The Sign (19 page)

“I know how this looks,” Matt told him, “but that’s not what happened. These guys came after Vince because of this thing in Antarctica.” He pointed angrily at the TV screen. “He thought my brother might have been murdered because of it. They killed Vince. I didn’t. You have to believe me.”

Which, reading Csaba’s jittery eyes, seemed like a tall order.

“You and Vince,” Matt asked. “You were talking about it, weren’t you? Before he bailed on you?”

Csaba nodded reluctantly.

It was all Matt had time for right now. “I need you to tell me what you guys said, but that can wait. They’re outside. We need to get out of here.”

“ ‘ We’ ? ” Csaba flinched, reaching for his phone. “Hey, I’m not going anywhere. You can do what you want. I’m calling the cops and—”

“We don’t have time for that,” Matt flared up fiercely as he grabbed the phone from him and slammed it back down close to its cradle. “They’re here. Now. Because of your little chat with Vince. Same deal. So if you want to live, you’re gonna have to trust me and come with me.” His gaze drilled into him, dead-committed.

Csaba hesitated, his eyes locked onto Matt’s, his breathing hard and fast—then he nodded.

“Do you have a car?”

“No.”

“Doesn’t matter. Come on.” Matt sprinted toward the door.

“Wait,” Csaba blurted, holding up one hand in a stalling gesture. He grabbed a backpack off the floor and started throwing things in it.

“We need to go,” Matt insisted.

“Just gimme a sec,” Csaba countered as he stuffed his Macbook laptop, charger, and iPhone into the backpack before flicking one last look around the room and joining Matt at the door.

Seeing the phone tripped something in Matt’s mind. “Your cell,” he told Csaba. “Switch it off.”

“Why?”

“They can track us with it. You must know that.”

Csaba’s mouth dropped an inch. Then the words clicked into place. “Yeah, right,” he said in a daze, and repeated “You’re right” as he fished out the phone and turned it off.

Matt glanced over at the screen for one last look—the blazing sign was still there, taunting him enigmatically—then he dashed out, with Csaba on his heels.

They took the elevator down to the garage. It was home to a dozen or so cars. Matt glanced around, not exactly spoiled for choice. Csaba’s neighbors seemed partial to Priuses and Japanese compacts, the Escalade owner notwithstanding. He settled on a marginally beefier Toyota RAV4, a car he was also pretty sure wouldn’t resist his charms.

He moved fast. He grabbed a fire extinguisher off the wall and smashed the driver’s window with it, then reached in and flung the door open. “Get in,” he ordered Csaba as he swept the tiny glass flakes off the seat with his hand.

The big man just stood there, slack-jawed. “That’s Mrs. Jooris’s car,” he said ruefully. “She’s gonna be seriously pissed, dude. She worships that car.”

“It’s just a window. Get in.”

In the time it took Csaba to relent and cram himself into the passenger seat, Matt had popped the hood, yanked out the transponder fuse from the power relay center, and got the engine running. He climbed back in, threw the car in gear, and screeched up to the garage door. An unseen sensor had already instructed it to open. As it rose, the ramp appeared ahead, unobstructed, curving to the left and hugging the building.

“Buckle up,” Matt said.

Csaba gave him a look and glanced down wryly at his bulging midsection. The buckle and its stalk were out of sight, smothered by his doughy thigh. “You wanna help me with that?”

“Maybe not,” Matt answered with a dry half grin. “Hang on.”

His fingers tightened against the steering wheel as the garage door rose enough to let them out. Matt nudged the RAV4 up the ramp, slowly at first—there was no point alerting the goons to their presence earlier than necessary. They’d see him soon enough—which happened the instant the small
SUV
cleared the side of the building.

Matt locked eyes with the two startled men facing him in the Chrysler, committing as much of their features to memory as he could in that nanosecond, his foot poised on the accelerator. He’d already played out his move in his mind’s eye. A quick charge across the street diagonally, right at the parked goons, aiming the Toyota’s left front bumper at the Chrysler’s right front wheel well, hitting it at a slight angle and with enough force to bend its wishbone and disable the car while allowing his own vehicle to keep going, bent but otherwise operational. It was a gamble, and a sacrifice he had to make. He’d lose the benefit of being able to track them, as they’d need to use another car from here on, but he had no choice. The Toyota was no match for the Chrysler. He wouldn’t be able to lose them.

He was about to floor the pedal when he sensed something coming from his right. He ripped his gaze off the Chrysler and spotted a car coming down the street toward him. Something clicked into place in his mind. He waited a second or so for the car to get nearer, Csaba watching, not understanding the wait and giving him a low, anxious “Dude, come on,” the killers in the Chrysler looking at them slightly perplexed now, not sure why they were still there, itching to bolt out of their car after them, probably pulling their weapons out of their holsters and ramming cartridges into their chambers—

—and just as the approaching car was almost at his level, Matt jammed his foot against the accelerator and charged into the street right in front of it, cutting it off. The car, a lumbering old Caprice from the bygone days of cheap and plentiful fuel and a blissful insouciance about destroying the planet, scraped against the Toyota and bounced off it, its driver—a nervy, ponytailed man wearing thick bone spectacles—swerving into the opposite lane evasively and screeching to a stop almost right alongside the Chrysler. Matt hit the gas and tore down the street, headed in the opposite direction to the one the Chrysler was facing. He watched in the rearview mirror as the Caprice’s hapless driver got out of his car and mouthed off at him angrily, and saw the goons climbing out of the Chrysler to get the man to move his car so they could get their car turned around to take up pursuit.

Matt dived into the first turning he saw, pulling a screaming left before charging down one empty street after another, changing directions often as he wove his way out of Cambridge and onto the expressway, all while keeping a wary eye on his mirrors for any sign of the Chrysler.

It was gone.

He relaxed a little and eased off the gas as he pointed the borrowed
SUV
north, heading out of the city, putting some much-needed miles between him and the streets that seemed determined to ensnare him in their deathly clutches.

He glanced sideways at Csaba. The round man’s face was still flushed and glistening with sweat, but his posture relaxed a touch as he gave Matt a pinched acknowledgment. And with a small shake of his head, he said, “Mrs. Jooris is gonna go mental when she sees this.”

“How you pronounce your name anyway?” Matt asked him.

“ ‘ Tchaba.’ But you can call me ‘Jabba,’ ” he replied without a hint of annoyance. “Everyone does.”

Which surprised Matt. “Really?”

Jabba nodded. “Sure.”

“And that doesn’t bother you?”

Jabba’s expression was one of laid-back, casual bewilderment. “Should it?”

Matt thought about it, then shrugged. “Okay then. Let’s ditch this car and find us a safe place, somewhere they won’t find us. Then I’m gonna need you to tell me exactly what you and Vince were talking about and help me figure out what the hell is going on.”

Deir Al-Suryan Monastery, Wadi Natrun, Egypt

B
efore long, the Previa had left the desert behind and was trudging through the snarled traffic leading into Cairo. There was no avoiding cutting across the sprawling city, as the new airport was east of it, with Wadi Natrun to its northwest. By now, it was early evening, and the low sun’s fading light punctuated the mist of exhaust fumes and dust that choked the overcrowded, run-down metropolis.

“Does he know what’s going on yet?” Gracie asked Brother Ameen. “Have you told him about the signs?”

“No,” the monk regretted. “Not yet.” He glanced back at her uneasily, his look signaling that it was something she’d soon be a part of. “Actually, he doesn’t know you’re coming. The abbot doesn’t know either.”

Gracie was about to ask him to clarify, but he beat her to it. “The abbot—he doesn’t know what to do. He didn’t want the outside world to know about it.”

“But you did,” Finch prompted.

The monk nodded. “Something miraculous is happening. We can’t keep it to ourselves. It’s not ours to keep.”

Gracie looked over at Finch. They’d been around such situations before: uninvited guests traveling into troubled spots to talk to reluctant interviewees, people whose first instinct was to shut themselves off from outside scrutiny. Sometimes, Gracie and Finch managed to get through; other times, they were locked out. In this case, they had to make it happen. They hadn’t flown halfway around the globe to leave empty-handed. Not when the whole world was waiting for an explanation.

The appearance of the tips of the pyramids at Giza told Gracie they were finally leaving the city behind. She’d seen them before, but the sight never failed to inspire awe, even in the most jaded observer. On this occasion, something else stirred inside her, the majestic, stone peaks that jutted out of the sand oddly reminiscent of the nunataks—the rocky crags that rose out of the fields of snow—that she’d looked down on only hours ago from the window of the chopper. The noisy, chaotic mess of Cairo quickly gave way to sleepier, scattered clusters of houses, and as they passed the small town of Bir Hooker, the last town before the desert and the monasteries, they lost the signals in their cell phones. The monk informed them that they’d be limited to the satphone from there on.

Ever since his first call, Gracie hadn’t been able to place his accent. “By the way, where are you from?” she asked him.

“I’m from Croatia,” he explained. “I come from a small town in the north, not far from the Italian border.”

“Then you must be Roman Catholic.”

“Of course,” the monk confirmed.

“So Ameen isn’t your real name?”

“It’s not my birth name,” he corrected with a warm smile. “I was Father Dario before I came here. We all take on Coptic names once we join the monastery. It’s the tradition.”

“But the Coptic Church is Orthodox,” she queried. Long before the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s, the Christian world had already been rocked by the great schism in the eleventh century. The longstanding rivalries and theological disputes between Rome and its Eastern counterparts in Alexandria and in Antioch had been festering since the earliest days of Christendom. These petty squabbles finally came to a head in 1054 and split Christendom into two: the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church. The Greek word
Orthodox
meant, literally, “correct belief,” which pretty much summed up the Eastern church’s belief that it was the true keeper of the flame, that its adherents followed the authentic and uncorrupted traditions and teachings that had been passed down by Jesus and his apostles.

“Orthodox, yes, but not Eastern Orthodox,” the monk specified. Gracie’s confused expression was obviously no surprise, nor was it limited to her. The monk glanced at his three visitors and waved the issue away. “It’s a long story,” he told them. “The Coptic Church is the oldest of them all, it out-orthodoxes the Eastern Orthodox Church. It was actually founded by the apostle Mark in the middle of the first century, less than ten years after the death of Jesus. But it’s all nonsense, really. Ultimately, all Christians are followers of Christ. That’s all that matters. And the monasteries here don’t make those distinctions either. All Christians are welcome. Father Jerome is Catholic,” he reminded her.

Before long, they rounded the nearby monastery of Saint Bishoi, and Deir Al-Suryan appeared at the end of a dusty, unlit lane. It looked like an ark adrift in a sea of sand—an image its monks had long embraced, believing the monastery to have been modeled on Noah’s ark. Detail soon fell into focus as the people carrier drew nearer to it: the two tall bell towers; the cubical, squat, four-story keep—the
qasr
—guarding the entrance gate; the small domes with big crosses on them strewn irregularly around the various chapels and structures inside the walled complex; all of it surrounded by a thirty-foot fortified wall.

They filed out of the minivan, and Brother Ameen led them past the keep and across the inner courtyard, which was presently deserted. The enclosure was deceptively large. It was roughly the width and length of a football field, Gracie noticed, and just as flat. Every exterior surface, wall and dome alike, was covered with a clay-and-limestone adobe of uniform color, a pleasing, sandlike beige, the corners and edges rounded, soft and organic. The walls of the keep were dotted with tiny, irregular openings in place of windows—to keep the heat out—and narrow stair-cases led in all kinds of directions. With the setting sun’s warm, orange gleam adding to the walled sanctuary’s otherworldly feel, and its stark contrast to the cold, bleak landscape of the ice continent whose chill still lingered in her bones, Gracie felt as if she hadn’t just leapfrogged across whole continents. It felt as if she’d stumbled onto Tatooine.

As they approached the entrance to the library, a monk stepped out and paused at their sight, looking at them first curiously, then with a dour expression on his face. Gracie guessed it was the abbot.

“Please wait here,” Brother Ameen told Gracie and Finch. They stayed behind while he stepped ahead and intercepted the clearly irate abbot. Gracie gave Finch a here-we-go look as they both did their best to observe the heated chat without appearing too interested.

A moment later, Brother Ameen came back with the abbot. He didn’t seem thrilled to see them, and wasn’t doing much to hide it.

“I’m Bishop Kyrillos, the abbot of this monastery,” he told them dryly. “I’m afraid Brother Ameen overstepped his bounds by inviting you here.” He didn’t offer his hand.