The Fellowship bc-2

by William Tyree

  “What I said was that I didn’t own a computer. And that was the truth. I did that to honor a promise to Madge. But I might have mosied down to the hotel every once in a while. The night desk manager was very accommodating.”

  As they pulled into the car rental return lot, Carver powered up an IP-anonymous browser on his phone, then logged onto the mission cloud. Arunus Roth had just uploaded a message he’d titled URGENT — FOR REAL–CALL ME!!! There were no other details.

  He did so. Roth answered on the first ring.

  “Where have you been?” he said breathlessly. “I’ve been calling you for hours. There’s a break in the Adrian Zhu disa-“

  Carver cut the kid off before he could say another word. “Per Julian, Crossbow is on hold. I thought he’d made that clear.”

  “This isn’t about Crossbow per se,” Roth clarified. “But it may be related. Just hear me out, bro.”

  “You’ve got 60 seconds. And don’t call me bro.”

  “Zhu’s last known location was at a hotel parking garage in the Rome suburbs. After that, the GPS stopped chirping. Tom Callahan called last night. It seems the morgue contains a couple of bodies that were found in the garage that night.”

  Carver’s hopes for resuming the operation suddenly faded. “Did Callahan ID the bodies?”

  “Neither one is Adrian Zhu, if that’s what you’re wondering. But here’s the part that’s relevant to us. One of them was carrying an octagon-shaped piece of fabric.”

  Carver signed off as Nico put the car in Park.

  “Change of plans,” Carver said. “Your homecoming will have to wait. We’re headed to Italy.”

  For the first time all day, Nico cracked a smile.

  The Villa

  Rome

  Adrian Zhu had no idea how far they had already descended. A hundred meters? Two hundred? Looking up through the center of the coiling iron staircase, the light from the villa, where they had left the Shepherd in a state of prayerful meditation, was rapidly shrinking away. The helix-shaped staircase seemed to plunge endlessly into the blackness below.

  Lars was at his side now, leading him behind a small group of armed guards. The tuff rock surrounding the staircase had been recently excavated. The ironwork vibrated beneath his feet. Somewhere in the distance, a group of generators hummed, no doubt powering a series of small lights strung along the vertical passage.

  In a few minutes, he would finally see the lab that he had so meticulously designed from the other side of the world. Creating a world-class paleo-DNA lab was difficult under the best of circumstances, but Zhu had done so in complete secrecy. The power that had come with the Chinese government contracts had been offset by a great deal of oversight. It was assumed that his phones, email and all other forms of communication were compromised, if not by the Chinese, then by the prying eyes of American intelligence. He had therefore conducted his work in person, in the rear of a Beijing mahjong parlor owned by a local Fellowship elder. Over the past three years, Lars had made 22 trips in and out of the country to meet with him, going over the exact equipment, procedures and staffing necessary to make the project possible. What they were attempting to do would surpass anything accomplished in world history. There was zero room for error.

  His anxiety was coupled by a nervousness that he had never known. Maybe the assault in the hotel parking garage had rattled him more than he had thought. Each time he looked down, the movie began again in his head. His attempts to break away during the opera’s intermission. His pathetic assault on his business partner, Spencer. The sight and smell of Spencer’s flesh on the grill of the Range Rover. The relentless pounding of machine gun fire against the vehicle. The fear that he would be killed, and everything he had worked for, everything he had put at risk, would be lost. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.

  But wow, he did fear evil. He couldn’t help it.

  “Watch your step,” Lars said as their feet finally touched earth. They entered a cavern that was 20 feet tall and more than 60 feet wide. Above a particularly magnificent archway, Zhu gasped as he saw an enormous relief of Mithra slaughtering a bull.

  “What is this place?”

  “As far as we can tell, this is a branch of the underground Caracalla baths complex. An excavation just like it was unearthed a few years ago in another part of Rome.” He allowed Zhu only a moment to take in the majesty of the relief before nudging him forward. “Come. We have work to do.”

  The next chamber was filled with more security personnel. Lars spoke to each of them as they passed, alternating between German, Italian and English. Zhu couldn’t understand much of what they said, but the immediacy of their responses suggested complete obedience.

  “The One from the East,” someone said in English. The guards, all of them, removed their caps as Zhu passed with his entourage.

  He was taken through a full-body scanner like the ones they had in airports. Beyond it was a narrow tunnel filled with floorboards.

  “There’s going to be a little noise now,” Lars said. “Step lightly, please.”

  The boards squeaked, like chirping birds, as they walked. The nightingale floors the Shepherd had spoken of. The sounds echoed in the symmetrical cavern, and the effect was that of a massive flock of birds raising hell.

  They came to a spacious open-air lift that appeared large and sturdy enough to support a commercial truck. It moved slowly up and down at regular intervals. There were no doors or buttons, and only a single rail prevented occupants from falling from the platform and into the chasm below.

  “I see you didn’t invest much in infrastructure,” Zhu said.

  Lars nodded. “The Shepherd insisted that the construction be minimally invasive of the ruins.”

  The descent was mercifully short. The air was suddenly much cooler. When they exited, he stood before a spotless glass-encased laboratory. At least a dozen people were working inside, making preparations for the Great Mission. Just as Zhu had specified in his instructions, the lab workers were wearing full body suits, with two layers of booties, and additional hoods, sleeves and gloves over the initial layer of outerwear.

  Zhu was clearly pleased. “It’s just like we talked about. How do we go in?”

  Lars pointed to an exterior chamber at the far end of the room. “You and your assistants change there. Then you enter a secondary chamber equipped with an air shower. Per your requirements, each working area is in a self-contained chamber with its own individual climate control. All the equipment you requested was sterilized in a dedicated room before its introduction to the environment.”

  Across the chasm was a vast chamber with algae-damaged walls that had once been frescoed. Still, there were elaborately carved fountains, and in one place, a pool covered with ivory veneers and containing beautiful blue water. A vaulted ceiling was adorned with a mosaic depicting a chariot race. And beyond the chamber, a throne room.

  Lars pointed to the stone-carved throne. Hundreds of tiny craters lined the arms and edges where jewels had once bedazzled it. “We believe that Nero himself sat there.”

  The grin on Zhu’s face grew even wider. Only the Shepherd could have had such a brilliant idea. The Great Mission would be consummated in the house of one of the most notorious persecutors of Christians, whose intolerance had quite literally driven the movement underground. Filled with renewed inspiration, Zhu turned back toward the lab.

  “And you shall use wisdom to create life,” Lars quoted the Living Scriptures. “Just as I have, for I have made you in my likeness."

  Zhu nodded. “Game on.”

  Washington D.C.

  The drizzle started as Haley Ellis exited the Metro Center subway station. She wandered over to a street vendor who had several mismatched umbrellas laid out on the cement before him.

  “Ten bucks for the small ones,” the guy said. “Twenty for king size.”

  “You have any new umbrellas?” Ellis said, noting the various levels of grime and dir
t across the entire collection.

  “These are just gently used. No leaks, I promise.”

  It was the idea that they might be stolen that bothered Ellis most. She decided to suck it up and move on. The hotel lounge where she was meeting Nathan Drucker was maybe ten minutes if she walked fast.

  It figured that she had brought the English weather home with her. Every bit of this investigation had been star-crossed so far. Much as she hated to admit it, Carver’s first thought — that they should divide and conquer — had been right. The only lead so far was a journalist whose office was within three miles from the crime scene.

  The lead was, on its surface, flimsy. But Nathan Drucker’s agitation on the phone — not to mention his kooky question, “Are you from the Bureau?” — had intrigued her. Was Drucker just a paranoid conspiracy freak?

  Ellis had confirmed that someone from the Bureau — a Special Agent Will Hollis — had contacted Drucker years earlier. Unfortunately, Hollis had since passed away, and the memo he had filed on Drucker had been merged into a separate case file that Ellis didn’t have access to.Bowers said he would look into it.

  The group Drucker had written about, the Fellowship World Initiative, was conspicuously absent from local and national news. All she had found were a few old newsgroup postings, from the days before private social networks, listing local meetups for “FWI Alums.” Maybe it was some kind of fraternity, she thought. That would explain the college connection between Gish and Senator Preston’s missing assistant, Mary Borst.

  Ellis walked into P.O.V., the 11th floor hotel bar known for its spectacular views of the city. She paused after entering, giving her eyes a chance to adjust to the dark lighting before perusing the patrons sitting on zebra-hide bar stools and red leather couches. She had been here once, years ago. She and a friend had waited an hour to get past the velvet rope, only to wait another 20 minutes to get a drink. It was nothing like that tonight. Just pleasantly bustling with tourists, many of whom were hoping to get a bird’s eye view of Washington.

  Once her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she recognized Nathan Drucker’s handlebar mustache from his bio photo on the Capitol Herald site. He sat at a table in the far corner of the lounge, drinking iced tea, with his back to the room.

  “I’m Haley,” Ellis said as she slid into the seat opposite him. She regretted having used her real first name with him on the phone, but what was done was done. There was no going back now.

  She didn’t extend her hand across the table, a habit she had picked up from her boss at NIC, who believed there was little good that would come from broadcasting to others that contact with a potential asset was taking place for the first time. You never knew who was watching.

  The journalist nodded once and said, “Nathan Drucker.” She noted the worry lines around his eyes and the creased forehead of a man in his early 50s. His tweed jacket fit snugly over an unfortunate plaid vest and a bow tie. He wore black plastic-framed eyeglasses under bushy eyebrows.

  “Is the Tweed Ride this week?” Haley said, referring to the annual event that had tweed revivalists cycling around the city dressed like 19th century Ivy League professors.

  “No. I always dress like this.”

  “Oh.”

  “Without further ado, Ms. Ellis, will you please prove you’re who you say you are?”

  Ellis plucked a business card from a small stainless steel cardholder and discretely placed it on the table close to Drucker.

  He inspected it for a long moment. He held the card up to the light, as if looking for a watermark, and still didn’t seem satisfied. “Let me see your badge,” he said.

  She took it out of her purse and held it out for him to inspect. “Would you like a urine sample?”

  “You think this is easy for me? I had to take something for my nerves this morning. Nobody’s contacted me about this for years. Then, out of the blue, wham!”

  Ellis somehow managed a reassuring smile. “No reason to be nervous, Nate. Can I call you Nate?”

  “I guess.”

  “Good. Rest assured, Nate, I’m just looking for information.”

  “I didn’t realize the FBI was still interested. How did this case get revived?”

  She couldn’t let him know that the original memo wasn’t even available to her. It was time to improvise. “To be honest,” she said, “the handoff was poorly handled. I was hoping you could help by recapping the last contact you had with the Bureau.”

  Drucker’s mustache twitched up and down. “Okay then. An Agent Hollis had contacted me the same day the article came out.”

  Ellis smiled and nodded. “To be clear, the article we’re referring to was the one you wrote called ‘The Country Club Cult that Runs Washington.’”

  “That’s right. As I told Agent Hollis, the article was beyond my editorial control. I’ll tell you what I told him, which is that the stuff in the article pales in comparison to what Sebastian Wolf may be up to. But Agent Hollis lost interest fast. We talked once more by phone, and that was the last time I heard from him. I tried calling the Bureau, of course, but he never seemed to be in, so I eventually said screw it and forgot the whole thing.”

  “Let’s take this one item at a time,” Ellis suggested. “You threw out a name. Sebastian Wolf. Who is that?”

  Drucker made a face. His head appeared to slide backward on his neck, as if on a rail, until he was looking down his nose at Ellis. “You didn’t even read the article you called me about!”

  “I read two pages,” Ellis confessed. “That was all I could find online.”

  Drucker sighed and shook his head. “This is all very disappointing. I can’t risk meeting with anyone who isn’t serious.”

  The journalist put a ten dollar bill on the table — which wasn’t quite enough to cover his iced tea, much less the tip — and began to slide out from the booth. Crap. There was a time and place to use her feminine wiles, and this was one of them. Ellis reached out and touched the journalist’s left wrist.

  “Nate,” she said in a gentle voice, her fingertips touching him gently, her eyes looking into his. “I’m sorry this wasn’t handled well internally, but I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t serious.” He paused, as if frozen by her touch. “This is important. Please stay and talk to me. Please.”

  Drucker’s pupils dilated, the telltale sign that Ellis had connected the old-fashioned way. He sighed, smiled and resettled himself on the leather couch. “All right,” he said. “I’m a little testy, I guess. I took an oath of silence on this stuff. They made me swear not to talk.”

  “Who did?”

  “Wolf’s people.”

  “Let’s start with you telling me exactly who Sebastian Wolf is.”

  “Wolf is…” Drucker struggled for words. “He’s not just a person. He’s a prophet.”

  Eisenhower Building

  Speers clenched his fists as he stared at the video image of the young woman passing through security at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport. Still sporting a blonde boy-cut, she had not dyed her hair or changed anything but her clothes since she had last been seen in Senator Preston’s den, just minutes before the fire.

  There was no use stating the obvious. The body of Mary Borst, daughter to a UN under-secretary-general and assistant to an American senator, would not be found among the ashes of Preston’s home. She was alive and well.

  “Tell me she’s still in the air,” Speers said into his speakerphone.

  “Wish I could,” Chad Fordham said. “This image was taken about 12 hours ago, and she landed in Rome approximately eight hours later. It’s possible that she then boarded a connecting flight to Tel Aviv, Cairo, St. Petersburg or Munich. We’re exploring all eventualities as quickly as possible.”

  As Speers began shouting into the phone, he had the odd sensation of standing outside himself. He had thus far borne the stress of the situation stoically. He suddenly felt a complete loss of control.

  “She used her own passport, for God’s sake! H
ow could we not know about this?”

  He was barely listening as Fordham blamed the Canadian border authorities for their slowness in responding to his request for cooperation. As he speculated that Mary Borst must have used cash to pay for her plane ticket, thus evading the monitor they had put on her credit cards and bank account. As he made excuses for Hank Bowers, who had, as Fordham put it, followed standard procedure to the letter. As if that mattered. There was nothing standard about this situation.

  Too little, too late. The only person of interest in Senator Preston’s murder had been right under their nose. And now she was gone.

  W Hotel

  Outside, night had fully enveloped Washington. The White House and the Treasury Building sparkled outside, and the Washington Monument rose up like a beacon in the distance. Drucker sipped from a dark ‘n’ stormy cocktail. The alcohol seemed to have calmed his nerves. Ellis sensed Drucker’s defenses coming down further.

  “You described Sebastian Wolf as a prophet. You also slammed his organization as a cult. So what is he, a visionary, or a cult leader?”

  “Don’t get hung up on labels.” The journalist looked around to make sure he wasn’t being watched. He lowered his voice before speaking again. “The Fellowship is, and I quote from the charter, dedicated to exposing hidden truths that will change the course of humanity.”

  “Like what?” Ellis said. “Government corruption?”

  Drucker shook his head. “No. That’s small ball.”

  “Religion?”

  “Warmer, but to be honest, Wolf doesn’t believe in religion. He thinks it gets in the way of following Jesus.”

  Ellis was growing impatient with Drucker’s bombastic declarations. He was simultaneously provocative and vague. She needed concrete details that could tie Preston, Gish and Borst together. But she had to resist rushing him. She had to be patient.

  “Looks like there’s nothing small about Eden,” she said. “The address on file with the IRS looks huge on Google Maps, like a compound.”