Watchers (66 page)

Cornell let go of him. Embarrassed, depressed, Lem straightened his tie, smoothed the wrinkles out of his shirt. He looked down at his pants— brushed them off.

“Ah, Jesus,” he repeated.

Cornell was willing to lead them to the place in the forest where he had buried The Outsider.

Lem’s men dug it up. The monstrosity was wrapped in plastic, but they didn’t have to unwrap it to know that it was Yarbeck’s creation.

The weather had been cool since the thing had been killed, but it was getting rank.

Cornell would not tell them where the dog was buried. “He never had much of a chance to live in peace,” Cornell said sullenly. “But, by God, he’s going to rest in peace now. No one’s going to put him on an autopsy table and hack him up. No way.”

“In a case where the national security is at stake, you can be forced—”

“Let them,” Cornell said. “If they haul me up before a judge and try to make me tell them where I buried Einstein, I’ll spill the whole story to the press. But if they leave Einstein alone, if they leave me and mine alone, I’ll keep my mouth shut. I don’t intend to go back to Santa Barbara, to pick up as Travis Cornell. I’m Hyatt now, and that’s what I’m going to stay. My old life’s gone forever. There’s no reason to go back. And if the government’s smart, it’ll let me be Hyatt and stay out of my way.”

Lem stared at him a long time. Then: “Yeah, if they’re smart, I think they’ll do just that.”

Later that same day, as Jim Keene was cooking dinner, his phone rang. It was Garrison Dilworth, whom he had never met but had gotten to know during the past week by acting as liaison between the attorney and Travis and Nora. Garrison was calling from a pay phone in Santa Barbara.

“They show up yet?” the attorney asked.

“Early this afternoon,” Jim said. “That Tommy Essenby must be a good kid.”

“Not bad, really. But he didn’t come to see me and warn me out of the goodness of his heart. He’s in rebellion against authority. When they pressured him into admitting that I made the call from his house that night, he resented them. As inevitably as billy goats ram their heads into board fences, Tommy came straight to me.”

“They took away The Outsider.”

“What about the dog?”

“Travis said he wouldn’t show them where the grave was. Made them believe that he’d kick a lot of ass and pull down the whole temple on everyone’s heads if they pushed him.”

“How’s Nora?” Dilworth asked.

“She won’t lose the baby.”

“Thank God. That must be a great comfort.”

Eight months later, on the big Labor Day weekend in September, the Johnson and Gaines families got together for a barbecue at the sheriff’s house. They played bridge most of the afternoon. Lem and Karen won more often than they lost, which was unusual these days, because Lem no longer approached the game with the fanatical need to win that had once been his style.

He had left the NSA in June. Since then, he had been living on the income from the money he had long ago inherited from his father. By next spring, he expected to settle on a new line of work, a small business of some kind, in which he would be his own boss, able to set his own hours.

Late in the afternoon, while their wives made salads in the kitchen, Lem and Walt stood out on the patio, tending to the steaks on the barbecue.

“So you’re still known at the Agency as the man who screwed up the Banodyne crisis?”

“That’s how I’ll be known until time immemorial.”

“Still get a pension though,” Walt said.

“Well, I did put in twenty-three years.”

“Doesn’t seem right, though, that a man could screw up the biggest case of the century and still walk away, at forty-six, with a full pension.”

“Three-quarter pension.”

Walt breathed deeply of the fragrant smoke rising off the charring steaks. “Still. What is our country coming to? In less liberal times, screwups like you would have been flogged and put in the stocks, at least.” He took another deep whiff of the steaks and said, “Tell me again about that moment in their kitchen.”

Lem had told it a hundred times, but Walt never got tired of hearing it again. “Well, the place was neat as a pin. Everything gleamed. And both Cornell and his wife are neat about themselves, too. They’re well-groomed, well-scrubbed people. So they tell me the dog’s been dead two weeks, dead and buried. Cornell throws this angry fit, hauls me out of my chair by my shirt, and glares at me like maybe he’s going to rip my head off. When he lets go of me, I straighten my tie, smooth my shirt . . . and I look down at my pants, sort of out of habit, and I notice these golden hairs. Dog hairs.
Retriever
hairs, sure as hell. Now could it have been that these neat people, especially trying to fill their empty days and take their minds off their tragedy, didn’t find the time to clean the house in more than two weeks?”

“Hairs were just all
over
your pants,” Walt said.

“A hundred hairs.”

“Like the dog had just been sitting there minutes before you came in.”

“Like, if I’d been two minutes sooner, I’d have set right down on the dog himself.”

Walt turned the steaks on the barbecue. “You’re a pretty observant man, Lem, which ought to’ve taken you far in the line of work you were in. I just don’t understand how, with all your talents, you managed to screw up the Banodyne case so thoroughly.”

They both laughed, as they always did.

“Just luck, I guess,” Lem said, which was what he always said, and he laughed again.

When James Garrison Hyatt celebrated his third birthday on June 28, his mother was pregnant with his first sibling, who eventually became his sister.

They threw a party at the bleached-wood house on the forested slopes above the Pacific. Because the Hyatts would soon be moving to a new and larger house a bit farther up the coast, they made it a party to remember, not merely a birthday bash but a goodbye to the house that had first sheltered them as a family.

Jim Keene drove in from Carmel with Pooka and Sadie, his two black Labs, and his young golden retriever, Leonardo, who was usually called Leo. A few close friends came in from the real-estate office where Sam— “Travis” to everyone—worked in Carmel Highlands, and from the gallery in Carmel where Nora’s paintings were exhibited and sold. These friends brought their retrievers, too, all of them second-litter offspring of Einstein and his mate, Minnie.

Only Garrison Dilworth was missing. He had died in his sleep the previous year.

They had a fine day, a grand time, not merely because they were friends and happy to be with one another, but because they shared a secret wonder and joy that would forever bind them into one enormous extended family.

All members of the first litter, which Travis and Nora could not have borne adopting out, and which lived at the bleached-wood house, were also present: Mickey, Donald, Daisy, Huey, Dewey, Louie.

The dogs had an even better time than the people, frolicking on the lawn, playing hide-and-seek in the woods, and watching videotapes on the TV in the living room.

The canine patriarch participated in some of the games, but he spent much of his time with Travis and Nora and, as usual, stayed close to Minnie. He limped—as he would for the rest of his life—because his right hind leg had been cruelly mangled by The Outsider and would not have been usable at all if his vet had not been so dedicated to the restoration of the limb’s function.

Travis often wondered whether The Outsider had thrown Einstein against the nursery wall with great force and then had assumed he was dead. Or at the moment when it held the retriever’s life in its hands, perhaps the thing had reached down within itself and found some drop of mercy that its makers had not designed into it but which had somehow been there anyway. Perhaps it remembered the one pleasure it and the dog had shared in the lab—the cartoons. And in remembering the sharing, perhaps it saw itself, for the first time, as having a dim potential to be like other living things. Seeing itself as like others, perhaps it then could not kill Einstein as easily as it had expected. After all, with a flick of those talons, it could have gutted him.

But though he had acquired the limp, Einstein had lost the tattoo in his ear, thanks to Jim Keene. No one could ever prove that he was the dog from Banodyne—and he could still play “dumb dog” very well when he wished.

At times during young Jimmy’s third birthday extravaganza, Minnie regarded her mate and offspring with charmed befuddlement, perplexed by their attitudes and antics. Although she could never fully understand them, no mother of dogs ever received half the love that she was given by those she’d brought into the world. She watched over them, and they watched over her, guardians of each other.

At the dark end of that good day, when the guests were gone, when Jimmy was asleep in his room, when Minnie and her first litter were settling down for the night, Einstein and Travis and Nora gathered at the pantry off the kitchen.

The Scrabble-tile dispenser was gone. In its place, an IBM computer stood on the floor. Einstein took a stylus in his mouth and tapped the keyboard. The message appeared on the screen:

THEY GROW UP FAST.

“Yes, they do,” Nora said. “Yours faster than ours.”

ONE DAY THEY WILL BE EVERYWHERE.

"One day, given time and a lot of litters,” Travis said, “they’ll be all over the world.”

SO FAR FROM ME. IT’S A SADNESS.

“Yes, it is,” Nora said. “But all young birds fly from the nest sooner or later.”

AND WHEN I’M GONE?

“What do you mean?” Travis asked, stooping and ruffling the dog’s thick coat.

WILL THEY REMEMBER ME?

“Oh yes, fur face,” Nora said, kneeling and hugging him. “As long as there are dogs and as long as there are people fit to walk with them, they will all remember you.”

AFTERWORD BY DEAN KOONTZ

If I am fortunate enough to live to such an advanced age that my wardrobe consists entirely of bathrobes, loose jumpsuits, bunny slippers, and adult diapers, and if I am also fortunate enough to be writing novels in that twilight of my life, I know that I can expect to receive mail from readers that says, in essence, “I love your new book, but that story you wrote when you were just a puppy,
Watchers
, is still the best thing you’ve ever done.” I’ll be at a book signing—accompanied by a nurse and by an attendant holding an ear trumpet, hooked to an IV drip feeding me liquefied nachos, wearing a lavishly embroidered jumpsuit more dazzling than anything Elvis ever wore during his Las Vegas period—and as readers greet me and receive their inscribed copies of my latest effort, a significant percentage of them will ask me to write a sequel to
Watchers
. I will smile, promise to think about it, try not to drool, and explain that I don’t believe in writing a sequel to a book unless I can be sure it will be at least the equal of the original.

For years after finishing the story of Einstein—the genetically engineered golden retriever with wildly enhanced intelligence—and his friends, I wondered if I would ever write another book that was as personally satisfying to me as this one had been. When I am writing a novel, I experience bleak spells of deep self-doubt about my work, moments of surging confidence, despair followed by joy—although there are usually more dark moments than bright. With
Watchers
, however, I knew only joy. The desire to write well can never be fulfilled without hard work, and
Watchers
involved as many hours at the keyboard and as much struggle as any book I’ve done; but in this case, all the time and effort was pure pleasure, because I was aware that I had a grip on a unique idea, special material, and a group of characters whose depth and warmth were greater than those in any book I’d written to that time. For days at a stretch, I found myself in what psychologists call a “flow state,” a condition in which one performs far beyond what previously had seemed to be the peak of one’s abilities, with greater fluency and speed and grace; it is similar to what athletes mean when they say they are “in the zone.”

Eventually, I wrote a few books I liked as well as
Watchers
; but to date, as I compose this essay, I can’t honestly say I’ve written one that I like better. I remain confident that day will come. I am an eternal optimist. I believe the greatest scientists of our time will soon discover a cure for gnarly oak fungus and perfect a process to make Brussels sprouts taste like peanut butter. I believe that one day society will become so compassionate that Big Foot will finally be able to come out of hiding and will be welcomed as a neighbor in any community in this land, as long as he showers regularly. And if that day comes, I suspect Mr. Foot will show up at a book signing to personally congratulate me when I do, at last, write a book that is a better performance than
Watchers
, because judging by the fleeting glimpses we’ve had of him over the years, he seems like a shy, kind soul. If I’ve misjudged him, and if he tears my arm off for lunch, I will be dismayed, but I’ll not be less optimistic and will not stop striving—albeit with only five fingers—to write a better book than this tale of Einstein.

In an annotated bibliography in
The Dean Koontz Companion
, a book about my work, the bibliographer made the following observation about
Watchers
: “It embodies all of the major themes with which [Koontz] has been obsessed: the healing power of love and friendship; the struggle to overcome the past and change what we are; the moral superiority of the individual over the workings of the state and large institutions; the wonder of both the natural world and the potential of the human mind; the relationship of mankind to God; transcendence; and how we sustain hope in the face of our awareness that all things die.” Those are, indeed, the fundamental issues in this novel.

For the most part, as I have written the essays for this series of editions, I have tried to keep them light and amusing, because although I take my work seriously, I never take myself seriously. The human species is a parade of fools, after all, and I am often at the front of the parade, twirling a baton. Nevertheless, for a moment here, I will wax serious (and then the car) because
Watchers
is so close to my heart.