The Sign (27 page)

—and suddenly, the crowd gasped in shock. Gracie saw people pointing upward—not at the priest, but higher up, at the sky above him, and she spun her head up and saw a ball of light, perhaps twenty feet or so in diameter, swirling over the priest. It hovered there for a moment, then started to rise directly above him, and as it did, it suddenly flared up both in size and in brightness and morphed into the sign, the same one she’d seen over the ice shelf. It now blazed overhead, a massive, spherical kaleidoscope of shifting light patterns, its lower edge hovering no more than twenty feet or so directly above Father Jerome.

The throng below just froze, rooted in place, entranced, staring up in openmouthed awe. The stones stopped flying. The brawls ended. The shouting died out. The sign was just there, shimmering brilliantly, rotating very slowly, almost within reach, closer now than it had been over the research ship, its radiant lines and circles mesmerizing.

Dalton was lying on his back at the very edge of the roof, filming the sign and panning back down to get the crowd’s reaction. Gracie was still crouching near him, fifteen feet or so away from Father Jerome, who had his head tilted back and was staring up at the blazing apparition above him, dumbfounded. The camera swung back, stopping momentarily to settle on Gracie. She stared into the dark abyss of the lens, tongue-tied. She wanted to say something, she could feel the whole world watching, hanging on the edge of their seats, willing her to tell them what it felt like to be there, but she couldn’t do it. The moment was simply beyond words. She looked up at the blazing sphere of light, then Father Jerome brought his head back down, and as he did, she caught his eye. She could tell that he was shivering, and saw a tear trickle down his cheek. He looked scared and confused, his stricken expression telegraphing an am-I-really-doing-this anguish to her and quietly pleading for some kind of confirmation, as if he didn’t believe what was happening. She mustered up a confirming nod and a supportive smile—then his expression shifted, as if something had suddenly startled him from within. He closed his eyes, as if locked in concentration, then, a few seconds later, he turned to face the crowd. He looked down on them for a moment, then he spread his arms expansively and tilted his head upward to face the sign. He shut his eyes again and breathed in deeply, basking in the sign’s radiance, drinking in its energy. The masses below were still paralyzed, staring up in shocked silence, their arms stretched upward toward him, reaching out, as if trying to touch the hollow globe of light.

Father Jerome maintained his outstretched stance for the better part of a minute, then he opened his eyes to face the crowd.

“Pray with me,” he bellowed out to them, his voice thick with emotion, his arms raised to the heavens. “Let us all pray together.”

And they did.

In a stadium wave-like reaction that spread slowly and silently from the front to the back of the crowd, every single person outside the monastery—Christian and Muslim, believer and protester alike—fell to their knees and bent forward, all of them dropping their foreheads to the ground and prostrating themselves in fearful adulation.

Washington, D.C.

“
W
hat the hell are you doing? I thought we had an agreement.” Rydell was seething. He’d been up through the night, monitoring the news. The images from Egypt had exploded across his TV screen a little after midnight, and right now, pacing around the cabin of his private jet by a quiet hangar at Reagan National Airport, his senses still throbbed with the burns of their visual sharpnel.

“We never agreed on it, Larry,” Drucker replied smoothly from his lush, padded seat. “You just wouldn’t have it any other way.”

“So you just went out and did it anyway?”

“We both have a lot invested in this. I wasn’t about to jeopardize it all because of your stubbornness.”

“Stubbornness?” Rydell flared up. “You don’t know what you’re doing, Keenan. Have you even thought about where this goes from here?”

“It’s working, isn’t it?”

“It’s too early to tell.”

Drucker tilted his head slightly. “Don’t be disingenuous. It demeans you.”

“I don’t know if it’s working, but—”

“It’s working, Larry,” Drucker interrupted emphatically. “It’s working because that’s what people are used to. It’s what they’ve been used to for thousands of years.”

“We didn’t need it.”

“Of course we did. What did you expect? Did you think people would see the sign and just ‘get’ it?”

“Yes. If we gave them a chance.”

“That’s just naïve. What people don’t understand they just push away to the far corners of their minds and eventually it fades away and gets forgotten. ’Cause it’s safer that way. No, people need someone to tell them what to believe in. It’s worked before, many times. And it’ll work again.”

“And then what?” Rydell fumed. “Where do you go from here?”

Drucker smiled. “We just let him grow his following. Get the message across.”

“That’s untenable and you know it,” Rydell flared up. “You’re building up something that’s going to be impossible to maintain.”

“Not if you graft it onto an existing structure. One that has staying power. One that can last.”

Rydell shook his head. “I can’t believe you’re saying this. You, of all people.”

Drucker chuckled. “You should be enjoying the irony of it. You should be sitting back and laughing instead of getting all worked up about it.”

“I can’t even begin to . . .” Rydell’s mind was overwhelmed with indignation. “You don’t get it, do you? You don’t see how wrong you are.”

“Come on, Larry. You know how the world works. There are only two surefire ways to get people to do what you want them to do. You either put on an iron glove and make them do it. Or you tell them God wants them to do it. If God wills it,” he scoffed, “it shall be done. That’s when they listen. And given that we don’t live under an Uncle Joe or a Chairman Mao—”

“That was the whole point,” Rydell protested. “God was supposed to be willing it. God. Not his self-appointed, holier-than-thou representatives.”

“That wouldn’t work, Larry. It’s too vague. Too open to interpretation. You’re asking people to decipher the message on their own, and that would be giving them far too much credit. That’s never worked. They’re not used to figuring things out for themselves. They like to follow, to be led. They need a guide. A messenger. A prophet. Always have. Always will.”

“So you create, what, a Second Coming?”

“Not exactly, but close. And why not? A major chunk of the planet’s expecting something like this. All this talk of End of Times and Armageddon. It’s a golden opportunity.”

“What about the other religions? ’Cause you do know there are others on the planet, right? How do you think they’re going to react to your manufactured messiah?”

“He won’t be exclusive. It’s been factored in. His message will embrace all.”

“Embrace all and encourage them to follow Jesus?” Rydell said acidly.

“Well,” Drucker mused with a mischievous twist to his mouth, “That’s not the main message he’ll be bringing, but I suspect it may well be a secondary effect of his preaching.”

“Great,” Rydell retorted fiercely. “And in doing that, you’ll be propping up this mass delusion we haven’t been able to shake for thousands of years. Can you imagine the field day these preachers are gonna have with this? Can you imagine how much power you’d be handing to all those blow-dried, self-serving egomaniacs out there? You’ll turn every born-again politician and every televangelist into a saint who can do no wrong. And before you know it, they’ll reclassify the pill as a form of abortion and ban it, the
Left Behind
books will become required reading in schools in between mass burnings of Harry Potter, kids will be saying Hail Marys for detention, and we’ll have a creationist museum in every town. If that’s the trade-off, I think I’d rather stick with global warming.”

“It doesn’t have to be that way. See, you’re forgetting one thing,” Drucker pointed out as he leaned forward, his face animated with expectation. “We control the messenger. Think about it, Larry. We’ve got a chance to create our own prophet. A messiah that we own. Just imagine the possibilities. Think of what we can make people do.”

Drucker studied Rydell through cold, calculating eyes.

“You know we’re right,” he continued. “You know this was the only way to go. These people don’t read newspapers. They don’t research things on the Internet. They listen to what their preachers tell them—and they believe them. Fanatically. They don’t question what the preachers say. They don’t bother to fact-check the bullshit they hear in their megachurches. They’re happy to swallow it whole, no matter how ridiculous it is, and not even an army of Pulitzer Prize-winning thinkers or Nobel Prize-winning scientists with all the common sense or scientific evidence in the world could convince them otherwise. They’d just dismiss them as agents of the devil. Satan, trying to cloud their minds. We need these windbags. We need them to sell our message. And what better way to get them on board than to give them a new prophet of their own to sell on to their flocks?”

Something in his words jarred within Rydell. “What about the rest of the world? You’re talking as if we’re the only problem here.”

“We’re the biggest polluters, aren’t we? So let’s start here. The rest of the world will follow.” He paused, gauging Rydell for a moment, his gaze unwavering. “Our focus hasn’t changed. We’re still in this for the same reasons. This is still about survival. It’s still about the singular threat facing the planet. It’s still about leading people away from the dangerous path they’re on.”

“By sending them back to the Dark Ages? By giving those poor deluded sods out there a real reason to believe in their Bronze Age superstitions?”

“See?” Drucker answered him with a smile. “Now you’re getting the irony.” He scrutinized Rydell, then added, “For better or for worse, the whole movement has become a religious one, Larry. You know that. It’s the same old story, the same classic myth that’s hardwired into our brains, and in this case it fits like it was tailor-made. It’s a story of salvation, after all, isn’t it? We’re sinners. We’re all sinners. We took this perfect Garden of Eden that God bequeathed to us and desecrated it with our orgies of consumption. And now we have to pay. Now we have to make huge sacrifices and flagellate ourselves by driving smaller cars and using less electricity and cutting down on flying and other luxuries we take for granted and choking our economies to death to make things right. We have to defeat the antichrist that is pollution and seek out the salvation of sustainability and save ourselves before Judgment Day rolls over us and wipes us out in an Armageddon of abrupt climate change. That’s how it’s playing out, Larry. And the reason it’s become that is that people like these religious myths. They thrive on them. Sooner or later, they turn everything into a crusade. And this crusade needed a prophet, not just a sign, to get the word across and make it happen.”

Rydell shook his head and looked away for a moment. He was still struggling to fully register that they were actually having this conversation. That, after they’d debated it many months earlier and put the issue to rest—or so he thought—he was actually sitting there facing it in its full, catastrophic glory today. “The others . . . they’re all with you on this?”

“Without hesitation.”

“And where does it end?” Rydell countered. “Do you really think you can keep Father Jerome in line forever? You really think you can keep this lie alive indefinitely? Sooner or later, someone’s gonna figure it out. Something’ll screw up, someone’ll slip up, and it’ll all come out. What happens then?”

Drucker shrugged. “We’re running a very tight ship.”

“Even the best laid plans eventually come unstuck. You know that. I thought that was one of the main reasons you agreed not to go down this route.”

Drucker wasn’t budging. “We’ll keep it going as long as we can.”

“And then?”

Drucker thought about it, then waved it off like a minor nuisance. “Then we’ll figure out a graceful exit.”

Rydell nodded stoically, processing it all. He just sat there, hobbled by the shock of it all, his eyes staring into the distance as if he’d just been told he had a week to live. “No,” he finally told Drucker, his voice thick with dismay. “This is wrong. This is a huge mistake.”

Drucker’s eyes narrowed a touch. “Take some time to think this through properly, Larry. You’ll see that I’m right.”

The words didn’t really sink in with Rydell. The image of the priest standing on the roof of the monastery in Egypt, with the sign hovering over him and hundreds of prostrate worshippers before him, shot to the forefront of his mind again. “Even with the best intentions, even given what we’re trying to do . . . I won’t be a part of this. I can’t help you make this . . . this virus any stronger than it already is.”

“You’re gonna have to. We both have too much at stake here,” Drucker reminded him dryly.

“It’s wrong,” Rydell flared. “The plan was to scare them, Keenan. To make them sit up and think about what they’re doing. That was it. A few carefully chosen appearances, then it’s gone. Keep it unexplained. Keep it mysterious and unsettling and scary. We were in agreement on this, goddammit. We agreed that it would be a good thing if people didn’t know where this was coming from, if they ended up thinking it was coming from some alien presence, from some higher intelligence out there. The beauty of this whole plan was that beyond making them sit up and listen, it might also help them pull away from this childish notion they have of this God of theirs, this personal God, this old man in a white beard who listens to every pathetic request they make and who sets down ridiculous rules about what they should eat or drink or wear or who they should bow to, and help them grow into the notion of God being, if anything, something that’s unfathomable and unexplainable—”

“—and nudge them to the half-assed mind-set of agnostics,” Drucker commented mockingly.

“Well, yes. It’s a step in the right direction, isn’t it?”

Drucker was unmoved. He shook his head. “It’s a noble thought, Larry, but . . . this was the only way it was ever going to work. The world’s not ready to give up its obsession with religion. Far from it. It’s becoming more fundamentalist by the day. And it’s not just our enemies. We’re doing it too. Look at what’s happening in this country. We don’t have a single congressman or senator who can admit to being an atheist. Not one. Hell, we had ten presidential candidates on a podium last year, and not one of them dared raise his hand and say he believes in evolution.”