The Prophet Motive (8 page)

“Mass extinction!” he said. “That’s what’s next, you know!”

From time to time, Marilyn noted, The Wizard’s words melted into nothing short of gibberish. Sheer nonsense.

“The molecular structures get into the water supply, where they compound with pollutants, becoming cancer receptors. That eventually enables their entrance into the astral pathway . . .”

Method, she knew, lurked behind The Wizard’s bouts of madness. The psychology literature called the tactic
fatiguing obscurities
. The effort listeners made to make sense of something that made no sense at all was so mentally draining and disorienting that it helped to maintain them in a trance state.

“In closing,” The Wizard said, almost an hour after taking the podium, “I hope you see why the work we’ll undertake together tomorrow is so vitally important. We have to begin somewhere, somehow, to right what has gone so terribly wrong over the course of the last century. We must spread the word. We must begin to take better care of our planet. For the Earth too is mortal, and we are all earthbound.”

Finally
!
Marilyn thought. Someone had finally uttered the cult’s name, however slyly.

The messianic frenzy in The Wizard’s eyes disappeared, replaced by a soft, avuncular twinkle. He smiled as he described a few of the events slated for the following day, the first day of the Eco-Warrior Boot Camp. Then he began extolling the virtues of the farm and the people who operated it.

“There are twelve hundred of us here now. A hundred sets of disciples dedicated to the vital work of preserving the planet.”

He emerged from behind the podium to pace in front of the first row of seats, like an army general reviewing his troops.

“We live a simple life as God intended, and for that reason, Natural High Farms is a spiritual place, transcendent, magical.”

He stopped in front of John, who sat two seats to Marilyn’s left in the first row. The Wizard bent down on one knee and stared into John’s face, their eyes mere inches apart.

I don’t believe it
! she thought.
He suspects John already
!

John grew uncomfortable with the cult leader staring him in the face for so long. “What?” he said at last.

But The Wizard, alias L. Rob Piper, gave him no answer. The cult leader’s unblinking blue eyes brimmed with energy, searching, it almost seemed, for something tiny swimming behind John’s cornea in the vitreous fluid. Another ten seconds ticked by in perfect silence.

At last The Wizard spoke to him. “We can do something about that insomnia problem.”

The hoods above John’s eyes retracted with surprise. His voice barely managed a whisper. “What did you say?”

“We have a special herbal medicine to help you sleep.”

John shook his head to clear it. Because what’d he’d heard from the mouth of The Wizard wasn’t possible. It really wasn’t possible. A dream-like sensation of falling caused him to grip the sides of his plastic chair. “How did you know about my—”

John halted his own words as The Wizard rose. The cult leader stepped past Marilyn to the end of the first row. In front of little Mick, the teenage rap lover, he dropped down on one knee and repeated the eye-to-eye investigation.

Ten or twelve seconds passed in silence before The Wizard spoke to him. “We also have an herbal treatment for peptic ulcers.”

Mick’s jaw dropped as if he were entering the first plunge on a star amusement park ride. “Get out, dude! You are freakin’ me! You’re like psychic! How’d you do that?”

The Wizard stood, smiling broadly. “Goodnight, everyone. God bless. See you in the morning.” He gave a quick wave then disappeared through his dark narrow passageway behind the podium.

Filing out, John’s head felt light, his legs, a little wobbly. He saw rapture in the other faces, or else beatific grins. The psychologist fell in beside him. Her grin seemed to be the plain old amused kind, and for a brief moment, she aimed it squarely at him.

He was a cop in search of murder suspects. He was a fugitive from the pressures of divorce—from bitterness and morose moods and increasingly bad habits. He was a son hoping to understand his deceased parents better. He was a fool too, John suspected, for coming here.

The cult leader had already knocked him off balance. For hours after meeting The Wizard, John had debated with himself whether the man was a genuine psychic, someone whose mere gaze could diagnose health problems invisible to the naked eye.

Then the trance had worn off, and his cynical cop’s mind had returned. The truth had come to John after the other men in his dormitory had fallen asleep and he had lain silently on his bunk bed for hours in the dark, replaying the day’s events. The truth was that some of the cult members had rifled through his personal belongings. His and every new recruit’s. Secretly. Here in the dormitory, at a time when they knew it would be empty. At dinner time, most likely. They’d found his bottle of insomnia pills. Found Mick’s pills too. Then The Wizard had been informed—of the medical items found, and who they belonged to, based on some brief physical description—prior to his speech. There had been that short, whispered conversation behind the podium just before the cult leader’s introduction. That might’ve been the moment.

Zzzzzz
. . . Someone began snoring. It was Mick, he determined, sleeping in the bunk overhead. On a different night, John would’ve shaken the kid’s bedsprings from below until the noise stopped. Instead, he pushed the nightglow feature on his Timex wristwatch. It was 1:59 a.m., or half an hour from rendezvous time. His local contact, a Tulare County deputy named Roger Fry, would soon be waiting on the farm’s perimeter—waiting for him and his so-called partner, Doctor Michaelsen—at a prearranged location, selected together over the phone using survey maps.

John perked his ears and peered through the darkness around him.
Is every last man asleep
? He heard nothing but scattered snores. Saw no movements. It’d been a long, draining day. Only another insomniac would be awake. He sat up, slipped off his thin, cotton blanket, and shifted into a sitting position on the side of the bunk.

With painstaking slowness, to reduce the sound of his own rustling, he dressed in his new shirt and overalls, in his old socks and shoes. His shoelaces he tied in double knots so they wouldn’t accidentally come loose and clatter, or trip him up. Then he stepped across the floor. Gingerly. He was grateful to have cement beneath his feet, rather than creaking floorboards.

At the front door, he turned the knob by small degrees to avoid metal squeaks. But soon the knob didn’t want to turn any further. He applied more pressure. More pressure still. But to no avail. It wouldn’t budge. He was locked in. The cult had locked them all inside!

Marilyn stared at the stubborn brass doorknob in disbelief. It shined radiantly, caught in a shaft of moonlight slanting through a nearby window. It seemed to mock her.

Not much of a sleuth, are you
?

The cult was really playing hardball. Earthbound wasn’t taking any chances that some of their new recruits—the ones who knew they were too weak to withstand a direct confrontation—would run off into the night.

She thought of John Richetti in the next dormitory and pictured him staring at his own brass knob. The mental image made her smile. She smiled some more at the memory of that little trick The Wizard had pulled on John earlier. Maybe now John would realize that he needed her. She tiptoed back to bed.

The windows were each four feet long, but less than a foot tall. Too narrow for John to squeeze through. Maybe pint-size Mick could manage it, but not him. So he reached into a pocket for the Swiss army knife he’d recently had customized.

The tiny scissors and the bottle opener had been removed, replaced by a folding pair of locksmithing implements—a straight pick and a tension tool. He’d planned on using the knife’s special accessories to break into the main office in the old red farmhouse, where he assumed that most of the cult’s records were kept. SFPD had obtained a surreptitious search warrant. The cult wouldn’t legally have to be notified of the search until the undercover operation had been completed.

He bent down to work on the door, feeling almost grateful for the unexpected practice. He inserted the pick and raised the tumbler pins. He kept the pins open with his tension tool while he manipulated the pick. Thirty seconds later, a soft click told him the door was now unlocked.

A cool gust of night wind greeted him on the front stoop. He shut the door—gently, ever so gently—and turned. He stood in darkness, confronting the deeper darkness of the woods. He heard the chirp of crickets, the rustle of tree leaves, an owl hooting.

He looked to his left, to the dim outline of the Women’s Guest Quarters, and considered freeing the psychologist.
No
, he decided,
she doesn’t belong here
.

She’d been useful to him with her academic knowledge, but now her work was done, as far as he was concerned. Now he would do, or not do, whatever it took to send her packing. It was for her own good. And the investigation’s.

He stepped off the stoop, heading toward his distant rendezvous point with the deputy. A few seconds later, crossing the gravel walkway that ran in front of the dormitories, he found himself instantly bathed in harsh white light. He froze in his tracks, squinting.

“Hey you there!” someone shouted.

John had no good options, he realized. Running into the woods would blow his cover, and he couldn’t dodge back inside the Men’s Guest Quarters. Whoever was out there would see where he’d gone, would recognize him. There was enough lighting for night baseball.

He peered straight into the blinding beams, where he thought the voice had originated. He couldn’t see anyone yet, but he could hear running footsteps . . .

Marilyn had almost drifted off to sleep when bright light flooded through her closed eyelids, retracting them. The light shone in through the row of windows on the other side of the dormitory room.

Hearing a voice bark in the distance, she rose quickly from her bed to survey the situation. At the window she gasped. John Richetti stood alone in front of the Men’s Guest Quarters, bathed in floodlights, as two men sprang from the darkness aiming rifles at him and shouting commands.

John raised his hands to the night sky. The armed men reached him and halted. One of them lowered his rifle and patted John down. The other seemed to be interrogating him.

She cranked open the window and strained to listen, but the voices were unintelligible. She could tell that John was acting confused, shrugging his shoulders, as if he didn’t understand their anger. Abruptly, the armed interrogators led him away.

“What is it?” someone whispered from a nearby bunk. It was Kira, a German college student, who’d been hiking alone in Point Reyes when she’d stumbled into Earthbound’s orbit.

“I don’t know,” Marilyn whispered back. “Lights came on. Then I heard someone shouting. I saw three men out there, but then they left.”

She crawled back beneath the covers of her bunk bed. The outside lights switched off. She worried about John being outed.

What would I do then
?

Insistent hands pushed John forward from behind. He didn’t at all appreciate that. “Keep your hands off me, assholes!”

They passed beside the cinder block pyramid. One of the armed men pointed with his rifle toward a two-story brown shingle. The sign above the entrance to the ground floor read:
Infirmary
. John veered in that direction.

What’s inside an infirmary? Doctors. Nurses. Patients. Medical equipment. Oh, shit! Oh, shit! Torture tools! Maybe I could stand to be a little more friendly
.

They didn’t use the front entrance. John’s escorts marched him around to the rear of the building, where a skinny set of wooden steps led up to a second floor landing. With a hard shove from behind to assist him, John began climbing the staircase. His escorts stayed grounded. Above on the landing stood a paunchy man, illuminated by a bare white bulb above an open door and light spilling out from inside.

The man wore a pair of black shorts and a gold Los Angeles Lakers tank top. Number 24. Kobe Bryant’s. His hair was dark and shiny and sleep-tousled. John recognized him from The Wizard’s speech. This had been one of the men in that small group whispering behind the podium with the cult leader beforehand. The one who’d fit the physical description for being Daryl Finck’s partner.

As John neared the top of the stairs the man called down behind him. “Brother Mike, you wait right there. Brother Gary, you go on back to your post.”

He motioned John inside. John stepped into the foyer of what appeared to be a small residential apartment. To his left a door stood ajar, exposing a dimly lit bedroom beyond it—the corner of an unmade bed, a mirrored dresser against the wall.