The Watchers Page 4

  “Yes, we all do. May I pour you a glass of my favorite single malt? It’s world-class.”

  “Sounds good.”

  While his host rose and turned to an unseen bar in the corner, he relaxed into his seat and watched the lights of a freighter plow toward the glow of L.A. Harbor. A brief moment later a finely etched crystal tumbler lowered into his field of view, grasped in manicured fingers. He drank deeply. It was indeed a complex scotch, rich with undertones of peat, barley, and malt.

  “I wonder if you gained a sense,” the older man continued, sitting back with a glass of his own, “as you went about your work, of how many great and powerful minds were frantic for news of your progress. I daresay that nothing you do again may be as closely watched in so many high places.”

  “No, I was too intent on my work to feel much beyond my immediate duty. But I did have a sense that the mission had a very high profile.”

  A low snicker drifted over to him. “High profile indeed.”

  He decided to strike. “Yes, my Elder. And that is why I wonder why no one chose to warn me of the opposition I would face.”

  He had expected the older man to react strongly, but the tanned face only lowered toward the glass and chuckled audibly. As though the outburst had been completely anticipated. “Opposition?” the man finally said. “Please elaborate.”

  “I have a feeling you know exactly what I’m referring to.”

  The voice grew an edge testier. “Nevertheless, I would like you to describe it for me.”

  “Well, it wasn’t a physical barrier. More like an invisible guardian, it would seem, posted there to thwart me. The problem is, as you know I don’t believe in such things.”

  “And how strong was this opponent?”

  “Very strong.”

  “Stronger than you?”

  Burning eyes bored into his own, so searing that they seemed to be devouring him. He felt his brain lock down. Could he answer now? Or lie successfully?

  “I’ll ask again. Stronger than you?”

  He shook his head slowly.

  “Just speak, my boy. I assure you, deception right now would prove far more trouble than it’s worth. Just start talking, and the answer will come out on its own.”

  It was easier just to relent, he told himself. Just open your mouth and speak. . . .

  “Yes. It was stronger than me. I failed to inject the full dose.” Saying it, he felt a tinge of nausea sweep over him.

  The wrinkled face drew closer, its expression completely slack. The killer now sat staring at his host’s patrician mask and into green heavy-lidded eyes. No longer friendly yet not entirely hostile, either. More like the impassive gaze of a lion watching a gazelle.

  “I managed to apply a partial dose on her wrist,” he said, his voice rising. “It should do the job eventually. But it may take some additional time.”

  “Did you see your enemy?” The two men were close enough now for the older one to bite his nose.

  “No. But I felt him. I . . . I suppose it was a him. His strength was overwhelming.”

  “You’re certain you did administer some of the poison.”

  “Yes. I saw it. I even smelled it reacting with her skin.”

  “And this document you discovered—did she actually post it to her website?”

  “I never had time to find out,” the killer answered. “I found it in a MyCorner text field, and it looked like it hadn’t been posted, but I was never able to find out for certain.”

  The older man sighed loudly and pulled away, settled back into his chair. “Our masters told me as much,” he said in a low voice, almost to himself. “That must be why they chose you for the honor.”

  The killer pursed his eyebrows and wondered what the “honor” was. But no explanation was offered. His host must have meant the meeting at hand. He leaned back and the two fell silent for several minutes.

  The gulls grew closer, their cries louder now, angry and accusing. The old man turned to his guest, his expression now bemused like that of one who had just birthed a great, surprising thought.

  “My younger Brother, our true masters have asked to bestow on you an honor which not even I have been offered.”

  “I am flattered, my Elder, but I have no idea what you’re referring to. What is this honor?”

  “They have asked you to join them.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Are you ready to hear this? The oldest, most powerful, deepest secret human history has ever hidden?”

  “I’m more than ready.”

  “I’m sure you are.” The older man took a deep drink, swallowed with a loud sniff and exhaled. “Well, all the dark portents are real. The mystics and the soothsayers were right. Although the full truth and power of what actually exists would quite literally blow them away.”

  “What actually exists?” he asked for the second time, now hardly bothering to conceal his impatience.

  “The force you encountered tonight. And those who oppose it. Like the entity which defeated you, they are invisible. They are what, for lack of better terminology, we’d call disembodied spirits. Does that surprise you, my Brother?”

  “Nothing surprises me this night. But please. Tell me more.”

  “Well, I don’t need to elaborate much. You will soon know more than I could ever dream of telling. But I will tell you the basics. You see, everything you’ve been told about the Scythian Directive is pure nonsense.” The speaker’s voice was now tinged with contempt. “Well, not untrue, necessarily, but the thinnest veneer of truth. All the stuff about ridding the planet of inferior beings. Bah. As though we were carrying out some crude form of population control. There’s no denying that most humans are worth less than the ground they walk on, but you’re a bright young man—did our grand Directive never strike you as a bit out of kilter? A rancid bit of rationalization, perhaps?”

  The assassin inhaled slowly, though only as a pretext for giving himself an extra second. He struggled to form an answer as the shock of what he was hearing sent his thoughts in a thousand different directions. His breath returned to the night, unspent.

  “Oh, admit it,” the older man continued. “You’re a killer. Every bit of your soul has been caught up in the lust for death. Why deny it? I certainly don’t. I slaughtered three people before dinner tonight. A man, a wife, and a homeless bum. I’m still basking in it as we speak.”

  “I think I understand.” It was the best reply he could manage.

  “No, you don’t! You don’t understand any of it!” The sudden venom in the man’s voice drifted away at the outburst’s end and the previous voice returned, conciliatory as before. “Well, perhaps I exaggerate. You only understand the slightest edge of the tiniest bit of the truth. That’s because deep down you realize that you’re not just serving some disembodied planet, some gauzy spirit of Gaia. Our Order and its killing serve a far higher and historic purpose.”

  His voice grew loud and pompous again. “You were opposed by an invisible being many fools in this world would call an angel. The very word makes my stomach churn. You see, as you might have surmised, nothing is as it seems. Up is down. Black is white. Good is cruel. Behind the drivel of organized religion lies a bitter parody of truth. There is an invisible realm. Call it the spirit, heaven, the veil, the other side—whatever you will. Angels, spirits and all that. Of course the religious fools have gotten it all backward. What they call angels are actually the instruments of oppression, of despair and betrayal. What they call God is actually the entity dripping with injustice and cruelty. And what they call evil is in fact the side to be pitied, to be shown sympathy and aid. These are the real purpose for our Directive.”

  The man stabbed his cigar into his goblet’s remaining ice. His facade of patrician charm was now spent. The flush on his cheeks and the quiver of his jowls showed he was clearly enraged.

  “It’s quite a saga, especially given that it’s older than history itself. The beings whom we serve have been condemned to roam t
his planet invisible, without purpose, companionship, or hope of redemption. They do not even possess the ability to inhabit a human body, which is a spirit’s deepest craving. And the cruelest part? Their only nourishment is something quite rare and elusive: the byproduct of human damnation. The spiritual essence of death itself. It’s something they cannot set in motion without our help. They literally feed off of the dying of souls. If you think of death as also a process of rebirth, then they consume the afterbirth of that ethereal delivery. Which means that even finding sustenance is a process over which they have no control. We Brothers provide them that, when we kill. You’ve provided them that dozens of times. Our Order is their lifeline, and has been for thousands of years. Of course, the minions of the so-called loving God have formed their own army to fight us, to deny them their only sustenance. Since the dawn of history there’s raged a war between our Brotherhood and their idiotic foot soldiers.”

  He turned to the younger man. His smile had now returned. “Around the world we are close to exterminating the fools’ army once and for all. Final victory is within sight. I tell you this because the young girl you visited tonight is a key battleground in this war. If we do not kill her, all could be in vain. You will learn why in due time.”

  “She will soon be dead. I’m sure of it.”

  “I am sure too, my boy. Do not concern yourself with that. As I said already, I have invited you here for a great honor. In fact, tonight you have catapulted to the very highest privilege our Brotherhood can offer. A status far higher than my own. As I told you before, our masters have asked you to join them.”

  “How do I do this? Join them, I mean. If they’re disembodied . . .”

  “A most practical, commonsense question. I respect that. One whose answer I suspect you already are beginning to guess.”

  “And the answer is?”

  He was beginning to tire of all the evasions.

  “I’ll have to take your life, of course.”

  The younger man felt his fingers quiver. A dead weight plummeted from his grasp and the sound of shattering glass reached him from a strange distance—a hollow sound from a faraway room.

  “Yes. Again, remember: It is the highest honor imaginable. I do not know if it is a result of your abject failure, or some inadvertent triumph. At this point, as I’ve said before, it matters little. All I know is that my personal master, who stands here with us on this veranda right now, has asked to consume you and bring you into himself.”

  The host reached out and caressed the younger man’s forearm. He spoke in a lascivious whisper. “It is forward and rather off-putting for a man to touch another in this manner, is it not? But can you brush away my hand? I rather doubt it. That’s because the paralyzing agent in your whiskey is taking effect right on schedule. Death is the medium of our commerce, you understand that. In your case, an exquisite agony which will produce the very sweetest and highest communion imaginable. And the more prolonged it is, the more exalted it will be.”

  The Elder knelt now in the front of the immobilized man.

  “I will give you a choice. I am about to flay you alive over the course of many hours. You will feel every twinge, for while the agent has paralyzed your limbs, it is expressly designed not to impair sensation. You wouldn’t believe the chemical balancing act required to bring that off. Then I can either dissolve you, quite slowly, in hydrochloric acid, or, since you enjoyed tonight’s aerial display as much as I did, I can feed you one morsel at a time to these remarkable seabirds. So— blink once for the acid, twice for the birds. Your eyelids will be functional for another minute or so.”

  The killer closed his eyes and kept them shut. He clamped them as tightly as his body’s last flutters of electrical energy would allow.

  “Fine. I’ll take that as two. Here’s the scalpel.”

  The old man knelt and plucked a generous shred from his shoulder. He held it up and allowed a fine spray of crimson droplets to fly into a sudden gust of wind.

  “Birdies! Come here, sweethearts . . .”

  LATER

  The furious flock remained, hovering, over the beach house veranda for most of the day. Passersby along the sands of America’s most famous beach shook their heads and concluded that the home’s eccentric owner had taken his odd passion for the birds to a new height of generosity.

  CHAPTER

  _ 6

  WESTWOOD MERCY HOSPITAL —THREE WEEKS LATER

  The door was opening; Abby’s eyes flew open. Then, seeing the expression on her doctor’s face, she felt her heart sink. The man’s eyes were almost half shut with the heaviness of someone facing a dreaded task. Her father and Teresa followed with their gazes averted. Her father seemed to be breathing strangely. She thought Teresa’s eyes looked red and puffy.

  They slunk in and sat in twin chairs at the far corner while the doctor settled on the end of her bed and gave her a smile not matching the cast of his eyes.

  “Abby.”

  He said it flatly, like a statement.

  “Are you gonna level with me now?” she asked.

  He shut his eyes against the frustration in her voice. “Now, there’s no need to talk like that. We’ve told you everything we could at every step.”

  She’d been hoarding this frustration since shortly after her admittance twenty-one days ago, and it was sweet release now to let it flow. “I don’t believe that. You’ve been managing me all three weeks I’ve been here. My nurses won’t even tell me my temperature without asking your permission.”

  “We’re unsure, that’s all. We’ve been trying to figure things out.”

  “But now you know, I can tell. What is it?”

  He breathed in deeply, ponderously, then out again. “We’re not sure—”

  “Oh, stop it,” she interrupted, until he held out his hand to stop her.

  “Abby, a very aggressive and destructive infection is moving through your body. We’ve never seen anything like it before. We’ve tried to analyze it against every known treatment known to medical science. And frankly, the results so far are inconclusive. But the effects on your body aren’t.”

  He sighed again, and from the corner of her eye she saw her father look down and wipe his eyes.

  “As you already know, your left arm is fully engaged. The infection is traveling along your neural pathways, your nerves, and simply shutting them off. I don’t know how long it will take, but without an effective cure—which we don’t seem to have—it will reach your heart at some point in the near future, your brain soon after that.”

  “Say it to me.” Her voice was a mixture of dread and defiance. “Say the words.”

  Finally, he looked straight into her eyes, his gaze clouded with sadness. “You’re going to die, Abby. Very soon. I could give you false hope, and I can truthfully say that we’ll keep trying. But there’s very little hope.”

  She felt her breathing skip somewhere beyond her control, her lungs fight for breath. The room began to sway. Her thoughts suddenly slowed as if unwilling to process the knowledge pounding at the gates of her conscious mind.

  Finally she felt her throat force out a few words.

  “So you’ve done all you can for me.”

  “No. We can give you our very best care. Manage your pain. Increase your comfort immeasurably. I’m so sorry, Abby . . .”

  “Does this have something to do with Narbeli’s murder?”

  He shook his head. “Not directly. But it seems your infection started around the same time. I don’t know how you could have acquired this thing. Only that it’s on the move, and I have no idea how to stop it.”

  She closed her eyes and wished the act could erase the sight of all of them—doctor and family together.

  “Pretty ironic, isn’t it, Dad?” He looked at her blankly, uncomprehending. “I mean, here you and I have been arguing the last six months over what I should do with my life. How badly I need to figure out what I want to do with my life. And now, it doesn’t even matter. It’s over. Do you
think maybe now you and I can start getting along better?”

  He shot her a brokenhearted smile. Blackness replaced the white light and stark expressions, then overtook her.

  THE NEXT DAY

  Abigail awoke to the sight of her father gazing down at her through eyes full of tears. His index finger lay poised atop her hand, grazing it like one afraid to apply too much pressure on a delicate object. Immediately the truth behind his expression burst upon her with an inner sensation like that of being drenched in ice water.

  He was already saying good-bye.

  No doubt about it—her father was weeping with a shocked distance she had only seen him adopt once before: a week and a half prior, after returning from Narbeli’s gravesite. At the time, she had barely possessed the strength to look about and register anyone else’s reactions, for the murder had knocked her into a pall of depression from which she had yet to catch her breath. But her father’s expression had been so altered that day, such a departure from his usually cool and competent demeanor, that even then she had taken note.

  And now he was looking at her with that very same unhinged expression.

  For a second she had the macabre sensation of already being in the grave, peering up at the mourners of her own funeral.

  “Daddy?” she heard herself say in alarm.

  Then the cause of his devastated expression came rushing back to her.

  Third week in this bed. No answers. No encouraging signs. Not even a diagnosis to speak of. Only the knowledge that she was dying. Yes, dying. Inexplicably, inexorably, painfully.

  At the age of twenty.

  Maybe his premature reaction to the sight of her wasn’t so unjustified. “I’m still here,” she said in a weak voice. “Daddy. Please. Don’t look at me that way.”

  Startled from his grief, he stirred himself and allowed a paternal smile to warm his features once more.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it.”

  Instead of returning the smile, she scowled and peered at him. A fierce shudder cascaded down her spine.

  She had just seen . . . felt . . . something. A breeze, a wisp, a flutter. A chill through her heart. A dark wing across the empty air just in front of her.