“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.”
“Why would the Fellowship fund something like that? What does that have to do with exposing essential truth?”
The waitress set down a plate of calamari. Drucker wasted no time in digging into it. “It gets weirder. More recently, Wolf has been obsessed with cloning. Those researchers that cloned an extinct species of goat from cells in hair that had been preserved in permafrost? The Fellowship funded that. Rumor has it that they’re behind the team trying to clone that frozen hunter they found in Greenland last year.”
Ellis got chills. “It’s like playing God.”
“And the world’s great minds will join his flock. And so too will the world’s great leaders, so that they may be in place when the time comes to usher in the new age of light.”
“Don’t recognize it,” Ellis said. “Is that Old Testament?”
Wolf shook his head. “Wolf claims he wrote that after being blessed with a vision. He’s got a book full of them, called the Living Scriptures. But don’t waste your time looking for a copy. You can’t get a look at the Living Scriptures until you’re at least a Level 15.”
“But you’ve seen it?”
Drucker nodded. “He’s got the original copy in a library at Eden. The Living Scriptures is the least interesting thing there by far. He’s got an actual mummy in there. He’s got Roman antiquities. I guess it’s not surprising considering who his father was.”
“Do I have to ask?”
Drucker licked a piece of calamari breading off his fingers. “Wolf’s father was a Nazi anthropologist. He worked for Heinrich Himmler.”
Now she had heard everything. She had indulged Drucker’s tall tales long enough. Ellis had flown all the way from London only to realize that the Capitol Hill journalist had already been dismissed by the Bureau years ago, and that he was more than likely mad as a hatter. She had come to find a simple, logical connection between the three murder victims, and the journalist was blabbering on about secret societies, cloning and Nazis.
It was time to cut to the chase. “Did you ever see Senator Preston at Eden?”
Drucker set his drink down and looked Ellis straight in the eyes. “Is that why you called me? You think there’s some connection between Eden and Preston’s death?”
“It’s just a question.”
“Like hell it is.” The horse fly was back again. Drucker swatted in the air again as it buzzed about his head. “If the feds thought Preston really died in a residential fire, you wouldn’t be here.”
She revealed nothing in her expression. “How can I get a list of all the Fellowship members?”
The journalist snickered. “You can’t. These are very cautious people. We haven’t even scratched the surface of what they’re capable of.”
Ellis sighed. Maybe it was wise to get a look at Agent Hollis’ notes on Drucker before investing any more time with him. She grabbed her purse and began scooting out of the booth.
Drucker’s face lost color and turned dead serious. “Wait. The information you’re looking for is in the book.”
The comment stopped Ellis in her tracks. In the midst of all of Drucker’s bluster, she had almost forgotten that he had been hired to write Wolf’s memoirs. “I’m listening.”
“Wolf was worried about his legacy after his death. He talked a lot about how the historians had been left to determine the way every important religious leader was viewed, from Moses to Joseph Smith to L. Ron Hubbard. He wanted the chance to tell his own story, especially about how he came to have the vision.”