He checked his backpack. “I’ve been thinking about what you were saying. Thought I’d put a call in to the documentary guys.”
“So use the satphone. Your phone doesn’t work here anyway, remember?”
Finch gave him a wiseass grin. “It’s got my contacts list on it, numbnuts.”
Dalton thought about it for a second, then said, “Last I remember, you had it out when we were up there,” pointing at the
Finch glanced up at the keep that towered over the monastery’s walled-in courtyard, and frowned. “Must have left it up there while we were packing up,” he said. “Be right back.”
He left Dalton, cut across the courtyard and up to the drawbridge, before disappearing into the keep.
As with each time he entered it, it took a moment for his eyes to adjust from the glare of the Egyptian sun to the dusty darkness of the windowless, low-ceilinged interior of the keep. He made his way down a passage to the narrow stairs and climbed up.
The keep was deserted, as before. Some of its rooms were used for storage, as the darkness and the thick walls kept the temperature relatively cool; others hadn’t been used for years, if not centuries. The ceilings were low, the windows were nothing more than thin slits cut into the thick walls—not the most inviting place to work, or sleep, neither of which was what it was designed for. He climbed the staircase up three floors and reached the top, then found the small landing with the wooden ladder that led up to the roof.
The BlackBerry was there, skulking in the dust behind a small stucco smokestack. Finch picked it up. He thought of edging forward for one last look at the teeming plain below, but decided against it. Instead, he found the phone number of the documentary’s producer, pulled out the satphone, and called him.
The man, Gareth Willoughby, was a respected, globe-trotting filmmaker with an impressive CV of well-crafted documentaries covering all kinds of topics. Finch only managed to get through to his voicemail, and left him a brief message explaining what was going on and asking him to return the call.
He took one last look across the desert, then headed back down. As his foot settled on the bottom rung of the ladder that came down from the roof, he heard a voice, a low murmur coming from one of the small rooms behind the chapel. A man’s voice, no more than a few words, but their rumble carried across the quiet, warrenlike space. Something about it made him listen more closely. He stepped away from the ladder, quietly, and followed the voice around the narrow corridor to a room that faced out, away from the monastery. Finch couldn’t make out what he was saying, but it struck him that the man was speaking English.
He reached the doorway and stopped just short of it, hovering, leaning in for a look. The man was inside, alone. It was a monk. Like the others, he wore the traditional black cassock with the distinctively embroidered hood, which was raised over his head. He had his back turned to Finch. Finch stood there, somewhat taken aback, as he realized the man was talking on a cell phone. In English.
“We should be leaving in ten, fifteen minutes,” the man said. “Shouldn’t take more than twenty minutes to get through.” He paused, then said, “Okay,” and hung up.
Finch stiffened as he recognized the voice, and it must have caused him to pull his foot back an inch, maybe less, nothing significant— except that it was significant enough for the monk to sense his presence and turn.
It was Brother Ameen.
The awkwardness of the moment was stifling. Finch’s eyes were drawn to the phone and back—there was something unusual about it, but his frazzled mind didn’t latch onto it immediately—and he looked the monk squarely in the eyes before he caught himself and relaxed his face into a casual, sheepish half smile.
“I, um,” he said, wavering, then pointing up at the roof, “I forgot my phone up there.”
Brother Ameen didn’t answer him. He didn’t return the casual half smile either. He just stood there, rooted in silence.
Finch sensed the monk’s muscles going tight. His eyes drifted down to the phone, then he realized what he’d unconsciously noted. It wasn’t just a regular cell phone. They didn’t work out there. It was a satphone, with its distinctive, oversized flip-up antenna. Not only that, but it had a small box plugged into its base, which Finch knew to be an encryption module.
Chapter 48
Nahant, Massachusetts
“More than anything, Dom lived for his work,” Jenna Reece was telling Matt and Jabba. “Even when the kids were around, he hardly ever managed to make it up here, and when he did, it didn’t make much difference anyway. His mind was always back in his lab.”
They were in the living room-slash-studio of her house in Nahant, a small town that squatted on a tiny crescent-shaped peninsula fifteen miles north of Boston. A couple of miles offshore, it was linked to the mainland by a narrow umbilical cord of sand bank. Reece’s house, a fully modernized Dutch colonial, faced the ocean on the town’s western coast. It had once been Dominic and Jenna’s summer home, she’d told them, but following her husband’s death, she’d sold their place in the city and moved full-time out here, where she’d turned the double- height living room into a workshop and lost herself in her sculpture.
“I imagine your brother was probably the same, wasn’t he?” she asked. “They all seemed consumed by their work.” She shrugged wistfully and leaned down to stroke her dog, a ginger-haired retriever that dozed lazily by her feet. A small Christmas tree twinkled in a corner, by the floor-to-ceiling sliding doors that led onto the deck. “And look what it got them in the end.”
Matt held her gaze and nodded solemnly. “What do you know about the project they were working on when they died?”
Jenna Reece let out a light chortle. “Not very much. Dom didn’t really go into much detail about his work with me. Not with his ditzy wife,” she laughed easily. “I haven’t really got much of a scientific mind anyway, so it wasn’t something I was normally curious about. It was his world. And, well, you must know how obsessive he and the rest of them were when it came to making sure no one knew what they were working on—not until they were good and ready to make their announcements and reap the glory. Which I always thought was a bit too paranoid . . . I mean, it’s not exactly the kind of thing I would slip into casual conversations at the coffee shop, is it?” she smiled.
Matt shifted in his seat and leaned forward, steepling his hands under his chin, clearly discomfited by what he needed to ask her. “Mrs. Reece . . .”
“It’s Jenna, Matt,” she softly corrected him.
“Jenna,” he tried again, “I need to ask you something, but you might find it a bit weird, and . . .” His voice trailed off and he looked at her, hoping for encouragement.
“Matt, you said you needed to talk and you drove all this way to see me, so I figure it has to be important.” She fixed him squarely. “Ask me what you need to ask.”
“Okay,” he nodded gratefully. “I just wanted to know . . . Did you actually get to see your husband’s body?”
Jenna Reece blinked a couple of times, and her eyes looked away before dropping down to her feet. She reached down and stroked her dog again, somewhat rattled by the memory. Outside, frothy December waves pounded the rocky outcroppings below the timber deck, their metronomic crashes punctuating the uneasy silence. “No,” she said after a moment. “I mean, not his whole body. But you know how they died, and . . . the conditions out there . . .”
“I know,” he offered, trying to avoid conjuring up any additional painful imagery. “But you’re sure it was him?”
Her eyes were aimed at Matt, but they were looking through him, far beyond, beyond the room’s walls and the town itself. “All they had for me was his hand,” she said. The words caught in her throat and she shut her eyes for a moment. When she opened them again, they glistened with moisture. “It was his hand, though. His left hand. His wedding band was still on it. I didn’t have any doubts.”
“You’re sure of it,” Matt probed again, despite his misgivings.
Jenna Reece nodded. “He had these really lovely, fine hands. Like a pianist’s. I noticed them the first time we
