The Sign

“A hundred yards. Maybe less.” His voice had a slight quiver in it as his eyes darted from the monitor to the apparition and back.

Gracie couldn’t take her eyes off of it. “It’s just magnificent, isn’t it?”

“It’s a sign,” someone said. It was the woman Gracie had noticed crossing herself. Gracie looked over, and Dalton panned over to her.

“A sign? Of what?” another answered.

“I don’t know, but . . . she’s right. Look at it. It’s a sign of . . . something.” It was the older man who was with her. Gracie remembered being introduced to them on her arrival. He was an American named Greg Musgrave, a glaciologist if she remembered correctly. The woman was his wife.

Musgrave turned to Gracie, waving toward the skycam, jabbing a nervous finger at it. “Don’t send that”—he stammered, struggling with what to call the Draganflyer—“thing any farther. Stop it before it gets too close.”

“Why?” Dalton sounded incredulous.

Musgrave raised his voice. “Pull it back. We don’t know what it is.”

Dalton didn’t take his eyes off his controls. “Exactly,” he shot back, “it can help us figure out what the hell it is.”

Gracie looked out. The skycam was very close to the apparition. She glanced at Finch, then at Dalton, who seemed determined to see it through.

“I’m telling you, pull it back,” Musgrave said, moving toward Dalton now, reaching out to grab the remote control console. Dalton’s fingers jerked against the joysticks, making the Draganflyer yaw and pitch wildly, its gyroscopes kicking in to keep it airborne.

“Hey,” Gracie yelled at him, just as Finch and the captain stepped in to restrain Musgrave.

“Grace, what the hell’s going on?” Roxberry again, in her ear.

“Hang on, Jack,” she interjected quickly.

“Calm down,” the captain snapped at Musgrave. “He’s gonna pull it back before it reaches it,” then, to Dalton, pointedly, “aren’t you?”

“Absolutely,” Dalton replied flatly. “You know how much that thing cost me?” He checked out the monitor, as did Gracie. The apparition filled the screen. It was grainy, but there was a subtle, undulating shimmer within the image that really gave the impression that it was bubbling with life. Gracie caught the worry in Dalton’s eyes, then looked over at the skycam. The tiny black dot was almost on it.

“Maybe it’s close enough,” she told Dalton, under her breath.

Dalton frowned with concentration. “A little closer.”

“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.

Chapter 4

Bir Hooker, Egypt

Yusuf 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 cafe—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 cafe’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 cafe 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.