The Fellowship (14 page)

Eurostar
Express Train

The Eurostar running from Verona to Rome sped past a vast field of grapevines that were heavy with fruit and ready for harvest. On the right, a hill town came into view. A citadel-like village surrounded by ancient stone walls and topped with medieval architecture. Completely unblemished by billboards, high rises or neon signs, it had hardly been the first jaw-dropping scene they had passed so far. But unlike his fellow passengers, Nico was oblivious to the bucolic scenery. He was about to boot up a beautiful new machine.

He savored the feel of the round
power button on the sleek computer Carver had purchased for him. He grazed his finger over the button several times before finally depressing it, savoring the satisfying whirr of the processor flickering to life.

During the 13 months spent hiding on South Africa’s Eastern Cape, he had kept his vow to Madge. No computers in the house. No web-accessible phones. No temptations. Except for the occasional trip down to the hotel, where the night manager had obliged his indulgences.

It had been for his own good, he knew. After all, it had been his inability to control his urges that had put him in lockup in the first place. But in a world where bills were paid online, customers paid for access to entertainment rather than owning it, and paper maps were relics of the 20
th
century, going web-free had been a difficult promise to keep.

He had managed the inevitable inner conflict mostly by immersing himself in the Xhosa and Afrikaans languages. Becoming fluent in both languages, as well as
taking on the challenge of teaching himself how to fish the Transkei riverways, had proven to be surprisingly rewarding. In recent months, the old impulses had nearly died off.

He had lapsed just once, after finding a discarded phone in a Transkei garbage dump. Rooting the phone to steal free web access had been more than the Internet-starved hacker could resist. For three nights in a row, he
had pretended to fall asleep, only to get up in the dead of night to explore the ever-changing universe of net security on the phone’s tiny screen. With Nico increasingly ragged and temperamental from his all-nighters, Madge finally recognized the warning signs and demanded that he hand over the contraband device.

Now the familiar rush of adrenalin returned to him as he logged onto the hotspot provided by Carver’s satphone. The encryption key was impossibly long, which only intensified the pleasure when the first site appeared before his eyes. But once he got started, the download speed was blazingly fast. Incomprehensible compared to anything he had ever experienced before.

Carver placed a Limonata and a pastry on the tray before him. With the train worker strike apparently still on, Carver had bought ahead, making sure they wouldn’t be hungry or thirsty on the trip to Rome. Nico set the food and drink aside and continued his bonding session with the new machine.

Before boarding in Verona, Carver had explained his immediate objective. Going on the presumption that a hidden relationship between Senator Rand Preston and Sir Nils Gish existed, he was to use any means necessary to expose any possible connections. For now,
they would leave the mysterious case of Mary Borst’s disappearance aside, although he could tell that whether he liked it or not, that some portion of Carver’s brain was still working on it.

He would start by analyzing the two politicians’ itineraries,
both private and public, looking for any overlap in destinations or meeting places. He would then pull a full social graph for the two men, working up a full profile on any first and 2
nd
second-degree contacts that the two men had in common.

Virtually any tactic was fair game
. They had already received Preston’s personal email data from the FBI, and Carver was working on getting Gish’s. That was about all the risk-free help they were going to get. They could not reach out directly to private companies for account access, for fear of exposing the investigation.  

The quickest way to discover who these men were, and where they had been, was to follow their money. That meant breaking into their credit card accounts.
Nico salivated at the thought of it. In the old days, he had favored bringing down financial networks through denial-of-service attacks. He had formed cyber gangs of users from different geolocations to overwhelm networks with the number of simultaneous requests needed to bring them to their knees.

Unfortunately, t
hat type of offensive was no longer an option. He hadn’t maintained his contacts in the hacker community during his exile. And even if he had, involving them would be too much of a risk. The sensitive nature of the operation required extreme discretion. As an alternative, he could enslave a great number of machines, masking the IP of each through a randomized spoofing process. In the past, his favorite targets had been large American state universities like Penn State. Any institution with a hefty on-campus population, where large numbers of students would create and eventually abandon accounts, was perfect. Nico would simply revive those accounts and use them for his own means.

He wasn’t yet privy to the details of the case, but he figured that
Carver wouldn’t have come all the way to South Africa if the stakes were small. And that was just fine by him. High stakes suited him.

Now he felt alive in a way that he had not in ages.

He thought of Madge. Poor lonely Madge, who had left her good home and good job in America to hide from the law with him. Who had, even before that, written him dozens of letters in prison because she wanted to reform him.

And then, as quickly as he had felt high on adrenaline, a wave of guilt washed over him.
Damn
, he thought. I don’t even miss her.

He shrugged and opened the can of
Limonata.

Nathan Drucker Residence

Haley Ellis
streamlined her body slightly as she sped toward the small patch of blue reflective water below. Less than a second later her three-story jump was broken by 39 inches of bubbling Jacuzzi water. She landed in a crouch, breaking the fall as much with the flexibility of her knees as with the water’s bubbly buoyancy.

A hand gripped her arm and pulled her toward the steps. She looked up, expecting Speers, but was instead eye-to-eye with a frightened
spa-goer in soggy swim trunks. She smelled vodka on him, and was immediately aware of three other spooked residents with cocktails in their hands.

Now
Speers hobbled toward her. His suit was dripping wet and he was holding the pack.

“Are you guys okay?” someo
ne asked as Ellis found dry land.

A ferocious blast ripped the wall away th
ree stories up. Ellis acted before she thought, shoving the spa-goers out of the way just before the water was deluged with scorched wood, glass and insulation. 

Speers
was suddenly over her, pulling Ellis up from the cement walkway. Her forearms were scraped up and bleeding, but she barely felt them. 

“
Get out of here,” Speers shouted at the residents as they scattered. “Call the police!”

The intelligence chief
was hobbling now. Ellis grabbed the pack containing Drucker’s work and steadied Speers as they made their way toward the parking lot. Now she knew these bastards wanted Drucker’s book. She was willing to do just about anything to deprive them of it.

Speers opened the doors of his SUV and slid behind the wheel. “You are about to witness some serious psycho driving.”

He
pulled into the late-night traffic, then stepped on the gas and powered past several dozen cars. He took an abrupt right turn, then navigated down an alleyway and through to the next street, where he came dangerously close to mowing down some pedestrians while merging into more traffic. It was some pretty fancy driving for a government exec.

“I
didn’t expect you to jump out that window,” Ellis said.

“What was I supposed to do, die there?”

He winced as he stepped on the brake. His ankle was badly twisted, if not broken.

“You need a doctor
.”

He nodded. “
Later. First we need to get you somewhere safe.”

Ellis
tensed at the thought of being cooped up. At least she had Drucker’s manuscript and notes to keep her busy. She couldn’t remember the last time she had read a book, but this was different. They’d have to kill her to keep her from reading this one. Lord knew they were trying.

Mayflower Hotel

Washington D.C.

Ellis had often fantasized about staying in the historic Mayflower Hotel, but
her fantasies had not been anything like this. Blackout shades had been applied to all the windows, and a security detail outside the 9
th
-floor room kept them confined. Overnight, Speers had grown increasingly concerned about the possibility that it had been Ellis, not Drucker, who had been the target of the attacks at the hotel bar and the condo. Ellis thought that theory was nonsense. Trouble just had a way of finding her.

At least the four-star
accommodations were spacious, and the room came at no extra cost. The vacant suite was booked year-round for visiting dignitaries, and it was equipped with an exceptional workspace. Speers had felt it was best to keep Ellis’ work away from the prying eyes at McLean.

Ellis’ sister, Jenna, was curled up in an armchair, wearing a hotel robe and audio headphones that were as large as tennis balls. For Jenna, Speers’ decision to move the Ellis sisters to a secured location was a
bona fide
staycation. If she had been spooked by the security in the hallway, or by the fact that her sister wasn’t allowed to disclose the security threat that had forced them to come to the hotel, she wasn’t letting on. After a grueling shift taking complex coffee orders at Starbucks, Jenna had already ordered room service twice and used the suite’s Jacuzzi tub. This was as good as it got.

Ellis was significantly less content.
Although she had hours of work ahead of her thanks to their raid on Drucker’s apartment, and her body was sore from their near-death escape, she was no less antsy for freedom. Understanding that Speers had placed her here for her own protection didn’t help. Every part of her body was screaming to get back on the trail.

Unable to relax long enough to concentrate, she surrendered to the hotel mini-bar. She found tiny containers of Jack Daniels and two brands of rum that she had never heard of.

“Whoa,” Jenna said as she watched her sister doing shots with the tiny bottles. She popped the enormous headphones away from her skull just enough to hear the sound of her own voice. “Can we order some room service?”

“Sure, Sis.”

Jenna wasted no time in popping open the menu. “Can
we order prime rib?”

The government per
diem for employee meals while traveling was $71 per day in D.C. The prime rib was going to take half their food budget in one fell swoop.

“Please?” Jenna pressed.

She was too tired to negotiate. And besides, it wasn’t every day she escaped death twice. “What the hell.”

As Jenna dialed room service,
Haley sat cross-legged on one of the beds. She emptied the contents of the backpack they had removed from Drucker’s apartment and spread the manuscript, photographs and handwritten notes out before her.

Now she saw something that she hadn’t seen in Drucker’s condo: the
infamous issue of Inside Washington magazine. The page was turned down to the article. A bold headline, ‘The Country Club Cult That Runs Washington,’ appeared across the top. Someone had drawn a red circle around the title and written SENSATIONALIST CRAP!!!  The handwriting matched Drucker’s scarcely legible scrawl.

She really hadn’t bought Drucker’s claim that it had been published without his consent, but now she saw he was probably telling the truth
. Why else would he have been so critical of his own writing?

She flipped through the handwritten legal pads. Some were filled with quotes supposedly attributed to Sebastian Wolf.
She was surprised to see pages and pages of scripture. What was it Drucker had said?
Wolf believes that religion gets in the way of following Jesus.
For a guy who disapproved of religion, Wolf sure liked to quote the Bible.

Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit -
Matthew 28:19

But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit
has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.” -
Acts 1:8 ESV

And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. -
Ezekiel 36:26, LS XXIV

And in turn, you will return my heart from stone to flesh, so that all men may share in the wisdom of the LORD. And the whole world shall rejoice.
-
LS XXXI

Ellis recognized some of the scriptures from her studies at Our Lady of Lourdes,
the Catholic school she had attended during junior high and high school, as well as her adult Bible study classes. Others weren’t familiar. The capitalized abbreviations at the ends of each passage typically referred to Bible versions. KJV stood for King James Version, ESV was English Standard Version, and so forth. She had never heard of LS.  She could only guess that it referred to the Living Scriptures that Drucker had spoken of.

There were pages and pages of
such odd scripture, many of which appeared to have been altered significantly from the versions she was familiar with. There was a strong emphasis on resurrection throughout all the passages, as well as many that seemed to validate the pursuit of science as a God-given directive.

Soon she came upon what looked like a series of hand-drawn org charts. Most were half-completed, a mixture of names and question marks. There were dozens of names, representing every ethnicity imaginable.

Written at the top of the chart on the first page was, S WOLF (SHEPHERD). Sebastian Wolf, she assumed, although the term “Shepherd” meant nothing to her. The level immediately below it had two spaces, both filled with question marks. The third and fourth tiers contained some names she recognized, among them N. GISH, and on the same level, R. PRESTON, among others.

She felt a rush of excitement. This was
what she was looking for. A membership list. The fact that there were so many question marks, and no full names or titles, was unfortunate. But she had a written document that appeared to validate the victims’ induction into a secret society. Now maybe she could connect the dots.

A knock at the door broke Ellis’ focus. She paused a moment, orienting herself. There were supposed to be two guards outside. The knock came again, more insistent this time.

“Ms. Ellis?”

She got up from the bed and tightened the white robe around her waist.

“What is it?” Jenna said, pulling her headphones off. Her eyes got big as she watched her sister retrieve the handgun from the nightstand next to the bed.

Ellis shushed her sibling, then went to the door and looked through the peephole. It was Jack McClellan, a longtime secret service agent who had been assigned to lead the security team guarding the suite. Ellis figured Speers had put McC
lellan on the job because he was a familiar face, having worked with her to defend the capitol during the Ulysses Coup.

The rumor was that he had taken a bullet meant for George W. Bush that he would never get public cred
it for. Why didn’t he just retire? He had served five administrations.  Surely he’d maxed out his pension by now.

She opened the door and found herself staring at the horrendousness of
Jack’s homemade dye job. He was obviously gray by now, and the jet black smear of thinning hair wasn’t doing anything to conceal it.

“
Major fail,” he scolded. “As we discussed, you need to ask one of our qualifying questions before opening the door. What if someone was behind me, holding me at gunpoint? That might be my only way of signaling to you that there was danger.”

Ellis sighed
irritably. “Okay, Jack. You got me. Are we done?”

He
turned to the side and waved his hand. A hotel staffer approached with a room service cart. “I think maybe I should have a bite of that prime rib,” McClellan said as Ellis pulled the cart into the room. “Might be poisoned.”

“Nice try.”

As Jenna dug into her dinner, Ellis’ focus returned to Drucker’s list. She was sure now that Gish and Preston had known each other through the Fellowship World Initiative. Now she had to try to identify some other names on the list.

Throughout the chart, a
Y-axis indicated numbers by each level on the org chart.
The Fellowship is a hierarchical society. You have to level up over time. Near the top, you’ve got world leaders, notable scientists.
Wolf’s name had no numerical attribution, which appeared to place him as the big kahuna. The second level – where there were only question marks – was the number 21. The number 20 was written beside Gish, Preston and a few other names she didn’t recognize. On the subsequent pages were a list of 19s and a few 18s and 17s.

The amount of diversity among the listed surnames was
worrisome. While Ellis guessed that there were plenty of ethnic minorities in the House and Senate these days, as well as in British Parliament, there couldn’t be this much diversity. That meant this list contained people from all over the world. The Fellowship World Initiative appeared to be truly global. Could all these people be world leaders? And if so, did that mean they were all in danger?

The thought of the crisis spreading to additional
nations was frightening. She had to talk to Carver.

She went to her bag, looking for her satphone, and remembered she
no longer had one. Speers had confiscated it, fearing that it had been compromised. Carver’s satphone number, as well as Arunus Roth’s, had been programmed into it. She went to the desk, powered up her computer, and logged into the secure mission cloud. She posted a private message:
call me.

She got up and paced, then flattened herself into the carpet and bent her legs into a pigeon
pose, pondering next steps. Without first names, titles and associated nationalities, identifying these people would be hard. Ellis kicked herself for not keeping up more with international political and scientific news. Maybe then she would recognize some of these people.

She flipped to a back page and found a whole new slew of Level 20 names. One stood out among them: V.
BORST.

Something shifted within Ellis.
Vera Borst? Mother of Mary?

She did a web search for the name.
It was evidently quite rare – there were virtually no other exact matches. United Nations Under-Secretary-General Borst. Like Carver said, a big shot.

Ellis quickly navigated to the woman’s Wikipedia page, where
Borst’s headshot was pictured above an image of the United Nations flag. She realized she had never really considered the flag’s design before. It had a blue background, with white laurel wreaths framing what could only be described as a bleached map of all the world’s continents as seen through a rifle scope.

Borst
’s face was soft and round under a Peter Pan haircut that made her head appear to be remarkably orb-like. The 49-year-old UN leader hadn’t worn any makeup, even in what was obviously a posed photograph. One of those ultra-organic types, Ellis thought.

According
to her Wiki page, Borst had been born in Amsterdam and earned a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering before abruptly leaving science for politics. She had been elected to the Netherlands’ lower house during her first try, and had served in the country’s diplomatic corps for a decade before being appointed UNICEF director. She had subsequently been appointed an under-secretary-general of the United Nations.

If Drucker’s claims were any measure,
Borst’s background in both science and politics made her a lock for Wolf’s inner circle.

Ellis scrolled
lower on the page, reading the text under “Personal Life”:

Borst is a frequent lecturer worldwide, discussing the need for enhanced global cooperation on the use of embryo stem-cell research to detect and prevent disease. She lives near Seattle, Washington with her life partner, Dr. Dane Mitchell, a professor of biology at the University of Washington.

“Feeling better, Sis?” Jenna said, spotting the triumphant look on Ellis’ face.

“Thank you Jack Daniels, thank you Coke.”

And thank you Drucker, she thought. May you rest in peace.

Dane
Mitchell’s number wasn’t publicly listed. But she knew that the State Department kept contact information for UN leaders.

She
used the hotel phone to dial a friend at State, allowing her typically suppressed southern accent to surface just long enough to charm the desperately single guy into looking up Borst’s personal phone number. In exchange, she promised to go out on a date with him. It wouldn’t be all that bad, she thought. He was kind of cute. 

She
hung up and dialed Borst’s number. After four rings, a woman answered the phone. “This is Vera.”