The Sign (37 page)

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.

Washington, D.C.

*T*oo 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.

Brookline, Massachusetts

T
he 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.