CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

After sending Cade on his way to Heathrow, Riley reported in to Preceptor Johannson, claiming that he hadn’t seen Commander Williams. He was ordered to catch the next flight back to the United States. Luckily, there’d been one headed to JFK in New York within the hour.

Thanks to the time change, he arrived in New York just before midnight and used one of the vehicles the Templars kept in long-term parking to return to the commandery in Westport, CT. Once back in his quarters, he collapsed on the bed and fell quickly asleep.

He awoke a few hours later to the sound of his cell phone.

“Riley here,” he said, once he’d fumbled it out of his pocket and put it to his ear.

“Where are you?”

Recognizing Cade’s voice, Riley said, “My quarters. Ravensgate. Why? What did you find out?”

Cade ignored both questions. “Stay where you are,” he said, instead. “I’ll be right with you.”

Right with me? How the hell was he...

There was a crash of glass from inside his bathroom and then the door opened and Cade stepped out, brushing glass shards off his shoulder. He was dressed in the clothes Riley had given to him at the airport and looked like he hadn’t slept since, but there was a manic light in his eyes that he only got when he was on the trail of something good.

“How on earth...?” Riley asked.

Cade grinned. “Yeah, pretty cool, huh?”

“Cool? That’s what you’re calling it?”

Riley was flabbergasted at what had just happened. Cade had never been able to control his passage through the Beyond before, he knew. Traveling that way had always been a bit of Russian roulette; step through the mirror and hope you ended up somewhere reasonably close to where you wanted to be. What Cade had done was the equivalent of trading a catapult throw for a laser guided nuclear missile.

“Learned a trick or two over the last couple of weeks,” Cade told him. “But forget about that. I’ve got something better. I know what the Adversary is up to!”

That caught Riley’s attention. He gestured that Cade should take a seat at the small table that served as his work area but Cade was too hyped up to sit. He paced back and forth while Riley took the chair instead.

“You’ve heard about the soldiers being kidnapped?”

Riley nodded. He hadn’t paid too much attention to the news reports, but he was at least aware of them. One missing soldier had been bad enough, with now with five of them missing, the situation was getting plenty of news coverage.

“All former US soldiers. All in top condition before whatever injury landed them in a coma. All of them with little to no brain activity and existing on life support.”

“Sounds like they’d be useless to the Adversary,” Riley said. “What am I missing?”

“They’re just the opposite, actually. They’re perfect for what the Adversary has in mind.”

Cade explained about meeting the Forsaken One and what he’d learned about the Adversary’s plans to bring back his scream as a result.

“He’s going to call the other members of his scream out of the infernal plane and give them the bodies of the kidnapped victims as vessels to inhabit on this one. Once he does, it won’t take the fallen angels long to assume control of their new forms, just as the Adversary did with Gabrielle.”

While Cade talked, Riley used his computer to pull up information on the kidnappings. Scanning it, he said, “Each of the victims were considered to be all but brain dead; in several of the cases, the doctors were just waiting for the family to give the word to take them off life support.”

“Right. Without an active intelligence to fight, it will be easy for the fallen angels to take over the bodies and make them their own. And if that happens, we’re in for a world of hurt.”

Riley looked up. “Define ‘world of hurt.’”

“Biblical-style-cataclysms-right-out-of-the-Book-of-Revelation-with-the-world-divided-up-between-seven-fallen-angels-as-their-personal-hunting-ground world of hurt.”

Riley knew Cade wasn’t joking; he never joked about things like that.

Taking a deep breath, he said, “Right. Just another day at the office then. So how do we stop this bastard?”

“With this.” Cade pulled the dagger out of his belt and laid it on the table in front of Riley.

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.