Maddox studied him dubiously. “It’s not you?”
“I’m telling you this has nothing to do with me,” Drucker insisted. “It’s got to be Rydell. He’s running things now. They got the priest out last night.”
“The sign,” Maddox realized, filling in the gaps mentally. “I thought it was something you’d planned. Then I tried Dario’s phone and got some cop, and that didn’t add up.”
“Dario’s dead,” Drucker confirmed.
Maddox nodded. Things were unraveling even worse than he’d thought. He turned to the screen, his mind processing what he was seeing. “So what’s he up to? What are they doing?”
“I don’t know. Maybe Rydell’s got the others convinced the global warming message is too important to kill.”
“But he knows you can blow it all up for him,” Maddox remarked.
“He can also take me down with him,” Drucker reminded Maddox, then added, “and you too, in case you forgot. He was the fall guy, remember? Without him, we’re out of options.” Then his face relaxed with a comforting realization. “They’re not going to expose him. They can’t. Not yet. Not before they figure out who they’re going to pin it on.” His face lit up. “Which gives us time. Time to figure out how to expose him without fingering ourselves as his puppet masters. Time to come up with another way out.”
Maddox studied him for a beat, then came to a quick conclusion. If he was going to disappear—if he was going to live to fight another day—he had to make sure he didn’t leave anyone behind who could ruin things for him. Like a career politician who wouldn’t think twice about selling him out to save his own skin.
But what he was seeing brought back to life a far more attractive option. One he thought had been wiped off his playbook.
He pulled out an automatic before Drucker had time to blink and shoved it right up against the man’s forehead. “I already have. Sit down.”
He herded Drucker backward and into an armchair facing the TV, then in one swift movement, he bent down, grabbed Drucker’s shaking hand with his gun hand, and arced it up so the silencer’s muzzle was jammed against Drucker’s mouth.
Drucker stared at him, terrified and confused.
“Thing is, right from the get-go, I never thought exposing Jerome was a good idea,” Maddox told him. “He’s much more useful this way. The truth is, we’re not out of options here, Keenan. You are.” And he pulled the trigger.
The bullet ripped out the back of Drucker’s head and sent a gray and burgundy mess splattering across the wall behind him. Maddox placed the gun in Drucker’s limp hand, pressed Drucker’s fingers tightly against the grip and the trigger, then let it drop as it would have had Drucker been alone.
Swift, Silent, Deadly. It was one hell of a good motto.
He pulled out his cell phone and hit the well-worn speed-dial number. “I think we’re back in business. How’s our boy?” he asked.
“He’s still put, at home,” his NSA contact told him. “Watching the live coverage from the park.”
“Good. Let me know if he moves. I need him to be home.” He glared at the screen, then slipped out the room, already calculating the quickest route to Hermann Park.
Chapter 83
Father Jerome stared at the crowd and hesitated, and felt a shiver spread across his lips and a tremble in his fingers. His forehead went sweaty as other thoughts started rising out of the caverns of his mind, fighting for attention. His eyes strayed, darting left and right nervously, clouded with uncertainty. Then a familiar voice echoed in his ears.
“You’re doing great,” Gracie told him. “Just keep going. Remember everything we talked about. Think about what you really want to tell these people. Block everything else out and open up your heart to them, Father. We’re right behind you.”
A ghost of a smile broke across his face, and he cast his gaze over the crowd, a renewed resolve blossoming within him. He bobbed his head in a slight gesture of confirmation, and pressed on.
CROUCHED IN THE BACK of the van, Gracie put her binoculars down and turned to address Matt across the big drum of the LRAD.
“This thing’s just incredible.” She grinned, patting it. “I want one.”
“Why not. It is Christmastime, right?” Matt said with an easy smirk. Then his expression tightened and he said, “Let them know I’m going in. And keep your eyes on Father Jerome in case he wobbles again.” He popped the door open.
“Good luck.” She smiled.
He smiled back and said, “I’ll see you in a little while.” He pushed his cell phone’s earpiece into place and glanced across at Dalton, who was behind the wheel. They exchanged a tight nod, then Matt slipped out of the van and headed for the plaza.
ACROSS THE FIELD from the plaza, tucked away behind the Miller Outdoor Theatre, Danny watched the proceedings through another set of binoculars while Rydell liaised with Gracie on the phone. The Navigator was parked nearby, tucked away in the service lot behind the theater, its rear door open. The launch tubes were huddled beside them, now freshly stacked with the last of the smart dust canisters.
“Matt’s on his way,” Rydell told Danny.
Danny nodded. “Launchers ready?”
“They’re all set,” Rydell told him. “You sure you had enough time to write the new programs?”
“They’ll be fine,” Danny said flatly.
Their eyes met. An unspoken anger still festered behind Danny’s gaze. Rydell winced and said, “I’ll make it up to you. I promise.”
Danny shrugged, and said, “Let’s make sure we pull this off first,” then turned his attention back to Father Jerome. “Ready?”
Rydell nodded. “Ready.”
“Let ’em rip.”
“WE’RE LIVING IN A FRACTURED WORLD,” Father Jerome announced. “Others have come before me. Blessed with revelations, with inspirations. With wise and noble thoughts that they tried to share with those around them. To help humanity. To give us food for thought. But all it’s done is turn man against man. Their wise and noble words and their selfless deeds have been misinterpreted, twisted, abused . . . hijacked by others for their own glorification. Institutions have been built in their names . . . great big temples of intolerance, each one of them claiming to be the true faith and pitting man against man. Turning their words into instruments of control. Instruments of hate. Instruments of war.”
He paused, breathing in short, ragged bursts now, sensing the unease spreading among the crowd. He frowned and redoubled his concentration, pushing the conflicting thoughts back, and said, “We have to try and fix that.”
Just then, the sphere of light spread out, growing outward until it dwarfed the piazza below it. The audience gasped, staring in wonderment as the sign pulsed and rippled with life before morphing into the sequence of geometric patterns it had previously displayed—only this time, it ended up settling on a different image. A cross. A large, blazing cross, burning in the sky over Hermann Park.
A loud cheer and shouts of “Praise the Lord” and “Amen” burst through the throng of onlookers as the cross just held there—but their joy was cut short when the sign started morphing again. The crowd gasped once more as the sign seemed to ripple and stretch outward and around before settling into another sign. Not a cross, this time. A star. The Star of David. The crowd flinched with surprise, roiled by the change, confused and scared and caught off-balance—but the sign wasn’t done yet. It held that shape, then changed again. It didn’t stop. It kept going, shape-shifting into a rotating sequence of symbols associated with other religions—Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Bahaism—and kept going, reaching back into history, assuming representations of all kinds of religious movements stretching back through the spider cults of Peru to the sun gods of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia and all the way back to the very dawn of civilization.