The Sign (22 page)

“Saw? Where?” he asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gracie nodded.

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

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

“Another one?”

“Yes,” Gracie confirmed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gracie froze. “What?”

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

Boston, Massachusetts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which wasn’t part of the plan.

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

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

He’d misjudged them again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Covert encouragement, to be precise.

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

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

As expected.

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

“Keenan, what the hell’s going on?”

Time for damage control. Something else he excelled at.

“Not on the phone,” he replied curtly.

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

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

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

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

Maddox picked up his call within two rings.

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

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

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

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

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