The Fellowship (12 page)

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! How 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.”

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 11
th
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 eye
s. “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 worried 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.