by John Altman
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The Watchmen
John Altman
FOR SARAH
PROLOGUE
Al Guhrair saw the man—sitting alone in a sidewalk café, nursing a cup of coffee as he watched the pedestrians shuffle through the marketplace.
He was surprised at the man’s smallness, as he had been during their first meeting. The little assassin was slight of build; his dark clothes hung loosely off a slender frame. There was something nervous in his eyes as they swept back and forth across the crowded marketplace. Something of the hunted, Al Guhrair thought in that first moment, instead of the hunter.
As he had during their first meeting, Al Guhrair felt a pang of skepticism. Could this little man possibly live up to his reputation? It was hard to believe. Yet they had already set the wheels in motion—so they would move ahead with their decision, doubts or no.
After a moment, he moved to keep the rendezvous.
Around him, the ancient Marché Rue Mouffetard bustled with chattering shoppers and well-stocked market stalls. Shellfish and octopus and sugarcane were sold alongside garlic-stuffed snails, fragrant wheels of cheese, and traditional French kitchenware. As Al Guhrair approached the café, the man’s dark eyes moved up and fell on his face. They glinted with recognition.
Al Guhrair sat, squeezing his bulk into the chair. A pretty waitress caught his eye. He pointed at the man’s coffee; she nodded.
For a few seconds the two men sat in something not unlike comfortable silence, as if they were old friends. The late afternoon light was turning pale. The waitress brought a cup of coffee. Al Guhrair gave her time to move away. Then he reached down, lifted his briefcase, and set it on the table.
He hit the latches, opened the case, and passed over the first item. He watched as the assassin opened the passport and considered the bundle of papers rubber-banded inside: driver’s license, social security card, and several hundred dollars of American currency. The expression on the man’s face remained blank, impossible to read.
Again, Al Guhrair felt a stirring of doubt. In most cases, when one created a false identity, one chose a nationality different from the sphere in which one would be operating. Yet the assassin had insisted that he would be able to pass for American, to blend in more completely than any foreigner ever could. Al Guhrair wondered. The man’s ethnicity was indeterminate—his complexion was European, yet his features hinted at some other ancestry. He was a combination of breeds, Al Guhrair thought. America was filled with such combinations. Perhaps the man had been right in his insistence that the identity be American; yet Al Guhrair still had his doubts.
Then the passport with the accompanying papers disappeared into a fold of the man’s black shirt—so loose that it might better have been called a tunic.
Al Guhrair reached into the briefcase again, and passed over a slim folder.
There were two maps in the folder. One represented the compound surrounding the safe house, the other the layout of the house itself. The assassin leaned forward, peering at the maps in the pallid light. Then he leaned back and closed the file. He left it on the table as Al Guhrair reached once more into the briefcase.
The final item was another folder, containing a photograph of the target. He handed it forward. The assassin took it, lifted a corner, looked inside flatly, and then closed the folder.
Al Guhrair cleared his throat. “I’ll be back in New York next week,” he said in English. “If you need to get in touch with us, for any reason …”
He produced a calfskin wallet and removed an embossed business card. When the assassin accepted it, their eyes met. Al Guhrair saw something there that surprised him: a flash of intensity, completely unexpected considering the man’s quiet demeanor.
The assassin stood.
He picked up the folders, spun a coin onto the table beside his untouched cup of coffee, and then moved away, melting into the crowd.
Al Guhrair watched him go. He reached for his own coffee and sipped. The meeting had been shorter than he had expected. And the assassin, he was realizing, had not spoken a single word.
He sipped the coffee and then looked for the man again. But already he was gone.
Could he do it? He was small and slight, almost meek. Yet there had been that unexpected flash in his eyes.…
Al Guhrair raised his coffee again, and wondered.
PART ONE
1
Finney’s breath caught in his throat.
He took a moment to steady his hands, then swept the binoculars back across the path they just had followed—over the dilapidated fence, past the stables, to a tangled thicket near the edge of the forest. There.
The Bachman’s warbler.
He found it perched on a low branch, seeming to look directly back at him. The Bachman’s warbler was the rarest songbird in North America. From the black cowl, Finney knew that it was a male.
As he watched, the bird gave its distinctive call: a low, grating bzz-bzz-bzz.
Then it took wing and vanished from his field of vision.
He lowered the 804 Swift Audubon binoculars. His heart was pounding. He hadn’t yet remembered to start breathing again. That brief glimpse, he knew, was all he would get. But he was not complaining. In seven years of combing these woods behind his farm, he never before had seen a Bachman’s warbler.
For another few moments he stood, trying to hold on to a sense of pleasure that already was slipping away. Then he remembered to take a breath. He consulted his watch. It was ten minutes before noon. His visitor would be arriving shortly.
He spent one last minute looking in the direction of the thicket, hoping against hope that the warbler would reappear. Then Dr. Louis Finney turned and headed slowly back to the converted farmhouse that he called home.
He knew upon opening the door that Arthur Noble was not well.
The last of his hair had gone; the sides of his head gleamed smoothly beneath the brim of a felt hat. He was supporting himself with a cane, using both hands. His face, which always had been somewhat suggestive of a basset hound, had hollowed, the folds drooping lower than ever. Yet he had managed to drive himself, Finney noted; and now he managed a crinkle-eyed smile.
“Louis,” Noble said.
“Arthur,” Finney answered stiffly.
After a moment he turned and led Noble through the foyer, to his study.
The study was furnished with two Windsor cherry sack-back armchairs, a burnished Queensleg desk, and much evidence of Finney’s interest in ornithology: calendars, posters, and photographs representing flickers, bluebirds, pheasant, and shrike. The window was open, letting in the sluggish drone of bumblebees from the garden. A gray-cheeked thrush was perched on the rim of the copper birdbath, looking off grandly into the distance.
Finney gestured at one of the armchairs. Noble sat gingerly, without removing his hat. The man seemed ten years older than his age, Finney thought. He wondered, with sudden self-consciousness, if he was making a similarly decrepit impression on Noble. His gray-threaded beard was likely windswept after his morning spent in the pasture; his posture was no doubt as stooped as ever. He tried to stand up straighter as he moved around the desk, and then to slip with some grace into his own leather-upholstered chair.
For a few moments, the men considered each other in silence. Then Noble gave
another smile.
“It’s good to see you,” he said.
Finney only nodded.
“Is Lila here?” Noble looked around as if she might have been hidden somewhere in the room. “It’s been too long. It would do these old eyes good to see …”
Finney shook his head.
Another moment passed.
“Louis—I’m sorry.”
“It was a blessing,” Finney said gruffly. “By the end.”
Silence, except for the distant, plaintive call of an oriole.
Finney’s eyes were drawn to a spot on Noble’s throat. A mole, or something like it. In the next instant, Noble had produced a dark handkerchief and pressed it against the spot.
Then he coughed, and the handkerchief moved reflexively to cover his mouth. Finney saw that the mole on his throat was bleeding. Except it wasn’t a mole, he understood suddenly.
Noble coughed again; his color rose. He looked up and saw the expression on Finney’s face. He smiled darkly, lowering the handkerchief into his lap.
He nodded.
“Kaposi’s sarcoma,” he said.
“Good Christ,” Finney said.
“They give me a month.”
“Good Christ.”
“I’m glad you agreed to see me today, Louis. I’d like to … not have enemies, when I leave this world. Especially not enemies who once were counted as friends.”
Finney paused.
From the hallway, the grandfather clock ticked solemnly.
Noble was talking again—but Finney was no longer listening.
Instead, he was remembering.
He remembered a young woman who refused to meet his eyes.
She was looking at her own hands, clasped tightly in her lap. The room was furnished only with the plain wooden chairs in which they sat. Except for the one-way mirror through which they were being observed, the lemon-colored walls were bare.
Finney watched, waiting.
At last, the woman stirred. When her eyes raised, they were not the eyes of Susan Franklin—the young woman’s primary identity. They were the eyes of Robin, her strongest alternate identity.
Those eyes locked onto Finney’s, and glimmered.
Then she was covering her mouth. Nauseated, Finney understood. In Susan/Robin’s mind, her personalities lived in her belly. When one came to the forefront, the other submerged. It was understandable that the transference might involve some upsetting of the stomach.
She gagged for a moment, then swallowed. Her eyes found his again. Those eyes were bright, intelligent, accusatory.
The face around the eyes was drawn and cadaverous. To access the personalities, they had subjected Susan Franklin to a harsh treatment that had lasted six months. The treatment involved sleep deprivation, sodium Amytal, electric shocks, Thorazine, and hypnosis—one reinforcing another. They were ruining her, Finney understood. The Hippocratic Oath had been thrown cheerfully over the side by the doctors involved in this project. Yet they had done it, wrapping themselves in the exalted cloak of national security as an excuse.…
“Would you excuse me?” Finney muttered.
He moved out from behind the desk without waiting for an answer, stepped into the hallway, and then came to an abrupt stop.
There was no point in holding grudges. Particularly not against the dead, or the soon-to-be-dead. And particularly, as Noble had said, when one’s enemies once had been counted as friends.
Yet he couldn’t bring himself to say the words that would confer forgiveness. Saying the words might imply that Noble had not fully been responsible for the things they had done together. And if Noble had not fully been responsible, then the burden of responsibility would have to shift somewhere else.
Onto Finney’s own shoulders, perhaps.
But he had been so young, when they had started working together. He had trusted Noble as a student trusts an accomplished teacher. Perhaps he had been … complicit … in the things they had done. Of course he had been. But he had been too young to know better. The fault was Noble’s. Not his, not theirs; just Noble’s.
But what was the point of this meeting, if he wasn’t prepared to offer forgiveness?
He stood for another moment, his brow furrowed. Then he threw back his shoulders and returned to the office. Noble’s eyes followed him as he moved around the desk. There was something implacable in the man’s gaze, and something vaguely pitying.
Finney took his seat again. He opened his mouth; and again he paused.
The things he wanted to say were not things that two grown men said to each other. Or perhaps they simply were not things that these particular two grown men could say to each other: both flinty, both proud, neither given to suffer fools gladly.
I trusted you, he might begin.
I followed your lead—and as a result I’ve had nightmares that only recently have begun to leave me in peace.
Or something less accusatory, and perhaps more honest. If I accept your apology, Arthur, I’m also accepting responsibility. And I’m not convinced that’s right.
But had Noble offered an apology? Not in so many words.
The handkerchief pressed back against the throat. Now Noble was looking at him with the thinly disguised impatience of a man who hasn’t a moment to waste.
“I shouldn’t feel the need to make excuses to you,” he said suddenly.
Finney blinked.
“I shouldn’t,” Noble repeated. “But I do. I haven’t accepted a government contract in fifteen years, Louis. But the nightmares still come.”
“I trusted you,” Finney heard himself saying.
“And I led you down some difficult roads. For that, I apologize. Whether or not you accept my apology is up to you.”
The oriole gave another call: tee-dee-dee, tee-dee-dee.
Two moments passed. Finney was on the verge of answering when Noble continued:
“In any case. I’ve got another reason for being here today. I haven’t accepted a government contract in fifteen years, I said. But that’s not strictly true. Last week I received a call. And I’ve decided, despite everything, that the call is too important to ignore.”
Finney couldn’t conceal his surprise. “Are you in any shape to …?”
“Hardly. This may take a few weeks, or a few months. Possibly even a year.”
His eyes twinkled, almost mischievously.
“I’m in no shape,” he agreed. “But you …”
The driver pulled up to the freight elevator and then found Al Guhrair’s eyes in the rearview mirror.
Al Guhrair licked his lips. Around the car, the echoes of engines off concrete reverberated through the underground garage.
“Five minutes,” Al Guhrair said, and reached for the door.
Two steps brought him into the elevator. He punched the penthouse suite button and then hit the door close button. Nothing happened. He kept pressing. At last the doors began to drift shut. In the next moment, the elevator was carrying him up.
He reached into his coat and withdrew the Heckler & Koch P7 pistol from the inside pocket. This was the first time the gun had left the drawer of his office desk for nearly three years. Al Guhrair had never fired the gun. He wondered if he would be able to fire it now, if the need arose. The mechanisms seemed simple enough—a clip was already loaded, and the safety could be switched off with one thumb. Yet he was hardly a gunslinger. He was a sixty-four-year-old man with a bad heart and a fairly serious case of arthritis, and gunslinging was not for him.
But he would manage—if the need arose.
The doors opened.
Before stepping into his apartment, Al Guhrair paused to listen. The place was quiet and dark, smelling faintly of Lemon Pledge. For the past twelve years, ever since his second divorce, he had lived here alone.
Yet if the assassin was here, he would not be making a sound. Had he made a sound when he had killed the others in the cell? Those men had been years younger than Al Guhrair—decades younger, in some cases—and som
e had had military experience. Yet the man had dispatched them with no apparent difficulty. He was not the type to make unnecessary sound.
Or perhaps the apartment truly was empty.
Al Guhrair licked his lips again, and stepped forward.
Through the vast polished windows on his right lay Central Park at night. Beyond the park was the scintillating East Side, bejeweled with lights. To his left, a hallway led past the kitchen, past the foyer—where the front elevator was located, the elevator he had avoided—to the bedroom.
He moved down the corridor slowly, holding the gun with both hands.
The bedroom was deserted.
He stood in the doorway for two full minutes before reaching for the light switch. Then he flipped it, moved to the closet, and looked inside. He crouched, with some effort, to look under the bed. He pushed open the door to the bathroom and ran his eyes over the marble and brass. No sign of an intruder.
He set the gun on the bed, tore a suitcase from the closet, and hastily began to pack.
When he had finished, he closed the suitcase, zipped it, and picked up the gun again.
Now the safe.
He returned to the darkened living room. If the man was here, how would he attack? Two of his other victims had been knifed; the third evidently had died of a heart attack. Poisoned. All of the deaths had been camouflaged to appear explicable—one stabbing, a mugging, the other a failed burglary.
But Al Guhrair knew the truth: The ghost wind was eliminating the very men who had hired him. During the twelve days since the meeting at the Marché Rue Mouffetard, every member of the cell besides Al Guhrair had met his fate.
He clutched the gun a bit tighter, and sent his eyes across the room.
The long, low, L-shaped sofa. The dusty bookshelves, the baby grand piano. He looked at these objects every single day, yet felt as if he were seeing them for the first time. He remembered the marketplace in Paris, the assassin’s striking smallness. The ghost wind might be hidden behind any of these objects, or none of them.
Al Guhrair crossed the room. He put the gun into his pocket, then took a painting off the wall—a lesser-known Hopper, but one of his personal favorites. He set it on the floor and spun the combination on the safe.
