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 café—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 café’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 café 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.
Right now, however, his attention was consumed by something entirely different. The screen showed a woman in heavy winter gear reporting from what seemed like one of the poles. In the image behind her, something shone in the sky. Something bizarre and otherworldly, the likes of which he’d never seen before. It was just floating there, blazing over a collapsing cliff of ice, and had—oddly, though it was unmistakable—the distinct, manifest shape of a symbol.
A sign.
The others also took note of the events on the screen and drew in closer to the counter, excitedly urging Mahmood to turn the sound up. The scene it showed was surreal, unimaginable, only that wasn’t what disturbed Yusuf most. What really troubled him was that he’d seen that sign before.
His face pinched together with disbelief as he stared at the screen.
It can’t be.
He inched forward for a closer look. His mouth dropped by an inch, his skin tingled with trepidation. The camera cut to another angle, and this time, the illuminated symbol took over the whole screen.
It was the same sign.
There was no doubt in his mind.
Unconsciously, his hand rose discreetly to his forehead, and he quietly crossed himself.
His friends noticed his sudden pallor, but he ignored their questions and, without offering an explanation or a farewell, rushed out of the café. He clambered into his trusted old Toyota Previa and churned its engine to life. The people carrier kicked up a small cloud as it fishtailed onto the dusty, unlit road and disappeared into the night, Yusuf riding the pedal hard, rushing back to the monastery as quickly as he could, muttering the same phrase to himself, over and over and over.
It can’t be.
Chapter 5
Cambridge , Massachusetts
The crowd caught Vince Bellinger’s eye as he ambled across the mall. They were massed outside the Best Buy, bubbling noisily with excitement, seemingly about something in the shop’s huge window display. Bellinger was more than familiar with the window—it usually housed the latest plasmas and LCDs, including the mammoth sixty-five-incher he’d been fantasizing about for Christmas this year. Covetable, to be sure, but nothing that merited this much attention. Unless it wasn’t the screens themselves, but rather what was on them, that had drawn the