He took a photograph of the dead man’s face. Are you the one who killed Sir Gish? Carver wondered. Did you kill Kenyatta? How many more are there like you?
Now he heard Seven’s voice. He turned and noted the blue glow of a computer screen flickering in the middle of the darkened crypt. He picked up an LED lantern and went to the other side of the room, where its florescent bulbs illuminated Seven and Nico.
Nico wore a dazed stare. His arms were bruised and lacerated in several places. Blood ran down one side of his face from the top of his ear. Carver felt a pang of responsibility. This wasn’t what he’d had in mind when he’d extracted Nico from his home. Not even close.
He could tell by the look in Seven’s moist eyes that something was very wrong.
“Where?” Carver said.
She pointed to the second staircase. At the bottom, the other Black Order assassin lay dead. His head had been bashed in by a blunt object.
A rivulet of blood snaked its way down the staircase. About halfway up, Prichard was sprawled face-down, his right arm twisted unnaturally behind him. He had been shot once in the chest.
A siren sounded in the distance.
Carver turned back toward Seven. “We have to get out of here.”
“I’m not leaving Sam,” Seven said.
He looked around. “This is going to be hard to explain to the police.”
He went up the steps, removing Prichard’s visa and other identification from his pockets. Nico collected both assailants’ phones and began sweeping several other items that had spilled from the overturned table into a manila folder.
Seven was frozen in place.
“We’re going,” Carver said, taking her hand. “All of us.”
Piazza di Spagna
Rome
Carver checked them into a luxury hotel near the Spanish Steps that was large enough to feel anonymous. To mask the powder burns and bloodstains on their clothes, they had bought three knockoff designer hoodies from a sidewalk vendor, zipping them as high as they would go. Nico tightened the hood around his head to mask the lacerations on his neck and ear.
Everyone managed to keep it together at the front desk. They did not speak in the elevator. There was a collective exhale as they finally reached the suite, which was larger than Carver’s apartment back in D.C. He stood in the living room and watched as Seven went to the minibar and downed six tiny bottles of vodka. She also made fast work of the gin and rum samplers. As if it would help stop the ringing in her ears from the gunfire. As if it would help her stop thinking about Sam Prichard’s body, which they had left in the old deconsecrated church crypt.
She went to the second bedroom and, without closing the door, stripped to her undergarments and fell into bed, weeping.
“Why don’t you say something?” Nico said.
Carver turned. “Like what?”
“I don’t know. Tell her it’s going to be all right. Give her a hug. Something.”
Carver shook his head. He knew better. His words of comfort would only seem hollow. He couldn’t tell her it was going to be all right, because it wasn’t going to be all right. At least not for Prichard.
A week ago, he had been sipping tea in his cushy MI6 office. He had never even heard of the Black Order. And tonight the Black Order had killed him.
Carver really knew nothing about him. Was he married? Were his parents alive? Did he have children? It was been obvious that he wasn’t battle tested, though. Carver had sensed that before launching the attack, and deemed it an acceptable risk.
Nico was their greatest asset right now. His life was simply more valuable than any of theirs. That was the cold, hard reality.
“You know what it’s like to lose somebody,” Nico reminded him.
The intensity of his glare startled Nico. “I told you,” he said. “I don’t discuss Agent O’Keefe with anyone.”
“Meagan. Her name was Meagan. And you don’t have to talk about her. Just tell Seven you understand.”
He hated himself at times like this. He wanted to feel more. He didn’t want to be so practical. But he could not force himself to think about O’Keefe. He couldn’t say her name. If he did, then he would lose all focus. He would become the emotional one. Unable to think strategically. Unable to maintain his edge.
It was the downside of hyperthymesia. He did not relive painful memories with the same soft focus that others did. Time created no protective buffer for him. Every moment was relived in excruciating detail. He had learned to suppress effect over the years by denying such memories entry altogether. But once they were unleashed, it was difficult to bottle them up again.
Against his better judgment, he walked to the bedroom. He had not experienced fear during the gun battle tonight, but he felt afraid now. He found it remarkably difficult to put one foot in front of the other.
It wasn’t just the fear of uncorking his own emotions, he knew, or the fear of confronting his own suppressed grief. It was a fear of attraction. Seven was witty and brave. She knew how to hotwire a scooter. He could imagine her London flat, white-walled and airy. An expensive bike parked near the front door, to which she owed her round, muscular haunches. A closet was half-filled with biking gear, and the other half with sensible evening wear, as she was often invited to events that required little black dresses and strands of pearls and good shoes.
He went to the bed where Seven was curled up in fetal position, clutching a pillow. Even as upset as she was, she was gorgeous. His eyes traced the contours of her athletic calves, which tapered into ankles that were strong but thin. It was wrong to want her at a time like this, but he did.
God, she smelled like a distillery.
She looked up at him. Waiting for Carver to speak.
“I lost a partner too.” His own words surprised him.
Seven swallowed hard. “Really?”
He nodded. “About a year ago.”
He sat down on the edge of the bed, keeping his back to her so she wouldn’t see the manifestation of his desire in his pants. He put a hand on her calf. Patted it lightly. He felt her cozy up to him. Just close enough so that they were touching.
And he let himself think about Megan O’Keefe. They had been followed to a rendezvous at Arlington House, and they’d escaped into a section of ancient tunnel underneath it that had been built by Robert E. Lee, who had lived there before the civil war. He never should have let her walk point as the partially flooded tunnel led them under the Potomac. He had seen her green eyes bloodshot with fear and felt her tremble at the frenzied screech of the rats up the tunnel walls. It had smelled like burnt oranges down there. And there had been things in the water. Black snakes six feet long. Carp nearly as big around as his waist. She shouldn’t have been there to begin with. It was his fault. She had been a NASA cryptologist when Speers had paired them up, and he had objected, at first, to working with an academic like O’Keefe on a mission that was likely to get hairy. He never should have demanded that she take weapons training. And he never should have pretended he hadn’t fallen for her on that summer night in the train station. He should have done everything differently.
“Hey Blake,” Seven murmured from behind him. He was transported back to the present.
“Yeah?”
“Would you just sit there while I go to sleep?”
The very thing that was hardest for him. Sitting still.
“Sure,” he nodded without turning around. “Go ahead and get some shuteye. I’ll be right here.”
He would be true to his word. With one last task to do before getting some rest, Carver took his phone he had purchased earlier that day out of his pocket and prepared to upload evidence to the mission cloud. Before leaving the church crypt, he had snapped death portraits of the Black Order assassins. Then he had pressed the ends of their gunpowder-blackened fingers onto his phone screen to get their prints. Fortunately, he had an app for that.
Now he navigated to the mission cloud, which resided at a hellishly convoluted URL t
hat only a security specialist could love. Once there, he entered the 23-digit passcode without hesitation.
He uploaded the death photos and the prints to the site with a simple message for Arunus Roth to ID the men. Then he put the phone away and waited for Seven to fall asleep.
*
The number of lacerations and bruises Nico had suffered kept his shower forcibly brief. He stepped out onto the marble tile, pausing to note the thinness of his white figure in the bathroom window before wrapping a towel around his waist. He opened the first aid kit he had found in the suite’s kitchenette and began applying Neosporin to several wounds on his arms, neck and ear. Then he used all eight bandages.
Wearing only the towel, he ventured out into the darkened living room and looked to see if any alcohol had escaped Seven’s thirst. He smiled as he found a Peroni beer. He cracked the lid and inhaled the fumes, savoring them before drinking.
Wow that was good. It wasn’t like the Italians made the world’s best beer. But any beer tonight was good. He was alive.
He walked back to the bedroom and opened the computer. He connected to the hotel wireless, and for the first time, saw the results of the search queries he had run at the church. Excitement pulsed through his veins. This was big.
He felt mildly astonished with himself. Where was the resentfulness he was accustomed to feeling? Where was the victimization? Why didn’t he want to blame anyone for the fact that his left ear would need a plastic surgeon? He felt something he had not felt since he began committing cybercrimes for the thrill of it. Invincibility. He had been pulled back from the abyss tonight, and that in itself was proof of his power.
Now he understood why he didn’t miss Madge. From the very first letter she had written him in prison, her goal had been to rehabilitate him. To convert him. To own him.
It was true that he had hurt people using his skills in the past. Madge had helped him understand that. But she had also wanted him to let go of those skills completely. And he had. Quit cold turkey. There hadn’t been so much as a mobile device in the house at Kei Mouth. Given all that they had been through, and given the way the Feds had “repaid” him for his good deeds during the Ulysses Coup, leaving it all behind had made sense at the time.
But in the process he had allowed Madge to transform him into someone else. Someone average, in an anonymous place, with aspirations that nobody would ever care about. That wasn’t who he was.
He closed his eyes, resolving to hold onto this feeling of renewal. His life was his again. There was only one piece missing. The control of his own destiny.
*
Carver woke on the couch. He patted his chest, feeling for the shoulder holster to make sure he had not been disarmed during sleep. The weapon was still there. Then he glanced at his wristwatch. Good. It wasn’t dawn yet.
He went to the balcony for some fresh air. A few street vendors were sleeping on the Spanish Steps in the very spots where, a few short hours from now, they would sell knockoff designer sunglasses, handbags and other wares. In the Piazza di Spagna he could see the illuminated Fountain of the Barcaccia, which had been created by Bernini’s father, Pietro. The 400-year-old public artwork was such a kid magnet — they were always leaping on and off the thing, drinking from it, throwing stuff into it — that Carver had never seen it unobstructed. Here, stripped down to its core, it was shockingly plain. A partially submerged boat that seemed to be sinking fast.
He spun around, detecting movement behind him. It was Nico, dressed in a fuzzy white hotel robe. He opened the balcony door.
“Can’t sleep?”
Nico shook his head. “I think Wolf is in Rome.”
Excitement stirred within Carver. “Say more about that.”
“A private Learjet owned by the World Fellowship Initiative landed at Ciampino Airport last week. There’s a good chance that Wolf was on it.”
Carver felt as if he had known it all along. Despite the killings in London, Washington, Seattle and Geneva, Wolf’s past and present always seemed to point to the Eternal city.
He put his hands in his pockets and held Nico’s gaze. “A lot of people would have given up after what you went through tonight.”
Nico seemed stunned by the lack of irony in Carver’s sentiment. “Well, out of the frying pan and into the fire, as they say.”
“I won’t let you down when this is over. I want you to know that.”
Nico held his gaze for a moment before gathering himself. “This sincerity stuff is a little awkward coming from you.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“I was about to look at the stuff we took from the crypt. Care to join?”
Nico went to the little kitchenette and found the manila envelope next to the toaster. He dumped its contents out onto the Formica countertop. It was a hasty assembly of loose notes, receipts and documents.
The two men quickly rifled through the mess. It hit Carver that this collection of ordinary items could easily have been a collection from his own desk in D.C. Were they somehow tracking expenses for reimbursement, or was one of them simply fastidious about his own personal finances?
Among the many incidental receipts for fuel and food, were two punched airline tickets from Rome to London.
Nico examined the dates. “The arrival date at Heathrow was three days prior to Sir Gish’s assassination.”
Carver nodded. “Good. Upload them to the mission cloud.”
“Will do. And one other thing. While you were sleeping, I managed to hack into one of the creep’s phones. There were no messages stored on the device, but I did uncover these.”
Carver took the phone and flipped through a series of candid photos of Sir Gish. In each he was dressed in a suit and was clearly on a subway car of some type.
“They were following him,” Carver observed. “Look at this one. You can see a station ad for the London Eye behind him. That’s right on Gish’s daily routine to parliament.”
Had they indeed gotten lucky and killed Gish’s assassins last night? He hoped so. It would make Prichard’s death a little easier to stomach.
Carver kept flipping. There were hundreds of pictures. Some looked as if they had been taken on a different device and simply downloaded to the phone.
One such image compelled him to pause. “The Council on Faith luncheon in Washington D.C.,” he said, reading the image tag.
“Looks like it was taken on 35 mil,” Nico added.
“For sure. It was taken in 2001. You couldn’t get this kind of definition on digital back then.”
Several young congressmen were pictured with a white-haired man whom, judging by the way they all deferred to him with their body language, they obviously regarded as a patriarch.
“This might be the last public snapshot of Sebastian Wolf,” Carver said.
“Check out that hair. What’s that gel he’s using? Liquefied horse cartilage?”
“Tag it and upload to the mission cloud.”
The final image was the one that really made Carver’s heart race. The subject was thin, with neck-length black hair, an Anglo nose and Asian eyes behind black-framed Armani eyeglasses.
“Adrian Zhu.”
It was all starting to add up. The Fellowship’s investment in LifeEmberz. Zhu’s disappearance in Rome. And now this confirmation that Zhu himself was on the Black Order hit list. There was no question about it. Zhu wasn’t merely associated with Wolf’s organization. He was critical to its success.
And if Wolf was in Rome, Carver was willing to bet everything that Zhu was still here too.
*
Carver rubbed his eyes and yawned into his hand. Nico had finally gone to bed, but he had continued working. The sun was coming in through the balcony glass now, the light warming his back. In the last hour he had organized the items they had taken from the church crypt into three piles. One pile pointed at evidence that seemed to confirm that the Black Order operatives they had killed were likely responsible for the death of Sir Gish. Another pile pointed
to a hunt for Adrian Zhu. And yet another contained the lone photograph of Sebastian Wolf. All were Black Order targets.
He called Dr. Charlotte Calipari, a molecular geneticist Speers had introduced him to at a State Department event the previous year. Although it had been some time since they had connected, and it was nearly 10 p.m. back in D.C., he took a chance. Calipari was the only person he had ever met who had supervised the creation of a paleo-DNA lab.
“If you had to build such a lab today,” Carver asked, “and you wanted to also clone from dead tissue, where would you find the equipment?”
There was a long pause before her response. “Well that’s not the sort of question I hear every day.”
Carver was acutely aware of the strangeness of the question. The fact was that Calipari owed him no favors. The only tool at his disposal was flattery. “When we met, I was impressed by you. I thought if there was anyone in the world qualified to answer this, it would be you.”
“You’re too kind. Fortunately, the answer to your question is simple. Short of creating your own machines, there would be only a couple of places where you could turn to get what you needed. The community is very small. There are just two providers in the entire world that are really considered state-of-the-art right now.”
Carver smiled. “And those would be?”
Psychiatric Office
Washington D.C.
Ellis wore oversized sunglasses to mask the facial bruises she’d sustained in Seattle. She eased down on the couch, her demeanor cool and distant behind the big black lenses. The doctor had said she’d be a little foggy for the next few days. Her memories were coming back to her, but not quickly enough to be of much use.
The shrink was in her mid-40s, with long brown hair tied in a ponytail and expensive eyeglasses. She sat across from Ellis in an armchair that looked comfortable enough to nap in.
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