The Sign (5 page)

“All right, forget that. What about other kinds of projections? Spectral imagery?”

Bellinger stared closely at the screen. “You know something I don’t? ’Cause except for the droid in—which one’s the white one that looks like a fire hydrant?”

“R2-D2.” The roll of the eyes came through in his mocking tone as clearly as if they’d been using high-def webcams.

“Except for R2-D2, I don’t think 3-D projectors actually exist.”

Which was true. Something that could achieve a free-floating, un-contained, three-dimensional moving image, like in Princess Leia’s seminal “Help us, Obi-Wan” moment—of any size, let alone something this big—still eluded the best brains in the business.

“Besides, you’re forgetting one pesky little detail,” Bellinger added, feeling slightly more uncomfortable now.

“I know, dude. It’s daylight.” Jabba sounded spooked at having that realization reaffirmed.

“Not exactly projector-friendly, is it?”

“Nope.”

Bellinger felt uncomfortable having that discussion out there, surrounded by people, his gym bag and laundry inches from getting trampled. But he just couldn’t tear himself away.

“Okay, so we can forget about lasers and projectors,” he told Jabba. “I mean, look at it. It’s not contained within any kind of framework, it’s not boxed in, there’s no dark backdrop behind it, no glass panes around it. It’s just there, free-floating. In daylight.”

“Unless there are a couple of monster mirrors on either side of it they’re not showing us,” Jabba mused. “Hey, maybe it’s generated from space.”

“Nice idea, but how exactly?”

Jabba bit noisily into another chip. “I don’t know, dude. I mean, this thing doesn’t compute, does it?”

“No. Hang on,” Bellinger told him, as he jammed the phone between his ear and his shoulder, grabbed his belongings, and inched back a few steps, out of the ever-growing crowd.

He and Jabba bounced around several other ideas, throwing everything they could think of at it, trying to pin some sensible, plausible explanation on it, but nothing stuck. Bellinger’s excitement, though, soon gave way to a sense of unease. Something else was bothering him. An uncomfortable feeling that something buried deep within him was clawing for attention.

Suddenly, the fixed camera got jarred as an altercation took place on the ship’s deck. Jabba lapped it up, as did the crowd at the mall, whooping and joking as the people on the ship filming the sighting scuffled, then the aerial camera came back. It closed in on the apparition, which then faded away, only to then suddenly reappear directly over the ship. The crowd around Bellinger shrieked and recoiled in shock as the shaky upward shot from the handheld camera on deck sent a shock wave crackling through them.

“Son of a bitch,” Jabba blurted. “Is it turning?”

Bellinger focused on the apparition, now aware of a growing lump in his throat. “It’s spherical,” he marveled. “It’s not some kind of projection. It’s actually physical, isn’t it?”

On the screen, Grace Logan was having trouble keeping calm, clearly rattled by the apparition that was just hovering there, directly over the ship. The crowd in the mall was echoing her reaction, visibly stiffening and going quiet.

Jabba’s crunching had also stopped. “I think you’re right. But how . . . ? It’s not an object, and yet . . . It’s almost like the air itself is burning up, but . . . that’s not possible, is it? I mean, you can’t light air up, can you?”

Bellinger felt a sudden rush of blood to his temples. Something clicked. It just rushed in on him, unannounced, out of nowhere. Long-forgotten, dormant neurons buried deep within his brain had somehow managed to reach out and find each other and make a connection.

An unhappy one.

Oh, shit.

He went silent, his mind racing to process that link and take it to its natural conclusion, lost in the dread of the possibility just as the sign faded from view and the sky above the ship went back to normal.

“Dude, you there?”

Bellinger heard his voice go distant, as if he were on the outside watching himself answer. “Yeah.”

“What? What’re you thinking?”

He felt his skin crawl. “I’ve got to go. I’ll call you when I get home. Let me know if you come up with anything.”

“Dude, hang on, don’t just—”

Bellinger hung up.

He stood there, his feet nailed to the cool tiled floor, the commotion around him fading as he turned his thoughts inward. Only minutes earlier, picking up the colorful linen shirts, all folded up and ready for packing, had conjured up a pleasant, warm feeling inside him. With the Christmas holiday days away, the sea, the sun, and the wide blue skies of the Dominican Republic beckoned—his annual pilgrimage, a welcome respite from the claustrophobic, windowless life he led at the research lab. Any feeling of warmth was now gone. A cold, crippling unease had taken its place and, Bellinger knew, wasn’t about to let go.

He just stood there for a few long minutes, contemplating the disturbing—and, he hoped, surely unlikely—idea that had clawed its way out from the darkest recesses of his mind.

No way,
he thought.
Be serious.

But he couldn’t shake the thought.

He stayed there as the TVs replayed the whole thing, lost in his thoughts as the crowd dissipated. He finally tore himself away from the screens, gathered his things, and drove home in silence.

No way.

He dumped his bags in his front hallway, decided to try and let it go and move onto other things, and headed for his fridge. He got himself a beer and went back to the hall and rifled through his mail, but it was no use.

He couldn’t shake it away.

He switched on his TV. The images it threw back at him were spine-tingling. Snarled traffic in Times Square, where a crowd of people had just frozen in place, mesmerized by the images of the sighting on the Sony JumboTron; people in bars and stadiums, on their feet, their eyes peeled on the screens; and similar chaotic images from around the world. He moved to his desk and fired up his laptop and spent a couple of hours scouring Internet chat rooms while flicking around various news reports, trying to get a clearer picture of what was going on, hoping to come across some ammo to dismiss his theory.

It was insane, outlandish . . . but it fit.

It just fit.

Which brought up an even bigger problem.

What to do about it.

His primal instinct told him to forget about it and leave it alone. Well alone. If what he was imagining was really happening, then he’d be far better off expunging any trace of the thought from his mind and never mentioning it to anyone. Which was the sensible thing to do, the rational thing to do, and Bellinger prided himself, above any other qualities he might have, on his rationality. But there was something else.

A friend had died. Not just a friend.

His best friend.

And that was something that his rationality was finding hard to ignore.

Visions of the tragic accident in the Skeleton Coast sparked in his mind’s eye, horrific images his imagination had conjured up long ago, after he’d been told about how Danny Sherwood had died.

He couldn’t ignore it.

He had to find out. Make sure. Get the whole picture.

He got himself another beer and sat alone in the dark living room, staring into nothing, his mind alternating between what he’d just seen and what had happened two years ago. A few bottles later, he retrieved his phone and scrolled down his contacts list until he found the entry he was looking for. It was a number he’d been given a couple of years ago, one he hadn’t called for almost that long.

He hesitated, then hit the call button.

He heard it ring through three, four times, then a man picked up.

“Who’s this?” The man’s tone had a detached, no-nonsense ring to it.

The sound of Matt Sherwood’s voice brought Bellinger a modicum of solace. A palpable connection, however fleeting, to his long-dead friend.

“It’s Vince. Vince Bellinger,” he answered, a slight hesitation in his voice. He paused for a beat, then added, “Where are you, Matt?”

“At my place. Why?”

“I need to see you, man,” Bellinger told him. “Like, now.”

Boston, Massachusetts

N
o one in the crowded arena could tear their eyes away from the huge video scoreboards. Not the fans. Not the players. And certainly not anyone in Larry Rydell’s perfectly positioned luxury suite at the Garden.

His guests, the design team working on the groundbreaking electric car he hoped to launch within a couple of years, had been enjoying the treat. They’d spent the whole day in the project’s nerve center over in Waltham, bringing him up to speed on the car’s status, going over the problems they’d managed to solve and the new ones they’d unearthed. As with everything Rydell did, the project had world-beating ambitions. His friend Elon Musk—another Internet sensation, courtesy of a little online business he’d cofounded by the name of PayPal—had already launched his electric car, the Tesla, but that was a sports car. Rydell was after a different kind of driver: the legions driving around in Camrys, Impalas, and Accords. And so he’d recruited the best and the brightest designers and engineers, given them everything they needed to make it happen, and let them do their thing. It was just one of several pet projects he had running at the same time. He had teams working on more efficient wind farms, solar cells, and better wiring to ferry the resulting power around. Renewable energy and clean power were going to be the next great industrial revolution, and Larry Rydell was nothing if not visionary.

The only resource his projects fought over was his own time. Money certainly wasn’t an issue, even with the recent turmoil in the markets. He was well aware of the fact that he had more of it than he’d ever need. Every computer and cell phone user on the planet had contributed his or her share to his fortune, and the stratospheric share price his company had enjoyed had done the rest. And although Rydell enjoyed the good life, he’d found better things to do with his money than build himself five-hundred-foot yachts.

They’d had a long, productive day, overcoming a big hurdle they’d been trying to solve for weeks, and so he’d decided to reward the team by sending them off on their end-of-year break in style. He’d treated them to a great dinner, all the drink they could handle, and the best seats in the house. They’d just watched Paul Pierce slip past Kobe Bryant and slam home a two-handed dunk, and heard the first-period buzzer go, when the suspended cube of screens had flicked over to a live news feed and all noise had drained out of the arena.

As he stood there, mesmerized by the surreal display before him, he felt his BlackBerry vibrate in his pocket. The alert was one of three that never went comatose, even when his privacy settings were on, which was most of the time. One was entrusted to Mona, his PA—or, more accurately, the senior PA among the four who controlled the drawbridge to his office. Another was allocated to his ex-wife, Ashley, although she usually found it easier to call Mona and get him to call her back. The third, the one that was now clamoring for his attention, told him his nineteen-year-old daughter Rebecca was calling.

Something she rarely did when she was on a distant beach, which was currently—and often—the case. The family villa in Mexico, he thought, though he wasn’t sure. It could have been the chalet in Vail or the yacht in Antigua. Between her appetite for partying and his scant appetite for anything that didn’t concern the projects he lived and breathed, that tidbit of information had some pretty large cracks to slip through.

He pressed the phone to his ear without taking his eyes off the screen.

“Dad, are you watching this?”

“Yeah,” he replied, somewhat dazed. “We’re all standing here at the Garden watching it like zombies.”

“Same here,” his daughter laughed, somewhat nervously. “We were about to go out when a friend of mine in L.A. called to tell us about it.”

“Where are you anyway?”

“Mexico, Dad,” she half-groaned, with an undisguised you-should-know-this tone.

Just then, the initial shock veered to cheers and claps as the already charged fans let their emotions rip. The noise reverberated through the arena. “Wow,” Rebecca echoed, “it sounds wild.”

“It is,” he said with a curious smile. “How long have they been showing it?”

“I’m not sure, we just switched it on a few minutes ago.” She paused for a moment, then said, “Dad . . . what do you think it is?”

And, in what was probably a first for a man who was rightly feted around the world as nothing less than a genius, Larry Rydell had no answer for his daughter. At least, not one that he could share with her.

Not now.

Not ever.

Washington, D.C.

A
light rain peppered the nation’s capital as a black, chauffeur-driven Lexus slipped out of the underground garage and slunk onto Connecticut Avenue and into the sparse late-evening traffic. In the cosseted comfort of its heated backseat, Keenan Drucker stared out in silence, lost in a streaming light show of passing cars, contemplating the events of the momentous day.

The phone calls had begun about an hour ago, and in the days to come, there would be plenty more, of that he was certain.

They were only getting started.

He shut his eyes and leaned back against the richly padded headrest. His mind chewed over his plan, once again dissecting every layer of it, looking for the fatal flaw that he might have somehow missed. As with every previous run-through, he couldn’t find anything to worry about. There were a lot of unknowns, of course—there had to be, by definition. But that didn’t trouble him. Oversights and miscalculations—now those were different. Those he wouldn’t tolerate. A lot of effort had gone into making sure there wouldn’t be any. But unknowns were, well, unknowable. A lifetime of making questionable deals in smoke-filled rooms had taught him that unknowns weren’t worth worrying about until they materialized. If and when they did, his thoroughness, his focus, and his level of commitment would ensure that, if it pleased the Lord—he smiled inwardly at his little joke—they wouldn’t prove too hard to deal with.