The Watchers (23 page)

“Patient 64,” she half whispered to the guard, who was already pulling out his nightstick. “You know how docile she usually is—only reason she's in here is her delusional state, not her behavior. But I've never seen her this agitated.”

The guard walked up to the tiny window and glanced in. Patient 64, a white woman in her early fifties, looked as disheveled and disoriented as he'd ever seen her. Eyes bugged open, she walked maniacally the length of her cell, turned around, repeated the short trip, all the while shouting, “God save her! God save her!”

The guard turned back. “Has she hurt herself? Hit the walls, even?”

“No. I just don't know if she's going to escalate.”

“Well, it's God she's harassing,” he said in a sarcastic tone. “I don't know how high she can escalate from there. . . .”

The nurse rolled her eyes and walked away.

JERUSALEM
—ALSO THAT MOMENT

It was almost sunset when the monk found her cot empty, its former occupant facedown on the still-scalding surface of the roof, moaning softly. Convinced that her weakened state had taken a turn for the worse, he jumped down and began to ease her backward by the shoulders.

She turned to him with an exasperated look.

“Brother Brehan, I am fine. I assure you. I was in urgent prayer!”

Mortified, the monk released her and stepped back. “I am so very sorry, my sister. Please forgive me.”

But she did not answer. She was already back down on her face, her arms and legs now extended outward as abject and prostrate as she could stretch them.

The monk took three more steps back, his gaze still fixed on her. In all the years she had been up here, he had never seen her adopt such a desperate posture. He stared closer. Was it delusion? Some kind of grandiose personality disorder?

He listened for the words of her supplication.

“. . . dear God, my dear God, will you spare her, whoever she is? Wherever she may be? And heal the breach?”

BELIEVERS GATHERING, NIGERIA

Although Abby and Sister Okoye could hear and sense the growing commotion on every side, a sense of driving intention fell upon them. They both, without saying it to the other, became filled with a mutual adamancy to finish the prayer.

Abby could not tell whether Okoye was praying in an African dialect or a prayer language. What she did know was that the healing was proving a bizarre and harrowing experience. The woman, who at closer look appeared to be in her sixties, seemed intent on forcing the illness from Abby's body by pressing with increasing strength on her side. As Abby was already in great pain, the pressure quickly became excruciating.

Beyond that, her strange gifting had chosen this moment to shift into overdrive. A kaleidoscope of spiritual impressions reeled through her in a dazzling yet mind-numbing cavalcade. Images, rainbow spectra, strange colors, beautiful voices—all these and more flooded through her conscious mind and threatened to overpower her.

As if that wasn't enough, the torrent of strange words pouring from Sister Okoye's mouth grew in volume with every second the woman did not receive satisfaction. Abby winced and wondered how long this could continue without some sort of resolution.

Suddenly, Okoye stiffened and jerked backward with a loud, plaintive sigh. Her hand remained on Abby, but the grip relaxed and the cadence of Sister Okoye's prayers changed abruptly.

“Dear God, take it, take it . . .” she said in almost a lament.

The sense of anticipation became nearly unbearable.

JERUSALEM

“Sister? Sister? Are you sure you're all right?”

The woman was rolling around the burning roof dust like a veritable autistic, and that was something the monks had never counted on. Some sort of noise was issuing from her mouth, but the lone monk in charge here on the rooftop could not tell if it was speech or dying sentiments.

Brother Brehan bent down to hear, to try to wrest some closure from this impossible dilemma.

“What is it, my sister? Can we be of help?”

She did not look up but pulled back from the surface an inch or two. Caked onto her smooth cheeks was the dust of two days' prostration. She continued to pray without pausing to address these simpletons and their cardiac paranoias.

“Dear God, take it, please take this from her, whoever, wherever she is. . . .”

CHAPTER
_
29

Sister Okoye's shift in position had finally afforded Dylan the shot he'd been waiting for. He steadied his grip, slowed his breathing, and began to tighten his finger on the trigger.

Apparently, he noted with a resigned sort of detachment, he was going to make his choice by letting the force of habit carry him straight through the moment. A lazy method, perhaps even a copout, but it seemed preordained somehow. The way it appeared destined to unfold.

He centered the crosshairs on the back of Abby's neck, but then lost his focus to the explosions and gunfire shattering the air on every side. He felt something foreign on his face, then realized that tears were running down his cheeks.

Get it together!
he warned himself.

What was it?
he asked himself as his finger hesitated on the rifle's trigger.
What had Shadow Leader said?

“. . . what this young woman threatens to unravel is incredibly dangerous. Dangerous to the whole world, in ways I could take days to explain to you. She cannot be allowed to continue. . . .”

A question emerged and refused to vanish, even as he tried to shake it off and finish his job. What observation from his forty-eight hours in this girl's company had confirmed even one iota of Shadow Leader's assertion?

And what had that assassin told him? The one Shadow Leader had sent to supposedly “train” him?

“. . . these are men who wouldn't bat an eyelash at killing a child.”

They'd been the man's final words, just before Shadow Leader had unceremoniously put a bullet in his head.

You can't turn back now
, another voice told him.
You're a professional. Your client's seven-figure down payment is already in your Swiss account, drawing interest. You're in too far. You've never before aborted a job, you fool . . .

He tightened his finger to what he estimated to be three pounds of trigger tension. One and a half more pounds to go and the choice would be made. And hopefully these yammering voices in his head would shut up.

He pulled a tiny bit harder . . .

. . . on the stage, Sister Okoye seemed to go limp. She reared back, her right hand still planted on Abby's side.

Then Abby began to jerk stiffly, like someone being electrocuted. Her mouth lay open, though it wasn't clear whether this was in sheer joy or mute suffering.

. . . Dylan blinked one last time, then focused his gaze.

No way. There is no way . . .

A large, luminous being had just appeared in front of the pair, blocking his aim. Not only did this . . . creature have its eyes focused squarely on him, but he was holding up his hand.

A clear gesture.

Stop.

You're going crazy!
Dylan admonished himself. He gritted his teeth.
Get it together and do your job! Kill the girl. If your intel was wrong, that's not your fault. You were trained to do what you were told, by far more accountable sources
.

He lowered his cheek to the rifle again, resolved to just pull the stinking trigger and be done with it.

He blinked in disbelief.
Now there were four of the beings, forming a ring around the two women
.

Fine. He'd shoot these ghosts first . . .

He pulled, felt the trigger give way, heard the blast. Winced as recoil drove the rifle butt back into his shoulder.

But he knew, almost after the fact, that he'd pulled his shot off to the side. Missed on purpose.

He saw the muzzle blast drive through one of the being's shoulder. The driving projectile seemed to smudge the ethereal body as a tiny finger would a fresh sketching of pastel. If not the bullet itself, at least a strange coil of turbulence, a tiny smoke-like curl.

Did the being flinch at its passage? Did its face even budge? At first, Dylan thought so, and just as quickly could not remember. All he could see now was the slightest trace of something like disappointment coming over the being's face, even as it continued to stare straight at him.

It melted away. Then the other three too.

From the ring they had protected, a blinding starlike flash of light erupted where Sister Okoye's hand met Abby's side.

Dylan felt himself fall backward, propelled by the brilliance magnified in his rifle scope. Free air, then a shocking pain—the impact of stage flooring against his back. He contorted himself in agony.

Rolling on the floor, he looked over at the podium through partly blinded eyes. Through roving spots of black and brown he barely made out the two women, who now were kneeling, intact, holding each other. Obviously celebrating something.

He scrambled to a sitting position, panting furiously, his gaze wide and terrified. He threw down his rifle and stood impulsively, stupidly. Good way to get himself killed. But he didn't care just then. He'd made his choice.

No way would Dylan Hatfield take out an innocent girl, no matter what. And no way was he going to defy a being such as the one he'd just encountered. He knew this with the unshakable certainty of someone whose destiny had just walked up and introduced itself to him, like a stranger offering a handshake.

Not only did his employer's arguments not add up, but the assignment didn't add up to
him
. And he knew that whatever pretext had been fabricated to justify killing someone like Abby had to be a lie. He might never find out why, but he would also never come this close again. He would not tiptoe over that moral precipice.

He chose good. Right.

And maybe, immediate death.

Abby!

His voice hardly carried across the stage, given all the screaming and detonations shattering the air around them. He just had to tell her. Tell her, and then follow through on his words. Turn from her undercover assassin into her genuine protector. He had helped to set in motion this homicidal deception; helped locate, recruit, and plan the operation from the United States just before taking off for Lagos. The jihadist attack now upon them had been his clever way to get rid of the target without casting suspicion on anything other than Islamic terrorism. However, he had never intended for there to be this much loss of life. He'd designed the diversionary attack to consist of shots fired over the crowd's heads, scary flashes of light and harmless explosions intended to send everyone scattering and so disguise Abby's murder. Nothing more.

Nevertheless, he had set this thing in motion. And now that he'd defected to the other side, he wasn't sure how to turn it off.

He now turned his attention to the huge crowds and the carnage taking place among them. Another, lesser-trained operative would have found it impossible to do his job in this madness of bloodcurdling screams, gunfire, and explosions. But Dylan had been specifically trained to take his shots regardless of any mayhem occurring around him. Now everything he had blocked out assaulted his conscience like a hammer blow.

He assessed the situation. Scowling, he glanced all around him. And then he saw it: a trail of strafer bullets, cutting a swath of death through the very center of the assembly. He mentally computed its path.

It would lead straight through the center of the podium!

He jumped up and, while shouting at the top of his lungs, began sprinting toward Abby. . . .

Something's happened to me
. The message pulsated through Abby's entire body, while at the same moment she saw Lloyd fall out of the sky and then run madly toward her.

Something profound and incredible had just taken place in her body. The fog slowly began to clear and she looked around for Sister Okoye. The woman lay prone on the stage floor, her limbs slightly shaking. Abby threw herself on her friend's body and pulled her up.

“You are healed, my Sister,” Okoye said to her with a smile.

“Is that what it is?” Abby cried.

Just then Lloyd struck them both with all the brutality of a linebacker. Her newly healed limbs once again screamed in pain as she slid across the stage, along with both Lloyd and Sister Okoye.

Bewildered, she glanced behind her, at the site of the collision.

There, punching upward a uniform row of pockmarks and sending up small showers of sawdust, came the approaching row of bullets. And there it continued, right through the spot where she had been lying just seconds before. She started to flail around for Lloyd, but he was too quick, his hands already pulling her up, and then doing the same for Sister Okoye.

“Let's go!” Abby called out to him.

Abby rushed to help Sister Okoye to her feet, and together the pair scurried with their protector off the bloodstained platform.

If Lloyd had been given more time to analyze the voice he had just heard, and the body from which it had just escaped, he would have realized that one Abby Sherman might have stepped slowly up to that podium, but another Abby Sherman had just stood and run from it. The ailing young woman he'd come to know had since undergone a complete transformation.

Meanwhile, Mara McQueen's expert cameraman had somehow remained functional and stationary during the entire massacre. And although he was here to cover the story of Abby Sherman's bizarre journey to Nigeria, the cameraman suddenly found himself recording history in the making—the brutal attack on the assembly as well as a jumpy glimpse of Abby's escape.

And then it was over, both the main assault and the brief resurfacing of Abby Sherman. For no matter how thoroughly they scoured the parking lots and roads surrounding the Believers Gathering site, the authorities would later find no more trace of either Abigail Sherman, the man known only as Lloyd, or Sister Okoye, whom Christians-in-the-know also called “Mummy Iya Agba.”