being, the idea of a safe bed and a hot shower had its merits, so he gave the receptionist a fake name, took a single, and paid in cash. He was soon ensconced at a workstation with a high-speed connection pumping information to his screen.
He logged onto the tracker’s website and checked its position. Having been a car thief, he appreciated the value of trackers more than anyone, especially when it came to covetable, high-value classics like his Bullitt Mustang. Right now, he was more grateful than ever for having it. The contract he’d taken out had the tracker set up to transmit its location every thirty seconds when the car it was attached to was on the move. It would hibernate and ping its location once every twelve hours if the car was stationary. Assuming the car wasn’t spending a lot of time on the road, the tracker’s battery would normally last around three weeks between recharges, only Matt was pretty sure it was near the end of that cycle and running low on juice. It probably wouldn’t last more than a few days before conking out.
It hadn’t moved. Which was both good and bad. If the goons were still there, it meant they weren’t on his tail, but then again, it also meant they weren’t giving up easily. He moved on and trawled the online white pages for Bellinger’s home address, which he found with ease. Clearly, Bellinger wasn’t too fussy about his privacy, though it was frightening how much information one could find about anyone online. It was over in Inman Square, a trendy, upmarket enclave in neighboring Cambridge that Matt had visited a few times. Danny had lived there too, right up to his disappearance, Matt thought, preferring the sound of that to the words he would have used before tonight: his death. At this hour, it was only a quick hop there. One that couldn’t wait.
Matt jotted down the address and was about to log off when he thought of something else. He Googled “Antarctica” and “sky” and “news” and let the billion-dollar algorithms do their thing. He hadn’t taxed them too hard. Almost instantly, they presented him with over a million hits. The first page was dominated by news reports about a huge ice shelf breaking off, and Matt clicked on the first link, the one of the Sky news channel, and read through the report.
It was less than enlightening. He sat back and digested it, perplexed as to how it could possibly be linked to Danny or lead to the vicious reaction that targeted Bellinger. He re-read it and was none the wiser, and was about to get up when a link below the article caught his eye. It mentioned an “unexplained sighting” on the frozen continent. He clicked on it, and it took him to a related article that had an accompanying, YouTube-like video clip.
This one had more bite.
He felt a tightening at the back of his neck as he read the report and watched the short video of the reporter and the apparition over the ice shelf. He re-read the report and viewed the clip a second time, his face flickering with confusion. He dug deeper and initiated a new search, and got a geyser of hits related to the unexplained sighting, and as he skimmed through them and let the implications they debated sink in, a grim realization dropped further into the roiling pit of his stomach.
This was no small event.
If Danny was somehow involved in it—against his will, Bellinger had insinuated, though Matt couldn’t even begin to imagine what his involvement could have been—then the stakes were much higher than Matt had imagined.
Minutes later, the Mustang was crossing the Longfellow Bridge and veering onto Broadway, a lone car gliding across the desolate cityscape. There was a stark beauty to the stillness around him, but Matt didn’t feel any of it. His mind was swirling with wild theories, and with them came an increasingly uncomfortable feeling, a sense of a sinister malignancy closing in on him.
He tried to stay focused as he made his way to the intersection with Fayette and a three-story Victorian house that matched Bellinger’s address. He did a precautionary drive-by, looped back on himself a couple of blocks up the street, and cruised past the house again for another look. It had stopped snowing, and the neighborhood was now huddled under a couple of inches of white frosting. The lights of a lone Christmas tree blinked