Drucker confirmed with a nod. “That’s not inaccurate.”
“Can we go there now? You could explain the backstory on the way.”
The journalist gave Ellis a look. “Lady, you have no idea what you’re getting into. You don’t just show up at Eden uninvited.”
“And how does someone get invited?”
“First, you have to know somebody. Second, you pretty much have to be either a scientist or a politician.”
Drucker was neither a scientist nor a politician, Ellis noted. But Gish and Preston were. “How does it work?”
Drucker sighed. “The Fellowship is a hierarchical society. You have to level up over time. There are roughly 21 levels. Near the top, you’ve got world leaders, notable scientists. In the middle tiers you’ve got up-and-comers. They call them soldiers. At the bottom are students.”
“How’d you get in?”
“My college roommate went on to become a congressman. I wrote a book for him during his initial campaign, outlining his position on healthcare reform. It didn’t sell anywhere except the campaign trail, and quickly went out of print. We lost touch after he moved to Washington. Then one day he calls me up and asks me if I’d be interested in writing the personal memoirs of someone truly visionary.”
“Wolf?”
“I’m getting to that. I said yeah, maybe, but who? He said he couldn’t tell me over the phone, but the pay was a hundred thousand dollars. I was living on a freelancer’s salary in Chicago at the time. The next thing I know, he sent me all these confidentiality agreements to sign, and he had me on a flight out to D.C. He had arranged for me to stay at Eden.”
“Had you ever heard of it before?”
“No, of course not. And after I signed all the legal docs, he told me was that Sebastian Wolf was the man. That’s how he put it. The man.”
“Go on.”
“My taxi dropped me outside the gates,” Drucker went on, talking right past Ellis’ question. “I rang the buzzer and announced my name into the speaker, looking right up at the camera. The big iron gates opened, and I walked in. These two guys ran down this massive sloping lawn to help me with my suitcase. They reminded me of big puppies. They were so friendly, my guard went up immediately.”
“They were students?”
Drucker nodded and sipped his iced tea. “Political science majors. They were just Level 3s, which meant they were still doing menial things like cooking and cleaning and hauling luggage. So they walk me up to this beautiful portico, between these massive Roman columns, and through a set of enormous doors. Not like the ones you see here. Like the grand ones they have in Europe. So I walk in, and the first thing I see, in this amazing foyer, is a tall sheik in white robes. Maybe he was Saudi royalty. But I can tell by the big rings on his fingers and the fabric of his robes that he’s got to be super rich and probably important. And the Saudi can’t take his eyes off the guy in front of him.”
“Wolf?”
“One and the same. Tall guy with a silver mane and an aura that is palpable. One look and you know he’s the grand patriarch. His age is deceptive. He’s just one of those people who looks like he has all the answers, you know? So he spots me and comes right over, leaving this rich sheik standing there! He takes one of my hands, puts another hand on my shoulder, and makes eye contact. I don’t even remember exactly what he said to me. I was just enamored with his presence. I felt like we were the only two people in the world at that moment.” Drucker was blushing, as if remembering a teenage crush, or an encounter with a rock star. “It was intense.”
“And then what?”
“In those days, it was common to see brilliant people from MIT or Cal Tech show up, not to mention the occasional senator or foreign minister. Some people even said presidents used to come, but that was before my time.”
“What about Nils Gish?”
Drucker swatted at a horse fly that had somehow found its way to the 11th floor lounge. “I got the impression that Gish brought donors in to fund the research projects.”
Ellis leaned forward, her elbows on the table. “What kind of research?”
“Mostly biomedical, bioengineering and anthro.”
A fuzzy prickle ran down Ellis’ arms. In his will, Rand Preston had left an endowment to a biomedical research foundation in Austin, Texas, and she had seen Gish’s name on the board of an English bioengineering ethics committee.
“For example,” Drucker went on, “I met an anthro at Eden who had gotten back from studying mitochondrial DNA in a 2,000-year-old burial tomb in Israel. This particular guy had his own agenda, but Wolf funded his project to see if he could expedite the process of decoding genome sequences using previously unexposed bits of bone marrow inside these ancient ossuaries.”
“Why would the Fellowship fund something like that? What does that have to do with exposing essential truth?”
The waitress set down a plate of calamari. Drucker wasted no time in digging into it. “It gets weirder. More recently, Wolf has been obsessed with cloning. Those researchers that cloned an extinct species of goat from cells in hair that had been preserved in permafrost? The Fellowship funded that. Rumor has it that they’re behind the team trying to clone that frozen hunter they found in Greenland last year.”
Ellis got chills. “It’s like playing God.”
“And the world’s great minds will join his flock. And so too will the world’s great leaders, so that they may be in place when the time comes to usher in the new age of light.”
“Don’t recognize it,” Ellis said. “Is that Old Testament?”
Wolf shook his head. “Wolf claims he wrote that after being blessed with a vision. He’s got a book full of them, called the Living Scriptures. But don’t waste your time looking for a copy. You can’t get a look at the Living Scriptures until you’re at least a Level 15.”
“But you’ve seen it?”
Drucker nodded. “He’s got the original copy in a library at Eden. The Living Scriptures is the least interesting thing there by far. He’s got an actual mummy in there. He’s got Roman antiquities. I guess it’s not surprising considering who his father was.”
“Do I have to ask?”
Drucker licked a piece of calamari breading off his fingers. “Wolf’s father was a Nazi anthropologist. He worked for Heinrich Himmler.”
Now she had heard everything. She had indulged Drucker’s tall tales long enough. Ellis had flown all the way from London only to realize that the Capitol Hill journalist had already been dismissed by the Bureau years ago, and that he was more than likely mad as a hatter. She had come to find a simple, logical connection between the three murder victims, and the journalist was blabbering on about secret societies, cloning and Nazis.
It was time to cut to the chase. “Did you ever see Senator Preston at Eden?”
Drucker set his drink down and looked Ellis straight in the eyes. “Is that why you called me? You think there’s some connection between Eden and Preston’s death?”
“It’s just a question.”
“Like hell it is.” The horse fly was back again. Drucker swatted in the air again as it buzzed about his head. “If the feds thought Preston really died in a residential fire, you wouldn’t be here.”
She revealed nothing in her expression. “How can I get a list of all the Fellowship members?”
The journalist snickered. “You can’t. These are very cautious people. We haven’t even scratched the surface of what they’re capable of.”
Ellis sighed. Maybe it was wise to get a look at Agent Hollis’ notes on Drucker before investing any more time with him. She grabbed her purse and began scooting out of the booth.
Drucker’s face lost color and turned dead serious. “Wait. The information you’re looking for is in the book.”
The comment stopped Ellis in her tracks. In the midst of all of Drucker’s bluster, she had almost forgotten that he had been hired to write Wolf’s memoirs. “I’m listening.”
“Wolf was worrie
d about his legacy after his death. He talked a lot about how the historians had been left to determine the way every important religious leader was viewed, from Moses to Joseph Smith to L. Ron Hubbard. He wanted the chance to tell his own story, especially about how he came to have the vision.”
“Why should I care?”
“For one thing, I’ve got information about Preston. I had access to information that you don’t get until you’re at least a Level 20.”
Ellis set her purse back down onto the table. “If the material is so great, then why hasn’t it been published?”
The peevish look on Drucker’s face foretold the fiasco he was about to describe. “My agreement with Wolf was that the book’s publication was contingent on two things. The first was his death. The second was completion of the Great Mission.”
“Great Mission?”
Drucker nodded. “But I got greedy. Before the old man had even seen the first draft, I sent a few chapters to a book agent. But this material was so hot. I thought maybe if we could get a big advance, then Wolf might change his mind and let us publish it right away.”
“And did you?”
“Yes, in fact. But my agent blew it for me. Somewhere deep in the representation agreement, I had apparently consented to let my agent place my work in short form for fair market value so long as it was for promotional purposes. The next thing I know, a portion of it had been edited and published as the article you found online.”
“I take it that didn’t go over so well.”
The very thought of it seemed to sap Drucker’s spirit. “Wolf’s security team used me as a punching bag.”
“They actually attacked you?”
“Broke my jaw and two ribs. Check the hospital records if you don’t believe me.”
Ellis was already planning on it. “And then what?”
“Like I said, they made me swear an oath that I’d keep quiet, or else. They took my computer, and I’m pretty sure they put a virus into the one I bought after that.” A smile crept across his face. “But they didn’t realize that I was such a paranoid son of a bitch.”
“You kept a copy?”
The ends of his handlebar mustache rose as he grinned devilishly. “All these years later, I’m still working on it. I know they periodically hack into my computer, but they’ll never find it. The best defense against cyberattacks is old-fashioned paper.”
Suddenly, Drucker slapped his neck hard. Ellis watched the horse fly bounce off Drucker’s shoulder and fall below. “Got the bastard.”
“Nate, I’m going to need to see that book.”
Drucker opened his mouth to reply, but words didn’t come. He groaned and moved his neck slowly to the right, straining against some unseen force.
It was then that Ellis noticed the growing welt on his neck, near his jugular. “Nate,” she said, “have you ever had an allergic reaction to an insect bite?”
He grunted. His lips and tongue seemed suddenly out of sync, and he was glassy-eyed.
The fly had fallen onto the table. Two of its legs were detached from the main body. When Ellis prodded it with her fingertips, she knew what Drucker never would. The fly was man-made.
Verona, Italy
The journey from South Africa to Italy had been a circuitous one. Their flight into Rome had been diverted to Munich due to thunderstorms across Italy. They had then been promised another flight the next afternoon, but Carver wasn’t content to wait that long. He opted instead to catch a night train heading south through the Austrian Aps.
Five hours later they arrived in Verona, where a train strike had forced the cancellation of the second leg to Rome. They would be forced to stay in the northern Italian town for the night. Both men were famished and grumpy as they headed for a late-night pizzeria near the station.
Now, sitting outside under a string of yellow lights, the two men looked better than they felt. They wore Hugo Boss suits and had both been to a barber at the Munich train station.
“About that thing you put in my arm,” Nico said, running his fingers over the welt where it had been inserted.
Carver nodded. “The tracking chip.”
“Not that I’m planning on it, but what’s to stop me from digging that out with a pocketknife?”
“It’s hooked around your cephalic vein. That’s the big one running down your bicep into your forearm.”
“What? How?”
“These hooks expand from the chip after it’s embedded. They start off as tiny, flaccid tentacles. But if you attempt to remove the chip after it’s embedded, the tentacles swell, go rigid and curl, cutting off blood flow.”
Nico was horrified. “And this thing is in me permanently?”
“I’m not that sadistic. It’s just that you can’t just get any quack to remove it. One of our people in the States will deactivate the hooks and remove the chip after the mission’s done.”
“That’s just wrong.”
“Not as wrong as handing you over to the CIA, which is what they wanted me to do. You’d be back in Lee Federal Penitentiary. Or worse, extradited to the Saudis, who would be willing to take your head in exchange for the money you stole from them.” Nico shivered visibly. Carver instantly regretted the remarks, hoping they hadn’t further hardened his asset. He softened his voice. “Look, Julian gave his personal assurances that this mission will pay your debt to America in full.”
“And Eva?”
“For the last time, it’s President Hudson now. And yes, I’m sure she’s on board as well.”
Carver wasn’t sure. But there was always a way. If Nico’s contribution to the investigation turned out to be half as valuable as Carver was expecting, a presidential pardon would be a moral imperative.
After dinner, they checked into a shabby motel with one bed, near the train station. Carver surveyed the dilapidated room, chewing on the end of a straw he had taken from the pizzeria. It wasn’t much, but they were just here to sleep before catching a train to Rome the following morning.
Carver urinated with the restroom door open, and then washed his face and hands. Then he pulled the blankets off the bed and handed them to Nico. “It’s all yours,” he said, gesturing toward the restroom.
“Where am I supposed to sleep, the bathtub?”
Carver nodded and tossed him a feather pillow. “Just for tonight. That way I won’t have to snooze with one eye open.”
“It’s not like I’m going to run.”
“I know. But it was only 24 hours ago that your girlfriend tried to shoot me, and I punched her in the face.”
“Ah. You’re afraid I’ll smother you with a pillow in the middle of the night.”
“Something like that.”
“Fair enough.”
Carver pushed the dresser against the bathroom door, sealing Nico inside.
“What if there’s a fire?” Nico yelled through the door. “I’ll be trapped in here.”
“Take a cold shower.”
W Hotel
The room lights were on full, offering Ellis a level of illumination that only the hotel bar’s cleaning crew usually witnessed. Men in white biohazard suits examined the booth where Ellis and Drucker had sat earlier in the evening. Two other crews probed every piece of furniture, glass and surface for electronic devices or cameras.
Drucker had died within 90 seconds of the insect bite. Ellis herself had frantically searched the 11th floor, as well as the P.O.V.’s rooftop terrace, for anyone suspicious. It had been a fruitless task. By then the lounge had been crowded with people, half of whom could have potentially utilized their phones as either cameras or remote control devices.
The object in question was in a sealed petri dish on the bar countertop. A federal robotics expert hunched over it, peering through a microscope, gently turning its tiny wings with delicate tweezers. Ellis and Speers stood behind him.
“Amazing nanotechnology,” the expert said.
Speers had divulged nothing of the situation — other than the fact that a man
appeared to have been attacked — to any of the crew on site. “Who could have done this?”
“Beats me. I’m no entomologist, but whoever did this made a pretty convincing female tabanid, otherwise known as a common horse fly. Right down to the proboscis, which is that needle-like snout that a horse fly uses to extract the blood meal it requires before reproduction.”
“Only this one didn’t suck his blood,” someone behind them said. The voice belonged to Chad Fordham, who had just come in. “I just talked to my toxins specialist. Drucker was poisoned. We’ll have to confirm this in the lab, but based on Ellis’ description of facial paralysis followed by respiratory failure, taken together with an early blood sample, they’re 90 percent sure that little robo-fly injected him with a botulinum toxin.”
Ellis scratched her head. “Isn’t that stuff in Botox?”
Fordham nodded. “In its purest form, this is the deadliest toxin on the planet. Couple bags of this stuff, and a smart delivery mechanism, and you’ve got a bioweapon capable of mass eradication.”
Ellis tried to imagine the people standing around them and seated at the bar. Lots of little black dresses. Lots of men in conservative dark suits. Typical Washington crowd. Nobody stood out.
Her head was spinning. Maybe the FBI hadn’t felt Drucker was worth following up with in the past 12 years, but someone else did. “We’re going to need to look at all the hotel camera footage. Maybe we can catch somebody operating this from their mobile device.”
Speers pulled Ellis aside. “We’ve been assuming Drucker was the target. We have to consider the possibility that the target was you.”
She had been thinking the same thought all morning. “Drucker had a crazy vibe,” she said. “But if half the stuff he told me was true, he could have been dangerous.”
“Dangerous to whom?”
She sat on a barstool and summarized all the madness Drucker had spewed in regards to the Fellowship World Initiative and its headquarters, Eden. Then she told him what little Drucker had said about its enigmatic leader, Sebastian Wolf.
Speers nodded, recognizing the name. He had met Wolf, years ago, at the Council on Faith luncheon. “I can hear about that later. Right now we have to assume that someone saw you two together. You can work from McLean until we know more.”
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