Judgment Day (Templar Chronicles Book 5) (18 page)

In recent decades rumors had surfaced about the chapel’s connection to the Templars. Several of those rumors were actually near the mark, though the public didn’t know it, and the Order made sure things stayed that way.

The interior of the chapel was decorated with more than 110 Green Man images – carvings of human faces with greenery all around them – a symbol that Riley always found to be a rather unusual choice for a Catholic place of worship given their usual association with deities of fertility and rebirth. He wandered the interior while he waited, passing the time by examining several of the unique carvings, and was in the midst of taking a closer look at one in a bay along the north wall when the entire carving suddenly rotated 180 degrees.

Riley jumped back in surprise, which turned out to be a fortunate move because the granite slab he had been standing on chose that moment to slide to the left, revealing a staircase descending into the ground beneath the chapel floor.

A voice Riley recognized spoke out of the darkness below.

“Let’s move, Captain. We don’t have all day.”

Ferguson.

Riley did as he was told.

He hustled down the steps and found himself standing in a tunnel hewn from solid stone. The Seneschal stood waiting a few feet deeper in the passage and as Riley looked on he reached out and manipulated something on the wall beside him. A grinding sound filled the air around them and the light from the chapel above slowly faded as the stone slid back into place with a gentle thud.

There was a click and a light blossomed in the darkness from the camper’s lantern that the Seneschal was holding in one hand.

“This way,” he said, “we don’t have much time,” and without waiting for an answer he turned and headed down the tunnel at a brisk pace.

Riley hustled to catch up.

There were alcoves on either side of the tunnel and as they headed down its length Riley could see that each one appeared to be a burial chamber, complete with stone sarcophagi. With a start he realized that they must be in the original crypt, the entrance of which many had thought long since lost to history. Several generations of the Sinclair family were buried here and back in 1837, at the death of the 2nd Earl, Riley knew that the chapel had been extensively searched for over a week in an effort to find the entrance to this very place without any luck. Unable to find it, the Earl had been buried in the Lady Chapel, a smaller room off the main structure, alongside his late wife.

Apparently, the crypt hadn’t really been lost at all.

At least, not to the Templars,
Riley thought.

They had been walking for nearly ten minutes before the Seneschal broke the silence.

“My apologies for last night,” he said. “I would have liked to have had the chance to speak with you, but events are moving faster than I anticipated. If we don’t act now, we might miss the opportunity to act at all.”

Events are moving faster than anticipated?
Riley thought.
What events? And what, exactly, had been anticipated?

He opened his mouth to ask but the Seneschal wasn’t finished.

“Commander Williams has been under Preceptor Johannson’s control for almost twenty-four hours now. Thanks to the Grand Master’s order declaring Williams persona non grata, it’s going to take time to get him released. Normally I would prefer to take the official route, but Johannson has already begun subjecting Williams to what he’s calling advance interrogation techniques in an effort to get him to reveal what he knows about the Adversary and I’m afraid Williams won’t last very long.”

Riley didn’t need a dictionary to know that “advance interrogation techniques” was just a polite term for torture. Nor was it hard to imagine Johannson subjecting Cade to repeated water boarding sessions and other methods of persuasion. He felt his blood boil at the thought of his friend in that asshole’s hands.

“We’ve can’t just leave him there! We’ve got to do something!”

The look Ferguson shot in his direction seemed to ask, “What on earth do you think we’re doing now?” and Riley sheepishly held up a hand in apology.

The last thing he wanted to do was alienate his only ally.

Ferguson went on. “Williams knows where to go from here. It is your job to get him out of the commandery and away from Johannson and his cronies. Think you can handle that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good.”

Ferguson stopped, glanced around as if assuring himself that he was in the right place, and then reached out and began running his fingers over the wall directly to his right.

Riley looked on curiously, wondering what the heck he was looking for and how it was going to help Cade, when suddenly the older man gave a mumbled, “Aha!” and the wall in front of them slid smoothly to the left.

Light shone into the tunnel from the hallway beyond.

Ferguson turned to him, his expression grave. “You’ll find Commander Williams in the left-hand cell at the very end of the hall, door code 5839. The guards have been taken care of, but you’ve only got about ten minutes before they come to so you’ll have to move quickly.” He pulled a small bundle of something made of cloth out of his pocket, handed it to Riley, and then guided him by the arm out into the hallway beyond, saying, “You have to get Williams out of here, no matter what. Quickly now!”

A bit dazed by the suddenness of it all, Riley glanced down to see that he was holding a very thin, skin-colored pair of cotton gloves. He recognized them as the kind that Cade wore on a daily basis to keep his psychometric ability from overwhelming him with unwanted emotional feedback.

If the Seneschal was giving him a spare set of gloves, then that meant…

The cold hand of fear reached out and seized his gut in its iron grip, preventing him from completing the thought. He looked up, intending to ask the Ferguson if his suspicions were correct, but the slab was already halfway closed and all he had time to do was catch the other man’s gaze for split-second before it fully closed, leaving him looking at a seamless section of stone that gave no clue to the opening hidden there.

Sonofa…

When in doubt, follow orders. He turned and hurried down the hall until he reached the duty station a dozen yards ahead. It was from here that a pair of guards usually monitored the prisoners in the cells just beyond. Unsurprisingly, he found both men lying unconscious on the floor by their chairs. Half-drunk cups of coffee stood next to each of their stations and it wasn’t hard for him to work out what had happened. Stepping over to the desk, he hit the button that unlocked the steel gates leading to the cell block and hustled through them before had even they finished opening, making a beeline for the last cell on the left.

One look through the glass enclosure was all it took to confirm Riley’s worst fears.

Cade lay face-down on the floor in the middle of his cell, shaking uncontrollably. Riley could see that Cade’s left hand was bare and was resting palm-down against the stone floor beside him, no doubt the reason for Cade’s jerking about. Whatever Cade was seeing through his Gift, it wasn’t good.

Riley punched the code into the lock – 5893 – and grabbed the handle, waiting for the light to turn green.

It beeped but the indicator remained stubbornly red.

“Come on!” Riley growled at it and tried again.

5-8-9-3.

Beep!

“Come on, you fucker!”

He slammed his palm against the glass in frustration, reached out a third time to try again, and then stopped himself as he remembered a crucial fact.

Three false entries and the combination electronically scrambles itself, requiring a supervisor’s override to get it open.

He’d already blown two of his three attempts.

Riley glanced at Cade convulsing on the ground less than ten feet in front of him and then quickly looked away, knowing that wasn’t going to help.

Focus, man, focus. You can do this!

He took a couple of deep breaths and then went back over what the Seneschal had said in his mind.

Left hand cell.

End of the hall.

Door code 5-8-

“3, you idiot! 3!”

His finger tapped on the keypad – 5839 – and this time the door lock disengaged with a gentle click.

He hauled open the door and rushed over to kneel beside Cade. He grabbed his friend by the shoulders and rolled him over on his back. He lifted Cade’s right hand, jammed one of the cotton gloves onto it, and then put it back down, before repeating the same with the left.

Cade’s convulsing stopped a few seconds after that.

Riley shook Cade’s shoulder gently. “Cade! Can you hear me, Cade?”

No response.

Conscious that the clock was ticking, Riley tried again, a bit harder this time.

“Wake up, boss! We gotta go!”

Cade stirred and mumbled something, but Riley couldn’t understand what he was saying.

Worry about it later,
Riley said to himself.
Right now, concentrate on getting both of you out of here while you still can.

He pulled Cade into a seated position, then slung him over one shoulder and lifted him up in a fireman’s carry. Forcing himself to his feet, he staggered for a moment until he got Cade’s weight adjusted properly, and then left the cell behind and headed down the hall as quickly as he could.

Clearly, he couldn’t just walk through the commandery with Cade draped over one shoulder, unconscious, so he was going to have to come up with a better plan to get them out. Thankfully, he thought he had one.

When he reached the duty station he gently lowered Cade into one of the chairs and then checked on the guards. Both were still unconscious and didn’t look like they’d be stirring any time soon.

Good. That’s one problem solved.

Riley grabbed the key ring off the guard’s belt and stepped over to the equipment closet. He slipped the key into the lock, said a quick prayer that they stocked the same equipment here as they did back at the Ravensgate commandery, and then opened it up.

A smile spread across his face when he flipped on the lights inside the closet and saw the collapsible stretcher pushed up against the back wall, right where he was hoping it would be.

The stretcher was typically used to transport a sick or injured prisoner from the cell block to the medical wing. In most commanderies, including this one, the medical wing was located close to the motor pool. Knights returning from combat missions often needed medical attention so having the two areas near each other was just common sense, but in this case the design was going to allow the two of them to reach their destination with minimal interference. The average knight wouldn’t dare interrupt a senior commander rushing a wounded comrade through the halls; if he ran into someone who outranked him, namely Johannson, he was screwed anyway.

Riley grabbed the stretcher and maneuvered it out into the main room, then pushed it over next to Cade. He bent over it, trying to figure out how to raise and lower the bed, and finally managed to do so after a few minutes of fussing with the mechanism.

When he was satisfied, he straightened up and turned, intending to roll Cade’s unconscious body out of the chair and onto the stretcher.

The chair was empty.

“Sorry, man,” he heard Cade say and then the other man’s fist slammed into his temple from the side and Riley knew no more.

# # #

Cade rolled Riley onto his back and then checked to be sure he was breathing. Satisfied that he was, Cade then moved to the nearest guard and began stripping him of the grey BDUs that identified him as one of the commandery security staff.

Thankfully, he was a bit heavier than Cade.

Cade had regained consciousness while Riley had been carrying him down the hall. It had taken him a few seconds to recover from the psychological overload caused by his Gift running rampant beneath his unprotected hands, but once he had he knew that he couldn’t allow his friend to endanger his position by participating in his escape. While Riley had been fetching the stretcher, Cade had decided that knocking him out and leaving him here with the guards was the best way of making it seem as if he’d simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Without evidence to the contrary, Johannson would have a hard time making any charges, even trumped up ones, stick.

After stripping the guard, Cade pulled the man’s uniform on over his own clothes and then dragged the underwear-clad man into the equipment closet, making sure to lock it behind him when he stepped out again.

A glance around the room prompted him to pick up the keycard, no doubt belonging to one of the two guards, that he saw resting on a nearby console, along with the set of keys that he found in Riley’s pants pocket. He would have loved to have found his gear pack and sword here at the duty station, but heaven only knew where they were and he didn’t have time to look for them. The sooner he got out of here, the better.

If he had even an hour’s rest, he would have simply taken the Mirror’s Road and left the commandery behind in a heartbeat. But the torture the night before, never mind the extended exposure to the emotional detritus of all those who had last occupied his cell before him, had left him with barely enough strength to stagger down the hall. If he travelled the Road into the Beyond, he’d be a sitting duck for anything with an appetite for the living, which, as near as he could tell, was just about everything on that side of the Veil. No, better to stay firmly on this side of reality.

Grabbing one of the guard’s ball caps, he put it on and pulled the brim down low, doing what he could to hide the scarring around his right eye, and then headed off down the hall without a backward glance.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The Adversary handed off the body of its latest acquisition to its three waiting acolytes and watched with satisfaction as they rushed it over to the nearest bed and began re-attaching the various wire leads and plastic tubes that were needed to sustain it for the time being.

This one was a particularly good specimen
, he thought,
a lean but well-muscled warrior woman who had fallen in the line of duty just a week before.
The bullet that had been her downfall had entered her head on the right side, hugged the interior of the skull cap, and exited on the left, doing just enough damage to put her into an indeterminate coma. Her long blonde hair had been shaved away prior to the surgery that had saved her life, leaving her skull looking like an oddly-shaped melon with fuzz growing atop it.