The Apocalypse Door

ONE

When Dante Alighieri wrote his guided tour of Hell one of the stops was the infernal city of Dis: the home of Pandemonium, all of the demons. Dante’s a great source if you want to figure out whether being an adulterer is better or worse than being an oathbreaker, but he doesn’t have the authority of Gospel. Dante said that the lowest circle of Hell is frozen, for example. Me, I don’t believe it.

Newark, New Jersey, isn’t the city of Dis, but it could play the part on TV without having to spend a lot of time in rehearsals. By day, Newark’s crowded and noisy and polluted, full of too many people going places too fast in pursuit of money or power or pleasure. By night, it’s all that and dark as well, with danger waiting in the shadows to catch the unwary.

I’d just finished a job in Canada, checking out a report of Black Masses being celebrated, and was on a get-well tour in New York, staying in a midtown Manhattan hotel and waiting for the stitches to come out. Breakfast was Eggs Benedict. When I’m on the Temple’s expense account I don’t spare my coronary arteries.

Yeah, I’m a Knight of the Temple. We didn’t go away in the fourteenth century, no matter what Philip the Fair tried to pull. The Order has a mission and we’re carrying it out. To protect holy places, travelers in holy places, and certain relics. Straightforward. You’d think that people would let us just get on with it.

But no. Warrior monks make too good a target, especially when they’ve got a lot of assets and the King of France doesn’t. So it was accusations of witchcraft, sodomy, and sacrilege; confiscation of worldly goods, the thumbscrew and the stake; and time for all good little Templars to find urgent business abroad. But that’s all ancient history—Anno Domini 1307, to be exact—and this story is about now.

I was finishing up my breakfast coffee when a businessman came in—Armani suit, silk tie, leather briefcase—sat in the chair opposite me, and curled his fingers on the table in one of the recognition patterns. I didn’t really need it. I recognized him as one of my poor fellow soldiers among the three-and-thirty, the innermost circle of the Temple. He went by the name of Gabriel Gleason, and I was too polite to raise an eyebrow at the moniker. He had ID saying that’s who he was, just like I have ID that says my name is Peter Crossman. Truth and reality can be such slippery things.

I gave the countersign and signaled the waiter for a cup of coffee for my friend.

Somebody loves you, Peter, Gabriel said as soon as the coffee arrived for him and my own cup got topped off.

How do you mean?

You’ve picked up an easy mission. Been reading the papers?

Looked at CNN. What’s up?

Hear about the UN peacekeeping team that got kidnapped in Jerusalem a couple of weeks back?

Landed in our laps?

Where else. He stirred his coffee. He takes it light and sweet. Me, I take my coffee black, the way God and Brazil made it. We were talking in Latin, per usual, which might slow down casual eavesdroppers. The big boys figure that there’s a connection with some dump across the river in Jersey.

Got the briefing book?

He slid his briefcase a little toward me on the floor. Yeah, and now you have it. But that isn’t what should make you feel all loved.

What, then?

You’re pulling preceptor duty.

Lovely. Some Knight hadn’t come home from one of the dark places the Temple sends you to. Or maybe someone had retired, too old for the game. I hoped that it was that. Either way, the ranks were being refilled, and I was the lucky soul who was going to be showing the new guy the lay of the land.

Non nobis, Domine, I muttered. The Templar motto. Not for us, Lord, but to Your Name give Glory. It beats Be Prepared.

You got that right, Gabriel said. He’d finally gotten his coffee to a color he liked and swigged it down. See you later.

He left, sans briefcase. I picked it up and went back to my room. I had some reading to do.

One day later I was in Newark with a newbie Knight in tow. We were in a part of town where the streets were lined with century-old buildings. Broken windows and brick walls spray-painted with graffiti in gang colors and stylized alphabets made it clear who owned the territory now.

The sun had gone down in a smog-red haze two hours before, and the temperature was dropping fast. Traffic roared and bellowed along the potholed streets, and the cracking towers of the refineries near the waterfront burned against the night sky like lurid orange torches. It sure as Hell wasn’t the New Jerusalem. Up to us to see if it was connected with the Old one.

The newbie and I had been watching one of the local warehouses since well before dawn. We had our blind set up a block away on a permanently unfinished highway overpass, part of a project that ran out of funds ten years ago. The rough concrete was hard and cold, but I was used to that.

You wondered why you spent all that time on your knees during your novitiate? I said to my partner for the night. He wasn’t exactly a young man, but still younger than me, a big genial-looking Irish-American gent who currently gloried in the alias of Simon B-for-Barnabas LaRoche. It’s to prepare you for this nonsense.

LaRoche just nodded, barely perceptible in the dark. So far, he’d been doing pretty well. He’d been in the right place at the right time for our meeting, he’d known the sign and countersign, and he had the air of quiet competence that you’d expect of a Knight—overlaid in his case with a certain amount of understandable new-guy nervousness about screwing up in front of the man who was supposed to be evaluating him.

The sign on top of the warehouse read BEST LONG-TERM STORAGE—BONDED. The lights under the right-hand end of the sign had all burned out. I wondered if I ought to take some kind of meaning from that, and decided not. Half the lights in this part of Newark were either burnt out or broken. All the same, somebody thought highly enough of whatever was inside Best Long-Term Storage to pay security guards to watch the building.

I braced my non-reflective binoculars on the upper edge of the guard rail and counted seconds. One of the guards rounded the corner of the warehouse, right on schedule.

What do you make of that guy? I asked. Simon had his binoculars up too.

He patrols the area at the front of the building once every twelve minutes. He came on duty six hours ago, and he probably has two more hours to go.

What makes you say that? The grey tarp that covered us crinkled in the wind.

The guy he relieved did an eight-hour shift. So he should be getting bored and careless around now, if he’s ever going to, and we have twelve minutes to get in.

Is that enough time?

We don’t have a lot of choice, do we?

The guard paced out of sight. Simon had given the right answer—we didn’t have a choice, and it was time to get moving.

I gave him the nod, and he tossed rappelling lines over the side of the bridge in preparation for a fast trip to ground level. He was counting under his breath. I could hear him over our IR link, throat mike to earplug. There shouldn’t be guards out this far, not if the intelligence reports in the briefing book were right.

I certainly hoped that they were right. That team of UN peacekeepers had gone missing about three weeks ago now, and so far none of the usual suspects had spoken up to take credit. Whoever had done the job hadn’t left any traces, either. Several different agencies, civil and military both, had turned the entire region inside out and shaken it, with no obvious results. The UN was reduced to following up leads so faint as to be almost laughable—things like unusually high-level security on a rundown Newark storage warehouse—and calling for help from nongovernmental agencies.

Including the Temple. Especially the Temple.

There’s the Outer Temple that most people know about. When the Knights of the Outer Temple run into something beyond their depth, they pass the word. The word filters up. If a level can’t cope it filters higher. Eventually, if no one else can handle the problem, it hits the Inner Temple and there’s nowhere else to go. There are three and thirty of us in the Inner Temple, all of us warriors and priests equally, all of us with special skills and training granted to us by the World, the Flesh, and sometimes the Devil. Not even the rest of the Knights Templar know about us; we take our orders directly from the Masters in Chatillon. Two days before, Simon B. LaRoche hadn’t known there was an Inner Temple, either. If he failed tonight, I’d haul his ass out of the fire and he’d spend the rest of his days in a mountaintop monastery under a serious vow of silence.

Floodlights high up on the warehouse walls cast the bright yellow-white light of sodium vapor, making the contrasting shadows into pools of inky black. I followed Simon as he moved from one patch of darkness to the next as quietly as my rubber-soled shoes could take me. A skittering noise came off to my left. I hoped it was a rat.

The last open stretch of bright light was coming up. If the timing worked—if we could make it across to the loading door directly opposite, if Simon could disable the alarm, if the door didn’t have any extraordinary locks on it—then we’d be out of sight inside before the guard rounded the corner. By my count, there’d be a whole five seconds of grace.

I went through that last patch of light like lust through a teenaged heart. Then we were in the arch of the warehouse doorway, with Simon fumbling for the control panel. The system was a standard Cybex 194 model, nothing exotic—which was good, because the count was running down. The front plate unscrewed, and Simon took a pair of wires and ran them down the electrical contacts to bridge the central alarm.

Then it was time to work on the heavy lock that held down the rolling door. This job made a good training scenario, and the intel was right on the money so far. Simon was doing real well. I wondered if maybe he hadn’t been a loft-and-safe man before he joined the Franciscans, then joined the Temple, then got the tap on his shoulder to tell him that more exotic things awaited. A long, strange journey for a Grey Friar. I guess it is for all of us.

The count was getting close now. The lock snapped, and I heard the tap-tap-tap of the guard’s footsteps rounding the corner.

I froze. So did Simon. People see motion a long time before they see shapes. We were wearing black. The guard was in the light of those vapor lamps. His night vision would be shot. I hoped.

The footsteps approached and I stopped breathing. Out of the corner of my eye I could see that Simon had his hand on his holster, though he hadn’t yet hauled iron.

The guard passed without looking in our direction. I let my breath out in a soft whisper and drank in the smog-tinged night air. Simon remained motionless until the guard should have made it all the way around the corner, then pushed the door up. He took it eighteen inches and rolled underneath. I followed. The door came down again, the lock snapped shut, and we were in.

Simon pulled a can of compressed air out of the left-hand cargo pocket of his trousers and sprayed a burst into the dark. The cold gas expanded into a cloud of mist, and in the mist I saw a tracery of laser beams: the next set of alarms.

Aside from the lines, the darkness on every side of us was complete. It felt like we were walking in a cave, or in a world of infinite night—nothing but darkness stretching out forever, no walls, no ceiling, the floor invisible even as it pressed against my feet, nothing left of reality except thin traces of laser light in a puff of vapor.

I stepped over one of the glittering red lines and ducked under the next as Simon squirted off another puff of compressed air. As long as we were going through snares, we were heading in the right direction.

We kept going until the feel of the air around me changed. A strange breeze blew on my face, and I knew that we had come out of the passageway into a large room. The sounds were different here—no echoes of our breathing, or of the quiet scrape and shuffle of our feet.

The room felt empty. I pulled out a set of thermal imaging viewers from my right-leg cargo pocket and fitted them over my eyes. With an infrared flashlight in my left, I did a slow turn. I put on the headphones from my belt-mounted scanner, checking for proximity alarms, motion detectors, and the sort of electrical activity that says a silent alarm has been tripped and the cavalry is on the