The Watchers (17 page)

“You're just full of interesting stories, aren't you?” she said, her voice tinged with suspicious irritation.

“The night I got my infection,” Abby responded warily, “someone broke into my house while I was sleeping and killed our housekeeper, who was more like a surrogate mother to me. Then he tried to kill me in my bed, but something scared him away. No one figured out what or who that was.”

“And that's
it
?” Mara cried out. “I mean, I don't mean to be crass, but I've got a longer list of stalkers and enemies than the president does, and I didn't seem to rate here.”

“There is something else,” Lloyd interrupted.

“What now?” Mara said.

“When Barry gave me the advance word on today, I did a little prep work and called some of my friends at the L.A. field office.”

“FBI?” Abby said.

“That's right.”

“I thought L.A. County was investigating it.”

“It was, until two weeks ago. And the reason they're not anymore is the something else I'm about to tell you. It seems there's a pretty solid cross-reference in the jacket to one of the oldest and most secret serial murder investigations in the bureau's history.”

Mara turned completely around in her seat, so enthralled now that she didn't even bother to utter a word. But her message was clear.
Keep talking!

“Doesn't make much sense to me,” Lloyd continued. “You see, the victims are all older, vulnerable African-American women. All shapes and sizes, and from every part of the country. None of the commonalities that usually make for a single perpetrator. Except for one thing.”

“What?” Mara snapped.

“Well, Mizz McQueen,” he said, darting his eyes over at Abby, “it's fairly gruesome. And I was hoping to spare young Abby here—”

“I read Narbeli's autopsy report,” Abby interrupted. “I imagine I can stomach whatever you can dish out.”

“Then maybe you know exactly what I'm talking about,” said Lloyd. “Because that's seemingly what ties your incident to all of these. It's the brutality of the killings, all of which is tied to the nature of the murder weapon. It's the handheld version of an old agricultural tool.”

He looked down and lowered his voice.

“A scythe.”

A long, dark pause fell over the Hummer's interior. For a moment the only noise was the huge engine speeding them along a crowded Los Angeles boulevard.

Abby did not glance out at the river of taillights streaming past her, not now. She kept her head down, her gaze aimed somewhere at her feet, and thought of her dear old friend, so cruelly dispatched by the whim of some homicidal aesthete, a bloodthirsty collector of antiques.

Didn't make sense.

“Hey,” Mara broke in at last, “we need to get Abby somewhere safe, make contact with her father and find out which new hospital to drop her off at.”

“Yeah,” the driver agreed.

“No,” said Abby. “Absolutely not. No more hospitals.”

“What are you talking about?” Mara said.

“Please lend me your cell phone.” Abby took the unit from Mara and dialed quickly. “Dad, it's me,” she said. “I'm safe . . . There was no time. Mara's security people got me out of there and quick . . . I'm sorry, I called for you and looked for you on my way out, but everybody said it was better to just hook back up later . . . Now we're driving downtown.”

She paused while her father talked for a while, her jaw muscles working feverishly.

“No, Dad, I'm not gonna do that,” she finally responded. The occupants around her dropped their pretense of not listening and suddenly turned toward her with staring eyes. “Dad, you heard what I said in that interview. Well, I meant it. I'm not gonna spend another minute in a hospital bed. I was put on this mission by no less than Christ himself, and I'm
not
about to let Him down . . . Well, I'm feeling better. I'll pick up some of the medicines before I leave. Lord knows I've got their names memorized . . . I understand your concern and you know I love you, but I'm not going to change my mind on this. Besides, there's nothing more the doctors can do for me other than pump me full of drugs and wait for the end . . . Why can't you just wish me luck, Dad? Better yet, why don't you come with me? What? . . . Where am I going? . . . I don't know yet. Now that I think of it, I'm going somewhere where I can find a half million African women worshiping God at the same time. Someplace where the word
Iya Agba
makes sense.”

Mara leaned in and whispered, “Nigeria.”

“What?”

“You'll find a million brown-skinned women worshiping God just outside of Lagos, Nigeria,” Mara said. “I did a report on last year's Son of God Assembly. Did you see it?”

“Apparently no,” Abby replied.

“I'm no expert, but while I was there I listened to many of the women speak in their native tongues.
Iya Agba
, if I'm not mistaken, sounds an awful lot like Yoruba.”

Abby cocked her head and wondered for a moment whether she should tell her father what she had just heard. She shook her head slowly, whispered “I love you, Dad,” and closed the cell phone.

CHAPTER
_
22

“Now, I didn't tell you that to give you crazy ideas,” Mara said. “Do you have any clue what a dangerous and difficult place Nigeria is today? In twenty years of television I don't think we had a tougher time pulling off a production.”

“Barry told me about it,” Lloyd cut in. “He had to basically hire a freelance army regiment to travel with you.”

“Forgive me, but I don't plan on going with a huge camera crew and an entourage,” Abby said.

“That will make it infinitely more dangerous,” Lloyd said. “The size of her contingent actually worked in Mara's favor. If you go as a single, sick, rich and famous Western woman, you won't reach the city gates of Lagos before getting kidnapped. Kidnapping and murdering Westerners is a cottage industry there.”

“Do you know anything about this country?” Mara asked with a sudden fire in her eyes. “The State Department has a travel advisory strongly urging Americans not go there. Warning them specifically about lawlessness and kidnapping on the nation's highways.”

Abby stared ahead and flexed her jaw stubbornly. “I appreciate the concern and advice, but you guys are
not
talking me out of going.”

“I'm not trying to talk you out of going, dear,” Mara countered. “I'm trying to get you to accept my help. Do you remember what I said on the air? Well, I've never reneged on an on-air promise—and I have no intention of starting now, girl. So if you're so bound and determined to go somewhere—”

“To Nigeria,” Abby interrupted.

“To Nigeria,” Mara conceded with an affectionate roll of her eyes, “then you'll take my plane. And my help. The only thing I'll ask you to take along as a personal favor is one of my video crews. If your trip's a disaster, I swear to you now that we'll toss the footage. But I can't resist trying. I am a TV woman, after all.”

“I've never known you to go anywhere without a camera in tow,” Abby said, smiling.

“Oh no,” Mara said, “
going
is the one thing I can't do. As much as I'd like to be there, I can never go back to Nigeria.”

“But why?”

“I made some enemies. I spoke plainly about conditions there, and the official corruption. Nigeria has enough oil to be one of the wealthiest nations on earth. Instead, it's one of the poorest, while a tiny slice of the population live like emperors. I spoke about it. My army colonel warned me when the episode aired that I could never come back and expect to live.”

“Well, so . . .” started Abby.

“Take my plane. Take Lloyd here, and all the security help I can hire. My producers will work the phones before you ever land, lining up for you a front-row seat at Nigeria's biggest church service. The Believers Gathering, largest in the world. And we'll find your
Iya Agba
.”

God, this is crazy. I mean, here I am, very, very sick—“terminally ill” seems to be everybody's favorite word for it—and here I'm running off to the literal ends of the earth. Without my dad, my friends, or any of what I would have called, until today, my support system. Or at least what seems like it from here. From a human, commonsense point of view, my dad's point of view, this is nuts.

And, Lord, if I've somehow deluded myself into this escapade, please find a way to break through my stubborn skull and let me know. Would
you? Because all I know now is, in spite of what common sense tells me, I had a real encounter with you the other night. And the promise of what you have in store is so real to me right now, it seems the only true craziness would be to throw away the opportunity you've put before me and just lie down and die quietly.

Maybe I am going crazy. Maybe some kind of brain-fry is part of my dying process. I mean, if you take all this one piece at a time, it makes me sound like a complete idiot. A word, Iya Agba. A strange occurrence in a waking dream. Wild stories over the Internet. Individually, they sound like nothing. Yet somehow they add up to my being here in this airplane, gambling the last days of my life on the ultimate wild goose chase. With the whole world speculating on whether I've lost my marbles.

The whole thing seems to require a heaping dose of faith, I suppose.
After all, some days you haven't seemed like the surest bet in this world.
Forgive me, but it's true—though on some days you are more real to me than my next breath, on other days, every once in a great while, when I've stuck my heart too deep in the things of this world, I look up and you seem so unlikely, so far-fetched. The whole thing—the Incarnation, the Atonement, the Cross, the return to heaven, the promise of eternity with you . . .

On days like that, I have to just take a deep breath and talk to you anyway. Act in faith.

And that's what I'm doing now, Lord. So please, don't let me do this alone. Don't go silent on me now, just as I'm taking the biggest plunge of my life based on things I believe you told me.

Please?

INSIDE A GULFSTREAM G550 PRIVATE JET, OVER TEXAS

They had barely reached cruising altitude before Mara McQueen, the jet's owner, held up a remote control and pushed a button, causing a mahogany cabinet door to slide open with a whir. Inside, three parallel monitors glowed with high-definition footage from each of the major cable news networks.

All three were running breathless, saturation coverage of the afternoon's events, beginning at Mara's dramatic interview with the world's newest-minted Internet celebrity, followed by chilling images of the camera shaking suddenly, the room going dark and the once-calm frame erupting into frenzied motion, anguished voices, and rounds of gunfire. Then the most dramatic of all: the unexplained disappearance of the episode's centerpiece, the seemingly ailing Abby Sherman. Not to mention her media champion, megastar Mara McQueen.

Speculation was rampant. Had the two women run off together? Had they both been abducted? No one could say for certain. Abby's father was on record as having fielded a cryptic cell phone transmission from his daughter, but its abrupt and ambiguous ending had left him with not much more knowledge of the truth than anyone else.

Someone whom security cameras had identified only as a tall, white male—who seemed to know exactly when to turn away from the lenses, but whom no one had correctly identified as one of Mara's personal staff—had gained admittance to the Sherman home, then mysteriously departed with Abby's passport and many of her clothes. Was the whole thing a hoax? Some tasteless publicity stunt?

In the absence of proof, any verdict would do.

“Honey, I think the time has come for you to set people's minds at ease,” Mara suggested. She reached the media cabinet and pulled out an ultra-thin laptop computer. “Your native medium?”

ABBY SHERMAN, [email protected]

Dear Friends,

I must start with an apology. I can't imagine how much concern, fear, and grief today's events must have caused some of you. While I didn't cause the attack at my hospital or the chaos that followed it, I should have paid more attention, in the hours that followed, to the millions of people who have become my “virtual friends” of late.

Please know that I haven't meant to ignore or disregard your concern for my well-being. I value your faithful prayers on my behalf more than you'll ever know.

The answer to why no one has heard from me until now is complex. Even more difficult, circumstances dictate that I can only reveal some of that answer to you now.

Please remember, as you read this, that the events in question didn't happen with the neat, cut-and-dry simplicity that media reports always convey. While you may now have been able to recreate nearly every step of the attack, when it happened it was sudden, brutal, and incredibly disorienting. We didn't make calm and deliberate decisions with the full weight of consequences in mind. We reacted. And, under the circumstances, we made the best choices we could.

So what happened? Basically, when the room first went dark, the first explosion and gunshots were heard, Mara and I both escaped. Tragically, as you probably know, Mara's longtime bodyguard was killed. Thankfully, a trusted backup was entering the scene just as it all fell apart. That person picked me up and hustled me to safety through the back of the hospital.

Once outside, I was taken away by a vehicle in Mara's convoy. At first, there was discussion of taking me to my family or to the nearest hospital. But the longer I thought about my conversation with Mara, the more I began to have second thoughts.

Eventually, I realized what the interview must have made clear: that I have a job to do. A mystery to solve. And that I had nothing better to do with my remaining days on earth than give them some meaning and purpose.