William Tyree - The Fellowship

He stepped inside. The house smelled of barbecue. Aside from an expensive-looking entertainment console at the living room’s far wall, the place was sparsely furnished. There were few books and no pictures on the wall except for a print of DaVinci’s The Last Supper .

Nico’s girlfriend, Madge, held a sawed-off shotgun. She looked unhappy. She had gained a great deal of weight since the CIA had last photographed her. Her long brown locks were graying around the temples and had been clipped into a short, unflattering cut. Judging by the jagged pattern of her bangs, Madge had done it herself using shearing scissors.

“Nice dogs,” Carver said. “Yours?”

Madge didn’t smile. “The kitchen.” She pointed to the next room.

Carver found Nico Gold sitting at the kitchen table with three kinds of meat on a plate before him. He looked much as he had when Carver had first met him in the Lee Federal Penitentiary the previous year. The African sun had added little color to his pale skin, and the meat-centered African diet had hardly fleshed out his lanky frame. He had, however, dispensed with his eyeglasses and had dyed his hair blonde. The tattoos that had read “EVA” on both forearms were gone. He wore a t-shirt that said OBEY in stylized font.

“Close the door,” Nico told him.

Carver sat in the chair where Madge had no doubt been eating across from her husband minutes before. The ex-con’s face was full of dread. He had the sweet smell of alcohol on his breath. There was an empty pinotage bottle on the table and another that was half-full.

“Dreamed the grim reaper was coming for me last night,” Nico said. “Couldn’t shake the feeling all day. Never had a dream like that before. So bad.”

Carver said nothing. He watched Nico’s hand shake as he held his wine glass.

“I need to know how you found me,” Nico continued. “I don’t use credit cards. I’ve taken nobody into confidence. My only bank accounts in this country are in a town 200 miles away under a different name. They draw their funds from banks abroad that have no idea who I am.”

“Don’t blame yourself,” Carver consoled him. “You were good. The best.”

“So how in God’s name did you find me?”

“Your eyes gave you away,” Carver said, referring to the corrective vision procedure Nico underwent in Durban earlier that year. “Organ theft is a bit of a problem here. The government requires that doctors document every eye that gets the surgery. The images are uploaded into a national database. Naturally, we have a script running that scans every image of every retina and matches them up with profiles on our list.”

Nico pounded the table with his fists, bouncing the dinner plates.

“Everything okay?” Madge yelled from the other room.

“Fine dear,” Nico yelled back through the door. He steadied his gaze on Carver and lowered his voice.

Nico reached for the open bottle of pinotage on the table and poured himself a full glass. He offered some to Carver, who politely declined. “I’d forgotten what a teetotaler you are. Probably made it all the way to Africa without so much as a wink of sleep or a drop of caffeine.”

“I’m not here to talk about me.”

“I read about O’Keefe,” Nico said. “I’m sorry. I could tell you two were close.”

Meagan O’Keefe, a young cryptologist from NSA whom Speers had turned into a field operative, had been Carver’s partner. The auburn-haired firecracker was untrained in combat, but her grounded, pragmatic procedural style had proved to be the perfect match for Carver’s aggressive energy. The two had worked together just long enough to get close when they were thrust into what would later be known as the Ulysses Coup. O’Keefe had died serving her country during the six-day siege. Carver missed her like crazy.

Carver got up, pulled a cup from the cupboard and helped himself to some tap water. He drank eight ounces and put the cup down. “I don’t discuss Agent O’Keefe with anyone.”

Nico finished his glass. “So. I guess Eva sent you?”

“Careful. Nobody calls her by her first name now. Not even me. It’s Madam President.”

“She’s going to hand me over to the Saudis, isn’t she?”

“She was thinking about it. Then she read Haley Ellis’ report detailing the miraculous way that five Ulysses Bradleys disappeared from the South Lawn just in time for the motorcade to come through.”

Nico folded his arms across his chest, looking partially validated. “Well, if you’re packing a presidential pardon, I’d say it’s high time you whip it out.”

“The way the president sees it, you owe her one more favor.”

Carver, of course, was taking liberties with the truth. The president had no idea he was there, and neither did Speers, yet. The way he saw it, if his mission status was deniable, then the methods and resources he used to complete it were up to him.

“I’m retired,” Nico said. “Don’t even own a computer. I’ve spent the last year learning Afrikaans and Xhosa. Madge tends to the guests during fishing season and cooks. I make repairs to the place, read books. We’re not hurting anybody.”

Carver pulled two newly issued passports from his jacket pocket. “We have an issue that needs tending to. Your services are required.”

Then he pulled three South African Airways tickets from his pocket and laid them on the table. The flight was to leave from Johannesburg International Airport and land in Washington some 17 hours later.

“This flight is tomorrow morning!” Nico raved. “We’d have to drive all night to get to Johannesburg in time.”

Carver gripped Nico’s spindly right arm and pulled him from the table. “Good point. You’ve got one minute to convince Madge that it’s a good idea. I’ll give you ten to pack.”

SIS Building

The first tangible connection between Rand Preston and Nils Gish was an address: 9002 River Road, Rockville, Maryland.

The murdered MP’s official college records had been delivered to the Legoland war room where Ellis and Seven Mansfield conducted their investigation. The large paper file — Gish’s college career had begun prior to the computerization of Oxford’s administrative operations — had been delivered by the same assistant that kept their teakettle full all day. Ellis appreciated the constant influx of Earl Gray, as she still hadn’t been able to locate a can of Venom in London.

With Carver off to Africa, and Prichard out gumshoeing Gish’s old haunts, Ellis and Seven had focused their efforts on finding any link that Roth’s semantic search exercise might have missed. While they had already discovered that Gish had studied abroad at the University of Maryland for one year, they had ruled out any connection to Preston, as it had occurred 12 years prior to the Senator’s arrival in Washington.

Ellis had grown up in Richmond, but she knew the Washington area well enough by now to know that Rockville was an affluent area northwest of D.C., and 19 miles from the University of Maryland campus. It struck her as odd that Gish, then a young exchange student from London, would live so far from campus. The only reason she could think of was if Gish had chosen to live with a relative or friend.

She looked up the address, which corresponded to an enormous estate a half-hour from Washington D.C. She pulled up Street View. This definitely wasn’t student housing. The term estate did not quite do it justice. The high ivory-covered walls and mounted cameras in the surrounding trees gave the place the feel of a compound. A sign above the gated entrance read “Eden.”

On a lark, Ellis had VPN’d into McLean’s dual-search tool, which allowed her to simultaneously run queries against both the intelligence community database — which included all declassified and classified data at her security clearance level — as well as public search engines. The record match on the residential address where Gish had lived during his study-abroad year postdated his era by nearly three decades.