The Fellowship Read Free Page A

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