The Templar's Secret (The Templar Series) (47 page)

Without the Blood Atonement,
his sinner’s slate could never be wiped clean.

And Cardinal Fiorio ha
d known that all along. Moreover, the ruthless cardinal had felt no compunction in recruiting Gracián to do his bidding.

He actually wants me to kill an innocent young woman.
After which, he will reward the heinous deed by wiring $2.2 million into the Sanguis Christi bank account.

Which
made Gracián little more than a gun for hire.
A paid Vatican assassin.

Fearing
the dark night of the soul, he hastily opened his desk drawer and grabbed a yellow sticky pad. Mind made up, he scrawled a message and slapped it on to his computer monitor where it would be readily seen.

‘
I am damned,’ Gracián murmured as he rushed from the office.

For all eternity
.

S
eeing the colossal stone mansion perched atop the knoll, Edie’s mouth gaped.

‘
It looks like something straight out of a spooky Gothic novel,’ she remarked, shivering slightly. ‘Not only do the photos on the Internet
not
do this place justice, I now understand why they brought Anala here.’ Given its vast size, she could be imprisoned in any one of a hundred different rooms.

Caedmon
made no comment as he pulled the Ford sedan into an open-ended porte cochère.

Nerves stretched taut,
Edie peered over her shoulder.

‘
Perhaps you should wait in the car with the doors locked and hold down the proverbial fort,’ Caedmon suggested.

‘
And let you face the dragon all alone? Nothing doing,’ she retorted in what she hoped was a strident tone of voice. A far cry from how she was actually feeling. ‘Besides, I’ve already donned my chain mail. That said, let’s hurry up and find Father Santos before the God Squad shows up.’

‘
Right.’ Getting out of the car, Caedmon opened the back passenger door and reached for his newly purchased waist pack. It was specifically designed for hunters, with special compartments to hold shotgun shells, knives, etcetera. Given that it was a mossy shade of camouflage, it wasn’t something that you’d ever take on a holiday. Not unless you were into hunter chic.

He snapped it around his waist, blue eyes glittering, hard as
colored glass. He then snatched the Mossberg shotgun and his rucksack from off the backseat.

‘
Stay close to me,’ he instructed, meeting her gaze across the top of the sedan. ‘Step softly. Speak softly.’

Edie nodded
wordlessly. Even if she’d wanted to raise her voice, she doubted that it would be possible, her vocal cords constricted with fear.

As they made their way towards the entrance of Mercy Hall, loose scree crunched underfoot. Again, she
turned her head and glanced over her shoulder. ‘Sorry. Bad case of the jitters,’ she whispered when Caedmon shot her a questioning glance.

‘
Perfectly understandable. We’re treading on dangerous ground.’

‘No kidding. It’s
like everyone vaporized into thin air,’ she remarked, the thought inciting yet another visceral surge.

While she should have been relieved that no one was present, that they’d not been greeted by armed guards, she couldn’t shake the feeling that something had gone terribly awry at Mercy Hall. The eerie silence was so unnerving that it was like a palpable, disembodied presence following in their wake.

As they ascended a wide stone staircase that led to a grand Victorian porch, an ozone-laden breeze rustled the nearby trees. To Edie’s surprise, Caedmon walked over to one of the oversized concrete urns that anchored the stair railing and, slipping his rucksack off his shoulder, stuffed it into the opening. She had no idea why he did it – particularly since the third copper plate was inside the rucksack – but knew better than to question his actions. Not when they were standing, quite literally, at the castle gate.

With the shotgun braced against his torso,
Caedmon opened the front door. Edie winced at the loud squeal made by the rusty hinges. Unsure what to expect, she followed him into an expansive hallway visually weighed down with a vast amount of dark-stained woodwork.
The walls. The staircase. The ceiling
. In a word, the hall took dreary to new decorative heights, the heavily carved wood everywhere. Overhead a crystal chandelier tinkled softly from the breeze that wafted in through the open front door.

Nudging
Caedmon in the ribs, Edie drew his attention to a truly odd bit of Victorian whimsy: a built-in organ under the stair landing. ‘If that thing starts playing Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor”,
I’m outta here.’

‘
If that happens, I think I’ll join you,’ Caedmon whispered, the first indication that he, too, was unnerved that there wasn’t a soul in sight.

Come out, come out wherever you are.

On high alert, they cautiously traipsed down the corridor, following the posted signs for the ‘Office’. The carpeted passage was illuminated by a row of Victorian-style wall sconces. She was no expert, but they looked like original fixtures; although 120 years ago the soft glow would probably have come from flickering gaslights rather than electric bulbs.

Caedmon
stopped abruptly, Edie accidentally plowing into his backside.

‘
I believe this is the office,’ he said, jutting his chin at an opened doorway.

Peering
around his shoulder, she saw what appeared to be an old-fashioned study with an ornate fireplace, again, more dark-stained paneling, and an entire wall of built-in bookcases.

‘
Where’s Father Santos?’ she asked. The office, like every other room they’d passed en route, was completely deserted.

‘
Haven’t the vaguest.’ Raising the Mossberg shotgun into shooting position, Caedmon tucked the butt against his shoulder. ‘Stay put,’ he silently mouthed to her.

The fear factor spiking off the charts, Edie anxiously watched as he slowly made his way into the
room, his head swiveling from side-to-side. Stepping over to a large desk strewn with folders and messy piles of paper, he examined a yellow slip of paper that was stuck on to the computer monitor.

‘
Just what kind of game is this bloody bastard playing?’

‘“
Your daughter is in the root cellar at the caretaker’s cottage that’s located due west of Mercy Hall,”’ Edie read aloud from the piece of yellow note paper. Like him, she was clearly perplexed by the scrawled message left on the monitor by the absentee priest. ‘Do you think this is some kind of ruse to ambush us?’

‘
I’m uncertain what to make of it,’ Caedmon confessed. Something was gravely amiss at the Sanguis Christi Fellowship,
of
that
he was certain. ‘Before we head to the caretaker’s cottage, I need to see the satellite maps that we earlier downloaded on to the iPad.’

Edie unzipped her messenger bag and retrieved the computer,
silently passing it to him.

Tablet in hand, he examined the satellite photo. Moderately relieved, he nodded his head and said,
‘There does seem to be a structure several hundred meters to the west.’

A determined look in her eyes, Edie stuffed the iPad back into her bag.
‘Okay. Let’s hit it. This place is giving me the creeps.’

And me, as well.
Although if the firing squad was waiting at the caretaker’s cottage, the brutes would be made to wish that they’d never left the egregiously named Mercy Hall. He would need little incentive to pull the trigger on his newly purchased weapon.

Leading with the shotgun,
Caedmon took the point position as they wended their way back to the hallway. With each footfall, his eyes blinked rapidly. Akin to a camera shutter clicking off each individual surveillance photo, he committed to memory doorways, corridors, staircases. Information he would need should they suddenly come under enemy fire. Like Edie, he worried that the priest was dropping enticing breadcrumbs that would ultimately lead them into a deadly trap.

S
eeing a recessed emergency fire cabinet, he came to a sudden halt. Peering into the glass-fronted case, he inventoried its contents: in addition to the standard red extinguisher, it also contained other fire-fighting paraphernalia.

‘
Stand back,’ he ordered just before he forcefully slammed the butt of his shotgun into the locked case, smashing the glass on contact.

Edie stared, button-eyed.
‘What the heck are you doing?’

‘
A man can’t have too many weapons,’ he informed her, plucking a rubber-handled fire axe out of the cabinet. Twelve inches long and weighing approximately two pounds, the short-handled axe could puncture, slice or pry.
A very handy weapon, indeed
,
he thought, tucking it into the nylon band on his waist pack.

‘
How about me? Don’t I rate a weapon?’ Edie griped under her breath as they continued down the hallway. Obviously, she was still peeved that he’d put his foot down at the gun shop, refusing to let her purchase a second shotgun.

‘
One deadly weapon in the family is quite enough.
’

A few moments later, they emerged from Mercy Hall. In the
short time that they’d been inside, fast-moving storm clouds had squeezed the last bit of sunshine from the sky, casting plum-colored shadows on to the mansion and surrounding landscape. In the far distance, thunder rumbled.

‘
Looks like a killer storm is brewing,’ Edie said worriedly as they descended the porch steps.

More concerned with the danger closer at hand,
Caedmon raised the Persuader, pressing the butt snugly against his shoulder. His finger hovered over the trigger. Should they have a run-in with anyone whom he deemed a threat, he would unload a blast of double-aught buckshot. The ‘shoot first, ask questions second’ rule had gone into effect the moment they’d entered the Sanguis Christi grounds. This was enemy territory. The fact that the priest had disappeared was worrisome and he now wondered if some nefarious plot was about to unfold.

As they hurriedly made their way across the manicured gardens that bordered the mansion, his gaze
darted from side-to-side, searching the shadows for any sign of movement. Off to one side, he saw a stone chapel. In the opposite direction he sighted a large six-bay carriage house.

They’d gone approximately one hundred
meters when the neatly trimmed lawn gave way to an overgrown grassy meadow. A wide swath had recently been mowed, creating a path capacious enough for a vehicle. The path led down the hillside, disappearing into a wooded glen. Given the deeply incised tire treads in the mashed earth, a heavy vehicle had recently passed that way.

More breadcrumbs?
he wondered as he scanned the surrounding area.

‘
I want you to stay here while I go find the caretaker’s cottage,’ he told Edie.

‘
But you might need me to –’

‘
I do need you, Edie,’ he interjected. ‘I need you to stand sentry.’ He pointed to a thick-waisted maple. ‘Right over there behind that tree where you can maintain a visual on both the mansion and the mowed swath. Should you see anyone, you’re to immediately call me on the mobile.’

Wearing a crestfallen expression, Edie nodded her head, no doubt realizing that it was the most prudent course of action.
Caedmon wrapped his free arm around her shoulders and pulled her close, soundly kissing her on the lips.

‘C
all me the moment that you find Anala. And
please
be careful, Caedmon.’

‘“Excuse me, then. You know my heart.”’

Not feeling nearly as jaunty as his farewell suggested, he set off down the mowed swath, shotgun at the ready.

At the bottom of the hill, he entered a dark glen. Towering trees ominously swayed under the force of a powerful wind gust. It was a dark, unruly landscape that reiterated what he already knew.

Every Eden had its snake.

‘
Good thing I’m not superstitious,’ Edie muttered as she caught sight of a lone raven circling overhead. ‘Because
that
is not the best of omens.’

She
dragged her gaze away from the moody gray sky, the frail sun half-hidden by combative storm clouds, and resumed her surveillance of the Sanguis Christi grounds. As she stared at Mercy Hall, a breeze rustled the trees, causing goose bumps to instantly pop out on her bare arms. Attired in a black tank top and a pair of khakis, she wished she’d worn a summer sweater, the day having turned cool.

A building that size, you’d expect to see a few people hanging around
, she thought for the umpteenth time. But there wasn’t a soul in sight.