Dust left the room, and alone as Munroe was, it would have been a prime opportunity for her to wander. But instinct told her to wait, and so she sat while the minute or two turned into five, and when Elijah arrived, he wore the harried look of a cook in the kitchen on Christmas morning.
Munroe stood in greeting, and he wrapped his arms around her in a tight and welcoming hug.
Her response to the uninvited physical contact was instant, a drive so intense that it required every shard of focus to keep her solidly in place. The rhythm of violence pounded in her chest and she remained frozen, fighting the urge to destroy him, to crush his head against the wall.
With fire burning a trail through her veins, she forced reciprocation.
To every single person in this commune, close physical contact was a part of everyday life, and this was a dangerous tightrope act that she had to walk. The rage had nothing to do with Logan or his daughter or even Elijah; this was Munroe’s own past, a history that would forever allow but a handful of people safely into her personal space—and Elijah certainly wasn’t one of them. It would be several moments until the urge to strike passed, and to remain so close to him now required pure, practiced self-control.
“We’re short-staffed today,” Elijah said, seemingly unaware of how near he stood to hospitalization. “Why don’t you join me in the dining room? We can talk during cleanup.”
Still fighting the internal pressure, still not trusting herself to speak, Munroe nodded, followed, saw in his profile and his gait similarities to Heidi that she hadn’t noticed before, and was irritated for having missed them.
They passed from the alcove, through the living room, past the stairs, and out the back door to a path that led to the annex. There, Elijah slid open wide glass doors, and instead of standing back to allow her to pass, as politeness would have dictated, he walked in ahead.
The doors opened directly to a room, which by appearances accounted for half of the building. The space was lit by neon, tiled white, and half of it was filled with row upon row of rough-hewn picnic-style tables and wooden benches. The other portion was devoted to serving food—large industrial-size pots sitting on a wide counter gave testament to as much—and a dishwashing assembly line.
The only others in the room were children, eight of them, between what seemed to be ten and twelve years old, silently busying themselves clearing tables and sweeping the floor. Munroe strained to see beyond Elijah’s shoulder, scanning faces, searching for a shock of blond hair, green eyes, anything that might confirm that she had come to the right place, but there was little opportunity.
Elijah ushered her to a table where a stack of papers and file folders were turned blank side up, and against all hope he motioned her to sit where his face was to the room and her back against it.
Each of these details filled in the gaps, all of them snapshots of commune life. She’d arrived at the end of either a very late lunch or an early dinner, and most of those who had once filled this hall were gone again, leaving this particular group of children to do the cleanup. Elijah, harried, juggling his paperwork and his leadership, filled in overseeing these children while whoever usually held the position was out in the vans today, and he, apparently unfamiliar with how odd such a scene would play out to fresh eyes, carried on.
Munroe listened, answered, her mind working overtime to stay in the present while thoughts pinballed through her head. That Hannah could be here, in the same room, invisible while her back was turned, made the attempt to focus on Elijah’s words almost unbearable.
She waited an appropriate amount of time, waited until the sounds and the limited conversation behind her indicated that the cleaning had come to an end, and then, as Bradford had done the day prior, she requested the restroom.
Elijah motioned one of the girls over and, in English, asked her to show Munroe where the bathrooms were. He said nothing more. No request to keep an eye on her, no warnings about limiting conversations, no instructions to wait with her charge. Perhaps such things were so ingrained as to make further commentary unnecessary.
Munroe stood, turned, and scanned the room, running her eyes from face to face, but found no one resembling Charity or Logan.
The girl led Munroe through another sliding door, to a hallway, which passed three smaller rooms, each without a door in the frame, each lined with bunks that stood three beds high.
The bathroom was makeshift and tightly fitted, narrow stalls of plywood on a cement dais set across from the one sink—what appeared to have been a large bathroom, gutted and refitted to run several toilets into plumbing built for one.
Munroe didn’t linger. There was no place to stash either a bug or a camera, and her reason for the trip had been to see the faces in the dining room.
The girl was still outside the bathroom when Munroe exited, eliminating any chance of poking around the bedrooms. They returned to the dining room in silence, the child offering no conversation and Munroe hesitating to initiate it lest her motives somehow be misconstrued.
In the dining room, the children sat at a table, silent, focused on small cards, and the girl went to join them while Elijah stood and motioned Munroe over.
He handed her a small book. “I want you to read this,” he said. “I’ve got a few errands to run and then I’ll be right with you.”
He signaled to a boy of twelve. “Nathaniel will show you the way back,” Elijah said.
Munroe knew the way. Didn’t need a guide or a warden, no matter how young, in order to walk from one house to the next, and she knew that Elijah knew that she knew. Instinct screamed in rebellion, but acquiescence was his expectation, and whether this was a test or merely the way of The Chosen, she couldn’t break from her role.
Showing only gratitude, she followed Nathaniel out.
The boy said nothing, and so again Munroe walked in silence, and at the alcove off the living room, Nathaniel left her alone.
She glanced around the room, sat, and made herself comfortable for the indefinite wait—by the number of pages she’d been assigned, it could be hours. She cracked open the book, and as Elijah, her new spiritual guide had instructed, she read.
Chapter 19
Miles Bradford slipped on his coat. And then, with a hesitant backward glance toward the desk and the tenuous connection to Munroe that the array of equipment and wires represented, stole out the door.
He’d no idea when he’d hear from her or when she’d return—if she’d return—and he’d waited as long as he could for any form of communication beyond what he’d picked up from the stairwell bug when she entered the Haven Ranch.
In the unknown, it was a risk to head out. Away from the desk, he’d be unable to monitor, wouldn’t know until far too late if anything eventful happened, but he wanted to see Heidi, needed to see Heidi, and the opportunity was fast slipping away.
They’d arranged to rendezvous on the sly, away from the others, had set a time and place, but in his reluctance to leave the desk he had waited too long and was now beyond fashionably late. He could only hope she’d wait, because he needed to meet now. Today. Not another day. And he had no way to contact her to let her know he was still on his way.
Outside the hotel, Bradford hailed a cab, and when he arrived at Cementerio de la Recoleta and spotted Heidi just outside the gated entrance, leaning against the wall, face in a book and the sun’s sparse rays shining down on her, relief welled through him. When she saw him, her face lit into a chill-dissolving smile.
In spite of his hurry and the uneasiness that had brought him here, Bradford couldn’t help but return the smile in kind.
Heidi greeted him with a hug and stepping back said, “So, tell me, Mr. Secret Guy, what it is that you need so badly that it comes to this.”
Bradford smiled again, his mouth in upward movement while his eyes diverted down the lanes, searching out anything familiar, chasing body shapes and wary steps. He’d asked her to be careful, to come alone, but both Logan and Gideon had the skill to follow
undetected if they wished, and to ask her now if she was certain they hadn’t would only insult her.
“Thank you for meeting me,” he said.
Heidi nodded, and he looped his arm in hers, diverting her down a branching mausoleum-lined lane. Here they would blend in, just one more couple among so many others taking in the dead on a pleasant afternoon stroll. He’d chosen this place because it wasn’t far from his hotel, and as an attraction to both tourists and locals alike, it would be impossible not to find, thus lessening the chances of either one of them getting lost.
Bradford stopped several times, ostensibly to admire the architecture, the marble and stonework, while his eyes passed beyond the lifeless monuments to the living who came and went. He saw no sign of Gideon and, better still, no sign of Logan, although it was impossible to know for certain.
Each time Bradford stopped, the puzzlement on Heidi’s face increased, but she said nothing until at last they came to a secluded alcove and Bradford headed toward it. The nook, with only one way in and out, was a field operative’s suicide, but under the circumstances, perfect. One final glance back the way they’d come and Bradford said, “Look, I need your help.”
“I figured as much,” Heidi said.
“Off the record, okay? Logan can’t know, Gideon can’t know, and most of all Michael can’t know.”
Heidi nodded, and Bradford hesitated. “Michael speaks very highly of you,” he said finally. “She says you’ve been brilliant in explaining the mind-set of The Chosen, and I’m hoping you can help me.”
He hesitated again, and Heidi’s smile radiated, as if she had all the time in the world, as if they stood waiting under spring blossoms instead of the warming winter sky.
“I haven’t done the research Michael has,” he said. “And I haven’t had a friend to drop snippets of information over the years. My experience with groups like The Chosen is limited entirely to what I’ve heard through the media and in dealing with extremist factions in the Middle East. I’ve got images in my head of Jonestown, Koresh, Heaven’s Gate, Aum Shinrikyo, and terrorists—mass suicide and murder—so forgive me any misperceptions, okay?”
Heidi nodded again, as if to say “go on,” and in response Bradford again paused. He burned precious time, needed to get back to the hotel, but the thoughts that had made so much sense when faced with Munroe’s solo entry into the Haven Ranch were quickly dissolving into the abstract.
He sighed and ran his fingers through his hair, fought back the urge to pace. “Hypothetically,” he said, “unless we can do a snatch-and-grab, to get Hannah will mean Michael goes inside the Havens. That was the whole point in bringing her into this, right? And the way I see it, it’s eventually going to come to that. But what about brainwashing? If Michael goes in, what are the chances she’ll be coming out the same person who went in—if she comes out at all?”
Heidi’s shoulders relaxed and, with a grin that bordered on smirking, leaned against the cold stone of the wall. “Yeah,” she said. “That’s kind of a misperception.”
There was a long silence as she gazed first at the ground and then off into some invisible distance. Bradford knew the look, the struggle for words, and so he let her be, although as the moments ticked away it was more difficult to fight the urge to hurry her.
“What’s your idea of brainwashing?” she said finally.
Bradford shrugged. “Mindlessness, I guess, from constant and repeated mental abuse. When a rational person starts doing irrational things that someone else has told them to do—things they never would have done before.”
“So, going against free will and changing them into something else, right?”
Bradford nodded.
Heidi said, “It would mean that a brainwashed person would lose the capacity to reason or to make personal decisions that fell out of line with what the brainwasher wanted or programmed, that they’d kill or commit suicide if told to, even if they didn’t want to do it. Mindless obedience, right?”
“I suppose,” he said.
Heidi’s eyes took on a note of sadness as they wandered again toward that invisible distance. “Isn’t that just another way of saying ‘the Devil made me do it’?”
Bradford pondered her words. “You’re saying there’s no such thing?” he asked.
Heidi turned toward him. “I’m not saying that brainwashing doesn’t exist,” she said. “I may personally doubt it, but I’m no expert. I wasn’t raised in any of the groups that you mentioned. I can only speak of The Chosen, of my own childhood and that of my friends.”
“There’s no brainwashing in The Chosen? People actually do those things because they want to—of their own free will?”
She shrugged. “Yes and no. It really depends on how you define brainwashing. There’s a lot of indoctrination, a tremendous amount of control, and so much pressure to conform to ‘the new’ and heed the word of The Prophet. I think a lot of people would consider that brainwashing—but that’s not the same as having no mind of your own. Everyone still has free will. Any one of the adults could say no.”
“But how?” he said. “And if that’s the case, why on earth do people do it, why do they stay?”
Heidi shrugged again. “Sometimes they go along with things out of fear of God’s judgment if they don’t, or because they feel it’s what God wants of them. Nobody’s a zombie or an automaton.” She hesitated, as if she found tedious Bradford’s inability to accept what to her was so obvious.
“Look at it this way, Miles,” she said. “There are two types of people in The Chosen. There are the ones who had adult or nearly adult lives before choosing to join, and there are people like me and Logan and Gideon, the children, who never had another beginning, never had a choice, who had no education, no access to television or books, little to no connection to family outside the movement, and who were terrified of what would happen to us if we were to leave. If anyone was brainwashed, it was us, the second generation.
“So then, completely cut off and indoctrinated as we were, if we are brainwashed, how can so many of us turn our backs on everything and walk away, sometimes even in the middle of the night with only the clothes on our back? And if we, the ones who never knew anything other than their world, can turn our backs on it, how can anyone who was supposed to know better claim brainwashing as an excuse for what they did?”
Bradford said, “So, these people on TV who say they were brainwashed into joining a cult, or that they did awful things, criminal things, against their will, that the leaders made them do it, they’re lying?”
“We’re all susceptible to influence to one degree or other,” Heidi said. “Apparently some more than others, but that isn’t the same thing as having no mind of your own. People who have sex with children, that’s not brainwashing. That’s not even coercion. Nobody took a bat to their kneecaps and said have sex with kids or we’ll hurt you. People who beat children, starved them, locked them in closets, called them demon-possessed, that’s not brainwashing, nobody made them do that.
“Do you know what the big punishment in The Chosen is?” Heidi asked.
“I don’t think so,” he said.
“Excommunication.”
“Meaning?”
“Let’s say a man in The Chosen is caught molesting little boys, which is against The Chosen’s rules because it’s homosexuality. Even though it’s also a crime, members of The Chosen, even the parents of the child, are forbidden to go to the police about it. Excommunication, which is sometimes only for a few months, is such a big deal, they consider it to be punishment enough. By their reasoning, sending the criminal out into the Void is the worst possible thing they could do. Excommunication is the heavy stick that they carry to keep people in line, and members will do just about anything to avoid it. But if brainwashing was all that it is cracked up to be, why the need for the big stick? Shouldn’t everyone automatically obey and keep all the rules?
“To say that the things done to us were done because of brainwashing is a slap
in the face to those of us who were tortured. They did what they did because The Prophet said it was right in the eyes of God, because they placed a greater value on some screwed-up ideology than they did on protecting the rights of children. But they were not mindless when they did it.”
“So what you’re saying,” Bradford said, “is that the only way a person like Michael would end up changed or stuck inside was if what they said and how they lived appealed to her?”
“Pretty much,” Heidi said.
“Does that also apply to someone who might be—” Bradford paused. “Well, someone who might be going through an emotional upheaval—would it be different for that type of person?”
“Is she?”
Bradford shrugged. “We all have our history, our scars, sometimes literally,” he said. “What Michael does is highly specialized. It’s not something you go to school for. The things that made her what she is left their mark, just like with you, just like with Gideon and Logan.”
Heidi nodded. “If she falls for any of it,” she said, “then she’s not half the woman I think she is, and I suspect that in reality, she’s much more than I’ve even glimpsed.”
Bradford nodded in appreciation of Heidi’s perception. He straightened and took his hands from his jacket pockets. “Thank you,” he said.
“Better now?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said, “much better.” Bradford paused, the running clock counting down time in his head, the pressure to get back to the hotel becoming stronger, but seeing Heidi there tipped back against the wall while her words tumbled around in his mind caused him to stop. He shoved the need to hurry aside.
“When you did finally get out, how did you manage?” he said. “Without any education or any connections, how did you start?”
The Innocent: A Vanessa Michael Munroe Novel Page 16