A pinkish hue enveloped the room, and a fuzzy white light hovered above The Wizard’s head. A halo!
“You want to help us save the world, don’t you?” The Wizard stretched his arms high and wide, as if cradling John in his aura.
John nodded. An intense feeling came upon him. Tears welled. His shoulders shook. He felt the presence of greatness, it was inescapable. He’d been so wrong about The Wizard in the beginning. But now he knew—here was a man of God!
“I understand now!” John shouted. “I do! I really do! Please don’t make me leave! Please! I-I-I want to stay! I want to help! I want to help you save the planet!”
“Confess!” The Wizard said. “Confess everything to me now, and you can stay.”
Still no John
, Marilyn thought while standing in the chow line.
Piper’s brainwashing him, I just know it. Which means as soon as John cracks—and he will—Piper will come for me
.
She felt an urge to cut and run. Now. This very minute. Dig up her phone in the peach orchard and dial 9-1-1. Because she couldn’t allow herself to be brainwashed too—or, short of that, tortured. She could spill a lot more than John.
Through her Piper could learn the truth of his situation, that the cops were wise to his human body farm, and then he’d be the one to cut and run, avoiding arrest.
But what if I’m wrong? John might not be under Piper’s suspicion at all. It might be the opposite. John could be ingratiating himself with the leadership. He could be missing because he’s been entrusted with a special task of some kind.
Stay put for now, woman, but be ready to run
.
She shuffled forward in line, reaching the stacks of plastic dinner trays when a strange sight across the hall distracted her. In an open space in front of the cold beverage machines, Aura had dropped her cut-off blue jeans and panties to her ankles, and she was squatting like a baseball catcher. A bare-bottomed man faced her, his stance identical. The pair eyed each other intently. And then Marilyn saw it—feces emerging from rectums, plopping to the floor.
She rushed to the spectacle, aghast, her undercover persona yielding to the psychologist. By the time she’d muscled through a small crowd of spectators, Aura and the bare-bottomed man had switched their positions, dropped to their knees, and lowered their heads to each other’s excretions.
“Aura!” Marilyn said. “What are you doing?!”
She nearly fainted when Aura’s head lifted, exposing stained lips and teeth.
“What does it look like? I’m eating shit!”
A hand gripped Marilyn’s arm above the elbow and tugged her back a step. She turned around to face Bob Marsh.
“Leave them be,” he said.
“But—”
“They were quarreling. And our work here is far too important for such trivial distractions. They need punishment.”
She remembered who she was supposed to be again and nodded. “I understand now.”
Bob turned back to the coprophagous twosome. Marilyn couldn’t bear to watch, and her appetite for food was now gone. She hurried from the building.
John had difficulty stringing more than a few thoughts or words together at a time. The Wizard grew impatient and began feeding his sluggish mind yes or no questions.
Yes, he was a homicide inspector with the San Francisco Police Department. Yes, he’d infiltrated Earthbound seeking answers to the death of Esperanza Chavez and good Samaritan Fred Ames, seeking Daryl Finck and his accomplice. Yes, he’d broken into the red farmhouse in search of the location of Daryl Finck and Earthbound’s safe houses.
“You had help on that job, didn’t you?” The Wizard said.
“Yes,” John said.
“Who honked the car horn to distract my guards?”
“Deputy Fry,” John said. “Local sheriff’s office.”
“What did you do inside my offices?”
“Plant bugs.”
“Where?”
“Um . . . Beneath some desks. In the main computer.”
Tom stood up from the bed he’d been sitting on and shambled out of the recovery room. The Wizard ignored his departure.
“What did you learn from the computer?”
John shrugged. “Ask Deputy Fry.”
“Are you the only undercover police officer on my farm?”
John thought of Doctor Marilyn Michaelsen, but only for a moment. She was no police officer.
“Yes.”
“Who’s your supervisor?”
“Captain Switzer.”
“In San Francisco?”
John nodded. “Homicide chief.”
The Wizard paced in front of John’s bed for a while. He turned back to John and smiled. “This captain of yours, the one who’s supervising the investigation—”
“Captain Switzer.”
“Do you know where he lives?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Think hard.”
“Okay.” John shut his eyes to think, his brow furrowing. “Oh, that’s right. Little house in Mill Valley. Went to a party there once. Last year, maybe.”
“Excellent,” The Wizard said. He stepped nearer, grazing the side of John’s bed. “Because I want you—you and Brother Tom—to pay a little visit to Captain Switzer.”
“What for?”
“We need to stop him from sending undercover cops here to disturb our work. It’s vitally important. Vitally important.”
“I don’t think he’ll listen.”
The Wizard sat down on the edge of John’s bed. “Then you’ll have to kill him.”
Marilyn raced through the dark peach orchard with practiced speed and stealth. She found Deputy Fry’s cruiser parked in its usual place, slanted in a ditch on the side of the unlit farm road, obscured by a dense stand of trees.
She hopped the fence and approached the car. The deputy’s profile in silhouette came into view behind the wheel. His head was pointing down. He was reading something by penlight. For a lark, she veered to the rear bumper of the vehicle, then crept up to the driver’s side window and yelled, “Boo!”
Fry yelped. His penlight flew out of his hand.
Marilyn laughed. “You startle good.”
“Jesus,” Fry muttered, retrieving his penlight from the floorboard. “And you’re acting more and more like a real cop. Wanna make a career switch?”
“No thanks. Amateur status is fine with me.”
“Okay, Doctor, but I must say, you make one heck of an amateur. You were right about the cult leader. He’s getting rich trafficking in human body parts and fluids.”
“Omigod,” she said, “he’s really doing it. Defrauding his followers of . . . of such personal contents. It’s obscene.”
“We can lock him up for decades. Tom Mahorn too. Whether we link them to the Esperanza Chavez murder, or the Fred Ames murder, or not.”
“Yes!” Marilyn jumped up and down in the road. “Yes!”
“Sssh!” Fry said. “Pipe down, amateur, and get in the car.”
Marilyn zipped around to the passenger side door, opened it, and hopped inside the vehicle. “Tell me what you found.”
“I’ll start with the business records. About four years ago, a certain Lawrence Robert Piper—AKA, L. Rob Piper—made a quick string of purchases in the Los Angeles area. He bought a commercial blood center, an egg brokerage, and a sperm bank. Last year, he bought himself a pharmaceutical laboratory. Also located in LA. Today, I drove there. Checked each of them out personally. They appear to be legitimate enterprises. And yet, I’m fairly sure they’re staffed by cult members.”
“Why do you think that?”
“For example, when I made a donation at the blood center, I told the woman drawing my blood that I grew up here in Tulare county, outside Visalia, and she shared with me that she’d been living on a farm there, until about a year ago.”
“Let’s think about this,” she said. “Some jobs in these types of businesses are low-skilled, but some require technical skills. Which few of Piper’s cult followers are likely to possess. But it wouldn’t take long to obtain the necessary certifications to become a medical technologist of some kind. A matter of months, not years. My guess is that Piper hand-selected some of his most loyal followers, sent them away for training, and then staffed his new businesses with them.”
“Makes sense to me,” Fry said. “We’re talking large volumes of product. Any non-cult members would grow suspicious.”
“Doctor Fosse, Piper’s fertility specialist, probably helps to oversee the companies. Though Piper may have other physicians working for him, because cults attract people from all social strata. At Waco, for example, a Harvard-trained lawyer went up in flames with David Koresh.”
“With a warrant, we could take a closer look at the firms.”
“It’d have to be a surreptitious warrant. We don’t want to tip Piper off. By the way, what have you learned about ‘Lawrence Robert Piper?’ ”
“Nothing yet. As soon as I had his real name, I called Captain Switzer, and he got the analysts running a criminal records check, nation-wide. Should be done in a few more hours.”
“Wish John were here to enjoy this,” Marilyn said, stroking her spiky hair.
“Yeah. Any word on his whereabouts?”
“Yes, finally. I was told that John’s been in the infirmary all this time, with a head injury. Turns out I’d seen the accident myself, a fall, you’ll remember, caused by a wicked bout of respiratory alkalosis. The accident didn’t seem too severe to me at the time, but you can never tell with a head injury.”
“So you buy it?”
“I want to, but I’m keeping an open mind, because it may be a cover story, and Piper’s been brainwashing John all this time.”
“Why don’t you pay a visit to the infirmary?”
“I did, earlier this evening, and the nurse told me John had just been discharged, and that he’d left on a trip somewhere.”
“A trip?” Fry said.
“Yeah. Here’s the worrisome part. He’s with Tom Mahorn.”
“Oh, boy.”
“I know. The last time someone went on a trip with Tom Mahorn, it was Daryl Finck, and things didn’t turn out so well.”
“What do you think this means?”
“The trip? It means John is winning the trust of the leadership. The question is why. Is this John’s own strategy, or has he been brainwashed? We’ll just have to wait and see.”
“Can’t wait long. I spoke to your captain today, and he says if John doesn’t show up within the next twenty-four hours, still on our side, he’ll pull the plug on the whole operation. Go in with a SWAT team—if he has to—and bring you two out.”
“That doesn’t sound like the Captain Switzer I know. What made him change his attitude?”
Fry heaved a sigh. “Yesterday, I lost the electronic feed from the computer we tapped into. Could be just a bad break—a glitch—or it could be John’s gone over to the other side.”
John sat in the passenger seat of Tom’s black Mercedes-Benz SUV hybrid, gazing through the front window at the city lights of San Francisco. With dawn slowly excavating Telegraph Hill, he could make out the Transamerica Pyramid and Coit Tower.
Soon Alcatraz Prison came into view, afloat on misty water. It was all so familiar, but it was all so different. Earthquakes were nothing to worry about now. Not compared to the End Time.
“I forgot to tell The Wizard about Marilyn,” John said.
“Marilyn?” Tom glanced over from the driver’s seat.
“Yeah. If we have to stop Captain Switzer from interfering in our work, then we better stop her too.”
“The blonde with the punk haircut and the big fun-bags?”
“That’s her. She came with me. Police psychologist.”
“Son of a bitch.” Tom whacked the palm of his right hand on the top of his steering wheel. “I’ll fix her myself.”
“You’re not gonna kill her, right?”
“One problem at a time.” He glanced at his watch. “What’s Mill Valley from here? Another twenty minutes?”
“I can’t do it,” John said, turning to him. “I can’t execute Captain Switzer, I don’t care how important the reason.”
“Trust in The Wizard. He said you’ll find the strength, Brother John, and somehow you will.”
“Maybe I can talk to the captain, tell him about the End Time and all. Maybe then he’ll leave us alone. How’s that?”
Tom shook his head. “You know what they say. ‘Desperate times call for desperate measures.’ ”
“It won’t hurt to try talking first.”
“If you insist.”
“I’m not a killer. I mean, I’ve killed in the line of duty before—once, in a shoot-out, in defense of my old partner, Bernie Hastings—but this is different.”
“Is it? I don’t think so. Seems to me, killing Switzer would be the same as killing in defense of others, considering what The Wizard has seen. He sees into the future, you know. Granted, it’s a little hazy, he says, but he can see some things pretty clear, and one thing he can see is that if Switzer isn’t stopped, then the End Time will come for sure. So killing him would be like killing in defense of the whole planet, right?”