The Fellowship (6 page)

“My God,”
Speers said, making eye contact with Fordham. “It’s just like London.”

The words shook Carver from deep thought.
His eyes darted back and forth between the two Intelligence directors. “What’s just like London?”

Independence Avenue SW

Washington D.C.

How strange life was, Carver thought. Just last night he had been feeling sorry for himself, pining to be back in the field, and dreading this morning’s committee hearing. And now, only hours later, he was neck-deep into something that he couldn’t even comprehend.

He sat in
the third row of Speers’ Highlander as they sped past Museum Row, near the National Air and Space Museum.  The intelligence czar drove with one hand on the wheel and the fingers of his other hand in his black hair. He was pulling at it, as he always did when he was stressed. Chad Fordham rode shotgun. With the SUV’s second row crowded with twin car seats, Carver and Ellis had piled into the third.

Ellis
stared into a compact, touching up her makeup. Carver didn’t blame her. They were headed to the White House for an unscheduled meeting with the President. Only a moron wouldn’t want to make a good impression.

“That piece of fabric that was stuffed in the
senator’s mouth,” Speers said. Carver looked up, meeting his boss’ gaze in the vehicle’s rear view mirror. “You mentioned it had some historical significance. Have you seen something like that before?”

“
Nobody has,” Carver said of the octagon-shaped fabric. “At least not in a few hundred years.”

“But you recognized it.”

He nodded. “From books. In Renaissance Europe, a certain assassination squad carried similar fabric with the same text written on it.”

“
A calling card? Like the Beltway Snipers?”

The Beltway Snipers,
who had shot 13 people in the Washington metro area over a period of weeks in 2002, had left Tarot cards at some of the crime scenes, presumably to taunt police.

“
Sort of. The organization was called the Black Order. They assassinated enemies of the Vatican, and sometimes left pieces of striped cloth in their victims’ mouths.”

Ellis
raised her eyebrows. “Hector always said you were like a walking Wikipedia.”

“
Is that supposed to be a compliment?”

Hector
Rios was Carver’s best friend and had, once upon a time, been Ellis’ boyfriend. After a steamy few months, she had shocked Hector by dumping him to focus on her career.

Carver knew that Hector
still had feelings for her, and he could see why. Ellis was tough, sexy and surprisingly worldly for someone in her late 20s. She had been born into a Catholic military family in Virginia. Thanks to her father’s frequent military transfers, she had scarcely gone to any school for longer than two years. After high school, she had enrolled in a 16-week training course in Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas, that would make her a combat medic. Within days of completing her course, she was deployed to Iraq.

S
ix months into her mission, the lead truck in Ellis’ convoy hit an IED. The bomb was a prelude to a small-arms assault that left three dead. Ellis managed to gun down one of the insurgents before pulling a pair of wounded soldiers from a burning truck, earning her Combat Medical Badge. Not long afterwards, her own vehicle hit a roadside bomb that took her out of the war for good. After a couple of reconstructive hip surgeries, she was offered a desk job in Washington, which she took after some arm-twisting by her sister, Jill. Life after that had been a blur of administrative jobs at the DIA, NIC and the FBI.

Typical Ellis. She never let the grass grow under her feet. 

She and Carver had first met by phone during the fight for Washington, and he had immediately been drawn to the sound of her warm Richmond dialect in his earpiece. Armed with an M4 carbine and a pair of binoculars, Ellis had taken up a position atop the Eisenhower Building, acting as the eyes and ears of the disparate forces fighting to ensure the president’s safety. Like Carver, she had later been awarded the
National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal in a private White House ceremony.

A few weeks after she dumped Hector
, Carver ran into her at the half-marathon up in Baltimore. Ellis had been decked out in blue and white running shorts and socks, quipping that she was “100% made in the USA.” Her tone and body language had been unmistakably flirtatious. He felt sparks when they chatted, and they had run the first few minutes of the race side-by-side. Carver felt an undeniable attraction to her. But he didn’t have many friends in Washington like Hector Rios, who was still licking his wounds. Ellis had tried to contact Carver after the marathon, but he had never responded. He could only hope that she had forgotten about the snub by now.  

Carver felt the vehicle slow as Speers
pulled into a private parking garage near the White House.  The security staff waved him through, and he promptly pulled the oversized vehicle into a parking spot labeled COS, for chief of staff. Speers hadn’t held that title since last year.

“That’s ballsy,” Carver said as they got out of the vehicle.

“
The spot is still mine.”

“
What?” Carver said. “Shut up.”

“I’m serious,”
Speers insisted as they walked across 17
th
Avenue toward the White House. “Eva’s new chief of staff parks a few blocks away. When they offered me the job out in McLean, I told them I needed the spot. I knew I’d be going back and forth between D.C. and McLean constantly.”

“
You’re offered the top intelligence job in the country, and the thing you want to negotiate is parking?”

Speers unwrapped a grape lollipop and
slid it between his cheek and gum. “That’s right,” he said, talking out of the left side of his mouth. “My next move is getting my old office back.”

The
White House

Washington D.C.

Carver hadn’t seen the
president’s private study since before Eva Hudson’s inauguration. During the previous administration, aside from the lavish molding on the walls and ceiling, the room hadn’t looked much different from any home office. Now the small sitting area, phone, desk and printer were all gone, having been replaced with a sleek conference table that seated five and an enormous TV on the wall.

Carver, Ellis, Speers and Fordham sat around the sides of the table, leaving the head of the table for the
president. Carol Lam, the 69-year-old grandmother of eight and the president’s private secretary, walked in with a tray of drinks.

“Mr. Carver,”
Carol said with a huge smile. “It’s been far too long since you’ve visited us.”

Carver stood. “You look amazing.” He meant it.
Carol looked younger now than she had when she’d arrived at the White House seven years earlier. Maybe Eva wasn’t really as high maintenance as Speers had led him to believe.

“There was a rumor last winter that we might be seeing more of you,”
Carol said, an obvious reference to Carver’s turning down the national security advisor role. “I was disappointed.”

Carol
removed a cappuccino from the tray and placed it on the coffee table before Ellis. She set two more in front of Speers and Fordham.

“No thanks,” Carver said when he saw her reaching for a
fourth cup. “I don’t –”

“Drink coffee
. I’m well aware of your aversion to artificial stimulants. The cappuccino is for the president.”

She left the room without offering him
anything. He turned to Speers. “I think she just snubbed me.”

“
It’s about time someone put you in your place,” Speers said.

“What are you saying?”

“That your dietary requirements are obnoxious. Like time we went out to dinner and you wanted the venison, but you asked the waiter to find out where the deer had been raised.”

“There’s nothing wrong with wanting to know w
here my meat came from.”

“
If it’s that important to you, kill your own deer.”

They all
stood as President Hudson entered. The bottle-blonde wore a slimming pantsuit with a matching pearl necklace and earrings. She was sporting a graduated bob cut that looked as if it had been shorn with a straight razor.

“I appreciate you coming in person,” she said as they all sat down. “Chad gave me the basics by phone. I’ll ask you all the same question I asked him. Was this a state-sponsored action?”

Speers shook his head. “No reason to believe that right now.”

“What else do we know?”

Speers
gave her the short version, explaining that it had looked as if the senator had been tortured, that it had probably been the work of two or more people, and that the killers had left a calling card with religious overtones.

The
president rotated the bracelet on her wrist three times in a clockwise motion, as if winding herself up. “This morning I spent the better part of an hour on the phone with the British prime minister."

Carver sat forward.
Based on how locked down the crime scene had been, he had hardly expected the president to discuss Preston’s murder with anyone outside the circle of trust, not to mention the British PM.  “What was his reaction to the news?”

“Actually,
he called with news of his own. There was another octagon-shaped piece of fabric found this morning. This one was in London.”

“London?”

Speers nodded. “Inside the mouth of Nils Gish.”

The name did
n’t register with Ellis. “Who?”

Carver’s fists clenched as he
considered the implications of what he’d just heard. “Sir Nils Gish,” he said just loud enough to be heard. “Member of parliament, leader of the Labour Party and possibly the next British prime minister.”

Ellis made the sign of the cross
– quick touches on the forehead and both shoulders.

The
president leaned back, resting her elbows on the armrests of her chair in a classic power pose. “High ranking members of Congress and Parliament were assassinated on the same night, within approximately three hours of each other.”

“Two
killers,” Carver deduced. “Or two
sets
of killers.” Only a handful of military jets could get from London to D.C. in just three hours, and even that didn’t allow for ground travel, to say nothing of the prep time that went into any professional assassination.

The treatment of the D.C. crime scene made more sense now. FBI chief Fordham had kept the late Senator Rand’s D.C. residence locked down tight. This was much bigger than a lover’s quarrel gone wrong, or the wrath of a vengeful loan shark.

“No group has claimed responsibility,” Speers added. “In both cases, black-and-red striped fabric was left in the victim’s mouth. Someone is clearly sending a message here. Agent Carver felt there might be a connection to some ancient European group.”

“
Not so fast,” Carver objected. “What I said was that a piece of fabric like it was used by a certain assassination squad in Renaissance Europe. Since nobody alive has ever seen one, obviously this is an organization who’s read about it, as I did, and decided to co-opt the symbol for their own purposes.”

The president raised an open hand. “Work out the details on your own time. How are we going to handle this publicly?”

Speers’ jaw tightened. “Whatever the spin, it’s going to be a circus.”

“All the progress we’ve made calming security jitters will vanish. It’s not like these men were simply shot. They were brutally tortured. Forget the fact that we were under no obligation to provide secret service protection to the senator. People will look at this as a huge security failure. And since Preston was a presidential hopeful, the media is only going to fan the flames.”

“
And once people start speculating about whether these assassinations were state-sponsored, there won’t be enough oxygen left in the room for anyone to think straight. It’ll make it that much tougher to catch these monsters.” 

E
very head in the room reluctantly nodded. Carver checked his watch. It had been at least four hours since the senator’s death. The fact that no group had yet claimed responsibility for the murders was highly unusual. It was also deeply disturbing.

Fordham licked his lips before speaking. “W
e may need to practice misdirection as a strategy.”

“
With all due respect,” Ellis said, “What are you going to tell people? That Senator Preston went to live on a big farm in the country?”

“Let me worry about that,”
the president said.

“
If the truth gets out, the scandal would be bigger than the missing WMDs in Iraq. Bigger than Benghazi by a mile.”

“
Just do your job,” the president put forth in a tone that officially sealed the discussion on that topic. She leveled her gaze at Carver and Ellis. “Starting now, this case is your entire world.”

As much as Carver had wanted to get out from behind the desk in
McLean, this wasn’t the way he wanted to do it. After months of boredom, Operation Crossbow had only just started to get interesting, only to be wrenched out of his hands.

“What about support?”
Ellis said.

“I
want as few people knowing the details as possible,” the president cut in. “Julian here, and Chad Fordham, will oversee this operation personally.”

Sp
eers’ protest came immediately, but the president cut him off. “You both have competent deputy directors. Let them run things for a few days. I want your full and undivided attention on this.”

“
This is a mistake,” Carver said. “We should have dozens, if not hundreds, of people on this.” 

“I
think I’ve made myself clear. We can’t afford a leak.”

She had a point.
As the business of keeping secrets went, this was about as big and juicy as they came. “When can I see the London crime scene photos?”

Speers
sucked his teeth, as he always did when he was about to say something disappointing. “You can’t. MI6 won’t chance transmitting anything electronically.”

Carver’s face felt suddenly hot. “We have a pact to share intelligence data that is mutually benef
icial to international security.”

“
Oh, they’re fully willing to cooperate. It’s just that they insist on doing it in person.”

“Wh
at is this, 1985?”

“
The hactivists have them spooked,” the president explained. Earlier that year, a group claiming to be former WikiLeaks members had risen from the organization’s ashes to release sensitive video that MI6 had shared with the CIA. Before either side could deploy its forces to shut the video down, the Allied Jihad had used the material to identify a British double agent within the Iranian government. He had never been heard from again. Similar moves by hacker activists – who believed that governments had no right to withhold even sensitive information from the public – had so terrorized governments across the globe that even diplomats had been transported back to the industrial age, at times refusing to communicate even benign correspondence by email.

“Fine,” Carver
conceded. “I’ll go to London if that’s what you want. But I suggest that Ellis stays here.” He deliberately avoided eye contact with his new partner. “We can’t afford to let the trail in Washington get any colder.”

“Noted,” Speers said, “But denied.
Chad and I will supervise the domestic end of this. You are both to go to London and anywhere else necessary to find out who did this.”

The
president stood up. “Until we know who’s behind this, and why, we are fully exposed.”

Speers glanced at his phone, reading an incoming text message. He looked up,
apparently horrified by what he had read. “Madam President…Senator Preston’s house just went up in flames.”

Before anyone could react,
Fordham also received a text. “It’s Bowers,” he said, gazing into his screen. “He’s all right.”

“
Thank God,” Speers gushed in relief. “And the senator’s assistant?”

Fordham shook his head
grimly. “Doesn’t look good. She was inside.”

Carver felt sick.
It wasn’t just that Mary Borst was likely dead. All forensic evidence had just burned up in the senator’s brownstone.