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“I told you that I do some mentoring, aside from classes.”
“Right.”
“I doubt that you’ve had time to keep up with the trend,” she said. “It sounds like simple tutoring, but there’s a lot more to it. Counseling, sometimes. Guidance toward long-term life decisions if appropriate.”
“Is there some course you take for that, like special training?” Bolan asked.
“I have my counseling credential, plus the teacher’s certificate,” she answered, “but it’s mostly personal experience and observation. Listening as much as talking, maybe more. I don’t come out and tell students they should be lawyers or mechanics. If they have an interest, we address it and discuss the options. If they have problems, we talk about those, too.”
“So, how’s it going?” Bolan asked, sincerely interested.
“I’ve lost one,” Val replied.
“Say what?”
“One of my students.”
“Val—”
“I don’t mean that he’s disappeared,” she hastened to explain. “For that, I would’ve gone to the police.”
“Okay.”
“I know exactly where he is. Well, not exactly, but within a few square miles. And what he’s doing. That’s the problem.”
“Maybe you should start from the beginning.”
“Right. Okay. But promise you won’t think I’m crazy.”
“That’s a safe bet going in,” said Bolan.
“All right, then. His name’s Patrick Quinn. He turned twenty-one last weekend, but I haven’t seen him for three months. It’s thirteen weeks on Friday, if you need to pin it down exactly.”
“Close enough,” he said, and waited for the rest of it.
“He comes from money. Anyway, a lot by how they measure it in Sheridan. His parents raise cattle. They have a few million.”
“Cattle?”
“Dollars,” Johnny answered from the backseat. “Four point five and change.”
“You hacked their bank account?” Bolan asked.
Johnny shook his head. “Bear did it for me.”
Meaning, Aaron Kurtzman, boss of the computer crew at Stony Man Farm, in Virginia.
“So, the Farm’s involved in this?”
“I asked a favor,” Johnny told him. “Strictly unofficial.”
Ah. A backdoor job. But why?
“Still listening,” he told them both.
“Pat’s father wanted him in law school, but he didn’t like the paper chase. Premed was too much science. What he really wanted was a job that let him work for the environment. Something like forestry, the conservation side. It made for stormy holidays at home, to say the least.”
“And he wound up with you,” Bolan said.
“Right. First in a class I taught last year, then counseling after he set his mind on dropping out completely.”
“I guess it didn’t take?”
“We made some headway, working on a new curriculum, before the Process came to town,” Val said.
“You don’t mean that satanic outfit from the sixties, tied in with the Manson family?”
“Wrong Process,” Val corrected him. “At least, I’m pretty sure. This one’s a sect run by an African—Nigerian, I think he is—named Ahmadou Gaborone.”
“Never heard of him,” Bolan admitted.
“He’s spent a lot of time flying below the radar,” Johnny said. “No flamboyant outbursts like Moon or Jim Jones, no public investigations. He’s been sued twice on fraud charges and won both cases.”
“Fraud?”
“The usual,” Val said. “Some youngster donates all of his or her worldly goods to the Process and the parents go ballistic, claiming undue influence, coercion, brainwashing, you name it. Gaborone’s been smart enough, so far, to only bilk legal adults, and they’ve appeared for his side when the cases went to court. All smiles and sunshine, couldn’t be more happy, the usual.”
Bolan shrugged. “Maybe they are,” he said, catching the look Val gave him. “Some folks don’t function well alone. They need a preacher or some other figure of authority directing them, telling them what to think. You see it in the major churches all the time. It’s what your basic televangelists rely on, when they beg for cash.”
“This one is different,” Val informed him. “Gaborone’s not just collecting money, cars, whatever. He’s collecting souls for Judgment Day.”
“You lost me,” Bolan said.
“Recruits—converts, whatever—don’t just pony up whatever’s in their bank accounts. They also leave ‘the world,’ as Gaborone describes it, and move on to follow him. He used to have three communes in the States, in Oregon, Wyoming and upstate New York, but all his people have been called to Africa. The Congo. He’s established a community they call Obike, also known as New Jerusalem.”
“You said the Process had a compound in Wyoming,” Bolan interrupted. “Am I right in guessing that your protégé was part of it?”
“You are,” Val granted. “Now he’s gone. I’m hoping you can bring him back while there’s still time.”
VAL HAD PREPARED for meeting Bolan, talked herself through the emotions that were bound to surface at first sight, considering their history. She’d braced herself, thought she was ready, but the storm of feelings loosed inside her when she saw him in the flesh still took her by surprise. She’d managed eating, barely, and was glad when they were in the minivan, moving, her story starting to unfold. But now, she had begun to wonder if her master plan was such a great idea.
“When you say, ‘bring him back,’” Bolan replied, “you mean…?”
“To us,” she said, too quickly. “Well, of course, I mean his family.”
“Suppose he doesn’t want to come?”
“It’s likely that he won’t, at first,” she said.
“So, it’s a kidnapping you have in mind?”
“If that’s what it takes.”
“I’m not a deprogrammer, Val. I don’t save people from themselves.”
“But Patrick—”
“By your own admission, he’s an adult. Twenty-one, in fact. I don’t know what kind of donation he’s given the Process, but—”
“A few thousand,” she said. Her turn to interrupt. “His parents froze Pat’s trust fund when they found out what was happening with Gaborone.”
“So, has he been declared incompetent to run his own affairs?” Bolan asked.
“Not specifically. His parents have a pending case, but Patrick’s unavailable to testify or be deposed. It’s all in limbo now, with a judicial freeze on his accounts until the court is satisfied he’s not acting under duress.”
“A standoff, basically.”
“So far,” Val said, keeping an eye on traffic as she spoke. “But money’s not my primary concern.”
“I gathered that,” Bolan replied. “So, what’s the problem, really? Do you think he’s been abused? Mistreated? Starved?”
“There’s been no evidence of anything like that,” Johnny remarked. “All members of the Process who’ve been interviewed so far seem happy where they are.”
“In that case,” Bolan said, “I don’t see—”
“Happy messages came out of Jonestown,” Val reminded him, “until the night they drank the poisoned fruit punch. Who knows what people are really thinking, what they’re really feeling in a cult?”
“Not me,” Bolan admitted. “Which explains why I don’t normally go in for kidnapping. Unless you’ve got some evidence—”
“You haven’t heard about the Rathbun party, then?”
Bolan considered it, then shook his head. “It doesn’t ring a bell.”
“Lee Rathbun is—or was—a congressman from Southern California. Orange County, if it matters. Some of his constituents had relatives who’d joined the Process and gone off to live in Africa with Gaborone. Last week, Rathbun and five others flew to Brazzaville and on to Obike. They should’ve been back on Monday, but word is that they’ve disappeared.”
“That’s it? Just gone?”
“It smells,” Johnny said from the backseat. “First, Gaborone and his people swear up and down Rathbun’s party made their charter flight on schedule. When the cops in Brazzaville start checking, they discover that the charter pilot’s killed himself under suspicious circumstances. Killed his sister, too—who, by coincidence, was also in the Process.”
“Why the sister?” Bolan asked.
“Police report they found a note and ‘other evidence’ suggesting incest,” Val said. “They think the sister tried to end it, or the brother couldn’t bear his shame. Theories are flexible, but none of them lead back to Gaborone.”
“Too much coincidence,” Johnny declared.
“It’s odd,” Bolan agreed. “I’ll give you that.”
“Just odd?” Val didn’t try to hide the irritation in her tone.
“How were the killings done?” Bolan asked.
“With a panga,” Val replied. “That’s a big—”
“Knife, I know. The pilot stabbed himself?”
“Not quite,” Johnny said. “Seems he put his panga on the kitchen counter, then bent down and ran his throat along the cutting edge until he got the job done. Back and forth. Nearly decapitated.”
“That’s what I call focus and determination.”
“That’s what I call murder,” Val corrected him.
“Assume you’re right, which I agree is probable. Who killed the pilot? Someone from the Process? Why?”
“To silence him,” Val said. “Because he knew that Rathbun’s people didn’t make their flight to Brazzaville on time.”
“How long between their scheduled liftoff and the murder?” Bolan asked.
“Twelve hours, give or take.”
“And how long is the flight from Brazzaville to Gaborone’s community?”
“About two hours,” Johnny said.
“Leaving ten hours for the pilot to contact police and spill the beans about his missing passengers. Why no contact with 911 or the equivalent?”
“We’re guessing the pilot was bribed, threatened, or both,” Val said. “Then Gaborone or someone close to him decided it was still too risky, so they silenced him and staged it in a way that would discredit anything the pilot might’ve said before he died.”
“Okay, it plays,” Bolan agreed. “But it’s a matter for police. There’s nothing to suggest your friend’s involvement with the murders, or that he’s in any kind of danger from—”
“That’s just the point,” Val said. “He is in danger.”
“Oh?”
“The Process is an apocalyptic sect. Gaborone is one of your basic hellfire, end-time preachers, with a twist.”
“Specifically?”
“Lately, he’s started saying that it may not be enough to wait for God to schedule Armageddon. When it’s time, he says, the Lord may need a helping hand to light the fuse.”
“From Africa?”
“It’s what he heard in ‘words of wisdom’ from on high,” Johnny explained.
“I never thought the Congo had much Armageddon potential,” Bolan said.
“Depends on how you mix up the ingredients, I guess,” said Johnny. “In the time since he’s been settled at Obike, Gaborone’s had several unlikely visitors. One party from the Russian mafiya included an ex-colonel with the KGB. Two others were Islamic militants, and there’s a warlord from Sudan whose dropped in twice.”
“You don’t think they were praying for redemption,” Bolan said.
