The Watchers

by Mark Andrew Olsen

  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 ha
d 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.”

  CHAPTER

  _ 30

  BELIEVERS GATHERING, LAGOS-BENIN CITY HIGHWAY, NIGERIA

  That day’s attack went down in history as the bloodiest and most galling example of religious fratricide to stain the African continent that whole year. By the time the remaining insurgents fell back and seemingly melted into the bush, over 300 Christian believers had died. As for the number of slain attackers, the numbers varied widely between the army’s official estimate of 425, the media’s number of 78, or local eyewitnesses’ accounts of three or four dozen bodies lying in a dismal heap right in front of the stage.

  Almost as dismaying to the Christians of southern Nigeria, however, was the fact that even though the world press had fixed its eagle eye on the Believers Gathering that day, the only story which survived into the following news cycle was not that of their people being massacred, but of the appearance and mysterious disappearance of Abby Sherman.

  By the time press-pooled footage of Abby’s cryptic speech, her bizarre contortions with Sister Okoye—who soon became a household name in her own right—and her narrow brush with death was analyzed and talk-showed into oblivion, the attack itself seemed to have been reduced to a convenient catalyst, a mere backdrop for the main event.

  Nigerians who had lost their loved ones on that horrific day had another perspective on the matter.

  Yet, thankfully, many of them pointed to Abby’s speech itself as their solace. The young American had described for them her visit to heaven and the incredible peace that had since come over her. For those forced by the day’s later events to contemplate eternity in a fresh new light, her words proved life-changing.

  Of all the facets of this story that kept it page one worldwide, however, the one aspect most compelling in the hours and days to follow was the simple question, Where in the world did Abby and her friends go?

  OUTSIDE THE BELIEVERS GATHERING — LATER THAT AFTERNOON

  The simple explanation for Abby, Lloyd (or Dylan) and Sister Okoye’s unlikely, and nearly invisible, escape was that it had been aided by the giftings of not one but two Iya Agbas.

  After the threesome had run from the stage, they had not stepped ten feet inside the ministers’ shelter when Okoye had stopped, her eyes blinking rapidly, and warned them of evil approaching. They then made an abrupt turn and raced down a flight of stairs into a basement area when, just as Okoye had warned, a phalanx of radical Islamic guerrillas burst onto the floor above them and mowed down a dozen prominent Nigerian clergymen, all in a matter of seconds.

  Fearing the gunmen would follow the stairs and find them hiding below, the three rushed to the far end of the dark basement where a bend in its corrugated tin wall had allowed a sliver of sunlight to intrude. From there they heard the appalling massacre as it was taking place above them.

  Unwilling to exit into an unknown location, Lloyd had fished out a small mirror and positioned it on the other side of the wall to have a look. After quickly pulling back the mirror, he warned them with alarm in his eyes that escaping from here was out of the question. Three enemy pickups sat parked right outside the shelter wall with aft-mounted fifty-millimeter guns at the ready.

  Sister Okoye laid a calming hand on Lloyd’s shoulder and told him that, despite the threatening presence, it was safe for them to pass that way.

  “You’re crazy,” he said. “I’m telling you, there’re men out there with their fingers on triggers right this second, aimed this way. We wouldn’t make it two yards.”

  Okoye smiled and glanced at Abby. “Sister Abigail, do you wish to tell him why we can pass this way?”

  Indeed, Abby had snapped back to the present and told him with a smile, “Because there’s a mighty warrior angel, Captain of the Ranks, standing right outside this wall, ready to blind their eyes.”

  Lloyd began to protest again, but then he remembered the reason why he was here and stopped himself. Had he not halted his killing because of supernatural sights—a flash of light which seemed to have healed Abby? Glowing beings guarding the pair?

  “All right,” he said. “I still wonder if this isn’t suicide, but if you’ll let me go first, I’m willing to give it a try.” He pulled a handgun from a side pocket in his pants and quickly checked its load. Then, scrambling down gun first, he squeezed himself through the wall’s small opening.

  The two women stood and watched each other, waiting for Lloyd’s “all clear.” It came as a soft thump on the metal wall. Next, Sister Okoye clambered down and disappeared. Abby, now more at ease with the reliability of her Sight, followed eagerly. She rose up in a twilit strip of grass, crowded with pickup trucks, seething with men and their demonic controllers, and in her myopic surface vision she’d failed to look up and notice the angel her Sight had shown her just a moment before.

  Lloyd was standing motionless before the pickup’s grill, immobilized by either fear, wonder at his not being detected, or some combination of both. As Abby dusted herself off, Sister Okoye nudged Lloyd’s shoulder and roused him back to reality. “Come with us, warrior man,” she teased him with a decided edge to her voice.

  They took off running, away from the trucks and the shooting, and toward the trees. The men with the guns never looked their way. And the cameras, which remained fixed on the official entrance to the ministers’ shelter, never caught them as they hid behind a helicopter and waited thirty seconds before sprinting into the nearby forest, just after a patrol of jihadist killers sauntered by.

  CHAPTER

  _ 31

  Within minutes of their escape, Abby found herself jogging through knee-high grass behind Lloyd and Sister Okoye along a lush green wall marking the edge of Nigeria’s rain forest. She did not yet realize that behind this very rampart of leaf and vine, equatorial jungle stretched across a broad swath of coastal Nigeria all the way east to the Cameroon border.

  Mere hundreds of yards behind them, isolated rounds of gunfire still popped every few minutes. Screams from the wounded and dying drifted over on a late afternoon breeze. Abby shivered and quickened her step each time one of the sounds reached her ears, for she could hardly wait to travel beyond earshot of the horrors.

  Suddenly a shot rang out more loudly than the others. A faint whistle and a hiss came from the grass just beyond her head. Harsh shouts echoed behind them.

  They’d been spotted.

  Sister Okoye, who swiftly took the lead despite her age, did not give an outward sign of having heard anything. Instead, she surged ahead with several lunging strides, then turned left without warning and disappeared into the trees. Too hurried to even register her surprise, Abby followed.

  A curtain of bright green leaves and vines tried to block her progress, but she just gritted her teeth and plowed ahead. Abby was too determined to be stopped or even slowed by anything like undergrowth. She pushed through, feeling leafy cords drape across her face and neck. Blinking, she forced her feet to propel her forward.

  Abby opened her eyes. She was shocked to find, instead of gloom and shadows, a vaulted, leafy cavern. It was like stepping into a whole new world. They were in that interlude between late afternoon and evening when the sun expends the last of its light in an eerily diffuse glow. As
a result, the entire forest seemed alight with an unearthly, radiant green.

  Her head craned upward, toward the distant canopy. The only sounds reaching them now came from nearby: the chattering of birds, the piercing shrieks of howler monkeys, echoes of untraceable cries against the cavernous jungle roof. Closer still could be heard the slapping of their shoes, the unavoidable thump of their breathing.

  Sister Okoye continued to amaze Abby with her competence and fitness. Still arrayed in her silk dress, the aging woman hiked the fabric about her knees and moved just as gracefully and tirelessly as the younger two. In fact, she was now their leader; it was Okoye who had run unerringly to the fringe of rain forest a third of a mile from the Gathering compound.

  For Abby, a jungle that at any other time might have felt gloomy and dangerous now felt like a haven. Every step away from the horror behind them seemed like a mile toward safety and calm. Not to mention the chance to sit down with Sister Okoye and ask a few pertinent questions on the real purpose for this journey.

  Roughly a half mile into the forest, Okoye’s remarkable endurance ran out and she asked them for a pause. They stopped under a break in the canopy, where stars already twinkled in anticipation of dusk.

  “It’ll be nighttime soon,” Lloyd warned. “Are we heading somewhere specific?”

  Okoye smiled and said, “Yes. We are.”

  “Well? Are you going to tell us about it?”

  She shrugged. “It is a place where we will be safe. Or safer—”

  A helicopter thundered overhead. A spotlight beam shot through the canopy and lit up the ground at their feet. Behind them, a rustling in the leaves betrayed the approach of a group along the trail.

  His eyes as large as quarters, Lloyd yanked the two women back from the trail and flat onto the forest floor. Their only shelter from the eyes of those approaching was a low depression in the ground and the trunk of a huge ginkgo tree.