A pensive silence smothered the room.
After a brief moment, Gracie glanced over to Rydell. “You really thought you could get away with this?” she asked him. Her voice was flat. She was still in shock at Ogilvy’s betrayal. At the thought of how she’d been played. At the idea of Finch having been killed because of this.
“I had to do something,” he said with a tired shrug. “People aren’t listening. They’re too passive. Too lazy. They don’t listen to reason until it’s too late. They don’t want to listen to politicians. They certainly don’t want some tree-hugger in Birkenstocks telling them how to live. They won’t take the time to read or to listen to the experts. Look at the financial meltdown. Experts have been warning about it for years. Buffett called derivatives ‘financial weapons of mass destruction.’ No one listened. Then it all fell apart overnight.” He looked around the room, as if looking for a hint of understanding, if not empathy. “I couldn’t just sit back. This isn’t about your 401(k) losing half its value. It isn’t about losing your home. It’s about the planet losing its ability to sustain life.”
“It’s like Finch said. It’s all in the branding,” Dalton remarked, throwing a glance at Gracie. “‘Global warming’ sounds way too nice and cozy. They should have called it global boiling.”
“It’s geocide,” Rydell said before leaning back into the darkness.
A couple of nods sent the tired room back into silence. Gracie finally broke through the weary haze again and asked Rydell, “If you weren’t going to be the fall guy . . . do you agree with what Drucker said? With what they’re trying to do?”
Rydell thought about it for a moment and gave a pained shake of his head. “I agree with what he thinks is wrong with our country. History’s shown us, time and again, that mixing religion and politics only brings destruction. And I have no doubt that it’s a real danger, maybe more dangerous than anything Homeland Security is worried about. But I don’t agree with his solution. And I certainly don’t agree with his methods.” He looked around the room. “No one was supposed to get hurt. Drucker’s just out of control. And he’s not done. Who knows what message he’ll choose to put into Father Jerome’s mouth before he’s through. He could make him say or do anything he likes. And the whole world’s listening.”
“We’ve got to stop him,” Gracie put in. “We’ve got to go live with what we know.”
“No,” Matt said flatly from the corner of the room.
Gracie turned to him. “What are you talking about? We’ve got to go public.”
Matt shook his head. “We can’t break the story. Not yet. If we do that now, they’ll kill Danny. I need to get him out first, make sure he’s safe. After that, you can slap it on the front page of The New York Times or wherever you want. It’s all yours.”
“You heard what they’re planning, Matt,” Gracie argued. “The show’s tomorrow. It’s going to be huge—and it’ll be watched across the planet. And you’ve seen what’s going on out there. People are buying into it, fighting over it. Every hour we wait, this thing’s sinking in deeper. If we wait until after the show to blow the lid off this thing, it might be too late to undo the damage it’ll have caused.”
“Once that happens, we’ll be kind of doing their work for them if we expose it, won’t we?” Dalton asked. “I mean, that’s their plan, right?”
“We don’t have a choice,” Gracie pointed out. “It’s not ideal, but we have to do it and we have to do it now.”
“They can’t expose it,” Matt countered. “Not yet. Not as long as they don’t have you,” he said as he chucked a nod at Rydell. “They don’t have their fall guy, right? So who are they going to blame it on? They’ve got to blame it on someone—someone without a political axe to grind. Plus as long as they don’t have you locked up,” he aimed his words at Rydell again, “they’d be running the risk of you coming out with your side of the story. They’d be screwed. They’ve got some figuring out to do before they tell the world it’s a setup.”
“Which they will, sooner or later, there’s no doubt about that,” Gracie interjected. “No way they’d let this run indefinitely. They’d be handing the Christian Right the keys to the kingdom. And we can’t let that happen either.”
Matt paused at the thought. There didn’t seem to be a way out, and although all he could think about was getting his brother back safely, he suddenly realized there were bigger considerations he couldn’t shy away from.
He chewed over it for a moment, then said, “We’ve got a small window before they figure out their fallback position, right?” He glanced over to Rydell. “They might even be wondering if you’ll keep quiet. As a trade-off for getting your green message out there.”
“They’d be wrong,” Rydell confirmed without hesitation.
“Either way, they won’t do anything yet. Not until they come up with another endgame that doesn’t leave them holding the bag. Which gives me a bit of time to try and get Danny back. Even if it means letting them put Father Jerome up on that stage. You can’t ask me to give up on him. Not when I’m so close.”
He looked around the room. The others glanced at each other, weighing his words.
He looked at Gracie. She held his gaze, then nodded warmly.
“The country’s already well on its way to buying it,” she finally said. “Tomorrow night will make it harder to come back from, sure, but . . . we can hold off till then. Besides, it seems to me that none of us would still be around if it wasn’t for Matt. We owe him that much.”
She glanced around, judging the others’ reactions. Rydell and Dalton each nodded their agreement. Her eyes ended up settling on Matt.
He smiled and gave her a small nod of appreciation.
“Okay, so how do we do it?” Gracie asked him.
“How do we do what?”
“Find your brother.” She caught his confused look and flashed him a slight grin. “What, did you think we were going to bail on you now?”
Matt glanced around the room again. Saw beaming support from everyone around him. Nodded to himself, accepting it. “We’ve got to assume they’re going to put a sign up over Father Jerome tomorrow, right?”
Gracie nodded. “No doubt about that.”
“Then that’s how we’ll do it.”
THEY STAYED UP most of the night, studying maps, plans, and photographs of the stadium pulled from the Internet, examining its layout and the spread of the surrounding area, trying to anticipate where Danny and the launch team were likely to be positioned.
By dawn, they felt they’d reached a consensus on how Drucker’s guys might try to stage it. They’d pretty much followed Rydell’s lead. Having the guy who’d been in charge of the sign’s technology gave them a nice head start, but there were still a lot of unknowns. Then as the first glints of sunlight broke through the darkness, the TV started showing cars and people already setting out on their pilgrimage, and they knew they had to get going too.
They loaded up the little gear they had into the back of the Lincoln. After they were done, Matt saw Gracie standing alone, down the walkway from their room, at the edge of the porch, staring out at the brightening sky. He ambled over and joined her.
“You okay?”
She studied him, then nodded. “Yeah.” She studied him for another beat, then looked away again. “It’s so weird. To think of how divided the country’s become. To think that people need to resort to . . .” She shook her head. “When did we become so hateful? So intolerant?”
“Probably around the same time some power-crazed douche bags decided it would help them win elections,” he quipped.