Again Butzburger nodded. 'There is evil on this planet, Mr. Seppanen, and the Church has many enemies. People, governments—forces that want to harm it. Destroy it if they can, legally or otherwise. Thus it has to be impenetrable. Impenetrable and formidable.'
There was that word again:
Butzburger's face pinched a little.
'As you said,' I went on, 'the church has a lot of enemies. It was born with enemies, and it's created a lot more, with lawsuits, the breaking up of families . . . things like that. There are a lot of people who'd like to see Ray Christman dead. So the opening question becomes who had the resources and the opportunity.
'I presume that Mr. Christman went around well guarded. The buildings on the Campus have guards at the entrances. That I know. At least the Neophyte Building does. And that nine-foot chain-link fence around the parking lot, with the razor wire on top, is obviously HardSteel. Plus I noticed men on the roofs who aren't up there to enjoy the view. So he wasn't all that vulnerable.'
I was thinking out loud, feeling my way through the situation. 'The Institute of Noetic Technology might have the necessary resources. They certainly regard themselves as the church's enemy, and when they lost that lawsuit against the church, and their appeal, they probably figured they had no further legal recourse. If they still wanted revenge, they'd have to get it some other way.
'Then there's the COGS, the Church of God in Science. Or actually its various and apparently numerous extremist groups. There's got to be some well-heeled people among them. They'd be nearly impossible to investigate, because the extremist groups don't have formal memberships. Mostly they seem to be ad hoc groups, and they're all hostile to anyone who asks questions. We can assume that various local police agencies throughout the country have moles in them, along with the FBI, but they certainly aren't going to give us any information about Christman, assuming there is any and they have it.'
Butzburger was taking it pretty well. He looked serious but not upset. 'My guess,' I went on, 'is that neither of those groups has the expertise necessary to get to Mr. Christman and kidnap him. But presumably they have the money necessary to contract the job out to some underworld outfit that does have that expertise. And it would make sense for them to contract with an L.A. mob—people who know the city. So one thing I'll do is talk to information sources in the underworld, and see what they may have heard.
'Then there are the families of converts who've broken their family ties and joined the church. Especially those who've joined church staffs. How many centers are there, worldwide? Seventy-eight?'
'Something like that.'
'So the number of hostile family members has got to be large,' I went on. 'Again though, the only way they could get at Christman would seem to be through the underworld.
'But why would any of these want Christman to disappear quietly? It would be a lot easier to have him ambushed, or his office bombed—something like that.'
I paused, examining the man sitting across from me, his face, his eyes. 'I'll look into all those possibilities as best I can. But I'll tell you, Mr. Butzburger, if Mr. Christman has been kidnaped or quietly killed, it's likeliest to have been by some faction within the church. They had access to him. They knew his habits, his patterns of movement, his vulnerabilities. They could approach him without arousing his suspicion.
'You talked about a power struggle in the hierarchy. I can imagine a faction that is less interested in saving the world than in getting rich and powerful.' Actually I could imagine both factions like that. 'And the Church of the New Gnosis has a large income, even if the published estimates are high by a factor of ten. Maybe one of those factions feels that they could really take over if Christman was out of the way.'
Butzburger didn't argue—he didn't even look as if he'd like to—and that was the end of our business conversation. All that was left was dessert. I don't think he enjoyed his cheesecake.
4
Tailed?
Back at the office, I phoned a few information sources. Most of them, though, I'd have to go out and contact personally. Almost all were loners on the fringe of the underworld, who lived with their ears open.
The best of them wasn't part of the fringe. She was on the inside—a Korean-American woman, 'Miss Melanie.' She was one I'd have to talk to in person. Melanie runs a large stable of expensive call girls—Asian, Eurasian, Anglo, Afro-American, and Chicanas. She even had her own clinical service. She also had the protection of the Korean mafia, probably paying for it with the services of her girls and with information the girls picked up. Information about rip-off possibilities, underworld activities—things like that. Occasionally she helped us out, for a healthy fee, with information about people or groups in competition with the Koreans.
One thing she never did though, she told me once. 'Melanie,' she said, referring to herself in the third person, 'never does blackmail.' It would kill the goose that laid the golden eggs.
When I'd finished my phone calls to information sources, I called up the directory to see if Gnostic Withdrawal Assistance still existed. It did. The same guy answered, and he still did business on the same basis at the same location. I told him I'd be there that afternoon, and that he probably wouldn't recognize me.
Then I had Larry, in our technical section, make me up—nothing ambitious, but misleading—and fit me out with some clothes. He darkened my complexion and my hair, and gave me brown eyes and a mustache. And a driver's license with a Turkish name. No one was going to talk Turkish to me, that was almost certain, and if I wanted to, I could swear in Finnish and pretend it was Turkish.
The makeup job didn't take long. Larry is fast. Afterward I called Tuuli, my wife, and told her I'd be home late. Probably very late. Then I went to Gnostic Withdrawal Assistance, and said I wanted to know about another missing person. He agreed to give my name and number to two recent exiles, plus Fred Hamilton again; Hamilton wasn't at his old number anymore. I also told him what I'd told Tuuli—that I'd be home late. They could leave a message on my phone.
The rest of the day I spent talking with assorted bartenders, pimps, hustlers, bail bondsmen, pawn brokers, and Miss Melanie. I wasn't optimistic, but I needed to cover all the bases. I stopped at Melanie's last. She gave me tea, and we agreed on charges.
Then I drove back to the office to get my personal car. It was full night by then, though with the sky-glow from street lights, headlights, windows, and signs, night in L.A. isn't very dark. Not like Hemlock Harbor, Michigan. As I drove my car out of the company lot, I noticed another, a late-model sea blue Hyundai, stopped across the street in the entrance of the Beverly Drugstore parking lot. The driver, it seemed to me afterward, had been black, with a
