The Sign

by Raymond Khoury

  Finch spun the laptop back and tapped some more keys. “And speaking of ET,” he said as he glanced pointedly across at Dalton, “a guy I know at the Discovery Channel sent me these.” He turned the screen back so it was facing them. “Some of them are the ones you’d expect, like clouds and Concorde contrails that make people think they’re seeing UFOs. I don’t know if I should be surprised, but he tells me there are over two hundred reported UFO sightings a month in America. A month. But then, there’s a whole slew of historic references to unexplained sightings going back thousands of years. We’re talking hundreds of references throughout history about bright balls of fire, flying ‘earthenware vessels,’ luminous discs. It’s not just a modern phenomenon. I mean, check out these historical records: ‘Japan, 1458: An object as bright as the full moon and followed by curious signs was observed in the sky.’ Or this one: ‘London, 1593: A flying dragon surrounded by flames was seen hovering over the city.’ ”

  “Opium’ll do that to you every time,” Dalton half-joked. “Seriously. Drugs were legal back then, weren’t they?”

  “Besides, none of these references are even remotely verifiable,” Gracie added.

  “Sure, but the thing is, there are so many of them. Written continents apart, at a time when traveling from one to another was virtually impossible, when most of the world was illiterate. Even the Bible’s got them.”

  “Big surprise there,” Gracie scoffed. A charged silence hung between them. “So what are we saying? What do you think we saw?”

  Finch pulled off his glasses and used his sleeve to give them a wipe as he thought about it. “I’d have said mass hallucination if it wasn’t for the footage.” He shook his head slowly in disbelief, slipped his glasses back on, and looked up at Gracie. “I can’t explain it.”

  “Dalton?” she asked.

  His face clouded with uncertainty. He leaned back in his chair and ran his hands tightly through his hair. “I don’t know. There was something . . . ethereal about it, you know? It didn’t look flat, like something projected, but then it didn’t look like something hard and physical either. It’s hard to explain. There was something much more organic, much more visceral about it. Like it was part of the sky, like the sky itself had lit up, you know what I’m saying?”

  “I do,” Gracie agreed uncomfortably. The sight of the bright, glowing sign, as vivid as when she first saw it, materialized in her mind’s eye. An upwelling of elation, the same one she felt when she first saw it, overcame her again as she remembered how it had formed itself out of nothing. It was as if the air itself had been summoned by God, lit up from within into that shape, she found herself thinking. Which didn’t sit well with her. She’d stopped believing in God when her mother died, ripped away from her young daughter by an unrelenting tumor in her breast. And now, here it was, this unexplained thing in the sky. As if it were taunting her.

  She pushed the thought away. Get a grip. We’re running ahead of ourselves here. There’s got to be a logical explanation for it.

  But a nagging question kept coming back.

  What if there isn’t?

  Gracie stared out the window, scanning the sky for another sighting, her jumbled mind desperate for an answer. The satphone rang, and as Finch stretched across the table to answer it, her mind migrated to a UFO hoax from a year earlier. The clip, showing a UFO buzzing a beach in Haiti, had clocked up over five million viewings on YouTube within days of its posting, hogging chat rooms and news aggregator sites across the Web and popping up on every FunWall on Facebook. Millions were taken in by it—until it turned out to be something a French computer animator had put together in a few hours on his MacBook, using commercially available software, reluctantly explaining it away as a “sociological experiment” for a movie—about a UFO hoax, natch—that he was working on. With the advances in special effects and the proliferation of faked videos of such high quality that they managed to convince even the most staunch of skeptics, a subtle question arose in Gracie’s mind: Would people recognize a “true” event of this kind when—as it seemed—it really happened? She knew what she saw. It was right there in front of her, but everyone else was only seeing it on a screen. And without seeing it with their own eyes, could they ever accept it for what it was, something wondrous and inexplicable and possibly even supernatural or divine—or would it be drowned in a sea of cynicism?

  “Gracie,” Finch called out, covering the phone’s mouthpiece with his hand.

  She turned.

  His face had a confused scrunch to it. “It’s for you.”

  “Now what?” she grumbled.

  “I’m not sure, but . . . it’s coming from Egypt. And I think you need to take it.”

  Chapter 16

  Boston, Massachusetts

  There were no cabs around, but it didn’t take too long for Matt to get back to his car. The van hadn’t traveled that far from the bar before he’d dived out of it. He would’ve made it back sooner, but he wasn’t at his best. He felt groggy and nauseous, his skin had been scraped raw in several places, and every bone in his body felt like it had been hammered by a blacksmith on steroids. And, as if to add insult to injury, it was snowing again.

  He was relieved to find his car, a highland-green 1968 Mustang GT 390 “Bullitt” Fastback that was his next restoration project, still where he’d left it, close to the bar on Emerson. It hadn’t even occurred to him to check for his keys before he got to it, but, mercifully, they were also still there, safely ensconced in the pocket of his peacoat.

  Just a couple of small miracles to cap off a magical night.

  Less miraculous, though, was the fact that he’d lost his cell phone. He guessed it had probably flown out of the pocket of his coat during his hard landing on the asphalt, though he didn’t dwell on it. He had more pressing concerns.

  He leaned against the car and caught his breath, and the brutal images of a helpless Bellinger getting fried and injected roared back into his mind’s eye. He had to do something to try and help him, but he couldn’t see a move that made sense. He couldn’t report it to the cops. The van was long gone, and the inevitable questions he’d be asked, given his record, would only cloud the issue. More to the point, he didn’t think the risk of flagging his whereabouts to the goon squad who’d come after Bellinger was outweighed by any positive effect it would have on helping the cops find Bellinger and bringing him back safely.

  Which, somehow, he didn’t think was going to happen anyway.

  The traffic was light and scattered as he drove home, the city now tucked in under a thin blanket of snow. He was on the expressway within minutes, and from there, it was only a short hop down to Quincy and the studio apartment he lived in over his workshop. As he cruised south, his mind grinded over what had happened to him, trying to make sense of the rush of events that had come at him from nowhere and figure out what the right move would be.

  Bellinger had called. He’d asked for a meeting, one that couldn’t wait. He’d then hit him with the news that his brother might have been murdered, or that his death might have been faked and that he might be locked up somewhere. How had he put it, exactly? Working on it, against their will?

  Danny, alive—but locked up somewhere?

  The thought flooded Matt’s gut with equal doses of elation—and rage. Matt and Danny had always been close, which never failed to amaze their friends, given how different they were. For a start, they didn’t look anything like each other. Matt, three years older, had inherited his dad’s olive skin, dark hair, and solid build, whereas Danny—two shades fairer and fifty pounds lighter—took after his mom. The stark difference between them extended to, well, pretty much everything else. Matt had no patience for classes or for schoolwork, whereas Danny had an insatiable appetite for learning. Matt lettered in as many sports as he could cram into his schedule. Danny couldn’t sink a basket if he was sitting on the backboard. Off campus, the contrast between the two brothers wasn’t any less pronounced. Matt was irreverent, wild, and reckl
ess—in other words, a babe-magnet. Danny was far more introverted and preferred the company of the computer he’d found in a junk shop and rebuilt in his bedroom. Still, despite it all, they had a bond that was unshakable, a deep understanding of each other that survived the nastiest taunts and the most callous temptations that high school could throw at them.

  Their friendship had also survived Matt’s repeated collisions with the law.

  As with a lot of cases like his, things had started small. Matt had built his first car at the age of thirteen, hooking up an old washing-machine engine to a soap-box derby car that became something of a fixture around his neighborhood. The local cops were amazed and even the hardheaded sticklers among them couldn’t quite bring themselves to take away his pride and joy—a relationship that would change dramatically over the years. For as he grew older, the disparity between his love of cars, on the one hand, and the bleak part-time work prospects available to him in the Worcester area and his parents’ wafer-thin bank account, on the other, became more frustrating. Headstrong and impatient, Matt sought to redress that imbalance his own way.

  Those early escapades were classic Matt. He didn’t go after any old ride. He would trawl the more affluent neighborhoods of Boston for specific cars on his hit list. He also never crashed or trashed the cars he stole, nor did he ever try to sell them. He would merely abandon them in some parking lot once he’d had the chance to sample them. He managed to test-drive quite a few before he got caught. The judge he came up against on that first conviction wasn’t amused or impressed by his antics.

  That inaugural stint behind bars proved to have far-reaching consequences. Upon his release from jail, it didn’t take long for Matt to realize how his life had changed. Work prospects dried up. Friends shied away from him. People looked at him in a different way. He had changed too. Trouble seemed to come looking for him, as if sensing it had a willing customer. His hardworking, God-fearing parents were overwhelmed and paralyzed by his wild streak. They didn’t have the good sense or the strength of character to offer him the guidance he needed. His underpaid and corrupt parole officer was even less of a candle in the dark. And despite Danny’s repeated, frustrated arguments about where this was headed, Matt ended up dropping out of high school before graduation, and from there, his life just spiraled out of control. He spent the next few years rotating in and out of jail for theft, criminal damage to property, and battery, among others, his future withering away while Danny’s blossomed, first at MIT, then at a highly paid job in a tech company based nearby.

  As he motored across the Neponset River, Matt ruefully remembered how he hadn’t seen much of Danny before his death. Matt had only been released from jail a few months before Danny had been offered the job with Reece, and he hadn’t seen much of him after that. Matt had been busy setting up his business—with the help of a life-altering loan from his kid brother, he thought with a twinge of shame. In a sense, he owed him his life.

  It was Danny who’d sat him down and talked some sense into him—finally. Made him realize he couldn’t keep doing this. And got him to straighten up.

  The way out Danny had suggested was simple. Turn what did the damage in the first place into something positive. Use it to carve out a new life. And Matt listened. He found a small car shop in Quincy that was closing down, and took over the lease. The plan he and Danny came up with was for him to find and fix up classic cars. Matt had a soft spot for American muscle cars from the sixties and seventies, like the Mustang he was now driving, a highly collectible model, a car he and Danny had fantasized about owning ever since they’d watched Steve McQueen catapult one across the streets of San Francisco—a movie they’d only seen about three dozen times. He knew it would be hard to part with it once he was done restoring it, but with a bit of luck, he’d be able to sell it for seventy grand, maybe more, probably to some deskbound executive in need of a weekend toy. In the heady days before the credit crunch, Matt had built up a solid reputation in car enthusiast circles. He’d even sold a couple to guys whose cars he’d stolen years earlier, not that they knew it. Things had been looking up for him, all while Danny had been sucked into the black hole of his new job. A black hole that had ultimately swallowed up his life.

  Or had it?

  Was it possible that Danny was still alive?

  Bellinger had made a convincing argument for it. And he’d been grabbed seconds after making it. That had to mean something.

  Whether Danny was still alive or not, the idea that they’d all been lied to, that someone knew the truth and had kept it from them—the idea that someone, not fate, had taken Danny away from them—felt like acid in his throat.

  He wasn’t about to let it slide.

  He took the Willard Street exit and turned into Copeland after the roundabout, and his fury swelled even more as he thought back to how the news of Danny’s death had devastated their parents. It was bad enough their eldest son was a convicted felon. To lose Danny too—their pride and joy, the redeemer of the family name—was too much to bear. Their mom had died a couple of months later. Despite the complicated medical terminology the doctors insisted on using, Matt knew it was simply a case of a broken heart. He also knew he was partly to blame. He knew the havoc raging in her veins started the day he’d been arrested that first time, if not earlier. His dad hadn’t fared much better. Danny’s job came with life coverage, and though the insurance payout paid for the nursing home and allowed their dad some minor touches of additional comfort, he’d been left a demolished man. He and Matt had hardly spoken at his mom’s funeral, and Matt hadn’t been out to see him since that bleak day in January. Then almost a year to the day later, the local sheriff, a craggy old nemesis, had managed to track Matt down to his garage in Quincy and given him the news of his dad’s death. A stroke, he’d said, although Matt had his doubts about that too.

  Bellinger’s words echoed in his mind. Someone had taken Danny, and it was linked to something that just happened in the skies of Antarctica. It sounded outlandish and surreal. Only it clearly wasn’t. The guys he’d just gone up against were very real. Highly professional. Well equipped. Ruthless. And not overly concerned with discretion.

  The implications of that last point were particularly worrying.

  He coasted east on Copeland, the Mustang’s forty-year-old headlights struggling to break through the swarm of cottonlike snowflakes. With no other cars around, the snow had had time to settle, covering the road ahead with a thin, undisturbed white duvet. He passed Buckley and motored on until he reached the 7-Eleven and the turnoff into the alleyway that led to his shop, and just before turning into it, a remote corner of his mind registered a set of tire tracks in the fresh snow.

  They belonged to a single car that had veered off Copeland. He couldn’t see down the alley. His shop was tucked away about a hundred yards back from the main road, and there were no streetlights that way, but the tire tracks were more than enough to trip his internal alarm, as they could only have been heading to his place. There was nothing else down there.

  Problem was, he wasn’t expecting anyone.

  Which didn’t bode well for the rest of his magical night.

  Chapter 17

  Amundsen Sea, Antarctica

  “You need to come here. There’s something you need to see.” The caller wasn’t a native English speaker, and Gracie couldn’t place his accent. And although he spoke slowly and deliberately, his words were laced with an urgency that came through loud and clear, despite the less-than-crystal clarity of the satellite link.

  “Slow down a second,” Gracie said. “Who are you exactly, and how’d you get this number?”

  “My name is Ameen. Brother Ameen, if you like.”

  “And you’re calling from Egypt?”

  “Yes. From Deir Al-Suryan—the Monastery of the Syrians, in Wadi Natrun.”

  Her internal kook-alert monitor, which had already moved up to yellow before the man had even started talking, got a slight nudge up to blue.


  “And how’d you get this number?” she asked again, a slight edge to her voice now.

  “I called your Cairo bureau.”

  “And they gave it to you?”

  Much as her vexation was clear, the man wasn’t going out of his way to placate her. Instead, he simply said, “I told them I was calling on behalf of Father Jerome.”

  The name bounced around Gracie’s tired mind for a moment, before landing on the obvious association. “What, the Father Jerome?”

  “Yes,” he assured her. “The very same.”

  Her monitor took a step back to yellow. “And you’re calling on his behalf from Egypt? Is that where he is?”

  It suddenly occurred to her that she hadn’t read anything about the world famous humanitarian for quite a while. Which was unusual, given his highly public, if reluctantly so, profile, and given the huge organization that he’d founded and still ran, as far as she knew.

  “Yes, he’s here. He’s been here for almost a year.”

  “Okay, well, now that you’ve got me on the line,” she said, “what’s this about?”

  “You need to come here. To see Father Jerome.”

  This surprised her. “Why?”

  “We saw your broadcast. You were the one to see the sign. You brought it to the world.”

  “ ‘ The sign’ ? ”

  Dalton and Finch were eyeing her curiously. She gave them an I’m-not-sure-where-this-is-going shrug.