him the better part of a minute to locate Fox One and his unit. The four men and their gear were also virtually invisible, huddled under camouflage netting in the sand dunes a couple of hundred yards away. Their contribution had been flawless, as expected. Its effect, staggering. He’d seen it before, in a video of a test in the desert. But not like this. Not live. Not in front of an unsuspecting audience.
It had taken his breath away. Even for a battle-hardened cynic like him, it was a heart-stopping moment. A one-two punch that, he knew, would resonate around the world.
Fox Two turned his attention back to the hordes at the monastery’s gates. He’d soon be able to leave this dump for good, he thought with a degree of relish. It had been a hellish assignment. Living in hiding, on call at dawn and at dusk, climbing up and down the mountain, lugging the gear, day in and day out. He’d been out here in the desert way too long. He missed the feel of a woman’s skin and the smell of a good barbecue, but most of all, he missed living among people.
Soon, he thought.
But before he could do that, he needed to make sure that the mission ended as smoothly as it had begun.
Chapter 43
Woburn, Massachusetts
The smell of fresh coffee tripped Matt’s mind and coaxed him out of a dreamless sleep. Everything around him looked hazy. He tried to sit up, but did so too quickly and almost blacked out and had to try again, a bit slower this time. His head felt like it was filled with tar as he took in his surroundings and awareness trickled in.
The TV was on, though Matt couldn’t really make out what it was showing. He tried blinking the fogginess out of his eyes. Jabba was sitting by the small table next to the window, watching the TV. He turned and grinned at Matt, a smoking cup of coffee in one hand—a venti or a grande or whatever quirkily-original-yet-misguidedly-obnoxious name coffee shops had replaced large with these days—and a half-eaten glazed doughnut—or was that “glazé”?—in the other, with which he pointed at the two other oversized cups and the box of doughnuts on the table.
“Breakfast is served,” he said, in between mouthfuls.
Matt acknowledged the venti-sized scientist with a weary smile before noticing the daylight streaming in.
“How long was I out? What time is it?”
“Almost eleven. Which means you’ve been out for,” Jabba did a quick mental calculation, “sixteen hours or so.”
Which Matt had needed.
Badly.
He also noticed a couple of newspapers on the table. The headlines were in an unusually large font—the type only used when a major event had occurred. An almost quarter-page photograph of the apparition, in color, was also emblazoned across the front pages, next to older, file portraits of Father Jerome.
Matt looked up at Jabba. Jabba nodded, and his expression took a detour into more ominous territory. “The Eagle has landed,” he said somberly, aiming his half-eaten doughnut at the TV.
Matt watched the footage from Egypt in silent disbelief. Breathless reports coming in from around the world also showed the explosive reaction to what had happened at the monastery.
In St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City, tens of thousands of people had assembled, hungrily awaiting the pope’s guidance on how to treat the apparition. In the Praça da Sé in São Paulo, hordes of euphoric Brazilians spilled into the square from in and out of the city, invading every available inch of the Sé cathedral, also looking for answers. The reactions reflected the local variations in faith and the different levels of appetite for the supernatural across the planet. The scenes were repeated in frenzied massings outside churches and in city squares in other centers of Christianity, from Mexico to the Philippines, but were different elsewhere. In the Far East, the reaction was generally more muted. Crowds had taken to the streets in China, Thailand, and Japan, but they were mostly orderly and there were only pockets of disturbance. The hotspot of Jerusalem, on the other hand, was very tense, with worrying signs of polarization already apparent among its religious groups. Christians, Muslims, and Jews were taking to the streets, looking for answers, conflicted and unsure about how to treat what many of them saw as a miraculous, supernatural manifestation—but one that didn’t match anything prophesized in any of their sacred writings. The same thing was going on in the Islamic world. Confused worshippers had taken over city