Judgment Day (Templar Chronicles Book 5)

by Nassise, Joseph

  When he’d emerged from the Beyond, he’d found himself on the floor of the storeroom that housed the mirror he’d used as his focus, just as he’d expected. Tall metal shelves holding a wide variety of objects filled much of the room, but as curious as he was about what some of them, he forced himself to turn away and head to the door. His time here was limited and he just couldn’t afford to waste any of it.

  The door to the storeroom was locked from the outside, but Cade had been expecting that. He put his ear against the wood and listened for a moment, trying to figure out if anyone was in the hallway beyond or not. Breaking out of a locked room right in front of the custodians probably wouldn’t be a good idea.

  Thankfully, he didn’t hear anything.

  Drawing his sword, he put the point between the door and the jamb right about at the spot where the lock would be and then threw his weight against it. The blade slid forward, popping the lock.

  Exiting the room, Cade moved down a short hallway, passing several similarly locked storerooms in the process, until he came to the main viewing area.

  This section of the archives looked like the library in a private gentlemen’s club from another era; bookshelves lined the walls while leather chairs and reading tables occupied the center of the room. An annex jutted off from the main room and through its door Cade could see free-standing shelves filled with ancient scrolls. The overhead lights were out, but the smaller lights inset into the baseboards around the room provided enough light for Cade to see by. He guessed there had to be a couple thousand books on the shelves in front of him alone.

  He’d been quite pleased to find the room empty.

  Now he stood before the wall of books, trying to figure out the best way of approaching what he’d come here to do. Since the sections weren’t labeled, there was no way to tell what was in a particular volume without taking it down and examining it. Given all the different languages that the books were written in, this wouldn’t be a quick or easy task. Never mind that this kind of approach didn’t take into account that many volumes covered a wide variety of topics that might not be easily be discernible with a quick glance.

  Without the help of one of the custodians – men whose job it was to know exactly what was in each volume and where particular volumes might be stored – it was going to take him all night to find what he wanted, Cade thought.

  Hell, it might take all week.

  It didn’t matter. The information he needed was here somewhere; he knew it. It was just a matter of finding it and there was only one way of doing that.

  He slipped the duffle bag off his back and leaned his sword against the wall, within easy reach if he needed it. He began

  scanning the titles on the shelves in front of him, taking down the books that he thought might hold information on the Adversary or fallen angels in general and stacking them up on a nearby table as he worked. He’d been at it for nearly twenty minutes, and had accumulated a small pile of books to review more closely when a voice spoke out of the shadows behind him.

  “Once again, you surprise me with your cleverness.”

  Cade grabbed his sword and spun around.

  The man standing on the other side of the room was in his mid-seventies, though he looked two decades younger, thanks to the extreme state of physical fitness at which he kept himself. His white hair was cropped close to his skull in a military-style crew cut and his blue eyes shone with amusement as they took in the sight of Cade standing there where he wasn’t supposed to be.

  Cade’s grip tightened on the hilt of his weapon but he didn’t draw it. “I surprise you? Why’s that?” he asked.

  “Preceptor Johannson has essentially put a price on your head, young man, and yet here you are, in the heart of your enemy’s stronghold. I must say it’s about the last place I would think to look for you, hence, very clever.”

  Cade ignored the backhanded compliment and focused instead on the first part of the Seneschal’s statement.

  “Is that what we are now, sir? Enemies?”

  To his surprise, Ferguson laughed.

  “Good heavens, son. Of course not. We’ve known each other too long, been through too much, for us to ever be enemies. Don’t you know that?”

  Cade had hoped as much, but he was done assuming those in command would do what was right. So far, his experience had been exactly the opposite.

  For years now, Cade had reported directly to Ferguson in his role as head of all the Templar special-action combat teams. He liked the man for his blunt honesty; if Ferguson had something to say to you, he said it, man to man, right to your face so that you always knew where you stood. It had been Ferguson who had backed Cade’s initiation into the Order when others had tried to claim he was tainted by what the Adversary had done to him so many years before, and Ferguson again who had tried to broker a deal to keep Cade on active duty when the Preceptors had banded together in the wake of the war with the Chiang Shih and demanded his resignation. Aside from Riley, the Seneschal was probably Cade’s staunchest ally within the Order.

  Still, Cade found himself oddly uneasy at the other’s presence. Had the events of the last few weeks changed so much that he couldn’t trust even his closest allies?

  “And yet you called this my “enemy’s stronghold,” which suggests that while you may not be one of them, I do, indeed, have enemies here.”

  Ferguson’s gaze remained steady as he said, “Of course you do. You’ve known that since the day you came to us. I’m not telling you anything new. Or did you think that your nickname was one of affection?”

  Cade couldn’t help but smile at that. The old man had a point. The Heretic wasn’t an appellation to be proud of when you belonged to a group of religious warriors. Relaxing at last, Cade put his sword down on the table in front of him and watched as the other man approached.

  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 a
ble 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 f
ound 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.