The Sign

“If you figure anything out, call me, okay? Just call me, anytime.” Gracie gave out her satphone number, hung up, and heaved a sigh of frustration.

Another dead end.

She mopped her face with her hands before sweeping them tightly through her hair, massaging some life into her scalp. She’d managed to coax some good video bites from Simmons and some of the other scientists on board, and while Dalton was editing it all into a high-def report to broadband back to the news desk in D.C.—much better than the jumpy, grainy Began live feed they’d used for the first broadcast, more Armageddon, less Cloverfield this time around—she’d been working the satphone.

Her years on the job had allowed her to build up a beefy Rolodex, and right now, she was mining it for all its worth. She spoke to a contact of hers at NASA, a project director she’d met while covering the space shuttle Columbia’s disaster back in 2003. She also called contacts of hers at CalTech and at the Pentagon, as well as the editor of Science magazine and the network’s science and technology guru.

They were all as baffled as she was.

She’d hardly hung up when the satphone rang.

Another reporter, angling for a comment.

“How are they managing to get hold of this number?” she groaned to Finch.

He pulled a who-knows face and grabbed the phone for yet another polite, but firm, rebuff. For the moment, it was their exclusive—for better or for worse.

It’s not that she was camera shy, or that she didn’t like being in the public eye. Far from it. Her career as a TV correspondent wasn’t an accident: She’d wanted it ever since high school. She’d pursued every opportunity to get those breaks, and once she did, she’d worked damn hard at grabbing her share of airtime and overcoming the endemic misogyny and the subtle bullying in the industry. She thrived on the stories she covered and the experiences she shared with her viewers, she loved stepping in front of that camera and telling the world what she’d found out, and undeniably, the camera loved her back. She had that unquantifiable magnetism that went beyond the purely physical. People just tuned in and enjoyed her company. Focus groups confirmed her broad appeal: Women weren’t threatened by her, they took a possessive pride in her expertise, and in an age where public image was everything and every word was carefully weighed for effect, her candor and honesty were a big draw; men, while readily admitting that they fancied the pants off her, more often than not pointed out how they found her brain to be just as much of a turn-on.

And so she’d gone from local reporter at a network affiliate in Wisconsin to weekend anchor at a bigger affiliate in Illinois and eventually to anchor and special correspondent for the network’s flagship Special Investigations Unit. In the process, she’d become a face America trusted, whether she was reporting from Kuwait in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, on board a Greenpeace vessel stalking Japanese whaling ships, or following the unfolding tragedies of the tsunami in Thailand and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.

More recently, she’d been unwittingly drawn into the emotionally charged debate on global warming. She’d approached the issue as a skeptic, her instincts compelling her to question—on air—the often lazy assumptions of the ever-more-fashionable, almost religious, environmental movement. She knew how unreliable long-term forecasts were, how history was littered with the failed predictions of the most brilliant minds on everything from population levels to oil prices, and she hadn’t minced her words when voicing her skepticism. Up until then, her honesty and integrity had served her well. On this issue, her candor proved to be a problem. The reaction had been nothing less than incendiary. She was lambasted for her doubts from all corners, and her career had hung in the balance.

She decided the subject matter merited her attention, whichever side of the fence she ended up on. She pitched a comprehensive, no-holds-barred, in-depth documentary tackling the issue, and the network’s brass signed off on it. And so, with the vast majority of her colleagues mired in the quicksands of the marathon election campaign back home, she focused her energies on examining all the available data on the climate issue and meeting everyone who mattered. She was soon convinced that greenhouse gases had undoubtedly risen in the last few decades, and the earth did appear to be warming, but she still needed to find out if the connection between the two was as direct as it was now being portrayed. And so she’d crisscrossed the globe, from the remote science station of Cherskii in Siberia, where 40,000-year-old permafrost was now thawing and, in the process, releasing huge amounts of greenhouse gases, to Greenland, where massive glaciers were sliding toward the sea at a rate of two yards every hour, taking a forensic look at every new report on the matter during her travels.

Her investigative claws sharpened when she looked into the Global Climate Coalition, the Information Council of the Environment, and the Greening Earth Society—all of them cleverly misnamed, created and funded by the automotive, petroleum, and coal industries with the sole purpose of deceiving the public by spreading disinformation and callously repositioning global warming as theory rather than fact. It didn’t take long for her to become more and more convinced that the planet was indeed in trouble because of us. What was far less clear, however, was what we could realistically—and pragmatically—do about it. That was a far more contentious, and troubling, debate, and one she felt very passionate about.

But she hadn’t expected it to lead to this.

She breathed out with exasperation. “I’m getting nothing here. You having better luck?” she asked Finch as she got out of her chair and walked over to the window to scan the skies.

Finch had been talking to the news desk back in D.C. and trawling through his own contacts list. “Nope. If it’s natural, no one’s seen anything like it. And if it’s not, they’re all telling me the technology to pull off something like this just doesn’t exist.”

“We don’t know that,” Dalton objected, looking up from his monitor. “I’m sure there’s a lot of stuff out there that we don’t know about.”

“Yes, but what we don’t know about doesn’t really matter in this case, because there’s nothing we know about that even comes close.”

“You lost me.”

“Technology breakthroughs—they have to start somewhere,” Finch explained. “They don’t just come out of nowhere. No one suddenly came up with cell phones. It started with Alexander Graham Bell two hundred years ago. There’s a progression. Regular phone, cordless home phones, digital phones, and eventually, cell phones . . . Stealth fighters—we didn’t know about them, but they’re just evolutions of other fighter planes. You see what I mean? Technology evolves. And that thing we saw . . . there doesn’t seem to be anything out there that we can point to and say, ‘Well, if we took that and made it bigger, or more powerful, or used it in such a way, it could explain it.’ It’s in a whole different ballpark. And everyone’s trying to figure it out. I mean, look at this.” He pulled up the latest e- mail from D.C. “It’s going ballistic,” he enthused. “Reuters, AP, CNN. They’re all carrying it. Every station from London to Beijing is running it. Same for the big news blogs. Drudge, Huffington. It’s been voted up to number one on Digg and we’ve crossed two hundred thousand hits on YouTube. And the chat rooms are just going nuts over it.”

“What are they saying?”

“From what I can see, people are in one of three camps. Some of them think it’s some kind of harmless stunt, a CGI, War of the Worlds kind of thing. Others also think it’s a con but they see something more sinister in it, and they’re throwing out all kinds of crazy ideas about how it could have been pulled off, none of which seem to hold water if you read the mocking replies they’re getting from people who seem to know what they’re talking about.”

“Is there anyone who doesn’t think we’re behind it?”

“Yep. The third group: the pro camp. The ones who believe it’s the real thing—real as in God, not ET. One of them called us ‘the heralds of the Second Coming.’ ”

“Well that makes me feel so much better,” she groaned, her chest tightening with unease. Greed and fear were tugging at her. Part of her was thrilled by the idea of being the face of the hottest story around—she couldn’t deny that—but the more reasoned side of her was clamoring for restraint. She knew what she’d seen; she just didn’t know what it was. And until she did, she was uncomfortable with how it was all spiraling out of control. If it