by John Dalmas
"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 in
to 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.
&
nbsp; 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.