both the main gate and at the front entrance to the facility – odd for a supposedly abandoned facility - as well as slivers of light seeping out past the edges of what were clearly covered windows on the third floor of the east wing.

Back at the van they double-checked that the transponder signal hadn’t moved – it hadn’t - confirming what Cade suspected all along; the Adversary intended to use Undercliff as a staging area for the ritual to come. The hospital had the equipment necessary to maintain the patients he had kidnapped as vessels for the other fallen angels in his scream and he’d clearly brought in some of his human acolytes to handle guard duty and other chores leading up to that point.

While Riley checked in with Davis, Cade stood by the side of the van, staring off in the direction of the sanatorium. His hand dropped unconsciously to the hilt of the dagger at his waist, running his fingers over the rough steel, as he thought about the confrontation to come.

Uriel had said that the power of the Tear would activate when it came in contact with the Adversary’s blood. He had, no doubt, believed that Cade would be striking with deadly force in order to draw that blood; the Adversary certainly wasn’t going to just stand around and let that happen. It was a logical assumption to make. Gabrielle’s body would be the recipient of that blow, hence Uriel’s remark that it would be deadly to her as well.

But Cade wasn’t convinced it had to happen that way. In fact, he was all but positive that it didn’t. He was going to use the Tear, just as Uriel instructed, but he would make sure the blow wasn’t the least bit dangerous to Gabrielle.

He would rescue his wife, just as he had intended all along.

They would beat this thing, once and for all.

Hang in there Gabrielle,
he thought.
Just a little while longer.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Davis and the three men with him arrived ten minutes later and the entire seven man team suited up for what was to come. All of them pulled on standard Templar tactical gear that included dark ceramic body armor worn under black jumpsuits of flame retardant material without markings or insignia, lightweight Kevlar tactical helmets with built–in communications gear along with audio and video recording devices, and military style combat boots. For this mission a set of I2 goggles had also been supplied; the image intensifier headgear – what most people called night vision goggles – would allow them to see in all but total darkness. Each man was armed with a Heckler & Koch MP5 SD submachine gun, a HK Mark 23 .45 caliber handgun and the holy sword they’d been given at their investiture into the Templar ranks. Cade eschewed the MP5, as was his habit, taking extra magazines for the Mark 23 instead and slipping them into the loops on his belt next to the angel’s blade.

Last, but certainly not least, he picked up a long case roughly the width of a standard sword case but twice as long. He’d used the mirror in Riley’s quarters to slip into the Reliquary to get it, figuring what it contained would come in handy when they finally faced the Adversary. Now he stared at it, wondering if it was a smart move or not.