Still, he’d had no choice. There was no way out of it. He knew Finch wouldn’t have bought into anything he could have come up with to explain his having a satphone, much less one that was encryption-module equipped.
He turned and glanced at Gracie. She was now sitting alone, her shoulders slightly hunched, looking out her window. He knew she wouldn’t bow out because of Finch’s death. She was a pro too. And like all pros, she had drive. Ambition. And the cold, rational ability to compartmentalize tragedies like her producer’s death and carry on.
Which was good.
She still had a role to play. An important one.
HALF AN HOUR after the Gulfstream had taken off from the airport at Alexandria, another aircraft had followed it into the sky and was now shadowing it, a couple of hundred miles back, headed in the same general westerly direction.
The plane, a chartered Boeing 737, was a much larger, and older, aircraft. It had enjoyed stints with various airlines over its twenty-six years of service, though none were as unusual as the one it was undertaking today.
The jet’s hold carried a highly covetable selection of state-of-the-art technology. It included a long range acoustic device, canisters of nanoengineered smart dust, and ultra-silent compressed air launchers. Also stowed there was some decidedly less sophisticated, but equally effective, gear: sniper rifles, silencer-equipped handguns, tactical knives, camouflage gear. The jet’s cabin held a load that was no less exceptionaclass="underline" seven men whose actions had entranced the world. Six of them were highly trained professionals: a three-man team that had spent over a year in the desert, another that had endured extreme weather all over the globe. The seventh was an outlier. He wasn’t highly trained, nor did he share their sense of purpose.
Danny Sherwood was only there out of fear.
He’d been their prisoner for close to two years. Two years of tinkering, of testing and double-testing, of waiting. Two years of worrying, of coming up with devious, complicated plans of escape, of fantasizing about them, of ditching them. And then, finally, it had begun. It was why they’d kept him alive. It was why they needed him. And now it was in play.
He didn’t know what their plans were or how it would all end. He’d heard snippets of talk. He thought he knew what they were up to, but he wasn’t sure. He’d thought of sabotaging it, of screwing up their plans, of re-jigging the software so that a giant Coca-Cola or Red Sox sign appeared instead of the mystical sign they had designed. But he knew they were keeping a close eye on his work, knew they’d probably figure out what he was up to before he got a chance to use it. He also knew that if he tried it, it would mean a death sentence for him, and, probably, for Matt and for their parents. And so he thought about it, he mulled it over and dreamed of it and enjoyed the brief satisfaction it gave him to imagine it, but he knew he’d never go through with it. He wasn’t a fighter. He wasn’t a tough guy.
If they’d taken Matt, he knew things would have been different. But Matt wasn’t there. He was.
He sometimes wished his survival instincts hadn’t kicked in just as the Jeep was launching itself off the canyon’s edge. Wished his hand hadn’t lunged out and pushed that door open. Wished he hadn’t leapt out of the Jeep just as its front wheels ran out of ground. Wished he hadn’t ended up clinging to life at the very edge of the abyss, staring up at the circling bird of prey that was about to land and take him away.
But he had. And he was here, now, shackled to his seat, headed for another corner of the planet, wondering when his nightmare would ever end.
Chapter 60
Framingham, Massachusetts
The hamburgers were big and juicy and grilled just right, the buns soft but not crumbly, the coleslaw freshly cut and crunchy, the fries thick, crisp on the outside and the right side of mushy on the inside, the Cokes—in glass bottles, not cans—nicely chilled and served in tall, curvy glasses filled with ice cubes that weren’t in a rush to melt. It was the perfect meal for Matt and Jabba, given their day—a solid, comfortable meal, a reassuring meal, the kind of meal that dragged one’s mind away from troubled times and pulled it back to better days, a meal that drew one into its own comfy world with its hearty offerings and put all thoughts of heavy conversation on indefinite hold.
They sat facing each other in a booth in a small diner in Framingham, about fifteen miles west of Brookline. It was far enough, and busy enough, for them to feel relatively safe. They’d polished off a burger each and hadn’t spoken more than ten words throughout. A lot had happened. It had been a charged day, a bad day right on the heels of another bad day. They’d seen a guy get crushed in half, another get his legs mangled up by a Japanese import. Bullets had whizzed by inches from their faces. Matt had shot several guys, possibly—probably—killing one or more of them, which was not something he’d done before. Not even close.
Thinking about it, revisiting those images in his mind’s eye, he found it hard to accept it had all really happened. That he’d done all that. He didn’t recognize himself. It all felt surreal, like he’d been on the outside, watching it. But it all became real again once he focused on the overwhelmingly good thing that had trumped everything else that had happened: the discovery that his kid brother was still very much alive.
They sat in silence. A small, wall-mounted TV over the cash register was set low. It was on a local channel and had been screening a rerun of an old Simpsons episode, one Jabba knew by heart and one Matt couldn’t have been less interested in. The end credits eventually gave way to some staggeringly unimaginative ads before segueing into the evening news, starting with the latest update from Egypt. It brought reality roaring back into Matt’s face in a flash.
The volume was too low for him to hear what was being said, but even before the waitress turned it up, the visuals themselves were deafening enough. A loud banner on the bottom of the screen informed them that Father Jerome hadn’t been seen since the sign had appeared over him earlier that day. Another added that unconfirmed reports had said that he had actually left the monastery for destinations unknown. Reporters and pundits around the world were scrambling to figure out where he was and where he could have gone to. They wondered about whether he might be headed to Jerusalem, or the Vatican, or back home to Spain.
Elsewhere, gargantuan crowds were still massed in St. Peter’s Square, in São Paulo, and in many more cities now, holding vigils and praying. The world was holding its breath, waiting for Father Jerome’s next appearance. Pockets of violence had cropped up in Pakistan, in Israel, and in Egypt, where men and women of all religions who had taken to the streets to proclaim their faith in Father Jerome had clashed with mobs of unswayed and unwavering believers who were sticking to the rigid tenets of their holy books. Riot police had been deployed, cars and shops had been set alight, and in each case, there had been deaths.