The Sign (18 page)

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

Momentarily blocking the Chrysler’s view.

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

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

He seemed clear.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What?” Matt snapped angrily.

“Don’t kill me, dude. Seriously.”

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

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

“What?”

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

Alarm flooded through Matt. “My face?”

Csaba nodded, still riven with fear.

“Show me,” Matt ordered.

Cairo, Egypt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What do you want to know?”

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

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

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

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

Cambridge, Massachusetts

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

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

He was pretty recognizable.

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

He noticed Csaba scrutinizing him nervously.