“But he was rational enough to do research.”
“Yes.”
“And attract followers who murdered for him.”
“So did Asahara and Jones.”
“But he invented a whole new disease.”
“You don’t get it. IQ has nothing to do with it. In fact, high IQ made him more effective.”
I shook my head. “You’re coddled up there at Yale, Doc. You just can’t conceive of evil.”
He shrugged. “Other people have said that. You know, I watched a stranger shoot my parents to death when I was seven, watched them lying on the street in San Diego. The man who did it smiled at me. He didn’t even know them. He’d been told to do it, he later said, by an Angel. That man actually offered me a piece of fudge, and then he walked away. He offered me fudge! So, Colonel, who knows? Maybe I came to this point of view to protect my own sanity. But if that’s the case, I like the world just as I see it. Please tell me exactly what you talked about with Harlan Maas.”
The following day — after the doctor left — a Honda Fit with Delaware plates pulled into my dirt/grass driveway and the middle-aged man who got out in a dark suit, tall, lanky, and harder looking, was the cult expert named Bobby Boyd. Boyd was a self-educated Kentucky man who said that his first experience with cults occurred when his mother was in a nursing home, and a cult took hold inside. Someone convinced half the residents there that he could turn back time and, if they followed his beliefs, make them younger. But that man stole money from the residents. Then he fled.
“Since then, for twenty years, I’ve been after them,” he said. “The people who run these things are evil manipulators. They’re con men and women. They study the techniques. They read up on methods. Harlan Maas did the same thing. They control every aspect, every minute, of their followers’ lives. They shut out influences from the outside. They say they have the great cosmic answers, that their followers are special, that they will lead the world into a new age. You’d be astounded how many times this has happened.”
“So Harlan Maas wasn’t insane?”
Bobby Boyd laughed. “No more than you or me.”
“What about the red telephone?”
“After a while they come to believe their own bullshit,” said Bobby Boyd fiercely. “But don’t think that means they’re insane. They know what they’re doing every step of the way.”
My bedtime reading consisted of reports the admiral forwarded, about cults. I followed the search for Orrin Sykes on TV. I watched a PBS special about Harlan Maas and the Cult of the Sixth Prophet, which ended with a trio of forensic psychologists — talking heads — arguing about Orrin Sykes.
The first man said, “He’s hiding. Separation from the group obviously gave him distance to reevaluate his connection.”
The second said, “I think he did what the group planned. Mass suicide. He’s dead. We may never find the body.”
“Mission,” the third shrink predicted. “If you look at his mission, it was to kill Colonel Joe Rush. And because he failed, the cult was destroyed. I believe it possible that he’s trying to make up for it and complete his mission.”
And I thought, Tell me something I don’t know.
Before I left Washington, I’d hit the spy shop and spent four thousand dollars on security equipment. I put the laser alarm detectors in the trees out back, and at the foot of the driveway. That didn’t work because at night too many animals prowled around outside. I moved the detectors to the deck and the foot of the front steps. They were small white boxes, visible, but you had to know where to look.
With the detectors so close to the house, I’d get less warning if the alarm went off. But I wouldn’t keep waking up in the middle of the night because a bear lumbered past and crossed a beam.
Spring became summer and the leaves were thick that year, and my shoulder ached less. Doctors said that sensation might return in my finger. I kayaked three times a week to work the muscles. Orrin faded from the news. His photo was covered up by a bank robber’s in our post office. The trial date was set for the other cult members. Harlan Maas was not even a subject of dinner talk anymore in Washington, the admiral e-mailed me. The new crisis in Ukraine was.
A couple of my old high school buddies knocked on the door and said they had seen that week’s New York Times Magazine, “the real story of the outbreak,” and the old photo of me from the Marines. A town selectman showed up and said that he wanted to honor me in the Memorial Day parade this year. No thanks. Aya and Eddie kept in contact. Eddie was in Boston, with his family, starting the business that we’d once thought to create together. Aya was getting ready for two weeks of science summer school at Woods Hole.
Each July the closest neighbors on my dirt road hold a paella party. They lay out immense cooking pans on steel rods, perched on concrete blocks, over a fire pit. They light up mesquite-scented charcoal and stir into the pan olive oil and chorizo, shrimp, peppers, onions, chicken, and the smells drift over the forest as outdoor speakers echo with old jazz favorites: Billie Holiday… Art Tatum.
More than a hundred people come. Our little road fills with cars, some park in the weeds along the shoulder, or in our driveways, the license plates from New York and Connecticut and as far away as Virginia.
I’d debated with myself whether to go this year, but the gathering was the perfect kind of event for me. There would be old friends there from high school. There would be neighbors who I bumped into sometimes by our grouped mailboxes on the road. Even strangers were welcome. Sure, for a few moments I’d be the center of attention for the out-of-staters… that’s the man who stopped the outbreak… but courtesy was the rule. I wouldn’t be bothered. I’d stay an hour, get the minimal amount of human contact that passed for social life these days. Then I’d walk two hundred yards home, and watch PBS, or read, or plan out tomorrow’s cement patch work on pockets of foundation gouged out by ice during the cold winter this past year.
Aya walked toward me in the crowd, holding a paper plate loaded with food.
“I made Mom drive me here. We’re taking a road trip looking at colleges. I wanted to see Williams. I made her not call you. She wanted to ask permission to come. But if we called you, you’d say don’t, Eddie said.”
“He’s not always right, you know.”
“Was he wrong, Joe?”
“No.”
“Here comes Mom. Be nice.”
She was the kind of woman that you notice even before you realize that you know her. Something about that petite body, the rhythm of the walk, back straight, hips rolling, slightly pigeon-toed steps, that drew glances. Chris Vekey made her way between the cluster of New York theater people drinking homemade sangria and the trio of town selectmen in folding chairs, stuffing brownies into their mouths. She held a paper plate piled with paella and romaine leaf and sweet walnut salad. Her eyes held me. They created a warm sensation that instantly became irritation that she was here.
“Joe.”
“Colleges, huh? Isn’t it a little early for that?”
“Aya finished up the year with straight A’s. She wanted to look now, start thinking about it.”
Aya said, “Can we see your house, Joe?”
I thought, Did you want to see colleges? Or did you want your mom to come here?