William Tyree - The Fellowship

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.