Free The Fellowship by William Tyree Page A

Fordham a moment to form a response . “Sorry, Julian. I never guessed this would go through you personally.”
    “ Just tell me what you’re looking for.”
    “ Well, everything, frankly. The president requested Carver’s involvement, not me. I want to know more about who I’m working with.”
    Speers wasn’t about to lay everything on the table. Besides, Carver’s most interesting work had been deliberately omitted from the record. “You called me last year asking who the hell he was. You remember what I told you?”
    He heard Fordham take a sip of something hot before speaking. “You said if I needed someone to parachute into a mountain fortress in the middle of the night to get somebody important, then Carver would be the guy.”
    “ That’s right. And here’s what I should have said – if you needed someone to figure out that the target was there in the first place, then Carver would also be the guy. You remember two years ago when the CIA foiled an Allied Jihad plot to kidnap that drone pilot out in Nevada?”
    “Don’t tell me that – ”
    “ Yes, that was Carver’s operation. What else?”
    “ There’s a rumor that he’s in trouble with the House Committee on Domestic Intelligence.”
    “Then you already know he’s protecting Nico Gold. It’s not what I’d do, but at least Carver’s loyal, which is more than I can say for most people.”
    “And that’s all there is to it?”
    “That’s right. He’s protecting an asset. That’s it.”
    Fordham thanked Speers for his time and hung up. Speers had hunch that Fordham wasn’t the type to be satisfied that quickly, though. He’d find a way into Carver’s file with or without permission. Speers unwrapped a grape lollipop and decided he better see if anything needed editing.
    He navi gated to Carver’s dossier and began browsing through it, not quite sure what he was looking for. He cracked the lollipop between his molars, chewing it as casually as gum although it sounded like he was crushing rocks.
    After college, Carver applied for the CIA’s clandestine service. But the evaluating psychiatrist recommended him for the Joint Strike Operations Command (JSOC) – a paramilitary spy, capture and kill force rolled into one.
    Pulling up the results of Carver’s initial background check, he saw a handful of unpaid parking tickets that had shown up on his initial federal background check. Other than that, it looked like he had never broken the law. The polygraph hadn’t budged when he’d claimed that he had never had drugs or alcohol. Heck, he’d never even had coffee. He had grown up in a small Mormon town in northern Arizona. When the examiner asked if he was religious, he answered no. When asked if he believed in God, he’d said yes.
    Back then he had listed his primary hobby as “hunting.” That figured. He had 5,000 square miles of Arizona’s White Mountains as his backyard. His father had taught him how to stalk game in the woods and be stealthy enough to kill an antelope with a bow & arrow. The psychiatrist asked him how many of his kills he had eaten over the years. The point of the question had been to discover whether Carver valued animal life, or whether he felt entitled to kill for sheer enjoyment. A typical response would have been, “We eat everything we kill.” Carver’s response was off the charts: “Fourteen deer, 12 elk, 151 ducks, 3 antelope, 29 geese.” He remembered every single one from the time he was nine years old. That was the super-autobiographical memory at work.
    Aside from being an expert marksman , he had a high tolerance for risk, did not suffer from nightmares, and was just athletic enough to be dangerous.
    Within five years of Carver’s joining JSOC, his unit became extremely active in Afghanistan as the war on terror switched into high gear. His unit would go out after a bad guy virtually every night. As the months and years went on, they had filled secret prisons and cemeteries with their