Gracie spotted the man in the black cassock, with the anxious expression, angling for her attention among the throngs of people lining the plate-glass windows of the arrivals hall at Cairo International Airport. She caught Brother Ameen’s eye and gave him a hesitant wave, which the monk acknowledged with a discreet, aloof wave of his own before moving sideways through the crowd to meet her.
The journey there had been fretfully long. After the chopper had deposited them at Rothera Station, a DASH-7 had flown them to Mount Pleasant Airport, a military airfield in the Falklands. There, they’d boarded an ageing RAF Tristar that provided commercial service for the long flight to the aptly named Wideawake Airfield on the Ascension Islands and onward to RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire. A cab to Heathrow led to the final leg on EgyptAir.
They’d had a brief, tense moment at Ascension, where they’d ducked out of sight and narrowly avoided being spotted by a British film crew headed in the opposite direction. They’d used the journey time to read up about the Coptic religion and, more specifically, the monastery’s history. They’d checked their phones for messages at each stop, now that they were back in GSM-land, but hadn’t replied to any of the messages that had been left for them. No one back in D.C., apart from Ogilvy, the network’s global news director—not even Roxberry, much to Gracie, Dalton, and Finch’s bemusement—had been told they’d left the ice continent, or where they were headed. Gracie and Ogilvy knew full well how ravenous their colleagues and competitors could be. The exclusivity of their story had to be ferociously guarded from the rest of the pack.
The new terminal, a gleaming, modern steel-and-glass structure, had surprised Gracie with its efficiency, even more so given that Egypt usually out-mañanaed the other countries of the region, no slouches themselves when it came to, well, slouching. The line through passport control had moved swiftly and courteously. The baggage had showed up on the carousel almost at the same time as they did. Even more surprisingly, people seemed to be observing the airport’s recently introduced no-smoking policy, no small feat in a country where laws were routinely ignored and where more than half the male population were smokers practically from birth.
More pressingly, Gracie, Dalton, and Finch were already aware of the new apparition over Greenland. Just after the 777 had landed, their BlackBerries had sprung to life almost in unison with urgent messages from the news desk and beyond. The bracing, electrifying news had shaken the tiredness out of their bones and injected them with renewed vigor. And as they sat in the back of Yusuf ’s Previa, inching their way through the bustling early evening traffic and into the city, they couldn’t get their questions in to the overwhelmed Brother Ameen fast enough.
He told them he’d seen it too, on the news, and confirmed that, as far as he could tell, it was identical to the one they’d seen over the ice shelf—and identical to the symbol lining the walls of Father Jerome’s cave. The ones he’d started drawing seven months earlier.
Gracie was now certain she’d made the right choice in heeding the monk’s call and coming to Egypt. Despite the continent hopping and its associated aches, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt this energized. The rare, but coveted, sensation—the thrill of the exclusive scoop—was off the charts in this case, given the sheer scale and impact of what was unfolding. Still, there were many questions she needed answered. Starting with the reason for their trip, Father Jerome.
“How and why did he come here in the first place?” she asked the monk.
Brother Ameen hesitated. “The truth is,” he winced, “we’re not sure.”
Gracie and Finch exchanged a questioning glance. “He was working in Sudan, wasn’t he?” Finch queried.
“Yes. Over the last few years, as I’m sure you know, Father Jerome was very concerned with what was happening in Darfur. Earlier this year, he opened another orphanage there, his fourth, just inside Sudan, near the border with Egypt. And then, well . . . he doesn’t quite understand it himself. He left the orphanage one night, by himself, on foot, with no belongings, no food or drink. He just walked out, into the desert.”
“Just like that? He’d just been sick, hadn’t he? Weren’t they worried he’d be kidnapped or killed? He