The Watchers (44 page)
Abby squinted and tried her best, but the Sight was not upon her just then. It had not been the most ideal of days. Fatigue, preoccupation, not spending enough time in prayer. She had seen darkness in the church downstairs, but that had been all.
But this seemed urgent. She had to do something.
Lord, I don't deserve it, but please restore to me the gift you so generously bestowed on me. Please allow me to see along with my sister. . . .
She opened her eyes again. Nothing. She knew what it was: she couldn't just treat God like that. He could grant her prayer in a second, but more than that, He wanted her to walk with Him.
Even though she knew it was for mixed motives, she began to praise Him. She started to hum her favorite worship tune under her breath, and despite being less than totally sincere, she felt her spirits begin to rise.
Then it came. She blinked against the brilliance pouring out of the two towering figures, standing at the rooftop's edge.
She peered closer. They were holding up their hands against something. A cascade of even more radiant light was pouring from those hands. Whatever or whoever the supernatural measure was being used against had better take cover. . . .
“Forget this!” the photographer barked in frustration. He already had the warm-up shot. It wasn't well focused, but good enough to identify the subject, which was all that mattered. It might have been a lucrative picture, might have even made his year. But for a professional photographer, nothing was worth burning out a retina.
Even if its source could not be explained . . .
He trudged down to the corner Internet café, e-mailed the shot, then waited for his cell phone to ring.
Within ten minutes of its transmission, the photograph had aroused interest and even frantic activity among no less than thirty-four people in Nigeria, Europe, and the United States. At Fort Meade, Maryland, home of the National Security Agency, the half-focused pixels were resolved and Abigail Sherman was positively identified with 94 percent certainty, including a margin of error of less than 3 percent.
By the time the photographer had returned to his rooftop post to make sure his prey had not escaped, his cell phone's voice-mail box had already logged in thirteen messages.
No matter, though, to the people involved. Although its ringer was turned off, its signal allowed a tracking to within fifteen feet of his location. The proximity to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was noted within secondsâthe nature of the building not lost for a moment on the Scythians receiving word on their way into the Old City.
OLD CITY JERUSALEM, CHRISTIAN QUARTER
Dylan and Sarha plunged into the thick afternoon crowd like tourists trying to win a footrace. Forty yards away from the Sepulchre walls, Dylan spotted a phone booth and nearly threw himself on it.
Accepting a phone card from Sarha, he covered the keypad with his body and dialed frantically.
“Hey, Reuven. Please don't hang up. This is Dylan Hatfield calling. I know this isn't a secure line, so I won't say Mossad and you won't say Delta Force, but you do remember me, from Tel Aviv? Early nineties. . . ?”
Dylan laughed heartily. It appeared his contact had remembered him.
“Listen, I've got a lot to lay on you in a very short time. And I hope you remember enough to know that you can trust me no matter what. I'm in the Old City right now. You need to know that a group of thirty to fifty serial killers . . . yes, you heard me right,
serial killers
. . . right, they just entered Jerusalem . . . No, I don't know how they all got through airport security together, but maybe disguised as some kind of group? Maybe religious. So look for a large, all-male tour group, like a group of priests or monks. Anyway, it'd be a big help if you could come to the city and work with me on this . . . whatever that might entail, you know. Oh, and I'm completely freelance now. I'm not on a formal op or mission for anyone else. I'll fill you in more later . . . No, I have no weapons on meâno comm., no cell phone, nothing . . . I'm just outside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. . . . Fifteen minutes? That's great! One more thingâbring a metal detector wand. I'll explain later. See you soon.”
Then he hung up the phone and exited the booth.
NEW GATE, OLD CITY JERUSALEM
âAT THAT MOMENT
Dylan's off-the-cuff guesswork had actually described the enemy's tactics to the letter. For the very moment he left the phone booth and began making his way toward the rendezvous point to meet up with his old Mossad contact, four groups of twelve men dressed in the garb of Nazarite monks, each one led by a scowling man of advanced age, approached a different gate of the Old City.
Two of the groups were composed of dark-skinned men, though all the leaders were white. All had passed customs that morning on a chartered flight from New York, traveling as an international delegation of Nazarite Brothers in Intercessory Prayer for the Peace of Jerusalem. Religious groups, especially traveling en masse, tended to receive gentler treatment from Israeli security, since their common purpose of the journey was easier to determine. The authorities had failed to realize that Nazarites wear white Essene robes, not the black colors worn by this group.
On the outskirts of modern Jerusalem, their bus had stopped in an industrial area and taken on a large box from a van marked as a carrier of agricultural implements.
The box contained fifty-five razor-sharp sickle blades. Those deadly weapons now lay concealed from the walking public of the Old City by the thinnest of monastic garb: a simple fold of robe.
As for those leading each pack, each of the elderly men grasped a crooked staff for support, but the use was merely cosmetic and to evoke sympathy from passersby. Each of the senior leaders was actually one of the Elders of the Scythian Brotherhood. And the reason why none spoke to the men behind them was not a matter of protocol or religious decorum. It was because the Elders were in the throes of exercising the one ability that had elevated them to their exalted rank among their murderous brethren.
They were conversing with demons, as freely and fluently as language students on an immersion trip.
And they were headed, finally, to a certain destination. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
DEIR ES-SULTAN MONASTERY, ROOFTOP OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE
“This is all incredibly fascinating,” Abby said to the Sentinel Rulaz. “But there appears to be some great mystery surrounding me and all that's happened up to now. And somehow I have been promised that the solving of this mystery will heal a breach of some sort.”
“Maybe we should say breaches, in the plural,” added Rulaz. “Let me explain. This is a closely guarded history, one that few Watchers know, at least in full. After meeting the baby Christ, Anna the prophetess lived to see Him crucified and the fledgling Church grow and flourish. When persecution intensified, she fled with a large group to Ethiopia, where she became a formidable witness and evangelist. But something extraordinary began to happen. A large number of the women Anna had led to Jesus started to manifest visionary gifts remarkably like her own. It was as if her spiritual endowments passed on to her offspring in the faith much like parental traits in one's children. The women whom
they
prayed with to accept Christ witnessed them too, and so on. As the numbers and layers of these visionary women grew, they began to notice additional wonders. It seemed a spiritual thread of interconnectedness linked them all, alerting them to each other's dangers, victories, and fluctuations in the Spirit.
“That's why the Iya Agba in Nigeria are aware of you and were concerned for your condition, even though they have no idea who you are or where you live.
“Now, after Anna's death at an age approaching 130, an old age prolonged by the dry, healthful desert air of our country and the faithful care of her multiplied family, the lineage spread with the word of Christ across Africa. Amazingly, Africa's matriarchal tradition, with mothers not only leading the family but counseling the young girls in matters of faith, caused this heritage to remain confined to mothers and their spiritual daughters.”
“Somewhere along in there,” Abby interjected, “a wealthy royal from Ethiopia traveled to Nigeria and established the Ijebu kingdom. Did you know about that?”
Rulaz closed her eyes and fell silent for a few seconds. “Yes. I remember hearing something in my youth about our Sisterhood having seeded a kingdom far west of us. Something about helping its queen, who was a native of our land, battle a powerful evil.”
“Yes. The Iya Agba of Nigeria are apparently descended from those sisters who came over.”
“I am aware of the Iya Agba in the Spirit, although I did not know their name until just now. You see, this is one of the most painful breaches I have referred to.”
“Please explain this to me.”
“It all came about through the next chapter in our continued history. Through the centuries, the Watchers evolved into far more than a spiritual family. Our gifts made us a vital but highly secret asset in the battles between good and evil all across the globe. Watchers have acted as sentinels beyond Africa: in Europe and Asia as well. We have warned countless homelands of impending invasions, kings of imminent assassination attempts, popes and clerics of every stripe of demonic attacks against all segments of society. And in the midst of all that headiness lay the seeds of our alienation.”
The State of Israel was home to twenty-one women descended from the spiritual lineage of Anna the prophetess who possessed the gift of the Watchers. These women formed an unusually tight-knit group as a result of living in a predominantly Jewish state and so close to the matriarch of the Sisterhood. They lived in virtually every corner of the nation: from the Golan Heights to the Sea of Galilee to the resort city of Eilat at the corner of the far-south Negev Desert.
At that moment, all of twelve who did not already live in the greater Jerusalem area were in their cars and within ten miles of the city, summoned by a powerful spiritual call.
Three had left children with their fathers. Five had left jobs mid-workday, having given their employers no warning or asked for time off. One would be investigated for desertion from her army post upon her return.
All but one of them had violated at least three traffic laws during their hurried trip into Jerusalem.
ROOFTOP OF CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE
Rulaz gazed back out over the Old City and blanched.
“Sister Abigail, whatever you do, do not look out there. First of all, you would be detected almost immediately. The air is thick with combatants. Secondly, the sight of it would make you ill. I have never once regretted having the gift of my Sight. Until this moment.”
“Are we losing?”
“I cannot say who is losing or winning. The battle is fierce right now. But I'm speaking of the sheer blackness and repulsiveness of our enemies. Perhaps we in Jerusalem have been overly sheltered by our many angelic guardians all these years. But I have never seen such a grotesquerie before. It is as if the pit of hell itself flew wide open and disgorged itself into our skies.”
“I am so sorry,” Abby said. “I feel like I am the cause of all this.”
“Do not say such a thing. If your coming caused this, it's because you are the greatest blessing to come our way in many lifetimes.”
“Well, at least let's finish this and see if I can leave you in peace.”
“Ah . . . now, where was I? Oh yes. The breaches arose from a myriad of sources. The Iya Agbas of Nigeria fell under a shadow when their countrymen started selling their brothers and sisters from all over Africa to the slave trade. Whether true or not, a rumor began that implicated a few of the Sisterhood in the heinous practice. But that was far from all. My own foremothers in the Ethiopian Coptic church became hopelessly embroiled in the eternally tumultuous politics of our country. As a result, we gradually drifted from fraternal contact with our neighbors. Some of our more zealous ancestors accused other sisters in Northern Africa of mixing their beliefs with the newly emerging Islam. Deepest of all was the heartbreak of our sisters over in America, whose fate we lost any ability to discern. And so it went. So after all these years, the Sisterhood's relevance, effectiveness, and anointing seem on the wane. A shadow of heartbreak and estrangement has corroded the invisible bonds between us all.”
“Isn't it strange to you that, after all these centuries, the Sisterhood is still a black, African phenomenon?”
“I will say that it saddens me. It is a remarkable testament to how socially separate so many races remain, especially in the most intimate areas of their lives. But think about it: the Watchers are but one family line in a vast human kinship called the body of Christ. And consider how many amputated limbs litter that tree, how many breaches and schisms have caused whole parts of our strength to atrophy and wither away from isolation or under use. I mean, look at the awful way supposed Christians treat each other here at the Church of the Sepulchre, the very place on which we sit. We have struck each other with fists and quarreled amongst ourselves in a manner that shames the cause of Christ, all on account of grievances that date back centuries ago. My life is being afflicted and shortened because of the hateful pettiness of the Egyptians, who have a laundry list against us of their very own.”
“Is this weakening of the Sisterhood the cause of your own physical difficulties?”
“Oh, I would like to think that because we all share this tenuous thread between us, our general decline has caused my own. And it is possible. It is also possible, though, as my brother and some of the monks here would argue, that I have simply neglected my health in my insistence on staying up here in prayer. In either case, I am certain that a healing of these breaches would be the best form of help I could receive.”