Aaron Jeffery Kincaid interrupted his pupil. “From your heart, my son. I know the teachings and the texts. I wrote them.”
“Forgive me.”
“No need. You were about to say, ‘a world where peace can reign and those who have chosen the way of unity can find freedom on the highest plane.’”
“Yes, Father.”
“You know the words, but do you understand them?”
A slight hesitation. “I believe so.”
Kincaid walked past the window to the array of framed photographs on the wall. He gazed into the smiling, playful faces in the pictures. “David, we are sowing beliefs, and we must all make sacrifices when we choose to follow our beliefs. You know this, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“We have to be ready to pay the price that our beliefs demand of us.” Kincaid paused and ran his finger along the cheek of one of the African-American girls in the photograph. He remembered her. Ananda, a Hindu name meaning “ultimate bliss.” She’d played tag with him in the jungle back when they were children, back before she drank the medication. Before she laid down in the pavilion and began to twitch.
She was one of the children who did not die quickly.
“David, do you know why there is no shortage of suicide bombers in the Middle East?”
David didn’t answer quickly. He seemed to weigh his words carefully, as if he were afraid he might let his master down. “Because their hatred runs so deep, Father?”
“No, David. Because their beliefs run so deep. Hatred is the result of beliefs. It is the fruit that falls from the tree of faith. So is love. Beliefs always come first. To change the fruit, you must change the tree; you must change the beliefs. A tree will always bring forth its own fruit. It will never do otherwise. The great prophet once said, ‘Every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.’”
“Jesus, the Nazarene?”
“Yes. The Nazarene.”
52
Ralph, Lien-hua, and I ended up talking about Bethanie’s murder and the White Night angle for a few minutes, but then Ralph said, “Wait, we need to stay on track here. What else happened down there in the jungle, Lien-hua? Anything else that might help us with this case?”
She thought for a moment. “Well, it’s with the assassination of Congressman Ryan that the conspiracy theories really begin. I wonder if they might be connected.”
“What conspiracy theories?” I asked.
“Bob Brown, an NBC photojournalist who was killed on the airstrip at Port Kaituma, got some video of the shooters. Some people who’ve analyzed the tape say the assassins were lined up in a military formation. The government has always maintained that the shooters were guards from Peoples Temple, but it was never confirmed. Eight years later one of the surviving temple members was tried and convicted for his involvement, but a lot of people think he was only a scapegoat. It went deeper than just one man.”
I thought back to what Terry had told me about Governor Taylor. That he’d been stationed in South America during the Jonestown massacre. That he’d been a government agent at the time. “Could it have been a government job? A professional hit?” I asked her.
Lien-hua had almost finished her rice. She nodded slowly. “Actually, some people think it was. Ryan was no friend of the CIA. A couple years earlier-I think it was in ’74-he’d co-sponsored a bill that required the CIA to report classified activities to Congress. At the time of his death he had another bill on the floor of Congress pushing for more restrictions. Two weeks after he was killed, the bill died in committee.”
“OK, now this is getting intense,” said Ralph.
“There’s more,” said Lien-hua. “The CIA had a top-secret psychosocial mind-control experiment going on back in the 1970s called MK-ULTRA. Supposedly, it was ended the year Jones moved to Guyana.”
“Nice coincidence,” said Ralph.
“You gotta be kidding me,” I said. “Mind control?”
“A combination of drugs, hypnosis, sleep deprivation, isolation, water-boarding, threats, brainwashing, social pressuring. The CIA has always been interested in seeing what it takes to break someone’s will.”
“Well, even if the CIA was involved,” I said, “those people in Jonestown weren’t robots. They made their choice.”
“Wait,” said Ralph. “Lien-hua, you said some of the people were murdered. Has that ever been confirmed?”
“At first the coroner said the cause of death for the people in Jonestown was cyanide by injection. He came to that conclusion after examining numerous victims with needle marks between the shoulders-the only place on your body where you can’t inject yourself. About a week later he changed the official records to indicate they all died by ingesting the cyanide, and that’s been the official story ever since-even though firsthand accounts record needle marks on the hands, necks, arms, and backs of the deceased.”
“So someone had a little talk with Mr. Coroner?” said Ralph.
“Maybe. No one knows. According to one account, at least 187 bodies had needle marks, then they just stopped counting. You don’t get needle marks between your shoulder blades from drinking cyanide-laced fruit punch.”
“No, you don’t,” he said. “Anything else?”
“All personal identification was removed from the bodies before they were returned to the U.S. No one knows why. And only seven autopsies were performed-out of 909 bodies-914 if you count the congressman and reporters.”
“This is unbelievable,” I said.
“It’s history,” she responded. “You can look it up. Then in the weeks and months following the massacre, a number of families were found dead in the U.S.-mostly ex-Temple members, some government officials with ties to Jones, a few CIA agents. According to one report, sixteen of the Green Berets that were assigned to remove the bodies from Jonestown committed suicide within three months of the tragedy. That, and there have always been murky ties between Jones and the CIA.”
“Spies, mind control, assassins, a suicide cult, a massive government cover-up…” said Ralph. “Whew… this would make one killer video game.”
Lien-hua and I just looked at him and shook our heads.
“What?” he said sheepishly. “It would.”
“So anyway,” I said to Lien-hua, “do people actually believe this stuff?”
“Some very influential people believe this stuff.”
“And what do you think?”
She took a deep breath. “Truth is, no one knows how many died willingly that day. There were armed gunmen surrounding the pavilion carrying AK-47s. Jones’s followers were isolated, territorial, paranoid about the government, and, for the most part, loyal to him. You choose-do you want a bullet in the back, or do you join the rest of your family and closest friends and give your children the ‘medication’? Do you try to fight off the whole community, or let someone you love press a needle against your arm? For most of them, it was at least coerced suicide, if not murder.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Does the term Q875 mean anything to you? Terry said it was a tape of some kind.”
She tapped her fingers on the table thoughtfully. “Well, that would make sense. Jones liked to record himself. The government found hundreds of his messages-talks, sermons, whatever you want to call them. When the FBI went in to clean up the place, they collected all the tapes and archived them. Then, back in 2000 or 2001 most of them became available to the public through a Freedom of Information Act request.”
“We need to listen to that tape,” I said to Ralph.
