The Watchmen

by John Altman

  Distantly came the sound of a train whistle. The loneliest sound in the world, he thought.

  Then a tentative knock at the door. Finney didn’t answer. The door opened; James Hawthorne peeked in.

  “I hope I’m not disturbing you.”

  Again, Finney didn’t answer. Hawthorne came to sit next to him on the bed. He was a short man, but solidly built; the frame creaked when he lowered himself onto it. He sat facing the window, looking out at the purpling twilight with his glass eye drifting off to the left.

  “I wanted to offer my condolences,” he said after a moment.

  Finney nodded.

  “I’ll speak with Warren about arranging the funeral. But it might be some weeks yet. You don’t happen to know if the man had a plot …?”

  To the best of Finney’s knowledge, Noble’s faith would not condone the delay of a funeral. But he only shook his head.

  Hawthorne folded his hands and rubbed the thumbs together, aping Finney’s behavior, consciously or not. Then he began to speak—expressing, with a modicum of subtlety, that if KINGFISHER did not move faster, they would do irreparable damage to their own cause. Hawthorne knew the Arab mindset. It was a tribal mentality. In the Arab world, kindness equated to weakness.…

  Finney knew from Warren that the man’s background was with the clandestine operations directorate. He had worked in Afghanistan twenty years before, arming rebels to fight against the Soviets. Now those same rebels had coalesced into al Qaeda. Their attention, along with their CIA-funded weaponry, had been turned from the Soviets to the Americans. It was no surprise, Finney supposed, that Hawthorne believed he understood the intricacies of the tribal mindset. He had toiled alongside these people. He likely had lost his eye toiling alongside them.

  “… every time Zattout receives a glass of wine or a walk outside, he takes it as evidence that we’re soft. I don’t mean to step on your toes, Doctor. You have your expertise, and I have mine. But you can’t deny that our progress has been disappointing, at best.”

  Finney was remembering a passage from a book he had read, comparing the religious symbols of the West and the Muslim East: the angular compositions of the cross and the Jewish star versus the softness of the crescent moon. The symbols of the West were straightforward, clearly defined. But the crescent moon was an ambiguous arc, turning back on itself. In the Arab world, the author had stated—in the world of tribal mentality, as Hawthorne put it—men could sit down and break bread and still consider one another mortal enemies when the meal was done. Because the Arab world was flexible, uncertain, ever changing. One leader held power only until another stronger leader came along to depose him. By trying to deal with these primitive clans as modern city-states, the author had concluded, the West was painting itself into a corner. For the Arab leaders would pretend to play by the rules of diplomacy; but it was only a pretense. And as soon as backs were turned, the knives would come out.

  But during war, of course, one depersonalized the enemy. And writing off the entire Arab culture as possessing a tribal mentality hardly offered a balanced picture.

  “I’ve had a chance to read your report,” Hawthorne was saying. “These sleeper cells, about which Zattout continues to hide his knowledge … their victims won’t be soldiers, Doctor. They’ll be innocents.”

  Finney grunted acknowledgment.

  “If you’re willing to do what needs to be done, you could make faster progress with Zattout—isn’t that so? Coercive techniques are not proving effective. It’s time to proceed to the next step.”

  Finney didn’t answer.

  Tribal mentality or no, there was truth in Hawthorne’s words. For whatever reasons, Finney had not pressed Zattout as hard as he might have. Because he had been afraid of the consequences, perhaps. Afraid of where confrontation might lead them.

  “It’s important to go after them where they live. We can’t wait for them to come to us. An ocean between America and the people determined to compromise our freedoms doesn’t keep us safe—”

  The wall between the past and the present had become a transparent scrim. He could feel Susan Franklin standing just on the other side of it. Lila was there too, watching. And somewhere in the shadows behind them, Arthur Noble. It was Noble as he once had been, callow and criminally self-assured, his chin thrust out with arrogance.

  “How do you train a dog? You slap him across the nose with a newspaper when he misbehaves. These people are the same way. They’ll get away with whatever they can, for as long as they can. At some point, if you want them to understand who is in charge, you need to give them a slap.”

  Finney thought of Black Jack Pershing, slaughtering forty-nine suspected Muslim terrorists with bullets soaked in pig’s blood—and forestalling extremist attacks for over four decades. “I agree,” he said.

  Hawthorne did a slight double take.

  “You do,” he said after a moment.

  Finney nodded.

  He would not proceed to depatterning. Depatterning was the last resort. But there were weapons in his arsenal that had not yet been brought to bear. If Zattout were to be drugged, he might become more susceptible to manipulation. Then Finney might make some headway in identifying the trauma underlying the cynophobia. He might isolate and exploit the child-identity within the man. The issue of his evasion on the sleeper cells might be confronted directly, from a position of power.

  “The kid gloves,” Finney said, “are off.”

  As he followed Police Chief Hank Reps into the woods behind the Sleepy Hollow motel, Thomas Warren II tried to keep his mind from telling bad jokes.

  He couldn’t help himself. In the safe house he had felt removed from his surroundings, living in a generic stretch of backwoods northwestern America; in the Manhattan brownstone he had been surrounded by modern technology. Now, with the night rustle of leaves all around, walking into a pitch-black forest, following the bobbing light of the police chief’s flashlight, he was acutely aware that he was in the Catskills.

  Or perhaps his mind was serving up the bad jokes for another reason—to provide distraction. Although the girl’s body had been removed twelve hours before, they were entering a killing ground where a child had met her end. The black forest was filled with a plangent, insinuating wind. In this atmosphere it was all too easy to imagine that the girl’s spirit would continue haunting the ground where her body so hastily had been laid to rest. And it was all too easy to imagine, as he and Police Chief Hank Reps approached the shallow grave, that the wind would gain strength; then the flashlight would begin to flicker as the batteries died …

  When I was born, my father spent three weeks trying to find a loophole in my birth certificate. Thomas Warren, Senior—otherwise a man of impeccable taste—had loved that borscht belt shriek. Whose had that been? Jackie Vernon’s? Or maybe Shecky Greene’s?

  Ahead, the bright yellow of police tape strung up between trees caught the flashlight. Beside him the police chief was talking in a laconic drawl, evidently not sharing Warren’s unease.

  “My brother-in-law,” he was saying. “He’s the one who gave me a ring about your BOLO/APB. Few days ago, we were at a barbecue and I was telling him about our prime suspect in the case. He thought the fellow in your photo looked like the fellow I’d described … so he sent it on, and I showed it to the girl’s parents. Beyond a doubt, they say. That’s the guy, they say. Simon Christopher.”

  They reached a flat rock by a streambed. As the light passed over it, the police tape trembled in the breeze. “You can see there was a little scuffle here …”

  Warren looked; but he saw no such thing. All he saw, in the moving circle of light, was a rushing creek, patchy grass, bare dirt. Some marks were in the dirt—squiggles and scribbles—but how was one to know they had come from a teenaged girl fighting for her life? Police Chief Reps, he thought, was a regular Sherlock Holmes.

  If he had been better rested, perhaps Warren could have read the scribbles in the dirt himself. He had reached a stage of sl
eep deprivation where it was difficult to connect one thought to another, let alone make brilliant leaps of deduction. Driving up, he had become so entranced by the sunset in the trees—the sun minting the leaves into gold, alchemy at its most real—that he had nearly plowed right off the road, through the guardrail and into a ravine.

  After a moment, the man led him still deeper into the forest. Warren lit a cigarette; the nicotine gave his system a jolt, sharpening his edges.

  “He left the motel the same night the girl disappeared. Nobody saw them together … but that don’t mean a thing. The girl was keeping to herself, more and more. It’s the way with teenagers, ain’t it? I’ve got two girls of my own. Eleven and thirteen. The thought of them—to tell the truth, I can’t even face it. Now here’s where we found her. Sometimes she’d come into the woods back here, alone. But she must have brought him along that night. We found a bottle of vodka in the grave. So that’s what they were up to, we think. Grave was dug by hand. Hard to see, since we took it up again using a Cat …”

  More police tape, flapping importantly. The Caterpillar that had dug up the grave had deposited the earth in two thick wedges shaped like oversized orange slices. As he looked over the scene, Warren wondered: Why had the man killed the girl? Perhaps she had seen too much. Or perhaps he was a rapist, along with everything else. He wondered if there had been evidence of molestation.

  “Didn’t touch her,” Hank Reps answered before the question had been asked. “Except to break her neck, that is. With his bare hands, according to the coroner. What kind of man can break a little girl’s neck with his bare hands? I don’t mean what kind of man, physically. I mean what kind of man, inside.”

  They stood looking at the upturned earth. Warren shivered, and thought of another joke:

  A musician played in Key West. It was the first time I knew what key he was in.

  Ah, Uncle Miltie. He’d had a million of them.

  Suddenly, Warren felt nauseated. He turned away from the shallow grave, ground out his cigarette on the sole of his shoe, then conscientiously pocketed the butt.

  So the man had been within thirty miles of the safe house. Because he’d been receiving intelligence from Quinlan? Had there been more avenues leading away from the compound than just the P.O. box in New York? If they had taken Ajami alive, they could have asked him for their answers. Alas, it wasn’t meant to be.

  Perhaps Quinlan would break, and provide illumination. But Warren wasn’t betting on it.

  Yet they had a name—Simon Christopher. They had a photograph. And now they had evidence that the man was a killer.

  “You’ve got to ask yourself if he did this before,” the police chief remarked. “Just because we only found one body doesn’t mean there aren’t others. In my experience, these guys don’t usually stop at one.”

  His experience, Warren thought. Hank Rep’s experience with serial killers, despite his Holmesian skills of deduction, probably began and ended with the Saturday-afternoon matinee on Channel 9.

  Absently, Warren put another cigarette in his mouth. The police chief continued staring at the grave, his lips twisting. Because he had two girls of his own, as he had said. To a man like this, a child killer was personal.

  He did some rough math. They had a photograph in the hands of the NYPD, an All Points Bulletin to Be on the Lookout—which meant that several thousand pairs of eyes were looking for the suspect. But how many men were there like the sheriff, with teenaged girls of his own? Many more than several thousand. And their eyes would be hungrier than the eyes of the police.

  Another joke occurred to Warren, unbidden. Never raise your hands to your kids. It leaves your groin unprotected.

  He smiled, very slightly. That was Red Buttons, he thought. The one and only.

  But you couldn’t get away with a joke like that these days. Violence against children, of course, was no laughing matter. Men like the police chief beside him—and countless others—would cry bloody murder at a joke like that.

  He thought of all these men, with all their teenaged daughters and all their eyes … just waiting to be put to use.

  Bloody murder, he thought again from nowhere, and lit the cigarette.

  The assassin sat on a bench on Central Park West, his face turned up to catch the bright morning sun.

  His head didn’t move; but his eyes tracked steadily back and forth, from the awning across the way—Iqbal Ajami’s building—to the government agents who also were watching the building.

  On the northern corner of the block, a man lingered with a dog on a leash. Taking his bulldog for a turn by the park, one might have thought. Except the man had been lingering for fifteen minutes; the dog clearly had no further business to do.

  On the southern corner was a second agent, manning a shoe-polish station. During the quarter-hour that the assassin watched, the agent was approached twice by pedestrians requesting a shine. He begged off, making some excuse that hardly seemed to satisfy the frustrated customers.

  So they not only were watching the box; they were watching the money man, too.

  How had they gotten onto him? Through Ajami’s own negligence? Or had they found him through the boy?

  Presently, the assassin stood. He wandered down Central Park West, moving unhurriedly. At Sixty-sixth Street he turned west. Perhaps a newspaper would offer more information about the disappearance of the girl. Perhaps there would be a clue, there, as to whether or not a connection had been made between her, and him, and Ajami, and Quinlan.

  The city around him was cacophonous: car alarms, sirens, blaring radios, whirring portable generators. The air felt heavy and humid, clinging to the back of his neck. He approached Broadway and saw a kiosk. As he angled toward it, a man selling snow globes featuring miniature Twin Towers followed him with a flat, chary glare.

  He matched the gaze with one of his own; but the man kept staring. Finally, as the assassin walked past, he looked away. No wonder the man stared, the assassin thought. He was not at ease with himself. Apprehension was radiating off him in waves. He needed to calm down.

  Upon reaching the kiosk, he took a coin from his pocket and then turned his eyes to the stacks of newspapers.

  CHILD KILLER, read twenty-point type on the Newark Star-Ledger.

  Below the headline, a photograph of his face filled the entirety of the front page.

  Fear touched the base of his spine.

  Beside the Star-Ledger was the New York Post. Here the headline was an interrogative: SERIAL KILLER? The photograph was smaller; he was sharing the front page with a picture of Sonya Jacobs. She was wearing a field hockey uniform and grimacing into the camera, her cheeks pouched with baby fat that had been gone by the time he’d met her.

  Beside the Post, USA Today. The headline concerned a rash of tornadoes in the Midwest. Beside USA Today, The New York Times. Again, the headline concerned tornadoes. But just above the fold was a hint of another story: “Police Identify Suspect in …” If he reached out and turned the paper over, to see the front page below the fold, the same photograph would be there. Where had they gotten it?

  A family was squeezing around him on the sidewalk: husband, wife, toddler. The husband’s eyes glanced across his face without pause. Then they returned, glinting.

  His paralysis broke. He started moving again, continuing down Broadway. His gait felt stiff; his knees were trying to lock. Was the husband still watching him?

  On the corner he was approaching stood two policemen.

  On a stoop to his left—a man reading the Post. The man looked up. He looked down at the paper. Looked up again.

  The assassin turned back toward Central Park West.

  The man on the stoop was bringing a cell phone to his ear. He was dialing a single number. 0, of course. For operator.

  He moved faster, heartbeat accelerating in his chest.

  On Central Park West, he turned south. To look over his shoulder would draw attention. And with his face on the front page of every newspaper, he cou
ld not afford that. Yet he needed to get off the street. He needed to find a taxi, immediately. He looked back—

  —and saw the pair of blue-suited policemen following.

  They moved at a fast walk, the same pace used by the assassin. Directed to him by the man on the stoop, he thought. The police were not accelerating, not forcing his hand. So they were backup. Backup implied something that needed backing up. A moment later he saw a police cruiser idling at a traffic light, half a block ahead. Then another cruiser, approaching the intersection from a cross street, prowling steadily forward.

  He turned to his left, into the park. One of the cops was yelling something. He missed the words, but the tone was unmistakable: an urgent imperative.

  He adjusted the bag he was carrying so that it hung tight across his chest, out of his way. His right wrist flicked and then there was a blade in his hand, concealed from sight.

  The park was relatively empty. He continued south, moving at a trot. A leafy glen lay to his left. He ducked through it, coming out onto another path running parallel to the first. Moving farther from Central Park West, deeper into the greenery, he could hear the echo of the policeman’s voice.

  A helicopter was crossing overhead. He paused, making certain he was concealed beneath an overhang of leaves. After a few seconds, the sound of the rotors receded. He continued south.

  Through foliage on the left, he could see one of the roads that ran through the park. A taxi there idled at a stoplight. Tempting—but no good. Traffic might choke to a stop. Then they would have him. Before getting into a taxi, he needed to throw off the pursuit.

  He tossed a glance over his shoulder. Distantly, he could see a spot of blue.

  When he looked front again, a policeman was there.

  The man looked ludicrously shocked. He promptly backed off, reaching for his holster. The blade whipped up, landed quivering in his throat.

  The assassin was past the body before it hit the ground, then under a canopy of branches, around a woman pushing a baby stroller.