The Fellowship

by William Tyree

  Carver liked Fordham, who was a rare holdover from the previous administration. Last year Fordham had helped put an end to the Ulysses Coup. Sixteen FBI agents sacrificed their lives that week – a huge loss by any measure, especially considering that, until that day in August, only 26 agents had been killed in the agency’s entire history.

  After assuming the presidency, Eva Hudson had set about cleaning house from top to bottom. No one was safe. Of the 17 agency heads making up the intelligence community, only Fordham had been retained. He had proven himself to be an ally.

  As they entered, Fordham greeted Julian and reached out to Carver with a latex-gloved hand. The presence of latex suggested a crime scene. And yet there was no police tape, no guys in FBI jackets swarming the yard.

  “If you two will suit up, please,” one of Fordham’s men told them. He pointed to a box of aqua latex gloves and shoe prophylactics, which the two men quickly put on. As Fordham led them through the home, Carver heard the sound of a woman in hysterics. He poked his head into the living room, seeking the source of the commotion. He didn’t spot the crier, but the calfskin rugs and original Eames lounge chairs told him that the occupants were people of means with western taste.

  “Who knows about this?” Speers asked.

  “As of now,” Fordham said, “There are only seven people in the circle of trust, including you two and the POTUS.”

  The president? Whatever was going on here, it was huge. Either someone high-profile is dead in this house, Carver thought, or they’ve found a nuke in the basement.

  Carver lingered in the doorway of a small study, where he found the source of the noise. A woman, mid-20s, sporting a blonde boy-cut and a sharp but conservative red dress. Her black flats danced on the floor as the rest of her convulsed in manic weeping. A plainclothes special agent with her back to the door was trying to calm the woman down and conduct an interview. Carver’s eyes scanned the gray pantsuit that revealed a runner’s haunches and slender, smallish shoulders. He knew those gams.

  “Haley?”

  Haley Ellis turned. The skin of her angular face was tanned and framed by wispy, shoulder-length hair. It was her, all right. The last time Carver had seen her, she had been a senior liaison for Pentagon-White House Affairs.

  “Forgot you two knew each other,” Speers said.

  Carver hadn’t seen Ellis in 13 months. And that had been on purpose.

  “This way,” Fordham urged, motioning for Carver to come to the end of the hallway. He held an old rectangular-shaped flashlight that looked large enough to light up FedExField.

  “Who’s that gal Haley’s talking to?” Carver said.

  “Mary Borst. She’s the executive assistant to Senator Preston.”

  Carver got tense just thinking about what her days must be like. The executive assistant for anyone on the Hill was never paid enough in relation to the stress they endured. They had to manage huge egos, scheduling and even menial tasks for the Senator, like picking up dry-cleaning and babysitting.

  They came to the basement staircase. “No lights down there,” Fordham commented as he switched on his flashlight, which was less powerful than it looked, and led them down 15 steps.

  The subject of interest was in the middle of the basement, which was unfurnished except for a row of tools and a wooden workbench along the far wall. A body clothed in a dark suit was crumpled in a fetal position, surrounded by a great deal of blood. The victim’s red-stained shirt was unbuttoned, revealing several dozen small slashes across the stomach and chest.

  “Who’s the…” Carver didn’t need to finish his sentence, as he quickly recognized the dead man’s face as that of Senator Rand Preston.

  This was huge. Preston was a third-term Republican from Texas. Over the past year or so, pundits had been touting him as a possible contender for the GOP nomination.

  The furnishings upstairs made sense now. Preston was from a Texas oil family, and he was often seen wearing pricey cowboy hats and boots.

  While some members of congress were forced to share apartments while congress was in session, many of those with means kept second homes in Washington D.C., while their families continued to reside in their home states. The location was perfect. They were just a few blocks’ walking distance not only to Congress, but also to the Senate offices and Union Station.

  Carver heard a scream from upstairs, which was followed by another bout of intense weeping. “What time did she find her boss down here?”

  “She didn’t,” Fordham said, pointing to a solidly built man in a gray suit. “This is Hank Bowers. Section Chief with us for 15 years now. He and the senator were in the same fraternity at UT Austin. He was first on the scene.”

  Carver noted the silver TKE ring on the man’s left hand. “You guys were still tight, huh?”

  “Not so much. We see each other maybe a couple times a year these days. But Rand called me last night, said he wanted to get together. Something had him spooked. Wanted some advice on how to hire personal security.”

  “And he couldn’t get Secret Service protection?”

  “Didn’t qualify,” Bowers said. “As a senator, the only way to get protection is if you’re the majority or minority leader, or if you run for president, and even for that, it has to be within 120 days of the general election.”

  “What was he scared of?”

  “He didn’t give any specifics.”

  “What else did he say?”

  “Nada. We were supposed to meet up for coffee this morning. When he didn’t show, I came here. Front door was wide open.”

  “We got lucky,” Fordham said. “If Mary had found him first, this place would be crawling with reporters right now.”

  “Who called her?”

  "Said the senator was a no-show for another meeting, and she got worried. Arrived just a few minutes before you two.”

  “I don’t think he was down here long,” Carver observed as he crouched alongside the body. Judging by the stains all over the workbench and covered pieces of furniture – not to mention several traps deployed along the far wall – the house had a major rat infestation. Yet there were only a handful of rodent bites on the senator’s face and hands. “Not more than three or four hours. Much longer and the rats would’ve given him a full facelift.”

  “Are you in forensics?” Bowers said.

  Carver shook his head. “I just watch a lot of TV. You guys find a murder weapon?”

  “No,” Fordham said. “We found his phone and his computer over there.” He shone his light into the corner, where Carver saw the notebook computer wedged in a vise on a workbench. “The SIM card is missing from the phone and the computer’s been gutted. My guess is they took the hard drive. Maybe we can pull some prints off the hardware.”

  Returning his attention to the body, it appeared to Carver that the senator’s jugular had been slit with an extremely sharp blade. There was a great deal of congealed blood directly in front of the neck, but the incision was fine. Nothing to suggest the sort of tearing you might get with a domestic weapon of convenience, like a steak knife. They were going to need to get a blood spatter expert out there. He didn’t want to be the one to tell Fordham how to do his job, but he couldn’t fathom why there wasn’t already a forensics team on site.

  Suddenly Carver rose and looked around the room. “Hey, you guys find any ropes around the place?” Fordham shook his head. Carver crouched down again and used a gloved finger to expose the senator’s right wrist. “See this?”

  He pointed to an inch-long laceration cutting through the skin and muscle, down to the bone. The flesh around the left wrist was identically damaged. Speers stepped back and held his palm over his mouth. He hadn’t been exposed to many dead bodies in his life.

  “What could cause that?” Fordham said. “Handcuffs?”

  “Doubtful. Look at the color of the skin on the back of his hands. He was bound with something thick and rough to the touch. I think Senator Rand was suspended in the air, somehow.�
�� He got to his feet and pointed at the ceiling. “Shine your light up there.”

  Fordham pointed his light overhead. The basement ceiling was about 14 feet high, with several exposed cross beams and pipes. “You should check out those beams,” Carver said. “Look for rope fiber.”

  “What, you think he was hanged before his throat was cut?”

  “Hanged, yes. But not by the neck. Check out his shoulders.”

  Fordham returned the spotlight to the body. “I don’t see anything.” Carver put his hand on Speers’ shoulder and guided him to a more advantageous position. “Oh.” The FBI director said. “Oh yeah, they don’t look right.”

  “I’d bet his arms are popped out of his shoulder sockets.”

  Speers scratched his salt-and-pepper Van Dyke goatee. “Sweet Jesus. You’re right.”

  “Don’t take my word for it. Where is forensics?”

  “Like I said, the president wanted you to see this first.”

  It was an odd request, but he appreciated the vote of confidence. Late last year, the president had offered Carver a role as a national security advisor. He had turned her down flat, insisting that he didn’t belong behind a desk. Not long after that, he found himself behind one anyhow, although the desk he was assigned was far less prestigious than the one he’d been offered in the first place. During Carver’s more paranoid moments, he wondered if the president still resented him for it. If he’d taken the job, would he still have the House Committee on Domestic Intelligence breathing down his neck?

  “The way I see this,” Carver continued, “the senator’s wrists were probably tied behind his back. The same rope was used to hoist him up in the air. Judging by the damage to his wrists, a weight might have been attached to his feet. Then, at the right moment, they dropped him halfway, dislocating the extremities.”

  Fordham’s face wrinkled in disgust. “That’s medieval.”

  “Quite literally,” Carver nodded. “It’s called rope torture, or if you prefer, the strappado. It was a favorite interrogation technique used by certain European organizations over the centuries. That’s not to say it’s gone completely out of style. A few people in our own military were said to have revived it at Abu Ghraib in the early 2000s. I believe they called it a Palestinian Hanging. Their words, not mine.”

  “Could one person have done this?”

  “Maybe with a hand winch or a pulley. But the senator’s a big guy. It would normally be a two-person job.”

  Then he noticed something red edging out of the senator’s mouth. He had seen it earlier and mistaken it for his tongue. Now he bent down, grabbed it with the tips of his gloved fingers, and pulled it out slowly. It was an octagon-shaped piece of fabric. Black, with two red stripes. On one side, a phrase was written in elaborate calligraphy: Paratus enim dolor et cruciatus, in Dei nomine.

  He recognized the phrase. The Latin could be roughly translated as ‘Prepared for pain and torment, in God’s name.’ He didn’t translate it aloud, or discuss where he recognized it. He had seen too many investigations go down the wrong path based on the misinterpretation of symbolism.

  But he also recognized the shape and color patterns. It was an old calling card of sorts. The people who had done this had gone to great lengths to mimic a methodology that the world had not seen in over 300 years.

  “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.

  Six 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 veh
icle 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 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.