The Prophet Motive (17 page)

Doctor Lipset swallowed audibly. Then he grew silent again, except for more huffing and puffing.

Was he thinking about his family? Tom hoped he was thinking about not eating stone crabs in prison, and meeting guys there named Bubba, or Tyrone—the kind who’d make visits to the proctologist’s office seem like pleasant memories. Tom hoped the doctor was thinking about having to sell his Lexus, and never being able to afford one again when he got out.

“Tell me this,” Doctor Lipset said. “How can I possibly trust that your employer will live up to his end of the bargain?”

Tom smiled. “He’s in a very lucrative business, and he can afford to take good care of the people who work for him. He takes damn good care of me.”

Tom stopped his vehicle beside the doctor’s car. Clicking open the passenger door, Doctor Lipset said, “If I decide I’m interested, then how do I contact you?”

“Drive the Lexus to court on Monday. Leave the car unlocked. I’ll put a flash drive with some written instructions underneath the driver’s side floor mat, then lock up for you. The password to access the disk is ‘SCRAM.’ All capitals. Got it?”

“Got it.” He stepped out, onto the pavement, began to shut the door, then changed his mind and ducked his head back inside the car’s interior. “One more question. This work I’d be doing, it’s not exactly legal is it?”

“Not exactly, but the risk of prosecution is so small there’s nothing to worry about.”

“That’s what I thought about my scheme,” Doctor Lipset said.

He shut the door.

John Richetti jammed the last of his personal belongings inside his army green duffel bag, hoisted and shouldered it, and joined the other new recruits assembling outside the men’s and women’s guest quarters. After everyone had gathered, Bob Marsh read aloud from a clipboard, assigning each new recruit to a different dormitory in the general population.

Each dorm was named after an endangered species. John was assigned to the Snail Darter.

He found his new dorm to be a near replica of the men’s guest quarters. It was the same size and shape, with the same spare furnishings, the same orderliness and cleanliness, the same lack of personal touches. And it was also occupied by one gender.

The dorm leader assigned John a bunk bed and issued him an empty green footlocker for his personal belongings. After unloading the contents of his duffel bag into the footlocker, he straightened and surveyed his surroundings.

With the rank and file members of the cult living at such close quarters, and in single sex dormitories, one elemental question nagged at him. Just when and where did these people get their freak on?

After lunch, John and his fellow recruits, under instructions from Bob Marsh, headed to the infirmary for a physical exam. In the waiting room, the group spoke in gushing tones of The Wizard and their new missions in life.

“It’s all so grand!” Kira said. “To be here! To be chosen! And yet so humbling too!”

John almost envied the new cult members. There was a kind of freedom in bondage. He’d known it as a child inside the People’s Temple, through his police service, and as a new husband and a new father. By placing yourself second, behind some great purpose, you could virtually disappear.

The receptionist handed out pens and clipboards with paper forms attached, containing a lengthy series of questions. John was surprised to find the cult asking for a detailed account of his personal and family medical history. If that wasn’t strange enough, the last form asked all about his ancestry.

He advanced to an examination room, typical of a general practitioner’s office. The cushioned examination table—and his own, twitching right eyelid—reminded him of the heavy sleep debt he owed himself. He hopped up on the table, rustling the crisp paper lining, and laid down on his back, hoping for forty winks. But he’d barely closed his eyes when the door opened and a female voice told him to sit up.

A young nurse in uniform whites stood beside him. He recognized her immediately as that topless redhead in flowered panties he’d met briefly in Tom Mahorn’s apartment, which was directly above them now. Karen was her name. She’d snubbed him. Snubbed him in regard to a possible three-way with her and Tom.

But Karen didn’t seem to recognize him. With professional detachment, she ordered him off the table and into a plastic chair, brandished a tourniquet and a needle, and drew four test tubes of blood from his right arm.

Another woman entered minutes after Karen left. She wore a white lab coat and introduced herself as Doctor Rebecca Fosse. She had pale skin and mousy hair and hardly seemed old enough to be an intern, but John wasn’t about to challenge her credentials.

Doctor Fosse commenced a standard physical exam. She planted her cold stethoscope in several spots, front and back. Her hands grazed his armpits and his neck and elsewhere, checking for outsized lymph nodes, he figured. She had him unbuckle his blue jeans and expose himself. She gripped him and had him cough. She bent him over and poked at his prostate with a condom-covered index finger. Then she handed him a clear plastic cup.

“Urine sample, please. Bathroom’s down the hall.”

When John emerged from the bathroom, half-filled cup in hand, Dr. Fosse stood a few feet away, locking up a supply closet.

“Here’s your sample,” he said, handing over the plastic cup of pale yellow liquid. To his surprise, the doctor handed him a second plastic container.

“Now I need a sperm sample.”

“Beg your pardon?”

“I need you to ejaculate into this container.”

“Why?”

“We need to know whether it’s good enough.”

“Good enough for what?”

“Good enough for safe-keeping.” John could only stare back. Doctor Fosse huffed with mild exasperation. “You know about the impending environmental holocaust, don’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, if we fail to prevent it from happening, The Wizard has learned that nearly all of the surviving men and women on this Earth will become sterile. So we’re preparing to help the survivors repopulate the planet through in vitro fertilization. We’ve begun collecting healthy sperm from the males and healthy eggs from the women. We also collect blood from everyone to ensure the survivors will have an untainted supply available.”

“Uh-huh,” he said. “Sounds . . . perfectly reasonable.”

“Someone should’ve told you this already.”

“Guess they forgot,” he said. “So how much of my sperm do you want anyway?”

Doctor Fosse laughed. “A lot. That’s why, from now on, The Wizard is going to regulate how often you have sex.”

“You’re kidding me, right?”

“No, I’m not.”

“Does he regulate everyone’s sex life?”

“Yes, you see, frequent ejaculation decreases the quality of the semen. So sex has to be rationed. It’s only permitted in one building here in the complex. We call it the Love Motel. You check in for a matter of hours, not days. But it’s very hard to get a reservation.”

“So you collect semen every day from all the men?”

“From all the men with good sperm, and only every other day, because a day of abstinence increases the quality.” She gripped his upper right arm and gently led him back toward the bathroom.

“What do you do with it, once you collect it?”

“We chill it in metal containers to minus three hundred and twenty degrees Fahrenheit. Then we ship it to a secret location beneath a mountain in Colorado, where it’ll be protected from the holocaust.” She opened the bathroom door. “Wash your hands and penis first with the sterilizing soap provided. Oh, and by the way, you’ll find some materials in the drawer beneath the sink to help you masturbate.”

John shut the bathroom door behind him. He felt a bit light-headed, but didn’t think it was only from loss of blood.

Collecting eggs and sperm and blood? Storing it beneath a mountain in Colorado? How much had they collected by now?

He opened the drawer, expecting to find a few old Playboy magazines. Instead, a scattered pile of snapshots lay before him. He picked up a handful of them and formed a small stack. The people in the shots were nude or semi-nude. The top photo, of three naked female dancers, had been taken outdoors. In the background, he recognized a rock formation, a unique outcropping on the farm. These nude people were Earthbound members.

In another photo, a voluptuous woman he recognized as working in the dining hall lounged naked in a tree-strung hammock. In the next photo, she stood with her ample buttocks to the camera, her head hanging upside down between her legs, hands spreading her cheeks wide.

Leafing through more photos, he chanced upon Karen, the nurse. Nude, but for a thin gold chain around her waist, she smiled, facing the camera, while the man sitting beneath her on a couch penetrated her vagina with a fat dick.

John dropped the photographs back inside the drawer and closed it with a shove. He unbuckled his blue jeans and went to work on his sperm sample. He envisioned Marilyn as he’d seen her recently, standing nude, knee-deep in the pond. As he got hard he transformed her into his ex-wife, Teresa. Morning sunshine streamed in through cracks in the curtains of their old bedroom. Teresa hovered above him, riding him slowly, her long black hair flowing with each rhythmic arching of her back. She told him in a husky voice: “I’ve missed this so much.”

“Why draw so much blood?” Marilyn asked Doctor Fosse. The nurse had taken four vials. “I don’t understand.”

The doctor commenced with the physical examination. “We have several tests to run. We have to ensure you aren’t carrying any diseases, and—”

“Diseases?” Marilyn asked. “For what purpose? The general protection of the community?”

“For one thing, we need to know if your eggs are healthy.”

“Why?” She felt a sharp pang in the pit of her stomach.

Doctor Fosse told her about the cult’s practice of collecting and storing human blood, male sperm, and female eggs. Marilyn grew queasy.

With the cold end of her stethoscope, Doctor Fosse chilled a spot of skin in the center of Marilyn’s back. “Breathe deep.”

Marilyn did. Meanwhile, she tried to fathom the meaning behind the cult’s vile and absurd collection practices. Nausea bloomed in her belly.

The doctor finished listening to her lungs. “Where are you in your menstrual cycle, dear?”

“Uh, right in the middle, why?”

“Be more specific, please.”

“Okay . . . I’m due to start my period in . . . nine days.”

“Then I need you to report back here in exactly two days. If the blood tests turn out okay, then we’ll start you on daily injections of a drug called ‘Lupron,’ which will temporarily shut down your ovulation system. That’s the first step we need to take to harvest your eggs.”

Marilyn broke into a cold sweat as her nausea fingered upwards, into her gullet. She jumped off the examination table and a moment later began retching into a stainless steel sink.

Through teary eyes, she gazed down at what she’d just expelled. Yet the chunky splatter seemed no more odious to her now than what stewed beyond the sink.

The Wizard’s sanity was in doubt now because the cult’s behavior had degenerated to bizarre extremes. There was a good chance he really believed he was Mother Nature’s chosen one.

God help us all! And God protect my eggs
!

Doctor Fosse laid a hand on her shoulder. “You’re not pregnant, are you, dear?”

L. Rob Piper was ambling alone along a sun-dappled path in the woods. He pursed his lips together and began to whistle a happy tune. Tom had flown back from Miami last night with the news that Doctor Martin Lipset had accepted the offer.

At dawn tomorrow, Tom’s men would pick up Doctor Lipset in Miami and make him vanish. The doctor would be hidden below deck on a leased yacht, bound for the Virgin Islands, where a private plane would whisk him to Brazil to obtain a new face.

Piper emerged from the woods, passed the old red barn, and entered the farmhouse using the rear entrance. On his way through the main office, he switched into The Wizard’s persona, greeting his two secretaries with a calm, beatific smile.

He climbed the staircase leading to his second floor office, whistling again. At the top of the stairs, his noise cut off abruptly. Tom stood alone in the hallway, pressing his face to within inches of one of the walls.

Tom turned to him. “There was an incident last night you should hear about.” He turned back to the wall. “Something you should look at too.”

Stepping beside Tom, he noted a soil mark on the white plaster wall, just below eye level, a partial shoe print. Tom told him what the guards had reported last night.

Meanwhile, Piper craned his neck to the ceiling, finding the rectangular opening to the attic directly overhead. His roving gaze found another shoe print on the opposite wall. Same height.

From the top of the stairs, Piper called down for a step ladder. Once in the dark attic, he pulled the string that hung below a bare light bulb, illuminating the cramped space, and searched with his eyes for what, he didn’t yet know.