The Fellowship bc-2

by William Tyree

  “I must admit,” Parisi said in English over the microphone. “When I first saw you, and realized how young you are in relation to your scientific achievements, I became rather depressed at my own life.”

  Zhu smiled wryly. “Actually, I’ve always wished I’d been born a few decades earlier. Everything was so wide open. For example, sometimes I think about how free it would feel to live in the age before mobile phones. The thought of leaving the house, and having no way for people to contact you. It must have been so liberating.”

  “You must be joking,” the professor said. “Imagine you make a date with someone to meet at a restaurant. You show up. They are running very late because of traffic, or the flu, or a tyrannical boss. Meanwhile, you are sitting there drinking wine in anger, thinking they forgot about you. Eventually you leave, having no way of knowing that they are about to arrive. Believe me, this was no golden age.”

  Carver fast-forwarded through the rest of the banter and most of the regular presentation, which he had seen from footage of previous appearances at Oxford and Zurich. The Q amp; A period was what he was interested in.

  Now he watched as a queue of journalists lined up at a microphone in the center aisle. The first reporter began her question in Italian before Professor Parisi admonished her for straying from English, the official language of the conference. “Mr. Zhu,” she began again in English, “Are the nutritional benefits from the milk of your cloned cows really superior to those of existing milk substitutes?”

  “Without question,” Zhu replied. “But to be honest, the challenge of cloning cattle from hair samples, rather than frozen embryos, was a lot more interesting to me than the public benefits of the project.”

  A writer from La Repubblica had the honor of asking the next question. “Mr. Zhu, you mentioned something about the milk of the cloned cattle called lysozyme. What is that exactly?”

  “A good bacterium,” Zhu said. “It contains proteins and vitamins and other things that help fight off infections and promote growth.”

  “Have there been any negative side effects in the children?”

  “Nope. Next question, please.”

  The journalist remained at the mic, fending off the writer behind her with an elbow. “It’s been rumored that LifeEmberz has actually cloned a human being that has matured beyond the embryo stage. Is there any truth to that rumor?”

  The audience let out a collective gasp as they waited to see if Zhu would answer the question. Carver wondered if the journalist had heard the same rumors he had. An American asset in China had reported — without any proof whatsoever — that Zhu had already successfully cloned a child for the most senior officer of the People’s Liberation Army, using mitochondrial DNA from the exhumed corpse of the official’s great-grandfather. The same asset had produced a dubious-looking set of emails in which a senior Communist Party official appeared to ask Zhu to clone Chairman Mao, the grand patriarch of the Communist Revolution, whose body lay perfectly preserved in a Tiananmen Square mausoleum. He implored Zhu to apply his considerable skills to the cause, explaining that his wife would give anything to have children with Mao’s DNA.

  Nothing gave Carver the creeps more than the idea of making fertilized eggs from the DNA of a totalitarian who had been on ice for decades. Still, a small part of Carver could understand it. How many Americans mothers would love to carry a baby made from the DNA of Abe Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton?

  Zhu licked his thin lips before speaking. “I’m not at liberty to comment on any research in progress.”

  Carver replayed the sound bite and played it again. And again. He called Arunus Roth, who was monitoring the situation from McLean. “Did you watch this Zhu video?” He didn’t wait for Roth’s answer. “Maybe I’m crazy, but I think Zhu just admitted to cloning a human.”

  U.S. Capitol Building

  Washington D.C.

  The hearing room had been fashioned in the style of a classic tribunal. Blake Carver and his attorney sat at a simple table on the hearing room floor. A panel of congressional representatives sat on an elevated panel in front of them. The height differential was designed to make the person testifying feel small and to exaggerate the power and influence of the committee members.

  Bolstering the committee members were two additional rows of junior congressmen and their staffers. As Carver surveyed the tired, stressed-out bunch of public servants, he envisioned an equal number of medicine cabinets stocked with Adderall, Ambien and antacid tablets.

  Luis Gonzalez, (D-New Mexico), Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, peered down from his seat in the front row. Although he sat scarcely 20 feet from his subjects, he switched on his microphone. “Glad to have you with us this morning, Agent Carver.”

  Carver, who was dressed in a shark-colored suit with no tie, leaned into the microphone situated on the table. “The feeling is not mutual,” he said to polite laughter.

  “It was a battle getting you in here,” Rep. Gonzalez remarked, “So forgive me if we waste little time in getting down to business. This committee is concerned with events taking place 13 months ago. Can you please characterize your professional activities during that time period?”

  He looked over his shoulder. Where was Julian? He had promised he would be here. It wasn’t just that Carver wanted him for moral support. Speers had been a district attorney prior to joining the Hatch administration as general counsel, and later as chief of staff. He was imminently more qualified than the rental lawyer he’d sent in his place.

  “Agent Carver?”

  “The answer is no. I won’t characterize last August.”

  Judging by the look on the committee members’ faces, nobody had ever refused to answer a question before. “Excuse me?”

  “It’s nothing personal, Congressman. My activities at that time were highly classified in nature, and frankly, above your security clearance.”

  The attorney leaned into Carver’s ear and whispered, “There’s no reason to piss these guys off. The administration has your back, but if you create enemies here, God help you.”

  Carver turned his head and covered his mouth before whispering — just in case there were any lip readers on the panel. “We just met. You don’t even know me. If you have sound advice of a legal nature, I’ll take it. Otherwise, please let me do the talking.”

  Gonzalez cut in. “Agent Carver, we aren’t here to uncover intelligence secrets. To be frank, we’re primarily interested in the release of a federal prisoner named Nico Gold into your custody on August 21 of last year.”

  So Julian was right. Of all the ethical lines that had been crossed that day in the name of national security, it figured that the committee would waste Carver’s time with this.

  Personally, Carver found Nico Gold obnoxious, manipulative and arrogant. But there was no denying that he had an unparalleled mind. For years nobody knew his real name. He had been the Banksy of the hacking community. He had started as a teenager, lifting tiny sums out of millions of bank accounts in western countries. He would then redistribute the money into the accounts of NGOs in poor African countries. Modern-age Robin Hood stuff. But then he took a big score from the International Monetary Fund, and got a little carried away in flaunting his success.

  As Nico would discover later, when he found himself serving 20 years, he had messed with the wrong lady. Eva Hudson had been the head of the IMF in those days. And once she learned the identity of the person who had stolen from their coffers, she was relentless in her pursuit.

  “August 21 is widely considered to be the first day of the Ulysses Coup,” Gonzales continued. “You saw Mr. Gold that day, didn’t you?”

  The Ulysses Coup. Carver shuddered at the name, which missed the point completely. It had only taken a few days with a TV network using the catchphrase before it had become a modern-day Watergate.

  In what appeared at first to be coordinated terror attacks by religious extremists, a group of conspirators h
ad succeeded in decapitating the presidential line of succession, an act of congress that had last been amended in 1947. President Hatch, his vice-president, the president pro tempore and the secretary of state were all killed. Of those in the immediate line, only treasury secretary Eva Hudson had escaped. Ulysses USA Inc., a security multinational that had grown to dwarf the once-mighty Blackwater Corporation, had only been the tool of the crime, not the cause of it. The complete information about the perpetrators and how they had infiltrated the president’s inner circle was still known only to a small group of Washington insiders, and, by executive order of the president, those names would likely be sealed for many years to come.

  It sickened Carver to think about the countless history teachers who would no doubt build curricula around the crisis in the coming years, only to get its most fundamental elements completely wrong. But that was neither here nor there. Ulysses USA Inc. was done for, even if all its puppet masters weren’t. And the official line of succession had been reinstated, making Eva Hudson, the fifth in line, the unlikely Commander-in-Chief.

  One thing was for sure: For Carver, the memories of those six days in August were still too raw for his liking. The horizontal scar on his neck — he’d been grazed by a bullet while defending the White House — was a daily reminder.

  The rent-a-lawyer was whispering something in his ear, but Carver wasn’t listening. He sat forward again. “About all I can tell you, Congressman, is that Nico Gold was critical in helping us with the national security crisis we faced that day.”

  “Our records indicate that on August 21 last year, you arrived at Lee Federal Correctional Facility at 10: 30 a.m., with the intention of recruiting Mr. Gold.”

  “It was 10:41 a.m. when I signed in.”

  “You remember that precisely?”

  He did indeed. What Carver’s small-town doctor had once diagnosed in Carver as a photographic memory, was now known in the medical community as super-autobiographical memory, or hyperthymesia.

  In short, it was the ability to recall an unusually high number of experiential moments in his life. He could point to most any day on the calendar and recall what he had for lunch, what the people he was with had been wearing, and what had been on the news that day.

  Hyperthymesia was often regarded as a problematic condition more than a gift. Some people found the constant recall of archived memories emotionally crippling. Others found that the constant influx of the past impaired their ability to experience new things.

  Carver was lucky. Although he occasionally had problems with focus, he was mostly able to wield the extreme amounts of data located within his brain to his advantage. His was a medical condition with benefits.

  “Yes,” he continued. “My partner and I signed in at 10:41. We were with Nico for approximately 17 minutes, during which time we were able to convince him to serve the very country that had incarcerated him.”

  Cindy Blick (R-Wyoming), a 55-year-old woman with a red beehive haircut, spoke into the microphone mounted before her. “Agent Carver, what I’m trying to understand is why you would enlist the help of a convicted felon when you had access to more than 20 qualified government and private cryptologists, including some from the NSA.”

  The attorney covered the microphone with his right hand and leaned in to offer advice. Carver nudged him away.

  “They may have been qualified,” Carver stated, “But they were ineffective. The cryptologists at my disposal had been working on the case for weeks without any progress. We’re living in an age where one truly gifted person with a computer can do more in a day than a roomful of PhDs could in a year.”

  “I’m not disputing that Nico Gold is a smart person. But in this case, when you chose to enlist the help of a felon, you made a mistake.”

  He hated them. He hated this. His thoughts drifted to Operation Crossbow, which had only just gotten interesting. One of the world’s most powerful bioengineers had said that he had the capability to clone a human being, and then had gone missing. Whatever country or organization had nabbed him now had a tremendous intellectual asset at their disposal, and you could bet they weren’t going to use it for a good cause.

  “Agent Carver?” Blick said. “We’re waiting.”

  Carver quickly rediscovered his train of thought. “My only mistake was bringing Nico in too late. If it hadn’t been for him, you might not be sitting up there today.”

  Gonzales leaned forward. “Save the speeches, Agent Carver. The committee will determine, upon learning more details, whether those choices were justified.”

  “No it won’t. The committee is incapable of making that determination without all the facts, and those facts are sealed.”

  “Is that so? Then I’d like to hear Mr. Gold’s heroics from his own mouth.”

  “I bet you would.”

  “Do you know where we can find him?”

  “I really couldn’t say.”

  Blick took off her glasses and peered down at Carver, her eyes darting back and forth between the federal agent and his attorney. “To be blunt, Agent Carver, we have evidence that you forged a judicial order to arrange for Mr. Gold’s unlawful release. Out of respect for your service, the White House has strongly recommended that we look the other way on this transgression, which we are inclined to do despite the fact that nobody will tell us why you’re such a value to our intelligence community, or even what agency you currently answer to. Despite this, we might be persuaded to comply with this request providing you help us return Mr. Gold into federal custody.”

  The double doors at the back of the room opened. Julian Speers blew in, nodding at Carver as he walked past the table and made a beeline for Rep. Gonzalez. The congressman leaned over the wood paneling to get a quiet but spirited earful from the DNI.

  Gonzalez’ face turned a shade of pink before he abruptly spoke into the microphone. “The director has just advised me the president has suspended these hearings in the interest of national security. Naturally, we will use every feasible legal and constitutional option to reverse this decision.”

  As the committee erupted into chaos, Speers motioned for Carver and started for the door.

  Carver waited until they were in the hallway before speaking. “Took you long enough,” he grumbled as they speed-walked. “Things were getting pretty heated in there.”

  “I didn’t bail you out for your benefit,” Speers said. “If you knew what was good for you, you’d have told them how to find Nico Gold.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “The president asked for you personally. We have a mess on our hands.”

  5th Street Northeast

  Washington D.C.

  The inside of Speers’ black Highlander was just as Carver had remembered it. It smelled like a candy store and was littered with chewed lollipop sticks and fast-food wrappers. The only new wrinkle was the pair of child car seats in the vehicle’s second row. The babies were the result of a torrid relationship Speers had with a DOJ analyst named Lydia. Within four months of dating, Speers had gotten her pregnant with twins. Before he knew it, he needed a wedding planner, a financial planner and a real estate agent.

  Speers pulled the SUV up to the address FBI Director Chad Fordham had given him on 5th Street Northeast. The home was inconspicuous among the row of three-story brownstones. “This is it?” Carver said incredulously. They were only a few blocks from the Capitol Building where Carver’s hearing had been. “We could have walked faster.”

  They got out of the vehicle and walked into the tiny yard. The front door opened and he spotted Fordham inside, beckoning them up the stairs. What was going on here? Carver couldn’t fathom anything happening at a residential address that would require the heads of both the FBI and the ODNI to make a personal visit. Nothing short of a major breech in national security.

  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.