The Sign (49 page)

Matt gave it a quick thought. “Just tell him to get somewhere safe. If he’s still out, tell him to stay away from the preacher’s place. We’ll call him back and tell him where to meet us.”

She started to dial, then paused and studied him curiously, her eyes still foggy, and asked, “Who the hell are you?”

“Just make the call,” he told her. “We’ll get to that later.”

They were all scattered around the motel room, a motley crew of haggard escapees: Matt, Gracie, Dalton, and Rydell. A week earlier, apart from Gracie and Dalton, none of them had met. They hadn’t even come close. They had roamed completely separate spheres, lived disparate lives, had different ambitions and concerns. And then everything had changed, their lives had been upended, and here they were, crammed into the small room, wondering how to stay alive.

Dalton had joined them at the motel, arriving not long after they had. They’d spent the next couple of hours filling each other in on how they’d ended up in that room, each contributing his or her part of the story. The conversation had been urgent and intense as the different pieces had fallen into place, the string of troubling news only brightening up when Rydell had gotten through to the doctor treating Jabba back in Boston. The surgery had been successful. Jabba had lost a lot of blood, but he was stable, and his prognosis was cautiously optimistic.

“What do we do now?” Dalton asked. He still looked spooked, having only just found out that Finch had been murdered, and that the likely suspect was a monk they’d been palling around with.

“I keep thinking of Father Jerome,” Gracie remarked, shaking her head. “He knew something was wrong. I could see it in his face.” She turned to Rydell. “You don’t know what they’ve done to him?”

“I don’t know the grim details,” Rydell admitted. “I didn’t want to hear about it when they brought it up. They mentioned stuff. About using drugs. Electroshock therapy. Implanting memories and adjusting character. To make him more accepting of his new status, I guess.”

“Nice,” Dalton said with an uneasy wince.

“He said he heard voices. Up on the mountain. He thought God was talking to him,” Gracie mentioned.

Rydell nodded thoughtfully. “They would have used an
LRAD
on him. A long range acoustical device,” he speculated. He slid a glance at Matt. “Same thing they used on me at the hotel. It can also send sound accurately over long distances. Like a sniper rifle, only for noise—or voices,” he explained. “They were talking to him through it.”

A pensive silence smothered the room.

After a brief moment, Gracie glanced over to Rydell. “You really thought you could get away with this?” she asked him. Her voice was flat. She was still in shock at Ogilvy’s betrayal. At the thought of how she’d been played. At the idea of Finch having been killed because of this.

“I had to do something,” he said with a tired shrug. “People aren’t listening. They’re too passive. Too lazy. They don’t listen to reason until it’s too late. They don’t want to listen to politicians. They certainly don’t want some tree-hugger in Birkenstocks telling them how to live. They won’t take the time to read or to listen to the experts. Look at the financial meltdown. Experts have been warning about it for years. Buffett called derivatives ‘financial weapons of mass destruction.’ No one listened. Then it all fell apart overnight.” He looked around the room, as if looking for a hint of understanding, if not empathy. “I couldn’t just sit back. This isn’t about your 401(k) losing half its value. It isn’t about losing your home. It’s about the planet losing its ability to sustain life.”

“It’s like Finch said. It’s all in the branding,” Dalton remarked, throwing a glance at Gracie. “‘Global warming’ sounds way too nice and cozy. They should have called it global boiling.”

“It’s geocide,” Rydell said before leaning back into the darkness.

A couple of nods sent the tired room back into silence. Gracie finally broke through the weary haze again and asked Rydell, “If you weren’t going to be the fall guy . . . do you agree with what Drucker said? With what they’re trying to do?”

Rydell thought about it for a moment and gave a pained shake of his head. “I agree with what he thinks is wrong with our country. History’s shown us, time and again, that mixing religion and politics only brings destruction. And I have no doubt that it’s a real danger, maybe more dangerous than anything Homeland Security is worried about. But I don’t agree with his solution. And I certainly don’t agree with his methods.” He looked around the room. “No one was supposed to get hurt. Drucker’s just out of control. And he’s not done. Who knows what message he’ll choose to put into Father Jerome’s mouth before he’s through. He could make him say or do anything he likes. And the whole world’s listening.”

“We’ve got to stop him,” Gracie put in. “We’ve got to go live with what we know.”

“No,” Matt said flatly from the corner of the room.

Gracie turned to him. “What are you talking about? We’ve got to go public.”

Matt shook his head. “We can’t break the story. Not yet. If we do that now, they’ll kill Danny. I need to get him out first, make sure he’s safe. After that, you can slap it on the front page of
The New York Times
or wherever you want. It’s all yours.”

“You heard what they’re planning, Matt,” Gracie argued. “The show’s tomorrow. It’s going to be huge—and it’ll be watched across the planet. And you’ve seen what’s going on out there. People are buying into it, fighting over it. Every hour we wait, this thing’s sinking in deeper. If we wait until after the show to blow the lid off this thing, it might be too late to undo the damage it’ll have caused.”

“Once that happens, we’ll be kind of doing their work for them if we expose it, won’t we?” Dalton asked. “I mean, that’s their plan, right?”

“We don’t have a choice,” Gracie pointed out. “It’s not ideal, but we have to do it and we have to do it now.”

“They can’t expose it,” Matt countered. “Not yet. Not as long as they don’t have you,” he said as he chucked a nod at Rydell. “They don’t have their fall guy, right? So who are they going to blame it on? They’ve got to blame it on someone—someone without a political axe to grind. Plus as long as they don’t have you locked up,” he aimed his words at Rydell again, “they’d be running the risk of you coming out with your side of the story. They’d be screwed. They’ve got some figuring out to do before they tell the world it’s a setup.”

“Which they will, sooner or later, there’s no doubt about that,” Gracie interjected. “No way they’d let this run indefinitely. They’d be handing the Christian Right the keys to the kingdom. And we can’t let that happen either.”

Matt paused at the thought. There didn’t seem to be a way out, and although all he could think about was getting his brother back safely, he suddenly realized there were bigger considerations he couldn’t shy away from.

He chewed over it for a moment, then said, “We’ve got a small window before they figure out their fallback position, right?” He glanced over to Rydell. “They might even be wondering if you’ll keep quiet. As a trade-off for getting your green message out there.”

“They’d be wrong,” Rydell confirmed without hesitation.

“Either way, they won’t do anything yet. Not until they come up with another endgame that doesn’t leave them holding the bag. Which gives me a bit of time to try and get Danny back. Even if it means letting them put Father Jerome up on that stage. You can’t ask me to give up on him. Not when I’m so close.”

He looked around the room. The others glanced at each other, weighing his words.

He looked at Gracie. She held his gaze, then nodded warmly.

“The country’s already well on its way to buying it,” she finally said. “Tomorrow night will make it harder to come back from, sure, but . . . we can hold off till then. Besides, it seems to me that none of us would still be around if it wasn’t for Matt. We owe him that much.”

She glanced around, judging the others’ reactions. Rydell and Dalton each nodded their agreement. Her eyes ended up settling on Matt.

He smiled and gave her a small nod of appreciation.

“Okay, so how do we do it?” Gracie asked him.

“How do we do what?”

“Find your brother.” She caught his confused look and flashed him a slight grin. “What, did you think we were going to bail on you now?”

Matt glanced around the room again. Saw beaming support from everyone around him. Nodded to himself, accepting it. “We’ve got to assume they’re going to put a sign up over Father Jerome tomorrow, right?”

Gracie nodded. “No doubt about that.”

“Then that’s how we’ll do it.”

THEY
STAYED
UP most of the night, studying maps, plans, and photographs of the stadium pulled from the Internet, examining its layout and the spread of the surrounding area, trying to anticipate where Danny and the launch team were likely to be positioned.

By dawn, they felt they’d reached a consensus on how Drucker’s guys might try to stage it. They’d pretty much followed Rydell’s lead. Having the guy who’d been in charge of the sign’s technology gave them a nice head start, but there were still a lot of unknowns. Then as the first glints of sunlight broke through the darkness, the TV started showing cars and people already setting out on their pilgrimage, and they knew they had to get going too.

They loaded up the little gear they had into the back of the Lincoln. After they were done, Matt saw Gracie standing alone, down the walkway from their room, at the edge of the porch, staring out at the brightening sky. He ambled over and joined her.

“You okay?”

She studied him, then nodded. “Yeah.” She studied him for another beat, then looked away again. “It’s so weird. To think of how divided the country’s become. To think that people need to resort to . . .” She shook her head. “When did we become so hateful? So intolerant?”

“Probably around the same time some power-crazed douche bags decided it would help them win elections,” he quipped.

She smiled and let out a slight chuckle. “Now why doesn’t Brian Williams ever put it in those terms?”

Her expression darkened as an eclipse crossed over her face.

“What are you thinking about?” Matt asked.

“Father Jerome. He’s . . . you couldn’t ask for a more decent human being. To think of the hell they must have put him through . . .”

Matt nodded thoughtfully. “It’s not going to be easy for him. When this thing breaks.”

Gracie stared at him, and her face flooded with concern. “His whole belief system’s going to get wiped out.”

“I think it’s more than his belief system you need to worry about,” Matt said. “You’re going to need to get him into some kind of protective custody. They’ll rip him to shreds.”

Gracie shrank back, winded by the thought. “We’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t, aren’t we?”

Matt shrugged. “We don’t really have a choice. We have to do this.”

“You’re right.” Gracie relented, although it was clear from her haunted look that it wouldn’t be that simple.

Matt let a moment pass, then said, “I want to thank you. For backing me up in there. And for not bailing on me.”

She waved it away. “After everything you’ve been through? I owe you my life.”

“Still, I know it wasn’t easy,” he insisted. “Putting the scoop of a lifetime on hold. I mean, there’s no doubt you’d be the biggest face on television right now if you walked into any newsroom and just told them what you know.”

“Just how shallow do you think I am?” She smirked.

“Not shallow, just . . . realistically ambitious.”

Gracie smiled and looked wistfully into the distance. “My Woodward and Bernstein moment,” she chortled, self-mockingly. She laughed inwardly. “It’s like, all your life, you wait for a big moment like this, you hope for it and you work hard to make it happen, you imagine it and picture yourself basking in its glory . . . then when it actually happens . . .”

“When it comes out, it’ll change everything for you, you know,” he told her. “And not necessarily for the better.”

She glanced over at him. “I know.” Her eyes had lost their disarming sparkle. For something every reporter dreamed about, it was starting to feel more like a nightmare.

He nodded, not really wanting to explore the darker side of what lay ahead. He pushed out a slight, comforting smile. “Come on. Let’s see how the rest of the day turns out first. And take it from there.”

T
he roads were already jammed by early morning. Miles of cars, streaming in from every direction, choking the Loop and the South Freeway and all the approach roads leading to the stadium at Reliant Park. It was unlike anything the city had seen before. Unlike anything any city had seen before: an antlike procession of packed cars squatting over every square inch of available asphalt for miles around and converging on the biggest sports, entertainment, and convention complex in the country.

It was a clear, perfect day, and by noon, the temperature was in the high seventies and all the parking lots were filled. More than half a dozen of them, scattered around the stadium, the Astrodome, the arena, and the exhibition center. Over twenty-six thousand parking spots, every single one of them taken. The four-wheeled invasion didn’t stop there. It spilled over into the vast, empty lot that used to house the Six Flags Astroworld before it was torn down in 2006. Seventy-five acres of flat, bare earth that nestled against the south side of the Loop, soil that was once the proud home of Greezed Lightnin’ and the Ultra Twister, now shuddering under the rumble of an unstoppable flood of cars, trucks, and vans.

They came by car, by foot, by any means possible. MetroRail was running extra trains to try and cope with the crush, their cabins struggling to retain the heaving mass of flesh pressed against their walls. Helicopters were ferrying in news crews and reporters, all of whom were busy setting up their satellite dishes and hustling to get the best vantage points to cover the event. Police choppers circled overhead, keeping an eye on the teeming chaos below. The gates of the stadium itself were closed shortly after twelve. Seventy-three thousand people had already filed in by then, after spending hours in long lines, waiting to be frisked for weapons and cleared, the last of them pushing and shoving and fighting their way through in a desperate attempt to make it inside. A few angry, hysterical worshippers wouldn’t take no for an answer and were creating scattered spots of trouble. Isolated brawls also broke out in the parking lots as cars jostled for position. Surprisingly, though, most of those who had made the journey were calm and well behaved. The police were doing a commendable job in marshaling the pilgrims around and keeping things civil. Darby’s people had also brought in a small army of volunteers to manage the flows on the outside and to help those inside get settled. They were distributing free bottles of water and pamphlets promoting Darby’s evangelical empire. The crowds in the parking lots, the ones who didn’t make it into the stadium, weren’t brooding over missing out. They’d come prepared and were already settling into a festive mood. The lots were brimming with tailgate parties. Turkey, eggnog, and carols were on offer everywhere. Whole families, young and old, people of all shapes and sizes and colors, were joined in one seamless celebration as a rolling wave of Christmas music wafted across the fields of multicolored sheet metal.