understand this. I intend to rescue Gabrielle and I won’t let you or anyone else get in my way.”
Riley was not easily intimidated. ”Think about it for a minute, man! We’re talking about the Adversary. You can’t possibly expect us to just sit back and let him carry out whatever fucked-up plan he has in mind while you get your act together. Innocent people will die!”
For the first time since the conversation started, Cade agreed with his former teammate. He just didn’t care. ”Yes, they will. But innocent people die all the time and in the end it doesn’t really matter, does it?”
“It doesn’t matter?” Riley replied, clearly incredulous at what he was hearing. ”Have you gone nuts? Of course it matters. Protecting the innocent is the entire reason the Order exists!”
A year ago Cade would have agreed with him. But the death of Preceptor Michaels had started a slow slide away from that focus as certain individuals began to assert their will on the way the Order was run, directing it not for the good of the people but for their own selfish ends, and now Cade no longer believed that the Order followed that original mandate. What he’d experienced earlier that very evening reinforced that opinion and told him that things were going to get much worse before they got better.
If they got better at all.
It was time he looked out for his own.
“Tell the Preceptor to back off,” Cade said. ”I will deal with the Adversary. If any harm comes to Gabrielle – if even a single hair on her head is damaged from something the Order decided to do from this point forward – then those responsible will have to deal with me!”
“Be reasonable! You can’t...”
Cade pressed the ‘End Call’ button and cut Riley off in mid-sentence. He powered the phone off, then dropped it to the ground and crushed it beneath the heel of his boot. Replacing the phone was much easier than taking the chance that the Order was tracking him through the phone’s connection to the cellular network he’d been using. He scooped up the pieces and flung them into the woods.
He glanced back down the road in the direction of his home a final time, as if to say goodbye, and then climbed back into the Jeep and drove off.
Time was running out and he had a fallen angel to find.
CHAPTER TEN
Once out of the woods and back on more regularly travelled roads, Cade drove north, through Hartford and across the state line into Massachusetts. He grabbed some fast food at a rest stop outside of Springfield, then drove into the outskirts of the city where he found a motel and took a room around the back, out of view of the street.
He’d had time to think about his next move on the drive north. He’d pretty much exhausted his local targets before running afoul of the Order; the succubus he’d interrogated the other night had been the last one on his list. With nowhere else to turn, he thought it was time to try something a bit more extreme.
It was time to look in the Archives.
Officially established in 1475, though they had existed for quite some time before that, the Archivum Secretum Vaticaun, or Secret Vatican Archives, was an extension of the Vatican library that preserved and enhanced the deeds and documents related to the government of the Catholic Church, including the papers of the individual Popes. Its five miles of shelving housed some one million volumes written between the 8th and the 21st centuries. It was the Church’s official stance that the word “secret” did not mean unknown or hidden away, but rather referred to the fact that the collection was the Pope’s personal property.
Conspiracy theorists believed that there was far more to the secret archives than the Church was letting on. In their view the Church was hiding information that would shake the very foundations of society if it was ever released to the public. What that information might actually be changed depending on who you were talking to; theories
Riley was not easily intimidated. ”Think about it for a minute, man! We’re talking about the Adversary. You can’t possibly expect us to just sit back and let him carry out whatever fucked-up plan he has in mind while you get your act together. Innocent people will die!”
For the first time since the conversation started, Cade agreed with his former teammate. He just didn’t care. ”Yes, they will. But innocent people die all the time and in the end it doesn’t really matter, does it?”
“It doesn’t matter?” Riley replied, clearly incredulous at what he was hearing. ”Have you gone nuts? Of course it matters. Protecting the innocent is the entire reason the Order exists!”
A year ago Cade would have agreed with him. But the death of Preceptor Michaels had started a slow slide away from that focus as certain individuals began to assert their will on the way the Order was run, directing it not for the good of the people but for their own selfish ends, and now Cade no longer believed that the Order followed that original mandate. What he’d experienced earlier that very evening reinforced that opinion and told him that things were going to get much worse before they got better.
If they got better at all.
It was time he looked out for his own.
“Tell the Preceptor to back off,” Cade said. ”I will deal with the Adversary. If any harm comes to Gabrielle – if even a single hair on her head is damaged from something the Order decided to do from this point forward – then those responsible will have to deal with me!”
“Be reasonable! You can’t...”
Cade pressed the ‘End Call’ button and cut Riley off in mid-sentence. He powered the phone off, then dropped it to the ground and crushed it beneath the heel of his boot. Replacing the phone was much easier than taking the chance that the Order was tracking him through the phone’s connection to the cellular network he’d been using. He scooped up the pieces and flung them into the woods.
He glanced back down the road in the direction of his home a final time, as if to say goodbye, and then climbed back into the Jeep and drove off.
Time was running out and he had a fallen angel to find.
CHAPTER TEN
Once out of the woods and back on more regularly travelled roads, Cade drove north, through Hartford and across the state line into Massachusetts. He grabbed some fast food at a rest stop outside of Springfield, then drove into the outskirts of the city where he found a motel and took a room around the back, out of view of the street.
He’d had time to think about his next move on the drive north. He’d pretty much exhausted his local targets before running afoul of the Order; the succubus he’d interrogated the other night had been the last one on his list. With nowhere else to turn, he thought it was time to try something a bit more extreme.
It was time to look in the Archives.
Officially established in 1475, though they had existed for quite some time before that, the Archivum Secretum Vaticaun, or Secret Vatican Archives, was an extension of the Vatican library that preserved and enhanced the deeds and documents related to the government of the Catholic Church, including the papers of the individual Popes. Its five miles of shelving housed some one million volumes written between the 8th and the 21st centuries. It was the Church’s official stance that the word “secret” did not mean unknown or hidden away, but rather referred to the fact that the collection was the Pope’s personal property.
Conspiracy theorists believed that there was far more to the secret archives than the Church was letting on. In their view the Church was hiding information that would shake the very foundations of society if it was ever released to the public. What that information might actually be changed depending on who you were talking to; theories
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