The Sign

ALSO BY RAYMOND KHOURY

The Last Templar

The Sanctuary

This one’s for Suellen

The idea that religion and politics don’t mix was invented by the Devil to keep Christians from running their own country.

—Jerry Falwell

My kingdom is not of this world.

—Jesus Christ (John 18:36)

Prologue

I. Skeleton Coast, Namibia—Two years ago

As the bottom of the ravine rushed up to meet him, the dry, rocky landscape hurtling past Danny Sherwood miraculously slowed right down to a crawl. Not that the extra time was welcome. All it did was allow the realization to play itself out, over and over, in his harrowed mind. The gut-wrenching, agonizing realization that, without a shadow of a doubt, he would be dead in a matter of seconds.

And yet the day had started off with so much promise.

After almost three years, his work—his and the rest of the team’s—was finally done. And, he thought with an inward grin, the rewards would soon be his to enjoy.

It had been a hard slog. The project itself had been daunting enough, from a scientific point of view. The work conditions—the tight deadline, the even tighter security, the virtual exile from family and friends for all those intense and lonely months—were even more of a challenge. But today, as he had looked up at the pure blue sky and breathed in the dry, dusty air of this godforsaken corner of the planet, it all seemed worthwhile.

There would be no IPO, that much had been made clear from the start. Neither Microsoft nor Google would be paying big bucks to acquire the technology. The project, he’d been told, was being developed for the military. Still, a significant on-success bonus had been promised to every member of the team. In his case, it would be enough to provide financial security for him, his parents back home, and for any not-too-overly profligate wife he might end up with along with as many kids as he could possibly envisage having—if he ever got around to it. Which he conceivably would, years from now, after he’d had his fun and enjoyed the spoils of his work. For the moment, though, it wasn’t on his radar. He was only twenty-nine years old.

Yes, the cushy future that was materializing before him was a far cry from the more austere days of his childhood in Worcester, Massachusetts. As he made his way across the parched desert soil, past the mess tent and the landing pad where the chopper was being loaded for their departure, and over to the project director’s tent, he thought back on the experience—from the lab work to the various field tests, culminating with this one, out here in this lost netherworld.

Danny wished he’d be allowed to share the excitement of it all with a few people outside the project. His parents, firstly. He could just imagine how stunned, and proud, they would be. Danny was making good on all the promise, all the lofty expectations they’d heaped on him since, well, birth. His thoughts migrated to his older brother, Matt. He’d get a huge kick out of this. Probably try and get Danny to back him in some dodgy, harebrained, borderline-legal scheme, but what the hell, there’d be plenty to go around. There were also a few big-headed jerks in the business that he would have loved to gloat to about all this, given the chance. But he knew that any disclosure outside the team was strictly—strictly—not allowed. That much had also been made clear from the start. The project was covert. The nation’s defense was at stake. The word treason was mentioned. And so he’d kept his mouth shut, which wasn’t too hard. He was used to it. The highly competitive industry he was in had a deeply ingrained subterranean culture. Hundreds of millions of dollars were often at stake. And when it came down to it, the choice between an eight-figure bank account and a dingy cell in a supermax federal penitentiary was a no-brainer.

He was about to knock on the door of the tent—it was a huge, air-conditioned, semi-rigid-wall tent, with a solid door and glass windows—when something made him pull his hand back.

Raised voices. Not just raised, but angry.

Seriously angry.

He leaned closer to the door.

“You should have told me. It’s my project, goddammit,” a man’s voice erupted. “You should have told me right from the start.”

Danny knew that voice well: Dominic Reece, his mentor, and the project’s lead scientist—its PI, short for principal investigator. A professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, Reece occupied hallowed ground in Danny’s world. He’d taught Danny in several of his formative classes and had kept a close eye on Danny’s work throughout his PhD before inviting him to join his team for the project all those months ago. It was an opportunity—and an honor—Danny couldn’t possibly pass up. And while Danny knew that the professor had a habit of expressing his opinions more forcefully and vociferously than most, he detected something else in his voice now. There was a hurt, an indignation that he hadn’t heard before.

“What would your reaction have been?” The second man’s voice, which wasn’t familiar to Danny, was equally inflamed.

“The same,” Reece replied emphatically.

“Come on, just think about it for a second. Think about what we can do together. What we can achieve.”

Reece’s fury was unabated. “I can’t help you do this. I can’t be a party to it.”

“Dom, please—”

“No.”

“Think about what we can—”

“No,” Reece interrupted. “Forget it. There’s no way.” The words had an unmistakable finality to them.

A leaden quiet skulked behind the door for a few tense moments, then Danny heard the second man say, “I wish you hadn’t said that.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Reece shot back.

There was no reply.

Then Reece’s voice came back, tinged with a sudden unease. “What about the others? You haven’t told any of them, have you?” An assertion, not a question.

“No.”

“When were you planning on letting them in on your revised mission statement?”

“I wasn’t sure. I had to get your answer first. I was hoping you’d help me win them over. Convince them to be part of this.”

“Well that’s not going to happen,” Reece retorted angrily. “As a matter of fact, I’d like to get them all the hell away from here as soon as possible.”

“I can’t let you do that, Dom.”

The words seemed to freeze Reece in his tracks. “What do you mean, you can’t let me do that?” he said defiantly.

A pregnant silence greeted his question. Danny could just visualize Reece processing it.

“So what are you saying? You’re not going to . . .” Reece’s voice trailed off for a beat, then came back, with the added urgency of a sudden, horrible realization. “Jesus. Have you completely lost your mind?”

The outrage in the old man’s tone froze Danny’s spine.

He heard Reece say, “You son of a bitch,” heard thudding footfalls striding toward him, toward the door, heard the second man call out to Reece, “Dom, don’t,” then heard a third voice say, “Don’t do that, Reece,” a voice Danny knew, a harsh voice, the voice of a man who’d creeped Danny out from the moment he’d first met him: Maddox, the project’s shaven-headed, stone-faced head of security, the one with the missing ear and the star-shaped burn around it, the man he knew was nicknamed “The Bullet” by his equally creepy men. Then he heard Reece say, “Go to hell,” and the door swung open, and Reece was suddenly there, standing before Danny, a surprised look in his eyes. Danny heard a distinctive, metallic double-click, a sound he’d heard in a hundred movies but never in real life, the all-too-familiar sound of a gun slide, and the second man, the man who’d been arguing with Reece all along and who Danny now recognized, turned to the Bullet and yelled, “No—”

—just as a muffled, high-pitched cough echoed from behind Reece, then another, before the scientist jerked forward, his face crunched with pain, his legs giving way as he tumbled onto Danny.

Danny faltered back, the suddenness of it all overwhelming his senses as he struggled to keep Reece from falling to the ground. A warm, sticky feeling seeped down his hands as he struggled to support the stricken man, a thick, dark red liquid gushing out of Reece and soaking Danny’s arms and clothes.

He couldn’t hold him. Reece thudded heavily onto the ground, exposing the inside of the tent, the second man standing there, horrified, frozen in shock, next to the Bullet, who had a gun in his hand. Its muzzle was now leveled straight at Danny.

Danny dived to one side as a couple of shots cleaved through the air he’d been occupying, then he just tore off, running away from the tent and the fallen professor as fast as he could.

He was a dozen yards or so away when he dared glance back and saw Maddox emerging from the tent, radio in one hand, the gun in the other, his eyes locking onto the receding Danny like lasers as he bolted after him. With his heart in his throat, Danny sprinted through the temporary campsite—there were a few smaller tents, for the handful of other scientists who, like him, had been recruited for the project. He almost slammed into two of them, top minds from the country’s best universities, who were emerging from one of the tents just as he was nearing it.

“They killed Reece,” he yelled to them, pausing momentarily and waving frantically back toward the main tent. “They killed him.” He looked back and saw Maddox closing in inexorably, seemingly carried forward on winged feet, and took off again, glancing back to see his friends turn to the onrushing man with confused looks, crimson sprouts erupting from their chests as Maddox gunned them down without even slowing.

Danny had ducked sideways, behind the mess tent, out of breath, his leg muscles burning, his mind churning desperately for escape options, when the project’s two ageing Jeeps appeared before him, parked under their makeshift shelter. He flung the first car’s door open, spurred the engine to life, threw the car into gear, and floored the accelerator, storming off in a spray of sand and dust just as Maddox rounded the tent.

Danny kept an eye on the rearview mirror as his Jeep charged across the harsh gravel plain. He clenched the steering wheel through bloodless knuckles, confused thoughts assaulting his senses from all directions, his heart feeling like it was jackhammering its way out of his chest, and did the only thing he could think of, which was to keep the car aimed straight ahead, across the deserted terrain, away from the camp, away from that crazed, insane maniac who’d killed his mentor and his friends, all while fighting for a way around the horrifying truth of his predicament, which was that there was nowhere to run. They were in the middle of nowhere, with no villages or habitations anywhere near, not for hundreds of miles.

That was the whole point of being there.

That fear didn’t have much time to torment him as a loud, throaty buzz soon burst through his frazzled thoughts. He looked back and saw the camp’s chopper coming straight at him, reeling him in effortlessly. He pegged the gas pedal to the floor, hard, sending the Jeep bounding over the small rocks and undulations of the outback, slamming his head against the inside of the car’s canvas roof with each jarring leap, avoiding the occasional boulder and the lonely bunches of dried up quiver trees that dotted the deathly landscape.

The chopper was now on his tail, its engine noise deafening, its rotor wash drowning the Jeep in a swirling sandstorm. Danny strained to see ahead through the tornado of dust, not that it made much difference since there was no road to follow, as the chopper dropped down heavily on the car’s roof, crushing the thin struts holding up the roof and almost tearing Danny’s head off.

He veered left, then right, fishtailing the car as he fought to avoid the flying predator’s claws, sweat seeping down his face, the car careening wildly over rocks and cactus bushes. The chopper was never more than mere feet from the Jeep, connecting with it in thunderous blows, slapping it from side to side like it was toying with a hockey puck. The thought of stopping didn’t occur to Danny: He was running on pure adrenaline, his survival instincts choking him in their grasp, an irrational hope of escape propelling him forward. And just then, in that maelstrom of panic and fear, something shifted, something changed, and he sensed the chopper pulling up slightly, felt a spike of hope that maybe, just maybe, he might make it out of that nightmare alive, and the twisting cloud of sand around his Jeep lifted—

—and that’s when he saw the canyon, cutting across the terrain dead ahead of him with sadistic inevitability, a vast limestone trench snaking across the landscape like something from the Wild West, the one he’d seen in countless cowboy films and had hoped to visit someday but hadn’t yet, the one he now knew, with a savage certainty, that he’d never get a chance to see, as the Jeep flew off the canyon’s edge and into the dry desert air.

II. Wadi Natrun, Egypt

Sitting cross-legged in his usual spot high up on the mountain, with the barren valley and the endless desert spread out below him, the old priest felt a rising unease. During his last few visits to that desolate place, he’d sensed a more ominous ring to the words that were reverberating inside his head. And today, there was something distinctly portentous about them.

And then it came. A question that sent a straightening spasm shooting up his spine.

“Are you ready to serve?”

His eyes fluttered open, blinking against the soft dawn light. He glanced around instinctively, as he’d done many times before, but it was pointless, as it had been each time before. He was alone up there. There was no one around. Not a soul, human or animal. Nothing at all, as far as the eye could see.

Despite the early morning chill, sweat droplets sprouted across his baldpate. He swallowed hard, and concentrated again.

And then it came, again.

The voice, the whisper, coming from inside his own head.

“The time of our Lord will soon be upon you. Are you prepared to serve?”

Hesitantly, with a tremor in his voice, Father Jerome opened his mouth and stammered, “Yes, of course. Whatever you ask of me. I am your servant.”

There was no reply at first. The old priest could feel the individual droplets of sweat sliding down the rugged skin on his forehead, one after the other, skating across the ridge of his brow before dropping onto his cheek. He could almost hear them trickling down, a slow, tortuous progress across his tightened, weather-beaten face.

Then the voice inside his head came back.

“Are you ready to lead your people to salvation? Are you prepared to fight for them? To show them the errors of their ways, even though they may not want to listen?”

“Yes,” Father Jerome cried out, his voice cracking with equal doses of passion and fear. “Yes, of course. But how? When?”

A suffocating silence gripped the mountain, then the voice returned, and simply told him, “Soon.”

Chapter 1

Amundsen Sea , Antarctica—Present day

The static that hissed through the tiny, noise-isolating earpiece disappeared, replaced by the authoritative-yet-soothing voice of the show’s anchorman.

“Talk us through why this is happening, Grace?”

Just then, another wall of ice crumbled behind her and collapsed on itself, crackling like distant thunder. Grace Logan—Gracie, to her friends—turned away from the camera and watched as the entire cliff plummeted into the gray-blue water and disappeared in an angry eruption of spray.

Perfect timing, she thought with a glimmer of satisfaction, a brief respite from the solemnity she’d been feeling since she’d arrived on the ship the day before.

Under normal circumstances, this could well have been a pleasant, sunny, late-December day, December being the height of summer in the Southern Hemisphere.

Today was different.

Today, nature was in turmoil.

It felt as if the very fabric of the earth was being ripped apart. Which it was. The slab of ice that was tearing itself off the rest of the continent was the size of Texas.

Not exactly the kind of Christmas present the planet needed.

The breakup of the ice shelf was now in its third day, and it was only getting started. The cataclysm had kicked up a ghostly mist that thinned out the sun’s warming rays, and the cold was starting to get to Gracie, even with the adrenaline coursing through her. She could see that the rest of her team—Dalton Kwan, the young, breezy Hawaiian cameraman she’d worked with regularly over the past three years, and Howard “Finch” Fincher, their older, über-fastidious and annoyingly stoic veteran producer—were also far from comfortable, but the footage they were airing was well worth it, especially since, as far as she could tell, they were the only news crew around.

She’d been out there for over an hour, standing on the starboard observation deck of the RRS James Clark Ross, and despite the thermals and the gloves, her fingers and toes were shivering. The royal research ship, a beefy three-hundred-foot floating oceanographic and geophysical laboratory operated by the British Antarctic Survey project, was currently less than half a mile off the coast of Western Antarctica, its distinctive deep-red hull the only blip of color in an otherwise bleak palette of whites, blues, and grays. Gracie, Dalton, and Finch had been on the continent for a couple of weeks, shooting footage in the Terra Firma Islands for her big global warming documentary. They had been ready to pack up and head home for Christmas, which was only days away, when the call from the news desk back in D.C. had come in, informing them that the shelf’s breakup had started. The news hadn’t been widely circulated at that point; a contact of the network inside the NSIDC—the National Snow and Ice Data Center, whose scientists used satellite data to track changes in the spread and thickness of the polar ice caps—had given them the heads-up on the sly. With the competition snoozing and the James Clark Ross a day’s sail away from the action and already heading toward it, Gracie and her crew had jumped on the opportunity for an exclusive scoop. The BAS had graciously agreed to have them on board to cover the event, going so far as to arrange for a Royal Navy chopper to ferry them in from the island.

Several of the ship’s onboard scientists were also on deck, watching the walls of ice disintegrate. A couple of them were filming, using handheld video cameras. Most of the crew were also out there, staring in resigned and awed silence.

Gracie turned back to face the camera and pulled her microphone closer. In between the irregular, thunderous collapses of the cliff face, the air reverberated with the distant, muffled retorts of the ice’s tortured movement farther inland.

“This breakup was probably caused by a number of factors, Jack, but the main suspect in this very complicated investigation is just plain old meltwater.”

She heard more hissing as the signal bounced off a couple of satellites and traveled ten thousand miles to the network’s climate-controlled newsroom in D.C. and back, then Roxberry’s voice returned, slightly confused. “Meltwater?”

“That’s right, Jack,” she explained. “Pools of water that build up on the surface of the ice as it melts. This meltwater is heavier than the ice it’s sitting on, so—basic law of gravity—it finds its way down into cracks, and as more and more water pushes through, it acts like a wedge and these cracks grow into rifts that grow into canyons, and if there’s enough meltwater to keep pushing through, the ice shelf eventually just snaps off.”

The physics of it were simple. The highest, coldest, and windiest continent on the planet, an area one and a half times as big as the United States, was almost entirely covered by a dome of ice over two miles thick at its center. Heavy snowfalls blanket it in winter, then spread downward by gravity, flowing like ice-cold lava to the coast. And when this ice floe runs out of land, it keeps going, beyond the edge of land, but it doesn’t sink: It floats, cantilevering over the sea in what we refer to as ice shelves. They can be over a mile thick at the point where they start floating, tapering to a no-less-staggering quarter mile at the water’s edge, where they end in cliffs of a hundred feet or more above the waterline.

There had been a handful of major breakups in the last decade, but none this big. Also, they were rarely captured live on camera. They were usually only detected long after the event, after scrutinizing and comparing satellite images. And even though what Gracie was witnessing was only a localized portion of the overall upheaval—the collapse of towering cliffs of ice at the shelf ’s seaward edge—it was still an astounding and deeply troubling sight. In twelve years in television news, a career she’d dived into straight after getting her BA in political science from Cornell, Gracie had witnessed a lot of tragedies, and this one ranked right up there with the worst of them.

She was watching the planet fall apart—literally. “So the big question then is,” Roxberry asked, “why is it happening now? I mean, as I understand it, this ice shelf has been around since the end of the last ice age, and that was, what, twelve thousand years ago?”

“It’s happening because of us, Jack. Because of the greenhouse gases we’re generating. We’re seeing it at both poles, here, up in the Arctic, in Greenland. And it isn’t just part of a natural cycle. Almost every expert I’ve talked to is now convinced that the melting is accelerating and telling me we’re close to some kind of tipping point, a point of no return—because of man-made global warming.”

Another block of ice disintegrated and crashed into the sea.

“And the concern here is that this ice shelf breaking off and melting will contribute to rising sea levels?” Roxberry asked.

“Well, not directly. Most of this ice shelf is already floating on water, so it doesn’t affect sea levels in itself. Think of it as an ice cube floating in a glass of water. When it melts, it doesn’t raise the level of water in the glass.”

“Doesn’t it?”

“I guess I’m not the only one who’s forgotten their sixth-grade physics,” she grinned.

“But you said there’s an indirect effect on global sea levels.” Roxberry’s voice exuded expertise, as if he were generously allowing her a chance to display her knowledge.

“Well, this area, the West Antarctic ice sheet, is the one place on the planet that scientists have been worried about most, in terms of ice melts. More specifically, they’re worried about the massive glaciers sitting on land, behind this ice shelf. They’re not floating.”

“So if they melted,” Roxberry added, “sea levels would rise.”

“Exactly. Up until now, ice shelves like this one have been keeping back the glaciers, sort of like a cork that’s holding in the contents of a bottle. Once the ice shelf breaks off, the cork’s gone, there’s nothing left to stop the glaciers from sliding into the sea—and if they do, the global sea levels rise. And this melting is happening much faster than forecasts had predicted. Even the data we have from last year is now considered too optimistic. In terms of disaster scenarios due to climate change, Antarctica was considered a sleeping giant. Well, the giant’s now awake. And, by the looks of it, he’s really grumpy.”

Roxberry quipped, “I’m trying real hard to avoid saying this could just be the tip of the iceberg—”

“A wise choice, Jack,” she interjected. She could just picture the smug, self-satisfied grin lighting up his perma-tanned face and groaned inwardly at the thought. “A grateful audience salutes you.”

“But that’s what we’re talking about here, isn’t it?”

“Absolutely. Once these glaciers slide into the sea, it’ll be too late to do anything about it, and . . .”

Her voice suddenly trailed off and dried up, as something distracted her: a ripple of sudden commotion, shrieks and gasps of shock and outstretched arms pointing out at the ice shelf. The words still caught in her throat as she saw Dalton’s head rise from behind the viewfinder of the camera and look beyond her. Gracie spun around, facing away from the camera. And that’s when she saw it.

In the sky. A couple of hundred feet above the collapsing ice shelf.

A bright, shimmering sphere of light.

It just appeared there, and wasn’t moving.

Gracie concentrated her gaze on it and inched over to the railing. She didn’t understand what she was looking at, but whatever it was, she couldn’t take her eyes off it.

The object—no, she wasn’t even sure it was an object. It had a spherical shape, but somehow, it didn’t seem . . . physical. It had an ethereal lightness to it, as if the air itself was glowing. And its brightness wasn’t uniform. It was more subtle, graded, intense at its core then gradually thinning out, as in a close-up of an eye. It had an unstable, fragile quality to it. Like melting ice, or, rather, just water, suspended in midair and lit up, if that were possible, only Gracie knew it wasn’t.

She darted a look at Dalton, who was angling the camera toward the sighting. “Are you getting this?” she blurted.

“Yeah, but,” he shot back, looking over at her, his face scrunched up in sheer confusion, “what the hell is it?”

Chapter 2

Gracie’s eyes were locked onto it. It was just there, suspended in the pallid sky over the edge of the ice shelf. Mesmerizing in an otherworldly, surreal way.

“What is that?” Finch asked. His hands went up to his glasses, fidgeting slightly with their position, as if it would help clarify things.

“I don’t know.” A surge of adrenaline spiked through her as she struggled to process what she was seeing. A quick, almost instinctive trawl through the possibilities of what it could be didn’t get any hits.

This was unlike anything she was even vaguely familiar with.

She glanced across at the knot of scientists crowding the railings. They were talking and gesticulating excitedly, trying to make sense of it too.

“Gracie? What is that behind you?” Roxberry’s voice came booming back through her earpiece.

For a second, she’d forgotten this was going out live. “You’re seeing this?”

A couple of seconds for her question and his reply to bounce off a satellite or two, then he came back. “It’s not perfectly clear, but yeah, we’re getting it—what is it?”

She composed herself and faced the camera squarely, trying to keep any quiver out of her voice. “I don’t know, Jack. It just suddenly appeared. It seems to be some kind of corona, a halo of some sort . . . Hang on.”

She looked around, scanning the sky, checking to see if anything else was around, noting the sun’s veiled position, unconsciously logging her surroundings. Nothing had changed. Nothing else was out there apart from their ship and the . . . what was it? She couldn’t even think of an appropriate name for it. It was still shimmering brightly, half-transparent, its texture reminding her of a gargantuan, deep-sea jellyfish, floating in midair. And it seemed to be rotating, ever so slowly, giving it a real sense of depth.

And, oddly, she thought, a sense of being somehow . . . alive.

She stared at it, resisting all kinds of competing, outlandish thoughts, and focused her mind on getting a handle on its size. As big as a large hot air balloon, she first thought, then adjusted her thinking upward. Bigger. Maybe as big as a fireball in a fireworks display. It was huge. It was hard to judge without a point of reference for scale. She ran a visual comparison to the height of the cliff face below, which she knew to be roughly a hundred and fifty feet tall. It seemed to be around the same size, maybe a hundred and fifty feet in diameter, maybe more.

Dalton looked up from behind the camera and asked, “You think it’s some freaky aurora borealis thing?”

She’d been thinking the same thing, wondering if it was a trick of the light, an illusion caused by a reflection off the ice. In Antarctica, the sun never set during the austral summer. It just circled around at the horizon, a little higher during the “day,” a little lower—almost a sunset—during the “night.” It had taken some getting used to and it played tricks on you, but somehow Gracie didn’t think it explained what she was seeing. The sighting seemed more substantial than that.

“Maybe,” she replied, almost to herself, lost in her thoughts, “but I don’t think it’s the time of year for them . . . and I’m pretty sure they only appear when it’s dark.”

“Gracie?” Roxberry again, waiting for an answer. Reminding her that she was going out live.

To a world audience.

Christ almighty.

She tried to relax and put on a genial smile for the camera, despite the tiny alarms buzzing through her. “This is just . . . It’s pretty amazing, Jack. I’ve never seen anything like it. Maybe someone else on this ship knows what it is, we’ve got quite a few experts on board.”

Dalton lifted his tripod and tracked along with Gracie as she edged over to the scientists and crew members on deck with her, keeping the apparition in frame.

The others were discussing it in excited, heated tones, but something about their body language worried Gracie. If it was a rare, but natural, phenomenon, they’d be reacting differently. Somehow, she got the impression that they weren’t comfortable with what they were seeing. Not just uncomfortable, but . . . rattled.

They don’t know what it is.

One of them, who’d been watching it through binoculars, turned and met her gaze. He was an older man, a paleoclimatologist she’d met on arrival named Jeb Simmons. She read the same confusion, the same unease, on his face that had to be radiating from hers. It only confirmed her feeling.

She was about to speak up when another wave of gasps broke out across the deck. She turned in time to see the shimmering shape suddenly pulse, brightening up to a blazing radiance for a heartbeat before dimming back to its original pearlescent glare.

Gracie glanced at Simmons as Roxberry’s excited voice crackled back. “Did it just flare up?”

She knew the image on the screen he was looking at would be grainy, maybe even a bit jumpy. The live video uplink back to the studio was always compromised, nowhere near as clear as the original, high-definition footage on Dalton’s cameras.

“Jack, I don’t know how clearly it’s coming through to you, but from out here, I can tell you, it’s not like anything I’ve seen before.” She tried hard to hang onto her unflustered expression, but her heart was racing now. This didn’t feel right.

She suddenly remembered something, and turned to Finch and Dalton. “How quickly can you get the bird up?”

Finch nodded and turned to Dalton. “Let’s do it.”

“We’re sending the skycam up for a closer look,” Gracie confirmed into her mike, then turned to Simmons, breathless, and clicked her mike off. “Tell me you know what this is,” she said with a tense smile.

Simmons shook his head. “I wish I could. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“You’ve been here before, right?”

“Oh yes. This is my fourth winter out here.”

“And your specialty’s paleoclimatology, right?”

“I’m flattered,” he smiled, “yes.”

“And yet . . .”

He shook his head again. “I’m stumped.”

Gracie frowned, her mind spinning, and pointed at his binoculars. “May I?”

“Sure.” He handed them over.

She looked through them. It didn’t add anything to what she’d already observed. The shimmer was more pronounced. It appeared hazy, slightly more mirage-like . . . but it was definitely there. It was real.

She gave the binoculars back to Simmons as a few of the others congregated around them. They seemed as bewildered as he was. She darted a look behind them. Finch had the skycam’s arms clicked into place while Dalton was double-checking the second camera’s harness and settings, both of them keeping an eye on the sighting. She noticed the captain coming out on deck. Two crew members hurried to join him. Gracie turned to the others. “None of you have any idea what we’re looking at here?”

“I first thought it might be a flare,” one of the other crew members said, “but it’s too big and too bright, and it’s just there, you know? I mean, it’s not moving, is it?”

The sleek noise of air being whipped around startled them just momentarily. It was a sound they’d heard earlier that day, when Gracie and Dalton had used the small, unmanned remote-controlled helicopter to get some panoramic establishing shots of the ice shelf.

Dalton shouted, “We’ve got liftoff,” over the whirr of the skycam’s rotor blades.

They turned to watch it rise. The Draganflyer X6 was an odd-looking but brilliant piece of engineering. It didn’t look anything like a normal helicopter. It was more like a matte-black alien insect, something you’d expect to see in a Terminator movie. It consisted of a small central pod that was the size of a large mango and housed the electronics, gyroscopes, and battery. Three small collapsible arms extended out from it horizontally, at twelve, four, and eight o’clock positions. At the end of each arm was a whisper-quiet, brushless motor, each one driving two parallel sets of molded rotor blades, one above it and another underneath. Any type of camera could be fitted to the rig under its belly. It was all powered by rechargeable lithium batteries, and the whole thing was made of black carbon fiber that was incredibly strong and yet super-light—the Draganflyer weighed less than five pounds, high-definition video camera with a helicopter-to-ground link included. It gave great aerial shots with minimal fuss, and Dalton never traveled anywhere without it.

Gracie was watching the black contraption rise above the deck and glide away slowly, heading toward the ice shelf, when a female voice yelled out, “Oh my God,” and Gracie saw it too.

The sighting was changing again.

It flared up again, then dimmed down from its outward rim inward, shrinking until it was barely a tenth of its original size. It held there for a couple of tantalizing seconds, then slowly flared back to the way it was. And then its surface seemed to ripple, as if it were morphing into something else.

At first, Gracie wasn’t sure what it was doing, but the second it started changing, something deep within her knotted. The sighting had clearly come alive. It was shapeshifting, twisting into itself, but always within the confines of its original envelope. It was taking on different compositions with alarming speed, all while keeping up its barely noticeable rotation, and they were all perfectly symmetrical, almost as if it were a kaleidoscope, but less angular, more rounded and organic. The patterns it took on melted from one to another continuously at an increasing, dazzling rate, and Gracie wasn’t sure of what they were, but they reminded her of cellular structures. And in that very moment, she felt a deeply unsettling sensation, as if she were staring at the very fabric of life itself.

The small gathering froze, equally dumbstruck. Gracie glanced over at them. A whole range of emotion was etched across their faces, from awe and wonder to confusion—and fear. None of them was debating what it could be, not anymore. They just stood there, rooted to the deck, eyes fixated on it, their only words brief expressions of their amazement. Two of them—an older man and woman—crossed themselves.

Gracie saw Dalton check on the fixed camera, making sure it was still capturing the event. He held the skycam’s remote control unit, which was suspended from a neck strap, at waist level, his fingers expertly controlling both joysticks.

She caught his gaze and moved her mike down. “This is . . . Jesus, Dalton. What’s going on?”

He looked up at the sighting. “I don’t know, but . . . Either Prince has a new concert tour coming up, or someone’s spiked our coffee with some serious shit.” Dalton could usually see the humor in anything, but right now, he sounded different to Gracie. His tone was drained of all light.

She heard a few gasps, and someone said, “It’s slowing down.” All eyes strained in nervous unison as the sighting moved to take on a final shape.

For a second, it felt to Gracie as if her heart had stopped beating. Every pore of her body was crackling with fearful tension as she stared dead ahead at it. Without daring to take her eyes off it, she said, almost to herself, “Jesus.”

The brighter zones of the sphere were being consumed by a spreading darkness, and it kept going until the sphere’s entire surface looked blackened and coarse, as if it had been carved from a lump of coal.

Chapter 3

A ripple of terror spread among the crowd. The apparition had lost all of its splendor. In the blink of an eye, it had gone from being strangely wonderful to sinister and lifeless.

Finch moved close to Gracie, both of them riveted by the ominous sight.

“This isn’t good,” he said.

Gracie didn’t reply. She glanced down at the skycam’s control box. The image on its small, five-inch LCD monitor was very clear, despite the light mist. Dalton had guided it in a wide, slight arc, in order for it not to come between them and the sighting. With the Draganflyer now more than halfway to the shelf, Gracie was able to get more of a sense of scale. The apparition dwarfed the approaching flying camera, like an elephant looming over an ant. It held the dark, lifeless skin it had assumed for a minute or so, bearing down on them with what seemed like a malevolent intent, then it flared up again, burning brightly, only this time, it took on a more distinct shape, defined by the light which was radiating with different strengths. It now looked unquestionably like a three-dimensional sphere, and at its core was a bright ball of light. Around it were four equal rings, running along the sphere’s outer face, evenly spaced. As they weren’t facing the ship head-on but were at a slight angle, they appeared like elongated ovals. The outer shell itself was brightly illuminated too, and rays of light were projecting outward from the core, between the rings, petering out slightly beyond the edge of the sphere. The whole display was hypnotic, especially as it blazed away against the dull, gray backdrop.

The sight was beyond breathtaking. It electrified the crowd and brought some of them to tears. The couple who had crossed themselves were holding each other close. Gracie could see their lips trembling in silent prayer. Her own body stiffened, and her legs went numb. She felt a confusing surge of euphoria and fear, which seemed echoed in the faces around her.

“Whoa.” Dalton recoiled.

Finch was also motionless, gaping at it. “Tell me I’m not really seeing this,” Finch said. “Tell me it’s not really there.”

“It is,” Gracie confirmed as she just stood there, enthralled. “It absolutely is.”

She held the mike up and struggled for words as everything around her faded to oblivion, a complete sensorial disconnect from her surroundings, her every thought consumed by the apparition. It was beyond understanding, beyond definition. After a moment, she emerged momentarily from her trance, and faced the camera again.

“I hope you’re still getting this, Jack, ’cause everyone here is just stunned by this . . . I can’t even begin to describe the sensation out here right now.” Her eyes dropped away for a passing glance at Dalton’s monitor. He was using the joysticks to zoom in on the apparition, which filled the screen with its radiance before he pulled back out.

She looked out at it again. The skycam was closing in on it. “How far from it do you think it is?” she asked Dalton.

“A hundred yards. Maybe less.” His voice had a slight quiver in it as his eyes darted from the monitor to the apparition and back.

Gracie couldn’t take her eyes off of it. “It’s just magnificent, isn’t it?”

“It’s a sign,” someone said. It was the woman Gracie had noticed crossing herself. Gracie looked over, and Dalton panned over to her.

“A sign? Of what?” another answered.

“I don’t know, but . . . she’s right. Look at it. It’s a sign of . . . something.” It was the older man who was with her. Gracie remembered being introduced to them on her arrival. He was an American named Greg Musgrave, a glaciologist if she remembered correctly. The woman was his wife.

Musgrave turned to Gracie, waving toward the skycam, jabbing a nervous finger at it. “Don’t send that”—he stammered, struggling with what to call the Draganflyer—“thing any farther. Stop it before it gets too close.”

“Why?” Dalton sounded incredulous.

Musgrave raised his voice. “Pull it back. We don’t know what it is.”

Dalton didn’t take his eyes off his controls. “Exactly,” he shot back, “it can help us figure out what the hell it is.”

Gracie looked out. The skycam was very close to the apparition. She glanced at Finch, then at Dalton, who seemed determined to see it through.

“I’m telling you, pull it back,” Musgrave said, moving toward Dalton now, reaching out to grab the remote control console. Dalton’s fingers jerked against the joysticks, making the Draganflyer yaw and pitch wildly, its gyroscopes kicking in to keep it airborne.

“Hey,” Gracie yelled at him, just as Finch and the captain stepped in to restrain Musgrave.

“Grace, what the hell’s going on?” Roxberry again, in her ear.

“Hang on, Jack,” she interjected quickly.

“Calm down,” the captain snapped at Musgrave. “He’s gonna pull it back before it reaches it,” then, to Dalton, pointedly, “aren’t you?”

“Absolutely,” Dalton replied flatly. “You know how much that thing cost me?” He checked out the monitor, as did Gracie. The apparition filled the screen. It was grainy, but there was a subtle, undulating shimmer within the image that really gave the impression that it was bubbling with life. Gracie caught the worry in Dalton’s eyes, then looked over at the skycam. The tiny black dot was almost on it.

“Maybe it’s close enough,” she told Dalton, under her breath.

Dalton frowned with concentration. “A little closer.”

“You shouldn’t be messing with it before we know what we’re dealing with,” Musgrave blurted out sharply.

Dalton ignored him and kept the joystick pressed forward. The skycam glided on, inching its way nearer to the blazing apparition.

“Dalton,” Finch said, low and discreet. It was getting uncomfortably close for him.

“I hear you,” he replied. “Just a little bit more.”

Gracie’s pulse quickened, thumping away in her ears as the skycam sailed ever closer to the apparition. It seemed tantalizingly close now, perhaps fifty feet or less—it was hard to judge the relative distance—when the sign suddenly dimmed right down and disappeared.

The crowd heaved a collective gasp.

“You see that? I told you,” Musgrave rasped.

“You kidding me?” Dalton fired back angrily. “What, you think I scared it?”

“We don’t know. But it was there for a reason, and now it’s gone.” The scientist put an arm around his wife, and they both turned and stared out into the distance, as if willing it to reappear, dismay clouding their faces.

“Get real, man,” Dalton shrugged, turning away.

Over the shelf, the Draganflyer continued on its trajectory unbothered. Nothing showed on its monitor as it buzzed through the air that the apparition had occupied. Dalton slid a glance at Gracie. He looked thoroughly spooked. She’d never seen him react that way, not to anything, and they’d been through some pretty gut-wrenching times together.

Gracie was just as shaken. She peered out into the grim sky.

There was no trace of the sign.

It was as if it had never happened.

And then, all of a sudden, Gracie felt the world around her darken, felt a momentous weight above her, and looked up to see the apparition right above her, hovering over the ship itself, a massive ball of shimmering light squatting above them, dwarfing the vessel. She flinched as the crowd gasped and recoiled in horror and Dalton pounced on the main camera to try and get it on film. Gracie just stood there, staring up at it in complete bewilderment, her knees trembling, her feet riveted to the wooden planks of the ship’s deck, fear and wonderment battling it out inside her, every hair on her body standing rigid for a brief moment that felt like an eternity—

—and then all of a sudden, the sign just faded out again, vanishing just as startlingly and as inexplicably as it had appeared.

Chapter 4

Bir Hooker, Egypt

Yusuf Zacharia puffed ruminatively on his sheesha as he watched his opponent pull his hand back from the weathered backgammon board. Nodding wearily to himself, the wiry old taxi driver palmed the dice. Anything less than a double-six meant he would lose the game. He didn’t have high hopes for the toss. The dice weren’t doing him any favors tonight.

He shook the small ivory cubes vigorously before flinging them across the board, and watched them skitter across its elaborately inlaid surface before they settled into a six and a one. He frowned, turning the fissures that lined his grizzled, leathery face into canyons, and rubbed his mostly bald pate, cursing his luck. To add to his misery, he became aware of a bitter, fruity bite gnawing at the back of his throat. The coals of his waterpipe had cooled down. He’d been so taken by the game and by his miserable run of rolls that he hadn’t noticed. Fresh, red-hot replacements would rekindle the soothing, honey-mint taste that helped lull him into a tranquil sleep every night, but he sensed he might have to forgo that little luxury tonight. It was late.

He glanced at his watch. It was time to head home. The other customers of the small café—two young tourists, an American couple, he thought, judging by their familiar guidebooks and newspapers—were also getting up to leave. Baseeta, he shrugged to himself. Never mind. There was always tomorrow. He’d be back for a fresh sheesha and another game, God willing.

He was pushing himself to his feet when something caught his eye, a fleeting image on the TV set that loomed down from a rickety old shelf behind the counter. It was way past the ever-popular soaps’ bedtime. At this hour, here, at the sleepy edge of the Egyptian desert, in the small village of Bir Hooker—haplessly misnamed after a British manager of the Egyptian Salt and Soda Company—and across the entire troubled region, for that matter, TVs would inevitably be tuned to some news program, feeding the endless debates and laments about the sorry state of the Arab world. Mahmood, the café’s jovial owner, tended to favor Al Arabiya over Al Jazeera until, aiming to put forward a more tourist-friendly face, he invested in a satellite dish with a pirated decoder box. Ever since, the screen was locked onto an American news network. Mahmood thought the foreign infusion gave his café more class; Yusuf, on the other hand, didn’t particularly care for the Americans’ never-ending coverage of the recent presidential election there, even though it had been, unusually, keenly watched across the region, a region whose fortunes seemed more and more entwined with the vagaries of that distant country’s leadership. But Yusuf’s resistance to the channel was counterweighed by an unspoken appreciation for its occasional coverage of pouting Hollywood starlets and scantily clad catwalk models.

Right now, however, his attention was consumed by something entirely different. The screen showed a woman in heavy winter gear reporting from what seemed like one of the poles. In the image behind her, something shone in the sky. Something bizarre and otherworldly, the likes of which he’d never seen before. It was just floating there, blazing over a collapsing cliff of ice, and had—oddly, though it was unmistakable—the distinct, manifest shape of a symbol.

A sign.

The others also took note of the events on the screen and drew in closer to the counter, excitedly urging Mahmood to turn the sound up. The scene it showed was surreal, unimaginable, only that wasn’t what disturbed Yusuf most. What really troubled him was that he’d seen that sign before.

His face pinched together with disbelief as he stared at the screen.

It can’t be.

He inched forward for a closer look. His mouth dropped by an inch, his skin tingled with trepidation. The camera cut to another angle, and this time, the illuminated symbol took over the whole screen.

It was the same sign.

There was no doubt in his mind.

Unconsciously, his hand rose discreetly to his forehead, and he quietly crossed himself.

His friends noticed his sudden pallor, but he ignored their questions and, without offering an explanation or a farewell, rushed out of the café. He clambered into his trusted old Toyota Previa and churned its engine to life. The people carrier kicked up a small cloud as it fishtailed onto the dusty, unlit road and disappeared into the night, Yusuf riding the pedal hard, rushing back to the monastery as quickly as he could, muttering the same phrase to himself, over and over and over.

It can’t be.

Chapter 5

Cambridge , Massachusetts

The crowd caught Vince Bellinger’s eye as he ambled across the mall. They were massed outside the Best Buy, bubbling noisily with excitement, seemingly about something in the shop’s huge window display. Bellinger was more than familiar with the window—it usually housed the latest plasmas and LCDs, including the mammoth sixty-five-incher he’d been fantasizing about for Christmas this year. Covetable, to be sure, but nothing that merited this much attention. Unless it wasn’t the screens themselves, but rather what was on them, that had drawn the crowd.

Against the backdrop of piped-in seasonal Muzak and gaudy tinsel decorations, some people were talking animatedly on their cell phones, others waving friends over to join them. Despite being heavily laden with a pile of dry cleaning and his gym bag, Bellinger veered toward the store, wondering what all the fuss was about. Instinctively, he flinched at the possibility of another horror, another 9/11-like catastrophe, images of that terrible day still seared into his mind—although, he quickly thought, today’s crowd didn’t have that vibe to it. They weren’t horrified. They seemed enthralled.

He got as close as he could and peered over the heads and shoulders of the gathered people. As per usual, the screens were all tuned to the same channel, in this case a news network. The image they showed drew his eye immediately, and he didn’t quite understand what he was looking at—a spherical light, hovering over what seemed like one of the polar regions, confirmed by the banner underneath. He was watching it with piqued curiosity, in a detached trance, catching snippets of the animated comments bouncing around him, when his cell phone trilled. He groaned and juggled his bag and laundry around to fish it out of his pocket. Groaned doubly when he saw who was calling.

“Dude, where are you? I just tried your landline.” Csaba—pronounced Tchaba, nicknamed “Jabba,” for not-too-subtle reasons—sounded overly excited. Which wasn’t unusual. The big guy had a hearty appetite for life—and pretty much everything else.

“I’m at the mall,” Bellinger replied, still angling for a clearer view of the screens.

“Go home and put the news on, quick. You’re not gonna believe this.”

Jabba, excited about something on TV. Not exactly breaking news. Although this time—just this once, Bellinger thought—his exuberance seemed justified.

A brilliant chemical engineer of Hungarian extraction who worked with Bellinger at the Rowland Materials Research Laboratory, Csaba Komlosy had a passion for all things televisual. Well-made, high-concept shows were normally his turf, the kind of show where a gutsy and intense government agent repeatedly managed to save the nation from mass destruction or where a gutsy and intense architect repeatedly managed to break out of the most escape-proof prisons. Lately, though, Csaba had veered into seedier territory. He’d embraced the netherworld of unscripted television—reality TV, so-called despite the fact that it had little to do with reality, or with being unscripted, for that matter—and, much to Bellinger’s chagrin, he really liked to share the more singularly sublime moments of his viewing.

In this case, though, Bellinger was ready to give him a free pass. Still, he couldn’t resist a little dig. “Since when do you watch the news?”

“Would you stop with the inquisition and put the damn thing on,” Jabba protested.

“I’m looking at it right now. I’m at the mall, outside Best Buy.” Bellinger’s voice trailed off as some heads in front of him shifted and the image on the screen snared his attention again. He caught sight of a banner at the bottom of screen, which read, “Unexplained phenomenon over Antarctica.” There was also a small “Live” box in the upper right corner. He just stood there, transfixed, his eyes curiously processing what they were seeing. He recognized the reporter. He’d caught some of her specials over the years and remembered her reports from Thailand after the tsunami a few years back, when he’d first noticed her. Shallow as it sounded, the relative hotness of a TV newscaster was directly proportional to how much attention guys paid to the screen—especially if the news in question didn’t concern armed conflict, a sports result, or a celebrity meltdown. For most guys, Grace Logan—with the unforgiving green eyes, the tiny, mischievous mole poised just above the edge of her lips, the unsettlingly breathy yet earnest voice, the blond curls that always seemed to have a slightly unkempt tousle to them, and the Vargas Girl body that owed its curves to burgers and milkshakes, not silicone—ticked the hot box with ease.

This time, though, Bellinger’s eyes weren’t on her.

The camera zoomed in on the phenomenon again, sending an audible shiver through the crowd.

“Dude, it’s unreal,” Jabba exclaimed. “I can’t take my eyes off the screen.”

Bellinger couldn’t make sense of it. “Is this a joke?”

“Not according to them.”

“Where is this exactly?”

“West Antarctic ice sheet. They’re on some research ship off the coast. At first, I thought it’s got to be a stunt for a new movie, maybe Cameron or Emmerich or even Shyamalan, but none of them have a live project that fits.”

Jabba—film geek extraordinaire—would know.

“How long has it been up?” Bellinger asked.

“About ten minutes. It came on out of the blue while la Logan was yapping about the breakup of the ice shelf. First it was like this ball of light, then it morphed to a dark sphere—like that black planet in The Fifth Element, remember? Totally creeped me out.”

“Then it turned into this?”

“Yep.” The crunching sound coming through the receiver spurred Bellinger’s mind to picture the likely setting for his friend’s call: sunken deep in his couch, a bottle of Samuel Adams in one hand—not his first, Bellinger guessed, since they’d both left the lab over an hour ago—and a half-empty pack of sizzlin’ picante chips in the other. Which was why he was on speakerphone.

Bellinger’s brow wrinkled with concentration as he rubbed his baldpate. He’d never seen anything like it. More people were gathering around now, crowding around him, jostling for position.

Jabba crunched noisily into another chip, then asked, “So what do you think?”

“I don’t know,” he answered, as if in a daze. The crowd oohed as an airborne camera gave a closer look at the unexplained apparition. “How are they doing this?” he asked, cupping the phone’s mike area to cut out the noise around him. As a technology researcher and a scientist, his mind was instinctively skeptical and was immediately trying to figure out ways this could be done.

Jabba was obviously thinking along the same lines. “Must be some kind of laser effect. Remember those floating beads of light those guys were working on at Keio—”

“Laser-induced plasma emissions?” Bellinger interjected. They’d both seen press coverage of the recent invention at the Japanese university, where focused bursts from a laser projector heated up the air at specific points above the bulky device, causing tiny bursts of plasma emissions that “drew” small, three-dimensional shapes of white light in midair.

“Yeah, remember? The guy with the weird goggles and the white gloves—”

“No way,” Bellinger countered. “You’d need a generator the size of an aircraft carrier sitting right under it for something this big. Plus it wouldn’t explain the sustained brilliance or the way it’s so clearly defined.”

“All right, forget that. What about other kinds of projections? Spectral imagery?”

Bellinger stared closely at the screen. “You know something I don’t? ’Cause except for the droid in—which one’s the white one that looks like a fire hydrant?”

“R2-D2.” The roll of the eyes came through in his mocking tone as clearly as if they’d been using high-def webcams.

“Except for R2-D2, I don’t think 3-D projectors actually exist.”

Which was true. Something that could achieve a free-floating, un-contained, three-dimensional moving image, like in Princess Leia’s seminal “Help us, Obi-Wan” moment—of any size, let alone something this big—still eluded the best brains in the business.

“Besides, you’re forgetting one pesky little detail,” Bellinger added, feeling slightly more uncomfortable now.

“I know, dude. It’s daylight.” Jabba sounded spooked at having that realization reaffirmed.

“Not exactly projector-friendly, is it?”

“Nope.”

Bellinger felt uncomfortable having that discussion out there, surrounded by people, his gym bag and laundry inches from getting trampled. But he just couldn’t tear himself away.

“Okay, so we can forget about lasers and projectors,” he told Jabba. “I mean, look at it. It’s not contained within any kind of framework, it’s not boxed in, there’s no dark backdrop behind it, no glass panes around it. It’s just there, free-floating. In daylight.”

“Unless there are a couple of monster mirrors on either side of it they’re not showing us,” Jabba mused. “Hey, maybe it’s generated from space.”

“Nice idea, but how exactly?”

Jabba bit noisily into another chip. “I don’t know, dude. I mean, this thing doesn’t compute, does it?”

“No. Hang on,” Bellinger told him, as he jammed the phone between his ear and his shoulder, grabbed his belongings, and inched back a few steps, out of the ever-growing crowd.

He and Jabba bounced around several other ideas, throwing everything they could think of at it, trying to pin some sensible, plausible explanation on it, but nothing stuck. Bellinger’s excitement, though, soon gave way to a sense of unease. Something else was bothering him. An uncomfortable feeling that something buried deep within him was clawing for attention.

Suddenly, the fixed camera got jarred as an altercation took place on the ship’s deck. Jabba lapped it up, as did the crowd at the mall, whooping and joking as the people on the ship filming the sighting scuffled, then the aerial camera came back. It closed in on the apparition, which then faded away, only to then suddenly reappear directly over the ship. The crowd around Bellinger shrieked and recoiled in shock as the shaky upward shot from the handheld camera on deck sent a shock wave crackling through them.

“Son of a bitch,” Jabba blurted. “Is it turning?”

Bellinger focused on the apparition, now aware of a growing lump in his throat. “It’s spherical,” he marveled. “It’s not some kind of projection. It’s actually physical, isn’t it?”

On the screen, Grace Logan was having trouble keeping calm, clearly rattled by the apparition that was just hovering there, directly over the ship. The crowd in the mall was echoing her reaction, visibly stiffening and going quiet.

Jabba’s crunching had also stopped. “I think you’re right. But how . . . ? It’s not an object, and yet . . . It’s almost like the air itself is burning up, but . . . that’s not possible, is it? I mean, you can’t light air up, can you?”

Bellinger felt a sudden rush of blood to his temples. Something clicked. It just rushed in on him, unannounced, out of nowhere. Long-forgotten, dormant neurons buried deep within his brain had somehow managed to reach out and find each other and make a connection.

An unhappy one.

Oh, shit.

He went silent, his mind racing to process that link and take it to its natural conclusion, lost in the dread of the possibility just as the sign faded from view and the sky above the ship went back to normal.

“Dude, you there?”

Bellinger heard his voice go distant, as if he were on the outside watching himself answer. “Yeah.”

“What? What’re you thinking?”

He felt his skin crawl. “I’ve got to go. I’ll call you when I get home. Let me know if you come up with anything.”

“Dude, hang on, don’t just—”

Bellinger hung up.

He stood there, his feet nailed to the cool tiled floor, the commotion around him fading as he turned his thoughts inward. Only minutes earlier, picking up the colorful linen shirts, all folded up and ready for packing, had conjured up a pleasant, warm feeling inside him. With the Christmas holiday days away, the sea, the sun, and the wide blue skies of the Dominican Republic beckoned—his annual pilgrimage, a welcome respite from the claustrophobic, windowless life he led at the research lab. Any feeling of warmth was now gone. A cold, crippling unease had taken its place and, Bellinger knew, wasn’t about to let go.

He just stood there for a few long minutes, contemplating the disturbing—and, he hoped, surely unlikely—idea that had clawed its way out from the darkest recesses of his mind.

No way, he thought. Be serious.

But he couldn’t shake the thought.

He stayed there as the TVs replayed the whole thing, lost in his thoughts as the crowd dissipated. He finally tore himself away from the screens, gathered his things, and drove home in silence.

No way.

He dumped his bags in his front hallway, decided to try and let it go and move onto other things, and headed for his fridge. He got himself a beer and went back to the hall and rifled through his mail, but it was no use.

He couldn’t shake it away.

He switched on his TV. The images it threw back at him were spine-tingling. Snarled traffic in Times Square, where a crowd of people had just frozen in place, mesmerized by the images of the sighting on the Sony JumboTron; people in bars and stadiums, on their feet, their eyes peeled on the screens; and similar chaotic images from around the world. He moved to his desk and fired up his laptop and spent a couple of hours scouring Internet chat rooms while flicking around various news reports, trying to get a clearer picture of what was going on, hoping to come across some ammo to dismiss his theory.

It was insane, outlandish . . . but it fit.

It just fit.

Which brought up an even bigger problem.

What to do about it.

His primal instinct told him to forget about it and leave it alone. Well alone. If what he was imagining was really happening, then he’d be far better off expunging any trace of the thought from his mind and never mentioning it to anyone. Which was the sensible thing to do, the rational thing to do, and Bellinger prided himself, above any other qualities he might have, on his rationality. But there was something else.

A friend had died. Not just a friend.

His best friend.

And that was something that his rationality was finding hard to ignore.

Visions of the tragic accident in the Skeleton Coast sparked in his mind’s eye, horrific images his imagination had conjured up long ago, after he’d been told about how Danny Sherwood had died.

He couldn’t ignore it.

He had to find out. Make sure. Get the whole picture.

He got himself another beer and sat alone in the dark living room, staring into nothing, his mind alternating between what he’d just seen and what had happened two years ago. A few bottles later, he retrieved his phone and scrolled down his contacts list until he found the entry he was looking for. It was a number he’d been given a couple of years ago, one he hadn’t called for almost that long.

He hesitated, then hit the call button.

He heard it ring through three, four times, then a man picked up.

“Who’s this?” The man’s tone had a detached, no-nonsense ring to it.

The sound of Matt Sherwood’s voice brought Bellinger a modicum of solace. A palpable connection, however fleeting, to his long-dead friend.

“It’s Vince. Vince Bellinger,” he answered, a slight hesitation in his voice. He paused for a beat, then added, “Where are you, Matt?”

“At my place. Why?”

“I need to see you, man,” Bellinger told him. “Like, now.”

Chapter 6

Boston, Massachusetts

No one in the crowded arena could tear their eyes away from the huge video scoreboards. Not the fans. Not the players. And certainly not anyone in Larry Rydell’s perfectly positioned luxury suite at the Garden.

His guests, the design team working on the groundbreaking electric car he hoped to launch within a couple of years, had been enjoying the treat. They’d spent the whole day in the project’s nerve center over in Waltham, bringing him up to speed on the car’s status, going over the problems they’d managed to solve and the new ones they’d unearthed. As with everything Rydell did, the project had world-beating ambitions. His friend Elon Musk—another Internet sensation, courtesy of a little online business he’d cofounded by the name of PayPal—had already launched his electric car, the Tesla, but that was a sports car. Rydell was after a different kind of driver: the legions driving around in Camrys, Impalas, and Accords. And so he’d recruited the best and the brightest designers and engineers, given them everything they needed to make it happen, and let them do their thing. It was just one of several pet projects he had running at the same time. He had teams working on more efficient wind farms, solar cells, and better wiring to ferry the resulting power around. Renewable energy and clean power were going to be the next great industrial revolution, and Larry Rydell was nothing if not visionary.

The only resource his projects fought over was his own time. Money certainly wasn’t an issue, even with the recent turmoil in the markets. He was well aware of the fact that he had more of it than he’d ever need. Every computer and cell phone user on the planet had contributed his or her share to his fortune, and the stratospheric share price his company had enjoyed had done the rest. And although Rydell enjoyed the good life, he’d found better things to do with his money than build himself five-hundred-foot yachts.

They’d had a long, productive day, overcoming a big hurdle they’d been trying to solve for weeks, and so he’d decided to reward the team by sending them off on their end-of-year break in style. He’d treated them to a great dinner, all the drink they could handle, and the best seats in the house. They’d just watched Paul Pierce slip past Kobe Bryant and slam home a two-handed dunk, and heard the first-period buzzer go, when the suspended cube of screens had flicked over to a live news feed and all noise had drained out of the arena.

As he stood there, mesmerized by the surreal display before him, he felt his BlackBerry vibrate in his pocket. The alert was one of three that never went comatose, even when his privacy settings were on, which was most of the time. One was entrusted to Mona, his PA—or, more accurately, the senior PA among the four who controlled the drawbridge to his office. Another was allocated to his ex-wife, Ashley, although she usually found it easier to call Mona and get him to call her back. The third, the one that was now clamoring for his attention, told him his nineteen-year-old daughter Rebecca was calling.

Something she rarely did when she was on a distant beach, which was currently—and often—the case. The family villa in Mexico, he thought, though he wasn’t sure. It could have been the chalet in Vail or the yacht in Antigua. Between her appetite for partying and his scant appetite for anything that didn’t concern the projects he lived and breathed, that tidbit of information had some pretty large cracks to slip through.

He pressed the phone to his ear without taking his eyes off the screen.

“Dad, are you watching this?”

“Yeah,” he replied, somewhat dazed. “We’re all standing here at the Garden watching it like zombies.”

“Same here,” his daughter laughed, somewhat nervously. “We were about to go out when a friend of mine in L.A. called to tell us about it.”

“Where are you anyway?”

“Mexico, Dad,” she half-groaned, with an undisguised you-should-know-this tone.

Just then, the initial shock veered to cheers and claps as the already charged fans let their emotions rip. The noise reverberated through the arena. “Wow,” Rebecca echoed, “it sounds wild.”

“It is,” he said with a curious smile. “How long have they been showing it?”

“I’m not sure, we just switched it on a few minutes ago.” She paused for a moment, then said, “Dad . . . what do you think it is?”

And, in what was probably a first for a man who was rightly feted around the world as nothing less than a genius, Larry Rydell had no answer for his daughter. At least, not one that he could share with her.

Not now.

Not ever.

Chapter 7

Washington, D.C .

A light rain peppered the nation’s capital as a black, chauffeur-driven Lexus slipped out of the underground garage and slunk onto Connecticut Avenue and into the sparse late-evening traffic. In the cosseted comfort of its heated backseat, Keenan Drucker stared out in silence, lost in a streaming light show of passing cars, contemplating the events of the momentous day.

The phone calls had begun about an hour ago, and in the days to come, there would be plenty more, of that he was certain.

They were only getting started.

He shut his eyes and leaned back against the richly padded headrest. His mind chewed over his plan, once again dissecting every layer of it, looking for the fatal flaw that he might have somehow missed. As with every previous run-through, he couldn’t find anything to worry about. There were a lot of unknowns, of course—there had to be, by definition. But that didn’t trouble him. Oversights and miscalculations—now those were different. Those he wouldn’t tolerate. A lot of effort had gone into making sure there wouldn’t be any. But unknowns were, well, unknowable. A lifetime of making questionable deals in smoke-filled rooms had taught him that unknowns weren’t worth worrying about until they materialized. If and when they did, his thoroughness, his focus, and his level of commitment would ensure that, if it pleased the Lord—he smiled inwardly at his little joke—they wouldn’t prove too hard to deal with.

His BlackBerry nudged him out of his reverie. The ring tag told him who it was, and a quick glance at the screen before picking up the call confirmed it.

The Bullet got straight to the point, as was his norm. They’d already spoken twice that evening.

“I got a call from our friend at Meade.”

“And?”

“He got a hit. A phone call, between two of the peripherals on the watch list.”

Drucker mulled the news for a beat. The Bullet, aka Brad Maddox, had initially suggested using one of his contacts inside the National Security Agency to—quietly—monitor for unexpected trouble. Although Drucker had thought the risk of exposure outweighed the unlikely benefits, it now looked like Maddox had made the right call. Which was why Maddox was in charge of the project’s security.

“You’ve heard the recording?” Drucker asked.

“Yes.”

“Is it anything to worry about?”

“I think it might be. The call itself was too brief to read either way, but its timing raises some concerns.”

Drucker winced. “Who are the peripherals?”

“One of them’s a techie, an engineer here in Boston. Vince Bellinger. He was Danny Sherwood’s college roommate. They were tight. Best buddies. The other’s Sherwood’s brother, Matt.”

A flash of concern flitted across Drucker’s eyes. “And there’s no history there?”

“Last communication we have between them goes back almost two years.”

Drucker thought about it for a moment. Two years ago, they had a natural reason to chat. The timing of this new call, though, was indeed troublesome. “I take it you’ve got it under control.”

Maddox couldn’t have sounded more detached if he’d been sedated. “Just bringing you up to speed.”

“Good. Let’s hope it’s a coincidence.”

“Not something I believe in,” Maddox affirmed.

“Me neither, sadly,” Drucker replied. Then, almost as an afterthought, he asked, “And the girl?”

“Just waiting to be plucked.”

“You’re going to need to handle that one with even more discretion,” Drucker cautioned. “She’s key.”

“She won’t be a problem,” the Bullet assured him. “My boys are ready. Just say the word.”

“It’s imminent. Keep me posted on the roommate,” Drucker added before hanging up.

He stared at his phone for a moment, then shrugged and tucked it back into his suit’s inside breast pocket. He looked out at the streaks of red and white light gliding past his wet window, and played out the next moves in his mind.

It was a good start, no question.

But the hardest part was yet to come.

Chapter 8

Amundsen Sea, Antarctica

Gracie watched the screen fade to a fuzzy gray and shook her head. The adrenaline rush was petering out, and she now felt exhausted, battered by a hurricane of exuberance, confusion, and unease. Yet another cup of the ship’s surprisingly decent coffee beckoned.

“Let’s see it again,” one of the scientists told Dalton.

Dalton glanced over at Gracie, who shrugged, got up, and headed over to the corner bar for her caffeine fix. Her throat felt dry and hoarse, and she’d lost all sense of time. The continuous, seemingly never-ending daylight didn’t help.

They’d stayed out on deck, scanning the skies, for about an hour after the apparition had vanished before heading inside for some warmth. Some crew members stayed out on watch, in case it reappeared, while Gracie and the others had crowded into the officers’ and scientists’ lounge—which sounded a lot more grand than it was—and watched the footage from both of Dalton’s cameras on a big plasma screen. Several viewings and countless cups of coffee later, they still weren’t anywhere remotely close to explaining what they’d witnessed.

The comfort zone of ascribing it to some spectacular weather phenomenon was quickly dispelled. The obvious candidates—aurora australis southern lights, fogbows, and green flashes—didn’t fit the bill. One possibility that did generate a brief debate was something called “diamond dust.” Gracie had never heard of it. Simmons had explained that it was a phenomenon that involved ice crystals that formed from the condensation of atmospheric water vapor. When these crystals caught the sunlight at a particular angle as they drifted down to earth, they generated a brilliant, sparkling effect, sometimes in the form of a halo. Which might have explained the first part of the apparition, at a stretch, and a pretty big one at that. But it didn’t even begin to explain the dazzling symbol that it had turned into.

Looking around the lounge, Gracie could see that the discussion was purely academic. Despite the heated debates and arguments, they were just grasping at straws, skirting the obvious. From the strained faces around her, from the wavering voices and the nervy eyes, it was clear that not one of those assembled really believed that this was a natural weather phenomenon. And this wasn’t a simple group of layfolk prone to flights of imagination. They were all highly qualified scientists, experts in their fields, and more than familiar with the unique conditions out there. And they’d all been seriously shaken up by what they’d seen. All of which meant one of two things. If it wasn’t natural, it was either man-made—or supernatural.

The first was easier to deal with.

Dalton frowned as he turned away from the footage. “Well if it isn’t a freak of nature, then maybe it’s some goofballs messing with us.”

“You think it could be a prank?” Gracie asked.

“Well, yeah. Remember those UFO sightings in New York a few years back?” Dalton continued. “They had half the city convinced. Turns out it was a bunch of guys flying some ultralights in formation.”

“On the other hand, no one’s been able to explain the lights over Phoenix back in 1997,” another scientist, a geophysicist with a thick goatee by the name of Theo Dinnick, countered. The sighting in question, a major event witnessed by hundreds of independent and highly credible people, remained unexplained to this day.

“You’re forgetting this was in broad daylight,” Gracie remarked.

Simmons, the paleoclimatologist with the binoculars, nodded dubiously. “If it’s a prank, I want to meet the guys behind it and find out how the hell they pulled it off, ’cause it sure isn’t something I can explain.”

Gracie glanced around the room. Her eyes settled on Musgrave, the glaciologist who’d become testy on deck, and his wife. They were both sitting back, not participating. They were clearly discomfited by the conversation, giving each other the occasional glance. Musgrave seemed really irritated, and finally stood up.

“For God’s sake, people. Let’s be serious here,” he announced. “You saw it. We all saw it. You really think something that magnificent, something that . . . sublime . . . you really believe it could just be a vulgar prank?”

“What do you think it is?” Simmons asked.

“Isn’t it obvious? It’s a sign.”

“A sign?”

“A sign,” he repeated. “From God.”

A leaden silence greeted his words.

“Why God? Why not aliens?” Dalton finally asked.

Musgrave flashed him an icy scowl.

Dalton didn’t flinch. “Seriously. ’Cause that’s the first thing that popped into my mind when I saw it.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Musgrave wasn’t making any effort to mask his contempt.

“Why is that ridiculous?” Dalton insisted. “You’re saying it’s supernatural, aren’t you? You’re happy to entertain the notion that it’s ‘God’”—Dalton made some air quotes with his fingers—“whatever that means, but not that it’s extraterrestrial, that it’s coming from some intelligent life form from beyond our planet? Why is that any more ridiculous than what you’re suggesting?”

“Maybe it’s a warning,” Musgrave’s wife suggested.

“What?” Simmons sounded incredulous.

“Maybe it’s a warning. It appeared here, now, over this ice shelf. During the breakup. It can’t be random. There’s got to be a reason for it. Maybe it’s trying to tell us something.”

“I’ll tell you what it’s telling me, it’s telling me we should get the hell out of here before it shows up again. It’s bad news.” Dalton again.

“Goddammit,” Musgrave blurted, “either take this seriously or—”

“All right, calm down.” Gracie cut off Musgrave before turning to Dalton and flashing him a castigating glance. “We’re all on edge here.”

Dalton nodded and leaned back, taking in a deep breath.

“I’ve got to say, I agree with him,” Simmons added, gesturing at Dalton. “I mean, we’re all scientists—and even if lasers or holograms or whatever the hell it could have been aren’t within our areas of expertise, I’m guessing we’re all pretty convinced that what we saw out there is, as far as any of us can tell, way beyond any technological capability we know of. Now, the fact that I can’t explain it excites me and scares me in equal measure. ’Cause if it’s not some kind of laser show, if it didn’t come from DARPA or some Japanese lab or from Silicon Valley—if it didn’t originate on this planet . . . then it’s either, as Greg says, God—or, as our friend here was saying, extraterrestrial. And frankly, either one would be just extraordinary, and I don’t see that the difference really matters right now.”

“You don’t see the difference?” Musgrave was incensed.

“I don’t want to get into a big theological debate with you, Greg, but—”

“—but you obviously don’t believe in God, even if you’re presented with a miracle, so any debate is pointless.”

“No, that’s not what I’m saying,” Simmons insisted calmly. “Look, you’re saying this is God, you’re saying our maker has, for some reason, chosen this day, this location, this event—and this method—to appear to us, here, today—”

Gracie interrupted, saying, “Do we know if anything like this has happened elsewhere? Has anyone checked the news?”

Finch said, “I just got off the phone with the news desk. There are no other reports of any other sightings.”

“Okay, so if He’s chosen to show up here and now,” Simmons continued, “then I’ve got to think He must have a damn good reason.”

“Half the West Antarctic ice shelf is slipping into the sea. You need more of a reason?” Musgrave’s wife said, irritably.

“Why do you think we’re here?” Musgrave added. “Why are we all here?” His eyes darted around the room feverishly before settling on the British scientist. “Justin,” he asked him, “why are you here?”

“England’s at the same latitude as Alaska,” the man replied. “The only thing that makes it livable is the Gulf Stream. Take that away—which is what happens if the ice melts—and that movie, the one with Manhattan swamped with ice and snow? That’ll be London. Along with most of Europe, for that matter.”

“Exactly,” Musgrave insisted. “We’re all here because we’re worried. All the signs are telling us that we’ve got one hell of a problem, and maybe this—this miracle is telling us we’ve got to do something about it.”

Gracie and Finch exchanged dubious glances.

“Okay, well,” Simmons conceded, “all I’m saying is, if that’s the reason, if it’s a warning, then . . . why couldn’t it be coming from a more advanced intelligence?”

“I agree with that young man,” Dinnick said with a slight, disarming grin, pointing at Dalton. “It’s just as ludicrous.”

Musgrave’s wife was clearly roiled. “It’s pointless to discuss this with either of you. You’re not open to the possibility.”

“On the contrary, I’m open to all possibilities,” Dinnick countered. “And if we’re talking about some entity making contact with us,” nodding toward Simmons, “maybe to warn us, which, granted, could justify the here and now of it . . . Well, if you accept the notion of a creator, of creationism, of intelligent design . . . why couldn’t that intelligent designer be from a more advanced race?”

Musgrave was incensed. “God isn’t something you find in a science fiction book,” he retorted. “You don’t even have a basic understanding of what faith means, do you?”

“There’s no difference. It’s all unknowable as far as our current capabilities are concerned, isn’t it?” Dinnick pressed.

“Believe what you will. I’m out of here.” He stormed off.

Musgrave’s wife got up. She looked at the faces around her with a mixture of anger, scorn, and pity. “I think we all know what we saw out there,” she said, before following her husband out.

An uncomfortable silence smothered the room.

“Man. That guy’s clearly never heard of Scientology,” Dalton quipped, raising a few nervous chuckles.

“I’ve got to say,” the British scientist finally offered, “while I was out there, looking at it . . . there was something rather . . . divine about it.”

He looked around for endorsement. A couple of other scientists nodded.

The honesty of his simple words suddenly struck Gracie, their simple, brutal significance sinking in and chilling her more fiercely than any wind she’d felt out on the ice. Listening to the arguments flying around the room, she’d been swept up by the semantics and all but lost track of the fundamental enormity of what they’d all been arguing about. What had happened, what they’d witnessed out there . . . it was beyond explanation. It was beyond reason. It would have been beyond belief if she hadn’t seen it with her own eyes.

But she had.

Her mind drifted away with the possibilities. Could it be? she wondered. Had they just witnessed a watershed moment in the history of mankind, something for which “before” and “after” attributes might be used from here on?

Her innate skepticism, the skepticism of a hardened realist, dragged her back from the swirl of dreamy conjecture with a resounding No.

Impossible.

And yet . . . she couldn’t ignore the feeling that she’d been in the presence of something transcendent. She’d never felt that way before.

She suppressed a shiver and glanced uncertainly at Finch. “What did they say?” she asked, away from the others.

Finch said, “They’re getting everyone they can think of to check it out. But they’re getting calls from broadcasters all over the world wanting to know what’s going on. Ogilvy wants us to send him a high-res clip pronto,” he added pointedly, referring to Hal Ogilvy, the network’s global news director and a board member of the parent firm.

“Okay,” she nodded. “We need to make some calls. You wanna see if we can grab the conference room?”

Finch nodded. “Yeah. Let’s get out of here.”

“Amen to that,” Dalton added.

A barrage of clearly unamused looks greeted his words.

Dalton half-smiled, sheepishly. “Sorry,” he offered apologetically, and left the room.

They walked down the hall in silence, the sheer magnitude of the discussion sinking in. As they reached the stairwell, Gracie noticed Dalton looking particularly adrift.

“What?” she asked.

He stopped, hesitated, then said, “What if that Bible-thumping nut back there is right?”

She shook her head. “There’s got to be a better explanation for it.”

“What if there isn’t?”

Gracie mulled the question for a moment. “Well, if that’s the case, if it’s really God,” she said somberly, “then for someone who had me totally convinced He didn’t exist, He sure picked one hell of a moment to show Himself.”

Chapter 9

Wadi Natrun, Egypt

Labored breaths and sluggish footfalls tarnished the stillness of the mountain as the three men trudged up the steep slope. Every step, every scattered rock and rolling pebble echoed, the small sounds amplified by the harsh, lifeless dryness of the hills around them. The moon had been conspicuously absent that night, and despite the fading array of stars overhead, the early dawn light and the chilling solitude weighed heavily on them.

Yusuf had driven straight to the monastery from the café. Like many other devout Coptic Christians, the taxi driver donated as much as he could afford to the monastery, delivering free fruit and vegetables from his brother’s stall at the market and helping out with various odd jobs. He’d been doing that for as long as he could remember, and knew the monastery like the back of his hand. Which was why he’d been to the cave, delivering supplies every few weeks to the recluse who was its sole inhabitant, and why he’d seen what was inside it.

Muttering the most profuse of apologies, he’d startled the monk he knew best, a young man with alert gray-green eyes and a gregarious demeanor by the name of Brother Ameen, out of a deep sleep with his startling news. Ameen knew Yusuf well enough to take him at his word and, driven by the old taxi driver’s urgent tone, he’d then led him to the cell of the monastery’s abbot, Father Kyrillos. The abbot listened, and reluctantly agreed to accompany them back to the café at that ungodly hour.

The monastery’s amenities, unsurprisingly, didn’t include a media room, and so they’d all watched the footage on the TV at the café. It had thoroughly shocked the monks. And although they were both certain that Yusuf was right, they had to be absolutely sure.

And that couldn’t wait.

Yusuf had driven them straight back to the monastery, where they’d counted down the hours anxiously. Then at dawn, he drove them six miles out, to the edge of the desert, where the barren, desolate crags rose out of the sand. From there, the three men had climbed for over an hour, pausing once for a sip of water from a leather gourd that the young monk had brought along.

The trek up wasn’t exactly a cakewalk. The steep, uneven slope of the mountain—a barren moonscape of loose, crumbling rocks—was treacherous and hard enough to navigate by daylight, let alone like this, in near-darkness, with nothing more than the anemic beams of cheap flashlights to guide them up the slope that was still bathed in shadow. It also wasn’t a path they knew well at all. Visits to the caves were a rare event. Access to the desolate area was, as a matter of principle, fiercely discouraged out of respect for the occasional, driven soul who elected to retreat into its harsh seclusion. They reached the small doorway that led into the cave. A simple wooden door guarded its entrance, held shut by an old, rusted latch. A small timber window, fashioned from a natural opening in the rock, sat beside it. The abbot, a surprisingly fit man with penetrating yet kind eyes, dark, weathered skin, and a salt-and-pepper, square-cut beard that jutted out from the embroidered hood of his black cassock, shone his flashlight briefly into the window and peered in, then retreated a step, hesitating for a moment. He turned to Ameen, unsure of whether or not to proceed. The younger monk shrugged. He wasn’t sure either.

The abbot’s expression darkened with resigned determination. His hand shaking more from nerves than from the cold, he gave the door a soft, hesitant knock. A moment passed, with no answer. He glanced at his companions again and gave the door another rap. Again, there was no reply.

“Wait here,” he told them. “Maybe he can’t hear us.”

“You’re going in?” Ameen asked.

“Yes. Just keep quiet. I don’t want to cause him any distress.”

Ameen and Yusuf nodded.

The abbot steeled himself, gently lifted the latch, and pushed the door open.

The interior of the cave was oppressively dark and bone-chillingly cold. It was a natural cavern shaped out of limestone, and the chamber the abbot now stood in—the first of three—was surprisingly large. It was empty, save for a few pieces of simple, handcrafted furnishings: a rudimentary armchair, a low table facing it, and a couple of stools. Beside the window was a writing table and a chair. The abbot aimed his flashlight toward it. The table had a lined notebook on it, a fountain pen lying across its open pages. A small stack of similar notebooks, looking well thumbed, sat on a ledge by the window.

His mind flashed to the notebooks. To the frenzied, dense writing that filled their pages, pages he’d only glimpsed, pages he’d never been offered to read. To how it had all started, several months earlier, unexpectedly.

To how they’d found him.

And to the miraculous—the word suddenly took on a wholly different ring—way he’d come to them.

The abbot shook the thoughts away and turned. That could all wait.

He lowered the beam toward the ground and stood motionless for a moment, listening intently. He heard nothing. He took slow, hesitant steps deeper into the cave until he reached a small nook that housed a narrow bed.

It was empty.

The abbot spun around, shining his flashlight across the cave walls, his pulse rocketing ahead.

“Father Jerome?” he called out, his voice tremulous, the words echoing emptily through the chamber.

No answer.

Perplexed, he retreated back into the main chamber, and turned to face the wall.

His hand shook with a slight tremble as he raised the flashlight, lighting up the wall that curved gently into the cavern’s dome-like roof. With his heart pounding in his ears, he surveyed its surface, the flashlight’s beam lighting it up from the cave’s entrance all the way back to its deepest recess.

The markings were just as he remembered them.

One symbol, painstakingly painted onto the smooth rock face using some kind of white paint, repeated over and over and over, covering every available inch inside the cave.

A clearly recognizable symbol.

The same symbol he had just seen on television, in the skies over Antarctica.

Yusuf was right.

And he’d been right to come to them.

Without taking his eyes off the markings, the abbot slowly dropped to his knees and, making no sound, began to pray.

Chapter 10

Perched on the crest of the barren mountain, high above the caves, Father Jerome contemplated the majestic landscape spread out before him. The sun was crawling out from behind the mountains, backlighting their undulating crowns and tinting the sky with a soft, golden-pink hue.

The thin, old man with the wire-rimmed glasses, the white, buzz-cut hair, and the dishdasha robe spent most of his mornings and evenings up here. Although the climb up the rocky, crumbling terrain had been harsh on his frail body, he needed the escape from the crushing solitude and the oppressive confines of the cave. And once he was up there, he discovered, the mountain presented him with a reward he hadn’t anticipated, a reward far beyond the awe-inspiring magnificence of God’s creation.

He still didn’t know what had brought him there, what had drawn him to this place. He wasn’t the first to come to this valley to serve his faith and to glorify his God. Many before him had done the same, over hundreds of years. Other men like him, men of deep religious faith, who had felt the same divine presence when confronted with the purity and the power of the vast, empty wilderness that stretched up and down the valley. But much as he thought about it, in those endless nights in the cave, he still couldn’t explain the calling that had led him to walk away from the orphanage—an orphanage he had only just opened, several hundred miles south, just over the border with Sudan—and wander into the desert, unprepared and alone. Perhaps there was no explanation. Perhaps it was just that, a calling, one from a higher power, one that he couldn’t not heed.

And yet, somehow . . . it scared him.

When he thought about it, he knew it shouldn’t. It was a grace from God, a blessing. He had been shown a route, a journey, and even if he didn’t understand it or know where it would lead, it was still a great honor for him to be the recipient of that grace. And yet . . .

The nights scared him most. The loneliness in the cave was, at times, crippling. He sometimes arose in a cold sweat, woken up by the howl of the wind, or by the yelps of wild dogs roaming the barren hills. It was in those moments that he was most acutely aware of his extreme isolation. The mountain was a fearsome place. Few could survive it. The early ascetics, the hermit monks who retreated from humanity and lived in the caves long before him, went there to get closer to God, believing that the only path to enlightenment, the only way to get to know God, was through such isolation. Up on the craggy, bare mountain, they could avoid temptation, they could free themselves from all vestiges of earthly desire, and concentrate on the one thing that could bring them closer to God: prayer. But for those who had lived it, the mountain was also a battleground. They were there to pray for us, believing that we were all constantly under assault by demons, no one more so than the hermits themselves, who also believed that the more they prayed, the more they were threatened by the forces of evil they were battling on our behalf.

If he’d been asked about it before coming to this mountain, Father Jerome would have said he disagreed with that rather bleak view of the world. But now, after living in the confines of the cave for months, after going through the hell and torment of solitary reflection, he wasn’t so sure anymore.

Still, he had to forge ahead. He had to embrace the challenges before him and not resist them.

It was his calling.

The days were better. When he wasn’t up on the mountain, he spent them either in quiet contemplation, in prayer, or writing. And that was something else he didn’t understand, something else that troubled him.

The writing.

There seemed to be no end to the words, to the thoughts and ideas and images—that image, in particular—that flooded his mind. And when the inspiration came—the divine inspiration, he realized, both exhilarating and scary at the same time—he couldn’t write down the words fast enough. And yet, somehow, he wasn’t sure where they were coming from. His mind was thinking them, his hand was writing them down, and yet it was as if they were originating elsewhere and flowing through him, as if he were a vessel, a conduit for a higher being or a greater intellect. Which, again, was a grace. For the words were, undeniably, beautiful, even if they didn’t necessarily concord with his own personal experience within the Church.

He drank in the view and its sea of haloed crests before closing his eyes and tilting his head slightly upward, clearing his mind and preparing himself for what he knew was coming. And moments later, as it did unfailingly, it began. A torrent of words that flowed into his ears, as clearly as if someone were kneeling right beside him and whispering to him.

He beamed inwardly, locked in concentration, the warmth of the rising sun caressing his face, and drank in the words that were, as with each previous moment of revelation, simply wondrous.

Chapter 11

Boston, Massachusetts

Snowflakes dusted the dimly lit sidewalk as Bellinger climbed out of the cab outside the small bar on Emerson, a quiet, narrow street in South Boston.

It was late, and the chill bit into him fiercely. The run-up to Christmas was usually cold, but this was shaping up to be a particularly harsh winter. As he turned to duck into the bar, he slammed into a woman who emerged from the shadows. She pulled back, all flustered, holding up her hands which had come up defensively, and apologized, her clipped words explaining that she was trying to grab the cab before it drove off. She hurriedly sidestepped around him and called out to the driver, and Bellinger managed a fleeting glimpse of her face, soft and attractive, nestling between a bounce of shoulder-length auburn hair and the upturned collar of her coat. It was an awkward moment. Beyond the thin veil of snow and the darkness, he was in a fog of his own, and before he could spew out any clumsy words, she’d hopped into the cab and it was pulling away.

He stood there for a moment, watching it recede and disappear around a corner, then snapped away from the distraction and headed into the bar.

Matt Sherwood had chosen the place. It was a typical, low-key Southie bar. Cheap beer, dim lighting, twenty-five-cent wings, and darts. Some token Christmas decorations scattered around, cheap stuff made in China using paper-thin plastic and colored foil. The place was busy, but not mobbed, which was good. The conversation Bellinger needed to have was one he’d prefer to keep as private as possible.

He paused by the door, taking stock of the place, and realized—oddly—that he was subconsciously scanning for some unseen threat, which surprised him. He wasn’t the paranoid type. He chided himself and tried to quash his unease, but as he made his way deeper into the bar, looking for Matt, the paranoid feeling was stubbornly clinging on.

The place had a mismatched cast of topers. Cliques of young, well-dressed professionals were toasting the night away in small, loud circles, in sharp contrast to the lone, sullen mopes who sat perched on their bar stools like narcoleptic vultures, staring into their tumblers through vapid eyes. The music—eighties rock, a bit tinny, coming out of a jukebox in a far corner of the bar—was just the right side of loud, which was good. They’d be able to talk without worrying about being overheard. Which, again, Bellinger realized, wasn’t something he normally thought about.

He also didn’t normally have sweat droplets popping up on his forehead when he visited bars. Especially not in Boston. In December. With snow falling outside.

He spotted Matt sitting in a corner booth. As he wove his way through the pockets of drinkers to join him, his cell phone rang. He paused long enough to pull it out of his pocket and check it. It was Jabba. He decided to ignore the call, stuffed the phone back into his pocket, and joined Matt.

Even hunched over his drink, Matt Sherwood’s hulking stature was hard to miss. The man was six-foot-four, a full head taller than Bellinger. He hadn’t changed much in the two years since Bellinger had last seen him. He still had the same brooding presence, the same angular face, the same close-cropped dark hair, the same quietly intense eyes that surveyed and took note without giving much away. If anything, any changes Bellinger thought he detected, minor though they were, were for the better. Which was inevitable, given the circumstances. He’d last seen him around the time of Danny’s funeral. Matt and his kid brother had been close, Danny’s death sudden and unexpected, the family rocked by an even bigger—and far worse—tragedy to befall its sons this time.

Which made dredging it up all the more difficult.

As Bellinger slipped onto the bench without bothering to take his coat off, Matt acknowledged him with a nod. “What’s going on?”

Bellinger remembered that about him. Laconic, to-the-point. A man who didn’t pussyfoot around, which was understandable. Time was something Matt Sherwood appreciated deeply. He’d had enough of it taken away from him already.

Bellinger found a half smile. “It’s good to see you. How are you?”

“Just terrific. I’ve got orders coming out of my ears, what with all this bonus money floating around.” He cocked his head to one side and gave Bellinger a knowing, sardonic look. “What’s going on, Vince? It’s way past both our bedtimes, isn’t it? You said we needed to talk.”

“I know, and I’m glad you could make it. It’s just that . . .” Bellinger hesitated. It was a tough subject to broach. “I was thinking about Danny.”

Matt’s eyes stayed on Bellinger for a moment, then he looked away, across the bar, before turning back. “What about Danny?”

“Well, last time I saw you, after the funeral . . . it was all so sudden, and we never really got a chance to talk about it. About what happened to him.”

Matt seemed to study Bellinger. “He died in a helicopter crash. You know that. Not much more to tell.”

“I know, but . . . what else do you know about it? What did they tell you?”

From Matt’s dubious look, it was obvious he could see through Bellinger’s tangential, circumspect approach. “Why are you asking me this, Vince? Why now?”

“Just . . . look, just bear with me a little here. What did they tell you? How did it happen?”

Matt shrugged. “The chopper came down off the coast of Namibia. Mechanical failure. They said it was probably due to a sandstorm they’d had out there, but they couldn’t be sure. The wreck was never recovered.”

“Why not?”

“There was no point. It was a private charter, and what was left of it was scattered all over the ocean floor. Not very deep there, I’m told. But the currents are tough. There’s a reason they call the area ‘the gates of hell.’ ”

Bellinger looked confused. “What about the bodies?”

Matt winced slightly. The memory was clearly a painful one. “They were never recovered.”

“Why not?”

His voice rose a notch. “The area’s swarming with sharks, and if they don’t get you, the riptides will. It’s the goddamn Skeleton Coast. There was nothing to recover.”

“So you—”

“That’s right, there was nothing to bury,” Matt flared. He was angry now, his patience depleted. “The casket was empty, Vince. I know, it was ridiculous, we cremated an empty box and wasted some decent wood, but we had to do it that way. It helped give my dad some closure. Now are you gonna tell me why we’re really here?”

Bellinger looked away, studying the faces around the bar. He felt a cold sweat rising through him, and his head throbbed with the strain of his confused, unsettling thoughts. “Did you watch the news today?”

“No, why?”

Bellinger nodded to himself, wondering how to go on.

“Vince, what’s going on?”

Just then, Bellinger’s BlackBerry beeped, alerting him to the receipt of a text message. Bellinger kept his hands on the table, ignoring it. He didn’t have the patience to deal with Jabba now.

He fixed on Matt and leaned in. “I think Danny may have been murdered.” He paused, letting the words sink in, then added, “Or worse.”

Matt’s expression curdled, and he looked like he’d been winded. “Murdered or worse? What could be worse?”

“Maybe he’s being held somewhere. Maybe they all are.”

“What?” His face was twisted with utter disbelief. “What the hell are you talking about?”

Bellinger motioned with his hand to keep it down and leaned in closer. “Maybe they killed Danny and the others and faked the chopper crash. Then again, maybe they’ve still got them locked up somewhere, working on it against their will.” His eyes were twitching left and right, scanning the bar. “I mean, think about it. If you got a bunch of geniuses to design something secret for you, wouldn’t you want to keep them around long enough to make sure nothing went wrong when you finally used it?”

His phone beeped again.

“To design what? You’re not making sense.”

Bellinger leaned in even closer and his voice dropped down almost to a whisper. “Something happened today, Matt. In Antarctica. There was this thing, in the sky. It’s all over the news. I think Danny had something to do with it.”

“Why would you think that?”

Bellinger was shaking visibly now, the words tumbling out of him nervously. His phone beeped again, but he ignored it. “Danny was working on something. He was playing around with distributed processing and he showed me some of his stuff and we talked about it and the possibilities were just mind-blowing, you know? I mean, he was brilliant, you know that. But then Reece showed up and whisked him away to work with him on that project of his, the biosensors, and—”

“Reece?”

“Dominic Reece. He taught him. He was his guru at MIT.” Bellinger shook his head, as if trying to block an unwelcome thought. “He was also in that chopper. With Danny.” He looked at Matt, as if to apologize for bringing it up. After a quiet beat, he added, “Anyway, it was a great project, the sensors would have saved thousands, tens of thousands of lives, and—”

His phone beeped for the fourth time.

Bellinger lost his train of thought and frowned. He ripped his concentration away from Matt and irritably fished out his phone. He grimaced as he fumbled to get to his inbox, and saw that three messages had come in from the same number.

Not Jabba’s. The messages were all from a number he didn’t recognize.

He punched up the last of the messages.

The words on the small screen hit him like a sledgehammer.

They simply read, “If you want to live, shut the fuck up and leave the bar now.”

Chapter 12

Boston, Massachusetts

“I think Danny may have been murdered.” The penny-sized mike tucked away under the lapel of Bellinger’s coat sucked in the words and rocketed them over to the earpieces of the three operatives who sat in the van that was parked outside the bar on Emerson.

The two other operatives—the ones inside the bar with the barely noticeable, clear earpieces—heard them too.

In the van, the operative leading the surveillance team looked up pointedly at his auburn-haired colleague. She had done well. Her hands had been lightning quick, the move fluidly executed, the tag unnoticed. It had also helped that her beguiling eyes and teasing smile had distracted Bellinger. He hadn’t been the first to fall under her spell.

But he now needed to be contained.

The voice of one of the men in the bar shot through their earpieces. “He’s not going for it.”

The lead operative scowled and brought up his wrist mike. “I’m giving him another prod. Get ready to move in if he still doesn’t take the hint.”

The harsh voice came back with, “Standing by.”

He hit the send button on his cell phone again.

THE WORDS on the screen seared Bellinger’s eyes. He glanced up, his alarmed gaze raking the bar, a tourniquet of dread choking the life out of his heart. Everyone around him suddenly looked suspicious, threatening, dangerous.

Matt noticed.

“What is it?” he asked.

Bellinger blinked repeatedly. He was having trouble focusing. For a confused moment, the faces in the bar all seemed to be staring at him with unbridled malevolence.

Matt’s voice broke through again. “Vince. What is it?”

Bellinger turned to him, his words catching in his throat. “This was a mistake. Forget I said anything.”

“What?”

Bellinger stumbled to his feet. He looked squarely at Matt, his eyes bristling with fear. “Forget I said anything, all right? I’ve got to go.”

Matt shot up to his feet from behind the table and reached out, just managing to grab hold of Bellinger’s arm. “Cut the crap, Vince. What’s going on?”

Bellinger spun around, yanking his arm free with rabid ferocity before pushing Matt back with both hands. His frenzied reaction surprised Matt, who fell back and landed heavily, jarring his head against the booth’s wooden edge and triggering a ripple of commotion that startled the drinkers closest to him and pushed them back a step.

Matt straightened up, his head throbbing from the knock, and staggered to his feet in time to glimpse Bellinger disappearing into the crowd, rushing for the door.

He bolted after him, ducking into his wake, into the clear path that snaked through the drinkers all the way to the bar’s entrance.

He burst out onto the pavement and stopped in his tracks at the sight of Bellinger being manhandled by two bulky men and getting dragged into the back of a van.

Matt shouted, “Hey,” and charged at them, only his feet had barely left the ground when he felt something heavy slam into him from behind, catching him at the base of the neck and across his back, pounding the breath out of him and sending him flying face-first onto the snow-speckled pavement.

He landed badly, his right elbow taking the brunt of his weight and lighting up with pain, and before he could push himself back onto his feet, two sets of strong arms grabbed him, pinned his arms behind his back, and shoved him toward the van before throwing him in through its open doors.

He landed—hard—on the van’s ribbed, bare-metal floor, heard the van’s doors slam shut somewhere behind him, and felt his weight slide back as the van took off. Jarring images and sensations were coming at him thick and fast and assaulting him from all angles. Still facedown, one eye squashed against the floor, he heard muffled shouts and angled his head up to glimpse Bellinger, the two bulky men over him, and the vague outline of—that couldn’t be right—a woman with a shoulder-length bob, seemingly attractive, looking back from the driver’s seat, her head silhouetted against the van’s windshield, backlit by the streaming lights from beyond. One of the men was sitting on Bellinger’s back, pinning him down, one hand covering Bellinger’s mouth and blocking his screams of protest. The other was bent down beside them and loomed over Bellinger. He held something that looked like an oversized electric shaver in his hand.

A vaguely familiar high-pitched whine, something powering up, pricked the edge of Matt’s hearing, but in his frazzled state, he couldn’t quite place it. He turned, trying to shift himself over and onto his back, but one of the men who had grabbed him stomped down heavily on his back and sent him splattering against the van’s floor again. A jolt of nausea rushed through Matt as the whine reached a fevered pitch, and his muscles seized up as he realized what it was.

Straining to raise his head an inch, he caught sight of the second man bringing his hand down onto Bellinger and branding him with what Matt now realized was a pocket Taser. Bellinger screamed out in agony as a faint blue light flickered inside the van. A two-second burst was usually enough to bring a fit man down with major muscle spasms, three seconds was enough to turn most men into the sobbing equivalent of a fish flopping around on a dry dock. Bellinger’s hit lasted well over five seconds, and Matt knew what the effect on the scientist would be. He’d been at the receiving end of those prods. It wasn’t a pleasant sensation, especially not when they were wielded by neolithic prison guards. His skin bristled at the memory, the buzzing noise dredging up the pain of what felt like thousands of needles being shoved simultaneously into every pore of his body.

The van made a left turn, the shift in momentum allowing Matt a brief respite from the weight pinning him down, and he spotted Bellinger’s tormentor finally putting down the Taser and bringing out something much smaller, something that glinted at him in the jagged lights cutting in and out of the van, a syringe, which he swiftly plunged into the stricken man’s back, just below the neck.

Bellinger’s flopping stopped.

“He’s done,” the man announced without a hint of exertion or discomfort in his voice, as if what he’d just accomplished was no more than a routine chore.

The bulldozer sitting on Matt asked, “What about this one?”

The man who’d dealt with Bellinger mulled the question for a moment. “Same deal,” he decided.

Not the answer Matt was hoping for. Then again, none of the likely answers held much appeal.

One thing he knew: He wasn’t about to sit back and let a million volts fry him inside out.

He glimpsed the man moving off Bellinger and making his way over to the back of the van, the pocket Taser in hand, the ominous whine cranking up again.

Just then, the van made another turn, a right one this time.

Time to be a killjoy.

The weight of the bulldozer sitting on top of him shifted slightly from the turn, lightening momentarily. Matt summoned up the furious energy in every corpuscle of his body and suddenly heaved back, as hard as he could. The move caught his captor by surprise, making him lose his balance and sending him flying against the wall of the van. Matt quickly managed to get both hands under him to increase his leverage, then followed through with a full twist, weaving his fingers together and locking them just as he swung around and used his extended arms as a baseball bat.

He caught the bulldozer flat across the nose, a loud, bone-crushing splat erupting in the van. The man’s head ricocheted against the van’s wall before he curled over, writhing with pain.

Matt didn’t pause to watch. There were three other thugs to deal with. The two who’d been busy with Bellinger could wait. The bulldozer’s partner, also at the back of the van, was the more immediate threat, and he was already leaping at Matt. Matt steadied himself on his elbow and bent down as he followed through with his roll, the move adding momentum to his leg which lashed out and hammered the incoming attacker across the neck. As the man’s head bounced heavily off the van’s rear doors, Matt pounced up, grabbed his head with both hands, and pulled it down, connecting it with his knee. Something in the man’s face cracked audibly and he went reeling backward, toward the front of the van, falling over the immobile body of Bellinger and interrupting the other two men’s advance.

Matt saw them clambering over Bellinger and knew he only had a second or two of clear air. He also knew he wasn’t likely to take them out as easily.

There was only one option, really, and he didn’t hesitate.

He grabbed the rear door handle, yanked it open, and despite the micro-glimpse of a car trailing not too far back, flung himself out of the moving van.

He didn’t have far to free-fall before hitting the asphalt. It was beyond brutal. His left shoulder and hip took the brunt of it, a lightning bolt of pain shooting through him as he landed. He rolled on himself several times, a cascade of confusing, alternating glimpses of streetlights and tarmac flooding his senses, every inch of his body getting its share of beating. A sudden, ear-piercing shriek hounded him, bearing down on him alarmingly fast, the sound of rubber scraping deliriously across asphalt, the hard-braking car’s front bumper only a few feet behind him and gaining fast.

They finally came to a rest together, as if in a synchronized performance, Matt inches away from the car that had fishtailed slightly and was now at a slight angle to the road. Through his dazed whiteout from the pain and the headlights, Matt could feel the heat radiating out from the car’s grille, and the air was thick with the smell of burned rubber and brake pads. His shoulder was alight with pain. He steeled himself and straightened up, and glanced down the road. The van was quickly receding, one of the men—it was already too far for anything more specific—looking back before reaching out and slamming the door shut.

Matt pushed himself to his feet. His left leg almost gave way, but he steadied himself against the car’s fender. He staggered over to the driver’s window. The driver—a man, old, sixties plus—was staring at Matt with a combination of trepidation and disbelief. Matt bent down to look in on him. The old man’s window was still closed. Matt gestured for him to open it, but the man just sat there, riven with fear.

Matt rapped his knuckles against the window. “Open the window, goddammit,” he shouted, gesturing frantically. “Open it.”

The man hesitated, then shook his head, his brow furrowed with confusion.

Matt jangled the door handle brusquely, but the doors were locked. He slammed the flat of his hand against the window again, scowling at the old man and yelling, “Open the goddamn door.”

The man did nervous little mini-shakes with his head again, darted an anxious glance into his rearview mirror, glanced over at Matt again, then turned to face ahead and just hit the gas. Matt reeled back and just watched, dumbstruck, as the car tore off and disappeared into the darkness.

Chapter 13

Deir Al-Suryan Monastery, Wadi Natrun, Egypt

A blossoming glint of golden light rose from behind the distant horizon as the three men climbed down the mountain.

They’d waited for close to an hour for Father Jerome to show up, and when he still hadn’t appeared, they’d finally given up and made their way back. They didn’t speak at all during the hike down or on the drive back. The abbot had simply nodded when asked by the younger monk if he’d been right about what they’d seen, and left it at that.

He needed to think.

Yusuf pulled up outside the monastery and offered to stick around should he be needed. The abbot told him he wasn’t, and thanked him, then his expression and his voice darkened.

“Yusuf,” he said gravely, “I need you to keep what you know about all this to yourself. No one else must be told. For now. Things could get out of hand very quickly if news of this came out. We need to handle this with great care. Do you understand?”

Yusuf nodded somberly, and kissed the abbot’s hand. “Bi amrak, abouna.” As you wish, Father.

The abbot studied him fervently for a beat, making sure his admonishment sank in, then nodded, giving him permission to leave. He and the monk watched as Yusuf climbed back into the Previa and drove away.

“What are we going to do?” Brother Ameen asked.

The abbot’s gaze followed the disappearing minivan. “First, I need to pray. This is all too . . . unsettling. Will you join me?”

“Of course.”

They entered the monastery through the small gate in the thick, forty-foot wall that surrounded it. Just inside the enclosure, to their right, the large qasr—the keep—a four-storied white cube punctured by tiny, irregular rectangular openings, squatted proudly in the dawn light, its timber drawbridge now permanently lowered and welcoming.

It hadn’t always been the case. The sixth-century monastery had been rebuilt several times during its turbulent history.

The valley of Wadi Natrun, which owed its name to the abundant natron in its soil, the sodium carbonate that was a key ingredient in mummification, was the birthplace of Christian monasticism. The tradition had started in the third and fourth centuries, when thousands of followers of Christ had fled there to escape from Roman persecution. Hundreds of years later, still more went there, this time to escape persecution at the hands of the Muslims. The valley held a special resonance for the faithful: It was there that Mary, Joseph, and their infant son had rested while escaping from King Herod’s men, before continuing on to Cairo.

At first, the small communities of early Christians had lived in the caves that dotted the low ridges overlooking the desert, surviving off the meager offerings of its scattered oases. Soon, they began to build monasteries where they hoped to worship in relative peace and safety, but the threats never went away, not for centuries. Desert tribes picked up the Romans’ baton of aggression and proved even more ruthless. The most vicious of those attacks, at the hands of Berbers in 817, decimated the monastery. When men didn’t threaten it, nature itself proved a willing understudy, with only one of the monastery’s monks surviving an outbreak of plague in the fourteenth century. And yet, time after time, the persistence and dedication of holy men kept on resurrecting it, and today, the monastery was home to over two hundred monks who followed in the footsteps of the desert fathers of the Old Testament and came here to escape from the distractions of daily life and the temptations of earthly desire to battle their own demons and pray for the salvation of mankind.

The valley had been an oasis of Christianity from the very first days of the movement. The monastic tradition was born there, long before it was eventually adopted by the Christians of Europe. For centuries, profoundly religious men had been drawn to its desolate wilderness. And on the dawn of this portentous day, the abbot thought, it seemed eminently possible that the valley hadn’t yet exhausted its relevance to the faithful.

And yet . . . the very thought scared him.

The world was a very different place.

More technologically advanced, undoubtedly. More civilized, perhaps—in certain respects, in certain pockets. But, at its core, it remained as vicious and predatory as it had ever been. Perhaps even more so.

The monk followed the abbot past the keep, through the courtyard that forked off into the Chapel of the Forty-Nine Martyrs—a single, domed chamber that was dedicated to the monks killed during a Berber raid in the year 444—and into the Church of the Holy Virgin, the monastery’s main place of worship. Mercifully, none of the other monks were there yet, but the abbot knew the solitude wouldn’t last too long.

He led the monk past the nave and into the khurus—the choir. As he passed the grand wooden portal that separated the two areas, his eyes drifted up to a wall painting adorning a half cupola overhead, a thousand-year-old depiction of the Annunciation that he’d seen countless times. In it, four prophets were gathered around the Holy Virgin and the archangel Gabriel. The abbot found his gaze drawn to the first prophet to the right of the Virgin, Ezekiel, and a chill crawled down his neck at the sight. And for the next hour, as he desperately prayed for guidance, he couldn’t shake the thought of the prophet’s celestial vision from his weary mind: the heavens opening up to a whirlwind of amber fire folding on itself, the wheels of fire in a sky “the color of a terrible crystal,” all of it heralding the voice of God.

They prayed, side by side, for close to an hour, facing the black, stone altar, prostrating themselves against the cold floor of the chapel in the praying tradition of the early Christians, a posture that was later adopted by Islam.

“Shouldn’t we have waited longer for him?” Ameen asked. With the sun comfortably ensconced in the eastern sky, they were now—alone—in the monastery’s small, newly restored museum. “What if something’s happened to him?”

The abbot had been concerned about that himself, and not for the first time. Still, he shrugged stoically. “He’s been up there for months. I should think he knows how to handle the mountain by now. He seems to be coping well.”

After a quiet beat, the younger monk cleared his throat and asked, “What are we going to do, Father?”

“I’m not sure what we should do,” the abbot replied. “I don’t understand what’s happening.”

Ameen’s eyebrows shot up with incredulity. “A miracle. That’s what’s happening.”

The abbot frowned. “Something we don’t understand is happening, yes. But from there to say it’s a miracle . . .”

“What other explanation is there?”

The abbot shook his head, lost for words.

“You said it yourself,” the younger monk persisted. “The sign you described, what you saw on the news.”

A confused tangle of images clouded the abbot’s mind. He thought back to that day, in the desert. When their guest had been found, before he took to the caves. The terrible state he was in. His recovery.

The word miraculous glided into his thoughts again.

“It doesn’t fit any of the prophecies of our holy book,” he finally said.

“Why does it need to?”

The comment took the abbot by surprise. “Come, Brother. Surely you don’t mean to negate the truth in those writings?”

“We’re living a miracle, Father,” Ameen exclaimed, his voice flushed with excitement. “Not reading about it hundreds of years after the fact, knowing full well it’s been translated and embellished and corrupted by countless hands. Living it. Now. In this modern day and age.” He paused, then added, pointedly, “With all the power of modern communication at our disposal.”

The abbot’s face contracted with unease. “You want people to know about this?”

“They already know about the sign. You saw the woman on the news service. Her images and words will have reached millions.”

“Yes, but . . . until we understand what exactly is happening, we can’t allow this to come out.”

Ameen spread out his hands questioningly. “Isn’t it evident, Father?”

The abbot felt cowed by his colleague’s fervent gaze, and nodded thoughtfully. He understood the younger man’s exuberance, but it needed to be reined in. There was no running away from what was happening, of that he had no doubt. He had to face it. He’d been thrust into this unwittingly, and now he needed to do what needed to be done. But with care, and caution.

“We need to study the scriptures more closely,” he concluded. “Consult with our superiors.” He paused, weighing the hardest part of the task ahead. “Most importantly, we need to go back up to the caves and talk to him. Tell him what’s happened. Perhaps he will know what to make of it.”

Ameen stepped closer. “Everything you say is reasonable, but it doesn’t detract from the fact that we can’t keep this to ourselves,” he pleaded. “We’ve received a grace from God. We owe it to Him to share it with the world. People need to know, Father. The world needs to know.”

“Not yet,” the abbot insisted, firmly. “It’s not up to us to decide.”

The younger monk’s voice rose with concern. “Forgive me, Father, but I believe you’re making a mistake. Others, many others, will undoubtedly try to claim the sign as their own. And in doing so, they will cheapen and corrupt this most sublime of messages. We live in cynical, amoral times. These charlatans will make it harder for the true voice to be heard. Our message could easily be drowned out by impostors and opportunists, irreversibly so. We can’t wait. We have to move quickly before the chaos turns this divine event into a circus.”

The abbot sat down and sighed wearily, massaging his brow with his calloused hands, feeling the room tightening in around him. The young monk’s words rang true, but he couldn’t bring himself to take that step. The consequences were too frightening to contemplate. He sat there, tongue-tied with uncertainty, staring at the stone floor while the monk hovered nearby, his steps heavy with frustration, waiting. The painting in the chapel crept back into his mind’s eye, and he thought again of Ezekiel’s vision:

Wheels of fire in a sky the color of a terrible crystal, all of it heralding the voice of God.

After a moment, the abbot looked up, a frown darkening his face. “It’s not up to us,” he repeated. “We need to consult with the councils and bring the matter to His Holiness. They will decide.”

AN HOUR LATER, Brother Ameen stood in the shadows and watched from the sanctity of a dark hallway as the library’s curator stepped out of his office.

He’d failed to convince the abbot. The old man was visibly overwhelmed by what he’d seen and seemed incapable of grasping the enormity of what was happening. But the younger man wasn’t about to let that stop him.

He needed to take matters into his own hands.

He waited patiently, his eyes tracking the priest as he ventured across the courtyard and entered the refectory. Moments later, the young monk sneaked into the priest’s office, picked up the telephone, and started dialing.

Chapter 14

Less than a mile from the ridge that the two monks and the driver had just climbed down, a boy of fourteen ambled after his small herd with tired feet.

Despite the early wake-ups, the boy did like the mornings best, as did all seven of his father’s goats. The sun was still low, the valley cloaked by the long shadows of the hills surrounding them. The cool breeze was a welcome alternative to the sun that would soon be bearing down on them, and the purple hues of the barren landscape were also easier on the eyes and, if he allowed himself to think of them that way, more inspirational.

Humming a tune he’d recently heard on his father’s radio, he rounded an outcropping of rocks and stopped in his tracks at the unexpected sight before him. Three men—soldiers, it seemed, from their outfits—were loading equipment into a dust-caked, canvas-topped pickup truck. Equipment like he’d never seen before. Like the sand-beige, drumlike object, perhaps three feet wide but only five or six inches deep, that snared his attention.

Even though the boy had frozen in place and stopped breathing, the men spotted him instantly. His eyes drew a line of hard, unforgiving stares that seared through the black Ray-Bans the men were wearing. He barely had time to register the familiar gear he’d seen on countless news broadcasts of the war in Iraq—the sand-colored camouflage BDUs, the boots, the sunglasses—before one of the men spat out a brief word and the others dropped what they were doing and took quick strides toward him.

The boy started to run, but he didn’t make it far. He felt one of the men rush up to him and tackle him from behind, bringing him down into the parched soil headfirst.

With his heart in his throat, he wondered what the hell they wanted from him, why they’d wrestled him to the ground, why he was biting into the sand and grit that also pricked painfully at his eyes. In a mad frenzy of terror, he tried to squirm around and get onto his back, but the man who sat on him was too heavy and had him solidly pinned down.

He heard another man’s footsteps crunching their way closer, then glimpsed a pair of military boots from the corner of his eye, looming over him like a demigod.

He didn’t hear a word.

He didn’t see the nod.

And he didn’t feel a thing after the big, practiced hands of the man sitting on top of him quickly and efficiently took up their positions—one around the side of his neck, the other around the other side of his head—and tightened their grip before twisting suddenly and fiercely in opposite directions.

Swift, Silent, Deadly.

It was, without a doubt, a well-earned motto.

Chapter 15

Amundsen Sea, Antarctica

“If you figure anything out, call me, okay? Just call me, anytime.” Gracie gave out her satphone number, hung up, and heaved a sigh of frustration.

Another dead end.

She mopped her face with her hands before sweeping them tightly through her hair, massaging some life into her scalp. She’d managed to coax some good video bites from Simmons and some of the other scientists on board, and while Dalton was editing it all into a high-def report to broadband back to the news desk in D.C.—much better than the jumpy, grainy Began live feed they’d used for the first broadcast, more Armageddon, less Cloverfield this time around—she’d been working the satphone.

Her years on the job had allowed her to build up a beefy Rolodex, and right now, she was mining it for all its worth. She spoke to a contact of hers at NASA, a project director she’d met while covering the space shuttle Columbia’s disaster back in 2003. She also called contacts of hers at CalTech and at the Pentagon, as well as the editor of Science magazine and the network’s science and technology guru.

They were all as baffled as she was.

She’d hardly hung up when the satphone rang.

Another reporter, angling for a comment.

“How are they managing to get hold of this number?” she groaned to Finch.

He pulled a who-knows face and grabbed the phone for yet another polite, but firm, rebuff. For the moment, it was their exclusive—for better or for worse.

It’s not that she was camera shy, or that she didn’t like being in the public eye. Far from it. Her career as a TV correspondent wasn’t an accident: She’d wanted it ever since high school. She’d pursued every opportunity to get those breaks, and once she did, she’d worked damn hard at grabbing her share of airtime and overcoming the endemic misogyny and the subtle bullying in the industry. She thrived on the stories she covered and the experiences she shared with her viewers, she loved stepping in front of that camera and telling the world what she’d found out, and undeniably, the camera loved her back. She had that unquantifiable magnetism that went beyond the purely physical. People just tuned in and enjoyed her company. Focus groups confirmed her broad appeal: Women weren’t threatened by her, they took a possessive pride in her expertise, and in an age where public image was everything and every word was carefully weighed for effect, her candor and honesty were a big draw; men, while readily admitting that they fancied the pants off her, more often than not pointed out how they found her brain to be just as much of a turn-on.

And so she’d gone from local reporter at a network affiliate in Wisconsin to weekend anchor at a bigger affiliate in Illinois and eventually to anchor and special correspondent for the network’s flagship Special Investigations Unit. In the process, she’d become a face America trusted, whether she was reporting from Kuwait in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, on board a Greenpeace vessel stalking Japanese whaling ships, or following the unfolding tragedies of the tsunami in Thailand and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.

More recently, she’d been unwittingly drawn into the emotionally charged debate on global warming. She’d approached the issue as a skeptic, her instincts compelling her to question—on air—the often lazy assumptions of the ever-more-fashionable, almost religious, environmental movement. She knew how unreliable long-term forecasts were, how history was littered with the failed predictions of the most brilliant minds on everything from population levels to oil prices, and she hadn’t minced her words when voicing her skepticism. Up until then, her honesty and integrity had served her well. On this issue, her candor proved to be a problem. The reaction had been nothing less than incendiary. She was lambasted for her doubts from all corners, and her career had hung in the balance.

She decided the subject matter merited her attention, whichever side of the fence she ended up on. She pitched a comprehensive, no-holds-barred, in-depth documentary tackling the issue, and the network’s brass signed off on it. And so, with the vast majority of her colleagues mired in the quicksands of the marathon election campaign back home, she focused her energies on examining all the available data on the climate issue and meeting everyone who mattered. She was soon convinced that greenhouse gases had undoubtedly risen in the last few decades, and the earth did appear to be warming, but she still needed to find out if the connection between the two was as direct as it was now being portrayed. And so she’d crisscrossed the globe, from the remote science station of Cherskii in Siberia, where 40,000-year-old permafrost was now thawing and, in the process, releasing huge amounts of greenhouse gases, to Greenland, where massive glaciers were sliding toward the sea at a rate of two yards every hour, taking a forensic look at every new report on the matter during her travels.

Her investigative claws sharpened when she looked into the Global Climate Coalition, the Information Council of the Environment, and the Greening Earth Society—all of them cleverly misnamed, created and funded by the automotive, petroleum, and coal industries with the sole purpose of deceiving the public by spreading disinformation and callously repositioning global warming as theory rather than fact. It didn’t take long for her to become more and more convinced that the planet was indeed in trouble because of us. What was far less clear, however, was what we could realistically—and pragmatically—do about it. That was a far more contentious, and troubling, debate, and one she felt very passionate about.

But she hadn’t expected it to lead to this.

She breathed out with exasperation. “I’m getting nothing here. You having better luck?” she asked Finch as she got out of her chair and walked over to the window to scan the skies.

Finch had been talking to the news desk back in D.C. and trawling through his own contacts list. “Nope. If it’s natural, no one’s seen anything like it. And if it’s not, they’re all telling me the technology to pull off something like this just doesn’t exist.”

“We don’t know that,” Dalton objected, looking up from his monitor. “I’m sure there’s a lot of stuff out there that we don’t know about.”

“Yes, but what we don’t know about doesn’t really matter in this case, because there’s nothing we know about that even comes close.”

“You lost me.”

“Technology breakthroughs—they have to start somewhere,” Finch explained. “They don’t just come out of nowhere. No one suddenly came up with cell phones. It started with Alexander Graham Bell two hundred years ago. There’s a progression. Regular phone, cordless home phones, digital phones, and eventually, cell phones . . . Stealth fighters—we didn’t know about them, but they’re just evolutions of other fighter planes. You see what I mean? Technology evolves. And that thing we saw . . . there doesn’t seem to be anything out there that we can point to and say, ‘Well, if we took that and made it bigger, or more powerful, or used it in such a way, it could explain it.’ It’s in a whole different ballpark. And everyone’s trying to figure it out. I mean, look at this.” He pulled up the latest e-mail from D.C. “It’s going ballistic,” he enthused. “Reuters, AP, CNN. They’re all carrying it. Every station from London to Beijing is running it. Same for the big news blogs. Drudge, Huffington. It’s been voted up to number one on Digg and we’ve crossed two hundred thousand hits on YouTube. And the chat rooms are just going nuts over it.”

“What are they saying?”

“From what I can see, people are in one of three camps. Some of them think it’s some kind of harmless stunt, a CGI, War of the Worlds kind of thing. Others also think it’s a con but they see something more sinister in it, and they’re throwing out all kinds of crazy ideas about how it could have been pulled off, none of which seem to hold water if you read the mocking replies they’re getting from people who seem to know what they’re talking about.”

“Is there anyone who doesn’t think we’re behind it?”

“Yep. The third group: the pro camp. The ones who believe it’s the real thing—real as in God, not ET. One of them called us ‘the heralds of the Second Coming.’ ”

“Well that makes me feel so much better,” she groaned, her chest tightening with unease. Greed and fear were tugging at her. Part of her was thrilled by the idea of being the face of the hottest story around—she couldn’t deny that—but the more reasoned side of her was clamoring for restraint. She knew what she’d seen; she just didn’t know what it was. And until she did, she was uncomfortable with how it was all spiraling out of control. If it turned out to be something less momentous than everyone was suggesting, she could already picture Jon Stewart ridiculing her into an early retirement.

Finch spun the laptop back and tapped some more keys. “And speaking of ET,” he said as he glanced pointedly across at Dalton, “a guy I know at the Discovery Channel sent me these.” He turned the screen back so it was facing them. “Some of them are the ones you’d expect, like clouds and Concorde contrails that make people think they’re seeing UFOs. I don’t know if I should be surprised, but he tells me there are over two hundred reported UFO sightings a month in America. A month. But then, there’s a whole slew of historic references to unexplained sightings going back thousands of years. We’re talking hundreds of references throughout history about bright balls of fire, flying ‘earthenware vessels,’ luminous discs. It’s not just a modern phenomenon. I mean, check out these historical records: ‘Japan, 1458: An object as bright as the full moon and followed by curious signs was observed in the sky.’ Or this one: ‘London, 1593: A flying dragon surrounded by flames was seen hovering over the city.’ ”

“Opium’ll do that to you every time,” Dalton half-joked. “Seriously. Drugs were legal back then, weren’t they?”

“Besides, none of these references are even remotely verifiable,” Gracie added.

“Sure, but the thing is, there are so many of them. Written continents apart, at a time when traveling from one to another was virtually impossible, when most of the world was illiterate. Even the Bible’s got them.”

“Big surprise there,” Gracie scoffed. A charged silence hung between them. “So what are we saying? What do you think we saw?”

Finch pulled off his glasses and used his sleeve to give them a wipe as he thought about it. “I’d have said mass hallucination if it wasn’t for the footage.” He shook his head slowly in disbelief, slipped his glasses back on, and looked up at Gracie. “I can’t explain it.”

“Dalton?” she asked.

His face clouded with uncertainty. He leaned back in his chair and ran his hands tightly through his hair. “I don’t know. There was something . . . ethereal about it, you know? It didn’t look flat, like something projected, but then it didn’t look like something hard and physical either. It’s hard to explain. There was something much more organic, much more visceral about it. Like it was part of the sky, like the sky itself had lit up, you know what I’m saying?”

“I do,” Gracie agreed uncomfortably. The sight of the bright, glowing sign, as vivid as when she first saw it, materialized in her mind’s eye. An upwelling of elation, the same one she felt when she first saw it, overcame her again as she remembered how it had formed itself out of nothing. It was as if the air itself had been summoned by God, lit up from within into that shape, she found herself thinking. Which didn’t sit well with her. She’d stopped believing in God when her mother died, ripped away from her young daughter by an unrelenting tumor in her breast. And now, here it was, this unexplained thing in the sky. As if it were taunting her.

She pushed the thought away. Get a grip. We’re running ahead of ourselves here. There’s got to be a logical explanation for it.

But a nagging question kept coming back.

What if there isn’t?

Gracie stared out the window, scanning the sky for another sighting, her jumbled mind desperate for an answer. The satphone rang, and as Finch stretched across the table to answer it, her mind migrated to a UFO hoax from a year earlier. The clip, showing a UFO buzzing a beach in Haiti, had clocked up over five million viewings on YouTube within days of its posting, hogging chat rooms and news aggregator sites across the Web and popping up on every FunWall on Facebook. Millions were taken in by it—until it turned out to be something a French computer animator had put together in a few hours on his MacBook, using commercially available software, reluctantly explaining it away as a “sociological experiment” for a movie—about a UFO hoax, natch—that he was working on. With the advances in special effects and the proliferation of faked videos of such high quality that they managed to convince even the most staunch of skeptics, a subtle question arose in Gracie’s mind: Would people recognize a “true” event of this kind when—as it seemed—it really happened? She knew what she saw. It was right there in front of her, but everyone else was only seeing it on a screen. And without seeing it with their own eyes, could they ever accept it for what it was, something wondrous and inexplicable and possibly even supernatural or divine—or would it be drowned in a sea of cynicism?

“Gracie,” Finch called out, covering the phone’s mouthpiece with his hand.

She turned.

His face had a confused scrunch to it. “It’s for you.”

“Now what?” she grumbled.

“I’m not sure, but . . . it’s coming from Egypt. And I think you need to take it.”

Chapter 16

Boston, Massachusetts

There were no cabs around, but it didn’t take too long for Matt to get back to his car. The van hadn’t traveled that far from the bar before he’d dived out of it. He would’ve made it back sooner, but he wasn’t at his best. He felt groggy and nauseous, his skin had been scraped raw in several places, and every bone in his body felt like it had been hammered by a blacksmith on steroids. And, as if to add insult to injury, it was snowing again.

He was relieved to find his car, a highland-green 1968 Mustang GT 390 “Bullitt” Fastback that was his next restoration project, still where he’d left it, close to the bar on Emerson. It hadn’t even occurred to him to check for his keys before he got to it, but, mercifully, they were also still there, safely ensconced in the pocket of his peacoat.

Just a couple of small miracles to cap off a magical night.

Less miraculous, though, was the fact that he’d lost his cell phone. He guessed it had probably flown out of the pocket of his coat during his hard landing on the asphalt, though he didn’t dwell on it. He had more pressing concerns.

He leaned against the car and caught his breath, and the brutal images of a helpless Bellinger getting fried and injected roared back into his mind’s eye. He had to do something to try and help him, but he couldn’t see a move that made sense. He couldn’t report it to the cops. The van was long gone, and the inevitable questions he’d be asked, given his record, would only cloud the issue. More to the point, he didn’t think the risk of flagging his whereabouts to the goon squad who’d come after Bellinger was outweighed by any positive effect it would have on helping the cops find Bellinger and bringing him back safely.

Which, somehow, he didn’t think was going to happen anyway.

The traffic was light and scattered as he drove home, the city now tucked in under a thin blanket of snow. He was on the expressway within minutes, and from there, it was only a short hop down to Quincy and the studio apartment he lived in over his workshop. As he cruised south, his mind grinded over what had happened to him, trying to make sense of the rush of events that had come at him from nowhere and figure out what the right move would be.

Bellinger had called. He’d asked for a meeting, one that couldn’t wait. He’d then hit him with the news that his brother might have been murdered, or that his death might have been faked and that he might be locked up somewhere. How had he put it, exactly? Working on it, against their will?

Danny, alive—but locked up somewhere?

The thought flooded Matt’s gut with equal doses of elation—and rage. Matt and Danny had always been close, which never failed to amaze their friends, given how different they were. For a start, they didn’t look anything like each other. Matt, three years older, had inherited his dad’s olive skin, dark hair, and solid build, whereas Danny—two shades fairer and fifty pounds lighter—took after his mom. The stark difference between them extended to, well, pretty much everything else. Matt had no patience for classes or for schoolwork, whereas Danny had an insatiable appetite for learning. Matt lettered in as many sports as he could cram into his schedule. Danny couldn’t sink a basket if he was sitting on the backboard. Off campus, the contrast between the two brothers wasn’t any less pronounced. Matt was irreverent, wild, and reckless—in other words, a babe-magnet. Danny was far more introverted and preferred the company of the computer he’d found in a junk shop and rebuilt in his bedroom. Still, despite it all, they had a bond that was unshakable, a deep understanding of each other that survived the nastiest taunts and the most callous temptations that high school could throw at them.

Their friendship had also survived Matt’s repeated collisions with the law.

As with a lot of cases like his, things had started small. Matt had built his first car at the age of thirteen, hooking up an old washing-machine engine to a soap-box derby car that became something of a fixture around his neighborhood. The local cops were amazed and even the hardheaded sticklers among them couldn’t quite bring themselves to take away his pride and joy—a relationship that would change dramatically over the years. For as he grew older, the disparity between his love of cars, on the one hand, and the bleak part-time work prospects available to him in the Worcester area and his parents’ wafer-thin bank account, on the other, became more frustrating. Headstrong and impatient, Matt sought to redress that imbalance his own way.

Those early escapades were classic Matt. He didn’t go after any old ride. He would trawl the more affluent neighborhoods of Boston for specific cars on his hit list. He also never crashed or trashed the cars he stole, nor did he ever try to sell them. He would merely abandon them in some parking lot once he’d had the chance to sample them. He managed to test-drive quite a few before he got caught. The judge he came up against on that first conviction wasn’t amused or impressed by his antics.

That inaugural stint behind bars proved to have far-reaching consequences. Upon his release from jail, it didn’t take long for Matt to realize how his life had changed. Work prospects dried up. Friends shied away from him. People looked at him in a different way. He had changed too. Trouble seemed to come looking for him, as if sensing it had a willing customer. His hardworking, God-fearing parents were overwhelmed and paralyzed by his wild streak. They didn’t have the good sense or the strength of character to offer him the guidance he needed. His underpaid and corrupt parole officer was even less of a candle in the dark. And despite Danny’s repeated, frustrated arguments about where this was headed, Matt ended up dropping out of high school before graduation, and from there, his life just spiraled out of control. He spent the next few years rotating in and out of jail for theft, criminal damage to property, and battery, among others, his future withering away while Danny’s blossomed, first at MIT, then at a highly paid job in a tech company based nearby.

As he motored across the Neponset River, Matt ruefully remembered how he hadn’t seen much of Danny before his death. Matt had only been released from jail a few months before Danny had been offered the job with Reece, and he hadn’t seen much of him after that. Matt had been busy setting up his business—with the help of a life-altering loan from his kid brother, he thought with a twinge of shame. In a sense, he owed him his life.

It was Danny who’d sat him down and talked some sense into him—finally. Made him realize he couldn’t keep doing this. And got him to straighten up.

The way out Danny had suggested was simple. Turn what did the damage in the first place into something positive. Use it to carve out a new life. And Matt listened. He found a small car shop in Quincy that was closing down, and took over the lease. The plan he and Danny came up with was for him to find and fix up classic cars. Matt had a soft spot for American muscle cars from the sixties and seventies, like the Mustang he was now driving, a highly collectible model, a car he and Danny had fantasized about owning ever since they’d watched Steve McQueen catapult one across the streets of San Francisco—a movie they’d only seen about three dozen times. He knew it would be hard to part with it once he was done restoring it, but with a bit of luck, he’d be able to sell it for seventy grand, maybe more, probably to some deskbound executive in need of a weekend toy. In the heady days before the credit crunch, Matt had built up a solid reputation in car enthusiast circles. He’d even sold a couple to guys whose cars he’d stolen years earlier, not that they knew it. Things had been looking up for him, all while Danny had been sucked into the black hole of his new job. A black hole that had ultimately swallowed up his life.

Or had it?

Was it possible that Danny was still alive?

Bellinger had made a convincing argument for it. And he’d been grabbed seconds after making it. That had to mean something.

Whether Danny was still alive or not, the idea that they’d all been lied to, that someone knew the truth and had kept it from them—the idea that someone, not fate, had taken Danny away from them—felt like acid in his throat.

He wasn’t about to let it slide.

He took the Willard Street exit and turned into Copeland after the roundabout, and his fury swelled even more as he thought back to how the news of Danny’s death had devastated their parents. It was bad enough their eldest son was a convicted felon. To lose Danny too—their pride and joy, the redeemer of the family name—was too much to bear. Their mom had died a couple of months later. Despite the complicated medical terminology the doctors insisted on using, Matt knew it was simply a case of a broken heart. He also knew he was partly to blame. He knew the havoc raging in her veins started the day he’d been arrested that first time, if not earlier. His dad hadn’t fared much better. Danny’s job came with life coverage, and though the insurance payout paid for the nursing home and allowed their dad some minor touches of additional comfort, he’d been left a demolished man. He and Matt had hardly spoken at his mom’s funeral, and Matt hadn’t been out to see him since that bleak day in January. Then almost a year to the day later, the local sheriff, a craggy old nemesis, had managed to track Matt down to his garage in Quincy and given him the news of his dad’s death. A stroke, he’d said, although Matt had his doubts about that too.

Bellinger’s words echoed in his mind. Someone had taken Danny, and it was linked to something that just happened in the skies of Antarctica. It sounded outlandish and surreal. Only it clearly wasn’t. The guys he’d just gone up against were very real. Highly professional. Well equipped. Ruthless. And not overly concerned with discretion.

The implications of that last point were particularly worrying.

He coasted east on Copeland, the Mustang’s forty-year-old headlights struggling to break through the swarm of cottonlike snowflakes. With no other cars around, the snow had had time to settle, covering the road ahead with a thin, undisturbed white duvet. He passed Buckley and motored on until he reached the 7-Eleven and the turnoff into the alleyway that led to his shop, and just before turning into it, a remote corner of his mind registered a set of tire tracks in the fresh snow.

They belonged to a single car that had veered off Copeland. He couldn’t see down the alley. His shop was tucked away about a hundred yards back from the main road, and there were no streetlights that way, but the tire tracks were more than enough to trip his internal alarm, as they could only have been heading to his place. There was nothing else down there.

Problem was, he wasn’t expecting anyone.

Which didn’t bode well for the rest of his magical night.

Chapter 17

Amundsen Sea, Antarctica

“You need to come here. There’s something you need to see.” The caller wasn’t a native English speaker, and Gracie couldn’t place his accent. And although he spoke slowly and deliberately, his words were laced with an urgency that came through loud and clear, despite the less-than-crystal clarity of the satellite link.

“Slow down a second,” Gracie said. “Who are you exactly, and how’d you get this number?”

“My name is Ameen. Brother Ameen, if you like.”

“And you’re calling from Egypt?”

“Yes. From Deir Al-Suryan—the Monastery of the Syrians, in Wadi Natrun.”

Her internal kook-alert monitor, which had already moved up to yellow before the man had even started talking, got a slight nudge up to blue.

“And how’d you get this number?” she asked again, a slight edge to her voice now.

“I called your Cairo bureau.”

“And they gave it to you?”

Much as her vexation was clear, the man wasn’t going out of his way to placate her. Instead, he simply said, “I told them I was calling on behalf of Father Jerome.”

The name bounced around Gracie’s tired mind for a moment, before landing on the obvious association. “What, the Father Jerome?”

“Yes,” he assured her. “The very same.”

Her monitor took a step back to yellow. “And you’re calling on his behalf from Egypt? Is that where he is?”

It suddenly occurred to her that she hadn’t read anything about the world famous humanitarian for quite a while. Which was unusual, given his highly public, if reluctantly so, profile, and given the huge organization that he’d founded and still ran, as far as she knew.

“Yes, he’s here. He’s been here for almost a year.”

“Okay, well, now that you’ve got me on the line,” she said, “what’s this about?”

“You need to come here. To see Father Jerome.”

This surprised her. “Why?”

“We saw your broadcast. You were the one to see the sign. You brought it to the world.”

“ ‘ The sign’ ? ”

Dalton and Finch were eyeing her curiously. She gave them an I’m-not-sure-where-this-is-going shrug.

“For whatever reason,” Brother Ameen said, “divine or otherwise, you were there. It’s your story. And, of course, I’m familiar with your work. People listen to you. Your reputation is solid. Which is why I am telling this to you and you only.”

“You haven’t told me anything yet.”

Brother Ameen paused, then said, “The symbol you witnessed, there, over the ice. It’s here too.”

An altogether different alarm blared inside her, one that sent her pulse rocketing. “What, you’ve got it there too? In the sky?” Her words also visibly snagged Dalton and Finch’s attention.

“No, not in the sky.”

“Where then?”

“You need to come here. To see it for yourself.”

Gracie’s kook monitor fluttered upward again. “I’m going to need a little more than that.”

“It’s hard to explain.”

“Why don’t you try.”

Brother Ameen seemed to weigh his words for a moment, then said, “Father Jerome’s not exactly here, at the monastery. He was here. He came to us several months ago. He was . . . troubled. And after a few weeks, he . . . he went up into the mountain. There’s a cave, you see. A cave that provides the basics—you know, a shelter with a bed to sleep in, a stove to cook on. Men of God go there when they’re looking for solitude, when they don’t want to be disturbed. Sometimes, they stay there for days. Sometimes, weeks. Months even.”

“And Father Jerome is there?”

“Yes.”

Gracie didn’t quite know what to make of that. “What does that have to do with me?”

The man hesitated. He seemed uncomfortable with what he was about to tell her. “He’s a changed man, Miss Logan. Something . . . something we don’t quite understand has happened to him. And since he’s been up in the cave, he’s been writing. A lot. He’s been filling one journal after another with his thoughts. And on some of their pages, there’s a drawing. A recurring drawing, one he’s painted all over the walls of the cave.”

Gracie’s skin prickled.

“It’s the sign, Miss Logan. The sign you saw over the ice.”

Gracie’s mind scrambled to process what he’d just told her. An obvious question fought its way out of the confused mire. “No offense, Brother, but—”

“I know what you’re going to say, Miss Logan.” He cut her off. “And of course, you’ve every right to be skeptical. I wouldn’t expect any less of you, of someone with your intellect. But you need to hear me out. There isn’t a television up in the cave. We don’t even have one here at the monastery, nor a radio for that matter. Father Jerome hasn’t seen your broadcast.”

Gracie’s kook-o-meter was having trouble sticking to one direction. “Well, I’m not sure your word on that’s gonna get me hopping on a plane just yet.”

“No, you don’t understand,” Brother Ameen added, the restraint in his voice struggling to contain the urgency he clearly felt. “It’s not something he only just started to do.”

An unsettling realization chilled her gut. “What are you saying? When did he start drawing this sign?”

His answer struck her like a spear.

“Seven months ago. He’s been drawing the sign over and over again for seven months.”

Chapter 18

Quincy,Massachusetts

Pure instinct took over and Matt turned in early, pulling into the lot of the 7-Eleven just before the alleyway.

Being a twenty-four-hour store, it was open, but there were no other cars outside. He flicked the Mustang’s lights off but left the engine gurgling, and just sat there for a moment, bathed by the alternating red-and-green flicker of the store’s Christmas lights, taking stock of the situation.

They were here already. Waiting for him. Had to be.

How?

He quickly segued back to Bellinger’s abduction. They must have been watching Bellinger. Maybe even listening to his calls. And if they were, they knew about his call to Matt. And if this was about Danny, then they knew all about Matt already.

And Matt had obviously become a problem for them.

Wonderful.

He gave his immediate surroundings a quick scan but didn’t notice anything that jarred. They had to be waiting for him near his garage. He put himself in their place and could almost picture the perfect spot where they’d have parked, out of sight, ready to ambush him on his return. Bastards. How could they react so quickly? It had only been, what, not even an hour since he’d leapt out of their van?

They weren’t short of resources.

Which wasn’t helping on the worrisome front.

He switched the engine off, pulled up his coat collar, and climbed out of the car, his eyes stealthily alert for any movement. He took a few quick steps over to the store and huddled under its awning, using the pause to give the area another quick once-over.

Nothing.

Just the single set of tracks headed down the alleyway to the side of the 7-Eleven, disappearing into the darkness, taunting him.

He stepped inside, triggering a two-toned electronic chime that brought him to the attention of Sanjay, the store’s congenial owner, who was busy restocking the hot dog grill.

Sanjay smiled, “Hey, Matt,” then noted the dusting of snow on Matt’s head with a bemused expression and said, “It’s really coming down, isn’t it?” In mid-sentence, his forehead crinkled with confusion as he registered Matt’s battered condition.

Matt just nodded absently, his mind still processing the situation while he made sure there was no one else around. “Sure is,” he finally replied after the distracted beat, then his face darkened and he said, “Sanjay, I need to go out the back way.”

Sanjay stared at him for a moment. “Okay,” he said. “Whatever you need, Matt.” They’d known each other ever since Matt had taken over the lease on the garage down the road. Matt had been a good customer and a reliable neighbor, and by now, Sanjay knew him well enough to know that Matt wouldn’t be asking if it wasn’t important.

He led him to the back of the store and unlocked the door.

Matt paused at the doorway. “Don’t lock it just yet, will you? I won’t be long.”

Sanjay nodded hesitatingly. “Okay.” He glanced away, then turned back and added, “You sure you’re okay?”

“Not really,” Matt shrugged, then slipped out the door.

There were no cars around. He stayed low and close to the wall of the back lot and headed away from the main road, making his way past Sanjay’s car and the Dumpsters. Any light from the store quickly petered out, and he was soon in total darkness with only a diffused moon glow to guide him. He ducked into a patch of trees and over to a low, single-story brick structure that housed a small law firm. As expected, all of its lights were out, and no cars were around. With his left leg and hip blazing with pain with every step, he scuttled along the back wall of the building quietly until it ran out.

He bent down and chanced a peek around the corner. He’d read it right. A dark Chrysler 300C was parked in one of the law firm’s spots, huddled behind the far side of the building, about twenty yards from the entrance to his shop. He could just about make out the silhouettes of two figures inside.

They were waiting for him. Either that, or they were about eight hours early for their appointment with their lawyer, and no one was that enthusiastic about meeting a lawyer.

Matt inched back into cover, his mind racing through his options. His first instinct was to charge in, beat them to a pulp, and pound the truth out of them. A few years back, he might have done just that, despite the odds. But right now, the odds weren’t good, and much as he was desperate to take them on, he grudgingly forced himself to accept that it would be the wrong move. He was hurting all over, and his left leg was barely holding him up. He wouldn’t stand a chance, and he knew it.

He had a momentary lapse and thought of calling the cops, but again kiboshed that idea. He didn’t trust them. Never did and never would. Besides, as far as the cops were concerned, he could always count on losing any his-word-against-theirs contest. And, as he’d realized, the guys in the Chrysler seemed to have a solid setup, which meant they had connections. All he had was a rap sheet that would dry up an inkjet cartridge.

Another idea, a more promising one, elbowed its way into that one’s place. He quickly put it through its paces, looking for flaws, and decided it was his best option. His best option out of a total of one, actually. He sneaked a last glance at the Chrysler, convinced himself that they weren’t going anywhere just yet, then made his way back to the 7-Eleven.

He cut through the store, past Sanjay, who gave him a worried, quizzical glance. Without breaking step, Matt flicked him a stay-put, though not hugely reassuring gesture.

“I need some tape,” he told him. “Something solid and sticky, packing tape, that kind of thing.”

Sanjay thought for a beat, then nodded. “I’ll get you what I have,” he said as Matt disappeared out the front door.

A quick glance around yielded no visible threats. Matt walked to the back of the Mustang and popped the trunk. With practiced fingers, he pulled back the lining along its side wall. He reached in behind it and found the small niche he was looking for. In it was a small black box, not much bigger than a packet of cigarettes. Matt pulled it out and stuffed it in his inside breast pocket. He then pulled out the lug wrench from the spare wheel’s tool kit, closed the trunk, and ducked back into the store.

Sanjay was waiting for him. In his hands was a roll of two-inch-thick duct tape. Matt just grabbed it, blurted out a guttural “Perfect,” and kept going.

He crept back to the corner of the brick building and peered around its corner. The Chrysler was still there, as he’d left it. He checked the perimeter, backed up, and crept into the shrubs and trees behind the parking bay, keeping low. He maneuvered to a spot around fifteen yards behind the Chrysler, making sure he wasn’t in the line of sight of their mirrors. From there, he dropped to the ground and crawled the rest of the way.

Matt advanced on elbows that were still suffering from his leap out of the van. He ignored the pain and kept going until he was right behind the Chrysler. He paused to catch his breath and check for a reaction. None came. Satisfied that he hadn’t been spotted, he rolled onto his back and pulled himself under the car. He quickly found a strut that would suit his purpose. He reached into his pocket, pulled out the tracker, and taped it to the strut.

He was almost done when he felt a small weight shift in the car, which was followed by the click of an opening door. He turned his head sideways, to the passenger side of the car, and froze as he saw first one foot, then the other, drop to the ground, faintly illuminated by the cabin’s inside light. They crunched into the snow, and the light dimmed as the man swung the door back quietly without clicking it shut.

He felt a surge of panic as a sudden realization hit him. Very slowly, he angled his head sideways to look behind the car and saw the trail he’d left behind in the snow. It led right up to the car, a black streak through the pearlescent shimmer of the light snow cover.

His body tensed up as he watched the man take a few steps. He was heading to the back of the car. Matt’s eyes stayed on him, fast-forwarding to the moment the man would spot the trail and what the best move would be. With his heart in his throat, he followed the man’s feet around past the rear wheel, farther back to the edge of the car—then they stopped. Every nerve ending in Matt’s body throbbed with alarm, and his fingers reached under his coat and tightened against the handle of the lug wrench. He was about to swing his legs out in an attempt to kick the man off-balance when he turned so he was now facing the wall. Matt then heard a zipper open, and his body pulled back from Defcon five as he realized the man was just out there to take a leak.

He waited for him to finish, then watched without moving an inch as the man got back into the car. Matt made sure the tracker was solidly attached, then slid back out from under the car and retreated along the same path he’d taken, only pausing briefly to commit the car’s license place to memory.

He found Sanjay standing by the cash register, clearly unable to do much, out of worry.

Matt gave him a firm nod of gratitude as he reached over for a pencil and scribbled down the Chrysler’s license plate on a flyer. He tucked it into his pocket, then turned to Sanjay. “Do me a favor. Anyone asks, you haven’t seen me, not since lunchtime. Okay?”

Sanjay nodded. “You gonna tell me what’s going on?”

Matt’s expression clouded under competing instincts. “Better you don’t get involved. Safer for you that way.”

Sanjay acknowledged his words somberly, then hesitated and said, “You’ll be careful, won’t you?” in an uncertain tone, as if unsure about how much he should say or get involved.

Matt half-smiled. “That’s the plan.” Then he thought of something, took a few steps to the fridge, and pulled out a can of Coke. He held it up to Sanjay and said, “My tab still good?”

Sanjay visibly relaxed a touch. “Of course.”

And with that, Matt was gone.

Chapter 19

Amundsen Sea, Antarctica

“So what’s the verdict? Do we believe this guy?” Gracie leaned her head against the cold glass of the conference room’s window. Outside, the light was virtually unchanged, the sky infused with the same grayish pallor, which didn’t help her flagging spirit. She needed to rest, to take a step back and give her mind a chance to reboot, if only for an hour or two. It had to be the equivalent of way past midnight, and the continuous daylight of the Antarctic’s austral summer had already wreaked havoc on her body clock, but there were still too many questions that needed to be answered.

“Gracie, come on,” Dalton replied. “He’s talking about Father Jerome.”

“So?”

“Are you kidding me? The guy’s a living saint. He’s not gonna fake something like this. That’d be like—I don’t know—like saying the Dalai Lama’s a liar.”

Father Jerome wasn’t technically a living saint. There was no such thing, since dying was a prerequisite to receiving the honor of sainthood, at least as far as the Vatican was concerned. But he was pretty much a shoo-in for beatification, if not canonization, at some point in the future.

In his case, though, the term saint was more than appropriate.

He’d begun his life in 1949 as Alvaro Suarez, the son of a humble farming couple in the foothills of the Cantabrian Mountains in northern Spain. His youth was far from cosseted. His father died when he was five, leaving his mother with the unenviable task of providing for six children in a Spain that was still under Franco’s iron fist and recovering from years of war. Raised a Catholic, the young Alvaro—the youngest of his siblings—showed a great resilience and generosity of character, especially during a harsh winter when a viral epidemic almost took away his mother and two of his sisters. He credited his faith with giving him the strength to forge ahead despite overwhelming odds, and with helping his mother and sisters pull through, and their salvation further solidified his bond with the Church. Throughout his youth, he was also particularly drawn to the stories of missionaries, of selfless souls doing the work of God in the less fortunate corners of the planet, and by the time he was in his teens, he knew he would devote his life to the Church. Having narrowly escaped becoming one himself, he chose to concentrate on helping orphans and abandoned children. He left home at seventeen and began his journey, joining a seminary in Andalusia before crossing into Africa, where he soon founded the first of many missions. En route, he took his first vows a few months short of his twenty-second birthday, choosing the name of Jerome after Jerome Emiliani, a sixteenth-century Italian priest and the patron saint of orphans. The modern Jerome’s hospices and orphanages were now scattered across the globe. His army of volunteers had turned around the lives of thousands of the world’s poorest children. His charitable work, as it turned out, had even outshone that of the historic figure who inspired him.

Forget the technicalities. The man was indeed a living saint, and Dalton’s point was hard to ignore. Provided what the monk had told Gracie really did involve Father Jerome.

“Yeah, but that wasn’t Father Jerome on the phone, was it? We don’t even know if the caller was really calling from Egypt, much less from the monastery,” she argued.

“Well, we do know Father Jerome is really there,” Finch pointed out.

The reports they’d pulled up after the call confirmed that Father Jerome was indeed in Egypt. He’d fallen ill while working at one of his missions there, close to the border with Sudan, a little over a year ago. After his recovery, he’d pulled back from active duty—he was just shy of sixty now—only going so far as to say he needed to take some time for himself, “to get closer to God,” in his own words. He’d subsequently retreated entirely from public view. Crucially, a couple of brief wire reports did have him traveling north and seeking out the seclusion of the monasteries of Wadi Natrun.

“And how could he actually have drawn what we saw? I mean, how would you draw it?” Gracie argued.

“We need to get a copy of that tape,” Dalton suggested.

Before ending his call, Brother Ameen had offered them a tantalizing piece of corroboration. A British film crew, working for the BBC, had visited the monastery several months earlier. They’d spent a few days there, filming part of a multi-episode documentary that compared the dogmatic approach to faith in Western churches with the more mystical approaches found farther east. They’d managed to get a quick peek inside the cave and shot some footage there, before being turned away by Father Jerome. Brother Ameen assured Gracie it included footage of the priest’s handiwork across its ceiling and walls.

It was proof that Gracie desperately needed to see. The problem was, getting hold of it would most likely alert the filmmakers to its significance—something they didn’t seem to have clicked to, so far—and Gracie could lose the lead on the story. A story that was still virtually exclusively hers.

She let herself sink into the sofa and heaved a sigh of frustration as she pondered Dalton’s suggestion. “No,” she decided, “not yet. We can’t risk it.”

She looked over at Finch, who nodded. After a moment, he said, “So what do you want to do?”

Gracie felt the air around her resonating with expectation. Warring sensations were tugging her in opposite directions, but, deep down, she knew that she’d already made the decision before she’d put down the phone.

With a conviction that surprised her, she said, “I have to go there.” Her eyes danced from Finch to Dalton and back, hoping to find some support.

“I want to believe him,” she explained. “I mean, look, none of this makes sense, right? But what if it’s all real? Can you imagine? If what he’s saying is true . . . Jesus.” She sprang to her feet, pacing around now, gesturing with her arms, her decision somehow liberating her, unleashing a surge of energy that was intoxicating. “I don’t know how this happened, I don’t know what’s really going on here, but, like it or not, we’re part of it, we’re caught up in something . . . exceptional. And the story’s not here anymore. It’s in Egypt. It’s in that monastery. And that’s where I need to be.” She fixed on them fervently. “I mean, what are we gonna do? We can’t stay on this ship forever. We sure as hell can’t go home, not while this thing isn’t resolved.” She paused, studying them, willing a reaction out of them, then she reiterated, “The story’s in Egypt.”

Finch looked thoughtfully at Dalton, turned back to her, and, after an uncertain, so-pregnant-it-must-be-triplets pause, he smiled.

“Let’s do it. Even if it means disappointing the kids. Again.” Finch had two under-tens, a son and a daughter. And although he was divorced, he was still friends with his ex-wife and had been planning to spend Christmas Day with them.

Gracie acknowledged Finch’s comment with a sheepish, clenched expression. She knew it would be tough on him. She didn’t have that problem. She was single and wasn’t seeing anyone special. She wasn’t a huge fan of the end-of-year holidays anyway. As a kid, she’d hated them, especially after her mom died. The cold weather, the short days, the passing of another year, one less year of life—it all felt morbid and sad to her. She turned to Dalton. He nodded, his expression pensive but supportive. He was in too.

Gracie beamed back. “Great.”

“I’ll go talk to the captain,” Finch said. “See how quickly he can get us choppered off this ship. You guys start packing.”

A lesser producer would have debated the point to death before covering his ass by getting his news director’s approval. Finch was rock solid, and right now, Gracie was hugely grateful to have him in her corner. He looked at her, as if reading the thoughts written across her face, gave her a nod of unflinching support, then left the room.

She crossed over to the window again and looked out. The shelf was still disintegrating, but the sign was long gone. In her mind’s eye, she saw it again, and as she relived the shock and awe it had generated in her, in everyone on that ship, a shiver of doubt crept into her.

Her back still to Dalton, she asked, “What do you think? Are we making the right call here?”

He joined her at the window. She glanced over at him, and thought she’d rarely seen him wearing such a solemn expression.

“We’re talking about Father Jerome,” he said, his voice lacking any traces of uncertainty. “If you’re not going to believe him . . . who are you going to believe?”

Chapter 20

Boston, Massachusetts

Matt guided the Mustang back onto the expressway and headed north, toward the city. He was cruising on auto-pilot, without any specific destination in mind, just putting some distance between him and the guys in the Chrysler.

He felt shattered. His brain was all tangled up, and he was having trouble making sense of what had happened since Bellinger called him. After the adrenaline rush from tagging the Chrysler, his body was now crumbling from under him. He needed to rest and think things through, but there were no obvious spots where he could crash out and no one to take him in. No spunky-and-resourceful girlfriend, no reluctantly supportive buddy, no irritable-but-still-smitten ex-wife.

He was on his own.

He rode up the expressway for a while, then drifted onto the South Station off-ramp and ended up at a fifties-style diner on the corner of Kneeland, the only place in town that he knew would be open this late.

He looked like a real mess and drew a couple of contemptuous glances as he stepped inside, which wasn’t ideal. The last thing he needed right now was to get noticed. He disappeared into the men’s room and cleaned himself up as best he could, then grabbed a stool at the far end of the bar. He ordered himself a coffee and decided to add on a cheeseburger, not knowing when he’d have a chance to eat in peace again, and hoping the caffeine-and-protein boost would help carry him through until daybreak.

Although his body still ached from his fall, the food and the coffee helped clear his mind. He asked the waitress for a refill and sifted through his options. He didn’t hold out much hope of being able to do anything to help Bellinger. It seemed pretty clear to him that the hit team that came after them were connected to whatever had happened to Danny, and they weren’t messing around. He was facing pros with serious resources and no inhibitions, and his options were limited, especially given that he didn’t really know much beyond the cryptic words Bellinger had left him with—and the idea that Danny could still be alive. If he was going to get anyone to help him—the press, maybe even the cops, he wasn’t sure who at this point—he needed to know more about what was going on. He could think of two threads to tug. One was the tracker. The other was Bellinger. Or, more accurately, whatever it was that Bellinger knew that put him in their crosshairs. His heart sank at the thought of the harmless scientist, his brother’s buddy, and the dire situation he must now be in, and he seethed with frustration at not being able to do something about it.

Not yet, anyway.

He needed to check the tracker’s position, and he also wanted to see what he could find at Bellinger’s place. And for both lines of attack, he needed to go online.

By now, it was well past midnight, and hotel business centers were the only option at this hour. He asked his waitress and got directions to a nearby Best Western, raided an ATM three doors down from the diner, and pulled into the hotel’s parking lot fifteen minutes later.

The business center by the soulless lobby was open all night, but it was restricted to hotel guests. Given that his home was off-limits for the time being, the idea of a safe bed and a hot shower had its merits, so he gave the receptionist a fake name, took a single, and paid in cash. He was soon ensconced at a workstation with a high-speed connection pumping information to his screen.

He logged onto the tracker’s website and checked its position. Having been a car thief, he appreciated the value of trackers more than anyone, especially when it came to covetable, high-value classics like his Bullitt Mustang. Right now, he was more grateful than ever for having it. The contract he’d taken out had the tracker set up to transmit its location every thirty seconds when the car it was attached to was on the move. It would hibernate and ping its location once every twelve hours if the car was stationary. Assuming the car wasn’t spending a lot of time on the road, the tracker’s battery would normally last around three weeks between recharges, only Matt was pretty sure it was near the end of that cycle and running low on juice. It probably wouldn’t last more than a few days before conking out.