The Sign

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.

He stood there and looked down, and the crowd erupted in a mix of whoops and cheers and angry shouts. The throng pressed forward, calling his name out and waving, the euphoria of the faithful at the front of the mob only riling even more those opposed to Father Jerome’s appearance, and the fighting farther back gained in intensity. Shouts of “Kafir,” Blasphemer, and “La ilah illa Allah,” There is no God but Allah, resounded angrily across the plain as incensed protesters started throwing rocks up at the keep.

Father Jerome stared down at the raging maelstrom below, beads of sweat trickling down his face. Slowly, he raised his arms, stretching them high and wide in a welcoming gesture. Again, as his mere appearance had done a short moment earlier, the gesture only seemed to polarize the crowd below even more and fuel the fighting.

“Please,” he yelled out in an Arabic that was heavily accented, “Please, stop. Please stop and listen to me.” His pleas could hardly be heard over the chaos raging below, and had no effect on the commotion. With rocks still pelting the wall of the keep and flying wildly past him, he remained steadfast and shut his eyes, his face locked in deep concentration, his arms held high—

—and suddenly, the crowd gasped in shock. Gracie saw people pointing upward—not at the priest, but higher up, at the sky above him, and she spun her head up and saw a ball of light, perhaps twenty feet or so in diameter, swirling over the priest. It hovered there for a moment, then started to rise directly above him, and as it did, it suddenly flared up both in size and in brightness and morphed into the sign, the same one she’d seen over the ice shelf. It now blazed overhead, a massive, spherical kaleidoscope of shifting light patterns, its lower edge hovering no more than twenty feet or so directly above Father Jerome.

The throng below just froze, rooted in place, entranced, staring up in openmouthed awe. The stones stopped flying. The brawls ended. The shouting died out. The sign was just there, shimmering brilliantly, rotating very slowly, almost within reach, closer now than it had been over the research ship, its radiant lines and circles mesmerizing.

Dalton was lying on his back at the very edge of the roof, filming the sign and panning back down to get the crowd’s reaction. Gracie was still crouching near him, fifteen feet or so away from Father Jerome, who had his head tilted back and was staring up at the blazing apparition above him, dumbfounded. The camera swung back, stopping momentarily to settle on Gracie. She stared into the dark abyss of the lens, tongue-tied. She wanted to say something, she could feel the whole world watching, hanging on the edge of their seats, willing her to tell them what it felt like to be there, but she couldn’t do it. The moment was simply beyond words. She looked up at the blazing sphere of light, then Father Jerome brought his head back down, and as he did, she caught his eye. She could tell that he was shivering, and saw a tear trickle down his cheek. He looked scared and confused, his stricken expression telegraphing an am-I-really-doing-this anguish to her and quietly pleading for some kind of confirmation, as if he didn’t believe what was happening. She mustered up a confirming nod and a supportive smile—then his expression shifted, as if something had suddenly startled him from within. He closed his eyes, as if locked in concentration, then, a few seconds later, he turned to face the crowd. He looked down on them for a moment, then he spread his arms expansively and tilted his head upward to face the sign. He shut his eyes again and breathed in deeply, basking in the sign’s radiance, drinking in its energy. The masses below were still paralyzed, staring up in shocked silence, their arms stretched upward toward him, reaching out, as if trying to touch the hollow globe of light.

Father Jerome maintained his outstretched stance for the better part of a minute, then he opened his eyes to face the crowd.

“Pray with me,” he bellowed out to them, his voice thick with emotion, his arms raised to the heavens. “Let us all pray together.”

And they did.

In a stadium wave-like reaction that spread slowly and silently from the front to the back of the crowd, every single person outside the monastery—Christian and Muslim, believer and protester alike—fell to their knees and bent forward, all of them dropping their foreheads to the ground and prostrating themselves in fearful adulation.

Chapter 41

Washington, D.C .

“What the hell are you doing? I thought we had an agreement.” Rydell was seething. He’d been up through the night, monitoring the news. The images from Egypt had exploded across his TV screen a little after midnight, and right now, pacing around the cabin of his private jet by a quiet hangar at Reagan National Airport, his senses still throbbed with the burns of their visual sharpnel.

“We never agreed on it, Larry,” Drucker replied smoothly from his lush, padded seat. “You just wouldn’t have it any other way.”

“So you just went out and did it anyway?”

“We both have a lot invested in this. I wasn’t about to jeopardize it all because of your stubbornness.”

“Stubbornness?” Rydell flared up. “You don’t know what you’re doing, Keenan. Have you even thought about where this goes from here?”

“It’s working, isn’t it?”

“It’s too early to tell.”

Drucker tilted his head slightly. “Don’t be disingenuous. It demeans you.”

“I don’t know if it’s working, but—”

“It’s working, Larry,” Drucker interrupted emphatically. “It’s working because that’s what people are used to. It’s what they’ve been used to for thousands of years.”

“We didn’t need it.”

“Of course we did. What did you expect? Did you think people would see the sign and just ‘get’ it?”

“Yes. If we gave them a chance.”

“That’s just naïve. What people don’t understand they just push away to the far corners of their minds and eventually it fades away and gets forgotten. ’Cause it’s safer that way. No, people need someone to tell them what to believe in. It’s worked before, many times. And it’ll work again.”

“And then what?” Rydell fumed. “Where do you go from here?”

Drucker smiled. “We just let him grow his following. Get the message across.”

“That’s untenable and you know it,” Rydell flared up. “You’re building up something that’s going to be impossible to maintain.”

“Not if you graft it onto an existing structure. One that has staying power. One that can last.”

Rydell shook his head. “I can’t believe you’re saying this. You, of all people.”

Drucker chuckled. “You should be enjoying the irony of it. You should be sitting back and laughing instead of getting all worked up about it.”

“I can’t even begin to . . .” Rydell’s mind was overwhelmed with indignation. “You don’t get it, do you? You don’t see how wrong you are.”

“Come on, Larry. You know how the world works. There are only two surefire ways to get people to do what you want them to do. You either put on an iron glove and make them do it. Or you tell them God wants them to do it. If God wills it,” he scoffed, “it shall be done. That’s when they listen. And given that we don’t live under an Uncle Joe or a Chairman Mao—”

“That was the whole point,” Rydell protested. “God was supposed to be willing it. God. Not his self-appointed, holier-than-thou representatives.”

“That wouldn’t work, Larry. It’s too vague. Too open to interpretation. You’re asking people to decipher the message on their own, and that would be giving them far too much credit. That’s never worked. They’re not used to figuring things out for themselves. They like to follow, to be led. They need a guide. A messenger. A prophet. Always have. Always will.”

“So you create, what, a Second Coming?”

“Not exactly, but close. And why not? A major chunk of the planet’s expecting something like this. All this talk of End of Times and Armageddon. It’s a golden opportunity.”

“What about the other religions? ’Cause you do know there are others on the planet, right? How do you think they’re going to react to your manufactured messiah?”

“He won’t be exclusive. It’s been factored in. His message will embrace all.”

“Embrace all and encourage them to follow Jesus?” Rydell said acidly.

“Well,” Drucker mused with a mischievous twist to his mouth, “That’s not the main message he’ll be bringing, but I suspect it may well be a secondary effect of his preaching.”

“Great,” Rydell retorted fiercely. “And in doing that, you’ll be propping up this mass delusion we haven’t been able to shake for thousands of years. Can you imagine the field day these preachers are gonna have with this? Can you imagine how much power you’d be handing to all those blow-dried, self-serving egomaniacs out there? You’ll turn every born-again politician and every televangelist into a saint who can do no wrong. And before you know it, they’ll reclassify the pill as a form of abortion and ban it, the Left Behind books will become required reading in schools in between mass burnings of Harry Potter, kids will be saying Hail Marys for detention, and we’ll have a creationist museum in every town. If that’s the trade-off, I think I’d rather stick with global warming.”

“It doesn’t have to be that way. See, you’re forgetting one thing,” Drucker pointed out as he leaned forward, his face animated with expectation. “We control the messenger. Think about it, Larry. We’ve got a chance to create our own prophet. A messiah that we own. Just imagine the possibilities. Think of what we can make people do.”

Drucker studied Rydell through cold, calculating eyes.

“You know we’re right,” he continued. “You know this was the only way to go. These people don’t read newspapers. They don’t research things on the Internet. They listen to what their preachers tell them—and they believe them. Fanatically. They don’t question what the preachers say. They don’t bother to fact-check the bullshit they hear in their megachurches. They’re happy to swallow it whole, no matter how ridiculous it is, and not even an army of Pulitzer Prize-winning thinkers or Nobel Prize-winning scientists with all the common sense or scientific evidence in the world could convince them otherwise. They’d just dismiss them as agents of the devil. Satan, trying to cloud their minds. We need these windbags. We need them to sell our message. And what better way to get them on board than to give them a new prophet of their own to sell on to their flocks?”

Something in his words jarred within Rydell. “What about the rest of the world? You’re talking as if we’re the only problem here.”

“We’re the biggest polluters, aren’t we? So let’s start here. The rest of the world will follow.” He paused, gauging Rydell for a moment, his gaze unwavering. “Our focus hasn’t changed. We’re still in this for the same reasons. This is still about survival. It’s still about the singular threat facing the planet. It’s still about leading people away from the dangerous path they’re on.”

“By sending them back to the Dark Ages? By giving those poor deluded sods out there a real reason to believe in their Bronze Age superstitions?”

“See?” Drucker answered him with a smile. “Now you’re getting the irony.” He scrutinized Rydell, then added, “For better or for worse, the whole movement has become a religious one, Larry. You know that. It’s the same old story, the same classic myth that’s hardwired into our brains, and in this case it fits like it was tailor-made. It’s a story of salvation, after all, isn’t it? We’re sinners. We’re all sinners. We took this perfect Garden of Eden that God bequeathed to us and desecrated it with our orgies of consumption. And now we have to pay. Now we have to make huge sacrifices and flagellate ourselves by driving smaller cars and using less electricity and cutting down on flying and other luxuries we take for granted and choking our economies to death to make things right. We have to defeat the antichrist that is pollution and seek out the salvation of sustainability and save ourselves before Judgment Day rolls over us and wipes us out in an Armageddon of abrupt climate change. That’s how it’s playing out, Larry. And the reason it’s become that is that people like these religious myths. They thrive on them. Sooner or later, they turn everything into a crusade. And this crusade needed a prophet, not just a sign, to get the word across and make it happen.”

Rydell shook his head and looked away for a moment. He was still struggling to fully register that they were actually having this conversation. That, after they’d debated it many months earlier and put the issue to rest—or so he thought—he was actually sitting there facing it in its full, catastrophic glory today. “The others . . . they’re all with you on this?”

“Without hesitation.”

“And where does it end?” Rydell countered. “Do you really think you can keep Father Jerome in line forever? You really think you can keep this lie alive indefinitely? Sooner or later, someone’s gonna figure it out. Something’ll screw up, someone’ll slip up, and it’ll all come out. What happens then?”

Drucker shrugged. “We’re running a very tight ship.”

“Even the best laid plans eventually come unstuck. You know that. I thought that was one of the main reasons you agreed not to go down this route.”

Drucker wasn’t budging. “We’ll keep it going as long as we can.”

“And then?”

Drucker thought about it, then waved it off like a minor nuisance. “Then we’ll figure out a graceful exit.”

Rydell nodded stoically, processing it all. He just sat there, hobbled by the shock of it all, his eyes staring into the distance as if he’d just been told he had a week to live. “No,” he finally told Drucker, his voice thick with dismay. “This is wrong. This is a huge mistake.”

Drucker’s eyes narrowed a touch. “Take some time to think this through properly, Larry. You’ll see that I’m right.”

The words didn’t really sink in with Rydell. The image of the priest standing on the roof of the monastery in Egypt, with the sign hovering over him and hundreds of prostrate worshippers before him, shot to the forefront of his mind again. “Even with the best intentions, even given what we’re trying to do . . . I won’t be a part of this. I can’t help you make this . . . this virus any stronger than it already is.”

“You’re gonna have to. We both have too much at stake here,” Drucker reminded him dryly.

“It’s wrong,” Rydell flared. “The plan was to scare them, Keenan. To make them sit up and think about what they’re doing. That was it. A few carefully chosen appearances, then it’s gone. Keep it unexplained. Keep it mysterious and unsettling and scary. We were in agreement on this, goddammit. We agreed that it would be a good thing if people didn’t know where this was coming from, if they ended up thinking it was coming from some alien presence, from some higher intelligence out there. The beauty of this whole plan was that beyond making them sit up and listen, it might also help them pull away from this childish notion they have of this God of theirs, this personal God, this old man in a white beard who listens to every pathetic request they make and who sets down ridiculous rules about what they should eat or drink or wear or who they should bow to, and help them grow into the notion of God being, if anything, something that’s unfathomable and unexplainable—”

“—and nudge them to the half-assed mind-set of agnostics,” Drucker commented mockingly.

“Well, yes. It’s a step in the right direction, isn’t it?”

Drucker was unmoved. He shook his head. “It’s a noble thought, Larry, but . . . this was the only way it was ever going to work. The world’s not ready to give up its obsession with religion. Far from it. It’s becoming more fundamentalist by the day. And it’s not just our enemies. We’re doing it too. Look at what’s happening in this country. We don’t have a single congressman or senator who can admit to being an atheist. Not one. Hell, we had ten presidential candidates on a podium last year, and not one of them dared raise his hand and say he believes in evolution.”

“And you’re helping make it even worse.”

“It’s a trade-off. It’s a message they’ll understand.”

Rydell shook his head again. “No. It’s wrong. There was no need to do it this way. You might help get rid of one evil, but you’ll be feeding one that’s just as vile. One that’ll turn our world into a living hell for any rational person.” His face darkened with resolve, and he fixed Drucker with a hard stare. “We need to figure a way out of this. We need to stop it before it gets too big.”

“You saw what just happened in Egypt. It’s too late.”

“We have to stop it, Keenan,” Rydell insisted.

Drucker shrugged. “We might just have to agree to disagree on that one.”

“I still have a say in this.”

“Within reason. And right now, you’re being unreasonable.”

Rydell thought for a moment, then said, provokingly, “You need me for the smart dust.”

“I do,” Drucker nodded calmly.

“You can’t do this without it.”

“I know that.”

Rydell was momentarily thrown by Drucker’s lack of even the slightest hint of agitation. “So?”

“So . . .” Drucker winced, as if pained by something. “So I had to take out some insurance.”

Rydell studied him, unsure of what he meant—then it fell into place. “What?” he hissed. “What have you done? What have you done, you son of a bitch?”

Drucker let him stew on it for a moment or two, then just said, “Rebecca.”

The word stabbed Rydell like an ice pick. His eyes turned to saucers as he yanked out his phone and stabbed a speed-dial button. After two rings, a voice answered. Not Rebecca’s. A man’s voice. Rydell instantly recognized it as the voice of Rebecca’s bodyguard.

“Ben, where’s Becca?”

“She’s safe, Mr. Rydell.”

Rydell’s heart somersaulted with relief. He shot a victorious glance at Drucker.

The man’s face was unnervingly serene.

A bolt of worry ripped through Rydell. “Put Becca on,” he ordered the bodyguard, hoping for an answer he knew he wasn’t going to get.

“I can’t do that, Mr. Rydell.”

The words coiled around his gut and twisted it, hard. “Put her on,” he growled.

The bodyguard’s voice didn’t waver. “Only if Mr. Drucker gives the word, sir.”

Rydell threw his phone to the ground and charged at Drucker. “Where is she?” he yelled.

Drucker sprang out of his seat and deflected Rydell’s attack, grabbing his hand and elbow and twisting his arm sideways and back. As he did so, he kicked out Rydell’s leg from under him. The billionaire tumbled to the floor heavily, slamming against one of the seats. Drucker eyed him for a beat, then took a couple of steps back.

“She’s fine,” he said as he straightened his jacket. His face was slightly flushed, his breathing slightly ragged. He took in a calming breath before adding, “And she’ll stay fine. As long as you don’t do anything foolish. Do we understand each other?”

Chapter 42

Deir Al-Suryan Monastery, Wadi Natrun, Egypt

Tucked away behind the crumbled wall four hundred yards west of the monastery and veiled by their desert camouflage netting, Fox Two and his two men watched silently through their high-powered binoculars, and waited.

Beside them, nestling under the truck’s canvas top, the long range acoustical device unit sat patiently, ready to wield its unseen power again. It had been painted a matte sand-beige in preparation for their mission, a color that had been matched perfectly to blend in with the terrain outside the monastery and farther up, on top of the mountain, above the cave. They’d left the directional microphone in its casing on this occasion. Today’s event had been planned strictly as a one-way conversation, unlike the long hours they’d spent during all those weeks and months, up on the mountain, when Father Jerome had occasionally seen fit to ask a question or two.

Fox Two studied the restless crowd below. So far, he’d been able to push the right buttons and generate the responses he needed without a problem. Father Jerome had reacted as expected to the gentle prodding he’d given him on the rooftop, after the sign had appeared above him—but then, he’d been well primed to react that way. A few whispered words, aimed at the more visibly heated pockets in the mob, were also enough to trigger a cascading reaction, to nudge them into a frenzy at the sight of an escaping car. A high-frequency, ultra-loud pulse using the crowd-control setting was more than enough to hobble their fervor when it was no longer needed and get them to pull away in order to facilitate an escape.

Remarkable, he still thought, even after using the LRAD device so often that it had become second nature to him. A simple concept, really—projecting noise in a tightly focused audio beam, the same way a film projector’s lens magnifies and focuses a shaft of light, so that only the persons—or person, for it was as accurate as a sniper’s rifle—in the device’s crosshairs could hear it. Even at that distance. And either make it appear as if someone’s voice, live or taped, was actually inside the target’s head, or—using the less subtle crowd-control mode—send an unbearably loud, caustic sound pulse into the target’s ears that, at its highest setting, caused nausea and fainting and crippled the toughest enemy.

Simple, but hugely effective.

His master’s voice, Fox Two mused.

The power of suggestion was particularly effective in this case, when the subjects were already burning with the desire to do what was required of them, as in the case of the selected targets in the mob outside the monastery, or, as in the case of Father Jerome, when they’d undergone weeks of forced indoctrination. Electroshocks and sleep deprivation sessions, followed by cocktails of methohexitol to take the edge off. Transcranial mental stimulation. A complete psycho-chemical breakdown. Tripping the switches inside the brain, disarming it entirely before bombarding it psychologically. Implanting visions, thoughts, feelings. Conditioning the brain to accept an alternate reality, like hearing the voice of God or overcoming one’s humility in order to embrace the notion of being the Chosen One.

He panned his binoculars across the desert, west of his position. Even though he knew what he was looking for, it still took him the better part of a minute to locate Fox One and his unit. The four men and their gear were also virtually invisible, huddled under camouflage netting in the sand dunes a couple of hundred yards away. Their contribution had been flawless, as expected. Its effect, staggering. He’d seen it before, in a video of a test in the desert. But not like this. Not live. Not in front of an unsuspecting audience.

It had taken his breath away. Even for a battle-hardened cynic like him, it was a heart-stopping moment. A one-two punch that, he knew, would resonate around the world.

Fox Two turned his attention back to the hordes at the monastery’s gates. He’d soon be able to leave this dump for good, he thought with a degree of relish. It had been a hellish assignment. Living in hiding, on call at dawn and at dusk, climbing up and down the mountain, lugging the gear, day in and day out. He’d been out here in the desert way too long. He missed the feel of a woman’s skin and the smell of a good barbecue, but most of all, he missed living among people.

Soon, he thought.

But before he could do that, he needed to make sure that the mission ended as smoothly as it had begun.

Chapter 43

Woburn, Massachusetts

The smell of fresh coffee tripped Matt’s mind and coaxed him out of a dreamless sleep. Everything around him looked hazy. He tried to sit up, but did so too quickly and almost blacked out and had to try again, a bit slower this time. His head felt like it was filled with tar as he took in his surroundings and awareness trickled in.

The TV was on, though Matt couldn’t really make out what it was showing. He tried blinking the fogginess out of his eyes. Jabba was sitting by the small table next to the window, watching the TV. He turned and grinned at Matt, a smoking cup of coffee in one hand—a venti or a grande or whatever quirkily-original-yet-misguidedly-obnoxious name coffee shops had replaced large with these days—and a half-eaten glazed doughnut—or was that “glazé”?—in the other, with which he pointed at the two other oversized cups and the box of doughnuts on the table.

“Breakfast is served,” he said, in between mouthfuls.

Matt acknowledged the venti-sized scientist with a weary smile before noticing the daylight streaming in.

“How long was I out? What time is it?”

“Almost eleven. Which means you’ve been out for,” Jabba did a quick mental calculation, “sixteen hours or so.”

Which Matt had needed.

Badly.

He also noticed a couple of newspapers on the table. The headlines were in an unusually large font—the type only used when a major event had occurred. An almost quarter-page photograph of the apparition, in color, was also emblazoned across the front pages, next to older, file portraits of Father Jerome.

Matt looked up at Jabba. Jabba nodded, and his expression took a detour into more ominous territory. “The Eagle has landed,” he said somberly, aiming his half-eaten doughnut at the TV.

Matt watched the footage from Egypt in silent disbelief. Breathless reports coming in from around the world also showed the explosive reaction to what had happened at the monastery.

In St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City, tens of thousands of people had assembled, hungrily awaiting the pope’s guidance on how to treat the apparition. In the Praça da Sé in São Paulo, hordes of euphoric Brazilians spilled into the square from in and out of the city, invading every available inch of the Sé cathedral, also looking for answers. The reactions reflected the local variations in faith and the different levels of appetite for the supernatural across the planet. The scenes were repeated in frenzied massings outside churches and in city squares in other centers of Christianity, from Mexico to the Philippines, but were different elsewhere. In the Far East, the reaction was generally more muted. Crowds had taken to the streets in China, Thailand, and Japan, but they were mostly orderly and there were only pockets of disturbance. The hotspot of Jerusalem, on the other hand, was very tense, with worrying signs of polarization already apparent among its religious groups. Christians, Muslims, and Jews were taking to the streets, looking for answers, conflicted and unsure about how to treat what many of them saw as a miraculous, supernatural manifestation—but one that didn’t match anything prophesized in any of their sacred writings. The same thing was going on in the Islamic world. Confused worshippers had taken over city centers, town squares, and mosques across the Arab world and farther east in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Indonesia. As always, moderate voices seemed to be either holding back, or crowded out by those of the more radical clerics. Reports were coming in of scattered skirmishes and brawls in several cities, both between followers of different religions as well as infighting among members of the same faith.

Around the world, official reaction was only starting to trickle in, but so far, government and religious leaders had refrained from making public statements about the phenomenon—apart from some fiery rhetoric that a few fundamentalist firebrands weren’t shy to express.

Throughout the coverage, Father Jerome’s face was everywhere. It was plastered across the front page of every newspaper in the country, if not the world. It beamed down from every channel, the frail priest suddenly thrust into megastardom. Every news outlet was locked in on the story. Anchors and talking heads across the language spectrum were struggling to hold back on the superlatives—and failing. The whole world was firmly gripped by the unexplained event.

As Matt drank and ate and watched the screen, Jabba told him what had happened during the night. The caffeine and sugar worked its magic on him again, slowly injecting a semblance of life back into his veins; the wall-to-wall footage from Egypt and from the rest of the world reached the parts the caffeine had missed. And with each new report, with each new video clip, Matt felt a crippling chill seep through him. The stakes were growing exponentially, along with the realization of the enormity of what he was facing.

When the doughnuts ran out, Jabba turned the volume down and filled Matt in on what he’d been up to. He’d been busy. After Matt had conked out and before the breakfast run, he’d gone back out to the reception alcove, handed the weedy receptionist another ten-dollar bill, and worked late into the night, and again this morning.

He’d gotten an update on the tracker’s position, and handed Matt the printouts. They showed that the Merc had left the Seaport district, the last position they had for it, sometime before ten the previous night. It had traveled to the downtown area where the signal had been lost—presumably boxed in by concrete walls deep in the underground parking lot of some building. It had appeared again soon after seven that morning and returned to the same location in the Seaport district, and hadn’t moved since.

Jabba had then spent most of his time trying to beef up the thin sketch they had managed to compile on the doomed research team and its covert project. He’d made more calls to contacts in the industry and had given Google and Cuil’s search algorithms a real workout, and although he hadn’t come up with much, what he didn’t find also told him something.

Even though his experience was in non-defense-related research projects, the secrecy surrounding his and his peers’ work was often military-like in its intensity. And although defense-related projects were even more cloaked, there was often a whisper, a hint, something that had seeped through the cracks and gave an idea, however vague, of what ballpark the project was in. The critical piece of information to protect was more often than not how a goal was to be achieved; the goal itself was, in most cases, at least obliquely known, especially within the most well-connected techie circles. In this case, however, no one knew anything. The project had been born, and had died, in total and utter secrecy. Which told Jabba that it was unlike anything he’d ever encountered. It also spoke to the resources and determination of those behind it, which made the prospect of going up against them even less appealing—if that was even possible.

He had, however, managed to unearth a real nugget, one he kept for last.

“I tracked down Dominic Reece’s wife,” he informed Matt with no small satisfaction beaming across his weary face. “Maybe she has some idea of what her husband and Danny were doing out there in Namibia.”

“Where is she?” Matt asked.

“Nahant, just up the coast,” Jabba replied, handing him a slip of paper with a phone number on it. “We can be there in half an hour.”

Matt thought about it for a moment, then nodded. “Sounds good. But let’s see what the tracker’s got for us at the Seaport first.”

Chapter 44

Deir Al-Suryan Monastery, Wadi Natrun, Egypt

Graciehad been doing almost continuous lives ever since the frenzied moment on the roof of the keep. She’d faced Dalton’s lens every half hour or so, feeding the connected world’s insatiable hunger for new information, regardless of how much—or how little—new information she actually had. Her throat felt numb, her nerve endings raw, her legs rubbery, but she wouldn’t have had it any other way. The whole world was sitting up and listening, hanging on every tidbit of information they could find. Every news broadcast was carrying the story. And she was right there, at the heart of it all, the singular face and voice that everyone on the planet was now hooked on.

And yet she still couldn’t believe it was happening, still couldn’t fathom the fact that she was there, doing this, living through the epochal events right alongside the man who was quite possibly an envoy from God.

They’d brought Father Jerome down off the roof for safety, given the mob that was massed outside the gates. After the dawn appearance of the sign, the crowd had grown tenfold, and more people were still streaming in from all corners. Father Jerome had been escorted into the bowels of the monastery by the abbot and Brother Ameen. He’d been baffled by the whole experience, and looked visibly drained. He needed time to recover and take stock of what had happened. Dalton, Finch, and Gracie had climbed back up onto the roof on a couple of occasions, and Dalton had crept right up to the edge and filmed the scene outside the monastery’s walls. He’d been desperate to use the skycam, but he’d reluctantly agreed with Gracie and Finch that it would be unwise, given the highly volatile nature of the crowd.

So far, ever since the sign had faded fifteen minutes or so after it had first appeared over Father Jerome, things out there were calm, if tense. The violence hadn’t flared up again, but the crowd had entrenched itself into separate areas, rival camps that were eyeing each other nervously: Christians who were gathering there to worship and pray, Muslims who were enthralled by the miracle they had witnessed and had joined the others in prayer even though they were unsure about how to interpret the appearance of the sign over a priest’s head, and fired-up groups of more fundamentalist Muslims who rejected any suggestion of a new prophet and whose mere appearance was pushing the more open-minded moderates among them to the sidelines.

In between broadcasts, Gracie, Finch, and Dalton were monitoring news reports streaming in from across the globe and getting updates from the network’s contacts in Cairo. The first major religious figure to make an official comment on what was happening was the patriarch of Constantinople. Unlike the pope, who was the undisputed leader of Roman Catholics and whose word they considered infallible, the patriarch had little direct executive power in the fragmented world of the Eastern Orthodox Church. It hadn’t stopped him from using his resonant historical title to promote his concern for the environment, presenting it as a spiritual responsibility. And in that context, he’d just released a statement that asked the people of the world to pay heed to what they were witnessing and to express his interest in meeting with Father Jerome to better understand what was happening.

Presently, as Gracie looked out over the teeming plain below, she felt increasingly uneasy about their situation. The air was heavy with a charged silence. The threat of a bigger eruption of violence was palpable. She gratefully accepted some fresh lemonade from one of the monks and sat down, cross-legged, on the far end of the roof, her back against a pack of gear. Dalton and Finch, glasses in hand, joined her.

They sat in silence for a moment, allowing their brains to throttle back and their pulses to settle.

“Amazing, isn’t it?” Finch just said, looking out over the irregular, domed roofs inside the monastery’s walls. “How everything can change like that, in a heartbeat?”

“Weren’t we just freezing our nuts off in the South Pole like yesterday?” Dalton asked in a weary, incredulous tone. “What just happened?”

“The story of our lives, that’s what happened,” Gracie replied.

“That’s for sure.” Dalton shook his head, a wry smile curling up one corner of his mouth.

She caught it. “What?”

“Weird how these things happen, isn’t it? I mean, I don’t know what you want to call it. Luck. Fate.”

“What do you mean?”

“We could have missed all this so easily. Imagine . . . If you hadn’t taken that call from Brother Ameen, back on the ship. Or if he hadn’t been able to convince us to come. If the documentary guys hadn’t been here before us and shot Father Jerome’s wall paintings. We might have passed, right?” His eyes swung from Gracie to Finch and back. “We wouldn’t be here right now, and maybe none of this would have happened.”

Gracie thought about it for a beat, then shrugged. “Someone else would be here. It’d just be someone else’s story.”

“But would it? What if the documentary guys hadn’t shot that footage. What if no one had showed up here to talk to him. The mob wouldn’t be out there. Father Jerome wouldn’t have been up here on the roof. There’d be no sign up there.” He raised his eyebrows in a think-about-it manner. “Makes you wonder if he’s the first, or if there were others before him.”

“Others?” Gracie asked.

“You know, kooks. Nuts with voices in their heads, painting weird signs all over their walls or filling journals with their ramblings. What if there were others, before him? Others who were also the real deal. But no one knew.” He nodded, to himself, his mind mining that vein further. “And what about the timing of it?” he added. “Why now? There were other times when we could have used a sign, a message. Why not just before Hiroshima? Or during the Cuban missile crisis?”

“You always get this lucid with lemonade?” she asked.

“Depends on what the good monks put in it.” He grinned with a raised eyebrow.

Just then, Brother Ameen popped his head through the roof hatch, his expression knotted with concern. “Come with me, please. You need to hear this.”

“Where?” Gracie asked as she got up.

“Down. To the car. Come now.”

They climbed down and followed him to the Previa, which was still parked by the gates. The abbot arrived as they did. The car’s doors were open, and Yusuf and a couple of monks were huddled around it, heads hung in concentration as they listened to an Arabic broadcast coming through on its radio. They looked thoroughly spooked.

Another religious leader was making a pronouncement, only this one wasn’t as inspirational as the earlier one. Gracie couldn’t understand what was being said, but the tone of the speaker wasn’t hard to read. It sounded just like the other furious, inflamed rants she’d heard countless times across the Arab world. And even before Brother Ameen explained it, she understood what was happening.

“It’s an imam, in Cairo,” he told them, his voice quaking slightly. “One of the more hotheaded clerics in the country.”

“He doesn’t sound happy,” Dalton remarked.

“He’s not,” Brother Ameen replied. “He’s telling his followers not to be deceived by what they see. He’s saying Father Jerome is either a heela—a trick, a fabrication of the Great Satan America—or he’s an envoy of the shaytan himself, an agent of the devil. And that either way, they should consider him a false prophet who’s been sent to sow fear and confusion among the true believers.” He listened some more, then added, “He’s telling them to do their duty as good Muslims and to remember the preachings of the one true faith.”

“Which is?” Finch asked.

“He’s asking for Father Jerome’s head,” Brother Ameen replied. “Literally.”

Chapter 45

River Oaks, Houston, Texas

“I’ve got to tell ya, I’m really confused,” the pastor grumbled as he I set down his tumbler of bourbon. “I mean, what the hell’s going on out there? This isn’t how it’s supposed to happen.”

“How what’s supposed to happen?”

“The Second Coming, Roy,” he answered. “The End of Times. The Rapture.”

They were seated across from each other in the large conservatory, a huge glass house that dwarfed most single-family homes but looked like an outhouse next to the rest of the pastor’s massive mansion. An oval-shaped pool lay beyond the chamfered windows, huddled under a glistening tarp cover and waiting for warmer days. The fence around Darby’s tennis court winked out from behind a row of poplars that skirted the left edge of the property.

Although they’d met countless times over the last year, Roy Buscema still studied the man before him with the fascination of an anthropologist discovering a new species. The Reverend Nelson Darby was an intriguing specimen. Modern in all things technological and where business practices were concerned, but immovably medieval when it came to anything relating to scripture. Genteel and measured, and yet a fierce right-wing culture warrior and unrepentant agent of intolerance. In all the times they’d met, Darby was never less than a charming, relaxed, and earnest host, nothing like the bombastic, fire-and-brimstone preacher he morphed into on stage. He was also always impeccably groomed, an elegant man who appreciated the finer things in life. Fortunately for Darby, God—according to the inerrant scripture he bequeathed us, in any case—took pleasure in the prosperity of his servants, and the pastor was nothing if not a loyal servant.

His refined style extended to his home. Nestling at the end of a leafy road in River Oaks, it occupied a privileged site, directly overlooking the fairways of the country club. It was a stately, white-columned mansion that dated back to the 1920s—stately, but tasteful and restrained, not a vulgar temple to Prosperity Theology. Darby was particularly proud of his conservatory. He’d had it custom-designed by one of London’s leading purveyors of garden houses, who’d then flown over a team of four carpenters to install it. He liked to take meetings there. It was away from the eyes and ears of the small army of staffers who toiled in the sprawling offices on his megachurch’s campus. It was a chance to show off and impress his visitors. And, of course, it inspired him. The glass house seemed, to Darby, a prism for the sun’s rays, a white hole that sucked in the faintest glimmer of light on even the bleakest of days. It normally helped instill a further sense of wonder in him than he already possessed. It was here that he prepared his most fiery sermons, the ones in which he took on homosexuals, abortion—even in the case of victims of rape and incest—condoms, evolution, stem cell research, and elitist-quasi-Muslim presidential hopefuls, even directing his bombastic, venomous rants at the Girl Scouts, whom he’d branded as agents of feminism, the Dungeons & Dragons game, and, still more bizarrely, SpongeBob SquarePants. It was here that he drafted the sermons he reserved for special occasions, like Christmas, which was now only days away.

Today, though, any inspiration was hobbled by the confused thoughts swarming inside him.

“Maybe this isn’t the End of Times,” Buscema suggested.

“It sure as hell isn’t,” the pastor agreed huffily. “Can’t be. Not yet. Not when none of the prophecies of the Good Book have happened.” He leaned forward, a studious stare in his eyes, and did the parallel-vertical-karate-chops thing with his hands for emphasis, as he did at his pulpit. “The Bible tells us the messiah will only return after we’ve had the final battle between God’s children and the army of the antichrist out there in Israel. It’s only after that happens that we can be saved by the Rapture.” He shook his head. “This isn’t right. Hell, we’re still waiting for the Israelis to bomb the crap out of Iran and kick-start the whole thing.”

“God’s giving us a message, Nelson,” Buscema put in thoughtfully. “He’s given us a sign—two signs—over the ice caps. And he’s sent us a messenger.”

Darby scoffed. “An Arab. And a Catholic at that, if you can get your head around that one.”

“He’s not Arab, Nelson. He’s Spanish.”

Darby swatted the correction away. “Same difference. He’s still Catholic.”

“It doesn’t matter. What did you think the messiah of the Second Coming was gonna be? Lutheran?”

“I don’t know, but . . . Catholic?” Darby groaned.

“That’s an irrelevant detail right now. He’s Christian. More importantly, he happens to be one of the holiest men on the planet. He’s spent the last few months holed up in some cave near a monastery in Egypt. Which is part of the Holy Land. Jesus himself hid in that same valley when he was being hounded by the Romans.”

“What about all that Coptic business?”

“The monastery where he’s staying is Coptic, but he’s not a Copt. You know much about Copts?”

“Not yet,” Darby answered with a self-effacing smile.

“They’re the Christians of Egypt. Maybe ten percent of the population. But they’re the ones who’ve been there longest. They were there long before the Arabs invaded in the seventh century. In fact, they’ve been there since day one. Uninterrupted. The purest, oldest uncorrupted Christians you’ll find, Nelson,” Buscema insisted. He paused to let his words sink in, then continued, “You do know who started the Coptic Church, right?”

“No,” Darby said.

“Mark. As in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. That Mark. He went out there to preach the gospel, about thirty years after Jesus’s death. He didn’t have too much of a hard time getting the people there to sign up. They already believed in everlasting life, had done so for thousands of years. Difference was, Mark told them it wasn’t just for pharaohs. No need to be mummified and put inside a huge pyramid and have priests perform all kinds of weird rituals for it to happen. Everyone was entitled to go to heaven, provided they believed in the One God and asked him to forgive them for their sins. Which, as you can imagine, was music to their ears. And that’s where it all started, where Christianity first took shape. The symbolism, the rituals. A lot of it came out of there. Look at the ankh—the ancient Egyptian symbol of eternal life, and the cross. Think about their God, Ra—the God of the sun—and our holy day, Sunday. And that valley where Father Jerome is holed up? It’s holier than you think. Those monasteries out there? They’re the oldest monasteries in the world. They hold some of the earliest holy books anywhere. Fourth- and fifth-century gospels. Priceless manuscripts. Piles of them. Just lying there. They’re still translating them. Who knows what they’ll find in them. It’s a deeply religious place, Nelson. A deeply religious, Christian place. And Father Jerome . . . well, you know all about him. Everything he’s done. God’s work. How he’s helped spread the word. If God was going to choose someone, it seems to me like Father Jerome fits the bill nicely.”

Darby nodded, grudgingly allowing his advisor’s sermon to sink in. “But why now? And why the signs over the poles?”

Buscema’s brows rose with uncertainty. “Maybe he’s telling us to watch out. Maybe he’d like us to stick around a bit longer. And who knows?” he smiled. “You might find people end up preferring that message to the End of Times prophecies you’ve been telling them about. Regardless of how much they’ve been looking forward to that.” He smiled inwardly at that last little dig.

Darby’s eyes narrowed as it registered. He let it pass. “It’s our destiny, Roy. That’s what the Bible says. That’s how those of us who’ve accepted Jesus Christ as our savior are going to be saved. Before Armageddon. Before the earth is reaped. Besides, you don’t really believe these greenhouse gases are gonna end up by wiping us all out with their tidal waves or with that new ice age they’ve been harping on about?”

Buscema gave him a noncommittal shrug. “I’m not sure it couldn’t happen.”

“Hogwash,” Darby shot back. “War’s gonna bring about the End of Times, Roy. Nuclear war between the forces of good and evil. Not global warming.” He sighed and sat back. “The good Lord created this earth. And if you remember your Genesis, He said, ‘It is good.’ Which means, He’s happy with how it turned out. It’s His divine creation. And He’s the Almighty, for crying out loud. You think He’d design it in a way that puny little man could destroy it just by driving some SUVs around and setting the A/C on high? His divine creation? It can’t happen. He wouldn’t let it happen. Not like that.”

“All I’m saying is,” Buscema countered in his calming manner, “there’s a sign popping up over the planet’s climate change tipping points. It’s a sign, Nelson. And I just saw the first national polling numbers.”

That fired up a totally different subsection of the pastor’s brain, and his face sharpened with keen interest. “What do they say?”

“People are taking notice. They’re listening.”

Darby exhaled with annoyance. “I bet those ‘creation care’ jugheads are smiling now.”

“‘The Earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof,’” Buscema quoted playfully.

Darby frowned. “Thanks for reminding me.”

“It’s in the Bible, Nelson. ‘The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it . . . and to take care of it,’ ” he pointed out. “People are worried about the kind of world their kids are going to grow up in. It’s a powerful hook.”

“They’re misguided. And dangerous. We’ve got to be careful, Roy. What are we talking about here? Are we saying the planet’s holy? Are we supposed to worship nature? That’s a slippery slope. We can’t go out there and tell people to love Mother Earth and look after her. Hell, that’s what the Indians believed in.”

Buscema smiled. The man understood the subtleties of faith. And he was smart, there was no denying it. A branding whiz, as well as a mesmerizing orator who knew how to entrance his audience. There was a reason thousands of people endured punishing traffic jams every Sunday morning to hear his rousing sermons. Why millions of others tuned in to catch their slick broadcast on national cable and network TV. Why the man’s opinions, despite being primitive and bigoted and containing such brain-dead inanities as blaming 9/11 on gays, had helped him build an empire that extended to over fifty different ministries and a global network of over ten thousand churches, a school and a university, a conference center, twenty-three radio stations, and a couple dozen magazines.

“It doesn’t have to get to that,” Buscema said. “Think of it more in terms of man’s sinful desires that have led him astray. He needs to see the road to salvation. And it’s your job to hold his hand and show him the way.” Buscema studied him, then leaned in for emphasis. “Unless I’ve got the wrong end of the stick here, you’re pro-life, right?” He teased him by letting the question hang for a beat, always perplexed—and pained—by how pro-lifers applied their zeal to the smallest cluster of cells, no matter how tragically disabled or conceived, but not to any other living species or to the habitat we all shared. “That’s what saving the planet’s all about, isn’t it? Life?”

Darby breathed out heavily, clearly not liking this, and steepled his hands, buttressing his chin with his thumbs.

“Why aren’t any of those bozos in Washington saying anything?”

“They will,” Buscema said, his expression leading Darby to assume he knew more than he was saying.

Darby bought it. “What have you heard?”

“He’s the real deal, Nelson. They know it. They’re just mapping out how best to handle it.”

Darby frowned. Small crinkles overpowered the Botox and broke through around his eyes. “They’re worried about the same thing I am.” He waved his arms expansively. “You build all this, you get to the top of the heap, king of your castle . . . then someone shows up and wants you to call him massa.”

“It’s happened, Nelson. We can’t change that. And he’s out there. I just don’t want you to miss the boat, that’s all.”

Darby asked, “What do you think I should do?”

Buscema thought about it for a beat, then said, “Grab him. While you can.”

“You want me to endorse him?”

Buscema nodded. “Others are thinking about doing it.”

“Who?”

Buscema held his gaze for a beat, then confided, “Schaeffer. Scofield. And many others.” He knew mentioning the names of two of Darby’s biggest competitors in the soul-saving sweepstakes would generate a reaction. One of them even had the affront to have his megachurch in the same city as Darby.

Judging by Darby’s expression, the names hit the sweet spot he was aiming for.

“You sure of that?” the pastor asked.

Buscema nodded enigmatically.

I should know, he thought. I spoke to them before coming here to see you.

“The man’s a friggin’ Catholic, Roy,” Darby grumbled, a flutter of panic in his eyes.

“It doesn’t matter,” Buscema answered flatly. “You’ve got to endorse him and endorse him big. Big and loud. Look, you’re already lagging on this front. The others, your fellow church leaders who signed up for the global warming initiative two years ago . . . they’re on board.” Buscema was referring to the eighty-six Christian leaders who, despite strong opposition from many of their evangelical brethren, had signed up for what became known as the “Evangelical Climate Initiative.” Some of the most prominent church leaders, however, such as the president of the National Association of Evangelicals, had resisted publicly supporting the movement, even if they privately backed it. “This is your chance to leapfrog over them and take control.”

Darby frowned. “But what about that sign that keeps popping up? What is it? If it was a cross or something clearly Christian, then fine . . . but it’s not.”

“It doesn’t matter what it is. What matters is that it’s there. It’s up there and everyone’s looking at it and wanting to be part of it.” Buscema leaned in and fixed Darby with unflinching resolve. “You’re missing the point here, Nelson. Catholic, Protestant, Baptist, Presbyterian, Quaker, or Amish—or even Mormon, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, or Scientologist for that matter. None of it matters now. You’re right that it’s not a cross up there. But it’s not a Star of David or a crescent or anything linked to any of the other major religions either. It’s a game-changer. An entirely new paradigm. It could be the start of something bigger than anything we’ve seen before, something new, something global. And as we’ve seen throughout history, when these things happen, they spawn big organizations. Right now, there isn’t one. There’s nothing. There’s just a man and a sign in the sky. But people are coming to him in droves. And you need to decide whether or not you want to be part of it. Right now, you can get a jump on the others by hitching your wagon to him before the rest of them. Things can change . . . in the twinkling of an eye.” He just couldn’t resist throwing that one in. “Because even if it isn’t specifically, obviously Christian,” he pressed on, “if you haven’t embraced it while everyone else has, you just might find yourself with a whole bunch of empty pews. And that wouldn’t be a good thing, would it?” He winced, trying to stop himself from taking another dig using an End of Times catchphrase, but he couldn’t resist, and he kept his voice as even as he could and added, “You don’t want to be left behind, now, do you?”

“DID HE BUY IT?” Drucker asked Buscema.

“Please,” the journalist said mockingly, the sound of rushing air coming through his car phone. “He’s so into it it’s almost painful to watch.”

“You gonna see Schaeffer again?”

“He’s left me two messages since I last spoke to him,” he confirmed. “Same with Scofield. I’ll let them sweat it out a little bit before calling them back.”

Good man, Drucker thought. It sounded like they’d already reeled in one major marlin. With a bit of luck, they’d be bringing in a record haul.

Chapter 46

Boston, Massachusetts

Matt and Jabba were in the bloodstained Camry, parked outside a modern, six-floor office block in the Seaport district.

Matt’s face was screened by the shadow of his baseball cap and the upturned collar of his coat. He sat in the passenger seat and eyed the building with quiet fury. It was a bland, architecturally bankrupt tile-and-glass box with a large parking area out front. There was no corporate signage by its front entrance; instead, various tenants probably leased suites there, moving in and out in accordance with the ebb and flow of their earnings. A thin blanket of snow from an early-morning flurry covered the asphalt and trimmed the bare branches of the trees that dotted the lot.

They’d been parked there for half an hour, and had seen only one person walk into the building. There had been no sign of the hard case.

The painkillers had taken the sting out of Matt’s wound, but it still hurt every time he moved. He still felt a bit light-headed, which he attributed to the loss of blood. His body was pleading with him to give it time to heal, but the pleas were falling on deaf ears. He could walk, and right now, that would have to do.

“I’m going to have a look,” he told Jabba. He reached for the door handle, grimacing with discomfort as he pulled on it.

Jabba reached out to stop him. “Not a good idea, dude. You shouldn’t even be here. Look at you.”

“Just a look,” Matt repeated; only as he pushed the door open, Jabba put a hand on his shoulder and stayed him.

“I’ll go,” Jabba said.

Matt looked at him.

“I’ll go,” he protested-insisted, his voice rising a notch, before concern flitted across his eyes. “If I’m not out in five minutes, call the cops,” he added, slapping his iPhone into Matt’s hand. Then he caught himself, and grinned. “God, I never imagined I’d ever hear myself say that.”

Matt brushed it away, dead serious. “Just don’t get too nosy.”

Jabba looked at him askance. “Seriously, sometimes, it’s like you don’t even know me,” he mock-griped, then climbed out of the car.

He scanned left and right as he ambled across the lot, slightly overdoing the casual don’t-mind-me attitude, but there was no one around to notice. Matt watched him disappear inside the building’s entrance lobby.

Less than a minute later, he emerged.

“Well?” Matt asked.

Jabba gave him a piece-of-cake smile, but his body told a different story. He was breathing fast, and his face was sprinkled with sweat droplets that weren’t there before.

“No receptionist. Five names on the roster, one per floor. Third seems unoccupied, or they’ve been too lazy to put their name up,” he informed Matt in between sharp breaths. “But I think I know which one we want. Just need to go online somewhere to confirm it.”

Matt thought about it, then said, “Okay. Do it here.”

Which totally threw Jabba. “What, you want me to use my phone?”

“Yep,” Matt confirmed, sure of it.

“Dude, they could track our position. My iPhone’s got A-GPS, as in ‘assisted.’ Makes their job even easier.”

“Fine. Do it. And stay on long enough for them to be able to do it.”

Jabba looked at him like he was nuts. “You want them to know we were here?”

Matt nodded. “Yep.”

Jabba was now looking at him like he’d sprouted little green antennas from his ears. “Why?”

“I want to fuck with them a little. Shake them up. Keep them unbalanced.”

“It’s my phone, dude,” Jabba specified. “All they’ll know for sure is that I was here.”

“Same difference. They know we’re together.”

Jabba looked like he wanted to object more, but he gave up, raised his hands in surrender, and turned on his phone. He checked his watch, then fired up his Macbook and connected it to the phone, using the phone’s Internet connection. Matt watched as Jabba’s fingers danced across the keyboard and tapped the touchpad a few times. He then swung the laptop so Matt could see the screen.

It was on the home page of a company called Centurion. A slick slideshow showed an oil refinery in a desert location at sundown, then what looked like a gated compound somewhere in the Middle East, then a convoy of cars, again in the same sunny, dusty environment. The last picture showed a steely guy in pristine quasi-military gear, black gloves, and surfer-cool wraparound shades, poised behind a large-caliber machine gun. A slogan flashed up with each image, the last of them announcing the company’s motto, “Securing a Better Future.”

Matt and Jabba read through the “About Us” paragraph, which described Centurion as a “security and risk management company with offices in the U.S., Europe, and the Middle East” and a “security provider to the U.S. government and a registered and active UN contractor.” Jabba clicked on the “Management” link, and a black-and-white portrait of Maddox leapt out at them. The hard case was the firm’s founder and CEO, and the accompanying blurb described his long, stellar career in the Marines and his achievements in the field of “security consulting.”

“Ouch,” Jabba said, flinching at the unsettling and unapologetic mug shot of Maddox. He glanced around nervously, clearly uneasy at the thought of taunting this man. He checked his watch again and held up his phone. “Eighty-five seconds. Can we please switch this off now and get the hell out of here?”

Matt was still absorbing every word of Maddox’s bio in silence. After a moment, he said, “Sure.”

Jabba turned it off as Matt fired up the car and pulled away.

He looked over at Matt. “So?”

Matt nodded to himself, his eyes a bit distant, his expression dour. “So now we know who we’re dealing with.”

“Dude, the man’s got a private army,” Jabba pleaded, his pitch doing its worry rise. “We’ve got a white Camry and a handgun with no bullets in it.”

“Then we’ve got some catching up to do,” Matt replied. “But let’s see what Reece’s wife has to say first.”

“YOU’RE SURE?”

Maddox wasn’t shouting. In fact, his voice was unnaturally calm, given the news he’d just been given. But his displeasure was coming through loud and clear to his contact at Fort Meade.

“Absolutely,” came the answer. “Komlosy’s phone signal popped up on the grid for just over a minute before powering down.”

Maddox walked over to his office’s window and looked down. Nothing unusual caught his eye. The parking lot and the street beyond were glacially quiet.

Two unexpected appearances from Sherwood in as many days, he fumed. The second one in the immediate vicinity of his office.

The man was good.

A bit too good for Maddox’s liking.

“How long ago?” he asked.

“It just went dead.”

Maddox seethed quietly. “Can’t you track him with his phone switched off?”

“Looking at his contract, it seems he’s got an iPhone, a 3G one,” the NSA monitoring agent told him. “If he keeps it on long enough, I can remotely download some burst software onto it that’ll let me track it even if it’s powered down.”

“I need you to do better than that,” Maddox insisted.

“We’re working on some stuff. But for now, it’ll get better every time he switches it on. The tracking software will have a head start on him; it’ll keep adding data every time he powers up. We won’t need as long to get a lock.”

“Okay. Let me know the second it powers up again,” the Bullet ordered. “And get that download done as soon as you get a chance.” With that, he hung up, stuffed the phone into his pocket, checked his watch, and glared out his window again.

Chapter 47

Deir Al-Suryan Monastery, Wadi Natrun, Egypt

“Don’t we have anyone who can get here sooner?” Dalton asked. “Where’s the damn sixth fleet when you need it?”

They were standing around uneasily by the base of the keep—Gracie, Finch, Dalton, Brother Ameen, and the abbot. An expectant hum of voices reverberated across the plain, beyond the monastery’s thick walls. Closer by, the imam’s hateful voice droned on from the people carrier’s radio, an angry, never-ending call to arms that was echoed on countless other radios outside the walls. “Yeah, that’ll look real good,” Finch commented wryly. “American troops flying in to safeguard a Christian holy man in a sea of angry Muslims. That’ll clinch the hearts-and-minds battle right there.”

“We need to get Father Jerome out of here,” Gracie said.

“I agree,” Finch said, “but how?”

“What about bringing a chopper in to whisk him out?” she asked.

“Where’s it gonna land?” Finch queried. “There’s nowhere wide enough for it to put down, not inside the monastery’s walls.”

Gracie pointed up at the keep. “What about up there?

Finch shook his head. “The roof ’s not strong enough. It’s hundreds of years old. There’s no way it can hold the weight. And I don’t think winching him out is gonna work either. He’s too old to take that, and even if he could, someone could take a potshot at him.”

Dalton slid a forlorn nod over at the keep behind them. “So what do we do? Bunker down?” He pointed up at the keep’s second-floor drawbridge, sitting above them. “This thing still work?” he asked the abbot, only half-joking. The fortified keep, with its food stores, water well, library, and top-floor chapel, had been used as a refuge in times of attack, but that hadn’t happened in over a thousand years.

“No, but . . . we should just stay here and wait for the security forces to arrive. They’re bound to send them in now. Besides, there aren’t just Muslims out there,” the abbot reassured them. “A lot of them out there, they’re our people. Christians. They’ll defend Father Jerome if they have to.”

“I’m sure they would, but that’s not the point,” Gracie pressed. “It’d be better to get him out of here before anything like that happens.

To make sure it doesn’t.”

“There might be another way out,” Brother Ameen offered.

All eyes turned swiftly to him. “How?” Gracie asked.

“The tunnel,” he said, turning to the abbot with a questioning look.

“There’s a tunnel? Where to?” Gracie asked.

“It goes from here to the monastery closest to us—the one we drove past on the way in.”

“The Monastery of Saint Bishoi,” the abbot confirmed.

“What, the one across the field?” Gracie was pointing northeast, trying to visualize the second monastery’s relative position from when she’d last seen it, from the roof of the qasr.

The abbot nodded. “Yes. The tunnel is older than this monastery. You see, our monastery was built over what was once the monk Bishoi’s hermitage, the cave he used to retreat to. Because of the constant threat from invaders, the monks decided to build an escape route from Saint Bishoi’s monastery, and they chose his old cave as the exit point. Years later, as the danger receded, a small chapel was built over his cave, and that small chapel eventually grew into this monastery.”

“You think it’ll still get us there?” Finch asked.

“The last time anyone went down there was years ago, but it was clear then. I don’t see why it should be any different now,” the abbot replied. “We haven’t had any earthquakes or anything like that.”

Gracie glanced doubtfully at Finch. Still, it was all they had.

“If we can make it across, can we get a car to drive us from there? Discreetly?” she asked.

The abbot thought about that for a moment, then looked around at the driver of the Previa and the others, smoking nervously as they listened to the radio. He stepped over to Yusuf and spoke to him in Arabic. Yusuf replied, then the abbot turned back to Gracie. “Yusuf’s brother-in-law also drives a car like his. If he can use your phone to call him, we can get him to meet you at Bishoi.”

“Okay, but then what? Where do we go?” Dalton asked. “The embassy?”

“It’ll be the same thing there,” Ameen put in. “Maybe even worse. It’s safer to fly him out of the country.”

Finch frowned, thinking ahead, stumbling over the logistics. “Easier said than done. Does Father Jerome even have a passport?”

“We have to sneak him out,” Gracie opined. “If anyone sees him, it’ll get complicated.”

“He can use my passport,” the abbot offered. “With his robe on and with his hood down, they won’t look too closely. And Ameen will be with you to deflect any questions.”

Gracie looked to Finch for approval. He thought about it quickly, then nodded. “Okay, it’s worth a shot. I’ll call D.C.,” he told her, “see how quickly they can get a plane over to us.” He turned to the monks. “How long do you think this tunnel is? Half a kilometer maybe?”

“I’m not sure,” the abbot said. “Maybe a bit more.”

Finch frowned. “We’re not going to be able to lug all our gear through.” He turned to Dalton. “Let’s bring it all down. We’ll grab as much as we can.”

The speech on the car radio flared up, the speaker’s voice rising fiercely. Gracie flashed on iconic, violent images from the region’s turbulent recent history, all of them fueled by religious fervor—the storming of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, the stoning and burning of the Danish embassy in Beirut, the beheadings in Iraq and Afghanistan. She didn’t want to become one of them, not in that sense, anyway.

“We’d better get moving.” She turned to the monk and the abbot. “You need to talk to Father Jerome.”

Ameen nodded. “I’ll go now,” he said, before leaving them and disappearing into the doorway, closely tailed by the abbot.

“THEY’RE TRYING TO GET HIM OUT,” Buscema informed Darby.

“Already? Who?”

“I just got a call from my guy at the network,” the journalist told the reverend. “They’ve still got that news crew there with him, and they’re not waiting for an official reaction. They’re handling him themselves.”

“Of course they are,” Darby chortled. “That inside track’s not exactly bad for their ratings, is it? How are they going to do it?”

“I’m not sure. They’re scrambling to get a plane out to them as soon as possible.”

“Where are they planning on taking him?” Darby asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t think they know. They just want him out of there before the whackos rip him to pieces.”

The reverend went silent. After a moment, he exhaled slowly, as if he’d reached a decision, and said, “Let’s bring him here.”

“Here?”

“Hell, yes. This is God’s country, isn’t it?” he boomed.

“It’s not gonna be easy. Everyone else will want him,” Buscema goaded him. “Did you see the rallies in Rome?”

“The pope hasn’t announced his position on this whole thing yet, has he?” An unusual, slight panic creeped into his words.

“No. The Vatican’s not exactly famous for its quick reactions.”

“So where else is he gonna go? France?” Darby scoffed.

“Spain, maybe. He’s from there originally. And the Brits are usually quick to put out the welcome mat for anyone in trouble.”

“No way. We’ve got to get him over here. Besides, like you said,” he added, “he’s polling through the roof. People here want to hear what he has to say.”

“The government hasn’t even made an official statement about him yet.”

“Just as well,” Darby said, gloating. “Gives me a chance to do it myself and save him from ending up with those heathens back east.”

There it is, Buscema thought. “You want to handle this yourself?” His voice rose with mock surprise.

“God’s sending us a message,” Darby asserted. “I’m going to make sure everyone hears it, loud and clear.”

Buscema went silent for a moment, then said, “If the State Department gives the embassy the green light—and they will—it’ll be over. If you want to make it happen, you’re gonna have to move fast.”

The reverend’s tone was as smooth and sharp as a blade. “Watch me.”

GRACIE, DALTON, AND FINCH had brought the rest of their gear down from the roof of the keep and were now sorting through it in the shade by the entrance to the library. The tunnel would be a long, dark trek through a narrow, dusty passage, and they hadn’t thought they’d be able to take everything with them. The camera and live broadcasting gear and as many of Father Jerome’s journals that they could carry made the cut. Dalton’s skycam rig was almost a casualty of the forced triage before the abbot drafted in a few monks who would accompany them through the passage and help them lug the rest of their gear.

Finch had spoken to Ogilvy, who went to work on rustling up a jet that could fly them out without asking too many questions. They’d still have to get past whatever security checks were in place at the airport, but Finch knew that those controls would be far less stringent for a private plane than they were for commercial flights. Still, they’d have to, pun notwithstanding, wing it at the airport. It didn’t give him too much cause for concern, though. They’d gotten out of trickier places before.

As Finch clicked his backpack shut, Dalton’s observations from earlier were still bouncing around his mind. Something was nagging at him. As Dalton had noted, everything had hinged on the preexistence of the documentary footage. Without it, he thought, none of this would have happened. They certainly wouldn’t have made the trip. Something else was bothering him too. The way the throng surrounding their car had recoiled and given them an opening to back up and return to the safety of the monastery. He couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was that bothered him—the moment had been a blur of frenzy. Still, something wasn’t right.

He thought again about putting in a call to the documentary’s producer to find out more about how it had all happened. He checked his watch and was about to say something when Dalton, looking around impatiently, said, “Where are these guys? We need to go.”

“I thought Ameen and the abbot went to get him,” Finch answered.

“I’ll see if I can find them,” Gracie offered.

She headed down the courtyard, toward the small building that housed the monks’ cells. Finch watched her go. He wiped the sweat off his brow and paced around for a beat, and decided to use the dead time to reach out to the documentary’s producer. He checked his watch again, made a quick mental calculation of the time difference between Egypt and England, where the producer was based, and found he wouldn’t be waking him up at some ungodly hour. He picked up the satphone, then patted his pockets, looking for his cell phone, only it wasn’t there.

“You seen my BlackBerry?”

Dalton glanced around. “No, why?”

He checked his backpack. “I’ve been thinking about what you were saying. Thought I’d put a call in to the documentary guys.”

“So use the satphone. Your phone doesn’t work here anyway, remember?”

Finch gave him a wiseass grin. “It’s got my contacts list on it, numbnuts.”

Dalton thought about it for a second, then said, “Last I remember, you had it out when we were up there,” pointing at the qasr. “Before you took that call on the satphone.”

Finch glanced up at the keep that towered over the monastery’s walled-in courtyard, and frowned. “Must have left it up there while we were packing up,” he said. “Be right back.”

He left Dalton, cut across the courtyard and up to the drawbridge, before disappearing into the keep.

As with each time he entered it, it took a moment for his eyes to adjust from the glare of the Egyptian sun to the dusty darkness of the windowless, low-ceilinged interior of the keep. He made his way down a passage to the narrow stairs and climbed up.

The keep was deserted, as before. Some of its rooms were used for storage, as the darkness and the thick walls kept the temperature relatively cool; others hadn’t been used for years, if not centuries. The ceilings were low, the windows were nothing more than thin slits cut into the thick walls—not the most inviting place to work, or sleep, neither of which was what it was designed for. He climbed the staircase up three floors and reached the top, then found the small landing with the wooden ladder that led up to the roof.

The BlackBerry was there, skulking in the dust behind a small stucco smokestack. Finch picked it up. He thought of edging forward for one last look at the teeming plain below, but decided against it. Instead, he found the phone number of the documentary’s producer, pulled out the satphone, and called him.

The man, Gareth Willoughby, was a respected, globe-trotting filmmaker with an impressive CV of well-crafted documentaries covering all kinds of topics. Finch only managed to get through to his voicemail, and left him a brief message explaining what was going on and asking him to return the call.

He took one last look across the desert, then headed back down. As his foot settled on the bottom rung of the ladder that came down from the roof, he heard a voice, a low murmur coming from one of the small rooms behind the chapel. A man’s voice, no more than a few words, but their rumble carried across the quiet, warrenlike space. Something about it made him listen more closely. He stepped away from the ladder, quietly, and followed the voice around the narrow corridor to a room that faced out, away from the monastery. Finch couldn’t make out what he was saying, but it struck him that the man was speaking English.

He reached the doorway and stopped just short of it, hovering, leaning in for a look. The man was inside, alone. It was a monk. Like the others, he wore the traditional black cassock with the distinctively embroidered hood, which was raised over his head. He had his back turned to Finch. Finch stood there, somewhat taken aback, as he realized the man was talking on a cell phone. In English.

“We should be leaving in ten, fifteen minutes,” the man said. “Shouldn’t take more than twenty minutes to get through.” He paused, then said, “Okay,” and hung up.

Finch stiffened as he recognized the voice, and it must have caused him to pull his foot back an inch, maybe less, nothing significant— except that it was significant enough for the monk to sense his presence and turn.

It was Brother Ameen.

The awkwardness of the moment was stifling. Finch’s eyes were drawn to the phone and back—there was something unusual about it, but his frazzled mind didn’t latch onto it immediately—and he looked the monk squarely in the eyes before he caught himself and relaxed his face into a casual, sheepish half smile.

“I, um,” he said, wavering, then pointing up at the roof, “I forgot my phone up there.”

Brother Ameen didn’t answer him. He didn’t return the casual half smile either. He just stood there, rooted in silence.

Finch sensed the monk’s muscles going tight. His eyes drifted down to the phone, then he realized what he’d unconsciously noted. It wasn’t just a regular cell phone. They didn’t work out there. It was a satphone, with its distinctive, oversized flip-up antenna. Not only that, but it had a small box plugged into its base, which Finch knew to be an encryption module.

Chapter 48

Nahant, Massachusetts

“More than anything, Dom lived for his work,” Jenna Reece was telling Matt and Jabba. “Even when the kids were around, he hardly ever managed to make it up here, and when he did, it didn’t make much difference anyway. His mind was always back in his lab.”

They were in the living room-slash-studio of her house in Nahant, a small town that squatted on a tiny crescent-shaped peninsula fifteen miles north of Boston. A couple of miles offshore, it was linked to the mainland by a narrow umbilical cord of sand bank. Reece’s house, a fully modernized Dutch colonial, faced the ocean on the town’s western coast. It had once been Dominic and Jenna’s summer home, she’d told them, but following her husband’s death, she’d sold their place in the city and moved full-time out here, where she’d turned the double-height living room into a workshop and lost herself in her sculpture.

“I imagine your brother was probably the same, wasn’t he?” she asked. “They all seemed consumed by their work.” She shrugged wistfully and leaned down to stroke her dog, a ginger-haired retriever that dozed lazily by her feet. A small Christmas tree twinkled in a corner, by the floor-to-ceiling sliding doors that led onto the deck. “And look what it got them in the end.”

Matt held her gaze and nodded solemnly. “What do you know about the project they were working on when they died?”

Jenna Reece let out a light chortle. “Not very much. Dom didn’t really go into much detail about his work with me. Not with his ditzy wife,” she laughed easily. “I haven’t really got much of a scientific mind anyway, so it wasn’t something I was normally curious about. It was his world. And, well, you must know how obsessive he and the rest of them were when it came to making sure no one knew what they were working on—not until they were good and ready to make their announcements and reap the glory. Which I always thought was a bit too paranoid . . . I mean, it’s not exactly the kind of thing I would slip into casual conversations at the coffee shop, is it?” she smiled.

Matt shifted in his seat and leaned forward, steepling his hands under his chin, clearly discomfited by what he needed to ask her. “Mrs. Reece . . .”

“It’s Jenna, Matt,” she softly corrected him.

“Jenna,” he tried again, “I need to ask you something, but you might find it a bit weird, and . . .” His voice trailed off and he looked at her, hoping for encouragement.

“Matt, you said you needed to talk and you drove all this way to see me, so I figure it has to be important.” She fixed him squarely. “Ask me what you need to ask.”

“Okay,” he nodded gratefully. “I just wanted to know . . . Did you actually get to see your husband’s body?”

Jenna Reece blinked a couple of times, and her eyes looked away before dropping down to her feet. She reached down and stroked her dog again, somewhat rattled by the memory. Outside, frothy December waves pounded the rocky outcroppings below the timber deck, their metronomic crashes punctuating the uneasy silence. “No,” she said after a moment. “I mean, not his whole body. But you know how they died, and . . . the conditions out there . . .”

“I know,” he offered, trying to avoid conjuring up any additional painful imagery. “But you’re sure it was him?”

Her eyes were aimed at Matt, but they were looking through him, far beyond, beyond the room’s walls and the town itself. “All they had for me was his hand,” she said. The words caught in her throat and she shut her eyes for a moment. When she opened them again, they glistened with moisture. “It was his hand, though. His left hand. His wedding band was still on it. I didn’t have any doubts.”

“You’re sure of it,” Matt probed again, despite his misgivings.

Jenna Reece nodded. “He had these really lovely, fine hands. Like a pianist’s. I noticed them the first time we met. Of course, it had been . . .” She brushed a painful thought away and straightened up. “I still knew it was his.” She smiled through it at Matt. “Why do you ask?”

“Well, there wasn’t anything left of my brother, so I was just wondering if . . . I was just hoping maybe someone had made a mistake,” he obfuscated.

“You think your brother might still be alive?”

The way she cut to the heart of his thinking surprised him, and he couldn’t help but nod.

She gave him a warming, supportive smile. “I wish I could tell you something that would help clear it up for you one way or another, but all I can tell you is what I know about my Dom.”

Matt nodded, quietly grateful that he didn’t have to explain any further. He thought back to the main reason for their visit. “Do you know who Dom was working for?”

“He didn’t share that with me,” she told him thoughtfully. “Not that he wasn’t very excited about it. He was. But like the rest of them, he was cagey about details. And I’d seen it all before—every discovery of his had the potential to change the way we live. That’s how they all thought, it was what they were all chasing after. And I guess some of these things can end up changing our lives, whether it’s cell phones or the Internet or electric cars.” She leaned forward, frowning with concentration, trying to see through the cobwebs of her mind. “But with this project . . . it was different. Like I said, Dom didn’t say much about his work at the best of times, but with this one, he was particularly aloof. And I could see that this was different. It was the big one. Much as he tried to hide it, he had this burning enthusiasm about it, this optimism . . . he felt it could really change things, on a more fundamental level. I pressed him on it a couple of times, and he’d just say, ‘You’ll see.’ And the day he got the green light on the funding—it was usually a big night out for us, a big celebration in some fancy restaurant. This one wasn’t like that. He was delighted, don’t get me wrong. But it was more than that. It was like the next phase of his life had begun. Like he was on a mission. And he was being more secretive than ever after that. I hardly ever saw him. Until . . .” She looked away, shaking the memory away.

“You didn’t know anything about who was backing him? He must have said something about that,” Matt pressed.

Jenna eyed him hesitantly, then said, “I’m not sure I should be telling you this.”

“Please, Jenna,” Matt said, palms open. “I really need to know. My brother was part of it.”

Jenna studied him, then heaved out a sigh and nodded. “Well . . . I always assumed the money was coming from one of the big tech VCs he knew or maybe the government. He only let it slip once, and that was by accident,” she confided.

“What?” Matt asked, gently.

“The money. It was coming from Rydell.”

Matt looked at her, confused. Jabba took up the slack. “Larry Rydell?”

“Yes,” she confirmed. “No one was supposed to know. I don’t know why, but that’s how they wanted it. Rydell has such a big public profile, and I guess he has his share price to worry about. Still, I was surprised—and more than a bit pissed off, to tell you the truth—when he didn’t even show up at Dom’s funeral. I mean, I can’t complain, they took good care of me, I didn’t have any trouble with their insurance people or anything, but still . . .”

Jabba looked at Matt pointedly. Matt knew the name—most people did—but didn’t quite grasp the significance it seemed to have for Jabba.

“You’re sure of this,” Jabba pressed.

“Yes,” Jenna Reece replied.

Jabba looked at Matt with an expression that said they had all they needed to know.

Chapter 49

Deir Al-Suryan Monastery, Wadi Natrun, Egypt

“So . . . you’ve got a satphone?” Finch found himself asking, rhetorically, as if he were in a trance.

Brother Ameen didn’t respond in any way.

“I didn’t think you had one out here,” Finch added, while trying to drain his tone of any hint of suspicion.

The monk still didn’t say anything. He just kept looking blankly at Finch.

“It’s funny,” Finch continued, “’cause I just thought the whole point of being here was to isolate yourself from the rest of the world, to allow you to, you know, concentrate on God and . . . and yet you’ve got a satphone,” he stated again, his attention traveling down to the phone in the monk’s hand and back to his eyes.

Finch’s forced smile dropped. It rose, fractionally, across Brother Ameen’s face.

“I do,” the monk finally said, almost regretfully. “And it’s got an encryption box.”

He held Finch’s probing gaze. Finch tried to dismiss the comment with a no-big-deal grimace, but the monk wasn’t buying.

“I know you recognized it when you saw it,” the monk added. “It was obvious from your expression. I expect you’ve seen them before, given your line of work, the kinds of places you’ve been.”

“Yeah, but . . .” Finch waved it away, mock-casually. “I see more and more of them these days. It’s safer, isn’t it? What with all the scanners and . . .” His voice trailed off as his mind went off on its own, rocketing back over all the events that had led to his being here, in this small, stuffy room; enlightening him with a barrage of revelations that he’d never imagined—and it suddenly hit him that he was in serious danger, an odd, instinctive reaction he didn’t quite understand but one that still made him take a hesitant step backward.

The monk mirrored him with a soft step forward.

Finch frowned. “What are you doing?”

“I’m sorry,” Brother Ameen said as he took another step toward him.

Finch’s instincts flared red-hot—and he bolted backward and turned to head back to the stairs, but he’d barely made it past the door’s threshold before the monk was right with him, moving lightning fast, slamming him back against the wall while driving a hard knee straight into his groin. Finch pitched forward, exhaling heavily from the kick. His glasses flew off his face as he bent over, and he pivoted around and raised his hands defensively, hoping to stave off another blow. For a split second, he caught sight of the monk’s fist. Without the spectacles, it was a bit out of focus, but it looked like the monk had it bunched tight, with its middle knuckle extended, and it recoiled before lunging at his head, fast as a rattlesnake’s strike. Its steely tap struck him on the side of his neck, just below his ear, pounding his carotid sinus with the force of a hammer blow. He felt his entire body tense up from the hit, before losing all motor control of his muscles and plummeting to the ground.

It was the oddest feeling—motionless, no control over his muscles, like a big lump of Jell-O dropped on the ground. Through groggy, hazy eyes, he saw the monk hover over him, look away and then back down, think for the briefest of moments, then bend down, grab him by the arm, lift him up, and sling him over his shoulder.

“WHERE IS HE?” Gracie asked, scanning the monastery’s courtyard.

She was standing with Dalton, ready to go. They’d been joined by the abbot and Father Jerome, and the other monks who’d be helping them carry their gear across.

Dalton tilted his head up at the top of the keep, cupped his hands around his mouth like a bullhorn, and yelled, “Finch. We’re all set here. Time to move out, pal.”

No answer.

Gracie looked around, then asked Dalton, “You sure he went up there?”

Dalton nodded. “It shouldn’t be that long. He’s just looking for his BlackBerry.”

Gracie glanced around again, impatiently, then frowned at the keep. “I’m gonna see what’s keeping him,” she said, and stepped away.

She’d almost reached the doorway when something inside her made her look up—the barely perceptible noise of a wind rush, a hardly noticeable darkening of the ground to her right—and she turned and looked up just in time to see Finch’s body hurtling to the ground and slamming into the hard sand a few feet away from her.

Chapter 50

Outskirts of Boston, Massachusetts

“It makes sense,” Jabba concluded, all pumped up, his mouth motoring ahead. “He’s got the money. He’s got the technical chops to pull off something like this. And he’s a major, major environmentalist.” Jabba shook his head, his face locked in concentration. “Question is, how’s he doing it?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Matt replied.

They were back on the mainland, heading down the Salem Turnpike, toward the city. Jabba had told Matt what he knew about Rydell—the way he championed alternative energy projects across the globe, the passion with which he lobbied Washington to take the climate change issue seriously, the support he gave to politicians and to groups who’d been fighting the mostly losing battle against the previous administration’s callous disregard for environmental concerns. Every word of it added an additional pixel of clarity to the picture that was forming in Matt’s mind: him getting in Rydell’s face and hearing what they’d done to Danny straight from the horse’s mouth.

“How is it you know so much about Rydell?” Matt asked.

Jabba looked at him askance. “Dude. Seriously? Where’ve you been living?”

Matt shrugged. “So he really thought he could start a new ‘green’ religion? Is that it?”

Jabba cracked a grin. “We’re hardwired to believe from minute one, dude. It’s all around us from the day we’re born. There’s no escaping it. And people will believe all kinds of crap. Look at what a third-rate sci-fi writer was able to pull off, and everyone knew he was only out to get stinking rich. Rydell . . . the man’s in a whole different league. He’s got state-of-the-art technology and all the money he needs at his disposal. And he’s no fool. It’s an awesome combination.”

Matt nodded, taking it in. “And he’s set this whole thing up to save the planet?”

“Not the planet. Us. It’s like George Carlin said. The planet’s gonna be just fine. It’s been through far worse than anything we can throw at it. It was here long before us and it’ll still be around long after we’re gone. It’s we that need saving.”

Matt shook his head in disbelief, then glanced out the window. The traffic up and down the turnpike was already noticeably heavier, with the Christmas rush home starting to clog the nation’s arteries.

“Do you think they knew what they were really working on?” he asked Jabba. “Danny, the others . . . do you think Reece and Rydell told them?”

“I don’t know . . . They had to be aware of the power of what they were putting together.” He glanced sideways at Matt. “The question isn’t just whether or not they were told. It’s whether or not they knew about it from day one. Whether or not they were working on it knowing what it was going to be used for.”

Matt shook his head again with denial.

“He was your brother, man,” Jabba added, hesitantly. “What do you think? Could he have been part of something like this?”

Matt thought about it. “A hoax like this? Scamming millions of people.” He shook his head again. “I don’t think so.”

“Even if he thought it was for a good cause?”

That one was harder to answer. Danny wasn’t any more religious than Matt was, despite their parents’ best efforts, so there wouldn’t have been any faith issues for him there. And although he was a high-minded, upstanding kind of guy, Matt didn’t remember him being particularly concerned with the planet’s environmental problems, no more than most well-read, levelheaded people. He certainly wasn’t mes- sianic about it. Still, they’d spent a lot of time apart, courtesy of Matt’s stints behind bars, and when all was said and done, how well did anyone know anyone else, really?

Jabba was scrutinizing him, unsure about whether or not to say anything more. Matt noticed it.

“What?” he asked.

“I don’t know, dude. I mean, I hate to say it, but it doesn’t look good. It’s been two years. If Danny didn’t pull a disappearing act to be part of this, I don’t see how they could have kept him locked up and muzzled all this time. He would’ve found a way to reach out to someone, to sneak a word out, don’t you think?”

“Not if they know what they’re doing.”

“Two years, man,” Jabba added with a slight wince.

Matt stared ahead, frowning. Suddenly, he was feeling a tightening in his chest. He didn’t know what was better—to find out Danny was actually long dead, or that he was part of all this willingly. Part of something that had gotten his own best friend killed and his brother accused of his murder.

“No way,” Matt finally said. “He’d never want to be part of something like this. Not if he knew what they were really doing.”

“Okay,” Jabba accepted and turned away.

They motored on for a mile or so, then Matt said, “Get us another lock on Maddox’s car, will you?”

“Okay, but we really shouldn’t be using this,” Jabba cautioned as he pulled out his iPhone.

“Just don’t stay on any longer than you think is safe. You can be in and out in less than your forty seconds, right?”

“Let’s make it thirty,” Jabba said and nodded reluctantly. He pulled up the tracker’s website. He didn’t need to key in the tracker’s number—it was now stored on a cookie. He waited a couple of seconds for the ping to echo back, then zoomed in on the map.

“He’s stationary. Somewhere by the name of Hanscom Field,” he told Matt. “Hang on.” He pulled up another website. Punched in his query. Waited a couple of seconds for it to upload. “It’s a small airport between Bedford and Concord. And I’m logging off before they track us.” He killed the phone, checked his watch—twenty-six seconds total—and turned to Matt.

Matt chewed it over quickly. A small airfield. He wondered what Maddox was doing there. He also liked the idea of maybe being able to surprise Maddox and get up close and personal with him outside the man’s comfort zone.

He glanced at the clock on the dashboard. It wasn’t far, even with the holiday traffic building up. A half hour, forty minutes maybe. “That’s just outside the ninety-five, isn’t it?”

Jabba’s face sank. “Yep,” he shrugged.

“Check it again in fifteen minutes or so, will ya? Keep making sure he’s still there.”

Jabba nodded grimly and sagged into his seat, sucking in a deep breath and anticipating the worst.

MADDOX HUNG UP with his contact at the NSA and scowled. He scanned the skies instinctively for the incoming jet, but his mind was now preoccupied elsewhere.

He’d received three consecutive calls. The first one was innocuous enough: The learning software had delivered on its promise, and the targets were just north of the city, heading into town. The second call told him the targets had changed direction and were now heading west on the Concord Turnpike, which, with hindsight, should have raised an eyebrow, but hadn’t. The third call, though, was seriously troubling. The targets had turned north once they’d hit I-95, and were now less than five miles away from the airfield.

Which was, again, seriously troubling. For the simple reason that Maddox didn’t believe in blind luck any more than he believed in coincidences. And it was the second time Matt had managed to track him down that day. Which meant he was either psychic, or he had an advantage Maddox wasn’t aware of.

Yet.

His mind did a one-eighty and ran a full-spectrum sweep of everything that had happened since he’d first come across Matt Sherwood. He shelved details he thought extraneous and focused on establishing causal links between that first encounter and the present moment and running them against the background skills he knew Matt possessed.

All of which colluded to draw his attention across to his car.

He took a half step closer to it, his eyes scrutinizing it as his operational instincts assessed what the likely culprit could be.

And frowned at the realization.

He wouldn’t have time to have the car checked out. Which meant there was a chance he’d have to leave it there for now. Which pissed him off even more. He really liked that car. He checked his watch. The jet’s arrival was imminent.

He looked around. The airfield was quiet, as it normally was. Which was good. He decided it was time to put an end to Matt Sherwood’s unexpected intrusions—permanently—and waved over two of his men who were waiting nearby.

“I think we’re about to have some company,” he told them.

Then he told them what he wanted to do about it.

Chapter 51

Deir Al-Suryan Monastery, Wadi Natrun, Egypt

“Finch!” Gracie’s cry shook the walls of the monastery as she dropped to the ground at his side. She was shaking. The blood drained from her face, and her hands shot up to her open mouth. Finch’s body just lay there, in front of her, flat against the desert sand. He was on his front, motionless, the puff of dust that he’d kicked up when he’d slammed into the ground drifting back down and settling around him.

Slowly, her hands came down and hovered over him, not daring to touch him. The others, led by Dalton, all rushed to her side.

“Is he . . . ?” Dalton couldn’t say it.

There were no visible open wounds, no blood seeping out. It didn’t make the sight any less horrific. His head, which must have hit the ground first, was twisted sideways at an impossible angle. He had one arm bent backward, and his eyes were staring lifelessly at the parched soil.

“Oh my God. Finch,” Gracie sobbed as she stared at him, not sure what to do. Her hands finally dropped down onto his body, her fingers pressing softly against his neck, searching for a pulse or for any sign of life she knew she wasn’t going to find.

She looked at Dalton through teary eyes and shook her head.

Dalton was shaking. He put his arms around Gracie, his eyes also locked on his fallen friend’s body. The monks, waiting hesitantly behind Father Jerome and the abbot, started murmuring some prayers. After a moment, Gracie pulled her hand back, then gently brushed a few errant strands of hair off Finch’s forehead and gave his cheek a gentle caress, staring at him, wanting to slide his eyelids shut but not daring to touch them. She sensed movement behind her, turned, and saw Father Jerome advance hesitantly, his gaze locked on Finch. The holy man took a few more steps until he was standing right next to her, then he knelt down beside her, softly, his concentration still focused on Finch’s dead body.

A shiver of anticipation rolled through her. What is he doing? She watched with rapt attention as he leaned in closer, held out his hands over Finch, and shut his eyes in silent prayer. For a fleeting moment, a wild notion rose within her, an impossible, absurd notion—that she was about to witness something miraculous, that Father Jerome was actually going to intervene with the heavens and bring her friend back from the dead. Her heart leapt into her mouth as she sat there, crippled with fear and hope, and she tried to hold onto that crazy possibility as long as she could, flashing to all the other impossible things she’d witnessed over the last few days and trying to convince herself that anything was now possible, clutching at it with raging desperation even as it slipped away as quickly as it had arisen, driven out by the sight of Finch’s mangled, still-dead body and the cold logic that had always guided her. A devastating sense of grief soon came rolling back in and numbed every nerve in her body.

She looked over at Father Jerome, who opened his eyes and made a cross over Finch’s head. He turned to face her with a look of profound sadness, and took her hands in his.

“I’m so sorry,” he said simply.

His expression, Gracie saw, was also riven with guilt. She nodded, but said nothing. He rose and shuffled back to join his brethren. The abbot and Brother Ameen were standing a few steps back, and as Father Jerome reached them, the abbot put a consoling hand on his shoulder, and he and the younger monk murmured some words to him. Gracie turned to Dalton, then glanced up at the top of the keep. Its sand-colored edge contrasted sharply against the backdrop of clear blue sky. It looked like a close-up one would find on a hip postcard or coffee table book, disconcertingly perfect with its striking pastel colors—too perfect to have hosted such an ugly death.

“How . . . ,” she muttered. “How could he fall like that?”

Dalton shook his head slowly, still in shock. “I don’t know.” His eyes went wide. “Do you think someone out there took a shot at him? Was he shot?”

Gracie looked at him with sudden horror, then bent back down to Finch’s side. Dalton bent down with her. She hesitated; then, with trembling fingers, she straightened Finch’s arms and legs and, slowly, turned him over. She scanned his front, but couldn’t see any bullet wound.

“It doesn’t look like it,” she said. “I didn’t hear a shot, did you?”

“No.” Dalton looked mystified. He turned his gaze back up at the top of the keep. “The lip of that wall up there, it’s so low. Maybe he was leaning over to tell us he found it and just . . .” His voice trailed off.

Gracie scanned the ground around them. The satphone glinted at her from a few feet away, half-buried in the sand. She scanned wider. Spotted it. A small black box, lying by the base of the keep’s wall. Finch’s BlackBerry. She got up, retrieved the satphone, then padded over to the wall. She picked up the BlackBerry and just stared at it, brushing the sand off it with her fingers, imagining Finch’s last moments in her mind’s eye as he found it on the roof and crossed over to the edge for—what, one last look? a wave? She wished there was some way to go back and stop him from climbing up there and having his life grind to a halt in one cruel and sudden moment. But there was no going back. She knew that. She’d seen enough deaths in her years and had learned, long ago, to accept their finality.

“What are we going to do?” she asked. Her eyes, still teary, drifted past Dalton, to Father Jerome, the abbot, and Brother Ameen, who were behind him, and the macabre contingent of monks slightly farther back.

“We’ve got to go,” Dalton told her, his voice hollow.

“What about Finch? We can’t leave him here like this.”

“We can’t take him with us,” he replied softly. “We just can’t.”

After a brief moment, she nodded, still reluctantly but with a hint of clarity seeping back into her. “You’re right,” she said. She looked over at the abbot. “Can you . . . ?”

Sparing her the need to say it, the abbot nodded solemnly. “Of course,” he told her. “We’ll take care of him until we can send him home . . . properly.” He paused, as if to make sure she was all right with that, then glanced over at the Previa and the men huddled around it. She followed his gaze. The faint drone of the radio was still there, threatening like a malevolent siren.

“You should go now,” he added, “as planned.”

AS THEY GATHERED THEIR GEAR, Gracie and Dalton watched as a few monks, aided by the driver, lifted Finch’s body onto a makeshift stretcher—an old door that they’d lifted off its hinges—and carried him inside the main chapel. Four other monks picked up the rest of the news crew’s gear, and the small troupe followed the abbot out of the sun-soaked courtyard and into the cool darkness of the monastery.

They trudged past the entrance of the Church of the Holy Virgin and the refectory, until they reached an ancient, unlit stairwell.

“You’ll need the lamps from here on,” the abbot instructed. The monks lit up a succession of small, camping gas lanterns, casting a cool white pallor across the stone passage. Slowly, they descended a narrow staircase, kicking up a fine mist of pungent dust, and landed in another passage that led them past a couple of olive-oil cellars, where some of the world’s earliest dated books—brought to the monastery by monks fleeing religious persecution in Syria and Baghdad in the eighth century—had been discovered in the mid-1800s, and on to the entrance of Saint Bishoi’s cave.

The abbot pushed the crumbling timber door open and led them in. The cave was dark and narrow, no bigger than a small bedroom. Gracie held her lantern up for a closer look. The cave’s floor was begrimed with dirt, its ceiling vaulted with rough-hewn stone. She saw nothing to support the legend she’d read about during the downtime on their journey over—the legend that Bishoi’s devotion to his faith was so powerful that he used to tie his hair to a chain that dangled from the roof of the cave, to make sure he didn’t fall asleep for days on end while awaiting the vision of Christ that he was praying for.

“It’s this way,” the abbot said.

Gracie swung her lantern in his direction. In a corner of the cave, to the left of the doorway, skulked another rotting timber door, this one even smaller than the one leading into the cave. Two monks helped the abbot pull it open, smothering the tight space with more dust. Gracie edged closer and spotted the entrance to the narrow, low tunnel. It was no more than five feet high and three across, a black hole that sucked in the dim gaslight just as it had barely made it inside.

“God be with you,” the abbot told Father Jerome as, one by one, they dropped their heads and clambered into the tight passage. Gracie was the last one in. She hesitated for a moment, still choking inside at the thought of abandoning Finch, before nodding a parting half smile at the abbot, clenching her jaw with stoic acceptance, and disappearing into the tunnel’s oppressive darkness.

Chapter 52

Bedford, Massachusetts

Matt slowed the Camry right down as the woods on either side of the two-lane road gave way to a handful of low office buildings that dozed behind snow-dusted lawns.

He slid a sideways glance at Jabba and said, “Heads up,” before scanning the surroundings.

There were no other cars on the road, and the area seemed very sedate. They cruised past the entrance to a small air force base that was tucked away to their right. A lone, bored guard manned its flimsy red-and-white barrier. The base shared its runway with the adjacent civilian airfield, but little else. From what they could see, it seemed austere and outdated, a stark contrast to the two swanky flight services buildings farther down the road that catered to the well-heeled clientele who favored flying their private jets into Hanscom Field to avoid the air traffic delays and heavy-handed security at Boston’s Logan Airport—the twin wonders of twenty-first-century air travel.

The approach road led to the civilian air terminal, which wasn’t exactly a hotbed of activity either. There, it doglegged left, then looped back on itself, ringing a disproportionately large, trapezoidal, asphalted central space that served as the visitors’ parking lot. Matt counted less than a dozen cars parked there, and none that he recognized.

The hangars and planes were to his right, on the outside of the ring road, across the street from the parking lot. The high-pitched whine of a taxiing jet could be heard behind one of the two main hangars. Given that we lived in a post-9/11 world, the low-level security was surprising. A pretty basic chain-link fence, seven feet high at best, with an extra foot on top canted outward, was all that separated the road from the apron. You could practically reach through the fence and touch the planes that were dotted around the hangar area. As he drove around the return leg of the road, Matt saw two entry points to the airfield. Again, surprisingly basic: chain-link rolling fences, two cars wide, that slid sideways on small metal wheels. No guardhouses. No guards. Just a swipe-card reader and an intercom on a stalk for those who weren’t regular visitors.

“Check it again,” Matt told Jabba. “We need a tighter fix on the bastard.”

“I don’t know, dude,” Jabba replied warily. “We’re too close.”

“Just don’t break your forty-second rule and we’ll be fine, right?”

Jabba studied him with a wry look. “You think that cocky optimism of yours might have anything to do with your getting that priority pass to prison?”

“Nah. Back then, I was just reckless,” Matt quipped.

“Didn’t really need to know that right now,” Jabba groaned as he fired up his laptop and phone. He zoomed right in on the linked Google map, then killed the connection. The tracker was about four hundred yards ahead, at the far edge of the apron, just before the tree line, beyond the second hangar and what looked like a smaller outbuilding.

“What’s he doing in there?” Jabba asked.

“Either dropping someone off or, more likely, meeting someone who’s flying in.” Matt twisted around, scanning the perimeter. He glimpsed a small private jet crossing from behind one hangar to another. It was rolling toward the tracker’s position.

Matt’s pulse quickened with a jolt of urgency. His instincts told him he needed to be in there—fast. He frowned at the near gate, giving his options a quick run-through, then saw the other gate, the one farther down and closer to the tracker, open up. He tensed—but it wasn’t the Merc, or the 300C, coming out. Just a silver Town and Country minivan, idling as the gate rolled back.

He nudged the throttle, propelling the Camry forward, its narrow tires giving out a tortured squeal. The car accelerated down the ring road, the airfield’s perimeter fence to its right. He was eighty yards away when the gate had rolled back far enough for the minivan to nose forward. Sixty yards away when the minivan had cleared the gate, turned right, and was driving off. Forty yards away when the gate had clicked to a stop and started to roll back. Twenty yards away when the gate was halfway shut—and closing. Which, given that it was two cars wide, meant the math wasn’t on his side.

Matt didn’t lift his foot. Fifteen yards from the gate, he twisted the steering wheel left to send the car swerving wide before flicking it right again while giving the gas pedal a violent kick. The Camry’s soft shock absorbers went into cardiac arrest as the rear end swung around and the small car leaned dangerously to the left, the momentum shifting its entire weight onto its two left tires—but Matt got what he wanted. The car had fishtailed into a position perpendicular to the gate and was now rushing toward it. Matt kept his foot down and threaded the Camry in, flying past the gate’s fixed post, while scraping the car’s right side against the incoming edge.

They were in.

THE BULLET WATCHED attentively as the Citation X veered left on the wide apron and pulled up between the outbuilding and the edge of the tree line, by the parked Merc and the 300C.

The X was a fabulous piece of engineering. Its Rolls-Royce turbofan engines took it to within a whisker of Mach 1, which meant it could fly twelve passengers from New York to L.A. in under four hours and in the height of luxury. Little wonder, Maddox mused, that it was the private-jet-du-jour for the lucky Forbes-level big-hitters who weren’t even aware there was a credit crunch going on: the biggest Hollywood stars, free-spending Russian tycoons—and evangelist preachers. Humble servants of the Lord like Kenneth and Gloria Copeland, who got their megachurch’s army of faithful followers to stump up twenty million dollars for their customized X to help them follow God’s personal directive and spread His word more efficiently.

The Bullet had used the spot before: It was tucked away at the far end of the airfield, away from prying eyes. It was well suited for whisking certain camera-shy clients in and out of the city unnoticed—usually, post-operative or post-scandal celebrities, or masters of the universe putting together sensitive transactions.

In this case, things were different.

As the plane’s tail-mounted engines whined down, a voice crackled in his earpiece.

“A white Camry just snuck in through the south gate,” the operative said. “I think it’s our boys.”

Maddox casually raised his wrist to his mouth and spoke clearly into his cuff mike. “Got it. Stay with them. And take them down once the package is in the car.”

He stepped closer to the plane as its door snapped open, his eyes casually sweeping the environment. He didn’t see anything suspicious, and turned his attention back to the plane, where Rebecca Rydell and her two bodyguards were now coming down the stairs.

MATT TURNED LEFT and hugged the back of the first hangar. He reached its corner and stopped, then edged forward slowly, looking out. He whirred his window open, and he could hear the plane in the distance, powering down, but he couldn’t see it, so he feathered the throttle again and crossed over to the second hangar. From what he could see on the frozen map on the laptop’s screen, there was nothing but open tarmac from there to the tracker’s position.

He edged forward. In the distance, about a hundred yards ahead, was the outbuilding, a low, concrete structure with no windows. He could see the tail of the jet sticking out from behind it, as well as the tailgate of a black Dodge Durango. A couple of private jets and a handful of smaller propeller-driven planes sat idly between the hangar and the outbuilding. They provided some kind of cover—which he needed if they were going to get closer without being spotted.

He decided to cut across and get behind the outbuilding. From there, they would be able to see what was going on—and, if feasible, Matt could make his move. He pulled out his handgun. Sat it on his lap. Noticed Jabba looking at him warily.

“You do realize it’s empty, right?” Jabba said.

“They don’t know that,” Matt replied. “Besides, I don’t plan on needing it.”

Which, judging from Jabba’s expression, didn’t seem to reassure him much.

“You can get out here and wait for me, if you want,” Matt told him.

Jabba looked left and right at the deserted area behind the hangar, then turned back to Matt. “I think I’ll stick around. It’s not exactly Grand Central Terminal out here, you know what I mean?”

Matt nodded, sat the gun in his lap, and eased the car forward.

They shadowed the parked aircraft and pulled in behind the outbuilding. It was a power substation and had a low, metal fence around it. Matt nosed forward, just enough to give them a view of the plane without exposing any more than the side of the car’s A-pillar.

Two men were escorting a young, tanned blonde off the plane.

Jabba leaned forward, his jaw dropping with surprise. “Whoa.”

Matt slid a reproachful glance at him. “Not now, tiger—”

“No, dude,” Jabba interrupted urgently. “She’s Rydell’s daughter.”

Matt studied her with more interest. She stepped off the stairs and glanced around uncertainly as the two men led her over to Maddox, who spoke to her briefly before leading them to the waiting Durango. As he opened the SUV’s rear door, he glanced across the tarmac and over in Matt’s direction, and their eyes met. Matt flinched slightly, but Maddox didn’t. In fact, he didn’t seem rattled at all. Which, given that he’d spotted them, could only mean one thing.

The hard steel muzzle that suddenly nudged Matt just above his ear confirmed it.

Chapter 53

Deir Al-Anba Bishoi Monastery, Wadi Natrun, Egypt

Half an hour after climbing into the tunnel, Gracie, Dalton, Father Jerome, Brother Ameen, and their four black-robed sherpas all emerged into a musty old cellar at the neighboring monastery. A few anxious monks, led by the local abbot, were there to greet them.

Gracie laid her backpack down, dusted herself off, and stretched her back as the abbot fussed over Father Jerome. He looked haunted. A compact, elderly man by the name of Antonius, the abbot seemed completely awed by the miraculous monk’s presence as well as rattled by the turn of events—which was expected. She watched his wrinkled fingers as they trembled while clasping Father Jerome’s hand tightly. “Praise God that you’re all right,” he was telling him as he fired off a nervous prattle of words and led them up a stone stairwell and into the monastery’s refectory.

They were offered cold water and took a moment to catch their breath before heading out into balmy daylight. The monastery had the same beige, Tatooine-like feel as the one they had just left, and although it was smaller, it was no less venerable. Many Coptic popes had started off as monks there, including the current pope, Shenouda III. It also enjoyed its share of religious myth. The body of Saint Bishoi himself—his name was the Coptic word for “sublime”—was kept there, sealed inside a wooden container that was wrapped in clear plastic. He was believed to be lying perfectly preserved and uncorrupted by time, even today, a claim that was hard to verify given that the container was locked away in a coffin and the faithful told stories of his reaching out from inside it and shaking their hands, seemingly undeterred by the limitations of physics. The magic wasn’t limited to him either. Nearby and similarly sealed were the remains of another monk by the name of Paul, a fellow ascetic who was rumored to have committed suicide—successfully—seven times.

They reached Yusuf’s brother-in-law’s taxi, a tired white VW Sharan people carrier. It was waiting for them in the shade by a small, multi-domed structure, Pope Shenouda’s occasional retreat.

“Are you sure it’s safe out there?” Gracie asked the abbot.

“It’s relatively quiet here,” Antonius informed her. “They’re not interested in us. So far.” He smiled uncomfortably. “Come, I’ll show you.”

They left the driver and the monks to pile the gear into the car and followed the abbot across the courtyard and up a maze of narrow outdoor stairs that snaked up to the top of the wall.

“Have a look,” the abbot told them, “but stay low—just in case.”

Gracie and Dalton rose slowly from their crouched positions. The familiar carpet of cars and trucks covered the plain between the two monasteries, but with one crucial difference. All attention seemed focused away from them, toward the monastery they’d just left. Which meant they had a reasonable chance of sneaking out unnoticed.

They climbed back down, thanked the abbot, and got into the car. This time, Dalton and Gracie sat on either side of Father Jerome, while Brother Ameen rode shotgun. Gracie felt a bubble of apprehension as she watched the gate creak open. She steeled herself and straightened up in her seat as the driver gave the throttle a gentle nudge and the Sharan rumbled out into the desert.

There were a few scattered cars and trucks parked on either side of the dusty trail that led away from the monastery. A few men loitered by each cluster of vehicles, talking, smoking, waiting. As their car got closer to the first group, Gracie turned to Father Jerome and raised his cassock’s hood over his head, shielding him from view. Yusuf’s brother-in-law kept calm, trying not to draw any attention to them as the Sharan cruised past slowly without eliciting more than a casual glance.

Gracie let out a small breath of relief. There weren’t many cars or trucks up ahead. A few more minutes, she guessed, and they’d be free and clear. They were less than a hundred yards out from the monastery’s gate when the road doglegged to the left by an old crumbling wall and a clutch of palm trees. A few more cars were parked there, with another bunch of men clustered against the wall, seemingly oblivious to the sun. Gracie felt a flutter in her gut as the driver slowed down to thread through the haphazardly strewn cars, which he managed without fuss—only to find a narrow ditch cutting across them. A lone man was walking toward them, alongside the trail, heading for the trees. Gracie spotted him and tensed up. She tried not to look over at him as the driver slowed right down to a crawl. They were halfway across the ditch when—just as Gracie feared—the passing man drew alongside them, and just as he glanced in, Father Jerome turned and looked sideways, casually, in his direction. It was enough.

The man reacted as if he’d been slapped. His relaxed features took on a sudden alarmed scowl as he put both hands against the car’s side window and leaned right in against the glass, trying to see in, side-stepping alongside them.

“He’s made us,” Gracie exclaimed. “Get us out of here—now.”

The driver glanced back, saw the man moving with them, and nudged the gas pedal. The Sharan’s engine whined as the rear tires bounced across the ditch and kept going. The man tried to keep up, but couldn’t, and quickly fell back into the car’s dusty trail. Gracie watched him drift away, but she knew they weren’t out of danger yet. Sure enough, she saw the man turn away and start running toward the cluster of men by the trees, waving his hands feverishly, trying to attract their attention. And then, he disappeared. She wasn’t sure what had happened, as her view was partially obstructed by the gear in the back of the car and the dust the car was kicking up behind it, but one moment he was there, running and waving and shouting, and then he was gone. She thought she saw him clasp his hands to his head and fall to the ground, almost as if a sudden spasm had crippled him, but she wasn’t sure. They weren’t about to stop and find out. The driver kept his foot pressed against the pedal, and fifteen minutes later, they were on the highway with a seemingly clear run to the airport.

And then Gracie’s satphone rang.

She’d been steeling herself to make that call to Ogilvy, to tell him about Finch, and thought he’d beat her to it. But as she reached for the phone, she didn’t recognize the number it was showing. She only recognized the prefix as that of an American cell phone.

“Hello?” she queried curiously.

“Miss Logan?” the voice boomed back. “We haven’t met yet, but my name is Darby. Reverend Nelson Darby. And I think I can help you.”

FOX TWO WATCHED the white people carrier streak away down the desert trail, then turned his binoculars back to the stricken man. He was still on the ground, writhing with pain, his hands pressed against his ears. Fox Two relaxed somewhat.

It had been a close call—but they’d been prepared.

He knew the agitator would be down for a while. They’d hit him with a potent blast, just to make sure. Fox Two was surprised the man hadn’t lost consciousness, though he knew he still might. Main thing was, he wasn’t going anywhere or saying anything. Not for a while, anyway. Which was all the time they needed.

He raised a finger and spun it around, giving his men the signal to move out. Swiftly and silently, they powered down the LRAD and covered it up before pulling away and heading out as innocuously as they’d arrived, shadowing the van from a safe distance and looking forward to finally going home.

Chapter 54

Bedford, Massachusetts

The man kept the gun pressed against Matt’s temple. “Easy.” His voice was flat, his arm stable. With his left hand, he reached down to Matt’s lap and pulled out his gun, which he stuffed under his belt. Matt cursed inwardly. He’d been so focused on watching the plane and Maddox that he hadn’t noticed the man sneaking up on them from the back. Another guy—same general appearance, dark suit, white shirt, no tie, granite-dark shades—appeared a few yards ahead, rounding the other side of the outbuilding, moving toward Jabba’s side of the car. He also had a gun out, and it was also leveled at Matt’s head. A big gun. A Para-Ordnance P14. It looked heavy. It looked like it could stop a charging rhino in its tracks. Which it could.

Matt’s mind rocketed into a manic good news/bad news sift-through. Maddox’s drones couldn’t really kill them there and then; the airport authorities had to have a record of their being there, there had to be some CCTV cameras scattered around that would have recorded their presence. It was altogether too messy for them, too risky, had to be. Which definitely went under the good news column. But they had plenty of other options. The key was getting him and Jabba off the airport grounds, quietly. They’d either lead them to their cars, or—the cleaner, more obvious option—one of the drones, or both of them more likely, would get into the Camry and lead him and Jabba, at gunpoint, to somewhere nice and quiet where they could pump a few bullets into them and leave their decomposing bodies for some hapless camper to discover. Which definitely went under the bad news column. Matt knew that if he let one or both of the drones into the car, he probably wouldn’t be running these good news/bad news exercises ever again. Which in itself wasn’t a bad thing, but he did feel like sticking around for other, less life-threatening, pursuits.

It was simple. He couldn’t let them into the car.

Which meant he probably had no more than a couple of seconds left to do something about it.

Matt’s hands and feet moved like lightning. His left hand shot up and grabbed the man’s right wrist—his gun hand—and slammed it forward, crushing it against the inside of the A-pillar. A shot erupted out of it—a deafeningly loud explosion inside the car, a mere eighteen inches from Matt’s face. He felt like he’d slammed face-first into a swimming pool. The shot’s sound wave hit him like a lead fist that pounded both ears and numbed them into a soundless, disconcerting stillness in the same split second that the .45 ACP round obliterated the rearview mirror and punched through the windshield, a clean, supersonic jab that didn’t shatter it but only spiderwebbed it around the bullet’s clean, oval-shaped hole of an exit point.

Matt thought he heard Jabba yell out, but he couldn’t be sure. He felt like he was still underwater, and besides, he wasn’t focusing on him. The other guy was more his concern. So in the same instant that he shoved the first shooter’s hand forward and jammed it against the windshield pillar, his right foot stamped on the gas pedal and his right hand twisted the wheel to the right. The car lunged forward and slewed right—straight at the second shooter. The guy to his left jerked backward, but Matt had his elbow locked and managed to keep the guy’s gun hand pinned against the pillar long enough for the car to cover the three yards to the second shooter and slam into him before he had the chance to loose a shot, crushing him against the low metal fence that jutted out from the side of the outbuilding. The shooter’s midsection was pulverized—his eyes popped wide and he let out a piercing yelp of agony before a gush of blood overwhelmed his vocal cords and came spewing out of his mouth and onto the Camry’s virgin-white hood.

Matt still had the first guy to deal with. For a second, the guy’s face went rigid with shock at seeing his coworker truncated, then he was all crunched up with renewed determination as he fought Matt’s grip and struggled to angle his gun inward. Another round exploded—again mere inches from Matt’s face, again deafening, dizzying, like a baseball bat to the ears—and whizzed past Jabba’s face before spinning out through his open window. Matt saw the guy reaching down with his free hand—his left hand—moving to pull the gun he’d taken off Matt from under his belt, and Matt spun the wheel to the right—once, twice, full lock, using one arm—then dropped his hand down to the gearshift, slammed it into reverse, and mashed the gas pedal again. The car leapt back, courtesy of the standard tight gearing in reverse, and with the steering locked all the way to the right, the Camry’s front swung sideways and outward violently and slammed into the first shooter. He was thrown back and, with his hand still pinned to the pillar, tripped over himself and stumbled to the ground—with the car still arcing backward. The Camry’s rear end crunched against the outbuilding’s concrete wall just as its left front wheel rode over the fallen shooter’s ankles, tearing up bone and cartilage in its wake. The man howled with pain and his fingers let go of the gun, which tumbled into Matt’s foot well. Matt threw the car back into drive and howled away in a squeal of rubber.

He threw a glance at the plane—the two bodyguards who were with Rydell’s daughter were rushing toward him, guns drawn. He floored the accelerator again and tore back up the apron, found the gate through which he’d sneaked in—it was closed—plowed right through it and tore down Hanscom Drive and into the shelter of its tree line.

“They knew we were coming,” he yelled at Jabba.

“What? How do you know that?”

“They knew. Maddox knew we were coming. They were waiting for us.”

“But . . .” Jabba’s mouth was stumbling for words, still in shock from the bullets slicing through the air right in front of him.

“Your phone—they’re reading it,” Matt stated flatly.

“No way,” Jabba objected. “I haven’t been keeping it on long enough—”

“I’m telling you they’re reading it,” Matt shot back angrily.

“There’s no way, man.” He held his iPhone up, examining it curiously. “No way they can lock onto it that fast, and I haven’t had it on long enough for them to download any spyware onto it and—”

Matt just snatched it out of his fingers, and was about to flick it out the window when Jabba grabbed it with both hands.

“No,” he yelled, “don’t.”

Matt looked at him angrily.

Jabba wrenched it out of his fingers and took it back. “My whole fucking life’s in there, man. You can’t just throw it away like that. Just give me a second.”

He looked around, checked the car’s side pockets, the ashtray, then opened the glove box and rifled through it. He found some paperwork in a plastic sleeve—service documents and a receipt—held together by the very thing he was looking for, a paper clip. He plucked it off, straightened it, and stuck one of its ends into the tiny hole on the top face of the phone. The SIM card tray popped out. He pulled the card out of its slot and showed it to Matt.

“No SIM card. No signal. For all intents and purposes, the phone’s dead. Okay?”

Matt frowned at him for a moment, then shrugged and nodded. “Okay.” He felt his pulse ratchet its way back. He’d just killed two men. Which should have felt bad, but—strangely—didn’t. It was, he told himself, a simple matter of kill or be killed. But he knew he’d have to be more careful if he didn’t want to fall on the wrong side of that equation the next time it presented itself.

Jabba sat quietly for a moment, just staring ahead, then asked, “What are we going to do now?”

“What do you think?” Matt grumbled.

Jabba studied him, then nodded stoically. “Rydell?”

“Rydell,” Matt simply confirmed.

Chapter 55

Wadi Natrun, Egypt

“ Iunderstand you’re looking to get out of there in a hurry,” Darby said in a casual tone.

Gracie stared ahead quizzically. “I’m sorry?”

Dalton leaned out and mouthed her a question. She gave him an uncertain glance back.

“You need a ride, Miss Logan,” Darby observed somewhat smugly. “And I’m calling to offer you one.”

Her mind scrambled to make sense of the call. She recognized the name, of course. She couldn’t exactly count herself among the pastor’s fans. Far from it, truth be told. But that didn’t really matter now, nor did it tell her what she needed to know. “How did . . . ?” she stammered. “Who gave you this number?”

“Oh, I have a lot of friends, Miss Logan. Well-connected friends. I’m sure you know that. But that’s beside the point, which is that you need to get yourself and my most esteemed brother in Christ out of danger. And I can help you do that. Are you interested?”

She tried to park his offer to one side while she dealt with the competing bits of information that were clamoring for attention and tried to figure out where they stood. Finch had called Ogilvy. The news director was supposed to be arranging a plane, but she hadn’t heard back. Hell, she hadn’t yet had time to tell him about Finch’s death. She didn’t even know what Ogilvy had told Finch exactly—whether or not he’d be able to get them a plane and, if so, how soon. She didn’t even know where they were headed. The embassy in Cairo? The airport? They didn’t have a specific destination—not in Egypt, and not beyond either. The overriding concern had been to put as many miles as possible between them and the mobs outside the monastery. The rest hadn’t been mapped out. It was all happening too fast, and besides, that was Finch’s domain, and he wasn’t there to sort it out.

She needed to know more. “What do you have in mind?”

The reverend breathed a smile down the phone. “First things first. Father Jerome is with you, right?”

“Of course,” she answered, knowing that was all he was interested in.

“Can you make it out of the monastery safely?”

Gracie decided to play it out on a need-to-know basis. “Yes,” she answered flatly. “We have a way out.”

“Okay, good. What I need you to do is get to the airport in Alexandria.”

“Why Alexandria?” Gracie queried.

Dalton gave her another mystified glance. She flicked him a hold-on gesture.

“It’s as close to you as Cairo is, but it’s quieter,” Darby told her. “More manageable. I’ll have a plane on the ground in under two hours. How soon can you get there?”

Gracie thought about it. Alexandria made sense. Smaller airport, off the beaten path, far fewer commercial flights, far less chance of being spotted. “Shouldn’t take too long,” she replied. “We can be there before that.”

“Perfect,” Darby shot back. “I’ll give you my number. Call me when you’re on your way.”

“Where are you thinking of flying us to?” she asked, feeling a stab of discomfort at the idea of giving up control and putting herself and Father Jerome in the reverend’s hands.

“Where else, Miss Logan?” he boomed. “The one place we know we can keep the good Father safe.” He paused, then proudly announced, “Home. You’re coming home, Miss Logan. To God’s own country. And you can take it from me, the people out here are going to be overjoyed to see you.”

Chapter 56

Brookline, Massachusetts

Darkness was moving in impatiently, crowding the low winter sun against the horizon as Matt slowed down and pulled over by the side of the road.

The area was heavily wooded, the traffic sparse. Just ahead, two waist-high stone posts marked the entrance to the municipal service center, which nestled between the forest of Dane Park and the thickets of oak trees that shielded the Putterham Meadows Golf Course. From where he was parked, Matt could make out the low, warehouse-like office-and-garage structure of the Brookline Municipal Service Center, set way back from the road, the drive leading up to it lined with parked cars and lingering thin patches of dirty snow. There wasn’t much going on in terms of activity, which suited Matt just fine.

They hadn’t driven there directly from Hanscom Field. First priority had been dumping the battered, bloodstained Camry. Which wasn’t too much of a problem. They’d ducked into a mall, pulled up to a far corner of its parking lot, and exchanged the car for an equally uninspiring, decade-old, dark polo-green Pontiac Bonneville that didn’t look like it had that much longer to live anyway.

Matt had wanted to get a few things first—more bullets for the handgun he’d taken off the shooter at the airfield, most importantly. His options were limited. He couldn’t exactly walk into a gun store, not in his current wanted and bruised state. Jabba didn’t possess an FOID card, so he couldn’t buy them for him either. So they’d rushed down to Quincy, where they’d hooked up with a deeply concerned Sanjay, who’d met them away from the 7-Eleven, at his place. He came through for Matt with two boxes of Pow’RBall rounds, some fresh gauze dressing for his wound, and some cash. Matt had wanted to ask him for another handgun, or maybe his rifle—Sanjay kept a loaded Remington 870 Breecher behind his counter that would have been good to have in hand, given what Matt was planning. But he knew he couldn’t ask his friend for it, not in these circumstances.

They’d also used Sanjay’s computer to look up Rydell’s home address—he lived in a big house in Brookline, where his planning applications to add to the existing house had caused a bit of a stink. Matt also got a refresher course in what Rydell actually looked like. Once that was done, Matt and Jabba had driven across to Brookline and scouted the service center and the area around Rydell’s house before staking out the house itself.

They didn’t have to wait too long.

Rydell’s chauffeur-driven Lexus had pulled into the narrow lane that led to his house and to a couple of other mansions shortly after five o’clock. Matt had thought about making his move there and then, but decided against it. The Bonneville wasn’t as meek as the Camry, but it was still weak on muscle, and the bodyguard and the heavyweight riding shotgun looked to be slightly too much to take on, given Matt’s condition and who he had riding shotgun next to him.

They’d watched the house for a while, making sure Rydell wasn’t going anywhere, then Jabba had stepped out of the car to keep an eye on the house while Matt climbed behind the wheel.

“Remember,” Matt told him, “if this goes wrong, don’t go to the cops. Don’t trust anyone. Just do what you thought was the right play right at the beginning, remember?”

“You mean, make like D. B. Cooper?”

“Yep.”

Jabba looked at him and shrugged. “Just make sure it doesn’t go wrong then, all right? I’m already missing my stuff as it is.”

Matt smiled. “I guess I’ll see you in a little while.”

He’d then left him there and looped back to the service center, where he was presently parked.

He double-checked the handgun, then tucked it in under his coat. He emptied one of the boxes of rounds into his pocket, checked the road ahead and the mirror, then got out and walked up the drive to the service center.

He’d taken some more painkillers, which had numbed the wound in his side, and found that he was able to walk halfway decently, in a way that didn’t scream out “walking wounded.” He followed the curving drive, past the parked cars, past the entrance to the reception area and offices, and past the building’s “employees only” door. A couple of guys stepped out, their shift finished, heading home. He met their casual gaze with a small bob of acknowledgment, muttered a laconic “How’s it going?”, which only elicited a similarly muttered reply, and didn’t break step until he reached the garage area out back.

There were several trucks parked in there, side by side, the wide letters on their grilles announcing they were Macks. Matt looked around. A couple of mechanics were working on a truck that was parked thirty or so yards away. One of them glanced over. Matt gave him a relaxed half wave and a nod, as if his being there was the most natural thing in the world, then walked toward the back wall of the garage with as much of a purposeful step as he could muster, so as not to appear out of place in any way. From the corner of his eye, he saw that the mechanic went back to work. Matt checked the back wall. He noticed a white board with some shift lists marked up on it, then spotted the metal, wall-mounted box where the keys were normally kept. It wasn’t locked, which wasn’t a surprise—garbage trucks usually ranked pretty low on the “most stolen vehicles” lists, which probably had a lot to do with the fact that they were garbage trucks.

He quickly matched the number on the tag of one of the keys with the last three digits of the license plate on one of the trucks, and gingerly picked the keys off their hook. He climbed into the big truck’s cabin, gave the surroundings another quick once-over, then stroked the engine to life. The big cab rumbled under him. He pressed down on the heavy clutch, selected first using the thin, long gear shifter, and teased the accelerator. The hydraulic brakes hissed loudly and the truck nudged forward. The same mechanic looked over again, an uncertain expression creasing his face. Matt stopped the truck long enough to give him another friendly nod, then thought better of it and leaned out the window.

“You almost done there? Steve said he was having trouble getting this one into third,” he bluffed matter-of-factly, using a name he’d noticed on the shift list.

The guy looked at him a bit perplexed, but before he could say anything, Matt added, “Clutch might need some work. I’ll be back in ten,” and gave him a short wave before pulling away.

He checked in the side mirror as he turned out of the garage. The man looked his way for a second before shrugging and getting back to what he was doing.

A moment later, Matt was turning onto the main road and guiding the lumbering orange behemoth toward the exclusive enclave that surrounded Sargent Pond.

FEELING NUMB as he sat in the book-lined study of his mansion, Larry Rydell stared into his tumbler of Scotch and fumed in silence.

Those bastards, he seethed, flinching at the thought of any harm coming to his daughter. If she so much as gets a scratch, he flared, a surge of blood flooding his temples . . . but it was pointless. He knew he couldn’t do anything about it.

He sagged in his chair and glared at his glass. He’d never felt as helpless in his life.

With his fortune and his power, he could and did take on the most aggressive hedge fund or shareholder revolt without blinking. He’d had heated debates in Senate chambers that didn’t ruffle him in the least. He’d reached a point of his life where he felt he was untouchable. But he was powerless to deal with these . . . thugs. That’s what they were, pure and simple. Thugs. Out to pervert his vision, to take his idea and twist it around and use it for . . . what, exactly?

It didn’t make sense.

Much as he ground and turned over what Drucker had said, it didn’t make sense. They were alike—all of them—when it came to what they believed in. They viewed the world the same way. They saw the risks facing the world—and those facing America—in the same light. They shared the same frustrations with some deeply entrenched aspects of the world’s, and the country’s, mind-set.

And yet they were doing this? They’d created a fake messiah? An envoy from God? One whose presence would reinforce and vindicate the mass delusion most of the world was suffering from?

It doesn’t make sense, he thought again. And yet they were doing it.

He’d seen it.

Drucker had confirmed it.

They were actually doing it.

The backstabbing bastards.

His mind latched onto Rebecca’s face, on the last time he’d seen her, shortly before her ill-fated trip to Costa Careyes. He’d wanted to join her there for the holidays—they really hadn’t spent much time together, ever, not with everything he wanted to achieve in life, and it was something he now deeply regretted. But he hadn’t been able to join her. Not with all this going on. Not with the biggest undertaking of his life in full swing. And, bless her, she hadn’t voiced her disappointment. She never did. She’d gotten used to having a mythical dad, in the good and bad sense. Which was something he’d fix, he now thought—if he ever got the chance.

He had to find her.

He had to get her out, put her out of their reach, tuck her away somewhere safe. Nothing else mattered. Even saving the planet now paled into insignificance. He had to get her out of their hands. Then—and only then—he had to try and stop this. He had to find a way to kill it off, to shut it down before it got too big.

But how? He didn’t have anyone else to call. He didn’t exactly have an “A-Team” tab in his Rolodex. For years, he’d entrusted all his security requirements—personal and professional—to that rattlesnake Maddox. The security guards “watching over him” right now, at his house. His driver-slash-bodyguard. The vetting of his pilot, of the staff on his yacht. The corporate security at his companies. E-mail, phones. Everything was covered by one firm. Maddox’s. On Drucker’s recommendation. “Keep it all under one roof ” had been his advice. “Use someone you can trust. One of us,” he’d said.

Clearly, Maddox was one of “us.” Rydell himself, he’d now found out, wasn’t.

He felt like a fool.

They had him covered.

He’d been played. From the beginning.

He stared angrily at the heavy tumbler, then flung it at the wall, by the huge, stone fireplace. It exploded and rained shards of glass on the carpet. Just then, he heard a rising whine at the edge of his hearing, the sound of a large engine straining. Curious, he edged over to the window and looked out, down the drive that sloped and curved gently to the mansion’s entrance gate.

MATT SPOTTED JABBA as he approached the turnoff into Sargent Lane. Jabba gave him the all-clear, a small thumbs-up, before darting back into the trees. Matt nodded, turned into the lane, and floored the gas pedal.

The Mack’s muscular, three-hundred-bull-horsepower engine growled as it raced ahead, straining with each additional mile-per-hour of speed that it managed to add. Before long, the mansion’s entrance gate appeared up ahead. Matt stayed in gear, red-lining the engine, not wanting to shift into a higher gear. He wasn’t exactly flying, but that didn’t matter. Speed wasn’t what Matt was after here.

It was bulk.

He reached the gate and wrenched the oversized, horizontal steering wheel left with both arms, fighting the lateral pull from the truck’s tires. He didn’t lift his foot off the pedal. The truck screeched and leaned a few degrees sideways before its fifteen tons of solid steel plowed into the gate and obliterated it into toothpicks.

The truck charged up the driveway, its heavy footprint scattering gravel and leaving twin ruts in its wake. Matt could see the house through a scattering of stately trees, looming at the top of a manicured, landscaped rise. It was a Georgian revival mansion with separate wings jutting out of the main house and a multi-car garage tucked off to one side. It had a circular gravel drive outside the main entrance. There was no sign of the Lexus or the muscle. Yet.

He aimed the truck right at the entrance and kept his foot down. Just as he reached it, one of the heavies—he thought he recognized him as the guy who’d been riding shotgun in Rydell’s Lexus—rushed out of the house. His eyes went wide as he spotted the charging garbage truck, and he was already pulling his gun out from an under-shoulder holster

Matt didn’t bother going around the drive. He just beelined for the house’s entrance. The truck bounced over the central floral bed and slammed into the bodyguard before he had a chance to fire off a single round. The man splattered against the panoramic windshield, staining it with blood before the truck squashed him against the front door as it bulldozed its way into the house.

Brick, timber, and glass exploded inward as the Mack thundered ahead and came to a rest inside the house’s cavernous foyer. Matt kept the engine running as he pulled his gun out and climbed from the cabin just as another heavy appeared from a side room, dumbstruck and gun drawn. Matt had the advantage of surprise and blew him away with two rounds to his chest. Matt stepped away from the truck, sizing up what was left of the house’s entrance hall, and yelled, “Rydell.”

Like a killer-bot on a mission, he advanced through the house, using his handgun like a divining rod, looking for his quarry. He checked the main living room, then a media room next to that, and was on his way into what looked like the kitchen area when a large double-door in a hallway to his right opened up and Rydell’s head popped out.

The man looked stunned and confused. Matt recognized him immediately. He looked more gaunt than the photos Jabba had shown Matt on his phone’s browser, but it was definitely him.

Matt raised his gun, rushed to him, and grabbed him by his shoulder.

“Let’s go.”

He manhandled him back toward the truck, jabbing the gun into his back. Rydell’s mouth dropped when he saw the truck squatting in the entrance hall, surrounded by debris, a twelve-foot-square gash eaten out of the house’s front façade. As Matt nudged Rydell forward, he heard some approaching footsteps, turned, and saw another guard rushing at them. By now, the adrenaline coursing through him was in control, and Matt was riding its autopilot of heightened awareness. He swung the gun away from Rydell, aimed, and squeezed, dropping the man to the floor.

“Is that all you’ve got, huh?” he barked furiously at Rydell. “Is that the best you can do?”

Before the shell-shocked Rydell could answer, Matt grabbed him by the neck, pushed him to the back of the truck, and shoved him against it. Matt glared at him and pointed at its rear-loading bay.

“Get in,” he ordered.

Rydell stared at him, terror-stricken. “In there?”

“Get in,” Matt roared, raising the gun so it hovered a few inches from the bridge of Rydell’s nose.

Rydell studied him for a beat, then climbed in. Matt glared at him crouched there, cowering, and hit the compacting switch. The hydraulic paddle churned to life and inched its way down, swinging over Rydell and herding him into the belly of the truck.

Matt hit the switch again to block the paddle in position, sealing the hold, then made his way back through the debris to the truck’s cabin and climbed in. Another man appeared, another drone in a dark suit with a big gun aimed at Matt’s face. He fired, the bullets punching through the windshield and hammering the back of the cabin behind Matt’s head. Matt ducked, crunched the gear lever into reverse and floored the accelerator. The truck extricated itself from the battered house and emerged onto the gravel drive again. The man followed, still shooting, his bullets digging themselves into the truck’s thick carcass. He wasn’t doing much damage—the way the truck was built, it was like trying to stop a rhino with a blowpipe. Matt swung the orange beast around and slammed it into first. The truck’s smokestack let out an angry bellow of black smoke—its engine probably hadn’t ever had such a workout—before hurtling down the drive and out onto the narrow lane again.

He was halfway to the main road when the first of the armed response cars appeared, a yellow SUV with a blaring siren and a rack of spinning lights on its roof. The lane wasn’t wide enough for both, and its driver knew it. He didn’t stand a chance. He swerved just as the big Mack reached him, but there was nowhere for him to go. The truck plowed into the side of the SUV and flicked it out of its way and into the trees like a hockey puck. The second armed response car didn’t fare much better. Matt encountered it just before the intersection of the lane with the main road, clipping its back and sending it pirouetting on its smoking tires before coming to a violent stop in a sewer ditch.

He slowed down at the mouth of the lane, picked Jabba up, and motored on, his neurons teeming with life. He had Rydell, which was good, and Matt was still alive, which was even better.

Chapter 57

Washington, D.C.

Too bad, Keenan Drucker thought. He liked Rydell. The man was a great asset, in any circumstance. And none of this would’ve happened without him. The term visionary was bandied about a lot, but in Rydell’s case, he truly was such.

Drucker’s mind traveled back to how it had all started.

Davos, Switzerland.

The two-hundred-thousand-dollar-a-table black tie dinner. The Aberdeen Angus beef and pink champagne jelly. Yet another gathering of the planet’s rich and famous, the powerful elite who aspired to solve the world’s big crises. Insecure egotists and well-meaning philanthropists, getting together not just to assuage their guilt by handing over some money to help a thousand or two poorer souls, but hoping to trigger change that could save the lives of millions.

Rydell and Drucker had sat together, late into the night, going over the growing mountain of data on global warming. Fourteen thousand new cars a day hitting the road in China. The booming industries there and in India building new coal-fired electricity plants every week. The developed world embracing cheap, coal-burning energy more than ever. Congress giving the oil and gas companies back home one tax break after another. The energy companies’ disinformation campaigns helping people duck the issue and avoid making hard choices. Every new study confirming that if things looked bad, they were actually far worse.

They were both in agreement: The planet was hurtling toward the point of no return. We were living a defining moment, the defining moment for our continued existence on this planet, and we were ignoring it.

The question was, what to do about it.

Throughout, Drucker couldn’t escape the feeling that Rydell was testing him, sounding him out. Seeing how far he’d go.

Drucker smiled inwardly as he remembered how Rydell had finally let it out.

Drucker had said, “All this,” gesturing at the lavish setting around them, “it’s something, but it won’t change much. Governments, big business . . . no one wants to upset the apple cart. Voters and share options, they’re the only things that matter. Growth. People don’t really want change, especially not if it costs something. The price of oil has quadrupled so far this century, and nothing’s changed. No one cares. The ‘don’t worry, be happy, it’s all a load of crap’ message the fuel lobby keeps pumping out—deep down, that’s what everyone wants to hear. It’s heaven-sent.”

“Maybe heaven should send them a different message,” Rydell had replied, a knowing—and visionary—blaze in his eye.

The rest had followed on from that.

At first, it had seemed Rydell was talking theory. But the theoretical soon became the possible. The possible became the doable. And when that happened, everything changed.

As far as Drucker was concerned, a whole host of possible uses were on the table. What Rydell and his people had come up with could be used as a weapon that could tackle any number of threats in different, and potentially spectacularly effective, ways. Problem was, Rydell wouldn’t be open to that. As far as he was concerned, there was only one major threat facing us.

Drucker disagreed.

There were others. Threats that were far more immediate, far more dangerous. Threats that required more immediate attention. For although Drucker was a concerned citizen of the world, he was, more than anything, a patriot.

The Muslim world was growing bolder and wilder. It needed reining in. Drucker didn’t think they’d ever be able to convert that part of the world, to pull its people away from their religion. But there were other ways of using Rydell’s technology there. One idea he’d toyed with was using it to foment an all-out war between Sunnis and Shias. China was also a growing concern. Not militarily, but economically. Which was even worse. A spiritual message could have shifted things there. And there were other concerns that troubled Drucker even more. Concerns that were closer to home. Concerns about threats that had cost his only son his life. In any case, using the global warming message as the first hook was the way to go. It was nonthreatening. It was a cause that everyone could embrace, one that transcended race and religion. It would help bring people on board from day one. The secondary message—the one that counted—would sneak in through the back door.

The strategy had to be carefully conceived. He had a head start, given the makeup of the country. Seventy percent of Americans believed in angels, in heaven, in life after death—and in miracles. Even better, fully 92 percent of Americans believed in a personal God, someone who took interest in their individual dramas and whom they could ask for help. The foundation was solidly there. Drucker had also drawn from the work of highly respected psychologists and anthropologists who studied the mental architecture of religious belief. What he was planning had to sit within the parameters such research had laid out. For one, the deception had to be minimally counterintuitive. It needed to be strange enough to capture people’s attention and root itself firmly in their memory, but not too strange, so they wouldn’t dismiss it. Studies had shown that convincing religious agents had to have just the right level of outlandishness. Also, the manifestation needed to have an emotional resonance in order for belief to set in. Religions used elaborate rituals to stir up people’s emotions: soaring, dark cathedrals filled with candlelight, hymns and chants, bowing in unison. In that context, the environmental movement taking on a quasi-religious aspect was the perfect platform. It wasn’t just us coming face-to-face with our mortality—it was the entire planet.

The timing was also helpful. The planet was living through scary times on many fronts. The environment. Economic meltdown. Terrorism and rogue nukes. Avian flu. Nanotechnology. Hadron colliders. Everything seemed to be out of control or have the potential to wipe us out. Our very existence seemed threatened on a daily basis. Which could only feed into the prophecies of some kind of savior, a messiah showing up to sort everything out and bring about a millennial kingdom. And it wasn’t just a Christian phenomenon. Every major religion had its own version of how a great teacher would appear and rescue the world from catastrophe. For Drucker, however, only one of them mattered.

Ultimately, though, he kept coming back to one main stumbling block: the notion that at some point, something would go wrong. They wouldn’t be able to fool all of the people all of the time. Someone would let something slip. The technology would leak out. Something was bound to screw up. Which was why he’d decided to embrace that fallibility and use it as the starting point of his strategy.

It proved to be an inspirational masterstroke.

Everything was in place. He’d recruited the right partners to help him pull it off. He just needed to wait for the right event, something big, something with enough emotional resonance. He knew that, sooner or later, it would come. The planet was roiling, writhing in anger. More and more natural catastrophes were taking place all around the globe. And the one he got came as if gifted by the gods themselves. The best part of it all was the role the media would play. They’d buy into the deception without hesitation. It was visceral, it was huge, and—in its crucial launch phase, anyway—it was about saving the planet, an issue that was dear to their hearts.

Too bad, Drucker thought again, his hands steepled in front of his pursed lips. He would have preferred for Rydell to be on board. To be part of it all. He’d tried to convince him about the need to introduce a messenger—a prophet—to the mix. They’d talked about it at length. But Rydell wouldn’t listen. Drucker didn’t like doing what they had to do to Rebecca either. He’d known her for years, he’d watched her grow into an attractive, free-spirited young woman. But it had to be done. Rydell was too passionate. His commitment and his intensity came with an inflexibility that couldn’t be overcome. He’d never be able to accept the trade-off. And, besides, he couldn’t be fully included anyway. He was part of the end game. The sacrificial pawn that was crucial to its successful closure.

Drucker’s phone trilled. He glanced at its screen. The Bullet’s name flashed up. The enabler. The man whose foot soldiers were making it all happen. The charred, deformed marine who was Jackson’s commanding officer. The man who’d left half his face in the same Iraqi slaughterhouse that had ripped Drucker’s son to shreds.

Drucker picked up the phone.

The news wasn’t good.

Chapter 58

Brookline, Massachusetts

The hydraulic compactor whined as it swiveled upward. Almost instantly, a sour stench wafted out of the truck’s belly, even though the truck wasn’t actually carrying any garbage. Matt let the compactor rise two thirds of the way up, then killed its motor. The heavy lid just held there, cantilevered over the yawning, stinking cavity of the truck’s hold.

Matt leaned in. “Get out here,” he ordered.

A short moment later, Rydell stumbled out, shielding his eyes from the day’s glare.

The truck was parked in a deserted, narrow alley that ran parallel to and behind a busier, low-rise commercial street, at the back of a closed-down Blockbuster video store. It was six blocks from the municipal service center where Matt had stolen the truck. The green Bonneville was parked nearby. They stood by the mouth of a narrow passageway, out of view, shielded from any potential passing cars by the bulk of the truck.

Rydell stank. His clothes had rips in them, and he was battered and bruised from bouncing around the empty metal box. He was wheezing, his breath coming in brief, ragged bursts. A nasty, bleeding gash had been cut into his left cheek. He was wobbly, totally unbalanced, and had to lean against the truck, breathing in heavily, shutting his eyes, gathering his senses, and probably doing his best not to throw up.

Matt allowed him a few seconds to recover, than raised the big silver handgun the shooter at the airport had lost and held it inches from Rydell’s face.

“What did you do to my brother?”

Rydell raised his eyes at him. They were still half-dead, drowning in a morass of pain and confusion. He glanced at Matt, then across to Jabba, who was hovering nervously a few steps back, but Rydell’s head was still spinning and he still wasn’t totally there. His eyelids slid shut and his head lolled forward again as his hands came up to rub his temples.

“What did you do to my brother?” Matt growled.

Rydell raised a hand in a stiff back-off-and-give-me-a-second gesture. After a moment, he looked up again. This time, his expression was alive enough to telegraph his not having a clue about who Matt and Jabba were or what Matt was asking him.

“Your brother . . . ?” he muttered.

“Danny Sherwood. What happened to him?”

The name resuscitated Rydell. His eyes flickered back to life, like a succession of floodlights getting switched on in a stadium. He winced, visibly struggling with how to answer.

“As far as I know, he’s okay,” Rydell said with a hollow voice. “But it’s been a few weeks since I saw him.”

Matt flinched at his words. “You’re saying he’s alive?”

Rydell looked up at him and nodded. “Yes.”

Matt glanced over at Jabba. Jabba put his almost-debilitating unease on hold and gave him a supportive, relieved nod.

“I’m sorry,” Rydell continued. “We didn’t have a choice.”

“Of course you did,” Matt shot back. “It’s called free will.” He was still processing the news. “So this sign . . . this whole thing. You’re doing it?”

Rydell nodded. “I was.”

“You ‘were’? ”

“The others . . . my partners . . . they’re doing it their way now.” Rydell sighed, clearly weighing his words. “I’ve been . . . sidelined.”

“What really happened? In Namibia? Was Danny ever really there?”

Rydell nodded again, slowly. “Yes. That’s where we did the final test. But there was no helicopter crash. It was all staged.”

“So Reece, the others . . . they’re also still alive?”

“No.” Rydell hesitated. “Look, I didn’t want any of that. It’s not how I do things. But there were others there . . . they overreacted.”

“Who?” Matt asked.

“The security guys.”

“Maddox?” Matt half-guessed.

Rydell looked at him quizzically, clearly surprised by Matt’s familiarity with the name.

“He got rid of them,” Matt speculated. “When you didn’t need them anymore.”

“It wasn’t like that,” Rydell objected. “None of them knew what we were really planning. Not Reece, not your brother. And then when I finally told Reece, he didn’t want to hear of it. I thought I could have convinced him. I just needed a bit of time . . . He would’ve come on board. And the others would have joined in too. But I never got the chance. Maddox just snapped and . . . it was insane. He just started firing. I couldn’t stop him.”

“And Danny?”

“He ran,” Rydell said.

“But he didn’t get away.”

Rydell shook his head witheringly.

“And you kept him locked up, all this time.”

Rydell nodded. “He designed the processing interface. It works perfectly, but it’s very sensitive to the smallest variations in air density or temperature or . . .” He caught himself, as if he realized he was rambling on unnecessarily. “It was safer having him around.”

“So all this time . . . you kept him alive, to use him now.”

Rydell nodded again.

“Why would he keep doing what you asked? He had to know you’d kill him once it was all over.” He studied Rydell, inwardly hoping he wouldn’t hear the answer he was dreading. “He’s not doing this of his own free will, is he?”

“No,” Rydell replied. “We—they—threatened him.”

“With what?”

“Your parents,” Rydell said, then added, “and you.” He held Matt’s gaze, then dropped his eyes to the ground. “They told him they’d hurt you. Badly. Then they’d get you thrown back into prison, where they’d make sure your life was a living hell.” He went silent for a beat, then added, “Danny didn’t want that.”

Matt felt an upwelling of anger erupt inside him. “My parents are dead.”

Rydell nodded with remorse. “Danny doesn’t know that.”

Matt turned and stepped away, his face clouding over. He looked away into the distance, hobbled by Rydell’s words. His kid brother. Going through hell for two years, living in a cell, cut off from the world, made to wield the fruit of his brilliance for something he didn’t believe in . . . going through it all to protect him. To keep Matt safe.

After everything Danny had already done for him.

Matt thought of his parents, how they’d been devastated by the news of Danny’s helicopter crash, and a crushing sense of grief overcame him. He glared back at Rydell and felt like ramming his fist down his throat and ripping his heart out.

Jabba watched Matt struggle with the revelation with a pained heart, but didn’t interfere. Instead, he took a hesitant step closer to Rydell.

He couldn’t help himself. “How are you doing it?” he asked him, his tone reverent, as if he still couldn’t believe he was here, face-to-face with one of his gods, albeit a fallen, battered, and bloodied one.

Rydell tilted his head up to take stock of him, then just shook his head and turned away.

“Answer him,” Matt barked.

Rydell looked at Matt, then back at Jabba. After a brief moment, he just said, “Smart dust.”

“Smart dust? But that’s not . . . I mean, I thought . . .” Jabba stammered, shaking his head with disbelief, a deluge of questions battering his mind as it stumbled over Rydell’s answer. “How small?”

Rydell paused, reluctant to engage Jabba, then shrugged. “A third of a cubic millimeter.”

Jabba’s mouth dropped an inch. According to everything he’d read or heard about, that just wasn’t possible. Not even close. And yet Rydell was telling him it was.

“Smart dust”—minuscule electronic devices designed to record and transmit information about their surroundings while literally floating on air—was still a scientific dream. The concept was first imagined, and the term coined, by electrical engineers and computer scientists working at the University of California’s Berkeley campus in the late nineties. The idea was simple: Tiny motes of silicon, packed with sophisticated onboard sensors, computer processors, and wireless communicators, small enough to be virtually invisible and light enough to remain suspended in midair for hours at a time, gathering and transmitting data back in real time—and undetected. The military was immediately interested. The idea of scattering speck-sized sensors over a battlefield to detect and monitor troop movements was hugely appealing. So was sprinkling them in subways to detect chemical or biological threats, or on a crowd of protestors to be able to track their movements remotely. DARPA had kicked in the initial funding, as, although the concept also had a host of potential civilian and medical uses, the more nefarious surveillance possibilities were even more alluring. But funding doesn’t always lead to success.

The concept was sound. Breakthroughs in nanotechnology were inching the dream closer to reality. Theoretically, manufacturing the motes was possible. In practice, we weren’t there yet. Not overtly, anyway. Making the sensors small enough wasn’t the problem. The processors that analyzed the data, the transmitters that communicated it back to base, and the power supply that ran the whole minuscule thing—typically, some kind of minute lithium battery—were. By the time they were added on, they turned the dust-sized particles into hardly stealthy clusters the size of a golf ball.

Clearly, Rydell’s team had managed to overcome those hurdles and achieve new levels of miniaturization and power management.

In secret.

Jabba was struggling to order the questions that were coming at him from all corners. “You were working on it for DARPA, weren’t you?”

“Reece was. The applications were endless, but no one could figure out how to actually manufacture them. Until he did. He told me about it before letting them know he could do it. We stayed up late one night, imagining all kinds of things we could use it for.” He paused, reliving that night. “One of them stood out.”

“So that whole biosensor story?” Jabba asked.

Rydell shook his head. “Just a smoke screen.”

“But . . . how? Where are they coming from? You dropping them from drones or . . . ?” His voice trailed off, his mind still tripping over the very notion.

“Canisters,” Rydell told him. “We shoot them up, like fireworks.”

“But there’s no noise, no explosion,” Jabba remarked. “Is there?”

“We’re using compressed air launchers. Like they’re now using at Disneyland. No noise. No explosion.”

The questions were coming to Jabba fast and furious. “And the motes . . . How are they lighting up? And how’d you get the power source down to a manageable size? What are you using, solar cells? Or did you go nuclear?” Sensing, sorting, and transmitting data used up a lot of juice. One option scientists were exploring was to sprinkle the motes with a radioactive isotope to give each mote its own long-term energy supply.

Rydell shook his head. “No. They don’t actually need an onboard power source.”

“So what are they running on?”

“That was Reece’s brilliant brainchild. They feed off each other. We light them up with an electromagnetic signal from the ground. They convert the transmission into power and spread it across the cloud where it’s needed.”

The answer triggered a new barrage of questions in Jabba’s mind. “But how do you get them to light up?”

Rydell shrugged. “It’s a chemical reaction. They’re Janus particles. Hybrids. They light up and switch off as needed to take on the shape we want, like skydivers in an aerial display. They burn up after about fifteen minutes, but it’s long enough.”

Jabba was visibly struggling to absorb the information and complete the puzzle. His voice rose with incredulity. “But they’re constantly moving around. They’ve got to be. I mean, even the slightest breeze pushes them around, right? And yet the sign wasn’t moving.” He extrapolated his own answer, then his eyes widened. “They’re self-propelled?” He didn’t seem to believe his own words.

“No.” Rydell shook his head, then glanced over at Matt, his expression darkening with remorse, his shoulders sagging, before looking away again. “That’s where Danny came in. His distributed processing program . . . more like massively distributed intelligence. He designed it. He came up with this brilliant optical system based on corner-cube reflectors. It lets them communicate with each other very elaborately while using up virtually no energy. It literally brought the motes to life.” He exhaled uncomfortably, then continued, “We needed the shape—the sign—to stay in one place. But you’re right, the motes, they’re so small, so light, they’re floating around, moving in the air like dandelion seeds. So we needed them to be able to talk to each other. Several hundred times a second. When one mote that’s lit up moves away, it turns itself off and the one that drifts closest to where it was lights up instead and takes its place and assumes its position in the display. So the sign appears stationary even though the dust particles are always changing position. Factor in that we wanted the sign to constantly morph in shape to appear like it’s alive, and . . . it’s a hell of a lot of processing power in a machine the size of a speck of dust.” He lifted his gaze back at Matt, guiltily. “We couldn’t have done it without Danny.”

“Oh, well in that case, I guess you did the right thing by locking him up all this time,” Matt retorted.

“You think this has been easy?” Rydell shot back. “You think this is something I just got into on a whim? I’ve put everything on the line for this. And the way things are going, I’ll probably end up dead because of it.”

“It’s a distinct possibility,” Matt confirmed dryly.

“I had no choice. Something had to be done. This thing’s getting out of hand, and no one’s paying attention.”

“Global warming?” Jabba asked. “That’s what this is all about, right?”

“What else?” Rydell flared up, pushing himself to his feet. “You don’t get it, do you? People out there—they’ve got no idea. They don’t realize that every time they get into their cars, they’re slowly killing the planet. Killing their own grandchildren.” He was gesticulating wildly, all fired up. “Make no mistake, we’re getting close to the point of no return. And when that happens, it’ll be too late to do anything about it. The weather will just shift dramatically and that’ll be the end of us. And it’s happening faster than you think. We owe it to our kids and to their kids to do something about it. Sometime in the next hundred years, people will be living on what will undoubtedly be a very unpleasant planet to live on, and they’ll look back and wonder how the hell no one ever did anything about it. Despite all the warnings we had. Well, I’m doing something about it. Anyone who’s in a position to do something about it has to. It would be criminal not to.”

“So you decided to go out and kill off a bunch of decent guys to get everyone’s attention,” Matt said.

“I told you, that wasn’t part of the plan,” Rydell snapped.

“Still, you’re going along with it.”

Matt’s point must have hit home, as Rydell didn’t have a quick answer for him. “What did you want me to do? Give up on the whole thing and turn Maddox and his people in? Waste everything we worked on for all those years, throw away a plan that could change everything?”

Matt didn’t waver. “But did you ever even consider it?”

Rydell thought about it, and shook his head.

Matt gave him a small, pointed nod with his head. Rydell’s face sank and he looked at Matt blankly before turning away.

“What about Father Jerome?” Jabba asked. “He’s not part of this too, is he?”

“I don’t know. He wasn’t part of the original plan,” Rydell said. “They came up with that one all on their own. You’ll have to ask them about it.”

“He can’t be in on it,” Jabba protested. “Not him.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Matt interjected firmly. “I just want to get Danny back.” He turned to Rydell. “Where is he?”

“I don’t know,” Rydell said. “I told you, I’m out of the loop.”

Matt raised the big handgun and held it aimed squarely at Rydell’s forehead. “Try again.”

“I’m telling you I don’t know, not anymore,” Rydell exclaimed. “But the next time the sign shows up, you’ll probably find him there.”

“What?” Matt rasped, thrown by Rydell’s answer.

“That’s why we needed him alive,” Rydell pointed out. “To make the micro-adjustments in real time. On-site.”

“‘On-site’?” Jabba asked. “He has to be there? He can’t do it remotely?”

“He could, but data transmission isn’t foolproof over such long distances, and even the smallest time lag could mess things up. It’s safer having him on location, especially if the sign’s gonna do more than just pop up for a few seconds.”

“So he was out there?” Matt asked. “In Antarctica? And in Egypt?”

“He was in Antarctica,” Rydell confirmed. “Egypt I don’t know about. Again, it wasn’t part of the plan. But from what I saw on TV, I’d guess he was there. He has to be within half a mile or so of the sign. That’s the transmitter’s range.”

An approaching siren wailed nearby. Matt tensed. Through a narrow passage that led to the main drag on the other side of the low, commercial buildings that backed up to the alley, he spotted the flash of a police car blowing past.

It was time to vamoose.

He turned to Jabba. “We need to move.” He flicked the gun at Rydell, herding him on. “Let’s go.”

“Where?” Rydell asked.

“I don’t know yet, but you’re coming with us.”

“I can’t,” Rydell protested. “They—”

“You’re coming with us.” Matt cut him off. “They’ve got Danny. I have you. Sounds like a good trade.”

“They won’t trade him for me. They need him. Much more than they need me. If anything, they’d probably be happy to see me dead.”

“Maybe, but if they haven’t killed you yet, it means they also need you for something,” Matt observed.

Which, judging by Rydell’s expression, struck a nerve. But he seemed to quickly shelve it as he told Matt, “I can’t go with you. They have my daughter.”

Matt scoffed. “Sure.” Rydell was, clearly, a cunning liar. Which suddenly put everything else he’d told Matt in question.

“I’m telling you they’ve got my daughter—”

“Bullshit. Let’s go,” Matt prodded him, though something about the intensity in his voice, in his eyes—was Matt missing something? His fury at Rydell didn’t let it in and plowed ahead. “Move.”

“Listen to me. They grabbed her. In Mexico. They’re hanging onto her as security. To make sure I don’t rock the boat. They can’t even know I talked to you. They’ll kill her.”

Matt wavered, suddenly unsure—and Jabba stepped closer.

“Maybe it’s true, dude.” He turned to Rydell. “She’s here.”

Rydell’s head jerked forward with attention. “Here?”

“We saw her,” Jabba informed him. “A couple of hours ago. Maddox and his goon squad flew her into a small airport near Bedford. We thought they were her bodyguards.”