William Tyree - The Fellowship

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 17th 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 where 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 didn’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.”