“Weird, isn’t it?” she observed, overcome by a sudden tiredness and setting herself down cross-legged beside them. “Sitting here, inside the gates, watching ourselves from the outside in.”
“It’s like a bizarro-world version of a hostage situation,” Dalton intoned.
Gracie noticed a shift in the shadows coming out of the roof hatch to her left, and saw Brother Ameen’s head pop out. He gave them a subdued nod and climbed up the rickety ladder to join them.
“How’s Father Jerome?” Gracie asked.
He shrugged wearily. “Confused. Scared. Praying for guidance.”
Gracie nodded in empathy, frustrated that she couldn’t give him any answers herself. She knew that the pressure he was under was only starting. Watching the streaming news reports on the laptop only confirmed it. The reports coming in from Cairo and Alexandria were troubling. The revelation that Father Jerome had effectively foreseen what was still unexplained was causing a huge stir across the country. The polarization of opinions was already clear, even though the story had barely broken. The clips chosen for broadcast showed the local Christians to be confused, but generally excited, by the news. For them, Father Jerome had long been a beacon of positive transformation, and on the whole, they seemed to be embracing his involvement as something inspirational and wanted to know more. The Muslims who were interviewed, on the other hand, were either dismissive or angry. And, Gracie thought cynically, probably chosen for how inflammatory—hence attention-grabbing—their reactions were. Clerics were denouncing Father Jerome and calling on their followers not to be swayed by what they were already describing as trickery.
She glanced over at the young monk. His face was tight with tension.
“What is it?” she asked him.
He kept his eyes on the screen for a moment, then turned to her.
“I don’t understand what this thing is that you all saw. I don’t understand Father Jerome’s visions either, or how they’re both related. But there are some things I do know. Egypt’s not a rich country. Half the people around here have little or no education and live on less than two dollars a day. Even doctors in public hospitals don’t get paid more than that. But we’re also a very religious country,” he continued, his eyes drifting off to the chaotic light show below. “People take comfort in their religion because they don’t see hope in anything else around them. They don’t have faith in their politicians. They’re tired of traffic and pollution and rising prices and falling wages and corruption. They have no one else to trust but God. It’s the same everywhere else in this part of the world. Religious identity matters more to people out here than their common citizenship. And here, in this country—we’re on a knife edge as far as sectarian differences are concerned. It’s taboo to talk about it, but it’s a real problem. There have been a lot of incidents. Our brothers at the Abu Fana Monastery were attacked twice in the last year. The second time, they were beaten and whipped and made to spit on the cross.” He paused then turned, his eyes bouncing between the three of them before settling on Gracie. “There’s a lot of tension and a lot of misunderstanding between the people of this country. And there are millions of them within an hour’s drive of here.”
Gracie understood. It wasn’t a good mix.
“Bringing Father Jerome down from the cave was a good move,” he added. “But it might not be enough.”
She’d been thinking the same thing. An alarming vision coalesced inside her: that of two seriously antagonistic groups outside the gates, Coptic Christians on a pilgrimage of sorts to hear what Father Jerome had to say, and Muslims out to repel whatever outrage the kuffar—the blasphemers—were perpetrating.
Again, not a good mix. Unless you were cooking up some nitro.
“Where’s the army?” she asked. “Don’t they know what’s going on here? Shouldn’t they be sending people here to protect the monastery? And the cave—it’s gonna get trashed if things get out of control.”
“Not the army,” the monk said somberly, “the internal security forces. They’re twice as big as the army, which tells you where the government perceives the real threat. But they don’t usually send them out until after a problem catches fire. And when they do show up, things generally get worse. They don’t have a problem with using force to bring things back to normal. A lot of force.”
A swell of unease rolled through her. She turned to Finch. “Can you get hold of someone at the embassy? Maybe they can rustle something up.”
“I can try, but—I think Brother Ameen is right. Might be better to get out of here before it gets out of hand. And that goes for Father Jerome too.”
Dalton indicated the crowd below with a nudge of his head. “It’s not going to be easy.”
Gracie’s expression darkened further. “We have a car and a driver. And it’s still calm out there. We should leave at first light. While it’s doable.” She faced Finch again. “We can take Father Jerome to the embassy. We need to let them know we’re coming. We’ll figure the rest out from there.”
“What if he doesn’t want to leave?” Finch asked.
Gracie turned to Brother Ameen. He gave her an uncertain shrug. “I’ll talk to him, but I don’t know what he’ll say.”
“I’ll go with you. We’ve got to convince him,” she insisted as she got off the floor. Brother Ameen nodded and crossed over to the open hatch. Gracie turned to Finch. “First light, okay?” She gave him a determined look before gripping the sides of the hatch and disappearing into the heart of the keep.
Chapter 38
Houston, Texas
The Reverend Nelson Darby’s cell phone rang just as the tall, elegant man was stepping out of his chauffeur-driven Lincoln Town Car. He was in great spirits, having just witnessed a dress rehearsal of the five-hundred-person choir’s Christmas show. The caller ID on his screen prompted him to wave his assistant on, and he stayed back to take the call on the wide stairs that led to the handsome manor that housed the administrative core of his sprawling “Christian values” empire, an empire whose flagship was the resplendent 17,000-seat glass-and-steel megachurch Darby had built, one of a growing number of full-service Christian cocoons the likes of which hadn’t been seen since the thirteenth-century cathedral towns of Europe.
“Reverend,” the caller said. “How are things?”
“Roy,” Darby answered heartily, as always pleased to hear Roy Buscema’s measured voice. A fit man in his early forties, Darby had an angular face, deep-set eyes, and thin lips. With his backswept, perfectly coiffed jet-black mane and Brioni suits, he looked more like a pre-credit crunch investment banker on the make than a preacher. Which wasn’t inappropriate, given that both involved managing multimillion-dollar enterprises in a highly competitive marketplace. “Good to hear from you. How are things with you?”
Buscema, a gregarious journalist for the Washington Post, had met the pastor a little over a year earlier, when he’d been commissioned to write a feature profiling him for the newspaper’s Sunday magazine. The finely observed and highly complimentary article that he’d written had laid the groundwork for the friendship that followed, a friendship that grew into an unofficial consigliere-godfather relationship with all the hours they spent discussing and strategizing the pastor’s endorsements in the marathon presidential primary of the last year. Buscema’s take on the events had been impressively astute and always correct, and he’d let the pastor in on more than one scoop that had borne itself out. The pastor was converted. He saw in Buscema a savvy analyst who had the pulse of the people and knew where to go to get his prognoses corroborated, and as such—and given that Darby was one of the Christian Right’s political bigwigs—he was an invaluable man to have at hand.
Especially now, with all this going on.
“Crazier than ever,” Buscema replied. “But hey, I can’t complain really. It’s what we’re here for. Say, you been watching that thing over the ice caps?”
“Who isn’t?”
“What do you think?”
“To be honest with you, I’m a bit befuddled by the whole thing, Roy,” the pastor confided with his usual disarming candor. “What in God’s name is going on out there?”
Buscema’s tone took on a slightly more serious edge. “I think we ought to talk about it. I’m gonna be in town tomorrow,” he told the pastor. “If you have some time, why don’t we get together?”
“Sounds good,” Darby replied. “Come out to the house. I’m curious to hear your take on it.”
I bet you are, Buscema thought as they agreed on a time. He said good-bye and hung up. He then scrolled down his contacts list and made a second, almost identical, call.
A third, similar call followed soon after that.
As did six other carefully coordinated calls, made by two other men of a similar profile to his, to other influential evangelical leaders across the country.
Chapter 39
Woburn, Massachusetts
The bullet hadn’t done as much damage as Matt had first feared. It had clipped him just below his bottom left rib, punching a small hole through him less than an inch in from his side. Not exactly a graze, but not a major organ-buster either. Still, he had a couple of half-inch holes gouged out of him. Holes that needed to be sealed. Which meant stitches. And given that going to a hospital or to a doctor was out of the question, whatever sewing talents Jabba had would need to be summoned.
Jabba was holding up surprisingly well. He’d managed not to throw up when Matt first staggered back into their room, his clothes soaked with blood. He’d made it to the closest drugstore and picked up the items on a shopping list Matt had hastily dictated to him: iodine to clean the wound; any anesthetic cream he could find, to numb the skin; sewing needles, along with a lighter to sterilize them; some nylon thread; painkillers; bandages.
Most impressively, he’d so far managed to complete three sutures on the entry wound without puking, which he’d come close to doing while attempting the first stitch. Three more would do the trick on that front. Then he had the exit hole to take care of.
They were huddled in the far-from-antiseptic bathroom of the motel room. Matt was in his shorts, on the floor with his back against the tiled wall by the bathtub, grinding down his teeth as Jabba pushed the needle through the caldera of skin that rimmed his raw, open wound. The sensation was far worse than the immediate after-effect of getting shot, when the wound was still warm and the pain receptors hadn’t started their furious onslaught up his spine. He felt weak and nauseous and was fighting hard not to pass out. He swam through it by telling himself, over and over, that it would pass. Which it would. He just had to get through this part. He’d had a couple of bad wounds before, and although he’d never been shot, he tried to convince himself that this wasn’t any worse than a nasty cut from a blade. Which was something he’d had. Only then, he’d been sewn shut by a real doctor who’d used a proper anesthetic, not an over-the-counter cream more suited to hemorrhoids and leg waxing.
He blinked away tears of pain as the needle came out the other side.
“This look right to you?” Jabba’s fingers trembled as he pulled the thread through.
Matt didn’t look down. His sweaty face winced under the strain. “You’re the movie buff. You must have seen them do it a few times, right?”
“Yeah, but I usually turn away when they’re doing it,” Jabba grimaced as he pulled the two sides of the wound closer to each other and tied a knot in the thread, adding, pointedly, “which, by the way, they usually do to themselves.”
“Yeah, but then they end up with these Frankenstein-like scars, whereas with Dr. Jabba on the case . . .”
“. . . the Frankenstein look’s guaranteed,” Jabba quipped as he cut the end of the thread off. It wasn’t a particularly elegant piece of stitching, but at least the wound wasn’t bleeding anymore. “See?”
Matt shrugged. “Don’t sweat it. I hear the ladies just love the hard-ass scars,” he cajoled him. “When you’re done with me, maybe you could take a look at mending that hole in my jacket? It’s kind of an old favorite, you know?”
Seven stitches and half an hour later, they were done.
As he cleaned up the bloody mess around them, Jabba filled Matt in on what he’d discovered while he was out, which wasn’t much. He’d given the deadbeat receptionist ten bucks to let him use his computer. He’d logged into his Skype account and made a few calls while burrowing through the Internet, trying to find out more about the team that had died in the helicopter crash.
He’d managed to come up with two other names to add to Danny’s and to Reece’s—a chemical engineer by the name of Oliver Serres, and a biomolecular engineer named Sunil Kumar.
“Both were at the top of their game and highly regarded,” he told Matt. “But it’s weird, dude. I mean, Kumar’s a biologist. So far, we’ve got him, a chemist, Reece—an electrical engineer and computer scientist—and Danny, a programmer. The last three, I get. But Kumar . . . what’s a biomolecular engineer have to do with this?”
The nuance was beyond Matt at the best of times. In his current state, it just streaked past him. “What do you think?”
“I don’t know, man,” Jabba said with visible discomfort. “These biomolecular guys, they’re into rearranging DNA, playing around with the building blocks of life. Pulling apart and rearranging atoms and molecules like they were Lego bricks. And this sign in the sky, the way it looks organic, alive even . . . the gray area between biology and chemistry, between life and non-life, you know? It’s giving me a creepy feeling. Like maybe what they’re doing has more to do with some kind of designed life-form than a projected image.”
Matt frowned, trying to wrap his head around what Jabba was saying. “You’ve spent too much time watching The X-Files.”
Jabba shrugged, like it wasn’t a bad thing. “These biotech guys, they’re always getting flak for messing around in God’s closet. God’s closet, man. Who knows what they found in there.”
He let it drift and ran the cold tap. He drank from it, then splattered water across his face before filling up a glass and handing it to Matt. He didn’t have much more to tell him. He hadn’t been able to find any mention of who was backing Reece’s project, let alone what it involved.
Darkness was closing in fast outside their room, which suited Matt just fine. He wasn’t going anywhere tonight. He needed to rest. Jabba went back out and picked up some blood-free clothes for Matt and brought back some food and some Coke cans. They wolfed it all down greedily while watching the news. The footage from the cave in Egypt was hogging the airwaves, and the warm pizzas, though welcome, weren’t doing much to quell the cold, dismal feeling inside them.
“This is getting bigger,” Jabba noted glumly. “More elaborate.”
Matt nodded. “They know what they’re doing.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“What then?”
“These people. They’ve got serious resources at their disposal. Think about what they’re doing. First, they rustle up some major brain power, put them to work somewhere for, what, a couple of years? Then they kill them all off.” He noticed a hint of resistance on Matt’s face and quickly amended his words. “Or, whatever, maybe lock them up somewhere and fake their deaths—even more complicated to pull off. But no one seems to know anything about what this scientific dream team was working on, and there’s no record of who they were all working for. The one thing that’s sure is that there’s some serious moolah involved. Danny, Reece, and the others, they wouldn’t have gotten involved if they didn’t know they had all the backup they needed. And the kind of research they do, it ain’t cheap. Plus the rest of it, all this,” he said as he waved at the screen. “Seriously deep pockets, dude.”
“Okay, so where’d the money come from?”
Jabba thought about it for a second. “Two possibilities. Reece could’ve raised the money privately,” he speculated, “though not from a VC or a public company. There’d be a trace of it, especially after the deaths. No
, it would have to be private money. Not easy, given the scale of it. And practically untraceable, given that the entire creative team was supposedly wiped out.”
“What’s the other possibility?”
“Reece was doing this for a government agency. A highly classified project. Which sounds about right to me.”
Matt’s face darkened with uncertainty. He’d been wondering about the same thing. “Any particular candidates?”
Jabba shrugged. “DARPA. In-Q-Tel.”
Matt looked a question at him.
“DARPA. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. It’s part of the DoD. They fund a ton of research. Everything from micro bots to virtual battlefields. Any technology that can help us win these wars and defeat those who hate our freedom,” he added mockingly.
“And the other one?”
“In-Q-Tel. It’s the CIA’s venture capital arm. They’re early stage investors, which is actually very savvy of them when you think about it. Get in on the ground floor. Find out about any useful technology while it’s still being dreamed up. They’ve got their fingers in a lot of tech companies—and that includes a few of the big, household-name Internet sites you and I use on a daily basis.” He gave him a pointed, big-brother-is-watching-you look.
Matt absorbed what Jabba was trying to say. “A government op.”
“It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? I mean, if what we’re saying is true, if they’ve really faked this thing, they’re on their way to convincing everyone out there that God’s talking to us. Maybe even through the good Father Jerome. Who else would try to pull off something like this?”
The Sign Page 20
