Has she already told them?
There were no good choices, only gradients of risk.
Get out. Now.
At dawn, the storm was over. Bright rising sun tinged five fresh inches of unplowed snowfall outside. The street was deserted. I saw no car tracks. There was one last thing to do. I turned on the desk lamp at a kitchen window overlooking peaceful Grant Road. I’d head out the back door if I saw even one car turn onto the block, whether it looked like an unmarked or not.
The kitchen computer was a Hewlett Packard, Galli’s day-to-day home model, not an encrypted machine, which required a password to get in. Maybe Eddie had sent me an e-mail. Maybe I’d gotten a relevant message that way. There was nothing of note there but I laughed when I saw that even in a time of national disaster, SPAM came through. A stranger named Brad wanted to friend me. A newsletter invited me to the annual dinner of the board of the National Emergency Disaster Group. I was about to click off when I saw a message from Aya Vekey, hours old.
I tried to call you, Joe, but there was no answer. I just saw you on TV and hope you are okay. I bet the police shot first!
I thought, I have two solid supporters, her and Eddie.
I couldn’t find anything on those names you gave me, but I really, really tried. I’m sorry.
I thought, That’s okay, you did your best.
I tried to find records from SUNY, and those men you asked about from Africa, but the school is closed. The university website is up, but to get student addresses it says you have to call the registrar. They’re closed.
Don’t worry about it, I thought.
Then I looked up other stuff you asked; Sixth Prophet and Cults. There was a cult called the Branch Davidians in Texas. They had a shootout with the FBI in 1993 in Waco, after a 51-day siege. Their leader David Koresh said he was the Seventh Prophet. I thought if there’s a seventh, there must be a sixth, but I never found out who they said it was.
Nice try, Aya, I thought, impressed with the kid’s inventiveness. The Branch Davidians had been a violent offshoot of the Seventh-Day Adventists, believing that an apocalypse was imminent, and Koresh had been a charismatic leader, but he had been dead for years.
Cults, I thought. Back at Wilderness Medicine, two months ago, at Harvard, Eddie and I had sat through a talk by a visiting Tokyo professor named Goro Akiyama, a Japanese expert on the cult Aum Shinrikyo, and their multiyear effort to secure biological weapons.
“Genetic manipulation is easier and cheaper than it has ever been,” he’d said, while we eyed a photo of Shoko Asahara, the chubby, bearded, benevolent-looking academic and business failure who somehow had convinced highly educated followers that he could levitate, and that the apocalypse was imminent. “They tried to jump-start a global war by releasing poison gas in Tokyo in 1995,” Goro said.
“At its peak, Aum Shinriko had over two thousand members, many of them Ph.D.s. It is still listed by the State Department as a terrorist group. They allegedly have members in Russia,” Goro went on.
“Or in the U.S., Marshall Applewaite, the bald, avuncular fanatic believed he was the son of God. His thirty-three followers in 1997 committed suicide at his order, thinking that would release their souls to join aliens in space,” Goro said, showing slides of the dead laid out with their feet facing in the same direction, their shirts and trousers all the same, their expressions benign.
Cults, I thought again. Charles Manson’s followers had believed he was the reincarnation of Jesus, and had gone on a rampage in California. Jim Jones, leader of the Peoples Temple in San Francisco, had led almost a thousand followers in Guyana, South America, where they’d poisoned themselves at his command.
Each leader predicted apocalypse. Each exerted life and death influence over followers. Each, Goro had told us, created an isolated culture composed of a hodgepodge of existing old religious belief, mysticism, and the notion that the leader alone had answers to universal questions, and that they could gain enlightenment by joining up.
After Goro had left, one of the Los Angeles — based doctors in the department had taken me aside in the cafeteria. “Chicken Littles.” He’d sighed. “You can scare yourself to death with this stuff. It will never really happen.”
And now Aya went on in her e-mail, I couldn’t sleep after that horrible segment of you on the news. I was almost asleep and found this blog from Pakistan. It’s from the sister of a man named Tahir Khan, who police say killed himself by jumping off a balcony in Florida. She didn’t believe it. She said her brother was pushed.
I sighed, thinking that this was the type of worthless tripe you got when you sent out a kid to answer a crucial question. She got distracted. She didn’t focus. She lacked experience to weed out dumb stuff and pass along the relevant. You couldn’t fault her. She was fifteen.
As I reached out to shut off the machine, my eyes slid over her next few words.
Miriam Khan said Tahir Khan had gotten mixed up with a dangerous cult near Albany, New York, at SUNY…
My hand stopped moving.
Tahir was a science major, just like those other names you gave me. And he went to the exact same college!
My heart beat faster.
Tahir’s sister said he took the money he inherited from his father and gave it to the cult leader, a man named Harlan Maas. She said Maas bought an old Quaker meeting camp in New Lebanon, New York with the money, and made it a compound for about eighty followers.
My breath caught in my throat.
Tahir e-mailed his sister that he was scared of Maas, and thinking of leaving. She never heard from him again until the Pakistani government contacted her. Police in Florida had traced the fingerprints of a suicide. Tahir was Muslim, but quit that religion. Miriam said Harlan Maas had crazy notions about the end of the world. I e-mailed her but got no answer.
I stared at the screen.
Joe? Ready for this? Tahir Khan studied LEPROSY at SUNY! Uh-oh. Mom is coming.
The message ended.
There were no other e-mails from her since then.
But now that I knew the blog existed, I found it easily and read it. Aya had hit the high points. There was nothing more to be learned this way.
I told myself, Erase this e-mail and don’t respond. If there’s a Washington connection, and they’re in my e-mail, if they know she’s looking into things, I may have doomed the kid. If I don’t respond, she’ll have a better chance.
First Karen in Alaska, then Eddie. Now Aya.
I knew where the admiral kept his 9mm home defense Glock 17. I stole the admiral’s five thousand dollar inherited antique watch. I’d need funds or valuables once I left this house. I made turkey and ham sandwiches and wrapped them in foil, filled a thermos with coffee, and shoved it all in an old knapsack. I took the admiral’s Russian flapped hat from the front closet, and a waist-length Thermolite ski jacket to give me a different look. I riffled the pockets of my old parka for gloves. That was when I felt the sharp edge of the cassette box I’d taken from Robert Morton’s car. I’d forgotten it. There was a label on the spine, in faded blue ink, in script.
HARLAN AT CHRISTMAS.
The force of the connection — HARLAN — made my knees weak. Stunned, I dropped into the chair, heard my own breathing. Was it possible? Was it conceivable that Goro Akiyama’s prediction had come true… and all the suffering had been caused by eighty people on a farm in New York?