The greater the suspense, the better the sleight of hand.
And the tighter the control.
The men gazed toward the stage.
Shaw thought of the office off the Study Room. What would he find there?
And there was a computer. If Shaw could get online he’d contact Mack McKenzie, who could alert Tom Pepper. His friend in turn would call colleagues at the Bureau and the Washington State Patrol.
Samuel asked Shaw, “Your journaling is going well?”
“I think so. It’s difficult.”
“Now that you’re an Apprentice, you know we’ll be looking for Minuses and Pluses from past lives. Those are always trickier. Is this a real memory, or from a John Wayne movie I saw as a kid? They’re more subtle, harder to find. We’ll do it, though. I often say the Process is about clearing the fog.”
“Your metaphors get better by the hour, Journeyman Samuel.”
The man laughed.
Shaw asked, “Were you a counsellor or therapist before you joined the Foundation?”
“Me? No. I was a teacher. Middle school. Master Eli taught me everything I learned about training and the Process.”
“I’ve heard glowing reports about you as a trainer,” Frederick told him. His mannerisms were natural, understated, his voice calm. A natural actor.
“Ah, now you’re making a fat old man blush.”
Shaw said he looked forward to the forthcoming sessions, putting what he saw as the right amount of joyful anticipation into his face, which seemed to please the trainer.
Samuel probably knew nothing of Eli’s murderous nature. He would be aware of the cult leader’s sexual appetites and blunt, egotistical behavior, of course, but, as Frederick had just suggested, those were typically just part and parcel of a visionary’s personality.
Shaw looked over the crowd once more. Still no sign of Victoria.
Frederick said, “I was just thinking, Journeyman Samuel. If enough people go through the Process, after the whole world is trued-up, maybe sadness can be eliminated entirely. Like we did with smallpox.”
Samuel looked thoughtful. “We can only hope, Journeyman Frederick. Though that would, of course, put me out of a job.” He winked.
The clapping started. Shaw was standing near a speaker and realized that this time someone had placed a microphone near clapping hands; the sound was especially piercing.
“The best . . .” Clap, clap, clap. “. . . is yet to come.”
“The best . . .”
“. . . is yet to come.”
The droning words and the slapping of palms rose in volume. Thirty seconds, a minute. Two.
Then the rhythmic clapping degenerated into frenzied applause.
Eli climbed onto the stage, turning to the audience and giving the salute. Once again, he glowed in the beam of artificial light from on high.
He then lifted his hands, smiling and nodding. As before, he pointed to certain people in the audience, blessing them with his attention.
That confident face.
Not the face of a murderer. But then Colter Shaw had seen plenty of killers who looked downright angelic.
“Greetings, Companions. Greetings!”
Slowly the sound faded.
“I’m making an important announcement today. I’ve got something . . . You’re going to like this. You’re going to love this. I guarantee it!”
“We love you, Master Eli!”
“We’re with you, forever!”
“Our Guiding Beacon!”
Eli’s hand rose. His right only. The gesture resembled a Nazi salute.
The Companions quieted.
“I’ve brought us to the most successful year ever, with the most Journeymen graduating from training and moving into the world to live better, happier lives.”
Now, cheers and frenzied clapping.
“I know what you want, I know what you need. And I’m giving it to you. I am proving to the Toxics of the world, the lying religions, the selfish politicians, the pernicious charlatans . . . You know ‘pernicious’? I love that word. Means evil. But sounds worse than ‘evil,’ doesn’t it? I think so.”
Laughter.
“The Process proves that what they’re trying to sell you is . . . manure!”
The ICs booed a bit, and the crowd took it up.
No chant with that, though Shaw wouldn’t have been surprised if Eli had encouraged one.
“I am now going to take our family to a higher level.”
Didn’t the Manson cult refer to themselves as family?
“I am announcing here the formation of the Osiris Foundation Circle of Representatives. This will be an elite group of Companions who will meet with me on a daily basis and help me in planning our expansion around the country . . . and eventually the world.”
Shaw and Frederick shared a look.
“And I am delighted to announce that the Director of the Circle will be one of our most loyal servants, a trainer who’s distinguished herself.” Eli began to applaud as he looked to the area behind the stage where a middle-aged woman stood.
“Come up here, Journeyman Marion!”
Beaming and blushing, she did so and gave the salute to the frenzied crowd.
“Journeyman Marion is one of the best. Don’t we love her? Who’s been trained by Journeyman Marion? Let’s see it! Look at all those hands. Look at them! I picked her, you know. I saw her, talked to her for three minutes, only three minutes. And I knew she was a born Journeyman and trainer.”
The chant stretched the word Marion out. The woman, intoxicated with happiness, waved to the crowd.
Eli then recited the names of the other four Companions who would form the group. “Come on up here! Join Journeyman Marion and me!”
They did, two men and two women, all in their forties, as surprised as Marion had been. Apparently caught off guard, all they could think to do was offer the shoulder salute.
Eli called, “Later today, we’ll have a formal induction ceremony, and I’ll ask each of you to tell me, in your own words, what the Foundation means to you. And if I’ve helped your life even in a small way . . . I want to know.” He was laughing. “Congratulations, my beloved Companions. Remember, the best . . .”
“. . . is yet to come!”
Eli strode off the stage, trailed by Anja and Steve. They joined the bodyguards and the group headed south.
When Shaw was sure no one was in earshot, he said to Frederick, “I’m going to get inside the residence. Can you try to get a phone from the luggage room?”
“Oh, you were in the woods, you don’t know. After the police showed up, they moved the phone storage box into the Assistance Unit. It’s guarded twenty-four/seven now.”
Shaw sighed. “Try the parking lot, see if anyone left one inside a car. I know they were searched but maybe somebody got careless.”
“But the AUs in the front.”
“Looks like a lot of them’ve been pulled off their details.”
“Well, the cars’re locked, aren’t they? And the keys are with the AUs too.”
Shaw said, “Some of the older ones won’t have alarms.”
He frowned. Then it dawned on him. “Oh, you mean break in.”
Shaw saw the man liked the idea. He explained to Frederick how he could take the path to the eastern edge of the wooden fence and then circle around to get to the parking lot.
Frederick thought for a moment. “You know. It’s going to be hard to tell if there’s an alarm. What if I got underneath, popped the hood and used something metal to short out the battery?”
“Good. Were you a mechanic before joining the Foundation?”
“I was a Mafia hitman.”
A line delivered with such a straight face that Shaw thought for a second it was true.
Frederi
ck smiled at Shaw’s reaction. “I managed a chain of frozen yogurt shops. Yo-Grrrrt.” He spelled it, as he would have done a thousand times. “Our logo was a happy bear. Where should we meet?”
“Behind my dorm. Building C. Make it an hour.”
Frederick nodded and vanished into the woods. Shaw turned east, disappearing into the line of trees that paralleled that edge of the camp. Then south, along the hidden path, toward the residence.
It turned out, though, that he’d have to wait. Eli, Steve and the two bodyguards were standing in a deserted grassy area on the eastern side of the residence. Eli was dictating, and Steve nodded fiercely as he transcribed. From where they stood, they’d be able to see Shaw break from the line of trees, heading for the back door, if any of them happened to glance that way.
Just then a faint scream rose from the far side of the residence, the west. Instantly, Squat and Gray turned. Gray’s bony left hand tugged up his tunic and his right was poised to draw his weapon. It was a small Glock, Shaw could see. He’d been right about the gun.
The two bodyguards and Steve hurried in the direction of the scream, Gray motioning Eli to stay back. Eli’s attention was focused away from the back of the residence, and Shaw started in that direction. But he stopped. He noticed motion in the woods not far from him. It was furtive and slow, careful. The movement of a stalking hunter—very much how Shaw himself pursued game, hunched over, making a small profile, assessing the quietest place to plant his feet, assessing which foliage would rustle and which would not.
Never be obvious.
Shaw froze, hardly believing what he was looking at.
The hunter was Victoria, hair tied into a severe bun. She eased closer to the clearing where Eli stood, thirty feet away. The leader’s back was to her.
In her hand was a knife. It seemed she too had stolen one from the kitchen but unlike his this was a lengthy butcher knife. From the discolored and uneven edge, Shaw knew that she’d spent quite some time honing the edge on a rock to turn the weapon scalpel sharp.
55.
She was moving forward steadily. Her posture and her movement told Shaw she was an experienced stalker.
Victoria was presently twenty feet away from Eli and closing the distance steadily, while keeping absolutely silent.
A voice called to Eli, “Just a fire, small one.” It was Steve speaking.
“Anyone hurt?”
“No. Just trash in a waste bin. Somebody sneaking a smoke maybe.”
Shaw judged distances. Soon, Victoria would break from cover, charge forward, and slash the Guiding Beacon to death.
The woman held the knife with the sharp edge up. This was proper hand-to-hand combat technique. She would come up behind him, cup his forehead and pull his head back, while simultaneously slashing his throat from ear to ear. It was a simple move and one that required little effort, provided you had surprise, which she certainly would if she could make a silent approach.
Who the hell was she really? Obviously not the vulnerable supplicant Shaw had believed. Whatever her motive, though, he could see that her mission would end in her death, not Eli’s. From where she was, she couldn’t see that Gray and Steve had paused just around the corner of the residence. Now that the “emergency” had turned minor, they were about to return. They’d see Victoria on the move and she’d be shot to death.
No time to formulate a percentage of success for one strategy or another.
Shaw circled behind her—picking out a silent path himself—and when he was ten feet away, he charged. By the time she heard, it was too late to turn and assume a defensive posture. He dropped her to the ground with a serviceable tackle. They tumbled into a pile of leaves.
The collision left her breathless, Shaw too—all the more so when she drove a well-placed elbow into his gut. With lightning-fast reflexes she leapt to her feet and tried to put distance between herself and her attacker—the first rule of meeting a surprise assault. Shaw, though, grabbed her ankle, twisted slightly and she went down, following the pressure rather than resisting and risking a dislocation.
One second later she was on her feet again, and in classic knife-fighting position: left hand out for distraction and gripping her enemy, her right slashing the air between them, back and forth.
Her face tightened and she glanced quickly at Eli and saw Steve round the corner. She was taking a measure of the distance between herself and her target.
“You would’ve died,” Shaw whispered.
“I could’ve made it.”
“No, you wouldn’t.”
“Yes, I would,” she said defiantly.
Shaw whispered, “He’s armed. The gray-haired one. Maybe the other one too.”
“I know,” she growled softly. “I saw the imprint. His partner isn’t.”
She kept the blade pointed his way and looked again at her prey. It seemed she was still contemplating the attack.
Then a look of disgust crossed her face and her shoulders slumped. She rose from the fighting position. She wrapped the blade in a napkin and slipped it into her back waistband.
She watched the men continue their conversation as they resumed their walk to the residence. The guards joined them. Apparently the fire was out.
Shaw walked closer to Victoria.
When she slapped him, with all her strength, it seemed, her palm was slightly cupped and the blow gave a sharp snap, which was every bit as loud and staccato as the rhythmic clapping that accompanied the Inner Circle’s chants.
56.
I get it now. It was you.”
“Me?” Shaw asked.
“You fucking drugged me to keep me out of the Study Room. To save my honor. Jesus Christ, where are we? Back in the 1950s?” Her voice was a furious rasp.
He looked around. “Not here. We’re too exposed.”
She calmed enough to consider his words. She asked, “Dormitories?”
“Could be bugged.”
“The cliff where you were stalking me,” she said pointedly.
Ten minutes later they had hiked up the hill to the bench overlooking the vast panorama and the mountains in the distance. One peak was particularly noble in the glass-clear air. No one else was present on the bluff.
“What was it?” Victoria asked.
“The drug? Verbena.”
“I thought I tasted something. Damn it. I’ve used pokeweed berries for the same thing. They have a better flavor but—”
“They’re deep purple. Telltale.”
How did she know this? The number of people in the country who needed to use emetic herbs in the field was extremely limited, Shaw assumed.
“I think we’ve established you’re not a librarian.”
Victoria dismissed his flippant comment with a wave of her hand. “I do security consulting. And something tells me you know what a security consultant does.”
“The blade. You honed it on a rock, not a whetstone. Where’d you learn that, the Army?”
“YouTube.” Her voice was mocking.
“And you kept calling Eli ‘sir.’”
She shrugged in concession. “True. Screwed up there.”
Victoria’s eyes were scanning for threats around them, head tilting slightly at sounds, dismissing them as natural and nonthreatening. This woman knew her skills.
Shaw supposed he’d had a clue that Victoria wasn’t quite who she seemed to be. After she’d been sick in the dining hall, he’d noted the wave of fury that appeared briefly on her face. Suggesting she was someone a bit different from the vulnerable, submissive woman she’d been presenting to the world.
“So. What’re you doing here?” Shaw lifted his palms.
Her internal debate concluded. “Somebody I was close to, she graduated from this bullshit place. She took the ‘goodbye until tomorrow’ thing seriously.”
“I’m sorry.”
She dismissed the sentiment with a scoff. “She was at a low time. She would’ve come out of it. Just a little more work, a little more help. But she chose different. So I signed on, got myself a blue uniform and started looking for the chance to kill him.” Her voice was ice. “I needed to get him alone, away from his guards and that little hobbit, Steve.”
“The Study Room. Just you and your knife.”
“No knife there. I can use my hands. It just takes a little longer.” Her shrewd gray eyes swiveled his way. “Not necessarily a bad thing.”
“You’re taking a big risk for revenge.”
“You can minimize risk by planning ahead.”
That, he agreed with.
“Okay,” she said, “that’s my story. What’s yours?”
Shaw had to laugh. “I came here to save you.”
57.
Shaw told her he had been on the cliff when Adam Harper had killed himself.
Victoria was nodding. “I told you I didn’t know him. That was true, though I knew about him. He was coming back for one of those rejuvenation sessions. And bringing a recruit. I went along to pick them up. It was a cover to help me figure out an escape route after I killed Eli. I hadn’t planned on giving up car keys and cell phone when I checked in.”
“I saw you and Hugh. Bullying you. Little free with the hands too. I heard about his demerit system.”
“He’s a pig. Adam had just died and he wanted me to go down on him when we got back to camp, you can believe it. He gave me five demerits when I said no. Took all my willpower to keep from crushing his windpipe or throwing him over the cliff myself.”
She then frowned. “But we only saw Adam, or his body. What happened to the person with him?”
“I took him back to Tacoma.”
“So who am I to you?”
“Somebody who shouldn’t be mixed up in something like this. Or so I thought. Adam died. From what I learned about cults, I thought maybe he’d been brainwashed or bullied. I didn’t want anybody else to end up like him. Then the more I learned, the more I decided Eli had to go.” He explained about the horrific murder of John.
The Goodbye Man Page 25