The Fellowship Read Free

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