The Fellowship (2 page)

Rome

The Range Rover’s velocity took Adrian Zhu’s breath away. He hung on as the vehicle
weaved in and out of the rows of headlights racing toward the suburbs. Zhu cast a sideways glance at Lars. Although the two men had met numerous times during Lars’ trips to China, he hardly recognized him tonight. The security specialist had dyed his hair black and styled it into a short, fashionable cut. He was clean-shaven now, and he had gotten some sun on his face. He could have easily passed for a local.

He didn’t know what title Lars held in the organization, or
how he had joined. He only knew that the Shepherd himself had entrusted Lars to deliver him safely.

A few minutes later
, Lars swerved the Range Rover abruptly into the parking garage of a large hotel. His black shirtsleeves had receded, revealing a set of thick, veiny forearms.

“The
Shepherd is here?” Zhu said.

Lars
didn’t answer. He took a ticket at the parking gate, then drove quickly up the second-floor r
a
mp, then the third, and finally to the fourth, where there were no other cars. He pulled into the middle of the otherwise empty row and kept the vehicle idling.

He
activated a small silver device about the size of a credit card and pointed it directly at Zhu. A blur of yellow numbers began flashing on the device screen. It seemed to be scanning frequencies. Some type of bug detector, Zhu figured. It seemed that Lars was a cautious man. He wanted to make sure Zhu wasn’t wired.

The German’s serious, black eyes rolled up at Zhu. “What’s in your pocket?”

Zhu pulled out his phone. He turned it this way and that in his hand, as if to demonstrate its innocuousness.

“
Not good,” Lars said. “They can track our location with it. Pull the battery out.”

“Okay, but can I keep the phone for later? All my pictures and stuff are on it.”

“No
.” He pointed to a white handkerchief neatly folded into a cup holder. “And wipe your fingerprints off the door panel and anything else you touched.”

Zhu wasn’t used to being talked to like this.
Even his customers within the Chinese government treated him like a prince. “What’s the point?” he said. “Spencer’s blood is already all over the grill.”

“Just do as I say
, and you will survive.” He pulled a duffel bag from the back seat and tossed it into Zhu’s lap. “Then change clothes. I have a motorcycle waiting on the other side of the garage.”

Zhu unzipped the bag and found a pair of black jeans, a motorcycle helmet,
a white V-neck T-shirt and blue Superga sneakers. He picked up the helmet and flipped down the visor. It was painted black.

“
The Shepherd is in a secret location,” Lars said, explaining the blackout visor. “Trust me. A helmet is more comfortable than a blindfold.”

Then
Zhu saw them. Over Lars’ shoulder, a black Mini Cooper with tinted windows pulled up abruptly. There would have been nothing particularly threatening about such a small car, except that the cockeyed parking job made it clear that they didn’t intend to stay long. The passenger-side window lowered.

The bioengineer’s eyes suddenly expanded into coin-size saucers.  Before Lars could turn to see what had frightened his passenger, the Range Rover’
s driver side was taking automatic gunfire. The side windows were instantly crystallized. Zhu ducked for cover.

National Counterterrorism Center

Carver stood
in a darkened conference room, pointing a laser dot at a magnified surveillance photo. His jet-black hair – a gentleman’s cut that was closely cropped around the sides, but short on top – was still damp with perspiration. The speed with which Crossbow had spun out of control had stunned him. He rubbed his unshaven chin with the back of his hand and looked at the five agency suits sitting around the conference table. The briefing had been planned as a simple FYI describing the ground game in Rome. Now it was damage control.

“The objective of Operation Crossbow,” he
started, “is to gain visibility into what military projects this man is working on. His name is Adrian Zhu.”

He drank from a water bottle as the bigwigs in the room got a good look. The snapshot Callahan had
taken at the opera showed Zhu with longish black curly hair, a small, angular face and black plastic designer eyeglasses.

“
Zhu is considered one of the world’s most brilliant bioengineers,” Carver said. “He was born in Boston to first-generation Chinese immigrants. After dropping out of MIT, he hooked up with a business partner, Spencer Griffin, and started a biotech firm in Boston called
LifeEmberz. Who here has heard of them?”

None of the suits raised their hands.

“You wouldn’t have. In the early years, they worked in the shadows using private funds. But let me ask another question. Who here has had their genome decoded in the last year?”

Three out of the five people
in the room raised their hands.

“LifeEmberz
had a hand in making that possible. Before they tackled it, this was something that only the super-rich could afford to do. It cost about a hundred thousand dollars per person, and even then, the evidence of whether you were really carrying a Parkinson’s gene, or a cancer gene, was pretty iffy. Within four years, LifeEmberz and its partners advanced the technology so much that the basic testing kits were being sold in over the counter.”

“Who funded them?” The voice belonged to Claire Shipmont, the agency’s deputy director. Like most everyone in the room, this was her first exposure to Operation Crossbow. She was a highly regarded career fed who, it was rumored, would soon be tapped to run Homeland Security.

“Good question. They were funded by an anonymous group that was so protective of its privacy that they actually delivered the seed money in cash. 
God knows what kind of kickback they got when LifeEmberz got bored of the genome business.”

Carver advanced to the next slide, which showed a silent video of Adrian Zhu standing over
a mummified body.

“This was taken
in Egypt. After LifeEmberz sold their genome decoding technology to a medical testing company, they used the money to do whatever interested them. One project had them utilizing the mitochondrial DNA found within hair samples to do what Zhu called ‘extreme paleo-DNA’ work. He was interested in exhuming dead bodies, preferably of people who had been dead for more than 300 years, and using the DNA within hair samples to find out things about them. For example, eye color, skin pigment, even defects that might have caused their deaths.”

”And people paid them for this?”
Shipmont said.

“
We don’t know. LifeEmberz never filed another U.S. tax return.”

“They closed down?”

“I’m getting to that.” Carver clicked to the next video clip, which showed Adrian Zhu, wearing a biohazard suit, working in a spotless lab. “Zhu had an idea that if LifeEmberz could exhume the body of one of your ancestors – a grandparent, for example – and extract mitochondrial DNA from it, they might be able to then take your embryonic stem cells and in a lab environment, create fertilized eggs that were just like your ancestors, but genetically superior.”

“And that
freaked people out,”
another voice said. Julian Speers, the Director of National Intelligence, had slipped into the back of the room. Speers had been the White House chief of staff under the previous administration before current president Eva Hudson offered him the role as her intelligence czar.

The move had been a controversial one.
Speers was a superb operational manager, but he had no prior intelligence experience.
Although the appointment had raised a lot of eyebrows, Speers was only the latest in a line of White House chiefs to head up a federal agency. Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff, James Baker, had gone on to become secretary of the treasury, and later, secretary of state. Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, Leon Panetta, had been appointed CIA director and later, secretary of defense. The theory was that operational expertise, coupled with a lack of specialty knowledge, could actually be an advantage. They were, by nature, forced to make decisions based on the big picture.   

But heading up the
ODNI was an enormous job, and one that even Carver didn’t know if his friend was up for. Speers was now a cabinet member with oversight of the entire intelligence community, including the CIA, FBI, NSA, Homeland Security and other agencies.

“Glad you could make it,” Carver said. “And you’re right, of course. LifeEmberz threw them
selves into all kinds of controversy. At one point they were getting a couple hundred death threats a week. Mr. Zhu packed his company up and moved their offices to Beijing.”

“Why China?” Shipmont said.

“Besides a hot economy?  Forty-two percent of the population is agnostic or atheist, and about 30 percent subscribe to folk religions, like Taoism. That equated to a lot less moral judgment about his research.”

Speers
stood in the back of the room, churning his right hand in a circular motion to get Carver to hurry up.

“Fast forw
ard a couple of years,” Carver continued. “The company’s assets in the U.S. were frozen due to tax delinquency, and they needed money. So they accepted a commission from the Chinese government to improve child nutrition in rural areas. They got way more than they bargained for. LifeEmberz created a new breed of supercattle, achieved by leveraging a blend of mitochondrial DNA and nuclear DNA, and using what Zhu calls extreme cloning techniques. In the past week, they’ve told audiences at Oxford, University of Edinburgh and Sapienza University that they’ve reduced the per-animal cloning process to less than a week.”

“
Impressive,” Shipmont remarked without enthusiasm. “But from a security standpoint, I still don’t know why we care about this guy.”

Carver dropped his laser pointer. “We think the
Chinese government commissioned LifeEmberz to work on military programs. We fear at least one might be a bioweapon. And we think another involves cloning, uh, supersoldiers.”

The room got quiet.
The DD chuckled. “As in
Attack of the Clones
?” she said, referencing the Star Wars storyline.

Speers stepped forward.
“That’s right. Supersoldiers. A clone army. Go ahead and laugh, but I know people here in Washington who have discussed it with a straight face.”

“
But it’s been difficult to get to Zhu,” Carver said. “So when we heard that LifeEmberz was going on the lecture circuit, we decided to use the opportunity to get close to him.”

The DD
leaned forward. “Get close to him?” she said. “Why didn’t we just hack in and plant the malware remotely?”

Oh yeah, Carver thought. For that matter, why didn’t
they just take him out with a drone strike? He was so tired of questions like this. Any operation that required an actual human on the ground was automatically questioned, and anything that could be handled via remote control from a secret government facility in the states was automatically applauded. Nobody understood that espionage was still a high-touch business. It was as much about psychology and relationships as it was technology. 

Speers scratched his salt-and-pepper goatee.  “
Blake, I think Claire’s question is a reasonable one. Why did we need an operative on the ground to hack into a phone?”

“Stealth” Carver said
quickly. “Every LifeEmberz employee, including Zhu, now uses a device that’s issued by the Chinese government. If we hacked into their network to get control on one or more specific mobile accounts, it’s only a matter of minutes or hours before they detect the intrusion and start looking for us. Our solution is completely local, and allows us to reach one user at a time without the risk of getting past numerous gatekeepers. This way, the malware could theoretically go undetected for as long as he used the phone.”

“Smart,” the DD admitted. “But expensive.”

“We just got some footage of Zhu’s lecture from our contact in Rome,” Carver said. “I think you’ll find one part of the presentation very illuminating.”

The door to the back of the room opened. It was Arunus Roth, and he looked even paler than usual. He drew an imaginary line across his neck.

“Sorry, everyone,” Carver said. “We’ve gotta cut this short. Thanks for coming. I’ll reach out to each of you to reschedule.”

As the suits filed out of the room, Arunus Roth made his way to the front. “
The hit and run victim is Spencer Griffin,” he said.

Carver sat down.
“And Zhu?”

Roth shook his head. “Callahan overheard the other LifeEmberz employees saying they can’t get hold of
him. They think he might have been kidnapped.”

Carver’s blood ran cold.
If Zhu really was working on some sort of supersoldier project, or even an advanced bioweapon, there could be any number of countries that might want the secrets he had locked up inside his head.

“Well
, we know where he is, right? Maybe we should go in.”

“Slow down, bro.”

“Don’t call me bro.”

Carver looked up. Speers was standing behind the kid. He had heard the entire thing. “You’re asking for the go ahead to
extract Zhu?”

“Think about it. His employees are convinced he’s been kidnapped. If we could find him, we could bring him back to the U.S. for his own safety. And in the process, of course, have a chat or two
about the work he’s been doing.” 

“
I was trying to tell you,” Roth said, “That’s not possible now. The phone, as far as we can tell, traveled very quickly three kilometers away. Zhu either went underground, or into something like an elevator or parking facility, or he pulled the battery out. The GPS just stopped chirping.” 

“So we’re completely blind,” Carver snapped.

“Yes.”

“Where the hell was Callahan?”

It wasn’t that the field operative was at fault, Carver knew. He wasn’t even supposed to tail him – the malware in his phone was supposed to keep tabs on him. It was just that Carver wished it had been him there in Rome. He was jealous. This remote operations consulting stuff wasn’t him. He had been born to be out in the wild, not cooped up here, thousands of miles from the action.