The Sign

by Raymond Khoury

  “Let’s make it thirty,” Jabba said and nodded reluctantly. He pulled up the tracker’s website. He didn’t need to key in the tracker’s number—it was now stored on a cookie. He waited a couple of seconds for the ping to echo back, then zoomed in on the map.

  “He’s stationary. Somewhere by the name of Hanscom Field,” he told Matt. “Hang on.” He pulled up another website. Punched in his query. Waited a couple of seconds for it to upload. “It’s a small airport between Bedford and Concord. And I’m logging off before they track us.” He killed the phone, checked his watch—twenty-six seconds total—and turned to Matt.

  Matt chewed it over quickly. A small airfield. He wondered what Maddox was doing there. He also liked the idea of maybe being able to surprise Maddox and get up close and personal with him outside the man’s comfort zone.

  He glanced at the clock on the dashboard. It wasn’t far, even with the holiday traffic building up. A half hour, forty minutes maybe. “That’s just outside the ninety-five, isn’t it?”

  Jabba’s face sank. “Yep,” he shrugged.

  “Check it again in fifteen minutes or so, will ya? Keep making sure he’s still there.”

  Jabba nodded grimly and sagged into his seat, sucking in a deep breath and anticipating the worst.

  MADDOX HUNG UP with his contact at the NSA and scowled. He scanned the skies instinctively for the incoming jet, but his mind was now preoccupied elsewhere.

  He’d received three consecutive calls. The first one was innocuous enough: The learning software had delivered on its promise, and the targets were just north of the city, heading into town. The second call told him the targets had changed direction and were now heading west on the Concord Turnpike, which, with hindsight, should have raised an eyebrow, but hadn’t. The third call, though, was seriously troubling. The targets had turned north once they’d hit I-95, and were now less than five miles away from the airfield.

  Which was, again, seriously troubling. For the simple reason that Maddox didn’t believe in blind luck any more than he believed in coincidences. And it was the second time Matt had managed to track him down that day. Which meant he was either psychic, or he had an advantage Maddox wasn’t aware of.

  Yet.

  His mind did a one-eighty and ran a full-spectrum sweep of everything that had happened since he’d first come across Matt Sherwood. He shelved details he thought extraneous and focused on establishing causal links between that first encounter and the present moment and running them against the background skills he knew Matt possessed.

  All of which colluded to draw his attention across to his car.

  He took a half step closer to it, his eyes scrutinizing it as his operational instincts assessed what the likely culprit could be.

  And frowned at the realization.

  He wouldn’t have time to have the car checked out. Which meant there was a chance he’d have to leave it there for now. Which pissed him off even more. He really liked that car. He checked his watch. The jet’s arrival was imminent.

  He looked around. The airfield was quiet, as it normally was. Which was good. He decided it was time to put an end to Matt Sherwood’s unexpected intrusions—permanently—and waved over two of his men who were waiting nearby.

  “I think we’re about to have some company,” he told them.

  Then he told them what he wanted to do about it.

  Chapter 51

  Deir Al-Suryan Monastery, Wadi Natrun, Egypt

  “Finch!” Gracie’s cry shook the walls of the monastery as she dropped to the ground at his side. She was shaking. The blood drained from her face, and her hands shot up to her open mouth. Finch’s body just lay there, in front of her, flat against the desert sand. He was on his front, motionless, the puff of dust that he’d kicked up when he’d slammed into the ground drifting back down and settling around him.

  Slowly, her hands came down and hovered over him, not daring to touch him. The others, led by Dalton, all rushed to her side.

  “Is he . . . ?” Dalton couldn’t say it.

  There were no visible open wounds, no blood seeping out. It didn’t make the sight any less horrific. His head, which must have hit the ground first, was twisted sideways at an impossible angle. He had one arm bent backward, and his eyes were staring lifelessly at the parched soil.

  “Oh my God. Finch,” Gracie sobbed as she stared at him, not sure what to do. Her hands finally dropped down onto his body, her fingers pressing softly against his neck, searching for a pulse or for any sign of life she knew she wasn’t going to find.

  She looked at Dalton through teary eyes and shook her head.

  Dalton was shaking. He put his arms around Gracie, his eyes also locked on his fallen friend’s body. The monks, waiting hesitantly behind Father Jerome and the abbot, started murmuring some prayers. After a moment, Gracie pulled her hand back, then gently brushed a few errant strands of hair off Finch’s forehead and gave his cheek a gentle caress, staring at him, wanting to slide his eyelids shut but not daring to touch them. She sensed movement behind her, turned, and saw Father Jerome advance hesitantly, his gaze locked on Finch. The holy man took a few more steps until he was standing right next to her, then he knelt down beside her, softly, his concentration still focused on Finch’s dead body.

  A shiver of anticipation rolled through her. What is he doing? She watched with rapt attention as he leaned in closer, held out his hands over Finch, and shut his eyes in silent prayer. For a fleeting moment, a wild notion rose within her, an impossible, absurd notion—that she was about to witness something miraculous, that Father Jerome was actually going to intervene with the heavens and bring her friend back from the dead. Her heart leapt into her mouth as she sat there, crippled with fear and hope, and she tried to hold onto that crazy possibility as long as she could, flashing to all the other impossible things she’d witnessed over the last few days and trying to convince herself that anything was now possible, clutching at it with raging desperation even as it slipped away as quickly as it had arisen, driven out by the sight of Finch’s mangled, still-dead body and the cold logic that had always guided her. A devastating sense of grief soon came rolling back in and numbed every nerve in her body.

  She looked over at Father Jerome, who opened his eyes and made a cross over Finch’s head. He turned to face her with a look of profound sadness, and took her hands in his.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said simply.

  His expression, Gracie saw, was also riven with guilt. She nodded, but said nothing. He rose and shuffled back to join his brethren. The abbot and Brother Ameen were standing a few steps back, and as Father Jerome reached them, the abbot put a consoling hand on his shoulder, and he and the younger monk murmured some words to him. Gracie turned to Dalton, then glanced up at the top of the keep. Its sand-colored edge contrasted sharply against the backdrop of clear blue sky. It looked like a close-up one would find on a hip postcard or coffee table book, disconcertingly perfect with its striking pastel colors—too perfect to have hosted such an ugly death.

  “How . . . ,” she muttered. “How could he fall like that?”

  Dalton shook his head slowly, still in shock. “I don’t know.” His eyes went wide. “Do you think someone out there took a shot at him? Was he shot?”

  Gracie looked at him with sudden horror, then bent back down to Finch’s side. Dalton bent down with her. She hesitated; then, with trembling fingers, she straightened Finch’s arms and legs and, slowly, turned him over. She scanned his front, but couldn’t see any bullet wound.

  “It doesn’t look like it,” she said. “I didn’t hear a shot, did you?”

  “No.” Dalton looked mystified. He turned his gaze back up at the top of the keep. “The lip of that wall up there, it’s so low. Maybe he was leaning over to tell us he found it and just . . .” His voice trailed off.

  Gracie scanned the ground around them. The satphone glinted at her from a few feet away, half-buried in the sand. She scanned wider. Spotted it. A small b
lack box, lying by the base of the keep’s wall. Finch’s BlackBerry. She got up, retrieved the satphone, then padded over to the wall. She picked up the BlackBerry and just stared at it, brushing the sand off it with her fingers, imagining Finch’s last moments in her mind’s eye as he found it on the roof and crossed over to the edge for—what, one last look? a wave? She wished there was some way to go back and stop him from climbing up there and having his life grind to a halt in one cruel and sudden moment. But there was no going back. She knew that. She’d seen enough deaths in her years and had learned, long ago, to accept their finality.

  “What are we going to do?” she asked. Her eyes, still teary, drifted past Dalton, to Father Jerome, the abbot, and Brother Ameen, who were behind him, and the macabre contingent of monks slightly farther back.

  “We’ve got to go,” Dalton told her, his voice hollow.

  “What about Finch? We can’t leave him here like this.”

  “We can’t take him with us,” he replied softly. “We just can’t.”

  After a brief moment, she nodded, still reluctantly but with a hint of clarity seeping back into her. “You’re right,” she said. She looked over at the abbot. “Can you . . . ?”

  Sparing her the need to say it, the abbot nodded solemnly. “Of course,” he told her. “We’ll take care of him until we can send him home . . . properly.” He paused, as if to make sure she was all right with that, then glanced over at the Previa and the men huddled around it. She followed his gaze. The faint drone of the radio was still there, threatening like a malevolent siren.

  “You should go now,” he added, “as planned.”

  AS THEY GATHERED THEIR GEAR, Gracie and Dalton watched as a few monks, aided by the driver, lifted Finch’s body onto a makeshift stretcher—an old door that they’d lifted off its hinges—and carried him inside the main chapel. Four other monks picked up the rest of the news crew’s gear, and the small troupe followed the abbot out of the sun-soaked courtyard and into the cool darkness of the monastery.

  They trudged past the entrance of the Church of the Holy Virgin and the refectory, until they reached an ancient, unlit stairwell.

  “You’ll need the lamps from here on,” the abbot instructed. The monks lit up a succession of small, camping gas lanterns, casting a cool white pallor across the stone passage. Slowly, they descended a narrow staircase, kicking up a fine mist of pungent dust, and landed in another passage that led them past a couple of olive-oil cellars, where some of the world’s earliest dated books—brought to the monastery by monks fleeing religious persecution in Syria and Baghdad in the eighth century—had been discovered in the mid-1800s, and on to the entrance of Saint Bishoi’s cave.

  The abbot pushed the crumbling timber door open and led them in. The cave was dark and narrow, no bigger than a small bedroom. Gracie held her lantern up for a closer look. The cave’s floor was begrimed with dirt, its ceiling vaulted with rough-hewn stone. She saw nothing to support the legend she’d read about during the downtime on their journey over—the legend that Bishoi’s devotion to his faith was so powerful that he used to tie his hair to a chain that dangled from the roof of the cave, to make sure he didn’t fall asleep for days on end while awaiting the vision of Christ that he was praying for.

  “It’s this way,” the abbot said.

  Gracie swung her lantern in his direction. In a corner of the cave, to the left of the doorway, skulked another rotting timber door, this one even smaller than the one leading into the cave. Two monks helped the abbot pull it open, smothering the tight space with more dust. Gracie edged closer and spotted the entrance to the narrow, low tunnel. It was no more than five feet high and three across, a black hole that sucked in the dim gaslight just as it had barely made it inside.

  “God be with you,” the abbot told Father Jerome as, one by one, they dropped their heads and clambered into the tight passage. Gracie was the last one in. She hesitated for a moment, still choking inside at the thought of abandoning Finch, before nodding a parting half smile at the abbot, clenching her jaw with stoic acceptance, and disappearing into the tunnel’s oppressive darkness.

  Chapter 52

  Bedford, Massachusetts

  Matt slowed the Camry right down as the woods on either side of the two-lane road gave way to a handful of low office buildings that dozed behind snow-dusted lawns.

  He slid a sideways glance at Jabba and said, “Heads up,” before scanning the surroundings.

  There were no other cars on the road, and the area seemed very sedate. They cruised past the entrance to a small air force base that was tucked away to their right. A lone, bored guard manned its flimsy red-and-white barrier. The base shared its runway with the adjacent civilian airfield, but little else. From what they could see, it seemed austere and outdated, a stark contrast to the two swanky flight services buildings farther down the road that catered to the well-heeled clientele who favored flying their private jets into Hanscom Field to avoid the air traffic delays and heavy-handed security at Boston’s Logan Airport—the twin wonders of twenty-first-century air travel.

  The approach road led to the civilian air terminal, which wasn’t exactly a hotbed of activity either. There, it doglegged left, then looped back on itself, ringing a disproportionately large, trapezoidal, asphalted central space that served as the visitors’ parking lot. Matt counted less than a dozen cars parked there, and none that he recognized.

  The hangars and planes were to his right, on the outside of the ring road, across the street from the parking lot. The high-pitched whine of a taxiing jet could be heard behind one of the two main hangars. Given that we lived in a post-9/11 world, the low-level security was surprising. A pretty basic chain-link fence, seven feet high at best, with an extra foot on top canted outward, was all that separated the road from the apron. You could practically reach through the fence and touch the planes that were dotted around the hangar area. As he drove around the return leg of the road, Matt saw two entry points to the airfield. Again, surprisingly basic: chain-link rolling fences, two cars wide, that slid sideways on small metal wheels. No guardhouses. No guards. Just a swipe-card reader and an intercom on a stalk for those who weren’t regular visitors.

  “Check it again,” Matt told Jabba. “We need a tighter fix on the bastard.”

  “I don’t know, dude,” Jabba replied warily. “We’re too close.”

  “Just don’t break your forty-second rule and we’ll be fine, right?”

  Jabba studied him with a wry look. “You think that cocky optimism of yours might have anything to do with your getting that priority pass to prison?”

  “Nah. Back then, I was just reckless,” Matt quipped.

  “Didn’t really need to know that right now,” Jabba groaned as he fired up his laptop and phone. He zoomed right in on the linked Google map, then killed the connection. The tracker was about four hundred yards ahead, at the far edge of the apron, just before the tree line, beyond the second hangar and what looked like a smaller outbuilding.

  “What’s he doing in there?” Jabba asked.

  “Either dropping someone off or, more likely, meeting someone who’s flying in.” Matt twisted around, scanning the perimeter. He glimpsed a small private jet crossing from behind one hangar to another. It was rolling toward the tracker’s position.

  Matt’s pulse quickened with a jolt of urgency. His instincts told him he needed to be in there—fast. He frowned at the near gate, giving his options a quick run-through, then saw the other gate, the one farther down and closer to the tracker, open up. He tensed—but it wasn’t the Merc, or the 300C, coming out. Just a silver Town and Country minivan, idling as the gate rolled back.

  He nudged the throttle, propelling the Camry forward, its narrow tires giving out a tortured squeal. The car accelerated down the ring road, the airfield’s perimeter fence to its right. He was eighty yards away when the gate had rolled back far enough for the minivan to nose forward. Sixty yards away when the minivan had cleared the gate, turned ri
ght, and was driving off. Forty yards away when the gate had clicked to a stop and started to roll back. Twenty yards away when the gate was halfway shut—and closing. Which, given that it was two cars wide, meant the math wasn’t on his side.

  Matt didn’t lift his foot. Fifteen yards from the gate, he twisted the steering wheel left to send the car swerving wide before flicking it right again while giving the gas pedal a violent kick. The Camry’s soft shock absorbers went into cardiac arrest as the rear end swung around and the small car leaned dangerously to the left, the momentum shifting its entire weight onto its two left tires—but Matt got what he wanted. The car had fishtailed into a position perpendicular to the gate and was now rushing toward it. Matt kept his foot down and threaded the Camry in, flying past the gate’s fixed post, while scraping the car’s right side against the incoming edge.

  They were in.

  THE BULLET WATCHED attentively as the Citation X veered left on the wide apron and pulled up between the outbuilding and the edge of the tree line, by the parked Merc and the 300C.

  The X was a fabulous piece of engineering. Its Rolls-Royce turbofan engines took it to within a whisker of Mach 1, which meant it could fly twelve passengers from New York to L.A. in under four hours and in the height of luxury. Little wonder, Maddox mused, that it was the private-jet-du-jour for the lucky Forbes-level big-hitters who weren’t even aware there was a credit crunch going on: the biggest Hollywood stars, free-spending Russian tycoons—and evangelist preachers. Humble servants of the Lord like Kenneth and Gloria Copeland, who got their megachurch’s army of faithful followers to stump up twenty million dollars for their customized X to help them follow God’s personal directive and spread His word more efficiently.

  The Bullet had used the spot before: It was tucked away at the far end of the airfield, away from prying eyes. It was well suited for whisking certain camera-shy clients in and out of the city unnoticed—usually, post-operative or post-scandal celebrities, or masters of the universe putting together sensitive transactions.