William Tyree - The Fellowship

Zhu nodded. “Game on.”

Washington D.C.

The drizzle started as Haley Ellis exited the Metro Center subway station. She wandered over to a street vendor who had several mismatched umbrellas laid out on the cement before him.

“Ten bucks for the small ones,” the guy said. “Twenty for king size.”

“You have any new umbrellas?” Ellis said, noting the various levels of grime and dirt across the entire collection.

“These are just gently used. No leaks, I promise.”

It was the idea that they might be stolen that bothered Ellis most. She decided to suck it up and move on. The hotel lounge where she was meeting Nathan Drucker was maybe ten minutes if she walked fast.

It figured that she had brought the English weather home with her. Every bit of this investigation had been star-crossed so far. Much as she hated to admit it, Carver’s first thought — that they should divide and conquer — had been right. The only lead so far was a journalist whose office was within three miles from the crime scene.

The lead was, on its surface, flimsy. But Nathan Drucker’s agitation on the phone — not to mention his kooky question, “ Are you from the Bureau ?” — had intrigued her. Was Drucker just a paranoid conspiracy freak?

Ellis had confirmed that someone from the Bureau — a Special Agent Will Hollis — had contacted Drucker years earlier. Unfortunately, Hollis had since passed away, and the memo he had filed on Drucker had been merged into a separate case file that Ellis didn’t have access to.Bowers said he would look into it.

The group Drucker had written about, the Fellowship World Initiative, was conspicuously absent from local and national news. All she had found were a few old newsgroup postings, from the days before private social networks, listing local meetups for “FWI Alums.” Maybe it was some kind of fraternity, she thought. That would explain the college connection between Gish and Senator Preston’s missing assistant, Mary Borst.

Ellis walked into P.O.V., the 11th floor hotel bar known for its spectacular views of the city. She paused after entering, giving her eyes a chance to adjust to the dark lighting before perusing the patrons sitting on zebra-hide bar stools and red leather couches. She had been here once, years ago. She and a friend had waited an hour to get past the velvet rope, only to wait another 20 minutes to get a drink. It was nothing like that tonight. Just pleasantly bustling with tourists, many of whom were hoping to get a bird’s eye view of Washington.

Once her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she recognized Nathan Drucker’s handlebar mustache from his bio photo on the Capitol Herald site. He sat at a table in the far corner of the lounge, drinking iced tea, with his back to the room.

“I’m Haley,” Ellis said as she slid into the seat opposite him. She regretted having used her real first name with him on the phone, but what was done was done. There was no going back now.

She didn’t extend her hand across the table, a habit she had picked up from her boss at NIC, who believed there was little good that would come from broadcasting to others that contact with a potential asset was taking place for the first time. You never knew who was watching.

The journalist nodded once and said, “Nathan Drucker.” She noted the worry lines around his eyes and the creased forehead of a man in his early 50s. His tweed jacket fit snugly over an unfortunate plaid vest and a bow tie. He wore black plastic-framed eyeglasses under bushy eyebrows.

“Is the Tweed Ride this week?” Haley said, referring to the annual event that had tweed revivalists cycling around the city dressed like 19th century Ivy League professors.

“No. I always dress like this.”

“Oh.”

“Without further ado, Ms. Ellis, will you please prove you’re who you say you are?”

Ellis plucked a business card from a small stainless steel cardholder and discretely placed it on the table close to Drucker.

He inspected it for a long moment. He held the card up to the light, as if looking for a watermark, and still didn’t seem satisfied. “Let me see your badge,” he said.

She took it out of her purse and held it out for him to inspect. “Would you like a urine sample?”

“You think this is easy for me? I had to take something for my nerves this morning. Nobody’s contacted me about this for years. Then, out of the blue, wham!”

Ellis somehow managed a reassuring smile. “No reason to be nervous, Nate. Can I call you Nate?”

“I guess.”

“Good. Rest assured, Nate, I’m just looking for information.”

“I didn’t realize the FBI was still interested. How did this case get revived?”

She couldn’t let him know that the original memo wasn’t even available to her. It was time to improvise. “To be honest,” she said, “the handoff was poorly handled. I was hoping you could help by recapping the last contact you had with the Bureau.”

Drucker’s mustache twitched up and down. “Okay then. An Agent Hollis had contacted me the same day the article came out.”

Ellis smiled and nodded. “To be clear, the article we’re referring to was the one you wrote called ‘The Country Club Cult that Runs Washington.’”

“That’s right. As I told Agent Hollis, the article was beyond my editorial control. I’ll tell you what I told him, which is that the stuff in the article pales in comparison to what Sebastian Wolf may be up to. But Agent Hollis lost interest fast. We talked once more by phone, and that was the last time I heard from him. I tried calling the Bureau, of course, but he never seemed to be in, so I eventually said screw it and forgot the whole thing.”

“Let’s take this one item at a time,” Ellis suggested. “You threw out a name. Sebastian Wolf. Who is that?”

Drucker made a face. His head appeared to slide backward on his neck, as if on a rail, until he was looking down his nose at Ellis. “You didn’t even read the article you called me about!”

“I read two pages,” Ellis confessed. “That was all I could find online.”

Drucker sighed and shook his head. “This is all very disappointing. I can’t risk meeting with anyone who isn’t serious.”

The journalist put a ten dollar bill on the table — which wasn’t quite enough to cover his iced tea, much less the tip — and began to slide out from the booth. Crap. There was a time and place to use her feminine wiles, and this was one of them. Ellis reached out and touched the journalist’s left wrist.

“Nate,” she said in a gentle voice, her fingertips touching him gently, her eyes looking into his. “I’m sorry this wasn’t handled well internally, but I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t serious.” He paused, as if frozen by her touch. “This is important. Please stay and talk to me. Please .”

Drucker’s pupils dilated, the telltale sign that Ellis had connected the old-fashioned way. He sighed, smiled and resettled himself on the leather couch. “All right,” he said. “I’m a little testy, I guess. I took an oath of silence on this stuff. They made me swear not to talk.”

“Who did?”

“Wolf’s people.”

“Let’s start with you telling me exactly who Sebastian Wolf is.”

“Wolf is…” Drucker struggled for words. “He’s not just a person. He’s a prophet.”

Eisenhower Building

Speers clenched his fists as he stared at the video image of the young woman passing through security at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport. Still sporting a blonde boy-cut, she had not dyed her hair or changed anything but her clothes since she had last been seen in Senator Preston’s den, just minutes before the fire.