The Watchers

by Mark Andrew Olsen

  “There is a great battle afoot,” she said.

  “I know. I sense it too. It is why I came. I sent out my best summons to all the sisters I know. They are all on their way.”

  “Good. I have never seen so many comings and goings over the skies of this city before. And never felt such foreboding. The battle ahead will be unlike anything we have known. But do you know why it is happening?”

  “I have no idea, Sister.”

  “She is here. The sister we have prayed for all these weeks. I have felt her approaching.”

  THE OLD CITY —THE NEXT MORNING

  Walking through the ancient stone walls of the Jaffa Gate beside Dylan, Abby gazed up at the deep blue, almost purple Judean sky, felt the Mediterranean sun warm her cheeks, smiled for a moment, then just as quickly willed the expression from her face. Frowning, she looked down while they walked.

  “I just can’t believe I asked him to lie to protect me,” Abby lamented, “yet never thought of asking him to protect himself.”

  “That may be true,” said Dylan, “but you didn’t ask your father to go traipsing around the globe, making enemies.”

  “He didn’t know what he was in for, you know that. He doesn’t even believe in spiritual things.”

  “I predict he will soon,” Dylan said.

  “What are you saying?” she asked, fuming.

  “Only that I think he’s got quite a learning curve ahead of him.”

  “Well, regardless, we need to pray for my dad’s safety, that God will protect him wherever he is right now. His life’s in serious danger. . . .”

  “I’m sorry, Abby. I didn’t mean to sound so cold. And I agree completely that we need to pray for him. By the way, are you going to tell me what you said to that security woman back at the airport?”

  She gave Dylan a long, appraising glance, and the faintest return of a smile. “Not on your life,” she said.

  “I didn’t think you would. But you realize this only gives my imagination more fodder to imagine anything it wants.”

  “Imagine away, Dylan. It will never beat the truth.”

  Smiling at each other, they passed under the gate’s arch and gaped in wonder. The sheer crush of humanity that greeted their senses nearly caused them to stop where they stood—except that in a crowd this thick and bustling, stopping was the one sure impossibility.

  Beyond the strip of shadow sprawled David’s Square, a marketplace crammed with street vendors, food stalls, souvenir stands, and more people than Abby had ever seen in such a small space. Abby glanced at a trinket stand beside her, piled high with copper pots of every size and shape. Just beyond it, a Palestinian boy barely in his teens hoisted wooden nativity scenes in both hands, screaming an incomprehensible sales pitch to all passersby. She craned her neck. Her gaze brought her exotic shades of blue and orange from a silk stall; her nostrils filled with hot steam and the aroma of fresh-baked pita bread, deep-fried falafel, and some kind of grilled kebab. As she walked by, she ducked to avoid the wild gestures of two men, one of them a Hasid wearing black clothes and a waist-length beard, haggling loudly over a large urn. Overwhelmed, Abby hopped aside to avoid being struck by a strange little cart, pushed along by a stone-faced teenaged boy.

  “That’s what passes for mules around here,” Dylan explained. “You see that strip of rubber dragging along behind? That’s the brakes. When they go downhill, the guy just steps on it hard and hangs on.”

  She laughed out loud at the thought. “Wow, you know so much! Do you know what it does for me, being back here?”

  “Back here? I thought this was your first trip to Israel.”

  “Well, Dylan, that’s the thing. All of this takes me back to the very first dream, or experience, that launched me on this whole journey. Remember, it was my experience of inhabiting the body of the prophetess Anna, on the morning her lifelong dream was fulfilled and she got to hold the baby Jesus, and tell the world that the Messiah had come. It all happened right here, and I can feel it, and taste it, and smell it.”

  “That’s great, Abby.”

  “Dylan, are you all right? You don’t seem all that excited to be here.”

  He turned to her, his features clouded over. “I’ve been here before, Abby.”

  “Oh. Well, is that such a bad thing?”

  “No. I mean”—and now he adopted a low, menacing tone—“I’ve been here before.”

  She shook her head, a blank expression on her face. “I’m sorry. I’m not catching your drift.”

  “Do you even remember what I told you, back in Africa, about my career?”

  “I know at first you were hired to kill me. But I guess I never put it all in a broader picture. Maybe I just didn’t want to see the whole meaning.”

  He stopped walking, turned to block her way, then leaned in close as the crowd flowed around them, bumping their shoulders and assaulting their senses with an unending variety of foreign clothes, snatches of exotic languages, and questioning looks from faces of every description. David Street had now turned into a narrow bazaar—a claustrophobic, deafening kaleidoscope of people, shops, and foods.

  “I’ve been an assassin, Abby,” he whispered. “A professional hired by our government and . . . sympathetic parties. No fake movie stuff. No James Bond. The real thing.”

  “People like that really exist?”

  “A few of us, yes. I was here in ’01, right after 9/11. A small team and I helped Israeli Mossad find and sanction a whole PLO team that was here preparing to do some very bad things.”

  “Sanction?”

  His face darkened. “You know what I mean.”

  “Oh . . .”

  Abby nodded thoughtfully, and they continued walking, the moment’s tension dissipated. She looked down at her feet and, for the first time, tried to absorb this deeper knowledge.

  “I never would have taken you for that kind of person. Not that I’m judging your actions, but I always imagined that those who did stuff like that would be—” she paused and searched for the right word—“hardened. And you, you’re not like that at all.”

  “Thank you, Abby. But you need to know: I only killed people that most folks would admit needed to be killed.”

  “Does that make it right?”

  “When we’re at war, it does. Whether our government declares it or not, we’re constantly at war on about a dozen covert fronts all the time, on any given day. The world is crisscrossed with wars, covert and public, and most of them are being fought over human beings who seem to have no conscience. No heart or compassion or regard for human life whatsoever. Besides, hasn’t God sanctioned war many times, you know, in the Scriptures?”

  “That reminds me of what Sister Okoye was trying to get across to us. Only in another context. Just as I didn’t have the perspective to see the wars you’ve just mentioned all around the world, so you once lacked the vision to see the spiritual wars being fought everywhere, probably even before your own nose. Right this very minute . . .”

  “Hey, knock it off!” Dylan mock protested, pretending to swat away demonic combatants from the air in front of him.

  “I mean it,” she insisted.

  “I know you do. And I believe it too. It’s just a lot to absorb. Add it all up, and it’s a lot of warfare for one sorry little world.”

  They turned onto Christian Quarter Road, which proved every inch as crowded and overpowering as David Street.

  “Yeah. Speaking of which. . . !” she said, pulling up short.

  “What do you see?” he asked.

  She stared, letting the crowd jostle past her.

  “You don’t want to know,” she replied, her gaze still locked ahead. “Dylan, you really don’t want to know.” She turned her head and kept walking. Then, just as suddenly, she stopped and shivered as though a cold front had just swept over her.

  “Abby, what’s happening?”

  The levity she had worn like a good-natured mask that whole morning had abruptly vanished. Her eyes began to
stare left and right, up and down. She edged closer to Dylan and shivered.

  “I love this place, I really do,” she said tentatively, “but it’s also an intense place. A scary place.”

  Dylan became very still and his eyes began to flutter. After a few seconds, her wandering gaze caught sight of him.

  “Dylan, what are you . . . are you praying? For me?”

  Without looking at her, he nodded. “How did you know?”

  “It’s the strangest thing. I can see it. It’s so vivid, like these beams of spiritual energy are just bouncing off you. And I can feel the love in them, somehow.”

  Now his eyes shot open. “Don’t flatter yourself,” he said with a smile.

  There was an awkward, lengthy pause as they continued their walking.

  “Anyway,” he finally began, “can you tell what I was praying for?”

  “You mean, specifically?”

  “Yeah. Specifically.”

  “Well, let me phrase it this way. You’re seeing so many disturbing things. But are you seeing anything good? Anything godly? You know, any players for the home team? Oh—” She stopped cold and peered ahead like someone facing a bank of fog. She breathed in sharply, and then her hand reached out and grabbed his. “Oh, my Lord . . .”

  “What?”

  “Why didn’t I see this before?”

  “See what?”

  Instead of answering him, she turned to face him. He saw at once that her lips, her cheek muscles, even her eyelids were quivering.

  “Thank you for praying what you did,” she said. “I have this . . . this habit of looking so much more closely at the darker things. I don’t know why I do that.”

  “I think we all do that.”

  “But you’re right. They’re everywhere.” She pointed up at the old walls, then over at the window sills of an ancient church. “They’re sitting, standing, flying around, some of them fighting in pitched battle right in full view of all the others. Oh, they’re so beautiful—it takes me back.”

  “Back to heaven? Not literally, I hope.”

  “No. But thinking back . . . it’s so encouraging. It reminds me of many wonderful things. Like the fact that I’ll see Sister Okoye again. Do you remember how freaked out I was when I first met her at the Gathering?”

  “How could I forget?”

  “I lost it, precisely because I had seen her face before. I had met her, in a vision of my heavenly future. So I know for sure. I’m guaranteed to be reunited with her.”

  As they turned left under a thick arch and a road marked Souk el-Dabbagha, Dylan took a long, tremulous breath.

  “What’s the matter?” Abby asked.

  “I can’t believe I let her die. I should have listened to her more. She practically begged me to handle things her way. If only I hadn’t been so focused on my own so-called strength.”

  She stopped him, placed both her hands on his shoulders, and faced him square in the eye. “Dylan, you listen to me. If you could hunt down Sister Okoye right this second and give her a second chance to come back to tired old earth, her tired old body, instead of where she’s at now, what do you think she’d say?”

  “I don’t know. You tell me.”

  “Having seen it myself, with my own two eyes, I will tell you. She’d groan and say, ‘Do I have to? Please, Lord, let me stay.’ See, Dylan, you did nothing wrong, and her passing wasn’t a tragedy. For her, at least. For her, it was the ultimate victory, just like death is for any believer. Okay? So drop the pity me, I messed up party.”

  He started to chuckle despite himself. “You’re something else, you know that?”

  “I take it that’s good.”

  “It’s something else, that’s all I’ll cop to.”

  They reached the bottom of a long staircase, turned left and looked up.

  “And look here,” he said flatly. “It seems we’ve arrived.”

  CHAPTER

  _ 60

  JERUSALEM, CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE

  Abby looked up at a plain, open plaza flanked by a high wall featuring two arches, one of them bricked over and the other framing an open door.

  “This is it?” she asked, her voice rising in disbelief. “It seems so . . .”

  Dylan did not wait to hear Abby finish, but began walking forward as though pulled by some invisible force. She caught up with him by the time he crossed the threshold and into the church itself.

  Surrounded by cool air and shade, for a moment they only stood and stared. The first item that captured their attention was a large, rectangular stone on the floor before them.

  “Look at this,” Abby said in a hushed voice, moving her eyes between a sign and the stone itself. “This is the rock where they say Christ’s body was laid after the crucifixion, as they were waiting to bury Him.”

  They turned and climbed a set of stairs, only to be confronted at the top with nothing less than Golgotha itself—on the surface nothing more than a wall of white panels bedecked with sculptures and inlaid finery, but if the sign was correct, the actual hill itself, with the site of the cross indicated by a spot under a stone table.

  Struck into awed silence, they continued to shuffle through an ever-unfolding maze of grand hallways, garish artwork, and random appearances of history itself. At one hand would loom a wall of intricately carved silver; another room would greet them with the pendulous shapes of a hundred suspended candleholders. They found the rotunda where the edicule—the structure built around the tomb of Christ—rose under an impressive marble dome. They found three of the actual Stations of the Cross, and chapel after tiny chapel dedicated to minute aspects of Christ’s last moments on earth.

  Finally, they both looked at each other with looks of weary over-stimulation.

  “This is incredible, but we can’t play tourist anymore,” he urged. “We’ve got to get serious about finding your mystery friend.”

  “Yes, we do,” she agreed.

  A tall, full-bearded Orthodox priest was walking past them. Abby reached out and touched the man’s arm. He turned toward her with a scowl on his face.

  “Uh . . . hello, we were wondering,” she began in a wimpy-sounding voice, “where we might find the Ethiopian monastery.”

  The priest shot her an angry look and stormed off.

  “Thanks for your Christian charity,” she said under her breath.

  “Come on, let’s find somebody else,” Dylan said. They walked for another ten minutes before spotting a Catholic priest and catching his attention.

  “Excuse me, Father,” said Dylan. “Could you direct us to the Ethiopian clerics?”

  “I’m sorry, there aren’t any Ethiopian clerics here,” the priest said as if making a distinction.

  “Really? There’s no Ethiopian Coptic presence anywhere?”

  “Why would you want to take up with those people, anyway?” he spat. “They’re squatters. Beggars. Not real men of God.”

  “Forgive me,” Abby broke in, “but if they are all those things, where are they?”

  “Who?”

  “These beggars you spoke of.”

  “Why, on the rooftop, of course.” With that, the man promptly walked away.

  Abby and Dylan exchanged amused glances. “They’re not very nice people,” he said, chuckling, “these men of God!”

  She snickered and said, “Maybe they got a dispensation from the Golden Rule.” Another ten steps later, she slowed her pace and looked up at Dylan. “If you saw what I could see,” she whispered, “you’d realize all that’s here is not as it seems. Some of these men had better learn the meaning of a ‘broken and contrite heart,’ or they just may find themselves in an eternity they never dreamed possible.”

  It took the pair another fifteen minutes to learn precisely how to find the ill-reputed Africans’ rooftop abode. In that time, they walked approximately a mile, during which they also learned that the Church of the Holy Sepulchre actually contained thirty-six different sub-churches of every size and function, an
d that five different subtypes of Christian clerics shared jurisdiction so jealously that combat had broken out no less than four years prior, requiring the intervention and arbitration of the Israeli government. Finally, their Ethiopian hostess had been right—these men of God were so perennially fractious that her keys had been given to a faithful Muslim family for safekeeping. Every morning, the Arab Muslim rose at sunrise to faithfully unlock this bastion of Christianity.

  It took a long theological harangue with an Orthodox prelate and a hefty “donation” to the man’s unimpressive renovation project to obtain the directions.

  By the time Abby and Dylan exited the church, walked around to its rear, and started climbing up a rickety metal stairwell, they had begun to realize the full extent of this divisiveness. Whereas they had walked on marble and gold a moment before, now they feared for their lives.

  At the stairs’ end, in a fleeting gesture of chivalry, Dylan allowed her to open the door and enter the rooftop area first.

  He almost bumped into her, for Abby had paused at the first step and not taken another. He edged closer, feeling a nugget of impatience travel through him.

  She turned to him. It could have been an accident of lighting or position, but he would forever describe Abby’s look during that turn as a classic vision of a beautiful girl twisted into an enigmatic profile, alongside Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring or Meryl Streep’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman.

  He was mystified in an instant and followed her inside.

  They both stood utterly motionless and silent for what must have been a truly long time, for some of the rooftop’s occupants had begun to stare at them by the time they moved again.

  CHAPTER

  _ 61

  What appeared before Abby and Dylan was a small and distressingly humble African village, perfectly re-created on the very rooftop of the Holy Sepulchre. Encircling a small dome that crowned one of the chapels below, a dozen low mud huts sat amid the clatter of cooking pots and the stench of a broken sewage line. Two African men, not attired in any sort of clerical garb but resembling instead the kind of malnourished and shabbily dressed men one sees in Western relief appeals, sat nursing a small fire into existence.