The Sign

This one had more bite.

He felt a tightening at the back of his neck as he read the report and watched the short video of the reporter and the apparition over the ice shelf. He re-read the report and viewed the clip a second time, his face flickering with confusion. He dug deeper and initiated a new search, and got a geyser of hits related to the unexplained sighting, and as he skimmed through them and let the implications they debated sink in, a grim realization dropped further into the roiling pit of his stomach.

This was no small event.

If Danny was somehow involved in it—against his will, Bellinger had insinuated, though Matt couldn’t even begin to imagine what his involvement could have been—then the stakes were much higher than Matt had imagined.

Minutes later, the Mustang was crossing the Longfellow Bridge and veering onto Broadway, a lone car gliding across the desolate cityscape. There was a stark beauty to the stillness around him, but Matt didn’t feel any of it. His mind was swirling with wild theories, and with them came an increasingly uncomfortable feeling, a sense of a sinister malignancy closing in on him.

He tried to stay focused as he made his way to the intersection with Fayette and a three-story Victorian house that matched Bellinger’s address. He did a precautionary drive-by, looped back on himself a couple of blocks up the street, and cruised past the house again for another look. It had stopped snowing, and the neighborhood was now huddled under a couple of inches of white frosting. The lights of a lone Christmas tree blinked out of a bay window on the ground floor, but otherwise, the rest of the building was dark, and the street seemed equally comatose. He also noticed that the snow outside the house was undisturbed.

He pulled into a small alley that separated the house from the similar, slightly larger one next door, and switched off the throaty V-8—not the most discreet of engines. He waited a moment to make doubly sure he was alone, then climbed out of the car. Everything around him was eerily quiet, the air cold and torpid under a moon that shone more brightly now that it wasn’t filtered by a veil of snow. He rummaged through his glove box and found what he needed, his trusted Leatherman multi-tool and a small, stiff piece of wire, and pocketed them, then climbed out of the car, pulled up his collar, and walked briskly over to the house’s front porch.

The labels on its buzzer showed three occupants, which matched the number of floors—one apartment per floor. Bellinger’s name was on top, which Matt took to mean that he had the penthouse. The lock on the communal entrance didn’t pose too much of a challenge. It was a five-pin tumbler, a standard household lock that was surprisingly easy to pick, even without his preferred tools for such a job—a pair of paper clips. Getting past the lock on the door to Bellinger’s place, up the stairs and on the third floor, was equally effortless. Matt had had way too much practice over the years.

Easing the door closed behind him, he slipped in quietly without turning the lights on, his eyes quickly adjusting to the darkness. He stepped deeper into the apartment, wishing he had a flashlight. The small entrance hall opened up to twin, open-plan living and dining rooms with a two-sided gas fireplace between them, its mantelpiece lined with a dozen or so Christmas cards. Moonlight bathed the wide, bay-windowed space with a delicate, silvery sheen that ushered him farther in. He advanced carefully, all senses on high alert. He spotted an upright halogen lamp with a dimmer switch in a near corner, by a large leather couch and away from the windows, and decided it wouldn’t be too visible from the outside on a low setting. He chanced it, barely turning it up. The dimmer buzzed slightly as the lamp suffused the room in a faint, yellowish gleam.

The room was impeccably arranged and ordered. A sleek, glass-and-chrome desk faced a wall on the opposite side of the room, away from the window. Matt angled across to it. It was covered with neat piles of newspapers, books, magazines, printouts, and unopened mail. The clutter of a busy professional with an inquisitive mind. Matt spotted a small box of Bellinger’s business cards, picked one up, and pocketed it. He could see that something was prominently missing from the man’s desk. A computer. A large flat screen was still there, as was an orphaned docking station for a laptop, and a wireless mouse. The laptop itself was, it seemed, gone.

Had they been here already?

Matt tensed up and gave the room another scan, his ears now listening intently for the slightest disturbance. They wouldn’t have had any trouble getting in. They had Bellinger, which meant they had his keys. He thought about it for a beat. If they had been here, they were probably already long gone. It had been maybe three hours since he and their van had parted company.

Still, he had to be sure.

With an even lighter step, he crept across the hallway and checked the rooms at the back of the apartment. He found two bedrooms, one a large master suite overlooking the side street and the back, the other smaller and sparsely furnished, both empty. He checked the bathrooms, also clear. He relaxed a touch and made his way back to the living room, where a blinking light on a coffee table caught his eye. It came from the base unit of a cordless phone that had waiting messages—just one of them, according to its LED display.

He clicked the playback button. An androgynous, digital voice informed Matt that the message came in at 12:47 a.m., which piqued Matt’s interest. People didn’t normally get calls at that hour.

“Dude, where the hell did you disappear to?” a hyper voice on the machine quizzed. “What’s going on? You’re not home, you’re not picking up your cell. Come on, pick up the damn phone, will ya? This thing’s gathering some serious mass. The blogs are going loco over it, you gotta see this. Anyway, call me back. I’m staying locked on the news in case it decides to make another appearance. Call me, or . . . whatever. I’ll see you at the ranch tomorrow.” He sounded deflated before he hung up.

Matt grabbed a pen, picked up the handset, and hit star-69. Another digital voice recited the caller’s number to him. It was local. As he wrote it down on the back of Bellinger’s business card, a faint noise intruded at the edge of his hearing, a car pulling up outside the building, shortly followed by the dull thuds of car doors closing.

He crossed to the window, but the crackle of brief radio transmissions told him what it was before he peered out and saw the two men walking away from an unmarked sedan and disappearing into the building.

Coming to check out Bellinger’s place.

Which meant one of two things.

Either they were more goons, on the same payroll as the guys who’d stuffed him into their van, or they were plainclothes cops and Bellinger’s body had already turned up.

Matt could just imagine how that one would play out.

He flinched as the entry phone in Bellinger’s apartment buzzed, then sprinted to the front door and cracked it open. He waited, listening intently, his heartbeat thudding in his ears, then it buzzed again, this one longer, more impatient.

The buzzing seemed to confirm the latter scenario. The hit team had Bellinger, meaning they had Bellinger’s keys. They wouldn’t need to ring up. Matt felt the blood seep from his face, and a crippling sense of further unreality swept through him as he pictured what might have happened to Bellinger. He waited by the door, his mind racing through possible outcomes, none of which seemed promising.

The entry phone stayed ominously silent.

He decided to take another look, and leaving the door slightly ajar, he scuttled back to the bay window and peeked out.

He could see the two men standing by their car, which he could now tell was a standard issue Crown Vic. One of them was on his cell phone, but Matt couldn’t hear what he was saying. Matt relaxed somewhat. They came, they buzzed, no answer, they’d leave. Or so he hoped. Then he saw the other man cock his head toward the entrance, as if reacting to something, before disappearing under the porch again.

Matt’s instincts sharpened. He slipped back to the door and, very quietly, picked up the entry phone’s handset. He came in mid-conversation.

“—on the second floor,” a woman’s voice was explaining. “Bellinger’s got the penthouse directly over me.” She hesitated, then asked, “Is everything okay?”

The man ignored her question and asked her, “Does Mr. Bellinger live alone, ma’am?”

Does, Matt thought, for a second. Not Did. Present tense. Maybe Bellinger was all right.

The cheery thought was quickly overruled. The guys in the van hadn’t looked like they were kidding. Bellinger was dead, he knew it. Why else would these guys be here? Why would they be asking if he lived alone?

The woman’s voice had a nervous quaver to it. “Yes, I think so. I mean, he’s single. I don’t think he lives with anyone. But I’m surprised he’s not picking up. I’m pretty sure he’s home.”

Her comment struck Matt like a bucket of ice water.

“What makes you say that?” the man asked, his voice snapping to attention.

“Well, I heard him come back. These are old houses, and even with the refurb, the floorboards have this creak in them that’s always there, and I can hear him coming in and out, especially when it’s late and it’s quiet outside—”

“Ma’am,” the man interrupted abruptly, clearly impatient.

“I think he came in earlier,” she said with more urgency, “and then he went out again. But then he came back.”

“When did you hear him come in?”

“Not long ago. Ten minutes, maybe? He should be upstairs.”

Matt’s nerves went haywire.

He heard the man’s tone take on a much harder edge as he ordered the woman, “I need you to let us in, ma’am, right now,” followed by a shout to his partner and the distinct sound of the entrance door snapping open.

Seconds later, heavy footfalls were charging up the stairs.

Chapter 21

Amundsen Sea, Antarctica

Gracie’s stomach fluttered as she watched Dalton rise off the deck of the royal research ship. Unlike the Shackleton, its stablemate, the James Clark Ross wasn’t endowed with a helipad. Transfers at sea could only be made by winching passengers to and from a hovering chopper. Which, in sub-zero weather and with a gargantuan wall of ice collapsing a few hundred yards away, wasn’t for the fainthearted.

It was now six hours since the sign had first appeared. After their extended, high-definition clip was broadcast and carried by the other channels, the news had simply exploded. It was all over the news updates, splashed across the world’s TV screens, and on every Internet news site. Armies of reporters and pundits were talking about it, wondering about it, offering wild theories. People across America and in the rest of the world were being interviewed and asked what they thought the sightings meant. As expected, some of the responses were glib and dismissive, but most people were seriously intrigued. And it was still the middle of the night across North America. Most people there were asleep. The next day, Gracie knew, was when the real frenzy would begin. Her satphone hadn’t stopped ringing with requests for interviews and comments, and her inbox was also flooded.

Across every channel, every news network, one expert after another was being wheeled in to try and explain it. Physicists, climatologists, all kinds of scientists, dragged in from every corner of the planet. None of them had a clue. They couldn’t offer any remotely convincing insight into how or why it was happening, and while that excited some people, it also scared a lot of them. The religious pundits were faring better. Faith was one explanation that didn’t carry the burden of proof. Priests, rabbis, and muftis were voicing their thoughts on the sign with increasing candor. On one clip that Gracie had watched, a Baptist pastor was asked what he thought about it. He replied that people of faith everywhere were watching it very closely, and wondered if there was anything other than the divine to explain it. It was a view that several other interviewees also expressed—and that perspective was gaining ground. Faith, not science, was where the true explanation lay. The thought consumed Gracie as she strained against the downdraft from the Lynx’s powerful rotor and shielded her eyes to watch Dalton’s slow ascent. A small smile cracked across her face as he waved to her from above, coaxing a wave back. Consummate filmmaker that he was, he held a small camcorder in one hand, capturing every hair-raising moment.

She noticed Finch turn, and followed his gaze to see the ship’s captain join them. He looked up, taking stock of the transfers’ progress, which had to be swiftly executed, as they were already at the edge of the helicopter’s operating range, even with its additional fuel tanks, then turned to Finch and Gracie.

“I got a call from someone at the Pentagon,” he informed them, shouting to be heard against the deafening rotor wash.

Gracie glanced over at Finch, both of them visibly and suddenly on edge.

“They wanted me to make sure no one left the ship before their people got here,” the captain added. “You in particular,” he specified, pointing his finger at Gracie.

She felt a paralysis of worry. “What did you tell them?”

The captain grinned. “I said we were in the middle of nowhere and I didn’t think anyone was going anywhere for the time being.”

Gracie breathed out in relief. “Thanks,” she said and beamed at him.

The captain shrugged it off. “It wasn’t even a request. It was more like an order. And I don’t remember signing up for anyone’s army.” His words were laced with bemused indignation. “I’ll expect you to kick up a big stink if they ship me off to Guantánamo.”

Gracie smiled. “You’ve got it.”

He glanced overhead at the chopper, then leaned in closer. “We’re also getting flooded with requests from journalists and reporters from all over the place. I’m thinking we should seriously bump up our room rate and rake in some cash.”

“What are you telling them?” Finch asked.

He shrugged. “We’ve hung up a no vacancy sign for the moment.”

“They’ll keep asking,” Gracie told him, “if they’re any good at what they do.”

“I know,” the captain said, “and it’s hard to say no, but this is a research ship. I don’t want to turn it into a Carnival cruise. Trouble is, we’re the only ones out here. The only other ships within a couple hundred miles are a Japanese whaler and the Greenpeace vessel that’s hounding it, and I don’t think either of them’s in a particularly hospitable mood.” His deep-set, clear eyes twinkled mischievously at Gracie. “Looks like it’s still your exclusive.”

She smiled back, the gratitude evident in her expression. “What can I say? I must be blessed.”

“I’m kind of surprised you’re in such a rush to get off my ship while everyone else seems so desperate to get on,” the captain queried with playful, barely disguised suspicion.

Gracie glanced at Finch; then, without trying too hard to throw their host off the trail, she grinned and told him, “That’s what makes us the best damn investigative reporting team in the business. Always one step ahead of the story.”

As if to rescue her from the uncomfortable moment, the harness appeared again, and a crewmember helped Gracie strap herself into it. Once she was safely locked in, he waved to the winch operator in the chopper, and the slack in the cable began to tighten up.

“Thanks again, for everything,” she yelled to the captain, emphasizing the last word in reference to Finch’s request that he keep their departure under wraps. He’d graciously agreed, without asking questions, and she felt a slight pang of guilt at not being able to share the whole story behind their hasty exit with him.

He flicked her a small parting wave. “It’s been our pleasure. Just let us know what you find out there,” he added with a telling wink. “We’ll be watching.”

Before she could react, the cable went taut, yanking her into the ice-speckled air. She breathlessly watched the ship recede beneath her, dreading the marathon journey ahead and the uncertain reward awaiting her at its end.

Chapter 22

West Antarctic Ice Sheet

The four ghosts on the ice shelf stayed low and watched as the Royal Navy chopper glided over the ship, just under half a mile west of their position.

They weren’t worried about being spotted. Their gear would more than take care of that. They just lay there, hugging the packed snow, invisible in their full “snow white” camouflage parkas and pants, faces hidden behind white balaclavas, eyes and mouths peeking out from unsettling round openings. Even the soles of their boots, which they scrubbed down every morning before heading into action, were white. Four snowmobiles, also white and without markings, squatted nearby. Hidden under white camouflage netting, they were also virtually undetectable from the sky.

The team leader monitored the chopper through his high-powered binoculars as it lifted the last of the news crew off the ship. A hint of a smile of satisfaction flitted across his chapped lips. Things were going as planned. Which wasn’t a given, considering how tight the timing had been and how frantic the deployment of his unit had been.

The operation had gone live four days earlier. They’d left their training camp in North Carolina and flown to Christchurch in New Zealand, where an Air National Guard C-17 Globemaster had been waiting on the tarmac to whisk them down to the National Science Foundation’s McMurdo Station, on the ice continent’s Ross Island. From there, an LC-130 Hercules aircraft fitted with skis had ferried them to an isolated staging area on the ice shelf itself, fifteen miles south of their current position. Snowmobiles that they’d flown in with them had carried them on the last leg of their thirteen-thousand-mile journey.

The extreme change of climate and the travel through multiple time zones were brutal and would have debilitated most people, but it didn’t affect them. They’d trained extensively for this operation and knew what to expect.

To say the job was a high-value, priority-one assignment was underselling it, big-time. He’d never experienced anything quite as intense, nor as uncompromising, as the rigorous interview process and psychological profiling he’d undergone before getting the job. Once that was settled, no expense had been spared in either the training facilities or the gear that was made available to him and his team. The client clearly didn’t have budget issues. Then again, a lot of the firm’s clients were governments—the U.S. government being its biggest—and they could usually afford what the job requirements would dictate.

In this case, however, it was clear to the team leader that the stakes were higher than on any of his previous assignments. Beirut, Bosnia, Afghanistan, then Iraq—he now saw those frenzied, violent years as mere stepping-stones. They’d led him here, to being selected to lead this unit.

It was, without a doubt, the gig of a lifetime.

And now, after all the preparation and after an interminable wait, it was finally under way. He’d started to think it would never happen. After completing their training, he and the rest of the small team of “contractors”—the spin-speak name always made him smirk, but he was more than happy to avoid the disdain associated with the more accurate “mercenary” label—had been put on standby. They’d waited for the go signal for months. The team leader didn’t like getting paid to sit still. It wasn’t his style. Like the others in his squad, he was ex-Force Recon, the U.S. Marines’ equivalent to the Navy’s SEALs or the Army’s Delta Force. Swift, Silent, Deadly, the Force Recon motto, didn’t exactly apply to sitting around watching endless hours of TV in isolated, if comfortable barracks. The world out there—misguided, tyrannized, evil—was waiting.

Something in his pack warbled. He glanced at his watch. The call was expected.

He checked on the chopper’s position again. It was banking away in a wide arc. He pulled out his satellite phone, a tiny Iridium handset. It was no bigger than a regular cell phone, if not for the ten-inch antenna that pivoted out from it and the STU-III voice encryption module clipped onto its base. He pressed the answer key. A sequence of beeps mixed with static told him the call was bouncing its way halfway across the planet. He waited for the red LED to tell him the call was secure, then spoke.

“This is Fox One.”

After the briefest of lags, a computerized male voice responded. “What’s your status?”

It sounded like Stephen Hawking was calling, and he knew his own voice sounded just as robotic at the other end. Although he and the project’s overseer had dodged bullets together on more than one continent, the military-level, 256-bit voice encryption made their voices unrecognizable, in case someone was eavesdropping. Which was unlikely enough, but one could never be too careful, which was also why a second safeguard was built into his phone’s microchip, enabling a hybrid of hopping and sweeping scrambling. Only another phone fitted with the same chip could decode their transmissions. Any other phone would only pick up a burst of ear-piercing static.

“We’re ready to roll,” Fox One replied.

“Any problems I should know about?”

“Negative.”

The synthesized voice came back. “Good. Pull your men out and initiate the next phase.”

The team leader terminated the call and glanced up at the sky. It was back to its monotone, off-white, bleak self again.

Not a trace, he mused. Perfect.

Chapter 23

Cambridge,Massachusetts

Matt slipped the phone back into its cradle and eased the door shut before darting through the hallway and into the main bedroom.

He had to get the hell out of there. They were only seconds away.

He ignored the near window in the bedroom and went straight to the back wall where, in the pale moonlight coming in through the window, he’d earlier spotted a half-glazed door that gave on to a ten-foot-square balcony. With his heartbeat throbbing in his ears, he peered out and saw that, as he’d suspected, it led to a fire escape.

He joggled the door handle, but it was locked. He looked left and right for a key, but there was nothing in plain sight. He pulled and yanked at it again, a hopeless, desperate gesture, the door stubbornly refusing to budge, then was glancing back toward the hallway, his brain tripping wildly, like the ever-accelerating countdown of a time bomb, wondering how much time he still had, visualizing the two men bursting into the apartment, when a heavy knock pounded the front door.

“Open up, police.”

He didn’t want to get caught in there. He was sure Bellinger was dead, and here he was, in his apartment, an apartment he’d broken into, the apartment of a dead man who was last seen running away from him after they’d had a bust-up in a crowded bar.

A slam-dunk with any jury—if it ever got to that.

Somehow, he didn’t think he’d make it that far.

His reflexes took over.

He grabbed a side table by the bed, swung it back, and hurled it through the window of the balcony door. Glass exploded as the heavy wooden console flew out and thudded heavily onto the decked floor. The posse outside the door must have heard it, as a more pointed shout of “Open up, police” echoed from the stairwell, a shout with a distinct finality to it. Matt dashed across the room, only he didn’t go for the balcony. Instead, he scurried in the opposite direction, away from it, and dived behind the door to the bedroom just as the front door erupted inward.

Two men thundered in, quickly got their bearings, and charged into the master bedroom, rocketing up to the shattered balcony door. Matt squeezed himself tightly against the wall and heard one of them yell, “He’s gone down the fire escape,” adding, “Check out the rest of the place” while using the muzzle of his handgun to sweep away the shards of glass that stuck up from the window frame, before clambering over and disappearing into the darkness outside. His partner darted past Matt, and just as he felt him go by, Matt slipped out from his hiding place and launched himself after him.

The man was halfway through the dark hallway when Matt tackled him from behind. They tumbled onto the hardwood floor, spilling over each other, something metallic clattering across the floor away from the downed cop. A handgun, by the sound of it. The man wasn’t too tall or bulky, but his thin arms had a fierce, coiled energy within them and he fought back like a caged mongoose, twisting around and lashing out with rapid-fire blows to try and get out from under Matt. Matt knew he didn’t have time on his side and had to end this fast. He weathered a couple of sacrificial blows to his ribs to set up an opening for a solid hit, then saw one and let loose with an anvil of a punch that caught the downed man just below the left ear and pounded the air out of him. The man curled over, groaning heavily. Matt used the brief respite to roll him back onto his front and felt something under his jacket. He reached under it and found a pair of handcuffs in a belt pouch. He pulled the groggy man a couple of feet to the wall and quickly locked his arms around a radiator pipe. A quick glance around yielded a coat rack overhead that held some jackets, caps, an umbrella, and a scarf that Matt yanked down and stuffed into the man’s mouth before roping it around his head a couple of times and tucking it in to secure it in place.

Without even glancing back, he sprung to his feet and flew out of the apartment, hurtling down the stairs three at a time. He plowed to a sudden stop at the main entrance to check out front. There was no sign of the man who’d gone down the fire escape. He took a deep breath to clear his senses, steeled himself for the move, and slipped out into the cold night.

The street was disconcertingly quiet, oblivious to his plight. He scuttled down the steps and crept over to the parked sedan, pulling out his Leatherman and slashing one of the car’s front wheels with its blade. He watched for a split second as its air rushed out, then leapt over the small picket fence by the pathway that led up to the house and skirted the front façade, avoiding the sidewalk and scanning ahead and back until he reached the alley.

The Mustang was still there, squatting in the shadows, waiting for him. He slid into it as quietly as he could, and pulled the door half-shut. With his breathing still coming short and fast, he spurred the engine to life without switching on the headlights, and just as it ticked over, the other cop appeared at the mouth of the alley, behind him, backlit by the streetlights. He hollered, “Stop, police,” reaching for his handgun and holding his other arm up, palm out and flat. He was blocking the way, leaving Matt no way out but to back out and charge him, risking a game of chicken that could end really badly for the one of them who wasn’t cocooned inside two tons of steel. It was either that, or—

Matt cursed under his breath, slammed the car into gear, and floored it. The Mustang’s wheels spun slightly in the thin snow cover before biting into the asphalt, and the car leapt forward, howling angrily through the alley, rushing deeper into its dark recess. Matt strained to see where he was headed, what waited for him at the end of the alley, and when it finally came into view, it wasn’t good. The alley ended in a mound of bushy terrain that rose into a thicket of trees. A Hummer might have had a chance. The Mustang wasn’t built for this. It didn’t have a hope in hell of making it through.

He slammed hard on the brake pedal, the Mustang sliding to a halt at the edge of the asphalt, the engine purring in anticipation, waiting to be unleashed again. He glanced in his rearview mirror. He could see the shadowy silhouette of the cop coming at him, weapon raised.

Matt was out of options. He ground down on his teeth and slammed the car into reverse. The car lurched, thundering through the alley—backward—its V-8 roaring angrily. Matt hugged the passenger headrest as he steered the car, riding virtually blind. In the best of light conditions, the fastback didn’t have the greatest visibility through its rear windshield, and here, in the dark and narrow alleyway, with only the Mustang’s feeble reversing light to guide him, all he could do was keep the car in a straight line and hope for the best—hope he could avoid the walls, and hope the cop didn’t have a death wish. He stayed as low as he could, tensing up while awaiting the inevitable gunshots, and sure enough, a shot reverberated in the narrow space, followed by several more, one of them drilling through the rear windshield and slamming into the passenger headrest, another pinging off the A-pillar somewhere to his right.

Within a heartbeat, he was almost at the cop’s level. Matt twitched the steering wheel to angle the car right up against the wall closest to him, across from where the cop was firing. The Mustang shuddered and squealed furiously as it scraped the side of the house, and with the cop flattening himself against the opposite wall, Matt managed to thread it through without hitting him. More shots followed him as he bounced out of the alley and onto the main road, where he hit the hand brake, spun the car so it was aimed right, and powered away.

He glanced in his mirror and saw the cop emerge into the street and rush to his car, but Matt knew he wouldn’t be following him. Still, he wasn’t in the clear. An APB concerning his less-than-low-key car would be heating up the airwaves any second now. He had to ditch the car—quickly—and lie low until dawn.

What he’d do the next day, though, was far less certain. He still had the rest of the night to get through first.

Chapter 24

Washington, D.C .

Keenan Drucker felt electric. He was well rested, having managed to tear himself away from surfing the news channels and the Internet soon after midnight and get a decent night’s sleep. In the morning, over a hearty breakfast of waffles and fruit, he’d gone through the newspapers with quiet satisfaction, something he hadn’t felt for years. A feeling he hoped he’d be able to build on as the day wore on.

Presently, sitting in his tenth-floor office on Connecticut Avenue, he pivoted in his plush leather chair, away from his wide desk—nihilistic in its lack of clutter, with nothing on it except for a laptop, a phone, and a framed photograph of his deceased son—and looked out across the city. He loved being in the nation’s capital, working there, playing a role in shaping the lives of the citizens of the most powerful country on the planet—and, by extension, the lives of the rest of the world’s inhabitants. It was all he’d ever done. He’d begun working his way up the system soon after leaving Johns Hopkins with a master’s in political science. He’d spent the next twenty-odd years as a congressional staff member, serving as senior policy advisor and legislative director to a couple of senators. He’d helped them grow in prominence and power while ensuring his own rise in stature, working quietly, behind the scenes, shunning the more visible positions that were constantly on offer—although he’d flirted with taking on that of undersecretary of defense for policy when it had been offered. He preferred the continuity afforded by pulling the strings from behind the curtain, and only left the Hill after an offer that was too good to turn down came in, giving him the opportunity to create and run a well-funded, far-reaching think tank of his own, the Center for American Freedom.

He was made for this life. He was a ruthless and imaginative political strategist, he had a mind like a steel trap, and his appetite for detail, combined with a prodigious memory, made him a master of procedure. And as if that weren’t enough, his effectiveness was further enhanced by an easygoing, gregarious charm—one that masked the iron resolve underneath and helped when one was a dedicated polemicist ready to take on the red-button issues that were splitting the country.

The last few years, though, had instilled a new sense of urgency within him. Groups of civilian advisors had firmly gripped the reins of policy—both domestic and foreign—and steered the country to their vision. Their unapologetic, unbridled sense of mission was, to a political animal like Drucker, a thing of beauty; their methods and tactics, breathtaking.

Most impressive, he thought, was their use of “framing”—the cunning technique of dumbing down complex, controversial issues and policies by using powerful, evocative, emotive catchphrases and images in order to prejudice and undermine any potential challenge to those policies. Framing had been elevated to a fine art in the new century, with deceptive expressions like “tax relief,” “war on terror,” and “appeaser” now firmly embedded in the public psyche, pushing the right emotional buttons and creating a misguided belief that anyone who argued against such measures had to be, by definition, a villain trying to stop the innocent sufferers’ champion from giving them their medication, a coward shying away from a full-blown war against an aggressor nation, or—even worse—one too spineless to stand up to Hitler.

Framing worked. No one knew that as well as Keenan Drucker. And he was now ready to do some framing of his own.

He checked his watch. A late-morning meeting had been hastily scheduled with the available senior fellows of the Center to discuss the unexplained apparition over the ice shelf. He’d already spoken to several of them by phone, and they were—understandably—as excited as they were unsettled.

After that, he’d monitor the news channels to check on the project’s status. Which seemed well on track, apart from that small complication in Boston. Drucker wasn’t worried. He could trust the Bullet to take care of it.

His BlackBerry pinged. The ring tag told him it was the Bullet.

As he reached for his phone, Drucker smiled. Speak—in this case, think—of the devil rarely had a more appropriate or literal embodiment.

WITH HIS HABITUAL CURT EFFICIENCY, Maddox updated Drucker on Vince Bellinger’s fate, Matt Sherwood’s subsequent escape, and his foray into the now-dead scientist’s apartment.

Drucker had absorbed the information with admirable detachment. Maddox didn’t like much about Drucker. The man was a politician, after all. A Washington insider. But he liked that about him. Drucker didn’t question or second-guess when it came to matters in which he was no expert. He didn’t have any ego issues, nor did he assume the annoying air of superiority Maddox had often seen—and enjoyed deflating—in deskbound executives and, even more so, in politicians. Drucker knew to leave the dirty work to those who were comfortable trudging through the muck, something Maddox had never shied away from, and still didn’t, even though his “security and risk management” firm had grown healthily since he first founded it three years ago, not long after he’d been wounded in Iraq.

Maddox was a hands-on kind of guy. He had a tough, single-minded work ethic, an unwavering discipline forged out of a twenty-year career with the Marines and their Force Recon outfit, where he’d initially earned the sobriquet “The Bullet” because of his shaved, slightly pointed head. It was a name that took on an even more disturbing connotation after his squad was cut to bits in a savage firefight in the apocalyptic town of Fallujah.

The tragedy that had first brought him and Drucker together and united them.

His unit had been doing good work in the mountains of Afghanistan. Hitting the Taliban and their Al Qaeda buddies hard. Weeding them out of the mountains and caves across the border from Pakistan. Closing in on Bin Laden. Then, frustratingly and inexplicably, they’d been pulled out and reassigned. To Iraq. And nine months into that war, Maddox lost fourteen men and an ear that horrific afternoon. Those who’d survived that attack had left arms, legs, or fingers behind. The word wounded rarely conveyed the horror of their injuries—or the permanent, crippling effect on their lives. It was a day Maddox remembered every time he caught a glimpse of his hideous self reflected in a windowpane or a colleague’s sunglasses. It was branded on his face, a star-shaped burn that spread out from the small, mangled flap of ear skin that the surgeons had been able to salvage.

He hated looking in the mirror. He relived that day every time he caught a glimpse of himself. Not just that day, but the aftermath. The inquests. The way his superiors had let him down. The way he’d been mistreated and spat out by the system. And if that wasn’t bad enough, he then found out he’d been lied to. The whole country had. The war was a sham. A catastrophic sham. And then, to add insult to injury—literally—he watched as the same lying bastards who’d sent him to war, from the lowliest congressman to a war hero who’d come close to becoming president, were voting against funding increases for those who, like him, had come home with debilitating physical and mental injuries. He watched as soldiers were hauled in, tried for every minor trespass of the rules of engagement, and sacrified for political expediency by men who’d never been within a hundred miles of a firefight. And with each new revelation about the lies and manipulations behind the war—the ones that had cost his buddies their lives, and him his face—he got angrier. More bitter. More vindictive. And out of the anger and the bitterness came a realization that he had to take matters into his own hands if he was going to change anything.

His wounded status made it easier for him to set up shop. Before long, he had dozens of highly trained, properly equipped men on his payroll, working for him in the hellholes of Afghanistan, Iraq, or anywhere else people were paying him to send them. Doing jobs that no one else wanted to touch. Jobs no one wanted to be seen doing. Jobs where they weren’t subject to arbitrary rules drawn up by politicians sipping twenty-year-old Cognac. And somehow, with each new job, he found more solace, more satisfaction. It became a revenge fix he couldn’t live without. And despite the hundreds of thousands of dollars in government contracts and fees his little operation was pulling in, despite having a small army of trusted, battle-hardened men ready and able to do whatever he asked them to do, he was still out there, on the front line, with them. And when this job came up, he immediately realized it was one he couldn’t delegate. To be doing it was satisfying on a whole different level.

If this thing could really achieve what they thought it could, then he sure as hell was going to make sure nothing went wrong.

Still, Drucker didn’t sound thrilled by his news.

“I’m not comfortable with Sherwood out there, running around,” Drucker told him. “You need to put him away before it gets out of hand.”

“Shouldn’t take long,” Maddox assured him. “He’s a murder suspect. He doesn’t have too many options.”

“Let me know when it’s taken care of,” Drucker concluded, before ending the call.

Maddox set his phone down on his desk and stewed on the night’s events. Matt Sherwood had proven far more resilient than his brother. They were clearly cut from a different cloth, something Maddox had already known, given Matt’s record. All of which necessitated a more concerted approach.

His men were monitoring police communications, but that wasn’t enough. Matt Sherwood was taking impulsive, unexpected initiatives like breaking into Bellinger’s apartment. Unexpected initiatives that could prove to be a major nuisance.

Maddox cleared his mind and put himself in Matt’s shoes, replaying every step the ex-con had taken, trying to get a better feel for the way Matt thought. He extrapolated ahead, looking for the straws Matt would be grasping at, straws he needed to cut down before Matt got to them. He thought back to the reports his men had called in and decided to plow that field.

He turned to his screen and brought up the phone logs of all the peripherals linked to Bellinger and to Matt. His eye settled on the last entry—the phone call from a coworker of Bellinger’s by the name of Csaba Komlosy. He clicked on the small icon by the entry and listened to the phone call, a message left on Bellinger’s home phone. He listened to it a second time, then went back and listened to the first call between the two scientists. The one that had precipitated the previous evening’s confrontations.

The Bullet checked his watch and picked up his phone.

Chapter 25

Boston, Massachusetts

Larry Rydell stared blankly at his BlackBerry’s screen for a moment before setting it down on his desk. He’d just gotten off the phone with Rebecca. Again. Two calls from his daughter in less than twenty-four hours. Far more than he was used to. They were close, for sure, despite his divorce from her mother almost a decade earlier. But Rebecca was nineteen. She was wild and fabulous and free, in her second year at Brown, and although surprisingly grounded for someone with the world at her feet, regular phone calls to Daddy had—as expected—been increasingly crowded out of the whirlwind of activity that her life had become.

He loved chatting with her. Loved seeing her so excited, so enthralled, so curious about something, even with the undercurrent of fear in her bubbly voice. Loved hearing from her twice a day.

But he hated lying to her.

And he had. Twice now, in less than a day. And, no doubt, he’d have to go on lying to her—if all went well, for the rest of his life.

He felt a small tearing inside at the realization, then the tear widened as the bigger picture of what was going on hit him again.

It’s really happening.

It was out there now. There was no turning back.

The thought terrified and elated him in equal measure.

It had all seemed so surreal when he’d first considered the possibility, just four years earlier. And yet it had all come about so fast. The breakup of the ice shelf had been expected. They’d been monitoring it through satellite imagery, but it had come sooner than they projected. And they’d been ready. Ready to capitalize on it.

Ready to change the world.

He thought back to that fateful evening with Reece, three years earlier. A great dinner. A bottle of Brunello di Montalcino. A couple of Cohiba Esplendidos. A long, inspired late-night chat about the possibilities of the manufacturing breakthrough that Reece had achieved. The many and diverse applications it could be used for. The leaps of imagination that great minds sometimes conjured up and actually turned into reality. And then, the mere mention of a word.

Miraculous.

One word. A catalyst that sent Rydell’s mind tripping into uncharted territory. Dark, mysterious, wonderful, impossible territory. And here he was, less than four years later, and the impossible had become a reality.

Reece. The brilliant scientist’s face drifted into his consciousness. Other faces materialized alongside it—young, talented, dedicated, all of them—and with them, a familiar cold, hard feeling deep inside him. He felt his very soul shrivel at the memory of that last day in Namibia. After the last test. After they’d all shared the elation of watching their hard work bear fruit in such spectacular, bone-chilling fashion. And then it all went wrong. He could still see Maddox, standing there beside him, pulling the trigger. He could hear himself shout, hear the bullet thumping into Reece’s back, see his friend’s body jerk before toppling into Danny Sherwood’s arms.

The sounds and images of that day had been gnawing away at him ever since.

He hated himself for not having been able to stop it. And despite what the others told him, none of the platitudes, none of the clichés about the greater good or about sacrificing the lives of the few for the lives of the many—none of it worked.

He hadn’t read them properly. He hadn’t realized to what lengths they were prepared to go. And it was too late to do anything about it. They needed each other. If everything he’d worked for was to succeed, he just had to swallow it all and keep going.

Which he did, even though it wasn’t easy. He could still feel it, deep inside, eating away at him, piece by piece. He knew it would eventually get him. One way or another, he’d die because of it. He had to. But maybe, before that happened, maybe, if all went well—maybe their deaths would amount to something in the end. Although he knew their ghosts wouldn’t let go of him, not even then.

Chapter 26

Boston, Massachusetts

Sheltering behind a tall hedge in the brisk, early morning chill, Matt waited and watched, trying to make sure no unpleasant surprises were in store for him at the hotel before breaking cover and making his way in. Tense and alert while avoiding eye contact, he slipped past a few bleary-eyed businessmen who brought a semblance of life to the drab, cookie-cutter lobby, took the elevator to the fifth floor, and reached the refuge of his room.

He was as tired as he was pissed off.

He’d had to dump the Mustang a few blocks from Bellinger’s place, and that only fueled his anger. The car represented a personal milestone for him, a notable and particularly satisfying step on his road back from the edge. Danny had not just guided him onto that road, but paid the toll and given him fuel money to boot. And now Matt had been forced to abandon the car on some dark side street, all because of the same bastards who had taken Danny away.

He was seriously pissed off.

After parking the Mustang, he’d scuttled in the shadows for a couple of blocks, then crossed to the north side of Broadway, where he’d hot-wired a defenseless, decade-old Ford Taurus. He’d then cut west, heading out of town before looping back on the turnpike, on the lookout for any blue-and-whites. He’d parked in an inconspicuous corner on the backlot of a small shopping center around the corner from the hotel and walked the rest of the way.

He stood by the window of his room, watching the city as it sprang to life. It was another overcast, wintery day, the sun struggling to break through the pasty-gray cloud cover. He lay down on his bed, his muscles and nerves ravaged by tension and fatigue. He hadn’t slept, and his body was crying out for a break. He hadn’t put it through such a ringer for years. But he knew that would have to wait. He opted instead for a long, hot shower to reinvigorate him and help settle his mind. It bought him a renewed, if rapidly dwindling, lease on life. Twenty minutes later, he was back at a workstation in the austere and windowless business center.

He used the white pages’ website to do a reverse listings search on the phone number he got off Bellinger’s answering machine. The number yielded the curious name of Csaba Komlosy, with a home address—no surprises there—in the same geek-central catchment area straddling Harvard and MIT that Bellinger—and Danny—lived in. He thought about calling him. According to his message, he and Bellinger had been discussing what was happening in Antarctica just before Bellinger had met Matt, and Matt sensed that this Csaba—he wasn’t sure how to pronounce it—could fill in some of the blanks. He decided against making that call. The goon squad seemed to be avid wiretappers. A face-to-face would be better anyway. He jotted down the address, an apartment by the sound of it, clicked on the map link for a more accurate read of its location, then, deciding he couldn’t duck it anymore, pulled up the website of the Boston Globe and hit the link for the local, breaking news section.

It was the first item.

His face contorted with sadness—and rage.

The report wasn’t long. A stabbing. Close to a bar in South Boston, shortly after midnight. They’d identified the body as Bellinger’s. There was a brief mention of a brawl in the nearby bar, but nothing more. A murder investigation was under way.

The report didn’t mention Matt—yet. But he knew there’d be more to come on that front.

They’d make sure of it.

He exhaled heavily, rubbed some alertness into his face, and re-read the article. Its dry, clinical words pushed a caustic bile of anger up to his throat, burning him with their finality. His fists hovered over the keyboard, clenched bloodless-white tight, as he summoned up every drop of restraint inside him to keep from bashing it against the desk and ripping the whole workstation to shreds.

It was that simple for these bastards. They could just pluck someone off the street, cut him open, dump him in the snow, and move on to their next assignment without batting an eyelid. A man’s life—an innocent, decent man’s life, snuffed out in its prime, and all because of what . . . a phone call? An idea?

Matt was boiling.

He took in a deep breath and let it out slowly, willing his fury to subside. A moment later, he raised his concentration back to the screen, keyed in the homepage of his tracker, and logged in.

The Chrysler was no longer outside his place.

A detailed map displayed the car’s itinerary in thirty-second increments. Backtracking to the first movement that his GPS tracker had registered, Matt saw that the goons had finally given up their stake-out—or, he thought, merely passed the baton to the next team—almost an hour ago. Which, he noted, was after he’d made it out of Bellinger’s place. He wondered if that meant that they were already aware of his little excursion to Cambridge. If they were, it meant they had insights into police activity, either through radio scanners or courtesy of someone inside the department. He made a mental note of it and zoomed in on the Chrysler’s current location.

It was parked on a street in Brighton, not far from St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center, and hadn’t moved for twenty-three minutes. The tracker’s website featured a built-in link-up with Google Maps. Matt clicked on the “street view” option, moved the little orange avatar to the Chrysler’s current location, and clicked again. A wide-angle shot popped up, as clear and detailed as if he were standing right in the middle of the street—not in real time, of course, but whenever the Google van with the panoramic camera had done its survey, which couldn’t have been that long ago, given that this wasn’t exactly Cold War-era technology. It afforded him a detailed view of what the place looked like. He full-screened it, scrolled up the street and back for a virtual drive-by, then rotated the camera to get a good look at the opposite sidewalk.

The narrow, residential street had a string of small, two-story clapboard houses. The fix, accurate to within three yards of the tracker’s location if you believed the pitch of the well-oiled salesman he’d bought it from, fell on a tired-looking, seal-gray house with a small balcony over the front porch and a gabled window in its roof.

He needed to take a closer look. A live one.

It didn’t take long to get there at this early hour, given that he was heading against the rush hour traffic. The light snow from the previous night was mostly gone, and the old Taurus was, well, functioning. He turned into Beacon and headed west, his mind busy imagining the different ways things could play out once he found them. He tried to rein in his primal instincts. Yes, they were vile, blood-sucking scum, and he knew he’d find it hard to resist beating the crap out of them if he ever got the chance. But there was no need to turn this into a suicide mission. If they were there, he needed to find out more about them—who they were, what they were doing, who had hired them.

What they knew about Danny.

What happened to him.

Once he got all that—well, there was no reason to let them live, really.

The notion just came to him, and it didn’t make him flinch. Which surprised him. He’d never killed anyone before. Sure, he’d had his share of fights. Before prison. In prison. He’d taken some serious beatings over the years, but he’d cracked a few skulls too. He hadn’t started out that way. He was wild and reckless and played by his own rules, but he wasn’t a thug and he never set out to hurt anyone. And although prison had a way of hardening a man, physically as well as mentally, it didn’t change what he was about. He was more prone to letting his temper erupt, less shy about using his fists, but he never took pleasure from it. It was always in self-defense, and never went beyond doing no more than was necessary to neutralize any threat facing him.

This felt different. And right now, he wasn’t too worried about that. Que sera, sera. He had to find them first.

He turned right on Washington and headed north, his pulse nudging upward with each passing block as he closed in on his target. He hit a red light at the big intersection with Commonwealth, and as he sat there waiting, sitting behind an equally tattered pickup truck in dire need of new piston rings, his gaze was drawn beyond it to the aggressive, toothy grin of a familiar grille—that of a Chrysler 300C. It was waiting at the opposite light, facing him, left indicator on.

He squinted, focusing on it, trying to ascertain whether or not it was “his” 300C, craning his neck to get a better look past the smoking pickup blocking his view. The opposite light must have changed to green, as the Chrysler cut across the intersection just beyond the truck and motored up Commonwealth, trailing a couple of small imports behind it like a shark with its remoras. As it streaked past, Matt leaned across and got a look at the guy in the front passenger seat, and although his hard features fit the bill, Matt wasn’t sure. He’d only seen the goons fleetingly, outside the bar and in the van, and in the shadows outside his place. Sealing it for him, though, was the 300C’s license plate. He managed to catch a glimpse of the last two numbers on it, and they matched the number he’d seen on the car that had been parked outside his garage.

It was them.

His pulse rocketed as his eyes followed the rapidly receding car and he wondered what to do, needing to make a split-second decision. He spun the wheel and hit the gas, jinking the car around the pickup truck and ramping its right wheels over the curb, and turned into the avenue, following in the Chrysler’s wake.

It was more of an instinctive reaction than a rational move, but as he trailed a few car lengths behind the silky sedan, his decision grew on him. He didn’t know what the location was that the tracker had kicked up, whether it was their base or just a random stop they wouldn’t be returning to. Besides, there were only two of them in the car, and he didn’t mind those odds. Not with the way he was feeling right now.

They drove east on Commonwealth, then turned left on Harvard and took the bridge into Cambridge. As they headed up River, a cold, uncomfortable feeling twitched inside him. They were leading back to the Inman Square area, the one he’d only just escaped from a mere hour or two earlier. His unease flared into full-blown dread when he saw the name of the street the Chrysler turned into and spotted the number of the building where it pulled up.

There was no mistaking it, as it was an address he’d only just looked up.

They were parked right outside Csaba’s place.

Chapter 27

Cambridge,Massachusetts

Matt coaxed the Taurus past the parked Chrysler, casually turning away as he drove by the brooding sedan, to deny its occupants a glimpse of his face. He kept going and took the first side street he found, and pulled over.

This wasn’t good.

He sat in the car, stewing in his thoughts, unsure about what this meant. Was this Csaba character working with them? Had he helped them set up Bellinger, alerted them to what he was up to? Matt didn’t know what to think anymore, although somehow, it didn’t ring true. The message Csaba had left for Bellinger sounded genuine enough. They were discussing the apparition, and Bellinger—it seemed—had abruptly cut the conversation short.

If Csaba wasn’t working with them, then they had to be here for the same reasons they’d gone after Bellinger. Which didn’t give Csaba much of a rosy future. Not to mention that the very fact that the goons were after him meant that he knew something, something that could help explain what they were so hell-bent on protecting—and that could shed light on what had happened to Danny.

What they’d done to Danny, Matt reminded himself.

He had to do something.

He slipped out of the Taurus and crept over to the corner. He edged out carefully and looked down the street. The Chrysler hadn’t moved, the two silhouettes still inside.

They were watching. Waiting.

Stalking Csaba. Matt was now sure of it.

He had to get to him first.

He sized up the block, looking for a way past the goon squad. He couldn’t see one. Csaba lived in a modern, six- or seven-story apartment block. The guys in the Chrysler had a controlling view of the street and a clear line of sight to the building’s landscaped approach and its entrance lobby, which deep-sixed any notion of going in that way. There was, however, a ramp going down along its side, the kind of ramp that normally led to an underground garage. Problem was, it was also within their sight line.

He pulled back from the corner and sprinted farther up the side street, and found a narrow alley that ran between two houses. He cut into it and advanced cautiously, moving in parallel to the main street, closing in on Csaba’s apartment block—only to hit a dead end and a five-foot-tall wooden fence after the second house in. He could see Csaba’s building looming ahead, past another couple of houses and fences. He clambered over the fence and kept going. A few minutes later, he reached a side passage that ran alongside the ramp and led back to the street.

Matt peered out. The Chrysler was still there, and he still couldn’t make it onto the ramp without them seeing him. From his vantage point, he noticed another problem. The ramp had a keypad-controlled entry. Not only that, it was the kind where the buttons didn’t have any numbers printed on them. Instead, the buttons would light up with randomly assigned, non-sequential numbers appearing on them when someone attempted to key a code in, in order to prevent anyone watching from mimicking the sequence and gaining entry.

Just then, Matt heard a mechanical snap, followed by a low, creaking rumble. Although he couldn’t see it from where he was, he knew it was the garage door opening. He tensed up and edged back. The nose and roof of a large, black Escalade emerged from the garage. The SUV obliterated a gallon of gas as it charged up the ramp and stopped where it met the street.

Momentarily blocking the Chrysler’s view.

Matt seized the opportunity. He charged out and leapt over the low wall that gave onto the ramp. He landed heavily, his bones juddering in protest. It had to be at least a ten-foot drop, more if you counted the height of the wall. He rolled on himself before righting into a low squat. Just then, he heard the Escalade thundering off, turning into the street, and exposing him to the Chrysler. Matt dived through the garage door as it closed, and took cover to one side, hoping he hadn’t been spotted.

He peered out, but didn’t sense any movement from the car.

He seemed clear.

The apartment numbers were listed next to the floor buttons in the elevator. He rode it to the third floor and made his way to Csaba’s door and was about to hit the doorbell when he noticed that the door had a peephole in it. He pulled back, looked up, then took off one of his boots, slipped it on his right hand, and quietly smashed a couple of lightbulbs in the hallway, plunging it into darkness. He slipped his boot back on and rang the bell, which chimed inside. Some footfalls echoed and drew near, then a shadow fell across the bottom of the door.

“Who is it?” It was the same, slightly wired voice from the answering machine.

Keeping a wary eye on the elevator, Matt winged it. “I’m a friend of Vince. Vince Bellinger.”

Matt heard some shuffling behind the door, as if Csaba were right up against it, trying to get a better look through the eyepiece—not easy given the now-dark hallway.

“A friend of Vince?” Csaba’s voice had a stammer in it. “What’s—what do you want?”

Matt tried to sound earnest and unthreatening, but firm. “We need to talk. Something happened to him.”

A beat, and more shuffling, then, as if with great reticence, Csaba said, “Vince is dead, man.”

“I know. Would you open the door so we can talk?”

A paralyzing dread seemed to tighten around Csaba’s voice box. “Look, I don’t . . . He’s dead, he’s been murdered, and I don’t know what you want, but—”

“Listen to me,” Matt interjected bluntly, “the same guys who killed him are parked outside your building right now. They heard your phone calls last night, they know what you were talking about, and that’s what got him killed. So if you want me to help you not end up like he did, open the goddamn door.”

A charged silence followed for a brief moment, then a decision was evidently reached, as the lock snapped and the door cracked open. A wide, boyish face surrounded by a shock of shaggy hair peered through the slit—then Csaba’s eyes suddenly widened in panic at the sight of Matt’s face.

“Shit,” Csaba blurted as he tried to push the door shut.

Matt stuck his boot through and shoved the door back and charged in. He shut it behind him as Csaba stumbled back into the room. The big man raised his arms defensively, tripping over himself as he backed away from Matt.

“Don’t hurt me, please, don’t kill me, I don’t know anything, I swear,” he muttered, gesturing frantically.

“What?”

“Don’t kill me, man. I don’t know anything.”

“Calm down,” Matt shot back. “I’m not here to kill you.”

Csaba stared at him in muted terror, droplets of sweat popping up all over his face. Matt studied him for a brief moment—then his attention was torn away by an image on the TV behind Csaba.

The big man noticed Matt’s sudden distraction and sidestepped hesitantly, giving him a full view of the screen. It was on one of the twenty-four-hour news networks and showed the same glowing sign he’d seen earlier, only this wasn’t the same footage. A loud banner on the bottom of the screen proclaimed, “Second unexplained sighting, now over Greenland.”

Matt inched closer to the screen, his forehead furrowed in confusion. “This isn’t the same one as before, is it?”

It took Csaba a second to realize he was being engaged in conversation. “No,” he stammered. “This one’s in the Arctic.”

Matt turned to Csaba, feeling lost. It must have come across clearly in his expression, as Csaba was now shaking even more visibly.

“What?” Matt snapped angrily.

“Don’t kill me, dude. Seriously.”

Matt was missing something. “Stop saying that, all right? What is wrong with you?”

Csaba hesitated, then, as if against his will and with a hollow voice, he said, “I know you killed Vince.”

“What?”

Csaba’s hands rocketed up again. “Your face, dude. It’s on the news.”

Alarm flooded through Matt. “My face?”

Csaba nodded, still riven with fear.

“Show me,” Matt ordered.

Chapter 28

Cairo, Egypt

Gracie spotted the man in the black cassock, with the anxious expression, angling for her attention among the throngs of people lining the plate-glass windows of the arrivals hall at Cairo International Airport. She caught Brother Ameen’s eye and gave him a hesitant wave, which the monk acknowledged with a discreet, aloof wave of his own before moving sideways through the crowd to meet her.

The journey there had been fretfully long. After the chopper had deposited them at Rothera Station, a DASH-7 had flown them to Mount Pleasant Airport, a military airfield in the Falklands. There, they’d boarded an ageing RAF Tristar that provided commercial service for the long flight to the aptly named Wideawake Airfield on the Ascension Islands and onward to RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire. A cab to Heathrow led to the final leg on EgyptAir.

They’d had a brief, tense moment at Ascension, where they’d ducked out of sight and narrowly avoided being spotted by a British film crew headed in the opposite direction. They’d used the journey time to read up about the Coptic religion and, more specifically, the monastery’s history. They’d checked their phones for messages at each stop, now that they were back in GSM-land, but hadn’t replied to any of the messages that had been left for them. No one back in D.C., apart from Ogilvy, the network’s global news director—not even Roxberry, much to Gracie, Dalton, and Finch’s bemusement—had been told they’d left the ice continent, or where they were headed. Gracie and Ogilvy knew full well how ravenous their colleagues and competitors could be. The exclusivity of their story had to be ferociously guarded from the rest of the pack.

The new terminal, a gleaming, modern steel-and-glass structure, had surprised Gracie with its efficiency, even more so given that Egypt usually out-mañanaed the other countries of the region, no slouches themselves when it came to, well, slouching. The line through passport control had moved swiftly and courteously. The baggage had showed up on the carousel almost at the same time as they did. Even more surprisingly, people seemed to be observing the airport’s recently introduced no-smoking policy, no small feat in a country where laws were routinely ignored and where more than half the male population were smokers practically from birth.

More pressingly, Gracie, Dalton, and Finch were already aware of the new apparition over Greenland. Just after the 777 had landed, their BlackBerries had sprung to life almost in unison with urgent messages from the news desk and beyond. The bracing, electrifying news had shaken the tiredness out of their bones and injected them with renewed vigor. And as they sat in the back of Yusuf ’s Previa, inching their way through the bustling early evening traffic and into the city, they couldn’t get their questions in to the overwhelmed Brother Ameen fast enough.

He told them he’d seen it too, on the news, and confirmed that, as far as he could tell, it was identical to the one they’d seen over the ice shelf—and identical to the symbol lining the walls of Father Jerome’s cave. The ones he’d started drawing seven months earlier.

Gracie was now certain she’d made the right choice in heeding the monk’s call and coming to Egypt. Despite the continent hopping and its associated aches, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt this energized. The rare, but coveted, sensation—the thrill of the exclusive scoop—was off the charts in this case, given the sheer scale and impact of what was unfolding. Still, there were many questions she needed answered. Starting with the reason for their trip, Father Jerome.

“How and why did he come here in the first place?” she asked the monk.

Brother Ameen hesitated. “The truth is,” he winced, “we’re not sure.”

Gracie and Finch exchanged a questioning glance. “He was working in Sudan, wasn’t he?” Finch queried.

“Yes. Over the last few years, as I’m sure you know, Father Jerome was very concerned with what was happening in Darfur. Earlier this year, he opened another orphanage there, his fourth, just inside Sudan, near the border with Egypt. And then, well . . . he doesn’t quite understand it himself. He left the orphanage one night, by himself, on foot, with no belongings, no food or drink. He just walked out, into the desert.”

“Just like that? He’d just been sick, hadn’t he? Weren’t they worried he’d be kidnapped or killed? He was very critical of what the warlords were doing out there,” Gracie pointed out. “He would have been a big prize for them.”

“The fighting, the massacres in Darfur . . . they affected him deeply. It weakened him, and he got very sick. It was a miracle he pulled through.” The monk nodded to himself, his tone heavy with sadness at the thought. “The night he left, he told a few of his aides there that he needed to go away for a while . . . to ‘find God.’ Those were his words. He said he might not return for a while and asked them to make sure their good work continued during his absence. And he just walked away. Five months later, some bedouins found him collapsed, in the desert, a few kilometers south of here. He was in a simple thawb—a robe, torn and filthy. The soles of his bare feet were all cut up and calloused; he was delirious, lost, barely alive. He didn’t have any water or food with him, and yet . . . it seemed that he’d crossed the desert. On his own. On foot.”

Gracie’s eyes flared up with puzzlement. “But it’s, what, five, six hundred miles from here to the border, isn’t it?”

“It is,” Brother Ameen confirmed, his voice unnervingly calm.

“But he couldn’t have . . . not in these conditions.” Gracie was struggling for words. “There’s nothing but desert out there. The sun alone, his skin . . . Wasn’t he badly sunburned? How did he survive?”

The monk turned out his palms quizzically and looked at her with an expression that mirrored her confusion, but said nothing.

Gracie’s mind raced ahead, processing his story. It was possible, maybe—but there were too many unknowns to his story. “What does Father Jerome say happened? He didn’t say he walked here all the way from Sudan, did he?”

“He doesn’t remember what happened,” the monk explained. He raised a finger, his eyebrows rising as his words took on a more pointed tone. “But he believes he was meant to come here, to our monastery, to our cave. He believes it was his calling. Part of God’s plan.” The monk paused, then a hint of remorse crinkled his face. “I really shouldn’t be speaking on his behalf,” he added. “You can ask him yourself, when you meet him.”

Gracie snatched a glance at Finch. He tilted his head in a discreet gesture that mirrored her bewilderment.

“What about the documentary?” she asked. “Tell us about that.”

“What do you want to know?”

“How it came about? Were you there, did you meet these guys?”

Brother Ameen shrugged. “There’s not much to tell. They contacted us. They said they were making a documentary, that they’d heard about Father Jerome’s being up in the cave, and could they come over and film him. The abbot wasn’t keen, none of us were. It’s not in our nature, it’s not what we’re used to. But they were coming from a very respectable network, and they were very courteous, and they kept on asking and insisting. Eventually, we accepted.”

“Lucky you did,” Finch told him. “We wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Brother Ameen replied, a hint of a smile in his eyes. “God works in mysterious ways. I imagine he would have found another way to bring you here, don’t you?”

Chapter 29

Cambridge,Massachusetts

Csaba hesitated, then, without turning his back to Matt, he took a few steps back to his desk. It was a mess of piles of magazines and printouts. Coffee cups teetered over them like cardboard watchtowers. Clearly, he and Bellinger were far from twins on more than just the physical front. A large Apple flat screen rose out of the morass and dominated it. It too showed the light over the ice shelf. Flicking his eyes from Matt to a wireless keyboard, Csaba tapped in a few keys and brought up another website. He turned to Matt with an expression that straddled sheepish and terrified.

Matt joined him at the desk. The news report he’d pulled up was a brief crime report. Bellinger’s body had been found in an alleyway not far from the bar. The report featured two black-and-white shots from a security camera inside the bar. One was a wide shot, showing Matt and Vince in mid-tussle. The other was a close-up of Matt’s face, taken from another frame.

He was pretty recognizable.

Matt’s eyes ate up the text voraciously. He didn’t see his name anywhere in it, although he knew that wouldn’t last. The article mentioned several witnesses, including an “unnamed woman” who claimed she was outside the bar when she saw Matt chase Bellinger furiously down the street. Which he hadn’t done. They’d grabbed them right outside the bar. Matt frowned, his mind flashing back to the woman in the van. He could picture her profile, backlit against the streetlights, the shoulder-length bob framing her face. One and the same, he was certain. He pictured the police showing up at his place, search warrant in hand. He also pictured them finding the murder weapon bob-girl and her buddies must have planted there.

He noticed Csaba scrutinizing him nervously.

“I know how this looks,” Matt told him, “but that’s not what happened. These guys came after Vince because of this thing in Antarctica.” He pointed angrily at the TV screen. “He thought my brother might have been murdered because of it. They killed Vince. I didn’t. You have to believe me.”

Which, reading Csaba’s jittery eyes, seemed like a tall order.

“You and Vince,” Matt asked. “You were talking about it, weren’t you? Before he bailed on you?”

Csaba nodded reluctantly.

It was all Matt had time for right now. “I need you to tell me what you guys said, but that can wait. They’re outside. We need to get out of here.”

“ ‘ We’ ? ” Csaba flinched, reaching for his phone. “Hey, I’m not going anywhere. You can do what you want. I’m calling the cops and—”

“We don’t have time for that,” Matt flared up fiercely as he grabbed the phone from him and slammed it back down close to its cradle. “They’re here. Now. Because of your little chat with Vince. Same deal. So if you want to live, you’re gonna have to trust me and come with me.” His gaze drilled into him, dead-committed.

Csaba hesitated, his eyes locked onto Matt’s, his breathing hard and fast—then he nodded.

“Do you have a car?”

“No.”

“Doesn’t matter. Come on.” Matt sprinted toward the door.

“Wait,” Csaba blurted, holding up one hand in a stalling gesture. He grabbed a backpack off the floor and started throwing things in it.

“We need to go,” Matt insisted.

“Just gimme a sec,” Csaba countered as he stuffed his Macbook laptop, charger, and iPhone into the backpack before flicking one last look around the room and joining Matt at the door.

Seeing the phone tripped something in Matt’s mind. “Your cell,” he told Csaba. “Switch it off.”

“Why?”

“They can track us with it. You must know that.”

Csaba’s mouth dropped an inch. Then the words clicked into place. “Yeah, right,” he said in a daze, and repeated “You’re right” as he fished out the phone and turned it off.

Matt glanced over at the screen for one last look—the blazing sign was still there, taunting him enigmatically—then he dashed out, with Csaba on his heels.

They took the elevator down to the garage. It was home to a dozen or so cars. Matt glanced around, not exactly spoiled for choice. Csaba’s neighbors seemed partial to Priuses and Japanese compacts, the Escalade owner notwithstanding. He settled on a marginally beefier Toyota RAV4, a car he was also pretty sure wouldn’t resist his charms.

He moved fast. He grabbed a fire extinguisher off the wall and smashed the driver’s window with it, then reached in and flung the door open. “Get in,” he ordered Csaba as he swept the tiny glass flakes off the seat with his hand.

The big man just stood there, slack-jawed. “That’s Mrs. Jooris’s car,” he said ruefully. “She’s gonna be seriously pissed, dude. She worships that car.”

“It’s just a window. Get in.”

In the time it took Csaba to relent and cram himself into the passenger seat, Matt had popped the hood, yanked out the transponder fuse from the power relay center, and got the engine running. He climbed back in, threw the car in gear, and screeched up to the garage door. An unseen sensor had already instructed it to open. As it rose, the ramp appeared ahead, unobstructed, curving to the left and hugging the building.

“Buckle up,” Matt said.

Csaba gave him a look and glanced down wryly at his bulging midsection. The buckle and its stalk were out of sight, smothered by his doughy thigh. “You wanna help me with that?”

“Maybe not,” Matt answered with a dry half grin. “Hang on.”

His fingers tightened against the steering wheel as the garage door rose enough to let them out. Matt nudged the RAV4 up the ramp, slowly at first—there was no point alerting the goons to their presence earlier than necessary. They’d see him soon enough—which happened the instant the small SUV cleared the side of the building.

Matt locked eyes with the two startled men facing him in the Chrysler, committing as much of their features to memory as he could in that nanosecond, his foot poised on the accelerator. He’d already played out his move in his mind’s eye. A quick charge across the street diagonally, right at the parked goons, aiming the Toyota’s left front bumper at the Chrysler’s right front wheel well, hitting it at a slight angle and with enough force to bend its wishbone and disable the car while allowing his own vehicle to keep going, bent but otherwise operational. It was a gamble, and a sacrifice he had to make. He’d lose the benefit of being able to track them, as they’d need to use another car from here on, but he had no choice. The Toyota was no match for the Chrysler. He wouldn’t be able to lose them.

He was about to floor the pedal when he sensed something coming from his right. He ripped his gaze off the Chrysler and spotted a car coming down the street toward him. Something clicked into place in his mind. He waited a second or so for the car to get nearer, Csaba watching, not understanding the wait and giving him a low, anxious “Dude, come on,” the killers in the Chrysler looking at them slightly perplexed now, not sure why they were still there, itching to bolt out of their car after them, probably pulling their weapons out of their holsters and ramming cartridges into their chambers—

—and just as the approaching car was almost at his level, Matt jammed his foot against the accelerator and charged into the street right in front of it, cutting it off. The car, a lumbering old Caprice from the bygone days of cheap and plentiful fuel and a blissful insouciance about destroying the planet, scraped against the Toyota and bounced off it, its driver—a nervy, ponytailed man wearing thick bone spectacles—swerving into the opposite lane evasively and screeching to a stop almost right alongside the Chrysler. Matt hit the gas and tore down the street, headed in the opposite direction to the one the Chrysler was facing. He watched in the rearview mirror as the Caprice’s hapless driver got out of his car and mouthed off at him angrily, and saw the goons climbing out of the Chrysler to get the man to move his car so they could get their car turned around to take up pursuit.

Matt dived into the first turning he saw, pulling a screaming left before charging down one empty street after another, changing directions often as he wove his way out of Cambridge and onto the expressway, all while keeping a wary eye on his mirrors for any sign of the Chrysler.

It was gone.

He relaxed a little and eased off the gas as he pointed the borrowed SUV north, heading out of the city, putting some much-needed miles between him and the streets that seemed determined to ensnare him in their deathly clutches.

He glanced sideways at Csaba. The round man’s face was still flushed and glistening with sweat, but his posture relaxed a touch as he gave Matt a pinched acknowledgment. And with a small shake of his head, he said, “Mrs. Jooris is gonna go mental when she sees this.”

“How you pronounce your name anyway?” Matt asked him.

“ ‘ Tchaba.’ But you can call me ‘Jabba,’ ” he replied without a hint of annoyance. “Everyone does.”

Which surprised Matt. “Really?”

Jabba nodded. “Sure.”

“And that doesn’t bother you?”

Jabba’s expression was one of laid-back, casual bewilderment. “Should it?”

Matt thought about it, then shrugged. “Okay then. Let’s ditch this car and find us a safe place, somewhere they won’t find us. Then I’m gonna need you to tell me exactly what you and Vince were talking about and help me figure out what the hell is going on.”

Chapter 30

Deir Al-Suryan Monastery, Wadi Natrun, Egypt

Before long, the Previa had left the desert behind and was trudging through the snarled traffic leading into Cairo. There was no avoiding cutting across the sprawling city, as the new airport was east of it, with Wadi Natrun to its northwest. By now, it was early evening, and the low sun’s fading light punctuated the mist of exhaust fumes and dust that choked the overcrowded, run-down metropolis.

“Does he know what’s going on yet?” Gracie asked Brother Ameen. “Have you told him about the signs?”

“No,” the monk regretted. “Not yet.” He glanced back at her uneasily, his look signaling that it was something she’d soon be a part of. “Actually, he doesn’t know you’re coming. The abbot doesn’t know either.”

Gracie was about to ask him to clarify, but he beat her to it. “The abbot—he doesn’t know what to do. He didn’t want the outside world to know about it.”

“But you did,” Finch prompted.

The monk nodded. “Something miraculous is happening. We can’t keep it to ourselves. It’s not ours to keep.”

Gracie looked over at Finch. They’d been around such situations before: uninvited guests traveling into troubled spots to talk to reluctant interviewees, people whose first instinct was to shut themselves off from outside scrutiny. Sometimes, Gracie and Finch managed to get through; other times, they were locked out. In this case, they had to make it happen. They hadn’t flown halfway around the globe to leave empty-handed. Not when the whole world was waiting for an explanation.

The appearance of the tips of the pyramids at Giza told Gracie they were finally leaving the city behind. She’d seen them before, but the sight never failed to inspire awe, even in the most jaded observer. On this occasion, something else stirred inside her, the majestic, stone peaks that jutted out of the sand oddly reminiscent of the nunataks—the rocky crags that rose out of the fields of snow—that she’d looked down on only hours ago from the window of the chopper. The noisy, chaotic mess of Cairo quickly gave way to sleepier, scattered clusters of houses, and as they passed the small town of Bir Hooker, the last town before the desert and the monasteries, they lost the signals in their cell phones. The monk informed them that they’d be limited to the satphone from there on.

Ever since his first call, Gracie hadn’t been able to place his accent. “By the way, where are you from?” she asked him.

“I’m from Croatia,” he explained. “I come from a small town in the north, not far from the Italian border.”

“Then you must be Roman Catholic.”

“Of course,” the monk confirmed.

“So Ameen isn’t your real name?”

“It’s not my birth name,” he corrected with a warm smile. “I was Father Dario before I came here. We all take on Coptic names once we join the monastery. It’s the tradition.”

“But the Coptic Church is Orthodox,” she queried. Long before the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s, the Christian world had already been rocked by the great schism in the eleventh century. The longstanding rivalries and theological disputes between Rome and its Eastern counterparts in Alexandria and in Antioch had been festering since the earliest days of Christendom. These petty squabbles finally came to a head in 1054 and split Christendom into two: the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church. The Greek word Orthodox meant, literally, “correct belief,” which pretty much summed up the Eastern church’s belief that it was the true keeper of the flame, that its adherents followed the authentic and uncorrupted traditions and teachings that had been passed down by Jesus and his apostles.

“Orthodox, yes, but not Eastern Orthodox,” the monk specified. Gracie’s confused expression was obviously no surprise, nor was it limited to her. The monk glanced at his three visitors and waved the issue away. “It’s a long story,” he told them. “The Coptic Church is the oldest of them all, it out-orthodoxes the Eastern Orthodox Church. It was actually founded by the apostle Mark in the middle of the first century, less than ten years after the death of Jesus. But it’s all nonsense, really. Ultimately, all Christians are followers of Christ. That’s all that matters. And the monasteries here don’t make those distinctions either. All Christians are welcome. Father Jerome is Catholic,” he reminded her.

Before long, they rounded the nearby monastery of Saint Bishoi, and Deir Al-Suryan appeared at the end of a dusty, unlit lane. It looked like an ark adrift in a sea of sand—an image its monks had long embraced, believing the monastery to have been modeled on Noah’s ark. Detail soon fell into focus as the people carrier drew nearer to it: the two tall bell towers; the cubical, squat, four-story keep—the qasr—guarding the entrance gate; the small domes with big crosses on them strewn irregularly around the various chapels and structures inside the walled complex; all of it surrounded by a thirty-foot fortified wall.

They filed out of the minivan, and Brother Ameen led them past the keep and across the inner courtyard, which was presently deserted. The enclosure was deceptively large. It was roughly the width and length of a football field, Gracie noticed, and just as flat. Every exterior surface, wall and dome alike, was covered with a clay-and-limestone adobe of uniform color, a pleasing, sandlike beige, the corners and edges rounded, soft and organic. The walls of the keep were dotted with tiny, irregular openings in place of windows—to keep the heat out—and narrow stair-cases led in all kinds of directions. With the setting sun’s warm, orange gleam adding to the walled sanctuary’s otherworldly feel, and its stark contrast to the cold, bleak landscape of the ice continent whose chill still lingered in her bones, Gracie felt as if she hadn’t just leapfrogged across whole continents. It felt as if she’d stumbled onto Tatooine.

As they approached the entrance to the library, a monk stepped out and paused at their sight, looking at them first curiously, then with a dour expression on his face. Gracie guessed it was the abbot.

“Please wait here,” Brother Ameen told Gracie and Finch. They stayed behind while he stepped ahead and intercepted the clearly irate abbot. Gracie gave Finch a here-we-go look as they both did their best to observe the heated chat without appearing too interested.

A moment later, Brother Ameen came back with the abbot. He didn’t seem thrilled to see them, and wasn’t doing much to hide it.

“I’m Bishop Kyrillos, the abbot of this monastery,” he told them dryly. “I’m afraid Brother Ameen overstepped his bounds by inviting you here.” He didn’t offer his hand.

“Father,” Finch said, “please accept our apologies for arriving here like this. We weren’t aware of the, um,” he paused, trying to find the most diplomatic way of saying it, “internal debate going on here regarding how to deal with it all. We certainly don’t mean to inconvenience you or to impose in any way. If you’d like us out of here, just say the word and we’ll head back home and no one needs to know about any of this. But I ask you to keep two things in mind. One, no one knows we’re here. We only told one person back at our headquarters—our boss—he’s the only one who knows where we are. So you mustn’t worry about this suddenly becoming a media circus because of us. We won’t let it happen.”

He paused again, waiting to see if his words were having any effect. He wasn’t sure they were, but thought he detected a softening in the man’s frown.

“Two,” he pressed on, “we’re only here to help you and Father Jerome as you—as we all—try to understand the extraordinary events that we’re witnessing. I assume you know that we were there. In Antarctica. We saw it all happening right in front of us. And if we’re here, it’s first and foremost as expert witnesses. We won’t broadcast anything without your permission. What we see and discuss here remains between us until you allow otherwise.”

The abbot studied him, glanced over at Gracie and at Dalton, shot an unhappy frown at Brother Ameen, then turned his attention back to Finch again. After a brief moment, he nodded slowly as he seemed to reach a verdict, then said, “You want to talk to Father Jerome.”

“Yes,” Finch replied. “We can tell him what we saw. Show it to him, show him what we filmed. And maybe, he can make sense of it.”

The abbot nodded again. Then he said, “Very well.” He then raised a stern finger. “But I have your word you won’t let any of this out before talking to me about it.”

“You have my word, Father.” Finch smiled.

The abbot kept his gaze locked on Finch, then said, “Come.”

He invited them into the most recent addition to the complex, a stuccoed, simple three-story building that dated from the seventies. Finch and Gracie followed while Dalton scooted off down the courtyard. Brother Ameen had told them the monastery didn’t have a television, and they were aching to see the footage from the Arctic and the reaction to it.

Gracie and Finch gratefully accepted a drink of water and a small platter of cheese and fresh dates, and they’d barely had time to exchange casual pleasantries when Dalton popped his head through the door.

“We’re up.”

They rushed out. Dalton had linked his laptop to the foldable Began satellite dish and was on the network’s website. Gracie, Finch, the abbot, and the monk huddled around him while he played the news clip of the sighting over Greenland.

A graphic showed the location of the sighting, by the Carlsbad Fjord on the eastern coast of Greenland, four hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle. The video clip that followed was eerily familiar. The footage was jerkier and grainier than their own. It wasn’t filmed by a professional crew. Instead, the sighting had been captured on tape by a team of scientists who were studying the effects of meltwater on the Arctic island nation’s glaciers. The apparition had taken them by surprise, with the breathless excitement and hectic activity coming through vividly on the screen. One of them, a white-bearded glaciologist with the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, was then interviewed live, his face heavily pixelated and breaking up from the webcam-linked satellite phone they were evidently using.

“First, Antarctica, and now here,” the offscreen anchorman’s voice asked him. “Why do you think this is happening?”

There was a two-second lag, then the scientist’s professorial face reacted to hearing the question. “Look, I’m . . . I don’t know what it is or where it’s coming from,” he answered with a gruff voice. “What I do know is that it can’t be a coincidence that this—this sign is showing up over what can only be described as disaster areas. I mean, that ice shelf in Antarctica that’s crumbling, and this glacier here—they’re ground zero. I’ve been studying these glaciers here for over twenty years.” He turned and waved a gloved hand at the gray-white expanse behind him. “You’d look out across the land there and it used to be pure white. Nothing but snow and ice, year-round. Now you look at it and it’s more blue than white. It’s melting so fast that we’ve now got lakes and rivers all over the place, and that water’s working its way down to the bedrock and loosening the bases of the glaciers, which is why they’ve started to slide out to sea. And if this one goes,” he pointed out gravely, “we’re talking a three-foot rise in global sea levels. Which could then trigger all kinds of nightmare upheavals. So, you ask me what I think is happening? I think it’s pretty obvious. Nature’s flashing us a red alert here, and I think we need to take that warning seriously, before it’s too late.”

Gracie stood there, rooted in silence, as the report cut away to a montage of reactions to the sign’s second appearance. The images were breathtaking. A large crowd congregated in Times Square, watching the scenes unfold on the huge screen, the crawler underneath announcing the sighting in bold letters. Similar scenes were captured in London, Moscow, and other major cities. What the first appearance seeded, this second one reaped in spades, in terms of impact. The world was sitting up and taking notice.

Gracie glanced over at Dalton and Finch, and felt a surge of trepidation. Something unprecedented was happening, something big and wonderful and baffling and terrifying all at the same time—and she was right at the heart of it.

The satphone startled her and dragged her attention away from the screen. It was Ogilvy, calling from his cell, as per their agreed communication protocol.

“I just got a call from the Pentagon,” he informed her. “Two DIA guys just landed in McMurdo and found out you’d skipped town. They’re pretty pissed off,” he said with a light chuckle.

Gracie frowned. “What did you have to tell them?”

“Nothing. It’s still a free country. Sort of. But they’ll track you to Cairo Airport pretty quickly, if they haven’t done it already. From there . . . who knows. You might want to switch off your phones.”

“There’s no signal out here anyway,” she told him, “but we need to keep in touch. We’re pretty cut off out here.”

“Check your satphone every hour; I’ll text you if anything comes up.” Ogilvy impressed her with his sangfroid.

“We’ll do that,” she confirmed. “And I’ll get you the landline of the monastery too, just in case.”

“Good.” Ogilvy’s voice took on a more serious tone. “Did you meet him yet?”

“No, we just got here.”

“Talk to Father Jerome, Gracie. Do it quickly. The whole world’s watching. And we’ve got to keep our lead on this thing. It’s ours for the taking.”

Gracie felt a hard lump in her throat. She glanced uneasily at the monks as she stepped away and turned her back to them, lowering her voice. “We’ve got to be careful here, Hal. We can’t just announce this without taking the necessary precautions.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, this is a Muslim country. I’m not sure they’d react kindly to something that smells like a Second Coming, especially not in their own backyard.”

“It’s where it happened the first time,” Ogilvy remarked dryly.

“Hal, seriously,” Gracie shot back, “we need to tread carefully. In case you hadn’t noticed, this isn’t the most tolerant corner of the planet. I don’t want to put Father Jerome in any danger.”

“I don’t want to put anyone in danger either,” Ogilvy countered, slightly testily. “We’ll be careful. Just talk to him. We’ll take it from there.”

Gracie didn’t feel overly relieved. She relented—“I’ll call you after I meet him”—then snapped the phone shut and turned to the abbot. She needed to get something out of the way. “The documentary footage they filmed in the cave. Can we see it?”

“Of course. It’s on the DVD they sent us—I haven’t watched it as we don’t have a player here.”

“This laptop’ll play it,” Dalton told him, tapping his computer.

The abbot nodded and left them.

Dalton glanced worriedly at Gracie and Finch. “What if the shot we need didn’t make the final cut?”

It was a disheartening possibility neither of them wanted to consider right now, as it meant they would then have to contact the filmmakers for the outtakes. The abbot interrupted their concern by reappearing quickly, DVD in hand. Dalton loaded it up and fast-forwarded through it until the screen showed the small film crew climbing up the mountain and approaching what looked like an old door cut into the rock face.

“There,” the abbot exclaimed. “That’s Father Jerome’s cave.”

Dalton reverted to play mode, and the screen showed the cameraman’s point of view as he entered the cave. Gracie watched, heart in mouth, as it tracked through the dark chamber, an ominous, first-person voice-over describing the cave and its sparse, simple furnishings, giving her a preview of what she would imminently be visiting—then the camera banked around and, in a sweeping pan, covered the curving ceiling of the chamber.

“Right there,” Gracie burst out, jabbing the screen with her finger. “That’s it, isn’t it?”

Dalton hit the pause button, backtracked a few frames, and played the clip again in slow motion. They all leaned in for a closer look. It was just a brief shot, no more than a passing glimpse at a curiosity within the cave—but it was all they needed. Dalton froze the image on one of the painted symbols. It was an elegant construction of concentric circles and intersecting lines that radiated outward. Despite its simplicity, it somehow managed to convey what they’d seen over the ice shelf and now, on the video, with surprising ease and clarity.

It was unmistakable.

Gracie turned to the abbot. Her nerves were buzzing with anticipation. “When can we go there and meet Father Jerome?”

He checked his watch. “It’s getting late. The sun will be gone soon. Tomorrow morning, first thing?”

Gracie winced, her heartbeat having a hard time pulling back from the frenzied quickening brought on by the footage on Dalton’s screen. “Father, please. I don’t mean to be a burden in any way, but . . . given what’s happening, I don’t think we should wait. I really think we ought to talk to him tonight.”

The abbot held her gaze for an uncomfortable beat, then relented. “Very well. But in that case, we should go now.”

LYING UNDER A SAND-COLORED CAMOUFLAGE net four hundred yards west of the monastery’s gate, Fox Two watched through high-powered binoculars as Gracie, Finch, and Dalton, accompanied by the abbot and another monk, climbed into the waiting people carrier.

His Iridium satphone vibrated. He fished it out and checked it. The text message told him Fox One and his team had just landed. On time. As expected.

He locked the phone and tucked it back into his pocket and watched as the Previa drove away in a swirl of dust.

He waited until they were half a mile away before pushing himself to his knees. Crouching low, he carefully folded the netting, stowed it in its pack, then slipped away to rejoin his two men, who waited nearby.

The mountain beckoned.

Again.

Chapter 31

Woburn,Massachusetts

The motel was grubby and run-down, but it provided Matt and Jabba with the basics: four walls, a roof, and the anonymity of a check-in alcove manned by a weedy daytime television addict who could barely string together a sentence. And right now, that was what they needed most. Shelter and anonymity.

That, and some answers.

Matt was sitting on the floor, leaning against the bed, his head tilted all the way back, resting against the lumpy mattress. Jabba, on the other hand, couldn’t sit still. He was pacing around and making repeated checks out the window.

“Would you stop doing that,” Matt grumbled. “No one’s coming for us here. Not yet, anyway.”

Jabba grudgingly let go of the thin, stained curtain and embarked on another lap up and down the room.

“Just sit the hell down,” Matt snapped.

“I’m sorry, all right?” Jabba fired back. “I’m just not used to all this. I mean, it’s just insane, dude. Why are we even here? Why can’t we just go to the cops and tell them what you know?”

“’Cause what I know is nothing compared to what the cops think they know, and I don’t fancy sweating this one out behind bars. Now do me and this carpet a favor and sit down.”

Jabba stared at him for a beat, then relented. He looked around, frowned at a rickety chair that looked like it would disintegrate if he even thought of sitting in it, and set himself down on the marginally sturdier bed instead. He palmed the remote and changed channels on the small TV that was bolted onto the wall. It matched the room: basic, run-down, but functional. Matt glanced at its screen. The picture was grainy and the set had a meek, tinny sound, but that didn’t matter. He could see what he needed to see.

News of the Greenland apparition had whipped up the media into an even bigger frenzy. Coming on the heels of the Antarctic event, it was an irrefutable confirmation that no one could ignore. It was on every channel—endless blathering that ultimately couldn’t offer any explanation beyond replaying the same clips over and over and exploring past mystical sightings for any relevance. Clips about previous claims, from Fatima to Medjugorje, were getting airtime, only they paled in comparison. This wasn’t a handful of kids claiming to see the Virgin Mary in a field.

The world was, simply, entranced.

Matt tilted his head back again and exhaled wearily. “Tell me what you and Vince talked about.”

“Tell you what we talked about?” Jabba rambled. “We talked about everything, dude. Where do you want me to start?”

“Last night,” Matt specified testily. “What did you guys talk about last night?”

“Last night. Last night, right,” he muttered, pinching the bridge of his nose between two fingers. “We were watching this thing,” he said, pointing at the screen. “The first one, anyway. Trying to work out how it could be done.”

Matt sat up. “ ‘ Done’? You think it’s a fake?”

Jabba gave him a look. “Dude. Come on. Something like this happens, your first instinct has to be it’s a fake. Unless you buy into that whole ‘the truth is out there’ mind-set.”

“Which, I’m guessing, you don’t?”

“No, hey, I’m open to it. I’m sure there’s some weird stuff they’re not telling us about. But there’s so much bullshit out there, whether it’s from the government or from people who are out to make a fast buck, you’ve got to look at things with a cynic’s eye. And we’re scientists, man. Our instinct is to ask questions first.”

Matt nodded, trying to stay focused. “So you and Vince bounced around some ideas. You come up with anything?”

“No, see, that’s the thing.” Jabba leaned forward, and his voice livened up. “Nothing stuck. Nothing at all. We couldn’t even begin to figure it out. If this thing’s a fake, then whoever’s doing it is using some technology that’s straight out of Area 51.”

Matt frowned. He was missing something. “What is it you guys do, anyway? I mean, if it was a fake, what made you think you and Vince could figure it out?”

“We’re electrical engineers. We work on . . . I mean, me and Vince, we . . .” He stumbled with visible discomfort. “We design computer circuits, microchips, that kind of thing.”

Matt glanced at the screen dubiously. “That doesn’t sound particularly relevant to this thing.”

“I’m not talking about Radio Shack walkie-talkies, dude. Or even iPhones. I’m talking sci-fi-level stuff. Like right now, we’re building these micro-RFID chips—you remember that scene in Minority Report? When Tom Cruise is walking through a mall and all these holographic panels know it’s him and start talking to him and showing him these tailor-made ads?”

“Not really.” Matt shrugged. “I’ve missed out on a few movies over the years.”

“Too bad, man. Awesome movie. Right up there with Blade Runner, the only other Philip K. Dick story Hollywood didn’t manage to screw up.” A look from Matt put him back on track. “Anyway, we can do that now. Not the screen. I’m talking about the recognition part. Tiny chips embedded in the actual fabric of your shirt, that kind of thing.”

“It still doesn’t tell me why you think you’d be able to figure this out.”

“What we do . . . it’s not just a job,” Jabba explained. “It’s a calling. You live it, breathe it, dream it. It takes over your life. It is your life. And part of it is keeping track of everything that’s going on, not just the stuff that’s directly related to your work. You’ve got to want to know about what everyone else is doing, whether it’s at NASA, in Silicon Valley, or in some lab in Singapore. Because everything’s interconnected. One of their breakthroughs could be combined with what you’re doing in ways neither one of you intended and could open up a whole new door in your brain. It can give you the one thing you need to make that quantum leap and send your work in a completely new direction.”

“Okay.” Matt didn’t sound too convinced. “So you and Vince kept an eye on what other brainiacs were dreaming up.”

“Pretty much.”

Matt still felt confused. “Well if the two of you couldn’t figure it out, then why was your conversation a threat to anyone? Do you think you might have hit on something without knowing it?”

Jabba did a quick mental rummage of his chat with Bellinger. “I doubt it. Everything we talked about is public knowledge—at least, among the other ‘brainiacs’ out there. If any of it was relevant in any way—and I don’t think it was—someone else would have made the connection too by now.”

“So why come after Vince? And why did it make him think that my brother was somehow involved?”

The word threw Jabba. “Your brother?”

“Vince thought my brother might have been killed because of it.”

“Why would he think that?”

“I don’t know. They were close.”

Jabba’s face signaled he was now missing something. “Who was your brother?”

“Danny. Danny Sherwood.”

A name that clearly struck a chord. A resonant one. “Danny Sherwood was your brother?”

Matt nodded. “You knew him?”

“I knew of him, sure. Distributed processing, right? Progamming’s holy grail. Your brother’s cred was rock solid on that front.” He nodded wistfully. “Vince loved your brother, man. Said he was the most brilliant programmer he’d ever seen.” He let the words settle as his mind tried to fill in the blanks and see the connections. “What did Vince tell you, exactly?”

“Not much. He said someone called Reece hired Danny to work with him on something. You heard of him?”

“Dominic Reece. They all went down in that chopper, didn’t they? I’m sorry, man.” Jabba’s expression tightened. “Vince told you he thought they’d been murdered? All of them?”

“Maybe. Maybe not.” He didn’t want to lose his thread. “He said they were working on some kind of bio-sensor project. Does that mean anything to you?”

“No. But Vince and Danny were close. Closer than close. He might have told him something in strict confidence. Something he wasn’t supposed to spread around. Like maybe the patents hadn’t been applied for yet. In our business, one slip of the tongue could lose you a billion-dollar advantage.”

Matt rubbed the exhaustion from his eyes. The sign over Greenland was on the screen again, taunting him. It was hypnotic, and Matt was finding it hard to take his eyes off it. “You and Vince. That night. He cut the conversation short, didn’t he?”

Jabba nodded.

“What was the last thing he said? Do you remember?”

Jabba concentrated. “He didn’t say it. I did. I was just saying that it looked like the air itself was being lit up. Like the air molecules themselves were on fire. Only that’s not possible.”

Matt studied the grainy image on the screen. “What if it is?”

“Setting the air on fire? I don’t think so.”

“What about a laser, a projector . . . something that needs the skill set of one hell of a programmer.”

Jabba just shook his head. “Nothing I know of can do that. And if anyone else knew how it could be done, they’d be on every channel.”

Matt shut his eyes and leaned back, frustrated. He was having a hard time concentrating and getting his head around it all. It didn’t help that he was running on empty. He was exhausted, physically as well as mentally. He hadn’t slept for well over twenty-four hours, hours that he hadn’t exactly coasted through. And it didn’t look like whatever it was that had him in its grip was about to let go anytime soon.

“There’s a reason they killed Vince. And it has to do with what happened to Danny and the others. Whether this damn sign is real or not, someone’s doing something.”

Jabba’s face sank. “And you want to find out who’s doing it.”

“Yep.”

Jabba looked at him like a kid studying a three-eyed panda at the zoo. “Are you nuts? ’Cause that’s the wrong play, dude. The right play is we lose ourselves until they’re done with whatever it is they’re doing. We disappear, maybe drive up to Canada or something, we sit tight and we wait until it’s all blown over.”

Matt eyed him like he was now the alien species. “You think?”

Jabba frowned, a bit discomfited by Matt’s sardonic expression. “You asked me what made me and Vince think we could figure this out. What makes you think you can? I mean, what are you, an ex-cop or something? Ex-FBI? Some kind of ex-SEAL special ops hard-ass maybe?”

Matt shook his head. “You’ve got me pegged on the wrong side of that fence.”

“Oh, well that’s just wonderful,” Jabba groaned. He shook his head again, then his tone turned serious. “Dude, seriously. These are bad people. We’re talking about guys who kill people by the chopper-load.”

Matt’s mind was elsewhere.

Jabba could see it. “You’re not listening to me, are you?”

Matt shook his head.

Jabba’s face sank again in exasperation. “We’re screwed, aren’t we?”

Matt ignored the question. “Can you find out who else was on that chopper? What their specialties were? And also . . . who was funding them?”

Jabba sighed. “Like I have a choice?” He reached into his backpack and pulled out his laptop.

Matt pointed at it. “Think you can get an Internet connection in this dump?”

“I seriously doubt they have wi-fi here, but . . .” Jabba held up his iPhone and flashed Matt a cheesy, knowing look. Then he remembered and his face clouded. “Forgot. Can’t use this. Dammit.” He rubbed his face with his meaty fingers, thought about it, then looked up. “Depends on what you need. I can fire it up for forty seconds max. Any longer than that and they’ll get a fix on where we are.”

Matt grimaced. “You get that from watching 24, or is this for real?”

Jabba held up the phone. “Dude. First thing I did when I bought this thing? I took it apart to jailbreak it. Just to piss off AT&T.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning I’ve set it free. I can hook up its Edge data connection to my laptop.”

“Okay. But just to play it safe, maybe the guy at reception’ll let you use his computer.”

Jabba frowned. “Why? What else do you need?”

“A little update,” Matt said. “On where our friends with the Chrysler are hanging out.”

Chapter 32

Mountains of Wadi Natrun,Egypt

Father Jerome looked very different than Gracie had imagined. That didn’t surprise her. In her experience, people often looked different in the flesh than they did in pictures or on film. Occasionally, the change was for the better, though mostly—and more commonly these days, given the amount of Photoshopping that went on—it led to disappointment. In this case, Gracie had expected him to look different, given what he’d been through since the last coverage she’d seen of him. And he was: thinner, more gaunt-faced, seemingly more fragile than she remembered. But even here, in the light of three gas lanterns and a few scattered candles in the oppressively dark cave, his eyes, a piercing green-gray that blazed out of the tanned corona of his face, were more captivating than on film and made up for any frailty his recent ordeal had exacerbated.

“So you don’t remember anything at all of your journey?” Gracie asked him. “You were out there for weeks, weren’t you?”

“Three months,” the old man answered, his eyes never leaving hers. Gracie, Finch, and Dalton had been pleasantly surprised by the fact that he hadn’t refused to see them. Far from it, he’d been warm and welcoming. He was unperturbed, his voice unwavering and soothing, his words clear and slow. He hadn’t lost the trace of Spanish that colored his words. Gracie had immediately warmed to him, no doubt predisposed by her great admiration for the man and the selflessness and humility he inspired.

“And it’s just . . . blank,” she added.

“It’s not something I’ve ever experienced. I have vague recollections, fleeting images in my mind . . . Walking, alone. I can see the sandals on my feet, walking in the sand, the endless landscape surrounding me. The blue sky, the burning sun, the hot air . . . I can smell it, I can feel the heat on my face, the hot air in my lungs. But that’s all they are. Snippets. Momentary flashes of consciousness in an otherwise blank slate.” He shook his head in despair, slightly, to himself, as if chiding himself for that failing.

Although Dalton and Finch were sitting there with her in the cave, along with the abbot and Brother Ameen, Gracie had decided not to ask for this first interview to be filmed. It hadn’t been an easy decision. Although she felt it was best to spend a bit of time with Father Jerome first, to get to know him, to get him comfortable with them, she also wasn’t sure how he’d react to seeing the footage of the signs in the sky. And she felt uneasy and disingenuous at the thought of springing the news on him with a camera rolling.

She glanced up at the roof of the cavern. The white swirls, unsettling representations of the sign she’d witnessed over the ice shelf, were all over it.

“Tell me about these,” she asked him, waving her hand across the ceiling.

The priest looked upward thoughtfully, studying the painted symbols above their heads, and thought about her question for a brief moment, before letting his eyes settle on her again. “Shortly after I arrived here,” he told her, “a clarity that I’d never experienced came over me. I began to understand things more clearly. It was as if my mind were suddenly liberated of its clutter and freed to see life for what it really was. And these thoughts, these ideas . . . they started coming to me with such clarity, and such power. I just need to close my eyes and they start flowing through me. It’s beyond my control. I’ve been writing them down, there.” He pointed at his desk. A few notebooks sat on its worn surface, some others on the ledge by the window. “Like a faithful scribe,” he added with a faint smile.

Gracie couldn’t take her eyes off him as he spoke. Most unsettling was how steady his voice was, how utterly normal he sounded, how casual his tone was. It was as if he were describing nothing more than the most mundane of experiences. “And this symbol?” she reminded him, pointing upward again. “You painted these, didn’t you?”

He nodded slowly, his face slightly pinched in confusion. “It’s something I can’t quite explain. When the thoughts come to me, when I hear the words in my head just as I hear you, I also see that,” he explained, pointing at the sign. “It’s just there, burning brightly in my consciousness. And after a while, I found myself drawing it, over and over. I’m not sure what it means, but . . . it’s there, in my head. I can see it, clearly. And it’s . . . it’s more than this,” he added almost ruefully as he gestured at the roof of the cavern. “It’s . . . clearer. Richer. More resplendent. More . . . alive.” He glanced away, hesitating to go further. “It’s hard to explain. Forgive me if this sounds too vague, but . . . it’s really beyond my understanding. Or control.”

“Could it be something you saw in your dreams?”

Father Jerome shook his head and smiled. “No. It’s there. I just need to close my eyes and I can see it. Anytime.”

Gracie felt a shiver at the base of her neck. “So you’ve never actually seen it? I mean, physically?” she specified, weighing her words—then an idea swooped into her mind. “Could it be something you saw while you were out in the desert? Something you saw but don’t remember?”

“Saw? Where?” he asked.

She hesitated, then said, “In the sky?”

The priest tilted his head slightly, his eyebrows raised, as he mulled her suggestion for a moment. “I suppose it’s possible,” he finally conceded. “Anything’s possible, given how those weeks are nothing but a blur.”

Gracie glanced over at Finch, then at the abbot. With the slightest nods, they seemed to agree with what she was thinking. She turned to Dalton, who had cottoned on and was already keying in the commands on his laptop.

She felt a tightening in her throat as she coaxed the words out. “I’d like to show you something, Father. It’s something we just filmed, something we saw in Antarctica, just before coming here to see you. I’m a bit wary of showing it to you like this, without preparation, but I really think you need to see this. It has to do with this symbol you’ve been drawing.” She paused, scrutinizing his face for signs of discomfort. She didn’t find any. She swallowed hard and asked, “Would you like to see it?”

The priest looked at her quizzically, but, calm as ever, nodded. “Please,” he said, spreading his hands invitingly.

Dalton got up and placed the laptop on a low table in front of the priest, and turned it so that they could all watch it. He hit the play button. The video from Antarctica, the edited piece they had sent the network, played. Gracie kept her gaze locked on Father Jerome, studying his face as he absorbed the images unfurling before him. She watched, on edge, expecting to see any one of a number of emotional responses to the clip—surprise, consternation, worry, fear even—and hoping it didn’t make the priest distraught. It didn’t. But it seemed to confuse him. His posture visibly stiffened as he leaned in for a closer look, his mouth dropped slightly, his forehead furrowed under the strain.

When it was finished, he turned to them, looking bewildered. “You filmed this?”

Gracie nodded.

The priest was lost for words. His eyes took on a haunted, pained expression. “What does this mean?”

Gracie didn’t have an answer for him. From the silence around her, it didn’t seem like anyone else did either. She winced a little as she said, “There’s been another sighting like that. In Greenland this time. Just a few hours ago.”

“Another one?”

“Yes,” Gracie confirmed.

Father Jerome pushed himself to his feet and shuffled over to the window. He stared at his desk, shaking his head in disbelief, then reached down and picked up one of his notebooks. He rifled through its pages until he found what he was looking for, and just stood there, staring at it. “I don’t understand it,” he mumbled. “It’s what I’ve been seeing. And yet . . .” He turned to face Gracie and the others, the open notebook in his hand. Gracie hesitantly reached out. He placed it in her hand, a faraway, haunted look in his eyes. She looked at the pages before her, then leafed through a few more pages. They were all similar: packed densely with an elegant, handwritten script, and dotted, here and there, with more elaborate renderings of the sign. She looked over at Finch and passed him the notebook, her fingers quivering slightly under the weight of what she’d seen on its pages.

“When I see it,” the old priest continued, “it . . . it speaks to me. Somehow, it’s as if it’s putting the words and ideas in my head.” He studied their faces intently, his gaze magnetic, his eyes jumping from one to the other, searching for comfort. “Don’t you hear them too?”

Gracie didn’t know what to answer. She felt the others shifting uncomfortably, not knowing what to say either. The abbot got up and crossed over to Father Jerome. He placed a comforting arm around his shoulder. “Perhaps we should take a small break,” he suggested, nodding at Gracie. “Let the good father’s mind settle down. It’s a lot to take in.”

“Of course,” Gracie agreed with a warm, supportive smile. “We’ll wait outside.”

The three of them left Father Jerome with the abbot and the younger monk and stepped out into the small clearing outside the cave’s entrance. The last vestiges of day that they’d witnessed on the climb up were now gone. With a total absence of ambient light as far as the eye could see, the ink-black dome above them looked unreal, blazing with a dazzling array of stars, an astounding and humbling display the likes of which Gracie had rarely seen.

No one said anything. They each seemed to be processing what the priest had said, looking for a rational explanation to it all. Gracie glanced absentmindedly at her watch, and saw that it was coming up to the hour. She suddenly remembered what they’d agreed with Ogilvy. “Where’s the satphone?” she asked.

Finch retrieved it from his bag, which he’d left at the door of the cave, inserted the battery back into it, and switched it on. Within seconds, it pinged with several text messages. The one that caught his eye was from Ogilvy. It simply said, in loud, capitalized letters, “CALL ME AS SOON AS YOU GET THIS.” He handed it to Gracie. “Something’s up.”

The curtness of the message unsettled her as she thumbed the redial key. Ogilvy picked it up inside of one ring, the words somersaulting out of his mouth.

“They just aired the documentary footage from the cave.”

Gracie froze. “What?”

“They showed it,” Ogilvy reiterated, breathless with urgency. “It’s out. The whole thing’s out. Father Jerome, the monastery, the symbol he’s painted all over his cave. It’s on every TV screen from here to Shanghai as we speak,” he told her, uncharacteristically nerve-wracked, clearly struggling to process the implications himself. “This thing’s just blown wide open, Gracie—and you’re standing right at ground zero.”

Chapter 33

Boston, Massachusetts

Larry Rydell was having a hard time focusing on what his chief advertising strategist and his director of interactive marketing were saying as they stepped out of the elevator. He’d had trouble concentrating on the conversation throughout their lunch at the firm’s laid-back canteen—a moniker that seriously understated the fine sushi and Mediterranean cuisine that were on offer. He knew both executives well. They were part of the brain trust that ran the firm—his firm, the one he’d founded twenty-three years earlier, before he’d dropped out of Berkeley. He used to thrive on their informal meetings. They were part of what fueled the company to its global success, and he normally enjoyed them with the enthusiasm of a young entrepreneur hell-bent on conquering the world. Lately, though, he’d been more distant, less focused, and today, he was only there in strictly physical terms. His mind was entirely elsewhere, locked on the events that were taking place continents away.

He gave them a casual half smile and a small wave as they parted, then strode down the wide, glass-covered hallway to his office. As he reached the secretarial pool stationed outside his door, he saw Mona, his trusted senior PA, and his three other assistants clustered around the bank of wall-mounted LCD screens that were constantly tuned to the major international news channels.

The sight surprised him somewhat. They’d already watched the Greenland sighting that morning. Mona turned and spotted him. She waved him over while gesturing at the screen. “Did you see this?” she asked. “It’s from a documentary they filmed six months ago in an old monastery in Egypt. You’ve got to see this.”

He felt a pinch of concern as he stepped closer to the screen, then the blood drained from his face as the significance of what it was showing sank in.

He managed to mask his unease and feigned sharing in their excitement for a minute or two before retreating into the sanctuary of his office, where he studied the news reports in private. He was familiar with Father Jerome, of course—who wasn’t—but he’d never heard of the monastery. Close-ups of the markings on the cave wall were everywhere he looked, and were definitely renderings of the sign. Which sent Rydell’s mind cartwheeling in all kinds of deeply troubling directions.

He flicked around TV channels and websites feverishly, looking for something, anything, to put his mind to rest. Nothing came to his rescue. On the screens, legions of commentators on the news networks were competing to make sense of it.

“Well, if what we’re seeing here is true, if this footage was really filmed when they’re saying it was,” one notable pundit was saying, “then clearly, it’s an association between this unexplained phenomenon and a highly regarded man of faith, and not just any faith—a Christian man of faith,” he emphasized, “who somehow foresaw these events we’ve been witnessing, while staying in one of Christianity’s oldest places of worship . . .”

The implications of the footage were obvious and inescapable, and it was already creating a huge stir. Evangelists and born-again Christians, parishioners and preachers alike, had begun staking their claim on the sign and making all kinds of prophetic proclamations. The followers of other faiths—predictably—didn’t share in their euphoria and felt excluded and threatened. A few angry denunciations had already been voiced by Muslim scholars. More would inevitably come, and from other religions too, Rydell was certain.

Which wasn’t part of the plan.

He pulled back and engaged his mind in a broader, less prejudiced analysis of what this might be. He knew there were a lot of other possible explanations for it. They’d expected people to claim the sign all along. They knew that crazies in every dark corner of the planet would be coming out of their rabbit holes and making all kinds of nonsensical declarations. But this was no nutcase. This was Father Jerome. The Father Jerome.

No, he was sure of it. Something was very, very wrong.

He’d misjudged them again.

And that possibility—that certainty—sent a bracing shot of ice rushing through his veins.

He did all he could to keep his anger in check as he picked up the phone and punched the speed-dial key for Drucker.

SEATED COMFORTABLY IN HIS OFFICE on Connecticut Avenue, Keenan Drucker watched his TV monitor with avid interest. He marveled at how quickly the media pounced on any development and whipped it around the planet. The content beast needed to be fed, and ever since the first appearance of the sign, it was positively feasting.

He felt a deeply rooted satisfaction at how things were unfolding, and his gaze ratcheted back from the plasma screen on his wall and dropped down to a framed picture on his desk. Jackson, his son—his dead son—beamed back at him from behind its thin glass plate. Drucker felt the same stab of grief he suffered every time he glanced at the picture. He tried to keep that image of Jackson in his mind—alive, vibrant, handsome, proudly turned out in his crisp officer’s dress uniform, the young man’s eyes blazing with a sense of pride and purpose—and not let the horrific images from the mortuary seep in and overpower it. But he never could. The images from that visit to the base, when he and his wife were presented with what was left of their son, were permanently chiseled into his hardened soul.

I’ll make things right, he thought to Jackson. I’ll make sure it never happens again.

He tore his eyes off his son’s face and looked up at the screen. He surfed away from the mainstream news networks and trawled the Christian channels instead. The sound bites coming through were promising. The footage from the caves was whipping up a storm of excitement, that much was clear. The people in the street were lapping it up. The preachers, however, were being more cautious. He watched as one televangelist after another gave cagey responses about what was going on, clearly unsure about how to handle this unexpected intrusion into their cosseted worlds.

Typical, he thought, knowing they had to be seriously threatened—but also aware that they’d be watching each other, waiting to see who’d be the first to jump into the pool.

“If he’s the real deal,” he heard one pundit remark on air, “these preachers will soon be falling over themselves to embrace him and claim him as their own.”

They’ll get there, he mused. They just need some encouragement.

Covert encouragement, to be precise.

Which, as it happened, was something Keenan Drucker excelled at.

His BlackBerry pinged. He dragged his concentration away from the monitor and glanced at the phone. It was Rydell.

As expected.

He inhaled a long, calming breath, then picked it up. Rydell’s voice was—also, as expected—agitated.

“Keenan, what the hell’s going on?”

Time for damage control. Something else he excelled at.

“Not on the phone,” he replied curtly.

“I need to know this isn’t what I think it is.”

“We need to talk,” Drucker just repeated, his words slow, emphatic. “In person.”

A beat later, Rydell came back. “I’ll fly down first thing in the morning. Meet me at Reagan. Eight o’clock.” And he was gone.

Drucker nodded slowly to himself. Anticipating Rydell’s reaction, and his call, hadn’t exactly taken an act of supernatural-level divination. It was simple cause and effect. But it meant he needed to initiate an effect of his own.

Maddox picked up his call within two rings.

“Where are you?” Drucker asked him. “Where are we with Sherwood’s brother?”

“It’s under control,” Maddox said. “I’m dealing with it myself.”

Drucker frowned. He didn’t expect the Bullet to dive in himself unless things were getting out of hand. He decided now was not the time to delve further on that front. He had a more pressing message to convey, in the form of three short words.

“Get the girl” was all he said. Then he hung up.

ALMOST TWO THOUSAND MILES EAST, Rebecca Rydell was still in bed and enjoying a late lie-in. By conventional standards, it was past lunchtime, but Costa Careyes was far from conventional. And at the Rydells’ sprawling Casa Diva, moreover, as in the other villas and casitas on the sun-kissed Mexican coast for that matter, life was unfettered by such mundane limitations.

She’d been up most of the night, with her friends. They’d watched the latest sighting on the big screen in the open-air living room before adjourning to the beach and wondering about it over ceviche, grilled shrimp, margaritas, and a big bonfire under a pearlescent moon.

Vague recollections of the evening drifted into her mind as she stirred, half-awake, her senses tickled to life by the delicate scents of bougainvillea and copa de oro that wafted through the house. She usually liked to sleep with the French doors open, preferring the sound of the ocean’s waves and the salty taste of the air to the clinical hum of the air conditioner, but it had been a particularly hot week, hotter than she could ever remember. Still drowsy, she realized something else had nudged her awake. A faint noise outside her bedroom. Footsteps, getting closer.

The door to her room swung open, and Rebecca almost jumped out of her skin at the sight of the two men who hurried in. She knew them, of course. Ben and Jon. The bodyguards her father had insisted should accompany her whenever she left the country. Especially when she was in Mexico. They were normally very discreet and stayed well out of sight, particularly here, in the sleepy, remote playground of Careyes, far removed from kidnap-central Mexico City and the drug warzones farther north. She’d known the two men for over a year now, and she liked and trusted them—which is why she sat up briskly, a sudden ripple of fear rushing through her. For them to be barging into her bedroom like this, without so much as a knock, meant that something very, very bad had happened.

“Get dressed,” Ben told her bluntly. “We have to get you out of here.”

She pulled the sheet right up against her chest and shrank back against the headboard, her breath coming short and fast. “What’s going on?”

Ben’s eyes fell on a light, floral-patterned dress that was strewn across a bench at the foot of her bed. He picked it up and flung it at her.

“We have to get you out here now. Let’s go,” he ordered.

Something about the way he said it, something about the way Jon’s eyes were dancing back and forth warily, made her uneasy. Her hand fumbled to the night table and she grabbed her cell phone. “Where’s my dad? Is he okay?” she asked as she hit the keypad.

Ben took a couple of quick strides to her bedside and snatched the phone out of her hand. “He’s fine. You can talk to him later. We have to go now.” He slipped her phone into his pocket and looked at her pointedly.

The finality of his words pummeled her into submission.

She nodded hesitantly and reached for her dress. The two men half-turned to give her some privacy as she pulled it on. She tried to calm herself, to placate the terror that was coursing through her. The two men were professionals. They knew what they were doing. This was what they were trained to do. She shouldn’t be asking questions. She knew her dad only hired the best of the best. She was in safe hands. She’d even met her bodyguards’ boss, the slightly creepy guy with the granite eyes whose firm handled all aspects of security for her dad’s businesses, a man who didn’t look like he did anything halfheartedly.

Everything would be fine, she tried to convince herself.

She slipped her sandals on. Seconds later, they were rushing her out of the house and into a waiting car that charged out of the estate and barreled down the bumpy road, heading for Manzanillo.

Everything’s going to be fine, she told herself again, although somehow, deep inside, a little voice was telling her she was wrong.

Chapter 34

Brighton,Massachusetts

Mattwas parked across the street and six car lengths back from the target house. He’d been there for over an hour, sitting low, watching, waiting. Thinking about his options. Not really liking any of them.

He’d ditched the RAV4 and picked up a bathtub-white Camry, pre-’89 and hence pre-car key transponders. Probably the blandest car he’d ever stolen—it even out-blanded the Taurus, which was no mean feat. Regardless, he’d felt a pang of guilt as he’d hot-wired it. Several people were now facing the unpleasant task of dealing with their insurance companies regarding their stolen cars, all because of him. Still, he didn’t really have a choice. He figured they’d probably understand if they knew what he’d been going through.

The gray house he was watching was equally unremarkable. Small, run-down, two floors, clapboard siding, gabled roof. Probably leased in the name of a shell company. Rent paid in advance. Practically untraceable, Matt imagined. It squatted there anonymously, its gray boards mirroring the dreary wintery sky overhead, looking as bleak and lifeless as the bare-limbed red oaks that dotted the quiet neighborhood. A small driveway ran alongside it and led to a covered single-car garage out back. The Chrysler was parked outside, as was the van—the one he’d last seen barreling down the snow-lined avenue after he’d jumped out of it.

His nerve endings bristled with impatience and anticipation. The answers he so wanted were probably inside that house, but he couldn’t exactly waltz in there and get them. He needed to bide his time. Watch. Study. And come up with a plan. One that had half a chance of working. One that wouldn’t end up with him dead.

He’d come up with one earlier, back at the motel, before driving over. A grand plan, one that had him excited—for a short spell, anyway.

He’d call the cops. Do the “anonymous-tip” thing and tell them Bellinger’s real killers were in the house. They’d send a car to check it out. The cops—maybe the ones who showed up at Bellinger’s apartment that night—would come up to the door and knock. One of the goons—not bob-girl, presumably, since she was one of the “witnesses” who’d “seen” Matt chase down Bellinger—would answer. They’d have a little Q&A. Dance around some questions.

And then Matt would ramp things up a notch.

He’d pick up a couple of empty bottles from a Dumpster on the drive over, along with any old rag he could find. He’d buy a jerrican of fuel and a lighter at a gas station. He’d fill the bottles with fuel. He’d shred the rag into strips and stuff them into the necks of the bottles and use them as wicks. And then he’d firebomb the house.

Maybe from the back. Or from the side. Just sneak up to a spot where he wouldn’t be seen and chuck a flaming bottle or two through a window. And watch. It would take them all by surprise. The cops would want to go in to help put out the fire. The goons would probably resist, not wanting them in the house where their gear might be on show. Their behavior would certainly be less than ingenuous, and they would probably behave suspiciously. The cops would get curious, especially given the reason they were there in the first place. They’d probably call for backup. A standoff would ensue. The goons would have a lot of explaining to do. In looking into the unexplained arson attack, the cops would find some forensic evidence in the van, linking it to Bellinger’s murder. The goons would get mired in a procedural swamp. They’d be off Matt’s back, and, with a bit of luck, Matt would be off the hook for the stabbing.

Maybe.

On the other hand, it could all go wrong and he could get shot by the cops and the case would be closed. And either way, he wouldn’t get the thing he most wanted: to find out what they had done to his brother.

So he dropped that plan. Decided to play it more cautiously. Take things one step at a time. Maybe try and get some one-on-one time with one of the goons. In which case a weapon would be good. The van—and the car—could yield one. Something he could use to even out the odds a little. And maybe, with a bit of luck, he could then grab one of the killers and get the answers he wanted.

Maybe.

No one had gone in or out of the house since he’d been there, but the cars and the lights in the front ground-floor room suggested the goons were in. He tried to think back at how many were in the van—four, he thought. Which was bad enough. He didn’t know if the two in the Chrysler were part of that crew, or if they were additional, in which case there’d be six of them in there. Which would be even worse.

The house next door looked dark and empty by comparison, with no sign of life apart from a Christmas tree that blinked on and off mind- numbingly in its front window. A five-foot-tall hedge ran between the houses, alongside the target’s driveway. Matt thought of waiting till it got dark, to give him more cover, but he didn’t feel like loitering around that long and wasn’t sure how long they’d be staying in there.

He decided to chance it.

He scuttled alongside the hedge and made his way to the back of the house. He skulked behind the Chrysler and peeked out. He couldn’t make out any movement at the back of the house. It was just dark and still. He looked through the 300C’s window. Couldn’t see anything inside, but the glove box and the trunk were the areas of real interest. The car’s doors were locked, which was expected—and unhelpful. It was a new car, high-specced, with robust locks and both perimetric and volumetric alarms as standard. Which meant that before he could get inside the cabin he’d need to get under the hood without disturbing the car too much. Not the easiest car to break into, certainly not with the basic tools he had at hand.

He crept over to the van. It was slightly older and had a more basic locking mechanism that would surrender more easily. He glanced inside. Again, nothing on view, but once inside, things could prove different.

He knelt by the passenger door and was about to start jimmying the lock when he heard a car slow down by the house and turn into the driveway. He ducked down and slipped quickly around to the front of the van as the other car, a black S-Class Mercedes, pulled up and stopped alongside the house.

Matt crouched low and peered out from under the van. He heard the Merc’s door open and watched as a man climbed out of it and walked up to the back door. Matt leaned over and risked a side glance off the van’s left fender. The man was close to six feet tall and had a sharp, accurate step. He walked with purpose. He had a shaved head and wore a dark suit that he was subtly packed into, but not with fat. Matt recognized the build from his time in prison. The slightly bow-legged step, the arms cocked out just a touch, limbs whose natural rest positions were impeded by the bulk of muscle. Not huge. Not in-your-face. But there, lurking under the otherwise-slender build, waiting to inflict damage.

As he turned, Matt saw the missing ear and the spiderwebbed burn scar spreading out from it. The unsettling sight took him by surprise. Matt wondered if the man was ex-military. Maybe they all were. And judging by the step, the suit, and the car, this guy didn’t seem to be just another one of the drones. He was their boss. As if to confirm it, the rear door of the house creaked open as the man in the suit approached it. One of the goons stepped out and took an instinctive glance around as the hard case in the suit walked right past him without acknowledging him and disappeared into the house. A moment later, the goon followed him in and shut the door behind him.

Matt crouched low, his mind working double-time at interpreting this new variable and adjusting his options accordingly. One move sprang to the forefront of his mind immediately. He embraced it, sneaked over to the 300C, and slid under it.

Chapter 35

Mountains of Wadi Natrun, Egypt

“It’s not safe,” Gracie told Father Jerome. “We have to get you out of here.”

She quickly related to the three holy men what Ogilvy had told her. “Trust me on this,” she concluded, “I know how it works. The news vans are already on their way and the satellite hookups are already booked. It’ll be a zoo out there before sunrise. At least at the monastery, you’ll have four walls around you to keep the world at bay until we figure things out.”

What she didn’t want to mention was another problem—not the bullying of the press, but an altogether more dangerous one. They were in an overwhelmingly Muslim country, in an overwhelmingly Muslim region. Sure, 10 percent or so of the country was Christian—Coptic, specifically—but that still left more than seventy million other Egyptians out there, and countless others in neighboring Muslim countries, who might take issue with what was unfolding. This was, after all, a region where the moon landings were still believed to be a hoax to promote American superiority, where everything had a “Christian plot” angle to it, where the Crusades still cast a long and angry shadow.

Father Jerome’s face sagged with dismay at the news, but he didn’t object. He’d witnessed the savagery that men in the region had a long habit of inflicting on each other for no reason other than what tribe they belonged to or what religion they were born into. The abbot and the young monk didn’t argue with Gracie’s read of the situation either. What she was suggesting seemed to be the sensible move.

“We should take what we can with us,” she told them, casting her eyes around the cave’s spartan interior before pointing at the journals. “Everything you wrote, Father. And anything else that’s of value to you. I don’t know what condition the cave will be in next time you see it.” She looked up at the markings on the ceiling with a sense of foreboding, wondering how long it would be before they’d be defaced, and asked for permission to film their exit, which was given. She got Dalton to shoot a quick take of the cave and of its ceiling while the others helped Father Jerome gather his belongings.

Before long, they were back under the stars and heading down the mountain.

Chapter 36

Brighton,Massachusetts

Matt was just sliding out from under the big Mercedes when he heard the back door of the house creak open.

He huddled against the car’s front passenger door and froze. He couldn’t risk a look, but he didn’t need to. The odds were, it was the hard case in the suit, but he knew he was in trouble regardless of who was coming out of the house. The Merc was blocking the Chrysler and the van. Before either of them could be driven out, the Merc would have to be moved first. And the Merc itself was exposed. It had yards of open air in front and behind it, the side and rear of the house to its left and the five-foot hedge that separated the two houses to its right, behind Matt. All of which meant that if anyone was driving anywhere, the Merc was about to move, and Matt was about to find himself out of cover.

He was stuck. He’d known it was a possibility going in, but he’d still gone ahead with it, thinking it worth the risk. Right now, as he listened to the approaching footsteps, he sorely regretted not going with his original firebombing plan. Then again, everything looked better with hindsight, especially when your back was up against a wall—or, in this case, a dense, impenetrable five-foot hedge.

There was more than one set of footsteps, and he figured there were at least two of them approaching. If they were going into the Merc, he’d have someone in his face in a matter of seconds. He crouched down, cheek to the ground, trying to get a handle on how many of them there were and which way they were heading. The backyard sloped upward. He couldn’t see anything for a tense moment, then one pair of shoes appeared—black brogues, the hard case’s shoes, he thought—closely followed by another. Two of them. Headed for the Merc. The hard case must have hit his alarm key fob, as the car beeped and the locks popped open with a loud snap.

Matt didn’t have a choice.

He coiled up, waiting, his ears straining to pick up the approaching footsteps. He heard a door click open, the driver’s door—and then a figure appeared on his side of the car, rounding the front right fender, a guy with high cheekbones and a brush cut that Matt thought he recognized from the car staking out Jabba’s place. Matt just sprung up before the guy could react, catching him by surprise and landing a crushing fist on his chin. Brush Cut’s face juddered sideways, twisting unnaturally around his neck, a loud, wet wheeze rushing out of his chest and mouth. He was tough and didn’t go down. Instead, he tried to turn in and fight back, but Matt was now close enough to inflict more serious damage and hooked him with a ferocious uppercut that lifted Brush Cut momentarily off his feet before sending him staggering backward.

Matt heard movement on the other side of the car and, from the corner of his eye, saw the hard case in the suit stepping back and reaching under his coat. Brush Cut was groggy and having a hard time staying on his feet. Matt grabbed him from behind, curling his left hand around the guy’s neck while diving his right hand under the guy’s jacket, praying his fingers would find a gun somewhere. On the other side of the Merc, the hard case had his own gun out. He chambered a round and raised the gun at Matt, with Brush Cut between them.

Matt hit pay dirt. Brush Cut had a handgun tucked under his jacket, in a belt holster on his right hip. Matt’s fingers found the gun’s ribbed grip and yanked it out. He raised it, his right arm extended, level with his hostage’s ear, and aimed it straight at the hard case.

“Get back,” Matt shouted, swinging the gun to his hostage’s head and back at the hard case.

He sidestepped to his left, putting the car between him and the hard case, who raised his left hand in a calming gesture while keeping his gun aimed at Matt’s face.

“Easy, Matt,” he said. “Just take it easy.”

“Who the fuck are you people?” Matt yelled, still edging sideways, his eyes darting left and right nervously, keeping tabs on the front and rear of the house.

“I’m impressed that you made it here, Matt,” the hard case said, clearly trying to work out how Matt had found them. “In fact, I’m pretty impressed by everything you’ve done since this thing started.”

Matt was now at the back corner of the Merc. The hard case wasn’t backing away. He was actually tracking Matt, sidestepping smoothly and moving closer to the Merc that was now between them, eyeing the surroundings with radarlike focus. There was something deeply unnerving about him. The missing ear and the scar, the bald head that tapered up in the shape of a bullet—and they only served as a backdrop to the real darkness that emanated from the ceramic-black eyes that looked like they’d been to hell and back without blinking, the dark, eyeliner-like eyelids that rimmed them, and the sharp eyebrows framing the stygian mask that brooded out of the center of his face.

“And what is this thing?” Matt rasped. “What the fuck’s going on? What happened to my brother?”

The hard case shook his face slightly, in a condescending, tut-tutting way. “You know what, Matt? You’re too concerned with the past. You need to think more about your future.”

Matt backed up another step. “What did you do to my brother?” he yelled again. “Is he still alive?”

The hard case didn’t flinch. He stayed unsettlingly calm, his cold eyes seemingly assessing Matt’s position and evaluating possible outcomes. “You’re messing around with something you really don’t want to be messing with,” he finally told him. “My advice to you is to let it go. Find yourself a nice, deep hole, bury your head down, and forget any of this ever happened. Or better still—”

—and he just squeezed the trigger, once, with no discernible emotion, just made a decision and acted on it without a trace of emotion. The round hit the guy Matt was holding up squarely in the chest—

“—let me put you in it.”

Matt felt Brush Cut jerk and felt a sudden burn at his own side, by his left ribs, but he didn’t have time to pause and check it out. He had to stay on his feet as everything rushed into a frenzied blur.

Brush Cut’s legs gave and he started to fall just as the hard case fired again, then again. One of the shots hit Brush Cut in the shoulder, the bullet exiting close to Matt’s crouched head, whizzing past his ear and splattering his face with blood and bone shards. Matt struggled to keep Brush Cut up, using him as a shield while firing back at the hard case, who ducked behind the Merc. He faltered backward, his eyes scanning around, the burning sensation in his left flank getting stronger with each step. The hard case came up for another shot, got Matt’s hostage in the thigh. Two more bodies rushed out of the back of the house, guns out. They saw Matt, crouched into firing positions, but they were wide open and Matt got one of them in the shoulder a split second after he realized it was the auburn-haired girl from the van, the night they took him and Vince Bellinger. She tumbled sideways as if her feet had been knocked out from under her. The other shooter dived behind the Merc and joined the hard case. Matt kept moving, still using the bloodied-if-not-dead Brush Cut as a shield, lugging his heavy body back toward the street, step by step, inch by inch, firing away every time he spotted a flash of skin. A couple of shots whizzed by and he retaliated with three more of his own, then his gun’s magazine spat out its last round and the slide locked in its open position.

He saw that the hard case and the other shooter cottoned onto it as soon as he did, and they emerged from cover with little concern. He looked around frantically and realized he was now only a couple of yards from the sidewalk. Summoning whatever energy he could muster, he dragged Brush Cut’s dead weight back a few steps before letting go of him and bolting into the street.

He didn’t look back. He just kept running, the spent gun in hand, hugging the parked cars before sprinting across the street and leaping onto the opposite sidewalk, putting a barrier of cars between him and the shooters’ line of fire, hoping one last round wouldn’t find him before he got to his Camry, wondering how badly he’d been hit already and whether or not he’d get the chance to find out.

Chapter 37

Deir Al-Suryan Monastery, Wadi Natrun, Egypt

As Gracie had predicted, they’d barely managed to beat the news crews to the monastery, and were now safely ensconced behind its walls. A growing number of cars and vans were gathering outside the gates. With the rest of the monks alarmed by the sudden activity—the monastery was home to almost two hundred of them—the abbot set out to calm them while dispatching Brother Ameen to talk to the journalists. The younger monk told those crowding the gates that Father Jerome had no comment as yet, and asked them to respect his privacy. The reporters protested loudly, but to no avail.

The siege had begun.

Gracie’s satphone was back up and running. There was no point in staying under the radar any longer. On the contrary. She, Dalton, and Finch were supremely well placed to trump their peers on this story, which was now monopolizing the screens at all the major news channels, commanding continuous coverage and constant live updates. Their exclusive was alive and well, and less than half an hour after getting back, they were sending their first “live” footage from the roof of the keep that abutted the monastery’s entrance gate.

Standing on top of the large, sand-colored cube, Gracie weighed her words carefully as she faced the lens of Dalton’s camera.

“He hasn’t yet made a statement, Jack. As you can imagine, he’s overwhelmed by what’s happened in the last couple of days. All I can confirm to you at the moment is that Father Jerome is indeed here with us at the monastery.”

“But you’ve talked to him, haven’t you?” Roxberry asked, through her earpiece.

“Yes, I have,” she affirmed.

“And what did he tell you?”

Roxberry’s frustration was coming through loud and clear, and Gracie’s cagey replies weren’t helping. She’d avoided mentioning to him that they’d shown Father Jerome the footage of the sightings, and hadn’t shared what he’d told them in the cave. She and Finch had sifted with great care through what she would or wouldn’t say, deciding that it wasn’t their place—not yet, anyway—to announce things that the priest had said in confidence and that could be taken wildly out of context and distorted at will, which was inevitable. Hard as it was to keep a huge scoop like that to themselves, they’d agreed that it was more appropriate to give Father Jerome the chance to tell his story himself, if and when he chose to do it. They’d approach him for a live interview as soon as he’d had a chance to rest and let it all sink in.

“He asked us to respect his need for a bit of peace right now, which we fully understand.”

She could almost feel Roxberry’s rising blood pressure throbbing through her earpiece.

She and Finch had also debated whether or not to use the material they’d shot inside the cave. Gracie felt they’d been granted a privileged viewing, and she had misgivings about airing the footage, feeling as if she’d be betraying the priest’s trust. But, as Finch had pointed out, they couldn’t not use it either. It was too good for that, it was part of the story, and besides, the British documentary crew had been allowed to film it for broadcast purposes. It was already airing around the world. He couldn’t see the harm in simply confirming it, and Gracie had agreed.

She signed off, expecting an instantaneous and irate callback from the news desk, and stepped over to the edge of the flat roof. The roof had nothing but a low, three-inch lip around it, and Gracie felt a bit uneasy looking at the sharp drop-off. As she gazed beyond it at the flat, barren landscape outside the monastery’s walls, she also had a different kind of bad feeling. The trickle of headlights bouncing across the desert was growing ominously as more and more cars converged on the monastery. She knew the region well enough to know how quickly things got out of hand, how suddenly religious passions got inflamed and escalated into bloodshed. She tore her gaze away from the eerie light show and joined Finch and Dalton, who were huddled around the open laptop, watching the Al Jazeera reporter’s live broadcast from outside the gates.

“Weird, isn’t it?” she observed, overcome by a sudden tiredness and setting herself down cross-legged beside them. “Sitting here, inside the gates, watching ourselves from the outside in.”

“It’s like a bizarro-world version of a hostage situation,” Dalton intoned.

Gracie noticed a shift in the shadows coming out of the roof hatch to her left, and saw Brother Ameen’s head pop out. He gave them a subdued nod and climbed up the rickety ladder to join them.

“How’s Father Jerome?” Gracie asked.

He shrugged wearily. “Confused. Scared. Praying for guidance.”

Gracie nodded in empathy, frustrated that she couldn’t give him any answers herself. She knew that the pressure he was under was only starting. Watching the streaming news reports on the laptop only confirmed it. The reports coming in from Cairo and Alexandria were troubling. The revelation that Father Jerome had effectively foreseen what was still unexplained was causing a huge stir across the country. The polarization of opinions was already clear, even though the story had barely broken. The clips chosen for broadcast showed the local Christians to be confused, but generally excited, by the news. For them, Father Jerome had long been a beacon of positive transformation, and on the whole, they seemed to be embracing his involvement as something inspirational and wanted to know more. The Muslims who were interviewed, on the other hand, were either dismissive or angry. And, Gracie thought cynically, probably chosen for how inflammatory—hence attention-grabbing—their reactions were. Clerics were denouncing Father Jerome and calling on their followers not to be swayed by what they were already describing as trickery.

She glanced over at the young monk. His face was tight with tension.

“What is it?” she asked him.

He kept his eyes on the screen for a moment, then turned to her.

“I don’t understand what this thing is that you all saw. I don’t understand Father Jerome’s visions either, or how they’re both related. But there are some things I do know. Egypt’s not a rich country. Half the people around here have little or no education and live on less than two dollars a day. Even doctors in public hospitals don’t get paid more than that. But we’re also a very religious country,” he continued, his eyes drifting off to the chaotic light show below. “People take comfort in their religion because they don’t see hope in anything else around them. They don’t have faith in their politicians. They’re tired of traffic and pollution and rising prices and falling wages and corruption. They have no one else to trust but God. It’s the same everywhere else in this part of the world. Religious identity matters more to people out here than their common citizenship. And here, in this country—we’re on a knife edge as far as sectarian differences are concerned. It’s taboo to talk about it, but it’s a real problem. There have been a lot of incidents. Our brothers at the Abu Fana Monastery were attacked twice in the last year. The second time, they were beaten and whipped and made to spit on the cross.” He paused then turned, his eyes bouncing between the three of them before settling on Gracie. “There’s a lot of tension and a lot of misunderstanding between the people of this country. And there are millions of them within an hour’s drive of here.”

Gracie understood. It wasn’t a good mix.

“Bringing Father Jerome down from the cave was a good move,” he added. “But it might not be enough.”

She’d been thinking the same thing. An alarming vision coalesced inside her: that of two seriously antagonistic groups outside the gates, Coptic Christians on a pilgrimage of sorts to hear what Father Jerome had to say, and Muslims out to repel whatever outrage the kuffar—the blasphemers—were perpetrating.

Again, not a good mix. Unless you were cooking up some nitro.

“Where’s the army?” she asked. “Don’t they know what’s going on here? Shouldn’t they be sending people here to protect the monastery? And the cave—it’s gonna get trashed if things get out of control.”

“Not the army,” the monk said somberly, “the internal security forces. They’re twice as big as the army, which tells you where the government perceives the real threat. But they don’t usually send them out until after a problem catches fire. And when they do show up, things generally get worse. They don’t have a problem with using force to bring things back to normal. A lot of force.”

A swell of unease rolled through her. She turned to Finch. “Can you get hold of someone at the embassy? Maybe they can rustle something up.”

“I can try, but—I think Brother Ameen is right. Might be better to get out of here before it gets out of hand. And that goes for Father Jerome too.”

Dalton indicated the crowd below with a nudge of his head. “It’s not going to be easy.”

Gracie’s expression darkened further. “We have a car and a driver. And it’s still calm out there. We should leave at first light. While it’s doable.” She faced Finch again. “We can take Father Jerome to the embassy. We need to let them know we’re coming. We’ll figure the rest out from there.”

“What if he doesn’t want to leave?” Finch asked.

Gracie turned to Brother Ameen. He gave her an uncertain shrug. “I’ll talk to him, but I don’t know what he’ll say.”

“I’ll go with you. We’ve got to convince him,” she insisted as she got off the floor. Brother Ameen nodded and crossed over to the open hatch. Gracie turned to Finch. “First light, okay?” She gave him a determined look before gripping the sides of the hatch and disappearing into the heart of the keep.

Chapter 38

Houston, Texas

The Reverend Nelson Darby’s cell phone rang just as the tall, elegant man was stepping out of his chauffeur-driven Lincoln Town Car. He was in great spirits, having just witnessed a dress rehearsal of the five-hundred-person choir’s Christmas show. The caller ID on his screen prompted him to wave his assistant on, and he stayed back to take the call on the wide stairs that led to the handsome manor that housed the administrative core of his sprawling “Christian values” empire, an empire whose flagship was the resplendent 17,000-seat glass-and-steel megachurch Darby had built, one of a growing number of full-service Christian cocoons the likes of which hadn’t been seen since the thirteenth-century cathedral towns of Europe.

“Reverend,” the caller said. “How are things?”

“Roy,” Darby answered heartily, as always pleased to hear Roy Buscema’s measured voice. A fit man in his early forties, Darby had an angular face, deep-set eyes, and thin lips. With his backswept, perfectly coiffed jet-black mane and Brioni suits, he looked more like a pre-credit crunch investment banker on the make than a preacher. Which wasn’t inappropriate, given that both involved managing multimillion-dollar enterprises in a highly competitive marketplace. “Good to hear from you. How are things with you?”

Buscema, a gregarious journalist for the Washington Post, had met the pastor a little over a year earlier, when he’d been commissioned to write a feature profiling him for the newspaper’s Sunday magazine. The finely observed and highly complimentary article that he’d written had laid the groundwork for the friendship that followed, a friendship that grew into an unofficial consigliere-godfather relationship with all the hours they spent discussing and strategizing the pastor’s endorsements in the marathon presidential primary of the last year. Buscema’s take on the events had been impressively astute and always correct, and he’d let the pastor in on more than one scoop that had borne itself out. The pastor was converted. He saw in Buscema a savvy analyst who had the pulse of the people and knew where to go to get his prognoses corroborated, and as such—and given that Darby was one of the Christian Right’s political bigwigs—he was an invaluable man to have at hand.

Especially now, with all this going on.

“Crazier than ever,” Buscema replied. “But hey, I can’t complain really. It’s what we’re here for. Say, you been watching that thing over the ice caps?”

“Who isn’t?”

“What do you think?”

“To be honest with you, I’m a bit befuddled by the whole thing, Roy,” the pastor confided with his usual disarming candor. “What in God’s name is going on out there?”

Buscema’s tone took on a slightly more serious edge. “I think we ought to talk about it. I’m gonna be in town tomorrow,” he told the pastor. “If you have some time, why don’t we get together?”

“Sounds good,” Darby replied. “Come out to the house. I’m curious to hear your take on it.”

I bet you are, Buscema thought as they agreed on a time. He said good-bye and hung up. He then scrolled down his contacts list and made a second, almost identical, call.

A third, similar call followed soon after that.

As did six other carefully coordinated calls, made by two other men of a similar profile to his, to other influential evangelical leaders across the country.

Chapter 39

Woburn, Massachusetts

The bullet hadn’t done as much damage as Matt had first feared. It had clipped him just below his bottom left rib, punching a small hole through him less than an inch in from his side. Not exactly a graze, but not a major organ-buster either. Still, he had a couple of half-inch holes gouged out of him. Holes that needed to be sealed. Which meant stitches. And given that going to a hospital or to a doctor was out of the question, whatever sewing talents Jabba had would need to be summoned.

Jabba was holding up surprisingly well. He’d managed not to throw up when Matt first staggered back into their room, his clothes soaked with blood. He’d made it to the closest drugstore and picked up the items on a shopping list Matt had hastily dictated to him: iodine to clean the wound; any anesthetic cream he could find, to numb the skin; sewing needles, along with a lighter to sterilize them; some nylon thread; painkillers; bandages.

Most impressively, he’d so far managed to complete three sutures on the entry wound without puking, which he’d come close to doing while attempting the first stitch. Three more would do the trick on that front. Then he had the exit hole to take care of.

They were huddled in the far-from-antiseptic bathroom of the motel room. Matt was in his shorts, on the floor with his back against the tiled wall by the bathtub, grinding down his teeth as Jabba pushed the needle through the caldera of skin that rimmed his raw, open wound. The sensation was far worse than the immediate after-effect of getting shot, when the wound was still warm and the pain receptors hadn’t started their furious onslaught up his spine. He felt weak and nauseous and was fighting hard not to pass out. He swam through it by telling himself, over and over, that it would pass. Which it would. He just had to get through this part. He’d had a couple of bad wounds before, and although he’d never been shot, he tried to convince himself that this wasn’t any worse than a nasty cut from a blade. Which was something he’d had. Only then, he’d been sewn shut by a real doctor who’d used a proper anesthetic, not an over-the-counter cream more suited to hemorrhoids and leg waxing.

He blinked away tears of pain as the needle came out the other side.

“This look right to you?” Jabba’s fingers trembled as he pulled the thread through.

Matt didn’t look down. His sweaty face winced under the strain. “You’re the movie buff. You must have seen them do it a few times, right?”

“Yeah, but I usually turn away when they’re doing it,” Jabba grimaced as he pulled the two sides of the wound closer to each other and tied a knot in the thread, adding, pointedly, “which, by the way, they usually do to themselves.”

“Yeah, but then they end up with these Frankenstein-like scars, whereas with Dr. Jabba on the case . . .”

“. . . the Frankenstein look’s guaranteed,” Jabba quipped as he cut the end of the thread off. It wasn’t a particularly elegant piece of stitching, but at least the wound wasn’t bleeding anymore. “See?”

Matt shrugged. “Don’t sweat it. I hear the ladies just love the hard-ass scars,” he cajoled him. “When you’re done with me, maybe you could take a look at mending that hole in my jacket? It’s kind of an old favorite, you know?”

Seven stitches and half an hour later, they were done.

As he cleaned up the bloody mess around them, Jabba filled Matt in on what he’d discovered while he was out, which wasn’t much. He’d given the deadbeat receptionist ten bucks to let him use his computer. He’d logged into his Skype account and made a few calls while burrowing through the Internet, trying to find out more about the team that had died in the helicopter crash.

He’d managed to come up with two other names to add to Danny’s and to Reece’s—a chemical engineer by the name of Oliver Serres, and a biomolecular engineer named Sunil Kumar.

“Both were at the top of their game and highly regarded,” he told Matt. “But it’s weird, dude. I mean, Kumar’s a biologist. So far, we’ve got him, a chemist, Reece—an electrical engineer and computer scientist—and Danny, a programmer. The last three, I get. But Kumar . . . what’s a biomolecular engineer have to do with this?”

The nuance was beyond Matt at the best of times. In his current state, it just streaked past him. “What do you think?”

“I don’t know, man,” Jabba said with visible discomfort. “These biomolecular guys, they’re into rearranging DNA, playing around with the building blocks of life. Pulling apart and rearranging atoms and molecules like they were Lego bricks. And this sign in the sky, the way it looks organic, alive even . . . the gray area between biology and chemistry, between life and non-life, you know? It’s giving me a creepy feeling. Like maybe what they’re doing has more to do with some kind of designed life-form than a projected image.”

Matt frowned, trying to wrap his head around what Jabba was saying. “You’ve spent too much time watching The X-Files.”

Jabba shrugged, like it wasn’t a bad thing. “These biotech guys, they’re always getting flak for messing around in God’s closet. God’s closet, man. Who knows what they found in there.”

He let it drift and ran the cold tap. He drank from it, then splattered water across his face before filling up a glass and handing it to Matt. He didn’t have much more to tell him. He hadn’t been able to find any mention of who was backing Reece’s project, let alone what it involved.

Darkness was closing in fast outside their room, which suited Matt just fine. He wasn’t going anywhere tonight. He needed to rest. Jabba went back out and picked up some blood-free clothes for Matt and brought back some food and some Coke cans. They wolfed it all down greedily while watching the news. The footage from the cave in Egypt was hogging the airwaves, and the warm pizzas, though welcome, weren’t doing much to quell the cold, dismal feeling inside them.

“This is getting bigger,” Jabba noted glumly. “More elaborate.”

Matt nodded. “They know what they’re doing.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“What then?”

“These people. They’ve got serious resources at their disposal. Think about what they’re doing. First, they rustle up some major brain power, put them to work somewhere for, what, a couple of years? Then they kill them all off.” He noticed a hint of resistance on Matt’s face and quickly amended his words. “Or, whatever, maybe lock them up somewhere and fake their deaths—even more complicated to pull off. But no one seems to know anything about what this scientific dream team was working on, and there’s no record of who they were all working for. The one thing that’s sure is that there’s some serious moolah involved. Danny, Reece, and the others, they wouldn’t have gotten involved if they didn’t know they had all the backup they needed. And the kind of research they do, it ain’t cheap. Plus the rest of it, all this,” he said as he waved at the screen. “Seriously deep pockets, dude.”

“Okay, so where’d the money come from?”

Jabba thought about it for a second. “Two possibilities. Reece could’ve raised the money privately,” he speculated, “though not from a VC or a public company. There’d be a trace of it, especially after the deaths. No, it would have to be private money. Not easy, given the scale of it. And practically untraceable, given that the entire creative team was supposedly wiped out.”

“What’s the other possibility?”

“Reece was doing this for a government agency. A highly classified project. Which sounds about right to me.”

Matt’s face darkened with uncertainty. He’d been wondering about the same thing. “Any particular candidates?”

Jabba shrugged. “DARPA. In-Q-Tel.”

Matt looked a question at him.

“DARPA. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. It’s part of the DoD. They fund a ton of research. Everything from micro bots to virtual battlefields. Any technology that can help us win these wars and defeat those who hate our freedom,” he added mockingly.

“And the other one?”

“In-Q-Tel. It’s the CIA’s venture capital arm. They’re early stage investors, which is actually very savvy of them when you think about it. Get in on the ground floor. Find out about any useful technology while it’s still being dreamed up. They’ve got their fingers in a lot of tech companies—and that includes a few of the big, household-name Internet sites you and I use on a daily basis.” He gave him a pointed, big-brother-is-watching-you look.

Matt absorbed what Jabba was trying to say. “A government op.”

“It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? I mean, if what we’re saying is true, if they’ve really faked this thing, they’re on their way to convincing everyone out there that God’s talking to us. Maybe even through the good Father Jerome. Who else would try to pull off something like this?”

Matt could see the sense in what Jabba was saying, only deep down, something was nagging at him. He winced with doubt. “You’re probably right, but . . . I don’t know. Something about the guys in the van. Their place down in Brighton.”

“What?”

“They’re a small unit. Working with good resources, but not overwhelming ones. Bunkered down in a small house in a quiet neighborhood. I don’t know. If it is a black op, it’s not just off the books, it’s way off the books.”

“Even worse, then,” Jabba added emphatically. “Officially, they don’t exist. Whoever sent them’s got full deniability. They can do anything they want to us and no one will ever know they were there.” He fixed Matt with a sobering stare. “We need to quit asking questions and disappear, dude. Seriously. I mean, I know he’s your brother and all, but . . . we’re outgunned.”

Matt processed his warning. He was too tired to think straight, his nerves numb with fatigue and apprehension. But one thought kept coming back to him, a steadying keel that was keeping his head above water in the storm of confusion that swirled around him. He looked at Jabba, and just said, “What if Danny’s still alive?”

Jabba took in a long, sobering breath. “You really think he might be?”

Matt thought back to the hard case’s reaction when he’d asked him that question. The man had an impenetrable poker face, and he hadn’t been able to read him. “I don’t know, but . . . what if he is? You want me to just forget about him and run?”

Jabba held his gaze for a moment, a conflicted glimmer in his eyes. It was as if his mind was desperately looking for a way to flush Matt’s words back out of his system and was failing miserably to do so. Then he nodded.

“Okay.”

Matt acknowledged his acceptance with a small nod of his own. After a quiet moment, he asked Jabba if he could hustle a few more minutes of online time from the receptionist and check the tracker’s website.

Jabba left him alone, then came back a few minutes later armed with some printed screen shots. He handed them to Matt. The tracker had moved within what Matt estimated had been mere minutes of his escape from the house in Brighton. Which was expected. Neighbors would have reported the shooting. The place would have been swarming with cops pretty quickly.

They’d obviously vacated their safe house in a rush. Hastily. Panicked. Matt’s incursion had screwed them up. Which lit a tiny fire of satisfaction deep in his gut.

He checked the tracker’s current position. It was stable, at a location in the Seaport district of the city. Which meant the big Mercedes—the hard case’s car, the one he’d moved the tracker onto—was there.

Matt glanced over at the handgun on the night table, then let his head loll back against the pillows. His eyelids rolled down and blocked out the world, and the last image that floated into his mind before everything went quiet was the hard case’s face.

The man had the answers Matt needed. And hard case or not, one way or another, Matt knew he’d have to wrest them out of him.

Chapter 40

Deir Al-Suryan Monastery, Wadi Natrun, Egypt

By dawn, the desert plain outside the monastery was teeming with life. Dozens of cars were scattered far and wide, strewn across the parched wasteland beyond the monastery’s walls and all along the narrow road that led up to its entrance gate. People—men, mostly—milled around by their cars or stood in small groups, tense, uncertain, waiting.

It was time to go.

Gracie and Finch sat on either side of Father Jerome in the middle row of the people carrier, with Dalton riding shotgun—his camera locked and loaded—next to Yusuf and Brother Ameen in the back.

The noise coming from outside the walls was disconcertingly subdued for such a large crowd. The general silence only accentuated the tension and the anticipation, like the wait between lightning and thunder. There were some pockets of activity, here and there. Hints of music wafted in from small groupings of worshippers, their heads down in prayer as they chanted traditional Coptic hymns. But there were also many pockets of disturbance, farther back, away from the monastery’s walls. Several firebrand clerics were angrily spouting invective, denouncing the priest and the sign to clusters of willing followers. The internal security forces were nowhere to be seen, and while the two opposing groups hadn’t collided, it was clear that the plain could erupt into violence at any moment.

Gracie fretted. It can’t last. They’re going to be at each other’s throats any minute now. Which was why Father Jerome had agreed—reluctantly—to leave. He was the lightning rod. And if he left, perhaps the storm could be avoided.

She watched as the abbot pushed the people carrier’s door shut. He peered in through the dark, tinted glass and gave them a small farewell wave, his face etched with concern. Father Jerome returned the wave with a forlorn look. He seemed even more lost now than he had in the cave.

The abbot waved to two monks manning the gate. They nodded and pulled its huge doors open. As the ancient cedar leaves pivoted inward slowly, creaking on their rusty hinges, a rising cacophony gushed in with them as the crowd outside took note and sprang to life.

Gracie’s pulse quickened as she heard the ambient noise rise around her. She shifted uncomfortably in her seat, staring out of her window, the combination of the car’s powerful air-conditioning and the musty smell of incense from Father Jerome’s cassock making her feel even more heady.

“Time to rhumba,” Dalton said, shifting his camera from the side window and aiming it forward.

Gracie swallowed hard.

The old people carrier lurched forward and charged out of the gate. It advanced quickly along the monastery’s wall, and almost immediately, people started swarming across the scrub and converging on it. As the van cleared the perimeter wall and turned down the road that led away from the monastery, the crowd around it swelled. Countless hands reached out, trying to stop their escape. Yusuf had to slow down as the wedge of clear space ahead of him disappeared. With his hand pressed against the horn, he managed to keep going another thirty yards or so at a sputtering crawl before coming to a complete stop, blocked by a wall of people.

Gracie leaned over and looked out past Yusuf and Dalton, who was panning his camera around to capture the pandemonium all around the van. Desperate faces were pressed against the Previa’s tinted windows, calling out Father Jerome’s name, trying to see if he was inside, pleading for him to talk to them. They rattled the door handles, fighting the locks, their pained, intense features distorted from being squeezed against the van, their sweaty, dusty hands streaking the windows. Father Jerome shrank into his seat as he darted nervous glances left and right at the faces that looked all the more threatening behind the dark glass.

“We’ve got to go back,” Finch urged Yusuf, “we’ve got to get back to the monastery.”

“We can’t,” Gracie said as she craned her neck back and saw the mass of bodies pressing against the car from all sides, the loud thumps against the roof and windows echoing like war drums. “We’re boxed in.”

AT THE EDGE OF THE CROWD, on a small rise by the crumbling remnants of an old wall, three men in a canvas-topped pickup truck surveyed the unfolding chaos with great interest through military-issue, sand-colored, high-powered binoculars.

As the people carrier disappeared behind the swarm of bodies, Fox Two watched and decided it was time to act.

He signaled his men with a curt hand.

One of his men peeled up a corner of the canvas top, enough to expose the tripod-mounted, drumlike device that lurked underneath. Another man, positioned behind it, looked through its targeting scope and aimed it at the scrum of men crowding the back of the Previa.

He double-checked the settings on the device.

Then he hit the trigger.

THE CRUSH OF PEOPLE pressed against the people carrier recoiled back for the briefest of moments, as if struck by an unseen force, their faces contorted in discomfort and pain, their hands rising to block their ears.

The effect only lasted a second, but it was long enough for Finch to catch it—as did Brother Ameen. As the mob jerked back, a crater of clear space opened up behind the Previa.

Brother Ameen caught Finch’s eye—both their faces were locked in confusion—then he pointed back frantically and yelled, “Go back,” to Yusuf.

The driver and Gracie swung their heads back and spotted the opening.

“Back. Go back now,” Brother Ameen shouted again.

Yusuf hesitated.

“Let’s go, come on, back up,” Gracie yelled at him, also pointing back fiercely.

The driver nodded reluctantly, slammed the car into reverse, and—with his hand still on the horn—eased the car backward. The men flinched back in surprise, widening the opening behind the Previa.

“Keep going,” Gracie insisted, scanning in all directions. “Get us back to the gates.”

The Previa gathered momentum, Yusuf taking advantage of the faltering crowd and keeping his foot down. They swerved around the bend at the far corner of the monastery, and the going got easier as they rushed up its long perimeter wall, still in reverse gear and chased by the frenzied horde. Fighting broke out as people lashed out and grabbed at each other, with Father Jerome’s followers trying to block the followers of the Islamic firebrands from getting to the van. The Previa kept moving, slipping past the tangle of fists and blood, finally making it to the monastery’s gates, which swung open just as it reached them. Yusuf skillfully managed to thread the Previa through the opening before the gates slammed shut and blocked off the crazed posse’s advance.

They all tumbled out of the car in a daze, hearts thumping, veins drowning with adrenaline. Dalton was still filming, capturing every moment of their escape.

“Let’s go up there,” Gracie yelled to Dalton and Finch, pointing up at the keep that stood next to the gate, jutting in from the perimeter wall. Finch nodded and said, “Let’s get the Began up,” lifting the compact satellite dish out of the Previa. “The guys on the outside are getting this live.”

Gracie turned to Father Jerome. “Please go inside, Father. You need to be somewhere safe, away from the gate,” she cautioned. She glanced at the abbot, whose grave face nodded with agreement.

Father Jerome didn’t seem convinced.

He didn’t acknowledge her words. He seemed distant, his mind preoccupied elsewhere. He was staring beyond her, beyond the gate even, at the people crowding it and shouting out his name, and seemed curiously calm.

“I need to talk to them,” he finally said, his voice settled and certain.

His eyes traveled back to Gracie and to the abbot. Then, without awaiting further words, he stepped away from the car and headed toward the keep.

“Wait, Father,” Gracie called out as she rushed in after him, closely followed by the abbot and Brother Ameen.

“I must talk to them,” Father Jerome insisted, without turning or stopping as he reached the narrow staircase and began marching up its stone steps.

They followed him across the second-floor drawbridge, into the keep and all the way up until they reached the top floor. The rickety wooden ladder still stood there, in a corner of the chapel, poking out through the small hatch. Moments later, they were all standing on the roof.

Gracie, Finch, and Dalton inched forward for a peek at the crowd below.

The scene below was unnerving. Hundreds of people were massed against the gates of the monastery, chanting, shouting, waving their hands and pumping their fists into the air, starved for a response, looking nervously over their shoulders as, behind them, the violence was growing, the pockets of fighting spreading like wildfire, threatening to engulf the entire plain.

Dalton got the live feed hooked up while Finch got through to Atlanta on the satphone. Gracie grabbed her earpiece and mike, mentally running through what she would soon be telling a world audience while watching the old priest as he stood by the hatch, staring ahead at the edge of the roof twenty feet in front of him, the only barrier between him and the clamoring mob below. From where he was standing, he could hear them, but he couldn’t see them yet. The abbot and the young monk were talking to him, pleading with him not to expose himself in that way, telling him someone below could easily have a weapon and might take a shot at him. Father Jerome was having none of it. He was calmly shaking his head, a strange mix of resolve and fear radiating from him. His arms were hanging down listlessly, his fingers straight, his sandaled feet idle. He turned his head sideways and met Gracie’s gaze, and, with the smallest, most stoic of nods, he started moving forward.

Gracie turned in alarm to Finch and at Dalton. They were huddled by the small, cross-topped dome that occupied a corner of the otherwise flat roof. Dalton had his camera up and was tracking the priest in a low crouch. Finch gave Gracie the sign that they were live. Gracie held up the mike but felt momentarily dumbstruck as she edged forward, tracking the old man, who soon reached the edge of the roof.