FBI Director Chad Fordham, the only other agency director with knowledge of the case, was scheduled to arrive shortly.
Local police had found the heinous Vashon Island crime scene in which three people had been murdered, and another in critical condition. Ellis had apparently been electrocuted and beaten. Thank God for Fordham. With one call, he had ordered a pair of local bureau agents to seal the crime scene. It had been far too late to contain the situation, of course. The mess Ellis had stumbled into was already the talk of the local police department.
Now the doctor emerged from Ellis’ room and closed the door behind him
“You can see her,” the doctor said, “but you have to go easy. She doesn’t even know who she is right now.”
“By that you mean…”
“Exactly what I said. She can’t remember her own name. It’s a pretty bad concussion. The good news is that the chance of permanent brain damage is minimal. In cases like this, amnesia is usually temporary.”
Speers was beside himself. “Usually?”
“Usually there’s no memory of the blunt trauma that caused the concussion, and sometimes there’s a blackout window that spans a few hours or days before it happened.”
“You don’t know Ellis,” Speers said. “She’s a combat vet.”
“Iraq?”
And D.C. too, Speers thought but didn’t say. He had managed to keep quiet the names of most the combatants that defended the capital in the Ulysses Coup. They were heroes, for sure, but they had also been forced to kill Americans to save the nation’s soul. The families of those Ulysses USA fighters weren’t about to forget so easily. Even now, the FBI had planted moles within a militia in South Carolina that was plotting revenge.
“Don’t underestimate this,” the doc warned. “It looks like she was in one hell of a fight.” The doctor opened the door to Ellis’ room. “Shall we?”
With the help of his cane, Speers got to his feet and entered the room with the doctor close behind. “Look who’s here,” the doc said. “You recognize this guy, Haley?” Ellis said nothing. The doc turned back to Speers. “Five minutes, and not a minute more.”
He shut the door on his way out. Speers pulled up a plastic orange chair and sat, leaning forward with his elbows resting on his legs. He didn’t know what to say.
“This is really weird for me, okay? I’m Julian Speers. I’m your boss.”
“I don’t like it here,” Ellis replied. “I need to go outside. Can we go outside? Right now?”
“Later,” he said. “Haley, do you know why you came to Seattle? I need you to try to remember.”
She shrugged, clearly too exhausted to even try.
There was so much he needed to know. Had Ellis known Mary Borst’s mother would be in danger? Was she operating on a hunch, or had she seen something in Nathan Drucker’s work that led her to that conclusion? How did Sebastian Wolf fit into the picture? The answers were locked away in the rafters of Ellis’ mind.
He reached into his pocket, removed his phone, and pulled up a photo of Jenna Ellis that he had taken at the Mayflower Hotel just before heading to the airport. He handed the phone to Ellis and waited a moment as she looked at the photo.
“You know her?”
Ellis peered at it uncertainly. “Maybe. I’m not sure.”
“That’s your sister,” Speers pressed. “Her name is Jenna.”
Haley handed the phone back. “I want to go outside.”
Now tears streamed down her cheeks. She clutched the sheets, pulling them to her chin, then up over her face. Speers sat on the edge of the mattress. He wiped the tears away with the cuff of his shirt, turning it so that his cuff links wouldn’t scratch her face.
He thought of his elderly neighbor back in Georgetown, Mrs. Tenningclaus, and her late husband who had suffered from dementia in the months before he died. In the early days, before he had to be confined to a facility that was skilled at keeping forgetful patients safe, Speers had seen him get so frustrated over his lack of memory that he was verbally abusive. Sometimes he would cry. Other times he would throw things. Once, he had hit his wife in the forehead with an ashtray.
Until he had seen Mr. Tenningclaus’ slow, cruel deterioration, death by fire had been Speers’ biggest fear. Now it wasn’t even close. His fear was not knowing who he was anymore. The thought was terrifying. It seemed worse than death. Like not existing at all. Seeing Ellis like this was unbearable. Was she still in there?
*
Speers went to a print shop near the University of Washington, where he personally scanned every page of the Nathan Drucker manuscript, as well as a set of handwritten notes he had retrieved from Ellis’ backpack. He then uploaded them to the mission cloud and ordered Carver to read them right away. Ellis couldn’t tell him what had led her to hop on a plane bound for Seattle to visit Ms. Borst, but he had a feeling that it had something to do with Drucker’s research.
Now he sat in a corner of the hospital cafeteria with his ailing ankle propped up on an opposing chair. He ate from two heaping plates of Jello while reviewing the Vashon crime scene photographs that he had downloaded to his tablet computer.
He clipped a facial photograph of the dead perp who had been found underneath Borst’s suspended body. Then he uploaded it to a secure site where Arunus Roth could access it, tapping out a short message: Give this creep a facial.
“Facial” was short for 3D Facial Recognition System, an invaluable intelligence tool that had first been developed by researchers at Technion, the oldest technology university in Israel, and had since been improved with the help of certain companies in Silicon Valley. He followed with photographic copies of the passports belonging to the two perps’, which he assumed were false. Finishing the image gallery was a pic of the tattoo on the perp’s shoulder, as the IC possessed a separate database that cross-indexed profiles with tattoos and birthmarks.
The most important image — those of two octagons that looked, to Speers’ eyes, identical to those found in the D.C., Rome and London murders — he uploaded for Carver’s eyes only. Gory as it was, he also sent Carver a video clip of Ms. Borst suspended by her wrists.
Carver continued to amaze him. Within the first two minutes of studying Senator Preston’s wounds — the ruined wrists, the dislocated shoulders, the gashes across his front — Carver had correctly surmised the precise method of torture. And here, in full color, was absolute proof.
He did not have time to send Carver a qualifying statement. His phone announced the arrival of Chad Fordham, who was, at this very moment, waiting for him in the lobby. Having eaten every morsel of the Mediterranean pizza he had ordered, Speers left the tray on the table and made his way toward the lobby.
The FBI director looked cold and pale and his head was drenched from drizzle. Fordham was only in his mid- 50s, but he maintained a “natural bald” look — the sides and back of his head were unshaven — that pegged him as a man from a different era.
Speers extended his hand. “Appreciate you coming.”
“How is she?” Fordham asked.
“Too banged up to tell me what led her here in the first place.”
“Are these the a-holes that did the senator?”
Speers spoke in an elevated whisper. “We don’t know. But even if they are, they can’t also be the people who killed Gish. There are more bad guys out there.”
“Still can’t rule out Mary Borst as a person of interest.”