Free The Fellowship by William Tyree Page B

trophies.
    Eventually JSOC created an intelligence support branch, which was initially staffed by CIA. Carver’s commander reassigned him. They needed a mind like his in the command center. By all accounts he was great in his new role, but he hated it. He wanted to be out where the action was.
    During the Hatch administration, when Speers had begun to suspect that something fishy was going on with the Pentagon’s relationship with Ulysses USA, he had gone to the CIA Director and asked him who their best guy was. Someone that was as strong in intelligence as he was in execution. Blake Carver’s name had been the first out of his mouth.
    What followed was deliberately absent from the file. He had resigned from the CIA so that he would be accountable only to Speers. There was no more history.  
    Speers scrolled back up through the dossier. He stopped at the description of Carver’s cognitive disorder. It concerned him. In the wrong hands, it could leave Carver vulnerable. Due to enhanced episodic memory, most people with hyperthymesia spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about their past. They also have an amazing capacity to recall personal events or trivial details, including sensory details such as smells, tastes and sounds. Mr. Carver appears to have the rare ability to turn off “retrieval mode” so that he can focus on the present. He should, however, have regular neurological examinations to monitor the functions in his frontal cortex. Should he experience highly violent scenarios in the line of duty, for example, losing the ability to control his recall abilities could be far more crippling than a person with a normal prefrontal cortex.
    Speers highlighted the entire diagnosis. Then he deleted it.
     
     
     

Somewhere Over the Atlantic
     
    With a phone call, Speers had arranged a private charter leaving immediately from Reagan National Airport.  If they had to go to London, at least they were aboard a fast plane. The Gulfstream IV was capable of speeds just short of Mach 1, shortening the flight time to a little over five hours. That was way better than the winged whales Carver was accustomed to flying. With a few rare exceptions, his modus operandi had been hitching rides on military transport planes that happened to be heading his way.  But in this case, he felt the cost of the charter – a couple hundred thousand dollars – was worth it.  The trail was growing colder by the second.
    As the Gulfstream cruised at 28,000 feet, Haley Ellis sat in a cream-colored leather chair facing his. She and Carver had said little to each other since taking off. They were both busy digesting a steady feed of public and classified information about the victims.
    There was nothing obvious to suggest that Preston or Gish had ever met. The fact that they were both publicly elected officials from Western countries seemed to be just about the only thing they had in common. Carver was confident they would find a common link, but how long would that take? More than anything, it was the ensuing fire that puzzled him. How and why had it been started? The killers had placed a calling card in Preston’s mouth. Obviously some sort of message. Why would they then burn the place up?
    He composed a text message and fired it off to Julian: anyone claimed responsibility? Speers’ reply: nope. Playing hard to get.
    Now he received a stream of information from Arunus Roth about the senator’s executive assistant, Mary Borst.  She was 26 years old. She held a Dutch passport, having been born in Amsterdam to a prominent politician named Vera Borst. Graduated with honors from NYU, where she had studied political science. Immediately after graduation she had worked as a volunteer on Preston’s reelection campaign, and had subsequently landed a job as a staff assistant in his D.C. office, where she had answered phones and staffed the front desk. In three years, she had worked her way up to an aide position, and then officer manager,