The Sign

by Raymond Khoury

  He stood by the window of his room, watching the city as it sprang to life. It was another overcast, wintery day, the sun struggling to break through the pasty-gray cloud cover. He lay down on his bed, his muscles and nerves ravaged by tension and fatigue. He hadn’t slept, and his body was crying out for a break. He hadn’t put it through such a ringer for years. But he knew that would have to wait. He opted instead for a long, hot shower to reinvigorate him and help settle his mind. It bought him a renewed, if rapidly dwindling, lease on life. Twenty minutes later, he was back at a workstation in the austere and windowless business center.

  He used the white pages’ website to do a reverse listings search on the phone number he got off Bellinger’s answering machine. The number yielded the curious name of Csaba Komlosy, with a home address—no surprises there—in the same geek-central catchment area straddling Harvard and MIT that Bellinger—and Danny—lived in. He thought about calling him. According to his message, he and Bellinger had been discussing what was happening in Antarctica just before Bellinger had met Matt, and Matt sensed that this Csaba—he wasn’t sure how to pronounce it—could fill in some of the blanks. He decided against making that call. The goon squad seemed to be avid wiretappers. A face-to-face would be better anyway. He jotted down the address, an apartment by the sound of it, clicked on the map link for a more accurate read of its location, then, deciding he couldn’t duck it anymore, pulled up the website of the Boston Globe and hit the link for the local, breaking news section.

  It was the first item.

  His face contorted with sadness—and rage.

  The report wasn’t long. A stabbing. Close to a bar in South Boston, shortly after midnight. They’d identified the body as Bellinger’s. There was a brief mention of a brawl in the nearby bar, but nothing more. A murder investigation was under way.

  The report didn’t mention Matt—yet. But he knew there’d be more to come on that front.

  They’d make sure of it.

  He exhaled heavily, rubbed some alertness into his face, and re-read the article. Its dry, clinical words pushed a caustic bile of anger up to his throat, burning him with their finality. His fists hovered over the keyboard, clenched bloodless-white tight, as he summoned up every drop of restraint inside him to keep from bashing it against the desk and ripping the whole workstation to shreds.

  It was that simple for these bastards. They could just pluck someone off the street, cut him open, dump him in the snow, and move on to their next assignment without batting an eyelid. A man’s life—an innocent, decent man’s life, snuffed out in its prime, and all because of what . . . a phone call? An idea?

  Matt was boiling.

  He took in a deep breath and let it out slowly, willing his fury to subside. A moment later, he raised his concentration back to the screen, keyed in the homepage of his tracker, and logged in.

  The Chrysler was no longer outside his place.

  A detailed map displayed the car’s itinerary in thirty-second increments. Backtracking to the first movement that his GPS tracker had registered, Matt saw that the goons had finally given up their stake-out—or, he thought, merely passed the baton to the next team—almost an hour ago. Which, he noted, was after he’d made it out of Bellinger’s place. He wondered if that meant that they were already aware of his little excursion to Cambridge. If they were, it meant they had insights into police activity, either through radio scanners or courtesy of someone inside the department. He made a mental note of it and zoomed in on the Chrysler’s current location.

  It was parked on a street in Brighton, not far from St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center, and hadn’t moved for twenty-three minutes. The tracker’s website featured a built-in link-up with Google Maps. Matt clicked on the “street view” option, moved the little orange avatar to the Chrysler’s current location, and clicked again. A wide-angle shot popped up, as clear and detailed as if he were standing right in the middle of the street—not in real time, of course, but whenever the Google van with the panoramic camera had done its survey, which couldn’t have been that long ago, given that this wasn’t exactly Cold War-era technology. It afforded him a detailed view of what the place looked like. He full-screened it, scrolled up the street and back for a virtual drive-by, then rotated the camera to get a good look at the opposite sidewalk.

  The narrow, residential street had a string of small, two-story clapboard houses. The fix, accurate to within three yards of the tracker’s location if you believed the pitch of the well-oiled salesman he’d bought it from, fell on a tired-looking, seal-gray house with a small balcony over the front porch and a gabled window in its roof.

  He needed to take a closer look. A live one.

  It didn’t take long to get there at this early hour, given that he was heading against the rush hour traffic. The light snow from the previous night was mostly gone, and the old Taurus was, well, functioning. He turned into Beacon and headed west, his mind busy imagining the different ways things could play out once he found them. He tried to rein in his primal instincts. Yes, they were vile, blood-sucking scum, and he knew he’d find it hard to resist beating the crap out of them if he ever got the chance. But there was no need to turn this into a suicide mission. If they were there, he needed to find out more about them—who they were, what they were doing, who had hired them.

  What they knew about Danny.

  What happened to him.

  Once he got all that—well, there was no reason to let them live, really.

  The notion just came to him, and it didn’t make him flinch. Which surprised him. He’d never killed anyone before. Sure, he’d had his share of fights. Before prison. In prison. He’d taken some serious beatings over the years, but he’d cracked a few skulls too. He hadn’t started out that way. He was wild and reckless and played by his own rules, but he wasn’t a thug and he never set out to hurt anyone. And although prison had a way of hardening a man, physically as well as mentally, it didn’t change what he was about. He was more prone to letting his temper erupt, less shy about using his fists, but he never took pleasure from it. It was always in self-defense, and never went beyond doing no more than was necessary to neutralize any threat facing him.

  This felt different. And right now, he wasn’t too worried about that. Que sera, sera. He had to find them first.

  He turned right on Washington and headed north, his pulse nudging upward with each passing block as he closed in on his target. He hit a red light at the big intersection with Commonwealth, and as he sat there waiting, sitting behind an equally tattered pickup truck in dire need of new piston rings, his gaze was drawn beyond it to the aggressive, toothy grin of a familiar grille—that of a Chrysler 300C. It was waiting at the opposite light, facing him, left indicator on.

  He squinted, focusing on it, trying to ascertain whether or not it was “his” 300C, craning his neck to get a better look past the smoking pickup blocking his view. The opposite light must have changed to green, as the Chrysler cut across the intersection just beyond the truck and motored up Commonwealth, trailing a couple of small imports behind it like a shark with its remoras. As it streaked past, Matt leaned across and got a look at the guy in the front passenger seat, and although his hard features fit the bill, Matt wasn’t sure. He’d only seen the goons fleetingly, outside the bar and in the van, and in the shadows outside his place. Sealing it for him, though, was the 300C’s license plate. He managed to catch a glimpse of the last two numbers on it, and they matched the number he’d seen on the car that had been parked outside his garage.

  It was them.

  His pulse rocketed as his eyes followed the rapidly receding car and he wondered what to do, needing to make a split-second decision. He spun the wheel and hit the gas, jinking the car around the pickup truck and ramping its right wheels over the curb, and turned into the avenue, following in the Chrysler’s wake.

  It was more of an instinctive reaction than a rational move, but as he trailed a few car lengths behind the silky sedan, his decis
ion grew on him. He didn’t know what the location was that the tracker had kicked up, whether it was their base or just a random stop they wouldn’t be returning to. Besides, there were only two of them in the car, and he didn’t mind those odds. Not with the way he was feeling right now.

  They drove east on Commonwealth, then turned left on Harvard and took the bridge into Cambridge. As they headed up River, a cold, uncomfortable feeling twitched inside him. They were leading back to the Inman Square area, the one he’d only just escaped from a mere hour or two earlier. His unease flared into full-blown dread when he saw the name of the street the Chrysler turned into and spotted the number of the building where it pulled up.

  There was no mistaking it, as it was an address he’d only just looked up.

  They were parked right outside Csaba’s place.

  Chapter 27

  Cambridge,Massachusetts

  Matt coaxed the Taurus past the parked Chrysler, casually turning away as he drove by the brooding sedan, to deny its occupants a glimpse of his face. He kept going and took the first side street he found, and pulled over.

  This wasn’t good.

  He sat in the car, stewing in his thoughts, unsure about what this meant. Was this Csaba character working with them? Had he helped them set up Bellinger, alerted them to what he was up to? Matt didn’t know what to think anymore, although somehow, it didn’t ring true. The message Csaba had left for Bellinger sounded genuine enough. They were discussing the apparition, and Bellinger—it seemed—had abruptly cut the conversation short.

  If Csaba wasn’t working with them, then they had to be here for the same reasons they’d gone after Bellinger. Which didn’t give Csaba much of a rosy future. Not to mention that the very fact that the goons were after him meant that he knew something, something that could help explain what they were so hell-bent on protecting—and that could shed light on what had happened to Danny.

  What they’d done to Danny, Matt reminded himself.

  He had to do something.

  He slipped out of the Taurus and crept over to the corner. He edged out carefully and looked down the street. The Chrysler hadn’t moved, the two silhouettes still inside.

  They were watching. Waiting.

  Stalking Csaba. Matt was now sure of it.

  He had to get to him first.

  He sized up the block, looking for a way past the goon squad. He couldn’t see one. Csaba lived in a modern, six- or seven-story apartment block. The guys in the Chrysler had a controlling view of the street and a clear line of sight to the building’s landscaped approach and its entrance lobby, which deep-sixed any notion of going in that way. There was, however, a ramp going down along its side, the kind of ramp that normally led to an underground garage. Problem was, it was also within their sight line.

  He pulled back from the corner and sprinted farther up the side street, and found a narrow alley that ran between two houses. He cut into it and advanced cautiously, moving in parallel to the main street, closing in on Csaba’s apartment block—only to hit a dead end and a five-foot-tall wooden fence after the second house in. He could see Csaba’s building looming ahead, past another couple of houses and fences. He clambered over the fence and kept going. A few minutes later, he reached a side passage that ran alongside the ramp and led back to the street.

  Matt peered out. The Chrysler was still there, and he still couldn’t make it onto the ramp without them seeing him. From his vantage point, he noticed another problem. The ramp had a keypad-controlled entry. Not only that, it was the kind where the buttons didn’t have any numbers printed on them. Instead, the buttons would light up with randomly assigned, non-sequential numbers appearing on them when someone attempted to key a code in, in order to prevent anyone watching from mimicking the sequence and gaining entry.

  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.

  Chapter 28

  Cairo, Egypt

  Gracie 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.