The accommodations were certainly much nicer than he’d anticipated. He’d expected to be sent to the prison-like secure forensic unit of the public mental hospital in San Francisco, where he’d dropped off many a disturbed suspect over the years.
How it was that he’d landed at this cushy place he couldn’t seem to recall. He’d forgotten to ask Doctor Jones during the psychiatric evaluation. He would try to remember the next time he saw her. But he was having a great deal of trouble focusing, concentrating, remembering things he tried remember.
Probably his landing here was The Wizard’s doing. Yes, that was it. The Wizard was his benefactor. The Wizard would get him out of here too. Just as he’d promised. And soon John would be serving him again. Doing The Wizard’s work. Preventing the End Time. Saving the planet. Saving Teresa and Angela.
He heard a knock at the door. “Come in,” John said, propping himself up on his elbows. The door opened, revealing a woman with an unbuttoned white lab coat over a business suit. Her high heels clicked across the floor as she entered.
“Hello, John,” Doctor Jones said. “I’ve brought someone here to see you.” She turned back toward the door.
A white-bearded man with a bald head stepped into the room. His eyes were gray-blue, deep-set, and small as pennies. He wore a charcoal gray business suit with a white shirt and a black tie.
“Hi, John,” he said. “My name’s Ezra Dean. I’m an exit counselor for former cult members, what some people call a ‘deprogrammer.’ You’re my new client.”
John didn’t say anything. The old man was of no importance. Soon John would be returning to The Wizard. There was so much still to do. The crisis was at hand, the End Time drawing near.
Doctor Jones left the room wordlessly, shutting the door with a gentle click. Ezra dropped his leather briefcase on the floor and lifted a small, wooden straight-back chair away from the wall. He placed the chair directly beside the bed and facing away, before sitting in it backwards, his arms crossed on top of the chair’s back. He leaned forward, tipping the chair onto its rear legs, his face not six inches from John’s.
“L. Rob Piper is a fraud.”
“The sale of human blood is a huge business,” Piper said as he paced back and forth in front of his baby grand piano, brandy snifter in hand. “A multi-billion dollar international business, in fact, in which America is the dominant player.”
Dr. Martin Lipset leaned forward on the sofa, transfixed.
At long last
, Piper thought,
here is someone who can fully appreciate genius! Envy a magnificent achievement
!
He continued. “There are more than four hundred commercial blood centers in the U.S. alone. Most of the blood collected by the centers is sold to pharmaceutical laboratories. They fractionate the blood to produce a variety of products. Antibodies, clotting factors, vaccines, diagnostics, drugs. I currently own a commercial blood center in Los Angeles. My cult followers make frequent donations.”
“Astounding idea,” Lipset said, “selling the blood of your cult followers. How much do you sell?”
“Oceans of it. My followers think it’s all being safely stored, to be used in the aftermath of a potential environmental catastrophe that I, in my infinite wisdom, foresee as a strong and imminent possibility.”
Lipset laughed. “Marvelous!” He sipped his brandy. “How much is a pint of blood worth?”
“It varies by individual. Some of my followers have rare blood, making it more valuable. For example, there are nine individuals who once had the measles, and their blood is worth three hundred dollars per bleed. Six of my followers are missing a blood clotting factor, making their blood worth seven hundred dollars per bleed. Five have a high concentration of Hepatitis B antibodies. Their blood is worth nearly a thousand dollars per bleed. But on average, each bleed earns about eighty dollars.”
“How often do you bleed them?”
“Twice a week.”
“How many of your followers do you bleed?”
“All twelve hundred, minus a small percentage who have diabetes, or some other disease or disorder that prevents them from donating blood.”
“Let’s see now,” Lipset said, his pupils rolling to the ceiling as he made calculations in his head. “Holy shit! You gross roughly ten million dollars a year!”
Piper beamed. “Actually, I’ve purchased my own small pharmaceutical lab, to fractionate some of the blood myself, so that number is low.”
Lipset shook is head in admiration. “Who operates the blood center and the pharmaceutical lab?”
“The lab is run by the same personnel who were working there when I purchased the enterprise. None of them could possibly discover that the steady stream of blood I send there from my blood center to be fractionated is illicitly obtained. Things are different at the blood center. When I bought it, I fired all the employees and replaced them with my own people, most of whom had to first undergo technical training.”
“One thing I don’t understand. Clearly, the cult members working in your blood center know that you aren’t preparing for some environmental Armageddon. What do you tell them?”
“Here’s your first lesson on being a cult leader, Martin. When you’re the cult leader, almost any story will do.”
Lipset chuckled. Outside, the afternoon waned. Piper escorted his new employee onto the balcony to watch the orange sun dip into the ocean. He swirled brandy in his snifter languidly as he resumed the pleasure of outlining his operation. “The sperm I collect from the male cult followers is handled in much the same way as the blood.”
“You . . . you collect sperm too!”
“I have foreseen, in my infinite wisdom, that if the environmental holocaust occurs, it will leave few survivors in its aftermath, and most of them will be rendered sterile. So my male followers donate sperm, because it may become necessary to repopulate the planet one day using in vitro fertilization.” He took another sip of brandy and savored it, practically letting it homestead on his tongue.
“I gather you own a sperm bank.”
“Yes,” Piper said. “Also in Los Angeles. And again, the employees are my own people. I market sperm samples to clinics and physicians all over the globe.”
“How much sperm do you collect?”
“About five hundred of my cult followers produce quality sperm. Each one of them makes three donations per week, averaging a ninety-five dollar fee per donation, which translates into seven point four million dollars in revenue annually.”
“What else are you reaping from your human body farm?”
“Only one other commodity. Female reproductive eggs.”
Lipset whistled in awe. “You bastard.”
Piper grinned. “Thank you.”
“Now, of course, we’ve entered my area of expertise, and egg harvesting is not an easy, or uncomplicated surgical procedure.”
“We have trained medical staff on site, including a fertility specialist, Dr. Fosse, whom you’ll meet. We’ve had only minor problems with complications. Some infections, some scarring, and one body that needed burying, but it’s a big farm.”
“Let me guess. You own a fertility clinic?”
“Actually, no. I own an egg brokerage, or matching agency, that supplies eggs overseas to fertility clinics lacking in-house donor recruitment.”
“I think I know why you don’t sell domestically,” Lipset said. “All those regulations.”
“Right. Too risky. Too much false documentation required. But outside the US, many countries go largely unregulated. It’s a black market, essentially. Demand outstrips supply, and nobody asks questions about where the eggs were harvested.”
“Certainly, your clients care about egg quality?”
“Certainly. So we follow the rules. We harvest only from women in their prime child-bearing years, women in good health with no major genetic defects in their immediate families. Currently, I’m averaging nineteen thousand dollars per egg. I harvest eggs from about three hundred and fifty women, each three times per year. That translates into just under twenty million dollars in annual revenues.”
The sun disappeared below the sea with a twinkle. Lipset closed his eyes tight in concentration. They opened shining in amazement. “So you’re grossing somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty-seven million dollars a year?”
“You’re only adding up the revenues from my illicit trade, but my businesses earn legitimate revenues too, the farm included. I should gross about forty-eight million dollars this year. My net profit should be about thirty-three million. But I hope to triple that over the next few years.”
“How?”
“Through expansion. That’s where you come in.”
“Oh?” Lipset said.
“Recently, I purchased a new farm in rural northwest Mexico. A bigger farm, capable of holding twice as many cult followers as the one I have now in the San Joaquin Valley. Over the next few months, I’ll get the operation up and running. Meanwhile, I’ll be grooming you to take over day-to-day leadership of the cult.”
Lipset gazed out to sea. “So that’s the main reason I’ve been made to look like you. You’re going to train me to be your successor, your divine brother.”
“That’s right. In exchange, you’ll get half a million untaxed dollars every year, free room and board, and a couple thousand people in the palm of your hand.”
Lipset swiveled his gaze from the ocean to Piper. “I can do with them whatever I please?”
“So long as it doesn’t interfere with, or threaten, the revenue stream.”
Lipset turned back to the ocean. “You offer a most generous compensation package. But then you can afford it.”
“I’m only warning you once,” Piper said. “Don’t ask for, and don’t take, a penny more than what we’ve agreed to. I snap my fingers, the cult snaps your neck.”
Ezra Dean studied the passive hull in baggy pajamas reclining on the bed. The first few sessions of deprogramming had not gone well. John was in worse shape than anticipated, unable to concentrate on any topic or any thing for very long.
The man had been rendered virtually incapable of reflective thinking. His mind kept floating away, abruptly forgetting its previous thought, ceasing to pay attention to its surroundings, slipping into altered states of consciousness.
Ezra had witnessed such behavior before, but only in patients who’d been living inside a cult for years. John’s rapid deterioration implied that he’d been subjected to intensive and prolonged psychological, perhaps even physical, torture.
In self-protection, John’s mind had trained itself to split off from reality. At some point, it’d become a habit, a random, involuntary retreat.
“Did you hear me, John?”
“Hmm?”
“I’ll ask you again.” Time would cure John, of course, but the ancient healer worked slowly. “Do you think Mother Nature likes to be raped?”
“Of course not,” John said. “That’s why she’s revolting against us now.”
“Then why would Mother Nature anoint a rapist as her spokesperson?” Ezra shoved a document in front of John’s nose. “I showed you the report, John.”
“I don’t believe you. It’s a made-up document.”
It would be more difficult for John’s mind to drift off if presented with different types of stimuli, so Ezra retrieved a DVD from his briefcase, popped it into the proper slot beneath John’s color TV set, and pushed
play
.
The video footage had been recorded more than twelve years earlier in a Los Angeles courtroom. The logo of a local news station, KTLA, shone at the bottom right corner of the screen. In the center of the video frame was a brown-haired man in a dark blue suit. L. Rob Piper.
He and his defense attorney stood while everyone else inside a packed courtroom sat. Piper’s face was frozen in defiance as he listened to the judge sentencing him for rape.
“You recognize him, don’t you?” Ezra said. “His hair’s a different color, because this happened more than a dozen years ago, but that’s definitely L. Rob Piper. Isn’t it?”
On the video, the judge stared over the top of his reading glasses as he addressed Piper in a stern voice. “Your extremely callous and violent deed has besmirched the entire medical and scientific communities . . .”
The video engaged John’s attention longer and more intensely than anything else had to this point, including any of Ezra’s own words. John kept watching, listening . . .
A single, loud rap on the door drew Ezra’s eyes from the television. An instant later, a tall, broad-shouldered young man in a brown corduroy sports jacket burst into the room.
“John!” said the intruder, rushing to the bedside, ignoring Ezra. “How the hell are you? No, don’t answer that, I don’t think you know.”
“What is this?” Ezra said to the intruder. “Who are you?”
The intruder flashed a badge. “His partner, and this is official police business.” Strangely, the cop ran his fingers through John’s scalp, as if searching for ticks. John sat passively, allowing him to do so.
Doctor Jones entered next. Ezra said to her, “I gave you strict instructions! We are not to be disturbed!”
“Sorry,” she said, “but this couldn’t be helped. That’s Inspector Bourne, and he has a warrant to take a CAT-scan of John’s brain.”