The Watchers (46 page)
Then a shout rang out. It was Brother Brehan, bounding toward the rooftop gate, shouting deprecations as he ran. “Nooo!” He launched himself over the wall and onto the metal staircase's top landing. The first Scythian stood only five feet below, his blade waving before him.
Brehan turned toward the wall and with two mighty yanks pulled a pair of ancient, rusting bolts out of crumbling limestone.
Rulaz threw her hands over her mouth and closed her eyes.
The staircase bent cruelly at the top, made a loud metallic creak, and collapsed. Brehan and the leading edge of Scythians were tossed mercilessly to the ground.
In the square, the remaining number turned about and glanced at their leader. Behind them advanced a row of emboldened Watchers, all of them holding out their hands and praying loudly.
Suddenly the elderly leader let out a guttural sound. He stiffened, and his followers mimicked him exactly.
He raised his sickle across his own throat, resting the blade tip just below his far earlobe. Eight more did the same.
He drew the scythe down in a fast, hard, swiping motion.
The men behind him performed the same motion in a single, precise rhythm.
It was Abby's turn to gasp at the horror below as nine bodies fell as one. Blood began spreading out across the plaza.
Rulaz turned to her, touched her forehead, and muttered a parting blessing. “It is time for you to go now,” she said in an urgent whisper. “Find Dylan. Return to America.”
“I thought it would end here,” Abby lamented.
“It has not. And these men are defeated today, but not for good. They will keep coming after you. But it will end soon. Now go, while the fog of battle is still upon the Old City. There is another stairway that leads down from this place, right over there. Godspeed, my Sister.”
OLD CITY JERUSALEM
Abby crossed the rooftop and fled the Abyssinian compound as swiftly as she could. Once she reached street level, she found Dylan, pulled him aside and told him what Rulaz had said.
After saying good-bye to Reuven, Dylan and Abby began sprinting down what they figured to be the least demon-infested street. Just minutes later they encountered a thick crowd along the narrowing lane where they felt it was safe to slow down.
The pair had vacated the Holy Sepulchre plaza with only seconds to spare. Only a moment after they had run from the site, two Israeli Shin Bet soldiers had ascended to the Deir es-Sultan rooftop.
There they found the nun known as Rulaz reclining as always, appearing only hours away from death. And yet, in a bizarre paradox, the barely living one struck the killers as the most vibrant person in the whole place.
They had intended to detain Rulaz and wait for orders over their cell phones. But a strange compulsion fell upon them. An unexplainable discomfort took hold of their extremities, and they began to shake so violently that they almost did not make it back down the steps and out into the street, where the symptoms immediately subsided.
From the apparent stupor of her weakened-again state, Rulaz smiled mildly and whispered a loving prayer of thanks.
KING DAVID HOTEL
Back in their East Jerusalem hotel room, Abby lay on the bed, trying to combine recuperation with brainstorming on their next step, which both of them knew had to take shape soon.
Very soon.
“Do you know what's strange?” she asked Dylan. “I never did tell Rulaz the highest likelihood is that my mom's dead. I don't know if that's denial, or some kind of deeper instinct, or what. It feels strange.”
Dylan stiffened, the evidence of a new idea blossoming on his face.
“Look. I have an old friend at the FBI. Looks like for all its failings, my old life is turning out to have its advantages. Let's just see if he can run her name through their databases and come up with something definitive.”
“All right,” she said, her voice filled with dread. “Here's the phone.”
She handed him the set and he swiftly dialed a number from memory. He waited almost a minute, then broke into a wide grin.
“Robert! Hey, it's Dylan Hatfield. Did I wake you up? I'm sorry, man, and you know better than to ask me where I'm calling from, but suffice it to say it's across the pond a ways. As if you couldn't find out . . .” He laughed awkwardly. “Actually, Robert, that's kind of why I called.”
Dylan paused and listened for a moment.
“Well yeah, you heard right, or at least on the surface it's right. I mean, yes, I have gone off the rez, my man. Left the old company store, as it were. But you know me, Robert. You and I go . . . how far back? Twenty years now? Anyway, you know that I have more conscience than half of those guys put together. Right?”
He laughed.
“I thought you and I would agree. So here's the deal: I'm willing to pay good coin for a little of your telecom expertise. I need a domestic name run through the databases. Could you do that? This is very important, a life-or-death honest-to-goodness big deal. Freedom, the flag, all that good stuff. All right, the name is . . .”
He held out the phone to Abby.
“Susanne Louise Sherman.”
Dylan broke out into a huge smile. “Did you hear that? Great. Thank you, buddy. I appreciate it.”
He hung up, pumped his fists in the air, and cheered.
Within an hour a name appeared in Dylan's e-mail account, sent from an unknowable and untraceable web address.
St. Stephen's Home for Mental Health and Recovery, St. Louis, Missouri.
ST. STEPHEN'S HOME FOR MENTAL HEALTH AND RECOVERY
âTHREE DAYS LATER
Reverend and Mrs. Paul Skinner of Matewan, West Virginia, had arrived without appointment, with no records and, most of all, without the troubled and ailing teenaged son for whom they were “checking out” the St. Stephen's facilities.
However frowned upon by government regulations, such drop-ins were not a problem to the St. Stephen's staff. Turned out most parents did pretty much the same thing when first sniffing around, prior to the pain of involuntary committal. No one wanted to appear too serious before it was necessary. One understood such things in the mental health business.
So when Reverend and Mrs. Skinner arrived, the missus clearly distraught over the mere consideration of such an act as committing her boy to an “asylum,” as she insisted on calling it, their impeccable dress and laudable concern warmed them to the facility staff.
The Reverend and Mrs. Skinner quickly discerned during their tour that Booneville was, despite occupying only a middle-tier status among private institutions, a most respected and well-managed private mental hospital. Its grounds featured one of the finest and largest specimens of Kentucky bluegrass of any place not already a horse farm, and its amenities were clean, non-odorous, and clearly above the norm. If the staff was somewhat less than stellar, and the success rate actually far below the national average . . . well, that only made for warm, long-standing relationships.
After they described their son as unusually strong-willed, physically strong, and resourceful, it seemed perfectly acceptable that the pair paid close attention to the home's security systems. The reverend, as most men of the cloth often did, protested a complete deficiency in technical matters and seemed lost when the home's director described to him the intricacies of the intensive ward lighting and locking grid.
But like most, he seemed mighty glad that the system was in place, whether understood or not.
The only disappointment to the director was that, as they left, they pointedly ignored three requests to leave their name and address in the brand-new contact-management system. They seemed sincere when they pledged to come back, but the hapless director now found himself, after the investment of an hour-long tour, completely unable to follow up with the decent couple.
He also wanted to express his goodwill to the poor wife, who seemed to be seeing ghosts, or some kind of frightening apparition, at nearly every turn of the hallway. He had never seen such a skittish woman. In fact, if he had been a suspicious man, he might have believed that it was she, and not some alleged son, who was the real object of their visit.
ST. STEPHEN'S HOME
âLATE THAT NIGHT
The perimeter lighting, which for most of the evening had kept the entire forty-acre grounds awash in an electric glow, blinked off at eleven o'clock, as promised. As a result, the cloudy winter night sank its unrelieved darkness down upon the campus like a thick black pillow.
The result? Conditions were almost too optimal for the man and woman, dressed in form-hugging black, as they scaled the high-brick wall and leaped inside. The two were so well disguised, they almost couldn't see each other.
Straining to spot his companion in the dark, Dylan almost wished he had skipped the black attire. If not for the ambient lighting from exit signs and night-lights inside the nearby building, there would have been no illumination at all.
That is, until the motion detectors set off a lawn spotlight. It was a windy night, so Dylan knew it would alert no one. As for the security guard who was parked in a truck on the other side of the campus, if he was awake at all he would attribute the spotlight to trees waving.
Finally he spotted Abby. She was standing still against the wall.
“Are you okay?” he asked, approaching her slowly to avoid causing a fright.
“I don't know if I can do this,” she said, breathless.
“You mean, breaking in somewhere?”
She shook her head violently. It wasn't that. “It's the spiritual activity here. You wouldn't believe it. Things weren't this thick earlier today.”
“Do you want to pray? We're not exactly on a time crunch, you know.”
He couldn't believe he was hearing himself volunteer this, at last. Part of him, the perverse and heedless male, chided himself for capitulating to such a female-dominated perspective.
Religion's for chicks, and the guys they've whipped into submission
âsomething like that.
Amazing how quickly, once back in the United States, parts of him could begin to forget everything he had seen and learned overseas.
But another part of Dylan had forgotten nothing. Oddly enough, that inner guide was the same part of him that embraced discipline. That remembered to observe the tactical rules when on an op. That observed total operational control in following a plan, handling a firearm, heeding orders. The part of him that cared about the truth and took pride in doing what was right.
It was the part of him that never forgot what he had experienced, no matter how much time had elapsed or how many miles had flown by. . . .
Healings, angels, blinding flashes of light, prayers answered miraculously . . .
So yeahâit felt a little strange to kneel down on a mission, with a girl beside him, on-site, in full operational gear, and talk to someone who wasn't visibly around.
But Dylan was a different kind of warrior now.
The prayer over, they hugged the wall over to a low hedge, which they then followed, hunched forward. They reached the outer door with its simple numeric keypad, and Dylan almost laughed, remembering how easy it had been to glance at the director's proud punching in of numbers during their comprehensive tour.
The service entrance, he noted, was the only one without an attendant video camera, so Dylan merely pushed 4â3â2â1âthe default factory setting, he was certainâand they were in.
Their earlier grilling of the director on security measures had, not accidentally, extended to the subject of nighttime staffing. Proudly extolling his facility's nocturnal vigilance, the man had told them exactly where the night-shift nurse sat for each of the home's major sections. The only one that did not rate a full-time desk inside was the high-security area, which, because of its narrow halls and highly medicated patients, could manage by sharing a nurse with the youth ward.
They wove silently through the hallways, easily evading the night desks by ducking into side halls and flowing along the length of the complex toward the high-security wing. But the ease of their access was not matched by ease of movement on the part of Abby. In fact, the farther she progressed into the building proper, the more her halting and jerky motions made her resemble one of the patients rather than a skilled intruder.
“Why now?” Dylan whispered to her during a break in one of the safer hallways. “Of all the places we've been, what's so bad about this place?”
“It's the patients. Think about it, Dylan. Most of the people in places like this are good, ordinary folks just having some problems. But if we know that demon possession makes people lose their minds, then how many of those folks also make their way to mental institutions? These hallways are full of . . . oh, there's, I can't even tell you . . .”
HIGH-SECURITY WING
âTHAT MOMENT
Unfold top half, open sideways.
Loving gaze. Pray.
Fold back. Trace the crease.
Unfold top half, open sideways.
Loving gaze. Pray.
Fold back . . .
That very day, Patient 64 had finally lost count of how many times she had performed the motion. It had taken years for the number to climb so high. Of the yearsâshe had lost count of those as well. Decades' worth, to be sure.
She had kept a careful count for all those minutes, all those days, all those years. Somewhere in the thirty-five-thousand range. That was all she could remember now.
Today, something was different. A different-ness that had creeped all the way into her little world and chased the number from her mind. She would have collapsed entirely at the loss of it had the different-ness not felt so promising, so hopeful somehow.
She could feel her breathing slow and fall into rhythm. Her spine straighten. Her tear-caked eyes, her brittle mouth start to soften into those of a human being again. Her mind clear itself at last.