The Sign

by Raymond Khoury

  He’d been ready to make his move. Waiting in a corner booth, behind the grand piano by the bar, away from the main seating area, biding his time at a staging point he’d chosen carefully. His fingers were wrapped around the Para-Ordnance’s wide grip, ready to yank it out and shove it up against Drucker’s ribs. But they’d moved first. Whatever they did to Rydell had sent Matt’s plans to the shredder.

  He rose and charged toward the café’s entrance. He caught sight of Drucker heading out of the room, flanked by two of his men. He was turning right, headed for the hotel’s front doors, whereas Rydell had been taken left, to the elevators. Matt hurtled across the café. He skidded to a stop at its entrance. Drucker was leaving the hotel with his escorts. There were a lot of people around him. Hotel guests, bellboys, valets. No way he could get to him. He’d missed his chance. He spun his gaze in the opposite direction. The lights over the elevator Rydell was in scrolled down to indicate he was being taken to the hotel’s parking lot.

  Matt chose to go after him instead. If Drucker had him again, Matt would be left with no leverage. Leverage he needed if he was going to see his brother again.

  He bolted across the lobby, past some shocked guests and through the door to the hotel’s internal stairwell. Flew down the stairs, three at a time, gripping the banister at the turns and flinging himself around them like an out-of-control bobsled. Six flights later, he was at the parking level. He burst onto its smoothly painted concrete floor in time to see a dark gray van squealing away and turning onto the exit ramp. His eyes traveled across the garage. He heard a door click open to his left, spun his gaze that way, and rushed toward the noise. A valet was getting out of a car. A big Chrysler Navigator SUV, silver. Matt didn’t flinch. He sprinted right up to him, yanked the car keys from his grasp, and shoved him away before climbing in and spurring the big Northstar V8 to life. He slammed the selector into drive and cannoned out of the parking slot and onto the exit ramp.

  He emerged into the golden-orange glow of dusk and threw a quick glance in each direction. The city center was an orthogonal grid of alternating one-way avenues, some of them five lanes wide. This one went east-west, and the van was pulling away to the right, heading west. He nudged the gas pedal. The Navigator slid out from under the garage entrance’s canopy and accelerated onto the avenue. The van was cruising away, three hundred yards down the road.

  Matt threaded the big SUV through a rolling chicane of slower vehicles and caught up with the van in no time. He held back, keeping a car between them. The road was straight and wide, the traffic sparse. The intersections were vast and generous, concrete plains outlined by patterned stone infills that gave them the feel of a Beverly Hills piazza. Two blocks on, a big green sign appeared overhead, announcing the on-ramp to the interstate and, beyond, to the 90. Matt knew he had to do something before they hit the highway. Once they were on it, all kinds of unknowns would come into play. He risked being spotted. He risked losing them. He risked them getting to wherever it was they were going, and having them end up with the home advantage.

  He had to make his move.

  The road was as wide as a runway and didn’t have any cars parked on either side. The block they were coming up to was lined with a row of thin trees to the left, and some kind of granite colonnade on the right. It wouldn’t do. Too brutal. Matt edged the Navigator right and peered ahead. The next block looked more promising. The left side was edged by a bunkerlike parking garage and wouldn’t do. The sidewalk on the right, on the other hand, led to a rise of a dozen or so wide, low steps that climbed up to a raised open area outside an imposing stone-clad office building.

  Matt settled on it and mashed the pedal.

  The V8 growled as the Navigator surged out from behind the buffering sedan and overtook it from the left. Matt went out wide to the left then veered right and aimed the Navigator’s nose at the van’s left front corner. He didn’t lift off. The Navigator homed in on the van like a guided missile. A split second before it slammed into it, Matt jerked the wheel to the left and righted the SUV. It hit the van at a tangent, catching its driver unawares, its momentum flinging the van off its trajectory and sending it shooting off to the right. Matt flung the wheel back to the right, bringing the Navigator right up against the van’s left side, hugging it tight and nursing it along its diagonal trajectory, then he swerved right even more to close the deal. The van had nowhere to go, and its driver knew it. He must have stood on the brakes, as the van lurched forward on its front wheels, lighting them up in a cloud of rubber, but he was still going too fast. The van bounced heavily up the stairs before slamming against one of the building’s massive square pillars.

  Matt ramped the Navigator over the curb and flew out of it just as the van hit the column. He stormed up the steps, the stainless steel handgun out and ready to draw blood, eyes peeled for any movement.

  The van had hit hard. Its radiator was smoking and its front end curled around the column. Matt didn’t know what state he’d find Rydell in. One thing he knew, though, was that the guys in the front wouldn’t be at their healthiest. The van had a steep front rake and little if no hood to protect the engine in case of a frontal collision. Plus, he knew, the guys weren’t expecting the hit.

  Passersby and people who worked in the building were edging forward to check out the crash, only to reel away at the sight of Matt and his handgun. He ignored them and rounded the side of the van, knees bent in a wide, low stance, eyeing the van’s doors and windows cautiously, looking for any sign of life. The front was badly mashed up, and Matt was pretty sure he wouldn’t be getting any grief from there. He side-stepped away to the back of the van, extended an arm across one of its back doors, and rapped on it with his gun. He pulled his hand back quickly, anticipating a few rounds through the bodywork. None came. He reached over and pulled the door open then swung across, looking down the gunsight of the P14.

  Rydell was in there, writhing on the floor, shaken up but alive. His hands were held by nylon cuffs. He saw one of the guys he recognized from the hotel, his head bloodied, trying to straighten himself up. The guy glanced up, saw Matt, blinked twice, and fumbled for a gun. Matt squeezed off a round and saw a red splatter burst out from the guy’s chest.

  “Come on,” he yelled at Rydell, who nodded vaguely like someone who’d been in a solitary confinement sweatbox for a month. As Matt reached in to him, he saw something else. Another body, lying facedown behind Rydell. A woman. Her hands were tied behind her back, same nylon cuffs. Matt climbed in and, carefully, turned her over. She had a fat piece of duct tape covering her mouth. He peeled it off and recognized her instantly. Gracie Logan, the news anchor who’d been covering the sign’s appearances. He reached in farther and put his fingers to her neck, looking for a pulse. She was alive.

  She stirred at his touch, then flinched, her eyes wide with shock.

  “Where are . . . ? Who . . . ?” she mouthed incoherently.

  “Give me your hand,” Matt told her as he tucked the P14 under his belt. He helped her up and slung her arm over his shoulders.

  “Come on,” he told Rydell. He half-carried Gracie as he cut past a gaggle of dumbstruck onlookers, down the steps to the waiting Navigator. He set her down in the backseat, got in behind the wheel with Rydell beside him, and powered away.

  In the rearview mirror, Matt saw Gracie straighten up. She was slowly coming out of it. Her eyes swept across her surroundings before settling on Matt’s face.

  “You okay?” he asked her.

  She stared at him blankly. She looked like she had the mother of all hangovers. Then things must have come flooding back, as her face tightened up with a worried frown.

  “Dalton,” Gracie blurted. “I’ve got to get Dalton out of there.”

  “Who?”

  Her hands were rummaging around, looking for something. “My phone. Where’s my phone? I have to call Dalton. It isn’t safe.” She turned to Matt. “I have to warn him.”

  Matt looked down the street, saw a bank
of phone booths, and pulled over. He helped Gracie out. “Where are we going? Where shall I tell him to go?” she asked.

  “Who are you talking about?”

  “Dalton. My cameraman. They’ll be going after him too.”

  Matt tried to fill in the blanks. “Where is he?”

  “At Darby’s mansion,” she said, her expression vague, as if she wasn’t exactly sure.

  “The preacher?”

  “Yes.” She concentrated hard. “No. Wait. I’m not sure.” She shook her head. “He went to the airport,” she added after a beat. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure of that. Either way, he’s on his cell.” She picked up the handset. “What’ll I tell him?”

  Matt gave it a quick thought. “Just tell him to get somewhere safe. If he’s still out, tell him to stay away from the preacher’s place. We’ll call him back and tell him where to meet us.”

  She started to dial, then paused and studied him curiously, her eyes still foggy, and asked, “Who the hell are you?”

  “Just make the call,” he told her. “We’ll get to that later.”

  Chapter 73

  They were all scattered around the motel room, a motley crew of haggard escapees: Matt, Gracie, Dalton, and Rydell. A week earlier, apart from Gracie and Dalton, none of them had met. They hadn’t even come close. They had roamed completely separate spheres, lived disparate lives, had different ambitions and concerns. And then everything had changed, their lives had been upended, and here they were, crammed into the small room, wondering how to stay alive.

  Dalton had joined them at the motel, arriving not long after they had. They’d spent the next couple of hours filling each other in on how they’d ended up in that room, each contributing his or her part of the story. The conversation had been urgent and intense as the different pieces had fallen into place, the string of troubling news only brightening up when Rydell had gotten through to the doctor treating Jabba back in Boston. The surgery had been successful. Jabba had lost a lot of blood, but he was stable, and his prognosis was cautiously optimistic.

  “What do we do now?” Dalton asked. He still looked spooked, having only just found out that Finch had been murdered, and that the likely suspect was a monk they’d been palling around with.

  “I keep thinking of Father Jerome,” Gracie remarked, shaking her head. “He knew something was wrong. I could see it in his face.” She turned to Rydell. “You don’t know what they’ve done to him?”

  “I don’t know the grim details,” Rydell admitted. “I didn’t want to hear about it when they brought it up. They mentioned stuff. About using drugs. Electroshock therapy. Implanting memories and adjusting character. To make him more accepting of his new status, I guess.”

  “Nice,” Dalton said with an uneasy wince.

  “He said he heard voices. Up on the mountain. He thought God was talking to him,” Gracie mentioned.

  Rydell nodded thoughtfully. “They would have used an LRAD on him. A long range acoustical device,” he speculated. He slid a glance at Matt. “Same thing they used on me at the hotel. It can also send sound accurately over long distances. Like a sniper rifle, only for noise—or voices,” he explained. “They were talking to him through it.”

  A pensive silence smothered the room.

  After a brief moment, Gracie glanced over to Rydell. “You really thought you could get away with this?” she asked him. Her voice was flat. She was still in shock at Ogilvy’s betrayal. At the thought of how she’d been played. At the idea of Finch having been killed because of this.

  “I had to do something,” he said with a tired shrug. “People aren’t listening. They’re too passive. Too lazy. They don’t listen to reason until it’s too late. They don’t want to listen to politicians. They certainly don’t want some tree-hugger in Birkenstocks telling them how to live. They won’t take the time to read or to listen to the experts. Look at the financial meltdown. Experts have been warning about it for years. Buffett called derivatives ‘financial weapons of mass destruction.’ No one listened. Then it all fell apart overnight.” He looked around the room, as if looking for a hint of understanding, if not empathy. “I couldn’t just sit back. This isn’t about your 401(k) losing half its value. It isn’t about losing your home. It’s about the planet losing its ability to sustain life.”

  “It’s like Finch said. It’s all in the branding,” Dalton remarked, throwing a glance at Gracie. “‘Global warming’ sounds way too nice and cozy. They should have called it global boiling.”

  “It’s geocide,” Rydell said before leaning back into the darkness.

  A couple of nods sent the tired room back into silence. Gracie finally broke through the weary haze again and asked Rydell, “If you weren’t going to be the fall guy . . . do you agree with what Drucker said? With what they’re trying to do?”

  Rydell thought about it for a moment and gave a pained shake of his head. “I agree with what he thinks is wrong with our country. History’s shown us, time and again, that mixing religion and politics only brings destruction. And I have no doubt that it’s a real danger, maybe more dangerous than anything Homeland Security is worried about. But I don’t agree with his solution. And I certainly don’t agree with his methods.” He looked around the room. “No one was supposed to get hurt. Drucker’s just out of control. And he’s not done. Who knows what message he’ll choose to put into Father Jerome’s mouth before he’s through. He could make him say or do anything he likes. And the whole world’s listening.”

  “We’ve got to stop him,” Gracie put in. “We’ve got to go live with what we know.”

  “No,” Matt said flatly from the corner of the room.

  Gracie turned to him. “What are you talking about? We’ve got to go public.”

  Matt shook his head. “We can’t break the story. Not yet. If we do that now, they’ll kill Danny. I need to get him out first, make sure he’s safe. After that, you can slap it on the front page of The New York Times or wherever you want. It’s all yours.”

  “You heard what they’re planning, Matt,” Gracie argued. “The show’s tomorrow. It’s going to be huge—and it’ll be watched across the planet. And you’ve seen what’s going on out there. People are buying into it, fighting over it. Every hour we wait, this thing’s sinking in deeper. If we wait until after the show to blow the lid off this thing, it might be too late to undo the damage it’ll have caused.”

  “Once that happens, we’ll be kind of doing their work for them if we expose it, won’t we?” Dalton asked. “I mean, that’s their plan, right?”

  “We don’t have a choice,” Gracie pointed out. “It’s not ideal, but we have to do it and we have to do it now.”

  “They can’t expose it,” Matt countered. “Not yet. Not as long as they don’t have you,” he said as he chucked a nod at Rydell. “They don’t have their fall guy, right? So who are they going to blame it on? They’ve got to blame it on someone—someone without a political axe to grind. Plus as long as they don’t have you locked up,” he aimed his words at Rydell again, “they’d be running the risk of you coming out with your side of the story. They’d be screwed. They’ve got some figuring out to do before they tell the world it’s a setup.”

  “Which they will, sooner or later, there’s no doubt about that,” Gracie interjected. “No way they’d let this run indefinitely. They’d be handing the Christian Right the keys to the kingdom. And we can’t let that happen either.”

  Matt paused at the thought. There didn’t seem to be a way out, and although all he could think about was getting his brother back safely, he suddenly realized there were bigger considerations he couldn’t shy away from.

  He chewed over it for a moment, then said, “We’ve got a small window before they figure out their fallback position, right?” He glanced over to Rydell. “They might even be wondering if you’ll keep quiet. As a trade-off for getting your green message out there.”

  “They’d be wrong,” Rydell confirmed without hesitation.

&nb
sp; “Either way, they won’t do anything yet. Not until they come up with another endgame that doesn’t leave them holding the bag. Which gives me a bit of time to try and get Danny back. Even if it means letting them put Father Jerome up on that stage. You can’t ask me to give up on him. Not when I’m so close.”

  He looked around the room. The others glanced at each other, weighing his words.

  He looked at Gracie. She held his gaze, then nodded warmly.

  “The country’s already well on its way to buying it,” she finally said. “Tomorrow night will make it harder to come back from, sure, but . . . we can hold off till then. Besides, it seems to me that none of us would still be around if it wasn’t for Matt. We owe him that much.”

  She glanced around, judging the others’ reactions. Rydell and Dalton each nodded their agreement. Her eyes ended up settling on Matt.

  He smiled and gave her a small nod of appreciation.

  “Okay, so how do we do it?” Gracie asked him.

  “How do we do what?”

  “Find your brother.” She caught his confused look and flashed him a slight grin. “What, did you think we were going to bail on you now?”

  Matt glanced around the room again. Saw beaming support from everyone around him. Nodded to himself, accepting it. “We’ve got to assume they’re going to put a sign up over Father Jerome tomorrow, right?”

  Gracie nodded. “No doubt about that.”

  “Then that’s how we’ll do it.”

  THEY STAYED UP most of the night, studying maps, plans, and photographs of the stadium pulled from the Internet, examining its layout and the spread of the surrounding area, trying to anticipate where Danny and the launch team were likely to be positioned.

  By dawn, they felt they’d reached a consensus on how Drucker’s guys might try to stage it. They’d pretty much followed Rydell’s lead. Having the guy who’d been in charge of the sign’s technology gave them a nice head start, but there were still a lot of unknowns. Then as the first glints of sunlight broke through the darkness, the TV started showing cars and people already setting out on their pilgrimage, and they knew they had to get going too.