Cult Following

by Donn Cortez

  So Sinhurma steps into the void created by Ruth’s death. He offers peace-filled answers in a world suddenly filled with violent questions…and somehow convinces Jason that the cult couldn’t possibly be responsible.

  But someone is. It wasn’t a bolt from the blue that killed Ruth, it was an arrow. Jason must know she was murdered—so who does he think killed her?

  Whoever Sinhurma points his finger at.

  Whoever gets branded the serpent…

  Every now and then, Calleigh would have a moment when she would step back, mentally shake her head and say, “Wow. I feel like I’m living in a science fiction novel.” Despite all the high-tech equipment she worked with on a regular basis, occasionally a particular process or piece of technology would just strike her as being a little surreal.

  Like bombarding a piece of evidence with radiation.

  The process was called neutron activation analysis. Its purpose was to detect and measure the gamma ray level of any given substance, thus identifying the elements it was composed of.

  First, she put each sample in a dark bottle with a 25 percent solution of nonionic detergent and shook the contents up thoroughly. When she was done, she carefully removed each sample from its bottle with a pair of plastic forceps, and rinsed it five times in deionized water. Then they went into a desiccator, under a vacuum, to dry.

  When they were ready, she sealed them in reactor-grade polyethylene containers for bombardment in a pneumatic irradiation reactor. There, a process called the neutron capture reaction would cause thermal neutrons to collide with the target, forming a compound nucleus. The new nucleus would be in an excited state, causing it to emit one or more gamma rays; by using a gamma ray detector and a computer program to compare it with the known half-lives of radioactive materials, she could tell exactly what element was now radiating.

  The GPS unit in Horatio’s hand told him they were approaching the right area. The ocean was close enough that though they couldn’t see them, they could hear waves crashing against the beach; the wind had picked up and the barometric pressure had dropped. They angled to one side, paralleling the coastline.

  “Stay alert and stay quiet,” Horatio said. “We may hear them before we see them—and we don’t want them to hear us first.”

  A sharp crack sounded in the distance. Horatio narrowed his eyes, listening intently. Several more followed in quick succession.

  “Gunshots?” Wolfe said.

  “I don’t think so,” Horatio said. “More like a hammer on rock…”

  They followed the sound. When Horatio thought they were close enough, they beached the boats on a muddy spit of land and proceeded on foot, guns drawn.

  They were very close to the shore. The Everglades existed on a broad, flat plain, a lip of limestone encircling it and providing a natural dike. That lip rose up before them now, crested by dunes that provided cover while they surveilled the activity on the other side.

  What they saw were three house trailers on a large, raised wooden platform, arranged in a U-shaped formation facing down the beach. A wooden boardwalk on stilts ran in a straight line from the platform into the ocean itself, extending at least fifty yards from the shore.

  Cult members were hard at work. Most of them were on the beach itself, using picks, shovels and sledgehammers to excavate or break up limestone boulders; others would load chunks of rock into a wheelbarrow, which would then be trundled up a ramp and down the boardwalk to the very end, where it would be dumped into the sea. They reminded Horatio of a line of busy ants.

  “What do they think they’re doing?” Wolfe whispered.

  “Building paradise,” Horatio said. “Unless I miss my guess, Sinhurma’s trying to construct an island.”

  “That’s insane,” Delko said softly.

  “For a control freak like Sinhurma, it almost makes sense,” Horatio said. “Like having your own little country…”

  “Except it’s still inside the boundaries of a national park,” Delko said. “Which is all kinds of illegal right there.”

  “We’ll add it to the list,” Horatio said. “I count seventeen bodies down there, but I don’t see Jason McKinley, Caesar Kim or the doctor. They must be inside one of the trailers.”

  “How’d they get all this stuff out here anyway?” Wolfe asked.

  “Must have used a barge,” Delko guessed. “Build the support structure first, then come in at high tide when the water’s deepest and use a crane to unload the trailers directly onto the platform.”

  The leader of the SWAT team, a burly man named Hernandez with a thick, black mustache, moved over beside Horatio. “How do you want to play this?” he asked.

  “Divide and conquer,” Horatio said. “We’ll take them in three teams—half of your men isolate the ones on the beach, the other half pin down the people on the boardwalk. We’ll concentrate on the trailers.”

  “Targets on the pier’ll be easy,” Hernandez said. “No place for ’em to go except the surf. The ones on the beach might have weapons, though—a lot of tall grass down there. And there could be anything in those trailers.”

  “Then let’s hope the doctor is a lousy shot,” Horatio said.

  The thunder was almost constant now, which Horatio was grateful for; it helped disguise the sound of their movements. With the element of surprise on their side, it was possible they could take the whole group into custody without bloodshed.

  The first of Hernandez’s teams moved into position, creeping into place as close as they could get to the group on the beach but still in sight of Horatio. He would lead a charge on the main structure, with the second group of SWAT officers continuing onward, trapping the cultists on the boardwalk.

  “Go,” Horatio snapped.

  “Is Horatio around?” Alexx said, sticking her head in the door.

  Calleigh put down her cup of tea; she’d been taking a break while waiting for the test results. “No, he’s somewhere out in the Everglades at the moment, chasing bad guys. From the look of the weather out there, I hope he brought rain gear.”

  Alexx walked into the break room and pulled up a chair. “Well, I’ll tell you, then. I took another look at Ruth Carrell’s tox screen, trying to figure out exactly what Sinhurma was trying to accomplish. Some of the drugs that came up didn’t make much sense at first—I thought maybe they were there to suppress the side effects of some of the others. One of them, though, I just couldn’t figure out—mefloquine.”

  “What’s it do?”

  “It’s highly toxic, for starters. It can produce headaches, nausea, dizziness, difficulty sleeping, anxiety, vivid dreams and visual disturbances. On a hunch, I took a look at Sinhurma’s Web site—it says he travels extensively. He just got back from a trip to Mozambique, in fact.”

  “So?”

  “So, mefloquine is used as an antimalarial.”

  “And countries like Mozambique have a high incidence of malaria.” Calleigh frowned. “So if Sinhurma was taking this drug, why would it show up in Ruth Carrell’s blood? She wasn’t traveling with him, was she?”

  “Not that I could tell—she didn’t even have a passport. I do have a theory, but it’s not good news. See, mefloquine has all sorts of neurological effects: in some cases it can cause depression, seizures, even psychosis. Somebody with an already overdeveloped messiah complex might get worse…and some religions have a tradition of using chemical means to commune with the Divine. If Sinhurma interpreted his own reaction to the drug as a metaphysical one, he might decide to share that experience with his followers—and it takes the body a long time to get rid of it. Months, sometimes. I checked Phillip Mulrooney’s tox screen, and sure enough, he had traces of it too.”

  “So the drug makes Sinhurma crazy, and he gives it to his patients,” Calleigh said. “That might explain why he thought murdering someone with a rocket was a rational decision.”

  “That’s what’s worrying me,” Alexx said. “If Sinhurma was giving his patients the same drugs he’s on, he may be taki
ng the same mix of drugs he’s giving them. And if that’s true, then Sinhurma’s just as irrational as the people following him….”

  Everything happened very fast.

  Hernandez’s first team crested the dune, two officers scrambling down it while a sniper with a rifle covered them from the top. Horatio and everyone else charged straight for the trailers, guns out.

  “Everyone freeze!” Hernandez yelled.

  Horatio’s attention was on the trailers. They had windows, but he could see no movement through any of them. He went for the trailer on the right, Delko and Wolfe right behind him. Horatio flattened himself against the wall to the side of the door and yelled, “Doctor Sinhurma! Come out of the trailer now!”

  He spared a glance at the action on the beach and the boardwalk. Hernandez’s teams had both groups covered; nobody had their hands in the air, but nobody seemed to be going for weapons, either.

  “Stop! Don’t come in!” Caesar Kim’s voice, sounding terrified. “He’ll kill us all!”

  Horatio called back, “Take it easy, Doctor! Your people out here are fine! Nobody has to die—”

  And then all hell broke loose.

  One of the cultists on the beach shouted, “BASTARDS!”, raised the pickax in his hands, and charged Hernandez. At the same moment, a woman dove for a clump of tall beach grass.

  Hernandez shot the man with the pickax three times in the chest. The woman came up with a semiautomatic rifle—screaming incoherently, she began to spray the area with bullets.

  The cultists on the boardwalk took this as a sign. When the officers covering them turned toward the gunfire, they jumped off the makeshift pier and into the surf. They splashed through the shallow water as fast as they could, heading for the beach.

  The sniper on the crest of the dune took down the woman firing the semiauto with a single shot. The remaining cultists on the beach bolted—not away from the fracas, but around it, toward the nearest trailer.

  “Stop them!” Horatio yelled. “Don’t let them get inside!”

  Officers on the beach took it as a warning they were going for more weapons. They opened fire on the fleeing cultists, hitting two in the back. Four more made it to the trailer, the farthest one from Horatio. The cultists in the water were on the beach now, racing for the same building.

  “No! Hold your fire!” Horatio shouted. He holstered his gun and sprinted for the group surging toward him. “Delko! Wolfe!”

  They followed his lead, holstering their guns and charging forward. Neither Horatio nor Wolfe were large men, but neither hesitated, either; they slammed into the cultists like a defensive line trying to stop an offensive rush. There were seven cultists and only three of them, but Horatio and Wolfe tackled one each while Delko managed to clothesline two of them. The others didn’t stop to help their fallen comrades; they continued their mad dash away from the water like hydrophobic lemmings.

  Horatio managed to get his opponent’s arm behind him, cuffed one wrist, then snagged an ankle and cuffed that. “Stay,” he barked, then helped Wolfe, who was wrestling with an energetic woman with long blond hair and a crazed look in her eye. One of Delko’s targets lay on the beach, unconscious; he had the other in a headlock and was shouting, “Stop it! Just stop, dammit!”

  The others managed to get inside. The door banged shut.

  An instant later the trailer exploded.

  The detonation was so loud Horatio couldn’t hear it at all. The shock wave knocked him flat with an invisible punch—he lay there for a moment, face against the damp sand, semiconscious. When his ears began to ring, he wondered for a second if it was his alarm clock. He’d been having this odd dream about playing football on a beach….

  He picked himself up groggily. “Eric! Ryan!” He could barely hear his own voice.

  “Right…here, H,” Delko gasped. He was already on his feet.

  “What?” Wolfe managed, sitting up. “That was—oh, man.”

  The remains of the trailer were burning, black smoke billowing skyward. Lightning flashed through dark storm clouds overhead. People were screaming, shouting, weeping.

  Horatio yanked the walkie-talkie from his belt. “Lieutenant Caine to Coast Guard Cutter Alhambra,” he said. “We need the support team here, now. We have a hostage situation and survivors of a bomb attack needing immediate medical attention….”

  Then it was time to round up the prisoners, see who else was hurt and wait for backup to arrive.

  And pray the other two trailers didn’t follow the first one.

  Calleigh knew a lot about the compound bow in front of her. She knew what its draw weight was, what it was made of, and how many inches it measured from tip to tip, strung and unstrung. What she didn’t know was who had fired it last—besides her, that is.

  With a firearm, she could have done a GSR—a Gunshot Residue Test. She’d tried dusting the bow for prints, but it had already been wiped clean. But there had to be something.

  She slipped on a pair of gloves, picked up the bow and hefted it. She pretended to nock an arrow, drew back on the string until it was level with her cheekbone….

  She glanced to the side. Her eyes widened and she whispered, “Of course.”

  She let the bowstring out slowly, then put the bow back on the table. She had one more test to run….

  “So much for the element of surprise,” Delko said. He winced as a medic taped a gauze pad over a cut in his forehead.

  “It could have been worse,” Horatio said. They were in a makeshift command post, a tent set up on the other side of the dunes by Coast Guard personnel. They’d come ashore in a rigid-frame zodiac, bringing reinforcements and equipment and taking away the badly injured. “We didn’t lose any cops; we have four prisoners that would have been corpses. And there are six cult members unnaccounted for and presumably still alive.”

  “Where do you want this?” a reservist in fatigues asked, hefting a blocky aluminum case. Horatio took it from him, snapped open the latches and lifted out a square electronics unit.

  “Yeah, but for how long?” Wolfe asked. He was staring at the the closest sand dune like he could see through it. “For all we know, they’re taking cyanide right now—”

  “No,” Horatio said firmly. “Kim’s still alive—we heard his voice. What he said—‘He’ll kill us all’—indicates Sinhurma’s alive as well. And he won’t go out by shooting himself or taking poison.”

  “Why not?” Wolfe asked.

  “Because he can’t stand to be upstaged,” Horatio said. “Whatever he used to blow up the first trailer, you can be sure he’s got ten times that much planted in his own.”

  “So why hasn’t he set it off?” Delko asked.

  “I don’t know—”

  Horatio’s cell phone vibrated in his pocket. He frowned, pulled it out, and checked who was calling. “Well, here’s our chance to learn,” Horatio said, flipping the phone open.

  “Hello, Doctor,” he said.

  “Hello, Horatio,” Doctor Sinhurma said. “I thought we should have a little talk.”

  “I’m surprised you can get reception way out here,” Horatio said. “You must have a good plan…what would you like to talk about?”

  “My imminent departure from this plane of reality,” Sinhurma said matter-of-factly.

  “You don’t have to do this, Doctor. All these people don’t have to die—”

  “Die? Nobody’s going to die, Horatio.” He sounded mildly puzzled. “At least, none of my disciples will. We are all going to return.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Of course not. You are standing on holy ground, Horatio. This spot—this very spot—was where the race of Man originated. I have been all over the world, searching for the cradle of humankind, and I have finally found it. It was not in the Tigris-Euphrates river basin; it was not in Ethiopia, nor in Brazil. It is here.”

  “I see,” Horatio said evenly.

  “No—you do not,” Sinhurma said, and now the fervor in his voice flared i
nto anger. “You see nothing. You see swampland and alligators and flamingos. You see the leaves of the cypress, but you do not see the roots. The rich ecosystem all around us, Horatio, is nothing more than life nurtured by death. It is meant as a beacon, an immense, living message for those with the vision to truly see. From death comes life. To die here—to die knowing the truth—is to be reborn into this place as it once was. Our souls will be drawn back through time, to the Garden known as Eden, the womb of life itself….”

  “There must be something you want, Doctor. Otherwise, you would have already made your exit.”

  “I will leave when the correct time arrives—and that time is fast approaching, Horatio. The next sunrise I see will be in Paradise. And as for what I want…I want you to join me, Horatio.”

  Horatio nodded, slowly. “And if I do?”

  “Then you will be redeemed.”

  Of course. In his script, he not only gets to return to Eden, he rehabilitates the serpent, too. “That’s a very interesting offer, Doctor. I know you think of me as your enemy, but really, we’re not so far apart. We both have the well-being of your disciples uppermost in our minds…and there’s something you may not have considered.”

  “Such as?’

  “You say that those who truly believe will go to the Garden if they die here. But what about those who are having doubts? Their deaths will be meaningless.”

  “All of those with me are filled with faith.”

  “Really? Have you asked them lately how they feel about leaving this ‘plane of existence’? Or are you afraid of not getting the answer you want?”

  Horatio held his breath. This was a delicate game, and the sanity of one of the players was uncertain. He couldn’t afford to push Sinhurma too far…but if he didn’t push, he wouldn’t get any results.

  Other than six more bodies to process.

  The voice on the other end of the line chuckled. “You play your role well,” Sinhurma said. “But I don’t see what you hope to accomplish. Surely you see I cannot allow doubt to infect my followers now?”