Epilogue
Maternity Ward
Olympia, Washington
9 Months Later
Carver
stood at the front desk, waiting for the station nurse to get off the phone. He caught sight of himself in the reflection of a glass cabinet. He was in need of a shave. His suit stank of Chinese food, and the shower he had taken this morning hadn’t helped.
He had been on the road for 17 days straight without a break.
All the leads had been weak, but he was in no position to ignore them. They were all he had now. He had rarely seen anyone disappear so completely.
Somewhere down the hall, some guy was yelling.
“
Go hard, honey, go hard
!” The woman’s rhythmic grunting reminded him of all the female tennis players on TV.
The station nurse hung up and looked up at him. The weariness in her eyes told him she’d been working a long shift. “I’ll need to see ID first.”
He handed it to her. She took it and laid it on the photocopy machine, closed the lid and pressed the SCAN button. Her fingernails were two inches long. He hoped she didn’t touch any patients with those claws.
“Now what can I do for you?” She said as she handed his identification back to him.
Carver placed both photographs on the counter.
“Looking for a fugitive,” he said. “The man’s name is Adrian Zhu, but he could be going by another name. He may be with a woman. Her name is Mary Borst. And again, probably using an alias.”
The station nurse hovered over the two photographs, putting her finger on Mary Borst’s face. “When was she due?”
“Could be anytime. If the baby was premature, she could have been here weeks ago.”
The nurse shook her head. “I’ll tell you the same thing as I told the last guy. I haven’t seen them.”
Carver felt his face flush. “Last guy?”
“You’re the second person this week to ask about these two. The last guy showed me the same pictures, except he said nothing about the one guy being a fugitive. Said some bad people were looking for them. Said they were in danger.”
And those afraid of the Rule of Light will search the Earth for me. As it was in the time of Herod, it will be again. Many innocents will die.
Carver swallowed hard. His mind was tap dancing. “I’ll need to report this. What was the guy’s name?”
“If you don’t know already, maybe you’re not supposed to know.”
“Was he a fed, like me?”
She hedged, drumming her nails on the counter. Click-click-click-click-click.
“Please.” He glanced at her name tag. “Wanda? I have to find the scheduler who made this mistake. You don’t really want two or three more people like me coming in and wasting your time, do you?”
She shrugged. “I guess it’d be all right.”
She went to the file cabinet and opened it. She was back in a minute with a folder full of photocopied identification cards. She flipped through the paper, talking to herself as she tried to remember the exact date.
“Ah-hah,” she finally said. “Here is your mystery man.”
She placed the paper flat and turned it so Carver could see. He bent down. The name on the ID was Sean O’Rourke. His badge was FBI.
Only he wasn’t O’Rourke. He wasn’t FBI. And he was no longer assigned to Operation Crossbow.
The man in the photo was Father Thomas Callahan.
†
AUTHOR’S NOTES
Now for a bit of historical housekeeping. You might be surprised to learn that a number of the shadowy organizations in this book, and more than a few of the events, are based on reality.
For example, the Nazi obsession with Christian antiquities and the occult was not something dreamed up for the
Indiana Jones
movies, nor for the sake of this book. Seven decades have passed since my grandfather, serving with the 70
th
armored infantry battalion, marched into Germany to end the nightmare of Nazism. And yet one of the lingering mysteries of this dark era in human history is why Himmler, who devoted considerable time to destroying the church despite being raised Catholic, poured so many wartime resources into the pursuit of religious relics.
Nothing I’ve written in
The Fellowship
will answer that question, as it is a work of fiction. But during my research, I discovered that the truth about many of the people and objects mentioned in this book are far stranger than anything I could have imagined.
In the book, Sebastian Wolf is enrolled at the Reich School, which is where the real children of the Nazi super elite such as Martin Bormann Jr., son of Hitler’s private secretary, were groomed for leadership. Incidentally, although Bormann Jr. became a priest and outspoken critic of the Nazi regime until his death in 2013, I want to make clear that none of the characters in the book are actually based on him. For those interested in learning more, I found the documentary series
Hitler’s Children
to be an excellent source of interviews with former students.
The organization that Wolf is recruited into, the
Ahnenerbe
, was also real. While routinely publishing an academic journal, anthropological expeditions to Tibet, Antarctica and the Middle East sought to find evidence that virtually all great civilizations were somehow the result of ancient Nordic or Germanic influence. The collection of artifacts was seen as critical to this effort.
Now here’s where it gets really weird. In 1940, Heinrich Himmler led a delegation to Spain’s
Montserrat Abbey in hopes that he would find the Holy Grail that Jesus Christ used during the last supper. Himmler believed that he had found a clue to the relic’s whereabouts from the Richard Wagner opera
Parsifal
, which hinted at the grail’s location in a castle in the Pyrenees, and had first been performed in nearby Barcelona. According to interviews of a German-speaking monk in
The Desecrated Abbey
, by Montserrat Rico Góngora, Himmler believed that the Grail would give the German army supernatural powers that would win the war.
While Himmler never found the Holy Grail, he had already managed to get his hands on another mystical object – the so-called Spear of Destiny. Also known as the Holy Lance, the spear
was believed to have been used by Longinus, the partially blind centurion, to pierce Jesus’ side at the crucifixion. Centuries later, Roman Emporer Constantine believed that carrying this lance into battle rendered his army invincible. As legend has it, the spear was subsequently possessed by the Holy Roman Empire during its reign in what is now Germany and used in coronation ceremonies. Although it was moved to Vienna in 1796, Germany eventually reclaimed the prize, along with the crown jewels, during its annexation of Austria in 1938. As we all know, possessing the lance didn’t win the war for Germany. The relic remained in the Bavarian town of Nuremburg until it was found by the invading American army in 1945 and returned to Vienna, where it can be seen today.
In
The Fellowship
, Himmler travels to occupied Paris in search of the Holy Ossuary. A shootout ensues inside Notre Dame Cathedral, which purports to hold many holy relics, including reeds from the Crown of Thorns and nails from the True Cross.
Anyone visiting Notre Dame today might be shocked to learn that an actual gun battle occurred there in 1944, and was even caught on film. The incident started when French General
De Gaulle led his men and thousands of civilians to reclaim Notre Dame from German hands. The shocking footage shows sniper fire raining down on the general and his freedom fighters in the square right in front of the cathedral. According to BBC accounts, the assault raged inside Notre Dame as well. Although the general escaped unharmed, many others weren’t so lucky. For the curious, you won’t find anything on this in the church’s little gift shop, so you’ll have to find the footage online or in a library.
So did the Nazis really believe that possessing these mystical antiquities and others would lead to a German victory? After a great deal of research, my feeling is that Himmler, for one, really did believe it. His belief in mysticism, the occult and reincarnation is
well-documented. His personal masseuse, Felix Kersten, wrote in his memoirs that Himmler believed himself to be the reincarnation of a dead German king.
The Fellowship
chapter in which Wolf is taken to the secret crypt containing the relocated bodies of ancient and contemporary German rulers, is closely based on fact. Among the most curious of the occupying American army’s finds was a Nazi crypt located deep within a salt mine. The crypt contained priceless Christian art, Germanic antiquities and most shocking of all – the relocated bodies of several nobles, including Frederick the Great and Frederick Wilhelm I. Among these was an empty coffin bearing Hitler’s name. A thoroughly creepy eyewitness account of this find can be
found
in the March, 1950 issue of
Life Magazine
.
Perhaps more disturbingly, Himmler also hoped to find evidence that Jesus was of Aryan descent. The mythology he attempted to create around this idea was convenient to say the least, in that it helped justify the regime’s extreme social views, including the persecution of the Jews and the destruction of the church. The first account of this concept being discussed within the Nazi inner circle can be found in
The Voice of Destruction
, written by former cabinet member Hermann Rauschning prior to the start of the war.
In
The Fellowship
, Rauschning’s book is mentioned as contraband because it really was. In it, all sorts of explosive private conversations among senior German leadership are revealed. For example, Hitler ominously says that the clergy will be made to dig their own graves, which they were, both literally and figuratively. But when someone suggests the idea of the Aryan Jesus, he is dismissive, saying, “
Do you really believe the masses will ever be Christian again? Nonsense! That tale is finished…They will replace the cross with our swastika.”
Still, Himmler continued to pursue this idea for years afterward, even throughout the war years. According to
Góngora, the belief that both Jacob and Jesus were Aryan drove him to search for the grail in Spain. Obviously, it was utter nonsense.
Moving on, it seems that the Vatican has never publicly acknowledged the existence of its intelligence agency. And yet, we have centuries of books in multiple languages detailing its activities in juicy detail. The Black Order is one of the more
well-documented Vatican espionage organizations. Olimpia Maidalchini (1591-1657), the sister-in-law of Pope Innocent X, is reported to have not only secretly controlled the pontiff, but also created The Black Order, a unit of assassins that ruthlessly destroyed the Vatican’s enemies.
Let me say for the record that modern Jesuits do all sorts of good deeds and come from all walks of life. Many are incredible teachers. However, many early Jesuits were soldiers. And although the order was originally recognized in Venice, they did not endear themselves to the city, making the Piazza San Marco the notorious epicenter of the brutal
strappado
, or rope torture.
Have I taken great liberties with all these factual nuggets? Definitely. Such is the power of
myth, and such is the nature of entertainment.
Interested in learning more about what really happened? In addition to the films, books and magazines I’ve already noted, I also strongly recommend that those interested in learning more about these subjects read
La Popessa: The Controversial Biography of Sister Pascalina, the Most Powerful Woman in Vatican History
. Also,
Jesus and the Ossuaries
, by Craig E. Evans, is a great anthropological perspective on the Holy Land. Also, the
Gnostic Gospels
, by Elaine Pagels is a terrific explainer of evolving views on resurrection throughout the ages.
Character
s
Blake Carver, intelligence operative.
Haley Ellis, intelligence operative.
Sebastian Wolf, CEO, Fellowship World Initiative.
Heinz Lang, Head of Vatican Intelligence.
Adrian Zhu, CEO, LifeEmberz.
Father Thomas Callahan
, double agent.
Nico Gold
, fugitive cybercriminal.
Nathan Drucker, journalist.
THE FEDS
Eva Hudson, President of the United States.
Julian Speers, Director of National Intelligence.
Claire Shipmont,
Deputy Director, ODNI.
Arunus Roth, associate project coordinator.
Rand Preston, senator.
Mary Borst, assistant to Senator Preston.
Chad Fordham, FBI Director.
Hank Bowers, FBI section chief.
Will Hollis, FBI special agent.
INTERNATIONAL
Seven Mansfield, MI6 operative.
Sam Prichard, MI6 operative.
Lord Nils Gish, MP, Labour Party leader.
Lars, security specialist.
Dr. Dane Mitchell, life partner to Vera Borst.
Vera Borst
, UN Undersecretary General.
Suk Kenyatta, UN envoy.
Antonio Tesla, detective, Rome Police.
Characters from the 1940s
Sebastian Wolf, Reich School cadet.
Heinz Lang, Reich School cadet.
Albert Hoppe, Reich School cadet.
Gertrude Wolf, mother of Sebastian.
Mrs. Lang, mother of Heinz.
Hans Wolf, brother of Sebastian.
THE AHNENERBE
Nagel, Commandant of Wewelsburg Castle.
Dr. Rudolph Seiler, authority on ancient Nordic society.
Bruno Fleischer, racial anthropologist.
Dr. Paul Ritter, blood researcher.
Dr. Gustav Hahn, professor of racial studies.
Hoffman, Himmler's chauffeur.
THE CLERGY
Father LeFevre, priest, Notre Dame Cathedral.
Father Leo Kruger, priest.
Dr. Enzo Marchesi, personal physician to Pope Pius XII.
Sister Klara Kohler,
secretary to Pope Pius XII.
THE SOLDIERS
Adler, soldier.
Bauer, soldier.
Kalb, soldier.
Matthias Ulrich, soldier.
Beck, Reich School drill instructor.
Zimmer, Gestapo detective.