Maybe.
On the other hand, it could all go wrong and he could get shot by the cops and the case would be closed. And either way, he wouldn’t get the thing he most wanted: to find out what they had done to his brother.
So he dropped that plan. Decided to play it more cautiously. Take things one step at a time. Maybe try and get some one-on-one time with one of the goons. In which case a weapon would be good. The van—and the car—could yield one. Something he could use to even out the odds a little. And maybe, with a bit of luck, he could then grab one of the killers and get the answers he wanted.
Maybe.
No one had gone in or out of the house since he’d been there, but the cars and the lights in the front ground-floor room suggested the goons were in. He tried to think back at how many were in the van—four, he thought. Which was bad enough. He didn’t know if the two in the Chrysler were part of that crew, or if they were additional, in which case there’d be six of them in there. Which would be even worse.
The house next door looked dark and empty by comparison, with no sign of life apart from a Christmas tree that blinked on and off mind- numbingly in its front window. A five-foot-tall hedge ran between the houses, alongside the target’s driveway. Matt thought of waiting till it got dark, to give him more cover, but he didn’t feel like loitering around that long and wasn’t sure how long they’d be staying in there.
He decided to chance it.
He scuttled alongside the hedge and made his way to the back of the house. He skulked behind the Chrysler and peeked out. He couldn’t make out any movement at the back of the house. It was just dark and still. He looked through the 300C’s window. Couldn’t see anything inside, but the glove box and the trunk were the areas of real interest. The car’s doors were locked, which was expected—and unhelpful. It was a new car, high-specced, with robust locks and both perimetric and volumetric alarms as standard. Which meant that before he could get inside the cabin he’d need to get under the hood without disturbing the car too much. Not the easiest car to break into, certainly not with the basic tools he had at hand.
He crept over to the van. It was slightly older and had a more basic locking mechanism that would surrender more easily. He glanced inside. Again, nothing on view, but once inside, things could prove different.
He knelt by the passenger door and was about to start jimmying the lock when he heard a car slow down by the house and turn into the driveway. He ducked down and slipped quickly around to the front of the van as the other car, a black S-Class Mercedes, pulled up and stopped alongside the house.
Matt crouched low and peered out from under the van. He heard the Merc’s door open and watched as a man climbed out of it and walked up to the back door. Matt leaned over and risked a side glance off the van’s left fender. The man was close to six feet tall and had a sharp, accurate step. He walked with purpose. He had a shaved head and wore a dark suit that he was subtly packed into, but not with fat. Matt recognized the build from his time in prison. The slightly bow-legged step, the arms cocked out just a touch, limbs whose natural rest positions were impeded by the bulk of muscle. Not huge. Not in-your-face. But there, lurking under the otherwise-slender build, waiting to inflict damage.
As he turned, Matt saw the missing ear and the spiderwebbed burn scar spreading out from it. The unsettling sight took him by surprise. Matt wondered if the man was ex-military. Maybe they all were. And judging by the step, the suit, and the car, this guy didn’t seem to be just another one of the drones. He was their boss. As if to confirm it, the rear door of the house creaked open as the man in the suit approached it. One of the goons stepped out and took an instinctive glance around as the hard case in the suit walked right past him without acknowledging him and disappeared into the house. A moment later, the goon followed him in and shut the door behind him.
Matt crouched low, his mind working double-time at interpreting this new variable and adjusting his options accordingly. One move sprang to the forefront of his mind immediately. He embraced it, sneaked over to the 300C, and slid under it.
Chapter 35
Mountains of Wadi Natrun, Egypt
“It’s not safe,” Gracie told Father Jerome. “We have to get you out of here.”
She quickly related to the three holy men what Ogilvy had told her. “Trust me on this,” she concluded, “I know how it works. The news vans are already on their way and the satellite hookups are already booked. It’ll be a zoo out there before sunrise. At least at the monastery, you’ll have four walls around you to keep the world at bay until we figure things out.”
What she didn’t want to mention was another problem—not the bullying of the press, but an altogether more dangerous one. They were in an overwhelmingly Muslim country, in an overwhelmingly Muslim region. Sure, 10 percent or so of the country was Christian—Coptic, specifically—but that still left more than seventy million other Egyptians out there, and countless others in neighboring Muslim countries, who might take issue with what was unfolding. This was, after all, a region where the moon landings were still believed to be a hoax to promote American superiority, where everything had a “Christian plot” angle to it, where the Crusades still cast a long and angry shadow.
Father Jerome’s face sagged with dismay at the news, but he didn’t object. He’d witnessed the savagery that men in the region had a long habit of inflicting on each other for no reason other than what tribe they belonged to or what religion they were born into. The abbot and the young monk didn’t argue with Gracie’s read of the situation either. What she was suggesting seemed to be the sensible move.
“We should take what we can with us,” she told them, casting her eyes around the cave’s spartan interior before pointing at the journals. “Everything you wrote, Father. And anything else that’s of value to you. I don’t know what condition the cave will be in next time you see it.” She looked up at the markings on the ceiling with a sense of foreboding, wondering how long it would be before they’d be defaced, and asked for permission to film their exit, which was given. She got Dalton to shoot a quick take of the cave and of its ceiling while the others helped Father Jerome gather his belongings.
Before long, they were back under the stars and heading down the mountain.
Chapter 36
Brighton,Massachusetts
Matt was just sliding out from under the big Mercedes when he heard the back door of the house creak open.
He huddled against the car’s front passenger door and froze. He couldn’t risk a look, but he didn’t need to. The odds were, it was the hard case in the suit, but he knew he was in trouble regardless of who was coming out of the house. The Merc was blocking the Chrysler and the van. Before either of them could be driven out, the Merc would have to be moved first. And the Merc itself was exposed. It had yards of open air in front and behind it, the side and rear of the house to its left and the five-foot hedge that separated the two houses to its right, behind Matt. All of which meant that if anyone was driving anywhere, the Merc was about to move, and Matt was about to find himself out of cover.
He was stuck. He’d known it was a possibility going in, but he’d still gone ahead with it, thinking it worth the risk. Right now, as he listened to the approaching footsteps, he sorely regretted not going with his original firebombing plan. Then again, everything looked better with hindsight, especially when your back was up against a wall—or, in this case, a dense, impenetrable five-foot hedge.
There was more than one set of footsteps, and he figured there were at least two of them approaching. If they were going into the Merc, he’d have someone in his face in a matter of seconds. He crouched down, cheek to the ground, trying to get a handle on how many of them there were and which way they were heading. The backyard sloped upward. He couldn’t see anything for a tense moment, then one pair of shoes appeared—black brogues, the hard case’s shoes, he thought—closely followed by another. Two of them. Headed for the Merc. The hard case must have hit his alarm key f
ob, as the car beeped and the locks popped open with a loud snap.
Matt didn’t have a choice.
He coiled up, waiting, his ears straining to pick up the approaching footsteps. He heard a door click open, the driver’s door—and then a figure appeared on his side of the car, rounding the front right fender, a guy with high cheekbones and a brush cut that Matt thought he recognized from the car staking out Jabba’s place. Matt just sprung up before the guy could react, catching him by surprise and landing a crushing fist on his chin. Brush Cut’s face juddered sideways, twisting unnaturally around his neck, a loud, wet wheeze rushing out of his chest and mouth. He was tough and didn’t go down. Instead, he tried to turn in and fight back, but Matt was now close enough to inflict more serious damage and hooked him with a ferocious uppercut that lifted Brush Cut momentarily off his feet before sending him staggering backward.
Matt heard movement on the other side of the car and, from the corner of his eye, saw the hard case in the suit stepping back and reaching under his coat. Brush Cut was groggy and having a hard time staying on his feet. Matt grabbed him from behind, curling his left hand around the guy’s neck while diving his right hand under the guy’s jacket, praying his fingers would find a gun somewhere. On the other side of the Merc, the hard case had his own gun out. He chambered a round and raised the gun at Matt, with Brush Cut between them.
Matt hit pay dirt. Brush Cut had a handgun tucked under his jacket, in a belt holster on his right hip. Matt’s fingers found the gun’s ribbed grip and yanked it out. He raised it, his right arm extended, level with his hostage’s ear, and aimed it straight at the hard case.
“Get back,” Matt shouted, swinging the gun to his hostage’s head and back at the hard case.
He sidestepped to his left, putting the car between him and the hard case, who raised his left hand in a calming gesture while keeping his gun aimed at Matt’s face.
“Easy, Matt,” he said. “Just take it easy.”
“Who the fuck are you people?” Matt yelled, still edging sideways, his eyes darting left and right nervously, keeping tabs on the front and rear of the house.
“I’m impressed that you made it here, Matt,” the hard case said, clearly trying to work out how Matt had found them. “In fact, I’m pretty impressed by everything you’ve done since this thing started.”
Matt was now at the back corner of the Merc. The hard case wasn’t backing away. He was actually tracking Matt, sidestepping smoothly and moving closer to the Merc that was now between them, eyeing the surroundings with radarlike focus. There was something deeply unnerving about him. The missing ear and the scar, the bald head that tapered up in the shape of a bullet—and they only served as a backdrop to the real darkness that emanated from the ceramic-black eyes that looked like they’d been to hell and back without blinking, the dark, eyeliner-like eyelids that rimmed them, and the sharp eyebrows framing the stygian mask that brooded out of the center of his face.
“And what is this thing?” Matt rasped. “What the fuck’s going on? What happened to my brother?”
The hard case shook his face slightly, in a condescending, tut-tutting way. “You know what, Matt? You’re too concerned with the past. You need to think more about your future.”
Matt backed up another step. “What did you do to my brother?” he yelled again. “Is he still alive?”
The hard case didn’t flinch. He stayed unsettlingly calm, his cold eyes seemingly assessing Matt’s position and evaluating possible outcomes. “You’re messing around with something you really don’t want to be messing with,” he finally told him. “My advice to you is to let it go. Find yourself a nice, deep hole, bury your head down, and forget any of this ever happened. Or better still—”
—and he just squeezed the trigger, once, with no discernible emotion, just made a decision and acted on it without a trace of emotion. The round hit the guy Matt was holding up squarely in the chest—
“—let me put you in it.”
Matt felt Brush Cut jerk and felt a sudden burn at his own side, by his left ribs, but he didn’t have time to pause and check it out. He had to stay on his feet as everything rushed into a frenzied blur.
Brush Cut’s legs gave and he started to fall just as the hard case fired again, then again. One of the shots hit Brush Cut in the shoulder, the bullet exiting close to Matt’s crouched head, whizzing past his ear and splattering his face with blood and bone shards. Matt struggled to keep Brush Cut up, using him as a shield while firing back at the hard case, who ducked behind the Merc. He faltered backward, his eyes scanning around, the burning sensation in his left flank getting stronger with each step. The hard case came up for another shot, got Matt’s hostage in the thigh. Two more bodies rushed out of the back of the house, guns out. They saw Matt, crouched into firing positions, but they were wide open and Matt got one of them in the shoulder a split second after he realized it was the auburn-haired girl from the van, the night they took him and Vince Bellinger. She tumbled sideways as if her feet had been knocked out from under her. The other shooter dived behind the Merc and joined the hard case. Matt kept moving, still using the bloodied-if-not-dead Brush Cut as a shield, lugging his heavy body back toward the street, step by step, inch by inch, firing away every time he spotted a flash of skin. A couple of shots whizzed by and he retaliated with three more of his own, then his gun’s magazine spat out its last round and the slide locked in its open position.
He saw that the hard case and the other shooter cottoned onto it as soon as he did, and they emerged from cover with little concern. He looked around frantically and realized he was now only a couple of yards from the sidewalk. Summoning whatever energy he could muster, he dragged Brush Cut’s dead weight back a few steps before letting go of him and bolting into the street.
He didn’t look back. He just kept running, the spent gun in hand, hugging the parked cars before sprinting across the street and leaping onto the opposite sidewalk, putting a barrier of cars between him and the shooters’ line of fire, hoping one last round wouldn’t find him before he got to his Camry, wondering how badly he’d been hit already and whether or not he’d get the chance to find out.
Chapter 37
Deir Al-Suryan Monastery, Wadi Natrun, Egypt
As Gracie had predicted, they’d barely managed to beat the news crews to the monastery, and were now safely ensconced behind its walls. A growing number of cars and vans were gathering outside the gates. With the rest of the monks alarmed by the sudden activity—the monastery was home to almost two hundred of them—the abbot set out to calm them while dispatching Brother Ameen to talk to the journalists. The younger monk told those crowding the gates that Father Jerome had no comment as yet, and asked them to respect his privacy. The reporters protested loudly, but to no avail.
The siege had begun.
Gracie’s satphone was back up and running. There was no point in staying under the radar any longer. On the contrary. She, Dalton, and Finch were supremely well placed to trump their peers on this story, which was now monopolizing the screens at all the major news channels, commanding continuous coverage and constant live updates. Their exclusive was alive and well, and less than half an hour after getting back, they were sending their first “live” footage from the roof of the keep that abutted the monastery’s entrance gate.
Standing on top of the large, sand-colored cube, Gracie weighed her words carefully as she faced the lens of Dalton’s camera.
“He hasn’t yet made a statement, Jack. As you can imagine, he’s overwhelmed by what’s happened in the last couple of days. All I can confirm to you at the moment is that Father Jerome is indeed here with us at the monastery.”
“But you’ve talked to him, haven’t you?” Roxberry asked, through her earpiece.
“Yes, I have,” she affirmed.
“And what did he tell you?”
Roxberry’s frustration was coming through loud and clear, and Gracie’s cagey replies weren’t helping. She’d avoided men
tioning to him that they’d shown Father Jerome the footage of the sightings, and hadn’t shared what he’d told them in the cave. She and Finch had sifted with great care through what she would or wouldn’t say, deciding that it wasn’t their place—not yet, anyway—to announce things that the priest had said in confidence and that could be taken wildly out of context and distorted at will, which was inevitable. Hard as it was to keep a huge scoop like that to themselves, they’d agreed that it was more appropriate to give Father Jerome the chance to tell his story himself, if and when he chose to do it. They’d approach him for a live interview as soon as he’d had a chance to rest and let it all sink in.
“He asked us to respect his need for a bit of peace right now, which we fully understand.”
She could almost feel Roxberry’s rising blood pressure throbbing through her earpiece.
She and Finch had also debated whether or not to use the material they’d shot inside the cave. Gracie felt they’d been granted a privileged viewing, and she had misgivings about airing the footage, feeling as if she’d be betraying the priest’s trust. But, as Finch had pointed out, they couldn’t not use it either. It was too good for that, it was part of the story, and besides, the British documentary crew had been allowed to film it for broadcast purposes. It was already airing around the world. He couldn’t see the harm in simply confirming it, and Gracie had agreed.
She signed off, expecting an instantaneous and irate callback from the news desk, and stepped over to the edge of the flat roof. The roof had nothing but a low, three-inch lip around it, and Gracie felt a bit uneasy looking at the sharp drop-off. As she gazed beyond it at the flat, barren landscape outside the monastery’s walls, she also had a different kind of bad feeling. The trickle of headlights bouncing across the desert was growing ominously as more and more cars converged on the monastery. She knew the region well enough to know how quickly things got out of hand, how suddenly religious passions got inflamed and escalated into bloodshed. She tore her gaze away from the eerie light show and joined Finch and Dalton, who were huddled around the open laptop, watching the Al Jazeera reporter’s live broadcast from outside the gates.
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