William Tyree - The Fellowship

Ellis had left the hotel before her new satphone had arrived from McLean. Traveling without a device made her feel both vulnerable and free. She was so accustomed to having the mapped world at her behest that the thought of finding Ms. Borst’s address — which she had handwritten on a piece of hotel stationary — seemed daunting. At the same time, she was grateful to be spared the inevitable barrage of demanding messages from Julian Speers. That went double for having her location trackable. She checked her watch again. It was 2 a.m. in D.C. With luck, she would be on her returning flight by the time Speers woke up.

Despite her eighth row window seat, Ellis managed to be the first one off the plane when the doors opened, elbowing her way past even the first class passengers.

Ellis quickly made her way through the tidy airport toward the signs for ground transport. Once she reached the outside, she stood for a moment on the curb, breathing in her first taste of Northwest air. Wet. Crisp. Verdant.

She jumped into a cab.

“Evening,” the driver said. “Just the pack? No other luggage?”

She handed the driver the Mayflower Hotel stationary on which she had written Borst’s address. She remembered watching her mother do the same thing once, when she was a child, before the age of smartphones.

The cab driver let out a hearty laugh. “Miss,” he chuckled. “Do you even know where this is?”

Ellis took it back. She saw nothing wrong with the address. “What’s the problem?”

“The zip code. It’s on Vashon Island.”

Crap. Ellis was vaguely aware that the Northwest was partitioned by lots of inlets, lakes and rivers, but she had no concrete knowledge of its actual geography. She had already spent a ton of her own money on the plane ticket, without any guarantee that Speers would ever agree to reimburse her for it.

“Okay. How much?”

“I can’t just drive there, if that’s what you’re asking. If it was Mercer Island, no problem. There’s a bridge to Mercer. For Vashon, you have to take a ferry, and the ferries stopped for the night already. You’ll have to wait until morning.”

That was out of the question. Vera Borst had said she was flying to Europe in the morning, presumably on UN business, although she hadn’t specified. She had said to come tonight.

“Are there water taxis?” Ellis said.

The cabbie chortled again. “There should be, right? Fact is that there’s a lot of people that want water service privatized, which would mean more jobs and service all night and all day, right? But no, the county protected the union jobs like always.”

“Is there someone else you can call? Someone with a boat?”

The driver shook his head.

Ellis reached into her pack, fished out one of the outdated NIC business cards she had shown Drucker, and handed it to the cabbie. “I’m not usually this pushy. It’s just that I’m here on a matter of national security. It’s important.”

Rome

The sun fell behind St. Peter’s Basilica just as Father Callahan turned his tiny Fiat onto Via della Conciliazione. Nico sat sideways in the car’s tiny back seat, watching as a group of tourists posed for pictures in front of the Santa Maria della Transpontina church. The car passed the embassies of Brazil, Iraq and Egypt. How was it that over the past two thousand years the Vatican had shrunk from a vast geographical empire of papal states to a tiny sovereign nation wedged inside Rome, and yet it influenced more people worldwide than any other government?

At last, the Fiat pulled up to the Palazzo della Rovere. “Buy you a drink?” Carver asked the priest, who was shaken from seeing the mangled corpses.

“I could use it,” he said. “I’ll meet you in Le Colonne.”

Carver and Nico unfolded themselves from the tiny car and watched as the priest pulled through the arched driveway in search of parking. The two hadn’t talked since Detective Tesla had shown them the bodies and the personal effects found on the dead Jesuits down at the morgue.

“In your estimation,” Carver said, “How accurate was Father Callahan’s translation?”

Nico scratched behind his left ear and rolled his shoulders up and down, as if to work the tension out of them. “Mmmm,” he said, “Detective Tesla talks a hundred miles an hour.”

Carver smiled. “I have a hard time believing that you, of all people, couldn’t understand him.”

“Of course I could understand him,” Nico quipped. “I’m just qualifying my answer first. The priest lives here, so naturally his comprehension is going to be a bit better than mine.”

“I get it. Now answer the question.”

Nico placed a hand flat against the wall and leaned into it, bringing his left leg up behind him as he spoke. “I didn’t notice any glaring omissions, but I thought it was curious that Father Callahan kept referring to the bodies as victims. Tesla never used that word to describe them.”

“What word did he use?”

“Gunmen.”

“That’s interesting.”

“Mind if I go up and wire in? You didn’t drag my ass all the way from Africa to hang around morgues.”

That much was true. Carver needed Nico to find connections between two more famous stiffs — Preston and Gish. Maybe it was time to let the tracking chip in Nico’s arm do the chaperoning for a bit. He took one of the room keys from his pocket and handed it over.

Carver held the door to the lobby open. “I want to know the moment you find anything.”

Nico scampered upstairs. Carver made his way through the lobby to Le Colonne, the hotel bar where Father Callahan had already sidled up to a bar stool. The priest had ordered whiskey for himself, along with a plate of pizza, and unsweetened iced tea and salmon for his American colleague.

Carver pointed toward a booth at the back of the room. He had no intention of disclosing the full details of the operation to Callahan or anyone. But the conversation would undoubtedly veer into territory that would be far too sensitive for anyone else’s ears.

“Now then,” Callahan began as they settled into the booth. The priest was smiling, but he wasn’t in a merry mood. “If you’ll do me the courtesy of disclosing the real reason you’re in Rome, perhaps I’ll feel like less of a jackass.”

“This isn’t about Operation Crossbow per se.”

“So I gathered.”

“Some very important people are dead. I’m looking for the assassins.”

“Plural?” Callahan asked.

“Yes. We believe this is the work of a sophisticated organization.”

“Is this somehow related to Adrian Zhu or LifeEmberz?”

“A valid question, Father. I don’t have the answer to that yet. But I have to find the organization behind these assassinations.”

Without naming the dead, or detailing the exact circumstances, Carver explained how they had found identical octagons in Washington, London, Seattle and now Rome.

The bartender walked over with the drinks and set them on the table. Carver held his tongue until the man was back at his post. “That octagon we saw today. Have you ever seen something like that before?”

The priest took a slug of his whiskey. “As a matter of fact, yes. The moment my security clearance was accepted by the Holy See, I went to the archives and read everything I could about the history of Vatican Intelligence.”

“I’m actually jealous.”

“You should be. It’s a cracking read. But yes, I saw a couple of preserved octagons like the one we saw today. Calling cards, apparently, for a group of nasties that went by the name Black Order.”

“How recently?”

“Not very. 1700s, if memory serves.”

That checked out. Carver knew that the Black Order had been officially dissolved by Pope Leo XIII in 1878. “What else can you tell me?”