The Watchers (2 page)

He peered closer and started reading, shaking his head and smiling. These kids. They all think they're so bold and trailblazing, and yet they're so predictable.

It was her personal home page. Not a keystroke required; it was right there waiting for him. Her MyCorner site. The latest cyber-fad, a computer page festooned with photos of the girl, her friends, covers of her favorite albums. Her own personal corner of cyberspace.

It all began with a welcoming block of text, a sort of electronic handshake beckoning visitors into her own private world.

Congratulations. You just reached my own little corner of cyberspace.

Who am I?

Abby Sherman, that's who. Just your basic, young, messed-up California beach girl.

Who are you? And why are you checking me out?

Drop me a few pixels and let's find out!

Oh yeah, vital statistics: I'm twenty. I'm Caucasian. Californian. Upper . . . Know what? I don't like the way all these labels make me sound. I know you're supposed to spit out all your demographic info for this MyCorner welcome block, but these facts don't tell the truth about me. They make me sound like some spoiled, privileged person I really want to believe I'm not.

Those handful of sloppy social labels don't tell you that I've taken four mission trips to orphanages in Romania, the Cité Soleil slum in Haiti, the Payatas landfill in Manila, and Mexico City's red-light district. That I volunteer ten hours a week at a local rape shelter. Or that I've taken ten semester credit hours of college courses.

How about the fact that my best friend isn't some debutante named Ashton like my “vital statistics” might indicate, but a very cool and wise 50-year-old expatriate from El Salvador named Narbeli. Who happens to be our ecstatic-to-have-the-job housekeeper (she's legal!) and has been since my mom took off when I was three. Who loves me so much that, even though she has her own apartment, she sleeps every night on the couch outside my door to make sure I'm okay.

I'm not telling this to be a goody two-shoes or puff myself up in any way. I'm no saint. But neither am I some girl who sits around the pool polishing her nails all day and snapping at “the help.” Please don't slap easy labels on me without knowing what's under the surface.

Okay—so on that surface, some people might feel compelled to label me a rich, tanned, well-educated American beach chick. I suppose if you want to classify me, I am in the upper—see, I even hate that. I'll say, quite freely, that I'm one of the most privileged people on earth. How's that? I may not apologize for it, but I'm definitely grateful. So let's move on.

Like I started to say, I live in California. Near the beach. I love the ocean almost as much as I love the God who made it.

I've been taking college classes since high school, but I'm totally unmotivated because I have no idea what I want to do with my life. My dad's so frustrated with me. He just wants me to pick something and forge ahead, but I'm one of those people who says, if I have no idea what I'm supposed to do, then what's the point? Why waste time and effort on a major that's not for me? So I'm currently pounding on God to give me a clue just how He wants me to serve.

And yeah, my dad's one of those Type A wheeler-dealers you've never heard about unless you memorize the faces on the cover of
Inc
. and
Forbes
magazine. In which case, I feel sorry for you. In fact, if you've heard of my dad, then you're probably not gonna relate to this site. His name's Robert Sherman, or Bob, I suppose. We live in Pacific Palisades with his wife Teresa. And my half sister, Caryn, who's four.

My mom? Forget it. I'm not talking about that. Not yet. We don't know each other near well enough.

If you're a friend, stay awhile. Check out my other friends, my fave tunes, my blog.

Oh yeah. I'm about to post some pretty bizarre stuff on my blog. Some far-out things have been happening to me—at least in my dreams. Maybe if you're a true mystic, you can IM me, tell me what in the world's going on.

Meanwhile, welcome to MyCorner. . . .

Definitely
her
, the killer told himself, shaking his head at people's willingness to display intimate knowledge of themselves in the most unsecured places. He breathed in deeply. She was the one. A typical young, attractive, well-advantaged American woman, except of course that . . .

. . . if all the heat around this op was true, this woman lay dead center in the crosshairs of history itself.

CHAPTER
_
2

JERUSALEM
—NOON, THAT SAME MOMENT

“Sister? You have a visitor . . .”

The monk frowned and lowered his voice to a whisper, which a gust of hot desert wind seized and blew away, over the tan rooftops, past the shining church cupolas and into the stifling haze of a Judean midday. He bent over the reclining figure and hesitated, unsure what to try next. He ventured a finger toward her thin, black-clad shoulder and prodded once, gingerly.

She was so still, so weak
.

Her eyes fluttered softly and parted. Beneath this five-inch strip of shade—all the monks could spare her today—she winced and her eyelids fluttered again. Her first motion in nearly three hours.

Behind the monk, the voice of the visitor floated out on the softest of whispers. “It is I. Sister Sarha, from Eilat.”

A faint smile slowly took hold of the death-mask mouth and tugged it upward at the corners.

“Greetings, my dear. You have traveled far.” The mouth closed again, appearing to gather strength for the very next word. “Have you felt it too?”

In response, Sarha bent over suddenly, her eyes ablaze.

“Yes! Oh, Sister, please tell us what it means. We have never sensed anything like this—ever, it seems. Many of us feel something, yet we are all so puzzled. Is this a person, a warning about you? A threat?”

“Yes, it is a danger,” the reclining one said. “A terrible peril. Beyond that, I cannot explain. You are right; it is odd beyond anything I have ever witnessed.”

Her voice mimicked the word it was conveying, trailing off into nothing.

“Is this the one we've been praying for?”

“I cannot tell.”

“What can we do?” the visitor asked.

The other shook her head ever so slightly. “Pray like our fate depends on it. Pray desperately that the threat will pass. And then maybe, if we survive, we can learn more.”

PACIFIC PALISADES
—THAT SAME MOMENT

The killer forced his senses to re-acquire. Straining to hear the faint inhale and exhale of young lungs, he grimaced, for despite the gravity of the mission he could not keep himself from picturing the homicidal delights this kill might have offered.

Had he been allowed to take her in the usual manner, that is.

Thick eyelashes opening just so wide, narrowing to identify him in the gloom. Then a curious and alluring squint contorting with terror as she realized what he was doing. . . .

Perhaps in a moment, when these preliminaries were over, his hidden earpiece would crackle with a muttered “Go ahead” to indulge this fantasy, to take the girl after all. But not until then. He could hardly risk the thought of it. And even then, he had been ordered to take her with unusual means. A potent and untraceable poison. All the fun removed for the sake of caution.

So be it
. He bit into his lower lip so deeply that a crimson trickle ran down his chin. He licked it as far as his tongue would reach, then bent to his appointed task.

It only took five seconds more to find what he was looking for. Her blog entry for the day. Raw and just entered, not yet uploaded onto her site.

He read the title and blanched.

“The most mind-blowing dream I've had yet.”

He clenched his jaw.
There it was. The entry that had brought him here . . .

Without turning away, he reached down to his thigh pocket and pulled out a strip of Velcro elastic holding a dozen short cords. He pulled off one, inserted its end into the laptop's USB port, the other into the recesses of the backpack strapped across his shoulders.

The pack beamed the book's contents to a laptop concealed in the backseat of his van tucked into an alley half a mile away. From there, a wireless Internet server sent an encrypted, electronic message to three e-mail accounts scattered hundreds and even thousands of miles away, at diverse points of the planet.

BEVERLY HILLS, CALIFORNIA
—THAT MOMENT

On a marble-floored veranda high above the Los Angeles basin, an impeccably manicured hand reached over to the output drawer of a chrome-plated printer. The first page had hardly even begun to emerge and yet the fingers trembled and reached hungrily for the shuddering vellum edge.

NEW YORK CITY
—THAT MOMENT

In a walnut-veneered library in Manhattan, gnarled and wrinkled fingers did not even pretend to wait, but snatched the first page of the very same transmission from the maw of a clattering dot-matrix. The sheet, still connected by a thin perforation to the one that followed, gave way and seemed swallowed up by a palsied grip that shakily raised it high, into the beam of a single recessed light.

ST. PETERS BURG, FORMERLY LENINGRAD
—THAT SAME MOMENT

In a nondescript warehouse loft in St. Petersburg, Russia, a head of gray tousled hair bent closer to an old console television jury-rigged as a computer monitor. Here, there was no printer, for the occupant did not trust paper records of any sort. In fact, he considered it foolhardy enough to let the old
Gorizont
's pixels hold even a moment's grasp of the image, this all-important picture.

In all three places, curses filled the air as the words unfolded. . . .

CHAPTER
_
3

Abby Sherman's Dream Blog

I slammed this out one morning after the dream itself. Please read it and pass it along, and watch for my plea at the end.

—
Abby

Dear World,

What in the world just happened to me?

I still don't know if this was just the wildest dream in the history of dreams, or something real. It sure
felt
real. So here goes . . .

It started with being jerked out of my sleep and thrown to one side of the bed and thinking the wind might have slammed a shutter against the house or lightning struck close by. Or maybe I'd overslept again and my stepmom Teresa was acting like my maternal unit that morning (even though she isn't, and never will be), shaking me and yelling that I have to wake up now or miss my ride to class.

Only this light hammered against the outside of my eyelids, like when I lay out on the beach on a really hot day. And I thought, this is weird—did I sleepwalk and wake up out in the backyard or something?

So I opened my eyes. And I was definitely outside—only outside on the hottest, brightest day of the year. I had to raise my hand up over my face, the sun was so intense, and I could actually feel it burn my forehead and cheeks. But how did I get here?

My nose instantly filled with a bunch of weird smells, like old dust and meat barbecuing and woodsmoke and even a whiff of animal poop that I can still smell right now. And I was wearing this thick robe thing that grated against my skin. Reminded me of when I played the shepherd in the manger scene last Christmas, and Mrs. Carter had cut my costume out of these old canvas bags that chapped me so bad that later that night I had to rub chamomile over my arms and legs.

Sorry to take so long getting to the story, but I just really want you to know that I'm not making this up when I say it was a totally
real
experience. Everything I just described sank in so fast, it was like, less than a split second. Before my eyes could even take in what was actually in front of me. Like layers of stuff filling my senses one at a time.

Then I looked out and saw that I was sitting on a pile of old blankets on a really hard floor in the middle of this desert kind of city. I thought, no wonder I'm smelling all these things, because everything is totally dusty and made out of stone and the air is dry and really, really hot. I was actually in this place, in some way more real than watching any TV. Actually way more than that. More like the coolest sensurround, high-def, 3-D, IMAX, smell-a-vision—all of them put together—show in the world.

Oh yeah. And I was someone else.

Back to that later, 'cause I'm not through telling you what I saw. Right in front of me this stone wall almost blocked out the sun, it was so high. And other walls just as high stood way behind it, all around me. But I finally realized I was inside a courtyard at the edge of some huge kind of campus or ancient mall, or something.

And thousands of people were walking on every side of my spot, this thick crowd just separating around me at the last second like those shows about animal stampedes where the camera's down on the ground and all these legs slam around it and you're wondering how it doesn't get stomped on. I know you're thinking, how can something that intense take me so long to get around to—but remember, there was so much sensory overload rushing at me in that second, I was just barely keeping up.

All these people were dressed the way I remember from some of the movies and pictures of Bible times. I saw men in robes with blue and purple and yellow turbans over their heads. And a lot of them were pulling donkeys behind them all loaded with packages and blankets and huge bottles. And women walking behind them, only most of them had their heads down, looking at their feet. And men in white church-type robes with these blue fringes coming down their shoulders, who were clasping their hands over their tummies and checking me out real sneaky-like from the corners of their eyes.

And the funny thing is, everyone was quiet, this huge crowd was just walking around all hushed, just the sound of their feet— which made this big clapping sound since they were all wearing sandals. Like some huge crowd touring a museum, or walking through some really strict library.