The Innocent: A Vanessa Michael Munroe Novel (21 page)

In the unknown, it was a risk to head out. Away from the desk, he’d be unable to monitor, wouldn’t know until far too late if anything eventful happened, but he wanted to see Heidi, needed to see Heidi, and the opportunity was fast slipping away.

They’d arranged to rendezvous on the sly, away from the others, had set a time and place, but in his reluctance to leave the desk he had waited too long and was now beyond fashionably late. He could only hope she’d wait, because he needed to meet now. Today. Not another day. And he had no way to contact her to let her know he was still on his way.

Outside the hotel, Bradford hailed a cab, and when he arrived at Cementerio de la Recoleta and spotted Heidi just outside the gated entrance, leaning against the wall, face in a book and the sun’s sparse
rays shining down on her, relief welled through him. When she saw him, her face lit into a chill-dissolving smile.

In spite of his hurry and the uneasiness that had brought him here, Bradford couldn’t help but return the smile in kind.

Heidi greeted him with a hug and stepping back said, “So, tell me, Mr. Secret Guy, what it is that you need so badly that it comes to this.”

Bradford smiled again, his mouth in upward movement while his eyes diverted down the lanes, searching out anything familiar, chasing body shapes and wary steps. He’d asked her to be careful, to come alone, but both Logan and Gideon had the skill to follow undetected if they wished, and to ask her now if she was certain they hadn’t would only insult her.

“Thank you for meeting me,” he said.

Heidi nodded, and he looped his arm in hers, diverting her down a branching mausoleum-lined lane. Here they would blend in, just one more couple among so many others taking in the dead on a pleasant afternoon stroll. He’d chosen this place because it wasn’t far from his hotel, and as an attraction to both tourists and locals alike, it would be impossible not to find, thus lessening the chances of either one of them getting lost.

Bradford stopped several times, ostensibly to admire the architecture, the marble and stonework, while his eyes passed beyond the lifeless monuments to the living who came and went. He saw no sign of Gideon and, better still, no sign of Logan, although it was impossible to know for certain.

Each time Bradford stopped, the puzzlement on Heidi’s face increased, but she said nothing until at last they came to a secluded alcove and Bradford headed toward it. The nook, with only one way in and out, was a field operative’s suicide, but under the circumstances, perfect. One final glance back the way they’d come and Bradford said, “Look, I need your help.”

“I figured as much,” Heidi said.

“Off the record, okay? Logan can’t know, Gideon can’t know, and most of all Michael can’t know.”

Heidi nodded, and Bradford hesitated. “Michael speaks very highly of you,” he said finally. “She says you’ve been brilliant in explaining the mind-set of The Chosen, and I’m hoping you can help me.”

He hesitated again, and Heidi’s smile radiated, as if she had all the time in the world, as if they stood waiting under spring blossoms instead of the warming winter sky.

“I haven’t done the research Michael has,” he said. “And I haven’t had a friend to drop snippets of information over the years. My experience with groups like The Chosen is limited entirely to what I’ve heard through the media and in dealing with extremist factions in the Middle East. I’ve got images in my head of Jonestown, Koresh, Heaven’s Gate, Aum Shinrikyo, and terrorists—mass suicide and murder—so forgive me any misperceptions, okay?”

Heidi nodded again, as if to say “go on,” and in response Bradford again paused. He burned precious time, needed to get back to the hotel, but the thoughts that had made so much sense when faced with Munroe’s solo entry into the Haven Ranch were quickly dissolving into the abstract.

He sighed and ran his fingers through his hair, fought back the urge to pace. “Hypothetically,” he said, “unless we can do a snatch-and-grab, to get Hannah will mean Michael goes inside the Havens. That was the whole point in bringing her into this, right? And the way I see it, it’s eventually going to come to that. But what about brainwashing? If Michael goes in, what are the chances she’ll be coming out the same person who went in—if she comes out at all?”

Heidi’s shoulders relaxed and, with a grin that bordered on smirking, leaned against the cold stone of the wall. “Yeah,” she said. “That’s kind of a misperception.”

There was a long silence as she gazed first at the ground and then off into some invisible distance. Bradford knew the look, the struggle for words, and so he let her be, although as the moments ticked away it was more difficult to fight the urge to hurry her.

“What’s your idea of brainwashing?” she said finally.

Bradford shrugged. “Mindlessness, I guess, from constant and
repeated mental abuse. When a rational person starts doing irrational things that someone else has told them to do—things they never would have done before.”

“So, going against free will and changing them into something else, right?”

Bradford nodded.

Heidi said, “It would mean that a brainwashed person would lose the capacity to reason or to make personal decisions that fell out of line with what the brainwasher wanted or programmed, that they’d kill or commit suicide if told to, even if they didn’t want to do it. Mindless obedience, right?”

“I suppose,” he said.

Heidi’s eyes took on a note of sadness as they wandered again toward that invisible distance. “Isn’t that just another way of saying ‘the Devil made me do it’?”

Bradford pondered her words. “You’re saying there’s no such thing?” he asked.

Heidi turned toward him. “I’m not saying that brainwashing doesn’t exist,” she said. “I may personally doubt it, but I’m no expert. I wasn’t raised in any of the groups that you mentioned. I can only speak of The Chosen, of my own childhood and that of my friends.”

“There’s no brainwashing in The Chosen? People actually do those things because they want to—of their own free will?”

She shrugged. “Yes and no. It really depends on how you define brainwashing. There’s a lot of indoctrination, a tremendous amount of control, and so much pressure to conform to ‘the new’ and heed the word of The Prophet. I think a lot of people would consider that brainwashing—but that’s not the same as having no mind of your own. Everyone still has free will. Any one of the adults could say no.”

“But how?” he said. “And if that’s the case, why on earth do people do it, why do they stay?”

Heidi shrugged again. “Sometimes they go along with things out of fear of God’s judgment if they don’t, or because they feel it’s what God wants of them. Nobody’s a zombie or an automaton.” She hesitated,
as if she found tedious Bradford’s inability to accept what to her was so obvious.

“Look at it this way, Miles,” she said. “There are two types of people in The Chosen. There are the ones who had adult or nearly adult lives before choosing to join, and there are people like me and Logan and Gideon, the children, who never had another beginning, never had a choice, who had no education, no access to television or books, little to no connection to family outside the movement, and who were terrified of what would happen to us if we were to leave. If anyone was brainwashed, it was us, the second generation.

“So then, completely cut off and indoctrinated as we were, if we are brainwashed,
how
can so many of us turn our backs on everything and walk away, sometimes even in the middle of the night with only the clothes on our back? And if we, the ones who never knew anything other than their world, can turn our backs on it, how can anyone who was supposed to know better claim brainwashing as an excuse for what they did?”

Bradford said, “So, these people on TV who say they were brainwashed into joining a cult, or that they did awful things, criminal things, against their will, that the leaders made them do it, they’re lying?”

“We’re all susceptible to influence to one degree or other,” Heidi said. “Apparently some more than others, but that isn’t the same thing as having no mind of your own. People who have sex with children, that’s not brainwashing. That’s not even coercion. Nobody took a bat to their kneecaps and said have sex with kids or we’ll hurt you. People who beat children, starved them, locked them in closets, called them demon-possessed, that’s not brainwashing, nobody
made
them do that.

“Do you know what the big punishment in The Chosen is?” Heidi asked.

“I don’t think so,” he said.

“Excommunication.”

“Meaning?”

“Let’s say a man in The Chosen is caught molesting little boys,
which is against The Chosen’s rules because it’s homosexuality. Even though it’s also a crime, members of The Chosen, even the parents of the child, are
forbidden
to go to the police about it. Excommunication, which is sometimes only for a few months, is such a big deal, they consider it to be punishment enough. By their reasoning, sending the criminal out into the Void is the worst possible thing they could do. Excommunication is the heavy stick that they carry to keep people in line, and members will do just about anything to avoid it. But if brainwashing was all that it is cracked up to be, why the need for the big stick? Shouldn’t everyone automatically obey and keep all the rules?

“To say that the things done to us were done because of brainwashing is a slap in the face to those of us who were tortured. They did what they did because The Prophet said it was right in the eyes of God, because they placed a greater value on some screwed-up ideology than they did on protecting the rights of children. But they were not mindless when they did it.”

“So what you’re saying,” Bradford said, “is that the only way a person like Michael would end up changed or stuck inside was if what they said and how they lived appealed to her?”

“Pretty much,” Heidi said.

“Does that also apply to someone who might be—” Bradford paused. “Well, someone who might be going through an emotional upheaval—would it be different for that type of person?”

“Is she?”

Bradford shrugged. “We all have our history, our scars, sometimes literally,” he said. “What Michael does is highly specialized. It’s not something you go to school for. The things that made her what she is left their mark, just like with you, just like with Gideon and Logan.”

Heidi nodded. “If she falls for any of it,” she said, “then she’s not half the woman I think she is, and I suspect that in reality, she’s much more than I’ve even glimpsed.”

Bradford nodded in appreciation of Heidi’s perception. He straightened and took his hands from his jacket pockets. “Thank you,” he said.

“Better now?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he said, “much better.” Bradford paused, the running clock counting down time in his head, the pressure to get back to the hotel becoming stronger, but seeing Heidi there tipped back against the wall while her words tumbled around in his mind caused him to stop. He shoved the need to hurry aside.

“When you did finally get out, how did you manage?” he said. “Without any education or any connections, how did you start?”

“It’s like being an immigrant stepping off the boat, heading into the big city with nothing but the clothes on his back,” she said. “Where
do
you start? I was lucky. My younger sister had already left, so I had a roof over my head. But we were both naïve. Our behavior was weird to people, we were taken advantage of until we figured out how things work here. But at least we had each other. Some of my friends were luckier—they had grandparents or uncles or aunts who had never given up hope of bringing them home and were able to help them get on their feet. The worst are cases like Logan and Gideon who were basically dumped on the doorsteps of unwilling relatives and ended up on the streets until they were old enough to sort things out.”

“Isn’t there some remedy?” Bradford said. “Have you ever thought about trying to get some closure, some form of justice through the court system?”

“Sure,” she said. “Lots of us have.”

“And?”

“Statute of limitations. Jurisdiction. Lack of evidence. It gets pretty complex.” She shook her head. “There’s no legal recourse for us,” she said. “The criminals polished their image, and we, the ones who tell what happened, are the bad guys.” She sighed. “But you know? You do the best with what you’ve got. You try not to lose any more time on the ones who hurt you, try to make something good out of it—they don’t deserve my future the way they took my past.”

“There’s so much I want to understand,” Bradford said. “But I’m already running late. I have to get going.”

“Anytime,” Heidi said, and she reached out to give him a parting hug.

Bradford walked to the lane and, after checking for signs of either Gideon or Logan and finding the way clear, blended into the crowd. As he moved away, he glanced over his shoulder. Heidi remained with her back to the wall, staring after him, and in that look he felt the touch of her agony.

O
utside the cemetery, across the lawn and on the other side of the fronting street, Logan stood tucked into a doorway and out of sight. For forty minutes he’d been waiting and watching, and now patience had been rewarded. There, blending with the crowd, a furtive glance right and left as he left the graveyard, was Bradford. The movement was quick enough, natural enough, to go unnoticed by most, but Logan understood. Bradford was wary of being seen, of being followed.

And it was tempting too, the idea of tracking him back to wherever he’d come from and figuring out where Munroe was holed up.

But there wasn’t any point to it.

Logan hadn’t followed Heidi here as a way to get to Munroe.

Bradford’s showing up was an unexpected twist that explained, possibly, Heidi’s erratic behavior today. For once, she was cautious of being followed—although her attempt to lose an invisible tail had been clumsy and awkward at best.

Bradford, though, was a twist that Logan didn’t understand. Especially that he, either alone or at Munroe’s bidding, had so furtively sought out Heidi. Answers would have to wait. Trying to track Bradford, like attempting to figure it out, would be a waste of energy and distract him from more important issues, such as keeping Heidi under control.