The Sign (4 page)

“You shouldn’t be messing with it before we know what we’re dealing with,” Musgrave blurted out sharply.

Dalton ignored him and kept the joystick pressed forward. The skycam glided on, inching its way nearer to the blazing apparition.

“Dalton,” Finch said, low and discreet. It was getting uncomfortably close for him.

“I hear you,” he replied. “Just a little bit more.”

Gracie’s pulse quickened, thumping away in her ears as the skycam sailed ever closer to the apparition. It seemed tantalizingly close now, perhaps fifty feet or less—it was hard to judge the relative distance—when the sign suddenly dimmed right down and disappeared.

The crowd heaved a collective gasp.

“You see that? I told you,” Musgrave rasped.

“You kidding me?” Dalton fired back angrily. “What, you think I scared it?”

“We don’t know. But it was there for a reason, and now it’s gone.” The scientist put an arm around his wife, and they both turned and stared out into the distance, as if willing it to reappear, dismay clouding their faces.

“Get real, man,” Dalton shrugged, turning away.

Over the shelf, the Draganflyer continued on its trajectory unbothered. Nothing showed on its monitor as it buzzed through the air that the apparition had occupied. Dalton slid a glance at Gracie. He looked thoroughly spooked. She’d never seen him react that way, not to anything, and they’d been through some pretty gut-wrenching times together.

Gracie was just as shaken. She peered out into the grim sky.

There was no trace of the sign.

It was as if it had never happened.

And then, all of a sudden, Gracie felt the world around her darken, felt a momentous weight above her, and looked up to see the apparition right above her, hovering over the ship itself, a massive ball of shimmering light squatting above them, dwarfing the vessel. She flinched as the crowd gasped and recoiled in horror and Dalton pounced on the main camera to try and get it on film. Gracie just stood there, staring up at it in complete bewilderment, her knees trembling, her feet riveted to the wooden planks of the ship’s deck, fear and wonderment battling it out inside her, every hair on her body standing rigid for a brief moment that felt like an eternity—

—and then all of a sudden, the sign just faded out again, vanishing just as startlingly and as inexplicably as it had appeared.

Bir Hooker, Egypt

Y
usuf Zacharia puffed ruminatively on his
sheesha
as he watched his opponent pull his hand back from the weathered backgammon board. Nodding wearily to himself, the wiry old taxi driver palmed the dice. Anything less than a double-six meant he would lose the game. He didn’t have high hopes for the toss. The dice weren’t doing him any favors tonight.

He shook the small ivory cubes vigorously before flinging them across the board, and watched them skitter across its elaborately inlaid surface before they settled into a six and a one. He frowned, turning the fissures that lined his grizzled, leathery face into canyons, and rubbed his mostly bald pate, cursing his luck. To add to his misery, he became aware of a bitter, fruity bite gnawing at the back of his throat. The coals of his waterpipe had cooled down. He’d been so taken by the game and by his miserable run of rolls that he hadn’t noticed. Fresh, red-hot replacements would rekindle the soothing, honey-mint taste that helped lull him into a tranquil sleep every night, but he sensed he might have to forgo that little luxury tonight. It was late.

He glanced at his watch. It was time to head home. The other customers of the small café—two young tourists, an American couple, he thought, judging by their familiar guidebooks and newspapers—were also getting up to leave.
Baseeta
, he shrugged to himself. Never mind. There was always tomorrow. He’d be back for a fresh
sheesha
and another game, God willing.

He was pushing himself to his feet when something caught his eye, a fleeting image on the TV set that loomed down from a rickety old shelf behind the counter. It was way past the ever-popular soaps’ bedtime. At this hour, here, at the sleepy edge of the Egyptian desert, in the small village of Bir Hooker—haplessly misnamed after a British manager of the Egyptian Salt and Soda Company—and across the entire troubled region, for that matter, TVs would inevitably be tuned to some news program, feeding the endless debates and laments about the sorry state of the Arab world. Mahmood, the café’s jovial owner, tended to favor Al Arabiya over Al Jazeera until, aiming to put forward a more tourist-friendly face, he invested in a satellite dish with a pirated decoder box. Ever since, the screen was locked onto an American news network. Mahmood thought the foreign infusion gave his café more class; Yusuf, on the other hand, didn’t particularly care for the Americans’ never-ending coverage of the recent presidential election there, even though it had been, unusually, keenly watched across the region, a region whose fortunes seemed more and more entwined with the vagaries of that distant country’s leadership. But Yusuf’s resistance to the channel was counterweighed by an unspoken appreciation for its occasional coverage of pouting Hollywood starlets and scantily clad catwalk models.

Right now, however, his attention was consumed by something entirely different. The screen showed a woman in heavy winter gear reporting from what seemed like one of the poles. In the image behind her, something shone in the sky. Something bizarre and otherworldly, the likes of which he’d never seen before. It was just floating there, blazing over a collapsing cliff of ice, and had—oddly, though it was unmistakable—the distinct, manifest shape of a symbol.

A sign.

The others also took note of the events on the screen and drew in closer to the counter, excitedly urging Mahmood to turn the sound up. The scene it showed was surreal, unimaginable, only that wasn’t what disturbed Yusuf most. What really troubled him was that he’d seen that sign before.

His face pinched together with disbelief as he stared at the screen.

It can’t be.

He inched forward for a closer look. His mouth dropped by an inch, his skin tingled with trepidation. The camera cut to another angle, and this time, the illuminated symbol took over the whole screen.

It was the same sign.

There was no doubt in his mind.

Unconsciously, his hand rose discreetly to his forehead, and he quietly crossed himself.

His friends noticed his sudden pallor, but he ignored their questions and, without offering an explanation or a farewell, rushed out of the café. He clambered into his trusted old Toyota Previa and churned its engine to life. The people carrier kicked up a small cloud as it fishtailed onto the dusty, unlit road and disappeared into the night, Yusuf riding the pedal hard, rushing back to the monastery as quickly as he could, muttering the same phrase to himself, over and over and over.

It can’t be.

Cambridge, Massachusetts

The crowd caught Vince Bellinger’s eye as he ambled across the mall. They were massed outside the Best Buy, bubbling noisily with excitement, seemingly about something in the shop’s huge window display. Bellinger was more than familiar with the window—it usually housed the latest plasmas and LCDs, including the mammoth sixty-five-incher he’d been fantasizing about for Christmas this year. Covetable, to be sure, but nothing that merited this much attention. Unless it wasn’t the screens themselves, but rather what was on them, that had drawn the crowd.

Against the backdrop of piped-in seasonal Muzak and gaudy tinsel decorations, some people were talking animatedly on their cell phones, others waving friends over to join them. Despite being heavily laden with a pile of dry cleaning and his gym bag, Bellinger veered toward the store, wondering what all the fuss was about. Instinctively, he flinched at the possibility of another horror, another 9/11-like catastrophe, images of that terrible day still seared into his mind—although, he quickly thought, today’s crowd didn’t have that vibe to it. They weren’t horrified. They seemed enthralled.

He got as close as he could and peered over the heads and shoulders of the gathered people. As per usual, the screens were all tuned to the same channel, in this case a news network. The image they showed drew his eye immediately, and he didn’t quite understand what he was looking at—a spherical light, hovering over what seemed like one of the polar regions, confirmed by the banner underneath. He was watching it with piqued curiosity, in a detached trance, catching snippets of the animated comments bouncing around him, when his cell phone trilled. He groaned and juggled his bag and laundry around to fish it out of his pocket. Groaned doubly when he saw who was calling.

“Dude, where are you? I just tried your landline.” Csaba—pronounced
Tchaba,
nicknamed “Jabba,” for not-too-subtle reasons—sounded overly excited. Which wasn’t unusual. The big guy had a hearty appetite for life—and pretty much everything else.

“I’m at the mall,” Bellinger replied, still angling for a clearer view of the screens.

“Go home and put the news on, quick. You’re not gonna believe this.”

Jabba, excited about something on TV. Not exactly breaking news. Although this time—just this once, Bellinger thought—his exuberance seemed justified.

A brilliant chemical engineer of Hungarian extraction who worked with Bellinger at the Rowland Materials Research Laboratory, Csaba Komlosy had a passion for all things televisual. Well-made, high-concept shows were normally his turf, the kind of show where a gutsy and intense government agent repeatedly managed to save the nation from mass destruction or where a gutsy and intense architect repeatedly managed to break out of the most escape-proof prisons. Lately, though, Csaba had veered into seedier territory. He’d embraced the netherworld of unscripted television—reality TV, so-called despite the fact that it had little to do with reality, or with being unscripted, for that matter—and, much to Bellinger’s chagrin, he really liked to share the more singularly sublime moments of his viewing.

In this case, though, Bellinger was ready to give him a free pass. Still, he couldn’t resist a little dig. “Since when do you watch the news?”

“Would you stop with the inquisition and put the damn thing on,” Jabba protested.

“I’m looking at it right now. I’m at the mall, outside Best Buy.” Bellinger’s voice trailed off as some heads in front of him shifted and the image on the screen snared his attention again. He caught sight of a banner at the bottom of screen, which read, “Unexplained phenomenon over Antarctica.” There was also a small “Live” box in the upper right corner. He just stood there, transfixed, his eyes curiously processing what they were seeing. He recognized the reporter. He’d caught some of her specials over the years and remembered her reports from Thailand after the tsunami a few years back, when he’d first noticed her. Shallow as it sounded, the relative hotness of a TV newscaster was directly proportional to how much attention guys paid to the screen—especially if the news in question didn’t concern armed conflict, a sports result, or a celebrity meltdown. For most guys, Grace Logan—with the unforgiving green eyes, the tiny, mischievous mole poised just above the edge of her lips, the unsettlingly breathy yet earnest voice, the blond curls that always seemed to have a slightly unkempt tousle to them, and the Vargas Girl body that owed its curves to burgers and milkshakes, not silicone—ticked the hot box with ease.

This time, though, Bellinger’s eyes weren’t on her.

The camera zoomed in on the phenomenon again, sending an audible shiver through the crowd.

“Dude, it’s unreal,” Jabba exclaimed. “I can’t take my eyes off the screen.”

Bellinger couldn’t make sense of it. “Is this a joke?”

“Not according to them.”

“Where is this exactly?”

“West Antarctic ice sheet. They’re on some research ship off the coast. At first, I thought it’s got to be a stunt for a new movie, maybe Cameron or Emmerich or even Shyamalan, but none of them have a live project that fits.”

Jabba—film geek extraordinaire—would know.

“How long has it been up?” Bellinger asked.

“About ten minutes. It came on out of the blue while la Logan was yapping about the breakup of the ice shelf. First it was like this ball of light, then it morphed to a dark sphere—like that black planet in
The Fifth Element,
remember? Totally creeped me out.”

“Then it turned into this?”

“Yep.” The crunching sound coming through the receiver spurred Bellinger’s mind to picture the likely setting for his friend’s call: sunken deep in his couch, a bottle of Samuel Adams in one hand—not his first, Bellinger guessed, since they’d both left the lab over an hour ago—and a half-empty pack of sizzlin’ picante chips in the other. Which was why he was on speakerphone.

Bellinger’s brow wrinkled with concentration as he rubbed his baldpate. He’d never seen anything like it. More people were gathering around now, crowding around him, jostling for position.

Jabba crunched noisily into another chip, then asked, “So what do you think?”

“I don’t know,” he answered, as if in a daze. The crowd oohed as an airborne camera gave a closer look at the unexplained apparition. “How are they doing this?” he asked, cupping the phone’s mike area to cut out the noise around him. As a technology researcher and a scientist, his mind was instinctively skeptical and was immediately trying to figure out ways this could be done.

Jabba was obviously thinking along the same lines. “Must be some kind of laser effect. Remember those floating beads of light those guys were working on at Keio—”

“Laser-induced plasma emissions?” Bellinger interjected. They’d both seen press coverage of the recent invention at the Japanese university, where focused bursts from a laser projector heated up the air at specific points above the bulky device, causing tiny bursts of plasma emissions that “drew” small, three-dimensional shapes of white light in midair.

“Yeah, remember? The guy with the weird goggles and the white gloves—”

“No way,” Bellinger countered. “You’d need a generator the size of an aircraft carrier sitting right under it for something this big. Plus it wouldn’t explain the sustained brilliance or the way it’s so clearly defined.”