The Sign (46 page)

“What, that they gave you the green light?”

“No, that they handed us the assignment in the first place,” Willoughby said cheerfully. “It was their idea. They came up with it.”

Gracie felt a buildup of pressure in her temples. “Whoa. Back up. You’re saying you were sent there? This wasn’t your idea?”

“No.”

“So exactly how did this show come about? Give me the whole back story.”

“You know how it is,” the Englishman related. “We pitch ideas. Programs we’d like to do. We keep pitching until something sticks. We agree on a budget and a timetable, and off we go. This one wasn’t like that though. We were bouncing around different ideas. I was more interested in doing a piece on the odd and rather sadistic appeal of End of Times preachings in your country. You know, the lunatics who are rooting for the whole world to blow up. But then the commissioning editor came back and proposed a three-parter that they had American partners lined up for and we ended up doing that instead. Comparing Eastern and Western approaches to spirituality. It was different, but it was still very apropos and they were laying out a decent budget for it.” He paused, taking stock of the conversation, and asked, “If I may ask, Miss Logan, why all the questions?”

Gracie instinctively put up a defensive wall. Despite the discomfort she felt at what she was hearing, a small voice inside her was telling her to protect what she was uncovering. “Nothing, really,” she lied. “I’m just . . . I guess I’m just trying to better understand what got us all out there. Why Finch died.” The second it came out of her mouth, she felt horrible at using his death in that way, and hoped Finch would have forgiven her for it. “Tell me something,” she asked Willoughby. “The monk who told you about Father Jerome. Do you remember his name?”

“Yes, of course,” Willoughby said. “He was a rather interesting chap. Lived through a lot of bad times, you know? He was from Croatia. His name was Ameen. Brother Ameen.”

GRACIE
FELT
like she was sinking. She felt like she’d fallen into a great whirlpool of doubt that was sucking her into its dark vortex. A vortex lined with Willoughby’s words and with previous sound bites her memory was now dredging up.

She tried to order them up in a nonthreatening way, in a way that defused the most sinister thoughts that were pulling her down, but she couldn’t. There was no way to gloss over it.

They’d been lied to.

She focused back on that conversation they’d had in the car after they’d been picked up at Cairo Airport. She closed her eyes and visualized the monk, Brother Ameen, telling them how the filmmakers had badgered them for access to Father Jerome and how the abbot had finally relented.

A clear lie.

The question was, why?

Her darkest instincts were going off in all kinds of directions, and none of them were good. And from that cobweb of conflicting thoughts and suspicions, another worrying sound bite rose up. It freed itself, shot up, and latched onto her consciousness.

She found her phone, pulled up her call log, and rang the number the abbot had called her from. It took a few seconds for the call to bounce its way halfway across the world. Yusuf, the driver, answered on the third ring. It was his cell phone. It was evening there, but not too late. He didn’t sound like she’d woken him up.

“Yusuf,” she said, her tone ringing with urgency. “When the abbot called, when you were driving back from Cairo, he said something. Something about where the glasses of my friend were found. You remember?”

“Yes,” Yusuf said, sounding unsure about what she was getting at.

“He said it was dark inside. That’s why whoever it was stepped on them. They didn’t see them. They were inside? Inside the keep?”

Yusuf paused for a moment, as if thinking, then said, “Yes. They were in a passageway on the top floor. Near the roof hatch. They must have fallen from your friend’s pocket on his way up to the roof.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“Yes, absolutely,” Yusuf confirmed. “The abbot told me about it.”

Gracie felt a cold stab in the pit of her stomach.

Finch couldn’t see without them. And hard as she tried, she couldn’t see how he could have climbed up there, much less how he could have found his BlackBerry on that roof, if he hadn’t been wearing them.

She hung up and caught herself eyeing the door to her room as if it were a gateway to hell. Something was wrong. Something was very, very wrong. She had to do something. Her first instinct was to speed-dial Ogilvy.

“I need to see you,” she said, her body stiff, her eyes still locked on the door. “Something’s not right.”

Houston, Texas

M
att swept his gaze across the hotel’s lobby with caution and walked through its elegant halls slowly. He glanced around casually, checking for security guards, cameras, escape routes, and vantage points. He traversed as far as he could, then doubled back on himself and made his way over to the café that fronted the hotel, the one that overlooked the street. He noted its layout, made a mental list of the ways in and out, took stock of the kind of clientele and their number. Then he went back out to check the service entrance at the back of the hotel.

He was there early. The meeting between Rydell and Drucker wasn’t planned for another two hours. Drucker wouldn’t even have landed in Houston yet, and besides, the plan was for Rydell to keep from telling him where they’d be meeting until Drucker was actually in the city. Still, Matt felt he needed to check the place out long before any of Drucker’s men had a chance to get there. He knew Drucker wouldn’t be coming alone. With a bit of luck, Maddox might even be with him. And even though he knew the odds were that he’d be outnumbered, Matt had something going for him that they didn’t. He didn’t need to be discreet. He wasn’t worried about appearances or about causing a panic. He didn’t care who saw him whip out a big gun and put it to Drucker’s head, right there, in the café. He didn’t have anything to lose. The one thing he needed to achieve was to get the muzzle of his gun pressed right against Drucker and walk out of there with him. It didn’t matter who saw him do that. It didn’t matter how freaked out the hotel’s guests got. Only the end result mattered. He would just sit there, bide his time, wait until Rydell got the information he needed out of Drucker, and then he’d move in.

It was easier said than done, and yet, oddly, Matt was actually looking forward to it.

SIX
BLOCKS
WEST
OF
THERE
, Gracie stood with Ogilvy in Sam Houston Park. Her mind was being pulled in all kinds of directions, none of which were heartening.

They were by the Neuhaus Fountain, an installation that featured three bronze sculptures of coyotes stalking the wild frontier. A few people were ambling by, stopping to experience the peaceful setting before moving on. Gracie wasn’t feeling any of that. In fact, she couldn’t stand still. She was rippling with nervous energy as she took the network’s head of news through what Willoughby and Yusuf had told her.

Ogilvy didn’t seem to share her concern. A slick-looking man with an aquiline nose and swept-back hair, he was studying Gracie patiently through rimless spectacles.

“These guys are humble, Gracie,” he remarked with an insouciant shrug. “So this Brother Ameen character didn’t admit he actually pimped Father Jerome out. He was probably hoping to get some screen time himself. Someone in his position would be the last person to admit he found the idea of a little publicity too hard to resist.”

“Come on, Hal. He wasn’t the least bit nervous when he was lying about it. He didn’t look embarrassed or rattled at all. It wasn’t like we caught him out. And what about Finch’s glasses?”

“It might explain why he fell. If he couldn’t see properly.”

“They should have been down on the ground, somewhere next to him,” she objected. “Or on the roof, and even that’s a stretch. But inside the keep? One floor down from the roof? How’d he even make it up there without them?”

“What if he dropped them and broke them himself. Before he got there?”

“So he just leaves them there? I don’t buy that. You step on glasses, you maybe break one lens. Not both. You can still wear them for some kind of clear vision. You don’t just leave them there.”

Ogilvy glanced away and heaved out a ragged sigh. He looked like he was losing patience. “So what are you saying?”

“I’m saying we’ve got two lies that need checking out. Something’s up, Hal. This is starting to stink.”

“Because of a monk who couldn’t admit he got a hard-on when he saw a TV camera and another who’s looking for some excuse to explain his clumsiness?”

Gracie was stunned by his dismissal. “We need to look into this. We need to find a way to talk to the abbot directly, confirm where the glasses were. And get some background on this Brother Ameen. He’s from Croatia, right? Where did he come from? How long has he been at that monastery? The guy’s been pivotal to getting us to buy into this story and we don’t know anything about him.”

Ogilvy paused and looked at her like she was saying she’d been abducted by aliens. “What are you doing?”

“What?” she protested.

“You’ve got the inside track on the scoop of the century. This is a huge, huge story. For us and for you. We have unparalleled access. You start poking your nose around and getting Jerome and Ameen all riled up and they could shut us out. Which wouldn’t go down well. Not well at all. You can’t afford to mess this up right now, Gracie. It’s too important. So how about you focus on that instead and put the conspiracy paranoia on hold for a while.”

Gracie looked at him as if he were the one who’d been spouting abductee tales.

“Hal, I’m telling you, something’s not right. The whole thing, it’s been one ‘lucky’ break after another,” she said, making quotes with her fingers. “Right from the beginning.” Her mind was running ahead of her now, and she was thinking aloud. “I mean, think about it. We happen to be there when the shelf breaks off. We happen to be filming nearby. Hell, we wouldn’t even have been down there if you hadn’t suggested it when we were planning the whole show.”

And then it happened. Her mind plucked out the disparate thoughts that were tumbling around inside her and lined them up so they all fit. Like the sides of a Rubik’s Cube falling into place. She saw a connection that was there all along and made a realization that suddenly seemed so obvious to her she couldn’t imagine it not to be true.

Almost without thinking, she said, “Oh my God. You’re in on it too.”

And in that briefest of moments between her saying it and his responding, in the nanosecond of his looking at her before he opened his mouth, she saw it. The tell. The tiniest, hardly noticeable hesitation. The one her most basal instincts enabled her to see. The one they wouldn’t let her ignore. A visceral pull-focus moment that made her feel like her very soul had been yanked right out of her.

“Gracie, you’re being ridiculous,” he said dismissively, his tone even.

She wasn’t listening to his words. She was reading through them, reading the creases around his eyes, the dilation of his pupils. And she was now even more irretrievably, horribly sure of it. “You’re in on it too, aren’t you?” she insisted. “Say it, goddammit,” she flared. “Say it before I shout it out loud to everyone here.”

“Gracie—”

“It’s fake, isn’t it?” she blurted. “The whole damn thing. It’s a setup.”

Ogilvy took a step forward and raised a calming hand out to her. “People are starting to stare. Don’t make a fool of yourself.”

She shoved his hand away from her and stepped back. Her mind was racing away. “You played me. You played me all along. This whole assignment. The trip to Antarctica. All that support, all that enthusiasm. It was all bullshit.” She glared at him, questions burning out of her. “What are you doing? What the hell’s going on?” Her mind was racing ahead, drawing on all its processing reserves. “You’re faking this? You’re faking a second coming? For what? You’re setting up a new messiah? Is that what this is? You want to convert the world?”

Ogilvy’s eyes were flicking left and right now. The tell was confirmed beyond a doubt. “You think I’d want that?” he hissed, trying to remain calm. “You know me better than that. It’s the last thing I’d want.”

“Well then why?” she insisted. “Don’t tell me this is about saving the planet?”

Something in Ogilvy shifted too. He seemed to give up the pretense and framed her with a fervent glare. “Maybe. But first and foremost, it’s about saving our country,” he stated firmly.

And right then, another realization burst out of the mire, like a diver on his last breath breaking surface and gasping for air. “Was Finch’s death an accident?”

Ogilvy didn’t answer fast enough. Something tore inside her.

“Goddammit, Hal,” she shouted, the horror of it making her inch back another step now. “Tell me Finch’s death was an accident. Say it.”

“Of course it was,” he assured her, opening his hands out defensively.

But her gut was telling her otherwise, and his eyes and the lines around them were confirming it. “I don’t believe you.” Her heart thumping wildly, she took another step back, suddenly hyperaware of her immediate surroundings. She didn’t see any innocent-looking strollers or joggers. All she could register were two stone-faced guys in short haircuts, dark suits, and no ties, one at each entrance to the fountain area. Their body language wasn’t casual.

Her eyes shot back to Ogilvy. He acknowledged the men with a barely perceptible nod. They started toward her with a threatening gait. Closing in. Blocking any escape route.

She looked at Ogilvy in disbelief, still backing away from him. “Jesus, Hal. What are you doing?”

“Only what’s necessary,” he replied, somewhat apologetically.

Gracie couldn’t just stand there. She spun on her heels and sprinted off, heading straight for one of the heavies coming at her, screaming her lungs out, calling for help. She tried to fake him out and veered left before swinging right, hoping to slip past him, but his arm whipped out and caught her and pulled her in. The other suit was on them a couple of seconds later. The first guy spun her around and pinned her arms behind her back, immobilizing her. She twisted around, trying to free herself, but couldn’t resist his vise-like grip. Instead, she lashed out with her right foot, kicking the suit facing her in the shin, catching it head-on. It must have hurt, as he jerked back and winced hard, but he came back with a backslap across the face that snapped her head sideways and rattled her teeth. She felt groggy and raised her eyes in time to see the suit facing her bring his hand up to her mouth. He pressed something against her nose, a kind of gauze patch. The smell from it was strong and sour. Almost instantly, she felt all the strength in her body seep away. Her eyes jerked sideways and she caught a glimpse of one of the coyotes that suddenly seemed far more threatening than she’d realized, then her head lolled down, her chin thudding against her chest. She saw a few of the flagstones under her feet fall away before everything drifted off into a silent and hollow darkness.