Revelation

Findhorn interrupted, typing rapidly on the keyboard: 'Mike, I stand corrected. I'll try to be good. Still, when you have people whose aim is the destruction of human life…'

The signal came back on the screen: 'If that really is the aim and not something that's been ascribed to them by some hate group.'

'Does the manufacture of nerve gas and botulism toxin qualify?'

'Obviously there's a threshold beyond which you have to declare war, if only to protect those you love. Then it's PC to talk about a doomsday cult.'

'These cults exist?'

'There are thousands of minority religious groups on our register, of which a couple of dozen need watching. Even these are largely harmless or at the most a danger to themselves, through suicidal tendencies. The scary thing is that irresponsible geeks have created Internet cookbooks giving step-by-step recipes for making biological toxins, et cetera. Aerosol poisons plus doomsday cults are an unholy combination.'

'Mike, you're scaring me.'

Mike continued, his typing coming up rapidly and almost error-free on the monitor: 'There are features common to most of these groups. First of course is the grand apocalyptic vision. Usually they believe that a tragedy is about to hit the earth, say like Armageddon. Sometimes they think that, through group suicide, they'll escape the tragedy and be carried off to heaven, perhaps by UFO.'

'I think I read about one such group.'

'That would be the Heaven's Gate cult, a Christian-UFO group which committed mass suicide when Comet Hale Bopp came in. The body count was thirty-nine. But the belief goes back at least to the Unarians, who've been holding to the UFO thing since 1954 without harming anyone. A second feature is the charismatic leader.'

'Do these leaders have any common traits?'

'Absolutely. They're invariably a dominant male, intelligent or at least cunning, a social misfit or failure in mainstream society, and a control freak. He exerts a sort of hypnotic effect on the faithful which he uses to control their sexual, social and emotional lives.'

'You've just described Adolf Hitler,' Findhorn suggested.

'Careful, Fred. Sensitive area.'

Findhorn paused at the keyboard, uncertain whether to interrupt his old friend, now a university rabbi. Then Michael was typing: 'And another feature of the cult mentality is the accumulation of weapons coupled with a sort of paranoid belief that outsiders or governments are out to get them. They see themselves as being monitored by the FBI or other government agencies.'

'I hope they are.'

'Of course many of the cults, especially the Christian right-wing people, are themselves hate merchants. You don't want to be black, gay, communist or Jewish within a thousand miles of Christ Foremost, for example.'

'Remember Abo? He scored three out of four.'

'Let's hope he never strays into Waco, Texas. Now, do you have a specific group in mind?'

'I need to identify them but the clues are thin. The Book of Revelation seems to be central to them, they're doomsday-minded and there's a Swiss connection, I think.'

There was a pause for about thirty seconds. The study door opened and Romella came in carrying two mugs of tea. She put them down on the desk and looked over Findhorn's shoulder. Then words were coming up on the monitor at speed: 'THE TEMPLE OF CELESTIAL TRUTH.'

Findhorn felt a surge of excitement. Then his friend was typing: 'Hang on, I'm putting them on another screen. Here we are. Yes, it's not one of your big-time doomsday cults. That's the problem, some of these groups are down in the noise and the first you hear of them is when they crawl out of the woodwork with some high-profile atrocity. At its peak the Supreme Truth had forty thousand members worldwide, including thirty thousand in Russia, several of whom were engineers with access to nukes, something you might want to think about. They had assets of a billion dollars —'

'The Celestial Truth?'

'Patience, it's still downloading. This is another Christian-UFO cult, with a hodge-podge of Greek and African myth thrown in. They use prophecies from the Book of Revelation along with the sixteenth-century writings of Nostradamus to predict that world end is due any time. They can't wait for it because when it happens the resultant cleansing of sin will allow the second wave of extraterrestrials to come and carry them up to Heaven.'

'What about their organization? How are they structured?'

'I've got an organogram here, but it's all conjecture. They're thought to have regional chapters which meet to co-ordinate activities. They're highly secretive, dispersed globally, and their membership is totally unknown. They're rich, with widely dispersed assets which may total a billion dollars but nobody really knows. They run a front organization, the Tati Foundation, which supports a wide variety of causes.'

'Where are they located? On Earth, I mean.'

'Hold on. Right, they have temples in Japan and Dakota, but their main spiritual centre is tucked away in a mountain region near Davos, in Switzerland. It's a place called Piz Radont and it looks like the devil to get to. I've got a photograph here. Hold on, I'll beam it through.'

Findhorn waited while a picture rapidly built up on the screen, line by line, overlaying the text. A blue sky appeared first, and then the tops of snowy peaks, and then the picture was showing golden, onion-shaped domes which seemed more Muslim than Christian, and finally there it was, a big white shoebox in an idyllic mountain setting. Findhorn clicked on a button, reduced the picture to stamp size, and resumed his rapid two-finger typing.

'About this world end they believe in. Is there any evidence that they'd like to speed it along?'

'Okay, here I have unclassified testimony to the Global Organized Crime Project Steering Committee, CSIS to the House of Representatives Committee on National Security.'

Findhorn hadn't a clue but let it pass.

'I'll fire it through but the essence is this. According to this testimony, NEST teams have been activated five times in California in the last two years, three of them in consequence of information pertaining to the Temple of Celestial Truth.'

'Information pertaining to. That's exceedingly vague.'

'Deliberately so, I don't doubt. They have sources to protect. The CIA has a Center for Counterterrorism, and there's an FBI equivalent for domestic stuff, and you could try them for more if you feel like wasting your time. There have also been suspicions of aerosol attacks in Germany from truck convoys, and Korean building collapses deliberately induced by poor loading and use of sub-standard concrete. But so much lousy building goes on anyway in the Far East that nobody can be sure if it was weirdo religion or just officials lining their pockets.'

'What about their leader?'

'Ah, now Freddie, there you have something very interesting.'

Findhorn waited. He read the words avidly as they came up on the monitor. 'You'll be interested to know that this particular outfit is led by a guy called Tati who just happens to come from Sirius. First time round he came to Earth in the body of Jesus. These guys are souls, you see, who just temporarily inhabit human bodies. Kind of like the Incas, who believed they came from the stars and returned to them after death.'

'When he's not being Tati from Sirius, who is he really?'

'That's what makes him interesting. Nobody knows. His background is a big mystery.'

'Maybe he really does come from Sirius.'

The rabbi's words came up on the screen: 'There's always that possibility.'