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The Puppet Master

John Dalmas

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

A Baen Books Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

www.baen.com

ISBN: 0-671-31842-X

Cover art by Gary Ruddell

First printing, October 2001

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Production by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH

Printed in the United States of America

This book is dedicated to Herbert D. Clough, 30 years with the FBI who, with the collaboration of the originator, Leslie

Charteris, resurrected the fabled SAINT magazine. Distribution problems shot her down, but for three wonderful months in 1984, she flew. A lovely project.

BAEN BOOKS by JOHN DALMAS

The Puppet Master

Soldiers

The Regiment

|The Regiment's War

The Three-Cornered War

The Lion of Farside

The Bavarian Gate

The Lion Returns

The Lizard War

FOREWORD

These stories are set in a time line that branched from yours and mine sometime after the close of World War Two. Much in it remains familiar; some things are very similar. But major differences have developed. The geogravitic power converter has energized economies while greatly easing energy, water, and pollution problems.

But the blessing is mixed. The GPC has brought more than cheap, clean, abundant energy and the new physics: The resulting flood of scientific and technological innovations is accelerating changes in society, with outgrowths positive and negative, attractive and ugly, exciting and fearsome.

Homo sapiens has major adjustments to make.

A MOST SINGULAR MURDER

a novella

My name is Martti Seppanen, and I work for Prudential Investigations and Security, Inc. Things had been slow, and I'd had nothing much to do for a day and a half—since I'd finished rounding up the collusion evidence against Funsch, Carillo, and Wallace. So I stood there in my two-by-four office—ten by ten feet, actually—looking westward across the L.A. basin toward the higher rises of Lower Wilshire. While drilling Spanish.

I don't mind days like that. But there was the nagging worry that if business didn't pick up, Joe might have to lay people off. Me for example. Times like that you can wonder whether it had been a good idea when Joe leased the whole ninth floor of this high-rent high rise. Of course, the old building got sold out from under him and knocked down. The old buildings are disappearing.

Besides, when I don't have a case, I get the munchies worse than usual, and I gain weight too easily.

I kept drilling, using a question and answer program on intermediate spoken Spanish. The computer would voice a question in fairly simple Spanish, and I'd answer it. Or it would tell me to discuss some simple thing. Then it would critique my diction, grammar, and pronunciation, and we'd repeat it till the program was satisfied with my performance.

¿«Donde guardan los documentos financiales»? the computer asked me. ("Where do you keep your financial records?") The program is part of the department's advanced language training.

«Debajo de la bañadera, I answered, donde nadie los buscaria». ("Under the bathtub, where no one would ever look for them.") You do enough of those drills, you learn what the program will accept.

That's where things stood when Carlos looked in on me. "Come in my office," he said. "We've got something for you."

"We" meant himself and Joe Keneely. Joe's the founder, principal shareholder, and CEO of Prudential. Carlos is the senior investigator, and I was his protégé, top of the list of junior investigators. And the something would be an assignment.

I followed Carlos down the hall. His office was big enough for a small conference without people sitting in each other's laps. He sat down behind his desk, and I took the chair across from him. Fingering his computer, he turned on the wall screen. A picture formed and stopped. It showed Joe Keneely's office, with Joe and Carlos, and some guy I'd never seen before.

"The client is Donald C. Pasco," Carlos said. "All the way down from Sacramento. Joe just signed a contract with him." He said it as if it tasted bad. I'd heard of Pasco. He was director of the Anti-Fraud Division of the California Department of Commerce, and had a reputation as an aye-aitch.

The picture came to life, and I watched their conference. Actually I watched Pasco bitch and snarl. About three weeks earlier, an astronomer named Arthur Ashkenazi had read a paper to the California Section of the Astronomical Society of America, at the section's annual meeting. The paper was what had gotten Pasco upset. Pasco didn't have much presence, but he had rank and venom. After playing back the meeting with Pasco, Carlos ran Ashkenazi's talk for me. I'd been aware of it before, just barely. It had been written up in the papers, but I hadn't read it. I read fast, but the L.A. Times is thick, and the talk hadn't had any significance for me.

Now, watching him deliver it, it turned out to be pretty interesting. It didn't offend me at all, but it had offended Ashkenazi's audience. He'd hardly gotten well underway when people started to leave. "Stalked out" is the best description.

About halfway through his talk and three-quarters of the way through his audience, one of them got up and shouted that Ashkenazi should be thrown out. That what he was spieling was astrology, not astronomy. And another guy stood up then, apparently an officer of the meeting, and told the guy yelling that he'd either have to sit down and be quiet, or leave. The guy left, madder than hell, most of the remaining audience following him out in a bunch. Ashkenazi finished to a dozen listeners, probably mostly reporters, and didn't seem upset at the exodus. I suppose he wasn't surprised.

Basically what Ashkenazi was reporting was, he'd run correlations of events of one sort and another against the positions of stars and planets. Which did amount to astrology, as far as I could see. And while I'm no statistical analyst, I do know that the kind of correlation coefficients he was claiming aren't the sort of thing you get by chance. Not in the real world.

He'd done it the hard way, too, or that's how it looked. He hadn't picked a scattering of historical events that fitted his purpose. Over a period of almost thirty years he'd predicted events, supposedly from the positions of stars and planets, and published them in various newsletters put out by different astrology groups, New Age groups, and groups into psychic phenomena. And a lot of his predictions came out as forecast, his scores getting better as he improved his system. Predictions like droughts, major political shifts, uprisings, big stock market swings, major deaths . . . If the publications were real. In 1994 he'd even predicted that a then-unknown source of electrical power would be released in 1997 that would change the world. Which of course was Haugen's geogravitic power converter! That was uncanny.

I could see why astronomers might get spooky about stuff like that. But why was Pasco so upset? Even if Ashkenazi made it all up, it wasn't illegal and it wasn't commerce. Which was what the Anti-Fraud Division was supposed to be concerned with—criminal fraud in commerce. This was something the astronomers could take care of themselves if they wanted to, by kicking Ashkenazi out of their society. Which in fact they had, for misrepresenting his talk to the program committee.

From the recording of the meeting with Pasco, I could see that Joe felt uncomfortable with the job, the same as I did. Because what Pasco wanted was a fishing expedition at taxpayers' expense. We were supposed to investigate every damned thing about Arthur Ashkenazi. Everything but his finances; the California Commerce Department's Audit Division would cover that. To quote Pasco: "Find something discreditable about this Ashkenazi, preferably something criminal."

I asked Carlos why Joe had accepted the contract. I guess I knew, but Joe spelled it out for me: "A fair amount of our business comes from Commerce. We're their number one contractor in southern California, and we can't afford their turning to another investigation firm."

I could have turned the assignment down. Joe's used to my being a hardhead, and I'd earned enough points with him and Carlos that they wouldn't have been too mad at me. But somehow I took it.

Back in my office, I sat down at my computer, accessed the L.A. library and called up what the media—print, Webworks, and TV—had said about Ashkenazi's talk. The professional media had had people there of course—probably stringers and junior staff. And since the news had been dull for a while, they'd played up the Ashkenazi flap pretty big. Mostly tongue in cheek, but pretty much without ridiculing it. The syndicates had gotten hold of it then, pontificating. Then Time magazine did a feature on it, treating it straight, and Ashkenazi made the talk show circuit.

All of which had burned Pasco up, and he was using his position, and us, to try to punish Ashkenazi at pubic expense.

Usually you start a case with evidence of a crime, and that gives you something to orient on. This one was different.

Since it was almost five o'clock, I killed a few minutes, then left the office promptly at quitting time. It wasn't a workout day, and I had a date that evening, so I went straight home, showered, re-shaved, dressed semi-dressy, and picked up Tuuli. We took my car—hers is nicer, but she's considerate about things like that—and drove to Mr. Ethel's on North La Cienega. They specialize in health foods, especially low-fat foods, but the quality is excellent and the prices affordable. The waiters are a little strange, but they're at least as courteous as their customers.

Tuuli doesn't worry about fat. That's my problem. She's the same age as me, thirty, but only five feet tall and fine-boned. She probably doesn't weigh more than 85 or 90 pounds, which is 40 percent of what I weigh. About a third of what I weigh, sometimes. She's the only Lapp immigrant I know; actually half-Lapp. Her father's a Finn, same as mine was. Born in the little mining town of Tuollivaara in Swedish Lapland, she grew up partly there, and partly on a backwoods farm near Koivujoki, in Finnish Lapland. Came to America when she turned eighteen. Her story is, she decided to emigrate when someone told her that in California women could be shamans, and all the shamans were rich.

She's been psychic, she says, since she was a little kid. From what I've seen, it's easy to believe. Her great-great-grandfather had been one of the last active Lapp shamans; the state church pretty much shut shamanism down in Sweden a hundred and fifty years ago. The basic lore got passed down to Tuuli through her mother, even though they were females. How I got to know her is, she sometimes consults for police agencies and private investigation firms in greater Los Angeles. The police don't like to acknowledge it—bad for their image—and she doesn't publicize it. She just deposits their credit transfers in her bank account.

But she built her reputation through the rich and famous. There's a lot of rich people around L.A., and most of her income is from them. It doesn't hurt that Tuuli Waanila's an interesting looking woman, either. Not just tiny. She has elfin features, sandy hair, and slanty hazel eyes. It especially helps with entertainment people. Looks mean a lot to them. Also she sounds good. She's got a light accent that sounds pretty much Finnish. She's well-named, too. Her full name is Tuulikki, which in Finnish means graceful. Her dad named her that when she was born, and it turned out to fit.

Anyway, at Mr. Ethel's we got a booth in a corner, and while we waited, we drank coffee and talked. "What do you think of astrology?" I asked.

Her eyes were direct, as usual. "Astrology? I'm not very informed about it. I don't practice it. But I usually look up my horoscope in the paper, in the morning."

"Really?"

"Sure. It's good to have a source of outside information. Psychics usually see better for others than for ourselves."

I didn't leave it at that. I had to pump her a little. It goes with the profession. "But astrology!" I said. "I mean, I can imagine people getting information through the omega matrix maybe, but from the positions of the planets?"

She shrugged. "You read the papers."

"Not the horoscopes, I don't."

"Did you read about the astronomer, Ashkenazi?"

"Do you believe him?"

"Nobody seemed anxious to try proving him wrong." She paused, looking pointedly at me. "Why don't you tell me why you brought this up?"

So I did. "And now Ashkenazi's my job. Thanks to Mr. Paska. Oops, Pasco."

She tried to grin and wrinkle her nose at the same time. The nose won out. "Paska is a good name for him."

"You know Pasco?"

"In my business, he has a reputation. He hates people like me. He's California's main agitator for laws to stop us from practicing our profession." Her eyes looked thoughtfully at me. "You've heard the saying, 'In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.' "

"Yeah?"

"The person who said it was mistaken. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is apt to be considered a liar and a fraud." She paused again. This time her eyes seemed to focus somewhere above and beyond my right shoulder. "You're likelier to find something criminal about Pasco than about Ashkenazi."

"Are you serious?"

"Yes I'm serious."

"What should I look for?"

Tuuli shrugged. "I don't know. If you're interested in Ashkenazi, look way back. To when he was young." She paused. "Ashkenazi's not his real name, his original name."

"How do you know?" I assumed she'd read it somewhere. "What is his real name?"

"I don't know. You should be able to find out. And it's something you really should look into. And find out about his twin. His twin brother. I'm pretty sure it's a brother."

I didn't know how to take that—whether she'd read something, or if she was being psychic. "And you say I can find something criminal about Pasco if I try?"

"I'm not sure. The feeling I get is a little confusing. It may be something he hasn't done yet."

"Huh! I'll keep that in mind," I told her. "But tomorrow I start checking on Ashkenazi."

An investigation contract with a public agency gets you direct access to the confidential State Data Center through your computer. You call and enter your case ID. Their computer checks the ID and your face and thumbprint against their records, then you insert the contract card so they know what it's all about. After that you tell them what you want, with a brief oral justification. If it sounds reasonable to them, and if everything checks out, the information downloads into your computer for your temporary use.

As for "temporary use," you're supposed to erase stuff within three business days of contract termination. Actually they give you a two-day grace period. The information is flagged in their computer when you get it, and they check contractor computers from Sacramento, to be sure the stuff has been erased. Obviously it's possible to hold out on them; make hard copies for example. But if you're caught, it can cost your license, as well as a fine and possible criminal charges.

Joe's grace period is less than Sacramento's. On the morning of the third day, the company checks. Your first violation brings a reprimand. The second time you're fired, or if you're lucky as hell, put on probation. That's part of the orientation pack you get when he hires you. Plus Joe tells you himself, with his bushy black Irish-Cornish eyebrows drawn up in a knot to make sure you take him seriously. He fires your ass, and the reason will be on your employment references.

So anyway, I called up all the information on Ashkenazi in the state's files, with the exception of tax and census data. Tax records are accessible only if your contract is with the California Franchise Tax Board. Census data isn't available under any contract, and I'm told if you even ask, the state investigates you.

I learned a lot about Ashkenazi: His current address, past addresses with dates . . . all kinds of stuff. But the most interesting item was that Arthur Aaron Ashkenazi was an assumed name. Just like Tuuli said. He'd been born Aldon Arthur Ashley, and had legally changed it in 1973, seven years before I was born. There was no hint of why.

There was nothing there to focus an investigation on except the name change, and offhand that didn't look very promising. So I decided to interview him. I'd present myself as a freelance writer doing an article on spec for the pop-science magazine Cutting Edge.

I had his unlisted number from the state, but using it might bring questions I wouldn't care to answer, so I dialed his answering service, which was listed. The woman who answered had a face like a bulldog. I decided right away he didn't want calls from strangers.

"I'd like to speak with Mr. Ashkenazi, please."

"What may I tell him the call is about?"

"It's confidential."

"Mr. Ashkenazi doesn't accept confidential calls at this number."

I'd only waste my time trying to cajole her. "Tell Mr. Ashkenazi I want to interview him. If I can't, I'll have to interview his twin. Tell him that. If you cut me off, he's going to be madder than hell at you."

Her look almost melted my set. I wished I'd looked up his twin's name, if he actually had a twin. I shouldn't have overlooked that. Using a name would have been more convincing. After glaring for a couple of seconds, she put me on hold. A minute later, Ashkenazi's face appeared on my screen. He looked mildly annoyed, nothing worse.

"What's this about?" he said.

"I've read and screened your address to the Astronomical Society, and some of the things written about you. I'm preparing an article for Cutting Edge, and I'd like to interview you."

"I don't give interviews."

"I appreciate that, Mr. Ashkenazi, and I respect your feelings on it. But I still plan to write the article. The direction it takes, and what I feature in it, depends on the information I have."

For a moment he just sat looking at me via our connection. "An interview," he said. Sounding resigned. "All right. Where are you calling from?"

"L.A."

He grunted. "This evening then. I'll give you thirty minutes, beginning at seven. Do you know how to find me?"

"You're at 4231 East Encino Road. I assume that rental cars in Santa Barbara have the Montecito grid in their computers."

"They may, but I'm three miles outside Montecito, in the Rhubarb Canyon development. I don't know if they've extended the grid this far out yet. If you have any trouble, call. I'll tell Mrs. Bowser to put you through to me. My place is fenced, with a remote control gate. The call box will get the house, and someone will let you in. That's this evening at seven."

"Thank you, Mr. Ashkenazi," I told him. Mrs. Bowser! I could hardly believe it.

Then I got Sacramento again. I needed to get all the available information on his family, something I should have already done.

Since geogravitic power, air transport has gotten cheaper and a lot more convenient, with virtually no risk of crash, short of collision. Floaters are AG, stable in flight, easy to operate, quiet, and don't pollute. From the office, if I want to fly somewhere, I drive a mile and a half to the Larchmont Station, where shuttles fly to LAX, Long Beach, Hollywood-Burbank, Ventura, or Santa Barbara at half-hour intervals.

I caught the 5:15 airbus to Santa Barbara and got there at 5:40. The air was clear as polished crystal. With the mountains behind her, L.A. looked beautiful, the Pacific magnificent, and the Sierra Madre rugged and wild. At the Santa Barbara Station I caught a turkey salad sandwich and at 6:23 was in a rental car headed for Montecito. The Montecito grid did cover the Rhubarb Canyon development, so all I had to do to find Ashkenazi's place was follow the route on the computer. It took me 16 minutes: I was 20 minutes early. Instead of using the call box, I voiced his number on the phone in the rental car and told him I was there already—that if he wanted I could drive around awhile. He said to come on up to the house, and a few seconds later the security gate opened.

His place was on two or three acres of land. You couldn't see the house from the gate because of the tall hedge along the road. Behind it was a concrete wall a yard high, eight feet of chain link with the waxy luster of new HardSteel above that, and razor wire on top.

Pretty mild, actually, for a development like Rhubarb Canyon in these days of trashers. Nothing at all like Ojibwa County, Michigan, where I grew up. His driveway started in through a stand of scrub live oak, but the house itself was surrounded by lawn, shaded thin by big encina oaks. The house was fairly large, partly one story and partly two, with big windows and glass doors. There were five paved parking places, one occupied by what had to be his car, another by a middle-aged pickup that probably belonged to household staff. Apparently Ashkenazi wasn't big on entertaining. I pulled into one of the other spaces, stepped up onto the porch and knocked. A man answered, wearing a sort of semi-uniform. He let me into an entryway and pressed a button.

Half a minute later, Ashkenazi was there, shaking my hand, cordial as you could hope for. Making the best of a regrettable situation, probably. He looked heavier than on the video, but healthy. I suppose he exercised. We went into a room lit by the yellow rays of a setting sun, and sat down. He looked at a wall clock. "Six-forty," he said. "We might as well start. Let me ask the first question: How did you know about Eldon?"

Eldon was his twin brother. Their parents' names were in the data on Ashkenazi, and I'd called up information on them that afternoon. There wasn't much of it, of course. But their children's names and birth dates were there. "Mr. Ashkenazi," I answered, "a writer learns research techniques, just as an astronomer does. I haven't taken the trouble to learn much about your family though. I haven't decided just what form the article will take, so I don't know what's relevant to it. I am, of course, interested in your research and yourself."

"You've read my paper."

"And watched you read it to the Astronomy Society."

"Then you saw how it was received by my professional brethren."

"Right. I also saw interviews with a few of them. They said what you talked about was astrology, not astronomy."

Ashkenazi smiled. "Astrology without astrological terminology. I followed basic astrological principles but abandoned the traditional framework and analyzed large volumes of data." The smile became a grin. "I call it 'predictive astronomy,' to irritate the astronomical fraternity."

"But apparently you don't know why it works. If you could have described the mechanism, you would have. Wouldn't you? You must have some kind of theory."

He shook his head. "If Ali Hasad's Limited Theory of Generated Reality is valid, it provides a partial explanation."

One of the advantages of reading 800 to 1200 words per minute is, you can read a lot of books and magazines. So I knew a little of what he was talking about. "Isn't Ali Hasad's theory rejected by scientists?"

"By most of them. Not all. If you polled the physics community, maybe six of ten would reject it out of hand, two would withhold judgement but express strong skepticism, and two would say something like, it's heuristically interesting and might lead to new understanding.

"But science isn't supposed to be democratic, in the sense of a vote making a theory viable or valid. Most of those who reject Ali Hasad's theory haven't read it, except perhaps the summary of his first paper on it. And aren't likely to.

"Its chief problem is, it supports and thus revives an old contention of Fred Hoyle's, based on the values of basic physical parameters of the universe."

I knew what he was talking about, and kept my mouth shut, letting him continue.

"The basic parameters are those fundamental forces on which the universe depends for its characteristics. And if those parameters were even moderately different than they are, we wouldn't simply have elements and planets and life somewhat different than they are. We wouldn't have them at all. And considering probabilities, Hoyle couldn't accept that those parameters are what they are simply by accident. He contended that it must have been designed. That this universe is an artifact programmed by some superintelligence operating outside our universe.

"An intelligence that some people identified with God, which is a word with a lot of unfortunate Bronze Age superstitions attached to it."

He cocked an eyebrow. "Have I thoroughly confused you?"

"I'm familiar with Hoyle's view," I said. "I never read anything by him, but I read an article about it years ago. It sounded reasonable enough, and when I read a description of Ali Hasad's theory, it did remind me of Hoyle. But I'm in no position to evaluate either one scientifically."

Ashkenazi chuckled. "Neither are the physicists who refuse to look. It's interesting how much of advanced physics is nonexperimental. Which in the traditional sense means nonscientific. That's not to knock it. Given the problems, they do what they can. For decades, the frontiers of physics have lain largely in the realm of mathematics. The subject demands theories that commonly can't be tested physically. They test them by seeing how consistent the math is, particularly with other, already-accepted math that describes physical phenomona.

"That's a simplification, I'll admit, but basically it's accurate. And Ali Hasad's math is compatible with the Meissner-Ikeda Lattice. And accommodates the math, such as it is, of the omega matrix."

My half hour was melting, but I let him go on. I had a notion he might let it stretch to as long as it took.

"You don't look old enough," Ashkenazi went on, "to remember when legislative know-nothings had the Tarzan books banned from school libraries in Tennessee. They said Tarzan and Jane weren't married, were living in sin, and the books were a danger to the morals of young people.

"Actually they were married. In Book Two. Jane's father was a professor, and they were married in the jungle at Tarzan's family's cabin, if I remember correctly. The damned know-nothings had never read the sonofabitch. Typical.

"Well, Ali-Hasad's critics haven't examined his math. There are know-nothings in science, too.

"Considering the track records of all the earlier mathematical super-theories, Ali-Hasad's will probably turn out to have serious holes and loose ends, but . . ."

He stopped and grinned, shaking his head ruefully. "You punched my buttons," he said. "And I suppose you're recording this."

I was, and admitted it. My audio recorder was in my shoulder bag, beside my chair. "But you'll have a chance to critique the manuscript," I told him.

"Hmh! That's something, anyway. As for my work, it has no theory. It's totally empirical."

He turned serious again. "I'm not worried about explanations. Arne Haugen had only a rough notion of the basis for the geogravitic power converter, but that didn't keep him from inventing it. I've established a certain predictive and planning value in a revised and sharpened form of astrology I developed empirically. It's no big deal to me if the astronomical community doesn't accept it. I'd have given odds of a hundred to one against it, and taken all the bets I could cover.

"My career doesn't depend on anyone's approval. My degrees are in astronomy, but I've never been employed in it. I made my initial money in computer software and consulting, back in the days before the personal computer. My real wealth I made through investments. Guided, I might add, by every predictive tool, including astrology, that I could program. Also I have clients, as many as I care to deal with, who don't give a damn about explanations, and even less about compatibility with current theory. They're interested in results, and that's what I give them."

With that, he seemed to have run down. I nodded. "And what does Eldon think of all this?"

His eyebrows raised. "You don't know much about Eldon, do you. He probably doesn't think about it at all. He's an invalid. Been brain-damaged since 1973. From an auto accident."

"Ah. Then I probably shouldn't bother him."

"I'm quite sure Veronica would prefer that."

What I said next was a shot in the dark, totally unpremeditated. "Do you, uh, contribute to his support, Mr. Ashkenazi?"

He frowned. "Really, Mr. Seppanen, I don't care to . . ." He paused, lips pursing. "I will answer that question. A number of years ago I set up a trust fund. Not that it's necessary. Veronica is a capable provider. She's the trust fund's payee of course, not Eldon.

"And she's a COGS," he added drily. "COGS put a lot of emphasis on being financially honorable and intellectually shabby."

A COGS! She wouldn't like at all what Ashkenazi was into. The Church of God in Science—COGS—is an attempt to meld fundamentalist Christian views with classical science. It's become a fairly major church since the plagues of 1999 and 2000. It's how some people are trying to come to terms with the accelerating changes in the world. The way that COGS feel about anything like astrology or psychic phenomena pretty much ranges between contempt and hatred.

And suddenly I got the idea that if I checked on Donald C. Pasco, I'd find he was a COGS, too. It would fit him like pantyhose.

"Thank you, Mr. Ashley—excuse me; Mr. Ashkenazi," I said getting up. "You've been very helpful. I'll phone you again when the article begins to take form. To fill holes."

Calling him Ashley hadn't been a slip. I wanted to see if he'd react. He had, with a look of annoyance. It rekindled my curiosity about the name change. "Maybe I'll start checking my horoscope in the morning paper," I added. "It might prove helpful."

* * *

Driving back to Santa Barbara, I examined what I'd learned. I couldn't see it leading anywhere, but I realized I liked Arthur Ashkenazi. He seemed like what the Jews call a "mensch," which I've had explained as someone who is able, responsible, decent, and feeling. I hoped I didn't learn something discreditable about him.

Meanwhile it was my job to look. So the next morning I hired a statistically sophisticated CPA intern to check the entries—the dates and contents of the actual publications—and the computations in Ashkenazi's research. It was a lot different than anything she'd done before, but she had the right attitude—she was a skeptic who liked a challenge. And it seemed to me she had the tools.

Then, independent of that, I went to Pasadena and hired a Ph.D. candidate in astronomy at Cal Tech, to check the same stuff from the viewpoint of an astronomer. I'd met him at Carlos' place that summer, at supper. He was a friend of Carlos' son, Keith. It seemed to me he'd be reasonably open-minded. He was an ex-member of the "New Gnus"—the Church of the New Gnosis—and you had to be damned flexible to even consider that one.

I also visited the Santa Monica High School library and looked through the 1968 and '69 yearbooks. I got a list of students who might have been personal friends of Aldon Ashley, kids who'd been in the same student activities. Then I did essentially the same things with the UCLA yearbook for 1973. After that it was back to the State Data Center for locations and phone numbers—the drudge work of investigation. Nearly half the people I was interested in had died in the plagues of '99 and 2000, but phone calls still got some information.

The most productive was a friend of both his high school and college days, who still exchanged Christmas/Hanukkah letters with him. They'd see each other every five or ten years. The guy lives in Minneapolis, so I didn't talk to him eyeball to eyeball, but a telephone call was useful.

For one thing, I learned why Aldon Ashley had changed his name, and there was nothing discreditable about it. The same weekend he'd graduated from UCLA, he'd gotten in some kind of fuss with his sister-in-law, whom this guy characterized as a real bitch. Eldon, Ashkenazi's twin, got upset listening to it, and left to drive around. And smoke dope, something Eldon was into. He ended up losing an argument with an overpass abutment, which is how he became a brain-damaged cripple.

The sister-in-law told their father that the reason Eldon had done this was, Aldon had insulted him. And for whatever reason, the father believed this, and raised hell with Aldon. Told him it was his fault his brother's life was ruined. Apparently overlooking the daughter-in-law, the dope, and Eldon's decision to drive recklessly.

So Aldon left home, and that summer changed his name. Something his father wouldn't learn about for years, the break was that complete. When Aldon's grandfather was young, he'd resigned from being Jewish, and changed his name to Ashley. Aldon, as a sort of resignation from being his father's son, had switched back to something about as Jewish as he could find. He even learned to speak some Yiddish. It was his Methodist mother, though, who secretly helped him through grad school at Arizona. She'd inherited money of her own.

All of which was interesting, but didn't seem to lead anywhere. It occurred to me that maybe I should write that article about Ashkenazi, or a whole damned biography. Make a truthful man of myself.

Something else Ashkenazi's buddy gave me was the name of a woman Ashkenazi had gone with for years, in their middle age. Again the Data Center gave me a location and phone number. After setting up an appointment, I took a short airbus hop down the coast to Oceanside, rented a car, and interviewed her in person.

They'd dated for several years, she said, and she'd liked him a lot. But she liked to travel and entertain, and had money of her own. While Aldon liked to stay home, read, walk, and play with his computer. "Arthur's idea of a night out," she told me, "was to take his portable telescope and we'd drive up to Pine Mountain Summit, in the Sierra Madre above Ojai. To look at stars. Our most typical dates were pleasant drives along the coast, stopping to walk on the beach. Then have a nice meal at some expensive restaurant, followed by a movie."

Which she'd enjoyed, she said, but they weren't enough. She'd ended up marrying a widower who also liked to travel and entertain.

She also told me about Ashkenazi setting up a trust fund for his brother, with his hostile sister-in-law as payee. Something I'd already verified through the Data Center. Ashkenazi might or might not hold grudges, but apparently he could set them aside when it seemed right to him. A mensch all right. I was getting to like him better all the time, and Pasco less.

I also talked to a guy who'd known him pretty well in grad school at the University of Arizona. The scene there was a set of grad students with a lot of attention on the problems of getting jobs once they graduated. People who spent so much time on their studies and assistantship duties, they'd hardly had any left for social life.

Aldon never did get a job in astronomy. But in the process of getting his degrees, he'd gotten well trained in math, statistical analysis, and computers. So he took a job with a Santa Monica firm called Spectronics. Within two years he was an independent software consultant and troubleshooter, and built a successful business. Meanwhile investing. Successfully. Another interview with the Minneapolis buddy got me the information that those were the years Aldon had begun "playing with astrology."

A couple of Aldon's software clients during those years said his prices had always been reasonable and his service good. And he'd always been pleasant and easy to communicate with.

By '92 he'd dropped out of the software business, apparently living on his investments. I learned little about his investment activities during those years. The broker he'd dealt through had suicided in the Great Crash of '96, and the broker's secretary had died, along with more than a billion other people, of epidemic viral meningitis in 2000.

None of that was going to make Pasco happy. I woke up one morning with the decision to lay it all out for Carlos and recommend we tell Pasco that was it. I was composing the recommendation in my mind when I walked into Morey's Deli on Beverly Boulevard, a block from the office. I generally eat breakfast there. When I eat at home, I keep going back for refills. At Morey's the only refills are coffee.

When I walked in, a guy waved to me, a guy called Indian. He wears a big feather in his sweatband; calf-length, moccasin-style boots with a fringe on their turned-down tops; and a beaded leather vest. I went over and sat down with him. Indian's got hair about the color of mine—halfway between brown and blond—a red, Viking-looking mustache, and a ruddy complexion. Pretty un-Indian looking, except for facial structure. He insists he's a quarter Chippewa, and that his mother grew up on the Bad River Reservation in Wisconsin.

Whatever, he's an Angeleno, born and raised. A tallish, strong-looking guy who works for Yitzhak's Transit as a casual. Some days Yitzhak has work for him, some days he doesn't. When he doesn't, Indian comes in to Morey's, about two blocks from Yitzhak's, for coffee and a fat, glazed doughnut. I see him quite a lot.

Yitzhak's a New Gnu, and almost all the people who work for him are New Gnus, but not Indian. Indian's a Loonie, belongs to a cult of moon worshipers. They don't actually worship the moon, but they meditate on it. And it occurred to me a Loonie might know something about astrology. So after I gave Morey's daughter my order, I asked Indian about it.

"Don't know much," he said. "But Moonbeam does. She checks the horoscopes in the paper each day and tells me if there's something I need to watch out for. Moonbeam's pretty spiritual, you know? She's part Indian too, and an Aquarius, so she's got a better feel for that stuff than me. That's why she's our house mother." He stopped and examined me a moment. "You got a girlfriend? You never talk about one."

"Yeah, I've got one. Her name is Tuuli."

"Tooley? That's a neat name! What does she do? For a living I mean?"

"She's a professional psychic."

"Hey! Wow! That's a coincidence! We got a fortune-teller in our house!" Indian's life is full of coincidences. "Her name is Becky. She's from Sacramento. You know they made a law against telling fortunes in Sacramento County?"

I did. But to keep him going, I said no, I didn't.

"Yeah. Ain't that crazy? What kind of country is this, they can make a law against telling fortunes? Becky didn't have no job, so she told a guy his fortune, and he's an undercover cop. She couldn't pay the fine, so they put her in jail. And when she got out, she still didn't have no job. A friend of hers, a hooker, give her the money to come down here."

Indian grinned. "The hooker said she'd get even for her, with the guy that got the law passed. She didn't say how. Maybe he's a customer or something."

Sometimes I just half listen to Indian. He rambles. This time he had my attention. "What's the guy's name?" I asked.

"I don't know. She said, but I don't remember."

"Wellington?" I threw that out to test him.

"Nah, nothing like that."

"Miller? Pasco?"

"Pasco! That's it! You know about him?"

"I've heard of him. He doesn't like psychics."

Indian looked suddenly wary. "It's not against the law in L.A., is it? Nah, couldn't be. Besides, your girlfriend is a psychic."

"Is Becky pretty good at fortunes?" I asked.

"I don't know. I guess. You want yours told?"

"Maybe. Tuuli won't tell me mine. Can I get in touch with this Becky?"

"There's a house on Franklin, on one of those little streets east of Bronson. It's got a little sign in the front yard—House of the Moon. They rent rooms to fortune-tellers to tell fortunes in. It's close enough, Becky don't need no car, or to take the bus or anything. She just walks there from the house about a mile. The hill climbing's good for her."

He told me Becky didn't leave for work till after nine, and gave me the phone number where he lives. So when I got to my office, I called her. A reading, she told me, cost ten dollars, and she'd be at the House of the Moon by ten o'clock.

I was too. She called herself Madame Rebecca, wore a head kerchief, a black satin shawl with white stars and moons, and a dress to her ankles. The face beneath the kerchief was small and pointy, vulnerable looking. I suspect going to jail in Sacramento wasn't her first visit from hard luck.

The fortune she told me was interesting. I'd entered a time of challenge and uncertainty, she said. And if I passed through it safely, I'd overcome the challenge. There was a special person in my life, someone with whom I shared a special communication, who would disappoint me. But if I persisted, I'd win there too. All this with appropriate silences and frowns, and passes at her crystal ball.

The whole thing was general enough to give me a choice of things it could allude to. I could interpret the uncertainty and challenge as the Ashkenazi case, though I couldn't imagine any danger there. The special person in my life I could take to mean Tuuli. We even shared a special communication—Finnish—though hers is a lot better than mine. I learned some of it from my dad, and after he died, I lived with my older brother Sulo and his wife, who talked it to me.

When Madame Rebecca had finished and I'd paid her, I got down to the questions I was really interested in. "Indian tells me you're from Sacramento," I said.

She admitted she was.

"I'm going up there on business next week. A couple of days. Can you recommend a lady I could look up? Someone reasonably nice looking, who's healthy and likes a good time?"

She gave me a name—Marilyn Vanderpol—and an approximate address. She didn't remember the phone number. I gave her another Hamilton and left.

Back in the office I checked with the Data Center again and learned that Marilyn Vanderpol had died of a drug-induced heart attack five weeks earlier. Probably not that unusual for a hooker, I told myself. On a hunch I also got the name and number of the investigating officer. I called him, identified myself, and gave him my contract number. Then I asked him about the death of Marilyn Vanderpol.

Sergeant Luciano is the kind of cop that doesn't have to refer to the files. He gave me the information off the top of his head, and I had no doubt he knew what he was talking about. The evidence, he said, would remain on file for at least two months from the time of death, because it appeared to be crime related. In this case drug related. Then the evidence, including the body, would be disposed of.

"You said appeared to be drug related. What did you mean by appeared?"

"It was drug related, but there was no evidence of previous drug use, or even an alcohol problem. But she'd apparently been servicing a john when it happened, and the drug in her bloodstream was HS, Harem Smoke. It doesn't do anything for the woman, but it enables repeated male orgasm and intensifies male climax, so it was probably his. And it's been known to trigger heart attacks." He paused and shrugged. "In males in climax. A coroner's decision is hard to argue with. He's the expert, and . . ." He shrugged again.

"And she was a hooker."

He nodded. And she was dead of a heart attack. Why complicate things? "Look," I said, "I'll fly up tomorrow morning. Can you show me the evidence?"

"Tomorrow's Saturday."

"I know." I could hardly justify the trip as a job expense. I'd have to go on my own time and money.

"I'm on duty till noon," he told me.

"I'll be there by ten."

I was there at 9:32, according to Luciano's wall clock. He showed me his brief written report, plus the evidence in a plastic bag. The report included photographs and a diagram. Vanderpol had been sprawled on the floor naked. In the plastic bag was a small fumer with Harem Smoke ash. Dope! I remembered my dad and mom dead in our living room, and feeling my mouth start to twist, took several deep quiet breaths. The opening step in a mental drill my therapist had taught me.

Other items included a Franklin—a hundred-dollar bill that had been lying on an end table; a small, clear plastic pillbox that looked empty; and a plastic needle cap with a flattened tip and ornamental grooves. "What's in the vial?" I asked.

"Semen. Found on Vanderpol."

I didn't get any subconscious twitches from that, but I did from the needle cap. "You know what this is," I said, pointing at it.

"Sure. A needle cap. It was lying on the shag carpet.

"One of the outpoints in the scene was, Vanderpol's arms showed no sign of needle useage, and there wasn't any needle lying around. And Harem Smoke was the only drug in her system. The needle could have belonged to the john, of course, and he could have taken it with him. Odd though."

"It's not that kind of needle cap," I told him. "Unless I'm mistaken, this is off a cork popper. Look at the size of the hole where the needle fitted. Druggies don't use needles that big. Or that long."

He looked puzzled. "Cork popper?"

"Instead of using a corkscrew, you push a long needle through the cork and release a little jolt of compressed air. Pops the cork right out."

Luciano nodded thoughtfully. "Was there a wine bottle there?" I asked.

"Yeah. Two-thirds full, on her kitchen table. But it was Gallo port. They've got a screw cap."

"Hmh!" Something was niggling my mind, just below the surface. "Look. Can you do something for me?"

"Maybe."

"I'd like this stuff sequestered."

Luciano frowned. "Sure. I can do that. What's going on?"

"I'm not sure. I'll let you know as soon as I do. Did you get any prints?"

"Off the bill, the wine bottle, and the screw cap. Didn't do anything with them though. The coroner's report, you know."

I did know. And she was a hooker who died of a heart attack. But the thing about the needle was surfacing in my mind. With Luciano beside me, I borrowed his office phone and used my code card to dial a friend of mine—an assistant L.A. county coroner, at his home. With the phone on speaker. "Elisio," I said, "what would be the effect of injecting a person with a jet of compressed air? With a cork popper."

"Depends on where. In the brain or spinal column or heart, or a major artery, it would kill them."

"Would the injection into one of those give the appearance of a heart attack?"

"An injection into the heart would cause a heart attack."

"If a woman was injected in the heart, what evidence would there be? Assuming she died at once."

"Huh. To start with, there might be a spot of blood at the point of injection. The perforation would be visible anyway, if you looked closely enough. And minor damage to the capillaries in the skin and intercostal muscle, and in the heart. If the needle didn't penetrate into one of the chambers, and the compressed air was released into the myocardium itself, there'd be conspicuous local tissue damage."

"And that would be deadly?"

"Definitely. It would cause severe myocardial trauma."

It helped to have had Introduction to Forensic Medicine back at Northern Michigan.

Luciano looked impressed and pleased. "I'll write this up," he said, "and check those prints against the files."

"Shave Vanderpol's head, too," I told him. "She wouldn't have held still for someone stabbing her with a needle like that one, unless she was unconscious. She may have been blackjacked. If she was, there ought to be discoloration. Maybe swelling; I'm not sure. And look under her left breast. That's a logical place to have injected her; it wouldn't show there. And if she was, check the breast for prints."

I left Sacramento with something further to do. Prints in the FBI archives are from police files. Access to print files of the military, government employees, and so forth are only accessible with a subpoena. And you need substantive evidence to get one. But Donald Pasco would have left prints on the video cubes he'd brought with him. They'd have other prints on them too, but with today's technology you can get useful images of prints overlain by prints, along with how many layers down any given print is. If prints on, say the bill and the needle cap, matched any of those on the cube, that would be evidence enough for the subpoena.

And enough to get a hair sample for a DNA analysis, to compare with one of the semen. Assuming there was clear evidence she'd been killed by an injection.

There were prints on both the cubes. I eliminated some of them as Joe's and Dalili's, his secretary. The rest, with a note, I sent from our computer to the police computer in Sacramento, attention Sergeant Luciano. Then I went home, stopping for a six-pack on the way, stripped down to cutoffs, and spent the rest of the day on my recliner watching baseball play-offs. Getting up mainly to put a frozen Mexican pizza in the oven. I felt like I'd earned it, calories and all, even if I hadn't made much progress on the Ashkenazi job.

On Monday I told Carlos about the Sacramento connection, which might or might not have anything to do with Pasco. I also ran down for him what I'd learned and hadn't learned about Ashkenazi, and recommended we call it a done.

He thought about that a minute. "No," he said, "stay with it for now. If we get lucky, and they arrest Pasco, then you can pull together what you've learned about Ashkenazi, and we'll go over it with whoever replaces Pasco as director there."

That meant waiting, not my favorite inactivity. So I took some compensatory time off and went to the club, where I stretched and did Choi Li Fut forms till I'd worked up a good sweat, then put in an hour on the exercise machines, twenty minutes on the bike, and an hour dozing on the grass in Plummer Park. After that I ate lunch and went to a matinee of A Man for His Time at Mann's Chinese Theater, where I ate a tub of popcorn. Finally I went back to the office. Vanderpol had been sapped and murdered, just as I'd figured. The prints on the needle cap and the bill were Pasco's. So were prints on Vanderpol's left breast. Pasco was being held without bond, for Murder One, and DNA prints were being made from the semen and hair. I played it for Carlos, and he congratulated me.

"Write up your report on the Ashkenazi investigation tomorrow, and we'll see what Anti-Fraud says when they see the bill. They won't be happy, but we've got a signed contract."

I went out to the parking lot, started my car, and turned on the radio to KFWB News Radio. I don't often listen to news while driving. It's a distraction. But this time I did, just in time to hear about the murder of Arthur Ashkenazi! The body had been discovered that morning and none of us had heard about it. He'd been shot in bed, through the head. I was back in the elevator in about fifteen seconds, up to the ninth floor, and caught Carlos just getting ready to leave. I told him what I'd heard.

"Ashkenazi's place is outside Montecito," I said, "so it'll be in the sheriff's jurisdiction. We ought to get the contract for it. We can tell them we've been investigating Ashkenazi for the state, which gives us a head start on the case."

He got on it right away. Carlos has the authority when Joe is out. The sheriff went for it, and Carlos told him I'd fly up that evening. I caught supper at Morey's, then headed for the Larchmont Station, and a flight to Santa Barbara.

* * *

At the Santa Barbara sheriff's headquarters I learned something about the case that hadn't been released. Ashkenazi had been critically ill when shot. Possibly even dead, according to Sheriff Montoya. He'd been shot through the brain, a shot that wouldn't have caused much bleeding alive or dead. The reason for keeping this quiet was, the coroner said the disease symptoms were of viral meningitis. And he didn't want to start a panic. People would remember EVM, the epidemic viral meningitis that had killed more than a billion people, planetwide, in the winter of early 2000.

Tissue samples had been sent to the California Department of Health Services, attention the Chief of Vector Biology and Control. She and Sheriff Montoya were the only persons the coroner had informed. He hadn't told his secretary, hadn't entered it on his autopsy report, hadn't even informed the county health department. The sheriff didn't tell me until I'd signed an injunction in advance, forbidding me to tell anyone without his approval. Even his undersheriff didn't know.

Viral meningitis! I wasn't very enthusiastic about going out to Ashkenazi's place, but I didn't have much choice.

A deputy drove me. It was dark when we arrived. There was another deputy at the house, and Ashkenazi's servants were still there.

The bedding was just as it had been when the body had been taken away, but not as it had been when he was found. Ashkenazi had been somewhat wound up in the sheet, and they'd had to cut it to disentangle him. There was little blood. More sweat stain than anything else, from the meningitis. The pistol must have had a silencer; the shot hadn't wakened the servants. There'd been faint powder burns; the shot had been fired from about three feet, from the side toward the window. The gunman must have stood almost against the queen-size bed. The 9mm slug had been dug out of the floor for ballistic tests. There was no cartridge case. Probably the action had been hand operated to give more effective silencing.

The house doors had all been locked—that was done by a single switch—and there'd been no forced entry. But a reasonably agile gunman would have had no trouble getting in through the window, which had been open. A moment's discomfort—the insect screen had been electronic—but no actual difficulty. Climb the encina oak in the side yard, walk out on a massive limb, then step off on the first-floor roof and walk to Ashkenazi's bedroom window.

I talked to the servants, a middle-aged Hispanic couple whose English was more fluent than my Spanish. At about 5:20, Mr. Ashkenazi had told Mrs. Ruiz he was going to eat supper out, something he did occasionally, but almost never without giving her a lot longer notice. He'd seemed quite cheerful. "Mr. Ashkenazi was a very nice man," she added. Then her face crumpled, and I waited till she'd had a brief cry. He'd left the house about 5:30 and returned at 7:28; she'd looked at the clock when she heard him come in.

"Did you notice if he seemed well?"

"Well? I don' know. I didn' actually see him. But I heard him talkin' to his periquito—his bird—when he walked through the livin' room. He sounded like he always sound; very frien'ly." Her voice broke, and she started to cry again.

I made two working assumptions. One, that the supper date had somehow been connected with Ashkenazi's death. And two, that the date had been arranged very shortly before he told Mrs. Ruiz.

When she calmed down again, I asked: "Did he have any company today?"

It was Mr. Ruiz who answered this time. "No sir. He didn' have no visitors since you the other day."

That made the supper date doubly suspicious. He must have eaten somewhere fairly near, though, to have left at 5:30 and gotten back at 7:28. But there are a lot of restaurants between, say, Santa Barbara and Ventura.

After a few more questions, we left. As we drove back to Santa Barbara, I found my attention going to two people: Veronica Ashley and Donald Pasco, two unlikely suspects. Presumably Veronica was more or less Ashkenazi's age, and I couldn't imagine a woman of, say 55 or 60 years climbing that encina. As far as that was concerned, I couldn't picture Pasco doing it either, and anyway he'd been in jail by then. Following that line of reasoning, the gunman must have been a hired professional, and it occurred to me the supper date might have been to get the gunman onto the property.

But that really didn't make sense, and anyway it felt wrong. Also it seemed to require the cooperation of the servants, who then would hardly have told me about the supper date.

I decided I'd better sleep on it.

I woke up the next morning knowing what I had to do. Not why, but what.

Meanwhile there was the matter of breakfast. The night before, when I'd arrived back at the Larchmont Station, I'd stopped at a Nielsen's, bought a half gallon of butter brickle, went home and binged out. So to partly make up for it, I had fat-free cottage cheese for breakfast, with Rye Krisp, carrot sticks, and black coffee. My low-fat, high-protein penance. Then, having halfway atoned for the binge, I went to the office and accessed the state's data on Veronica Ashley.

It started with her current address and phone number, then got into more personal stuff. She'd been born Veronica Sue Pipolli, on 10 November 1950, in Culver City. An Angelena all the way. Married Eldon Robert Ashley on 21 March 1972, received her BS in biology magna cum laude from UCLA on 2 June '73, and her MS in molecular biology two years later. After five years as a lab technician in the med school there, she'd moved to the genetics research lab in the biology department, as a senior research assistant. It was a level she'd stay at for twenty years, the cost of not having a doctorate. In April of 2000, she'd been jumped to research associate. Like everything else, the research staff and supply of new Ph.D.s had been decimated by the Great Flu and EVM, and they needed to fill vacancies, Ph.D. or not.

Her father had died in an auto accident in October '75, her mother in the Great Flu in December '99.

She had memberships in Phi Kappa Phi, which given her scholastic record was no surprise. And the Church of God in Science, which Ashkenazi had already told me.

And Veronica Ashley had a criminal record! Not much of a record—a misdemeanor: disturbing the peace. Specifically, blocking the entrance of a church and interfering with worship during a demonstration outside a Church of the New Gnosis in West L.A., in June 2006. The New Gnus were supposedly into psychic practices. In August '09 she'd been detained, then released without charge, after allegedly throwing rotten eggs at windows and doors of the Hollywood Hilton, and at security officers, during a demonstration against an International Conference of Parapsychologists.

So Veronica was not only a COGS. She was an activist member. Whatever malice she may have felt for her brother-in-law earlier, his new astrology must have pushed her buttons pretty hard.

I figured to go talk to her, and to Eldon if he seemed mentally functional. But just now she'd be at work, so it was time to follow up on the only real lead I had, thin though it seemed. Data Center got me the record of the previous day's phone traffic to and from Ashkenazi's residence. There almost wasn't any: Two calls received through his answering service, and one on the direct line. That one was made from a Dairy Delite in Ventura, at 5:14 p.m. The timing fitted perfectly, though Dairy Delites weren't the kind of place at which I pictured Ashkenazi eating.

I keyed directory assistance, and a page came onto my screen. There was only one Dairy Delite in Ventura, the cursor flashing beside it. The number didn't match the one on the list of phones, but that was no surprise. The call to Ashkenazi would have been from their pay phone.

I memorized the address without trying, a matter of simply intending to remember. It's a knack I have that's a lot handier than writing everything down. Next, accessing the Data Center again, I got color copies of the photos from Veronica's and Ashkenazi's driver's licenses. Finally I called the Ventura Dairy Delite number, which got me an order girl, as I'd expected. I asked her who worked the cash register weekdays at suppertime. The manager did, she told me. He came in at noon and usually stayed till 9 or 10.

Carlos had looked in while I was on the line to Ventura, so I went to see what he wanted. He'd had a call from an Inspector Zebriski in Sacramento, Sergeant Luciano's big boss. The DNA print from the semen was Pasco's. The district attorney said they had an ironclad case. The inspector was very happy with Prudential, which of course could mean future business for us, and reflected back on me. I could have that. I didn't plan to be a junior investigator all my life.

After lunch I drove to Ventura and found the Dairy Delite. I'd never been in one before. It turned out to be more than just an ice-cream place. They had burgers, chicken, a salad bar . . . the whole list. It was a little past two. The guy at the cash register wore a tag that said Frank, and beneath it, Manager. I showed him my ID and contract cards, and asked to talk to him privately. He led me into his office. The plaque on the door said Mr. Piper.

I showed him the pictures of Ashkenazi and Veronica Ashley, and asked if he'd ever seen either of them before. Not so far as he knew, he said. "What'd they do? Rob a bank?"

"One of them died," I told him. "The other one didn't." Then, for no reason I can think of, I added, "The poisoner and the poisonee."

"Huh! If you know that, why snoop around any further?"

"You go to court with as much evidence as you can muster."

I had a fishburger then and left. It felt as if I'd just wasted a couple of hours on a false lead, but in my profession you get used to that. The names of the game are patience and thoroughness. Two of the names.

* * *

My next stop would be Veronica Ashley's place, but I didn't want to get there too early. A little before she got home from work would be about right. Maybe 5:15. So it being a nice sunny day, I drove to a nearby beach, took off my shoes, and had a nice, hour-long hike along the surf line, enjoying the feel and smell of the sea breeze and getting my feet wet now and then. After letting Fidela know, back at the office. When I got back to the car, I rolled down my windows, let the seat back, and took a short nap. My car computer woke me up at 3:30, and I headed for Westwood, and Veronica Ashley's address. It was an older house, probably from before World War Two, because the glass doors had a lot of little diamond-shaped panes instead of being single panes of safety glass. It was two-story, pseudo-Moorish pink stucco, and had a small balcony upstairs with a little wrought-iron railing. Tall Washingtonia palms stood along the curb, and the walk to the front door had a big date palm on each side. There were glossy-leaved shrubs in front, with big pink blossoms, a kind you see a lot of in L.A. but I never heard a name for.

It occurred to me I was resisting going to the door, so I took myself by the scruff and started walking. Then there was nothing for it but to ring the doorbell. A big, strong-looking black lady answered, wearing a light green uniform like a nurse's. I introduced myself, showing my ID, and told her I'd come to talk to Mr. and Mrs. Ashley. I figured Veronica wouldn't be there yet, and I was right. The nurse? housekeeper? also told me that Mr. Ashley didn't see anyone.

"He's looking at me right now," I answered. Dimly I could see him through a doorway behind her, in a poorly lit inner room. My eyes hadn't adjusted from the late sunlight outdoors, and he looked vaguely like an ape on all fours. "If Mrs. Ashley isn't in, I'll speak with Mr. Ashley."

I sort of pushed past her, she giving way to one side, and I walked through the vestibule into a comfortable living room. Sky light came through a tall south window, thinned by trees and drapes. It jarred me to see Eldon Ashley, and to realize he was Aldon's twin. Both legs had been amputated, leaving stubs maybe eight inches long. And instead of prosthetics, he moved on his knuckles. No, on thick blunt fingers! His torso was small, but below the sleeves of a body shirt, his arms were corded with muscle. His eyes were wary, and did not seem unintelligent. Brain-damaged he might be, but he looked aware and alert.

"Mr. Ashley," I said, "my name is Martti Seppanen." I didn't offer my hand; he was standing on his. I'm one of the stronger people I know, but I doubt I could hold my own in a grip-down with Eldon Ashley. "I'm an investigator for the police," I went on. "I'm here because your brother Aldon was shot in his bed, night before last."

"Night . . . before . . . last?"

Not "Shot?"; just, "Night before last?" As if the time meant something to him.

"I've been assigned to investigate," I went on, then paused, trying to read his eyes. In that light they could have been marbles. "Do you have any idea who'd do such a thing?"

There was a long response lag, which in his case could have been physiological instead of psychological. There was no sign of grief, but his face seemed to have shrunk. When he answered, it was quietly. "No."

"Have you talked with your brother lately?"

He stared blankly, saying nothing. The nurse came into the room then. She showed no sign of hostility, only concern, presumably for Eldon. "I've called Mrs. Ashley," she said. "She'll be here in a few minutes."

"Right. Did you know that Mr. Ashley's twin brother was shot, night before last?"

Instead of looking shocked, she looked puzzled.

"Didn't you know he had a brother?"

"No sir, I didn't."

"How long have you worked here?"

"Five years last May."

"Do you live on the premises?"

"I have a room upstairs."

"Um. His brother's name was Arthur Ashkenazi, but it had been Aldon Ashley." I was addressing myself to the nurse, but my eyes were on Eldon. I had no idea why I was saying these things. "He changed his name after a big row with their father," I went on. "After Veronica, Mrs. Ashley, had told their father that Aldon had said terrible things to Eldon. She said Aldon was to blame for Eldon's auto wreck, the wreck that left him—" I groped. "Without his legs."

Eldon's eyes had opened wide. His mouth opened too, not to speak, but in shock. He never knew! I thought. Eldon Ashley never knew! Then a terrible thought hit me. Maybe it hadn't happened that way. I'd had the story from Ashkenazi's old college buddy, who'd had it from Ashkenazi, but how accurate was it? If it wasn't true, I'd done a very bad thing to Eldon, and to his wife.

The nurse brought me out of it. "Uh, sir, can I bring you some tea?"

I told her yes, and when she left, I asked Eldon if I could sit down. It took him a few seconds to answer, but he said yes, so I sat. Then, using his stubs as the third point of a mobile tripod, he went to another chair and got into it with a remarkable movement, a one-armed vault, torso twisting, free hand grasping the far arm of the sturdy overstuffed chair. And this man was 61 years old! I curbed my gawking and made a little small talk, an awkward, one-sided monolog.

The nurse came in with a tray, holding a teapot, two cups and saucers, a cream pitcher, and a sugar bowl with tongs. And oatmeal cookies. There was a little side table by each large chair; she served and left. I sipped, and tried to think of something to say that wouldn't sound inane. "Are you and Aldon identical twins?" I asked, then realized the question was insensitive on two counts. But after the typical long pause, he answered.

"Yes. Identical. But . . . we . . . were . . . always . . . different."

He may be brain-damaged, I told myself, but he's not stupid. Not across-the-board stupid. I found myself saying, "Different but close, I suppose."

"Yes," Eldon said. "Close. Stood . . . up . . . for . . . each . . . other. Always."

It hurt to hear it. But he seemed okay now. Not cheerful, but resigned. Accepting.

Then I heard the front door open, and got to my feet. A minute later Veronica Ashley strode into the room. Her eyes moved to me like a laser. She was not pleased. "I'm Veronica Ashley," she said. Making it a challenge. "Mr. Ashley's wife."

She wasn't a tall woman, but she had presence. Her build was sturdy. I got the impression of someone who worked out, probably at the faculty women's health club. But the strongest impression was of will, perhaps mixed with unforgivingness. Maybe she could have climbed the encina with a gun and shot Ashkenazi.

"You're also Arthur Ashkenazi's sister-in-law," I said. "My name is Martti Seppanen. I presume you've heard about his death."

"I was informed by his attorney."

"He was shot in the head," I added. "Once, right through the brain, with a 9mm pistol."

She was definitely startled by that. "He didn't tell me that," she said. "I'd assumed—assumed he'd died of natural causes."

Something felt wrong here, but I had no notion what. "I'm investigating the death on a contract with the Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Department. Do you have any idea why someone would shoot your brother-in-law?"

"None at all." Veronica Ashley was fully in control of herself now.

"Have you had any contact with him recently?"

"We haven't seen Aldon since their mother's funeral, ten years ago. And barely then."

"Not even in connection with the trust fund he set up for you? To help take care of Eldon?"

She grimaced, her face darkening with blood. "No. His attorney handled it."

I glanced at Eldon. He was watching intently, his mouth slightly open. His eyes were unreadable, but it seemed to me he was comprehending it all. And that it was new to him.

"You're the payee of the fund. What do you suppose your brother-in-law was worth?"

Her answer was stiff. "I have no idea."

"I don't either, Mrs. Ashley, but apparently quite a few million." I changed direction on her then. "Perhaps you have some idea who might have killed him. Think back. These things can grow out of old grudges."

Her lips had compressed. Now they opened. "Am I a suspect, Mr.—?"

"Seppanen. Detective Seppanen. Family is often suspect in these matters, Mrs. Ashley. That's a general rule."

"Well I'm afraid I can't help you. And you can believe this or not, but I hope you catch the gunman. If for no other reason than to remove any suspicion from me."

The way she said it, it felt like the truth.

I drove home trying to make sense of it, and getting nowhere. Back in my apartment, I phoned Tuuli. It was late to ask for a date that evening, so knowing her taste for space opera, I suggested the Star Wars festival showing at the New Hollywood Palladium. The first three movies in one marathon night! In honor of the ninetieth anniversary of George Mather, who'd produced the special effects for the first one.

When I finished my pitch, she answered me in Finnish. "Martti," she said, "that was nice of you. But what you're really looking for is distraction from whatever is on your mind. And I don't feel like being a distraction tonight." She may have picked up that I felt abused by her answer, because after a moment she added: "But I'd enjoy visiting on the phone awhile. Tell me about your day."

So I did: the day and the night before. When I'd told her about getting the data on Veronica, Tuuli interrupted. "When was she born?" When I said November 10, 1950, she laughed.

"A Scorpio! It fits like a glove. Sometimes they don't. Just a minute." I waited. After a minute she was back. "I just looked up her horoscope in this morning's Times. It says Scorpios should avoid strangers today, that they could cause serious danger." She laughed again. When I'd run the rest of it by her, she said I was getting close, that it would start coming together soon. Starting tomorrow.

"What do you mean?"

"It's not explicit. But a lot of things are going to simplify for you." She paused. "You might want to call Carlos this evening."

So I let her go and phoned him. His machine told me he and Penny had gone to the New Hollywood Palladium, to the Star Wars festival. It struck me as uniquely twenty-first-century American: Carlos, grandson of Japanese peasant immigrants, who grew up on a hardscrabble farm in Colorado, and Penny, who'd been a child on a paddy farm in wartime Viet Nam, driving downtown in a car powered basically by gravity, to sit in the New Palladium watching a laserized renovation of a space opera classic about a war "a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away."

So what happened when I got to work in the morning? I had two messages waiting. One was from Carlos, telling me to see him first thing. He wasn't in yet. Then I played the other message, from Sacramento, and shared it with him when he did get in.

The evening before, a patrol car had been chasing a guy for driving erratically. Finally he stopped on a bridge and threw something in the Sacramento River before they grabbed him. In his luggage they found a silencer for a 9mm pistol, and a box of 9mm cartridges. A magnetic sounder team then recovered a 9mm pistol from the river, and his prints were on it. Ballistics test-fired it, and computer checked the slug against the national files. It matched the slug dug out of the floor of Ashkenazi's bedroom.

The guy's driver's license address was obsolete, but his auto registration address had been current. A search of his apartment turned up several Franklins—hundred-dollar bills. They'd checked for prints and found Pasco's.

Pasco's! It's one thing to be uptight, maybe even a little crazy, about someone "promoting" astrology. But to have him assassinated?

What struck Carlos most about it was that the Sacramento police had accomplished it all in one night. The result of technology, including computerization of damn near everything. And budgets that allowed a full night shift. Twenty years earlier, he pointed out, it would have taken days, a week, and they might not have found the pistol at all.

Not only was Pasco discredited and in jail, but the shooting of Arthur Ashkenazi was solved. Which should close the contracts with the Anti-Fraud Divison and Santa Barbara County, and the company could collect its fee. My problem was, I felt uncomfortable with it, and said so to Carlos.

"Tell me about it," he said.

"Well, Montoya said Ashkenazi might have been dead when he was shot. And if that's true, then Ashkenazi died of natural causes. And Pasco's hit man was guilty of illegal entry, illegal discharge of a firearm, mutilation of a corpse, and attempted murder, but not murder."

Carlos frowned. "So I'll phone Sacramento and let them know what Montoya told you. Is that all?"

"No. I'm hung up on what the 'natural cause' was, of Ashkenazi's death. I was told what it was, but I'm under an injunction not to tell anyone. It's really bad. Dangerous. But keep the Santa Barbara contract open till noon. To authorize some calls, and maybe some data access."

Carlos gave me a long look. Then he nodded and left without asking anything more. I got on the line with Sacramento again, this time to the Chief of Vector Biology and Control. No, she said, there hadn't been another reported case of viral meningitis except for Ashkenazi's. Not anywhere in the world, so far as she knew, for ten years. And "remarkably," as she put it, they hadn't succeeded in establishing a colony of Ashkenazi's virus on human tissue cultures. Considering its swift development in Ashkenazi, and its apparent identity with the EVM virus, that was hard to accept. Especially after they repeated their attempts, this time being extraordinarily careful to do everything just right.

"How do you explain something like that?"

Her image shrugged on the screen. "I don't. I'm calling it a noninfectious virus, and describing its infection of Mr. Ashkenazi as an unexplained anomaly. But we're taking no chances with it."

I thanked her and hung up, then told Carlos about it. Talking around it, never saying the words viral meningitis. "I think," I told him, "that I just may find the explanation. Can you come up with a contract that'll pay for it?"

He leaned back in his tilt-seat swivel chair. "Martti," he said, "I've got a lot of confidence in you. I did before, and I've got a lot more since you nailed Pasco. That was brilliant. And I'd really like to accommodate you. And if I did, Joe would probably go along with it. But with no more to go on than you just gave me, there's no way."

He sat back up. "However, if you want to do it on your own time, I'll give you unpaid adminstrative leave. Keep track of your time and expenses, and if you come up with something that will justify pitching a contract to—who? Vector Biology?"

I nodded.

"If you can do that, we'll pitch it to them. And if we get a contract, we'll charge them retroactively for your time and expenses. There's plenty of legal precedent, and right now your stock is high."

I called Vector Biology, and asked the director if they planned to keep the virus. She said absolutely. They had it on file in a freezer. Something as weird as it was, they'd definitely not discard. I told her I was involved with the Ashkenazi case, and had a data trail that might lead to an explanation. Admittedly I exaggerated, but it would set her up in case we hit her later with a contract request.

Then I called Santa Barbara and asked Montoya for his approval to mention the case of viral meningitis. Recording the call, of course. I said it was vital to following up a lead on the case. He told me the injunction was still legally binding, but considering the time elapsed, Vector Biology's inability to culture it . . . If it was really necessary, and if nothing bad came of it, he wouldn't pursue the matter.

I didn't tell him I'd have done it anyway. We were both on record on the matter, our asses half covered.

Next I phoned the Westwood Station of the LAPD and got the name of a restaurant—Peri's Cafe—favored by their people for private one-on-one meetings. According to Lieutenant McNab, the food wasn't great, but the booths gave maximum privacy.

Finally, I called the genetics lab at UCLA and asked to talk to the director. The receptionist asked what I wanted to talk to him about, and when I said it was confidential, she told me Dr. Chatterjee didn't accept calls on that basis. But when I told her it was a legal matter, she put me through. Suspecting she might listen in, I told Chatterjee I was an investigator for the state, and we needed his expertise.

I'd appealed to his sense of professional pride, so he gave me a one o'clock lunch appointment, suggesting a faculty dining room. Still suspecting a snoopy receptionist, I told him I'd meet him there, and how he could recognize me. I was pretty sure I'd recognize him, with a high-caste Hindu name like his.

I parked in a restricted faculty parking lot and met him as agreed. Showed him my ID and told him that actually I needed to talk somewhere more private. He went for it, intrigued by the sense of secrecy, I suppose. At Peri's, after we'd gotten menus and a pot of tea, I said in a low voice: "Doctor, what I'm going to tell you is strictly confidential. I'm working on a case that's highly sensitive and secret." Then I told him about the viral meningitis, and Vector Biology's inability to culture it.

"First, though— Years ago I read that the viruses that caused the Great Flu and EVM, maybe even the AIDS virus, might have been engineered. In your opinion, is that technically feasible?"

He answered as quietly as I'd asked. "Many things are feasible today. Thirty years ago, when AIDS first appeared, genetic engineering was quite primitive. But today, yes. Something like those could definitely be engineered. If one had the requisite facilities. It's not something one could do on a carpentry bench in one's garage.

"On the other hand, there's no need to blame genetic engineering for devastating plagues. Deadly pandemics have occurred throughout history without humans engineering them."

I said nothing to that for a minute, just looked at him, setting him up. "Dr. Chatterjee, I'm not interested in a virus that could infect millions. Can a virus be engineered that could infect only one person? One genotype?"

It took him a minute to answer. "You are familiar with killer bees?" he said.

"Not directly. I've read about them. Saw a TV special on them once."

"Then you are aware that what people today call killer bees are not the same insects imported into South America half a century ago. The killer bees we have here are the result of hybridization and introgression. They are an introgressed form of our domestic, mild-mannered Apis mellifera—but as dangerous as the original African bees.

"However, earlier this year a geneticist at Stanford, Kareem Bennett, succeeded in tailor-making a disease that should eliminate the killer bee genes from the Americas. He started with an old endemic viral disease of the domestic bee, one that's been around for as long as anyone knows. And created a genetic component in the virus that makes it far more virulent than the normal virus." He paused, shaking a finger for emphasis. "But only for bees with the genes connected with killer bee aggressiveness. In a few years it will probably have killed all the bees south of Nebraska. Then the normal, gentle Apis mellifera from farther north can be reintroduced."

I was starting to feel excited, instead of merely hopeful. "How difficult is it to do something like that?"

"Now that it's been done once, it should not be so difficult. Assuming you have a properly equipped laboratory and the necessary skills. First Bennett engineered a viral genome that was totally nonvirulent. That was the most time-consuming step. Then he tailored a selected low-grade virulence for genomes that included what we can call the 'killer' genes. With that accomplished, he altered that virus for an extreme virulence which worked slowly enough that infected bees will be able to spread the virus before succumbing to it. It will be released extensively into colonies next spring."

"And other geneticists can adapt his procedures to their problems?" I asked.

"That is correct. Bennett's completed work has just been published in scientific journals. And, of course, a fully detailed description is available through the virological, medical, and entomological networks. As a referee for the AIBS journal, I received a draft of Bennett's manuscript, and with his permission circulated copies in our laboratory. I considered his work that interesting."

"Umm. And a virus could be tailor-made for a single specific human being and no other?"

"A specific human genotype, almost certainly. One person, and any twins and other clones that might exist of him or her. But to make it specific, it would probably be simplest, certainly safest, to key the virus to that person's total genome. Which would seem to require working with diploid material from that particular person or his clone."

"What sort of diploid material?"

"Hair would suffice."

It was looking more and more as if this was the right track. "If," I said, "a meningitis virus was designed to kill Arthur Ashkenazi and only Arthur Ashkenazi, I suppose they'd have started with the EVM virus. Correct?"

For just a moment, Chatterjee's eyes widened. Up till then we'd been talking bees and hypothetical humans. Now we were down to cases. "Probably not," he answered. "There is something available that would make the work much quicker and easier. Assuming the designer had diploid material from Mr. Ashkenazi.

"The EVM epidemic simply ran itself out, you know. Epidemics do that. And may renew themselves later with genetic variants. The great flus of history, for example, and the Black Death. Meanwhile, researchers all over the world had worked desperately to develop a vaccine, and finally succeeded. If EVM should now recur in some genetic variant or other, there exists a noninfectious, nonvirulent form with which people may safely be inoculated. Unless they happen to have an allergic reaction. A form which will give them immunity without even a mild fever. It can even be taken orally.

"Thus if someone wished to tailor a virulent form, one would best start with the vaccine. A major part of the work has already been accomplished."

Something else occurred to me. "How long would it take to do it?"

"It is difficult to say. Three months perhaps. Or possibly as little as two weeks, considering that one would be designing it for a complete genome. Also, one would not need to go through the steps of designing a low-level virulence and then modifying it for a greater. So let us say ten to thirty days."

"And how long would it take after inoculation to make the victim sick?"

"It's difficult to state in advance with any certainty. It might be quite quick."

"Hours?"

"Quite possibly."

"Who'd have access to the vaccine?"

"Many persons. Many principal hospitals must have it on hand. I'd be exceedingly surprised if we didn't have a supply here at the medical center. They'll have an abundance of it at the Office of Vector Biology and Control in Sacramento."

"Who'd have access to the supply here in the med center?"

He looked thoughtfully at the question. "Assuming they have it, probably many persons. Numerous materials must be stored in their freezers, and presumably quite a number of persons go in and out. How many know where, in the freezer, to find it is another matter."

"Right. Dr. Chatterjee, thank you very much. You've given me serious food for thought. And remember, sir, it's important—vital—that you don't mention our talk to anyone. Not your friends, your wife, or anyone on your staff."

For a moment I'd thought of telling him who, specifically, I was interested in—Veronica Ashley. That she was Ashkenazi's sister-in-law. It would make the importance of silence more real, and reduce the chance of a leak. But it wouldn't be fair to her. I felt reasonably sure she was guilty, but I'd been wrong before.

After driving Chatterjee back to his office, I called the UCLA med center, got connected to Medical Supplies, and talked to the guy in charge. That night at nine he let me into the freezer room where the EVM vaccine was kept, and I took print masters off the drawer and flasks that held the vaccine. The next day our lab sorted out the prints, but none matched Veronica Ashley's in the national print archives. She could, of course, have worn gloves, but I wouldn't have expected her to.

So all I had was an ingenious theory and some circumstantial evidence. Nothing a prosecutor could make work in court. I went to Carlos' office and ran it all by him, hoping he'd see something I'd missed. He didn't. He asked if I wanted to continue on administrative leave, or if he should line me up with a new assignment. I said I'd keep plugging, then went to my own office wondering if I was just being stubborn.

I called Tuuli and told her answering machine I wanted to take her out for Mexican food that evening. I'd call her again before five. Then I went to Gold's and worked out for the first time since Monday, extra hard to make up for the calories I intended to take on that evening. After that I went home for a nap.

About the only satisfaction I had that day was listening to KFWB on my car radio. Arthur Ashkenazi's will had left the bulk of his estate to the Hypernumbers Institute, a psychically oriented group. For research into the multidimensional nature of reality. Veronica Ashley would be fit to kill.

It was getting dark when Tuuli and I got to her building from Casa de Herreras. I felt stuffed. There was a parking place made to order, and I grabbed it. Then, instead of getting out of the car, we sat for a few minutes in a weird, silent mood.

"I don't think you'd better come up tonight," she said at last.

I got out, went around and opened the off-side door for her. She looked worried. "I mean it," she said.

"What's wrong?"

"I'm not sure, but . . . Something doesn't feel right."

I reached to help her out. "I'll just walk you to your door and leave," I told her. We walked up the sidewalk between her building and the thick, eight-foot hedge bordering the property. There was night jasmine around somewhere, smelling a bit like Michigan in lilac time. Night jasmine's one of the things I like best about L.A. Tuuli's apartment was on the second floor, front corner. Like a lot of places in L.A., the stairs were outside, leading to an outside second-floor walkway. I opened the screen, intending to hold it for her while she unlocked her door.

I heard a chuff, and a bullet clunged like a hammer against an ornamental wrought-iron upright from the walkway railing to the overhang. A fragment bit my cheek. I threw Tuuli to the deck, then vaulted over the railing, hearing another chuff as I did so. The sound of a silenced pistol. I landed on the hedge, half scrambling, half falling off it onto the sidewalk. A third shot chuffed, and I heard the slug spending its energy clipping hedge stems as I ran crouching for the street and my car. I got there panting more from excitement than exertion, fumbled the key into the lock, and snatched my car gun out of the door pocket.

The shots had come from the building next door, and I couldn't make up my mind whether to go there, or back up to Tuuli's. While I crouched there trying to decide, her front window opened. "Martti!" she called softly. "Stay there! I'm all right. I'll call 911."

I didn't take her advice. Instead I went back to the stairs, and crouched listening in the cover of the hedge in case whoever it was came over. Although I was pretty sure he wouldn't. It was me he was after, and having lost his surprise, he'd taken off. Maybe to set another ambush at my place.

Things were still as midnight. We hadn't made enough noise to draw attention. I had no idea who the gunman might be. In my business you offend people who might take a notion to exercise their grudge that way. Something I'd learned the hard way. And while most of them end up domiciled with the state for extended periods, there are always some running around loose.

Two or three minutes later the police pulled up, and after I'd identified myself, we went next door together. There was a sign out front:

APTS FOR RENT

1 & 2 BEDROOMS

SEE MGR

9 AM–7 PM

We went up the stairs two at a time, and along the second-floor walkway on the side facing Tuuli's. The drapes were open wide in one apartment, the window was open, there was a hole in the screen, and it was dark inside. One of the officers went and got the manager.

All we found inside were three empty cartridge cases: .40 caliber. I was damn lucky he hadn't hit me. By that time another patrol car had arrived, this one with a senior sergeant. After talking with him, I got in my car, and the first officers followed me home. Staying close on the chance the gunman might try for me again.

My apartment's in a security building on Lanewood, with a basement garage. They waited in the patrol car while I stopped on the ramp to insert my key card. Lanewood has a row of big shaggy Mexican pines on each side of the street, and it was darker than hell, but it seemed to me someone was crouched in the tall shrubs ten feet from the ramp. While the door opened, I spoke into my shortwave mike. "Car 1094," I said, "I think our man's in the shrubs just to the left of the ramp."

Then I rolled in, got out of my car, and with pistol in one hand reopened the garage door from the inside. The officers had already moved in on the suspect. He had his hands in the air.

A little peering around with a flashlight found his gun where he'd dropped it. Then they took both of us to the Hollywood Station on Wilcox, where they questioned us. I answered everything they asked. The gunman told them only his name. Said he'd gone into the shrubbery to take a leak. They booked him for creating a public nuisance, and carrying a gun illegally. He had a record.

His name was Harley Suk O'Connell. Part Afro, part oriental—Korean, judging by his middle name. He was reputedly a freelance hit man who did occasional jobs for the black mafia. So far as I knew, I told them, I'd made no particular enemies there.

When they were done with me, I talked in the hall with the sergeant on the case. Someone must have paid O'Connell to try for me, I said. If they checked out his pad, they might find some cash in large-denomination bills. Which might have useful prints. He agreed it could be worthwhile.

Then they took me home, and I phoned Tuuli to tell her what happened. She'd been waiting for my call, and worrying because I hadn't. She told me to come over.

I was back at her place in five minutes. She'd been watching for me, and met me at the stairs, wearing her jacket. In her purse, I was willing to bet, was the little .25 caliber Lady Colt I'd given her. It's just a few blocks from her place to Laurel Canyon. Laurel Canyon Boulevard crosses the Santa Monica Mountains, a range of high, rugged hills that divides the L.A. Basin to the south from the San Fernando Valley to the north. From Laurel Canyon, narrow residential streets zigzag their way up among the slopes and draws.

I drove up one of them without either of us saying anything. Finally I parked at a place we like, in a tiny park, on a crest overlooking the basin. It's not the safest place in the world, but I had a gun under my left arm, and my car gun in the door pocket.

Since the internal combustion engine had been banished by the geogravitic power converter and the stringent air protection laws that followed, you can see forever from up there: a vast sea of city lights. To the south is a big unlighted area that I suppose is a golf course. And more miles and billions of lights farther, the hills of the Palo Verdes Peninsula, sparkling in white, red, green, and blue. Amazing that you can see individual lights so far away! And over all, scattered tall clouds side-lit by the city. It's one of the most beautiful sights in the world, another reason I love L.A.

I reached over, took Tuuli's hand, and for maybe the dozenth time asked her to marry me. She leaned against me and said she loved me, but no, she wasn't ready to commit herself. Might never be. "If I change my mind, Martti," she said in Finnish, "you'll be the first one I tell."

How could I argue with that? After a little bit I drove her home, and she invited me up.

The next day I slept till ten. Then I called the Hollywood Station to see what they'd learned from O'Connell's apartment. They'd found bundles of Franklins in a dresser, with prints they'd already identified as Veronica Ashley's. They planned to question her.

I asked them if they'd hold off on that for twenty-four hours. Otherwise it might queer a case I was working on. They agreed. There was no hurry. They had all they needed to put O'Connell away for a while.

Why, I wondered, would Veronica get a contract on me? I'd offended her all right, but what had I said and done that might have scared her? I called up the data on her from my files. And stared. Veronica Ashley, nee Pipolli.

Pipolli. Piper. Could be. I called the Data Center again, using the Santa Barbara County contract, and accessed Dairy Delite in Ventura. The franchise holder was Francis Gustavo Pipolli, DBA Frank Piper. His records gave his father's name, and his father's records showed his father's, and his showed a daughter, Veronica. Veronica Ashley was Piper's paternal aunt.

Something else struck me, too, something I'd overlooked before and shouldn't have. GTE's computer records show when a call was made from a pay phone. I checked again. The call to Ashkenazi hadn't been. She had to have called from her nephew's office, so he might very well know what she was up to. And I'd said something to him about "poisoner and poisonee." He'd almost certainly called and warned Veronica.

I laid it all out for Carlos, and his eyes lit up. He'd take it up with Vector Biology right away, and if he couldn't get a contract on it from the state, the firm would cover the cost. And use the case for publicity

Assuming it worked out.

* * *

Carlos didn't ask me what I was going to do next, and I didn't volunteer. I spent most of the day catching up on odds and ends, and working on my Spanish. Then with my pocket recorder and my gun inside my jacket, I headed for Westwood to confront Veronica Pipolli. I'd start dumping my evidence on her now—it might even be enough for a prosecutor to take her to court with—and maybe she'd start saying things.

If she was home.

She was, and unfriendly. When the nurse-housekeeper announced me, Veronica came into the living room like a drill sergeant. Eldon came swinging in too, on his fingers and stumps, looking somehow more formidable than most guys with legs. I started by telling her that Harvey O'Connell botched his contract, and the LAPD had him locked up. Sarcastically she said that was nice, and who was Harvey O'Connor?

I matched her tone. Sarcasm can get people to say things they otherwise wouldn't. "O'Connell," I said, "not O'Connor. I thought you knew him. Or do you give bundles of hundred-dollar bills to people you don't know? Or maybe there's something new in the world: two people with the same fingerprints. O'Connell had three shots at me, incidentally, and all I got was a fragment in the cheek."

I touched my face as I said it, my eyes on hers. She showed no fear. What I was looking at was supressed rage.

"The fingerprints weren't your only mistake," I went on. "That was stupid, using your nephew's phone to set up the date with Arthur. Aldon, that is. Why didn't you use the pay phone?"

With that her face went white, but she didn't look faint at all. The muscles in her jaw lumped like walnuts. "Was that when you hired O'Connell to kill me?" I asked. "After I talked with Frank? The timing's about right. It would have taken O'Connell awhile to learn where I lived. And maybe follow me around until he saw a good opportunity."

She still wasn't saying anything, so I tried another shot. "They've decided Aldon was dead before he was shot," I lied. "I'd never have figured out how you killed him, if I hadn't heard about the killer bee research. Do you keep some of your tricked up meningitis virus around the house? Maybe you plan to use it on your husband next. He's Aldon's twin, after all."

That broke it. "Get out!" she shouted suddenly. "Get out of this house! Now!"

I shook my head. "Not without the rest of the virus."

"All right!" she shouted, "I'll give it to you!"

And stomped out of the room. For the first time that day I turned my attention to Eldon. He was in a state of shock. In ten seconds Veronica was back. But what she had in her hand was not a flask or vial or petri plate, it was a snub-nosed .32, looking bigger because it was pointed at me. All that saved me getting shot was, she was too damned mad to simply kill me. She was going to blast me with venom first, with words.

Before she got any of them out though, Eldon was between us, facing her. I wished he was taller. "You . . . killed . . . Aldon," he said. "And . . . you . . . lied . . . about . . . him . . . to . . . father. How . . . could . . . you . . . do . . . that? You . . . said . . . you . . . loved . . . me!"

The steel and the fire went out of Veronica Ashley as if they'd never been. "I do love you, Eldon," she said, and watching her, I knew she meant it. "I love you very much. I've always loved you."

"No," he said, and moved toward her on splayed and calloused fingers. "You . . . can't . . . love . . . me. You . . . killed . . . Aldon!" Then he launched himself at her, I'm not sure just how, tackling her, scrambling all over her. I ducked out of the room and drew my own gun. She screamed, and hers went off, once, and after a couple of seconds a second time. Crouched and ready, I looked back in.

Veronica sat on the floor against a heavy chair, weeping quietly, her hands on her belly. Her face was already gray. Eldon lay sprawled on the floor, his head a ruin, far worse than Aldon's had been. One way or another she'd been gut-shot, then he'd put the barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Her eyes moved to me when I stepped back into the room, the hatred gone from them, replaced by shock and something else. Grief.

"Jesus," I said to her. "Jesus, Veronica, I'm sorry. I'm really really sorry." And I meant it.

It was all recorded, of course. At the hospital next day, Veronica Ashley told everything, and naturally the papers picked it up. And played hell out of it. They gave Prudential a lot of good publicity and made me sound like Sherlock Holmes. So of course I got promoted. I don't wear junior in front of investigator anymore.

As a matter of policy, I'd phoned Carlos from the Ashleys' right after I'd called the police. When I told him what happened, he said come to the office as soon as I possibly could. He knew what was coming. When I got there, he was waiting with Joe. In my profession it's best not to have your face on the six o'clock news. So Joe gave me a paid vacation as a bonus, and sent me to his place to hide till I could leave town. I phoned Tuuli from there, and she surprised me: She agreed to go with me!

I left Joe's at 4:30 the next morning, picked her up, and we flew to Hemlock Harbor, back in Ojibwa County, Michigan. Where she met my sister Elvi, and my half brother Sulo. Sulo's more than old enough to be my father. Both of them loved Tuuli right away. Now she and I are roughing it in dad's old fishing shack, his hytti, back in the bush on Balsam Lake, where I'm taping this. Elvi said I owe it to my nieces and nephews, and whatever children Tuuli and I might have.

Yep, Tuuli and I got the license the second day there, and got married in Hemlock Harbor's Trinity Lutheran parsonage. She says I'll have to improve my Finnish now, speak it as well as Elvi, or better yet, Sulo. Next week we'll go back to L.A. and find a security building in a good location. One where she can rent an efficiency apartment in the same building we live in, for her consulting office.

And that's all there is to the story, so I'll go split some wood for the stove. I'm not missing L.A. too much yet.

THE PUPPET MASTER

a novel

PART ONE:

Church of the New Gnosis

PROLOG

Actually it was a bedroom in a private home, but it looked like a large, private hospital room in baby blue, with vases of varied, freshly cut flowers adding indigo and white, violet and butter yellow against the delicate green of ferns. The bed was a hospital bed, and a private nurse sat beside it in a chair. Next to her stood a cart, an instrumented, stainless-steel life-support system on wheels, with LEDs displaying the patient's critical biofunctions. A telescoping rod extended upward from it, topped by a pivoting arm that dangled wires and a tube to disappear beneath the bed cover.

The nurse was reading a paperback novel—one of the New Age novels that were popular then. Just enough daylight filtered through the thick drapes to show it was morning.

The figure in the bed was male and elderly. He appeared to have a glandular disorder; his face was like raised bread dough, puffy and pale. It was also drawn down on one side by stroke, leaving the wide mouth twisted. Just now the muscles were slack and the eyes closed, their lids thick.

Given the puffy face, one might have expected a great swollen body. Actually, its bulk beneath the soft cotton sheet was not particularly large, but it seemed to spread, as if its bones were cartilage, not rigid enough to support it.

The eyes opened. Their blue was faded, their whites yellowish. They shifted to the nurse, not in an invalid's drugged or helpless or apathetic gaze, but coldly. As if feeling the touch, she set the book aside.

"Ten twenty-six, sir," she said as if answering a question, and stood up. She pressed two keys on a small control box at the foot of the bed, and slowly the bed took a shape suited to reading.

Nothing more was said. She didn't ask if he was hungry or wanted an alcohol rub or to relieve himself. Instead she took the eyeglasses from the bedside table, made sure again that they were clean, and carefully set them on the puffy face. Laser surgery could have corrected his astigmatism, but he'd declined it. He intended to correct it himself one day, along with much else.

Next she swung a hospital reading screen on its arm and positioned it, looked questioningly at him, then sat down at a small table and keyed in instructions on a small console. The masthead for the L.A. Times wire edition lit the screen for a moment. The date was 2008 August 13, and the edition, 1000 hours. A menu screened. One of the selections was scan, and touching, she activated it, controlling the speed with a knurled knob. Page one scrolled up too rapidly for all but the swiftest readers.

From where she sat, to watch the screen would have been awkward, and she didn't try. Her eyes stayed mostly on the old man. Now and then she slowed the image for a moment or for several, as if sensing his wishes and his reading rate. As one of the items brought a change of expression to his face, she slowed the scrolling nearly to a stop. It read:

Ex-OSS Official's Daughter Weds Gnostie

Gloria DeSmet of Pacific Grove, 21-year-old daughter of retired OSS Deputy Director Alex DeSmet, has married Fred L. Hamilton, a counselor for the Church of the New Gnosis in Los Angeles, according to a friend of the DeSmet family.

A student at Stanford University, Gloria DeSmet was employed for the summer at Holy Redeemer Hospital in Monterey. Hamilton, who'd concealed his affiliation with the Gnostic cult, had also been employed there, as a psychiatric assistant. (Supp A). Hamilton and DeSmet had been dating.

Hamilton's use of Gnostic counseling procedures on patients at Holy Redeemer was discovered, and he was discharged. Last Friday, after telling her parents that she would spend the weekend near Grass Valley with friends, Gloria DeSmet followed Hamilton to Los Angeles. She was not missed until she failed to show up for work on Monday. She and Hamilton were married in Los Angeles on Tuesday. She then notified her family.

The old man began to chuckle.

DEBRIEF

2012, July 5

It was a UCLA project. Its purpose was to record "the anatomy of selected investigations."

Martti Seppanen watched the young woman adjust her camcorder and other gear, skeptical that anything useful would come of it. To him it smelled like academic/bureaucratic barn waste. The case was already thoroughly documented in his taped debriefs, and in case and court records.

Also it would end up in UCLA's security archives, because Martti would be freeflowing, and some or much of what he said would be about persons not guilty of any crime, persons whose privacy had to be protected. It would be seen only with hard-to-get approvals, mainly by candidates for advanced degrees in law enforcement.

Joe Keneely didn't think much of the project either, because confidentiality prevented using it as promotion. He could have refused, of course, but the California Department of Justice had pushed, and the state was a major client of Prudential Investigations and Security, Inc. Within the limits of ethics and the law, it was desirable to humor them.

Why video? Martti wondered. All it would show was him sitting with his eyes closed or unfocused, talking. Maybe it had something to do with the aura analyzer she'd set up beside the camcorder. Presumably it would be monitoring his frame of mind while he talked.¹

The aura analyzer was more than just a lie detector. According to articles in the Journal of Law Enforcement Technology, they were more reliable than polygraphs, and gave broader information.

They're not going to believe everything I say anyway, Martti told himself, regardless of what my aura shows.

It occurred to him that some of what he might say could surprise him, too. He'd read that with a Veritas injection, you remembered a lot you otherwise wouldn't, and in detail. Supposedly even stuff you'd psychologically suppressed after it happened. And while you could hold back under Veritas, you'd rarely feel an impulse to. Normally you just freeflowed. Probably the aura analyzer would show if you were withholding.

He decided he'd view it himself when they were done. There might be insights for him.

The woman removed a syringe from a small, flat, velvet-lined box. "All right, Mr. Seppanen," she said cheerily, "I believe I'm ready. How about you?"

He'd eaten a pizza half an hour earlier, so hunger wouldn't distract him, had avoided caffeine with its diuretic effects, and had just been to the restroom. He took a deep breath and let it out. "Yeah, I'm ready."

"Good," she said, and stepped over to his chair. "You don't need to speak loudly. Just murmur. It's easier on the

¹ In 2009, President Douglas Ishimatsu declassified a number of mood- and mind-altering devices previously withheld under the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, or by the FDA, while legalizing private research and the publication of results. Why most of the devices had been withheld in the first place is difficult to imagine, beyond the bureaucratic dictum: "Cover your rear." Legalization has brought a flurry of new research on the mind and neuro-electrical fields.

throat, and my corder will get it. Now if you'll just give me your hand . . ."

He laid a thick hand on the corner of his desk. She took it, held the syringe against the back of it, and pressed the trigger. The hiss reminded him of the adjustment valves on the exercise machines at Gold's. "It'll take a minute or so," she said, and sat down across from him, her laptop open in front of her on the folding laptop table she'd brought. Bit by bit he felt his mind relaxing. The room blurred, and though he found he could bring it back in focus, it didn't seem worthwhile to. It was easier just to close his eyes. His lips opened, and he started to speak.

GNOSTIES

In a way, I got involved with the Christman case in May of 2010, a year and a half before Christman disappeared. I was an investigative assistant here, with an MS in Law Enforcement from Northern Michigan University and four years of experience on the Marquette, Michigan, police force. I'd just spent five months apprenticing under Carlos—that's Carlos Katagawa, Supervisory Senior Investigator here at Prudential. He'd told Joe—Joe Keneely is president and majority shareholder—that I was ready for a case of my own, and Joe said go ahead. So when I came in that day, Carlos called me down the hall to his office and played a cube for me.

They'd recorded it late the day before. It showed a handsome, well-dressed woman in her forties, telling Carlos and Joe what it was she wanted, and answering their questions. Her name was Angela DeSmet. Twenty-one months earlier, her twenty-some-year-old daughter, Gloria, had "run away" to L.A. and married a guy who worked for the Church of the New Gnosis. The mother had tried to get in touch with her, but the church is—impenetrable, the papers have called it.

So Angela DeSmet had hired an investigator from Monterey—the DeSmets lived in nearby Pacific Grove—but the guy couldn't even learn where the daughter was, let alone get to her. He said the church might have sent her to any one of its locations in or out of the country.

Angela had wanted to hire a serious investigation then, but her husband, Alex DeSmet, wouldn't go for it. Gloria was a grown woman, he'd said. She had the right to live her own life, and if she got unhappy with the church, she could always walk out. And come home if she wanted to.

Then DeSmet had gotten a consulting job with the Republic of India, and a few weeks after their daughter left, he and his wife had gone to New Delhi to live. He was a retired technical specialist with the State Department, she said. After a couple of years, India started having severe civil disturbances, the ones that led to it splitting off from ECOTEB, the Eastern Co-Prosperity Technical and Economic Bloc. Splitting off and starting SACU, the Southeast Asian Co-Prosperity Union. Anyway, Alex DeSmet had sent his wife back to the States, and she'd decided it was time to find her daughter. Carlos and Joe had decided I was the one to do it.

* * *

My own case! I had nervous stomach. The first thing I did was sit down at my terminal and call up the accessible information on DeSmet. Which was not a lot, because the case didn't get us access to the State Data Center. It takes a contract from the city or county or state for that. The DeSmet family, I learned, was big in shipping. It also had a family history of public service dating back to Gerhard DeSmet, a New York banker who'd helped finance the colonial army during the Revolution. Every generation of the DeSmet family had had a career officer in either the State Department or the armed forces or both. Alex DeSmet hadn't been in the State Department though, regardless of what his wife claimed. He'd been in the CIA until '96 or '97, when President Haugen took its Office of Special Projects and recreated the old OSS out of it. DeSmet ended up being deputy director there, after the Great Flu killed the guy who'd been holding the job.

I suppose Gloria had grown up mainly with her mother. Odds were that Alex had been away a lot.

Then I keyed up the L.A. City Library and selected a summary article on the Church of the New Gnosis. It was interesting but not particularly helpful. Some of it I'd read before, here and there. Before I'd finish that case and the Christman case, I'd know a lot about the church that the writer hadn't. Meanwhile, the only lead I had on Gloria DeSmet was her married name, Gloria Hamilton.

California has the world's largest concentration of cults, and there are more every year, but the Church of the New Gnosis has got to be the biggest, even bigger then the Institute of Noetic Technology when it was going strong. Its world headquarters—what it calls its "World Episcopate"—is here in L.A., on what used to be the campus of Pacific Southern University.

I signed out a car and drove over there. I'd never really paid any attention to the place before. It still looked pretty much like a mid-city college, built after real estate got so expensive. After the GPC boomed the economy, and Congress passed the Education Rights Bill. Including its parking lots, the campus covers what originally had been four large city blocks, containing several large buildings. Unfortunately it failed—went bankrupt when the Great Flu and Epidemic Viral Meningitis cut populations, enrollments, and faculty too drastically.

The surrounding neighborhood is mostly post-plague apartment houses, built around security courtyards with swimming pools. The streets are lined with tall Washingtonia palms, and the campus grounds have well-tended lawns, flowerbeds, and night jasmine, with ornamental-orange hedges.

One of the buildings has a sign in front that reads neophyte building. That sounded about right for me, so I went in to ask questions. Careful questions. Sneaky questions. The church has a reputation for secrecy, and I was there to get answers, not thrown out. I had no trouble recognizing staff. They wore one-piece, sky blue space-cadet uniforms, with tapered legs tucked into light weight white boots that had to be a nuisance to keep clean. Also, staff members tend to walk fast or even jog, as if they're in a hurry.

It turned out that the staff who deal with new people are trained to control the conversation. Mostly they seem friendly, but all you learn is what they want you to know. I went along with their pitch, figuring that if I became part of the scene, I'd learn things. I ended up registering for a free introductory lecture that evening. That introductory lecture's about the only thing they don't charge for, and even then they practically insisted that I buy A Beginner's Book on the New Gnosis, written by their guru, Raymond Arthur Christman, whom they call "Ray."

By the time I'd gotten registered, it was noon. It turned out they have a staff dining room, but some staff members who can afford to, eat out. So I followed a couple of them across the street to a place called the Saints' Deli, carrying my book to mark me as a would-be new member. I figured to get into a conversation, or maybe eavesdrop.

The Saints' Deli is a Gnostie hangout run by Gnosties. It's a strange kind of place for L.A.; it felt as if everyone there, including the waitresses, belonged to a family. And I was an outsider. They had a big menu board on the wall, chalk on green, and I ordered "Saint's Delight." It turned out to be cream cheese and ripe olives on sourdough bread, with kosher dills on the side. It was a day for new experiences. Then I got my coffee and number tag, and looked for a place to sit.

Almost everyone was sitting with friends and talking, a lot of them animatedly, most of them wearing civvies. But at a table for two, a skinny guy in his late thirties or so, wearing a staff uniform, sat alone by an empty chili bowl, sipping coffee and reading a paperback. I went over. He drank his coffee black, and from what I could see of the cover, the book was science fiction. His uniform was threadbare and too big for him, but clean except for ring around the collar.

"Mind if I sit here?" I asked.

He looked at me, then at my beginner's book. "If you insist," he said, "but please don't open a conversation with me. I deal with neophytes eight hours a day, seven days a week, and three further hours a day I attend class. On my free time I like to sit alone and relax with some light reading."

"Class?" I said.

"Staff are required to be on some approved course or other at all times. I'm studying to be a Gnostic counselor. Now if you please . . ."

He withdrew his attention as if I wasn't there. I sipped my coffee and people-watched. Some would stop by a notice board and browse the stuff posted there. After a few minutes a waitress came with my sandwich, dill pickle spears, and some damned good potato salad.

To me a diet is something to fall off of, and I'd been holding to mine fairly well—I'd weighed 226 pounds that morning—so when I finished, I ordered a milkshake, which turned out to be a jumbo. When I'd finished that, I went to see what sort of stuff got posted on the notice board. Some of it was advertisements, which from the jargon seemed to be by small Gnostie businesses. A few were hand-scrawled notes from one person to another, or "to anyone traveling to the such-and-such area."

Most, though, bore the official logo of the church, some of them notices of special-price offers for what appeared to be services that the church sold its members—counseling and classes. Several were headed DECLARATION OF EXPULSION, or even DECLARATION OF APOSTASY AND EXPULSION. Each of these began with a stock statement: Further unauthorized contact with the below named is an act of treason. Below that, in bold black capitals, would be one or more names. From one of them, the name jumped out at me: FREDERICK L. HAMILTON. It was dated nearly three months earlier. Below it was a short list of what appeared to be statute numbers, presumably of church laws he'd broken. It seemed to me I had my lead.

As I stood looking at it, a hand touched my shoulder.

"Don't let the declarations disturb you." It was the guy I'd sat with. "Staff members are an elite, and when one of us refuses correction, he has to be pruned away. To refuse correction is to hold to one's weaknesses and evil impulses, and that is a further act of evil. Most people who get expelled will eventually desire correction, and return to be saved. But if their intentions are evil enough to threaten the Church, something invariably happens to them, something unpleasant. I could give you examples. The Church doesn't do it—don't take me wrong. The universe punishes them."

Then he turned and left, leaving me staring after him, my scalp crawling. Evil, he'd said. I wondered if the evil wasn't inside the church instead of out.

* * *

Back at the office I called up the directory listings under EMERGENCY AID > CULT WITHDRAWAL, and found one that called itself Gnostic Withdrawal Assistance, at 1764 Hillhurst. I dialed their number and learned they had someone on the desk twenty-four hours a day. They did not discuss business over the phone.

So I drove over there. The guy on duty was black, about six-five and maybe 280 pounds; could have played defensive end for the Steelers. His eyes were calm, and as direct as any I'd ever seen. His face had multiple scars, and his nose had been flattened badly enough that it looked like the business end of a double-barreled shotgun, yet he didn't look mean or even hard, just someone who was in charge of himself. The church had a reputation for intimidating people it considered its enemies, but I couldn't picture anyone intimidating that guy. I told him I wanted to get in touch with someone named Fred Hamilton, who'd gotten kicked out about three months earlier. Did he know him?

"Yeah, I know Fred," he told me. "I've known him for years. When they kicked him out, they hadn't paid staff their weekly ten dollars for four weeks. As punishment because church income was down. He came in here in grief, without a dime. I let him use my phone to call his parents, so he could ask them for skybus fare. They weren't home, so he stayed with me overnight."

"Could you give me his address?"

"We don't give out addresses. For all I know, you could be one of Lonnie's goons—Lonnie Thomas'—looking to harass him."

Lon Thomas. I remembered the name from the summary article. The author called him the administrative chief of the Gnosties, the guy in charge of day-to-day operations. The goals, the directions, and the central policies, on the other hand, supposedly came from Ray Christman.

I took out my wallet and showed the guy my Prudential ID plate. He couldn't have looked less impressed. "Look," I told him, "I don't care one way or another about whether Hamilton is in or out of the church. He has a wife, and her mother wants to know how she is. And where."

He appraised me with dark, reddish brown eyes. "Our standard offer for something like that is, you give me twenty-five George in cash, and I'll call and give him your phone number. And tell him what you want. If he wants to, he'll get in touch with you. If not . . ." He shrugged.

I took one of my business cards and two bills out of my wallet, gave them to him and asked for a receipt. "One more question," I added. "You told me you've known Fred Hamilton for years. How'd you get to know him?"

"We were on staff together at the Campus. Shared a room, along with ten other guys. They kicked me out a year and a half ago, for thinking for myself—asking questions and being critical." He shrugged again. "You live in the church like that a while, it takes some adjusting to live in the real world again. For some people it's pretty bad, so I started this place."

"Got it," I said. "Where'd you get the money?"

"To start this? Same way I got money before I joined. In the ring." He grinned. "I wasn't much for finesse, but people liked to watch me. Now I run this place on money from people I help, after they get their feet on the ground. People like Fred. Or from their families." He held up the bills. "And now and then someone like you, who wants a line to one of them."

Then he gave me a receipt and I left, hoping he was making it all right. Providing a service that depended on gratitude for pay sounded pretty uncertain to me.

Back at the office I read the book by Christman. It was kind of fascinating, actually. I could see how it might hook people. My main problem with it was, I kept dozing off, interest notwithstanding. Then I checked out early and went to the health club for an hour before going home.

* * *

That evening at 7:57, my phone rang. It was Hamilton. He looked older than I'd expected, probably in his thirties, intelligent and well groomed. I asked him if I could record our conversation and he said, "Sure, go ahead."

The guy at Withdrawal Assistance had told him what I was after, but Hamilton waited for me to ask. "Gloria lives right there at the Campus," he answered. "When she first joined church staff, on the same day we got married, the church sent her to Australia for a while, to put distance between her and her parents. She had money—she'd emptied out her checking account at Pacific Grove—so while she was in Australia, she bought 'soul salvage' and 'spiritual enlightenment,' a couple of counseling levels. When she got back to L.A., she was broke." He grinned ruefully. "And a dedicated Gnostie, like her husband."

"They kick her out too, did they?"

He chuckled. "She was on the Board of Review that kicked me out! She'd decided her husband was an evil person who was trying to drag mankind the rest of the way into ruin by harming the church. Right after that she filed for divorce. I tried to get custody of our baby girl, but no luck. She already had a would-be stepfather lined up for her. Gloria is Gloria Hebner now."

Angela DeSmet was not going to be thrilled. "What's your daughter's name?" I asked him.

"Spirit," he said. "Nice, eh?"

"How do you raise a kid on ten dollars a week?"

He grunted, and smiled a small wry smile. "You don't. In L.A. the staff lives in, and the church raises their kids. More or less. Unmarried staff members sleep in double- and triple-deck bunks in dorm rooms. Married staff couples get a small room to themselves in an old dorm wing, and share a coed community bathroom with about twenty others. Fun. Especially when the plumbing screws up, or someone uses newspaper for toilet paper, and a commode floods. That happens quite a bit, because you have to provide your own toilet paper, and sometimes you're broke. Lots of weeks we didn't get that ten. Five maybe, or nothing.

"The children live in another building, on a floor called the Child Nurture Center. You get to see them during 'parents' hour'—that's actually for half an hour after supper—unless your supervisor decides there's something more important you should be doing."

He was rambling. I let him.

"The Child Nurture Center is really bad. Complaining about it got me in trouble more than once. It's dirty, for one thing. A goddamn roach nest. And most of the time the kids have head lice. Twice a year, before the semiannual inspection by the County, the church assigns a bunch of parents to clean the place thoroughly and delouse the kids. The rest of the time, the church gives it bottom priority, because time and money spent on it don't produce income."

"Why do the parents put up with it?"

He grimaced. "They believe the church is out to save the world from an evil conspiracy. Sacrifices are necessary."

There was that word: evil. I told him the thought that had come to me in the Saints' Deli. He grinned lopsidedly. "There's individual evil in the church, sure, but the major problem isn't evil, it's ignorance and incompetence taken to a whole new level by incredible arrogance."

He went on to tell me more about the Child Nurture Center—a gross story of filth, mismanagement, and neglect. That spring, the ages one-to-six section was down to just two nannies; the rest had run away, deserted. Just two nannies, each working alone on a twelve-hour shift, taking care of rambunctious, undisciplined little children plus some babies in diapers; about thirty in all. After several days, one of the two remaining nannies disappeared—grabbed her own kid and took off.

"Somehow," he told me, "the one nanny who was left held on for more than thirty hours alone—no sleep, no meal breaks—until one of the Central Chancery execs showed up, an arrogant twenty-year-old little bitch named Janie Blitz. Some parent had come to get her kid for parents' hour, and complained, so Janie came storming over. Gloria and I had just come back with Spirit, and we saw the whole thing. Instead of getting help for Trudy, Janie started raising hell with her, actually screaming at her, because the place was such a mess. 'Look at that!' she yelled, and pointed. 'You're so fucking lazy, you can't even put the lid back on the fucking diaper pail!'

"That's when Trudy broke. She was a big strapping girl, and had a juice pitcher in her hand. First she threw the juice in Janie's face, and before Janie could stop sputtering, bonged her on the head with the empty stainless-steel pitcher. Then she grabbed her by the hair and threw her down. After thirty hours without rest, she must have been running on fumes, but right then she had the strength of a Kodiak bear, and when Janie hit the deck, Trudy started kicking her.

"Gloria was shrieking obscenities at Trudy by then, and trying to help Janie, which tells you something about what Gloria had become. But I held her back. When Trudy got tired of kicking, she took a diaper pail, half full of dirty diapers soaking in detergent, and emptied the whole mess on Janie, then jammed the pail on her head.

"That's when I got hysterical. I laughed myself nearly sick, then let go of Gloria and left the building. I should have walked right on off the Campus, but—" He paused, shook his head. "I was too brainwashed. I hate to use the term, it's been politicized for so long, and the meaning's so vague and stretched out of shape. But it's the best term we've got.

"Within the hour, Janie and Gloria had reported me to the Morals Police, for not rescuing Janie or letting Gloria try. And for laughing, the ultimate insult. The next day they held a Board of Review, and offered me a chance for restitution and correction: I could volunteer to serve on the SRC—that's the Spiritual Reclamation Crew, which I won't try to describe—and when I got out I'd be assigned as a nanny. Or I could be expelled—kicked out. I told them to kiss my ass."

He was shaking his head, remembering. "That sounds as if I didn't give a damn, as if I was pretty independent. And at the moment I thought I was. Then the reaction set in, and I left in shock, in grief. I'd been kicked out, lost my marriage, maybe my kid . . . And my eternal salvation. I still believed!" He looked at me via his phone screen, and shook his head with a small rueful grin.

We talked for two or three minutes more, then he gave me his name and his Denver address and phone number, and Gloria's address, and we disconnected. I had the phone print out the conversation, and gave it to Carlos the next day, along with my dictated write-up summarizing the case. In my summary, I left out the details of the Child Nurture Center, and Carlos said I did the right thing on that: We weren't hired to describe the conditions that Angela DeSmet's granddaughter lived in, and besides, Hamilton could have been exaggerating, although I didn't think so. As wild as the story was, something about the man made me believe him. Then Carlos faxed the report to Angela DeSmet, along with the paperwork, and transferred to her what she had coming back on her deposit.

And that, I thought, was the end of that. The Church of the New Gnosis might not be evil—after all, it had let Hamilton simply walk away—but it was ugly and unpleasant, and I was glad to be done with it.

I never imagined how much criminality I'd find connected with it, though I've had to rethink the word evil since then.

BUTZBURGER

It was last April, the thirteenth, that we got the real case, the case of Christman's disappearance. When a guy named Armand Butzburger came in about a contract.

He'd talked to Joe on the phone the day before, and Joe and Carlos had discussed it and decided they wanted me to do the job. I'd been raised from investigative assistant to junior investigator after I'd located Gloria DeSmet for her mother, and to full investigator after I solved the case of Arthur Ashkenazi, the twice-killed astronomer. I'd done some pretty good work in between, too, but when I picked that one apart, they decided I was a real sherlock.

So when Butzburger arrived at Joe's office for his interview, Joe called Carlos and me to come down, and introduced us.

Butzburger's a wealthy "New Gnu"—people pronounce it "New Guh-new"—a polite name for a Gnostie, which is pronounced without the G. And what he told us was that Ray Christman, the Gnostie guru, hadn't been seen in public since last October or maybe September. Within his church, Ray Christman had been a highly visible man, but now and then, for whatever reason, he'd disappear from the Campus for a few weeks or even a month or more, so for a while, people didn't think anything about it.

Then, in December, the church held its annual big Christmas event at the New Palladium in Hollywood. A really great-looking woman named Marcy Mannheim conducted the opening ceremony. Which was something Christman traditionally did. The proceedings were always taped, and the tapes sold for twenty bucks each. Every New Gnu was expected to buy one. Butzburger had brought his with him, and played it for us on Joe's wall screen.

What Mannheim said to the crowd was, "In October, Ray went to stay at the Ranch, to do concentrated research on Freed Being. And after a while"—she paused there to tighten their attention—"after a while, things began to break for him." She paused again, and the place exploded with applause and cheering. She let them clap and shout for maybe a minute, then with a motion, cut them off. Like she'd pulled their plug. "Finally," she went on, "early in December, Ray left the Ranch for a location where he could continue his work in virtually complete solitude, in an environment totally uncontaminated with activities of any kind, except for such basic matters as the preparation of meals. He has only one person with him to see to his needs. He plans to stay where he is until he's worked out the complete road, the full procedures, and the state of Freed Being is ready to deliver to the public!"

She stopped again, and for a long few seconds the place was quiet as a mortuary, as if the crowd was stunned. Then once more it exploded with wild cheering. After a few seconds of that, Butzburger turned off the tape.

"That's all of it that's relevant to my problem," he said, and looked around at us with steady blue eyes. Somehow they reminded me of the red-brown eyes of the guy at the withdrawal assistance office. "I could accept what Marcy told us," he went on. "In fact I did accept it, without hesitation. But since then? . . . Since then there's been evidence and rumor of a power struggle within the Church's top executive strata. Replete with expulsions of executives, then reinstatements and amnesties, then more expulsions. Which certainly supports the power-struggle rumors."

His eyes moved to me and stopped. "To appreciate that, you need to realize that within the Gnostic community, rumors are rare. We are not—not—a gossiping people. So this has concerned me. It's been three and a half months since the Christmas event, and nothing more has been heard from Ray, at least not publicly. And if he was around, even on a remote island in the Indian Ocean or someplace like that, he'd know, be psychically aware of, anything like a power struggle within his Church. And take immediate and effective steps to end it.

"This does not seem to have happened, and I'm troubled by it. It may seem unreal to you, but Ray Christman is the hope of mankind and the world, so I want you to find him for me, and find out whether he's all right." Butzburger's gaze fell away then. "It may be that I'm simply lacking in faith," he added slowly, "and that what I'm doing here is harmful to his cause. I'm not as—perceptive as I should be; I'm well aware of that. But I've decided." He looked back up at me, then at Joe. "I realize that this is a very difficult undertaking. It may well prove impossible. But my attorney tells me that Prudential is the best investigation firm in the country, probably the world, and very ethical. So if you're interested in the case, I'm ready to discuss an agreement."

That's when I left the room; the negotiating aspects weren't anything I needed to sit through. Prudential has a standard contract with standard clauses. Individual agreements can vary within limits, but we're expensive. That's why most of our contracts are with corporations and government agencies, especially the city and state. Documented reports would be sent to Butzburger at regular intervals and sometimes in between.

I figured he must have deep pockets, and wondered how someone like him got mixed up with something like the Church of the New Gnosis. I'd thought of it as an outfit that attracted the weak and wishful, not the strong and wealthy. I knew it had wealthy members, but to the extent I'd thought about it, I'd assumed they were playboys and playgirls who'd inherited their money. Butzburger didn't seem to fit that image.

* * *

I went to my office and started calling stuff up on my computer from the L.A. City Library, mostly articles in the L.A. Times. I read about 800 to 1,200 words a minute, maybe the most useful single skill I have, and I was getting quite an education. After about half an hour, someone knocked at my door. It was Butzburger; he wanted to know if I'd have lunch with him, his treat.

He'd already called a cab. We rode to downtown Hollywood, to Musso and Frank's Grill. It's a place where you're apt to find yourself at a table near some holo star. But we didn't; he'd reserved a small private room. He wanted to ask questions, to get a better feel for the kind of guy who'd be working for him. Until I'd finished my ranch-size prime rib, though, all he made was small talk. Then, while we waited for dessert, he asked about my earlier case involving the church. Without naming names or going into the matter of the Child Nurture Center, I gave him the picture.

"So your experience is very limited," he said.

"With the church, right. Most of what I know, I have from news articles. I was reading one of them when you knocked." He nodded. I could see he wanted to say something and was trying to decide whether he should. Or more likely how. Finally he asked for my initial view of the case.

"Usually," I told him, "we go into a case with definite evidence of a crime, and a set of additional information that seems pertinent. And work from there. This time we don't have much, which is going to make it tough. And what will make it tougher is that the church is— It's been described as impenetrable, and that fits my experience. Mine and others'. If the church is right, and Mr. Christman is holed up in some out-of-the-way place doing his research, they're not going to give me his address. So the best way to approach it is to look for evidence of kidnaping or murder."

Again Butzburger nodded. "There is evil on this planet, Mr. Seppanen, and the Church has many enemies. People, governments—forces that want to harm it. Destroy it if they can, legally or otherwise. Thus it has to be impenetrable. Impenetrable and formidable."

There was that word again: evil. "Right," I said. "And those enemies are another part of the problem. If he's not lying up somewhere, then it seems highly probable that someone's killed him."

Butzburger's face pinched a little.

"As you said," I went on, "the church has a lot of enemies. It was born with enemies, and it's created a lot more, with lawsuits, the breaking up of families . . . things like that. There are a lot of people who'd like to see Ray Christman dead. So the opening question becomes who had the resources and the opportunity.

"I presume that Mr. Christman went around well guarded. The buildings on the Campus have guards at the entrances. That I know. At least the Neophyte Building does. And that nine-foot chain-link fence around the parking lot, with the razor wire on top, is obviously HardSteel. Plus I noticed men on the roofs who aren't up there to enjoy the view. So he wasn't all that vulnerable."

I was thinking out loud, feeling my way through the situation. "The Institute of Noetic Technology might have the necessary resources. They certainly regard themselves as the church's enemy, and when they lost that lawsuit against the church, and their appeal, they probably figured they had no further legal recourse. If they still wanted revenge, they'd have to get it some other way.

"Then there's the COGS, the Church of God in Science. Or actually its various and apparently numerous extremist groups. There's got to be some well-heeled people among them. They'd be nearly impossible to investigate, because the extremist groups don't have formal memberships. Mostly they seem to be ad hoc groups, and they're all hostile to anyone who asks questions. We can assume that various local police agencies throughout the country have moles in them, along with the FBI, but they certainly aren't going to give us any information about Christman, assuming there is any and they have it."

Butzburger was taking it pretty well. He looked serious but not upset. "My guess," I went on, "is that neither of those groups has the expertise necessary to get to Mr. Christman and kidnap him. But presumably they have the money necessary to contract the job out to some underworld outfit that does have that expertise. And it would make sense for them to contract with an L.A. mob—people who know the city. So one thing I'll do is talk to information sources in the underworld, and see what they may have heard.

"Then there are the families of converts who've broken their family ties and joined the church. Especially those who've joined church staffs. How many centers are there, worldwide? Seventy-eight?"

"Something like that."

"So the number of hostile family members has got to be large," I went on. "Again though, the only way they could get at Christman would seem to be through the underworld.

"But why would any of these want Christman to disappear quietly? It would be a lot easier to have him ambushed, or his office bombed—something like that."

I paused, examining the man sitting across from me, his face, his eyes. "I'll look into all those possibilities as best I can. But I'll tell you, Mr. Butzburger, if Mr. Christman has been kidnaped or quietly killed, it's likeliest to have been by some faction within the church. They had access to him. They knew his habits, his patterns of movement, his vulnerabilities. They could approach him without arousing his suspicion.

"You talked about a power struggle in the hierarchy. I can imagine a faction that is less interested in saving the world than in getting rich and powerful." Actually I could imagine both factions like that. "And the Church of the New Gnosis has a large income, even if the published estimates are high by a factor of ten. Maybe one of those factions feels that they could really take over if Christman was out of the way."

Butzburger didn't argue—he didn't even look as if he'd like to—and that was the end of our business conversation. All that was left was dessert. I don't think he enjoyed his cheesecake.

Tailed?

Back at the office, I phoned a few information sources. Most of them, though, I'd have to go out and contact personally. Almost all were loners on the fringe of the underworld, who lived with their ears open.

The best of them wasn't part of the fringe. She was on the inside—a Korean-American woman, "Miss Melanie." She was one I'd have to talk to in person. Melanie runs a large stable of expensive call girls—Asian, Eurasian, Anglo, Afro-American, and Chicanas. She even had her own clinical service. She also had the protection of the Korean mafia, probably paying for it with the services of her girls and with information the girls picked up. Information about rip-off possibilities, underworld activities—things like that. Occasionally she helped us out, for a healthy fee, with information about people or groups in competition with the Koreans.

One thing she never did though, she told me once. "Melanie," she said, referring to herself in the third person, "never does blackmail." It would kill the goose that laid the golden eggs.

When I'd finished my phone calls to information sources, I called up the directory to see if Gnostic Withdrawal Assistance still existed. It did. The same guy answered, and he still did business on the same basis at the same location. I told him I'd be there that afternoon, and that he probably wouldn't recognize me.

Then I had Larry, in our technical section, make me up—nothing ambitious, but misleading—and fit me out with some clothes. He darkened my complexion and my hair, and gave me brown eyes and a mustache. And a driver's license with a Turkish name. No one was going to talk Turkish to me, that was almost certain, and if I wanted to, I could swear in Finnish and pretend it was Turkish.

The makeup job didn't take long. Larry is fast. Afterward I called Tuuli, my wife, and told her I'd be home late. Probably very late. Then I went to Gnostic Withdrawal Assistance, and said I wanted to know about another missing person. He agreed to give my name and number to two recent exiles, plus Fred Hamilton again; Hamilton wasn't at his old number anymore. I also told him what I'd told Tuuli—that I'd be home late. They could leave a message on my phone.

The rest of the day I spent talking with assorted bartenders, pimps, hustlers, bail bondsmen, pawn brokers, and Miss Melanie. I wasn't optimistic, but I needed to cover all the bases. I stopped at Melanie's last. She gave me tea, and we agreed on charges.

Then I drove back to the office to get my personal car. It was full night by then, though with the sky-glow from street lights, headlights, windows, and signs, night in L.A. isn't very dark. Not like Hemlock Harbor, Michigan. As I drove my car out of the company lot, I noticed another, a late-model sea blue Hyundai, stopped across the street in the entrance of the Beverly Drugstore parking lot. The driver, it seemed to me afterward, had been black, with a close beard. I paused and waved for him to pull out first; he'd been there ahead of me. But he didn't move, so I pulled out. When I turned east on Beverly, so did he, which didn't have to mean a thing; I barely noticed. But when I turned north on Fairfax and he turned too, I wondered, so I doubled back west on Rosewood; if he'd done the same, I'd have been pretty sure. But he didn't. He had the chance but continued north on Fairfax.

He could have been innocent, or he could have recognized that I was testing him. Whatever. He was gone.

HAMILTON

Two calls were recorded on my phone when I got home, with numbers to call the next day, a Saturday. They were from two of the ex-Gnosties, but not Hamilton. I didn't really know why I wanted to talk with Hamilton anyway. He'd been out for three years. I guess because I'd liked his frankness and intelligence when I'd talked with him before.

Tuuli would bawl me out for working on weekends if I didn't really have to. So I waited till she went out for groceries, then called them back. The first exile had worked on the church's in-house magazine, and simply deserted. He was totally soured on the church, but totally devoted to Christman. When I told him the missing person I was interested in was Christman, he told me he was sure that Christman was too psychic to be abducted or physically harmed! His view was that the great guru had withdrawn from the church "to punish it for its degeneracy and aberrations."

He hadn't heard anything about a power struggle, though he was aware of the rash of expulsions and cancellations. I got the impression he wasn't very bright.

The second exile was a "technical compliances enforcer," who got kicked out when he refused to coerce the San Diego church to suspend counselors for what upper management had decided were technical errors. I had no idea at all what he was talking about. My reading hadn't dealt with "technical" aspects.

He was aware of two factions, one led by Lon Thomas, president of the church, and the other by a Frank Evanson, who was "the director of technical practices." The guy was very cynical about both the church and Ray Christman, whom he considered had abandoned "his crusade" and was only interested in how rich he could get. Nothing I'd read, including Christman's book for beginners, had said anything about a crusade, either.

The guy believed that Christman was probably dead, most likely assassinated by an insider with a grudge. He didn't think that either faction would have Christman killed, even if they wanted to, because "with Christman dead, the great moneymaking machine will grind to a halt." The claim that Christman had gone off to do research, he said, was a fraud, to hide his death. "But it won't work forever. When the church doesn't come through with procedures leading to Freed Being, people will get smart and see through it, and leave."

Killed by an insider with a grudge! He'd only been guessing, but it could be. And the church would probably hide it. I had virtually zero chance of finding out, from an organization like the Church of the New Gnosis.

When Tuuli got home, we took a commuter airbus to Santa Barbara. I love L.A., but in Santa Barbara the air is softer than anywhere else in the known universe. We strolled around and snacked and shopped, neither of us actually buying much. Tuuli likes to look, and I kind of do too. One place we went was Nielsen's Dairy, where we sat outside under an awning and had about a dozen different flavors of rich, rich ice cream. I could almost feel myself getting fat. Tuuli can eat like that and stay tiny, but that's not how it works with me at all.

When we got home, Fred Hamilton had called and left his number. A local number. I called him right away, Tuuli notwithstanding. He was living in West Hollywood, working as a stockbroker, and admittedly was out of touch with what was going on in the church.

I asked him how a would-be abductor might have gone about getting his hands on Christman.

"Look," he said, "I have a friend with me now, from out of town. Will tomorrow be all right? I'd like to meet you. We'll eat out somewhere, on me."

"Sure." Obviously he'd come a long way from the Gnostie exile who needed to bum a phone call, to ask his parents for bus fare.

"There's a little place on La Cienega," he said, "near Willoughby. Called Yolanda's. It's hard to miss; got a conspicuous sign, and tables with awnings out front for nice weather. Suppose I meet you there at noon, for brunch?"

"Um. Would earlier be possible? On Sundays my wife and I usually eat lunch together at home. It's gotten to be sort of a tradition."

"Actually, earlier would be better for me, too. My company's heading out early tomorrow, flying back to Seattle, so I'll be up at seven anyway."

* * *

We settled on breakfast at eight-thirty. It turned out to be a good hour; there weren't a lot of people there, and most of them were eating outside. We took a booth in a back corner. Yolanda's was a health food kind of place, though the food turned out to be excellent. I ordered black coffee, a stuffed bell pepper, and buttermilk, trying to make up for yesterday's ice-cream binge. "Real buttermilk or cultured?" the waitress asked. When I lived with my half brother, Sulo, after dad and mom were killed, I used to drink real, homemade buttermilk. Eila made it when she churned butter. I hadn't realized you could get it in L.A. It came from Altadena Dairy, the waitress said. She looked Hispanic, so I told her, "Real then. Leche cuajada."

She laughed. "I think I'd better bring you suero de mantequilla," she said.

Which left me unsure whether I'd made a real mistake, or if it was a matter of dialect. L.A.'s got about every Spanish dialect there is, plus usages all its own. While we waited, Hamilton and I talked, and I told him what I had to work with. Mainly speculations.

He stirred honey into his herb tea. "Christman has, or had, three residences," he said, "each of them well guarded. He moved from one to another at irregular intervals by sky limo. The main one was a luxurious penthouse apartment at the Campus, on top of the Administration Building. He was there more than anywhere else, sometimes for extended periods. His office was in the penthouse too. It would be nearly impossible for outsiders to get at him there; there were too many people around. Including his bodyguards, who were chosen for utter loyalty and obedience. They were security-checked on the psychogalvanometer. He dressed them well, in civvies, and they were trained to be totally unyielding. They carried guns, too. I know that for a fact, because I saw one of them take off his jacket in the restroom, and he was wearing a pistol in a shoulder holster. Supposedly they practiced on a pistol range somewhere beneath the Admin Building."

The theory of a gangland hit, never very compelling, began to shrivel.

"Another place he lived is called 'the Ranch.' It's out in the Imperial Valley, backed up against the Vallecito Mountains, southwest of the Salton Sea. Supposed to be forty acres. I was there a few times when I was a courier in the church's Executive Communications Section. It was surrounded by a twelve-foot chain-link fence—HardSteel topped by razor wire—with little towers at the back corners where they weren't conspicuous. Watchmen sat in them with radios and guns, watching the fence. At night there were lights here and there along it so they could see if anyone came up to it, colored lights so they wouldn't seem like a security thing, although they were.

"Inside the fence it was beautifully landscaped. Had been when he got it. All the way around, there were rows of Washingtonia palms—the real tall, skinny ones—alternating with tall, stout date palms. And irrigated Bermuda grass lawns, and marvelous gardens. Fountains played constantly, and there were pools with exotic carp, red and white and gold. At night, colored lights would play on the fountains, except when Ray was stargazing. Then they were turned off.

"A really nice place. Makes being rich seem worthwhile. He'd go there off and on in the winter, though we never knew when in advance. Especially when L.A. had one of its stormy, rainy winters. On a February day when it was gray and wet and chilly at the Campus, it'd be sunny and warm at the Ranch. Maybe a little windy. He'd host rich churchies there, rich members, especially Europeans or Japanese or Brazilians, when he wanted to pitch some expensive project to them. He always preferred to spend other people's money.

"He'd had an observation deck built on the roof of his residence there—we called it 'the hacienda'—with an expensive telescope, and he'd go out and stargaze at night." Hamilton laughed. "I remember being shocked at a thought I had: If Ray can leave his body—that's the soul going for an outing, you understand, the body being left to run on automatic—if Ray can leave his body like that, which was supposed to be nothing for him, he should be able to go out into space and look at any star he wants to, from as close as he'd like. So why use a telescope?"

Hamilton chuckled. "At the time it seemed like a terrible, heretical thought.

"There was a bigger tower near the back, screened from the hacienda by tall date palms. It was said to have electronic scanners, and supposedly surface-to-air missiles in case of aerial attack. That could have been a rumor, of course, the part about the missiles. It's hard to know."

I interrupted. "I've been told by a church member that in the church, rumors are rare."

Hamilton laughed again. "That may be true of rumors about controversial or negative matters; it's considered evil to pass along bad rumors. But there were always rumors about what wonderful things Ray was doing or was going to do. Churchies feed on them; they're nourished by them. They don't think of them as rumors.

"His third residence is called 'the Hideaway,' on 160 acres of private land inside the Willamette National Forest. In Oregon, in the Cascade Mountains. I was there just once, as a courier. There's a log lodge in virgin forest, beautiful, and the whole place is surrounded by a security fence. I guess you know how tough it is to get through a HardSteel fence, and any disturbance of it—someone climbing it, or a tree falling on it, anything like that—would set off alarms and flashing lights in the guardhouse. And of course, there's the usual razor wire on top.

"The fence is patrolled twenty-four hours a day, or it was, by armed patrols with German police dogs." He chuckled. "Makes Ray sound paranoid, and I guess he was, at least a little. But apparently people did try to get in. Supposedly several were injured on the razor wire at different times, trying to get over the fence at night. At least that's the story. Guards picked them up and called the sheriff, and meanwhile their injuries were treated in the little clinic at the lodge. When the sheriff got there, he hauled them to town.

"Ray didn't spend a lot of time up there; it was too far. But now and then he'd go, maybe during a bad hot spell in summer. And when there was a storm on the sun, and northern lights were forecast. Ray loved the northern lights. I think he got high on them. Oregon's a lot farther north, and there's no light pollution at the Hideaway. The word was that he'd fly up there to watch.

"There was a stony ridge that sort of wrapped around where the buildings were, with a foot trail up to the top. He'd had a little observatory built up there for stargazing. I've seen it. I guess Ray had a thing about the stars.

"He seldom traveled, except between those places. So if anyone kidnaped or killed him, it was probably at one of them, or traveling between them. Unless he changed his habits since three years ago."

The waitress brought our food while he was telling me about the observatory, and we pretty much stopped talking to eat. When we were done, we skipped dessert. He sipped his tea and I worked on a refill of my coffee.

"Fred," I said, "I'd like to ask a personal question. Or maybe several of them. Tell me to stuff them if you feel like it."

He grinned. "Shoot."

"How much do you make a year now?"

"Huh! It's hard to say for this year. A hundred and twenty thou last year."

A hundred and twenty thou. About two and a half times the national average for families. "I haven't talked to many New Gnus," I told him, "and most that I have talked to, worked for the church as staff members. I got the impression, though, that they weren't too bright. But the guy at Gnostic Withdrawal Assistance . . . ?"

"Gerald. Gerald Williams."

"Gerald not only seemed smart; he had something. Had it together, you could say. That's the impression I got. And a wealthy guy I talked to yesterday, who's a totally dedicated New Gnu, or seems to be, made somewhat the same impression. And today, you. Why the difference?"

Fred grunted. "First," he said, "there are simply differences between people, for whatever reasons. In the church as well as out. Also, strange as it may seem to you, Ray's counseling procedures do help people. They don't do everything he claims for them, by half, but they help. A lot. And a lot of staff members never get any of them. I did, and Gerald did, because we managed to get ourselves trained as counselors, and counselors are allowed time to counsel each other.

"Most members not on staff have had quite a lot of counseling. That's where probably ninety-nine percent of the money comes from. They tend to be in good shape, mentally and emotionally—except in matters concerning the church. Concerning the church, they tend very strongly to be obedient, even robotic."

Robotic. I remembered the staff member I'd talked to in the Neophyte Building. She didn't think; she recited.

"And then there's the matter of in or out," Hamilton went on. "For most of the time I was in, ten years, I was a good little robot. I believed what I was told to believe, and rejected what I was told to reject. In the midst of a whole lot of evidence to the contrary. Sometimes—quite often, actually—I noticed the contrast between what I saw and the way things were said to be or supposed to be. And I always found an excuse for them. Then, for a while, I was a sort of secret questioner. Finally the effects accumulated, and I got myself kicked out.

"Within days after leaving, I began to see a lot of things more clearly. More freely. It was like I'd been colorblind, and was starting to see color. People who've been in the church, who've gotten counseling and then left, tend to do better personally than before they'd gotten in. Sometimes a lot better."

"Do many of them leave?"

"Martti, most of them leave. A big majority of them. The biggest product of the Church of the New Gnosis is ex-members."

That was something I hadn't been aware of. Somehow it made me feel better about the church; it was less a trap than I'd thought. My coffee was cold, and I signaled the waitress for a refill. When I had it, I asked, "How much money do people usually spend on counseling?"

"In my case, nothing. I discovered New Gnosticism as a college senior, a finance major, and quit before I graduated, to join staff. I didn't have any money. But there are lots of people, wealthy people, who've spent more than a quarter million." I sat stunned. A quarter million! It seemed impossible, even considering prices of up to a thousand dollars an hour I'd read about for counseling. "How . . . Why does anyone spend that much money on a cult?"

He smiled a small smile. "There are enough unusual truths, or what feel like truths, in the books and introductory lectures, to get you curious. Maybe even hopeful; even excited. Me, I got excited. And particularly if you're dissatisfied with your life, or the world, you may decide you want to look into it further. Then, if you get some counseling— The results of getting counseling, particularly the more basic levels, can seem miraculous: old fears and worries gone, old grim moods, old regrets, old grudges, old psychosomatic conditions. Gone! Crap you thought you were stuck with for life! So you think, Jesus! This stuff works miracles! And you keep expecting more. Ray was always promising more and more up the road."

Fred had started quivering, trembling, as he talked about it. It was pretty strange, because his voice, his eyes, seemed perfectly calm.

"While at the same time," he went on, "he fed us a line that this was all part of a crusade, that the human race was doomed unless we got everyone in the world into the church. And that, of course, was going to take lots of money and lots of dedication. The church was an embattled army fighting to save humanity. And like any army, ours had to be obedient. Unquestioning. Also, it could be destroyed from inside, by subtle deviations in teaching and procedures. So absolute orthodoxy was vital, and continuous vigilance—an uncompromising ruthlessness with anything done differently than Ray said."

With that he stopped, sat dead in the water for a minute, then took a sip of tea. "Sound like anything else you ever heard of?" he asked.

To some degree or another, it seemed to me, most cults were like that; some mainstream religions were too. "It must be a relief to be out of it," I said.

His smile was rueful. "It is and it isn't. Being out has left a hole. For me, dealing stocks is a way to get money. Beyond that, it's neither satisfying nor important. I'm looking for something that is. And that's not easy, when you've been burned like I was."

We didn't say anything more for a couple of minutes. I started wishing I'd ordered dessert. Finally I asked, "Do you have any thoughts about what may have happened to Ray Christman?"

He shook his head. His eyes focused again, and he came out of whatever he'd been in. "No. No I don't. Every possibility I can think of seems unlikely. He may have simply taken off with a bunch of the loot, to live somewhere as an anonymous rich American. That's probably the best bet."

That stunned me. It seemed so damned logical! And obvious! And I hadn't thought of it before. "Tell you what," he said, and he sounded all business now. "I'll give you the name of a woman, an ex-churchie like me, who may be the best-informed person there is on the church. Outside its upper executive levels. She has sources everywhere, sucks in contacts and information like a black hole. The difference being, she'll let it back out when she feels like it.

"Even churchies talk to her. She's probably the only outie I know who has information sources inside. And she's never been expelled—kicked out. It's supposed to be automatic to expel anyone as evil who openly quits the church, but she's never been expelled."

He gave me the phone number and address of a woman called Molly Cadigan, a business consultant who worked out of her home. "She's informal," he said, "and may not make a great first impression, but she's smart. I've seen her in action. The first time I met her, she gave me some free advice, and it worked like a bomb. I cashed in. Since then I buy her advice, and it's always good. She's not in it to get rich, either. She doesn't go looking for business. She's content to make a comfortable living, and lives the way she pleases, does what she likes.

"She's a well of information, not only about the church, but about its enemies. And so far as I know, she doesn't sell that kind of information—not to individuals. She gives it away. Although she might charge a corporation like yours."

He emptied his cup and didn't pour any more. Apparently we were about done.

"She was an early member," he continued, "one of the founding members. Before that she was a Noetie—one of Leif Haller's followers. Beginning in her teens. But she was always self-determined. She quit the Noeties when Haller began to demand conformity. Later she quit the church for the same reason.

"Since I've been out," Hamilton went on, "I've met a lot of ex-churchies, some of them oldtimers like Molly. And they tell stories. One of them is that Molly was Ray Christman's girlfriend, once upon a time. That may be why she never got expelled."

* * *

I left the restaurant knowing that Molly Cadigan was someone I wanted to talk to.

MOLLY CADIGAN

Reading the L.A. Times at my desk the next morning, I found an item that jarred me. "Gerald Williams, owner and operator of a firm called Gnostic Withdrawal Assistance, was arrested yesterday on a charge of possessing for sale a quantity of crack cocaine." Crack has long since been out of style, but it still has its users.

Anyway that rocked me back in my chair. Williams a pusher? I didn't believe it.

He was being held in lieu of $50,000 bail.

I got on the phone to the LAPD and identified myself, explaining that Williams was an information source for me in an investigation. I asked to speak to the officer in charge of the case. A Lieutenant Emiliano Gonzaga accepted the call. My name was familiar to him. He told me they'd gotten their tipoff from a teenaged kid named Joseph R. Minnis.

"I can't help but wonder," I said, "if Joseph R. Minnis isn't a Gnostie. Or was put up to it by the Gnosties."

"You're not the first to wonder," he told me. "We're looking into it. So far as we can determine, Minnis isn't a Gnostie, but he is a street hustler on the make.

"We found the package in Williams' restroom cabinet, with the extra soap, scouring powder, and TP. And failed to find his prints on it, or anyone else's. It could have been left there by anyone. We've also verified that he lets street people use his restroom. If we don't get firmer evidence against him today, we plan to release him late this afternoon."

Gonzaga paused and grinned. "Incidentally, my office has taken half a dozen calls like yours. Williams has lots of friends."

I hadn't foreseen that, but it didn't surprise me. "Thanks, Lieutenant," I told him, and we disconnected. I felt pretty burned. I was sure the church had set Williams up, and right then I really wanted to get something on them: hopefully Ray Christman's murder. Assuming, of course, that Christman had been murdered.

* * *

When I'd finished the paper, I called Molly Cadigan's number and caught her at home. I explained who I was, and told her I was investigating Christman's disappearance. We agreed to meet at her place at ten o'clock, which gave me plenty of time. Briarcliff Drive is in the Hollywood Hills, but it's not one of those winding little goat-trail streets that appear and disappear up there. It's easy to find and keep track of.

So on a hunch, I went out of my way to swing by the Campus, and parked in the church's lot. I stopped in at the Saints' Deli to look at the notice board. Sure as hell, there was a Times fax right in the middle, with everything else moved back a little to draw attention to it. Next I went into the Neophyte Building and found one on the notice board in their reception area, edged with red tape to make it hard to overlook. A typed note beneath it read: "This is the kind of person who attack Ray adn the Church. And this the kind of thig that happen to them." Replete with typos and poor grammar on church notepaper. I wondered how the church could favorably impress someone like Armand Butzburger. If someone typed for him like that, he'd fire their ass in a minute, I was willing to bet.

When I came out, I saw a guy across the street and down a ways, sitting on the edge of a planter lighting a cigarette. A lightish-brown black guy with a short beard. Minutes earlier he'd been going into the deli when I was just about to leave. I couldn't help wondering.

So I sat down on a bench and pretended to check through my pocket notebook, waiting to see what he'd do. After a minute he got up, crossed the street, and walked into the Neophyte Building. I put my notebook back in my pocket and went to my car, where I sat and waited. Five minutes later he came into the lot and drove away in a somewhat beat-up red Chevy. Not a sea blue Hyundai. False alarm, I decided, and left.

Next I drove past Gnostic Withdrawal Assistance, which was pretty much on my way. There was space at the curb, so I stopped by. The place was open, with a white guy at the desk now. He wasn't as big as Williams, but he made the same kind of impression: straight, competent, fearless. I introduced myself; his name was Eric Fuentes.

"Gerald may be back pretty soon," I said, and told him what Lt. Gonzaga had told me.

He laughed. "It figures. The church's been caught in enough dirty tricks that people distrust them automatically."

Then I told him about finding the Times faxes at Saints' Deli and in the Neophyte Building. He gave a wry grin. "Right," he said. "It's the Disinformation Section in the Division of Public Relations. That's the way they operate. They're in charge of dirty tricks."

He was matter-of-fact as hell about it. I was surprised he didn't look mad, and told him so. "It's a waste of energy to get mad," he answered, "and a bigger waste to stay that way." He grinned again. "I admit I was steamed when I got here this morning and found a copy taped to our front door. And to most of the front windows along the block." He gestured at his waste basket. "I ripped 'em all off." "They actually have something they call the Disinformation Section?"

"Yeah. It's not shown on the open T.O., the table of organization that the public sees, but it's there, part of the Information Department, Division of PR."

"You must be a Gnostie exile."

"You've got it. I was a case reviewer in the Technical Division. Got in a row with Evanson himself, and told him what I thought. A year earlier I'd have said 'yes sir,' and done what he ordered, regardless of my own judgement. My eyes had been opening since a friend of mine got kicked out by a kangaroo court."

And apparently all in the name of saving the human race. The more I hear about them, I thought, the less I like them. I wondered if Fuentes' friend was Fred Hamilton.

* * *

I looked at my watch then. It was 9:37, and I'd rather get somewhere early than late, so I left. I got there early enough that I sat in the car and listened to KFWB News Radio for a few minutes. At 9:58 I knocked at Molly Cadigan's door. A young woman opened it, wearing blue jeans, a red-and-white checkered blouse, and a small apron. I decided she must be family. "My name is Seppanen," I told her. "I have an appointment to see Ms. Cadigan." She took my card and peered at it, then turned.

"Molly!" she shouted, "it's Mister—" She stumbled and looked harder at the card. "Mr. Seppanen to see you." She said the syllables well enough, but put the accent on the second, even though I'd said it for her. That happens a lot. "Come right in, sor," she said and, turning, led me through a foyer and the living room, then into a hall, chattering as we went. Her speech was so Irish, I could hardly believe it. She gestured me into what had probably been a large bedroom originally. As no one else was there, she waited with me. It was an office now, with a big heavy table, desk, built-in bookshelves, and a Hewlett-Packard Executive VIII, about right for the Mount Wilson Observatory. Wide old-fashioned French doors stood open, with a balcony outside. The morning haze had burned off, and beyond the wrought-iron railing was a long view across the L.A. Basin, burnished by April sun and framed by the tops of eucalyptus trees lower on the ridge.

The spell was broken by the sound of flushing, and a moment later Molly Cadigan stepped out of her private bathroom. Behind me the girl left the room, leaving the door ajar. "Nice view, eh, Sweetbuns?" Molly said.

Not exactly a formal opening. "Yeah," I said, "it's beautiful."

Molly didn't sound Irish any more than most Americans who have Irish names. I decided I'd been met by a domestic instead of her daughter or niece. Cadigan was a big woman—six feet and 240 pounds, at a guess, and maybe fifty years old. With red hair that would have been carroty before it was diluted by encroaching gray. "Sit down," she said, and motioned to a chair. "You like coffee? Or tea?"

I sat. "Coffee," I told her.

She went to a stainless-steel urn on a sideboard. One of the spigots showed coffee in the glass, the other hot water, both near full. This, I thought, is a serious coffee drinker. The Insulmugs she filled held about a pint; she put one down in front of me. "Cream and sugar?"

"Both." My diet needed a break.

She put them on the table by my mug. "Doughnuts?"

I hesitated.

"They're good for you," she honked. "Chockful of vitamin sucrose."

I poured cream in my coffee—real cream by the look of it, and decided what the hell. "A doughnut would be nice."

"KATEY!" The abrupt volume almost made my ears ring. "BRING SOME DOUGHNUTS FOR MY GUEST!" Then to me: "You like chocolate?"

I sipped my pale brown coffee. It had hair on its chest. "Chocolate's my favorite," I told her.

"CHOCOLATE, KATEY!"

She looked at me again and sat down, picked up her own mug, and sipped the strong brew straight. Her eyes were interesting. Redheads most often have blue eyes, or green. Hers were chestnut brown, almost the color of Gerald Williams'.

"So you're interested in what might have happened to Ray Christman." I almost missed what she said. I was trying to picture what she might have looked like maybe twenty-five years earlier, to attract the sexual interest of the young guru. He was still a good-looking guy in news pictures as recently as a year ago.

"Uh, yeah. I'm accumulating a lot of information, but none of it points anywhere yet. One informant says Christman may simply have blown with a ton of money, and be living somewhere as an anonymous rich American."

She snorted. "Not likely. Ray was broad-spectrum greedy. He wanted a lot of things in life, and one of them was admiration—or adoration. He wanted to be something very special, and be appreciated for it."

She pursed her lips thoughtfully. "Try this one for size. Ray liked to live well—good food, good booze, good-looking women, and he smoked like a fireplace with a dead buzzard in the flue. He stayed in halfway decent shape with steam baths, vitamins, massage, occasional dieting, and periodic fits of riding an exercise bike while reading.

"He may have just dropped dead. Stroke, heart attack, something like that. If he did, and it wasn't in public, Lonnie and Evanson would sure as hell try to hide it. Ray Christman, dying of a physical illness? It would ruin his mystique! The church would have to cover it—smuggle the body out, dispose of it, and release some kind of cover story."

Katey came in with the doughnuts, each about five inches across and loaded with chocolate frosting, a whole damn platter of them, about a thousand calories each, mostly fat. She set them down between Molly and me, then left. I eyed them carefully, then took one, broke it, and dunked. I was pretty sure Molly Cadigan wouldn't mind my dunking. It tasted as good as I'd known it would.

"What do you think of the theory that someone inside the church killed him?" I asked.

"Hell, honey, anything's possible, but that's one of the less likely. I knew Ray when he was still young. Knew him well; you could even say we were close friends. People were already claiming he was psychic, but that was bullshit. He ran a bunch of interesting procedures on himself after that, but I'll bet you dollars against rabbit turds he wasn't any more psychic a year ago than he was in 1990.

"What he was was damned observant. He noticed things that even I didn't, and I'm one of the most observant people I know. He could pretty much read your emotions, even if you were good at hiding them. By things like slight eye movements, pupil dilation, subtle color changes in your skin and the white of your eyes. Along with more obvious things like facial expression, fidgeting, and sweat. He taught me some of it. If someone around him was hostile toward him, or was trying to conceal things from him, he'd know it, Sweetbuns, he'd know it."

I knew some of those techniques. My dad taught them to me when I was still a preadolescent. They were part of what made him such a good lawman. But I couldn't do the sort of thing with them that Molly Cadigan was claiming for Ray Christman, not reliably, and I doubted that Christman could either.

"Incidentally," she said, "if you want to know what he saw in me, that's me over there. And that's Ray's Corvette behind me." She pointed at a framed photo on the cluttered wall, showing a long-legged, shapely young woman in shorts, with a pretty face and hair like red gold. The car was an old gas-driven machine from before geogravitic power converters. And scarlet! Tuuli would love it.

Molly kept talking. "He used that talent to play people. It helped make him such a great salesman. And cocksman. Like I said, he loved the ladies, but he didn't waste his time or cause upsets by making passes at someone who wasn't already interested. Or at married women. He isn't—wasn't a bastard, just self-indulgent. And most of the people around him, including Lonnie Thomas, damn near worshiped the man.

"So no, I don't think someone inside killed him. Not unless they'd been PDHed, and killed him without any advance awareness themselves of what they'd been programed to do." She paused. "You know what PDH stands for, don't you?"

I nodded; I'd had a period of reading spy thrillers. PDH meant treatment by Pain, Drugs, and Hypnosis. To condition someone to do something, usually murder someone, when triggered by some word, or maybe music, or something that happened. I didn't know whether such things were possible, except in theory.

"It wouldn't be easy," she went on. "It may not even be possible to PDH someone that precisely, not without leaving them visibly strange, anyway. Maybe, just maybe, some outfit like the OSS could, but I can't see them taking Ray Christman or the church that seriously. I think they got over that sort of bullshit with Leif Haller and his Institute of Noetic Technology."

Which reminded me: Hamilton had said Molly'd been a Noetie first. "Could the Noeties have had someone kill Christman?" I asked.

She frowned. "Maybe, but I doubt it. Like I said, lots of things are possible, some of them things neither of us has thought of and probably won't.

"I was a Noetie once myself, but back in Rochester, New York, where things were different than here. And I'm way out of date on them. Matter of fact, I don't know who isn't. But I know a couple of people who may have kept some attention on them. They might have some insights for you."

She gave me two names, with addresses and phone numbers. One was a Dr. Winifred Landau Sproule—Molly gave me all three names plus the title, as if that was how the woman was referred to. She'd not only been a member of the Noetie's board of directors. Later she'd been on the board of directors of the Church of the New Gnosis, and a math professor at LACC. Now she was a research associate at the Hypernumbers Institute—the so-called "Beverly Glen Church by the Numbers." She'd also known Ray Christman "as well as anyone had," according to Molly. The other name was Olaf Sigurdsson, whom I'd heard of, a well-known psychic. Like Winifred Sproule, Sigurdsson had worked directly with the Noetie founder, Leif Haller, and eventually became estranged from him.

"They may not be any help to you," she added, "but they're interesting as hell, both of them. And who knows?"

Yeah, I thought, who knows? "Well then . . ." I started to get up.

"Just a minute."

I paused.

"Do you think you might try to interview anyone in the church? Lon Thomas maybe?"

"It's crossed my mind." I used her line then. "Who knows?"

"Sit down, Sweetbuns." When I had, she went on. "What do you know about church staff? And the Campus? The actual physical property?"

"The property's four square blocks, six or seven buildings, and some parking lots. And the staff? There's a lot of them, and they aren't very smart."

She snorted. "Don't underrate them. They work incredibly hard, and do what they're told. More than a few of them are even bright; they just have a blind side. They're also loyal as hell. If Lonnie Thomas tells them a cow turd is cheesecake, they ask for seconds. Otherwise most of them wouldn't be there. They'd have seen through it and blown." I found my hands breaking another doughnut. My third? Fourth? I dunked it and took a bite, remembering the things Fred Hamilton and Eric Fuentes had told me about being on church staff. Molly opened a drawer of hanging files in her desk and handed me what looked like a folded-up road map. "The latest table of organization of the church," she said. "Of the Central Chancery—the central management organization that is. Could be useful to you, and I've got a couple others."

I started to open it. "Don't look at it now," she told me. "It'll take too long, and I've got to get some phone calls made this morning. Besides, you're not going to understand a lot of it. I just want you to have an idea of how big and complicated an outfit we're talking about.

"Meanwhile, Sweetbuns, if you decide to talk to Lonnie Thomas, and if by some quirk he agrees to see you, be careful."

"I'd probably do better to talk to someone lower on the totem pole," I said. "High enough that they might know something, but not that high."

She shook her head. "Nobody's going to talk to you about anything except registering for church services or joining staff. Except Lonnie. Even Ray never gave interviews; not since the early days. Said he was consistently misquoted, and his facts altered or used out of context. Which was true. If an outsider wants an interview with someone in the church, it's Lonnie or no one. Usually no one."

She cocked an eye at me. "And if you plan to join staff and snoop from inside, forget it. Anyone who wants to join staff gets grilled on a sort of lie detector first, a psychogalvanometer. You'd never pass.

"If Lonnie does give you an interview, be damned careful. There are interconnecting utility tunnels all over beneath the Campus. Some have dead ends used for storage rooms, full of junk and the personal stuff of people on staff, but mostly they hook up. If you know your way around, and some staff members do—the security people do—you can go between any two buildings there without ever sticking your head above ground."

"So?"

"So if Lonnie Thomas decides you're a threat, you could be quietly drugged, taken underground, and brought out through some manhole by the light of the moon. Slid into the back of some staff member's old van, and given a free ride out to the Ranch, where they could grind you up for fertilizer."

I stared at her. As far as I could see, she was serious.

"Do you think they'd actually do something like that?"

Her eyes were steady as a lioness'. "Damn straight they would! So don't give them an incentive. Don't even hint you're investigating the possible death of Ray Christman. Because if they think he's dead, and they think you might find any real evidence, they're going to be scared spitless."

Her eyes had narrowed, the pupils glistening out at me through the slits. Her voice, normally loud, lowered almost to a whisper, pulling me into it. As if it was important that I listen and understand.

"If the word gets out," she went on, "it will do two things. It'll do more than hurt the church's income. It'll slowly kill the church itself."

I thought then that I knew what she was getting at. Some of the staff members, maybe most of them, felt at a gut level that they couldn't survive outside it. It was their family, their home. Their cocoon. Williams and Hamilton and Fuentes, even Molly Cadigan, had left because they were disillusioned. If they got kicked out, it had been only the formal, final act. But for those who weren't yet disillusioned . . .

Molly wasn't done; she talked on relentlessly. "And to almost all of them," she said, "even Lonnie Thomas I suspect, reality and the alternative futures of mankind are exactly the way Ray Christman described them."

Her eyes burned me like lasers as she finished. "The ones who know their cover story is only a cover story are already scared. They're scared because Ray isn't with them anymore. They're scared because Ray won't be developing new procedures to bring people to Freed Being—or more to the point, bring them to Freed Being. They think of the church as the only salvation of mankind, and that its failure will damn us all forever. It's crazy, but that's how they see it."

* * *

The chills still hadn't gone away entirely as I walked to my car.

A TAIL VERIFIED

As I drove away, all I could think of was how crazy people could get in the grip of religious fanaticism. By the time I got back to my office, I'd gotten things at least partway into perspective again, but there were some things I wanted to ask Hamilton about.

As soon as I got back, I keyed Hamilton's office number. He was busy; his secretary said he'd call back at lunch time. So I keyed the number Molly Cadigan had given me for Doctor Winifred Landau Sproule. Sproule had turned off the vidcam on her phone, leaving me to guess what she looked like. She sounded too young to be a veteran of the Noeties in their prime. We only talked for a minute or so, but I got a mental image of someone slim and blond and beautiful. She gave me an appointment for 9 a.m. the next morning. Then, so I wouldn't be talking to her cold, I keyed the library and called up an article on the life of Leif Haller, serialized by the L.A. Times in 1990, updated and published as a small book twelve years later. The writer had done her homework, traced Haller's roots and talked to scores of people who'd known him before he got famous.

It was one of the more interesting lives I've read about.

* *

Leif Haller

The Early Years

Oscar Leif Haller, founder of the Institute for Noetic Technology, was born on Valentine's Day, 1930, on a farm near Opdal, Wisconsin, to Britta Augustsdatter Haller and Johan Ola Haller, Norwegian immigrants. Among his peers, the child would insist on being called "Leif"; he despised the name Oscar, and rarely even used the initial.

Almost from the beginning, Leif Haller was an energetic dynamo, but not hyperactive. His schoolmates would remember him as always in control of himself, and generally of the situation. For even as a child, a child smaller than most, he had charisma. In the one-room country grade school he attended, he was a leader, full of ideas, and able to dominate in his boyhood disputes.

He matured early. He was shorter than average, of medium frame, and sinewy muscular. By age fifteen, despite his youth, he was locally renowned for the amount of heavy work he could do in an hour or a day. By his sixteenth birthday, Haller was in trouble with three different families regarding their daughters. This seems to have been less a matter of adolescent horniness than of a desire, a need, to dominate.

But he was already careful in matters that could seriously complicate his life. He impregnated none of the girls he entertained in the back of his father's 1938 Chevrolet sedan; he had an older youth buy condoms for him.

He excelled in class from the beginning, through his high intelligence, his energy, and his determination to be superior. He read voraciously. At age thirteen, in the tenth grade, he read his new history textbook on the evening of his first day, and claimed never to have looked inside it again. No one doubted him. His memory was remarkably responsive. He got an A in the course, as he did in every other course he took. Math he did with only quick and partial homework, enough to get the feel of procedures, and earned a perfect score on almost every quiz and test.

In high school he did not participate in sports, although he'd been outstanding in playground sports in grade school. He was small, of course, and there were a lot of chores to do on the farm. And as he told at least two friends, he'd outgrown athletics. Instead he read his way through the village library. Beginning when he started high school at age twelve, he'd go home from school at four o'clock, do chores, including milking several cows by hand, eat supper, and often bicycle five miles of gravel road back to Opdal, to the library. Sometimes he was the only person there besides the librarian. He'd return the books he'd borrowed at his last visit, usually six or eight of them, browse the shelves for an hour, and start home with another load. In winter, when the gravel road was snowy, he'd jog or ski in, if he couldn't borrow his father's car.

Years later he'd be remembered as the first person in Opdal school to use a book bag—an old skier's knapsack.

Among much else, he read H.G. Wells' Outline of History; the books and essays of Elbert Hubbard; and of all things for a boy in an ethnic farm community, the Harvard Classics. Norwegian was the language at home, and he read Ibsen in the original Dano-Norwegian. He read Nietzsche and Kant, Freud and Jung, Kierkegaard and Swedenborg, Ramakrishhna and Yogananda. He read Plato and Alfred Korzybski. Intellectually further afield, he even read Heinrich Harrer and Alexandra David-Neel on Tibet. The librarian in Opdal was delighted to have a young reader with such an avid desire to learn, and through interlibrary loans, ordered whatever he requested that her shelves did not have.

Perhaps most impressive of all, for someone so young, he became the devotee of none of the great men whose books he read. He read critically, absorbing and analyzing, gradually evolving his own basic cosmology, his own metaphysics. Listening to ex-schoolmates reminiscing on his boyhood, one might wonder if he hadn't been born with his philosophy and metaphysics. The closest thing he had to a real confidant was Morten Jacobsen, an older was three times promoted. But business success was not what he was looking for. The experience was useful, as was the modest investment portfolio he acquired, but after two and a half years he quit, having arranged employment as a staff assistant to Congressman Harvey Lingdal of Wisconsin.