Watchers (54 page)

A year ago, a month ago, even a few days ago, he would have said it was impossible to hold fast to that love and still be his own man. But now, by God, it seemed not only possible but essential that he separate his love for his father from his adherence to his father’s workaholic code.

What’s happening to me? he wondered.

Freedom? Freedom, at last, at forty-five?

Squinting into the mirror, he said, “Almost forty-six.”

chapter nine

Sunday, Travis noted that Einstein still had less of an appetite than usual, but by Monday, November 29, the retriever seemed fine. On Monday and Tuesday, Einstein finished every scrap of his meals, and he read new books. He sneezed only once and did not cough at all. He drank more water than in the past, though not an excessive amount. If he seemed to spend more time by the fireplace, if he padded through the house less energetically . . . well, winter was swiftly settling upon them, and animals’ behavior changed with the seasons.

At a bookstore in Carmel, Nora bought a copy of
The Dog Owner’s Home Veterinary Handbook.
She spent a few hours at the kitchen table, reading, researching the possible meanings of Einstein’s symptoms. She discovered that listlessness, partial loss of appetite, sneezing, coughing, and unusual thirst could signify a hundred ailments—or mean nothing at all. “About the only thing it couldn’t be is a cold,” she said. “Dogs don’t get colds like we do.” But by the time she got the book, Einstein’s symptoms had diminished to such an extent that she decided he was probably perfectly healthy.

In the pantry off the kitchen, Einstein used the Scrabble tiles to tell them: FIT AS A FIDDLE.

Stooping beside the dog, stroking him, Travis said, “I guess you ought to know better than anyone.”

WHY SAY FIT AS A FIDDLE?

Replacing the tiles in their Lucite tubes, Travis said, “Well, because it means—healthy.”

BUT WHY DOES IT MEAN HEALTHY?

Travis thought about the metaphor—fit as a fiddle—and realized he was not sure why it meant what it did. He asked Nora, and she came to the pantry door, but she had no explanation for the phrase, either.

Pawing out more letters, pushing them around with his nose, the retriever asked: WHY SAY SOUND AS A DOLLAR?

“Sound as a dollar—meaning healthy or reliable,” Travis said.

Stooping beside them, speaking to the dog, Nora said, “That one’s easier. The United States dollar was once the soundest, most stable currency in the world. Still is, I suppose. For decades, there was no terrible inflation in the dollar like in some other currencies, no reason to lose faith in it, so folks said, ‘I’m as sound as a dollar.’ Of course, the dollar isn’t what it once was, and the phrase isn’t as fitting as it used to be, but we still use it.”

WHY STILL USE IT?

“Because . . . we’ve always used it,” Nora said, shrugging.

WHY SAY HEALTHY AS A HORSE? HORSES NEVER SICK?

Gathering up the tiles and sorting them back into their tubes, Travis said, “No, in fact, horses are fairly delicate animals in spite of their size. They get sick pretty easily.”

Einstein looked expectantly from Travis to Nora.

Nora said, “We probably say we’re healthy as a horse because horses
look
strong and seem like they shouldn’t ever get sick, even though they get sick all the time.”

“Face it,” Travis told the dog, “we humans say things all the time that don’t make sense.”

Pumping the letter-dispensing pedals with his paw, the retriever told them: YOU ARE A STRANGE PEOPLE.

Travis looked at Nora, and they both laughed.

Beneath YOU ARE A STRANGE PEOPLE, the retriever spelled: BUT I LIKE YOU ANYWAY.

Einstein’s inquisitiveness and sense of humor seemed, more than anything else, to indicate that, if he had been mildly ill, he was now recovered.

That was Tuesday.

On Wednesday, December 1, while Nora painted in her second-floor studio, Travis devoted the day to inspecting his security system and to routine weapons maintenance.

In every room, a firearm was carefully concealed under furniture or behind a drape or in a closet, but always within easy reach. They owned two Mossberg pistol-grip shotguns, four Smith & Wesson Model 19 Combat Magnums loaded with .357s, two .38 pistols that they carried with them in the pickup and Toyota, an Uzi carbine, two Uzi pistols. They could have obtained their entire arsenal legally, from a local gun shop, once they purchased a house and established residence in the county, but Travis had not been willing to wait that long. He had wanted to have the weapons on the first night they settled into their new home; therefore, through Van Dyne in San Francisco, he and Nora had located an illegal arms salesman and had acquired what they needed. Of course, they could not have bought conversion kits for the Uzis from a licensed gun dealer. But they were able to purchase three such kits in San Francisco, and now the Uzi carbine and pistols were fully automatic.

Travis moved from room to room, checking that the weapons were properly positioned, that they were free of dust, that they did not need to be oiled, and that their magazines were fully loaded. He knew that everything would be in order, but he just felt more comfortable if he conducted this inspection once a week. Though he had been out of uniform for many years, the old military training and methodology were still a part of him, and under pressure they surfaced more quickly than he had expected.

Taking a Mossberg with them, he and Einstein also walked around the house, stopping at each of the small infrared sensors that were, as much as possible, placed inconspicuously against backdrops of rocks or plants, snug against the trunks of a few trees, at the corners of the house, and beside an old rotting pine stump at the edge of the driveway. He had bought the components on the open market, from an electronics dealer in San Francisco. It was dated stuff, not at all state-of-the-art security technology, but he chose it because he was familiar with it from his days in Delta Force, and it was good enough for his purposes. Lines from the sensors ran underground, to an alarm box in one of the kitchen cupboards. When the system was switched on at night, nothing larger than a raccoon could come within thirty feet of the house—or enter the barn at the back of the property— without tripping the alarm. No bells would ring, and no sirens would blare because that would alert The Outsider and might run it off. They didn’t want to chase it away; they wanted to
kill
it. Therefore, when the system was tripped, it turned on clock radios in every room of the house, all of which were set at low volume so as not to frighten off an intruder but high enough to warn Travis and Nora.

Today, all the sensors were in place, as usual. All he had to do was wipe off the light film of dust that had coated the lenses.

“The palace moat is in good repair, m’lord,” Travis said.

Einstein woofed approval.

In the rust-red barn, Travis and Einstein examined the equipment that, they hoped, would provide a nasty surprise for The Outsider.

In the northwest corner of the shadowy interior, to the left of the big rolling door, a pressurized steel tank was clamped in a wall rack. In the diagonally opposite southeast corner at the back of the building, beyond the pickup and car, an identical vessel was bolted to an identical rack. They resembled large propane tanks of the sort people used at summer cabins for gas cooking, but they did not hold propane. They were filled with nitrous oxide, which was sometimes inaccurately called “laughing gas.” The first whiff
did
exhilarate you and make you want to laugh, but the second whiff knocked you out before the laugh could escape your lips. Dentists and surgeons frequently used nitrous oxide as an anesthetic. Travis had purchased it from a medical-supply house in San Francisco.

After switching on the barn lights, Travis checked the gauges on both tanks. Full pressure.

In addition to the large rolling door at the front of the barn, there was a smaller, man-size door at the rear. These were the only two entrances. Travis had boarded over a pair of windows in the loft. At night, when the alarm system was engaged, the smaller rear door was left unlocked in the hope that The Outsider, intending to scout the house from the cover of the barn, would let itself into the trap. When it opened the door and crept into the barn, it would trigger a mechanism that would slam and lock the door behind it. The front door, already locked from outside, would prevent an exit in that direction.

Simultaneous with the springing of the trap, the large tanks of nitrous oxide would release their entire contents in less than one minute because Travis had fitted them with high-pressure emergency-release valves tied in with the alarm system. He had caulked all of the draft-admitting cracks in the barn and had insulated the place as thoroughly as possible in order to insure that the nitrous oxide would be contained within the structure until one of the doors was unlocked from outside and opened to vent the gas.

The Outsider could not take refuge in the pickup or the Toyota, for they would be locked. No corner in the barn would be free of the gas. Within less than a minute, the creature would collapse. Travis had considered using poisonous gas of some kind, which he probably could have obtained on the underground market, but he had decided against going to that extreme because, if something went wrong, the danger to him and Nora and Einstein would be too great.

Once gas had been released and The Outsider had succumbed, Travis could simply open one of the doors, vent the barn, enter with the Uzi carbine, and kill the beast where it lay unconscious. At worst, even if the time taken airing out the building gave The Outsider a chance to regain consciousness, it would still be groggy and disoriented and easily dispatched.

When they had ascertained that everything in the barn was as it should be, Travis and Einstein returned to the yard behind the house. The December day was cool but windless. The forest surrounding the property was preternaturally still. The trees stood motionless under a low sky of slate-colored clouds.

Travis said, “Is The Outsider still coming?”

With a quick wag of the tail, Einstein said,
Yes
.

“Is it close?”

Einstein sniffed the clean, winter-crisp air. He padded across the yard to the perimeter of the northern woods and sniffed again, cocked his head, peered intently into the trees. He repeated this ritual at the southern end of the property.

Travis had the feeling that Einstein was not actually employing his eyes, ears, and nose in search of The Outsider. He had some way of monitoring The Outsider that was far different from the means by which he would track a cougar or squirrel. Travis perceived that the dog was employing an inexplicable sixth sense—call it psychic or at least quasi-psychic. The retriever’s use of its ordinary senses was probably either the trigger by which it engaged that psychic ability—or mere habit.

At last, Einstein returned to him and whined curiously.

“Is it close?” Travis asked.

Einstein sniffed the air and surveyed the gloom of the encircling forest, as if he could not decide on an answer.

“Einstein? Is something wrong?”

Finally, the retriever barked once:
No
.

“Is The Outsider getting close?”

A hesitation. Then:
No
.

“Are you sure?”

“Really sure?”

At the house, as Travis opened the door, Einstein turned away from him, padded across the back porch, and stood at the top of the wooden steps, taking one final look around at the yard and at the peaceful, shadowed, soundless forest. Then, with a faint shiver, he followed Travis inside.

Throughout the inspection of the defenses during the afternoon, Einstein had been more affectionate than usual, rubbing against Travis’s legs a great deal, nuzzling, seeking by one means or another to be petted or patted or scratched. That evening, as they watched television, then played a three-way game of Scrabble on the living-room floor, the dog continued to seek attention. He kept putting his head in Nora’s lap, then in Travis’s. He seemed as if he would be content to be stroked and have his ears gently scratched until next summer.

From the day of their first encounter in the Santa Ana foothills, Einstein had gone through spells of purely doggy behavior, when it was hard to believe that he was, in his own way, as intelligent as a man. Tonight, he was in one of those moods again. In spite of his cleverness at Scrabble—in which his score was second only to Nora’s, and in which he took devilish pleasure forming words that made sly references to her as yet unnoticeable pregnancy—he was nonetheless, this night, more of a dog than not.

Nora and Travis chose to finish the evening with a little light reading— detective stories—but Einstein did not want them to bother inserting a book in his page-turning machine. Instead, he lay on the floor in front of Nora’s armchair and went instantly to sleep.

“He still seems a little draggy,” she said to Travis.

“He ate all his dinner, though. And we did have a long day.”

The dog’s breathing, as it slept, was normal, and Travis was not worried. Actually, he was feeling better about their future than he had for some time. The inspection of their defenses had given him renewed confidence in their preparations, and he believed they would be able to handle The Outsider when it arrived. And thanks to Garrison Dilworth’s courage and dedication to their cause, the government had been stymied, perhaps for good, in its efforts to track them down. Nora was painting again with great enthusiasm, and Travis had decided to use his real-estate license, under the name of Samuel Hyatt, to go back to work once The Outsider had been destroyed. And if Einstein was still a little draggy . . . well, he was certainly more energetic than he had been for a while and was sure to be himself by tomorrow or the day after, at the latest.