Revelation

16 Cult

The first time round, it might have been his imagination.

But not the second. There it was again, a faint bump from the room directly below him. He struggled with the geometry of the house before settling on Doug's study.

Findhorn reckoned he had been asleep for about two hours.

He lay in the dark, his heart thumping, straining to hear. Long ago, the fire authorities had insisted that metal stairs should come from the top floor of the big house down to the back garden. These stairs were reached through the window in Stefi's room. Sensible to get the women and himself out, call the police from a public box.

He wriggled his feet into Doug's slippers and wrapped a dressing gown round himself before opening the door, an inch at a time. Faint light came up the stairwell.

He stepped quietly down the stairs, knowing it was against all sense. The study door was slightly ajar. Keeping about two feet back from the door, he peered in, the strong light hurting his eyes.

Romella, in a peach-colored negligee, was at the keyboard of Doug's machine, staring intently at the monitor. Findhorn couldn't make out the text on the screen, the angle was too awkward. Unexpectedly, she glanced in his direction. He pulled away and slipped back up the stairs, uncertain whether he had been seen.

In bed, he lay on his back and thought that maybe his long sojourns in Arctic environments had made him stupid, that mixing with nobody but people like himself had made him fail to appreciate the range and depth of human duplicity. That maybe the Fat Sam's people had reached Romella before he did, or that her brief captivity had turned her. Archie's words, 'Trust nobody', kept forcing themselves into his head.

They had the diaries. But they would know that Findhorn had made copies. Maybe they wanted the copies destroyed. Maybe the bandstand incident was a setup, maybe he had been allowed to escape with Romella. Maybe Romella appreciated the finer things in life, things you could do with a million pounds. All she had to do was find the files and press the delete button. Not a lot to do for a million. What did she owe Findhorn anyway?

Then he thought that maybe circumstances were making him paranoid, that there was a natural explanation, that only a heel would think this way.

He fretted for half an hour, wriggling and turning on wrinkled sheets, feeling betrayed, paranoid and guilty, sometimes all at once, before drifting into a restless sleep.

'You want to be very careful when you talk about a religious cult, Fred. The point is that "cult" is a hate word. It carries emotional baggage and people use it as a weapon to impart bad vibrations to the group they're talking about. Likewise your use of the word "nutter" shows that there's an evil intolerance at work in the murky depths of your subconscious. Most way-out systems of religious belief are harmless and deserve the tolerance —'

Findhorn interrupted, typing rapidly on the keyboard: 'Mike, I stand corrected. I'll try to be good. Still, when you have people whose aim is the destruction of human life…'

The signal came back on the screen: 'If that really is the aim and not something that's been ascribed to them by some hate group.'

'Does the manufacture of nerve gas and botulism toxin qualify?'

'Obviously there's a threshold beyond which you have to declare war, if only to protect those you love. Then it's PC to talk about a doomsday cult.'

'These cults exist?'

'There are thousands of minority religious groups on our register, of which a couple of dozen need watching. Even these are largely harmless or at the most a danger to themselves, through suicidal tendencies. The scary thing is that irresponsible geeks have created Internet cookbooks giving step-by-step recipes for making biological toxins, et cetera. Aerosol poisons plus doomsday cults are an unholy combination.'

'Mike, you're scaring me.'

Mike continued, his typing coming up rapidly and almost error-free on the monitor: 'There are features common to most of these groups. First of course is the grand apocalyptic vision. Usually they believe that a tragedy is about to hit the earth, say like Armageddon. Sometimes they think that, through group suicide, they'll escape the tragedy and be carried off to heaven, perhaps by UFO.'

'I think I read about one such group.'

'That would be the Heaven's Gate cult, a Christian-UFO group which committed mass suicide when Comet Hale Bopp came in. The body count was thirty-nine. But the belief goes back at least to the Unarians, who've been holding to the UFO thing since 1954 without harming anyone. A second feature is the charismatic leader.'

'Do these leaders have any common traits?'

'Absolutely. They're invariably a dominant male, intelligent or at least cunning, a social misfit or failure in mainstream society, and a control freak. He exerts a sort of hypnotic effect on the faithful which he uses to control their sexual, social and emotional lives.'

'You've just described Adolf Hitler,' Findhorn suggested.

'Careful, Fred. Sensitive area.'

Findhorn paused at the keyboard, uncertain whether to interrupt his old friend, now a university rabbi. Then Michael was typing: 'And another feature of the cult mentality is the accumulation of weapons coupled with a sort of paranoid belief that outsiders or governments are out to get them. They see themselves as being monitored by the FBI or other government agencies.'

'I hope they are.'

'Of course many of the cults, especially the Christian right-wing people, are themselves hate merchants. You don't want to be black, gay, communist or Jewish within a thousand miles of Christ Foremost, for example.'

'Remember Abo? He scored three out of four.'

'Let's hope he never strays into Waco, Texas. Now, do you have a specific group in mind?'

'I need to identify them but the clues are thin. The Book of Revelation seems to be central to them, they're doomsday-minded and there's a Swiss connection, I think.'

There was a pause for about thirty seconds. The study door opened and Romella came in carrying two mugs of tea. She put them down on the desk and looked over Findhorn's shoulder. Then words were coming up on the monitor at speed: 'THE TEMPLE OF CELESTIAL TRUTH.'

Findhorn felt a surge of excitement. Then his friend was typing: 'Hang on, I'm putting them on another screen. Here we are. Yes, it's not one of your big-time doomsday cults. That's the problem, some of these groups are down in the noise and the first you hear of them is when they crawl out of the woodwork with some high-profile atrocity. At its peak the Supreme Truth had forty thousand members worldwide, including thirty thousand in Russia, several of whom were engineers with access to nukes, something you might want to think about. They had assets of a billion dollars —'

'The Celestial Truth?'

'Patience, it's still downloading. This is another Christian-UFO cult, with a hodge-podge of Greek and African myth thrown in. They use prophecies from the Book of Revelation along with the sixteenth-century writings of Nostradamus to predict that world end is due any time. They can't wait for it because when it happens the resultant cleansing of sin will allow the second wave of extraterrestrials to come and carry them up to Heaven.'

'What about their organization? How are they structured?'

'I've got an organogram here, but it's all conjecture. They're thought to have regional chapters which meet to co-ordinate activities. They're highly secretive, dispersed globally, and their membership is totally unknown. They're rich, with widely dispersed assets which may total a billion dollars but nobody really knows. They run a front organization, the Tati Foundation, which supports a wide variety of causes.'

'Where are they located? On Earth, I mean.'

'Hold on. Right, they have temples in Japan and Dakota, but their main spiritual centre is tucked away in a mountain region near Davos, in Switzerland. It's a place called Piz Radont and it looks like the devil to get to. I've got a photograph here. Hold on, I'll beam it through.'

Findhorn waited while a picture rapidly built up on the screen, line by line, overlaying the text. A blue sky appeared first, and then the tops of snowy peaks, and then the picture was showing golden, onion-shaped domes which seemed more Muslim than Christian, and finally there it was, a big white shoebox in an idyllic mountain setting. Findhorn clicked on a button, reduced the picture to stamp size, and resumed his rapid two-finger typing.

'About this world end they believe in. Is there any evidence that they'd like to speed it along?'

'Okay, here I have unclassified testimony to the Global Organized Crime Project Steering Committee, CSIS to the House of Representatives Committee on National Security.'

Findhorn hadn't a clue but let it pass.

'I'll fire it through but the essence is this. According to this testimony, NEST teams have been activated five times in California in the last two years, three of them in consequence of information pertaining to the Temple of Celestial Truth.'

'Information pertaining to. That's exceedingly vague.'

'Deliberately so, I don't doubt. They have sources to protect. The CIA has a Center for Counterterrorism, and there's an FBI equivalent for domestic stuff, and you could try them for more if you feel like wasting your time. There have also been suspicions of aerosol attacks in Germany from truck convoys, and Korean building collapses deliberately induced by poor loading and use of sub-standard concrete. But so much lousy building goes on anyway in the Far East that nobody can be sure if it was weirdo religion or just officials lining their pockets.'

'What about their leader?'

'Ah, now Freddie, there you have something very interesting.'

Findhorn waited. He read the words avidly as they came up on the monitor. 'You'll be interested to know that this particular outfit is led by a guy called Tati who just happens to come from Sirius. First time round he came to Earth in the body of Jesus. These guys are souls, you see, who just temporarily inhabit human bodies. Kind of like the Incas, who believed they came from the stars and returned to them after death.'

'When he's not being Tati from Sirius, who is he really?'

'That's what makes him interesting. Nobody knows. His background is a big mystery.'

'Maybe he really does come from Sirius.'

The rabbi's words came up on the screen: 'There's always that possibility.'

'Well?' Romella asked.

Findhorn was pacing up and down. 'It might be coincidence.'

'It might. Whatever you're talking about.'

'It so happens there's a doomsday cult with a centre near Davos. The Book of Revelation is one of their props.'

'Meaning what?'

Findhorn stopped pacing and Romella handed him his tea. 'I think the diaries were taken from us by the Temple of Celestial Truth. They might even be in this Piz Radont temple.'

'Fred, don't get too excited. It's all circumstantial. Who was that anyway?'

'Mike? An old pal, a hard-drinking friend from my student days. He trained as a rabbi, did a stint in a kibbutz and came back as university pastor. He lost the use of his limbs after a motorcycle accident and now spends his time keeping up with trends in religious thought everywhere. He's become quite an authority and he makes pots of money out of it.'

'It's a compensation, I suppose.'

'I have to pull over the last batch of diaries. They're scanned into a computer. It'll take me a couple of hours.'

'Okay, I'll grab some sleep.'

'Didn't you sleep?'

'Not a lot. I was surfing the net, trying to get info on Mercedes car sales in Switzerland.'

'Any luck?'

'Sod all.' Romella left the study, looking puzzled at Findhorn's unexpected grin.

I should learn to have a little trust in people, Findhorn told himself as he tapped his way into the cookies, the record of the last five hundred keyboard instructions.

Stefi turned up in a green blouse and skirt, with a black choker and heavy eye shadow and hair freshly blonde and hanging down in ringlets. She was driving a large red Saab with cream upholstery, leaving Findhorn to wonder how close his credit card was to breaking point. She gurgled the car round to the rear lane where Romella and Findhorn tossed holdalls into the boot. She handed Findhorn a folder containing air tickets; Findhorn gave her the key to Doug's flat. Romella sat in front, while Findhorn tried to look invisible in the rear seat.

Stefi took them west, away from the city centre, handling the big car with ease. She drove through the Corstorphine suburbs and onto the M8 towards Glasgow and, beyond it, Prestwick International Airport. She took the car up to a steady eighty and Findhorn felt that he could at last safely poke his nose above windowsill level.

They slept all the way across the Pond.

'The parting of the ways,' Romella announced. She had a small green holdall at her feet and was glancing from time to time at the taxi queue on the other side of the airport glass.

Findhorn, on the other hand, was looking in the opposite direction, at the Dulles Airport departure screens. 'Would you believe I'm still weary?'

'We could find a hotel,' Romella suggested, leaving Findhorn to wonder what she had in mind.

'There's no time, Ms Grigoryan. The competition must be going flat out.'

'You still don't want to say what you've seen in the diaries?'

Findhorn rubbed his overnight stubble. 'It's too fantastic to be believable, Romella. The chances are it's nothing. I'll have to see what I can find out in Los Alamos, if anything.'

'There's something weird here, Fred. If Petrosian was escaping to Russia he didn't need the diaries to tell them what was going on. So why was he escaping with them?'

Findhorn nodded his agreement. He was still nervous about standing openly in a crowded place. 'I think I need to get to Phoenix and connect to Los Alamos from there.'

The taxi queue was shortening. Romella picked up her bag and Findhorn walked with her towards the automatic doors. She said, 'And I'll see what I can rustle up from old FBI files in Washington. I expect they're public domain by now.'

'Which leaves us with one last question, Romella. Where, in these Yoonited States, shall we meet up?'

Romella said, 'Make it some place where we can't easily be followed. Not a town like Los Alamos or Washington.'

'Sparks flew between Lev and Kitty at the Grand Canyon.'

Romella gave a surprised, sunny smile. 'What's this, Fred? Could there be romance buried somewhere in the depths of your soul?'

'I'm mad, bad and dangerous to know.' He yawned. 'The south rim of the Grand Canyon, then, just as soon as we can make it.'

'Be careful, Fred. Remember you're still a target.'

Findhorn made a face. 'Tell me about it.'

A taxi drew up and Romella turned as she opened the door. 'And don't speak to any strange women.'