“On the contrary, I’m open to all possibilities,” Dinnick countered. “And if we’re talking about some entity making contact with us,” nodding toward Simmons, “maybe to warn us, which, granted, could justify the here and now of it . . . Well, if you accept the notion of a creator, of creationism, of intelligent design . . . why couldn’t that intelligent designer be from a more advanced race?”
Musgrave was incensed. “God isn’t something you find in a science fiction book,” he retorted. “You don’t even have a basic understanding of what faith means, do you?”
“There’s no difference. It’s all unknowable as far as our current capabilities are concerned, isn’t it?” Dinnick pressed.
“Believe what you will. I’m out of here.” He stormed off.
Musgrave’s wife got up. She looked at the faces around her with a mixture of anger, scorn, and pity. “I think we all know what we saw out there,” she said, before following her husband out.
An uncomfortable silence smothered the room.
“Man. That guy’s clearly never heard of Scientology,” Dalton quipped, raising a few nervous chuckles.
“I’ve got to say,” the British scientist finally offered, “while I was out there, looking at it . . . there was something rather . . . divine about it.”
He looked around for endorsement. A couple of other scientists nodded.
The honesty of his simple words suddenly struck Gracie, their simple, brutal significance sinking in and chilling her more fiercely than any wind she’d felt out on the ice. Listening to the arguments flying around the room, she’d been swept up by the semantics and all but lost track of the fundamental enormity of what they’d all been arguing about. What had happened, what they’d witnessed out there . . . it was beyond explanation. It was beyond reason. It would have been beyond belief if she hadn’t seen it with her own eyes.
But she had.
Her mind drifted away with the possibilities. Could it be? she wondered. Had they just witnessed a watershed moment in the history of mankind, something for which “before” and “after” attributes might be used from here on?
Her innate skepticism, the skepticism of a hardened realist, dragged her back from the swirl of dreamy conjecture with a resounding No.
Impossible.
And yet . . . she couldn’t ignore the feeling that she’d been in the presence of something transcendent. She’d never felt that way before.
She suppressed a shiver and glanced uncertainly at Finch. “What did they say?” she asked, away from the others.
Finch said, “They’re getting everyone they can think of to check it out. But they’re getting calls from broadcasters all over the world wanting to know what’s going on. Ogilvy wants us to send him a high-res clip pronto,” he added pointedly, referring to Hal Ogilvy, the network’s global news director and a board member of the parent firm.
“Okay,” she nodded. “We need to make some calls. You wanna see if we can grab the conference room?”
Finch nodded. “Yeah. Let’s get out of here.”
“Amen to that,” Dalton added.
A barrage of clearly unamused looks greeted his words.
Dalton half-smiled, sheepishly. “Sorry,” he offered apologetically, and left the room.
They walked down the hall in silence, the sheer magnitude of the discussion sinking in. As they reached the stairwell, Gracie noticed Dalton looking particularly adrift.
“What?” she asked.
He stopped, hesitated, then said, “What if that Bible-thumping nut back there is right?”
She shook her head. “There’s got to be a better explanation for it.”
“What if there isn’t?”
Gracie mulled the question for a moment. “Well, if that’s the case, if it’s really God,” she said somberly, “then for someone who had me totally convinced He didn’t exist, He sure picked one hell of a moment to show Himself.”
Chapter 9
Wadi Natrun, Egypt
Labored breaths and sluggish footfalls tarnished the stillness of the mountain as the three men trudged up the steep slope. Every step, every scattered rock and rolling pebble echoed, the small sounds amplified by the harsh, lifeless dryness of the hills around them. The moon had been conspicuously absent that night, and despite the fading array of stars overhead, the early dawn light and the chilling solitude weighed heavily on them.
Yusuf had driven straight to the monastery from the café. Like many other devout Coptic Christians, the taxi driver donated as much as he could afford to the monastery, delivering free fruit and vegetables from his brother’s stall at the market and helping out with various odd jobs. He’d been doing that for as long as he could remember, and knew the monastery