The Watchers (10 page)

Yet he'd always taken a special satisfaction in knowing that his targets had been bad guys. African warlords. Balkan drug traffickers. Terrorists of every stripe. His mode of national service might have been more disturbing, although he had considered it no less honorable than the work of a mortar operator or artillery gunner.

Even when the Cold War had ended and his identity dissipated into the realm of joint CIA/NSA black ops, he had always taken pride in the necessary nature of his work. The righteous choice of targets. It might not have made polite conversation, but the fact remained that the world had people in it who needed killing. And he was often on a short list of the best men alive to answer his nation's call for the job.

The homicidal chill of centering a man's head in the crosshairs, of ending someone's life with a twitch of his trigger finger—that was simply the operational downside. The burden of his mission, just as claustrophobia was to a submariner, or boredom to an officer in a missile silo.

And now that he had disappeared even further from the mantle of government service—barely knowing even the identity of his employers, but instead trusting in decades-old relationships, code words, and drop-boxes—he still clung to the fraying mantle of his perennial rationale. Today's bad guys might have been lesser threats to national security, yet they were still major-league scumbags.

No, he wasn't some mere hit man, he reminded himself. No conscience-for-hire. He was one of the best in the world at a job that might seem alluring to some yet was agonizingly difficult, incredibly dangerous, and despite its justifications, he realized—potentially corrosive to the soul. If those hazards did not make his occupation exactly respectable, well, they nevertheless enabled him to hold his head up high.

Most of the time he wasn't even a killer. He was an unspecified artistic type—painter, actor, writer, musician—living alone in Manhattan's Tribeca district, a bohemian existence that none of his girlfriends or acquaintances questioned or took special notice in. Men of such hazy pursuits were a dime a dozen in his neighborhood. For some reason, no product of a life's work was ever expected—only the means to continue paying the rent on shabby-chic lofts and the tabs on never-ending supplies of morning espresso and trendy overpriced cuisine.

He traveled a great deal, and most of his casual acquaintances thought this was due to his sideline of occasional modeling. According to Gretchen—the latest raven-haired jet-setter with an undetermined European accent to grace his bed—he was here on some German magazine shoot of unspecified duration.

A faint vibration at his thigh told him the pager was going off. He had several impulsive clients. Some refused to wait even one second before either granting him an assignment or shifting it to someone else. Sometimes one of them would even call in the final seconds of a sanction to cancel the order. Naturally he resented the vacillation, but it was better than killing someone unnecessarily. The clients still paid, of course. But they always appreciated the ready access.

Without breaking stride he reached down into a low-slung pocket of his cargo pants and retrieved the pager. A well-dressed elderly couple was approaching him on the sidewalk. He could feel their gazes on him, their eyes probing him for some polite nod or affirmation. He glanced down with a vague smile to avoid eye contact.

The display's green letters read,
555–310–2998
. His eyes widened at the sight.

Two minutes later he stepped onto a quiet cobblestone street overshadowed by residential buildings. There a dark blue Mercedes sedan with Dutch plates awaited him. He climbed inside; instantly the engine roared and he sped away in European fashion.

Before he'd gone a hundred yards, he was on the cell phone to America.

“This is Rover,” he said.

“Shadow Leader here. Remember when I told you the day would come when we needed some extreme backbone from you?”

“Yeah, I remember. I told you I had no shortage of that, if you cared to take another glance at my record.”

“Yes, but I did not explain myself. And that day has now come, my friend. It couldn't be a nobler cause or a higher risk to the world if you fail. But it won't be easy.”

“Yeah?”

“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 up 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.