The Sign

by Raymond Khoury

  The world was, simply, entranced.

  Matt tilted his head back again and exhaled wearily. “Tell me what you and Vince talked about.”

  “Tell you what we talked about?” Jabba rambled. “We talked about everything, dude. Where do you want me to start?”

  “Last night,” Matt specified testily. “What did you guys talk about last night?”

  “Last night. Last night, right,” he muttered, pinching the bridge of his nose between two fingers. “We were watching this thing,” he said, pointing at the screen. “The first one, anyway. Trying to work out how it could be done.”

  Matt sat up. “ ‘ Done’? You think it’s a fake?”

  Jabba gave him a look. “Dude. Come on. Something like this happens, your first instinct has to be it’s a fake. Unless you buy into that whole ‘the truth is out there’ mind-set.”

  “Which, I’m guessing, you don’t?”

  “No, hey, I’m open to it. I’m sure there’s some weird stuff they’re not telling us about. But there’s so much bullshit out there, whether it’s from the government or from people who are out to make a fast buck, you’ve got to look at things with a cynic’s eye. And we’re scientists, man. Our instinct is to ask questions first.”

  Matt nodded, trying to stay focused. “So you and Vince bounced around some ideas. You come up with anything?”

  “No, see, that’s the thing.” Jabba leaned forward, and his voice livened up. “Nothing stuck. Nothing at all. We couldn’t even begin to figure it out. If this thing’s a fake, then whoever’s doing it is using some technology that’s straight out of Area 51.”

  Matt frowned. He was missing something. “What is it you guys do, anyway? I mean, if it was a fake, what made you think you and Vince could figure it out?”

  “We’re electrical engineers. We work on . . . I mean, me and Vince, we . . .” He stumbled with visible discomfort. “We design computer circuits, microchips, that kind of thing.”

  Matt glanced at the screen dubiously. “That doesn’t sound particularly relevant to this thing.”

  “I’m not talking about Radio Shack walkie-talkies, dude. Or even iPhones. I’m talking sci-fi-level stuff. Like right now, we’re building these micro-RFID chips—you remember that scene in Minority Report? When Tom Cruise is walking through a mall and all these holographic panels know it’s him and start talking to him and showing him these tailor-made ads?”

  “Not really.” Matt shrugged. “I’ve missed out on a few movies over the years.”

  “Too bad, man. Awesome movie. Right up there with Blade Runner, the only other Philip K. Dick story Hollywood didn’t manage to screw up.” A look from Matt put him back on track. “Anyway, we can do that now. Not the screen. I’m talking about the recognition part. Tiny chips embedded in the actual fabric of your shirt, that kind of thing.”

  “It still doesn’t tell me why you think you’d be able to figure this out.”

  “What we do . . . it’s not just a job,” Jabba explained. “It’s a calling. You live it, breathe it, dream it. It takes over your life. It is your life. And part of it is keeping track of everything that’s going on, not just the stuff that’s directly related to your work. You’ve got to want to know about what everyone else is doing, whether it’s at NASA, in Silicon Valley, or in some lab in Singapore. Because everything’s interconnected. One of their breakthroughs could be combined with what you’re doing in ways neither one of you intended and could open up a whole new door in your brain. It can give you the one thing you need to make that quantum leap and send your work in a completely new direction.”

  “Okay.” Matt didn’t sound too convinced. “So you and Vince kept an eye on what other brainiacs were dreaming up.”

  “Pretty much.”

  Matt still felt confused. “Well if the two of you couldn’t figure it out, then why was your conversation a threat to anyone? Do you think you might have hit on something without knowing it?”

  Jabba did a quick mental rummage of his chat with Bellinger. “I doubt it. Everything we talked about is public knowledge—at least, among the other ‘brainiacs’ out there. If any of it was relevant in any way—and I don’t think it was—someone else would have made the connection too by now.”

  “So why come after Vince? And why did it make him think that my brother was somehow involved?”

  The word threw Jabba. “Your brother?”

  “Vince thought my brother might have been killed because of it.”

  “Why would he think that?”

  “I don’t know. They were close.”

  Jabba’s face signaled he was now missing something. “Who was your brother?”

  “Danny. Danny Sherwood.”

  A name that clearly struck a chord. A resonant one. “Danny Sherwood was your brother?”

  Matt nodded. “You knew him?”

  “I knew of him, sure. Distributed processing, right? Progamming’s holy grail. Your brother’s cred was rock solid on that front.” He nodded wistfully. “Vince loved your brother, man. Said he was the most brilliant programmer he’d ever seen.” He let the words settle as his mind tried to fill in the blanks and see the connections. “What did Vince tell you, exactly?”

  “Not much. He said someone called Reece hired Danny to work with him on something. You heard of him?”

  “Dominic Reece. They all went down in that chopper, didn’t they? I’m sorry, man.” Jabba’s expression tightened. “Vince told you he thought they’d been murdered? All of them?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.” He didn’t want to lose his thread. “He said they were working on some kind of bio-sensor project. Does that mean anything to you?”

  “No. But Vince and Danny were close. Closer than close. He might have told him something in strict confidence. Something he wasn’t supposed to spread around. Like maybe the patents hadn’t been applied for yet. In our business, one slip of the tongue could lose you a billion-dollar advantage.”

  Matt rubbed the exhaustion from his eyes. The sign over Greenland was on the screen again, taunting him. It was hypnotic, and Matt was finding it hard to take his eyes off it. “You and Vince. That night. He cut the conversation short, didn’t he?”

  Jabba nodded.

  “What was the last thing he said? Do you remember?”

  Jabba concentrated. “He didn’t say it. I did. I was just saying that it looked like the air itself was being lit up. Like the air molecules themselves were on fire. Only that’s not possible.”

  Matt studied the grainy image on the screen. “What if it is?”

  “Setting the air on fire? I don’t think so.”

  “What about a laser, a projector . . . something that needs the skill set of one hell of a programmer.”

  Jabba just shook his head. “Nothing I know of can do that. And if anyone else knew how it could be done, they’d be on every channel.”

  Matt shut his eyes and leaned back, frustrated. He was having a hard time concentrating and getting his head around it all. It didn’t help that he was running on empty. He was exhausted, physically as well as mentally. He hadn’t slept for well over twenty-four hours, hours that he hadn’t exactly coasted through. And it didn’t look like whatever it was that had him in its grip was about to let go anytime soon.

  “There’s a reason they killed Vince. And it has to do with what happened to Danny and the others. Whether this damn sign is real or not, someone’s doing something.”

  Jabba’s face sank. “And you want to find out who’s doing it.”

  “Yep.”

  Jabba looked at him like a kid studying a three-eyed panda at the zoo. “Are you nuts? ’Cause that’s the wrong play, dude. The right play is we lose ourselves until they’re done with whatever it is they’re doing. We disappear, maybe drive up to Canada or something, we sit tight and we wait until it’s all blown over.”

  Matt eyed him like he was now the alien species. “You think?”

  Jabba frowned, a bit discomfited by Matt’s sardonic
expression. “You asked me what made me and Vince think we could figure this out. What makes you think you can? I mean, what are you, an ex-cop or something? Ex-FBI? Some kind of ex-SEAL special ops hard-ass maybe?”

  Matt shook his head. “You’ve got me pegged on the wrong side of that fence.”

  “Oh, well that’s just wonderful,” Jabba groaned. He shook his head again, then his tone turned serious. “Dude, seriously. These are bad people. We’re talking about guys who kill people by the chopper-load.”

  Matt’s mind was elsewhere.

  Jabba could see it. “You’re not listening to me, are you?”

  Matt shook his head.

  Jabba’s face sank again in exasperation. “We’re screwed, aren’t we?”

  Matt ignored the question. “Can you find out who else was on that chopper? What their specialties were? And also . . . who was funding them?”

  Jabba sighed. “Like I have a choice?” He reached into his backpack and pulled out his laptop.

  Matt pointed at it. “Think you can get an Internet connection in this dump?”

  “I seriously doubt they have wi-fi here, but . . .” Jabba held up his iPhone and flashed Matt a cheesy, knowing look. Then he remembered and his face clouded. “Forgot. Can’t use this. Dammit.” He rubbed his face with his meaty fingers, thought about it, then looked up. “Depends on what you need. I can fire it up for forty seconds max. Any longer than that and they’ll get a fix on where we are.”

  Matt grimaced. “You get that from watching 24, or is this for real?”

  Jabba held up the phone. “Dude. First thing I did when I bought this thing? I took it apart to jailbreak it. Just to piss off AT&T.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning I’ve set it free. I can hook up its Edge data connection to my laptop.”

  “Okay. But just to play it safe, maybe the guy at reception’ll let you use his computer.”

  Jabba frowned. “Why? What else do you need?”

  “A little update,” Matt said. “On where our friends with the Chrysler are hanging out.”

  Chapter 32

  Mountains of Wadi Natrun,Egypt

  Father Jerome looked very different than Gracie had imagined. That didn’t surprise her. In her experience, people often looked different in the flesh than they did in pictures or on film. Occasionally, the change was for the better, though mostly—and more commonly these days, given the amount of Photoshopping that went on—it led to disappointment. In this case, Gracie had expected him to look different, given what he’d been through since the last coverage she’d seen of him. And he was: thinner, more gaunt-faced, seemingly more fragile than she remembered. But even here, in the light of three gas lanterns and a few scattered candles in the oppressively dark cave, his eyes, a piercing green-gray that blazed out of the tanned corona of his face, were more captivating than on film and made up for any frailty his recent ordeal had exacerbated.

  “So you don’t remember anything at all of your journey?” Gracie asked him. “You were out there for weeks, weren’t you?”

  “Three months,” the old man answered, his eyes never leaving hers. Gracie, Finch, and Dalton had been pleasantly surprised by the fact that he hadn’t refused to see them. Far from it, he’d been warm and welcoming. He was unperturbed, his voice unwavering and soothing, his words clear and slow. He hadn’t lost the trace of Spanish that colored his words. Gracie had immediately warmed to him, no doubt predisposed by her great admiration for the man and the selflessness and humility he inspired.

  “And it’s just . . . blank,” she added.

  “It’s not something I’ve ever experienced. I have vague recollections, fleeting images in my mind . . . Walking, alone. I can see the sandals on my feet, walking in the sand, the endless landscape surrounding me. The blue sky, the burning sun, the hot air . . . I can smell it, I can feel the heat on my face, the hot air in my lungs. But that’s all they are. Snippets. Momentary flashes of consciousness in an otherwise blank slate.” He shook his head in despair, slightly, to himself, as if chiding himself for that failing.

  Although Dalton and Finch were sitting there with her in the cave, along with the abbot and Brother Ameen, Gracie had decided not to ask for this first interview to be filmed. It hadn’t been an easy decision. Although she felt it was best to spend a bit of time with Father Jerome first, to get to know him, to get him comfortable with them, she also wasn’t sure how he’d react to seeing the footage of the signs in the sky. And she felt uneasy and disingenuous at the thought of springing the news on him with a camera rolling.

  She glanced up at the roof of the cavern. The white swirls, unsettling representations of the sign she’d witnessed over the ice shelf, were all over it.

  “Tell me about these,” she asked him, waving her hand across the ceiling.

  The priest looked upward thoughtfully, studying the painted symbols above their heads, and thought about her question for a brief moment, before letting his eyes settle on her again. “Shortly after I arrived here,” he told her, “a clarity that I’d never experienced came over me. I began to understand things more clearly. It was as if my mind were suddenly liberated of its clutter and freed to see life for what it really was. And these thoughts, these ideas . . . they started coming to me with such clarity, and such power. I just need to close my eyes and they start flowing through me. It’s beyond my control. I’ve been writing them down, there.” He pointed at his desk. A few notebooks sat on its worn surface, some others on the ledge by the window. “Like a faithful scribe,” he added with a faint smile.

  Gracie couldn’t take her eyes off him as he spoke. Most unsettling was how steady his voice was, how utterly normal he sounded, how casual his tone was. It was as if he were describing nothing more than the most mundane of experiences. “And this symbol?” she reminded him, pointing upward again. “You painted these, didn’t you?”

  He nodded slowly, his face slightly pinched in confusion. “It’s something I can’t quite explain. When the thoughts come to me, when I hear the words in my head just as I hear you, I also see that,” he explained, pointing at the sign. “It’s just there, burning brightly in my consciousness. And after a while, I found myself drawing it, over and over. I’m not sure what it means, but . . . it’s there, in my head. I can see it, clearly. And it’s . . . it’s more than this,” he added almost ruefully as he gestured at the roof of the cavern. “It’s . . . clearer. Richer. More resplendent. More . . . alive.” He glanced away, hesitating to go further. “It’s hard to explain. Forgive me if this sounds too vague, but . . . it’s really beyond my understanding. Or control.”

  “Could it be something you saw in your dreams?”

  Father Jerome shook his head and smiled. “No. It’s there. I just need to close my eyes and I can see it. Anytime.”

  Gracie felt a shiver at the base of her neck. “So you’ve never actually seen it? I mean, physically?” she specified, weighing her words—then an idea swooped into her mind. “Could it be something you saw while you were out in the desert? Something you saw but don’t remember?”

  “Saw? Where?” he asked.

  She hesitated, then said, “In the sky?”

  The priest tilted his head slightly, his eyebrows raised, as he mulled her suggestion for a moment. “I suppose it’s possible,” he finally conceded. “Anything’s possible, given how those weeks are nothing but a blur.”

  Gracie glanced over at Finch, then at the abbot. With the slightest nods, they seemed to agree with what she was thinking. She turned to Dalton, who had cottoned on and was already keying in the commands on his laptop.

  She felt a tightening in her throat as she coaxed the words out. “I’d like to show you something, Father. It’s something we just filmed, something we saw in Antarctica, just before coming here to see you. I’m a bit wary of showing it to you like this, without preparation, but I really think you need to see this. It has to do with this symbol you’ve been drawing.” She paused, scrutinizing his face for si
gns of discomfort. She didn’t find any. She swallowed hard and asked, “Would you like to see it?”

  The priest looked at her quizzically, but, calm as ever, nodded. “Please,” he said, spreading his hands invitingly.

  Dalton got up and placed the laptop on a low table in front of the priest, and turned it so that they could all watch it. He hit the play button. The video from Antarctica, the edited piece they had sent the network, played. Gracie kept her gaze locked on Father Jerome, studying his face as he absorbed the images unfurling before him. She watched, on edge, expecting to see any one of a number of emotional responses to the clip—surprise, consternation, worry, fear even—and hoping it didn’t make the priest distraught. It didn’t. But it seemed to confuse him. His posture visibly stiffened as he leaned in for a closer look, his mouth dropped slightly, his forehead furrowed under the strain.

  When it was finished, he turned to them, looking bewildered. “You filmed this?”

  Gracie nodded.

  The priest was lost for words. His eyes took on a haunted, pained expression. “What does this mean?”

  Gracie didn’t have an answer for him. From the silence around her, it didn’t seem like anyone else did either. She winced a little as she said, “There’s been another sighting like that. In Greenland this time. Just a few hours ago.”

  “Another one?”

  “Yes,” Gracie confirmed.

  Father Jerome pushed himself to his feet and shuffled over to the window. He stared at his desk, shaking his head in disbelief, then reached down and picked up one of his notebooks. He rifled through its pages until he found what he was looking for, and just stood there, staring at it. “I don’t understand it,” he mumbled. “It’s what I’ve been seeing. And yet . . .” He turned to face Gracie and the others, the open notebook in his hand. Gracie hesitantly reached out. He placed it in her hand, a faraway, haunted look in his eyes. She looked at the pages before her, then leafed through a few more pages. They were all similar: packed densely with an elegant, handwritten script, and dotted, here and there, with more elaborate renderings of the sign. She looked over at Finch and passed him the notebook, her fingers quivering slightly under the weight of what she’d seen on its pages.