Watchers

seagulls. Instead of being calmed by their graceful flight, he grew edgy.
    Garrison Dilworth was intelligent, clever, a born fighter. Now that the link had been made between him and the Cornells, the attorney promised to take the NSA to court to unfreeze Travis’s assets. “You’ve filed no charges against the man,” Dilworth had said. “What toadying judge would grant the power to freeze his accounts? Your manipulation of the legal system to hamper an innocent citizen is unconscionable.”
    Lem could have filed charges against Travis and Nora Cornell for the violation of all sorts of laws designed to preserve the national security, and by doing so he’d have made it impossible for Dilworth to continue lending assistance to the fugitives. But filing charges meant attracting media attention. Then the harebrained story about Cornell’s pet panther—and perhaps the NSA’s entire cover-up—would come down like a paper house in a thunderstorm.
    His only hope was that Dilworth would try to get in touch with the Cornells to tell them that his association with them had been at last uncovered and that contact between them would have to be far more circumspect in the future. Then, with luck, Lem would pinpoint the Cornells through their telephone number. He did not have much hope of everything working out that easily. Dilworth was no fool.
    Looking around at the Santa Barbara yacht harbor, Lem tried to relax, for he knew he needed to be calm and fresh if he was to outthink the old attorney. The hundreds of pleasure boats at the docks, sails furled or packed away, bobbed gently on the rolling tide, and other boats with unfurled sails glided Serenely out toward the open sea, and people in bathing suits were sunning
    on the decks or having early cocktails, and the gulls darted like stitching needles across the blue and white quilt of the sky, and people were fishing from the stone breakwater, and the scene was achingly picturesque, but it was also an image of leisure, great and calculated leisure, with which Lem Johnson could not identify. To Lem, too much leisure was a dangerous distraction from the cold, hard realities of life, from the competitive world, and any leisure activity that lasted longer than a few hours made him nervous and anxious to get back to work. Here was leisure measured in days, in weeks; here, in these expensive and lovingly crafted boats, was leisure measured in month long sailing excursions up and down the coast, so much leisure that it made Lern break into a sweat, made him want to scream.
    He had The Outsider to worry about as well. There had been no sign of it since the day Travis Cornell had shot at it in his rented house, back at the end of August. Three months ago. What had the thing been doing in those three months? Where had it been hiding? Was it still after the dog? Was it dead?
    Maybe, out in the wilds, it had been bitten by a rattlesnake, or maybe it had fallen off a cliff.
    God, Lem thought, let it be dead, please, give me that much of a break. Let it be dead.
    But he knew The Outsider was not dead because that would be too easy. Nothing in life was that easy. The damn thing was out there, stalking the dog. It had probably suppressed the urge to kill people it encountered because it knew each murder drew Lem and his men closer to it, and it did not want to be found before it had killed the dog. When the beast had torn the dog and the Cornells to bloody pieces, then it would once again begin to vent its rage on the population at large, and every death would hang heavily on Lem Johnson’s conscience.
    Meanwhile, the investigation into the murders of the Banodyne scientists was dead in the water. In fact, that second NSA task force had been dismantled. Obviously, the Soviets had hired outsiders for those hits, and there was no way to find out whom they had brought in.
    A deeply tanned guy in white shorts and Top-Siders passed Lem and said, “Beautiful day!”
    “Like hell,” Lem said.
     
     
5
    The day after Thanksgiving, Travis walked into the kitchen to get a glass of milk and saw Einstein having a sneezing fit, but he did not think much of it. Nora, even quicker than Travis to worry about the retriever’s welfare, was also unconcerned. In California, the pollen count peaks in spring and autumn; however, because the climate permits a twelve-month cycle of flowers, no season is pollen-free. Living in the woods, the situation was exacerbated.
    That night, Travis was awakened by