C1 Chapter One

Cade Williams crouched in an alley in one of Bridgeport, Connecticut’s rougher neighborhoods, watching the front of a two-story dwelling just up the street from his position. The smell of garbage from the Dumpster he was using for cover was heavy in the early-evening air, though Cade had gotten used to the stench.

“TOC to all units. You have compromise authority and permission to move to Green. I say again, Green.” The bone-mike was pressed securely against his lower jaw, the high-tech device carrying his words clearly to the rest of his team though they were spoken in no more than a whisper.

“Five. . .”

He pictured the assault group sitting in their specially modified Expeditions half-a-block away, the breaching rams in their laps. He knew they were concentrating on the sequence to come; who gets out first, who hits the door first, how to say “drop your gun” in Spanish.

“Four. . .”

His thoughts jumped to the sniper teams on the adjacent rooftops, his eyes and ears since this assault began. He knew their preparations intimately, from the way they slid that first bullet into the breach with their fingertips, needing the reassurance of feeling it seat properly, to the thousands and thousands of rounds they’d fired, learning the way the weapons reacted to heat and wind and weather.

“Three. . .”

He knew that his sharpshooters were aligning their bodies with the recoil path of their weapons, pressing their hips against the ground, and spreading their knees shoulder width apart for stability. He knew what it was like to stare through a Unertl ten-power scope at the target, watching, waiting for the moment. He’d been there himself, too many times to count.

“Two. . .”

Discipline was the name of the game, and in Cade’s unit, it was the only game being played. The stakes were too high, the consequences too horrible for it to be anything but deadly serious.

“One. . .”

His men took out the two guards standing near the front door from 250 yards away, the impact of their .308 caliber rounds knocking the targets backward into the tall grass on either side of the front stoop with barely a sound. As the bodies hit the ground the Expeditions slammed to a halt out front, the rest of Echo Team swarming the house. The front and back doors fell victim to the breaching rams, flashbangs quickly following, then Cade’s men were inside. Brief, sporadic gunfire reached his ears, then silence.

Cade held his breath.

“Echo-1 to TOC. Structure is clear. Objective is secured.”

“Coming in,” Cade replied. He would have preferred his usual position on one of the entry teams. He was the type of commander who led by example, not from the sidelines, and staying behind as tactical operations command had been a test of his patience; but his concern over their target’s ability to detect his presence had won out over his need to be involved in the action. The need for stealth was over. Signaling Riley, his second-in-command, Cade emerged from cover and strode briskly forward.

He swept up the steps and entered the house, ignoring the snipers’ victims lying in the uncut grass on either side of the porch. As he moved swiftly through the lower floor he passed four other bodies, all young Hispanic males, each lying in a rapidly expanding pool of blood. He had no sympathy for their wasted lives; they were on the wrong side of this conflict, and the unflinching hand of righteousness had finally caught up with them. If anything, he was simply pleased that there were four fewer gangbangers on the city streets. It was the man that his team held captive in the kitchen that truly mattered to Cade. Everything and everyone else beyond that was just a means to an end.

Juan Alvarez was seated in the middle of the room in an old chair, his arms pulled back between the steel posts supporting the seatback, his hands secured together with a set of nylon flex cuffs. Wilson and Ortega stood a few feet to either side of the prisoner, their Mk 17 SCAR-H rifles at the ready and aimed in his direction.

His pistol still in hand but pointed at the floor, Cade crossed the room to stand in front of the prisoner. Alvarez looked as if he had just been roused from sleep; his normally slicked-back hair was in disarray, and all he was wearing was a pair of hastily donned jeans. His usual air of smug superiority was still in place, however.

Cade fully intended to change that.

Alvarez had been under surveillance by Echo Team for the last three weeks. During that time it quickly became clear that the Bridgeport police were correct in their suspicions; Alvarez was indeed the primary conduit for the movement of heroin through Connecticut and into the rest of New England.

Cade didn’t care about the drugs.

He wanted Alvarez for a far more personal reason, and he wasted no time getting to the point.

“Where is he?” Cade asked.

The prisoner gave him a look of disdain, and a stream of rapid-fire Spanish poured forth from his mouth. Cade understood enough to know that it was more a commentary on his mother’s background than an answer to his question.

Shaking his head in resignation, Cade nodded to Riley.

The larger man stepped forward and gripped the back of the prisoner’s chair, holding it tightly.

Cade moved closer, placed the barrel of his pistol against the prisoner’s left kneecap, and, without another word, pulled the trigger.

Blood flew.

Alvarez screamed.

Riley held the chair firmly in place against the man’s struggles.

Cade waited patiently until the screaming stopped. Then, softly, he said, “I don’t have time for this. I asked you a question. I want an answer. Where is the Adversary?”

This time, the answer was in English.

“Drop dead, asshole. I don’t know who you’re talkin’ about.”

Expressionless, Cade shot him in the other leg, shattering the man’s right kneecap.

Alvarez writhed in agony, his muscles straining against the pain. Riley’s arms tensed, but that was the only sign of the increased effort he exerted to hold the prisoner securely in place.

Over the wounded man’s cries, Cade shouted, “Tell me where he is!”

The prisoner lapsed back into Spanish, cursing his interrogator vehemently; but he did not acknowledge Cade’s demand. Blood flowed down his legs and began to pool on the cracked linoleum beneath his feet.

Cade snorted in disgust and motioned Riley out of the way. The sergeant lost no time following orders.

Cade raised the gun and pointed it at the prisoner’s face. “Last chance.”

With that, Alvarez went abruptly still. His eyes lost focus, as if listening to a voice no one else could hear, and his face went slack. Out of the corner of his eye Cade caught Riley looking at him quizzically, but he kept his eyes on the prisoner, watching him closely and didn’t respond.

Without a change in expression, Alvarez began to shake. His head twisted from side to side erratically as it shuddered atop his neck, darting this way and that like a hyperactive hummingbird. His mouth opened wide, stretching impossibly far. It seemed as if he was screaming, but no sound issued forth. Finally, with a loud pop, his lower jaw dislocated itself.

Cade calmly watched, his gun unwavering from the target.

The shaking intensified, the legs of the chair skipping and bumping against the tiles, leaving little skid marks in the blood pooling beneath Alvarez’s feet. A strange squealing sound came from his throat. Alvarez’s eyes bulged from their sockets, and blood ran freely from his ears.

Still, Cade stood and waited.

It was only when a widening crack appeared in the center of the prisoner’s forehead, a crack that dripped a substance far darker than blood, that Cade reacted.

With a twitch of his trigger finger, he put a bullet through Alvarez’s skull.

The prisoner and his chair went over backward to lie still on the blood-stained tiles.

In the silence that followed, no one moved for several long moments as they waited to be certain the thing that had once been Juan Alvarez was good and truly dead, then Cade gave the signal, and the team went instantly into motion. One of the men policed the brass from the floor while another checked to be certain no one had left anything behind that might betray their presence in the house. Thirty seconds later the team was filing out the front door and climbing back into the Expeditions, with Cade and Riley taking open seats in the lead vehicle.

Less than five minutes after entry the team was on its way, leaving behind seven bodies to lie cooling in the darkness.

Niall O’Connor watched those around him intently. It was early evening, and the Vienna streets were still crowded, which could make spotting a tail difficult. He was a veteran of this kind of operation, however, and so he took his time, carefully examining his surroundings. When he was certain he hadn’t been followed from the museum, he stepped into the phone booth on the corner and shut the glass door behind him. Ignoring the mounted public telephone, he removed a satellite phone from his pocket and dialed an overseas number from memory.

The phone rang several times before it was picked up. O’Connor could sense someone’s presence at the other end, could hear the sound of breathing, but nothing was said, not even hello.

Into that silence, O’Connor said, “It’s done.”

“And?” The voice was deep and liquid, like water running over gravel.

“The Hofberg object is a fake.”

Another long moment of silence. Then, “And the other?”

O’Connor thought back to the long hours he’d spent in the Vatican Basilica; the endless lines, the quiet hope of the faithful, the majestic beauty of the cathedral itself. He’d walked beneath Michelangelo’s Dome and examined the pilasters, the four square-shaped columns that supported it, paying particular attention to the great statues of the saints - Andrew, Helena, Veronica, and Longinus - that rested in niches within them.

There was power in the cathedral, great power. He’d sensed its ebb and flow as it reacted to the faith of those inside; in some fashion almost every object within the building had glowed with traces of it. Even the statue of St. Peter, its right foot worn smooth after generations of caresses by the faithful, had glistened with the faintest of auras though it wasn’t known to be anything more than an ordinary sculpture.

The greatest concentration of power had clearly been beneath the Dome. Three of the four statues that he’d examined had blazed with it, a result of the True Relics each of them contained, relics that were easily discernible to a man of his particular talents.

But the statue of Saint Longinus, the one supposedly containing the remnant of the Holy Lance, had not. It was barren, bereft of the same spark of Divinity that so encased the other statutes and their contents.

“That’s a fake, too,” he said.

“You’re certain?”

“Yes. I’d stake my reputation on it.”

“Very well. Return to us, and we will begin the next phase of the operation.”

“As you wish.”

O’Connor closed his satellite phone, put it back in his pocket, and stepped out of the phone booth. Night had come, the Vienna air grown cold and still. He pulled the collar of his greatcoat closer about his neck, glancing around again as he did so. When he was satisfied that he was still alone, he walked to the end of the street, gazing in contempt at the closed iron gates of the Hofberg as he passed. Reaching the intersection, he paused for a moment to light a cigarette, waiting for the traffic signal to change. When it did, he stepped out into the street, confident in the performance of his mission and already dreaming of the ways in which he would spend his exorbitant fee.

A smile of expectation on his face, he didn’t see the city bus surge through the intersection against the light, didn’t see the wide front grill bearing down on him until it was too late.

O’Connor’s body bounced off the unyielding surface of the speeding vehicle, flipped high into the air and came crashing down several yards away. From where he lay broken and twisted in the gutter, his dead eyes stared through the windshield of the vehicle at the empty driver’s seat.

Across the Atlantic in a darkened room, a grey hand reached out in the half-light and finally replaced the phone, severing the connection.