“You’ve got lunch in your beard,” the FBI director said as soon as the connection was established.
Speers moved a reasonable distance from the camera while he combed his salt-and-pepper goatee with his fingers.
“Better?”
“Yup,” Fordham observed. “How’s it going?”
“Just another day in paradise,” Speers said, leaning back in his chair with his hands clasped behind his head. “I just spoke with the operatives whom we’ve entrusted with restoring global security.”
“Something wrong?”
“It seems that Carver has enlisted the help of Nico Gold.”
Fordham smirked the way people do when they hear about little boys getting up to mischief. “The president’s not going to like that one bit.”
“Better that she not know,” Speers said. “We need to shield her for her own protection.”
“Risky.”
The two men didn’t always agree with each other, but Speers respected him. That hadn’t always been the case. They had knocked heads a few times during the Hatch Administration over funding and, more recently, issues relating to the DNI’s increasing control over strategic intelligence operations. But when it counted, during the Ulysses Coup, Fordham had made the gutsy call to deploy an improvised force of special agents to help defend the Capitol. Speers would never forget that.
“What choice do we have?” Speers said. “So far, the intel our people have turned up has been garbage, and Carver is the one out in the field, shouldering all the responsibility without even a guarantee that we would extract him if he got into trouble.”
“What about the committee?”
“Screw the committee. Carver should get the job done any way he sees fit, as far as I’m concerned.”
“All righty then. And what about Ellis?”
“She’s on her way back to D.C. to interview some journalist that might know something. What about you?”
“It’s 24 hours after Mary Borst disappeared, and we have no idea where she is. Her roommate says she didn’t come home, and Hank has been unable to reach the mother.”
“She’s in Europe, right?”
“Relocated to Seattle, but she’s constantly traveling on business. She’s one of the UN’s most senior people.”
“But she must have seen the news about Preston. Weird that she wouldn’t have come to Washington out of concern for her daughter by now.” As soon as Speers said it, he thought of his own schedule. He hadn’t even been home since the crisis began, and home was just a few miles away. “Did we triangulate Mary’s phone?”
“Obviously. Zero activity. The phone either went up in the fire, or the battery’s been removed. In the meantime, we’ve contacted her carrier and we have complete access to all her communications. The inbound calls are just piling up, one after another. Concerned friends, distant relatives who knew she worked for the senator keep dialing in, leaving messages of support.”
“Outbound?”
Fordham shook his head. “Nothing.”
Speers rested his elbows on the oak desk. “The simplest explanation is usually the right one.”
“Meaning…”
“Our people made a mistake. Maybe she really did go up in the fire, and we just missed her. Let’s get a second set of eyes onsite.”
Johannesburg, South Africa
It had been a hard drive from Nico’s hideout in Kei Mouth, through the winding roads of the Eastern Cape, and into the grassy golden flatlands of the Transvaal. Carver had let Nico drive while he kept a careful watch from the passenger seat. If they were going to work together again, he had to re-establish the trust Nico had destroyed when he fled the country. That meant giving him a job to do.
Nico had driven without incident, asking only that the radio remain off so that he could process all that had happened. Apart from lunch orders and bathroom breaks, there was very little talking between the two men. That was fine by Carver. He too had plenty to mull over. Chiefly, how the president was going to react when she found out that he had dug Nico Gold out of hiding for this. With luck, Nico would easily earn his way out of the president’s doghouse. If he didn’t show results, and fast, Carver himself might be looking for a hideout.
As they approached the airport, Carver pulled a battery out of the glove compartment and inserted it into his phone.
“Either you really needed some quiet time,” Nico observed, “or you didn’t want anyone to know where you were.”
Carver nodded. “More like I didn’t want people to know where you were.”
“Houses built close together also burn together.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means our wagons are hitched together, Agent Carver. The way I see it, The House Committee on Domestic Intelligence would have given you a pass if you’d disclosed my location. I want you to know I appreciate it. It’s the only reason I haven’t run this car into a ditch.”
Carver turned in his seat. “That committee hearing was closed to the public.”
“That sort of thing has never deterred me.”
“You said you’d given up computers.”
“What I said was that I didn’t own a computer. And that was the truth. I did that to honor a promise to Madge. But I might have mosied down to the hotel every once in a while. The night desk manager was very accommodating.”
As they pulled into the car rental return lot, Carver powered up an IP-anonymous browser on his phone, then logged onto the mission cloud. Arunus Roth had just uploaded a message he’d titled URGENT — FOR REAL–CALL ME!!! There were no other details.
He did so. Roth answered on the first ring.
“Where have you been?” he said breathlessly. “I’ve been calling you for hours. There’s a break in the Adrian Zhu disa-“
Carver cut the kid off before he could say another word. “Per Julian, Crossbow is on hold. I thought he’d made that clear.”
“This isn’t about Crossbow per se,” Roth clarified. “But it may be related. Just hear me out, bro.”
“You’ve got 60 seconds. And don’t call me bro.”
“Zhu’s last known location was at a hotel parking garage in the Rome suburbs. After that, the GPS stopped chirping. Tom Callahan called last night. It seems the morgue contains a couple of bodies that were found in the garage that night.”
Carver’s hopes for resuming the operation suddenly faded. “Did Callahan ID the bodies?”
“Neither one is Adrian Zhu, if that’s what you’re wondering. But here’s the part that’s relevant to us. One of them was carrying an octagon-shaped piece of fabric.”
Carver signed off as Nico put the car in Park.
“Change of plans,” Carver said. “Your homecoming will have to wait. We’re headed to Italy.”
For the first time all day, Nico cracked a smile.
The Villa
Rome
Adrian Zhu had no idea how far they had already descended. A hundred meters? Two hundred? Looking up through the center of the coiling iron staircase, the light from the villa, where they had left the Shepherd in a state of prayerful meditation, was rapidly shrinking away. The helix-shaped staircase seemed to plunge endlessly into the blackness below.
Lars was at his side now, leading him behind a small group of armed guards. The tuff rock surrounding the staircase had been recently excavated. The ironwork vibrated beneath his feet. Somewhere in the distance, a group of generators hummed, no doubt powering a series of small lights strung along the vertical passage.
In a few minutes, he would finally see the lab that he had so meticulously designed from the other side of the world. Creating a world-class paleo-DNA lab was difficult under the best of circumstances, but Zhu had done so in complete secrecy. The power that had come with the Chinese government contracts had been offset by a great deal of oversight. It was assumed that his phones, email and all other forms of communication were compromised, if not by the Chinese, then by the prying eyes of American intelligence. He had therefore conducted his work in person, in the rear of a Beijing mahjong parlor owned by a local Fellowship elder. Over the past three years, Lars had made 22 trips in and out of the country to meet with him, going over the exact equipment, procedures and staffing necessary to make the project possible. What they were attempting to do would surpass anything accomplished in world history. There was zero room for error.