had an insatiable appetite for learning. Matt lettered in as many sports as he could cram into his schedule. Danny couldn’t sink a basket if he was sitting on the backboard. Off campus, the contrast between the two brothers wasn’t any less pronounced. Matt was irreverent, wild, and reckless—in other words, a babe-magnet. Danny was far more introverted and preferred the company of the computer he’d found in a junk shop and rebuilt in his bedroom. Still, despite it all, they had a bond that was unshakable, a deep understanding of each other that survived the nastiest taunts and the most callous temptations that high school could throw at them.
Their friendship had also survived Matt’s repeated collisions with the law.
As with a lot of cases like his, things had started small. Matt had built his first car at the age of thirteen, hooking up an old washing-machine engine to a soap-box derby car that became something of a fixture around his neighborhood. The local cops were amazed and even the hardheaded sticklers among them couldn’t quite bring themselves to take away his pride and joy—a relationship that would change dramatically over the years. For as he grew older, the disparity between his love of cars, on the one hand, and the bleak part-time work prospects available to him in the Worcester area and his parents’ wafer-thin bank account, on the other, became more frustrating. Headstrong and impatient, Matt sought to redress that imbalance his own way.
Those early escapades were classic Matt. He didn’t go after any old ride. He would trawl the more affluent neighborhoods of Boston for specific cars on his hit list. He also never crashed or trashed the cars he stole, nor did he ever try to sell them. He would merely abandon them in some parking lot once he’d had the chance to sample them. He managed to test-drive quite a few before he got caught. The judge he came up against on that first conviction wasn’t amused or impressed by his antics.
That inaugural stint behind bars proved to have far-reaching consequences. Upon his release from jail, it didn’t take long for Matt to realize how his life had changed. Work prospects dried up. Friends shied away from him. People looked at him in a different way. He had changed too. Trouble seemed to come looking for him, as if sensing it had a willing customer. His hardworking, God-fearing parents were overwhelmed and paralyzed by his wild streak. They didn’t have the good sense or the strength of character to offer him the guidance he needed. His underpaid and corrupt parole officer was even less of a candle in the dark. And despite Danny’s repeated, frustrated arguments about where this was headed, Matt ended up dropping out of high school before graduation, and from there, his life just spiraled out of control. He spent the next few years rotating in and out of jail for theft, criminal damage to property, and battery, among others, his future withering away while Danny’s blossomed, first at MIT, then at a highly paid job in a tech company based nearby.
As he motored across the Neponset River, Matt ruefully remembered how he hadn’t seen much of Danny before his death. Matt had only been released from jail a few months before Danny had been offered the job with Reece, and he hadn’t seen much of him after that. Matt had been busy setting up his business—with the help of a life-altering loan from his kid brother, he thought with a twinge of shame. In a sense, he owed him his life.
It was Danny who’d sat him down and talked some sense into him—finally. Made him realize he couldn’t keep doing this. And got him to straighten up.
The way out Danny had suggested was simple. Turn what did the damage in the first place into something positive. Use it to carve out a new life. And Matt listened. He found a small car shop in Quincy that was closing down, and took over the lease. The plan he and Danny came up with was for him to find and fix up classic cars. Matt had a soft spot for American muscle cars from the sixties and seventies, like the Mustang he was now driving, a highly collectible model, a car he and Danny had fantasized about owning ever since they’d watched Steve McQueen catapult one across the streets of San Francisco—a movie they’d only seen about three dozen times. He knew it would be hard to part with it once he was done restoring it, but with a bit of luck, he’d be able to sell it for seventy grand, maybe more, probably to some deskbound executive in need of a weekend toy. In the heady days before the credit crunch, Matt had built up a solid reputation in car enthusiast circles. He’d even sold a couple to guys whose cars he’d stolen years earlier, not that they knew it. Things had been looking up for him, all while Danny had been sucked into the black hole of his new job. A black hole that had ultimately swallowed up his life.
Or had it?
Was it possible that Danny was still alive?
Bellinger had made a convincing argument for it. And he’d been grabbed seconds after making it. That had to mean something.
Whether Danny was still alive or not, the idea that they’d all been lied to, that someone knew the truth and had kept it from them—
He wasn’t about to let it slide.
He took the Willard Street exit and turned into Copeland after the roundabout, and his fury swelled even more as he thought back to how the news of Danny’s death had devastated their parents. It was bad enough their eldest son was a convicted felon. To lose Danny too—their pride and joy, the redeemer of the family name—was too much to bear. Their mom had died a couple of months later. Despite the complicated medical terminology the doctors insisted on using, Matt knew it was simply a case of a broken heart. He also knew he was partly to blame. He knew the havoc raging in her veins started the day he’d been arrested that first time, if not earlier. His dad hadn’t fared much better. Danny’s job came with life coverage, and though the insurance payout paid for the nursing home and allowed their dad some minor touches of additional comfort, he’d been left a demolished man. He and Matt had hardly spoken at his mom’s funeral, and Matt hadn’t been out to see him since that bleak day in January. Then almost a year to the day later, the local sheriff, a craggy old nemesis, had managed to track Matt down to his garage in Quincy and given him the news of his dad’s death. A stroke, he’d said, although Matt had his doubts about that too.
Bellinger’s words echoed in his mind. Someone had taken Danny, and it was linked to something that just happened in the skies of Antarctica. It sounded outlandish and surreal. Only it clearly wasn’t. The guys he’d just gone up against were very real. Highly professional. Well equipped. Ruthless. And not overly concerned with discretion.
The implications of that last point were particularly worrying.
He coasted east on Copeland, the Mustang’s forty-year-old headlights struggling to break through the swarm of cottonlike snowflakes. With no other cars around, the snow had had time to settle, covering the road ahead with a thin, undisturbed white duvet. He passed Buckley and motored on until he reached the 7-Eleven and the turnoff into the alleyway that led to his shop, and just before turning into it, a remote corner of his mind registered a set of tire tracks in the fresh snow.
They belonged to a single car that had veered off Copeland. He couldn’t see down the alley. His shop was tucked away about a hundred yards back from the main road, and there were no streetlights that way, but the tire tracks were more than enough to trip his internal alarm, as they could only have been heading to his place. There was nothing else down there.
Problem was, he wasn’t expecting anyone.
Which didn’t bode well for the rest of his magical night.
Chapter 17
Amundsen Sea, Antarctica
“You need to come here. There’s something you need to see.” The caller wasn’t a native English speaker, and Gracie couldn’t place his accent. And although he spoke slowly and deliberately, his words were laced with an urgency that came through loud and clear, despite the less-than-crystal clarity of the satellite link.
“Slow down a second,” Gracie said. “Who are you exactly, and how’d you get this number?”
“My name is Ameen. Brother Ameen, if you like.”
“And you’re calling from Egypt?”
“Yes. From Deir Al-Suryan—the Monastery of the Syrians, in Wadi Natrun.”
