The Sign (39 page)

“What about Father Jerome?” Jabba asked. “He’s not part of this too, is he?”

“I don’t know. He wasn’t part of the original plan,” Rydell said. “They came up with that one all on their own. You’ll have to ask them about it.”

“He can’t be in on it,” Jabba protested. “Not him.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Matt interjected firmly. “I just want to get Danny back.” He turned to Rydell. “Where is he?”

“I don’t know,” Rydell said. “I told you, I’m out of the loop.”

Matt raised the big handgun and held it aimed squarely at Rydell’s forehead. “Try again.”

“I’m telling you I don’t know, not anymore,” Rydell exclaimed. “But the next time the sign shows up, you’ll probably find him there.”

“What?” Matt rasped, thrown by Rydell’s answer.

“That’s why we needed him alive,” Rydell pointed out. “To make the micro-adjustments in real time. On-site.”

“‘On-site’?” Jabba asked. “He has to be there? He can’t do it remotely?”

“He could, but data transmission isn’t foolproof over such long distances, and even the smallest time lag could mess things up. It’s safer having him on location, especially if the sign’s gonna do more than just pop up for a few seconds.”

“So he was out there?” Matt asked. “In Antarctica? And in Egypt?”

“He was in Antarctica,” Rydell confirmed. “Egypt I don’t know about. Again, it wasn’t part of the plan. But from what I saw on TV, I’d guess he was there. He has to be within half a mile or so of the sign. That’s the transmitter’s range.”

An approaching siren wailed nearby. Matt tensed. Through a narrow passage that led to the main drag on the other side of the low, commercial buildings that backed up to the alley, he spotted the flash of a police car blowing past.

It was time to vamoose.

He turned to Jabba. “We need to move.” He flicked the gun at Rydell, herding him on. “Let’s go.”

“Where?” Rydell asked.

“I don’t know yet, but you’re coming with us.”

“I can’t,” Rydell protested. “They—”

“You’re coming with us.” Matt cut him off. “They’ve got Danny. I have you. Sounds like a good trade.”

“They won’t trade him for me. They need him. Much more than they need me. If anything, they’d probably be happy to see me dead.”

“Maybe, but if they haven’t killed you yet, it means they also need you for something,” Matt observed.

Which, judging by Rydell’s expression, struck a nerve. But he seemed to quickly shelve it as he told Matt, “I can’t go with you. They have my daughter.”

Matt scoffed. “Sure.” Rydell was, clearly, a cunning liar. Which suddenly put everything else he’d told Matt in question.

“I’m telling you they’ve got my daughter—”

“Bullshit. Let’s go,” Matt prodded him, though something about the intensity in his voice, in his eyes—was Matt missing something? His fury at Rydell didn’t let it in and plowed ahead. “Move.”

“Listen to me. They grabbed her. In Mexico. They’re hanging onto her as security. To make sure I don’t rock the boat. They can’t even know I talked to you. They’ll kill her.”

Matt wavered, suddenly unsure—and Jabba stepped closer.

“Maybe it’s true, dude.” He turned to Rydell. “She’s here.”

Rydell’s head jerked forward with attention. “Here?”

“We saw her,” Jabba informed him. “A couple of hours ago. Maddox and his goon squad flew her into a small airport near Bedford. We thought they were her bodyguards.”

Rydell’s expression clouded.

“They have your daughter, and you only think you’ve been ‘side-lined’?” Matt’s expression was heavy with contempt. “I don’t know, man. Me, I’d take it as a definite sign that you guys are now enemies.”

Rydell looked at him blankly, Matt’s words clearly weighing him down.

Matt shook his head indignantly and just said, “Let’s go.” He motioned to Rydell with his gun.

Rydell’s features fogged up as he desperately searched for a glimmer of clarity. He then shook his head and raised his hands in surrender, palms out, and took a step backward. “I can’t.” He took another step back, then another. “They’ll kill her.”

Matt’s anger flared. “You should have thought of that before you started looking the other way while your people got bumped off.”

“How many times do I have to say it?” Rydell blurted. “I didn’t want any of that.” He shook his head stoically. “Even if I wanted to help you, I can’t. Not as long as they have her. So do what you want, but I’m not going anywhere with you.”

Matt raised his gun at him, but Rydell didn’t stop. He kept inching backward, his palms spread, his eyes darting around, taking stock of his surroundings.

“Stop. I mean it,” Matt ordered.

Rydell just shook his head and kept backing up. He was now at the mouth of the small passageway that led to the main drag.

Matt hesitated. Rydell saw it. He gave him a small, knowing, almost apologetic tilt of the head before bolting into the passageway.

“Shit,” Matt muttered as he took off after him. “Rydell,” he yelled, his voice echoing through the narrow brick canyon as he charged down the grubby passage, Jabba in tow. Within seconds, they burst onto the main road. Matt stumbled to a halt. A few pedestrians stood there, on the wide sidewalk, motionless, eyes locked on Matt, taken aback by his sudden appearance and his gun. Behind them, Rydell was backing away, arms spread out in a calming gesture.

Matt felt too many eyes on him. Rydell was slipping away, and he couldn’t do anything about it.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” he told Jabba, before turning and rushing back down the passage toward the Bonneville. He’d lost Rydell, but Danny was alive, and right now, that was all that mattered.

Alexandria, Egypt

T
he decision to avoid Cairo Airport proved to be an inspired one, although it hadn’t started off that way. Gracie had gotten herself into a knot by picturing herself doing what Finch normally took care of—in this case, trying to sneak Father Jerome past an Egyptian passport clerk who would be either maniacally fastidious, sexist, anti-American, or any combination thereof.

The plane was waiting for them when they got there. Darby had come through, as promised. They made their way to the civil aviation office in order to access the tarmac without going through the main terminal, and kept Father Jerome well out of view. They were well aware that the merest glimpse of him could trigger a stampede. He was too recognizable—perhaps the most recognizable face on the planet right now. The clerk manning the small office turned out to be a Copt—a one-in-ten chance in Egypt—and a devout one at that. One look at Brother Ameen’s cassock did the trick. Within minutes, their passports had been stamped, the gates had been opened, and they were climbing up the stairs of the hastily chartered jet. The plan was for the driver to wait and make sure the plane took off unhindered before letting the abbot know it was safe to announce that the priest was no longer at the monastery, in the hope of defusing the tense crowd besieging its walls.

Gracie started to relax as the Gulfstream 450’s wheels lifted off the runway and the sleek fourteen-seater aircraft streaked upward to its cruising altitude, but her relief was short-lived. It only allowed darker thoughts to resurface. Thoughts about Finch. Visions of him, lying there in the sand. Dead.

A veil of grief descended over her. “I wish we hadn’t left him there,” she told Dalton. He was in the seat opposite her, facing back. “It feels awful. Us being here, while he’s . . .” She let the words fade.

“We didn’t have a choice,” Dalton comforted her. “Besides, it’s what he would have wanted us to do.”

“And to think, just when he was covering the story of a lifetime.” She shrugged, thinking back. “After everything he’s been through, all the wars and the disasters . . . to die like that.”

Dalton nodded, and they just sat there quietly, crippled by the loss. After a moment, Dalton said, “We’ve got to tell the folks back home about Finch.”

Gracie nodded quietly.

“We need to give Ogilvy an update on our
ETA
,” he added. “I’ll go talk to the pilot. See if he can patch us in to the desk.”

He pushed himself to his feet, but Gracie’s hand reached out and arrested his move. “Not just yet, okay? Let’s . . . let’s just take a few minutes for ourselves, all right?”

“Sure.” He glanced back at the galley and said, “I’ll see if they have some fresh coffee. You want one?”

“Thanks.” She nodded, then added, “If they’re out, a couple of fingers of Scotch will do just as nicely.”

THE
FALSE
PRIEST
who had chosen to be called Brother Ameen watched Dalton rise from his seat opposite Gracie and head his way. He acknowledged the cameraman with a friendly nod as he walked past him to the back of the plane, then turned away and stared out the window.

It was his first kill on this mission, though he’d killed many times before. The war in his homeland had been brutal. It had turned a lot of young Serbian men like him into heartless killers. Once the war was over, some had been able to smother that aspect of their past and morph back into average, amiable folk. Others liked what they’d discovered in themselves. And some of those, like Dario Arapovic, also discovered that the talents that they’d forged in places like Vukovar and during operations like the Otkos 10 offensive were in strong demand. That region of the world was still unstable. It was an ongoing struggle, and any lull was but a temporary pause in the Great Game. A game that people like Maddox were actively participating in, a game where talents like Dario’s were coveted—and richly rewarded. And his decision had paid off handsomely, for although Dario had taken great pride in playing a covert role in helping shape his homeland’s future, his being picked by Maddox to play this key position in a far more important match was a source of even greater satisfaction.

He would have much preferred not to kill the producer. The risk of detection was high. Equally dangerous was the risk of disrupting a plan that had been working smoothly up until then. The news team had done everything that had been expected of them. They couldn’t have done a better job had they been a covert unit themselves. Finch’s death had disrupted that. They worked well as a team. They saw things and reacted the way they had been expected to. They were professionals, and professionals who knew what they were doing could be counted on to follow a well-thought-out methodology—and to listen to reason and act accordingly. Finch had been an integral part of that. With him gone, a new door had been opened. One that led down an untried path. Someone else would have to replace him. A new producer. A hardhead who might not be as easy to steer as Finch had been.

Still, he’d had no choice. There was no way out of it. He knew Finch wouldn’t have bought into anything he could have come up with to explain his having a satphone, much less one that was encryption-module equipped.

He turned and glanced at Gracie. She was now sitting alone, her shoulders slightly hunched, looking out her window. He knew she wouldn’t bow out because of Finch’s death. She was a pro too. And like all pros, she had drive. Ambition. And the cold, rational ability to compartmentalize tragedies like her producer’s death and carry on.

Which was good.

She still had a role to play. An important one.

HALF
AN
HOUR
after the Gulfstream had taken off from the airport at Alexandria, another aircraft had followed it into the sky and was now shadowing it, a couple of hundred miles back, headed in the same general westerly direction.

The plane, a chartered Boeing 737, was a much larger, and older, aircraft. It had enjoyed stints with various airlines over its twenty-six years of service, though none were as unusual as the one it was undertaking today.

The jet’s hold carried a highly covetable selection of state-of-the-art technology. It included a long range acoustic device, canisters of nanoengineered smart dust, and ultra-silent compressed air launchers. Also stowed there was some decidedly less sophisticated, but equally effective, gear: sniper rifles, silencer-equipped handguns, tactical knives, camouflage gear. The jet’s cabin held a load that was no less exceptional: seven men whose actions had entranced the world. Six of them were highly trained professionals: a three-man team that had spent over a year in the desert, another that had endured extreme weather all over the globe. The seventh was an outlier. He wasn’t highly trained, nor did he share their sense of purpose.

Danny Sherwood was only there out of fear.

He’d been their prisoner for close to two years. Two years of tinkering, of testing and double-testing, of waiting. Two years of worrying, of coming up with devious, complicated plans of escape, of fantasizing about them, of ditching them. And then, finally, it had begun. It was why they’d kept him alive. It was why they needed him. And now it was in play.

He didn’t know what their plans were or how it would all end. He’d heard snippets of talk. He thought he knew what they were up to, but he wasn’t sure. He’d thought of sabotaging it, of screwing up their plans, of re-jigging the software so that a giant Coca-Cola or Red Sox sign appeared instead of the mystical sign they had designed. But he knew they were keeping a close eye on his work, knew they’d probably figure out what he was up to before he got a chance to use it. He also knew that if he tried it, it would mean a death sentence for him, and, probably, for Matt and for their parents. And so he thought about it, he mulled it over and dreamed of it and enjoyed the brief satisfaction it gave him to imagine it, but he knew he’d never go through with it. He wasn’t a fighter. He wasn’t a tough guy.

If they’d taken Matt, he knew things would have been different. But Matt wasn’t there. He was.

He sometimes wished his survival instincts hadn’t kicked in just as the Jeep was launching itself off the canyon’s edge. Wished his hand hadn’t lunged out and pushed that door open. Wished he hadn’t leapt out of the Jeep just as its front wheels ran out of ground. Wished he hadn’t ended up clinging to life at the very edge of the abyss, staring up at the circling bird of prey that was about to land and take him away.