The Sign

by Raymond Khoury

  And yet . . . the very thought scared him.

  The world was a very different place.

  More technologically advanced, undoubtedly. More civilized, perhaps—in certain respects, in certain pockets. But, at its core, it remained as vicious and predatory as it had ever been. Perhaps even more so.

  The monk followed the abbot past the keep, through the courtyard that forked off into the Chapel of the Forty-Nine Martyrs—a single, domed chamber that was dedicated to the monks killed during a Berber raid in the year 444—and into the Church of the Holy Virgin, the monastery’s main place of worship. Mercifully, none of the other monks were there yet, but the abbot knew the solitude wouldn’t last too long.

  He led the monk past the nave and into the khurus—the choir. As he passed the grand wooden portal that separated the two areas, his eyes drifted up to a wall painting adorning a half cupola overhead, a thousand-year-old depiction of the Annunciation that he’d seen countless times. In it, four prophets were gathered around the Holy Virgin and the archangel Gabriel. The abbot found his gaze drawn to the first prophet to the right of the Virgin, Ezekiel, and a chill crawled down his neck at the sight. And for the next hour, as he desperately prayed for guidance, he couldn’t shake the thought of the prophet’s celestial vision from his weary mind: the heavens opening up to a whirlwind of amber fire folding on itself, the wheels of fire in a sky “the color of a terrible crystal,” all of it heralding the voice of God.

  They prayed, side by side, for close to an hour, facing the black, stone altar, prostrating themselves against the cold floor of the chapel in the praying tradition of the early Christians, a posture that was later adopted by Islam.

  “Shouldn’t we have waited longer for him?” Ameen asked. With the sun comfortably ensconced in the eastern sky, they were now—alone—in the monastery’s small, newly restored museum. “What if something’s happened to him?”

  The abbot had been concerned about that himself, and not for the first time. Still, he shrugged stoically. “He’s been up there for months. I should think he knows how to handle the mountain by now. He seems to be coping well.”

  After a quiet beat, the younger monk cleared his throat and asked, “What are we going to do, Father?”

  “I’m not sure what we should do,” the abbot replied. “I don’t understand what’s happening.”

  Ameen’s eyebrows shot up with incredulity. “A miracle. That’s what’s happening.”

  The abbot frowned. “Something we don’t understand is happening, yes. But from there to say it’s a miracle . . .”

  “What other explanation is there?”

  The abbot shook his head, lost for words.

  “You said it yourself,” the younger monk persisted. “The sign you described, what you saw on the news.”

  A confused tangle of images clouded the abbot’s mind. He thought back to that day, in the desert. When their guest had been found, before he took to the caves. The terrible state he was in. His recovery.

  The word miraculous glided into his thoughts again.

  “It doesn’t fit any of the prophecies of our holy book,” he finally said.

  “Why does it need to?”

  The comment took the abbot by surprise. “Come, Brother. Surely you don’t mean to negate the truth in those writings?”

  “We’re living a miracle, Father,” Ameen exclaimed, his voice flushed with excitement. “Not reading about it hundreds of years after the fact, knowing full well it’s been translated and embellished and corrupted by countless hands. Living it. Now. In this modern day and age.” He paused, then added, pointedly, “With all the power of modern communication at our disposal.”

  The abbot’s face contracted with unease. “You want people to know about this?”

  “They already know about the sign. You saw the woman on the news service. Her images and words will have reached millions.”

  “Yes, but . . . until we understand what exactly is happening, we can’t allow this to come out.”

  Ameen spread out his hands questioningly. “Isn’t it evident, Father?”

  The abbot felt cowed by his colleague’s fervent gaze, and nodded thoughtfully. He understood the younger man’s exuberance, but it needed to be reined in. There was no running away from what was happening, of that he had no doubt. He had to face it. He’d been thrust into this unwittingly, and now he needed to do what needed to be done. But with care, and caution.

  “We need to study the scriptures more closely,” he concluded. “Consult with our superiors.” He paused, weighing the hardest part of the task ahead. “Most importantly, we need to go back up to the caves and talk to him. Tell him what’s happened. Perhaps he will know what to make of it.”

  Ameen stepped closer. “Everything you say is reasonable, but it doesn’t detract from the fact that we can’t keep this to ourselves,” he pleaded. “We’ve received a grace from God. We owe it to Him to share it with the world. People need to know, Father. The world needs to know.”

  “Not yet,” the abbot insisted, firmly. “It’s not up to us to decide.”

  The younger monk’s voice rose with concern. “Forgive me, Father, but I believe you’re making a mistake. Others, many others, will undoubtedly try to claim the sign as their own. And in doing so, they will cheapen and corrupt this most sublime of messages. We live in cynical, amoral times. These charlatans will make it harder for the true voice to be heard. Our message could easily be drowned out by impostors and opportunists, irreversibly so. We can’t wait. We have to move quickly before the chaos turns this divine event into a circus.”

  The abbot sat down and sighed wearily, massaging his brow with his calloused hands, feeling the room tightening in around him. The young monk’s words rang true, but he couldn’t bring himself to take that step. The consequences were too frightening to contemplate. He sat there, tongue-tied with uncertainty, staring at the stone floor while the monk hovered nearby, his steps heavy with frustration, waiting. The painting in the chapel crept back into his mind’s eye, and he thought again of Ezekiel’s vision:

  Wheels of fire in a sky the color of a terrible crystal, all of it heralding the voice of God.

  After a moment, the abbot looked up, a frown darkening his face. “It’s not up to us,” he repeated. “We need to consult with the councils and bring the matter to His Holiness. They will decide.”

  AN HOUR LATER, Brother Ameen stood in the shadows and watched from the sanctity of a dark hallway as the library’s curator stepped out of his office.

  He’d failed to convince the abbot. The old man was visibly overwhelmed by what he’d seen and seemed incapable of grasping the enormity of what was happening. But the younger man wasn’t about to let that stop him.

  He needed to take matters into his own hands.

  He waited patiently, his eyes tracking the priest as he ventured across the courtyard and entered the refectory. Moments later, the young monk sneaked into the priest’s office, picked up the telephone, and started dialing.

  Chapter 14

  Less than a mile from the ridge that the two monks and the driver had just climbed down, a boy of fourteen ambled after his small herd with tired feet.

  Despite the early wake-ups, the boy did like the mornings best, as did all seven of his father’s goats. The sun was still low, the valley cloaked by the long shadows of the hills surrounding them. The cool breeze was a welcome alternative to the sun that would soon be bearing down on them, and the purple hues of the barren landscape were also easier on the eyes and, if he allowed himself to think of them that way, more inspirational.

  Humming a tune he’d recently heard on his father’s radio, he rounded an outcropping of rocks and stopped in his tracks at the unexpected sight before him. Three men—soldiers, it seemed, from their outfits—were loading equipment into a dust-caked, canvas-topped pickup truck. Equipment like he’d never seen before. Like the sand-beige, drumlike object, perhaps three feet wide but only five or six inches deep, that sna
red his attention.

  Even though the boy had frozen in place and stopped breathing, the men spotted him instantly. His eyes drew a line of hard, unforgiving stares that seared through the black Ray-Bans the men were wearing. He barely had time to register the familiar gear he’d seen on countless news broadcasts of the war in Iraq—the sand-colored camouflage BDUs, the boots, the sunglasses—before one of the men spat out a brief word and the others dropped what they were doing and took quick strides toward him.

  The boy started to run, but he didn’t make it far. He felt one of the men rush up to him and tackle him from behind, bringing him down into the parched soil headfirst.

  With his heart in his throat, he wondered what the hell they wanted from him, why they’d wrestled him to the ground, why he was biting into the sand and grit that also pricked painfully at his eyes. In a mad frenzy of terror, he tried to squirm around and get onto his back, but the man who sat on him was too heavy and had him solidly pinned down.

  He heard another man’s footsteps crunching their way closer, then glimpsed a pair of military boots from the corner of his eye, looming over him like a demigod.

  He didn’t hear a word.

  He didn’t see the nod.

  And he didn’t feel a thing after the big, practiced hands of the man sitting on top of him quickly and efficiently took up their positions—one around the side of his neck, the other around the other side of his head—and tightened their grip before twisting suddenly and fiercely in opposite directions.

  Swift, Silent, Deadly.

  It was, without a doubt, a well-earned motto.

  Chapter 15

  Amundsen Sea, Antarctica

  “If you figure anything out, call me, okay? Just call me, anytime.” Gracie gave out her satphone number, hung up, and heaved a sigh of frustration.

  Another dead end.

  She mopped her face with her hands before sweeping them tightly through her hair, massaging some life into her scalp. She’d managed to coax some good video bites from Simmons and some of the other scientists on board, and while Dalton was editing it all into a high-def report to broadband back to the news desk in D.C.—much better than the jumpy, grainy Began live feed they’d used for the first broadcast, more Armageddon, less Cloverfield this time around—she’d been working the satphone.

  Her years on the job had allowed her to build up a beefy Rolodex, and right now, she was mining it for all its worth. She spoke to a contact of hers at NASA, a project director she’d met while covering the space shuttle Columbia’s disaster back in 2003. She also called contacts of hers at CalTech and at the Pentagon, as well as the editor of Science magazine and the network’s science and technology guru.

  They were all as baffled as she was.

  She’d hardly hung up when the satphone rang.

  Another reporter, angling for a comment.

  “How are they managing to get hold of this number?” she groaned to Finch.

  He pulled a who-knows face and grabbed the phone for yet another polite, but firm, rebuff. For the moment, it was their exclusive—for better or for worse.

  It’s not that she was camera shy, or that she didn’t like being in the public eye. Far from it. Her career as a TV correspondent wasn’t an accident: She’d wanted it ever since high school. She’d pursued every opportunity to get those breaks, and once she did, she’d worked damn hard at grabbing her share of airtime and overcoming the endemic misogyny and the subtle bullying in the industry. She thrived on the stories she covered and the experiences she shared with her viewers, she loved stepping in front of that camera and telling the world what she’d found out, and undeniably, the camera loved her back. She had that unquantifiable magnetism that went beyond the purely physical. People just tuned in and enjoyed her company. Focus groups confirmed her broad appeal: Women weren’t threatened by her, they took a possessive pride in her expertise, and in an age where public image was everything and every word was carefully weighed for effect, her candor and honesty were a big draw; men, while readily admitting that they fancied the pants off her, more often than not pointed out how they found her brain to be just as much of a turn-on.

  And so she’d gone from local reporter at a network affiliate in Wisconsin to weekend anchor at a bigger affiliate in Illinois and eventually to anchor and special correspondent for the network’s flagship Special Investigations Unit. In the process, she’d become a face America trusted, whether she was reporting from Kuwait in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, on board a Greenpeace vessel stalking Japanese whaling ships, or following the unfolding tragedies of the tsunami in Thailand and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.

  More recently, she’d been unwittingly drawn into the emotionally charged debate on global warming. She’d approached the issue as a skeptic, her instincts compelling her to question—on air—the often lazy assumptions of the ever-more-fashionable, almost religious, environmental movement. She knew how unreliable long-term forecasts were, how history was littered with the failed predictions of the most brilliant minds on everything from population levels to oil prices, and she hadn’t minced her words when voicing her skepticism. Up until then, her honesty and integrity had served her well. On this issue, her candor proved to be a problem. The reaction had been nothing less than incendiary. She was lambasted for her doubts from all corners, and her career had hung in the balance.

  She decided the subject matter merited her attention, whichever side of the fence she ended up on. She pitched a comprehensive, no-holds-barred, in-depth documentary tackling the issue, and the network’s brass signed off on it. And so, with the vast majority of her colleagues mired in the quicksands of the marathon election campaign back home, she focused her energies on examining all the available data on the climate issue and meeting everyone who mattered. She was soon convinced that greenhouse gases had undoubtedly risen in the last few decades, and the earth did appear to be warming, but she still needed to find out if the connection between the two was as direct as it was now being portrayed. And so she’d crisscrossed the globe, from the remote science station of Cherskii in Siberia, where 40,000-year-old permafrost was now thawing and, in the process, releasing huge amounts of greenhouse gases, to Greenland, where massive glaciers were sliding toward the sea at a rate of two yards every hour, taking a forensic look at every new report on the matter during her travels.

  Her investigative claws sharpened when she looked into the Global Climate Coalition, the Information Council of the Environment, and the Greening Earth Society—all of them cleverly misnamed, created and funded by the automotive, petroleum, and coal industries with the sole purpose of deceiving the public by spreading disinformation and callously repositioning global warming as theory rather than fact. It didn’t take long for her to become more and more convinced that the planet was indeed in trouble because of us. What was far less clear, however, was what we could realistically—and pragmatically—do about it. That was a far more contentious, and troubling, debate, and one she felt very passionate about.

  But she hadn’t expected it to lead to this.

  She breathed out with exasperation. “I’m getting nothing here. You having better luck?” she asked Finch as she got out of her chair and walked over to the window to scan the skies.

  Finch had been talking to the news desk back in D.C. and trawling through his own contacts list. “Nope. If it’s natural, no one’s seen anything like it. And if it’s not, they’re all telling me the technology to pull off something like this just doesn’t exist.”

  “We don’t know that,” Dalton objected, looking up from his monitor. “I’m sure there’s a lot of stuff out there that we don’t know about.”

  “Yes, but what we don’t know about doesn’t really matter in this case, because there’s nothing we know about that even comes close.”

  “You lost me.”

  “Technology breakthroughs—they have to start somewhere,” Finch explained. “They don’t just come out of nowhere. No one suddenly came up w
ith cell phones. It started with Alexander Graham Bell two hundred years ago. There’s a progression. Regular phone, cordless home phones, digital phones, and eventually, cell phones . . . Stealth fighters—we didn’t know about them, but they’re just evolutions of other fighter planes. You see what I mean? Technology evolves. And that thing we saw . . . there doesn’t seem to be anything out there that we can point to and say, ‘Well, if we took that and made it bigger, or more powerful, or used it in such a way, it could explain it.’ It’s in a whole different ballpark. And everyone’s trying to figure it out. I mean, look at this.” He pulled up the latest e-mail from D.C. “It’s going ballistic,” he enthused. “Reuters, AP, CNN. They’re all carrying it. Every station from London to Beijing is running it. Same for the big news blogs. Drudge, Huffington. It’s been voted up to number one on Digg and we’ve crossed two hundred thousand hits on YouTube. And the chat rooms are just going nuts over it.”

  “What are they saying?”

  “From what I can see, people are in one of three camps. Some of them think it’s some kind of harmless stunt, a CGI, War of the Worlds kind of thing. Others also think it’s a con but they see something more sinister in it, and they’re throwing out all kinds of crazy ideas about how it could have been pulled off, none of which seem to hold water if you read the mocking replies they’re getting from people who seem to know what they’re talking about.”

  “Is there anyone who doesn’t think we’re behind it?”

  “Yep. The third group: the pro camp. The ones who believe it’s the real thing—real as in God, not ET. One of them called us ‘the heralds of the Second Coming.’ ”

  “Well that makes me feel so much better,” she groaned, her chest tightening with unease. Greed and fear were tugging at her. Part of her was thrilled by the idea of being the face of the hottest story around—she couldn’t deny that—but the more reasoned side of her was clamoring for restraint. She knew what she’d seen; she just didn’t know what it was. And until she did, she was uncomfortable with how it was all spiraling out of control. If it turned out to be something less momentous than everyone was suggesting, she could already picture Jon Stewart ridiculing her into an early retirement.