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