Skip jumped at the offer so eagerly that Pender was afraid he might have given them away. No real journalist would have even considered allowing a subject the equivalent of a filmmaker’s final cut.
But Oliver didn’t appear to have noticed anything amiss. He would have one of his assistants draw up an interim agreement and prepare the requisite waivers for them to sign before the ceremony, he told them. “Until then, feel free to explore our beautiful surroundings, have a soak in the world-famous hot springs. Myself, I’m going back to my cabin for my midafternoon ‘horizontal meditation,’” he added, winking broadly and bracketing the last two words with two-finger quotation marks, in case they hadn’t figured out that he was going down for a nap.
4
“Braxton is a little over a hundred miles southeast of here, in Lake County,” says the desk clerk. “I jotted down the directions for you. If you’d like a map, I could print you—Mr. Daniel? Is everything okay, Mr. Daniel?”
“What? Oh, everything’s just fine.” Except for the smirking, leathery-faced imp perched like a pet monkey on the clerk’s shoulder, making washing motions with its clever little paws. “You were saying?”
“Do you need me to print you out a map to Braxton Hot Springs?”
“That won’t be necessary.”
“Here you go, then. And if you could sign here?”
“Sure thing.” Asmador closes his eyes long enough to access his eidetic recall, and visualizes the signature on the late Peter Daniel’s Mastercard before forging it on the receipt.
The route, all state highways save for a fifteen-mile stretch of U.S. 101, is straightforward enough; the driving is anything but. The hardest part isn’t so much staying on the road as it is ignoring the distractions—the blazing fields, the writhing trees, the mocking demons. For now that his system has managed to cleanse itself after three chemical restraint–free weeks, as Dr. Hillovi predicted, Asmador’s two worlds are beginning to merge at a disconcerting pace.
But Asmador perseveres. By tucking in behind another car and copying its movements, he learns to tell the difference between the things you have to brake for—cows, stop signs, and railroad crossings—and the things you don’t, the things the other cars drive through—capering demons, smoking geysers, and heaps of offal.
A few hours after leaving Fort Bragg, Asmador spots the turnoff for Braxton Springs Road. A blacktop driveway winds for another two and a half miles, to an unpaved lot with seven parked vehicles and no attendant. Asmador jockeys the dark green Cherokee into an empty space between an old hippie bus and a white…Hot damn! Could it be? Yes, it could. Out of all the vehicles in either of his worlds, Asmador has stumbled upon the same Buick he tailed and lost in San Francisco a few days ago. Epstein’s Buick.
Scarcely able to believe his eyes or his luck, Asmador has to get out and run his hands wonderingly over the smooth metal curves of the car to convince himself it’s real. But it is—and the hood is still warm.
5
Steve Stahl, Oliver’s dour, crew-cut factotum, entered the dining hall just as Pender and Epstein were leaving. Shirtless and shoeless, wearing a terry-cloth robe over a pair of baggy surfer shorts, he held the screen door open for them, then performed an exaggerated, head-swiveling double take behind their departing backs. “Who in the name of all that’s holy was that?”
“Writers. They’re doing a book on the movement. They want to observe the ceremony tonight.”
“You turned them down, right?” said Stahl, a retired Marine captain who also functioned as Oliver’s chief son of a bitch. (Every spiritual leader has one.)
“Partially—I told them that if they wanted to stick around, they’d have to participate like everyone else.”
“You’re kidding! Did you look at them, O—there’s a pair of walking buzzkills if I ever saw one.”
“I’m quite aware of that, Steven. But this could be a major opportunity for the institute—the big break that moves us from the backwaters to the forefront of the movement.”
Oliver lifted his cup of chai to his lips, discovered it was empty, and handed it wordlessly to Stahl, who refilled it from the gleaming stainless-steel urn on the table by the wall and brought it back to him. The guru, who preferred to be called a spiritual adviser, took a sip, nodded appreciatively, then closed his eyes. He inhaled slowly and deliberately through his nostrils, then exhaled a gentle stream of air from between his pursed lips. “So rather than send them away,” he continued after a few more calming breaths, “what we need to work on is how to maximize their experience tonight while minimizing the, ah, ‘buzzkill’ effect, as you put it.”
“How much do they actually know about the ceremony?”
“Very little.”
“The sacrament?”
“I shouldn’t think so.”
“But you want them to take the sacrament, same as everybody else?”
The boss nodded ever so slightly. The icy blue eyes of the designated s.o.b. took on a hint of a sparkle. “Leave it to me, O.”
Oliver put down his cup. “That’s all I wanted to hear,” he told his aide. “But, Steven?”
“Sir?”
“Be sly. I have the distinct impression that neither of them is as stupid as he looks—particularly the stupid-looking one.”
“Understood,” said Stahl.
“Good man,” said Oliver.
6
After leaving the dining hall, Skip and Pender commandeered the golf cart for a tour of the grounds and soon discovered that Pender’s cell phone was useless even at the higher elevations. They also learned that there was no practical way of securing any of the buildings, much less the surrounding wilderness area. “Instead of flanking Oliver,” said Pender on their way back, “one of us’ll have to keep watch on the other two at all times, from concealment, if possible.”
“It should be me—I’m the better shot,” Skip pointed out.
“Only if there’s a good stationary vantage point—if not, it’ll have to be me.”
“Fair enough,” said Skip, casting a longing glance at the bathhouses coming up on their left.
Pender either caught Skip’s glance out of the corner of his eye or read his mind. “You want to take a dip while there’s still time? I can keep an eye on Oliver.”
“Why don’t we take turns?”
“I’m not that big on hot tubs or saunas,” Pender confessed. “They make me feel all watery in the knees. And to tell you the truth, I’ve never been all that comfortable taking my clothes off in mixed company.”
“What’s the matter, you afraid you’ll get a hard-on? That hardly ever happens.”
“To you, maybe,” said Pender proudly.
Up the road from the Center, on the other side of the dirt lane, there were four volcanically heated springs housed in ascending order of temperature in dim, echoey, half-timbered fieldstone bathhouses the size of one-car garages. After a mandatory shower and a dip in the lower pool, Skip worked his way up to the hottest spring, where he lay alone, submerged to his chin in steaming 113°F water, listening to the plangent echoes, watching the Tinker Bells of light dancing off the azure-tiled walls, and feeling the tension and soreness of the last forty-eight hours gradually beginning to ooze out of his aching—
Skip awoke with a gasp from a half-conscious dream in which he was being attacked by a vulture, and inhaled a mouthful of sulfury-tasting water. Splashing, floundering, coughing, windmilling his arms like a drowning man, he had just succeeded in struggling to his feet when Dr. Oliver’s statuesque assistant Candace appeared out of nowhere, naked as a jaybird, and began slapping him between the shoulder blades with one hand while guiding him toward the side of the pool with the other. “Just try to breathe normally.”
“I’m okay, really I’m okay,” protested Skip, lowering himself onto the submerged ledge that ran the circumference of the pool and patting the bandage covering the talon marks on his shoulder back into place.
Candace eased down next to him. Out of
the corner of his eye, he caught a glimpse of her magnificent young breasts bobbing on the dimly sparkling, silvery gray surface of the water. “I don’t want to interfere in your process,” she said in her soft, imaginary-gum-chewing California accent, “and no offense intended, but you seem to be wired rilly tight for some reason.”
“No, I’m fine. Just a little PTSD flashback, is all.” Posttraumatic stress disorder. “I can handle it.”
“Oh.” Candace nodded knowingly—the Oliver Institute had held a sliding-scale retreat for troubled veterans a year earlier. “Were you in Vietnam? Is that where you hurt your leg? If you don’t mind my asking.”
I’d—I’d rather not talk about the war, if that’s all right with you, Skip wanted to say, haltingly and humbly. Instead he told her the unglamorous truth, then quickly changed the subject. “About this thing tonight,” he said. “You know, I’m not really all that clear on exactly what’s supposed to happen.”
She smiled and touched his forearm lightly. “Lucky you,” she said. “You get to be surprised.”
7
For his preliminary recon, Asmador changes into a light-colored, green-and-tan camo jumpsuit. Loping silently up the path through the woods, he refuses to be distracted by the way the forest keeps bursting into flames on either side of the path, the fresh young spring leaves dancing with pale green fire, the shafts of sunlight burning like golden pillars.
Eventually the path widens out into a one-lane dirt road with a two-story, wood-and-glass building on the left and a steaming, open-air pool farther ahead on the right. Coming directly toward him down that road is a golf cart with a striped canopy. A cart being driven by—and here an eidetic image of a blown-up fragment of text from the Book flashes through Asmador’s mind as he ducks into the bushes by the side of the path—a huge fat guy wearing a loud sport coat and one of those stupid little checked hats with feathers in the brim.
Fat guy, loud jacket, checked hat—the realization scarcely has time to register before the driver pulls the cart off the road and hurries into the two-story building with the slanting roof.
Asmador can scarcely believe his luck. All three of his surviving enemies—Dr. O, Epstein, Pender—gathered in one place for his convenience. It couldn’t possibly be a coincidence, he tells himself—surely all hell must have been brought to bear to bring this about. And why? For the same reason he and the husband-and-wife team of bow hunters had converged on that lonely rest stop last night: to ensure that his mission will be carried out.
Asmador’s first inclination is to wait for Pender to emerge again, then put an arrow through him. But crouching in the bushes with his laminated bow drawn and a carbon-shafted arrow nocked, Asmador has time to mull over the probable consequences. Sure, he could kill Pender easily enough from here (unless he misses his shot: there is always that possibility). But that would put the other two on alert, and soon the place would be crawling with cops. Maybe he’d get a second shot from cover at either Epstein or Dr. O during the confusion, maybe he wouldn’t; maybe he’d have time to make it back to the Cherokee, maybe he wouldn’t.
But the powers below haven’t gone to all the trouble of arranging this miraculous confluence in order to have him pick off one victim at the cost of losing the other two, Asmador decides. No, it would be better to—
A scratching, scurrying sound breaks Asmador’s train of thought. He wheels, draws back the bowstring, aims downward at a forty-degree angle, and releases the arrow in one smooth, continuous motion. It sizzles through the shimmering, green-and-gold-dappled air and with a solid thwack! pins something furry, a large chipmunk or a small squirrel, to the base of a tree with mossy gray bark a good ten or fifteen yards away.
Or maybe missing isn’t always a possibility, Asmador tells himself as he approaches the still twitching critter. By the time he reaches it, the light has drained from its eyes. The little body looks like an empty sack of fur—the arrow, rated for a much larger mammal, has done an astounding amount of damage.
“Ouch,” Asmador squeaks aloud, as if speaking for the tiny creature—for him, that’s about as close to empathy as it gets.
8
After dropping off Skip, Pender continued on to the Center and parked the cart where he’d found it. He hopped down and buttoned his sport coat to cover his shoulder holster before entering.
The dining hall was cool and dim; the paneled walls and varnished trestle tables gave off a buttery, honey-brown glow. “Anybody home?” called Pender.
“Back here in the kitchen.”
The crew-cut, bathrobe-clad man Pender had passed in the doorway earlier was standing with his back to the room, washing a bunch of dusky red grapes in the big industrial sink. “Hi. Where’s Dr. Oliver?”
“In his cabin. Why?”
“I, uh, I just wanted to ask him a few questions about tonight’s ceremony.”
Leaving the grapes in a colander to drain, Steve dried his hands on a dish towel, then turned and extended his hand to Pender. “You’re Ed, right?”
“Right as rain.”
They shook hands. Stahl, who stood a sturdy-looking five-ten, with a weathered complexion that accentuated the arctic blue of his eyes, had a firm grip, but his hand was lost in Pender’s huge paw. “I’m Steve. I can answer any questions you may have.”
“Okay, sure,” said Pender. “How about a quick summary of what’s going to go down tonight?”
“We’re going to meet upstairs at five o’clock. O’s going to introduce you to everybody, then lead a breathing exercise. After that, we’ll hike up into the hills, to a clearing known as the Omphalos, where O will lead everybody in a Bodhisattva vow. Then comes the, uh, sacrament, then everybody chants for a while, then we head up to the bluff to watch the sunset. Then more chanting and meditation, and around ten o’clock we come back here and usually everybody dances or meditates or whatever until dawn.”
Pender had not missed the quick sideways flicker of Stahl’s eyes or the hesitation that preceded the word sacrament. “Tell me more about this sacrament,” he prompted. “What exactly does it involve?”
“A single grape, a crouton, and a drink of springwater,” said Stahl, without making eye contact.
Is he that bad a liar, Pender wondered, or is he trying to give me a heads-up here? “I see. And of those three items, which one is spiked?”
Stahl’s frosty eyes narrowed and his thin lips tightened. Then he sighed an unmistakable I-guess-you-got-me sigh. “Everybody else knows about it, so I guess there’s no reason you shouldn’t. But just to cover my ass, let’s make it a hypothetical, okay?”
“That’ll work.”
“Okay, let’s say there was a group of people doing a ceremony that involved taking a substance that might not be technically legal but in the proper setting, under the proper guidance, would help them reach a higher state of consciousness—you know, kind of open the doors of perception, as Huxley put it. Are you with me so far?”
Pender nodded—he could always ask Skip who this Huxley was, if it turned out to be important.
“Excellent. Now let’s say maybe one person was nervous about the substance-taking part of it, or just didn’t feel like he or she was ready for that. Still with me?”
“Still with you.”
“Okay, do you know what I’d advise that person?”
“I’m all ears.”
“I’d say, Don’t eat the crouton. Got it? Do not…eat…the crouton.”
“Loud and clear,” said Pender. “I appreciate the heads-up.”
“Glad to help,” said Stahl, who waited until Pender was gone before turning back to the wet grapes, which he now began to dry with a clean dish towel, one at a time, as carefully and painstakingly as if they were precious gems, or little baby eyeballs.
CHAPTER FOUR
1
Around five o’clock, Steve Stahl wrestled a six-foot-long didgeridoo out the screen door of the Center, took a deep breath, puffed out his cheeks, and blew a series of long, deep-toned, p
eritoneum-tingling hawaughhhs that resounded the length and breadth of Braxton Hot Springs. Then he rejoined Skip, Pender, Dr. Oliver, and Candace, who were watching from the glass-enclosed second story as the trainees converged on the building, strolling down the dirt road or climbing the lightly wooded slope leading up from the campground in the woods behind the Center. They were all dressed in comfortable-looking cotton meditation outfits similar to those worn by Oliver and his aides, and carried coats and sweaters over their arms.
Laughing and chattering, the trainees climbed the open-treaded spiral staircase to the second floor, where sage and sandalwood incense burned in bowls and a small boom box played a CD of ethereal Steve Reich space music. Fat, round meditation pillows known as zafus were already arranged in a circle; the atmosphere was intense, charged with nervous energy as the trainees took their places.
“Namasté,” said Dr. Oliver, seating himself cross-legged on a white zafu with an incense bowl and a small silver bell in front of it. His meditation pajamas were white, Steve and Candace wore royal blue, and the ten trainees were dressed in pale orange.
“Namasté,” the others echoed, lightly pressing their palms and fingers together in a prayerful mudra.
“It’s so good to see your shining faces. Let’s take a few calming breaths, taking in peace through the nostrils, letting out ego through the mouth. Eyes shut? Here we go…”
Pender had seated himself next to Oliver. Skip was sitting directly across the circle, his good leg folded and his withered leg outstretched, with the toe of his built-up shoe pointing straight up. He opened his eyes after a few seconds, caught Pender looking back at him, and winked.
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