Templar Chronicles: Judgment Day Part 19

Always leery of touching artifacts that he knew nothing about, Riley left it right where it was. "What is it?"

Cade reiterated what he'd learned from Uriel.

Riley stared at it for a moment, then looked up at Cade, the question he was about to ask written all over his face even before he said it.

"You'll kill Gabrielle if you use this thing. You know that, right?"

Cade winced and put the knife away again. "I'm hoping it won't come to that. Uriel said that I have to draw blood; he didn't say how much."

Riley didn't say anything for a moment and the hesitation told Cade he was unconvinced. "Don't worry about that right now. I'll figure it out when the time comes. Trust me."

His former teammate held up his hands in surrender. "No argument here. We still have to find the SOB, unless you've figured that out, too?"

"No, but I think I know how we can do so. I need a list of patients injured in the last, say three months, who are currently in a coma on life support. Can you do that?"

"Sure. Give me ten minutes."

"Olsen could have done it in three."

"True, but I'm not Olsen. You're going to have to live with ten."

In the end, it only took him seven minutes. His triumphant smile quickly disappeared when he realized that the search turned up hundreds of patients, far too many for the list to be useful to them.

"No, we're good," Cade told him. "The hospital records will indicate if the patients were or are currently members of the armed services, right?"

"Yes."

"Okay. The kidnapping victims were all soldiers, so we can expect the next two to be the same. Cull the list and eliminate everyone who isn't one."

Riley did so, giving them a list with just over 150 names.

"Still too big," Cade said, "but at least we're getting there."

They sat together in silence for a moment, thinking, and then Riley began tapping away on the keyboard again.

"How long does it take for the muscles of coma patients to start to atrophy?" Riley asked. "A few weeks?"

"Depends upon the shape they were in before the accident, I suspect. I'd guess a few weeks before you'd see significant problems."

Riley typed another search string into the computer. "They aren't going to want to take up residence in bodies that are weak from lack of use, right? So they'll be targeting the most recent cases. If we narrow our search to those injured in the last few weeks..."

The computer spit out a list of fifteen names. A quick check confirmed Riley's hypothesis; all of the previous victim's names were on the list.

Cade clapped him on the back. "Well done!"

Riley shook his head. "We narrowed it down, but we've still got nine different candidates to choose from and that's too many. There's no way you and I can keep an eye on that number all at once. We could take a guess, but that's all it would be, a guess. If we get it wrong, the Adversary claims the sixth and final victim he needs."

Cade paced back and forth in the small room, thinking it through. Riley was right; they were only going to get one shot at this. They had to get it right the first time.

The choice didn't feel random to him; something tied these victims together, but what?

Make a list, he told himself, and start with the obvious.

They were all U.S. service personnel. They were all roughly the same age, or at least within several years of each other. They had all been in excellent physical shape right up to the event or injury that put them in the hospital.

But that was where the similarities ended.

Three were male, two were female. They had different ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds. Different education levels. Different family backgrounds and situations. They couldn't have gotten a more diverse group even if someone had actively worked to create one.

So why these five? Cade asked himself.

Then it hit him.

"Can you plot the hospitals were the victims were kidnapped from on a map?" he asked.

"Sure. Piece of cake."

A moment later Riley turned the screen to face him; it showed a map of the eastern seaboard, from Boston the north to Washington DC in the south, and west to Detroit in the west.

"How about the patients on our possibles list. Can you plot their current locations in blue?"

A few seconds later fifteen blue diamonds showed up on the map.

Two of them were within the same general area as the original five. All the rest were farther west, across the Mississippi.

"Gotcha!" Cade said softly.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT.

Cade lay p.r.o.ne on the edge of the ridgeline, his hips pressed against the ground and his knees shoulder-width apart to improve his stability. In his hands he held an M24 US Army sniper rifle, originally chambered for a 7.62 NATO match slug but now custom refitted to handle a special long-range Templar-designed tracking device similar to those used to tag grizzly bears in the wild. This particular model was also equipped with a Leupold Mark4 10x Mildot scope, which Cade currently had dialed in on the window of a room on the eighth floor of the building downhill from him.

In that hospital room lay Sergeant First Cla.s.s Edward Mason, U.S. Army, mortally injured while on patrol in Afghanistan. The sergeant had sustained severe injuries to the skull and was presently in a medically induced coma designed to give the doctors time to figure out how to deal with the growing hematoma inside his skull. According to the records Riley had been able to pull up, no one on the medical staff expected him to recover. If by some miracle he did, the long-term prognosis was that he would spend the rest of his life in a vegetative state, which, given the robust health of the rest of his body, might be for many years to come.

Mason was a perfect target for the Adversary and that was why Cade was lying on a rooftop with a scoped rifle hoping that his proximity theory was correct.

Riley was sitting behind the wheel of a van parked a few hundred yards up the road from the hospital. In the back of the van, manning the receiver for the tracking gear, was fellow Echo Team member Jimmy Martinez. When Cade made the shot, it would be Jimmy's job to call out the directions as the tracked the demon to its lair.

Two hundred miles away, outside a hospital in Baltimore, another team led by Phil Davis was set up in similar fashion, keeping an eye Ernest Jessup in case the Adversary decided to go after him instead.

Guessing that the Adversary would take the patients closest to its current position, Cade had decided to focus on the only two patients within the same general locale. Everything ahead of them was depending on Cade's theory being correct. If it wasn't...

Don't think like that, he told himself. You've been right so far and you're right this time, too.

He spoke softly into the mike at his throat.

"Sound check."

There was a pause and then Riley's voice came over the communications headset he was wearing beneath his watch cap.

"Reading you 5 by 5, Cade."

"Roger that. Anything on the news?"

"Nada."

That was good, at least.

They had been at it for nearly forty-eight hours now with no sign of the Adversary. Even worse, they had no idea if or when he might show up; it was all a big guessing game. The only way they would know they were right was if the Adversary showed up at one of the two locations they were covering or if there was another report of a kidnapping victim elsewhere that fit the bill.

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 s.p.a.ce 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 pa.s.sed 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. d.a.m.n 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.