William Tyree - The Fellowship

There was no use stating the obvious. The body of Mary Borst, daughter to a UN under-secretary-general and assistant to an American senator, would not be found among the ashes of Preston’s home. She was alive and well.

“Tell me she’s still in the air,” Speers said into his speakerphone.

“Wish I could,” Chad Fordham said. “This image was taken about 12 hours ago, and she landed in Rome approximately eight hours later. It’s possible that she then boarded a connecting flight to Tel Aviv, Cairo, St. Petersburg or Munich. We’re exploring all eventualities as quickly as possible.”

As Speers began shouting into the phone, he had the odd sensation of standing outside himself. He had thus far borne the stress of the situation stoically. He suddenly felt a complete loss of control.

“She used her own passport, for God’s sake! How could we not know about this?”

He was barely listening as Fordham blamed the Canadian border authorities for their slowness in responding to his request for cooperation. As he speculated that Mary Borst must have used cash to pay for her plane ticket, thus evading the monitor they had put on her credit cards and bank account. As he made excuses for Hank Bowers, who had, as Fordham put it, followed standard procedure to the letter. As if that mattered. There was nothing standard about this situation.

Too little, too late. The only person of interest in Senator Preston’s murder had been right under their nose. And now she was gone.

W Hotel

Outside, night had fully enveloped Washington. The White House and the Treasury Building sparkled outside, and the Washington Monument rose up like a beacon in the distance. Drucker sipped from a dark ‘n’ stormy cocktail. The alcohol seemed to have calmed his nerves. Ellis sensed Drucker’s defenses coming down further.

“You described Sebastian Wolf as a prophet. You also slammed his organization as a cult. So what is he, a visionary, or a cult leader?”

“Don’t get hung up on labels.” The journalist looked around to make sure he wasn’t being watched. He lowered his voice before speaking again. “The Fellowship is, and I quote from the charter, dedicated to exposing hidden truths that will change the course of humanity.”

“Like what?” Ellis said. “Government corruption?”

Drucker shook his head. “No. That’s small ball.”

“Religion?”

“Warmer, but to be honest, Wolf doesn’t believe in religion. He thinks it gets in the way of following Jesus.”

Ellis was growing impatient with Drucker’s bombastic declarations. He was simultaneously provocative and vague. She needed concrete details that could tie Preston, Gish and Borst together. But she had to resist rushing him. She had to be patient.

“Looks like there’s nothing small about Eden,” she said. “The address on file with the IRS looks huge on Google Maps, like a compound.”

Drucker confirmed with a nod. “That’s not inaccurate.”

“Can we go there now? You could explain the backstory on the way.”

The journalist gave Ellis a look. “Lady, you have no idea what you’re getting into. You don’t just show up at Eden uninvited.”

“And how does someone get invited?”

“First, you have to know somebody. Second, you pretty much have to be either a scientist or a politician.”

Drucker was neither a scientist nor a politician, Ellis noted. But Gish and Preston were. “How does it work?”

Drucker sighed. “The Fellowship is a hierarchical society. You have to level up over time. There are roughly 21 levels. Near the top, you’ve got world leaders, notable scientists. In the middle tiers you’ve got up-and-comers. They call them soldiers. At the bottom are students.”

“How’d you get in?”

“My college roommate went on to become a congressman. I wrote a book for him during his initial campaign, outlining his position on healthcare reform. It didn’t sell anywhere except the campaign trail, and quickly went out of print. We lost touch after he moved to Washington. Then one day he calls me up and asks me if I’d be interested in writing the personal memoirs of someone truly visionary.”

“Wolf?”

“I’m getting to that. I said yeah, maybe, but who? He said he couldn’t tell me over the phone, but the pay was a hundred thousand dollars. I was living on a freelancer’s salary in Chicago at the time. The next thing I know, he sent me all these confidentiality agreements to sign, and he had me on a flight out to D.C. He had arranged for me to stay at Eden.”

“Had you ever heard of it before?”

“No, of course not. And after I signed all the legal docs, he told me was that Sebastian Wolf was the man . That’s how he put it. The man .”

“Go on.”

“My taxi dropped me outside the gates,” Drucker went on, talking right past Ellis’ question. “I rang the buzzer and announced my name into the speaker, looking right up at the camera. The big iron gates opened, and I walked in. These two guys ran down this massive sloping lawn to help me with my suitcase. They reminded me of big puppies. They were so friendly, my guard went up immediately.”

“They were students?”

Drucker nodded and sipped his iced tea. “Political science majors. They were just Level 3s, which meant they were still doing menial things like cooking and cleaning and hauling luggage. So they walk me up to this beautiful portico, between these massive Roman columns, and through a set of enormous doors. Not like the ones you see here. Like the grand ones they have in Europe. So I walk in, and the first thing I see, in this amazing foyer, is a tall sheik in white robes. Maybe he was Saudi royalty. But I can tell by the big rings on his fingers and the fabric of his robes that he’s got to be super rich and probably important. And the Saudi can’t take his eyes off the guy in front of him.”

“Wolf?”

“One and the same. Tall guy with a silver mane and an aura that is palpable. One look and you know he’s the grand patriarch. His age is deceptive. He’s just one of those people who looks like he has all the answers, you know? So he spots me and comes right over, leaving this rich sheik standing there! He takes one of my hands, puts another hand on my shoulder, and makes eye contact. I don’t even remember exactly what he said to me. I was just enamored with his presence. I felt like we were the only two people in the world at that moment.” Drucker was blushing, as if remembering a teenage crush, or an encounter with a rock star. “It was intense.”

“And then what?”

“In those days, it was common to see brilliant people from MIT or Cal Tech show up, not to mention the occasional senator or foreign minister. Some people even said presidents used to come, but that was before my time.”

“What about Nils Gish?”

Drucker swatted at a horse fly that had somehow found its way to the 11th floor lounge. “I got the impression that Gish brought donors in to fund the research projects.”

Ellis leaned forward, her elbows on the table. “What kind of research?”

“Mostly biomedical, bioengineering and anthro.”

A fuzzy prickle ran down Ellis’ arms. In his will, Rand Preston had left an endowment to a biomedical research foundation in Austin, Texas, and she had seen Gish’s name on the board of an English bioengineering ethics committee.

“For example,” Drucker went on, “I met an anthro at Eden who had gotten back from studying mitochondrial DNA in a 2,000-year-old burial tomb in Israel. This particular guy had his own agenda, but Wolf funded his project to see if he could expedite the process of decoding genome sequences using previously unexposed bits of bone marrow inside these ancient ossuaries.”