Infernal Cries: An Echo Team Urban Fantasy Novel Page 13

  Cade took a final look around to be certain no one was watching and then drew his pistol from the shoulder holster he wore underneath his jacket. Gun in hand, he raised one booted foot and brought it smashing back down against the apartment door directly to the right of the lock.

  The door flew open and bounced off the opposite side of the narrow hallway, but Cade was already past it, moving forward into the apartment with his gun out before him in a ready position. There was an open doorway to his right – kitchen, empty – and then a living room to his left, where a wiry-looking man in jeans and a sweatshirt had just leapt off the couch and was reaching into the drawer of the small table near the sofa.

  Cade didn’t need to be told what was in that drawer; he knew it was a weapon of some kind and acted according, slamming one foot against the outside of the drawer and pinning the man’s hand inside.

  “Arrgh!” the man yelled in pain. “My hand!”

  “Shut up!” Cade told him, pointing his gun at the man’s forehead. “That’s what you get for thinking you can pull a gun on me!”

  Lenny Abrams put his other hand in the air in surrender. “I didn’t know it was you! Honest! All you had to do was knock and I would have let you in!”

  “Yeah, right. Tell me another, Lenny.”

  “I swear, I swear! Come on, let me go! You’re gonna break my hand!”

  Cade put the barrel of his weapon right against Lenny’s forehead and Lenny abruptly went still. That didn’t stop his pleading, though.

  “Please, please, please, don’t shoot. I didn’t know, honest, I swear!”

  Cade ignored him. “You’re going to take your hand out nice and slow, right Lenny?”

  The other man nodded.

  “Cuz you know what will happen if you don’t, right?”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ll be good; promise!”

  Cade took his foot off the drawer and backed up a few steps, out of Abrams’ reach.

  “What the hell do you want?” Abrams asked sullenly, as he yanked his hand out of the drawer and collapsed on the sofa, cradling his injury with the other hand.

  “I’m in need of your services, Lenny, and lucky for you, I’m even willing to pay for them.”

  Lenny Abrams was a medium. Cade had run into him a few times in the past. Abrams had kept his nose clean after a warning from Cade to stop bilking his clients with fake seances and so Cade hadn’t turned him in. The Order frowned heavily on people who called up the spirits of the dead just to satisfy the curiosity of the living and would have quickly made Abrams' life miserable, which put Abrams in Cade’s debt.

  Cade was about to call in his marker.

  At the mention of getting paid, Lenny forgot all about his injured hand. “What, exactly, do you need me to do?” he asked.

  Cade explained.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  The idea was a simple one. Call up the spirit of the man who had last been in charge of the reliquary, Nigel Stone, leader of the Custodes Veritatis, the secret sect that cared for all of the Order’s artifacts, and ask him if there was a backdoor into the vault.

  The question in Cade’s mind was whether or not Lenny Abrams could manage to call up the dead man’s spirit and keep him there long enough for Cade to get the answers he needed.

  Lenny certainly thought he was up for the challenge.

  “Seriously? That’s all you want? I thought you were going to ask for something difficult. Give me a few days and I’ll…”

  Cade was already shaking his head. “I don’t have a few days; I need you to do it now.”

  “Now? As in, right now?”

  Cade just looked at him.

  Lenny glanced at the gun in Cade’s hand and then back at the steely look on Cade’s face. He sighed in surrender. “All right. Where do you want to do this?”

  The kitchen table seemed like a decent place to Cade.

  The reality of the situation was that Abrams was the real deal. Just as Cade had the ability to read the psychic residues left on objects by those who last touched them or the gift of walking the mirror's road, Abrams was connected to the spirit world in a way that few others were. As a result, he didn’t need anything beyond his own innate skills to connect with the dead. All the pomp and circumstance that he put into the sceances he performed for clients was just that – pomp and circumstance. It didn’t impact the success or failure of his efforts at all.

  All Abrams needed to do the job was himself.

  The two men sat down opposite each other at the kitchen table.

  “What can you tell me?” Lenny asked.

  Cade said, “Stone died alone after being tortured by a group of necromancers who reanimated the body of his dead little girl and let her chew through his internal organs until he bled to death.”

  Lenny stared at him.

  “Tell me you aren’t serious.”

  “Do I look like I’m joking?”

  Lenny hesitated, started to say something, then thought better of it. Instead he put his hands flat on the table top, palms down, leaned back in his chair, and closed his eyes. “What was his name again?”

  “Nigel Stone.”

  Names have power. It was one of the basic rules underlying the supernatural world, Cade knew. With the right name, one could do some incredible things. It was with the creature’s true name that Riley had been able to bind the angel Baraquel in the tunnels of the Eden complex and how Cade had called the scream of angels that had torn Baraquel to pieces shortly thereafter. Names have power and a name was all Lenny needed to locate the spirit of the dead man and drag it, kicking and screaming, back into this world for a little chat.

  “Given the way he went out, I don’t suspect he’s going to be all that happy to be brought back,” Lenny warned, without opening his eyes. “Don’t blame me if he’s too pissed to answer your questions.”

  And without further ado, Lenny called to the dead.

  It happened so quickly that for a moment Cade thought he was faking it. One moment Lenny was sitting, half-slumped in his chair, hands flat on the table in front of him in a relaxed position, and the next he was sitting up ramrod straight in a manner that made it look like someone had shoved a piece of steel rebar down along his spine.

  Cade leaned forward. “Nigel? Nigel Stone? Can you hear me?”

  “I’m dead Williams, not bloody well deaf.”

  The voice coming from Lenny’s mouth was tinged with a thick British accent and was very clearly not his own. Cade felt the hair on the back of his neck stand on end.

  He’d only spoken to Williams once, after the attack on the Broadmoor Commandery. Their conversation had been short, and conducted over a cell phone, but even so Cade knew he was talking to the same man. The voice, the accent, even the speech patterns were the same.

  On the drive over Cade thought long and hard about how to gain Stone’s cooperation in breaking into the reliquary. The man had spent half his life protecting the objects inside the vault. Getting him to offer up his secrets would be against pretty much everything he had worked toward as a knight and as commander of the Custodes Veritatis.

  But Cade thought he’d come up with just the thing. He leaned forward and asked, “How’d you like to help me gut the bastard that did that to your little girl?”

  In the seat across the table, the body of Lenny Abrams smiled a shark’s smile. “What do you need to know?”

  Riley was following up on the umpteenth sighting that had come into the command center of a man fitting the Necromancer’s description when Tech Sergeant McGreevy walked up and tapped him on the shoulder.

  “I think I’ve found him,” she said.

  Riley held up a finger telling her to wait and then motioned for her to follow him as he got up and walked out of the operations center. He found an empty office a few steps down the hall and ushered her inside it.

  If she found the subterfuge unusual, she didn’t say anything.

  Once they were alone, Riley said, “Okay, what do you have?�
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  “I got one hit off the false IDs you gave me. Knight Commander Williams caught a flight to Paris the night after the Necromancer escaped and returned two days later, right about the same time Echo Team did. If you’d been flying commercial, you probably would have ended up on the same flight.”

  Riley nodded; he’d figured they would be able to track that one down and was glad that his hunch proved correct.

  “After that I’ve got bupkiss on the IDs; he disappeared back into the woodwork as soon as he returned to the States. Whatever he’s doing, he’s not doing it under any of those names.”

  Riley opened his mouth to say something, but McGreevy held up her finger in a wait-a-minute gesture.

  “However, I think I’ve got something much more interesting on the safe house issue. Like I said before, we can’t track individual use of the safe houses, only that they’ve been accessed by someone with the proper authorization codes. We can tell when the gates have been opened and when the alarms are turned on and off, for instance.”

  Riley wanted to tell her to get to the point, that he knew all this, but he restrained himself. No sense alienating her just because he didn’t have enough patience to go around today.

  “In the last forty-eight hours there have been three safe houses accessed in a hundred mile radius surrounding the commandery. Of those three, I’m fairly confident that I can match the use of the house to teams involved in routine assignments.”

  “So they’re all legit?” Riley didn’t see how that helped him.

  “Yes, I think so. It doesn’t totally rule out Commander Williams as one of the users, but I’m about seventy-five percent certain it isn’t him. I know that doesn’t help us, except from an exclusionary viewpoint. But while I was looking into those three instances, I discovered that there was a false alarm report from a fourth safe house in the same general area. The system came back up again almost immediately, and appeared to be operating properly after that, so a team wasn’t dispatched to the location to check it out physically.

  “All of which means that it could…”

  “…have been Cade monkeying around with the security system and making it look like an accident,” Riley finished for her. “Good work, McGreevy!”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Any activity at the location since?”

  “No, sir.”

  That didn’t necessarily mean anything, Riley knew. If Cade had found a way to bypass the alarm system, he could be there right now, hanging out and resting up for whatever he planned to do next and they would still be getting a negative readout on their end. It sounded like it was worth checking out.

  “Address?”

  McGreevy handed him a slip of paper with the address printed on it in neat block letters.

  “Thank you, McGreevy. Not a word, right?”

  She smiled. “A word about what, sir?”

  It took Riley just shy of two hours to assemble the necessary resources and line up the clearances he needed from those above him in the command structure to make the take-down. Normally the Order frowned on assaults in broad daylight, which is why he bothered to get permission in the first place, but anything to do with the Necromancer was a priority at the moment and no questions were asked.

  That was good, because he preferred not to lie.

  When he had the go-orders in hand, he assembled his team in one of the briefing rooms. He decided to use only Echo’s command unit, knowing it would be less conspicuous and he’d be better able to control the flow of information concerning the operation.

  He waited for Simmons, Martinez, and Ortega to join him in the briefing room and then shut the door. The men were alerted that there was an op in the works, but hadn’t received any details beyond that. It was time to bring them up to speed.

  When the men were seated, Riley hit the projector and threw a satellite picture of the safe house up on the wall.

  “This is one of the safe houses in Norwalk. Early yesterday afternoon a suspect we believe can provide information on the whereabouts of the Necromancer slipped past the building’s security and took up temporary residence inside. The possibility is good that he is still there.

  “Command has ordered that we execute a smash-and-grab on the individual in question and bring him in. The safe house is in a reasonably well populated area and so we’ll be going in under cover as U.S. Marshals. Word will be going out to local law enforcement that a team will be executing a warrant at that location, which should both keep them off our backs and deal with any civilian reports that might come into them while our mission is underway.”

  Riley could see the three men glancing back and forth at each other and knew exactly what they were thinking. How did an ally of the Necromancer know where one of their safe houses was, never mind how to defeat the security to get inside it without setting off the alarm?

  If he was going to have their earnest cooperation, Riley knew he was going to have to share his suspicions with them.

  He flipped off the projector and turned to face them.

  “I know what you’re thinking, so let’s clear the air. I have reason to believe that the Necromancer has coerced Knight Commander Williams into helping him, most likely by holding one or more hostages to ensure Commander Williams’ cooperation.”

  He let that sink in for a moment and then went on. “I further believe that Commander Williams’ presence inside that safe house is part of a clever plan to allow him to be taken by our people without it appearing that he has reneged on his agreement to assist the Necromancer in exchange for the continued safety of the hostages.”

  It wasn’t too far from the truth. After all, he did believe that the Necromancer was holding a hostage, Cade’s wife in fact. He just hadn’t chosen to mention that hostage in question wasn’t actually alive, in the regular sense of the word.

  It was a lie, yes, but it was a necessary one and he could live with himself for telling it. Still, he made a mental note to include it in his next confession. For the moment, that would have to do.

  Ortega raised his hand. “Rules of engagement?”

  “Non-lethal force unless and until Commander Williams chooses otherwise. I want to talk to him not turn this into the gunfight at O.K. Corral. I don’t think I have to remind any of you just how good a fighter the Knight Commander is, do I?”

  All three of them shook their heads; they’d served under Cade, just as Riley had, and were well aware of their former commander’s martial prowess.

  “Questions?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  They drove past the house once in order to match the lay of the land with what they had seen in the satellite photos. It was a single-story dwelling set back from the street behind a thick hedge and tall iron gates. There were no cars in front of the house and no sign of anyone inside as far as he could see, but Riley hadn’t expected there to be. Cade wasn’t going to make a hash out of such basic tradecraft; he was too good for that.

  All four of them were dressed in bright blue windbreakers with the words U.S. Marshal on their backs in yellow letters and had badges on lanyards around their necks. If someone bothered to run the badges, they’d even come back as legitimate; the Order had their fingerprints inside the computer systems of the major U.S. law enforcement agencies for decades now. In consideration of the roles they were supposed to be playing, they left the heavy firepower at home. They were all carrying their standard issue HK Mark 23 handguns and Ortega was armed with a Mossberg combat shotgun, but that was all. They weren’t planning to have a shootout with their former commander after all, just a sit-down chat.

  Martinez was behind the wheel of the Suburban and he pulled into the driveway as they came up on the house a second time. In the passenger seat Riley kept his gaze focused on the door and windows of the house in front of them as Martinez rolled down the window and punched the access code into the control panel for the gate. There was a short buzz and then the gate was rolling back to let them onto the property.

/>   “Stay sharp and let’s get this done right,” Riley called.

  Martinez pulled the Suburban to a halt at the end of the drive as the others popped the doors and made for the front entrance in a triangle formation with Riley in the lead. Riley knew Martinez would go around back and prevent anyone from trying to escape that way while they breached the front door, so he put the other man out of his mind and concentrated on the job ahead.

  Up the stairs, over to the door, try the knob.

  Locked.

  Step back and let Simmons get in with the ram. One short, sharp swing of the forty-pound hunk of solid steel against the interior edge of the door and he and Ortega were moving in, shouting, “U.S. Marshals,” as they entered the home, guns out and at the ready.

  The living room led to kitchen, which led to twin bedrooms and a bathroom in back. It took them less than two minutes to cover the entire premises and as shouts of “clear” came back from the others Riley lowered his pistol and looked around.

  The graffiti on the walls was the first clue to who had actually been inside the property.

  The Order maintained the safe houses in good quality, with simple but adequate furnishing in case knights on assignment had to stay there for any length of time. As such they were normally outfitted with televisions, desktop computers, sometimes even gaming systems like Xbox or Wii to allow the team members to wind down after a mission.

  Looking from the kitchen into the living room, Riley could see that all of the electronics were missing. The entertainment center stood bare and graffiti tags, most likely the gang signs and symbols of those who had broken in to rip the place off, had been painted on the walls, the ceiling, and even the leather couch.