The Sign

turned out to be something less momentous than everyone was suggesting, she could already picture Jon Stewart ridiculing her into an early retirement.

Finch spun the laptop back and tapped some more keys. “And speaking of ET,” he said as he glanced pointedly across at Dalton, “a guy I know at the Discovery Channel sent me these.” He turned the screen back so it was facing them. “Some of them are the ones you’d expect, like clouds and Concorde contrails that make people think they’re seeing UFOs. I don’t know if I should be surprised, but he tells me there are over two hundred reported UFO sightings a month in America. A month. But then, there’s a whole slew of historic references to unexplained sightings going back thousands of years. We’re talking hundreds of references throughout history about bright balls of fire, flying ‘earthenware vessels,’ luminous discs. It’s not just a modern phenomenon. I mean, check out these historical records: ‘Japan, 1458: An object as bright as the full moon and followed by curious signs was observed in the sky.’ Or this one: ‘London, 1593: A flying dragon surrounded by flames was seen hovering over the city.’ ”

“Opium’ll do that to you every time,” Dalton half-joked. “Seriously. Drugs were legal back then, weren’t they?”

“Besides, none of these references are even remotely verifiable,” Gracie added.

“Sure, but the thing is, there are so many of them. Written continents apart, at a time when traveling from one to another was virtually impossible, when most of the world was illiterate. Even the Bible’s got them.”

“Big surprise there,” Gracie scoffed. A charged silence hung between them. “So what are we saying? What do you think we saw?”

Finch pulled off his glasses and used his sleeve to give them a wipe as he thought about it. “I’d have said mass hallucination if it wasn’t for the footage.” He shook his head slowly in disbelief, slipped his glasses back on, and looked up at Gracie. “I can’t explain it.”

“Dalton?” she asked.

His face clouded with uncertainty. He leaned back in his chair and ran his hands tightly through his hair. “I don’t know. There was something . . . ethereal about it, you know? It didn’t look flat, like something projected, but then it didn’t look like something hard and physical either. It’s hard to explain. There was something much more organic, much more visceral about it. Like it was part of the sky, like the sky itself had lit up, you know what I’m saying?”

“I do,” Gracie agreed uncomfortably. The sight of the bright, glowing sign, as vivid as when she first saw it, materialized in her mind’s eye. An upwelling of elation, the same one she felt when she first saw it, overcame her again as she remembered how it had formed itself out of nothing. It was as if the air itself had been summoned by God, lit up from within into that shape, she found herself thinking. Which didn’t sit well with her. She’d stopped believing in God when her mother died, ripped away from her young daughter by an unrelenting tumor in her breast. And now, here it was, this unexplained thing in the sky. As if it were taunting her.

She pushed the thought away. Get a grip. We’re running ahead of ourselves here. There’s got to be a logical explanation for it.

But a nagging question kept coming back.

What if there isn’t?

Gracie stared out the window, scanning the sky for another sighting, her jumbled mind desperate for an answer. The satphone rang, and as Finch stretched across the table to answer it, her mind migrated to a UFO hoax from a year earlier. The clip, showing a UFO buzzing a beach in Haiti, had clocked up over five million viewings on YouTube within days of its posting, hogging chat rooms and news aggregator sites across the Web and popping up on every FunWall on Facebook. Millions were taken in by it—until it turned out to be something a French computer animator had put together in a few hours on his MacBook, using commercially available software, reluctantly explaining it away as a “sociological experiment” for a movie—about a UFO hoax, natch—that he was working on. With the advances in special effects and the proliferation of faked videos of such high quality that they managed to convince even the most staunch of skeptics, a subtle question arose in Gracie’s mind: Would people recognize a “true” event of this kind when—as it seemed—it really happened? She knew what she saw. It was right there in front of her, but everyone else was only seeing it on a screen. And without seeing it with their own eyes, could they ever accept it for what it was, something wondrous and inexplicable and possibly even supernatural or divine—or would it be drowned in a sea of cynicism?

“Gracie,” Finch called out, covering the phone’s mouthpiece with his hand.

She turned.

His face had a confused scrunch to it. “It’s for you.”

“Now what?” she grumbled.

“I’m not sure, but . . . it’s coming from Egypt. And I think you need to take it.”

Chapter 16

Boston, Massachusetts

There were no cabs around, but it didn’t take too long for Matt to get back to his car. The van hadn’t traveled that far from the bar before he’d dived out of it. He would’ve made it back sooner, but he wasn’t at his best. He felt groggy and nauseous, his skin had been scraped raw in several places, and every bone in his body felt like it had been hammered by a blacksmith on steroids. And, as if to add insult to injury, it was snowing again.

He was relieved to find his car, a highland-green 1968 Mustang GT 390 “Bullitt” Fastback that was his next restoration project, still where he’d left it, close to the bar on Emerson. It hadn’t even occurred to him to check for his keys before he got to it, but, mercifully, they were also still there, safely ensconced in the pocket of his peacoat.

Just a couple of small miracles to cap off a magical night.

Less miraculous, though, was the fact that he’d lost his cell phone. He guessed it had probably flown out of the pocket of his coat during his hard landing on the asphalt, though he didn’t dwell on it. He had more pressing concerns.

He leaned against the car and caught his breath, and the brutal images of a helpless Bellinger getting fried and injected roared back into his mind’s eye. He had to do something to try and help him, but he couldn’t see a move that made sense. He couldn’t report it to the cops. The van was long gone, and the inevitable questions he’d be asked, given his record, would only cloud the issue. More to the point, he didn’t think the risk of flagging his whereabouts to the goon squad who’d come after Bellinger was outweighed by any positive effect it would have on helping the cops find Bellinger and bringing him back safely.

Which, somehow, he didn’t think was going to happen anyway.

The traffic was light and scattered as he drove home, the city now tucked in under a thin blanket of snow. He was on the expressway within minutes, and from there, it was only a short hop down to Quincy and the studio apartment he lived in over his workshop. As he cruised south, his mind grinded over what had happened to him, trying to make sense of the rush of events that had come at him from nowhere and figure out what the right move would be.

Bellinger had called. He’d asked for a meeting, one that couldn’t wait. He’d then hit him with the news that his brother might have been murdered, or that his death might have been faked and that he might be locked up somewhere. How had he put it, exactly? Working on it, against their will?

Danny, alive—but locked up somewhere?

The thought flooded Matt’s gut with equal doses of elation—and rage. Matt and Danny had always been close, which never failed to amaze their friends, given how different they were. For a start, they didn’t look anything like each other. Matt, three years older, had inherited his dad’s olive skin, dark hair, and solid build, whereas Danny—two shades fairer and fifty pounds lighter—took after his mom. The stark difference between them extended to, well, pretty much everything else. Matt had no patience for classes or for schoolwork, whereas Danny