The Fellowship (44 page)

He looked right
. Broken pieces of a stone slab were piled near the empty body bays cut into the wall. Nico suddenly found himself in motion. He picked up a piece of cut stone that had once been a piece of a burial tomb, heaved it over his shoulder, and rushed the goon.

As
Nico swung the slab, his captor turned. Suddenly the bastard looked surprisingly human. Brown eyes. Pimples on the forehead. A look of stunned surprise.

A
s the stone connected with his skull, a mural of blood splattered across the archway. All Nico’s adrenaline seemed to evaporate at once. His ears were ringing. He felt the urge to run, but there was nowhere to go.

*

From his position atop the
first staircase to the crypt, Carver heard both machine pistols go silent. Seven and Prichard had been assaulting the other entrance. He was hoping one of them had breached the room. He had only come into this with two spare clips, and he was already two rounds away from empty.

Now
gunfire resumed. It was coming from his side of the fight, but judging by the sound of the ricochet at the far end of the crypt below, it was aimed in the opposite direction. The shooter had been distracted by something behind him.

He had to make his move now.

Carver ripped a framed portrait of some long-dead archbishop from the wall beside him. It was approximately five feet in length, and three or so feet wide. Judging by the fact that it had been left behind in this gloomy place, he reckoned that it wouldn’t be missed.

He placed
the portrait at a 45-degree angle at the top of the staircase and leapt atop the makeshift sled. The edges of the stone steps had been worn down from centuries of use, making for a surprisingly fast descent toward the basement. He managed to hold his balance for approximately two seconds. Then he brought his legs under him and pushed off the sled from the ball of his right foot, exploding forward. 

His shooting hand, head and shoulders were the first to enter the room. Time seemed to slow down.
His form mimicked the
fleche
technique he had used to win countless fencing bouts over the years
–
pushing off from the ball of the front foot and flying forward unexpectedly in mid-air for a surprise attack. When facing lefties, Carver used the move to slip behind his opponents and score from behind.

Now i
n mid-flight, Carver’s body cleared the threshold, floating not two feet from the assassin. He was a white, balding European who was obviously stunned by Carver’s sudden presence.

Unlike Carver’s
expert swordplay, his midair shot did not find its mark. The round struck the wall over the man’s shoulder. Carver braced his fall by tumbling into a lightweight wooden table. His gun skittered into the shadows.

A
set of long blades fell from the table surface, clanging against the stone floor. The blades were sharp and shiny with precious-looking stones along the handles. Ritual blades, Carver noted. Could these have been the same knives used on the others?

Two
shots hit the wooden table, splintering the thick wood and missing Carver’s face by mere inches. Then Carver heard the chukka-chukka sound of an empty clip being discharged from the assailant’s weapon.

He
grabbed the longest blade of the bunch – about 18 inches – and rose up as the chrome-domed thug reloaded. Wielding the heavy blade, he sprung forward into a flunge –
a combination of the fleche and the traditional lunge – that ended in a chop to the side of the head.

A section of the assailant’s scalp flew overhead.
He dropped his gun and tried to catch the severed flesh in mid-air. He then crawled toward the place where it landed, clutching it for a moment before the heavy loss of blood rendered him unconscious. Carver lingered over him for a moment, wielding the blood-drenched blade in a defensive stance, as the man’s body worked out its final electrical impulses.

“Nico?” he called out.

“I’m all right!” a quivering voice called from the other side of the room.

With Nico safe, Carver refocused on the dead man’s
face. He couldn’t be certain, but the wide flared nostrils, glasses and complexion bore a strong resemblance to the man on the security camera footage they had seen at Legoland.

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. H
is 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.

S
he 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 navigate
d to the mission cloud, which resided at a hellishly convoluted URL that 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 an
d 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 b
alcony 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 mo
vement 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.”