The Sign by Raymond Khoury Read Free Book Online Page A

in style. He’d treated them to a great dinner, all the drink they could handle, and the best seats in the house. They’d just watched Paul Pierce slip past Kobe Bryant and slam home a two-handed dunk, and heard the first-period buzzer go, when the suspended cube of screens had flicked over to a live news feed and all noise had drained out of the arena.
    As he stood there, mesmerized by the surreal display before him, he felt his BlackBerry vibrate in his pocket. The alert was one of three that never went comatose, even when his privacy settings were on, which was most of the time. One was entrusted to Mona, his PA—or, more accurately, the senior PA among the four who controlled the drawbridge to his office. Another was allocated to his ex-wife, Ashley, although she usually found it easier to call Mona and get him to call her back. The third, the one that was now clamoring for his attention, told him his nineteen-year-old daughter Rebecca was calling.
    Something she rarely did when she was on a distant beach, which was currently—and often—the case. The family villa in Mexico, he thought, though he wasn’t sure. It could have been the chalet in Vail or the yacht in Antigua. Between her appetite for partying and his scant appetite for anything that didn’t concern the projects he lived and breathed, that tidbit of information had some pretty large cracks to slip through.
    He pressed the phone to his ear without taking his eyes off the screen.
    “Dad, are you watching this?”
    “Yeah,” he replied, somewhat dazed. “We’re all standing here at the Garden watching it like zombies.”
    “Same here,” his daughter laughed, somewhat nervously. “We were about to go out when a friend of mine in L.A. called to tell us about it.”
    “Where are you anyway?”
    “Mexico, Dad,” she half-groaned, with an undisguised you-should-know-this tone.
    Just then, the initial shock veered to cheers and claps as the already charged fans let their emotions rip. The noise reverberated through the arena. “Wow,” Rebecca echoed, “it sounds wild.”
    “It is,” he said with a curious smile. “How long have they been showing it?”
    “I’m not sure, we just switched it on a few minutes ago.” She paused for a moment, then said, “Dad . . . what do you think it is?”
    And, in what was probably a first for a man who was rightly feted around the world as nothing less than a genius, Larry Rydell had no answer for his daughter. At least, not one that he could share with her.
    Not now.
    Not ever.

Chapter 7

    Washington, D.C.

    A light rain peppered the nation’s capital as a black, chauffeur-driven Lexus slipped out of the underground garage and slunk onto Connecticut Avenue and into the sparse late-evening traffic. In the cosseted comfort of its heated backseat, Keenan Drucker stared out in silence, lost in a streaming light show of passing cars, contemplating the events of the momentous day.
    The phone calls had begun about an hour ago, and in the days to come, there would be plenty more, of that he was certain.
    They were only getting started.
    He shut his eyes and leaned back against the richly padded headrest. His mind chewed over his plan, once again dissecting every layer of it, looking for the fatal flaw that he might have somehow missed. As with every previous run-through, he couldn’t find anything to worry about. There were a lot of unknowns, of course—there had to be, by definition. But that didn’t trouble him. Oversights and miscalculations—now those were different. Those he wouldn’t tolerate. A lot of effort had gone into making sure there wouldn’t be any. But unknowns were, well, unknowable. A lifetime of making questionable deals in smoke-filled rooms had taught him that unknowns weren’t worth worrying about until they materialized. If and when they did, his thoroughness, his focus, and his level of commitment would ensure that, if it pleased the Lord—he smiled inwardly at his little