The Prophet Motive (7 page)

Strike two
. One more and she’d be out, he decided.

Bob Marsh led them on another short walk through the woods to a second clearing and another cluster of buildings, mostly two-story brown-shingles, but including one enormous oddity: a cinder block building shaped exactly like a pyramid. Its peak protruded above the trees.

New Age bullshit
, John thought, staring up.

He found Ben standing near the dining hall, which was larger than the pyramid, though not quite as tall, with massive windows and a pitched roof. The other personal handlers were there waiting too, to pair off again as they all joined a long chow line extending outside the front doors.

Once inside, John counted thirty elongated, school lunch room-style tables, each one jammed with twenty people or so. He calculated that the facility served about 600 diners at a time, which meant that, according to the FBI report, about half of the cult’s population was in the dining hall at that very moment.

The male cult members favored beards, earth-toned hemp shirts, and blue jeans or overalls. They walked in dirt-caked black or brown work boots. The women wore hemp shirts too, or peasant blouses, or tank tops. Their blue jeans were sometimes cut-offs, or bell-bottoms, often low-waisted. Cotton dresses in muted colors appeared here and there. One woman wore a sari. Most went bra-less. Few shaved their armpits or legs. None wore jewelry.

All the children and adolescents sat together at two neighboring tables in the rear of the hall. The sight of them pained John. He’d dined at such a table too once, inside the People’s Temple, forcibly separated from his parents.

John turned his back to the children. He could hardly stand knowing so much about their racing little hearts.

Until he reached the serving line, he scanned the dining hall for unusually tall young men. As expected, though, he found no one matching the DMV photo of Daryl Finck that he’d recently seared into his brain.

Full plate in hand, he followed Ben toward a table, focusing now on Daryl’s unidentified accomplice by counting dark-haired forty-somethings. He couldn’t find but two, and to his delight, he realized why. Roughly three-quarters of the cult members were under thirty years of age. Identifying Daryl Finck’s accomplice might prove easier than he’d anticipated.

John sat down with Ben, near a large picture window with a view of the nearby meadow and a stream and crop fields in the distance. He dug into the main entrée, a spicy eggplant dish with too much cumin. His life-long habit of devouring animal protein at every meal had already made him weary of the vegetarian diet. But he intended to finish every morsel on his plate. A malnourished body made the mind easier to manipulate. He hadn’t needed the psychologist to teach him that much.

A pay phone hung on the wall near the beverage dispensers. John stood, telling Ben he was going to make a quick call.

He’d been worried the cult would track his calls through his cell phone at some point, so he hadn’t brought one. Ben had suggested he phone in San Francisco, but the buses hadn’t stopped long enough. He’d had another chance at an interstate rest stop, but Ben wouldn’t leave his side, not for a second. They’d pissed together, shoulder to shoulder, at the urinals. So he still owed SFPD an update.

With the phone receiver against his ear, John heard to his complete surprise . . . nothing. No dial tone. He triggered the metal receiver holder a few times, but the line was dead.

Hanging up, he cursed himself for being so naive. During the indoctrination period, especially, the cult would try to prevent their new recruits from having any contact with the outside world. This phone was out of order on purpose.

He returned to his seat. “The phone is out of order.”

“That’s too bad,” Ben said.

“There must be other phones on the premises.”

“Yes, but the rest are dedicated for business purposes.”

“Oh, c’mon, what does it matter? Let me use one of them.”

“This is a commercial-scale organic farm,” Ben said. “We can’t afford to have the lines tied up with personal calls.”

“But it’s after hours.”

“It’s never after hours,” Ben said. “We ship food all over the globe. Besides, we have our rules, and as long as you’re a guest here, John, you must abide by them.”

“Somebody in my dorm ought to have a cell phone.”

“Cell phones aren’t allowed on property. Too many unhealthy electromagnetic waves. Don’t you remember when we were still on the bus and that man stopped by, asking whether you had one?”

John remembered. “I just thought he wanted to borrow one.”

“No, we hold them until it’s, uh, time to leave.”

“You said I could call.”

“We’ll get that phone fixed as soon as possible.”

Luckily, there was a back-up plan in place. Each night following his disappearance—or that of his so-called partner’s—a local contact would attempt to rendezvous at a spot within walking distance, a deputy from the Tulare County Sheriff’s department. He spooned into his dessert of sliced peaches in syrup.

“No time for dessert now,” Ben said. “We have to go.”

“Go where?” John asked.

“To see The Wizard.”

Inches from his open mouth, John’s spoon twitched, dropping a peach slice into his lap. “Where am I? The land of Oz? Who the hell is The Wizard?”

They were in a tunnel, dark and damp and cool, tramping behind the puny rays of a small flashlight. A low, beamed ceiling hung overhead. Narrow, cinder block walls corralled them, and a slope in the floor kept taking them deeper and deeper somewhere beneath the pyramid-shaped building. Nervous yelps of the kind heard in haunted mansion funhouses escaped now and then from the new recruits. Marilyn recalled that genuine Egyptian pyramids always had tunnels too.

Her thoughts turned to the cult leader. She hadn’t even met him yet, but he’d already impressed her. Impressed her in the same way that an historian of World War Two might be impressed by Joseph Goebbels and his Nazi propaganda machine.

During the previous twenty-four hours, Earthbound had staged a virtual clinic on how cults manage to manipulate people away from their homes—their friends, their relatives, their loved ones, their lives—and into a strange environment, isolating them from their support networks, rendering them far more vulnerable to mind persuasion techniques.

A ring of light lay ahead. The tunnel ended in a round hall, where mounted electric torches gave off a dim sulfurous glow. A ceiling of imitation sandstone—made perhaps from plaster of Paris—hung claustrophobically low. Painted in polychrome colors on the imitation stone walls were Egyptian hieroglyphics, often obscured by shadows. Incense burned.

The grand gallery
, she thought, again tapping her limited knowledge of true pyramids. But it wasn’t grand at all. It felt counterfeit, like Las Vegas, or a theme restaurant.

Neat rows of black plastic chairs filled the floor space. About ninety seats in all. They faced a tall wooden podium at the front of the room. Marilyn took a seat in the first row—all the better to observe the cult leader. She began running through everything she knew about New Age pyramidology—all those mystical powers ascribed to the ancient, geometric form.

A lanky man wearing blue jeans and a leaf-green hemp shirt emerged from a dark and narrow passageway in the wall behind the podium. A small clutch of cult members, including Bob Marsh, gathered around him. They conversed in whispers. Shortly, the conversation broke up, and the cult members left the lanky man standing alone again, against the back wall.

Bob Marsh took the podium. “Now, it’s my pleasure to present our spiritual leader. His name is L. Rob Piper, though we often refer to him affectionately as ‘The Wizard.’ ”

Bob gestured toward the cult leader with an outstretched arm. The Wizard stepped forward. The personal handlers, sitting directly behind their new recruits, and about a dozen more cult members, standing stiff as palace guards at the rear of the hall, commenced a short, vigorous round of clapping.

“Welcome to the farm,” The Wizard said, taking the podium. “We’re so delighted to meet new friends. New friends who, like us, are willing to lay aside for a time all personal desires and goals to support the environmental movement, a movement that simply must succeed if life on this planet, as we know it, is to continue. I heartily applaud you.”

The Wizard’s cobalt blue eyes scanned the faces of the new recruits. He was in his early to mid fifties, Marilyn guessed. His long face featured a patrician nose and a powerful jaw. He combed back thick wavy hair, Jesus-length and silver, flickering like tinsel in the electric torchlight. His voice was a baritone, his delivery grandiloquent, halting, and yet melodic, like Gregory Peck’s or Charlton Heston’s.

“Once, a few years ago,” he said, “a child named Nina, who lives here at the farm, said to me, ‘When you’re asleep, you can wake up, right?’ I said, ‘Of course.’ ‘But,’ she said, ‘when you’re already awake, can you wake up even more?’ ”

The personal handlers and the other cult members standing in the rear led a round of giggles. The purpose of their presence, Marilyn knew, was to model, or demonstrate, desired reactions and behaviors from the new recruits.

The Wizard continued. “That in a nutshell, my friends, is my task this evening, my daunting task. To help you—those who are already awake—to wake up even more! You simply must wake up even more, and before it’s too late!”

Even more, and before
, Marilyn repeated in her mind. A little rhyme. And she’d noted a fondness for word repetition too.
Delighted to meet new friends, new friends who . . . support the environmental movement, a movement that simply must succeed . . . my daunting task . . . make you . . . already awake . . . wake up even more . . . You simply must wake up . . .

Rhymes. Word repetition. That could only mean—.

“Although each of you chose to be here today,” The Wizard said, “I wonder just how many of you, my new friends, recognize the urgency of this moment in history. Do you realize that we—and when I say, ‘we,’ I mean, humankind, and humankind alone—have pushed and kicked and dragged every living creature on the planet onto a new Noah’s ark? That’s right, a new Noah’s ark. Can you feel, as I can, the icy cold wind of fate at our backs as we float together upon treacherous waters?”

He was using guided imagery now, speech evoking strong visual images. Rhymes and word repetition and guided imagery delivered in a thick melodic cadence meant that The Wizard sought to elicit an altered state of consciousness in the new recruits. He was utilizing a common psychological persuasion technique known as
naturalistic trance induction
. Falling into a trance could temporarily inhibit the mind’s ability to think critically or analytically, suspend independent judgement, blur the very boundary between fantasy and reality.

“We are not actually on Noah’s ark,” The Wizard said, shaking his head. “Oh, no, quite the contrary. We, humankind—too many of us inhuman, too many unkind—are aboard another great ark, one that has taken the reverse course of Noah, one that is now on the verge of undoing Noah’s mission. For, unbeknownst to most of those aboard, the ark is sinking fast! Sinking with every living thing aboard! Everything!

“Every human being. Every insect. Every single-celled amoeba. Every sponge. Every earthworm. Every starfish. Every jellyfish. Every octopus. Every snail. The beetles, the grasshoppers, the bees, the scorpions, the spiders, the shrimps, the crabs, the lowly sea squirts. Sharks, rays, lizards, crocodiles, snakes. Frogs, newts, birds, kangaroos—”

Whap
! Marilyn slapped her cheek involuntarily with the palm of her hand to prevent drifting into a trance state. The sound carried crisply, derailing The Wizard.

He eyed her before continuing. “And aboard this giant ark we call Earth, only the human beings can stop it from sinking. Stop it from sinking into the black ocean of annihilation!” He paused. “But why, you may ask, should you believe me? Why believe some strange, silver-haired man’s ranting and raving about the imminent destruction of the biosphere? After all, nobody else seems to agree. No one else is so concerned, right?”

Marilyn peeked at several of the other new recruits. Their subdued, glassy-eyed expressions indicated the trances were already beginning to take hold.

“Well,” said The Wizard, “that’s easy to explain. No one else has found the courage to face the truth, even though it’s out there now for anyone to see and grasp. And the truth is nothing less than this: that humans—or rather, inhumans—have by now damaged the biosphere to such an extent that it may already be too late to avoid an ecological holocaust!”

The Wizard commenced a wild-eyed oration on air pollution, acid rain, carbon dioxide, ultraviolet radiation, ozone holes, and other causes and effects of global warming, often waving torn and yellowed newspaper clippings that purportedly substantiated his views. He decried the steep decline in plant and animal species and its ominous implications for eco-systems around the globe. He castigated government supported over-fishing, which he claimed had seriously depleted the oceans and threatened future food supplies. But he saved his longest, loudest tirade for chemical pollutants, focusing on the damage they were causing to animal and human reproductive systems.