Keeping Watch

  LAURIE R. KING

  KEEPING WATCH

  Bantam Books

  NEW YORK TORONTO LONDON SYDNEY AUCKLAND

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Acknowledgments

  Before

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Book 1

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Book 2

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Book 3

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Book 4

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Book 5

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  After

  Glossary

  Other Books by Laurie King

  Copyright

  To all the children who fight in wars not of their making

  I and the public know

  What all schoolchildren learn,

  Those to whom evil is done

  Do evil in return.

  —W. H. Auden

  “September 1, 1939”

  Thanks to John Tiley, who tried to make sure I took the right equipment with me into the green; to Jason and Jeff of Media Associates in Mountain View, who put Allen’s equipment up in the tree; and to Nathan King, gamer extraordinaire.

  And with thanks to all the men and women who wrote about their experiences in Vietnam, that those of us who come after might understand.

  And for those who like to know the meaning of words, a glossary of war terms lies at the end of the book.

  Before

  Chapter 1

  Allen Carmichael balanced on the precariously slim branch of the vine maple, pawing aside the soft new greenery and cursing the incompatibility of most trees with the human body. Particularly a six-foot-one-inch human body with a stiff leg, working its way through a sixth decade. Too old for this kind of stunt, he grumbled to himself. No doubt about it: It really was time to turn this side of things over to some younger maniac.

  The house over which he was keeping watch—or rather, which his machines had been watching for him—lay slightly lower than his current treetop perch and at the other end of half a mile of well-maintained driveway. It was a solid house, big, with double-glazed windows and a lot of fake stone wrapped around a confusing number of rooms and a three-car garage. The sort of house Allen disliked, even without the things that went on inside it. Showy, unsuited to the climate, “Tudoresque” (whatever the hell that meant), and with no personality to show for its vast expense. It was also irritatingly well situated for defense. With good reason, Allen knew, but it made life no easier for a man trying to pry it open.

  He downloaded the information stored in the treetop receiver, gave it a new battery, and paused to check the area around the tree for onlookers. He was grateful, always, when his targets were not dog owners. Remarkably few of them were—for the simple reason, he’d always supposed, that dogs demanded a kind of affection they had no time for. Their interests lay elsewhere.

  He clambered down through the unfurling April leaves, reaching the ground without breaking any of his middle-aged bones, and set off for the motorcycle buried in some bushes half a mile away. The surveillance on AmberLyn’s stepfather was nearly finished; time to break up the party.

  Late that night, back in his barely furnished residential-hotel apartment, Allen Carmichael dropped his pack on the kitchen table and got himself a beer. Half of it went down his throat before he bothered to shut the door on the fridge.

  He set the bottle down next to the pack and shrugged off the leather biker’s jacket he wore, taking it to the apartment’s single closet, where he winced at the smell of cat piss that wafted out. He worked one of the flimsy hangers into the coat’s shoulders, hung the heavy garment up gingerly on the chipped paint of the metal bar, and closed the door, then remembered the smell and left the door ajar a few inches so his clothes wouldn’t be quite so pungent in the morning. Sitting on the end of the wobbly mattress, he picked open the laces of his scuffed steel-toed boots, placing them precisely under the corner of the bed, then unbuttoned the grubby, paper-thin flannel shirt he wore and tugged it free from his jeans. He pushed the garment into the dresser drawer that he used in lieu of a dirty-clothes hamper (unconsciously adjusting the ill-fitting drawer so it lay precisely flush to the frame), then scratched his grease-rimed fingernails through his scalp, loosing hair matted by the day’s headgear of knit cap and helmet, before stretching hard in an attempt to rid his body of the day’s tiredness. The attempt was not a success.

  He walked out of the bedroom, limping slightly, dressed in stocking feet, jeans, and the spotless army-green T-shirt he had worn beneath the plaid flannel. In the apartment’s tiny bathroom (which was still pretty grim even though he’d got down on his hands and knees the day he moved in and scoured every surface) Allen ran the rust-stained basin full of cold water, splashed and dried his face. He used the toilet, then went back to the basin, using hot water and soap this time to scrub his hands, his bearded face, and the back of his neck. He’d rather have taken a shower, to rid himself of the indescribably oily feeling of his day, but he knew he’d really need one later and he couldn’t permit himself to have two showers in one evening—a little compulsiveness was okay, but let’s not let it get out of hand. So he washed his face and hands, and when every inch of exposed skin was clean and glowing, he arranged the thin, damp towel foursquare on the peeling chrome of the bar and switched off the light.

  At no point had he looked into the dim mirror over the basin.

  In the kitchen again, Allen frowned at the contents of the refrigerator, glanced over the meager supply of pasta and canned goods in the cupboard, and in the end fried up a pair of thick ham and provolone sandwiches with tomatoes and onions on week-old bread. He carried his plate with the remains of the beer into the cramped living room and propped his feet up on the massive pseudo-wood table in front of the musty sofa, allowing the greasy food and the mindless television to carry him through to the half-hour break.

  With a sigh, and another beer, he then sat down to his work.

  In the arc of experience that had brought him from a scorching runway in Saigon to this fetid apartment among the winos, Allen had picked up a number of skills. Primary among them, then and now, was the ability to disengage. Going through the pockets of a long-dead enemy soldier, dropping down to check a bunker they’d thought was empty but which a fragmentation grenade had proved was not, watching a brutal interrogation, loading a ville’s weeping inhabitants into a Chinook like cattle—you had to stand aside mentally and let your hands and eyes do their job. Like a flak jacket on the emotions, disassociation made it possible to carry on even if you were hit.

  Now, it made it possible for Allen to watch his illicit videos of blond, curly-headed, six-year-old AmberLyn McKenzie with the least possible involvement of the mind. If he stopped to let it all in, if he allowed his eyes to dwell on the child’s face or let his ears hear her stepfather’s clever cajoling, he knew damn well that he’d put down his beer and just go murder t
he bastard. Which wouldn’t help anyone, least of all that little girl whimpering on the television screen. Instead, he fast-forwarded parts of what the bedroom spy camera had recorded, although truth to tell, it was rarely the actual rape that got to him on these sorts of cases. No; the part he found truly unbearable was, he’d long ago decided, the very same part that the pedophile loved the most: the seduction. Most pedophiles weren’t interested in merely overpowering a child, but rather found their greatest pleasure in the game of domination, keeping the child just this side of outright panic by first discovering and then manipulating each particular victim’s individual needs, fears, and nobilities. The subtle interplay of threat and cajoling, pressure and affection, always hit Allen the hardest: the terrible intimacy involved, a predator’s complete understanding of his prey, a knowledge such as, more often than not, no other human being in the child’s life came anywhere near to possessing. It was this terrible familiarity with the victim’s very soul that made Allen crave the simplicity of murder.

  When the bedroom tape was over, he got himself a third beer by way of reward before settling down with a pad of paper to watch the scenes from the three other cameras he’d planted. He made the occasional note and replayed one or two parts before labeling the recordings precisely and sealing them into a padded mailer; only then did he go and take his shower. Afterward, he sat in the dark room for nearly an hour with his feet on the table and his fingers laced together over the front of his fresh T-shirt.

  Thank God this time there was a mother. It made life so much easier, having an adult to take charge of the child once he’d gotten the victims free—even if the mother was a large part of the child’s problem, which was usually the case. But at least Allen didn’t have to act alone, at least he avoided the soul-withering need to ingratiate himself into the child’s life like the molesters he watched. He always felt . . . cleaner, when there was a mother on board.

  A few minutes after midnight, Allen got up to fetch a cell phone from his bedside table. He thumbed in the numbers and put it to his ear, standing at the bedroom window and looking through its dirty glass at the deserted street below. As he’d expected, the phone was answered after the first ring. He spoke. “Tomorrow, I think. He’ll be out of town until late. So plan A looks good. Everything ready at your end? Fine, see you then.”

  He closed the phone and climbed between the clean-smelling sheets, where he slept the sleep of a middle-aged adrenaline junkie on the eve of action, whose only dreams were cool and green and quiet as April leaves.

  Chapter 2

  The boy sat without moving before the multicolored screen of his computer, head bowed, pulling the room’s silence around his bony shoulders as if harnessing the billowing cloak of a superhero. As if by wrapping himself head to foot in the fabric of silence, he might become invisible as well.

  The boy thought of his cloak as The Quiet, imagined it to be woven from ever-shifting tones of gray and blue, mistlike colors of peace and invisibility. He was, in truth, still nearly halfway convinced of its actual existence, a portion of his heart even now almost certain that if only he could concentrate intensely enough, like some Chinese martial-arts master—if he could just find the precise area in his brain from which The Quiet flowed—he would be able to trigger it at will, pulling it up over himself like a blanket so that he simply winked out, into another dimension or something, vanishing from the world’s sight.

  He knew this was nonsense, of course. He was twelve years old now, and he’d lost his belief in fairy tales a long time ago. The problem was, sometimes it seemed to work. Sometimes he’d sit really, really still, so motionless he could feel the blood slowing in his veins, hear his mind turning within its skull; when he reached just that right place, he could reach in and summon The Quiet. He would feel its cool fabric brush lightly across his skin and snug down against his clothes, as firm and protective as a mother’s arms. When that happened, when he got it right, Father’s footsteps would continue on past his door, as if he had lost sight of the boy wrapped in his cloak of silence.

  Other times, however, the boy would just think he’d got it right. He’d sit without moving a muscle, his breath so low it did not hide the slow lub-dub of his heart, stilling his mind until he felt The Quiet begin to creep up over him, clothing him in the knowledge that tonight’s footsteps would go on by, since he was not there for Father to see. Only, incomprehensibly, the approaching footsteps would turn and come through the shattered doorway, and the real world would crash over him with the shock of a bucket of ice water.

  He’d seen a television program one time about a dog trainer, and although the woman herself was stupid and ugly he’d left it on for a while because he couldn’t take his eyes off one of her dogs. It was a small brown-and-white animal with soft-folded ears and intelligent black shiny eyes—a terrier, she’d called it. It was a compact dog, sharp of feature and round of belly, just the right size to fit into a boy’s lap and wriggle around to lick his chin with that pink tongue, but the woman acted like it was a lab rat or something. The terrier had been mistreated by its owners, she’d told the camera—and he knew just what she was talking about, oh yeah. But, she said, from the terrier’s point of view, the worst part was not the physical abuse it had suffered, or even the lack of affection. It was the unpredictability of it all, the way the owner would one day kick the dog and another day pick it up and feed it treats and spoil it, so the poor animal (those were her words: poor animal) never knew what to expect. That was what had made the dog vicious, so that he couldn’t be trusted not to bite.

  The dog lady hadn’t said anything about the opposite result of being treated unpredictably: the hope, constant and tenacious, that insisted on whispering in the back of a person’s mind, If only . . . If only I could find the right spot in the brain, I’d be able to enter The Quiet anytime I wanted. If only I could figure out what I do that sets Father off, I could stop doing it. If only . . .

  Maybe it didn’t work that way with dogs. Maybe dogs didn’t hang on to hope like people did. Maybe they just gave up thinking that life might make sense one day, so when they looked up and saw a hand reaching out to feed them or to hit them, they just bit it without waiting to see which it would be. Because they Couldn’t be trusted. Not to bite.

  Maybe only little kids hung on to the hope that they could do something—like they clung to the idea of some superhero cloak of invisibility. Lately, he’d begun to think it was time he grew out of the fantasy, that basically there was not a thing he could do to avoid Father when Father was in one of his moods.

  Or maybe there wasn’t all that much difference between a boy and a terrier. (Great name that, somehow like terror, only friendly, like the dog looked, his ears cocked at the camera and at the stupid woman who hadn’t even said his real name. The boy had decided the dog’s name was Terry, and concluded that Terry Couldn’t be trusted only when it came to stupid women and unpredictable owners.) Maybe, the boy thought, it was time for him to start growing up, time to become more like the mistreated white-and-brown dog.

  Time for him to become vicious, and snap those sharp white teeth down into flesh and bite and tear and—

  When the sound of feet came on the stairs, the boy jabbed the SAVE button on the keyboard and subsided into motionlessness, trying not to breathe, searching desperately for The Quiet, for the tiny button in his brain that would render him invisible.

  Chapter 3

  Allen’s dreams were cloaked in green, even after all these years.

  The good dreams, dreams like those flickering behind his eyelids that night in the apartment smelling of cat’s piss, were woven from the rich and varied greens of the islands where he had grown up: the dark, dull cedar and the sword fern in autumn, the gloss of wet madrone and Oregon grape, the brilliant tips of the springtime firs against the gray-green mounds of the distant mainland, the opal-green tint the sea took on during a clear day after a rain, the blues and greens of the small braided rug that had met his bare feet each an
d every morning of his childhood, all of them melding in his sleeping mind with the mind-boggling, gorgeous multiplicity of colors that had made up the Vietnam countryside, ranging from near-black to startling chartreuse, from the quiet bottle-green flavor of light under the jungle canopy to the artificially bright patchwork of the rice paddies.

  Those were the good dreams.

  But then there were the other nocturnal greens. He could not have said what the difference was, why one color was comforting and its close brother brought menace. He only knew that the dreams that had him thudding out of sleep into full, sweat-drenched, tight-muscled battle alert were shaded with dead tones. They might begin with the bright olive of a new guy’s fatigues, a clean slate waiting for the messages of battle and blood and the permeating red earth of Vietnam, to be followed by the ominous flatness of one lone shrub on an entire hillside of vegetation, a shrub whose roots had been cut by some tunneling creature. Sooner or later he would dream the startling jade-green of Flores’s eyes, and once those eyes had appeared, the shades of green worming their way into his sleeping mind bore the inevitability of decay: the weird tones of chemically murdered foliage and the blatant innocence of the vines that sprang up overnight from soil disturbed by man; the lifeless colors of the hacked-off branches used to camouflage the enemy’s trucks and the yellow-green glow of terrain through a nightscope and the nauseous blue-green of suppurating infections in Caucasian bodies that had lain a week in the jungle heat. The greens would writhe and merge like jungle phosphorescence through his sleeping brain until he bolted upright, sweating and breathless at the piercing reality of a green body bag being zipped shut inches from his nose, or of eight-foot-high elephant grass curling down upon him like the maw of some huge carnivorous creature. Sometimes he would be heading back to the NDP in a Huey, the cool breeze fingering his damp hair and his M16 easy between his knees, relaxed and safe and riding high above an undulating sheet of emerald-colored crushed velvet that draped the soft curves of the earth below—only the chopper would shudder and Allen’s harness would open and out the open door he would shoot, floating unencumbered over that endless green expanse of unbroken jungle, achingly beautiful and pure except that he was not floating he was falling and the jungle was rising up at great speed and the crushed velvet became individual trees reaching up for him and the ground was getting closer so close it was nearly at his eyelids and he was about to—