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 buy into this story and we don’t know anything about him.”
Ogilvy paused and looked at her like she was saying she’d been abducted by aliens. “What are you doing?”
“What?” she protested.
“You’ve got the inside track on the scoop of the century. This is a huge, huge story. For us and for you. We have unparalleled access. You start poking your nose around and getting Jerome and Ameen all riled up and they could shut us out. Which wouldn’t go down well. Not well at all. You can’t afford to mess this up right now, Gracie. It’s too important. So how about you focus on that instead and put the conspiracy paranoia on hold for a while.”
Gracie looked at him as if he were the one who’d been spouting abductee tales.
“Hal, I’m telling you, something’s not right. The whole thing, it’s been one ‘lucky’ break after another,” she said, making quotes with her fingers. “Right from the beginning.” Her mind was running ahead of her now, and she was thinking aloud. “I mean, think about it. We happen to be there when the shelf breaks off. We happen to be filming nearby. Hell, we wouldn’t even have been down there if you hadn’t suggested it when we were planning the whole show.”
And then it happened. Her mind plucked out the disparate thoughts that were tumbling around inside her and lined them up so they all fit. Like the sides of a Rubik’s Cube falling into place. She saw a connection that was there all along and made a realization that suddenly seemed so obvious to her she couldn’t imagine it not to be true.
Almost without thinking, she said, “Oh my God. You’re in on it too.”
And in that briefest of moments between her saying it and his responding, in the nanosecond of his looking at her before he opened his mouth, she saw it. The tell. The tiniest, hardly noticeable hesitation. The one her most basal instincts enabled her to see. The one they wouldn’t let her ignore. A visceral pull-focus moment that made her feel like her very soul had been yanked right out of her.
“Gracie, you’re being ridiculous,” he said dismissively, his tone even.
She wasn’t listening to his words. She was reading through them, reading the creases around his eyes, the dilation of his pupils. And she was now even more irretrievably, horribly sure of it. “You’re in on it too, aren’t you?” she insisted. “Say it, goddammit,” she flared. “Say it before I shout it out loud to everyone here.”
“Gracie—”
“It’s fake, isn’t it?” she blurted. “The whole damn thing. It’s a setup.”
Ogilvy took a step forward and raised a calming hand out to her. “People are starting to stare. Don’t make a fool of yourself.”
She shoved his hand away from her and stepped back. Her mind was racing away. “You played me. You played me all along. This whole assignment. The trip to Antarctica. All that support, all that enthusiasm. It was all bullshit.” She glared at him, questions burning out of her. “What are you doing? What the hell’s going on?” Her mind was racing ahead, drawing on all its processing reserves. “You’re faking this? You’re faking a second coming? For what? You’re setting up a new messiah? Is that what this is? You want to convert the world?”
Ogilvy’s eyes were flicking left and right now. The tell was confirmed beyond a doubt. “You think I’d want that?” he hissed, trying to remain calm. “You know me better than that. It’s the last thing I’d want.”
“Well then why?” she insisted. “Don’t tell me this is about saving the planet?”
Something in Ogilvy shifted too. He seemed to give up the pretense and framed her with a fervent glare. “Maybe. But first and foremost, it’s about saving our country,” he stated firmly.
And right then, another realization burst out of the mire, like a diver on his last breath breaking surface and gasping for air. “Was Finch’s death an accident?”