Riley cringed at the sound; no human being should ever be reduced to such fear and pain.
“It’s Commander Williams, Dr. Bhanjee. Take it easy, we’re here to help you. We’re going to try and get you down.”
It took a few moments and more than one repetition by Cade, but finally what he was saying seemed to get through to the wounded man. The doctor visibly relaxed when he understood it was not his captor coming back to torture him further, his hands stopping their panicked fluttering and his head slumped forward on his chest in exhaustion.
Cade reached out and Riley watched as he gently lifted the man’s head.
What had been done to him was hideous. Bruises covered the doctor from head to toe and there were more than a handful of open, bleeding wounds across his flesh as if he’d been cut by a knife.
Dr. Bhanjee’s eyes had been torn out, the sockets now raw bloody wounds in the canvas of the man’s face. His lips had been stitched together with what looked like electrical wire and a word had been scrawled across his forehead in blood.
Riley might not read Hebrew, but he knew his Biblical Greek well enough.
Paradidomi.
Betrayer.
Someone was very unhappy with this man.
His teammates stepped up and grasped the doctor’s arms and body, supporting him under the armpits, doing what they could to take the pressure off his lungs and give him a chance to breathe easier. Cade looked over at Riley, silently asking if he was ready for what was to come.
Riley nodded.
They had no choice; it had to be done.
Riley moved forward and grasped Dr. Bhanjee’s right forearm, locking it firmly in place against the door, preventing it from moving. He nodded again to Cade that he was ready.
Using a set of pliers from Flynn’s tech kit, Cade placed one foot against the door beneath the doctor’s arm, grasped the protruding end of the spike with the teeth of the pliers, and hauled backward with all his might.
Bhanjee screamed in agony, tearing his sewn lips apart...
Riley was not surprised to see a tear on Duncan’s face before he turned away; he felt like crying himself. The spike had barely moved. The pain had to be excruciating and at this rate it was going to take awhile before the spike came free. Never mind the other two that would have to follow the first.
Cade went back to work.
It took them more than twenty minutes just to work the first spike free. Dr. Bhanjee lapsed into unconsciousness after a few minutes, unable to bear the horrible agony, and Riley found himself offering a silent prayer of thanks that he did not have to listen to the man’s agony any longer.
The second and third spikes took even longer. By the time they were able to gently lower the doctor to the floor, Riley’s sympathy had turned to raging anger. Whoever had done this would pay, he vowed. No matter how long it took. He hadn’t liked the man, had despised him a bit even, but no one should have to undergo such pain and suffering at the hands of another.
As they got up to give him some room, Bhanjee gave a quick little hiccup and then stopped breathing.
Chapter Twenty-Four
“Damn it!” Riley knelt beside the body, yanked Dr. Bhanjee’s shirt open, and began giving him CPR, cursing their luck all the while. Thirty compressions, one after another. Tilt the head, pinch the nose, expel air into the lungs, two breaths. Sit back up. Start pumping again, one...two...three...four...
He gave up after twenty minutes, unable to get Dr. Bhanjee’s heart restarted. Rocking back on his heels, he did what he could to catch his own breath.
Cade wasn’t about to give up that easily, however. He suspected Dr. Bhanjee had known far more than he’d let on and he wasn’t about to let him take that information with him to the grave. It was time for the gloves to come off.
Literally.
He let the others know what he intended.
Riley wasn’t happy with the idea. “You sure about this?” He glanced around them and from his face it was clear he had serious concerns about their present position. “This isn’t the most secure location, you know?”
“I’ll be quick. I don’t want to be lost in his memories for long; his last few moments weren’t all that pleasant and I don’t want to relive them unless absolutely necessary.” Cade knew he was going to get some of it, no matter what he did, but he hoped that the man’s close proximity to death would have had him mentally focused on more important matters there at the end.
Reluctantly, his exec nodded his agreement and then set about doing what he could to provide Cade as much security as possible. The rest of the men were ordered into two concentric circles, one inside the other, with the Knight Commander and Dr. Bhanjee’s body at the center. Ortega was in charge of the outer ring, with Riley taking control of the inner one. When he was satisfied with the arrangements he gave Cade the go ahead.
Cade knelt on the floor and stripped off his gloves, just as he had back in the walk-in freezer. He remembered his failure there, but quickly dismissed it as irrelevant. Lingering psychic impressions often dissipated within forty-eight hours and they’d had no idea how long that man had been dead. But they’d just watched Bhanjee die; his final thoughts and feelings were still locked up in the shell of his body and Cade was confident he could tease them free.
Taking a deep breath to steady himself, Cade reached out and put his bare palms on either side of Dr. Bhanjee’s face.
As soon as he did, a kaleidoscope of images surged past, as if Bhanjee had, indeed, seen his life flash before him there at the end. Cade struggled to narrow his focus, to separate the wheat from the chaff, and get something meaningful form the montage that played on despite Bhanjee’s passing.
Heat.
Sand and rock. The quiet hiss of the wind as it skittered across the ground and echoed softly in the trenches they’d dug that morning.
“Who else knows?” asked a voice.
“No one. I’ve been working this end of the trench all day by myself. You’re the first to see it, other than me.” Bhanjee answered and in his response Cade heard all the guilt and pain that the decision would eventually cause.
A flash of darkness and then he stood in a conference room, confronting a grey-haired man in white lab coat. Underneath it Cade could see that the man wore a blue jumpsuit. They were having a heated argument and Cade could feel the disdain and contempt for the man in front of him, but he couldn’t make out the words or understand just what the fight was about.
The other man finally threw down his pen in disgust and left the room, leaving Bhanjee to stare smugly at the closing door.
Now the real work can begin, he found himself thinking, and his pulse surged.
Flash.
Another scene swam into view and this time Cade found himself gazing down at a deformed mass of flesh that vaguely resembled a human being lying stretched out on a steel table in a lab. Various parts of it were recognizable for what they should have been. Those short, twisted appendages had tried to be arms. That long thick trunk might have later developed into legs. And in the center of that bulging mass that served as its head, clear as day, was a human eye.
As he watched, the eye turned and looked at him.
He felt the tears running down his cheeks now and held his breath as the thing opened up a gaping maw in the center of its chest that might eventually have served as a mouth and shrieked its rage and humiliation at him.
Flash.
The scene changed a fourth and final time, the transition so sudden and so jarring that Cade was almost swept away in its unstoppable tide.
Agony.
Sheer, unrelenting agony as the spike pierced his feet and sank deeply into the metal of the door behind. His throat, already raw from seemingly endless screaming, let loose with another long peal of pain and misery that rang up and down the corridor.
Through the pain the questions had never stopped, questions asked in a voice that was louder than his cries of pain despite the fact that they were never spoken
in anything louder than a whisper, questions to which he had no answer.
What was his purpose?
Who were his allies?
Where were the Watchers and what had happened to the throne?
Question after question, none of which made any sense.
Through it all there was the face.
And with that face a command to commit it to memory, a command felt down in the very center of his bones, as if placed there at the long-forgotten time of his creation and only activated now when it was urgently needed. An order to be certain that every single detail, every nuance and expression, every blemish and wrinkle, be saved for what was to come thereafter.
With the aid of his Gift, Cade saw the face that Dr. Bhanjee had committed to memory, the face of the individual that had tortured him for what seemed like hours.
A face of smooth planes and unblemished skin.
A face with a mouth that seemed forever locked in a perpetual sneer.
A face with coal-black eyes that bored into his own, searching, prying, hunting for the answers it so desperately needed.
And with that face, a name.
Baraquel.
It was the clue Cade had been looking for.
Cade broke contact and collapsed to the floor beside the professor’s body, too weak from the ordeal to do anything but lie there and recover his breath for several long moments.
They had a Name now.
And in the circles that Cade traveled in, names meant power.
For the first time since entering the facility known as Eden, Knight Commander Cade Williams smiled a wolfish smile of his own.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Cade needed some time to rest and regain his strength after his viewing, so Echo took a short break. As they did, Riley and Flynn went to work on the door that Dr. Bhanjee had been crucified against, eventually prying it open to find a single set of stairs just beyond.
The steps led upward another entire level. At the top they found a door secured by another key-code device, the third they’d seen since entering the complex the day before.
This time, however, the pass keys they’d acquired in the cafeteria did no good. Flynn pulled out his tools and started in on the door while the others took five. The events of the last half-hour must have hit him harder than he’d thought; he noticed his hands were shaking as he attached the various leads and set his handheld to trying to find the right combination to open the door.
“You all right?”
Flynn jumped and nearly yelled aloud; he hadn’t realized that Cade had climbed up the last few steps to stand next to him. When he could find his voice, he gave a self-deprecating laugh and waved away his commander’s concerns. “I’m good, boss,” he said, a bit gruffly to hide his embarrassment.
Cade eyed him for a minute, nodded, and then turned away without saying anything further. Flynn knew he hadn’t fooled him but also knew that Cade was confident that Flynn could handle whatever was thrown their way and Cade’s lack of further questioning was proof that he depended and trusted Flynn. It was exactly what he needed to cast off the willies he’d been experiencing and get back to work with renewed vigor.
And I’ll bet he knew it, too, he thought to himself and grinned wryly at his commander’s back.
At that moment the handheld beeped, indicating that it had found the proper sequence, and Flynn carefully made note of it before calling the rest of the men back into action. Riley and Cade set up beside him on the narrow landing. He input the correct combination, glanced at them to be certain they were ready, and then hauled open the door. They swept past him quickly, ready for whatever might be waiting for them.
Which turned out to be nothing.
The door opened onto a set of personal quarters, but these were far more lushly appointed than any they had discovered previously.
Where the others were simple dormitory style setups, with communal bathrooms and no dining facilities, this space was divided into four separate rooms, with its own bathroom and even a mini-kitchen with a small dinette set and a stovetop. The furniture here was of much nicer caliber as well; the couch in the living room was genuine leather and the desk in the study was clearly polished oak. Even more surprising, the far wall of the study was made up of a huge window that looked out upon the mountainside and the base below. Outside, Flynn could see that the funnel cloud they’d tangled with earlier was still there, churning up the ground and casting a dark cloud of dust and grit over the entire facility. For the first time since entering the complex, Flynn found himself glad he was inside instead of outside amidst the storm.
The desk held a desktop computer, the first he’d seen outside of the labs, and he suspected that they’d finally found the base commander’s personal quarters. The stack of handwritten journals they found in the desk drawers confirmed that fact. Inside the cover of each, written in spidery, yet meticulous handwriting, it read:
Dr. Juan Vargas
Notes and Observations
The Eden Project
It was the goldmine of information they had been looking for. The only problem was that the rest of the pages were written in a strange, indecipherable language that wasn’t familiar to any of them. While the others were flipping through the pages of the journals, trying to make heads or tails of the odd script, Flynn found himself wandering around the perimeter of the room, poking at this and that, his thoughts wandering. One wall held a large tapestry and he idly pushed one edge to the side.
To his surprise, he found a doorway concealed behind it.
Brushing the tapestry aside, he stepped through the entryway, only to be brought up short by what he saw just beyond.
“Son of a...,” Flynn said to himself, and then he called out loud enough so that the others in the next room could hear him. “Hey boss, you’d better get in here!”
Responding to the urgency in his voice, both Williams and Riley rushed into the room, weapons ready, only to stop short when they saw what Flynn was looking at.
“Mary and Joseph!” Riley breathed at the sight.
“Kinda catches your attention, now doesn’t it?” Flynn said smugly and then went back to staring at it himself.
It was astounding. He’d seen some amazing things since joining the Order, but this one had to take the prize. The stone itself was huge. It covered nearly the entire wall, a length of more than twenty feet and a good ten or so in height, near as he could estimate. It looked to be a good foot thick. It appeared to him to be some kind of shale or slate, though he’d be the first to admit his knowledge of geology was limited. Still, he’d seen his share of fossils embedded in similar rocks and he didn’t think he was too far off the mark. The stone was resting on what could only be specially designed supports, for the weight alone would cause the average wall to collapse as if it were made of toothpicks. Small spotlights had been arranged along the ceiling and floor to artistically showcase the display.
Yet, it wasn’t the stone that captured his amazement or the way it had been so carefully hung, but what was embedded within it. The skeleton had to be at least several thousand years old and he would have bet good money that it was even older than that. It looked ancient. It stood almost as tall as the stone itself and was nearly perfectly preserved. The skull had a strong brow and a large cranium, indicative that it had probably been highly intelligent. Based on the thickness of the bones in the arms and legs, Flynn could only imagine the strength the creature must have possessed.
But it was the wings that truly captured his attention.
They stretched out all the way to the edge of the stone on either side of the skeleton, a wingspan of nearly twenty feet. The feathers had been preserved in the fossilization process and in many cases the individual shafts and vanes were clearly visible, etched into the stone. When the creature had been alive, it must have been an awesome sight.
The thought caused him to snort at himself in derision. The creature? It wasn’t a creature, except in the sense that it had been created.
Stop being such a wimp and admit the obvious.
It was much more than a creature.
It could only be one of the bene-elohim.
The sons of God.
An angel.
The idea that he was standing in front of the skeletal remains of one of the holiest creations ever devised by the Lord was amazing. Beyond amazing. While it was nothing more than a skeleton now, he could imagine that this being had once stood in the very presence of God. It had probably fought on the side of righteousness and stood as a soldier in the Lord’s army. One of its brethren had swept through the city of Pharaoh and had slaughtered all of the firstborn that had not been protected by the mark of the lamb’s blood on the lintels of the doors. Another had freed Peter from his chains and helped him escape from imprisonment in Rome. Four such beings now stood at the corners of the earth, holding back the winds of heaven. They were the messengers and the arms of justice of God.
But as he gaped in wonder, another more ominous thought suddenly occurred to him.
He was making assumptions, and unfounded ones at that.
Not all of the angels had been on the side of righteousness.
Not all of them had fought on the side of Heaven.
There were also the Nephilim, the fallen ones, those who had been cast out, those who allegedly had sided with Lucifer and had been thrown from the mount of heaven for their sin of pride.
Bene-elohim or Nephilim. The odds were fifty-fifty.
His thoughts were interrupted as Riley spoke up.
“Looks like they removed a piece,” Riley said, pointing to a spot on the left foot where it was obvious one of the metatarsals had been carefully removed from the stone.
Flynn bent over to give it a closer look and that’s when it hit him.
The quote carved over the front entrance to the secret complex.
The creche chamber and its accompanying tanks.
Angels Scream (Echo Team Book 2) Page 14