Jack McClellan stood from his post in the foyer. “Morning, director,” McClellan said as Speers took his coat off and hung it on the rack behind the door.
“Evening, Jack. The girls up yet?”
McClellan nodded. “Jenna’s always up. She’s going stir crazy. Can’t blame her, I guess. After Haley’s little Mayflower stunt, we’ve really had this little place on lockdown. I’ve got people in the backyard, in the kitchen and in the hallway between their bedrooms. No closed doors allowed.”
“You’ve been spooning them at night too?”
“Everything but,” McClellan grinned.
“And Haley?”
McClellan furrowed his brow. “Quiet. Real quiet. She’s up, though. I heard Jenna bring her some tea a little while ago.”
Speers slapped McClellan on the shoulder. “Unless something changes, we can all go home in about 24 hours.”
“Good. Haley’s down the hall, second door.”
As McClellan had indicated, Speers found the door to the bedroom ajar. Ellis was sitting in a rocking chair, sipping tea and gazing out into the backyard. She wore black leggings and a gray wool sweater that the secret service had brought from the apartment she shared with Jenna. A Bible and a pair of rosary beads rested on the table next to her.
Speers shut the door behind him. “How’s your head?”
“Numb.”
He sat down on the edge of the bed and looked around at the room furnishings. The bedspread, lamps and dresser had all been purchased decades ago, but they weren’t what anyone would call classic. “Jeeze,” he said. “You think this stuff would even sell at a yard sale?”
She sighed, but still did not look at him, and then took a long sip of tea. “What do you want, Julian?”
“To tell you that it’s over. Wolf and Lang are dead.”
Another long pause. She drew one leg up, resting the heel against the edge of the rocking chair. “And the ossuary?”
“En route to the Vatican as we speak.”
Speers frowned. He wasn’t expecting a high-five, but he resented the lack of any response. Maybe the concussion was worse than they had thought. Maybe he needed to have another neurologist check her out.
“Not that you asked, but Blake is all right, by the way. It’s just a matter of getting him home now.”
“I’m glad,” she said after a pause. “Is that it?”
“We also got Preston’s killers. You can thank Blake for that.”
No smile. No reaction.
Ellis set her tea down. “You could have called to tell me all this. Why are you here?”
He pulled a grape lollipop from his pocket, unwrapped it and slid it between his cheek and gum. Screw his stomach ache. He needed a sugar fix.
“I need to know if you’ve remembered anything else about Seattle.”
Her answer was quick. “No.”
“How did it go with the shrink?”
Ellis turned to face him for the first time. “It’s personal, Julian.”
“Obviously, I want to respect your personal boundaries. But this is mission critical.”
She returned her gaze back to the window. “Mission’s over, Julian. You said as much.”
“Your mission is over. You’re right about that. But Operation Crossbow isn’t. Adrian Zhu is still out there, and my people have to find him.”
“Really? From what I can tell, your intel about him working on military projects was bogus. His passion is obviously elsewhere.”
“The situation has evolved, I’ll give you that. But we believe Zhu may be with Mary Borst. She’s still missing. What if she’s being held against her will? If you know anything, now’s the time.”
The hypnotism had indeed worked. The psychologist had been able to take Ellis back to that moment on Vashon Island. She had been on the ground, banged up and bloodied. Vera Borst had been swinging over her, hanging by a rope, suspended by her wrists, slowly bleeding to death from an array of small incisions to her torso. So much blood. But she had still been conscious. She knew she was dying. She had a message. Mary, she had said. The voice had been soft and earnest, as if whispered by a dying angel.
Mary. My daughter. The virgin. They know. It’s her they’re looking for.
Who knows?
The Black Order. And those afraid of the Rule of Light will search the Earth for me. As it was in the time of Herod, it will be again. Many innocents will die.
Herod? Who, King Herod? I don’t understand.
Mary will carry the child. You must protect them. You must protect the child. The codeword. Shepherd with threes.
What followed next — a spoken 32-digit string of letters and numbers that Ellis had recounted under hypnosis — had been even more baffling. Eight sets of four characters. The shrink had copied the string onto a sheet of paper for her, but oddly, Ellis found that she had no need for it. She could recite the sequence from memory, as if she had known it all along. It was crazy. Ellis couldn’t even memorize phone numbers.
And then last night, she had woken suddenly at 3 am with the realization. She knew what it was. An IP address.
She had switched on her computer and typed the sequence into a web browser. When a password prompt appeared, she had entered the codeword Vera Borst had given her. Shepherd with threes. When it didn’t work, she tried a few variations. All caps, all lowercase, with and without spaces. Finally it hit her — Sh3ph3rd. Boom. She was in.
The resulting screen was all white except for the sign of the Chi-Rho and two lines of simple black webtext. The Rule of Light Begins 6-28. Check back for further instructions.
Now Speers’ voice broke through. “You all right?” He was standing in front of her now. “You’re not taking your meds, are you?”
“I’d like to be alone.”
“Haley, I know this took a toll on you. And I’m very grateful for that. But if you remembered anything that might help us find her, no matter how painful…”
The words seemed to stick to the top of Ellis’ mouth. “Mary Borst doesn’t want to be found, Julian.”
“You do know something, don’t you?”
“What we all know is that she got on that plane to Rome by herself. We saw the security camera footage. I’d say that’s proof she didn’t go under duress. I think we should just pretend that she died in that fire, like we thought in the first place.”
“Don’t tell me you actually believe she’s — ”
“That doesn’t matter. People are going to be gunning for her. They’re going to be gunning for that child. If you bring her in, you’re just making their job easier. You won’t be able to protect them. Do you really want to be responsible for that?”
The hum of Speers’ phone interrupted their conversation. It was a text message from Arunus Roth. He turned his back for a moment to read it: Carver never showed at the extraction point. Please advise.
Piazza di Spagna
The hotel elevator climbed past the second floor en route to the 10th. He had come in through the service entrance, avoiding the lobby altogether. Coming back here was insane, Carver knew. As a rule, he never returned to the roost after an operation was finished. Even when there didn’t appear to be survivors, he assumed they were out there, like roaches after a nuclear winter. They always wanted their pound of flesh. They wanted any semblance of payback they could get.
His phone rang. It was Speers.
“You missed the rendezvous,” he complained over the spotty connection. “The chopper pilot says he can’t wait any longer. Are you close?”
“You should already know the answer to that.”
Hadn’t they triangulated his phone location to the hotel near the Spanish Steps? And as for Nico, hadn’t they already checked the location of the RFID chip in his arm?
After all, Nico was the only reason he had returned.
He had not answered the room phone in nearly two hours. Nor was he answering either of the two stolen phones he had hacked into. Carver knew because he had tried them all endlessly. Fearing the worst, he had logged into the mission cloud to get a location on the chip. It was still here, within the hotel.