“I’ve got kids here, Decker. Little kids with shiny faces. They’ll make damn good cover photos for all the major magazines. You hear what I’m saying?”
Decker knew damn well what he was saying.
“It’s like the elusive graviton,” Bob went on. “It’s out there but you can’t see it. You’re going to have to accept me at face value or we’re going to have real problems.”
Decker’s face was mired in sweat. Webster said, “Don’t do it—”
“Shut the fuck up and listen,” Decker said. “As I get up, you two crawl over and take cover in the cruisers—”
“Sir, I—”
“That’s a fucking order, Webster! As soon as you get to safety, find out whatever the fuck you can on who this Bob Ross is and what makes him tick! Call up Europa Ganz. She used to date the motherfucker—”
“Decker!” Bob screamed out. “I’m losing patience!”
“I make my move,” Decker whispered to his men, “you make yours. Go!” Inch by inch, Decker forced himself to get to his knees.
As visible as the moon.
Slowly, he rose to his feet.
As visible as the sun.
He stood stock-still…waiting.
Nothing.
He started to inch backward to the cars.
Bob shouted, “Don’t do anything funny! We got infrared scopes. You’re as bright as daylight. And keep your hands over your head.”
Decker held up his arms. “Free and clear.” He stole a quick glance over his shoulder. Webster and Martinez had made it to safety.
“Don’t move!” Bob shouted.
Decker stopped. “Bob, I’ve got to give orders to my men for everyone’s protection.”
“Then shout them out loud!” Bob screamed. “Why couldn’t you leave well enough alone—”
The sirens were drowning him out. Cruisers flashing reds and blues, pulsating in strobic fashion. The cars pulling up one after another, each time more and more officers getting out, guns drawn, squatting behind open doors. Five, six, seven…Captain Strapp should be here soon.
More and more. A dozen in all.
Finally the sirens died down and all that remained were the silent gaudy car lights—as if someone muted the remote control and this TV cop scene was played out in silence. Decker’s voice carried easily.
“Hold your fire!” He yelled. Then louder, just to make sure. “Hold your fire!”
Silence.
Flash, flash, flash went the overhead patrol car lights. Blue, red, blue, red, blue, red…hypnotic.
Decker could feel his heart skipping beats, feel his head pounding against his skull. He couldn’t stay out in the open forever, prey to some psycho’s mental game.
“I’m going over to a cruiser now—”
“Stay where I can see you!” Bob demanded.
“No, Bob, I won’t do that.” A pause. “Remember the graviton. You don’t improvise and we won’t either. Trust is the name of the game.”
No response.
“Bob, you hear me?”
Nothing.
With almost imperceptible movements, Decker walked backward to the nearest patrol car.
One second, two seconds, three, four, five…
It took him almost a minute to touch a hood. His first instinct was to bolt for the door.
But that would have shown fear.
Don’t ever let them see you sweat.
His face was sopping wet so it was too late for that.
Forcing himself not to immediately take cover.
Bob seemed to pride himself on some kind of perverse notion of trust. Decker decided to work on that. He shouted, “I’m still out in the open, Bob! Easy pickings. Completely open. That’s how much I trust you, Bob. I know you see me—”
“Perfectly through the crosshairs!” the guru shouted back.
“And you can also hear me.”
“Like a bell.”
“I’ve got a cell phone in my pocket, Bob. Lemme give you the number.”
Silence.
Decker gave him the number anyway.
Ten seconds.
Nothing.
Twenty seconds.
Nothing with nothing.
Flash, flash.
Thirty seconds.
The shrill ring broke the silence. Decker, startled, jumped, then managed to connect the line with his shaky hands. “Yo, Bob—”
“Why couldn’t you just leave well enough alone, Lieutenant. Now look what you got!”
“I’ve got a mess.”
“You’ve got more than just a mess, my friend!”
With one fluid motion, Decker slid into the safety of a nearby car, his hands trembling so hard he almost dropped the phone. He took in a deep breath and let it out with yoga precision. “I think we’ve got a stand-off, guy.”
“You’re one smart dude.” A laugh. “That’s exactly what we’ve got. And if you or anyone else tries to be a hero, you’ll get one dead kid for every time you fail. In this Hollywood world of flash images and sound bites, that’ll make for great Nielsen ratings. Your fuck-ups will be broadcast across the world.”
25
From inside Martineg’s Honda, Decker spoke fast and furiously. “We’ve got about five minutes before Strapp steps in and I’m off the case. I want you two out of here.”
“What?” Webster started in. “Why?”
“If you two stay here, you’ll be trapped into answering the captain’s questions. Also, this is now a high-profile case. Most likely, the feds’ll be called in. If you’re here answering questions, you can’t solve murders. If you’re out, you can do some good. As long as Bob is talking to me, I’m forced to stick around. So you two go, and I’ll make excuses for your absences.”
“What kind of excuses?” Martinez asked.
Decker’s mind was racing. In the distance, he heard the bleating of more sirens. “Did either of you skin yourself when we went down?”
Webster said, “I b’lieve I scraped my knee.”
“Great!” Decker exclaimed. “I thought it might have been a graze wound from a bullet. I sent Martinez to take you to the hospital to have it looked at.”
The wailing was getting louder, the brass was moving in. He said, “Tom, call up Dunn and Oliver. Tell them to come back to Los Angeles, but don’t come to the Order until they hear from me. In the meantime, fill them in.”
“Got it.”
“Next, find out everything you can about Guru Bob aka Bob Ross.” Decker was talking rapidly. “To be thorough, you’ve got to check the databases. But in my gut, I still think Europa’s our best bet. Grill her hard and once we have some background info on Bob maybe we can figure out why he’s doing this. And if we can figure out the why, maybe that’ll give us a strategy on how to play him.”
The sirens were on top of them. Decker had to shout. “Eventually, we’re going to plan a raid or infiltration. SWAT is going to need Marge, Scott and me because we’ve been inside the Order. I’ve been in parts of the compound, Marge and Scott have seen other areas. They’ll want us to get together and create a floor plan. This is our ace in the hole—a way to keep everyone interested in us and buy some time until we know more. It would be nice if we found someone who’s actually familiar with the interior of the place. Any suggestions?”
Webster spoke up. “What about Reuben Asnikov? Maybe he knows some ex-cult members who can help us out.”
“Go for it,” Decker answered.
“Cars are pulling up,” Webster said.
Decker jumped out of the car just as the tires on Strapp’s car spat gravel. He banged on the hood. “Go!”
Martinez gunned the motor and the Honda sped off. As Strapp got out, Decker jogged away and tried to hide himself in the shadows. He dialed the Order. After twenty rings, he cut the connection and decided to face his boss. But within moments, his cellular rang.
Decker punched the button. “Bob, I’m about to be taken over.” Waiting for a response. But none came. “What we ha
ve is upper echelon. Brass is going to take over. They’ll probably call in the feds, although it isn’t strictly a fed case. Someone’ll probably confiscate my phone. I just thought I’d be a gentleman and let you know that it wasn’t my idea.”
“I don’t like this. Feds are hotheads. Look at Waco.”
“I’d be happy to stick around, Brother Bob, but like your own organization, we’ve got a pecking order. I’m way down on the food chain.”
Bob said, “Precisely what’s wrong with our world. I’m trying to keep this small and personal—I mean we all know the players involved—and the government is screwing up. It’s why we can’t get anywhere in the space race. It’s why we’re behind in the arms’ race. We have the science and the technology, but the bureaucrats hold us back. That and the fundamentalists. They’re inherently afraid of progress.”
“That may be, but there are still realities to deal with. Mine is my superiors.”
“Well, I’m not dealing with your superiors or the feds, Lieutenant. You tell them that. And you also tell them if they try anything, I’ve got enough goodies in here to make Oklahoma City look benign.”
Decker took in his words. Did he mean bombs?
Bob was saying, “…just tell them what I said, Decker!”
“Guru Bob, if you’re going to blow up things, could you wait until I’m out of the picture—”
“Too late, Lieutenant. As far as I’m concerned, you’re so much in the picture, you’re hanging in a museum. But I’ll tell you what. If I barbecue the place, I’ll tell them you had nothing to do with it.”
“It would be better if you held off—”
“Now you’re getting pushy. You just want to stalemate me, so you clowns can plan a raid.”
“We can’t storm the Order,” Decker said. “It’s a bunker.”
“You got that right!” A stilted laugh. “Still, I’d like to see them try. It would be…amusing.”
Someone tapped Decker on the shoulder—Strapp. Decker said, “Captain Strapp is here, Brother Bob. Would you like to talk to him?”
But the line had gone dead.
The Order of the Rings of God was getting its requisite fifteen minutes of fame with news personnel asking inane questions that had no answers. Misinformation was flying faster than sound, making it that much harder to sort fact from fiction. The good guys had set up camp behind a barrier of police vehicles—cars and vans. The media had been roped off at a distance, supposedly out of firing range, but zoom cameras were focused on strategic points. Within the hour, three different law enforcement agencies were called in, all of them pooling their ignorance.
As predicted, Decker immediately lost his command of the operation, replaced by Captain Strapp, who was then discarded in favor of the LAPD chief of police with the mayor in tow. Because Bob had mentioned bombs, the mayor had called in the ATF and the FBI to set up a task force with LAPD. The assistant director in charge (ADIC) of the Los Angeles branch of the FBI was out of town—in Sacramento—but was taking the first flight out in the morning. Explosives had turned everyone fearful. Both the police and the FBI had their own SWAT teams and hostage negotiators specializing in these kinds of delicate situations. Quantico had been apprised, the attorney general’s office had been notified, there was phone contact between the on-site agents and the White House.
Ordinarily, Decker would have been ousted hours ago. But because he held sway with Bob, as predicted, the higher powers kept him on. Everyone ready, set and waiting to go except for one minor fact. Nothing was happening.
The techno-wizards had set up several James Bond superspy vans equipped not only with the standard SWAT MP5 rifles but also with alien, high-powered sniper gear. The weapons were sleek, heavy and lethal, outfitted with the latest in infrared scopes and sights. The van also held state-of-the-art cameras and surveillance equipment.
All of it would have been invaluable if the Order housed its people in tents. But as most of the place was shielded by thick, reinforced concrete block—and none of the policing agencies had X-ray vision—no one really knew what was happening on the inside. Warehoused in one of the FBI steel-plated monsters-on-wheels, Decker remained phoneless and jobless, cramped and hunched over, staring at static monitors. His cellular phone had been taken from him. Wired to FBI tape recording machines.
Everyone waiting for it to ring.
With him were a trio of feds. There was Supervisory Special Agent Jan Barak, a technical equipment specialist. She appeared to be in her mid-thirties with a round face and a nervous expression. She wore a black pants suit, black shirt and sneakers without socks. There was also Special Agent Darrel Lombardo, who seemed a bit older—an African-American with a receding hairline. Decker couldn’t discern his assignment. He suspected Lombardo’s job was watching Decker.
The final member was Bennett McCarry, special agent in charge. This rank was known as an SAC but pronounced Ess Ai Cee, never as the acronym SAC. Decker found this out when he had referred to McCarry as a SAC and was duly corrected. McCarry was Caucasian—a dapper man in his forties, dressed in a gray suit, white shirt and black-and-white geometric tie, which hung loosely around his neck. His face was long and lean, his pink cheeks sprouting light stubble. He had a prominent chin, high cheekbones and deep-set eyes. His expression was as taut as steel wire. He manned the tach phone lines—giving orders to his people, taking orders from faraway superiors, coordinating the whole mess with the mayor’s command post a few vans down. During the interludes, he asked Decker pointed questions.
“How you’d get into this fiasco?”
Decker countered, “Same way you got into Waco and Ruby Ridge.”
McCarry glared at him, waiting for a proper response.
Decker said, “If you ask me a specific question, I can give you a specific answer.”
McCarry ground his teeth together. “What do you know about Guru Bob?”
“You want a physical description?”
“You can start with that.”
“A thin guy around six-even. Lean with a goatee. Get me a police artist, I’ll get you a picture. His hobbies appear to be gardening and women. He told me he had been a student at Southwest University of Technology. He was a disciple of Emil Ganz’s work.”
“Aka Father Jupiter,” Agent Barak said out loud. “The head of the Order—”
McCarry interrupted. “Jupiter died several days ago. Suspicious death. An OD. A Heaven’s Gate copycatter—empty bottle of vodka and pills.”
Decker nodded. “Earlier this evening, the coroner informed me that there had been arsenic in Jupiter’s system.”
McCarry perked up. “So now it’s homicide.”
“Not necessarily. Dr. Little still thinks booze and pills killed him. Could have been accidental, could have been suicide. But with the autopsy findings, I was able to pull warrants for a full-scale search and seizure of the Order. Which I couldn’t do before because I didn’t have probable cause. We got here around two in the morning—”
“Who’s we?” Agent Lombardo piped in.
Decker said, “Pluto and I. Pluto’s the dead guy Bob blew away. He had called off the guard dogs—the Dobies—and was entering the premises when Bob opened fire.”
McCarry asked why Decker was with Pluto at two in the morning.
“A good question,” Decker said. “Wait until you hear the answer. We had been up at Central City, at the Order’s chicken ranch, trying to pry out a swollen, disarticulated, decapitated torso stuffed into the kitchen cabinet.”
The trio went slack-jawed…without comment.
Decker went on. “The body turned out to be another high-ranking member of the Order—a podiatrist who called himself Guru Nova. The corpse was less than two days old because we had interviewed him around forty-eight hours ago. He signed Jupiter’s death certificate, ruling it as an OD. We wanted to know why. He was squirrelly around us. Obviously, he felt fear from somebody. And from his outcome, his fears were well grounded.”
Barak’s mo
uth opened and closed. “Did Bob cut up Nova, also?”
“Bob’s high on our hit list. A distant second suspect is the ranch’s hired help—a man named Benton, who’s holed up in the Central City jail. I left a couple of my guys up there to interview Benton so that I could come back down here and execute search warrants for the Order. When Bob opened fire on Pluto, I was about thirty…forty feet behind him. My guys and I dropped. We managed to reach safety. I called in the incident.” A pause. “Now you’re up to date.”
McCarry played with his tie. “Why’d Bob kill Nova?”
“I don’t know that he did.”
“Well, why did he shoot Pluto?”
“Beats me.”
“You must have a theory.”
“I have several and they’re all incomplete. Before I shoot off my mouth, I’m waiting for more facts.”
Barak asked, “So Bob’s taking over the Order?”
“Looks like it.”
“Anyone else in his way?”
Decker told them about Venus.
McCarry asked, “Any idea if she’s alive?”
“Nope. If he calls, I could ask him to put her on the line. But Bob’s an irritable guy. He’s not going to like demands.”
Barak said, “You said Bob was a disciple of Ganz.”
“Yes I did.”
“So he was a scientist…once?”
“I don’t know if Bob actually worked as a scientist. He was majoring in astrophysics at Southwest U. when Ganz resurfaced as Father Jupiter. Bob followed him into the Order of the Rings of God, and the rest is history.”
“What do you mean resurfaced as Jupiter?” McCarry asked.
“What do you know about Ganz?”
“Cult leader of the Order of the Rings of God. Been around…what, ten years?”
“Fifteen.”
“He used to be a well-known scientist.”
“Twenty-five years ago, Dr. Emil Euler Ganz left his job and all his prestige at Southwest University of Technology and walked off the face of the earth. For ten years, his whereabouts were unknown. Fifteen years ago, he came back as Father Jupiter and started the Order.”
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