The Sign (29 page)

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.”

Deir Al-Suryan Monastery, Wadi Natrun, Egypt

G
raciehad 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.”

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.”