Cult Following

by Donn Cortez

  “Oh, I know what you did, Albert. You got caught—caught smoking hashish in Doctor Sinhurma’s home. And he didn’t like that, did he? He demoted you to washing pots and pans in the restaurant. You’d think that might stop you, but no—you kept on doing it. A little hot-knifing off a portable torch with your pal Samuel Lucent when no one else was around—what did you do, stay late to clean up and drive your own car back to the compound, or did he give you a ride?”

  “You can’t believe what he says. He’s not—not—”

  “Not what? One of you? No, he does his own thinking…. but you needed him, didn’t you? Needed someone to sell you drugs. Needed someone to get high with. Is that when you got the idea to kill Phil Mulrooney? The whole rocket-and-lightning idea sounds like the kind of thing someone would cook up when they were stoned….”

  “It wasn’t like that.”

  “Really? That’s not what the evidence says. The evidence places those jumper cables in your hands—”

  “I connected them, all right?” Humboldt gave him an aggrieved look. “I attached the clamps to the pipe and to a device on the roof. But that’s hardly a crime.”

  “Considering it led to an event that stopped Phillip Mulrooney’s heart, I think a jury would disagree with you…but for the sake of argument, let’s say you’re right. How would you explain your actions?”

  “I was simply carrying out a task. I had no knowledge of any rocket or even what that pipe was connected to. And at the time I performed that task, Phillip wasn’t even in the bathroom. That’s not murder.”

  Horatio studied him intently for a moment. “And what, exactly, did you think was the purpose of your task?”

  “I didn’t know. I didn’t need to know.” Humboldt smiled. “It was part of a larger pattern; my heart told me I was doing the right thing.”

  “Right. You know what the military calls that, Albert? Plausible deniability. You claim you didn’t really know the consequences of your actions, that you were ‘out of the loop.’ But someone told you to place those cables…and I’m going to find out who.”

  “Is that all you want?” Albert said, his smile widening. “Why don’t you just ask me?”

  Horatio smiled back.

  “Dooley! Listen, I really am a police officer—”

  “YEAH? COPS ALWAYS SNEAK AROUND WITH DUFFEL BAGS FULLA STOLEN DOPE?”

  “I don’t have any of your drugs, Dooley!”

  “YOUR BUDDY SURE DID! RIPPED UP FIFTEEN OF MY BEST PLANTS BEFORE I CAUGHT HIM!”

  “Look, I don’t have anything to do with the man you shot!”

  “NOT ANYMORE, YOU DON’T—’LESS YOU PLAN ON GOIN’ TO HIS FUNERAL! WHICH YOU AIN’T GONNA HAVE THE CHANCE TO DO ANYHOW!”

  A shot cracked out. She tried to keep as much of the tree between her and Dooley as she could, but it wasn’t that thick; she had to find better cover.

  Sounded like all he had was a handgun, which was good. She’d only gotten a brief look at it, from a distance, but she’d seen it was a large revolver; from the full-length underbarrel lug and stainless steel finish it was probably a Colt King Cobra.

  Two point six pounds, empty. Six-round cylinder, double action, good to around a hundred and fifty feet. You can chamber it for a .38-caliber, but it’s a cowboy gun—he’ll be using the full 357 Magnums. He’s got the six-inch barrel—too bad, the four-inch would have cut down on his accuracy. Not that he’s hit anything farther away than point-blank, so far.

  She looked around. There was a fallen tree to her left, which looked like good cover but wasn’t—rotten wood wouldn’t slow a 357 down enough to matter. It would hide her, but that was about it—and if he saw her duck behind it, she’d be out of luck.

  Just past the fallen log, though, was a slight depression in the ground, with a boulder on the edge of it. Taken together, they should provide enough protection if she lay prone…but she’d have to cross his field of fire to get there.

  Probably had his gun fully loaded. Might have fired a shot at the thief to get his attention, but probably not—Dooley seems more like a “Fire first, ask questions later” kind of guy. He’s fired two shots at me, and one to kill the thief, which leaves him with three shots—unless he’s reloading right now. Better not give him the chance.

  She fired a quick two shots off in his direction. He responded, as she expected, with two shots of his own—and then she was sprinting toward the fallen log.

  The last bullet sprayed her with decaying wood as she darted past the log, and then she was down in the pine needles, behind sheltering gray rock.

  “WHERE YOU GOIN’, TOAST? YOU WANNA BE CAREFUL OUT HERE—NEVER KNOW WHAT YOU MIGHT RUN INTA!”

  Traps. He’s talking about traps.

  She looked around cautiously—then froze.

  Less than a foot from where she sprawled, an almost invisible monofilament line was suspended six inches or so above the ground. It was so fine, at first she thought it was a spiderweb…but then she followed it to the hollow base of a stump. Something was inside—something hidden except for a single metal corner that stuck out. A metal corner painted a flat khaki green.

  She had a pretty good idea what the object would look like when exposed: metal, smaller than a shoebox, with the words THIS SIDE TOWARD ENEMY stenciled on it in big white letters.

  Antipersonnel mine. This guy’s playing for keeps.

  “IF YOU GO OUT IN THE WOODS TODAY, YER IN FOR A BIG SURPRISE….”

  And he’s singing “The Teddy Bear’s Picnic” at me. I almost wish I’d tripped the mine…

  “IF YOU GO OUT IN THE WOODS TODAY, YOU’LL GET IT BETWEEN THE EYES!”

  All right, then—no more running around. She’d stay where she was, and wait him out. Sooner or later Stainsby would be back with reinforcements—all she had to do was hang on until then. Maybe she could even learn a few things in the meantime.

  “Hey, Dooley! You planning on serenading me to death?”

  A bullet spanged off the rock in response. Well, he knew where she was—and he obviously had more bullets.

  “YOU GONNA BE SORRY YOU EVER CAME UP HERE, TOAST!”

  The only thing I’m sorry about is that I didn’t bring a little more firepower with me…. “You might want to ask yourself how I found this place, Dooley!”

  Silence.

  Then, “WHAT THE HELL’S THAT SUPPOSE T’MEAN?”

  “Think about it!” she called back. If that’s possible.

  It was a calculated gamble. Dooley might assume she’d got the information from Joseph Welfern—but that would be a correct assumption, and so far Dooley hadn’t made too many of those. If, on the other hand, he made the same kind of wrongheaded guess he’d been making so far—

  “THAT GODDAMN LITTLE PEAR-SHAPED BASTARD! I’M GONNA KILL HIM DEADER’N I KILL YOU! NOBODY SELLS ME OUT!”

  Calleigh smiled.

  “And why should I believe you?” Horatio asked. “Forgive my skepticism, but it seems to me that one of Doctor Sinhurma’s tenets is loyalty…so what would make you suddenly betray one of your own?”

  Humboldt gave him a superior look. “He was never one of us, not really. The best strategy is to turn an enemy’s strength against him—that’s the only reason he was allowed to join.”

  “The only reason you recruited him, you mean….” Horatio frowned. “That was Ruth Carrell’s job, wasn’t it? She brought him in, made him feel welcome—on Sinhurma’s orders.”

  “Doctor Sinhurma had nothing to do with this.”

  “Forget it, Albert. That dog won’t hunt. You might think you can pin this whole thing on a martyr, but that’s not going to happen.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Humboldt said primly. “The person who told me to connect those cables obviously hates our organization and is trying to destroy it.”

  “I thought you were following your heart, Albert. Which is it? Were you doing the right thing on the orders of your leader, or doing the wrong thing because you were ignorant of th
e facts?”

  “I—I was doing as I was told.”

  “By whom?”

  Humboldt locked eyes with Horatio. “His name is McKinley. Jason McKinley, the rocket expert.”

  Calleigh thought she had a pretty good idea where Dooley was located now. From the sound of his voice and the angle of the shots, she thought he was holed up in a deer blind, about twenty feet above the ground, around a hundred yards away. She was lucky; the terrain sloped up toward her, negating most of his height advantage—otherwise, he could have taken his time and picked her off. As it was, they were almost at the same level.

  Except he was sitting up in a tree.

  She thought she could make out the shape of the blind, a slightly darker, squarish blob in the trees, no doubt covered with camouflage netting. She wondered why he was still using the Magnum; a sentry post like that one should have a rifle with a scope in it at the very least.

  Maybe it does. Maybe he’s trying to draw me in closer, get a better shot.

  Maybe he’s not as dumb as he sounds.

  “I’M COMIN’ TA GET YA, TOAST! AIN’T NO PLACE TA HIDE!”

  The voice didn’t sound any nearer. He was obviously trying to get her to rabbit, maybe stumble into one of his traps—which gave her an idea.

  “You just stay where you are!” she yelled. She tried to put just a little fear in her voice. “I’ve got friends coming!”

  “SURE YA DO! CAN’T WAIT TA MEET ’EM!”

  She scooted to the side, careful to avoid the trip wire, and examined the mine. There were hundreds of varieties of antipersonnal mines, and she wasn’t familiar with all of them—but lucky for her, this was one she recognized. It was an M18 Claymore with a simple trigger: pull on the wire, activate the mine. She took a deep breath, reached out and grabbed the metal box, lifting it up slowly.

  Nothing happened. She let her breath out and put the box down, facing away from her, with the trip wire no longer taut. Then, keeping low, she crawled back to where the other end of the line was attached. She clipped it off with a multitool from her pocket, and hung on to the end.

  “You stay away!” she yelled, crawling as far from the mine as she could without exposing herself. She plugged both her ears with her fingers—and yanked on the line.

  THWOOM!

  A Claymore was loaded with seven hundred steel balls that could turn a target into hamburger from 150 feet away. Fortunately, they were directional, spraying their shrapnel into an arc in front of them—the only thing Calleigh had destroyed was some foliage.

  “HA! YOU RUN INTO A LITTLE SURPRISE, TOAST?”

  She kept quiet.

  “TOAST?”

  Okay, Mister Dooley—it’s your move. Come on down and take a look for yourself.

  And then you’ll get a little surprise of your own….

  “What was that name, H?” Wolfe asked.

  “Jason McKinley,” Horatio said.

  Wolfe scanned the membership list he’d gotten from the rocketeer club. “McKinley, McKinley…yeah, here it is. Jason McKinley. Who is he?”

  “At the moment, our prime suspect,” Horatio said. “I talked to him about rocket-triggered lightning, but at the time he had no connection to the case—he was just a resource.” And the last time we talked, you weren’t having an allergy attack, were you? You’d been crying—in mourning for Ruth. Somehow, you kept it together during our conversation, then got rid of me as quickly as you could.

  Horatio was on the move, striding down the corridor and toward the stairs. Wolfe hurried to keep up.

  “Looks like you weren’t the only one to draw on his expertise,” Wolfe said. “If Kim is really as clueless about rockets as he seemed, then McKinley must be the one who built the rocket.”

  “Which is why he was recruited into the organization in the first place,” Horatio said, taking the stairs two at a time. “Somebody aimed Ruth Carrell at him like a missile—and from what she told me, it was Sinhurma himself.”

  Wolfe and Horatio exited the building together. “What do you want me to do?” Wolfe asked.

  Horatio headed straight for his Hummer. “Get a search warrant for Jason’s home address,” he said as he yanked open the door and climbed in. “I’ll meet you there. I’m going to check out the place he works first.”

  The big silver vehicle roared off. Wolfe sprinted back inside.

  “Dammit,” Horatio said under his breath. Should have checked that membership list personally. He knew that it wasn’t always possible to have each and every scrap of information in an investigation undergo his personal scrutiny—and there hadn’t been any obvious reason to flag McKinley as a suspect—but he hated it when something important slipped past him.

  Or someone.

  The question now was the extent of Jason’s involvement. He hadn’t seemed like the rest of the Vitality Method patients, obsessed with appearance and popularity—but that was probably what made him an easy target. Having someone like Ruth pay attention to him was probably all the encouragement necessary; no drugs or fasting needed.

  Despite its science-fiction trappings, the lightning-rocket stunt wasn’t that hard to pull off. It was entirely possible that Jason had been used only as a source of information, and that someone else built and launched the rocket. Except…

  Except someone else wouldn’t have used a custom blend of fuel. That was the mark of a tinkerer, of someone who knew what he was doing and was always trying to do it a little better.

  He didn’t want to believe Jason was guilty. It was somehow easier to think of him as a victim than a killer—someone who’d been used for his knowledge and then discarded.

  Maybe Jason was an innocent dupe. Or maybe Sinhurma’s influence had corrupted him much further than Horatio wanted to admit…and that was the crux of what was really bothering him. That a decent, rational man—a man of science—could have his intelligence subverted by Sinhurma’s brand of shallow, egocentric nonsense just stuck in Horatio’s craw.

  But loneliness could get to anyone. Reason and logic couldn’t keep you warm at night…and all the precision and symmetry of the laws of physics could vanish in the depths of a pair of green eyes.

  He didn’t know how deep Jason had gotten.

  But he was going to find out.

  Kyle “Dooley” Dolittle was no fool.

  No, sir. He’d heard the Claymore detonate, and he was pretty sure it had blown that thieving little tramp’s legs off, but that didn’t mean he was going to take anything for granted. No, he was going to go down and check on the body personally, make sure she was dead. Then…well, he wasn’t exactly certain what he was going to do. Maybe grab as many plants as he could and hightail it out of here—maybe stick around and shoot anyone else that showed up.

  The deer blind worked just fine for that. It would’ve worked even better if he hadn’t gotten bored sitting up there and used up all the rifle ammo shooting at birds and squirrels, but hell—he didn’t figure anyone would actually show up and try to rip him off. And he still had the Cobra, didn’t he? Big-ass handgun wasn’t too good at long range, but it worked just fine close up. It was all he’d needed to kill the first poacher, and it would take care of anybody else that got in his way, too.

  He climbed down with the gun stuck in the waistband of his jeans, jumping the last few feet and landing with a thump. He drew the gun immediately and started making his way forward, darting from tree to tree. If she was still alive, she might try to shoot him as her last act—and while he could respect that, it didn’t really fit into his plans.

  The light seemed unnaturally bright to him; adrenaline plus the speed he’d been popping for the last two days had his heart racing like a Harley on a mountain road. His skin was all atingle and he swore he could feel the hair on his head growing.

  He wondered who the hell the guy in the helicopter had been. Whoever he was, Dooley was going to track him down and put a bullet between his eyes—nobody but nobody ripped him off. Not even somebody with a helicopter.
/>   And how the hell did they figure they were going to land, anyway? There wasn’t even a dirt track leading to this place, let alone a patch big and flat enough to land a chopper. He and Jimbo had to pack the whole damn crop out by hand, and when they were this close to harvest they took turns guarding it twenty-four/seven.

  He stopped for a second and considered whether or not Jimbo had sold him out. He’d known the guy for twenty years and done time with him too, but anything was possible. Maybe he’d have to have a little talk with his partner after he was done burying the bodies.

  He approached cautiously. The trees around where the mine had blown looked like someone with a shotgun had been using them for target practice.

  Funny, though—he thought he’d placed this Claymore facing more toward the east—

  “Drop the gun, Dooley,” a soft Southern voice said from behind him. “Don’t make me shoot you in the head.”

  He let the Magnum fall to the ground, cursing as he did so.

  “Now turn around.” He did, slowly.

  There was no one there.

  “And look up.”

  A blond woman was perched in the branches of a tree, pointing a gun down at him steadily. “High ground is always a good idea—but you don’t always need a platform. I was quite the tree climber when I was younger.” She sighed. “But I’m not happy, Dooley. I think I’ve ruined these pants.”

  “Guess you’re gonna shoot me now, huh?”

  She tossed down something that landed at his feet with a metallic clink. “Depends. If you cuff yourself to the nearest tree and promise to behave yourself until my backup arrives, probably not.” Her voice got a little colder. “On the other hand, if you call me ‘Toast’ one more time, all bets are off.”

  11

  “I’M SORRY,” Doctor Wendall told Horatio, “But I haven’t seen Jason in two days. He’s just vanished.”

  Horatio was in Wendall’s office at the Atmosphere Research Technologies. The scientist rubbed the top of his smooth skull and added, “I really don’t know where he would be. Is he involved in the case you were telling me about?”