by Al Ruksenas
He flashed his dagger in defiance and shouted again: “How dare you?”
Knowlton slashed the blade downward toward the woman’s torso amid a loud report from Caine’s pistol. He dropped instantly on the opposite side of the gurney from Taylor; the dark blade catching the edge and flopping onto the ground next to him just as the echo of the shot subsided.
Mrs. Knowlton looked on in horror as her husband fell and scurried comically around the cart in her oversized robe. Pushing past Dunne, who jostled the obscene altar, she saw the velvet clad body alongside it and turned on Caine in a rage.
“You beast!” she hollered and charged him with her dagger poised to strike.
He wagged his pistol to ward her off, but to no avail. She was upon him in seconds. Caine squeezed the trigger and she fell at his feet; his shot resounding through the chamber.
Victor Sherwyck edged along the gurney and looked down in shocked disbelief at Philip Taylor—his instrument of glory—mouth agape in the same way Taylor’s was locked in terminal surprise.
Caine saw one of the supplicants beyond the cart fumbling at his hip for something under his robe. Caine sensed it was a weapon and fired unerringly across the room. The bullet whizzed audibly past Senator Dunne’s ear and instantly dropped a disciple who was one of the night shift guards.
Sherwyck kept edging around the autopsy cart—followed by the terror stricken eyes of the struggling woman upon it—until he was next to Senator Dunne. Dunne shuffled slightly, but perceptibly away from him.
Caine waved his pistol at them. “Get back! Away from her!”
Dunne quickly joined the others, while Sherwyck hesitated, staring, testing.
Caine aimed demonstratively at Sherwyck’s head. Sherwyck was confident he would not fire. Caine squeezed another round, the noise of which reverberated once more through the chamber.
Sherwyck’s face was pale. He felt the searing heat of a bullet passing next to his ear inside his hood. He was not sure if this arrogant interloper was a bad shot or deliberately provocative.
He looked back at shuffling noises behind him and saw the remainder of the robed group mumbling over the fallen body of the union steward.
For the first time since he was ensconced in America, Victor Sherwyck felt unsure. A fleeting thought of failure crossed his ancient mind. It could not be! Philip Taylor was dead. Still, he was but a temporary cog. Capitulation could still be had. Everything was still in place.
The sacrifice could yet be made. She lay before the group.
The President would fall. Sherwyck, through his force of will, could still impose on the next in nuclear command.
He will, he thought. He needed just a little time to outwit this despoiling intruder. He would salvage the triumphant moment.
Sherwyck raised his hands, as if in compliance, turned and walked slowly around the shackled woman to the group behind him. He looked intently at her, spread eagled on the red velvet cloth, then resignedly at Philip Taylor’s body, spread eagled on the floor.
In the momentary silence, footfalls and shouts filled the hallway amid urgent banging on the door to the chamber. Then, gunfire.
Sherwyck smirked at his remaining followers. Their sentinels would save the night. He would have his victory. Sherwyck stared at his supplicants in cold calculation.
“Our people are at hand! The infidel has used all his bullets! Take him! Kill him!”
At this, Sherwyck’s sycophantic butler shouted: “Take him! Kill him!”
His stupefied followers flayed their hands and charged at Caine on the other side of the gurney. Their robes flowed as one, covering Sherwyck’s quick move to grab Philip Taylor’s sacrificial dagger from his lifeless hand.
Only Dunne, the Senator, stood frozen in place.
Caine opened fire on the charging line, cursing the Sorcerer, and toppling his cultists in rapid succession. Two of the infernal worshippers pitched onto the gurney, pushing it towards him. He quick‐stepped back as he fired. Several realized too late that bullets were spewing from Caine’s empty pistol. They fell in a line, deceived by their false Master.
The terrified woman looked helplessly on, but heartened by the bedlam around her that she might still survive.
Sherwyck stood still with his hands crossed, the obsidian blade deep in his sleeve.
Senator Dunne stood nearby staring in fear at Caine.
The other robed figures lay in various positions of death along the floor.
“Where’s the other woman?” Caine demanded as he roughly unbuttoned his shirt, then deftly switched his Beretta from hand to hand as he pulled each arm from the sleeves.
A flash of perplexity in the Sorcerer’s piercing eye betrayed to Caine that Sherwyck didn’t know. His goons have her elsewhere, he thought. Alvin Carruthers knew every corner of the building. He’d find her. He had to.
Caine moved to the autopsy cart. She huddled to the limits of her shackles as he stretched the shirt over her torso, barely covering her. She winced seeing the prominent scar on his chest.
“Where’s the key?” he commanded.
“One of these poor souls must have it,” Sherwyck replied in a cynically innocent voice. “They provide. I merely preside.”
“You have the smell of hell about you,” Caine said dismissively.
“And how is it you presume to know?” Victor Sherwyck asked haughtily.
“I’ve been to your roost.”
A look of rage came over Sherwyck. “You lie!” he shouted. “Only those who rise from there are witness to the place! An ageless legion of disciples preparing the way for our Prince!”
Senator Dunne listened quietly, hunched slightly in humiliation.
“Now, now,” Caine said in deliberate belittlement, baiting the ever composed Presidential adviser. “You overreach!”
“You impudent fool!” Sherwyck raged. “The power of the Devil’s Eye is seared in every page of history!”
“Now! Now! Now!” Caine goaded—keen to the shuffling outside the door and eager to get the woman off the gurney.
“The spell of our Prince captivates all! It pulsates through every fragment of the priceless Eye so purposely given in shares to the world!”
“And we’re supposed to thank you for it?”
“You are supposed to worship it!” Sherwyck yelled, his veins bulging at his neck.
“I’ve seen it, Victor,” Caine said derisively, using his first name. “I spit on it!”
“You lie!” Sherwyck shrieked again, his body throbbing with increasing rage. He had never been challenged before. “How dare you? You saw nothing!”
“Warlock told me.”
“Warlock? Warlock?”
“Nikolai Kuznetsov. Remember him?”
“How? What?” Victor Sherwyck felt vulnerable beyond the Beretta pointed in his direction.
“So long ago. Smuggling you here. You shouldn’t have killed him. He wouldn’t have talked.”
“Nonsense! You lie! Dead men don’t talk!”
“Ahh, but what is this?” Caine said with a grand sweep of his pistol. “Human sacrifice. Necromancy. Seeking favor through the dead?”
“You insolent infidel!”
“Your vocabulary is diminishing,” Caine scoffed with narrowing eyes.
Victor Sherwyck breathed heavily, sputtering with rage. No one alive had ever insulted him, much less dared flaunt authority over him.
Senator Everett Dunne unexpectedly lifted his round, boyish face and blurted: “He told me to say it! He told me to use ‘Warlock’ all these years! He told me it was Nikolai Kuznetsov! He gave me all the leads out of Moscow! He told me what to do!”
Victor Sherwyck’s rage suddenly found an outlet.
He pulled the hidden dagger from his sleeve and drove it wildly into Dunne’s chest
“You said you would never betray me!” he yelled and followed the collapsing Senator to the floor with his hand still on the handle of the blade. “Traitor!” He snarled into the Senator’s fading fa
ce. “You’re not worthy!”
Victor Sherwyck stood up, ignoring the Senator’s dying gasps.
“An unaccustomed setback,” he said serenely.
“A permanent setback.”
“No one dares tell me that!”
Never since Soviet agents had planted him in the United States at the command of the Old One through arrangements with Commissar Vladimir Dekanazov—a principal in the cursed cult—was he ever challenged or confronted.
Never in his steady climb in financial, social, and political circles did he ever sense a hint of impediment or failure. Never did anyone dare direct him, much less command him to do anything. Never did anyone dare threaten him.
“You’ll pay for this!”
“I’m sure, I will,” Caine said, hovering over the woman, adjusting the shirt on her and rattling one of the handcuffs.
“I’m going to ask you one last time. Where’s the key?”
Victor Sherwyck slowly approached the gurney.
“Keep your distance!” Caine hissed.
“The key is in hell!” Sherwyck shouted and reached for the abandoned blade at her knees.
“Back off!” Caine commanded as Sherwyck fumbled for the obsidian dagger.
“I am invincible!” he declared raising it above the sacrifice to be.
Caine fired.
Victor Sherwyck collapsed onto the woman who jostled in terror to get him away. Caine pushed gruffly and he sank slowly to the floor, holding onto the edge of his demonic altar.
“You’ll… pay… for this!” he wheezed, kneeling next to it with head bowed from draining life.
“I’m sure, I will,” Caine murmured.
“Legions…behind me…through ages…will avenge.”
“I know,” Caine replied. “They’re next.”
Sherwyck lifted his head in defiance, stared at Caine with profound hatred and collapsed on his back.
“Is he dead?” the woman asked fitfully.
“He’s dead,” Colonel Caine answered cryptically. “For now.”
Chapter 51
Alvin Carruthers walked into the room from the storage area, followed by Colonel Garrison Jones. Both had pistols in their hands. They looked warily around, focusing on the velvet covered autopsy cart. They saw Colonel Caine comforting the woman, who was now wearing his tan campaign shirt and standing huddled next to him.
“Jeannie McConnell, I presume,” Colonel Jones said perfunctorily.
“Jeannie! Meet my friend, Colonel Garrison Jones. We were all very worried about you.”
Caine looked to the curator. “And that’s my friend, Al Carruthers. Where’s Laura? “
“She’s not in the museum,” Carruthers answered. “We’ll find her.”
Caine was disheartened.
“We’ll find her, Chris!” Carruthers insisted. “We’ll find her. Maybe someone picked her up. She does have her uncle’s arrangements to make. We can’t always think the worst.”
“Do you believe that?”
“Well…” Carruthers began. He looked at Jeannie.
“Come here, sweetie,” he soothed changing the subject. He could see she was still trembling. “Let’s get some real clothes on you. We have a whole history back here to choose from. Then we’ll get you some medical attention.”
The curator put his arm consolingly around her and led her into the storage area.
“Who are all these people?” Colonel Jones asked pointing his pistol around.
“Some of the cream of Washington society.”
“Gone sour?”
“Long ago.”
“We’ll find her, Chris. I’m sure.”
The image of the woman lying in the street in Beirut flashed across his mind. He was reaching out to her—a haunting resemblance to Laura Mitchell—a face that destined him to meet the alluring professor—a professor who ignited his burning love for her. Was she now, too, beyond his reach?
“The General said I might find you here.”
Caine looked at him.
“You were supposed to report.”
“I was on my way.”
“I can see,” Jones said nodding at the bodies strewn around the room. “He called me back from Egypt as soon as I told him what we found. He figured you’d be takin’ a detour to the Pentagon.”
Colonel Jones stepped among the velvet robed bodies, reminiscent of the monks in the cavern. “My, my, my. Some fancy names. What do we have here—ten, twelve people? Not counting your guard downstairs and our few outside the door.”
He looked back at his friend. “We thought you were in real trouble when we heard the gunshots in here. Al said you had a silencer on your piece.”
“This deserved louder attention.”
“I imagine,” Jones agreed. “But how far can it carry?”
***
With their sidearms drawn, Colonel Caine and Colonel Jones escorted Al Carruthers and Jeannie McConnell to the service area.
Unmarked official looking sedans and several coroner’s vans were parked in the lot. Forensic technicians were examining Laura Mitchell’s car and the dark green van with Caine’s bullet hole in the rear panel.
“We’ll keep looking around here,” Colonel Jones said. “Question some detained workers.”
“I’m heading back to the hospital,” Caine said. “Maybe there’s something there.”
“General Bradley’s office tomorrow, Chris. That was his order.”
Caine nodded, thanked Carruthers, hugged Jeannie McConnell, and hurried to his roadster.
***
Driving west on Constitution Avenue in the glow of evening lights, he noticed one pair of headlamps in his mirror that were immediately suspect. He saw the lights glow brighter and dimmer as they weaved in traffic and soon were right behind him. The gap between his Viper and the car behind him was closing. He was ready to accelerate, but evening traffic boxed all lanes.
Inside the trailing car, Oleg Alekseev looked to his driver. The driver looked back—anticipating. Alekseev nodded approval. The driver accelerated.
“Hold on!” Alekseev cautioned.
Caine saw in his mirror the beams switch to high. He braced himself and readied for another impact.
Seconds later Alekseev’s sedan banged into the rear of Caine’s Viper.
Alekseev was already at the side of the sedan when Caine jumped out and started for him.
“I’m sorry, Colonel! Truly sorry!” Alekseev said loudly above the din of traffic slowing and them moving around them amid the sound of several horns. “There has to be a better way for us to meet!”
Before Caine could react, Alekseev motioned towards the opening rear door of his sedan. Out bounded Laura Mitchell and ran towards him with open arms.
“Chris! Chris! Chris!” she said as he enfolded her in a crushing embrace.
Behind her two muscular men in dark suits, had climbed out the back seat and began guiding traffic around the vehicles.
“What the—!” He began in Alekseev’s direction only to be cut off by Laura.
“It’s okay, Chris! It’s okay!” she assured breathlessly. “Alekseev explained everything! I was scared at first, then I was mad as a banshee, but he explained everything!”
The three of them walked across a lane of traffic to the sidewalk.
“I’m sorry, Colonel. I know we caused you distress. But it was to save her life.”
“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” he challenged with a seething voice.
“We had to make sure you followed your suspicions—that she was kidnapped.”
“She was kidnapped!” Caine snapped.
“A minor inconvenience, Colonel. In the face of profound threats. We had to make sure you went into the museum.”
“I was going to the museum.”
“We didn’t know, Colonel. I regret. We have heard stories like your charming friend has. I must admit we had followed her now and then.”
“Because of her uncle,” Caine declared.
“Because of her uncle,” the Russian diplomat and spymaster admitted. “I extend my condolences to both of you for his loss. We are very much attuned to telling events that do not seem to have a natural explanation.”
Laura hugged Caine closely and shivered at the thought of her uncle alone in his office with a wayward cat creeping inside.