Chapter 33
Boston, Massachusetts
Larry Rydell was having a hard time focusing on what his chief advertising strategist and his director of interactive marketing were saying as they stepped out of the elevator. He’d had trouble concentrating on the conversation throughout their lunch at the firm’s laid-back canteen—a moniker that seriously understated the fine sushi and Mediterranean cuisine that were on offer. He knew both executives well. They were part of the brain trust that ran the firm—his firm, the one he’d founded twenty-three years earlier, before he’d dropped out of Berkeley. He used to thrive on their informal meetings. They were part of what fueled the company to its global success, and he normally enjoyed them with the enthusiasm of a young entrepreneur hell-bent on conquering the world. Lately, though, he’d been more distant, less focused, and today, he was only there in strictly physical terms. His mind was entirely elsewhere, locked on the events that were taking place continents away.
He gave them a casual half smile and a small wave as they parted, then strode down the wide, glass-covered hallway to his office. As he reached the secretarial pool stationed outside his door, he saw Mona, his trusted senior PA, and his three other assistants clustered around the bank of wall-mounted LCD screens that were constantly tuned to the major international news channels.
The sight surprised him somewhat. They’d already watched the Greenland sighting that morning. Mona turned and spotted him. She waved him over while gesturing at the screen. “Did you see this?” she asked. “It’s from a documentary they filmed six months ago in an old monastery in Egypt. You’ve got to see this.”
He felt a pinch of concern as he stepped closer to the screen, then the blood drained from his face as the significance of what it was showing sank in.
He managed to mask his unease and feigned sharing in their excitement for a minute or two before retreating into the sanctuary of his office, where he studied the news reports in private. He was familiar with Father Jerome, of course—who wasn’t—but he’d never heard of the monastery. Close-ups of the markings on the cave wall were everywhere he looked, and were definitely renderings of the sign. Which sent Rydell’s mind cartwheeling in all kinds of deeply troubling directions.
He flicked around TV channels and websites feverishly, looking for something, anything, to put his mind to rest. Nothing came to his rescue. On the screens, legions of commentators on the news networks were competing to make sense of it.
“Well, if what we’re seeing here is true, if this footage was really filmed when they’re saying it was,” one notable pundit was saying, “then clearly, it’s an association between this unexplained phenomenon and a highly regarded man of faith, and not just any faith—a Christian man of faith,” he emphasized, “who somehow foresaw these events we’ve been witnessing, while staying in one of Christianity’s oldest places of worship . . .”
The implications of the footage were obvious and inescapable, and it was already creating a huge stir. Evangelists and born-again Christians, parishioners and preachers alike, had begun staking their claim on the sign and making all kinds of prophetic proclamations. The followers of other faiths—predictably—didn’t share in their euphoria and felt excluded and threatened. A few angry denunciations had already been voiced by Muslim scholars. More would inevitably come, and from other religions too, Rydell was certain.
Which wasn’t part of the plan.
He pulled back and engaged his mind in a broader, less prejudiced analysis of what this might be. He knew there were a lot of other possible explanations for it. They’d expected people to claim the sign all along. They knew that crazies in every dark corner of the planet would be coming out of their rabbit holes and making all kinds of nonsensical declarations. But this was no nutcase. This was Father Jerome. The Father Jerome.
No, he was sure of it. Something was very, very wrong.
He’d misjudged them again.
And that possibility—that certainty—sent a bracing shot of ice rushing through his veins.
He did all he could to keep his anger in check as he picked up the phone and punched the speed-dial key for Drucker.
SEATED COMFORTABLY IN HIS OFFICE on Connecticut Avenue, Keenan Drucker watched his TV monitor with avid interest. He marveled at how quickly the media pounced on any development and whipped it around the planet. The content beast needed to be fed, and ever since the first appearance of the sign, it was positively feasting.
He felt a deeply rooted satisfaction at how things were unfolding, and his gaze ratcheted back from the plasma screen on his wall and dropped down to a framed picture on his desk. Jackson, his son—his dead son—beamed back at him from behind its thin glass plate. Drucker felt the same stab of grief he suffered every time he glanced at the picture. He tried to keep that image of Jackson in his mind—alive, vibrant, handsome, proudly turned out in his crisp officer’s dress uniform, the young man’s eyes blazing with a sense of pride and purpose—and not let the horrific images from the mortuary seep in and overpower it. But he never could. The images from that visit to the base, when he and his wife were presented with what was left of their son, were permanently chiseled into his hardened soul.
I’ll make things right, he thought to Jackson. I’ll make sure it never happens again.
He tore his eyes off his son’s face and looked up at the screen. He surfed away from the mainstream news networks and trawled the Christian channels instead. The sound bites coming through were promising. The footage from the caves was whipping up a storm of excitement, that much was clear. The people in the street were lapping it up. The preachers, however, were being more cautious. He watched as one televangelist after another gave cagey responses about what was going on, clearly unsure about how to handle this unexpected intrusion into their cosseted worlds.
Typical, he thought, knowing they had to be seriously threatened—but also aware that they’d be watching each other, waiting to see who’d be the first to jump into the pool.
“If he’s the real deal,” he heard one pundit remark on air, “these preachers will soon be falling over themselves to embrace him and claim him as their own.”
They’ll get there, he mused. They just need some encouragement.
Covert encouragement, to be precise.
Which, as it happened, was something Keenan Drucker excelled at.
His BlackBerry pinged. He dragged his concentration away from the monitor and glanced at the phone. It was Rydell.
As expected.
He inhaled a long, calming breath, then picked it up. Rydell’s voice was—also, as expected—agitated.
“Keenan, what the hell’s going on?”
Time for damage control. Something else he excelled at.
“Not on the phone,” he replied curtly.
“I need to know this isn’t what I think it is.”
“We need to talk,” Drucker just repeated, his words slow, emphatic. “In person.”
A beat later, Rydell came back. “I’ll fly down first thing in the morning. Meet me at Reagan. Eight o’clock.” And he was gone.