mouth, she felt horrible at using his death in that way, and hoped Finch would have forgiven her for it. “Tell me something,” she asked Willoughby. “The monk who told you about Father Jerome. Do you remember his name?”
“Yes, of course,” Willoughby said. “He was a rather interesting chap. Lived through a lot of bad times, you know? He was from Croatia. His name was Ameen. Brother Ameen.”
GRACIE FELT like she was sinking. She felt like she’d fallen into a great whirlpool of doubt that was sucking her into its dark vortex. A vortex lined with Willoughby’s words and with previous sound bites her memory was now dredging up.
She tried to order them up in a nonthreatening way, in a way that defused the most sinister thoughts that were pulling her down, but she couldn’t. There was no way to gloss over it.
They’d been lied to.
She focused back on that conversation they’d had in the car after they’d been picked up at Cairo Airport. She closed her eyes and visualized the monk, Brother Ameen, telling them how the filmmakers had badgered them for access to Father Jerome and how the abbot had finally relented.
A clear lie.
The question was, why?
Her darkest instincts were going off in all kinds of directions, and none of them were good. And from that cobweb of conflicting thoughts and suspicions, another worrying sound bite rose up. It freed itself, shot up, and latched onto her consciousness.
She found her phone, pulled up her call log, and rang the number the abbot had called her from. It took a few seconds for the call to bounce its way halfway across the world. Yusuf, the driver, answered on the third ring. It was his cell phone. It was evening there, but not too late. He didn’t sound like she’d woken him up.
“Yusuf,” she said, her tone ringing with urgency. “When the abbot called, when you were driving back from Cairo, he said something. Something about where the glasses of my friend were found. You remember?”
“Yes,” Yusuf said, sounding unsure about what she was getting at.
“He said it was dark inside. That’s why whoever it was stepped on them. They didn’t see them. They were inside? Inside the keep?”
Yusuf paused for a moment, as if thinking, then said, “Yes. They were in a passageway on the top floor. Near the roof hatch. They must have fallen from your friend’s pocket on his way up to the roof.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“Yes, absolutely,” Yusuf confirmed. “The abbot told me about it.”
Gracie felt a cold stab in the pit of her stomach.
Finch couldn’t see without them. And hard as she tried, she couldn’t see how he could have climbed up there, much less how he could have found his BlackBerry on that roof, if he hadn’t been wearing them.
She hung up and caught herself eyeing the door to her room as if it were a gateway to hell. Something was wrong. Something was very, very wrong. She had to do something. Her first instinct was to speed-dial Ogilvy.
“I need to see you,” she said, her body stiff, her eyes still locked on the door. “Something’s not right.”
Chapter 70
Houston, Texas
Matt swept his gaze across the hotel’s lobby with caution and walked through its elegant halls slowly. He glanced around casually, checking for security guards, cameras, escape routes, and vantage points. He traversed as far as he could, then doubled back on himself and made his way over to the cafe that fronted the hotel, the one that overlooked the street. He noted its layout, made a mental list of the ways in and out, took stock of the kind of clientele and their number. Then he went back out to check the service entrance at the back of the hotel.
He was there early. The meeting between Rydell and Drucker wasn’t planned for another two hours. Drucker wouldn’t even have landed in Houston yet, and besides, the plan was for Rydell to keep from telling him where they’d be meeting until Drucker was actually in the city. Still, Matt felt he needed to check the place out long before any of Drucker’s men had a chance to get there. He knew Drucker wouldn’t be coming alone. With a bit of luck, Maddox might even be with him. And even though he knew the odds were that he’d be outnumbered, Matt had something going for him that they didn’t. He didn’t need to be discreet. He wasn’t worried about appearances or about causing a panic. He didn’t care who saw him whip out a big gun and put it to Drucker’s head, right there, in the cafe. He didn’t have anything to lose. The one thing he needed to achieve was to get the muzzle of his gun pressed right against Drucker and walk out of there with him. It didn’t matter who saw him do that. It didn’t matter how freaked out the hotel’s guests got. Only the end result mattered. He would just sit there, bide his time, wait until Rydell got the information he needed out of Drucker, and then he’d move in.
It was easier said than done, and yet, oddly, Matt was actually looking forward to it.
SIX BLOCKS WEST OF THERE, Gracie stood with Ogilvy in Sam Houston Park. Her mind was being pulled in all kinds of directions, none of which were heartening.
They were by the Neuhaus Fountain, an installation that featured three bronze sculptures of coyotes stalking the wild frontier. A few people were ambling by, stopping to experience the peaceful setting before moving on. Gracie wasn’t feeling any of that. In fact, she couldn’t stand still. She was rippling with nervous energy as she took the network’s head of news through what Willoughby and Yusuf had told her.
Ogilvy didn’t seem to share her concern. A slick-looking man with an aquiline nose and swept-back hair, he was studying Gracie patiently through rimless spectacles.
“These guys are humble, Gracie,” he remarked with an insouciant shrug. “So this Brother Ameen character didn’t admit he actually pimped Father Jerome out. He was probably hoping to get some screen time himself. Someone in his position would be the last person to admit he found the idea of a little publicity too hard to resist.”
“Come on, Hal. He wasn’t the least bit nervous when he was lying about it. He didn’t look embarrassed or rattled at all. It wasn’t like we caught him out. And what about Finch’s glasses?”
“It might explain why he fell. If he couldn’t see properly.”
“They should have been down on the ground, somewhere next to him,” she objected. “Or on the roof, and even that’s a stretch. But inside the keep? One floor down from the roof? How’d he even make it up there without them?”
“What if he dropped them and broke them himself. Before he got there?”
“So he just leaves them there? I don’t buy that. You step on glasses, you maybe break one lens. Not both. You can still wear them for some kind of clear vision. You don’t just leave them there.”
Ogilvy glanced away and heaved out a ragged sigh. He looked like he was losing patience. “So what are you saying?”
“I’m saying we’ve got two lies that need checking out. Something’s up, Hal. This is starting to stink.”
“Because of a monk who couldn’t admit he got a hard-on when he saw a TV camera and another who’s looking for some excuse to explain his clumsiness?”
Gracie was stunned by his dismissal. “We need to look into this. We need to find a way to talk to the abbot directly, confirm where the glasses were. And get some background on this Brother Ameen. He’s from Croatia, right? Where did he come from? How long has he been at that monastery? The guy’s been pivotal to getting us to
