The Fifth Rule of Ten

by Gay Hendricks

  “Will it be dangerous?”

  “Possibly, yes.”

  “And you still don’t know where this is taking place?”

  “No. But I will.”

  “You’re certain?”

  I pulled back slightly. “Almost certain.”

  Purdham-Coote sighed. “Yes, well, nothing’s one hundred percent, is it? I appreciate your honesty.” Suffering a total loss of control had softened his ironclad persona. Pain is never welcome, but I liked him the better for it.

  “How are you for funds?” he said.

  I felt positively weepy at his concern, from which I deduced, induced, and abduced that Percocet still lingered in my system. “I’m fine, sir,” I said.

  “Just say the word, understand?”

  “I appreciate that. Try not to worry. I’ll let you know the moment I hear anything.”

  “Please do. And if you will, call Bertie. He has been most distressed over something, but he won’t tell me what.”

  I retrieved Bertie’s number from the file on my desk. Using my left thumb, I awkwardly tapped on the keys on the face of my work phone. It felt good to be up and about again.

  Bertie answered immediately.

  “Whaddya know, ladies and gents? He’s alive.”

  “I have a good excuse.” I explained about the accident and my mysterious sniper.

  “Goes to show. Everyone over there has a bleedin’ gun.” His lighter snapped, and he inhaled.

  “Lord Purdham-Coote said you had news for me?”

  “Yeah. Didn’t want to worry him, but I went back to the Round Church, like you asked. Found some scribbles in the tower, on the wall. Same initials, JMM, and some kind of whatchmacallit. Hi-ro-glyph.”

  “Written in blood?”

  “Yeah. Or something that looked just like it.”

  I waited. There had to be more.

  “So I started to sniff around.” He paused for a hit of nicotine. “I discovered three more suicides. Same pattern. Troubled kid runs away. Turns up a little later dead. Robes. Self-inflicted stab wounds. Skinned in places like a rabbit.”

  “And nobody connected the deaths?”

  “Nah, they were all over the map. St. Ives. Trowbridge. Yarmouth. Different boroughs. Months apart. Nothing to link ’em, unless you knew where to look.”

  “But you did.”

  “Yeah. On account of them being on the same watchamacallit, ley line, as the Round Church.”

  “You figured that out?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Bertie, that’s brilliant.” I’d forgotten about the ley line connection. I mentally added it to what I’d recently learned. One more puzzle piece.

  “No biggie,” he said, but he sounded pleased. “I let Garfield know, in case there are more.” Bertie’s voice darkened. “Some guru. Fuckin’ nightmare. I could wring her Paki neck.”

  “She’s not . . .” I stopped. Now was not the time to address racial miscasting.

  “You want me in L.A.? Sounds like you could use the help. Lord P-C’s prepared to ship me over anytime.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “But no. Not yet, anyway.”

  He rang off. I took physical stock. My arm still hurt like hell, but otherwise I felt much better this morning. Mike had persuaded me to eat a small bowl of oatmeal with half a sliced banana. I also managed the first cup of coffee in two days. Maybe some of the cerebral ache had been due to caffeine withdrawal, because my head was pain-free for the first time since I’d landed on it.

  Mike let out a long, low whistle from his temporary kitchen-table office. “Ho-ly shit.”

  “What is it?”

  He loped into the living room. He’d been here since last night, and his hair was a turbine experiment gone very wrong. “So I’ve been tracking various cryptocurrency money trails. You know, looking for overlap between your boy TJ, Indra’s Net, and Nawang. Impossible task, by the by.” His fingers raked through his mane. “But I think I just found a link, to that Buddhist temple. Your alma mater.”

  “Dorje Yidam? Makes sense. Nawang was there for a while, remember?”

  “No, boss. The temple here. In Highland Park.”

  “Ganden Gyatso?” A vein at my throat pulsed.

  “Bang.” Mike started to pace. “So, you remember how Indra’s Net—I’m talking about last year’s version—exclusively used the cyber currency DNAcoins?”

  “Yes.” When Mike first stumbled on it, NDRSNT was a flourishing peer-to-peer marketplace for the worst kind of consumers. As Silk Road was to drugs, NDRSNT was to human traffickers, at least until Bill and I ran their Bosnian branch to ground. Then the server, and everything else, went dead—switched off like a light.

  Decoding the acronym NDRSNT came a little later, when my mind finally connected the dots. I realized the letters stood for Indra’s Net—a pre-Buddhist concept of the interconnectedness of time. A notion that had morphed for Buddhists into . . .

  My blood chilled. How had I missed this connection?

  . . . had morphed into our very own Kalachakra tantra. The Wheel of Time. The Power of Ten.

  It’s time.

  Holy shit, indeed.

  “. . . crytpocurrency exchange site,” Mike was saying, as he marched past me.

  “Sorry, Mike. Can you repeat that? And can you please stop pacing around?”

  Mike put on the brakes. “Boss, you gotta listen. This is crucial. I said, I managed to track down a cryptocurrency exchange site, where you can switch up your cyber dough. Bitcoins, BlackCoins, Auroracoins, like that. But strangely, no DNAcoins anymore.” He pointed at me. “But here’s the thing. I did find something called Dana-puñña. And I remembered you thought DNAcoins stood for Dana-coins, so I put two and two together.”

  “Wait, Dana-puñña? I saw that term recently.” I racked my brain. “On some website, maybe?”

  “Uh, yeah, try the Ganden Gyatso website. Better yet, try the Ganden Gyatso fund-raising link to your monk-friends’ tour.”

  Dana-puñña. There it was again, Sanskrit roots, connecting to Tibetan tradition. Dana was the Vedic word for purification, until it also became the Buddhist term for generosity. Puñña meant merit. And the cultivation of generosity and merit were cornerstones of our spiritual path.

  “It’s fucking brilliant, actually,” Mike said. “All that virtual money, automagically changing names but not hands. Millions, maybe billions in untraceable cash, disappearing onto benign sites for nonprofits. You could payroll a lot of things that way.”

  Yes, you certainly could. And if Nawang was using spiritual websites as a front, that meant he was once again manipulating Indra’s Net for his own dark uses. No wonder Maha Mudra’s mission seemed to spring from nowhere yet was spreading as quickly as a virus.

  The Vyrus. Another thread I had dropped.

  “Really good work, Mike.”

  “No worries. I actually really dig this dark web spy stuff.” He stifled a yawn. “That said, I might not last much longer. These last two days taking care of you have been killer. Now I know what life must be like with a newborn. No offense.”

  “Go home,” I said. “Get some sleep. I feel fine.”

  “Roger that.” Moments later, he and the Mini had vacated the premises.

  The Vyrus motorcycle website listed 10 dealerships worldwide. I eliminated all but three, using my own favored method of deduction: hunch.

  That left Mexico, the UK, and Vyrus North America, which was in Raleigh, North Carolina, of all places.

  I called the UK dealership first, located in Surrey, but no one answered the long string of double rings. Vyrus Mexico was no longer in service. Only North Carolina remained. I dialed the number—it, too, rang and rang.

  So much for hunches. I jammed the phone into its charger. Hadn’t these people ever heard of voice mail?

  I typed out an e-mail on my computer, lowercase, one key at a time. I included both phone numbers and a fairly detailed query, as well as the bike’s orange-and-black color scheme. There were so
few Vyruses, color was up there with DNA when it came to identification.

  I copied and pasted the e-mail addresses of all 10 dealerships worldwide, a painstaking process. If there was a language issue, let them deal with it.

  By the time I pushed “send” it was almost time for Eric.

  The act of getting dressed was as uncomfortable as it was humiliating. My clothes were loose, but not in a good way. I’d lost muscle mass, already.

  Tank’s expression was dubious as he watched me wrestle with the buttons on my fly.

  “What?” I asked. “You try doing this one-handed.”

  The Neon was the only possible choice of wheels. No stick shift for me, not for a while.

  I threw the burner phone onto the front seat, but I had little patience, and even less hope.

  CHAPTER 55

  How quickly Eric’s office had become a place of refuge. I scanned the bookcase from my chair, enjoying the assorted amulets and tomes of wisdom. My eyes fell on the vajra hammer. The head was made of rugged blue-black iron, vaguely familiar.

  “Eric?” I called. “Is the head of your vajra hammer from a meteorite?”

  He emerged from the bathroom with two tumblers of water. “Very perceptive,” he said. “It is indeed.”

  “How old does that make it?”

  “As old as you need it to be. Pick a number.” Eric put the water on the table and settled across from me. “Well. You’ve had quite a week.”

  I reached for my glass. The shift in position caused me to flinch.

  “You’re still in pain. I’m sorry.”

  “On the plus side, I’ve been so busy beating myself up, I haven’t had a panic attack in days.”

  “I can help you with that.”

  “My sense of failure?”

  “Your pain.”

  “Well, you are a psychologist.”

  “I mean literally, Ten.”

  “Really?”

  “Look. You’re extremely depleted. In fact, I’m surprised you even made it here. Don’t misread me, your coming sends the right message to the part of your psyche that wants to be well. But you’re physically hurting and mentally shaken—not the ideal platform for deep therapy.”

  I wasn’t sure how to respond.

  “We can, however, work with your innate ability to reach a trance state. There’s a phenomenon called arm catalepsy. You might find it useful as a pain suppressant.”

  My arm was suddenly on fire, as if triggered by the mere suggestion of relief.

  “I’m game,” I said, “but first, can I ask you about something else? It has to do with Ganden Gyatso’s finances.”

  Eric steepled his fingers, but didn’t answer.

  “I can ask Adina, if you think that would be better.”

  “It would, actually. But Adina’s at a weeklong retreat.”

  “I thought she was in Ojai.”

  “Nope.”

  I must have misunderstood Julie. Inside the splint, pain snaked up and down the ulna nerve.

  “Okay, here’s what I’ll do,” Eric said. “I’ll answer what I can. And if I feel I’m breaching confidentiality, I won’t.”

  “How did this tour come about?” I asked.

  Eric took his time answering.

  “The temple received a rather large donation,” he finally said. “Very generous, and very specific.”

  “Who from?” I asked, without a lot of hope.

  “It was anonymous.” Eric’s answer validated my pessimism. “At first we assumed the benefactor was the family trust of Roderick Paul, our founder. But I put in a call to the trust manager, to thank him, and he denied making the donation. We still don’t know where it came from.”

  “What do you mean by specific?”

  “Again, this is Adina’s area of expertise, but I believe the terms and conditions regarding the contribution were quite explicit. Tour dates, types of events, right down to the choice of sand mandala. Even the monks were handpicked.”

  This startled me. “All of them? Including TJ?”

  “Yes.”

  I followed that trail. “Plus my two best friends growing up. Plus my mentor.”

  “I think I see where you’re going.”

  “So whoever orchestrated this knew me. Knew my past. Knew exactly what it would take to draw me back in. Had the financial means and created the opportunity.”

  “You’re thinking Nawang.”

  “Who else could it be?” Fear balled in my chest. “Eric, I need to know what I’m dealing with here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I lifted my sling an inch, ignoring the pain. “Look at me. You already said it. I’m weak. Mentally and physically. I have none of my normal skills to fall back on.” My voice rose. “You never met Nawang. I did. He was like some kind of twisted god, even back then. I would have followed him anywhere! And now he’s using this Maha Mudra ruse to pull in Colin and TJ, and who knows how many others? And no one can find any of them. They’re like ghosts!”

  “More like pied pipers,” Eric said.

  “What?”

  “Malignant pied pipers, these cult leaders. Malevolent gurus. Jim Jones. Charlie Manson. Some even put Osama bin Laden in that category.”

  “Oh, great.”

  “Ten, they’re monsters. But they’re also human. And if anyone can meet Nawang at the level of his humanity, it’s you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because whatever he has planned, he clearly needs you to ensure its success. He’s obsessed with you. And that obsession is the chink in his armor.”

  The knot loosened a little. “I’m listening,” I said.

  “Personality types like Nawang, or . . .” Eric paused. “I’ll focus on Nawang. He and Maha Mudra are clearly fused in some way, but she’s submissive to him in this partnership.”

  “I agree. Can I tape this?”

  “Please.”

  With a bow to Lia Pootah, I found the recording function on my iPhone and thumbed it on.

  “Okay, it’s recording.”

  “I was saying, messianic personalities share certain traits. They’re good at reading people, not to mention manipulating them, often by using a combination of inspiring rhetoric and personal magnetism.”

  “Showmen.”

  “Yup. They can raise any roof with their testifying. They’re aloof at times, but can also be incredibly warm. They seem to be available, but in fact are completely detached, and that detachment, too, feeds the impression of spiritual superiority.”

  “Sounds like Nawang.”

  Also a little like me.

  “What else . . . They’re usually highly empathic. Unconventional. Rebellious. And completely convinced that they are messengers for a higher truth. That’s part of their appeal. They’re narcissists, but they genuinely believe in their prophecies.”

  I thought about this. “The Buddha talked a lot about dependant origination. You know, causes and conditions. What conditions give rise to a Nawang?”

  “Funny you should ask.”

  “Why?”

  “Because many of those same conditions have also given rise to genuine prophets. Including the Buddha. None of this is ever black-and-white.”

  I took another sip of water. Eric glanced at the clock.

  “Please,” I said. “This is helping me so much.”

  “Okay. Well, the journey to personal prophecy tends to follow distinct stages. Usually there’s early evidence of at least one excessively doting parent. Doting, yet also conflicted. And that unhealthy bond is often followed by a traumatic loss of some kind.”

  My mother, Valerie.

  “The child incubates with a sense that there is something different about him or her, of not belonging anywhere, or to any group.”

  Yes.

  “He becomes almost radically autonomous. In constant conflict with authority, yet also very good at acquiring practical skills.”

  Like building a deck. Or shooting a gun.

  “But the key shif
t comes in the form of a spiritual awakening. A moment of total transformation. The burning bush, if you like. But this personality type is not content with experiencing such a shift just for himself. He wants the world to follow. This becomes his mission. A dark mission, in the case of Nawang and others like him.”

  So here was where Nawang and I parted ways.

  “But why?”

  “Good question. Nobody knows exactly, but I have a theory. When the self one has constructed is false, external props are required to keep it upright. The weaker the false structure, the more support required. Survival is at stake. At any cost.”

  “Which means lots of followers.”

  “Exactly. So they use their considerable talents to recruit and retain others. Devise rituals to give their followers a taste of transcendence. Regulate their reality wherever possible. But it all goes back to a false self, and the overwhelming terror of facing that inner vacuum.”

  I thought back to Dorje Yidam. To the young confused boy I was, desperate for attention and value. “They prey on the weak, don’t they?”

  “You bet. It’s part of their genius, an almost primal ability to identify and seduce people who are at especially vulnerable points in their lives. People on the cusp of change.”

  Like I was then.

  Like I am now.

  But was Nawang’s intention to lure me back as acolyte or destroy me once and for all?

  What if the answer was both?

  CHAPTER 56

  Delicious weightiness. Utter surrender.

  “That’s it . . . and your awareness can start to fade into an unconscious sense of drifting, drifting deeper . . . and how your right hand is heavier than your left . . . and deeper still . . . down . . . and down . . . but your right arm just stays comfortably still . . .”

  My forearm was a warm brick of heaviness.

  “That’s it . . . and the muscles are stiff, immobile now, and there is no pain, only detachment . . .”

  My arm grew rigid, but pleasantly so.

  “And your arm is detached . . . but strong . . . right here, right now . . . an immovable iron bar . . . and you can find that strength, that numb detached strength, whenever you need it . . . you can generate that power, yes?”