The Fellowship (22 page)

“
Wait, that’s really her calling? Right now?” The doc put up his hands in surrender. “Okay, okay. Talking is going to be tough, though. His lips are burned off.”

Speers
answered the phone as Fordham ushered the doctor out of earshot. “Madam President.”

“It’s been four hours since I had a progress report,” she said. “That’s too long relative to the heat I’m feeling.
”

“I’m sorry, Madam President.”

“The prime minister is having second thoughts about keeping this under wraps. I need some good news.”

Speers understood.
The longer this crisis went unresolved, the more likely that it would become an international scandal.

“
We identified two suspects,” Speers said. “One deceased. The other one’s in bad shape.”

He heard the tension in Eva’s voice ease a bit.
“That’s encouraging. So what’s the bad news?”

Speers
told her about Vera Borst and Dane Mitchell.

There was a long silence before the
president spoke again. “So let me get this straight. Three international leaders, representing three separate bodies of government, have been brutally tortured and killed, thousands of miles apart from each other.”

“Plus the
professor,” Speers reminded her. “I understand Dr. Mitchell was a rising name in the bioengineering world.”

He did not tell her the
truly terrible news. Captain Zack had called 911, and the local police and paramedics had been on the scene within minutes. The FBI had, of course, asked the first responders to keep the story out of the press, but with this kind of a horror show, these embargoes never lasted long on the local level. There was little they could do short of sequestering everyone involved. Sooner or later, details about the heinous crime were going to hit the press. He would be worried enough about that part for both of them.

*

No one – not even his brothers in Venice – would have recognized Brother Roberto Melfi. Bandages covered his entire fa
ce. Two small holes had been carved into the bandages. One, over his nostrils, enabled him to breathe. The other permitted him to see out of his remaining eye.

The monk
could only stare up helplessly as a man positioned himself over the eyehole, looking down as if peering into a deep, dark well. He heard the man take the Lord’s name in vain. Melfi forgave him for that. Anyone would have been horrified by his appearance.

“
Hello,” he said. “My name is Julian Speers. Blink twice if you understand English.”

Melfi knew
English all too well. He also knew that he would not be alive much longer. Even now, his pain had receded, and he felt a certain lightness of being, as if his spirit was separating itself from his flesh. The Lord would take him soon. He felt obligated to use his final moments meaningfully. If only he knew how.

“You are under
arrest for the murders of Dane Mitchell and Vera Borst,” Speers said. “Understand?”

He blinked twice.

“Good. Can you tell us anything about the death of Rand Preston?”

Melfi blinked only once.

Speers’ face was suddenly tense. He did not believe him. “Are you telling me that you did not visit the home of Rand Preston in Washington D.C.? Blink twice if you were there.”

Melfi blinked only once.

Speers disappeared from view. Melfi heard him swearing again. He was chatting with someone. Yes, there was someone else in the room. They talked for a moment before Speers appeared again in his tunnel-like field of vision.

“I’ll be honest with you.
You killed a Swedish citizen on American soil. The Swedes are going to want you. You know what their prisons are like? It’ll be like being in a hotel. If you tell me what I need to know about the senator, I’ll consider releasing you into their custody.”

Brother Melfi
was not motivated by promises of light punishment. He would soon get his reward in heaven. Nevertheless, he blinked twice to show that he understood. Then he focused all his energy on his right hand. With considerable effort, he managed to lift it. He curled his fingers together and moved them slowly up and down, as if he were writing.

Speers said something to the other man in the room. He disappeared from view. Melfi felt someone open his hand and place a pen between his fingers. Then he saw a note pad appear overhead. Speers must have been holding it. It seemed impossibly far away, but with the other man’s help, his writing hand was lifted toward it until the inky tip was pressed against the pad.

He jotted a quick note.

You must
stop them.

Speers flipped the notepad over and read it.
His face broke into an icy grin. “Stop them? You did a pretty good job of that yourself. Those people are dead.”

Melfi pressed the pen to the paper again.

The others. The world is in danger.

He felt his arm fall to his side. He heard the pen clatter on the linoleum floor.  His right eye closed and he felt himself drift.
He began to feel inner warmth. Someone lifted up his arm again, placed the pen within his grasp, and guided the hand toward the notepad. He opened his eyes.

“Tell me how,” Speers commanded. “Concentrate. How is the world in danger?”

He wrote again.

False prophets.
A global war. Without state. Without end.

He rested his arm for a moment as Speers digested this. His body was depleted. He could scarcely focus. How could he make them understand, when the words did not come to him?

“Why did you kill Vera Borst?” Speers pushed.

Melfi
felt a burst of energy. A burst of inspiration. His hand shot back to the paper and he began writing:

They said, “Come, let us build a tower whose top will reach into heaven, and let us make for ourselves a name.” The Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of men had built. The Lord said, Behold, they are one people, and they all have the same language. And this is what they began to do, and now nothing which they try to do will be impossible for them. So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of the whole earth, and they stopped building the city.

His arm once again fell to his side. The pen once again clattered on the floor. But now Melfi could see Speers with both eyes. How was this possible? He had heard the surgeon say that his right eye had been burned, and he was certain that it was covered with bandages.

He saw Speers flip the pad and devour its contents.
“Damn. I think he’s just writing random scripture.”

Th
e machine next to the bed emitted a loud noise. Suddenly Speers was over him. “Hello? Hey! Chad, Get that doctor in here!”

Rome

Carver struggled to keep his emotions in check as he viewed the grisly Seattle crime scene photos. There was a lot of blood. No doubt that some of it belonged to Ellis. What had she been doing there? It was just like her, getting on a plane without telling anyone.

He took a deep breath, flooding his body with fresh oxygen. The truth was that he blamed himself. Maybe if he hadn’t jetted off to South Africa to get Nico, leaving her to fend for herself in London. Maybe if he hadn’t been so vocal about the fact that the team was so thin.

He refocused on the images. Speers had annotated the snap of Vera Borst strung up with her hands tied behind her back: “You were right about the method.”

He felt no pride in knowing that he had been able to deduce the
killers’ technique upon observing Senator Preston’s body. What good had it done? It hadn’t stopped the murders from happening again. No one had been saved. It only told him that the killers were an unusually disciplined and cruel organization. What remained to be seen was whether they used torture to punish their victims, or whether they were actually extracting information.

This thing was spreading like the flu. D.C., London, Rome and now Seattle.
Four time zones.
Four
! How many assassins could there be? He understood Speers’ desire to keep the team size small for security reasons, but it was a gamble that was already blowing up in their faces. They needed more people on this.

And to that end, how many more
victims were targeted? Five? A hundred? And from what countries? The presence of a United Nations leader from the Netherlands among the casualty list only further clouded things.

Nico was in the other room expanding his search. He was now focused on data-matching
Borst’s purchase and travel histories with those of Preston and Gish. He hoped Arunus Roth was looking into Mary Borst’s background, because they had their hands full here.

Carver opened a bottle of
Pellegrino, settled onto the suite’s leather sofa and opened the document Speers had uploaded. He had scrawled, in all caps, a directive on the first page:

DIGEST THOROUGHLY – DO NOT SKIM!!!

Did Speers really expect him to read this entire thing? The document Nathan Drucker had made his life’s work was an unwieldy collection of typed and handwritten passages that had been worked and reworked countless times. What a mess. There were attributions and qualifications and scrawled illustrations all over the place. There were even sticky notes in Ellis’ handwriting that had been photocopied right onto the page, at times obscuring the original text. Some of the document wasn’t even edited, but rather looked like straight transcriptions from interviews.

Carver
focused on the first page of Drucker’s typewritten document and began to read.

The Memoirs of Sebastian Wolf

a
s told to Mr. Nathan Drucker

I should start by telling you that the man who will try to stop us – all of us, from the very thing humanity has sought for these past two millennia – was once my best friend. I do not say this to be sentimental. I mean only to demonstrate that the harmonic echoes of the spiritual war we are now waging have sounded time and again throughout history, and I am but one conduit through which they are transmitted. Heinz Lang and I share a destiny. Every man has his Judas and Heinz Lang is mine.

By the time you have read
my story, my purpose in this epic will have been completed. This has been foretold. Sadly, Lang’s purpose, which is to preserve the empire of lies that he serves at all costs, and along with it a legacy of deceit, may still be underway. But know that what we have been waiting for shall come to pass, and know, too, that this is precisely what the Great Architect requires from us. Soon we will, all of us, I promise you, receive our heavenly reward.

How shall I tell you how we arrived at this moment in history? There are so
many possible starting points. Shall I describe the first time the stigmata flowed through my hands and feet?

W
ithout context, it could seem like some sort of cheap parlor trick. Or shall I tell you about The Fellowship, and how this great organization was created? Alas, it is possible that at the time this work is shared with the wider world, our senior brothers and sisters in the movement may yet need to remain hidden for several more years (Know that they both walk among you and look upon you from high, waiting for the right moment to reveal themselves to the world).

Each of us experience
s a pivotal moment in time when we are suddenly propelled at high speed toward our destiny. This is not the same as an awakening. It is rather a triggering moment, when we realize painful inconsistencies between our beliefs and reality. It is a moment when we realize that we are being led by God’s will toward Total Awareness.

My moment
occurred in Feldafing, Germany, on November 6, 1942.  I was fifteen years old.

This
is my story.

PART II

The Reich School

Feldafing, Germany

November 6, 1942

Cadet Sebastian Wolf woke moments before the merciless clang of the steel triangle echoed throughout the yellow mansion. The cadets had 15 minutes to relieve themselves, dress and assemble outside for morning calisthenics. As he did every morning, Wolf sat up and groped for the box of matches next to the bed. He broke the first match by striking it against the wrong side of the box. He turned the box and sparked the second, touching the ensuing flame to the wick of the gas lantern on the nightstand.

He spat into his palm and swept the moisture over the wild tuft
of white blonde hair at his widow’s peak until it lay flat. As usual, Heinz Lang stirred in the bunk beside him. And as usual, a shoe flew from Lang’s hand, striking the still-sleeping Albert Hoppe in the bunk across the room. Albert was a heavy sleeper.

The boys donned
white exercise shorts, white tank tops and brown lace-up saddle shoes with steel toes. They trickled downstairs like white blood cells into an artery, speaking little as they joined other cadets in the cold morning air. Nearly 200 other cadets exited the other mansions, which, they had been told, had been owned by Jewish bankers who had decided to emigrate in the 1930s.

The grass was tipped with the first frost of the season
, glowing faintly in the purple pre-dawn light. Although it was still too dark to see clearly, they formed remarkably symmetrical callisthenic lines. The previous months and years of drilling had instilled a sense of automated navigation in the boys. They moved as a single organism, powerful in their unity.

Obersturmführer
Beck– a veteran of the first war with France whose fingers were calloused and bent, like tree roots –led more than 200 students in jumping jacks, pushups, sit-ups and various stretching exercises. Beck’s voice exuded unforgiving authority, and yet somehow, managed to be encouraging rather than punishing. A full year after his arrival at the Reich School, the boys were fully synchronized, bending, stretching and pushing in perfect harmony.

As the purple
morning light faded to bluish yellow, Wolf noticed that the bleachers, which were typically free of spectators, were full. Two men sat front row center, surrounded by a large number of aides. Soon whispers began, blowing softly across the field from one column of students to the next.

“
Vogel,” Lang whispered just after he had heard it from another boy. A visit from Otto Vogel, Hitler’s private secretary, was not so unusual. The Reich School was the most prestigious of all Germany’s political leadership institutions, and it was only natural that Hitler, through Vogel, wanted regular progress reports on his country’s future leaders. But Vogel had another reason for coming to the school so often.  His son, Adolf Otto Vogel Jr. – named after his godfather, Adolf Hitler – was enrolled in one of the lower grades. The concept of royalty was anathema to National Socialism, but there was no denying that the Vogel boy, by virtue of his relationship to the
führer
, was regarded as a prince.

Wolf imagined the solid-looking
Vogel, a man with a square jaw and no neck to speak of. The red lapels of his uniform – adorned with the party eagle surrounded by gold laurels – marked him as one of the party elite.

As the boys launched into jumping jack
s, Lang whispered, “Himmler!”

T
his was truly a name worthy of gossip. Heinrich Himmler was head of the
Schutzstaffel
, or the SS. Following the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich months earlier, Himmler had firmly established himself as the second-most powerful man in Germany. The very name prompted Wolf to step up his workout. Himmler was a man to be feared.

*

After
calisthenics, the boys were split into their units and marched toward the lake. They marched everywhere, and always in neat columns. Despite the frigid water, Wolf looked forward to these morning swims. Upon his first visit to the Reich School, he had been stunned to see the picturesque community of yellow mansions situated on the verdant shore of Lake Starnberg. Although it was an easy train trip from his hometown, Munich, the campus felt refreshingly isolated from the political tension he had grown up with in the city. As far back as he could remember Munich had been a place of endless party rallies, political speeches, military parades and ethnic violence.

Now
the lakefront glistened orange as the sun rose over the surrounding hills. Wolf removed his clothes and leapt over a half-meter patch of semi-solid ice around the lake’s perimeter. None of the boys complained about the temperature as they swam the four laps between the shore and Rose Island. That was typical of the Reich School attitude. But with the high command watching, there were no pranks today. No boy dunked any other boy, and no boy pretended to be taken under by the ghost of Ludwig II, the Bavarian King who had drowned in the lake in 1886.

A breeze had picked up b
y the time Wolf and Lang returned to shore and began dressing. As usual, Albert was still swimming his last lap. Albert was a slow swimmer, and Beck usually waited for him before moving the unit to their next activity. Not today. As Beck began marching the shivering unit across a wheat field that the cadets had harvested themselves in July, Albert was alone in the water.

Wolf looked over his shoulder as they rounded the first hilltop.
There was still no sign of Albert.

“He better
catch up,” Lang muttered. “Himmler will bring the dogs.”

Stories of Himmler’s cruelty were
legendary. One tale had him picking out a straggler from a line of boys and, after giving the student a 20-second head start toward a grove of trees, setting a pack of vicious dogs on his trail.

“
Nonsense. Maybe at the NAPOLA schools. But not here. They have invested too much in us.”

It was true that the Reich School had the highest admissions standards of all schools in Germany. Exemplary achievement in either athletics or academics was mandatory.
Another hurdle was racial qualification. A person born in Eastern Europe was not eligible for enrollment at the Reich School. Neither was a person whose family had been in Germany for less than 140 years. The bloodline, it was thought, needed at least that much time to be purified of other races. In addition, students were eligible for admittance only if they could prove that their family had been of pure German descent since the year 1800.

Wolf’s mother, Gertrude, had hired a certified genealogist to create an extensive
family tree showing that the family had been of Germanic descent since at least the 1500s. And even with all the right paperwork in place, doctors from the SS came to the family apartment in Munich to measure Wolf’s cranium. It was believed that the skull should be of a certain size as proof of intellectual aptitude and, of course, there were certain undesirable curvatures that were supposedly telltale signs of an ethnic minority. To Wolf, these requirements had seemed more ludicrous than sinister. After placing a set of very cold calipers against Wolf’s head, the doctor declared, “Your skull is not overly round.” Within two months, he had received his admission letter.

*

The unit
did not catch sight of Himmler and Vogel until they neared a barn in a neighboring field. There was still no sign of Albert. Wolf offered a stiff-arm salute as he passed wordlessly, feeling the inspecting eyes of the German high command upon him.

Moments later, Wolf spotted the longcoats. They were standing at the end of a barn
with stone siding and a gambrel roof. They were setting up a movie camera.

A movie camera
could mean only one thing. They were going to jump today.

Trust jumps. That is what
Beck called them. In Wolf’s two years at the Reich School, he had leapt from a guard tower, several school and government buildings and, once, a gorge in the Austrian Alps. Trust jumps were always unannounced and, more often than not, they were also filmed. The footage of boy after boy leaping from great heights made terrific propaganda footage. It was nothing less than proof that the country’s next generation of leaders had already coalesced into a formidable, unified socialist machine. Germany’s future was bright indeed.

What
awaited the boys on the ground was always a mystery. Sometimes they landed on a sort of trampoline held by older boys. At other times, a safety net had been tied in place ahead of time. In the Alps they had landed in a deep river. There was no choice but to have faith in Beck’s preparation. That, of course, had been the point. To follow orders without hesitation.

But Wolf had no faith in Beck’s oversight of this activity. His
stomach filled with dread with each new ascent. His mind exploded with questions. When had Beck prepared the landing? Had he scouted the landing himself, or had he delegated the task to a junior instructor? What if the conditions had changed in the hours since the landing had been prepared? Could a trampoline tie not break? Could a tree or an animal or a boulder not fall into their path? 

Now they were led inside a barn cavernous enough to hold at least 100 cattle. Beck instructed them to climb a wooden ladder to the
hayloft, and then to ascend to the rooftop. Wolf measured his pacing as they made their way toward the rickety wooden ladder. He slackened his pace deliberately, falling back in line.

Don’t be the first, he told himself. Be second, or tenth.
Anything but first. To see a boy jump before him and land safely was marvelous for Wolf’s courage.

By the time he reached the ladder, he was third in line. He climbed behind two other boys into a
spacious loft that slanted sharply to accommodate snow drainage. A prominent steeple at the apex allowed for heat ventilation as well as an exit onto the rooftop for occasional repairs.

Looking down, he saw that Albert had finally caught up
. He had no shoes or shirt on, and he looked rattled, wet and out of breath as he stood at the bottom of the ladder.

He
soon found himself in the sunlight, standing near the steeple. He paused to admire the vast expanse of golden farmland. Hundreds of majestic acres bristled in the gentle morning breeze.

S
uddenly he was jostled forward. He found himself at the head of the line. Beck’s voice cut through the morning, urging them to jump. Wolf looked left, down the eastern slope of the roof. He saw Beck, his finger pointed toward the far edge of the roof. Himmler, Vogel and the two longcoats were by his side. All waiting for Wolf to leap.

A flip of
white-blond hair tottered back and forth on his forehead. Goose pimples rose over his legs as the breeze picked up. His peripheral vision was suddenly rimmed with darkness, as if looking through a pair of old binoculars.  He stood on his tiptoes, but he could not see the landing zone.

As each succeeding student exited the steeple, Wolf found himself bumped further down the rooftop.
He felt Lang behind him, hands pressed against the small of his back, pushing him. He heard Lang’s breath in his ear. “Go on, Sebastian! Jump!”

Suddenly
Albert ran past him. Wolf was thrown off balance. He teetered, then felt Lang’s grip on his bicep. He recovered his footing just in time to glimpse Albert’s body disappear over the horizon.

The boys held their collective
breath, waiting for the sound of Albert’s inevitable war cry.  It did not come. Only a crunching thud and a chorus of worried noises erupted from Himmler’s entourage. One of the longcoats rushed to the film camera and switched it off.

Forgetting his fears, Wolf walked to the edge and peered over the side
. Albert was a broken smear of skin and bones and flesh over a parked threshing machine. A large piece of torn netting was pinned between the body and the machine’s cylinder. The truncated ends were tied to nearby trees, flapping like windsocks in the morning breeze.

Now t
here was no sound except that of the wind and the breathing of the other boys and their footsteps as they took turns walking to the edge to see Albert’s body. They had all, of course, seen other dead children. Outbreaks of flu, tuberculosis, whooping cough and smallpox routinely thinned the ranks. But to see a cadet die in this way was truly novel. But Wolf detected no evidence of pity in the other boys. The boys’ overriding emotion seemed to be fascination. Except Lang, of course. He had always been a sensitive boy. Even now, his body convulsed as he tried to suppress his tears.

The sharp report of a pistol broke the silence. Wolf’s eyes snapped
toward the ground in time to see Beck’s breath cloud the chilly air. Then Beck fell face-first onto the field. The trigger man stood over the body. It was Heinrich Himmler.

*

The
unit was relieved of duties until lunchtime. Lang held himself together until he and Wolf returned to their room. The sight of Albert’s bed and footlocker set him off. Wolf stood by idly as Lang came unglued, unsure whether he was more upset by the force of his friend’s emotion, or by the lack of his own.

When Lang finally gathered himself, he said, “
I’ll go first.”