The Puppet Master

corporate headquarters in West Hollywood. The Gnosties were unlikely to try anything further tonight, but if they did, that's where they'd hit.

As he drove, I sat by Tuuli in the backseat, turning the interrogation over in my mind. I didn't even ask how they'd known where I was. Carlos stopped at a Denny's on Sunset, where we took a booth and ordered coffee and pie. At that hour, it was a good place to wait while the added security had time to reach headquarters.

We were almost the only customers there. It was a good place to talk, if we kept it quiet.

'So,' Carlos said, 'I suppose you've got questions.'

'Yeah. How did you guys come to be there?' I looked at Tuuli. 'You especially.'

It turned out she actually had gone to Arizona. About the time the flight left Williams though, she'd had a premonition that I'd need her, that I'd be in extreme danger. Frank Diacono was waiting for her at Flagstaff. She told him her premonition, then tried to phone me. I'd already left my room, and left my beeper there. I don't usually carry it off duty. So she called the office, and the night watch forwarded her call to Carlos. They'd agreed to meet at building reception.

When she'd finished her call, Frank had flown her to Barstow himself, where she could catch a Vegas-L.A. local with almost no wait. Frank, of course, didn't have a permit to fly in L.A. airspace—those are really hard to get, for obvious reasons—or he'd have flown her the rest of the way. All the way back she'd worried about what she could possibly do when she got here. The premonition was vague. I was in danger; that's all there was of it.

When she got with Carlos though, it seemed to her that the danger was or would be at the Campus. So they'd driven there, and she'd told Carlos, 'Park here.' 'Here' being at the curb about forty or fifty meters from where I eventually came over the fence. That had been about midnight; they'd had more than a two-hour wait. She smiled at me, then reached and patted Carlos' cheek. 'And you never complained a bit,' she said to him. 'I'm not sure you even doubted.'

He laughed. 'No comment,' he said. Carlos Katagawa was seldom the inscrutable Oriental, regardless of his Japanese ancestry. 'Actually I assumed it was genuine when you first talked to me on the phone. I've seen you operate before, remember. But I admit feeling spooky about sitting there at the curb with nothing happening. What good could it possibly do to wait there? Next to a nearly empty parking lot!' He sipped coffee and looked at me. 'That's quite a lady you married. So. Now it's your turn to talk. How did you get into a situation like that?'

I put off answering till we got to the office, where I could talk to the computer terminal, to a confidential fail- safe file, telling him pretty much what I told you. Adding that I might have killed Miller; a kick like that to the sternum would shock the heart, might even stop it. Or Collins' shot may have hit him. Collins might also be dead, though I doubted it. I might have broken some of his ribs, though, so he could have a punctured lung.

'We've got grounds to call in the LAPD now,' Carlos pointed out.

'No, I don't want to do that. I'd rather we each tape our statements of what we saw and heard, and duplicate the files into two or three legal repositories for use as depositions when the time comes. I'm not out to bust the church hierarchy, necessarily. I want to find out what happened to Christman.'

Carlos raised an eyebrow. I suppose he figured I'd want to bust the hierarchy, after what had happened. 'If we get a few people indicted,' he said, 'and some hotshot LAPD interrogators talk to them awhile, maybe they'll tell what happened to Christman.'

'I don't think they would, Carl. I don't think even Thomas knows what happened to Christman.'

He didn't say anything, just waited for me to explain. 'It's the questions he asked me: Thomas seemed unwilling to accept that Christman was really dead. He argued that the Noeties and the COGs couldn't possibly have killed him. Which tended to load the case against him. Why would he do that? And who was he trying to convince? Me? He never intended for a minute to let me out of there alive.

'No, he was thinking out loud. My best judgement now is that he doesn't know what happened to Christman, and wishes he did.'

'Okay, then why is he trying to kill the investigation? Or at least the investigator.'

'If Christman's dead, he doesn't want us to find out. Plus I don't think he's all there mentally.

'Now here's a question for you: According to the Times article, Christman had things set up so the church paid him essentially all its income beyond strictly budgeted operating expenses. If it wanted money for any extraordinary project—something not budgeted as routine operating funds—they had to ask him for it. That seemed to be his major form of control after he turned the executive functions over to his bureaucracy. And considering how rich he apparently was, he really didn't spend a whole lot on his personal life.

'The same writers estimated that, by 2006, the church's long-term gross income had certainly surpassed 200 million. I called up the hypertext on that, and their estimate was based on a lot of hard information and some rough assumptions. So say its long-term gross income was half a billion by last fall, when Christman dropped out of sight. That's church income. Then add whatever earnings that money had accumulated!'

Carlos' pursed lips formed a thoughtful O, a silent whistle. Tuuli wasn't saying anything either.

'It'd be interesting to see Christman's will,' I went on. 'Who'd get his money if it was legally established that he was dead? That's a piece of information that might break this case. But it's my impression that as the law stands, it's information we can't get at, without compelling evidence that Christman is dead.'

Carlos nodded. 'So what do you want to do?'

* * *

What I did was call church security; it seemed like the only office they'd have open at that hour. A stoney-faced woman answered, and I told her I wanted to talk to Thomas. She told me he wasn't available.

'He is to me,' I said. 'Tell him Martti Seppanen wants to talk to him.'

'Mr. Seppanen'—she got the name right, first shot—'it is three-forty in the morning. If you want to speak to Mr. Thomas, you'll have to leave your . . .'

I interrupted her. 'You're damned well aware that someone escaped from the kitchen about two-fifteen this morning, and left two guys badly injured or dead. He got away through the tunnels, across the parking lot, and over the fence.'