The Sign

This one’s for Suellen

The idea that religion and politics don’t mix was invented by the Devil to keep Christians from running their own country.

—Jerry Falwell

My kingdom is not of this world.

—Jesus Christ (John 18:36)

A
s the bottom of the ravine rushed up to meet him, the dry, rocky landscape hurtling past Danny Sherwood miraculously slowed right down to a crawl. Not that the extra time was welcome. All it did was allow the realization to play itself out, over and over, in his harrowed mind. The gut-wrenching, agonizing realization that, without a shadow of a doubt, he would be dead in a matter of seconds.

And yet the day had started off with so much promise.

After almost three years, his work—his and the rest of the team’s—was finally done. And, he thought with an inward grin, the rewards would soon be his to enjoy.

It had been a hard slog. The project itself had been daunting enough, from a scientific point of view. The work conditions—the tight deadline, the even tighter security, the virtual exile from family and friends for all those intense and lonely months—were even more of a challenge. But today, as he had looked up at the pure blue sky and breathed in the dry, dusty air of this godforsaken corner of the planet, it all seemed worthwhile.

There would be no
IPO
, that much had been made clear from the start. Neither Microsoft nor Google would be paying big bucks to acquire the technology. The project, he’d been told, was being developed for the military. Still, a significant on-success bonus had been promised to every member of the team. In his case, it would be enough to provide financial security for him, his parents back home, and for any not-too-overly profligate wife he might end up with along with as many kids as he could possibly envisage having—if he ever got around to it. Which he conceivably would, years from now, after he’d had his fun and enjoyed the spoils of his work. For the moment, though, it wasn’t on his radar. He was only twenty-nine years old.

Yes, the cushy future that was materializing before him was a far cry from the more austere days of his childhood in Worcester, Massachusetts. As he made his way across the parched desert soil, past the mess tent and the landing pad where the chopper was being loaded for their departure, and over to the project director’s tent, he thought back on the experience—from the lab work to the various field tests, culminating with this one, out here in this lost netherworld.

Danny wished he’d be allowed to share the excitement of it all with a few people outside the project. His parents, firstly. He could just imagine how stunned, and proud, they would be. Danny was making good on all the promise, all the lofty expectations they’d heaped on him since, well, birth. His thoughts migrated to his older brother, Matt. He’d get a huge kick out of this. Probably try and get Danny to back him in some dodgy, harebrained, borderline-legal scheme, but what the hell, there’d be plenty to go around. There were also a few big-headed jerks in the business that he would have loved to gloat to about all this, given the chance. But he knew that any disclosure outside the team was strictly—
strictly
—not allowed. That much had also been made clear from the start. The project was covert. The nation’s defense was at stake. The word
treason
was mentioned. And so he’d kept his mouth shut, which wasn’t too hard. He was used to it. The highly competitive industry he was in had a deeply ingrained subterranean culture. Hundreds of millions of dollars were often at stake. And when it came down to it, the choice between an eight-figure bank account and a dingy cell in a supermax federal penitentiary was a no-brainer.

He was about to knock on the door of the tent—it was a huge, air-conditioned, semi-rigid-wall tent, with a solid door and glass windows—when something made him pull his hand back.

Raised voices. Not just raised, but angry.

Seriously angry.

He leaned closer to the door.

“You should have told me. It’s my project, goddammit,” a man’s voice erupted. “You should have told me right from the start.”

Danny knew that voice well: Dominic Reece, his mentor, and the project’s lead scientist—its PI, short for principal investigator. A professor of electrical engineering and computer science at
MIT
, Reece occupied hallowed ground in Danny’s world. He’d taught Danny in several of his formative classes and had kept a close eye on Danny’s work throughout his PhD before inviting him to join his team for the project all those months ago. It was an opportunity—and an honor—Danny couldn’t possibly pass up. And while Danny knew that the professor had a habit of expressing his opinions more forcefully and vociferously than most, he detected something else in his voice now. There was a hurt, an indignation that he hadn’t heard before.

“What would your reaction have been?” The second man’s voice, which wasn’t familiar to Danny, was equally inflamed.

“The same,” Reece replied emphatically.

“Come on, just think about it for a second. Think about what we can do together. What we can achieve.”

Reece’s fury was unabated. “I can’t help you do this. I can’t be a party to it.”

“Dom, please—”

“No.”

“Think about what we can—”

“No,” Reece interrupted. “Forget it. There’s no way.” The words had an unmistakable finality to them.

A leaden quiet skulked behind the door for a few tense moments, then Danny heard the second man say, “I wish you hadn’t said that.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Reece shot back.

There was no reply.

Then Reece’s voice came back, tinged with a sudden unease. “What about the others? You haven’t told any of them, have you?” An assertion, not a question.

“No.”

“When were you planning on letting them in on your revised mission statement?”

“I wasn’t sure. I had to get your answer first. I was hoping you’d help me win them over. Convince them to be part of this.”

“Well that’s not going to happen,” Reece retorted angrily. “As a matter of fact, I’d like to get them all the hell away from here as soon as possible.”

“I can’t let you do that, Dom.”

The words seemed to freeze Reece in his tracks. “What do you mean, you can’t let me do that?” he said defiantly.

A pregnant silence greeted his question. Danny could just visualize Reece processing it.

“So what are you saying? You’re not going to . . .” Reece’s voice trailed off for a beat, then came back, with the added urgency of a sudden, horrible realization. “Jesus. Have you completely lost your mind?”

The outrage in the old man’s tone froze Danny’s spine.

He heard Reece say, “You son of a bitch,” heard thudding footfalls striding toward him, toward the door, heard the second man call out to Reece, “Dom, don’t,” then heard a third voice say, “Don’t do that, Reece,” a voice Danny knew, a harsh voice, the voice of a man who’d creeped Danny out from the moment he’d first met him: Maddox, the project’s shaven-headed, stone-faced head of security, the one with the missing ear and the star-shaped burn around it, the man he knew was nicknamed “The Bullet” by his equally creepy men. Then he heard Reece say, “Go to hell,” and the door swung open, and Reece was suddenly there, standing before Danny, a surprised look in his eyes. Danny heard a distinctive, metallic double-click, a sound he’d heard in a hundred movies but never in real life, the all-too-familiar sound of a gun slide, and the second man, the man who’d been arguing with Reece all along and who Danny now recognized, turned to the Bullet and yelled, “No—”

—just as a muffled, high-pitched cough echoed from behind Reece, then another, before the scientist jerked forward, his face crunched with pain, his legs giving way as he tumbled onto Danny.

Danny faltered back, the suddenness of it all overwhelming his senses as he struggled to keep Reece from falling to the ground. A warm, sticky feeling seeped down his hands as he struggled to support the stricken man, a thick, dark red liquid gushing out of Reece and soaking Danny’s arms and clothes.

He couldn’t hold him. Reece thudded heavily onto the ground, exposing the inside of the tent, the second man standing there, horrified, frozen in shock, next to the Bullet, who had a gun in his hand. Its muzzle was now leveled straight at Danny.

Danny dived to one side as a couple of shots cleaved through the air he’d been occupying, then he just tore off, running away from the tent and the fallen professor as fast as he could.

He was a dozen yards or so away when he dared glance back and saw Maddox emerging from the tent, radio in one hand, the gun in the other, his eyes locking onto the receding Danny like lasers as he bolted after him. With his heart in his throat, Danny sprinted through the temporary campsite—there were a few smaller tents, for the handful of other scientists who, like him, had been recruited for the project. He almost slammed into two of them, top minds from the country’s best universities, who were emerging from one of the tents just as he was nearing it.

“They killed Reece,” he yelled to them, pausing momentarily and waving frantically back toward the main tent. “They killed him.” He looked back and saw Maddox closing in inexorably, seemingly carried forward on winged feet, and took off again, glancing back to see his friends turn to the onrushing man with confused looks, crimson sprouts erupting from their chests as Maddox gunned them down without even slowing.

Danny had ducked sideways, behind the mess tent, out of breath, his leg muscles burning, his mind churning desperately for escape options, when the project’s two ageing Jeeps appeared before him, parked under their makeshift shelter. He flung the first car’s door open, spurred the engine to life, threw the car into gear, and floored the accelerator, storming off in a spray of sand and dust just as Maddox rounded the tent.

Danny kept an eye on the rearview mirror as his Jeep charged across the harsh gravel plain. He clenched the steering wheel through bloodless knuckles, confused thoughts assaulting his senses from all directions, his heart feeling like it was jackhammering its way out of his chest, and did the only thing he could think of, which was to keep the car aimed straight ahead, across the deserted terrain, away from the camp, away from that crazed, insane maniac who’d killed his mentor and his friends, all while fighting for a way around the horrifying truth of his predicament, which was that there was nowhere to run. They were in the middle of nowhere, with no villages or habitations anywhere near, not for hundreds of miles.

That was the whole point of being there.

That fear didn’t have much time to torment him as a loud, throaty buzz soon burst through his frazzled thoughts. He looked back and saw the camp’s chopper coming straight at him, reeling him in effortlessly. He pegged the gas pedal to the floor, hard, sending the Jeep bounding over the small rocks and undulations of the outback, slamming his head against the inside of the car’s canvas roof with each jarring leap, avoiding the occasional boulder and the lonely bunches of dried up quiver trees that dotted the deathly landscape.

The chopper was now on his tail, its engine noise deafening, its rotor wash drowning the Jeep in a swirling sandstorm. Danny strained to see ahead through the tornado of dust, not that it made much difference since there was no road to follow, as the chopper dropped down heavily on the car’s roof, crushing the thin struts holding up the roof and almost tearing Danny’s head off.

He veered left, then right, fishtailing the car as he fought to avoid the flying predator’s claws, sweat seeping down his face, the car careening wildly over rocks and cactus bushes. The chopper was never more than mere feet from the Jeep, connecting with it in thunderous blows, slapping it from side to side like it was toying with a hockey puck. The thought of stopping didn’t occur to Danny: He was running on pure adrenaline, his survival instincts choking him in their grasp, an irrational hope of escape propelling him forward. And just then, in that maelstrom of panic and fear, something shifted, something changed, and he sensed the chopper pulling up slightly, felt a spike of hope that maybe, just maybe, he might make it out of that nightmare alive, and the twisting cloud of sand around his Jeep lifted—

—and that’s when he saw the canyon, cutting across the terrain dead ahead of him with sadistic inevitability, a vast limestone trench snaking across the landscape like something from the Wild West, the one he’d seen in countless cowboy films and had hoped to visit someday but hadn’t yet, the one he now knew, with a savage certainty, that he’d never get a chance to see, as the Jeep flew off the canyon’s edge and into the dry desert air.

S
itting cross-legged in his usual spot high up on the mountain, with the barren valley and the endless desert spread out below him, the old priest felt a rising unease. During his last few visits to that desolate place, he’d sensed a more ominous ring to the words that were reverberating inside his head. And today, there was something distinctly portentous about them.