Crisscross rj-8

by F. Paul Wilson

  "Could they be human?"

  Lewis nodded. "I don't know much about bears, but I think they tend to scrounge around alone. So, yeah. More than likely they're human."

  Shit.

  Jensen gave Lewis a rough tap on the shoulder. "Up." When Lewis complied Jensen said, "You two wait outside."

  He and Hutch exchanged puzzled looks but did as told. When Jensen had the room to himself he clicked his way to the AV monitors. There he entered his ID number and punched in a password. He toggled the pickups to LIVE. That turned them on and started them transmitting.

  A menu popped up, offering him a choice of half a dozen views. He clicked on the great room and waited for the picture to focus.

  Even though the transmission was encrypted, it hadn't made sense to keep it going twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Besides, in the standby state the pickups were immune to most bug sweeps.

  He'd put up decoy cameras just so Blascoe could disable them. It let him think he was rebelling and gave him a false sense of privacy.

  A wide-angle view of the great room, through the glass eye of the moose head, swam into view. When he saw the three figures seated in a rough circle, he realized his worst-case scenario had become reality.

  He exited the program and kicked open the door to the next room.

  "Hutch! Lewis! Get your stuff. Road trip!"

  17

  Cooper Blascoe leaned back and laced his fingers behind his head and started talking. He had a Howard Hughes situation going with the hair and fingernails, and smelled like a wet collie, but Jamie ignored all that.

  "Well, seeing as you're here, and you found me like this, I guess I won't be blowing your minds by telling you that Dormentalism is all a sham, man. Just something I cooked up to get money, women, and drugs—not necessarily in that order."

  Jamie checked to make sure she was recording. She prayed her batteries lasted. If she'd known she was going to wind up here tonight, she'd have come prepared with spares.

  She turned her attention back to Blascoe. She still found it hard to believe that she was sitting with the supposedly self-suspended Father of Dormentalism. That was a coup itself, but to be recording the real story from the man who started it all…

  Did it get any better than this? She couldn't imagine how.

  "I wanted a rock star life, but I was a paunchy, balding thirty-year-old who couldn't play music for shit, so that was out. But it was the sixties, man, when all these nubile chicks were joining communes and that sort of shit, and I wanted in on some of that—not to be some worker drone on a commune farm or anything like that. Not me. I wanted my own.

  "But I needed a hook to bring them in. I racked my brains and dropped a ton of acid hoping something would come to me—you know, pop into my head like divine inspiration—but nothing. Nada. Zilch. I was ready to give it up and go join someone else's gig when—I don't know, late in the winter of '68, maybe February, maybe March… all I remember is it was cold in Frisco when I had this dream about some guy from someplace called Hokano talking about—"

  "Wait," Jack said. "It came to you in a dream?"

  Blascoe shrugged. "I guess it was a dream. Sometimes, with all the drugs 1 was doing, the line got a little blurred, but I'm pretty sure this was a dream."

  "Do you speak Japanese?"

  He smiled. "You mean beyond konichiwa and arigato? Nope. Languages never were my strong suit. They made me take Spanish my first year at Berkeley—also my last year, if you want to know—and I flunked it miserably."

  "All right then, this guy in your dream—what did he look like?"

  "Like a dream guy—golden hair, golden glow, the whole deal. Like an angel maybe, but with no wings."

  Jamie could tell from Jack's expression that this wasn't what he wanted to hear. It almost seemed as if he'd been expecting a certain description and this wrasn't it.

  "Anyway," Blascoe said, "the dream guy was talking about my inner spirit, something he called my xelton, being split, with half of it sleeping within, half of it somewhere else.

  "When I woke up I knew that was it: the calling card for my commune… like it had been handed to me. I mean, it was all there, and perfect. Finding the Real You, the Inner You sleeping in your mind—any pitch with "mind" in it was a sure grabber in those days—and achieving some sort of mystical natural harmony. Dynamite stuff. But I needed a name. I definitely wanted 'mental' in it—you know, for mind?—and then got the brainstorm of putting it together with 'dormant'—as in dormez vous, because the gals were gonna have to sleep with me to wake up their xelton."

  Jack shook his head. "The waking involved sleeping with you… and you got takers?"

  "Better believe it. It was before your time, I'm sure, but we called it 'sleeping together' back in those days. Now it's just 'fucking.' But anyway I put the two words together and came up with 'Dormentalism.' Pretty slick, huh?"

  "Pretty clunky if you ask me," Jack said.

  "Well, I didn't ask you. But Brady thought the same thing when he came along."

  Jack made a face. "Swell. Just the man I want to emulate."

  "Let's not get onto the Brady situation yet," Jamie said. "You came up with the name and the concept… then what?"

  "Like you say, I had the name and the idea, now I needed to find a place to put it to work. I found this guy in Marin County who'd let me use a corner of this big tract of land he owned. I rented it for a song, even talked him into letting me put off the first payment for ninety days. Oh, I was a silver-tongued devil then. Next came the pamphlet. 1 wrote up a lew pages and called it Dormentalism: The Future Resides Within. Got it mimeoed, started handing out free copies in Haight-Ashbury, left them all over the Berkley campus. I even went to some established communes and passed them out there.

  "Before I knew it, the whole thing took off, I mean, beyond my wildest dreams. People duplicated my pamphlet and sent it all over the country—there were Xerox machines back then, but no e-mail or fax yet, so they had to use the Post Awful. But that worked. And then the folks on the receiving end duplicated it, and they sent it around, and on and on. In no time I had hundreds of followers. Then a thousand. Then two thousand. Then… I stopped counting. They gave me their money—sometimes everything they had—and they helped build their own housing.

  "And the sex… oh, man, helping those gals awaken their dormant xel-ton… so many of them." He grinned again. "I was so dedicated that I often 'helped' two, sometimes three, at a time… just incredible… in-fucking-credible."

  "You had only female followers?" Jack said.

  "Nah. All kinds."

  "What about the men? Did you—?"

  "Hell no! The 'awakened' women—the ones who'd had their 'breakthrough' with me—went out and 'awoke' the men. There was plenty to go around, believe me."

  Jamie wanted to lean back and kick her feet in the air. This was dynamite. No, this was nuclear.

  Jack looked at her. "Can we please get to Luther Brady?"

  Before she could answer, Blascoe said, "Brady showed up somewhere in the seventies. He looked like a godsend at the time. I mean, I was spending money like there was no tomorrow. Fast as it came in, it went out. I'd been given pieces of land all over the country that I didn't know what to do with. The IRS was starting to sniff around, asking questions I couldn't answer—I wasn't a businessman, so what did I know? Anyway, I was too wasted most of the time to even care about it, let alone do anything. And then up pops Brady with his fresh new accounting degree and all sorts of ideas."

  Jamie checked her recorder again—still going. She had a question and did not want to miss the answer.

  "So Luther Brady joined and took part in the 'awakenings' of various female members?"

  "Not that I remember. I didn't notice at the time but he was lots more interested in getting close to me than the women."

  Damn, Jamie thought. JNot what she wanted to hear.

  "Brady said he wanted to be my assistant. When I said all my assistants were of the female pe
rsuasion, he told me he could supply services they couldn't. Like getting me out of Dutch with the government.

  "Like I cared. After my usual rant about how the government was irrelevant—the big word in those days—and how awakening your xelton was the only thing that mattered, he went on to explain how the government did matter and how I'd lose everything and do federal time for tax evasion and all sorts of other crimes if I didn't get my shit together. He said he was the man to straighten things out.

  "And damn if he doesn't do just that. Sets up accounts, keeps records, writes letters to the IRS, files all the right forms, and in no time we're 'in compliance,' as the feds like to say."

  Jamie watched Jack get up and walk to the front door. The rain was doing drum rolls on the roof. He opened the door and stared out at the storm for a few seconds, then closed it and returned to his chair. He reminded her of a cat when it sensed a coming storm.

  She turned to Blascoe. "So now he had your confidence. What did he do next?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "I mean, he went from assistant to running the whole show. How?"

  Blascoe showed anger for the first time since their arrival.

  "How? By being a weasel, that's how! Course I didn't see it at the time. He kept coming to me and saying we needed to spread the word about Dor-mentalism—yeah, he hated the name but we were stuck with it. When he promised greater fame and fortune, I said, 'Cool. Do it, man.'

  "And do it he did. Hired someone to expand my original pamphlet into The Book ofHokano and really ran wild with it. I mean, he added a shitload of new stuff I'd never heard of. I might have stopped him if I'd known, or cared. But I didn't. Not really. I was on extended leave from reality—Mr. Spaceman. But if I'd taken a gander at what he was doing, I'm pretty sure that even in my addled state I'd have squawked. It was scary."

  "Scary how?" Jack said.

  "All the rules, man. The rigid structure. The guy was rule crazy. I mean, he took this nice, easygoing, fun thing I'd begun and started messing it up. All these crazy acronyms and such. He codified everything into steps and procedures. It wasn't anything like what was really going on. I mean, he left out the sex part completely. He made it all self-realization and self-improvement and maximizing potential instead of getting laid.

  "I didn't know any of this at the time. And for a while it looked like it wouldn't matter what was in The Book of Hokano because he couldn't find a publisher anywhere in the world that wanted it. But that didn't stop Brady. He made an end run by starting Hokano House and publishing it himself." Blascoe frowned and shook his head. "Hard to believe people would fall for his line of bullshit, but they did. In droves.

  "With all the new converts, Brady was able to branch out. He started opening Dormentalist temples all around the country. Christ, templesl Back in Marin we were still doing the commune thing, you know, according to my vision, but everywhere else it was Brady-style regimentation. And on my land!"

  "Wait," Jack said. "Your land? Where'd you get land?"

  "Given to me. Lots of my followers gave over their worldly possessions to the movement, and pieces of land made up a fair number of those possessions. Brady would sell the pieces we had and buy others, with no rhyme or reason. Like Monopoly for psychos, man. Guy's land crazy. Soon he had temples in all the major cities—New York, Boston, Atlanta, Dallas, Frisco, L.A., Chicago, you name it—and they were thriving.

  "He made his Fusion Ladder thing into a money machine. Made it so you had to take 'courses' to climb from rung to rung. He designed texts for each rung and sold them for rapacious prices. You couldn't afford the price, too bad: You had to have the text to complete the rung. A money grab, that's what it was. One big money grab.

  "But he didn't stop with textbooks. He commissioned a series of personal-true-story books about how Dormentalism had changed lives. The first time I got an idea of where my happy little cult was going was when he had me read the books onto tape. I started getting a bad feeling then, but when the books and the cassettes sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and I started seeing the checks rolling in, well…" He flashed Jamie a quick, guilty smile. "You know how it is."

  "I can only imagine," she said. But maybe she wouldn't have to imagine when she turned this series of articles into a book.

  "But Brady's not through yet. The guy's got endless ideas. He hired some hack novelists to write a series of thrillers under my name starring this Fully Fused detective hero who communes with his xelton to solve crimes."

  "The David Daine mysteries," Jack said. "Someone lent me one recently."

  Blascoe looked at him. "How far'd you get?"

  "Not very."

  "Yeah, they were awful, but that didn't stop them from being bestsellers. That's because Brady issued an edict to all the temples that every

  Dormentalist had to buy two copies: one for personal use and one to give away. And they all had to buy them the same week. The result: instant bestsellers."

  Jamie pumped her fist. "I knew it! Everybody figured that was the case, but no one could prove it."

  And here it was, straight from the horse's mouth—or horse's ass, depending on how you wanted to look at it.

  "Yeah, it all worked. Dormentalism kept getting bigger and bigger, spreading throughout the world, even to Third World countries—which may not have much money but they've got bodies and their governments practically have FOR SALE signs on their front lawns.

  "Then came the time I thought Brady was gonna lose it. When he heard back in '93 that the Scientologists had wrangled themselves tax-exempt status for their church, he went after the same thing. But no way. Got us officially declared a church, yeah, but couldn't get tax-free status. Made him crazy that the Scientologists had something we didn't, but no matter what he tried, the IRS said no way. Which means those Scientologists must have had something super bad on somebody really high up to rig their exemption. So Brady had to be satisfied with starting the Dormentalist Foundation, which ain't as good a tax dodge as a tax-exempt religion, but it gets the job done."

  Blascoe dropped his hands into his lap and hung his head.

  "Then one day a few years ago I woke up and realized this thing called Dormentalism wasn't at all what I'd had in mind, that its natural harmony had turned into something ugly, the exact opposite of what I'd intended."

  Jack shook his head. "Sort of like building a glass house and then hiring Iggy Pop to house sit."

  "Just about. Even worse. At least you can fire a house sitter, but me… I had this high-sounding title of Prime Dormentalist, but I was a figurehead. I had no say in where Dormentalism—my thing—was going. Hardly anyone else did either, except maybe Brady and his inner circle on the High Council.

  "Like I said, he'd looked like a godsend, but he turned out to be the worst thing that ever happened to Dormentalism. Or to me. I didn't believe in God when I started out, but I do now. Oh, not the Judeo-Christian God, but Somebody watching over things, seeing that what goes around comes around in certain cases. Like mine. I'm full of cancer because I started a cancer known as Dormentalism."

  He made a strange sound. It took Jamie a few heartbeats to realize he was sobbing.

  "It's not fair! I never wanted this corporate Grendel, this litigious,

  money-grubbing monster. I was just looking to gel laid and have a good time." He looked up. 'That's all! Is that so bad? Should 1 have to pay for it by being eaten alive by my own cells?"

  Jack was up again, looking out the door. He turned to Jamie and made a rolling motion with his hands. She got the message: Let's move this

  along-

  Jamie gave him a single nod. All right. He'd brought her up here, got her inside, and coerced Blascoe into talking. She was recording the interview of her career, so the least she could do was throw him a bone.

  "Of course not," she told Blascoe. "No one deserves that. But tell me: Brady is said to keep this huge strange globe hidden away in his office. Do you know anything about that?"

  Jack crossed bac
k to his seat, giving Jamie a surreptitious thumbs-up along the way.

  Blascoe nodded. "Yeah. Enough to know he's certifiable. You think you've heard some weird shit tonight? You ain't heard nothing yet."

  18

  "What's with this rain?" Hutch said, banging a fist on the wheel. They'd been sitting on 684 for what seemed like hours.

  "Probably some asshole wrapped his car around an abutment up ahead," Lewis muttered from the shotgun seat. "How much you wanna bet he was yakking on a cell phone when it happened?"

  "Yeah, while drinking coffee and doing eighty in the rain."

  Jensen had the back seat of the Town Car to himself. He needed the space. Hutch and Lewis sat up front. Odds were they were right. Somewhere up ahead there'd be road flares and flashing red lights and glass and twisted metal all over the asphalt.

  Jensen didn't care if people killed themselves on the road—probably cleaned up the gene pool a little—but even on a good day it pissed him off when they did it ahead of his car. The least they could do was wait till he'd passed.

  Lewis half-turned in his seat. "Long as we're sitting here, boss, mind telling us what's up?"

  "What do you mean?" Jensen said, as if he hadn't been expecting the question. The only surprise was that it had taken this long.

  "This place we're going to—what are we looking at here?"

  "I don't get you."

  "I mean, we're loaded for bear, right? Just want to know what to expect. Who's in this cabin and why are we after him tonight?"

  Besides Jensen, only Brady and a few High Council members knew the truth about Cooper Blascoe. The guy had become a real liability. Jensen had wanted him to have an accident, but Brady had vetoed that. Not that he wouldn't have liked Blascoe silenced and out of the way, but he'd said that a sudden death might cause more problems than it solved. Especially with the High Council. Even the members closest to Brady held out hope that Blas-coe's erratic behavior was temporary and that he might be able to get back in touch with his xelton—obviously he'd lost contact—and turn himself around, heal his mind and his body.