The Sign (8 page)

He also didn’t normally have sweat droplets popping up on his forehead when he visited bars. Especially not in Boston. In December. With snow falling outside.

He spotted Matt sitting in a corner booth. As he wove his way through the pockets of drinkers to join him, his cell phone rang. He paused long enough to pull it out of his pocket and check it. It was Jabba. He decided to ignore the call, stuffed the phone back into his pocket, and joined Matt.

Even hunched over his drink, Matt Sherwood’s hulking stature was hard to miss. The man was six-foot-four, a full head taller than Bellinger. He hadn’t changed much in the two years since Bellinger had last seen him. He still had the same brooding presence, the same angular face, the same close-cropped dark hair, the same quietly intense eyes that surveyed and took note without giving much away. If anything, any changes Bellinger thought he detected, minor though they were, were for the better. Which was inevitable, given the circumstances. He’d last seen him around the time of Danny’s funeral. Matt and his kid brother had been close, Danny’s death sudden and unexpected, the family rocked by an even bigger—and far worse—tragedy to befall its sons this time.

Which made dredging it up all the more difficult.

As Bellinger slipped onto the bench without bothering to take his coat off, Matt acknowledged him with a nod. “What’s going on?”

Bellinger remembered that about him. Laconic, to-the-point. A man who didn’t pussyfoot around, which was understandable. Time was something Matt Sherwood appreciated deeply. He’d had enough of it taken away from him already.

Bellinger found a half smile. “It’s good to see you. How are you?”

“Just terrific. I’ve got orders coming out of my ears, what with all this bonus money floating around.” He cocked his head to one side and gave Bellinger a knowing, sardonic look. “What’s going on, Vince? It’s way past both our bedtimes, isn’t it? You said we needed to talk.”

“I know, and I’m glad you could make it. It’s just that . . .” Bellinger hesitated. It was a tough subject to broach. “I was thinking about Danny.”

Matt’s eyes stayed on Bellinger for a moment, then he looked away, across the bar, before turning back. “What about Danny?”

“Well, last time I saw you, after the funeral . . . it was all so sudden, and we never really got a chance to talk about it. About what happened to him.”

Matt seemed to study Bellinger. “He died in a helicopter crash. You know that. Not much more to tell.”

“I know, but . . . what else do you know about it? What did they tell you?”

From Matt’s dubious look, it was obvious he could see through Bellinger’s tangential, circumspect approach. “Why are you asking me this, Vince? Why now?”

“Just . . . look, just bear with me a little here. What did they tell you? How did it happen?”

Matt shrugged. “The chopper came down off the coast of Namibia. Mechanical failure. They said it was probably due to a sandstorm they’d had out there, but they couldn’t be sure. The wreck was never recovered.”

“Why not?”

“There was no point. It was a private charter, and what was left of it was scattered all over the ocean floor. Not very deep there, I’m told. But the currents are tough. There’s a reason they call the area ‘the gates of hell.’ ”

Bellinger looked confused. “What about the bodies?”

Matt winced slightly. The memory was clearly a painful one. “They were never recovered.”

“Why not?”

His voice rose a notch. “The area’s swarming with sharks, and if they don’t get you, the riptides will. It’s the goddamn Skeleton Coast. There was nothing to recover.”

“So you—”

“That’s right, there was nothing to bury,” Matt flared. He was angry now, his patience depleted. “The casket was empty, Vince. I know, it was ridiculous, we cremated an empty box and wasted some decent wood, but we had to do it that way. It helped give my dad some closure. Now are you gonna tell me why we’re really here?”

Bellinger looked away, studying the faces around the bar. He felt a cold sweat rising through him, and his head throbbed with the strain of his confused, unsettling thoughts. “Did you watch the news today?”

“No, why?”

Bellinger nodded to himself, wondering how to go on.

“Vince, what’s going on?”

Just then, Bellinger’s BlackBerry beeped, alerting him to the receipt of a text message. Bellinger kept his hands on the table, ignoring it. He didn’t have the patience to deal with Jabba now.

He fixed on Matt and leaned in. “I think Danny may have been murdered.” He paused, letting the words sink in, then added, “Or worse.”

Matt’s expression curdled, and he looked like he’d been winded. “Murdered or worse? What could be worse?”

“Maybe he’s being held somewhere. Maybe they all are.”

“What?” His face was twisted with utter disbelief. “What the hell are you talking about?”

Bellinger motioned with his hand to keep it down and leaned in closer. “Maybe they killed Danny and the others and faked the chopper crash. Then again, maybe they’ve still got them locked up somewhere, working on it against their will.” His eyes were twitching left and right, scanning the bar. “I mean, think about it. If you got a bunch of geniuses to design something secret for you, wouldn’t you want to keep them around long enough to make sure nothing went wrong when you finally used it?”

His phone beeped again.

“To design what? You’re not making sense.”

Bellinger leaned in even closer and his voice dropped down almost to a whisper. “Something happened today, Matt. In Antarctica. There was this thing, in the sky. It’s all over the news. I think Danny had something to do with it.”

“Why would you think that?”

Bellinger was shaking visibly now, the words tumbling out of him nervously. His phone beeped again, but he ignored it. “Danny was working on something. He was playing around with distributed processing and he showed me some of his stuff and we talked about it and the possibilities were just mind-blowing, you know? I mean, he was brilliant, you know that. But then Reece showed up and whisked him away to work with him on that project of his, the biosensors, and—”

“Reece?”

“Dominic Reece. He taught him. He was his guru at
MIT
.” Bellinger shook his head, as if trying to block an unwelcome thought. “He was also in that chopper. With Danny.” He looked at Matt, as if to apologize for bringing it up. After a quiet beat, he added, “Anyway, it was a great project, the sensors would have saved thousands, tens of thousands of lives, and—”

His phone beeped for the fourth time.

Bellinger lost his train of thought and frowned. He ripped his concentration away from Matt and irritably fished out his phone. He grimaced as he fumbled to get to his inbox, and saw that three messages had come in from the same number.

Not Jabba’s. The messages were all from a number he didn’t recognize.

He punched up the last of the messages.

The words on the small screen hit him like a sledgehammer.

They simply read, “If you want to live, shut the fuck up and leave the bar now.”

Boston, Massachusetts

“
I
think Danny may have been murdered.” The penny-sized mike tucked away under the lapel of Bellinger’s coat sucked in the words and rocketed them over to the earpieces of the three operatives who sat in the van that was parked outside the bar on Emerson.

The two other operatives—the ones inside the bar with the barely noticeable, clear earpieces—heard them too.

In the van, the operative leading the surveillance team looked up pointedly at his auburn-haired colleague. She had done well. Her hands had been lightning quick, the move fluidly executed, the tag unnoticed. It had also helped that her beguiling eyes and teasing smile had distracted Bellinger. He hadn’t been the first to fall under her spell.

But he now needed to be contained.

The voice of one of the men in the bar shot through their earpieces. “He’s not going for it.”

The lead operative scowled and brought up his wrist mike. “I’m giving him another prod. Get ready to move in if he still doesn’t take the hint.”

The harsh voice came back with, “Standing by.”

He hit the send button on his cell phone again.

THE
WORDS
on the screen seared Bellinger’s eyes. He glanced up, his alarmed gaze raking the bar, a tourniquet of dread choking the life out of his heart. Everyone around him suddenly looked suspicious, threatening, dangerous.

Matt noticed.

“What is it?” he asked.

Bellinger blinked repeatedly. He was having trouble focusing. For a confused moment, the faces in the bar all seemed to be staring at him with unbridled malevolence.

Matt’s voice broke through again. “Vince. What is it?”

Bellinger turned to him, his words catching in his throat. “This was a mistake. Forget I said anything.”

“What?”

Bellinger stumbled to his feet. He looked squarely at Matt, his eyes bristling with fear. “Forget I said anything, all right? I’ve got to go.”

Matt shot up to his feet from behind the table and reached out, just managing to grab hold of Bellinger’s arm. “Cut the crap, Vince. What’s going on?”

Bellinger spun around, yanking his arm free with rabid ferocity before pushing Matt back with both hands. His frenzied reaction surprised Matt, who fell back and landed heavily, jarring his head against the booth’s wooden edge and triggering a ripple of commotion that startled the drinkers closest to him and pushed them back a step.

Matt straightened up, his head throbbing from the knock, and staggered to his feet in time to glimpse Bellinger disappearing into the crowd, rushing for the door.

He bolted after him, ducking into his wake, into the clear path that snaked through the drinkers all the way to the bar’s entrance.

He burst out onto the pavement and stopped in his tracks at the sight of Bellinger being manhandled by two bulky men and getting dragged into the back of a van.

Matt shouted, “Hey,” and charged at them, only his feet had barely left the ground when he felt something heavy slam into him from behind, catching him at the base of the neck and across his back, pounding the breath out of him and sending him flying face-first onto the snow-speckled pavement.

He landed badly, his right elbow taking the brunt of his weight and lighting up with pain, and before he could push himself back onto his feet, two sets of strong arms grabbed him, pinned his arms behind his back, and shoved him toward the van before throwing him in through its open doors.

He landed—hard—on the van’s ribbed, bare-metal floor, heard the van’s doors slam shut somewhere behind him, and felt his weight slide back as the van took off. Jarring images and sensations were coming at him thick and fast and assaulting him from all angles. Still facedown, one eye squashed against the floor, he heard muffled shouts and angled his head up to glimpse Bellinger, the two bulky men over him, and the vague outline of—that couldn’t be right—a woman with a shoulder-length bob, seemingly attractive, looking back from the driver’s seat, her head silhouetted against the van’s windshield, backlit by the streaming lights from beyond. One of the men was sitting on Bellinger’s back, pinning him down, one hand covering Bellinger’s mouth and blocking his screams of protest. The other was bent down beside them and loomed over Bellinger. He held something that looked like an oversized electric shaver in his hand.

A vaguely familiar high-pitched whine, something powering up, pricked the edge of Matt’s hearing, but in his frazzled state, he couldn’t quite place it. He turned, trying to shift himself over and onto his back, but one of the men who had grabbed him stomped down heavily on his back and sent him splattering against the van’s floor again. A jolt of nausea rushed through Matt as the whine reached a fevered pitch, and his muscles seized up as he realized what it was.

Straining to raise his head an inch, he caught sight of the second man bringing his hand down onto Bellinger and branding him with what Matt now realized was a pocket Taser. Bellinger screamed out in agony as a faint blue light flickered inside the van. A two-second burst was usually enough to bring a fit man down with major muscle spasms, three seconds was enough to turn most men into the sobbing equivalent of a fish flopping around on a dry dock. Bellinger’s hit lasted well over five seconds, and Matt knew what the effect on the scientist would be. He’d been at the receiving end of those prods. It wasn’t a pleasant sensation, especially not when they were wielded by neolithic prison guards. His skin bristled at the memory, the buzzing noise dredging up the pain of what felt like thousands of needles being shoved simultaneously into every pore of his body.

The van made a left turn, the shift in momentum allowing Matt a brief respite from the weight pinning him down, and he spotted Bellinger’s tormentor finally putting down the Taser and bringing out something much smaller, something that glinted at him in the jagged lights cutting in and out of the van, a syringe, which he swiftly plunged into the stricken man’s back, just below the neck.

Bellinger’s flopping stopped.

“He’s done,” the man announced without a hint of exertion or discomfort in his voice, as if what he’d just accomplished was no more than a routine chore.

The bulldozer sitting on Matt asked, “What about this one?”

The man who’d dealt with Bellinger mulled the question for a moment. “Same deal,” he decided.

Not the answer Matt was hoping for. Then again, none of the likely answers held much appeal.

One thing he knew: He wasn’t about to sit back and let a million volts fry him inside out.

He glimpsed the man moving off Bellinger and making his way over to the back of the van, the pocket Taser in hand, the ominous whine cranking up again.

Just then, the van made another turn, a right one this time.

Time to be a killjoy.

The weight of the bulldozer sitting on top of him shifted slightly from the turn, lightening momentarily. Matt summoned up the furious energy in every corpuscle of his body and suddenly heaved back, as hard as he could. The move caught his captor by surprise, making him lose his balance and sending him flying against the wall of the van. Matt quickly managed to get both hands under him to increase his leverage, then followed through with a full twist, weaving his fingers together and locking them just as he swung around and used his extended arms as a baseball bat.