Darkness descended.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN.

What had been a rather heated conversation just moments before as Riley came down the hallway dropped to a dull whisper and then died entirely as he stepped inside the locker room.

Normally he would have ignored it; the men had a tendency to be closed-mouthed whenever an officer was present, even if, like himself, the officer had come up through the ranks. It was to be expected to some degree. But something about the way several of the men kept stealing glances in his direction as he pa.s.sed through the room finally brought him to a halt.

He looked around; of the two dozen or so men that stood around the room in various shades of undress following an exercise drill, the majority of them would not meet his eyes. Those that did seemed to do so defiantly, as if daring Riley to say something.

To their surprise, and perhaps even his own, he did.

"What's going on?" he asked.

No one said anything. "Grover? Chambers? What's the problem here?"

The former didn't say anything, but the later, Chambers, looked away as he said, "No problem, sir."

Riley was about to press the issue there obviously was a problem of some kind or another when someone in the back of the room said, "I think they should hang him."

The Echo Team commander couldn't tell who had spoken, so he asked the room in general. "Hang who? And for what?"

No one said anything.

A feeling of dread began to drift its way up his spine. Suddenly he knew that something had gone terribly wrong. Now he just needed to find out what.

"When I ask a question, I expect an answer. One last time, hang who and for what?"

This time one of the men from the back of the room stepped forward. Riley recognized him as one of the new replacements that had been brought into the strike team ranks in recent months by Preceptor Johannson. Pasquale, Riley thought his name was.

"The Heretic. Williams. You ask me it should have been done a long time ago," the man said with a sneer, looking around at the other men to see who was with him.

Hang Cade? Riley couldn't believe what he was hearing.

Nor seeing, for that matter. A number of the men were nodding in agreement with Pasquale. Most were rookies, but there were a handful of veterans doing the same. It was as if the Preceptor's whisper campaign against Cade had wiped away the years of sacrifice he had made on the Order's behalf.

The rest of the men were muttering darkly as well, but their ire was directed at their comrades rather than at Cade. A tension sprang into the air, one that hadn't been there moments before. It was as if voicing their opinions to a superior officer had suddenly made their differences all the more real. If left unchecked, Riley had no doubt that fists would be flying before long.

Dissension like this was a cancer festering in the ranks, and he needed to cut it out before it grew too big to be contained.

He walked across the room until he stood toe-to-toe with Pasquale. Riley had six inches on the other man, never mind seventy-five pounds, and so Pasquale was forced to crane his neck upward to look him in the eye, which was just what Riley wanted. It was awfully hard to stare someone down if you were forced to look up and it didn't take more than a few seconds for the rookie to break eye contact and look away.

Riley kept the grin of satisfaction off of his face. Instead, he turned and looked over the rest of the men in the room, making it absolutely clear that he wasn't happy with them.

Into the silence, he said, "Let me be absolutely clear. The next time I hear someone make a remark about "hanging" Knight Commander Williams or any other member of this Order, I will have him facing a court martial for threatening a fellow Templar faster than you can Jimminy Cricket, is that clear?"

"Yes, sir!"

Riley glared at them all once more and then said, "I'm sure you've all got things to do. Get to them. Dismissed!"

As the men returned to their tasks, Riley caught Chambers' eye and indicated that he should follow. He led the other man a short way down the hall where a conference room stood empty and open. Riley stepped inside, gestured for Chambers to do the same, and then asked, "What the h.e.l.l was that all about?"

"You haven't heard then, sir?"

"Heard what? I've been holed up writing after-action reports all morning."

Chambers hesitated.

"G.o.d in heaven, Chambers. Just tell me, will ya? It can't be that bad."

But it was.

Worse even.

"Commander Williams was caught trying to a.s.sa.s.sinate the Grand Master earlier this morning."

"What? You have got to be kidding me!"

"No joke, sir. There are conflicting reports about how it happened, but one thing is clear Knight Commander Williams was involved and by all accounts, he tried to kill Grand Master Devereaux in his sleep."

Riley didn't know what to say. Cade? Kill the Grand Master?

He thanked Chambers for filling him in, dismissed him, and then continued to his office where he used his desktop to access the communications system and pull the office report from the server. It had been emailed to all senior staff half an hour ago yet somehow his name had been left off the recipients list, despite his position as a strike team commander. He didn't bother to contact Communications to try and find out why, for he knew he'd just be told that it was an "oversight" and that it wouldn't happen again.

Yeah, oversight my a.s.s, he thought sourly, as he sat down to read the report.

It didn't say much; just that former Knight Commander Williams had been captured inside Rosslyn Castle after making an armed attempt on the Grand Master's life and that he was being questioned concerning his relationship and interaction with the Adversary.

Riley didn't believe it, of course; Cade might be slipping when it came to keeping his anger in check when dealing with creatures of a supernatural persuasion and he'd certainly lost it the other night on the bridge when Riley had tried to open fire on the Adversary, but Cade would never try to kill the head of the Order.

At least, Riley thought, not without good reason.

Right?

But the more he thought about it, the less certain Riley became. Cade's behavior had grown more and more erratic since the confrontation with the Necromancer, Simon Logan, and had only gotten worse with every day that his wife, Gabrielle, remained under the Adversary's control. Where a year ago he couldn't have imagined Cade doing anything that could potentially harm the Order, times certainly had changed. That had been before Cade had been ordered to abandon men on the battlefield, before he'd been accused of consorting with the enemy, before those he thought of as friends and allies had been forced to fire upon his beloved wife. Riley could easily come up with half-a-dozen scenarios where Cade might feel violence against the Grand Master was necessary to reach a certain end.

He still didn't think the rumors were true, but now he couldn't just dismiss them out of hand.

Besides, even if they weren't true, his friend could still be in trouble. If there was anything the last few weeks had shown it was that former Knight Commander Cade Williams had made more than his fair share of enemies within the hallowed ranks of the Templars, starting with Preceptor Johannson himself.

Who just happened to be in Scotland right now.

The coincidence was too great to ignore. Johannson had something to do with this mess; Riley was certain of it.

And that meant that Riley had a decision to make.

He'd been relieved of heading up the search for the Adversary, but that didn't mean he wasn't still an integral part of the process. With the exception of Cade, Riley was probably one of the few Templars that had faced the Adversary at full strength and lived to tell the tale. That made him an invaluable resource to the search; he hated to admit it, but it was true.

They hadn't seen hide nor hair of the Adversary since the encounter on the bridge two nights earlier. It had gone to ground as effectively as it had for the two weeks prior. Riley didn't know if that was intentional or a result of the fact that the Adversary seemed to be having some trouble controlling the body that it was inhabiting. If it was having any trouble at all, he thought. Whole thing could just be a big ruse to throw us off.

Of course the Adversary could surface again at any moment. If it did, Echo would get called out to support Gamma Team when they tried to take it down. Given his knowledge, Riley would be expected to be there, even if he was no longer in charge of the primary search.

But experience was telling him that there was very little he could do from here to help Cade, especially if Johannson was behind the whole mess as he suspected him to be.

If there was anyone who could help Cade, it would be the Seneschal. Cade had reported directly to Ferguson for several years and their interaction had always been one of mutual respect and admiration. It was only in the aftermath of the Chiang Shih incident that the chain of command had been revised to require the head of each special combat team to report to their local Preceptor and Riley didn't think Ferguson ultimately had anything to do with that decision. In fact, Riley was pretty sure the Seneschal had argued against it as vehemently as Cade had.

Riley might not have the political power needed to make a difference in Cade's current situation, but the Seneschal certainly did. If Riley could get him on Cade's side of the issue, then Cade stood a chance.

And therein lay the problem. It was going to take a bit of effort, never mind time, to layout all that had happened to Cade and his wife since their first encounter with the Adversary and to get the Seneschal to understand Cade's recent reluctance to do anything that might endanger his chances of getting her back, limited though they may be. Riley had no doubt that his chances of success would be greatly increased if he had the discussion in person but that meant traveling to Scotland and cutting out on his duties here.

Duties? What duties? Johannson cut you out of the search and gave your task to Gamma Team, remember?

It was that, more than anything else, that helped him make up his mind. Cade had saved his life more than once in their years together and there was no way he could desert his friend now, especially not when Cade's judgment seemed to be floundering in the wake of his grief.

Scotland it was.

Now he just had to figure out how to get there.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN.

The first thing Cade saw when he opened his eyes was Preceptor Johannson. The other man stood on the opposite side of a door made of bullet-resistant gla.s.s, dressed in his characteristic Saville Row suit, and stared in at Cade with an expression that spoke volumes about his intentions.

a.s.shole, Cade thought.

Realizing he was lying with the side of his face against a cold stone floor, Cade put his palms flat against the floor beneath him, intending to push himself up into a sitting position, and the Preceptor's trap was sprung.

The second his bare hands came in contact with the floor of his cell Cade was overwhelmed with a barrage of emotions that blasted out of the stone beneath him. It was like getting hit with a fire hose on full blast, but instead of water the hose carried the emotional detritus of the prisoners who'd touched that floor before him, who had wept or cried or raged at the situation in which they'd found themselves. Sometimes the prisoners had been wounded and sometimes they'd been completely psychotic; both their agony and their madness were bound up in the surface of the tiles that they had touched and were contained in the torrent that swept over him, A scream burst involuntarily from his lips as his mind sought to make sense of all it was seeing and feeling; if he'd been a weaker man, he could easily have been reduced to a gibbering shadow of the man he'd once been. As it was he barely had the strength and presence of mind to realize what was happening and yank his hands away from the floor as he forced himself into a sitting position.

For a moment, it was all Cade could to just breathe.

His heart was jack-hammering in his chest so hard that he thought he might break a rib or two and his body was trembling uncontrollably from the ma.s.sive dose of adrenaline that had poured into his system. Worse yet, he was having trouble sorting out his memories from those that his psychometry had forced him to experience. Images kept flooding his mind and with them all the sensory perceptions that had gone along with them and yet he knew, somewhere deep in his mind, that he hadn't physically lived through a single one of them.

It was enough to drown a man in a river of madness.

If he hadn't had years of practice dealing with his Gift he might have lost himself then and there, might have drifted into a world of unrealities without any means of finding his way back and spent the rest of his days as a gibbering idiot.

Thankfully, after several minutes of effort, he got his thoughts and his body back under control.

Looking down at his hands, he saw that his gloves had been removed, most likely while he'd been unconscious. Nor were his gloves the only things; his clothing had been taken from him and replaced with an orange jumper, just like the kind they issued to all of their long-term prisoners.

Cade was furious, both for the loss of his gloves which he needed if he was going to get out of this place - and for the loss of his clothing, but he didn't let either show on his face.

He could feel Johannson standing there, watching him from outside the door, but Cade ignored him for the moment, turning his attention instead to figuring out where he was.

The room they had him in was small no more than eight by eight, he guessed and was devoid of any kind of furnishings except for a chemical toilet in one corner. Cade recognized the room immediately as one of the temporary holdings in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the commandery. It was missing the usual meager cot that they provided to the inmates, but the foot-thick reinforced gla.s.s door that provided the only entrance and exit to the cell and the toilet were dead giveaways.

He'd put more than his fare share of monsters human or otherwise in cells like this over the last seven years and knew exactly how difficult they were to break out of. He was going to have to be patient and wait for them to take him somewhere else before trying to escape.

Unfortunately patience was not one of his virtues.

He looked over at the Preceptor, still standing outside the door, and thought, Maybe there's a quicker way out.

Cade walked over and stood in front of the door. A narrow slot, no more than two inches high and eight inches wide, set into the door at chest height allowed him to converse with anyone standing outside his cell.

Cade decided to go on the offensive.

"I don't know what your game is, Johannson, but I suggest you open this door and let me out immediately.

"No, I don't think so," the other man said.

"Your men attacked a senior commander in the Order; the Seneschal, never mind that the Grand Master will not be pleased to hear it."

Johannson laughed. "On the contrary, the Grand Master will be quite pleased."

He reached inside the suit coat he was wearing and removed a piece of paper. He unfolded it and then held it up so Cade could read it.

"You might find this of interest," he said with a wink.

One glance was all it took for Cade to recognize it as a formal proclamation from the office of the Grand Master; he'd seen enough of them during his years in the Order, after all. He skipped past the legalese at the top and jumped down to the meat of the order.

Words jumped out at him.

Former Knight Commander Cade Williams.

Conspiring with the enemy.

Excommunicated.

Considered armed and highly dangerous.

He didn't bother reading any further.

"It's all bulls.h.i.t and you know it," Cade said, trying not to show how much it had rattled him. Now the Seneschal's unwillingness to get involved made more sense; anyone who a.s.sociated with an excommunicated individual was at risk for the same. Cade's faith might be on rocky ground despite all he'd seen and done but for many of the troops it was the solid bedrock beneath them and the very reason they stayed in the fight. Even his staunchest allies would be hard pressed to support him at this point.

"Bulls.h.i.t? Oh, I doubt that. I doubt that very much," the Preceptor said. "But we'll know for sure soon enough."

The words were out before Cade could catch them. "What does that mean?"