The Fellowship

by William Tyree

  Bad sign.

  He entered the bedroom. Nico’s bed was made. Neatly. Impeccably. No sign of his computer or the phones they had taken from the dead men in the deconsecrated church. He silently dropped to his knees and checked under the bed. Nothing but dust.

  The blood trail – scant as it was – led to the bathroom, which was also fully lit. As Carver rounded the final corner, he braced himself for what he might find – Nico’s body in the bathtub, or worse. He imagined the struggle. A whack to the head. Gloved hands holding his head below hot water.

  He stepped sideways slowly, silently, until the bathroom was in full view. The shower curtain was pulled back. Save for some black body hair on the side of the tub, it was empty. The bathroom floor was also clear. There was no body. He was alone in the suite.

  Carver let his shooting hand fall to his side. He stepped closer, noting a few more small splotches on the white rug.

  “Not much blood,” he said aloud, taking comfort in the notion. More blood than he would expect from a paper cut, but certainly less than from an execution.

  The fire alarm ceased its ear-shattering clamor as he entered the bathroom. He was suddenly conscious of the sound of his own heart, his own breathing. He inhaled deeply once, then again, to calm his system.

  The vanity was less tidy. Nobody had been killed here, but there was definitely enough dried blood in and around the sink to freak out the maids.

  In the wastebasket, he spotted an emptied package of Band-Aids with a red travel sewing kit, no doubt delivered from room service. The handle and blade of the miniature scissors held bloody fingerprints. A tiny needle, with approximately two feet of attached thread, was coated with organic matter.

  Then he saw it. Situated behind the 10-inch makeup mirror on the corner of the vanity, so that it was magnetized to several times its actual size. It had been placed there on purpose, he realized. So that he wouldn’t miss it.

  A tiny, clear capsule. No larger than a grain of rice. Smooth, except for four tiny extensions jutting out of either end. Like antennae.

  The RFID chip. It looked a lot like the one he had injected into Nico’s arm.

  Carver holstered his gun and called Arunus Roth.

  “I need a bio update on Nico Gold,” Carver said.

  Roth’s tone was curt. “Aren’t you supposed to be at the extraction point?”

  “Just tell me what you see.” All Carver could glean from the mission cloud was the chip’s location. Roth would be able to see Nico’s blood pressure and heart rate.

  He waited a moment for Roth to return to the phone. “Judging by his pulse, I’d say he’s sleeping. What’s going on? Shouldn’t he be with you?”

  Carver laughed, but not joyously. He was at once devastated and perplexed and concerned and hurt and amazed. The crazy little bastard had actually dug the chip out of his arm and sewed it back up.

  How had he managed to deactivate the tentacles? How had he managed to keep up the illusion that it was still in his body? The reading back in McLean was consistent with a still-embedded chip. In a sleeping man, no less.

  “Agent Carver?” Roth brought him back to reality. “Is everything all right?”

  “Fine.”

  “The pilot has left the extraction point. What are you going to do?”

  Then Carver saw the note. It had been taped to the vanity mirror. It was handwritten. There was no salutation, and no signature. Just a few lines scrawled on hotel notepaper:

  This was fun, but I couldn’t chance a trip back to the federal pen. I’m sure you’ll understand. PS – tell yer geeks to fix the java in the admin panel. That’s where I found the vulnerability.

  Carver couldn’t help but smile. Nico had freed himself the only way he knew how. He had hacked his way out of this. He had located a weakness in the mission cloud code, gotten in, and somehow deactivated the chip’s tentacles. And at the same time, he had created a ghost chip signature that fooled them all.

  Maybe that part shouldn’t have surprised him. Nico was the best hacker he had ever seen. But digging it out of his arm? Even though it was tiny, and had been just below the skin, it wasn't exactly a splinter.

  A voice crackled in his ear. “Agent Carver?”

  “Yeah, Roth. I’m still here.”

  “Agent Carver, I’ve got a fix on your location. There’s a helipad on the roof of the hotel. Should I see if the pilot can circle back and pick you guys up?”

  His thoughts turned back to Nico. Carver couldn’t blame him. Even if they could count on Speers’ support, going back to the U.S. still had its risks.

  He had no idea how Nico was planning on getting out of Rome. But he would find a way. That much was for sure. He was nothing if not resourceful. And a head start was the least Carver could give him. He owed him that much.

  But the idea of heading home alone darkened his mood. Days of debriefings awaited him, to say nothing of the domestic intelligence committee. He shuddered at the thought of how pissed the committee chair would be if he knew that Nico had been here in Rome with him.

  Roth was back in his ear. “Agent Carver? The helicopter – ”

  “Cut the pilot loose,” Carver finally replied.

  “What? Seriously?”

  “Tell Julian I’ll be in touch.”

  He hung up and popped the battery out of the phone. Then he entered the living room and sat on the white leather couch. His feet were blistered and his throat was scratchy. No telling how much dust he had inhaled in the tunnels. But he would have to ignore that. He had to stay focused. He had to save his strength.

  If he could get down to the street without being spotted, he would be fine. The city was full of hideouts. Its underground was as porous as Swiss cheese. He could lay low until things cooled down. Then he would go to Geneva. He had a safe deposit box there with a fake passport and a little emergency money. He figured he had earned a little time, and he was going to spend it. Not much. Ten days, maybe. Just enough time to get off the grid and recharge. He went out to the balcony, relishing the thought as he began his descent.

  Epilogue

  Maternity Ward

  Olympia, Washington

  9 Months Later

  Carver stood at the front desk, waiting for the station nurse to get off the phone. He caught sight of himself in the reflection of a glass cabinet. He was in need of a shave. His suit stank of Chinese food, and the shower he had taken this morning hadn’t helped.

  He had been on the road for 17 days straight without a break. All the leads had been weak, but he was in no position to ignore them. They were all he had now. He had rarely seen anyone disappear so completely.

  Somewhere down the hall, some guy was yelling. “Go hard, honey, go hard!” The woman’s rhythmic grunting reminded him of all the female tennis players on TV.

  The station nurse hung up and looked up at him. The weariness in her eyes told him she’d been working a long shift. “I’ll need to see ID first.”

  He handed it to her. She took it and laid it on the photocopy machine, closed the lid and pressed the SCAN button. Her fingernails were two inches long. He hoped she didn’t touch any patients with those claws.

  “Now what can I do for you?” She said as she handed his identification back to him.

  Carver placed both photographs on the counter.

  “Looking for a fugitive,” he said. “The man’s name is Adrian Zhu, but he could be going by another name. He may be with a woman. Her name is Mary Borst. And again, probably using an alias.”

  The station nurse hovered over the two photographs, putting her finger on Mary Borst’s face. “When was she due?”

  “Could be anytime. If the baby was premature, she could have been here weeks ago.”

  The nurse shook her head. “I’ll tell you the same thing as I told the last guy. I haven’t seen them.”

  Carver felt his face flush. “Last guy?”

  “You’re the second person this week to ask about these two. The last guy showed me th
e same pictures, except he said nothing about the one guy being a fugitive. Said some bad people were looking for them. Said they were in danger.”

  And those afraid of the Rule of Light will search the Earth for me. As it was in the time of Herod, it will be again. Many innocents will die.

  Carver swallowed hard. His mind was tap dancing. “I’ll need to report this. What was the guy’s name?”

  “If you don’t know already, maybe you’re not supposed to know.”

  “Was he a fed, like me?”

  She hedged, drumming her nails on the counter. Click-click-click-click-click.

  “Please.” He glanced at her name tag. “Wanda? I have to find the scheduler who made this mistake. You don’t really want two or three more people like me coming in and wasting your time, do you?”

  She shrugged. “I guess it’d be all right.” She went to the file cabinet and opened it. She was back in a minute with a folder full of photocopied identification cards. She flipped through the paper, talking to herself as she tried to remember the exact date.

  “Ah-hah,” she finally said. “Here is your mystery man.”

  She placed the paper flat and turned it so Carver could see. He bent down. The name on the ID was Sean O’Rourke. His badge was FBI.

  Only he wasn’t O’Rourke. He wasn’t FBI. And he was no longer assigned to Operation Crossbow.

  The man in the photo was Father Thomas Callahan.

  †

  AUTHOR’S NOTES

  Now for a bit of historical housekeeping. You might be surprised to learn that a number of the shadowy organizations in this book, and more than a few of the events, are based on reality.

  For example, the Nazi obsession with Christian antiquities and the occult was not something dreamed up for the Indiana Jones movies, nor for the sake of this book. Seven decades have passed since my grandfather, serving with the 70 armored infantry battalion, marched into Germany to end the nightmare of Nazism. And yet one of the lingering mysteries of this dark era in human history is why Himmler, who devoted considerable time to destroying the church despite being raised Catholic, poured so many wartime resources into the pursuit of religious relics.

  Nothing I’ve written in The Fellowship will answer that question, as it is a work of fiction. But during my research, I discovered that the truth about many of the people and objects mentioned in this book are far stranger than anything I could have imagined.

  In the book, Sebastian Wolf is enrolled at the Reich School, which is where the real children of the Nazi super elite such as Martin Bormann Jr., son of Hitler’s private secretary, were groomed for leadership. Incidentally, although Bormann Jr. became a priest and outspoken critic of the Nazi regime until his death in 2013, I want to make clear that none of the characters in the book are actually based on him. For those interested in learning more, I found the documentary series Hitler’s Children to be an excellent source of interviews with former students.

  The organization that Wolf is recruited into, the Ahnenerbe, was also real. While routinely publishing an academic journal, anthropological expeditions to Tibet, Antarctica and the Middle East sought to find evidence that virtually all great civilizations were somehow the result of ancient Nordic or Germanic influence. The collection of artifacts was seen as critical to this effort.

  Now here’s where it gets really weird. In 1940, Heinrich Himmler led a delegation to Spain’s Montserrat Abbey in hopes that he would find the Holy Grail that Jesus Christ used during the last supper. Himmler believed that he had found a clue to the relic’s whereabouts from the Richard Wagner opera Parsifal, which hinted at the grail’s location in a castle in the Pyrenees, and had first been performed in nearby Barcelona. According to interviews of a German-speaking monk in The Desecrated Abbey, by Montserrat Rico Góngora, Himmler believed that the Grail would give the German army supernatural powers that would win the war.

  While Himmler never found the Holy Grail, he had already managed to get his hands on another mystical object – the so-called Spear of Destiny. Also known as the Holy Lance, the spear was believed to have been used by Longinus, the partially blind centurion, to pierce Jesus’ side at the crucifixion. Centuries later, Roman Emporer Constantine believed that carrying this lance into battle rendered his army invincible. As legend has it, the spear was subsequently possessed by the Holy Roman Empire during its reign in what is now Germany and used in coronation ceremonies. Although it was moved to Vienna in 1796, Germany eventually reclaimed the prize, along with the crown jewels, during its annexation of Austria in 1938. As we all know, possessing the lance didn’t win the war for Germany. The relic remained in the Bavarian town of Nuremburg until it was found by the invading American army in 1945 and returned to Vienna, where it can be seen today.

  In The Fellowship, Himmler travels to occupied Paris in search of the Holy Ossuary. A shootout ensues inside Notre Dame Cathedral, which purports to hold many holy relics, including reeds from the Crown of Thorns and nails from the True Cross.

  Anyone visiting Notre Dame today might be shocked to learn that an actual gun battle occurred there in 1944, and was even caught on film. The incident started when French General De Gaulle led his men and thousands of civilians to reclaim Notre Dame from German hands. The shocking footage shows sniper fire raining down on the general and his freedom fighters in the square right in front of the cathedral. According to BBC accounts, the assault raged inside Notre Dame as well. Although the general escaped unharmed, many others weren’t so lucky. For the curious, you won’t find anything on this in the church’s little gift shop, so you’ll have to find the footage online or in a library.

  So did the Nazis really believe that possessing these mystical antiquities and others would lead to a German victory? After a great deal of research, my feeling is that Himmler, for one, really did believe it. His belief in mysticism, the occult and reincarnation is well-documented. His personal masseuse, Felix Kersten, wrote in his memoirs that Himmler believed himself to be the reincarnation of a dead German king.

  The Fellowship chapter in which Wolf is taken to the secret crypt containing the relocated bodies of ancient and contemporary German rulers, is closely based on fact. Among the most curious of the occupying American army’s finds was a Nazi crypt located deep within a salt mine. The crypt contained priceless Christian art, Germanic antiquities and most shocking of all – the relocated bodies of several nobles, including Frederick the Great and Frederick Wilhelm I. Among these was an empty coffin bearing Hitler’s name. A thoroughly creepy eyewitness account of this find can be found in the March, 1950 issue of Life Magazine.

  Perhaps more disturbingly, Himmler also hoped to find evidence that Jesus was of Aryan descent. The mythology he attempted to create around this idea was convenient to say the least, in that it helped justify the regime’s extreme social views, including the persecution of the Jews and the destruction of the church. The first account of this concept being discussed within the Nazi inner circle can be found in The Voice of Destruction, written by former cabinet member Hermann Rauschning prior to the start of the war.

  In The Fellowship, Rauschning’s book is mentioned as contraband because it really was. In it, all sorts of explosive private conversations among senior German leadership are revealed. For example, Hitler ominously says that the clergy will be made to dig their own graves, which they were, both literally and figuratively. But when someone suggests the idea of the Aryan Jesus, he is dismissive, saying, “Do you really believe the masses will ever be Christian again? Nonsense! That tale is finished…They will replace the cross with our swastika.”

  Still, Himmler continued to pursue this idea for years afterward, even throughout the war years. According to Góngora, the belief that both Jacob and Jesus were Aryan drove him to search for the grail in Spain. Obviously, it was utter nonsense.

  Moving on, it seems that the Vatican has never publicly acknowledged the existence of its intelligence agency. And yet, we have centuries of books in multiple l
anguages detailing its activities in juicy detail. The Black Order is one of the more well-documented Vatican espionage organizations. Olimpia Maidalchini (1591-1657), the sister-in-law of Pope Innocent X, is reported to have not only secretly controlled the pontiff, but also created The Black Order, a unit of assassins that ruthlessly destroyed the Vatican’s enemies.

  Let me say for the record that modern Jesuits do all sorts of good deeds and come from all walks of life. Many are incredible teachers. However, many early Jesuits were soldiers. And although the order was originally recognized in Venice, they did not endear themselves to the city, making the Piazza San Marco the notorious epicenter of the brutal strappado, or rope torture.

  Have I taken great liberties with all these factual nuggets? Definitely. Such is the power of myth, and such is the nature of entertainment.

  Interested in learning more about what really happened? In addition to the films, books and magazines I’ve already noted, I also strongly recommend that those interested in learning more about these subjects read La Popessa: The Controversial Biography of Sister Pascalina, the Most Powerful Woman in Vatican History. Also, Jesus and the Ossuaries, by Craig E. Evans, is a great anthropological perspective on the Holy Land. Also, the Gnostic Gospels, by Elaine Pagels is a terrific explainer of evolving views on resurrection throughout the ages.

  Characters

  Blake Carver, intelligence operative.

  Haley Ellis, intelligence operative.

  Sebastian Wolf, CEO, Fellowship World Initiative.

  Heinz Lang, Head of Vatican Intelligence.

  Adrian Zhu, CEO, LifeEmberz.

  Father Thomas Callahan, double agent.

  Nico Gold, fugitive cybercriminal.

  Nathan Drucker, journalist.

  THE FEDS

  Eva Hudson, President of the United States.

  Julian Speers, Director of National Intelligence.