The Sign

by Raymond Khoury

  He slammed hard on the brake pedal, the Mustang sliding to a halt at the edge of the asphalt, the engine purring in anticipation, waiting to be unleashed again. He glanced in his rearview mirror. He could see the shadowy silhouette of the cop coming at him, weapon raised.

  Matt was out of options. He ground down on his teeth and slammed the car into reverse. The car lurched, thundering through the alley—backward—its V-8 roaring angrily. Matt hugged the passenger headrest as he steered the car, riding virtually blind. In the best of light conditions, the fastback didn’t have the greatest visibility through its rear windshield, and here, in the dark and narrow alleyway, with only the Mustang’s feeble reversing light to guide him, all he could do was keep the car in a straight line and hope for the best—hope he could avoid the walls, and hope the cop didn’t have a death wish. He stayed as low as he could, tensing up while awaiting the inevitable gunshots, and sure enough, a shot reverberated in the narrow space, followed by several more, one of them drilling through the rear windshield and slamming into the passenger headrest, another pinging off the A-pillar somewhere to his right.

  Within a heartbeat, he was almost at the cop’s level. Matt twitched the steering wheel to angle the car right up against the wall closest to him, across from where the cop was firing. The Mustang shuddered and squealed furiously as it scraped the side of the house, and with the cop flattening himself against the opposite wall, Matt managed to thread it through without hitting him. More shots followed him as he bounced out of the alley and onto the main road, where he hit the hand brake, spun the car so it was aimed right, and powered away.

  He glanced in his mirror and saw the cop emerge into the street and rush to his car, but Matt knew he wouldn’t be following him. Still, he wasn’t in the clear. An APB concerning his less-than-low-key car would be heating up the airwaves any second now. He had to ditch the car—quickly—and lie low until dawn.

  What he’d do the next day, though, was far less certain. He still had the rest of the night to get through first.

  Chapter 24

  Washington, D.C .

  Keenan Drucker felt electric. He was well rested, having managed to tear himself away from surfing the news channels and the Internet soon after midnight and get a decent night’s sleep. In the morning, over a hearty breakfast of waffles and fruit, he’d gone through the newspapers with quiet satisfaction, something he hadn’t felt for years. A feeling he hoped he’d be able to build on as the day wore on.

  Presently, sitting in his tenth-floor office on Connecticut Avenue, he pivoted in his plush leather chair, away from his wide desk—nihilistic in its lack of clutter, with nothing on it except for a laptop, a phone, and a framed photograph of his deceased son—and looked out across the city. He loved being in the nation’s capital, working there, playing a role in shaping the lives of the citizens of the most powerful country on the planet—and, by extension, the lives of the rest of the world’s inhabitants. It was all he’d ever done. He’d begun working his way up the system soon after leaving Johns Hopkins with a master’s in political science. He’d spent the next twenty-odd years as a congressional staff member, serving as senior policy advisor and legislative director to a couple of senators. He’d helped them grow in prominence and power while ensuring his own rise in stature, working quietly, behind the scenes, shunning the more visible positions that were constantly on offer—although he’d flirted with taking on that of undersecretary of defense for policy when it had been offered. He preferred the continuity afforded by pulling the strings from behind the curtain, and only left the Hill after an offer that was too good to turn down came in, giving him the opportunity to create and run a well-funded, far-reaching think tank of his own, the Center for American Freedom.

  He was made for this life. He was a ruthless and imaginative political strategist, he had a mind like a steel trap, and his appetite for detail, combined with a prodigious memory, made him a master of procedure. And as if that weren’t enough, his effectiveness was further enhanced by an easygoing, gregarious charm—one that masked the iron resolve underneath and helped when one was a dedicated polemicist ready to take on the red-button issues that were splitting the country.

  The last few years, though, had instilled a new sense of urgency within him. Groups of civilian advisors had firmly gripped the reins of policy—both domestic and foreign—and steered the country to their vision. Their unapologetic, unbridled sense of mission was, to a political animal like Drucker, a thing of beauty; their methods and tactics, breathtaking.

  Most impressive, he thought, was their use of “framing”—the cunning technique of dumbing down complex, controversial issues and policies by using powerful, evocative, emotive catchphrases and images in order to prejudice and undermine any potential challenge to those policies. Framing had been elevated to a fine art in the new century, with deceptive expressions like “tax relief,” “war on terror,” and “appeaser” now firmly embedded in the public psyche, pushing the right emotional buttons and creating a misguided belief that anyone who argued against such measures had to be, by definition, a villain trying to stop the innocent sufferers’ champion from giving them their medication, a coward shying away from a full-blown war against an aggressor nation, or—even worse—one too spineless to stand up to Hitler.

  Framing worked. No one knew that as well as Keenan Drucker. And he was now ready to do some framing of his own.

  He checked his watch. A late-morning meeting had been hastily scheduled with the available senior fellows of the Center to discuss the unexplained apparition over the ice shelf. He’d already spoken to several of them by phone, and they were—understandably—as excited as they were unsettled.

  After that, he’d monitor the news channels to check on the project’s status. Which seemed well on track, apart from that small complication in Boston. Drucker wasn’t worried. He could trust the Bullet to take care of it.

  His BlackBerry pinged. The ring tag told him it was the Bullet.

  As he reached for his phone, Drucker smiled. Speak—in this case, think—of the devil rarely had a more appropriate or literal embodiment.

  WITH HIS HABITUAL CURT EFFICIENCY, Maddox updated Drucker on Vince Bellinger’s fate, Matt Sherwood’s subsequent escape, and his foray into the now-dead scientist’s apartment.

  Drucker had absorbed the information with admirable detachment. Maddox didn’t like much about Drucker. The man was a politician, after all. A Washington insider. But he liked that about him. Drucker didn’t question or second-guess when it came to matters in which he was no expert. He didn’t have any ego issues, nor did he assume the annoying air of superiority Maddox had often seen—and enjoyed deflating—in deskbound executives and, even more so, in politicians. Drucker knew to leave the dirty work to those who were comfortable trudging through the muck, something Maddox had never shied away from, and still didn’t, even though his “security and risk management” firm had grown healthily since he first founded it three years ago, not long after he’d been wounded in Iraq.

  Maddox was a hands-on kind of guy. He had a tough, single-minded work ethic, an unwavering discipline forged out of a twenty-year career with the Marines and their Force Recon outfit, where he’d initially earned the sobriquet “The Bullet” because of his shaved, slightly pointed head. It was a name that took on an even more disturbing connotation after his squad was cut to bits in a savage firefight in the apocalyptic town of Fallujah.

  The tragedy that had first brought him and Drucker together and united them.

  His unit had been doing good work in the mountains of Afghanistan. Hitting the Taliban and their Al Qaeda buddies hard. Weeding them out of the mountains and caves across the border from Pakistan. Closing in on Bin Laden. Then, frustratingly and inexplicably, they’d been pulled out and reassigned. To Iraq. And nine months into that war, Maddox lost fourteen men and an ear that horrific afternoon. Those who’d survived that attack had left arms, legs, or fingers behind. The word wounded rarely conv
eyed the horror of their injuries—or the permanent, crippling effect on their lives. It was a day Maddox remembered every time he caught a glimpse of his hideous self reflected in a windowpane or a colleague’s sunglasses. It was branded on his face, a star-shaped burn that spread out from the small, mangled flap of ear skin that the surgeons had been able to salvage.

  He hated looking in the mirror. He relived that day every time he caught a glimpse of himself. Not just that day, but the aftermath. The inquests. The way his superiors had let him down. The way he’d been mistreated and spat out by the system. And if that wasn’t bad enough, he then found out he’d been lied to. The whole country had. The war was a sham. A catastrophic sham. And then, to add insult to injury—literally—he watched as the same lying bastards who’d sent him to war, from the lowliest congressman to a war hero who’d come close to becoming president, were voting against funding increases for those who, like him, had come home with debilitating physical and mental injuries. He watched as soldiers were hauled in, tried for every minor trespass of the rules of engagement, and sacrified for political expediency by men who’d never been within a hundred miles of a firefight. And with each new revelation about the lies and manipulations behind the war—the ones that had cost his buddies their lives, and him his face—he got angrier. More bitter. More vindictive. And out of the anger and the bitterness came a realization that he had to take matters into his own hands if he was going to change anything.

  His wounded status made it easier for him to set up shop. Before long, he had dozens of highly trained, properly equipped men on his payroll, working for him in the hellholes of Afghanistan, Iraq, or anywhere else people were paying him to send them. Doing jobs that no one else wanted to touch. Jobs no one wanted to be seen doing. Jobs where they weren’t subject to arbitrary rules drawn up by politicians sipping twenty-year-old Cognac. And somehow, with each new job, he found more solace, more satisfaction. It became a revenge fix he couldn’t live without. And despite the hundreds of thousands of dollars in government contracts and fees his little operation was pulling in, despite having a small army of trusted, battle-hardened men ready and able to do whatever he asked them to do, he was still out there, on the front line, with them. And when this job came up, he immediately realized it was one he couldn’t delegate. To be doing it was satisfying on a whole different level.

  If this thing could really achieve what they thought it could, then he sure as hell was going to make sure nothing went wrong.

  Still, Drucker didn’t sound thrilled by his news.

  “I’m not comfortable with Sherwood out there, running around,” Drucker told him. “You need to put him away before it gets out of hand.”

  “Shouldn’t take long,” Maddox assured him. “He’s a murder suspect. He doesn’t have too many options.”

  “Let me know when it’s taken care of,” Drucker concluded, before ending the call.

  Maddox set his phone down on his desk and stewed on the night’s events. Matt Sherwood had proven far more resilient than his brother. They were clearly cut from a different cloth, something Maddox had already known, given Matt’s record. All of which necessitated a more concerted approach.

  His men were monitoring police communications, but that wasn’t enough. Matt Sherwood was taking impulsive, unexpected initiatives like breaking into Bellinger’s apartment. Unexpected initiatives that could prove to be a major nuisance.

  Maddox cleared his mind and put himself in Matt’s shoes, replaying every step the ex-con had taken, trying to get a better feel for the way Matt thought. He extrapolated ahead, looking for the straws Matt would be grasping at, straws he needed to cut down before Matt got to them. He thought back to the reports his men had called in and decided to plow that field.

  He turned to his screen and brought up the phone logs of all the peripherals linked to Bellinger and to Matt. His eye settled on the last entry—the phone call from a coworker of Bellinger’s by the name of Csaba Komlosy. He clicked on the small icon by the entry and listened to the phone call, a message left on Bellinger’s home phone. He listened to it a second time, then went back and listened to the first call between the two scientists. The one that had precipitated the previous evening’s confrontations.

  The Bullet checked his watch and picked up his phone.

  Chapter 25

  Boston, Massachusetts

  Larry Rydell stared blankly at his BlackBerry’s screen for a moment before setting it down on his desk. He’d just gotten off the phone with Rebecca. Again. Two calls from his daughter in less than twenty-four hours. Far more than he was used to. They were close, for sure, despite his divorce from her mother almost a decade earlier. But Rebecca was nineteen. She was wild and fabulous and free, in her second year at Brown, and although surprisingly grounded for someone with the world at her feet, regular phone calls to Daddy had—as expected—been increasingly crowded out of the whirlwind of activity that her life had become.

  He loved chatting with her. Loved seeing her so excited, so enthralled, so curious about something, even with the undercurrent of fear in her bubbly voice. Loved hearing from her twice a day.

  But he hated lying to her.

  And he had. Twice now, in less than a day. And, no doubt, he’d have to go on lying to her—if all went well, for the rest of his life.

  He felt a small tearing inside at the realization, then the tear widened as the bigger picture of what was going on hit him again.

  It’s really happening.

  It was out there now. There was no turning back.

  The thought terrified and elated him in equal measure.

  It had all seemed so surreal when he’d first considered the possibility, just four years earlier. And yet it had all come about so fast. The breakup of the ice shelf had been expected. They’d been monitoring it through satellite imagery, but it had come sooner than they projected. And they’d been ready. Ready to capitalize on it.

  Ready to change the world.

  He thought back to that fateful evening with Reece, three years earlier. A great dinner. A bottle of Brunello di Montalcino. A couple of Cohiba Esplendidos. A long, inspired late-night chat about the possibilities of the manufacturing breakthrough that Reece had achieved. The many and diverse applications it could be used for. The leaps of imagination that great minds sometimes conjured up and actually turned into reality. And then, the mere mention of a word.

  Miraculous.

  One word. A catalyst that sent Rydell’s mind tripping into uncharted territory. Dark, mysterious, wonderful, impossible territory. And here he was, less than four years later, and the impossible had become a reality.

  Reece. The brilliant scientist’s face drifted into his consciousness. Other faces materialized alongside it—young, talented, dedicated, all of them—and with them, a familiar cold, hard feeling deep inside him. He felt his very soul shrivel at the memory of that last day in Namibia. After the last test. After they’d all shared the elation of watching their hard work bear fruit in such spectacular, bone-chilling fashion. And then it all went wrong. He could still see Maddox, standing there beside him, pulling the trigger. He could hear himself shout, hear the bullet thumping into Reece’s back, see his friend’s body jerk before toppling into Danny Sherwood’s arms.

  The sounds and images of that day had been gnawing away at him ever since.

  He hated himself for not having been able to stop it. And despite what the others told him, none of the platitudes, none of the clichés about the greater good or about sacrificing the lives of the few for the lives of the many—none of it worked.

  He hadn’t read them properly. He hadn’t realized to what lengths they were prepared to go. And it was too late to do anything about it. They needed each other. If everything he’d worked for was to succeed, he just had to swallow it all and keep going.

  Which he did, even though it wasn’t easy. He could still feel it, deep inside, eating away at him, piece by piece. He knew it would eventually get him. One way o
r another, he’d die because of it. He had to. But maybe, before that happened, maybe, if all went well—maybe their deaths would amount to something in the end. Although he knew their ghosts wouldn’t let go of him, not even then.

  Chapter 26

  Boston, Massachusetts

  Sheltering behind a tall hedge in the brisk, early morning chill, Matt waited and watched, trying to make sure no unpleasant surprises were in store for him at the hotel before breaking cover and making his way in. Tense and alert while avoiding eye contact, he slipped past a few bleary-eyed businessmen who brought a semblance of life to the drab, cookie-cutter lobby, took the elevator to the fifth floor, and reached the refuge of his room.

  He was as tired as he was pissed off.

  He’d had to dump the Mustang a few blocks from Bellinger’s place, and that only fueled his anger. The car represented a personal milestone for him, a notable and particularly satisfying step on his road back from the edge. Danny had not just guided him onto that road, but paid the toll and given him fuel money to boot. And now Matt had been forced to abandon the car on some dark side street, all because of the same bastards who had taken Danny away.

  He was seriously pissed off.

  After parking the Mustang, he’d scuttled in the shadows for a couple of blocks, then crossed to the north side of Broadway, where he’d hot-wired a defenseless, decade-old Ford Taurus. He’d then cut west, heading out of town before looping back on the turnpike, on the lookout for any blue-and-whites. He’d parked in an inconspicuous corner on the backlot of a small shopping center around the corner from the hotel and walked the rest of the way.