The Prophet Motive (32 page)

Muzzled, immobilized, and entombed in darkness, she wept.

John’s sweet and aimless daydream of what had once been home, of sitting in his wing chair and bouncing Angela on his knee and teasing her about boys, ended with a screech of the jet plane’s intercom. The announcement, repeated in several tongues, including badly broken English, was that it was time to prepare for landing. As the jet descended, he peered through white cloud wisps at the scene below.

His eyes swept across a frame of purple mountains in the near distance, then lowered to green fields, black rolling forests, and snaking blue rivers. Dotting the landscape were rustic villages of stone and dark wood. Each village boasted a hilltop church, or else a medieval castle, intact, in ruin, or somewhere in-between.

They were landing in a place called Ljubljana in a nation called Slovenija. John hadn’t heard of either one before. But he knew from a map in the airline magazine that he was now in Central Europe, a couple hundred miles or so east of the border to Northern Italy.

Had Earthbound also hidden Daryl Finck on the other side of the world?

They breezed through customs. Tom took back the fake international passport he’d presented John before leaving the farm. John suspected that Tom had access to scores of genuine passports belonging to the cult members and had used one of them, and a digital photo he’d snapped of John, to construct the fake.

At the baggage carousel, Tom introduced him to a lanky young woman named Nastia, who spoke a few words of greeting in English, her accent Russian-sounding to John’s un-traveled ear, her face unsmiling, as severe as the Iron Curtain.

In the parking lot, they piled into her little red Renault, with John crammed into the back seat with the bags. It was a popular vehicle, he discovered out on the highway, yet so small and skinny by American standards, and so seemingly flimsy, that it reminded him of the cars circus clowns climb out of. The Citroens and Fiats weren’t much larger. There were a number of motorcycles with sidecars.

Every vehicle drove with its headlights on, even though the sun glared through a pollution-hazed sky. He kept thinking someone had died, kept searching for the hearse. When he asked Nastia about the headlights she said it was due to a traffic regulation designed to reduce accidents.

The city’s old European architecture evoked pleasant memories of reading to his daughter from illustrated fairytale books. The skyline also teemed with identical, often crumbling, cement boxes, which he asked about, and which Nastia called “fitting monuments to communist era.”

The weather was hot and sticky, and there were chemical smells—leaded gasoline among them, he thought—that he wasn’t accustomed to, that made him a bit nauseous until they left the city behind.

The countryside was hilly. They passed field laborers grimly whacking wheat by scythe. They slowed through villages, where ancient homes, built long before the first motor car, stood so close to the paved streets that bruises and scrapes from automobile traffic could be seen on the stone or wood sidings. They shot by stone castles and a number of churches with domed steeples painted a convincing blood red.

At one point, John slipped into one of his altered states, fixating on the car’s gearshift. He regained his sense of time and place and self as the hills gave way to mountains.

Keep it together
! he told himself, not really knowing whether that would help.

Higher and higher the little red Renault climbed. Where steel guardrails would surely exist in America, only asphalt hugged the treacherous curves, while spectacular views tempted all eyes from the road: snow-capped mountains, glacial lakes, plunging gorges, and hawk’s eye views of fertile valleys. The temperature dropped, Ljubljana’s swelter a vanishing memory.

“Whereabouts are we?” John said.

“The Julian Alps,” Nastia said. “The border between Slovenija and Austria.”

The houses now looked like ski chalets. John said so, and Nastia confirmed they were in a ski resort area.

The land flattened as they entered a resort village at the edge of a glacial lake. Canoes and bicycles were displayed on the street for rental. A wooden sign posted by the jade green water announced they had reached Lake Bohinj. Nastia corrected John when he tried to say the name.

“It’s pronounced
Bohini
,” she said.

The lake was surrounded on three sides by snow-capped mountains whose sharp slopes seemed to intrude upon the shore. A thick white mist swayed above the water, hundreds of feet high.

Crossing a wooden bridge, they left the resort village behind for a compact community of stone and wood farmhouses and barns. The smell of manure was almost cough-inducing.

Nastia pulled the Renault into a dirt driveway, beside a two-story stone farmhouse set close to the road, like all the others. The barn of white-painted wood stood only yards away. A cowbell clinked from inside, followed by a
moo
. The pasture and hay fields out back were empty.

John dropped his duffel bag in the entrance hall to the farmhouse, where Nastia explained that the other residents were on holiday, scaling the mountain behind them.

Damn it
! John thought. “When will they be back?”

“Tomorrow,” she said. “Early afternoon, I think.”

“Nastia,” Tom said. “I’d like you to go into town for a few hours. Two hours, let’s say. Shop or something. Understand?”

She nodded and, without a word, retreated through the front door, pulling it shut behind her. John followed Tom into the kitchen. It was a long, narrow space with a wooden dining table seating twelve. Tom rummaged through a cupboard.

Outside, the Renault roared to life. Its tires crunched gravel backing up, and then it rumbled away. Tom turned from the cupboard with a canister in hand.

“Like some coffee?”

“What I’d really like is a good nap,” John said. Despite the broad daylight outside, it was still the middle of the night to Californians.

“Me too.” Tom hung his head wearily. “But you and I have some important business to attend to first. Very important.”

He told John to take a seat in the adjacent living room. John found a spot on one end of a large sofa. Shortly, Tom came in carrying two cups of coffee and handed one off.

“Thanks,” John said.

“Don’t say thanks yet. Wait’ll you taste it.” Tom sat down in a chair beside the sofa. “You see, they don’t have American coffee here, just Turkish. Tastes like motor oil on its own, but I put a lot of milk and sugar in it for you.”

Tom quizzed John about his confrontation with Ezra Dean, writing notes on a yellow pad. In bits and pieces, John spun his pre-invented story about Ezra’s spy.

“Once or twice,” John said, “Ezra called him by name. Alex. He called him Alex. Or was it Allan? I’m not quite sure.”

“Did Ezra ever mention the Sacred Seven?” Tom asked.

“No, what’s that?”

“Guess you never got that far,” Tom said, scribbling away. “Never mind.”

Twenty minutes later, Tom dropped his pad and pen on a coffee table and announced that he was out of questions. He stood, stretched, and yawned. Gazing out the rear window, he said, “Nastia mentioned it was supposed to rain later today. And there’s a big-ass pile of chopped wood outside. Why don’t you and I go put it in the woodshed so it doesn’t get wet? Then we can both take a nap.”

“Okay.” They walked outside. John stared up at the sky. “Not many clouds. And they’re white as beer foam.”

“Yeah, well, the weather’s different here too,” Tom said. “It can change in a flash.”

“You don’t say.” John picked up a few heavy logs and started toward a red woodshed with a flat roof. Tom followed, cradling a small bundle of kindling.

Inside the woodshed, John stooped and dropped his load, keeping Tom in the corner of his vision. A single stick of kindling dropped from Tom’s clutches, rattling on the cement floor. John turned to see that Tom had transferred his load to one arm and begun to pull something from his pocket. John caught a flash of its color and shape—flesh-pink and rectangular—before he charged. He gripped Tom’s wrist, the one with the object, and raised it overhead while his forehead smashed into Tom’s nose.

Tom’s hoard of kindling clattered to the floor, and the object dropped from his hand. John snatched it up from among the sticks at their feet and straightened.

“Weather’s changed, asshole!”

Tom gripped his nose with both hands as his legs gave way and his back slid down the wall until he was sitting on his ass.

“What did you say?”

“Weather’s changed. I might also mention it’s your turn to eat shit now. Because I know L. Rob Piper planted electrodes in my brain. And I know this gadget is a neurostimulator. It’s used to set off the electrodes. It’s how you got me to kill Captain Switzer for you. You stimulated my rage center. You might as well have pulled the trigger of a gun yourself. And you’re going to pay for Switzer’s murder as if you had.” John grabbed a fistful of Tom’s greasy curls and yanked hard until the man scrambled to his feet. “In the house!”

Tom wobbled out the door like a man on his tenth Tequila, due to the force of the blow to his face or else to sudden and dramatic misfortune. John followed, rubbing his aching forehead.

“I want you to know, Tom, I know about the whole damn scheme. The huge fraud you and Piper are perpetrating. You’re selling human body parts, and human juices—the blood of the cult followers, their sperm, their reproductive eggs. And you’re using legitimate businesses in Los Angeles for cover. A sperm bank, an egg brokerage, a pharmaceutical lab, a blood center.”

“Fuck,” Tom said. “Holy fuck.”

John smiled. He glanced at the neurostimulator. “Well, I’ll be damned. This thing’s even got my name on it!”

Below where his name had been etched in the plastic, there were four labeled buttons: Aura, God, Rage, Paralysis.

Which one had Tom planned to push?

Suddenly, it dawned on him that Mahorn could only have been about to paralyze him. John shivered at that, at how close he’d come to disappearing off the face of the Earth. Just like Esperanza Chavez.

In the living room, John told Tom to have a seat. “Time for another interrogation,” he said, “only this time you’re answering the questions.”

“Why should I?” Tom’s voice was nasally from the injury. He wiped a dribble of blood beneath his nose with a shirtsleeve.

“Because I’m bigger than you, and I can whup your ass. And because you know the criminal justice system as well as I do. Time to cooperate in exchange for leniency.”

“What are you offering?”

“Nothing specific at the moment. I’m still a fugitive from justice, after all. But that’ll change shortly. And then I promise to talk to the DA on your behalf. What I’ll have to say will be based on the level of cooperation I get, starting now.”

Mahorn considered his options before nodding in defeat. “What do you want to know?”

“Daryl Finck’s on that mountain, isn’t he?” John pointed through the rear window.

“Yes,” Tom said.

“Where is Esperanza Chavez?”

“Marin County. Taking a dirt nap.”

“Be more specific.”

“Behind a motel off Highway 101. The Novoto Sleep Inn.”

“I need the exact location.”

John had Tom describe the location with as much detail as possible. The body was buried on ranch land, about fifty yards behind the motel, beneath a hillside stand of pine. John took notes using Tom’s yellow pad.

“Why did Esperanza Chavez jump off the roof?”

“She had a splitting headache,” Tom said. “A real doozy. Daryl gave it to her.”

“Daryl?”

“That’s my story.”

John frowned. He saw Tom’s game now—cooperate, but avoid as much personal responsibility as possible, even if it means lying and transferring blame. “How did . . .
Daryl
. . . give her the headache? He was never inside the building, or on the roof of the building with Esperanza, was he?”

“Piper likes to experiment,” Tom said. “He’s a scientist, after all. When he performed brain surgery on Esperanza, he put an electrode in her pain center and then did what that Russian scientist did with the dog. You know. Ringing the bell.”

“You mean Pavlov?”

“Right.” Tom coddled his nose some more. “Only Piper used the pound sign button on his cell phone. Over and over again, he stimulated her pain center, each time playing the pound sign in her ear, until the sound alone would set the electrode off. I think you broke my nose.”

John had to pause a few seconds. Piper’s experiment with Esperanza had chilled his blood faster than a January dip in San Francisco Bay. “Where does Piper conduct his brain operations?”

“Hidden basement beneath the infirmary,” Tom said. “He must have a couple million dollars worth of stolen lab and surgical equipment down there.”

“Where did he get it?”

“Beats me.” When John shot him a disbelieving look, Tom added, “That’s my story.”