Keeping Watch (18 page)

Let one of us walk a straight path,
he decided. No reason for both the Carmichael brothers to be pulled to shreds because of some distant war, over now.

“A cop, huh?” he said instead. “Man in a suit, the FBI maybe?”

“Oh, right, I can just imagine me in a skinny tie working for the feds,” Jerry answered him, willing to be distracted. “No, I'd like to be in a city for a while, just for the experience, and then maybe come back here, work for the sheriff's department.”

“Well, I've got to say, Jer, you'll look pretty sharp in one of those uniforms.”

The summer was idyllic, a calm place the world could not touch. Allen remained in the islands. Jerry spent his days at the marina and his evenings out on dates with girls local or seasonal, while Allen took over first the cooking, then the shopping, and even gave the house a more or less thorough cleaning. In early August he dug out the key to the boat shed and dragged out one of the small sailboats he and Jerry had used to explore their watery neighborhood when they were kids, and set to work scrubbing, painting, and refitting it.

Without either of them voicing either offer or acceptance, Allen made himself available to Ed De la Torre, a deckhand for Ed's licit services or assistant for the shadier times when goods or people were moved across the border. On the days Ed did not need him, Allen ran the pretty little sailboat down into the water and spent long hours skipping up and down the islands. Under the influence of sun and canvas, wood and physical labor, Jerry's cheerful conquests and Ed's philosophical reflections—and of the cave, although he went there less often than he'd have liked, fearing the watchful eyes of summer boaters—the brutal images in his mind grew paler, and his mind and memory began to unclench enough to permit some reflections of his own.

For the first time since he'd shipped out for the war, Allen's mind began to nibble at the idea of a future.
What do I want to do with my life?
he pondered one morning, steering the sailboat toward open water.

The answer was there: I want to sleep without nightmares. I want to have a purpose. I want to feel alive.

And what have I got to work with? he went on, tacking the channel between San Juan Island and Shaw. I hear voices and see dead men, and I'm paranoid as hell. On the other hand, like they say, it's not paranoia if there
are
people out to get you. Physically I'm in decent shape—amazingly so, considering the shit I've put myself through. A little money, a college education, fair brains, loads of patience, lots of practice in doing without—without food, roof, freedom. I've got good jungle skills—for all kinds of jungles—and the experience to know where the enemy walks.

Actually, he reflected, bringing the little boat about to dance away from a lumbering ferry, a person might say that just being aware there
was
an enemy out there put him one up on a lot of the good citizens of this fair country, most of whom had no idea what waited in the shadows. And of those who had learned the hard way about the dangerous creatures that moved outside of the lights, most hadn't a clue what to do about them, so that they either curled up and died, or wrung their hands and waited for someone to take over their rescue.

I am, he realized later as he lay on the sun-warmed beach of the Sanctuary cove, a soldier. Since the day I set foot on that baking airstrip in Saigon, I've never really been anything else. A fucking romantic, a soldier convinced that he's Serving Right, that he could do something about the fucked-up state of the world. Like Jerry, he realized, astonished at the connection; that's why Jerry wants to be a cop.

But Allen knew himself well enough to be certain that he would never wear a uniform again.

He was, then (this epiphany unfolded at dusk, while he was sitting at the end of the family dock, line in the water and bare feet dangling), both a romantic and a man willing and able to break the law, ferociously if need be. A loaded weapon, looking for a Cause.

Some vets in that condition became mercenaries, but Allen had seen enough of war to know that no side was right, and to pay a man to do your fighting for you made it even less right. He was not the man to become one weapon among many: On that road lay a heap of dead children and their mothers. No, what Allen wanted to be, he decided, was something less structured, more individual. Without the heavy restrictions a cop labored under, free to turn down anything he felt uncertain about. Surely there had to be people out there who needed the services of a . . . what? A civilian mercenary?

Yeah, right, he jeered at himself. Might as well buy me a mask and a cape, call myself a Crime Fighter. You've really lost it this time, Crazy, he thought, yanking the lure off his line and tossing it into the gear box. You've gone right off the deep end.

He gutted his catch, rinsed the blood and scales from his hands, and took the fish off to the kitchen to make dinner.

But he couldn't shake the conviction that somewhere, someone needed what he could do. That someone needed him. There would be some cause he could ally himself with that didn't involve breaking down the doors of wife-beaters and letting the animal rage sweep over him. Some underground of the oppressed, if only he could find them. Something linked with the cave, and Ed, and with the sounds of children playing.

Thus, Allen's summer gently passed. September came, and Jerry went back to college, but Allen stayed on, reassuring his brother that he'd drain the pipes and clean out the refrigerator before he took off. Before Jerry drove away, Allen hugged him hard, grateful that, if nothing else, the summer had brought him back to his brother.

September edged into October. The weather turned too rough to sail, so that the Sanctuary cave became hard to reach, but Allen stayed on. He split a mountain of firewood, repaired the front steps and a drooping gutter, spent the better part of a week sanding and finishing the bashed-up hardwood living room floor, all the while knowing that somehow the fractured pieces of his life were trying to reassemble themselves, that if he waited, in patience, he would know what he needed to do.

The solution came with a tiny event, a terse paragraph of newsprint in a thrice-read paper. In itself, it would have been nothing, but coming as it did after the summer's two fundamental events—rediscovering Sanctuary and meeting the tattooed philosopher-boatman Ed De la Torre—it laid the first stones in the path of Allen's life.

With Jerry gone and the islands settling into their annual liberation from the summer hordes, Allen had gotten into the habit of walking into town once a day to eat at a café frequented by locals. The woman who owned the place was a rangy ex–basketball player who led a troop of Girl Scouts. She had been in his class in junior high, and had never once asked him about Vietnam. He could have kissed her for that, and felt that buying a few meals was the least he could do to show his appreciation. Besides, she had the best pie on the island.

He tended to go when the place wasn't busy, breakfast at ten or lunch at three in the afternoon, exchanging nods with the other regulars and taking a corner table (his back to the wall—some habits were unbreakable) where he would settle in with the Seattle newspaper that had come over on the morning ferry. This particular day he glanced at the headlines, turned to the sports without much interest, and skimmed through the section in which they stuck a variety of things like book reviews and human interest stories plucked off the wire service. This day's paper ran one of the latter, the sad tale of a veteran's widow whose second husband had recently run off with their three children, only the youngest of which was his, taking them to one of the many parts of the globe where a request for extradition was met with open hands and a decade-long delay. He read every word—like picking at a scab, it was painful and irresistible—then shook his head, finished his sandwich, and told the attentive waitress that he would have a slice of that apple pie she'd offered him after all, but only if she could wrap it in some tinfoil. He then paid and walked home, end of story.

Except for the mental click that came while he was watching some mindless variety show on the television that night. In two minutes Allen was in boots and jacket, wobbling through the pouring rain on Jerry's bicycle, to pound on the café's door and ask the startled woman who peered down from the second-floor apartment if she'd thrown out that day's paper. The sleep-befuddled woman dropped the object from her upstairs window and pulled her head back inside; Allen ducked into the shelter of the café entrance to read the article again.

As he'd thought. The name of the decorated vet the bereft widow had once been married to was given as Connor Rychenkow.

Streak.

Seventy-two hours later, Allen Carmichael crouched at the foot of a neatly trimmed privet hedge in a suburb east of Los Angeles, waiting for the ranch-style house on the other side of the street to go dark. It was, he reflected, one of the oddest jungles he'd patrolled yet. The woman who lived there had visitors—a sister, guessing from the resemblance, with the sister's husband and two small kids. Kids they would surely want to take home and tuck into bed, he urged, before some neighbor walking their dog last thing at night came across the intruder in the privet hedge.

And there they were at last, one kid flaked out in Daddy's arms, the other whining and half-asleep, being tugged along after Mommy. The sister kissed the woman who lived in the house, and the visitors drove away. The porch light went off, followed by the light in the front room.

Allen didn't worry much; he doubted any woman whose kids had been taken from her less than two weeks earlier would be sleeping all that soundly.

He retreated to his car in the next block, stayed there until the golden Labs and the German shepherds had finished their business, then slipped back up the quiet sidewalks to the house over which he had been keeping watch. Sure enough, a light shone from the back of the house, which proved to be the kitchen. Through the door's window he saw the woman, seated at the table with a mug in front of her, head in hands.

She jerked up at his gentle knock on the screen. Allen took a step back from the door, far enough not to seem a threat but near enough so the porch light would fall on him. When it came on, he held his hands out so she could see he wasn't holding a weapon, then lifted one finger to his lips as a plea for silence. Through the glass the frightened face shaped the words “Who are you?”

He stepped forward so she could hear him. “I'm sorry to startle you, coming at this time of night. My name is Allen Carmichael. I knew your first husband in Vietnam. We called him ‘Streak,' ” he added, by way of proof.

The door opened a crack, and she studied him. “So?”

“I think I might be able to help you get your children back.”

BOOK THREE

Jamie

Chapter 16

Twenty-six and a half years after the night he met Streak Rychenkow's widow, Allen Carmichael was in a camper-topped tan Ford pickup, traveling the endless miles from central Montana to his island home above the hidden cave. Sometimes he felt that all he had ever done with his life was drive unending miles in unfamiliar cars, fly over vast spaces miles high in the air, sleep in strange beds, and look in the mirror at so many slightly wrong faces, men with dark hair or extravagant moustaches, men with obviously bleached hair and the trimmed beards of gigolos, men with nerdy glasses and protruding teeth. Twenty-six years; nearly half his life.

Over now, he reminded himself for the hundredth time that day. Each time the thought came, Allen felt the same jolt of relief and apprehension, as if someone had told a weight lifter he could let go of that enormous thing across his shoulders, but not told him how to get it off. And each time he had to reassure his apprehensive self that he'd be fine, that retirement didn't kill a man, that he'd settle into a less active life with no problems.

His apprehensive self hadn't believed it the first dozen times, and was little closer to accepting the reassurance now. But it would come, he told himself. He'd get the burden down, and after a while, he'd wonder how on earth he'd borne it so long. He would reshape himself around a future that did not actively involve him in the process of taking children away from violent adults. The cave's foodstuffs, its generous supply of games, videos, and children's clothing could be cleared away, its role of temporary safe-house for fugitives closed down. He knew he was probably going to take Alice up on her offer of a supervisory role, of making contacts with lawyers and shelters and document forgers, extending and laying down new connections on their modern underground railway, but as for climbing trees and snatching kids, he was retired from that, for good this time. Alice had dragged him back from the brink once—and truth to tell, he was glad she had talked him into it: He wouldn't for the world have missed his encounter with Jamie O'Connell. But that was over now. Jamie was safely stowed far away from his father, under the care of a good, strong, clever woman and her affectionate family.

The highway stretched out between the two hands on the wheel, unseen by anything but his automatic vision, the rest of his mind working to get itself around the idea of a new life. For twenty-six years, Allen had been a civilian mercenary in the service of abused children and their mothers, disappearing them from harm. Sometimes this required his services only as advisor or advocate, at other times as out-and-out kidnapper with his own ass on the line. His clients had been mothers with young children, and although he had occasionally helped a man disappear, there was less pleasure there, merely the satisfaction of exercising skills. It was transporting kids to safety that he treasured, the joy of watching a mother as it slowly dawned upon her that the burden she had carried for so long, the threat to her children that she alone had known was there, had been taken away. As thrills went, witnessing that expression was right up there alongside good sex. Almost as satisfying as seeing one of his clients, years later, strong and proud and transformed into steel by what she'd been through.

Twenty-six years of dealing with terrorized women and children, two and a half decades of keeping out of sight of both law enforcement and abusers, a quarter of a century of collecting, witnessing, and collating the most distasteful sort of evidence imaginable. How many hours of abuse had he watched, by means of his hidden cameras? How many whimpers and shouts had he heard through his microphones?

There was no reckoning the hours. What he did know precisely was the number of rescues he'd participated in: forty-eight, roughly two a year. He remembered every face and all the names, each identity inextricably wrapped up with tactile impressions of the case: the texture of a sleeping toddler's hair against his bare arm on an early morning ferry leaving New York; the scent of datura flowers outside the moonlit walls of a Palm Springs mansion; the sand crunching under his boots as he sprinted across the Mexican beach toward the waiting
Orca Queen;
the laugh—a song of joy and wonder—that the small blond woman named Wanda gave out when she stepped from the mountaintop cabin and saw the ten thousand acres of trees that separated her from a husband with murder in his eyes.

Strong, clear memories that made the fatigue, the rootlessness, the danger, and even the endless gut-churning surveillance tapes all worthwhile.

If there'd been just one kid like Jamie in the past twenty-six years, Allen would have felt his life justified. To have been instrumental in preserving seventy-nine kids, that felt like a gift.

Not that all the children had been like Jamie. Most had been simply a logistical problem, a potential source of disruption that he needed to keep under iron control until he had them away from danger. Most of the kids had been either so young they were unformed, or else so confused and frightened that he couldn't tell what their personalities would be. He did his job, he lodged his evidence, he made sure they were cleanly away, and then he turned his back. Only rarely had he been tempted to look up one of his rescues and see what had become of them. But Allen already suspected that Jamie O'Connell would be a different matter—not that he'd endanger the kid by hanging around to check on him, of course not, but somehow he knew that he was going to be tempted. Maybe it was because the boy had been his very last client. Maybe he'd spent a day too long in Jamie's company, and what a shrink would call countertransference had begun to establish itself.

And maybe he ought to think about other things.

With a wrench, Allen pulled his mind away from Jamie, from Montana, and from the past. That was over; he had a life to live now. He was still a young man—well, a healthy middle-aged man—and he had a life ahead of him. He'd leave Alice dangling for a while before accepting her offer, just long enough so she didn't take him for granted. In the meantime, there was his increasingly interesting relationship with the extraordinary woman who owned Sanctuary Island, to say nothing of the challenge he would face in ingratiating himself back into his extended family, finding a way of convincing his younger brother the sheriff that his long, long absence was neither sinister nor unfriendly, merely eccentric. It was June: the beginning of a promising summer.

The miles spun on beneath the truck's tires, and as they did, the myriad gossamer threads that bound Allen Carmichael to his life as a professional kidnapper grew taut, and silently, one by one, parted, leaving him, for the first time in his adult life, a free man.

Or so he told himself. In fact, a portion of his mind could not quite let go of Jamie O'Connell, a boy whom he almost hadn't met at all.

Allen had retired for the first time barely a month before, once blond-haired AmberLyn McKenzie was safe with her mother over the Canadian border. And maybe that was the problem—he'd just begun to relax, only to be snatched back for Jamie; some part of him anticipated it happening again.

Relaxation did not come naturally to Allen Carmichael. Relaxation was as dangerous to a man who spent his life on the wrong side of the law as it was to a soldier in the jungle, and most of what he did in the course of disappearing people was illegal: He was, after all, a man who routinely committed breaking-and-entering, burglary (both physical and electronic), hideously illicit and often supremely tasteless forms of electronic surveillance, blackmail, assault (twice, when it had proven unavoidable), threat with a deadly weapon, kidnapping persons whose custody had been granted to others and transporting them across state lines, conspiracy, falsification of evidence, and half the offenses in the penal code. Once he'd even murdered a guard dog.

Kidnapping was a tool with a whole lot of really sharp edges to it. It had taken Allen years to refine the techniques, figuring out ways to use them without causing a world of hurt to himself and others. That first time, stealing Streak's kids away from their Cuban stepfather, had been an ignorant grab-and-snatch, and he and Ed had been incredibly lucky not to have been caught and either shot by the stepfather's pet cops—a bullet had whizzed over their heads, for God's sake—or arrested by their U.S. brothers. One time was all it took and, adrenaline rush or no, he'd had to confront the hard fact that luck just wouldn't do it. What he was doing was the equivalent of long-range patrols into a VC-infested green, and on that kind of mission, a man's luck ran out fast.

The key was not high-tech gadgetry or super-spy techniques, although Allen had used plenty of cutting-edge technology and had trained in a wide variety of arcane secret-agent skills, from lock-picking to martial arts. He was no black belt, but he'd taken a lot of classes, mostly the sort of dirty fighting that would win him no prizes on a mat but which might save the life of a client, one day. He hadn't fired a gun at a living being since Vietnam, but he practiced regularly at the range, both with a scoped rifle and a handgun. He was no master of disguise, but he could apply makeup that made him look younger or older or of a different ethnic background, and he'd practiced long hours with a coach to learn to change the way he moved. He was no race-car driver, but on a racetrack he'd mastered the controlled skid, the quick hundred-and-eighty-degree hand-brake turn, and the trick of nudging a car ahead of him into a spin.

For twenty-six years, Allen had survived by appearing absolutely ordinary while telling himself that the police forces of five countries were on his neck. In another twenty or thirty years, when electronic surveillance would become so all-pervasive that cameras hooked to central computers would occupy every city block, his job might well become impossible, but so far, he'd managed to avoid becoming a blip on any official radar. Nod a greeting to the cop on the corner and walk on by; look curious instead of guilty when a siren screamed past; drive like a law-abiding citizen who knew that the worst he did was edge up a couple of miles over the limit; with young kids, be a granddad with white hair and a Pontiac, with teenagers, wear brown hair dye and the look of a harassed father.

Normal and invisible was the answer. Sure, they could find you if they were looking hard enough; the key was not to have them notice your presence in the first place. No police force would have a gun battle or put out an APB or do a credit card search unless they had a name, a face, or a fingerprint, and all of Allen's skill over the years had gone into presenting none of those pieces of evidence. And those police forces that did have an unsolved disappearance on their books scaled the search down when they got a note from the wife or kids saying they'd run off, and here's evidence (maybe not justifiable cause, but evidence) to show the man left behind was a dirtbag. Allen had even two or three times come across cops who'd taken a cold, hard look at the facts behind a child's disappearance and chosen to turn their back on it. The letter of the law doesn't necessarily save lives.

So he'd learned the skills of urban surveillance and Internet security, false identities and how to go unnoticed by the most suspicious of men, how to disappear completely when burdened by the innocent. He'd moved through a network of small churches and women's shelters, making friends with doctors and psychotherapists who understood the necessity of going outside the law. He had set up the Sanctuary cave as a place to conceal kids and their mothers; he'd even learned how to snatch a frightened child who didn't know him, who regarded this tall stranger as just one more threat in a lifetime of them. For that, he'd had to learn to think like a real kidnapper, and he'd studied his tapes of pederasts to see how they coaxed their victim into trust. He hated it; his skin crawled with self-disgust while he was seducing a child into going with him, but he did it. And afterward he slept, more often than not unvisited by deRosa.

Thus it was that on a spring morning a little over four weeks earlier, following his fifty-second and (or so he thought at the time) final rescue mission of six-year-old AmberLyn, his biker's jacket (still emanating the gentle aura of cat's piss) stowed in the rental locker with a dozen or so other personas that he never intended to use again, Allen had been sitting on the balcony of his Seattle apartment, feet propped up, drinking a beer, enjoying the bustle of the waterfront below, and idly checking in his mind to see if he'd left anything undone. The child he'd spent most of April watching was physically fine and young enough to be psychologically resilient; copies of the tapes Allen had made were locked away both in his own safe and that of the private investigator who'd hired him in the first place; and the police would get a set of the evidence as soon as the PI was satisfied that the threads that linked her with Allen had been safely cut. The tapes and letters might not convict the bastard, but they would make him squirm, and keep him too busy to pursue his daughter. Another child safe, another creep with a heel about to crush his head. His final job well done.

So Allen sat with the gentle sun of early May shining full on his face, and thought lazily about giving Ed a call. They'd made loose plans for a fishing trip, maybe even a run on the
Orca Queen
down to Baja to soak up some serious rays and go scuba diving in the clear, soothing waters, but hadn't been able to set a date for it, not until Allen was free. Well, he was free now, free as a bird, a man of leisure, a fifty-four-year-old retiree. And none too soon; God, he was tired, tired of the life, worn to the bone. A rest would be good. Maybe he'd even start it right here in the warm . . .

The
beep beep
of the fax machine tickled his awareness half an hour or so later, and although it was not enough in itself to wake him, it did make him aware that the sun was not really very warm. He stretched, picked up his empty beer bottle from between the legs of the deck chair, and went in for a sweater, then decided instead that he'd put off a trip to the gym for long enough, and checked to see that the sweatpants and lifting gloves were still in the bag before he left the apartment.