William Tyree - The Fellowship

And yet she had the opportunity to save at least one high-ranking Fellowship member with solid ties to Preston and Gish. Stop thinking, she told herself. If she wanted to save Borst, she had to act now. She followed the blood path, and the noise, to an open door and descending stairs.

A basement. Of course. It followed the pattern. The killers in London and D.C. had chosen windowless places where the cries of their victims wouldn’t be heard. Here on Vashon, there seemed little chance of that. The home was huge and the dense foliage and gentle white noise of Puget Sound would have obscured virtually any disturbance from even the closest neighbors.

Ellis removed her shoes. She stepped lightly down the stairs until the most horrifying image of her career came into focus.

Rome

Trusting that the tracking chip embedded within Nico’s arm would keep him tethered to the palazzo, Carver set out on foot across the Tiber River. He had accepted Father Callahan’s invitation to meet at Caffe Sant’Eustachio, a legendary coffee house in Old Rome. The priest said he had some information for Carver, but wasn’t willing to be more specific over the phone. Some nuggets about the identities of the assassins in the Rome morgue, perhaps? When they had talked at Le Colonne , Carver had given the priest plenty to chew on, but had stopped short of divulging the identities of the deceased politicians, Sir Nils Gish and Senator Rand Preston.

Despite the fact that Rome was eight time zones away, the events of the past 24 hours told him that caution was justified. In D.C., a seemingly insignificant journalist had been assassinated right under Ellis’ nose. Someone had then ambushed Ellis and Speers in Nathan Drucker’s apartment, nearly killing both. Now Ellis herself had gone missing.

The cafe was located in a tiny neighborhood square just two blocks from the Pantheon. The labyrinthine design of the neighborhood hid it from casual foot traffic, and kept the crowds down to a tolerable level. Carver stopped at the square’s edge, scanning the patrons sitting at outside tables. Seeing that none of them fit suspicious profiles, he then took a moment to admire the stag’s head that seemed to watch over the square from atop the church named after the saint, antlers framing the simple iron cross. Two columns on one side of the church’s exterior were said to be remnants of Nero’s baths.

He found a place inside at the coffee bar, with his back to the wall. The cafe was abuzz with a cacophony of conversation and the intense aroma of premium coffee and dark chocolate. He ordered fresh-squeezed orange juice, keeping his eyes squarely on the door. As he eyed each and every customer with suspicion, he reminded himself that meeting in public had hardly provided safety for Nathan Drucker. Not only would Carver have to be on the lookout for the usual eavesdroppers and hit men, he would now have to watch out for deadly horseflies.

Callahan loped into view a few minutes late, at 10:36. This time the priest did not try to hug him, and that was fine with Carver. He leaned on the counter with his back to the door. The barista, a thin, leathery man, approached Callahan from behind the counter. “ Cafe Americano ?” he asked.

The priest shook his head. “ Doppio ,” he replied, then turned to Carver. “Four years in Rome, and my face is still so pale, they still offer me the watered-down stuff. You want one?”

“No thanks,” Carver said. “You have some information for me?”

The barista set Callahan’s coffee before him. The priest’s eyes followed her movements until she was out of earshot. “Unfortunately, I’ve hit a dead end on the two lads in the morgue. I trust Detective Tesla will find out who they are.”

“We don’t have the luxury of time,” Carver said. “We can’t just leave this to some local cop.”

“Tesla is quite tenacious,” Callahan said. “In the meantime, I do have a name for you. Sebastian Wolf.”

The priest brought the small white cup to his lips and sipped the double shot of espresso, never breaking eye contact with his American counterpart.

Bells rang in Carver’s head. Ellis had uploaded a recording of her conversation with Nathan Drucker to the mission cloud a few hours earlier. Carver had listened to it quickly, but was sure the name Sebastian Wolf was mentioned in association with something called the Fellowship World Initiative. In the audio transcript, Ellis had tagged Wolf’s name as meriting follow up.

Still, Carver managed to maintain perfect control over his facial features. “Who is he?”

“Well well,” Callahan said, “I thought you knew everyone worth knowing in D.C. I understand Wolf is quite the swinging dick over there.”

“Influential?”

“Important enough that some very bad people are looking for him. I got the strong sense that he might be connected to this nasty business you alluded to.”

“And you know this how? Vatican Intelligence?”

The priest ignored the question. “This is his last known address.” Callahan handed Carver a slip of paper with a Rockland, Maryland, address on it. Eden. The one in Ellis’ case notes. “He moved without leaving a forwarding address. Perhaps you can get one of your people on it?”

The American slipped the paper into his pocket and smiled. He had been around long enough to know how double agents played their employers. One side would ask for information. They would then go to the other side, framing the request itself as a golden nugget. When the subsequent investigation then yielded fruit, they would take it back to the original source.

But Carver didn’t like being played.

“I’ll do that,” he said. And then he told his second lie of the evening: “I’ll let you know what we find out.”

Vera Borst Residence

Vera Borst was suspended in mid-air by a rope that was attached to a pulley and a hand winch. Her hands were tied behind her back, her torso arched forward. Her blouse was torn open, revealing sagging white breasts and a bulging stomach, which was already bloodied by several open incisions. Carver had been right. It was just like he had predicted. Rope torture.

Borst’s mouth was fixed in an “O” shape. Her eyes were closed. Her chin bobbed wearily against her chest. Her vocalizing was less constant now, breaking up into great spastic bursts of guttural release.

A man in dark coveralls stood at her feet. He seemed to be attaching some sort of weight to her ankles, which Ellis imagined might be enough to actually break Borst’s wrists and sever them from her body. Ellis judged the distance between her and the tormentor to be about 30 feet. As much as he might deserve to die, she wanted to take him alive. He had to be questioned.

He didn’t look like the most overpowering physical specimen. Perhaps five foot ten, with a trim, but not especially muscular, build. Ellis was no dojo master, but she had studied a variety of hand-to-hand combat techniques in the Army.

The man had his back to the staircase. He seemed to be preoccupied with affixing the weights to Borst’s ankles. There was no telling whether he was alone. Ellis did not have a full view of the basement, nor was it well lit. However small, there was a chance that another perpetrator could be behind the row of canoes, kayaks and oars to the right of where Borst hung, or lurking in a dark corner of the space, perhaps behind the crates of Christmas ornaments or behind the air hockey table at the far end.

Nevertheless, there was no time for deliberation. Borst’s life was quickly slipping away.

Ellis crossed herself before leaping down the stairwell. Although she had perfected her flying kick several years earlier en route to earning a brown belt in karate, she had been skeptical about its effectiveness in an actual combat situation. That had changed while watching a cage match on TV the previous year, when a 230-pound bruiser was dropped senseless by a much smaller man using such a move. It was time to find out for herself.