Purgatory

by Guido Eekhaut

“Let’s concentrate on the main things,” Dewaal said, ignoring his rant. She was wearing a sharply tailored business suit that made her look powerful and sexy. She could be tough, and wore this civilian uniform only as a compromise. She seemed to feel more at ease in jeans and a sweater. Or combat gear. “The Church of the Supreme Purification is an underground religious organization. It’s very close to a cult, even in the legal sense. You Belgians are really tough on cults. You even banned Scientology from operating in your territory. We prefer a little more caution. We’re a bit more concerned about the lawyers on our doorstep. The Church of the Supreme Purification has existed in its current form for about seventy years, a bit longer perhaps. At least as far as we know.”

  “That’s pretty young for a religion.”

  “It’s not a damn religion, Eekhaut. It’s a cult. A cult. Shut up and let me tell the story. Their premise is that the world will perish in somewhat more than two years, in late 2020—”

  He again wanted to interject but realized he’d better just listen. “In 2020,” she continued. “And don’t ask me why. That year, the world will perish by fire. Bad enough as things go, but the members of the church also believe that only a handful of the human population will be spared. These few will experience the ultimate grace of God, and so on.”

  “Yes, of course,” Eekhaut said, “the usual idiocies of your common homegrown apocalyptic religion. Uttered by idiots who, even after centuries of enlightenment, still assume their personal creator will save them from their own stupidity.”

  “Something like that, yes. I’m sure they prefer an altogether different definition. Their original thesis was that only their followers who wielded the purification of the fire would be among the elect.”

  “Wielded the—?”

  “That’s what it says in the occasional snippets of information they choose to make public.”

  “Oh, all right. Let me guess, they had to set themselves on fire, ritually if possible. And why not, I say. Members of a cult choosing to commit collective suicide is by definition the way to ensure your cult dies out by itself.”

  Dewaal remained patient. They had come to know each other well by now. He was annoying her on purpose. She would not be drawn into his game. “No, Walter, it’s actually a lot worse than that. The ritual of purification meant—and probably still means—the elect were assumed to destroy other people, the large number of unbelievers, if you will, through fire. People who were, in the eyes of the church, unworthy.”

  “Unworthy?”

  “That’s right. It isn’t complicated: anyone who’s not a member of the church is unworthy. It’s classic. There’s still no definitive proof that the ritual was ever performed. At least no one has come up with definitive evidence, and the church never publicly claims anything. The true believers keep quiet about it for obvious reasons, given the seriousness of the alleged crimes, and given the level of secrecy surrounding the church. In the end, we know almost nothing about their activities. There is, however, quite a bit of speculation about certain well-documented disasters being the work of the church. Los Alfaques, the plane crash at Tenerife airport in the Canary Islands, the fire at the Innovation department store in Brussels—”

  “That one dates back to 1967!”

  “Exactly. And there’s a long list of other incidents where many people died.”

  “The cause of the Innovation fire was never really explained.”

  “No. And more than three hundred people lost their lives. The crash at the Tenerife airport where two planes collided was probably due to a technical problem, but there are still doubts about the real cause.”

  “And you assume this church is responsible? But why kill so many people? What makes random victims belong to the . . . unworthy?”

  “I leave that to your imagination, Walter. Los Alfaques: a tanker filled with a flammable gas drives off the road and explodes near a popular RV park and campsite, again randomly killing hundreds of people. With a cult believing that public semi-nakedness is an affront to your god and a mortal sin, you may well have a solid if delusional reason for mass murder.”

  “I see. And if your religion tells you eternity awaits you after you’re done the vengeful god’s work on Earth . . . What about your informant?”

  She avoided his gaze. He noticed she looked tired. She wasn’t her usual dynamic self. Since when had she been carrying this burden? “The story,” she said, “is even more complex as far as we could find out. Some twenty years ago, new people began to lead the church. Apparently, they were tired of the killings, the sacrifices. They replaced these sacrifices with a purely symbolic ritual, no human victims involved. A ritual cleansing, no more. And much less dangerous to themselves as well, for they were no longer doing something illegal. They had no wish to face lifelong incarceration.”

  “But still they claimed the planet and humanity were approaching its expiration date.”

  “It still was, and it still is, I guess. Anyway, the Church of the Supreme Purification disappeared for a while. Disasters still happened, but there no longer was any reason to suspect them, or so the international intelligence community assumed. Not that we had much proof earlier. Unfortunately, many followers of the church didn’t agree with the new moderate doctrine. They convened around a new movement that became known under an equally unsavory name: The Society of Fire. It didn’t seem much creative thinking went into that.”

  Eekhaut frowned. “Really? The Society of Fire? Appropriate, I guess, but with a name like that, there’s usually no way back for people joining you.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “About talking people into some stupid superstition. You give them an apocalyptic agenda and a set of prejudices, all wrapped in a seemingly sound doctrine, and you find yourself in the presence of followers who are assured they’re the human elite. What amazes me is that you have an informant—and I assume he’s well informed—who’s probably one of these people. What else did he tell you? Names, places?”

  “There’s not much more in my file than what I just told you. Most of what the AIVD and other agencies have is circumstantial, mere rumors. No member of the church was ever found guilty of any crime, nor did anyone spill the secrets to the outside world. We cannot condemn people for adhering to a religious doctrine if they don’t commit crimes or actively incite others to commit hate crimes or murder. We can only hope the new guardians of the church are as much concerned about the radicals as we are and are willing to reveal the truth about them at some point.”

  “And it’s this informant who provided the coordinates?” Eekhaut said.

  After which they found themselves, on a cold January day, in a clearing in a forest, with only each other and death as companions.

  Now, three weeks after their initial foray, they were still nowhere.

  “He hinted that what we’d discover was only the proverbial tip of the iceberg,” Dewaal said.

  “A sort of preview? Of what exactly?”

  “I don’t know, Walter. I’ve never had any real conversation with my informant, who isn’t keen on stepping into the daylight after all.”

  “No, I assume he wouldn’t want to,” Eekhaut said.

  “Are they telling us,” she said after a moment of awkward silence, “that there’s no way we can identify the other five victims?”

  “We can’t identify any of them yet, Chief,” Eekhaut said. “We’ve collected usable DNA on two of the bodies, but there’s nothing to match them with since we can’t find anything in our databases. One thing’s for sure: while alive, these two didn’t commit any crimes. Or were never registered as criminals. They’re part of the millions of people not in our or any other database.”

  “We need a transnational DNA database of all citizens in the European Union,” Dewaal said. She knew citizens, in the Netherlands as much as anywhere else, were very uncomfortable with being registered by the authorities. It was the type of thing only totalitarian states do. It would never pass legislation. The wo
rds “police state” would be heard whenever the subject came up. “Any other clues, like dental records? We could try dental records, assuming the victims are Dutch. Maybe none of them are Dutch.”

  “Our technical people tried to reconstruct jaws and dentures, but under intense heat, any part of the body becomes too brittle for them to use. Anyway, we would probably need to search records abroad, and we don’t have the workforce to do that.”

  Dewaal leaned back in her chair. Eekhaut kept his gaze away from her suddenly tightening blouse. “So far nothing much, then. What was used to burn them?”

  “Material that can be bought in any hardware store. Kerosene as an accelerant, mostly. Nothing complicated, nothing that leaves distinct clues. And the scene was about two weeks old, as far as the pathologist told us. The only thing he can say for certain is that they burned alive, but perhaps they were no longer conscious.”

  “That’s horrible enough.”

  “Three of them were women. Ages probably between thirty and fifty. And probably Caucasian. That’s about it as far as details are concerned.”

  “Must have been a lot of smoke. No reports about that? Anybody seeing the plume of smoke? Foresters, hikers?”

  “Apparently no one was around at the time. The police inquired in the nearby villages, but there’s no human habitation around for twenty kilometers. You remember how long it took us to get there on foot. And around the time of the murders, there had been several days of overcast weather and snow. It’s unlikely anyone saw the smoke.”

  “These people prepared this execution carefully. Everything seems thought through, even the weather conditions.”

  “Isn’t that what we could expect from a cult with such an impressive track record? That they prepared carefully and wouldn’t want to get caught?”

  She shook her head.

  He wouldn’t let it slide. “At least your informant should know better. Where did he get those coordinates? What role does he have in the organization? Is he actually reliable?”

  “Are you questioning my informant, Walter?”

  “I don’t even know who he is, Chief.”

  “We did find the bodies, after all, didn’t we? So, in my opinion, he is reliable. Shall we leave it at that?”

  “Maybe these people wanted the bodies to be found. Maybe the informant has played the role he was intended to play. Is he a member of the conventional church? Or is he one of the radicals?”

  “I know only that he walks with the radicals, the ones who want to continue the grand old tradition, and those bodies are proof of that intention. Try to keep things clearly separate, Walter.”

  “But we don’t have any names? Nobody we know that’s carrying a membership card? We could check their alibi and so on. Rattle their cage or whatever. Can’t he give us some names?”

  “As I understand it, he’s deeply involved with the Society of Fire. That’s not the problem. The problem, apparently, is that no one ever uses real names. And my informant is scared, really, that they’ll find out he’s talking to me. Can you imagine what they’ll do to him? That’s why our contacts so far have been brief. That is the problem with all cults: nobody talks to outsiders. And don’t forget, the outside world is due to be destroyed. The apocalypse is nigh and all that. These people know only one thing. If they want to survive the coming onslaught, they need to pray to their creator and do what their leaders tell them to do.”

  “Well,” Eekhaut said, “don’t expect any prayers from me, even if the sky turns black right now and the Four Horsemen appear. If there were a god, he’d be less bloodthirsty and more compassionate than that. What about the message?”

  “What message?”

  “The one written on the cabin wall. Does it make any sense yet?”

  She inhaled deeply. “Your guess is as good as mine, Walter. I asked Van Gils to google the text, but he came up with nothing. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything at all.”

  “It’s an explicit message. This world seems to take forever / But it is only the dream of a sleeper. That’s clear enough, by way of warning. And it sounds vaguely familiar too. We must ask ourselves how many people are connected to this event. How extensive is this conspiracy?”

  “There’s no way of telling how many people were involved, since we found no trace of anyone. But that’s not unusual, given that the ground was frozen in the whole area.”

  “I can’t believe just one person was involved out there. He might have been able to drug the victims by himself, but he couldn’t possibly have carried them all to the clearing without help. That or the material needed for the whole setup, the stakes and the chains and the kerosene. This was done by a group of people, with a clear goal in mind. Punishment, perhaps. But one of the reasons you punish people is as a caution to others. So why do it in a remote area? After this thing, I’m really concerned we’ll be hearing from them again, and soon.”

  “You’re probably right,” she said. “Incidentally, I asked Veneman to consult the missing persons’ database for the last couple of months. He told me a lot of people in the thirty- to fifty-year-old group are getting lost in Europe.”

  “Why don’t we look at the Dutch only?”

  “We could. But the Church of the Supreme Purification has an estimated hundred thousand members around the globe, and we may assume that’s where the victims come from. That they’d be people killed by the radicals for belonging to the actual church.”

  “And how many of these radicals are there?”

  “We don’t know. Not even an estimate.”

  He rubbed his hands down his face and thought of Linda, who had been delighted with the news that she’d finally get to go to Africa on a humanitarian mission, although regretting that she’d be separated from him for six months—which was nearly as long as their time together until now. Linda, who had gone to Schiphol Airport on her own, didn’t want him to come along and knew she’d be able to communicate with him only irregularly from somewhere in Somalia, technology permitting. He didn’t want to think about the seven bodies on stakes, knowing that scenes like that weren’t at all unknown to humanity. Burning people alive wasn’t the sort of thing he came to expect here in peaceful and prosperous Holland, though. Or in Belgium, for that matter.

  Dewaal interrupted his thoughts. “You and Prinsen will conduct a search for Dutch nationals, or Belgian ones, who’ve been reported missing during the month preceding the incident. We have to start somewhere. If we can’t find anyone who might fit the little description we have of the victims, we’ll expand our search. The boy can use the experience.”

  Prinsen, Eekhaut thought. “Yes, all right.”

  “And it’s not a question of him being my nephew.”

  “He’s better off with me than with any of the other members of the team, isn’t he?”

  She knew what he meant. To the other members of the team, young Prinsen was too close to Dewaal, family-wise. Eekhaut didn’t care about her family relations, however. He was the odd man out in the group, the only Fleming. “God knows what they’d teach him, anyway.”

  “I leave things as usual in your most incapable hands, Walter. Although I should know better. Anyway, I hope your bad habits don’t rub off on him. Got that?”

  So, I’m not babysitting him, Eekhaut thought. Actually, he was. Eekhaut didn’t know where to start anyway. Prinsen could do the heavy lifting, and Eekhaut could keep him knee-deep in research. Interrogating relatives of the hundreds of Dutchies who had recently vanished from the surface of the planet. Sounds like fun. This would keep them both busy for a long time.

  “How many of them are there?” he inquired.

  “How many what?”

  “People. Dutch citizens gone missing.”

  “Oh! About a hundred and forty. Grown-ups anyway. Maybe fewer if you omit the ones who are either too young or too old.” She stood up. “Start here in Amsterdam. Good luck with it. Maybe you’ll be lucky right off.”

  2

  NICK PRINSEN HADN’T R
IDDEN his bike for several weeks now. Not because of the cold so much, which was bad enough this deep in winter, but because the snow in the streets and especially the patches of dirty, half-melted ice made riding through Amsterdam hazardous on two wheels. The winter so far had been severe, despite global warming. Storms and snow had come unpredictably, as if the weather wanted to challenge the doomsayers and weather forecasters alike. For more than a month now, Western Europe had been in the grip of winter. And it wouldn’t be over soon. Still, the season had its occasional better moments. At night, temperatures would drop to the mid-teens, but during the day the sky would be clear and the sun would cause the mercury to rise to the mid-thirties. Soon enough, though, came clouds and high winds with more frozen rain and snow, forcing people back inside.

  Riding his bike wasn’t fun anymore, so Prinsen took the tram from his apartment to Prinsenkade, where he walked the short distance to Kerkstraat. Parkas had been in vogue for a while, along with laced-up boots and thick leather gloves. Amsterdam, usually the city of cyclists, had become a city of slow, hunched figures in heavy clothes waiting for trams or walking close to the storefronts. Restaurants were more popular than ever during daytime and on the weekend, but at night most people chose to stay home. More movies than ever were sold or downloaded, and more booze bought and consumed. And books read. Books, more than TV or games, were popular. This was the new literary winter.

  That morning, however, Prinsen didn’t have winter on his mind, or snow, the tram, or work. Last evening, he had had a call, a call he had been waiting for. Eileen Calster had called from Groningen, up in the north, and she announced she would soon be back in Amsterdam. She had already rented an apartment, found a part-time job, and was planning to take up studies again.

  As far as Prinsen was concerned, all this was excellent news. Four months earlier, following a previous case, he had driven Eileen to Groningen to stay with her parents. Her life was no longer in danger, but she didn’t want to remain in Amsterdam. She was still getting over the trauma of seeing her boyfriend shot, her brother murdered, and being chased by the same assassin.