The Watchers (22 page)

The massive crowd assembled for that day's session of the Believers Gathering was just ending a soaring chorus of “Lord Most High,” a favorite praise song, all with the help of a two-hundred-person choir, a gifted song leader and rock band, when things began to truly rock.

Before the last note had even finished echoing across the vast human expanse, the Gathering's host, Reverend Evelyn Ebando, one of the most revered of Nigeria's female pastors, took the pulpit with a stunned look on her face. “My brothers and sisters,” she began, then paused for the loudspeakers to carry her final syllables to the edge of the crowd, “we have prayed mightily. And I am here to inform you that she is here. Sister Abigail is in our midst. This Gathering, this assembly turned out to be her destination!”

A veritable tsunami of cheers and applause rose and rolled over the woman. She took one step back, then another. Although she seemed about to fall over backward, the ecstasy on her face confirmed that she was in fact fine.
Just fine
.

She turned and motioned for Abby to walk out. After some shuffling of bodies, the backstage crowd parted. Held up by Sister Abedago and a strapping young man in a broad-shouldered suit, Abby stepped forward with the halting gait of one using her last ounce of strength.

Amazingly, the ovation grew in volume. Doubled in intensity and power.

She reached the podium, gripping its sides, and her helpers stepped back. As the greeting crescendoed she stood motionless, blinking, staring at what sprawled before her.

Blinked. Stared.

Concentrated very hard on continuing to breathe.

And all the while, a massive roar of love and greeting rose from beyond the stage to wash over her in deafening waves.

Breathe . . .

You can do it, Abigail
.

Problem was, her eyes simply could not process the scene before her, the sea of humanity, the sheer scale of it all. What lay beyond the stage seemed to violate some law of nature. You simply weren't designed to see humanity in this kind of abundance. The human faces, all crowded together into such a profusion. Individual bodies standing close to each other and swaying as if from some invisible breeze, forming a single, intricate quilt that stretched half a mile from horizon to horizon. The endless smiles, one after the other, and in infinite variety. The shimmering dresses of turquoise and cerulean and purple and white, crowned by head wraps of diverse shape and hue.

It all struck Abby as the most beautiful of sights. In another realm, another sense that her soul found truest, this vast array of souls gathered in one place seemed perfectly natural, a vestigial image ingrained deep inside of her, one which had never been coaxed into betraying its presence . . . until now.

The ovation finally subsided. It was time for her to speak. She had avoided thinking about this moment and therefore had not composed anything. She closed her eyes, breathed a quick prayer, and began to speak.

“My brothers and sisters, this is a great and fearful day for me. To say that God has led me here is without a doubt the greatest understatement I may ever speak.”

She took another deep breath and during the pause realized with astonishment that the crowd had fallen silent.

“He's led me here without a doubt, and I'm not entirely sure why. Some of you believe He led me here to be healed. And while I don't presume to know His purposes, I can tell you that this wasn't in my own thoughts. And yet, as I've been told that amazing signs and wonders happen here in Nigeria, which would be considered unbelievable back in my so-called Christian country, I would never reject that possibility. Without being melodramatic, I must tell you that His reason may be for me to die here among you today. Like all of us are, I am dying. And this would be a wonderful day, and a wonderful place, to go and be with Him. Here, with all of you.”

A tentative ripple of applause and cheers arose in response.

“And, although some of you may know this—and I have no idea whether or when Mara McQueen airs here in Nigeria—but the Lord recently erased all my misgivings about going to be with Him. You see, I believe with one hundred percent certainty that He showed me what awaits all of us who know Him. I can tell you . . .”

“Shadow Man, are you in position? Everything ready?”

The voice stuttered with bits of static and distortion, but considering that it was being bounced from three satellites all the way from New York City, Dylan thought it remarkably clear.

At that moment Dylan sat perched just below a light pole at the rooftop of a tin building backing up to the assembly stage. The spot afforded him an unbroken panoramic view of the surroundings: from the stage to the nearly 360-degree-wide audience to the outermost edges of the site. He could see also, merely because he had been given their positions, where Colonel Shawkey's men had stationed themselves at the rear of the crowd to buffer an initial onslaught.

“Yes, Shadow Leader. Everything is in place and proceeding perfectly. Our mark is just seconds away from her final position.”

“And the defenses?”

“They have no idea what's coming. They're good soldiers, but they're few and outmatched. Over and out.”

Dylan knew he had rushed an ending to the conversation, but he had intended to. Given all the thoughts tumbling over each other in his brain, Shadow Leader was the last person he wanted to talk to.

On every op until now, Dylan had always found it a worthwhile exercise to warm up by mentally picturing the hit, over and over again. In fact, the ritual had evolved over the years into an essential part of his preparations. But today, he simply could not force himself to even begin. Trying to picture Abby, of all people, in his scope's crosshairs, then watch his finger mercilessly squeeze the trigger to send a bullet hurtling through her brain—he just couldn't bring himself to conjure the mental image.

He could feel a moment of nearly suicidal choices rushing toward him, but felt powerless to either stop it or delay its coming. Neither choice would be simple, easy or painless; he knew that with a cold certainty.

And yet, as much as he dreaded its arrival, Dylan felt that if the moment didn't come soon, he would doubtless go insane.

CHAPTER
_
28

Abby was still speaking, in a halting but heartfelt voice, when Reverend Ebando walked up behind her and gently placed a hand upon her shoulder. The reverend looked at Abby with kind, deep-set eyes and a warm smile, and said, “I'm sorry to interrupt, my dear sister, but I feel the Lord leading me to introduce you to Sister Okoye.”

At the sound of that name Abby abruptly stopped speaking and turned to see the newcomer. The two locked eyes. Something passed between them that was both mysterious and quite visible to the audience. For her own part, Abby froze midway through offering her hand to be shaken. Again, she blinked and stared.

Then her face twisted, and she began to weep uncontrollably.

Abby cried not in a guarded way but in an abandoned, childlike flood of tears. Her knees began to waver, and Reverend Ebando had begun moving forward to offer support when suddenly Sister Okoye stepped in with a forbearing smile and wrapped Abby in her arms.

“What is it, my Sister?” she whispered into Abby's hair.

“I've seen you before,” Abby managed to stutter between gasps. “I've met you.”

“How is that, dear?” Okoye asked in a tone of voice remarkably clear of incredulity.

Abby pulled back to look at her again. “I saw you in heaven.”

The woman stared at Abby, the breath seemingly torn from her lungs.

“It's true,” Abby continued. “I saw you with a group of others. It's the mystery—the great question that drove me here. Who you, and all the others, were. Why He showed all of you to me. And now, here you are. Right here. Alive.”

“My dear, does your spirit bear witness as mine does?”

“I can tell that we're bound, somehow. I feel like you're family, just as I did at the gates of heaven, where I first saw you.”

“
Iya Agba
. It means Seer. Watcher. A gift you did not choose.”

“Yes. That's why I'm here.”

“But I am not only here to meet you. I am here to do much more. This is a great and terrible day, and I am here to pray for your healing.”

Sister Okoye turned to the microphone. The crowd had never stopped its murmuring during the private whispers between the two women. Yet despite not knowing the precise nature of their conversation, the Nigerian believers were mature enough to know that something mighty was brewing.

“Brothers and sisters,” Okoye began in the traditional way, “I am about to lay hands on our dear Abigail. And with the whole world watching, I beg you to pray with me as never before that the seed of death inside this dear girl will be destroyed in Jesus' name!”

At the farthest edge of the horizon—a hazy fringe where the carpet of humanity seemed to finally thin out and shimmer into forest— a faint row of gray dots rose silently into the sky and began to grow. They did not stay distant for long, for they were overflying the treetops at a full intercept speed of nearly two hundred miles an hour.

They were not, as some of the first worshipers to spot them casually assumed, more media helicopters. Their doors stood open, and from those gaping apertures bristled automatic weapons well known to veterans of a century's worth of Nigerian conflicts.

Islamic insurgents, hidden just beyond the perimeter, took that very first hum of rotor blades as their cue to launch a simultaneous volley of mortar rounds upon Colonel Shawkey's outlying positions. The result was a single thunderous boom which seemed, to those who would describe it later, as a sonic complement to the great cheer that had just risen from the Gathering.

When a chattering of machine-gun fire broke out in reply, however, the worshipers farthest back immediately knew the truth.

Like a great football audience performing the wave, the human sea turned as one toward the back of the site. Already, five columns of smoke, punctuated by cores of flame, uncoiled into the sky.

And now, instead of joyful voices lifted in praise, there came the sound of screaming.

“Operation Intercept is under way,” Dylan declared into his headpiece. “Ground attack has commenced.”

“Shadow Man, do you hear me? I'm watching the networks. They're all carrying it, and they all note a disturbance at the rear of the audience, but they haven't moved their cameras! They're still fixated on the girl and this old woman!”

“Give it a second. Fatalities are already mounting.”

“No! I will not wait! This old woman is doing something to her, and if the coverage goes on a moment longer, then they've won! They've won, you hear me?”

“
Who
has won, Shadow Leader? You never explained this.”

“Forget it! Just follow orders. Obey now, before it's too late! Take the shot yourself!”

“I can't. The old woman's draped herself over her. Unless I take them both out . . . but I can't do this surgically.”

“Doesn't matter. Take them both out, take out the whole Christian trash heap, I don't care. Just stop it!”

Christian trash heap
—the odd excessiveness of the phrase gave Dylan a moment's pause. He was already on fire now with curiosity about just what Shadow Leader had failed to brief him on earlier— the supposedly ironclad rationale for “harvesting” this young girl in the first place. But now this strange, hateful term. It seemed to push the absurdity of this whole operation right over the top.

The moment is here, Dylan . . .

. . . make your choice
.

Seething with unfocused anger at the dilemma now upon him, he returned his sniper rifle to the two women at the podium, searching for an opening, some random development that would take the conscious decision away from him.

“Hey! Lloyd! The fighting's begun! Who are you aiming at?”

Dylan pulled away and looked down, swiveling his rifle barrel with him. The voice belonged to Colonel Shawkey, who was rushing by with three of his men, their weapons at the ready.

“Come with me, Lloyd,” Shawkey ordered. “We need you at the rear. No freelancing, remember?”

At that moment, Dylan's world groaned into a slow-motion, graytinged nightmare. A snail's world where the point of his index finger grazing the trigger loomed as large as a mountain. And where the sweet spot at the center of Shawkey's forehead, its every bead of sweat and buried capillary, seemed to throb in anticipation of a bullet.

“Lloyd? I'm serious!” warned Shawkey's stern voice from a place seemingly far away.

Dylan yanked himself into real time, jerked his weapon away and fired two rounds in Shawkey's direction. The colonel's men stiffened and shouldered their weapons to fire, but the sound of bodies falling just behind them stopped their motion.

They turned.

It was not Colonel Shawkey dropping to the ground like a rag doll, but a pair of jihadist gunmen who had been running up from behind, clearly intent on murdering them. The two now lay quivering in their death throes.

Colonel Shawkey and his men turned back around to face Lloyd. The colonel stared from the man's face to his still-smoking gun barrel.

“I need to stay here,” Dylan said, his face a bit dazed. “I'm covering the podium.”

Colonel Shawkey quickly cut his eyes over to Abby and Sister Okoye. He nodded and said, “You do that.” And they strode away.

Dylan returned his aim to the two women, who, swaying together, had yet to leave the stage.

ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI
—THAT VERY MOMENT

A guard walked up to the cell door just as the charge nurse settled back down from her tiptoe look through the observation window. The windows were all too high; it was the way the place had been built. Since the facility had been constructed sixty years before as a prison, not a mental hospital, this was far from the only indignity visited by its design upon the nursing staff.