The Watchers Page 8

  “The target is a young girl. A beautiful young girl who’s dying of a rare infection.”

  “What possible threat could this girl pose?”

  “It’s not necessarily her fault. But she’s about to provoke a very dangerous international incident. She could trigger a world war. You’re gonna have to trust me on this, because I can’t elaborate.”

  Dylan paused and thought for a minute. He had never been obliged to trust a client before on the suitability of a target. And he certainly didn’t like the sound of this.

  “I don’t know,” he replied. “I’ve never sanctioned anyone over unintended consequences. They’ve always had to be an intentional bad guy. And a young girl—that’s taking it really far.”

  “I hear you, but there’s no other way, Rover. You’ll have to trust me when I tell you that millions could die if she stays alive.”

  “Look, this is a whole new ball game for me. I kill bad guys, period. You know that. All this crystal-ball stuff about possibilities and consequences—I’m not sure that’s for me.”

  There was a pause. Then the voice returned, now with a harder edge.

  “I could tell you that I’d just take the assignment elsewhere, but the fact is I need you. This needs to be handled with the lightest touch imaginable. Completely covered up. The other guys are bunglers compared to you. Now, remember all the assignments I swung your way during the lean years?”

  “You know I do.”

  “Well, you’ve refined your operational tradecraft to the extreme. You’re the best in the world. But now it’s time to hone a new skill. Moral toughness. There’s pressure on this one, my friend. And, oh yeah . . .”

  His voice trailed off, and Dylan thought he had lost the connection.

  Shadow Leader returned with a trace of mirth in his words. “Five mill down, ten upon completion. Not to buy your conscience, mind you. Just in recognition of the degree of difficulty. It’s what this kind of job commands.”

  Dylan whistled softly. He was no mercenary, yet he couldn’t deny that fifteen million was the fee of a lifetime. Retirement money— enough to let him fade away and start a new life. He returned the phone to his ear.

  “I’m still listening. . . .”

  CHAPTER

  _ 10

  WEST WOOD MERCY HOSPITAL —2 : 4 7 A.M .

  Abby waited until each of her chief mourners had left her room in turn—the nurse, her best friend, Bonnie, half sister, Caryn, and even her father, who had lingered until his usual 10:00 p.m. “kick-out time”—before she allowed herself to lean down beside the bed and pull her laptop from its case.

  She noticed a tremor as she typed in the address for her MyCorner site, then glanced down at her hand. She hadn’t felt such trepidation at the computer since learning to use her first Macintosh in junior high school, nearly a decade before.

  There it was—MyCorner.com. She typed in her username and password, then pressed Enter.

  She read, frowned, and cocked her head. Instead of the usual animated graphic depicting an aerial approach through a thatched roof into a warmly lit cottage, leading down into a hearth, a brightly blazing fire, and a weathered leather armchair—in other words, a graphic of a corner—she saw a stark and uninspired warning.

  ADMINISTRATOR WARNING TO USER ABIGAIL SHERMAN!

  MyCorner.com user Abigail Sherman: your corner’s data size has exceeded purchased bandwidth capacity by 1006%. This surplus consists of 21,597 unread and waiting messages, and 19,372 Corner Friends registered since your last log-in. Access to your site has been blocked until you either contact Technical Support for a paid upgrade of your storage size or dispose of 97% of unread messages and accept or reject your unprocessed Friends during your very next log-in.

  Ms. Sherman, please contact us to resolve this matter immediately.

  Without even pausing to consider the consequences, she logged in and opened the very first message in her queue.

  Abby,

  My best friend Tonya e-mailed me the text of your dream with the subject line, ‘Wasn’t this Lady Marietta’s story?’ I read it, and my friend was absolutely right.

  Let me explain.

  When we were little girls back in Alabama in the mid-sixties, this fascinating old lady showed up at a church social one day. No one even saw her walk up; she just seemed to gather out of the old pine floor. I say that because we were a tight-knit church body of about 45, it was the height of the Civil Rights movement, and newcomers were most definitely noticed. Not that we were unfriendly, but conversation would just pause and no one failed to know when a stranger had entered our midst. And yet this lady somehow seemed to be known by someone, as if she was some member’s old friend or long-lost aunt. But I never learned whose.

  So Tonya and I turned our attentions back to the potluck until we noticed that all the ladies had formed this tight circle around the visitor. She was talking so low that no one but them could hear her words. Naturally, Sonya and I were overcome with curiosity, so we crawled down on our hands and knees and scuttled through my mama Nettie’s skirts, which, believe me, were plenty wide enough for the two of us. And as soon as we broke through to the middle of this ring, that old lady looked down at us, then kind of peered around our faces, and broke into tears! She pulled us up and told us that we both had the most beautiful and strapping guardian angels you’d ever want to see. Then she just looked back up again and continued her story, as though it had been nothing unusual.

  What she spoke was your story.

  The one you told in your Corner, that is. Of course I learned later that it was the story of the prophetess Anna, who the Bible describes as an old woman who had waited most of her life at the Temple for the Messiah to come, and who saw Him as a tiny baby being brought in by His parents. It wasn’t the story itself that was so memorable and so similar to yours. It was more the way the old woman seemed to experience it. How she saw the prophetess’ thoughts and emotions and memories, even while her own thoughts still hovered there, suspended.

  It was exactly the way you described it.

  Abby, I don’t know if this is good news for you or not. For you see, this old woman, who everyone began to call Lady Marietta— no one was quite sure whether it was because she was born in that Georgia town, or it was truly her name—stirred up quite a hornet’s nest in our church. She told the women that she’d been driven out of her congregation in a neighboring county for the things she’d been seeing. See, the dream seemed to have awakened some kind of spiritual sight within her. She’d started walking up to people and describing the beings, good and evil, that followed them around. It turned out there were far more dark spirits abroad than anyone would have liked. And her church people had become so frightened that even her own family had told her to leave. She had nowhere to go.

  Marietta started sleeping on a pile of blankets on the back pew of our tiny choir loft and doing odd jobs in our members’ houses. But soon our own pastor questioned her. And he didn’t like what he heard. Pastor became convinced that she was either possessed of a demon or actually some kind of sorceress, and he threw her out without so much as a good-bye.

  Well, you can imagine that this created quite a row among the women, who, as in so many country churches, were the congregation’s true leaders and hard workers. One after another of them took in the old woman to sleep on their sofas. Yet our pastor would not relent. He traveled to each of her benefactors’ homes and threatened the whole families with excommunication if they did not heed the warning of the Lord. The conflict reached such a boiling point that one of the husbands took a swing at the pastor, and a neighbor wound up calling the police. Before the patrol car arrived, though—we were in Freemantown, the black neighborhood, and so police cars always took their time—Marietta stepped up to the pastor and described, in horrible detail, the appearance of the giant warrior demon that had its claws embedded deep into the pastor’s back.

  Acting like someone roused from a very deep stupor, the old woman straightened u
p and began to shout at the entity in a commanding and totally abnormal tone of voice. According to the witnesses, it wasn’t an exorcism so much as one whale of a harangue. But one thing every spectator knew for certain: that old woman was not the least bit afraid of what she was speaking to.

  And so instead of the old woman fleeing, it was our pastor who turned tail and ran screaming into the head-high briar and kudzu vine that draped down from Freemantown’s old railroad trestle.

  He was never seen in our town again.

  But then, neither was Marietta. Police found a decomposed body outside of town late that fall, and with their usual lack of diligence, never even bothered to identify her after finding out it was that of a black woman. Somehow the rumor that this was Marietta’s body swept through church like a revival swoon.

  So my message to you? Yeah, you may have something special. But watch out. It’s not only a blessing in disguise, it’s also a curse. I wish I could tell you more than that, give you some direction or contact point. But this is just an old, weird story from my childhood. So you take care, Sister. Watch who you speak to about such things, and make sure you stay square with the Author of all True Fairy Tales.

  Abby shook her head in amazement, then read further down. The next letter, and the letter after that, and the letter after that . . .

  . . . all bore the same message.

  She was not alone. Others had dreamed her same dream. Walked through similar aftermaths.

  There were hundreds. Thousands.

  She found herself weeping, swept away on a wave of awe and gratitude. Even as the tears flowed she continued to read. And as she did, she began to slowly realize one common denominator in her responses.

  Each respondent was as clueless, as pleading, as lost as she was. No one had any answers. There were shadowy tentacles of the phenomenon reaching back into the history of the last hundred years, but they largely consisted of rumors and oral folktales. No one could give her any more clues or direction other than a simple confirmation that, no, her experience was not unique.

  Beyond that, her sisters were all of them, each one, alone.

  In the early hours of the morning, after fatigue had conspired with the sheer number of responses to numb her capacity for reason, Abby reached both hands to the keyboard and began to type out a response.

  CHAPTER

  _ 11

  Dear Sisters,

  Thank you all for your responses to my ignorant and aimless plea. I am humbled and awed by the passion, kinship, and love in each of your letters. I just finished my first attempt to read through all of your posts, so I am still reeling, to be honest. I had no idea, when I sent my blind question out into the cyber-void, that there were so many of you out there.

  And now, since so many have honored me with your stories, I have some news for you. I’m writing from a hospital bed. A few hours after I finished typing my dream-blog on my laptop, someone very twisted and unspeakably evil broke into my house and not only murdered my beloved friend and housekeeper, Narbeli, in monstrous fashion, but then tried to kill me. He did not succeed. At least not immediately. But my doctors tell me that he infected me with some sort of poisonous substance that they are not able to identify, but whose effect is unstoppable.

  So, if you pick up and read the electronic clipboard hanging from the end of my bed, it seems I am dying. No one can tell me whether it will be next week or next month. Nor can they treat with any great success the pain that wracks my body while the poison does its work. My mind is fine. For that fact, even my body is remarkably functional, except for the pain itself. I can move around still. It just hurts like crazy. I’d be up and walking, although more slowly than usual, if I wasn’t in this place for round after round of never-ending tests.

  Even as I type these words, it occurs to me that there must be meaning to all this. There just has to be. I’m not here to tiptoe up to the edge of this mystery and simply pass away, leaving it all unsolved. You didn’t write me so the unanswered questions in each of your stories could only deepen, sit there and rot.

  There must be an answer. I sense it in my deepest spirit. Don’t you? I think I can feel it “between the lines” in each of your replies. There’s a reason for all this. We’ve all been stranded on the very edge of something really big, and up until now apparently unseen.

  Pray for me, Sisters, and gather round, if there’s an Internet version of such a thing. We’ve got a mystery to solve. A bridge to find, and to cross.

  (One thing about being told you’re going to die very soon and way too young. It sharpens your sense of purpose like no kick in the head you’ll ever get on any soccer field or karate dojo. It clears the mind and everything else about you. Leaves you keen and sharp as a knife’s edge. That’s what I’m feeling right now.)

  Forget this. I’m not going to sit here and wait to die. I’m going to get up from this bed and figure out what’s up.

  Are you with me?

  Abby Sherman

  She woke up the next morning with a sense of determination, if anything, beating stronger and more urgently within her. Her father entered the room shortly after seven o’clock and, instead of finding her still dozing as he had every morning before, saw his daughter finishing up an early power breakfast.

  “Abby, what’s up?” he asked.

  “Dad, I have something to tell you.”

  He stared hard and long at her, for he had not heard such steel in her voice for quite a long while. “I have something to tell you too,” he said. “But why don’t you go first.”

  “Dad, I’m getting out of here. I can’t explain it, but I just know that God doesn’t mean for me to sit here and wait for the end. You know how many arguments you and I have had about what I should do with my life. You know I’ve always thought He had a special purpose for my life, and as weird as this sounds, I know that now more than ever. I just have far less time to waste. And now I have a direction I never had before.”

  He took a seat in the visitor’s chair, crossed his leg and pretended to wave some invisible dust bunny from his knee. “Have you really thought this through? You know that the doctors want you here. If you check yourself out against their orders, you may be shutting yourself off from pain management, from the kind of treatment you’re going to need as this thing progresses. Worse still, you could be cutting off their research just as they’re about to discover what’s wrong with you.”

  “Dad, they’ve taken enough of my blood to fill a swimming pool. They’ve got their samples. They don’t need me to stick around. I’m not just going to lie here and waste my last days being a guinea pig. Look up at these lights. Would you want this to be the last sky you ever gazed up on? Would you want this to be your last bed? The last sight your eyes ever saw?”

  He gave the sigh he always let out when her logic had gotten the best of him.

  “So where are you proposing to go?”

  “I have no idea, Dad. I just know I’ve stumbled into something big, and I’m supposed to do something about it. But all I know is the first step, and that’s to get out of this bed. After that, it’s all on faith.”

  “Well, now it’s my turn,” he said after a pause. “And I may just know what your second step may be.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Take a look outside.”

  She slowly swung her legs down and walked gingerly over to the window, waved aside the flimsy curtain and peered out. Three floors down, the sidewalk lay jumbled with a mass of television trucks, glowing reflector screens, and camera lights.

  “What’s going on?” she asked, turning to face her dad. “Some kind of celebrity in here with me?”

  His gaze bore into hers. “It’s you, sweetheart.”

  “Me? What are you talking about?”

  “I think you know. It seems that Internet blog you posted has made a huge splash. You’re the flavor of the day. The web celebrity of the hour, honey. In less than twelve hours you’ve registered more friends than anyone in MyCorner h
istory.”

  She sat back down, her head swimming.

  “What in the world did you write about?” he continued. “Was this something about Narbeli’s death? Your sickness? What could have provoked a response like this?”

  “Both of those, I guess. But it’s more than that, Dad. It was actually a dream I had.”

  An incredulous look crossed his handsome features. “A dream. That’s it?”

  She picked up the laptop and handed it to him. “It’s too involved to explain right now. Here, read it for yourself. I have to go.”

  “Where?” His voice had become tinged with exasperation. “Where are you going? Don’t think I’m just going to let my little girl take off and leave her to the wolves.”

  “Who’re the wolves, Dad? Those people outside?”

  “Some of them. You know the media. They don’t care about your privacy or your peace of mind.”

  “I’m not after peace of mind. I’m after answers.”

  He sighed deeply. “Well, Abby, maybe I can help. Just before I walked in here, I got a call from a producer working for Mara McQueen. Mara wants to interview you.”

  Abby began to shake her head slowly, as though answering a question only she could hear.

  “Wow. Mara. I’ll talk to her. Tomorrow morning.”

  “I’ll arrange the interview, sweetheart, on one condition. Just stay in the hospital one more day. Let her interview you here, and in the meantime give your doctors one more chance to help you. Will you do that for me?”

  She nodded and glanced glumly around the room. “For you, Dad. Only for you.”

  CHAPTER

  _ 12

  BRITISH AIRWAYS 747, FIRST CLASS, 37,000 FEET ABOVE THE ATLANTIC

  Dylan’s Sidekick hummed to life on the airplane tray before him, vibrating with the special ring tone that announced a warning from the one contact in the world he could least afford to ignore.