The Puppet Master

The congressman might not have hired the energetic youngster if he'd known of Haller's association with witchcraft on Long Island, in a coven that ritually used drugs and hypnosis in an era when drug use was rare. Haller and his Long Island friends saw witchcraft as a way, or hopefully the way, to expand their individual powers. Hypnosis and drugs were tools in their witchcraft.

Leif Haller had no more intention of climbing to power via a political ladder than he'd had in doing it via the stock market. Later he'd tell friends he took the job for the knowledge, experience, and insights it could provide. He was already fixated on becoming the world's most powerful man by other means: He intended to develop psychic powers to go with his remarkable intelligence.

By the time he moved to Washington, he was already disenchanted with witchcraft. It's not clear how much he'd ever really expected of it. After his Long Island experience, he still considered that there was validity in some of its principles, but he'd concluded that the subject was based too largely on erroneous theories, and too cluttered with superstitions, to be useful as it stood.

Besides, it is clear that he planned to build his own system. He would write that its two branches, theory and practice, would grow simultaneously and in parallel, practices being based on theory, with further theory growing out of experience with practices.

The Making of a Guru

Haller soon found his job as a congressional staff assistant too demanding on his time; sixty- and eighty-hour weeks left far too little time for study and experimentation. So after five months he left the capital and went to Los Angeles, there to try his hand at applying the procedures he'd concocted.

The first thing he did was grow a beard—a rarity at the time. It's been suggested he grew it to camouflage his youth, but more likely it was to project a specific image. People who'd known him as early as his university days say he looked more mature than his years. While he grew his beard, he worked as a warehouseman for an auto parts chain. Finally, suitably bearded, he rented a tiny office on Melrose Avenue, and opened for business as a mystic counselor, under the name Swami Suvarnananda; suvarnananda in Sanskrit meaning Bliss in Gold. (Haller's humor could be sly or broad; in this case it was both.) For a time he made a sparse living at best, perhaps converting investments to cash when necessary. Some of his clients were deeply troubled; some had little money, but needed repeated counseling sessions.

He regarded these as necessary learning projects, and tried to see them through to successful conclusions, continuing to work with people who could no longer pay. Later he would say that it was during his Swami period that he refined his cosmology and his theories (he called them "the laws") of the soul and mind, as well as his basic principles of counseling.

With experience and a modicum of success, he moved to a better office, shared a secretary with a chiropracter, billed himself as Dr. Karl Mogens, psychoanalyst, and affected a cultured Danish accent. The diplomas on his wall, he once said, were the best that money could buy. As the good doctor, he had numerous rather impressive successes, and through word of mouth developed a profitable practice. Within six months he'd moved to a still nicer office, with a secretary of his own.

In working out his early procedures, Haller borrowed heavily from the work of others. He was influenced by Freud's early work in regression, work done before Freud became fixated on sex as the key to the psyche. And by Jung's work. Though Haller rejected Jung's concept of archetypes, he adapted his use of the psychogalvanometer in compiling and evaluating, with the patient, lists of psychologically charged words as a wedge and lever in analysis. He was also strongly influenced by Alfred Korzybski and Edgar Cayce.

Some of these works he'd read in his teens, others in the UCLA library. Later he would mention reading case histories of idiot savants. There is no evidence that he borrowed any practices from witchcraft.

It seems clear that his tenure as a swami and bogus Danish analyst was the first project in a long-term plan. It also seems clear that the plan was to culminate in himself as superman, surrounded by an expanding corps of supermen who would be subordinate to himself. The phase after the swami/Mogens phase was the establishment of the Institute for . . .

There was a knock at my door. It was Carlos, with some questions about a case I'd handled earlier. As he was leaving, Hamilton called; it was his lunch break. "Is this a good time?" I asked him. "It may take twenty or thirty minutes."

"Go ahead," he said. "What you're doing is more interesting than eating at Hannery's. If necessary, I'll catch a sandwich and juice from the snack machine later."

I told him what Molly Cadigan had said about the leaders of the church believing in Ray Christman's theories on reality and the alternative futures of mankind—some kind of doom on the one hand and presumably a golden age on the other, with the church being the difference. That they were scared because Ray wasn't around to feed them new procedures and keep the thing going; that basically they were fanatics who might go off the deep end if they thought someone was going to show that Christman was dead.

"Does she have something there?" I finished. As I said it, I remembered what Hamilton had told me about a hole in his own life, a sort of pointlessness, since he'd left the church.

It took him a minute to respond. "She has a point. Three kinds of people get to the upper echelons of the church. One kind is cynical predators. Another is dedicated fanatics. I'm not sure which kind Lonnie Thomas is; some of each, maybe, incompatible as they seem. And the third kind is people who honestly believe but don't behave like fanatics, people who can get things done and who can get others to get things done, in spite of confusion and stupidity.

"As for their running scared . . . With due respect to Molly, I doubt it. Worried maybe, but not scared. They've been without Ray Christman for about half a year now, and I think they've probably gotten used to the situation. And I saw no evidence that Ray was conceived by the Holy Ghost and born unto a virgin. What he did, other people should be able to do, especially when they have his lead to follow. I suspect that before long they'll start coming out with new procedures they've invented themselves, and say that Ray sent them. And the faithful will cheer themselves hoarse, and start transfering credits to pay for them.

"Whatever; Molly's point is well taken. If I were you, Martti, I'd be careful not to let the church know what you're interested in."

We disconnected then, and I sat there sorting out who I'd told. Nobody in the church. The biggest danger seemed to be that Armand Butzburger might get a guilty conscience and unload it on his confessor or whatever they have.

* * *

At quitting time I got in my car and drove east down Beverly. I'd only gone half a block when I saw a guy behind the wheel of a parked DKW sport coupe. I'd have sworn it was the same guy I'd seen that morning across the street from the Neophyte Building, but wearing a white soft cap now—a cap like a lot of merchant seamen wear, with a small, snap-down bill and a button on the top. And it occurred to me that someone didn't need to drive the same car all the time. Suppose he'd been hired by the church. He could take a different car every time out. He'd parked it nose-on to a loading zone, where he could pull out quickly. And sure as hell, he did.

So I drove east all the way to LaBrea, catching sight of him pretty often, then south, and pulled into a parking lot at a Denny's. I went inside, and walked right through the kitchen and out the service entrance, with the chief cook yelling at me. Then I slipped around the side of the building and peered over the shrubbery. I could see the DKW in a bank lot across the street, where the driver could watch for me driving out.

I waited till the light at the intersection turned red, stopping the traffic flow, then I trotted out and across the street, hand inside my jacket on the butt of my Walther 7.65mm.

The DKW backed, U-turned, and burned rubber out another entrance. There was no question at all about it now; I'd had a tail. And he knew that I knew. I watched his disappearance with a big rock in my stomach.

8

Winifred Sproule

My wife is self-employed, a professional psychic with a reputation that lets her charge fairly big fees. Psychics have been big in L.A. since the plagues at the turn of the century, and the business is growing. Anyway, while Tuuli isn't awfully busy, she makes a good income. Generally she arranges things so she can sleep late—commonly till nine. By which time I've been at the office for an hour, which means I either fix my own breakfast or eat out. Most often I eat at Morey's Deli, down the block from the office. It's not that I don't like to prepare meals; I just don't like to eat by myself. Besides, there's less traffic earlier.

But on the day of my appointment with Winifred Sproule, I ate at home. I was trying to make up for all the fat, chocolate-frosted doughnuts I'd eaten at Molly Cadigan's the day before, so what it came down to was low-fat cottage cheese, Rye Krisps with nothing on them, and slices of raw turnip (try raw turnips; they're mildly sweet), all washed down with a big glass of Altadena Dairy's real churned buttermilk.

I can enjoy a meal like that without getting carried away. Probably because it's not sweet and not salty. Some foods send me into a feeding frenzy. Chocolate! God!

The only thing wrong with breakfast that day was, I had the TV on to the morning news. Which featured a trashing. Trashers had damn near destroyed a senior citizens' center in Burbank the night before. After disabling the alarm system, which had taken some know-how, they'd poisoned the shrubbery and lawn, slashed and hacked the furniture, knocked holes in the drywall, spray-painted obscenities . . . and waited till they were ready to leave to break the windows; the noise would bring the beat cops.

The police estimated the trashers must have carried out the whole thing in under ten minutes. As if they'd drilled it. Something like that always rouses a terrible urge to homicide in me. Which scares me, because I almost always carry a gun. I imagine myself shooting half a dozen of them, gut-shooting them, then going around kicking the wounded, busting ribs and stuff like that. Bad stuff. It makes me remember . . .

So I turned off the TV and did the drill my therapist gave me after mom and dad were killed, to settle me down. It usually only takes a minute or two. Then I went down to the parking level, got in my car and left.

The Hypernumbers Institute is in Bel Air, of all places, on a little goat-trail street called Chikaree Lane that snakes along the top of a ridge in the Santa Monica Mountains. I went the back way, via Mulholland Drive and Beverly Glen. I hadn't realized the neighborhood was a security neighborhood, but Dr. Sproule had let the gate guards know I was coming, so my Prudential ID got me through.

The institute sprawls along the upper slope, with a great view across Stone Canyon to the west. A rambling, two-story building with cedar siding, it could easily pass for some holo star's western-style mansion. Tall Mexican pines shade it, while rhododendrons stand guard. The receptionist called and told Sproule I was there, then gave me directions to her office. Somehow I'd expected to see students trooping through the halls or standing around drinking coffee, chatting. Instead it was quiet. The few people I saw looked as if they had things to do.

Winifred Sproule's office was on the second floor. Most of her west wall consisted of sliding doors, one-way Klearglass that opened onto a balcony with view. They were open when I walked in, open to birdtalk and a warm April breeze. Sproule had gotten up when I entered. I'd visualized her pretty well—blond, slim but well-built, and all-round good looking. Also elegant, in spite of, or maybe because of, the short, slit, Singapore skirt. The kind of elegance you see in old 2-D movies with European leading ladies. Dietrich. Garbo. She could easily have passed for the proverbial thirty-nine, but I judged she'd be in her late forties. That seemed like a minimum, if she'd been a high-ranking Noetie while Leif Haller was still alive and publicly active.

"I'm Martti Seppanen," I said.

She gestured. "Have a seat, Mr. Seppanen." She sat down herself. Elegantly. There was no desk between us; it faced a side wall. She was only about five feet from me, close enough to make me edgy at first. The office wasn't that small, and I was strongly aware of her crossed legs, which were elegant too.

"You said you're investigating the disappearance of Ray Christman. For whom, may I ask?"

"A private individual."

"I see." She lit a cigarette, the smoke wisping upward into an air cleaner. Even so, I got a whiff. It wasn't tobacco or weed. Maybe one of the herbals you can buy, supposed to be relatively harmless. I didn't know much about the different brands. I'd still been a kid when the government made it illegal to advertise them. This one had an apricot-colored filter tip.

"How can I help you?" she asked.

"I've heard you were once on the Gnosties' board of directors. And on the Noetie board of directors before that. Is that true?"

"They're both true, but neither was a position of any influence. That's one respect, one of several, in which Ray was like Haller at that time. Both kept the power—all the real power—in their own hands. A directorship wasn't even an honor, really, though they treated it as one. We rarely even had meetings. All they wanted a board of directors for was a list of names to put on legal papers and letterhead. Names with a Ph.D., MD, or DD appended, or some such. I had a doctorate in math."

I revised my estimate of her age up another notch—not easy to do, considering her looks. Or maybe she'd been a child prodigy. "But I suppose you're knowledgeable about them," I said.

She shrugged. "About current situations, no. If you're interested in organization and philosophy, yes. History definitely." Even her raised eyebrow was elegant. "Ask your questions and we'll see."

I'd been reviewing what to ask the evening before, and on the way over. Basically I was groping, fishing for leads and trying to evaluate the too numerous possibilities. What I could most hope to get from her were insights into the church and the Noeties, and possibly more contacts. I still couldn't discard the possibility that the Noeties had done Christman in. They'd had a serious grudge. And if the story was true about Christman and her, she'd have insights into him, too.

"Of the members of the Church of the New Gnosis," I said, "what proportion had been members of the Institute for Noetic Technology?"

"Over the long term? A tiny percentage. The institute was already declining when the church began. But the church began quite largely with disaffected members and ex-members of the institute."

"The institute's suit against the church was for copyright infringement. . . ."

"And was quite properly rejected by the court."

I wondered what made her so sure. "Did the church borrow ideas from the institute?" I asked. There's no legal protection for ideas by themselves.

"Your question would better be phrased, 'Did Ray Christman borrow ideas from Leif Haller.' The answer is no. Leif insisted otherwise, and I have no doubt he believed it, but by that time he was borderline psychotic. Ray didn't even know much about Leif's ideas. He'd never been connected with the institute, or interested in its technical procedures. Though the source of his own ideas had been."

"The source of Christman's ideas?"

"Right. Ray's cosmology was not his own, and the basis for his procedures wasn't either. But neither were they Leif's."

I gawped. The booklets I'd bought from the church, and material I'd called up from the library, credited all of it to Christman, or blamed it on him. "Tell me about that," I said.

"First of all, almost anyone's ideas derive to some degree from other people's. You borrow, and you build from there: revise, rearrange, and add on. Haller, for example, openly borrowed from others, bits and pieces, major ones. He added his own ideas, and integrated all of it into a functional whole, Noetics I. Which wasn't as good as he claimed, of course—nothing was—but overall it was new and remarkably effective. Later he erected a shaky additional structure on it—Noetics II—that promised more and delivered less. Considerably less.

"Ray, on the other hand, borrowed a whole system intact from someone else, reworked it to make it easier to understand, then designed an organization for large-scale application. And told people that all of it was his. The person he'd borrowed from had been associated with Leif Haller, and some of Leif's ideas were implicit in what Ray borrowed. But they weren't basic ideas, just rules of application. That's where most of the similarities lay that inspired the suit—in the rules of application."

Christman had borrowed someone else's system and never acknowledged them! That could be a motive for murder! But I stayed with the Noetie matter just then. I could come back to the other.

"The institute claimed that the copyright infringements had materially damaged it," I said. "If we change 'copyright infringements' to 'lawful borrowing of ideas,' did Ray Christman actually rob or otherwise harm the institute?"

She reached, stubbed out her cigarette, then leaned back in her tiltback chair. Not only her legs were nice. It was hard to keep from staring, and she knew it. "The institute had begun to shrink, or at least had quit growing, before Ray ever started his church," she said. "Charisma doesn't necessarily include charm, and Haller's heavy-handed arrogance had turned off too many people. And especially to people close to him, it was more and more apparent that he was becoming a mental case. Also he'd made too many claims and promises for too many years without coming through.

"As Ray's church grew, Leif came to hate him, first for cutting in on his game, and secondly for the cardinal sin of being more successful at it. The church simply speeded the institute's decline; people left more readily because they saw an alternative.

"And now, what had been a network of nearly a hundred Noetic centers worldwide, recruiting members and delivering counseling and training, is down to one, just one. A two-story building in Santa Maria. There's not much left except a few sour, hard-bitten loyalists to the memory of Leif Haller."

If they'd shrunk that much, they might be hard pressed to finance a contract on Christman. On the other hand, there'd been stories, when I was a kid, that the institute had procedures that could produce super intellects and psychic powers. I had a friend who used to fantasize about that, said that when he grew up, he was going to get in on it. I mentioned this to Sproule, and asked if there'd been anything to it.

She laughed wryly. "Not really. I said that Leif had made too many promises and claims without coming through. His early procedures and their results—Noetics I, that is—got people excited and enthused. And that, along with his charisma, made them ready to go along with him on other things. Noetics II was a much larger, open-ended set of procedures, with a foundation of untested and unlikely theory. By that time Leif was too enamored of his own intuition. The only test was application, and when it failed, he blamed other things, not his intuitions."

"Isn't that more or less what happened with Christman's work?"

"More or less, yes. But in developing his applications, Ray Christman took a lot of liberties with the theories, which makes it impossible to evaluate the theories from his results.

"And in comparing the two men, there's the matter of intentions. Their work was directed at different goals. Leif wanted to be superman—actually more than superman—and to surround himself with a corps of supermen. What he called Metapsyches. Ray, on the other hand, wanted to save humanity, which required, he felt, that we all rise above our physical selves and be what he called Freed Beings.

"They both had a lot of success with their beginning procedures, which were designed to rid people of fixations, phobias, psychosomatic ailments, things like that. Even neuroses, quite commonly; sometimes even psychoses. You get rid of someone's eczema and asthma, and they see other people around them losing their stutter, for example, or their fear of flying, or their inferiority complex . . . If you do that for someone when all the medical profession did was ease them more or less, that someone's going to look at you as a magician. And of course the medical establishment will look at you as a dangerous fraud. Not every doctor, not every psychiatrist, but the establishment as a whole: the AMA, the APA. Partly because they've seen too many charlatans; it wasn't entirely self-interest.

"Meanwhile a lot of people are going to be impressed by Uncle Frank, whose arthritis went away at the Noetic Center. They're not going to pay much attention to Dr. Pokefinger when he says it's all a fraud." She paused, looking me over. "It freed me of some troublesome problems, though I do retain a foible or two."

I wondered if she could read people like Molly claimed Christman could. "So what went wrong?" I asked.

"Basically they hit limits. It's as simple as that. When they cured someone's arthritis and recurrent migraines, or his compulsion to window peek or fondle little boys—when they cured something like that—they had a saner, healthier human being. What neither of them succeeded in doing was to produce a Metapsyche or a Freed Being, at least not stably. Nor even that intermediate phenomenon, a reliably psychic human.

"You might have psychic experiences during and after their procedures, especially Ray's. Sometimes even verifiable psychic experiences. Even on the lower-grade procedures. And when you did, it had a real and powerful effect on how you looked at the world afterward. But you were still a human being. You still had foibles, problems, and limits. They never took us beyond that."

"So it was a matter of overreaching," I said. "They weren't actually phonies."

"Certainly not to begin with. I have no doubt that Haller deliberately lied from the beginning, but I'm also convinced that he thought he could come through in the long run. Toward the end . . . Who knows what he thought and felt, in seclusion back in Wisconsin? He used to claim that his procedures, fully and properly used, could cure virtually everything. Said it off the record, of course, so the AMA and FDA couldn't hit him for it. Publicly he only implied it. Yet he became a physical wreck himself, years before the Great Flu killed him."

She paused, glancing at the coffeemaker on her worktable. The pitcher on it held only water, presumably hot. "I'm a hell of a hostess," she said, and got up. "Would you like coffee? Tea?"

"Coffee," I told her, and she mixed two cups of instant. "Honey?" she asked. I told her I'd take mine plain.

When she sat down again, she changed direction a bit. "If you want to see some reliable psychics, visit a home for the retarded that has some idiot savants, hopefully one that does more than calendar computations. You've heard of psychic photographers? There's a boy—a young man now—who's a ward of the Savants Project at the University of Minnesota. He does some marvelous things."

I'd read a book about a psychic photographer named Ted Polemes, who'd been studied by the University of Nebraska med school, fifty or so years ago. Intriguing. But I was looking for insights into the Christman case, not psychic photography. "That would be interesting," I said, and got back on the subject. "Who was the person that Ray Christman got his ideas from?"

"There were two of them, a husband and wife: Vic and Tory Merlin. Apparently they'd dedicated themselves to metaphysical and psychic research."

"And Christman didn't tell anyone? Except you?"

"So far as I'm aware, I'm the only one."

"Why you?"

She didn't answer right away. She sipped coffee, then lit another cigarette. "I was Ray's girlfriend for a while," she said at last. "I was with him for more than a year—longer than any other I've heard of. I've always been sexually attractive, interested, and talented. And Ray . . . Besides charisma, he had a large, strong body, something that's always turned me on."

She looked thoughtfully at me. I squirmed.

"Every now and then," she continued, "Ray would get a letter from Vic Merlin, updating him on what the Merlins were doing. Some of these were fifteen or twenty pages long. I remember the first one he got while I was with him. When he saw it, he dropped what he was doing and canceled an appointment. When he'd finished reading it, he was so enthused, he gave it to me to read. That's how I learned about them.

"The first time I read it, I understood almost none of it, so he gave me a stack of older letters, a couple of hundred pages, with marginal notes in Ray's handwriting. Reading them in chronological sequence, and being a fairly advanced counseling student, they made a certain amount of sense to me, but a lot of it was still a mystery. Ray told me to read them again in a week or so, and I was surprised at how much more I got out of them the second time. It was as if exposure started a subliminal mental ferment, and out of that grew a sense of what Merlin was communicating. Reading it a third time, I found myself saying 'of course.' It was beginning to seem obvious.

"Actually, that's what got me hooked on Charles Musés' work with hypernumbers, and eventually brought me here. I'd read some things on hypernumbers years earlier, and while it was interesting, I hadn't found it at all compelling. But the Merlins' work in metaphysics, on what they called 'the reality matrix' and 'the parts of man,' complemented it and gave it additional meaning for me."

"If the subject is that abstruse," I said, "how was Christman able to use it?"

"That was where Ray's contribution came in. He saw his function as translating Vic Merlin's stuff into teachable statements and procedures. I asked him why he didn't let others get it the same way he did, from repeated readings of Merlin's writing. His answer was that people wouldn't do it, and he was probably right.

"On a couple of occasions that year, he rented a plane and flew to Arizona to consult with the Merlins, go over things with them. It was all very secret. He flew himself; he was a licensed pilot. He'd be all excited at the prospect of seeing them. Ray could be like a child. I suspect they gave him counseling sessions while he was there. Once I asked to go with him; I wanted to meet these Merlins. Ray wouldn't take me. Said he didn't want any distractions. There should be only himself, and Vic and Tory."

I'd forgotten to drink my coffee. Now I took a sip; it was tepid. "What did the Merlins think of his using their stuff and not giving them credit? Did he pay them for it?"

Sproule looked surprised. "I don't know. I never wondered. They kept sending him stuff though. There may have been some kind of payment."

She went on to tell me how Christman got connected with them. "He'd never been interested in philosophy or psychology," she said. "He'd been a hot-shot salesman—in his own words, he 'could sell sand to the Arabs.' By age twenty-six, he'd parlayed his salesmanship into a chain of computer service centers in the west, and gotten hooked on golf. The way he told it, he was one of the world's worst golfers. Then someone suggested he see Vic Merlin, that Merlin could sit down with him and perform some psychic voodoo, and it would help his golf game.

"Ray had always been interested in the idea of psychic powers, so he went to see Merlin. After that he had no more trouble with his golf game, because he lost interest in it. Merlin had blown his mind, and had also blown his muscle spasm problems; he never had another muscle spasm.

"So he attached himself to them—he insisted that Tory was as powerful as Vic—and read their foot-high stack of 'research notes.' He also had them teach him some of the procedures they used. The result was the Church of the New Gnosis.

"There was one thing about it that troubled Ray, though," Sproule went on. "It hadn't developed in him the kinds of powers he insisted the Merlins had: telepathy, clairvoyance, out of body travel . . . That sort of thing. He put a lot of importance on things like that, believed it was part of what mankind needed to be saved. I think the lack must have troubled him more as time went on—made him fear he might fail. That may have been why he got more interested than ever in money and adulation, the last few years. They helped him feel successful. That's still the dark side of American culture, though it's lost ground since the plagues—the idea that money is success and success is money."

* * *

That was effectively the end of the interview. Sproule didn't know the Merlins' address. They lived on a ranch somewhere. But she told me someone who might know: Olaf Sigurdsson. Molly Cadigan had already given me Sigurdsson's address and phone number.

Thanking Sproule I got up, and she stepped over to me, so close we almost touched. "It was my pleasure, Mr. Seppanen," she purred, putting her hand on my arm. And then, more softly, "If there's anything else I can do for you, I hope you'll let me know."

That's when I discovered how sexually overwhelming a woman can be. I managed to get out without stumbling over my feet.

9

OLAF SIGURDSSON

Outside the Hypernumbers Institute, I called up the Los Angeles grid on my car computer, and keyed in the address Molly Cadigan had given me for Ole Sigurdsson. I'd intended to talk to him anyway, about the Noeties. Now it seemed he might also be able to tell me something about the Merlins, including how to get in touch with them. I wanted to see him as soon as I could.

If Ray Christman had been paying the Merlins for their ideas, paying them some agreed-upon rate, then they might or might not have a motive for killing him. It depended partly on how much they valued public recognition.

And if Christman flew to Arizona from time to time to see them, flew there alone without telling anyone, they certainly had the opportunity. My heads-up display showed Sigurdsson living in Bel Air, not far from where I was, and a Bel Air address meant he had to be pretty damned affluent. It was hard to visualize a psychic having that much money, unless . . . Maybe he could predict stock prices—things like that.

I keyed in his phone number and got a bowl-cut security man. "You've just dialed Laura and Ole's number," he said. "Neither is at home now; you've got Bel Air Security. We're being recorded. How may I help you?"

"What would be a good time for me to try again? My name is Seppanen, and I want to speak with Olaf Sigurdsson. I was referred to him by Dr. Winifred Landau Sproule."

"Right, Mr., ah . . ."

"Seppanen," I repeated.

"Seppanen. Right. Would you care to leave your phone number?"

I gave it to him. It occurred to me that Sigurdsson might be aware of Tuuli as a psychic, and feel favorably inclined toward fellow psychics, so I went on. "That's the residence of Martti Seppanen and Tuuli Waanila." I spelled them for him. "I'll call again at about nine."

"Oh! Martti Seppanen! I'm sorry! Certainly, Mr. Seppanen." People sometimes recognize my name, usually from media coverage of the case of the twice-killed astronomer. It's kind of a kick when it happens.

When we'd disconnected, I keyed the office. We carry beepers, but it's company policy not to use them except for urgent messages. In our work, beeping can be a nuisance, even a danger, so we check in from time to time. Fidela told me I hadn't had any calls, and Carlos and Joe hadn't put a come-in on me. Then I went to the gym for a couple of hours. I left the Nautilus alone, worked hard on my flexibility and forms, sparred awhile, and finally beat and kicked hell out of first the heavy bag and then Big Dummy, the response mech. After that, and ten minutes in the sauna, I ate a green salad and a bowl of rice and beans, and took my coffee black. All in all, I figured, I'd almost made up for Molly Cadigan's chocolate doughnuts.

Afterward I keyed up the public access information on Olaf Sigurdsson. He was no kid. He'd been born near Eskifjördur, Iceland, on 8 February 1928, which made him eighty-four years old. His profession was listed as psychic consultant, and there was a published biography on him by Laura Wayne Walker.

* * *

Tuuli and I ate supper at home that evening: broiled walleye with lemon, microwaved potatoes, barely cooked mixed veggies . . . You get the picture. I can eat all I want of stuff like that. I've discovered it's good, too, but it pains me to see Tuuli eat butter brickle ice cream for dessert while I finish off with fat-free fruit yogurt. She says she can't help it if she can eat the way she does and stay trim. She's right, and I'm glad for her, but it hurts.

I told her I was trying for an appointment with Ole Sigurdsson, and right away she wanted to go with me. She'd never met him, and wanted to. I told her I had nothing against her meeting him, but not when I was on official business. It wouldn't be professional.

We were about ready to have a fight over that, when the phone rang. I answered. The man on the screen was elderly, his face strong-boned and hawk like. "I'm Olaf Sigurdsson," he said. "And you're Martti Seppanen."

"Right. With Prudential Investigations and Security. I'm not looking for your services as a psychic, Mr. Sigurdsson. Not just now. What I would like is your views on the Institute of Noetic Technology. In connection with an investigation. I'd like to talk with you; tomorrow. If possible."

"Ja-ah?"

It came out as a question, as if he wanted to know more about it, or what else I was interested in. I didn't intend to mention my interest in the Merlins yet. Sproule had said he was a friend of theirs. I'd bring them up when I was with him; make it seem as if my interest was incidental.

"Yes, sir," I said. He had an eye like a hawk, and it was looking inside me, right over the phone.

"Do you vant to know v'at I charge for consulting vith police? Or investigators like you?"

I said yes. It wasn't as high as I thought it might be, but I'd prefer not to pay it out of my own pocket.

"You'll have to make it this evening, though," he went on. "My vife and I are leaving town tomorrow."

"I can be there in under an hour."

He nodded, then looked at me silently, as if thinking. Or looking into my head. Disconcerting. "And bring your vife. Ve have heard of her."

I glanced at Tuuli. Where she stood, she'd shown in his screen too, though out of focus. She was grinning. "Fine," I said. "We'll both be there."

* * *

Sigurdsson's place was modest for Bel Air, but the location was something else, on top of a ridge. Sigurdsson himself answered the door, a tall, rawboned old man who still stood straight.

His eyes settled on Tuuli right away. Men generally find her interesting. She's small, dainty actually, but nicely shaped, with a face that's delicate and pretty. She's been described as elfin. Her hair is tan and so is her skin. All over; it's her natural color. Her eyes are green and tilted. She's Lapp on her mother's side, and Finn on her father's.

I introduced us. Sigurdsson's eyes shifted to me while I spoke, then turned back to Tuuli. It wasn't as if he was an old lecher. It was more like a—like a personnel examination. After four or five seconds he nodded, as if he approved of her.

"Laura vill vant to meet you both v'en ve're done vith business," he said. "She is in her office, marking up a shooting script. Yust now she's executive producer for a picture that the director is trying to run up the costs on."

He led us down a hall to a comfortable room like a small living room, that obviously served as his den. Against one wall, a brick stove had been built that could be used for heat in chilly weather. I'd never seen a brick stove before. It had a steel plate in the top that you could cook on, and looked as if it burned wood. There was also a table painted like a couple I'd seen in old Swede farmhouses back in Ojibwa County, with chairs to match. The couch he motioned us to was high enough and firm enough for comfortable sitting.

"Coffee?" he asked.

We both said yes. He put on a red-laquered percolator with something written on the side in a foreign language, Icelandic I suppose.

"So," he said, looking me over, "v'at do you vant from me?"

I told him I was investigating the disappearance of Ray Christman. That the Institute of Noetic Technology, or people inside it, were suspect, and I wanted to know more about it. A woman named Molly Cadigan had suggested I talk to him, had said he might be more up to date than she was. That I'd read a Times article on the institute, dated 1993, and a brief biography of Leif Haller which had information about the institute as it had been years ago. And that I'd talked with Winifred Sproule.

"Vell," he said, "I ain't much more up to date than that. But I'd be surprised if the institute vas up to getting Christman killed. If any individual Noetie vas, it vould be Haller himself."

"And he's dead," I said.

"Do you know that?"

That stopped me. "According to his biography," I answered, "he died of the Great Flu in December '99, and was buried in a mass grave near Eau Clair, Wisconsin." I looked at the circumstances that would have prevailed then. I didn't know how big Eau Claire had been, but big enough to be a well-known name throughout the region—forty or fifty thousand maybe. That mass grave would have been one of many for Eau Claire, each with maybe a hundred or even five hundred bodies. There'd have been no autopsies, no embalmings, little if anything more than an identification by whoever discovered the body or brought it in. Even my home town, Hemlock Harbor, had mass graves, and it only had some four thousand people before the Flu—twenty-eight hundred afterward. They bulldozed a trench, lined the bodies out in it, limed them heavily and covered them up.

I changed tack. "As a psychic, does it seem to you that Haller's alive?"

"I don't get anything vun vay or another on that."

"Do you get anything on who's responsible for Christman's disappearance?"

He stood silent for a minute, frowning, then grunted and shook his head. "Nothing on that either. How long has he been missing?"

I gave him a rundown on what Armand Butzburger had told me. Meanwhile the coffeepot had been perking, and when I'd finished, Sigurdsson got up and poured three mugs. I had mine with honey and cream, the cream out of a little oak-veneer fridge built into his oak bookcase. He didn't have anything to say till he'd served all three of us.

"So he has been missing probably since October. More than six months. Then I vould guess he is dead. But that's only a guess. And considering v'at the church is like, I vould guess that somevun or some group inside it killed him."

"I don't suppose it would do me much good to interview Lon Thomas?"

Again he grunted. "From v'at I've heard, he vouldn't give you an interview. And if he did, v'at makes you think he'd tell you the truth?"

"I consider myself pretty observant about things like that. I think I'd know if he was lying."

"Don't be too sure. I vas never in the church, but I have friends that vere, three or four of them that vere pretty high up. Thomas is sharp—maybe not intelliyent, but sharp—kvick, avare. And he came up through their PR division. The people in public relations there do lying drills till they can say anything to anyvun, straight-faced and vithout blinking."

My first reaction was, it sounded like a myth, the kind that can grow up about a mysterious organization or secret government agency. But even as I thought it, I realized it was possible, and might well be true of an outfit like the Gnosties. I nodded. "Who are these three or four people you mentioned? I'd like to talk with them."

"There vas three of them. Two died in the plagues. The other vun you already talked to: Vinny Sproule."

"Ah."

"So," he said. His eyes, I'd thought, were gray. Now I decided they were blue. They looked into me, steady and disconcerting. "There is something else you vant from me. V'at is it?"

"Dr. Sproule mentioned a couple named Vic and Tory Merlin."

His gaze never changed, he didn't nod, his eyebrows didn't arch. He simply said, "O-oh?"

I hadn't intended to say what I said next. It just sort of blopped out. "She told me that Christman's ideas came from them. That he simply adapted them for teaching and application."

"She is right about v'ere his ideas came from. His ideas about reality and people and how to help them. But Christman did more than adapt them. Overall he changed them. Not on purpose, I don't think. He didn't fully understand them. He changed importances, left important things out . . . Made a dog's breakfast out of them, if you vant to know. Except the easy stuff, the beginning stuff. He got that pretty good."

"Could you tell me how to get in touch with the Merlins? Give me their phone number?"

He pursed his lips. "Tell you v'at. I'll give them your number, and tell them v'at you're interested in. If they vant, they can get in touch vith you."

* * *

And that's as far as I got. Sigurdsson turned his attention to Tuuli, and they talked for a few minutes while I sat there like a lump. If he'd been forty years, or maybe even thirty years younger, I'd have been jealous. Tuuli gave him her card, and he talked about the Merlins, whom he called the most powerful psychics he knew of. Then he buzzed his wife, and she came in, a really good-looking lady in her sixties, I judged. Probably twenty years younger than her husband. She and Sigurdsson and Tuuli had a good time yakking for another half hour, but I had things on my mind, and didn't add much to the conversation.

I needed to talk with Lon Thomas. I'd been afraid of it, afraid of him, been holding the idea down, mostly refusing to look at it, telling myself he wouldn't say anything useful. After a few minutes we got up, shook hands and left. As we drove away, Tuuli was full of the evening, full of having had a conversation with Olaf Sigurdsson! And of how friendly and charming Laura Sigurdsson had been. She was so full of it all that at first she didn't seem to notice I was only half with her. When she did notice, she laid a hand on my arm.

"Thank you, Martti," she said softly in Finnish. "Thank you for taking me along."

I hadn't had much choice; Sigurdsson had almost ordered it. But she wasn't expressing thanks; she was expressing affection. Love. She didn't do that a lot. Of course, lots of times I wasn't very loveable; I was inconsiderate and unreasonable, and took too much for granted. We both did, as far as that went.

I'd turned onto Mulholland Drive by then, headed east. We came to a place—a public overlook—with a great view of the billion lights of the San Fernando Valley, and I pulled off the right of way into one of the diagonal parking slots there. Then we just sat holding hands and looking. We didn't even neck. I can't say personally what L.A. was like in the smog years. But with Arne Haugen's geogravitic power converters powering everything from cars to cities, from desalinization plants to transmountain water pipelines, L.A.'s got to be one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Especially at night, from the Santa Monica Mountains.

We'd been there about three or four minutes when a Buick pulled up behind us, blocking us in. Both of us stiffened; I thought of the guy who'd tailed me. I had my 9mm Glock in the door pocket and my 7.65 Walther under one arm. Presumably Tuuli had the little .25-caliber Lady Colt I'd given her in her shoulder bag. There were at least four guys in the Buick. Three piled out with wrecking bars and hammers in their hands. Trashers. Two of them came to my door and one to Tuuli's, all of them grinning, probably high on something.

My window was open—Tuuli had run hers up—and one of them stuck his face in. "Hey! You!" he said. "No fucking in the car! Unless you're gonna pass it around!"

Now I knew which one was the ringleader. The others laughed at his wit until I pointed my Walther at him. He backed away quickly, both of them did, but not any quicker than I keyed the door open and stepped out.

"You pull a gun on someone and you can go to jail!" He half yelled it; the other half was whine, high and nasal.

I answered by shooting once, blowing the Buick's right front tire. Their hands were already up. Now they reached higher, stretching. "On your bellies!" I said, twitching my gun at the two in front of me. They went down as if their knees had melted, very cooperative, hands wide. Meanwhile I'd heard Tuuli's door close. I glanced back and saw the guy on her side backing away. She'd have her Lady Colt in her hand. I pointed the Walther at the guy still in the Buick, behind the steering wheel; his hands were up by his ears. I stepped to where I could see his other front tire, and shot it out. That left me with seven rounds. "Out!" I told him, and out he got.

"You got a trashing tool in there?" I asked. He nodded. "In back?" Another nod. "Get it out! Carefully, or I'll put one of these right through your spine." He gave a little half sob, opened the back door, and brought out a short-handled sledgehammer.

"Whose car?" I asked.

"My old man's."

"Your what?!"

"My father's."

"He know what you use it for?"

"He thinks I'm at Sepulveda Mall, ice skating."

"Hon!" I said. "Cover those three!"

"I am!"

I had the driver get back in his Buick and drive it ahead a few meters, out of the way, then get out with his hammer and lie down by the other three. "Hon," I said, "back out and then back east down the road a hundred feet or so." I was assuming none of the punks had read my plates, and I didn't want them to. When she'd done it, I had the four of them get up, watching them closely. I decided that none had a gun actually on him, though there may have been one in their car. They were dressed in the Valley Smooth style, tights with a codpiece, and not even pocket space for a handkerchief. "Pick up your tools!" I told them.

They did.

"Now trash the Buick!"

No one moved. Then I fired a round close, very close, to the head of one of them, the one nearest the car, the driver. He may have felt it zip past his ear. Whatever. He flinched and yelped. "The next one," I told him, "is right through your face."

It was really real to him now that he could die, bleed out his life right there, right then. He stepped quickly to his father's car, smashed a front window, then stopped and looked back at me. The others were moving reluctantly. "That's a start," I told him. "Keep it up."

Meanwhile Tuuli had come back and handed me the Glock. I stood there like John Wayne, a gun in each hand. The driver sobbed again, not weeping but in frustration, and again he swung, this time with more force, putting a large dent in the door. The others joined in, and in a moment they were all hammering away.

That's what they were doing while we backed off to my car and got in. I presumed the shots had been heard, and three should have been enough for someone to get a directional fix on them, more or less. I accelerated hard past the trashers, wanting to get off Mulholland onto Beverly Glen Boulevard, the quickest way into the anonymity of Valley traffic.

As we wound down the hill, I was shaking, telling myself it was all right, that no one could identify me. That they'd had it coming; that they were lucky I hadn't leg-shot them. They weren't really hard cases, but up there with the two of us alone, if we hadn't been armed, they'd hardly have settled for trashing our car.

But I didn't really calm down all the way home.

Our building loomed square and shadowed behind its sentinel date palms and the row of tall, vine-covered Mexican pines along the curb. The place had never looked so good. I stopped, put my key card into the slot, and when the cover raised, keyed in my code number. Through the open window, I heard insects or tree frogs or something chirring in the darkness, and a mockingbird tried a tentative half bar. Voices murmured on balconies, and someone laughed softly. The door swung up, and I rolled down the ramp and inside. Al, the guard covering the garage that night, waved from his booth.

I never even thought about Lon Thomas or Vic Merlin. When we got to the apartment, Tuuli and I were in one another's arms almost before the door closed.

10

TWO APPOINTMENTS

The next day I slept in till after Tuuli was up. She fixed our breakfasts, then left for an appointment in Thousand Oaks. If I hadn't had the Christman case in mind when we got in the night before, I did now. And I knew what I wanted to do next. I'd pretend to be a freelance writer, and get an interview appointment with N. Lonnberg Thomas, President of the Church of the New Gnosis.

I wasn't sure what I might accomplish, the case was still so amorphous. But church factions were suspect, and I needed to poke around and see what I could learn.

I spent a couple of hours at Gold's, doing Choi Li Fut forms followed by a Nautilus workout, had a good lunch at Morey's, then went to my office, where I created a fictional résumé of imaginary publication credits, and printed it out. Next I tried to foresee what questions Thomas or his secretary might ask before giving me an interview, and how I'd handle them.

Then I called the church, got a receptionist, and told her I wanted to speak with N. Lonnberg Thomas. When she asked what the call concerned, I told her my name was Martin Eberly—Eberly's my mother's maiden name—an identity I have official-looking documentation for, from driver's license to credit cards. That I was a freelance writer preparing an article on the church, and wanted an interview with Reverend Thomas at his earliest convenience. I'd gotten a lot of adverse statements about the church, I said, and felt I should hear its story from its own president. Particularly since I had an uncle in Detroit whom the church had relieved of his eczema and asthma.

"Give me your phone number," she said, "and Reverend Thomas can call you back."

"No," I told her, "I'm not willing to do that. My experience has been that all too often such return calls are never made. They get postponed and then forgotten. Tell Mr. Thomas that the article will be written, whether or not he talks with me."

She put me on hold for forty minutes, which didn't bother me. The executive director of a controversial outfit like Thomas' would receive more than a few calls from writers and would-be writers. One way to thin them was to leave them on hold for extended periods. While I waited, I read my new ASI Journal.

Suddenly I had only a dial tone, which did irritate me. I dialed again. This time I was only on hold four or five minutes before Thomas' personal secretary came on the line, a sound-only connection. She asked a few well-designed questions, then somewhat to my surprise gave me an appointment to talk with Thomas the next afternoon at 1:30, in the Administration Building on Campus.

It had been easier than I'd expected. After that I went to Carlos' office and we talked about the guy who'd tailed me. We couldn't see anything to do about it. And the guy knew, now, I was onto him, which could well be the end of it. There was no strong reason to think the church was responsible, or anyone interested in the Christman case. In our business you offend people from time to time, and some of them get resentful. I knew that better than almost anyone, from when I was a kid. You can also draw the attention of the police or other investigation firms, who may suspect you of operating in an area they're interested in.

* * *

It was that evening at home that I got a call from Vic Merlin. From the way he talked, I guessed he'd been a Texas country boy who'd read a lot and gone to college, then lived somewhere else. He called me Martti right away. Visually he made a very different impression on me than Sigurdsson had: he made me think of a slightly built, elderly pixie who'd grown up on grits and beef instead of herring and mutton. I told him what Sigurdsson no doubt already had—that I'd gotten his name from Sproule, and that I was investigating the disappearance of Ray Christman. I ended up with a date to meet him at the airport in Wickenberg, Arizona, in two days, at 2:30 p.m. From there he'd take me to his place.

"And Martti," he said, "Ole told me your wife is Tuuli Waanila." He pronounced it to rhyme with vanilla. "Why don't you bring her along, too? We-all would like to meet her."

I threw a glance in her direction. She'd been listening from her easy chair, and now was nodding enthusiastically. But the invitation had made me uncomfortable. "I don't know," I said, "she's pretty busy lately." Her expression changed instantly, and she started to get up, as if to come over. "Just a minute; let me talk to her."

I touched the hold key and, turning, reminded her that the Merlins were murder suspects. That I was investigating them, and they could be dangerous.

"Martti," she said, "I want to go." Her voice was not pleading; there was steel in it, honed to an edge. "If these people are more powerful than Ole Sigurdsson, I want to meet them."

I didn't find her logic compelling. I'd met Sigurdsson, and he hadn't done anything psychic at all. I was willing to bet the Merlins wouldn't either. On the other hand, her tone of voice was compelling as hell. I shrugged, and opened the line again. "She says she can make it," I told him. "She looks forward to meeting you. Ole made you sound pretty interesting."

The way he grinned out at me from the screen, I wondered if maybe the hold hadn't worked, and he'd watched and heard. But it had worked. The screen had been blank when I'd turned back to it.

After a minute we disconnected. I couldn't help but wonder, though, what Vic Merlin's real reason was for inviting her.

11

LONNIE THOMAS

Considering what Molly Cadigan had said about the church being dangerous, and how Fred Hamilton had agreed with her, and that I'd been followed lately, the next day I took a company car with Colorado plates. In California it's now legal for licensed investigation firms to register a vehicle in more than one state, as long as one of the states is California. I parked in the big lot on Campus, and arrived in the lobby of the Admin Building at 1:20, ten minutes early.

The receptionist—smiling, good-looking, and wearing a space-cadet uniform—called to a tall, skinny, teenaged kid wearing a uniform and a complete set of pimples. I guessed his IQ as about equal to his weight—in kilos, not pounds—maybe sixty. He led me to an office. The plaque beside the door read simply Central Communications. Inside, a not so pretty and sure as hell not smiling young woman wearing a dictation headset sat typing rapidly at a computer. Without slowing, or even looking at me, she told me to take a chair. There was a reading rack, but all it held was church promotion, and booklets supposedly written by Ray Christman.

I took one of the booklets, titled The Freedom Road. Beneath the typist's fingers, the keyboard sounded like a popcorn popper having an orgasm. I'd never seen anyone type so fast; I had to watch. Her fingers were a blur. How many typos per minute, I wondered? She sat ramrod straight, and while she typed, smoked steadily on a cigarillo, letting ashes dribble on her lap. Finally it was down nearly to the filter tip. She stopped just long enough to put it in a big ashtray that needed emptying—didn't even take time to butt it out—then lit another and started typing grimly again.

I wondered how the hell many letters or pages she typed in a day. There was a graph taped to the wall—hand-drawn!—showing an ascending curve. From where I sat, I couldn't see what it said, and it was behind her so I could hardly go over and look at it closely. Pages typed per day or week, maybe.

I gave my attention to The Freedom Road. The damned thing actually made sense, if you accepted the underlying premises. It made a certain amount even if you didn't, as good promotion should.

One-thirty came and went, and 1:40. By then she'd lit still another cigarillo. If Hamilton had been truthful about that ten dollars a week, she had to borrow to keep herself in smokes. Maybe they gave bonuses for production. "Does Mr. Thomas know I'm here?" I asked.

She actually stopped typing to look at me. As if I'd crawled out from under a rock. "He knows." Then she jabbed, and jabbed is the word, an intercom key and spoke to someone on her throat mike, an exchange of maybe eight seconds. "He'll be a few minutes late," she told me. "He's with someone important."

Having put me in my place, she began typing again. A couple of cigarillos later, another uniformed, teenaged boy hustled in with a large styrofoam cup of coffee for her; she accepted it without thanks or even a look, took a sip, then typed on furiously. I wondered how many empty styrofoam cups were in her wastebasket.

At 1:52 another young woman hurried in, a girl, really, in a form-fitting uniform guaranteed to raise your body temperature. Her eyes were on me as she came through the door. "Mr. Eberly? Come with me."

I followed her down the hall to a small elevator foyer, almost trotting to keep up. She poked impatiently at a button, as if pumping it formed a vacuum in the shaft that would pull the elevator in against all resistance. It arrived and took us to the seventh floor, where I stepped out into a penthouse with the quiet of sound insulation and the feel of humidified air conditioning. There she led me down a short hall to an office suite with no plaque on the door. Probably the only office up there, I decided. This had to be the penthouse that Hamilton had said held Christman's apartment and office. Apparently Thomas had moved in, at least into the office. As if he didn't expect Christman back.

I found myself in a small reception room. The receptionist was a tall and very handsome Hispanic lady, maybe forty-five years old, with raven hair, and the first smile I'd seen since the receptionist in the lobby. She too wore a headset, but not a uniform. There was a couch and a matching chair by one wall, and she gestured. "Please have a seat, Mr. Eberly. Mr. Thomas will be with you in a minute or two." I sat. She turned to a computer and began to type. I'd have thought she was really fast, if I hadn't been watching the typist downstairs. After a moment, a silent printer kicked a sheet of paper out into a basket beside her. She scanned it, then put it atop a stack on her desk and continued at her keyboard.

I took the compad out of my attaché case, put it in my jacket pocket to have it handy, then reopened The Freedom Road and began to read again. At 2:09, a buzzer brrrrted at her from her computer. She picked up a privacy receiver and listened, then got up and looked at me, smiling again. I got the impression that the smile was genuine, that she was actually friendly. And more—that she was somewhat the kind of person the church claimed to produce! "Mr. Thomas will see you now," she said, and led me to the door of what turned out to be a large, richly furnished office. When I stepped in, she stepped back out and closed the door behind me.

Thomas looked skeptically at me, and motioned toward a chair across a desk from his own. "All right, Mr. Eberly," he said when I'd sat down, "what do you want to know?"

He was a large man, about six-four and maybe 270 pounds—overweight but not obese, more beef than pork. I judged his age at forty-five. Like the typist's, his ashtray was full of butts.

"First, let me say I'm recording this." I touched my attaché case. "So I won't have to rely on notes."

He nodded curtly.

"Is it true that the Church of the New Gnosis has a standing offer of refunds for services given which the parishioner considers unsatisfactory?"

He could see what was coming. His face took a "that again" look. "That's right. And it's an offer we make good on."

I spoke carefully. "I've had people tell me they've applied for refunds and gotten the run-around. Endlessly. What's the truth about that?"

"The truth is that a parishioner has to go through certain steps for a refund. We try to determine what, if anything, went wrong. If the fault was ours, we try to ensure that it doesn't happen again. It's a necessary step in quality control. We're the only church I know of that has a quality control division and offers refunds. Mr. Christman realized when he established the refund policy that it invited trouble. But he considered it the only ethical thing to do."

I jotted notes in speed-writing, as if I was doing more than chumming the water for serious fishing. "Two people have told me they've been trying to get refunds for more than a year, and have been sent to one office after another for a long list of approvals. From people who were 'in conference or out of town'—that sort of thing. After having had appointments with them. Do you know anything about that?"

"Mr. Eberly, fewer than two tenths of one percent of the people who receive services from the church apply for refunds. So. What sort of person does request one, do you suppose?" He paused, then answered his own question. "The malcontent, Mr. Eberly, the troublemaker. The compulsive liar. Someone who wants something for nothing. Gnosis isn't for everyone—we don't deceive ourselves that it is. But even people who resign from the church seldom request refunds, often despite extreme pressure from family members, and often under the influence of the psychiatric establishment or predatory lawyers. Until you realize these simple facts, you'll have difficulty writing a factual account of the church."

I nodded, wondering if that figure, two tenths of one percent, was correct, or something he'd plucked out of the air. In my business, you learn that some people create lies as easily as they breathe, and I remembered what Ole had said about lying drills. And Thomas' eyes didn't tell me a thing.

"I've also been told," I said—actually I'd only read it—"that Mr. Christman ordered the church to frustrate all refund requests until the requester gave up. What truth is there to that?"

Thomas' lips thinned and tightened. "None. That is patent slander. For years Mr. Christman has paid no attention whatever to the financial activities of the church. They distracted him from his key and vital function, his central purpose—his research. He established basic financial and other policies years ago, and left management to the managers he appointed, and their successors."

Now it was time to bring up serious business. "Is it true that threats have been made against Mr. Christman's life?"

He handled it without blinking. "Of course. Any major public figure, especially one who runs counter to various establishments, receives threats. He'd have felt he wasn't doing his duty if he didn't get death threats."

"You feel no concern then for Mr. Christman's safety?"

He sighed, an act somewhere between impatience and being worn out by stupid questions. "Mr. Eberly, I can't imagine they could even find Mr. Christman to harm him. Even I don't know where he is. He has retired to carry on his spiritual researches in virtually complete seclusion. His written message to me was that he'd employed three persons to see to his personal needs."

Three persons. That was up two from the "message" read at the Palladium. "He must have financial needs," I said. "How does the church get money to him?"

"Mr. Christman was a wealthy man before he established the church. He then sold his business and converted the funds into more fluid and convenient investments. My impression is that many of them survived the Crash of '96, and subsequently became profitable again. The key point is, he receives no money from the church, none, and never did. I presume he lives on investment income."

Not for the first time I wished we had a contract with the state or city for some aspect of this case. Then I could use the State Data Center and maybe track down his whereabouts from credit flows. If he was still alive.

"Not long ago," I said, "the church was the victor in a lawsuit brought against it by the Institute of Noetic Technology. Is the institute a possible danger to Mr. Christman in his retirement?"

He stared at me for a long moment. Something was going on with him, but I didn't know what.

"Mr. Eberly," he said slowly and deliberately, "this interview is wasting my time. Either you don't grasp what I tell you, or you ignore it. Write your book or article and send me a copy of the manuscript, and I'll either critique it for you myself, or have one of our attorneys do it."

He stood up. "And now— And now, Mr. Eberly, I want you off these premises."

At that point something flared in him, a focused anger. Generally when someone gets mad, it splashes; his anger was as hard and sharp as a laser. "AND I MEAN NOW! GET YOUR . . . "

He mixed his obscenities in unlikely combinations, leaning over his desk at me and pointing at the door. At the time it shook me, shook me deeply, and it takes a lot to do that. If it had come down to it, if he'd attacked me physically, I could have stomped the seeds out of him without any trouble at all. And looking back at what happened and what didn't, I think he suspected as much, or knew it, but it didn't matter to him.

At the time though, like I said, it shook hell out of me, and it was more than fear I felt. It was the sheer blasting force of his anger. It knocked the breath out of me. I backed out of his office door, then turned and hurried through his secretary's office and into the hall. I didn't even pause to see what kind of look she had on her face.

* * *

I didn't slow down in the hall, either, or wait for an elevator. Both cabs were down, so I used the stairwell. The crash-door at the bottom opened into a first-floor corridor. I followed it to the lobby, and went out the front door into the bright April afternoon. The entry guard paid no attention to me at all, just chewed his gum. Pausing, I pulled myself together, relieved to find my attaché case in my right hand, then strode north down Kinglet Place toward the parking lot. My personal antennae were up even higher than usual, and I was aware that someone was walking behind me, not quite as fast as I was. Not trying to catch up, but there. There was no reason there shouldn't be, of course. People walk on the sidewalk all the time. I angled across the street, looking both ways as I did, and catching a look at the person behind me. He was neither black nor bearded; one of the uniformed teenagers I'd seen earlier, running errands in the Admin Building.

I took another look when I turned in at the parking lot gate. He'd stopped at the sidewalk to the Neophyte Building, not seeming to do anything, just standing there as if waiting, or listening to the birds.

A minute later, as I stopped my car to pay the gateman, I saw the kid still there, watching the gate now. He saw me, then looked the other way and started to walk back toward the Admin Building. That, it seemed, was a signal. There was a parking lot across the street, with a sign that said Staff Only, and by the time I'd rolled out into the street, a veteran white Dodge Westerner was nosing out. I turned north and so did it.

It hadn't been near enough that I knew what the driver looked like, beyond being white and beardless.

I drove to the next cross street, Villamere, and turned west. I'd gone maybe half a block when the Dodge turned west too. I stayed on Villamere west to Vermont, and turned north. So did he. Vermont had a lot a traffic, but he stayed near enough to keep me in sight, and when I came to the on-ramp to the Hollywood Freeway east, I took it. He did too. He still had me in sight when I exited onto the Harbor Freeway south. He did the same. Which almost guaranteed he was following me: If he'd wanted to go south on the Harbor from the Campus, it would have been shorter and quicker to take Wilshire.

But how could Thomas have gotten someone on me that quickly? Or had he set this up before he had me brought to him?

So far I hadn't tried ditching the guy behind me. Now I did, changing lanes, ducking behind delivery trucks, then making a last-minute move into an exit lane and onto the Santa Monica Freeway. And saw no more of him. I'd tried not to be too obvious about it; hopefully they wouldn't realize I knew I'd been followed.

I exited the Santa Monica onto LaBrea and drove back to the office. Why, I asked myself, had I been followed? The likeliest answer was, to find out where I'd come from. That could mean where I worked out of, or where I lived.

My tail should have seen my Colorado plates. Which should put them off. But would it? I couldn't be traced by them. The owner's—the firm's—address was confidential, available only to California and Colorado motor vehicle departments and to law enforcement agencies.

Did the church know that private investigation firms could use out-of-state plates? It had worked its way into detective dramas on TV and holos, much to Joe's disgust. And Prudential was the biggest and most prominent investigation firm in California; it would be the logical place to start checking. The Colorado plates would have to come off, just in case. Because Thomas could be dangerous; I felt sure of it now.

12

VIC AND TORY

The next day Tuuli and I drove to the Hollywood-Burbank Airport, and from there took a skybus to Sky Harbor in Phoenix. After a thirty-minute wait at Sky Harbor, we took the mail-stop shuttle that serves Wickenberg, Lake Havasu City, and places north from there. Places that didn't have scheduled air service in the days before AG.

All to the good, right? Skybuses can be small and still economical to operate, which means you can have a lot of small ones with frequent departures. Also they're a lot cheaper to build than airplanes were. They land and take off vertically, make slow and almost silent approaches, and they're a lot cheaper, easier, and safer to fly than the big, clumsy, noisy, polluting airfoil craft of six or eight years ago. And they don't require roads, runways, or large fields. All in all they're like a clean, superfast bus service, which is why people started calling them skybuses.

Almost no one today wants to go back to the old ways of travel. Or telephoning. Or going to the library or heating a building, or . . . You name it. The problem is, you never have a chance to get used to things. You learn a trade today, and it may disappear tomorrow. Not mine, but a lot of them. Forty or fifty years ago, a guy named Toffler wrote a book called Future Shock. I read it about the time—about the time my folks were killed, and it was old then. If he wrote it today, he could call it Now Shock. And twenty, twenty-five years ago, a science fiction writer named Vinge—Vernor Vinge—wrote about a future when things changed so fast that people—biological people—couldn't handle it anymore. Well, I'll tell you what. When the research in nanotechnology breaks through the barriers it's run into . . .

Sorry. That's not what you're here to record. Blame it on the Veritas. So. Where were we? Oh yeah. Tuuli and I were going to visit the Merlins. Vic was waiting for us at the Wickenberg airport. He turned out to be a sprightly old guy. I'd have judged him at a lively seventy-five and been short by ten years. He was also taller than I'd expected, but thin: close to 6 feet and probably 130 pounds. But in jeans, a twill workshirt, and work boots, he looked lean and wiry, not frail. He shook my hand with a strong grip, and appreciated Tuuli with his eyes. I could tell she loved him right away.

My first impression was, he'd never murder anyone.

He led us to his pickup and we sped away from town, at first on a highway, then on a narrow blacktop road too minor to rate a center stripe. The air was dry, the April sun bright, and the desert had more vegetation than you might think. It was dominated mainly by what Vic identified for me as mesquite—broad, thorny, 6- to 10-foot shrubs—and in places by what he called creosote bush. There were also lots of spiny cane cactuses 3 to 5 feet tall with big pink flowers, and similar ones so thick with stiff pale spines, they seemed to wear a white aura. He called both kinds chollas. There was a scattering of saguaro cactus, too, some of them 30 feet tall. Vic said they were getting toward their upper elevation limit there. Graceful ocotillas were scattered almost everywhere. Shrubs I guess you could call them, thorny shrubs without twigs or branches, their leaves tiny and sparse, but bright green. Their spiny, sprawling, multiple green stems grew from a common base, to spread 20, maybe 30 feet across, each stem ending with clusters of vivid red flowers.

I could get to like that country, at least in the spring.

After a while we came to a mailbox that read Vic & Tory Merlin, and from there left the blacktop for a private road that obviously had never known an engineer or road grader. In about a mile of gradual climbing, we reached a range of hills that, farther on, grew to a long low mountain, and the road entered a small canyon. A little brook trickled down it, among rounded stones, with groups of distorted old cottonwoods along its banks. During the occasional storm, according to Vic, the brook could become quite a stream, though most of the time it was dry.

About a mile up the canyon we came to their home, a low, pink-tan adobe ranchhouse with narrow, deep-set windows. Behind it, a windmill pumped water to a tank on a roof-high timber platform, the water supply for the house. They had a GPC-driven pump that did their pumping when the wind was down—gravity is always there, and as cheap as the wind—but Vic said they enjoyed having the windmill do it.

Tory was on the porch to greet us, a small woman, not much bigger than Tuuli. Her hair was still red-tinged, though she was probably as old as her husband. Her eyes were chestnut brown like Molly Cadigan's, and just as direct and powerful. But her look was less aggressive than Molly's, more calm and—knowing is the word, I guess. I don't believe anything could flap her—not the arrival of the angel of death, not the end of the world. According to Winifred Sproule, Ray Christman thought Tory was as powerful as Vic. I wasn't sure what Christman meant by powerful—I wasn't sure what I meant by powerful—but it seemed to me that if anything she might be more powerful than Vic. And I got that impression just in the minute or so between being introduced on the porch and her going into the kitchen to check on the coffee. She seemed to me like someone who could pretty much control whatever went on around her, if she wanted to.

The living room was big, the ceiling supported by vigas, rough-hewn timbers with axe marks on them. More than a century old, I'd guess. One wall had a wide adobe fireplace. Tuuli and I had taken seats on a comfortable benchlike sofa that might have been made of local cottonwood, upholstered with big fat cushions. Vic sat across from us in a wicker rocker that would have seemed old-fashioned to my dad, who was born in 1917.

"How did you know about Tuuli?" I asked.

He grinned at me. "We've got friends who keep up to date on psychics and who did what." He turned to Tuuli then. "We first heard about you after you took care of the poltergeist that Emmy Raye Crockett had trouble with, after she bought that mansion at Pacific Palisades."

I looked at my wife. She'd never told me anything about a poltergeist! It must have been before I'd met her. And for Emmy Raye Crockett! Doing a successful psychic gig for a major, free-talking country-western star must have gotten important word-of-mouth promotion, as well as publicity in the New Age magazines and newsletters.

"How'd you handle that?" he asked.

Tuuli blushed, something I'd never seen her do before. "I'm not sure," she said. "Well, I guess I am now, partly, but at the time . . . When the dishes started to fly, and the ashtrays and books, my hair stood out like this." She held her hands a foot from her head. "So I admired it. I thought, you are amazing! Truly marvelous! And I meant it, because it was. It really was.

"When I thought that, I could feel the change, from anger to something else—pleased pride. No one had admired her before! Ever! I say 'her' because she'd been a woman, I could tell; an old woman who'd lived unappreciated and scorned, and died neglected. Then she picked up a heavy glass tabletop and threw it in the fireplace. It broke in a thousand pieces! After that she stopped. Emmy Raye told me the ghost had never thrown anything heavy before. Mostly it hadn't really thrown things at all, just knocked things over and blew curtains—things like that. When it threw the tabletop, it felt to me as if it had already stopped being angry and was just showing off. I don't think it had ever admitted to itself how powerful it was."

My hair was standing up just hearing about it. For a minute there, psychic felt really real to me. I didn't doubt it had happened the way Tuuli said. It wouldn't be like her to exaggerate. Until after I started dating her, psychic had never been real to me at all, even though the firm hired a psychic consultant now and then; that's how I got to know Tuuli. And sometimes we'd gotten useful information from them. Now I asked myself what kind of world she lived in, where you communicate with ghosts. What was it like to have dishes and books and tabletops flying around? Tory had come back from the kitchen while Tuuli was talking. "Then what?" she asked.

Tuuli shrugged. "After a few seconds the poltergeist went away, and that was the end of it."

"How could you tell it had gone away?" I asked, "if it had already stopped throwing things."

"She wasn't there anymore. I could tell. I couldn't feel her anymore."

I let it go at that and turned to Vic, moving the conversation in the direction I wanted and needed. "According to Winifred Sproule, you're psychic. And you knew Ray Christman personally. Could you concentrate on him and find out whether he's alive or not? And where he is?"

He laughed. "If you want information like that, ask Tuuli here. Or Ole. I don't compete with folks in the consulting business."

His answer should have irritated me, but it didn't. I did wonder though whether he could but wouldn't, or would but couldn't. I changed the subject again, telling him what Sproule had said about his being the source of Christman's theology. That's the word I used: "theology." He grinned at it.

"I did send him write-ups from time to time. I needed to write it down anyway, so all I had to do was mail photocopies. A lot of it there isn't words for, of course, or familiar concepts to frame it in, so he'd fly out here now and then to go over it with us. But a lot of it he never fully got, and what he taught, and the procedures he applied, were his own, not ours."

"But wasn't your material the basis of his . . ." I had to grope for the word. "His cosmology? And his, ah, technical procedures? That's what Sproule said."

He nodded. "Yep, that's right. When Ray first decided to start a church, he wanted us to go in on it with him. We'd be the spiritual leaders, and he'd be the executive director, in charge of management and promotion. But it looked to us like the wrong thing to do. For one thing, we'd lose too much freedom."

"So what did you get out of it? If I may ask. What did he pay you for it?"

Tuuli's sharp elbow dug hard in my ribs.

"We never asked for anything; we didn't really need it. But when he came out, he always left us a check. Usually for twenty thousand." He turned to Tory as if looking for help in remembering. "That time he was here when we had snow on the ground, that was fifty thousand. And the time we took him up to visit the kachina in Mount Humphrey—" He looked back at me then. "Say three hundred thousand over the years."

A lot of money maybe, but not much from an operation that according to an L.A. Times estimate had grossed more than half a billion by 2006. Which brought to mind the question, where was all that money? Even if a lot of it had been lost in the worldwide Crash of '96 . . . The church was listed as the owner of a lot of real estate, but supposedly that made up no great part of the total. The Times had compiled a chart listing the property values, and the church had never built a new building. Its specialty was buying properties from owners who were in a serious bind for money. It would offer them twenty to forty percent of the listed value in instant cash, take it or leave it. It was impressive how many had gone for it. Christman had gotten the Campus for only eight mil. The land by itself had been worth more than that.

"Didn't that bother you?" I asked. "I mean, he made millions on millions, got a lot of recognition . . ."

"Nope. We didn't need the money. I'd done pretty well as chief technical editor for Bourdon Electronics, and before that from Viggers Technologies in Maryland. And I'd helped finance a few small but promising businesses." He grinned again. "The owner of one of them introduced me to Ray. Before I was fifty, we were living off investments.

"Now and then I'd do counseling on somebody with a lot of money, like Ray. One of them signed this place over to us; these eighty acres plus the buildings. Just gave them to us. The entire ranch is half a million acres, and he'd decided to run the whole spread from his headquarters over by Yellow Jacket. Actually I was still working for Bourdon then. Getting this place was what decided me to quit and work full-time on my research." He laughed. "Research, naps, and puttering around the place."

"What kind of research?"

"Nothing that science would recognize. I'd been a Noetie counselor before that, and before that I'd been interested in the mind and what the science fiction of that time called psionics. I'd had experiences that gave me something to work with, and training and experience in science and technical editing that gave me a viewpoint.

"There were problems, of course. The experiences had mostly been personal, or even subjective. So I went into it subjectively. I couldn't see any other way. Sometimes I use the psychogalvanometer and ask myself questions, to get me into it. Other times I start out with meditation. Usually not like in yoga though; generally I meditate on something. Not think, just put my attention on it. Then, after a while, things are likely to happen; I follow where they lead me, and watch or experience the results. After that I do the best I can to sort it out. Put it in words and diagrams like the ones I gave Ray. It's not always easy."

He gestured. "Tory gives me an anchor—Tory and sometimes the boys. Bails me out when I get in over my head." He grinned again, ruefully this time. "There were times, early on, when I foundered. They gave me an external viewpoint then. Seems like they'd get a sense of what was going on when I didn't." He paused. "Been interesting."

He'd been leaning forward while he talked. Now he sat back. "No," he said, "we live the way we like, and like the way we live. We do what we want, when we want. And we don't do without. Sometimes we don't see anyone for a week or two, until we go to town. Our nearest neighbors live seventeen miles from here. Now and then one or both our boys will drive out from Phoenix with their wives for a weekend. Other times friends will drop by, with or without their bodies."

With or without their bodies! I wondered if he was serious. Tuuli thought so. She was listening intently.

"Ole flies out from L.A. once or twice a year," Vic went on, "and now and then the Diaconos fly down from the Rim. It's a good life, and public attention would have spoiled it."

I got the message, and believed it: the Merlins were happier without recognition. Another dead end, I decided, but I still might get some useful insights out of the trip.

"Look, people," Tory put in, "I've got a big pot of coffee and a tray of chocolate-chip cookies in the kitchen." She looked at me. "Guaranteed not to add weight. If y'all are interested, we'll go out there and you can help yourself."

We trooped to the kitchen behind her. Again there were rough-hewn roof beams, and a big adjoining pantry in which I could see a freezer. Besides freezer, fridge, electric range, microwave, dishwasher, and all the rest of the modern stuff, there was a tall 'dobe fireplace built into a corner, with two pot hooks for cooking! There were even two black iron pots on a mantel, and a woodbox to one side. With wood in it, I had no doubt. On the table, a glass cream pitcher was full of what looked to me like real cream, and the sweetener was sugar cubes, not low-cal powder in envelopes. The cookies had calories written all over them. I took three. They're not as fattening as Molly Cadigan's chocolate-glazed doughnuts, I told myself. They weren't cooked in deep fat.

Back in the living room I asked, "What did you hope to learn from your research?"

"Whatever there was to know. I was exploring."

"Didn't you have a hypothesis?"

"Two of 'em. That there was something to find—something to learn—and that I could learn it."

"Such as?"

He grinned again. "How the odds and ends of unexplained observations and experiences relate to one another, especially the ones that science doesn't like because they don't fit orthodox scientific paradigms: things like clairvoyance, telepathy, telekinesis, psychic photography, firewalking. . . . I figured if you poke around in things like that, some of them might come together for you.

"I ran into anomalies, of course, and things I could only see vaguely." He chuckled. "There was a time, twenty-five years ago, we thought we'd gone far enough, we could tie the rest of it up pretty fast. Have us a tight, inclusive theory; a sort of metaphysical universal field theory. That was after we debugged the surprise generator."

I didn't know how to take that, especially the thing about a surprise generator. Metaphor I suppose.

His laugh was relaxed and self-amused. "There were more barriers left than we'd imagined. Then Arne Haugen turned physics upside down without any metaphysical research at all. With just . . ." He paused and laughed. "Just his native inventiveness—the meeting ground of physics and the subliminal mind. And of course the engineering knowledge and money that made it work.

"All we contributed here was, we'd debugged the surprise generator. Which had to make a difference." He raised an eyebrow. "That was up in your part of the country."

Surprise generator again. I had no idea what he meant by that. Or how he knew, or if he knew, what part of the country I was from. Actually, his comment almost slipped past me. I'd started feeling groggy; something about the subject was getting to me.

I straightened, pushing the grogginesss away. "Dr. Sproule told me that when Christman changed your stuff, she thought he screwed it up. Ole thought so too."

Vic laughed again, as if that didn't bother him at all. "Ray's idea was to create a religion with it, train a lot of people to go out and help others to be freed beings. His problem was writing it up and teaching it. He felt folks had to understand it before they could know it; grokking it wouldn't do. And of course, he didn't understand it himself, actually, any more than I do."

I stared at him. He got to his feet then, took a ruled pad from a big old-fashioned desk, and drew a quick diagram, then brought it over and, kneeling, showed it to Tuuli and me, pointing with his pencil and explaining.

To me it was just marks on paper, and I got to feeling weirder and weirder. It was a little like when I was thirteen and climbed this big willow tree on a cutbank on the Hemlock River, at the edge of town. Bobby Latvala had spiked pieces of one-by-four on the trunk for a ladder, and you could jump off branches into the water. The highest branch you could get out on to jump was fifty-three feet above the river, measured by Jimmy Dobrik's mother's clothesline. The first time I went out on it to jump, it felt like my knees were made of water—as if I was going to faint and fall off. Physically that's a little like I felt when Vic was explaining his diagram—like I was going to faint and fall a long way. Nothing was coming through mentally at all.

"Vic," Tory said, "I think that's a little steep for Martti." That did come through, and I was aware of her eyes on me. "Martti," she told me, "get up and walk around the room. Look at things. Touch them." I did, and felt better right away. Then we all refilled our coffee cups and I got a couple more chocolate-chip cookies, and they asked Tuuli about what it was like growing up in Lapland.

After a little, I brought the conversation back to Ray Christman, more or less. "So all this information and theory you developed—what good does it do? If Christman got it wrong and you're not doing anything with it yourself?"

"It doesn't have to do good. The bottom line is, we had fun doing it, Tory and the boys and me. Especially me. And Ray had fun with it in his own way. Beyond that, he gave half a million people enough of it that it's making a useful difference in their lives and their environments. And it's percolating into the overall body of the New Age movement, with all its interests and information, its mythologies and misinformation from a lot of different directions.

"Folks need a new paradigm, you see. One they can relate life to. Even before Arne Haugen introduced his geogravitic power converter, things were changing so fast in people's lives that a lot of them were having trouble coping. Then along came the GPC, and the incomplete theory that Haugen based it on, and all of a sudden, science had the breakthrough it needed to start simplifying a lot of things, and integrating them into new and more powerful conceptual models. And engineers had a whole new information set to play with. Play and build with. And boy have they ever!"

He paused to dunk and eat another cookie. I matched him; I'd forgotten all about calories.

"So things got to changing faster than ever," he went on, "and people are having more and more trouble with the changes. They feel like the world's getting away from them."

I nodded. "That's why the government passes laws to slow things down, some things."

I thought of the agricultural preservation acts that restrict the use of food factories in the United States and a lot of other countries. The geogravitic power converter changed agriculture as drastically as it did transportation. Desalinized seawater was nearly as cheap as river water now, and pumping it long distances over mountains is economical too. Though to call the machinery "pumps" is stretching the term; they just create localized energy fields where uphill is downhill. And there was storm control that grew out of the same theories, and the advances in molecular engineering. Along with genetic engineering, they'd changed farming so drastically my dad wouldn't have recognized it, and he'd been dead less than twenty years.

But it was still farming. People still lived on the land and worked the soil, even if a lot of it was under clear-tents that covered acres of ground. The unrestricted development of food factories would wipe out most of it, something a whole lot of people weren't ready to face yet.

That's the kind of thing I meant when I mentioned government restrictions.

"Right," Vic said, "the government does hold back some changes. But even so, they're coming faster than ever, and a whole lot of people feel anxious. Some get to be activists for some cause, trying to increase their control of things. Some take drugs, trying to relieve their anxieties. Others look for deeper meaning in consciousness clubs, dream networks, or just life itself. Or join churches or cults. A religious cult, if it's not a con, is just a church outside of what folks are used to."

He stopped to eat another cookie, chewing and sipping thoughtfully. "More of them might join cults, except they've learned not to trust 'em. So there's getting to be a lot of New Age eclectics, borrowing from this belief and that philosophy and these other sets of practices—puttin' them together in a system that makes sense to them. People leave groups like Leif's and Ray's, and take with them what they learned there, and gradually it spreads.

"Leif borrowed a lot from psychiatry and psychology—culled it, tested it, and unified it. And added his own ideas. Some of them, especially dealing with application, have worked their way into psychology and psychiatry in a sort of reverse flow. You can find quite a few psychiatrists now, and clinical psychologists, who'll treat you with what amounts to Noetics One, which are the levels that bite best. Especially when they're not loaded up with Leif Haller's cosmology and megalomania. Even his cosmology can be beneficial; it can break older false realities, and give you food for thought."

I interrupted. "You're talking about Noeties. What about Gnostic procedures?"

"They've barely begun to influence psychology and psychiatry. They're less familiar seeming."

Tuuli broke in then, and what she said startled hell out of me. Shook me! "I want to— I want to realize my potential as a psychic," she said. "I know there's more. I can feel it. Will you be my guru? You or Tory?"

She hadn't asked me about it or even warned me. As if she was independent, unmarried. Vic wasn't grinning now. "We're not in the guru business, Tuuli," he answered softly. "If we were, we'd sure like to have you, but we're not. Tell you what though. Before you folks head back to L.A., we've got something to give you. Each of you."

He turned his attention back to me then, and after a few thoughtful seconds picked up more or less where he'd left off. "The big breakthrough in philosophy won't come from people like Tory and me. Not directly. It'll come from the scientific establishment."

I stared at him.

"Physics and math. It started long before Arne Haugen, but he shifted it up a few gears. And it's changing a lot more than the way we travel, and power our factories, and raise our crops. Physics has been turned on its head, and it's growing a new cosmology. Now we've got theoretical constructs like the omega matrix and the Meissner-Ikeda Lattice. Interest in hypernumbers theory is getting to be respectable; it's spread beyond the Institute. And Ali Hasad's Limited Theory of Generated Reality is gaining supporters in mainstream physics. In a decade or so there'll be a new model of reality to orient on, compelling enough and simple enough that it'll change how people look at things. And sooner or later it'll give rise to a psychology that'll compare to present-day psychology the way chemistry does to alchemy."

He stopped then and picked up his last cookie.

I knew this wasn't just a pause. He'd finished. I ate my last cookie too, and finished my coffee. As far as I could see, I was done there.

13

MERLIN THE MAGICIAN

Before I could say anything about going home though, Tory invited us to stay for supper, and she seemed to mean it. Vic said they were having friends down from "up on the Rim"—that's the Mogollon Rim, the rim of the Coconino Plateau—who looked forward to meeting us. It would have been rude to insist on leaving sooner, and besides, I could see that Tuuli wanted to stay. Really wanted to.

Then Vic asked if I'd care to take a hike around, and that seemed like a good way to use some of the time.

"You want to come?" I asked Tuuli.

Tory spoke before Tuuli could. "I'd planned to show her some things around here."

So Vic and I went alone, hiking a path that slanted up the canyon side to the top, stopping to rest when we needed to. A couple of times we passed what seemed to be pieces of airplane, and when we got to the top, sure as hell, there was a whole damned propellor stuck upright in the ground. When I asked about it, he said the plane had belonged to "the Four," and had blown up. I got a strange chill when he said it, and didn't ask for an explanation.

We sort of moseyed along up there in late-afternoon sunshine and a mild breeze. The temperature must have been about 75 degrees. We talked about everyday kinds of things. He asked about my family, and I got carried away. Told him about my dad having been Ojibwa County Sheriff for twenty-five years, and a deputy for ten years before that. That he'd married my mother when he was sixty-one, and they'd had Elvi and me. I also told him a couple of stories I'd heard of things dad had done as sheriff. I was still a preschooler when he'd retired.

Dad was a pretty remarkable man, born on a homestead in a Finlander colony in Upper Michigan, and went to work in the logging woods when he was fourteen, instead of going to high school. I didn't mention how he died though, how they both died. I'd learned years before that I couldn't trust myself not to break down. The last person I'd told was Tuuli, and I didn't tell her everything. My sister Elvi and my half brother Sulo did it for me.

Vic was from Texas; he could even talk Tex Mex. His dad had been an oil field worker, a roustabout, and Vic had too, after high school. Till he had enough money to start college, where he got his bachelor's in chemistry. He'd started on his master's in biochem, but washed out by getting a C in physical chemistry. He'd switched to science education then, to finish his degree, but taught only briefly before getting a job with Viggers.

While we walked, a Dodge Skytote came in from the northeast; its driver saw us and put down on the ridge. It had Diacono's Spirit Lodge painted on the side, in script resembling the Devanagari of India. A big, powerfully built guy got out, and a woman as good looking as it's possible to be at sixty. With them was what I took for a Hindu, small, hardly bigger than Tuuli, looking totally incongruous in Levi's, a chamois shirt, and a very large hat. I stood back and watched while all three of them, laughing, hugged and kissed Vic as if he were a favorite uncle they hadn't seen for years. My family had had a lot of affection among themselves, but its men didn't kiss each other, or their wives in front of anyone. I'd always felt uncomfortable, seeing men kiss each other, but for these people it seemed natural.

When the hugs had been distributed, Vic turned to me. "Frank, Mikki, Bhiksu, I'd like you to meet Martti Seppanen, the visitor I told you about from L.A. Martti, this is Frank Diacono, and this pretty lady is his wife Mikki." He chuckled. "And this rawhide buckaroo is Bhiksu. Frank and Mikki and I are old friends from way back; Frank helped me debug the surprise generator, and Mikki saved his life on the lake ice. He'd been shot, and like to have froze unless he bled to death first. Bhiksu's an old friend too, who came to Arizona three years ago. Bhiksu's all the name he uses. I think he's on the run from somewhere."

Something about Vic's monolog had made my head spin, but pressing the flesh cleared it. Frank Diacono's grip was as strong as mine, and his strength seemed to flow through it into me.

"Glad to know you, Frank," I said. "And Mikki. And Bhiksu." It seemed to me I knew Diacono's face, and his wiry hair, half gray now. Knew it from when he was younger and I was a kid. The name rang a bell, too. It would come to me.

Then we all got in the Skytote and floated down to the house. As soon as I got out, I could hear two women laughing in the kitchen, and for a minute thought someone else had arrived while we were gone. It turned out to be just Tory and Tuuli; I'd never heard Tuuli laugh like that before, or look so beautiful.

Supper was a ranch-style meal: steak, chili, and coffee, plus a salad with boiled eggs and home-sliced cheese on top of lettuce and slices of cucumber and tomato. There wasn't any dessert, but when we went to the living room afterward, there was a tray of brownies, and two battery-powered thermal coffee pitchers to supplement the pot.

I really can't tell you what was talked about. I started feeling groggy early on, a grogginess I decided later was protection against mental or psychic overload. Tuuli, though, was taking it all in. I have a sort of vision of her there, laughing and lovely, her tan cheeks with a pink underglow. Before I conked out entirely, I was in a sort of weird falling-asleep state, with Bhiksu seeming to float in the air, glowing a violet blue. That was the last I remember until I woke up in darkness, having to use the hyysikää, the bathroom. It was half past one, and the house was quiet. The only light came from the bathroom door, standing slightly ajar down the hall. When I was done and came back out, there was Vic, sitting in the wicker rocker, almost invisible in the dimness. I wondered if he'd been there all along.

He stood up, and without saying anything, beckoned. I didn't know what else to do, so I followed him down the hall to a corner room. He opened the heavy wooden door and closed it behind us.

It was an ordinary, if undersized, bedroom with no bed, only two kneeling chairs, well upholstered. He gestured at one, and I knelt-sat down on it. He sat down facing me about six feet away, and spoke. "Remember I said we had something to give you?"

"Yeah."

"Tory gave Tuuli hers while you and I were up the hill."

I nodded. Something had happened, that I knew.

"I thought I'd better give you yours tonight, so you could sleep on it."

I had no idea what he was talking about, but for whatever reason, it was okay with me.

"I want you to just sit there and look at me, while I look at you."

We did, and I felt tension gradually developing. Then something began pulling inside of me, twisting, and suddenly I felt as if the whole world was dying. I could feel my face screwing up, and then the tears started. I was a grown man crying, crying right in front of someone, another man, and I couldn't stop, didn't want to stop. I keened and swayed and sobbed, and then a stranger thing happened. Much stranger. I seemed to be outside myself, in a back corner of the room, up by the ceiling. I watched myself cry, and as I watched, felt a strange warm affectionate feeling, tinged with amusement. And at the same time still felt the grief and the bitter bitter loss. It was as if I was two people, one watching the other.

It went on like that for several minutes—long enough that my shirtfront was wet with tears. Then it eased, and I realized I felt—clean. Drained but totally clean.

"Well," Vic said quietly, "shall we call that a done?"

I nodded. It felt done to me.

"Then how about we have a bite to eat?"

I followed him to the kitchen and sat watching him fry bacon and eggs at two in the morning, the bacon in an electric skillet, the eggs on an electric grill. The sound of sizzling was an aesthetic masterpiece. Frying bacon had never smelled so good, and things had never looked so sharp and clear before. I couldn't remember feeling so relaxed. While the eggs and bacon fried, toast popped from the toaster, four slices, and I helped butter them. Then Vic poured a tall glass of milk. Neither of us said anything till the bacon was crisp, perfectly crisp. Then he sat me down and put the whole batch in front of me, enough to feed a family.

"That's yours," he said. "I'll make some more for me."

Salivating like a rabid wolf, I started eating. It was marvelous. I scarcely thought, just savored the food, and the smell and sound of more bacon frying. Vic settled for two eggs, with bacon and toast in proportion. When we'd finished, we put jackets on and walked outside to look at the desert sky awhile. Living in L.A., I'd forgotten how many stars there are to see. Linnunrata, the Milky Way, was a broad white swath across the sky, and mentally I reached, glorying in it, high as a bird.

Back inside I lay down on the couch again, not to waken Tuuli. Vic went on to bed. I wondered if I'd go to sleep, and in a minute or two was drifting off, remembering Tuuli's laughter when I'd come back from the hill. Then I slept and dreamed, though I don't remember what.

I awoke to a kiss. Tuuli was kneeling beside me, and sunlight was glowing through the windows.

14

PIE ARE SQUARE

We flew out of Wickenberg at noon for L.A. It was another beautiful April day. I didn't feel as strangely marvelous, or as marvelously strange, as I had in the kitchen with Vic, and maybe I never will again. But I felt more relaxed than I was used to—than I had since I was sixteen. Since before dad and mom were killed, and I shot and stomped their murderer.

I can talk about it now. I still feel—not grief, but the memory of grief, a shadow of it. And the rage is gone, the rage and shame I worked to hide for so long, suppressed for so long.

On the flight home, Tuuli and I talked more than usual to each other, and without the sharp edges that sometimes were there—that often were there beneath the surface. Also, I came away with Frank Diacono's business card:

Frank Diacono

(602) 555-3443

Diacono's Spirit Lodge

Long Valley Route

Box 146

Pine, Arizona 85544

And an invitation: "If you ever need a place to get away to, give us a call. We can pick you up at Flagstaff or Phoenix."

* * *

The next day I caught up on office work, especially reading. Joe subscribes to a clipping service that faxes us clipsheets on crime and criminals in California, Nevada, and Arizona, covering both English and Spanish-language newspapers. And I turned in my expense account for the weekend—airfare, not including Tuuli's, my mileage driving to Hollywood-Burbank, and airport parking.

I also worked out at Gold's. I didn't buy Tory's comment that her brownies and chocolate-chip cookies were nonfattening. Although I hadn't gained any weight over the weekend, which didn't hurt my feelings.

Most of the next two days I spent contacting my informants and learning nothing. Just after I got back to the office on Wednesday, Tuuli called. The WorldWide Films Theatre was showing a Finnish film about the Lapps, and she wanted us to go that night. I told her sure. After that I dictated an interim report on the case, for Joe's editing and initials. He'd send clean copy to Butzburger, recommending the investigation continue. It was too soon to give up. Butzburger, of course, might feel differently, and it was his money. Also he might not like what I'd learned about the source of Christman's ideas.

The report didn't take long. Then I left early, to get home before the rush hour traffic.

We took Tuuli's little red Sportee, and stopped at a restaurant on Hillhurst near Sunset, called Pie Are Square. We eat there now and then. As we followed the hostess, we passed close by a table where three people sat, wearing the sky blue uniform of Gnostie staff. One of them laid his eyes on me almost as soon as we came in, and said something quietly. The other two glanced at us then. As we walked toward them, Tuuli started talking Finnish at me, telling me to talk, but to speak Finnish, not English.

So I did, asking her what was going on. She told me she felt danger. I didn't know whether she was being psychic or if it was because the Gnosties were looking at us. We talked Finnish all the way to the corner booth we went to; she wanted the Gnosties to think we were foreigners. I sat where they couldn't see me. That was her idea too. A couple of them could see Tuuli, but she wasn't worried about that. A few minutes later, Nerisa, our usual Filipina waitress, came over and took our orders. A couple of minutes after that, Tuuli saw one of the Gnosties beckon to Nerisa and talk to her, but nothing more happened.

When we left, two of the Gnosties were still at the table, talking over coffee. Tuuli hadn't noticed when the other one left, or if he'd just gone to the rest room. One of the two gave me a glance, but that was all, and I told myself that if there'd been any danger, it was past. We went out to her car and drove to the movie.

15

INDIAN'S STORY

A couple of days later I stopped at Morey's for breakfast, and while I was eating, a guy called Indian came in. He'd taken to wearing his hair in a Mohawk, exposing the skull patches he'd had put on for electronic brain stimulation. Indian's a Loonie who works as a casual for Yitzhak's Transit, just down the street from Morey's. As a casual, some days he works and some days he doesn't. He turns up at Yitzhak's at 7:10 for muster, and if they don't have a job for him that morning, he stops in at Morey's for coffee and a glazed doughnut. He's been doing that for at least as long as Prudential's been in the new building.

He's a big, rawboned Angeleno, not an Indian, though he claims to be a quarter Chippewa. His hair's sort of sandy brown, and his mustache is red, but if you dyed his face and hair, he might pass.

He saw me when he came in, and when he'd gotten his coffee and doughnut, he came over. "Hey, Martti!" he said. "I ain't seen you lately! You're looking good, man! Like the spirits are bein' good to you!"

I told him Tuuli and I had gotten out of town last weekend and it had done us both a lot of good.

"I seen you and her a couple days ago at that pie place on Hillhurst. Me and Moonbeam were across the street in the ticket line at SF Adventures, to see Time Drifters. And I seen a little red Ford parked at the pie place, and I said to Moonbeam that it's the kind your wife drives; I wonder if they're havin' supper there? And a little later, sure enough! You came out and drove away."

"Yeah," I told him, "we went to the WorldWide to see a movie."

He broke his doughnut in half, dunked a piece, and took a bite. "You know what else I saw?"

He said that quietly, looking around, which caught my interest. It was out of character for him; Indian's usually very open. "Right after I first saw your car, some New Gnu in uniform came out and stopped behind it. And wrote down your license number."

Yitzhak's a New Gnu, a politer term for Gnostie, and most of the people who work for him are New Gnus. According to Indian, they're a good bunch to work for and with, but they don't have any tolerance at all for outsiders talking about the church, because it catches so much bad-mouth.

"Writing down our license number?"

"That's how it looked. He stopped behind it and it looked to me like he was writing it down in a pocket notebook or something."

That actually gave me a cold chill. "Huh! That's weird. Why would he do that?" Because there was no way he could have known it was ours. He couldn't have seen us get out of it from where they'd been sitting. "Maybe he was getting the number of the car next to it," I suggested.

"Might be. Couldn't be sure from where we were."

* * *

I spent most of the day on other things, and before lunch took time for an hour's workout. I seemed to be dead in the water on the Christman case.

That afternoon I got a phone call from Molly Cadigan. "You alone, Sweetbuns?" she asked. I told her I was; actually Carlos was in my office at the time.

"I had a lunch date this afternoon with a friend of mine. In the Saints' Deli. The Gnostie hangout on Winderly, across from the Campus. While I was waiting for her, I looked at the notice board." She paused for effect. "And saw your picture."

"My picture?!"

She held it in front of her vidcam, a printed church circular with a composite computer sketch of me. A pretty good one. "I recognized you right away," she said. I couldn't read much of it on the screen, only the heading: Security Division. FOR IN-HOUSE DISTRIBUTION ONLY. "It orders anyone who recognizes you to notify church security," she told me.

I thought, Judas Priest! What does this mean?

"It says In-House Distribution Only, which is ominous by itself," she went on. "If they didn't have something unpleasant in mind, they wouldn't have said that. Obviously some dimwit on church staff posted it in the Saints' anyway. So I took it down."

Obviously she had. "Wasn't that sticking your neck out?" I asked her.

"Sweetbuns, my neck's been out so far for so long . . . But if anyone had noticed, they'd have squawked. And I'd have jumped all over them, because the thing says In-House Only." She paused. "What'd you do to stir them up?"

"I'm not sure," I told her. "I did get an interview with Lon Thomas. Under an assumed name. I told him I was writing a book."

"Hah!" She barked the sound. "I'll bet he had someone research the name and found out you weren't legit! Look, Sweetbuns, take my advice. Stay well away from the Campus. Lon Thomas doesn't play with a full deck. He's smart, but he's crackers, too."

She didn't have to convince me. When we'd disconnected, I sat back wondering if one of those might get posted in Yitzhak's. Not likely, but . . . Occasionally there was a guy or two from Yitzhak's besides Indian that ate at Morey's, and they'd recognize the picture.

"Sweetbuns?" Carlos said. One eyebrow was cocked halfway up his forehead. He couldn't see my phone screen from where he sat.

"It's just something she says," I told him. "She's twenty years older and twenty pounds heavier than me."

He grinned. "If you say so. You're wondering about Yitzhak's now, right?"

"I was, yeah."

"Penny and I are going to put some stuff in storage," he said. "I think I'll walk down to Yitzhak's. I suppose he sells storage boxes. And while I'm there, I'll browse their notice board."

That's Carlos for you. He didn't get to be supervisory investigator by being slow.

After Carlos left, I recalled Indian telling about the Gnostie staff member writing down our license number. I thought I knew why. Tuuli had a Finnish-flag bumper sticker, with "Suomi" written on it. It's unlikely he knew that Suomi meant Finland, and even less likely that he recognized Finnish when he heard it. But we'd been talking a foreign language, and he could easily have recognized the sticker as a flag. Flag stickers aren't rare with a generation that's gotten interested in their ethnic roots.

And if they'd questioned Nerisa about us, she might have said that ordinarily when we came in, we spoke English. Even Tuuli doesn't have much accent.

All in all I didn't feel too comfortable.

16

WRONG TARGET

That was on Friday. On Sunday I slept in, and Tuuli and I had breakfast together. We figured that after we'd eaten, we'd go to the L.A. Zoo. It's in Griffith Park, built against the foot of the Hollywood Hills, and if the winter rains have come through, the hills are exceptionally beautiful in spring. The zoo itself is sort of overgrown with tropical and subtropical plants, its paved paths leading around through them. Just for starters, there are albino tigers, pens with goats that children can get in with and pet, and an African bull elephant that dwarfs the Asian elephants. He wears a huge leg chain bolted to a steel post set god knows how deep in concrete.

Our plans got altered though. We had the TV news on for breakfast, something we seldom do. It's bad for the digestion. Maybe Tuuli's psychic power was operating subliminally. She's the one who turned it on.

The feature story was a bombing the evening before, and the building bombed was the apartment house she used to live in. Worse, the specific apartment bombed was on the southwest corner of the second floor, the one that used to be hers. It killed an Armenian immigrant family: Barkev Boghosian, his wife Sophie, their two children, and Boghosian's mother. It also killed a person in the apartment below. A still picture showed Boghosian as a husky, thirtyish guy who worked for an import-export firm.

A neighbor reported having seen a man, with a package "as big as a suitcase," ringing the Boghosian's doorbell a few minutes ealier. The man had worn a brown shirt and trousers like a deliveryman's uniform. Apparently the package had held the bomb.

It could have been a coincidence, of course, but right from the start, neither of us had any doubt that the bomb had been meant for us. For me specifically and for Tuuli by association. I put it together for her this way: The Gnostie that took her license number had then reported seeing us at Pie Are Square. Maybe he'd even been sitting in his car watching, and saw us come out and drive away. We'd been speaking a foreign language, but according to Nerisa were able to speak perfectly good English.

Tuuli admitted that she hadn't sent her change of address to the Department of Motor Vehicles after we got married, and she hadn't had to reregister her car yet, so their records still showed the old Hollywood Boulevard address. Someone in the church either hacked or bought their way into the DMV's computer and got that address; not an easy thing to do. The guy who delivered the bomb would even have been met at the door by a burly guy with a foreign accent, though presumably that made no difference in what happened.

Thomas would have watched this morning's news, or maybe last night's, and read the morning paper. And he'd know from the DMV records that Tuuli's car wasn't registered to any Boghosian. Besides, except for the build, Boghosian's picture didn't look like me. He'd know they'd hit the wrong target.

When I'd run through it, we sat looking at each other over our coffee. "How'd you like to take a vacation in Arizona?" I asked her.

"If you'll come with me."

"Honey, I can't; I've got a case. This is the best lead I've had on it, and if I solve it, I'll have the people who want to kill me. This is real evidence, circumstantial but real, that the church is behind Christman's disappearance."

"Let Carlos handle it."

"Honey, Carlos is good, very good, but he's not as good as I am. The firm will rent me a room somewhere; maybe a series of rooms. You can go stay at Diacono's. I'll bet the firm will cover the cost. If they won't, we'll cover it ourselves."

She looked thoughtful. I could almost see the wheels turning: she was thinking about studying or whatever with a guru. She'd already told me that Bhiksu was psychically very advanced, and had done some remarkable things that evening at the Merlins', after I'd fogged out and gone to sleep.

I remembered the dream that maybe hadn't been a dream.

She'd also told me that Mikki was a psychic whose powers had been expanded and stabilized by Tory and Vic.

A lot of people, Tuuli said, had occasional psychic moments, probably most people. With some of them, these were explicit, but mostly they were vague, like a notion with no apparent source. With her, they were only occasional, unless she deliberately looked for one. Then she'd often get something, often sharp and clear.

And one of the things they did at Diacono's Spirit Lodge, she said, was train people in that sort of thing—people with a talent for it. My natural tendency was to be skeptical, but if believing would get Tuuli out of L.A. for a while, great. Besides, I couldn't doubt that Vic had some sort of power, not after what he'd done for me. And apparently Tory did too.

After a minute, Tuuli nodded. "All right. I have appointments with clients on Monday and Tuesday. Surely the people that want to kill us won't have our new address by then, will they?"

"I've assumed they got your name and old address from DMV. And now that they know the address was wrong . . ."

Suddenly I realized there was something I needed to do. Right away! I got up from the table and called GTE. Had them remove both of us from directory assistance—Tuuli's business listing as well as our residential listings. I used my investigator's credentials to have it done immediately. In fact I didn't disconnect till it was done. The big question was, had it been in time?

Tuuli hated to have her listings removed, but she recognized the need. If Thomas or whoever hadn't checked yet, being unlisted would stall them for a while, maybe quite awhile, and we could get listed again when it was safe. There were phone books, of course, but most people didn't have one. If your phone wasn't computerized, you got the books free, white and yellow pages separately. Otherwise you had to order and pay for them. Presumably the church didn't have phone books, and wouldn't think to check one anyway. If someone wasn't in the electronic directory, they'd rarely be in the book either.

Of course, if they'd already checked . . . "Hon," I told her, "I think you should leave today. Call and notify your clients that you've had an emergency of some kind."

She frowned, considering. "This is a security building," she countered, "and Prudential has the contract. I don't like to be driven out of my home by some criminal. And I hate to lose business."

"There are worse things to lose. And building security isn't intended to prevent determined terrorist-type attacks. It's to prevent nuisance entry and discourage crime on the premises. Utilities people, delivery personnel, clients who come to see you—anyone who seems to have a proper reason to enter—they let in."

I shifted my approach then, and phoned the Diaconos to ask how much they charged. Frank answered. For Tuuli, he said, they'd only charge for meals and housekeeping: fifteen dollars a day. When I objected that that seemed awfully cheap, he laughed. "We've got unoccupied rooms, and our food is nothing fancy. If it was you, we might charge twenty-five."

While we were talking, I remembered where I'd known Diacono before. Not personally, but on television, when I'd been a kid. He'd been an all-pro NFL linebacker before I was born, and I'd seen his antidrug spots on television when I was little.

I generally liked people who fought drugs. The guy who'd gunned down my parents had been a drug smuggler dad had caught, and who'd nursed his grudge for eighteen years in prison. As if it was dad's fault, not his. He'd only had about half a minute to enjoy it before I unloaded a charge of number four shot into his back from my twelve-gauge. It severed his spinal cord. Then I'd kicked and stomped him very thoroughly to death. Something I used to revisit in nightmares.

I told Frank what our situation was, and that conceivably Tuuli's presence could be a risk to them. He grinned and said so was a tornado or Lucifer's Hammer, and not to worry about it.

She talked to him then. He finally agreed to accept twenty. She also arranged to be picked up at Flagstaff on Wednesday—made the decision on her own and without discussing it with me. When she disconnected, she turned, expecting me to blow up. "I won't postpone my clients," she said. I surprised her. "Okay. I'll call Joe and tell him what's happened. I'll ask him to intensify security here for a couple of days. If we have to, you and I can pay for an extra guard or two."

Joe agreed without hesitating. He'd add a third guard on each shift, seasoned people with superior ratings, and send out a scanner they could use to check packages. Then I called the building manager and had him take our names off the directory. I told him we'd had some harassment calls.

We did get to the zoo that day, only later than we'd planned. By the time we got back, I'd thought of something else I needed to do. I'd called myself Martin Eberly for my appointment with Lon Thomas. Presumably he'd checked afterward, when he'd decided I might be a threat, and concluded that the name was false, but I wouldn't take it for granted. So I checked for possible Martin or M. Eberlys, Eberleys, and Eberles listed in metropolitan L.A.-Riverside-Long Beach. There weren't any. If there had been, I'd have had the firm warn them of possible danger.

17

TUNNELS

On Monday I talked with Carlos about the bombing and the encounter at Pie Are Square, and he agreed it pointed to the church. Joe called the LAPD, told them the firm might have a lead on the bomber, and asked for a contingency contract on the bombing case. A contingency contract pays nothing unless you get information that at least contributes to an indictment, but it doesn't commit you to anything, either.

He had to give his reason for thinking there might be a connection, and put it in very general terms: The bombed apartment had until recently been occupied by the wife of one of his investigators, whose car the investigator sometimes used. Thus the bomber might well be connected with some case the investigator was working on or had worked on. It was a nice job of selected facts effectively worded. And broad enough not to sound promising, so they didn't ask for more details. Which also gave Joe the impression that the LAPD's theory was totally different.

Still, we had a reputation, and a contingency contract would be insurance for them, so it seemed likely their Contract Office would approve Joe's request. Which would give us limited computer access to the State Data Center, via contract ID.

Meanwhile, Joe told me to carry a gun at all times, including off the job.

* * *

Tuuli's Tuesday meeting ran into complications, and she had to meet with her client again on Wednesday. So she rescheduled to leave Hollywood-Burbank Airport at 4:20 Wednesday afternoon, on one of those flights that service smaller towns—in this case Victorville, Barstow, Needles, Kingman, Williams, and Flagstaff.

She'd drive her new Haugen Arrow to Hollywood-Burbank. She hadn't felt comfortable with her Sportee since the bombing, and had found a buyer for it. I was to drive it to work that morning. The buyer, a dealer from the Lower Wilshire District, would pick it up at noon. My own car was already in the security lot, at the building. I'd drive it to the room the firm had rented for me.

Life was getting complicated.

On Wednesday morning I drove my usual route to work, crossing the Santa Monica Mountains on Laurel Canyon Boulevard, through a light drizzle and mist, enjoying the way the Sportee handled the curves and how green and lovely everything looked. I didn't notice anyone following me, and I doubt there was. At the lot, I transferred my bags from the Sportee to my Olds.

I'd spent Monday looking into the department's evidence from the bombing site, and didn't find anything useful. On Tuesday I'd checked with my main informants again, with the usual lack of results. The only thing that tweaked me at all was that Miss Melanie seemed uncomfortable with me. I didn't ask her why. She wouldn't have told me, and it would have made her more wary.

Wednesday morning I worked out, then checked with more informants.

At the end of the day I drove to the apartment hotel I'd been registered at, and moved into my room there. It was getting dark before I drove to Canter's for supper; I like Yiddish food almost as well as Mexican. I did better than I sometimes do at walking out before I was stuffed, and had just reached my car when a guy with a pistol pointed at me stepped from behind a van.

"Hands up, asshole!" he said. "We want your money!"

Never get into a life-threatening fight over your wallet, sure as hell not when the other guy's got the drop on you. My hands went all the way up, shoulder-width apart and open wide. I heard someone else come up behind me, and expected him to go through my pockets. Instead, something pressed against the back of my neck, something not a gun or knife. It stung, and almost instantly I felt my mind fogging, my knees going weak. I started to fall, and he grabbed me under the arms. That's all I remember of that.

* * *

When I woke up, I was in the back of a van, parked in someone's attached residential garage. Some Gnostie's no doubt. The dome light was on, and there was a guy in the off-side front seat. I was gagged, but I must have made a noise, because he was looking back at me. My wrists had been handcuffed behind my back, and my ankles and knees were tied with duct tape. The guy didn't say anything, just put his book aside, got out, and went into the house.

I don't know what they juiced me with, but I didn't feel too bad. A little headachey, a little weak. I rolled around enough to discover that my pistol was no longer in my shoulder holster, not that I could have gotten to it anyway. A couple of minutes later he came back with two other guys. One was big, with a nasty smile. He stood in the van door, flexing and unflexing his hands in front of him, trying to intimidate me, while the third guy got in and blindfolded me. Then they threw a plastic tarp over me. A minute later I heard the garage door open, and we backed out.

As we started down the street, I heard one of them talking on the car phone, telling someone we were on our way. We drove for fifteen or twenty minutes, then stopped—I had no idea where—and the tarp was pulled off me. Someone grabbed my feet, pulled me most of the way out, and cut the tape on my ankles and knees. Someone else grabbed my upper right arm. "Stand up!" he said, and pulled.

I was a little unsteady, but I managed. The problem was being blindfolded and disoriented, not the shot. I heard traffic sounds not far off, smelled night jasmine and damp soil. Then he told me "Walk!" I stumbled trying, and someone grabbed me to keep me from falling.

"Fischer, take his blindfold off. It doesn't matter if he sees something. Walking blind like that he'll fall down, and he must weigh 250 pounds."

Two hundred thirty, I thought. At most. I felt someone untying the blindfold, and when he pulled it off, I realized at once where I was: at a service entrance to one of the Campus buildings. I could see a residential street maybe 120 feet to my left, with apartment houses on the other side.

And it didn't matter if I saw things! That could only mean one thing. I yelled as loudly I could, louder than you'd think. The gag was effective against speaking words, but when it came to an animal-like howl . . . The big guy slugged me in the gut, doubling me over, then uppercut me, hitting me in the forehead. I went down like a stone, and he kicked me once in the side. When I looked up, he'd stepped back. He had a police baton in one hand, and the guy in charge was swearing at him in a hard-edged undertone.

"Miller, you goddamn fucking idiot, if you kill him, Lon will have your balls on a stick! You'll be lucky to get assigned to the SRC! He wants information from this guy."

"Whaddaya mean? I had to shut him up!"

"You did that when you hit him in the gut. If you hit him with that goddamn billy club, you could kill him."

"Shit! You couldn't kill him by hitting him on the head with a crowbar."

"That's backflash, Miller! Once more and I'll see you before a committee! And when you talk to me, call me sir! Now get him inside!"

He took a key ring off a clip on his belt and unlocked a pair of double doors, holding one of them open while the other two guys dragged me inside, into a dimly lit corridor. The door clashed shut behind us. After he'd locked it, he spoke to me. "Can you stand up?"

I grunted, nodding my head.

"Help him!"

Fischer and Miller lifted me by the arms. I stood there for a second, steadying myself. Actually, Miller didn't seem particularly strong. He'd been getting by on big.

"Okay," the leader said, "let's go."

We went down the corridor, turned left down another, and entered a large dining room at the end. It was unlit except for city light shining like a full moon through large windows. Open windows; night jasmine overrode the smell of floor-cleaning compound. Three people were sitting at a table near the front, looking at us. The light was too weak to show their facial features from across the room, but the big one had to be Lon Thomas. The others were probably bodyguards, I told myself. My keepers led me to him.

It was Thomas, all right. As for the bodyguards— One didn't seem to be. He was a thin, tallish guy with some kind of instrument on the table in front of him. The other was a woman, young and good-looking in a hard, lipless way, but a bodyguard sure enough. One of her hands rested on a machine pistol, an Uzi. Anyone who'd carry one of those where an ordinary pistol would do, is at least a little crazy.

Thomas looked me up and down, then nodded. I noticed Miller rubbing his right fist. I hoped he'd broken it; sprained it at least.

"He yelled," my captor told Thomas. "Right through the gag."

Thomas grunted. "So that's what that was." He looked at the quiet one, Fischer. "Mr. Fischer," he said, "go outside and see if anyone's poking around who seems curious about the noise. If there is, tell them someone was, uh, preparing to braze a door handle and burned himself with the torch. Be casual but convincing. At this hour, I doubt anyone would investigate, but let's not take anything for granted."

Fischer left. Thomas was looking at me again. "So. Mr. Seppanen," he said. "You see, I know your real name. I am going to have your gag taken off so you can answer some questions. If you become abusive or refuse to cooperate, I'll have to have you disciplined and perhaps injected. If you cooperate, we'll finish our business here and I'll have you returned to your car."

Yeah, I thought. Dead. The victim of a mugging, no doubt. A clock glowed pale on a wall: It was minutes after two in the morning.

"Miller, be prepared to, um, punch Mr. Seppanen in the abdomen if he becomes unruly. Hard enough to subdue him. Collins, take his gag off."

Collins took the gag off, and I stood there working my jaw from side to side. Thomas looked at me thoughtfully. The bodyguard hadn't moved, as far as I could tell. I'd a lot rather have Miller mad at me.

"We'll have to have his hands in front of him. Collins, do you have the key to his cuffs?"

"Yes, sir." Collins took the ring of keys from his belt clip again and held one up.

"Mr. Seppanen," Thomas told me, "get down on your knees."

I did. Collins took the cuff off one wrist, had me put my hands in front of me, then chained them together again. With the cuffs over my shirt sleeves—that was Thomas' order. Then Thomas had me stand up and sit on a chair across the table from the thin man, whose instrument panel lit his face a ghostly blue.

Thomas looked at him. "Will there be any difficulty getting reads with his hands manacled?"

"There shouldn't be."

"Fine. Mr. Seppanen, please pick up the electrodes and rest your hands in your lap." The electrodes were a pair of metal cylinders. I picked them up, wrapping my hands around them.

"Very good. Now please don't move any more than you must, and don't touch the electrodes together. The instrument is a psychogalvanometer. I presume you know what that is?"

"It's used in polygraphs; it measures electrical resistance across the skin."

"Very good." He turned to his technician. "Selkirk, talk the dial down into range."

"It's there now, Mr. Thomas."

"Oh? Well then, we'll begin." Thomas turned back to me. "You are a man of exceptional self-possession, Mr. Seppanen. My congratulations."

He wanted to keep me calm, to make the galvanometer readings as meaningful as possible. "Thanks," I said.

His eyebrows lifted. "Well then, let's begin."

It was a short interrogation. First he asked me some ranging and calibration questions: My name, where I'd grown up, if I'd ever committed a sex crime, any other crime, things like that. And what, before my present assignment, I'd thought of the Church of the New Gnosis.

His first meaningful question was what, specifically, I was investigating. I told him: the disappearance of Ray Christman. That we suspected he was dead or kidnaped. Thomas didn't look surprised or angry, but the question seemed to introvert him. He didn't ask who our contract was with.

Then he asked who my suspects were, and I told him: the Noeties, the COGS, factions within the church, and the various and numerous people with grudges against it. I didn't mention the Merlins; I no longer suspected them.

The guy with the psychogalvanometer never said a word; presumably he would have if he'd had any meaningful instrument readings.

But to me, Thomas' response was especially important: He looked thoughtfully past me and said, "How could any Noeties or COGS have gotten to Ray? It would have been virtually impossible. Surely you considered that?"

"They could have hired professionals. Some underworld outfits are pretty resourceful."

"If they only wanted to assassinate him, yes. A sniper, someone with a military mortar, that kind of thing. But I can't accept that that sort of people—any sort of people—could have secretly abducted him."

"Which brings us," I said, "to the major reason for suspecting someone in the church."

Thomas shook his head, a strong, decisive rejection. That's when I told him we'd been bogged down badly on the case, and if something hadn't developed soon, we might have dropped it, or mothballed it. But then someone had bombed Tuuli's old apartment. That must have been done by the church, I told him, and told him why. I thought he'd deny it, but he only frowned. I also told him we had a contract with the LAPD to compile evidence for an indictment on the bombing, which was true as far as it went.

His face turned wooden. "Thank you, Mr. Seppanen," he said. "You have been very helpful. I'm going to have you returned to your car. We have nothing to fear from your investigation, because Mr. Christman's retirement was entirely his own decision. And I can absolutely assure you we had nothing to do with any bombing. Also, I assume you are astute enough to realize that there is no way you can prove that this little discussion ever took place. As you said, in the Church we are a very close group. 'Impenetrable,' I believe the media have called us."

As I put down the electrodes, Thomas looked past me. "Mr. Collins, take Mr. Seppanen to the security entrance and hold him there till a vehicle comes for him. I want you to see personally that he arrives back where he came from."

Fischer had come back, and Collins told him and Miller to take my arms. Then Collins, with a gun in his hand, led the three of us into and through a big kitchen to a service elevator. He pushed a button, the door opened, and a few seconds later we were on our way down to the basement.

I didn't like the look of the room at the bottom. The floor was smooth-finished concrete, sloping to a central drain, and there was a large meat-cutting table near the middle. The ceiling was low, and there was an overhead track with rolling meat hooks that led to what appeared to be a reefer door.

Collins turned. By the light of the fluorescents, he looked as pale as anyone I'd ever seen, as if he might faint or puke, but his face was set. He pointed his gun at me. "Miller," he said, "I know you'll be disappointed if you don't get to do the honors."

Miller let go my arm and slugged me in the kidneys. Except he didn't, quite. He'd been just high, banging me in the floating ribs from behind. It hurt all right, but not as much as I pretended. Then he stepped around in front of me, police baton in one hand. He could just as well have clubbed me from behind, but he wanted me to see what was coming, which was stupid—right in character.

Miller was just slapping the baton against his left palm when I stomped down as hard as I could on Fischer's instep. He let go my arm with a yell. At the same instant I launched a flying sidekick that took Miller in the breastbone. In the gym I'd have been criticized for it; it leaves you vulnerable to a quick counter. But Miller wasn't quick, and it slammed him backward into Collins, who swore as his gun went off, possibly into Miller. The greater danger had been that, with my hands manacled in front of me, I might have lost my balance after the kick, but I didn't. I was on Collins before he could recover, kicked the side of his knee, and about the time he hit the concrete, kicked him hard in the gut, then the ribs. He rolled into a ball, a natural reaction, and stepping around, I kicked him once more, in the neck. He stiffened with spasm, then went slack.

I knelt, grabbed his gun, and spun to see what Fischer was doing. What I saw was the elevator door closing. So I put the gun on the butcher table, fumbled the key ring off Collins' belt clip, and put it between my teeth. Then I picked up the gun again and looked around. At that moment I was really scared, for the first time that night. I felt trapped down there, and remembered Thomas' bodyguard with that damned Uzi. Thomas was probably armed, too. Then I saw a door at the back of the room, ran to it and opened it. There was a narrow staircase leading downward, and I remembered what Molly Cadigan had said about utility tunnels connecting the different buildings. I started down, and a pneumatic closer closed the door behind me.

The tunnel was about ten feet wide, dim and chilly, with ducts and big pipes overhead wrapped with insulation. Here and there was a single fluorescent tube for light. It took precious seconds to find what I assumed was the right key. I put it between my teeth, got my hands free, and took off at an easy trot. About a hundred feet farther, I came to a steel door in the side wall, like a ship's door, and opened it. Inside was a lightless room with a lot of old sheet-iron junk. I trotted on, glad to be wearing crepe-soled shoes; they were virtually soundless on the concrete.

Pretty soon I passed a junction with a narrower tunnel, then steep steel stairs like a ship's ladder, leading up. Presumably to some other part of the building I'd just left. I passed it by. A ways farther was a wide door, apparently to another tunnel, but it was locked, and I padded on. There were more doors like the first; I ignored them. Farther on, the tunnel I was in ended at a cross tunnel. It was even wider, and there was another steel stairway leading up. Hesitating, I considered. I might still be under the building with Thomas in it—it was a big one—so instead of going up, I turned right.

This tunnel was blocked, farther on, by a broad, heavy sliding door. I paused and listened, but couldn't hear a hint of pursuit. I reminded myself I'd been down there for no more than two minutes, and maybe Thomas and his bodyguard had left the dining room when I did. Maybe Fischer was having to chase them down. I grabbed the handle of the door and pulled. With an effort it opened, fairly quietly, moving on wheels on an overhead track. After taking a moment to close it behind me, I ran on. A short way ahead, the tunnel turned about 45 degrees and, a little way past the turn, entered a sort of workroom like a large alcove, about 20 feet wide and 40 long. Along the far side was a bench with pipefitter's vises. Overhead were racks with a few pipes on them.

Just now, though, the room seemed to be a dormitory. It was pretty much taken up with old canvas folding cots, most of them occupied by unblanketed men and women in gray coveralls, patched and dirty. They were curled against the chill, but seemed to be sleeping heavily. A single man, also in dirty coveralls, was standing by a small and battered metal desk beneath a single fluorescent. What looked like a logbook lay open on it. I guessed he was a straw boss or something like that. He wore an orange ball cap that I took to be a badge of rank. His eyes, calm and direct, stopped me in my tracks.

"Sir," he said quietly, "this is SRC space. It's off limits to all others except security and the morals police. You'll have to leave."

I nodded, said, "Right!", and strode on through the room and out of it, prepared to sprint if the guy yelled. He didn't. The continuation of the tunnel was narrower here, not more than six feet wide, and darker, all the fluorescents dead but one. It occurred to me with a pang that the wall I could make out about 200 feet ahead might be a dead end.

It wasn't. When I got there, I found another cross tunnel, also narrow. This seemed to be neglected territory. The dust was heavy, and in the branch to my right I could hear and smell a steam leak. The only fluorescent was flickering weakly.

Suddenly I heard voices behind me, farther off than the "SRC space." I had pursuers, and they'd passed through the sliding door. I took the left branch.

And 80 feet farther came to a narrow steel door in one wall, with a simple handle. I stepped inside and found myself in an unlit vertical tube about three feet in diameter, with rungs up one side. I grabbed one, then pulled the door shut behind me, which left me in pitch darkness. Groping, I climbed two rungs at a time until my reaching hand came to an overhead. With a push I raised it—a manhole cover. I shoved it out of my way and it fell with a loud clank. Then I hoisted myself out onto a raised concrete dock at one end of a big parking lot; the lid had fallen off it to the pavement. The end I was in was walled on three sides by buildings. A ways ahead, the buildings ended and the lot widened. There were hardly any cars at this hour. Maybe 400 feet ahead, streetlights showed the row of tall palms where the fence would be. It had begun to drizzle. The dominant smell was ripe Dumpster instead of jasmine.

I'd jumped from the dock and begun trotting toward the palms, when a strong flashlight beam swept the pavement ahead of me. Security men on a roof, I realized. They'd heard the manhole cover fall. Another light joined it, swept the pavement to my right. Then someone saw me and called out. A light beam found me. I ignored it.

A voice yelled from the direction of the manhole, and I ran faster. Ahead I could see the fence—chain link topped with razor wire. The palm trees were on the inside. Breathing hard, I reached the nearest of them and began to shinny up the trunk. It was harder than I'd expected. Behind me, someone yelled "Shoot!" and someone else yelled "No, goddamn it, it'll bring the police!" When my feet were well above the fence, I jumped, pushing off as best I could, clearing the razor wire and landing heels first on the sidewalk, to crash heavily onto my back.

It knocked the wind out of me. Stunned and gasping, I rolled onto my hands and knees and looked up. They were not more than 150 feet away, running toward me. Then headlights caught me, and a minivan pulled to the curb. I lurched to my feet, ready to run again, when a voice called from the van—Tuuli's voice! "Martti! Quick! Get in." A door was open, and she had me by a sleeve, pulling. I half climbed, half fell in. Before Tuuli could close the door, the van pulled away, burning rubber.

18

COMMAND PERFORMANCE

The driver was Carlos. He asked if I was all right, and I told him I was. He didn't ask any more questions. Instead he phoned our security division headquarters, in north Burbank. Told them to send an extra crew to corporate headquarters in West Hollywood. The Gnosties were unlikely to try anything further tonight, but if they did, that's where they'd hit.

As he drove, I sat by Tuuli in the backseat, turning the interrogation over in my mind. I didn't even ask how they'd known where I was. Carlos stopped at a Denny's on Sunset, where we took a booth and ordered coffee and pie. At that hour, it was a good place to wait while the added security had time to reach headquarters.

We were almost the only customers there. It was a good place to talk, if we kept it quiet.

"So," Carlos said, "I suppose you've got questions."

"Yeah. How did you guys come to be there?" I looked at Tuuli. "You especially."

It turned out she actually had gone to Arizona. About the time the flight left Williams though, she'd had a premonition that I'd need her, that I'd be in extreme danger. Frank Diacono was waiting for her at Flagstaff. She told him her premonition, then tried to phone me. I'd already left my room, and left my beeper there. I don't usually carry it off duty. So she called the office, and the night watch forwarded her call to Carlos. They'd agreed to meet at building reception.

When she'd finished her call, Frank had flown her to Barstow himself, where she could catch a Vegas-L.A. local with almost no wait. Frank, of course, didn't have a permit to fly in L.A. airspace—those are really hard to get, for obvious reasons—or he'd have flown her the rest of the way. All the way back she'd worried about what she could possibly do when she got here. The premonition was vague. I was in danger; that's all there was of it.

When she got with Carlos though, it seemed to her that the danger was or would be at the Campus. So they'd driven there, and she'd told Carlos, "Park here." "Here" being at the curb about forty or fifty meters from where I eventually came over the fence. That had been about midnight; they'd had more than a two-hour wait. She smiled at me, then reached and patted Carlos' cheek. "And you never complained a bit," she said to him. "I'm not sure you even doubted."

He laughed. "No comment," he said. Carlos Katagawa was seldom the inscrutable Oriental, regardless of his Japanese ancestry. "Actually I assumed it was genuine when you first talked to me on the phone. I've seen you operate before, remember. But I admit feeling spooky about sitting there at the curb with nothing happening. What good could it possibly do to wait there? Next to a nearly empty parking lot!" He sipped coffee and looked at me. "That's quite a lady you married. So. Now it's your turn to talk. How did you get into a situation like that?"

I put off answering till we got to the office, where I could talk to the computer terminal, to a confidential fail-safe file, telling him pretty much what I told you. Adding that I might have killed Miller; a kick like that to the sternum would shock the heart, might even stop it. Or Collins' shot may have hit him. Collins might also be dead, though I doubted it. I might have broken some of his ribs, though, so he could have a punctured lung.

"We've got grounds to call in the LAPD now," Carlos pointed out.

"No, I don't want to do that. I'd rather we each tape our statements of what we saw and heard, and duplicate the files into two or three legal repositories for use as depositions when the time comes. I'm not out to bust the church hierarchy, necessarily. I want to find out what happened to Christman."

Carlos raised an eyebrow. I suppose he figured I'd want to bust the hierarchy, after what had happened. "If we get a few people indicted," he said, "and some hotshot LAPD interrogators talk to them awhile, maybe they'll tell what happened to Christman."

"I don't think they would, Carl. I don't think even Thomas knows what happened to Christman."

He didn't say anything, just waited for me to explain. "It's the questions he asked me: Thomas seemed unwilling to accept that Christman was really dead. He argued that the Noeties and the COGs couldn't possibly have killed him. Which tended to load the case against him. Why would he do that? And who was he trying to convince? Me? He never intended for a minute to let me out of there alive.

"No, he was thinking out loud. My best judgement now is that he doesn't know what happened to Christman, and wishes he did."

"Okay, then why is he trying to kill the investigation? Or at least the investigator."

"If Christman's dead, he doesn't want us to find out. Plus I don't think he's all there mentally.

"Now here's a question for you: According to the Times article, Christman had things set up so the church paid him essentially all its income beyond strictly budgeted operating expenses. If it wanted money for any extraordinary project—something not budgeted as routine operating funds—they had to ask him for it. That seemed to be his major form of control after he turned the executive functions over to his bureaucracy. And considering how rich he apparently was, he really didn't spend a whole lot on his personal life.

"The same writers estimated that, by 2006, the church's long-term gross income had certainly surpassed 200 million. I called up the hypertext on that, and their estimate was based on a lot of hard information and some rough assumptions. So say its long-term gross income was half a billion by last fall, when Christman dropped out of sight. That's church income. Then add whatever earnings that money had accumulated!"

Carlos' pursed lips formed a thoughtful O, a silent whistle. Tuuli wasn't saying anything either.

"It'd be interesting to see Christman's will," I went on. "Who'd get his money if it was legally established that he was dead? That's a piece of information that might break this case. But it's my impression that as the law stands, it's information we can't get at, without compelling evidence that Christman is dead."

Carlos nodded. "So what do you want to do?"

* * *

What I did was call church security; it seemed like the only office they'd have open at that hour. A stoney-faced woman answered, and I told her I wanted to talk to Thomas. She told me he wasn't available.

"He is to me," I said. "Tell him Martti Seppanen wants to talk to him."

"Mr. Seppanen"—she got the name right, first shot—"it is three-forty in the morning. If you want to speak to Mr. Thomas, you'll have to leave your . . ."

I interrupted her. "You're damned well aware that someone escaped from the kitchen about two-fifteen this morning, and left two guys badly injured or dead. He got away through the tunnels, across the parking lot, and over the fence."

She actually changed expression slightly. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"The hell you don't! The whole thing is over an investigation of whether Ray Christman is dead or alive. Lon will want to talk to me. He wanted to so badly earlier, he had me kidnaped. Now get him on the goddamn screen or we'll go to the LAPD with everything we've learned. We've already got an investigation contract with them."

The stone face slipped a little more. "Just a moment," she said, and put me on hold. I glanced at Tuuli; she looked impressed and—proud.

I winked at her, and she grinned. "Thanks for saving my ass, babe," I told her. "It's all yours now." It was my version of Bogart as Sam Spade. Of course, in those ancient movies they'd never have said ass.

It took a few minutes before Thomas came on the screen. He looked like hell. I suppose I didn't look too good either. I spoke first. "Thomas," I said, "I want to do two things for you."

He stared.

"First I need to tell you that this conversation is being recorded. I want you to know that I and the two witnesses who picked me up have just recorded and safe-stored our separate statements of what each of us saw and experienced tonight. They've been covering me since I left my office—actually since the bombing. They witnessed the assault on me outside Canter's Restaurant, and followed my kidnapers.

"Your people didn't do that bad a job of searching me, incidentally. It's just that my shirt is an ultrawave transmitter. When your goons got me down in the meat-cutting room and Miller told me what they were going to do to me— Well, it's all in the net now, in triplicate safe-files, along with your interrogation."

Thomas' face had looked a little puffy when he'd come on. It had shrunk since then. "We don't particularly want to bust the church," I went on. "Like I said a couple weeks ago, I have an uncle who swears it turned his life around, even though he quit it years ago. Probably saved him from cirrhosis of the liver. All we want to do is find out what happened to Ray Christman. And we want your cooperation. If you did nothing criminal to him, you're clear.

"On the other hand, if you try to interfere, your ass is in the fire, along with the church. Our depositions are coded to several keeper keys in the law enforcement net. If anything happens, the LAPD, the county prosecutor, and the FBI will have them, and you know how they'd love that. Incidentally, those statements also cover what we know about the bombing of the Hollywood Boulevard apartment and the murder of the Boghosians."

He was still staring haggardly at my image on his screen. "I'll tell you something else," I said. "Yesterday we were a little afraid of you people. Now we've got you by the balls. But we don't particularly want you scared of us; we just want you to act rationally, and cooperate.

"I'm going to ask you a question now. But I'll preface it by reminding you of your rights: you don't have to talk. Anything you say may be held against you in a court of law. So. What do you know about the disappearance of Ray Christman?"

There was a long pause; when he spoke, his voice was husky. "Nothing," he said at last. "If I did, I'd probably tell you. But I really honest to God don't know."

"All right, Mr. Thomas, I'll let it go for now. Where have you taken the two goons who were going to murder me?"

Another long pause. "Presbyterian Hospital."

"What names are they under? I'll be checking with Presbyterian."

"Their own names: Collins and Miller."

"What first names?"

"Miller is—Clark Miller, I think. And James Collins."

"Thank you, Mr. Thomas. We'll be getting in touch with you from time to time. Make sure your people put us through. And Mr. Thomas—I am not a vengeful person. Only one with a professional responsibility."

I broke the connection then and sat back, feeling I'd handled an awful lot awfully well. Carlos shook his head. "My what marvels our radio people have come up with! A shirt-transmitter! And ultrawave yet!"

"Make you a bet," I said. "I'll bet he doesn't check it out to see if it's possible."

* * *

After she and Carlos had recorded their statements, Tuuli and I drove home. Actually she drove; we used her car. An investigative assistant would pick mine up at Canter's. We felt pretty confident that Thomas wouldn't try to hit any of us now. That had been a major purpose in calling him and saying what I'd said. Meanwhile, Carlos had told me to take the day off, and the next day if I wanted to.

At that hour, Tuuli and I had Laurel Canyon Boulevard almost to ourselves. Dawn was graying the sky, and a cool green smell blew in on us through my open window.

"What was it like, your premonition?" I asked.

"Just a realization. A realization that you were in danger."

"No voice? No vision?"

She shook her head. "Would you still like to spend a week in Arizona?"

"I would, but it can wait a couple of days. Or longer if you want."

"Not today?"

"You and I are going to spend today alone," she purred, and put her hand on my leg. "I suppose you're so tired, you'll want to go straight to sleep when we get home."

I laughed. "Not to sleep. Only to bed. After a hot shower."

"Good," she said. "That shower is going to be crowded though."

19

SHOPPING PSYCHICS

Needless to say, we were both asleep an hour after we got home. Tuuli woke up first, not long after noon, and it was the nicest day, I think, of my whole life. We'd never been so relaxed around each other, or talked so much. And we didn't cross swords even once.

The coffee took a beating, but we drank hers. Tuuli always drinks decaf at home, but I'd never thought it was anything for me. As a young kid I'd drink coffee with my dad. He liked his sweet and strong, so strong the spoon would stand straight up in it—not really—and mom made it the way he liked. He was easygoing, never bossy to her, but she liked to please him, make him happy. He was sixty-one and she was twenty-five when they got married, a strange but happy story, right up to the bloody end.

Huh! Look at that! I can actually talk about it now.

Me, on the other hand—I'd been, if not actually bossy, at least judgemental, and Tuuli had . . . But I'm getting off the subject.

Like I said, we loafed around and talked a lot that day, and I asked her way more about psychics and being psychic than I ever had before. I'd always felt uncomfortable about it, a little edgy maybe, but that day I was really relaxed. Like Winifred Sproule, she mentioned idiot savants, and said that some of the more capable psychics had been either neurotic or more or less retarded. Ole Sigurdsson, she said, had supposedly been kicked in the head by a horse when he was a child, and it had left him both feebleminded and psychic. Then, when he was pretty much grown, he'd come to America with relatives, and en route had somehow lost his feeblemindedness.

I told her it was hard to think of Ole as having been feebleminded. She agreed, but said she'd read it in his biography, written by his wife Laura, before they were married.

Anyway, for some reason the conversation reminded me of the psychic photographers Winifred Sproule had mentioned, and when I went to work the day after that, it was on my mind. I didn't know why. And not only psychic photographers, but psychics in general. I still didn't have a real lead on what had happened to Christman. Could a psychic help me?

I hadn't asked Tuuli: She knew the problem, and nothing had come to her or she'd have told me. I'd asked Vic, and he'd seemed to dodge it, while Ole'd said he "didn't get anything" on it.

I knew there was a compendium of psychics put out some years ago by a university. It had added respectability to the field, and boomed the growing post-plague interest. So, from the office, I phoned Winifred Sproule. I figured she might be able to discuss and evaluate it better than an electronic or even a human reference librarian.

It turned out she had it on her shelves in hard copy: A Catalog of Significant Confirmed Psychics in North America, compiled by a Dr. Norman J. Gustafson and Dr. Lisabet V. Mitchell, and published by Washington State University Press. She said I could come in and borrow it if I'd like. I told her I'd just call it up on my computer, from the L.A. Library tank. The truth was, I was a little afraid of Dr. Sproule.

The title page read "Copyright 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011," so it was updated regularly. I read the Introduction first. There was, it said, a companion publication, in three volumes, on exposed fraudulent psychics. Three volumes of case histories! And those were only "a representative sample."

The "confirmed psychics" volume, on the other hand, was thin, 115 pages exclusive of the stuff up front. Even that length was due partly to multiple listings and even more to extensive appendices—hypertext in the computer edition—that summarized briefly the more important studies made of the individual psychics.

It didn't include those idiot savants whose only known talent was calendar computations. There was disagreement as to whether or not calendar computation was actually psychic.

The first list was alphabetical, and I checked to see if Tuuli was included. She was. So was Ole. The Merlins weren't, or Bhiksu, or Mikki Diacono. Maybe they hadn't come to the compilers' attention. After each name on the alphabetical list was a list of talents verified for that person, and reference codes to appendix material. Cross lists were by talents, and state or province. Under any particular talent, the people were listed in a consensus order of reliability: a 1 rating was highest, and according to the introduction, no one had rated a 1 except some idiot savants.

I looked under psychic photographers. The best, according to the book, was a Charles Tomasic, originally of St. Cloud, Minnesota, and currently the ward of Dr. Clarence Hjelmgaard, Savants Project, Department of Psychiatry, College of Medicine, University of Minnesota. I called up and read the hypertext on Tomasic. He was born in 1993, had an IQ of 64, etc. His photographs were more reliably clear than those of any other known psychic photographer.

And his most notable performance had been to produce photos of a crime in progress, that had occurred ten months earlier. A vagrant in Willmar, Minnesota, had been accused of molesting a retarded, ten-year-old girl, then killing her. He'd been found guilty, and Tomasic had seen the sentencing on television. Even at the sentencing, the murderer had continued to insist he was innocent. Tomasic, then sixteen years old, had been angrily indignant at this, and insisted that Dr. Hjelmgaard expose a pack of Polaroid at him.

As usual, none of the exposures showed Tomasic. The first several were "whities," as if shot at the sun, but two were clear shots of the crime—the molestation and the murder. When compared to the garage where the crime had occurred, the pictures were an exact match, even to the '02 Plymouth sedan parked there, though Tomasic had never seen the place, apparently had never even been in Willmar.

I sat back and stared at the screen for a minute. The thing must have been kept quiet at the time, or the papers would have publicized hell out of it. I could see a rationale to that. Tabloid-type publicity would be bad for a research project, and reporters would have hounded poor Tomasic out of his skull.

Meanwhile though— I called Fred Hamilton's number. "Do you have time to talk?" I asked him.

"Will ten minutes do?"

"How would you like to fly up to Christman's Hideaway that you told me about? In Oregon. We'll fly over it, and you can help me case the place. You said he had an observatory on a hill. That might be where he was most vulnerable to abduction. I want to size it up."

He didn't answer for a moment. Then: "When?"

"We could fly up Saturday afternoon, look it over Sunday morning, and fly back afterward."

Then I told him what I really had in mind.

"Martti," he said, "if you'll cover the travel costs and lodging, you've got a taker. I'll pay for my meals."

I told him I'd cover the meals too, and pay him two hundred a day. It was the least I could do and be professional, and my client was responsible for expenses. I'd call him later regarding departure time, and where and when to pick him up.

Then I looked in the catalog for the clairvoyant rated most reliable. His name was Seamus Waterford, and I was in luck; he lived just half an hour down the coast in San Diego. I called, got a sound-only connection, and five minutes later had an appointment for that afternoon. I had time for a tuna sandwich at Morey's, then drove to the Tamarind Station for an air shuttle to LAX. The hourly flight from LAX to Lindbergh Field at San Diego took twenty-eight minutes, and a cab to Waterford's address twelve more. I was there almost twenty minutes early, but I'd come prepared. I sat on the edge of a big planter across the street, and read my way into a pocket novel, one I'd read half a dozen times before: Poul Anderson's novelization of Hrolf Kraki's Saga.

Then I went and rang Waterford's doorbell. He answered it wearing a heavy bathrobe, stocking cap down over his ears, and a scarf! I could hardly believe it! It was hot in his apartment—close to ninety, I'd guess.

He waved me in, a tallish, skinny Irishman with red cheeks that made him look feverish, and tufted reddish blond eyebrows. There wasn't a drop of sweat on his face. I wondered if his disorder was mental or physical. I was almost afraid to go in, as if it was catching. "Come in! Come in!" he said with an Irish accent, and waved harder. "Before you let in the cold!"

I went in. It must have been about 75 degrees outside, almost perfect shirtsleeve weather. Once I was in, he relaxed. "Would you like some lemonade?" he asked. There was a big pitcher of it, maybe three liters, half of it ice, on a table by stacks of books and papers.

I told him no thanks. Somehow I didn't want to eat or drink anything there.

He gestured at an ancient recliner upholstered with something leatherlike. It looked as if it might fold up and eat me, but I sat. After pouring himself a tall lemonade, he sat down across from me and swigged most of it noisily at one go, as if dying of thirst. Then he gestured back at the littered table. "I'm writing my book," he said genially. "Now. What can I do for you?"

"Have you ever heard of Ray Christman?"

For a moment he frowned in thought, then, "The cult leader!" he said. "I've known people he'd got in his clutches! What about him?"

"He's disappeared. He may have gone into seclusion somewhere, or been abducted or murdered, or simply died. I hoped you could tell me."

Waterford frowned slightly for a few seconds, then said, "The man's dead. I can tell you that much. Dead long enough, he's either reincarnated—become someone else, some infant—or he's absent from the material realm. Beyond that I get nothing at all.

"Is that all you want?"

I told him yes, and wrote a credit transfer on his PC, using my company card number and intersig. A minute later I was out the door, wondering if I'd just been had. Two hundred dollars for that! Plus the time and air fare. I was in the wrong business—had the wrong talent.

20

OVERFLIGHT

Tuuli flew back to Arizona on Friday afternoon. On Saturday, Hamilton and I rode an AirWest express flight to Portland, then Oregon Air to Eugene. The office had already chartered an outfit at Eugene to fly us over the church's property in the mountains east of town.

The pilot assigned to us knew about the Hideaway and where it was. When Hamilton asked about possible SAMs there, she looked at him as if he were crazy. If the Gnosties shot up an overflight, she said, even it couldn't hire enough lawyers to save its ass. Even given the near silence of modern skycraft, private property is protected from nuisance overflights—flights low enough or frequent enough to constitute harassment—but that protection was by law, not weapons.

Twice in the past, a pilot had been accused by Christman and the church. The first time, the court threw the case out on the basis that the church's witnesses weren't credible, and this was upheld by the appeals court. A result, I suppose, of the church's reputation for public lying, and for using the threat of costly litigation to intimidate. The second time though, the evidence was electronic—radar and radar-directed video photography—as well as visual. The same court fined the same pilot, and told him another such instance would bring more than just a fine. It would confiscate his skyvan and operator's license, and lock him up.

Our first overflight was 2,500 feet above the lodge, and we saw no sign of occupancy except for a surface bus—a crew bus—and what Hamilton said were the caretaker's house and the security barracks. The next pass was at 1000 feet. We didn't see any sign, IR or otherwise, that a security patrol was out. No radar was operating, either. In fact, there was no electronics at all operating on the ridge. It looked as if a skycar could land on it at night and never be noticed.

And most important, what appeared to be the boundary fence ran along the ridge crest, which was about 100 feet wide. The fence was only about 30 feet from Christman's observatory. Yes, the pilot said, property lines sometimes ran along a ridge top. She called a topographic map onto her screen; the land on the other side belonged to the Willamette National Forest.

Which meant we could land on the ridge without trespassing on church property.

21

A REVIEW FOR BUTZBURGER

Butzburger came into my office on Monday morning just as I was getting ready to call Dr. Hjelmgaard at the University of Minnesota. "Mr. Seppanen—Martti," he said. "I'd like to stand you to lunch today and discuss some aspects of your investigation."

Considering what it had already cost him, and how far I seemed to be from the information he wanted, that was understandable, but I didn't have to look forward to it. "Would it be all right to talk about them now?" I asked. "My terminal gives me access to things I might want you to see, and you won't have to wait."

He nodded, looking as if he preferred it that way himself. I guessed then that he was going to be critical, and the invitation had been to soften the criticism. "Yes, that would be fine, Martti. If you'll agree to have lunch with me afterward." He sat down in a chair beside my desk. "I'm concerned with the lack of progress thus far. Not that I'm criticizing you for it. You and Mr. Katagawa made clear at the beginning that progress was likely to be slow and uncertain, and I can understand why. But— Last Friday I found an expense statement for consultation with a psychic, a Mr. Waterford. And there'd been one earlier with a Mr. Sigurdsson. Under the best of circumstances, I'd feel uncomfortable about paying money to psychics. In a situation where progress has been so slow, it occurred to me that it might have been a matter of desperation." He shrugged slightly. "If things have gone that badly, it might be well to discontinue the investigation."

"I understand," I said. "This morning Mr. Keneely told me to report to you today on a major—call it 'a happening'—last week. Beyond that, a new possibility occurred to me, and I spent the weekend in Oregon, checking its feasibility.

"But let's talk about the psychics first, because frankly I'm surprised it bothers you. I thought the church considers psychic powers real, and teaches that a person can learn to use them."

He nodded, looking slightly troubled. "But what it takes to become psychic," he said, "these gentlemen very likely have never experienced. I'm assuming that neither of them is a member of the church."

"The church says that the only way to psychic power is through its training?"

"To reliable psychic power, yes. First through its counseling services, which remove the deep spiritual traumas that foul the channels, so to speak. The individual parishioner may have sporadic psychic experiences even during early counseling, but only sporadic. The channels are opened further by advanced counseling, which prepares the parishioner for the training that programs and exercises those channels."

Then he added, almost apologetically, "The procedures are still incomplete. As of now, the ability varies considerably between individuals."

I was tempted—well, not tempted, but it crossed my mind—to ask him how advanced Lon Thomas was. Thomas showed all the perceptual sensitivity of a stone. Instead I said, "I have something here that may interest you." Then I rolled my chair to one side so he could move in beside me, and called up the WSU catalog of psychics. "When you've read the introduction," I said, "I'll show you what I have in mind."

When he was done, I called up the material on Charles Tomasic, the psychic photographer. As he read, Butzburger commented that he'd read about a much earlier case, Ted Polemes, who'd been studied at the University of Nebraska. Polemes had produced remarkable pictures, but was very inconsistent, and showed little control of his talent. When Butzburger had finished, he looked at me. "And your plan is to . . . ?"

"Information I've obtained indicates that Mr. Christman's greatest susceptibility to abduction was at his mountain hideaway in Oregon, and that he was usually there when solar storms promised to provide an auroral display. He loved the aurora.

"This weekend I scouted the Hideaway from the air, visually and with infrared and electronic surveillance. It seems entirely practical to land on the ridge where he has a small observatory . . ."

Butzburger interrupted. "I've been to his lodge. There are radar installations on the ridge, and some kind of defensive installation to repel possible aerial attacks."

I remembered Hamilton saying that Christman hosted rich Gnosties at the Ranch when he wanted to pitch something to them. Apparently he'd used the Hideaway for the same purpose. "We looked into that," I said. "To date, the only response the church has made to overflights has been in the federal court at Salem, and our instruments showed no indication of even radar monitoring. As a matter of fact, the place seems nearly deserted. Inserting a rumor of radar and surface-to-air missiles could have been a useful fiction to discourage aerial snooping."

I'd expected at least some sign of annoyance from Butzburger at that, but he simply looked thoughtful. I continued. "The fence that runs past the observatory is a boundary fence. The land on the other side belongs to the Forest Service. Because landing there looks feasible, I plan to call Dr. Hjelmgaard today and examine the possibility that we can fly Charles Tomasic in there with us. And maybe get a photograph of an abduction in progress."

He shook his head, but before he said anything, I went on. "There is another aspect of the case that came to a head last week. An attempt was made to kill me. And there'd been an earlier occurrence, a bombing, that seemed to be aimed at me."

If he'd intended to say anything, that stopped him. Then I told him of my interview with Thomas, when I'd posed as a freelance writer, and the events that led to the bombing that killed five people. That was enough to tighten his lips; he was waiting for me to accuse the church, something he wasn't about to accept.

I forestalled that, too. As I'd finished describing the bombing, I'd called up the statements recorded by myself and Tuuli and Carlos, after my run through the tunnels. Now I had the computer play them back aloud, followed by my phone conversation with Thomas. When it was over, Butzburger was in shock.

"Tuuli's recorded statement wasn't complete," I said. "Mr. Butzburger, my wife is a Laplander, and a professional psychic. She was born and grew up in Lapland, in a tough mining town in the Swedish arctic, till she was nine. After that they lived on a frontier farm in northern Finland. Her mother's lineage has a sequence of tribal shamans, and Tuuli has the talent. Mostly her clients are people in entertainment, but she's been used as a consultant on several cases by police agencies, defense attorneys, and private investigators; that's how I met her. She was in Arizona that evening, got a premonition that I was in danger, and tried to call me. I was gone. Then she called Carlos—Mr. Katagawa—and flew home. At no cost to you, I might add. At eleven that night, she showed Carlos where to park. The rest you know."

If Butzburger had backed out then, Joe would not have been happy with me. An investigator is not supposed to try dealing with a client's uncertainties. That's Joe's hat. But Butzburger had been up front with me, and I wasn't willing to put him off.

"So you think the church is . . . But assuming for some incredible reason that Lon Thomas or anyone else in the Church wanted to get rid of Ray . . ."

"Exactly," I interrupted. "Why would they abduct him at the Hideaway? I don't think the church did abduct him. What I do believe is, they're afraid we'll get evidence that he's dead. That would have a powerful negative effect on the church. And there's the matter of who or what gets Christman's fortune."

"Christman's fortune?"

"Right." I stopped there. From the way he'd said it, there was more.

"Ray Christman had no fortune."

"Oh?"

"He had no fortune. He lived in church facilities and accepted only a modest salary."

I turned to my keyboard again, dumped the memory, and called up the summary article that the Times had published a few years earlier, moving to the part on Christman funneling most of the church's disposable income into personal accounts. Butzburger shook his head. "That's a lie," he said, "the sort of thing his enemies write about him." But he didn't sound confident. He was reciting Christman's PR line, and maybe, for the first time, wondering. I shrugged.

"Could be it is." I called the backup data to the screen, where he could see it too. It looked convincing. "Meanwhile I'm using it as a working assumption. And if there's not any will—maybe even if there is one—the church would get none of the money. That could account for Thomas' concern. He may want Christman to show up alive somewhere."

Butzburger was gnawing on his lower lip. "That doesn't entirely make sense. If Ray is simply in seclusion somewhere, the Church would . . ."

"Get none of it anyway. True, as far as we know. We're short on information. What I've been doing is accumulating pieces of the puzzle. Some parts of the picture are beginning to take shape. Maybe some photographs from Oregon will give us a major key.

"Now if you want, I can call Mr. Keneely. He's the man you need to tell if you want to drop the investigation." Butzburger had strong-looking hands. I was willing to bet that his early experience in construction hadn't been at a desk. Just now he was holding them in front of him, looking down at them as if searching for an answer there. "No, Mr. Seppanen," he said, "I'm not dropping out. Not now. I want to know what happened."

"Thanks. Where are we going for lunch? And when?"

I thought that might release any residual tension, and half expected him to laugh. He didn't.

"Would you prefer noon?" he asked, "or one o'clock?"

"Noon," I said. "I don't like to postpone eating."

"Noon then." He got up. "Thank you, Mr. Seppanen. I appreciate frankness and honesty in the people I do business with."

I'd recorded the meeting; it was standard practice. When Butzburger had gone, I wrote it to the case file and sent a flag to Joe's terminal so he'd know it was there.

* * *

Next I phoned Dr. Hjelmgaard: he was interested but leery, and wanted to talk to me in person. He also wanted time to investigate the firm; to see how "Charles" responded to me; and to be assured that his one-in-a-billion ward would not be endangered in any way. And he didn't want any publicity. None at all.

* * *

My lunch with Butzburger was nonbusiness. Despite being from upstate, he's a Dodgers fan, so we talked about them first, then the Raiders. Neither of us mentioned the church—we were both careful about that—and the matter of psychics never came up.

Later that day, Joe said Butzburger had told him he was glad it was me on the case, so our talk had worked out even better than I'd thought.

That afternoon, Hjelmgaard called back. He'd looked into Prudential's reputation, record, and financial condition, and been impressed. He'd also looked into my own record, came across the case of the twice-killed astronomer, and read my debrief and the prosecutor's summary report. And again had been impressed. I've gotten a lot of mileage out of that one. He ended up giving me an appointment for the next afternoon at 3:30—half-past one, Pacific Time—which meant catching a morning flight out of Hollywood-Burbank. So I left the office early and went to Gold's, where I worked out harder than a logger on piecework.

I was optimistic about my Tomasic project. It seemed to me Hjelmgaard would go for it, and that Tomasic would give us something useful. I didn't have any evidence, but that's how it felt.

22

CHARLES TOMASIC

The nonstop flight to Minneapolis took four hours, plus about thirty minutes waiting at the terminal, riding the air shuttle to the Campus Station, and walking to the ultramodern, tile-faced Steinhof Building where Hjelmgaard was located. I got to the departmental office about four minutes early, and the doctor had them bring me right over.

Being the leader of the Savant Project—they avoided the term "idiot savants"—Hjelmgaard had an office big enough to hold small conferences. He even had a silver tea service—a monument to the prosperity that had begun with the introduction of the geogravitic power converter. Hjelmgaard was a short, pink, balding blond, and wore old-fashioned on-the-nose glasses over blue eyes. I guessed his age at forty-five. He was forward without seeming aggressive, direct without being rude. After seating me and offering tea, coffee, or hot chocolate, he asked me five minutes worth of questions about myself. His questioning was skillful, and when he was done, he probably knew more about me than most people who've been around me for years.

"I think," he said, "it's time for Charles to meet you." Then he keyed his phone and waited long enough for three or four rings. "Hello, Charles. Do you remember I said a Mr. Seppanen would be here to meet you today? . . . That's right, the detective. . . . Fine. I'd like to bring him over now. . . . Good. We'll be there in five minutes."

He broke the connection. "The reason I set our appointment for three-thirty is that Charles is with his tutor till three. Usually he watches television till four, then does his homework."

Homework? I thought. The catalog had given his IQ as 64.

"He's quite interested in history and geography," Hjelmgaard went on, "but because he reads rather laboriously, with resulting poor comprehension, he listens to his homework on audio tapes designed especially for the disadvantaged. They're a little like learning tapes for the blind, but the language is simpler and the learning gradient easier. And they use visual material, computer-coordinated with maps, simple charts, and photographs or video footage. And some of the better historical and biographical documentaries. In general, our wards do quite well with them."

The apartments for the Project's savants were in a wing of the same building, across a courtyard from the office wing. In bad weather you could go from one to the other indoors, through the classroom section, which was the main or base section of the U-shaped building.

We shortcut across the courtyard, where the planters and tulip beds were splashed with red and yellow, white and violet. Some of the shrubbery was putting out new leaves. Even the young maples were tinged with green from the bud scales separating. It was about as nice a garden as you could hope for in a climate where the temperature in January averages 11 degrees. (I'm interested in weather and climate: I subscribe to the Weather Service's electronic Michigan and National Monthly Climatic Summaries, with statistics out the tubes. And to Monthly Weather Review. Hemlock Harbor, a lot farther north, averages the same January temperature as Minneapolis, but its winters arrive two weeks earlier, as defined by a normal daily temperature of 32 degrees, and end more than three weeks later. And it has a normal annual snowfall of 128 inches, compared to 51 in Minneapolis. We Upper Peninsulers are proud of our winters, especially when we've left them for places like L.A.)

Hjelmgaard showed me a little of the savants section in passing. They had their own dining room, a gymnasium and pool, a sort of small theater that handles TV, holos, and film, and a social room with an honest to God concert grand piano. According to Hjelmgaard, one of the savants came to their attention because he played the classics on the piano—Chopin, Beethoven . . . without ever having had lessons. And one of their wealthy supporters—a wide receiver on the Vikings—decided the kid needed a good piano to play on. Each savant also had a private room, with the exception of a pair of twins who were inseparable. Hjelmgaard said that in general, they needed the opportunity to be alone.

When we got to Tomasic's door, Hjelmgaard knocked politely, and a young man's voice called out, "Just a minute." To my ears, it could have been a teenager's, one not into cynicism or being "smooth." Then he let us in. Charles was medium—medium size, medium build, with medium brown hair in the currently mod "bowl cut." He thrust out a hand to shake. His grip was firm but not strong or assertive. "You're Mr. Seppanen," he said, putting the accent on the first syllable, where it belongs. From learning it by ear, I suppose, instead of seeing it in writing.

"And you're Charles Tomasic," I answered. "It's up to you, but I hope you'll call me Martti."

He grinned. "Okay. I'll call you Martti and you call me Charles. Dr. Hjelmgaard told me something about you. You're a famous detective."

I grinned back. "Not really famous. Semi-famous. And you make pictures like nobody else can."

He nodded. "Yes," he said. "Dr. Hjelmgaard says I do it even better than Ted Polemes did." He tapped his head. "That's why I don't figure things out as well as other people. Part of my brain got used to do my special thing." He looked at Hjelmgaard, who was beaming like a father. "I figured that out myself, didn't I, Clarence?"

"Yes, you did."

We sat around and talked for about twenty minutes, then Hjelmgaard excused us, and we left Charles to do his homework. "It tires him to carry on a conversation at that level for too long," Hjelmgaard said. "Then he begins to act childish, and realizes it, and tends to get upset with himself. I tell him it's all right just to be himself, that everyone has their own style, but advice like that isn't always easy to follow." He shrugged. "For any of us.

"Studying history and geography, especially cultural geography, has increased his confidence and competence in social situations. He's a very special person, entirely aside from his talent, and very interesting as well.

"He came to us at fourteen, more than five years ago. At that time his IQ was fifty-one. His father had died in the EVM plague, when Charles was only six, and his mother, who needed to work, had left him at a day care center for special children.

"His talent didn't show up until a Christmas picture—a candid shot—was taken of him with his mother and grandparents. Instead of showing them, it showed a ship at sea: a specific ship—the Alvin S. Baker of the Baldwin Transportation Company." Hjelmgaard laughed. "The uncle who took it couldn't imagine what had happened. The negative was a single frame in an uncut roll! So a week or so later he tried again and got an aircraft, an old Boeing 747. In flight, as if shot from above!"

Hjelmgaard chuckled. "His mother mentioned it to the director of the care center, not as something Charles was responsible for, but as a family mystery. But the director there had read an article, years before, about a psychic photographer, probably Polemes. Knowing of the Savant Project, she called us.

"Charles is not autistic, but he was a somewhat disturbed boy at that time. Then our Dr. Pendleton did a series of traumatic incident reductions on him—Pendleton was the first person on our staff trained for it—and it not only stabilized Charles emotionally; it caused an immediate eleven-point jump in his IQ. It's climbed several more points since then, perhaps due to his growing confidence."

We sat down in Hjelmgaard's office again. "Charles reacted very well to you, Mr. Seppanen, and you to him. You seem nicely compatible. What I need to know now is how, specifically, we would proceed. You said it wouldn't be necessary to trespass."

* * *

I wasn't even sure it would be necessary for Charles to leave his room, but according to Hjelmgaard, the Willmar murder case was the only instance in which he'd succeeded in producing a photo of an intended subject. He'd seen the murderer on television, heard about the crime, had an emotional response, and produced what might be termed "target photos." So we acted on the hope, if not the expectation, that if Charles was told about the presumed crime, and then shown the presumed site, he might give us a picture of the crime in progress.

The fee that Hjelmgaard named was $2,500, to be paid directly into a trust fund that the project had already set up for Charles. I checked it with Butzburger over the phone, and he agreed without even looking troubled. Apparently to him that was pocket money, once he'd decided it was all right to use psychics. And maybe he liked where this particular twenty-five hundred was going. A good man, Butzburger, in spite of his church.

We ended up with an agreement to do it in three days, or as soon afterward as conditions were suitable. Hjelmgaard was to come along too, of course. He wasn't charging anything for his time and services. All we had to do was cover his expenses. I also told Hjelmgaard I'd like to take along an ex-Gnostie, Fred Hamilton, to advise me as necessary. We called Hamilton at his office—he'd just gotten back from a business lunch—and Hjelmgaard and he talked for several minutes. Hamilton would remain behind if Charles didn't like him.

Then I called Joe. He had Contracts finalize the agreement then and there, and Hjelmgaard's computer received a copy with Joe's intersig. When I took off from Lindbergh that evening, I felt as if I'd done a really good day's work.

23

EVIDENCE—OF A SORT

I reserved two moderately priced suites in the New Black Angus Inn in Eugene, Oregon, one for Hamilton and myself, the other for Hjelmgaard and Charles. Our flight arrived at the airport a little after noon, half an hour ahead of theirs. We waited for them there and took a taxivan to the motel.

The idea was to go to bed early, because our chartered skyvan would take off with the four of us at 2 a.m., which meant that Hjelmgaard and Charles would have to get up at half-past midnight. Hamilton and I would make a preliminary overflight at eleven, to make sure there was no reason to postpone or cancel.