Bitter Waters

by Wen Spencer

  The photo sparked no memory in Ukiah. “No.”

  “He goes by the name William Harris.” Hutchinson looked to see if the name meant anything to them. Max was shaking his head. “That might be an alias—both first and last names are on the top twenty most common names in the United States. The only other name we have for him is Core. He’s the founder of a cult known as the Temple of New Reason.”

  Ukiah shook his head. The only William Harris they had dealt with had been a very dark African-American; the other Harrises—Daniel, John, James, Carl—weren’t this man either.

  Max indicated that he didn’t know the face or the name. “What does he have to do with us?”

  “That’s one of the questions I’m looking for an answer to.” Hutchinson pointed to the other bank patrons. “These two we only have code names for: Ping.” A young Asian woman in a black running suit, and then a blond man, partially hidden by a potted plant. “And Ice.”

  “Did they rob this bank?” Ukiah asked.

  “Something more sinister than that.” Hutchinson pulled a fourth photo and put it down with a slight reluctance. “They were at the bank with this woman, Christina Amelia Whillet of Dover, Massachusetts.”

  She was a woman caught between extremes. Small but muscular, a face free of baby fat but filled with wistful innocence, more striking than beautiful, she seemed too old to be a teenager, too young to be in her twenties. Bare of makeup, barefoot, in cutoff shorts and midriff T-shirt, she sat on the hood of a small blue convertible with wide racing stripes and Massachusetts plates.

  “A Dodge Cobra. You don’t see many of those.” Max identified the car, then indicated the diamond tennis bracelet that the woman wore. “If those are real, she’s worth money.”

  “About ten million dollars.” Hutchinson grounded out his cigarette butt. “She inherited it from her grandfather in a trust fund that she can’t touch until she’s thirty, but started drawing a yearly allowance of a hundred thousand dollars when she turned eighteen. Until Harris got hold of her, she always donated a large portion of her allowance to charities, most of them dealing with terminally ill children and battered women.”

  “Is she dead?” Ukiah asked.

  Hutchinson looked pained. “We don’t know.” He tapped out another cigarette, the want to do violence plain in his body language. “Along with donating money, Christa did fund-raising, public awareness, and support work via Web sites, newsgroups, and chat rooms. She met members of Harris’s cult over the Internet; it started as a seduction of words, then, somehow, it went deeper than that. She had been using the screen handle of Crowsong, because her initials were CAW; after interacting with the cult, she changed it to Socket. Finally she met with them. I—I’ve been told that she used safeguards: a public place that she knew well, people she trusted to escort her to and from her car. An hour into the meeting, though, she got up and left with them.”

  Why the fumble with words? Ukiah glanced to Max, who indicated with a tick of his mouth that he’d heard it but didn’t know what to make of it.

  “She’s been missing since then?” Max guessed.

  “No, she came home the next day with Ping.” Hutchinson paused to light his cigarette with the gold lighter. “She apologized for worrying her parents, wrote out good-bye notes to everyone who might miss her, and packed her things.” He tapped the photographs. “She and Ping met Ice and Core at her bank and cashed out her allowance for the year. They moved on to nearby computer stores and charged her credit cards to the limit. Witnesses say she seemed happy, relaxed, and at ease. Last stop was at a pawnshop, where she pawned her jewelry. All in all, it was nearly three hundred thousand dollars in cash and electronics that Christa handed over to Harris at the end of the day.”

  “Okay, something definitely went hinky there,” Max said. “We don’t do it, but there are private investigators who will kidnap kids back off of cults and noncustodial parents. Her parents didn’t try something like that?”

  “They did.” A fifth picture joined the others, a gorilla of a man. “They hired John Rizzo, a private investigator out of Boston. Not the wisest choice of men, but they were essentially paying him to break the law. They had a staff of expert deprogrammers on hand to break whatever hold the cult had on Christina.” Hutchinson leaned back, taking out his cigarettes, as Max and Ukiah studied the photos. “Rizzo is, by all reports, a greedy son of a bitch. He would have earned a hundred thousand dollars; instead, he joined the cult. We believe he now goes by the name of Hash.”

  “Core, Ping, Socket, Hash,” Max murmured. “They’re all computer terms.”

  “Christina placed a lot of emphasis on the fact that they became her friends without knowing how much money she had.”

  Max snorted. “It wouldn’t have been hard to hack her identity.”

  Hutchinson regarded Max for a moment of silence. “Do you know a lot about hacking computers?”

  “Regardless of what I know about computer security, it doesn’t explain how all this relates to us. A Massachusetts high-society girl runs off to join a cult in New England. What the hell does it have to do with us?”

  “I said you were a long shot. Bear with me. This is going to take some explaining.” Hutchinson leaned back and organized his thoughts for a minute before starting to talk. “The cult maintained a commune on a farm in New Hampshire. In January, they sold the farm and moved with great secrecy.”

  “To Pittsburgh?” Max asked.

  “No. Buffalo, New York.” Hutchinson held up his hand. “I’m almost to you. They stayed in Buffalo for a few months, renting a lakefront house off-season. The lease ran out at the end of May, but they pushed it into July. We’d just located them when they vanished again.”

  “To Pittsburgh?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.” Hutchinson pulled another photo out; it took Ukiah a moment to realize that the man in the photo was dead, lying on a metal gurney. “Last week the police stopped this man for speeding on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. He was driving a car with expired registry from New Hampshire with no proof of insurance or ownership. He had no driver’s license or ID; he said his name was Zip and wouldn’t give any other name.”

  “So how did he end up dead?” Max asked.

  “The police impounded the car and took him in for questioning. He refused his one phone call and right to an attorney. They put him in holding and called the public defender, who couldn’t get him to talk. Late the next day, he died of an aneurysm.”

  “I suppose that’s a literal dead end there,” Max said.

  Hutchinson gave him a dark look. “We’re working on an ID on him; it might give us a lead.”

  “And the car?”

  “Registered to a John Pender of New Hampshire. His parents report that he joined the cult two years ago. But the John Doe isn’t him.”

  “And this connects with us how?”

  “Zip, the John Doe, had these.” Hutchinson laid five photos out like a poker hand.

  “Oh, fuck,” Max muttered.

  Ukiah recognized the first two photographs; a professional photographer by the name of Gunter Dettersen took them for a magazine article on the agency. Gunter had followed them in a punt boat through the freshwater marsh, taking roll after roll of pictures, as Ukiah tracked a lost little girl. Gunter had used mostly black and white film to capture the bleakness of the day: the vast marsh, the thick fog, and the lone tracker. Max and Ukiah had gone through all the photographs after the magazine article came out and bought the six that they liked best. The two photographs that Hutchinson held showed Ukiah at two extremes of the search. The first in profile caught him at the beginning of the track, clean, fresh, tense, and focused only on the girl. The second showed him at the successful end, filthy, exhausted, cold, and exuberant, smiling at the camera.

  While he could place the first two pictures down to the click of the camera taking them, Ukiah didn’t recognize the third. It was a color photograph of Ukiah and Max at the start of another search. They stood in front of b
ushes that were blurred beyond recognition. Ukiah ignored it to focus on the last two, obviously taken after the shoot-out at the airport terminal. They showed Ari Johnson and Max standing together behind Ari’s patrol car, off center, as the subject of the photos were the Ontongard dead. In the first, Max’s back was to the camera, but the second one caught him in profile.

  Ukiah scanned through his memory of the shoot-out’s aftermath. Gunter had been in the vanguard of media arriving as Ukiah and Max pried themselves free of the confusion.

  Hutchinson pointed to the Pittsburgh Police badge—a round shield encircled with a belt and buckle—painted on the door of Ari’s squad car. “From the emblem on the police car, we knew Officer Johnson was with the Pittsburgh Police. We had his captain identify him, and he identified the two of you.”

  That matched with what Ari told them. Gunter, though, had been extremely protective of his photographs; he wouldn’t have given them out freely.

  “Do you know where the cult got these pictures?” Ukiah asked.

  “Gunter Dettersen, a free-lance photographer.” Hutchinson turned the black and white photos over to reveal Gunter’s copyright stamp. “He was attacked at his studio last week; he’s currently in a coma. His attackers dissembled his filing cabinet and carried off all his negatives but left a fortune in photography equipment.”

  “I . . . don’t get this.” Max checked the other three photos for copyright stamps and found their backs blank, which probably meant the cult had developed the photos from negatives. “The cult attacked Dettersen to steal pictures of Ukiah? Why? What does a bunch of religious loonies want with us?”

  “We don’t know,” Hutchinson said. “If nothing else, we hoped that you’d be able to shed some light on where they might be. They’ve gone completely underground. We’re assuming that all of the members are still alive, but we might be tracking a mass grave at this point.”

  “What do you mean?” Ukiah asked.

  “The problem with nutcases,” Hutchinson said bleakly, “is that they tend to crack in spectacular fashion. Waco. Jonestown. Heaven’s Gate. If the leader loses it, he generally takes the whole cult out with him.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Shadyside, Pennsylvania

  Monday, September 13, 2004

  They talked with Hutchinson for another thirty minutes, but with no results. Simply, from what the federal agent told them, they could find no connection between themselves and the Temple of New Reason besides the photographs.

  At the end of the meeting, Hutchinson gave them both a business card and asked to be called if the cult contacted them.

  Max walked Hutchinson to the front door and firmly saw him out. Max went to the window then and scanned the street. “There are times I’d like to be able to read minds.”

  “Why?”

  “None of this makes sense. Cults are FBI matters. Why is Homeland Security involved? What does this cult want with us? Why does Homeland care?”

  Ukiah shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Well, let’s see what we can find out about them.” Max turned from his study of the street.

  Ukiah could do Web searches, but Max worked the Internet like a wizard, opening multiple windows, designing searches, and flipping through the results faster than Ukiah could read the text.

  “Well, they’re not registered with the National Database of Nonprofit Organizations.” Max closed three of the windows. “If they’re a church, they don’t have to file an annual return with the IRS. I think. I’m not totally clear if they need to be registered or not to be tax exempt. I’ll have to ask Picray.”

  The filtered search on “Temple of New Reason” pointed to one URL, but clicking on it took Max to an error message saying THE PAGE CANNOT BE FOUND.

  “Looks like they took down their Web site.” Ukiah pulled around one of the visitor chairs to get comfortable.

  Undaunted, Max opened new windows. “What most people don’t realize when they throw up a quick Web page is that nothing really disappears off the Internet. Too many places are cache sites.

  “What’s this?” Max muttered as his attempts continued to return PAGE CANNOT BE FOUND error. “Oh, I see. Tricky. Making the front page look like an error message.”

  “How can you tell it’s a trick?”

  “The site’s really returning a 200 OK code but displaying the text that normally comes up when the page is missing.” Max saw that he didn’t understand and tried another explanation. “Web sites return a numeric code. ‘200’ means the server returned the desired page. Anything in the 400s means there’s an error.”

  “But it’s still there.”

  “Yeah, they’re doing security through obscurity.” Max tried several guesses at URLs before discovering the true index page with professional-looking graphics reading Temple of New Reason. “Weird. Looks like they started with a Heaven’s Gate mindset but then decided to go underground.”

  “What’s Heaven’s Gate?”

  “A cult that ran a Web page design business. They had a very public Web site that basically spelled out that they were going to kill themselves; unfortunately no one seemed to notice until afterward. This was back in nineteen ninety”—Max thought a moment, doing math—“seven. They got some crazy idea that the Hale-Bopp comet signaled the end of the world or the second coming or something. They did a very neat and orderly mass suicide. Somewhere around forty of them, laid out on their beds covered with purple shrouds, with five dollars in their pockets, as if the cost of the ferryman had gone up with inflation. It was all very creepy.”

  Ukiah had started to work with Max in 1999. While well meaning, his moms had sheltered him from the world, and so the tragedy had gone unrecorded in his perfect memory. “Forty? At once?”

  “No. The truly creepy thing is it was over a three-day period, in groups of thirteen or fourteen. I don’t remember the exact number. Apparently, one group would kill themselves, and the remaining members would clean everything up, lay them out, and start the next round.”

  Ukiah stared at his partner, horrified. “They killed themselves? Are the police sure an outsider didn’t kill them? Why would that many people all want to kill themselves?”

  “Suicide is infectious.” Max spoke with calm, personal knowledge of a survivor. “Once the idea of killing yourself gets in, it starts to grow, until it crowds out everything else. Death seems like a release, wiping clean all the darkness and pain.”

  “But all of them, together, like that?”

  “Cults are like the Ontongard; they erase the individual. The leaders of these things do research into brainwashing and adapt the methods, all dressed in religious mumbo jumbo. For example, they might set up a ritual that deprives the new members of sleep; fatigue can really warp your judgment. ‘Fasting’ is just a way of controlling a person’s food intake. You isolate a new member away, control everything down to his ability to use the toilet, work him until he drops, and so forth until his mind is putty, then you can mold him into a willing follower that believes everything you tell them.”

  “I don’t understand why anyone would stay.”

  “Well, we’re not talking about the strongest-willed people here. People who join cults are unhappy and searching for something better. They want to belong. And then the human mind is a funny thing. One of the simple brainwashing techniques requires a person to stand in one spot for hours. The person starts with a determination to stick it out. But as time goes by, and discomfort becomes pain, the person realizes that his own determination is the reason for being in pain. Basically the technique pits one’s strength of will, your moral fortitude, against the limits of your body. One of them has to give out.”

  Max grunted as he clicked through the Web site. “These pages are from the 1990s, but already they’ve stripped the members of their real names and given them computer terms as a ‘designation.’ Parity. Gopher. Zip. Veronica.”

  “Veronica is a computer term?”

  “Very Easy Rodent Oriented Net-wid
e something or other Application. It’s a gopher, meaning it retrieves documents. This cults sounds like a bunch of deluded hackers. Eck.”

  “What is it?” Ukiah leaned forward to read the page Max had stopped on. It was titled “A Ferruginous Comet Caused Plagues of Egypt.”

  As the Earth moved through a tail of the comet, a fine red dust turned the Nile “into blood.” Next, there was a rain of glowing debris from innumerable little meteors burning in the atmosphere, causing “boils on man and beast.” When the Earth passed through the densest part of the tail, a hailstorm of large meteorites bombarded Egypt. The next plague was an impenetrable darkness, accompanied by a mysterious state of lethargy among men: “They did not see one another, and none of them got up from his own place in three days.” Such a state of lethargy is a typical symptom of people who have been exposed to cyanogen, or “cyanide gas.” Many comets are surrounded by a cloud or coma-containing poisonous cyanogen gas. Spectroscopic analyses indicate that Hale-Bopp does contain, among other things, large amounts of reddish dust and cyanogen gas! Cyanogen is easily soluble and gives a very bitter taste when dissolved in water . . .

  It all sounded very plausible.

  “Is it true that a comet caused the plagues?” Ukiah asked Max.

  “Oh, who knows? I’ve heard similar arguments that it was a volcanic activity. Actually thinking about it, the volcano thing is more credible. The whole Red Sea thing can be explained as a tsunami wave triggered by an earthquake; the water level drops drastically and then returns as a massive wall. That’s the problem with these cults; they start out with something that sounds halfway possible, but the deeper in you get, the crazier their logic is. It’s not a good sign that they’re mentioning Hale-Bopp.”