The Watchers

by Mark Andrew Olsen

  His apartment.

  First, he tensed his body out of the half-dozing state in which he’d allowed himself to lapse. He furtively glanced around him to gauge the prudence of checking in right away. The first-class cabin lay dark and deep in that nocturnal midflight interlude when all its privileged occupants were either sleeping or spellbound by some form of seat-back entertainment. Apart from the plane’s droning engine noise and a light snore from the businessman beside him, no sound of life emanated from anywhere around the space.

  Dylan picked up the Sidekick, flipped down its keyboard, and pressed on the touch screen to respond. A password dialog box appeared. He glanced around him again and typed in five digits to reach his most urgent contact.

  It was Camera One calling. As usual. The one he’d had hidden inside the crown molding of his loft’s vestibule to catch any visitors, welcome or unwelcome. It was the most-used camera in his inventory. Naturally, as the one that recorded people’s initial approach, it was nearly always the one that responded first.

  He winced. The video, even while it stuttered with the imperfections of its airborne bandwidth, clearly revealed the person approaching. Actually, two persons. One of them was Gretchen, his current prime candidate for what one might loosely label a girlfriend. Her companion, stumbling drunkenly and giggling, was her favorite fashion photographer, Claude. Gretchen had introduced him to Dylan at various parties, always failing to conceal her infatuation with the man.

  Dylan allowed himself a small groan. He’d always known that Gretchen wasn’t the epitome of faithfulness. For one thing, their relationship could hardly be thought of as monogamous, a fact for which he was as much to blame as she. But the blue-eyed Swede was so exotic that he’d willingly overlooked the drawbacks.

  Still, bringing a man to his apartment . . .

  The Sidekick broadcast the rattle of his industrial garage-sized door being yanked upward. Camera Two switched on, its motion detector installed to catch activity just inside the loft.

  He heard laughter, then Gretchen’s voice giggling in that alluring Scandinavian accent of hers. “He’s in Europe, scaredy cat. Come on in. It’s beautiful.”

  And it was. Since he was a bit vain about the place, the remark caused him to feel a twinge of goodwill for Gretchen. His apartment was indeed the quintessential Tribeca loft: shabby-chic industrial, sprawling, devoid of walls, open on three sides to high windows, bright with views of the neighborhood’s distinctive Romanesque Revival architecture.

  The scene switched over to Camera Three, Dylan’s kitchen. The cheaters had ducked in for a quick perusing glance. Then Camera Five kicked in as they hurried into the bedroom, a vague area bounded by only a bookcase and a large ficus tree.

  Dylan sighed and for the first time began to question how long he could endure this. It certainly gave him no voyeuristic thrill. His index finger quivered with an autonomous urge to click Shutdown. Just as he was poised to switch off the whole transmission, Camera Three abruptly switched back on.

  What burst upon his screen nearly made him forget to breathe. A male figure dressed in tightly fitting black clothes hid behind a column, a long revolver gripped in one fist. For the first time in several years, Dylan lost external control and audibly gasped. The security system, prompted by activity in dual locations, abruptly switched to a split screen. On the left, the gunman tiptoed forward with the slowness and exaggerated mannerisms of a trained professional. On the right, Gretchen and her lover stood beside his bed, kissing ardently and beginning to peel off each other’s shirts.

  Dylan’s fingers now flew into a flurry of action. Was there time? He’d armed his apartment with four layers of cutting-edge security systems. The fourth, which the gunman surely would not have disabled, might save . . .

  There came an angry sound of bone striking flesh, then the sight of furious movement flooded the underlit image. Claude’s head flew back and violently struck the headboard, his body flung along with the force of the intruder’s brutal kick. Gretchen screamed so loudly that Dylan was forced to punch down the Sidekick’s volume.

  Too late.

  The security module had loaded, but not in time. In the top right-hand corner of the screen, discreetly positioned to avoid obscuring his view, sat three dialog boxes he only had to press in order to release one of a trio of gases.

  The first, labeled K for Knockout, contained a relatively harmless cocktail that would swiftly put an intruder to sleep. The second, N for Noxious, was a variant of tear gas, intended to incapacitate the intruder and drive him, coughing, away. The third, framed in bright red, warned F for Fatal. It would kill within two seconds, also triggering a sophisticated exhaust system that would render his apartment uninhabitable for several days to anyone not wearing a special gas mask.

  “It’s not him!” Gretchen screamed at the man, even as she clawed frantically from a pathetic kneeling position. The gunman paced, striding away from Claude’s unconscious body, which he had kicked over for a better look. At her side, he brandished the weapon in her face and growled at her to be quiet.

  Dylan grimaced again. Obviously the gunman was surprised to find that he had knocked out someone other than him. Claude did resemble Dylan, true, but in a twinge of professional objectivity he observed that the intruder should have been one hundred percent certain. At least he’d been prudent enough to choose a hard kick over a wild first shot.

  Now the man was in a bind. Surely whoever had hired him to kill someone like Dylan would not be the sort to tolerate near-misses, extra bodies, or complications like unnecessary parties to the plot. Collateral involvements added to the event’s visibility and invariably multiplied the odds of getting caught. This man was probably now in serious, if not mortal, trouble. The intruder sank into a crouch, then jumped up. The abruptness of it told Dylan that awareness of peril had finally begun to sink into a brain seething with equal parts adrenaline and testosterone.

  Gretchen’s own agitation was surging louder, more out of control. Dylan peered closer for a better look at the gunman’s body language, and yes, just as Dylan had feared—the man’s gestures were growing more impulsive, staccato and sudden. His instincts flung a chilling and certain verdict into Dylan’s conscious mind.

  He was seriously thinking about hurting Gretchen too.

  Perhaps the woman deserved the same fate as her lover. Somewhere deep under the competing strata of reactions fluttering across Dylan’s mind, he could have located rage and resentment. But no, he realized—whatever he felt toward her wasn’t justification for letting her be brutalized. Certainly not sitting here and watching it happen from some godlike perch high in the sky.

  He pressed Knockout.

  No mist appeared on his screen, for the system had been designed for invisibility. Yet automatically a stopwatch appeared inside the dialog box and began counting. The desired effect was touted to take effect within eight seconds. The gunman, however, was breathing so heavily that at second six his body slumped over—ironically, on the bed right next to a fast-blinking Gretchen. Two seconds later, both lay completely unconscious.

  Amazing what I can do with a jacked-up cell phone, he chuckled to himself, despite the gravity of the situation. He had saved a life, narrowly missed stopping a vicious assault, and incapacitated a killer. All without leaving his seat. And all from over a thousand miles away.

  He slipped the unit shut, looking around to see if anyone was watching him, and replaced the phone on his tray as though terminating a routine text message.

  CHAPTER

  _ 13

  NEW YORK CITY, JOHNF. KENNEDY AIRPORT

  When the plane landed at JFK two hours later, Dylan did not afford himself the luxury of a return-as-usual. He knew that the killer may have lain incapacitated on his bedroom floor, knocked out for a possible duration of at least eight hours, according to his chemist. For now, the killer wasn’t the problem. The problem was that the man had been sent by someone.

  And that someone would be growing antsy
by now.

  As an expert on the protocols of high-tech murder, Dylan knew that some form of check-in would normally be expected soon after a successful hit. After failing to receive any acknowledgment, the group behind the contract would soon grow agitated. If they possessed any other assets in the area, then those too might be already deployed—at least in surveillance and perhaps even active attempts at reentry. If not, then he had the luxury of three, four hours tops before the response would escalate.

  The focus of attention, of course, would be his apartment. A place he’d worked very hard to render attention-free.

  At JFK’s first-class lounge, he pulled out his laptop to gain a fuller picture of the security system and how the gunman had managed to defeat it. Or, at least, part of it.

  While he sat in a leather chaise and waited for the bulky system to boot up, he thought back over the arduous evolution of his private, custom-designed intruder repellent.

  Dylan had considered it part of basic survival to install the most rigorous and advanced security imaginable. As someone who made it his living to defeat such systems, he’d had it built to be substantially more intricate and powerful than anything a killer like him would expect. Normally, the best installed security network had at least two, and up to four, independent systems. That did not include built-in redundancies, complex power protection, and increasingly devilish concealment features.

  So Dylan had designed the first three layers with as much complexity as sophistication required, but little more. They were throwaways, intended to convince an expert that the basics had been observed.

  First came a biometric thumbprint reader at the door. Highly effective in keeping out petty burglars, the odd meth freak and homeless squatter. But no great shakes to a true pro. Second was the array of concealed, motion-activated video cameras featuring hidden, but otherwise conventionally wired, power sources. That network might take a skilled intruder around an hour to find its hidden and dedicated electric wires. Yet, once located, one snip of the needle-nosed pliers and the scanners were down.

  Dylan’s third layer was more than adequate to challenge the most exacting and paranoid techie. He called it his Rapid Gas system, and it was this system that had brought down the recent intruder. Only the use of a decoy or fatal guinea pig would be guaranteed to detect that contingency. However, another killer who knew what Dylan did for a living would expect defenses beyond the pale, and therefore, if he spent the time and effort to find it, would likely be satisfied that he had extinguished all the options.

  But Dylan had a fourth layer, his coup de grâce.

  Obtaining the necessary technology had obliged Dylan to launch a small front company to penetrate all the layers of secrecy as well as the legal safeguards. The application of that technology was his own idea, derived from an obscure yet exotic innovation. Dylan had read about the raw advances in a small, innocuous newspaper article three years before. “Smart concrete: the Chinese are high on the stuff!” Turns out a Chinese-American scientist had developed a way to imbed threads of tiny sensors inside otherwise ordinary blocks of concrete. Those sensors, when installed in a construction setting, could gather and transmit a number of measurements back to a central computer for a range of vital, and until now unobtainable, calculations. Those included structural fatigue, ambient stress, sturdiness, and—of most interest to Dylan—the presence and weight of anyone walking across the blocks.

  Slumped over his monitor in the British Airways lounge, Dylan suddenly stopped his typing and leaned back in pleasant surprise.

  Layer four had worked.

  The intruder had successfully disabled power to systems one, two, and three before setting foot in his apartment. But then he had wrongly considered his efforts sufficient and stepped inside. With that first footfall, he had activated layer four’s smart-concrete sensors, including its crowning feature—an infrared reactivation of all the other systems, regardless of whether their conventional power sources had been disabled. Tiny, undetectable emergency batteries containing three hours of power, imbedded inside each system, had instantly blinked to life. Each was activated by an infrared beam triggered by the unauthorized weight of a human foot on the concrete floor.

  Still, Dylan hesitated. If layer four had reactivated the other three systems, then why had the gunman not been the very first sight broadcast through the video system? Why had Gretchen and Claude come on-screen before him?

  Then he remembered—it took approximately four seconds for the infrared beam to finish reactivating all the systems and all three to come back fully online. The gunman could have entered, then found his place of concealment and frozen still within that interval. Preoccupied with its reactivation tasks, the system’s motion detectors would have effectively forgotten about the man whose step had triggered it. Upon its restart, it would have focused on the amorous pair in the bedroom.

  Reassured that his system had worked as desired, Dylan hopped a cab for the Tribeca district. On his way through midtown he instructed the driver to pause at Grand Central Station while he darted out, stashed his luggage in a travel locker, and returned. He needed to make his return light-handed.

  Two blocks from his building, he exited to trace his circuitous tactical return.

  NEW YORK CITY, TRIBECA DISTRICT

  Even though it was only late afternoon, Dylan noted with frustration that Church Street was already crowded with young couples and clots of partiers ambling through the district’s artsy storefronts and outdoor cafés.

  Worst possible time to shake off a tail.

  He spent ten minutes wandering in circles, detected no obvious pursuit and so decided, for the first time, to forgo his usual counter-surveillance regimen and head straight home. Normally he would have bar-hopped through a sequence of progressively emptier clubs and bistros before returning well after quitting time. This routine was a great way to spot any followers, recurring faces or silhouettes. Of course it wasn’t a bad excuse for partying in some of America’s best watering holes, but Dylan rarely admitted that to himself.

  Tonight he had no time to lose. The intruder would be waking up soon. If there was danger, it now awaited him at home. From within, not without.

  In the last half block he pulled out what appeared to be an MP3 player and threaded its stylishly thin earphones around his head. Rather than a music device, however, the card-deck sized unit was a small PDA whose wireless receiver displayed, rather than song titles and album covers, the latest footage from layer two’s half dozen external video cameras trained on the surrounding perimeter. He manipulated the small screen with his thumb, scanning each of the miniscreens to verify that no ambush awaited him in any of his apartment’s cunningly designed sight lines.

  He walked past his building’s front door, swerved abruptly through the side entry of a neighboring French restaurant, and disappeared.

  CHAPTER

  _ 14

  DYLAN'S APARTMENT, TRIBECA, NEW YORK

  Claude’s attacker stirred and inched open an eyelid. The only sight greeting his hazy vision was a bewildering chaos of shadows and gloom. He groaned—whether from the challenge of clearing his eyes or the pain of something jabbing him in the ribs, he could not say.

  Finally, in a cool, bracing rush, his discipline and warrior’s training roared back to his senses. Ignoring all else, he willed his legs to straighten and stand.

  A hammer blow to the face threw him onto his back again.

  Awash in fury, he rolled away and jumped to his feet, assuming his best fighter’s stance before he could even see his assailant.

  Another kick swept his ankles from beneath him and drove him to the floor. Faster than his still-addled senses could respond, a fist yanked into his hairline, brutally jerking his head back.

  “Who are you?” a snarling voice said, close in his ear.

  “A messenger,” the man said, after a pause. “And you?”

  The fist threw him forward onto his face. “I live here. I don’t have to answer questi
ons.”

  The man lowered his gaze into the gleaming bore of a chrome handgun, held perfectly still mere inches from his nose.

  “Let’s cut the nonsense,” Dylan said in a more normal voice. “I know what you do for a living. I’ve got it on tape. And I’ll bet you know what I do. You know I have sanction, maybe even a professional duty, to blow your brains out. And you know I have the means to make you talk before I do it. So why don’t we chat?”

  “Fine. Let’s chat,” the killer said, as the resignation of the utterly defeated settled into his eyes. He glanced over at the bed where Gretchen and her would-be lover still lay unconscious, still immobilized.

  The two men sat facing each other. Dylan’s eyes traveled up and down this so-called killer, sizing him up. “Fairly new at this, aren’t you? I mean, in the civilian realm.”

  “Delta Force, who cares,” the other said with a defensive wag of his chin. “I was set up. They gave me a rough description of your wiring grid, and I believed that was enough.”

  “Maybe they did too. Maybe I outsmarted you and your clients. So who are they? You gonna tell me?”

  The man stared into the bank of windows and winced against a beam of dying sunlight. “Yeah. I can either take my chances with you, or die for sure with those guys.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that,” Dylan countered. “After all, those guys chose you. You were obviously the best they had. You might still evade them.”

  The man shook his head and chuckled bitterly. “No. Actually, I was just a test. I overheard one of them. I’m just here to rile you, to test your readiness. I wasn’t supposed to kill you, just knock you out. Although I was authorized to shoot back in self-defense.”

  “You’re kidding! This client wouldn’t have been Shadow Leader, would it?”

  “Yeah, that’s one of his names,” the man said, shaking his head. “And you must be that hotshot they’ve been whispering about all these years. The one who’s so precious, they haven’t even bothered to bring you in.”