Another cutting-edge thriller set at the intersection of science, religion, and history from the bestselling author of The Last Templar
New York Times bestselling author Raymond Khoury— whose debut novel, The Last Templar, has sold more than a million copies in the United States, and whose second, The Sanctuary, was also a major national bestseller—returns with The Sign. Like the first two, this new thriller combines gripping contemporary suspense with a high-concept mystery rooted in history, philosophy, religion, and science. And like those novels, it is bound for bestseller lists nationwide.
In Antarctica, a scientific expedition drops anchor for a live news feed. As the CNN journalist begins her report, a massive, shimmering sphere of light suddenly appears in the sky, enveloping the ship in luminous white light before disappearing as mysteriously as it arrived—the entire event witnessed by an incredulous world audience.
Meanwhile in a dusty bar in Egypt, a dozen men are lazily discussing the state of the world when the brilliant, glowing symbol on the television stops them cold. One man breaks out in a sweat, crosses himself repeatedly, and rushes out of the bar muttering the same phrase over and over again: It can’t be.
Across the Internet and around the globe, a stunning controversy threatens to consume the world: Has God finally decided to reveal himself? Or is something more sinister at hand?
CHAPTER 1
Amundsen Sea, Antarctica – Present day
The static that hissed through the tiny, nose-isolating earpiece disappeared, replaced by the authoritative-yet-soothing voice of the show's anchorman.
"Talk us through why is this happening, Grace?"
Just then, another wall of ice crumbled behind her and collapsed on itself, crackling like distant thunder. Grace Logan—Gracie, to her friends—turned away from the camera and watched as the entire cliff plummeted into the gray-blue water and disappeared in an angry eruption of spray.
Perfect timing, she thought with a glimmer of satisfaction, a brief respite from the solemnity she'd been feeling since she'd arrived on the ship the day before.
Under normal circumstances, this could well have been a pleasant, sunny, late-December day, December being the height of summer in the Southern hemisphere.
Today was different.
Today, nature was in turmoil.
It felt as if the very fabric of the earth was being ripped apart. Which it was. The slab of ice that was tearing itself off the rest of the continent was the size of Texas.
Not exactly the kind of Christmas present the planet needed.
The break-up of the ice shelf was now in its third day, and it was only getting started. The cataclysm had kicked up a ghostly mist that thinned out the sun's warming rays, and the cold was starting to get to Gracie, even with the adrenaline coursing through her. She could see that the rest of her team—Dalton Kwan, the young, breezy Hawaiian cameraman she'd worked with regularly over the past three years, and Howard ‘Finch' Fincher, their older, über-fastidious and annoyingly stoic veteran producer—were also far from comfortable, but the footage they were airing was well worth it, especially since, as far as she could tell, they were the only news crew around.
She'd been out there for over an hour, standing on the starboard observation deck of the RRS James Clark Ross, and despite the thermals and the gloves, her fingers and toes were shivering. The royal research ship, a beefy 300-foot floating oceanographic and geophysical laboratory operated by the British Antarctic Survey project, was currently less than half a mile off the coast of Western Antarctica, its distinctive deep-red hull the only blip of color in an otherwise bleak palette of whites, blues and grays. Gracie, Dalton and Finch had been on the continent for a couple of weeks, shooting footage in the Terra Firma Islands for her big global warming documentary. They were ready to pack up and head home for Christmas, which was only days away, when the call from the news desk back in D.C. had come in, informing them that the shelf's break-up had started. The news hadn't been widely circulated at that point; a contact of the network inside the NSIDC—the National Snow and Ice Data Center, whose scientists used satellite data to track changes in the spread and thickness of the polar ice caps—had given them the heads-up on the sly. With the competition snoozing and the James Clark Ross a day's sail away from the action and already heading toward it, Gracie and her crew had jumped on the opportunity for a exclusive scoop. The BAS had graciously accepted to have them on board to cover the event, going so far as to arrange for a Royal Navy chopper to ferry them in from the island.
Several of the ship's on-board scientists were also on deck, watching the walls of ice disintegrate. A couple of them were filming, using handheld video cameras. Most of the crew were also out there, staring in resigned and awed silence.
Gracie turned back to face the camera and pulled her microphone closer. In between the irregular, thunderous collapses of the cliff face, the air reverberated with the distant, muffled retorts of the ice's tortured movement farther inland.
"This break-up was probably caused by a number of factors, Jack, but the main suspect in this very complicated investigation is just plain old melt water."
More hissing as the signal bounced off a couple of satellites and traveled ten thousand miles to the network's climate-controlled newsroom back in D.C and back., then Roxberry's voice shot back, slightly confused. "Melt water?"
"That's right, Jack," she explained. "Pools of water that build up on the surface of the ice as it melts. This melt water is heavier than the ice it's sitting on, so—basic law of gravity—it finds its way down into cracks, and as more and more water pushes through, it acts like a wedge and these cracks grow into rifts that grow into canyons, and if there's enough melt water to keep pushing through, the ice shelf eventually just snaps off."
The physics of it were simple. The highest, coldest and windiest continent on the planet, an area one and a half times as big as the United States, was almost entirely covered by a dome of ice over two miles thick at its center. Heavy snowfalls blanket it in winter, then spread downwards by gravity, flowing like ice-cold lava to the coast. And when this ice flow runs out of land, it keeps going, beyond the edge of land, but it doesn't sink: it floats, cantilevering over the sea in what we refer to as ice shelves. They can be over a mile thick at the point where they start floating, tapering to a no-less-staggering quarter mile at the water's edge where they end in cliffs of a hundred feet or more above the water line.
There had been a handful of major break-ups in the last decade, but none this big. Also, they were rarely captured live on camera. They were usually only detected long after the event, after scrutinizing and comparing satellite images. And even though what Gracie was witnessing was only a localized portion of the overall upheaval—the collapse of towering cliffs of ice at the shelf's seaward edge—it was still an astounding and deeply troubling sight. In twelve years in television news, a career she'd dived into straight after getting her B.A. in political science from Cornell, Gracie had witnessed a lot of tragedies, and this one ranked right up there with the worst of them.
She was watching the planet fall apart—literally. "So the big question then is," Roxberry asked, "why is it happening now? I mean, as I understand it, this ice shelf has been around since the end of the last ice age, and that was, what, twelve thousand years ago?"
"It's happening because of us, Jack. Because of the greenhouse gases we're generating. We're seeing it at both poles, here, up in the Arctic, in Greenland. And it isn't just part of a natural cycle. Almost every expert I've talked to is now convinced that the melting is accelerating and telling me we're close to some kind of tipping point, a point of no return—because of man-made global warming."
Another block of ice disintegrated and crashed into the sea.
"And the concern here is that this ice shelf breaking off and melting will contribute to raising sea levels," Roxberry asked.
"Well, not directly. Most of this ice shelf is already floating on water, so it doesn't affect sea levels in itself. Think of it as an ice cube floating in a glass of water. When it melts, it doesn't raise the level of water in the glass."
"Doesn't it?"
"I guess I'm not the only one who's forgotten their sixth-grade physics," she grinned.
"But you said there's an indirect effect on global sea levels." Roxberry's voice exuded expertise, as if he were generously allowing her a chance to display her knowledge.
"Well, this area, the West Antarctic ice sheet, is the one place on the planet that scientists have been worried about most, in terms of ice melts. More specifically, they're worried about the massive glaciers sitting on land, behind this ice shelf. They're not floating."
"So if they melted," Roxberry added, "sea levels would rise."
"Exactly. Up until now, ice shelfs like this one have been keeping back the glaciers, sort of like a cork that's holding in the contents of a bottle. Once the ice shelf breaks off, the cork's gone, there's nothing left to stop the glaciers from sliding into the sea—and if they do, the global sea levels rise. And this melting is happening much faster than forecasts had predicted. Even the data we have from last year is now considered too optimistic. In terms of disaster scenarios due to climate change, Antarctica was considered a sleeping giant. Well, the giant's now awake. And, by the looks of it, he's really grumpy."
Roxberry quipped, "I'm trying real hard to avoid saying this could just be the tip of the iceberg—"
"A wise choice, Jack," she interjected. She could just picture the smug, self-satisfied grin lighting up his perma-tanned face and groaned inwardly at the thought. "A grateful audience salutes you."
"But that's what we're talking about here, isn't it?"
"Absolutely. Once these glaciers slide into the sea, it'll be too late to do anything about it, and …"
Her voice suddenly trailed off and dried up, as something distracted her: a ripple of sudden commotion, shrieks and gasps of shock and outstretched arms pointing out at the ice shelf. The words still caught in her throat as she saw Dalton's head rise from behind the viewfinder of the camera and looking beyond her. Gracie spun around, facing away from the camera. And that's when she saw it.
In the sky. A couple of hundred feet above the collapsing ice shelf.
A bright, shimmering sphere of light.
It just appeared there, and wasn't moving.
Gracie concentrated her gaze on it and inched over to the railing. She didn't understand what she was looking at, but whatever it was, she couldn't take her eyes off it.
The object—no, she wasn't even sure it was an object. It had a spherical shape, but somehow, it didn't seem … physical. It had an ethereal lightness to it, as if the air itself was glowing. And its brightness wasn't uniform. It was more subtle, graded, intense at its core then gradually thinning out, like in a close-up of an eye. It had an unstable, fragile quality to it. Like melting ice, or, rather, just water, suspended in mid-air and lit up, if that were possible, only Gracie knew it wasn't.
She darted a look at Dalton, who was angling the camera toward the sighting. "Are you getting this?" she blurted.
"Yeah, but," he shot back, looking over at her, his face crunched up in sheer confusion, "what the hell is it?"
(Excerpt from The Sign by Raymond Khoury © 2009.
Published by Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA).
All Rights Reserved.)
“This is a thoughtful book with a powerful message and yet also a thrilling read with compelling, well- developed characters. Highly recommended.”
—Library Journal
“Khoury’s thrillers engage the reader’s mind, even as they move at a breakneck pace. His first two novels, The Sanctuary (2007) and The Last Templar (2006), were first-rate adventure yarns, and so is this one....Readers who like their thrillers to have a solid intellectual component will enjoy Khoury’s books very much. Given the high quality of each of his novels, it seems fair to say that he may be around for a while.”
—Booklist
Raymond Khoury/Steve Berry interview
“There's a fine line between science and religion. Too often that border becomes blurred, or confused, usually through either ignorance or fanaticism, which nearly always leads to conflict. The Sign expertly explores this ever-shifting line of myth and reality. But this book is not a religious thriller. Nobody is trying to destroy the Catholic Church; Christ is not being cloned; and there are no ancient theological secrets that could change the course of history. Instead, Raymond Khoury explores the concept a religion by posing the ever-present question What if? in a unique and appealing way. Protagonists Matt Sherwood, a former-car thief (which is interesting in and of itself), and news reporter, Gracie Logan, are who Khoury calls upon to determine if God has finally decided to reveal himself, or is something more sinister afoot? I like that in a Khoury book the title actually means something. That was true in The Last Templar and The Sanctuary, and it is equally true here. The sign is important. This story captivates with plausibility and imagination. It's fiercely intelligent and equally curious. Khoury casts his fictional world in a dark pall-a fitting atmosphere for his protagonists as they race both time and shadowy instincts toward a scintillating conclusion. The Sign is a rapid paced adventure that delivers equal quantities of story and lesson, neither one suffering in the process. Khoury's background as a screenwriter shows. He is especially adept at action scenes. His expertly chosen verbs cause the scenes to leap from the page. You can literally feel the blows as they're landed; wince as the bullets find their marks. He has an intense brand of storytelling all his own. The Sign is a prize to be savored.” –Steve Berry
STEVE BERRY: Your new thriller, THE SIGN—I’m gonna come right out and say it: I think it’s your best one yet. What do you think?
RAMOND KHOURY: Tough call. It’s my new baby, and much as I adore its elder siblings, it does have that newborn magic to it.
STEVE: Trust me, it is. It’s also a bit of a departure from your first two books, in that it doesn’t have the past-and-present storylines. Knowing how stories kind of take on a life of their own, that wasn’t a conscious decision from the get-go, was it?
RAYMOND KHOURY: No, it wasn’t premeditated. It’s just the way the story came out. The whole story happens in the present. It takes place over a few manic days—I think you’re familiar with that pacing, right?—and it deals with the present, it’s about a ‘what if’ situation that’s very today and now, there’s a mystery, something to figure out, but there’s no throwback to the past, no long lost secret to uncover.
STEVE BERRY: It’s also very topical. Your editors must be pleased.
RAYMOND: I guess it happened that way because the story came out of some very strong feelings I had, feelings about what was going on around the world, in the US and abroad.
STEVE: Tell me about that process. Where the story came from.
RAYMOND: It’s where they all come from, isn’t it? That kernel, that one thought or one observation you have that just sticks and triggers a book, the one that bugs you late at night and that you can’t shake. This one came to me while watching the news one day, and every item, one after another, it was all bad news. Not just bad, but it was like a lot of people were behaving so insanely in so many places around the world—and, sadly, a lot of it was fuelled by the manipulation or distortion of religious faith—
STEVE: —by intolerance—
RAYMOND: —exactly. Intolerance and closed minds. And it got me thinking. About how divided we are, about how so many people all over the world believe in the absolute infallibility of their faith and how it rules every aspect of their lives—you know what I mean, ‘we’re right, everyone else is wrong,’ that medieval mindset—and wondering if anything could ever unite the planet under a single faith.
STEVE: One global religion. RAYMOND: Well, imagine if something did happen that convinced everyone that what we had until now, all these different religions that have grown over the last few thousand years—what if something new came along that was so overwhelming that it was impossible to ignore? Would we listen? Would we drop our previous faiths and embrace it?
STEVE: But your book’s about much more than that. Without wanting to give too much away, it’s really a political thriller, isn’t it?
RAYMOND: It’s always so hard to talk about a book without giving too much away—
STEVE: —it’s the fine line we walk.
RAYMOND: True. But yes, you’re right—it’s really about the absolute power something like that would bring—and how it could be abused. Cause above all else, it’s a thriller. There’s got to be a brilliantly dastardly scheme, right?
STEVE: Always. And this one certainly is dastardly. One thing I’ve noticed, though, in all three of your books so far—they’re all, essentially, about the big questions that face us: why we believe, whether or not we have to die. Religion, longevity, life and death, science vs. faith ... Big questions. And in this one, you revisit—though in a completely different way—the power of religion, the good it can bring as well as the bad, something that was also central to THE LAST TEMPLAR. Will this always be your signature genre—books that have a big, central ‘theme’ at their core?
RAYMOND: You asked me earlier about where the story came from. For me, in order to get excited about a book, it has to have a big central theme about how we live at its heart, something I’m interested in exploring. It’s got to be about something I care about deeply. That’s what drives the story and the characters forward for me. That’s what I hope makes the books stand out. That they’re not just page-turners—which ain’t easy in itself—but that they’re also about something. I see it in your books too. A point of view about things, a passion for laying out interesting information about a topic that interests you. Michael Crichton used to do that very successfully. Dan Brown, of course, does it brilliantly. That’s what makes the books worth writing, I think.
STEVE: And in reading the book, it’s clear you still had tons of research to do, even though there isn’t a historic mysery to unravel?
RAYMOND: Absolutely. Some of it was about history—the monasteries in Egypt, for one. Again, part of the story, organically. Had to be done, and we do love our history, don’t we?
STEVE: Guilty as charged.
RAYMOND: But for this book, I didn’t need to do that much of it—nothing like what you did for THE CHARLEMAGNE PURSUIT, for instance. Which I loved, by the way. Particularly since you beat me to using the Voynich Manuscript in a story!
STEVE: We do seem to be spookily in sync with our writing—as further evidenced by THE SIGN’s opening in Antarctica—
RAYMOND: —I know!
STEVE: So tell me—Matt and Gracie. Are we going to see them again?
RAYMOND: I don’t know. On the one hand, I envy your situation with Cotton Malone, you’ve got a solid anchor for your books, you’re building this great world around him, his son and Stephanie and Henrik and Cassiopeia—who I hope we see again real soon—and it’s meaty and it’s epic and like the rest of your readers, I’m hooked and I want to know what they do next. You’ve got that, Lee Child has had it since day one with Reacher, Harlan Coben with Myron Bolitar, the list goes on. Great characters. I’d love to do that one day, but it has to feel right. I wasn’t in that frame of mind in my first two books, certainly the world after the end of THE SANCTUARY would be a very different place from the world Mia started out in at the beginning of that book. Tess and Reilly, I could maybe bring back. A lot of fans have asked for that. But with THE SIGN, Iinitely think Matt and Gracie are characters that I could bring back. I’d like to put them through another wringer, and it feels like it would come naturally. But before I do that, I’m writing the next book which introduces a new lead character, so they’ll be getting a bit of a breather.
STEVE: They sure can use it. Good luck with the book.
RAYMOND: Thank you.
