Cundieffe wasn't overly bothered by cemeteries or mass suicides. His office in LA overlooked the Veteran's Cemetery across Wilshire Boulevard, and he had studied the files on the Branch Davidian and Heaven's Gate incidents extensively to prepare himself psychologically. Other agents scoffed, said you'd never be ready the first time you experience something like that. He wasn't quite surprised to find that it didn't faze him at all.
Agents Dorsey and Chen spotted him and met him halfway across the swampy, overgrown grass. The two were from the San Francisco office, and looked as if they'd rather be in church. Unless the investigation took a dramatic turn, their job would amount to crowd control and technical support.
"I'm Martin Cundieffe. I believe I spoke to Agent Dorsey?"
"That's me." Dorsey offered his hand. It was cold and water trickled up Cundieffe's wrist. "Sprinklers came on a few minutes ago. Whole mickeymouse operation the cops're making out of this, they better pray it's a clean suicide."
Cundieffe felt water seeping into his socks. He hustled across the lawn to the front porch steps, lingered along the rail while two Colma sheriff's deputies dragged a loaded gurney out and two paramedics wheeled an empty one in. "So how many are there?"
"Twenty-seven bodies, all adults, no visible cause of death. And one—" Dorsey looked up at his partner, a much taller Asian agent with spiky hair and a mangled plastic coffee stir clamped in his teeth. "You think they're done photographing it, Theo? I'll go check."
Chen adjusted his stirstick and nodded, and Dorsey disappeared into the house. Cundieffe smiled at him. He could already tell they didn't like him. Disapproved of his surprise intrusion onto their crime scene, didn't like Division agents in general, didn't like his looks. For his part, Cundieffe wasn't too keen on Chen, either, though less for his obvious ill will than for his weak character. The agent was riding the dregs of a coffee binge. Hoover never let his agents drink coffee, not in the office, and never, ever, in public. Martin Cundieffe, Sr. never touched the stuff. These days, coffee was the fuel of choice at the Bureau, and everyone thought Cundieffe was a Mormon, except the Mormons, of course, of whom he disapproved even more strongly because excessive religious fervor was every bit as much a vice in his eyes as drug use.
Chen finally cleared his throat. "What exactly brings you up from LA? Dorsey said a related case, but he didn't get told much."
"Well, it's a counterterrorism case. Suspect in a murder-arson down in Death Valley was sighted in the area. We—" We? The Royal We, surely not the Federal We "—we think he might be a part of a militia group."
"We've got our own counterterrorism task force."
"You don't want to catch him. Heck, I don't want to catch him. I'm only hoping to find out where he's going. That's why I'm here. You see, a local called in the sighting anonymously last night, a little after midnight. Your office followed up on it right away, but no soap. Then this. Has the coroner established a time of death yet?"
"Sometime early this morning, eight to ten hours ago. All of them went about the same time."
Chen waded into the flood and Cundieffe followed. He leaned across a gurney, felt a stiff claw brush his crotch as he lurched sideways through the door. A line-up of deputies and policemen crowded both sides of the entry hall. Twenty-seven people died here last night, so now every cop in town was here, standing guard over the one place where something was bound not to happen. Cundieffe considered flashing his badge to make a hole. Chen had no trouble plowing through, and would spread the word about his high-handedness if he started making a nuisance of himself. So he squeezed through the front doorway and veered into the front sitting room. There was a policemen's ball going on here, too, but it was more spread out. They had room to drink coffee. There was nothing to sit on, though, and the walls were padded with black velvet. It looks like a recording studio, Cundieffe thought. He spotted Dorsey across the room, talking to a sixtyish hippie college professor in a chocolate brown three-piece suit. The man's hands grabbed at the air as he held forth, as if protesting his innocence. No, lecturing, trying to prove a point. Dorsey looked bored.
Cundieffe made his way for the pair. "Sorry," he said to Chen. "Gotta mingle."
Cundieffe elbowed his way through to Dorsey and beamed at the stranger, but said nothing. Dorsey didn't introduce him. The stranger's eyes crawled around on Cundieffe for a moment, then he started talking again, and Cundieffe put together who and what he was.
"So, the question you're asking is impossible to answer to any degree of certainty. Who is this man?" He pointed at Cundieffe.
"He's an agent on an unrelated case."
"Agent Martin Cundieffe. And you are?"
Still looking at Cundieffe, the man said, "I don't think I want to say anything else without my lawyer here."
"Sir, the case I'm working may well be related to this one. I'm looking for a man I have reason to believe was in this area last night at the time that this unfortunate event occurred. If there's any corroborating evidence that he was here, and foul play is indicated, he may be our prime suspect, and anything you can tell us that will expedite the satisfactory resolution of this tragedy will stand in your good stead. Now what is it you were trying to tell my colleague Agent Dorsey that he either won't believe or doesn't understand?"
Dorsey snorted and spilled coffee. The man seemed to go for his approach in a big way. "Linus Ullman. I teach over at Stanford, and I design biofeedback equipment—it's based on the principle of—"
"I'm aware of biofeedback. Please continue."
"Yes, well, Charles Angell—the founder of this group is—was—an old friend of mine. I put together the system in use at this place. I think—it may have had something to do with their deaths."
"How do you mean?" Cundieffe listened intently, nodding vigorously to keep Ullman talking.
"To put it as simply as possible, the School Of Night were into deep meditation, conscious Delta state trances. Only enlightened gurus in the East have mastered this capability even infrequently. But they meditated as a group. They wanted a system that would link up all of their brainwaves into a sort of symphony of harmonics, and they would work towards syncing up. I'd never seen anything like it, not even in Nepal."
"So you're suggesting that they could have used your system to drive their brainwaves below a level at which even autonomic life functions can be sustained?"
"Yes. That's it exactly. This other agent seems to believe they've been poisoned."
"Preliminary screens show they were on something," Dorsey added.
"Did you know them to consume narcotics?" Cundieffe asked.
"Herbal stimulants and copious amounts of hashish, but nothing else. For something like what I'm suggesting, they would've had to ingest several grams of hashish each, just to slow their heartrates to the threshold where this could even, uh, conceivably occur. I'm sorry. This is just such a shock…" Ullman looked around the room, as if he expected to see a familiar face. Behind him, the corridor was strung with klieg lights, illuminating open cells running down both sides. They'd only just gotten the last of the bodies out of them. "I want it to go on record that I never anticipated something like this happening. This was not possible using the device as it was originally designed."
"Then what makes you so sure it was the cause of death?"
"Have you seen the back room? Where all the computers are?"
Dorsey put a hand on his arm, but Cundieffe slipped out from under it. "No. Show me."
Ullman led him down the hall. Flashes popped in several of the cells, the whine of recharging batteries, and the litany of forensic details being recorded. It was incredible how the acoustic padding drank the sounds out of the room. He saw people talking across the room, but couldn't hear a word.
Ullman reached the end of the hall and stopped beside a closed door. A yellow CAUTION ribbon was draped across the doorway. Cundieffe pulled down the tape and opened the door. Ullman pushed past him and rushed into the room. Dorsey grabbed at Cundieffe's arm again, but again he got free.
He stepped into the room and immediately slipped. The floor was slimy with something. His hands shot out and grabbed the doorframe, and he steadied himself, flicked on the light.
Ullman was gingerly padding across the floor with his hands out like a tightrope walker. Plastic tarp crinkled under his feet. "Look at what they did!" he shouted. His voice was achingly loud here, because this room was all bare floor and mainframes. Every computer was down, even the flashing backup lights were off. And the floor was awash in tacky blood.
Ullman made his way over to the far wall, and when he did, he moved out of the way so that Cundieffe could see what Dorsey'd mentioned earlier. "Look at what they did!" Ullman shouted.
A big black leather office chair sat before the main computer console. A man sat in it with his hands splayed out on a keyboard resting in his lap. His throat was slashed down to the bone. His head was thrown back, all his vital plumbing laid open for the world to see. It was indecent, like a skin magazine photograph. What's more, someone had taken every sharp tool out of a toolbox and a kitchen knifeblock to the victim's head. They were all still there, rammed to the hilt into his eyesockets, his nostrils, ears, cheeks, even through the dome of his skull. The butt ends of these last were scuffed, so a mallet had been employed to drive them in. The raw, primal hatred of the act made Cundieffe's head swim. The head had been totally ravaged, as if the killer had wished to erase every detail of the victim's features. It was the explosion of a catastrophic mania. Cundieffe closed his eyes and reviewed the shots of Sheriff Twombley and his deputy, filled with so much lead the killer must've reloaded at least a second banana clip. Overkill.
"Has this man been identified yet?" Cundieffe asked.
"He's Kaman-Thah," Ullman said in a wistful, lost voice. "The Teacher and the Keeper of the Gate of Deeper Slumber."
"He's Charles Walter Angell, the leader," Dorsey said from outside. "There's no fingerprints on him."
"Have all the residents been accounted for?"
"Yes," Dorsey answered too quick, too loud, eyes boring into Cundieffe's, beaming
Who died and made you Agent-In-Charge, Four Eyes?
"What about hired help?"
"Enough of this." Chen pushed Dorsey aside and stepped into the room. "Agent Cundieffe, why don't you get with the Colma Sheriff's to find out if the man you're looking for was even here while we take care of this?"
Cundieffe leaned round the looming local agent to fix on Ullman. "Professor, what did they do to your computer?"
"Well, look at this. There's a CPU hardwired into my system that wasn't there before. The soldering on it's still soft. Aside from the rest of it—"
"Agent Chen, respectfully submitted, were the computers already shut off when the police arrived?"
Chen scowled at him. "Nothing has been changed, except for the footprints everywhere."
"That's what I'm talking about!" Ullman said. "The whole system is shorted out. All the motherboards are fused. Something hit this network like a lightning bolt and destroyed every piece of hardware."
"So it won't be possible to retrieve any of their files."
"No, there's nothing left to retrieve. The current turned the chips to slag."
"Maybe they did it on purpose, to ditch something else," Chen thought out loud.
"Or whoever did this to them destroyed the computer to keep his or her identity a secret," Dorsey added.
"Or whoever did this ruined the network in the process of trying to get something out of it. Is that possible, professor?"
"Oh, certainly, for people this computer-literate, and as obsessed with secrecy as they were—" Ullman was looking at Angell's corpse now, and he ran out of words.
"Gentlemen," Cundieffe said, "this is now a counterterrorism case."
25
Storch pulled into the parking lot of the Mojave Outpost truckstop just as dusk fell on the central valley. The car, a late model Taurus station wagon, ate up its last ghosts of fuel fumes dragging itself onto the vast plain of the lot. The engine sputtered and died, and the power steering went out, the lumbering family battlewagon suddenly as hard to steer as a runaway locomotive in mud, and Storch with only one hand to manage it. He was afraid to step on the brakes and lose momentum in the middle of the lot. He'd risked calling enough attention to himself just getting here.
The trucker, Nathaniel Stumbo, had picked him up two miles north of a tiny, spooky burg called Atwater, and they'd continued south. Storch helped himself to Stumbo's first aid kit, used all the gauze and antiseptic and most of the surgical tape to shore up his calf, and borrowed a musty black and orange flannel shirt he found in the sleeping cabin to make a sling for his left arm. He even found a lockpick set in a ceiling compartment, and after breaking one pick off in the lock of his left ankle shackle, got the others off and tossed them out the window.
Stumbo talked a lot, and Storch wagered he'd have picked him up regardless of the circumstances or his military background, just to have an ear to bend. Stumbo'd lost all of his right leg and half of his left in an accident of some kind just two months out of the service. Storch watched the man talking, the monotonous low growl lulling him into sleep. He dug his ragged fingernails into the meat of his palms to keep alert. He watched Stumbo and kept catching himself trying to figure out which side the trucker was on, if he'd have to kill him to insure his silence.
This became a nonissue when they approached Fresno, and Storch spotted the unmarked Chrysler sedans parked in the lot at the weigh station. FBI, looking at trucks. He ordered Stumbo to merge into the slowest lane, backed up a quarter mile longer than the others and standing still. The trucker looked askance at him, but did as he was told. Storch leaned out the window and surveyed the end of the line in a quick glance, then ducked back out of sight. The line was backed up because of a convoy of flatbeds carrying prefabricated houses. The highway patrol and two men in blue windbreakers were walking through each house. Up and down the line, horns honked, and Storch saw the other lanes getting the same treatment. There was a massive search on, but he doubted it was for him. It was like a smuggling inspection. They would recognize him, though. People who were just doing their jobs would end up getting killed.